CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Mr. Hollis R. Upson 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 6013.R1455Q3 
 
 The quest of the face, 
 
 3 1924 013 619 824 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 361 9824 
 
THE QUEST OF THE FACE 
 
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON - BOMBAY • CALCUTTA ■ MADRAS 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 DALLAS ■ SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
Toil tc\Mmmuu\'m\Mmm%\\im(,TL u mmm\A uu 
 
 Vasnetsqf. 
 ' * He was wou7ided for our transgressions, he was bruised for our 
 iniquities : ike chastisement of our peace was upon him ; and with his 
 stripes we are healed.' ' 
 
THE 
 
 QUEST OF THE FACE 
 
 BY 
 
 STEPHEN GJIAHAM 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 " THE PRIEST OF THE IDEAL,'' ETC. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 1918 
 
COPYRIGHT 
 
To the Most Heavenly and Beautiful 
 of Women. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 " The Quest of the Face " was my last writing 
 before entering the Army. The supplementary 
 studies belong to varying times and places in 
 my life and wanderings. The illustrations are 
 mostly from Russian sources, and I hope that 
 the suggestion of their power and beauty may 
 remind some that though Russia seems to have 
 fallen there is an imperishable Russia which 
 cannot fall. 
 
 " The Quest of the Face " was written with 
 much earnestness and joyful expectation, and 
 it is in part a record of actual life and seeking 
 in the streets and among friends. To the many 
 into whose hands the book will come I hope it 
 may be an invitation to become builders of the 
 City in which Dushan and I have been active 
 spiritual masons. 
 
 STEPHEN GRAHAM. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. 
 
 The Face of Christ . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 3 
 
 II. 
 
 The Immortal 
 
 . 131 
 
 III. 
 
 The Changeless God 
 
 . 161 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Light 
 
 • 171 
 
 V. 
 
 A Russian Beggar . 
 
 . 203 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Student. 
 
 . 217 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Shadow . 
 
 233 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Alice .... 
 
 • 255 
 
 IX. 
 
 Mathilde 
 
 267 
 
 X. 
 
 Serapion the Sindonite 
 
 • 273 
 
 XI. 
 
 Simon on the Pillar 
 
 . 285 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 " He was wounded for our transgressions, he was 
 bruised for our iniquities : the chastisement of our 
 peace was upon him ; and with his stripes we are 
 healed " . ... Frontispiece 
 
 FACE PAGE 
 
 '' What is Truth?'' . . . . .28 
 
 Bad News from France . . 30 
 
 Vassily and Ivan . . . . -36 
 
 " Whom do men say that I am ? " . .46 
 
 On the Shroud at Turin . . .60 
 
THE FACE OF CHRIST 
 
We are all seeking a face. It may be the dream face of the 
 ideal, our own fcu:e as it ought to be, as we could wish it to be, 
 or the face that we could love, or a face we once caught a glimpse 
 of and then lost in the crowds and the cares. We seek a face of 
 such celestial loveliness that it would be possible to fall down 
 before it in the devotion of utter sacrifice. Some seek it desper- 
 ately, others seek it ever hopefully, some forget and remember 
 and then forget again and remember again. Others live their 
 life in the consciousness of a promise that they shall see the face 
 at some definite time by and by. The vision of it seems com- 
 pletely remote from some, and they live their life hardly and 
 darkly, but there are others who are perpetually in the light of il, 
 and they see all the common sights of the world transfigured by it. 
 Each has his separate vision of the face. And as there 
 is an infinite number and diversity of mankind, so the faces of 
 the ideal are infinitely numerous and diverse. Yet as in truth 
 we are all one, so all these faces are one, and all the loveliness 
 is one loveliness. 
 
THE FACE OF CHRIST 
 
 I SET out to look afresh at men's faces. My 
 first impression is that all faces are paler than 
 they were. Men are wearing tattered grave- 
 clothes. Lazy faces, tired faces, worried faces, 
 busy faces, self-satisfied faces, fat faces that 
 droop, lean faces that peer, easy-going faces, 
 hating faces — mostly hurrying, restless, acci- 
 dental, tide-swept, tide-moved. On the sunny 
 side of the great highway they are thronging ; 
 at a street corner they are wedged in a crowd 
 looking up at the sky, in which it seems a 
 balloon is floating. On the cold and shady 
 side of the street they are sparse and anxious. 
 I do not pass over but enjoy the Spring sun- 
 shine with the sunlit throng. They pass and 
 they pass and are the same though diverse. 
 Everywhere I discern the faces of the 
 
4 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 broken and the suffering, the faces of those 
 needing healing, needing to be made at one : 
 nowhere do I see the face of a healer who 
 could make whole. I see sometimes the faces 
 of seekers, but I wait and do not find the face 
 of a revealer. 
 
 A blind man with red sunburnt face stares 
 upward from empty eye-sockets, looks full-face 
 at the sun and sees naught, though wet tears 
 ooze from where his eyes should be. A tin 
 can hangs from his neck, and across his 
 wretched breast is written: Pity the poor blind! 
 A lady, moved by the sight of him, comes 
 forward and drops a penny into his tin can ; 
 it falls with a clank, and the blind man, still 
 staring upward, thanks her with an unearthly 
 voice. She passes on forgetfully and uses her 
 eyes to find Spring likenesses of colour in the 
 adorned shop-windows. 
 
 Suddenly in the approaching tide two new 
 faces appear and on them a look of expectancy, 
 a knowledge of coming pleasure. And I 
 wonder what is the reason. But they enter a 
 public-house. Anon the door opens again and 
 they come out with a look of indulgence- 
 satisfied and a dull curtain of disillusion. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 5 
 
 I walk westward where the shops are larger 
 and the women are multiplied. Women's faces 
 turn, glance, peer ; refined faces, shallow faces, 
 worldly faces, vulgar faces, purse -conscious, 
 dress - conscious ; shop - reflections, husband- 
 reflections, neighbour-reflections. They stare 
 till they see themselves in the shop windows, 
 picture themselves suddenly in other hats, 
 other blouses, other habits, and still it is not 
 so, they are not satisfied. No woman comes 
 carrying a child in her arms. 
 
 In shops like marble halls or palace apart- 
 ments the women see themselves as they 
 would like to be, see or search for their alter- 
 egos in wax. Some wax egos say, " Don't I 
 look nice?" Others say, "How do you like 
 me in this blouse .-* " Others haughtily, " Am 
 I not perfect ? " — the paradise of dames. A 
 foolish paradise, the women flutter past. The 
 first blue - bottle buzzes against the bright 
 panes. 
 
 The pavement becomes crowded again and 
 it is difficult to pass. It is in front of a picture 
 shop. There are more men than women 
 staring into the window, and there they see 
 many studies of Eve in the glamour of her 
 
6 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 nakedness. They stare hungrily and restlessly. 
 Their faces are hard, masked, curious ; pre- 
 occupied faces, cruel faces, lascivious faces, 
 comic faces, the faces of buffoons. In the 
 midst of the window there is a face they see 
 accidentally but do not mark, the miraculous 
 portrait; above it is written in red ink, 
 
 Jesus Christus 
 
 2/6 
 
 and underneath is printed: '' If you watch the 
 eyes, which are shut, you will see them suddenly 
 open." If you look upon Christ He will look 
 upon you. But the sons of Adam are looking 
 at the daughters of Eve. 
 
 They do not look on the miraculous face 
 and therefore it does not look upon them, the 
 Christ remains blind. But if perchance one 
 man looks, one man sees — then he gives eyes 
 to the blind, the blind Christ, blind till then, 
 and He opens His eyes and looks upon him. 
 
 A haunting face, unusual, unnatural. I 
 shall not find that likeness as I stray through 
 the crowds of men, nothing like unto it. And 
 yet everywhere and in every face there is 
 something which is related to it. As the faces 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 7 
 
 pass by me in review I cannot help asking 
 whose face shall I take for my new mystery 
 play, which face of all those thousands has the 
 most fittingness to be chosen for Christ. They 
 have been wont to dress up any man for the 
 part, to give him the conventional beard and 
 chestnut hair, and put the words into his 
 mouth. But mine when I find him will have 
 more responsibility, for I need him not only to 
 be the part but also to prompt me, the artist, as 
 to just exactly who Christ is. So they go past 
 me, these fractions of humanity, each all too 
 small, each one lacking, lacking so much. I 
 love them all, and it is a little sad to reflect 
 that they take no pains, that each one would 
 probably straighten himself and look a little 
 better if he knew he were being looked at as 
 a candidate and being seriously considered as 
 an approximation to the face of Christ. But 
 then at once he would cease to be authentic, 
 his naturalness would disappear and he would 
 begin to act, and I need no one to act the part 
 to me, I could act it very well to myself. 
 When I see the true face it will speak to my 
 heart ; the faces that I see so far tell me 
 naught except the sadness, the loneliness, the 
 
8 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 emptiness, the mistakenness of everyday human 
 life. Pass then, pass, pass on, pass by ! On 
 thee, on thee, on thee, brother, perchance I shall 
 never look again. On thee, sister, my eyes 
 have rested, and belike I shall never look on 
 you more. 
 
 Once more a crowd ! This time outside a 
 phrenologist's window, in which is exhibited a 
 plaster cast of a perfect cranium, and beside it 
 scrolls which record phrenological valuations of 
 the heads of Cabinet Ministers and Generals. 
 Soldiers go in and out at the door of the shop, 
 enter nervously and exit happily. The phreno- 
 logist marks you for each of the human qualities 
 on a normal of five. If you exceed five marks 
 you are in excess and need to exercise restraint, 
 if less than five you are lacking and should 
 cultivate. Thus each man is tabulated for faith, 
 hope, and charity, fear, combativeness, honesty, 
 imagination, sense of time and place, humour 
 and sublimity. 
 
 " Do you ever get a perfect man with five 
 for everything ? " I ask. 
 
 " No, never, nor do we ever get two exactly 
 the same," the phrenologist replies. 
 
 1 sit in the room whilst various soldiers with 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 9 
 
 expressions of doubt, obstinacy, self-conscious- 
 ness, vanity, and the like come in to have their 
 qualities and defects stated. Some have com- 
 bativeness in excess, some despite their khaki 
 are pronounced low - spirited, some are too 
 hopeful, others lacking in hope ; none seems to 
 have a faith that will remove mountains, but 
 most have an excessive sense of the humorous. 
 No fives are given, but many sevens and threes. 
 
 " Thousands of heads pass through my 
 hands," I hear the expert saying. " But no 
 perfect head ever turns up. I never hand out 
 a complete series of fives. But if you take the 
 charts of twenty or thirty ordinary human beings 
 and add them up you'll find the average works 
 out at about five." 
 
 " So humanity on the whole is perfect ! " 
 
 I take out from my pocket a portrait of 
 Christ which has no halo and ofTer it for 
 examination. 
 
 " A strong face, but most unbalanced," comes 
 the phrenologist's reply. " Too slight a hold on 
 life, charity too extreme, likely to be deceived 
 by others. Sense of time and place good, 
 but dangerous lack of combativeness. 9, 9, 2, 
 II, 8 " 
 
lo THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 "And the cranium in the window is perfect?" 
 1 ask. " Strange that it should remind me so 
 of a bust of Julius Caesar." 
 
 I pass out on to the great highway and 
 thoroughfare once more, murmuring the thought 
 that humanity in the mass is perfect, though 
 individually it is lacking. The Christ, however, 
 is unbalanced. It is the type of Caesar that has 
 the perfect brow. 
 
 In a restaurant all are eating or expecting 
 food, or talking as they eat, a new world of 
 faces., all abnormal, but less tired, less pallid, 
 less interesting. No seeking on any face. A 
 tall priest comes in, and before breaking bread 
 solemnly makes the sign of the Cross. That 
 is good, but he sits down to his food and 
 straightway forgets the solemnity. At a large 
 table a dozen or more are sitting and a large 
 fish is served and a whole loaf is cut up, and 
 the one fish and the one bread goes to make 
 flesh in each of the twelve — the unity underlying 
 our partaking of bread together. 
 
 I am not of their party, but eat my lonely 
 bread at a table in a far corner, and having 
 eaten, give thanks, leaving no crumbs, and I 
 stray once more into the city, on which night is 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST ii 
 
 coming down. I am soon in the midst of a 
 crowd, and it is my lot to walk against the tide, 
 peering into faces, hoping and expecting. But 
 in the lights of evening the faces are more 
 abnormal, less natural. 
 
 The streets have become darker, and human 
 eyes have become brighter. The day of toil is 
 over, and an expectation of happiness throbs in 
 the air. Eyes turn from the darkness to the 
 light, to the screened brilliancy of the windows 
 of jewellers' shops and of costumiers' and the 
 light of so-called palaces and halls. A more 
 mysterious humanity is flocking together, and I 
 go in with it at a door and find myself in a large 
 and crowded theatre. The lights are down, and 
 only the stage, where a beautiful girl is dancing, 
 is lit. I see hundreds of pale featureless faces 
 turned toward the beautiful girl, faces like 
 leaves, sad, silent, pallid faces, hundreds of them, 
 thousands as I surmise. And the beautiful 
 dark girl in pink tights dances before them, 
 makes them pleasure. She enchants them and 
 promises happiness. Every slightest movement 
 is watched, saved, preserved in leaves of memory 
 like delicate rose-petals. She is taken to pieces 
 like a beautiful rose, and kept. She becomes 
 
12 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 the possession of all, as if many hundreds of 
 men and women merged into one could have 
 collectively one bride. And all accept in silence, 
 as if each man in his stall were dead in his 
 grave and powerlessly yearned toward life. 
 Only one thing is clear, she has celestial power, 
 she could make them live ; at one expressed 
 wish all would begin to stir, to whisper, to 
 stretch out hands. And presently it is so — she 
 ceases to dance, goes out from the lighted stage, 
 comes back re-clothed, and coming forward to 
 the centre holds up one hand and commences 
 to sing. 
 
 The spell of the dance continues, but with 
 her song it slowly gives way to another spell, 
 as from all parts of the theatre one hears a 
 humming. She is comforting, soothing, promis- 
 ing, crooning, whispering through smiles and 
 tears. She lays a gentle hand on each man's 
 heart, she comes nearer and closer, and recon- 
 ciles and beguiles, and presently out of all the 
 vast audience from all parts, even from the 
 most remote, voices begin to sing with her, to 
 her. She holds up a delicate finger and all 
 sing to her, to her bright eyes and dark hair 
 and her miniature little figure swathed in light 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 13 
 
 and silk. And I also begin to sing vaguely 
 and move spiritually toward that one centre 
 where the light-beams, streaming through our 
 breath and smoke, converge. An intoxicating 
 golden moment of unity and desire. 
 
