FROM JOY TO WOE
ON THE day before the double wedding, the Lavender Dragon was in a didactic mood, and said many interesting things which won the applause of some among his listeners but, as usual, made Sir Jasper, Sir Claude, Father Lazarus and other good men sad.
The monster spoke with his usual directness on the limitation of families.
“A great source of human unhappiness is over-crowding,” he declared to them, “and here, as we know, it is agreed, with general accord, to expand in a ratio which bears directly upon the well-being and prosperity of all.”
“You interfere with the liberty of the subject, Sir Dragon,” ventured George Pipkin.
“That the liberty of the community shall not be interfered with, George,” replied L.D. “The need to rear and fatten armies and navies for slaughter does not, you see, arise with us. We are a feeble, but not a fearful, folk, and we know that there are too many people in the world. Authority cannot cope with the increase and Nature does so—in a manner very painful to all of good will. Reason bewails the starved souls and bodies of many little ones, while superstition, patriotism and other faulty inspirations, still too much in evidence, clamour for more of these failures. It will presently, however, be driven into man’s thick skull that quality is of greater force in affairs than quantity, and that war, famine and pestilence are cruel and abominable engines to keep the race in bounds. And when he makes this discovery, what will he do? He will first reach limitation of swords and spears, then, being a logical beast in his saner moments, attain to limitation of his own species. For when men compose their differences without shedding of blood, masses to murder and be murdered are an anachronism, and over-production becomes folly. It is argued that restriction may rob us of occasional great men. But can great men only be bred at cost of misery to thousands of small ones? If so, then let us struggle on without great men and rest content with the healthy and the sane. Our danger lies in the Orient world, whose fecundity is awful to contemplate and renders it a great obstacle to the security of the earth. East will not listen to the West on so delicate a subject, for Asia has family ideals and superstitions in this matter which must take centuries of time to dissipate.”
“You want better bread than is made of wheat,” said Sir Claude, and his voice was drearier than usual.
“Of course I do,” replied the Lavender Dragon. “Most certainly I do; and you also, I should hope, and every man and woman who has a spirit worth calling one, and intelligence to measure things as they are. I deprecate discontent and covetousness as you will admit; but there is a discontent of the soul, Sir Claude, without which man is no better than the tadpole. Plenty of hearty, healthy children let us have by all means; and let us learn more from them and about them before we begin pouring in the varied and doubtful nonsense always on tap for their little, empty heads; let us wait in patience until they are ready to pronounce some opinion on the nostrums we hold to their infant lips.”
“Do we not know far better than they, what is good for them, dear friend!” asked Father Lazarus.
“No, best of men, we do not,” replied the dragon firmly. “I have studied the child for many hundreds of years, and I tell you this: the young are often far more reasonably minded than their parents. Nature leads them to take an honest view of life, and if that view is un-vitiated by grown-up lumber, it will not seldom develop and display a very rational estimate of conduct. But the work of our school-men in this virgin soil is often disastrous, and woe betide those who sow tares at that critical season when the rich material is best fitted to nourish and sustain them. To warp youthful intelligence and poison growing reason is a great fallacy and evil. There are precious, humanistic instincts of inquiry in well-nurtured and intelligent children, and that we should graft upon this spirit our questionable conclusions, rules of conduct, conventions, hatred of reality, chronic untruthfulness of outlook and imbecile pride, is utterly to spoil them in a very large proportion of cases. The potential power and value of many future men and women has thus been diminished; they are by so much rendered inferior, both as doers and thinkers. The stream of progress is dammed, the evolution of morals retarded. For, as I have often told you, the evolution of morals is a glorious fact; and that it should tend upwards is still more glorious; because upon this assurance hangs the destiny of mankind—all pessimists and doubters to the contrary notwithstanding. Let us, therefore, suffer the children to follow their bent, guarded and guided by pure reason; let us not catch them too young and foul the well-springs of their souls with a thousand uncertain and preposterous theories. Why, for example, does good Father Lazarus always agitate to get the children? Because he firmly believes that their future happiness and usefulness depend upon his doing so. He is much mistaken. Teach them to be clean, honest and faithful, just and merciful to the weak, humble, tolerant of others, scornful of self. Let them understand that certain instincts and temptations belong to their ancestry and original endowment; explain wherein good and evil consist according to our present worthiest values; but for the creeds and dogmas, the myths and magics, the mysteries and metaphysics, concerning which there is such an infinite diversity of opinion, let us spare them these until they reach years of discretion and are qualified to judge of their value to life and their correspondence with truth. This is not to weaken faith, but set it upon a basis of reason; for think not that faith and reason are opposed. Reason is founded upon our faith in all things reasonable.”
