The Seaboard Parish, Complete
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I had stood regarding her for a moment. She turned and saw me, and came forward with her usual morning greeting.
“I beg your pardon, papa: I thought it was Walter.”
“I am glad to see a smile on your face, my love.”
“Don’t think me very disagreeable, papa. I know I am a trouble to you. But I am a trouble to myself first. I fear I have a discontented mind and a complaining temper. But I do try, and I will try hard to overcome it.”
“It will not get the better of you, so long as you do the duty of the moment. But I think, as I told you before, that you are not very well, and that your indisposition is going to do you good by making you think about some things you are ready to think about, but which you might have banished if you had been in good health and spirits. You are feeling as you never felt before, that you need a presence in your soul of which at least you haven’t enough yet. But I preached quite enough to you yesterday, and I won’t go on the same way to-day again. Only I wanted to comfort you. Come and give me my breakfast.”
“You do comfort me, papa,” she answered, approaching the table. “I know I don’t show what I feel as I ought, but you do comfort me much. Don’t you like a day like this, papa?”
“I do, my dear. I always did. And I think you take after me in that, as you do in a good many things besides. That is how I understand you so well.”
“Do I really take after you, papa? Are you sure that you understand me so well?” she asked, brightening up.
“I know I do,” I returned, replying to her last question.
“Better than I do myself?” she asked with an arch smile.
“Considerably, if I mistake not,” I answered.
“How delightful! To think that I am understood even when I don’t understand myself!”
“But even if I am wrong, you are yet understood. The blessedness of life is that we can hide nothing from God. If we could hide anything from God, that hidden thing would by and by turn into a terrible disease. It is the sight of God that keeps and makes things clean. But as we are both, by mutual confession, fond of this kind of weather, what do you say to going out with me? I have to visit a sick woman.”
“You don’t mean Mrs. Coombes, papa?”
“No, my dear. I did not hear she was ill.”
“O, I daresay it is nothing much. Only old nursey said yesterday she was in bed with a bad cold, or something of that sort.”
“We’ll call and inquire as we pass,—that is, if you are inclined to go with me.”
“How can you put an if to that, papa?”
“I have just had a message from that cottage that stands all alone on the corner of Mr. Barton’s farm—over the cliff, you know—that the woman is ill, and would like to see me. So the sooner we start the better.”
“I shall have done my breakfast in five minutes, papa. O, here’s mamma!—Mamma, I’m going out for a walk in the rain with papa. You won’t mind, will you?”
“I don’t think it will do you any harm, my dear. That’s all I mind, you know. It was only once or twice when you were not well that I objected to it. I quite agree with your papa, that only lazy people are glad to stay in-doors when it rains.”
“And it does blow so delightfully!” said Wynnie, as she left the room to put on her long cloak and her bonnet.
We called at the sexton’s cottage, and found him sitting gloomily by the low window, looking seaward.
“I hope your wife is not very poorly, Coombes,” I said.
“No, sir. She be very comfortable in bed. Bed’s not a bad place to be in in such weather,” he answered, turning again a dreary look towards the Atlantic. “Poor things!”
“What a passion for comfort you have, Coombes! How does that come about, do you think?”
“I suppose I was made so, sir.”
“To be sure you were. God made you so.”
“Surely, sir. Who else?”
“Then I suppose he likes making people comfortable if he makes people like to be comfortable.”
“It du look likely enough, sir.”
“Then when he takes it out of your hands, you mustn’t think he doesn’t look after the people you would make comfortable if you could.”
“I must mind my work, you know, sir.”
“Yes, surely. And you mustn’t want to take his out of his hands, and go grumbling as if you would do it so much better if he would only let you get your hand to it.”
“I daresay you be right, sir,” he said. “I must just go and have a look about, though. Here’s Agnes. She’ll tell you about mother.”
He took his spade from the corner, and went out. He often brought his tools into the cottage. He had carved the handle of his spade all over with the names of the people he had buried.
“Tell your mother, Agnes, that I will call in the evening and see her, if she would like to see me. We are going now to see Mrs. Stokes. She is very poorly, I hear.”
