CHAPTER 7.

 

            AT length, breaking in upon the reverie in which Margaret was lost, Maynard said, –

 

            ‘It is curious to mark the numberless phases of life through which we may pass, and yet all the time retain our own identity of being and character. I quite feel with you the influence of this place, and recognise its idea as an eternal and luminous crystal of religion. Yet, as I sit here under the noblest of manmade domes, I am not so altogether dominated by it but that I can, in imagination, wonder away into the wild open far off countries, where I have lived for months together with no dome above me but that of heaven, and nought but living nature around me. There, as a humble student of nature, knowing something of botany, of geology, of astronomy, of history, I have found it impossible to believe in the’ eternity of forms.

 

            ‘Whether it be plant or animal, man or mountain, yea, or the great globe itself, all show themselves subject to change. Conditions ever control being, and conditions are by no means a monotonous repetition of themselves. Man’s purpose in art is even less to imitate nature than to perpetuate an imitation of it in an enduring form. It is true that life is one, but its manifestations must change with its conditions. Thus, immutability is no proof of vitality. In every department of nature, in the operations of the mind, in manners, in life national, social, or individual, crystallisation is death. History does not exempt even Faith from the general law. The instant any party or person claims the finality of infallibility, his doom is indicated. He ceases to be in harmony with his surrounding conditions. I love to rejoice in the beauty and fitness of things as they spring up in harmony with the world. The conviction of their transitoriness rather enhances their beauty in my sight, and impels me to wonder by what new variety of beauty they will be succeeded.’

 

            ‘When you used the phrase “later revelation,” ’ said Margaret, I did not quite understand its connection with what we were talking about. It seemed as if you regarded the older religions as an earlier revelation. Did you mean that there was in them anything divinely communicated?’

 

            ‘Do you remember,’ asked Maynard in return, how indignant

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you were as we roamed over the Coliseum and the Baths of Caracalla, at the wanton destruction of those magnificent edifices? Yet all modern Rome is built, “not only on the very site, but with the very materials of the ancient city. It is the same with its religion. It has laid all previous religions under contribution as, of old, Imperial laid the rest of the world. And much of what exists here now, will form part of that which will supersede it. Catholicism retains much from Paganism. The Reformation retains much from Catholicism; and that which the Reformation contains most fitted to survive, will survive, and become part of man’s future inheritance. If it be only a protest in favour of free inquiry and free expression, it will be much.’

 

            ‘I am not sure now,’ said Margaret, ‘that I find any answer to my question, which referred to divine revelation, and not to human ideas.’

 

            ‘The origin of ideas,’ replied James, ‘is a very old problem, and one not quite settled yet. The old philosophy and the new are at issue on an essential point. Where the Hebrews thought that if a thing was of God it would stand for ever, our observers of facts say that, wherever it comes from, it will live only so long as the laws of its being fit it to live; and so they find an ever-changing natural selection to be the divinely established order of things, instead of a hard rigid rule of invariability. We must not assume a system to be exclusively divine merely because it seems to harmonise with our own individual mood and habit. Probably I cannot better illustrate my meaning than by yourself,’ he continued, laughing. ‘Perhaps you don’t know that your name indicates you a scion of the ancient race of the Varinghians, or Varini, as Tacitus calls them; and the hypothesis receives confirmation from your type and colouring. Starting from no one knows where, spreading, by force of their energy and intelligence, over nearly all Europe from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, the Warings were once a largo family, surpassing all the other Scandinavian races together in the extent of the country they dominated. But they gradually became subdivided, and merged in races which had either been subordinate to them, or which rose in energy as they subsided, until now their vestiges are to be found only in names such as that of the “Waring-Sea,” which only a thousand years ago the Baltic was called, the “Varanger Fiord,” and others beginning with War, Var, or Wer, of which you will

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find numbers in your maps of England and Germany; and in a certain type of humanity which I venture to think finds a not unworthy representative in yourself.’

 

            ‘I never heard so much of my ancestors before,’ said Margaret. ‘I always felt as if I belonged to nobody. I shall feel more at home in the world now. I hope they were a noble race.’

 

            ‘They were indeed; such great warriors as to suggest the idea that the word War came from them, and distinguished by a remarkable faculty for governing others in such a way as to make others like being governed by them. They, or their immediate kindred, made themselves very much at home here in Rome, long before you followed their example.’

 

            ‘And what argument were you going to draw from my family?’

