“I know, I know what you mean,” said Miriam in contemplation, they were naive; showing their thoughts, in sets, readable, with shapes and edges, but it was the Tories and clerics who had the roomiest, most sympathetic expressions, liberals and nonconformists had no thoughts at all, only ideas. Lawyers had no ideas even. …
“You would like my father; he hasn’t a scrap of originality, only that funny old-fashioned English quality from somewhere or other Heaven knows.” … and they could play chess together! … “But lawyers are not gentlemen. They are perfectly awful.”
“That is a prejudice. Your English law is the very basis of your English freedom.”
“They are awful. The others look Christians. They don’t.” Fancy defending Christianity. …
“The thing you are seeing,” she said, “is Christianity. I don’t mean that there is anything in it; but Christian ideas have made English civilisation; that’s what it is. But how can you say all these things when you believe we are grabbing diamond mines?” Haw, what? Champagne and Grand pianos. Nice, jolly prejudiced simpletons; not even able to imagine that England ought not to have everything there was to be had, everywhere. Quite right, better for everybody … but … wir reiten, Pieter, reiten … oh Lord … who was right?
“Stop a bit, stop a bit. Christianity will not explain. There are other Christian countries where there is no sign of this thing that is in England. No. The explanation is very simple. It is that you have had in England through a variety of causes, not the least of which is your Protestant Reformation, a relatively very rapid and unrestricted secular development.”
“What about Germany and Holland?”
“Both quite different stories. There was in England a specially favourable gathering of circumstances for rapid secularistic development.”
“Then if we have been made by our circumstances it is no credit to us.”
“I have not said anything about credit.”
“But there are people now who think we are dying of the Reformation; not the break with Rome; but with Catholic history and tradition. No, wait a minute, it’s interesting. They have discovered, proved, that there was Christianity in Britain, and British Christian Churches, long before the Romans came. That means that we are as old, and as direct as Rome. The Pope is nothing but a Roman Bishop. I feel it is an immense relief, to know we go right back, ourselves; when I think of it.”
“All these clericalisms are immaterial to life.”
“Then there were two Popes at one time, and there is the Greek church. I wonder Newman didn’t think of that. Now he is one of your fine English types, although he looks scared, as if he had seen a ghost. If he had known about the early British church perhaps he would not have gone over to Rome.”
“I cannot follow all this. But what is indisputable is, that in every case of religious authority, secular development has been held back. Buckle has completely demonstrated this in a most masterly exhaustive consideration of the civilisations of Europe. Ah it is marvellous, this book, one of your finest decorations; and without any smallest touch of fanaticism; he is indeed perhaps one of your greatest minds of the best English type, full of sensibility and fine gentleness.”
Miriam was back, as she listened, in the Chiswick villa, in bed in the yellow lamplight with a cold, the pages of the Apologia reading themselves without effort into her molten mind, as untroubled beauty and happiness, making what Newman sought seem to be at home in herself, revealing deep inside life a whole new strange place of existence that was yet familiar, so that the gradual awful gathering of his trouble was a personal experience, and the moment of conviction that schism was a deliberate death, a personal conviction. She wondered why she always forgot that the problem had been solved. Glancing beyond the curve of her umbrella she caught, with his last words, the sudden confident grateful shining of Mr. Shatov’s lifted face and listened eagerly.
“It is this one thing,” she lifted the umbrella his way in sudden contrition, shifting it so that it sheltered neither of them; “Thank you I am quite well. It is hardly now raining,” he muttered at his utmost distance of foreign intonation and bearing. She peered out into the air, shutting her umbrella. They had come out of their way, away from the streets into a quietness. It must be the Inner Circle. They would have to walk right round it.
“It is this one thing,” again it was as if her own voice were speaking, “this thesis of the conditions of the development of peoples,” Anglican priests married; but not the highest high-Anglican. But they were always going over to Rome … “that has made your Buckle so precious to the Russian intelligentsia. In England he is scarcely now read, though I have seen by the way his works in this splendid little edition of World Classics, the same as your Emerson, why did you take only Emerson? There is a whole row, the most fascinating things.”
“My Emerson was given to me. I didn’t know it came from anywhere in particular.”
“This Richards must be a most enlightened publisher. I should wish to possess all those volumes. The Buckle I will certainly take at once and you shall see. He is of course out of date in the matter of exact science and this is no doubt part reason why in England he is no more read. It is a great pity. His mind is perhaps greater than even your Darwin, certainly with a far wider philosophical range, and of far greater originality. What is wonderful is his actual anticipation, in idea, without researches, of a large part of what Darwin discovered more accidentally, as a result of his immense naturalistic researches.”
“Someone will discover some day that
