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The Case of Richard Meynell by Mrs. Humphry Ward

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> The Case of Richard Meynell




From a covert of thorn in the park, a youth who had retreated into its
shelter on their approach watched them with malicious eyes. Another man
was with him--a sheepish, red-faced person, who peered curiously at the
little procession as it passed about a hundred yards away.

"Quite a family party!" said Maurice Barron with a laugh.

* * * * *

In the late evening Meynell returned to the Rectory a wearied man, but
with hours of occupation and correspondence still before him. He had left
Hester with Alice Puttenham, in a state which Meynell interpreted as at
once alarming and hopeful; alarming because it suggested that there might
be an element of passion in what had seemed to be a mere escapade
dictated by vanity and temper; and hopeful because of the emotion the
girl had once or twice betrayed, for the first time in the experience
of any one connected with her. When they entered Alice Puttenham's
drawing-room, for instance--for Hester had stipulated she was not to be
taken home--Alice had thrown her arms round her, and Hester had broken
suddenly into crying, a thing unheard of. Meynell of course had hastily
disappeared.

Since then the parish had taken its toll. Visits to two or three sick
people had been paid. The Rector had looked in at the schools, where a
children's evening was going on, and had told the story of Aladdin with
riotous success; he had taken off his coat to help in putting up
decorations for an entertainment in the little Wesleyan meeting-house of
corrugated iron; the parish nurse had waylaid him with reports, and he
had dashed into the back parlour of a small embarrassed tradesman, in
mortal fear of collapse and bankruptcy, with the offer of a loan, sternly
conditional upon facing the facts, and getting in an auditor. Lady
Fox-Wilton of course had been seen, and the clamour of her most
unattractive offspring allayed as much as possible. And now, emerging
from this tangle of personal claims and small interests, in the silence
and freedom of the night hours, Meynell was free to give himself once
more to the intellectual and spiritual passion of the Reform Movement.
His table was piled with unopened letters; on his desk lay a half-written
article, and two or three foreign books, the latest products of the
Modernist Movement abroad. His crowded be-littered room smiled upon him,
as he shut its door upon the outer world. For within it, he lived more
truly, more vividly, than anywhere else; and all the more since its
threadbare carpet had been trodden by Mary Elsmere.

Yet as he settled himself by the fire with his pipe and his letters for
half an hour's ease before going to his desk, his thoughts were still
full of Hester. The incurable optimism, the ready faith where his
affections were concerned, which were such strong notes of his character,
was busy persuading him that all would be well. At last, between them,
they had made an impression on the poor child; and as for Philip, he
should be dealt with this time with a proper disregard of either his own
or his servants' lying. Hester was now to spend some months with a
charming and cultivated French family. Plenty of occupation, plenty of
amusement, plenty of appeal to her intelligence. Then, perhaps, travel
for a couple of years, with Aunt Alice--as much separation as possible,
anyway, from the Northleigh family and house. Alice was not rich, but she
could manage as much as that, if he advised it, and he would advise it.
Then with her twenty-first year, if Stephen or any other wooer were to
the fore, the crisis must be faced, and the child must know! and it would
be a cold-blooded lover that would weigh her story against her face.

Comfort himself as he would, however, dream as he would, Meynell's
conscience was always sore for Hester. Had they done right?--or hideously
wrong? Had not all their devices been a mere trifling with nature--a mere
attempt to "bind the courses of Orion," with the inevitable result in
Hester's unhappy childhood and perverse youth?

The Rector as he pulled at his pipe could still feel the fluttering of
her slender hand in his. The recollection stirred in him again all the
intolerable pity, the tragic horror of the past. Poor, poor little girl.
But she should be happy yet, "with rings on her fingers," and everything
proper!

Then from this fatherly and tender preoccupation he passed into a more
intimate and poignant dreaming. Mary!--in the moonlight, under the
autumn trees, was the vision that held him; varied sometimes by the dream
of her in that very room, sitting ghostly in the chair beside him, her
lovely eyes wandering over its confusion of books and papers. He thought
of her exquisite neatness of dress and delicacy of movement, and smiled
happily to himself. "How she must have wanted to tidy up!" And he dared
to think of a day when she would come and take possession of him
altogether--books, body and soul, and gently order his life....

