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But what a method for Infinite Wisdom and Infinite Goodness! There was more sense, and less cruelty, in the ancient method of infanticide. Mr. Le Gallienne seems to feel that his theory of pain is too fantastic, so he falls back on "mystery." "We can form no possible conception," he says, "of the processes of God." Why then does he talk about them so consumedly?
Above the caryatids were marble busts of men whom that age esteemed great moral emancipators and pioneers; for the most part their names were strange to Graham, though he recognised Grant Allen, Le Gallienne, Nietzsche, Shelley and Goodwin.
The subjective ideas of poetry cease to be admirable and stimulating when they are projected into the external world, and become our masters instead of our servants. Mr. Le Gallienne follows the beaten track of theology in talking about "mysteries," which are only subterfuges to cover the retreat of a nonplussed debater, or a warren for the fugitive game of the hounds of reason.
Le Gallienne and Davidson, and even Symons, were provincial at their setting out, but their provincialism was curable, mine incurable; while the one conviction shared by all the younger men, but principally by Johnson and Horne, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an opposition to all ideas, all generalisations that can be explained and debated.
From the age of seventeen, when she had graduated from the high school in white ribbons and heavy new boots and tight new organdy to twenty-three, she had kept house and gone to gossip-parties and unmethodically read books from the town library Walter Scott, Richard Le Gallienne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs.
"Great is your reward in heaven," and similar sentences, lose all meaning without the doctrine of a future life, about which the early Christians were intensely enthusiastic. It was not in this world, as Gibbon remarks, that they wished to be happy or useful. Mr. Le Gallienne argues that Christ taught in parables. He promised heaven, and threatened hell, but he spoke in a Pickwickian sense.
Gallienne the little island, frequently mentioned before, near Sark, Le Tas, where Mr. Howard Saunders found several breeding on the 24th June, 1878. I could not accompany him on this expedition, so he alone has the honour of adding Le Tas to the breeding-places of the Storm Petrel in the Channel Islands, and he very kindly gave me the two eggs which he took on that occasion.
Le Gallienne's god is the old celestial despot of theology in a new costume. On the question of a future life, however, we are pleased to find a vein of heterodoxy and common sense. Mr. Le Gallienne asks, with respect to the "hereafter," whether we "really care about it so much as we imagine."
Perhaps so; but what becomes of that "masterful synthesis," in which Christ gathered up the "joyous naturalism of the Greek," no less than other ancient characteristics? Christianity has been historically a failure. Mr. Le Gallienne more than admits the fact; he emphasises it, and tries to explain it.
"Science can tell us that oxygen and hydrogen will unite under certain conditions to produce water, but it cannot tell us why they do so; the mystery of their affinity is as dark as ever." Mr. Le Gallienne has a whole chapter on the Relative Spirit, yet his "long and ardent thought" does not enable him to see that he is himself a slave of metaphysics.
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