The Choir Invisible [63]
each other in grace of life and for the immortal mysteries of the spirit. She had said that he should have read this book long before but that henceforth he would always need it even more than in his past: that here were some things he had looked for in the world and had never found; characters such as he had always wished to grapple to himself as his abiding comrades: that if he would love the best that it loved, hate what it hated, scorn what it scorned, it would help him in the pursuit of his own ideals to the end. Of this and more he felt at once the truth, since of all earthly books known to him this contained the most heavenly revelation of what a man may be in manliness, in gentleness, and in goodness. And as he read the nobler portions of the book, the nobler parts of his nature gave out their immediate response. Hungrily he hurried to and fro across the harvest of those fertile pages, gathering of the white wheat of the spirit many a lustrous sheaf: the love of courage, the love of courtesy, the love of honour, the love of high aims and great actions, the love of the poor and the helpless, the love of a spotless name and a spotless life, the love of kindred, the love of friendship, the love of humility of spirit, the love of forgiveness, the love of beauty, the love of love, the love of God. Surely, he said to himself, within the band of these virtues lay not only a man's noblest life, but the noblest life of the world.
While fondling these, he failed not to notice how the great book, as though it were a living mouth, spat its deathless scorn upon the things that he also--in the imperfect measure of his powers--had always hated: all cowardice of mind or body, all lying, all oppression, all unfaithfulness, all secret revenge and hypocrisy and double-dealing: the smut of the heart and mind. But ah! the other things besides these.
Sown among the white wheat of the spirit were the red tares of the flesh; and as he strode back and forth through the harvest, he found himself plucking these also with feverish vehemence. There were things here that he had never seen in print: words that he had never even named to his secret consciousness; thoughts and desires that he had put away from his soul with many a struggle, many a prayer; stories of a kind that he had always declined to hear when told in companies of men: all here, spelled out, barefaced, without apology, without shame: the deposits of those old, old moral voices and standards long since buried deep under the ever rising level of the world's whitening holiness. With utter guilt and shame he did not leave off till he had plucked the last red tare; and having plucked them, he had hugged the whole inflaming bundle against his blood--his blood now flushed with youth, flushed with health, flushed with summer.
And finally, in the midst of all these things, perhaps coloured by them, there had come to him the first great awakening of his life in a love that was forbidden.
He upbraided himself the more bitterly for the influence of the book because it was she who had placed both the good and the evil in his hand with perfect confidence that he would lay hold on the one and remain unsoiled by the other. She had remained spirit-proof herself against the influences that tormented him; out of her own purity she had judged him. And yet, on the other hand, with that terrible candour of mind which he used either for or against himself as rigidly as for or against another person, he pleaded in his own behalf that she had made a mistake in overestimating his strength, in underestimating his temptations. How should she know that for years his warfare had gone on direfully? How realize that almost daily he had stood as at the dividing of two roads: the hard, narrow path ascending to the bleak white peaks of the spirit; the broad, sweet, downward vistas of the flesh? How foresee, therefore, that the book would only help to rend him in twain with a mightier passion for each?
He had been back at the school a week now. He had never dared go to see her. Confront that luminous
While fondling these, he failed not to notice how the great book, as though it were a living mouth, spat its deathless scorn upon the things that he also--in the imperfect measure of his powers--had always hated: all cowardice of mind or body, all lying, all oppression, all unfaithfulness, all secret revenge and hypocrisy and double-dealing: the smut of the heart and mind. But ah! the other things besides these.
Sown among the white wheat of the spirit were the red tares of the flesh; and as he strode back and forth through the harvest, he found himself plucking these also with feverish vehemence. There were things here that he had never seen in print: words that he had never even named to his secret consciousness; thoughts and desires that he had put away from his soul with many a struggle, many a prayer; stories of a kind that he had always declined to hear when told in companies of men: all here, spelled out, barefaced, without apology, without shame: the deposits of those old, old moral voices and standards long since buried deep under the ever rising level of the world's whitening holiness. With utter guilt and shame he did not leave off till he had plucked the last red tare; and having plucked them, he had hugged the whole inflaming bundle against his blood--his blood now flushed with youth, flushed with health, flushed with summer.
And finally, in the midst of all these things, perhaps coloured by them, there had come to him the first great awakening of his life in a love that was forbidden.
He upbraided himself the more bitterly for the influence of the book because it was she who had placed both the good and the evil in his hand with perfect confidence that he would lay hold on the one and remain unsoiled by the other. She had remained spirit-proof herself against the influences that tormented him; out of her own purity she had judged him. And yet, on the other hand, with that terrible candour of mind which he used either for or against himself as rigidly as for or against another person, he pleaded in his own behalf that she had made a mistake in overestimating his strength, in underestimating his temptations. How should she know that for years his warfare had gone on direfully? How realize that almost daily he had stood as at the dividing of two roads: the hard, narrow path ascending to the bleak white peaks of the spirit; the broad, sweet, downward vistas of the flesh? How foresee, therefore, that the book would only help to rend him in twain with a mightier passion for each?
He had been back at the school a week now. He had never dared go to see her. Confront that luminous