UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES 
 
 ROLF HOFFMANN
 
 ANCESTRAL VOICES
 
 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN A. HUTTON, D.D. 
 
 NEW XBJr YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 {Printed in Great Britain.]
 
 It 
 
 at 
 
 " Priests 
 
 Should study passion; how else cure mankind, 
 Who come for help in passionate extremes?" 
 
 ,
 
 TO A 
 
 DEAR FRIEND 
 F. A. A. 
 
 wii
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 'nr^HE title is taken from a line in Coleridge's 
 * Kubla Khan, and itself suggests much of 
 what lies behind this volume of essays. 
 
 Coleridge wrote, "Ancestral voices prophesying 
 war." The thesis underlying these essays might 
 be put in this way : the nature of man, especially 
 of the man of Western civilisation, has, on the 
 whole, taken form. There is in him the fruit 
 of his long physical and historical travail an 
 invincible core of wisdom and final prejudice, 
 and any invasion of his catholic human nature, 
 man as an individual and in societies inevitably 
 rises to repel. 
 
 The book, therefore, may help serious people 
 to perceive that what we are beholding in this 
 terrible time is a conflict between the Ancestral 
 Voices of the soul and a merely rationalistic 
 and temporary way of conceiving man's true
 
 x PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 function in this world ; and that the darkness 
 which is meanwhile over the world is the protest 
 of man's established and universal nature against 
 a proposed sectional tyranny. 
 
 OGSCASTLE, 
 
 CARNWATH, September 1915.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE . . . . . ix 
 
 I. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY so FAR . . . i 
 
 II. Is AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? . . .18 
 
 III. THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE . . 40 
 
 IV. THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACTARIANISM . . 71 
 
 V. TERTIUM QUID : THE MESSAGE OF G. K. 
 
 CHESTERTON . . . . -95 
 
 VI. FIVE PAPERS ON "THE SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT 
 LITERATURE " 
 
 Introductory . . . . . 131 
 
 1. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" . 141 
 
 2. "Peer Gynt" . . . .158 
 
 3. "La Morte" . . . . .178 
 
 4. The Redemption of our Solitude (Dostoi- 
 
 evsky, Tolstoy, Shaw) . . . 203 
 
 5. Here and There .... 224 
 
 VII. Is HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF? "JULIAN THE 
 
 APOSTATE " : A PARALLEL . . . 239 
 
 EPILOGUE ..... ,262
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SO FAR 
 
 'nr^O write just now about the twentieth 
 JL century is as unseasonable a task as it 
 would be to write down one's impressions of a 
 voyage a few days out at sea wild weather, the 
 ship mounting and yawing, and oneself so mixed 
 up in the cosmical business as not to be very 
 well. 
 
 I can, however, make a beginning, in the only 
 stable region that is left to us meanwhile 
 the region of my memory. I can recall quite 
 definitely some of the circumstances of my own 
 mind in the months immediately preceding the 
 outbreak of war. I had just finished reading a 
 book by Holbrook Jackson, entitled The Eighteen 
 Nineties, in which, whether the writer intended 
 such an inference or not, one was permitted to 
 see, in the light of certain pathetic and terrible 
 examples, the failure and inevitable nausea of
 
 2 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 naturalism as a formula for life or for art. It 
 was like the reading of a tragedy. Those young 
 bloods set out into life, one and all, as though 
 there were no laws, no nature of things ; and 
 one by one they ran their heads against one 
 or other of those stone walls which are there 
 the rude precaution of society, or the more 
 delicate embarrassment of God, for the defence 
 of some final decency. They all went to the 
 Devil or returned to God ; and these last, with 
 an abjectness and confusion of the soul which, 
 I believe, must have mixed with grief God's joy 
 at their return. One went mad, one died in 
 prison, and another made a clutch at God as 
 he was slipping out of life, with a cry as much 
 of indignation and despair as of faith. " I 
 implore you," wrote Aubrey Beardsley on his 
 
 death-bed, " to destroy all copies of and 
 
 bawdy drawings. Show this to (naming a 
 
 friend), and conjure him to do same. By all 
 that is holy, all obscene drawings." And the 
 words, "in my death-agony," were added after 
 his signature. 
 
 All this, coupled with a similar wave of reaction 
 in France, and anticipated in classical statements 
 in the profound psychological work of Tolstoy
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SO FAR 3 
 
 (all this) meant for me that there is a way by 
 which we human beings must go, and it is, on 
 the whole, the way by which we have come. 
 And so, eight months ago my working formula 
 for the Church would have been, that we should 
 simply sit still, that we should be watchful and 
 strengthen the things which remain, that we should 
 bide our time, leaving it to certain invincible 
 forces working subtilly in the depths of men's 
 souls, to lay them open to the revenge and 
 indignation of something deep and holy. It 
 seemed to me then, and it seems to me still, that 
 the churches with a future are the churches with 
 a high threshold ; that when the day comes for 
 any general movement towards faith amongst 
 the people, they will be attracted, not by appeals 
 which are easy and obvious, but by appeals 
 which are exacting and mysterious, having as 
 little as possible in common with the standards 
 of value which please men in the days of the 
 flesh. 
 
 Something of the same kind cf solution of 
 what is called " the Social Problem " was the 
 best I had to offer myself. Every thinking man 
 must have in imagination some way out of the 
 troubles which are threatening. And that was
 
 4 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 my way out. Having spent the most real part 
 of my own life amongst the poor, not so much 
 amongst the high-wage-earners, who are re- 
 markably disregardful of the poor, so that to 
 this day I can speak their dialect and think their 
 thoughts, I know how they resent the persistent 
 effort to do them good in an external way, and 
 how they are alienated from those who appear 
 to think that it is impossible to live properly 
 in their circumstances. I know how they under- 
 stand and are always the better for brotherliness 
 and love and a common laughter ; how they 
 suspect and are immediately on guard against 
 any attempt to deal with them in the name of a 
 theory, and how they justify themselves in ex- 
 ploiting such helpers and reformers. 
 
 There is a fine passage in the speech of 
 Dostoievsky in 1881 at Moscow, at the unveiling 
 of a memorial to Pushkin, in which he works out 
 my idea ; how the poor say to us, "If you will 
 love me, you must love mine " : you must love 
 the things I love : you must come to me in the 
 midst of these, so that if I should ever leave 
 them for other conditions, it will be in obedience 
 to some new desire ; and when I do leave them, 
 it will be with respect and sorrow. And so, for
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SO FAR 5 
 
 myself, I have never lost the faith that to put 
 the matter in an illustration one day a voice 
 will break out at a mass meeting and will cry, 
 "When are you going to stop speaking to us 
 about our interests ; when are you going to stop 
 speaking to us as children, or rather as atheists 
 or machines ? When are you so-called leaders 
 going to speak to us in the name of something 
 which rebukes us ? When are you going to 
 speak to us as to men who have their own hours 
 of bad conscience and secret shame ? " 
 
 That was my way out : that here and there 
 would arise out of the masses of the people 
 humble men who should overthrow the present 
 bitterness, not by the spirit of revolt, but by 
 an overflowing and intolerable happiness of the 
 soul. The entrance of " Russia " will contribute 
 to this. 
 
 All this is to say that had I been writing last 
 July of the twentieth century from the point of 
 view of the interest of serious and forecasting 
 men, I should have set myself to detect and 
 pursue here and there indications of a spirit 
 of reaction, of fatigue, of caution, of wisdom, 
 settling down in the first instance upon guid- 
 ing and eminent minds. I should have dwelt
 
 6 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 upon that as a sign of the turn of the tide of 
 naturalism, as the confession by unprejudiced ex- 
 plorers that out there in the darkness things are 
 as they always were, that the deep souls in all 
 ages were right. Indeed, my own forecast at the 
 time and it may be that later events have made 
 it a still more likely one was, that the danger 
 which lay ahead of us was not the danger of any 
 general movement towards atheism or denial, but 
 rather of a movement in sensitive and religious 
 spirits towards something in the way of religion, 
 outwardly more unanimous and undisturbed and 
 mysterious, even more tyrannical than anything 
 WE exhibit, who in a day of darkness may seem 
 to souls in flight to be ourselves too restless and 
 insecure. What I foresaw then was a stampede, 
 in which the one cry should be for shelter. 
 
 All that was before the Flood : and yet it 
 may very well be that this break-down of civilisa- 
 tion may force men in masses to the very con- 
 clusions and solutions which were already offering 
 themselves to, we might even say tempting, finer 
 minds. There is a real danger that intelligence 
 in matters of religion may for a long time be 
 disparaged, and that in the panic over the alleged 
 collapse of the secular reason we may all be
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SO FAR 7 
 
 borne beyond a proper faith, into credulity and 
 superstition. Such an anti-cyclone in the general 
 atmosphere would be a sinister thing, and lead 
 later on to another storm. And yet something 
 of the kind will almost inevitably happen : there 
 will be a suspicion of mere enlightenment, and 
 the suspicion once aroused may go to all lengths. 
 It will be for convinced and manly men to take a 
 firm hold of the situation, and to deal closely and 
 ruthlessly with the misgivings of the time, 
 acknowledging indeed that we live by faith, but 
 protesting at the same time that we live by a 
 faith which stands to reason. 
 
 There is a charge which one already hears, 
 which we shall probably hear more and more 
 from outsiders : the charge, namely, that the 
 present break-down is a reproach to Christianity ; 
 in the sense that it is due to the failure of Christian- 
 ity. We must at once secure the general currency 
 of a contradiction to such a charge. It ought not 
 to be difficult to let the masses of the people see 
 that this break-down in civilisation is due first and 
 last, in its principles and in its processes, to the 
 neglect, and indeed to the explicit repudiation, 
 of the entire body of ideas, and warnings, and 
 motives, and beliefs, ideas concerning human
 
 8 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 nature, and the nature of things which came 
 into the conscience of the world with Jesus, a 
 body of ideas and beliefs for the obedience to 
 which He laid down His life, and for the pro- 
 pagation of which He attached some men to His 
 side and appealed to them never to let them 
 die. 
 
 The present collapse of civilisation, the 
 present "failure of knowledge," may on the 
 contrary present a temptation to preachers and 
 teachers. It will be hard for us to resist the 
 inclination to say " I told you so," and not to 
 adopt contemptuous references to the "so-called 
 twentieth century." 
 
 And yet it would be wrong to let the occasion 
 pass without a sober and persistent claim on the 
 part of the Church of Christ, that the whole 
 tragedy has come about, first and last, because of 
 the neglect or denial of the Christian view of God 
 and the world. For, whatever more we are to 
 learn from this eruption of natural force through 
 the heart of man, which is raging about us like 
 a sea of fire, already surely we have learned that 
 we had all fallen into a way of dealing with our- 
 selves and with life which, we see now, fails 
 utterly face to face with man in his heights and
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SO FAR 9 
 
 depths. The fact is, we of this generation for 
 the first time are in a position to understand 
 Christianity and the great insights which Chris- 
 tianity has registered in its doctrines concerning 
 God and man. We are beginning to understand 
 Christianity in the only way in which you can 
 understand anything, namely, by perceiving the 
 kind of thing this life of ours would be were 
 Christianity even now to fail. We have been 
 taught the nature of things in the only way in 
 which people can be taught the nature of things, 
 and that is by seeing things running loose for a 
 time. 
 
 " Life and death," says Paulsen, "are the great 
 preachers." No man by searching can find out 
 God, or truth. No argument could ever have led 
 our age to believe, or even to suspect, that human 
 nature when it escapes from the shadow of God 
 is as wild as it ever was. That man by nature is 
 wild, that man by nature is simply a bit of nature, 
 and liable to behave like an earthquake or like a 
 tidal wave, or like a wild beast in some functional 
 ecstasy (to adopt an illustration from one of those 
 gentle German writers) how were ideas of that 
 kind ever to be brought home to us, and how, 
 even if their likelihood had been established in
 
 10 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 reason, could they have been made effective for 
 the rebuke of man's headlongness ? 
 
 We had all allowed ourselves to suppose that 
 knowledge, increased amenities, savoir-faire, 
 would soften and tame the primitive passions. 
 We see now that we had no reason to think 
 that knowledge and social amenities would 
 have such an influence. We know that know- 
 ledge by itself does not make us less selfish 
 or less determined to have our own way, or less 
 churlish if someone gets in front of us. We 
 know that something must take place within us, 
 which is more like crucifixion than anything we 
 can think of, before we ourselves gain a clean 
 victory over some ugly passion or temper. We 
 had no reason whatever to suppose that Europe 
 could for fifty years be steadily undermining the 
 fabric of Christianity in societies, and laying base 
 insinuations all about the roots of the human soul, 
 and yet at the same time would have the power, 
 or would have the wish, to rebuke the ancient 
 lust of the eye, and restrain the ancient pride of 
 life. What has happened in our day is simply this : 
 we are seeing what life ought to be, and what it 
 must be, if the great things that Christ means are 
 not true and are not felt to be necessary. For until
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SO FAR n 
 
 a thing is felt to be necessary it is not believed in : 
 for we believe not with our heads, but most fre- 
 quently by the help of a shudder passing over us at 
 the prospect of the alternative. What we are see- 
 ing to-day is perhaps (since the time of Julian) the 
 first organised and reasoned repudiation of the 
 mind of Christ concerning the nature of true 
 goodness. And the darkness which has come 
 over the whole earth is once again the protest 
 of the wider order against a local and temporary 
 blasphemy. 
 
 From this point of view it may be that we are 
 approaching a new dawn, though here I should 
 like to say that I cannot imagine more mischiev- 
 ous language than men are already beginning to 
 use, such as that " this terrible time is bound to 
 do good." Still, I believe the very depth of the 
 darkness which has fallen upon the modern world 
 will lead the soul of man in our day, and in our 
 children's day, back to humility and faith. We 
 are so made that we do not see things until they 
 are gone from us. We know nothing about our- 
 selves until we have found ourselves out. We 
 were all too secure to feel our need of God. 
 What errors certainly we had fallen into what 
 assurance, what pride, what dullness towards the
 
 12 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 very religion we profess ! How we had come to 
 look upon faith in Christ as something which a 
 man might have or might not have : that it de- 
 pended largely upon his temperament or upon his 
 reading! How little we understood that faith in 
 Christ is an absolute necessity if human existence 
 is to remain sane and not a contradiction in terms ! 
 This leads me to two points with which I may 
 deal and conclude. I should have liked to speak 
 of the change in the education of children and 
 young people which is likely to follow the 
 total change and contradiction even, if Germany 
 were to win, or were so much as to score a draw. 
 One sees at a glance how totally diverse the 
 ideas of the training of young people must be if 
 we believe that the ideal is a final brotherhood 
 of nations, and that there is a Power higher than 
 the power of the State, call it humanity, call it 
 God (one sees at a glance how totally diverse the 
 ideas of the training of young people, i.e. the 
 function of our schools and colleges, must be), 
 from those which will be in vogue if it be estab- 
 lished by the brutal fact and issue that those 
 nations have the best chance to survive which 
 are organised to create terror. Leaving that, 
 however, there are some things which the present
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SO FAR 13 
 
 darkness has made visible to me. What nonsense 
 we used to talk when we said " that it did not 
 matter so much what a man believed, that the 
 great thing was to live well " ! We had the 
 tiresome contrast between creed and conduct, a 
 contrast which I have no doubt had at one time 
 a moral value, in a community, for example, in 
 which the traditional faith had never been dis- 
 turbed ; but a contrast which had no sense 
 whatever, and might easily become the minister 
 of evil in a community which was only too ready 
 to hear that the delicate barriers of the soul had 
 no sanction in God, that those high doctrines 
 concerning God and man, concerning Guilt and 
 the difficulty of forgiveness, were no longer so 
 sure, that, in fact, "they didn't know everything 
 down in Judee " ! 
 
 And now, in the midst of all this palaver, the 
 world has gone wild, has broken loose. And 
 where has it broken loose? Through what 
 sluice-gate has the black flood poured ? Through 
 what bulwark, ruined now, and shattered, and 
 undermined ? Simply for this reason, namely 
 Europe to-day is not unanimous about God. It 
 is without any Decisive and Implacable sense 
 of the Nature of God. We are at war to-day
 
 14 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 because we are not at one as to the Nature of 
 God. That is why this is, in its essence, a Holy 
 War. The Kaiser quite sincerely invokes a 
 God who to us is the Devil. The fact is, that 
 the fight to-day is for the Homoousion : and it 
 is the only controversy for which a nation does 
 well to pour out its blood. 
 
 There are two things then, which, in the thick 
 darkness that is over the whole earth, I seem to 
 see standing out in a white light. 
 
 In the first place, I can see now, with the entire 
 assent of my mind, how the Church was led by 
 the pressure of circumstances which will always 
 recur, circumstances which spring from the very 
 nature of human beings their subtilty, their 
 self-seeking, their ingenuity for giving fine names 
 and discovering fine reasons for ideas and am- 
 bitions which they happen to be passionately 
 bent upon ; I can see how the Church was led 
 to define the Nature of God, to define the essence 
 and moral quality of the Great Power behind 
 all things, and to say explicitly that, for the 
 Church, the character of God is Christ. For 
 the name of God in the sense of the Inscrutable 
 and Infinite Power behind all Creation is a 
 name which may be invoked by any audacious
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SO FAR 15 
 
 and sanguine human being. It is simply a 
 "Graven Image" of the Ineffable. A man's 
 appropriation of the name of God may simply 
 mean that he himself is passionately persuaded 
 of his cause, and that he anticipates great diffi- 
 culties. 
 
 But the name of Christ is a name which no 
 one can invoke with any reality if the cause for 
 which he invokes that name is a cause which 
 cannot be made to look harmonious with the 
 Mind of Christ. It may very well be that the 
 word GOD is a word which, for a generation or 
 two, we ought to abandon. It is a heathen word, 
 i.e. a purely human and natural word, and it has 
 for the time being lost its baptismal grace. By 
 itself it has no more moral or intellectual content 
 than the symbol "x." 
 
 The word God is not our characteristic word. 
 And I can now well imagine the circumstances 
 in which St. Paul broke out with words which 
 have in our day an extraordinary freshness and 
 urgency : ' ' For though there be that are called 
 gods, whether in heaven or on earth ; as there 
 are gods many, and lords many ; yet to MS there 
 is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, 
 and we unto Him ; and one Lord, Jesus Christ,
 
 1 6 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 through whom are all things, and we through 
 Him." 
 
 The second thing which I see with greater 
 clearness in the darkness is this : that the only 
 just war that a nation can engage in, is a war of 
 ultimate ideas, a religious war. It was another 
 of the foolish things we used to say in the day of 
 our deadness and security : we used to turn up 
 our eyes and say how wrong and sinful it was for 
 people to fight about religion. We see now that 
 there is nothing else for which a nation must 
 honourably contend. Nations have fought for 
 territory, for trade, for revenge : and these were 
 mean struggles. But to fight for an idea about 
 all life, to fight for an interpretation of human 
 nature, to fight for the very definition of God, 
 a matter, i.e., of such a kind that, if we triumph, 
 our children and our children's children shall be 
 with us in life and in death and after death ; and 
 if we fail, our children and our children's children 
 must reject our testimony, and make for some 
 strange fierce heaven to fight for the true nature 
 of man, and of society, and of God, what else 
 did we come into this world for ? For what is it 
 " to fight," except " to suffer " ? 
 
 That is not a proper contrast which we draw
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SO FAR 17 
 
 between War and Peace. There is no necessary 
 contradiction between War and Peace. The 
 real contradiction is between WRONG and 
 PEACE. In a world, the heart of which is 
 good, and good in the sense in which we say 
 that Christ is good in such a world there is no 
 enduring peace, nor even the beginning of peace, 
 except by the way of a common acknowledgment 
 of what God is : " And for us there is but one 
 God, the Father ; and one Lord, Jesus Christ."
 
 II 
 
 IS AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? 
 
 IT is Mr. Balfour, among those who in recent 
 years have published their reflections upon 
 the present situation, who observes that the great 
 movements which history records have in every 
 case been "irrational." They have come to life, 
 not as the result of intellectual statement or 
 appeal, but always in obedience to forces at first 
 so obscure and in the day of their power so 
 complicated and diverse, that it is impossible to 
 isolate or name them or to relate them to man's 
 average behaviour. 
 
 We may accept Mr. Balfour's generalisation as 
 giving the impression which history makes upon 
 a spectator, and, remembering the limitations of a 
 spectator, as accurate, that the more remarkable 
 episodes and crises in human affairs have ever 
 been " irrational." That, however, must not be 
 held to mean that they occurred without reason ; 
 
 18
 
 IS AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? 19 
 
 but only that they occurred in obedience to some 
 force which was a new element in the particular 
 age ; a force therefore which, because it was new, 
 did violence to the mental habits of the observers 
 of that time. The fact is, there is something 
 irrational in everything that moves. It moves, 
 not for reasons that may be given, but in 
 obedience to something more primitive and 
 elementary. In the last analysis the force behind 
 any movement is something which is "there." 
 The movement is the expression of it, the sign of 
 it, the opposition of life's ancient circumstances to 
 it ; but it itself is original, irrational, free. It is 
 therefore no disparagement of a movement that 
 it is irrational ; for that is only to say that it 
 is spontaneous, living a new contribution to the 
 sum of energy in the world. Great movements 
 are irrational in the precise sense that every act 
 of life is irrational ; for every act of life is the 
 expression of something which, in itself, has 
 nothing to do with man's reasoning powers. 
 " Rationality," in the restricted sense of the word, 
 is as little the impulse or vital element in human 
 affairs on any scale, as the rudder is the power 
 which drives a ship through the water. 
 
 We shall return later to this point. Meanwhile,
 
 20 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 let us consider some signs, as they seem to me to 
 be, that a very great change is already beginning 
 to take place in the public mind, one of those 
 changes so obscure in its beginnings, so diverse 
 in its fruits, so contemptuous of maxims which 
 until yesterday appeared to be incontrovertible, 
 that it may yet come to be included amongst 
 movements which have that quality of "irration- 
 ality " which is the proof of a certain inevitableness 
 and authenticity. 
 
 On the principle of the swing of the pendulum, 
 we ought to anticipate a reaction against a mood 
 which has dominated men during, to speak 
 roughly, the last generation. It is possible, no 
 doubt, to give an airy and cynical interpretation 
 of this pendulum principle, that it is due to the 
 incurable levity of the public mind. But a more 
 serious and honourable explanation is also 
 competent. Any reaction which is widespread, 
 and has the note of spontaneity, will be found to 
 be the protest of man's entire nature against the 
 arrogance and tyranny of one aspect or faculty of 
 that nature. We have the instinct for freedom, 
 for self-assertion ; but it may be a reminiscence 
 in our blood, or it may be the calling and election 
 of God we have also the instinct to deal severely
 
 IS AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? 21 
 
 with ourselves, the instinct of obedience, of 
 bondage. We will wander making our experi- 
 ments in living ; but we will tire of our freedom, 
 and become reverent, or even panic-stricken. 
 There are signs, it seems to me, that men, in 
 certain matters, are beginning to have misgivings, 
 beginning to fear they have gone far enough ; 
 signs of a certain timidity which will be con- 
 demned as weakness by some still strenuous minds, 
 but which will be regarded by others as belonging 
 equally to man's true nature, as the sign of his 
 inevitable need of some shelter for his spirit. 
 But, not to dwell longer upon the principle of the 
 swing of the pendulum, though it is not to be 
 neglected in any forecast of the public mood, it is 
 possible to name certain misgivings and grounds of 
 anxiety which supply the very condition for a total 
 change in men's attitude towards life and affairs. 
 
 There is one circumstance which weighs upon 
 the minds of serious observers who look forward, 
 to which I shall barely, and even that with 
 difficulty, allude. I refer to it at the present 
 moment, because it also is a symptom of the 
 absence in the general mind of some powerful and 
 unquestioned rule or standard, which might help 
 us in the lonely business of life. If statistics are
 
 22 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 to be trusted, and certain ominous words spoken 
 from time to time by those who are qualified to 
 know, society to-day, almost from top to bottom, 
 is trifling with certain natural duties and responsi- 
 bilities in ways which we usually associate with 
 the decadent days of Imperial Rome. If this be 
 as is alleged, it means that with all our knowledge 
 we are on the threshold of unworthy and threaten- 
 ing days. For my own part, I do not believe 
 that a view of family life, which must always 
 seem hideous to wholesome and unsophisticated 
 minds, is about to take up a permanent place 
 amongst us. But simply because this abandon- 
 ment of natural life has its root and defence in 
 personal selfishness, in love of ease and vanity ; 
 and because, in such an atmosphere, vice of that 
 kind seems not right indeed, but yet not terrible, 
 I have no hope that it will be swept out of lives, 
 except by the recovery of an instinct, in a wave 
 of horror and indignation and revenge, such as 
 is let loose by the vision of God. It is one 
 of Pater's deep and beautiful insights, that the 
 religion of Jesus, when it came home to the 
 hearts of Roman ladies of patrician rank, brought 
 with it a new reverence for the elementary 
 conditions of life.
 
 IS AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? 23 
 
 It would be an easy matter to name additional 
 symptoms in the life and expression of our people, 
 to show that we are living from hand to mouth, 
 without the moral order and peace which come of 
 obedience to some faith or vision. Education has 
 brought no moral motive ; and we are beginning 
 to see that it was idle to look for such motive in 
 mere knowledge. The social question, likewise, 
 is now beginning to be apprehended, even by 
 those who at one time dreamed dreams of whole- 
 sale amelioration, as, when all is said, a moral 
 question ; that without the socially regenerate 
 man, the best conceived scheme will fail. 
 
 This same feeling that meanwhile there is 
 something awanting, something which in better 
 days we and our fathers knew, something without 
 which we are at a disadvantage has become a 
 real discovery in the Church. In the various 
 denominations, this consciousness of inability, this 
 sense at the same time of a completeness which 
 nevertheless is possible, manifests itself in various 
 ways. Ultimately there are only two attitudes 
 which are possible to men in real distress the 
 Roman Catholic and the Reformed ; the one to 
 give up the world, the other to call upon God. 
 Every Church just now is living too much by its
 
 24 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 wits. Never did men in office in the Church 
 work harder. Never were they more willing to 
 learn. Never were church buildings so constantly 
 in use. Never were appeals more insistent. Yet 
 at the best, "having done all, we stand." Such 
 success as the Churches may claim is not of the 
 highest possible quality ; it is too much fretted 
 with anxiety and labour. It wants certain notes 
 of peace, of fullness, of that confidence in God 
 which has the victory over the world. It is not 
 pregnant, overflowing. It has a basis of worry 
 and strain. It has enough to do with itself. 
 
 I note these signs, not in order to disparage 
 them, for, indeed, it may be that they were in- 
 evitable. I note them because there once again 
 we encounter, and this, in the case of the most 
 sensitive and potent people in our community, a 
 condition of unstable equilibrium, of discord and 
 uneasiness, of insecurity through which the secret 
 yearning rises for that state of soul in which the 
 strife is past. But what I wish to say about this 
 present-day temper and outlook in the Churches 
 is, that it is a condition of things which will not 
 continue. It is a condition of things out of which 
 an entirely new attitude and settlement may very 
 suddenly take place. After all, the community is
 
 IS AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? 25 
 
 the individual writ large. We know how, in the 
 case of a man, there is a limit to the amount of 
 worry and harassment which he will endure. A 
 point is reached when he can worry no more. At 
 that point he flings up his hands, in faith or in 
 despair. Just so, the Church which has been 
 subjected for many years to a strain in every 
 region of its life comes to a point where it either 
 loses heart and becomes a tame accessory to the 
 general situation, or appeals from its own con- 
 fessed failure and inability to the right hand of 
 God. 
 
 Enough has been said to show that at this 
 present time we have reached as a community 
 that temper of unrest and misgiving, having 
 ideals which we will not abandon, which never- 
 theless we cannot fulfil ; depressed by the failure 
 of mere knowledge to increase or even to sustain 
 our moral energy ; suspicious of words and ideas 
 which have had their turn and have failed ; and 
 in all this the vague confidence that there is a 
 more excellent way the temper, in short, which 
 itself is the invitation and prelude to a total change 
 of attitude. 
 
 Certain as I am that as a community we shall 
 get out of this condition of strain and confusion
 
 26 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 somehow, I hold that already there are many 
 signs that we are about to emerge on the honour- 
 able side of the morass. 
 
 It is one way of stating the terms of the 
 controversy of the last fifty years, to say that it 
 has been a battle between man and the universe, 
 between man with his instinctive and traditional 
 ideas of himself his dignity, his significance on 
 the one hand, and, on the other, the infinite 
 world nature, history, all things. Or, to use the 
 familiar antithesis, it has been a conflict between 
 faith and reason, between the heart and the 
 head. 
 
 During the greater part of the struggle, the 
 advantage lay with those forces which we gather 
 together under the name of " science." This is 
 not to be wondered at. Science was fresh, and 
 much on the other side was indefensible. So far, 
 no sensible or just man was alarmed. But the 
 engagement proceeded. " Faith " seemed to be 
 driven to her last ditch. But now, that is to say 
 yesterday, when science, as it seemed, was about 
 to deal the coup de grace, her arm has grown 
 heavy, and a look of anxiety has come into her 
 hitherto bold countenance. Meanwhile "faith," 
 taking advantage it may be of the signs of
 
 IS AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? 27 
 
 weakness on the other side, or, it may be, summon- 
 ing her last reserves, is manifesting such vitality 
 that it is quite credible she may win back many a 
 position ; indeed, may win back more than she 
 can safely hold. For every mood is absolute 
 so long as it lasts ; and, in such a conflict as we 
 are speaking of, the situation at the last ditch is 
 apt to decide the question everywhere. Without 
 metaphor, it seems to me that man's "personality," 
 which in reality was being threatened by the 
 formulas and deductions of materialistic science, 
 is showing signs of recovery ; and, because the 
 sense of personality once confirmed will proceed 
 to claim its inherent rights, and at the further 
 stage to take up its duties and responsibilities, the 
 survival and reinforcement of personality is a 
 conclusion which must be hailed with satisfaction 
 by all who would not despair of the human 
 enterprise. 
 
 In what remains of this paper, let me indicate 
 some features in the mental situation, more or less 
 public and apparent, which seem to me to mean 
 that after a long period of depression, of low 
 spirits, of a kind of shamefacedness and apology 
 the soul of man man, i.e., contrasted with his 
 natural circumstances is about to stand up ; is
 
 28 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 already, indeed, upon his feet, with something of 
 the ancient daring in his eyes. 
 
 That the Christian Science propaganda should 
 begin and should find such a welcome in an 
 age and amongst habits of thought diametrically 
 opposed to its ideas, is a shining illustration of 
 how extremes meet. Sympathetically considered, 
 also, it gives the rationale, the inner reasonable- 
 ness, of that long-established maxim. Extremes 
 meet for the same reason as tyrannies are over- 
 thrown. The latter extreme is the passionate 
 reaction, often unjust and disastrous but inevitable, 
 against the former. To the ipse dixit of material- 
 ism, becoming more and more strident and cock- 
 sure, that there is nothing but matter in the world, 
 Christian science with equal self-confidence replies 
 that there is nothing but spirit. Now, it is not 
 the purpose of this paper to enter into proofs, or 
 to justify the general movement, signs of which 
 are here alleged. My purpose is simply to name 
 some signs, as they seem to me, that, whether 
 rightly or wrongly in an absolute sense, the 
 general mind to-day is steadily inclining towards 
 a certain considerateness and attitude of attention 
 with regard to the spiritual view of man and the 
 world.
 
 IS AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? 29 
 
 The same interpretation may legitimately be 
 given of the remarkable revival of the "occult" 
 in our time. It is idle, it is simply not true, to 
 say that this dabbling in the black arts is confined 
 to those few queer people whom we shall always 
 have with us, and that it is without significance. 
 One has only to walk up and down a street in the 
 busier part of any of our cities to see what a trade 
 must be going on in the unseen and the diabolical. 
 It may not be a comfortable sign ; indeed, it 
 points to a real peril which will accompany any 
 wholesale return to faith, as it has accompanied 
 every such instinctive and elementary movement 
 in past times. But it is the sign, I believe, of a 
 kind of wild revenge which the spiritual side of 
 our human nature is celebrating as a protest 
 against its long neglect. As such, it gives an 
 insight into the necessities of human nature ; that 
 in the absence of the prophet from the soul, in 
 the absence of some honourable faith, which will 
 control the fluid and haunting faculties of man, 
 there may take place, even in the most enlightened 
 society, a kind of stampede into dark and 
 dubious and imbecile things. By themselves, 
 these things are disheartening and deplorable 
 enough, but they are not by themselves. They
 
 30 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 are rather like pieces of paper and bits of straw 
 and clouds of dust blown about by a wind which, 
 nevertheless, is a good enough wind, bearing ships 
 out to sea and home. 
 
 I have already alluded, in a 'phrase, to the note 
 of relenting, of misgiving and insecurity, which 
 has come into the testimony of science on its 
 speculative, or, so to call it, its metaphysical side. 
 I think this much may be claimed by the so long 
 hard-pressed camp of idealists, that science has 
 been taught her place. To speak fairly, science 
 has become sober and judicial, as is the way of 
 youth always, not in deference to the advice of 
 those who were alarmed by her recklessness, but 
 by her own discoveries as she proceeded. Time 
 is on the side of all the facts. It has become 
 evident that when science leaves her sphere of 
 criticism and observation, and presumes to unveil 
 the last source or final purpose of things, she can 
 only guess or talk nonsense. And it is very 
 wonderful how widely that essential limitation 
 of science has come to be known and understood 
 by average people. Wonderful, too, is it, how 
 commonly it is now understood that science, not 
 one whit less than revelation, needs postulates, 
 needs to create an atmosphere of hypothesis,
 
 IS AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? 31 
 
 needs to make demands upon faith, in order to get 
 even under way. That all her processes rest upon 
 a credulity with regard to fundamental things, as 
 thorough-going as is required by the twin- 
 postulates of God and the soul. The serious 
 banter of such books, to name but one, as Dr. 
 Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism, in which 
 science will seem to fair-minded people to be hoist 
 with its own petard, has found its way, and now 
 serves as a caution in minds which formerly rioted 
 in negative proofs. And such a state of things, 
 because it raises a subtle barrier of scepticism 
 against science whenever science seems to invade 
 some ancient safeguard of man's peace, is a result 
 which is already of great consequence for faith, 
 and, in the event of any notable movement 
 towards belief, will throw wide open many a door. 
 It is an immense relief for some people to know, 
 on the authority of university men, that one may 
 believe in God, without being intellectually an 
 ass. 
 
 You see symptoms of the same subtle difference 
 of temper in contemporary philosophical writing. 
 Here, very abundantly, you have signs that man 
 is fast coming into his own again. Even a worm 
 must turn if he would have his wrongs observed.
 
 32 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 To a philosophy which had come to regard man 
 as a mere article in the Inventory of the Universe, 
 there has arisen amongst us a philosophy prepared 
 to wait upon man, hoping to attain to wisdom by 
 observing patiently and with reverence man's 
 habitual and instinctive life. "Pragmatism," 
 "soft determinism," "personal idealism " are but 
 names for a new mood, a new point of view ; the 
 one thing about which I desire at this time to 
 note being, that it puts the accent and emphasis 
 upon man. When one contrasts the idealistic 
 philosophy of even twenty years ago with the 
 writing which to-day, on the whole, occupies the 
 same place in the intellectual field, one notes, I 
 think above all other differences, a new robustness, 
 a spirit of confidence, a certain glow and intoxica- 
 tion even, a zest for the battle, which were want- 
 ing from the earlier phase. Idealists to-day are 
 very cheery persons. Rightly or wrongly, they 
 feel that they have the ball at their foot. They 
 are not ashamed at times to reply to an argument 
 with a laugh or by telling a good story. When 
 a controversialist on the other side has circum- 
 stantially demonstrated the intellectual impossi- 
 bility of " believing," they will answer, as one did 
 the other day, by protesting that, at the time of
 
 IS AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? 33 
 
 writing, he is simply prancing with belief. In 
 short, able men to-day have the hardihood to 
 appeal from the sophistry of pure reason to the 
 generous intimations of a healthy temperament. 
 It may be very Philistine ; but it is very human. 
 It is the true and only useful positivism. One 
 thing is certain, it is there, cheerful and un- 
 ashamed. It is one of those "irrational " move- 
 ments, one of those " offences " against the pure 
 reason "which must needs come," in which some 
 elementary instinct or function, long denied, finds 
 at length its voice, and utters its uncontrollable 
 joy. For, as Caponsacchi said : "A man grows 
 drunk with truth, stagnant within him." This 
 latest movement in philosophy, though doubtless 
 it had its impulse in the essential nature of man, 
 and denotes a protest by one long thwarted 
 element of our life against the tyranny of the pure 
 reason, has already made some valuable contri- 
 butions to the apologetic for faith, over and above 
 that sense of cheerfulness with which it has 
 infected a great company of thinking people. It 
 may be that not one of those contributions would 
 convince a man who was disinclined to believe ; 
 but coming as they do at a time when, I contend, 
 a great mass of people are waiting for a decent 
 3
 
 34 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 excuse to believe, they have the decisive effect of 
 turning the scale. For it is one of the positions 
 which this new philosophic tendency is not 
 ashamed to occupy, that no pure reason can 
 ever be given for any act of personal life, that we 
 seldom act on reason, that the deepest things 
 cannot be proved, that every step we take here 
 in this world is a leap in the dark, that the 
 evidence always stops short, and that there is no 
 way of filling up the gap except by putting one- 
 self into it ; in short, that we live by faith, in 
 obedience to a profound and unconquerable 
 instinct that, to put it variously, a cosmos cannot 
 have chaos for its crown, that there is a final 
 correspondence between man and the Universe, 
 or, in the language of piety, that "this is none 
 other than the house of God and the gate of 
 Heaven." 
 
