CHAPTER XLI.
_NATURE AND SUPERNATURE._
But Richard soon began to recover both from the separation and from his
disappointment in regard to his letter. He was satisfied that whatever
might be the cause of her silence, it came from no fault in Barbara.
Nothing ever shook his faith in her.
And soon he found that he looked now upon the world with eyes from which
a veil had been withdrawn. Barbara gone, mother Earth came nigh to
comfort her child. He had always delighted in the beauty of the world--in
what shows of earth and air were to be seen in London. The sunset that
filled as with a glowing curtain the end of some street where he walked,
would go on glowing in his heart when it left the street. Even in winter
he would now and then go out to see the sunrise, and see it; and from the
street might now and then, at rare times, be beheld a dappling and
streaking, a mottling and massing of clouds on the blue. The fog of the
London valley, and the smoke of the London chimneys, did not _always_,
any more than the cares and sorrows and sins of its souls, blot out its
heaven as if it had never looked on the earth. But he had learned much
since he went to the country; he had gone nearer to Nature, and seen that
in her lap she carried many more things than he knew of; and now that
Barbara was gone, the memories of Nature came nearer to him: he
remembered her and was glad. Soon he began to find that, both as regards
Nature and those whom we love, absence is, for very nearness, often
better than presence itself. He had been used to think and talk of Nature
either as an abstraction, or as the personification of a force that knew
nothing, and cared for nothing, was nobody, was nothing; now it gradually
came to him, and gained upon him ere he knew, first that the things about
him wore meanings, and held them up to him, then that something was
thinking, something was meaning the things themselves, and so moving
thoughts in him, that came and went unforeseen, unbidden. Thoughts
clothed in things were everywhere about him, over his head, under his
feet, and in his heart; and as often as anything brought him pleasure,
either through memory or in present vision, it brought Barbara too; and
she seemed their maker, when she was but one of the fair company, the
lady of the land. Everything beautiful turned his face to the more
beautiful, more precious, diviner Barbara. With each new sense of
loveliness, she floated up from where she lay, ever ready to rise, in the
ocean of his heart. She was the dweller of his everywhere!
He knew that Barbara did not make these things; it only seemed as if she
made them because she was the better joy of them: did not the fact show
how the fiction of a God might have sprung up in the minds that had no
Barbara to look like the maker of the loveliness? But Barbara was there
already, known and loved. The mind did not invent Barbara. And again, why
should the mind want anyone to look like a maker, an indweller, an
_ingeniuer_--to use a word of Shakespeare's invention? Yet again, why
should the thought of Barbara _suggest_ a soul, that is, a causing,
informing presence, to these things? Was there a meaning in them? How did
they come to have that meaning? Could it be that, having come out of
nothing--the mind of man, and all the things, out of the same nothing,
they responded enough to each other for the man to find his own reflex
wherever he pleased to look for it? Only, if man and Nature came both out
of nothing, why should they not be nothing to each other? why should not
man be nothing to himself? As it was, one nothing, having no thought,
meant the same the other nothing meant, having thought!--and hence came
all the beauty of the world! And once again, if these things meant
nothing but what the mind put into them--its own thought, namely, of
them--they did not really mean anything, they were only imagined to mean
it; and why should he, if but for a moment, imagine Barbara at the root
of nothing? And why should he not, seeing she was herself nothing? Or was
he to consent to be fooled, and act as if there was something where he
knew there was nothing?
The truth of Richard's love appeared in this that he was more able now to
see the other side of a thing, to start objection to his own idea from
the side of one who thought differently.
"If I feel," he would say to himself, "as if these things meant
something, and conclude that they only mean _me,_ being the body to me,
who am the soul of them; and still more if I conclude that the sum of
them is the blind cause of me; then, when I grow sick of myself, finding
no comfort, no stay in myself for myself, and know that I need another,
say _another self,_ then the seeming sympathy that Nature offers me, is
the merest mockery! It is only my own self--myself gone behind and
peeping round a corner, grinning back sympathy at me from its sickening
death-mask! Why should man need another if he came from nothing? But he
came from a father and mother: man needed the woman: will not that
explain the thing? No; for even the relation itself needs to be comforted
and sustained and defended!"