"Why, you rascals!"--he said, jealously, to the dogs--"she fed you--I
know she did--she patted and pampered you, eh, didn't she? She likes
dogs--you may thank your lucky stars she does!"

But they only raised their eager heads, and turned their loving eyes upon
him, prepared to let loose pandemonium as soon as he showed signs of
moving.

"Well, you don't expect me to take you out for a walk at ten o'clock at
night, do you?--idiots!" he hurled at them reprovingly; and after another
moment of bright-eyed interrogation, disappointment descended, and down
went their noses on their paws again.

* * * * *

His trust in the tender steadfastness of Mary's character made itself
powerfully felt in these solitary moments. She knew that while these
strenuous days were on he could allow himself no personal aims. But the
growing knowledge that he was approved by a soul so pure and so devout
had both strung up all his powers and calmed the fevers of battle. He
loved his cause the more because it was ever more clear to him that
she passionately loved it too. And sensitive and depressed as he often
was--the penalty of the optimist--her faith in him had doubled his faith
in himself.

There was a singular pleasure also in the link his love for her had
forged between himself and Elsmere--the dead leader of an earlier
generation. "Latitudinarianism is coming in upon us like a flood!"--cried
the _Church Times_, wringing its hands. In other words, thought Meynell,
"a New Learning is at last penetrating the minds and consciences of
men--in the Church, no less than out of it." And Elsmere had been one of
its martyrs. Meynell thought with emotion of the emaciated form he had
last seen in the thronged hall of the New Brotherhood. "_Our_ venture is
possible--because _you_ suffered," he would say to himself, addressing
not so much Elsmere, as Elsmere's generation, remembering its struggles,
its thwarted hopes, and starved lives.

And Elsmere's wife?--that rigid, pathetic figure, who, before he knew her
in the flesh, had been to him, through the reports of many friends, a
kind of legendary presence--the embodiment of the Old Faith. Meynell only
knew that as far as he was concerned something had happened--something
which he could not define. She was no longer his enemy; and he blessed
her humbly in his heart. He thought also, with a curious thankfulness, of
her strong and immovable convictions. Each thinking mind, as it were,
carries within it its own Pageant of the Universe, and lights the show
with its own passion. Not to quench the existing light in any human
breast--but to kindle and quicken where no light is: to bring forever new
lamp-bearers into the Lampadephoria of life, and marshal them there in
their places, on equal terms with the old, neither excluded, nor
excluding: this, surely this was the ideal of Modernism.

Elsmere's widow might never admit his own claim to equal rights within
the Christian society. What matter! It seemed to him that in some
mysterious way she had now recognized the spiritual necessity laid upon
him to fight for that claim; had admitted him, so to speak, to the rights
of a belligerent. And that had made all the difference.

He did not know how it had happened. But he was strangely certain that it
had happened.

But soon the short interval of rest and dream he had allowed himself was
over. He turned to his writing-table.

What a medley of letters! Here was one from a clergyman in the Midlands:

"We introduced the new Liturgy last Sunday, and I cannot describe the
emotion, the stirring of all the dead-bones it has brought about. There
has been of course a secession; but the church at Patten End amply
provides for the seceders, and among our own people one seems to realize
at last something of what the simplicity and sincerity of the first
Christian feeling must have been! No 'allowances' to make for scandalous
mistranslations and misquotations--no foolish legends, or unedifying
tales of barbarous people--no cursing psalms--no old Semitic nonsense
about God resting on the seventh day, delivered in the solemn sing-song
which makes it not only nonsense but hypocrisy....

