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Newsletter 08 and other things that should make this two line.
The morning broke in bitter silver along the grey and level plain; and almost as it did so Turnbull and MacIan came out of a low, scrubby wood on to the empty and desolate flats. They had walked all night.
They had walked all night and talked all night also, and if the subject had been capable of being exhausted they would have exhausted it. Their long and changing argument had taken them through districts and landscapes equally changing. They had discussed Haeckel upon hills so high and steep that in spite of the coldness of the night it seemed as if the stars might burn them. They had explained and re-explained the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in little white lanes walled in with standing corn as with walls of gold. They had talked about Mr. Kensit in dim and twinkling pine woods, amid the bewildering monotony of the pines. And it was with the end of a long speech from MacIan, passionately defending the practical achievements and the solid prosperity of the Catholic tradition, that they came out upon the open land.
MacIan had learnt much and thought more since he came out of the cloudy hills of Arisaig. He had met many typical modern figures under circumstances which were sharply symbolic; and, moreover, he had absorbed the main modern atmosphere from the mere presence and chance phrases of Turnbull, as such atmospheres can always be absorbed from the presence and the phrases of any man of great mental vitality. He had at last begun thoroughly to understand what are the grounds upon which the mass of the modern world solidly disapprove of her creed; and he threw himself into replying to them with a hot intellectual enjoyment.
“I begin to understand one or two of your dogmas, Mr. Turnbull,” he had said emphatically as they ploughed heavily up a wooded hill. “And every one that I understand I deny. Take any one of them you like. You hold that your heretics and sceptics have helped the world forward and handed on a lamp of progress. I deny it. Nothing is plainer from real history than that each of your heretics invented a complete cosmos of his own which the next heretic smashed entirely to pieces. Who knows now exactly what Nestorius taught? Who cares? There are only two things that we know for certain about it. The first is that Nestorius, as a heretic, taught something quite opposite to the teaching of Arius, the heretic who came before him, and something quite useless to James Turnbull, the heretic who comes after. I defy you to go back to the Free-thinkers of the past and find any habitation for yourself at all. I defy you to read Godwin or Shelley or the deists of the eighteenth century of the nature-worshipping humanists of the Renaissance, without discovering that you differ from them twice as much as you differ from the Pope. You are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are always telling me that I ignore the cruelty of nature. If you had been an eighteenth-century sceptic you would have told me that I ignore the kindness and benevolence of nature. You are an atheist, and you praise the deists of the eighteenth century. Read them instead of praising them, and you will find that their whole universe stands or falls with the deity. You are a materialist, and you think Bruno a scientific hero. See what he said and you will think him an insane mystic. No, the great Free-thinker, with his genuine ability and honesty, does not in practice destroy Christianity. What he does destroy is the Free-thinker who went before. Free-thought may be suggestive, it may be inspiriting, it may have as much as you please of the merits that come from vivacity and variety. But there is one thing Free-thought can never be by any possibility—Free-thought can never be progressive. It can never be progressive because it will accept nothing from the past; it begins every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction. All the rational philosophers have gone along different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone farthest. Who can discuss whether Emerson was a better optimist than Schopenhauer was pessimist? It is like asking if this corn is as yellow as that hill is steep. No; there are only two things that really progress; and they both accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill and down; they may be growing steadily better or steadily worse; but they have steadily increased in certain definable matters; they have steadily advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things, it seems, that ever canprogress. The first is strictly physical science. The second is the Catholic Church.”
“Physical science and the Catholic Church!” said Turnbull sarcastically; “and no doubt the first owes a great deal to the second.”
“If you pressed that point I might reply that it was very probable,” answered MacIan calmly. “I often fancy that your historical generalizations rest frequently on random instances; I should not be surprised if your vague notions of the Church as the persecutor of science was a generalization from Galileo. I should not be at all surprised if, when you counted the scientific investigations and discoveries since the fall of Rome, you found that a great mass of them had been made by monks. But the matter is irrelevant to my meaning. I say that if you want an example of anything which has progressed in the moral world by the same method as science in the material world, by continually adding to without unsettling what was there before, then I say that there is only one example of it. And that is Us.”
“With this enormous difference,” said Turnbull, “that however elaborate be the calculations of physical science, their net result can be tested. Granted that it took millions of books I never read and millions of men I never heard of to discover the electric light. Still I can see the electric light. But I cannot see the supreme virtue which is the result of all your theologies and sacraments.”
“Catholic virtue is often invisible because it is the normal,” answered MacIan. “Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and all fashions are mild insanities. When Italy is mad on art the Church seems too Puritanical; when England is mad on Puritanism the Church seems too artistic. When you quarrel with us now you class us with kingship and despotism; but when you quarrelled with us first it was because we would not accept the divine despotism of Henry VIII. The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue.”
