,::m- 
 

 
 
 \
 
 BALDWIN
 
 By the same AitlJior. 
 
 EUPHORION: 
 
 Studies of tlic Aiitiqiic ami the Mediavai in the 
 
 Renaissance. 
 
 Second Edition. 
 
 Demy 8vo, Cloth, 7s. 6d. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 " Experience has taught us to expect three things upon opening a book 
 written by Vernon Lee : first, a serious studj', conceived in a modern 
 spirit, of the subject matter ; second, independent though not necessarily 
 new views of its bearings ; and third, an unusual faculty of exposition, in 
 cultivated, ingenious, and often picturesque forms of diction. These are 
 merits, and conspicuous merits. On the other hand, there is a counter- 
 vailing defect, which we have also learnt to look for ; this is a habit of 
 over-criticizing and over-writing — an inclination to start an argument and 
 raise a distinclion on the slightest provocation— an indisposition to let the 
 reader go when once the subject has been propounded. For a writer 
 concerned with critical inquiry this is, no doubt, a fault on the right side, 
 still it is a fault. 'Euphorion' is the largest and most various book 
 which Vernon Lee has yet produced. It displays her excellences in large 
 measure, and is not exempt from her defect. The book is bold, extensive 
 (it does not aim to be exhaustive) in scope, and replete with well-defined 
 and unhackneyed ideas, clear impressions, and vigorous and persuasive 
 modes of writing. Vernon Lee professes to have studied only certain 
 aspects of the Renaissance, and consequently to have produced a series 
 of essays which only cover a small space of the vast area. She has not, 
 however, shirked difficulties, nor sat down contented with a smattering 
 of knowledge. Large questions have been scrutinized in a comprehen- 
 sive spirit, and are treated with both breadth and minuteness, according 
 to the scale of the work. . . . Lastly comes the longest essay of all, 
 ' Mediaeval Love,' filling nearly one hundred pages. This is certainly 
 a masterly performance." — Atheturuiii, July 5, 1884. 
 
 "'Euphorion' is a distinct advance on Vernon Lee's previous work. 
 The impressions it records are as vividly individual as ever, the know- 
 ledge which informs it is fuller and riper. It deals with a period incom- 
 parably more interesting than the " teacup times of hood and hoop,'' 
 through whose mazes her first work led us so pleasantly ; and it has more 
 unity and continuity than ' Belcaro.' . . . The exquisite paper on ' The 
 Out-door Poetry." "—Pall Mail Gazette. 
 
 " Deserves a most cordial welcome as a fresh and original contribution 
 to the history of civilization and art; written in graceful and often 
 eloquent li.w^\i^\." ^Spectator. 
 
 London: T. FISHER UNWIN, 26, Paternoster Square, E.C.
 
 Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 BALDWIN: 
 
 DIALOGUES ON VIEWS AND ASPIRATIONS. 
 
 VERNON LEE 
 
 AUTHOR OF "STI'DIES OF THE iStH CENTURY IN ITAI.V, 
 
 "euphorion," "miss brown," etc. 
 
 ".I tnan is a method, a progressive arran^einoit, a selecting principle, gatkerijig 
 his like to him luherever he goes." — Emerson 
 
 "And if I contradict myself, why, I contradict myselfy—V'l A\^x Whitman 
 
 T FISHER UN WIN 
 
 26 Paternoster Square 
 ^ 1886
 
 P 1^ TTPRARY 
 
 rr . I sr- UNIVERPTTY OF CATJFORNIA 
 
 ^ SANTA BARBARA 
 
 TO MY BROTHER, 
 
 EUGENE LEE HAMILTON, 
 
 I DEDICATE 
 
 THIS BOOK OF VIEWS AND ASPIRATIONS, 
 
 GRATEFUL FOR ALL HE HAS DONE 
 IN FORMING MY OWN.
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 TAGE 
 
 OF BALDWIN, INTRODUCTORY .... I 
 
 THE RESrONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF . 1 5 
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF ... 75 
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION . . . 12/ 
 OF NOVELS . . . . ^. . . .185 
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL . . . 247 
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM .... 3O9
 
 INTRODUCTION.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 It would grieve me that any reader should question 
 the real existence of my friend Baldwin ; yet I con- 
 fess also that I should be sorry were any one to believe 
 too implicitly therein. There is, in a hitherto un- 
 specified part of this world, a borderland between fact 
 and fancy ; and in this borderland my friend has a 
 very actual habitation. I dread misapprehension, 
 and crave permission for a few words on this 
 point. Ask yourself, my patient or impatient reader, 
 how much you actually know of your own nearest 
 and dearest ; nay, of the nearest and dearest of all 
 — of yourself. The question is one over which a 
 judicious person might reasonably go mad, or die, 
 without coming nearer to a complete solution. But 
 this much of certainty would be acquired by the way, 
 that the something to which we give the name of our 
 friends is a creature somehow mysteriously born of 
 ourselves and of them ; a creature which exists not 
 really in the exterior and concrete world, but in
 
 4 BALDWIN. 
 
 our mind, or, if you prefer, in that particular border- 
 land of fact and fancy. I do not care to commit 
 myself to stating on which side, nearer or farther, 
 of that strip of borderland, lies the exact dwelling- 
 place of the chief speaker in the following Dialogues. 
 To any over-inquisitive person I would make this 
 answer: Tell me precisely how much of yourself is 
 real or imaginary ; and you shall have the correspond- 
 ing information respecting my friend Baldwin. 
 
 To be brief, Baldwin exists ; and it matters not 
 whether in the kingdom of the subjective or in that 
 of the objective. What is more important, is of his 
 mode of existence. If,as is usually the case, and as 
 I distinctly request, this introductory chapter be read 
 the last of all, the reader will not require to be told 
 that the existence of Baldwin has been, so far as the 
 Past is concerned, equally uneventful and eccentric. 
 He has, in good sooth (and this may lead some 
 to consider him as a denizen of the subjective world), 
 lived a life of exclusively mental experiences, never 
 doing or being done to, but merely receiving a series 
 of impressions and responding thereunto by a series 
 of opinions. These op'inions, if you have read the 
 book, you will sufficiently understand : there remains 
 only to explain the circumstances which conduced to 
 their formation ; in other words, to say something of 
 Baldwin's impressions. 
 
 This rather abstract personage, to whom life has been 
 scarcely more than a string of abstract experiences and.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 resultant ideas, has two further peculiarities, that com- 
 plete, so to speak, his abstract personality — the some- 
 thing rather negative about him. The accident of 
 education, carried on exclusively at home and in excep- 
 tional solitude, has placed this not very feminine man 
 to some measure at a woman's standpoint, devoid of 
 all discipline and tradition, full of irregularities and 
 individualities. And the accident of family circum- 
 stances, carrying him from country to country, has 
 made this very English Briton see questions of all 
 sorts through variously tinted cosmopolitan glasses. 
 Indeed, since I have mentioned the subject of nation- 
 ality, I may say that one of my friend's eccentricities 
 and weaknesses consists in a secret satisfaction at the 
 fact of having been born upon French soil, and a 
 corresponding slight dissatisfaction at being unable to 
 prove the existence in his nature of some strain or 
 other of French blood. 
 
 Of my friend Baldwin's actual education and early 
 life I am unable to give any very definite account. I 
 see that they were vague, casual ; and that, so far as 
 life is concerned, the various periods of existence, in 
 the sense in which they were symbolized by mediaeval 
 artists as Pueritia reading a grammar book, Adoles- 
 centia holding a hawk, and so forth, were rather out 
 of sequence or jumbled up in his case. He was a 
 commonplace child, a sentimental boy, a harshly 
 philosophic youth ; and is now, close upon what the 
 Poet defined as the " mezzo del cammin di nostra vita "
 
 6 BALDWIN. 
 
 rejected by some as over-sceptical and subjective, by 
 others as densely dogmatic and utilitarian. We have 
 met, he and I, every now and then, turning up when 
 least we expected to see one another, at various 
 periods of our lives. My earliest recollections of 
 Baldwin are of a time when the streets of Rome were 
 periodically strewn with yellow sand, into which the 
 multitude flopped on bent knees, putting out index 
 and little finger against the evil eye, whenever there 
 passed the golden coach of the Holiness of Our 
 Sovereign Pius IX. ; when we children woke up and 
 rubbed our eyes one foggy autumn morning with (for 
 such is the nature of children) a slightly delicious 
 horror at the thought that Monti and Tognetti were 
 having their heads cut off, like Browning's Frances- 
 chini, at the Bocca della Verita. Baldwin and I, and 
 another lad who, while we have gone off on the endless 
 hunt for ideas (A good day's sport ? asked a friend of 
 mine lately of two men with guns on an umbrian 
 road — So, so, only two mushrooms), has seized hold 
 of that more satisfactory though unruly creature, 
 beauty ; Baldwin and this other lad and myself used, 
 at that time, to wander along those long muddy roads 
 bordered with arum and shaded with carub, now all 
 built over in streets, then the haunt of solitary car- 
 dinals taking their stroll, employing our leisure in 
 digging out of the gutters bits of porphyry and 
 serpentine, which to us represented all antiquity ; of 
 an evening we indulged in learned disputes over Dr.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 Smith's Smaller Classical Dictionary. Later I met 
 Baldwin again, a decided failure in all that the world 
 calls education, but possessed by a frenzy of enthu- 
 siasm, nay, rather madness, for all things musical, 
 especially of the eighteenth century, with which he 
 contrived to infect me, but completely and seriously, 
 with the later result, to myself and literature, which 
 some readers perhaps know. We had a music master 
 in common, Baldwin and I ; an old man nearly ninety, 
 chosen by my friend mainly in the vain hope that he 
 might bridge over that fearful gulf separating the 
 eighteenth century from these degenerate days ; and 
 whom he adored less like a human being than a 
 precious relic, getting sonnets written by his acquain- 
 tances and placing upon the old gentleman's piano 
 large nosegays, which the receiver, I suspect, regarded 
 principally in the light of their being damp. Baldwin 
 was at this time eighteen. He read Goethe and 
 Lessing all day long, descanted upon the wisdom of 
 the Greeks in avoiding the sight of pain and consider- 
 ing illness as a proof of bad taste and a reason to be 
 cut ; and believed firmly that all moral qualities were 
 contained in the Beautiful ; and that if there were any 
 which the Beautiful did not contain, there was 
 probably something Morbid about them. That word 
 morbid was Baldwin's favourite expression ; and it 
 was wonderful to see how freely and with what terrible 
 effect he flung it about in his conversation. When 
 next my friend's path suddenly crossed mine, he never
 
 8 BALD WIN. 
 
 mentioned Goethe, nor the Antique, nor eighteenth 
 century music, and manifested impatience when they 
 were alluded to ; he was comparatively uncommuni- 
 cative, and excessively pessimistic. I suspected him of 
 being miserably unhappy, and afterwards discovered 
 that he was struggling hopelessly with certain ideas 
 that were surrounded by a kind of blackness : Death, 
 Sin, Pain, Justice. How he emerged from this, some of 
 the following Dialogues are designed to show. Such 
 is, roughly, the history of my friend Baldv/in. Such 
 it is, at least, in so far as an outsider can show it. 
 But a letter which I received from him within the 
 last year seems in a manner to fill up these bare 
 outlines, or at least to show what sort of colour there 
 might be within them, " It comes home to me," he 
 wrote from a small Italian village where he was 
 passing a few days — " it comes home to me, on return- 
 ing here, how large is the part which this microscopic 
 place has played for me. My life seems hanging, 
 flakewise, like the wool of a sheep, on every stone 
 and bramble ; it is the only place which has been to 
 me a home, in the sense of long and close intimacy, 
 and, so to speak, possession ; for Rome, Florence, 
 Paris, are things with which one cannot feel intimate, 
 which may possess us, but which we never possess. 
 Also, I think that this sense of so much of my life 
 being represented here is due in part to the fact that 
 nothing new has ever come to me here, that I have 
 merely chewed the cud of any novelty of the winter ;
 
 INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 that this place has, instead of producing change, merely- 
 registered it. Clicwed the cud of my thoughts, mind 
 you, in virtual solitude — the enforced solitude of the 
 four broiling months for which I was pent up in this 
 valley ; chewed the cud of my thoughts and feelings 
 as one might do while walking up and down a piece 
 of prison garden ; and observed, taken a vivid interest 
 in every detail, much upon the principle of Saintine's 
 Picciola. I speak with no disrespect or want of love. 
 Narrow and fatally imprisoning as this place was, and 
 much as I often chafed at the thought of all that lay 
 beyond these eternal green mountains, from the 
 scarce known England, the vaguely remembered 
 Germany, the faintly imagined far-off regions, down 
 to the little country town twelve miles off — despite 
 all this nostalgic craving to getaway, I certainly loved 
 the place. It is indeed the only place I have possessed 
 
 in absolute familiarity, excepting perhaps T , in 
 
 my childhood ; the only place where I have been 
 obliged to take an interest in everything, or rather 
 within whose limitations I have had to find every- 
 thing. I can remember something similar in my 
 
 childish years at T : the complete intimacy with 
 
 every turn, every path ; the interest in the fern grou-- 
 ing on certain walls, in the scarlet mushroom on a 
 particular bank skirting a beech wood ; the historical 
 mania and fancies evoked by a few scraps, a tower, an 
 old piece of wall, a graven hand on a milestone. I 
 can remember all this, and the effort to construct
 
 lo BALDWIN. 
 
 myself a universe out of this tiny spot. The same 
 happened, with a more mature myself, greater wants 
 and richer surroundings, here ; the same making out 
 of this place my microcosm of the world. The con- 
 stant going over the same ground, the necessity 
 among all these things, which were old to me, of find- 
 ing something new ; of squeezing some sort of excite- 
 ment out of this exhausted place, most certainly 
 taught me to see, and in great measure to imagine, to 
 feel, acutely. The smallest trifles gained a value : 
 the particular curve of the hill here, the particular 
 effect of a clump of trees there ; the trunk of an olive ; 
 the stones in the water ; the tips of the cypresses and 
 their beautiful compactly fibrous greyish boles ; the 
 feathery tuft of fennel in an old wall; the runnel of water 
 below it, plastering down the grass ; — all such trifles 
 became subjects of constant observation, interest, and 
 pleasure. And each path represented a new combi- 
 nation of such specific little impressions, and hence 
 possessed a sort of almost dramatic value by being 
 able to produce a given set of feelings. As with 
 nature, so with associations. I had to make up the 
 Past out of this place. Hence an extraordinary 
 interest in all things local (just as when, as a child, 
 
 I used to make the schoolmistress of T tell me, 
 
 over and over again about the VeJiingericJit, the 
 Wciids, the Frisians y all the various legends of the 
 place) — chronicles, documents, traditions, folklore. A 
 dear old friend, a local antiquary, would sit by the
 
 INTRODUCTION. 1 1 
 
 hour tellinc;- mc about Latins and Longobards, and 
 lend me large folios of documents. The little I know 
 of the Middle Ages I learned by thinking over all 
 these little Apennine towns and villages. And when 
 the eighteenth century craze was on me, I got hold of 
 it, quarried for it, here ; fixing my mind upon the 
 little villcggiatura houses with sundials, escutcheons, 
 and long flights of steps, seeing Lindoros and Lu- 
 cindas on the twisted iron balconies, musing even 
 over the old stiff chairs and tables in the villa ante- 
 rooms. These visions, the strange imaginative fumes 
 raised by myself, still hang about the place. I 
 remember the interest in a destroyed feudal village, 
 which had disappeared off the earth's face, leaving its 
 name, its association of feudal hunts, San Mamcrto a 
 Ccrbaiola, to the chestnut woods on a certain hill. 
 Even now, I cannot see, or think of, the two square 
 grey towers of Pieve a Gioviano, three miles off, rising 
 in the evening light against the solemn background of 
 mountains, the wide river washing round them, with- 
 out the feeling coming over me that those towers 
 penetrate somehow into the Middle Ages ; that their 
 bells, tolling above the river roar, among the hill 
 echoes, have in them the voice of the centuries swing- 
 ing, as it were, from the Present to the Past and back 
 again. This is the real, the existing, and this is the 
 intensity which restriction within so limited a space 
 produced concerning it. Similarly with the purely 
 imaginary. 1 cannot but think that a certain intensity,
 
 12 BALDWIN. 
 
 almost broodingness, not much in keeping with an 
 impressionable, and in a sense abstract, unreal, fickle 
 character like mine, was due in a measure to the 
 months of solitude in such a place as this. The very 
 spots where my day-dreams arose bring them back to 
 me : a certain wall on the hillside, leaning upon which 
 and looking down upon the oleanders and tawny 
 honeysuckles in the garden below, and the deep green 
 ravine below that, my mind went a Brocken ride after 
 the Witches of Lodrone, the Lady of Monza, the 
 strange Bonvisi woman of Lucca. Again, a certain 
 lane between high-lying cornfields and vine trellises, 
 haunted, as Vv'ith the smell of its wild rose and privet, 
 by the thought of Charles the Bold and Louis XI. 
 and Joan of Arc ; just as the damp autumnal paths 
 beneath the sycamores of a certain villa bring home 
 to me strains of eighteenth century music, Consuelo 
 visions of singers and poets and composers, Pacchie- 
 rotti, Farinclli, Porpora, Metastasio. And I remember 
 the struggle in my mind of horror and reason on 
 reading first of the wickedness of the Renaissance, as 
 connected with the simmering, shimmering cornfields, 
 the smell of the green standing hemp, the rush and 
 flash of the river among the reeds. It has done much 
 towards making me, this little place. But making 
 me what .'' The usual story : many ingredients, much 
 fussing, and a result how out of all keeping ! A 
 creature troubled with the desire to create, yet able 
 only to criticize ; consumed (which is worse) with the
 
 I NT ROD UCTION. 1 3 
 
 desire to affirm, yet condemned to deny ; a life spent 
 in being repelled by the exaggerations of one's friends, 
 and attracted by the seeming moderation of one's 
 enemies, in taking exception in the midst of assent : 
 scepticism in a nature that desires to believe and rely, 
 intellectual isolation for a man who loves to be borne 
 along by the current — an unsatisfactory state of affairs, 
 yet to me the only one conceivable." 
 
 A negative being, in many respects, my friend 
 Baldwin, as you have already been told ; and negative 
 perhaps all the more that, as you see, there is much 
 which is positive in his nature. An illusive, shimmering 
 personality, seemingly full of contradictions, yet, at 
 the same time, almost repulsively cut and dried. 
 Negative, self-contradictory, abstract, as becomes an 
 inhabitant of the country which lies, as I have ob- 
 served, upon the boundaries of fact and fancy. 
 
 My own relations towards him .'' Remember what 
 I have just remarked above. They arc absolutely 
 indefinable. I am the pupil of Baldwin, the thing 
 made by him, or he is my master, yet made by me ; 
 choose and understand, for I cannot. I agree in all 
 his ideas ; yet I can place myself at the point of view 
 of some of his opponents. I have felt like Vere, I 
 often feel like Rheinhardt, I respect Agatha, I do not 
 utterly despise Marcel, I love and am dazzled by the 
 beautiful transcendentalist Olivia ; yet I agree with 
 Baldwin, and, agreeing, I sometimes dislike him. If 
 I am pushed into a logical corner and compelled to
 
 14 . BALDWIN. 
 
 confess the truth, I have to admit the identity between 
 my own ideas and Baldwin's ; nay, short of all such, 
 being pushed to extremities, I often internally jubilate 
 and swell with pride at the fact. And yet, Baldwin 
 and I are distinct ; he does not understand me quite ; 
 he stands outside me ; he is not I. No, dear friend 
 Baldwin, better far than I and wiser, but perhaps a 
 little less human, you are not myself; you are my 
 mentor, my teacher, my power of being taught ; and 
 you live, dear abstract friend, on the borderland 
 between fact and fancy. 
 
 Florence, 
 
 November^ 1S85.
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF 
 UNBELIEF.
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF 
 UNBELIEF: 
 
 A CONVERSATION OF THREE RxVTIONALISTS. 
 
 ■*' And final!}'," asked Verc, "what do you think is 
 likely to have been the result of Monsignore's wonder- 
 ful sermon ? " 
 
 He had gone to meet his two friends in the late 
 summer afternoon; and as they walked slowly towards 
 the old farm on the brink of the common, they had 
 been giving him an account of the sermon which they 
 had just been to hear; a sermon probably intended 
 to overcome the last scruples of one Protestant in 
 particular, a lady on a visit to the neighbouring 
 Catholic Earl, but ostensibly delivered for the benefit 
 •of Protestants in 'general, that is to say, of as many 
 countryfolk and stray visitors as could be collected in 
 the chapel of Rother Castle. 
 
 "The result," answered Rheinhardt, with thatindefin- 
 .able cosmopolitan accent, neither French nor German, 
 
 3
 
 1 8 BALDWIN. 
 
 which completed the sort of eighteenth century citizen 
 of the world character of the great publiciste ; "the 
 result," answered Rheinhardt, " is that Baldwin and I 
 have spent a most delightful and instructive after- 
 noon ; and that you would have done so too, Vere, if 
 you had not scornfully decided that no Catholicism 
 more recent than that of St. Theresa was worthy of 
 the attention of the real aesthetic pessimist." 
 
 Vere laughed. 
 
 " What I want to know is, whether you suppose 
 that Monsignore has succeeded in making another 
 convert 1 " 
 
 " I think he must have succeeded," answered Bald- 
 win ; " he had evidently brought that soul to the very 
 brink of the ditch which separates Protestantism from 
 Catholicism ; his object was to make the passage 
 quite insensible, to fill up the ditch, so that its pre- 
 sence could not be perceived. He tried to make it 
 appear to Protestant listeners that Catholicism was 
 not all the sort of foreign, illiberal, frog-eating, Guy- 
 Fawkesy bugbear of their fancy ; but, on the con- 
 trary, the simple, obvious, liberal, modern, eminently 
 English form of belief which they had thought they 
 had got (but in their hearts must have felt that they 
 had not) in Protestantism ; and I really never saw 
 anything more ingenious than the way in which, 
 without ever mentioning the words Catholicism or 
 Protestantism, Monsignore contrived to leave the 
 impression that a really sincere Protestant is already
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 19 
 
 more than half a Catholic. I assure you that, if it 
 had not been for the sixpenny chromolithographs 
 of the Passion, the bleeding wooden Christs, the 
 Madonnas in muslin frocks and spangles, and all 
 the pious tawdriness which makes Rother Castle 
 Chapel look like some awful Belgian or Bavarian 
 church, I might almost have believed, for the moment,, 
 that the lady in question would do very wisely to turn 
 Catholic." 
 
 " I wonder whether she will } " mused Vere, as they 
 walked slowly across the yielding turf of the common, 
 which seemed in its yellow greenness to be saturated 
 with the gleams of sunshine, breaking ever and anon 
 through the film of white cloud against which stood 
 out the dark and massive outline of the pine clumps, 
 the ghostlike array of the larches, and the pale-blue 
 undulation of the distant downs. 
 
 " She may or she may not," answered Rheinhardt ; 
 " that is no concern of mine, any more than what 
 becomes of the actors after an amusing comedy. 
 What is it to us unbelievers whether one more medio- 
 crity be lost by Protestantism and gained by Catho- 
 licism ? Tis merely the juggler's apple being trans- 
 ferred from the right hand to the left ; we may amuse 
 ourselves watching it dancing up and down, and from 
 side to side, and wondering where it will reappear 
 next— that's all." 
 
 Vere was fully accustomed, after their three weeks' 
 solitude together, correcting proofs and composing
 
 20 BALDWIN. 
 
 lectures in this south country farm, to Rheinhardt's 
 optimistic Voltairian levity, his sheer incapacity of 
 conceiving that religion could be a reality to any one, 
 his tendency to regard abstract discussion merely as 
 a delightful exercise for the aristocracy of the in- 
 tellect, quite apart from any effect upon the thoughts 
 or condition of the less gifted majorit\\ He admired 
 and pitied Rheinhardt, and let himself be amused by 
 his kindly sceptical narrowmindedness. 
 
 " Poor woman ! " replied Vere, " it does seem a 
 little hard that her soul should be merely an apple to 
 be juggled with for the amusement of Professor 
 Rheinhardt. But, after all, I agree with you that it is 
 of no consequence to us whether she turn Catholic or 
 remain Protestant. The matter concerns only herself, 
 and all is right as long as she settle down in the faith 
 best adapted to her individual spiritual wants. There 
 ought to be as many different religions as there are 
 different sorts of character — religions and irreligions, 
 of course ; for I think you, Rheinhardt, would have 
 been miserable had you lived before the invention of 
 Voltairianism. The happiness of some souls appears 
 to consist in a sense of vigour and self-reliance, a 
 power of censuring one's self and one's neighbours, 
 and Protestantism, as austere and Calvinistic and 
 democratic as possible, is the right religion for them. 
 But there are others whose highest spiritual well-being 
 consists in a complete stripping off of all personality, 
 a complete letting themselves passively swing up and
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 21 
 
 down by a force greater than themselves ; and such 
 people ought, I think, to turn Catholic." 
 
 Rheinhardt looked at Vere with a droll expression 
 of semi-paternal contempt. " My dear Vere," he 
 asked, " is it possible that you, at your age, can still 
 believe in such nonsense ? Ladies, I admit, may 
 require for their complete happiness to abandon their 
 conscience occasionally into the hands of some saintly 
 person ; but do you mean to say that a man in the pos- 
 session of all his faculties, with plenty to do in the 
 world, with a library of good books, some intelligent 
 friends, a good digestion, and a good theatre when he 
 has a mind to go there — do you mean to tell me that 
 such a man can ever be troubled by the wants of his 
 soul ? " 
 
 " Such a man as that certainly would not," answered 
 Vere, " because the name of such a man would be 
 Hans Rheinhardt." And shading his eyes from the 
 yellow gleams of sunshine, Vere stopped to look at a 
 sight which came upon him as something quite unex- 
 pected and fairylike. Beyond the blush and gold 
 (coppery and lilac and tawny tints united by the faint 
 undergrowing green) of the seeding grasses and flower- 
 ing rushes, was a patch of sunlit common-ground of 
 pale, luminous brown, like that of a sunlit brook-bed, 
 fretted and frosted with the grey and rustiness of moss 
 and gorse, specks of green grass and tufts of purple 
 heather merged in that permeating golden brown. 
 The light seemed to emanate from the soil, and in it
 
 22 BALD WIN. 
 
 were visible, clear at many yards' distance, the deli- 
 cate outlines of minute sprays and twigs, connected 
 by a network of shining cobwebs, in which moved 
 flies and bees diaphanous and luminous like the rest, 
 and w^hose faint, all-overish hum seemed to carry out 
 in sound the visible pattern of that sun-steeped piece 
 of ground, 
 
 " It is very odd," remarked Baldwin, as Rhcinhardt. 
 who found effects of light as unnecessary to his happi- 
 ness as spiritual beliefs, impatiently hurried them out 
 of their contemplation ; " it is very odd that neither 
 of you seem to consider that the lady's conversion can 
 concern anybody except herself; Rhcinhardt looks 
 upon it as a mere piece of juggling ; you, Vere, seem 
 to regard it in a kind of aesthetic light, as if the woman 
 ought to choose a religion upon the same principle 
 upon which she would choose a bonnet — namely, to 
 get something comfortable and becoming." 
 
 " Surely," interrupted Vere, " the individual soul 
 may be permitted to seek for peace wherever there is 
 most chance of finding it ? " 
 
 " I don't see at all why the individual soul should 
 have a right to seek for peace regardless of the in- 
 terests of society at large, any more than why the 
 individual body should have a right to satisfy its 
 cravings regardless of the effect on the rest of man- 
 kind," retorted Baldwin, " You cry out against this 
 latter theory as the height of immorality, because it 
 strikes at the root of all respect for mine and thine ;
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 23 
 
 but don't you see that your assumed right to gratify 
 your soul undermines, what is quite as important, all 
 feeling of true and false ? The soul is a nobler thing 
 than the body ; you will answer, but why is it 
 nobler ? Merely because it has greater powers for 
 good and evil, greater duties and responsibilities ; and 
 for that very reason it ought to have less right to 
 indulge itself at the expense of what belongs not to 
 
 it, but to mankind. Truth " 
 
 " Upon my word," put in Rheinhardt, " I don't 
 know which is the greater plague, the old-fashioned 
 nuisance called a soul, or the new-fangled bore called 
 mankind." And he pushed open the gate of the 
 farm-garden, where the cats rolled lazily in the neatly 
 gravelled paths, and the hens ran cackling among the 
 lettuces and the screens of red-flowered beans. When 
 they entered the little farm-parlour, with its deep 
 chimney recess, curtained with faded chintz, and its 
 bright array of geraniums and fuchsias on the window- 
 ledge, they found that their landlady had prepared 
 their tea, and covered the table with all manner of 
 home-baked cakes and fruit, jugs of freshly cut roses, 
 and sweet peas. " It is quite extraordinary," re- 
 marked Rheinhardt, as he poured out the tea, " that 
 a man of your intelligence, Baldwin, should go on 
 obstinately supposing that it can matter a jot what 
 opinions are held by people to whom opinions can 
 never be anything vital, but are merely so many half- 
 understood formulae ; much less that it can matter
 
 24 BALDWIN. 
 
 whether such people believe in one kind of myth 
 rather than in another. Of course it matters to a man 
 like Monsignore, who, quite apart from any material 
 advantage which every additional believer brings to 
 the Church of which he is a dignitary, is fully per- 
 suaded that the probable reward for Protestants are 
 brimstone and flames, which his Evangelical oppo- 
 nents doubtless consider as the special lot of Papists. 
 But what advantage is it to us if this particular 
 mediocrity of a great lady refuses to be converted to 
 the belief in a rather greater number of unintelligible 
 dogmas? Science and philosophy can only gain 
 infinitely by being limited strictly to the really intelli- 
 gent classes ; the less all others presume to think, the 
 better " 
 
 " Come now," objected Vcre, " you are not going to 
 tell me that thought is the privilege of a class, my 
 dear Rheinhardt." 
 
 " Thought," answered Rheinhardt, " is the privilege 
 of those who are capable of thinking." 
 
 " There is thinking and thinking," corrected Bald- 
 win ; " every man is neither able nor required to think 
 out new truths ; but every man is required, at least 
 once in his life, to take some decision which depends 
 upon his having at least understood some of the truths 
 which have been discovered by his betters ; and every 
 man is required, and that constantly, to think out 
 individual problems of conduct, for which he will be 
 fit just in proportion as he is in the habit of seeing
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 25 
 
 and striving to sec things in their true h'ght. The 
 problems which he has before him maybe trifling and 
 may require only a trifling amount of intellect ; but 
 of such problems consists the vast bulk of the world's 
 life, and upon their correct decision depends much of 
 the world's improvement." 
 
 " The world's improvement," answered Rheinhardt, 
 " depends upon everything being done by the person 
 best fitted to do it, the material roads and material 
 machinery being made by the men who have the 
 strongest physical muscles and the best physical eyes ; 
 and the intellectual roads being cut, and the intel- 
 lectual machinery constructed by the men who have 
 the best intellectual muscle and sight. Therefore, 
 with reference to conversions (for I see Baldwin can't 
 get over the possible conversion of that particular 
 lady), it appears to me that the only thing that can 
 possibly concern us in them, is, that these conversions 
 should not endanger the liberty of thought of those 
 who can think, and this being gained (which it is, 
 thoroughly, nowadays), that they should not interfere 
 with the limitation of thought to those whose it is by 
 rights. That religious belief is the best which is most 
 conducive to complete intellectual emancipation." 
 
 " But that is exactly why I am sorry that Mon- 
 signore should make any converts ! " cried Baldwin. 
 
 "And for that reason," continued Rheinhardt, fixing 
 his eyes on Baldwin with obvious enjoyment of the 
 paradox, " I think that we ought to hope that Mon-
 
 26 BALDWIN. 
 
 sicjnorc may succed in converting not only this great 
 lady, but as many ladies, great and small, as the world 
 contains. I beg, therefore, to drink to the success of 
 Monsignore, and of all his accomplished, zealous, and 
 fascinating fellow-workers ! " And Rheinhardt drank 
 off his cup of tea with mock solemnity. 
 
 " Paradoxical as usual, our eighteenth century 
 philosopher," laughed Vere, lighting his pipe. 
 
 " Not paradoxical in the very least, my dear Vere. 
 Look around you, and compare the degree of eman- 
 cipation of really thinking minds in Catholic and in 
 Protestant countries : in the first it is complete — 
 confession, celibacy of clergy, monasticism, Transub- 
 stantiation, Papal infallibility, Lourdes water, and bits 
 of semi-saintly bones in glass jars, as I have seen 
 them in Paris convents, being too much for the 
 patience of an honest and intelligent man who reads 
 his Voltaire and his Renan. With your Protestant 
 your case is different, be he German or English ; the 
 Reformation has got rid of all the things which would 
 stink too manifestly in his nostrils ; and he is just 
 able to swallow (in an intellectual wafer which pre- 
 vents his tasting it) the amount of nonsense, the 
 absorption of which is rewarded by a decent social 
 position, or perhaps by a good living or a professor- 
 ship ; meanwhile he may nibble at Darwinism, posi- 
 tivism, materialism, be quite the man of advanced 
 thought ; for, even if he be fully persuaded that the 
 world was not created in six days, and consider
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 27 
 
 Buddha and Socrates as quite as divine as Christ, he 
 will yet perceive that the lower classes absolutely 
 require to be taught that Eve was made out of Adam's 
 rib, and that Jacl was most humane in driving that 
 particular nail. Hence, while in Catholic countries 
 intellectual life goes on freely among a set of men 
 who have thoroughly barricaded themselves from all 
 priestly influence, and who go on to the walls merely 
 to pour a certain amount of flaming resin of scepticism 
 on to clerical besiegers ; in Protestant countries no 
 one knows exactly what he thinks or what he may 
 say ; time is lost, conscience is sophisticated, brains 
 are wasted, and a man is bored to death by having to 
 discuss matters which were despatched when Bayle 
 wrote his Dictionary. And this merely because a 
 parcel of men of the sixteenth century, without any 
 scientific reasons for doubt and up to the ears in 
 theology, chose to find that certain Romish dogmas 
 and practices were intolerable to their reason and 
 conscience ; and therefore invented that disastrous 
 modus vivcndi with Semitic and Mediaeval notions 
 which we call Protestantism. And then we men of 
 the nineteenth century are expected to hold Luther 
 and Calvin centenaries, to make fine speeches and 
 write enthusiastic passages about them, and cry 'Long 
 live religious toleration!' No, no; give me the Council 
 of Trent, the Bull Unigonitus, Loyola, Lainez, and 
 Pascal's Jesuits ; give me Lourdcs water and silver 
 ex-votos, and slices of the Pope's slipper, and
 
 28 BALDWIN. 
 
 Capuchins and Trappists ; give me Monsignor 
 Russell, because in so doing you are giving me 
 Voltaire and Diderot, and Michelet and Auguste 
 Comte ! " 
 
 "But," put in Vere, "you seem, by your own 
 account (for you know I don't regard Catholicism as 
 you do, and I don't think it matters what a man 
 believes as long as his belief suffices to his soul), to 
 be buying the total emancipation of a few minds at 
 the expense of the slavery and degradation of an 
 enormous number of men. If Catholicism is so bad 
 that no one \A'ho has the option will compromise with 
 it, have you a right to prescribe it to the majority of 
 mankind ? " 
 
 " Progress, my dear Vere, exists only in the 
 minority. The majority may receive an improved 
 position, but it cannot improve itself; so secure the 
 freedom of the minority before thinking of anything 
 else." 
 
 " That is all very well," answered Baldwin, who had 
 been leaning upon the table, eagerly following Rhein- 
 hardt's words, and watching for an opportunity of 
 interrupting him ; " that's all very well as long as 
 you go upon the supposition that the only thing of 
 value in this world is scientific truth, and the only 
 improvement which can be wished is the increased 
 destruction of error. But there is something more 
 valuable than scientific truth, and that is, the temper 
 which cannot abet falsehood ; there is something which
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 29 
 
 it is more urgent to demolish and cart off than mere 
 error, and that is, all the bad moral habits, the habit of 
 relying on other folk's judgment, the habit of not 
 sifting the evil from the good, the habit of liking one- 
 self to be moved instead of moving oneself, the habit of 
 sanctifying low things with high names ; all the habits 
 of spiritual sloth, spiritual sybaritism, spiritual irre- 
 sponsibility. In this is the real degradation, the real 
 danger. And Protestantism, which you call a modus 
 vivendi with falsehood, merely because the men of 
 the sixteenth century rose up against only as much 
 error as they themselves could discern. Protestantism 
 meant the refusal to abet falsehood and foulness, the 
 effort to see, to disentangle good from bad, to replace 
 mysticism by morality ; it meant moral and intel- 
 lectual activity, and completeness and manliness. It 
 meant that in the sixteenth century ; and say what 
 you will, it means that still nowadays. The men who 
 arose against the Papacy in the time of Luther are 
 naturally not the men who would still be mere Pro- 
 testants in the days of Comte, and Darwin, and 
 Spencer ; as they preceded and dragged on their 
 inferiors then, so they would seek to precede and 
 drag on their inferiors now ; they would be, what 
 they were, pioneers of truth, clearers away of error. 
 But those are Protestants nowadays — that is to say, 
 possess a religion expunged of the more irrational 
 notions and demoralizing institutions of the Middle 
 Ages, a religion less mythological and more ethical —
 
 30 BALDWIN. 
 
 those men possess this saner, cleaner, more modern 
 religion who, but for the Reformation, would still be 
 morally starving, and from starvation contracting all 
 the loathsome moral diseases and degrading moral 
 palsies which we observe in their Catholic forefathers 
 before Luther, in their Catholic contemporaries of 
 Spain, and Italy, and France. The Reformation may 
 have done nothing for the thinking minority, it may 
 even, as Rheinhardt insists, have made that minority 
 smaller ; but to the small minority the Reformation 
 gave a vast majority, which is not, as in Catholic 
 countries, separated from it by an unbridgeable gulf. 
 The number of completely emancipated minds may 
 be less in Protestant countries ; but behind them is a 
 large number of minds which are yet far from being 
 utterly cramped and maimed and impotent, which have 
 not gone very far on the right road, but have never 
 gone at all on the WTong one ; minds possessing at 
 least rudimentary habits of inquiry, of discrimination, 
 of secular morality, and which, little by little, may be 
 influenced, improved, enfranchised, by those who are 
 more fully developed and more completely free. This 
 is what Protestantism has done for us ; and the highest 
 thing that we can do, is to follow in the steps of those 
 first Protestants, to clear away what appears to be 
 error in our eyes as they cleared away what appeared 
 to be error in theirs." 
 
 " The Reformation," persisted Rheinhardt, calmly, 
 " was a piece of intellectual socialism. It consisted
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OE UNBELIEE. 31 
 
 in dividing truth so that each man might have a httlc 
 scrap of it for himself, and in preventing all increase 
 by abolishing all large intellectual capital." 
 
 " I have never doubted," remarked Verc, " that the 
 Reformation was, for all the paradoxes of this Vol- 
 tairian of ours, a most necessary and useful revolution. 
 It swept away — and this is what I most regret — the 
 last shreds of Pagan purple, the last half-withered 
 flowers of Pagan fancy, out of Christianity, and left 
 it a whitewashed utilitarian thing — a Methodist 
 chapel, well ventilated and well warmed, but sin- 
 gularly like a railway waiting-room or a warehouse. 
 But of course such a consideration can have no 
 weight. Protestantism (excuse my confusion of 
 metaphors) may be called the spiritual enfranchise- 
 ment of the servile classes ; it turned, as Baldwin 
 says, a herd of slaves and serfs into well-to-do artizans 
 and shopkeepers, I think, therefore, that Protes- 
 tantism was an unmitigated blessing for what Rhein- 
 hardt calls the intellectual proletariat, for the people 
 who neither increase intellectual wealth nor enjoy 
 intellectual luxury. There is something as beautiful 
 in the rough cleanness of belief of a Scotch or Swiss 
 artizan as there is in a well-scoured deal table and 
 a spotless homespun napkin ; and I often have felt, 
 talking with certain French, Italian, and Austrian 
 peasants, that, spiritually, they live in something 
 between a drain and a cellar. So that, if I were a 
 great landed proprietor, or a great manufacturer, or
 
 32 BALDWIN. 
 
 any other sort of modern leader of men, I should 
 certainly feel bound to put every obstacle in the way 
 of a conversion of my tenants and operatives by a 
 man like Monsignore ; I should feci as if they were 
 going to sell their solid and well-drained cottages in 
 order to live in mere mud cabins without drains and 
 without chimneys. But when it cpmes to the upper 
 classes, to those who have a certain secured intellectual 
 life, the case would be different." And Vere puffed 
 away at his pipe, as if he had settled the question, 
 
 " Really," cried Baldwin, " I don't see at all why 
 you should be indifferent to the aristocracy of intellect 
 (as Rhcinhardt calls it), living in what you describe 
 as a spiritual dwelling partaking of the cellar and the 
 drain." 
 
 " I am not indifferent," answered Vere, " but I see 
 that a certain standard of intellectual and moral 
 wealth having now been attained, there is not the 
 faintest chance of a man living in a cellar or a drain. 
 Given a certain amount of intelligence and culture, 
 which one may nearly always assume among our 
 educated classes, our spiritual dwellings are sure to be 
 quite healthy enough ; and I can't see, therefore, why 
 each man should not be permitted to build his house 
 to please his fancy, and fill it with whatever things 
 may give him most pleasure ; let it be Greek or 
 mediaeval, according to his taste ; let him become 
 Catholic or Protestant, let him follow Swedenborg, or 
 Buddha, or Comte, or Dr. Pusey, or Professor Huxley;
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 33 
 
 or let him make up a religion for himself, or have 
 none at all, as he likes : he is doing no harm to any- 
 body, and no one has any right to interfere with him. 
 Oh, I know you, Baldwin ! you would be for forcing 
 your way into a man's spiritual house and insisting 
 (with a troop of positivistic policemen and sanitary 
 inspectors at your heels) that every room must have 
 a given number of cubic feet of air and a given 
 number of windows, and that wall-papers must be 
 made to wash, flowers be carefully restricted to the 
 hothouse, and that an even temperature, never rising 
 much above the moral and intellectual freezing-point, 
 should be kept up. Now, I happen to consider that 
 this visit of yours, although most benevolent, would 
 be a quite unjustifiable intrusion ; and that you would 
 not have the smallest right to tear down the curtains 
 ■of a man who enjoys a subdued light, still less to 
 pitch his flowers and incense burners out of his bed- 
 room window. Joking apart, I think there is no 
 greater mistake than to interfere with the beliefs of 
 people belonging to a class which has secured quite 
 ■enough spiritual freedom ; let them satisfy their own 
 nature, and remember that the imaginative and 
 •emotional wants, the spiritual enjoyments of each 
 
 man, are different from those of his neighbour " 
 
 " That is exactly my view," put in Rheinhardt, " let 
 the imbeciles keep out of my way, and I certainly 
 won't get into theirs. Let us enjoy our own intellec- 
 lual ambrosia, and leave them to their beer and 
 
 4
 
 34 BALDWIN. 
 
 porridge, which they think every bit as nice," and 
 Rheinhardt threw his cigarette into the fire. 
 
 " I understand," said Baldwin, overlooking Rhein- 
 hardt's remark, and addressing himself directly to 
 Vere, " according to you the class which professes the 
 highest intellectual life, has, like the governing social 
 body, a right and an obligation to interfere in the 
 spiritual mode of life of such classes as might, if left 
 to themselves, become a public nuisance." 
 
 " That is rather a hard way of putting it," answered 
 Vere, " but such in the main is my principle." 
 
 " You wish your lower classes to be Protestant for 
 the same reason that you would wish your lower 
 classes to live in sanitary-regulation houses, because 
 a condition of spiritual darkness and dirt would pro- 
 duce nasty spiritual diseases, which might spread to 
 your upper class, and would at all events fill the 
 streets with sights and smells quite unendurable to 
 your upper class, which is of course as aesthetical as 
 it is humane. The unfortunate hardworking creatures 
 who save us from manual labour must be looked after 
 and taught how to be decent, spiritually as well as 
 physically, both for their own sake and for ours. So 
 far I completely follow your ideas. But I confess my 
 inability to follow, in the sense of understanding the 
 justifiableness, the rest of your theory. From your 
 manner of speaking, and your allusion to men building 
 their spiritual homes to suit their fancy, and excluding- 
 the light and scenting the air as they please, I
 
 THE RESPONSIDILiriES Oh UNBELIEF. Zy 
 
 presume that in your opinion a man who has inherited' 
 the means of Hving in leisure, untroubled by the 
 necessity of earning his bread or of liberating his. 
 conscience (his ancestors having given their labour and 
 their blood for that), need think of nothing beyond 
 making his life as agreeable as possible to himself" 
 
 " I wonder, Baldwin, you can be so grotesque as to 
 suppose that T am an advocate of anything of the 
 sort," interrupted Vere, rather angrily. 
 
 " Why not ? " asked Rheinhardt, " 'tis the height of 
 wisdom ; and for that reason, indeed, cannot be your 
 idea, Vere." 
 
 " You are not an advocate of this theory when 
 applied by fashionable numskulls, certainly, my dear 
 Vere. Of the men who think of nothing but 
 enjoying themselves by eating dinners at a guinea a 
 head, sitting up till six in the morning in ball-rooms 
 or playing cards at the club, driving four-in-hand and 
 having mistresses or wives dressed out by Worth, and 
 collections of bad pictures and apocryphal bric-d-brac ; 
 of such men, or rather beings, you have as bad an 
 opinion as myself. Indeed, I dare say you have a 
 considerably worse one than I have, because I am 
 always ready to admit that the poor devils whom we 
 revile as the corrupt of the world, are in reality acting 
 for the best according to their lights, being totally 
 unable to conceive of a higher mode of existence or a 
 more glorious destiny. But the case changes when a 
 man's leisure consists not merely in his no longer
 
 36 BALD WIN. 
 
 being required to earn his bread, but in no longer 
 requiring to free his mind from the painful restric- 
 tions and necessities of former days ; when his 
 inherited wealth consists not merely in estates and 
 cash, but in intellect and knowledge. What are we 
 to think of this new sort of favourite of fortune, if he 
 employ that intellectual leisure and those intellectual 
 riches merely in feeding his mind with exotic spiritual 
 dainties (among which, even as with the more 
 material epicure, rottenness constitutes a great attrac- 
 tion) ; in playing games of chance with his own beliefs 
 and emotions; in bedecking himself and attitudinizing 
 in the picturesque rags and tags of effete modes 
 of feeling and antiquated modes of thought, because 
 he enjoys making himself look interesting, and enjoys 
 writing sonnet sketches of his poor maimed and 
 crippled soul decked out in becoming purple, and 
 grey and saffron and sad green of paganism, and as- 
 ceticism, and Baudclairism, and Schopenhauerism. 
 What shall we say of the man who does this, while 
 nine-tenths of his fellow-men are slaving at me- 
 chanical labour ; who refuses to employ his leisure 
 and his powers in doing that other kind of work 
 without which mankind cannot exist, the work of 
 sowing and grinding the grain which must make 
 the spiritual bread of the world ? To me it seems 
 as if this man were but a subtler and less con- 
 scious robber ; keeping in barren mortmain as the 
 clergy before the Revolution kept the fruitful acres of
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 37 
 
 France, that which ought to keep and strengthen and 
 support a thousand morally starving and aUcemic 
 wretches." 
 
 "What!" interrupted Rheinhardt, "a man is not to 
 enjoy his own intellectual advantages, but must 
 consider himself the steward of all the confounded 
 imbeciles, the proktaires and paupers of the intellec- 
 tual world ! This is Socialism, my good Baldwin, of 
 the rankest and most intolerable description ! " 
 
 "It may be Socialism to you, Rheinhardt, and it 
 may be a private, pet Socialism of my own ; but it 
 has nothing to do with what other folks call Socialism, 
 which defeats not only its own, but still more my own 
 object. Understand me rightly — all progress (and I 
 think you will have to agree with me), all diminution 
 of misery and increase of happiness is in direct pro- 
 portion to the utilization of the various sorts of 
 capital — physical, intellectual, and moral ; land, money, 
 muscles, brains, hearts, which we possess ; and the 
 more we put our capital to profit, the more do we 
 enable the putting to profit of such capital as has 
 lain dormant ; hence progress must increase at a 
 constantly greater ratio. For instance, think of all 
 the energies of mind, and heart, and hand, which 
 must have been wasted in the cast-civilizations and 
 in the feudal system ; think of all the precious 
 qualities which must be wasted nowadays owing to 
 the still imperfect exchange of individuals among 
 the various classes of society, which may keep a man
 
 38 BALD WIN. 
 
 with a great financial endowment making bad tables 
 and chairs, and a man with a genius for carpentering 
 ruining his partners with imbecile speculation." 
 
 " That is very true," remarked Vere ; " but," he 
 added, not perhaps without a touch of satisfaction in 
 his voice, as if unconsciouly pleased at any want of 
 connection in Baldwin's ideas, " I don't see that these 
 remarks, however interesting, have much to do with 
 your onslaught on the poor mortals who venture to 
 retain doubts, and habits, and love of old faiths which 
 your philosophy happens to condemn." 
 
 " They have everything to do with each other, 
 since one is but the other's logical consequence. 
 Rheinhardt has just called me a Socialist ; well, I 
 don't think you would get many Socialists to agree 
 in my belief that all progress depends upon the 
 existence of a class quite above all necessity of 
 manual labour and business routine, which, while 
 the majority of men arc keeping the world going by 
 supplying its most pressing bodil\- wants, may 
 separate the true from the false, and gradually 
 substitute higher aims and enjoyments for lower ones ; 
 in short, do the work of improvement, if not by 
 actually discovering new truth, or even by promul- 
 gating it, at least by storing it ready for need." 
 
 " All improvement must come from the miinority," 
 remarked Rheinhardt, " since improvement means 
 the development of special and rare advantages." 
 
 "In short," went on Baldwin, "I hope for a fair
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 39 
 
 division of labour between the upper and lower 
 classes, the one working for the other, and neither 
 idle. Of course this is but a distant ideal, itself 
 possible only as the result of infinite progress ; still, it 
 is clear that we are tending that way. At present 
 the great proportion of what we call upper classes are 
 quite incapable of any work that could not be 
 performed by the lower ; their leisure is, and must be, 
 mere idleness. But, as I said just now, within the 
 upper classes there is an upper class ; the men who 
 can originate, or at least appreciate, thought ; the 
 nucleus of my real upper class of the future. These 
 have not merely leisure, but also the faculties to 
 render it profitable ; and their leisure, as I said before, 
 means not only that they have been saved the 
 trouble of supplying bodily wants, but also, which is 
 much more important, that they have been saved the 
 trouble of ridding themselves of so many erroneous 
 modes of thought which are still heaped up in the 
 path of the inferior classes. This is the class of men 
 whom you, Vere, say w-e have no right to interfere 
 with ; who, as we may be sure that they won't elect 
 to live in cellars and drains, ought to be permitted to 
 build their spiritual dwellings in accordance with 
 their own fancy, and to fill them with whatsoever 
 mental and moral bric-a-brac and stage property may 
 give them most pleasure, turn them into little pleasure 
 palaces of the Imitation of Christ, the Positive 
 Philosophy, or the Flciirs du Mai style of spiritual
 
 40 BALDWIN. 
 
 decoration. With the unfortunate ricli numskull, too 
 stupid to do intellectual work, too stupid to know 
 that there is any to do ; too helpless to have respon- 
 sibilities ; with him I can have patience, I can even 
 sympathize. But with this other man who has not 
 only leisure and education, but intellect and con- 
 science, I have no patience, I have only indignation : 
 and it is to this man that I would say — ' What right 
 have you to arrange your spiritual house merely to 
 please your fancy or your laziness ? What right 
 have you to curtain out the intellectual light from 
 eyes which are required to see for others as well as 
 for yourself? What right have you to enervate with 
 mystical drugs the moral muscle, which must clean 
 out not your own conscience merely, but the con- 
 science of others ? Above all, what right have you 
 to bring up in this spiritual dwelling of your fancy, in 
 this confusing penumbra, and amid these emascu- 
 lating fumes, those for whose souls you are most 
 responsible, your children ; that not only your mind 
 and heart, but theirs, should be mere waste and 
 vanity for all the world ? ' " 
 
 Baldwin had gradually grown earnest and excited ; 
 and, what had been at first but an abstract discussion, 
 became, as the thought burned stronger within him, 
 almost a personal attack ; in speaking the last words he 
 had risen from his chair, and instinctively fixed his eyes 
 on Vere, where he sat in the dusk of the twilit room. 
 
 The latter did not look up ; he knocked the ashes
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 41 
 
 out of his pipe and remained seated, watching the 
 smouldering fire. There was a moment's silence, 
 during which the ticking of the clock and the cackling 
 of the poultry outside were painfully distinct. 
 
 " If there is a thing I detest," muttered Rheinhardt, 
 " it is the militant, humanitarian atheist ; no priest 
 ever came up to him for spoiling a pleasant chat." 
 
 He felt that the discussion had long ceased to be 
 academic ; and to him, who enjoyed controversy 
 as a sort of aesthetic pleasure, nothing could be more 
 utterly distasteful than a discussion taken too much 
 in earnest. He suddenly broke the silence by 
 exclaiming — 
 
 " Just look what an odd sky ! " 
 
 The room was by this time getting rapidly dark, so 
 that Rheinhardt, who was at bottom the most sympa- 
 thizing of men, could feel rather than see the excited 
 face of Baldwin, the gentle and melanchol)', but 
 slightly ironical, just a little pained, expression of 
 Vere. In the midst of the duskiness, the window 
 blazed out white and luminous, with the sashbars, the 
 stems and leaves of the flowers, the bushes outside, 
 the distant firs and larches bounding the common 
 sharp and black against a strange white light. He 
 stepped into the garden, 
 
 " Do come out," he cried, " and look at this pre- 
 posterous sunset, it is worthy the attention of restheti- 
 cal creatures like you, and Vere may write a fine 
 splash-dash description of it."
 
 42 BALDWIN. 
 
 The two men rose, and followed Rheinhardt out 
 into the garden, and thence on to the road, which 
 wound behind the stables and hayricks of the old 
 farm. The sun was sinking, hidden behind a thick 
 bank of grey clouds, and below them was a rift of 
 open sky, white, luminous, lustrous, into which 
 gradually emerged the lip of the sun, slowly working 
 its way, a great rayless ball of brilliant white, into this 
 sea of white luminousness ; the sky like a liquid, 
 molten sun ; the sun like a denser, more lustrous sky, 
 white upon white, metallic sheen upon metallic sheen. 
 And all the while the clouds from whence the sun had 
 descended grew dark, of bluish grey, and all the upper 
 sky of strange darkness ; not the blackness of cloud, 
 for it seemed scarce covered with mist film, but a 
 metallic darkness as of burnished blue steel. 
 
 " I have never seen anything like it in my life," 
 said Vere, as they stood upon the brow of a hill, 
 overlooking the sea of gently undulating hillocks, 
 steeped in a broad and permeating white light, the 
 mere consciousness of which, as it were, dazzled and 
 dazed. A brilliant light which seemed to suck out of 
 the landscape all its reds and yellows, and with them 
 all life ; bleaching the yellowing cornfields and brown 
 heath ; but burnishing into demoniac energy of colour 
 the pastures and oak woods, brilliant against the dark 
 sky as if filled with green fire. Along the roadside 
 the poppies, which an ordinary sunset makes into flame, 
 were quite extinguished, like burnt-out embers ; the
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 43 
 
 yellow hearts of the daisies were quite lost, merged 
 into their shining white petals. And, striking- against 
 the windows of the old black and white chequered 
 farm (a ghastly skeleton in this light), it made them 
 not flare, nay, not redden in the faintest degree, but 
 reflect a brilliant speck of white light. I£verything 
 was unsubstantial, yet not as in a mist ; nay, rather 
 substantial, but flat, as if cut out of paper and pasted 
 on, the black branches and green leaves, the livid 
 glaring houses, with roofs of dead, scarce perceptible 
 red (as when an iron turning white-hot from red-hot 
 in the stithy, grows also dull and dim\ The various 
 ranges of hills projected beyond each other like side- 
 scenes covered with uniform grc\' ; the mass of trees 
 towards the distant downs were bleached white against 
 the white sky, smoke-like, without consistence ; while 
 the fields of green barley and ripening wheat trembled, 
 and almost vibrated with a white, white-hot light. 
 
 " It looks like the eve of the coming of Antichrist, 
 as described in mediaeval hymns," remarked Verc, 
 "the sun, before setting never more to rise, sucking 
 all life out of the earth, leaving it but a mound of 
 livid cinders, barren and crumbling, through which 
 the buried nations will easily break their way when 
 they arise." 
 
 " For the matter of that," answered Rheinhardt, 
 " the sun might have taken its departure a good many 
 3'ears ago, if it was waiting for the arrival of Anti- 
 christ," and he looked towards Baldwin, as much as
 
 44 BALDWIN. 
 
 to say, that violent discussion was his idea of com- 
 plete fiendishness. Baldwin indeed had no intention 
 of resuming the subject, conscious as he was of the 
 utter futility of attempting to make either of his 
 friends feel like himself ; and sorry also that he should 
 perhaps have hurt Vere, who always appeared to him 
 as a somewhat sickly mind, and deserving of the for- 
 bearance with which such people should be treated, 
 especially if too old to be cured. Ikit to Baldwin's 
 surprise, and Rheinhardt's annoyance, Vere himself 
 returned to the subject of their former conversation. 
 As they were slowly walking home, watching the 
 strange whiteness gradually turning into the grey of 
 twilight, he said, as he passed his arm through 
 Baldwin's — 
 
 " My dear Baldwin, I see very plainly that you 
 think you may have hurt my feelings, and that you 
 are sorry for it. But don't worry yourself about that,, 
 because you haven't really done so. I am, excuse 
 my saying so, sufficiently your elder, not merely in 
 years, I think, but in experience of the world, to 
 understand perfectly that to you everything seems 
 very simple and obvious in this world, and that you 
 haven't had time to find out how difficult it is to know 
 right from wrong. It seems to you that you have 
 written me down, or rather have compelled me to 
 write myself down, a selfish and cowardly wretch ; 
 and you are sorry for me now that it should have 
 happened — nay, don't try to deny it. But I know
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 45 
 
 very well that I am nothing of the sort ; and I can 
 understand your position sufficiently to understand 
 why you think me so ; and also, considering your 
 point of view, to like you all the better for your 
 indignation. But tell me, has it never struck you, 
 whose philosophy consists in checking the waste of 
 all the good and useful things in the world — has it 
 never occurred to you to ask yourself whether you 
 may not, in this instance, be wasting, ruthlessly 
 scattering to the four winds of heaven, something 
 ■quite as precious as this leisure to think and this 
 power of thought of which you make so much — 
 wasting a certain proportion of the little happiness 
 which mankind has got?" 
 
 " I don't see what you are driving at, Vere," an- 
 swered Baldwin, pushing open the wicket which 
 separated the farmyard from the common. 
 
 " The happiness of mankind — that is to say, of the 
 only part of mankind worth taking into account," put 
 in Rheinhardt, with a malicious pleasure in intruding 
 his own jog-trot philosophy among what he considered 
 the highflown nonsense of his two friends — "depends 
 upon its being able to discuss abstract questions 
 without getting red in the face, and telling people 
 that they are vile." 
 
 " There is some truth in that also," laughed Vere 
 *' but that was not in my mind. What I mean is 
 this," he went on, as they entered the farm parlour 
 once more, now in complete darkness, except where
 
 46 BALDWIN. 
 
 the fire threw a broad red light on to the opposite 
 wall ; " has it never occurred to you that instead of 
 increasing the happiness of mankind, as you intend 
 doing by insisting that every one who can should 
 seek for the truth in spiritual matters, you would in 
 reality be diminishing that happiness by destroying 
 beliefs, or half-beliefs, which afford infinite comfort 
 and consolation and delight to a large number of men 
 and women ? " 
 
 " I have never doubted," answered Baldwin, some- 
 what bitterly, " that it would be extremely distressing 
 to many souls to find that they must give up the 
 pleasant spiritual warmth and spiritual half-light to 
 which they are accustomed, and go forth into the cold 
 and blearness and fog in order to help their inferiors. 
 I don't doubt that it was very distressing for the 
 French nobles to have their domains confiscated in 
 the Revolution ; and for the poor, elegant, chivalric 
 planters to have their negroes emancipated for them. 
 Still, such distressing things have to be done occasion- 
 ally." 
 
 " You misunderstand me again," answered Vere, 
 "and you might know better than to continue fan- 
 cying that I am a kind of spiritual jesthete or 
 sybarite " 
 
 Rheinhardt, who had lit the lamp, could not refrain 
 from raising his eyebrows and ejaculating an incredu- 
 lous "Oh!" at this remark, for Vere represented to 
 him the very perfection of that kind of aesthetic and
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 47 
 
 spiritual vague craving upon which he was wont to 
 descant as a specially English quality. 
 
