God and Mr. Wells Part 4

After all, is it a greater miracle that consciousness should exist _de_tached from matter than that it should exist _at_tached to matter?

Yet the latter miracle n.o.body doubts, except in the nursery games of the metaphysicians.

To define, or rather to adumbrate, the realm of mystery, which is yet as indisputably real as the realm of reason and sense, we naturally turn to the poets, the seers. Here is a glimpse of it through the eyes of Francis Thompson, that creature of transcendent vision who made a strange pretence of wearing the blinkers of the Roman Catholic Church.

Thus he writes in his "Anthem of Earth":--

Ay, Mother! Mother!

What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed, Thou l.u.s.tingly engender'st, To sweat, and make his brag, and rot, Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness?

From nightly towers He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens, Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust, And yet is he successive unto nothing But patrimony of a little mould, And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth Avid of all dominion and all mightiness, All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs, All beauty and all starry majesties, And dim transtellar things;--even that it may, Filled in the ending with a puff of dust, Confess--"It is enough." The world left empty What that poor mouthful crams. His heart is builded For pride, for potency, infinity, All heights, all deeps, and all immensities, Arras'd with purple like the house of kings,-- To stall the grey rat, and the carrion-worm Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries!

Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues, Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark As we ourselves, thy darkest!

Surely this is the very truth. Man is a hieroglyph to which reason supplies no key--nay, reason itself is the heart of the enigma. And does not this lend a strange fascination to the adventure of life?

Another singer, in a very much simpler strain, puts something of the same idea:--

Marooned on an isle of mystery, From a stupor of sleep we woke, And gazed at each other wistfully, A wondering, wildered folk.

There were flowery valleys and mountains blue, And pastures, and herds galore, And fruits that were luscious to bite into, Though bitter at the core.

So we plucked up heart, and we dree'd our weird Through flickering gleam and gloom, And still for rescue we hoped--or feared-- From our island home and tomb.

But never over the sailless sea Came messenger bark or schooner With news from the far-off realm whence we Set sail for that isle of mystery, Or a whisper of apology From our mute, malign marooner.

The strain of pessimism in this is even more marked than in Thompson's "Anthem"; and indeed it is hard to deny that the resolute silence of the "Veiled Being," the "Invisible King," and all the G.o.ds and G.o.dlings ever propounded to mortal piety, is one of their most suspicious characteristics. Yet it may be that this reproach, however natural, does the Veiled Being--or the Younger Power of our alternative myth--a measure of injustice. It may be that the great Dramaturge keeps his plot to himself precisely in order that the interest may be maintained up to the fall of the curtain. It may be that its disclosure would upset the conditions of some vast experiment which he is working out. Where would be the interest of a race if its result were a foregone conclusion? Where the pa.s.sion of a battle if its issue were foreknown? What if we should prove to be somnambulists treading some dizzy edge between two abysses, and able to reach the goal only on condition that we are unconscious of the process? Perhaps the sanest view of the problem is that presented in Bliss Carman's haunting poem

THE JUGGLER

Look how he throws them up and up, The beautiful golden b.a.l.l.s!

They hang aloft in the purple air, And there never is one that falls.

He sends them hot from his steady hand, He teaches them all their curves; And whether the reach be little or long, There never is one that swerves.

Some, like the tiny red one there, He never lets go far; And some he has sent to the roof of the tent To swim without a jar.

So white and still they seem to hang, You wonder if he forgot To reckon the time of their return And measure their golden lot.

Can it be that, hurried or tired out, The hand of the juggler shook?

O never you fear, his eye is clear, He knows them all like a book.

And they will home to his hand at last, For he pulls them by a cord Finer than silk and strong as fate, That is just the bid of his word.

Was ever there such a sight in the world?

Like a wonderful winding skein,-- The way he tangles them up together And ravels them out again!

If I could have him at the inn All by myself some night,-- Inquire his country, and where in the world He came by that cunning sleight!

Where do you guess he learned the trick To hold us gaping here, Till our minds in the spell of his maze almost Have forgotten the time of year?

One never could have the least idea.

Yet why he disposed to twit A fellow who does such wonderful things With the merest lack of wit?

Likely enough, when the show is done And the b.a.l.l.s all back in his hand, He'll tell us why he is smiling so, And we shall understand.

