Yeast: a Problem

The banker, thanks to Barnakill’s assistance, is rapidly getting rich again—who would wish to stop him?  However, he is wiser, on some points at least, than he was of yore.  He has taken up the flax movement violently of late—perhaps owing to some hint of Barnakill’s—talks of nothing but Chevalier Claussen and Mr. Donellan, and is very anxious to advance capital to any landlord who will grow flax on Mr. Warnes’s method, either in England or Ireland. . . .  John Bull, however, has not yet awakened sufficiently to listen to his overtures, but sits up in bed, dolefully rubbing his eyes, and bemoaning the evanishment of his protectionist dream—altogether realising tolerably, he and his land, Dr. Watts’ well-known moral song concerning the sluggard and his garden.

Lord Minchampstead again prospers.  Either the nuns of Minchampstead have left no Nemesis behind them, like those of Whitford, or a certain wisdom and righteousness of his, however dim and imperfect, averts it for a time.  So, as I said, he prospers, and is hated; especially by his farmers, to whom he has just offered long leases, and a sliding corn-rent.  They would have hated him just the same if he had kept them at rack-rents; and he has not forgotten that; but they have.  They looked shy at the leases, because they bind them to farm high, which they do not know how to do; and at the corn-rent, because they think that he expects wheat to rise again—which, being a sensible man, he very probably does.  But for my story—I certainly do not see how to extricate him or any one else from farmers’ stupidity, greed, and ill-will. . . .  That question must have seven years’ more free-trade to settle it, before I can say anything thereon.  Still less can I foreshadow the fate of his eldest son, who has just been rusticated from Christ Church for riding one of Simmon’s hacks through a china-shop window; especially as the youth is reported to be given to piquette and strong liquors, and, like many noblemen’s eldest sons, is considered ‘not to have the talent of his father.’  As for the old lord himself, I have no wish to change or develop him in any way—except to cut slips off him, as you do off a willow, and plant two or three in every county in England.  Let him alone to work out his own plot . . . we have not seen the end of it yet; but whatever it will be, England has need of him as a transition-stage between feudalism and * * * * ; for many a day to come.  If he be not the ideal landlord, he is nearer it than any we are like yet to see. . . .

Except one; and that, after all, is Lord Vieuxbois.  Let him go on, like a gallant gentleman as he is, and prosper.  And he will prosper, for he fears God, and God is with him.  He has much to learn; and a little to unlearn.  He has to learn that God is a living God now, as well as in the middle ages; to learn to trust not in antique precedents, but in eternal laws: to learn that his tenants, just because they are children of God, are not to be kept children, but developed and educated into sons; to learn that God’s grace, like His love, is free, and that His spirit bloweth where it listeth, and vindicates its own free-will against our narrow systems, by revealing, at times, even to nominal Heretics and Infidels, truths which the Catholic Church must humbly receive, as the message of Him who is wider, deeper, more tolerant, than even she can be. . . And he is in the way to learn all this.  Let him go on.  At what conclusions he will attain, he knows not, nor do I.  But this I know, that he is on the path to great and true conclusions. . . .  And he is just about to be married, too.  That surely should teach him something.  The papers inform me that his bride elect is Lord Minchampstead’s youngest daughter.  That should be a noble mixture; there should be stalwart offspring, spiritual as well as physical, born of that intermarriage of the old and the new.  We will hope it: perhaps some of my readers, who enter into my inner meaning, may also pray for it.

Whom have I to account for besides?  Crawy—though some of my readers may consider the mention of him superfluous.  But to those who do not, I may impart the news, that last month, in the union workhouse—he died; and may, for aught we know, have ere this met Squire Lavington . . . He is supposed, or at least said, to have had a soul to be saved . . . as I think, a body to be saved also.  But what is one more among so many?  And in an over-peopled country like this, too. . . .  One must learn to look at things—and paupers—in the mass.

The poor of Whitford also?  My dear readers, I trust you will not ask me just now to draw the horoscope of the Whitford poor, or of any others.  Really that depends principally on yourselves. . . .  But for the present, the poor of Whitford, owing, as it seems to them and me, to quite other causes than an ‘overstocked labour-market,’ or too rapid ‘multiplication of their species,’ are growing more profligate, reckless, pauperised, year by year.  O’Blareaway complained sadly to me the other day that the poor-rates were becoming ‘heavier and heavier’—had nearly reached, indeed, what they were under the old law. . . .

But there is one who does not complain, but gives and gives, and stints herself to give, and weeps in silence and unseen over the evils which she has yearly less and less power to stem.