 '' Be that as it may," continued Vere, " my meaning 
 is simply this. The world which surrounds us is not 
 everything ; the faculties with which we perceive it 
 enter for just as large a share into our life; and this 
 action is as much a reality as is a stone or a bench 
 outside us. The world exists around us in a certain 
 definite way, and with certain definite necessities, 
 vv'hich we may find out by trying, as we find out that 
 the stick plunged in water is not crooked, as it looks 
 to our eye, and that the sun which seems to go round 
 our earth does nothing of the sort ; in the really 
 existing universe, the objective universe, there is death 
 and inevitable decay, and there is, as it seems to you 
 and me and Rheinhardt, a cruel and conscienceless 
 will, or no will at all, and, as an end to all our efforts, 
 there is annihilation. But besides the outwardly 
 existing, there is the inwardly existing, our faculties 
 which act in a given way, reconstructing this outward 
 world ; and in this universe thus reconstructed by 
 our mind and our conscience there is no real death, 
 no evil \\\\\ or indifferent omnipotence ; above all, 
 there is no annihilation. It is false, you will say ; 
 but is it false if according to the laws of our sight, 
 the stick plunged in the water is crooked ? Would 
 it not rather be false were we, because experience has 
 taught us that the stick is straight, to cease to see it 
 as crooked ? "
 
 48 BALDWIN. 
 
 " I see," put in Rheinhardt, who loved metaphysics 
 as he loved a French comedy; "and the fact that all 
 have faculties which make us see sticks which are 
 straight as crooked when plunged in the water, is an 
 obvious proof that somewhere or other there must 
 exist a w^orld in which all straight sticks really do 
 become crooked when held under water. The theory 
 is not new, but it has the charm of eternal freshness." 
 
 " Be quiet, Rheinhardt ! " cried Baldwin. 
 
 " The subjective universe," answered Vere, with a 
 smile at Rheinhardt's absurdity, " is not equally true 
 with the objective universe ; but in many cases it is 
 much more beautiful and consoling. In short, what I 
 mean is this : since at the bottom of the Pandora's 
 box which has been given to mankind, and out of 
 which have issued so many cruel truths, there exists 
 the faculty of disbelieving in some of them, of trusting 
 in good where there is only evil, in imagining sym- 
 pathy where there is indifference, and justice where 
 there is injustice, of hoping where there is room only 
 to despair — since this inestimable faculty of self-de- 
 lusion exists, why not let mankind enjoy it, why wish 
 to waste, to rob them of this, their most precious 
 birthright ? " 
 
 " Because," answered Baldwin, " increasing truth is 
 the law of increasing good ; because if we elect to 
 believe that which we wish instead of believing that 
 which is, we are deliberately degrading our nature, 
 renderuTg it less excellent and useful, instead of more
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OE UNBELIEE. 49 
 
 so, than it was ; and because by being too cowardl)' 
 to admit that which is, we arc incapacitating ourselves, 
 misleading and weakening others, in the great battle 
 to make the kingdom of that which is into the king- 
 dom of that which should be." 
 
 "I leave you to fight out your objective and sub- 
 jective worlds," said Rheinhardt, taking up a book 
 and settling himself by the lamp, " and, by the way, 
 here is a hero, by name John Inglesant, who is also 
 wondering about the what is and what should be, and 
 who, for my part, I most decidedly consider as be- 
 longing to the kingdom of what should not be, 
 namely, Boredom." 
 
 Vere was silent for a moment. " Every one," he 
 said, " is not called upon to battle in life. Many are 
 sent in, to whom it might be merely a tolerably 
 happy journey. What right have we to insist upon 
 telling these things which will poison their happiness 
 and which will not, perhaps, make them any the 
 more useful } You were speaking about the educa- 
 tion of children ; and this, which to you is a source of 
 bitterness and reproach, has been to me the subject 
 of much doubt and indecision. And I have come to 
 the conclusion that I have no right to take it for 
 granted that my children will necessarily be put in 
 such positions as to require their knowing the things 
 of which I, alas ! have had the bitter certainty ; that 
 should such a position be awaiting them, disbelief in 
 all the beautiful and consoling fictions of religion will
 
 50 BALDWIN. 
 
 come but too soon, and that I have no right to make 
 such disbelief come any earlier." 
 
 " In short, you deliberately teach your children 
 things in which you disbelieve ? " 
 
 Vere hesitated. " I teach them nothing ; their 
 mother is a firm believer, and I leave the children's 
 religious instruction entirely in her hands. I have 
 never," he added, with some pride, " made the 
 slightest attempt to undermine my wife's belief, 
 and shall not act differently towards my children." 
 
 Baldwin fixed his eyes searchingly upon Vere. 
 
 " Have you ever really cared much about your wife, 
 Vere .-' " he asked. 
 
 "Well, I married her for love; and I think that 
 even now I care more for her than for any one else 
 in the world. Why do you ask 1 " 
 
 " Because," answered Baldwin, " it is perfectly in- 
 conceivable to me that, if you really love your wife 
 as I should love a wife if I took one, not as my mere 
 squaw, or odalisque, or as the mother of my children, 
 but, as you say, more than any one else in the world, 
 you can endure that there should exist a subject, the 
 greatest and most solemn in all the world, upon which 
 you and your wife keep your thoughts and feelings 
 secret from each other." 
 
 " I have friends, men, with whom I can discuss it." 
 
 " And you can bear to be able to open your whole 
 soul to a friend, while keeping it closed to the person 
 whom you say you love best in the world ? You
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 51 
 
 can bear to feel that to your highest thoughts and 
 hopes and fears there is a response in a man, Hke me, 
 scarcely more than a stranger to you, while there is 
 only blindness and dumbness in this woman who is 
 constantly by your side, and to whom you are more 
 than the whole w^orld ? Do you consider this as 
 complete union with another, this deliberate silence 
 and indifference, this growing and changing and 
 maturing of your own mind, while you see her mind 
 cramped and maimed by beliefs which you have long 
 cast behind you ? This divorce of your minds, which 
 I can understand only towards a mistress, a creature 
 for whom your mind does not exist, how can you 
 reconcile it to your idea of the love of a husband to 
 a wife ? " 
 
 " I love my wife, and I respect her belief." 
 " You may abet her belief, Vere, but if, as you say, 
 you consider it mere error and falsehood, you cannot 
 respect it." 
 
 " I respect my wife's happiness, then, and my chil- 
 dren's happiness ; and for that reason I refrain from 
 laying rough hands upon illusions which are part 
 of that happiness. Accident has brought us into 
 contact with what you and I call truth — I have been 
 shorn of my belief ; I am emancipated, free, superior 
 — all the things which a thorough rationalist is in 
 the eyes of rationalists ; but," and Vere turned round 
 upon Baldwin with a look of pity and bitterness — " I 
 have not yet attained to the perfection of being a
 
 52 BALDWIN. 
 
 hypocrite, a sophist to myself, of daring to pretend 
 to my own soul that this belief of ours, this truth, is 
 not bitter and abominable, arid and icy to our hearts." 
 
 Rheinhardt looked up from his book with a curious 
 expression of wonder. " But, my dear friend," he said, 
 very quietly, " why should the truth be abominable 
 to you ? A certain number of years employed as 
 honourably and happily as possible, and after that, 
 what preceded this life of yours ; what more would you 
 wish, and what evil is there in this that you should 
 shrink from teaching it to your children, instead of 
 telling them of a Heaven which we cannot conceive 
 otherwise than as utterly monotonous and insipid, a 
 delightful life despoiled of all that gives a little delight 
 and nobility to our earthly life ; and of a Hell which 
 required the united efforts of all the crazy and blood- 
 thirsty maniacs of the Middle Ages to invent it. I 
 am not afraid of death ; why should you be ? " 
 
 " You misunderstand me," answered Vere ; " heaven 
 knows I am not afraid of death — nay, more than once 
 it has seemed to me that to lie down and feel my 
 soul, like my body, grow gradually numb and number, 
 till it was chilled out of all consciousness, would be 
 the greatest of joys. The horror of the idea of anni- 
 hilation is, I think, to all save Claudios, the horror, 
 not of our own annihilation, but of the annihilation of 
 others ; this Schopenhauer overlooked, as you do, 
 Rheinhardt, when he comfortably argued that after 
 all we should not know whether we were bein^::
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OE UNBELIEF. 53 
 
 annihilated or not, that as long as we ourselves are 
 awake we cannot realize sleep, and that we need only 
 say to ourselves, ' Well, I shall sleep, be unconscious, 
 never wake.' In this there is no horror. But Scho- 
 penhauer did not understand, having no heart, that 
 death is the one who robs us, who takes away the 
 beloved, leaves us with empty arms, Eurydice, 
 melting away into mist, sorrows at most for Orpheus; 
 once dissolved, there is for her no more grief; it is for 
 him, left alone, who has had to look on, to lose 
 without possibility of struggle, for whom emptiness 
 only remains. The worst of death is not the annihi- 
 lation of ourselves; oh no, that is nothing; no, nor 
 even the blank numbness of seeing the irremediable 
 loss ; it is the sickening, gasping terror, coming by 
 sudden unexpected starts, of foreseeing that which 
 will inevitably be. Poets have said a great deal, 
 especially Leopardi, of Love and Death being 
 brothers, of the desire of the one coming along with 
 the presence of the other ; it may be so. But this 
 much is certain, that whatever may be said of the 
 brothership of Love and Death, Love, in its larger 
 and nobler sense, is the Wizard who has evoked for 
 us the fata morgana of an after life ; it is love who 
 has taught the world, for its happiness, that there is 
 not an endless ocean beyond this life, an ocean 
 without shores, dark, silent, whose waters steam up 
 in black vapours to the black heavens, a rolling chaos 
 of disintegrated thoughts and feelings, all separate,
 
 34 BALDWIN. 
 
 all isolated, heaving up and down in the shapeless 
 eternal flood. It is love who has taught us that what 
 has been begun here will not for ever be interrupted, 
 nor what has been ill-done for ever remain unatoned ; 
 that the affection once kindled will never cease, that 
 the sin committed can be wiped out, and the good 
 conceived can be achieved ; that the seed sown in life 
 will yet bloom and fructify in death, that it will not 
 have been cast too late upon an evil soil, and the 
 blossom of promise will not for ever have been 
 nipped, the half- ripe fruit not for ever have fallen 
 from the tree ; that all within which is good and 
 happy, and for ever struggling here, virtue, genius, 
 will be free to act hereafter ; that the creatures thrust 
 asunder in the world, vainly trying to clasp one 
 another in the crowd for ever pushing them apart, 
 may unite for ever. All this is the wonderful phan- 
 tasmagoria of love ; love has given it to mankind. 
 What right have we to sweep it away ; we — " and 
 Vera turned reproachfully towards Baldwin — "who 
 have perhaps never loved, and never felt the want of 
 such a belief? " 
 
 Baldwin was silent for a moment, then answered, 
 as he struck a shower of sparks out of the dull red 
 embers. 
 
 " I have never actually had such a belief, but I 
 have experienced what it is to want it. I was 
 brought up without any religious faith, with only a 
 few general notions of right and wrong, and when I
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OE UN BELIEF. 55 
 
 first began to read and to think for myself, my ideas 
 naturally moved in a rationalistic, nay, a materialistic 
 path, so that when in the course of my boyish 
 readings I came upon disputes about an after life, it 
 seemed to me quite impossible to conceive what people 
 could dispute about. When I was very young I be- 
 came engrossed in artistic and archaeological subjects ; 
 it seemed to me that the only worthy interest in life 
 was the beautiful ; and, in my Olympian narrowness 
 of sympathy, people who worried themselves about 
 other questions seemed to me poor morbid mediaeval 
 wretches ; you see, I led a life of great solitude, and 
 great, though narrow happiness, shut up among 
 books, and reading only such of them as favoured my 
 perfect serenity of mind. But little by little I got to 
 know other men, and to know somewhat more of the 
 world ; then things began gradually to change, I 
 began to perceive the frightful dissonances in the 
 world, the horrible false notes, the abominable har- 
 monies of good and evil ; and to meet all this I had 
 only this kind of negative materialism, which could 
 not sufifice to give me peace of mind, but which 
 entirely precluded my accepting any kind of theory of 
 spiritual compensation and ultimate justice ; I grew 
 uneas}^, and then unhappy. Just at that moment 
 it so happened that I lost a friend of mine to whom 
 I was considerably attached, whose life had been 
 quite singularly unfortunate, indeed, appeared to be 
 growing a little happier only a few months before his
 
 56 BALDWIN. 
 
 death. It was the first time that dcatli came near 
 me, and close before my eyes. It gave me a frightful 
 moral shock, not so m.uch perhaps the loss of that 
 particular individual to myself, as the sense of the 
 complete extinction of his personality, gone like the 
 snuffed-out flame or the spent foam of the sea, gone 
 completely, nowhere, leaving no trace, occupying no 
 other place, become the past, the past for which we 
 can do nothing." Baldwin paused for a moment, as 
 if it had all returned to him with painful reality, then 
 continued, in a very quiet, subdued tone — '"' I remem- 
 ber, as it Averc yesterday, a crisis, a sort of dreadful 
 vision which came to me in those weeks of acute, 
 moral sickness following my friend's death ; a vision 
 of the full sense of the words never again ; I had not 
 realized before the interminableness of time, the 
 nnfinity of negation. For a moment there came 
 home to me as in a flash the consciousness of the 
 unceasing waves of time which roll and die away, and 
 rise again and furl again, and which, could we wait 
 for ever, v/atch for all eternity upon their banks, 
 would never disclose that which we have lost. 
 Separation, after all, is a soft word ; it means a gulf, 
 a gulf of centuries perhaps, but a gulf which has a 
 limit, another shore, a bottom ; and it is the mercy 
 of our nature that we feel thus, that our conscious- 
 ness cannot bear the strain of realizing absolute 
 negation, that there lurks in our mind and heart a 
 vague sense of limit ; that we feel as if we might wait,
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 57 
 
 wearily indeed, but wait for an end of the negation. 
 And yet I knew that it was not so." 
 
 Rheinhardt had put down his book for a moment, 
 and listened, with a puzzled and wondering look. 
 That people should be haunted by thoughts like these 
 seemed to him almost as incomprehensible as that the 
 dead should arise and join in a ghastly dance round 
 the grave-stones ; nor would this latter phenomenon 
 have seemed to him much the more disgusting of the 
 two ; so, after a minute, he settled down again and 
 pulled out of his pocket a volume of Aristophanes. 
 
 " You have felt all this, Baldwin," said Vere, " and 
 you would nevertheless deliberately inflict such pain 
 upon others ? You have felt all the misery of disbelief 
 in a future life, and you are surprised that I should be 
 unwilling to meddle with the belief of my wife and 
 children ? " 
 
 " I am surprised at your not being almost involun- 
 tarily forced into communicating what you know to 
 be the truth ; surprised that, in your mind, there 
 should not be an imperious sense that truth must out. 
 jMoreover, I think that the responsibility of holding 
 back truth is always greater than any man can calcu- 
 late, or any man, could he know the full consequences 
 thereof, could support. We have been speaking of 
 the moral discomfort attendant upon a disbelief in a 
 future life ; a moral discomfort, which, say what we 
 may, is nowadays only momentary, does not outlive 
 our first grief at death, for wc moderns have not a
 
 58 BALDWIN. 
 
 very vital belief in a future state. Well, we ought 
 also to think of what was the state of things when 
 such a belief thoroughly existed, when what you call 
 the phantasmagoria of love was a reality. Bring up 
 to your memory the way in which the mystics of the 
 Middle Ages, and, indeed, the mystics of all times, 
 have spoken of life — as a journey during which the 
 soul must neither plough nor sow, but walk on, 
 the eyes fixed upon Heaven, despising the earth 
 which it left barren and bitter as when it came. 
 " Scrvate tanquam peregrinum et hospitem super 
 terram, ad quern nihil spectat de mundi negotiis," 
 that is what the Imitation bids us to. Ask yourself 
 which is the more conducive to men making the world 
 endurable to others and themselves, to men weighing 
 their wishes and thoughts, and bridling their desires, 
 and putting out all their strength for good : the notion 
 that there is a place beyond the grave where all is 
 perfect, where all sloth and unkindness, and repented 
 folly and selfishness may be expiated and retrieved ; 
 or the notion that whatever excellence there can be, 
 man must make with his own hands, that whatever 
 good may be done, whatever may be felt, repaired, 
 atoned for, must be done, felt, repaired, and atoned 
 for in this world. Even were I logically convinced of 
 the existence of a future life, I should be bound to 
 admit the enervating effect thereof on our sense of 
 responsibility and power of action ; I should regret the 
 terrible moral tonic of the knowledge that whatever
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 59 
 
 of good I may do must be done at once, whatever of 
 evil I have done be effaced at once also. Ikit let 
 this be ; and answer me, Vere, do you believe that a 
 single individual has a right to hide from others that 
 which he believes to be the truth ? Do )^ou seriously 
 consider that a man is doing right in destroying, for 
 the sake of the supposed happiness of his children, 
 the spark of truth which happens to be in his power, 
 and which belongs neither to him, nor to his children, 
 but to the whole world ? Can you assert that it is 
 honest on your part, in order to save your children 
 the pain of knowing that they will not meet you, or 
 their mother, or their dead friends again in Heaven, 
 to refuse to give them that truth for which your 
 ancestors have paid with their blood and their liberty, 
 and which your children are bound to hand on to 
 their children, in order that this little spark of truth 
 may grow into a fire which shall warm and light the 
 whole world ? " 
 
 " There is something more at stake than the mere 
 happiness or unhappiness of my children," answered 
 Vere; "at all events than such happiness as they 
 might get from belief in an after life. There is the 
 happiness, the safety of their conscience." 
 
 " Do you think you can save their conscience by 
 sacrificing your own ?" 
 
 " I should not be sacrificing my conscience were I 
 doing that which I felt bound to do, Baldwin. Would 
 you have me teach my children that this world, which
 
 6o BALDWIN. 
 
 they regard as the kingdom of a just and lovhig God, 
 whose supremest desire is the innocence and happiness 
 of his creatures, is in reahty the battlefield or the 
 playground of physical forces, without thought or 
 conscience ; nay, much worse, is the creation either 
 of a principle of good perpetually allying itself to a 
 principle of evil, or of a dreadful unity which permits 
 and furthers good and evil alike ? What would you 
 think of me were I to tell my children that all that they 
 had learned of God and Christ is falsehood ; and that 
 the true gods of the world are the serenely heartless, 
 the foully bloodthirsty gods of early Greece, of 
 Phoenicia, and Asia Minor ? You would certainly 
 think me a bad father. Yet this old mythology 
 represents with marvellous accuracy the purely 
 scientific view of the world, the impression given by 
 the mere contemplation of Nature, with its conflicting 
 and caballing divinities, good and bad, black and 
 white, resisting and assisting one another, beneficent 
 and wicked, pure and filthy by turns. The chaos, the 
 confusion, the utter irresponsibility, which struck the 
 framers of old myths, is still there. All these stories 
 seem to us very foolish and very horrible : an omnis- 
 cient, omnipotent Zeus, threatened by a mysterious, 
 impersonal Fate, looming dimly behind him ; a Helios 
 who ripens the crops and ripens the pestilence ; a 
 Cybclc for ever begetting and suckling and mutilating ; 
 we laugh at all this. But with what do we replace it ? 
 And if we look at our prosaic modern nature, as is
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 6i 
 
 shown us by science, can we accuse the chaotic and 
 vicious fancy of those early explainers of it ? Do we 
 not sec in this nature bounty and cruelty greater than 
 that of any early gods, corribats more blind than any 
 Titan's battles, marriages of good and evil more 
 hideous than any incests of the old divinities, monster 
 births of excellence and baseness more foul than any 
 Centaur or Minotaur ; and do we not see the great 
 gods of the universe sitting and eating the flesh of 
 men, not unconsciously, but consciously, serenely, 
 and without rebuke ? " 
 
 " That's a curious observation of yours," put in 
 Rheinhardt ; " but it would appear as if there had 
 liere been a difference between the two great races ; 
 that with the Semitic the feeling of right and wrong, 
 of what ought or ought not to be in the abstract, 
 entirely overshadows mere direct perception, scientific 
 perception of Nature, and considerable phenomena, 
 not with respect to their necessity, but with reference 
 to their ethical propriety ; while, as you remark, the 
 Aryan race " 
 
 But Rheinhardt's generalizations were altogether 
 wasted upon his two friends. 
 
 " Such is Nature," pursued Vere, with impetuosity ; 
 " and in it you scientific minds bid us to seek for 
 moral peace and moral safety. How can we aspire, 
 as to the ideal of moral goodness, to that which pro- 
 duces evil — ineffable, inevitable evil ? How measure 
 our moral selves against this standard ; how blush
 
 62 BALDWIN. 
 
 before this unblushing god ? How dare we look for 
 consolation where our moral sense, if enlightened, 
 must force us to detest and to despise ? Where, 
 then, shall we seek the law, the rule by which to 
 govern our lives ? And the horror of horrors lies in 
 this — -that we are forced to conceive as evil all that 
 which is at variance with the decrees of Nature, of 
 this same Nature which is for ever committing evil 
 greater than any of us could commit ; herein, that we 
 cannot rebel. As long as Nature meant the Devil, it 
 might be opposed ; but we know that for us there 
 can be no good save in obeying Nature — obeying that 
 which is not good in itself ; it has, as if with inten- 
 tional malice, forced us to bend, to walk in its ways ; 
 if we refuse solidarity with it, we are sucked into a 
 worse evil still. The sight of individual misfortune 
 can never bring home this horrible anomaly as does 
 a study of the way in which whole peoples have been 
 sacrificed first to sin, then to expiation ; of the manner 
 in which every rebellion against this evil-polluted 
 nature, every attempt of man to separate himself, to 
 live by a rule of purity of his own, has been turned 
 into a source of new abominations. Am I to show 
 all this to my children, and say to them : Only 
 Nature is good ; and Nature is the cvilest thing that 
 we can conceive, since it forces to do evil and then 
 punishes. Would a belief in Ashtaroth or Moloch 
 not be as moral as this one } " 
 
 Baldwin waited till Vere had come to an end.
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 63 
 
 " I can quite understand all that you feel, because 
 I have felt it myself," he said, unshaken by his friend's 
 vehemence. " I was telling you of the terrible depres- 
 sion which gradually came over me as I perceived what 
 the world really was ; and which, for a couple of years, 
 at least, made me live in constant moral anguish, 
 especially after the death of that friend of mine 
 had, as I told you, brought home to me how the dis- 
 belief in a future life took away the last possibility of 
 believing in a just and merciful Providence. I revolved 
 in my mind every possible scheme for conciliating the 
 evil inherent in the world with our desire for good. 
 Christianity, Buddhism, Positivism — they all assumed 
 to quiet our conscience with the same hollow lie ; 
 Positiyism saying that the time would come when 
 Nature and good would be synonymous ; Christianity 
 reminding us that man may have but a moment 
 wherein to be righteous, while God has all eternity ; 
 always the same answer, the evil permitted or planned 
 in the past is to be compensated by the good in the 
 future, agony suffered to be repaid in happiness, 
 cither to the worn-out, broken soul in another world, 
 or to the old, worn-out humanity in this. Such 
 answers made me but the more wretched by their 
 obvious futility : how efface the indelible, and can 
 God Himself undo the accomplished, cancel that which 
 has been committed and suffered .'' Can the God of 
 religion with His after death Paradise joys, efface the 
 reality of the agonies endured upon earth ? Can the
 
 64 BALDWIN. 
 
 Inconceivable of Positivism efface with the happiness 
 of the men of the twentieth century the misery of the 
 men of the nineteenth ? Can good cause evil in the 
 same individual, — the warmth and honour of the old 
 man cancel the starvation and cold and despair of the 
 youth ? Can evil suffered be blotted out, and evil 
 committed be erased ? Forgiven perhaps ; but effaced,, 
 taken from out of the register of the things that have 
 been, never. This plea of the future, whether in this 
 world or another, what is it but a half-hour which the 
 mercy of man gives to his God wherein to repent and 
 amend and retrieve ; a half-hour of centuries indeed, 
 but a half-hour none the less in eternity, and to expiate 
 the evil done in a lifetime of infinitude ? " 
 
 " What is the use of going on like that ? " asked 
 Rheinhardt ; " why cannot you two be satisfied with 
 the infinite wickedness of mankind, without adding 
 thereunto the wickedness of Nature ? As Wolfram 
 von Eschenbach remarked already six centuries ago : 
 — ' Ihr nothight Gott nichts ab durch Zorn ' — try and 
 reform man, but leave God alone. But in truth all 
 such talk is a mere kind of rhetorical exercise, brought 
 into fashion by Schopenhauer, who would have been 
 horrified at the waste of time and words for which he 
 is responsible." 
 
 "We shall certainly not make Nature repent and 
 reform by falling foul of her," answered Vere ; " but 
 at all events, by protesting against evil, however in- 
 evitable, we shall prevent ourselves being degraded 
 into passive acceptance of it."
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 65 
 
 " I was going to say," went on Baldwin, " that I 
 went through all these phases of moral wretchedness. 
 And while they lasted, the temptation to have done 
 with them, to free myself by a kind of intellectual 
 suicide, was constantly pursuing me ; it seemed as if 
 every person I spoke with, every book that I opened, 
 kept repeating to me : — * Disbelieve in your reason, 
 and believe in your heart ; that which may be im- 
 possible to your logic, may yet be possible to God's 
 goodness.' It seemed to me as if I would give every- 
 thing to be permitted to lay down my evil convictions, 
 to shut my intellectual eyes, to fall into spiritual sleep, 
 to dream — to be permitted to dream those beautiful 
 dreams which consoled other men, and never again 
 to wake up to the dreadful reality. But I saw that to 
 do so would be mean and cowardly ; I forced myself 
 to keep awake in that spiritual cold, to see things 
 plainly, and trudge quietly forward upon that bleak 
 and hideous road. Instead of letting myself believe, 
 I forced myself to doubt and examine all the more ; 
 I forced myself to study all the subjects which seemed 
 as if they must make my certainty of evil only 
 stronger and stronger. I instinctively hated science, 
 because science had destroyed my belief in justice 
 and mercy ; I forced myself, for a while, to read only 
 scientific books. Well, I was rewarded. Little by 
 little it dawned upon me that all my misery had 
 originated in a total misconception of the relative 
 positions of Nature and of man ; I began to perceive 
 
 6
 
 66 BALDWIN. 
 
 that the distinction between right and wrong conduct 
 had arisen in the course of the evolution of mankind, 
 that right and wrong meant only that which was con- 
 ducive or detrimental to the increasing happiness of 
 humanity, that they were referable only to human 
 beings in their various relations with one another ; 
 that it was impossible to explain them, except with 
 reference to human society, and that to ask for moral 
 aims and moral methods of mere physical forces, 
 which had no moral qualities, and which were not 
 subject to social relations, or to ask for them of any Will 
 hidden behind those forces, and v/ho was equally 
 independent of those human and social necessities 
 which alone accounted for a distinction between right 
 and wrong, was simply to expect one set of pheno- 
 mena from objects which could only present a wholly 
 different set of phenomena ; to expect sound to be 
 recognized by the eye, and light and colour to be 
 perceived by the ear. In short, I understood that 
 man was dissatisfied and angry with Nature, only 
 because he had accustomed himself to think of Nature 
 as only another man like himself, liable to human 
 necessities, placed in human circumstances, and 
 capable, therefore, of human virtues and vices, and 
 that I had been in reality no vv'iser than the fool who 
 flew into a rage with the echo, or the child who strikes 
 the table against which it has hurt itself." 
 
 " I see," said Vere, bitterly, " your moral cravings 
 were satisfied by discovering that Nature was not
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. (yj 
 
 immoral, because Nature had never heard of morality. 
 It appears not to have struck you that this utterly 
 neutral character of Nature, this placid indifYerencc 
 to right and wrong, left man in a dreadful moral 
 solitude ; and might make him doubt whether, since 
 morality did not exist for Nature, it need exist at all ; 
 whether, among all these blind physical forces, he too 
 might not be a mere blind physical force." 
 
 " On the contrary," answered Baldwin, " when I 
 came to understand why morality was not a necessity 
 for Nature, I also understood why morality was a 
 necessity for man ; the rule of the road, the rule 
 that each coachman must take. a particular side of 
 the street with reference to other coachmen, could 
 certainly not exist before the existence of streets and 
 of carriages being driven along them; but without that 
 rule of the road, gradually established by the practice 
 of drivers, one carriage would merely smash into 
 another, and the thoroughfare be hopelessly blocked. 
 Thus it has been with morality. Rules of the road 
 are unnecessary where there are neither roads 
 nor carriages ; ,and morality would be unnecessary, 
 indeed inconceivable, where there are no human 
 interests in collision. Moralit}^, I now feel persuaded, 
 is the exclusive and essential qualification of the 
 movements of an assemblage of men, as distinguished 
 from an assemblage of stones, or plants, or beasts, the 
 qualification of man's relation, not with unsentient 
 things, but with sentient creatures. Why go into
 
 68 BALDWIN. 
 
 details ? You know that the school of philosophy to 
 which I adhere has traced all the distinctions of right 
 and wrong to the perceptions, enforced upon man by 
 mankind, and upon mankind by man, of the difference 
 between such courses as are conducive to the higher 
 development and greater happiness of men, and such 
 other courses as are conducive only to their degrada- 
 tion and extinction. Such a belief, so far from leaving 
 me in moral solitude, and making me doubt of my 
 own moral nature, brings home to me that I am but a 
 drop in the great moral flood called progress ; that 
 my own morality is but a result of the morality of 
 millions of other creatures who have preceded me 
 and surround me now; that my morality is an essential 
 contribution to the morality of millions of creatures who 
 will come after me ; that on all sides, the more society 
 develops, there is a constantly increasing intricacy of 
 moral connection between the present, the past, and 
 the future. If I refuse to pass on in the ranks of 
 good, there will be so much the less havoc made in 
 the ranks of evil ; if I fall, those on either side of me will 
 be less united and less vigorous to resist, those follow- 
 ing after me will stumble ; I must therefore keep in my 
 place, be borne along by the current mass of moral 
 life, instead of being passed over and trampled by it." 
 Vere did not answer. He looked vaguely towards 
 the window, at the ghostly billows of the downs, dark 
 blue, bleak, unsubstantial under the bright cold windy 
 sky. The wind had risen, and went moaning round
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 69 
 
 the farm, piping shrilly in all its chinks and crannies, 
 and making- a noise as of distant waters in the firs of 
 the common. Suddenly in the midst of the silence 
 within doors, there came from the adjoining room a 
 monotonous trickle or dribble of childish voice, going 
 on breathless, then halting suddenly exhausted, but 
 with uniform regularity. 
 
 " It is Willie reading the Bible to his grandmother," 
 remarked Rheinhardt ; " the old lady is left alone at 
 home with him on Sunday evenings, while her husband 
 goes to the village. It is a curious accompaniment 
 to your and Baldwin's pessimistic groanings and 
 utilitarian jubilations." 
 
 " I think," remarked Baldwin, after a moment's fruit- 
 less listening to catch the words from next door, " I 
 think in some matters we unbelievers might take a 
 lesson from our neighbours. I was very much struck 
 to-day, while listening to Monsignore's sermon, with 
 the thought that that man feels it his duty to teach 
 others what he believes to be the truth, and that we 
 do not." 
 
 " It is a priest's profession to preach, my dear 
 Baldwin," put in Rheinhardt ; "he lives by it, lives off 
 his own preaching and off the preaching of all the 
 other priests that live now or ever have lived." 
 
 " We unbelievers — I should rather say we believers 
 in the believable" — answered Baldwin, "should all of 
 us be, in a fashion, priests. You say that Monsignore 
 lives off his own preaching and the preaching of all
 
 70 BALD WIN. 
 
 Catholic priests that ever have been — well ; and do \vc 
 not live spiritually, do we not feed our souls upon the 
 truth which we ourselves can find, upon the truth 
 which generations of men have accumulated for us ? 
 If, in the course of time, there be no more priests in 
 the world, I mean in the old sense, it will be that 
 every man will be a priest for his own family, and 
 every man of genius a priest for the whole of man- 
 kind. What I was thinking of just now is this — that 
 this Monsignore, whom we consider a sort of clever 
 deluded fool, and this old country woman, whose 
 thoughts scarcely go beyond her village, are impressed 
 v/ith the sense of the responsibility incurred by the 
 possession of what they consider superior truth — the 
 responsibility of not keeping that truth to themselves, 
 but participating it to others ; and that herein they 
 both of them assume a position far wiser, far more 
 honest, far nobler, than do we unbelievers, who say, 
 ' What does it matter if others know only error, as 
 long as ourselves know truth ?'" 
 
 "You forget," answered Rheinhardt, "that both 
 Monsignore and our landlady are probably persuaded 
 that unless they share their spiritual knowledge with 
 their neighbours, they will be responsible for the souls 
 of those neighbours. And if you remember what 
 ma}-, in the opinion of the orthodox, happen to the 
 souls of such persons as have been slightly neglected 
 in their religious education, I think you will admit 
 that there is plenty to feel responsible about."
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OE UNBELIEE. 71 
 
 " You mean that there is nothhig for us to feci 
 responsible about. Not so. Whatever in ay happen 
 to the souls of our fellows will indeed not happen in 
 an after world, nor v/ill they suffer in a physical hell 
 of Dante, or enjoy themselves in a physical Paradise 
 of Mahomet. But there is nevertheless, for the souls 
 which we know, for the souls which look up to us for 
 instruction and assistance, a hell. A hell of moral 
 doubt and despair and degradation, a hell ^\•here there 
 is fire enough to scorch the most callous, and ice 
 enough to numb the warmest, and mud to clog and 
 bedraggle the most noble among us. Yes. There is 
 a hell in the moral world, and there is heaven, and 
 there is God ; the heaven of satisfied conscience, the 
 God of our own aspirations ; and from this heaven, 
 from the sight of this God, it is in our power to 
 exclude those most beloved to us. Shut them out 
 because we have not the courage to sec them shiver 
 and wince one moment in the cold and the light of 
 truth ; shut them out and leave them to wander in a 
 world of phantoms, upon the volcano crust of that 
 hell of moral disbelief, unaware of its existence or 
 aware too late, too suddenly of the crater opening 
 beneath their feet. That old woman in the next 
 room is teaching, feels bound to teach, her child the 
 things which she looks upon as truth. And shall a 
 man like you, Vcre, refuse to teach your children 
 what you know to be true? Will you leave them to 
 believe that the world and man and God, the past
 
 72 BALDWIN. 
 
 and future and present, are wholly different from what 
 they really are ; or else, to discover, unaided, with 
 slow anguish or sudden despair, that all is different 
 from what they thought, that there is falsehood where 
 they relied on truth, and evil where they looked up to 
 good ; till falsehood and evil shall seem everywhere 
 and truth and good nowhere ? You spoke of the 
 moral happiness and safety of your children ; will 
 you let that consist in falsehood, and depend upon 
 the duration of error ; will you let your children run 
 the risk of losing their old faith, without helping them 
 to find a new one ? Will you waste so much of their 
 happiness for themselves, and of their usefulness for 
 the world ? " 
 
 Vere did not answer; he remained as if absorbed 
 in thought, nervously tearing the petals off a rose 
 which stood in the glass before him. 
 
 " Do please leave that flower alone, Vere," remon- 
 strated Rheinhardt ; "that is just the way that all 
 you pessimists behave — pulling to pieces the few 
 pleasant things which Nature or man has succeeded 
 in making, because the world is not as satisfactory as 
 it might be. Such a nice rose, that was, the very 
 apple of our landlady's eye, who picked it merely to 
 afford you a pleasant surprise for supper ; and you have 
 merely made a mess of it on the tablecloth. That's 
 what comes of thinking too much about responsibilities. 
 One doesn't see the mischief one's fingers are up to." 
 
 And Rheinhardt, who was a tidy man, rose, and
 
 THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. n 
 
 carefully swept the pink petals and the yellow seeds 
 off the table into his hand, and thence transferred 
 them into a little earthenware jar full of dry rose 
 leaves, which he kept in true eighteenth-century style, 
 on his writing table. 
 
 " That is the difference of our philosophies," he 
 remarked, with satisfaction ; " you tear to pieces the 
 few roses that are given us, and we pick up their leaves, 
 and get the pleasant scent of them even when 
 withered." 
 
 "The definition is not bad," put in Baldwin, throwing 
 a bundle of faggots on the fire, and making it crackle 
 and flare up lustily, flooding the room wdth ruddy 
 light. 
 
 Vera turned away his face from the glow, and 
 looked once more, vaguely and wistfully, into the 
 bleak blueness of common and downs lying chill and 
 dim in the moonlight. 
 
 " What you have been saj-ing, Baldwin," he at last 
 remarked, " may perhaps be true. It may be that it 
 would be wise to teach my children the things which I 
 believe to be true. But you see I love my children a 
 great deal ; and — . Well, I mean that I have not the 
 heart to assume the responsibility of such a decision." 
 
 " You shirk your responsibilities," answered Bald- 
 win, " and in doing so you take upon yourself the 
 heaviest responsibility of any."
 
 f-JH 
 
 x^. 
 
 
 yf/ry' d^
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF.
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. 
 
 " ] 'a-t-il de vcritablcs atlices ? 
 Oiti ; s'ily a dc 'jeritabla Cluxiicns" — Diderot. 
 
 The summer evening was turning into night, 
 merging in delicate twilight grey the houses of the 
 harbour, the shipping all round, the oozy sandbanks 
 where the boats lay embedded at low water. From 
 the town, its big square belfry looming in the dusk, 
 came the first yellow reflections across the water, and 
 the distant sound of the Rappel drums and bugles. 
 Agatha, who had been silently watching the sailors 
 going and coming on the wharf, the cranes slowly 
 swinging upwards with their clutched bales, the ooze 
 of high water lazily trickling from the green, clammy 
 walls, turned suddenly to Baldwin as he paced up 
 and down the lonely deck. 
 
 " I want to speak to you," she said. 
 
 He had not taken much notice of that stubborn- 
 looking Scotch girl whom he had met the previous 
 day travelling homewards with his friends ; she had 
 been silent, depressed, and almost morose that whole
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. 77 
 
 afternoon, and he had thought, if he had thought 
 about it at all, that the sense that this long, first 
 journey having come to a close, of the confusion of 
 new impressions, stolidly received at the moment, but 
 now overwhelming, was the cause of her depression. 
 
 " I want to speak to you," repeated Agatha, 
 v/ithout giving him time to answer, " because I have 
 been thinking all day long about what you said in 
 the cathedral — do you remember ? — about religion 
 being a waste of energy, because there is no God with 
 whom it could bring us into connection. Of course 
 it's possible that you may not really have believed 
 what you were saying, though I don't understand 
 how people can say things they don't believe. But I 
 want to know whether that is the case, or whether 
 you seriously think in that way," 
 
 Baldwin stopped and leaned against the side of the 
 boat. 
 
 " People do very often say things which they don't 
 believe, especially on such subjects ; and I don't find 
 it as impossible as you do to realize their doing so. 
 But I don't think there is much danger of it with 
 me." 
 
 " Then you seriously think that there is no God } " 
 
 " I do not think that at all. I did not say there 
 was no God ; I merely said there was no God with 
 whom religion can bring us into contact." 
 
 " Oh yes," burst out Agatha, contemptuously, " I 
 know the sort of thinsf. You believe that there is a
 
 78 BALDWIN. 
 
 god who is really in everything and virtually in 
 nothing ; you believe that there is a god who is in 
 the steam of a kettle, and the brain of a convict, and 
 the virus of smallpox, and the chlorophyl of the 
 leaves — a god who is the cosmos and all it contains 
 — a deaf, blind, inconscient, overallish god, whose 
 qualities are gravitation and expansion and so forth, 
 who is much the same sort of thing as electricity, or 
 heat, or light, and who can be approached, not by 
 prayer, but by chemical analysis. I know the sort of 
 god you mean." 
 
 "You think that you know him," corrected Baldwin, 
 quietly. 
 
 "Well, perhaps I don't know him as exactly as you 
 do, because I have not studied chemistry, and dyna- 
 mics, and physics, and all those things which reveal 
 what he is. But I know what he is not ; I know that 
 he has no mind and has no heart ; I know that he is 
 no god. I feel that I am repeating blasphemies in 
 saying these things which you think, and I know that 
 I shall hear more blasphemies if I continue speaking 
 with you on the subject. But I must talk about it 
 all the same — I must talk about it, although I dare 
 say you will consider me absurd and childish, and 
 forward, and disagreeable, because I think you must 
 be very unhappy v/ith such beliefs as those." 
 
 "I don't think I am particularly unhappy," answered 
 Baldwin, " and, supposing I were unhappy, I don't 
 see how that could affect my belief. I believe things
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. 79 
 
 — at least I try to do so — not because the}- make me 
 happy or unhappy, but because they appear to me to 
 be true." 
 
 " But you wilfully refuse to see one half of the 
 evidence ; you wilfully choose to hear only one side 
 of the argument. It is no use saying that you do 
 not ; if you did not, you would not believe what you 
 do. Now, I know that in people like you — in mate- 
 rialists or atheists, or whatever you may choose to call 
 yourselves — all this may often be the result of a sort 
 of self-importance which inclines you to think that 
 the more painful path must be the path of duty. 
 You disbelievers are the very same men who in 
 former days would have been religious fanatics : you 
 desire martyrdom, you take a pleasure in tormenting 
 yourselves, and, just as people used formerly to wear 
 hair shirts and to drink brackish water because they 
 wanted to feel that they were saints, so you choose to 
 believe all the things that cost you most pain, that 
 do most violence to your feelings, because you also 
 are vain and morbid, and wish to feel yourselves better 
 than other men ; and so you force yourselves to think 
 that there is no good save yourselves in the universe, 
 and that there is no God outside it : things which arc 
 cruel and abominable to believe, just in proportion as 
 they are false to God's nature and your own, and 
 which you take a satisfaction in believing, just in 
 proportion as they are cruel and abominable." 
 
 Baldwin did not answer. Agatha had surprised him ;
 
 8o BALDWIN. 
 
 she was not, as he had imagined, merely an amiable 
 and self-sufficient young quixot, parroting the stale 
 arguments of some fashionable Broad Church preacher. 
 
 " You think that very noble on your part, I have 
 no doubt," went on Agatha, "just as those anchorites 
 of former time, and those Indian ascetics, thought it 
 noble to torture their bodies. I think it is merely 
 repulsive and contemptible, and I, personally, don't 
 feel any compassion for you : if you deliberately go 
 out of your way to court suffering, why then suffer. 
 But in suffering you are diminishing the amount of 
 good which it has pleased God to put into the world ; 
 you are running counter to His will ; you are laying 
 wanton hands upon His work — and to see that makes 
 me indignant." 
 
 " I thought Christianity taught mankind to hate 
 the sufferings of others for the sake of those others." 
 
 " I am not a Christian ; I do not care what may be 
 taught or may not be taught. I believe in God, and 
 in the goodness of God's will — that is all. I don't 
 think God would be offended merely by your 
 doubting His existence ; but He is offended because 
 you refuse to see the goodness which He has made 
 manifest in order that men and women may be 
 happy." 
 
 And Baldwin saw Agatha's eyes fixed solemnly on 
 him in the dusk. 
 
 " You are indignant with me because, by being 
 wilfully unhappy in my belief, you suppose me to be
 
 THE CONSOLATIO.\S OF BELIEF. 8i 
 
 frustrating God's will," he answered ; " but what if I 
 am not unhapp)- ? " 
 
 " That is impossible. Oh," added the girl, with fierce 
 contempt, " I don't mean to say that a kind of happi- 
 ness may not be compatible with such a belief as 
 yours. A sheep is happy nibbling the grass, a cat 
 is happy lying in the sun, or a dog running about in 
 the fields ; and we have all of us sufficient of the 
 animal in our nature to experience some sort of 
 happiness so long as we have what would satisfy the 
 mere animal, or the scarcely higher creature which 
 seeks bare comfort, not in actual food or in actual 
 physical warmth, but in worldly prosperity or worldly 
 consideration. But supposing you be something 
 better than that, supposing you have a mind and a 
 heart, do not your mind and your heart require some- 
 thing which is to them as breathable air and food and 
 space to move in are to the mere body — a spiritual 
 atmosphere in which you can see and live, and which 
 is the all-pervading goodness of God ? " 
 
 " I do not feel such a want ; " said Baldwin ; " I feel, 
 like you, a desire, a want, that the world be full of 
 justice and forethought and charity ; but I do not 
 imagine that this justice and forethought and charity 
 are to be those of God : I desire them of man." 
 
 " The justice and forethought and charity of man ! " 
 cried Agatha — '' what can they be — what could they 
 be — even at the best } Individual, impotent, finite 
 things. Man can set right, at the very best, only the 
 
 7
 
 82 BALDWIN. 
 
 smallest speck of wrong ; only that tiny speck which 
 is near enough to his weak eyes, to his weak hands ; 
 he can love only those that he knows, and how many 
 are they ? Nay, only those whom his imperfect 
 understanding, his limited sympathies, permit him to 
 understand. Take the very noblest, and wisest, and 
 most loving of men — how narrow is his power of 
 separating the good from the evil, of making allow- 
 ance, of justly weighing — why, he can understand 
 only those who are made like himself. But God, who 
 has made all, knows all, loves in each and every one 
 whatever microscopic good there may exist, invisible to 
 other men's eyes ; He, in whose hands is all good and 
 all evil, can not merely destroy all evil, but can create 
 all good ; He can bring in the right hand as much 
 good as He can remove evil with the left. He, who is 
 everywhere and all-seeing, can come always at the 
 right time, can always help and console at the moment 
 that help and consolation is wanted, can always revive 
 with the consciousness of His love at the instant that 
 want of love is letting us freeze or stifle to death. 
 The knowledge that such love surrounds not only 
 ourselves, but all men, surrounds those whom we see 
 down-trodden and suffering without being able to help 
 them — the knowledge of this love, is happiness, and 
 the absence of this knowledge is misery." 
 
 Baldwin listened to Agatha with a patience and a 
 reverence which his friends, who complained of his 
 uncompromising and impatient spirit of dispute,
 
 THE CONSOLA TIONS OF BELIEF. 8 j. 
 
 would have been surprised to witness. The fact was,, 
 it seemed to Baldwin that there was as much ground 
 for reverence and gentleness towards this strange,, 
 quixotic girl, who had cast off every orthodox faith to 
 make herself a faith which mirrored only her own- 
 nature, as there was reason for contemptuous impa- 
 tience with men who, while able and accustomed to 
 think, repeated nevertheless, from moral laziness or 
 pusillanimity, the threadbare arguments of others. 
 
 " I perfectly agree with you, Miss Stuart," he said, 
 " that a conviction such as you describe is an element 
 of happiness in the life of a man or a woman. But 
 an clement of happiness may be none the less falla- 
 cious and none the less mischievous. The persuasion 
 of a conceited man that he is the admired of all 
 beholders is so great an clement of happiness in his 
 life that without it his life would be unendurable ; yet 
 the persuasion is utterly unfounded, and the man has 
 no right to it. You will say that this is a grotesque 
 instance — well, let us take one from the very class of 
 subject about which we are discussing. In the 
 Middle Ages some of the noblest and purest-minded 
 men and women, like St. Catherine of Siena, and 
 nearly all the m}'stical saints, firmly believed that 
 the hysterical fits induced b}^ fasting and want of sleep 
 and maceration — pitiable and disgusting prostrations of 
 body and mind — were participations in the life of God. 
 This belief compensated them for every imaginable 
 evil and hardship, this delusion of superhuman happi-
 
 84 BALDWIN. 
 
 ness where there was only a degrading disease, 
 enabled them to go cheerfully through lives which 
 were almost unendurable, and which were noble and 
 even useful. You cannot say that the happiness was 
 not true, or that the belief on which it rested was not 
 false. How can you be certain that this belief of 
 yours, which you describe as so enormous an element 
 of happiness in your life, which you say would make 
 such a difference in mine, is not a delusion like St. 
 Catherine's or St. Francis's belief in ecstasy ? " 
 
 Agatha looked round her for a moment. Some- 
 thing in the hour and the light, a poignancy in the 
 sense that an eventful time in her young life was 
 fading into the past with this fading away of this last 
 day of her first long journey, brought home to Agatha, 
 even more strongly than before, a dull pain, which she 
 misnamed indignation to her resolute spirit, at the 
 moral blindness of this man. 
 
 " The belief of St. Francis and of St. Catherine," 
 she answered, with a little Scotch contempt for 
 saints, " was, for all their virtues, due to mere 
 diseased vanity, and appealed to a morbid, degrading 
 craving for excitement : they wanted to be God, they 
 did not want to know God's goodness. Besides, it was 
 a survival, in people whom it disgraced, of super- 
 stitions which they accepted along with the spiritual 
 truths of their religion." 
 
 " That is what you think, and I think," replied 
 Baldwin, " but it would have seemed a monstrous
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF 85 
 
 blasphemy to the people of those days. Does it not 
 occur to you that this belief in the goodness of God, 
 which affords you so much happiness — happiness less 
 acute, I am inclined to think, than that of the saints, 
 conscious of their power of ecstasy, but also less selfish 
 and nobler — does it not strike you that this belief 
 also may be the expression of a mere desire of your 
 nature, the survival from some phase of belief which 
 you have in the main left behind you ? " 
 
 Agatha shook her head. 
 
 " In the first place," she answered, looking up in 
 the pale blue overhead, where the earliest stars 
 seemed struggling to the surface, and watching the 
 swallows whirring about the rigging of the ship, and 
 dipping across the deck, "you are mistaken in 
 supposing that I accept any religion as those saints, 
 superior as they were to me, could not help doing in 
 their day. I was brought up among devout believers, 
 and I was, for a long time, a devout believer myself. 
 I loved religion ; it came naturally to me, and was my 
 greatest pleasure. When I was a child I used to cut 
 out angels of tissue paper with crowns of gilt foil, 
 and to lie dreaming of heaven for hours under the 
 bushes in the garden ; after that I liked nothing 
 so much as reading religious books and scribbling 
 verses about God and Christ. But then one day, 
 while reading some book on the Fall and the Re- 
 demption, it suddenly came home to me how terrible, 
 how wicked it was of God to have brought sin and
 
 86 ' BALDWIN. 
 
 death into the world to avenge so trifling a dis- 
 obedience, such as every boy and girl commit by the 
 dozen ; and then to let His own Son offer Himself up 
 to be insulted and martyred, and to wash out the 
 memory of His wrath only in innocent blood. And 
 then it came home to me also how incredible it 
 seemed of a good God to condemn so many men and 
 women to eternal torture ; and I began to disbelieve. 
 It was most cruel to me to have to wrench myself 
 from my belief, to give up Christ and the angels in 
 heaven, to bring it all down to human proportions, to 
 find myself quite alone, without any mediator to help 
 and encourage me, in the awful presence of God. 
 Oh, you can't think how horrible it was : all the 
 poetry and cheerfulness and security seemed to 
 have gone out of life. But still I went on doubting 
 and disbelieving ; and now I accept no one's belief 
 but my own — nothing except what m}^ heart tells me 
 is true. So you see that I am able to tear m}-sclf 
 from beliefs which I love ; and that \-ou have no right 
 to suppose that my present faith is either a mere con- 
 cession to my wishes, or a lazy survival of the doc- 
 trines of other folk." 
 
 Baldwin smiled at this deeply religious nature 
 persuading itself so seriously that it was strong- 
 minded and sceptical. 
 
 " I see," he said, gently, " that you started v/ith the 
 belief in a good and loving God ; and that as soon as 
 you saw in the orthodox religion notions about God
 
 THE CON SO LA TIONS OF BELIEF. f,-] 
 
 which did not square with your belief in His good- 
 ness and lovingness, you forthwith broke with ortho- 
 doxy. But this merely proves to me that I \\'as 
 quite right in suggesting that your belief was, what 
 you scornfully defined the belief in ecstasy of St. 
 Catherine and St. Francis, a survival of a tradi- 
 tional creed and an expression of personal desires. 
 You have dropped some portion of the orthodox 
 creed ; but you have not dropped what corresponds 
 to this faith in visions and trances, since you have not 
 dropped what was to you the delightful part of your 
 belief." 
 
 " I did not drop what is vital in all religion, what 
 is necessary for spiritual life, what is proven to every 
 mind which docs not wilfully refuse the evidence of 
 the whole universe. No ! I have not dropped that," 
 cried Agatha, indignantly : " but what right have you 
 to compare the delusion of those half-crazy monks 
 and nuns, taking their own fever visions for God's 
 presence, and their own hysteric ravings for God's 
 voice — what right have you to compare such 
 things with the testimony of all nature proclaim- 
 ing the goodness of God } Look there," she went 
 on, passionately, pointing at the port where the 
 boat lay awaiting the tide, where the white- 
 wash of the houses on the wharves glared a lurid 
 white beneath their huddled roofs, the light in 
 windows and doorways still struggling, yellow and 
 uncertain, with the fading twilight, the chimney stacks
 
 88 BALDWIN. 
 
 black against the pale sky delicately streaked \\'ith 
 smoke-like cloud-wreaths, upon which the rigging 
 and pennons of the boats appeared clear and thread- 
 like, while the gurgoyles and pinnacles and lit-up 
 clock alone remained distinguishable from the dark 
 mass of the cathedral belfry. All was marvellously 
 subdued and delicate and peaceful : the whirr of 
 the swallows and the distant song of the children 
 playing in the twilight mingling with the drowsy 
 lapping of the waves against the ship and the wharf 
 side, as the subtle curls of smoke from the old town 
 mingled with the grey mists streaking the sky. 
 
 " Look there," went on Agatha, " does not every- 
 thing on this beautiful evening speak to you of the 
 goodness of God .'' does not the very sense of the 
 purity and peacefulness of the sky and the water — • 
 does not the knowledge of the great green rolling 
 country, with its orchards and cornfields, and rows of 
 poplars, and lily-grown canals behind us, of the 
 great grey, misty sea before us, mean the sense, the 
 knowledge of the goodness of God } Do you not 
 feel it even in the very perception of the lovely tints 
 of the sky, of the reflections on the water, of the 
 breeze and the swallow's sound ? And does not the 
 remembrance of all the hundreds of men and women 
 and children who are resting from their day's work in 
 yonder town, and the strong wish which you feel 
 that they may be peaceful and happy all their lives 
 — does not all this say, as clearly as all your various
 
 THE CON SO LA TIONS OF BELIEF. 89 
 
 sensations and thoughts say, that there is a yourself, 
 that there is a God, and that He is Love ? " 
 
 " I follow your argument," answered Baldwin. 
 " These things are beautiful and noble, they make us 
 happy, they represent so much happiness ; and the 
 God who has made them thus must therefore be good 
 and loving. But let us look a little closer at the 
 things around us — let us try and realize what exists 
 beneath this beautiful scene. This water, which looks 
 so lovely with its black wavy surface broken by the 
 long yellow reflections — what do you suppose it 
 really is .'' — a wash of filth and of death, a drain-and- 
 shambles-polluted slime, which sends up fever to 
 poison into weakness a proportion of those men and 
 women, to poison into death a proportion of those 
 children whom you suppose to be happily resting 
 after their day's work. That fertile country behind 
 us, with the fields and farms and orchards, does it not 
 suggest to you all the overwork, the ignorance, the 
 sordid avarice of the people who cultivate it ? As to 
 the sea, which happens to be so calm at present, what 
 is it except an enormous watery charnel-house, where 
 not only the bones of uncountable dead men, but the 
 hopes and honour and happiness of even a vaster 
 number of living men and women. He buried } This 
 seems to you far-fetched — well, then, try for one 
 instant to realize all that is at this moment going on 
 in that little sleepy city; try for a moment to guess at 
 the amount of cruelty and falsehood and bestial foul-
 
 90 ■ BALDWIN. 
 
 ness which exists even among those comparatively 
 few men and women ; try to bring home to yourself 
 merely one-twentieth of the misery, the bodily and 
 mental agony, the bodily and mental starvation, and 
 corruption, and dying inch by inch of its inhabitants ; 
 try and conceive the condition of merely one dying 
 man, or sick child, or polluted woman among the 
 many in those few houses opposite, and tell me 
 whether you still think that the things which surround 
 us at this moment bear to us the assurance that the 
 God who made them is a God all love." 
 
 Agatha gave a slight shudder and did not answer 
 for a moment. 
 
 " Everything in the world is not good," she said, 
 after a pause, " but everything in the world is for the 
 best. We cannot even conceive existence without 
 this amount of evil ; without it we might be happier, 
 but we should be happy merely like well-provided 
 domestic animals ; if there were no temptation, no 
 degradation, no despair, there could be no purity, no 
 aspiration, no charity, no self-sacrifice, no justice. 
 Tell me, can you conceive a world less bad than 
 this ? " 
 
 " I cannot — I, being part and parcel of this world, 
 taking all my notions of possible and impossible from 
 its already established arrangements ; I, with the 
 limitations imposed upon me by this world, certainly 
 could not. But the God of whom you speak is not 
 merely all good, He is all powerful. He is met by no
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. 91 
 
 limitations, since all limitations are imposed by Him- 
 self. You cannot say of Him, ' He put into the world 
 as much happiness as was possible,' for the words 
 possible and impossibility have no meaning in relation 
 to Omnipotence." 
 
 " I do not know why God has permitted what evil 
 there is in the world," said Agatha, with eager 
 thoughtfulness — " no one can, on account of those very 
 limitations of our nature of which you speak. And I 
 know, oh, I know but too well, that there is evil, 
 terrible, hopeless evil in the world. I know it ; and 
 the thought of it would overwhelm me, were it not 
 that I know that God has no limitations like ours, 
 that He Is all good and all just, and has the whole of 
 time, the whole of space, wherein to compensate for 
 this evil of the world ; that if a man or a woman, nay, 
 the humblest of His creatures, is doomed to suffer in 
 the few hours of this life, that suffering will be washed 
 out by the floods of happiness which will be poured 
 forth in eternity. Oh, yes herein lies the blessedness 
 of the belief in God's goodness ; herein, that every 
 time we see some creature disinherited, hopelessly and 
 cruelly, of happiness, of health, or freedom, or love, 
 in this world, and that we feel that we are power- 
 less to help ; that every time we look upon a city 
 like this one, and picture to ourselves all the 
 vice and degradation and misery in it which we can 
 only shudder at in impotence, the thought comes to 
 console us that all these thines shall be set ricfht, all
 
 92 BALD WIN. 
 
 this evil turned to good, and that God has Infinitude 
 and Eternity wherein to do it." 
 
 "But," objected Baldwin, "what assurance have 
 you, who have rejected as mere human utterances 
 the words of promise handed down by the Church — 
 you, who accept only your own convictions — that there 
 is for any of these creatures, higher and lower, for the 
 dog tied down for hours while disembowelled by the 
 physiologist, or for the man wasting away from 
 hereditary disease which has carried off, one by one, 
 all his beloved ones, for the stag rushing along with the 
 teeth of the hounds already upon him, and for the 
 woman hounded by society from one stage of infamy 
 and misery to another, till she sinks down a m.ere 
 mass of bodily and moral disease — what assurance 
 have you that when death releases them from their 
 miseries, death does not also put an end to all possi- 
 bilities of compensation and justice? when, on the 
 contrary, everything fresh that we learn respecting 
 the physical basis of mind and character, the physical 
 constituents of identity, renders it daily more difficult 
 to conceive the survival of the soul when separated 
 from the body of which it seems uncommonly like a 
 a function, or a combination of functions ? An 
 orthodox believer, who accepts the teaching of the 
 Church as the word of God, settles the matter by a 
 reference to the creed, as I might settle a question of 
 my future financial condition by a reference to my 
 father's or grandfather's will at Doctors Commons ;
 
 THE CONSOLA TIONS OF HE LIEF. 93 
 
 but you cannot say, I know there will be an after life, 
 because I possess a written promise to that effect." 
 
 " I know that all the things which science is 
 teaching make it very difficult for us to understand 
 by what means and in what manner our soul will 
 survive our body," answered Agatha, composedly ; 
 " we do not know, and have no need to know. Our 
 conviction rests elsewhere. We possess a document 
 by which a future life is promised to us more solemnly 
 and certainly than by any lawyer's parchment ; for 
 the promise that all evil will be compensated here- 
 after is written and sealed deep in our heart, and, if 
 we look into that, and seriously contemplate that 
 mysterious writ, we must recognize that God's own 
 hand has traced it." 
 
 " There is indeed in our consciousness," said Bald- 
 win, " a difficulty of conceiving annihilation, something 
 analogous, I fancy, to our mechanical difficulty of 
 seeing our own back ; and there is also a strong 
 instinctive desire for the preservation of our life and 
 of our property, among which latter the life of 
 those beloved of us is certainly the most valuable. 
 This horror of annihilation and this difficulty of 
 conceiving it, both of them peculiarities explicable by 
 reference to our mere present condition, naturally 
 combined and produced, in the absence of any 
 scientific facts which rendered such a conception 
 difficult, a hope, a belief in a future existence, which 
 it is quite possible may have become almost heredi-
 
 94 BALDWIN. 
 
 tary in us. Your God-written promise is thus easily 
 reduced to a mere wish for a prolongation of con- 
 sciousness, grown to a certainty for sheer want of 
 being contradicted." 
 
 Had it been less dark Baldwin might have seen a 
 sort of convulsion pass over Agatha's quiet and 
 earnest face. 
 