 Christ somewhere is hidden here. But 
 though there are many faces I cannot see the 
 features, cannot look into each individually. I 
 am not visually aware of my fellow-man. But 
 how strongly I am aware of him in another 
 way, aware of him altogether. If this theatre 
 were empty, if there were no audience but only 
 the girl singing, I should not be moved, and 
 the girl would be less beautiful. She is our 
 unity as it were, our Psyche, dancing and 
 singing before us, not each man's Psyche so 
 much as the Psyche of all as one, of all who 
 are thus moved. 
 
 But she goes, and in her place jugglers 
 appear, who quickly cause humanity to forget. 
 And I do not stay, but, the spell being broken, 
 flit outward to the long stone stairs and to the 
 deserted open doorway. 
 
 The street of the theatre is now devoid of 
 people. It is as if all had been gathered in to 
 make that great unity of yearning eyes and 
 
14 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 pallid faces. The lights are screened, and from 
 the back the theatre looks like some strange 
 black box with the lid shut down. Yet within 
 is a composite humanity, tier upon tier. 
 
 To be by myself is lonely. I am wistful and 
 heart-sick. The song which united me with 
 all those throbbing humans now haunts my 
 mind and plays itself over in my mind as it 
 were with one finger, whereas but lately some 
 marvellous orchestra had rendered it. Yet it 
 was but the gentle voice of a slight girl. 
 
 All about me the shutters are down, as if 
 living shops had drawn down visors over their 
 faces. There is the sense of being in some 
 underground graveyard moving among vaults, 
 and I hasten to find people once more, hasten 
 home, because all seem to be in their homes 
 except those I left in the great painted serrated 
 theatre. Then, nearing home, a last group of 
 peering mortals attracts my gaze to the gloom 
 of a side street. An accident has occurred, and 
 five or six men and women are staring at the 
 ground and asking questions of one another. A 
 stranger on the road has suddenly fallen down, 
 has fainted or is perhaps dead. He lies full 
 length. Some one is trying to lift him ; how 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 15 
 
 heavy he is ! Some one has undone his collar 
 and coat, but his pallid reposing face looks 
 upward without animation. Gazing at him I 
 completely lose the impression I had of the 
 theatre. A strange face. The strangest I have 
 seen to-day. As I stare at it questioningly I 
 ask myself why it has not been my lot to see 
 just such a face borne on the shoulders of the 
 living — in the midst of the crowd. Of all faces 
 that I have seen this one is likest to the 
 miraculous portrait, and as I look at his closed 
 eyes attentively it is as if they open quietly 
 and look upon me. 
 
 I bend over him to see him more clearly. 
 For the murky light of the darkened lamps 
 causes the white face with its dark beard and 
 hair to look even more like a picture, like an 
 old painting of Rembrandt. 
 
 " Do you know him ? " a voice asks. " No ? 
 You do not recognise him ? He has no marks 
 of identification, not even a letter or a tailor's 
 name sewn to his cloak ? " 
 
 I take from my bosom the portrait of Christ 
 without a halo and offer it to the man ad- 
 dressing me. 
 
 " It is not the same," says the latter. " But 
 
i6 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 it has a family likeness. Whose portrait is it ? 
 His brother's perhaps." 
 
 Perhaps. It was given me when I was a 
 child, but I have never met Him in the flesh. 
 Yet I've always thought I might. A wonderful 
 face. It has lain between the leaves of my 
 Testament for twenty years and has grown pale 
 there. They say He is alive. I long to find 
 Him. He is to be found. But oh that I 
 knew where ! 
 
 So we stand gazing upon the face of the 
 dead and watch the heavy body laboriously 
 lifted up by bearers. My mind goes back 
 suddenly to the bright Psyche on the stage. 
 How light was that Psyche, how heavy this 
 corpse on the street ! We watch the bearers 
 grapple with it and bear it ponderously away 
 to the police station and then to the mortuary 
 to be ranged with other bodies of anonymous 
 humanity. 
 
 Though the body was taken away, the symbol 
 and sense of death remained graven in my 
 mind. In my wanderings among men during 
 the day I had become intimate with but one 
 individual and he was dead. True, I had 
 become intimate with the nameless many, in 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 17 
 
 the hurrying road-throng at noonday, in the 
 theatre at night, strangely and marvellously in- 
 timate. But only with the dead man had I as an 
 individual established common ground. And 
 with human perversity I preferred to dream 
 of the latter. I obliterated the larger im- 
 pressions from my mind. Sadness and gloom 
 filled the space of my loneliness and wrapped 
 me about in the night hours. The thought 
 that people are and then are not was my 
 despair, that people have once been but are not 
 now, are not even remembered but lost. 
 
 Toll the bell ! Toll the bell for the dead ! 
 Pray for the poor dying men and women ! 
 Light the candles and weep for the dead, for the 
 living who have entered the great darkness ! 
 For the living who are entering it in thousands 
 whilst we think ! 
 
 Think of those whose bright faces were 
 .turned away from us ages ago, of those whom 
 you have forgotten, whom every one in the 
 world has forgotten, whom no one of any 
 coming age shall ere recall. They are lost in 
 the vast outer limbo, which is so much greater 
 
 c 
 
i8 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 than the narrow sphere of memory. That is 
 our despair, the despair even of a Christ-seeker. 
 We have all to enter it, not only the first 
 twilight of memory but the outer darkness of 
 complete oblivion wherein myriads are lost. 
 
 There are nights which the days succeed. 
 They begin with radiant sunset that promises 
 a morrow. Day follows night, day follows 
 night, day follows night, but at last comes a 
 night that no day follows. The twilight is 
 murky and without promise, and night comes 
 on without stars, and lamps are lit and burn 
 low, and are replenished with oil and burn 
 again, and again burn low and flicker, and 
 again are replenished and again burn out, and 
 night goes on. It goes on till all the oil in the 
 world is burnt, and on and on for ever, intense, 
 silent, black, and breathless. 
 
 We are lighting lamps for Solomon and 
 Homer and Dante and Shakespeare, but they 
 and all the rest recede. All our dead have 
 entered the darkness, and when we write of 
 them or call their faces back to memory we are 
 lighting the lamps — we light them, succeeding 
 generations light them, but at last a generation 
 comes that has no oil. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 19 
 
 I mused in this way as I lay in bed in the 
 oppressive darkness of my room. And the face 
 of the dead man whom I had seen remained 
 pale and sad in my memory and yet vivid as if 
 the moon were shining upon it. The face of 
 one who was destined to oblivion, a face also 
 near to that of Christ. 
 
 Next morning my dear professor joined me at 
 breakfast, and rufifling his hair with both hands, 
 exclaimed in a distracted way : 
 
 " What a morning, what a morning ! " 
 
 "Yes, it is a lovely morning," said 1. 
 
 /'Oh, not that I mean, not that I mean," 
 replied the professor with chagrin. "It is 
 Marathon morning, my dear fellow, the anni- 
 versary of Marathon, think of it ! " 
 
 And the sun streamed through the upper 
 panes of the windows, lightening his silvery 
 hair and my gaunt haggard cheeks. 
 
 " Its memory shall never pass away," said 
 the professor. 
 
 We opened The Tunes. Its pages were 
 replete with the casualties of a great battle, a 
 long list of the dead printed in small type. 
 
 " But the memory of those who died at 
 Marathon has gone," said I. 
 
20 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 "No, no," said the professor. "They are 
 remembered. Each of these names you see 
 here has his home where for generations they 
 will be proud of him. It is glorious, it is 
 moving, my dear fellow, moving " 
 
 " We have not, alas, the Marathon casualty 
 list that we might look it over," said I coldly. 
 
 " But we have, we have," said the professor, 
 and he flattened out the newspaper before me, 
 and I smiled. 
 
 A strange thought suffused my mind, and I 
 suppose it came from the professor's faith — 
 even those who died at Marathon are alive in 
 Christ. 
 
 I have no doubt it is true. For as in 
 Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be 
 made alive. By Christ, in some mysterious 
 way, all who died even before He was born 
 must be saved also. He is the link between 
 the living and the dead, and looking on the 
 dead man's face one is suddenly, as it were, 
 aware of Him. The face of Christ can be 
 descried from the gate of death. Even so. 
 The Eastern mediaeval portrait such as I have 
 seen on old ikons is a reflection from the face 
 of the dead — brown, wizened, wrinkled and 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 21 
 
 unearthly. That portrait is a saying Nay to 
 this life in favour of some other life to which 
 death is nearer. 
 
 Pity for the forgotten dead and for those 
 who now seem to lie in dissolution, and also 
 terror, all incline us to raise up the efifigy of the 
 dead as Christ. They incline me also. 
 
 Nevertheless I fervently believe that Christ 
 is to be found in the faces of the living. Christ 
 walks perdu among the flocking crowd, and I 
 might find Him in a human face. His face 
 lurks in the face of some one who has passed 
 me. If the face which is a reflection of death 
 be authentic I should be able to find that face 
 in the human faces which go by. The quest 
 cannot be vain : I can and will find the face 
 that I seek. A dead man could not play in my 
 mystery play, though he might prompt some 
 words of the drama. The word is good, but I 
 must also have the life. I look at men's faces 
 afresh, but I do not see death. I see mortality, 
 foreknowledge of death, but not death itself. 
 Sad faces, tired faces, jaded faces, the faces of 
 the dying, of those condemned to death — but all 
 have in them life. 'Tis true no one seems to be 
 completely and absolutely alive. It would take 
 
22 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 four or five of these pitiful fractional brother 
 humans of the street to make up one face which 
 should be wholly alive. Perhaps more. But 
 no number would add up to death. It is im- 
 possible to see the dead man Christ standing 
 in the background of a man, behind his eyes. 
 And for that reason, though seemingly death is 
 in proximity to Christ, I decide not to accept 
 the guidance of the face of the dead ma.n. 
 Christ is no corpse tied to a living man's back. 
 
 There is in men's features something un- 
 wonted, something unusual. The most ordinary 
 face as well as the most striking and unusual 
 gives a hint of something or some one other 
 than himself. It is not a likeness to any one I 
 know, but a likeness to some one I have not 
 seen. Perhaps they have to develop the like- 
 ness more, or I have to develop the eyes that 
 see more. But I have a feeling that the 
 mystery is a large one. It draws me on, and 
 it is because of it that I feel the face is to be 
 found thus, and though I accept the help of 
 so-called portraits I do not accept the portraits 
 as a substitute. The Living One is my only 
 authenticity. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 23 
 
 The temptation comes to me to seek the 
 likeness in those who seem more alive. In 
 the windows of Paternoster Row I see pictures of 
 the Western Christ, the typical and recognisable 
 portrait of the West. His face in these is far 
 removed from the image of death. There is a 
 fairness in His face. He is the resurrected One, 
 saying as it were, " Why seek ye the living 
 among the dead? " He is agraciouslivinghuman 
 being with a suggestion in His face and bearing 
 of some mystical white horse. This picture is 
 true for most of us in the West. For the West, 
 being always more eager to be obvious, identifies 
 itself readily with the simple idea of life. 
 
 And it is on the side of life that I seek for 
 my type, not knowing, however, what exactly 
 life is or what are its limitations, not even 
 certain whether in life I include death also as 
 a mere incident in living and greater living. 
 Life presents itself first of all as strength. I look 
 carefully at Burgess who swam the Channel, and 
 Zbysco the wrestler, whom none could over- 
 throw, at many sturdy soldiers, those especially 
 from country places and overseas. Among 
 these, however, is dulness and less inspiration. 
 I then seek strength coupled with boldness and 
 
24 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 then associated with authority and tempered by 
 mercy, and I see the face on which is written, 
 "Enough unto myself." I see confident, 
 decisive, and resolute faces, the faces to which 
 others look reliantly, the faces of those who take 
 life into their own hands and make out of it 
 something worth while. They are in contrast 
 to the pitiful broken faces of average humanity. 
 It is pleasure to look on them. And yet I do 
 not love them so much, am not attracted to 
 them, and feel as if somehow their life must be 
 narrower. The strong man abides by himself 
 A paradox if in reality the strong man is 
 narrower than the weak, has less possibility of 
 divinity than the weak. A still greater paradox 
 if the Divinity is to be sought in the weak. 
 
 I suppose Napoleon and Alexander in their 
 pitch of pride had a suggestion of immortality 
 in their faces. They almost looked immortals, 
 as if a new type had arrived on the earth and 
 would not die, would not decay or wane or 
 tend toward the grave. Yet even in their 
 eyes was the monition : Remember that thou 
 also must die. 
 
 Yet they craved immortality, as we all do, 
 and perhaps the strong desire and will were 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 25 
 
 good evidence of capability. They (and we) 
 are capable of being immortal. 
 
 With this thought I dream as I walk and 
 ask myself the questions, "What is it to be 
 immortal ? What would it be like to be im- 
 mortal ? " Then I see the type. If I par- 
 took of the magical elixir I should suddenly 
 straighten myself out, and there would fall 
 from me all manner of signs of weakness, not 
 only from my face but from every part of my 
 body and limbs and from my guise and bear- 
 ing. I should not step as I do now, timidly 
 and tentatively as if I were not altogether sure 
 where my foot would come to earth, and even 
 if I took small steps there would be something 
 different about them. The sound of the foot- 
 fall would become metallic. My speech would 
 be changed. It would be forthright — a more 
 absolute utterance. No whispers and lispings. 
 The tones of ordinary human sadness would 
 vanish. And the face, wherein the hiero- 
 glyphic of man's destiny is written, would be 
 different, the old features erased and a new 
 lettering of the eternal Sanscrit inscribed. My 
 brow, broken with lines of mortality, would 
 become like brass or marble, massive as that 
 
26 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 of the Sphinx. My eyes would become larger, 
 and instead of being liquid and gentle would 
 be hard and glittering like polished stones. 
 Mortality would have gone from these orbs, I 
 should not be lovable any more. But I should 
 be strong. It seems I should be everything 
 which man is not. 
 
 Man is the weak, the unfulfilled, the mortal. 
 
 He weaves and is clothed with derision, 
 Sows and he shall not reap, 
 His life is a watch and a vision 
 Between a sleep and a sleep. 
 
 For that reason we love one another, yearn 
 toward one another. 
 