"I have held both a marriage and a funeral this week under the new
service-book. I think that all persons accustomed to think of what they
are saying felt the strangest delight and relief in the disappearance of
the old marriage service. It was like the dropping of a weight to which
our shoulders had become so accustomed that we hardly realized it till it
was gone. Instead of pompous and futile absurdity--as in the existing
exhortation, and homily--beautiful and fitting quotation from the unused
treasures of the Bible. Instead of the brutal speech, the crudely
physical outlook of an earlier day, the just reticence and nobler
perceptions of our own, combined with perfectly plain and tender
statement as to the founding of the home and the family. Instead of
besmirching bits of primitive and ugly legend like the solemn
introduction of Adam's rib into the prayers, a few new prayers of great
beauty--some day you must tell me who wrote them, for I suppose you know?
(and, by the way, why should we not write as good prayers, to-day, as in
any age of the Christian Church?). Instead of the old 'obey,' for the
woman, which has had such a definitely debasing effect, as I believe, on
the position of women, especially in the working classes--a formula, only
slightly altered, but the same for the man and the woman....

"In short, a seemly, and beautiful, and moving thing, instead of a
ceremony which in spite of its few fine, even majestic, elements, had
become an offence and a scandal. All the fine elements have been kept,
and only the scandal amended. Why was it not done long ago?

"Then as to the burial service. The Corinthian chapter stripped of its
arguments which are dead, and confined to its cries of poetry and faith
which are immortal, made a new and thrilling impression. I confess I
thought I should have broken my heart over the omission of 'I know that
my Redeemer liveth'--and yet now that it is gone, there is a sense of
moral exhilaration in having let it go! One knew all the time that
whoever wrote the poem of Job neither said what he was made to say in the
famous passage, nor meant what he was supposed to mean. One was perfectly
aware, from one's Oxford days, as the choir chanted the great words, that
they were a flagrant mistranslation of a corrupt and probably
interpolated passage. And yet the glory of Handel's music, the glamour
of association overcame one. But now that it is cut ruthlessly away
from those moments in life when man can least afford any make-believe
with himself or his fellows--now that music alone declaims and fathers
it--there is the strangest relief! One feels, as I have said, the joy
that comes from something difficult and righteous _done_--in spite of
everything!

"I could go on for hours telling you these very simple and obvious things
which must be so familiar to you. To me the amazement of this Movement is
that it has taken so long to come. We have groaned under the oppression
of what we have now thrown off, so long and so hopelessly; the Revision
that the High Churchmen made such a bother about a few years ago came to
so little; that now, to see this thing spreading like a great spring-tide
over the face of England is marvellous indeed! And when one knows what it
means--no mere liturgical change, no mere lopping off here and changing
there, but a transformation of the root ideas of Christianity; a
transference of its whole proof and evidence from the outward to the
inward field, and therewith the uprush of a certainty and joy unknown to
our modern life; one can but bow one's head, as those that hear
mysterious voices on the wind.

"For so into the temple of man's spirit, age by age, comes the renewing
Master of man's life--and makes His tabernacle with man. 'Lift up your
heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, And the King
of Glory shall come in.'"

Meynell bowed his head upon his hands. The pulse of hope and passion in
the letter was almost overpowering. It came, he knew, from an elderly
man, broken by many troubles, and tormented by arthritis, yet a true
saint, and at times a great preacher.

The next letter he opened came from a priest in the diocese of Aix....

"The effect of the various encyclicals and of the ill-advised attempt to
make both clergy and laity sign the Modernist decrees has had a
prodigious effect all over France--precisely in the opposite sense to
that desired by Pius X. The spread of the Movement is really amazing.
Fifteen years ago I remember hearing a French critic say--Edmond Scherer,
I think, the successor of Sainte Beuve--'The Catholics have not a single
intellectual of any eminence--and it is a misfortune for _us_, the
liberals. We have nothing to fight--we seem to be beating the air.'

"Scherer could not have said this to-day. There are Catholics
everywhere--in the University, the Ecole Normale, the front ranks of
literature. But with few exceptions _they are all Modernist_; they have
thrown overboard the whole _fatras_ of legend and tradition. Christianity
has become to them a symbolical and spiritual religion; not only
personally important and efficacious, but of enormous significance from
the national point of view. But as you know, _we_ do not at present
aspire to outward or ceremonial changes. We are quite content to leaven
the meal from within; to uphold the absolute right and necessity of the
two languages in Christianity--the popular and the scientific, the
mythological and the mystical. If the Pope could have his way,
Catholicism would soon be at an end--except as a peasant-cult--in the
Latin countries. But, thank God, he will not have his way. One hears of a
Modernist freemasonry among the Italian clergy--of a secret press--an
enthusiasm, like that of the Carboneria in the forties. So the spirit of
the Most High blows among the dead clods of the world--and, in a moment
the harvest is there!"

