Paul Faber

“ Neither did Faber make any attempt to find out whether she knew what had passed; even about Amanda and any possible change in her future he was listless. He had never been a man of plans, and had no room for any now under the rubbish of a collapsed life. His days were gloomy and his nights troubled. He dreamed constantly either of Amanda's mother, or of Juliet—sometimes of both together, and of endless perplexity between them. Sometimes he woke weeping. He did not now despise his tears, for they flowed neither from suffering nor self-pity, but from love and sorrow and repentance. ”

“ Only, you would witch me out of opinion and judgment and every thing else with two words from your dear lips."
"Should I, Paul?" she said; and lifting her face from his shoulder, she looked up in his from the depths of two dark fountains full of tears. Never does the soul so nearly identify itself with matter as when revealing itself through the eyes; never does matter so nearly lose itself in spiritual absorption, as when two eyes like Juliet's are possessed and glorified by the rush of the soul through their portals. Faber kissed eyes and lips and neck in a glow of delight. ”

“ To make the woman who had loved forget utterly, was a greater victory, he said, than to wake love in the heart of a girl, and would yield him a finer treasure, a richer conquest. Only, pure as snow she must be—pure as the sun himself! Paul Faber was absolutely tyrannous in his notions as to feminine purity. Like the diamond shield of Prince Arthur, Knight of Magnificence, must be the purity that would satisfy this lord of the race who could live without a God! Was he then such a master of purity himself? one so immaculate that in him such aspiration was no presumption? ”

“ Yes, one might choose to be born, if there were suffering one might live or die to soften, to cure! That would be to be like Paul Faber. To will to be born for that would be grand indeed!"
In paths of thought like these her mind wandered, her head lying upon her arms on the old-fashioned, wide-spread window-sill. At length, weary with emotion and weeping, she fell fast asleep, and slept for some time.
The house was very still. Mr. Drake and Dorothy were in no haste to return. Amanda was asleep, and Lisbeth was in the kitchen—perhaps also asleep.
Juliet woke with a great start. ”

“ This was the righteous judgment of a man who could, by one tender, consoling word, have made the sun rise upon a glorious world of conscious womanhood, but would not say that word, and left that world lying in the tortured chaos of a slow disintegration. This conscious being with a heart, this Paul Faber, who saw that a God of love was the only God supposable, set his own pride so far above love, that his one idea was, to satisfy the justice of his outraged dignity by the torture of the sinner!—even while all the time dimly aware of rebuke in his soul. ”

“ Was he relieved from no misty sense of a moral consciousness judging his, and ready to enforce its rebuke—a belief which seems to me to involve the highest idea, the noblest pledge, the richest promise of our nature? There may be men in whose turning from implicit to explicit denial, no such element of relief is concerned—I can not tell; but although the structure of Paul Faber's life had in it material of noble sort, I doubt if he was one of such. ”

“ When Wingfold read the letter of which I have thus given the substance—it was not until a long time after, in Polwarth's room—he folded it softly together and said:
"When he wrote that letter, Paul Faber was already becoming not merely a man to love, but a man to revere." After a pause he added, "But what a world it would be, filled with contented men, all capable of doing the things for which they would despise themselves."
It was some time before the minister was able to answer the letter except by sending Amanda at once to the doctor with a message of kind regards and thanks. ”

“ Such a nearness can be brought about by no negation however genuine, or however evil may be the thing denied.
Sympathy, then, such as he desired, Faber was now bent on finding, or bringing about in Juliet Meredith. He would fain get nearer to her. Something pushed, something drew him toward the lovely phenomenon into which had flowered invisible Nature's bud of shapeless protoplasm. He would have her trust him, believe him, love him. ”

“ Faber had not an idea of what was in the creature who represented to him one of Nature's failures at man-making; while Polwarth, from what he heard and saw of the doctor, knew him better than he knew himself; and although the moment when he could serve him had not begun to appear, looked for such a moment to come. There was so much good in the man, that his heart longed to give him something worth having. ”

“ He has no passion for humbugging other people. There's that curate of his now believes every thing, and would humbug the whole world if he could! How any man can come to fool himself so thoroughly as that man does, is a mystery to me!—I wonder what the rector's driving into Glaston for on a Saturday."
Paul Faber was a man who had espoused the cause of science with all the energy of a suppressed poetic nature. He had such a horror of all kinds of intellectual deception or mistake, that he would rather run the risk of rejecting any number of truths than of accepting one error. ”

“ The doctor would have done better to talk shop too.
"Of course he has nothing else," answered the curate; "and if he had, he must follow his conscience all the same."
"There you are, Wingfold!—always talking paradoxes!" said Faber.
"Why, man! you may only have a blundering boy to guide you, but if he is your only guide, you must follow him. You don't therefore call him a sufficient guide!"
"What a logomachist you are! If it is a horn lantern you've got, you needn't go mocking at it."
"The lantern is not the light. ”

“ It remains a question, however, which there was no one to put to Faber—whether he had not some amends in relief from the notion, vaguely it may be, yet unpleasantly haunting many minds—of a Supreme Being—a Deity—putting forth claims to obedience—an uncomfortable sort of phantom, however imaginary, for one to have brooding above him, and continually coming between him and the freedom of an else empty universe. To the human soul as I have learned to know it, an empty universe would be as an exhausted receiver to the lungs that thirst for air ”

“ I do not love thee; but I can eat, and I enjoy my wine, and my rubber of whist—'"
She broke into a dreadful laugh. It was all horribly unnatural! She rose, and in the deepening twilight seemed to draw herself up far beyond her height, then turned, and looked out on the shadowy last of the sunset. Faber rose also. He felt her shudder, though she was not within two arm's-lengths of him. He sprang to her side.
"Miss Meredith—Juliet—you have suffered! The world has been too hard for you! Let me do all I can to make up for it! I too know what suffering is, and my heart is bleeding for you!" ”