For in a darkened chamber of the fine house at Steamingbath, lies on a sofa Honoria Lavington—beautiful no more; the victim of some mysterious and agonising disease, about which the physicians agree on one point only—that it is hopeless.  The ‘curse of the Lavingtons’ is on her; and she bears it.  There she lies, and prays, and reads, and arranges her charities, and writes little books for children, full of the Beloved Name which is for ever on her lips.  She suffers—none but herself knows how much, or how strangely—yet she is never heard to sigh.  She weeps in secret—she has long ceased to plead—for others, not for herself; and prays for them too—perhaps some day her prayers will yet he answered.  But she greets all visitors with a smile fresh from heaven; and all who enter that room leave it saddened, and yet happy, like those who have lingered a moment at the gates of paradise, and seen angels ascending and descending upon earth.  There she lies—who could wish her otherwise?  Even Doctor Autotheus Maresnest, the celebrated mesmeriser, who, though he laughs at the Resurrection of the Lord, is confidently reported to have raised more than one corpse to life himself, was heard to say, after having attended her professionally, that her waking bliss and peace, although unfortunately unattributable even to autocatalepsy, much less to somnambulist exaltation, was on the whole, however unscientific, almost as enviable.

There she lies—and will lie till she dies—the type of thousands more, ‘the martyrs by the pang without the palm,’ who find no mates in this life . . . and yet may find them in the life to come., . .  Poor Paul Tregarva!  Little he fancies how her days run by! . . .

At least, there has been no news since that last scene in St. Paul’s Cathedral, either of him or Lancelot.  How their strange teacher has fulfilled his promise of guiding their education; whether they have yet reached the country of Prester John; whether, indeed, that Caucasian Utopia has a local and bodily existence, or was only used by Barnakill to shadow out that Ideal which is, as he said of the Garden of Eden, always near us, underlying the Actual, as the spirit does its body, exhibiting itself step by step through all the falsehoods and confusions of history and society, giving life to all in it which is not falsehood and decay; on all these questions I can give my readers no sort of answer; perhaps I may as yet have no answer to give; perhaps I may be afraid of giving one; perhaps the times themselves are giving, at once cheerfully and sadly, in strange destructions and strange births, a better answer than I can give.  I have set forth, as far as in me lay, the data of my problem: and surely, if the premises be given, wise men will not have to look far for the conclusion.  In homely English I have given my readers Yeast; if they be what I take them for, they will be able to bake with it themselves.

And yet I have brought Lancelot, at least—perhaps Tregarva too—to a conclusion, and an all-important one, which whoso reads may find fairly printed in these pages.  Henceforth his life must begin anew.  Were I to carry on the thread of his story continuously he would still seem to have overleaped as vast a gulf as if I had re-introduced him as a gray-haired man.  Strange! that the death of one of the lovers should seem no complete termination to their history, when their marriage would have been accepted by all as the legitimate dénouement, beyond which no information was to be expected.  As if the history of love always ended at the altar!  Oftener it only begins there; and all before it is but a mere longing to love.  Why should readers complain of being refused the future history of one life, when they are in most novels cut short by the marriage finale from the biography of two?

But if, over and above this, any reader should be wroth at my having left Lancelot’s history unfinished on questions in his opinion more important than that of love, let me entreat him to set manfully about finishing his own history—a far more important one to him than Lancelot’s.  If he shall complain that doubts are raised for which no solution is given, that my hero is brought into contradictory beliefs without present means of bringing them to accord, into passive acquiescence in vast truths without seeing any possibility of practically applying them—let him consider well whether such be not his own case; let him, if he be as most are, thank God when he finds out that such is his case, when he knows at last that those are most blind who say they see, when he becomes at last conscious how little he believes, how little he acts up to that small belief.  Let him try to right somewhat of the doubt, confusion, custom-worship, inconsistency, idolatry, within him—some of the greed, bigotry, recklessness, respectably superstitious atheism around him; and perhaps before his new task is finished, Lancelot and Tregarva may have returned with a message, if not for him—for that depends upon him having ears to hear it—yet possibly for strong Lord Minchampstead, probably for good Lord Vieuxbois, and surely for the sinners and the slaves of Whitford Priors.  What it will be, I know not altogether; but this I know, that if my heroes go on as they have set forth, looking with single mind for some one ground of human light and love, some everlasting rock whereon to build, utterly careless what the building may be, howsoever contrary to precedent and prejudice, and the idols of the day, provided God, and nature, and the accumulated lessons of all the ages, help them in its construction—then they will find in time the thing they seek, and see how the will of God may at last be done on earth, even as it is done in heaven.  But, alas! between them and it are waste raging waters, foul mud banks, thick with dragons and sirens; and many a bitter day and blinding night, in cold and hunger, spiritual and perhaps physical, await them.  For it was a true vision which John Bunyan saw, and one which, as the visions of wise men are wont to do, meant far more than the seer fancied, when he beheld in his dream that there was indeed a land of Beulah, and Arcadian Shepherd Paradise, on whose mountain tops the everlasting sunshine lay; but that the way to it, as these last three years are preaching to us, went past the mouth of Hell, and through the valley of the Shadow of Death.