“Let us go through the churchyard, papa,” said Wynnie, “and see what the old man is doing.”
“Very well, my dear. It is only a few steps round.”
“Why do you humour the sexton’s foolish fancy so much, papa? It is such nonsense! You taught us it was, surely, in your sermon about the resurrection?”
“Most certainly, my dear. But it would be of no use to try to get it out of his head by any argument. He has a kind of craze in that direction. To get people’s hearts right is of much more importance than convincing their judgments. Right judgment will follow. All such fixed ideas should be encountered from the deepest grounds of truth, and not from the outsides of their relations. Coombes has to be taught that God cares for the dead more than he does, and therefore it is unreasonable for him to be anxious about them.”
When we reached the churchyard we found the old man kneeling on a grave before its headstone. It was a very old one, with a death’s-head and cross-bones carved upon the top of it in very high relief. With his pocket-knife he was removing the lumps of green moss out of the hollows of the eyes of the carven skull. We did not interrupt him, but walked past with a nod.
“You saw what he was doing, Wynnie? That reminds me of almost the only thing in Dante’s grand poem that troubles me. I cannot think of it without a renewal of my concern, though I have no doubt he is as sorry now as I am that ever he could have written it. When, in the Inferno, he reaches the lowest region of torture, which is a solid lake of ice, he finds the lost plunged in it to various depths, some, if I remember rightly, entirely submerged, and visible only through the ice, transparent as crystal, like the insects found in amber. One man with his head only above the ice, appeals to him as condemned to the same punishment to take pity on him, and remove the lumps of frozen tears from his eyes, that he may weep a little before they freeze again and stop the relief once more. Dante says to him, ‘Tell me who you are, and if I do not assist you, I deserve to lie at the bottom of the ice myself.’ The man tells him who he is, and explains to him one awful mystery of these regions. Then he says, ‘Now stretch forth thy hand, and open my eyes.’ ‘And,’ says Dante, I did not open them for him; and rudeness to him was courtesy.’”
“But he promised, you said.”
“He did; and yet he did not do it. Pity and truth had abandoned him together. One would think little of it comparatively, were it not that Dante is so full of tenderness and grand religion. It is very awful, and may teach us many things.”
“But what made you think of that now?”
“Merely what Coombes was about. The visual image was all. He was scooping the green moss out of the eyes of the death’s-head on the gravestone.”
By this time we were on the top of the downs, and the wind was buffeting us, and every other minute assailing us with a blast of rain. Wynnie drew her cloak closer about her, bent her head towards the blast, and struggled on bravely by my side. No one who wants to enjoy a walk in the rain must carry an umbrella; it is pure folly. When we came to one of the stone fences, we cowered down by its side for a few moments to recover our breath, and then struggled on again. Anything like conversation was out of the question. At length we dropped into a hollow, which gave us a little repose. Down below the sea was dashing into the mouth of the glen, or coomb, as they call it there. On the opposite side of the hollow, the little house to which we were going stood up against the gray sky.
“I begin to doubt whether I ought to have brought you, Wynnie. It was thoughtless of me; I don’t mean for your sake, but because your presence may be embarrassing in a small house; for probably the poor woman may prefer seeing me alone.”
“I will go back, papa. I sha’n’t mind it a bit.”
“No; you had better come on. I shall not be long with her, I daresay. We may find some place that you can wait in. Are you wet?”
“Only my cloak. I am as dry as a tortoise inside.”
“Come along, then. We shall soon be there.”
When we reached the house I found that Wynnie would not be in the way. I left her seated by the kitchen-fire, and was shown into the room where Mrs. Stokes lay. I cannot say I perceived. But I guessed somehow, the moment I saw her that there was something upon her mind. She was a hard-featured woman, with a cold, troubled black eye that rolled restlessly about. She lay on her back, moving her head from side to side. When I entered she only looked at me, and turned her eyes away towards the wall. I approached the bedside, and seated myself by it. I always do so at once; for the patient feels more at rest than if you stand tall up before her. I laid my hand on hers.
“Are you very ill, Mrs. Stokes?” I said.
