THE STRANGE TALK OF TWO VICTORIANS

The Faith always returns in a counter-attack; and it is generally not only a successful attack but almost always a surprise attack.

Here more than anywhere it is the unexpected that happens; the religion supposed to be rotting away slowly in unlettered peasantries was found present in pressing numbers in the new industrial towns; the creed compassionately tolerated in a few old sentimentalists is today making converts among the young almost entirely of the hard-headed logicians.

But this tendency to a reconciliation with intellectuals, once regarded as a reconciliation with irreconcilables, has produced, among other queer points in the position, this fact; that the newest group consists rather too much of those who are in a position to teach, while there is not yet a sufficient crowd, or larger public, of those who are in a position to learn. There is, for instance, a huge mass of material in Catholic history for very good novels or plays; and there are a considerable proportion of Catholics capable of writing them; but there is not yet a sufficient number of ordinary readers capable of reading them, in the sense of understanding them. This is especially true of the high historic quality of irony.

An Englishman realising the real religious history of his country constantly comes upon small social and political episodes, of which the irony is as grand as Greek tragedy; and then he remembers most of the other Englishmen, and has to own that it would be Greek to them. The very ironic point which gives him grim gratification would be quite pointless, because the public at large would probably take the suggestion quite seriously and never even see the joke.

So, till very lately at least, the public hardly saw the joke of talking about the Virgin Queen or the Glorious Revolution. You cannot have drama without a public; you cannot have irony without an instructed public.

I was wondering the other day whether anybody had thought of a play, or rather a scene, which could be a very fine scene written by anybody well read in eighteenth-century England. It might be called "Five Irishmen."

Seated round a table in a coffeehouse (but conspicuously not drinking coffee) would be Goldsmith, an old Tory almost a Jacobite; Sheridan, a younger Whig almost a Jacobin; Burke, a Whig more alarmist than any Tory about disturbing the balance of the British Constitution (which he had largely made up out of his own highly imaginative head); Grattan, a Whig orator also, but native to the Irish Parliament; and (if he could be dragged in somehow) somebody more dangerous, like Lord Edward of Tone, foreshadowing the Irish Rebellion. All these men were Protestants. All, either in their own persons or through their families, could be traced back in some way to the time when it seemed that the heart of Ireland was broken; and for a man who did not abandon the Faith there was no normal hope on earth.

I think somebody could make a fine study, in several stages, of how layer after layer began to crack and that awful forbidden ancestral Thing rose slowly to overshadow them like a ghost. They would begin decorously, of course, probably discussing Catholic Emancipation with cold pagan liberality; and the wine and the words and the Irish passion for personal recrimination, and especially for family reminiscence, would bring strange things spouting from the depths; and through a wild scene I actually seemed suddenly to hear the high voice of Sheridan, shrill with intoxication, crying out some taunt: "Have ye forgotten that, O'Bourke?" And then I remembered that an audience in a London theatre would probably make nothing of the notion of that great eternal Thing terribly returning; because any number of them do not know that it is eternal and hardly that it is great.

In Edith Sitwell's very graceful sketch of Queen Victoria, I came on another quaint little drama, which in this case would be a duologue. Also, in this case, the thing really happened. It is there described briefly and impartially; but anyone knowing persons and period can easily understand and expand it; and to me it is enormously amusing; amusing and also enormous. It has exactly that grim Greek irony of the contrast between great things known and the greater thing that is not known. It was a discussion, and even a dispute between two very eminent Victorians. It was concerned with the news of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

They were both good men; they were both men of the first prominence in the public eye. Both had the finest culture of the Protestant; both had a faint streak of the prig; but both had a warmth of generous conviction for their own favourite causes; neither certainly was a fool; neither was a No-Popery man in the narrow and vulgar sense; both believed themselves flooded with the full daylight of the age of enlightenment and liberty; and, at the same time, both had hobbies and intelligent interests that might soften them toward older religious traditions.

One was a great reader of the Fathers and the first devotional literature; the other had a genuine taste in what was still often regarded as the childish cheap jewellery of medieval painting. One was a High Churchman of the Oxford Movement; the other was a liberal Lutheran. One was the great Gladstone; the other was Albert, the Prince Consort.

The two men talked and disagreed. They sharply disagreed. The point on which they disagreed was extraordinary. But it was not a hundredth part as extraordinary as the part on which they agreed.

Mr. Gladstone was greatly grieved because he had found the Prince Consort in a state of indecent hilarity, he thought, over the news about the Immaculate Conception. Indecent hilarity is not a vice conspicuously staining Prince Albert's name, any more than Gladstone's; two more solemn disputants would be hard to find. But Prince Albert was the more cheerful, because (he said in effect) it is always a good thing when an evil system tottering to its fall, does some one wildly insane and frantic act of arrogance; which will quite certainly bring it to a final crash. Rome had staggered along somehow till now; but, obviously, Rome would never have a leg to stand on after this.

But Mr. Gladstone (of the Oxford Movement) could not join in this simple German triumph over the disaster and disgrace that had at last destroyed the Eternal City. In those deep tones of reproach he could command so well, he rebuked the Prince for his insensibility to this blasting and blackening of a name that had meant so much in history; no Christian, he felt, could be insensible to the utter downfall of so large a section of the Christian world. He meant it. He was tremendously upset about it. He returned to the subject afterwards; repeatedly imploring Prince Albert to drop at least one tear upon the ruins of St. Peter's, now lying as desolate as Stonehenge.

But the Prince also was firm; and remained in his somewhat rare state of high spirits over the news that the unduly protracted business was finished; and the Pope had done himself in at last.

And all this was becauseof what? Because one more crown had been added to that tower of crowns that crowd after crowd, city after city, nation after nation, age after age, have reared higher and higher on the image which is of all others most strongly based and founded and built, as regards this earth, in the affection of the universal people. And Prince Albert, with his unselfish labours for the education of the working classes, and Gladstone, with his confident appeal to the great heart of the people, understood so little of what that crown and image really meant to millions of ordinary poor people, in all the countrysides and cities of half the world, that they actually expected that it would be dethroned like a tyranny, for this last toppling insolence in the demands of a tyrant.

The one extraordinary thing on which these extraordinary men agreed, it seems, was that the decision would be unpopular. ... One of Belloc's Ballades had a refrain chiefly remembered by the Envoi, which ran:

Prince, is it true that when you met the Czar You said that English people think it low To coax to life a half-extinct cigar? Good Lord, how little wealthy people know!

Anyhow, the one assumption shared by these admirable public men seems to have been wrong somewhere. Apple-women did not rush madly out of church; seamstresses in garrets did not dash their little images of Mary to the ground, on learning that she was named Immaculate.

Four years after these potentates had their regrettable difference, while the Bishop still frowned and the parish priest feared to believe, little knots of poor peasants began to gather round a strange starved child before a crack in the rocks, from whence was to spring a strange stream and almost a new city; the rocks she had heard resound with a voice crying, "I am the Immaculate Conception. . . ."

"Good Lord, how little wealthy people know!"