* * * * *

Meynell let the paper drop. He began to write, and he wrote without
stopping with great ease and inspiration for nearly two hours. Then as
midnight struck, he put down his pen, and gazed into the dying fire. He
felt as Wordsworth's skater felt on Esthwaite, when, at a sudden pause,
the mountains and cliffs seemed to whirl past him in a vast headlong
procession. So it was in Meynell's mind with thoughts and ideas.
Gradually they calmed and slackened, till at last they passed into an
abstraction and ecstasy of prayer.

When he rose, the night had grown very cold. He hurriedly put his papers
in order, before going to bed, and as he did so, he perceived two
unopened letters which had been overlooked.

One was from Hugh Flaxman, communicating the news of the loss of two
valuable gold coins from the collection exhibited at the party. "We are
all in tribulation. I wonder whether you can remember seeing them when
you were talking there with Norham? One was a gold stater of Velia with a
head of Athene."...

The other letter was addressed in Henry Barron's handwriting. Meynell
looked at it in some surprise as he opened it, for there had been no
communication between him and the White House for a long time.

"I should be glad if you could make it convenient to see me to-morrow
morning. I wish to speak with you on a personal matter of some
importance--of which I do not think you should remain in ignorance. Will
it suit you if I come at eleven?"

Meynell stood motionless. But the mind reacted in a flash. He thought--

"_Now_ I shall know what she told him in those two hours!"




CHAPTER XV


"The Rector will be back, sir, direckly. I was to I tell you so
pertickler. They had 'im out to a man in the Row, who's been drinkin'
days, and was goin' on shockin'--his wife was afraid to stop in the
house. But he won't be long, sir."

And Anne, very stiff and on her dignity, relieved one of the two
armchairs of its habitual burden of books, gave it a dusting with her
apron, and offered it to the visitor. It was evident that she regarded
his presence with entire disfavour, but was prepared to treat him with
prudence for the master's sake. Her devotion to Meynell had made her
shrewd; she perfectly understood who were his enemies, and who his
friends.

Barron, with a sharp sense of annoyance that he should be kept waiting,
merely because a drunken miner happened to be beating his wife, coldly
accepted her civilities, and took up a copy of the _Times_ which was
lying on the table. But when Anne had retired, he dropped the newspaper,
and began with a rather ugly curiosity to examine the room. He walked
round the walls, looking at the books, raising his eyebrows at the rows
of paper-bound German volumes, and peering closely into the titles of the
English ones. Then his attention was caught by a wall-map, in which a
number of small flags attached to pins were sticking. It was an outline
map of England, apparently sketched by Meynell himself, as the notes and
letterings were in his handwriting. It was labelled "Branches of the
Reform League." All over England the little flags bristled, thicker here,
and thinner there, but making a goodly show on the whole. Barron's face
lengthened as he pondered the map.

Then he passed by the laden writing-table. On it lay an open copy of the
_Modernist_, with a half-written "leader" of Meynell's between the
sheets. Beside it was a copy of Thomas a Kempis, and Father Tyrrell's
posthumous book, in which a great soul, like a breaking wave, had foamed
itself away; a volume of Sanday, another of Harnack, into the open cover
of which the Rector had apparently just pinned an extract from a Church
paper. Barron involuntarily stooped to read it. It ran:

"This is no time for giving up the Athanasian Creed. The moment when the
sewage of continental unbelief is pouring into England is not the moment
for banishing to a museum a screen that was erected to guard the
sanctuary."