Nicholas Warrender agreed with his master.
“Man is credulous enough through his aboriginal forefathers, without making him more so and teaching him to believe in goblins—good and bad—from his youth up,” said the seneschal. “Thus you stain his dawning intellect, and soak it to such a colour that only one in a thousand ever gets the fabric of thought clean again. Remember that youth is the time of leisure, and when the young grow up, life and its immediate cares and occupations intervene, so that few have opportunity, let alone inclination, to go back and intelligently examine the opinions that have been implanted in them. They take these for granted henceforth, and bolt the doors of the mind upon inquiry. But what do you call them who decline to live behind bolted doors and seek for freedom instead? What name do you give to such as exercise liberty of thought and reject the learning thrust upon their infancy? ‘Infidel’ is the title reserved for such persons. Yet unto what are they unfaithful? Not to honour, justice, mercy, self-denial or charity. Only to the goblins. Thus the mass of men, who care not two pins for this subject, and whose sole concern is to prosper and preserve the approval of their neighbours, succeed in doing so, while such as honour their own gift of understanding and perceive these great and vital questions of religious faith and a world beyond the grave demand the very quintessence of their reverent examination, are cast out, persecuted, horribly destroyed for their pains, when and where the hierophants possess power to destroy them.”
“And what is the melancholy result, my friends?” asked L.D. “In the Golden Age, the idea that religion should come between man and wisdom entered no head. The philosophers instructed and the sages questioned and argued without let and hindrance; for then it was understood that progress depended upon the spirit of inquiry. But now, alas! official and state-supported superstitions block this spirit at every turn; prosperous error bars the way to afflicted truth, and he who approaches these profound subjects through any other road than that pointed out for him by his rulers will soon find himself a trespasser on forbidden ground.”
“All religions are as scaffolding, and our children’s children will yet see the scaffolding pulled down,” declared Nicholas Warrender. “These opinions are yet in the tide of their career, but must presently remain with us only as the useless hair upon our bodies and the tell-tale fragments of our anatomy which point to purposes now outworn.”
“Consider,” added the dragon, “how many shapes man has given to his divinities. It was long before he exalted God to his own image. He ransacked the categories of Nature before he conceived those august forms of the later and human pantheons beyond which he cannot go. The Egyptians worshipped Apis, the ox; at Arsinoe, the crocodile was deity; in the city of Hercules, the ichneumon. Others adored a cat, an ibis, a falcon. The people of Hispanola kneel to invisible fairies and pray to them under the name of Zemini. In the Isle of Java the thing first met of a morning is the god for the day, no matter whether a reptile, beast or fowl. Those of Manta have made an emerald the Everlasting, and offer prayer and pilgrimage to it, bringing the inevitable gifts which the priesthood of that precious stone know how to charm from them. The Romans created a goddess of a city, and the people of Negapatam built their Pagod, a massy monster drawn upon a chariot of many wheels and over-laid with gold. The warlike Alani worship a naked sword, which is the only god they know who can answer their petitions; and in Ceylon, upon the peak of Adam, is kept the tooth of an ape—held by the Cingalese to be the holiest thing and the most potent in all Asia. With a more noble faith do the Assyrians confront us, for they worshipped the Sun and the Earth, from which they received life. The dove was sacred among them; it is a symbol still held in holiest esteem among the Christians, as you know. At Ekron the Lord of Flies enjoyed first place, and Baal-zebub, the Larder-god, doubtless received many prayers to keep his myriads under control. Those of Peru adored the corpses of their Emperors, and ancestor worship persists among certain Oriental people unto this day.