 

            ‘I was about to say that a religion, like a race, starts from a single germ or idea, and undergoing accretion or growth, conquers, destroys, and supersedes, or modifies, adapts, and appropriates other religions; and, after its culmination, duly decays, and gives place in turn to something new; yet leaving, perchance, like your own race, one fair idea to bless the ages to come.’

 

            ‘Thanks,’ said Margaret, smiling, ‘that is very pretty, but is not the idea a very sad one?’

 

            ‘Who shall say,’ resumed Maynard, ‘how far the same history is enacted by religions, countries, races, planets, and even solar systems themselves? All may dissolve and leave, I will not say, “not a wrack behind,” – there I differ from the poet; I disbelieve in the destructibility of anything, of even a thought; force may he transferred, never destroyed; – but leave a germ, idea, or cell of greater capacity than had before been possible, as a worthy result of the whole previous universe of being. In the mean time, the grand moral duty of all things is clear “increase and multiply;” “work while it is day.” ’

 

            ‘It seems to me as if you took pleasure in contemplating the passing away of everything that man has been accustomed to love and venerate.’

 

            ‘Only in so far as it gives place to something better, or better suited to him. I cannot conceive a time when the hills will cease to wear away under the influence of sun and rain, the valleys to fill up, the ocean to fret the shores, and the rivers to carry their sediment to the sea. Yet I do not believe in a dead level ever being reached in the world physical or the world

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mental, for thus there would some day be an end to the possibilities of a higher life than that of the marsh monsters. All that now exists would change and degenerate into, or at least give place to, those lower forms, which are best fitted to thrive under such conditions. Such retrogression, indeed, occurs in places, and is a necessary corollary to the idea of advance and development. Whether the change be towards a higher and more complex, or a lower and more simple, organisation, the first to dwindle and perish will be that which has the smallest faculty of adaptation to the new conditions.

 

            ‘Man has a faculty beyond that of all other creatures, for modifying the conditions under which he lives. His circumstances, political and social, are for the most part of his own permission. Too often his ignorance and incompetence induce him to accept in modification of his difficulties solutions which involve fatal errors. But these are but a condition of his retrogression. Thus in this very land the fear of over-population has led to myriads of men and women turning monks and nuns. Whereas, under a healthy spirit of enterprise they might be actual producers of wealth, instead of mere useless consumers; and be leading lives really virtuous in the education of happy families.’

 

            ‘What! is that the motive of the religious houses? I thought it was that they might be free to worship God.’

 

            ‘They are little else than gigantic poor-houses,’ returned Maynard; ‘though the superstitious fears of their inmates have been played upon to make them think they have a better chance of saving their souls by shirking the duties or, as they deem them, the snares of life, than by serving God as useful citizens with active brains, busy hands, and loving hearts. There is only one rule for judging of all these things,’ he added, seeing that he had succeeded in producing in his companion’s mind the disturbance which he desired. If I want to ascertain whether any principle or practice be right, I look to its fitness for aiding humanity on the path towards such perfectibility as it is capable of. So long only as it coincides with the requirements of the most advanced reason and utility, does it show itself to be intended by God to stand. There is no standard for man out of man.’

 

            ‘You judge everything by the standard of the future. What becomes of the “good old paths” then?’

 

            ‘It is not the really old, but the intermediate that I am

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decrying, when the promptings of Nature and Truth were superseded through the selfish artifices of those who wanted to exercise power over their fellows.’

 

            ‘I cannot accept your explanation of monasticism, and I do not wish to,’ said Margaret, with animation. ‘You seem to reverse everything, so that things appear to me as if I saw them with my head downwards. See how curiously yonder priests eye us, sitting here so long. Had we not better go now?’

 

            As they were passing towards the great entrance, Maynard said, ‘Perhaps their instincts enable them to scent heresy from afar, for doubtless they would not recognise my ideas as quite orthodox; although if everything had been unchangeable Rome and its system would never have had existence. But you are right about monasticism. I gave but the church-statesman’s reasons for encouraging celibacy, and not the devotee’s motives for practicing it. But I can hardly bring myself to do them justice. Humanity has so little place in the consideration of monks and nuns, except as a thing to be repudiated; and I am almost a Greek in my love of it. It is Greek and not ecclesiastical Rome that has won my love. The Greek in her crumbling temples, the Greek in the sculptures of her galleries, for me, outweigh all the rest. The Greek was the real half-way house between the primitive world and the future. Nearly all that was good in the Latin was derived from it, just as all the best sculptures in Rome are either by Greek artists or imitated from the Greek; and even now, in order to attain excellence, it is necessary to follow them. Their language, their literature, their legends, still dominate the Western world, and will do so yet more when what is called Latin Christianity shall have vanished from its place in men’s minds, and the old original gospel of humanity will shine out unobscured by the clumsy figments of the West. But I am always forgetting that I am talking to a young lady of seventeen. The fact is, you make so good a listener that you encourage me to run on as if you were not here at all. What a quantity of unintelligible stuff I have been talking to you.’