“ For Thou art the perfection which every heart sighs toward, no mind can attain unto. If Thou wast One whom created mind could embrace, Thou wouldst be too small for those whom Thou hast made in Thine own image, the infinite creatures that seek their God, a Being to love and know infinitely. For the created to know perfectly would be to be damned forever in the nutshell of the finite. He who is His own cause, alone can understand perfectly and remain infinite, for that which is known and that which knows are in Him the same infinitude.
Faber came to see Dorothy—solemn, sad, kind. ”

“ The sweetest of western airs came in, with a faint scent chiefly of damp earth, moss, and primroses, in which, to the pensive imagination, the faded yellow of the sunset seemed to bear a part.
"I am sorry to say we must shut the window, Miss Meredith," said the doctor, rising. "You must always be jealous of the night air. It will never be friendly to you."
"What enemies we have all about us!" she returned with a slight shiver, which Faber attributed to the enemy in question, and feared his care had not amounted to precaution. ”

“ Inquiry might have given him ground for fearing that with the love of the imagined God, the love of the indubitable man would decay and vanish. But such as Faber was, he was both loved and honored by all whom he had ever attended; and, with his fine tastes, his genial nature, his quiet conscience, his good health, his enjoyment of life, his knowledge and love of his profession, his activity, his tender heart—especially to women and children, his keen intellect, and his devising though not embodying imagination, if any man could get on without a God, Faber was that man. ”

“ But she withdrew it, saying in a tone which through the darkness seemed to him to come from afar, tinged with mockery.
"You ought to have been a poet—not a doctor, Mr. Faber!"
The jar of her apparent coolness brought him back with a shock to the commonplace. He almost shuddered. It was like a gust of icy wind piercing a summer night.
"I trust the doctor can rule the poet," he said, recovering his self-possession with an effort, and rising.
"The doctor ought at least to keep the poet from falsehood. Is false poetry any better than false religion?" returned Juliet. ”

“ Juliet returned no satisfactory response to this tentative remark; but it was from no objection any longer in her mind to such a relation in the abstract. She had not yet at all consented with herself to abandon the faith of her father, but she did not see, and indeed it were hard for any one in her condition to see, why a man and a woman, the one denying after Faber's fashion, the other believing after hers, should not live together, and love and help each other. Of all valueless things, a merely speculative theology is one of the most valueless. ”

“ He never joined in any jest over suffering, not to say betted on the chance of the man who lay panting under the terrors of an impending operation. Can one be capable of such things, and not have sunk deep indeed in the putrid pit of decomposing humanity? It is true that before he began to practice, Faber had come to regard man as a body and not an embodiment, the highest in him as dependent on his physical organization—as indeed but the aroma, as it were, of its blossom the brain, therefore subject to all the vicissitudes of the human plant from which it rises ”

“ Are they jealous of us?"
"Clearly, at all events, we are not at home amidst them—not genuinely so," admitted the doctor.
"And yet you say we are sprung of them?" said Juliet.
"We have lifted ourselves above them," rejoined the doctor, "and must conquer them next."
"And until we conquer them," suggested Juliet, "our lifting above them is in vain?"
"For we return to them," assented Faber; and silence fell.—"Yes," he resumed, "it is sad. The upper air is sweet, and the heart of man loves the sun;—"
"Then," interrupted Juliet, "why would you have me willing to go down to the darkness?" ”

“ Faber mistook the cause and object of his evident emotion.
"Come now, Mr. Drake, be frank with me," he said. "You are out of health; let me know what is the matter. Though I'm not religious, I'm not a humbug, and only speak the truth when I say I should be glad to serve you. A man must be neighborly, or what is there left of him? Even you will allow that our duty to our neighbor is half the law, and there is some help in medicine, though I confess it is no science yet, and we are but dabblers." ”

“ Who could have brought himself to say to him—"There is loveliness yet left, and within thy reach: take the good, etc.; forget the nothing that has been, in the something that may yet for awhile avoid being nothing too; comfort thy heart with a fresh love: the time will come to forget both, in the everlasting tomb of the ancient darkness"? Few men would consent to be comforted in accordance with their professed theories of life; and more than most would Faber, at this period of his suffering, have scorned such truth for comfort. ”

“ How Faber would have laughed at the notion! But Polwarth felt confident that one day the friendly doctor would be led out of the miserable desert where he cropped thistles and sage and fancied himself a hero. And now in the drawn look of his wife's face, in the broken lights of her eye, in the absorption and the start, he thought he perceived the quarter whence unwelcome deliverance might be on its way, and resolved to keep attention awake for what might appear. In his inmost being he knew that the mission of man is to help his neighbors. ”

“ She knew that she would rather break with her husband altogether, than to do one action contrary to the known mind and will of that Man. Faber would call her faith a mighty, perhaps a lovely illusion: her life was an active waiting for the revelation of its object in splendor before the universe. The world seemed to her a grand march of resurrections—out of every sorrow springing the joy at its heart, without which it could not have been a sorrow ”

“ I am the master of the flowers that will now grow by my labor, though not one of them will know me—how much more must He be the Master of the men He has called into being, though they do not acknowledge Him! If the story of the gospel be a true one, as with my heart and soul and all that is in me I believe it is, then Jesus of Nazareth is Lord and Master of Mr. Faber, and for him not to acknowledge it is to fall from the summit of his being. To deny one's Master, is to be a slave. ”