“A thousand other manifestations of divinity are in the knowledge of the learned before we come to the solitary god of the Jew—a Being nobly exalted and purified, but, even as the Allah of Mahomet, One still all too human in his essence and behaviour. These deities occupied my profound attention and I made this discovery concerning the different interpretations put upon them, that not Absolutism or Idealism, not Immanentism or Pragmatism, or any other ‘ism,’ or scism whatsoever, will lead mankind’s few and uncertain footsteps through his short life to happiness, or security. To suppose, as these people do, that their gods possess the potency, impatience and selfishness of Oriental panjandrums is vain; and whether such Eternal Beings are transcendent or immanent, universal or particular, matters nothing at all. What does matter is that they are not gentlemen; and to how parlous a state must that divinity be reduced who can learn manners, discipline and conduct from the like of us! The gods who behave worse than their creatures and make it needful that their chosen ministers should forever apologise and explain their unsocial conduct, are not gods; for right must be right and wrong must be wrong, whether committed by a deity or a dragon; and if it be admitted that these Supreme Beings know how to choose, direct and control with utmost wisdom and purest virtue, what shall be thought while they themselves, in their almighty power, daily perpetrate or sanction abominations for which the world would execrate any child of man?
“Then you, my own dear Christians, have discovered a triune God—Three in One and One in Three. And who shall presume to question your convictions if you abide in them peacefully, without hating and murdering other people who cannot see eye to eye with you? Truth asks for nothing but open and honourable warfare against Falsehood. Given a fair field, she cannot be defeated. The story will reach its conclusion, however, because, when there is a means of return to independence, freedom with security, and consequent renewed progress, mankind must be swift to take that way. We shall presently see philosophers, each with his personal God. They will write books about their deities and every one will seek to show how his own concept of the Eternal transcends all others. Some of these home-made divinities may not be all powerful; some will even depend upon their creatures to strengthen their knees and help their difficult task. They are much to the good—these personal gods conceived by clever and earnest people, even though no two of them will ever have more than a family resemblance. Time does not stand still, and evolution continues to do her perfect work.”
But the Christians had all stolen away, led by Sir Claude and Father Lazarus. The dragon found only his seneschal still left to listen; and he was not listening: the old man had gone to sleep.
A glorious autumn day dawned for the weddings, and Dragonsville made holiday. Only those whose duty it was to milk the cows and feed the cattle put a hand to work, and though it was impossible for L.D. to go to church, the building not being constructed to admit him, he sat just outside with his huge head on the earth, where he might listen to the marriage service and the admirable address delivered to the wedded couples by Father Lazarus. In this exordium the good priest took occasion to traverse sharply and caustically many of the Lavender Dragon’s own most cherished sentiments; but the monster felt no unkindly emotion before such an attack. He loved Father Lazarus and never quarrelled with the least person who declined to share his own ideas. Any sort of persecution caused him violent uneasiness, for he held that nothing excused loss of temper and cruelty, fanaticism and intolerance.
L.D. fell into error at the banquet which followed the nuptials and, despite his doctor’s entreaties, drank far too much cider and ate too many sugared kidney beans.
After all was consumed, the dragon went into his treasure house and produced wedding gifts and also presents for everybody, to the least infant on his mother’s lap.
“I cannot give the little ones anything they value,” exclaimed L.D. to Sir Jasper, “for the idea of property vanishes in a generation or two when once human nature begins to share the ethical purity of the ant. It is better to want than to have; it is better still not to want. They do not want. But you see everybody takes my gifts for my sake; and you must do the same. These jewels are of priceless value, according to the world’s opinion, but of none whatever in Dragonsville. Even for beauty, a necklace of bluebells beats them hollow.”
The happy couples departed for their honeymoons in a distant part of the kingdom half a day’s ride from town. There, in a notable spot known as the Valley of Ferns, stood two bungalows sacred to the newly wed, and in this sequestered and attractive region the Lady Pomeroy and Mrs. George Pipkin wandered very happily with their husbands.
Then they returned to hear sad news, which at L.D.’s orders had been kept from their ears until they did so.
The Lavender Dragon had fallen dangerously ill with an attack of gout, which involved not only his four gigantic paws, but threatened his vitals also.
A gloom as of eclipse sat upon the faces of the people. All merrymaking had ceased; even the children only played the quietest games and could put little heart into their pleasure.