 " Had such a belief been a delusion," she burst out, 
 after a moment, " do you think that God would have 
 permitted it to rise up in our heart? Is it not more 
 consonant with all we know of His wisdom and 
 goodness to suppose that He caused these blind 
 instincts of our nature to unite into such significance, 
 to reveal what our reason could not grasp, than to 
 imagine that He is a callous bungler, or a cruel liar, 
 deluding us with belief in the impossible 1 " 
 
 " Your certainty, then, of the existence of a future 
 life depends upon your conviction of the goodness of 
 God ? " 
 
 "Yes ; God cannot let us perish after such a life as 
 this ; God cannot bid us hope for what He is not 
 going to give." 
 
 " You found your belief in a future life upon your 
 certainty of the goodness of God ? " repeated Baldwin. 
 
 " I do," interrupted Agatha ; " are there not moral 
 facts revealed to the heart as well as intellectual facts 
 revealed to the reason .'' " 
 
 " But you forget that this very future life had been 
 postulated by you to vindicate God's goodness," he
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. 95 
 
 went on. " The opportunity of compensating for the 
 evil of this world is thus made finally to rest upon 
 that very incompatibility with evil, whose existence 
 it was intended to prove. Is this too complicated } 
 Well, then, in plainer terms, belief in the goodness of 
 God depends upon belief in immortalit}', and belief in 
 immortality depends upon belief in the goodness of 
 God. Does this strike you as a satisfactory argu- 
 ment ? " 
 
 Baldwin smiled rather bitterly ; he was an impa- 
 tient man, and even with a girl like Agatha he felt 
 just a little out of patience. 
 
 " Why not ? " answered Agatha, defiantly. " Is not 
 the goodness of God a fact sufficiently important to 
 account for all things ? " 
 
 " The goodness of God," replied Baldwin, drily, 
 "that is to say, the goodness of all-wise Omnipotence, 
 does not seem to me a sufficient explanation for the 
 evil which Ke has inflicted upon His creatures. The 
 moral character of God is so fearfully compromised 
 in your eyes by all the foulness and misery which He 
 has admitted into His scheme of things, that you 
 require to rehabilitate Him, to save Him from 
 condemnation by your own conscience, the supposi- 
 tion of another state of existence in which He will 
 compensate for the injustice and cruelty with which 
 He has treated us in this one. But what right have 
 you to suppose that the God who does not shrink 
 from inflicting unnecessary evil — for God is bound by
 
 96 BALDWIX. 
 
 no necessity — must feel bound to repair it ? What 
 right have you to expect the absolute justice and 
 kindness, which would plan a future life, from the 
 Being who has shown the absolute injustice and 
 cruelty which He has worked into this one ? Oh 
 no ! the God who has created evil is not the God 
 from whom we may expect compensation — the Un- 
 just is not the one from whom we may await final 
 justice." 
 
 Agatha was silent. The night was hot and wind- 
 less, the sky overcast with a dark film. The town, 
 all save the brilliant eye of the cathedral clock, was 
 hidden in darkness ; only close b}', the wharf was 
 distinguishable by the flicker of its lanterns ; and 
 dark figures hovered about in the glow of the 
 furnaces of engines, which belched out, ever and 
 anon, great masses of thick flame-reddened smoke, 
 drowning all voices with their constant whirr and grind 
 and tremendous pant. A kind of terror came over 
 Agatha ; the light seemed to be dying out of her 
 soul as out of the heavens, leaving only lurid gleams 
 like those all round them. But she struggled bravely 
 against this horror. 
 
 " But evil," she said, " is not really of God ; it 
 exists, but it is foreign to Him. E\'il, physical and 
 moral, are against nature ; nature is for ever trying 
 to cast out evil, punishing the existence of crime and 
 foulness ; and nature is but the expression of God's 
 will."
 
 THE COXSOLA TIONS OF BELIEF. c^-j 
 
 "Evil is not contrary to naturc,"answercd Baldwin — 
 and his words had a horrible fascination to Agatha, 
 mingling as they did with all the unearthly sounds of 
 the wharf — " evil is not contrary to nature ; it is con- 
 trary, or partially contrary, only to certain processes 
 of nature upon which depend our life and happiness. 
 But do you suppose there are no other processes in 
 nature than these which are for our benefit ? The 
 movement which disorganizes is as natural as the 
 movement which organizes; the process which means 
 pain and death is as natural, as easy, as much a part 
 of the whole, as the process which means pleasure 
 and life. It so happens that out of these various 
 processes, some have made us ; that does not mean 
 that they are one whit more natural than those w^hich 
 may unmake us ; it means merely that they happen 
 to have been the stronger ; but the weaker are in 
 nature also. Disease follows upon putrescence, but 
 putrescence and disease are as much products of 
 nature as are the health in ourselves to which they 
 are opposed. However much we may get the better 
 of these hostile powers of nature, however much we 
 may in future secure ourselves from sickness, famine, 
 earthquake, and all the destructive powers of nature, 
 we shall not diminish the fact that those powers, or 
 at all events the elements thereof, exist within nature, 
 even as the vanquished malefactor, bound hand and 
 foot, reduced to harmlessness, exists in nature, is its 
 product as well as the policeman who has got the
 
 98 BALDWIN. 
 
 better of him ? Na}% these evil powers of nature, 
 these which we choose to call ag'ainst nature because 
 they are against us, are not by any means hostile 
 even to those processes which befriend us ; they work- 
 together. Destruction helps preservation, life lives 
 off death ; not only does the survival of this civiliza- 
 tion depend upon the destruction of that one, even 
 as the survival of one particular race of animals de- 
 pends upon the destruction of another particular race 
 of animals, but the bodily and moral health, the 
 material prosperity of one part of the community 
 depends upon the dying out, the annihilation of 
 another part of the community. It is useless to say 
 that it is the less endowed giving way to the better 
 endowed, or the minority to the majority ; the very 
 fact of being worse endowed or of constituting a 
 minority is, inasmuch as it entails this destruction, a 
 sufficiently positive evil. The crimes of nature are 
 not unnatural, neither are the crimes of man. Un- 
 natural in what sense ? Unnatural when nature, with 
 countless meshes, drags generations and races of men 
 into it, compels them, with the irresistible force of 
 inborn constitution and surrounding circumstances, 
 to be corrupt and cruel ; unnatural because crime 
 is punished by the same necessity of nature by which 
 it is created ? because Nature hounds up all mankind 
 against the tyrant which she has produced, or tears 
 to pieces with disease the profligate of her own 
 making ? In proportion as the world improves, so
 
 THE CONSOLA TIONS OF BELIEF. 99 
 
 does justice triumph, and good ; but the injustice 
 and evil over which it triumphs is as much a pro- 
 duct of nature as itself. But mark, this which 
 improves is human justice ; man improves, but 
 nature, fate, do not. The cases when the innocent 
 man is crushed b}- the hand of guilty mankind are 
 becoming rarer; but not one whit the rarer become the 
 cases when the wretch is condemned to misery, to sick- 
 ness, to sin, by the unjust hand of Fate. Nature re- 
 mains as callous and as impartial as in the days of Nero ; 
 and nature, you sa}", is the expression of God's will." 
 
 Agatha had listened not so much with patience as 
 with a kind of stupefaction. But she roused herself 
 and said, when Baldwin had ended — 
 
 " You argue according to your reason, according 
 to the appearance of things in your reason's light. 
 But }'Our reason is the work of God ; and who can 
 be so bold as to sa}-, upon the authority of this 
 created reason, that its judgments ma\- not be mere- 
 error, its ideas of good and evil mere delusions i*' 
 Be this as it may, God, although He has given us 
 reason which may be fallible, has given us a heart 
 whose words must, must be true. If evil is not, as may 
 perhaps be the case when things are seen unwarped 
 by our judgment, then God requires not to com- 
 pensate; and if evil really is, then God, who has 
 permitted us to know of such things as goodness and 
 justice, will show that He is all good and all just : 
 He will compensate hereafter."
 
 loo BALDWIN. 
 
 The men had come on deck, and were beginning, 
 with strange nautical chants and shouts, and amid 
 the roar and whizz of the engine, to take in the 
 cables. 
 
 " If, according to your first suggestion, our reason 
 deludes us into supposing that there is evil, and our 
 senses, I must add, to carry out your thought, delude 
 us in telling us that there is pain, why then," 
 answered Baldwin, " I can only sa}- that of all the 
 evils which may be laid at the door of the First 
 Great Cause, none is so monstrous as to have thus 
 created His creatures that what is really good and 
 therefore joy, should be to them evil and suffering ; 
 none is so base as to oblige them to have false- 
 hood, and to make the universe in which they live 
 nothing but one vast lie. If, on the other hand, cur 
 senses and our reason may be trusted, if there is 
 pain, and if there is evil, why then that pain, that 
 evil, can never, never be compensated. For com- 
 pensation is a vain word when applied to the 
 Almighty. We may compensate for what tke neces- 
 sity of our nature, the force of circumstances, or our 
 own imperfection has made us do ; I may testify, by 
 going out of my way to make my victim happy, 
 that I had no intention of hurting him, or that such 
 an intention no longer exists for me save as a shame 
 in the past. But how can He compensate who made 
 necessity instead of being made by it ? How can He 
 compensate v/ho was ever-present, almighty, and
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. loi 
 
 omniscient? What ignorance of consequences mis- 
 led Him, who estabhshed all relations of cause and 
 effect ? Therefore I say that the Almighty God can 
 plead no extenuating circumstances, that He is res- 
 ponsible for every millionth of a vibration of pain in 
 this universe, and that all the asons of bliss which 
 He might offer as compensation could not buy off 
 one tittle of that responsibility. The Omnipotent 
 and Omniscient has willed evil, and the moral sense 
 which He has made to arise in His creatures must 
 judge Him and hold Him guilty." 
 
 " Agatha ! Baldwin ! " cried the voices of their 
 friends through the darkness, " are you on deck .'* 
 Why we. thought }^ou must have gone ashore and lost 
 your way in the town, and that vv-e should have to leave 
 without you. Do }-ou know that it is not at all 
 proper for you two people to sit up on deck while 
 your friends think you are lost ? " 
 
 Agatha rose to meet her friends, v.-hile ropes 
 thumped back from the wharf to the deck, and the 
 first dull throb of movement ran through the boat. 
 
 " We shall have a beautiful calm night," said 
 Baldwin, looking up to where the clouds were 
 breaking and the rising moon sending a first broad 
 beam of silver on to the water : " it seems a pity that 
 our theological discussion should be broken into just 
 in the middle ; but we will resume it, if you be not too 
 tired, to-morrow morning. Good-night, Miss Stuart." 
 
 " Good-night," answered Agatha, coldly. But she 
 
 LTBKARY 
 
 UNTVKT?r:T'nY Qp CALIFORNIA 
 ^- '^ BARBARA
 
 I02 BALDWIN. 
 
 stopped suddenly, and, stretching out her hand, said, 
 in a curious tone, agitated and yet solemn, " I don't 
 suppose any longer that you do it from mere 
 perversity ; I think you could not — oh no, }'OU could 
 not think as you do of God from free choice. And 
 God will not be angry with 3^ou, because you must be 
 too unhappy ; He must be merely grieved, since even 
 I am merely grieved — and perhaps, perhaps some 
 day He may persuade you of His goodness." 
 
 For a moment, as he stood watching the moonlit 
 ripple in the wake of the boat, and the port lights 
 gradually fading away, Baldwin thought he was very 
 prosaic and brutal. 
 
 II. 
 
 The next morning, when Agatha came on deck, 
 she found Baldwin leaning over the side of the ship, 
 looking out on a scene very different from that which 
 they had left the night before. The sea had dis- 
 appeared, and the river was already narrowing, and 
 exchanging its green marshes for low banks, ghastly 
 with low black sheds and coal cinders, with here or 
 there a tall factory chimney spectral in the grey mist : 
 a desolate sight, these masses of thick livid water, 
 curdling in huge folds beneath the Vv-ind,and reddened 
 here and there into a strange tawniness by the fitful, 
 yellow gleams from out of the leaden clouds — grey 
 water and grey banks, and grey gusty sky as far as
 
 THE COXSOLATJOXS OT BELIEF. 103 
 
 you could see up and down its great snakc-likc bends, 
 a gaunt tree or two dim in the. mist below, a faint 
 forest of masts and chimneys in the smoke-cloud 
 higher up ; the red, distended sail of some big barge, 
 rocking on the waving surface of the river, carrying 
 out, as it were, the pattern of the reddish sun-gleams 
 on the muddy grey water. 
 
 " I have been thinking all night of what you told 
 me yesterday evening," said Agatha to Baldwin, 
 " and the more I think about it the more horrible and 
 incredible it seems to me that a human soul should 
 live in such a nightmare of wickedness as that — 
 should endure the pollution of a belief such as }'ours. 
 Oh, it is much worse than any physical horror of 
 which one can read, than any story of travellers dying 
 all alone of thirst and agony among the ice or the 
 burning sand, than any torture of being shut in a 
 charnel-house and feeling the slimy creatures 
 creeping on to one's living flesh from the corpses 
 all round ; it is worse than being tied up, alive, with a 
 dead body, this horror of living, a soul which knows 
 good and evil, in the tangle of a world where evil is 
 as natural as good, to know oneself to have been 
 made by a power of injustice and cruelty, to know 
 that all the good there is in the world, and in oneself, 
 all the good which one strives after, and all the good 
 which one can attain, is kneaded up with evil ; that 
 the Being to obey whose laws is one's sole notion of 
 good, that the God who has taught us the difference
 
 I04 BALDWIN. 
 
 of right and wrong, who is our sole standard of 
 righteousness, to please whom is our highest virtue, 
 is more callous and cruel and unjust than the 
 wickedest of mankind. Oh, the fate of the worm who 
 works his way in the slime is noble compared with 
 yours, if you believe such things ! But you cannot 
 believe them ! you could not have believed them, for 
 one moment ! " 
 
 " My dear Miss Stuart," answered Baldwin, with a 
 half-touched, half-admiring smile at the girl's fervour, 
 " I am very sorry you should have been making your- 
 self unhappy about me. Had our conversation not 
 been interrupted last night I would have made it 
 plain that I really do not deserve any commiseration ; 
 nay, perhaps even that I am happier in my opinions 
 than most people. I was going to explain to you 
 that I do not in the least believe that the l^rst Cause 
 is either unjust, or callous, or cruel." 
 
 "You do not .^ " exclaimed Agatha, joyfully; but 
 added indignantly, after a moment, " then why, why 
 did you pretend to believe the horrible things which 
 you did ? " 
 
 " I did not pretend to believe an}-thing which I do 
 not believe," answered Baldwin, quietly. " Indeed I 
 made no full-length confession of faith at all — nay, 
 have patience ; I know what you are going to say. I 
 merely answered your arguments. You said that the 
 whole world proclaimed the lovingness of God, and I 
 pointed out to you that if the constitution of the
 
 THE COXSOLATIOXS OF BELIEF. 105 
 
 universe was the proof of God's nature, it was quite 
 as easy to prove that lie is entirely cruel and unjust 
 as that He is all loving and righteous. You then 
 said that He would set everything right in a future 
 life ; and, when I asked for your reasons fcr a belief 
 in a future life, }-ou returned to your original state- 
 ment that God was all good, and insisted that, since 
 He was all good, we must absolutel}- believe in a 
 future state where He would compensate for the evil 
 of this world. Then I told you that in m\- opinion 
 Omnipotence could not have the benefit of compen- 
 sation, and that, moreov^er, the very fact of there being- 
 evil to compensate in the world militated against the 
 notion of the Creator of this evil caring to compen- 
 sate it. That is all I said." 
 
 " But do you, or do you not believe all these 
 things } " cried Agatha, impatient with such subtle- 
 ties. "Do you believe that God is good, or do you 
 believe that God is bad 1 " 
 
 " I do not believe either," he answered, gravel}^ and 
 turning round to look in her puzzled face. 
 
 " Then you do not believe in God at all ; you are a 
 real, complete atheist," she said, disappointed and 
 contemptuous ; " that is a very easy solution of the 
 difficulty ; but I never understood how a man with 
 any reasoning faculties could be a real atheist." 
 
 " Nor could I ; and although at one period, when I 
 had gone through the same argument with myself 
 that I went through with you last night, I tried, out
 
 io6 BALDWIN. 
 
 of sheer moral and intellectual despair, to believe 
 myself a thorough atheist, I never could succeed. 
 No, I am not an atheist : to be an atheist, a real 
 atheist, means simply to disbelieve in the existence of 
 a God ; well " 
 
 " Well, if there is a God, He vnist be either good 
 or bad," cried Agatha. 
 
 Baldwin shook his head. " Look at this river," he 
 said, pointing to the huge mass of heaving, wind- 
 v/orried water, with its metallic grey lustre where it 
 caught the light ; its strange, unearthly opalescent 
 films under the sides of the big anchored ships, and 
 the smokc-cncrustcd piles of the wharves — " look at 
 this river : if I ask you whether you believe in its 
 existence, you will certainly answer yes. But if I ask 
 you whether this river, which is at once so hideous 
 and so beautiful, which rises and sinks with the tide 
 as if for our benefit ; which occasionally overflows, 
 destroying property and leaving pestilence ; Avhich 
 lets hundreds of wretches dishonour and make 
 miserable their families by drowning their responsi- 
 bilities instead of bearing them ; which, on the other 
 hand, permits our poorest classes to live on corn from 
 Russia, and vegetables from the South, and fruits and 
 spices from the East and the tropics, as the Tiber 
 never permitted any Roman emperors — if I asked }'ou 
 whether the river is just or unjust, kind or cruel, 
 whether it loves men or hates men, what would you 
 answer? You would laufjh, and ask me whether I
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. 107 
 
 expect you to have the beliefs of an educated woman 
 of the nineteenth century, or of a fetish-worshippinj^ 
 savage " 
 
 "The cases arc not at all parallel," interrupted 
 Agatha. 
 
 " Pardon me, the cases are parallel — the First Cause, 
 the inscrutable something behind all law and all 
 phenomenon, moves and upheaves itself (and with it 
 the world) in such a way that we men and women are 
 sometimes benefited and sometimes injured ; bringing 
 us, as this river does to the city, power and a wealth 
 of joy to our lives, or overwhelming them with sin 
 and misery as this river drowns or poisons its banks 
 with its waters and its slime. We know of the First 
 Cause, of God, only this much — that through it things 
 are such as they are, for good and ill, and this much 
 is not one whit more than we know of the river ; we 
 have no more right to say that the good of the world 
 is due to God's kindness, and its evil to His wicked- 
 ness, than we have a right to ascribe the benefits and 
 injuries done us by the Thames to some venerable 
 v/eed-beardcd river-god, stretching his huge limbs 
 beneath this water." 
 
 " That is absurd," cried Agatha, indignantly. " We 
 k-now that the river does us good and harm uncon- 
 sciously, without any such thinking and feeling as are 
 requisite for a knowledge of good and evil ; we know 
 that a river is a river." 
 
 "And we know that God is God; I understand.
 
 io8 BALDWIN. 
 
 But tell me, how dp you know that a river has no 
 consciousness, that it cannot think or feel, that it can 
 have no knowledge of good and evil ? You know it 
 because a river is not a human being, because it has 
 not the body, the brain, the physical necessities and 
 social relations of man ; because you can conceive no 
 reason why this river, which is not a man, and which 
 does not associate with men, should resemble mankind 
 in soul, when it does not resemble mankind in body. 
 But tell me, do you know of the First Cause that He 
 is a human being ? Do you believe that He has the 
 body, the brain, the physical necessities and social 
 relations of man ? You do not know it ; and, more- 
 over, you do know that such a supposition is as 
 absolutely irreconcilable with your notion of a First 
 Cause as the supposition of this Thames having limbs 
 and a head and a beard is irreconcilable with your 
 visual perception of this mass of muddy water." 
 
 " I know," answered Agatha, fervently, " that God 
 has made the universe and man, that God has made 
 man's soul ; and I know, therefore, that the instincts 
 which He has placed in the heart of man arc His 
 instincts." 
 
 " Who tells you that God has made the universe and 
 man and man's faculties ? Who tells you that He 
 has placed any particular faculties in man's soulj 
 Miss Stuart } You have been told these things by 
 your father and mother, who have learned them from 
 their parents ; it is a tradition, a mere guess or fancy
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF 109 
 
 handed down, for want of a better explanation, from 
 generation to generation. But where is your evidence ? 
 Here is the universe and ourselves, and a certain 
 number of phenomena which account for the universe 
 and for ourselves, which account, within a certain 
 limit, for each other. Beyond that limit we find no 
 further explanation ; and here our mind, which cannot 
 conceive an effect without a cause, places God — a 
 first great hidden cause, behind which we forbid our 
 reason to seek any further, since we should merely 
 multiply thereby the unknown and the unknowable. 
 The original cause of all phenomena — that is all that 
 we have a right to define God. But that this cause 
 should imply will, scheme, plan, consciousness, is 
 merely attributing to the Unknown the qualities of 
 the known — attributing to God the modes of existence 
 and of action of man. God has made man, God has 
 placed instincts in man — is. God made in man's image 
 that you should say that He makes or plans or 
 designs } The sun is nearer to us than God ; we can 
 see, feel his influence directly, we can study his 
 properties and habits ; and the sun we no longer 
 endow with a will, with motives and plans ; but of 
 God, who is beyond the boundary of the directly or 
 indirectly knowable, of God, Vvho is merely a surmise, 
 a phantasm created by the necessity of our reason, 
 which may or may not have a corresponding reality, 
 we assert attributes which are intelligible only of 
 creatures identical with ourselves. You spoke just
 
 no BALDWIN. 
 
 now of God's having placed moral instincts within us 
 — taking for granted that the mode of connection 
 between us and the First Cause was a mere copy of 
 the connection between man and what he manipulates 
 — as being a proof that He must have what He is able 
 to give. Do you suppose, then, that God has got 
 carnal necessities, since He, if He has made us, has 
 implanted them also in His creatures?" 
 
 Agatha seemed to think for a moment. " I am 
 willing to believe," she said, " that the necessities of 
 our body arc not the direct work of God ; that they 
 may be the physical results of a physical evolution, 
 which I am far from denying. Thus God need 
 possess none of these. But the moral necessities of 
 our nature are explicable by no such physical evolu- 
 tion ; hence they come direct from God, and if God 
 has given them. He must possess them." 
 
 Baldwin smiled. " Your theory is very ingenious," 
 he said, " but I fancy it is not without its parallel in 
 the old mystical speculators about God and the 
 universe. Unfortunately, I don't think it will hold 
 water for various reasons. One is, that it con- 
 tinues to suppose that the relations of the First 
 Cause and its effects are identical with the relations 
 between man and his works. They say that the 
 moral necessities of our nature cannot be accounted 
 for in the same manner as the physical ones ; but 
 upon these physical necessities depend our mental 
 necessities, upon which, in their turn, depend the
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. in 
 
 moral ones ; so that since, as \vc daily sec more and 
 more plainl}-, a difference in the structure of our brain, 
 of our nervous system and perceptive organs, would 
 necessitate a difference in our mental conceptions, 
 this physical difference would surely also imply a 
 difference in those moral notions which arc based upon, 
 nay, perfectly interwoven with, our intellectual notions." 
 
 " All that is very well. But there are other moral 
 notions which cannot be thus explained. Our reason 
 may tell us what is beneficial to our neighbours, but 
 our reason cannot tell us that we ought to benefit 
 them. The physical constitution of man does not 
 explain this ; it comes to man not from within, but 
 from without." 
 
 " I perfectly agree with you. Our moral instincts 
 are not explicable by mere physical or mere mental 
 evolution ; they come not merel}- from within, but 
 from without. But }-ou forget that besides the exterior 
 world pressing upon and moulding our body, and our 
 body pressing upon and moulding our mind, there is 
 something more which coerces and modifies our 
 instincts ; you forget that there is something outside 
 man which is not God, but mankind." 
 
 " Oh," said Agatha, contemptuously, " I had for- 
 gotten that. The old eighteenth century argument, 
 warmed up in our days, that man and mankind will 
 choose virtue from self-interest, always seems to me 
 so shallow, so idiotic, that I can never realize that any 
 one really believes in it."
 
 112 BALDWIN. 
 
 " No one docs believe in it, as it happens. The 
 eighteenth century, in this matter as in so many other 
 questions connected with evolution, guessed where the 
 truth lay, but failed to see the truth itself. No one 
 imagines nowadays that man respects his neighbour's 
 welfare from an egoistic calculation which, in many 
 cases, would be utterly mistaken : what we believe is 
 that mankind sees its own proximate interest suffi- 
 ciently to make the position of any individual who 
 endangers it so insupportable, that the individual is 
 speedily deterred from his intentions, or as speedily 
 exterminated ; and that as the individuals whose 
 mode of life is most favourable to the welfare of the 
 majority have a greater chance of surviving and 
 leaving descendants, a certain habit of conforming to 
 the general standard of proper behaviour becomes 
 hereditary in the race, producing, every now and then, 
 an accumulation of itself, an individual more than 
 usually sensitive to the common welfare, who adds 
 some new idea of right and wrong to the little stock 
 already existing ; some man who surprises his neigh- 
 bours by applying their rules of self-restraint and bene- 
 fit to some larger section of living beings ; some man 
 who says : These negroes, despite their blackness, feel 
 the same physical and moral pain as yourselves ; in 
 this respect they are exactly like the white men whom 
 you neither sell nor lash ; so why should you sell and 
 lash them ? — a notion which seems quite crazily far- 
 fetched, till one day the whole of that man's nation
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. 113 
 
 are, so to speak, born with it, and wonder how anyone 
 could ever have done without. No; certainly moraHty 
 is not a result of mere physical or mere intellectual 
 development ; it requires that man should be brought 
 into relation with man ; it is, indeed, the gradually 
 established mode of relation between man and man, 
 the unconsciously established rule of social movement 
 involving least effort and waste, even as the logical 
 instinct is the habit of thinking of things in such 
 relations with one another as involve least mental 
 trouble and error. And this being the case, it seems 
 to me, as I said before, that it is not only wholly un- 
 necessary to suppose that God has instilled into us 
 moral instincts whose origin can be otherwise 
 accounted for, but, moreover, that as the Godhead, 
 inasmuch as the First and Absolute Cause, can be 
 subject to no necessities and liable to no relations, it 
 is wholly unwarranted to attribute to Him the posses- 
 sion of such moral instincts, which would be as utterly 
 uncalled-for in Him as would all social virtues in 
 Robinson Crusoe, had he been born of the rocks and 
 waves of his island, and never met his man Friday." 
 
 " I understand," said Agatha ; " you do not call 
 yourself an atheist ; oh no, that would be blundering, 
 unscientific, impolite, old-fashioned. You admit that 
 there is a God — a God somewhere or other, doubtless 
 doing something or other, a God by all means. But 
 you spunge out His God-like qualities — you spunge 
 out the God-like from all the world. Everything is 
 
 9
 
 114 BALDWIN. 
 
 but an accident, and of these accidents God is the 
 earliest and man's soul the latest. You say this 
 satisfies you — well, after extirpating divinity from 
 God and from the world, you have perhaps extir- 
 pated it from yourself — you, your universe, and your 
 First Cause are all of a piece." And Agatha leaned 
 against the sides of the boat, looking back upon the 
 hull of a large vessel stranded in the mud, a black 
 and melancholy carcass in the lurid grey light, whose 
 green and slimy ribs were slowly being broken up for 
 firewood. It seemed to her as if the whole belief of 
 mankind was such a thing as this, a noble wreck 
 which had weathered many a storm, and was now 
 falling ignominiously in the mud beneath the work- 
 men's tools. " You have got rid of the terrors which 
 beset our mind," she said, "but what have you left .-' 
 You have made our spiritual life more easy to live, 
 but who would care to live it .'' There is for you no 
 goodness in God, no goodness in man ; nay, there is 
 no goodness itself; it is the mere sea slum, the mere 
 land-making deposit of life, a sort of mud that 
 happens to harden and carry weight, instead, like 
 vice, of letting you sink in and stick. What master 
 shall man serve "^ " 
 
 " You make me remember," answered Baldwin, 
 " some thoughts which came into my mind only 
 yesterday, reading the announcement, posted upon 
 the cathedral door, of the centenary of some saintly 
 person who is styled 'the servant of God.' If God is
 
 THE CONS OLA TIONS OF BELIEF. 1 1 5 
 
 the maker and master of the universe, why then 
 every man, do he what he may, good or bad, is His 
 unconscious servant, since he is doing what God has 
 pre-established ; if, on the other hand, God is the 
 principle of good, why then only a few of those men 
 obeying His orders are really His servants ; He is 
 misleading the rest. If the whole world is but an 
 emanation of the will of the sovereign good, the 
 incitement to do evil must emanate also from Him, 
 and resistance to the will of the sovereign good must 
 surely be evil. You see how soon the principle of 
 God being identical with righteousness leads us, if 
 logically applied as it was logically applied by 
 certain mediaeval mystics, to the obliteration of all 
 distinction between good and evil ; nay, to the 
 principle of men like Molinos, that man must not 
 refuse to sin. What do you say to this manner of 
 serving God ? " 
 
 " You have no right to attribute such abominable 
 theories to me. I say that to do good is to serve 
 God ; and the knowledge that God is being served is 
 our highest inducement to doing good." 
 
 " You mean," answered Baldwin, gently, " that I 
 have no right to suppose that you will be as rigidly 
 logical as poor Molinos ; it's by relaxing this logical 
 severity that religion has for ever been saving itself 
 from falling into immorality. But tell me, how can 
 you define what is good — which, among the innume- 
 rable actions that God, supposing Him to be, as you
 
 ii6 BALDWIN. 
 
 do, a conscious creator, has made inevitable to us, are 
 those in whose performance we are really serving Him ? 
 If you think over the matter you will find yourself 
 reduced to define the good actions as those which 
 are conducive to the greatest well-being of mankind. 
 You will find yourself reduced, in choosing among 
 the thousand God-ordained actions, to the use of that 
 purely human and utilitarian standard of right and 
 wrong which you despise. You say that I am for 
 expunging the divine not only out of God, but out of 
 man. But tell me, does it not seem to you, when 
 you consider the number of purely indifferent or 
 absolutely unrighteous actions forced upon us by 
 Nature or God — that this element which you call the 
 divine, this element of respect for man's collective 
 and increasing welfare, this law of righteousness — 
 ought to be called, not the divine element in man,, 
 but the human element in the Godhead .'' " 
 
 Agatha did not answer. The gaunt black- 
 chimneyed factories, the gaping warehouses at whose- 
 feet were moored the heavy barges, the wood of 
 distant masts and funnels, the whole grimy and 
 hideous and yet grand and solemn array of the docks 
 and wharves seemed to pass before her like a dream ; 
 her thoughts were whirling like the water at the 
 boat's keel, and she tried to seize hold of a thought 
 which she knew must be present, as vainly as she 
 attempted to identify one particular bit of driftwood, 
 among these which danced in their wake.
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. 117 
 
 " Why should you therefore imagine that I am 
 unhappy in my belief?" he went on; "because I 
 think that the First Cause is an unknowable some- 
 thing of which we have no right to suppose any 
 human qualities, any attitude towards ourselves, any 
 consciousness of our existence, any sense of right 
 and wrong, because I think that morality is a neces- 
 sity grown out of social life, that the only duties of 
 man are towards the mortal creatures of the present 
 and the future, and the highest possible conception 
 of mankind is the man who enlarges the sphere of its 
 moral obligations — why should you think me un- 
 happy ? " 
 
 " Because," answered Agatha — " because, for one 
 thing, you isolate your noblest man from all com- 
 panionship ; instead of walking with God you make 
 Him walk and suffer in solitude, in solitude propor- 
 tionate to His nobility." 
 
 "And do you then suppose that the noblest men can 
 ever be consoled for the injustice which they endure? 
 Do you suppose that to a just mind the fancied 
 companionship of God can ever truly compensate for 
 th2 sense of the injustice of the world ? To the good 
 evil can never lose its bitterness. Heroism is not 
 that which suffers only physically, not feeling the 
 shafts in its side because the heavens have opened 
 rosy above, and the angels are singing all around. 
 The consciousness of God's approval would be but a 
 drug deadenin"- our noblest sensibilities if it could
 
 nS BALDWIN. 
 
 make us indifferent to man's injustice, a mere moral 
 chloral, or moral opium. The real martyr sees no 
 heavens open, hears no angels sing, feels only the 
 smart of his wounds, the dreariness and darkness and 
 isolation, feels that he is abandoned to fight the 
 battle with evil, unseen, unpraised, unrewarded, 
 suffers in anguish and desolation, suffers for a good 
 which does not exist as active principle of the world, 
 for a good which lets him perish. It is the infinite 
 pathos and grandeur of Christ that he dies, not like 
 some Dorothea of the stage martyrdoms, with angels 
 singing and strewing flowers; not like Sebastian, with 
 a crown of glory descending on his head ; but alone, 
 scoffed at, and crying out in the darkness that he 
 has been abandoned by the God for whom he 
 suffers." 
 
 " But it is not given to us all to be the best and 
 noblest, to make the great sacrifices from which we 
 are certain that great good will come," objected 
 Agatha : " most of us I mean — of those who do really 
 care enough about right and wrong to be pained by 
 the victory of wrong over right — most of us are 
 condemned to lead mere humdrum lives of small, 
 partial, unsatisfactor)', often useless sacrifice, con- 
 demned to look on at their own and other men and 
 women's lives being overwhelmed or slowly eaten 
 away by the flood of misfortune. Most of us are 
 given no solid ground of present and of future upon 
 which to build up an edifice of good ; we live in
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. 119 
 
 marshes whose dykes are for ever giv^'ng way, on 
 mountain sides which are for ever crumbHng, in the 
 beds of torrents which have swept away our friends, 
 which must fatally, inevitably, sweep away ourselves. 
 And if there is no God to lead us on to more solid 
 ground hereafter, or to look down, visible as the sun 
 looking down upon the grime and squalor of this 
 town ; why, then, what remains for us but to pray that 
 the dyke may give way at once, that the rubble on 
 the hillside may slip beneath our feet, that the river 
 may rise and wash us away ? " 
 
 Baldwin was silent for a moment. 
 
 " I do not see why we should do that," he answered. 
 "You speak of living in a river bed and praying that 
 the flood may overwhelm us. Let me tell you about 
 a real river bed which I know, in an Apennine valley 
 where I have spent a good part of my life. When 
 the water subsides in early summer it leaves a tract 
 of shingle and river sand. The shingle, all the 
 summer long, is reddened and yellowed with I know 
 not what very delicate and lovely stone-flower, whose 
 seeds are brought there by the inundation ; and the 
 little patch of sand and mud, separated from the 
 swirling blue river by a few inches of barren stones, 
 has been laid hold of by some peasant of the neigh- 
 bourhood, who digs and hoes it up as soon as the 
 river has gone down, and plants it with beans, oats, 
 sometimes a little wheat and hemp among the red- 
 berried river brambles. All summer long the sun
 
 120 ■ BALDWIN. 
 
 pours down upon it, making the shingle into burning 
 metal ; the river flows by, but too low to wet or 
 refresh it, so that morning and evening the peasant 
 comes down into the river bed to water the drooping, 
 withering plants. Sometimes, in the course of the 
 summer, the river suddenly rises, killing the plants 
 with a layer of ooze and sand, or else a violent 
 downpour — one of those cataracts of rain which fill 
 the whole valley with a wind-shaken curtain of water 
 — washes the roots out of the soil, and whirls them 
 down the river ; and always, in the autumn, comes 
 the flood ; the river, swelling, swirls, a great tossing, 
 foaming mass of reddish water, higher and higher 
 round the bank of shingle, eating its way with every 
 moment, dashing to and fro like long grass the 
 branches of the red-berried willows and ashes on its 
 surface, till at last the whole river, a great curly red 
 flood, passes across the island, covers it, eddying and 
 jerking up its foam, not so much in anger, it would 
 seem, as in triumph. And then, when the flood has 
 sunk, the island reappears, and what was once a 
 garden, a field, is a mere barren expanse of round 
 stones and sand and slime, like any other in the river. 
 But during those few weeks of constant watering and 
 weeding and tilling, of constant struggle with the 
 river and the sun, that bank of stones in the river 
 bed has been green with its hardly planted crops ; so 
 that, if they are swept away before the ripening time, 
 they have at least been sweet to see in their green-
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. 121 
 
 ness. And even if the peasant should lose courage, 
 and think it is not worth while to hoe and plant and 
 water morning and evening, and lop and protect with 
 boughs from the sun these few green things which 
 may never bear fruit or grain, which will be washed 
 away by the autumn floods, even then God — for why 
 not call nature by that name ? — does not lose heart, 
 and for those short weeks which the river gives in 
 peace He makes the pale purple and yellow stone- 
 flowers rise out of the shingle, and the short sweet 
 herbs out of the sand ; and the bees and butterflies, 
 and things of shorter life than those weeks, come 
 and are happy. And to be pleased that the shingle 
 should be made sweet and fruitful, between the floods 
 of June and the floods of September, this seems to 
 me more wise and noble than to say: ' I have no solid 
 present or solid future on which to build,' and to pray 
 that the water may overwhelm you." 
 
 " All that is very well, said Agatha, after a pause, 
 " and it sounds very beautiful. But our lives are not 
 always mere clean sand banks in a clear river, which 
 may easily be beautified and made fertile ; they are more 
 often things like those banks," and she pointed to the 
 soft, wet strand, encrusted with coal ash, and fringed 
 with loathsome shiny ooze, which the grey water 
 lapped as the boat made its way slowly among the 
 shipping and the wharves. " And how, if you no 
 longer believe in God — in a God who loves us — can 
 you endure the horrible eating away of the good by
 
 122 BALD WIN. 
 
 the evil — the horrible waste of happiness, the horrible 
 purposelessness of suffering ? " 
 
 " I endure the purposelessness of so much un- 
 necessary pain, of so much fruitless action," answered 
 Baldwin, "because I do not seek in things any 
 universal purpose. Things are the results from a 
 cause ; and it is only when these results from a cause 
 are accidentally or purposely combined that they 
 become, accidentally or purposely, means unto an 
 end. The old habit of making Nature or God in the 
 semblance of man, persists in our habitual, almost 
 instinctive, tendency to see in the ways of the universe 
 the mere magnified picture of the ways of man : to 
 chide that earth and spar which drifts unconscious 
 and aimless on the ocean. It drifts not because its 
 broken and rotting fragments, if brought by the 
 current near to other drifts and kneaded together 
 with them by sea-slime and froth, may form the 
 beginning of an island — for this may never happen : 
 the current may disperse it for ever and ever, and 
 the waves may drift it for ever. It drifts because 
 the crumbling earth, the shattered mouldering wood, 
 were one day fetched, licked out into the ocean by 
 the tide. That is all. Pain, passion, struggle — all 
 things which are because other things were before 
 them — used to a purpose onl}- by the accident of 
 fate, or by the great accident of man's will. What 
 is there in this to rebel against ? " 
 
 " We must rebel," cried Agatha, " we must rebel
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. 123 
 
 against pain, against ruin and disappointment, 
 scattered all over the world to bear no fruit, or 
 only the fruit of worse misery." 
 
 "You must rebel? Well, so I thought once. I. 
 was a pessimist, indignant with all the wastefulness 
 and wanton loss of the world, angry with God. 
 Now I would as soon be angry with, indignant at, 
 the table corner against which I hit myself You 
 have been saying that such a belief as mine is too 
 intolerable to be endured ; that it leaves man isolated 
 with evil, with no master to serve, no father to look 
 up to. But in reality this belief is yours, and not 
 mine ; it is your belief whenever you let your mind 
 think and judge, whenever you ask yourself how the 
 arrangements of this world tally with your con- 
 science — nay, don't interrupt me. I once believed 
 in such a God as yours, as you once believed in such 
 a God as that of the Bible ; and, as you were 
 miserable in the belief that God had doomed man 
 to disobey and to die, that He had required the 
 sacrifice of His own innocent Son to atone for the 
 guilt which He had abetted ; so I, also, was miserable 
 in the belief in an Almighty First Cause who had 
 implanted in His creatures instincts of right and 
 wrong which His whole repartition of the fate ot 
 those creatures was perpetually violating. I did not, 
 like you, relinquish my belief because it pained me. 
 I went on suffering. No human wickedness or in- 
 justice could possibly have filled my mind with such
 
 124 BALDWIN. 
 
 gloom as did the notion of this fearful contradiction ; 
 no human guilt could have taken away my hope as 
 did the contemplation of this Divine imperfection. 
 Indeed, my only consolation lay in the perception 
 of the way in which the creature gradually rose 
 superior to the Creator, rose so much, indeed, as to 
 be unable, in his greater justice and mercy, to con- 
 ceive the indifference and iniquity of his Maker ; 
 refusing to believe in it, trying to explain away as 
 a good man vvould refuse to credit, would explain 
 away some crime too foreign to his nature to seem 
 real. The righteousness of man, nay, rather his 
 very incapacity of believing in the evil of God, was 
 my only comfort during the daily increasing con- 
 viction of the callousness and cruelty of God. It 
 seemed to me as if I saw^, mysteriously, a new Satan, 
 a rebel angel of good, raising his banners against 
 the Jehovah of Evil ; a creature, like Frankenstein's 
 image, a terrible new kind of monster, more noble 
 than its base maker. These were the things I felt ; 
 and they are the things which, in your heart of 
 hearts, whenever you let your reason shed light on 
 the subject, you feel also, vainly trying to arrange 
 matters by' appeals to your own ignorance, by 
 theories of compensation which will not hold water, 
 by notions of a future life for which you have no 
 ground, by saying to yourself, ' I know that God is 
 good ' when you feel that He is bad. You think 
 that your belief is sustaining and consoling ; but
 
 THE CONSOLATIONS OF BELIEF. 125 
 
 what you take for your belief is merely a reflection 
 of your desire, what you take for certainty is merely 
 hope. Your real belief, if you have one, the real 
 scheme of things which your reason must present 
 to you, is that you are the creature of a God who 
 has shown you the difference between right and 
 wrong, and who, at the same time, is forcing you 
 to do wrong, and is doing wrong Himself This is 
 your belief, and not mine. And can you still wonder 
 if I consider that I am a happier man for believing 
 that morality has no meaning, no raison d'etre, no 
 use, except where human beings are brought into 
 relation with each other ; that it cannot, therefore, be 
 expected of any save human beings ; and for having 
 thus been liberated myself from the frightful incubus 
 of a Creator who establishes morality and violates 
 and forces to its violation ? Do you think I am to 
 be commiserated, or rather to be envied ? " 
 
 The ship was rapidly approaching the wharf. 
 The sun had made its way through the fog ; it was 
 shining bright from a pale blue rift in the heavy 
 smoke-clouds, burnishing the surface of the thick 
 livid water into steel-like lustre, making the coal in 
 the barges, the coal refuse along the wharves, glitter 
 like blue jet, and drowning the distant lines of roofs, 
 the tall chimneys and towers, in a delicate smoke- 
 like blue haze. A blind man with an accordion had 
 somehow come on to deck, and was squeezing the 
 long, melancholy notes of a march out of his in-
 
 126 BALDWIN. 
 
 strument, while the steam let off from the engine 
 screeched a series of hoarse screeches ; and the 
 vessel throbbed with a dull roar as it turned towards 
 the quay, splashing the water in its slow movement. 
 
 A strange melancholy, almost like a physical 
 ache, came over Agatha. 
 
 " Do you still think I am deserving of compassion 
 Miss Stuart?" repeated Baldwin. 
 
 " I think you are deserving of envy," answered 
 Agatha, coldly, looking vaguely about her, at the 
 blue of the sky, the grime of the land, and the 
 bluish grey of the water. " I think you are de- 
 serving of envy. But I prefer to believe in the 
 goodness of God."
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION.
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 
 
 Baldwin had noticed a change in Michael since 
 their last meeting five months before, when the 
 young man had talked evolution by the hour in his 
 Oxford rooms, and had displayed his chemical in- 
 struments with the pleasure of a schoolboy. 
 
 ' You don't seem to have enjoyed your Sunday 
 in the country, my dear Michael," he remarked, as 
 they walked across the high-lying cornfields which 
 separated the railway line from the country house 
 where they had met the previous day. " I thought 
 you would have been so pleased to meet the Pro- 
 fessor — you who are so science-mad — ^and you 
 positively snubbed him. By the way, how goes 
 chemistry ? " 
 
 " Chemistry doesn't go on at all. I have given it 
 up," answered the undergraduate, briefly. "You 
 see, Baldwin," he went on, after a minute, avoiding 
 the other man's eyes, and looking straight before 
 him at the rising ground sparkling with stubble in 
 the sun's last rays, closed in by the round bluish 
 
 10
 
 I30 BALDWIN. 
 
 elms, impervious to light, and flat as if cut out of 
 paper against the pale evening sky — -" I dare say it 
 will make you laugh, as it would have made me 
 laugh a few months ago, but I feel I have lost all 
 pleasure in science ever since. I have found out 
 something about vivisection." 
 
 Baldwin looked up with a look of surprise, but 
 did not speak. 
 
 " Of course," went on Michael, " I had often heard 
 of vivisection m a vague sort of way ; and I knew 
 that one of my aunts made herself ridiculous going 
 on about it, I thought it was one of the fads of 
 faddy people, or I thought nothing at all. But this 
 spring, when Ruskin gave up the Slade Professor- 
 ship, and every one was talking about vivisection in 
 consequence, I thought I ought to know something 
 aboilt it, and I borrowed some of my aunt's pam- 
 phlets on the subject. Of course they were rather 
 rubbishy as literature, and had a deal of sentimen- 
 tality and piety, and the ' Faithful Dog' and 
 ' Merciful Creator ' sort of thing. But the}- contained 
 facts, hundreds of quotations, title, and date and 
 page, on the subject ; and they induced me to open 
 the various physiological treatises and hand books 
 and periodicals from which these quotations had 
 been taken. And the result has been that I feel 
 as if I could never take any pleasure in science 
 again — as if all science were dishonoured." 
 
 Baldwin had been listening very attentively.
 
 OF HO you R AND EVOLUTION. 131 
 
 " Why all science ? " he asked. " Why, if you arc 
 disgusted with the one science which inflicts pain on 
 living- creatures, should you, therefore, be disgusted 
 with the other sciences, which deal only with gases, 
 and earths, and plants, and historical facts, and so 
 forth ? " 
 
 " Science endeavours to discover the manner in 
 which things happen, the circumstances which de- 
 termine their happening in that manner ; and the 
 whole of every science consists in observing facts 
 (however carelessly at first), having ideas, observing 
 facts again ; a perpetual round of seeing, thinking, 
 and seeing again. Do you grant me that .'' " 
 
 " Certainly : go on," answered Baldwin. 
 
 "Well, then, all sciences are identical in their 
 speculative dealing with facts, and differ only in the 
 different mode of obtaining the facts ; the intellectual 
 method is the same, the physical method various. 
 Some sciences seek their facts by the mere observa- 
 tion of real phenomena, in the past or present ; by 
 the mere watching of how bees build hives, or how 
 races supplant each other ; but others require for the 
 obtaining of their facts that the objects of their 
 inquiry be subjected not merely to observation, as 
 in reading a chronicle or watching an ant-hill, but 
 also to experiment ; that is to say, to the artificial 
 producing of circumstances which will expose that 
 which the ordinary course of events does not leave 
 bare. In these more physically analytical sciences,
 
 132 BALDWIN. 
 
 we must get at the constituent parts the result of 
 whose properties and functions have attracted our 
 inquiries ; we must undo the mechanism to under- 
 stand the action ; we must seek for the reason of a 
 movement or the trace of an action by placing the 
 objects of our examination in conditions differing 
 from those of every-day experience. The chemist, 
 by means of complicated machincr}-, by the action 
 and reaction of a thousand substances, must divide 
 his earths and fluids and gases into their component 
 elements, and reunite these into new compounds ; 
 the geologist must lay bare the strata of rock and 
 soil, examine by the microscope the broken frag- 
 ments, seeking in this the trace of fire, in that of 
 water ; the botanist must cut up his plants, ex- 
 amining their different organs, and subject them to 
 strange processes of artificial fertilization and cross- 
 ing. Now what is the fact-collecting and theory- 
 testing process for the man who studies the properties 
 and functions, not of gases and minerals or of plants, 
 but of animals and animal man ? What is, for the 
 physiologist, the experimental process corresponding 
 completely to the experimental processes of chemist 
 or botanist ? " 
 
 " Evidently," replied Baldwin, " the opening of the 
 body, or the subjection of its organs to given con- 
 ditions." 
 
 " Yes ; but if the physiologist places on his table 
 a corpse, opens it, examines its contents, subjects it.
 
 OF HOXOUR AND EVOLUTION. 133 
 
 to various chemical or mechanical conditions, and 
 arijues from the structure the manner of the func- 
 tions, the parallel between this modus operandi and 
 those of the other men of science is not, as yet 
 correct. The chemist has his gases just as they 
 exist in the laboratory of Nature ; the geologist has 
 his inorganic masses just as Nature has left them ; 
 the botanist has his unsentient plants, growing as 
 they grow in the field. But the physiologist, so far, 
 has only the corpse ; he has the living thing without 
 its life, the sentient thing without its sensation ; the 
 organism with its functions stopped, the vast or- 
 ganic laboratory with its chemistry suspended. 
 Visibly he has not in his domain that which cor- 
 responds to the possessions of his fellow-workers in 
 theirs : v/here they can test, he can only speculate ; 
 where they can see, he can only infer. What more 
 is needed ? On his table no longer death, but life ; 
 the organism with its processes going on, v.'ith its 
 cunning system of concatenated action and reaction, 
 sensation and motion, in full work ; no longer the 
 corpse, but, as in the studies of the contemporaries 
 of Celsus, as in the workrooms of the predecessors 
 of Harvey, the living slave, the living felon ; as in 
 the laboratories of the more easily satisfied, or less 
 easily gratified, men of science of our own day, the 
 living animal ; the strappcd-down monkey, the 
 poison-paralyzed dog. This is the equivalent, to 
 the student of the body and its workings, of the
 
 134 BALDWIN. 
 
 gases and minerals of the chemist, of the stratified 
 stones of the geologist, of the plants of the botanist ; 
 and the equivalent to this student of organism and 
 functions — of the relations of process to process, of 
 sensation to movement, of the whole animal fabric 
 to the atmosphere, the heat and cold, the electric 
 condition, the drugs of surrounding Nature — the 
 equivalent to the physiologist of that well-nigh 
 complete manipulation, that tested speculation, which 
 to the chemist is passing gases through black-lead, 
 or pouring liquids on to solids ; which to the geolo- 
 gist is testing his pounded fragments and placing 
 them under the microscope ; which to the botanist 
 is slicing his bulbs and fertilizing his flowers : this 
 physiological equivalent, this complete physiological 
 experimental process, consists in opening the living 
 stomach, removing fragments of the living brain, 
 injecting the living veins with drugs and purulent 
 matter, tying up the living viscera or cutting them 
 out ; ulcerating the living tissues, and sending 
 streams of electricity through the living nerves ; 
 baking or boiling the living cuticle ; watching 
 which way flows in the opened chest the living 
 blood ; how shrink and twitch the ripped-up living 
 muscles ; how impressions are received, and writhings 
 and yells are ordered, by the uncovered living brain- 
 mass/ 
 
 ' Experiments of Prof. Scliiff ; experiments of Profs. Goltz, 
 Gergens, Tiegel, Schreiber, Ferrier, &c. ; experiments of Dr.
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 135 
 
 Michael paused in obvious emotion ; the words 
 had come faster and faster, and as they came, hurried 
 and hoarse, his pale face had flushed painfully. They 
 walked for a few seconds in silence, Michael look- 
 ing vaguely around him, as if contrasting the things 
 of which he had been speaking with the things all 
 round : the last low lights, grazing the yellow stubble 
 and the tawny corn sheaves, making each wayside 
 dr}- grass blade or down-laden thistle sparkle like 
 silver, while in the suffused sunset greyness the 
 distant trees were separated into distinct groups, 
 the foremost almost blue and still substantial, the 
 furthest quite white and bodyless, by the layers of 
 bluish haze. The rooks formed black lines across 
 the field, cawing ; and from the sky came the 
 twitter of invisible larks. 
 
 " This is," resumed Michael, " or rather this would 
 be, if the human subject could be vivisected instead 
 
 Burdon Sanderson, of M. Thidy, of Prof. Ludwig, of Dr. Crisp, 
 of \'ulpian, and Dr. Savory, &c. ; experiments of Magendie, of 
 Dr. Legg, of Profs. Tiedemann, Camelin, Leyden, Golowin, and 
 H. Mayer ; experiments of Dr. G. Fischer, of Dr. Radcliffe, of 
 Prof. Hermann ; experiments of Bernard, Schiff, and Gavarret; 
 experiments of Bernard, Heidenhain, Cyon, Brown-Sequard ; 
 experiments of Profs. Rutherford, Ferrier, Goltz, Schifif, Schrei- 
 ber, «S;c. Prof. Paolo Mantegazza, Senator of the kingdom of 
 Italy, has made a whole series of experiments on the perception 
 of pain as such ("Fisiologia del Dolore"). I have given only 
 a few references, taken from Pfliiger's Physiol. Archiv, Reichert 
 and Du Bois-Reymond's ArcJiiv., Fritzsch, and Hitzig's .r4;r/^/T', 
 the Lanscf., various other medical and physiological journals 
 and magazines, besides special works by individual writers.
 
 136 ■ BALDWIN. 
 
 of being merely intellectually manipulated by 
 analogy, the physiological equivalent for the un- 
 hampered experimentation of the sciences which 
 deal with lifeless things or unsentient ; and this is 
 the mechanical process which is called vivisection. 
 Now let us see the mental process b)^ which this 
 mechanical process is governed ; the necessities of 
 proof and verification by which this experimentation 
 is distributed and systematized. The various sciences 
 differ solely by their manner of acquiring facts, due 
 to the difference of the materials with which they 
 deal ; but they agree exactly in the manner in which 
 such facts are intellectually dealt with, because the 
 laws of evidence are in every science the same. 
 Hence in physiology, as in chemistry, mechanics, 
 botany, nay, even history, a man does not always 
 know exactly that for which he seeks. He seeks 
 knowledge in this or that direction ; and, as the 
 chemist, or physicist, or botanist, or historian, turns 
 to his instruments, his gases and metals, his plants, 
 or his chronicles and statistics, to see whether his 
 mental eyes may see some facts or groups of facts 
 (and hence some law) unperceived by his prede- 
 cessors ; so also the physiologist turns very often 
 to his live subjects, and does something to their 
 circulation, or nerves, or brain, and waits for what 
 results may appear and what ideas may suggest 
 themselves, at least as often, or rather far oftcncr, 
 than he cjoes intending to find the confirmation of
 
 OF HO NO UR A ND E VOL UTIOX. i yj 
 
 some preconceived idea. And again, like every 
 other man of science, the physiologist has often a vague 
 inkling of something somewhere ; and, on the prin- 
 ciple which made Cook or Vancouver set sail not 
 knowing for what coasts, he also does something to 
 an animal, and watches whether some effect will not 
 manifest itse4f in some particular set of organs, which 
 happens to be the gucssed-at unknown Polynesia of 
 his mind. Moreover, as the physicist or chemist 
 has to repeat his experiment, as the arithmetician 
 must prove his calculation, as the historian must 
 collate his sources, so also must the ph)"siologist try 
 once, twice, and thrice, and again under slightly 
 different conditions, his experiments upon his living 
 subject, doing the thing over again on the original 
 animal, or taking a series of successors, lest some 
 individual peculiarity have disturbed the natural 
 course of things. And then, in order that the obser- 
 vation may profit to science and to the observer, it 
 must, just like an observation on expansion of gases, 
 on the mutation of consonants, or on the finances of 
 France under Louis XVI., be published. Again, just 
 as the assertion of the chemist concerning the property 
 of an element, of the philologist upon a phonetic 
 change, of the historian upon some point of past 
 events, cannot be accepted and registered as a scien- 
 tific certainty until the vast majority of the other 
 chemists, or philologists, or historians, have each 
 separately gone over the chemical process, compared
 
 13S BALDWIN. 
 
 the phonetic conditions, or collated the historical 
 documents ; so also the alleged discoveries, be it no 
 matter how trifling, of the physiologist, must submit 
 to the same intellectual necessity ; and his experi- 
 ment must be repeated and re-repeated, his obser- 
 vations tested by all the other men who have any 
 knowledge of the matter. Furthermore, as in every 
 other science, so also in physiolog}', different scientific 
 observers and thinkers will conceive different reasons, 
 will seek in a new set of observations, in a new set of 
 experiments, an explanation more in keeping with 
 their general conception of phenomena ; which new 
 explanation will again require the test of universal 
 repetition of experiment. And, as in every other 
 science, so in physiology likewise, the student cannot 
 be expected to accept upon mere authority the facts 
 which are to form the basis of his own further dis- 
 coveries : as the young chemist must be shown the 
 material processes of which he reads ; as the young 
 philologist must be given examples of languages and 
 dialects ; as the young historian must have access to 
 chronicles and State Papers ; so also the young 
 physiologist must be taught how to perform, or must 
 witness the performance by his teacher, of at least a 
 certain number of the experiments which have been 
 the basis of alleged facts. As, therefore, physiology 
 is a science, its mode of obtaining, testing, publishing, 
 disputing, and demonstrating its facts must be in- 
 tellectually similar to that of other sciences ; and.
 
 OF MONO UR AND E VOL UTION. 1 39 
 
 indeed, there are daily published all over the world 
 books and pamphlets describing the experiment 
 which Professor A., B., or C. has made, with or with- 
 out a theoretic result ; and the experiment which 
 Professor D., E., or V. has made to disprove the 
 correctness of Professor A., B., or C. ; there is a 
 whole class of periodicals, in pretty well every 
 language, containing accounts of discoveries and 
 refutations thereof, recipes for experiments and 
 counter-experiments ; and, finally, numerous hand- 
 books for students, from the most elementary to the 
 most advanced, in which, just as in the handbooks 
 of chemistry or physics, the reader is taught by 
 description and diagram the precise manner in which 
 he is to set about practically to convince himself of 
 the received facts of the science. All these things 
 being the case, physiology being a science with the 
 same intellectual processes .of induction and verifi- 
 cation as every other, and moreover, like every other, 
 rapidly spreading in the number of its students and 
 the multiplicity of its problems, it bccomics evident 
 that the assertion of Professor Ray Lankester, that 
 the number of experiments must increase in almost 
 geometrical proportion as the science enlarges, is 
 merely the equivalent of what might be said of every 
 other science, and so self-evident as to be well-nigh 
 a platitude." 
 
 They had come to the little station. The day- 
 light had faded away ; the fields were drowned in
 
 I40 BALDIVIA. 
 
 mist, and the white shafts and arms, the crimson and 
 green Hghts of the signals along the line, rose fan- 
 tastic against the blue of the evening. The two men 
 paced up and down the gravelled platform, waiting 
 for the train that should carry them to London. 
 
 " So much for the scientific justification," said 
 ]\Iichacl. " As regards the m^oral one, what veto can 
 be opposed by an ethical system which accepts 
 nature as a mass of contending and cruel forces, a 
 system which sets up as final aim the preservation 
 of the fittest, that is to say, of the strongest and 
 most fortunate ? Christianity may invoke a higher 
 law, but scientific morality cannot condem.n the 
 sacrifice which is for the glory of science and the 
 benefit of mankind. I am not a Christian, and never 
 can be one ; but I swear to you that since reading 
 those handbooks and magazines and treatises I wish 
 to heaven I could see my way to a moral system 
 different from this moral system which is bound to 
 abet abomination, this moral system sprung from 
 the solidarity of the clean-handed sciences with this 
 foul-handed science of physiology." 
 
 '■ I think you are unreasonable, j\Iichael," began 
 Baldwin. 
 
 " Unreasonable? " interrupted the young man. "I 
 dare say I am ; reason ought to teach me that vivi- 
 section is good, and my whole sickened nature 
 teaches me that it is evil. Stupid ? Oh, yes, I know 
 I have grown quite stupid over this matter. It is
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 141 
 
 stupid to talk about it with you. A man should 
 speak against vivisection with silly pictistical old 
 maids, not with men who have ideas and are up to 
 their times ; they will only think him a sentimental 
 jackass. Forgive me, Baldwin, for having bored you 
 so long," and Michael laughed a bitter little laugh. 
 
 Baldwin shook his head. 
 
