At the end of a fortnight Christian found himself able to confront the system, and even look it in the face, with a certain degree of mental composure. He was far from imagining that he had comprehended it all, but the thought of it no longer made his brain whirl by the magnitude of its scope, or frightened him by its daring. The implication that he was expected to do still more with it than Emanuel, its inventor and evangel, had done, possessed its terrors, no doubt, but one is not young for nothing. The buoyancy of youth, expanding genially amid these delightful surroundings, thrust these shadows off into the indefinite future, whenever they approached.
This system need not detain us long, or unnerve us at all. Lord Julius had spoken figuratively of it as the Pursuit of Happiness; perhaps that remains its best definition.
Like other systems, it was capable of explanation by means of formulas; but the most lucid and painstaking presentation of these could not hope to convey complete meaning to the mind. Stated in words, Emanuel’s plan hardly appealed to the imagination. Save for a few innovations, not of primary importance, it proceeded by arguments entirely familiar to everybody, and which indeed none disputes. Most of its propositions were the commonplaces of human speech and thought. The value of purity, of cheerfulness, of loyalty, of mercy—this is not gainsaid by any one. The conception of duty as the mainspring of human action is very old indeed. For this reason, doubtless, Emanuel’s efforts to expound his System by means of books had failed to rivet public attention. He could only insist afresh upon what was universally conceded, and Mr. Tupper before him had done enough of this to last several generations.
Viewed in operation, however, the System was another matter. Our immemorial platitudes, once clothed in flesh and blood, informed with life, and set in motion under the sympathetic control of a master mind, became unrecognizable.
Emanuel as a lad had thought much of the fact that he was of the blood of the Spinozas. When he learned Latin in his early boyhood, the task was sweetened and ennobled to his mind by the knowledge that it would bring him into communion with the actual words of the great man, his kinsman. Later, when he approached with veneration the study of these words, the discovery that they meant little or nothing to him was almost crushing in its effects. Eventually it dawned upon his brain that the philosopher’s abstractions and speculations were as froth on the top of the water; the great fact was the man himself—the serene, lofty, beautiful character which shines out at us from its squalid setting like a flawless gem. To be like Spinoza, but to give his mind to the real rather than the unreal, shaped itself as the goal of his ambitions.
It was at this period that he became impressed by the thought that he was also of the blood of the Torrs. On the one side the poor lens-grinder with the soul of an archangel; on the other the line of dull-browed, heavy-handed dukes, with a soul of any sort discoverable among them nowhere. Slowly the significance of the conjunction revealed itself to him. To take up the long-neglected burden of responsibilities and possibilities of the Torrs, with the courage and pure spirit of a Spinoza—there lay the duty of his life, plainly marked before him.
Ensuing years of reading, travel and reflection gave him the frame, so to speak, in which to put this picture. He had from his childhood been greatly attracted by the glimpses which his father’s library gave him of what is called the Mediaeval period. As he grew older, this taste became a passion. Where predilection ended and persuasion began, it would be hard to say, but when he had arrived at man’s estate, and stood upon the threshold of his life-work, it was with the deeply rooted conviction that the feudal stage had offered mankind its greatest opportunities for happiness and the higher life. That the opportunities had been misunderstood, wasted, thrown away, proved nothing against the soundness of his theory. He had masses of statistics as to wages, rent-rolls, endowments and the like at his fingers’ ends, to show that even on its reverse side, the medieval shield was not so black as it was painted. As for the other side—it was the age of the cathedrals, of the Book of Kells, of the great mendicant orders, of the saintly and knightly ideals. It was in its flowering time that craftsmanship attained its highest point, and the great artisan guilds, proud of their talents and afraid of nothing but the reproach of work ill-done, gave the world its magnificent possessions among the applied arts. Sovereigns and princes vied with one another to do honor to the noblest forms of art, and to bow to the intellect of an Erasmus, who had not even the name of a father to bear. Class caste was the rule of the earth, yet the son of a peasant like Luther could force himself to the top, and compel emperors to listen to him, more readily then than now. The bishop-princes of feudal England were as often as not the sons of swineherds or starveling clerks, whereas now no such thing could conceivably happen to the hierarchy. Above all things, it was the age of human character. Men like Thomas More, with their bewildering circle of attainments and their extraordinary individual force, were familiar products. In a thousand other directions, Emanuel saw convincing proofs that mankind then and there had come closest to the possibilities of a golden age. True, it had wandered off miserably again, into all manner of blind lanes and morasses, until it floundered now in a veritable Dismal Swamp of individualism, menaced on the one side by the millionaire slave-hunter, on the other by the spectral anarchist, and still the fools in its ranks cried out ceaselessly for further progress. Oh, blind leaders of the blind!
