Give me thy hand, terrestrial; so! Give me thy hand, celestial; so!—Merry Wives of Windsor.
It was the close of a bright sunshiny day in the spring of 18—. The sun was setting crimson on the lonely peak of the Zugspitz in the heart of the Bavarian Highlands, and the shadows of the pine woods which fringed the melancholy gorges beneath were lengthening towards the valleys.
Through one of these mountain gorges, following a rocky footpath, a man was rapidly walking. He was roughly, almost rudely, dressed in a sort of tourist suit. On his head he wore a broadbrimmed felt hat of the shape frequently worn by clergymen, and in his hand he carried a staff like a shepherd’s crook.
Scarcely looking to left or right, but hastening with impatient paces he hurried onward, less like a man hastening to some eagerly-sought shelter, than like one flying from some hated thing behind his back. His cheeks were pale and sunken, his eyes wild and sad. From time to time he slackened his speed, and looked wearily around him—up to the desolate sunlit peaks, down the darkening valley with its green pastures, belts of woodland, and fields of growing corn.
But whichever way he looked, he seemed to find no joy in the prospect, indeed hardly to behold the thing he looked on, but to gaze through it and beyond it on some sorrowful portent.
Sometimes where the path became unusually steep and dangerous, he sprang from rock to rock with reckless haste, or when its thread was broken, as frequently happened by some brawling mountain stream, he entered the torrent without hesitation, and passed recklessly across. Indeed, the man seemed utterly indifferent to physical conditions, but labouring rather under some spiritual possession, completely and literally realising in his person the words of the poet:
His own mind did like a tempest strong
Come to him thus, and drave the weary wight along.
The wild scene was in complete harmony with his condition. It was still and desolate, no sound seeming to break its solemn silence; but pausing and listening intently, one would in reality have become conscious of many sounds—the deep under-murmur of the mountain streams, the ‘sough’ of the wind in the pine woods, the faint tinkling of goat-bells from the distant valleys, the solitary cry of rock doves from the mountain caves.
The man was Ambrose Bradley.
Nearly a year had elapsed since his sad experience in Rome. Since that time he had wandered hither and thither like another Ahasuerus; wishing for death, yet unable to die; burthened with the terrible weight of his own sin and self-reproach, and finding no resting-place in all the world.
Long before, as the reader well knows, the man’s faith in the supernatural had faded, he had refined away his creed till it had wasted away of its own inanition, and when the hour of trial came and he could have called upon it for consolation, he was horrified to find that it was a corpse, instead of a living thing. Then, in his horror and despair, he had clutched at the straw of spiritualism, only to sink lower and lower in the bitter waters of Marah. He found no hope for his soul, no foothold for his feet. He had, to use his own expression, lost the world.
It was now close upon night-time, and every moment the gorges along which he was passing grew darker and darker.
Through the red smokes of sunset one lustrous star was just becoming visible on the extremest peak of the mountain chain. But instead of walking faster, Bradley began to linger, and presently, coming to a gloomy chasm which seemed to make further progress dangerous, impossible, he halted and looked down. The trunk of an uprooted pine-tree lay close to the chasm’s brink. After looking quietly round him, he sat down, pulled out a common wooden pipe, and began to smoke.
Presently he pulled out a letter bearing the Munich post-mark, and with a face as dark as night began to look it through. It was dated from London, and ran as follows:
‘Reform Club, March 5, 18-.
‘My dear Bradley,—Your brief note duly reached me, and I have duly carried out your wishes with regard to the affairs of the new church. I have also seen Sir George Craik, and found him more amenable to reason than I expected. Though he still regards you with the intensest animosity, he has sense enough to perceive that you are not directly responsible for the unhappy affair at Rome. His thoughts seem now chiefly bent on recovering his niece’s property from the clutches of the Italian Jesuits, and in exposing the method by which they acquired such dominion over the unhappy lady’s mind.
‘But I will not speak of this further at present, knowing the anguish it must bring you. I will turn rather to the mere abstract matter of your letter, and frankly open my mind to you on the subject.