“Oh, I have heard all that!” said Turnbull with genial contempt. “I have heard that Christianity keeps the key of virtue, and that if you read Tom Paine you will cut your throat at Monte Carlo. It is such rubbish that I am not even angry at it. You say that Christianity is the prop of morals; but what more do you do? When a doctor attends you and could poison you with a pinch of salt, do you ask whether he is a Christian? You ask whether he is a gentleman, whether he is an M.D.—anything but that. When a soldier enlists to die for his country or disgrace it, do you ask whether he is a Christian? You are more likely to ask whether he is Oxford or Cambridge at the boat race. If you think your creed essential to morals why do you not make it a test for these things?”
“We once did make it a test for these things,” said MacIan smiling, “and then you told us that we were imposing by force a faith unsupported by argument. It seems rather hard that having first been told that our creed must be false because we did use tests, we should now be told that it must be false because we don’t. But I notice that most anti-Christian arguments are in the same inconsistent style.”
“That is all very well as a debating-club answer,” replied Turnbull good-humouredly, “but the question still remains: Why don’t you confine yourself more to Christians if Christians are the only really good men?”
“Who talked of such folly?” asked MacIan disdainfully. “Do you suppose that the Catholic Church ever held that Christians were the only good men? Why, the Catholics of the Catholic Middle Ages talked about the virtues of all the virtuous Pagans until humanity was sick of the subject. No, if you really want to know what we mean when we say that Christianity has a special power of virtue, I will tell you. The Church is the only thing on earth that can perpetuate a type of virtue and make it something more than a fashion. The thing is so plain and historical that I hardly think you will ever deny it. You cannot deny that it is perfectly possible that tomorrow morning, in Ireland or in Italy, there might appear a man not only as good but good in exactly the same way as St. Francis of Assisi. Very well, now take the other types of human virtue; many of them splendid. The English gentleman of Elizabeth was chivalrous and idealistic. But can you stand still here in this meadow and be an English gentleman of Elizabeth? The austere republican of the eighteenth century, with his stern patriotism and his simple life, was a fine fellow. But have you ever seen him? have you ever seen an austere republican? Only a hundred years have passed and that volcano of revolutionary truth and valour is as cold as the mountains of the moon. And so it is and so it will be with the ethics which are buzzing down Fleet Street at this instant as I speak. What phrase would inspire the London clerk or workman just now? Perhaps that he is a son of the British Empire on which the sun never sets; perhaps that he is a prop of his Trades Union, or a class-conscious proletarian something or other; perhaps merely that he is a gentleman when he obviously is not. Those names and notions are all honourable; but how long will they last? Empires break; industrial conditions change; the suburbs will not last for ever. What will remain? I will tell you. The Catholic Saint will remain.”
“And suppose I don’t like him?” said Turnbull.
“On my theory the question is rather whether he will like you: or more probably whether he will ever have heard of you. But I grant the reasonableness of your query. You have a right, if you speak as the ordinary man, to ask if you will like the saint. But as the ordinary man you do like him. You revel in him. If you dislike him it is not because you are a nice ordinary man, but because you are (if you will excuse me) a sophisticated prig of a Fleet Street editor. That is just the funny part of it. The human race has always admired the Catholic virtues, however little it can practise them; and oddly enough it has admired most those of them that the modern world most sharply disputes. You complain of Catholicism for setting up an ideal of virginity; it did nothing of the kind. The whole human race set up an ideal of virginity; the Greeks in Athene, the Romans in the Vestal fire, set up an ideal of virginity. What then is your real quarrel with Catholicism? Your quarrel can only be, your quarrel really only is, that Catholicism has achieved an ideal of virginity; that it is no longer a mere piece of floating poetry. But if you, and a few feverish men, in top hats, running about in a street in London, choose to differ as to the ideal itself, not only from the Church, but from the Parthenon whose name means virginity, from the Roman Empire which went outwards from the virgin flame, from the whole legend and tradition of Europe, from the lion who will not touch virgins, from the unicorn who respects them, and who make up together the bearers of your own national shield, from the most living and lawless of your own poets, from Massinger, who wrote the Virgin Martyr, from Shakespeare, who wrote Measure for Measure—if you in Fleet Street differ from all this human experience, does it never strike you that it may be Fleet Street that is wrong?”
“No,” answered Turnbull; “I trust that I am sufficiently fair-minded to canvass and consider the idea; but having considered it, I think Fleet Street is right, yes—even if the Parthenon is wrong. I think that as the world goes on new psychological atmospheres are generated, and in these atmospheres it is possible to find delicacies and combinations which in other times would have to be represented by some ruder symbol. Every man feels the need of some element of purity in sex; perhaps they can only typify purity as the absence of sex. You will laugh if I suggest that we may have made in Fleet Street an atmosphere in which a man can be so passionate as Sir Lancelot and as pure as Sir Galahad. But, after all, we have in the modern world erected many such atmospheres. We have, for instance, a new and imaginative appreciation of children.”