 Along that line of insight rather than of argu- 
 ment, it is not difficult to show that there are 
 certain high postulates, prejudices, beliefs, without 
 which man will never be able to accomplish the 
 long task of life, to overcome its disheartening 
 details ; without which, most certainly, he will 
 never bring into play the most precious qualities 
 of his mysterious nature, Indeed, so utterly do
 
 IS AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? 35 
 
 we live at the bidding of these intangible and 
 potent instincts, that if it could be brought home 
 to mankind that these were not true, that they 
 did not represent realities, it is fair to predict that 
 life would come to a standstill, and this suicide 
 and despair would begin with the best first. From 
 that position it is a leap which competent men 
 who see the consequences of the other view are 
 prepared to-day to take, that such prejudices and 
 postulates, such beliefs and intuitions and instincts 
 as lie at the root of man's normal and healthy life, 
 have in that very circumstance sufficient proof 
 and defence. " Securus judicat orbis terrarum." 
 
 Already this recovery of personality has led to 
 a new sense of human responsibility in the teach- 
 ings of the most recent philosophy. Idealism, 
 twenty years ago, was for the most part rabbinical. 
 It contented itself with proving that the idealistic 
 view was rationally tenable. It seems tome that 
 to-day the note is nothing short of this, that the 
 idealistic view is humanly necessary. Formerly, 
 idealists were content to go on, registering the 
 state of the barometer, telling us from time to 
 time the condition of the weather ; to-day, the 
 philosophers have begun to preach. It is not 
 putting the situation unfairly to say, that from
 
 36 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 declaring unweariedly, using the terminology of 
 Hegelianism, that all is well, and bound to turn 
 out well, philosophy to-day has begun to declare 
 that everything may yet be well ; but that for that 
 very reason everything is bound to go wrong, 
 unless we, actual living men, see to it ! 
 
 Further, the disabling and morbid idea that we 
 act with human propriety only when we act for 
 reasons apprehended, that therefore we ought to 
 hold ourselves in suspense on such a momentous 
 matter as our personal faith and not commit our- 
 selves, lest through further knowledge we should 
 learn that we had decided wrongly, that morbid 
 idea, which really would keep us in bed all day, 
 has largely given way under this new access of 
 health and energy. We see now that those who 
 ask us to withhold our assent to faith, and to 
 restrain ourselves from faithful actions, until the 
 evidence is complete, lest further knowledge should 
 show us that we had chosen wrongly, are asking 
 of us something which we are not in the habit of 
 conceding in any other department of our life. 
 We live and learn ; not learn and live. 
 
 To the whole contention of this paper it may 
 be opposed, that since the time of the last great 
 reinforcement of religious faculty and personal
 
 IS AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? 37 
 
 idealism since, in short, those days when last 
 " the sea of faith was at the full " discoveries 
 have been made as to the processes of nature, 
 and criticisms of the historic documents of spiritual 
 belief have been established, with the effect of 
 disturbing all accepted ideas. That, in conse- 
 quence, never again can we have a return to faith 
 as faith has hitherto been conceived. But that is 
 just what I deny. Admitting that science and 
 criticism have in their several regions changed 
 many things, this will never withstand a genuine 
 outbreak of temperament, a genuine return of 
 spring and summer to the soul of man. If such 
 a movement is really due, it will soon find new 
 reasons a new intellectual statement and defence. 
 But at first it will need none of these things. 
 Thomas Paine's criticisms of Biblical literature 
 have perhaps never been answered ; but when 
 the Spirit moved, when men were searched anew 
 by some elementary moral disquietude which led 
 them to cry out in despair and faith, the things 
 that Paine had said seemed far away. " Simulat 
 que increpuit suspitio tumultus, ilico nostrae artes 
 conticescunt." A drowning man is not aware that 
 he is wet. 
 
 The faith to which, as it seems to me, we are 
 
 196S99
 
 38 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 about to return, will not be the same in many 
 particulars as that of any previous time ; but it 
 will have the same background, the same funda- 
 mental attitude. It will be a newly recovered 
 confidence in life, in that body of personal facts, 
 of moral misgivings, flashes of the ideal and the 
 holy, reminiscences of some previous condition of 
 private integrity and peace, with the corrobora- 
 tions of these which, to the hearing ear and the 
 understanding heart, seem to rise up so fittingly 
 out of life's ordinary events. The new faith will 
 be a return, a kind of homecoming, to a sufficiently 
 solid confidence, that in trusting those elements 
 of our nature which urge us and help us on to- 
 wards what seems best, we are not deceived ; 
 that rather, in those so personal intimations and 
 contacts, we are dealing with Reality, and with 
 that kind of reality which, for beings such as 
 we are, and placed as we are, is our proper and 
 abiding concern ; that though it is at best but 
 relative proof that we have attained, this is no 
 disparagement, but means only that it is absolute 
 for us and so far. " If hopes were dupes, fears 
 may be liars." 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne tells the story of a child 
 who had a mark a birthmark on her face. She
 
 IS AN AGE OF FAITH RETURNING? 39 
 
 grew to be a beautiful woman beautiful, though 
 the mark remained. Her husband, vain and 
 ambitious, set himself to have the mark wiped 
 out. He summoned science to deal with nature. 
 Under the treatment the birthmark began to 
 recede, though meanwhile the victim languished. 
 An hour came when the mark was gone, but in 
 that hour the sweet woman died. 
 
 There is no explanation of things which 
 accounts for so many of the facts, as simply to 
 say, that on the soul of man there is an ineradic- 
 able birthmark which, at times, stands out.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 
 
 F^OR us, in Europe, there is at the moment 
 only one object, and it is to reach a decision 
 (I speak for myself) on the question of the ulti- 
 mate basis of life, for the individual and for 
 society : whether it is to be conceived as natural 
 or as spiritual. 
 
 We, in Great Britain, since the war began, 
 have been reading with every variety of emotion, 
 from surprise to terror, books by Treitschke, von 
 Bernhardi, and the others. And, not to put it 
 too finely, we have the feelings towards those 
 who are in the field against us which we should 
 have towards people who had often taken a meal 
 with us, about whom we had just learned that all 
 the time they were carrying about in their pocket 
 a wonderful formula for poisoning the soup ! 
 
 Perhaps it is to Hegel, ultimately, that we 
 shall have to trace the roots of this movement
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 41 
 
 which subdues the individual to the claims and 
 necessities of the State. But it is to Nietzsche, 
 with his passion, with his style, that we are 
 indebted for the glorification of force, for the new 
 worship of Thor and Odin, and the new scorn for 
 those ideals which, as a fact of history, Christ 
 offered to the world. It is upon Nietzsche ulti- 
 mately that von Bernhardi bases his concise and 
 deliberate blasphemy, that "war is a biological 
 necessity." Let us then consider Nietzsche, 
 whose spirit is behind all those books and 
 papers and tracts which litter the counters of 
 all our book stores. 
 
 Perhaps we shall most easily be just to 
 Nietzsche, and shall best appreciate his signifi- 
 cance in saying the things he says at the time 
 when he has said them, if we consider his work 
 as poetry. And I mean by "poetry " there what 
 Arnold meant when he defined "poetry" as the 
 " criticism of life," as the reaction made upon an 
 elect and sensitive spirit by the aspect of things 
 at the moment. In order to qualify for our 
 acceptance of him as a poet, according to this 
 definition, it is only necessary that Nietzsche 
 should be able to convince us of his own sincerity, 
 of his own unmixed loyalty to such insight as had
 
 42 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 been given him ; and in his case this last had 
 a shrewdness and sagacity almost sublime or, 
 rather, diabolical. 
 
 The mark of a poet, on Arnold's terms, is, 
 above everything, spontaneity, a natural and 
 incorrigible gift of utterance, and utterance of 
 such a kind that we feel as we listen that it is not 
 the result of planning and calculation, that it is 
 rather the rising and overflow through the spirit of 
 this man of some well, deep in the heart of things. 
 
 If I remember rightly what I once learned, and 
 if I was not misinformed at the time, it was this 
 very quality of naturalness and fullness, it might 
 even be excess and violence, which was the 
 accepted sign of the true NABI or prophet of God. 
 His words came pouring out without apology or 
 qualification. Listening to him men felt that he 
 was not saying such things for a livelihood, but 
 only because he was doomed to say them. He 
 might not be rational, or even intelligible, or 
 consistent with himself in his various outpourings, 
 but he was always quite manifestly the medium 
 or mouthpiece of some hidden power ; through 
 him things were being brought into the effective 
 life of man, which had their reason and justifica- 
 tion in the deep Source of all things and of our-
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 43 
 
 selves. Face to face with such an elect spirit, 
 it was perhaps the wisest course to listen ; to 
 interpret his message by the things of one's own 
 spirit ; to let his words pass over us, if they could 
 pass over us ; but if they seemed to be finding 
 their way into us, to attend to them. 
 
 Speaking for myself, Nietzsche seems to 
 answer to most of these signs. He does affect 
 me as an authentic voice. I confess that this 
 impression begins to fade when I read books on 
 Nietzsche by disciples of his ; for these disciples 
 wzY/find a system in Nietzsche, a reasoned defence 
 of some prejudice of their own ; and the moment 
 we apply reasoning to the complete work of 
 Nietzsche we disturb the atmosphere in which, as 
 it seems to me, he has his proper effect. Face 
 to face with a man of Nietzsche's force and passion 
 and violence it is futile to ask, at least in the first 
 instance, whether he is right or wrong. The fact 
 is, he is there ; and since he is there, it must be 
 because in some real sense he was due. " Thou 
 askest why?" he writes, and here you have his 
 humour everywhere, "Thou askest why? I 
 am not one of those who may be asked for their 
 whys ! I am not a barrel of memory to have my 
 reasons with me ! "
 
 44 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 Now when you separate from these sayings the 
 insolence which tries us so much in Nietzsche, 
 they are not wholly illegitimate. As reason- 
 ing, it is quite as forcible on the merely logical 
 plane as, say, Tennyson's main argument in "In 
 Memoriam." To the insinuation of materialism 
 Tennyson retorts in effect : " Here am I so made 
 that I hate and shudder at your ideas ; and I 
 hold my shudder to be an argument in the case." 
 Like a man in wrath he protests ; and he holds 
 the warmth of his wrath as evidence of the truth 
 of his intuition. Nietzsche does no more in the 
 saying I have quoted and in hundreds of others. 
 
 To return to Arnold's definition of the poet as 
 a critic of life, as one who in his message passes 
 judgment upon the temper and ideals of his time, 
 it is easy to name that total view of life, of 
 progress, of society, against which Nietzsche 
 reacted with such passion and fertility as to ensure 
 him a kind of immortality. 
 
 It was inevitable that the Western world should 
 not go on as it had been going for fifty years, 
 attacking, amending, the traditional view of life 
 and all things, producing in one region its Renans, 
 in another its Darwins, in another its Schopen- 
 hauers ; it was inevitable that an era of time
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 45 
 
 which had been giving birth each year to some 
 cold and careful analysis of a great body of facts, 
 to some new "ology" or "onomy," "each a little 
 tinkling-bell that signifies some faith's about to 
 die " ; it was inevitable, I say, that out of that 
 vortex of challenge and disillusionment there 
 should arise one who should take literally and as 
 his message that dark result which so much of the 
 learning of the century seemed to insinuate, and 
 should summon men once for all in their actual 
 lives to proceed upon the frank negation of God. 
 It is the nature of things to move on to their 
 proper crisis and catastrophe. Nietzsche was one 
 of those " offences which needs must come." It 
 was given to him to see that the denial of God 
 was not the conclusion of the materialising pro- 
 cess. He saw clearly that the denial of God was 
 not the end, on reaching which the ruthless 
 intellect of man might rest. He saw that it is 
 only a new beginning. 
 
 He saw that if the ultimate denial was estab- 
 lished, then it became us, if we would be self- 
 consistent, to carry that denial back and forward, 
 up and down, swinging it like a sad lamp along 
 all the corridors of our life. He saw, in fact, 
 though he did not put it in these words, that the
 
 46 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 materialistic evolutionary hypothesis denies not 
 only God, but man. Wagner had written The 
 Twilight of the Gods ; Nietzsche wrote The 
 Twilight of the Idols. And what he meant was, 
 that if the gods have gone, then the idols, who 
 are the simulacra of the gods, the reminiscence 
 in our moralities of the gods ; the pieties, the 
 manners, the tendernesses which had their source 
 and reason in the gods these must also go. 
 This is the meaning of his contempt for half-and- 
 half men like Strauss and Renan. It is the real 
 meaning of his breach with Wagner and his later 
 preference for the "purely intellectual music of 
 Bizet, wedded to, the dispassionate prose of 
 Merime'e." 
 
 In Nietzsche's view, Strauss, Renan, Wagner 
 were men who halted betwixt two opinions, who 
 had not the courage to complete the syllogism of 
 denial. Looking back, so far as I am qualified, 
 on the literature of unbelief during our own and 
 an earlier generation, I have the compassion for 
 Nietzsche which we have for Prometheus, for 
 CEdipus, for any tragic figure of literature or of 
 life, in whom some error of the human soul 
 greatly vaunting itself receives the public over- 
 throw of God. Nietzsche went mad.
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 47 
 
 There is no compelling answer in terms of 
 reason for any profound misapprehension of life. 
 Life is plastic, indifferent, capable to a long length 
 of many interpretations. There is no answer 
 except the test of the experience. If a man will, 
 like Balaam, put aside those private restraints 
 which come from the hard-earned wisdom of the 
 human race, if he will set out, there is a real 
 sense in which he must set out. He must be left 
 to learn from the narrowing of the way by which 
 he goes, and from the behaviour of the beast on 
 which he is riding, the delicate but inviolable 
 nature of things. The great weapon of truth is 
 time. We say, Solvitur ambulando ; we might 
 likewise say, Confunditur ambulando. 
 
 It is from this point of view alone that we 
 are able to perceive the positive or constructive 
 element in that mass of moral or immoral and a- 
 moral and infra-moral teaching which we all have 
 in our minds when we think of Nietzsche's work. 
 It is from this point of view alone that we can see 
 how we can at all apply the words "positive " and 
 "constructive" to teaching which has certainly 
 the sound of bedlam. 
 
 Nietzsche's characteristic teaching takes its 
 point of departure from the blank pessimism of
 
 48 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 Schopenhauer. There was a time in Nietzsche's 
 life rather a precise time ; it was when he was 
 a student at Bonn, when he quite decisively 
 ceased to believe. So far as I am aware, he 
 himself has given us no history of his own spirit 
 during the transition, no account of how it came 
 to pass that one who was the child and grandchild 
 of Lutheran pastors, one who had been cared 
 for by loving Christian women, should find 
 himself stripped of those garments of the spirit 
 which it has been such a poignant sorrow for 
 many another to lose. Nor can one trace any- 
 where in his work any recollection of even the 
 lost illusions of faith. I should infer that religion 
 with Nietzsche had been simply the acquaintance 
 with a system of rules and manners resting upon 
 a certain metaphysic. This metaphysic, it seemed 
 to him, had become incredible ; and with its 
 failure the entire fabric fell away from him. I 
 cannot find in Nietzsche any interval of pathos, 
 of hesitation and misgiving. It would seem that 
 he accepted without reservation or regret the 
 total denial and absence of God. And with him 
 the denial of God did not simply mean the denial 
 of a holy and loving guardian of our lives ; it 
 did not mean merely the denial, say, of a future
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 49 
 
 state, and of " some far-off Divine event." With 
 him the denial of God meant and this I have 
 said is to the credit of his logic the denial of 
 everything suggestive of order or sense or pur- 
 pose in things : it simply meant chaos. 
 
 Standing in this " shivered universe," what 
 remained for him? It was at this stage that 
 he fell upon Schopenhauer ; and like a man in 
 thirst he drank that goblet to the dregs. "The 
 World is Will " ; that seemed to promise a way 
 out. The world is not to be explained in terms 
 of reason. An explanation in terms of reason 
 leaves the door open for the great hypothesis of 
 God : which must not be. It may be that 
 Nietzsche misunderstood Schopenhauer, or, rather, 
 that he allowed himself to take from Schopen- 
 hauer suggestions to which by his temperament 
 he was predestined. Certainly he did not rest 
 satisfied with the exhortation or moral formula 
 which Schopenhauer himself commends to those 
 who occupy his ground. For Schopenhauer's 
 recommendation is no more than that we accept 
 our melancholy lot ; do nothing to carry on the 
 business ; and, if we have opportunity, deal gently 
 with one another until death end all. 
 
 Now it is by contrast with that ethic of 
 4
 
 50 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 Schopenhauer, which counsels man to resigna- 
 tion and apathy and the negating of life, that 
 Nietzsche's ethic, uproarious and disorderly as it 
 is, is at least positive, energetic, robust. Utterly 
 disillusioned, Schopenhauer says in effect : " Let 
 be; let me die." Utterly disillusioned, Nietzsche 
 says : " Let me live ; nay, let me kick my 
 heels." 
 
 Here, then, let me, imperfectly it must be, 
 introduce what, using a term which is becoming 
 a little overworked amongst us, we should call 
 his message, and proceed to indicate what, ac- 
 cording to Nietzsche, was his authority for that 
 message both in history and in that nexus and 
 meeting-place of instincts, as he might describe 
 our soul and all we know. 
 
 It is sometimes objected to Nietzsche that he 
 changed his point of view from time to time, 
 and that doubtless if he had been spared he 
 might have come full circle back to faith. I do 
 not find any real change ; on the contrary, I find 
 beneath the surface, beneath the various fields of 
 illustration, an unbending persistence in one moral 
 category as the imperative, if not for all men, at 
 least for himself and for all who have ears to hear 
 him. It is true that he has a way of picking the
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 51 
 
 brains of other men, taking what he likes and 
 using it, out of its original context, it may be, 
 or with another meaning than was originally in- 
 tended. But perhaps no one of us escapes the 
 temptation to assimilate from our reading and 
 the incidents of our life those things which seem 
 to confirm and reinforce our abiding interest. 
 So it was with Nietzsche. He took up Schopen- 
 hauer, thanking him for the category of "the 
 world as will," thanking him, i.e., for the sug- 
 gestion of some principle other than that of 
 Reasonable Consistency, by the help of which he 
 could look out upon the world. But he did not 
 accept Schopenhauer's ethical conclusions ; nor 
 indeed did he accept his understanding of "Will." 
 "Will" became in Nietzsche's hands simply 
 desire, impulse, caprice, appetite, anything at all 
 that moved himself. 
 
 In the same way he took up Darwinism, as a 
 working theory of the origin of man, so long as 
 he needed illustrations of man's primitive de- 
 gradation. But the moment his keen eye de- 
 tected the innuendo in Darwinism, that a being 
 like man who had come thus far, and from such 
 a lowly place, might after all have within him a 
 protesting and indestructible quality which would
 
 52 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 yet compel him upwards even to perfection, at 
 that moment he dropped Darwinism as a system. 
 This forsaking of philosophies and breaking-off 
 of friendships with men gives ground for thinking 
 that Nietzsche did not know his own mind. But 
 the opposite is the truth. He knew his own 
 mind, and held to it so obstinately that he 
 did not permit any old love to check his utter- 
 ance. 
 
 I find in his earliest work, The Birth of 
 Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, the funda- 
 mental principle of all his subsequent teaching, 
 the insight which he permitted to carry him 
 wherever it would. 
 
 Let us dwell for a moment upon the thesis of 
 that work. If I can isolate it and make it clear, 
 I think we shall have the key to the understand- 
 ing of all his characteristic words and phrases like 
 " The Will to Live " and "The Will to Power," 
 " The Superman," " Master-morality " and " Slave- 
 morality," "The Transvaluation of all Values" 
 and " Eternal Recurrence." And I can already 
 perceive that this paper will not be able to 
 accomplish more than to illustrate his application 
 here and there of the principle on which he seized 
 in that first book of his. I quote from the
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 53 
 
 epitome of one of his latest commentators, Dr. 
 Miigge. 
 
 "There are two instincts, two states of the human mind 
 the Apollonian and the Dionysean. On these two physical 
 dispositions depend all the developments of Art ; for Apollonism 
 and Dionysism are the pure and direct states of Art. The 
 Apollonian instinct is a sort of dream of beauty : the Dionysean 
 instinct is a kind of intoxication resulting from the delight 
 of mere existence. The 'principium individuationis ' of 
 Schopenhauer and the god Apollo with his sunny eyes : these 
 convey to us the idea of the former. The Dionysean impulses 
 of spring, of the St. Vitus' dancers of the middle-ages, the 
 conception of the music of the world : these convey to us an 
 idea of the latter. The art and the civilisation of Greece were 
 originally Apollonian; it was a beautiful visionary world and 
 moderation was its axiom. Later on the Dionysean instinct 
 became united with the Apollonian, and together they gave 
 rise to the greatest works of art. For example, in a popular 
 song, melody is the most important part. All music has a 
 Dionysean character; for, being pure will, it symbolises a 
 realm beyond all forms of visible manifestation. Under the 
 influence of this mysterious Dionysean state of music, the 
 Apollonian instinct in the lyric poet comes to life, first as a 
 visionary conception. Thus Schiller mentions a 'musical 
 sentiment ' as always preceding the composition of his poems " 
 (as our own Burns wrote his songs to music that was already 
 singing in his ear) "... Greek tragedy developed itself out 
 of the tragic-choir, the satyr-choir. Tragedy was born of the 
 spirit of music. To the Greek, the satyr was an expression 
 of the longing for freedom, for a return to nature ; a longing 
 strengthened by the artificiality of the Apollonian instinct. . . . 
 
 "To the mind of the Greek, the satyr bore the stamp 
 of primitive man, possessing all the highest and strongest 
 emotions. . . . The effect of the Dionysean tragedy is, that
 
 54 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 State and Society and in general all the depths between man 
 and man, yield to an overwhelming feeling of unity and oneness 
 which leads back to the heart of nature. The metaphysical 
 consolation with which every good tragedy dismisses us is 
 this, that Life which is at the heart of all things is, in spite of 
 its different manifestations, for ever indestructible, powerful, 
 joyous. What then was Dionysus ? He was a Power excelling 
 the Vine-Spirit and far more ancient. He was the 'will to 
 live,' and it is by that inexhaustible fountain and torrent of 
 energy, expressing itself in motion and emotion, in frenzied 
 music, in ecstasy, in abandonment to impulses, it is on that 
 tide only that man lives when he may be said to live at all." 
 
 I am, of course, unable to say whether Nietzsche 
 is justified in his account of the origin of tragedy. 
 He was, it is acknowledged, well equipped for 
 dealing with Greek literature, and commentators 
 who have nothing but abhorrence for his moral 
 teaching, have admitted the depth and originality 
 of his observation. In effect it may well have 
 been as he says, that it was the inrushing of some 
 primitive and irrational Force which fertilised the 
 soul of Greece at a particular moment in her 
 history. It may also be true that the history of 
 man is the alternating domination of Dionysus 
 and Apollo. Emerson reversed the order when 
 he said that all great epochs, epochs of abnormal 
 mental activity, occur at the moment when a 
 nation is passing out of its barbarism ; holding,
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 55 
 
 therefore, that it was not the inrushing of Dionysus 
 which gave birth to music and the tragic emotion, 
 but rather the appearance in the midst of life's 
 exuberance of Apollo the lord of measure ; that 
 it was the pressure of thought, the strain of a 
 coming contradiction, which, harnessing in the 
 wild steeds of passion, introduced the human soul 
 to its greatness. And certainly on an appeal to 
 experience, either to our own experience or to 
 the classical autobiographies of the soul, a strong 
 case could be stated for the view that it is not the 
 inrush of the Dionysean spirit, but the approach 
 of the shadow of Apollo which makes for life and 
 fullness. The natural man within each of us is, 
 I suppose, still the primitive man ; but is it not 
 our experience that even that natural man within 
 us does not get his true play and freedom until 
 he is forced back into the second place under the 
 dominion of some spiritual purpose ? The one 
 proof that untrammelled naturalism is not the 
 proper life of man is simply this, that he cannot 
 go on with it. The one thing we yearn for, as 
 deeply as we yearn for freedom, is for bondage. 
 A man may easily become more natural than it is 
 natural for him to be. 
 
 I can recall many a great passage in Tolstoy
 
 56 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 great for its absolute fidelity to the things of the 
 soul in which the converse to Nietzsche's thesis 
 is illustrated, in which "natural men" like 
 Olenine in The Cossacks, Levin in Anna Karenina, 
 Prince Andrei in War and Peace, and Nekhludoff 
 in Resurrection, come upon life, upon their own 
 proper vitality, not when they are letting them- 
 selves go, but when for the first time they come 
 within the shadow of life's holier meanings. 
 
 However these things may be, and without 
 going more deeply into the matter, there are 
 these two main spirits in life call them Dionysus 
 and Apollo, The Flesh and the Spirit, Love and 
 Law, Impulse and Reflection, Life and Reason 
 we might even say Faith and Experience ; and 
 the crises in history do come when, after the long 
 tyranny of one of these spirits, the other, equally 
 indestructible, throws off the yoke. 
 
 What all this meant for Nietzsche was, that 
 Dionysus was 'the lord of life, that man's true 
 health and well-being lay, not in thought but 
 simply in life itself, and simply in that life of 
 instinct, of innocence (he calls it), in which he 
 yields to impulse without reflection or misgiving. 
 Now, once more, it was never Nietzsche's way to 
 hold himself bound by any formula, even though
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 57 
 
 it had been his own. And if the Dionysus- 
 Apollo insight into man's nature had begun to 
 present difficulties or to suggest modifications, he 
 would simply have dropped it as he dropped 
 Schopenhauer and Darwin and Wagner, bearing 
 off with him the one idea to which indeed he 
 had been predisposed. There is evidence that 
 Nietzsche was aware of certain implications in his 
 own interpretation of the great Greek period, 
 which must qualify the headlongness of his pro- 
 positions. And there is evidence that he did pay 
 heed to them, notably in his own greatest book, 
 I mean, Thus Spake Zarathustra. For example, 
 let any worldly-minded person begin by hailing 
 Nietzsche as his particular moral guide. Let him 
 begin by quoting Nietzsche in order to justify his 
 own riotousness. If he is loyal even to such a 
 master, Nietzsche will presently begin to make 
 proposals to that man which will, from his own 
 point of view, be as severe and thwarting as would 
 be the ethics of the Church. 
 
 "Oh, that ye would understand my word. Be sure to do 
 whatever ye like only first of all be such as can will." 
 
 " This new command, O my brethren, I give unto you : 
 Become hard." 
 
 " Die proudly, when it is no longer possible to live proudly." 
 
 " What is freedom ? The will to be responsible for one's
 
 58 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 self; the maintaining of the distance that separates man from 
 man ; becoming indifferent to trouble, severity, privation, and 
 even to life; being ready to sacrifice people to one's cause, 
 not even excepting thyself" 
 
 The one idea which Nietzsche carried away 
 with him from his philological studies was the 
 idea that the true sign of that which is good is 
 strength, fullness, spontaneity ; and following upon 
 that, that any manner of restriction was of the 
 devil. This is the rallying-point, the nexus of all 
 his subsequent teaching : 
 
 " Egoism is of the Essence of all noble souls." 
 " The senses do not deceive us, ... at present, we possess 
 knowledge only to the extent of our resolution to accept the 
 testimony of the senses. The rest is abortion, and incomplete 
 knowledge, i.e. metaphysics, divinity, psychology, and the 
 theory of perception, or formal science, sciences of symbols, 
 as logic, and that applied form of logic metaphysics. 
 Actuality is never met with in those sciences." 
 
 " All old-morality monsters, and especially Christianity, have 
 waged war against the passions with a view to exterminating 
 them. The praxis of the church is inimical to life." 
 
 In Nietzsche's view Socrates contributed 
 largely to the sadness, and finally to the over- 
 throw, of Greece. Through him largely it came 
 about that the "native hue of resolution was 
 sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 
 
 " Opinions and valuations with regard to life either for or
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 59 
 
 against can never in the end be true : they only possess value 
 as symptoms." 
 
 " Socrates, according to his descent, belonged to the lowest 
 of the people : Socrates was of the proletariat. He was ugly. 
 Ugliness, while in itself an objection, is almost a refutation 
 when found among Greeks." " Often enough ugliness is the 
 expression of a thwarted development. . . . The typical 
 criminal is ugly and decadent." 
 
 " Previous to the time of Socrates, dialectic methods were 
 repudiated in good society. We employ dialectics only when 
 we have no other means." 
 
 "The dialectician merely leaves it to his opponent to 
 demonstrate that he is not an idiot, thus making him furious 
 and at the same time helpless." 
 
 "As long as life is in the ascendant, happiness is identical 
 with instinct; to be forced to combat the instincts, that is 
 the formula of decadence." " Socrates, the chronic valetudin- 
 arian, was a mistake. The whole of improving morality, 
 including Christian morality, has been a mistake. It has all 
 been decadence under another name." 
 
 " I mistrust all systematisers and avoid them. The desire 
 for system is a lack of rectitude." 
 
 "Convictions are prisons. A man who believes, becomes 
 dependent and cannot be upright." 
 
 And so on and on. 
 
 This, of course, is all very well, but it means 
 what I meant when I said that thoroughgoing 
 materialism not only does away with God, but 
 does away with man. This is to do away with 
 man. Is not society, to which, after all, we owe 
 everything, is not society the attempt to arrive at
 
 60 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 a compromise between the free play of instincts 
 and the absolute restriction of instincts? It is 
 obvious that we cannot all of us at every moment 
 of our existence get up and speak, or walk out, or 
 knock one another over. In order to play a game 
 even, one must observe rules. Even in order to 
 be funny one must have a kind of solemn back- 
 ground. In order to be a Nietzschean one must 
 have a contrast in the general orderliness of 
 the people. To take the kind of header that 
 Nietzsche recommends, one must have a jump- 
 ing-board of patient backs. " When everybody's 
 wearing tweed, up goes the price of shoddy ; 
 when everybody's somebody, then nobody's any- 
 body." 
 
 A Nietzschean requires spectators who are not 
 Nietzscheans. 
 
 Originally it may very well have been that 
 people were left-handed or right-handed as they 
 pleased. But the moment they came together in 
 communities, they were compelled to come to a 
 decision. Otherwise, if each man, that is to say, 
 in using the scythe had taken his own way, they 
 would all have hacked off each other's legs. The 
 left-handedness of a tribesman of Benjamin must 
 have been a disadvantage to him when he went
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 61 
 
 abroad. Nietzsche is an advocate of left-handed- 
 ness in morals, appearing in a world which for 
 good or evil has decided to use its right hand. 
 
 There is no need for me to deal dialectically 
 with this part of Nietzsche's teaching : that has 
 been done once for all by Plato in his treatment 
 of Thrasymachus in the First Book of the 
 Republic, and in his criticism of Callicles in 
 the Gorgias. This being so, I should regret 
 that I had laboured the obvious difficulties which 
 beset an unbridled individualism, only that the 
 quotations from Nietzsche, which I made a 
 moment ago, and my comment and illustration, 
 have had the good effect of carrying me on to a 
 later stage of the man's teaching. And here I 
 shall increase my own pace and take a short cut 
 towards my conclusion. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that Nietzsche was 
 not aware of the embarrassments of his own 
 theory : he was aware of them, as being within 
 the theory itself and also within these institutions 
 of the spirit, systems of philosophy, of ethics, 
 manners, customs, proverbs, and above all within 
 the Christian tradition which had had dominion 
 over man for so long, and still more or less 
 occupied the field.
 
 62 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 It is evidence to me that Nietzsche became 
 aware of the difficulties in his own Dionysean 
 maxims, that I detect a steadily increasing 
 severity, and (in spite of himself) a groping after 
 system, in his subsequent books. He sees that, 
 without the pressure of the Apollonian spirit, 
 Dionysism is mere riotousness, ending in melan- 
 choly and ennui. 
 
 Nietzsche's total burden and protest is : to 
 oppose with every weapon of irony, laughter, 
 argument, contempt, all the current fashion of 
 liberty, democracy, socialism, pity, and equality. 
 For him there are two orders of men : there are 
 masters and there are slaves. That, he says, is 
 the ordinance of nature ; and here he annexes 
 the whole literature of "natural law in the 
 spiritual world " in a way which would have 
 greatly amazed some of its genial advocates 
 amongst ourselves. 
 
 " Ye preachers of equality, ye are tarantulse. Therefore do 
 I tear your web, that your revenge may leap forth from behind 
 your word 'justice.' 'Will unto Equality,' they say shall 
 henceforth be the name of virtue, and they clamour against 
 everything that hath power. O ye preachers of equality, the 
 tyrant-frenzy of Impotence. Your most secret tyrant-longings 
 cry thus in you for ' equality.' Fretted conceit and suppressed 
 envy thus break out in you. Nay, friends; distrust all in 
 whom the impulse to punish is powerful, and who talk much
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 63 
 
 of their justice. Unto me, Justice saith : Men are not equal : 
 neither shall they become so. Life is a struggle to rise, and 
 to surmount itself. Divinely will we strive against each other. 
 " He who is of my type cannot escape the hour which saith 
 unto him : Now go thou only the way of thy greatness. Life 
 is that which must ever surpass itself." 
 
 He is aware, too, and, indeed, the theory 
 involves it, that there are those who will 
 respond to his summons and those who will not. 
 He is not anxious to make proselytes ; they must 
 come only if they are called. And if they obey, 
 it is to no easy life he summons them. For by 
 this time Zarathustra also has so far conformed 
 to all ethical codes, that he too announces 3 
 motive for his master-man. In this world wherein 
 no Divine or resolute meaning is to be found, 
 what are these master-men to live for ? To what 
 light are they to lift up their faces in the intervals 
 of reaction or misgiving ? For Zarathustra also 
 has now come so far towards normal manhood 
 that he confesses to great loneliness at times, and 
 sorrow and bitterness : 
 
 " Oh, loneliness, my home-loneliness ! Among the many 
 I felt forsaken. To feel forsaken is one thing : to feel lonely 
 is another. O human kind, how strange thou art ! " 
 
 What, then, is the star for this elect spirit in a
 
 64 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 degraded world ? Not mere Dionysism : Zara- 
 thustra is beyond that now. 
 
 "If ye had more belief in life, ye would yield yourselves 
 less to the impulse of the moment" 
 
 Not mere joy or animalism. 
 
 " Creating that is the great salvation from suffering, and 
 life's alleviation." "Let yourself be in your action as the 
 mother is in the child." " Man is not a goal, but a bridge." 
 
 And a bridge to what? He is a bridge 
 between the animal and the Superman. 
 
 " Let us build. On the tree of the future we will build our 
 nest. The eagles shall bring us food. . . ." 
 
 "Man shall be educated for war, and woman for the 
 recreation of the warrior. Let women be a joy, pure and fine 
 like a precious jewel, illumined with the virtues of a world not 
 yet come. Let the beam of a star shine in your love. Let 
 your hope say : ' May I bear the superman.' Marriage, so 
 call I the will of the twain to create the one that is more than 
 those who created it. But that which the far-too-many call 
 marriage is one long stupidity. Even your best love is but 
 a torch to guide you unto loftier paths. ..." 
 
 " A great horror to us is the degenerating sense which says : 
 ' All for myself.' Upward soareth our sense ; the body goeth 
 through history, growing and fighting. And the spirit what 
 is it unto the body ? The herald, companion, and echo of its 
 fights and victories." ..." Man hath been only an attempt. 
 We fight step by step with the giant, Chance. There are a 
 thousand paths which have never yet been trodden. Arise, 
 ye lonesome ones, one day shall ye be a people. Out of you a 
 chosen people shall arise ; and out of it the Superman." . . .
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 65 
 
 " I love only the land of my children." ..." Only the day 
 after to-morrow is mine." 
 
 He is equally alive to the opposition which his 
 message will encounter from everything that is 
 ancient and experienced in the institutions of the 
 people, from civilisation, from the traditional 
 pieties of life, and especially from Christianity, 
 so far as it sanctions the existing state of 
 things. 
 