‘What you say is very brief, but, from the manner in which it recurs in your correspondence, I am sure it represents the absorbing topic of your thoughts. Summed up in a few words, it affirms your conclusion that all human effort is impossible to a man in your position, where the belief in personal immortality is gone.
‘Now I need not go over the old ground, with which you are quite as familiar as myself. I will not remind you of the folly and the selfishness (from one point of view) of formulating a moral creed out of what, in reality, is merely the hereditary instinct of self-preservation. I will not repeat to you that it is nobler, after all, to live impersonally in the beautiful future of Humanity than to exist personally in a heaven of introspective dreams. But I should like, if you will permit me, to point out that this Death, this cessation of consciousness, which you dread so much, is not in itself an unmixed evil. True, just at present, in the sharpness of your bereavement, you see nothing but the shadow, and would eagerly follow into its oblivion the shape of her you mourn. But as every day passes, this desire to die will grow less keen; and ten years hence, perhaps, or twenty years, you will look back upon to-day’s anguish with a calm, sweet sense of spiritual gain, and with a peaceful sense of the sufficiency of life. Then, perhaps, embracing a creed akin to ours, and having reached a period when the physical frame begins slowly, and without pain, to melt away, you will be quite content to accept—what shall I say?—Nirwâna.
‘What I mean, my dear friend, is this, simply: that Death is only evil when it comes painfully or prematurely; coming in the natural order of things, in the inevitable decay of Nature, it is by no means evil. And so much is this the case that, if you were to discover the consensus of opinion among the old, who are on the threshold of the grave, you would find the majority quite content that life should end for ever. Tired out with eighty or a hundred years of living, they gladly welcome sleep. It is otherwise, of course, with the victims of accidental disease or premature decay. But in the happy world to which we Positivists look forward, these victims would not exist.
‘Day by day Science, which you despise too much, is enlarging the area of human health. Think what has been done, even within the last decade, to abolish both physical and social disease! Think what has yet to be done to make life freer, purer, safer, happier!
I grant you the millennium of the Grand Être is still far off; but it is most surely coming, and we can all aid, more or less, that blessed consummation—not by idle wailing, by useless dreams, or by selfish striving after an impossible personal reward, but by duty punctually performed, by self-sacrifice cheerfully undergone, by daily and nightly endeavours to ameliorate the condition of Man.
‘Men perish; Man is imperishable. Personal forms change; the great living personality abides. And the time must come at last when Man shall be as God, certain of his destiny, and knowing good and evil.
‘“A Job’s comforter!” I seem to hear you cry. Well, after all, you must be your own physician.
No man can save another’s soul,
Or pay another’s debt!
But I wish that you, in your distracted wandering after certainty, would turn your thoughts our way, and try to understand what the great Founder of our system has done, and will do, for the human race. I am sure that the study would bring you comfort, late or soon.
‘I am, as ever, my dear Bradley,
‘Your friend and well-wisher,
‘John Cholmondeley.
‘P.S.—What are you doing in Munich? I hear of curious doings this year at Ober-Ammergau, where that ghastly business, the Passion Play, is once more in course of preparation.’
Bradley read this characteristic epistle with a gloomy frown, which changed before he had finished to a look of bitter contempt; and, as he read, he seemed once more conscious of the babble of literary club-land, and the affected jargon of the new creeds of the future. Returning the letter to his pocket, he continued to smoke till it was almost too dark to see the wreaths of fume from his own pipe.
The night had completely fallen before he rose and proceeded on his way.
Love! if thy destined sacrifice am I,
Come, slay thy victim, and prepare thy fires;
Plunged in thy depths of mercy let me die
The death which every soul that lives desires.
Madame Guyon=.
‘I AM writing these lines in my bedroom in the house of the Widow Gran, in the village of Ober-Ammergau. They are the last you will receive from me for a long time; perhaps the last I shall ever send you, for more and more, as each day advances, I feel that my business with the world is done.
‘What brought me hither I know not. I am sure it was with no direct intention of witnessing what so many deem a mere mummery or outrage on religion; but after many wanderings hither and thither, I found myself in the neighbourhood, and whether instinctively or of set purpose, approaching this lonely place.