“Quite so,” replied MacIan with a singular smile. “It has been very well put by one of the brightest of your young authors, who said: ‘Unless you become as little children ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven.’ But you are quite right; there is a modern worship of children. And what, I ask you, is this modern worship of children? What, in the name of all the angels and devils, is it except a worship of virginity? Why should anyone worship a thing merely because it is small or immature? No; you have tried to escape from this thing, and the very thing you point to as the goal of your escape is only the thing again. Am I wrong in saying that these things seem to be eternal?”
And it was with these words that they came in sight of the great plains. They went a little way in silence, and then James Turnbull said suddenly, “But I cannot believe in the thing.” MacIan answered nothing to the speech; perhaps it is unanswerable. And indeed they scarcely spoke another word to each other all that day.
Newsletter 07
At about half past one, under a strong blue sky, Turnbull got up out of the grass and fern in which he had been lying, and his still intermittent laughter ended in a kind of yawn.
“I’m hungry,” he said shortly. “Are you?”
“I have not noticed,” answered MacIan. “What are you going to do?”
“There’s a village down the road, past the pool,” answered Turnbull. “I can see it from here. I can see the whitewashed walls of some cottages and a kind of corner of the church. How jolly it all looks. It looks so—I don’t know what the word is—so sensible. Don’t fancy I’m under any illusions about Arcadian virtue and the innocent villagers. Men make beasts of themselves there with drink, but they don’t deliberately make devils of themselves with mere talking. They kill wild animals in the wild woods, but they don’t kill cats to the God of Victory. They don’t——” He broke off and suddenly spat on the ground.
“Excuse me,” he said; “it was ceremonial. One has to get the taste out of one’s mouth.”
“The taste of what?” asked MacIan.
“I don’t know the exact name for it,” replied Turnbull. “Perhaps it is the South Sea Islands, or it may be Magdalen College.”
There was a long pause, and MacIan also lifted his large limbs off the ground—his eyes particularly dreamy.
“I know what you mean, Turnbull,” he said, “but… I always thought you people agreed with all that.”
“With all that about doing as one likes, and the individual, and Nature loving the strongest, and all the things which that cockroach talked about.”
Turnbull’s big blue-grey eyes stood open with a grave astonishment.
“Do you really mean to say, MacIan,” he said, “that you fancied that we, the Free-thinkers, that Bradlaugh, or Holyoake, or Ingersoll, believe all that dirty, immoral mysticism about Nature? Damn Nature!”
“I supposed you did,” said MacIan calmly. “It seems to me your most conclusive position.”
“And you mean to tell me,” rejoined the other, “that you broke my window, and challenged me to mortal combat, and tied a tradesman up with ropes, and chased an Oxford Fellow across five meadows—all under the impression that I am such an illiterate idiot as to believe in Nature!”
“I supposed you did,” repeated MacIan with his usual mildness; “but I admit that I know little of the details of your belief—or disbelief.”
Turnbull swung round quite suddenly, and set off towards the village.
“Come along,” he cried. “Come down to the village. Come down to the nearest decent inhabitable pub. This is a case for beer.”
“I do not quite follow you,” said the Highlander.
“Yes, you do,” answered Turnbull. “You follow me slap into the inn-parlour. I repeat, this is a case for beer. We must have the whole of this matter out thoroughly before we go a step farther. Do you know that an idea has just struck me of great simplicity and of some cogency. Do not by any means let us drop our intentions of settling our differences with two steel swords. But do you not think that with two pewter pots we might do what we really have never thought of doing yet—discover what our difference is?”
“It never occurred to me before,” answered MacIan with tranquillity. “It is a good suggestion.”
And they set out at an easy swing down the steep road to the village of Grassley-in-the-Hole.
Grassley-in-the-Hole was a rude parallelogram of buildings, with two thoroughfares which might have been called two high streets if it had been possible to call them streets. One of these ways was higher on the slope than the other, the whole parallelogram lying aslant, so to speak, on the side of the hill. The upper of these two roads was decorated with a big public house, a butcher’s shop, a small public house, a sweetstuff shop, a very small public house, and an illegible signpost. The lower of the two roads boasted a horse-pond, a post office, a gentleman’s garden with very high hedges, a microscopically small public house, and two cottages. Where all the people lived who supported all the public houses was in this, as in many other English villages, a silent and smiling mystery. The church lay a little above and beyond the village, with a square grey tower dominating it decisively.
But even the church was scarcely so central and solemn an institution as the large public house, the Valencourt Arms. It was named after some splendid family that had long gone bankrupt, and whose seat was occupied by a man who had invented a hygienic bootjack; but the unfathomable sentimentalism of the English people insisted in regarding the Inn, the seat and the sitter in it, as alike parts of a pure and marmoreal antiquity. And in the Valencourt Arms festivity itself had some solemnity and decorum; and beer was drunk with reverence, as it ought to be. Into the principal parlour of this place entered two strangers, who found themselves, as is always the case in such hostels, the object, not of fluttered curiosity or pert inquiry, but of steady, ceaseless, devouring ocular study. They had long coats down to their heels, and carried under each coat something that looked like a stick. One was tall and dark, the other short and red-haired. They ordered a pot of ale each.
