The Soul of a Bishop

It had seemed natural for Lady Ella to acquiesce in the proposals of the leading Princhester photographer. She had always helped where she could in her husband’s public work, and she had been popular upon her own merits in Wealdstone. The portrait was abominable enough in itself; it dwelt on her chin, doubled her age, and denied her gentleness, but it was a mere starting-point for the subtle extravagance of The Snicker’s poisonous gift… The thing came upon the bishop suddenly from the book-stall at Pringle Junction.

He kept it carefully from Lady Ella… It was only later that he found that a copy of The White Blackbird had been sent to her, and that she was keeping the horror from him. It was in her vein that she should reproach herself for being a vulnerable side to him.

Even when the bishop capitulated in favour of Princhester, that decision only opened a fresh trouble for him. Princhester wanted the palace to be a palace; it wanted to combine all the best points of Lambeth and Fulham with the marble splendours of a good modern bank. The bishop’s architectural tastes, on the other hand, were rationalistic. He was all for building a useful palace in undertones, with a green slate roof and long horizontal lines. What he wanted more than anything else was a quite remote wing with a lot of bright little bedrooms and a sitting-room and so on, complete in itself, examination hall and everything, with a long intricate connecting passage and several doors, to prevent the ordination candidates straying all over the place and getting into the talk and the tea. But the diocese wanted a proud archway – and turrets, and did not care a rap if the ordination candidates slept about on the carpets in the bishop’s bedroom. Ordination candidates were quite outside the sphere of its imagination.

And he disappointed Princhester with his equipage. Princhester had a feeling that it deserved more for coming over to the church from nonconformity as it was doing. It wanted a bishop in a mitre and a gilt coach. It wanted a pastoral crook. It wanted something to go with its mace and its mayor. And (obsessed by The Snicker) it wanted less of Lady Ella. The cruelty and unreason of these attacks upon his wife distressed the bishop beyond measure, and baffled him hopelessly. He could not see any means of checking them nor of defending or justifying her against them.

The palace was awaiting its tenant, but the controversies and bitternesses were still swinging and swaying and developing when King George was being crowned. Close upon that event came a wave of social discontent, the great railway strike, a curious sense of social and political instability, and the first beginnings of the bishop’s ill health.

(4)

There came a day of exceptional fatigue and significance.

The industrial trouble was a very real distress to the bishop. He had a firm belief that it is a function of the church to act as mediator between employer and employed. It was a common saying of his that the aim of socialism – the right sort of socialism – was to Christianize employment. Regardless of suspicion on either hand, regardless of very distinct hints that he should “mind his own business,” he exerted himself in a search for methods of reconciliation. He sought out every one who seemed likely to be influential on either side, and did his utmost to discover the conditions of a settlement. As far as possible and with the help of a not very efficient chaplain he tried to combine such interviews with his more normal visiting.

At times, and this was particularly the case on this day, he seemed to be discovering nothing but the incurable perversity and militancy of human nature. It was a day under an east wind, when a steely-blue sky full of colourless light filled a stiff-necked world with whitish high lights and inky shadows. These bright harsh days of barometric high pressure in England rouse and thwart every expectation of the happiness of spring. And as the bishop drove through the afternoon in a hired fly along a rutted road of slag between fields that were bitterly wired against the Sunday trespasser, he fell into a despondent meditation upon the political and social outlook.

His thoughts were of a sort not uncommon in those days. The world was strangely restless. Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people’s ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow. Not that Queen Victoria had really been a paper-weight or any weight at all, but it happened that she died as an epoch closed, an epoch of tremendous stabilities. Her son, already elderly, had followed as the selvedge follows the piece, he had passed and left the new age stripped bare. In nearly every department of economic and social life now there was upheaval, and it was an upheaval very different in character from the radicalism and liberalism of the Victorian days. There were not only doubt and denial, but now there were also impatience and unreason. People argued less and acted quicker. There was a pride in rebellion for its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition to sporadic violence that made it extremely hard to negotiate any reconciliations or compromises. Behind every extremist it seemed stood a further extremist prepared to go one better…

The bishop had spent most of the morning with one of the big employers, a tall dark man, lean and nervous, and obviously tired and worried by the struggle. He did not conceal his opinion that the church was meddling with matters quite outside its sphere. Never had it been conveyed to the bishop before how remote a rich and established Englishman could consider the church from reality.

“You’ve got no hold on them,” he said. “It isn’t your sphere.”

And again: “They’ll listen to you – if you speak well. But they don’t believe you know anything about it, and they don’t trust your good intentions. They won’t mind a bit what you say unless you drop something they can use against us.”

