XXIX DISCUSSION

          Will kein Gott auf Erde sein? Sind wir selber G?tter.         
          W. MüLLER.

THROUGH the years Father Soledano had remained a fairly frequent visitor at the house of the Folyats. His was the only really constant intimacy that Francis enjoyed, and it was based on the kinship of their humour and their common taste for mental caricature. Both strangers to our town and dwelling outside its activity, they loved to foregather and burlesque its politics, its manners, and its worship of money. Father Soledano went further than Francis and poked his fun at English institutions, though then he became malicious and Francis could not see eye to eye with him. Francis had no politics save a dislike for Mr. Gladstone and a distrust of Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury, and he knew too little of modern English literature to be able to appreciate the priest’s sarcasms at the expense of Carlyle, Ruskin, George Eliot, or Robert Browning. He had never heard of George Meredith, but he became almost angry when Soledano scoffed at Dickens and Thackeray. . . .

Their discussions used to take place on Sunday evenings in the study, and it often happened that Serge was present. One Sunday night when, as often happened, Soledano, harked back to the Manchester murders, he launched out upon a violent assault upon England, and quoted once more words that were often upon his lips, words of the mother of Charles Stewart Parnell:

“‘The English are hated everywhere for their arrogance, greed, cant, and hypocrisy. They want us all to think they are so goody-goody. They are simply thieves.’”

[Pg 289]

“Oh! come, come,” said Francis, “not so bad as that. After all we have given the world a good deal and showed the way to other nations in many things.”

“You have shown the other nations how to steal.”

“I don’t think any nation, or any collective body of men who have pooled their sense of right and wrong need much instruction in that,” said Serge. “It is simply a question of stealing from a body of men weaker than themselves. Men in the mass are abominable. There isn’t anything to choose between England and France, or Italy, or the new German Empire or America. England has been more successful than the rest and has therefore had more opportunity of doing harm. . . .”

“Good as well,” put in Francis. “Good as well.”

“Only incidentally and by accident,” retorted Soledano. “What I contend is that you cannot have collective villainy and individual virtue, collective bad action and individual good action.”

“You can’t indict a nation,” said Serge.

“I can and I do.”

“Then you are not so clever as I thought. There is no such thing as collective action, there is only the action of individuals. You herd men together so that they may carry out the will of individuals, and, as in the present condition of society, the most cunning and cold-blooded and unscrupulous men survive to exercise their wills over the herd. What is produced by the herd is almost always bad, because their efforts are directed only towards base ideals. . . . In the long run it may be a good thing to gather men together into huge masses for the easier and more expeditious creation of wealth and the means of subsistence. I don’t know. I can’t see into the future. But you and my father know—who better?—how the poor are being ground down in this town, and it must be the same in every other. What appals me is that there is no sort of corrective to the base ideal of success and accumulated wealth and what is called power except the blind revolt of nature in man and woman—especially woman. There is absolutely nothing. There are a certain number of artists in this town, men of my own trade, but they [Pg 290]all seem to be doing their work from the dealer’s point of view, to produce a saleable article, and not for the sheer delight of exercising a talent, without which the result cannot give delight. The theatres are even worse: they are fed from London with stupid replicas of pieces designed to give the illusion of pleasure rather than pleasure itself. The newspapers will soon be nothing but advertising sheets. It will soon be impossible for any man to do his work with any joy in it. It is bad enough when a man wastes himself in feeding his own vanity, but when he is used only to feed the vanity of another man then there is absolutely no hope for him. There might be something said for an arrangement by which a man gave a certain number of hours of his day to joyless work, so that during the rest he can take joy in other things. But all these men who are doing work in which there is no reward at all are paid so little that they are shattered by financial anxiety. They marry wives whom they cannot afford to keep and produce children whom it is impossible for them to feed and educate. . . . England is in a bad way, Father. It seems to me rather unfair to attack her when she is down.”

“The greatest Empire the world has ever seen!” said Father Soledano mockingly.

Francis looked thoughtful. He lit his pipe and said:

“I wish I understood what you are talking about, Serge.”

“I want a corrective,” answered Serge. “All this material organisation may be a good thing in the long run, but spiritual health is every bit as important as physical health—more. They’re organising education now, but towards no ideal save the base ideal of cunning unscrupulous men—self-help, and all that. A man’s life consists of only two things, work and love. At present love is wiped out of consideration altogether, and work is regarded as a damned unpleasant thing that has to be stomached. At present a man must be either a slave or an employer of slaves, that is, a slave who is promoted. If you promote a slave to the condition of a free man he goes bad, because he has the soul of a slave and cannot live except under [Pg 291]tyranny. If he escapes from the tyranny of a man he seeks that of his own vices. . . . If you educate men as slaves they will be slaves, just as your Loyola said, Father—every child who passed through the Jesuits’ hands remained theirs for ever. . . . You get revolt every now and then as in the French Revolution and in 1848, but that is nothing but the desire of the slaves of poverty for the slavery of wealth.”