 "You don't understand me," he said. "I think }-ou 
 are unreasonable, Michael, at present, in your hostility 
 towards all science on account of the sins of a single 
 one; but heaven knows I can sympathize with your 
 unreasonableness. I have passed through it all my- 
 self, my dear boy. If any one felt inclined to think 
 you silly and sentimental because of your discovery of 
 the realities of vivisection, how much sillier and more 
 sentimental would such a one think me when I 
 say that this same discovery, when I was your age, 
 made my life black for months, and caused me to 
 pass through a moral struggle as sickening and 
 seemingly hopeless as that of other men who have 
 suddenly come to doubt of the goodness of God ! 
 Everything seems very simple and comprehensible 
 now that my mind has long been made up; but I 
 can remember those black da)"s : I could not easily 
 forget them. It so happened that my attention was 
 first drawn to vivisection, which, like most people 
 I had associated with the pricking of a guinea-pig 
 and the inoculation of a cow, while I was very 
 anxious about a friend of mine, much older than
 
 142 BALDWIN. 
 
 myself, a dear, bright, child-like woman who was 
 supposed to be dying of consumption. One morn- 
 ing I was allowed to see her for the first time after 
 a long and dangerous relapse, during which my 
 thoughts had been constantly with her, lying stiff 
 and forbidden to move, with ice and salt in her 
 mouth, silent for days in a darkened room. I re- 
 member it so well : the little room with the 
 southern sunshine in it, and she seated propped 
 up in her armchair, a table covered with hyacinths 
 and jonquils and roses, sent by her friends, at her 
 elbow, looking, after such loss of blood, as white as 
 her pillows, the bunch of violets I had brought 
 her lying on her lap; and I holding one of her poor 
 thin little hands in both mine, and looking into 
 those childish eyes of hers ; she seemed so good, so 
 child-like, and so helpless. She insisted on knowing 
 what I had been doing ; and, without intending it, I 
 mentioned, as I mentioned everything to her, that I had 
 been reading up about vivisection. I felt remorseful 
 the next second, for such horrible things ought not 
 to be alluded to before her. But it had done her 
 no harm. The look came into her eyes which she 
 had whenever the past was vividly recollected, and 
 in her childish whisper she told me. . . . How she told 
 it me God knows ; it seemed a sudden thunder-clap, 
 a revelation from hell that this woman, whom I saw 
 before me so white and weak and patient, had, in her 
 girlhood, helped her brother in his work, tied down
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 143 
 
 the creatures he was disembowelling, prowled with 
 him at nightfall to coax stray dogs to his laboratory. 
 There was an anecdote of a performing poodle they 
 had bought and let off on account of his comic tricks, 
 which made her laugh. I don't know how she told 
 it, or I listened. I know that I was conscious that 
 she was there, weak, bloodless, with a scared}' healed 
 wound in her chest, that a word might bring on 
 another frightful haemorrhage; and that I must hold 
 my tongue, but that all was black before my eyes, 
 and a taste of copper in my mouth, that everything 
 seemed to reel and darken as I left the house. She 
 had given me some of her delicate yellow roses in 
 return for my violets. When I camq home I flung 
 them on the fire, and stood stupidly watching them 
 shrivel and blacken ; and yet they seemed to me, at 
 that same moment, the only clean things in this 
 filthy world." 
 
 They took a turn or two in silence. 
 
 " And then," said Michael, briskly, " you gradually 
 subsided into her belief that vivisection was quite 
 scientifically useless, a mere new-fangled vice, which 
 would soon become obsolete ; and you kept quite 
 cheerful, and scientific, and utilitarian, and believed 
 that the great God Evolution would evolve phy- 
 siology out of its errors ? I am not so lucky. I sec 
 that Vivisection is, considered from the merely in- 
 tellectual side, the rational equivalent in physiolo- 
 gical science of the experimental processes of other
 
 144 BALDWIN. 
 
 sciences. I am not one of those optimistic persons 
 who miOst honestly persuade themselves, and attempt 
 to persuade others, that this practice is a scientific 
 mistake, and can lead neither to abstract truth nor 
 to practical benefits ; clinging, in their disgust for 
 the doings of man, to an ideal arrangement of God, 
 according to which good could not arise from evil^ 
 and Nature would hide her secrets from those who 
 violate and torture her. No, I cannot logically per- 
 suade myself that physiologists should be different 
 from chemists, physicists, or any other men of 
 science, in not knowing best the exact value of their 
 various scientific methods, even as a cobbler knows 
 best the value of his various tools, and that they 
 should all cling \vith fearful tenacity to a method of 
 observation from which nothing can be hoped ; 
 neither can I persuade myself, with the best will in 
 the v.-orld, that, making allowance for the greatest 
 possible amount of disturbance due to artificial con- 
 ditions, the experimentation on living animals does 
 not afford much practical knowledge which the 
 dissection of dead bodies could not give. I think,, 
 therefore, that physiologists are distinctly the only 
 people who can really estimate the scientific value 
 of vivisection. But for these very reasons, on account 
 of this same unanimous tenacity which persuades me 
 of the intellectual fitness of this practice, I am per- 
 suaded also that physiologists, and all those who 
 obtain facts and theories from physiolog}-, are utterl}''-
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 145 
 
 unfit to really estimate the moral legitimacy or 
 illegitimacy of vivisection. Similarly, I am most 
 lamentably persuaded of the fact that (contrary to 
 the good, beautiful poetical belief of Christians and 
 deists) good results may most assuredly be obtained 
 from infamous means; and that, just as very useful 
 and bread-giving money may be obtained by murder, 
 so also very reliable and applicable knowledge may 
 be obtained by vivisection. But just on account of 
 my recognition of this nasty arrangement of things 
 am I impressed with the necessity of rebelling against 
 its nastiness. I know that science requires vivi- 
 section, and that scientific morality allows it ; and 
 for that very reason I wash my hands of science, I 
 reject scientific morality, I break with this ration- 
 alism which rationally abets abomination ; and I say 
 ' give me any folly, any superstition which my reason 
 refuses, but which my conscience can accept.' " 
 
 " I quite understand your state of mind," answered 
 Baldwin ; " I have gone through it myself, and a 
 great many people have gone through it also. This 
 question of vivisection is pretty well unique in the 
 anomaly which it presents, and in the anomalies to 
 which it gives rise, because it consists of two part?, 
 each separately most singular in the history of moral 
 dilemmas ; and combining in confusion and con- 
 tradiction to form a tangle of good and bad most 
 painful and difficult to unravel. The first half of 
 ■this anomaly compounded of anomalies consists in 
 
 II
 
 146 BALDWIN. 
 
 the fact that, in the question of vivisection, we are 
 deahng with the relations of creatures so separate in 
 their interests, and so unequal in their power, that 
 the victimized party receives no benefit while suffer- 
 ing the whole pain of the sacrifice ; whereas the 
 victimizing party is at once sole culprit, accuser, and 
 judge in the matter. And the second anomalous 
 half of this most anomalous question is, that the evil 
 is not one inherited from more barbarous times, and 
 certain of being abolished by the mere general 
 movement of progress ; but is, on the contrary, a 
 thing of modern development and infinite future 
 extension, and that it is entangled by a whole net- 
 work of scientific solidarity with that same new 
 philosophy which is securing for us not only a more 
 prosperous future, but a more reliable conscience." 
 
 Baldwin's voice was drowned by the hurtling din 
 of a train rushing by ; a red flame of light, a jet of 
 reddish vapour suddenly in the distance ; just time 
 enough to perceive the fact that it was not yet there, 
 that the rails were free ; a screech and a rushing 
 wind as from the wing of death, and then, for 
 another second, a red spot again in the distance ; 
 and all was silence, with only the bleating of sheep 
 and cawing of rooks from the neighbouring fields. 
 
 " Evolution and evolutional morality," remarked 
 Michael, "have seemed to me, ever since this question 
 of vivisection has come up, just about as God-like 
 as that express. Make a religion out of an express
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLLTION. iaj 
 
 train, and a moral cede out of its woes, if }-ou like ;. 
 I can't." 
 
 "My dear Michael," answered Baldwin," you are 
 just an instance of the results of not bringing evolu- 
 tional morality sufficiently to bear upon the problem 
 of vivisection." 
 
 " I have seen enough of bringing evolutional 
 morality to bear upon it, thank you." 
 
 "You don't understand what I mean. Listen. 
 When this system of physiological experimentation, 
 which had been hitherto carried on as one of those 
 mysteries of science into which no layman cares to 
 pry, was suddenly revealed, by the miscarriage of 
 certain technical manuals into the uninitiated circles 
 for which they were not intended, there was an 
 almost universal shock of indignation ; an almost 
 universal impulse to examine, to interfere, to check, 
 to forbid ; the literature of physiolog}' was dragged 
 from off its placid scientific shelves ; the physio- 
 logical laboratories were broken into by the im- 
 agination of the lay public, the reluctant men of 
 science were button-holed -by the conscience of 
 England. The sudden scuffle of consciences has 
 now been succeeded by an organized warfare of 
 books, articles, lectures, and societies, which is to it 
 what a year-long campaign might be to the sudden 
 rush to arms of a whole city ; but that first move- 
 ment has existed nevertheless. And though the 
 convulsion of conscience has subsided, and only
 
 148 BALDWIN. 
 
 two distinct parties have remained, to one of which 
 gravitates each straggHng opinion, in which is merged 
 each individual struggle, the moral commotion has 
 nevertheless been, and the moral anomaly has not 
 yet been settled. Peace of conscience has indeed 
 been obtained by each party ; by the one which said 
 to physiology, You may, and by the other which 
 said, You may not. But it is on both sides a false 
 and selfish peace ; a peace obtained at the expense 
 of injustice towards a portion of the heart or a por- 
 tion of the mind ; at the expense of suppression of 
 some of the instincts, either of justice or of reason, 
 of the individual. For let us examine what are the 
 persons, or rather what are the conditions of mind, 
 constituting each of these parties, after excluding 
 from each the huge fluctuating mass of people in- 
 capable of mental or moral struggle, who have joined 
 whichever party appealed to them first, whether 
 because the stories of animal torture unconsciously 
 roused their fears for their own pet beasts, or because 
 the oracular assertion by their doctor that vivisection 
 had discovered the cure for this, that, or the other 
 disease, made them tingle with fear lest they or theirs 
 might ever require the remedy. The party which 
 said to the physiologists You may, is also a fusion of 
 two kinds of minds ; first, of those minds completely 
 mutilated by merely scientific interests of the bare 
 possibility of conceiving that the agonies of any 
 number of scientifically-experimented-on animals can
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 149 
 
 be a matter of an}- consideration ; and secondly, of 
 minds which did distinctly participate in the horror 
 of the first disclosures respecting the nature of vivi- 
 section, but whom the connection of their sciences — 
 psychology, anthropology, chemistry, with physiology 
 — or the strong instinct of the solidarity of all the 
 sciences, has gradually accustomed and reconciled 
 to the requirements of physiology ; minds whom the 
 all-pervading sense that theological systems having 
 been thrown aside, there remains no security for 
 them save in scientific progress, no hope save in the 
 improvement of human conditions, no moral test 
 save the diminution of human misery, has forced to 
 acquiesce in what they recognize as an evil, but 
 persuade themselves to be inevitable and decidedly 
 the lesser of those submitted to their choice. Of 
 the party which said and still says to the physiologists 
 You shall not, one half are. minds with whose pre- 
 existing indifference or aversion to science, the 
 horror at the sudden disclosures of physiological 
 literature came quite harmonious : artistic minds, to 
 Avhom Science meant what Art most hates — analysis ; 
 and religious minds, of believers or deists, to whom 
 science represented what religion most hates — the 
 reduction of God to ph}-sical necessit}- ; of the won- 
 derful to the simple ; while the other half of the 
 party, saying "You shall not," are minds hitherto 
 inclined to scientific conceptions, but whom the 
 monstrous things of physiology and their calm
 
 I50 BALDIVJX. 
 
 support by the whole confraternity of sciences have 
 gradually made sceptical of a scientific philosophy 
 which produced, abetted, and cherished such things ; 
 so that the whole party may be said to consist of 
 minds who either lost nothing by quarrelling with 
 science, and of minds which preferred breaking with 
 all science to contracting a solidarity with that which 
 appeared to them abominable. Thus has that first 
 great movement of indignation ended. It has ended 
 in a feud, which means in reality a compromise — a 
 compromise made for the sake of unity of endeavour 
 and peace of mind by the more worthy half of each 
 party with the less worthy. And the moral loss, the 
 loss in the amount of individual moral judgment 
 among our thinking classes, has, I think, been very 
 great. For the battle between those who say to 
 vivisection Yes, and those who say to it N^o, while 
 offering a great show of moral weapons and moral 
 entrenchments, and moral loopholes and moral pit- 
 falls, and giving a general impression of great moral 
 vigour, has meant in reality a mere diminution of 
 moral activity ; each individual of each party making 
 up for his cowardliness in not venturing to attack his 
 own neighbours when he thought them wrong, in 
 not venturing to fight only for what was really his 
 cause against what was really the opposed cause ; 
 by his readiness to attack much which ought to be 
 to him most sacred, while elbowing many things 
 which ou£:ht to be to him most abominable. So
 
 OF HO NO UR A ND E VOL UTION. 1 5 1 
 
 that, in this question of vivisection, we see repeated 
 that loathsome historical phenomenon of men being 
 willing to burn their intellectual kith and kin 
 because they have enrolled in a crusade beside 
 people whom they ought to have gibbeted ; and 
 this from sheer want of the strength of will required 
 to reject the mistakes of either party, to stand alone, 
 and hope that others, equally willing to stand alone, 
 might join to form the nucleus of a group whose 
 object is to accept the good whatever its origin, and 
 to reject the bad whatever its neighbourhood. For, 
 while in this question of vivisection there exist two 
 halves of each party who are always single-minded 
 and who make no compromise — namely, those who, 
 like so many physiologists, simply throw aside any 
 moral restraint ; and those who, like the greater 
 part of the religious believers, snap their fingers at 
 scientific progress, two sections who sacrifice nothing 
 in sacrificing respectively moral feelings which they 
 never had, and scientific interests which they have 
 never understood ; there exist the balance of each 
 of the two parties who have hitherto simply let 
 themselves be dragged by their intellectual neigh- 
 bours into cither repudiating rationalistic beliefs 
 which they ought to have held, or abetting moral 
 sophisms which they ought to have combated. It 
 is for these persons, and these alone (since all the 
 rest can see only one alternative, and consequently 
 one decision), that the question of vivisection is one
 
 152 BALDWIN. 
 
 of real moral choice ; it is these, and these alone, 
 who, being able to weigh the pros and the cons, to 
 appreciate the sacrifice which must be made, to feel 
 the temptation which must be resisted, can ever 
 finally settle the c^uestion. If I were a writer, I 
 would wish to write for those of my intellectual 
 comrades whom belief in scientific methods, in 
 human developmicnt, and in evolutional morality 
 seems by the bond of scientific solidarity to be 
 drawing to the admission of the legitimacy of a 
 practice from which their feelings shrink ; and, on 
 the other hand, for those whose moral repugnance 
 at an abomination abetted by science is gradually 
 inducing to seek for a philosophic creed in the un- 
 intelligible, for a moral code in the arbitrarily stated, 
 and for an ideal future state in the impossible." 
 
 Michael smiled. 
 
 " You might write your fingers off, Baldwin, before 
 you could persuade your people that vivisection is 
 not merely the pricking of an occasional guinea-pig 
 or the dissection of Vv'hat is, virtualh-, thanks to 
 anaesthetics, a corpse. Nervous and fastidious 
 people have an insuperable aversion to believing 
 that vivisection means every manner of horrible 
 mutilation, ulceration, racking with electricit}', poi- 
 soning by drugs or by excision of excretory organs, 
 baking, flaying, and dissecting of an animal with 
 his motor nerves paralysed, but his sensory nerves 
 horribly excited, most likely by curare, S:c. They
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 153 
 
 don't like having their opinions changed and their 
 stomachs turned by the reading of physiological 
 literature." 
 
 " That is but too true, l^ut you see there are 
 logical proofs, besides direct evidence from books. 
 First, it is preposterous to suppose that a moral 
 tumult, followed by a moral crusade such as is pre- 
 sented by the anti-vivisection agitation, could arise 
 nowadays and continue for several years, unless 
 there were a very serious and real evil to produce 
 and maintain them. Second, the habit of asserting 
 the moral right to inflict suffering in the service of 
 mankind, after having argued and insisted that 
 vivisection does not entail suffering, proves pretty 
 plainly that those who can argue that they have a 
 right to inflict pain do not believe that there is no 
 pain in the matter. And thirdly, it is not likely that 
 men wdio, perceiving that yivisection being scientifi- 
 cally and medically valuable to mankind, have 
 persuaded themselves that the service rendered to 
 mankind quite outweighs the iniquity committed to 
 animals, that such men will consider an extraordinary 
 and compromising correctness of statement pre- 
 ferable to an alleviation of human ignorance and 
 misery. Oh, there is no insurmountable difficulty 
 in showing vivisection to be what it really is. But 
 what interests me at present is not the class which 
 tends to abet vivisection because it sympathizes 
 with science and scientific ethics, but the class
 
 154 BALD U 'IX. 
 
 which, because it abominates vivisecti-on, tends to 
 become ahenated from the doctrines of evoki- 
 tion and evolutional morality ; because, my dear 
 Michael, I have passed through that danger my- 
 self, and I see you gradually coming very near to 
 it. You are, without knowing it, growing a sort 
 of independent retrograde ; you will soon take a 
 secret pleasure in every bungle of science ; you 
 will soon feel a secret hankering after any 
 mystically established code of right and wrong." 
 
 They were interrupted by the arrival of their train. 
 It advanced slowly, casting a blood-like stain on the 
 line before it; a vague moving blackness, enveloped 
 in flameless smoke and vapour, which waved scarlet 
 and orange in the deep blue of the evening sky ; an 
 unearthly and terrible magnificence of luridness, like 
 Turner's " Fighting Tcmeraire." And as it approached 
 that seeming slowness was revealed to be speed, as 
 the great engine, with its seams of crimson and 
 yellow light, its wreaths of luminous vapour, bore 
 forwards, stately, resistless. 
 
 " Well, yes," said I\Iichael, when they were seated 
 in the train which was bearing them towards London 
 ■ — " well, yes ; perhaps I am growing into an indepen- 
 dent retrograde, as you are pleased to call it. Perhaps 
 I do long to invoke something higher than mere 
 expediency as a moral standard. I want, in this 
 question of vivisection, to invoke a principle which 
 used to exist before people began to deal in evolu-
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 155 
 
 tional morality ; I want to invoke the principle of 
 pity." 
 
 Baldwin shook his head. 
 
 "You are mistaken," he answered. "The real 
 horror of vivisection is not, however it ma}' express 
 itself, the horror at something piteous, but the 
 horror at something dishonourable. It is, vaguely 
 formulated as it may be, and strangely confused 
 with ideas of mercy, not the shrinking with which 
 we may contemplate 'some inevitable or righteously 
 inflicted pain, the pain of the starving poor whom 
 vv^e cannot relieve, the pain of the sick wretches 
 vv'hom we cannot cure, the pain of the hounded 
 criminal whom we cannot let off ; it is the shrinking 
 at the idea, not of pain, but of injustice ; it is the 
 feeling, not of sympathy with m.isery, but of indig- 
 nation against fraud. The code condemning vivi- 
 section is the code of honour ; and the code of 
 honour is the code of justice, enforced not upon 
 police-watched men by the judge and the hangman* 
 but by the self-scrutinizing conscience on the un- 
 hampered wmII." 
 
 " This code of honour," went on Baldwin, " forces u.s 
 to refrain from a variety of sets of actions wholly apart 
 from the consideration of their ultimate result upon 
 ourselves ; actions which, in some circumstances, may 
 be disadvantageous and dangerous, but in other cir- 
 cumstances (such as those of the Renaissance prince- 
 lets philosophized by Machiavelli, and the seventeenth-
 
 156 BALDWIN. 
 
 century gentry instructed in direction of the intention 
 by the Jesuit casuists) may be, on the contrary, safe, 
 advantageous, and dehghtful to the persons under- 
 taking them. Among such actions which — the back 
 of the pohce being conveniently turned or the supreme 
 jurisdiction of one class over another being thoroughly 
 recognized — honour, nevertheless, insists upon men and 
 women desisting from, may be mentioned : robbery, 
 which is seizing advantages by force which cannot be 
 resisted by other force; deceit, which is obtaining advan- 
 tages by telling untruths, which are not resisted by 
 doubt nor retaliated by untruth, but acted on as truths ; 
 cheating, which is making another stake all where he 
 can win nothing, while we stake nothing and can win 
 all ; and a variety of similar actions, the tendency 
 of which is to increase instead of diminishing the 
 inequality of chances of good and bad. This code of 
 honour, which in our tolerably moralized civilization 
 is often in harmony with the dictates of enlightened 
 selfishness, does yet sometimes appear in opposition 
 to that nobler kind of selfishness, that selfishness 
 immolating self, but immolating also others, which 
 asks for the greatest good for the greater number. 
 The greatest number insisting upon obtaining the 
 greatest good are sometimes liable to receive from the 
 principle of honour a rebuke : — What right have you 
 to the good which you have not earned, and which 
 belongs to others? What right have you to a diminu- 
 tion of the pain mixed up with your pleasure, by a
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 157 
 
 diminution of the pleasure which is mixed up with 
 your neighbour's pain? If this other man, or class, 
 or nation is to lend you, for your benefit, its work, its 
 happiness, its life, how soon will come the day when 
 to this man, or class, or nation, maimed or beggared 
 in your service, you will repay with accumulated 
 interest the good which all this while has ceased to 
 be enjoyed? This says the principle of honour ; and 
 this does it say to the men who wish to have for 
 physiology the same unlimited freedom of experiment 
 permitted to other sciences which deal with senseless 
 elements or vegetables." 
 
 Michael here interrupted. 
 
 " But what becomes of your utilitarian principles?'' 
 he asked. " Shall pain not be inflicted on the few, that 
 it may be spared to the many ? " 
 
 " Yes," answered Baldwin, " if the few are part of 
 the many, and share equally with the others the 
 chance of suffering, and equally with the others the 
 chance of benefitting thereby. No, if the few arc 
 separate from the many, if they alone can lose, and 
 they alone cannot win. Otherwise, the many arc 
 simply playing with the few a game of loaded dice : 
 the many are really not staking, and are bound to 
 win ; the few are really excluded from winning, and 
 are forced to stake. That the few are often deliber- 
 ately sacrificed to the many is most true: the soldier 
 who slowly dies abandoned on the field of battle is 
 sacrificed to the people at home ; but the soldier is
 
 158 BALDWIN. 
 
 originally part of those at home — he, as a child, has 
 eaten the bread, the corn of which would have been 
 trampled, he has been sheltered under the roof which 
 would have been burnt, he has been protected in 
 mind and body by the whole civilization which would 
 have been ruined, had not other men been singled out 
 to fight and die miserably in defence of the country. 
 Nay, when in the course of history wc see whole 
 classes and nations temporarily sacrificed for the 
 benefit of others, those classes and nations have yet 
 in the long run benefitted ; since, as in the case of the 
 feudal serfs and the negro slaves, the very oppression 
 meant the predominance of the class and race most 
 capable of improvement, which inevitably led to a 
 raising of level even for the temporarily sacrificed 
 class or nation, and of which that sacrificed class or 
 nation would, if let alone, have been incapable ; 
 moreover, that very class or nation sacrificed at one 
 historical moment to another class or nation, owed 
 much of whatever advantages itself enjoyed to the 
 sacrifice to it of a class or nation equally inferior. The 
 whole movement is one of taking the good with the 
 bad, being refunded in process of time for the evil to 
 which one is submitting, or refunding some other by 
 one's suffering for the evils often by which one has 
 benefitted. The system is harsh, but it is in the long 
 run equitable : ' You have inherited an incurable 
 disease ; but have you not also inherited therewith 
 a certain fortune, a certain intelligence ? ' ' In this
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 159 
 
 particular case I have inherited a disease, but I have 
 inherited neither fortune nor intelh'gence — that is 
 unjust.' 'lout had you, Hke your neighbour yonder, 
 inherited at once good health, fortune, and intelligence, 
 would you deem that unjust ? ' ' No.' ' Then accept 
 your chance in peace.' Thus goes the great lotter}-. 
 But in reality there is neither so much chance nor so 
 much inequality. We all participate in the good and 
 the bad of our neighbours. Our parents have suffered 
 that we might be prosperous ; our children may suffer 
 because we have been prosperous ; and moreover, in 
 reality, the suffering is greatly of our own making, or 
 of the making of those who have made for us also 
 our pleasure. The mass of mankind is a sea of con- 
 stantly shifting atoms : not one but has at one 
 moment been in every place, or will at one moment 
 be brought there. The wave that rises is the water 
 that has just sunk, the water which has just sunk is 
 the wave which will next rise. And when the con- 
 scienceless movement of things brings to one man 
 the power of making himself more fortunate by 
 making his neighbour less fortunate ; when, after 
 having fed one man into strength and starved another 
 into weakness, it offers to the strong an opportunity 
 of snatching the remaining food of the weak, something 
 interposes and says ' No ' — and that something, that 
 further equalizer of insufncienth- balanced good and 
 evil, is honour. Now such a condition of fluctuation, 
 of giving and taking, of disimbursing and reimbursinij,
 
 i6o BALDWIN. 
 
 does not exist where two classes are so utterly separate 
 that the one which suffers does not profit even even- 
 tually by the result of its sufferings. The advantages 
 which may accrue from the vivisection of animals are 
 of two sorts : the direct and less important ones being 
 the detail, improvement in medicine ; the indirect and 
 more important ones being the advance of knowledge 
 upon questions intimately connected with the great 
 and almost social and religious problems of mind and 
 matter ; but those advantages are both of them 
 advantages to mankind, for it is not merely a lie, but 
 a stultification, to pretend that animals will gain any- 
 thing equivalent to the sufferings of vivisection, by 
 the improvement of veterinary medicine, of the greater 
 kindness of mankind, since it is evident that the 
 remedy for such ignorance or inhumanity as exists is 
 to them much greater than the evil — in short, a case 
 of chopping off the head to cure its aching. These 
 advantages are therefore simply advantages to man- 
 kind ; advantages bought at the expense of other 
 creatures. And the buying of such advantages for 
 one class at the expense of another is, as I have said, 
 dishonourable." 
 
 " But," again interrupted Michael, " there is no rule 
 without exceptions. There are cases where it may be 
 more moral, and therefore more honourable, to lie 
 and even to steal than to let respect for truth or 
 respect for property entail agony on those whom 
 we can help ; morality can mean only the right
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. iCi 
 
 course, and in many an instance the right course 
 may be to do the thing theoretically wrong, but 
 practically right, because the theory has not taken 
 special circumstances into account." 
 
 " No," answered Baldwin, " it all sounds plausible 
 enough, and of a higher kind of morality. But 
 morality which is eccentric and dwells in higher isola- 
 tion is no morality at all. It is most true that life is 
 so complicated and so ill-organized that even with 
 regard to righteous laws, where exceptional cases do 
 occur the law may be in the wrong, the criminal in the 
 right. But we cannot legislate for such exceptions, 
 nor does society ever do so except at its cost. If one 
 of the angels of good had remained shut out of the 
 heavenly fortress, and its holy body were on the point 
 of being trampled by the spirits of evil, the postern of 
 heaven could not be opened, for with that one spirit 
 of good would rush in a thousand devils. Good and 
 evil are unfortunately often mixed, but we cannot let 
 pass the evil in order to obtain the good. Morality, 
 be it remembered, deals with frightfully huge masses, 
 and masses one atom of which being displaced, the 
 whole may crash on to our heads. This has long 
 been tacitly recognized by mankind : thus certain 
 actions, in themselves wholly indifferent, give a 
 woman the opportunity for being unchaste, and as 
 society cannot actually witness the unchaste action, 
 but only these indifferent actions by which it is sur- 
 rounded, society is forced to punish as unchaste every 
 
 12
 
 ]62 BALDWIN. 
 
 woman who indulges in these indifferent actions ; yet 
 an honest woman may not only honestly commit 
 them, but may even, under certain circumstances, be 
 forced by some serious moral obligation to their 
 committal. This society knows, but being unable to 
 plant a fence round the ditch itself, it is obliged to 
 rail over a larger space of ground, in itself perhaps 
 quite safe, and the laws of honour have to be drawn 
 tighter instead of slacker." 
 
 "Do you remember," asked Michael, "that mediaeval 
 legend, made into a poem by Hartmann von Aue, 
 about a noble knight, surnamed the poor Henry, who 
 might have been cured of a loathsome disease, and 
 his strong heart and arm given back to Christendom, 
 by means of a bath in the blood of a very insignificant 
 little peasant wench, twelve years old, and of no use 
 to any one.'' The advocates of vivisection are fond of 
 placing before us a re-edition of this tale, showing 
 that the refusal to sacrifice a few dogs might widow 
 the world of some noble spirit and cheat it of his 
 works ; but they draw the conclusion, contrary to that 
 of Hartmann von Aue's poem, that the dishonour 
 would consist not in the accepting, but in refusing 
 the bath of blood for their hero." 
 
 " P^xactly. This is one of those exceptional cases in 
 favour of which mankind is ever and anon requested, 
 by romance writers and Jesuit casuists, to change its 
 code of honour. Now it is possible that if morality 
 were composed of mere single cases, instead of being
 
 OF HO NO UR A ND E VOL UTION. 1 63 
 
 a most compact mass, easily upset by tampering witlr 
 one part, that the blood bath of vivisection might bc^ 
 honourably prescribed for one inestimable Knight 
 Henry ; although I think that the inestimable man' 
 would be cleaner with his leprosy than with that 
 blood which had washed it off But as such things as 
 single cases do not in reality exist for the legislator, 
 and must be treated, being specialities, only by 
 attempting special things to prevent their recurrence ; 
 the permission to vivisect three particular dogs to^ 
 save one particular man in the exceptional case which 
 might occur once in a thousand 3''ears of that man being, 
 such that the rest, not only of mankind, but of beast- 
 kind, would suffer by his loss, would mean in reality the 
 permission to vivisect an unlimited number of beasts 
 all over the world with no direct object, and merely 
 because we know that the advance of science will 
 improve the condition of mankind at large, and of 
 any stray invaluable man who may be included 
 among its millions of valueless numskulls and 
 scoundrels. This would mean by analogy that in 
 order that one honest woman might not unjustly be 
 accused of being no better than she should be, all 
 the weak and fleshly women in Christendom should be 
 enabled to sin unnoticed and with impunity. For in 
 reality the admission of the legitimacy of vivisection 
 means not one operation for one case, but a systematic 
 torturing of thousands of beasts all over the world 
 during hundreds of years, in order to obtain whatever
 
 1 64 BALDWIN. 
 
 advantages may result therefrom. And when this 
 vivisectional poetic episode is reduced to prose, when 
 the unique Knight Henry, the saviour of the world, 
 is shown to mean all the Toms, Dicks, and Willies of 
 mankind — to diminish some of the physical and moral 
 aches inherent in whose otherwise daily improving 
 lives we are asked to turn into fierce agony the mere 
 physical life which is all that the thousands of beasts 
 to be sacrificed for hundreds of years possess or ever 
 can possess ; when we have seen the real state of the 
 case, can we deny that the legalization of vivisection 
 would be the authorization of a huge theft, of a 
 casting of loaded dice — a gigantic magnifying of that 
 act of taking all the profits for ourselves and giving 
 all the risks to another, which in its pettiest and most 
 individual form means to a man indelible dishonour?" 
 
 " Honour, dishonour — very fine-sounding words ! " 
 exclaimed Michael : " but how much are they worth ? 
 Figments, useful enough in their day when only 
 figments had power ; effete expressions inherited from 
 a time (answers my historical and sociological friend), 
 when it appears that people committed abominations 
 with much greater impunity than nowadays. This 
 code of honour is scientifically merely a museum 
 curiosity." 
 
 " True enough," ansvv^ered Baldwin ; " but it so 
 happens that the standard by which we must judge 
 vivisection has two faces and two names, a very old 
 and a very new one, is a sort of Janus. The old
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 165 
 
 face I have spoken of, and is this, as you consider it, 
 god of otlier days, called Honour. But there is 
 another face, or rather the same thing presents a 
 younger one seen from the other side. And this 
 newer face is what is called evolutional morality. 
 For the old name and the new mean but one thing. 
 The old code of things to be done and things to be 
 avoided, which used to be considered as a mysterious, 
 inexplicable something, of no particular origin, 
 miraculously given, I suppose, is in truth a now 
 intelligible something, whose reason and origin we 
 understand. As the sudden v/ord of command by 
 which things were created, is now understood as the 
 mere inevitable adjustment and development of 
 physical things, so also this old principle of honour is 
 now comprehensible as the instinct, the ingrained 
 habit due to ages of deliberate choice, of preferring 
 certain sets of motives to certain other ones. For as 
 our physical nature has been evolved by the selection 
 and survival of those physical forms which are in 
 harmony with the greatest number of physical 
 circumstances ; so also has our moral nature been 
 evolved by the more and more conscious choice of 
 the motives including consideration for the greatest 
 number of results from our actions, of the motives 
 which, instead of merely enlarging the shapeless and 
 functionless moral polyp-jelly of ego, work out, 
 diversify and unify, lick into shape, the complicated 
 moral organism of society, with all its innumerable
 
 i66 BALDWIN. 
 
 and wondruusly co-ordinated limbs and functions. 
 And thus has evolved itself that which was formerly 
 called Honour, and whose other name is natural 
 morality : the preference of justice to expediency. 
 Slowly and with difficulty, indeed ; every single 
 preference of right to desire having been as a 
 touch which has moulded the wonderful instinct 
 into existence ; every single preference of desire 
 to right having been the rude thumbing which 
 obliterates the nascent form ; every single just action 
 making easier a score of just actions, every single 
 unjust decision having begotten a score of future 
 unjust decisions. A very arduous work has been this 
 making of man's conscience, v/hich seems to be at 
 once the greatest requisite and the most crowning 
 perfection of the evolution of society ; for if mere 
 overbalance of pleasure above pain had been the 
 highest goal of our gradual evolution, evolution might 
 have ended with those half-existing things whose 
 happiness is more complete than that of the most 
 noble mind. And the making of man's conscience 
 has been the evolution of a spiritual organism which 
 perceives and chooses justice within ranges ever and 
 ever extending : justice, at first (when the moral 
 sight was a mere titillating all-overishness on the 
 contact of some adjacent thing, and the moral limbs 
 were fastened like those of a limpet to one spot) 
 limited to the mere family, then to the tribe, then to 
 the class and the race; and nowadays, when the
 
 OF HO NO UR AND E VOL UTION. 1 67 
 
 times of justice, limited to class and race, arc 
 separated from us by barely a century — nay, by 
 barely a score of years — extending to whatever can 
 feel, to whatever can have its poor little portion of 
 happiness exchanged by fraud and violence for 
 misery." 
 
 " But Nature," objected Michael, " is not thus just ; 
 she uses as her instruments starvation, pestilence, 
 continuous sacrifice of weaker to stronger ; and 
 Nature having made us, shall we be wiser or mor 
 Pharisaical than she ? " 
 
 " True enough ; but this Nature of which you speak, 
 what is she, when you tear away the allegorical and 
 mythical rags of religion with which we still mumm 
 up our scientific conceptions? What is this Nature? 
 contending forces, a chaos which has not made us, 
 but out of which we have gradually emerged. If 
 Nature — that is, the course of continually clashing 
 and reacting events — has been unjust, why should we 
 be unjust, who are not an abstraction fonned out o^ 
 abstract ideas, but living men and women, with eyes 
 and ears to see and hear, and minds to judge and 
 wish and hope and choose ; why should we, with 
 our reason and conscience, pretend to take lessons 
 from a mere abstract entity, a mere expression by 
 which we symbolize phenomena? Indeed, we do 
 not ; and had we done so, society would never have 
 existed. 
 
 " Hence, when I say that honour rejects vivisection
 
 1 68 BALDWIN. 
 
 as an unjust and cheating practice, I mean thereby 
 also that it is contrary to the tendencies of the highest 
 result of our gradual evolution. I mean that by 
 preferring in this case the advantages which our race 
 might gain at the expense of wholesale and profitless 
 agony to another race, we are laying obliterating 
 fingers upon those delicate moral features which have 
 thus slowly and arduously been moulded into shape. 
 For, in the first place, we are deliberately buying our 
 good with the evil of others, and thus running counter 
 to the great moral principle of obtaining advantage 
 only in return for advantage, of being spared pain 
 only by sparing it ; of making the actions of men into 
 the transactions of those who barter, lend, and repay, 
 instead of those of men who cheat and rob. And, in 
 the second place, this great movement of moral 
 retrogression consists of a number of minor move- 
 ments of moral retrogression. For we are m.aking our 
 perception of the evil of others give way to our 
 perception of our own desire : we are letting ourselves 
 slip instead of holding ourselves erect, and thus 
 weakening our moral muscle. We are diminishing 
 ,our most precious quality, the power of submitting to 
 justice, of foregoing our wishes. And with this 
 weakening of our moral will, goes inevitably the 
 diminution also of our moral perception ; for every 
 time that we prefer desire to right, we not only 
 increase the tyranny of covetousness, but, by jostling 
 the one wrong choice Y>'ith the many right ones which
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 169 
 
 all except an utterly immoral life must contain, we 
 let our soul lose its keenness, its moral scent : it 
 endures foulness, gets pimply, weak, diseased, some- 
 times loses a limb, and always loses somewhat of its 
 most precious power, of its elasticity, its endurance, 
 its resistance. Moreover, every time that we prefer 
 desire to justice, we arc warping not only our moral, 
 but also our intellectual nature. For a man, who is 
 naturally inclined to morality and thoughtful as well, 
 finds in his life numbers of opportunities of eschewing 
 evil, and doing good with either no cost at all to his 
 selfishness, or only so little as merely to enhance the 
 natural pleasure which he takes in virtue ; thus he 
 develops for himself a moral nature in which 
 acknowledged evil cannot dwell without constant 
 moral discomfort from its presence ; hence if the 
 temptation of some evil choice overcome him, he will, 
 in proportion to his honesty of habits and ideals, be 
 anxious to persuade himself that this choice was not 
 evil, but good ; he will persuade himself that what 
 was culpable self-indulgence was wise self-sacrifice, 
 that the mud with which he has bespattered himself 
 while seeking his pleasure is the trace of honourable 
 moral labour ; and thus he will, after giving way to a 
 lower motive, listen to a false argument ; and strange 
 and lamentable are the sophisms which have ever, 
 from the well-intentioned society-reorganizing Jesuit 
 moralists of the seventeenth century to the honest and 
 humane advocates of the modern vice of vivisection.
 
 170 BALDWIN. 
 
 followed upon a choice in which the desire or 
 the habit of evil has conquered the perception of 
 good. 
 
 " I think you will find," went on Baldwin, after a 
 pause, " that this deliberate choice of adv^antagcs to 
 mankind, bought by unrequited and cheating in- 
 fliction of agony upon creatures who cannot partici- 
 pate in the gain while they sustain all the loss, is 
 nearly always followed by a blunting of moral 
 judgment and a stultification of intellectual argument 
 among those who defend this retrogression in the 
 path of moral evolution, this preference of desire to 
 right. The temptation to recognize vivisection as a 
 legitimate practice is to any person imbued with 
 modern scientific views a very great temptation ; 
 vivisection means a most valuable instrument, or 
 rather a most valuable short cut, for the attainment 
 of a kind of knowledge, with which are connected not 
 only a great number of problems of body and soul, 
 of present and future life, of moral health and disease, 
 having an almost religious importance to us, who 
 have forsworn our old creeds ; but also a kind of 
 knowledge at the same time bearing upon the actual 
 well-being of mankind, upon the diminution of 
 misery, which has become the mission of the men 
 and women who would formerly have wasted their 
 energies in prayers and crusades. It is a practice, 
 therefore, which — to us who are scarcely weaned of 
 our beloved old creeds, and but ill-accustomed as yet
 
 OF HONOUR AXD EVOLUTION. 171 
 
 to the rude bracingncss of a new faith which merely 
 tells us to do right without reward, and endure pain 
 without compensation — still craving for the imagina- 
 tive stimulant, the almost physically rapturous self- 
 unconsciousness of complete surrender to a single 
 object — to us still so unable to dispense with a 
 superstition — is in reality an ingredient in the heady 
 elixir with which we comfort our chilly souls, In the 
 spiritual cordial of a religion of science and human- 
 kind which has replaced the old religion of Christ and 
 His wounds, until the world be fit for the religion of 
 justice. Hence those, and they are among the 
 noblest of us, who have been seeking strength and 
 warmth in this belief, are, when the sense of this 
 horrible ingredient of vivisection comes home to 
 them, tempted by the strongest of all temptations, 
 habit, to gulp down the poisonous moral absinth of 
 acquiescence in injustice together with the streng- 
 thening and purifying things with which it has 
 lamentably got mingled. They have not the strength 
 to bear the dreary soul-chilliness which they know 
 they must suffer while carefully analyzing this creed 
 of complete subservience of all good to human 
 progress ; they prefer to take it as it is, and they 
 persuade themselves that all its ingredients are good. 
 Thus to a large class of men, not merely ph}'siologists 
 and physicians dependent upon physiology, but a 
 multitude of generous thinkers to whom the idea of a 
 loss to science or to medicine is unendurable, vivisec-
 
 172 BALDWIN. 
 
 tion has become as much a vicious necessity as any- 
 beastly vice to a swinish sinner ;— a necessity which 
 it has become necessar}' to their conscience to make 
 from a vice into a virtue, or at least to exclude from 
 any moral analysis. And while they have thus 
 sophisticated or silenced their own conscience into 
 acquiescence with evil, their example — the example 
 of men eager in the cause of good which is agreeable 
 to them, earnest against evil with which they do not 
 sympathize, noble with all that nobility which is 
 inherent in a fine nature and costs it no more than 
 would vice to a vicious one — the apparently deliberate 
 sanction of vivisection by these the moral censors of 
 our day, implies also the blind acquiescence of those 
 conscientious men and women who feel that they 
 must accept the decisions on right and wrong of their 
 intellectual superiors. There stands before the eyes 
 of the honest mediocrity, which in all such matters 
 has the casting vote, an irresistible array of sanction 
 of vivisection by men who are the highest authorities 
 in the new philosophic morality. But this seeming 
 strength is mere weakness, this apparently energetic 
 decision is for the most part mere apathetic acquies- 
 cence. The knowledge that vivisection is conducive 
 to progress of ideas and human welfare ; the sense of 
 the solidarity of science, of free thought with experi- 
 mentalism ; the habit of abetting anything which is 
 modern and due to a modern movement ; all this goes 
 to make up that imposing display of approbation by
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 173 
 
 which progress, freedom, generous thought are made 
 responsible for a huge act of injustice." 
 
 " Yes," interrupted Michael, "but there is also some- 
 thing lower than all this, lower and yet more 
 irresistible and natural : the social habit, the official 
 solidarity, of thinking men, which makes the historian, 
 the philologist, the political man meet the physiologist 
 on terms of familiarity, perhaps of professional 
 comradeship ; and which has for results that the 
 clean-handed man, who has been writing of Buddha, 
 or Christ, or the new basis of morality, who has been 
 moralizing back-slums or speaking against Nubian 
 slave-dealers persuades himself that there must be 
 a frightful deal of exaggeration in the stories told 
 about Professor A.'s or Dr. B.'s laboratory, that 
 Professor A., or Dr. B. is the best authority about his 
 own doings, that his own statements about the mere 
 tickling pains he inflicts, -and the gallons of ances- 
 thctics which he employs, are surely the most 
 reliable ; and finally, that vivisection must be perfectly 
 justifiable and praiseworthy, since it is practised by 
 his colleague and friend. Professor A. or Dr. B., who 
 must be an altogether exemplary man, willing to 
 sacrifice his profession and his fame on the least 
 suspicion of immorality, since he is the necessary 
 colleague and friend of himself, the noble, humane, 
 conscientious writer on elhics or reformer of abuses. 
 This may seem unjust ; but let any of us ask his 
 conscience how often he has successfully resisted the
 
 174 BALDWIN. 
 
 desire of believing in the moral cleanness of the hands 
 which he is forced to shake in comradeship, or pleased 
 to squeeze in friendship and admiration ; let us ask 
 ourselves whether one of the reasons of most acquies- 
 cence in evil has not always been, in all mankind, the 
 reluctance to perceive the foulness and injustice and 
 cruelty mixed up with the greatness of our heroes 
 and our gods. 
 
 " As to those moral anomalies, intellectual stultifi- 
 cations, self-contradictions, and fact-garblings to which 
 you alluded, Baldwin, I who am fresh from the 
 polemical literature of vivisection, could give you a 
 fine collection of them, culled from the various 
 papers on the moral bearing of vivisection by 
 notoriously most honourable men and distinguished 
 thinkers, perhaps I may add sincere philanthro- 
 pists, like Sir J. Paget, Mr. Lowe, Professor Owen, 
 Dr. Carpenter, and Professor Virchow. The 
 argument of Dr. Carpenter, that moral duties exist 
 only towards those possessing moral responsibility, 
 carries as logical conclusion that infants, idiots, and 
 madmen may freely be maltreated, not to speak of 
 their being rendered useful to mankind by under- 
 going vivisection ; the argument of Professor Virchow, 
 that a man may in all morality inflict whatever pain 
 is necessary for his purposes (for vivisection, like all 
 rational crime, restricts pain to the strictly necessary) 
 as long as he does so on creatures which do not 
 belong to some other man, but are his honestly bought
 
 OF MONO UR AND E VOL UTION. 1 7 5 
 
 chattels, brings the great German thinker into close 
 intellectual cantact with the slave-dealers and slave- 
 owners whom mankind at last pronounced unfit to 
 judge moral questions." 
 
 "Yes," said Baldwin; "and there is another 
 favourite argument, largely employed by all the 
 advocates of vivisection, which moralizes this practice 
 by claiming for it the right of being endured which is 
 still enjoyed by a number of barbarous sports and 
 practices inherited from more callous days, sports and 
 practices which it must be the strenuous wish of 
 every thinking and feeling man to see outgrown, as 
 we have outgrown many another nasty habit ; and 
 this argument, this legitimizing of a new kind of 
 cruelty by the survival of a few very old ones from 
 among the number which civilization has already 
 made obsolete, appears to me not over consistent with 
 the doctrines of elimination of abom.inations and 
 gradual cleansing of life which scientific believers have 
 accepted in exchange for the old aesthetical paradise 
 promised by Christianity. Yet another and equally 
 favourite argument consists in confronting us with all 
 the various advantages which we have reaped at the 
 expense of pain and injustice ; summoning us to 
 renounce this or that advantage inherited from the 
 past, because we cannot be quite sure whether the 
 hands, of man or of fate, which got us that advantage 
 were quite clean ; representing to us that we have 
 been moulded by a cruel and unjust nature with many
 
 176 BALDWIN. 
 
 a cruel and unjust instrument ; the logical result of 
 all ot" which is intended to be that if our forefathers 
 made their fortune by cheating customers or robbing 
 travellers, \vc ought ourselves to condone, if not to 
 practise, the same kind of trade. This is not an 
 argument, it is a theatrical effect, intended to stagger 
 the conscience. * Are you sure,' says the devil to 
 the honest woman, ' that your mother was not 
 unchaste and that you yourself are not the fruit of 
 adultery } ' And this also, this upsetting of the 
 moral judgment by appeal to the imagination, this 
 degrading of the present and the future by pointing to 
 the ignoble past, seems to me more akin to the 
 branding and chaining into eternal prostitution of the 
 woman who has once sinned, than to the principle 
 that man is for ever on the road to a greater moral 
 good, and must with every step leave the original 
 slums further behind and cast from him their befouled 
 rags. This (as it appears to me) flagrant moral 
 contradiction due to the one choice of evil, is summed 
 up, almost in a kind of allegory, by the fact that the 
 flower of moral rhetoricians, the very prince of dainty 
 comwissciirs in charity and justice, M. Ernest Renan, 
 writing — with the same hand that had written of 
 Christ ' for all those who suffered ' — the superb 
 description of the august priest of truth, Claude 
 Bernard, surrounded by the fumes of the blood of the 
 living beasts vrhom he had poisoned with curare 
 into a state ' of the most atrocious sufferings ' (to use
 
 OF HO NO UR AND E VOL UTION. 177 
 
 his own words) ' that the imagination of man can 
 conceive.'^ 
 
 " I know it well : it is in his Eloge of Bernard, 
 spoken when he replaced him in the French 
 Academy," answered Michael ; " but unless you have 
 studied the subject as I have, you can have no concep- 
 tion of the strange condescensions to ignoble moral 
 argument into which the desire of defending vivisec- 
 tion has forced men fully conscious of right and wrong, 
 nay, even experts in moral beauty. I need scarcely 
 say that, the principle once established that the 
 advancement of science and the diminution of human 
 aches is the highest moral test, it must have become 
 a positive duty to sacrifice to this end any scruples 
 not only as to infliction of pain, but also as to the 
 mutilation and disfigurement of truth ; of which any 
 one who will note the innumerable evasive answers, 
 the actual flagrant contradictions in statement, and 
 the general denial of the evils of vivisection registered 
 in the Blue-book of the Royal Commission, may 
 persuade himself; and, if he desire further persuasion, 
 obtain it by comparing the vague accounts of the 
 trumpery pains of vivisection, the mere prickings and 
 
 ' Reviic dcs deux viondcs, Sept. 1864, p. 173. It should be 
 observed that Bernard expressly says in his " Lecons de 
 Physiologic Opcratorie," p. 16S, that "curare is now employed 
 in a vast number of experiments as a means of restraining the 
 animals. There are but few observations the narrative of 
 which does not begin by notifying that they were made on a 
 curarized dog.'"' 
 
 13
 
 178 BALDWIN. 
 
 ticklings, given in the reviews by various eminent 
 physiologists and physicians to the suspicious public 
 at large, with what may be found in any advanced 
 physiological handbook or physiological periodical in 
 the way of innumerable admirably clear recipes for 
 day-long torturings. But the degradation of a wrong 
 moral choice carries with it not only horrid prostitu- 
 tions of conscience but melancholy stultifications of 
 intellect ; makes not only honourable men argue 
 according to dishonourable standards, but makes 
 intelligent men talk rubbish. When, for instance, 
 Professor Humphry has said that nothing has shaken 
 his faith in the moral sensitiveness of Englishmen so 
 much as the movement which has subjected vivisec- 
 tion to moral scrutiny ; when Professor Owen has 
 declared that a day's pigeon-shooting in one place 
 inflicts more agony than a year's physiological experi- 
 mentation all over the world ; when Dr. Wilks has 
 stated that it is clear that in the anti-vivisection 
 agitation the real motive was fear of atheism, while 
 the plea of cruelty was a mere subterfuge ; when such 
 astounding nonsense has been talked by men who 
 are trained to logical thought ; there remains possible 
 only one further degree of audacious absurdity of 
 argument, reserved oddly enough for one of the most 
 eminent scientific thinkers of the day. Professor 
 Virchow, who warned the public that if vivisection 
 should ever be prohibited, the logical sequel to 
 refusal to permit the infliction of agony on living
 
 OF HO NO UR A ND E VOL UTION. 1 79 
 
 beasts would evidently be a prohibition to dissect 
 stone-dead corpses. But there has been worse stulti- 
 fication than this ; stultification stranger and much 
 more lamentable, because on the part, not of an 
 infuriated physiologist or plausible doctor, but of a 
 man apparently defending vivisection from a mere 
 abstract desire for the diminution of human pain, a 
 man proved in other fields a most powerful and 
 original thinker, and obviously almost nervously 
 careful in weighing the rights and wrongs of either 
 side. Mr. Edmund Gurney suggests, with saint-like 
 simplicity, that the evils of vivisection may easily be 
 abolished by referring to a board of eminent physio- 
 logists and physicians the question whether this, that, 
 or the other experiment may be authorized in con- 
 sideration of the distinct medical or surgical results 
 which it promises. And he does this in the face not 
 only of the obvious fact that vivisection is an infinitely 
 varied system of experimentation by which abstract 
 truth is sought, as by every other scientific process, 
 on the principle of digging and seeing what may turn 
 up ; a system, moreover, of experiment repeated 
 hundredfold for suggestion, verification, re-verifica- 
 tion, correcting, refuting, and demonstrating, exactly 
 analogous to the hundredfold experimentation of 
 chemistry or physics ; and of the equally obvious fact 
 that by restricting their own experiments English 
 physiologists and physicians would simply be vir- 
 tuously condemning themselves to hopeless inferiority
 
 i8o BALDWIN. 
 
 to the untrammelled experimenters of the Continent, 
 a degree of self-sacrifice, little less than suicide ; but 
 in the face of the distinct assertions of the highest 
 physiological authorities, summed up by Dr. Wilks, 
 that it is utterly absurd for a Government official to ask 
 experimenters ' before he permits them to commence 
 their work, what good object they can foresee in 
 pursuing their researches,' and that ' the only answer 
 which a really scientific man could give would be — 
 knowledge.' " 
 
 The train had stopped, and Baldwin and Michael 
 had walked through the unearthly electric flare, with 
 its strange blue shadows and its apparent alterations of 
 distances, of the station. 
 
 " It seems to me, in my present mood," said 
 Michael, as they got out of the din and glare, " that 
 modern civilization has a sort of mark of the beast — 
 a something hideous and Moloch-like, even where it 
 is most obviously subservient to our comfort and 
 welfare. The angel of progress makes a sound with 
 his wings, and has a sulphurousness in his breath 
 which is oddly suggestive of hell. Vivisection some- 
 how seems to fit very neatly into it." 
 
 Baldwin laughed. 
 
 " I told you that you were growing a retrograde," he- 
 said, as they walked along the silent, shadowy streets on> 
 to the embankment. You forget that this is a moment 
 of transition. You forget that if we have new evils, we 
 have also new sensitiveness to them. In former days
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. i8i 
 
 there was no such hidcosity as a large London railway 
 station, but I question whether there was either any 
 capacity for feeling its hideousness as we do. So also as 
 to vivisection. Our great-grandfathers were compara- 
 tively free from this modern vice ; but I greatly 
 question whether, had it existed then to the same 
 extent as nowadays, there would have been among 
 our ancestors one-tenth of the moral doubt and 
 dispute and crusading zeal which it has provoked in 
 our times." 
 
 Michael did not answer for a minute, but looked 
 vaguely at the lights dotting the darkness on the 
 opposite shore, at the wide yellow reflections from the 
 the gaslights, shivered and heaving on the river ; at 
 the spectral towers of Westminster, dim in the dim 
 sky, where the watery moon went in and out among 
 the suffused, buff-tinted clouds. 
 
 " Do you think," he said, " that any man or woman 
 whose heart is really in the progress of modern ideas 
 will ever allow that physiology should be fettered, 
 that the discovery of facts and laws should be 
 retarded, that one science should be separated by a 
 moral barrier from the full data which it covets ? 
 Why, to these people such a decision would seem 
 positively sinful, impious, frightful." 
 
 " It would not be so frightful if we looked well at 
 the matter, nor by any means so unique. Physiology 
 would not really be placed in a position so wholly 
 different from that of the other sciences as one is at
 
 1 82 BALDWIN. 
 
 first apt to think. For in reality there are few, if any, 
 sciences, which are permitted to obtain directly all 
 the materials they require : barriers exist for them, 
 sometimes almost enclose them — barriers across which 
 only the strong muscle of analogical argument can 
 raise itself to peer, the strong wing of imaginative 
 reason can fly — barriers, which we are apt to forget, 
 of place and time, hopeless barriers of chaos and 
 vacuity and obliteration which separate the historian, 
 the geologist, the astronomer, the physicist, the socio- 
 logist, from the facts which he covets. Moreover, this 
 very science of physiology, in its higher levels of 
 human biology, of mental physiology, has between it 
 and its facts a wall as yet solid and unbroken, the 
 wall of public opinion, of long habit, perhaps almost 
 prejudice, which will not let the investigator experi- 
 ment on the living nerves and brain, the living 
 imagination and passions of a human victim. These 
 Avails exist for all science ; their presence is borne 
 with patience, and mankind does not fret at the long 
 and roundabout ways by which knowledge must 
 wearily proceed. A bit more wall or a bit less, a 
 little more patience and a little more fortitude, a little 
 more ingenuity in hewing out the difficult paths of 
 thought where we cannot follow the broad highway 
 of experiment : this is what would be meant to men 
 of science by the prohibition of vivisection. A little 
 more manly endurance of physical and mental pain ; 
 a little more wise recognition that w^ith the pain
 
 OF HONOUR AND EVOLUTION. 1S3 
 
 mankind has equitably drawn a possible and probable 
 lot of pleasure ; a little more truthful perception that 
 the pains which we suffer are largely due to the folly 
 and vice of ourselves and our fathers ; a little more 
 grateful perception that the joys of mind, and eye 
 and ear and heart, are multifold with which man can 
 compensate himself for the sufferings of the body — 
 a certain amount of gained moral vigour: this is what 
 the prohibition of vivisection would mean to mankind 
 at large." 
 
 " You are not a real believer in evolutional morality, 
 Baldwin," said Michael. 
 
 " Pardon me, I think that way of seeing the 
 question is due precisely to my believing in evolutional 
 morality more completely than other folk. Let us 
 see. Here we have on either side a loss and a gain. 
 Which shall we choose ? To me it seems that to the 
 man who not merely superficially knows and repeats, 
 but whose thoughts and feelings are saturated with 
 our new creed of the perpetual development of the 
 nobler by perpetual elimination of the baser motives 
 of our nature, it will be clear, sooner or later, that the 
 improvement of bodily condition, the advancement of 
 our knowledge, must be a retrogressive step if bought 
 at the expense of the infliction of manifold and daily 
 increasing tortures on creatures who will participate 
 in no way thereby ; on creatures who have not our 
 innumerable consoling pleasures of thought, sentiment, 
 hope, and aesthetic perception ; who, if they suffer,
 
 i84 BALDWIN. 
 
 lose all and everything they possess, nay rather, are 
 basely cheated and robbed like some poor serf of their 
 miserable birthright of painless existence by us, their 
 lords, rich with a hundred inherited riches, rich with a 
 hundred riches within our grasp. And similarly, it 
 seems to me, that to every man imbued with the 
 noble religion of choice and improvement, it should 
 appear that the patient foregoing of knowledge thus 
 to be bought, the manly endurance of suffering at 
 such a price to be diminished, must be a great step in 
 the great journey of human bettering ; must be, both 
 in the large act of preference of justice to injustice, 
 and in the minor attendant acts of cherished forbear- 
 ance from the coveted, of fortitude in pain, of 
 thoughtful weighing of good and evil, of candid 
 listening to our conscience, one of those choices of 
 the higher rather than the lower which have made us 
 what we are, which shall make us what we should be."
 
 ON NOVELS.
 
 ON NOVELS. 
 
 " After all," said Mrs. Blake, the eminent novelist, 
 " with the exception of very few touches, there is 
 nothing human in 'Wuthering Heights;' those people 
 with their sullenness and coldness and frenzy are 
 none of them real men and women, such as Char- 
 lotte Bronte would have given us had she written the 
 book instead of her sister. You can't deny that, 
 Monsieur Marcel." 
 
 They had clambered through the steep, bleak 
 Yorkshire village, which trickles, a water-course of 
 rough black masonry, down the green hillside ; past 
 the inn where Branwell Bronte drank and raved ; 
 through the church}'ard, a grim, grassless garden of 
 blackened tombstones ; under the windows of the 
 Brontes' parsonage ; and still higher, up the slippery 
 slope of coarse, sere grass, on to the undulating flat- 
 ness of Haworth Moor. 
 
 Andre Marcel, the subtle young French critic and 
 novelist, who had come to Yorkshire in order to 
 study the Brontes, listened to Mrs. Blake with dis-
 
 i8S BALDWIN. 
 
 appointed pensiveness. Knowing more of English 
 things than most Frenchmen, and with a natural 
 preference for the exotic of all kinds, it was part of 
 his mission to make known to the world that England 
 really was what, in the days of Goethe, Italy had 
 falsely been supposed to be : a sort of exceptional 
 and esoteric country, whence aesthetic and critical 
 natures might get weird and exquisite moral impres- 
 sions as they got orchids and porcelain and lacquer 
 from Japan. Such being the case, this clever woman 
 with her clever novels, both so narrow and so normal, 
 so full at once of scepticism and of respect for prece- 
 dent, gave him as much of a sense of annoyance and 
 hostility almost as his placid, pessimistic, purely 
 artistic and speculative nature could experience. 
 
 They walked on for some minutes in silence. 
 Marcel and Mrs. Blake behind, Baldwin and his 
 cousin Dorothy in front, trampling the rough carpet 
 of lilac and black heather matted with long withered 
 grass and speckled with the bright scarlet of sere 
 bilberry leaves ; the valleys gradually closing up all 
 around ; the green pasture slopes, ribbed with black 
 stone fences, gradually meeting one another, uniting, 
 disappearing, absorbed in the undulating sea of 
 moorland, spreading solitary, face to face with the 
 low, purplish-grey sky. As Mrs Blake spoke, 
 Dorothy turned round eagerly. 
 
 " They are not real men and women, the people in 
 * Wuthering Heights,' " she said ; " but they are real
 
 ON NOVELS. 189 
 
 all the same. Don't you feel that they are real, 
 Monsieur Marcel, when you look about you now ? 
 Don't you feel that they are these moors, and the 
 sunshhie, the clouds, the winds, the storms upon 
 them ? " 
 
 "All the moors and all the storms upon them put 
 together haven't the importance for a human being 
 that has one well-understood real character of Char- 
 lotte Bronte's or George Eliot's," answered Mrs. Blake, 
 coldly. 
 
 " I quite understand your point of view," said 
 Marcel ; " but, for all my admiration for Charlotte 
 Bronte and George Eliot, I can't agree that either of 
 them, or any writer of their school, can give us any- 
 thing of the value of ' Wuthering Heights.' After 
 all, what do we gain by their immense powers of 
 psychological analysis and reconstruction ? Merely a 
 partial insight into a certain number of characters — 
 characters which, whatever the genius of the novelist, 
 can be only approximations to reality, because they 
 are the result of the study of something of which we 
 can never completely understand the nature — because 
 it is outside ourselves." 
 