The bishop tried a few phrases. He thought there might be something in co-operation, in profit-sharing, in some more permanent relationship between the business and the employee.

“There isn’t,” said the employer compactly. “It’s just the malice of being inferior against the man in control. It’s just the spirit of insubordination and boredom with duty. This trouble’s as old as the Devil.”

“But that is exactly the business of the church,” said the bishop brightly, “to reconcile men to their duty.”

“By chanting the Athanasian creed at ‘em, I suppose,” said the big employer, betraying the sneer he had been hiding hitherto.

“This thing is a fight,” said the big employer, carrying on before the bishop could reply. “Religion had better get out of the streets until this thing is over. The men won’t listen to reason. They don’t mean to. They’re bit by Syndicalism. They’re setting out, I tell you, to be unreasonable and impossible. It isn’t an argument; it’s a fight. They don’t want to make friends with the employer. They want to make an end to the employer. Whatever we give them they’ll take and press us for more. Directly we make terms with the leaders the men go behind it… It’s a raid on the whole system. They don’t mean to work the system – anyhow. I’m the capitalist, and the capitalist has to go. I’m to be bundled out of my works, and some – some “ – he seemed to be rejecting unsuitable words – “confounded politician put in. Much good it would do them. But before that happens I’m going to fight. You would.”

The bishop walked to the window and stood staring at the brilliant spring bulbs in the big employer’s garden, and at a long vista of newly-mown lawn under great shapely trees just budding into green.

“I can’t admit,” he said, “that these troubles lie outside the sphere of the church.”

The employer came and stood beside him. He felt he was being a little hard on the bishop, but he could not see any way of making things easier.

“One doesn’t want Sacred Things,” he tried, “in a scrap like this.

“We’ve got to mend things or end things,” continued the big employer. “Nothing goes on for ever. Things can’t last as they are going on now…”

Then he went on abruptly to something that for a time he had been keeping back.

“Of course just at present the church may do a confounded lot of harm. Some of you clerical gentlemen are rather too fond of talking socialism and even preaching socialism. Don’t think I want to be overcritical. I admit there’s no end of things to be said for a proper sort of socialism, Ruskin, and all that. We’re all Socialists nowadays. Ideals – excellent. But – it gets misunderstood. It gives the men a sense of moral support. It makes them fancy that they are It. Encourages them to forget duties and set up preposterous claims. Class war and all that sort of thing. You gentlemen of the clergy don’t quite realize that socialism may begin with Ruskin and end with Karl Marx. And that from the Class War to the Commune is just one step.”

(5)

From this conversation the bishop had made his way to the vicarage of Mogham Banks. The vicar of Mogham Banks was a sacerdotal socialist of the most advanced type, with the reputation of being closely in touch with the labour extremists. He was a man addicted to banners, prohibited ornaments, special services at unusual hours, and processions in the streets. His taste in chasubles was loud, he gardened in a cassock and, it was said, he slept in his biretta; he certainly slept in a hair shirt, and he littered his church with flowers, candles, side altars, confessional boxes, requests for prayers for the departed, and the like. There had already been two Kensitite demonstrations at his services, and altogether he was a source of considerable anxiety to the bishop. The bishop did his best not to know too exactly what was going on at Mogham Banks. Sooner or later he felt he would be forced to do something – and the longer he could put that off the better. But the Rev. Morrice Deans had promised to get together three or four prominent labour leaders for tea and a frank talk, and the opportunity was one not to be missed. So the bishop, after a hasty and not too digestible lunch in the refreshment room at Pringle, was now in a fly that smelt of straw and suggested infectious hospital patients, on his way through the industry-scarred countryside to this second conversation.

The countryside had never seemed so scarred to him as it did that day.

It was probably the bright hard spring sunshine that emphasized the contrast between that dear England of hedges and homes and the south-west wind in which his imagination lived, and the crude presences of a mechanical age. Never before had the cuttings and heapings, the smashing down of trees, the obtrusion of corrugated iron and tar, the belchings of smoke and the haste, seemed so harsh and disregardful of all the bishop’s world. Across the fields a line of gaunt iron standards, abominably designed, carried an electric cable to some unknown end. The curve of the hill made them seem a little out of the straight, as if they hurried and bent forward furtively.

“Where are they going?” asked the bishop, leaning forward to look out of the window of the fly, and then: “Where is it all going?”

And presently the road was under repair, and was being done at a great pace with a huge steam-roller, mechanically smashed granite, and kettles of stinking stuff, asphalt or something of that sort, that looked and smelt like Milton’s hell. Beyond, a gaunt hoarding advertised extensively the Princhester Music Hall, a mean beastly place that corrupted boys and girls; and also it clamoured of tyres and potted meats…

The afternoon’s conference gave him no reassuring answer to his question, “Where is it all going?”