 Here, had I made a more economical use of 
 my time, I should have dealt with Nietzsche's 
 breach with Wagner, not only for the sake of 
 the matter at issue, but as making clear the 
 nature and depth of his divergence from Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 I know no words about music and about the 
 music of Wagner, so luminous, so exact and 
 convincing, as those which Nietzsche knows how 
 to make use of. He can make plain to our 
 reason things so intangible that we ourselves 
 should scarcely have known them, or known 
 that we had felt them. His words have the 
 effect of helping us to identify our own souls, 
 of helping us to retain in our memory because 
 he has caught them in some phrase images and 
 impressions which would otherwise have died, so 
 5
 
 66 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 far as things may be said to die, with the actual 
 moment. 
 
 " With Wagner we scale the most elevated peaks of feeling, 
 and it is only there that we feel ourselves brought back to 
 Nature's boundless heart, into the realm of liberty. There 
 we see ourselves and our fellows emerge as something sublime 
 from an immense mirage, if I may call it so : we see the 
 deep meaning in our struggles, in our victory and our defeat. 
 Changed thus into tragic men, we return again to life in a 
 strangely consoled mood. . . . The trouble and proud wonder 
 which an artist experiences with regard to the world are united 
 to an ardent desire to embrace the same world in love." 
 
 And yet, soon afterwards, the man who wrote 
 such words could write these : 
 
 "Wagner has been ruinous to music. Was Wagner a 
 musician at all ? He was at least something else in a higher 
 degree, i.e. an unsurpassable actor. . . . Even I was at first 
 fascinated by him, but it was a mistake on my part. I freed 
 myself from him, though it caused me much suffering. . . . 
 Wagner is a Romanist, and he made the poor Devil, the 
 country lad, Parsifal, a Roman Catholic. I despise everyone 
 who does not regard Parsifal as an outrage in morals." 
 
 You get at the secret of this sudden aversion if 
 you listen to another quotation : 
 
 "In Wagner's works," says Nietzsche, "there is always 
 someone who wants to be saved." 
 
 That's it. The conflict between Nietzsche and
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 67 
 
 Wagner was reproduced the personalities being 
 smaller in the conflict, some years ago, between 
 W. E. Henley and Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 Henley could not understand how an erect and 
 strenuous spirit like Stevenson could have his 
 hankering after forgiveness. He called Stevenson 
 " The Shorter Catechist." It seemed to him 
 unmanly, weak, cringing, cowardly, precisely 
 the words which Nietzsche uses of Wagner. The 
 fact is, Nietzsche did not understand Christianity ; 
 and nowhere did he show himself less capable 
 congenitally of understanding Christianity than 
 in his misapprehension of the nature of Christian 
 forgiveness. I am not saying that the Church 
 had altogether in his day (or in ours) guarded 
 herself sufficiently against the imputation of 
 antinomianism and sentimentalism. But it ought 
 not to have been beyond Nietzsche's penetration 
 to see that the cry for forgiveness is in many ways 
 very like his own purest cries for personal freedom ; 
 that the cry for pardon is in one respect the pro- 
 test of a man, in the name of what he believes to 
 be his essential nature, against that lower ex- 
 pression of himself which he sees in his moral 
 failures. Adopting Nietzsche's own jargon, I 
 should say that, occupying the place that it does
 
 68 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 in the Christian scheme, forgiveness, the definite 
 pardon by God, the new right to lift up our head 
 again, though we have been what we have been, 
 and the consequent inrush of a new and whole- 
 some vitality all that is the confirmation by 
 Christianity of everything that was true in 
 Nietzsche's analysis of the soul. 
 
 I find, as is usual in a paper in which one 
 simply writes on and on, that I have arrived at 
 what must be the limit of my space without 
 having said the very things which were most emi- 
 nently in my mind when I began. I had hoped, for 
 example, to ask myself how serious men ought to 
 deal with this spirit, which, not always traceable 
 to Nietzsche, has its flagrant apostles amongst 
 us, so as to absorb and obey what is signifi- 
 cant and organic to the enduring soul of 
 man. 
 
 I definitely close with one remark ; let us make 
 of it what we may. It is this : I cannot fincl the 
 trace of any thoroughly good man or woman, of 
 any person having first-rate ability and a grace of 
 Christian character to match it, with whom poor 
 Nietzsche ever came into contact. He knows 
 only the hypocrisies and frauds and disingenu- 
 ousnesses of Christianity. He knows only its
 
 THE CRY FOR FREEDOM NIETZSCHE 69 
 
 greed of power, of physical influence, of sus- 
 picion. 
 
 " It is the shrewdness of Christianity," he says, " that men 
 talk about their beliefs, but they obey their instincts." 
 
 And so, when, as it seemed to him, the meta- 
 physic of Christianity gave way, there were no 
 tender memories, no dear ties, no cautionary 
 examples to restrain him, and it might be to save 
 him. 
 
 " A philosophy " and the same is true of a personal faith 
 "which we accept out of pure intellect, will never become 
 quite our own, because it never was our own." 
 
 Those are his words. They are true. 
 
 And one of the ties deeper than reason which 
 binds men to religious beliefs will always be the 
 quite evident happiness and unworldliness of those 
 who profess such a belief. Nietzsche, in his own 
 bitter way, once proposed for himself a thesis on 
 which he should write. The subject was to be : 
 
 " What is the nature of the kinship or contrast between a 
 man like Tischendorf, who had examined and judged over two 
 hundred manuscripts, dating from before the ninth century 
 a man cunning and diplomatic, fanatical, frivolous, ever so 
 sharpsighted in his own department, painfully exact in publica- 
 tion, vain beyond all bounds, greedy of gain, defensor fidei, 
 a courtier and a speculator in the book-market what is the
 
 70 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 nature of the kinship or contrast between such a man and the 
 writers of the New Testament with the Sinaitic recension of 
 which his name will be for ever associated ? " 
 
 We are all responsible for one another ; and 
 the Church of every age is responsible if not 
 for the general atmosphere, at least for its own 
 atmosphere. And perhaps something different 
 might have come of Nietzsche. There was a 
 tender spot in a soul, and a capacity for a high 
 fidelity, who could write of Jesus of Nazareth as 
 Nietzsche did write (if I have caught the tone of 
 his voice) : 
 
 "There has been only one Christian, and He died upon 
 the Cross." 
 
 I might here take a deep breath and say, 
 adopting for one moment the Carlylean, accidental 
 view of history, that it is in consequence of 
 Nietzsche's utter misunderstanding of Christianity 
 and scorn for its words and ideas and personalities, 
 that Europe to-day is one battlefield.
 
 IV 
 THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACTARIANISM 
 
 IN order to feel absolutely free, I shall not 
 begin with a definition of my subject. 
 "Tractarianism" I shall take to mean the whole 
 business with which I shall have been dealing in 
 the course of this paper. I shall take it to mean 
 the entire body of ideas and points of view which 
 are let loose in the mind of an intelligent man 
 by that movement associated with the name and 
 personality and career of John Henry Newman. 
 
 In this paper I shall attempt no criticism of a 
 formal kind. I have indulged my hostility to the 
 whole movement elsewhere, and have said what 
 it then occurred to me to say by way of meeting 
 Newman's chief positions. I felt then, and I feel 
 more powerfully now, that such a movement as 
 Tractarianism deserves something more than 
 criticism or hostility. And most of the men who 
 
 have set themselves to disparage the Tractarians 
 
 71
 
 72 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 on the philosophical or historical plane, admirable 
 and fierce as their work has been, simply demon- 
 strate to me that they themselves were congenitally 
 and it may even be from all eternity disqualified 
 for the task. A movement may have attained 
 such proportions and have been the instrument 
 of such blessings and powers to innumerable 
 souls, that to say that it all rested upon an error 
 may even be to impugn the Divine control of the 
 world. The first thing that a man has got to 
 face in dealing with this movement, or with any 
 movement in the same unworldly region, which 
 has attained a like volume and power is the fact 
 that it all happened. If you demonstrate to me 
 with mathematical precision that it ought not 
 to have happened, then I can only retort that 
 obviously in this world there is an order of things 
 which is not amenable to your mathematical 
 vetoes. In fact, a man who sets himself to show 
 that first and last and all along the line a move- 
 ment proceeded in defiance of certain facts and 
 rules and laws which are patent to all the moment 
 you consider, only heightens the wonder, and, 
 for me, only increases the authenticity of such a 
 movement. His argument really is on all fours 
 with the sophism of Achilles and the tortoise,
 
 THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACTARIANISM 73 
 
 On a certain conception of space, namely, that it 
 consists of an infinite number of contiguous points, 
 it can be demonstrated that Achilles can never 
 overtake the tortoise : just as it can be shown on 
 the same postulate that the minute-hand of my 
 watch can never reach the next five minutes' 
 space. But we know that Achilles could over- 
 take the tortoise, and that the minute-hand of my 
 watch will reach that impossible place and this, 
 finally, for the same reason as led to Tractarianism 
 in spite of all kinds of rationalism, namely, because 
 the human reason, in dealing with anything that 
 lives and moves has no function except, first to 
 look on and afterwards to consider and under- 
 stand. The mere intellect, as Bergson has been 
 the last to say, though he was not the first, is 
 distinguished by an utter incapacity to deal with 
 reality. 
 
 Any movement so general, so cordial, so happy 
 and triumphant in the experience of those who 
 have flung in their lot with it, any movement 
 which, as we see from this distance, has come to 
 occupy such a place and to affect its surroundings, 
 as it has beyond all question done, is a move- 
 ment in my view which was inevitable and 
 according to the will of God. That is to say, it
 
 74 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 must have arisen out of the necessities of the case, 
 and must have had allies in the true and abiding 
 spirit of man. It will not do to explain it away 
 by such a saying as had vogue for a time, a 
 saying which I have always thought the height 
 of absurdity, namely, that had Newman known 
 German, there would have been no Oxford move- 
 ment. People who say such a thing hold a 
 different view from mine of human history. But 
 surely we do not live in such a haphazard and 
 precarious world. To make a tremendous con- 
 sequence hang exclusively upon some thread of 
 chance is surely to come near to Atheism. The 
 converse might with more reason be urged. It 
 may be the true explanation of everything to say 
 that Providence, or Fate, or the nature of things 
 was so intent upon securing a certain result that 
 it defended some slender incident (Newman's 
 ignorance of German, in which so many of his 
 friends, Pusey, Hurrell Froude, Mozley, were 
 expert) lest the great event and consequence 
 should be imperilled. 
 
 Allow me then to recall some of the features 
 of the time which gave Tractarianism its signi- 
 ficance, some of the current principles held 
 privately and avowed, which, as I hold, becoming
 
 THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACTARIANISM 75 
 
 fixed and general, encountered in Newman and 
 his fellows their predestined opposition and, in 
 his case, their overthrow. There will be no 
 need for me to do more than allude to names 
 and tendencies. 
 
 " Perhaps it is not too much to say that never, 
 during the course of well-nigh two thousand years 
 in the world, did Christianity so widely lose the 
 character of a spiritual religion as during the last 
 half of the eighteenth century. Not in England 
 only but in all Protestant countries the general 
 aim of its accredited teachers seems to have been 
 to explain away its mysteries and to extenuate 
 its supernatural character ; to reduce it to a system 
 of Ethics little differing from the doctrines of 
 Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius." " Religious 
 dogmas were almost openly admitted to be 
 nonsense." " Religious emotion was stigmatised 
 as enthusiasm." A bishop of that period pre- 
 pared his own epitaph, which still exists, to the 
 effect that he was, and he thanked God for it, 
 the foe of all enthusiasm. " Theology had sunk 
 into an apologetic which seemed to be satisfied 
 if it had demonstrated the possibility of the bare 
 Existence of a Deity. Morality rested upon the 
 lowest instincts of human nature, as, e.g., that
 
 76 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 God is stronger than we are and able to denounce 
 us if we do not do good." " The categorical 
 imperative was, ' Be respectable/ and proofs were 
 continually being led in the sermons of the time 
 that religion is on the whole conducive to 
 pleasure." "The age seemed smitten with an in- 
 capacity for producing deep or strong feeling. . . . 
 There were few poets, and none of a high order. 
 Philosophy had fallen into the hands of men of a 
 dry prosaic nature, who had not enough of the 
 materials of human feeling in them to imagine 
 any of its more complex and mysterious mani- 
 festations ; all of which they either left out of their 
 theories or introduced them with such explanations 
 (Hume, e.g.') as no one who had experienced the 
 feelings could receive as adequate." 
 
 Such a state of matters could not continue in a 
 race which, to say no more, had been wont to 
 draw from deeper wells. There was sure to be 
 a cry of hunger which would satisfy itself some- 
 how. Into this emptiness came John Wesley and 
 the grace of God by his word. Though the 
 Tractarians had nothing but hard words and an 
 intellectual contempt for evangelicalism as they 
 knew it, they have one and all of them paid 
 tribute to the work of Wesley, acknowledging
 
 THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACT ARI AN ISM 77 
 
 freely that he restored the idea of supernatural 
 grace to the religious life of England. Newman 
 himself passed through a spiritual crisis in no way 
 differing from a typical Methodist conversion ; 
 and however much he may have resented the 
 surroundings and manners of evangelicalism he 
 never moved away from the discoveries of him- 
 self and of God which had been borne in upon 
 him at the first. Christianity was always to him 
 a tragic experience, in which a man is saved from 
 some elementary terror, not by any process of en- 
 lightenment or alleviation, but by the reception and 
 acceptance of something proposed and offered, 
 something which his own reason, his taste, his 
 pride may resist, but something which his 
 essential nature is crying out for, something which 
 has its only but sufficient evidence in the utter- 
 ness of his own collapse, and the certainty of 
 his own ruin if he continues to reject it. The 
 Tractarian spirit will always descend upon the 
 Church in an age in which serious men feel that 
 it is no time for half-measures. 
 
 The more deeply one considers any phenomenon 
 of the nineteenth century, the more thoroughly 
 is one convinced that the French Revolution 
 dominated everything. I do not know a juster
 
 78 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 thing to say, and one which, if you accept it, 
 means more than that the French Revolution 
 sent a shudder through three men of supreme 
 rank, who together affected fundamentally the 
 whole expression of the nineteenth century its 
 politics, its idealism, its religion. I mean Burke 
 and Wordsworth and Newman. They had seen 
 Wordsworth with his own eyes human nature 
 let loose, and they had no wish to see it 
 again. 
 
 It is, I venture to think, by keeping our eyes 
 upon the swift and symbolical degradation of 
 the Revolution in France that we can best 
 understand the wave of timidity and disillusion- 
 ment which passed over England in the first thirty 
 years of that century. The finer spirits had 
 supposed that what man needed, and what alone 
 he needed, was to be set free from social tyrannies ; 
 that thereafter the essential nature of man, which 
 was supposed to be, and had been declared by 
 Rousseau to be, "wonderfully good and innocent," 
 would rise naturally into a beautiful behaviour 
 which man would go on maintaining and 
 making more beautiful. Men who are now 
 midway through life are old enough to recall the 
 rhetoric of their own earlier days, when it was
 
 THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACTARIANISM 79 
 
 believed that if only the people had two things, 
 secular education and the franchise, wars and 
 animosities and licentiousness even would pass 
 away as tortures and superstitions had passed 
 away. The disillusionment and sorrow of our 
 time has at the heart of it this very disappointment. 
 And the next great movement, I hold, in the 
 Church will be based upon the same timidity, 
 approaching to terror at times, that lies at the back 
 of all Wordsworth's greatest poetry, and became 
 the very basis and reason of Tractarianism. 
 
 What happened in France and though history 
 never repeats itself, yet the human soul is the 
 same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, in its 
 ultimate attitudes and reactions and precautions, 
 and these form the material of religion what 
 happened in France was that human nature, let 
 loose from the old feudal restraints, plunged into 
 a liberty without obligation, without any holy 
 background or overmastering idea in which to 
 rebuke itself and to recover itself ; and had ended 
 in an unbridled orgy under the aegis of a goddess 
 of reason who was simply incarnate licentious- 
 ness. Wordsworth had witnessed all that and 
 though Browning went too far in calling him 
 11 The Lost Leader," still it is true that though he
 
 8o ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 is ever on the side of man, his mind is haunted 
 by the memory of that great collapse. There is 
 never absent from his writing a spirit of caution, 
 an appeal to make the best of what remains to 
 us all and can never be taken from us. He asks 
 us to be on our guard against all violent and 
 catastrophic courses. He would assure us that 
 true freedom lies not in circumstances but in the 
 soul ; that the really good things of life are open 
 and free to us all the natural world, the hills, 
 " the round ocean and the living air, and the 
 blue sky and in the mind of man," so that his 
 friend Charles Lamb twitted him, that in his 
 view a man could not be a man unless he had a 
 mountain outside his window. It is this message 
 of caution, of patience this appeal to men to find 
 liberty and the joy of life in themselves, in dis- 
 regard and contempt of circumstance, which lies, I 
 repeat, at the heart of his most significant work. 
 
 "The primal duties shine aloft like stars, 
 The Charities that soothe and heal and bless, 
 Are scattered at the feet of man like flowers." 
 
 "A true man 
 
 Finds comfort in himself and in his cause, 
 And while the mortal mist is gathering, draws 
 His breath in confidence of heaven's applause." 
 
 " Long have I loved what I behold : 
 The night that calms, the day that cheers;
 
 THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACTARIANISM 81 
 
 The Common growth of mother-earth, 
 The humblest mirth and tears. 
 These given, what more need I desire, 
 To stir, to soothe, to elevate? 
 What nobler marvels than the mind 
 May in life's daily prospect find, 
 May find or may create ? " 
 
 Or again : 
 
 "There's not a man 
 
 That lives, who hath not known his godlike hours, 
 And feels not what an empire we inherit 
 As natural beings, in the strength of nature." 
 
 In these, and I claim that these are character- 
 istic of Wordsworth's mature inspiration, for his 
 inspiration was not like Shelley's, purely intuitional, 
 but was the result of a pressure of reason upon 
 things, in these you have Wordsworth's reaction 
 (to use our modern phrase) against a wind which 
 was blowing strongly in his day, a wind which 
 seemed to him to threaten to fling down some 
 long-flying flag of the soul. 
 
 And if you say, " But Wordsworth was a poet, 
 an artist," and proceed to afflict me with some 
 talk about art for art's sake, I reply that, like 
 Dante, Wordsworth was above everything a 
 thinking man and a moralist whose work is 
 penetrated by a moral concern. And besides, we 
 
 have his own explicit avowal in a letter to Sir 
 6
 
 82 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 George Beaumont that in all his poetry he is to 
 be considered a teacher or nothing. 
 
 Now all this is not beside the point when I go 
 on to say that in essence the caution and con- 
 servatism which underlies Wordsworth is the 
 same spirit precisely, and rooted in the same 
 circumstances, as gave rise and cogency and joy 
 and prosperity to the Tractarian movement. Both 
 offer the aristocratic or individualistic solution 
 of life's problems. Both have a genuine fear of 
 human nature except within the sanctions of a 
 long-established society. In both there is a 
 shrinking from the face of things, a falling back 
 upon an esoteric insight and experience. 
 
 Now if Wordsworth behaved in this way 
 simply because he was an Englishman, if the 
 wave of liberty and secular knowledge and 
 analysis as these assaulted all the institutions of 
 the Spirit, had this effect of fear upon him, it is 
 not to be wondered at that in England at that time 
 there should be a group of sensitive men in the 
 Church with the fineness to detect the same 
 grounds for fear, with the speculative boldness 
 to push their inquiries back and back into still 
 remoter causes ; and with the training and tem- 
 perament as officers in the Church to conclude
 
 THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACTARIANISM 83 
 
 that the Church was the instrument by which the 
 higher interests of life could be secured, and the 
 home in which a totally different moral taste and 
 ambition could be created and fostered. 
 
 Stripped of all that was merely local or 
 temporary, the problem as the Tractarians 
 perceived it, was precisely the problem which 
 confronted Faust in the very moment of his 
 dying. He saw, you remember, a great wave of 
 knowledge, of knowledge let loose from the hard- 
 won maxims of the human race, and in antagonism 
 to them, he saw that wave creeping up over the 
 sand on a long promontory. He saw it rising up 
 and up towards two buildings erected there on 
 the shore of the inexorable ocean of time. The 
 two buildings were the twin edifices of the 
 Christian spirit in the world, namely, a Christian 
 Church and a Christian home. Heedless of the 
 value of these, he had consented to their destruc- 
 tion. But, as the smoke of their burning blew 
 towards him, he realised how he had injured the 
 human race, and in a cry of agony that he might 
 be spared, if not to replace those ancient haunts of 
 the spirit, at least to offer mankind some other 
 reason and retreat for life, Faust fell down dead. 
 
 And now let me pass by all manner of things,
 
 84 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 and proceed to fling down some of the pro- 
 positions which I should have liked to co-ordinate 
 into some kind of system. 
 
 The Tractarians set themselves, as they 
 believed, to save Society as they and we know 
 Society. And they believed it could be saved 
 only by a new manifestation of the supernatural 
 powers inherent in the Church of Christ. Now 
 with that position we should probably none of us 
 quarrel if we were permitted to define the terms 
 in our own way. But with that position I find 
 myself in an increasing and deepening sympathy 
 even when the terms are defined as they were 
 defined by the Tractarians. Society, as we know 
 it, is a Christian product. Marriage, as we know 
 it, is part of the Christian discipline or "kultur.' 
 I do not wonder that certain things which I hold 
 to be cardinal in social life should be assailed 
 in our day, any more than I should wonder at a 
 building collapsing when I know that for a long 
 time people have been undermining its foundations. 
 The Tractarians chose as their way of influencing 
 the world that the Church should stand aloof 
 from men. The first thing was for the Church to 
 save herself, to establish anew her bodily existence 
 in the midst of all human contentions. And so
 
 THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACTARIANISM 85 
 
 the Tractarians witness Newman's sermons 
 continually declare that there is no hope, until 
 Christian men separate themselves from the 
 general life that is about them, and live as men 
 have not lived for generations, a more secluded 
 and supernatural life. The world as such was 
 almost wholly evil. The contentions of men 
 were all rooted in self-seeking, however their 
 spirit might be cloaked in high-sounding words. 
 The human reason had got out of hand, and 
 was now intruding into matters for which she was 
 in the nature of things not competent. Criticism, 
 analysis, had reached a point where thinking had 
 become a vice, simply another form of self- 
 indulgence, and so on. 
 
 The Tractarians were right in believing that 
 the Church is strongest when she is in protest 
 against the spirit of the time. It is minorities 
 which control the world. And in taking the high 
 ground which she did take, it was only a late 
 instance of a recurring and invincible instinct of 
 the Christian spirit. Already we can detect this 
 exclusiveness in the New Testament. 
 
 " Beloved, we are of God, and the whole world 
 lieth in the Evil One." It is the very breath 
 of the Old Testament, subsequent to the Exile.
 
 86 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 "Chronicles" may not be good history but it is 
 excellent devotion, and represents the attitude 
 which the Church will always take in a day of 
 general apostasy. The finer souls will draw 
 together, to cherish in each other's breast the 
 sacred fire. The Church will always pass into a 
 period when she will cease disputing with the 
 world as I think she should now cease and 
 should proceed to cultivate her own life. There 
 are things which are not true for the world, which 
 are binding on members of Christ's body. I ndeed, 
 I doubt very much whether it is possible to 
 practise Christianity in the world, whether it 
 must not be practised within the believing com- 
 munity and towards the world. 
 
 No good comes of bullying men of the world 
 with the enunciation of our higher principles. 
 These the world fundamentally rejects because 
 meanwhile it has no taste for them. We must 
 convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and 
 of judgment to come. 
 
 And there are times I hold the present to be 
 such a time when we can do this only by the 
 manifestation of a holier and more satisfied life 
 within the community. We must not hesitate to 
 tell men that Christianity is torture to the natural
 
 THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACT A RIANISM 87 
 
 man ; and that that is so because, in the 
 bracing language of our fathers, the natural 
 man is damned. 
 
 "The question to-day is not, is Christianity 
 true, but is Christianity possible ? " 
 
 You cannot prove to the world that Christianity 
 will work : it will not work for worldly men. On 
 the purely intellectual level Nietzscheanism is 
 as self-consistent a system as Christianity. And 
 if the one or two absolutely essential things in 
 Christian dogmatics are withdrawn such as the 
 existence of the soul and a judgment at the end 
 of the world, in which men will be tried by their 
 loyalty to Christ truths not of the reason if 
 these be withdrawn, then Antichrist can give 
 reasons for his rule. 
 
 The instinct to give up the world slumbers at 
 all times within the Church, and from time to time 
 becomes public and inevitable. Unless we are 
 going to secularise all history, this instinct betrays 
 some necessity in the religious soul. The required 
 atmosphere is secured by shutting out certain 
 things, by selection and refusal. But all thinking 
 all sane living, proceeds by the same process by 
 walling off things which are meanwhile irrelevant 
 to the purpose in hand. It is one description of
 
 88 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 an insane man that everything occurs to him at 
 the same moment and as being of equal import- 
 ance. And to quote Bergson again, the very 
 function of the brain is to enable us, not to 
 remember but to forget, to exclude, to select. 
 
 There is something which claims my allegiance 
 in a saying of Newman's to the effect that the 
 vicissitudes in the soul of a poor Irishwoman are 
 of more consequence to God than the fall and 
 the disintegration of empires. At any rate, I 
 challenge any Christian man to continue to hold 
 the converse or to preach the converse. 
 
 "The spectacle of triumphant evil and of the 
 world's corruption has always acted upon some 
 remarkable minds like the perpetual presence of 
 some hateful apparition, penetrating them with 
 disgust, depressing them with gloom, or goading 
 them to retaliation. They are ever in imaginary 
 contest with that foe that hostile impersonation, 
 challenged by his success and disquieted by his 
 satisfaction. Such minds have embraced the ap- 
 palling vision of the world's evil with the keenness 
 and illumination of inspired prophets " (Mozley) 
 and again and again they see no immediate re- 
 source but to gather together like-minded people, 
 in order that in each other's society, and as is
 
 THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACTARIANISM 89 
 
 believed, within a more immediate and sustained 
 communion with the Unseen, they may continue 
 to believe in their own best inspirations. 
 
 The criticism of Tractarianism which comes 
 ready to hand, is that it was a Clerical move- 
 ment : and this is supposed of necessity to dis- 
 parage it. 
 
 To that criticism I have two things to say : 
 first, it was not a purely clerical movement ; 
 and, second, supposing it was, it will not do to 
 give it that name and then stop thinking about it. 
 To say that it was a clerical movement need only 
 mean, and in the circumstances only meant, that 
 it was a movement amongst those who, by their 
 very calling, were most concerned about the 
 welfare of the Church, and most distressed by the 
 apparent contradictions of her whole idea both 
 within the Church and in the world. It is not 
 strange that the Church recognised the situation, 
 in her heart and brain. In my own view it 
 would not disparage or reduce the authority of a 
 movement in this country that it should begin 
 with a small group of highly educated and sensi- 
 tive men who are set apart for this very thing, to 
 feel in a kind of substitutionary way the malady 
 or threatening of our time, to feel as a personal
 
 90 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 grief the general apostasy, and to examine them- 
 selves in order to see some way of escape. 
 Unless there was never intended to be anything 
 in the metaphor of the shepherd and the sheep, 
 it must always be in the minds of selected men 
 that things first become acute and intolerable. 
 " I protest," said an apostle, " that we die daily 
 nevertheless you live." 
 
 I should not disparage a movement which 
 should begin with the frank facing of two in- 
 controvertible positions as I take them to be : 
 first, that a religion must never be allowed to 
 become less than it was less either in the 
 matter of its moral severity, or less in the matter 
 of its ministrations of peace ; and second, that 
 whilst Popery and Calvinism were, and are, real 
 religions, having created and moulded nations 
 and laws and societies, a vague and consenting 
 Christianity has done nothing and is never likely 
 to do anything. 
 
 Then there is a second criticism which I shall 
 allude to, and close. I mean the criticism, also 
 made in disparagement, that the movement was 
 academic, secluded, aristocratic in short, that it 
 was an Oxford movement. But in the first place 
 it did not remain at Oxford. And again, the
 
 THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACT ARIANISM 91 
 
 beginnings of all great movements have been in 
 some place which, if it was not in Oxford, was 
 nevertheless a place of retreat, where men could 
 think out things and see the bearing of one thing 
 upon another. And besides, since a great part of 
 the challenge to the Church and Christian creed 
 was made in the name of reason and enlighten- 
 ment and new learning, it was a fitting and 
 admirable thing that the defence should come by 
 the lips of men who could not be accused of 
 ignorance. In these later days we have all 
 been greatly relieved by the services rendered 
 to faith by university men by men like James 
 Ward of Cambridge and William James of 
 Harvard. 
 
 It is a question to ask ourselves whether it is 
 not the absence of some such place of intense and 
 thorough thinking which is responsible for the 
 want of decision in our own immediate outlook 
 and for the want of concentration upon some 
 immediate task of the Spirit. 
 
 And there, by the way, I have touched upon 
 another matter which I should have liked to 
 dwell upon. The Church needs for its life and 
 for its influence upon every passing generation 
 some aim short of the ultimate aim of the
 
 92 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 Kingdom of God. The religious life of Scotland 
 has always had, I think, a very near horizon. 
 We have had always some definite plea, some 
 protest or claim ; and we have included or 
 excluded men by their attitude towards that 
 particular thing. It made for the strength of 
 Tractarianism, and it makes for the strength of 
 the High Church party, that it knows what it 
 wants ; and what it wants, it wants from you 
 before it has any further dealings with you. 
 
 It was inevitable that the Tractarians should 
 try to put a curb upon the spirit of criticism, upon 
 what they would not have hesitated to call the 
 licentiousness of the mere intellect. Newman 
 may not have known German, but he had learned 
 from Kant, by way of Coleridge, of the difference 
 between the " Verstand " and the "Vernunft" 
 and in consequence you will find in his apologetic 
 wonderful anticipations of recent and present-day 
 results in psychology. There is an amazing 
 similarity in the underlying ideas of such very 
 dissimilar books as The Grammar of Assent, 
 the Pragmatism of William James, and the 
 Personal Idealism of men like Schiller and Bussell 
 and Inge. 
 
 The only difference is that Newman and the
 
 THE CRY FOR CONTROL TRACTARIANISM 93 
 
 T ractarians proceed iipon the truth that finally the 
 thing which disposes a man to accept a belief is a 
 last prejudice or bias in his own mind towards it. 
 The Tractarians would not agree that truth is 
 simply what one troweth. Such an idea was their 
 bUe noire. But they did agree that training and 
 early suggestion had much to do with the require- 
 ments which anyone will afterwards make of any 
 theory of human life and destiny which is pro- 
 posed for his acceptance. They were altogether 
 opposed to the idea, which indeed has nothing to 
 say for itself, that Truth must not receive any 
 assistance from within our own minds. We hear 
 men speak as though nothing must ever be gained 
 for Truth from within and by the mind's own 
 courage, enabling us to face difficulties. In 
 order to be intelligent, it is announced that Faith 
 must always be making concessions, and that it is 
 only when she acknowledges herself beaten that 
 she is sound and healthy. They held that a great 
 belief is not to be gained by making a doctrine 
 less supernatural, but by making the mind more 
 aspiring ; not by lowering the truth but by 
 raising the mind. The mind, they held, is to be 
 trained to faith of set purpose and by distinct 
 inculcation of all the imagery of faith upon its
 
 94 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 attention (Mozley). And so, whilst it would be 
 unfair to accuse the Tractarians either at the 
 beginning or in their present representatives of 
 encouraging superstition and over-beliefs, they 
 certainly and I for one do not blame them 
 were not too eager to examine critically men's 
 habitual ways of thinking. They were always 
 afraid lest, in emptying out the bath, you might 
 empty out the baby. They shared Blougram's 
 fear, that if you begin to make cuts at the out- 
 growths of faith, at the enthusiastic expressions 
 of belief which have come down to us from 
 warmer and surer times and from more intimate 
 communications with God, you may wound some- 
 thing vital : in any case you whet your own 
 appetite for criticism. Like Blougram, they were 
 afraid and I think I rather share their misgiving, 
 though I should have to alter the phraseology 
 that " once cut at the Naples' liquefaction, and 
 you may end with Fichte's clever cut at God 
 Himself."
 
 V 
 
 TERTIUM QUID: THE MESSAGE OF 
 G. K. CHESTERTON 
 
 THERE is one qualification which I can 
 claim for presuming to write upon the 
 work of Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton with the view 
 of indicating his spirit and intention this, namely, 
 that I start with a rather enthusiastic prejudice 
 in his favour. For it is one of many proofs that 
 Mr. Chesterton has something vital to say to us, 
 and challenges the very temper of the time, that 
 of those who know his work with any real under- 
 standing, there are only two classes those who 
 receive him with enthusiasm, and those who 
 become quite angry when you mention his name. 
 There are, of course, others who adopt another 
 attitude. They say he is simply a very bold and 
 careless writer who has a trick of exaggeration 
 and paradox. I do not propose to deal with 
 these last : no good could come of it ; we have 
 nothing in common. 
 
 95
 
 96 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 In dealing with a man's work it is an advantage 
 to have a prejudice in his favour. It seems to 
 me indeed that it is only about those for whom 
 we have a private regard that we should take 
 upon ourselves to speak. Our prejudice gives us 
 our point of view, and in every region our view is 
 largely determined by our point of view. We 
 know how very dangerous an exercise it is for us 
 to be speaking about one who is absent, unless 
 we are quite sure that we like him. We know 
 how, otherwise, we are apt to fall into a merely 
 external and critical tone of voice, to make an 
 unfair selection of his words or his actions, and 
 so arrive at a conclusion which really all the time 
 was predetermined by the bias of our mind. 
 The fact is, that in dealing with a man like 
 Chesterton, who is never for one moment engaged 
 with anything less than the ultimate meaning of 
 life, we cannot avoid playing with loaded dice. 
 On ultimate matters we have none of us mere 
 opinions, in the strict sense of the word. We 
 have really only prejudices. What we fondly 
 imagine to be our opinions are without doubt the 
 effect or resultant within us of an unfathomable 
 wealth of instincts, reasons, desires, corroborated 
 or modified or contradicted by education, by
 
 TERTIUM QUID 97 
 
 environment, by the stimulus of example, by the 
 rebuke of pain all these fixed, summarised, and 
 sealed in moulds of thought or faith from time to 
 time by some pre-eminent event of our personal 
 life. The white sheet of paper with which we 
 begin our life is an impossible fancy. We begin 
 with, so to speak, a sheet of sensitised paper on 
 which innumerable characters are already inscribed 
 in invisible ink. We begin with a possible career 
 ready to declare itself, ready to take advantage 
 of occasions, ready to find correspondences in the 
 world. What we see in life depends, when all is 
 said, upon certain secrets of ultimate personality ; 
 and what we shall see in any man like Chesterton, 
 whose whole intellectual interest is in life con- 
 sidered in its ultimate significance, will likewise 
 depend upon the secret things of our spirit. 
 
 It is easy to name the features in Chesterton's 
 work which have made the bricks fly at his head. 
 Those features which have provoked this violence 
 in certain souls have had a milder effect in the 
 case of certain others : they scarcely know whether 
 to accept him or not. For one thing, his con- 
 fidence in the value of human existence, or (to 
 use the words we know best) his belief in God, 
 is a very strange thing in those high places of 
 7
 
 98 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 literature and art and philosophy which together 
 form Chesterton's chosen ground. And in his 
 case belief in God is no difficult attainment, no 
 conclusion to which he merely inclines simply to 
 save him from despair or madness. (He sees 
 very clearly that faith alone really does save men 
 from despair and madness, but it was not because 
 of that that he first believed.) He believes in 
 God with heartiness and uproariousness. If you 
 were to ask him, as many of his critics in various 
 ways have asked him, for what reason he believes, 
 he would probably retort by telling you that it is 
 for the same reason as he eats, or laughs, or takes 
 a walk in the moonlight, i.e. because he wants to. 
 He would be quite willing to confess to you that 
 ultimately the reason for the faith in his heart was 
 precisely the same as the reason for, say, the nose 
 on his face namely, that there it is, that he was 
 so made. Deeply considered, that is neither 
 frivolous nor unphilosophical. We might make 
 a list of the most serious thinkers of the world, 
 beginning with St. Augustine (to go no farther 
 back), including such names as Pascal and our 
 own Butler, and closing with the contemporary 
 school of philosophy in Oxford, and with William 
 James of Harvard, the fundamental argument for
 
 TERTIUM QUID 99 
 
 faith in each case being simply that which 
 Chesterton states and reiterates with violence and 
 enthusiasm : that so we are made, that to be a 
 man is to have so to put it some share in God. 
 This defence of faith which Chesterton has 
 celebrated namely, that the faculty and exercise of 
 faith belong to the proper life and essence of man, 
 that belief is a normal function of the human soul 
 is his message to our time : it is the background 
 and motive of all his work. He is the protagonist 
 of normal men, seeking to declare and to defend 
 their rights, and, above everything, their right to 
 believe in God. I do not wonder, therefore, that 
 those people should not like Chesterton, and 
 should privately be rather astonished that a man 
 of his wide-awakeness and erudition should be 
 saying the confident things that he does say, and 
 that his whole work should be penetrated by 
 Christianity those people who imagined that 
 the whole Christian view of God and the world 
 had received its quietus from Tyndal and Huxley 
 and Renan and Strauss, who have not been giving 
 their minds to the later stages of the controversy, 
 and who are therefore not aware of the embarrass- 
 ments which pure materialism has discovered from 
 its own postulates. But it is not only the substance
 
 100 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 of Chesterton which offends many ; it is not only 
 that certain people are enraged that the spiritual 
 basis of life should have found such a cheerful 
 and boisterous defender, who will not take the 
 materialists so seriously as they take themselves : 
 there are many others who are probably in perfect 
 agreement with Chesterton's principles and point 
 of view who are nevertheless offended and irritated 
 by the manner in which he w ill say what he has 
 to say. There is no doubt whatever that Chester- 
 ton's humour and playfulness his ridiculousness, 
 indeed has had the effect of diminishing his 
 authority for a great many people. It is a very 
 curious thing that we all of us are much more 
 easily convinced by a solemn manner than by a 
 happy manner. For my own part, I agree with 
 Chesterton that when we deal in a merely solemn 
 way with the ultimate meaning of our life it is a 
 proof that at that moment we ourselves are not 
 very sure of it. It was this paradox which the 
 plain man a verger he is reported to have been 
 had at the back of his mind when he professed 
 that although he had heard some twenty courses 
 of Bampton Lectures on the Defence of Faith, he 
 still remained a humble believer. 
 