“Christopher Sly,” said Soledano, “will always be Christopher Sly. If you are stupid enough you can stand anything. Men are stupid. That is the whole story. When you have said that you have said everything.”

Serge brought his fist down on the table.

“I don’t believe it. If, inspired by a base ideal, they can do all that they have done, they can, when inspired by a noble ideal, the simplest and most beautiful of all, the ideal of a life of love and work, do better yet and gain material well-being in justice through spiritual health.”

“Bah!” said Soledano. “That is your English idealism. Men can only understand a base ideal. They are impelled only by one instinct—hunger. They are terrified of hunger and fight only to protect themselves against it. All their other instincts, even the instinct of reproduction, have to take their chance—a very poor one. Also my friend, your idealism is just a joke to women. Life is too serious, too immediately appalling for them, for they are just as cruelly driven by their instinct of reproduction as they are by the instinct of hunger.”

“Very well, then,” said Serge, “drop the idealism and call it practical good sense. Concentrate on the instinct of hunger and the instinct of reproduction and organise for the satisfaction of both.”

“It is impossible. You are asking men to be intelligent. The English will never be that.”

Father Soledano said good-night to Francis and held out his hand to Serge.

“I’m coming with you,” said Serge.

“Still unconvinced?”

“Absolutely convinced that I am right.”

[Pg 292]

They drove back in a cab to the priest’s house in the asphalted courtyard under the cathedral.

“Will you tell me,” asked Serge, “how you reconcile what you have said this evening with what you say in your Church?”

“I don’t.”

“Can you go on?”

“Like the rest of the world, I do what I am told. If I examined and scrutinised everything that I was told to do I should do very little of it. . . . On the whole we do good. We save a certain number of men from sinking into brutality, and to a certain number of others we give an outlet for their emotions, which amounts to the same thing.”

“How much do you believe of what you tell them?”

“I have never examined my belief. Like your father, I do what I am told to do. Suppose I renounced my faith and the priesthood. My place would be taken by another. There are too many men, my friend, too many women, and life moves both too slowly and too swiftly . . . What can you do? You say that the good life consists wholly of work and love. Then work, my friend, and love. There is nothing to prevent you. I also work, and I also love. Very lovingly I despise men, because I know them, as you, I think, do not.”

“Quite candidly, it seems to me cowardly and rather despicable to teach men to believe in another life beyond the grave.”

“Life, as it is, must be made supportable.”

“From within, not from without.”

“You seem to be levelling an accusation at my Church, but you must be just and observe that we do display, for the benefit of the men whose souls are our care, a certain faith in the next life by renouncing the pleasures of this.”

“You stifle an instinct. That seems to me as great a sin as abusing it by excess of the pleasure derived from its satisfaction.”

“I find your point of view interesting, but too na?ve and simple. The idea of original sin may be fanciful, it [Pg 293]may have its origin in Oriental myth, but there is contamination from some source or other.”

“Simply from a wrong interpretation of life. I say it is possible for men to understand life.”

“It is quite impossible. They can only live it.”

“Then there is absolutely no meaning in all their activity, all their inventions, all their discoveries . . .”

“I can see none. They are still the slaves of hunger. When you appease the hunger of the body there remains the hunger of the spirit.”

“Exactly, and I contend that in the hands of intelligent men the machinery in their power could satisfy the bodily hunger of all men, and set them free to find satisfaction for the hunger of the spirit. . . . As I see it, it is towards that that the world is tending. There will be a great deal of cruelty and oppression by the way, but there will come a time when man’s mastery of the world will be so great that anything save the most elastic organisation will make life intolerable for rich and poor alike. As you say, if you are stupid enough you can endure anything. Men are more intelligent now than they were fifty years ago. They will be ten times as intelligent fifty years hence. . . .”

“Look at home, my friend. Look at home.”

“I do. And it is just that absurdly pathetic tragi-comedy that makes me scan the world to see what hope there is for future generations. . . . You make the mistake of taking men as you find them. I take myself and discover what I might be, to what I might grow if I could get my fill of friendship, and affection, and love.”

“Love is of God.”

“God is in Man. I take myself, as I say. There is much in myself that I despise, even as you despise men, but there is in myself an essence which I know to be unconquerable and free. That you translate into another world and call God and eternal life. You postpone freedom, because to you the crust of slavery seems impenetrable. I want freedom for that essence in myself here and now. It is the fiercest instinct in me, stronger than hunger, stronger than reproduction, which [Pg 294]are only by the way. What I find in myself I believe to exist in all other men.”

“But then,” said Father Soledano, “you have never done as you were told.”

Serge laughed and took his leave.