or with the directness of humble but important business
among crowds. At Oxford he had interested some
of his friends and worried others by wistful inclinations
toward the shelter of that Mother Church which bids
her children be at rest and leave to her the responsibility.
Lindsay, with his robust sense of a right to exist
on the old unmuddled fighting terms, to be a sane and
decent animal, under civilised moral governance a
miserable sinner, was among those who observed his
waverings without prejudice or anything but an affectionate
solicitude that, whichever way Arnold went, he should
find the satisfactions he sought. The conviction
that settled the matter was accidental, the work of
a moment, a free instinct and a thing made with hands—the
dead Shelley where the sea threw him and the sculptor
fixed him, under his memorial dome in the gardens
of University College. Here one leafy afternoon
Arnold came so near praying that he raised his head
in confusion at the thought of the profane handicraftsman
who might claim the vague tribute of his spirit.
Then fell the flash by which he saw deeply concealed
in his bosom, and disguised with a host of spiritual
wrappings, what he uncompromisingly identified as
the artistic bias, the aesthetic point of view.
The discovery worked upon him so that he spent three
days without consummated prayer at all, occupied in
the effort to find out whether he could yet indeed
worship in purity of spirit, or how far the paralysis
of the ideal of mere beauty had crept upon his devotions.
In the end he cast the artistic bias, the aesthetic
point of view, as far from him as his will would carry,
and walked away in another direction, from which,
if he turned his head, he could see the Church of Rome
sitting with her graven temptations gathered up in
her skirts, looking mournfully after him. He
had been a priest of the Clarke Mission to Calcutta,
a “Clarke Brother,” six years when he stood
in the door of Ahsing’s little shop in Bentinck
Street, while Lindsay explained to Ahsing his objection
to patent leather toe-caps; six years which had not
worn or chilled him, because, as he would have cheerfully
admitted, he had recognised the facts and lowered his
personal hopes of achievement—lowered them
with a heroism which took account of himself as no
more than a spiritual molecule rightly inspired and
moving to the great future already shining behind
coming aeons of the universal Kingdom. Indeed,
his humility was scientific; he made his deductions
from the granular nature of all change, moral and
material. He never talked or thought of the
Aryan souls that were to shine with peculiar Oriental
brightness as stars in the crown of his reward; he
saw rather the ego and the energy of him merged in
a wave of blessed tendency in this world, thankful
if, in that which is to come, it was counted worthy
to survive at all. It should be understood that
Arnold did not hope to attain the simplicity of this
by means equally simple. He held vastly, on