“MacIan,” said Turnbull, lifting his tankard, “the fool who wanted us to be friends made us want to go on fighting. It is only natural that the fool who wanted us to fight should make us friendly. MacIan, your health!”
Dusk was already dropping, the rustics in the tavern were already lurching and lumbering out of it by twos and threes, crying clamorous good nights to a solitary old toper that remained, before MacIan and Turnbull had reached the really important part of their discussion.
MacIan wore an expression of sad bewilderment not uncommon with him. “I am to understand, then,” he said, “that you don’t believe in nature.”
“You may say so in a very special and emphatic sense,” said Turnbull. “I do not believe in nature, just as I do not believe in Odin. She is a myth. It is not merely that I do not believe that nature can guide us. It is that I do not believe that nature exists.”
“Exists?” said MacIan in his monotonous way, settling his pewter pot on the table.
“Yes, in a real sense nature does not exist. I mean that nobody can discover what the original nature of things would have been if things had not interfered with it. The first blade of grass began to tear up the earth and eat it; it was interfering with nature, if there is any nature. The first wild ox began to tear up the grass and eat it; he was interfering with nature, if there is any nature. In the same way,” continued Turnbull, “the human when it asserts its dominance over nature is just as natural as the thing which it destroys.”
“And in the same way,” said MacIan almost dreamily, “the superhuman, the supernatural is just as natural as the nature which it destroys.”
Turnbull took his head out of his pewter pot in some anger.
“The supernatural, of course,” he said, “is quite another thing; the case of the supernatural is simple. The supernatural does not exist.”
“Quite so,” said MacIan in a rather dull voice; “you said the same about the natural. If the natural does not exist the supernatural obviously can’t.” And he yawned a little over his ale.
Turnbull turned for some reason a little red and remarked quickly, “That may be jolly clever, for all I know. But everyone does know that there is a division between the things that as a matter of fact do commonly happen and the things that don’t. Things that break the evident laws of nature——”
“Which does not exist,” put in MacIan sleepily. Turnbull struck the table with a sudden hand.
“Good Lord in heaven!” he cried——
“Who does not exist,” murmured MacIan.
“Good Lord in heaven!” thundered Turnbull, without regarding the interruption. “Do you really mean to sit there and say that you, like anybody else, would not recognize the difference between a natural occurrence and a supernatural one—if there could be such a thing? If I flew up to the ceiling——”
“You would bump your head badly,” cried MacIan, suddenly starting up. “One can’t talk of this kind of thing under a ceiling at all. Come outside! Come outside and ascend into heaven!”
He burst the door open on a blue abyss of evening and they stepped out into it: it was suddenly and strangely cool.
“Turnbull,” said MacIan, “you have said some things so true and some so false that I want to talk; and I will try to talk so that you understand. For at present you do not understand at all. We don’t seem to mean the same things by the same words.”
He stood silent for a second or two and then resumed.
“A minute or two ago I caught you out in a real contradiction. At that moment logically I was right. And at that moment I knew I was wrong. Yes, there is a real difference between the natural and the supernatural: if you flew up into that blue sky this instant, I should think that you were moved by God—or the devil. But if you want to know what I really think…I must explain.”
He stopped again, abstractedly boring the point of his sword into the earth, and went on:
“I was born and bred and taught in a complete universe. The supernatural was not natural, but it was perfectly reasonable. Nay, the supernatural to me is more reasonable than the natural; for the supernatural is a direct message from God, who is reason. I was taught that some things are natural and some things divine. I mean that some things are mechanical and some things divine. But there is the great difficulty, Turnbull. The great difficulty is that, according to my teaching, you are divine.”
“Me! Divine?” said Turnbull truculently. “What do you mean?”
“That is just the difficulty,” continued MacIan thoughtfully. “I was told that there was a difference between the grass and a man’s will; and the difference was that a man’s will was special and divine. A man’s free will, I heard, was supernatural.”
“Rubbish!” said Turnbull.
“Oh,” said MacIan patiently, “then if a man’s free will isn’t supernatural, why do your materialists deny that it exists?”
Turnbull was silent for a moment. Then he began to speak, but MacIan continued with the same steady voice and sad eyes:
“So what I feel is this: Here is the great divine creation I was taught to believe in. I can understand your disbelieving in it, but why disbelieve in a part of it? It was all one thing to me. God had authority because he was God. Man had authority because he was man. You cannot prove that God is better than a man; nor can you prove that a man is better than a horse. Why permit any ordinary thing? Why do you let a horse be saddled?”
“Some modern thinkers disapprove of it,” said Turnbull a little doubtfully.
“I know,” said MacIan grimly; “that man who talked about love, for instance.”
Turnbull made a humorous grimace; then he said: “We seem to be talking in a kind of shorthand; but I won’t pretend not to understand you. What you mean is this: that you learnt about all your saints and angels at the same time as you learnt about common morality, from the same people, in the same way. And you mean to say that if one may be disputed, so may the other. Well, let that pass for the moment. But let me ask you a question in turn. Did not this system of yours, which you swallowed whole, contain all sorts of things that were merely local, the respect for the chief of your clan, or such things; the village ghost, the family feud, or what not? Did you not take in those things, too, along with your theology?”
