Wood and Stone. John Cowper Powys
him.”
With Mr. Goring still as their topic, they strolled amicably together towards the same gap in the hedge, through which the apologist of the papacy had emerged an hour before. There they separated; Vennie returning to the vicarage, and the young clergyman carrying off Mr. Taxater to supper with him in his house by the church.
Clavering’s establishment consisted of a middle-aged woman of inordinate volubility, and the woman’s daughter, a girl of twelve.
The supper offered by the priest to his guest was “light and choice”—nor did it lack its mellow accompaniment of carefully selected, if not “Attic,” wine. Of this wine Mr. Taxater did not hesitate to partake freely, sitting, when the meal was over, opposite his host at the open window, through which the pleasant murmurs of the evening, and the voices of the village-street, soothingly and harmoniously floated.
The famous theologian was in an excellent temper. Rich recondite jests pursued one another from his smiling lips, and his white hands folded themselves complacently above the cross on his watch-chain.
Lottie Fringe, the child of Clavering’s servant, tripped sportively in and out of the room, encouraged in her girlish coquetries by the amiable scholar. She was not yet too old to be the kittenish plaything of the lighter moments of a wise and scholarly man, and it was pleasant to watch the zest with which the vicar’s visitor entered into her sportive audacities. Mr. Taxater made her fill and refill his glass, and taking her playfully on his knee, kissed her and fondled her many times. It was the vicar himself, who finally, a little embarrassed by these levities, sent the girl off to the kitchen, apologizing to his guest for the freedom she displayed.
“Do not apologize, dear Mr. Clavering,” said the theologian. “I love all children, especially when they are girls. There is something about the kisses of a young girl—at once amorous and innocent—which reconciles one to the universe, and keeps death at a distance. Could one for a moment think of death, when holding a young thing, so full of life and beauty, on one’s knee?”
The young priest’s face clouded. “To be quite honest with you, Mr. Taxater,” he murmured, in a troubled voice, “I cannot say that I altogether agree. We are both unconventional people, so I may speak freely. I do not think that one does a child any good by encouraging her to be playful and forward, in that particular way. You live with your books; but I live with my people, and I have known so many sad cases of girls being completely ruined by getting a premature taste for coquetry of that kind.”
“I am afraid, my friend,” answered Mr. Taxater, “that the worst of all heresies is lodged deep in your heart.”
“Heresies? God knows,” sighed the priest, “I have enough evil in my heart—but heresies? I am at a loss to catch your meaning.”
In the absence of his playful Clerica—to use the Pantagruelian allusion—the great Homenas of Nevilton was compelled to fill his “tall-boy of extravagant wine” with his own hand. He did so, and continued his explanation.
“By the worst of all heresies I mean the dangerous Puritan idea that pleasure itself is evil and a thing detestable to God. The Catholic doctrine, as I understand it, is that all these things are entirely relative to the persons concerned. Pleasure in itself is, in the Aristotelian sense, a supreme good. Everyone has a right to it. Everyone must have it. The whole thing is a matter of proportion and expediency. If an innocent playful game, of the kind you have just witnessed, was likely in this definite particular case to lead to harm, then you would be justified in your anxiety. But there must be no laying down of hard general rules. There must be no making a virtue of the mere denying ourselves pleasure.”
Mr. Clavering could hardly wait for his guest to finish.
“Then, according to your theory,” he exclaimed, “it would be right for you, or whoever you will,—pardon my making the thing so personal—to indulge in casual levities with any pretty barmaid, as long as you vaguely surmised that she was a sensible girl and would not be harmed?”
“Certainly it would be right,” replied the papal apologist, sipping his wine and inhaling the perfume of the garden, “and not only right, but a plain duty. It is our duty, Mr. Clavering, to make the world happier while we live in it; and the way to make girls happier, especially when their occupations are laborious, is to kiss them; to give them innocent and admiring embraces.”
“I am afraid you are not quite serious, Mr. Taxater,” said the clergyman. “I have an absurd way of being direct and literal in these discussions.”
“Certainly, I am serious. Do you not know—young puritan—that some of the noblest spirits in history have not hesitated to increase the pleasure of girls’ lives by giving them frequent kisses? In the Greek days he who could give the most charming kiss was awarded a public prize. In the Elizabethan days all the great and heroic souls, whose exquisite wit and passionate imagination put us still to shame, held large and liberal views on this matter. In the eighteenth century the courtly and moral Joseph Addison used never to leave a coffee-house, however humble and poor, without bestowing a friendly embrace upon every woman in it. The religious Doctor Johnson—a man of your own faith—was notoriously in the habit of taking his prettier visitors upon his knee, and tenderly kissing them. It is no doubt due to this fact, that the great lexicographer was so frequently visited;—especially by young Quakers. When we come to our own age, it is well known that the late Archbishop Taraton, the refuter of Darwin, was never so happy as when romping round the raspberry-canes in his garden with a crowd of playful girls.
“These great and wise men have all recognized the fact that pleasure is not an evil but a good. A good, however, that must be used discreetly and according to the Christian self-control of which God has given his Church the secret. The senses are not under a curse, Mr. Clavering. They are not given us simply to tempt and perplex us. They are given for our wise and moderate enjoyment.”
Francis Taxater once more lifted his glass to his lips.
“To the devil with this Protestant Puritanism of yours! It has darkened the sun in heaven. It is the cause of all the squalid vice and gross excesses of our forlorn England. It is the cause of the deplorable perversities that one sees around one. It is the cause of that odious hypocrisy that makes us the laughing-stock of the great civilized nations of France, Italy and Spain.” The theologian drew a deep breath, and continued. “I notice, Mr. Clavering, that you have by your side, still unfinished, your second glass of wine. That is a mistake. That is an insult to Providence. Whatever may be your attitude towards these butterfly-wenches, it cannot, as a matter of poetic economy, be right to leave a wine, as delicate, as delicious as this, to spoil in the glass.
“I suppose it has never occurred to you, Mr. Clavering, to go and sit, with the more interesting of your flock, at the Seldom Arms? It never has? So I imagined from my knowledge of your uncivilized English ways.
“The European café, sir, is the universal school of refined and intellectual pleasure. It was from his seat in a Roman café—a place not unknown to me myself—that the great Gibbon was accustomed to survey the summer moon, rising above the Pantheon.
“It is the same in the matter of wine as in the other matter. It is your hypocritical and puritanical fear of pleasure that leads to the gross imbibing of villainous spirits and the subterranean slavery of prostitution. If you allowed yourselves, freely, naturally, and with Christian moderation, to enjoy the admirable gifts of the supreme giver, there would no longer be any need for this deplorable plunging into insane vice. As it is—in this appalling country of yours—one can understand every form of debauchery.”
At this point Mr. Clavering intervened with an eager and passionate question. He had been listening intently to his visitor’s words, and his clear-cut, mobile face had changed its expression more than once during this long discourse.
“You do not, then, think,” said he, in a tone of something like supplication, “that there is anything wrong in giving ourselves up to the intense emotion which the presence of beauty and charm is able to excite?”
“Wrong?” said Mr.