Читать книгу Babes in the Darkling Woods - H.G. Wells - Страница 13

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All unwittingly, you see, the vicar had detonated a mine of newly digested discussion that had been floating ready in Gemini's mind.

"I'm sorry to cut in, Sir," said the young man eagerly.

"Ask me any question?

"You say material. You say spiritual. You seem to be assuming that there is a sort of primary two—sidedness in things. Most of us, I admit, have been brought up on that assumption. Language is soaked with it. But a lot of us have come to believe that it is an almost fundamental error in human thought."

"But surely you attach some meaning to—when I say 'spiritual values'?"

"No, Sir. For me, for us, no. We know the sort of thing that attaches, that has attached, to that phrase. But for us, when we are talking of reality, that sort of association has got quite loose."

"But then. Are you so old-fashioned as to be materialistic?"

"Is that 'old-fashioned' quite fair? Anyhow it is easy to say tu quoque and leave it at that." And Gemini proceeded to argue, with all the confidence and ready fullness of a brilliant student fresh from his preparation, that the false fundamental dichotomy implied in the opposition of material and spiritual was being kept alive by the organised religions in despite of advancing human thought, that it encumbered that advance, and this was the chief cause of the stupefaction of civilisation in the present crisis.

"Fundamental dichotomy," repeated the vicar almost inaudibly. "Chirm—"

Doctor Kentlake, pursued Gemini, allowing no intervention, treated the universe as being of one nature throughout, would have nothing to do with that ancient primary opposition. You couldn't call him materialist; you couldn't call him spiritualist. "Monist" was a better word. Doctor Kentlake had merely given a philosophical form to what was the established practice of the scientific worker. The practical scientific worker thought in the same way even if he did not formulate it very clearly. He might be pluralist or he might be monist, consciously or implicitly, but he was never in practice dualist. Essentially he was a pragmatist. He threw terms over reality rather like a fly-fisher making a cast, Sir, and found out what they hooked for him. Matter, force, rhythm, electricity and so on were terms invented by the human mind in its struggle to apprehend the world, they were all in reality "partial, tentative terms." They were bait, so to speak, to catch the unknown. So were such words as imagination or beauty or belief.....

The vicar opened and shut his mouth.

"Where has Gemini got all this?" Stella asked herself. "He must have been reviewing some book. He can't simply have read it up. He must have been writing it down. He's glib. That Oxford glibness of his! He's got it at his fingers' ends."

Intelligent people nowadays, Gemini went on remorselessly, intelligent people were ceasing to consider any of the terms they used as finalities. Formerly they did so, but now they were more penetrating. Meaning, they were discovering, was elusive, it was the final wisdom towards which the mind moved; it did not leap into existence with a word and a definition. They knew the terms they employed never did quite "get it." Our naive forefathers thought they "got it" completely and that "it" could be defined exactly and completely. You defined your term, you put it through the logical machines and there you were with your conclusion neatly extracted. Such word-worship was coming to an end. Semantics had changed all that. Semantics—or Significs if you preferred the older term. It was just as unreasonable to say the world was all matter, as it was to say it was all movement, or all electricity or all rhythm or all beauty or all imagination.

"Shakespeare! Imagination all compact!" interjected the vicar with an air of scoring an unexpected point. "We are such things as dreams are made on."

"And also, Sir, we are creatures who can eat potatoes, get drunk and suffer from rheumatic fever. We are such stuff as crowds and concentration camps are made on. We are such stuff as operating theatres deal with. All that and more. The universe won't simplify out to oblige us, Sir." p Gemini had warmed up steadily as his argument had unfolded. He spoke now with all the precocious maturity of the Ex—Union President. His was a compendium of lecturers' styles and debaters' exposition. A great dominating organisation like the Anglican or Roman Church had no right, he asserted, to carry on nowadays with "this old, this superseded and misleading bilateralism." It ought to speak the language of the new period. But Christianity had planted itself in the way of the modernisation of thinking, just as, by its Creationism, it still blocked the way to a clear biological vision of life. That was one of the chief reasons why we were all now at sixes and sevens and so desperately out of touch with reality —in the face of catastrophe. "To which our generation seems likely to be pretty completely sacrificed, Sir. Far worse than 1914. You must forgive us if we get a little shrill about it."