No. Emanuel saw clearly that humanity could right itself by retracing its steps, and going back to the scene of its mistaken choice of roads. It had taken the wrong turning when it forsook the path of coherent and interdependent organization—that marvelously intricate yet perfectly logical system called feudalism, in which everybody from king to serf had service to render and service to receive, and mutual duty was the law of the entire mechanism.
Though Christian heard much more than this, enough has been said to indicate the spirit in which Emanuel had embarked upon the realization of his plan. The results, as Christian wonderingly observed them, were remarkable.
The estate over which the System reigned was compact in shape, and enjoyed the advantage of natural boundaries, either of waste moorland or estuaries, which shut it off from the outside world, and simplified the problem of developing its individual character. In area it comprised nearly fifteen square miles, and upon it, as has been said, lived some two thousand people. About half of these were employed in, or dependent upon, the industrial occupations Emanuel had introduced; the others were more directly connected with the soil. Whether artisans or farmers, however, they lived almost without exception in some one of the six little villages on the property.
In each of these hamlets there were conserved one or more old timbered houses; the newer cottages had been built, not in servile imitation of these, but after equally old models, no two quite alike. As the “Fortnightly Review” article said, if the System had done nothing else it had “gathered for the instruction and delight of the intelligent observer almost a complete collection of examples of early English domestic architecture of the humbler sort.” The numerous roads upon the estate were kept in perfect order, and were for the most part lined with trees; where they passed through the villages they were of great width, with broad expanses of turf, shaded by big oaks or elms, some of which had been moved from other spots only a few years before, to the admiring surprise of the neighborhood. Each village had a small church edifice of its own, quaintly towered and beautiful in form, and either possessing or simulating skillfully the graces of antiquity as well. Beside the church was a building presenting some one or another type of the tolsey-house of old English towns, devoted to the communal uses of the villagers. About the church and the tolsey was the public garden and common, with a playground with swings and bars for the children at the back—and there was no grave or tombstone in sight anywhere. A hospitable, ivy-clad, low-gabled inn, with its long side to the street, was a conspicuous feature on each village green.
Christian retained a vivid recollection of entering one of these taverns with Emanuel, very early in his tour of observation. Above the broad, open door, as they went in, swung the cumbrous, brightly painted sign of “The Torr Arms.” Two or three laborers in corduroys were seated on benches at the table, with tankards before them; they dragged their heavily shod feet together on the sanded floor, and stood up, when they saw Emanuel, touching their hats with an air of affectionate humility as he smiled and nodded to them. There was a seemingly intelligent and capable landlady in the bar, who drew the two glasses of beer which Emanuel asked for, and answered cheerfully the questions he put to her. Two brightfaced young women, very neatly dressed, were seated sewing in this commodious bar, and they joined in the conversation which Emanuel raised. Christian gathered from what he heard and saw that his cousin took an active interest in the fortunes of this tavern and of both its inmates and its patrons, and that the interest and liking were warmly reciprocated. The discovery gave him a more genial conception of Emanuel’s character than he had hitherto entertained.