“Yes, very,” she answered with a groan. “It be come to the last with me.”
“I hope not, indeed, Mrs. Stokes. It’s not come to the last with us, so long as we have a Father in heaven.”
“Ah! but it be with me. He can’t take any notice of the like of me.”
“But indeed he does, whether you think it or not. He takes notice of every thought we think, and every deed we do, and every sin we commit.”
I said the last words with emphasis, for I suspected something more than usual upon her conscience. She gave another groan, but made no reply. I therefore went on.
“Our Father in heaven is not like some fathers on earth, who, so long as their children don’t bother them, let them do anything they like. He will not have them do what is wrong. He loves them too much for that.”
“He won’t look at me,” she said half murmuring, half sighing it out, so that I could hardly, hear what she said.
“It is because he is looking at you that you are feeling uncomfortable,” I answered. “He wants you to confess your sins. I don’t mean to me, but to himself; though if you would like to tell me anything, and I can help you, I shall be very glad. You know Jesus Christ came to save us from our sins; and that’s why we call him our Saviour. But he can’t save us from our sins if we won’t confess that we have any.”
“I’m sure I never said but what I be a great sinner, as well as other people.”
“You don’t suppose that’s confessing your sins?” I said. “I once knew a woman of very bad character, who allowed to me she was a great sinner; but when I said, ‘Yes, you have done so and so,’ she would not allow one of those deeds to be worthy of being reckoned amongst her sins. When I asked her what great sins she had been guilty of, then, seeing these counted for nothing, I could get no more out of her than that she was a great sinner, like other people, as you have just been saying.”
“I hope you don’t be thinking I ha’ done anything of that sort,” she said with wakening energy. “No man or woman dare say I’ve done anything to be ashamed of.”
“Then you’ve committed no sins?” I returned. “But why did you send for me? You must have something to say to me.”
“I never did send for you. It must ha’ been my husband.”
“Ah, then I’m afraid I’ve no business here!” I returned, rising. “I thought you had sent for me.”
She returned no answer. I hoped that by retiring I should set her thinking, and make her more willing to listen the next time I came. I think clergymen may do much harm by insisting when people are in a bad mood, as if they had everything to do, and the Spirit of God nothing at all. I bade her good-day, hoped she would be better soon, and returned to Wynnie.
As we walked home together, I said:
“Wynnie, I was right. It would not have done at all to take you into the sick-room. Mrs. Stokes had not sent for me herself, and rather resented my appearance. But I think she will send for me before many days are over.”
CHAPTER IV. THE ART OF NATURE
We had a week of hazy weather after this. I spent it chiefly in my study and in Connie’s room. A world of mist hung over the sea; it refused to hold any communion with mortals. As if ill-tempered or unhappy, it folded itself in its mantle and lay still.
What was it thinking about? All Nature is so full of meaning, that we cannot help fancying sometimes that she knows her own meanings. She is busy with every human mood in turn—sometimes with ten of them at once—picturing our own inner world before us, that we may see, understand, develop, reform it.
I was turning over some such thought in my mind one morning, when Dora knocked at the door, saying that Mr. Percivale had called, and that mamma was busy, and would I mind if she brought him up to the study.
“Not in the least, my dear,” I answered; “I shall be very glad to see him.”
“Not much of weather for your sacred craft, Percivale,” I said as he entered. “I suppose, if you were asked to make a sketch to-day, it would be much the same as if a stupid woman were to ask you to take her portrait?”
“Not quite so bad as that,” said Percivale.
“Surely the human face is more than nature.”
“Nature is never stupid.”
“The woman might be pretty.”
“Nature is full of beauty in her worst moods; while the prettier such a woman, the more stupid she would look, and the more irksome you would feel the task; for you could not help making claims upon her which you would never think of making upon Nature.”
“I daresay you are right. Such stupidity has a good deal to do with moral causes. You do not ever feel that Nature is to blame.”
“Nature is never ugly. She may be dull, sorrowful, troubled; she may be lost in tears and pallor, but she cannot be ugly. It is only when you rise into animal nature that you find ugliness.”