 Mrs. Blake, who could understand of Marcel's 
 theories only the fact they were extremely distasteful 
 to herself, began to laugh. 
 
 " If we are never to understand anything except 
 ourselves, I think we had better leave off novel-writing 
 at once, Monsieur Marcel," she said.
 
 iQo BALDWIN. 
 
 " I don't think that would suit ]\Iarcel at all," put in 
 Baldwin, "and he does not by any means condemn 
 the ordinary novel for being what he considers a 
 mere approximation to reality. All he says is, that 
 he prefers books where there is no attempt at com- 
 pletely solving what he considers the inscrutable — 
 namely, the character of every one not oneself. He 
 perceives, more than most people, perhaps even too 
 much, the complexity of human nature ; and what to 
 you or me is a complete moral portrait is to him a 
 mere partial representation. I personally think that 
 it is all the better for us if we are unable to see every 
 little moral nerve and muscle in our neighbours : 
 there are in all of us remains of machinery which 
 belongs to something baser, and is little or not at all 
 put in movement. If we could see all the incipient 
 thoughts and incipient feelings of even the best 
 people, we should probably form a much less really 
 just estimate of them than we do at present. It is 
 not morally correct, any more than it is artistically 
 correct, to see the microscopic and the hidden." 
 
 " I don't know about that," said Marcel. " But I 
 know that, by the fatality of heredity on one hand, a 
 human being contains within himself a number of 
 different tendencies, all moulded, it is true, into one 
 character, but existing none the less each in its 
 special nature, ready to respond to its special 
 stimulus from without ; on the other hand, by the 
 fatality of environment every human being is modi-
 
 ON NOVELS. 191 
 
 fied in many different ways : he is rammed into a 
 place until he fits it, and absorbs fragments of all the 
 other personalities with whom he is crushed together. 
 So that there must be, in all of us, even in the most 
 homogeneous, tendencies which, from not having met 
 their appropriate stimulus, may be lying unsuspected 
 at the very bottom of our nature, far below the level 
 of consciousness ; but which, on the approach of the 
 specific stimulus, or merely on the occasion of any 
 violent shaking of the whole nature, will suddenly 
 come to the surface. Now it seems to me that such 
 complications of main and minor characteristics, such 
 complications inherited or induced, of half-perceived 
 or dormant qualities, can be disentangled, made 
 intelligible, when the writer is speaking of himself, 
 may be shown even unconsciously to himself ; but 
 they cannot be got at in a third person. Therefore 
 I give infinitely less value to one of your writers with 
 universal intuition and sympathy, writing of approxi- 
 mate realities neither himself nor yourself, than to 
 one who like Emily Brontii simply shows us men, 
 women, nature, passion, life, all seen through the 
 medium of her own personality. It is this sense of 
 coming really and absolutely in contact with a real 
 soul which gives such a poignancy to a certain very 
 small class of books — books, to my mind the most 
 precious we have — such as the Memoirs of St. 
 Augustine, the 'Vita Nuova,' the 'Confessions' of 
 Jean- Jacques Rousseau; and 'Wuthering Heights,
 
 192 BALDWIN. 
 
 although an infinitely more imaginative book, seems 
 to me worthy to be ranked with these." 
 
 Dorothy Orme had been walking silently in front, 
 her hat slung on her arm, her light curly hair flying 
 in the wind, filling her arms with pale lilac heather, 
 and seeming to the Frenchman a kind of outcome of 
 the moor, an illustration of " Wuthering Heights ; " 
 something akin to Emily Bronte's heroine, nay, rather 
 to Emily Bronte herself, as she existed for his imagi- 
 nation. She turned round as he spoke, and said, 
 with a curious mixture of surprise, pain, and re- 
 proach : 
 
 " I am glad you put ' Wuthering Heights ' with the 
 * Vita Nuova ; ' but how can you mention in the same 
 breath those disgusting, degraded ' Confessions ' of 
 Rousseau ? I once tried to read them, and they 
 made me feel sick." 
 
 Marcel looked at her with grave admiration. 
 "Mademoiselle," he said, "the 'Confessions ' are not 
 a book for you ; a diseased soul like Jean-Jacques 
 ought never to be obtruded upon your notice : you 
 ought to read only things like ' Wuthering Heights ' 
 and the ' Vita Nuova,' just as you ought to walk on 
 these moors, but not among the squalor and confusion 
 of a big town ; you fit into the one, and not into 
 the other. But I put the * Confessions ' by the side 
 of these other books because they belong, in their 
 deeply troubling way, as the ' Vita Nuova ' is in its 
 perfect serenity, to that very small class of scarcely
 
 ON NOVELS. 193 
 
 self-conscious revelations of personality which may 
 teach us what the novel should aim at." 
 
 Dorothy did not answer. This young man, with 
 his keen appreciation, his delicate enthusiasm alike 
 for purity and impurity, puzzled her and made her 
 unhappy. She felt sure he was good himself, yet his 
 notions were so very strange. 
 
 " At that rate," put in Mrs. Blake, " there is an end 
 of the novel as a work of art, if we are to make it 
 into a study of the mere psychology of a single 
 individual. As it is, the perpetual preoccupation of 
 psychology has pretty well got rid of all real interest 
 of plot and incident, and is rapidly getting rid of all 
 humour ; a comic character like those of Dickens, and 
 even those of Thackeray, will soon be out of the 
 question. Did you read an extraordinarily suggestive 
 article by Mr. Hillebrand, which appeared in The 
 Contemporary last year, contrasting the modern 
 novel with the old one ? It was very one-sided, of 
 course ; but in many things wonderfully correct. I 
 felt that he must condemn my novels along with the 
 others, but I was pleased ; it was as if Fielding's 
 ghost had told us his opinion of modern novelists." 
 
 Dorothy Orme was not addicted to literary dis- 
 cussions ; but the recollection of this article seemed 
 suddenly to transform her. 
 
 " I read it," she cried, eagerly ; " I hated it. He 
 was very angry with George Eliot because she had 
 made the story of Dorothea and Casaubon tragic, 
 
 14
 
 194 BALDWIN. 
 
 instead of making it farcical, as I suppose Fielding or 
 some such creature would have done ; he would have 
 liked some disgusting, ridiculous comedy of an old 
 pedant, a sort of Don Bartolo, and a girl whom he 
 bored and who made fun of him. Did he never ask 
 himself whether the reality of a situation such as that 
 of Dorothea and Casaubon would be more comic or 
 tragic, whether we should be seeing things more as 
 they really are, whether we should be entering more 
 into the feelings of the people themselves, whether 
 we should be placing ourselves more in the position 
 to help, to diminish unhappiness, by laughing at 
 Dorothea and Casaubon, or by crying at their story ? 
 I am sure we are far too apt to laugh at things already. 
 I dare say that the sense of the ridiculous is a very 
 useful thing ; I dare say it helps to make the world 
 more supportable ; but not when the sense of the 
 ridiculous makes us see things as they are not, or as 
 they are merely superficially ; when it makes us feel 
 pleased and passive where wc ought to be pained and 
 active. People have a way of talking about the 
 tendency which the wish for nobility and beauty has 
 to make us see things in the wrong light ; but there 
 is much more danger, surely, of that sort of falsifi- 
 cation from our desire for the comic. There's Don 
 Quixote — we have laughed at him quite long enough. 
 I wish some one would write a book now about the 
 reverse of Don Quixote, about a good and kind and 
 helpful man who is made unjust, unkind, and useless
 
 ON NOVELS. 195 
 
 by his habit of seeking for the ridiculous, by his habit 
 of seeing windmills where there are real giants, and' 
 coarse peasants where there are really princesses,- 
 The history of that man, absurd though it may seem- 
 as a whole, would yet be, in its part, the history of 
 some little bit of the life of all of us ; a bit which 
 might be amusing enough to novelists of the old 
 school, but is sad enough, I think, in all conscience, 
 when we look back upon it in ourselves." 
 
 Marcel looked up. To him the weirdest and most 
 exotic flowers of this moral and intellectual Japan 
 called England, were its young women, wonderful it 
 seemed to him in delicacy, in brilliancy of colour, in 
 bizarre outline, in imaginatively stimulating and yet 
 reviving perfume ; and ever since he had met her a. 
 few days ago, this cousin of his old friend Baldwin, 
 this Dorothy Orme, painter, sculptor, philanthropist, 
 and mystic, with the sea-blue eyes, and the light hair 
 that seemed always caught up by the breeze, this 
 creature, at once so mature and so immature, so full 
 of enthusiasm, so unconscious of passion, so boldl\' 
 conv'ersant with evil in the abstract, so pathetically 
 ignorant of evil in the concrete, had appeared to him 
 as almost the strangest of all these strange English 
 girls who fascinated him as a poet and a critic. 
 
 Baldwin had affectionately taken his cousin's arm 
 and passed it through his own. 
 
 " You are quite right, Dorothy," he said ; " you 
 have put into words what I myself felt while reading
 
 195 BALDWIN. 
 
 that paper ; but then, you know, unfortunately, as 
 one grows older — and I am a good bit older than you 
 — one is apt to let oneself drift into looking at people 
 only from the comic side ; it is so much easier, and 
 saves one such a deal of useless pain and rage. But 
 you are quite right all the same. A substitution of 
 psychological sympathetic interest for the comic inte- 
 rest of former days has certainly taken place in the 
 novel, and is taking place more and more every day. 
 But I don't think, with Mrs. Blake and Hillebrand, 
 that this is at all a matter for lamentation. Few 
 things strike me more in old fiction, especially if we 
 go back a century, than the curious callousness which 
 many of its incidents reveal ; a callousness not merely 
 to many impressions of disgust and shame, which to 
 the modern mind would counterbalance the pleasure 
 of mere droll contrast, as is so constantly the case in 
 Rabelais (where we can't laugh because we have to 
 hold our nose), but also to impressions of actual pain 
 at the pain, moral or physical, endured by the person 
 at whom we are laughing ; of indignation at the base- 
 ness or cruelty of those through whose agency that 
 comic person is made comic. After all, a great deal 
 of what people are pleased to call the healthy sense 
 of fun of former days is merely the sense of fun of 
 the boy who pours a glass of water down his com- 
 panion's back, of the young brutes who worry an 
 honest woman in the street, of the ragamuffins who 
 tie a saucepan to a cat's tail and hunt it along. Some-
 
 ON NOVELS. i()7 
 
 times it is even more deliberately wanton and cruel ; 
 it is the spiritual equivalent of the cock-fighting and 
 bull-baiting, of the amusement at what Michelet 
 reckons among the three great jokes of the Middle 
 Ages : ' La grimace du pendu.' It is possible that we 
 may at some future period be in danger of becoming 
 too serious, too sympathizing, of losing our animal 
 spirits ; but I don't see any such danger in the pre- 
 sent. And I do sec that it is a gain, not only in our 
 souls, but in the actual influence on the amount of 
 good and bad in the world, that certain things which 
 amused our ancestors, the giimace of the dupe, of the 
 betrayed husband, of the kicked servant, should no 
 longer amuse, but merely make us sorry or indignant. 
 Let us laugh by all means, but not when others are 
 crying." 
 
 " I perfectly agree with you," said Marcel. " What 
 people call the comic is a lower form of art ; legiti- 
 mate, but only in so far as it does not interfere with 
 the higher. Complete beauty in sculpture, in paint- 
 ing, and in music has never been compatible with the 
 laughable, and I think it will prove to be the same in 
 fiction. To begin with, all great art carries with it a 
 poignancy which is incompatible with the desire to 
 laugh." 
 
 " The French have strangely changed," exclaimed 
 Mrs. Blake. " It is difficult to imagine that you 
 belong to the country which produced Rabelais and 
 Moliere and Voltaire, Monsieur IMarcel."
 
 198 BALDWIN. 
 
 Marcel sighed. " I know it is," he said ; '" it is sad, 
 perhaps, as it is always sad to see that one is no 
 longer a child, but a man. Our childhood, at least as 
 artists, is over; we have lost our laughter, our pleasure 
 in romping. But we can understand and feel ; we 
 are men." 
 
 Mrs. Blake looked shrewdly at the young man. 
 " It seems to me that they were men also, those of 
 the past," she answered. " They laughed ; but they 
 also suffered, and hoped, and hated ; and the laugh 
 seemed to fit in with the rest. Your modern French 
 literature seems to me no longer French : it all some- 
 how comes out of Rousseau. Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, 
 Baudelaire, all that comes out of those ' Confessions ' 
 which you choose to place by the side of the ' Vita 
 Nuova.' And as Rousseau, who certainly was not a 
 true Frenchman, has never seemed to be a genuine 
 man either, but a sickly, morbid piece of half- 
 developed precocity ; so I cannot admit that the 
 present phase of French literature represents man- 
 hood as opposed to the French literature of the past. 
 Had there remained in France more of the old power 
 of laughter, we should not have had your Zolas and 
 Baudelaires, or rather the genius of your Zolas and 
 Baudelaires would have been healthy and useful. 
 Don't wish to lose that laugh of yours, Monsieur 
 Marcel ; our moral health here, in England, where 
 evil is brutish, depends upon seriousness ; yours, in 
 France, where evil immediately becomes intellectual
 
 ON NOVELS. 199 
 
 depends upon laughter. I am an old woman, so you 
 must not be offended with me." 
 
 " There is a deal of truth in what you say," said 
 Baldwin. " The time will come, I am sure, when 
 Frenchmen will look back upon the literature of the 
 last twenty-five years, not as a product of maturity, 
 but rather as a symptom of a particular sort of 
 humourless morbidness which is one of the unbeau- 
 tiful phases of growth." 
 
 Marcel shook his head. " You are merch- falling 
 foul of a new form of art because it does not answer 
 to the critical standf.rds which you have deduced from 
 an old one. The art which deals with human 
 emotions real and really appreciated is a growth of 
 our century, and mainly a growth of my country ; 
 and you are criticizing it from the standpoint of a 
 quite different art, which made use of only an ap- 
 proximation to psychological reality, for the sake of a 
 tragic or comic effect; it is as if you criticized a land- 
 scape by Corot, where beauty is extracted out of the 
 quality of the light, of the soil, and the dampness or 
 dryness of the air, without a thought of the human 
 figure, because it is not like the little bits of conven- 
 tional landscape which Titian used to complete the 
 scheme of his groups of Saints or Nymphs. Shake- 
 speare and Cervantes are legitimate ; but wc moderns 
 are legitimate also : they sought for artistic effects 
 new in their day; we seek for artistic effects new in 
 ours."
 
 200 BALDWIN, 
 
 Baldwin was twisting a long brown rush between 
 his fingers meditatively, looking straight before him 
 upon the endless, grey and purple, thundercloud- 
 coloured undulations of heather. 
 
 " I think," he said, " that you imagine you are 
 seeking new artistic effects ; but I think, also, that 
 you are mistaken, simply because I feel daily more 
 persuaded that artistic aims are only partially com- 
 patible with psychological aims, and that the more 
 the novel becomes psychological the less also will 
 it become artistic. The aim of art, of painting, 
 sculpture, music, and architecture, is, if we put aside 
 the mere display of technical skill, which, as a rule, 
 appeals only to the technically initiated — the aim of 
 art is the production of something which shall give 
 us the particular kind of pleasure associated with 
 the word beautiful, pleasure given to our nssthetic 
 faculties, which have a mode of action and neces- 
 sities as special and as impossible to translate into 
 the mode of action and necessities of our logical 
 and animal faculties as it is impossible to translate 
 the impressions of sight into the impressions of 
 hearing. All art addresses itself, however uncon- 
 sciously and however much hampered by extra- 
 neous necessities, to a desire belonging to these 
 aesthetic faculties, to a desire for the beautiful. 
 What I may call the freely inventive arts, music 
 and architecture, do this most obviously. We are 
 apt to think that painting does so less, because
 
 ON NOVELS. 20I 
 
 painting- is at present seeking for beauty in a region 
 — the region of effects of mere atmosphere, Hght 
 and colour independent of linear form — where it 
 was not sought in the past, and where we are there- 
 fore not prepared to acknowledge it at present, like 
 a certain eminent painter of the old school, who 
 complained to me that Corot had no sense of 
 beaut}', because Corot painted grey drizzly skies 
 instead of the blue ones in which beauty used ex- 
 clusively to reside in former days. But painting, 
 even in the branch which happens to address a non- 
 artistic desire, even in portraiture, is intensely pre- 
 occupied with arrangements, the sole aim of which 
 is that specilic quality which we call beauty. If a 
 painter select this or that arrangement of light 
 wherein to place what in itself may be ugly ; if he 
 say ' such a dress, such an attitude, is better ; ' if he 
 rack his brains to make his sitter the centre of a 
 scheme of colour ; he does this, however, uncon- 
 sciously, under the impulse of the artistic desire for 
 beauty. We outsiders are apt to overlook, when we 
 see a painter painting some very simple scene or 
 person, neither of which comes up to our idea of 
 beauty, the special sort of beauty which he pursues 
 when, for instance, he changes the tint of the sky 
 in order to give a greater value to the tint of the 
 rocks or so forth. We do not perceive the thought 
 and labour expended, for instance, in arranging the 
 hands of several figures, or the fingers of the hands
 
 202 BALDWIN. 
 
 of a single one ; still less do we reflect that if the 
 painter were aiming at mere psychological character 
 or truthfulness to nature, he would have placed those 
 hands or those fingers no matter how. Hence, I 
 say, all real art addresses itself mainly, however un- 
 consciously, to a desire for beauty. Now, to postulate 
 such a predominant desire for the beautiful in a 
 literary work dealing exclusively with human emotion 
 and action seems to me utterly absurd. First, 
 because mere beauty, the thing which gives us the 
 specific aesthetic impression, exists, I believe, in its 
 absolute reality only in the domain of the senses 
 and of the sensuous impressions recalled and recon- 
 structed by the intellect ; and because I believe that 
 it is merely by analogy, and because we perceive 
 that such a pleasure is neither unreasoning and 
 animal nor intellectual and utilitarian, that we appl}' 
 to pleasing moral impressions the adjective beautiful. 
 The beautiful, therefore, according to my view, can 
 exist in literature only inasmuch as literature re- 
 produces and reconstructs certain sensuous impres- 
 sions which we name beautiful ; or as it deals with 
 such moral effects as give us an unmixed, direct 
 unutilitarian pleasure analogous to that produced 
 by these sensuous impressions of beauty. No\\', 
 human character, emotion, and action not mercl)- 
 present us with a host of impressions which, applying 
 an aesthetical word to moral phenomena, are more 
 or less ugly ; but, by the very fatality of things,
 
 ON NOVELS. 203 
 
 nearly always require for the production of what wc 
 call moral beauty a certain proportion of moral 
 ugliness to make it visible. It is not so in art, A 
 dark background, necessary to throw a figure into 
 full light, is as much part of the beautiful whole as 
 the figure in the light ; whereas moral beauty — 
 namely, virtue — can scarcely be conceived as ex- 
 isting, except in a passive and almost invisible 
 condition, unless it be brought out by struggle with 
 vice ; so that we can't get rid of ugliness in this 
 department. On the other hand, while the desire 
 for beauty can never be paramount in a work deal- 
 ing with human character and emotion, at least in 
 anything like the sense in which it is paramount in 
 a work dealing with lines, colours, or sounds ; there 
 are connected with this work, dealing with human 
 character and emotion, desires special to itself, in- 
 dependent of, and usually hostile to, the desire of 
 beauty — such desires as those for psychological truth 
 and for dramatic excitement. You may say that 
 these are themselves, inasmuch as they are desires 
 without any proximate practical object, artistic ; and 
 that, in this sense, every work that caters for them 
 is subject to artistic necessities. So far you may call 
 them artistic, if you like ; but then we must call 
 artistic also every other non-practical desire of our 
 nature: the desire which is gratified by a piece of 
 scientific information, divested of all practical value, 
 will also be artistic, and the man who presents an
 
 204 BALD WIN, 
 
 abstract logical argument in the best order, so that 
 the unimportant be always subordinate to the im- 
 portant, will have to be called an artist. The 
 satisfaction we have in following the workings of a 
 character, v/hen these workings do not awaken 
 sympathy or aversion, is as purely scientific as the 
 satisfaction in following a mathematical demonstra- 
 tion or a physiological experiment ; and when these 
 workings of character do awaken sympathy or aver- 
 sion, this sympathy or aversion is a moral emotion, 
 to which we can apply the sesthetical terms 'beautiful^ 
 and 'ugly' only by a metaphor, only in the same way 
 that we apply adjectives of temperature to character, 
 or adjectives belonging to music to qualities of paint- 
 ing. The beautiful, as such, has a far smaller share 
 in the poem, novel, or the drama than in painting, 
 sculpture, or music ; and, what is more, the ugly has 
 an immeasurably larger one, both in the actual sense 
 of physical ugliness and in the metaphorical sense 
 of moral deformity. I wonder how much of the 
 desire which makes a painter seek for a peculiar 
 scheme of colour, or a peculiar arrangement of hands, 
 enters into the production of such characters as 
 Regan and Goneril and Cousine Bette and Emma 
 Bovary ; into the production of the Pension Vauquer 
 'dining-room and the Dissenting chapel in Browning's 
 ' Christmas Eve and Easter Day ' ? To compare a 
 man who works with such materials, who, every now 
 and then at least, carefully elaborates descriptions of
 
 ON NOVELS. 205 
 
 hideous places and odious people, with an artist like 
 Corot, seeking for absolute loveliness in those less 
 showy effects which previous painters have neglected, 
 is simply an absurdity. The arts which deal with 
 man and his passions, and especially the novel, which 
 does so far more exclusively and completely than 
 poetry or the drama, are, compared with painting, or 
 sculpture, or architecture, or music, only half-arts. 
 They can scarcely attain unmixed, absolute beauty ; 
 and they are perpetually obliged to deal with un- 
 mixed, absolute ugliness." 
 
 There was a moment's silence. 
 
 " I can't make out our friend Baldwin," said Mrs. 
 Blake ; " he is too strangely compounded of a 
 scientific thinker, a moralist, and an jesthete ; and 
 each of the three component parts is always starting 
 up when you expect one of the others. Yesterday 
 he was descanting on the sublime superiority of 
 literature over art ; now he suddenly tells us that, 
 compared wuth art, literature is an ugly hybrid." 
 
 Dorothy Orme had been listening attentively, and 
 her face wore an expression of vague pain and 
 perplexity. 
 
 " I can't understand," she said. " What you say 
 seems dreadfully true ; it is what I have often 
 vaguely felt, and what has made me wretched.* 
 Human nature does not seem to give one that com- 
 plete, perfect satisfaction which we get from physical 
 beauty ; it is always mixed up, or in conflict with,
 
 2o6 BALDWIN. 
 
 something that gives pain. And yet one feels, one 
 knows, that it is something much higher and nobler 
 than mere combinations of lines, or sounds, or 
 colours. Oh, why should art that deals with these 
 things be the only real, the only thoroughly perfect 
 art ? Why should art that deals with human beings 
 be a mistake? Don't you feel that there is some- 
 thing very wrong and very humiliating in such an 
 admission ? — in the admission that an artist is less 
 well employed in showing us real men and women 
 than in showing us a certain amount of heather and 
 cloud and rock like that ? " 
 
 And Dorothy pointed to the moor which spread, 
 with immediately beneath them a sudden dip, a deep 
 pool of rough, spray-like, blackish-purple heather 
 round half-buried fragments of black rock, for what 
 might be yards or miles or scores of miles ; not a 
 house, not a tree, not a track, nothing but the tufts 
 of black and lilac heather and wind-bent rushes 
 being there by which to measure the chain of moors : 
 a sort of second sky, folds and folds and rolls and 
 rolls of grey and purple and black-splashed cloud, 
 swelling out and going in, beneath the folds and 
 folds and rolls and rolls of the real sky, black- 
 splashed, purple and grey, into which the moorland 
 melted, with scarcely a line of division, on the low 
 horizon. 
 
 " I make no such admission, my dear Dorothy," 
 answered Baldwin. " Nay, I think that the artist
 
 Oi\ NOVE/.S. 207 
 
 who shows us real men and women in their emotion 
 and action is a far more important person than the 
 artist who shows us trees and skies, and clouds and 
 rocks ; although the one may always give us beaut}', 
 and the other ma}- often give us ugliness. I was 
 saying just now that the art dealing with human 
 character and emotion is only half an art, that it 
 cannot fulfil the complete c-esthetic purpose of the 
 other arts, and cannot be judged entirely by their 
 standard ; but while fiction — let us sa}' at once, the 
 novel — falls short of absolute achievement on one 
 side, it is able to achieve much more, something 
 quite unknown to the rest of the arts, on the other ; 
 and while it evades some of the laws of the merel}- 
 cesthetical, it becomes liable to another set of neces- 
 sities, the necessities of ethics. The novel has less 
 value in art, but more importance in life. Let mc 
 explain m}^ idea. We have seen that there enter 
 into the novel a proportion of interests which are not 
 artistic, interests which are emotional and scientific ; 
 desire for the excitement of sympathy and aversion, 
 and desire for the comprehension of psychological 
 problems. Now one of the main differences between 
 these emotional and scientific [interests and the 
 merely sesthetic ones is, I think, that the experience 
 accumulated, the sensitiveness increased, by aesthetic 
 stimulation serves merely (except we go hunting for 
 most remote consequences) to fit us for the reception 
 of more aesthetic experiences, for the putting out of
 
 2oS BALDWIN. 
 
 more aesthetic sensitiveness ; familiarity with beauty- 
 training us only for further familiarity with beauty. 
 Whereas, on the contrary, our emotional and scientific 
 experiences obtained from art, however distant all 
 practical object may have been while obtaining 
 them, mingle with other emotional and scientific 
 experiences obtained, w-ith no desire of pleasure, in 
 the course of events ; and thus become part of our 
 viaticmii for life. Emotional and scientific art, or 
 rather emotional and scientific play (for I don't see 
 why the word art should always be used when we 
 do a thing merely to gratify our higher faculties with- 
 out practical purposes), trains us to feel and com- 
 prehend — that is to say, to live. It trains us well 
 or ill ; and, the thing done as mere play becoming 
 thus connected with practical matters, it is evident 
 that it must submit to the exigencies of practical 
 matters. From this passive acquiescence in the 
 interests of our lives to an active influence therein 
 is but one step ; for the mere play desires receive a 
 strange additional strength from the half-conscious 
 sense that the play has practical results : it is the 
 difference, in point of excitement, between gambling 
 with markers and gambling v/ith money. There is 
 a kind of literature, both in verse and in prose, in 
 which the human figure is but a mere accessory — a 
 doll on which to arrange beautiful brocades and 
 ornaments. But wherever the human figure becomes 
 the central interest, there literature begins to diverge
 
 ON NOVELS. 209 
 
 from art ; other interests, foreign to those of art, 
 conflicting with the desire for beauty, arise ; and 
 these interests, psychological and sympathetic, in 
 mankind, create new powers and necessities. Hence, 
 I say, that although the novel, for instance, is not 
 as artistically valuable as painting, or sculpture, or 
 music, it is practically more important and more 
 noble." 
 
 " It is extraordinary," mused Marcel, " how aesthe- 
 tical questions invariably end in ethical ones when 
 treated by English people ; and yet in practice you 
 have given the world as great an artistic literature 
 as any other nation, perhaps even greater." 
 
 " I think," answered Mrs. Blake, who was always 
 sceptical even when she assented, and who repre- 
 sented that portion of reasoning mankind which 
 carries a belief in spontaneous action to the length 
 of disbelief in all action at all — " I think that, like 
 most speculative thinkers, our friend Baldwin always 
 exaggerates the practical result of everything." 
 
 They had turned, after a last look at the grey and 
 purple and blackish undulations of the moors, and 
 were slowly walking back over the matted sere grass 
 and the stiff short heather in the direction of 
 Haworth ; the apparently continuous table-land 
 beginning to divide once more, the tops of the 
 green pasture-slopes to reappear, the valleys sepa- 
 rating hill from hill to become apparent ; and a 
 greyness, different from the greyness of the sky, to 
 
 15
 
 2IO BALDWIN. 
 
 tell, oil one side, of the neighbourhood down below 
 of grimy, smoky manufacturing towns and villages, 
 from which, in one's fancy, these wild, uncultivated, 
 uninhabited hill-top solitudes seemed separated by 
 hundreds of miles. 
 
 " I don't think I exaggerate the practical effects in 
 this case," answered Baldwin. " When we think of 
 the difference in what I must call secular, as dis- 
 tinguished from religious, inner life, between ourselves 
 and our ancestors of two or three centuries, nay, of 
 only one century, ago, the question must come to us : 
 Whence this difference ? Social differences, due to 
 political and economical ones, will explain a great 
 deal ; but they will not explain all. Much is a 
 question of mere development. Nothing external 
 has altered, only time has passed. Now what has 
 developed in us such a number and variety of moral 
 notes which did not exist in the gamut of our fathers ? 
 What has enabled us to follow consonances and dis- 
 sonances for which their moral ear was still too 
 coarse ? Development } Doubtless ; just as develop- 
 ment has enabled us to execute, nay, to hear, music 
 which would have escaped the comprehension of the 
 men of former days. But what is development ? A 
 mere word, a mere shibboleth, unless we attach to it 
 the conception of a succession of acts which have 
 constituted or produced the change. Now, what, in a 
 case such as this, is that succession of acts ? We 
 have little by little become conscious of new harmonies
 
 ON NOVELS. 211 
 
 and dissonances, have felt new feelings. But whence 
 came those new harmonies and dissonances, those 
 new feelings? Out of their predecessors : the power 
 of to-day's perception arising out of the fact of yes-- 
 terday's. But what are such perceptions ; and would 
 mere real life suffice to give them ? I doubt it. In 
 real life there would be mere dumb, inarticulate, un- 
 conscious feeling, at least for the immense majority 
 of humanity, if certain specially gifted individuals did 
 not pick out, isolate, those feelings of real life, show 
 them to us in an ideal condition where they have a 
 merely intellectual value, where we could assimilate 
 them into our conscious ideas. This is done by the 
 moralist, by the preacher, by the poet, by the 
 dramatist ; people who have taught mankind to see 
 the broad channels along which its feelings move, who 
 have dug those channels. But in all those things, 
 those finer details of feeling which separate us from 
 the people of the time of Elizabeth, nay, from the 
 people of the time of Fielding, who have been those 
 that have discovered, made familiar, placed within the 
 reach of the immense majority, subtleties of feeling 
 barely known to the minority some hundred years 
 before ? The novelists, I think. They have, by 
 playing upon our emotions, immensely increased the 
 sensitiveness, the richness, of this living keyboard ; 
 even as a singing-master, by playing on his pupil's 
 throat, increases the number of the musical intervals 
 which he can intone."
 
 212 BALDWIN. 
 
 " I ask you," went on Baldwin, after a minute, " do 
 you think that our great-grandfathers and great-grand- 
 mothers would have been able to understand such 
 situations as those of Dorothea and Casaubon, of the 
 husband and wife in Howells' ' Modern Instance,' as 
 that of the young widow in a novel which I think we 
 must all have read a couple of years ago — Lucas 
 Malet's ' Mrs. Lorimer ' ? Such situations may have 
 existed, but their very heroes and heroines must have 
 been unconscious of them. I ask you again, Mrs. 
 Blake — for you know the book — could you conceive 
 a modern girl of eighteen, pure and charming and 
 loving, as Fielding represents his Sophia Western, 
 learning the connection between her lover and a 
 creature like Molly Seagrim, Avithout becoming quite 
 morally ill at the discovery ? But in the eighteenth 
 century a nice girl had not the feelings, the ideal of 
 repugnances, of a nice girl of our day. In the face of 
 such things it is absurd to pretend, as some people do, 
 that the feelings of mankind and womankind are 
 always the same. Well, to return to my argument. 
 Believing, as I do, in the power of directing human 
 feeling into certain channels rather than into certain 
 others ; believing, especially, in the power of reiteration 
 of emotion in constituting our emotional selves, in 
 digging by a constant drop, drop, such moral channels 
 as have already been traced ; I must necessarily also 
 believe that the modern human being has been largely 
 fashioned, in all his more delicate peculiarities, by
 
 ON NOVELS. 213 
 
 those who have written about him ; and most of all, 
 therefore, by the novelist. I believe that were the 
 majority of us, educated and sensitive men and women, 
 able to analyze what we consider our almost inborn, 
 nay, automatic views of life, character, and feeling ; 
 able to scientifically assign Its origin to each and 
 trace its modifications — I believe that, were this 
 possible, we should find that a good third of v/hat we 
 take to be instinctive knowledge, or knowledge vaguel)' 
 acquired from personal experience, is really obtained 
 from the novels which we or our friends have read." 
 
 The discussion, somehow, was dropped at this 
 point ; and it was not till some hours later, as they 
 were returning home from their visit to Haworth and 
 the moors, that Baldwin reverted to the subject. They 
 were driving along one of the green hillsides, ribbed 
 with fences of black stone, and dotted here and there 
 with one of those low black stone houses, with long 
 narrow mullloned windows for the hand-loom, which 
 bring home to one the days, scarcely beyond those of 
 our fathers and yet seemingly so distant, when the 
 dales of Yorkshire, now crowded with manufacturing- 
 towns, belonged to a scattered population of peasants 
 who spun and wove the wool of the sheep of their 
 moors. In the valley below lay the huge black city, 
 spreading up and down the neighbouring hills, as if 
 all the world were soon to be covered with streets and 
 factories and warehouses. The day's work was over, 
 and the last smoke lazily rising into the sk}-, or rather
 
 214 BALDWIN. 
 
 into the cloud of smoke which ah-eady enwrapped 
 the city, and overhung it as far as one could see. The 
 sun was setting, invisible in this strange artificial 
 twilight ; but as it sank, unseen, its light permeated 
 the smoke, dividing it into huge masses of dull 
 coppery and leaden cloud, and turning its lividness 
 into a vague ethereal goldeness, against which the 
 hundreds of factory chimneys, their base lost in the 
 smoky twilight, stood out dim and spectral like the 
 masts of innumerable gigantic ships. 
 
 " Look at that," said Marcel : " ought not such a 
 sight to convert any one to modern art, to show 
 beyond controversy that, no matter how ugly a thing 
 may be, a great artist can always find a moment in 
 its existence when it becomes as beautiful as the most 
 intrinsically perfect and noble object ? " 
 
 *' This sudden transfiguration of our hideous city," 
 remarked Baldwin, " makes me think again about our 
 conversation on novels. As it is with towns, so also 
 is it, I think, with human beings : there are com- 
 paratively few so utterly base, so utterly deserted by 
 all better influences, that they have not, however 
 rarely, moments when they are worthy of being 
 shov/n us, moments when their soot and smoke is 
 glorified by the light within or without them. We 
 must all have remarked such moments in others and 
 in ourselves : nobler moments, during which the in- 
 dividual is loosened from the selfish and petty interests 
 and habits of every day, and rises to a state of con-
 
 ON NOVELS. 215 
 
 sciousncss, of emotion, of perception and sympathy 
 with higher things ; only to be caught once again by 
 the baser interests, to flop down again to where life is 
 languid, and the horizon narrow." . . . 
 
 Marcel shook his head sadly. " Don't speak of 
 them," he said ; " they are the bitterness of life. 
 Without them, without these nobler revelations of 
 ourselves and others which last only a minute, we 
 could be happy and even dignified, like the beasts 
 around us." 
 
 Baldwin laughed. " Nay," he answered, " that was 
 not at all my thought. What I was going to say was, 
 on the contrary, ought we not rather to be grateful 
 rather than disgusted at such things ? Heaven forbid 
 that I should pretend that in such moments we see 
 the real individual despoiled of the merely accidental ; 
 the real individual is whatever he may be in the bulk 
 of his nature: weak if that bulk be weak, strong if 
 it be strong, mixed if it be mixed. These nobler 
 moments are not moments of revelation of the reality ; 
 they arc? moments of transfiguration of the possibility ; 
 and for this very reason they are much more useful 
 and worthy. They are in truth the sports, in Dar- 
 winian language, of our nature : out of these nobler 
 accidents comes progress. Thousands of such must 
 be wasted for one to come to good, as thousands of 
 germs must rise on the wind for one to fall on the 
 right soil. But it is the experience of such moments 
 as these, brief as they may have been, which enables
 
 2i6 BALDWIN. 
 
 us to conceive nobler characters than our own in the 
 abstract, to sympathize and co-operate with them in 
 the concrete. Dorothy was talking this morning 
 about some letters which had been written to her by 
 a rather morally mediocre woman, in circumstahces 
 which greatly shook this woman's nature. Dorothy 
 seemed to think it rather disgusting, as you do, 
 Marcel, that a person should be able to feel nobly 
 only to descend again into a life of rather m^ean 
 feeling. That this particular woman in question, 
 whose letters my cousin was showing me, has by this 
 time descended most thoroughly from the height of 
 those sentiments, I am perfectly prepared to admit \ 
 but that those sentiments should have been there is 
 none the less a good thing for her, for the world, and 
 for Dorothy and me. It is good for us to have wit- 
 nessed this momentary transfiguration ; both practi- 
 cally and because every memory of such a thing is or 
 ought to be valuable, as a pleasure, in the same sense 
 as a remembered melody, or picture, or couplet. 
 
 " It is one of the noble uses of literature, especially 
 of the novel," continued Baldwin, looking down on 
 the city, whose forest of slender chimneys was 
 gradually fading into greyness, as the last yellow 
 suffusion died away out of the smoke and mist of the 
 sky, " and one of the things which puts this sort of 
 half-art above the perfect arts which can attain 
 perfect and unmixed beauty ; — this, that it artificially 
 increases these rare moments when our meaner part
 
 ON NOVELS. 217 
 
 is in abeyance, our better inactivity ; that it connects, 
 \\\\.\\ its network of imaginary emotions, those few and 
 far between noble real ones ; that it records, as a 
 painter might have recorded the sunset which has 
 just glorified this ugly mass of brick and smut and 
 smoke, those nobler moments which would otherwise 
 fade away forgotten, into the uniformity of our trivial 
 existence." 
 
 II. 
 
 "I am sorry that Miss Dorothy should have been 
 reading * Une Vie,' " said Marcel, as he sat next 
 morning after breakfast in the country house near the 
 big black Yorkshire city ; " the book is perhaps the 
 finest novel that any of our younger Frenchmen have 
 produced, and I wish I, instead of Maupassant, were 
 its author. But I shrink from the thought of the im- 
 pression which it must have made upon this young 
 girl, so frank and fearless, but at the same time so 
 pure and sensitive. I am very sorry it should have 
 fallen into her hands." 
 
 " I have no doubt that my cousin felt very sick after 
 reading it," said Baldwin, coldly ; "but I think that if 
 there is any one who might read such a book without 
 worse result than mere temporary disgust, it is exactly 
 Dorothy. What I feel sorry about is, not that an 
 English girl should read the book, but that a French- 
 man, or rather the majority of the French people, 
 could write it."
 
 2i8 BALDWIN. 
 
 Marcel looked surprised. "The book is a painful 
 one," he said ; " there is something very horrible, 
 more than merely tragic, in the discovery, by a pure 
 and ideal-minded woman, brought up in happy igno- 
 rance of the brutish realities of life. But I cannot 
 understand how you, Baldwin, who are above the 
 Pharisaism of your nation, and who lay so much — so 
 far too great (I think) — weight upon the ethical im- 
 portance of the novel, can say that ' Une Vie' is a 
 book that should not have been written. We have, I 
 admit, a class of novel which panders to the worst 
 instincts of the public ; and we have also, and I think 
 legitimately, a class of novel which, leaving all practical 
 and moral questions aside, treats life as merely so 
 much artistic material. But 'Une Vie' belongs to 
 neither of these classes. There is, in this novel, a 
 
 distinct moral purpose; the author feels a duty " 
 
 " I deny it," cried Mrs. Blake, hotly ; " the sense of 
 duty in handling indecent things can never lead to 
 their being handled like this ; the surgeon washes his 
 hands ; and this Guy de Maupassant, nay, rather this 
 French nation, goes through no similar ablution. 
 The man thinks he is obeying his conscience ; in 
 reality he is merely obeying his appetite for nastiness 
 and his desire to outdo some other man who has 
 raised the curtain where people have hitherto drawn 
 it." 
 
 "Pardon me," answered Marcel, "you seem to me 
 guilty of inconsistency ; Baldwin to his theories of the
 
 ON NOVELS. 219 
 
 ethical importance of novels : you, Mrs. Blake, to the 
 notions which all English people have about the en- 
 lightenment of unmarried women on subjects from 
 which we French ,most rigorously exclude them. 
 Looking at the question from your own standpoint, 
 you ought to see that such a sickening and degrading 
 revelation as that to which Maupassant's heroine is 
 subjected, is due to that very ignorance of all the 
 realities of married life in which our girls are brought 
 up, and which you consider so immoral. This being 
 the case, what right have you to object to a book 
 which removes the sort of ignorance that turns a 
 woman into a victim, and often into a morally 
 degraded victim V 
 
 " My dear Monsieur Marcel," said Mrs. Blake, " I 
 quite see your argument. I do consider the system of 
 education of your French girls as abominably immoral, 
 since they are brought up in an ignorance which 
 would never be tolerated in entering upon the most 
 trifling contract, and which is downright sinful in 
 entering upon the most terribly binding contract of 
 all. But I say that a woman should get rid of such 
 ignorance gradually, insensibly ; in such a manner 
 that she should possess the knowledge without, if I 
 may say so, its ever possessing her, coming upon her 
 in a rush, filling her imagination and emotion, dragging 
 her down by its weight ; she ought certainly not to 
 learn it from a book like this, where the sudden, com- 
 plete, loathsome revelation would be more degrading
 
 220 BALDWIN. 
 
 than the actual degradation in the reahty, because 
 addressed merely to the mind. Hence such a book 
 is more than useless, it is absolutely harmful : a blow, 
 a draught of filthy poison, to the ignorant woman 
 who requires enlightenment ; and as to the Avoman 
 who is not ignorant, who understands such things 
 from experience or from the vicarious experience 
 gleaned throughout years from others and from books, 
 she cannot profit by being presented, in a concentrated, 
 imaginative, emotional form, these facts which she has 
 already learned without any such disgusting concen- 
 tration of effect. Believe me, respectable, Pharisaic 
 mankind knows what it is about when it taboos such 
 subjects from novels ; it may not intellectually under- 
 stand, but it instinctively guesses, the enervating 
 effect of doubling by the imagination things which 
 exist but too plentifully in reality." 
 
 " I perfectly agree with Mrs. Blake," said Baldwin. 
 "We English are inclined to listen to no such pleas as 
 might be presented for ' Une Vie,' and to kick the 
 man who writes a book like this downstairs without 
 more ado ; but I regret that, while the instinct which 
 should impel such summary treatment would be 
 perfectly correct, it should with most of my country- 
 people be a mere vague, confused instinct, so that 
 they would be quite unable to answer (except by 
 another kick) the arguments which moral men who 
 write immoral books might urge in defence." 
 
 " But why should }'ou wish to kick a man because
 
 ON NOVELS. 221 
 
 he docs not conceal the truth ? " argued Marcel, 
 " Why should that be a sin in an artist which is a 
 virtue in a man of science ? Why should you fall 
 foul of a book on account of the baseness of the world 
 which it truthfully reflects ? Is not life largely com- 
 pounded of filthiness and injustice? is it not hope- 
 lessly confused and aimless ? Does life present us 
 with a lesson, a moral tendency, a moral mood ? And 
 if life does not, why should fiction ? " 
 
 " Because," answered Baldwin, " fiction is fiction. 
 Because fiction can manipulate things as they are not 
 manipulated by reality; because fiction addresses 
 faculties which expect, require, a final summing up, 
 a moral, a lesson, a something which will be treasured 
 up, however unconsciously, as a generalization. Life 
 ■does not appeal to us in the same way, at the same 
 moment, in the same moods, as does literature ; less 
 so even than science appeals to us in the same way as 
 art (and yet we should be shocked to hear from a poet 
 what would not shock us from a doctor). We are 
 conscious of life in the very act of living — that is to 
 say, conscious of it in the somewhat confused way in 
 which we are conscious of things going on outside us 
 while other things are going on inside us ; conscious 
 by fits and starts, with mind and feelings, not tense, 
 but slack ; with attention constantly diverted else- 
 where ; conscious, as it were, on a full stomach. The 
 things which are washed on to our consciousness, 
 floating on the stream, by the one wave, are washed
 
 22 2 BALDWIN. 
 
 off again by another wave. It is quite otherwise with 
 literature. We receive its impressions on what, in the 
 intellectual order, corresponds to an empty stomach. 
 Wc are thinking and feeling about nothing else ; we 
 are tense, prepared for receiving and retaining im- 
 pressions ; the faculties concerned therein, and which 
 are continually going off to sleep in reality, are broad 
 awake, on the alert. We are, however unconsciously, 
 prepared to learn a lesson, to be put into a mood, and 
 that lesson learnt will become, remember, a portion of 
 the principles by which we steer our life, that induced 
 mood will become a mood more easily induced among 
 those in which we shall really have to act. Hence we 
 have no right to present to the intellect, which by its 
 nature expects essences, types, lessons, generalizations 
 — we have no right to present to the intellect ex- 
 pecting things which it graves into itself, a casual 
 bit of unarranged, unstudied reality, which is not any 
 of these things ; which is only reality, and which 
 ought to have reality's destructibility and fleetingness ; 
 a thing which the intellect, the imagination, the 
 imaginative emotions, accept, as they must accept all 
 things belonging to their domain, as the essential, the 
 selected, the thing to be preserved and revived. 
 Hence, also, the immorality, to me, of presenting a 
 piece of mere beastly reality as so much fiction, without 
 demonstrating the proposition which it goes to prove 
 or suggesting the reprobation which it ought to 
 provoke. Still greater, therefore, is the immorality
 
 ON NOVELS. 223 
 
 of giving" this special value, this durability, this 
 property of haunting the imagination, of determining 
 the judgment, this essentially intellectual (whether 
 imaginative or emotional) weight to things which, in 
 reality, take place below the sphere of the intellect 
 and the intellectual emotions, as, for instance, a man 
 like Rabelais gives an intellectual value, which means 
 obscenity, to acts which in the reality do not tarnish 
 the mind, simply because they don't come in contact 
 with it. In fact, my views may be summed up in one 
 sentence, which is this : Commit to the intellect, 
 which is that which registers, re-arranges, and develops, 
 only such things as we may profit by having registered, 
 re-arranged, and developed." 
 
 Dorothy had entered the room, and presently she 
 and Marcel were strolling out on the lawn, leaving 
 Mrs. Blake and Baldwin to continue their discussion. 
 
 " What is the use of talking about such things with 
 a Frenchman "^ " exclaimed Mrs. Blake. " I could 
 scarcely refrain from laughing when I saw you 
 gravely arguing about morality and immorality in 
 novels with that young man, who would give one of 
 his fingers to have written ' Une Vie ' ; and who, after 
 talking pessimistic idealism with Dorothy, and going 
 on by the hour about the exotic frankness, and 
 purity, and mixture of knowledge and innocence of 
 English girls, probably shuts himself up in his room 
 to write a novel the effect of which upon just such 
 a girl he positively shrinks from thinking of, as the
 
 224 BALDWIN. 
 
 morbid, puling creature said about ' Une Vie.' Uo 
 you remember the preface to the ' Nouvelle Heloise ' ? 
 Rousseau declaring that if any modest girl read the 
 book he had just written, she would be lost ? That 
 is how all the French are : they can neither under- 
 stand that their books arc sickening, nor that a 
 decently constituted human being can recover after 
 five minutes from the feeling of sickness which they 
 inspire. It is impossible to argue with them on the 
 subject." 
 
 " It is very difficult to argue with them on the 
 subject," answered Baldwin, "but not so much for the 
 reasons you allege. The difficulty which I experience 
 in attacking the French novel to a Frenchman is, 
 that I cannot honestly attack it in the name of the 
 English novel ; the paralyzing difficulty of being 
 between two hostile parties which are both in the 
 wrong. The French novel, by its particular system 
 of selection and treatment of subject, by choosing the 
 nasty sides of things and investing them with an 
 artificial intellectual and emotional value, falsifies our 
 views of life and enervates our character ; the English 
 novel, on the other hand, falsifies our views, of life 
 and enervates our character in a different way, by 
 deliberately refusing to admit that things can have 
 certain nasty sides, and by making us dravv^ conclusions 
 and pass judgments upon the supposition that no 
 such nasty factors really enter into the arrangement 
 of things. A girl, for instance, who has read only
 
 ON NOVELS. 225 
 
 English novels has not merely got a most ridiculously 
 partial idea of life, an idea which can be only of the 
 most partial practical utility, but she has, moreover, 
 from the fact of the disproportion between the 
 immense amount of talk on some subjects and the 
 absolute silence on others, acquired an actually false 
 idea of life, which may become actually practically 
 mischievous. I have taken the example of a girl, 
 because men get to know but too easily the ugly 
 sides of things and of themselves ; and it has always 
 struck me that there is something absolutely piteous, 
 and which should make an honest man feel quite 
 guilty, in the fact of girls being fed exclusively upon 
 a kind of literature which conduces to their taking 
 the most important steps, nay, what is almost worse, 
 which conduces to their forming the most important 
 ideals and judgments and rules of conduct, in igno- 
 rance of the realities of life, or rather in a deluded 
 condition about them." 
 
 Mrs. Blake looked at Baldwin with an air of 
 whimsical compassion. " My dear friend," she said, 
 " I am an old woman and an old novelist. When I 
 was young I thought as you do, for, permit me to say, 
 all that array of scientific argument seems to tend to 
 prolonging people's youth most marvellously in some 
 respects. You say that it is unjust that women 
 should be permitted to form ideals and rules of 
 conduct, that they should be allowed to make decisions, 
 while labouring under partial and erroneous views of 
 
 16
 
 226 BALDWIN. 
 
 life. Is that not exactly what Marcel answered when 
 you called ' Une Vie ' a filthy book ? What does 
 that book do, if it does not enlighten the ignorance 
 of which you complain ? " 
 
 Baldwin shook his head. " You misunderstand me. 
 I said to you just now that the English novel is 
 pernicious because it permits people, or rather let us 
 say w^omen (for the ethics of novels are, after all, 
 framed entirely for the benefit or detriment of women)^ 
 to live on in the midst of a partial, and therefore 
 falsified, notion of life. That has nothing to do with 
 my strictures on ' Une Vie ' or upon any other French 
 novel whatsoever. I objected, in answer to Marcel, 
 that a book like Maupassant's gave a false impression 
 of life, because it presented as a literary work — that 
 is to say, as something which we instinctively accept 
 as a generalization, as a lesson — what is in truth a 
 mere accidental, exceptional heaping up of revolting 
 facts, as little like a generalization of life as a hump- 
 backed dwarf is like a figure in a book of artistic 
 anatomy ; and I objected to it still more because, 
 like nine out of ten French novels, it dragged the 
 imagination over physical details with which the 
 imagination has no legitimate connection, which can 
 only enervate, soil, and corrupt it ; because, as I said, 
 it gave an intellectual value to facts with which the 
 intellect cannot deal with the very smallest profit in 
 the world. I said just now that, in attacking the 
 French novel, I felt the disadvantage of not being
 
 ON NOVELS. 227 
 
 able to do so in the name of the English novel ; at 
 present the case is exactly reversed : I feel the 
 difficulty of attacking the restrictions of the English 
 novel, because the excesses of the French novel are 
 staring me in the face. I assure you that one pays 
 a price for the satisfaction of remaining independent 
 between two rival systems of novel-writing, as one 
 does for remaining independent between two rival 
 political or religious parties : the price of being 
 continually isolated and continually in antagonism ; 
 dragged, or rather pushed away, from side to side, 
 sickened, insulted in one's own mind, told by oneself 
 that one is narrow-minded and immoral by turns. 
 I know that, if I wrote a novel, it would be laughed 
 at as stuff for schoolgirls by my French and Italian 
 friends, and howled down as unfit for family reading 
 by my own country-people." 
 
 " Very likely," answered Mrs. Blake, " and it would 
 serve you right for not having the courage to decide 
 boldly between the timidity of the English and the 
 shamelessness of the French." 
 
 " I do decide. I decide boldly that both are in the 
 wrong. I cannot admit that a man should give his 
 adherence to either party if he think each represents 
 an excess. At that rate, it would be impossible 
 ever to form a third party in whom justice should 
 reside, and things would always go on swinging from 
 one absurdity or one evil to the other. I see that 
 you consider me already as a partisan of the French
 
 228 BALDWIN. 
 
 novel. Permit me to say that I would rather that 
 the English novel were reduced to the condition of 
 Sunday reading for girls of twelve than that such 
 a novel as Maupassant's ' Unc Vie ' or Gautier's 
 ' Mademoiselle de Maupin ' should be written in this 
 country. I tell you frankly that I can scarcely think 
 of a dozen modern French novels in which I should 
 not like to cut out whole passages, sometimes whole 
 chapters, from Balzac to Daudet. Let me explain 
 myself, and recapitulate what I consider the sins of 
 the modern French novel. One of these, fortunately 
 rare, but gaining ground every day, can be dismissed 
 at once : I mean the allusion to particular kinds of 
 evil which are so exceptional and abnormal that any 
 practical advantage derivable from knowledge of 
 them must inevitably be utterly outweighed by the 
 disadvantage of introducing into the mind vague 
 and diseased suspicions of unprovable but also undis- 
 provable evil. The other principal sins of modern 
 French novelists are, to my mind, first : the presenta- 
 tion of remarkable evil without any comment on 
 the part of the author, or without any presentation 
 of remarkable good to counterbalance, by its moral 
 and resthetical stimulus, the enervating effect of 
 familiarity with evil. The sight of evil is not merely 
 necessary, if evil is to diminish ; it is wholesome, if 
 it awakens indignation : it is good for us to maintain 
 our power of taking exception, of protesting, of 
 hating ; it is good for us, in moral matters, to have
 
 ON NOVELS. 229 
 
 the instinct of battle. But this becomes impossible 
 if evil is represented as the sole occupant of this 
 earth : in that case we no longer have any one to 
 fight for, and we run the risk of forgetting how to 
 fight for ourselves. So much for the demoralizing 
 effect of the pessimistic misrepresentation, or at all 
 events the representation of an unfairly selected 
 specimen of life. It distinctly diminishes our energies 
 for good. The other, and I decidedly think even 
 worse, great sin of French novelists is their habit of 
 describing the physical sides of love, or of what 
 people call love, whether it be socially legitimate or 
 socially illegitimate. Such descriptions are absolutely 
 unnecessary for the psychological completeness of 
 their work, since, as I said to Marcel, they drag the 
 mind and the intellectual emotions into regions below 
 their cognizance, and cram them with impressions 
 which they can never digest, which remain as a mere 
 foul nuisance ; besides, by stimulating instincts which 
 require not stimulation, but repression, they entirely 
 betray the mission of all intellectual work, which is 
 to develop the higher sides of our nature at the 
 expense of the lower. There is not a single descrip- 
 tion of this kind which might not most advan- 
 tageously be struck out, and I could have gone on my 
 knees to Flaubert to supplicate him to suppress whole 
 passages and pages of ' Madame Bovary,' which I 
 consider a most moral and useful book. I don't 
 think you yourself would be more rigorous in dealing 
 with the French novel."
 
 230 BALDWIN. 
 
 Mrs. Blake looked puzzled. " I confess I can't well 
 conceive ' Madame Bovary ' with those parts left out," 
 she said ; " nor do I clearly understand, since you are 
 so uncompromising with the French novel, why in the 
 world you cannot rest satisfied with the English one. 
 You seem to me to be merely removing its limits in 
 order to fence the French novel round with them. 
 What do you want ? " 
 
 " I want absolute liberty of selection and treatment 
 of subjects to the exclusion of all abnormal suggestion, 
 of all prurient description, and of all pessimistic 
 misrepresentation. I want the English novelist to 
 have the right of treating the social and moral 
 sides of all relations in life, as distinguished from 
 treating their 'physical sides. I want him to deal 
 with all the situations in which a normal human soul, 
 as distinguished from a human body, can find itself. 
 I want, in short, that the man or woman who purports 
 to show us life in a manner far more minute and far 
 more realistic than the poet, should receive the same 
 degree of liberty of action as the poet." 
 
 "As Swinburne in the first series of 'Poems and 
 Ballads ' ? " asked Mrs. Blake, with a sneer. 
 
 Baldwin looked quite angry. " If people are irra- 
 tional, is that my fault .'' " he exclaimed. " You 
 know perfectly well that if I condemn Maupassant, 
 and Daudet, and Zola, I condemn Swinburne, in the 
 poems you allude to, a hundred times worse, because 
 he has no possible moral intention to plead, because
 
 ON NOVELS. 231 
 
 his abominations arc purely artistic. The liberty 
 which I ask for the English novelist is the liberty 
 which is given to a poet like Browning, or Browning's 
 wife — the liberty in the choice of subject which wc 
 would none of us deny to Shakespeare. Does the 
 English public disapprove of ' The Ring and the 
 Book,' of 'Aurora Leigh,' of the plot of 'Othello' or 
 of ' Measure for Measure ' ? Well, ask yourself what 
 the English public would say of a novelist who should 
 treat ' Othello ' or ' Measure for Measure,' who should 
 venture upon writing 'Aurora Leigh' or ' The Ring 
 and the Book,' in prose. Let us look a moment at 
 this last. You will not, I suppose, deny that it is 
 one of the most magnificent and noble works of 
 our day ; to my mind, with the exception perhaps 
 of the ' Miserables,' by far the most magnificent and 
 the most noble. Now the plot of 'The Ring and the 
 Book ' is one which no English novelist would dare 
 to handle ; Mudie would simply refuse to circulate 
 a novel the immense bulk of which consisted in the 
 question, discussed and re-discussed by half-a-dozen 
 persons : Has there been adultery between Pompilia 
 and Caponsacchi ? Has Guido Franceschini tried 
 to push his wife into dishonour, or has he been 
 dishonoured by his wife? Ask yourself what would 
 have been the fate of this book had it been written 
 b}' an unknown man in prose. Every newspaper 
 critic would have shrieked that the situation was 
 intolerable, and that the mind of the reader had been
 
 232 BALDWIN. 
 
 dragged through an amount of evil suggestion which 
 no height of sanctity in Pompilia or Caponsacchi 
 could possibly compensate. I foresee your answer : 
 you are going to rejoin that poetry addresses a 
 select, a higher, more moral, more mature public than 
 does the novel ; that the poet, therefore, may say 
 a great deal where the novelist must hold his tongue. 
 Is it not so ? Well, to this I can only answer (forgive 
 mc, for you are a novelist yourself) that I would rather 
 never put pen to paper than be a novelist upon such 
 terms. What, is a man or woman who feels and 
 understands and represents as strongly and keenly 
 and clearly as any poet, to be thrust into an inferior 
 category merely because he or she happens to write 
 in prose instead of writing in verse ? Is the novel, 
 the one great literary form produced by our age, 
 as the drama and the epic were produced by other 
 .ages, to appeal to a public of which .we are to take 
 for granted that it is so infinitely less mature, so 
 infinitely less intelligent, and less clean-minded than 
 the public of the poet ? A public of half-grown boys 
 or girls, too silly to understand the bearings of things ; 
 a public of depraved men and women, in whom 
 every suggestion of evil will awake, not invigorating 
 indignation, but a mere disgusting and dangerous 
 response ? Tell me : is the novelist to confess that 
 he addresses a public too foolish and too base to be 
 addressed plainly ? " 
 
 Mrs. Blake did not answer for a minute. In her
 
 ON NOVELS. 233 
 
 youth, while she had still believed in the nobility of 
 mankind, she had written a novel which had been 
 violently attacked as immoral ; and ever since, in pro- 
 portion as her opinion of men and women had become 
 worse and worse, she had carefully avoided what she 
 called "sailing too near the wind;" a woman, the 
 morality, as people called it, of whose books was due 
 to deep moral scepticism, in the same, way that the 
 decorum, the safety, of certain great cities is due 
 to the State's acquiescence in the existence of shame- 
 ful classes. 
 
 " That's all very fine," she answered, " in theory ; 
 but look at the practical result of letting novelists 
 treat certain subjects in a pure-minded way ; you have 
 it in France. In order to prevent people getting 
 to the thin ice, we must forbid their going on to the 
 pond ; we must fence it round and write up ' No 
 trespassing allowed.' Believe me, were the English 
 novelist permitted to write a ' Ring and the Book ' 
 or an ' Aurora Leigh ' in prose, he would have written 
 ' Une Vie' or ' Nana' before the year was out." 
 