Why was there so much, and most of all in himself, for which, as Richard
was beginning to understand, even a Barbara could not suffice? Why also
did her sufficiency depend so much on her faith in an all-sufficient? And
why was there so often such a gulf betwixt the two that seemed made for
each other? Ah! they were made for each other only in the general! For
the individual, Nature did not care; she had no time! Then how was it
that he cared for Nature? If Nature meant anything, was an intelligence,
a sort of God, why should he, the individual, who loved as an individual,
was a blessing or curse to himself as an individual--why should he care
anything for one who loved only in the general? Could a man love in
general? Yes; he himself loved his kind and sought to deliver them from
superstition. But that was because he could think of them as a multitude
of individuals. If he had never loved father, mother, or friend, would he
have loved in the general? Would crowds of men and women have _awaked_
love in him? If so, then the bigger crowd must always move the greater
love! No; it is from the individual we go to the many. Love that was only
in the general, that cared for the nation, the race, and let the
individual perish, could not be love. He would be no God who cared only
for a world or a race. The live conscious individual man could not love
or worship him! And if no individual worshipped, where would be the
worship of the crowd? Still less could a vague creator of masses, that
knew nothing of individuals, being himself not individual, be worthy to
be called God! Demon be might be--never God! But if God were a person, an
individual, and so loved the individual!--ah, then indeed!--Barbara
believed that such a God lived all about and in us! Mr. Wingfold said he
was too great to prove, too near to see, but the greater and the nearer,
the more fit to be loved! There were things against it! Nature herself
seemed against it, for, lovely us she was, she did awful things! Could
Nature have come from one source, and God be another source from which
came man? He was too near Nature, too much at home with her, to believe
it. Could it be one Nature that made all the lovely things, and another
Nature that decreed their fate? That also he could not believe: they and
their fate must be from one hand, or heart, or will! He could but hope
there might be some way of reconciling the terrible dissonance between
Nature and Barbara's God! If there was such a way, if their contradiction
was only in seeming, then the very depth of their unity might be the
cause of their seeming discord!
Something in this way the mind of Richard felt and thought and saw and
doubted and speculated. Then he would turn to the ancient story--still
because "Barbara said."
The God Barbara believed in was like Jesus Christ!--not at all like the
God his mother believed in! Jesus was one that could be loved: he could
not have come to reveal such a God as his mother's, for he was no
revelation of that kind of a God! He was gentle, and cared for the
individual! And he said he loved the Father! But he was his son, and a
good son might love a bad father. Yes, but could a bad God have a good
son? No; the son of God must be the revelation of his father; such as the
Son is, just such and no other must the Father be; there cannot but be
harmony between the beings of the two!
In very truth there must appear schism in Nature, yea schism in God
himself, until we see that the ruling Father and the suffering Son are of
one mind, one love, one purpose; that in the Father the Son rules, in the
Son the Father suffers; that with the Son the other children must suffer
and rise to rule. To Richard's eyes there was schism everywhere; no
harmony, no right, no concord, no peace! And yet all science pointed to
harmony, all imagination thirsted for it, all conscience commanded it!
all music asserted and prophesied it! all progress was built on the
notion of it! all love, the only thing yielding worth to existence, was a
partial realization of it! So that the schism came even to this, that
harmony itself was divided against itself, asserting that the thing that
was not, and could not be, yet ought to be! Nothing but harmony has a
real, a true, an essential being; yet here were thousands of undeniable
things which seemed to exist in very virtue of their lack of harmony!
There were shocks and recoils in every part of every thinking soul, in
every part of the object-world! And yet in certain blissful pauses,
unlooked for, uncaused by man, certain sudden silences of the world, an
eternal harmony would for one moment manifest itself behind the seething
conflicting discords that fill the atmosphere of the soul--straightway to
vanish again, it is true, but into the heart of Hope that saves men. If
harmony was not at one with itself in its harmony, neither was discord at
one with itself in its discordancy! Now and then all nature seemed on the
point of breaking into a smile, and saying, "Ah, children! if you but
knew what I know!" Why did she not say what she knew? Why should she hide
the thing that would make her children blessed?
The thought, half way to an answer, did not come to Richard then: What if
we are not yet able to understand her secret--therefore not able to see
it although it lies open before us? What if the difficulty lies in us!