"H'm," said Stella, manifestly approving, and she turned like a chairman to the vicar. She had not suspected Gemini of any of this metaphysical precision. He had it all so well packed and so ready to hand. Certainly he must have been summarising something or editing something very, very recently indeed. Queer quick mind he had! Better than hers! The vicar sat with his extended hands together, finger tips to finger tips. As Gemini had talked he had, to begin with, nodded his head gravely and encouragingly, listening as a doctor might listen to the symptoms of a patient. In that phase he had a faintly irritating air of having expected all that Gemini had to say. He had nodded less frequently as the spate had proceeded. "Fundamental dichotomy" had definitely ended the nodding phase, and a mood of apprehensive listening had followed, as who should say, What next? His pose was failing him. At "semantics" he had quailed visibly. Had he heard that strange word before, she asked herself? No. Evidently not. Now he took a deep breath almost like a sigh before he spoke.

"I admit," said he. "I grant you there has been much vigorous thinking about fundamentals in the—shall we say? scientific world in the last half century. Yes. I should be the last to quarrel with these modern ideas. Nevertheless-? He began to argue that perhaps it was unreasonable to treat I spirit and matter as things diametrically opposed. Not diametrically. He would meet them there. He stressed the word. He adopted a tone of reluctantly using an alien and subtly unsatisfactory terminology for the benefit of his hearers. "Let us agree upon that." Nevertheless there were grades of value, things one would call higher and things one would call lower. Were not those higher things, the things of the spirit? Possibly one might find a more exact and more technical word nowadays, some phrase from Pavlov or Freud or one of those people might please Gemini better, but "spirit" was still the old, customary, established word. It was still the "normal" language. "If you will forgive my reverting to normal language," he said with a tentative smile.

Gemini answered this warily, rather more in debating society fashion and rather less professionally. The grades of value, he said, did not run on those lines the vicar was suggesting. It was not a question of moral quality; it was a question of scope. Yes, scope. Stella perceived his main attack was over. He went on talking, but now he was getting away from the substance of that book review and his exposition was less lucid and assured. The vicar seemed to be rallying his evasiveness. Stella noted the change of phase with the impartiality of a boxing referee. The fine precise sparring was over. The disputants were getting winded.

They were soon embarked upon a manifestly futile wrangle; they were playing now for points in the air; their terms and phrases were failing to mesh; were swinging about without any attempt to mesh; it was becoming an argey-bargey. Stella listened with growing impatience. They were saying nothing now of any significance whatever to her. She broke in at last with "But what has this to do with my uncle having no spirituality?"

"We have rather got away from that," said the vicar. "I may, I admit, have formed false conclusions about your uncle's line of thought. After all, you know, in this busy parochial life of mine one is apt to get one's ideas about things from reports and reviews and secondary sources. One has to carry on. I would be the last person to take a rigid line about him. Without further enquiries.... But fundamentally you know.... Fundamentally...."

He looked at his wrist watch. "I must go very soon. Always I seem to be going on and going away. But before I go I'd like to say something that has been coming up in my mind as we have been arguing here."

"But first of all, Sir," Gemini pressed, "I must say a word or so more. I do want to put our case to you, Sir. I presume that you stand by the literal statement of your creeds and the story in the New Testament, even if you find some of the Old rather coloured by—well—primitive oriental symbolism. What we want you to know is that it isn't simply a question of metaphysics with us; it's a question of fact. We do not believe in your creeds. We find your Trinity-whatever it meant to the Greeks and Egyptians—entirely inconceivable. We do not believe in your simple Bible story. From the paternity by the Holy Ghost right up to Pentecost, Sir, it all seems to us mythology, absurdity, with no relation to any living human reality at all. That's what we tell you. And there's a whole lot like us. What have you to say to that?"