I am not, perhaps, very firmly a.s.sured of this consummation. Yet I am much more hopeful of one day understanding the Juggler and the b.a.l.l.s than of ever getting into confidential relations with Mr. Wells's Invisible King.

One is conscious of a sort of churlishness in thus rejecting the advances of so amiable a character as the Invisible King. But is Mr.

Wells, on his side, quite courteous, or even quite fair, to the Veiled Being? "Riddle me no riddles!" he seems to say; "I am tired of your guessing games. Let us have done with 'distressful enquiry into ultimate origins,' and 'bring our minds to the conception of a spontaneous and developing G.o.d'--one of whose existence and benevolence we are sure, since we made him ourselves. I want something to worship, to take me out of myself, to inspire me with brave phrases about death. How can one worship an insoluble problem? Will an enigma die with me in a reeling aeroplane? While you lurk obstinately behind that veil, how can I even know that your political views are sound?

Whereas the Invisible King gives forth oracles of the highest political wisdom, in a voice which I can scarcely distinguish from my own. You are a remote, tantalizing ent.i.ty with nothing comforting or stimulating about you. But as for my Invisible King, 'Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.'"

A little way back, I compared Mr. Wells to Moses; but, looked at from another point of view, he and his co-religionists may rather be likened to the Children of Israel. Tired of waiting for news from the G.o.d on the cloudy mountain-top, did they not make themselves a synthetic deity, finite, friendly, and very like the Invisible King, inasmuch as he seems to have worked no miracles, and done, in fact, nothing whatever? But the G.o.d on the mountain-top was wroth, and accused them of idolatry, surely not without reason. For what is idolatry if it be not manufacturing a G.o.d, whether out of golden earrings or out of humanitarian sentiments, and then bowing down and worshipping it?

The wrath of the tribal G.o.d against his bovine rival was certainly excessive--yet we cannot regard idolatry as one of the loftier manifestations of the religious spirit. The man who can bow down and worship the work of his hands shows a morbid craving for self-abas.e.m.e.nt. It is possible, no doubt, to plead that the graven image is a mere symbol of incorporeal, supersensible deity; and the plea is a good one, if, and in so far as, we can believe that the distinction between the sign and the thing signified is clear to the mind of the devotee. The difficulty lies in believing that the type of mind which is capable of focussing its devotion upon a statuette is also capable of distinguishing between the idea of a symbol and the idea of a portrait. But when we pa.s.s from the work of a man's hands to the work of his brain--from an actual piece of sculpture to a mental construction--the plea of symbolism can no longer be advanced. This graven image of the mind, so to speak, is the veritable G.o.d, or it is nothing; and Mr. Wells, as we have seen, is profuse in his a.s.surances that it is the veritable G.o.d. That is what makes his whole att.i.tude and argument so baffling. One can understand an idolater who says "I believe that my G.o.d inhabits yonder image," or "Yonder image is only a convenient point of concentration for the reverence, grat.i.tude, and love which pa.s.s through it to the august and transcendent Spirit whom it symbolizes." But how are we to understand the idolater who adores, and claims actual divinity for, an emanation from his own brain and the brains of a certain number of like-minded persons? Is it not as though a ventriloquist were to prostrate himself before his own puppet?

This craving for something to worship points to an almost uncanny recrudescence of the spirit of Asia in a fine European intelligence.

For my own part, as above stated, I cannot believe Mr. Wells's case to be typical; but in that I may be mistaken. It is possible that an epidemic of Asiatic religiosity may be one of the sequels of the War.

If that be so--if there are many people who shrink from the condition of the spiritual "ronin," and are in search of a respectable "daimio"

to whom to pay their devotion--I beg leave strongly to urge the claims of the Veiled Being as against the Invisible King.

He has at the outset the not inconsiderable advantage of being an ent.i.ty instead of a non-ent.i.ty. Whoever or whatever he may be, we are compelled by the very const.i.tution of our minds to a.s.sume his (or its) existence; whereas there is manifestly no compulsion to a.s.sume the existence of the Invisible King.