The afternoon’s conference did no more than intensify the new and strange sense of alienation from the world that the morning’s talk had evoked.

The three labour extremists that Morrice Deans had assembled obviously liked the bishop and found him picturesque, and were not above a certain snobbish gratification at the purple-trimmed company they were in, but it was clear that they regarded his intervention in the great dispute as if it were a feeble waving from the bank across the waters of a great river.

“There’s an incurable misunderstanding between the modern employer and the modern employed,” the chief labour spokesman said, speaking in a broad accent that completely hid from him and the bishop and every one the fact that he was by far the best-read man of the party. “Disraeli called them the Two Nations, but that was long ago. Now it’s a case of two species. Machinery has made them into different species. The employer lives away from his work-people, marries a wife foreign, out of a county family or suchlike, trains his children from their very birth in a different manner. Why, the growth curve is different for the two species. They haven’t even a common speech between them. One looks east and the other looks west. How can you expect them to agree? Of course they won’t agree. We’ve got to fight it out. They say we’re their slaves for ever. Have you ever read Lady Bell’s ‘At the Works’? A well-intentioned woman, but she gives the whole thing away. We say, No! It’s our sort and not your sort. We’ll do without you. We’ll get a little more education and then we’ll do without you. We’re pressing for all we can get, and when we’ve got that we’ll take breath and press for more. We’re the Morlocks. Coming up. It isn’t our fault that we’ve differentiated.”

“But you haven’t understood the drift of Christianity,” said the bishop. “It’s just to assert that men are One community and not two.”

“There’s not much of that in the Creeds,” said a second labour leader who was a rationalist. “There’s not much of that in the services of the church.”

The vicar spoke before his bishop, and indeed he had plenty of time to speak before his bishop. “Because you will not set yourselves to understand the symbolism of her ritual,” he said.

“If the church chooses to speak in riddles,” said the rationalist.

“Symbols,” said Morrice Deans, “need not be riddles,” and for a time the talk eddied about this minor issue and the chief labour spokesman and the bishop looked at one another. The vicar instanced and explained certain apparently insignificant observances, his antagonist was contemptuously polite to these explanations. “That’s all very pratty,” he said…

The bishop wished that fine points of ceremonial might have been left out of the discussion.

Something much bigger than that was laying hold of his intelligence, the realization of a world extravagantly out of hand. The sky, the wind, the telegraph poles, had been jabbing in the harsh lesson of these men’s voices, that the church, as people say, “wasn’t in it.” And that at the same time the church held the one remedy for all this ugliness and contention in its teaching of the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of men. Only for some reason he hadn’t the phrases and he hadn’t the voice to assert this over their wrangling and their stiff resolution. He wanted to think the whole business out thoroughly, for the moment he had nothing to say, and there was the labour leader opposite waiting smilingly to hear what he had to say so soon as the bout between the vicar and the rationalist was over.

(6)

That morning in the long galleries of the bishop’s imagination a fresh painting had been added. It was a big wall painting rather in the manner of Puvis de Chavannes. And the central figure had been the bishop of Princhester himself. He had been standing upon the steps of the great door of the cathedral that looks upon the marketplace where the tram-lines meet, and he had been dressed very magnificently and rather after the older use. He had been wearing a tunicle and dalmatic under a chasuble, a pectoral cross, purple gloves, sandals and buskins, a mitre and his presentation ring. In his hand he had borne his pastoral staff. And the clustering pillars and arches of the great doorway were painted with a loving flat particularity that omitted nothing but the sooty tinge of the later discolourations.

On his right hand had stood a group of employers very richly dressed in the fashion of the fifteenth century, and on the left a rather more numerous group of less decorative artisans. With them their wives and children had been shown, all greatly impressed by the canonicals. Every one had been extremely respectful.

He had been reconciling the people and blessing them and calling them his “sheep” and his “little children.”

But all this was so different.

Neither party resembled sheep or little children in the least degree.

The labour leader became impatient with the ritualistic controversy; he set his tea-cup aside out of danger and leant across the corner of the table to the bishop and spoke in a sawing undertone. “You see,” he said, “the church does not talk our language. I doubt if it understands our language. I doubt if we understand clearly where we are ourselves. These things have to be fought out and hammered out. It’s a big dusty dirty noisy job. It may be a bloody job before it’s through. You can’t suddenly call a halt in the middle of the scrap and have a sort of millennium just because you want it…

“Of course if the church had a plan,” he said, “if it had a proposal to make, if it had anything more than a few pious palliatives to suggest, that might be different. But has it?”