 Still, as I said, many do crave the absolute 
 nature of strength and are pleased when 
 some one flatters them, saying, " Thou art an 
 immortal." One man says, " I cannot look 
 on a weak man without a certain feeling of 
 repulsion." Perhaps that is because the weak 
 man reminds him silently: You are not so 
 strong as you pretend, you also must die at 
 last, and have a portion in the grave and with 
 the worms. Nevertheless this solecism of 
 feeling strong, desiring to be strong, taking 
 one's stand as strong, since it does exist, and 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 27 
 
 is part of the natural history of humanity, 
 cannot be thus dismissed. 
 
 Where does the truth He ? With the weak 
 or with the strong ? That is a great question, 
 and though I theorise and speculate whilst I 
 seek, I cannot accept any answer which I may 
 deduce merely as a deduction. My answer, I 
 know, must come from the living face. 
 
 There is a clever picture by the Russian 
 painter Ge that states the question, puts it 
 before my eyes ; it is called " What is Truth ? " 
 and it might have been called "Where does 
 the Truth lie.'"' It is a representation of 
 Pontius Pilate and Christ. Pontius Pilate is 
 strong and full of life ; he is fat from good 
 living, hard in his self-sufficiency, and he 
 stands in the full light of prosperity. Christ, 
 on the other hand, stands in deepest shadow. 
 He is broken and enigmatical and sorrowing. 
 He is weak, and when Pilate makes his im- 
 perious gesture and asks, "What is Truth?" 
 Christ even seems confused and has not 
 wherewith to reply. He is almost abashed. 
 Pontius Pilate is strong and secure : Christ, 
 however, is like a tramp or a broken-down 
 fellow of the streets. He is an exaggeration 
 
28 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 of the weak. There is perhaps even guilt in 
 His face. For to be ill -dressed and weak 
 smacks a little of guilt in the presence of one 
 who is strong and has authority. It can com- 
 promise a case. But where does the Truth 
 lie ; with which of these two ? We would 
 answer pat, knowing the answer from their 
 respective names, but the average Christian of 
 to-day, not knowing one was Pilate and the 
 other Christ, would be inclined to think the 
 prosperous man had the truth, was more to be 
 relied upon. These fat men, they who sleep o' 
 nights, are much preferred. 
 
 However, if they were walking before me, 
 this Pilate and Christ of the picture, I should not 
 find my answer in either of them. I should, 
 however, feel that the weaker face was nearer 
 and that there was more of the ideal in the 
 man who was nearer to death. 
 
 Of this picture the most extreme hopes were 
 entertained by Ge and his friend Tolstoy, and 
 they thought it might change the whole point 
 of view of Europe with regard to the significance 
 of Christ — a whole Russian novel on a canvas. 
 But there is something lacking in it, how- 
 ever. We feel that Christ, pitiful as He is, is 
 
WHA T IS TR UTH ? " 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 29 
 
 not saving the sinful man in His presence, and 
 Pontius Pilate, instead of being in any way 
 redeemed or made lovable, is shown as more 
 odious, thrown into sharp contrast with the 
 unfortunate one. Even the strong man, granted 
 that he be human, seems to be in need of being 
 saved. 
 
 Another statement of the question whether 
 human truth is to be sought with the weak or 
 with the strong might be made by the mere 
 presentation of two portraits of absolute types, 
 as for instance by placing Napoleon and Christ 
 in contrast as in Verestchagin's picture.^ In 
 the East this question is more debated than 
 in the West. Napoleon is shown in Moscow. 
 He has made his bed in the most holy place 
 there, in the Cathedral of the Assumption on 
 Moscow's holy hill. He has chosen it, not 
 because it is holy, but because it is convenient. 
 Napoleon is sitting in the midst of the majesty of 
 the temple he does not understand. He is strong 
 and mighty and well-clothed, and still prosper- 
 ous though anxious. He has a suggestion of 
 the look of an immortal, and at the same time 
 lurking in his eyes the conditional destiny latent 
 
 ^ "Bad News from France." 
 
30 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 in the year 1812. He holds in his hands a 
 despatch. 
 
 This picture might be called " Where does 
 the Truth lie?" For Napoleon has his back 
 to Christ. The fresco behind him shows 
 the Master. It is marked by bullets and 
 slashed by bayonets. Soldiers have peeled 
 parts away. The portrait of Christ is fading 
 in the emphatic presence of Napoleon. But 
 where does the Truth lie ? History has given 
 the answer, as she will no doubt give it again. 
 But lest we should miss it the painter has given 
 us an extra suggestion for guidance. For 
 whilst in Napoleon's hand is urgent news, in 
 Christ's is the open Bible ; in Napoleon's hands 
 the telegram, so to speak, in Christ's the Eternal 
 Word. We are reading the Gospel, and a 
 telegram or the latest paper comes. We drop 
 the holy Book and read the news. And then 
 we return to the Gospel again. 
 
 Napoleon is history's strongest man. As the 
 lion is a king of beasts, so he stands to us as a 
 king of men. And in seeking the strong man 
 as opposed to the weak or in contrast to the 
 weak we seek him. He is the next term of the 
 Darwinian theory. As the ape is to man, so is 
 

 1 
 
 • ''< ■ . 
 
 /:i '• 
 \' ■ 
 
 ■i ■■■: 
 
 It \. 
 
 
 Wj^ii^=f? / ''"\\ j ^ 1" ' ^- ^^ '1 
 
 n 
 
 Imm 
 
 hI 
 
 
 
 
 
 - ■;'•. r 
 
 m 
 
 mi 
 
 Ve7'estchagin. 
 
 BAD NEWS FROM FRANCE. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 31 
 
 man to Napoleon. That is how it has been 
 stated. And in any case Napoleon stands as 
 a portent on the road of humanity. He is 
 the pet pattern of man ; identity with him is 
 frequently the fixed idea of the lunatic. Many 
 men are preoccupied with ideas concerning him, 
 and the literature about him is in thousands of 
 volumes. In the more vulgar domain of com- 
 merce we have Napoleons of finance, Napoleons 
 of the press, but even in the purified air of 
 philosophy we find the noble and unhappy 
 Nietzsche obsessed by the fineness of being a 
 Napoleon. He looks with disgust at the faces 
 of contemporary humanity and reacts violently 
 in favour of the strong man, the man who is 
 not weak. " What is it that just I find intoler- 
 able, that which alone I cannot away with," asks 
 he, " which makes me suffocate and pine .'' Bad 
 air ! Bad air ! That something ill-constituted 
 comes near me ; that I must endure the smell 
 of an abortive soul ! . . . From time to time 
 permit me one glance upon something perfect, 
 something completely finished, something happy, 
 mighty, triumphant, in which there is still some- 
 thing to be feared ! Upon a man that justi- 
 fies man ; upon a complementary, lucky, and 
 
32 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 redeeming case of man, vindicating our faith in 
 man ! The levelling of European man hides 
 our greatest danger. We see to-day nothing 
 which will grow larger ; we divine that all goes 
 still downward ... to the more Chinese, the 
 more Christian." 
 
 And the German philosopher obtains relief 
 from the spectacle of broken and fractional 
 humanity by gazing on his favourite figure, the 
 one who nearer than any other was whole, 
 Napoleon. At the French Revolution, as he 
 says, there appeared "the antique ideal," and 
 against the battle-cry of the right of the most, 
 though not against the love-cry of the right of 
 all, " there resounded the rapturous counter-cry 
 of the privilege of the fewest. Like some last 
 hintpointing to another road appeared Napoleon, 
 the most isolated of men that ever was. . . ." 
 
 In such words does the philosopher, out of 
 patience with humanity, ask you and me to seek 
 the Superman, to look into the faces of passing 
 men for the Napoleon. He constructs on his 
 surmise a philosophy of individualism. 
 
 And I ask the question : Is the face I seek 
 the face of the Superman? No? Then is it 
 the face of the under-man ? 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 33 
 
 It seems no face could be His unless there 
 were the possibility that all others could hail 
 and acknowledge it as ike face. The strong 
 face does not gain much assent. Christ said, 
 "I am the vine; ye are the branches." But 
 we cannot imagine Napoleon as the vine and 
 ourselves as the branches. There is a char- 
 acteristic story which shows what sort of man 
 the people naturally pick out as holy. Ivan the 
 Terrible built a cathedral in Moscow, one of 
 the architectural wonders of Europe, St. Vassily 
 Blazhenny. He was a terrible monarch, a great 
 Russian Caesar. Many a man he sent to the 
 stake, and the square where the cathedral 
 stands is called the Red Square because of the 
 blood which was shed there. The cathedral is 
 not, however, associated to-day with Ivan, but 
 with a poor wretched cripple who sat in the 
 Red Square all the time the cathedral was 
 a- building, and reviled the monarch. This 
 cripple was called Vassily the Silly or the 
 Blessed (Vassily corresponds to William in our 
 language). The Tsar did not lay hands on the 
 cripple because the people held him to be holy, 
 the Tsar himself may even have felt that he 
 was holy. But the question is again : Where 
 
34 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 does the Truth He, with Caesar or with Silly 
 Willy ? The word blazhenny means both 
 blessed and silly, just as our word silly was 
 once selig, and it was possible to speak of the 
 Silly Babe. Silly and Christlike once had 
 something in common. Be it remembered in 
 passing that the novelist Dostoievsky, en- 
 deavouring to show a type in our everyday 
 life approaching to Christ in character, produced 
 the Idiot, Prince Mishkin. If each portrait of 
 Christ be an answer to the question, " Whom 
 do men say that I am ? " Dostoievsky answers 
 with the picture of Mishkin the Idiot ! 
 
 I cannot help contemplating two conceptions : 
 Christ as the fool, and then civilisation as " fool- 
 proof," as a brutal modern phrase expresses the 
 idea. Both are alarming : Christ as fool, and 
 civilisation as fool-proof. But as I walk through 
 the street I think of Carlyle's shocking phrase, 
 " mostly fools," and it breaks in upon my mind 
 with an unexpected, unintended charm. "Mostly 
 fools " — what if in reality that might mean 
 mostly images of Christ } 
 
 But Carlyle did not mean that. He spoke 
 out of his irritation at the common run of 
 humanity, because the average man had not 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 35 
 
 his intellect nor type of spiritual struggle, and 
 could not share his thought or add a word of 
 poetry to his. It was spasmodic misanthropy, 
 and of the same kind as Nietzsche's phrase 
 expressed — " the-much-too-many." 
 
 I see a new type come through the crowd. 
 He jostles his neighbour contemptuously, on 
 his face is enmity and impatience. Every man 
 and all are in his way. They hinder him. He 
 spits to one side as he gets free, and shakes 
 himself in his clothes, as it were to get free of 
 an infection. He looks as though he would 
 prefer a desert to any populace. He is the 
 misanthrope. His attitude, though it may be 
 little more than a pathetic human pose, makes 
 for disruption and death. It is a discord and it 
 mars the unity of love. Carlyle, however, did 
 not hate his fellow-men. Looking at them at a 
 certain moment and in a certain mood he found 
 them somewhat contemptible. The best they 
 could do was to find some hero whom they 
 could humbly obey and then yield up their 
 personal intelligence and follow him. He did 
 not see a potential hero in every fellow-man, 
 the chance man. Nor do I perhaps. 
 
 If a man be misanthropic or an egoist he 
 
36 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 " abideth alone " ; he becomes segregated from 
 the crowd. But if he love humanity he sinks 
 himself in the crowd, rejoices to be of the many. 
 The emblems of the two types are — Christ on 
 the Cross, and Napoleon on St. Helena ; Christ 
 is crucified between two thieves in the midst of 
 humanity, a miserable human on His right and 
 a miserable human on His left ; but Napoleon 
 makes his end in segregation from humanity, 
 on the island. He is godlike but less than a 
 god, human yet more than human — the ego 
 intensified and affirmed, whereas Christ is the 
 ego laid down. 
 
 I see the fools in the passing crowd. I do 
 not often see a Napoleonic type. Napoleon, 
 however, professed to see in each common 
 soldier the possibility of becoming a Napoleon, 
 and it might be another man's quest to seek 
 Napoleons in people's faces. At a parting of 
 the ways 1 might say to a friend who had 
 accompanied me so far, " You seek Napoleons : 
 I seek Christs." 
 
 An important question, however, is : What 
 sort of a place is it in which we are seeking 
 these differing great types? As two friends 
 might agree to part, one seeking tigers, the 
 
VASSILY AND IVAN. 
 
 {In this composite picture " Holy Willy,'' as he was called, 
 and Ivaii the Terrible are brought in contrast.) 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST ^ 
 
 other lambs — a great deal depends on the place 
 in which they seek. Is man's face a likely place ? 
 Is the animal or the God to be found there ? 
 Is the animal normal or is the human face 
 of to-day a place where the animal is seen 
 to be outlived? My feeling is that the truly 
 characteristic and new type of face of to-day is 
 one in which love is an insoluble factor. 
 
 Rubeck the sculptor, in his misanthropic 
 period, sought as a key to the personality of 
 those who came to him the animal base.^ In 
 each accidental ordinary face which he saw there 
 was something equivocal, and accordingly the 
 busts which he did of them were equivocal also. 
 On the surface they were " striking likenesses," 
 as people called them, staring at them in 
 astonishment ; but at bottom they were, as he 
 said, "pompous horse faces; self-opinionated 
 donkey-muzzles ; lop-eared, low-browed dog- 
 skulls and fatted swine-snouts, or sometimes 
 dull brutal bull-fronts." With less malevolence 
 the sculptor Rubeck might perhaps have found 
 tiger nature also, especially in women, and bird- 
 consciousness, reptilian earth consciousness, 
 and the like. It is true there is something 
 
 1 " When we dead awaken.'' 
 
38 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 equivocal in men's faces. There has been for 
 a long time. It is possible to find all these 
 animals in the faces of the passing crowd. It 
 is also possible to see gleams of a celestial 
 substance which is not animal. In that sense 
 the faces are equivocal. 
 