 Let me bring before your minds an historical
 
 TERTIUM QUID 101 
 
 contrast. There is a very obvious similarity 
 between the humour of Thomas Carlyle and that 
 of Chesterton. There is, indeed, a very interest- 
 ing identity between the messages of the one and 
 the other, Carlyle girding at the Utilitarians of 
 his day as Chesterton pokes fun at the " Scientists " 
 of our own. But Carlyle has not to encounter 
 the suspicion of people as Chesterton must, and 
 this I believe really for one great reason. Carlyle 
 is solemn, he is heavy, he is awful. It may not 
 be true in fact that he counselled a humble 
 tobacconist, who confessed that she had not the 
 particular brand that he asked for but had another 
 quite as good, that " she should always deal in the 
 eternal verities " that may not be a true story, but 
 it ought to be. Now Chesterton will not be solemn, 
 and never is he so full of laughter and joy as when 
 he is dealing with the most momentous things. 
 Carlyle is always making his way towards some 
 tremendous aphorism which shall embody the 
 argument of a whole paragraph or chapter ; 
 whereas Chesterton is always making for some 
 apparently frivolous instance or paradox. 
 
 Now I venture to say that just as the teaching 
 of Carlyle and this is true of all merely solemn 
 minds is much shallower than it looks, so that
 
 102 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 the farther you go into it the less original or 
 profound it is, so the teaching of Mr. Chesterton, 
 gay and careless and ridiculous as it so fre- 
 quently seems to be, is at the last always serious, 
 and to anyone who knows the age in which we 
 live, who knows what is being said and the 
 conclusions which are being formed, his words 
 will always have the effect of sending the spirit 
 sounding on and on. 
 
 For the fact is you cannot do justice to Mr. 
 Chesterton's humour and whimsicality, as an 
 instrument for arriving at truth, until you take 
 hold of this that, in his view, the sense of 
 humour, the happy way of looking at things, the 
 faculty for joy, is an integral part of the human 
 soul, having rights as inalienable as any other. 
 In his fine paper in the volume on Heretics, in 
 answer to Mr. M'Cabe's criticism that he ought 
 to consider the intellectual problems of life more 
 gravely, Chesterton deals at length with the 
 charge, and almost on every page of his work 
 he presents the same thesis. For example : "A 
 man must be very full of faith to jest with his 
 divinity. . . . To the Hebrew prophets, their 
 religion was so solid a thing, like a mountain or 
 a mammoth, that the irony of its contact with
 
 TERTIUM QUID 103 
 
 trivial and fleeting things struck them like a 
 blow." " Merriment is one of the world's natural 
 flowers and not one of its exotics. Gigantesque 
 levity, flamboyant eloquence, are the mere out- 
 bursts of a human sympathy and bravado as old 
 and solid as the stars." " We should all like 
 to speak poetry at the moments when we truly 
 live ; and if we do not speak it, it is because we 
 have an impediment in our speech." 
 
 In his volume on Dickens he says a thing 
 which must have been suggested not only by the 
 reading of Dickens, but by observing the pro- 
 cesses of his own mind. " Dickens," he says, 
 " had to be ridiculous in order to begin to be true. 
 His characters that begin solemn end futile ; his 
 characters that begin frivolous end solemn in the 
 best sense. His foolish figures are not only 
 more entertaining than his serious figures, they 
 are also much more serious." We shall give an 
 example of this in a moment. 
 
 Let us dwell for a little longer on this matter 
 I mean the medium of good-humour and gaiety 
 and colloquialness which Chesterton uses, and 
 cannot help using, in the interests of truth ; and 
 let us keep before ourselves the literary medium 
 which by contrast Carlyle adopted. I should say
 
 104 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 that the difference is just this : Carlyle, though 
 by birth one of the common people, nevertheless 
 speaks of the people or at the people from above. 
 Chesterton, though by birth, as I should imagine, 
 of a much higher rank, in all his writing and 
 thinking speaks of the people from their own 
 point of view, from the point of view which they 
 would take up if they should ever become self- 
 conscious and enlightened enough to express them- 
 selves. It is a definite charge which Chesterton 
 makes against Carlyle, that he had no belief in 
 the people, no belief in the elementary instincts 
 of the masses of men ; that he assumed that his 
 message was in advance of them, that he could 
 be nothing else than a voice crying in the wilder- 
 ness. And so, rather than change the pitch of 
 his voice, he remained in his wilderness, and in 
 fact got rather to like being there. Now merely 
 to be a prophet, merely to fling thunderbolts of 
 truth at people, is, in essential matters, to have 
 given up the whole business. Our Lord said of a 
 great moral teacher of His day that he was more 
 than a prophet : I believe He meant that he was 
 a good man. " There are two main moral 
 necessities for the work of a great man," says 
 Chesterton, speaking of Carlyle : " the first is
 
 TERTIUM QUID 105 
 
 that he should believe in the truth of his message ; 
 the second is that he should believe in the accept- 
 ability of his message. It was the whole tragedy 
 of Carlyle that he had the first and not the 
 second. ... It was this simplicity of confidence, 
 not only in God, but in the image of God, that was 
 lacking in Carlyle." 
 
 I seem to see everywhere in Chesterton, and 
 this is in my own view the explanation of his 
 entire literary manner, a kind of passion to be 
 understood. His critics are perhaps quite right 
 in saying that he chose his manner in order to 
 startle people into reading him. I should not 
 put it that way ; though I think there is some- 
 thing in it. Chesterton would hold, I believe, 
 as indeed we have quoted, that whatever is true 
 is a thing that should be known, and known by 
 as many people as possible. Truth is public 
 property. One of our human and social duties 
 is to communicate the truth to one another. He 
 would say that a man has not got hold of truth 
 who sets out with the idea that people will not 
 hear it. That, on the contrary, it is the first 
 business of a man who has anything to say that 
 he shall say it in such a way that the people, 
 the common people, the people who are most
 
 106 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 directly to be affected, shall become aware of it. 
 A man gets a sight of truth not simply in 
 order that he may embody it in words that 
 please himself, but that he may embody it in 
 such words as shall give it its greatest immediate 
 reach ; and so Dante writes his Divine Comedy 
 in the lingua franca, in the speech of the common 
 people ; Luther translates the Bible into German ; 
 and, if I may dare the comparison, Chesterton 
 makes use of good-humour, ridiculous illustrations, 
 in order, if you like to put it so, to get a hearing 
 in order, as I prefer to put it, to get his message 
 delivered to the proper quarter. " There are 
 those," he says somewhere, "who declare that 
 they have no doubt the Salvation Army is right 
 in its aims, but they very much dislike its 
 methods. On the other hand, I have my doubts 
 about its aims, but I have no doubt at all about 
 its methods ; these are obviously right." For, he 
 goes on to say, there must always be something 
 corybantic about religion, about the announce- 
 ment of truth. The conclusion of this whole 
 matter we might put in an image, not of Chester- 
 ton's own, but not unlike many a one of his. 
 
 If a man gets up on a lorry at a street corner 
 and begins to hammer a huge gong so that
 
 TERTIUM QUID 107 
 
 everybody is compelled to look in his direction ; 
 if he lays down the gong and takes up a bell, 
 and rings it violently so that a crowd gathers, you 
 must not conclude that he is a mountebank. He 
 may be a man who has something to say. He 
 may indeed be one of those men to whom the 
 world has all along owed so much, who imagine 
 that unless the people who are passing stop and 
 listen to him they will in various ways go to the 
 devil. Recollecting the great and even tremend- 
 ous figures in history, it is only fair to wait until 
 we hear him say what he has to say ; not to 
 condemn him by the grotesqueness of his appear- 
 ance, remembering, say, John the Baptist ; or by 
 something in his voice that jars ; but judging him, 
 if we must judge him, by the manifest passion 
 which, as he goes on speaking, begins to kindle 
 within him and to sway his words, and by the 
 fire which, by a profound and unconquerable 
 affinity, begins to kindle in our hearts as we listen 
 to him. For in our day also, as in the days of 
 Elijah, fire is the sign of God. 
 
 Still working our way into the substance of 
 Mr. Chesterton's philosophy, let me deal here 
 it can only be in a hurried way with another 
 feature of his work which has been declared to
 
 io8 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 be an offence. The common criticism of Chester- 
 ton is that he is always striving after paradox. 
 That criticism, you observe, resolves itself into 
 two separate charges. The first is, that he 
 strives ; the second is, that the conclusions at 
 which he arrives are always paradoxical. With 
 regard to the first namely, that Chesterton strives 
 after paradox I think it very manifestly unfair. 
 I am quite sure that, on the contrary, his greatest 
 artistic difficulty is to keep back the paradoxes 
 which are crowding down to the point of his pen. 
 Mr. Chesterton never affects me as striving after 
 anything. It often happens with him, indeed, 
 that he sees what is going to be the conclusion of 
 his reasoning long before he has quite established 
 it, and down it goes in all its crudeness long before 
 he has prepared us for it. But that he strives 
 after such effects never once occurred to me. A 
 man does not need to strive after that particular 
 way of expressing himself which he has practised 
 consistently in every line of his writing, extending 
 now over as much literary matter as would fill a 
 small library. It is quite as natural for him to be 
 picturesque as it is for a great many of us not to 
 be. It is as natural for him to be violent and 
 excessive and uproarious as it is for other writers
 
 TERTIUM QUID 109 
 
 to be timid and futile and lady-like. It is as 
 natural for him to arrive at paradoxes as it is 
 for more solemn writers to arrive at platitudes. 
 Indeed, there are perhaps only two conclusions to 
 which all serious consideration of life can lead 
 us either to the uttering of a platitude, a truism, 
 or to the uttering of a paradox, the discovery, i.e., 
 of a certain impassable chasm between subject and 
 object, between things and the indomitable spirit 
 of a man. I repeat, that what gives the impres- 
 sion of striving and posing to Chesterton's entire 
 style is this : he sees at a glance the principle of 
 the matter in hand, and then, without thinking 
 further, embodies it in a very crude and haphazard 
 illustration or figure. He knows and it is this 
 which makes his method quite legitimate that if 
 his thought is really right, then this illustration 
 which he has created will bring out certain aspects 
 or corroborations which he could not have stated 
 with such concreteness of definition if he had 
 restricted himself to the language of pure thought. 
 There is nothing more characteristic of his style 
 than this : that an image or figure which he has 
 flung down begins to mean more and more for 
 himself begins to clarify his own intermediate 
 processes, and to give edge and eloquence to his
 
 no 
 
 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 contention. In this, as in many other matters, it 
 is easy to trace the great influence of Browning 
 upon Chesterton. Carlyle tells us, in one of his 
 translations of Tieck, of a baron who needed to 
 jump back and forward over a table in order to 
 get himself into a good humour. Some men with 
 the same object in view I mean, in order to 
 warm up their mind take cold baths ; some take 
 hard walks over the hills ; some drink strong 
 coffee : Chesterton confronts his own mind with 
 violent and unlikely situations. Let me give an 
 illustration which, if we had time, we should find 
 to cast light upon all these points, and especially 
 upon this point, that Chesterton's mind works 
 most easily under the stimulus of an apparently 
 intractable metaphor or concrete illustration, and 
 that the illustration which seems far-fetched, so 
 that people accuse him of striving after it, begins 
 to fall back again into the living context of the 
 man's thought. " Suppose that a great commo- 
 tion arises in the street about something, let us 
 say a lamp-post which many influential persons 
 desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is 
 the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon 
 the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner 
 of the Schoolmen, ' Let us first of all consider, my
 
 TERTIUM QUID in 
 
 brethren, the value of light. If light be in itself 
 good. . . .' At this point he is somewhat 
 excusably knocked down. All the people make 
 a rush for the lamp-post. The lamp-post is down 
 in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating 
 each other on their un-mediseval practicality. 
 But as things go on, they do not work out so 
 easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post 
 down because they wanted the electric light ; 
 some because they wanted old iron ; some because 
 they wanted darkness, because their deeds were 
 evil ; some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, 
 some too much ; some acted because they wanted 
 to smash municipal machinery ; some because 
 they wanted to smash something. And there is 
 war in the night, no man knowing whom he 
 strikes. So gradually and inevitably to-day, to- 
 morrow, or the next day there comes back the 
 conviction that the monk was right after all, and 
 that all depends on what is the philosophy of 
 light. Only, what we might have discovered 
 under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the 
 dark " (Heretics). 
 
 I detect no evidence of striving, or posing, or 
 intellectual levity in an illustration of that kind : 
 and it is one of probably tens of thousands. I saw
 
 H2 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 that someone the other day wrote an article in a 
 newspaper full of veiled disparagement of Chester- 
 ton. The writer insinuated that it was simply a 
 kind of trick such as he himself and some other 
 people could easily affect if they had the mind to. 
 I recall that that was the very condition on which 
 Charles Lamb said a certain man could write the 
 plays of Shakespeare " if he had had the mind." 
 But seriously, I wish some of those modest men 
 would come out of their hiding-places and augment 
 the great tide of speculative joy and fundamental 
 confidence in life which Mr. Chesterton has done 
 so much to raise. I should say of most of us what 
 he himself says of people who thought they could 
 easily have written some of the easy-going but 
 inevitable pages of Dickens : " Perhaps we could 
 have created Mr. Guppy, but the effort would 
 certainly have exhausted us : we should be ever 
 afterwards wheeled about in a bath-chair at 
 Bournemouth." 
 
 It is perfectly true that Chesterton sees truth in 
 paradox ; but it is no merely literary form with 
 him. The style here is the man ; and to Chester- 
 ton truth is found by beings such as we are, and 
 placed as we are, only in the guise of paradox. I 
 cannot attempt to justify Chesterton's position
 
 TERTIUM QUID 113 
 
 here, or even to illustrate it, though if one had 
 time it would be an easy matter to show that we 
 are all quite familiar with what he means, and that 
 it is our own habitual and unconscious attitude 
 towards life and experience. But take, for 
 example, such words as faith and hope and love. 
 It is the very nature of faith, that it comes into 
 play only with regard to matters which from 
 certain other points of view and on other categories 
 are unbelievable. There is and there must always 
 be an opposition between the intuitions of faith 
 and those materials and conclusions with which 
 our merely intellectual faculty deals. The truth 
 is, as Hegel said, " in a relationship." In this total 
 world, there is room for faith as there is room for 
 reason, but they deal with life on different grades, 
 and with different ends in view. So the very 
 nature of hope, which Mr. Chesterton so thought- 
 fully describes as "the irreducible minimum of the 
 spirit," is that it goes beyond experience, and if need 
 be contradicts experience. In Mr. Watts' well- 
 known picture, what is "Hope"? It is the 
 figure of a woman, blindfolded, sitting on the circle 
 of the earth. In her hand she holds an instrument 
 of music. She has struck one string, and it has 
 broken at her touch ; she has struck another, and
 
 H4 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 it too has snapped. One chord remains. It alone, 
 it at last, must stand the strain and challenge of 
 her touch. From it the music must come, else 
 there is no music in this world at all. That is 
 hope. Though one chord and another has given 
 way, has snapped under the test ; though only one 
 thread remains as ground and reason for this 
 invincible instinct of the soul, she prepares to 
 strike, knowing that the last chord will not fail. 
 So too, the very nature of love is, that it goes out 
 towards the unlovely, towards those who at 
 present seem incapable of appreciating or under- 
 standing love. 
 
 Paradox in literature has its counterpart in the 
 antinomies of philosophy which represent the 
 farthest and deepest insight possible to us into 
 the region of reality. Recollecting the ill-success 
 which attended Mr. Haldane's ingenuous effort, 
 on a recent and notorious occasion, to enlighten 
 the mind of a Lord Chancellor on the antinomies 
 of Free Will and Predestination, I shall not abuse 
 your patience, though really the whole matter is 
 not so very difficult. It is one which was very 
 accurately appreciated by the religious people of 
 Scotland for two centuries, and ought not to have 
 been beyond the dialectical skill of Lord Halsbury.
 
 TERTIUM QUID 115 
 
 I must content myself with repeating that paradox 
 in literature is simply the expression of that 
 apparent conflict between subject and object and 
 yet that necessary relationship between subject 
 and object which marks the boundary of our 
 philosophical vision. 
 
 Now it is no part of Mr. Chesterton's ambition 
 to remain in the clouds. Having discovered in 
 the clouds the nature of paradox, or having pursued 
 it into the clouds, having seen in the loneliness of 
 his own most accomplished mind that truth must 
 always have this paradoxical expression, he sees 
 it everywhere, and discovers it to us, for our joy, 
 and to keep off the dreadful tyranny of the merely 
 scientific category. Taking the large question of 
 life itself, he sees, like Tolstoy, like Carlyle, like 
 every true and resolute thinker, that life is a much 
 earlier thing than thought ; that we live before we 
 reason ; that to this day the really great and 
 characteristic things which we do, we do not at 
 the dictate of our cool intellectual faculty, but in 
 obedience to primitive and unfathomable instincts, 
 appetites, desires, ideals, faiths. Seeing that this 
 is so, Chesterton rejoices to point out to the soul 
 of man its inviolable way of escape. 
 
 All this brings us, late perhaps, and circuitously,
 
 n6 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 to what we must call the message of Mr. Chester- 
 ton ; for, as he himself defines it, "paradox simply 
 means a certain defiant joy which belongs to 
 belief." 
 
 To put the matter in as short compass as 
 possible, leaving it to be modified in our own 
 minds as we proceed, Mr. Chesterton is the pro- 
 tagonist in our particular day of the natural man. 
 He has been chosen by virtue of his tempera- 
 ment, by virtue of the fortunate emergence in him 
 of certain primitive faculties which in most men 
 of his condition have been rendered impotent or 
 untrustworthy he has been chosen to champion 
 the rights of, so to call him, the average and 
 catholic man. If the phrase were not so loaded 
 with both a sinister and a merely affected con- 
 notation, we should say that his message is to 
 call us back (or, as he would say, forward) to the 
 joys and the duties and the faith of the natural 
 life. The life of nature as man's sphere is, in 
 Chesterton's view, something very different from 
 a merely animal life, without social restraints 
 or without those equally fundamental restraints 
 which the wisdom of the race has discovered and 
 approved. In his view, and as he himself might 
 put it, the only thing in man which is as obstinate
 
 TERTIUM QUID 117 
 
 as his love of liberty is his love of bondage. The 
 only thing that man will do as inevitably as he 
 will live a merely animal life, is that he will repent 
 and put himself in irons. The only thing which 
 is as true of man as that he is made of clay, is 
 that into that clay, by some unfathomable mystery, 
 a Holy God has infused something of His own. 
 It is this man whose nature, which bears within 
 itself traces of much besides its lower status, 
 which bears within itself evidences of its long and 
 hazardous journey, and of its difficult and precious 
 enlightenment it is this natural man, in the sense 
 of unsophisticated man.) whose total soul Chesterton 
 celebrates and defends. 
 
 And arriving at the moment when he has 
 arrived, Chesterton has acquired the quality of 
 greatness. For a great man in these matters is 
 a man who arrives at the right moment, who 
 comes to the rescue of that in man which at the 
 moment is threatened yet which must not be lost. 
 I hail him as a great writer when I consider the 
 great temptation of the hour with which he deals. 
 That man in his measure is a great man whose 
 word has the effect of reassuring us, just as that 
 writer is a bad writer who disposes his readers 
 to succumb. Anything is bad which disheartens
 
 n8 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 us on our predestined journey. Anything is bad 
 which raises a suspicion as to the value of our 
 existence. Anything is bad which would lead 
 us to disparage the human enterprise. Any- 
 thing is bad which would make us let our hands 
 fall and our knees shake, face to face with our 
 elementary duties and responsibilities, and face 
 to face with our own ignorance and the darkness 
 that lies about us. Anything is bad which makes 
 us regret life. All laughter at man is hollow and 
 of the devil. The account of man which is thrust 
 upon us by a hasty and dogmatic materialism is, 
 from the point of view of man's instincts, and 
 from the point of view of the highest words he 
 has ever obeyed, a form of laughter at man. As 
 such it is bad, a thing it may even be to be put 
 down one day, as witchcraft was put down, and 
 for the same reason that it is seducing man from 
 his true and normal and natural life. 
 
 One general line of criticism which Chesterton 
 applies to those tendencies in modern life and 
 thought which in his view threaten that deposit 
 of faith on which man has come thus far, is this. 
 He convicts the opponent with whom he is deal- 
 ing at the moment of neglecting some fact of the 
 human soul which is just as trustworthy, just as
 
 TERTIUM QUID 119 
 
 inalienable to man, as is the faculty on which the 
 threatening theory is basing itself. In short, in 
 Chesterton's view, the specialists are always wrong 
 when they leave their own particular field and 
 impose their methods on what he would call " the 
 rich and reeking human personality." He would 
 say : You cannot exhaust all the qualities of a 
 man. You cannot really sum him up. You can 
 only examine him in the abstract. But then he 
 does not exist in the abstract. You can examine 
 him only after he is dead. All your reports about 
 man are therefore of the nature of post-mortem 
 reports ; they have nothing to say as to the very 
 thing which is of most importance life itself. 
 This, which is true of man, considered physio- 
 logically, is true likewise of him considered as a 
 sentient being. Take, for example, the nature 
 of personal happiness, or joy. You may make 
 out a list of circumstances which ought to ensure 
 this joy ; and you may be all wrong. You may 
 surround a man, like Carlyle's shoeblack, with all 
 those circumstances, and yet leave him miserable. 
 You may see, on the other hand, a human being 
 in rags and difficulties, with none of the circum- 
 stances which according to your inventory secure 
 human joy. You may conclude that you are in
 
 120 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 the presence of a miserable creature ; whereas 
 you may be in the presence of one who is in love, 
 and therefore delirious with human faith and con- 
 fidence in the value of existence. Or you adduce 
 your reasons for denying to man his imperishable 
 confidence in a will beyond his own in short, in 
 God. You may forecast his inevitable doom, to 
 perish like the beasts ; but 
 
 "Just when you're safest, there is a sunset touch, 
 A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
 A chorus-ending from Euripides ; 
 And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears 
 As old and new at once as Nature's self. . . ." 
 
 Chesterton would test every theory or proposi- 
 tion by its fitness to satisfy, or to control for a 
 higher exercise, some ineradicable endowment of 
 man of man as we know him, in his glory and 
 gloom alike, but above everything in his altogether 
 divine perseverance in life. He would arraign 
 all systems which invade man's sanctuary of 
 feeling and desire and faith, as he would arraign 
 a brother man accused of some crime against 
 man's nature or the social compact he would 
 arraign them all before a jury of common 
 men. 
 
 " The trend of our epoch up to this time has been con- 
 sistently towards specialism and professionalism. We tend to
 
 TERTIUM QUID 121 
 
 have trained soldiers because they fight better, trained singers 
 because they sing better, trained dancers because they dance 
 better, especially instructed laughers because they laugh better, 
 and so on and so on. The principle has been applied to law 
 and politics by innumerable modern writers. Many Fabians 
 have insisted that a greater part of our political work should 
 be performed by experts. Many legalists have declared that 
 the untrained jury should be altogether supplanted by the 
 trained judge. 
 
 "Now if this world of ours were really what is called 
 reasonable, I do not know that there would be any fault to 
 find with this. But the true result of all experience and the 
 true foundation of all religion is this that the four or five 
 things that it is most practically essential that a man should 
 know are all of them what people call paradoxes. That is to 
 say, that though we all find them in life to be mere plain 
 truths, yet we cannot easily state them in words without being 
 guilty of seeming verbal contradictions. One of them, for 
 instance, is the unimpeachable platitude that the man who 
 finds most pleasure for himself is often the man who least 
 hunts ifor it. Another is the paradox of courage : the fact 
 that the way to avoid death is not to have too much aversion 
 to it. Whoever is careless enough of his bones to climb some 
 hopeless cliff above the tide may save his bones by that care- 
 lessness. Whoever will lose his life, the same shall save it : 
 an entirely practical and prosaic statement. 
 
 " Now one of these four or five paradoxes which should be 
 taught to every infant prattling at his mother's knee is the 
 following : That the more a man looks at a thing the less he 
 can see it, and the more a man learns a thing the less he knows 
 it. The Fabian argument of the expert, that the man who is 
 trained should be the man who is trusted, would be absolutely 
 unanswerable if it were really true that a man who studied a 
 thing and practised it every day went on seeing more and 
 more of its significance. But he does not. He goes on see-
 
 122 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 ing less and less of its significance. In the same way, alas, 
 we all go on every day, unless we are continually goading 
 ourselves into gratitude and humility, seeing less and less of 
 the significance of the sky or the stones. 
 
 " Now it is a terrible business to mark a man out for the 
 vengeance of men. But it is a thing to which a man can 
 grow accustomed, as he can to other terrible things : he can 
 even grow accustomed to the sun. And the horrible thing 
 about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magi- 
 strates, barristers, detectives, and policemen, is not that they 
 are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid 
 (several of them are quite intelligent) it is simply that they 
 have got used to it. 
 
 " Strictly, they do not see the prisoner in the dock : all they 
 see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the 
 awful court of judgment : they only see their own workshop. 
 Therefore the instinct of Christian civilisation has most wisely 
 declared that into their judgments there shall upon every 
 occasion be infused fresh blood and fresh thoughts from the 
 street. Men shall come in who can see the court and the 
 crowd, the coarse faces of the policemen and the professional 
 criminals, the wasted faces of the wastrels, the unreal faces of 
 the gesticulating counsel, and see it all as one sees a new 
 picture or a ballet hitherto unvisited. 
 
 " Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that 
 determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too im- 
 portant to be trusted to trained men. If it wishes for light 
 upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law 
 than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the 
 jury-box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar 
 system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its 
 specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really 
 serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. 
 The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder 
 of Christianity."
 
 TERTIUM QUID 123 
 
 Mr. Chesterton, like every other who would 
 aid the human soul, has not delivered his message 
 in so many philosophical principles. He does 
 not speak or write in vacuo, but with his eye 
 upon some threatening spirit of our time. And 
 at least so it seems to me he has a faultless 
 eye for the moment when any tendency is begin- 
 ning to assail the abiding interest of man. 
 Therefore he has been compelled to deliver his 
 message in the way of criticism and opposition to 
 tendencies in thought or speculation, and in life, 
 which seem to him likely to seduce man from the 
 main highway of healthy and natural and believ- 
 ing life on which alone he is equal to himself and 
 secure. Even as the angel measured the founda- 
 tions of the Heavenly Jerusalem, so Chesterton 
 measures and tests the principles, the effects for 
 man's present moral practice and his outlook, 
 of certain ways of looking at life he tests them 
 all "according to the measure of a man, i.e. of 
 the angel." And therein also lies his confidence. 
 The human soul he sees too firmly rooted in 
 essential things, too firmly persuaded of the 
 essential good of life, to be disturbed for more 
 than a period from its true career. As Abraham 
 Lincoln said and it is the very quality of all
 
 124 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 great words to serve greater causes than their 
 first cause " you may deceive some people all 
 the time, and all the people for some time ; but 
 never all the people all the time." 
 
 Man has seen what he has seen ; and never 
 can he be as though he had not seen it. And, 
 Chesterton would add, man has seen Christ ; and 
 would rejoice with the dying Marius in Pater's 
 great work (Pater, whom alone, as it seems to 
 me, Chesterton does less than justice to), that in 
 Jesus Christ there has been erected in this world 
 a plea, a standard, an afterthought which man- 
 kind will always have in reserve against any 
 wholly mean or mechanical theory of himself and 
 his conditions. 
 
 In the course of his intellectual career so far, 
 Chesterton has dealt with some of the chief 
 doctrines for man which have been urged upon 
 us in the name of enlightenment during the last 
 generation. " Heresies " he calls these doctrines ; 
 and this not because they conflict with the theo- 
 logical propositions of the Church, but because, 
 if accepted, they would seduce and ultimately 
 destroy the soul of man as it has come to be and 
 as we know it. Pessimism, with its strange and 
 insane joy in its own success, he finds tolerable as
 
 TERTIUM QUID 125 
 
 a system of thought only so long as you take care 
 that it never be translated into life and action ; 
 for if pessimism be true, then death is the only 
 proper pursuit of man. " The popularity of pure 
 and unadulterated pessimism is," he says, "an 
 oddity. It is almost a contradiction in terms. 
 Men would no more receive the news of the 
 failure of existence or of the harmonious hostility 
 of the stars with ardour or popular rejoicing than 
 they would light bonfires for the arrival of 
 cholera, or dance a breakdown when they were 
 condemned to be hanged." 
 
 "The pessimists who attack the universe are 
 always under this disadvantage : they have an 
 exhilarating consciousness that they could make 
 the sun and moon better; but they also have 
 the depressing consciousness that they could not 
 make the sun and moon at all." 
 
 The fact is, those who write thus gloomily 
 about life considered as a whole, are usually 
 comfortable above the average lot in some par- 
 ticular of their life which they take care not to 
 lose. " Existence has been praised and absolved 
 by a chorus of pessimists. The work of giving 
 thanks to heaven is, as it were, ingeniously 
 divided among them. . . . Omar Khayydm is
 
 126 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 established in the cellar and swears that it is the 
 only room in the house. . . . Even the blackest 
 of pessimistic writers enjoys his art. At the 
 precise moment that he has written some shame- 
 less and terrible indictment of creation, his one 
 pang of joy in the achievement joins the universal 
 chorus of gratitude with the scent of the wild 
 flower and the song of the bird." 
 
 It is because Atheism conflicts with an instinct 
 of the soul which has been enticed and corrobor- 
 ated and purified by human experience, that 
 Chesterton assails it and predicts its failure to 
 tyrannise over men. It is because a doctrinaire 
 Socialism is contrary to the heights and depths of 
 man's soul, because it would restrict man to a 
 tame paddock, man who has something in him 
 which hungers for the risks of hazardous and 
 unequal living, that Chesterton has no fear that 
 it will ever be embraced. It is because Evolu- 
 tion is really the enemy of Revolution, and 
 because, were it accepted as the whole truth that 
 we are fated to rise in the scale, we should all sit 
 down and wait either until we were raised, or 
 cast aside to make room for another's rising, that 
 Chesterton is afraid of Evolution. It is because 
 Puritanism lays emphasis upon the spirit in man,
 
 TERTIUM QUID 127 
 
 that he celebrates its great service to our country. 
 It is because Puritanism neglects the flesh that 
 he condemns it. It is because Mediaevalism 
 and ^Estheticism find their happiness in looking 
 backwards, and thus cease to make for that total 
 victory of the race which if it is to be anywhere 
 must lie in front of us ; it is because many writers 
 do not see that in their little plans and purposes 
 for men they are often playing with fire, tamper- 
 ing, as Stevenson says, with the lock which holds 
 down all sorts of sulphurous and subterranean 
 things that Chesterton lays about him with the 
 ancient sword of the spirit. 
 
 And now, I must content myself with having 
 written these things in appreciation of one whom 
 I consider a very great and constructive force, 
 altogether on the side of man, which is eventually 
 on the side of God. Recalling his general line 
 of criticism, I should say it is what pedants would 
 call an argumentum ad kominem. Personally I 
 have always held that on matters of prime human 
 importance no other argument tells in the long run 
 except the argumentum ad kominem. " Humanly 
 speaking," a student began. " My dear sir," 
 said his professor, "there's no other way of 
 speaking."
 
 128 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 When Tennyson protests against the material- 
 istic doctrine of man, he protests in the name of 
 a warm and instinctive desire for the contrary. 
 His heart, he tells us, rises up like a man in 
 wrath. In fact, he simply won't have it. And 
 really no theory will ever establish itself in the 
 mind of man if his gorge simply rises against it. 
 When Darwin's Descent of Man was at the 
 height of its popularity, George Gilfillan, a 
 popular preacher of that time in Dundee, voiced 
 the opposition in quite a happy phrase. " I 
 won't have a monkey for my grandfather," said 
 the good man. Now I venture to think that 
 there is something in the protest which will 
 always be invincible. And really it is something 
 more than the recoil of the spirit from a proposed 
 degradation. It is good science likewise. The 
 really important thing for us is not, W T here did we 
 come from ? but, Where are we bound for ? 
 
 We may have had the lowliest of origins. The 
 Bible confesses we are made from the dust ; 
 though it declares that it was God who made us. 
 The point is, here we are, and we are not tired of 
 rising, if we may, in the scale. Now there must 
 always have been something in us like a coiled- 
 up spring which urged us on so far, leaving many
 
 TERTIUM QUID 129 
 
 things behind which belonged to our more lowly 
 lot. 
 
 When the present German Emperor showed 
 himself able to dispense with Prince Bismarck, 
 when, in Sir John Tenniel's phrase, " he dropped 
 the pilot," we all concluded that there was 
 something in the German Emperor, both as a 
 man and as a ruler of men, which made him 
 equal to that. It is quite a fair thing to say, by 
 the same token, that there must always have 
 been something in man, something which was 
 only awaiting its opportunity, that enabled man, 
 in a word, to drop his tail. 
 
 Number Nine of the King's Regulations for 
 Officers of the Navy contains these words : 
 " Every officer is to refrain from making remarks 
 or passing criticisms on the conduct or orders of 
 his superiors which may tend to bring them into 
 contempt, and is to avoid saying or doing any- 
 thing which might discourage the men or render 
 them dissatisfied with their condition or with the 
 service on which they are or may be employed." 
 
 Chesterton sees the human soul, arrived thus 
 
 far not without difficulty. He sees that any 
 
 fundamental health which we have is due to the 
 
 power which is still within us of the Christian 
 
 9
 
 130 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 tradition as it gives an issue and a consecration 
 to the fountain of our natural life. 
 
 And anyone who seriously interferes with the 
 foundations of the soul, with the particular kind 
 of hardihood which has become intertwined for 
 ever with the Cross of Christ, Chesterton sees 
 as a rebel or a traitor as a heretic in the sublime 
 sense. And because as such he is poisoning the 
 wells of all sane and hearty living, and cutting 
 man off from his Source, like the great Florentine, 
 Chesterton would appoint him a place in hell.
 
 VI 
 
 THE SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 MY object in the papers which follow im- 
 mediately is to get down beneath the 
 surface of our life. And the route which I am 
 going to take is to follow in the track of some 
 strenuous thinker who, it seems to us, as we 
 consider everything, was fated, it may even have 
 been from all eternity, to taste a certain moral 
 loneliness, and to report. 
 
 Out of the heart of a people there is thrust 
 forth from time to time one who by virtue of 
 his sensitiveness and experience feels things 
 which we who are of duller apprehension had 
 not seen, or had forgotten. And yet we are 
 so made that when a man of true insight, of 
 an insight cleansed and certified by suffering, 
 tells us what he saw and what he felt, there is
 
 132 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 something within us which acknowledges his 
 story, and recognises that in some real way it 
 is our story, and that we are no longer living 
 honourably, if, having heard that story, it should 
 be denied its proper influence with us. 
 
 I have entitled these studies : " The Sense of 
 Sin in Great Literature," 
 
 Now, though I have no wish to dally over 
 words, I should like to say what, from the stand- 
 point of these studies, great literature shall be held 
 to be. By great literature I mean, now, literature 
 which has dealt with the human soul at such a 
 depth and with such purity and thoroughness of 
 vision that what it has said is true, and will be 
 recognised as true by serious souls in all times. 
 
 In my own view and belief, all great literature 
 is confessional. Every really great work of art 
 is the display of personality. This is not to say 
 that in a great poem or drama, for example, the 
 writer is giving us the facts of his own life ; but 
 it is to say that in a great poem or drama the 
 writer is isolating some mood or feeling or moral 
 discovery of his own, and is there brooding over 
 it, pursuing the implications of it, tracking the 
 roots and principles of it, until his own heart 
 and flesh cry out with a cry which means that 

 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 133 
 
 in the last agony of his thinking the man has 
 found nothing ; or that in the last agony of his 
 thinking he has found God. 
 