"What I have to say will seem a paradox to you," said the vicar. "When I was a child I believed in all those things as simply as one believes at that age in brightly painted pictures on a wall. Since then, I have not been impervious to modern doubt. No. Some of those pictures, I admit, have faded out, others have become transparent. I have had struggles. I have had to wrestle with many perplexities. But always afterwards I have won my way back to a profounder, more subtle and satisfying interpretation. Always. Always, I assure you. The deeper I go, the more certainly I believe. But as concerns many of the factual elements in the story, as crude facts, the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes for example, or the swallowing and disgorging of Jonah, I refuse to argue that it happened precisely so, or indeed that it actually happened at all.... No."

"And you cannot impart these deeper meanings?"

"No. Frankly no. Not in an atmosphere of factual scepticism. Not without conviction of sin and prayer. That is why the Church never really comes into the Debating Society, stark and unreservedly, as your scientific theories do. Let us recognise that. In the last resort the Church relies upon something that science excludes, if only on the score that repetition and verification are impossible; it relies upon religious experience. Naturally, necessarily, religion rests on religious experience and on nothing else. If you do not know what that is from having undergone it, you do not know what it is."

"But you can describe—?"

"One can describe. Yes. Yes, I think one can describe. First then there is a deepening and at last insupportable sense of Sin. Self-disgust."

"But we do not believe in sin. Are you sure you do not mean just a fear of life?"

"A fear of God and his righteousness?

"There again we are not equipped with the necessary belief. I can understand a fear that life may be too much for one. But that is not self-disgust."

"Well, grant me that. And then comes an intense hunger for reconciliation to God—."

"That is how you phrase it."

"And then conversion. Suddenly. An unutterable sense of concentration, oneness and completion. The peace of God that passeth understanding."

"Or a return of courage. Don't you think, Sir, one may go through all these phases without the slightest reference to theology? You feel reconciled to something, but how does that establish a belief on the Virgin Birth, or the raising of Lazarus, or the story that God created the world in, as Huxley had to explain to Mr Gladstone, a non-evolutionary sequence? And what will you say if an out and out atheist tells you he has had much the same experience, the depression, the self-disgust, the sense of an urgent need for a change, and then release suddenly to a feeling of Rightness and Oneness, and that he attaches no religious significance whatever to it all? This sequence of moods, Sir, has, I assure you, no special relation to Christianity. It's in all the text-books. William James gives instances from a dozen creeds. Moslem mystics have it. Rabindranath Tagore related the whole experience as the achievement of a sense of Oneness with the universe. It's a way the mind has of recoiling and changing phase. William James tells of an avaricious man who felt a conviction of sin; it was the sin of extravagance in his case; and found concentration and salvation in becoming a strict miser."

The vicar made no answer for a moment. Then he answered with an evasion of the question so complex as to take away Gemini's controversial wind altogether. "Faith may realise itself under many Formulae. Nevertheless it remains Faith."

What could one say to that?

The vicar ceased to lounge and sat up. He simply abandoned the argument. "I must go," he said. "What I had in mind to say was this, a point very urgent nowadays. Suppose—. Suppose the Christian religion is based on a fundamental error in what you call this assumption of the dualism of matter and spirit. Suppose it is. For the purposes of argument, let us suppose even that. None the less, that assumption has interwoven with human thought and language for thousands of years. Suppose its myth, as you would term it, The Fall and the Redemption, has no factual reality. Suppose what we call the beliefs, the prayers and ceremonies on which the Christian life is based, incorporate a whole tangle of inaccuracies and errors. Suppose they do. Nevertheless that system of living, morality, civilisation, the most successful civilisation the world has ever known, rests upon those same foundations. What happens if you pull them away? They are the sustaining skeleton of the present social order. M an's skeleton, I am told, is mechanically imperfect; we could have bigger heads and better brains if what they call the pelvis was larger or the skull sutures didn't close so early. But that doesn't justify an attempt to remove the skeleton and put in steel rods. I tell you that—when everything has been said and done— still from the practical point of view only, and disregarding everything else, the Christian religion is well worth the effort of believing."