 And if there are animal faces in the faces of 
 men, it is also true that there are reflections of 
 human beings in animals. Dogs especially 
 reflect their master's personality, and cows the 
 character of their milkmaids. A cock in France 
 is different from a cock in England. The bear 
 upon occasion walks like a man, and the bull- 
 dog has the mannish aspect of John Bull. The 
 horses of the Kirghiz, so legend says, sometimes 
 change into men, and men conversely into 
 horses, so near they are akin. On Christmas 
 Eve the Serbs carry cakes to the oxen, for they 
 also participated in the birth of Christ and will 
 ultimately be saved. A wolf suckled the founders 
 of Rome itself. But all these manifestations 
 are wonderful, inasmuch as they show the 
 human on the basis of the animal. Mowgli 
 is a marvellous stranger among the animals, 
 and though civilisation is like the scampering 
 of the Bandar-log the man-child cannot find his 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 39 
 
 home among the animals but yearns away from 
 the jungle. So men yearn away from the 
 animal in themselves. And because of that 
 also their faces are equivocal. Therein lies 
 the wonder of the ordinary face, and any artist 
 who would be true and do noble work must 
 paint the looking-away-from which is in every 
 face. And if besides that he can show also 
 that which he is looking-onward-to it will be 
 perfect painting. 
 
 The faces in the crowd are to me an enigma. 
 They are all veiled or else my eyes have films. 
 This looking-away-from and looking-onward-to is 
 written in each face, even in the most jaded, but 
 I cannot fathom the mystery of it, cannot write 
 the origin and destination it betokens. What 
 is hidden thus is not a simple or mechanical 
 mystery such as a riddle, but a Divine one 
 such as of the nature of God. The solution 
 does not come as a precise mathematical result, 
 but the sense is wafted to and fro, comes and 
 goes, now making my soul ache, but anon 
 leaving me with the thought that there is no 
 mystery whatever. One thing is certain — when 
 I am moved by any one face, it gets larger 
 vividly, I see a canvas of humanity, and all 
 
40 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 manner of faces seem to press into the picture 
 into the one face that I see. And I obtain a 
 vivid sense of humanity as a whole looking- 
 away-from and at the same time looking- 
 onward-to. 
 
 Individual man, however, is the artist. He 
 draws the face of Christ, the ideal likeness, in 
 his own striving, and in the midst of the 
 muddle of his existence. In his features are 
 lines of the portrait. He works in the book of 
 life which the angel keeps, wherein every page 
 is illuminated and emblematical. Each man's 
 life when it has been lived and written in the 
 book may be seen as an individual attempt 
 to paint the portrait of Christ. Forgiveness, 
 so necessary to all, is the erasure of the lines 
 which do not count. 
 
 A priest, discussing the merits of an ex- 
 hibition of portraits of Christ, remarked that 
 each portrait was a personal answer to the 
 question, "Whom do men say that I am?" 
 I take that to be a valuable criterion for art and 
 life. Technique does not seem to have the 
 importance asked for it — we are ourselves 
 many of us ill-fashioned, asking often in the 
 phrase of Omar, "What! did the hand then of 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 41 
 
 the potter shake?" Historical accuracy, his- 
 toricity as it is called, is vain. But " Whom 
 do ye say that I am ? " is a vital and eternal 
 standard. As there seems to be no answer for 
 ever to the Sphinx question, " What is man ? " 
 so there seems to be infinite answer all the 
 time to the Christ question, " Who is Christ ? " 
 
 A collector of portraits has named his col- 
 lection " The Cloud of Witnesses." I wonder if 
 his thought could be extended with reference 
 to the context of that phrase, " Seeing we are 
 compassed about with so great a cloud of 
 witnesses ... let us run with patience the race 
 that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the 
 author and finisher of our faith." ^ Reading 
 that scripture the mind's eye sees all the faces 
 that ever were created watching us being per- 
 fected and finished in Christ, because without 
 us they also cannot be perfect. It is also the 
 thought of my dear professor — even those who 
 died at Marathon are waiting our perfection. 
 
 Each portrait of Christ is an answer to the 
 question, " Whom do men say that I am ? " and 
 therefore the collection of portraits, though 
 possessing a similarity, like the series of family 
 
 ' Hebrews xii. 
 
42 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 photographs nailed to the cottage wall, have 
 also a multifarious diversity. And the diversity 
 of the portraits is not unlike the diversity of 
 the faces passing on the street. 
 
 As we look at the faces* now we feel that 
 some are alive, some dead. Those seem most 
 alive which are nearest to our own conception 
 of what the Face should be. But I suppose 
 none, not even the most formal and conven- 
 tional, is really dead, but like the barren staff 
 is capable of flowering again. We need to 
 see each portrait in its true place — in the time 
 when it was produced and among the people for 
 whom it was painted. If we would know the 
 complete answer which the Italians have given 
 to the Christ question we need to review all 
 Italian portraits of Christ from the first till now. 
 If we wish to know the answer given by the 
 Spanish or Dutch or Germans or Russians we 
 must think of the cloud of witnesses each nation 
 has afforded. The one picture which we look 
 at is as much part of an infinite series as is the 
 face of the chance passer-by. 
 
 In Russia's portraits of Christ a great 
 harmony is discernible. The early pictures 
 need the later ones, and the later pictures need 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 43 
 
 the early ones. Ushakofs portrait of Christ 
 painted in 1661 needs Vasnetsof's painted in 
 1905 to make it perfect, and Vasnetsof's portrait 
 cannot quite stand by itself. It is arresting ; it 
 has modernity written in it. But the very word 
 modernity has an uncharitable afterthought or 
 aftertaste, as if it were unpleasantly forgetful 
 of the past. When we see the two pictures 
 together we have the Christ in whom the dead 
 are raised up equally with the living. Ushakof 
 and Poznansky and myriads of others asleep in 
 the old earth of the centuries await the faces of 
 succeeding generations to complete their por- 
 trait, they need Nesterof and Vasnetsof and G6 
 and the many painters of to-day, they need 
 and we need those who yet shall come. As 
 clearly ,as Vasnetsof is seen perfecting and 
 finishing Ushakof, shall they be seen perfecting 
 the face which we show now. And if I look 
 at many faces of different epochs and at the 
 same time dream of faces to be, the conceptions 
 seem to blend and magnify one another, and 
 I visualise spiritually the collective Russian 
 Christ. 
 
 And even now that vision is partial, fractional. 
 It needs also the collective French Christ, the 
 
44 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 collective German Christ, the collective Christ 
 of the small but not less mighty nations, the 
 Christ also of nations not yet born a second 
 time, the Christ of China, India, Japan. As 
 the phrenologist said, " All individuals are lack- 
 ing ; only humanity in the mass is perfect," 
 so I suppose all individual portraits of Christ 
 are lacking also, it needs all humanity to be 
 one in the portrait of Christ before perfection 
 is reached. 
 
 The English answer touches us most since we 
 are English, for as a nation we have to prepare 
 our full and complete answer for the day when 
 all the nations of the world will give each in his 
 own language witness to the heavenly King. 
 
 Wandering through the crowd I came to- 
 day upon a theologian, who explained to 
 me at length that I was wrong. Christ was 
 independent of miserable humanity. He was a 
 God far away in the splendid heavens. True, 
 He had walked here once incognito as a man, 
 and purblind humanity had attempted to destroy 
 Him. But being a God He conquered death 
 and returned to His throne afar. He was no 
 longer here: He was risen. One day would come 
 a reckoning, and those who had lived righteously 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 45 
 
 would be given a reward of bliss, and those who 
 had lived unrighteously would be thrust down 
 into everlasting fire. Christ had no portion 
 now in our miserable life. 
 
 But if Christ be not part of us how can we 
 be one with Him ? My hand or my child is 
 subject to me because it is flesh of my flesh. 
 And it is in the same way that we are subject 
 to God — because we are part of Him. 
 
 I suppose the theologian's conception of 
 Christ was, however, his answer to the question, 
 " Whom do ye say that I am ? " and made up 
 part of the whole series of answers, loth though 
 I may be to find a common ground with him. 
 
 Another answer is that which Holman Hunt 
 gave in his picture " The Shadow of the 
 Cross." Christ is standing in the carpenter's 
 shop, and His shadow as it falls makes a cross. 
 The floor is covered with lovingly - painted 
 curling shavings of wood, and even waste-ends 
 are seen to be beautiful in the presence of 
 Christ. Through the clear window we see the 
 Holy Land, recognise it at once if we have 
 ever been there. No detail in the picture is 
 too small for the loving and creating hand of 
 the painter. That perhaps was the meaning 
 
46 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 of the character of pre-Raphaelite painting — no 
 small or mean or miserable thing was really 
 mean or negligible, but had a true value and 
 loveliness in the presence of the Master. In 
 many of the pictures of Holman Hunt and 
 Millais and Madox Brown and Burne-Jones 
 there is an invisible Christ — in the presence 
 of whom everything in the scene has its own 
 particular loveliness. They painted Christ in 
 ordinary life and brought Him from an in- 
 accessible heaven into the life of the every-day. 
 They saw Him there, found His presence there. 
 And that inspired them with a love of all the 
 eyes saw — because such things had been made 
 holy by Christ seeing them — were made holy 
 now by the presence of the invisible Christ. 
 
 How differently men have answered : — 
 Carlyle with his history of Cromwell ; Dos- 
 toievsky with Myshkin ; Gorky in the Fellow- 
 Traveller ; Oscar Wilde in De Profundis ; 
 Walt Whitman in Salut au monde ; Solovyof 
 in his vision of Divine Humanity ; Tolstoy in 
 his simplification of the Gospels, in his desire 
 to found a religion of Jesus without miracles ; 
 Goethe in his Thought that if Christ had not 
 lived it would now be necessary for some one 
 
Ushakof, 
 
 •WHOM DO MEN SAY THAT I Ai\I?" 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 47 
 
 to become Christ ; Kant by his moral im- 
 peratives ; Nietzsche in his denial of the ex- 
 clusiveness of the moral. Strange that the 
 artistic Friend of sinners of Wilde's De Pro- 
 fundis is the same as He who in the Brothers 
 Karamaso/ kissed the aged Grand Inquisitor on 
 the lips, the same as the Cromwellian Christ, 
 the Happy Warrior of Wordsworth, and the 
 Supreme but central and mystical figure of 
 Solovyof ! 
 
 As strange and as simple as that all man- 
 kind, differing so widely and so much more 
 hostilely than these, is in reality a unity, a 
 brotherhood ! Our own divinity could only be 
 perfectly met by a Christ who had diversity in 
 the same degree. Each typical sufferer needs 
 a different vision. When the question is 
 asked : Who is Christ .'' the d/tnd man answers : 
 it is he who gives sight to the blind. The 
 mute man : it is he who opens the lips of the 
 dumb. The cripple : it is he who makes me 
 whole. The sick : it is he who shows me 
 where my health lies. The condemned: he 
 who says, " Neither do I condemn thee." The 
 hard : it is he who melts and fuses the material 
 shell. One answers : it is he who gives hope 
 
48 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 in the hour of great sorrow. Another : it is 
 he who saves me in the moment of temptation. 
 He who needs spiritual leadership claims that 
 he is above all, the Captain of his soul. All 
 these and myriads besides. And yet there are 
 not many almighties but one Almighty. 
 
 Every man's ideal is his abstract Christ — his 
 
 All I could never be, 
 All men ignored in me. 
 
 That ideal is the picture we draw in life. Not 
 all paint with the brush, some paint in the word, 
 but all at least paint with life. Some answer on 
 canvas, some on the printed page, others in 
 marble ; but all in life. 
 
 Yet not one of the men and women whom I 
 see wears the ideal face, though, as I suppose, 
 even the dullest possesses it, masks it. They all 
 see naturally gleams of something more beautiful 
 than themselves and yearn toward it. There 
 is one face and then a second face hanging in 
 front of it or behind it. There is always a 
 suggestion of unseen features behind the visible 
 ones, and I am reminded of women I have seen 
 in the East wearing such thin veils over their 
 faces that shadowy features suggesting some- 
 times an unearthly beauty were seen thi"ough 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 49 
 
 them. Such were the faces of the men and 
 women in the crowd, shadowy, with other more 
 beautiful features vaguely showing through. 
 
 I take one out of the crowd at random and 
 let him be Christ to me, try him for Christ's 
 part in my mystery play. 
 
 He is an ordinary man, vigorous, ambitious, 
 hail-fellow-well-met, fond of a joke and a drink, 
 not mean, not particularly generous, not sus- 
 picious ; on the other hand, not particularly 
 trustful of a stranger. He has a wife and 
 children for whom he cares more than for the 
 rest of humanity, and he has two brothers, one 
 of whom he loves, the other he dislikes. He 
 has a business handed on from his father, now 
 retired. In politics he is Liberal ; he does not 
 go to church, though his wife goes and prays 
 for him. He reads the newspapers. 
 
 In looking on him I have the thought, 
 " I have chosen you," and this fact begets a 
 certain stillness in the breast, a hush, a sense of 
 the marvellous. " In you, my friend, lives the 
 Son of Man." Not that I tell him. Instinct 
 saves me from letting him know my purpose 
 
 E 
 
50 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 in direct language. I enter into his life, he 
 into mine, and I prepare a manuscript to take 
 down the words of Christ for my play as he 
 shall speak them. 
 
 I feel a great tenderness and gentleness 
 towards him. I forgive him and make allow- 
 ances for all in him that is not Christ, for the 
 animal in him, the earth in him, the parrot in 
 him, the jackdaw in him, the human, all-too- 
 human in him. For whole days this man is a 
 frog ; for days he is a worm, he is an ape, an 
 elephant, a small dog. Even in the midst of 
 his ordinariness there shows occasionally some- 
 thing of the pre-historic, — though there never 
 leaves his eyes the gleam of something beyond 
 this time, the post-historic. The more I know 
 him the more curious do I find his natural 
 history, the way he behaves from day to day. 
 " Cheery old Saunders," his friends say of him, 
 "he's always the same." But he is never the 
 same. In his quiet way he is always trying a 
 new r61e. He imitates in a vague way the 
 King, the Prime Minister, John Bull, the 
 American dancer, his chance acquaintance, the 
 average man ; or he strives to look what a good 
 Liberal ought to be, or wears a style of clothes 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 51 
 
 to suggest wealth. I never, however, see him 
 pretending to be Christ, or imitating the Master, 
 and that is somewhat disconcerting to a seeker. 
 On the other hand, I see behind his features 
 certain other ideal features. It is curious that 
 often as he looks at himself in the glass, en- 
 deavouring to see that he looks well, or to find 
 resemblance between his features and those of 
 other men, he does not once descry the shadowy 
 but sweet and beautiful countenance lurking 
 behind his. , 
 
 He knows not Christ. My manuscript re- 
 mains untouched save for a few beginnings and 
 a few corrections. This ordinary man seems 
 to be too busy, too matter-of-fact, to lay hold 
 of the poetry of life and be that. As a portrait 
 of Christ I am afraid he is a failure. Which 
 means once more that I myself have failed. 
 