Beneath it, in Meynell's writing:

"A gem, not to be lost! The muddle of the metaphor, the corruption of the
style, everything is symbolic. In a preceding paragraph the writer makes
an attack on Harnack, who is described as 'notorious for opposing' the
doctrines of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. That history has a
right to its say on so-called historical events never seems to have
occurred to this gentleman; still less that there is a mystical and
sacred element in all truth, all the advancing knowledge of mankind,
including historical knowledge, and that therefore his responsibility,
his moral and spiritual risk even, in disbelieving Harnack, is probably
infinitely greater than Harnack's in dealing historically with the Birth
Stories. The fact is the whole onus is now on the orthodox side. It is
not we that are on our defence; but they."

Barron raised himself with a flushed cheek, and a stiffened mouth.
Meynell's note had removed his last scruples. It was necessary to deal
drastically with a clergyman who could write such things.

A step outside. The sleeping dogs on the doorstep sprang up and noisily
greeted their master. Meynell shut them out, to their great disgust, and
came hurriedly toward the study.

Barron, as he saw him in the doorway, drew back with an exclamation. The
Rector's dress and hair were dishevelled and awry, and his face--pale,
drawn, and damp with perspiration--showed that he had just come through a
personal struggle.

"Sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Barron. But that fellow,
Pinches--you remember?--the new blacksmith--has been drinking for nearly
a week, and went quite mad this morning. We just prevented him from
killing his wife, but it was a tough business. I'll go and wash and
change my coat, if you will allow me."

So he went away, and Barron had a few more minutes in which to meditate
on the room and its owner. When at last Meynell came back, and settled
himself in the chair opposite to his visitor, with a quiet "Now I am
quite at your service," Barron found himself overtaken with a curious and
unwelcome hesitation. The signs--a slightly strained look, a quickened
breathing--that Meynell still bore upon him of a physical wrestle,
combined perhaps with a moral victory, suddenly seemed, even in Barron's
own eyes, to dwarf what he had to say--to make a poor mean thing out of
his story. And Meynell's shining eyes, divided between close attention to
the man before him and some recent and disturbing recollections in which
Barron had no share, reinforced the impression.

But he recaptured himself quickly. After all, it was at once a charitable
and a high-judicial part that he had come to play. He gathered his
dignity about him, resenting the momentary disturbance of it.

"I am come to-day, Mr. Meynell, on a very unpleasant errand."

The formal "Mr." marked the complete breach in their once friendly
relations. Meynell made a slight inclination.

"Then I hope you will tell it me as quickly as may be. Does it concern
yourself, or me? Maurice, I hope, is doing well?"

Barron winced. It seemed to him an offence on the Rector's part that
Meynell's tone should subtly though quite innocently remind him of days
when he had been thankful to accept a strong man's help in dealing with
the escapades of a vicious lad.

"He is doing excellently, thank you--except that his health is not all I
could wish. My business to-day," he continued, slowly--"concerns a woman,
formerly of this village, whom I happened by a strange accident to see
just after her return to it--"

"You are speaking of Judith Sabin?" interrupted Meynell.

"I am. You were of course aware that I had seen her?"

"Naturally--from the inquest. Well?"

The quiet, interrogative tone seemed to Barron an impertinence. With a
suddenly heightened colour he struck straight--violently--for the heart
of the thing.

"She told me a lamentable story--and she was led to tell it me by
seeing--and identifying--yourself--as you were standing with a lady in
the road outside the cottage."

"Identifying me?" repeated Meynell, with a slight accent of astonishment.
"That I think is hardly possible. For Judith Sabin had never seen me."

"You were not perhaps aware of it--but she had seen you."

Meynell shook his head.

"She was mistaken--or you are. However, that doesn't matter. I gather you
wish to consult me about something that Judith Sabin communicated to
you?"

"I do. But the story she told me turns very closely on her identification
of yourself; and therefore it does matter," said Barron, with emphasis.

A puzzled look passed again over Meynell's face. But he said nothing. His
attitude, coldly expectant, demanded the story.

Barron told it--once more. He repeated Judith Sabin's narrative in the
straightened, rearranged form he had now given to it, postponing,
however, any further mention of Meynell's relation to it till a last
dramatic moment.