What if Nature is doing her best to reveal! What if God is working to
make us know--if we would but let him--as fast as ever he can! There is
one thing that will not be pictured, cannot be made notionally present to
the mind by any effort of the imagination--one thing that requires the
purest faith: a man's own ignorance and incapacity. It is impossible to
think of the object of our ignorance, how then realize the ignorance
whose very centre is a blank, a negation! When a man knows, then first he
gets a glimpse of his ignorance as it vanishes. Ignorance, I say, cannot
be the object of knowledge. We must _believe_ ourselves ignorant. And for
that we must be humble of heart. When our world seems clear to the
horizon, when the constellations beyond look plainest, when we seem to be
understanding all within our scope, then have we yet to believe that,
unseen, formally unsuspected, beyond, lies that which may wither up many
forms of our belief, and must modify every true form in which we hold the
truth. For God is infinite, and we are his little ones, and his truth is
eternally better than the best shape in which we see it. Jesus is
perfect, but is our idea of him perfect? One thing only is changeless
truth in us, and that is--obedient faith in him and his father. Even that
has to grow--but with a growth which is not change. That there is a
greater life than that we feel--yea, a life that causes us, and is
absolutely and primarily essential to us--of this truth we have a
glimpse; but no man will arrive at the peace of it by struggling with the
roots of his nature to understand them, for those roots go down and out,
out and down infinitely into the infinite. It is by acting upon what he
sees and knows, hearkening to every whisper, obeying every hint of the
good, following whatever seems light, that the man will at length arrive.
Thus obedient, instead of burying himself in the darkness about its
roots, he climbs to the tree-top of his being; and looking out thence on
the eternal world in which its roots vanish and from which it draws its
nourishment, he will behold and understand at least enough to give him
rest--and how much more, let his Hope of the glory of God stand at its
window and tell him. For in his climbing, the man will, somewhere in his
progress upward, the progress of obedience, of accordance to the law of
things, awake to know that the same spirit is in him that is in the
things he beholds; and that his will, his individuality, his
consciousness, as it infolds, so it must find the spirit, that root of
himself, which is infinitely more than himself, that "one God and Father
of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all." When He is
known, then all is well. Then is being, and in it the growth of being,
laid open to him. God is the world, the atmosphere, the element, the
substance, the essence of his life. In him he lives and moves and has his
being. Now he lives indeed; for his Origin is his, and this rounds his
being to eternity. God himself is his, as nothing else could be his. The
serpent of doubt is gagged with his own tail, and becomes the symbol of
the eternal.
Dissatisfaction is but the reverse of the medal of life. So long as a man
is satisfied, he seeks nothing; when a fresh gulf is opened in his being,
he must rise and find wherewithal to fill it. Our history is the opening
of such gulfs, and the search for what will fill them.
But Richard was far yet from having his head above the cloudy region of
moods and in the blue air of the unchangeable. As the days went by and
brought him no word from Barbara, the darkness again began to gather
around him. There are as many changes in a lover's weather as in that of
England. The sad consolations of nature by degrees forsook him; they grew
all sadness and no consolation. The winter of his soul wept steadily upon
him, laden with frost and death. He went back to his stern denial of a
God. He thought he had no need of any God, because he had no hope in any.
Strangely, but in accordance with his nature, while he denied God, he
denied him resentfully. "If there were a God," he said, "why should I
pray to him? He has taken from me the one good his world held for me!"
Not an hour would he postpone judgment of him; not one century would he
give the God of patience to justify himself to his impatient child! He
lost his love of reading. A book was to him like a grinning death's-head.
He ministered to it no longer with his mind, but only with his hands. He
hated the very look of poetry. The straggling lines of it were loathsome
to his eyes. Where, in such a world as he now lived in, could live a God
worth being? Where indeed? Richard made his own weather, and it was bad
enough. Happily, there is no law compelling a man to keep up the weather
or the world he has made. Never will any man devise or develop mood or
world fit to dwell in. He must inhabit a world that inhabits him, a world
that envelops and informs every thought and imagination of his heart.
In Richard's world, the one true, the one divine thing was its misery,
for its misery was its need of God.