 I try another man. He is a sad-eyed wan- 
 faced being, pacing to and fro on a bridge over 
 a river. He has a look of tragic poetry in his 
 visage, has been a poet once, perhaps, but the 
 poetry has left him, and he is now trying to 
 decide whether 'twere better to endure the ills 
 he has or fly to others that we know not of. 
 And when I tell him I have chosen him he 
 
52 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 gives no smiling answer back but remains still 
 in his gloom. 
 
 " Life does not mean much to you ? " I ask. 
 
 " Then perchance you are just the one who 
 can be Christ to me," I proceed. " He who 
 would lose his life shall save it." 
 
 " No, I am a failure," says he. " I have 
 come to the end." 
 
 " Are you a believer in Christ ?" 
 
 "Believer! Friend, I am a lover, and I love 
 Him so much that I will shortly join Him, go 
 to Him, and be one with Him — 
 
 For all we gain 
 Until we come to Him is vain." 
 
 I try to persuade him to think better of life, 
 but he laughs hollowly at my words. 
 
 "What is it ?" I ask soothingly. "Is it pain 
 that gives you a distaste for life ? " 
 
 " It is life itself, this wretched partial exist- 
 ence, that disgusts me. It is loneliness and 
 life- weariness." 
 
 " But our life is part of the universal eternal 
 life," say I. "A very small part, but still a 
 part, an actual fraction of eternity." 
 
 " Oh, no," says he. " A libel on eternity. 
 Eternity is always going on, but our life is not 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 53 
 
 on eternity's plane ; it is a wretched conditional 
 existence. I have had ideals, but I could never 
 even begin to realise them here. Only with 
 Christ can I make a beginning. I have tried 
 for thirty years to write Alpha, and I believe 
 you seriously fear that I am about to write 
 Omega. Only after I have plunged into the 
 river shall I write my true Alpha — 
 
 And say to Him, What shall I be ? 
 O Master, smite, but make me free. 
 Perchance in these far worlds to be 
 The better thing I sought to be. 
 
 I am a failure, humanity is a failure, What 
 can I do ? What can they do ? " 
 
 And he continues crooning a melancholy 
 poem to which there is no answer. Alone 
 there courses through my soul the thought, "In 
 what sad plight I find my figure of Christ. 
 He needs my help. Yet I cannot help him." 
 I feel that Christ is in him, and yet clearly 
 this man does not speak or act like a Christ. 
 He is a little mad. If Christ had gone mad. 
 He might have spoken somewhat as this 
 suicide speaks. 
 
 I pull him towards the gloom of the lower 
 parts of the city and he croons as he goes — 
 
54 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 " Upon thy couch lie down 
 And fold the hands which have not sown, 
 And as thou liest there alone, 
 Perhaps some breath of seraph blown 
 As soft as dew upon the rose 
 Will fall upon thee at life's close. 
 And thou wilt say, At last ! At last ! 
 All pain is love, when pain is past. 
 Then to the Master once again — 
 Oh, keep my heart too weak to pray ; 
 I ask no longer questions vain 
 Of life and love, of loss and gain, 
 These for the living are and strong — 
 I go to Thee, to Thee belong." i 
 
 And with that I let him go back. I feel he 
 knows his own need better than I do mine. 
 As a portrait of Christ he is a failure, however, 
 and once more I fail. 
 
 I choose then another. This time a lover 
 and a poet. He is a plain man made hand- 
 some by his passion, an inarticulate one made 
 vocal by love. He gladly gives me his con- 
 fidence. He cares infinitely for another, and 
 would be ready to die or be annihilated for her 
 sake. " I was an egoist till I fell in love," 
 says he ; "I cared for nothing but my own 
 personal rights and interests. I confess I was 
 
 ^ R. James. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 55 
 
 a selfish person. But now I would lay down 
 everything for another. It is strange, but I 
 am ready to be swallowed up and forgotten 
 and utterly lost in the personality of my 
 beloved." 
 
 I find this to be suggestive of Christ in 
 man — this readiness to sink self in another's 
 life and individuality. The lover prompts some 
 words of the drama. But he marries, begets 
 children, and anon is egoist as before. As a 
 portrait of Christ he showed gleams of the 
 miracle. But as I see him now he is, alas, a 
 failure. And I fail. 
 
 Another man at random in the fast-flowing 
 crowd. He is a politician, and ready to stake 
 life and money and happiness for a principle or 
 a political ideal. He is full of noble wrath 
 at the spectacle of tyranny. He votes con- 
 scientiously at all elections, and canvasses all 
 stupid neighbours to give up their own opinions 
 and vote as he does. In the name of his ideal 
 he occasionally refuses to pay taxes to Caesar. 
 He is a substantial man of conscience. He 
 prays and believes. He is a follower of Jesus. 
 Jesus is his invisible, political captain, and he 
 serves under Him against money-changers and 
 
56 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 sellers of the Spirit, would-be stoners of the 
 unfortunate, against Pharisees, priests, and 
 scribes, Caesars, Pilates, Herods. He lives 
 strenuously, his lamp is lit, his loins are girded ; 
 he makes out of life a big thing and stakes 
 high. 
 
 I meet also a reactionary who sees the 
 seamy side of the Liberal's life, the dreary 
 industrial background of his vision. He under- 
 stands something the politician does not — that 
 man is independent of material progress, does 
 not need it. He sees the true beauty of 
 individual man in his ability to rise superior to 
 all material things. But he and all the rest 
 seem failures as portraits of Christ. It is the 
 same with other nationalities also. I take a 
 Russian, a German, a Frenchman, an American, 
 and many others ; but I cannot accept a Russian 
 Christ as enough for me, nor a German Christ, 
 nor a French, nor an American. All the portraits 
 have truth in them, but they are not complete, 
 not satisfying. 
 
 Curious that in Art it is as in life. Portraits 
 of Christ are all more or less failures. The 
 painter may have felt that he expressed what 
 he meant, but others are not satisfied. It may 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 57 
 
 be his Christ, it is not ours. It seems to have 
 been always impossible to paint truly the face 
 of Christ. Hence, I suppose, the miraculous 
 likeness, such as that on the shroud of Turin 
 and the other on the handkerchief of Saint 
 Veronica. And these are miserable, bitter, 
 Judaic faces — not New Testament faces at all. 
 The idea of the painters has been to make 
 something which could pass as historical, 
 authentic, a dead record. All that lives 
 changes, so they wished to show definitely what 
 Christ was. Probably a lower type of mind 
 was at work when these pious representations 
 were painted. Not that there is not a certain 
 wistfulness and beautiful pathos in these shroud- 
 pictures and towel-prints. The wan faces of 
 tens of millions of human beings have looked 
 on them, tried to look into them, and these 
 have given life, just as certain stone and 
 wooden idols are said to have wrought miracles 
 because of the faith of the worshippers — 
 a theory which, however, many reject, for 
 wood and stone cannot inspire the faith that 
 removes mountains. Nevertheless, even a 
 dead idol which has been worshipped by one 
 human being has an atmosphere of human 
 
58 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 pathos which all but hallows it, and those 
 " authentic " portraits have that pathos also. 
 There is an infinite positive significance in the 
 seeking eyes that look at the portraits and 
 ask, "Art thou He? Art thou He, or do 
 we look for another ? " Thus it is, beautiftil 
 legends arise round about objects which in 
 themselves may be base. They do not take 
 their rise from the fraud or the error, but from 
 the living spirit of humanity seeking ever the 
 truth of its own destiny. In the East, so far 
 from keeping to the historical ikon faces, the 
 variously miraculously delivered portraits, as 
 if these were fact and all else must be fancy, 
 painters take as their supreme task the paint- 
 ing of that type of portrait of Christ which they 
 call " NoT-BY-HANDS-CREATED." It is the sort 
 of paradox one does not often find in our 
 straightforward culture, the man painting with 
 his hands, using all the skill of his fingers to 
 paint a picture which he entitles the " Portrait 
 not made by hands." It is the painter's claim 
 of inspiration. He works in the medium of 
 prayer ; and without inspiration from God he 
 cannot hope to portray Christ. He puts forth 
 his arm and the Spirit teaches his hands. It 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 59 
 
 is also a tacit confession that without miracle 
 the face of Christ cannot be expressed, and it 
 implies as tacitly that the Face when seen will 
 be a miraculous one, a mystical one — that is, 
 one which each human being can see accord- 
 ing to his own light and love according to his 
 own need. The likeness of the shroud of 
 Turin is par excellence the portrait-made-by- 
 hands, the would-be authentic ; the other, the 
 inspired and mystical picture, is the " Not-by- 
 hands-created." 
 
 Yet this lively conception derives from the 
 dead towel - portrait idea. And it does so 
 because of a legendary explanation of miraculous 
 portraits. It is said that a painter came to Jesus 
 whilst He was in the midst of the crowd and 
 endeavoured to portray Him, but failed because 
 of the infinite way the expression of the face 
 changed. It reflected constantly the faces of 
 those in the crowd who had need of Him, and 
 was not one face so much as five thousand in 
 one. Jesus therefore took a towel and pressed 
 it to His face saying, "The portrait of Christ 
 may not be drawn by hands lest at any time it 
 should be said this and this only was Christ." 
 And He gave to the painter the miraculous 
 
6o THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 likeness imprinted on the towel, and then the 
 further blessing, " Thou couldst not paint My 
 face for the reflection there of the face of the 
 common man. Behold, henceforth thou shalt 
 not attempt to paint the face of any common 
 man, but shalt find My face there also." 
 
 It is a curious way of explaining that the 
 painter was after all able to paint a miraculous 
 likeness — one not made by hands. The en- 
 deavour of all the mystical painters after him 
 has been to paint a miraculous face in which 
 the whole of praying and yearning and suffering, 
 and even cursing humanity is somehow reflected. 
 
 The shroud of Turin needs to be held to 
 the light, and then the Divine features are 
 vaguely apparent in the texture. Some one 
 has said that the only test of its genuineness 
 would be a chemical analysis. The only test 
 of the mystical portrait, however, is in that the 
 common doubting man standing in front of it 
 should confess, " My Lord and my God." 
 If a man's heart is touched, Christ must be 
 there to touch it. 
 
 I show to an ordinary man a copy of 
 Vasnetsof's wonderful picture. He gives it 
 more attention than I expect, rivets his eyes 
 
ON THE SHROUD OF TURIN. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 6i 
 
 upon it and wishes a copy for himself. 
 "All portraits of Christ are failures, but this 
 one somehow touches me. It is the first I ever 
 cared for," says he. I show it to a lover and 
 he wants it for his love, and to a politician and 
 he wants to hang it in the Liberal Club. So 
 it seems I find a common ground ; for I also 
 hail this face as that of Christ. 
 
 I find a personality in myself which 
 accepts the soul of the picture — it is the 
 highest aspect of my personality, and I am 
 ready to sacrifice all else to it. The ordinary 
 man and the rest also find in the picture some- 
 thing which answers to a desire in themselves, 
 I can therefore go back to the crowd and take 
 the chance passer-by once more and find the 
 Christ in him by aid of the picture, let him 
 be Christ to me, and prompt the words of my 
 drama. 
 
 "You acknowledge this picture to be Christ," 
 say I. " I also acknowledge it to be Him. But 
 I do not feel I altogether know Him. I know 
 partly what He was nineteen hundred years 
 ago, but I urgently need to know what He is 
 to-day, what He means now, and what are His 
 intentions." I do not tell him of my mystery 
 
62 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 play, in which Christ must play the central 
 part. But I ask him to tell me about the 
 Divine Man he sees in my miraculous picture. 
 
 He tells me he sees a Being infinitely 
 understanding, infinitely loving. He sees the 
 Redeemer. He tells me the face says to him 
 that whoever despises him, there is One to 
 whom he is not despicable. One who has a 
 place for him in His kingdom. He finds the 
 most complete consolation and reconciliation 
 with destiny in the picture. 
 
 " Is there one thing more than another that 
 the picture means to you ? " I ask. 
 
 He blushes and looks awkward, as if I had 
 uncovered a secret, but then takes faith through 
 my earnestness, and answers in these words : 
 
 " I should not have thought you needed to 
 ask. To me it shows a face that understands 
 completely the torments of the desires of the 
 flesh, one who understands that the flesh which 
 lusts is not the ego, one who confirms a poor 
 struggling failing being in His Godhead and 
 does not leave him in death and disease. I see 
 in that picture the outstretched hand that saved 
 Peter when he was sinking into the waves. I 
 hold it and I get home." 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 63 
 
 So that is what the picture means to the 
 chance passer-by. 
 
 I understand what I should not otherwise 
 have guessed, that this brother human suffers 
 torments through low desire. For him the title 
 of the picture might almost be "Saviour of all 
 who suffer from low desires." But the picture 
 does not appeal to me in that way, and that 
 aspect of it had not occurred to my mind. I 
 take the picture to the man who for twenty 
 years has lived the life of an ascetic, and he 
 is as much enraptured by it as the other — 
 but for a totally opposite reason. I tell my 
 chance passer-by what for my part I find in 
 the picture, and he disagrees with me, dis- 
 agrees so violently that he is almost ready to 
 quarrel. So even the miraculous portrait is 
 somewhat of a failure. At least I do not seem 
 altogether to be able to find the new Christ 
 among men by the help of it. 
 
 I try the man who is tired of life : he sees 
 the Christ who though He could save Himself 
 refused to come down from the cross. I try 
 the lover. He sees the link which unites him 
 with his beloved. I try the politician, and he 
 sees a face that men will die for. The scientist 
 
64 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 says it is the whole sense of Evolution : some 
 call Him Evolution, others call Him God. The 
 musician sees the substance of music ; the poet 
 of poetry; the sculptor divines form and majesty 
 of bearing, the inner secret of outward beauty ; 
 the painter, the spirituality of the surface and 
 the shadow ; the soldier sees what makes for 
 esprit de corps ; the sailor sees the face among 
 the stars. 
 