 Baldwin shook his head. '' You are entirely mis- 
 taken," he said ; " these novels are, could not be, the 
 result of greater liberty being given to the English 
 novel, for they are not the result of the liberty given 
 to the French novelist. They are the result simply 
 of the demoralization of France, and of all nations 
 influenced by France, in certain matters : a demorali- 
 zation due partly, perhaps, to a habit engrained in the
 
 234 BALDWIN. 
 
 race ; partly, most certainly, to the abominable 
 system of foreign female education and of foreign 
 marriage ; due, in short, to the fact of P>ench 
 civilization (and under the head of French I include 
 Italian, Spanish, and Russian) being to a much 
 greater extent a masculine civilization, made by men 
 for men, and therefore without the clement of chastity 
 which women have elaborated throughout the cen- 
 turies, and which only women can diffuse. The 
 French may not be more licentious than the English ; 
 but they are less ashamed of licentiousness, or, rather, 
 not ashamed of it at all ; and when I say the French 
 I mean the Latin peoples and the Russians and 
 Poles as well. If you had lived abroad as much as 
 I have, you would know that the incidents which 
 revolt us most in French novels are the incidents 
 which are taken as matter of course in French- 
 speaking countries, that the allusions and discussions 
 which seem to us most intolerable are made freely 
 wherever, out of the presence of unmarried women, 
 French or Italian is spoken. No thoroughbred 
 English person — at least, no thoroughbred English- 
 woman — can have a conception of the perfect 
 simplicity, the innocence of heart I might almost say, 
 ^\■ith whicii French and Italian and Russian women 
 absolutely virtuous in their conduct and even theo- 
 retically opposed to vice, bandy about suggestions, 
 suspicions, accusations, which would make an English- 
 man's hair stand on end. There is, in what I may call
 
 OiY NOVELS. 235 
 
 the French world, a positive habit of putting nasty 
 constructions upon things, which is as striking" in its 
 way as our English habit of ahvays pretending that 
 such a thing as vice cannot exist among our respect- 
 able neighbours, a perfect Philistinism — or even 
 Pharisaism — of evil, as conventional as our Philistinism 
 of good. The immorality of the P>ench novel is 
 simply the immorality of P'rench society." 
 
 " And you think," asked Mrs. Blake, sceptically, 
 " that English society is not sufficiently immoral to 
 produce, if allowed to do so, a French novel ? My 
 poor Baldwin ! " 
 
 " I think so, most certainly. And I think that if 
 English society were sufficiently immoral to produce 
 a French novel, the sooner it did so the better ; for in 
 that case our English novel would be almost the 
 worst sign of our weakness and depravity — a white 
 leprosy of hypocrisy and cowardice. If England 
 were sufficiently immoral to produce a P^xnch novel, 
 and restrained from so doing merely by conventional 
 reasons, why the whole of our nation would simply 
 be no better than a convent-bred young French girl 
 of whom 1 heard lately, who was not permitted to go 
 to a ball for fear of meeting young men, and who 
 slipped out every night her mother was at a party, 
 and took a solitary walk on the boulevards." 
 
 " Speaking of girls, there is your cousin walking 
 along the road with Marcel," interrupted Mrs. Blake. 
 " I think, considering the sort of young ladies to
 
 236 BALDWIN. 
 
 whom, according to his novels, he is accustomed, it 
 would be as well that we should accompany these 
 representatives of a moral and an immmoral civiliza- 
 tion on their walk." 
 
 Baldwin laughed. " You are more French than 
 Marcel himself!" he exclaimed. 
 
 Baldwin and Mrs. Blake had soon overtaken the 
 two young people on the road which, leading to a 
 patch of moor that had got enclosed among the 
 pasture land, wound along the round hills, covered 
 with grass and corn and park land, above the big 
 manufacturing city, which lay, wrapped in grey fog, 
 with its hundreds of chimneys smoking away, invisible 
 in the valley. The morning was fine. One appeared 
 to be walking in the sunshine, feeling it on one's back 
 and accompanied by one's shadow ; but this sunlit 
 patch extended only a few paces around one, and 
 moved on as one moved, leaving all the rest of the 
 earth veiled in a dense and not at all luminous mist 
 of blackish grey — of the grey in which there is no 
 blue at all, but which seems like a mere dilution of 
 black ; the grey of coal-smoke, heavy all round, but 
 perceptibly thickening and gaining blackness in one 
 spot, where the hidden chimneys of the black city 
 slowly poured their blackish-grey smoke-wreaths into 
 the blackish-grey sky. 
 
 " Oh, hov/ can you write about such women," 
 Dorothy was saying to Marcel, " and write about 
 them so quietly — look at them and paint them as if
 
 ON NOVELS. 237 
 
 they were merely a curious effect of light, merely a 
 strange sk}- like this one ? " 
 
 "What else are they?" answered Marcel. " I mean, 
 what else can they be to an artist or a psychologist ? 
 We cannot destroy such women because there are 
 other women, like you, Miss Dorothy, who are all 
 that they are not, any more than we can forbid this 
 smoke, this fog, to exist because there are mornings 
 full of light, and breeze, and freshness. We cannot 
 prevent their existing, and cannot hide from ourselves 
 that as this fog, this smoke, has beauties strange and 
 eerie, which make it valuable to a painter ; so also 
 such women, weak, perverse, heartless, destructive, 
 have a value, a strange unhealthy charm for the 
 imagination." 
 
 There was a brief silence ; then Baldwin and Mrs. 
 Blake heard Dorothy's voice, earnest and agitated, 
 answering the languid voice of Marcel, as they walked 
 on enveloped in the mist. 
 
 " No, no," she said ; " you think that, because you 
 have never felt what those women are, because it has 
 never come home to you." 
 
 Marcel sighed. " I fear it has come home to me 
 but too much, Miss Dorothy," he answered. 
 
 " That is not what I mean. You may have known 
 women like that — I dare say you have — and still not 
 have known all that their wickedness means. If you 
 had you could not talk like that about skies and light 
 and mist. I have known such a woman, known the
 
 238 BALDWIN. 
 
 full meaninp^ of such a woman. I can't very well 
 explain ; my ideas are rather confused, you know ; 
 but I understand that I understood that woman's real 
 meaning. I had a friend once ; she was beautiful, 
 and young, and noble, and she was dying ; and her 
 husband, instead of caring for her, cared for a woman 
 such as you describe in your novel ; the two betrayed 
 and outraged her, and made her last years bitterness 
 and ignominy. She is dead now, I am thankful. 
 Last year I went to the play in Paris. They were 
 giving one of those horrible, vulgar vaudevilles, full 
 of half-dressed people, and horrid, hideous songs and 
 jokes ; it was all about a burlesque actress, a sort of 
 apotheosis of her. There were lots of people in the 
 theatre ; and some one pointed out to me, in one of 
 the boxes, the woman who had made my friend so 
 unhappy. She was what people call a lady, quite 
 young, beautifully dressed, with a beautiful, delicate 
 face, and she was laughing and blushing a great deal 
 behind her fan, and looking very happy. It was the 
 first time that I had ever seen her, and I never 
 expected to see her there. I could not take my eyes 
 off her. I can't tell you how I felt : as if a precipice 
 had suddenly opened before me. I shall never forget 
 it. She seemed somehow to be the concentration of 
 what was going on on the stage ; the play seemed to 
 be about her, the songs about her. She seemed to be 
 framed, as it were, beautiful and delicate though she 
 was, in all that indecency and vulgarity, those hideous
 
 ON NOVELS. 239 
 
 gestures, that frightful music, those disgusting jokes. 
 And the play seemed to become terrible, tragic, as if 
 some one were being killed somewhere. I don't know 
 how to explain it. But ever since that evening I have 
 understood what a bad woman is." 
 
 Dorothy's voice died away, hot and hoarse. 
 
 " Did you hear ? " Baldwin whispered to jMrs. 
 Blake. "Well ; what my cousin has just been saying 
 is a thing which an English novelist would not be 
 allowed to say ; he would not be allowed to show 
 us the bad woman in her box ; and he would not 
 be allowed, therefore, to show us what was pass- 
 ing in that girl's heart, all the rebellion of outraged 
 love and respect, all that great and holy indig- 
 nation. And yet, to have seen the contents of 
 Dorothy's heart at that moment, braces our soul, does 
 us more moral good than the sight of all the bad women 
 in Christendom could do us harm ; for it means that 
 we have stood for a moment in the presence of the 
 Lord, of the true God, whose name is Love and 
 Indignation." 
 
 They got up with Marcel and Dorothy, and walked 
 for a little while silently in the moving luminous gap 
 in the body of the blackish grey mist. All colour 
 seemed removed from out of things : green pastures, 
 on the hills, thick tangles of bluish-green trees in the 
 river-courses between them, patches of ripening grain ; 
 all were reduced to the same blackish-grey smoke of 
 the sky, against which stood out, sharply defined and
 
 240 BALDWIN. 
 
 in preternatural blackness, the telegraph posts and 
 wires covered with birds, the circling rooks, the few 
 wind-warped beeches with black trunks and blackened 
 leaves, the long low black walls, or rather lines of 
 heaped-up black stones in the fields. The foreground 
 started into vivid relief and colour : the grass, divided 
 by the lines of black stones, was of Alpine greenness, 
 the heather and ling intensely purple, the oats and 
 barley strangely yellow ; but even into this colour 
 (and this was the strangest part of that strange effect) 
 there seemed to enter a quantity of black, as of a 
 thick sprinkling of cinders ; the bit of moorland was 
 dabbed with black patches of gorse and withered 
 heather among the pale lilac and the deep purple of 
 the flowers, and shot with the blackness of heather 
 roots and long sere grass ; the ripening oats were 
 picked out with a sort of black granulation in the 
 light ; the very grass, in its intense greenness, seemed 
 sparkling with the black glint of coal dust, making 
 it but the more vivid and shining in its freshness ; the 
 houses were of black stone, the dust of the road, 
 pulverized stone and dried peat, was blackish as if 
 coal had been crushed into it ; and all round, as if 
 to emphasize the blackness, as if to show the under- 
 lying quality of earth and sky, of grass, and grain, 
 and heather, the inky black was scattered about in the 
 walls which streaked the blackish green of the fields; 
 in the stones which patched the pale violet, the strong 
 purple, land with blackness of stems and sere grass, 
 of the moorland.
 
 ON NOVELS. 241 
 
 "Are you still talking of novels?" asked Baldwin 
 of Dorothy and Marcel. 
 
 " I wish no more novels might ever be written," 
 answered Dorothy. " I wish no novels ever had been 
 written. Life is too hideous and melancholy to be 
 painted." 
 
 " That is to say, life as painted in ' Une Vie,' my dear 
 child," said Mrs. Blake, feeling her own art attacked. 
 
 At that moment, as if to make things complete, 
 there came riding through the lane a little girl on a 
 white horse, emerging out of the mist, entering, taking 
 body in the luminous space in which they seemed to 
 be walking. In that light concentrated between the 
 grey mist, the fair flesh, the blond hair, in long curls, 
 of the child, took, with their grey shadows, their 
 greyish blond high lights, a diaphanous, almost an 
 unearthly, loveliness. 
 
 " She looks like a sister of Velasquez's Infanta 
 Margaret," said Marcel, looking back as the little 
 figure on the pony vanished once more in the mist. 
 
 "Yes," answered Dorothy, "she is lovely. And that is 
 what is so horrible in life, and in all art which deals 
 with life, instead of dealing merely with visible things ; 
 this, that while there is scarcely a thing which, at 
 some moment, is not worth painting, not a light in 
 which something does not look beautiful and impres- 
 sive, in life, on the other hand, we may go on for 
 hours and miles seeing only uninteresting and ugly 
 moral sights. Such a morning as this, with the fog 
 
 17
 
 242 BALD WIN. 
 
 and the smoke, is like death, at first sight ; and yet, 
 did you notice how lovely and charming that child 
 looked in the black smoke and mist ? But when once 
 we come to moral questions, to life, all is confusion 
 and ugliness : the good people seem so unreason - 
 able and intolerant, their attempts to do good seem 
 so often foolish and mischievous ; the people, on the 
 other hand, who understand, and are just and tolerant, 
 seem so half-hearted and useless. There is no satis- 
 faction to be got anywhere. The ' how things are ' 
 seems for ever, hopelessly, opposed to the 'how things 
 should be.' If we paint reality, we paint imperfec- 
 tion ; if we paint perfection, we paint unreality. I wish, 
 therefore, that people would write only about trees 
 and skies and effects of light. I wish they would 
 give up writing about human beings. I wish they 
 would never write any more novels." 
 
 Mrs. Blake laughed, " That is not very encourag- 
 ing for Monsieur Marcel and me," she said. 
 
 "What you say is perfectly true, Dorothy," said 
 Baldwin, "but I think it is a reason that novels should 
 be written, and not the contrary. It is most true 
 that, as you say, the ' how things are ' is for ever 
 militating against the ' how things ought to be.' The 
 best people, those with most desire for good, and 
 most self-sacrificing power of attaining it, seem 
 usually also to be those who are most ignorant, most 
 credulous, most blind. The knowledge of what men 
 and women really are, the knowledge of the inevitable.
 
 ON lYOVELS. 243 
 
 sequence of cause and effect which has made them so, 
 of the complication of actions and reactions which 
 necessarily render all changes slow and partial — this 
 comprehension of how things are makes us, we 
 cannot doubt it, gradually cynical and indifferent 
 and passive, deprives us of initiative for good. And 
 yet, without such knowledge, what is the use of the 
 most ardent aspirations? Dealing with the unknown, 
 improvement is rarely attained ; and in the attempt to 
 improve, heaven only knows how much additional 
 evil is not created. Surely three-quarters of all the 
 foolish regulations which hamper life, divert it into 
 unnatural channels, and create vice and misery, have 
 been framed by people wishing to do good, and 
 believing they could do it. It is sad to see this 
 double waste — the waste of knowledge which becomes 
 conducive merely to cynical indifference ;. and the 
 waste of generous impulse which results merely in 
 abortive or mischievous attempts. And from the 
 medieval saints, who, ignoring the baser necessities 
 of human nature, aimed at impossible ideals of 
 conduct and produced new evils, bodily and mental, 
 in trying to cure old ones ; from these to the good 
 people who try, from some interpretation of Scripture, 
 to prevent a man marrying a woman with whom he 
 has no blood connection, and who may be the fittest 
 guardian of his and her dead sister's children, a good 
 half of human history consists in such abortive and 
 mischievous results of eenerous feelin";. On the
 
 244 BALDWIN. 
 
 other hand, as I have said, those who see and under- 
 stand are too apt to acquiesce. When we perceive 
 how naturally all manner of base things have come 
 about, how difficult it is to get rid of them, how uni- 
 versal they are, and how inextricably interwoven in 
 normal life, we get sad and useless for effort. Besides, 
 we see, what they others do not, the good things 
 which are mixed up with the bad, and we are 
 paralyzed ; we sympathize with the good in faulty 
 mankind, and condone its faults ; above all, we are 
 angered in our sense of logic and justice, by the 
 unreasonableness, the injustice of the people of noble 
 aims : they ask so much that is impossible, they 
 spurn so much that is good ; they are so stupid and 
 uncharitable often. And yet, without them, how 
 little improvement in life, and how little nobility in it! 
 Does not the whole of the world's life consist in the 
 balancing of these two tendencies ? and is not that 
 balancing, at present, a conflict, a terrible waste and 
 misery? If only, instead of conflicting, they could be 
 united, they would be as fruitful of good as, in their 
 conflict, they are fruitful of evil. To make the shrewd 
 and tolerant a little less shrewd and tolerant ; to make 
 the generous and austere a little more sceptical and 
 easy-going — this seems to me pretty well the chief 
 problem of life; and also the chief use of the novel. But, 
 for that attempt to be possible, the novel itself must 
 represent a compromise between the knowledge of 
 how things are, and the desire for how things ought
 
 ON NOVELS. 245 
 
 to be ; the novel must represent what there is of 
 good in the scientific spirit of France, and what there 
 is of good in the moral spirit of England." 
 
 " I don't know if it is you or the weather, but I feel 
 less dismal about life, Baldwin," said Dorothy. 
 
 " It is the weather," answered Mrs. Blake. 
 
 The mist had gradually thinned, the luminous 
 space about them had widened, the greyish-black 
 vapour, gradually turning white, was rising into 
 clouds, leaving the tree-tops distinct and green 
 against a rift of moist, bright sky.
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 
 
 The old painter smiled in his beard : that gently 
 ironical smile which meant that age had brought 
 with it scepticism, but scepticism of the reality only 
 of mean and foolish things. 
 
 " My dear boy," he said, laying his delicate veined 
 white hand on Carlo's shoulder, " when you are as 
 old as I, you will have given over being a realist." 
 
 The obvious retort was that, not being so old as Sir 
 Anthony, he could not be an idealist ; for, to Carlo's 
 mind, saturated with cosmopolitan modernnesses, 
 idealism appeared in connection with the mahogany 
 and rep furniture, the crinolines of thirty years ago. 
 But, irritated though he was at having his ideas 
 measured by an obsolete standard; and also at being, 
 as he considered, twitted with his youth, he could not 
 even feel the temptation of cheap sarcasm towards 
 Sir Anthony ; the young realist unconsciously bowed
 
 2 so BALDWIN. 
 
 before something ideal in this old man's personality. 
 And the bitter thing was that Sir Anthony's smile, 
 although the smile of the champion of a false 
 jEsthetical theory, had nevertheless a power of 
 scattering his triumphant realistic arguments. 
 
 " But why," cried the young man, the curious arch- 
 modern outcome of mixed nationalities—" why should 
 any one want idealism nowadays ? Surely there has 
 been enough of it in the past ! Surely people have 
 shown us sufficiently often how things don't look ; it 
 is time that they show us a little how they do look ! 
 Idealism nowadays," he went on, delighted at recover- 
 ing possession of his favourite arguments — "idealism 
 is a waste of time and energy. Why should a man 
 paint us his conception of an olive tree, a stick with 
 five little branches, each with five little leaves and five 
 little berries upon it ; and his conception of marigolds, 
 little yellow paper stars arranged like the pattern of a 
 Persian rug, when he could paint us the reality of 
 olives and marigolds — such a reality as that ? " 
 
 Baldwin, who had been watching the beautiful 
 ironical face framed in white hair and beard ; and the 
 eager, dark young face, full of energetic curiosity, like 
 that of some frescoed Italian of the Renaissance, 
 turned his head in the direction whither Carlo was 
 pointing. They were sitting on the wall of Sir 
 Anthony's Tuscan villa, the foxglove in the chinks 
 forming rich crimson and yellow dabs on the inky- 
 black stone beneath them ; the pomegranate bios-
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAE 251 
 
 soms standing out, in luminous scarlet, against the 
 distant, constantly receding, and yet all-pervading 
 blue luminousness of the sky over their heads. 
 Below stretched the farm-lands, a shimmer of half-ripe 
 corn, of pale green vines hanging in garlands from 
 maple to maple, of bluish-green reed tufts, enfolded 
 in the smoke-like blue haze of the hill-side. And 
 opposite, catching the sun, was a raised plantation of 
 olive-trees, their smooth, twisted trunks shining like 
 silver, their silvery leafage, more feather-like for pale 
 new sprouts and spray of white blossom, detaching 
 itself delicately and clearly from the bright air in 
 which it seemed to swim, as the light, pale weeds 
 swim in the transparent water of a stream. And at 
 the gnarled roots of the olives, clustered, golden 
 against the grey, the thick growth of orange mari- 
 golds. 
 
 " It is downright wastefulness to go in for idealism 
 in the face of such reality as this," repeated Carlo ; 
 *' to give us, with the brush, a mere symbol, a mere 
 suggestion, a thing which any writer could do as well 
 with the pen, when we might be given the real 
 appearance of the thing, which only the painter can 
 give." 
 
 The old painter of strange, gorgeous, symbolic 
 creatures drummed lightly on the warm black stone 
 of the wall, where, every now and then, darted a 
 bright-green lizard amongst the fallen pomegranate 
 petals.
 
 252 BALDWIN. 
 
 "You speak of wastefulness," he said, slowly; "have 
 you ever asked }'oui'self whether realistic art is not 
 wasteful ? " 
 
 " In giving us the picture of what we have already 
 got?" answered Carlo quickly, ready to crush this 
 conventional argument. " Yes, I know idealists say 
 that; but it is not wasteful, because there is no waste- 
 fulness in teaching us to see in the picture of a thing 
 the characteristic qualities which we may have missed 
 seeing in the original ; or in giving us once more, 
 greatly enhanced, the pleasure which we had already 
 received from perceiving them in the original. No, 
 I think this is no argument against simply showing 
 us reality, because no wastefulness is really proved." 
 
 " My plea against realism has nothing to do with 
 that," answered Sir Anthony. "You were saying just 
 now that idealism means wastefulness, because idealism 
 (according to you, at least) implies that painting, 
 instead of giving us what can be given only by itself, 
 attempts to give us such things as are better given to 
 us by literature — was not that your argument? 
 Well, I want to show you that realism, on its side, 
 can result, and indeed has resulted, in just the same 
 sort of wastefulness. Your realistic painters, the 
 French and Italian particularly, go upon the principle 
 that art has the power, by means of faithful repre- 
 sentation, of giving us pleasure out of the slightest 
 things ; is it not so ? " 
 
 " Yes ; and the principle is, I think, a true one,"
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 253 
 
 replied Carlo, proudly. " Modern art has proved to 
 us that a thing too trifling to be mentioned, a little 
 dust and sky, for instance, will make a picture, and a 
 picture which may be delightful ; and that, once out- 
 side the domain of absolute aesthetic satisfaction in 
 the beautiful, there is nothing so trumpery, vulgar, 
 nay, ugly, that it cannot serve at least to display the 
 technical skill, the individuality of eye and mind and 
 hand, of the painter. Do you remember Manet's 
 picture of the ' Bar of the Folies Bergeres ? ' Nothing 
 more trumpery, or even more vulgar, could be 
 imagined than the coloured liqueur-bottles and glasses 
 on the counter, the wet cab-roofs in the distance; 
 and yet there was interest, and even beauty, in 
 those coloured bottles and glasses, in those wet, blue, 
 shining cab-roofs." 
 
 Sir Anthony nodded. 
 
 " Exactly," he remarked. " Well, modern writers 
 of the sort calling themselves realists have recognized 
 this power in modern painting, nay, in some instances 
 they seem to have guessed the intention of art, and 
 to have forestalled it. Hence, especially on the Con- 
 tinent, where realism reigns supreme, a deluge of 
 minute descriptions which the mind strains to realize, 
 and which, realizing, it most often loathes. Hence, 
 what is even worse, the mania for the minute enume- 
 ration of the colours and shapes of things as seen at 
 a given moment ; all action in time carefully left 
 out, because action in time cannot be shown in a
 
 2 54 BALDWIN. 
 
 picture. Eveiy visible object in a room or a street 
 catalogued, as if instant death would follow on 
 the smallest omission. Everything there, appallingly 
 there, except — except, what do you think ? Except 
 those things which are the essential, unique pro- 
 perty of literature : action, feeling, sequence of ideas, 
 association of impression — the things, in short, 
 which a painter cannot give, and a writer can." 
 
 " Modern descriptive passages," said Baldwin, 
 " always remind m.e of the fury of an old music- 
 master of mine with the stupidity of those fellows 
 who make piano-arrangements of operas ; he used 
 to point out to me how they carefully copied into 
 their versions every little note of the full orchestral 
 score, forgetting that the note which, given by an 
 insignificant instrument in the midst of a whole 
 orchestra, merges into the general effect without 
 being individually perceived, will, if given on the 
 piano, and therefore in perfect equality with the 
 other notes, acquire a value, a distracting, fatiguing, 
 impertinent value, which was never intended by 
 the composer," 
 
 " That's just it," answered Sir Anthony ; " these 
 young realistic writers think it necessary to trans- 
 cribe all those things which the artist transcribes, 
 forgetting that he copies them on to his canvas, 
 that is to say, on to a second reality, which affects 
 the mind with much the same graduation as the 
 original rcalit}' ; whcxas the writer copies them
 
 THE VALUE OE THE IDEAL. 255 
 
 directly on to the consciousness of the reader, where 
 they have a very different vakie. They are thrust 
 upon him, like the unnecessary notes of the piano- 
 arrangement, instead of going thereby to form part 
 of a vague general impression. They arc treated 
 as if they were the equals of those more important 
 items which the mind has instinctively selected and 
 re-arranged in its reproduction of the real scene. 
 The result is complete falseness of perceptional and 
 emotional values; the impression produced is crowded, 
 out of perspective, utterly crude and glaring. And 
 this is not all. There is the much worse result 
 of falsifying our impressions by leaving out, or, at 
 all events, clogging and checking, those effects which 
 only words can produce, and which are as inevitable 
 and indispensable to our intellectual perception of 
 things as are the shadows, gradationsi of tints, and 
 the hundred and one similar details, to our visual 
 perception of them. To leave out, in a description, 
 the action we understand, the emotion we guess at, 
 the feelings we ourselves share, is as false in point 
 of fact as to leave out in painting the ground upon 
 which people move, the light in which they are seen ; 
 indeed, it is even falser, since what is shown to our 
 eyes, however badly, we do actually see; but what is 
 shown badly to our mind we do not see at all. I 
 have ventured to make these remarks," added the 
 old painter, subsiding from the excitement of un- 
 wonted discussion to his usual gentle and delicately
 
 256 BALDWIN. 
 
 ironical manner, "because you accused idealism of 
 being wasteful, of doing the thing which need not 
 be done, and omitting the thing which requires 
 doing. It seems to me, so far as I can judge, that 
 modern realistic description is itself an instance of 
 this mode of proceeding." 
 
 Carlo rose from the wall. 
 
 ■' You must give me time to muster my thoughts. 
 Master," he said. " I feel as if you had bowled me 
 over ; and yet — and yet — " he added, laughing, " I 
 feel as if I were a realist still." 
 
 The old painter strolled along the grassy path, 
 powdered over with hemlock, between the low sweep- 
 ing garlands of green vines, accompanying his two 
 friends out of the villa grounds. 
 
 " You will not always remain a realist, take my 
 word for it," he said, with that curious smile in the 
 curls of his beard, as he stood under the ivied pent- 
 house gate, looking after Baldwin and Carlo strolling 
 out into the corn-fields, which shimmered and 
 throbbed, all a hum and a buz with insects, in the 
 yellow afternoon sun. 
 
 The two young men walked along for a moment 
 in silence, which the half English, half Italian, and 
 wholly cosmopolitan lad was the first to break. 
 
 " I don't know what to think about it," he said to 
 Baldwin. " I know that my portfolio is crammed 
 with manuscript descriptions of which I was very 
 proud ten minutes ago, and which exactly answer to
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 257 
 
 the Master's account of everything that a descrip- 
 tion should not be : pages and pages of inventory 
 of tints and shapes, and effects of h'ght without a 
 scrap of human interest about them. And yet, at 
 the same time, I feel that there's sophistry some- 
 where ; and that although my descriptions, and 
 every one else's nowadays, may be all wrong, Sir 
 Anthony's pictures are not all right." 
 
 " Sir Anthony's pictures are all wrong for the 
 selfsame reason that your descriptions are all wrong, 
 my dear Carlo ; " answered Baldwin ; " and, what is 
 more, his attack upon your school of literature is 
 well founded, for the same reason that your attack 
 on his school of painting is well founded also. 
 Both of you are theoretically for each art doing 
 the particular sort of work which it does better 
 than the other arts ; and both of you are practically 
 for your own art attempting the work which it does 
 less well. He tries to produce literary effects in 
 painting, and you try to produce pictorial effects 
 in literature." 
 
 " You think, then," said Carlo, " that the Master 
 was merely carrying the warfare into the enemy's 
 camp, when he argued that realistic art is just as 
 wasteful as idealistic ; that he was merely retorting 
 about a minor point? You don't think that what 
 he said really affects the question of the superiority 
 of idealism or realism ? " 
 
 " I think," replied Baldwin, " that Sir Anthony is 
 18
 
 25S - BALDWIN. 
 
 a remarkably clever man, who knows how to get the 
 better in an argument ; but I think that, like most 
 artists, he can reason only in self-defence. After 
 all, he merely attacked you upon the very same 
 point upon v^hich you had attacked him : you had 
 demonstrated that idealism, or what you consider 
 idealism, is occasionally wasteful ; he demonstrated 
 that one could say just as much about realism." 
 
 "That's true," said Carlo, cheerfully: "what he said 
 proved nothing against the theory of realism. It's 
 very silly of me to have let myself be shut up. I 
 suppose these old idealists are full of little dodges of 
 attack and defence like this." 
 
 Baldwin laughed. 
 
 " You feel as if you were up to all these little 
 dodges, now, don't you?" he asked; "as if you 
 could demolish poor Sir Anthony and the ideal for 
 good and all ? " 
 
 " Why do you say that ? I am not so conceited, 
 indeed. But I think you could do the demolishing, 
 and I should like to look on. Will you tackle him 
 this evening } Oh, do, Baldwin, do please demolish 
 the ideal in my presence." 
 
 Carlo's eagerness to become his disciple, his curious 
 mental attitude, at once modest and militant, like 
 that of one of Plato's youths, greatly tickled Baldwin. 
 
 " But what will you say to me if I answer that I 
 can't demolish idealism. Carlo ; and if I confess to 
 you why I can't demolish it } "
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 259 
 
 " Why can't you, Baldwin ? Why ? You arc not 
 afraid of the Master, surely ? " 
 
 " I'm not afraid of the Master ; I am afraid of you. 
 You will never listen to me again if I tell you why 
 I can't attempt to demolish idealism," 
 
 Carlo seized Baldwin's hand. 
 
 " Oh, Baldwin," he cried, " please, please tell me ! — 
 don't be disagreeable ! — please tell me ! " 
 
 Baldwin laughed as he looked at this eager, 
 humorous young philosopher, trying to wring the 
 drops of wisdom out of him. 
 
 " Well, but how shall I put it ? Prepare yourself 
 for something very startling and dreadful. I can't 
 demolish the ideal, my dear Charlie, because — because 
 — because, in short, I believe in it myself ! I am an 
 idealist, there's for you." 
 
 Carlo stopped for a moment, not knowing whether 
 to be amused or perplexed. The young enthusiast 
 for modernness had sought out Baldwin because he 
 had always heard of Baldwin as a man of advanced 
 modernness of views ; and he had always a lurking 
 fear, being endowed with a good sense of humour, 
 that his self-chosen guide and philosopher might be 
 taking a pleasure in seeing how much the disciple 
 could be made to swallow on the score of modernness. 
 
 " You are making fun of me, Baldwin," he said, 
 his dark Renaissance face perplexed with an in- 
 cipient laugh, as he mechanically dissected a lace-like 
 star of hemlock-flower.
 
 26o BALDWIN. 
 
 " I am not making fun of you," said Baldwin, 
 " I am merely saying the truth. I believe, for my 
 part, in idealism quite as much as Sir Anthony." 
 
 "No, I can't believe that you are serious." ex- 
 claimed Carlo ; " don't be so cruel as to tease me. 
 How can }'ou believe in idealism — you who are 
 always saying that we must face the reality of 
 things ? How can you, who are always refusing to 
 submit to arbitrary standards, admit of art which 
 does things by a compromise, making them a little 
 less real here, a little more real there ? Nonsense ! 
 I remember how you answered the Master the 
 other day, when he said that ideal portrait-art was 
 the representation of the individual as he never is 
 at any given moment, but as you get him by striking 
 an average." 
 
 " I certainly don't believe in Sir Anthony's idealism," 
 answered Baldwin, stopping to light his cigarette ; 
 " but can't you conceive any idealism besides his > 
 To me idealism has value only inasmuch as it 
 develops the resources of art and enables art to do 
 more for us. Now, idealism, such as Sir Anthony 
 understands it, does just the reverse : it gives a 
 scientific formula instead of an artistic manifestation ; 
 it transfers the necessities of our mode of thought 
 to the mode of existence of real things. An ab- 
 straction of a man such as he would like to paint 
 is no better than a diagram in a book of anatomy." 
 
 " I know ; that is what you said to him. And,
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 261 
 
 what I can't understand is that, having said tliat, 
 you should now stick up for just that same sort of 
 dcHberate alteration of things in conformity to some 
 abstract notion." 
 
 Baldwin shook his head. 
 
 " Not at all," he answered. " Make up your mind 
 to this, that when I speak of idealism I mean some- 
 thing quite different from what Sir Anthony means. 
 To me, idealism does not imply deliberate alteration 
 in conformity to an abstract notion ; it does not 
 even necessarily imply alteration of any sort what- 
 ever. It means merely the attempt, conscious or 
 unconscious, to obtain for the soul a special sort of 
 satisfaction, or something approaching to such a 
 special sort of satisfaction, which may, according to 
 the case, be obtained by mere selection, or by mere 
 accident, or, again, may be obtained by what you call 
 the alteration of things. For me the ideal means 
 simply the sufficiently beautiful, the something that 
 satisfies, the great desideratum ; and the desire for 
 this perfect satisfaction, the quest of this supreme 
 desideratum, is what I call idealism." 
 
 They were strolling along through the fields, which 
 the sun filled with a vague golden green haze before 
 hiding behind the high Apennine peaks all round. The 
 leaves of the vine-supporting poplars quivered like 
 flakes of greenish gold in the sunshine ; the poppies 
 flamed like drops of scarlet fire by the road-side, 
 and here and there a clump of rye, no longer green,
 
 262 BALDWIN. 
 
 but not yet yellow, stood out in the bright light, 
 each separate long silvery blade and lustrous bristly 
 ear seeming to twist and erect itself like wire which 
 rebounds. 
 
 " But why call it idealism ? " asked Carlo. " What 
 has the desire for beauty to do with the idealism of 
 men like Sir Anthony, that you should confuse them 
 together ? If you want something perfectly satisfying, 
 something supremely desirable, why seek for it 
 outside reality? Doesn't an evening like this one, 
 in such a spot, nay, in a hundred such spots, give you 
 all you can wish : does it not satisfy you ? Or 
 rather — how shall I express it ? — does it not give 
 you something more almost than satisfaction, a sort 
 of half nostalgic feeling, due not to deficiency in the 
 object, but to deficiency in our own power of enjoying, 
 to the strain on our feelings of taking in so much 
 delight, the sort of feeling which makes all beautiful 
 music pathetic } Don't you feel that the reality of 
 this moment gives you that ? " 
 
 As he spoke, and the low light enveloped his brown 
 face in a sort of aureole, the lad really looked as if 
 he felt that strain of incapacity to take in so much 
 pleasure. 
 
 "Certainly I feel that," answered Baldwin, as they 
 walked along ; " but did I not tell you just now that 
 this satisfaction, which I call ideal, can come to us 
 by mere accident, that we can receive it, and do 
 receive it constantly, ready made at the hands of
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 263 
 
 nature ? Why, it always seems to me that the artist 
 of landscape, the man who has the keenest desire for 
 the superlative satisfaction of external things, may 
 require to do but little save study, and nothing miorc 
 than select. Hills and valleys, and light and sky 
 and plants, are just as beautiful as we can conceive 
 them ; a painter need only bring home their beauty 
 to us, or pick out the rarest instances of that beauty. 
 There is so much physical beauty in the world that 
 one might think that, except as regards the human 
 form, we might almost dispense with art ; or, rather, 
 that art is scarcely more than the result of the joy 
 which we have had, its multiplication by its very rich- 
 ness, the means of fixing these joys for ourselves, or of 
 pointing them out to others." 
 
 " I suppose that is what Ruskin meant by saying 
 that art is the expression of our pleasure in God's 
 works," mused Carlo. 
 
 He had sat down on a bank of ferns, under 
 solitary chestnut tree, which shed its white tassels 
 on the moss. 
 
 The sun was just sinking over a high mountain ; 
 a little more and it would be completely hidden 
 behind it. Its rays, thrown up in great dust-like 
 beams, among the grey clouds above, expanded over 
 the mountain side, veiled it, nay, rather drowned it, 
 in a broad, luminous, grey pallor, a wash of lustreless 
 smoke-like silver, in which all shapes of trees were 
 lost, and only the deep embosomings of the hills
 
 264 BALD WIN. 
 
 appeared as unsubstantial blue depths on that silvery 
 unsubstantial faintness. Against the spectral luminous 
 grey of this smoky hill-side stood out the luminous 
 tops of the tremulous poplars by the river, a tuft of 
 uncertain shimmer ; and, spread on their scintillating 
 clear silveriness, the tall bearded stems of a ripening 
 r3'e-field, visible almost separately or interweaving 
 like cobweb in the sunshine. And in front, in the 
 immediate foreground, the tall silver poplars (which 
 sing the same note in the southern quire of colour 
 as the lady birches do in the north) intertwined, in 
 large simple lines, their dazzling white trunks, their 
 dazzling silver branches, against the luminous grey 
 smoke of the mountain side, against the shimmer of 
 the silver sky. 
 
 "Art," said Baldwin, "is, as Ruskin says, the 
 expression of man's pleasure in the works of God. 
 But art is also, and quite as much, the expression of 
 man's dissatisfaction with them." 
 
 " I don't follow your meaning, Baldwin." 
 
 " I mean," answered Baldwin, " that art is simply 
 the practical result of a hunger of our soul, which 
 the real things of this world may or may not happen 
 to satisfy." 
 
 "At that rate," remarked Carlo, "art would give 
 us merely the same sort of satisfaction as nature." 
 
 " As nature sometimes gives us, mind you, but as 
 nature frequently also refuses." 
 
 "Then art is, according to you, in a position some-
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 265 
 
 what analogous to cooking : it helps out nature. 
 We paint a picture or compose a symphony because 
 the sights and sounds of nature are not sufficient to 
 satisfy our spiritual hunger, exactly on the same 
 principle that wc cook a piece of meat because there 
 are not enough apples or oranges to live off — is that it ? " 
 
 Baldwin laughed. " And also because we are so 
 constituted that a diet of nothing but raw fruit would 
 make us ill, my dear Carlo." 
 
 Carlo leaned back on the bank, and looked up 
 for a moment at the green fans of narrow, sun-per- 
 meated leaves and the tassels of white blossom which 
 the Spanish chestnut tree printed, like some huge 
 Japanese ornaments, on to the pale blue sky. 
 
 " Then allow me to say that you are contradicting 
 yourself," he remarked, after a minute. " You now 
 say that we can no more be satisfied with the mere 
 beauty of nature than we can be satisfied with mere 
 raw fruit. You compare art with the process of 
 cooking in so far as it changes the quality of our 
 mental food. And yet you seemed to imply that the 
 use of art is merely the same as the use of beautiful 
 nature. If that is the case, why should not nature 
 suffice .? " 
 
 " I certainly think that the function of art is the 
 same as the function of beautiful nature. They both 
 feed our soul in exactly the same way. As to your 
 culinary image, I can explain in a minute what strikes 
 you as a contradiction in my views."
 
 266 BALDWIN. 
 
 "No, don't!" exclaimed Carlo — "not yet, please, 
 because I think I can see my own way. I think I 
 have got hold of a train of thought ; I am not sure of 
 it yet, but I want to catch hold of it. I think I see 
 where you are wrong ; I think I can hit the mark. 
 May I try, Baldwin? " 
 
 Baldwin laughed. There was something very 
 pleasant in this young creature's delight in in- 
 tellectual movement quite independent of all 
 personal vanity or personal bias — the delight of a 
 young horse galloping round a paddock. 
 
 " Don't nip my idea in the bud, please, please^ 
 Baldwin ! " he went on, " but let me explain. I think 
 that, just as there is a difference between cooked food 
 and raw food, so there is a difference between the 
 pleasure we derive from nature and the pleasure we 
 derive from art. Haven't you left one item out of 
 your calculation ? Haven't you forgotten that art is 
 the expression of the mind of the artist .'' " 
 
 " I have not forgotten it any more than I have 
 forgotten the other great truth that cooked food is 
 the expression of the mind of the cook, my dear 
 boy." 
 
 " There you are making fun of me again, Baldwin ! 
 I think it is very cruel, when I am trying hard to 
 understand. Do you mean to deny that every work 
 of art owes the greater number of its constituent 
 qualities, of what makes us recognize it, to the pecu- 
 liar qualities of the artist who has produced it .'' "
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 267 
 
 " To the peculiar artistic qualities, certainly ; but 
 can you deny that the constituent qualities of a dish 
 are not due to the culinary qualities of the cook ? I 
 bring in your favourite culinary sinnile once more, 
 because I want to lay particular stress upon the fact 
 that the peculiarities of a work of art arc due to the 
 peculiarities of the machinery which produces it, 
 which machinery is the artistic organization of the 
 artist. If the artist is a colourist, colour will be the 
 predominant quality ; if a draughtsman, drawing ; if a 
 melodist, melody, and so forth. In this I don't at all 
 see how a work of art differs from a natural object : 
 that also owes its peculiarities to the causes which 
 produce it. If those hills are rounded in the particu- 
 lar way which, as you express it, makes us recognize 
 them, I suppose it is because they were produced by 
 a geological process which results in rounding ; if this 
 soil is red, I suppose it is because there is a certain 
 amount of iron in it ; if those mists take that particu- 
 lar silvery tone, I suppose it is because the light 
 strikes upon them in the way which makes mists 
 silver}-. All one can say is that things answer to 
 their producing cause ; whether that producing cause 
 be what we call a natural force or a mental force 
 seems to me to make no difference in the value which 
 the result may have, in the artistic enjoyment which 
 they afford us." 
 
 Carlo was silent for an instant. 
 
 " That is just where I think you are a little bit
 
 268 BALDIVIX. 
 
 sophistical. You talk of a work of art as the produce 
 of artistic machinery, as you would talk of natural 
 effects, like the shapes of these hills, the colour of 
 these mists, and so forth, being the produce of natural 
 machinery. You suppress one fact, which is that the 
 artistic machine to which we owe a picture, a statue, 
 a symphony, or a poem, happens to be a man, a thing 
 with consciousness, sympathies, a character, opinions, 
 and life, a whole individuality finding its expression 
 in his work." 
 
 " I suppress nothing of the sort, because nothing of 
 the sort exists to be suppressed. Don't look at me 
 as if you thought I was joking, Charlie ; but let me 
 explain. I said that a work of art is produced by an 
 artistic mechanism, which is the artist. Into this 
 artistic mechanism, this artist, there enters only so 
 much of the peculiarities of the man of whom this 
 artist is a part as can possibly influence the work of 
 art. You may cook a piece of meat on a fire made 
 of oak branches or of oak carvings by Grinling 
 Gibbons ; the roast beef may be better or worse for 
 the wood being dry or damp, hard or soft, but the 
 fact of the wood being carved into an ornamental 
 garland won't make the smallest culinary difference 
 And similarly with art. The fact of your Michael- 
 Angelo being a man of haughty and melancholy and 
 violent character may account in some measure for 
 the haughty and melancholy and violent faces which 
 he draws or models ; but the domestic relations and
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 269 
 
 political views of the man have nothing to do with his 
 artistic work." 
 
 " But the domestic relations and political views of 
 Dante have a great deal to do with the ' Vita Nuova ' 
 and the ' Divine Comedy.' " 
 
 "Did I not say just now that the peculiarities of 
 the man enter into the artist in proportion as they 
 can affect the art ? The very stuff of which the 
 ' Vita Nuova ' and the ' Divine Comedy ' are made 
 happens to consist of what you call domestic rela- 
 tions and political opinions ; of course, therefore, the 
 particular nature of those of Dante comes into play 
 and is expressed. But this does not alter the fact 
 that in a great many cases the man does not, and 
 cannot, enter into the artist ; and that it is therefore 
 no more necessary that we should see the traces of 
 an artist's human emotions in his works than that we 
 should find a proportion of iron in every sort of soil. 
 The iron is sometimes there and sometimes not there, 
 but its presence or its absence does not affect the 
 question whether the soil is or is not worth looking 
 at and painting. And it is exactly the same with 
 art : the fact of finding in it the expression of the 
 artist's nature has a scientific, but not an artistic, 
 value. This theory of art as an expression of an 
 artist's personality is due, I think, to our constantly 
 viewing art through the medium of critical literature, 
 which is, indeed, specifically, the expression of the 
 author's mind. All that art can show us, unless
 
 2JO BALDIVIX. 
 
 indeed it take the artist's feelings as its absolute 
 subject matter, is that each particular artist sees 
 things somewhat differently from his fellows, has 
 preferences, and reproduces in a different way the 
 object of these preferences. I prefer fair people, you 
 prefer dark ones ; I paint on rough canvas with a big 
 brush and a liking for cool colours, you paint on 
 smooth canvas with a fine brush and a liking for 
 warm colours : these are really the principal things 
 which a picture can tell us about the man who has 
 painted it. And therefore I say that we have no 
 right to consider that beauty in art affects us, 
 artistically, at all differently from beauty in nature," 
 
 Carlo mused for a moment. 
 
 " I don't think you are right," he said ; " there still 
 remains, for all that you have been saying, a some- 
 thing in art which does not exist in nature. Do you 
 remember Goethe says somewhere that art is that 
 which gives form ? Now, if it gives form, it must 
 evidently give form to something — there must be a 
 contents, a thought contained within this form." 
 
 " Art certainly gives form. And do you know to 
 what it gives form .^ — to its constituent elements, line, 
 colour, light and shade, or sound. The mistake is to 
 suppose, by a false analogy, that this form necessarily 
 encloses something ; a mistake due to a metaphor 
 which has quite passed into the language of aesthetics, 
 where we are always talking of contents, of that 
 blessed German invention, Iiihalt. Now it so hap-
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 271 
 
 pens that the non-artistic matter of art is in no 
 respect a contents. That is a false metaphorical 
 expression originating probably in the time when art 
 was looked upon as symbolic, its forms being a mere 
 shorthand writing ; and when consequently art, like 
 the symbols of ordinary writing, like a letter or a 
 book, got spoken of as having a contents. The form 
 does not contain anything — remember that. It may 
 have attached to it the more or less arbitrary thing 
 called a subject, or it may — I mean the form — be 
 constituted of elements fraught with emotional or 
 imaginative suggestion ; but in neither of these two 
 cases does the form contain the subject in the same 
 way as the body was supposed to contain the soul. 
 The elements of the non-imitative arts are fraught 
 with emotional and imaginative suggestion. In the 
 case of music it is the direct nervous power of tone 
 and movement, and the blurred and confused associa- 
 tions of feeling with it ; a suggestion due to the fact 
 that tone, rhythm, and so forth, are recognized dimly 
 and unconsciously as having been modes or concomi- 
 tants of expression. In the case of the imitative arts 
 it is the power of evoking past and distant images 
 and trains of thought owing to the fact of the things 
 used by the artist having been seen before in reality, 
 and suggesting therefore the significance which they 
 had therein. But this emotional and imaginative 
 suggestiveness engrained in the elements used by the 
 artist exist equally outside the art, and they may
 
 2 73 BALDWIN. 
 
 either be deliberately used or deliberately neutralized 
 or merely overlooked by the artist ; and whether he 
 deliberately employ or merely neglect these sugges- 
 tive elements, is a question outside the jurisdiction of 
 his special art, although within that kingdom of 
 emotion and imagination which surrounds it. Some 
 of the art which is most absolutely art is wholly 
 without intellectual contents ; you must have re- 
 marked this yourself" 
 
 " It is true as to pattern art, and colour art, 
 generally," answered Carlo, hesitating. " I suppose 
 there is really no intellectual contents, no Iiihalt, in a 
 Persian carpet, a Moorish lustre plate, or in the things 
 which come nearest to that — the pattern mosaics of 
 San Vitale and Galla Placidia at Ravenna. And I 
 suppose there are certain Venetian pictures which are 
 pretty well in the same case. Do you remember the 
 little picture of the death of Sophonisba, by Paul 
 Veronese, of which I am so fond ? The pale girl in 
 the shot iris and opal dress being stabbed by a 
 red-capped negro, the indifferent young man in scarlet, 
 the indifferent old man in shot purple and yellow — all 
 these are as simply and entirely so many notes of 
 colour as are the pale sky and the opalescent clouds. 
 The absolute negation of interest on the part of 
 actors and artist in what is going on makes it per- 
 fectly impossible to feel the slightest interest or 
 emotion connected with this picture. I suppose you 
 would say, Baldwin, that such a picture as this
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 273 
 
 appeals to us in the same way as a sunset or an 
 evening sky ? " 
 
 " Not only this picture, but every picture, in so far 
 as it is a picture. Some of the noblest works of 
 linear art (for you have been speaking of colour), not 
 merely arabesques of carving or stalactite of architec- 
 tural decoration, but actual human figures, appeal to 
 us, and can appeal to us, only as form : the draped 
 fragments from the Parthenon, the Belvedere Mercury, 
 the naked men of Signorelli, the draped virgins of 
 Andrea — all these appeal to us as exclusively by their 
 form as does a pattern in lace. It is useless to object 
 that they represent something, namely, men and 
 women ; we perceive that only as part of the fact of 
 their being form, and form only. In none of these 
 things, if we enjoy them, do we seek for an Inlialt!' 
 
 " Don't you think you are turning artistic enjoy- 
 ment into something rather soulless, Baldwin .'' " 
 
 " My dear Carlo, I am merely arguing that we 
 enjoy art in the same way that we enjoy nature ; 
 and I have never heard it called soulless to enjoy 
 nature. Ask yourself where is the difference } Don't 
 the marvellous peacock harmonies, the branching, 
 spreading, and interlacing sea blue, and sea green, and 
 russet gold of those Ravenna mosaics, appeal to the 
 same faculties as the even more marvellous colour 
 harmonies of the peacock's tail and breast ; don't the 
 sun-permeated flesh and shot draperies of Veronese's 
 pictures affect us exactly as would the sun-permeated 
 
 19
 
 274 BALDWIN. 
 
 flesh, the shot draperies of some living woman ; and 
 don't the throat and neck and head of the youths 
 in Signorelli's frescoes arrest our attention as would 
 the similar throat and neck and head of a beautiful 
 real youth ? We do not seek for an explanation of 
 the how and why, for an expression of the artist's 
 nature, in natural things ; nor for an intellectual 
 contents of their beauty ; and, as a matter of fact, we 
 do not look for any of these things at the moment 
 that we are really enjoying art. And therefore I 
 say that art merely adds to the stock of beaut}^ which 
 nature has given us : it completes and multiplies it 
 when deficient." 
 
 " You may be right, so far," remarked Carlo, half 
 assentingly. " But I don't see how what you have 
 been saying just now bears upon the question of 
 realism and idealism." 
 
 They were strolling once more along the grassy 
 Dath, between the compact masses of tall dark green 
 hemp, and the heavy garlands of vines hanging from 
 tree to tree. The sun was now hidden behind the 
 high mountain peaks ; the valley was filled with a 
 greyish-green mist, a dewy freshness, as of all this 
 young green, and with the vibration of the long, 
 quavering note of the cicalas in the trees and the 
 crickets in the grass. 
 
 " What I have been saying, namel}', that the 
 beautiful things of art give us the same sort of 
 emotion as the beautiful things of nature, supplement
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 275 
 
 them so to speak ; what I have been trying to prove 
 to you, my dear Charlie, bears upon the other question 
 because I told you before, that our soul is for ever 
 craving after something sufficiently beautiful, some- 
 thing satisfying, which something I call the ideal." 
 
 " But why should you call that satisfaction ideal ? " 
 insisted the lad, to whom the word was particularly 
 obnoxious. 
 
 " In contradistinction to the real ; because the 
 enjoyment of this particular quality, and the desire 
 for it, are independent of the fact of its existing in 
 reality, or of its being artificially made up. Because, 
 more particularly, the standard by which we measure 
 this desideratum is not outside ourselves, but inside ; 
 not in real things, but in our feelings." 
 
 " Upon my word, Baldwin, one would think that 
 you believed in innate ideas!" exclaimed Carlo. 
 
 " I don't believe the least in innate ideas," answered 
 Baldwin, amused at the young man's look of horror ; 
 " but I don't believe either that our minds and feelings 
 are merely whitewashed walls, on which the external 
 world projects its magic-lantern figures. Every real 
 impression that we receive decomposes and leaves 
 behind it a greater or lesser amount of fragments 
 of itself : broken-down impressions, sometimes a mere 
 minute dust, which live on within us. And the 
 aggregate, constantly shifting, of all this living dust 
 of broken impressions, lives and has its necessities of 
 life, its sympathies and desires. In speaking of the
 
 276 BALDWIN. 
 
 aesthetic or imaginative sides of our life," went on 
 Baldwin, " we are apt to think of them as composed 
 of distinct impressions, voluntary and well-defined, 
 the seeing of a picture or piece of architecture, the 
 reading of a poem, the hearing of a song or sym- 
 phony. Nothing could be further from the fact. Our 
 aesthetic life goes on within us, or if not constantly in 
 fact, constantly at all events potentially ; and in this 
 the new sights or sounds play no more part — nay, I 
 think, play less — than do new facts in our intellectual 
 life. As this latter is an almost permanent process 
 — a process of constant weighing and comparing and 
 classifying of our ideas — so likewise is our resthetic 
 life an almost permanent process, infinitely vaguer 
 and more delicate, and, to a great extent, unconscious, 
 a kaleidoscopic shifting and rearranging of all pleasant 
 impressions of colour, sound, form, or emotion. The 
 fact is, that we live much more in the past of our 
 aesthetic impressions than in their present : our 
 aesthetic life consists really in the fluctuations, the 
 mov^ements, of these, if I may call them so, living 
 molecules of aesthetic feeling ; it consists of the action 
 and reaction produced within us by any new impression 
 that we receive. It is for this reason that the value 
 of art must not be measured, as I said, by conformity 
 to a reality which is outside us, but by conformity to 
 these feelings within us. Remember, what you re- 
 alists forget, that there is not merely the real constitu- 
 tion of external nature to be taken into account ;,,
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 277 
 
 there is, what is much more important, the real nature 
 of our soul." 
 
 For a moment Carlo did not answer. 
 
 " Then, according to you," he said, as they walked 
 along a narrow lane between the ridges of corn and 
 hemp, wdicre goats and sheep nibbled at the fern and 
 honeysuckle ; " according to you, art is there, so to 
 speak, for the express purpose of gratifying the 
 fantastic requirements of this fantastic living mass of 
 heterogeneous broken-down impressions within us — 
 art is not there to register our knowledge of 
 reality?" 
 
 " Only incidentally, so far as reality is, after all, the 
 storehouse whence the majority of our impressions 
 come. Art registers our knowledge of reality when 
 reality happens to coalesce with that which constitutes, 
 as I have said, our aesthetic life; when, in short, reality 
 is what we term beautiful." 
 
 " But art is continually doing the very opposite, 
 registering reality pure and simple, merely because it 
 is reality, Baldwin." 
 
 " Art does it, and does it especially at present ; but 
 to do so is, whenever it happens, a new, a false start, 
 due to the mixing up of scientific interests, or to the 
 usurpations of technical knowledge or skill, the 
 usurpations of the /c'^t'^r of doing. But you will find 
 that while left to itself, while in possession of unex- 
 hausted means, and while absolutely spontaneous, all 
 art tends, as Pater has said, to the condition of
 
 27S BALDWIN. 
 
 music. I don't know what Pater exactly meant by 
 that remark." 
 
 " I think he was probably merely repeating Hegel's 
 old theories about music being the romantic art, and 
 all other arts tending towards the romantic condition," 
 interrupted Carlo. 
 
 "I dare say he did. But the saying to me expresses 
 a far more important truth: all art tends to the con- 
 dition of music, that is to say, to the condition of 
 producing freely, with reference not to a pre-existing 
 reality, but to the desires of our soul." 
 
 " At that rate," answered Carlo, incredulously, " a 
 perfect piece of artificiality, a monstrosity, like the 
 opera, is the typical form of art." 
 
 Baldwin was not at all put out by this remark. 
 
 " Exactly so," he said ; " and so, from the Greek 
 tragedy to the great ceremonial altar-pieces of the 
 Venetians, where madonnas and saints and real 
 people sit and stand among clouds and lamps and 
 garlands, none taking heed of his companions, all 
 the greatest and most spontaneous art has been. 
 And this is exactly what I want to prove to you, 
 and what I shall prove to you in five minutes, I 
 hope — I mean that realistic art is an after-thought, 
 an artificial growth ; and idealistic, unreal art, a direct, 
 spontaneous one. I hope we may be in time for the 
 demonstration of this fact." 
 
 And Baldwin nodded in the direction of the village 
 towards which they were walking, its semicircle of
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 279 
 
 black walls, overtopped by houses and a ruined 
 castle and belfry, and open loggias, nestling among 
 the poplars and vines of the hill-side, against the 
 ultramarine of distant mountains, like the back- 
 ground of some picture by Cima or Bellini. 
 
 " Where are we going ? " asked Carlo. 
 
 " You shall see," answered Baldwin. " To some- 
 thing which will, I hope, illustrate my theory." 
 
 The lane was now steep and roughly paved, be- 
 tween banks where the lilac mint and starry hemlock 
 grew beneath trellisses of delicate green vines, and 
 high box edges, through the gaps in which you 
 caught a distant glimpse of hills, a sheen of mulberry 
 and wheat and vines, burnished golden green by the 
 sun, which had not yet disappeared in that wider 
 part of the valley. Women with great stacks of 
 freshly-mown grass and clematis and vinetrails on their 
 heads, clattered past them up the paved lane in their 
 light wooden clogs ; little brown boys and girls, bare- 
 foot, bare-armed, and bare-legged, drove sheep and 
 lazy grey cows down from the village to browse 
 along the road-side. From the little crown of for- 
 tified houses, bristling with towers, came the jangle 
 of bells. The time for work was over ; on to the 
 fields, the lanes, the farmyards which they passed, 
 peacefulness seemed to descend, permeating, like 
 rain, with the golden mist of the sunset. 
 
 "Such idealism, such artificiality," went on Baldwin, 
 " will, you may object, shock us ? We think so, but
 
 2So BALDWINS 
 
 the event proves the contrary. However much we 
 may appreciate the reality of Zola, we care none the 
 less for the unreality of Shakespeare. And why ? 
 Simply because the faculties appealed to by realism 
 are not the same that are appealed to by idealism : 
 the one have reference to what exists — are scientific, 
 analytic ; the others are creative, are longings of our 
 nature. To these longings of our nature things are 
 right, quite independently of any prototype they may 
 or may not possess in reality ; they are right, in the 
 sense that a pattern, a wilfully altered, composed 
 arrangement of lines and colours, is right to the 
 aesthetic sense. That people in great passion should 
 use the language of Lear or Hamlet is absolutely 
 incorrect to our perception of what is ; but it is all 
 right to our desires, v/hich, after all, are the best 
 judges of what they want. Nor are such desires 
 unreasonable. They attempt to combine, by means 
 of one art, effects existing scattered in our soul. 
 Thus in the balcony scene of 'Romeo and Juliet,' where 
 the words of the lovers give us not merely the im- 
 pression of their own sentiment, but also of that 
 sentiment which is awakened in us by the knowledge 
 that they are in a garden, and in the presence of 
 dawn, the poetry merges the thing actually pre- 
 sented to our mind with the impressions which that 
 object finds dormant already in it, and wakes up 
 with its presence. In this way the garden scene, 
 objectively false in the sense that no two people
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 281 
 
 would have spoken in that wa}^ becomes subjectively 
 most correct, embodying all the confused artistic 
 elements in ourselves. Similarly," went on Baldwin, 
 as they clambered up under the high walls of the 
 fortified village with foxglove and wild fig growing 
 on their blackness, " similarly with all that which 
 I should call the decorative and musical effects 
 introduced into the Shakespearian drama ; they are 
 perfectly true to our state of mind. Have you never 
 remarked how the thought of heroism, love, misfor- 
 tune, brings with it a perfect train of sights and 
 sounds? Except in our scientific moods, we feel 
 about Napoleon (when his face suddenly turns up 
 on a coin, or, for instance, as when you saw his 
 medal on that old tattered beggar the other day) 
 with a vague splendour as of Mantegna's triumphs, 
 a vague clangour as of Cherubini's music about him. 
 And we easily think of any dear and noble dead 
 person on a wave of music, and with a flutter of 
 flowers and a fragrance of incense. Is there not a 
 sort of framework of I know not what exquisite 
 things — light, music, pattern, nay, rather a visible 
 and audible aureole, round the figure of Dante's 
 Beatrice — nay, almost round any quasi-Beatrice of 
 our own ? Our desire for beauty, our sense of it, is 
 not analytic, like that for truth, but synthetic, col- 
 lecting round one image the gold-dust of a thousand 
 bruised impressions." 
 
 They had got to the gate, surmounted by the
 
 2<S2 BALDWIN. 
 
 Virgin's Image, of the little place. Everything 
 seemed very deserted, looking up its steep black 
 street between the high black houses ; and at the 
 well outside, under the big chestnut-tree, there re- 
 mained only two women, one wringing out linen 
 over the big stone tank, the other waiting for her 
 brass pitcher to be filled out of the rudely-carved 
 lion's head. And from a neighbouring group of 
 farm-buildings, hidden among walnut trees and box 
 hedges, came a scraping of fiddles, a quavering of 
 flutes, and gusts of a strange guttural chant. 
 
 " We are still in time. I am so glad. I feared it 
 might be all over," exclaimed Baldwin, and he 
 beckoned Carlo to follow him between the black 
 walls of the farm-buildings, to the place whence 
 the sounds came, now broken with loud clapping 
 and shouts, namely, a threshing-floor closed in by 
 boarding and sheets. 
 
 " What is all this ? " asked Carlo. 
 
 " It is the demonstration of my aesthetic theory," 
 answered Baldwin. 
 
 II. 
 
 The peasant play drew to a close. The last sun- 
 beam grazed the black farm-buildings, with the 
 fishing-nets and silkworm-mats fastened to their 
 walls, making the women's faces behind the sweet 
 basil and red cloves at the windows glow, red spots
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 2 S3 
 
 surrounded by a halo of sun-transfigured hair, against 
 the square of darkness ; merging the spectators 
 crammed on the threshing-floor beneath into a h'ght- 
 drowned confusion of auburn and blond of heads, 
 and scarlet and yellow and purple and black of 
 kerchiefs and hats and dresses ; creeping, a golden 
 braid, in between the ill-jointed deal boards, the 
 ill-sewn sheets, which closed in the rustic theatre. 
 