‘As I have more than once told you, I have of late, ever since my past trouble, been subject to a kind of waking nightmare, in which all natural appearances have assumed a strange unreality, as of shapes seen in dreams; and one characteristic of these seizures has been a curious sense within my own mind that, vivid as such appearances seemed, I should remember nothing of them on actually awaking. A wise physician would shake his head and murmur “diseased cerebration;” nor would his diagnosis of my condition be less gloomy, on learning that my physical powers remain unimpaired, and seem absolutely incapable of fatigue. I eat and drink little; sleep less; yet I have the strength of an athlete still, or so it seems.
‘I walked hither across the mountains, having no other shelter for several nights than the boughs of the pine-woods where I slept. The weather was far from warm, yet I felt no cold; the paths were dangerous, yet no evil befell me. If I must speak the truth, I would gladly have perished—by cold, by accident, by any swift and sudden means.
‘But when a man thirsts and hungers for death, Death, in its dull perversity, generally spares him. More than once, among these dizzy precipices and black ravines, I thought of suicide; one step would have done it, one quick downward leap; but I was spared that last degradation—indeed, I know not how.
‘It was night time when I left the mountains, and came out upon the public road. The moon rose, pale and ghostly, dimly lighting my way.
‘Full of my own miserable phantasy, I walked on for hours and descended at last to the outlying houses of a silent village, lying at the foot of a low chain of melancholy hills. All was still; a thin white mist filled the air, floating upward from the valley, and forming thick vaporous clouds around the moon. Dimly I discerned the shadows of the houses, but in none of the windows was there any light.
‘I stood hesitating, not knowing which way to direct my footsteps or at which cottage door to knock and seek shelter, and never, at any moment of my recent experience, was the sense of phantasy and unreality so full upon me. While I was thus hesitating I suddenly became conscious of the sound of voices coming from a small cottage situated on the roadside, and hitherto scarcely discernible in the darkness. Without hesitation I approached the door and knocked.
‘Immediately the voices ceased, and the moment afterwards the door opened and a figure appeared on the threshold.
‘If the sense of unreality had been strong before it now became paramount, for the figure I beheld wore a white priestly robe quaintly embroidered with gold, and a golden headdress or coronet upon his head. Nor was this all. The large apartment behind him—a kind of kitchen, with rude benches around the ingle—was lit by several lamps, and within it were clustered a fantastic group of figures in white tunics, plumed head-dresses of Eastern device, and mantles of azure, crimson, and blue, which swept the ground.
‘“Who is there?” said the form on the threshold in a deep voice, and speaking German in a strong Bavarian patois.
‘I answered that I was an Englishman, and sought a night’s shelter.
‘“Come in!” said the man, and thus invited I crossed the threshold.
‘As the door closed behind me, I found myself in the large raftered chamber, surrounded on every side by curious faces. Scattered here and there about the room were rudely-carved figures, for the most part representing the Crucifixion, many of them unfinished, and on a table near the window was a set of carver’s tools. Rudely coloured pictures, all of biblical subjects, were placed here and there upon the walls, and over the fireplace hung a large Christ in ebony, coarsely carven.
‘Courteously enough the fantastic group parted and made way for me, while one of the number, a woman, invited me to a seat beside the hearth.
‘I sat down like one in a dream, and accosted the man who had invited me to enter.
‘“What place is this?” I asked. “I have been walking all night and am doubtful where I am.”
‘“You are at Ober-Ammergau!” was the reply.
‘I could have laughed had my spirit been less oppressed. For now, my brain clearing, I began to understand what had befallen me. I remembered the Passion Play and all that I had read concerning it. The fantastic figures I beheld were those of some of the actors still attired in the tinsel robes they wore upon the stage.
‘I asked if this was so, and was answered in the affirmative.
‘“We begin the play to-morrow,” said the man who had first spoken. “I am Johann Diener the Chorfuhrer, and these are some of the members of our chorus. We are up late, you see, preparing for to-morrow, and trying on the new robes that have just been sent to us from Annheim. The pastor of the village was here till a few minutes ago, seeing all things justly ordered amongst us, and he would gladly have welcomed you, for he loves the English.”