 I am driven to the conclusion that wonderful 
 as is this miraculous picture in that it can be 
 Christ to so many different eyes, it is almost as 
 much a failure as mankind is, inasmuch as 
 besides reflecting Christ it reflects also endlessly 
 broken and suffering and varying humanity. 
 Each man sees the apology for his own life, 
 and few are capable of seeing in it at the same 
 time the apology for their neighbours' lives. 
 There lie the limits of the picture, or of 
 humanity, or of myself. I suppose only in 
 heaven is the archetype of the miraculous 
 portrait, only there is the great real Face with 
 the myriads of changing reflections of humanity 
 within it. And I cannot obtain that greater 
 vision unless I find some one who can be a 
 little window to heaven for me. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 65 
 
 I will try myself. Necessarily I am much less 
 intimate with the chance passer-by than I am 
 with myself. It is possible to probe a deeper 
 abyss in my own soul than in that of my 
 neighbour. It is difficult to probe far into 
 a neighbour's soul. Even good manners keep 
 one to the surface. It is indiscreet to put my 
 questions to him, but I could not easily be 
 indiscreet in the questions I put to myself. 
 
 There is a Christ in me : who is He ? 'Tis 
 not indiscreet to ask. Nevertheless some one 
 in my being does feel taken aback even though 
 / ask it. Though the question may not be 
 indiscreet to ask, it may be indiscreet to 
 answer. In any case, the question is too blunt 
 and must remain unanswered for a while. 
 
 I am a little shy of the Christ in me. To tell 
 of Him is to turn into an egoist. For when He 
 is in question I seem to place a value on myself 
 higher than on any one else in the world. 
 
 I suppose that if another were seeking Christ, 
 as I do now, in the chance passer-by, and I 
 passed by, he might discern behind my ordi- 
 nary features those other shadowy and more 
 beautiful lineaments which I for my part descry 
 as I now look upon the man in the crowd. 
 
 F 
 
66 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 The mysterious better face of humanity stands 
 
 behind me also. And it is the face of a person. 
 
 I know that person — it is my alter ego. From 
 
 lower nature, from the animal side of me of which 
 
 the ego is instinctively ashamed, there is always 
 
 another being growing invisibly. Something of 
 
 Him is half- visible in my eyes. Yes, that is He. 
 
 I should be a disgusting creature but for Him. 
 
 In all this sordidness called life He just makes 
 
 the difference between worth while and not 
 
 worth while. 
 
 " Hullo, little boy, you've been beaten," came 
 
 His first whisper when He soothed me, and 
 
 comforted me, and dried my cheeks, and 
 
 brightened my eyes, and bade me forget the 
 
 shame and live as if it had not been. I forgot 
 
 what I had been crying about, and forgot also 
 
 the comforting and soothing other self till 
 
 another occasion arose, and yet another. I 
 
 became conscious of Him again on long walks, 
 
 when my mind did not think, but was placidly 
 
 set upon something unknown, unrealised. He 
 
 was with me — or rather I was with Him. 
 
 A boy's will is the wind's will, 
 
 And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. 
 
 Yes, because he does not know what he is 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 67 
 
 thinking. He feels out toward the ideal as 
 plants turn to the sun. 
 
 But the boy of these days was ill-kempt and 
 untidy, speaking the language of the street, 
 mischievous and pugnacious. I did many 
 things which caused me shame, and the prayers 
 which my mother taught me to say at her 
 knee I forgot. I used foul language, as we 
 all did at school. Then later I voluntarily and 
 on some mysterious impulse gave up the bad 
 language and remembered the prayers I used 
 to say. I began consciously to wish to be good, 
 and experienced the sweet moments of new 
 resolutions. I fought my way through jungles 
 of sordid life, and though I failed and failed again, 
 I had always a personal secret, a life which I led 
 with an alter ego in myself. When in great diffi- 
 culties I used to pray myself out of them, and 
 when my mind began to analyse and ask ques- 
 tions concerning God, I used to answer thus : 
 
 " The kingdom of heaven is within me, is it 
 not ? God is in heaven. God therefore is 
 within me. And if I pray, I pray to one who 
 is within me. God is almighty. Then with 
 prayer I also might be almighty." 
 
 All hymns about Jesus as friend appealed to 
 
68 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 me as to so many with soul-ravishing attractive- 
 ness — 
 
 I've found a Friend ; O such a Friend ! 
 He loved me ere I knew Him, 
 
 That friend was the sweet, better personality in 
 my bosom, my ideal self, my alter ego, as I 
 have called Him. 
 
 I began to have a period of love, and longing 
 for self-sacrifice. I formed passionate attach- 
 ments to various comrades. I had a childish 
 desire to die for them somehow, to show how 
 much I loved them, or that I might appear 
 beautiful in their eyes. 
 
 I also began to read various romances and 
 fall in love with the heroes. After reading 
 Morte U Arthur I dreamed myself Lancelot, 
 and then Tristram, and then Galahad. After 
 Ivanhoe I was Wilfred. I rescued maidens and 
 killed giants, and jousted with splendour at many 
 tournaments. At the same time, however, 
 was I not stupid, mulish, lazy, inaccurate, and 
 mischievous ? As a punishment I had once to 
 write a hundred times in a fair hand, " Samson 
 was a strong man, Solomon was a wise man, 
 but I am a donkey," which I indeed slavishly 
 wrote. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 69 
 
 The alter ego, however, was never touched 
 by the world unless I felt shamed or hurt. 
 And then He would come to the rescue and 
 take me apart, and console me, and breathe 
 secret life and power into me. 
 
 So it was in the after years of first working 
 for a living. The ideal personality obtained 
 more sway in me, and I began to live in daily 
 consciousness that I, the true ego of me, was 
 a celestial being, one higher than any one 
 dreamed or than I could openly assume. I grew 
 in spiritual stature and watched myself changing. 
 I marvelled at the new life. My direct centre of 
 consciousness began to move from the lower 
 towards the higher ego, and as it did so I 
 became vocal and wrote poetry, read poetry, 
 lived in poetry. I walked with feet on the earth 
 and head in the sky. From then till now I 
 have been conscious of a spiritual truth, in 
 the atmosphere of which I have lived, so that all 
 the negative values of earth-living have become 
 positive values of absolute-living. And I have 
 grown to identify myself with the ideal person- 
 ality within. Not that it is quite possible. There 
 clings somewhat of the lower, and as for the 
 higher there remains an infinite which I have 
 
^o THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 not reached. Indeed as I live from day to 
 day, my alter ego, this Christ in me, seems to 
 grow also, and projects beyond me like a 
 flower which the earth nurtures and loves. I 
 am lured on further from day to day into a new 
 spiritual plane where the flower is growing and 
 budding. I call it a seeking, but it is in truth 
 a becoming. 
 
 Something I seem to be spending, and that 
 is of the flesh, physical energy, lower life. But 
 all the while I am becoming. I am growing 
 into another plane. I am obtaining a higher 
 consciousness. 
 
 Belief in my ideal self, the almighty in me, 
 has made me a sort of spiritual egoist. I might 
 have been an egoist in a different way, it is 
 true. I might have rejoiced in good looks, in 
 physical strength, in scholarship or intellectual 
 attainments, in will power or in success. Had 
 I become a champion boxer, I might have 
 been an egoist for that reason. I might have 
 been a great arithmetician, and have felt that 
 I had no equal as a mathematical mind. I 
 might have been honest, and accurate, and 
 dutiful, and then possessed the egoism of the 
 elder brother. I might have been a philosopher, 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 71 
 
 an intellectual don, and been proud of my use of 
 words and arguments as foils and fence. If I 
 had been very heavy, I might have been proud 
 of my weight. I might have been proud of 
 conquests among women. But instead of all 
 these things I have the egoism of the failure 
 who identifies himself not with the failing 
 being, but with the celestial and almighty 
 being within. 
 
 When wrestled in the ring ; when unable 
 to compete with my neighbour in eating and 
 drinking ; when cut off from a lady's regard 
 by some one more handsome ; when admitting 
 that my philosophical opponent has proved his 
 case ; when found wanting as a model citizen ; 
 when reduced as a prodigal to feed among the 
 swine, I have always had the joy of a spiritual 
 reservation. Though among you, I am not of 
 you ; though beaten, I am unconquered and 
 unconquerable. That is the egoism of the failure. 
 He knows that there is something in him which 
 does not fail 
 
 It leads to a higher consciousness. The ego 
 tends to enlarge and take to itself something 
 more, begins to find a common ground with the 
 spiritual / in other people, and to experience a 
 
^2 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 sense of unity with it. My ego extends to 
 hold two, so that for the first time the first 
 person plural in our Lord's prayer seems to 
 be felicitous — " Our Father which art in 
 heaven." I strive to recognise in the mass 
 of humanity the we of which this our is spoken. 
 It is the unity of all the alter egos. The 
 higher consciousness which I discern is /the 
 recognition of unity. I can love any 017'e in 
 whom I discern an ideal self over and above 
 the ordinary self. The sense for this/ ideal 
 self in every one prompted me to seek the 
 Christ-face in the passer-by. And throughout 
 my quest so far I have been preoccupied with 
 the sense for unity. Now I am beginiiing to 
 understand that not only have I a s/snse for 
 unity but a knowledge of actual unity. / 
 
 All these other gleams of ideal personality 
 in human beings are one and the sgme thing. 
 Every man possesses an ideal self, vj'hether he 
 be conscious of it or not, and all the |deal selves 
 of all men are one and the same. They have 
 the same consciousness and are truly one. 
 They seem all separate and yet jare all one 
 body. There is one ideal body of all humanity 
 — as it were a tree of Christ in our/background. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 73 
 
 There must be an invisible system of 
 branches connecting all individuals past and 
 present and showing them as one system. It 
 is all Christ. That is what He meant when He 
 said, " I am the vine : ye are the branches " — 
 I am the whole vine : ye are the branches 
 which make up the vine. 
 
 That is the Christ which I see. Yet He is 
 not a tree. He is man and God. He is our 
 sum total on the ideal side ; He is also the 
 smallest, most intimate, private friend ; He is 
 the face behind the ordinary face of the passing 
 man. He has therefore infinite variety of face 
 and of expression ; He is also one face and one 
 alone. He is sweet and wise, not predatory 
 and brute-like. His substance is love. He is 
 our leader. He is an invisible but truly in- 
 fallible Pope. Or rather. He is almost visible : 
 following Him, even though we discern Him 
 vaguely, we cannot go wrong — the highest light 
 of each individual being. Higher types of 
 humanity are those in which He shines out 
 morei^clearly ; degenerate types are those which 
 are far from the consciousness of being Christ- 
 men. Observe a divergence of opinion here 
 as to who are degenerates. The common 
 
74 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 criterion is the superman— he is a degenerate 
 who is furthest from being a Napoleon or a 
 Sandow. But in this truer light of reason 
 Napoleon himself may be a degenerate. The 
 animal triumphant in man is degeneracy. 
 
 Whilst thus I moralise there comes out of 
 the crowd unbidden, uninvited, a new and 
 unusual type of man, prompted somehow to 
 apply himself to me. And instead of my 
 choosing him as I have been choosing others 
 and considering them, suddenly he chooses me. 
 He is a Southern Slav, a representative of one 
 of the ruined peoples of the Balkans. His 
 country, Serbia, is lost. He tells me he has 
 ceased to be a Serb, because Serbia is not any 
 more and cannot be again what it was, even if 
 it should rise from death. He calls himself a 
 European, and pleads that all should obtain, 
 in addition to consciousness of nationality, the 
 higher consciousness of being Europeans. With 
 an almost alarming rapidity he engages me in 
 most earnest converse. We walk along the 
 crowded thoroughfare, and just ahead of us in 
 the throng is a nurse wheeling out a young 
 sleeping babe. " That child," says Dushan, 
 " must first learn to be a human being, then to 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 75 
 
 be English at the same time, then to be a simple 
 human being, English and European at the 
 same time, and then to be pan-human — 
 
 Infant 
 
 Individual 
 
 National 
 
 Group-national 
 
 Universal. 
 
 The sun shines on the baby ; it smiles and 
 sneezes, as it w^ere, at its tremendous pro- 
 gramme — 
 
 Worm 
 
 Devil 
 
 Man 
 
 Christ 
 
 God," 
 
 says the Serb, "that is the true progress of 
 humanity." 
 
 I take him to my old professor, who expounds 
 to him universal history, and the old man re- 
 acts to him perfectly. I have never seen more 
 sense of unity and happiness than in these two 
 scholars talking to one another with the joy of 
 children, and all about the Christ in whom all 
 nations have lived and moved and had their 
 being. 
 
 I take him to my friends in turn, and he, 
 
76 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 unbalanced and enthusiastic as he is, seems 
 always to give them happiness, make them 
 whole. They are the most varied of people, 
 but this Dushan seems alive on all sides. He 
 is a sort of mystical fraction which, added to 
 any other fraction, always makes up unity. 
 
 For no fraction is natural — or rather, all 
 fractions are naturally complementary and wait 
 for others to bring them to unity. Thus you 
 may be seven twenty-thirds. Well, somewhere 
 a sixteen twenty-thirds is waiting for you. I 
 may be seven-tenths— somewhere there is a 
 three-tenths waiting. Yonder fellow is a five 
 ninety-ninths^ — somewhere must be a ninety-four 
 ninety-ninths. But there exists a mystical 
 fraction, a fraction which makes each different 
 other fraction up to unity, can be the necessary 
 sixteen twenty-thirds for you, but coming 
 to me is at once changed to three-tenths ; 
 coming to the other it is his ninety-four 
 ninety - ninths. Such would be a mystical 
 or miracle-working fraction. This mystical 
 fraction is Christ the man. He worked 
 infinitely various miracles with men. Christ 
 on the cross is the statement of the fraction, 
 the fact, but also the hieroglyphic. For note : 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST ^^ 
 
 to be a fraction is to be broken. Christ on the 
 cross can be applied to any human being who 
 is living a partial existence and he will be 
 saved, will be enfranchised in the all. When 
 the phrenologist said that the face of Christ 
 was unbalanced, I felt that it was true. It 
 had to be unbalanced to redress our infinitely 
 varying deficiencies. His was a face in which 
 must be myriads of complementary fractions. 
 
 There is something of this nature about 
 Dushan, that is why I have called him a 
 mystical fraction, a phrase that I thought 
 rightly applied only to Christ. 
 
 The fact that DusTian has come is part of my 
 seeking, or rather of my finding. He is going 
 to help me to fill in the words of my drama. 
 
 "You are seeking Christ ?" says he. "You 
 believe in the unity of all in Him. Well, then, 
 let us work for that unity, for the consciousness 
 of it throughout the world. That is Christianity 
 itself. If we can find ten who believe as you 
 believe, then in ten years all Europe will realise 
 Christ, and within our life-time China and 
 India will come in. Let us begin to-day and 
 endeavour to realise universal consciousness of 
 unity in Christ." 
 