Then, again, the Veiled Being is entirely unpretentious. There is no bl.u.s.ter and no cant about him. He does not claim our grat.i.tude for the doubtful boon of life. He does not pretend to be just, while he is committing, or winking at, the most intolerable injustices. He does not set up to be long-suffering, while in fact he is childishly touchy. He does not profess to be merciful, while the incurable ward, the battlefield--nay, even the maternity home and the dentist's parlor--are there to give him the lie. (Here, of course, I am not contrasting him with the Invisible King, but with more ancient and still more Asian divinities.) It is the moral pretensions tagged on by the theologians to metaphysical G.o.dhead that revolt and estrange reasonable men--Mr. Wells among the rest. If you tell us that behind the Veil we shall find a good-natured, indulgent old man, who chastens us only for our good, is pleased by our flatteries (with or without music), and is not more than suitably vexed at our naughtinesses in the Garden of Eden and elsewhere--we reply that this is a nursery tale which has been riddled, time out of mind, not by wicked sceptics, but by the spontaneous, irrepressible criticism of babes and sucklings.

But if you divest the Veiled Being of all ethical--or in other words of all human--attributes, then there is no difficulty whatever in admiring, and even adoring, the marvels he has wrought. Tennyson went deeper than he realized into the nature of things when he wrote--

"For merit lives from man to man, But not from man, O Lord, to thee."

Once put aside all question of merit and demerit, of praise and blame, and more especially (but this will shock Mr. Wells) of salvation and d.a.m.nation--and nothing can be easier than to pay to the works of the Veiled Being the meed of an illimitable wonder. When we think of the roaring vortices of flame that spangle the heavens night by night, at distances that beggar conception: when we think of our tiny earth, wrapped in its little film of atmosphere, spinning safely for ages untold amid all these appalling immensities: and when we think, on the other hand, of the battles of claw and maw going on, beneath the starry vault, in that most miraculous of jewels, a drop of water: we cannot but own that the Power which set all this whirl of atoms agoing is worthy of all admiration. And approbation? Ah, that is another matter; for there the moral element comes in. It is possible (and here lies the interest of the enigma) that the Veiled Being may one day justify himself even morally. Perhaps he is all the time doing so behind the veil. But on that it is absolutely useless to speculate.

Light may one day come to us, but it will come through patient investigation, not through idle pondering and guessing. In the meantime, poised between the macrocosm and the microcosm, ourselves including both extremes, and being, perhaps, the most stupendous miracle of all, we cannot deny to this amazing frame of things the tribute of an unutterable awe. If that be religion, I profess myself as religious as Mr. Wells. I am even willing to join him in some outward, ceremonial expression of that sentiment, if he can suggest one that shall not be ridiculously inadequate. What about kneeling through the C Minor Symphony? That seems to me about as near as we can get. Or I will go with him to Primrose Hill some fine morning (like the Persian Amba.s.sador fabled by Charles Lamb) and worship the Sun, chanting to him William Watson's magnificent hymn:--

"To thee as our Father we bow, Forbidden thy Father to see, Who is older and greater than thou, as thou Art greater and older than we."

The sun, at any rate, is not a figure of speech, and is a symbol which runs no risk of being mistaken for a portrait. If Mr. Wells would be content with some such "bright sciential idolatry," I would willingly declare myself a co-idolater. But alas! he is the hierophant of the Invisible King, and prayer to that impotent potentate is to me a moral impossibility. I would rather face d.a.m.nation, especially in the mild form threatened by Mr. Wells, which consists (pp. 148-149) in not knowing that you are d.a.m.ned.

And if Mr. Wells maintains that in the worship of the non-moral Veiled Being there is no practical, pragmatic comfort, I reply that I am not so sure of that. When all is said and done, is there not more hope, more solace, in an enigma than in a _facon de parler_? I should be quite willing to accept the test of the reeling aeroplane. The aviator can say to his soul: "Here am I, one of the most amazing births of time, the culmination of an endless series of miracles. Perhaps I am on the verge of extinction--if so, what does it all matter? But perhaps, on the contrary, I am about to plunge into some new adventure, as marvellous as this. More marvellous it cannot be, but it may perhaps be more agreeable. At all events, there is something fascinating in this leap in the dark. Good bye, my soul! Good-bye, my memory!

'If we should meet again, why, we shall smile; If not, why then this parting was well made.'"

I cannot but think that there is as much religion and as much solace in such a shaking-off of "the bur o' the world" as in the thought that the last new patent G.o.d is going to die with you, and that you, unconsciously and indistinguishably merged in him, are going to live for ever.

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