“True in the main only; for no lines of absolute division can be drawn in nature. I have seen ugly flowers.”
“I grant it; but they are exceptional; and none of them are without beauty.”
“Surely not. The ugliest soul even is not without some beauty. But I grant you that the higher you rise the more is ugliness possible, just because the greater beauty is possible. There is no ugliness to equal in its repulsiveness the ugliness of a beautiful face.”
A pause followed.
“I presume,” I said, “you are thinking of returning to London now, there seems so little to be gained by remaining here. When this weather begins to show itself I could wish myself in my own parish; but I am sure the change, even through the winter, will be good for my daughter.”
“I must be going soon,” he answered; “but it would be too bad to take offence at the old lady’s first touch of temper. I mean to wait and see whether we shall not have a little bit of St. Martin’s summer, as Shakspere calls it; after which, hail London, queen of smoke and—”
“And what?” I asked, seeing he hesitated.
“‘And soap,’ I was fancying you would say; for you never will allow the worst of things, Mr. Walton.”
“No, surely I will not. For one thing, the worst has never been seen by anybody yet. We have no experience to justify it.”
We were chatting in this loose manner when Walter came to the door to tell me that a messenger had come from Mrs. Stokes.
I went down to see him, and found her husband.
“My wife be very bad, sir,” he said. “I wish you could come and see her.”
“Does she want to see me?’ I asked.
“She’s been more uncomfortable than ever since you was there last,” he said.
“But,” I repeated, “has she said she would like to see me?”
“I can’t say it, sir,” answered the man.
“Then it is you who want me to see her?”
“Yes, sir; but I be sure she do want to see you. I know her way, you see, sir. She never would say she wanted anything in her life; she would always leave you to find it out: so I got sharp at that, sir.”
“And then would she allow she had wanted it when you got it her?”
“No, never, sir. She be peculiar—my wife; she always be.”
“Does she know that you have come to ask me now?”
“No, sir.”
“Have you courage to tell her?”
The man hesitated.
“If you haven’t courage to tell her,” I resumed, “I have nothing more to say. I can’t go; or, rather, I will not go.”
“I will tell her, sir.”
“Then you will tell her that I refused to come until she sent for me herself.”
“Ben’t that rather hard on a dying woman, sir?”
“I have my reasons. Except she send for me herself, the moment I go she will take refuge in the fact that she did not send for me. I know your wife’s peculiarity too, Mr. Stokes.”
“Well, I will tell her, sir. It’s time to speak my own mind.”
“I think so. It was time long ago. When she sends for me, if it be in the middle of the night, I shall be with her at once.”
He left me and I returned to Percivale.
“I was just thinking before you came,” I said, “about the relation of Nature to our inner world. You know I am quite ignorant of your art, but I often think about the truths that lie at the root of it.”
“I am greatly obliged to you,” he said, “for talking about these things. I assure you it is of more service to me than any professional talk. I always think the professions should not herd together so much as they do; they want to be shone upon from other quarters.”
“I believe we have all to help each other, Percivale. The sun himself could give us no light that would be of any service to us but for the reflective power of the airy particles through which he shines. But anything I know I have found out merely by foraging for my own necessities.”
“That is just what makes the result valuable,” he replied. “Tell me what you were thinking.”
“I was thinking,” I answered, “how everyone likes to see his own thoughts set outside of him, that he may contemplate them objectively, as the philosophers call it. He likes to see the other side of them, as it were.”
“Yes, that is, of course, true; else, I suppose, there would be no art at all.”
“Surely. But that is not the aspect in which I was considering the question. Those who can so set them forth are artists; and however they may fail of effecting such a representation of their ideas as will satisfy themselves, they yet experience satisfaction in the measure in which they have succeeded. But there are many more men who cannot yet utter their ideas in any form. Mind, I do expect that, if they will only be good, they shall have this power some day; for I do think that many things we call differences in kind, may in God’s grand scale prove to be only differences in degree. And indeed the artist—by artist, I mean, of course, architect, musician, painter, poet, sculptor—in many things requires it just as much as the most helpless and dumb of his brethren, seeing in proportion to the things that he can do, he is aware of the things he cannot do, the thoughts he cannot express. Hence arises the enthusiasm with which people hail the work of an artist; they rejoice, namely, in seeing their own thoughts, or feelings, or something like them, expressed; and hence it comes that of those who have money, some hang their walls with pictures of their own choice, others—”
“I beg your pardon,” said Percivale, interrupting; “but most people, I fear, hang their walls with pictures of other people’s choice, for they don’t buy them at all till the artist has got a name.”