 The peasant play drew to a close. The tyrant had 
 been defeated ; the monster, with very obvious blue 
 trowsers protruding from his furry hide, had been 
 killed ; the two hapless princesses rescued. The sur- 
 viving virtuous persons were heaping benedictions, 
 in the long phrase of archaic chant, upon the con- 
 queror, while the fiddles and flutes and accordion 
 closed in each verse with two or three bars of 
 symphony. When all evil had been set right, and 
 the throne of Ormuz vainly offered to the good 
 knight-errant, when, so to speak, the world of that 
 rustic drama was filled with peace and glor}-, the 
 principal actors united into a group on the front of 
 the stage, the hero in the middle, and raised up their 
 voices, men and boys, into solemn choral song in 
 praise of virtue. The low }-ellow light eddied round 
 their heads, transfiguring the make-shift robes and 
 caftans of old rags and patches, the armour of tinsel 
 and tin-foil, into magnificent spots of crimson, and 
 green, and ultramarine, and shimmerings of steel 
 and of gold, while the good Prince, overtopping the
 
 284 BALDWIN. 
 
 rest in his scarlet tunic, beat time slowly with a 
 solemn movement of his beautiful strong bare arms, 
 his blond young head thrown back in beatitude 
 like some painted St. Sebastian ; the poplars and 
 young vines behind the boarding quivered golden 
 in the setting sun, and above the stage rose the 
 circle of fortified village, bristling among the green 
 with belfry and towers, and higher up, further yet 
 behind, the ultramarine mountains with delicate clear 
 outline against the white evening sky, flecked here 
 and there with rosy cloud-feathers. 
 
 Baldwin and Carlo walked slowly homewards 
 through the fields, while the rapid Italian twilight 
 fell around them over the plantations of ripening 
 corn and vines and serried fresh-scented hemp. 
 
 " I understand what you wanted me to see," said 
 Carlo, after a moment ; " it was very impressive and 
 beautiful. But art such as that is not possible for 
 us. Those people may pursue, and may attain, that 
 which to them is the ideal, because they are peasants, 
 because to them a story out of Ariosto, or Tasso, or 
 the Lives of the Saints, a few red and blue dresses, a 
 little tinsel, a little scraping of fiddles, constitutes 
 the ideal. But with us it is different. Our purely 
 aesthetic faculties are no longer so clamorous, and 
 our other faculties cry out for reality. We have no 
 great works, at least no great spontaneous works 
 (for I don't count your pre-Raphaelite eclectic decora- 
 tiveness of Morris and Swinburne) that belong to 
 such a conception of art."
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 285 
 
 " In the first place," answered Baldwin, " I cannot 
 admit of the justice of treating the art of Swinburne 
 and Morris as mere eclectic, culture stuff; it is as 
 spontaneous, given our civilization into which the 
 past enters so largely, as the art of Chaucer or 
 Spenser was spontaneous at the period when the 
 present ruled much more despotically. But letting 
 alone Swinburne and Morris, and putting aside 
 Tennyson, whom you might also accuse of not being 
 sufficiently spontaneous, there remains in our day 
 one of the greatest monuments of ideal art, great 
 in magnitude and completeness of beauty in the 
 same sense as some temple front or fresco decora- 
 tion on an immense scale : your own favourite poem, 
 which, by the wa}-, I made you read : ' the Ring and 
 the Book.' " 
 
 Carlo almost jumped for astonishment. 
 
 " Good gracious, Baldwin ! " he exclaimed, " you 
 must be stark staring mad ! Why, if ever there was 
 an instance of realism, it is 'the Ring and the Book' ! 
 Why, you will be putting down Zola's novels as 
 ideal art next ! " 
 
 " Zola's novels are not without their bits of 
 idealism every now and then," answered Baldwin. 
 " The girl who suffocates herself with the flowers in 
 ' L'abbe Mouret,' the madness of the husband and 
 wife in the 'Couquete de Plassans' — do you think 
 realism is responsible for that? But to return to 
 'the Ring and the Book' — do you remember the re-
 
 286 BALDWIN. 
 
 marks of your friend, the little Neapolitan novelist, 
 about the chapter called after Caponsacchi ? That 
 speech of Caponsacchi's, he said, is the most im- 
 possible rhetoric ; no man could by any kind of 
 chance hold forth in that way — the whole thing was 
 absolutely unnatural. And, from the realistic point 
 of view, so it is." 
 
 "Not at all," cried Carlo. "Caponsacchi is per- 
 fectly natural, and every word he utters is perfectly 
 natural, when once we understand the man and the 
 circumstances in which he is placed. . . . That talk 
 with our realist friend made me think over the 
 ' Ring and the Book ' very much, and I tried to note 
 down my impressions upon Caponsacchi. I think I 
 may have those notes in the book in my pocket : 
 would you mind — would you just let me read them 
 to you, Baldwin ? " 
 
 " Certainly, my dear boy, if there is light enough 
 for you to read by." 
 
 The enthusiastic young man had pulled a volumi- 
 nous note-book out of his pocket — a thing in which, 
 with the ardour of a young writer, he noted down 
 every little impression he received. 
 
 " May I really read it .'' " he repeated, with his 
 thumb between the pages. " It won't bore you, 
 Baldwin ? I should so much like you to hear that 
 note, because it bears upon the subject, and also 
 because I think it's the best thing I have done, 
 so far."
 
 THE VALUE OE THE IDEAL. 287 
 
 Baldwin nodded, and they slackened their pace 
 a little. 
 
 " To understand its naturalness — I am speaking 
 of Caponsacchi's speech to the judges, you know," 
 began Carlo — " to understand its naturalness, we 
 must understand not merely Caponsacchi in general, 
 but Caponsacchi at that moment. To say that he 
 is a good, pure, and chivalrous man is to understand 
 only part of the matter. The moment when Capon- 
 sacchi is called to rescue Pompilia coincides with 
 the climax in the awaking of a singularly earnest, 
 noble, and, above all, singularly reverential and 
 poetical character in a man who has hitherto been 
 (as some natures undoubtedly remain during years) 
 morally dormant and, in a way, only half fledged. 
 The end of his original state of half-life is heralded 
 by a daily increasing discomfort therein ; the soul, 
 so to speak, quickening within the body. We have, 
 in a much baser character, a somewhat similar 
 phenomenon in Alfieri ; we have it very notably in 
 St. Augustine. When, therefore, this soul is finally 
 awakened, or rather born, it finds among all its 
 surroundings nothing that answers to its cravings, 
 since Caponsacchi has seen religion too close to 
 become an Augustine; and these cravings, ideal in 
 their very essence, become the more so for remaining 
 unsatisfied, for it is the nature of the desire for the 
 always higher never to find satisfaction. At this 
 moment Pompilia crosses his path ; his urgent desire
 
 288 BALDWIN, 
 
 for something to which to devote his stored-up moral 
 energies flings, fastens itself upon her, attracted by 
 what to such a nature is a great attraction, the 
 thought of injustice, and stimulated by the inherent 
 tendency of such a late-born soul — which, however 
 much its possessor may have lived before its exis- 
 tence, has not lived long enough to be blunted by 
 reality — the tendency, I mean, to make more beau- 
 tiful and appealing whatever is so already. 
 
 " Pompilia, to this man, is not merely the reality, 
 the merely pure and lovely and injured woman ; she 
 is the first thing that may become that which his soul 
 longs for, the ideal ; and hence she becomes it. He 
 knows her no better than Dante knows Beatrice ; he 
 really sees not her, but the state of mind she pro- 
 duces in himself A priest seeking for a new god, 
 Caponsacchi's soul bows down to Pompilia ; not to 
 the woman, but to the whole splendid moral vision 
 which he has evolved out of this woman. Such is 
 his state when he rescues her. Magnify this, then, 
 by the fact that, despite all his efforts, the victim has 
 succumbed, that the saint has become a martyr, and 
 you have the man's condition when he addresses the 
 judges. Nay more, and more potent : consider that 
 between him and this woman has come death, that 
 the already ideal has become, alas! the unattainable ; 
 consider that his poetic and idealizing nature is con- 
 vulsed, thrown into hundred-fold activity, by the 
 sudden fact of the martyrdom, by the sudden dis-
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 289 
 
 appearance of the thing for which he has lived from 
 out of the reach of the living ; consider all this, and 
 you will understand that there never was in all 
 poetry a moment more entirely lyric. All care of 
 reality had long ago ceased, aspiration after the 
 unknown perfection had long since begun ; and now, 
 under the stress not merely of love and reverence, 
 but of grief, and in the presence of death, the tem- 
 pestuous desire for moral perfection, the tempestuous 
 longing for the lost beloved, unchain all other vague 
 desires for beauty, and his soul is swept by them. 
 His speech is henceforth poetry — one might almost 
 say, music. All that is noblest and most lovely rises 
 to the surface : the rare, the exceptional only exists, 
 and leaves below it, far away, the ideas and words of 
 ordinary life. Over the body, transfigured, of Pom- 
 pilia, he casts the flowers which have bloomed up 
 within his mind ; and, as he sinks upon his knees 
 before the martyred saint, he does not speak, he 
 sings." 
 
 Carlo's voice trembled as he read the last lines 
 •of the note ; and there was a brief interval of 
 silence after he had replaced the note-book in his 
 pocket. 
 
 " All that you say about Caponsacchi is very just, 
 my dear Charlie, and I congratulate you on your 
 note. But what I can't at all understand is that, 
 having written that note, you should still imagine 
 that you are a realist." 
 
 20
 
 290 BALD WIN. 
 
 " I am a realist, but I don't at all deny that there 
 is within us, and even within mc, a tormenting desire 
 for the beautiful, the perfect — if you choose, the 
 unreal. But I consider this as one of our misfor- 
 tunes. The desire merely deludes us, for our ideal 
 can never be attained ; we rush after it, neglecting 
 whatever of interest we might iind to our right and 
 left, and all that we get is disappointment and 
 bitterness. Prose, prose, everything around us is 
 prose ! " he suddenl}' burst out, angrily beating the 
 grass and flowers from side to side with his stick 
 as he went along ; " don't you think, Baldwin, that 
 I have found that out yet, even at my age ? and 
 don't you see that it is just because I know that the 
 ideal torments us that I think a man should boldly 
 cast in his lot with mere reality ? You laughed at 
 me because I got so excited over that old man, with 
 the hairy chest and the medal of the Napoleonic wars, 
 who turned up at the villa. Well, that was idealism 
 on my part, what you laughed at. There was a gush, 
 a spurt at least, of poetry, of something fine — a 
 moment's imaginative emotion. If only one could 
 have fixed that moment ! But the very next the 
 mind, working on the subject, meets trivial details. 
 This old man — after all, what is he ? What has been 
 his life in its detail ? Nay, what were those very 
 campaigns, which seem so poetical, in their details ? 
 Prose, the ugly, the unsatisfactory ; that on which 
 the mind does not care to dwell. Is all, then, a
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 29F 
 
 mere moment, a combination, as it were, at a certain 
 angle, of our own fancy and the things outside us ? 
 the smallest alteration in the thing outside, or in our 
 own attitude, destroying all ? Is poetry, the beautiful, 
 the noble, in life, only as the breadth of a grain of 
 sand ? I am getting to think so, Baldwin." 
 
 Baldwin looked long at Carlo. 
 
 " Young idealist," he said, " who are merely shift- 
 ing your hopes to the real — that is what you are. 
 Of the things which we desire most, we can taste 
 but little, that is true ; and true especially as regards 
 such desires as these. And yet they do come, and 
 they are poignant and memorable, those moments 
 when in the real you find interwoven a thread of that 
 which our imagination spins, the dream-stuff which 
 makes the heroes and heroines of poetry. Is it not 
 so. Carlo ? There is nothing like it in the pleasure 
 ^vhich we receive from nature : the only thing coming 
 near to it is music. I have been watching you and 
 your psychological studies of late, my dear boy ; and 
 I know how you felt when there came home to you 
 the knowledge that in that splendid woman of the 
 world whose gait and manners and toilettes you 
 wanted to copy into a realistic novel, there existed 
 a sort of primitive, homogeneous, heroic soul ; that 
 there existed, under the same roof with you, and in 
 a seemingly prosaic creature, an all-absorbing passion 
 of sexless love and devotion. Nay, don't feel 
 ashamed of the pleasure which you felt. It was
 
 292 BALDWIN. 
 
 like having seen a grand sunrise or storm, like 
 having heard some great symphony. I understand 
 what you felt, my realist : you felt that you had 
 clutched the ever-retreating garments of the ideal, 
 heard the tremendous rustle of its wings, breathed 
 its breath as it rushed by " 
 
 Baldwin had put his arm affectionately round 
 Carlo's shoulder, and smiled as he noticed the shy- 
 ness, and almost shame, with which the lad admitted 
 that he could possibly be enthusiastic about anything 
 more human than an idea or a form. 
 
 It was rapidly growing dark. Here and there an 
 isolated hill-side pine or cypress printed its feathery 
 clearness upon the milky luminousness of the sky ; 
 but the valley was filled with mist and vagueness, 
 while the sawing of the cicala in the trees flagged, 
 and the hum of the beetles and crickets, the long 
 quavering note of the frogs in the reeds, made a 
 sort of twilight of sound. Between the garlands of 
 vines and the high-growing corn and hemp, now 
 mere blackish masses, there flickered the distant 
 lights of a procession which was winding through the 
 fields, the white shimmer of the wax, the Avhite 
 wreaths of the incense, the white cowls of the 
 peasants bearing banners and crucifix, mingling, 
 ghost-like, with the greyness of the fields. There was 
 something solemn and pathetic, and at the same 
 time pagan, bringing with it vague reminiscences 
 of Virgil and Tibullus, in this ending of a holiday.
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 29J 
 
 "Yes — I did feci like that," admitted Carlo, " but 
 even in the midst of that feeling, I said to mj-self, 
 ' Shall I see things in this light this time next year 
 — nay, even this time to-morrow?' And that is why," 
 he went on, " I say let us have none of this ideal- 
 ism in art. If the ideal torments us, cheats us, if we 
 cannot see the reality in life, let us see it boldly in art.'' 
 
 Baldwin smiled. 
 
 " You crave for the ideal in life, and you are to 
 seek after the real in art ! You strange creature ! 
 Does it not strike you that it might be more logical 
 to employ art to realize that ideal which escapes 
 you in life ? " 
 
 Night had closed in about them. The hills were 
 mere huge round masses of unsubstantial darkness ; 
 the trees stood out as solid black masses, with but a 
 few leaves trembling clear on the topmost twigs, 
 against the moonless deep blue sky. But between 
 the shadov>y trees the fireflies seemed to weave a 
 mystic network, as they rose and fell, crossed and 
 recrossed, palpitating sparks of green fire floating 
 swiftly across the path, and all around the mountain 
 slope heaved and scintillated with a thousand 
 quivering specks of light, a wave of darkness with 
 innumerable ever-changing, ever-movmg, rippling, 
 glittering, phosphorescent tips. 
 
 " I don't see that it is necessary," Carlo answered. 
 " Art has other things to do than to strain after our 
 ideals. You said that a man who paints landscape
 
 294 BALDWIN. 
 
 need do little besides copy what he sees, nothing' 
 more than select. Why, then, should a man Avho 
 paints human character and emotion be called upon 
 to enlarge, and alter, and idealize ? " 
 
 " Because moral beauty is in quite a different case 
 from physical beauty. It exists not in space, but in 
 time ; it exists not in the simple thing nature, but in 
 the complex thing man. It exists in momentary 
 flashes ; rarely permanent and never perfect. There 
 is, in our search after moral beauty, an element of 
 dissatisfaction, nay, despair ; at best of unrest and 
 suspicion, very different from the complete and quiet 
 satisfaction derivable from physical beauty. The 
 state of mind which produces an heroic action has but 
 a brief duration ; before and after it lies very often 
 what is trivial, sometimes what is base. Nay, worse, 
 the heroic action, the noble sentiment, do not occupy 
 the whole personality at once : heaven only knows 
 what mean desires may not be crawling over some 
 other part of the soul. Thus it continually happens 
 that we sec in physical nature an object, a scene, 
 quite as perfect as we can conceive it ; he or she is 
 fortunate, or very blind, who can find a character of 
 man or woman which, even during the time we might 
 spend looking at a sky or a group of trees, could be so 
 perfect throughout that they could bear being looked 
 at as long or as closely as a painter looks at his 
 model. Hence it is, that in our search for the moral 
 equivalent of physical beauty, we are all of us so
 
 THE VALUE 01- THE IDEAL. 295 
 
 much less realists ; we have to make up so much. In 
 order to enjoy a full and satisfynig joy like that given 
 us through our eyes so often, we are forced to take 
 the creatures who are to give it us out of reality into 
 the domain of art. Art, not of the professional artist 
 in human feeling, called poet or novelist, but art of 
 our affections and enthusiasms. Most of us, at least 
 of the better, are as great artists in this line as any 
 Phidias or Titian ; w^e know exactly what to blur and 
 what to accentuate, how to correct here, to leave out 
 there, how to place the creature from whom we 
 expect moral delight, or rather its image, in the very 
 most favourable light ; we make ourselves this 
 corrected, perfected image, and call it the reality. 
 We must all know, all of us who long for such im- 
 pressions, how we manipulate our conceptions of 
 people and events, how we almost consciously hide 
 all that detracts from our pleasure and magnify all 
 that gives it ; we know the pain, dull or sharp, of 
 having to undo our arrangements of light and colour, 
 of having to own that the portrait which we have 
 adored is idealized as no bodily portrait ever was. 
 In this matter we are all artists on our own behalf, 
 for we all seek beauty that transcends reality ; and 
 hence, I think, the necessity that, so far from being 
 enclosed within reality, art should boldly step into 
 this region of the ideal." 
 
 " Even at the risk of departing from reality ? " 
 asked Carlo.
 
 296 BALDWIN. 
 
 " Certainly — or I should rather say, in order to 
 depart from reality. To escape, at least, from its in- 
 terference, to get to a place where we need no longer 
 be afraid of the pleasure which we expect being con- 
 tinually spoilt by a lot. of trifling matters." 
 
 " But don't you see, Baldwin, that in order to 
 prevent the spoiling of these pleasures — the pleasures 
 dependent upon the realization, or partial realization 
 of the ideal — you would deprive us of the pleasure 
 which we derive from the perception of the reality. 
 I give you up Caponsacchi, because you say that 
 Caponsacchi is himself, so to speak, idealism incarnate. 
 But look at the other hero of the ' Ring and the 
 Book,' Guido Franceschini. What would become of 
 him if Browning had set up his poetical workshop in 
 that famous region of the ideal ? And yet you must 
 admit that we feel a poignant pleasure in reading his 
 speeches, a sort of thrill all over us when we exclaim, 
 * How true ! ' " 
 
 Baldwin nodded. " I was just going to mention 
 Guido Franceschini myself, as an exemplification of 
 part of my theory about the necessity for the ideal. 
 It is perfectly true that when we think of Guido 
 Franceschini we exclaim to ourselves, ' How true ! ' 
 and believe we have thereby explained everything. 
 As it happens, Guido is in reality very far from true, 
 infinitely less true than many a character in a novel 
 before which wc do not gape and cry, ' How true ! ' 
 Nay, Guido is, in great measure, false. Have you
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 297 
 
 ever come across a little book by a man called 
 Ademollo, ' Le Giustizic di Roma ' ? " 
 
 " Never," answered Carlo. 
 
 " It is a collection of summings up of the chief 
 criminal cases of Rome from the end of the seven- 
 teenth century, a sort of death register kept by the 
 confraternity which attended the condemned in 
 prison and on the scaffold. And among these 
 sLimmings up is that of the murder of Pompilia and 
 her reputed parents by Guido Franceschini. Well, 
 there you get the real Guido, and you see that this 
 man whom Browning has shown us as great, a 
 creature of the stature of Faust or Othello, was what 
 such a cardinal's parasite,outwitted cheat, and sneaking 
 murderer, could not help being — a very small person 
 indeed." 
 
 " The Franceschini of history may have been only 
 that, Baldwin ; but Browning had a right to create a 
 new Franceschini of his own ; and the Franceschini of 
 Browning's creation is true to nature, although he 
 may be false to history." 
 
 " Not at all. A man of the intellect and passion 
 of Browning's Guido, a man who could feel and think 
 and speak as he does, would certainly not have spent 
 his life tormenting a wretched little wife, nor ended 
 it ignominiously for a bungled murder : he would 
 have been a Sforza, a Napoleon, at the least a Caesar 
 Borgia. Why, therefore, do we instinctively exclaim, 
 ' How true? ' In point of fact not because that par-
 
 298 BALDWIN. 
 
 ticular exclamation expresses our feeling, but because 
 we have a feeling to express, and we make use of the 
 exclamation which comes most readily. Now, owing 
 to some original misconception of things, owing to 
 one of those many resthetical bungles with which the 
 world is rife, mankind has got to associate feelings of 
 admiration for the creations of the poet (and in a 
 measure those of the painter) with the recognition of 
 the fact that these creations have a familiar prototype 
 in reality ; than which few errors could be more 
 erroneous. We recognize, indeed, forms and characters 
 which we have seen before, we stretch out, as it were, 
 our mental feelers towards them, suck them in ; but 
 every faculty of our nature recognizes, as the needle 
 may be said to recognize the loadstone, the special 
 object of its desires — it sucks them in ; and the fact of 
 the recognition by certain aesthetic appetites of the 
 things which are their food has in reality no more to 
 do with the recognition of resemblance between a 
 natural object and its artistic imitation, than the 
 recognition by a hungry man of the smell of roast 
 meat has to do with the recognition of a tune we have 
 heard before : both are lively stretchings forth of our 
 faculties, and that is all. We exclaim, therefore, ' How 
 true ! ' partly from an engrained theory that only 
 inie tilings (whatever exact meaning we may choose 
 to connect with those terms) give us pleasure — ' Rien 
 n'est beau que le vrai, le vrai seul est aimable,' as 
 Boileau taught mankind, which, by the way, the
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 299 
 
 A\holc experience of the pattern arts, music, archi- 
 tecture, and so forth, goes to beHc. And we exclaim, 
 * How true ! ' partly from a dim perception of the 
 analogy existing between the recognition by our mind 
 of something which it had seen before, and the recog- 
 nition by our desires of the desired object. Forgive 
 this long piece of metaphysic, you will sec in a 
 moment how it bears upon Guido Franceschini, and 
 how Guido Franceschini bears upon the question of 
 realism and idealism. Well, as to Guido. In this 
 case recognition is not the recognition by our mind 
 of the reality of a villain, since, if only we think over 
 the matter, we sec that the likeness is far from perfect ; 
 it is the recognition by our aesthetic desires of one 
 of their special desiderata : the grand. The colossal 
 proportions of Guido's intellect and passions, abso- 
 lutely false to history, are delightful to our cravings 
 for moral (or immoral) ideals in the same way, and as 
 unintelligibly, as the particular curve of a hill or the 
 particular modulation of a song is delightful to our 
 cravings for form or melody. Do I make myself 
 understood, Carlo ? " 
 
 " Perfectly, Baldwin ; but " 
 
 " Have patience a moment, my dear Charlie. This, 
 I say, is the explanation of a thing being tnic to our 
 ivants, as distinguished from being true to our powers 
 of recognition ; and, as our powers of recognition have 
 ample scope in daily life, while our aesthetic wants are 
 kept on short commons, the emotion attendant on the
 
 300 BALDWIN. 
 
 recognition of the object of such wants, is infinitely- 
 more powerful than the emotion attendant on our 
 recognition of mere resemblance, and therefore the 
 artist who can awaken such emotion takes so much 
 higher rank." 
 
 Carlo was silent for a moment. 
 
 " But there is an emotion, and hence a foundation 
 for art, in all perception of reality," he said ; " an 
 emotion in all recognition, quite apart from beauty, 
 moral or physical." 
 
 " Yes ; but it is an emotion whose pleasureableness 
 or painfulness must be decided by other circumstances, 
 being in itself negative in nature. The representation 
 of a thing which we have seen before awakens our 
 attention, but that is all, unless some circumstance of 
 beauty or importance, of pain or pleasure, be attached 
 to the thing in question. There may be a little more 
 excitement, apart from the excitement of technical 
 criticism (which, of course, is another matter) in the 
 picture of a kettle than in the kettle itself; but the 
 excitement is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. But 
 when the object represented is one which has already 
 produced in us an emotion either pleasant or un- 
 pleasant, the going over the track, the re-opening of 
 the cicatrice left in our soul by this emotion, is often 
 more strongly perceived than the original making of 
 the track or cicatrice. There is an increase of effect 
 in the very act of recognition ; the description of a 
 beautiful scene delicrhts us because we were delighted
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 301 
 
 with the original ; but if we return to the original, we 
 shall be more delighted with it, in consequence of our 
 delight with the description, and in consequence also 
 of that storage and dissemination of connected im- 
 pressions of which I have spoken before." 
 
 " You are always taking for granted a sort of 
 internal manipulation of our impressions, Baldwin — • 
 always taking for granted something beyond the 
 mere impression from without, and the mere perceiving 
 mind, it seems to me." 
 
 " I am taking for granted, as I already told you, 
 that our mind is neither empty nor inactive ; that it 
 has an already assimilated contents, and instincts of 
 fresh assimilation ; that it is, in short, a living thing 
 with living necessities. And herein, by the way, lies 
 the chief fundamental difference between a realist of 
 your school and an idealist of mine ; herein, that 
 while the realist thinks only of the impression from 
 v/ithout, the idealist thinks also of the mind for whose 
 benefit the impression from without is to be elicited. 
 Art, my dear boy, exists, not because the things out- 
 side us clamour to have their portraits taken ; but 
 because the things, the desires, within us clamour for 
 a particular kind of satisfaction. After all, we paint 
 pictures and write poems to please ourselves, not to 
 please the stones and trees and skies, the dead heroes 
 and heroines who are none the wiser for our pro- 
 ceeding." 
 
 " To return to Guido Franceschini, or rather to the
 
 302 BALDWIN. 
 
 discussion which made us mention him," said Baldwin, 
 after a moment. " I said, at the beginning of our 
 conversation, that the artist who deals merely with 
 trees and skies and light and shade need scarcely do 
 more than copy, and nothing more than select ; and 
 you, my dear Carlo, said, if I remember correctly, 
 that as regards human character and emotion, the 
 beautiful, the noble, what we call p.oetry, is only as 
 the breadth of a grain of sand. Do you remember I " 
 
 " I remember, and I remember also my conclusion 
 that it would be wiser to learn to do without this 
 beauty and nobility and poetry of which Ave are per- 
 mitted to taste only that we may long for it and 
 starve," answered Carlo, fiercely. 
 
 "We cannot do without it, and we must not starve. 
 And art is there to prevent our starving ; and to 
 prevent our forgetting the nobler food of our soul, 
 and learning to live a baser life on baser spiritual 
 food. I told you that, as regards life and feeling, and 
 the men and women in whose life our feelings live, we 
 arc all artists on our own behalf, seeking to obtain, 
 making up, a beauty that transcends reality ; craving 
 for a kind of pleasure which is the most acute and 
 exquisite that our soul can enjoy. For this sort of 
 pleasure, which, when given us by reality, is so far less 
 perfect, is rarer than any other, but, when obtained, 
 more poignant : no physical beauty can make our 
 souls brim over with delight as this moral loveliness 
 when wc see it — see it in our mind, not imperfect and
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 303 
 
 fleeting as in realit}-, but with the stead}- and complete 
 perfection into which our soul has wrought it. \Vc 
 have such works of art, idealized portraits, all of us, 
 in our souls ; but they are portraits which fade and 
 alter, and against which our reason and our love of 
 truth are for ever revolting. Hence the good done to 
 us (far greater than the good done by any selecting 
 artist of material things) by the artist who gives us 
 certain imaginary creatures. Such beings are, alas ! 
 so ideal, that in contemplating, for instance, Pompilia 
 or Caponsacchi, or Jean Valjean, we experience some- 
 thing more than the mere humdrum pleasure in the 
 beauty of painting and sculpture, arts so near reality. 
 We feel the pleasure in artificial harmony and per- 
 fection, the same sort of pleasure, nay, almost the 
 very same pleasure, which is given us by the art of 
 beauty without a prototype on earth : I mean music." 
 They had entered Sir Anthony's villa, and were 
 waiting for the old painter on the terrace which 
 adjoined his improvised studio. For a few minutes 
 they leaned against the parapet in silence, looking out 
 into the summer night, vibrating with the quavering 
 notes of insects ; vibrating, one might almost say, with 
 the poignant scent of vague flowers and distant hay- 
 fields. The moon, very nearly full, was not very high 
 in the heavens, and small and luminous with a pale 
 sheen. While the sky opposite was a sea-green blue 
 which seemed to shed a light of its own, so bright 
 that not a star could be seen ; the sky, on the con-
 
 304 BALDWIN. 
 
 traiy, surrounding the moon was a pale, opalescent 
 luminousness, as of the bluish iridescence of mother- 
 of-pearl, through which the larger stars trembled as if 
 they were infinitely distant. Against it lay the line 
 of hills, misty, bodiless, blue, turned by the moon 
 into something of its own substance ; and underneath, 
 the trees of the villa gardens. Not a ray caught their 
 leaves, not a shimmer about them ; not a cypress 
 stood out solid against the sky ; but everything lay 
 wonderfully distinct and diaphanous : the white 
 blossom of some trees clear and shaken out, as it 
 were, in the pale blue night ; the other trees, cypresses, 
 elms, cedars, poplars, surrounded by an atmosphere 
 of blue luminousness, in which their branches, nay, 
 almost their leaves, seemed to float spread out, every 
 leaf and twig far apart and distinct, like the weeds 
 spread out upon the surface of a stream, the light 
 separating their parts, spreading them out like lace ; 
 the adjacent trees separate in this flood of opalescent 
 blue ; even the cypresses become semi-transparent, 
 like the veined and ribbed rose petals dried in a 
 book. 
 
 "Ah ! we want it, we want it, that something which 
 you call the ideal," said Carlo, leaning on the terrace 
 and looking into the night ; " we want it, Baldwin ; 
 and it is useless pretending that we do not. We want, 
 on such a night as this, the belief in a Cordelia, a 
 Clarissa, a Caponsacchi, a Jean Valjean; as we want, 
 sometimes, a voice to sing clearly out the part, to
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 305 
 
 bring it home to us, when we are playing some ex- 
 quisite music on a beautiful instrument. Wc want it ; 
 but is it right that we should have it? The satisfying, 
 the perfect, eludes us for ever in this world of reality ; 
 it can exist only, as you say, in our imagination. ^But 
 have we a right to pursue the unattainable, we who 
 have so many realities to clutch and to hold ; have 
 we a right to live in company with the imaginary, we 
 who must struggle for ever with the remorselessly 
 real ? " 
 
 Baldwin nodded silently as he listened to the lad. 
 
 " We struggle for ever with the real," he said, " and 
 we must struggle with it for ever. But ask yourself, 
 Carlo, in whose name does this battle go on ; or rather, 
 what is it within ourselves that urges us to struggle, 
 that struggles for us .'' The ideal ; the desire, if you 
 choose to call it so, of the unattainable, through 
 which alone all higher things are ever attained." 
 
 " People nowadays," he continued, after a pause, 
 " have a way of talking as if the one useful thing, the 
 one necessary, were to know the world such as it is. 
 True enough : but only in order that we should know 
 how to make the world, each of us so far as his power 
 goes, a little more like what it should be. With us, 
 who are no longer plants or beasts, a new kind of 
 selection comes into play ; and that selection means 
 the setting up in our mind of the model to which we 
 may as yet be unable to conform the things outside 
 us. Let us know the reality, and know the unreal ; 
 
 21
 
 3o6 BALDWIN. 
 
 above all, know the border-line of both. Let us crave 
 for complete satisfaction of our souls that we may 
 not grow enervate in satisfaction which is but partial; 
 let us seek the unattainable in order that we may not 
 stick fast and rot in the attainable." 
 
 " Then life, according to you, is to be a constant 
 straining after the unreachable, a race, a battle ? " 
 
 " Life is that already ; all else is death." 
 
 " But that is dreadful, Baldwin ; dreary and dread- 
 ful. Don't you see that you are telling us to care for 
 nothing which really exists } to be dissatisfied with 
 everything that is not the creation of our own nature, 
 with everything, in fact, which is a reality and a 
 certainty ? " 
 
 "As you grow older," answered Baldwin, "you will 
 learn that what your imagination and your heart have 
 made for you, and what resides within your own soul 
 is the one and only thing of which you can be 
 certain, the one and only thing which can never alter 
 and can never betray you. You will learn that the 
 great reality which is yours, unalterably and eternally, 
 is the ideal. ' 
 
 Sir Anthony had come out on to the moonlit ter- 
 race, and listened to the discussion. 
 
 " Well, young realist," he asked, " has Baldwin con- 
 verted you to believe in the ideal ? " 
 
 " Not yet ! " answered Carlo, " not yet. The ideal 
 is too distant, too vague. And the real seems to me 
 so full of endless and uncounted beauty and satisfac-
 
 THE VALUE OF THE IDEAL. 307 
 
 tion. Look there ! " and he pointed to the valley, 
 lying clear and blue in the moonlight, the soft, short 
 note of Shelley's Aziola gently dividing, as water is 
 divided by a boat's keel, the sort of silence made up 
 of the vague hum of insects. A firefly rose slowly, 
 shining green against the dark bushes, then golden 
 against the blue sky, till it was lost, a brighter star 
 merged gradually in the dimness of the real stars in 
 the heavens. 
 
 Sir Anthony smiled ; that curious, gentle, ironical 
 smile of scepticism towards everything foolish and 
 base. 
 
 " For the moment," he said, " be a realist, my dear 
 boy. At twenty-one you can still afford to seek in 
 reality for everything that you desire ; you can still 
 seek in reality for the ideal."
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM.
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 
 
 "What a pity gondoliers can't sing Tasso any- 
 longer ! " said Marcel, in his whimsical way, letting his 
 finger tips caress the green water as they rowed slowly 
 across the lagoon in the low afternoon light. "I should 
 have liked to hear the canto where the fairy steers the 
 knights across the summer sea, towards the enchanted 
 island, within sight of the great dead cities of the 
 Past — ' cadano le citta, cadano i regni ; e d'essere 
 mortalc par che I'uom sdegni' — do you remember? It 
 must have been so like this, don't you think? Do 
 repeat it to us, Miss Olivia ; or, better still, make us 
 the song of the fairy, about weighing anchor for the 
 land of unreality, and drifting, drifting, into the sun- 
 set, down into peace and nothingness." 
 
 " One doesn't feel sentimental and sing songs like 
 that when one is a professional poet. Monsieur Marcel 
 — one writes verses only when there is a volume to 
 finish and a publisher in the background ; " answered 
 Olivia, with that pleasure in treating poetry as a 
 mechanical trade., which was one of the wayward-
 
 312 BALDWIN. 
 
 nesses of her wayward poet's nature. " Besides, I 
 don't think our friend Baldwin would at all approve 
 of such songs as that, would he, Charlie ? " 
 
 Carlo looked up to his half-sister from where he 
 sat, meditating, with boyish rapture, upon possible 
 adjectiv^es as the boat skirted the long hedges of pale 
 yellow matting and pale grey tamarisk, overtopped 
 here and there by the russet leaves of a peach tree, 
 the vermilion fruit of a pomegranate ; while above, in 
 the sky of lilac blue, the sea-gulls eddied like snow- 
 flakes. 
 
 "No, indeed!" he exclaimed; "Baldwin might 
 capsize the gondola from utilitarian motives, if we 
 were to sing anything of the kind. Baldwin likes us 
 to be rational beings and to discuss philosophy, and 
 he thinks nothingness the most immoral thing that 
 was ever invented ; don't you, Baldwin ? " 
 
 Baldwin laughed from where he stood rowing at 
 the prow of the gondola, and, turning round, showered 
 the drops from his oar on to Carlo's head. 
 
 " Little boys mustn't make impertinent remarks to 
 old folk who know exactly when they were taken out 
 of Eton jackets," he said, as Carlo screamed in the 
 midst of his tirade. "I beg, moreover, to add," he 
 continued, working away at his oar, " that if any of 
 the present company decidedly prefer arguing on 
 metaphysics to looking about, it is not my unworthy 
 self, but my old friend Olivia and our distinguished 
 guest, Monsieur Marcel. Why, they were discussing
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSLMIS.V. 313 
 
 free-will and necessity like German mystics of the 
 fourteenth century all the time we were at Chioggia, 
 as if there were no houses, or sky, or water, or yellow 
 sails, or pretty girls to look at. My own discussions 
 are strictly limited to cases where a definite solution 
 or a practical result seems possible." 
 
 " That is because you are a utilitarian, Baldwin," 
 answered Olivia ; " you don't really care for meta- 
 physics." 
 
 " I hate them," interrupted Baldwin, as his oar cut 
 a deep turquoise gash in the green water. 
 
 " I know you hate them. That's your mistake in 
 life. You persist in thinking that logic has a practical 
 value, that we can get at what you call definite 
 solutions and useful results by its means ; Monsieur 
 Marcel and I don't feel at all so sure about that; 
 but we have the candour to admit that while we 
 don't expect to be much the wiser, or much the more 
 comfortable for our logical straw-splitting, we find 
 that logical straws-splitting, in itself, one of the most 
 delightful employments in life." 
 
 " After all," she continued, her metaphysical 
 spirit, which was as the prosaic side of her singular 
 lyric gift, once aroused — " after all, thought is only one 
 of our modes of existence, logic is but one factor in 
 life ; so where is the use of applying the laws of 
 thought to our other modes of existence, emotional 
 or aesthetical, or whatever they may be .'' Where is 
 the use of seeking a logical explanation for our
 
 314 BALDWIN. 
 
 feelings, for our preferences of good to bad and 
 beautiful to ugly, when logic has absolutely nothing 
 to do with these preferences ? All these things are 
 separate, parallel ; and we may walk on till doomsday 
 before we find their meeting place." 
 
 Carlo had taken his head in his hand. The young 
 man, devoured with a boyish passion to understand 
 all modern problems, to be a modern man, looked up 
 with perplexed and conflicting admiration at the 
 superiority of his elder sister, of her former playfellow 
 and domestic philosopher, Baldwin, and at this subtle 
 and brilliant Marcel, whose every written word seemed 
 fraught with a kind of clairvoyant suggestion. 
 
 " Half of our life at least," pursued Olivia, " is a 
 matter of the emotions ; and tell me whether our 
 emotions are logical ? You might as well say that 
 digestion is due to our reasoning faculties." 
 
 Baldwin handed over his oar to Carlo, and sat 
 down near Olivia and the young French critic. - 
 
 " I perfectly agree," he answered ; " but you forget 
 that to subordinate non-logical impressions and 
 activities to logical motives is one thing, and to seek 
 out by logical analysis the reasons of these non-logical 
 impressions and activities is another. Thought does 
 not make us prefer beauty to ugliness, nor good to 
 evil ; but thought, by explaining the structure of the 
 emotional or eesthetic apparatus, may explain the 
 reasons of their peculiar mode of action ; thought, 
 to take up your metaphor, is certainly no factor in
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 315 
 
 digestion ; yet it may enable us to understand what 
 digestion is, and why it is so." 
 
 The poetess shook her head. She was one of those 
 rare creatures, blond and tall, in whom thinness, 
 instead of angularity, means only a strange half 
 artificial exquisiteness of outline and movement, a 
 bodily perfection more transcendent for its very im- 
 materiality, and which affects one like a kind of 
 intellectual superiority. That things for her should 
 move for ever in the region of mere abstract thought 
 and fancy seemed only right and natural : her own 
 beauty was an abstraction, unconnected with material 
 wants or purposes. 
 
 "But thought can never approach emotion, or any 
 of the realities of our inner life," she persisted ; " if it 
 does, it becomes absolutely inconsistent. Look at 
 Stuart Mill ; there was a man, if ever there were, who 
 might be considered as the incarnation of logic and 
 utilitarianism. Well, Stuart Mill, while believing 
 firmly that there survived of his dead wife nothing 
 that might derive pleasure or profit from any posthu- 
 mous expression of love and respect, yet did all that 
 he could in the way of such expressions of love and 
 respect. Yet this man was the most logical and 
 practical that ever lived. Surely this is enough to 
 show the uselessness of logic." 
 
 " By no means," answered Baldwin. " Logic, while 
 explaining to Mill that there could remain of his wife 
 nothing to appreciate such demonstrations on his
 
 3i6 BALDWIN. 
 
 part, explained or might have explained to him also 
 that it was impossible for the complicated train of 
 emotional action and reaction set up in his mind by 
 his wife while she was living, to be cut short, snuffed 
 out like her physical existence. Logic explained that 
 the image of her must persist much longer than the 
 reality ; nay, that the very act of dying, which put an 
 end to her objective existence, must inevitably, by 
 the sudden heightening of desire and appreciation 
 and vivid imaginative perception implied in grief, 
 have immensely reinforced this emotional activity 
 which resulted in a sense of her presence to the 
 survivor." 
 
 " That is true," interrupted Marcel, to whom all 
 personal psychology had a peculiar charm ; " indeed, 
 I question whether there is a moment of subjective 
 existence, of existence in the consciousness of others, 
 superior to that immediately following on death, that 
 is to say, on the cessation of all objective existence." 
 
 " Hence," continued Baldwin, " while logic, applied 
 narrowly, shows us that Mrs. Stuart Mill could not 
 profit by her husband's expressions of grief and 
 affection ; logic also, when applied more largely, to 
 the cause and not to the result, shows us that it must 
 have seemed to her husband's feelings as if these 
 expressions would give her satisfaction. In the same 
 way, while logic explains that this or that religious 
 belief is absolutely mistaken, it explains also why 
 that same religious belief has been or is inevitable in 
 eiven circumstances."
 
 OF DOUBTS AXD PESSIMISM. 317 
 
 " That," put in Carlo, " is the difference between 
 the attitude of Rcnan and modern students of 
 reh'gions, and the attitude of the old school, who 
 thought that because dogmas were absurd and per- 
 nicious, the men who taught them — the Bonzes, Fakirs, 
 and Old Men of the Mountain, as Voltaire calls 
 them in his stories — must have been either knaves or 
 fools." 
 
 " Exactly," said Baldwin. "And it is one of the 
 practical, strictly utilitarian advantages of logic that 
 it teaches us why we must sometimes be illogical." 
 
 They rowed on for some while in silence, absorbed 
 once more in the strange beauty of the islands and 
 sandbanks which their gondola skirted on its north- 
 ward way towards Venice. Broken only by orchards 
 was a long line of little villages, their rows of houses 
 reflected in the sea — houses whose red scoriated 
 bricks, and worn white and rose-coloured plaster, 
 illumined with intensity by the reflected light from 
 the water, had, against the lilac blue, hot, opaque sky 
 printed with slender pink belfries and white-funnel, 
 shaped chimneys, a strange powdery brilliancy of 
 colour, full of thick white and rose as of pastel : 
 unreal, exquisite in tone, like some canvas by 
 Veronese, or fresco by Tiepolo. Indeed, only the sea 
 seemed real, consistent, made of something less 
 illusory than delicate tinted chalks on reddish pre- 
 pared paper ; the sea, with white and orange sails 
 flecking it like butterflies, which was of a thick marble
 
 3i8 BALDWIN. 
 
 smoothness, grey with bhie and lilac veinings, and 
 opalescences, in the low light, as of glass spun with 
 gold dust. 
 
 "But as logic, even according to you, Baldwin," 
 remarked Marcel, "is perpetually teaching us that 
 we cannot be logical, so also, in the course of 
 discussing any kind of practical matter, we are con- 
 stantly learning that all such discussion is vain. 
 The longer one lives the more plainly one sees, 
 unless one be a fool or a fanatic, that the world is 
 made up of one-sided views on all matters, obstinate, 
 not to be reasoned with, because constitutional ; that 
 wherever one expects to be able to reason out a 
 truth for oneself and others, the place is already filled 
 by bulky preconceived ideas, or guarded by in- 
 vincible preconceiving tendencies. Where is cer- 
 tainty? Where is reason? Nowhere, perhaps, save 
 in the very fact of that conflict between excessive 
 views. Here again, therefore, logic can demonstrate 
 only logic's practical impotence." 
 
 "I quite agree with you," answered Baldwin, "that 
 the intellectual and moral life of the world is largely 
 carried on by means of exaggeration, prejudice, and 
 injustice. Every day impresses me more and more 
 with the seeming necessity of excess in all things 
 in order that excess may be checked. I am some- 
 times quite oppressed by the sense that one idiotcy, 
 one selfishness, nay, one dangerous enthusiasm or 
 dangerous self-sacrifice, is required to balance and 
 correct some other."
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 319 
 
 " But then," exclaimed Carlo, suddenly resting on 
 his oar, " is no one to see the light ? Are we all to 
 be excessive, unjust, monstrous, having our injurious 
 excessive opinions and actions counteracted by those 
 of others ; and counteracting, rendering nugatory, 
 theirs ? Is the world to be carried on thanks to our 
 irrationalism and pigheadedness and self-righteous- 
 ness and selfishness ? " 
 
 " I don't know," replied Baldwin : " it certainly 
 seems as if justice and lucidity were scarcely com- 
 patible with feeling and action ; as if seeing all 
 things would prevent doing anything. But after all, 
 is it necessary that the person who understands and 
 judges should be the one who at that moment feels 
 and acts ? Is it not sufficient that, as Butler said 
 better than Herbert Spencer could say it, we should all 
 
 ' Compound for sins we have a mind to 
 By damning those we're not inclined to ' ? "' 
 
 Is it not sufficient that each of us should, turn about, 
 correct by his power of seeing the power of feeling 
 of another, and be corrected in his turn ; or will not 
 a habit of seeing lucidly and judging justly when we 
 are not in the moment of feeling and acting, prepare, 
 as it were, a safer channel in which our feeling and 
 action may flow ? Must conflict inevitably imply 
 wastefulness and destruction ? Sometimes it seems 
 to me that it must ; that of wastefulness and 
 destruction consists all life. But it is this waste- 
 fulness and destruction which makes life as sterile
 
 320 BALDWIN. 
 
 as death. Surely the day will come when the con- 
 flict of mere constitutions, of mere inherent ten- 
 dencies and interests, may be enough ; the conflict of 
 partial truth with partial truth, not of error with 
 error. I believe meanwhile in the possibility of 
 compromise instead of conflict ; I pray for the 
 equitable distribution of belief and scepticism, of 
 pushing on and hanging back ; and I pray, therefore, 
 for the reign of lucidity, which is the reign also of 
 justice." 
 
 Marcel shook his head. 
 
 " You are an optimist, .Baldwin," he said, sadly. 
 " Not at all. I am merely not a pessimist. Marcel." 
 "You speak, Baldwin," put in Olivia, "as if the 
 result of what you call lucidity would be certainty. 
 But what do we see in the moments — very rare 
 moments — when the scales of personality seem to 
 fall from our eyes, when there comes to us a reve- 
 lation of the real reality of the world and our 
 position in it } I see that every creature is a centre, 
 a meeting-point of different and incongruous ideas ; 
 that each creature understands and tolerates and 
 loves so many creatures and ideas and tendencies 
 which hate one another ; that each creature is a 
 sort of point of justice, a point of equilibrium, a 
 centre, as I said ; and that each creature is at the 
 same time a diverging ray in some other system ; 
 is, as regards some other person's feelings and ideas^ 
 a misunderstanding, an injustice, a blindness ; that
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 321 
 
 each of us is at once a reconciler and an inocon- 
 cilable, a dealer out of justice and a judged thing. 
 And thus on, circle cutting circle, centre touching 
 circumference, ra3's uniting and diverging in all 
 directions, all moving, whirling, acting, reacting ; an 
 universe of egos, of wills and judgments and feelings, to 
 which the stars in the heavens, with their interlacing 
 systems, are as a diagram in the first book of Euclid. 
 Have you ever grasped that ; and if you have, do 
 }-ou not know the paralyzing awe of that moment 
 of comprehension .'' " 
 
 Baldwin nodded. 
 
 " I have realized it, I do realize it every now 
 and then. But such a knowledge has virtually no 
 effect on our feelings and actions, any more than 
 the knowledge that this seemingly steady earth is 
 spinning about at a furious rate ; or that our body, 
 which seems so completely ourself, is for ever 
 changing and being made anew. Such things go 
 against our consciousness. We see, at most, and not 
 every one sees even so much, that there are other 
 centres and other circles which cut our own. To 
 do this is as much as we can permanently realize 
 without falling into a kind of metaphysical trance ; 
 and it is therefore enough, and more than enough." 
 
 " But this metaphysical trance carries us into the 
 presence of Truth," answered Olivia, " even as the 
 mystic trance brought the saints of old into the 
 presence of God." 
 
 22
 
 322 BALD WIN. 
 
 " And, as the saints of old, indulging in this 
 mystic trance, ceased to feel or act, so should we 
 also cease to feel and act, cease to be of any use 
 in this world, were we to indulge in such meta- 
 physical contemplations ; growing dizzy and cata- 
 leptic from trying to fix our mental eyes upon more 
 than we can see. Such truth as you speak of is 
 not truth with reference to our nature : we are 
 individual, limited, and cannot grasp the infinite and 
 absolute." 
 
 " We can and we should," cried Olivia. " Not 
 the larger and most remote infinite and absolute — 
 for, as measured by our faculties, there is infinite 
 beyond infinite, absolute beyond absolute, a series 
 of ever receding horizons. There is in all of us 
 something that makes us akin to the universal and 
 absolute, there is in our souls somewhat of the 
 infinite ; though limited on all sides by the barriers 
 of personality, though prevented, by the narrow 
 vessel which contains it, from mingling freely in 
 the ocean of infinite life and thought and feeling. 
 Our every aspiration, our every ideal, proves it : we^ 
 at least the nobler of us, are striving for ever to get 
 beyond the actual, the narrow, to press forward 
 towards something in which we may rest in satisfac- 
 tion and peace ; love, art, the desire to know, all 
 prove this." 
 
 " I fear," put in Baldwin, with a smile, " that 1 am, 
 then, not of the nobler sort. I notice, indeed in
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 323 
 
 Others, and I feci in myself, those aspirations and 
 ideals which you describe, those strivings for more 
 complete satisfaction. I know that when we pursue 
 beauty or truth, that when we idealize, as we always 
 do, any beloved object, we are manifesting dissatis- 
 faction with the reality of things and of ourselves. 
 But I know also that these desires and strivings are 
 merely the expansion of our individuality, not the 
 breaking its bounds ; they are the efforts to obtain 
 a response to our most personal cravings, not the 
 efforts to be rid of our personality. If we desire to 
 see the manifestation of greater goodness or beauty 
 than habitually comes before us, it is merely as we 
 desire to eat a greater amount of food, to get a 
 greater amount of sleep, or take a greater amount of 
 exercise than at present : our individual powers are 
 clamouring for satisfaction. The infinite and the 
 absolute have nothing to do with this." 
 
 "You do not understand," persisted Olivia, "or 
 rather you refuse to understand, Baldwin. There is 
 the positive desire to get rid of our individuality ; to 
 get rid of the personality which prevents our seeing 
 the whole truth and feeling the complete truth " 
 
 " To be, in short, less naughty and less stupid 
 than we are," put in Baldwin ; " to improve " 
 
 " No, not to improve. To cease to be ourselves, 
 to cease to live our lives ; to live in a larger life not 
 our own, to see and feel vision and feelings vaster 
 than ours."
 
 324 BALDWIN. 
 
 " Hero-worship, then. You wish to abdicate your 
 emotions and ideas into the hands of some one else." 
 
 "I do not wish to abdicate in favour of anyone, 
 although that also is a great temptation : to feel a 
 larger life than one's own. I wash merely, in this 
 case, to get rid of my own personality, moral and 
 mental and physical." 
 
 " That would be a dreadful loss to every one," 
 murmured Marcel, his eyes fixed upon that strange 
 diaphanous blond beauty, less a woman, as he had 
 once remarked, than a series of exquisite movements. 
 
 " My own personality which is for ever hampering 
 and checking me, preventing me from moving ; 
 getting between myself and the things I desire to 
 see and embrace. And also," added Olivia, a sort of 
 childish w^aywardness and impertinence coming over 
 her, " I wish to get rid of the tiresome, contradictory, 
 doctrinaire, utilitarian personality of other folk." 
 
 Baldwin smiled and bowed. 
 
 The sun was beginning to set in a sky of perfect 
 purity ; and as the gondola glided over the lagoon 
 tovv^ards the westernmost point of Venice, the shallow 
 w^aterwas turned into a pavement veined and streaked 
 like jasper, almost solid in its marble stillness, and 
 tesselated with gold, down whose middle ran a narrow 
 golden pathway, leading towards a strip of shining, 
 steel-like water, above w^hich, and above the vague 
 grey line of terra firma, the sun was descending, a 
 vast disc of crold.
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 325 
 
 " I wish;' went on Olivia, screening her e}-cs with 
 her hand, and looking far into the sunset, as if indeed, 
 as Marcel had suggested, its golden causeway might 
 lead into the mysterious country where the soul strips 
 off all individual baseness and falls asleep in the 
 wings of the ideal — " I wish, I long, to shuffle off my 
 own self and all the pettinesses of identity. I should 
 like to stand in the presence of absolute truth and 
 absolute good, to feel myself absorbed into the 
 real reality." 
 
 Baldwin smiled. 
 
 " You are a poet. Do you not also wish to walk to 
 the rainbow's foot and dig for the gold that is buried 
 there ? As the rainbow has no foot, and you might 
 walk on till doomsday without finding the place to 
 dig in, so also this transcendent good and transcen- 
 dent truth would for ever elude you. It is an 
 abstraction, and does not exist." 
 
 " But abstractions are the only real realities," cried 
 Olivia; "they are the only things which do not 
 change." 
 
 " They do not change simply because they do not 
 rcallyexist. They aremerely the exprcssionof ourmode 
 of seeing things intellectually. All these fine things 
 which v/e make into ideals exist only in our mind ; 
 and it is for that reason that they can be our ideals. 
 Mankind — the humanity which our Comtiste friends 
 would bid us worship, where may it be found .'' Has 
 any one seen it yet ? Is it a crowd .-' No ; it is an
 
 326 BALDWIN. 
 
 abstraction. The real existence is the individual 
 man, and of him endless numbers, the individual man 
 with his necessities and powers and vices and virtues. 
 And so also of good and truth : real good and real 
 truth is the good which each man does and aspires to 
 do, the truth that he sees and strives to see. In order 
 to increase this good and this truth, we must increase 
 it in the individual. To destroy the personality in 
 hopes of getting at a higher good or a higher truth is 
 to cut off one's head to cure the toothache. Prune 
 away the base peculiarities, improve the individual by 
 comparing him with as many other individuals as you 
 like ; make an abstraction, if you please, of all that 
 you love best in all individuals ; but do not expect 
 that this abstraction can ever become a reality except 
 in each separate creature ; do not strive to grasp 
 what remains only as a m.ental conception, an 
 emotional desire. We are the sole realities, we 
 individuals ; and our law is the improvement of the 
 individual : to loosen the individual's limits and 
 become united with transcendent good or transcen- 
 dent truth, is to be dissolved into nothingness." 
 
 Olivia was silent for a minute. She respected 
 Baldwin, and perceived his greater lucidity of thought, 
 the stronger grasp he possessed over ideas ; and she 
 could not deny that what he said seemed true. But 
 a habit of certain modes of imagination and feeling 
 which she mistook for ideas, the essentially poetical 
 bias of her nature tliat, loving metaphysics, she mis-
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 3:7 
 
 took for a peculiar speculative aptitude, prevented her 
 from being satisfied with his conclusions. The tran- 
 scendent, the mysterious, fascinated her imagination ; 
 and she believed in its existence as, in her childhood, 
 she would have believed that, could they only row out 
 sufficiently long, they would have reached, not the 
 sandbank, and stagnant waters, and stunted willows 
 of the mainland, but the real country of the setting 
 sun. 
 
 " But, Baldwin," she persisted, " have you never 
 felt choked by your own personality — choked as a man 
 buried alive would feel choked by the bricks and 
 mortar and earth ? Have you never felt that you were 
 being prevented, not by any one else, but by your own 
 self, from being just, from uniting, as )'ou should, in 
 sympathy and affection with some person outside 
 you ? " 
 
 " I know what you mean ; " answered Baldwin, "but 
 that does not prove that we should or could unite 
 ourself with any abstract truth or good. It means 
 merely, I think, that we are some of us, perhaps most 
 (perhaps all), made, so to speak, of several pieces ; of 
 an inner and innermost myself and of a number of 
 outer ones. It means, what we have, alas ! nearly all 
 of us, occasion to experience, that our real soul which 
 can appreciate, love, help, is sometimes fenced in, as 
 the just king is in his palace, by a crowd of habits of 
 thought and manner, of accidentally or deliberately 
 made up spurious iiiysclfs hedging the reality in, pre-
 
 328 BALD WIN. 
 
 venting it from seeing other realities, or at least from 
 uniting with them. I think, were we to look round in 
 our past, we should most of us see some cause we 
 ought to have joined, some friend we ought to have 
 loved, which have passed across our life and been 
 nothing in it." 
 
 Marcel had been sitting, "meditating a description," 
 as Carlo maliciously defined it to himself, looking 
 before him over the water as the gondola advanced 
 across the sea floor paved with golden scales, in the 
 direction of the little black island of Saint George of 
 the Sea- Weed, with its lonely madonna shrine on the 
 watery path standing out against the amber of the 
 sky, out of which the sun was slowly descending into 
 a narrow pool of silver-sparkling water ; turning his 
 eyes sometimes from the scarce endurable sunset 
 •effulgence to the opposite side of the sky, where it 
 .and the water were of vague, coldest moonlight blue, 
 with the little crescent moon rising and the black 
 fishing boats moored motionless. 
 
 Although his pessimism and a vague poeticalness 
 frecjuently led him to sigh after an extinction of the 
 individual, a blissful nirvana that should deliver him 
 of a soul which he felt to be unhealthy and ill at ease, 
 Marcel, as a prominent member of the school of 
 psychological criticism, or, as some consider it, of soul 
 pathology studied in artificially induced cases, could 
 not hear Olivia's abuse of the individual without 
 feeling that she would deprive him oi what made the
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 329 
 
 world and himself supremely interesting in his eyes. 
 And the principles of his school of literary criticism — 
 a school which has much if not complete reason on 
 its side — were also aroused by this constant seeking 
 after an abstract and absolute standard of truth and 
 right which seemed to him a positive nuisance. 
 
 " I think," he said, " that by attempting to deprive 
 us of personality in all matters of thought, Miss 
 Olivia would be incurring the risk of depriving us of 
 the few things that we really and thoroughly study ; 
 depriving us, in the desire of something more absolute 
 in the way of truth, of an invaluable subject of 
 scientific research and aid thereunto. Take, for an 
 instance, the sphere of intellectual activity with which 
 I am myself best acquainted : that of criticism. The 
 new school of criticism, like the new school of history, 
 is altogether personal ; it purports to show how certain 
 works of art, or philosophical schemes, or men or 
 historical periods, affect the mind of the individual 
 critic; instead, as was formerly the case, of pretending 
 to judge of all such things according to certain abstract 
 rules. Now, if a critic is content to give you his 
 impressions, you may, by being shown at once what 
 manner of mind is his, and what manner of impres- 
 sion that mind is likely to receive — you may, I say, 
 miake allowance for the action and reaction, strike an 
 average, and thus get for yourself an idea of the 
 absolute potentiality, say, of the book he is writing 
 about. But if, on the contrary, the critic measures
 
 330 BALDWIN. 
 
 the book according to a standard, you have first to 
 verify that standard, to find out whence he got it, and 
 whether it coincides with your own; and then, beneath 
 all this remains the inevitable conviction that the 
 adoption of the standard or the particular application 
 thereof in the present case, is merely an expression of 
 the nature and limits of the critic's personality. The 
 question may be tested by examining who are the 
 people (not Miss Olivia, for her aversion to personality 
 is quite of another sort) that are most violently in 
 favour of the old and against the new school of 
 criticism. You will find that they are nearly always 
 people either with a constitutional aversion to any 
 sort of intrusiveness and meddlesomeness ; or with a 
 magisterial or slavish fear of presumptuousness, of 
 want of deference from the unknown towards the 
 consecrated. Myself, the longer I live, the more also 
 do I feel how completely this world is made up of 
 relative appreciations ; how useless and absurd it is to 
 attempt to get at a positive one. We must think 
 according to our mind's organization ; we must con- 
 tinually select the judgments of others and balance 
 them against each other and our own ; and other 
 folk must do the same with ours. We are bound, by 
 our constitution, to feci, each and all of us, the centre 
 of that great system of circles, whose centre, as Miss 
 Olivia remarked, is nowhere. Hence it seems to me 
 that it were a great step in the direction of seeing 
 the value of opinions, let alone their genesis and
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 331 
 
 filiation, if personality could be reinstated in our 
 books of criticism and philosophy. Is it nothing to 
 have learned the secret of such characters as Renan 
 and Michelet, as your Carlyle and Ruskin ? And is 
 it not far easier for us to calculate what may be the 
 actual value of these men's opinions, b}- knowing the 
 characteristics in which they originate? " 
 
 Carlo, who was consumed with the desire to be 
 modern, and therefore to be personal, let go his oar 
 and clapped his hands. 
 