MacIan stared along the dim village road, down which the last straggler from the inn was trailing his way.
“What you say is not unreasonable,” he said. “But it is not quite true. The distinction between the chief and us did exist; but it was never anything like the distinction between the human and the divine, or the human and the animal. It was more like the distinction between one animal and another. But——”
“Well?” said Turnbull.
MacIan was silent.
“Go on,” repeated Turnbull; “what’s the matter with you? What are you staring at?”
“I am staring,” said MacIan at last, “at that which shall judge us both.”
“Oh, yes,” said Turnbull in a tired way, “I suppose you mean God.”
“No, I don’t,” said MacIan, shaking his head. “I mean him.”
And he pointed to the half-tipsy yokel who was ploughing down the road.
“What do you mean?” asked the atheist.
“I mean him,” repeated MacIan with emphasis. “He goes out in the early dawn; he digs or he ploughs a field. Then he comes back and drinks ale, and then he sings a song. All your philosophies and political systems are young compared to him. All your hoary cathedrals, yes, even the Eternal Church on earth is new compared to him. The most mouldering gods in the British Museum are new facts beside him. It is he who in the end shall judge us all.”
And MacIan rose to his feet with a vague excitement.
“What are you going to do?”
“I am going to ask him,” cried MacIan, “which of us is right.”
Turnbull broke into a kind of laugh. “Ask that intoxicated turnip-eater——” he began.
“Yes—which of us is right,” cried MacIan violently. “Oh, you have long words and I have long words; and I talk of every man being the image of God; and you talk of every man being a citizen and enlightened enough to govern. But if every man typifies God, there is God. If every man is an enlightened citizen, there is your enlightened citizen. The first man one meets is always man. Let us catch him up.”
And in gigantic strides the long, lean Highlander whirled away into the grey twilight, Turnbull following with a good-humoured oath.
The track of the rustic was easy to follow, even in the faltering dark; for he was enlivening his wavering walk with song. It was an interminable poem, beginning with some unspecified King William, who (it appeared) lived in London town and who after the second rise vanished rather abruptly from the train of thought. The rest was almost entirely about beer and was thick with local topography of a quite unrecognizable kind. The singer’s step was neither very rapid, nor, indeed, exceptionally secure; so the song grew louder and louder and the two soon overtook him.
He was a man elderly or rather of any age, with lean grey hair and a lean red face, but with that remarkable rustic physiognomy in which it seems that all the features stand out independently from the face; the rugged red nose going out like a limb; the bleared blue eyes standing out like signals.
He gave them greeting with the elaborate urbanity of the slightly intoxicated. MacIan, who was vibrating with one of his silent, violent decisions, opened the question without delay. He explained the philosophic position in words as short and simple as possible. But the singular old man with the lank red face seemed to think uncommonly little of the short words. He fixed with a fierce affection upon one or two of the long ones.
“Atheists!” he repeated with luxurious scorn. “Atheists! I know their sort, master. Atheists! Don’t talk to me about ‘un. Atheists!”
The grounds of his disdain seemed a little dark and confused; but they were evidently sufficient. MacIan resumed in some encouragement:
“You think as I do, I hope; you think that a man should be connected with the Church; with the common Christian——”
The old man extended a quivering stick in the direction of a distant hill.
“There’s the church,” he said thickly. “Grassley old church that is. Pulled down it was, in the old squire’s time, and——”
“I mean,” explained MacIan elaborately, “that you think that there should be someone typifying religion, a priest——”
“Priests!” said the old man with sudden passion. “Priests! I know ‘un. What they want in England? That’s what I say. What they want in England?”
“They want you,” said MacIan.
“Quite so,” said Turnbull, “and me; but they won’t get us. MacIan, your attempt on the primitive innocence does not seem very successful. Let me try. What you want, my friend, is your rights. You don’t want any priests or churches. A vote, a right to speak is what you——”
“Who says I a’n’t got a right to speak?” said the old man, facing round in an irrational frenzy. “I got a right to speak. I’m a man, I am. I don’t want no votin’ nor priests. I say a man’s a man; that’s what I say. If a man a’n’t a man, what is he? That’s what I say, if a man a’n’t a man, what is he? When I sees a man, I sez ‘e’s a man.”
“Quite so,” said Turnbull, “a citizen.”
“I say he’s a man,” said the rustic furiously, stopping and striking his stick on the ground. “Not a city or owt else. He’s a man.”
“You’re perfectly right,” said the sudden voice of MacIan, falling like a sword. “And you have kept close to something the whole world of today tries to forget.”
“Good night.”
And the old man went on wildly singing into the night.
“A jolly old creature,” said Turnbull; “he didn’t seem able to get much beyond that fact that a man is a man.”
“Has anybody got beyond it?” asked MacIan.