He did not find his task so easy on this occasion. There was something in
the personality of the man sitting opposite to him which seemed to make a
narrative that had passed muster elsewhere sound here a mere vulgar
impertinence, the wanton intrusion of a common man on things sacredly and
justly covered from sight.

He laboured through it, however, while Meynell sat with bent head,
looking at the floor, making no sign whatever. And at last the speaker
arrived at the incident of the Grenoble visitor.

"I naturally find this a very disagreeable task," he said, pausing a
moment. He got, however, no help from Meynell, who was dumb; and he
presently resumed--"Judith Sabin saw the gentleman who came distinctly.
She felt perfectly certain in her own mind as to his relation to Miss
Puttenham and the child; and she was certain also, when she saw you and
Miss Puttenham standing in the road, while I was with her that--"

Meynell looked up, slightly frowning, awaiting the conclusion of the
sentence--

--"that she saw--the same man again!"

Barron's naturally ruddy colour had faded a little; his eyes blinked. He
drew his coat forward over his knee, and put it back again nervously.

Site of the Week: The International Literary Quarterly

An intricate, kaleidoscopic, all-embracing history of 20th-century music from Mahler to La Monte Young is the winner of this year's Guardian first book award. Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise was the clear and undisputed winner of the £10,000 prize, which has been presented at a ceremony in central London tonight.

The chair of the judging panel, Guardian literary editor Claire Armitstead, said: "In some quarters this book has been seen as not having a popular appeal. Our prize – which, uniquely, relies on readers' groups in the early stages of judging – proves that, on the contrary, there is a huge appetite among readers for clear, serious but accessible books."

According to one judge: "Where Ross lifts his book above the 'expert' and impressive to the 'good read' category is in the way he wears his learning lightly, never clutches for false or contrived ways of explaining music, and never dumbs down in order to explain."

One of the members of the Waterstone's reading groups, who helped in the judging process, said: "Every time I felt overwhelmed by the technicalities, along came a sublime metaphor or simile that would light up the prose."

Ross, who is the music critic of the New Yorker, has distilled a lifetime's enthusiasm and learning into a rich narrative of musical history, setting the works of Mahler, Schoenberg, John Cage and the rest into their cultural and political contexts – but also giving a vivid sense of what the music he describes actually sounds and feels like.

Of all the artforms, modern and contemporary classical music is often seen as the most rebarbative. Ross brushes aside the mythology of 20th-century music's "inaccessibility" as he charts its meandering histories. Along the way, fascinating connections are made: hip-hop has more in common with Janacek than you might think; Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were tennis partners; Gershwin, in turn, was an ardent fan of Alban Berg and kept an autographed photo of the composer of Lulu in his apartment. If there is an overarching idea to the book, it is perhaps contained in Berg's pronouncement to Gershwin: "Mr Gershwin, music is music."

Ross, 40, was born in Washington DC, and studied English and history at Harvard. An enthusiastic teenage musician and student broadcaster, he began writing music criticism after university and in 1996 was appointed music critic of the New Yorker. His blog – also called The Rest Is Noise – has been a trailblazer in harnessing the internet as a way of amplifying (often literally) his writing on music.

The New York Review of Books described The Rest Is Noise as "by far the liveliest and smartest popular introduction yet written to a century of diverse music". The Economist noted: "No other critic writing in English can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording."

Nicholas Kenyon, managing director of the Barbican and a former Observer music critic, said: "At a time when people are still talking about 20th-century music as if it were a problem, here is a lucid and entertaining book about what I regard as some of the greatest music ever written. It's a wonderful way to advance the cause of 20th-century music to an ordinary, intelligent general reader. It's the ideal mix of enthusiasm and information."

This year's judging panel comprised novelist Roddy Doyle; broadcaster and novelist Francine Stock; poet Daljit Nagra; the historian David Kynaston; novelist Kate Mosse and Guardian deputy editor, Katharine Viner. Stuart Broom of Waterstone's also joined the deliberations, speaking as the representative of the readers' groups.

The other books on the shortlist were Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes; Ross Raisin's God's Own Country; Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole (which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker prize) and Owen Matthews's Stalin's Children.

Previous winners of the prize have included Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters (2005) and Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000).

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