78 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 We go out together to reconsider humanity, 
 and I think now as I see the great throngs 
 of humans, " Something is in you, something 
 after all can be made out of you." First, we go 
 to the slums, where fractional humanity seems 
 so small that hundreds together might not make 
 one. We pass along the river-side where the 
 little houses of the poor are crowded around 
 factories, and men, women, and children look to 
 one point above them — the smoking summit of 
 the high factory chimney. The women's faces 
 reflect soul-killing drudgery; the children's faces, 
 though bright, are broken and spoiled, often per- 
 verted, or too dirtyfor even human features to be 
 seen. Even so there seems more possibility of 
 Christ's face being seen in the least of these than 
 in the faces of their parents. They all live in 
 a world we do not know. The air is different, 
 and it is difficult for us to breathe, being full of 
 the odours of chemicals and decay, as if humanity 
 had been disintegrated and by some ghastly 
 artificial process were being put together again. 
 A thousand families are living day and night, 
 and months and years in an atmosphere which 
 we hurry through, in the odour of soap manu- 
 facture. Another thousand are played on con- 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 79 
 
 tinually by blighting sulphurous fumes. Here 
 comes a mulatto ; he enters a wretched dwelling 
 and is met by two yellow girls and a yellow 
 mother. No, not half-breeds ; they have been 
 so coloured by the fumes in which they work. 
 On many men and women are unnatural scars 
 and civilisation-marks. A strike is in progress 
 and savage rebellion is written in many faces ; 
 there is visible an active will to make mischief 
 and increase disaffection. We hear various 
 expressions of opinion on their behaviour on 
 the part of employers, the chief being that it is 
 sad to see such a lack of the spirit of self- 
 sacrifice, no one is ready to sink his personal 
 interest for the bigger thing. The strikers are 
 called shirkers. It is said with truth that no 
 one will do any more work than he is forced to 
 do, even when he is satisfied with the terms of 
 his employment. Young folk talk of giving up 
 everything and going on their own, or going to 
 America, of " cutting themselves adrift. " Young 
 men are sacrificing others to their own life and 
 freedom ; young women also ; though it is 
 equally true that many are sacrificing their own 
 life and freedom and chances of development 
 for others who depend on their work. The 
 
8o THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 former are despised by employers, the latter 
 petted and approved. The married men are 
 considered better " hands " because it is less 
 easy for them to rebel. To the free and un- 
 encumbered younger ones the employer says, 
 " You must look at your work heroically. 
 Remember that it is your duty. It is the 
 place to which God has called you. Your 
 happiness lies in fulfilling your part well. You 
 must not take a narrow and selfish point of view. 
 Humanity is in reality all one, and if you do 
 your part the whole body politic is the gainer. 
 You want to cut yourself adrift, but you know 
 what the poet says : 
 
 To be a whole is to be small and weak. 
 To be a part is to be great and mighty." 
 
 On hearing this advice we are somewhat 
 astonished, hearing our own gospel used to en- 
 force industrial slavery. The sense of the verse 
 is haunting — "To be a part is great and mighty." 
 Part of what ? That, I suppose, is the great 
 question. So Dushan asks : To be part of what .'* 
 The employer gazes at us, and then waves his 
 hand about him, indicating factory shafts and 
 warehouses and workshops, bridges, cranes, 
 viaducts, houses and shops, churches. " It is 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 8i 
 
 visible," says he. " It's all about you : part of 
 all that. Is that not grand enough?" 
 
 " That is sufficiently curious," says Dushan, 
 smiling. " We must have more of that English 
 poem. That cannot be what the poet intended. 
 To be one brick in Jerusalem the Heavenly is 
 to be truly great, but to be a mighty pillar in 
 Rome itself is to be too small." 
 
 We meet a writer on the staff of a powerful 
 newspaper ; he writes articles every day, printed 
 without a signature. He also tells us he has 
 grasped the great truth that to be a part is to 
 be great and mighty. He could not hope to 
 wield the power he has if he came out and 
 wrote simply for himself and from himself what 
 he had to say. He is proud to be part of a great 
 newspaper, of a great collective expression of 
 opinion. 
 
 We meet many priests, and they also are proud 
 to be part. Dushan does not like the official as 
 such. But the priest tells us what a difference 
 it makes when a man puts on the vestments of 
 God. Just as a raw youth obtains a certain 
 dignity not his own when he puts on the uniform 
 of soldier, or policeman, or commissionaire ; 
 he becomes greater because he has given up 
 
82 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 his individuality to become part of something 
 larger. So in the highest degree with the man 
 who enters the Church ; he becomes something 
 greater than he could ever hope to be as an 
 individual. When he is ordained he gives up 
 the rhythm of his old life. The simple way is 
 merged in a greater way, and he finds that 
 instead of walking apart he is marching in the 
 great procession of the Church. 
 
 But is it really so in reality ? Does not the 
 young priest seem to have lost when he puts 
 on the "cloth" or his vestment? Is he not 
 actually handicapped by it ? It might become 
 true if each priest were at liberty to think out 
 his own vestment and express through it his 
 particular relationship to God and to us all. 
 But then the idea of uniform would be lost. 
 For my part, I think the leaves of the Bible 
 meant more before they were put into the uni- 
 form of print. When each illuminator glorified 
 the Word variously there was more life. There 
 is an unmistakable sense of greater truth and 
 life in an illuminated Bible than in a printed 
 one. When you read a chapter which has been 
 illuminated it is as if reading the chapter for 
 the first time. There is the same difference felt 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 83 
 
 in the contrast of the wafer with its mechanically 
 produced emblem of Christ crucified imprinted 
 upon it and the simple broken bread. On the 
 whole, uniform in religion is a handicap dis- 
 guising the glory of the multiform. The unity 
 of the Church is an inner unity, not an outer one. 
 
 I find agreement with this thought more 
 among Puritan ministers and the Friends, but 
 complete disagreement in the priest of the 
 Catholic Church. Each Roman priest, however 
 humble, has the consciousness of being part of 
 the greatest organisation of the visible Church. 
 All members of that Church have also that 
 sense of being part of a mighty whole, of some- 
 thing which now is great and shall be universal. 
 They do not deny inner unity, but do require 
 an external unity. 
 
 " The Church of Rome, however, even with 
 success, the vast material success which it 
 requires, would not correspond to the vision 
 that human consciousness already holds of a 
 universal spiritual unity which might be realis- 
 able," said the Serbian. " There is a worldly 
 as well as a spiritual truth in the words of the 
 poet. But we must find out how the poem 
 goes on." 
 
84 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 We go into a public library and a librarian 
 finds for us the necessary volume of Kingsley. 
 Ah, yes, here it is, here are the words : 
 
 To be a whole is to be small and weak, 
 To be a part is to be great and mighty, 
 In the one spirit of the mighty whole, 
 The spirit of the martyrs and the saints. 
 
 Dushan, in excitement, strikes me on the back 
 as I read. I give the book back. " We know 
 now," cries the Serbian, "what it is necessary 
 to be a part of in order to be truly great and 
 mighty — not civilisation, not the ' combine,' 
 not the visible Church, but part of the com- 
 munion of saints, part of the living and the dead 
 in Christ, the all-one, the intangible and unseen 
 Christendom." 
 
 The Quest of the Face resolves into a quest 
 of that true splendour, the endeavour to obtain 
 a true and complete and ever-present conscious- 
 ness of its existence. The great mystery play 
 has a r61e for all humanity. " All true Christian 
 things must be joined," says my friend. " Our 
 activities can be manifold. We approach each 
 new person on his characteristic and individual 
 side. One way in which the face of Christ may 
 be seen is through the unity of Christendom. At 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 85 
 
 present Christendom seems to be divided against 
 itself. We must work for tlie consciousness of 
 unity in all churches. I do not mean a unity 
 brought about by denying all creeds except one, 
 but a unity brought about by correlating and 
 including all creeds." 
 
 " Not by creed-smashing, as the American 
 phrase goes," I interject. 
 
 " No, rather by creed-building and creed- 
 supporting." 
 
 " You want a true Catholic Church ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " But in what way would united Christendom 
 differ from the Roman Church if its dream were 
 fully realised .■• " 
 
 "You would see the difference. Roman 
 Catholic Christendom disallows other modes of 
 expression than its own. In modern times it 
 has become more liberal and tolerant outwardly 
 than of old. But the essence of its idea is still 
 a universal uniformity. It has a standardised 
 Christianity and has one pattern which it wishes 
 all men to wear. Those who will not wear it 
 are still tacitly heretics. In a lesser way other 
 churches are fchargeable on the same count. 
 But the true united Christendom will be one 
 
86 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 of complete mutual understanding. Tolerance 
 must come first, and then joy in difference, 
 glory to God for the diversity of His creatures." 
 
 (Sod, we agree, is no Hindenburg, no Kaiser, 
 he is not a Prussian God imposing obedience. 
 If He were, it would be quite simple, since He 
 is omnipotent, to correct humanity to type. We 
 know through Christ God does not expect us 
 to conform to a type. He leaves us free as 
 He has made us diverse. And the world 
 in which we live is a marvellous diversity. 
 The rose is not wrong, the lily is not wrong, 
 the lion is not absurd, the tiger is not absurd, 
 diamond does not contradict ruby. And in the 
 same way man is compatible with man. There 
 is a Diogenes and an Edison, an Achilles and 
 a Bertrand Russell, and Zoroaster and General 
 Booth and St. Peter and St. John, and Henry 
 VHI. and Henry VI., and St. Sava and 
 Father Nicholas, and the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury and St. Francis of Assisi, and for an 
 endless diverse humanity glory to God for ever 
 and ever. Amen. 
 
 Through Christ we understand that the way 
 of the Spirit is the way of truth. The Spirit 
 manifests itself passively in an infinite number 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 87 
 
 of ways. It should also manifest itself actively 
 in as many ways. 
 
 " And the unity ? " I ask. 
 " The unity is the consciousness that no one 
 true way of expression contradicts any other 
 true way. In that consciousness is unity. And 
 for that the time has come to strive. All the 
 sects and churches of the world are waiting in 
 the darkness ; but it is just before dawn. The 
 connections between them will soon be seen : 
 all will see them. 
 
 " But that is only a small part of the task. 
 The visible churches as such are a very small 
 fraction of humanity. They are good, but up 
 till now, and perhaps still for a long while, they 
 stand in the way of the realisation of a greater 
 thing. Their official stamp, their rigidity is 
 standing in the way of a free and living Christi- 
 anity. There are millions of men and women 
 who are in Christ yet not in any of the official 
 churches. They must not be forgotten. The 
 Christian consciousness of joy and love and 
 unity must be brought to them in larger and 
 ever larger numbers — so as to form a sort of 
 invisible and unexpected complement to the 
 churches. 
 
88 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 " The churches are so hard to-day that the 
 dress and style of the priests and curates and 
 ministers are unpopular with large masses of 
 the people. And indeed those who wear the 
 cloth are badly handicapped by it — worse handi- 
 capped by ecclesiastical system, Christianity 
 has in it a stupendous depth of philosophic 
 truth. It is so marvellous that it can win its 
 way almost by itself — but not quite. It must 
 be spread from heart to heart, cannot come 
 simply from nowhere to the heart. It is an 
 easy doctrine to propound and it is not difficult 
 to bring it to the heart of a man. But how slow 
 the progress along official ways ! 
 
 " India, China, Japan, all must be brought in, 
 and would be brought in if the best Christians 
 went to them. But we do not send out our best. 
 We send often stupid or shallow men who strive 
 for numbers of baptisms, for vulgar number, 
 not esteeming the deep religion and profound 
 though old philosophic truth in the mind and 
 tradition of the East. I know Buddhism, 
 Confucianism, Brahminism, — these philosophies 
 are deep and true. They are not shallow or 
 absurd, they are not of the nature of idolatry or 
 obscure nature-worship, and when we send out 
 
1 THE FACE OF CHRIST 89 
 
 men to bring fine thinkers and religious men 
 to Christ we need to send the wisest that we 
 have." 
 
 "Yes," said the Serb, with large eyes, "it 
 could be done ; the churches could be brought- 
 to Christ, those outside the churches and all 
 the East. Then united humanity .would be at 
 hand. And when we are all one and at peace 
 we shall see the Master coming. That is what 
 you have asked to see, is it not, my friend ? " 
 
 "Yes, even so." 
 
 Something further should follow from the 
 union of Christendom and the mutual joy of 
 the sects, and that is the union of the nations. 
 As the true universal Church should include all 
 the smaller would-be churches, so humanity, 
 the true nation of God, should exhibit the 
 mutual joy of all the would-be chosen nations. 
 Nations are the sects of humanity as individuals 
 are the sects of the nations. They are not 
 meant to destroy one another but to amplify 
 one another — to amplify one another toward 
 the perfect man. French and Germans should 
 in friendship make something larger than either. 
 Russians and English should magnify one 
 another. Greeks and Italians and Serbs and 
 
90 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 Bulgars and Norwegians and Swedes, Spanish 
 and Portuguese, instead of being jealous of 
 one another, should be neighbours in Christian 
 communion. 
 
 Yet if these high ideals are to be practic- 
 ally consummated, Christ in man must be an 
 ascendant force, must be more and more 
 triumphant in individuality. If the devil in 
 man, or the animal, is the real characteristic 
 thing, this can never come about. If ill-will, 
 malevolence, hate, enmity, are characteristic, 
 this can never come about. If satiety and 
 normality, content and servility, the readiness 
 to be a happy slave, are characteristic traits 
 of humanity, then these high ideals can never 
 be realised in any objective way. They can 
 only exist as dreams in individual human 
 hearts, as the transcendent realities of individual 
 human lives. 
 
 If Nietzsche was altogether right, we are 
 wrong. If Napoleon was right, we are wrong. 
 If Rubeck was right, we are hopelessly wrong. 
 If men are animals, we are wrong ; if they are 
 devils, we are wrong. 
 
 Dushan, who now leads in the adventure, 
 turns his head less over his shoulder than I. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 91 
 
 He has a more stedfast vision. He is the man 
 vouchsafed to me from the crowd, and I shall 
 faithfully record his words. He comes to me 
 one evening, and I tell him as much as I can 
 of my quest and my need. It appears that 
 before I saw him he was as eager in the quest 
 as I. We are two independent seekers who 
 have met on life's road, an Englishman and 
 a Slav, very different, and yet having the 
 greatest of all things in common, a similar 
 spiritual desire. 
 