“That is true. And yet there is a shadow of choice even there; for they won’t at least buy what they dislike. And again the growth in popularity may be only what first attracted their attention—not determined their choice.”
“But there are others who only buy them for their value in the market.”
“‘Of such is not the talk,’ as the Germans would say. In as far as your description applies, such are only tradesmen, and have no claim to be considered now.”
“Then I beg your pardon for interrupting. I am punished more than I deserve, if you have lost your thread.”
“I don’t think I have. Let me see. Yes. I was saying that people hang their walls with pictures of their choice; or provide music, &c., of their choice. Let me keep to the pictures: their choice, consciously or unconsciously, is determined by some expression that these pictures give to what is in themselves—the buyers, I mean. They like to see their own feelings outside of themselves.”
“Is there not another possible motive—that the pictures teach them something?”
“That, I venture to think, shows a higher moral condition than the other, but still partakes of the other; for it is only what is in us already that makes us able to lay hold of a lesson. It is there in the germ, else nothing from without would wake it up.”
“I do not quite see what all this has to do with Nature and her influences.”
“One step more, and I shall arrive at it. You will admit that the pictures and objects of art of all kinds, with which a man adorns the house he has chosen or built to live in, have thenceforward not a little to do with the education of his tastes and feelings. Even when he is not aware of it, they are working upon him,—for good, if he has chosen what is good, which alone shall be our supposition.”
“Certainly; that is clear.”
“Now I come to it. God, knowing our needs, built our house for our needs—not as one man may build for another, but as no man can build for himself. For our comfort, education, training, he has put into form for us all the otherwise hidden thoughts and feelings of our heart. Even when he speaks of the hidden things of the Spirit of God, he uses the forms or pictures of Nature. The world is, as it were, the human, unseen world turned inside out, that we may see it. On the walls of the house that he has built for us, God has hung up the pictures—ever-living, ever-changing pictures—of all that passes in our souls. Form and colour and motion are there,—ever-modelling, ever-renewing, never wearying. Without this living portraiture from within, we should have no word to utter that should represent a single act of the inner world. Metaphysics could have no existence, not to speak of poetry, not to speak of the commonest language of affection. But all is done in such spiritual suggestion, portrait and definition are so avoided, the whole is in such fluent evanescence, that the producing mind is only aided, never overwhelmed. It never amounts to representation. It affords but the material which the thinking, feeling soul can use, interpret, and apply for its own purposes of speech. It is, as it were, the forms of thought cast into a lovely chaos by the inferior laws of matter, thence to be withdrawn by what we call the creative genius that God has given to men, and moulded, and modelled, and arranged, and built up to its own shapes and its own purposes.”
“Then I presume you would say that no mere transcript, if I may use the word, of nature is the worthy work of an artist.”
“It is an impossibility to make a mere transcript. No man can help seeing nature as he is himself, for she has all in her; but if he sees no meaning in especial that he wants to give, his portrait of her will represent only her dead face, not her living impassioned countenance.”
“Then artists ought to interpret nature?”
“Indubitably; but that will only be to interpret themselves—something of humanity that is theirs, whether they have discovered it already or not. If to this they can add some teaching for humanity, then indeed they may claim to belong to the higher order of art, however imperfect they may be in their powers of representing—however lowly, therefore, their position may be in that order.”
CHAPTER V. THE SORE SPOT
We went on talking for some time. Indeed we talked so long that the dinner-hour was approaching, when one of the maids came with the message that Mr. Stokes had called again, wishing to see me. I could not help smiling inwardly at the news. I went down at once, and found him smiling too.