Turnbull looked at him curiously. “Are you turning an agnostic?” he asked.
“Oh, you do not understand!” cried out MacIan. “We Catholics are all agnostics. We Catholics have only in that sense got as far as realizing that man is a man. But your Ibsens and your Zolas and your Shaws and your Tolstoys have not even got so far.”
At about half past one, under a strong blue sky, Turnbull got up out of the grass and fern in which he had been lying, and his still intermittent laughter ended in a kind of yawn.
“I’m hungry,” he said shortly. “Are you?”
“I have not noticed,” answered MacIan. “What are you going to do?”
“There’s a village down the road, past the pool,” answered Turnbull. “I can see it from here. I can see the whitewashed walls of some cottages and a kind of corner of the church. How jolly it all looks. It looks so—I don’t know what the word is—so sensible. Don’t fancy I’m under any illusions about Arcadian virtue and the innocent villagers. Men make beasts of themselves there with drink, but they don’t deliberately make devils of themselves with mere talking. They kill wild animals in the wild woods, but they don’t kill cats to the God of Victory. They don’t——” He broke off and suddenly spat on the ground.
“Excuse me,” he said; “it was ceremonial. One has to get the taste out of one’s mouth.”
“The taste of what?” asked MacIan.
“I don’t know the exact name for it,” replied Turnbull. “Perhaps it is the South Sea Islands, or it may be Magdalen College.”
There was a long pause, and MacIan also lifted his large limbs off the ground—his eyes particularly dreamy.
“I know what you mean, Turnbull,” he said, “but… I always thought you people agreed with all that.”
“With all that about doing as one likes, and the individual, and Nature loving the strongest, and all the things which that cockroach talked about.”
Turnbull’s big blue-grey eyes stood open with a grave astonishment.
“Do you really mean to say, MacIan,” he said, “that you fancied that we, the Free-thinkers, that Bradlaugh, or Holyoake, or Ingersoll, believe all that dirty, immoral mysticism about Nature? Damn Nature!”
“I supposed you did,” said MacIan calmly. “It seems to me your most conclusive position.”
“And you mean to tell me,” rejoined the other, “that you broke my window, and challenged me to mortal combat, and tied a tradesman up with ropes, and chased an Oxford Fellow across five meadows—all under the impression that I am such an illiterate idiot as to believe in Nature!”
“I supposed you did,” repeated MacIan with his usual mildness; “but I admit that I know little of the details of your belief—or disbelief.”
Turnbull swung round quite suddenly, and set off towards the village.
“Come along,” he cried. “Come down to the village. Come down to the nearest decent inhabitable pub. This is a case for beer.”
“I do not quite follow you,” said the Highlander.
“Yes, you do,” answered Turnbull. “You follow me slap into the inn-parlour. I repeat, this is a case for beer. We must have the whole of this matter out thoroughly before we go a step farther. Do you know that an idea has just struck me of great simplicity and of some cogency. Do not by any means let us drop our intentions of settling our differences with two steel swords. But do you not think that with two pewter pots we might do what we really have never thought of doing yet—discover what our difference is?”
“It never occurred to me before,” answered MacIan with tranquillity. “It is a good suggestion.”
And they set out at an easy swing down the steep road to the village of Grassley-in-the-Hole.
Grassley-in-the-Hole was a rude parallelogram of buildings, with two thoroughfares which might have been called two high streets if it had been possible to call them streets. One of these ways was higher on the slope than the other, the whole parallelogram lying aslant, so to speak, on the side of the hill. The upper of these two roads was decorated with a big public house, a butcher’s shop, a small public house, a sweetstuff shop, a very small public house, and an illegible signpost. The lower of the two roads boasted a horse-pond, a post office, a gentleman’s garden with very high hedges, a microscopically small public house, and two cottages. Where all the people lived who supported all the public houses was in this, as in many other English villages, a silent and smiling mystery. The church lay a little above and beyond the village, with a square grey tower dominating it decisively.
But even the church was scarcely so central and solemn an institution as the large public house, the Valencourt Arms. It was named after some splendid family that had long gone bankrupt, and whose seat was occupied by a man who had invented a hygienic bootjack; but the unfathomable sentimentalism of the English people insisted in regarding the Inn, the seat and the sitter in it, as alike parts of a pure and marmoreal antiquity. And in the Valencourt Arms festivity itself had some solemnity and decorum; and beer was drunk with reverence, as it ought to be. Into the principal parlour of this place entered two strangers, who found themselves, as is always the case in such hostels, the object, not of fluttered curiosity or pert inquiry, but of steady, ceaseless, devouring ocular study. They had long coats down to their heels, and carried under each coat something that looked like a stick. One was tall and dark, the other short and red-haired. They ordered a pot of ale each.
“MacIan,” said Turnbull, lifting his tankard, “the fool who wanted us to be friends made us want to go on fighting. It is only natural that the fool who wanted us to fight should make us friendly. MacIan, your health!”