“That is one of my most satisfactory enterprises,” Emanuel had said when they came out. “We brew our own beer, as well as the few cordials which take the place of spirits, and I really feel sure it’s the best beer obtainable in England. I am very proud of it—but I am proud of these taverns of ours too. That was one of the hardest problems to be solved—but the solution satisfies me better, perhaps, than anything else I have done. Nobody ever dreams of getting drunk in these ‘pubs’ of ours. Nobody dreams of being ashamed to be seen going into them or coming out. The women and children enter them just as freely, if they have occasion to do so, as they would a dairy or grocer’s shop. They are the village clubs, so to speak, and they are constantly open to the whole village, as much as the church or the tolsey. But here is one of my parsons. I want you to take note of him—and I will tell you about his part in the System afterward. He is as interesting a figure in it as my publican.”
A tall, fresh-faced, fair young man approached them as Emanuel spoke, and was presented to the stranger as Father William. Christian observed him narrowly, as he had been bidden, but beyond the fact that he was clad in a somewhat outlandish fashion, and seemed a merry-hearted fellow, there was nothing noteworthy in the impression he produced. He stood talking for a few minutes, and then, with affable adieux, passed on.
“That is wholly my invention,” commented Emanuel, as they resumed their walk. “There is one of them in each of the six villages, and a seventh who has a kind of general function—and really I have been extraordinarily fortunate with them all. They come from my college at Oxford—Swithin’s—and when you think that twenty years ago it was the most bigoted hole in England, the change is most miraculous. These young men fell in with my ideas like magic. I don’t suppose you know much about the Church of England. Well, it drives with an extremely loose rein. You can do almost anything you like inside it, if you go about the thing decorously. I didn’t even have the trouble with the bishop which might have been expected. These young men—my curates, we may call them—have among themselves a kind of guild or confraternity. They are called Father William, or Father Alfred; they wear the sort of habit you have seen; they are quite agreed upon an irreducible minimum of dogmatic theology, and an artistic elaboration of the ritual, and, above all, upon an active life consecrated to good works. They have their own central chapter-house, where they live when they choose and feel like enjoying one another’s society, but each has his own village, for the moral and intellectual health of which he feels responsible. Without their constant and very capable oversight, the System would have a good many ragged edges, I’m afraid. But what they do is wonderful. They have made a study of all the different temperaments and natures among the people. They know just how to smooth away possible friction here, to encourage dormant energy there, to keep the whole thing tight and clean and sound. They specially watch the development of the children, and make careful notes of their qualities and capacities. They decide which are to be fully educated, and which are to be taught only to read and do sums.”
“I am not sure that I understand,” put in Christian. “Is not universal education a part of your plan?”
Emanuel smiled indulgently. “There was never grosser nonsense talked in this world,” he said, with the placid air of one long since familiar with the highest truths, “or more mischievous rubbish into the bargain, than this babble about universal education. The thing we call modern civilization is wrong at so many points that it is hard to say where it sins most, but often I think this is its worst offense. The race has gone fairly mad over this craze for stuffing unfit brains with encumbering and harmful twaddle. In the Middle Ages they knew better. The monks of a locality picked out the children whose minds would repay cultivation, and they taught these as much as it was useful for them to know. If the system was in honest operation, it mattered nothing whether these children belonged to the lord of the manor or the poorest peasant. Assume, for example, that there was a nobleman and one of his lowest dependents, and that each of them had a clever son and a dull one. The monks would take the two clever ones, and educate them side by side—and if in the end the base born boy had the finer mind of the two, and the stronger character, he would become the bishop or the abbot or the judge in preference to his noble school-fellow. On the other hand, the two dull boys were not wearied by schooling from which they could get no profit. The thick-headed young-noble, very often without even learning his alphabet, was put on a horse, and given a suit of armor and a sword; the heavy-witted young churl was given a leathern shirt and a pike or a bow, and bidden to follow behind that horse’s tail—and off the two happy dunces went, to fulfill in a healthful and intelligent fashion their manifest destiny. Those were the rational days when human institutions were made to fit human beings—instead of this modern lunacy of either shaving down and manglin............