 When the children of Israel were crossing 
 the Jordan on their first entry into Canaan, 
 Joshua summoned them one by one to take an 
 oath of allegiance to the God who had so far 
 prospered them. This they did. But before 
 dismissing the assembled people, Joshua, we 
 read, erected a stone in the presence of them 
 all, and said, "This stone hath heard your 
 vow. Therefore it shall stand there for ever 
 as a witness against you, lest you deny your 
 God." 
 
 The kind of literature I am thinking of is that 
 kind of disclosure of the soul which, because it 
 was given once upon a time, remains for ever 
 as an afterthought, a plea, a standard to hold 
 man to his destiny. For man will not consent 
 for more than a time to be less than he has been ; 
 and that is not enlightenment, it is not, properly 
 speaking, progress, which proposes for us a poorer 
 moral career. Great literature, then, I shall take 
 to mean that literature which deals with the soul 
 of man as the home of great issues, as the 
 meeting-place of the seen and the Unseen, of
 
 134 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 the occupations of time and the recurring pre- 
 occupation of eternity. 
 
 I know that in speaking so pointedly about 
 the sense of sin I may be thought to be dealing 
 with matters which are really not present to 
 people's minds in our day. We had recently 
 the obiter dictum of one of our most versatile 
 men, himself no enemy of faith, that " men are 
 not worrying about their sins." But that might 
 very well be reason enough for some things being 
 said which should have the effect of reviving 
 that noble disquietude. And besides, we must 
 not be guided by what men, who have their 
 own interests and preoccupations, perceive or do 
 not perceive. We must be guided by what we 
 believe to be there, whether men are thinking 
 about it or not thinking about it 
 
 It is a very silly thing to say that " men in 
 our day are not worrying about their sins," if 
 you mean by that, that therefore they are not 
 to be worried, or that they have somehow got 
 beyond the need for worrying. On the contrary, 
 it should be held to be a very alarming moral 
 and social symptom that men are not now worry- 
 ing over matters which have undoubtedly worried 
 men in all times, as often as men have looked
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 135 
 
 themselves in the soul. St. Paul in his day was 
 aware that great masses of people were not 
 worrying about their sins. He spoke of them 
 as being "past feeling." But that is a condition 
 which no true man will regard as a desirable 
 one for himself. It is also a condition which 
 no far-seeing man will welcome as a sound one 
 for society. To say that men in our day are 
 not worrying about their sins, is to say that men 
 are satisfied with themselves and satisfied with 
 things as they are. And that is simply to say 
 that such men are no longer men, no longer the 
 instruments of God for better things ; which, if 
 history in the long-run means anything, means 
 that the Mysterious Force whose very being 
 and passion it is to heighten and intensify the 
 Spirit in man, will one day take from these 
 decadent souls their high responsibility. 
 
 I say, we are to be guided not by what seems 
 the spirit of the time. We are to be guided 
 by what is there all the time. To take an 
 illustration from a disaster, the terror of which 
 time may have so softened as to make the 
 allusion not too poignant. As the Titanic tore 
 through the dark waters on that April night two 
 years ago, the passengers and the crew were
 
 i 3 6 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 not worrying about ice. A thousand things 
 contributed to their gaiety and absence of care. 
 The bright lights, the general opulence, the 
 hearty faces, the music, the long tradition of 
 safety ; or, if one bethought himself for a moment, 
 there were the life-boats and the life-belts. And 
 besides, the night was calm. Why then should 
 anyone worry? And no one did worry. Yet 
 the terrible thing was there : and all the time 
 the ship was rushing to meet its unequal, inex- 
 orable foe. But consider this also : earlier in 
 the day which led up to that disastrous night, 
 a message had been borne to the vessel not yet 
 doomed ; for ships and souls are not yet doomed 
 so long as they have the faculty of hearing. 
 That message, that report and rumour out of the 
 vast sea, had reached the ship had fallen indeed 
 upon the ear of one whose very function it was 
 to hear. We might without violence use words 
 which St. Paul used of the souls of men and say 
 that God did not leave that ship without witness. 
 Well, " we mortals cross this ocean of a world 
 each in the average cabin of a life." As we 
 voyage on, and surely this which is the high 
 interpretation of great literature is the true one, 
 from time to time, by the way of elected souls,
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 137 
 
 voices are heard, the presence of threatening 
 shapes is disclosed, and they, captains of the 
 soul, have it imposed upon them, so that it is a 
 fire in their bones if they do not speak out, to 
 declare what they have heard and to testify what 
 they have seen. 
 
 But I do not believe that " men to-day are not 
 worrying about their sins." I can well believe 
 that an immense number of people are not think- 
 ing about their sins ; though even there I am 
 probably quite at fault. But even were it true 
 that an immense number of people are not think- 
 ing about their sins, it is equally true that there 
 is an immense number of people, it may even 
 be the same people, who are not thinking about 
 anything, because they are not thinking at all. 
 But this is nothing new or singular. Every man 
 who thinks finds that he has to think for others 
 besides himself. Every man who is living a 
 spiritual life at all is carrying in his soul the 
 care of some others. And if there are immense 
 numbers who are not thinking seriously about life 
 and about how things are going, the responsibility 
 is simply the greater that those who are morally 
 sensitive shall in a day of unusual carelessness be 
 the more faithful to their scruples.
 
 138 
 
 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 But, I repeat, I do not believe that in our day 
 men are not worrying about their sins. If the 
 literature of our time is in any faithful way the 
 mirror of men's souls, the one preoccupation and 
 concern to-day is just the ancient moral concern. 
 
 It is true that one may have to listen carefully, 
 and to see the immediate aspect of things in the 
 light of history, to perceive in the moral anarchy 
 of our time anything with a high significance. 
 Besides, there are times in which a mood of revolt 
 descends upon a people and acquires such a head 
 and volume that no good comes of mere argu- 
 ment. You might in literal truth as profitably 
 argue with a bull which has begun to charge. 
 We must wait and see, in the sense that we must 
 simply wait until other people see what we for 
 ourselves saw all the time. 
 
 The last generation has witnessed what seems 
 to us an unusually strong and thoroughgoing 
 criticism of the traditional morality. The nature 
 of the soul has been put to the test. Experi- 
 ments in living have been urged and followed 
 which disputed the rulings and findings of the 
 former time. We have been invited in the name 
 of liberty and proper manhood to set out, to 
 discover for ourselves the nature of this world
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 139 
 
 and our own nature. To find out whether there 
 is a limit in the nature of things, or, as we should 
 say, in God, to the self-seeking and ruthless- 
 ness of the individual. But already, as I verily 
 believe, signs are beginning to appear of the 
 return upon the soul of those ancient misgivings 
 which may one day fling men, even in a kind of 
 panic, upon the breast of the ancient faith. 
 
 For the fact is, we men and women who are 
 living in these days were in a sense not born in 
 these days. The blood of our race is in us. The 
 blood of humanity is in us. The reminiscence 
 is there in our blood like a shadow, the remin- 
 iscence of great perils just escaped, of great 
 disasters from which only with pain and the beat- 
 ing of the breast we have arisen. It was never 
 for a moment to be believed that the race of man 
 had learned nothing through all its long travail ; 
 or that its wisdom, embodied in its laws and 
 in its pieties, had no objective and reasonable 
 reality. Therefore it is not to be wondered at 
 that, when any experiment in living which 
 repudiates that hard-won wisdom of the race 
 has gone a certain length, something should re- 
 awaken in the human soul which protests that it 
 shall go no further, for at the point at which it
 
 140 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 has arrived it seems to be reminded by dim 
 intangible portents that once before it occupied 
 that perilous ground and came within sight of 
 some huge terror. 
 
 In his great literature the soul of man has 
 gone out all alone to face, without the distractions 
 which we average men allow to obscure our 
 vision, the limits and barriers of the moral world. 
 Certain elect and predestined men have stood 
 upon lonely promontories of the Spirit looking 
 across sad waters. They have seen what they 
 have seen and they have reported it to us. And 
 so far as their soul has been truly human, and so 
 far as they have kept their eyes upon the facts 
 and have not spared themselves, they have with 
 varying degrees of clearness and authority cor- 
 roborated the testimony of Him who, in full 
 self-consciousness, tasted death and touched the 
 bottom and last limit of human experience and 
 personality. 
 
 These elect and priestly souls, who have 
 spoken in great literature, have assured us that 
 the deepest and last thing about man is, that 
 there is a way by which he must go, that he 
 bears to a Holy God a relation which cannot be 
 dissolved.
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 141 
 
 I. "THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER" 
 
 If my purpose were purely literary, I should 
 occupy myself with quotations and recollections 
 from the wonders of The Rime of the Ancient 
 Mariner. My object rather is to allow the poem 
 to speak for itself, to make its own proper im- 
 pression upon our moral nature. I believe it is 
 by some such form of words as that, that we may 
 maintain the balance in the controversy between 
 art and morals. It is probably true, on the whole, 
 that art must not have a conscious moral motive. 
 On the other hand, the human soul is so subtle 
 and swift-glancing that you must not put a limit 
 to its resources. It would be easy to accept the 
 saying, "art for art's sake," if it were not so 
 manifest that every supreme work of art in 
 sculpture, in painting, in music, in literature has 
 an effect upon us in addition to its effect of 
 beauty. We understand and can sympathise 
 with the feelings of impatience and proper pride 
 which led to the protest underlying the phrase, 
 "art for art's sake." It must have seemed to 
 sincere and eager spirits a sordid thing to see art 
 hiring herself out to the support of conventional 
 views of life, thereby depressing her own vitality
 
 142 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 because thereby allowing the world of interests 
 to divert and make oblique what should have 
 been her steadfast gaze. And so at the rallying 
 cry of this phrase there was a movement on the 
 other side which, because it was a movement and 
 self-conscious, was sure to do equal violence to 
 the truth of things. Men of fine sensibility, 
 jealous for the independence and freedom of art, 
 made their protest against the relation which they 
 found existing in their day between art and 
 morals. But in most cases the way they took 
 to make their protest was by devoting their art 
 to the other side of the moral issue. This, of 
 course, was really to be guilty of the very offence 
 from which in their view art needed to be purged. 
 The only difference was that, from being the 
 servant of moral convention, art became the 
 servant of want of convention. Now, as St. Paul 
 once said, "circumcision availeth nothing"; but 
 he added, "neither doth uncircumcision." 
 
 It is an old controversy : and yet the truth of 
 the matter is perhaps simple enough. Art should 
 be sincere. Or better still, artists should be sincere 
 men. If we must not look to them to support 
 conventional morality, we ought to look to them 
 not to support what Carlyle used to call Bedlam,
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 143 
 
 either for the fun of the thing, or still less for the 
 money there may be in the business. 
 
 A great man who is expressing himself in a 
 picture or in a poem, or, if I may say so, in 
 a sermon, is not thinking of anything except how 
 he shall not pervert or qualify the flood of truth 
 which somehow has been let loose within him. 
 The moment he becomes self-conscious, the 
 moment he permits other considerations even to 
 whisper to him, in that moment he has, obscurely 
 it may be, but quite patently in the judgment of 
 his peers, cut himself off from the source and 
 home of all truth and beauty and power. 
 
 That is what I meant when I said some time 
 ago that all truly great literature is confessional. 
 It is that quality in great literature that it is 
 confessional and not that it supports or impugns 
 the moral code of our time, which gives great 
 literature an influence in the region of the Will. 
 It is not that the writer, the poet, or the dramatist, 
 or the teller of a tale, sets out with the object of 
 influencing us in any way. What happens is, 
 that the poet, or the dramatist, or the teller of the 
 tale, has himself been so moved, so unified in the 
 depths of his life, by the intensity and logic of his 
 own imagination, that his words reach down in us
 
 144 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 to that precise depth from which they proceeded 
 in him. And so great literature and the same 
 is true of every medium of spiritual expression 
 great literature cannot but have a moral influence 
 upon us ; for it has borne witness to the depth 
 and spirituality of our human nature. When we 
 read or witness a great tragedy, it may very well 
 be that no single moral scruple in our soul has 
 been fortified, but our whole soul has been re- 
 newed, purified by pity or by terror. We close 
 the book, or we come out into the night, 
 with something of that double assurance, whose 
 presence indeed makes us truly human : we are 
 sure of our own soul, and if we are not sure 
 of God, we are sure at least that it is a very 
 serious thing to live, that we live in a world of 
 relationships. 
 
 Now, instead of working my way through 
 these things, I might have been employed more 
 wisely in expounding the wonderful poem which 
 gives indeed such pointed illustration of what I 
 have been saying. 
 
 You will read in any text-book that Coleridge 
 and Wordsworth inaugurated the Romantic move- 
 ment in English literature. You may learn there 
 further that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 145 
 
 or something that was to be like it, was deliber- 
 ately planned by those two great poets. As 
 things turned out, the poem came to be written 
 entirely by Coleridge, though Wordsworth sup- 
 plied a fine couplet and suggested the Albatross. 
 But when you have learned these odds and ends, 
 you have learned nothing of real consequence. 
 It is practically true, for example, of Coleridge 
 and Wordsworth that, in the words of the 
 Ancient Mariner himself, "they were the first 
 that ever burst into that silent sea." But why 
 did they set out ? Why did they break away 
 from the recognised materials and methods of the 
 eighteenth century ? Why, when they felt com- 
 pelled to set out, did they take the line they 
 took ? Why, confining ourselves to Coleridge 
 and to this poem, could he not escape, he who 
 was so apt to refuse a task which was likely to 
 make a demand upon him why could he not 
 escape such a subject as this ? And how did it 
 come to pass that, once launched upon this poem, 
 his soul seems to us to be under a doom to 
 penetrate to all the subtleties and horrors of such 
 a thing of the spirit ? The simple fact is, and we 
 only deceive ourselves if we try to get behind it, 
 about every great work of art that is to say, of 
 
 10
 
 146 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 self-expression there is something mysterious, 
 inexplicable, fated, "and he who can explain it 
 least is he by whose hand it was done." 
 
 "A creative work stands apart and remains 
 mute when we question its ancestry." "It is a 
 very suggestive fact that Goethe could never 
 explain many things in Faust. The origin of 
 the work itself was as mysterious to him as to 
 everyone else. It is easy enough to indicate the 
 sources of the legend and of many of the incidents 
 woven into it ; but what affinity lodged this seed 
 in the soil of his nature, what were the stages by 
 which it sank deep into his soul and became so 
 thoroughly part of himself that it came forth from 
 his brain not only re-fashioned, amplified, harmon- 
 ised with itself in artistic consistency, but pervaded 
 by a soul which made it significant of profound 
 and universal truth ? . . . ' They come and ask,' 
 writes Goethe, ' what idea I meant to embody in 
 my Faust, as if I knew myself.' 
 
 " For more than sixty years the drama was on 
 his mind ; and yet he tells us that the whole poem 
 rose before him at once when it first touched his 
 imagination. He often spoke of the progress of 
 the work : there are indeed few works of art 
 concerning the shaping and evolution of which
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 147 
 
 we possess such full and trustworthy information ; 
 and yet of the first contract between the idea and 
 his own soul, all he can tell us is that it was sud- 
 denly and completely disclosed to his imagination " 
 (Mabie, Essays on Literary Interpretation). 
 
 In all this, great literature approaches to the 
 passivity of nature. It offers to us levels and 
 depths of interpretation equal to the level and 
 depth of our own soul. You may take the poem 
 as a temporary tract against cruelty to animals ; 
 and even from that point of view it will always 
 deserve attention. But, if you are so minded, if 
 life has laid your soul open to such a world of 
 ideas, the poem may be to you and will be to you 
 another of those utter and unflinching portrayals 
 of what happens when a man has done something 
 wrong, irreparable, and when the wrong he has 
 done comes back upon him, so that he sees 
 nothing else in all the world except that wrong 
 thing. Of course, you may say, " But no man 
 should take his sins so seriously as the Ancient 
 Mariner took his shooting of the Albatross." 
 And you and I may decide for ourselves that we 
 shall not take ours so seriously. Still, as the 
 Psalmist said, "we are fearfully and wonderfully 
 made, and that my soul knoweth right well."
 
 148 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 We never know in what mysterious ways some 
 little thing which we have been able to make 
 light of, and almost forget, is going to start up 
 like an armed man, and stand before us blocking 
 our way, until we trample it down and deliberately 
 choose hell, or allow its accusation to compel us 
 to our knees, where we must remain until we find, 
 each one for himself, some reason for rising, in 
 God and in a new depth and softness of our soul. 
 
 Emerson has a noble passage where, illustrating 
 the indomitable perseverance of man, he describes 
 a race who build and rebuild their homes on the 
 slopes of a volcano. In the great poems of the 
 soul, we may all learn on the surface of what 
 unquiet moral elements we take our liberties. 
 
 I have been reading recently a volume entitled 
 The Eighteen Nineties, a book which describes 
 with sympathy and justice the wonderful outburst 
 of youth in literature some twenty years ago. I 
 am not speaking of the excellence of the work 
 done by the men of that movement ; and I am 
 not doubting but that in the long-run the change 
 of air may prove to have been good even for our 
 spiritual life ; but as an experiment in living it 
 was a movement which failed and will fail. 
 
 It was all true enough for those who said the
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 149 
 
 things which they said at the stage at which they 
 were when they said them. But it was no way 
 of life for people who were going to get old, or 
 were to have little children, or having little 
 children were to lose them. They wrote and 
 advocated views, those young men, as though 
 they had it in their own power to control the 
 subtle and inevitable reactions of the soul within 
 them. They did not lay their account with that 
 traditional life the sum, within the breast of 
 every man, of all that the soul has seen and been 
 that traditional life which, like the turbulent 
 element beneath volcanoes, was bearing them all 
 the time that they were making their futile and 
 provincial proposals. And yet already in that 
 book the ground has begun to rock, and here and 
 there the old terror has burst from the ancient 
 depth of things, and men are on their knees who 
 in the headlong days of their youth had despised 
 themselves for having knees. 
 
 " I've taken my fun where I've found it, 
 And now I must pay for my fun." 
 
 "And the end of it's settin' and thinkin'." 
 There was one of them he has left behind him 
 a mass of strange drawings like the work of 
 Blake. He died at twenty-six. In his last days
 
 150 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 he became a Christian. Aye, there's the rub ! 
 It is all very well if a man is never to know 
 better. But if one day he comes to know better, 
 why then a moral upheaval is as certain as the 
 thing which happens when a mine is fired. 
 Indeed that is the very formula for the coming of 
 truth to a man or to an age : it is the firing of 
 a mine. In his last days, this young man became 
 a Christian, and was received into the Church. 
 Whereupon a terror took hold on him. Oh, 
 unreasonable if you will, exaggerated, something 
 that took advantage of his bodily weakness ! 
 Yes, that may all be true. But it was everything 
 to him who endured it. Out there in the last 
 lucidity of his soul it was the one thing. " I 
 implore you," he wrote, " I implore you to destroy 
 all copies of (naming a work of his) and all like 
 drawings that are harmful. Show this to (naming 
 a friend), and conjure him to do the same. By 
 all that is holy, all obscene drawings." Then he 
 signed his name, adding the words, "In my 
 death agony." 
 
 We none of us know how we are going to 
 behave, what terrible misgivings are one day 
 going to be let loose by some event. We know 
 within limits what we are, surrounded by the
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 151 
 
 interests, the faces, the habits which go some way 
 towards the making up of our life. But we all 
 know likewise that there is something wild and 
 unpredicable within us. Concerning this thing it 
 is a great part of my own personal religion that in 
 every set of circumstances into which I may 
 plunge or drift in this world or in any world, 
 Christ, whom I invoke daily, may take hold of 
 that interior life of mine and maintain for me my 
 personal identity and chosen spiritual order. For 
 no man can say how he will behave, were life to 
 drive him into that lonely sea through which the 
 Ancient Mariner voyaged. No one knows what 
 visions will yet assail him, and what moral terrors, 
 based it may be upon tiny scruples like inverted 
 pyramids (what terrors), may one day shake his 
 soul. 
 
 Here is the story as Coleridge himself repeated 
 it on the margin of the poem. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants 
 bidden to a wedding-feast, and detaineth one. 
 
 The Wedding-Guest is spellbound by the eye 
 of the old seafaring man, and constrained to hear 
 his tale.
 
 152 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 The Mariner tells how the ship sailed south- 
 ward with a good wind and fair weather, till it 
 reached the Line. 
 
 The Wedding- Guest heareth the bridal music ; 
 but the Mariner continueth his tale. 
 
 The ship driven by a storm toward the south 
 pole. 
 
 The land of ice and of fearful sounds where no 
 living thing was to be seen. Till a great sea-bird, 
 called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog, 
 and was received with great joy and hospitality. 
 
 And lo ! the Albatross proveth a bird of good 
 omen, and followeth the ship as it returned 
 northward through fog and floating ice. 
 
 The Ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the 
 pious bird of good omen. 
 
 PART II. 
 
 His shipmates cry out against the Ancient 
 Mariner for killing the bird of good luck. 
 
 But when the fog cleared off, they justify the 
 same, and thus make themselves accomplices in 
 the crime. 
 
 The fair breeze continues ; the ship enters the 
 Pacific Ocean, and sails northward, even till it 
 reaches the Line.
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 153 
 
 The ship hath been suddenly becalmed. 
 
 And the Albatross begins to be avenged. 
 
 A Spirit had followed them ; one of the in- 
 visible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed 
 souls nor angels ; concerning whom the learned 
 Jew Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan 
 Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very 
 numerous, and there is no climate or element with- 
 out one or more. 
 
 The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain 
 throw the whole guilt on the Ancient Mariner : 
 
 In sign whereof they hang the dead sea-bird 
 round his neck. 
 
 PART III. 
 
 The Ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the 
 element afar off. 
 
 At its nearer approach it seemeth him to be 
 a ship ; and at a dear ransom he freeth his 
 speech from the bonds of thirst. 
 
 A flash of joy. 
 
 And horror follows. For can it be a ship that 
 comes onward without wind or tide ? 
 
 It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship. 
 
 And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the 
 setting Sun.
 
 154 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 The Spectre- Woman and her Death-mate, and 
 no other on board the skeleton-ship. 
 
 Like vessel, like crew ! 
 
 Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the 
 ship's crew, and she (the latter) winneth the 
 Ancient Mariner. 
 
 No twilight within the courts of the Sun. 
 
 At the rising of the Moon, 
 
 One after another, 
 
 His shipmates drop down dead. 
 
 But Life-in-Death begins her work on the 
 Ancient Mariner. 
 
 PART IV. 
 
 The Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is 
 talking to him ; 
 
 But the Ancient Mariner assureth him of his 
 bodily life, and proceedeth to relate his horrible 
 penance. 
 
 He despiseth the creatures of the calm. 
 
 And envieth that they should live, and so 
 many lie dead. 
 
 But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the 
 dead men. 
 
 In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth 
 towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 155 
 
 still sojourn, yet still move onward ; and every- 
 where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their 
 appointed rest, and their native country and their 
 own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, 
 as lords that are certainly expected and yet there 
 is a silent joy at their arrival. 
 
 By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's 
 creatures of the great calm. 
 
 Their beauty and their happiness. 
 
 He blesseth them in his heart. 
 
 The spell begins to break. 
 
 PART v. 
 
 By grace of the holy Mother, the Ancient 
 Mariner is refreshed with rain. 
 
 He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights 
 and commotions in the sky and the element. 
 
 The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and 
 the ship moves on ; 
 
 But not by the souls of the men, nor by 
 demons of earth or middle air, but by a blessed 
 troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invoca- 
 tion of the guardian saint. 
 
 The lonesome Spirit from the south pole 
 carries on the ship as far as the Line, in obedience 
 to the angelic troop, but still requireth vengeance.
 
 156 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 The Polar Spirit's fellow-daemons, the invisible 
 inhabitants of the element, take part in his wrong ; 
 and two of them relate one to another that 
 penance long and heavy for the Ancient Mariner 
 hath been accorded to the Polar Spirit, who 
 returneth southward. 
 
 PART VI. 
 
 The Mariner hath been cast into a trance ; for 
 the angelic power causeth the vessel to drive 
 northward faster than human life could endure. 
 
 The supernatural motion is retarded ; the 
 Mariner awakes, and his penance begins anew. 
 
 The curse is finally expiated. 
 
 And the Ancient Mariner beholdeth his native 
 country. 
 
 The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies, 
 
 And appear in their own forms of light. 
 
 PART VII. 
 
 The Hermit of the Wood 
 Approacheth the ship with wonder. 
 The ship suddenly sinketh. 
 The Ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's 
 boat. 
 
 The Ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 157 
 
 Hermit to shrieve him ; and the penance of life 
 falls on him. 
 
 And ever and anon throughout his future life 
 an agony constraineth him to travel from land to 
 land. 
 
 And to teach, by his own example, love and 
 reverence to things that God made and loveth. 
 
 That is the story. The moral authority of it 
 lies just here, that we cannot read it or hear it 
 read without the sense that in some region, remote 
 indeed from our accustomed interests but close to 
 us and of the deepest consequence, it is all true, 
 nay that it is all the truth. There is a sense in 
 which it is what it is to us. If there is anyone 
 to whom it all means nothing, then in that one's 
 case nothing more is to be said. That he feels 
 nothing when other people feel something, is his 
 own personal problem. 
 
 For there are those for whom the story does 
 mean something on the moral plane, and indeed 
 means nothing else, and must be permitted to 
 mean nothing further until the moral demand of 
 it is confessed. Well, there it is. The soul of 
 a man once saw all that. And he has enabled 
 us to see it. Out upon that lonely, inalienable
 
 158 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 life of our own we have seen his signal and have 
 signalled back to him. 
 
 We have heard a story. And this is the 
 immense responsibility of seeing truth : it is left 
 to us one by one, who have heard such a story, 
 to act and take up our life henceforward as people 
 must- who by the illumination of such a story have 
 now become aware of certain things ; as people 
 for whom it means what it means. 
 
 II. "PEER GYNT" 
 
 It is the customary thing to say that Ibsen in 
 Peer Gynt set himself to hold up the mirror to the 
 moral countenance of his native Norway. Here, 
 however, as elsewhere, the insight of genius, 
 like the word of God, is never of merely private 
 interpretation. Peer Gynt is not simply a Nor- 
 wegian of our time ; he is a man of all time. 
 The poet has grasped the principle of his life so 
 deeply, has with such fairness and inevitable- 
 ness pursued what may have seemed to Peer 
 Gynt himself to be casual and irrelevant words, 
 imaginations, actions, to their one source in his 
 ultimate nature, that in writing the play Peer 
 Gynt Ibsen has declared from the housetops the
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 159 
 
 secret of many hearts. For, once again, we men 
 and women have come a long way, and have in 
 the course of our voyage seen many things by 
 land and sea. We have trafficked in strange 
 merchandise. The reminiscences of infinitely 
 various experiences lurk within us, written, as it 
 were, on the tablets of our heart, in invisible ink. 
 And at the challenge of a deep-seeing report 
 concerning any one human soul, the hidden 
 characters in every human heart stand out. 
 
 I am quite sure that if Peer Gynt had a fair 
 chance, it would do an enormous moral service. 
 In spite of its apparent richness and complexity, 
 it is a simple drama. The very opening words, 
 " Peer, you're lying ! " put the clue into our 
 hands at the outset. All that follows is the 
 movement towards that particular moral crisis 
 (and to the solution of it, if there is in the drama 
 such a solution) in which an essentially shifty and 
 plausible human soul is at last confronted with 
 the truth about itself. 
 
 It is a work also which should appeal to men 
 of what is called a practical turn of mind, who 
 may not take seriously the moral challenge of 
 such poetry as deals with the troubles and em- 
 barrassments of rarer souls. I can overhear a
 
 160 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 man saying, " Hamlet ! ' to be or not to be ! ' 
 What moonshine ! The man had far too little 
 to do ! These dreamers and poets only put 
 ideas into people's heads." Now Peer Gynt is a 
 practical man in the sense that he is one of those 
 men who, having set his heart upon something, 
 tries to get it. If scruples arise in his mind as to 
 whether or not what he is doing or has done is 
 right, he has an inexhaustible faculty for dodging 
 the moral point and slurring it over with that 
 rhetoric of self-support and self-justification for 
 which we all have a perilous facility. Of course, 
 he has his deeper moments as we all have, even 
 the most prosaic, when we suspect that the kind 
 of thing which we try to make light of as poetry, 
 as imagination, as dreaming, may after all be 
 the truth and the thing with which we have 
 to do. 
 
 I once walked over the island of Rousay in 
 the Orkney group. It stands sheer out of the 
 sea like a table, a green and pleasant island. 
 The sun was shining in a cloudless sky that day ; 
 and yet it would have been disastrous to keep 
 one's eyes too much above the earth. For again 
 and again one came to a narrow slit or crack 
 where, looking down, one saw the sea wriggling
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 161 
 
 like a snake some hundreds of feet beneath. In 
 his successful and outrageous career Peer Gynt 
 comes to such slits and cracks in his own chosen 
 scheme of things. Of course he does things 
 which we who dwell in cities cannot do. But 
 these are not of the essence of his moral 
 history. The essence of his moral history is 
 something which we have in common with him, 
 something certainly which offers itself to us all. 
 No one knows better than Peer Gynt himself 
 what precisely is that fundamental fault. He 
 did not regard it as a fault : he simply regarded 
 it as a fact. Sometimes he boasted of it. Some- 
 times he simply accepted it as part of himself, 
 as he accepted the mountains as part of the 
 world. There were moments when he was 
 ashamed of it. And at the last he cried out 
 in terror to be delivered from it. 
 
 And now what was this last fact or bias in 
 Peer Gynt's soul which, and not circumstance, 
 ordered his life and, to say no more, put his 
 eternal destiny in hazard ? Well, after all, no 
 one knows us so well as we know ourselves. 
 " The spirit of a man is the candle of the Lord " : 
 and more than once did Peer Gynt himself put 
 his finger with absolute precision upon his own 
 
 zi
 
 1 62 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 weak spot. For example, once upon a time, 
 when he was in hiding in the forest, after one of 
 his early misdemeanours, he sees a boy carrying 
 a scythe. The boy looks about him stealthily to 
 make sure that he is not observed, and then 
 with the scythe cuts off his own finger. He 
 wraps up his bleeding hand and disappears. 
 Peer Gynt understands everything. It is a boy 
 who in fear or hatred of the national conscription 
 has maimed himself so that he may escape as 
 disqualified. Pondering the incident, Peer sees 
 with perfect clearness that it is just a thing like 
 that that he could never bring himself to do. 
 Like that boy, he also might hate conscription 
 and take means to escape it ; but it never, never 
 would be such means. He might think of such 
 means. Yes, he probably would : for it was 
 a well-known, much-used way of avoiding the 
 military service. He would certainly think of 
 it 
 
 "Ay, wish it done, will it to boot, 
 But do it 1 No, that's past my understanding." 
 
 There you have the moral formula for this man : 
 he will never go through a thing, but round about 
 it. He will never stand up to the consequences 
 of his own acts. He will not act unless he has
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 163 
 
 already conceived the consequences and dis- 
 counted them, not by the energy and fidelity of 
 his own soul, but by making sure of a back door, 
 a line of retreat, a bridge. Rather than look into 
 the face of those moral realities which visit him, 
 he will fell trees, as another man might play hard 
 at golf, or he will drink, or he will whip up his 
 own jaded passions, or he will intoxicate himself 
 with lies of his own imagining, or he will assume 
 the very consolations of religion as though they 
 had been specially intended for him. Peer Gynt 
 will not go straight. He will not think straight : 
 and straight thinking is a formula for righteous- 
 ness. Whenever a situation is becoming too hot 
 for him, he will leave it. Whenever his own 
 thoughts are becoming too sombre and close- 
 fitting, he will think of something else. He will 
 never cut off his finger for anything, either good 
 or bad. He will not endure the knife of reality 
 even for the sake of the integrity and thorough- 
 ness of his soul. And yet, all the time, except 
 in those moments when he sees through himself 
 and knows that with all his tricks he is merely 
 postponing a painful interview, all the time he 
 takes pride in this mastery of himself, as he calls 
 it, that he is above those scruples and interior
 
 1 64 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 judgments which stultify weaker men. He calls 
 this "being himself," and "being emperor of 
 himself," when the fact is, he is all the time 
 afraid of himself. He even allows himself to 
 believe that he is fighting his own battle and 
 bearing the consequences of his own acts, 
 whereas the fact is, his whole path is strewn with 
 sorrow, which falls, not upon himself, but upon 
 those like Ase his old mother and Solvejg his 
 sweetheart, who, because they love him, must 
 wait and suffer. It is such an easy thing for a 
 man to say that he can surely do what he likes 
 so long as he is ready to bear the penalty. 
 But the fact is, no man can bear more than a 
 very small part of the influence which follows 
 inevitably upon his acts. 
 
 One night, later on in the story, Peer Gynt, in 
 the height of his prosperity, is discoursing over 
 the wine. He is, as usual, complimenting himself 
 upon his success. He attributes it all to his 
 consistent adherence to the policy of "going 
 round," of hedging, of not committing oneself 
 " once for all " to anything. He has a fine 
 outburst elsewhere against the phrase "once for 
 all," and against the entire idea of it. Hold on, 
 he would say, so long as it suits you ; but at that
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 165 
 
 point let go. But hearken to Peer Gynt : like 
 some of the world's most sinister figures, he has 
 style. 
 
 "The key to the art 
 Of life's affairs is simply this : 
 To keep one's ear close shut against 
 The ingress of one dangerous viper." 
 
 " What sort of viper, pray, dear friend ? " asks 
 Mr. Cotton, one of the sycophants who is listening 
 to him. And Peer continues : 
 
 "A little one that slyly wiles you 
 To tempt the irretrievable. 
 The essence of the art of daring, 
 The art of bravery in fact, 
 Is this : To stand with choice-free foot 
 Amid the treacherous snares of life, 
 To know for sure that other days 
 Remain beyond the day of battle, 
 To know that ever in the rear 
 A bridge for your retreat stands open. 
 This theory has borne me on, 
 Has given my whole career its colour." 
 
 Peer Gynt, in fact, is one of those who will be 
 morally comfortable. They do not propose to 
 conform to the rules for living which make for 
 peace of conscience. But if conscience should 
 stir, and such men are not unaware that it may, 
 he has his resource. He will dodge its thrust. 
 He will think of something else. He will make 
 a large contribution to some undoubtedly good
 
 1 66 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 cause, as Peer Gynt, when he became a little 
 uneasy about his slave-carrying business, became 
 a large exporter of Bibles by the same ships, 
 with the idea that God will be sensible and is 
 sure to put one thing against another. It was 
 like him, for instance, when, after a long absence, 
 during which his old mother was left to see her 
 home dismantled to pay his fines, herself sinking 
 to death, it was like him, on entering the old 
 home, to forestall any word of reproach by sitting 
 on the edge of her bed, putting his big arms 
 round her frail body, knowing (for these subtle 
 rascals know everything) that the divinity of a 
 mother is just this, that she is ready to take any 
 excuse for not keeping up even a true judgment 
 of her child if that judgment is hard. There he 
 sat, and before she could speak he had begun his 
 old romantic stories recalling old incidents, mixing 
 them with new lies, bearing down all her sense of 
 injury : 
 
 " No, now we will chat together, 
 But only of this and that, 
 Forget what's awry and crooked, 
 And all that is sharp and sore." 
 
 " Forget all that is sharp and sore " : that is the 
 formula for Peer Gynt. 
 
 And now for this piece of sincere imagination,
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 167 
 
 in which one who even here betrays that profound 
 and ruthless power of analysis to which he gave 
 free rein in his later social plays depicts the career 
 of a man who has adopted such a formula for life. 
 
 Peer Gynt's first handicap was his father. 
 From that father he inherited a swaggering and 
 disorderly disposition. The father had been a 
 hard drinker, proud, flamboyant, unusual. He 
 came of a family of some standing, and that fact 
 alone had seemed to justify his indolence, and to 
 establish his right to be a law to himself. He 
 was what Mr. Chesterton has called "a rich and 
 reeking human personality." As was natural, his 
 wife Ase had a hard time. Poverty crept upon 
 the home like a frost. Poverty, says Emerson, 
 is demoralising. It is no answer to Emerson to 
 say that it need not be. 
 
 Ase took refuge from the brutality of her 
 position in fairy-tales, in stories of heroes, in 
 folklore and mystery. Peer Gynt was the child 
 of these two, according to the spirit also. 
 
 For myself, I think that in this drama Ibsen is 
 fairer to all the facts of heredity than he came to 
 be in his later writings. In those later writings 
 he lays a terrible emphasis upon the inheritance 
 which descends from generation to generation
 
 1 68 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 But he came almost to lose sight of the spirit of 
 protest and moral freedom which likewise is an 
 endowment or prejudice of every human life. 
 