Dusk was already dropping, the rustics in the tavern were already lurching and lumbering out of it by twos and threes, crying clamorous good nights to a solitary old toper that remained, before MacIan and Turnbull had reached the really important part of their discussion.
MacIan wore an expression of sad bewilderment not uncommon with him. “I am to understand, then,” he said, “that you don’t believe in nature.”
“You may say so in a very special and emphatic sense,” said Turnbull. “I do not believe in nature, just as I do not believe in Odin. She is a myth. It is not merely that I do not believe that nature can guide us. It is that I do not believe that nature exists.”
“Exists?” said MacIan in his monotonous way, settling his pewter pot on the table.
“Yes, in a real sense nature does not exist. I mean that nobody can discover what the original nature of things would have been if things had not interfered with it. The first blade of grass began to tear up the earth and eat it; it was interfering with nature, if there is any nature. The first wild ox began to tear up the grass and eat it; he was interfering with nature, if there is any nature. In the same way,” continued Turnbull, “the human when it asserts its dominance over nature is just as natural as the thing which it destroys.”
“And in the same way,” said MacIan almost dreamily, “the superhuman, the supernatural is just as natural as the nature which it destroys.”
Turnbull took his head out of his pewter pot in some anger.
“The supernatural, of course,” he said, “is quite another thing; the case of the supernatural is simple. The supernatural does not exist.”
“Quite so,” said MacIan in a rather dull voice; “you said the same about the natural. If the natural does not exist the supernatural obviously can’t.” And he yawned a little over his ale.
Turnbull turned for some reason a little red and remarked quickly, “That may be jolly clever, for all I know. But everyone does know that there is a division between the things that as a matter of fact do commonly happen and the things that don’t. Things that break the evident laws of nature——”
“Which does not exist,” put in MacIan sleepily. Turnbull struck the table with a sudden hand.
“Good Lord in heaven!” he cried——
“Who does not exist,” murmured MacIan.
“Good Lord in heaven!” thundered Turnbull, without regarding the interruption. “Do you really mean to sit there and say that you, like anybody else, would not recognize the difference between a natural occurrence and a supernatural one—if there could be such a thing? If I flew up to the ceiling——”
“You would bump your head badly,” cried MacIan, suddenly starting up. “One can’t talk of this kind of thing under a ceiling at all. Come outside! Come outside and ascend into heaven!”
He burst the door open on a blue abyss of evening and they stepped out into it: it was suddenly and strangely cool.
“Turnbull,” said MacIan, “you have said some things so true and some so false that I want to talk; and I will try to talk so that you understand. For at present you do not understand at all. We don’t seem to mean the same things by the same words.”
He stood silent for a second or two and then resumed.
“A minute or two ago I caught you out in a real contradiction. At that moment logically I was right. And at that moment I knew I was wrong. Yes, there is a real difference between the natural and the supernatural: if you flew up into that blue sky this instant, I should think that you were moved by God—or the devil. But if you want to know what I really think…I must explain.”
He stopped again, abstractedly boring the point of his sword into the earth, and went on:
“I was born and bred and taught in a complete universe. The supernatural was not natural, but it was perfectly reasonable. Nay, the supernatural to me is more reasonable than the natural; for the supernatural is a direct message from God, who is reason. I was taught that some things are natural and some things divine. I mean that some things are mechanical and some things divine. But there is the great difficulty, Turnbull. The great difficulty is that, according to my teaching, you are divine.”
“Me! Divine?” said Turnbull truculently. “What do you mean?”
“That is just the difficulty,” continued MacIan thoughtfully. “I was told that there was a difference between the grass and a man’s will; and the difference was that a man’s will was special and divine. A man’s free will, I heard, was supernatural.”
“Rubbish!” said Turnbull.
“Oh,” said MacIan patiently, “then if a man’s free will isn’t supernatural, why do your materialists deny that it exists?”
Turnbull was silent for a moment. Then he began to speak, but MacIan continued with the same steady voice and sad eyes:
“So what I feel is this: Here is the great divine creation I was taught to believe in. I can understand your disbelieving in it, but why disbelieve in a part of it? It was all one thing to me. God had authority because he was God. Man had authority because he was man. You cannot prove that God is better than a man; nor can you prove that a man is better than a horse. Why permit any ordinary thing? Why do you let a horse be saddled?”
“Some modern thinkers disapprove of it,” said Turnbull a little doubtfully.
“I know,” said MacIan grimly; “that man who talked about love, for instance.”
Turnbull made a humorous grimace; then he said: “We seem to be talking in a kind of shorthand; but I won’t pretend not to understand you. What you mean is this: that you learnt about all your saints and angels at the same time as you learnt about common morality, from the same people, in the same way. And you mean to say that if one may be disputed, so may the other. Well, let that pass for the moment. But let me ask you a question in turn. Did not this system of yours, which you swallowed whole, contain all sorts of things that were merely local, the respect for the chief of your clan, or such things; the village ghost, the family feud, or what not? Did you not take in those things, too, along with your theology?”
MacIan stared along the dim village road, down which the last straggler from the inn was trailing his way.