‘The man’s speech was gentle, his manner kindly in the extreme, but I scarcely heeded him, although I knew now what the figures around me were—the merest supernumeraries and chorus-singers of a tawdry show. They seemed to me none the less ghostly and unreal, shadows acting in some grim farce of death.
‘“Doubtless the gentleman is fatigued,” said a woman, addressing Johann Diener, “and would wish to go to rest.”
‘I nodded wearily. Diener, however, seemed in some perplexity.
‘“It is not so easy,” he returned, “to find the gentleman a shelter. As you all know, the village is overcrowded with strangers. However, if he will follow ml I will take him to Joseph Mair, and see what can be done.”
‘I thanked him, and without staying to alter his dress, he led the way to the door.
‘We were soon out in the open street. Passing several chalets, Diener at last reached one standing a little way from the roadside, and knocked.
‘“Come in,” cried a clear kind voice.
‘He opened the door and I followed him into an interior much resembling the one we had just quitted, but smaller, and more full of tokens of the woodcutter’s trade. The room was dimly lit by an oil lamp swinging from the ceiling. Seated close to the fireplace, with his back towards us, engaged in some handy work, was a man.
‘As we entered the man rose and stood looking towards us. I started in wonder, and uttered an involuntary cry.
‘It was Jesus Christ, Jesus the son of Joseph, in his habit as he lived!
‘I had no time, and indeed I lacked the power, to separate the true from the false in this singular manifestation. I saw before me, scarce believing what I saw, the Christ of History, clad as the shape is clad in the famous fresco of Leonardo, but looking at me with a face mobile, gentle, beautiful, benign. At the same moment I perceived, scarcely understanding its significance, the very crown of thorns, of which so many a martyr since has dreamed. It was lying on the coarse table close to a number of wood-carving tools, and close to it was a plate of some red pigment, with which it had recently been stained.
‘Johann Diener advanced.
‘“I am glad to find you up, Joseph. This English gentleman seeks shelter for the night, and I scarcely knew whither to take him.”
‘“You will not find a bed in the place,” returned the other; and he continued addressing me. “Since this morning our little village has been overrun, and many strangers have to camp out in the open air. Never has Ober-Ammergau been so thronged.”
‘I scarcely listened to him; I was so lost in contemplation of the awful personality he represented.
‘“Who are you?” I asked, gazing at him in amaze.
‘He smiled, and glanced down at his dress.
‘“I am Joseph Mair,” he replied. “Tomorrow I play the Christus, and as you came I was repairing some portion of the attire, which I have not worn for ten years past.”
‘Jesus of Nazareth! Joseph Mair! I understood all clearly now, but none the less did I tremble with a sickening sense of awe.’
‘That night I remained in the house of Joseph Mail sitting on a bench in the ingle, half dying, half dreaming, till daylight came. Mair himself soon left me, after having set before me some simple refreshment, of which I did not care to partake. Alone in that chamber, I sat like a haunted man, almost credulous that I had seen the Christ indeed.’
‘I have seen him! I understand now all the piteous humble pageant! I have beheld the Master as He lived and died; not the creature of a poet’s dream not the Divine Ideal I pictured in my blind and shadowy creed; but Jesus who perished on Calvary, Jesus the Martyr of the World.
‘All day long, from dawn to sunset, I sat in my place, watching the mysterious show. Words might faintly foreshadow to you what I beheld, but all words would fail to tell you what I felt; for never before, till these simple children of the mountains pictured it before me, had I realised the full sadness and rapture of that celestial Life. How faint, miserable, and unprofitable seemed my former creed, seen in the light of the tremendous Reality foreshadowed on that stage, with the mountains closing behind it, the blue heaven bending tranquilly above it, the birds singing on the branches round about, the wind and sunshine shining over it and bringing thither all the gentle motion of the world. Now for the first time I conceived that the Divine Story was not a poet’s dream, but a simple tale of sooth, a living experience which even the lowliest could understand and before which the highest and wisest must reverently bow.