 In Peer Gynt we can see the working of the 
 drunken, riotous father, and of the dreamy, 
 imaginative mother : but in Peer Gynt we can 
 see also the working of another personality which 
 knows itself and which might have taken 
 measures. 
 
 When we first meet Peer Gynt, he is in the 
 middle of one of his stories which were apt to 
 grow more and more wonderful as he proceeded 
 with them ; stories which he told with such 
 circumstance and eloquence that he ended either 
 believing them, or feeling and behaving as though 
 they were true. 
 
 He is sore at the moment because in a quarrel 
 he has had the worse of it, and with that thin- 
 skinnedness of his he suspects that people are 
 laughing at him. He would like to do something 
 to sooth his vanity and to re-establish himself as 
 what Mr. Arnold Bennett has called " a card." 
 
 Ingrid, who would appear to have been in love 
 with him, though her parents were opposed, is to 
 be married to a kind of simpleton. Peer Gynt 
 hangs about, hating everybody. The young
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 169 
 
 girls will not dance with him. Even Solvejg, 
 whom Peer has the insight to see as differing from 
 all the others in sweetness and modesty, " with 
 her eyes on the ground and her hand on her 
 mother's skirt," even Solvejg shrinks from this 
 wild man. He breaks through a door, finds 
 Ingrid, the bride, and carries her off to the 
 mountains by a path too perilous for pursuers. 
 This is done not in love, but in sheer vanity and 
 rebelliousness and self-assertion. An action like 
 that, of course, brings things to a crisis : a man 
 must repent and get better, or go on and get 
 worse. He sends Ingrid home, and himself 
 wanders among the mountains. Here he 
 encounters mythical beings, trolls and the Dovre 
 King, representing without doubt the collapse 
 for the time being of all the protesting voices in 
 the man's soul. For the trolls are those beings 
 in this world who are affected by our thoughts^ 
 and whose thoughts affect us just as though 
 thoughts were completed actions. 
 
 Nevertheless the higher voice is not quite 
 silent in Peer ; though when it appeals to him, 
 instead of acting upon it, he simply becomes 
 sentimental over it, thus allowing it to evaporate 
 without having touched his will.
 
 1 70 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 "There go two brown eagles sailing, and 
 southward the wild geese fly ; and here in the 
 mire knee-deep must I tramp and moil. (Leaps 
 up.) Yea, I will with them ! Yea, I will wash 
 myself pure in the bath of the keenest wind ! I 
 will up ; I will plunge myself clean in the shining 
 baptismal font, I will out . . . o'er the mountains, 
 I will ride all sweet in soul." 
 
 But as a matter of fact he does nothing. He 
 was one of those who exhaust the impulses of 
 their soul in mere feeling or in speech ; who, 
 instead of acting, simply approve of themselves 
 for having had such feelings, and move a vote of 
 confidence in themselves. If there is any motion 
 to the contrary, they declare it to be out of order. 
 
 Solvejg, the sweet maiden, who, as such things 
 in the wonderful Providence of God do happen, 
 sees something in this wild man which has let 
 loose her power to love, Solvejg seeks him in the 
 mountains, and is ready to share her life with him. 
 He is man enough to know the value of her, 
 " it makes any day a holy day to look at you " ; 
 and sensitive enough to perceive that in loyalty 
 to such a pure woman his disintegrated life would 
 become sound and true. But he is man enough 
 also to know that Solvejg is not one to love
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 171 
 
 lightly, but to love once for all. And there, of 
 course, he fails. She has entered his cottage, 
 he remaining outside. But he does not enter. 
 Solvejg speaks : " Are you coming ? " " Round 
 about ! " he answers to himself. " What ? " 
 "You must wait. It is dark, and I've got some- 
 thing heavy to fetch." " Wait : I will help you : 
 the burden we'll share." " No, stay where you 
 are ! I must bear it alone." " But don't go too 
 far, dear ! " "Be patient, my girl : be my way 
 short or long, you must wait." And Solvejg 
 answers, nodding to him as he goes, "Yes, I'll 
 wait." 
 
 But he does not come back : at least, not yet. 
 
 He visits his mother, who is just dying. She 
 is too weak to scold, and, as we saw, he soon, 
 with his stories and his fancies, puts her off. He 
 makes her imagine that he and she are off on 
 a sleigh. He snaps his fingers, cracks a whip, 
 until the old woman feels the wind on her cheeks, 
 and sees the lights of the city towards which she 
 is being borne. But it is the city of God : for as 
 Peer Gynt looks hard at her he sees that she is 
 dead. A great gulp of tenderness rises in his 
 throat ; but once again he destroys the very 
 power of moral grief to do him good. He takes
 
 172 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 credit to himself for such fineness of feeling. 
 He kisses his mother, saying, " That is the 
 driver's fee," and then goes out, leaving a poor 
 peasant girl to bury her ! 
 
 Peer Gynt emigrates, and we are led to under- 
 stand that by the faithful application of his own 
 unscrupulous principles he makes a fortune. 
 This, in course of time, he loses. After wander- 
 ings in Morocco and in the Sahara he at length 
 turns his face homewards. It is here that the 
 drama rises to the level of great writing, to that 
 level of moral insight and tenderness which will 
 ensure it a place for ever. Peer Gynt comes 
 back, and Ibsen makes us feel that this is what 
 we have all to do : we have to come back. It is 
 not easy. " Like an infinite wail is this coming 
 in, coming home, coming back." For those who 
 have eyes to see it is the first streak of any 
 possible dawn for this man that he has so far 
 overcome his love of moral comfort as to come 
 back to scenes which must have the power to 
 strike at his soul. 
 
 On the ship which is bearing him to Norway 
 he encounters, when they are about a day's 
 sailing from port, a stranger whom he had not 
 seen previously. Of course this is simply Peer
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 173 
 
 Gynt himself. It is the poet's way of telling us 
 that after the mid-time of our life a man is never 
 alone ; that there is always himself, the man he 
 has been, and himself, the better man he has 
 not been and might have been. Out at sea, and 
 especially when, as happened to Peer Gynt's 
 ship, a storm has broken loose and spars are 
 going by the board, is a sure time and place for 
 meeting that stranger who is a man's own self. 
 
 The ship is wrecked. Peer Gynt and the cook 
 hang on to the keel of an upturned boat. But it 
 can only bear one, and Peer Gynt takes care that 
 he is the one. Seated there, the mysterious 
 stranger joins him and begins to talk about 
 things. Peer Gynt reaches land, and things 
 begin to ferment in his soul. There was a time 
 when he was more or less master of his own 
 faculties, a time when he could use his subtilty 
 to extricate him out of difficult places. But, as I 
 said in our last study, we never know how we are 
 going to behave. Those very faculties now turn 
 upon Peer Gynt and employ all their subtilty to 
 drive him out of his own corners, to expose his 
 own sophistries to himself and to leave him no 
 hiding-place from reality. He begins with awful 
 clarity to see through himself. He sees that he
 
 174 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 has never been anything. Thinking himself 
 master of himself, he has, on the contrary, been 
 the victim of this and that and everything. He 
 picks up an onion and begins to peel one layer 
 from another, always discovering still another, 
 and that the whole thing is a thing of layers 
 without any central personality. And he per- 
 ceives that that is a picture of himself. 
 
 " What an enormous number of swathings ! 
 Isn't the kernel soon coming to light? 
 I'm blest if it is ! to the innermost centre 
 It's nothing but swathings each smaller and smaller." 
 
 He tries to rally the old Peer Gynt who could 
 sophisticate his own feelings ; but in vain. He 
 cannot but be serious, even superstitious. He 
 sees grey thread-balls, and they keep saying to 
 him : " We are the thoughts thou shouldst have 
 brought us." He sees withered leaves, which 
 also charge him : " We are a watchword : thou 
 shouldst have proclaimed us." The winds sigh, 
 and they seem to say : "We are the songs thou 
 shouldst have sung." "We are tears," say the 
 dewdrops, "unshed for ever." The broken 
 straws on which he treads speak up to him : 
 " We are deeds, thou shouldst have achieved us : 
 Doubt hath throttled, hath crippled us." And at
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 175 
 
 last he hears the wailing of his old mother's 
 voice : " You've driven me the wrong way," it 
 complains. 
 
 In this mood he encounters a strange symboli- 
 cal figure. Ibsen calls him the Button-moulder. 
 He carries with him a ladle in which are placed 
 for melting the souls of people who, like Dante's 
 neutrals (who were too bad for Hell), have in this 
 world been nothing, have never with energy been 
 either good or bad. 
 
 There is, says this Button-moulder, one destiny 
 for those whose will has been good : and there is 
 another destiny for those whose will has been 
 bad ; but for those who have never taken up a 
 strong stand in life, either good or bad, who have 
 simply been for themselves at every moment, 
 there is no destiny but to be melted down into 
 mere material, as you melt down a defaced coin. 
 The charge, that is to say, which Peer Gynt's 
 awakened conscience makes against him is that 
 he has been nothing ! 
 
 There follows a time, we are asked to imagine, 
 when Peer Gynt is searching for something either 
 good or bad which he can bring to the Button- 
 moulder's judgment, claiming that there and then 
 did he, Peer Gynt, assert his true soul, that he
 
 176 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 may claim on the strength of that one thing a 
 man's place and destiny. But his own ruthless 
 and subtle mind, which formerly served him well, 
 is now against him. He can find in all his career 
 no individual, personal act, no act which with all 
 its consequences he accepted and stood by. 
 Time and again the Button-moulder crosses his 
 path, reminding him that the hour cannot be 
 much longer delayed. 
 
 One day in his wanderings he hears through 
 the mist the voice of one singing. Something 
 awakens within him. Following the direction of 
 the sound, he reaches a hut, and coming to the 
 doorway he sees within, Solvejg, the sweet maiden 
 who loved him, now old and blind. Though her 
 eyes are without vision, she knows that it is he, 
 he for whose coming she has waited all those 
 years. "It is he ! it is he ! Now blessed be 
 God ! " she cries. But in a voice hoarse with 
 concern he interrupts her. He asks her for the 
 tale of his heartlessness towards her, so that he 
 may submit even that to his judge. But she 
 protests that he has never wronged her ; that, 
 on the contrary, her love of him has made her 
 life the great thing it has been. 
 
 With this, his last hope seems lost, when it
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 177 
 
 comes suddenly upon him that perhaps Solvejg 
 can tell him where his true self has been. And 
 here let Ibsen speak : 
 
 Peer Gynt. Lost ! if you cannot guess riddles. 
 
 Solvejg. Ask them. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Ask them ? ay, verily ! Can you tell me 
 where Peer Gynt has been since last we met? 
 
 Solvejg. Where he has been ? 
 
 Peer Gynt. With the mark of his destiny upon his brow ; 
 e'en as he sprang from God's thought ? Can you tell me that ? 
 If not, I must wend me home, must sink into the land of 
 mists. 
 
 Solvejg. Oh, that riddle is easily read. 
 
 Peer Gynt. Then say what you know. Where have I been 
 as myself, whole and true ? Where have I been with God's 
 stamp on my brow ? 
 
 Solvejg (smiling). In my faith, in my hope, in my love. 
 
 Peer Gynt (starting back). What say you ? Ha ! they are 
 juggling words. To that boy in your heart 1 you yourself are 
 the mother. 
 
 Solvejg. His mother I am. But who is his father ? 'Tis he 
 who pardons at the mother's prayer. 
 
 Peer Gynt (as a ray of light from the rising sun falls on 
 him). My mother, my spouse, thou innocent woman ! Oh, 
 shield me, shield me in thy bosom ! (He grips fast hold of 
 her and buries his face in her lap. Long silence as the sun 
 rises.) 
 
 Solvejg (sings softly). Sleep thou, sleep, my darling boy. 
 I will rock thee, I will watch. The boy has sat on his 
 mother's lap. They two have played the whole livelong day. 
 The boy has rested on his mother's breast the whole livelong 
 
 1 " Boy in the heart "= idea. 
 
 12
 
 1 78 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 day. God bless thee, my joy ! The boy has lain so close to 
 my heart the whole livelong day. Now he is so tired. Sleep 
 thou, sleep, my darling boy ! I will rock thee, I will watch. 
 
 The Button-Casters voice (from behind the house). We 
 meet at the last crossway, Peer ; and then we shall see I say 
 no more. 
 
 Solvejg (sings louder as the day strengthens). I will rock 
 thee, I will watch. Sleep and dream, my darling. 
 
 It is true that Peer Gynt has still to meet the 
 Button-moulder. He has still to stand up at the 
 great Assizes. What then is his new confidence ? 
 It is this : that in any world in which the Button- 
 moulder has a place there will be a place likewise 
 for Solvejg. 
 
 There are two rocks on which man must cast 
 anchor, or be wrecked, woman and God. For 
 many souls those two rocks are outcroppings of 
 the same underlying reef. 
 
 III. "LA MORTE" 
 
 There is a sentence in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 
 most notable story which I recall from a remote 
 memory, with which I may begin this study. The 
 words are somewhat to this effect : God help two 
 people, a man and a woman, if one or the other 
 should ever learn that there is a more beautiful
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 179 
 
 kind of love than that to which they have 
 accustomed each other. He goes on, of course, 
 to say that that higher way, once it has dawned 
 upon one or the other, will make the lower way 
 intolerable, and a tragedy, secret or open, will 
 follow, unless those two can find some deeper 
 foundation on which to rebuild the shattered 
 fabric of their common life. Now I know of no 
 idea which has expressed itself so persistently in 
 the literature of the soul as just that idea, that 
 there is a quality of spiritual light which, when it 
 falls upon a human life, begins there and then to 
 disturb, to provoke, to protest, to appeal, to arouse 
 shame and anger, and at the same time hope and 
 the passion to be different. When that ray of 
 white light falls upon a soul of a certain quality, 
 and the great affirmation of Christianity is that 
 every soul is at its depths of that very quality, 
 there begins to work at its centre a kind of 
 revulsion which soon acquires such force as to 
 tear a way out for itself, overturning, if need be, 
 the habits of a lifetime, and facing as a very light 
 and even grateful thing the retribution of society 
 and the astonishment and forsaking of friends. 
 Until the moment when that light dawned, the 
 man was able to control his thoughts about him-
 
 1 8o ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 self. He had his times of uneasiness ; but he had 
 learned how to deal with himself at such times. 
 It was enough simply to cease from some practice 
 which aggravated the uneasiness, or for a season 
 to adopt some slight severity towards himself 
 which seemed to have the effect of misleading, 
 and, for the time, satisfying the inner demand of 
 his nature. But when this white light falls upon 
 him, when this predestined messenger knocks at 
 his door, half-measures no longer meet his case. 
 He must either rally all that is evil within him to 
 insult and browbeat the messenger of God as 
 when Peter kept up his denial for a time by the 
 help of oaths ; or he must throw wide open his 
 door, and say in any language which the stress of 
 the occasion discovers to him : " My Lord and 
 my God ! " 
 
 There is no single fact about human nature to 
 which one may quote such a unanimous testimony 
 from all great literature as to this fact, that the 
 soul of man lies open, with an incurable open- 
 ness, to the challenge and appeal of the holier 
 way. 
 
 The face of Beatrice let loose in Dante a moral 
 tide which, I will not say made him drag his 
 anchors, but compelled him to carry his anchors,
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 181 
 
 quite unconscious of their weight, into that great 
 sea whose farther shore was Heaven. 
 
 Pagan as he was, Goethe also knew himself too 
 well not to perceive that this was the deepest 
 thing in man, his liability to be smitten to the 
 centre of his being, and sent out upon his new 
 career by the vision of something holier than had 
 come into his philosophy. N Let me save you, 
 Margaret," he pleaded in the dungeon where his 
 poor victim, crazed with grief, awaited death, " let 
 me save you." " How save me ? " she asked ; 
 "by the help of that low way of life which has 
 been our bane?" "Yes, let us flee: let us 
 resume life on the old basis," Faust pleaded. To 
 which Margaret answered : " Henry, I shudder 
 at thee ! " And in that shudder she placed a live 
 coal on the altar of that not very honourable 
 heart. 
 
 It is this very idea, and the fertility of his 
 applications of it, which for myself I have always 
 held to be the distinctive message of Robert 
 Browning. Caponsacchi can go on living his 
 double life with only slight spasms of discomfort, 
 until one day he sees the sweet pure face of 
 Pompilia. Whereupon the world begins to give 
 way under him. Away along the corridors of his
 
 1 82 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 life tapers begin to light up the darkness. The 
 life he had been leading becomes in one moment 
 impossible for ever. 
 
 Sebald could still hold down the man of God 
 within him, could still confuse his conscience with 
 reasons and examples from the behaviour of the 
 world, until Pippa went by that spring morning, 
 singing. Whereupon there was kindled in him, 
 and through him in Ottima, a moral fire which 
 made death more desirable than one further hour 
 of the old dishonour. 
 
 Ned Bratts and his wife could brazen out the 
 disgrace and punishment of this and that, until, in 
 Bedford Jail, they met John Bunyan, who took 
 down "the Blessed Book "and spoke to them 
 about God, about Christ, about forgiveness ; 
 whereupon it was with them also as if something 
 had been killed for ever, and something had been 
 born. 
 
 In what will be the last of these studies we shall 
 see how Bernard Shaw has made a handsome 
 acknowledgment of this ultimate liability of the 
 human soul, that, given the proper occasion, a 
 beautiful, moral tenderness may be let loose in a 
 most unlikely heart, by its contact with something 
 gentle and uncorrupted ; in the particular case,
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 183 
 
 by the feeling of a child's fingers on a wild man's 
 neck. 
 
 In the light of the literature of the soul we 
 recover our confidence. There will be no 
 apostasy of the human race. There may be 
 experiments. There will be. There will, in 
 consequence, be many a sore head, and many a 
 sore heart. But " securus judicat orbis terrarum." 
 We never know the day of the Son of Man, the 
 day when here and there the human soul may come 
 to itself, when here and there man may cry out 
 for a new bondage in God, as with a more strident 
 voice he has been crying for a freedom from God. 
 For once again we have seen what we have seen, 
 and we can never be as though we had not seen 
 it. Each epoch of time has its own voice, its 
 own emphasis : but there are ancestral voices 
 to which man is for ever even terribly sus- 
 ceptible. 
 
 In a controversy between the wind and the 
 tide the issue is never really for a moment in 
 doubt. There may be much noise, but the deeper 
 influence has its way. For a wind is local, 
 whereas a tide is connected with the moon, and 
 the sun, and the stars ; and there are great times 
 when moon and sun and a group of stars are
 
 1 84 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 in conjunction and pull one way. In the firma- 
 ment of the soul such great times are always 
 coming. 
 
 
 Octave Feuillet's La Morte may not belong 
 to the very greatest order of fiction : the story 
 is too conscious of its own moral. And yet the 
 story deals with such a universal interest, and does 
 such justice to the conflicting standpoints, that it 
 will bear pondering for many a long day. 
 
 The author tells us explicitly that he has brought 
 together two well-defined types of character, so 
 that he may observe or predict how things will 
 turn out with them. And so far as he is quite 
 faithful to his own imagination he has shown us 
 in miniature how similar lives on the wide scale of 
 a general society will also work out. The story 
 deals with a marriage ; and there at once we are 
 at the real heart of the controversy between the 
 different ways of looking at life. For any way 
 of looking at life which claims general acceptance 
 is to be judged, and soon or late will come to be 
 judged, by its ability to carry us through those 
 elementary human functions, one of which is 
 enshrined in Christian marriage. 
 
 La Morte, then, consists for the most part of
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 185 
 
 letters in which Bernard, Vicomte de Vaudricourt 
 (whom we shall simply call " Bernard " ) tells his 
 own story. He describes himself as one who 
 quite early in his manhood had come under the 
 agnosticism of the nineteenth century. He had 
 tenderness enough to shed tears when it seemed 
 to him no longer possible to believe. He bids us 
 take his word for it, and we do, that it was not 
 merely to justify his own way of living that he 
 abandoned his faith. He describes himself, in 
 short, to use a phrase, as an average man 
 about town. Of an old family, rich, and the 
 prospective heir to a wealthy uncle, he meets, 
 with a view to marriage, Mademoiselle Aliette 
 de Courteheuse (whom we shall henceforth call 
 "Aliette"). 
 
 Belonging to a family of equal standing, Aliette 
 is a sensitive and ardent Catholic. She was the 
 devoted daughter of a father who himself had 
 been a recluse, defending himself from the con- 
 tamination of the time in the history and literature 
 and circumstances of what seemed to him an 
 infinitely better time, for it was by comparison 
 an age of faith the seventeenth century. But let 
 me transcribe a scene. Aliette is showing Bernard 
 the library of the Chateau. He has remarked
 
 1 86 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 upon its richness in materials of the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
 "Your father must have had a great predilection for the 
 century of Louis XIV ? " I said. 
 
 " My father lived in it," she replied gravely. 
 
 And as I looked at her with a somewhat uneasy surprise, she 
 added 
 
 " And he made me live in it with him." 
 
 The eyes of this strange girl filled with tears as she spoke. 
 
 She turned away and took a few steps to repress her emotion ; 
 then, coming back, she pointed to a chair, sat down herself on 
 the library footstool, and said 
 
 " I must describe my father to you." 
 
 She paused a moment, as if lost in thought ; then, speaking 
 with unaccustomed freedom, hesitating, and blushing visibly 
 whenever she was about to pronounce a word which might 
 appear a little too serious from such young lips, she continued : 
 
 "My father died from the effects of a wound which he 
 received at Patay. To tell you this, is to say that he loved 
 his country but he did not love the time in which he lived. 
 He had a great love of order, and he saw none anywhere. He 
 had a perfect horror of disorder, and this he saw on all sides ; 
 more especially towards the end of his life, everything which 
 occurred, all that was said and all that was written, was sorely 
 opposed to his opinions, to all that he respected, and to all his 
 tastes. Deeply grieved by the events of the present, he took 
 refuge in the past ; the seventeenth century corresponded more 
 particularly to the kind of society in which he would have 
 preferred to live ; a society well-ordered, polite, believing and 
 lettered. As time went on, he liked, more and more, to shut 
 himself up with that period. He liked, more and more, to see 
 the moral discipline and the literary tastes of his favourite 
 century take precedence in his house. You may possibly have 
 remarked that he encouraged this fancy even in the picture-
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 187 
 
 frames and decorations. From this window you can see the 
 long straight alleys, the boxwood edgings, the clipped yew-trees, 
 and the wych elms of our garden. You can see that we have 
 in our flower-border none but the flowers of that time lilies, 
 peonies, hollyhocks, marigolds, pinks in short, those which 
 are called parson's flowers. Our old sylvan tapestries are also 
 of the period. You see, too, that all our furniture, from the 
 wardrobes and the sideboards to the consoles and the easy- 
 chairs, is in the most severe style of the time of Louis XIV. 
 My father had no taste whatever for the refined affectations of 
 modern luxury. He believed that excessive comfort enervated 
 the mind as well as the body. That is the reason," added the 
 young girl laughingly, "that you have such uncomfortable 
 chairs in our house. Yes, naturally. You are going to speak 
 of compensations Very good ! " 
 
 Then resuming her grave tone 
 
 " In this way, my father tried to carry out the illusion of 
 living in the epoch upon which his thoughts were always 
 running. Need I say that I was my dearly loved father's 
 confidant the sympathising confidant of his troubles, the 
 indignant confidant of his annoyances, the happy confidant of 
 his joys ! It was in this very room amidst these books which 
 we read together, and which he taught me to love it was here 
 that I passed the happiest hours of my youth. Together we 
 sang the praises of those days of faith and tranquillity, of those 
 safe and happy moments when the pure and beautiful French 
 language, refined taste, and high-bred politeness were the mark 
 and fame of our country, and which have since then ceased to 
 be so." 
 
 She paused, slightly confused by the warmth with which she 
 had uttered the last words. 
 
 I said, merely for the sake of saying something 
 
 " You fully account for the impression often made upon me 
 by your home, and which, at times, took the form of an 
 hallucination an agreeable one, I confess. The internal
 
 1 88 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 appearance, the style, and the whole keeping of the house 
 carried me back so completely for two hundred years, that I 
 should not have been much surprised to have heard Monsieur 
 le Prince, Madame de la Fayette, or even Madame de Se'vigne' 
 herself announced at your drawing-room door." 
 
 " Would to Heaven it could be so ! " said Mademoiselle de 
 Courteheuse. "How I love all those good people! What 
 delightful company they would be ! What pleasure they took 
 in elevated ideas ! How immensely superior they were to the 
 fashionable people of the present day ! " 
 
 I was anxious to try and calm down her enthusiastic retro- 
 spect, so little flattering to my contemporaries and to myself, 
 so I remarked 
 
 "The time you regret certainly had exceptional merits, 
 which I appreciate as fully as you do; but still, we must 
 admit that underneath this society which was so well balanced, 
 so well ordered, and apparently so select, there existed the 
 very same sorrows and disorders as in our own. I see here 
 many memoirs of that time, but, of course, I do not know 
 which of them you have read or not read and consequently 
 I feel slightly embarrassed." 
 
 She interrupted me 
 
 " Oh," she said simply, " I know what you mean quite well. 
 I have not read everything here ; but I have read enough to 
 know that my ancient friends had their passions, their weak- 
 nesses, their errors, just like the people of to-day. But, as my 
 father used to say, all these were founded upon a serious and 
 solid basis, which always righted itself. Great faults were 
 committed, but there was also genuine repentance. There 
 existed an upper sphere, where everything came right in the 
 end even wickedness." 
 
 On its becoming known to Aliette's family that 
 Bernard did not share their form of faith, and
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 189 
 
 was not even a Christian, all thought of marriage 
 between them is opposed. Bernard, on his side, 
 most scrupulous as he is not to encourage the 
 illusion that even such a marriage as this, which 
 he greatly desires, will alter his mind on matters 
 of belief, is nevertheless ready to pledge his 
 honour that he will leave his wife entire liberty 
 there, and will never by word, or action, or 
 innuendo, seek to injure or deflect her mind. On 
 this basis the marriage is agreed upon and takes 
 place. But not until an uncle of Aliette's, a high 
 dignitary of the Church, has given his consent. 
 This in his case rested upon the hope, which he 
 communicated to Aliette herself, that there was 
 no saying what influence such a wife might 
 have. 
 
 Thus those two set out into life ; and we are 
 asked again to confess by the witness of another 
 illustration that two cannot go far together unless 
 they be agreed. 
 
 They make their home in Paris, and there 
 very soon comes the rift within the lute. Aliette 
 tries bravely to live her own life, defending and 
 nourishing her soul, and at the same time to go 
 out with Bernard, meeting the world on its own 
 ground. Bernard sees clearly what it is all costing
 
 190 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 his wife, and in course of time becomes impatient. 
 Now and then he allows some reckless word to 
 escape, for which he never fails indeed to rebuke 
 himself. Aliette likewise, even more scrupulous 
 than he, in terror of losing her husband's love, or 
 of failing in her duty as a wife, makes heroic 
 attempts to compromise with the higher in- 
 sistences of her nature, and steels her spirit to 
 mingle freely in her husband's world, which was 
 just the world. 
 
 But it seemed to her like being on board a sinking ship 
 where the officers instead of doing their duty were making 
 themselves drunk with the crew. 
 
 One day, their conversation having fallen upon the moral 
 condition of the poorer classes, with whom Aliette's charitable 
 disposition brought her into frequent contact, the young wife 
 ventured to say that, unfortunately, lessons in materialism 
 were given to the people only too often by the higher classes 
 of society. 
 
 " You are quite right," said Bernard, " and I really do not 
 know where we are all going to at this rate, nor what terrible 
 things will happen next ; but, as we can do nothing, the best 
 way is not to think about it." 
 
 "Like Louis XV?" replied Aliette. "But are you quite 
 sure that nothing can be done ? Do you not think that the 
 abolition of all religious belief, of all hope beyond this life, of 
 all recourse to God, has a great deal to do with this furious 
 and all-absorbing eagerness for present enjoyment, at which 
 you yourself are alarmed ? " 
 
 "On the contrary, I am convinced of it," said Bernard. 
 " But what then ? What are you driving at ? Is it my fault
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 191 
 
 if the earth turns round ? Is it my fault if unbelief reigns high 
 and low, and invades all classes ? Do you mean to insinuate 
 that I ought to set an example to the people ? An example of 
 what I should like to know, since I believe in nothing ? The 
 example of hypocrisy and sacrilege?" 
 
 Aliette turned very pale and made no answer. 
 
 " My dear," he went on in a hard tone, " you are contending 
 for the impossible. You are a Christian in reality in the 
 midst of a society which is so only in name. You cannot 
 reform the century in which you live. You cannot turn Paris 
 of the nineteenth century into a Port Royal, of which you would 
 be the Mother Angelique. Do for goodness' sake give up the 
 idea ! And especially I beg of you give up the idea of bring- 
 ing me back, me personally, to your way of thinking. You 
 are possessed with the mania of converting me, and, to speak 
 frankly, it annoys me a little, for I am conscious of it under 
 your slightest words and actions. . . . Give up this idea once 
 and for all : do not think about it any more, and you will see 
 what a relief it will be to our two unhappy lives." 
 
 Aliette could only look at him with the tearful, beseeching 
 eyes of some dumb creature at the last extremity. His natural 
 good temper returned to him, and sitting down beside her, he 
 said in a gentler tone 
 
 "I am wrong, dear. As to conversion, one must never 
 despair of anything or anybody. Do you remember Monsieur 
 de Ranee, for instance, who is of our own day ? Well, before 
 becoming the reformer of the Trappists, he had been like my- 
 self, a worldling and a great sceptic, what was then called a 
 libertine. For all that, he became a saint ! It is true that 
 there was a terrible reason. You know what brought about 
 his conversion ? " 
 
 Aliette made a sign that she did not know. 
 
 "Well, he came back to Paris after an absence of some 
 days and found her whom he loved dead . . . her head 
 severed."
 
 192 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 " If I were sure," said Aliette, " that my head would have 
 the same power, I should be glad to die." 
 
 One only needs insight to foresee how things 
 will end. Aliette's health gives way under the 
 strain of this discordant life. On a certain night 
 which brought incidents to which Bernard con- 
 fessed he had no right to expose his wife, Aliette 
 swooned away. It was long before she recovered, 
 and when at length she did regain consciousness, 
 it was to beseech her husband with tears to allow 
 her to live her own life. 
 
 They returned to the country. The days that 
 followed were the happiest she had ever known. 
 The quiet and regularity of her life, the care of 
 Jeanne, her little girl, occupied and soothed her. 
 Bernard too for a time seemed to be satisfied. 
 But soon the weather of his soul changed, and 
 events followed close upon one another towards 
 the catastrophe. Their little daughter fell sud- 
 denly ill of a diphtheria which threatened to 
 carry her off. An operation became immediately 
 necessary. It was too late to bring a surgeon 
 from the city. Bernard \astened to a neigh- 
 bouring house where a stranger, a celebrated 
 doctor, with his niece or cousin, was staying 
 temporarily. This man, Dr. Vallehaut, and his
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 193 
 
 niece, Sabine, returned with Bernard, and the 
 child's life was saved. 
 
 Dr. Vallehaut is a man of science who, like 
 Bernard, has lost all faith in revealed religion; 
 but the absence of faith has not yet robbed his 
 life of ideals. The quest of pure truth, the hope 
 of devoting the results of his research to the good 
 of man, serve in the case of one of his tempera- 
 ment to keep him free from cynicism and any low 
 way of conceiving life. It is left, as we shall see 
 in a moment, to his cousin Sabine to carry out the 
 principles of religious negation to their logical 
 issue in life and action. 
 
 Dr. Vallehaut has still effectively within him- 
 self the moral reminiscences of religion. Sabine, 
 who belongs to the next generation, has no such 
 reminiscences : she is the author's warning of 
 what we are to expect in the second generation 
 of a materialistic and irreligious community. 
 
 But to resume. A friendship as deep as was 
 possible among such discordant people grew up 
 between Aliette and her husband on the one 
 hand, and the Doctor and Sabine. Bernard in 
 particular sees a good deal of the Doctor's cousin, 
 and both of them hover on the edge of folly. 
 
 In consequence doubtless of the strain, Aliette's 
 '3
 
 194 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 health gives way. At first there is no ground for 
 alarm ; the Doctor reassures them and leaves his 
 cousin, who, by the way, is betrothed to him, to 
 act as nurse, her duty being to give the patient a 
 potion at intervals. Aliette, however, does not 
 recover. One day Bernard, taking the potion 
 from Sabine's hand, gives it to his wife, who, as 
 she takes it, looks into his eyes with a searching 
 gaze which almost freezes his blood. She drinks 
 the potion, and next day dies. It had contained 
 aconite, a slow and untraceable poison which had 
 been placed there by Sabine. 
 
 According to his daily custom, Monsieur Vallehaut con- 
 ducted his ward to the door of her room, kissed her forehead, 
 shook her by the hand, and withdrew to his own apartment 
 
 About an hour and a half afterwards, when he thought 
 Sabine would be asleep, Dr. Vallehaut, who had not gone to 
 bed himself, left his room with great caution, went down the 
 long passage and descended the stairs. The candlestick, 
 which he held in his hand, illumined the pallor and contrac- 
 tion of the face. He entered the large room, on the ground- 
 floor, which served him as a drawing-room and library, and 
 from there, raising a heavy tapestry curtain, he passed into the 
 laboratory. He went straight to a kind of sideboard of old 
 oak, which filled up one of the angles of the wall, and in 
 which the dangerous substances which he used in making up 
 his medicines and in his experiments were locked up. This 
 sideboard was fastened by one of those locks which have no 
 key, and of which it is necessary to know the secret combina- 
 tion. After he had turned the revolving plate of the lock, Dr.
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 195 
 
 Vallehaut seemed to hesitate for some seconds before opening 
 the panel of the cabinet; then, with a violent gesture, he 
 opened the panel. His pale forehead immediately became of 
 a livid tint ; in one of the rows of bottles which were ranged 
 on the highest shelf his first glance revealed an empty space. 
 At the same moment there escaped from his agitated and con- 
 vulsed lips a word uttered feebly as a breath 
 
 " Aconite ! " 
 
 All at once it seemed to him that he heard a slight noise in 
 the interior of the house. He extinguished his candle, and 
 listened attentively. A few minutes afterwards, he distinctly 
 heard the gliding of a furtive step, and the rustling of a silk 
 dress in the next room. He went quickly to the door and 
 waited. The night was beautifully fine, and was illuminated 
 by a crescent moon, which threw its white rays across the 
 windows and into the laboratory. The curtain of the door 
 was raised and Sabine appeared ; at the same instant the hand 
 of Dr. Vallehaut was laid heavily upon the arm of his ward. 
 
 The young girl uttered a stifled cry, and in her first alarm 
 dropped a small bottle which fell with a ring on the stone 
 floor. She drew back, and ran into the next room. Near the 
 large centre table she stopped abruptly, and leaning heavily 
 upon it with one hand, she faced her approaching guardian. 
 
 In the library, as in the laboratory, the windows opening 
 into the garden had no shutters, and the polar clearness of 
 the sky spread a half-light in patches across the room. 
 Monsieur Vallehaut could perceive an air of wild bravado 
 on Sabine's face and in her eyes. 
 
 " Unhappy girl," he said to her in a hollow voice, " defend 
 yourself. Say that you have made some mistake ; aconite is 
 also a medicine ; you have seen me employ it, myself, some- 
 times. You have perhaps been imprudent, careless, and you 
 were afraid that I should blame you. That is why you were 
 hiding yourself. Come, speak ! " 
 
 " What is the use ? " she answered, with a disdainful wave of
 
 1 96 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 the hand; "you would not believe me; you do not believe 
 your own words." 
 
 The unhappy man sank down into the easy-chair in which 
 he was accustomed to write, talking aloud to himself in his 
 deep trouble. 
 
 " No," he murmured, " it is true. It would be impossible ; 
 she could not have made so great a mistake ! Alas ! she 
 knew only too well what she was doing. With what infernal 
 skill she chose the poison, the effects of which should imitate 
 the symptoms of the disease itself, be mistaken for them, and 
 aggravate them, very gently, till death resulted ! Yes, it is a 
 crime; an odious, premeditated crime against that gentle, 
 lovable creature ! " 
 
 And after a silence 
 
 " Oh what a miserable dupe I have been ! " 
 
 Then, raising his head towards Sabine 
 
 "Tell me at least that her husband is your accomplice; 
 that it is he who has induced you to commit this infamous 
 deed ! " 
 
 "No," said Sabine, "he knew nothing of it. I love him, 
 and I know that I am loved by him. Nothing more." 
 
