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Only the flattest literalism was intelligible to her; she could follow nothing but the very macadam of conversation had no palate for anything but the suet-pudding of talk. Rhoda's eyes twinkled, and Miss Barfoot laughed. Everard was allowing himself a freedom in expression which hitherto he had sedulously avoided.
My mother accepted the task gladly, for in spite of a certain narrowness of view the natural but deplorable result of her earlier surroundings she was one of the most truly pious women whom I have ever known; unfortunately for herself and us she had been trained in the lowest school of Evangelical literalism a school which in after life both my brother and myself came to regard as the main obstacle to the complete overthrow of unbelief; we therefore looked upon it with something stronger than aversion, and for my own part I still deem it perhaps the most insidious enemy which the cause of Christ has ever encountered.
Vaughan fails in doing. Summarily, I would say this Hindoo mysticism Lays claim to disinterested love as opposed to a mercenary religion; Reacts against the ceremonial prescription and pedantic literalism of the Vedas; Identifies, in its pantheism, subject and object, worshipper and worshipped; Aims at ultimate absorption in the Infinite;
But if MacDowell's method of transmutation is not the method of Strauss, neither is it the method of Schumann, or of Debussy. He occupies a middle ground between the undaunted literalism of the Munich tone-poet and the sentimental posturings into which the romanticism of Schumann so frequently declined.
He does this so beautifully that the reader can hardly discern where Paul quits the region of literalism and takes us into that of mysticism. Hence he talks about dying with Christ, being crucified with Christ, dying to sin, and so on, evidently meaning that the whole redeeming process has to take place within the soul of the sinner who seeks God.
It is certain, however, that the danger must be incurred, since nothing could make sense out of an absolutely literal interpretation. It would mean a reductio ad absurdum. Apply such a literalism, for example, to the point at which for centuries the Church has sought to apply it the indissolubility of marriage.
The American use of the word is ancient and respectable, but the English limitation of its meaning seems to me convenient, seeing we have the general terms "unwell" and "ill" ready to hand. Again, the New York Press authority follows Freeman in wishing to eject the word "ovation" from the language; surely a ridiculous literalism.
Has not he, or rather have not the great men of his school, over-obsessed us with the dogma, derived from Scriptural literalism, of human corruption flowing from Adam? There is, by contrast, a more radiant and yet as realistic view of the world as Christ saw it, to be recovered.
As a theory it is quite different from Paul's, unless we are content to shed Paul's literalism, get rid of all thought of an angry God and a physical death penalty for sin, and betake ourselves instead to the inner spiritual region where self-sacrifice is realised to be the means of saving, not only the individual, but the whole race, by uniting it to the source of all being.
Here, too, are the far-off, "wrinkled sea," and the final cataclysmic and sudden descent: yet, despite the literalism of the close, there is no yielding of artistic sobriety in the result, for the music has an unassailable dignity. It remains, even to-day, one of MacDowell's most characteristic and admirable performances.
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