‘I seem to see your look of wonder, and hear your cry of pitying pain. Is the man mad? you ask. Is it possible that sorrow has so weakened his brain that he can be overcome by such a summer cloud as the Passionspiel of a few rude peasants—a piece of mummery only worthy of a smile! Well, so it is, or seems. I tell you this “poor show” has done for me what all intellectual and moral effort has failed to do—it has brought me face to face with the living God.
‘This at least I know, that there is no via media between the full acceptance of Christ’s miraculous life and death, and acquiescence in the stark materialism of the new creed of scientific experience, whose most potent word is the godless Nirwâna of Schopenhauer.
‘Man cannot live by the shadowy gods of men—by the poetic spectre of a Divine Ideal, by the Christ of Fancy and of Poesy, by the Jesus of the dilettante, by the Messiah of a fairy tale. Such gods may do for happy hours; their ghostliness becomes apparent in times of spiritual despair and gloom.
‘“Except a man be born again, he shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven!” I have heard these divine words from the lips of one who seemed the Lord himself; nay, who perchance was that very Lord, putting on again the likeness of a poor peasant’s humanity, and clothing himself with flesh as with a garment. I have seen and heard with a child’s eyes, a child’s ears; and even as a child, I question no longer but believe.
‘Mea culpa! mea culpa! In the light of that piteous martyrdom I review the great sin of my life; but out of sin and its penalty has come transfiguration. I know now that my beloved one was taken from me in mercy, that I might follow in penitence and love. Patience, my darling, for I shall come;—God grant that it may be soon!’
The following letter, written in the summer of 18—, by John Cholmondeley to Sir George Craik, contains all that remains to be told concerning the fate of Ambrose Bradley, sometime minister of Fensea, and a seceder from the Church of England:—
‘My dear Sir,—You will remember our conversation, when we last met in London, concerning that friend of mine with whose fortunes those of your lamented niece have been unhappily interwoven. Your language was then sufficiently bitter and unforgiving. Perhaps you will think more gently on the subject when you hear the news I have now to convey to you. The Rev. Ambrose Bradley died a fortnight ago, at Ober-Ammergau, in the Bavarian highlands.
‘From time to time, during his wanderings in the course of the past year, we had been in correspondence; for, indeed, I was about the only friend in the world with whom he was on terms of close intimacy. Ever since the disappearance of Miss Craik his sufferings had been most acute; and my own impression is that his intellect was permanently weakened. But that, perhaps, is neither here nor there.
‘Some ten days ago, I received a communication from the village priest of Ober-Ammergau, informing me that an Englishman had died very suddenly and mysteriously in the village, and that the only clue to his friends and connexions was a long letter found upon his person, addressed to me, at my residence in the Temple. I immediately hastened over to Germany, and found, as I had anticipated, that the corpse was that of my poor friend. It was lying ready for interment in the cottage of Joseph Mair, a wood-carver, and a leading actor in the Passion Play.
‘I found, on inquiry, that Mr. Bradley had been in the village for several weeks, lodging at Mair’s cottage, and dividing his time between constant attendance at the theatre, whenever the Passion Play was represented, and long pedestrian excursions among the mountains. He was strangely taciturn, indifferent to ordinary comforts, eating little or nothing, and scarcely sleeping. So at least the man Mair informed me, adding that he was very gentle and harmless, and to all intents and purposes in perfect health.
‘Last Sunday week he attended the theatre as usual. That night he did not return to the cottage of his host. Early next morning, Joseph Hair, on going down to the theatre with his tools, to do some carpenter’s work upon the stage, found the dead body of a man there, lying on his face, with his arms clasped around the mimic Cross; and turning the dead face up to the morning light, he recognised my poor friend.
‘That is all I have to tell you. His death, like his life, was a sad affair. I followed him to his grave in the little burial-place of Ober-Ammergau—where he rests in peace. I am, &c.,
‘John Cholmondeley.
‘Judging from some talk I had before leaving with the village priest, a worthy old fellow who knew him well, I believe poor Bradley died in full belief of the Christian faith; but as I have already hinted to you, his intellect, for a long time before his death, was greatly weakened. Take him for all in all, he was one of the best men I ever knew, and might have been happy but for the unfortunate “set” of his mind towards retrograde superstitions.’