 Dr. Vallehaut, after minutes of speechless dejection, resumed 
 firmly, but in a distinctly altered voice 
 
 " Sabine, if you have counted on a criminal weakness on 
 my part, you have not known me ; my duty, from this moment, 
 is to hand you over to justice ; and however horrible such a 
 duty may be, I shall perform it" 
 
 "You will think twice, uncle, before doing so," the girl 
 said coldly, standing on the other side of the table, and facing 
 her guardian, "for if you give me up to justice, if you give 
 society the pleasure of witnessing such a trial in court, you 
 must foresee what the world will say : it will say that I am 
 your pupil, and it will say nothing but the truth ! " 
 
 " My pupil, wretched girl ? Have I ever taught you other 
 principles than those which I practise myself? Have I ever
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 197 
 
 given you, by precept or example, other lessons than those of 
 uprightness, justice, humanity and honour ? " 
 
 " You surprise me, uncle. How is it that such a mind as 
 yours has never foreseen that I might extract, from your 
 doctrines and from our common studies, conclusions and 
 teachings different from those which you drew from them 
 yourself? The tree of science, uncle, does not produce the 
 same fruit upon every soil. You speak to me of uprightness, 
 of justice, of humanity, of honour? You are astonished 
 that the same theories which have inspired you with these 
 virtues have not inspired me with the same ? The explanation 
 is, however, quite simple; you know, as well as I do, that 
 these sham virtues are, in reality, free to be acquired, or 
 not ; since they are only instincts, veritable prejudices imposed 
 upon us by nature, because she requires them for the preserva- 
 tion and the carrying on of her work. It pleases you to 
 submit yourself to these instincts, and it does not please me 
 to do so, that is all." 
 
 " But have I not told you, and repeated to you a thousand 
 times, you wretched creature, that duty, honour, even 
 happiness consisted in submission to these natural, these 
 divine laws ? " 
 
 "You have told me so: you believe it; I believe the 
 contrary. I believe that the duty, the honour of a human 
 being is to rebel against such servitude, to shake off these 
 fetters with which nature, or God, as you like, leads us and 
 oppresses us, in order to make us work, in spite of ourselves, 
 towards an unknown end ; towards a work in which we have 
 no interest. Ah yes ! you have indeed told me, and repeated 
 to me, that for you it was not only a duty, but a joy, to 
 humbly contribute, by your works and your virtues, towards 
 I know not what divine work, I know not what superior and 
 mysterious point, towards which the universe is progressing. 
 But, really, those are pleasures to which I am perfectly 
 insensible. I care very little, I swear to you, to deny myself,
 
 198 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 to force myself to suffer all my life, in order to prepare a 
 state of happiness and perfection for I know not what future 
 humanity a state which I shall not enjoy, festivals to which 
 I shall not go, and a paradise into which I shall have no 
 entrance." 
 
 Under the influence of the emotions which agitated her 
 in this awful moment, her speech, at first calm and icy, 
 became, little by little, more animated, and gradually assumed 
 a character of violent exultation. She had quitted her first 
 attitude, and commenced to walk, with slow steps, from one 
 end of the library to the other, stopping at intervals to 
 accentuate her remarks by an energetic gesture. Monsieur 
 Vallehaut, still motionless in his easy-chair, answered her 
 only by vague exclamations of indignation, and his eye 
 appeared to follow, with an air of stupefaction, this spectral 
 shadow now disappearing in the darkness, now plainly visible 
 in the pale light which came from outside. 
 
 "Must I tell you everything?" she continued. "I was 
 mortally tired : tired of the present, of the past, of the future. 
 The idea of passing my life here, poring over your books 
 or over your furnaces, with the perspective of the final 
 perfection of the universe for my whole satisfaction and for 
 all my comfort, this idea was insupportable to me. Such a 
 life may suffice for a being who is all brain, like you; but 
 for those who have nerves under the skin, blood in the veins, 
 and passions in the heart, never. I am a woman, and I have 
 all the aspirations, all the passions of a woman; these are 
 even more powerful in me than they are in others, because 
 I have neither the superstitions nor the prejudices which, 
 with others, may deaden them. I dreamt of great love, I 
 dreamt of a luxurious life, of amusements, of elegance, in 
 the midst of the pleasures of society. I felt that fate had 
 bestowed on me all the gifts which would enable me to 
 enjoy these things in their fulness, and I was called upon 
 to renounce them for ever. To what end would this in-
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 199 
 
 dependence of spirit which I had acquired have served me 
 then ? Of what use was all my science, if I did not extract 
 from it some opportunity for my ambitions, some weapon for 
 my passions? An occasion presented itself. I loved this 
 man, and I felt that he loved me. I felt that, were he free, 
 he would marry me. And then I did what I have done ! 
 A crime ? Nothing but a word ! What is good, and what 
 is evil? What is true, or what is false? In reality, you 
 know very well that the code of human morality has to-day 
 become nothing but a blank page, on which each one writes 
 what he likes, according to his intellect and his temperament. 
 Individual catechisms are the only ones left to us. Mine 
 is the very same which nature teaches me by her example; 
 she eliminates everything which annoys her with impassible 
 egotism ; she suppresses everything that opposes itself to her 
 aims ; she crushes out the weak to make room for the strong. 
 And be assured, it is not now for the first time that this 
 doctrine obtains with really free and superior minds. It has 
 been said since all time, ' Good people are taken away.' No ! 
 it is the weak ones who disappear, and they only do what is 
 their duty; and when one assists them a little, one only 
 does after all the same thing as God. Read your Darwin 
 over again, my uncle." 
 
 On reading such a passage as that one feels 
 that, far from it being strange and irrational 
 that people should ever have gone to war about 
 religion, the one thing which men might at any 
 time quite justifiably go to war about is just 
 religion and the moral implications of religion. 
 After reading such a passage, and the inferences 
 seem to me to be quite logical, and granted the
 
 2OO 
 
 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 premisses, quite inevitable, one feels that 
 thoroughgoing unbelievers may yet have to be 
 exterminated for poisoning the wells and threaten- 
 ing to bring human life to a standstill. 
 
 After a suitable lapse of time, Bernard marries 
 Sabine ; and once again we have the materials 
 for a tragedy which will balance the earlier one. 
 This later tragedy we shall not pursue. 
 
 A short time only is needed for these two to 
 cease even pretending to respect one another ; 
 and on Sabine's individualistic theories of life, 
 the moment a relationship ceases to bind, it 
 ceases to be binding. They separate. Bernard's 
 heart turns to his little daughter whom he has 
 left with Aliette's mother in the old Chateau. 
 The child is in the care of an old nurse, Victoire, 
 who had been Aliette's nurse. On Bernard's 
 proposing to take away his child, Victoire 
 vigorously objects, saying that if he persists in 
 taking the child, she, Victoire, will then believe 
 what she has not yet allowed herself to believe, 
 that he, Bernard, was an accomplice with Sabine 
 in the poisoning of Aliette. 
 
 The Pope in The Ring and the Book 
 describes how once upon a time he stood in 
 Naples. It was a night of the blackest darkness ;
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 201 
 
 no town, no sea, no sky ! Suddenly there was 
 a lightning flash, by which for one moment he 
 saw everything. Just so did those words of the 
 old nurse light up the mystery of poor Aliette's 
 last days. He remembered her last look, and 
 in that moment something began to break, to 
 melt, to yield within him. 
 
 " She died, believing me guilty ! It is a 
 frightful idea ! I cannot bring myself to think 
 of it ; so fragile, so tender, so gentle a being. 
 Yes, she said to herself, ' My husband is a 
 murderer. What he is giving me to take is 
 poison, and he knows it to be so.' And she 
 died with this thought, her last thought : and 
 never, never will she know that it is not true. 
 O, Lord God Almighty, if You exist, You see 
 what I suffer : have pity on me. Ah, that I 
 could believe that all is not finished between 
 her and myself ; that she sees me ; that she hears 
 me ; that she knows the truth." 
 
 Thus the dead Aliette began her reign. For, 
 as I have said more than once in these studies, 
 we do not know ourselves, and do not know how 
 we shall behave in the great waters. 
 
 The race is older than the individual. It may 
 need some great thing to break up that hard
 
 202 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 crust with which our conventional life overlays 
 and conceals the qualities of our essential and 
 abiding human nature. But life is full of ex- 
 periences, any one of which may become such 
 a ploughshare in the hand of God. 
 
 Bernard, exhausted by grief, fell a prey to 
 disease. Something sinister made its appearance 
 in his throat. Feeling his end draw near, he 
 sent for Aliette's uncle, the Bishop. He wished 
 to die in Aliette's religion. And so she had her 
 way ; or, God had His way through her. 
 
 Here, once again, we have been considering a 
 case which in its essentials need not be at all 
 unusual or curious. It is another illustration, on 
 the testimony and authority of a true imagination, 
 that the human soul moves in an orbit round a 
 central sun, so that at the limit of its apogee it is 
 already coming back. 
 
 Of this also we have had another illustration, 
 namely, that a life of moral disorder is already 
 discovering and creating its own tragedy, out of 
 which it will at length cry out. 
 
 And of this, finally, we have had an illustration, 
 and it prepares us for the studies which shall 
 follow, that for everyone who in this world has 
 wronged another there is but one way back to
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 203 
 
 self-respect, to peace, to God, and it by kneeling 
 in perfect humility before the face, alive or dead, 
 of that one whom he has wronged. 
 
 And there again we enter that Valley of the 
 Spirit, at the head of which and against a 
 wonderful sky, stands for ever the Cross of 
 Calvary. 
 
 IV. THE REDEMPTION OF OUR SOLITUDE 
 (Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw) 
 
 I think we have now abandoned for ever that 
 way of dealing with august and accepted facts of 
 human nature, or of society, which was the first- 
 fruits of the scientific spirit, and remained in 
 vogue until a saner and severer scientific method 
 found it wanting. 
 
 The formula was, to trace some highly de- 
 veloped state of mind or social institution to its 
 primitive and rudimentary form. Then, with an 
 appearance of logic and candid thinking, to leave 
 us to conclude, in the first place, that anything 
 which is so natural must somehow not be authori- 
 tative for man ; and, in the second place, that 
 anything which had such a mean beginning, and 
 which at the outset sustained itself by the help of
 
 204 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 ideas and of a view of life which are no longer 
 possible, cannot be expected to have our moral 
 and intellectual assent in these days when we all 
 know so much. 
 
 The method was always the same. Indeed, I 
 believe its dullness and monotony contributed to 
 its overthrow. It ceased to be interesting. The 
 intention was so obvious, and the process in each 
 case so precisely the same as in every other. It 
 all worked with such neatness and reasonableness, 
 that men's minds began to be quite sure that it 
 was not the whole truth. Man was alleged to 
 have affinities with the lower creatures. It took 
 some time for us to see that this account of man 
 left out any explanation of the very things in man 
 which, as we say, make a man of him. For the 
 decisive thing about man, the characteristic thing, 
 lies, of course, not in those features which he 
 shares in common with lower creatures ; but in 
 those features, those prejudices, and a certain 
 resiliency of spirit, which are entirely his own, 
 and amongst these the indomitable prepossession 
 that he is not a lower creature. When you pro- 
 pose to a company of men to-day that they should 
 regard themselves as mere animals, on the ground 
 that once upon a time they were little if anything
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 205 
 
 better, that company of men may shudder at your 
 words, or they may laugh at you, or, if they 
 happen at the moment to be in one of those fierce 
 moods which descend upon us from time to time, 
 they may even put you to death. And you are 
 bound to explain that shudder, that laughter, and 
 that fierceness in which man separates himself 
 from all other creatures, and reveals something 
 essential and central to his own nature. 
 
 By the same reasoning it was discovered that 
 " morals " was but another word for " manners." 
 The Latin word was given, and we were left 
 with the insinuation that our private and social 
 moralities were simply the strictures which men 
 had placed upon themselves in bygone times in 
 order to dwell together in unity and to hold their 
 own. In any case, these private and social 
 moralities were to be considered as the tene- 
 ments and dwelling-places of the spirit of fear, 
 of physical fear, or of religious fear, and this, of 
 course, had vanished in the general enlightenment. 
 
 We need not, however, further illustrate the 
 method of reasoning, though it was applied in 
 every field, and assailed all the securities for 
 essential human life in our laws and in the 
 Christian faith. The method has been frankly
 
 206 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 abandoned, and in this very sense that it is now 
 employed to support an entirely opposite con- 
 clusion. The fact that man has arisen from lowly 
 conditions, and has improved his status, is now 
 made the basis, not for a contempt of ideals : it 
 has become, on the contrary, the ground of a new 
 rhetoric concerning human nature which may run 
 to its own excess. When we say nowadays that 
 man arose from lowly conditions, we put the 
 emphasis upon the fact that he arose. For if he 
 arose, it was by virtue of something within him 
 which was never satisfied with its achievement at 
 any particular stage, something which made him 
 weary of every resting-place ; and, if he lingered 
 on, that weariness deepened into shame. And 
 so, in our day, man is being conceived as a being 
 who bears within himself a spirit, an .impulse, still 
 fresh and unexhausted, which, simply because it has 
 led him on so far, must continue to lead him on. 
 
 Concerning the true nature of that mysterious 
 urgency, we know apart from the illumination 
 of faith nothing for certain except this, that it 
 compels man onwards, in the line and direction 
 of his earlier progress, never to the denial or 
 frustrating of any moral dignity to which he had 
 attained, but always to some further and finer
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 207 
 
 application of itself. Man's progress, in short, is 
 seen to lie along the line of a fuller expression, 
 of a more sensitive apprehension of a principle 
 of his nature, concerning which no fair-minded 
 observer can be in doubt as to its tendency in 
 past times, and as to the destiny it is seeking to 
 accomplish in the midst of all our failures and 
 protests and secret strife. 
 
 It is true that society might again be convulsed 
 by war, and war of such violence and duration 
 that the more delicate achievements of man's 
 moral sense might be entirely lost. Or there 
 might occur in our day, or in a later time, some- 
 thing which invaded and overwhelmed our heaped- 
 up civilisation, as the Goths and Vandals swept 
 over Europe. 
 
 In such a day, in a sheer struggle for life, the 
 finer things of the soul would shrink back and 
 hide behind the coarse and more necessary 
 faculties. Round the platter of life the tiger in 
 man would whet his teeth anew. The airy fret- 
 work of the spirit, the more exquisite and subtle 
 perceptions and demands, would all go down in 
 that dark day. 1 
 
 1 These two paragraphs were written when the sky in Europe 
 was still as clear as it had been for ten years.
 
 208 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 But, unless that day returns, the moral sense in 
 man will become more and more individual and 
 delicate and subtle. His sins, the failures with 
 which he charges himself, will also become more 
 individual and delicate and subtle. He will 
 arrive at a day in the evolution and refinement of 
 his nature, a day which has in every age dawned 
 upon elect and rarer souls, when he will live by 
 the guidance of secret and spiritual signs, in an 
 intenser solitude, liable to the thrustings and 
 hauntings of most delicate fears, and to the 
 encouragement and appeal of equally intangible 
 approvals : the condition indeed predicted in a 
 verse of a psalm which promises that a day is 
 coming when God will guide people with His 
 eye, by the lights and the shadows, i.e., on His 
 answering countenance. 
 
 And serious men to-day no longer attempt to 
 disparage these delicate and poignant distresses 
 of the soul by recalling the rude restraints and 
 penalties of primitive societies. They rather 
 perceive that this necessity, which from the 
 beginning was acknowledged, this willingness to 
 accept restraint and punishment, bears witness to 
 something in man which is his true and differen- 
 tiating sign.
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 209 
 
 And now, passing by many matters which, 
 strictly speaking, intervene, I propose to bring 
 before our minds one or two further illustrations 
 and corroborations from the more serious literature 
 of our time of the thesis underlying these studies. 
 That thesis I might state in some such words as 
 these : There is a way by which we must go, and 
 that way is, on the whole, the way by which we 
 have come. 
 
 For the modern period, Goethe's Faust is 
 perhaps the classical illustration of a man setting 
 out to test the findings of human wisdom in the 
 region of morals. In Faust you have already 
 those principles of revolt and experiment which 
 reappear in much of our contemporary literature. 
 In Faust, in addition, you have the forecast of 
 what, according to Goethe, who weighed the 
 matter for a whole lifetime, is sure to be the 
 outcome, for the individual and for society, of the 
 application of those principles. 
 
 " Let me have him," said Mephistopheles, 
 "and I pledge me he will eat the dust, and that 
 with joy." Well, eat the dust he did. He 
 marched through blood and rapine to the satis- 
 faction of every appetite. But never with joy, 
 never with a moment of solid peace. " The tiger 
 14
 
 210 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 sleeps when he has devoured his prey, but a man 
 sleeps not after he has sinned." If you retort 
 that, on the contrary, he does sleep, we must 
 answer with all great literature that, in that case, 
 he is not truly a man. 
 
 But it is over a hundred years since Faust 
 was written ; and it may very well be that every 
 age must write its own Faust, as every man 
 has, in fact or in imagination, to enact his own 
 Faust. 
 
 There are three works of the imagination 
 written in our own very language of feeling, and 
 in the light of all that we know who belong to 
 this age. I shall briefly consider them from the 
 point of view of these studies. 
 
 I am thinking of Dostoievsky's Crime and 
 Punishment, Tolstoy's Resurrection, and Bernard 
 Shaw's The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet. 
 
 When men go deeply enough into the human 
 soul, they find the same things : and when they 
 go still more deeply, they find the same thing. 
 That final thing I would call an awful loneliness 
 and sense of God. But not to anticipate. Those 
 three works are three determined experiments in 
 living, determined adventures into the region of 
 ultimate things, and in each case, I hold, the
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 211 
 
 voyaging soul comes upon a limit and barrier in 
 the very nature of things, which limit and barrier 
 is God. Now, in saying that this limit and 
 barrier is God I am not saying something which 
 would be only equal to saying that "X" is "X." 
 I mean something more vital and constructive. 
 I mean that in each of those studies of the soul a 
 man in his passionate progress in one direction 
 encounters a limit and barrier which simply blocks 
 his way. But it is not a wooden barrier, or a 
 stone wall : nor is it merely a precipice beyond 
 which stretches chaos and old night. He is met 
 by a living barrier, by something which has the 
 qualities of a Person, something which has the 
 effect of dealing with him in his despair and 
 bankruptcy, something which can not only stop 
 him but can turn him back. And not only turn 
 him back, as one might come back sullenly and 
 heavily, but turn him back, as in the case of 
 Raskolnikov and Nekhludov, with a strong and 
 sober gratitude to God for the moral inexorable- 
 ness of things : and as in the case of Blanco 
 Posnet, with a shining countenance. 
 
 In Dostoievsky's novel, moral nihilism forms 
 the central theme. The hero of the story is a 
 student whom all kinds of unhappy conditions
 
 212 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 have made miserable and tired of life. In this 
 frame of mind he takes up an attitude of revolt, 
 not merely against the external order, such as 
 social conventions, rights of government, and the 
 rest, but against the entire conception of personal 
 responsibility. All the moral judgments and feel- 
 ings which education has implanted in him now 
 seem to be ridiculous childish prejudices, con- 
 temptible weakness, to emancipate himself from 
 which is the mark of a free and strong mind. 
 Encouraged by such reflections, he kills an old 
 repulsive usuress in order to obtain money, but, at 
 the same time also, to test his own theory, to test 
 this idea which for a long time he had been 
 handling and accustoming himself to, wearing 
 down his own scruples, and working himself up to 
 greater and greater boldness the idea that one 
 only needed to be strong enough and hard enough 
 to go his own way and to prosper. " I wanted to 
 know," he afterwards says in discussing the 
 matter, "whether I was like all of them, merely 
 vermin, or a man ; whether I was able to break 
 through the barriers, or not, whether I would 
 really stoop to gain power, or not ; whether I was 
 merely a trembling creature, or whether I had a 
 right ..." and so on. He commits the crime.
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 213 
 
 No one saw him strike the blow. Besides, she 
 was an old woman, one of a despised race too, 
 and plying a disreputable trade. And these were 
 circumstances which, from the moment after his 
 deed, he had at once to summon to his aid, to 
 keep back the first tricklings of the dark flood of 
 reaction and remorse. 
 
 But he never has an hour's quiet. He must 
 talk. He must talk even to a friend, who as a 
 detective is engaged upon the case. He must 
 set out again and again to see that detective 
 friend, to talk about the case. The police fail. 
 Raskolnikov might have escaped except for 
 himself and the inveterate demand of his own 
 spirit that he shall not be alone, that he shall talk, 
 and, talking, shall speak about the things that are 
 most urgent to himself. Speaking about these 
 things, he cannot hide his feelings, until at last, 
 noticing how it gives him a little happiness even 
 to speak about the case, and a little more happi- 
 ness the more he seems to implicate himself, he 
 one day goes the whole length, and first betrays 
 himself, then confesses everything, and this to 
 an accompaniment of moral happiness and ease so 
 tumultuous and wonderful that he feels that he 
 had never lived until that moment. When he
 
 214 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 confesses his guilt to his friend the detective, the 
 detective only replies, " I knew it all the time. 
 The first day you came to see me, after the crime, 
 I suspected you. When you began to speak of 
 it, I became quite sure. I didn't lay hands upon 
 you, for I knew that you were one of those who 
 would have to come at last ! " 
 
 " When I kept silent," says someone in the 
 32nd Psalm, "my bones waxed old through 
 my roaring all the day long. For day and 
 night Thy hand was heavy upon me. My mois- 
 ture was turned into the drought of summer. 
 I acknowledged my sin unto Thee, and mine 
 iniquity I did not hide. ... I said, Thou art 
 my hiding-place." So speaks a man to the 
 mysterious One who haunts him in the deep 
 places of moral solitude. 
 
 There is another voice from a psalm which 
 I recall : " These things thou hast done and 
 I kept silence. Thou thoughtest that I was 
 altogether such an one as thyself. But I will 
 reprove thee, and set them in order before thine 
 eyes." 
 
 And all great literature seems to have as its 
 burden just this, that such beings we are, and in 
 the hand of such an One.
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 215 
 
 In the last of his greater works Tolstoy has 
 advanced, for those who did not acknowledge the 
 teaching of the New Testament, the moral 
 demand which the human soul must henceforth 
 make of all who would live honourably and at 
 peace with themselves. I do not say that he 
 was the first to proclaim our duty to make re- 
 paration to everyone whom we have wronged. 
 Tolstoy was not the first to say that. It was the 
 greatness of Tolstoy that he was not the first to 
 say anything. Anything that is said for the first 
 time might as well not have been said. It is 
 quite certainly either not true or of no real 
 importance. But it is Tolstoy's greatness, in that 
 late work of his, to have recalled, with a fidelity 
 to the facts of our conscience which is almost 
 intolerably true, the instinct of the soul of man, 
 aroused at length, and indignant at itself, and 
 full of revenge upon itself, the instinct of man 
 to regard himself as no longer belonging to him- 
 self, but to that one, if there be such an one, 
 whom he has pre-eminently wronged. 
 
 There is no doubt whatever that if confession 
 ceases to be in some sense public, it is apt to lose 
 its cleansing quality. If we say "it is enough 
 that we confess to God in secret," the answer is,
 
 216 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 that it is not enough, and was never regarded as 
 enough by finer souls. Besides, it is a bad sign 
 when we take our religion on its lowest terms. 
 It is a bad sign when we wish to get clear of an 
 offence with the least measure of sacrifice. We 
 may, indeed, get off, but we simply get off. We 
 are fixed there. We stand still. 
 
 Again, when we say, defending ourselves, that 
 we are taking the easier way, we must' remember 
 that in morals the easier way is never the higher 
 way. Besides, if we will but attend to the voice 
 of our own soul in the hour when we confess our- 
 selves to God, when we smooth out our secret 
 life to the judgment of the Highest, we shall find 
 that our conscience is not yet appeased. We 
 shall hear an instruction from Him who is behind 
 everything, commanding us, were it only to prove 
 our sincerity, to go out and find him or her whom 
 we have wronged. 
 
 "If thou art offering thy gift at the altar," said 
 Jesus, "and there rememberest that thy brother 
 hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift 
 before the altar, and go thy way : first be re- 
 conciled to thy brother, and then come and offer 
 thy gift." 
 
 It is when we recall the severity of such words
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 217 
 
 and, far from standing alone, they arise out of 
 the whole message of the New Testament that 
 we wonder again how an entire ethical system 
 should have arisen in our day based upon the 
 idea that the ethics of Jesus are too soft and easy. 
 This, though Jesus said more than once that 
 there were circumstances in which a man might 
 find himself when it would be as hard to follow 
 Him as it would be for one to cut off his right 
 hand with his left. 
 
 Prince Nekhludov was summoned to act upon 
 a jury. It was his turn. That is to say, it was 
 one of those apparently casual things which, as 
 we get older, we begin to suspect as having God 
 very emphatically behind them. A prisoner was 
 brought in, charged with murder, and this in 
 circumstances of the utmost degradation. In a 
 moment, as the Bible once again puts it (and if 
 you know the Bible, you simply cannot keep it 
 out of any deep consideration of life), in a 
 moment "a dart struck through his liver." It is 
 Maslova, an orphan, at one time a sweet, warm- 
 hearted girl, who had acted as a kind of com- 
 panion to Nekhludov's aunts. And it was he, 
 Nekhludov, who had led Maslova out upon her 
 disastrous way and had set her face towards hell.
 
 2i8 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 Maslova is condemned, though innocent of the 
 crime, and is banished to Siberia. And Nekhlu- 
 dov accompanies her. A prince, a great landlord, 
 a soldier, sought after by society, and Maslova, 
 one whom he might have dismissed from his 
 mind, if what so many in our day say about the 
 human soul were the whole truth! Nekhludov 
 does not hesitate even for a moment. Maslova 
 has never reproached him. Even when it comes 
 home to her that he is unhappy, and when she 
 understands, first dimly, but at last quite clearly, 
 that in his own feeling and belief Nekhludov can 
 never be at peace until she, Maslova, has forgiven 
 him, and even then that he can never be at 
 peace, she tries to put him off his own terrible 
 seriousness, even saying that for herself it is 
 nothing, and that as for him, he is a prince, and 
 besides, she had loved him in that far-off time. 
 But Nekhludov has seen his way, and for him 
 there is no other. Henceforward, and until God 
 shall release the one or the other from this 
 present world, and even thereafter in the other 
 world, as in Dante's heart-shaking story of Paolo 
 and Francesca, these two must share each other's 
 thoughts, each other's life, and every day and at 
 the last must stand before God hand in hand.
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 219 
 
 This is what I meant when I said that it had 
 been given to Tolstoy to recall man to that 
 demand which conscience makes upon us, not 
 simply that we shall confess our sin, thereby 
 separating ourselves from it, but that we shall 
 make all possible reparation. If there live in the 
 world one whom we have wronged, that one 
 alone has the power to shut us out from heaven. 
 Or rather, let me say, if God should forgive us 
 our sin, it will be our first, and, until it is granted, 
 our only petition, that we be given some task of 
 prostrate love towards that one whom we, either 
 in ignorance or with a high hand, caused to 
 offend. 
 
 Speaking for myself, the terrible moral reality 
 of Tolstoy makes even the Confessions of St. 
 Augustine sound far short of what is possible to 
 the soul of man in the region of moral grief. 
 
 And now I come to a play of Bernard Shaw's, 
 in which we find the soul of a man behaving in 
 precisely the same way as in those two over- 
 whelming stories. 
 
 The scene of the short drama is laid in the far 
 west of America, in the midst of a wild and 
 coarse-living community.
 
 220 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 Blanco Posnet has stolen a horse, and is now 
 standing his trial in a rough-and-ready court, the 
 sheriff and jury being men as wild and un- 
 scrupulous as himself. Though Posnet has been 
 caught, and there is no doubt whatever of his 
 guilt, still it is difficult to bring the crime home 
 to him : for when he was apprehended he was 
 walking on foot, the horse nowhere to be seen. 
 A witness is pressed to give false evidence 
 against him. She has no difficulty. Blanco 
 Posnet behaves all through with an excitement 
 and intoxication which we do not quite under- 
 stand until later. He breaks out into snatches 
 of a hymn, which he allows them to suppose is 
 pure blasphemy, as the censor who interdicted 
 the play evidently considered it to be. And yet 
 it is not pure blasphemy. In a moment of some- 
 thing like tenderness Posnet speaks about a 
 woman and a child, but so indistinctly that his 
 hearers can make nothing of it. He keeps 
 saying: "They were not real," and "I see her 
 whenever I look up." The sheriff and jury are 
 getting tired, and about to execute judgment, 
 when there is a stir at the door, which presently 
 opens. A woman enters, pale and hurried ; 
 whereupon Posnet appeals to the court not to
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 221 
 
 listen to a word she says ; that she is not real, 
 and that it is she whom he sees whenever he 
 looks up. 
 
 But the woman speaks, and we learn the whole 
 truth, the beautiful and even holy truth. This 
 is what had happened. Blanco Posnet, riding 
 off on the stolen horse, had been stopped on the 
 way by a woman, this woman, who at the time 
 was carrying a little child. She besought Posnet 
 to lend her his horse that she might ride to the 
 nearest doctor with her child. For the child 
 was in the grip of a kind of croup. At first 
 Posnet spurns her. Why should he, why should 
 any man, especially in this twentieth century, 
 when so many books have been written to prove 
 that such a thing is absurd, weak, unworthy of 
 the Nietzschean "blonde beast" which is sup- 
 posed to exhaust the qualities of human nature, 
 why should he be interrupted, brought to a 
 standstill, be made tender, be converted, in fact, 
 by this plea of a woman ? And so he tries to 
 push on. But the woman, with the ingenuity of 
 love and of despair, lifts up the child to the man's 
 neck, and Blanco Posnet feels the little fingers 
 playing behind his ears, and in his hair. And 
 with that, something melted, something went
 
 222 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 soft. He let the woman and child ride off with 
 the horse, and he came back to be hanged. 
 And, to the confusion of all those moderns who 
 think that the fashion in morals of a decadent 
 minority can withstand the ancestral voices of 
 the soul, Blanco Posnet is not ashamed of what 
 he has done. Looking round upon that court of 
 wild men and women, he sees that, like himself, the 
 very telling of the story has made them all go soft. 
 " Gosh, when I think that I might have been 
 safe, and fifty miles a/vay by now, with that 
 horse ; and here I am waiting to be hung up and 
 filled with lead ! What came to me ? What 
 made me such a fool ? That's what I want to 
 know. That's the great secret. ... It wasn't 
 a man. . . . He done me out of it. ... He 
 means to win the deal and you can't stop 
 Him. . . . Boys, I'm going to preach you a 
 sermon on the moral of this day's proceedings. . . . 
 I started in to be a bad man like the rest of 
 you. ... I took the broad path because I 
 thought I was a man and not a snivelling, canting, 
 turning-the-other-cheek apprentice angel serving 
 his time in a vale of tears. . . . Why did the 
 child die ? Tell me that if you can. He can't 
 have wanted to kill the child. Why did He
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 223 
 
 make me go soft on the child, if He was going 
 hard on it Himself? Why should He go hard 
 on the innocent kid and go soft on a rotten thing 
 like me ? Why did I go soft myself ? Why did 
 the Sheriff go soft ? Why did Feemy go soft ? 
 What's this game that upsets our game ? For 
 seems to me there's two games bein' played. 
 Our game is a rotten game that makes me feel 
 I'm dirt, and that you're all rotten dirt as me. 
 T'other game may be a silly game ; but it ain't 
 rotten. When the Sheriff played it, he stopped 
 being rotten. When Feemy played it, the paint 
 nearly dropped off her face. When I pi lyed it, 
 I cursed myself for a fool, but I lost the rotten 
 feel all the same. . . . What about the croup ? 
 It was early days when He made the croup, I 
 guess. It was the best He could think of then ; 
 but when it turned out wrong in His hands, He 
 made you and me to fight the croup for Him. 
 You bet He didn't make us for nothing, and He 
 wouldn't have made us at all if He could have 
 done His work without us. By Gum, that must 
 be what we're for! ... He made me because 
 He had a job for me. He let me run loose till 
 the job was ready, and then I had to come along 
 and do it, hanging or no hanging. And I tell
 
 224 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 you, it didn't feel rotten : it felt bully, just bully. 
 Anyhow, I got the rotten feel off me for a minute 
 of my life; and I'll go through fire to put it off 
 me again. . . . There's no good and bad . . . 
 but, by Jiminy, gents, there's a rotten game and 
 there's a great game. I played the rotten game ; 
 but the great game was played on me ; and now 
 I'm for the great game every time. Amen." 
 
 Not a word more shall I say. There is nothing 
 more to be said. 
 
 "When I think that I might have been safe, 
 and fift / miles away by now, with that horse ; 
 and hei e I am waiting to be hung up and filled 
 with le; id ! What came to me ? What made me 
 such a fool ? That's what I want to know. 
 That's the great secret." 
 
 That indeed is the secret. I hold that it is an 
 open secret. I leave my case at that. 
 
 V. HERE AND THERE 
 
 The objection may be taken to these studies that 
 we are dealing with rare and unusual personalities ; 
 that therefore the inferences which we deduce 
 from their behaviour in extremis are good only for 
 them and are not authoritative for average human
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 225 
 
 beings. Well, there are many things to be 
 said by way of answer or qualification to such a 
 criticism. For example, it is surely a presump- 
 tion in favour of the universality which is claimed 
 for these tragic moods and protests, that they 
 awaken a response in the souls of those who 
 choose to come within hearing of them, and that 
 when men are reduced by life to some constraint 
 or fear, the language of great literature becomes 
 their own natural speech. It is not claimed that 
 all men dwell habitually among those deep things. 
 It is not claimed even that all men have had 
 experience of those deep things. What is claimed 
 is that those deep things are there ; that the soul 
 of man is capable of and liable to the vision of 
 those depths ; and that whenever the soul has 
 been thrown back upon itself, and shut in with 
 itself, there are certain persistent fears which 
 present themselves, and a certain course which 
 offers itself as the only possible way of peace. 
 
 The deeper literature of the soul, with a 
 unanimousness which makes it authoritative for 
 many of us, and ought to make it worthy of 
 consideration by all responsible people (the deeper 
 literature of the soul), has given a name and body 
 to those intangible things. 
 '5
 
 226 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 To say that there are many who have never 
 had such feelings is simply to say that their great 
 day, that day on earth wherein the soul rehearses 
 what its behaviour shall be before the Great White 
 Throne, their great day has not yet come. Or 
 it may only mean that they have so far succeeded 
 in escaping from any season of loneliness long 
 enough and acute enough to bring out those 
 lurking shapes. 
 
 Certainly it is no news to those of us who are 
 acquainted with that great body of the literature 
 of the soul, the Bible, to be told that all men have 
 not these tremors and disquietudes. " All men 
 have not faith," said St Paul, meaning, when he 
 wrote the words, this very thing, that all men have 
 not this moral tenderness which keeps us soft 
 towards God. Plato also discriminates between 
 " royal " natures, as he calls them, natures, that is 
 to say, which are liable to waves of contrition, 
 and natures of another kind which, so far as we 
 see, but then in these matters we do not see 
 very far, and can only see for ourselves, live on 
 without ever coming to a day of reckoning with 
 themselves. 
 
 In our own day, William James of Harvard 
 divided all souls into two classes, souls which,
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 227 
 
 with a measure of predestination, are tough, and 
 souls which, by an equal necessity, are tender. 
 
 It is another aspect of the greatness of Jesus 
 that in His view the human soul in its final in- 
 stincts and necessities is one, however certain 
 features may have been heightened or depressed. 
 He believed that the true and final nature of the 
 soul is to seek, and having found, to dwell in 
 communion with, Him whom He called "the 
 Father." He believed that if the Father were 
 brought to the heart of man, as He by His own 
 unstinted life of love was bringing Him, the heart 
 of man in every instance would respond. Not 
 easily indeed. With great difficulty and labour 
 rather, as happens at every new birth. 
 
 But this He did believe, and in this faith He 
 gave Himself without reserve, that there was and 
 is in every human being the capacity for seeing 
 something higher than its own reach at any 
 moment, and that, when the human spirit becomes 
 aware of that Presence of God knocking and 
 waiting at its own very door, there and then 
 begins a controversy between impulses which, 
 whatever be the issue, makes the man morally 
 self-conscious and a party to his own fate. 
 
 Whether or not all men are ultimately liable to
 
 228 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 the miseries which follow wrong-doing, or to the 
 shame and sorrow which afflict souls of a certain 
 kind when they see themselves in the light of 
 some holier way, is a matter so serious that it is 
 wiser not to dogmatise upon it. It must be left 
 to ourselves one by one to say whether we have 
 such feelings, or do not have them. It may be 
 that once upon a time we did have them. But 
 they do not trouble us now. In that case, we 
 ought to ask ourselves whether we dealt honour- 
 ably by them when they visited us, or whether 
 we tampered with the delicate mechanism of our 
 spiritual life and trampled down the secret barriers 
 of God. 
 
 Once again it may be said that all this agonis- 
 ing over one's ways has lost its reason and 
 foundation by the work, in various fields, of the 
 scientific method. If moral grief appears to-day 
 in literature or in life, it is a reminiscence from 
 pre-scientific times. In short, to recall the phrase 
 with which these studies began " no one to-day 
 is worrying about his sins." Well now, let me say 
 one or two things just there. 
 