“What you say is not unreasonable,” he said. “But it is not quite true. The distinction between the chief and us did exist; but it was never anything like the distinction between the human and the divine, or the human and the animal. It was more like the distinction between one animal and another. But——”
“Well?” said Turnbull.
MacIan was silent.
“Go on,” repeated Turnbull; “what’s the matter with you? What are you staring at?”
“I am staring,” said MacIan at last, “at that which shall judge us both.”
“Oh, yes,” said Turnbull in a tired way, “I suppose you mean God.”
“No, I don’t,” said MacIan, shaking his head. “I mean him.”
And he pointed to the half-tipsy yokel who was ploughing down the road.
“What do you mean?” asked the atheist.
“I mean him,” repeated MacIan with emphasis. “He goes out in the early dawn; he digs or he ploughs a field. Then he comes back and drinks ale, and then he sings a song. All your philosophies and political systems are young compared to him. All your hoary cathedrals, yes, even the Eternal Church on earth is new compared to him. The most mouldering gods in the British Museum are new facts beside him. It is he who in the end shall judge us all.”
And MacIan rose to his feet with a vague excitement.
“What are you going to do?”
“I am going to ask him,” cried MacIan, “which of us is right.”
Turnbull broke into a kind of laugh. “Ask that intoxicated turnip-eater——” he began.
“Yes—which of us is right,” cried MacIan violently. “Oh, you have long words and I have long words; and I talk of every man being the image of God; and you talk of every man being a citizen and enlightened enough to govern. But if every man typifies God, there is God. If every man is an enlightened citizen, there is your enlightened citizen. The first man one meets is always man. Let us catch him up.”
And in gigantic strides the long, lean Highlander whirled away into the grey twilight, Turnbull following with a good-humoured oath.
The track of the rustic was easy to follow, even in the faltering dark; for he was enlivening his wavering walk with song. It was an interminable poem, beginning with some unspecified King William, who (it appeared) lived in London town and who after the second rise vanished rather abruptly from the train of thought. The rest was almost entirely about beer and was thick with local topography of a quite unrecognizable kind. The singer’s step was neither very rapid, nor, indeed, exceptionally secure; so the song grew louder and louder and the two soon overtook him.
He was a man elderly or rather of any age, with lean grey hair and a lean red face, but with that remarkable rustic physiognomy in which it seems that all the features stand out independently from the face; the rugged red nose going out like a limb; the bleared blue eyes standing out like signals.
He gave them greeting with the elaborate urbanity of the slightly intoxicated. MacIan, who was vibrating with one of his silent, violent decisions, opened the question without delay. He explained the philosophic position in words as short and simple as possible. But the singular old man with the lank red face seemed to think uncommonly little of the short words. He fixed with a fierce affection upon one or two of the long ones.
“Atheists!” he repeated with luxurious scorn. “Atheists! I know their sort, master. Atheists! Don’t talk to me about ‘un. Atheists!”
The grounds of his disdain seemed a little dark and confused; but they were evidently sufficient. MacIan resumed in some encouragement:
“You think as I do, I hope; you think that a man should be connected with the Church; with the common Christian——”
The old man extended a quivering stick in the direction of a distant hill.
“There’s the church,” he said thickly. “Grassley old church that is. Pulled down it was, in the old squire’s time, and——”
“I mean,” explained MacIan elaborately, “that you think that there should be someone typifying religion, a priest——”
“Priests!” said the old man with sudden passion. “Priests! I know ‘un. What they want in England? That’s what I say. What they want in England?”
“They want you,” said MacIan.
“Quite so,” said Turnbull, “and me; but they won’t get us. MacIan, your attempt on the primitive innocence does not seem very successful. Let me try. What you want, my friend, is your rights. You don’t want any priests or churches. A vote, a right to speak is what you——”
“Who says I a’n’t got a right to speak?” said the old man, facing round in an irrational frenzy. “I got a right to speak. I’m a man, I am. I don’t want no votin’ nor priests. I say a man’s a man; that’s what I say. If a man a’n’t a man, what is he? That’s what I say, if a man a’n’t a man, what is he? When I sees a man, I sez ‘e’s a man.”
“Quite so,” said Turnbull, “a citizen.”
“I say he’s a man,” said the rustic furiously, stopping and striking his stick on the ground. “Not a city or owt else. He’s a man.”
“You’re perfectly right,” said the sudden voice of MacIan, falling like a sword. “And you have kept close to something the whole world of today tries to forget.”
“Good night.”
And the old man went on wildly singing into the night.
“A jolly old creature,” said Turnbull; “he didn’t seem able to get much beyond that fact that a man is a man.”
“Has anybody got beyond it?” asked MacIan.
Turnbull looked at him curiously. “Are you turning an agnostic?” he asked.
“Oh, you do not understand!” cried out MacIan. “We Catholics are all agnostics. We Catholics have only in that sense got as far as realizing that man is a man. But your Ibsens and your Zolas and your Shaws and your Tolstoys have not even got so far.”
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