"It is an effort," said Gemini.

"Certainly," said the vicar. "There is nothing good in this life that you do not have to hold on to with both hands."

"It is an effort for you, Sir? If you lost your grip—?"

"I do not intend to lose my grip."

He stood up.

"Now I think we see you better," said Gemini. "I wish we could go on with this talk. I am sorry you have to go. It was very kind and friendly of you to call, and I am afraid we have rather put you through it."

"Good for me too," said the vicar civilly. "And let me repeat my question why, until you can see your way to another social system better than this we live in, you should abandon the worn old serviceable working creed?"

"But we question that, Sir. We must make it clear we disagree with that. We two—in all honesty—brought up in a Christian country——do sincerely believe that Christianity, in itself, and apart from other humanising influences, has been an evil rather than a good thing in human life, and that for the past century or more in particular it has been a barrier to human enlightenment. We want you to understand clearly that we have no sort of religious belief at all, in Providence, in a Supreme Being or in anything of the sort. We two are Atheists right out, and to us you, with your religion, seem like a man who has been squeezed into antiquated and quite useless armour that does nothing but impede the freedom of his life and mind."

"You are franker and franker," said the vicar. "Indeed you are almost needlessly frank. But you are young yet. I thank God for that ancient armour, into which I have been as you say squeezed, daily, hourly. I thank Him. Why should I complain of a loss of freedom? Where should I be without it?"

He glanced again at his watch.

For a moment the three stood still.

"We haven't been outrageous with our arguments, I hope," said Gemini. "You see life presses on us. Things are very urgent with all us young people just now. The shadow of war—"

"At any moment," said the vicar, as though he forced himself to say it, "you may have a realisation of Sin."

"We have about as much conviction of sin," said Gemini, with a faint distaste for the Balch touch in the phrasing that had come into his mind, "as lambs in a slaughter house. We may feel frightened presently.... That is different...."

"I must go," said the vicar for the third time. He liked them, they liked him and he knew they both liked him. But disapproval and entire detachment was his duty. He bowed gravely to Stella as though she was the accomplished hostess she had been impersonating. Then he went to the door and stood for a moment on the threshold.

"Anyway we've not humbugged you in any way," said Gemini.

"Not at all. I shall have much to think about. There is more in all this than mere argument"

"You won't invoke the prayers of the congregation, Sir?"

Stella dashed a silent reproof at Gemini.

"I may pray for you myself," said the vicar. "I don't know. You are so wrong about all this—and so well-meaning? But Gemini was still out of hand. Stella's sudden decision to fling deception to the winds, had infected him. He pressed his defeated antagonist. "I'm afraid, too, that we ought to tell you that we're living in what you would call Sin, Sir. We don't want to deceive you in any way."

The vicar winced.

"I can't countenance that. I'm so sorry. I am sorry to hear you say it. No good was ever done by open lawlessness, even when the law was wrong. No. And why tell me? Why have you told me? I wonder. Defiance only makes things more awkward."

He turned at the gate and looked back at them for a whole second perhaps. Again there was an air of hesitation about him. "No," he said, almost as much to himself as to them. He passed out of sight behind the hedge.

"Patriotism is a vice," said Gemini, still glowing with self-approval from his dialectical display and his ultimate lapse into sincerity. "But in this mild sunshine, this green privacy, this picturesque, unobtrusive go-as-you-please—. To the sound of church bells. Dear, mellow, humbugging, tolerant old England!... Tolerant.... And now how about breaking it to Mrs Greedle?"

"That," said Stella, "would not be honesty. It would be indelicacy. The essence of indecency is insisting upon things that everybody knows are there...."

"Stella," said Gemini, still pleased with himself and the encounter; "there was something infectious about that parson. That was absolutely in his line of thought."