 " Long live personal criticism ! " he cried, " and 
 long live Marcel ! And allow his abject admirer to 
 sum up the matter in a more or less brutal formula : 
 Shall v/e not gain immensely b\- having the pseudo- 
 scientific, or rather pseudo-religious, impersonal dog- 
 matism of judgment according to standards, or 
 supposed standards, replaced : in the resthetic world, 
 by men's impressions ; in the intellectual world by 
 their opinions ; in the moral world by their enthusiasms 
 and indignations ? Shall we not gain b}^ human beings 
 showing themselves to be human beings, instead of 
 abstract entities, clothed in paper and printer's ink ?" 
 
 They were turning the corner of one of the outlying 
 islands, and making straight for Venice, when the 
 sun disappeared, leaving behind it at first but a palest 
 yellow, against which the jagged line of the 
 Cadore Alps, the egg-shaped Euganean hills, became 
 with every moment greyer and more distinct. Little 
 by little the luminous amber band enlarged and grew
 
 33^ BALD WIN. 
 
 more vivid in colour; turning into a mist of rosy 
 copper, which met the tender blue overhead, and 
 sent delicate cobwebs of rosy cloud far above in the 
 sky, the little waves turning rosy also, with crests of 
 shining silver. Until, as they turned aside, and shot 
 straight towards the back of the Giudecca, the copper 
 colour deepened and deepened into red and orange, 
 till at last the western sky became like a gigantic 
 dome lined with burnished gold, embrowned and 
 purpled with vapours below, and brilliant with clear 
 yellow lights above, like the domes of St. Mark's : 
 an immense vault of mellowed gold, to which 
 corresponded a floor made of the jasper and 
 alabaster, and onyx, the gold and silver tesserae of 
 the sea. Turning their eyes from the sunset they saw 
 before them the towers of Venice rising in ghostly 
 vividness from out of a steely blue sea into a sky of 
 polished dark blue steel ; and the whiteness of its 
 houses, the glass of its windows, staring in an un- 
 earthly wintry glare, a ghostly city. 
 
 . And Marcel, who had half forgotten the subject 
 under discussion, murmured to himself, as he watched 
 the yellow sailed boats, the black riggings of ships 
 entering port, against that golden sky, the lines, like 
 a picture by Claude or by Turner, of his favourite 
 poet : 
 
 " Ou les vaisseaux, glissant dans For et dans la moire, 
 Ouvrent leur vastes bras pour embrasser la gloirc 
 D'un ciel pur ou frcmit rcternelle chaleur."
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. y:,^ 
 
 But the words of Marcel and of Carlo seemed to have 
 touched a particularly vibratnig string in Baldwin's 
 nature. 
 
 " You said, Marcel," he remarked, " that to see the 
 character, as well as the mere opinions of men like 
 Renan and Michelet, and Ruskin and Carlyle, is a 
 scientific gain. Do you not go beyond the mere 
 scientific interest ? Does it not seem to you an even 
 greater gain morally, a pleasure, an encouragement or 
 a warning, to have come in a manner into contact with 
 such personalities ? It seems to me that one of the 
 great benefits of literature is exactly its power of 
 bringing us into the presence of a desirable friend, or 
 even of an enemy, at all events of a human being, 
 contact with whom will develop ourselves, will give 
 us spiritual pleasure or profit, or, what is often equally 
 necessary to us, disinterested spiritual pain ; the 
 power of preventing the waste and multiplying the 
 use, of that essential thing (I beg Olivia's pardon), 
 human individuality. Science is necessary for the 
 practical welfare of our life, and art is valuable as its 
 amusement ; but the life itself, that to which science 
 and art are but conducive, what is it, save commerce 
 with individuals ? Our work, our play, are after all 
 only a small part of our life ; they are its basis or its 
 ornamental superstructure. The life itself, what in 
 the spiritual corresponds to the constant processes, as 
 of respiration and assimilation, of the body, is this 
 constant reaction of one creature upon another ; and
 
 334 BALDWIN. 
 
 as the acutest pains and acutest pleasures of the body 
 being only exceptional and momentary things, the 
 most permeating and constant sense of bodily well- 
 being or the reverse depends upon the condition of 
 these perpetual bodily functions, rather than upon 
 those of our eyes and ears, &c. ; so also, I think, does 
 the enormous bulk of vague overallish pleasure or 
 pain constituting happiness or unhappiness, depend 
 not upon the intermittent functions which we associate 
 with science and art, but upon that constant action and 
 reaction of personalities — action and reaction which, 
 I am inclined to conceive, constitutes life. Hence, 
 in my opinion, there is nothing more important to a 
 person than personality, and nothing more precious 
 than such personality as will by its contact do us 
 good, nothing more important than the rendering of 
 such personality accessible." 
 
 "When I say do good" pursued Baldwin, " I don't 
 mean in any direct or practical way : a creature may 
 do us good, in the sense of making us happy, by 
 redoubling certain better energies of our nature, and 
 improving us in any particular way ; it may do us 
 good also merely by heightening our degree of life, 
 by turning a partial into a complete, or less incom- 
 plete, existence. To this literature can conduce. 
 Indeed, literature is the only thing that can save from 
 continual waste, that can distribute so as to bring 
 to fullest use, the thing we call a soul. Neither art 
 nor science can do this : we may enjoy a work of art.
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 335 
 
 we may follow a scientific demonstration ; but we can 
 live, be acted on by, and react towards, only a human 
 being, real or imaginary. And we must remember 
 that the circumstances of life are such that we can 
 but rarely come fully in contact with a real, complete 
 personality : it is only our few most absolutely 
 intimate friends that we know otherwise than piece- 
 meal ; and then, in this extremely small number of 
 individuals, brought by accident within our thorough 
 familiarity, how small is not the proportion of such 
 with whom contact is rather more than an indifferent 
 matter ? Here literature steps in. What do we not 
 owe for the companionship of so many creatures, 
 never actually of this world, but who seem neverthe- 
 less to have lived by our side, better known to us than 
 the living creatures all round, more living than they, 
 and forming more absolutely a part of ourselves } 
 How much more even do we not owe, therefore, to 
 those men and women who have actually lived, or do 
 actually live, but separated from us by time or space, 
 who come near us, draw us out, ask for our sympathy, 
 and, in the highest cases (as, for instance, I felt once 
 while reading ' Sartor Resartus '), give us theirs ? 
 Creatures often not merely separated from us by 
 impassable barriers, but placed in a way above us, 
 and who yet draw near, feel with us and let us feel 
 with them ; in whom we recognize, dead as they may 
 be, what the finest creations of the imagination can 
 never give us, what we feel in the touch of a man or
 
 336 BALDWIN. 
 
 a woman, and miss for ever in the presence of a 
 statue or a picture, the power of being something- 
 more, the possession of something further, the quality 
 for which all living things for ever yearn — life." 
 
 While Baldwin was speaking, they had been 
 skirting the lagoon side of the Giudecca island, 
 past the grey-ribbed cupola and minarets, the greyish 
 pink masonry of the Redentore, an exquisitely 
 delicate and fantastic lilac pattern upon the bluish 
 lilac sky ; past the red wall overtopped by the 
 mulberry trees and pomegranates of some orchard, 
 whence the shrilling of crickets came over the 
 water ; gliding gently over the shallow waters, lilac 
 with a pale rosy sheen, towards the sunset ; green 
 on the other side, and fretted by the moon with 
 innumerable green facets. As Baldwin finished the 
 gondola drew in under a garden wall on the western- 
 most extremity of the Giudecca. Lights were 
 shining from the windows of the old white villa 
 house built into the water, and from it issued the 
 notes of a piano and the hum of voices. 
 
 " Father and mother must have been waiting for us 
 for dinner," said the practical Carlo. 
 
 Marcel, in his half dreamy way, got out of the 
 gondola, and would have offered his assistance to 
 Olivia in climbing the slippery, sea-washed wooden 
 steps. But the poetess had already taken the arm of 
 her old friend and playfellow, and said to him, as they 
 entered the house —
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. ^yj 
 
 " I don't know what it is about you, Baldwin, but 
 somehow you always make me feel inclined to con- 
 tradict you ; and yet I agree with you. I'm not a 
 pessimist like Monsieur Marcel, I don't really think 
 he's in the right ; but feel it's easy to agree with 
 him. I think it is that you're too cut and dried. 
 You have no sympathy for people's doubts, and I 
 am full of doubts. Do you never have doubts 
 yourself?" 
 
 Baldwin laughed, 
 
 " Constantly. But I usually work them out for 
 myself, and give other folk only my certainties. But 
 it is a bad habit, I allow." 
 
 II. 
 
 After dinner, while Marcel and Carlo were still 
 seated with the elder folk in the dining-room of the 
 old villa, or rather garden house, Baldwin and his 
 former playfellow, the poetess, strolled down into 
 the garden. 
 
 " You complained, as we came here, of my being 
 cut and dried, having no sympathy with doubt — 
 never feeling doubt myself," said Baldwin, as they 
 crossed the court, carpeted smooth and white by the 
 moonlight, where the orange trees glistered in every 
 leaf like glass cut in facets, and an invisible choir of 
 crickets and frogs mingled with the dripping sounds 
 of a fountain hidden in the dark foliacre. " The fact
 
 338 BALDWIN. 
 
 is, that the doubt which you mean, the doubt of 
 which you have a fit upon you just now, Olivia, is 
 not of the sort about which one can ask people for 
 advice, for logical assistance. It isn't doubt about 
 any particular idea or dogma, about anything that 
 other folk can understand ; it is doubt about oneself, 
 about the reality of one's feelings, about the reality, 
 in a way, of oneself. Religious people bring it into 
 connection with God ; we, who are not religious, 
 remain sufficiently wide awake to see that it is about 
 our own selves ; and this very perception of its, so 
 to speak, subjective nature, makes us all the more 
 sceptical. It's a thing that comes over one when 
 one has just enough experience of life to perceive 
 that one's feelings are not always the same, that 
 one's ego varies, and is made to vary by a hundred 
 external causes ; and when one has too little ex- 
 perience of life to take this as a matter of course. 
 We all begin by being mysteries to ourselves, 
 solid, concrete like the people outside us, indeed 
 almost outside the reach of our own analysis. Then 
 we gradually get to understand the mechanism, we 
 cease to be mysteries ; but we also begin to feel 
 that we are shams. Then we get into a semi- 
 mystical state, as you are, we perceive ourselves as 
 mere phenomena ; and having discovered, as you 
 said, that we are not the centre of anything, we strive 
 to understand something that is ; we see that we arc 
 after all (what children and servants never see) very
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 339 
 
 relative concerns, fluctuating, elusory, often unreal, 
 and we hanker in consequence after the absolute, the 
 real ; trying to leave all our shams behind and 
 become united with something which can't be a 
 sham — which isn't one, because it doesn't exist at 
 all. At least we do so if we are poets or meta- 
 physicians. Doubt, doubt ; or rather certainty of 
 change. To what extent is any of my feelings real, 
 what is their relative weight by the side of the 
 feelings of others ? Are they mere pieces of card- 
 board painted to look like metal, but which bend 
 and twist, and which every wind blows away.^ Your 
 brother, because he is five years younger than you, 
 because, perhaps, he is an Italian in part, doesn't ask 
 himself these questions : you do, Olivia, because you 
 are no longer a child. Is it not so } " 
 
 " Oh, thank Heaven that you force me to say it, 
 Baldwin," exclaimed Olivia, with a sigh of relief. 
 " Somehow one cannot say these things except to 
 people who do not need to be told them. With 
 others — with my brother, because he is a child, and 
 with Marcel, because he is a stranger, I feel forced, 
 since I can't keep it altogether to myself, to speak 
 of such things under false names, to put myself and 
 others on to false tracks ; I pretend to myself that 
 I wish to get at the absolute in God, because I can't 
 tell them that I wish to fly from the doubtful and 
 elusory in myself, and I feel as if I must say some- 
 thing, because it worries me so constantly."
 
 340 BALD WIN. 
 
 Baldwin smiled. 
 
 " So you talk mystical metaphysics. You say you 
 hate personality, because you are not comfortably 
 sure about your own and that of others ? " 
 
 Olivia nodded. 
 
 '•' How long," she said, almost as much to herself 
 as to Baldwin, " will any of it last ? How long shall 
 I want, care for, the same thing } Is it a reality 
 to-day; and if it is, will it be a reality to-morrow ,'' 
 The habit of seeing one feeling replaced by another 
 does not prevent my feeling. But while feeling, it 
 makes me see the mechanism, the accident by which 
 all has arisen, the mechanism by which all will 
 disappear. And the sense of understanding the 
 machinery, of seeing the strings which pull my 
 puppet self, brings with it a sense also of insincerity: 
 the past and the future give the lie to the present. 
 All this," added Olivia, half angrily, "doubtless 
 seems very ridiculous to you, Baldwin ; the pseudo- 
 inner life of a pseudo-poet — of a poetess, that is ! 
 You have somehow, I suppose by some horrid pro- 
 cess of horrid abstract logic, got to know that people 
 do feel in this way, but you have never felt it." 
 
 " You consider me, that is to say, as a machine 
 that grinds out logic — so much of wood, so much 
 steel, carefully labelled 'to be kept perfectly dry,' 
 laughed Baldwin. " Do you remember once last 
 spring, a conversation we had about poor Agatha 
 Stuart } "
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 341 
 
 " We have had so many conversations about her, 
 Baldwin. And I don't see what that has to do with 
 the question of such doubts." 
 
 " Doubts — that is not exactly the word either," 
 mused Baldwin. " I should like to call what we are 
 talking about after a line of Whitman's — "of the 
 terrible doubt of appearances." Well, the conversa- 
 tion I allude to was one late evening last March : it 
 was stormy, and you had on a white teagown — the 
 white teagown impressed itself on my memory, and 
 may serve to recall the occasion to you, as I suspect 
 it was the first time you had put that dress on. 
 You had been reading me a poem of yours about 
 your cousin Agatha. I told you what my feelings 
 about her were — how we had formerly quarrelled 
 over religious subjects, and I had thought she was 
 merely interfering and presumptuous, and had often 
 been rough and sharp with her while she was alive ; 
 then, when she was dead, and I re-read her letters 
 and heard a great many things I had not known 
 about her, and remembered many I had forgotten, 
 how I had seemed suddenly to understand it all, 
 and how I had felt miserably ungrateful for her 
 interest in me, and how it had seemed as if my best 
 friend had been wasted and lost in her. Do you 
 remember my telling you that, one evening last 
 spring, my dear Olivia } " 
 
 The poetess nodded. 
 
 " Quite well, now. It was a rainy evening, and we
 
 342 ' BALD WIN. 
 
 were looking into the garden after dinner, while 
 Charlie was playing the piano. I told you, as the 
 person who had known poor cousin Agatha best, 
 that you had been mistaken ; that Agatha never 
 really cared much for any one, except perhaps me ; 
 that she was interested in you, not because she 
 wanted your friendship, but because it seemed to 
 her that God was being cheated of you, and you 
 vv'ere being cheated of God." 
 
 " Exactly," answered Baldwin, slowly, " That 
 evening left me, has left me, with a fit of the 'terrible 
 doubt of appearances.' I was disconcerted much 
 less by what you have told me than by my own 
 way of taking it. It seemed to me as if I were so 
 constituted that nothing could be really painful to 
 me so long as it was still exciting, that I enjoyed 
 the drama too much to feel the blows I got in it. 
 It impressed me very much, I mean this unreality 
 of myself, at the very time. Certainly, with the ex- 
 ception of literally one or two minutes at most, I 
 distinctly enjoyed that talk when we leaned out of 
 the window, you in your white brocade dress, look- 
 ing out into the rain and darkness among the leafless 
 trees ; and the fact that I was being robbed of a long 
 petted belief, that I was being deprived of a friend 
 who had walked faithfully by my side this year and 
 more (often consoling me, poor non-existence, with 
 the certainty of its non-existent affection) added 
 merely an excitement in which the beauty of the
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 343 
 
 woman by my side, the shimmer of her dress, the 
 spring storm and rain and darkness, the vague strong 
 pleasure cf talking about poor Agatha, of finding 
 myself in presence of your feeling for her, seemed to 
 acquire a greater poignancy, almost a greater pleasure- 
 ableness. And I wondered at myself. But I went 
 away cruelly dashed. For the thing which resulted 
 from all this talk was, or seemed to be, that I had 
 been mistaken, that I had not been loved where I 
 thought I had been ; that, alas ! this ghost which for 
 months had walked by my side, had taken my hand 
 and looked into my eyes, was a mere phantom of my 
 own imagination ; that I had been mistaken when 
 I had said to myself, * Nothing can deprive me of this 
 friend ' — no, indeed, for I was being deprived of her 
 then, being told I had never possessed her." 
 
 Olivia did not answer ; she was simply amazed. 
 They were standing by the little pond, where the 
 bay trees shimmered, each leaf a metal blade, and 
 the big cypress seemed to wait silently, as if holding 
 its breath, its black plume motionless against the 
 metallic moonlit sky. 
 
 "Had it all been an unreality.'" went on Baldwin ; 
 " had I been imagining myself a dupe of my own 
 stupidity and suspiciousness, spurning and then 
 regretting bitterly a proffered invaluable friendship, 
 while in reality there had been no affection to spurn 
 or to regret, while I was a dupe when I repented of 
 my indifference, not when I felt it? Was it so? I
 
 344 BALD WIN. 
 
 turned the matter round and round, I ransacked my 
 own consciousness, and the only answer that came, 
 indeed that coraes, always the same, ' I cannot tell.' 
 The real Agatha — what was she, and how did she 
 feel ? Strange to say, I felt easy on that point. It 
 seemed to me as if I had lost nothing or but little in 
 the possible loss of the real Agatha ; for did there 
 not remain, does there not remain, unchanged and un- 
 changeable, the imagined one ? Do I not know that 
 one ; have I not lived by her side, leaned upon her 
 in my trouble, looked into her face in my isolation ? 
 The dead — yes, even the dead may be lost to one, I 
 grant it you ; but the creature born of one's fancy 
 and one's desires, the unreal, cannot be lost. She 
 remains, and remains a certainty." 
 
 Olivia looked at him in surprise. 
 
 " You unreal creature ! " she exclaimed. 
 
 •* It was not about Agatha that I began to doubt," 
 interrupted Baldwin; "it was about myself The 
 whole incident was phantasmagoric : after it nothing 
 concerning myself seemed real. When, just now, you 
 described your own trouble with the ' terrible doubt of 
 appearances,' you were describing a good portion of 
 my life quite lately. Akvays ? the way in which we 
 express all that we feel strongly — akvays? But it 
 was not there yesterday ; and yesterday something 
 else was in its place; so what shall we think of 
 to-morrow .'' Unreal, everything is unreal, because it 
 is passing. Yet, at the moment all seems so real.
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 345 
 
 Does it depend upon a particular condition of nerve? 
 a fluid, a molecule, right or wrong at a given moment ? 
 And who can tell how that molecule may be to- 
 morrow — nay, an hour hence ? If we are changing 
 continually, and feel ourselves changing, what is this 
 ourself? " 
 
 There was a pause as they walked up and down 
 the paved court, Olivia's tall, slender figure in the 
 white vague dress, her pale face and pale blond hair, 
 looking diaphanous, almost transparent, in the bluish 
 moonlight, as if she were herself but the embodiment 
 of one of these shifting moods, herself a mere 
 momentary apparition. But as Baldwin spoke, any 
 of that " terrible doubt of appearances " which might 
 have been in her mind vanished entirely. She felt 
 the shock of the sudden contact of reality. Her old 
 friend, in this sudden manifestation, became for the 
 first time absolutely real to her. 
 
 " You are very strange, Baldwin," she kept repeat- 
 ing — " very strange. Why, you are much worse than 
 Marcel or I." 
 
 " Yes, for I can't malce poems of it all," 
 
 "But then," she went on, with some hesitation, "if 
 you are like that, why always show yourself cut and 
 dried, a hard lump of opinions ? " 
 
 Baldwin laughed. 
 
 " Because it's more sensible and useful. All these 
 doubts, all that one feels on personal subjects, concerns 
 only oneself, at most such others as may be in the
 
 340 BALDWIN. 
 
 same state. You poets can appeal to such others, 
 give them your sympathy by showing them your 
 feehng : it is one of your great uses in the world ; 
 one of the uses also of the great novelist. A mere 
 logic chopper can't. But such things don't prevent 
 one's having opinions. On the contrary, one's 
 opinions come out of it, since all that constitutes 
 one's life, one's experience : out of each vague and 
 shimmering feeling comes an opinion, which is solid, 
 and clear, and stable. I wished to show you how I had 
 come to have a certain opinion, and I showed you 
 myself. Now that I have done so, forget it ; and 
 consider me henceforth once more the man of cut 
 and dried opinion, the desultory philosopher on the 
 loose." 
 
 There was a certain banter in Baldwin's voice. 
 
 " I don't know whether you are serious or not," 
 answered Olivia. 
 
 " Perhaps I don't know either. Let it remain a 
 case of doubt — of the ' terrible doubt of appear- 
 ances.' " 
 
 At this moment they were joined by the two other 
 young men, lazily smoking in the moonlight. 
 
 " Look here, Baldwin," said Carlo, passing his arm 
 through that of his friend, " I have been making 
 grave reflections, while Marcel was talking with 
 mother upstairs, and I have come to the conclusion 
 that you have very seriously contradicted yourself." 
 
 "Well, 'and if I contradict myself, why, I con-
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 347 
 
 traclict myself,' as Walt Whitman says," answered 
 Baldwin, laughing. 
 
 "But I won't permit you to do so. You are my 
 private philosopher, my Socrates, Virgil, Mcphisto- 
 pheles — everything you choose ; and I can't afford to 
 allow you any self-contradictions. Why, I should 
 have to go over to Marcel ! and Marcel is too 
 depressing." 
 
 "And what is this self-contradiction for which I 
 may be dismissed from your august service ? " asked 
 Baldwin. 
 
 They were walking underneath the pergola, whose 
 woodwork made a black pattern, with its curved 
 beams and twisting vines and pointed leafage, on the 
 blue light of the sky : here a bunch of leaves in full 
 light, floating in the blue, transparent luminous them- 
 selves ; there the trellis drawn in white precision by 
 the moon, or a mere fantastic writhing of branches ; 
 while under foot was a pavement of fretted moonlight, 
 broken into patterns by the shadows of the woodwork 
 and foliage. 
 
 " Why, thus." answered Carlo, " You made us, as 
 we rowed from Chiaggia, a very fine speech about 
 the value of personality, and the necessity of its 
 being duly expressed in literature. Pray, how do you 
 make that square with the opinion which you ex- 
 pressed last night, that as a whole a book like the 
 ' Fleurs du Mai ' is an abomination 'i If you think 
 personality such an important thing, what right
 
 348 BALD WIN. 
 
 have you to object to such an expression of it as 
 that ? " 
 
 " Perfectly logically, my dear Charlie. I consider 
 personality a most important item in literature ; and 
 I consider the personality of Baudelaire, for all his 
 genius, as that of a vicious cad. I blackball such 
 personality ; and I therefore blackball the expression 
 of it." 
 
 Marcel had been walking on with Olivia. At the 
 name of his favourite poet he turned round towards 
 Baldwin. 
 
 " It is extraordinary how some things are engrained 
 in a race," he remarked, with his usual mildness : " here 
 is Baldwin, a cosmopolitan if ever there was one, 
 brought up in France and Italy, and who yet cannot 
 rid himself of that essentially English habit of 
 applying moral standards to artistic questions. How 
 is it that you, as part of an utilitarian nation, as an 
 utilitarian individually, can fail to recognize that a 
 man must do what he can do best, that there is*no 
 greater waste in the world than forbidding genius to 
 find its own aims and methods ? " 
 
 " Am I an utilitarian > " answered Baldwin. " Well, 
 perhaps I am. Perhaps to be utilitarian is to be 
 narrow-minded ; but I would rather err, or take my 
 chance of erring, on this side. As to this question, I 
 think that when you say, as you do, Marcel, that a 
 writer ought merely to write sincerely and to the best 
 of his powers, without asking himself what may be
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 349 
 
 the result upon others, you are simply confusing two 
 matters. You are arguing in reality not against the 
 application of a moral standard to artistic questions, 
 but against the application of a moral standard to 
 what is distinctly a moral question." 
 
 " I am laying down a utilitarian principle, my dear 
 Baldwin," interrupted Marcel : " namely, that it is 
 every man's duty to do as well as he can do what- 
 ever he does best. You cannot dispute that principle." 
 
 " Certainly not, as long as the thing which your 
 man can do is in itself a thing worth doing. I am just 
 as much persuaded as you are that no man has a right 
 to refuse to do his own business which he can do well, 
 because the business of another man, which he can do 
 less well, or not at all, strikes him as more worth 
 doing. It is certainly his duty to do what he does 
 best. But this presupposes that the choice lies entirely 
 among things which are all of them desirable ; that 
 these many and various sorts of work, some more, 
 some less necessary, are all of them such that 
 mankind will be the better for their being done. 
 Now, when the question is : Shall a man like Shelley 
 spend his time in writing lyrics finer than any other 
 man's, or writing humanitarian essays no better than 
 sixty other men could write, the answer is plainly : 
 Shelley shall write what he writes best — namely, lyrics. 
 But when you ask : Shall Baudelaire or Swinburne 
 write, because he writes them well, morbid or 
 obscene poems, such as only he can write equally
 
 35° BALDWIN. 
 
 powerfully, rather than poems neither morbid nor 
 obscene, which may require less special endowment, 
 the matter is shifted on to another ground. The 
 choice is no longer between two things each of which 
 is desirable, but between two things one of which is 
 desirable, while the other is distinctly not. You might 
 as well ask, Shall this man be a mediocre mechanic or 
 a first-rate pickpocket ? It is only of things that are 
 useful, or at least harmless, in themselves, that we 
 can say. Let them be done by those who do them best. 
 When once we get into the region of things which 
 are harmful, the desideratum is that they should be 
 done by those who do them least well : success to 
 useful undertakings, ill luck to harmful ones. This 
 confusion," added Baldwin, " is due to the fact of 
 considering literature as a mere art, and the choice of 
 a topic or attitude as something within the artistic 
 jurisdiction ; as already within the bounds of the 
 legitimate and desirable, and therefore liable only 
 to the condition of being well done. But inasmuch 
 as a writer deals with results which are practical, and 
 practically concern the moral health of mankind, he 
 is still, in the choice of his work, outside the merely 
 artistic domain. The question is not yet, ' How can 
 it best be done,' but, Ought it to be done at all." 
 
 " At that rate," answered Marcel, " you strike at the 
 root of literary sincerity. A book like Rousseau's 
 ' Confessions,' which is of incalculable interest to the 
 pyschologist, goes into the fire along with the ' Fleurs 
 du Mai.'"
 
 OF DO UB TS A ND PESSIliflSM. 3 5 1 
 
 " Are you sure, Marcel," put in Carlo, with his 
 Itahan suspiciousness of anything like pose — " are you 
 sure that Baudelaire was a sincere man in the same 
 sense as Rousseau ? " 
 
 Marcel took no notice of this interruption. 
 
 "At all events," he went on, "you are for forbid- 
 ding a man saying what is, or what appears to 
 be, true about himself. And that is discouraging 
 sincerity." 
 
 " Not at all," answered Baldwin. " A man may be 
 perfectly sincere without blurting out what concerns 
 only himself; it is no part of an honest man's duty 
 to wash his dirty consciousness in public. As to 
 physiological specialists, they must seek their know- 
 ledge in some more private fashion, even as their 
 psychological brethren : moral pathology need not be 
 investigated in the open thoroughfare ; and I certainly 
 consider a book like the ' Confessions ' as a remarkably 
 nasty pathological exhibition." 
 
 " There you arc, contradicting yourself again, Bald- 
 win," exclaimed Carlo : " you approve of such whole- 
 sale showing up of vice as we have had from the 
 Fall Mall Gazette ; and you condemn Rousseau for 
 displaying his individual weaknesses." 
 
 " The cases are absolutely different, Charlie," 
 replied Baldwin. *' To shed light, the greatest 
 amount of light, on the organization of vice, is to help 
 in its repression ; it is, what is even more important, 
 to show the full responsibility to all those who, from
 
 352 BALDWIN. 
 
 thoughtlessness or moral slackness, are in danger of 
 joining the fearful unconscious conspiracy of evil. 
 But a book like Rousseau's helps neither to repress 
 nor to warn. It merely shows mediocre people that 
 a very great man, and in many respects a very 
 admirable man, may be morally unclean ; and thus 
 teaches them to condone and tolerate in themselves 
 what has become, in their eyes, excused or even 
 ennobled by the solidarity with his greatness. Such 
 an example, like the example of Napoleon, and the 
 example of Machiavelli's successful political scoun- 
 drels, is profoundly dangerous to the moral health of 
 the mass of mankind." 
 
 Olivia had remained silent during this conversation. 
 Fond of speculation, with a poet's fondness for the 
 distant and unattainable, she had, on the other hand, 
 a vague aversion to discussion, which brought subjects 
 into their practical prosaic reality, and hacked them, 
 as it seemed to her, out of all intellectual shape ; a 
 sort of semi-aesthetic sensitiveness of fibre which also 
 made, sometimes to her own shame, the thought of 
 concrete evil as intolerable as a series of false notes 
 or a disgusting smell. She was one of those exquisite 
 beings who are unfit for the rough work of the world ; 
 and who do the world good merely by setting before 
 it, in their own delicate and immaculate selves, an ideal 
 and a consolation. But she felt that this attitude 
 of mind did not satisfy her own conscience ; and she 
 made an effort to join the conversation, which.
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 353 
 
 as a result, immediately resumed a certain abstract 
 character. 
 
 " But, Baldwin," she said, " does progress depend 
 upon what you call the mass of mankind and upon 
 its moral healthiness ? Is it not the work of the 
 individuals, the exceptions, of those who do not 
 participate in what you call moral health — that is to 
 say, a balance of faculties which means mediocrity ? 
 It comes home to me more and more every day how 
 little mankind at large has to do with human im- 
 provement, how utterly all that is the business of a 
 small minority. jNIerely looking at the types that 
 meet one in the streets, even among so intelligent 
 a race as this, I am struck by the utter dulness of 
 mankind. You will object that many of these 
 people, of these seeming incapables, carry on some 
 trade or business of a by no means easy sort. But 
 ■they have not invented nor even developed this trade 
 •or business : they have been taught it throughout 
 generations by others who had gradually learned it 
 from the men who did invent or develop it. These 
 incapables have been forced into a kind of capability 
 much as a top is lashed into spinning ; and one is 
 astonished at the seeming ingenuity of an artisan or 
 a peasant whose face seems to show utter incapacity. 
 Similarl}^ even in what may be called the thinking 
 classes, one is astonished at the power of discussion, 
 of appreciation of certain people whose face, whose 
 whole nature, is stamped with this same incapacity : 
 
 24
 
 354 BALDWIN. 
 
 here, again, they are thinking, as the others are acting, 
 in the way invented and taught by their betters. It 
 is curious to think over one's own acquaintances, the 
 people whom one treats as intelligent, with whom 
 one speaks, for whom one writes, and to imagine the 
 attitude which such folk would have assumed, had 
 they lived in some past time, on the promulgation of 
 any of those facts or principles on which they are 
 now almost automatically basing their mental and 
 moral decisions. It is curious to reflect how, even 
 among these superior beings, one would have found, 
 when intellectual movement was less general (and 
 perhaps one would find even nowadays were any 
 new intellectual or moral effort suddenly required), 
 nothing but inert or active obstacle ; curious to 
 reflect how, in the course of civilization, at least nine- 
 tenths of mankind have been employing whatever 
 mental or moral force they might have in wasting 
 the time of the other tenth." 
 
 " What you say is perfectly true," answered 
 Baldwin, " but that does not go against the fact 
 that this mass of mankind, these various people 
 who strike us as incompetent with regard to any 
 higher and more original work, have }'et a most 
 important share in all progress. These creatures 
 who could never invent, nor even accept (for there 
 is an intermediate class for that) any new thing, 
 material or intellectual or moral, are those who pre- 
 serve and hand on the material and intellectual and
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 355 
 
 moral things invented and gained by previous genera- 
 tions. Mediocrity, so to speak, is the old stocking 
 in which civilization is hoarded ; of course as long as 
 all the money is always in the old stocking it does 
 not increase, and thus the old stocking may often be 
 in the way of any such employment of capital as 
 may lead to increase. But it remains equally true 
 that the stupids, at least the mediocre, arc those 
 upon whom the moral and physical security of the 
 world rests ; the clever folk, the innovators, would 
 not carry on the business of life, they would often 
 deliberately check it. Now, in all moral matters, to 
 carry on the traditions, even the prejudices, of man- 
 kind, is of the very highest importance ; to prevent, 
 their waste and destruction in a moment of sudden 
 new-fangled enthusiasm. Personall}-, for instance, I 
 am for making divorce sufficiently easy to put an 
 end to all such unions as have become false positions, 
 impediments to development, mere holding in social 
 and spiritual mortmain ; but I am very glad that 
 there should be people to defend the indissolubility 
 of marriage ; just as, although I am on the whole a 
 Liberal, perhaps even a Radical, I would on no account 
 do without a sufficient number of obstructive Tories. 
 Well, to return to what I am saying. The mass of 
 mankind ought to be a sort of moral filter, through 
 which everything new has to be passed, with this 
 difference, that in the moral filter what is valuable 
 remains, what is worthless passes out. And such a
 
 356 BALDWIN. 
 
 moral filter they most distinctly are, mediocre and 
 even vicious as they may be, the stupidity and per- 
 versity of each individual being compensated in the 
 mass. Therefore I stick most decidedly to my 
 opinion, that the moral healthiness of the mediocrity 
 is a thing most jealously to be guarded. The mass 
 can always reduce the individual, or the individual's 
 doctrine, to the condition of healthiness or innocuous- 
 ness, but only if the mass is itself in proper condition. 
 The filter must be clean, if what passes through it is 
 to be cleansed. Now if you allow a superior indi- 
 vidual, a moral or intellectual reformer, to make a 
 whining and helpless display of his moral diseases 
 (which he must deal with himself, or carry to a moral 
 specialist) before the multitude, as was the case with 
 Rousseau, you are striking a blow at the moral health 
 of the mass, even as a man like Machiavelli may be 
 said to have done so. Progress requires that popular 
 imagination should not learn to condone or admire 
 evil because it exists among the superior few : if 
 the king is a leper, he must cover his leprosy." 
 
 Neither Olivia nor Marcel made any answer : 
 Olivia, because she was thinking of the curious 
 suffering personality revealed to her but half an 
 hour before by this man who spoke, it seemed to 
 her, always in a manner so impersonal, always so 
 harsh ; Marcel, because this kind of thought jarred 
 upon his theories and his practice, and that any 
 such jar was intensely painful to him. But Carlo,
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 357 
 
 v/ho boldly asserted that he had no opinions, and 
 intended tasting all before deciding on any, burst 
 out with an objection. 
 
 " But supposing I say to you, Baldwin," he began, 
 " that I don't care for progress ; supposing I prove 
 to you that progress does not mean greater happiness? 
 Happiness depends upon a balance between our 
 activities ; above all, upon the existence of a certain 
 surplus energy : we can't be happy if we are always 
 uncertain in our minds, and always weary and 
 hurried and worried, can we ? Well, what you call 
 progress, which is increasing complexity, must inevi- 
 tably disturb the harmony of our faculties and 
 deprive us of all that margin of feeling which is 
 required for happiness. We are becoming daily 
 more critical, more self-conscious ; our emotions and 
 our activities will soon be eaten up by our conscious- 
 ness " 
 
 " There's for you, Baldwin," whispered Olivia. 
 
 " Moreover," went on Carlo, " we shall lose all 
 force of deciding from being shown too many alter- 
 natives, all force of willing from examining too much 
 how we will " 
 
 " Quite true, quite true," murmured Marcel, whose 
 whole pessimistic philosophy this lad, boiling over 
 with energy, was thus cheerfully summing up. " In 
 this way, progress, which means complexity, will 
 make us less, not more, fit to live and enjoy our- 
 selves."
 
 358 BALDWIN. 
 
 Baldwin laughed, 
 
 "We shall grow old, we have grown old, as that 
 Italian foretold Goethe — 'perche pcnsa ? pensando 
 s'invecchia ' — which prophecy, by the way, was not 
 carried out, certainly, in Goethe's self. No ; I don't 
 think we need be afraid of becoming too highly 
 organized, of our civilization reaching too high a 
 point, my dear boy. Remember, in the first place, 
 that we are in an evident age of transition, and have 
 no right to suppose that in a hundred or two hundred 
 years things will be exactly as they are. All these 
 new habits of thought, which are so painfully obvious 
 to us, which, allow me to add, we take a pleasure 
 in making so painfully obvious to ourselves, will 
 gradually be integrated in our nature ; will become, 
 little by little, automatic. We shall do the new 
 things : give a share to mankind in our judgments, 
 understand complex mental states, make allowance 
 for difference of time and race, enjoy new kinds of 
 art, as we do so many things which at first required 
 a strain of attention almost preventing real mental 
 action, such as reading a foreign language, playing 
 the piano, nay, even riding or smoking. There will 
 be nothing half so marvellously complicated in the 
 process by which, with reference to an utilitarian 
 standard of duty, in consideration of exotic standards, 
 in cognisance of complex states of mind, our des- 
 cendants will rapidly decide how to act towards a 
 given individual, as there is in the process by which
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 359 
 
 our friend Carlo plays at first sight a piece scored 
 for many instruments and noted in many clefs. 
 No, no, the human mind does not give way so easily 
 as you are pleased to suppose : it merely eliminates 
 from consciousness, strides across what it once 
 wearily toddled over. I can quite imagine a pessi- 
 mist of pre-railway days prophesying that we should 
 all go crazy from seeing too many things whirl past 
 us ; whereas experience has shown that we see only 
 just the same amount as if we were in a postchaise : 
 the mind adapts itself, and, having to see things over 
 a greater number of miles, sees less in each." 
 
 " I shut up," answered Carlo, quite satisfied. " By 
 the way, Baldwin, you mustn't think that when I 
 raise objections to your views I necessarily go 
 against you and believe in those objections. But I 
 like to see what can be said on both sides ; I like to 
 draw people out ; I assert because I want my asser- 
 tions to be demolished," 
 
 Baldwin laughed. 
 
 " I know you do, I don't think you arc cut out for 
 a pessimist, Charlie," 
 
 "No," answered the young man, very simply; 
 " how can one feel bad about a world in which there 
 are such quantities of interesting questions .? " 
 
 Carlo's answer provoked a general laugh, as they 
 walked in the long trellised avenue, where the roses 
 shone out a wan pink, and the moonlight made pools 
 and runnels and water-like drippings among the
 
 36o BALDWIN. 
 
 trees and bushes. At the extremity of one of these 
 walks they stopped, and, pushing aside the tall stems 
 of the bay trees, leaned on the low wall, and looked 
 out on to the pale sea, hung v/ith mists and paved 
 with moonbeams, the realm of the Fata Morgana, 
 which seems to recede the more you pursue. 
 
 Marcel was the first to break the silence, made 
 more silent by the dim voice of Olivia, who was 
 singing to herself some fragment of an old Venetian 
 song. 
 
 " You speak of progress, of happiness, of moral 
 health and moral sickness," he said : " but what are all 
 these ? Words, words of which no one of us can so 
 much as determine the meaning. Let us take pro- 
 gress in one of its nobler senses : not merely the 
 progress which ministers to our bodily comfort, but 
 the progress that means more light, a clearer com- 
 prehension, a wider power of sympathy. How does 
 this affect what you call happiness, and what you call 
 moral health and moral sickness? It teaches us that, 
 in the first place, no standard is unchangeable, that 
 no standard is divine ; that those laws which we once 
 believed were from God, are the adaptations, shifting 
 and momentary, to the shifting and momentary con- 
 ditions of man ; that what is now vice was once 
 virtue, that what is now virtue may in time become 
 vice." 
 
 " Nay," interrupted Olivia ; " science may teach us 
 that what was once virtuous, as being the lesser of
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 361 
 
 two evils, may become vicious when it becomes the 
 greater ; or when the alternative ceases entirely, as, 
 for instance, in the case of slavery. But all science 
 goes to confirm that he is acting for the good of 
 society, that he is virtuous and to be venerated, who, 
 whatever the case, chooses the alternative which 
 implies the lesser evil, the greater good ; all science 
 shows us that, however much the conditions of man- 
 kind may have changed, there were always courses 
 which were good and courses which were evil, and 
 men and women, therefore, who were good and bad." 
 
 Marcel smiled bitterly. 
 
 " I grant you that," he said ; " but science, and 
 when I say science I mean thought, has shown us 
 something else besides. It has shown us that a man 
 or a woman is sent into the world with a definite 
 moral constitution, with definite powers of resisting 
 or necessities of succumbing ; and is then placed, by 
 the mere accident of birth or education, in such a 
 situation that he must resist or must succumb. 
 Science shows us that, instead of a criminal, there 
 exists only a victim ; science teaches the old lesson 
 of religion, that we must not judge, but only mourn ; 
 • it says to us, like Christ, that we must not throw the 
 stone ; nay, more, it says what even Christ never said, 
 that, in the presence of such as the world calls wicked, 
 those others whom the world calls good must cast 
 down their eyes, must sink on their knees, and, as the 
 hero of that great novel of Dostoievsky does to the
 
 362 BALDWIN. 
 
 fallen woman, kiss the hem of their garment, and cry 
 out that this reverence is for all suffering and all sin." 
 
 Marcel, as always, spoke very low, and, as he slowly 
 uttered the last words, his voice dropped to a scarce 
 audible whisper. Instinctively the eyes of Baldwin 
 sought those of Olivia. She was still gazing out at 
 the moonlit lagoon, but the tears had gathered in 
 her eyes ; such appeals as this shook her delicately 
 strung nature like some harrowing melody. 
 
 " No," he said, " that is not the lesson of science, 
 not the lesson of what you call thought. It is, on the 
 contrary, the result of a revulsion against science, as 
 the similar doctrine of early Christianity expressed a 
 revulsion against paganism. For science has merely 
 replaced by a definite formula the allegories in which 
 paganism taught the great fact of the necessity of evil 
 and pain, and submission of the weak to the strong ; 
 both paganism and science opposing to our desires of 
 how things should be the reality of how they are. 
 Paganism had shown the superiority of strength. 
 Christianity did not deny it — nay, it accepted but too 
 well the demonstration, and to it made but one 
 answer — ' Blessed are the weak.' Science has de- 
 monstrated the fatality of sin ; and to this new 
 crushing of our desires by our reason a new senti- 
 mentalism has answered — ' Blessed are the sinful.' 
 Nay, do not deny it ; that is the meaning of that 
 magnificent scene between Raskolnikoff and Sonia in 
 the Russian novel ; that is the meaning of your own
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISJT. 363 
 
 answer, Marcel, whenever I have ventured to suggest 
 lliat you have not branded in your books some 
 thoroughly vile and noxious creature : the poor 
 creature could not help being that ; it is his or her 
 misfortune — 'c'est un pauvre etre qui souffre.'" 
 
 " I do not deny it, and never would do so," 
 answered Marcel, passionately. " I see that society 
 requires to be reminded that it makes individuals 
 sinful, and then punishes them." 
 
 " Society," replied Baldwin, " requires to be re- 
 minded of no such thing. Society requires to have 
 recalled to it, if anything, that the distinction between 
 good and evil has its origin, not in the conscience of 
 the individual, but in the interests of the community. 
 Responsibility can enter into the estimate only of him 
 who forbids our being free agents ; and society is not 
 an omnipotent creator who chastises the creatures 
 whom he has made sinful, that we should say to 
 society, ' You are unjust.' Society does not create ; 
 it struggles : the fatality of evil is not made by, but 
 imposed upon, it. The question of free-will in the 
 theological sense in which we are using it now, of 
 original individual responsibility, is one entirely out- 
 side the jurisdiction of mankind. The frame of mind, 
 the constitutional peculiarities which caused his crime, 
 is important to society only as a practical guide in 
 judging whether the creature who has done this 
 mischief may yet be able to do good sufficient to 
 render his existence valuable, in judging whether the
 
 364 BALDWIN. 
 
 creature is or is not such as must be unhesitatingly 
 exterminated by death, or prison, or obloquy ; whether, 
 in short, it is a case for radical or palliative action. 
 If an injury to society is the result of dire distress or 
 mental sickness, it is worth while to consider whether 
 the causes of that dire distress being removed, the 
 mental sickness being healed, the person or class to 
 which such an injury is due may not become harmless 
 or even useful. But whether the injurious action is 
 committed with pain or with rejoicing, whether the 
 criminal is happy or unhappy, except in so far as this 
 happiness or unhappiness affects, as I have said, his 
 future capabilities for good or ill, is no concern of 
 society's. Evil is probably more often accompanied 
 by circumstances distressing to the evildoer ; but this 
 does not in the least diminish its power of injuring 
 the other members of the community, and of such 
 injury spreading. The one aim of society is to 
 diminish the doing and spreading of such injury. 
 Now the fact of one crime being the result of another 
 crime does not interfere with the fact that, unless 
 repressed, it will engender yet a third crime ; quite 
 the contrary." 
 
 " You forget," put in Marcel, reproachfully, " or you 
 do not perhaps know, that about all suffering, whether 
 innocent or guilty, there is a kind of holiness." 
 
 " I know, on the contrary, that nothing can be 
 more false or more pernicious than to bestow the 
 glory of holiness upon suffering. Holiness means
 
 OF DOUBTS AND FESS/J/ISJr. 365 
 
 moral value ; and suffering, as such, has no moral 
 value whatsoever." 
 
 " Oh, Baldwin ! " exclaimed Olivia, " you go against 
 all human instinct there. You know perfectly that 
 suffering has a kind of poetic value, that it attracts 
 our veneration, and places an aureole round the head 
 of the sufferer." 
 
 " Suffering, my dear Olivia, attracts us to the 
 sufferer because we are attracted to free him from it ; 
 it places an aureole round his head upon the supposi- 
 tion — in many cases false — that it is supported mag- 
 nanimously : the air of holiness depends upon the 
 intuition, ' If this man, in his condition, is as good as 
 we, he is much better' ; the apparent dignity, what 
 you call the poetic value, of suffering, means merely 
 that we recognize it as something odious which ought 
 to be removed, as something often degrading which, 
 when it does not degrade, testifies to an unusual 
 nobility. This does not alter the fact that, in itself, 
 suffering has no moral value, therefore no holiness. 
 It is merely a great destroyer. That some natures 
 pass through suffering without injury and even with 
 profit, is merely saying that a sieve is a sieve, that 
 there is such a thing as survival of the fittest. But 
 there are all the natures which have not profited by 
 suffering, whose nobility, instead of being increased, 
 has been irremediably damaged or utterly lost — 
 natures which might yet have been, in normal circum- 
 stances, useful in their way and excellent."
 
 365 BALDWIN. 
 
 " But suffering," persisted Olivia, " adds to our 
 power of understanding and sympathizing ; and is 
 that not a moral value ? " 
 
 " It does not imply that suffering is good or holy. 
 That to have suffered gives additional powers of com- 
 prehension and sympathy to some natures, means 
 merely that as there is an immense amount of suffering 
 in the world, no person's experience and power of 
 helping can be complete without a knowledge of it — 
 a knowledge obtainable only by participation. A 
 person who should never have seen sickness could 
 not be completely sympathizing and useful as regards 
 it ; but that is not saying that sickness is a good 
 thing. On the contrary, the experience of suffering 
 in A. is useful only in proportion as it can diminish 
 or forestall the sufferings of C. and D. and E. It is 
 the enemy, whom we must know if we would vanquish ; 
 but the enemy Suffering is no more holy than the 
 enemy Satan. Therefore I say, that the fact of 
 crime being the result of suffering, does not diminish 
 by a tittle the necessity of exterminating crime, and, 
 if necessary thereunto, exterminating the criminal." 
 
 Olivia did not answer. Such questions sickened 
 her soul, and almost prevented her thinking. But 
 Carlo, to whom, in reality, suffering was not much 
 more than a word, a pawn in the metaphysical 
 game that delighted him, burst out against his 
 friend — 
 
 " You arc very hard-hearted, Baldwin," he said, " or
 
 OF DOUBTS AND rESSIMISM. 2^7 
 
 pretend to be so. You have no repugnance for the 
 suffering of the guilty." 
 
 " I have repugnance, my dear bo}'," answered 
 Baldwin, with that readiness which the metaphysical 
 Olivia particularly alluded to when she said that this 
 materialist ought to have been a priest, " I have 
 repugnance for the suffering of the innocent. In so 
 far as the evildoer is a victim, I pity and desire to 
 avenge him ; in so far as he makes victims of others, 
 I desire to exterminate him on the spot." 
 
 " We were talking," said Marcel, as they slowly 
 walked towards the garden house, where the gondola 
 awaited them once more to take them home — "we 
 were talking not of the measures which society ma}' 
 take for the suppression of evildoers — a subject that 
 afflicts me profoundly — but of the effect which science 
 must have on our own views of good and evil by 
 showing us the fatality of each. You had been 
 singing hymns to progress. Myself, as a pessimist, I 
 asked you, after all, what does all this progress come 
 to 1 Progress, among other things, brings with it — 
 at least so it seems to my mind — the belief in deter- 
 minism ; and determinism, by removing responsibility, 
 puts an end to all idea of right and wrong." 
 
 " Not at all," answered Baldwin ; " and thereunto 
 belongs our previous discussion about the sufferings 
 of evildoers. Determinism shows why one man is 
 destined to have a will, and another to have none — 
 why one man is destined to be a nuisance, and another
 
 368 BALDWIN. 
 
 a benefit to society ; but determinism cannot tell us 
 that the man with the will is not more useful than the 
 man without the will ; determinism cannot remove 
 the fact that the nuisance is a nuisance, and the 
 benefit a benefit. Now our ideas of right and wrong 
 depend not upon the consideration of cause, but upon 
 the consideration of effect. A thing is wrong which 
 leads to a balance of suffering, a thing is right that 
 leads to a balance of happiness ; and the question 
 why a creature is noxious, or whether it is so from 
 fatality or otherwise, does not interfere with the fact 
 that all noxious things must be stamped out. Now 
 right and wrong, morality, is the question of what 
 should be abetted and what should be stamped out : 
 it is the question of the result of a certain action, not 
 of its cause. Your determinism merely explains why 
 some people are good and some bad ; it does not 
 diminish the fact that good people are to be en- 
 couraged, and bad ones to be discouraged. I deny, 
 therefore, that progress, in the sense of greater know- 
 ledge and wisdom, can at all interfere with our notions 
 of right and wrong." 
 
 " I have nothing to do with right and wrong," 
 answered Marcel, somewhat peevishly ; " they seem 
 to me mere fluctuating unrealities. I see happiness 
 and unhappincss ; or rather, I see unhappiness mainly. 
 Progress means development, greater complexity, and 
 sensitiveness. The modern man is much more difficult 
 to deal with than the man of former days. He has,
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 369 
 
 in virtue of his greater complexity, a far greater 
 number of desires, and desires which are conflicting ; 
 while, at the same time, increased sensitiveness 
 implies greater lassitude. The power of extracting 
 pleasure is diminishing with familiarity with all such 
 things as might yield it ; and yet the demand for 
 satisfaction is growing more and more imperious with 
 every fresh complexity of our nature. The world, all 
 that which ministers to man's desires, bodily and 
 spiritual, remains the same, and man is changing ; 
 and thence that want of adaptation between the inner 
 constitution and the surroundings which we call 
 disease. Look at the two men who have perhaps — 
 amongst us French at least — done most to form the 
 younger generation, Baudelaire and Renan. What is 
 the secret of their pessimism — rebellious and mur- 
 derous in the one, sceptical and resigned in the other .'' 
 It is that they have outstripped their contemporaries, 
 and that, being more highly developed, more complex, 
 more sensitive than other men, they are also more 
 exacting and more impotent, tormented already by 
 the double disease of the future, satiety of the possible, 
 hunger for the impossible. These men are but the 
 elder brothers of all mankind to come : Baudelaire 
 has found the limit to all possible satisfaction of the 
 senses ; Renan the limit of all satisfaction of the 
 intellect. The one has felt till he has found only pain 
 instead of pleasure ; the other has thought till he has 
 found that thinking leads only to eternal doubt. Wc 
 
 25
 
 370 BALDWIN. 
 
 can enjoy no longer. This is the secret of the 
 pessimism which hes at the bottom of all our hearts, 
 a gnawing worm in the present, a devouring monster 
 in the future." 
 
 Marcel sighed as he stood in the moonlight, slowly 
 crushing in his hand the aromatic leaf of a laurel, and 
 fixing his curious clairvoyant glance on Olivia. 
 
 But Olivia did not respond to that look. To 
 Baldwin's surprise, the poetess flushed with indignation. 
 
 " No, no ! " she exclaimed, in a quick, low voice ; 
 " you are mistaken. Monsieur Marcel. We have not 
 all of us such pessimism in our hearts. This pessimism 
 which you describe is not the pessimism of a man like 
 Carlyle, nor even of a man like Schopenhauer. It is 
 not the pessimism, which only the noblest can feel, 
 when it comes to them that every day and hour and 
 half-hour of their own peace and happiness is filled 
 brimful with the suffering of a million others. This 
 pessimism of yours comes merely from the concen- 
 tration of all interest upon oneself and one's own self's 
 powers of enjoyment ; measuring all good and evil by 
 the standard of one creature's pleasure or pain or 
 lassitude. This pessimism is mere selfishness. The 
 secret of the ignoble misery of a man like Baudelaire 
 is simply that, having lived exclusively for his own 
 gratification, and having exhausted, not indeed the 
 enjoyable things of this world, but his own faculty for 
 enjoying ; having overtaxed and perverted his nature 
 till it can vibrate only to the abnormal, he is devoured
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 371 
 
 by the ennui and despair of his impotence and 
 depravity. This is the pessimism of the voluptuary ; 
 the pessimism of intellectual selfishness is cleaner, 
 less revolting, but it is not much nobler : he finds 
 himself deprived of certain higher pleasures like 
 religion ; and thought, pursued only for its own sake, 
 leads only to uncertainty : he, too, is sterilized by 
 selfishness. No, no ; we have not all of us such 
 pessimism as this to make us v/retched ; and indeed, 
 indeed. Monsieur Marcel, I do not believe you have it 
 either, for you are good and honest and kind." 
 
 IMarcel passed his hand wearily over his brow. " I 
 may be good and honest and kind," he answered — " or 
 rather I may have been it. But I am weary, tired, 
 tired — I am sick, and with the sickness of our days." 
 
 " But you must not let yourself be that," exclaimed 
 
 Olivia ; " indeed you must not, you " and she 
 
 stopped ; for the thought of what seemed to her the 
 shipwreck of this noble soul in the gulf of selfish 
 pessimism made her feel dizzy and faint. 
 
 " Olivia is quite right," said Baldwin, as the three 
 walked slowly up and down the trellised walk. " All 
 this pessimism is due to selfishness. It is the attitude 
 of men v/ho, having refused to feel or think or act, 
 save for their own gratification, come to the end of 
 all feeling or thought or action, and sit down in weari- 
 ness, like a child crying after too long a holiday. 
 This pessimism, to begin with, in so far as it is 
 represented by a man like Baudelaire, is mainly
 
 3/2 BALDWIN. 
 
 founded upon the mere beastliest debaucher)'. It is 
 no use glossing it over with fine phrases, but the 
 misery of the ' Fleurs du Mai ' is much more akin to 
 that of the old rake so wonderfully described in the 
 'Suicide Club,' who says that fear is more delicious than 
 love, than with the Faust who says, ' Habe nun, ach, 
 Philosophic.' Moreover, allow me to say that I think 
 it is all twaddle about our intellectual work coming 
 to an end. No greater lie Avas ever penned than La 
 Bruyere's ' Tout est dit,' which you Frenchmen are 
 echoing in all tones. I am not a scientific man, but 
 I know sufficient of science to see that there is no 
 chance of our remaining twiddling our thumbs in a 
 universe whence we have dislodged God only to 
 instate the Unknowable. Every branch of science, 
 like every branch of practical work, implies far too 
 many all-absorbing details and applications for the 
 scientific mind ever to feel as if it had nowhere to 
 expend its energies. Further, there is the equally 
 absurd twaddle about over-much thought and feeling 
 weakening the body and breaking down the nerves. 
 To begin with, feeling, in the case of Baudelaire, means 
 merely debauchery. But, my good man, why should 
 life consist only of the activity of the feelings and the 
 intellect? Have we not got a body, and can't we 
 exercise that also and take pleasure in its exercise ? 
 Above all, can't we think a little less of our own con- 
 dition, and a little more of that of others > " 
 Marcel sicrhed.
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 373 
 
 "Ah," he answered, "you are EngHsh, you belong 
 to an exceptional nationality. You can't understand 
 these things." 
 
 " You have put your finger upon it, Marcel, only 
 that }-our argument turns to my advantage. I am 
 English, as you say ; but I am sufficient of a cosmo- 
 politan — nay, rather, of a Frenchman — to see and to be 
 able to say without disrespect to your great country, 
 which, you know, is in a measure also my country, 
 that this sort of pessimism is due mainly to the 
 miserable rcstrictedness of continental life. The 
 French, you must admit, pay little attention at 
 present to such things as do not touch their pocket 
 or their vanity: the three questions, political, religious, 
 and economic, absorb their practical efforts and one 
 half of their speculation ; whereas we English, inferior 
 as we are in many respects, are distracted by a 
 hundred different questions not dependent upon 
 vanity or interest : agrarian reform, poor law, work- 
 men's dwellings, penny dinners, diminution of vice, 
 teetotalism, vivisection, &c., which do not practically 
 affect the well-to-do classes, not to speak of dozens 
 of various religious and humanitarian agitations; 
 fads all these, in our neighbours' eyes, which make us 
 disagreeable and ridiculous, but which are the proof 
 of our greater vitalit}' and health. Believe me, if 
 your French pessimists would give a little of their 
 attention to the miseries of others, they would soon 
 find out that the limit of all feeling and activity had 
 not been reached."
 
 374 BALDWIN. 
 
 Marcel shook his head. 
 
 "Your time has not yet come," he said: "you are 
 exceptional people, you English ; you talk of pessimism 
 being optimists ; you judge of spiritual exhaustion 
 while you have still a surplus of energy. We, who 
 have hastened along the path before you, are weak, 
 ill ; do not talk to us of the wants of others ; they 
 merely add to the paralyzing weight of our own." 
 
 They were in the little court paved by the moon- 
 light, where the statues shone forth, modelled by the 
 moonbeams as with a brush full of white paint ; or 
 stood out, among the shimmering laurels, the pale 
 roses, dark against the luminous blue ; where the 
 cypress moved scarce perceptibly its plumy tip, as 
 if, by that faintest of motions, to make but more 
 apparent the stillness of the night ; while the blue 
 light, the vague scent of autumn flowers and fallen 
 leaves, the quaver of the insects and frogs, seemed to 
 unite as a sort of general effluvium of sleeping 
 things. 
 
 " Do not say that. Monsieur Marcel," intreated 
 Olivia. " It is not true that the thought of others can 
 make one but the more selfish and selfishly miserable. 
 Does it not strike you this condition of being sated 
 with some things and starving for others, is due, like 
 the ainui and impotence of rich people, to a dis- 
 tribution of good and bad, of activity and idleness, 
 which requires rearrangement, and which we can all 
 do our microscopic something to rearrange.^ Docs
 
 OF DOUBTS AND PESSIMISM. 375 
 
 it not strike you that opposite to this Baudelaire, sated 
 to sickness with pleasure, is the man whose whole life 
 is a struggle with pain ; that opposite this Renan, 
 sated with thought and sensitiveness, is the man for 
 whom thought and sensitiveness do not exist ; that 
 opposite the epicure, who cannot awaken appetite 
 because he has eaten too much and fed on too highly 
 seasoned food, is the beggar who has not a crust to 
 put into his stomach ? Oh, if there is anything in the 
 v/orld that can make us despair," continued Olivia, 
 with excitement, but excitement which was solemn, 
 " it is that, when there is so much misery for which to 
 think and feel and act, there yet exists a number of 
 men with noble gifts and sensibilities, who sit and 
 moan that they have exhausted all subject of thought 
 and feeling and effort." 
 
 As Olivia was finishing her sentence, there came 
 from the garden house, staring out white and ghostly 
 in the moonlight, the sound of Carlo's piano, of the 
 young man's clear and guttural voice, with the swing- 
 ing rhythm, the wide vigorous intervals of old Caris- 
 simi's song, "Vittoria." 
 
 The very first notes made ]^.Iarcel start as if he had 
 been rudely shoved or struck. 
 
 "Ah ! " he exclaimed, with a pained contraction of 
 his face, " how I hate that song ! It is brutality put 
 into music." 
 
 " And I," answered Baldwin, raising his eyes to the 
 lit window — "■ I love it. It is the song of energy."
 
 TNWIN BROTHERS, 
 
 THE GRESHAM TRESS, 
 
 CHILWORTH AND LONDON.
 
 5115 
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