 

            ‘Oh, I don’t at all expect to understand everything at first. It is so new to me to have any interpreter beside my own fancies. I don’t know whether you intended it, but you have made il Duomo look less to me than it did before, and I cannot tell whether it is by a darkening or an enlightening process.’

 

            ‘A little of both probably,’ said Maynard, laughing, as they

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went out into the piazza. ‘A sudden influx of light has at first much the same effect as its withdrawal; we must get accustomed to it. The dawn of new knowledge must ever be gradual.’

 

            ‘I shall never bear the word dawn again,’ said Margaret, ‘without thinking of our visit to the Villa Borghese. I had often looked at Bernini’s lovely group of Apollo and Daphne without in the least understanding it, until your remark, “and so the sunshine ever follows the dawn,” revealed the hidden meaning; and then I saw the dawn growing into day, and the earth breaking into flowers before the advancing sun-god.’

 

            ‘The various aspects of Apollo,’ observed Maynard, ‘well illustrate the various effects of the sun’s force. In your once favourite Belvedere, you see him merciless in his severity, capable of inflicting deadly sunstrokes, and blasting the produce of the earth. But with the Daphne he has all the tenderness and beneficence of a genial season.’

 

            ‘But did the Greeks themselves rationalise their myths in this way?’ asked Margaret.

 

            ‘Some of their thinkers did, as you will, I hope, some day learn from Plato. But it is through the labours of our Oriental scholars that we have got most of our light on the subject. There is an instance. The very word “dawn” is Sanskrit, and has the same derivation as Daphne; and they could hardly have adopted the name and the fable without comprehending their meaning. I was referring to the eastern element in the Greek when I spoke of it as the half-way house between the old world and the new. One of the greatest defects in our knowledge which remains to be made good, is in the links which connect the various parts of the world’s history. The one-sidedness that rejects the study of all except one particular view and period, is fatal to real Catholicity. I do not know whether it is through ignorance or some shallow prudential motive, that the meaning of so small a matter as the wax altar-candles is veiled from the worshipper. But for my part, if I were a Catholic, I should conceive a far greater veneration for the rites of my religion when I learnt that they are derived from a worship far more universal than Catholicism, and older than any period recorded in history.’

 

            ‘Is it possible?’ exclaimed Margaret.

 

            ‘Yes, and true, for they belong to the earliest periods of Nature-worship, when all vivifying force as represented by the

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sun was adored under the forms of the column, or the obelisk, and the flame. The former was ever the symbol of Phœbus Apollo. In the lighted candle you have a combination older than Zoroaster and the Parsees, and recognised by Abraham and the patriarchs, as part of the only really Catholic worship that ever existed or will exist.’

 

            ‘You have made the religion of the place look small now, as well as its cathedral,’ said Margaret, as she bade him good-bye.

 

            Thus talking, Maynard sought to win Margaret from her tendency to a religiousness that ignored nature, to a wider appreciation of the meaning of life. He used much reserve and caution in his exhibition of the facts which he had collected in the course of his studies, for he perceived that while her high religious instinct led her to sympathise with all noble results, she would be revolted by any near view of the bare basis of things. He hoped to widen the range of her affections by showing her that in the affections all religion had its origin, and that one idea has pervaded all the modes in which man recognises and adores his Creator. He thought to arouse in her the sense of human love, and sanctify it for her by showing it to be the agency whereby the universal underlying consciousness gradually develops into the idea of God. Could Margaret once be led to regard it as but a morbid or factitious spirituality which fails to find its basis in physiological fact, she would, he thought, shrink from the life towards which she seemed to be drifting – the life of the convent. He was not conscious of having any selfish reason for his solicitude; but could not endure that the idea of her in his mind should be marred by association with incompleteness or failure.

 

            Maynard’s method of procedure in his attempt to open the heart of a girl may have been a strange one, but his peculiar character and education, living as he had ever done in total ignorance of all domestic association, made it natural to him. He knew of no avenue to the heart save through the intellect. Even the sense of natural affection had been so early repressed as to have died out. Any reproach to curiosity about his parentage had been so effectually rebuked by his guardian, that it had become a second nature with him to regard the subject as involving a fairly forbidden mystery. 

 

 

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