 It is probably quite true that in our day the 
 sense of sin is much fainter than it has been ; for 
 the sense of God may not be so strong as it has
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 229 
 
 been. The sense of sin is the shadow of the sense 
 of God ; and a dim light casts no shadow. It is 
 the bright shining of a light which discovers us to 
 ourselves. It is inevitable that in a society which 
 is without moral seriousness, the individual, if he 
 does not summon himself each day before a higher 
 court, will come more and more into equilibrium 
 with his surroundings. But this is not to say that 
 he has lost the power to feel the misery of his own 
 way, if the higher way should be revealed to him. 
 And besides, populous and confusing as is the 
 general life in these days, one's soul is always 
 distinct to itself and keeps urging its own business 
 upon each one's attention. It is true that there 
 are many ways by which we may for a time 
 escape from ourselves. We may even train our 
 mind to an extraordinary pitch of ingenuity for 
 escaping seriousness. And yet all the time we 
 know that we are merely evading something, we 
 know that we are living by our wits. It is not 
 without significance that the best-known poem 
 of Francis Thompson should be " The Hound of 
 Heaven." It but shows that there the poet had 
 revealed the thoughts of many hearts. 
 
 So long as a man believes himself, he will 
 believe in the unhappiness of wrong-doing, and he
 
 230 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 will know precisely wherein for him wrong-doing 
 consists. It is when we cease to believe ourselves, 
 and begin to believe other people ; it is when we 
 take our eyes off our own case and let them 
 wander carelessly upon the general life ; it is when 
 we say, "Why should I trouble myself, in this 
 busy city where the crowds are passing to and fro, 
 and where other people are not troubling them- 
 selves ? " it is then and thus that we escape the 
 very issue which bears witness to our moral worth 
 in the world. Now the fact is that those crowds 
 who help us to get over our own scruples are made 
 up of individuals like ourselves, who, so far as we 
 know, are doing precisely what we are doing, 
 avoiding the challenge of some personal question 
 by looking out upon what seems the fashion 
 or custom. So long as we keep our eyes upon 
 ourselves we feel we must decide something, 
 whereas when we look away from ourselves and 
 begin to speak about the spirit of the time, about 
 progress, about enlightenment and so forth, we 
 begin to feel that everything has already been 
 decided, and decided in a way that falls in very 
 happily with our own inclination. 
 
 But once again it is simply not true, if one may 
 judge from the best writing of our own time,
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 231 
 
 that man has found a formula for the silencing 
 of those ancient voices of the soul. Book after 
 book has appeared in our day, where one might 
 even say the author has tried to prove a case 
 against the established moral habit and prejudice. 
 He has launched a human being out upon life on 
 some principle which is against the social tradi- 
 tion. And yet I know of no single case where 
 the end is not bitterness. I know of no case in 
 any piece of serious literature where a person, 
 or persons, who flout the accepted morality in 
 fundamental things, gain happiness : I mean, of 
 course, such a happiness as they themselves can 
 bear to think about and to look back upon. 
 You may say, indeed, that the reason for this 
 is, that society itself is so constituted, so hide- 
 bound by conventionality, so timid, so insincere 
 and hypocritical, that souls who will be free must 
 suffer. But that is not my point. That men 
 suffer at the hands of society is, of course, no 
 proof that they are wrong. It may be proof 
 that society is wrong. It is true likewise that 
 it will only be by the faithful endurance of suffer- 
 ing at the hand of society that society itself will 
 be renewed. It would be no disparagement of 
 a life's principles that they nailed a man to a
 
 232 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 cross ; but it is a disparagement of a life's 
 principles that they lead on to private misery, 
 that they provoke an invincible reaction towards 
 shame and bitterness. And that is what I find 
 in every sincere piece of writing in which the 
 dice are not loaded, in which, I mean to say, 
 the writer obeys with fidelity the logic of his 
 own imagination. The thing in the long run 
 does not work. Not only does it not work, and 
 will it not work, on the large scale as a social 
 habit ; it does not work in the kingdom of a 
 man's own spirit. If you still protest that this 
 liability to remorse, this tendency of self-seeking 
 to leave the taste of ashes in the mouth, is simply 
 the reminiscence in our blood of barbarous and 
 hideous social retributions before these days of 
 enlightenment, once again you leave the real 
 issue untouched. For human nature is just that 
 thing which has come down through history 
 bearing within itself those profound and terrible 
 susceptibilities. 
 
 But it is not enough to say that this misery 
 which free spirits cannot escape is the reminis- 
 cence of the social penalties of earlier times, or 
 that it is the effect of the attitude of society 
 to-day towards one who violates its conventions.
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 233 
 
 Society has not the power to cause moral misery. 
 Society has the power to inflict penalty ; society 
 has not the power to make one ashamed of him- 
 self. There is a quality of misery which I alone 
 can bring upon myself, and it arises when at 
 length I have come within sight of a way of 
 living which makes the way I have come seem 
 unworthy, or cruel, or sensual, in any case 
 intolerable. 
 
 So long as my own heart does not reproach 
 me, so long as, in the fine speech of the Bible, 
 I can lift up my face to God without spot, I 
 may suffer, I may be forsaken, but, deeper than 
 everything, I ought to be at peace, my heart 
 should be free of even one drop of bitterness. 
 I ought, indeed, to be contemptuous of a society 
 or of a generation which is so blind as not to 
 see the glory of the way which I have chosen. 
 Suffering, indeed, is no proof that a man's life- 
 principles are at fault ; the society which inflicts 
 the suffering, or stands by while it is being 
 endured, may be at fault. In such a case, the 
 man's life-principles, though they are opposed 
 to the principles of his day, may all the time 
 be in harmony with the principles of a day that 
 is coming. But misery, the taste of ashes in
 
 234 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 the mouth, personal shame, the sense of world- 
 weariness, these, when they follow upon some 
 way of life, and when they arise in the human 
 heart out of some way of life, do demonstrate 
 that that way of life is contrary to the man's 
 own true nature and spirit. For a way of life 
 which destroys the very principles of human 
 nature cannot be according to the nature of 
 things. 
 
 " And so," I said, " Good-bye to London ! " We said no 
 more, but watched the South-side streets below bright 
 gleams of light and movement, and the dark, dim, monstrous 
 shapes of houses and factories. We ran through Waterloo 
 Station, London Bridge, New Cross, St. John's. We never 
 said a word. It seemed to me that for a time we had 
 exhausted our emotions. We had escaped, we had cut our 
 knot, we had accepted the penalty. That was all settled. 
 That harvest of feelings we had reaped. I thought now 
 only of London, of London as the symbol of all we were 
 leaving and all we had lost in the world. I felt nothing 
 now but an enormous and overwhelming regret. . . . Then 
 suddenly, stabbing me to the heart, came a vision of 
 Margaret's tears and the sound of her voice ... I came 
 out of a cloud of thoughts to discover the narrow compart- 
 ment with its feeble lamp overhead, and our rugs and hand- 
 baggage swaying on the rack, and Isabel, very still in front 
 of me, gripping some wilting red roses tightly in her bare 
 and ringless hand. 
 
 For a moment I could not understand her attitude, and 
 then I perceived she was sitting bent together with her head 
 averted from the light to hide the tears that were streaming
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 235 
 
 down her face. She had not got her handkerchief out for 
 fear I should see this, but I saw her tears, dark drops of tears 
 upon her sleeve. 
 
 For a time I stared at her and was motionless in a sort 
 of still and weary amazement. Why had we done this 
 injury to one another? Why? Then something stirred 
 within me. 
 
 " Isabel," I whispered. 
 
 She made no sign. 
 
 " Isabel ! " I repeated, and then crossed over to her, crept 
 closely to her, put my arm about her, and drew her wet 
 cheek to mine. 
 
 So ends a great modern story. But surely 
 this sad way is the wrong way. It is not that 
 they are suffering which proves that they are 
 wrong. Their chief suffering is that they know 
 that they are wrong. 
 
 "Sail in there," cried an old admiral, when 
 the fight had gone against him, "sail in there; 
 for I have taken the soundings, and when they 
 sink my ship, the flag at the mast-head will still 
 be flying." That is the language of a man whose 
 heart is with him in the deep waters. But " wet 
 cheeks, silence, wilting red roses" these are 
 signs that their own heart has gone out of the 
 business. 
 
 The last thing about us is that we are not 
 alone. When we look long and deeply into
 
 236 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 ourselves, we perceive that we stand for ever 
 in a relation to Another, to an Absolute and 
 close-fitting Personality. We can no more think 
 of ourselves as quite alone and independent than 
 we can think of space except as being surrounded 
 by space, and of time except as surrounded by 
 time. Whatever may be the truth in regard 
 to other races, it is true with regard to us, that 
 the only God with whom we have to do is the 
 God of our fathers. We can free ourselves from 
 the bondage of one aspect of His nature only 
 by appealing to another aspect, which we claim 
 as belonging still more properly to Him, more 
 central and abiding. 
 
 I do not know how better to describe the 
 private misery which, on the witness of all great 
 literature, has been let loose in men's hearts by 
 certain ways than to say, that it is the experience 
 by us of an intolerable loneliness. We can all 
 of us endure loneliness in one region of our life, 
 so long as we are sustained by friendliness and 
 belief in us, in another region deeper and more 
 intimate. We can bear to be misunderstood by 
 those who do not know us, so long as we are 
 supported by the love, or, if need be, by the 
 patience of those who know us to some depth.
 
 SENSE OF SIN IN GREAT LITERATURE 237 
 
 And even when friends forsake us, when the 
 one or two on whom we leaned fall away, if we 
 can still without conscious self-deception send 
 our soul more deeply into itself and there find 
 comfort and no embarrassment ; if, to use 
 language concerning matters about which 
 language fails, we can look across the frontier 
 of our own personality and truly believe that 
 we are not outcasts or outlaws from the Kingdom 
 of God, we may surfer, we will suffer, but we 
 have not failed, and we are not unhappy. The 
 Spirit beareth witness with our spirit that we 
 are sons of God. But, if it is otherwise with 
 us, if when we descend into ourselves for solace 
 we find none ; if, when we would lean upon our 
 last Resource and make our protest from the 
 judgment of the world to Him who knows every- 
 thing, if there and then we are alone ; if the 
 Face we plead with seems to be turned away 
 from us, we have come, I think, upon that 
 final silence and disapproval from which there 
 is no appeal. 
 
 This was an idea which more than once our 
 Lord dwelt upon. In some of His gravest words 
 He warned men that the penalty for certain 
 courses was not the pain which they entailed
 
 238 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 The true penalty was the consequence, and 
 that consequence was that one day they should 
 be left out of something. It might be the society 
 of men. It might be the friendship of those who 
 had been dear to them. It might even be the 
 Fellowship of God. 
 
 And the great cries of the soul in literature 
 and in life are the cries of those who are afraid 
 of that loneliness, or who already are tasting the 
 bitterness of it.
 
 VII 
 
 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF ? JULIAN 
 THE APOSTATE" 
 
 A PARALLEL 
 
 I BE LI EVE that when we get far enough away 
 from the present terrible state of things to 
 reflect upon how it all came about, we shall 
 perceive that what we witnessed was a deliberate 
 attempt to find a basis other than the traditional 
 Christian basis for human life, and the difficult 
 overthrow of that attempt. Certainly it was as 
 I was reading the terrifying political literature of 
 modern Germany, its Bernhardi, and Treitschke, 
 and, earlier and greater, its Nietzsche, and even 
 such frank and casual obiter dicta as we have in 
 Count von Buelow's The German Empire, that 
 there kept coming back upon my mind the idea 
 that I had read all this before, that once before 
 positions of the kind had been advanced, that
 
 240 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 once before Christianity had been rejected by the 
 great ones of the earth, that once before the 
 attempt had been made to remove the Christian 
 basis from an entire Empire, and to revert to 
 what was believed to be a manlier and more 
 reasonable foundation ; and that that attempt 
 had dramatically failed. When, in one of those 
 terrifying German books, terrifying as a thing 
 is terrifying which reappears when we were all 
 supposing that we were done with it for ever, I 
 read that the world-struggle which was imminent 
 was, in spirit, a struggle between " Corsica and 
 Galilee," the phrase brought clearly to my mind 
 the parallel I had been thinking of. 
 
 I had been thinking of " Julian the Apostate." 
 That word " Galilee " had brought back to my 
 mind the fine story which is really too good not 
 to be true : " Thou hast conquered, O Galilean," 
 with which, if I can order my way, I shall con- 
 clude. 
 
 This war which is upon us is too big a thing to 
 have had a merely local and accidental origin. 
 Of every great war we may say with St. Paul 
 that it is not "a conflict with mere flesh and 
 blood, but with the despotisms, the Empires, the 
 forces that control and govern this dark world
 
 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF? 241 
 
 the spiritual hosts of evil arrayed against us in a 
 heavenly warfare." 
 
 What terrified the Early Church in Julian's 
 movement is what sends the cold waves down 
 my back as I read the literature in which, as it 
 appears, modern Germany has uttered and re- 
 inforced her soul. The Early Church had had 
 experience of cruel emperors and of bad people 
 generally. But while she was suffering contempt 
 and persecution at their hands, the Church could 
 comfort herself by two lines of reflection. For 
 one thing, she felt in her soul that persecution and 
 the world's contempt were keeping the fire of her 
 own faith clean and passionate. And for another 
 thing, she could always say with her Master, 
 " Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
 they do." 
 
 But face to face with the movement under 
 Julian she was deprived of these resources. For 
 Julian knew a great deal about Christianity. He 
 thought he knew everything about it, and he did 
 know all that an extremely able and sensitive 
 man may know about something in which, never- 
 theless, he does not believe. It was, he pretended, 
 because he knew what Christianity was, and 
 
 because he observed its influence, that he was led 
 16
 
 242 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 to the rejection of it as a private faith, or as a 
 basis for society on the large scale. 
 
 And again, his rejection of Christianity was 
 something altogether different from anything the 
 Church had experienced. Julian did not propose 
 to persecute Christians. In fact, he did not 
 propose to take Christianity seriously. In my 
 own view, a man is not taking Christianity 
 seriously who is merely prepared to tolerate it ; 
 who will even admit that it is true enough in 
 certain cases, and for certain people, but is not 
 the truth, is not the express will of God. 
 
 What made Julian's rejection of Christianity so 
 unusual was, that Julian was a sincerely religious 
 man. His gods were the old gods of Greece and 
 Rome, the symbols of strength and beauty. That 
 whole region in which Christianity moves 
 including its ideas of sin, penitence, forgiveness, 
 pity, the spiritual advantage of poverty and weak- 
 ness all that was obnoxious to him. Had Julian 
 been a private citizen he would probably have 
 done nothing more than write some tracts against 
 the entire Christian scheme as indeed he did. 
 Being the brilliant man he was, and an emperor 
 to boot, the movement which he inaugurated 
 became so thorough, its principles received such
 
 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF? 243 
 
 prestige and outward expression, that the episode 
 of Julian forms one of those recurring crises of 
 history in which two formulas for life struggle 
 for the mastery, and one or the other must accept 
 defeat. In the fourth century it was Julian who 
 was overthrown. 
 
 I take courage from the sign. 
 
 There are two views of history which have had 
 their advocates. There is the view that strong 
 personalities create events ; and there is the view 
 that, on the other hand, strong personalities are 
 themselves simply the expression of the world- 
 spirit, the dlan vital, the soul in things, which, 
 blindly, or with its own intention, is for ever urging 
 its way. There is something attractive in either 
 theory : the truth includes both. There does 
 seem to be an element of what we call accident in 
 history a man of a certain type appearing at a 
 certain time which gave him his very stage and 
 opportunity. And yet at the same time, when 
 one ponders an age deeply, say the age of 
 Napoleon, or the present crisis, one feels that for 
 a long time forces had been gathering beneath 
 the surface which had to find some outlet through 
 persons and events. History is organic. There 
 is a background and soil which give the figures
 
 244 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 on the stage their milieu. Without that back- 
 ground the figures would be irrelevant and futile. 
 Without those figures the background would be 
 voiceless and featureless, like a dull sea or a desert 
 of sand. 
 
 It is an absolutely sound thing to say that if 
 any one element had been different in the age of 
 Julian, everything would have been different. If 
 the Christian Church of the fourth century had 
 been more Christian, more unmistakable, less 
 corrupt, Julian's movement would not have been 
 called for. If Julian had been, in the depths 
 of his own soul, a Christian, he would have set 
 himself to cleanse the Augean stables, instead 
 of blaming Christianity for the immoralities, and 
 insincerities, and hypocrisies with which he saw it 
 associated. As it was, he saw Constantius, his 
 uncle, the secular head of the Church, receiving, 
 though a murderer, honours which should be re- 
 served for saints. But there is no end to the " ifs 
 and ans " which we can imagine, any one of which 
 might, we suppose, have averted this particular 
 crisis. Just as we might speculate, with Carlyle, 
 as to what course the history of Europe would 
 have taken if Louis XVI. had not waited for that 
 yellow Berline in which to escape from Paris, or
 
 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF? 245 
 
 if it had not gone quite so slowly, or if a dissatis- 
 fied Frenchman had not happened to see the face 
 of Louis through the window, and gone ahead to 
 arrange for his apprehension. Or what course 
 would the history of England and of America 
 have taken if Oliver Cromwell had sailed for New 
 England, as at one time he intended? 
 
 Interesting as such speculations are, I feel that 
 we are secularising history when we make too 
 much of them. Behind all those things which we 
 call accidental we seem to be aware of something 
 solemn and inevitable which, had this or that 
 failed, would have found some other way of 
 achieving substantially the same result. 
 
 Take the present crisis. Whilst we must take 
 care how we say that war was inevitable, lest 
 we should be understood to mean that we are 
 all puppets in the hands of a kind of Ironical 
 Devil, nevertheless we may say that, given cer- 
 tain things and certain persons, given Bismarck, 
 and Nietzsche, and those others whom I have 
 named, given that these men have dominated 
 without rebuke the fluid spirit of a people, given 
 forty years of increasing prosperity, in which 
 their chosen principles seem never to have failed, 
 and it was inevitable that soon or late that
 
 246 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 people should attempt a colossal application of 
 the spirit and policy which had carried them 
 thus far. 
 
 Julian challenged the nature and disposition of 
 things as he had found them, and in the day of 
 his overthrow he discovered that Christianity, 
 once operative in human affairs, remains for ever 
 a standard and rebuke. Modern Germany, on 
 her own witness, is out to-day to assail the 
 accepted nature and disposition of things ; and 
 I believe she also is about to learn that there 
 are words which, having once been spoken, can 
 never be forgotten, that there are ideas which, 
 having for ages held sway in the name of God 
 over man's natural wildness and excess, cannot 
 be repudiated without bringing on a day of such 
 darkness, that it will appear to be the end of the 
 world, and indeed will be the end of man as we 
 had come to know man, and, on the whole, had 
 come to love him. 
 
 Again and again, in my reading of the literary 
 and philosophical work which lies at the back of 
 German political action, I have had the same 
 feeling as I am conscious of in reading about 
 Julian. Again and again I find myself in entire 
 agreement with charges which Germany and
 
 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF? 247 
 
 Julian alike make against things as they are. 
 Julian hated the slovenliness and want of erect- 
 ness and thoroughness amongst Christians, just 
 as Germany hates and despises the sentimentalism 
 and social indolence of all nations not Teutonic. 
 Both Germany and Julian associate this indolence 
 and effeminacy with Christianity as popularly 
 understood. Therefore, in the case of both, their 
 polemic against Christianity has long since got 
 beyond the denial of the metaphysical doctrines 
 of the faith, and beyond the denial of the claims 
 of the personalities of the faith. They have both 
 moved right on to the rejection of the ethic and 
 personal habit of Christianity, as being contrary 
 to reason and unequal to the demands of life. 
 
 Now, with much of this criticism we should all 
 do well to agree, even though we are aware that 
 it is based upon a misunderstanding of true 
 Christianity. In fact, the mistake which Julian 
 made, and which representative writers of Ger- 
 many have made, is the commonplace mistake 
 of refusing Christianity because of the low level 
 in moral energy of an enormous number of people 
 who profess it. Their reasoning is not so crudely 
 expressed as this, but essentially it is not different, 
 that, since the Latin races, let us say, are easy-
 
 248 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 going, sentimental, lazy, not very clean, all this is 
 due to their traditional piety, which encourages 
 such ways of living, which certainly does not 
 rebuke such ways of living. Our proper attitude 
 towards such a criticism, if we are wise, is not to 
 say there is nothing in it, but to admit that there 
 is a great deal in it ; thereupon we ought to show, 
 by the way we address ourselves to the removal of 
 unworthy features, that these unworthy features 
 are not due to our Christianity, but survive, in 
 spite of our Christianity, the not yet transformed 
 qualities of our hereditary human nature. 
 
 For example, and these are the matters to 
 which we shall attend when this war is over, 
 it is a shocking fact that there should be such 
 poverty and squalor in a land like our own, in 
 which, to say no more, the religion of Jesus, with 
 its demand for justice as well as for pity, is the 
 acknowledged religion of the State. But to reject 
 Christianity because of those very things from 
 which Christ came into the world to deliver us, 
 is on a level with rejecting a gold currency be- 
 cause there are in circulation many counterfeit 
 coins. 
 
 Julian and these German philosophers charge 
 Christianity with ministering to certain undesir-
 
 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF? 249 
 
 able human instincts, and with undermining the 
 strength and hardihood of people. Well, we 
 must not be astonished. George Eliot, once 
 upon a time, said that the ethics of Jesus were 
 effeminate ; and this although the symbol of Chris- 
 tianity is a cross ; and although Jesus declared 
 more than once that in order to follow His way, 
 it would take as much out of a man as it does to 
 cut off your left hand with your right ; that you 
 might be compelled to pluck out your own eye 
 rather than go one step further on your way once 
 known to be wrong. 
 
 The fact is, it may not be, and it is not, Christ 
 that these men impugn, but the more-than-half 
 worldly and accommodating and unreal thing 
 which has been allowed to take the name of 
 Christianity. It ought never to be possible, as 
 it was in Julian's day, and as it must be in our 
 day, otherwise the thing would not have 
 occurred, to criticise Christianity in the name 
 of a higher and more wholesome way of living. 
 And the answer to all such criticism is, not to 
 write a book in defence of Christian doctrine, or 
 of Christian ethics in the abstract, but to manifest 
 a life in ourselves, and as Christians to organise 
 such a life of health and moral energy in the
 
 250 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 State, that such criticisms shall fail because of 
 their sheer unreality and irrelevance. 
 
 The truth is, as every serious student of his- 
 tory has confessed, including the devout Catholic, 
 Dante, when Constantine made Christianity the 
 religion of the State, he almost extinguished it. 
 Constantine, whom it takes a singular want of 
 humour to consider a Christian at all, issued the 
 edict making Christianity the religion of Rome, 
 in 306. Julian became Emperor of Rome in 361. 
 And in that interval of fifty years Christianity 
 had simply touched bottom. Constantine, wish- 
 ing to use the Church for his own purposes, to 
 make it an instrument of power, gave it wealth 
 and privileges, thus radically transforming it. 
 "It was no longer that religious brotherhood, 
 composed of poor and humble people, often per- 
 secuted, without worldly influence, and content 
 with the simple worship celebrated in obscure and 
 private dwellings. Triumphant Christianity felt 
 the need of imposing itself on the multitude by 
 means of a luxury that attracts, and legends that 
 strengthen the faith. In its evolution it profited 
 by the spirit of the times ; in contact with pagan- 
 ism it became worldly, and acquired many pagan 
 habits. Hence the pomp, the luxury, and the
 
 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF? 251 
 
 numerous hierarchies that were prevalent in the 
 fourth century. The liturgy was developed, and 
 by means of the councils dogmas were formulated 
 and defended with the greatest ardour. The life 
 of the clergy and the bishops no longer resembled 
 that of the primitive Church. It became corrupt 
 and luxurious. Ammianus describes the bishops of 
 the cities, who, 'enriched by the gifts of the matrons, 
 drove around the streets, seated in coaches ; splen- 
 didly attired, and lovers of abundant banquets, 
 surpassing those of the Imperial table.' 
 
 " As long as Christianity was compelled to use 
 all the strength of a minority in resisting persecu- 
 tion, it was a powerful moral force with men and 
 developed in them sentiments of heroic virtue. 
 But Christianity, when victorious, rested quietly 
 in security and peace, leaving man free to return 
 to the indulgence of his passions and to devote to 
 evil all the energies that were no longer engaged 
 in the supreme combat." 
 
 It may be wrong in reason for Germany, as 
 for Julian, to attribute to Christianity vices which 
 are indeed contradicted by Christianity ; but the 
 proper answer is not to dispute such logic, but 
 to remove such facts. 
 
 What I mean by much that has gone before,
 
 252 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 from which I now pass, is simply this, that if 
 Christianity had been more vital, more real, more 
 obviously mastering the minds of men, Julian the 
 Apostate would have had no case, and the char- 
 acteristic teaching of Germany, which has found 
 its occasion in this European crisis, would never 
 have found a hearing. It is thus that we are all 
 to blame. We have all of us in various ways 
 allowed men to misunderstand Christianity. 
 Christianity does not make men prostrate. It 
 offers to men who acknowledge themselves 
 prostrate a basis on which to recover their self- 
 respect. Christianity is a faith for the poor and 
 the defeated, for the halt and maimed and blind. 
 But its whole object is to make men of us all, 
 to give us the victory over disabling things, to 
 make the blind see, and to restore the lame to 
 the ranks. It is a charge against Christianity 
 which can quote many things in its support, that 
 it has been construed as encouraging blindness 
 for the sake of blindness, and poverty for the 
 sake of poverty, and a suffused incompetence and 
 imbecility as though these were the marks of the 
 children of God. 
 
 But to proceed, let me say something more 
 definite of Julian, who, after all, is my subject,
 
 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF? 253 
 
 though I have confessed that I chose him on a 
 pretext. He was born in the year 331 of our 
 era. Constantine, called the Great, who almost 
 ruined Christianity by making it the religion of 
 the State, was his uncle. This gave Christianity 
 a bad chance with the young man Julian. We 
 all of us begin by taking our ideas of religion 
 from one or two people whom we happen to 
 know very well. It is therefore not to be 
 wondered at that Julian suffered all his life from 
 a perverse and uncomprehending attitude towards 
 the Christian religion. The next Emperor, 
 Constantius, was no better than Constantine. 
 Constantius murdered Julian's mother. You 
 cannot be astonished, therefore, that from the 
 dawning of his intelligence Julian was disposed 
 to think the worst of Christianity. Indeed, just 
 as in the course of a long reading on Nietzsche 
 I cannot recall his ever having met a truly good 
 and able Christian man, but only Christian 
 courtiers and worldly-wise men, neither can I 
 recall any hearty and fine friendship that Julian 
 ever had with an able and good man, who was 
 at the same time a Christian. Both Nietzsche 
 and Julian judged of Christianity by some 
 wretched examples of men.
 
 254 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 Julian was a child of genius. Even the 
 accounts of him which we have from Gregory of 
 Nazianzus, who was his exact contemporary, 
 cannot conceal the Emperor's eminent and un- 
 usual qualities. He was nervous, restless, many- 
 sided ; a great soldier, who, in a brilliant 
 campaign, overcame the Gauls, against whom 
 Constantius had sent him in the hope that there 
 he would find a grave. But far from that, the 
 Gauls, whom Julian overcame, rallied to his 
 standard, proclaimed him Emperor, and fought 
 under his eye from that day until the day when, 
 in the retreat from Ctesiphon, he fell under the 
 javelin of a Persian. It is said that so resourceful 
 and various was Julian, that he could at one 
 moment write a report, dictate another, and listen 
 to a third. He was a poet, a writer of essays, a 
 priest of the gods, deeply versed in the occult. 
 We have an account of him from Gregory, pre- 
 judiced indeed, but full of insight. It was 
 written after the death of Julian, and when the 
 Empire, which for a short time had withdrawn its 
 public support from the Church, had returned to 
 the ordinance of Constantine. 
 
 " I was not favourably impressed with the 
 jerking motion of his neck," says Gregory, "the
 
 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF? 255 
 
 shifting shoulders, the roaming eyes, that turned 
 from one side to another, having in them some- 
 thing of the maniac ; the unsteady shaking feet, 
 which seemed unable to support his weight, his 
 nostrils dilated with pride and disdain, the linea- 
 ments of the face ridiculous and conceited, the 
 immoderate and sudden laugh ; the gestures of 
 assent and dissent without reason ; questions 
 confused and irrelevant, the answers no better, 
 intermingling the one with the other, without 
 order or reason." 
 
 But that, I repeat, is the report of a good but 
 properly prejudiced man. In any case, Julian 
 died at thirty-two : so we must be charitable. 
 Men of genius who die at thirty-two are not 
 to be estimated by the headlines of copy-books. 
 He was Emperor for only two years, and in 
 that time, to say no more, he marched at the 
 head of conquering armies from France to 
 Persia. 
 
 The hostility to Christianity which, until he 
 ascended the throne, he concealed, went on 
 deepening thereafter until the end. It is difficult 
 to see how a man of Julian's ability could be so 
 unfair, so blind to the idealism of Christianity, so 
 unable or unwilling to discriminate between the
 
 256 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 hypocrisies which throve in a Church because it 
 was fashionable and worldly, and the essence of 
 the whole matter, which he might have found 
 by a study of the Gospels. He was able enough 
 and philosophic enough to discriminate between 
 the pure ideas underlying the stories of the gods 
 and those stories themselves. And yet I cannot 
 find in Julian even one sentence in which he 
 lashes professing Christians for their disloyalty 
 to their own master, such, for example, as I 
 recall in the noble and pathetic words of Nietzsche : 
 " There has been only one Christian in this world, 
 and He died on Calvary." 
 
 The fact is, there is a type of mind which 
 becomes positively furious at the whole body of 
 Christian ideas. W. E. Henley, in our own day, 
 seems to me to have had the kind of mind I 
 mean. They cannot, or will not, it is the same, 
 see anything except a wretched cringing and 
 cowardice in the cry for forgiveness. And any- 
 one who confesses to this particular need becomes 
 to them, there and then, almost nauseous, as 
 Robert Louis Stevenson became to Henley. 
 They cannot understand that in seeking forgive- 
 ness from God, a man, far from running away 
 from the consequences of his actions, is trying to
 
 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF? 257 
 
 face them, to stand up to them. He is not asking 
 God to let him off. He is asking God to punish 
 him if He will and as He will, but not to cast him 
 away. The cry for forgiveness is really a cry for 
 life, for energy to make amends so far as is pos- 
 sible for the folly of former days. 
 
 Poor Julian was to learn that even Christians 
 had not a monopoly of vice and hypocrisy. He 
 became lonelier as he went forward. He began, 
 as lonely people will unless they are on guard 
 over themselves, to be superstitious. He culti- 
 vated soothsayers. In fact, he did for Paganism 
 what Constantine did for Christianity he estab- 
 lished it. And soon all the low creatures who 
 had come in with Christianity when it became a 
 safe and profitable thing began to pour in with 
 Paganism, now restored to favour. 
 
 There is probably always a touch of madness 
 in genius ; and genius in an emperor is almost 
 sure for want of criticism and the kindly rebuke 
 of friends to lead on to something unsafe. 
 
 Julian began to have an obsession that he was 
 the Messiah. He believed that he was a vessel 
 chosen by the gods. He declared that he was 
 guarded continually by a host of angels. It was 
 for this reason that on his last battlefield he 
 17
 
 258 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 refused a breastplate, and the javelin of a Persian 
 buried itself in his side. 
 
 Before the end his bitterness against the 
 Christians became a disorder of the mind. He 
 boasted to an ecclesiastic that, on the termination 
 of the war, he would treat the Christians with so 
 much severity that the Son of the Carpenter 
 would be unable to aid them ; whereupon the 
 ecclesiastic rejoined that the Son of the Carpenter 
 was at that very moment preparing him a coffin 
 a story which shows two things : first, that Julian 
 was becoming excited and even unworthy of him- 
 self; and second, that his hostility to the Church 
 was already beginning to separate in the Church 
 the dross from the gold, and to bring out brave 
 men. The moment the Church was dethroned it 
 began again to mount its proper throne. The 
 Arian gang went out, with their enlightenment 
 and their vague theology. The Athanasians, by 
 their virtue and qualities of character, had become 
 the leaders. And the Church, like Peter after his 
 lapse, had recovered her great way of speaking : 
 " We must obey God rather than men." 
 
 The career of Julian has more than once, even 
 in our day, attracted the minds of thoughtful 
 men. To men who have an eye for the play
 
 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF? 259 
 
 of principles in history it will always have 
 a fascination. Merejkowsky and Ibsen have 
 pondered Julian. Curiously enough it was the 
 proclamation of the German Emperor in Versailles 
 in 1871 which set Ibsen thinking of Julian. Did 
 Ibsen foresee that Germany, which had committed 
 itself to certain principles, would encounter a 
 hostility in the nature of things ? Nothing is 
 impossible to genius. At any rate, here is the 
 story of Julian's end. 
 
 It is a great saying that he who takes the 
 sword shall perish by the sword. Every victory 
 which Julian gained seemed to lead on to another 
 war. At last he invaded Persia. With infinite 
 pains he transported a great army across the 
 Tigris to the very walls of Ctesiphon. There 
 the tide of prosperity failed with that awful 
 unmistakableness which a dramatist loves to 
 detect. The Persians would never come to a 
 decisive battle. They hung upon the Roman 
 flanks as old Kutuzow hung upon the flanks of 
 Napoleon in that terrible retreat. Everything 
 happened amiss, as when the waters came back 
 upon the Egyptians, so that their chariots drave 
 heavily, and God looked at them from the edge 
 of a cloud.
 
 260 ANCESTRAL VOICES 
 
 At last a battle was offered and accepted. 
 Julian, ever brave, and now recklessly brave, 
 rushed into the midst of it. It was then that a 
 javelin, flung pointedly at him, grazed his arm and 
 lodged in his liver. He tried to pull it out with his 
 naked hands, but it cut them. Ibsen tells us that 
 the javelin which slew Julian was the very spear 
 with which the Roman soldier had pierced the 
 side of Jesus as He hung upon the Cross. In 
 any case, as a fact in symbolism, Julian was slain 
 by an instrument which had been dipped in the 
 blood of Christ. As he lay dying he delivered 
 a beautiful message to his henchmen. And as 
 he died he seemed to see something in front of 
 him, just overhead, to which, according to the 
 record, he spoke with his last breath, saying, 
 "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean." 
 
 There is something which is not to be set aside 
 in this recurring confession, " Thou hast con- 
 quered, O Galilean," for it has the support of 
 history. It is simply the fact that wherever 
 enmity to Christ has become organised, and has 
 proceeded to act strongly upon its own principles, 
 wherever, in short, the attempt has been made to 
 dethrone Christianity, it has failed. All sorts 
 of things are forgiven to nations, as Christ
 
 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF? 261 
 
 promised they should be all sorts of hypocrisies 
 and treacheries even. But the sin against the 
 Holy Ghost, the denial of the spirit and mental 
 type of Christianity, the reasoned repudiation of 
 Christianity as the way and the truth and the life, 
 the reversion to the pre-Christian and diabolical 
 view of man's nature that, on the evidence of 
 history, has not been forgiven a people. 
 
 A nation which acts upon a reasoned rejection 
 of the Christian way may not immediately be 
 overwhelmed by contrary events ; but in the 
 depth of its soul it comes to perceive something 
 which chills its heart and paralyses its arm.
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 IN the heart of Paris, in the Panthe'on, and on 
 the spot where in the old days stood the 
 steps towards the altar, in the very place where 
 transepts, nave, and chancel converge, where the 
 lights from all quarters meet and blend, there has 
 been erected In our day a group in plaster (one 
 day to be marble), which, because of its dignity 
 and seriousness, because of its background of 
 something sublime, pathetic, indestructible, might 
 itself have signified to the world that France was 
 risen into newness of life. 
 
 On an immense white block stands the noble 
 figure of a woman. On one side of her throng 
 the spokesmen of the Revolution, their hands 
 outstretched, passionate, threatening. On the 
 other side, the soldiers of the Revolution, horse 
 and foot, with fife and drum march out to war 
 the happy instruments of an unquestioned, un- 
 suspected will. But it is the central Figure which 
 
 controls everything, subduing to its own gravity 
 
 269
 
 EPILOGUE 263 
 
 the thought and speech and action on this side 
 and that. It is the figure of a woman. Her 
 right hand leans upon a sword-hilt, the point of 
 which rests upon the ground. With her left hand 
 she holds in place the " securis cum fascibus " the 
 symbol of justice. It is the free spirit of the 
 Nation ; it is the general mind ; it is Liberty. 
 But it is Liberty aware now of her awful task. 
 Unlike the eyes of her sister in the harbour of 
 New York, which have the valour of ignorance, 
 this one's eyes are on the ground. Here is 
 Liberty white, sober, anxious. Here is Liberty 
 after a hundred years ; with her eyes upon the 
 ground, musing, aware of something missing, 
 preparing her soul so my mind wandered as I 
 considered her to return to some still-remem- 
 bered loyalty, to go back, say rather, to go 
 forward, to the shelter and security of something 
 wiser than liberty : I mean, Faith.
 
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