 " Let us start a new social life," says he, 
 "and begin an unorganised society to stand 
 instead of Church and State. Let us begin 
 seriously to realise the Kingdom of Heaven 
 upon earth. What is the use of going on for 
 ever in the old way of politics, revenge, wars, 
 separation ? Let us pray for the end of the 
 world, and prepare to make it ready for the 
 end. The Church, the churches as churches 
 stand in the way, as do statues and idols ; they 
 are all too visible and palpable. They have 
 all contradicted one another in the Great War, 
 have they not ? Not one has gone against the 
 State with which it was associated. Each and 
 every has blessed the cause and the killing. 
 
92 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 Because they have been organised they have 
 failed. Nothing organised as we understand 
 organisation can be part of the fabric of heaven. 
 Everything that ever has been or ever will be 
 organised will be struck as with a bar of iron 
 and dashed in pieces like a potter's vessel. 
 It was left out of the old Judaic command- 
 ments : Thou shall not organise ; and it seems 
 the Jews had more grace than we. It could 
 not even enter their minds to imagine that the 
 Kingdom could be organised ; though there 
 were occasions when the unwritten command- 
 ment was infringed, as when David took a 
 census of his people and was punished for 
 that departure from dependence upon the im- 
 measurable power of God. We for our part must 
 be without visible form. We must be Christen- 
 dom itself — the universal and indivisible. 
 
 " A universal society, unorganised, with no 
 list of members, no subscriptions, no president 
 or committee, no patrons, vice-patrons, no 
 publicity or appeals to the Press. Every new 
 member shall be a first member, and ought to 
 tell others whom he meets, even if they be 
 ourselves, what are the principles of the society 
 as he conceives of them." 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 93 
 
 " I don't quite see this society coming into 
 being. How can we realise such a society 
 without organisation ? " say I. 
 
 "The new society is consciousness," he 
 replies. "It is the mutual knowledge of 
 Christian people that one and another have the 
 Kingdom in their heart and eyes and the will 
 to the building of it guiding their hands and 
 feet. It is brotherhood and friendship and 
 faith in an illimitable, unseen brotherhood. It 
 is a discovering of that which is even now 
 existent in its beginnings but not visible." 
 
 " The Kingdom ? " 
 
 " The Kingdom of Heaven at present latent 
 in space, latent in society and the universe. 
 It is held negatively in the air. What we 
 have to do is to bring it on to the positive 
 side, develop it." 
 
 To this I agree. 
 
 "Very good, let us begin," says he. "We 
 must find those who are in agreement with us 
 in spirit and in life, and realise in them a sacred 
 fellowship, setting them on to realise the same 
 in others. Whenever you meet a new face and 
 can say in your heart — ' So you also are of the 
 Kingdom,' the society has been made larger 
 
94 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 by one man and the unity of Christendom has 
 been extended." 
 
 In every man the face of Christ is to be 
 descried. It follows, therefore, that every man 
 in the world is on his ideal side qualified to 
 enter this society and be part of it, part of 
 the sacred communion of the universal and 
 intangible Christendom. 
 
 It is something to work for, a quest to live 
 for. And we look on men's faces anew. 
 
 The first man, however, whom we meet, and 
 to whom we communicate the idea, gives us 
 some discouragement. He is deeply interested, 
 follows our thought closely, but eventually 
 gives his verdict in these words : " Very ideal- 
 istic : very, very wonderful ; the most desirable 
 thing that could possibly be imagined, and yet 
 you know I hardly think it likely to be realised." 
 
 And he takes the idea and converses with 
 many concerning it, makes it in fact a charming 
 item of Ijalk at ladies' tea-parties. And he 
 always adds his remark, " Very idealistic, but 
 not likely to come to anything, you know ! " 
 
 Says Dushan, "In every man there is 
 Christ, but only in that man is there no Christ 
 whatever." 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 95 
 
 That, however, is uncharitable. He is only 
 suffering from a sort of knock-knees, which is 
 called the English disease abroad, a type of 
 paralysis of will, perhaps, accompanied with 
 a mania for being a looker-on, a watcher and 
 criticiser, not a doer and maker in the realm 
 of the mind and the heart. Very characteristic- 
 ally twenty-two men play a match in our national 
 game, and a hundred thousand look on and 
 criticise and lay odds. Even in politics half the 
 nation is looking on and watching, priding itself 
 on anticipating the result, not so much wanting 
 a side to win as wanting to be on the winning 
 side. They do not so readily throw themselves 
 into the cause which they think true and good, 
 and work for it as if they had the power to 
 realise it against any odds in the world. Our 
 English disease — the disease of looking on. 
 
 At the outset also we come upon another 
 who gives us pause, a third man working in the 
 background of everyday life for the realisation 
 of Christianity. He does not believe, but has 
 this credo : Christianity has never been tried, 
 so it is not a failure ; why not give it a chance .'' 
 
 This is Mr. H , with his beautiful wife. 
 
 They wish to form a new political party, the 
 
96 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 party of common sense. Christianity to them 
 is the supreme common sense, the obvious thing 
 which nobody will try ! To them the advance- 
 ment of the Kingdom is the giving of more 
 education, the raising of wages and salary, the 
 striking away of the fetters of servitude, the 
 nationalisation of justice (the defraying of all 
 law costs by the State), model housing, and 
 minimum wages. As the party is the party of 
 common sense, any one of intelligence is qualified 
 to belong to it, even if in opposition to the pro- 
 gramme it puts forth. It welcomes those of 
 differing views, and appeals to all to co-operate 
 for the general good. Here is Christianity 
 masked by a practical programme — Peter's 
 voice saying, " Let us build three tabernacles." 
 But since they are so charitable, it follows we 
 can help them. They believe very strongly in 
 organisation ; in fact they think all human ills 
 can be removed by it. What is beautiful at 
 least is that they desire to raise humanity. We 
 long to give them the sense of the great con- 
 sciousness. There may come a time when the 
 idea of an unseen Kingdom of Heaven, which 
 
 might seem laughable to Mr. and Mrs. H 
 
 now, will be for them as realisable as for us. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 97 
 
 At the outset also behold a novelist pro- 
 mulgating the idea of a Theocracy : the de- 
 thronement of all visible kings in favour of an 
 invisible one, namely God ; the efifigies of 
 kings to be removed from our stamps and 
 coins and the emblem of the dove to be 
 substituted, so that it would be impossible for 
 Christ again to find the image and superscrip- 
 tion of Caesar on the money which should be 
 paid as tribute. The novelist foresees the 
 Kingdom. In this kingdom he says that when 
 a lawyer becomes convinced that the client he 
 is defending is in the wrong he will either give 
 up his case or do his best to persuade the 
 client to admit that he is not right. Rather an 
 astonishing idea that lawyers will be necessary 
 in the Kingdom, that they will still have any 
 function to perform — a kingdom controlled by 
 justice ! The God of this kingdom is the 
 " Captain of mankind," and He is served by a 
 world of obedient individuals wholly efficiently 
 serving Him. It seems to us to be a sort of 
 Prussia transmuted into the domain of the 
 eternal and absolute, with God as a blameless 
 and perfect Kaiser. But I am certain that a 
 kingdom founded on obedience rather than on 
 
 H 
 
98 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 impulse, and on justice rather than on love, is 
 an anachronism. That is Babel, the tower to 
 which the tireless builders continually return, 
 no matter how often its own inherent instability 
 brings it down. Human personality is not in 
 the nature of brick and beam, and that which 
 joins us and makes us one, the cement of our 
 eventual union, must have life in it, love in it. 
 There are two opposite types of building : 
 Babel and Sophia ; Babel is the seemingly 
 obvious and childish way of reaching Heaven. 
 Babel is built with square blocks; it is struc- 
 ture founded on justice and right. Sophia is 
 a temple not made by hands. Sophia is built 
 of living bricks ; it is founded on the love of 
 God. Babel is superstitious alchemy ; Sophia 
 is spiritual alchemy. The objection which 
 Catholics have to Masonry is that the Masons 
 are builders of Babel ; they inherit the traditions 
 of Babel and would always restore Babylon, 
 that is "the world," the material — evil Rome. 
 But there are also spiritual masons, namely, 
 those in the living wall of the Heavenly Jeru- 
 salem. Does not the secret of success in 
 building lie in the architectural conception, 
 in the places allocated to certain stones (for 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 99 
 
 the stone which the builders rejected is the 
 
 headstone of the corner), and is not the infinite 
 
 stability which is desired only to be obtained 
 
 by a living cement which grows from and is 
 
 grown into — the cement which is love ? The 
 
 theocracy of the Invisible King is the dream of 
 
 a completed and stable Tower of Babel. But 
 
 the voice of the novelist is the voice of the 
 
 people thinking about change. I also read in 
 
 his pages that he renounced the desire for 
 
 personal immortality. His immortality shall 
 
 be God. Once he rejoiced in the poet who 
 
 wrote : 
 
 I thank whatever gods there be 
 For my unconquerable soul ; 
 
 now his immortality is God. It bodes well to 
 hear such a thought whispered in the streets by 
 the man in the crowd. For to find one's im- 
 mortality in God is to find it in the changeless 
 and eternal Christendom which is now and is 
 for ever. 
 
 I am in the midst of the world. Yes : I 
 am also in the midst of the Church, in the 
 midst of the true communion of Jesus. I am 
 reminded of this by the example of my more 
 intimate friends. They are such wonderful 
 
loo THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 people. There is not one about whom one 
 might not write a long novel. And even then 
 no Dostoievsky could fully bring out the 
 marvellousness of God's creative hand appar- 
 ent in their souls. There is not a friend who 
 does not upon occasion make the heart ache 
 by the infinite wonder of his nature. It 
 evokes that which one can seldom show — a 
 wish to help in life, to love and express love 
 vitally and openly. The pathos of that con- 
 sciousness is that the friend cannot meet friend, 
 cannot be one with him when he has that 
 insight into him. He remains apart and 
 knows not what is in the other's heart. It is 
 perchance for him a secular moment. It will 
 be at a different time when the other's mind is 
 full of secular care that he will look at him with 
 the same aching joy and pain of knowledge and 
 love. But for me it seems now that I am on 
 the way to bridge over this separating ground 
 by that mutual Christian consciousness in which 
 it may be possible to exist and work. 
 
 I bring Dushan to Mr. N , whose 
 
 greatest interest in life is the treatment of 
 children. I remember how he came in one 
 day from visiting a home for boys, one for 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST loi 
 
 which he had lately become in a way 
 responsible as patron and magistrate. " There 
 has been an unpleasant case," said he. "A 
 boy has been found out in picking the pockets 
 of the others. Marked coins were put in 
 overcoat pockets, and one of the boys was 
 found with the same marked coins in his 
 possession. The master's idea was to cane him 
 and expel him, send him away. But I said to 
 him, 'It is no use sending him away to make 
 trouble in some other place. The boy is your 
 responsibility, and you've got to look after 
 him.' I put it to the rest of the boys that they 
 should decide what his punishment should be, 
 and they made several suggestions, chiefly of 
 thrashings. 'Well,' said I, ' I leave it to you 
 boys to decide what is to be done. Remember 
 he is one of you, and you can't get rid of him 
 by sending him away, and you've got to go on 
 living with him after you've punished him ! ' " 
 
 That is most characteristic of my friend 
 
 Mr. N . He is a practical Christian of 
 
 to-day : he is after Dostoievsky. 
 
 Dushan does not at first see how this atti- 
 tude touches us or the unorganised society. 
 But I explain how it appears to me one point 
 
I02 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 of departure for the practical realisation of the 
 Kingdom. The large thing has always its 
 integral unit, which is a small and seemingly 
 trivial thing when taken by itself. The new 
 attitude is the practical aspect of a new heart. 
 The new action follows from it. 
 
 Mr. N and his wife are two of the 
 
 moving spirits who brought into existence the 
 Children's Commonwealth, a republic of child 
 "criminals" which- manages its own affairs, 
 rules itself, institutes its own laws, elects its 
 parliament, its judges, and officers. Here the 
 treasurer of the republic is one who was sent 
 as an incorrigible thief, the despair of magis- 
 trates ; the judge is a lad who has been 
 several times birched. Boys and girls have 
 equal rights in every department, and the 
 good little mothers of the various public tables 
 have been very naughty girls in the outside 
 world. 
 
 One might well ask. Whatever would be- 
 come of a state composed entirely of thieves, 
 incendiaries, rascals, and beggars ? Would it 
 not be impossible ? The righteous, including 
 possibly ourselves, hold up our hands in 
 horror. But we are mistaken. The so-called 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 103 
 
 criminals are much more like ourselves than 
 we take them to be. They will do all right if 
 trusted. Distrust no doubt brings out the 
 things we fear. Possibly all the crime in the 
 world is caused by distrust. Distrust is 
 expecting the devil or animal in man to win ; 
 trust is expecting the Christ to win. 
 
 The attitude toward children can thus be a 
 starting-point for practical Christianity. Under 
 the old system the children had to be severely 
 disciplined and watched over, punished, and 
 upon occasion expelled. The schoolmaster was 
 the tyrant. Under the new system which is 
 now to be found here and there in Europe the 
 child is trusted, discipline is left largely to the 
 children themselves ; they have freedom, and 
 it is found that in that freedom they teach 
 themselves more, and make a truer start in 
 life than under the rigid standardising system. 
 Montessori is practical Christianity. Old edu- 
 cation endeavours to produce a type, or raise 
 to a given standard. New education recog- 
 nises that each individual human heart is 
 different and is capable of a distinct perfection 
 of its own. The true natural beauty in each 
 child must be allowed to develop, must not 
 
I04 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 be curbed in favour of some governmental 
 standard. 
 
 In a school there is one boy meant to be 
 a lyrical poet, another to be a wanderer and 
 seeker, a third to be a student and lover of 
 birds, a fourth to be a soldier, a fifth to be a 
 priest, a sixth to be a preacher, a seventh to be 
 a fisherman, an eighth to be a farmer, but all 
 are being trained to be clerks and taught short- 
 hand and indexing and commercial geography ; 
 or they are being given a gentleman's education 
 and standardised on dead French and Latin and 
 Greek and remote unnecessary science. They 
 are not given scope to show their natural gifts 
 and propensities, and so they die or are warped 
 — most commonly warped. The least gifted 
 become often the best scholars and the most 
 gifted commit crimes. 
 
 The masters believe in themselves, in their 
 boards and birches and syllabuses and curri- 
 culums, examinations, and prizes. They do not 
 believe in the children. But this attitude is 
 going. The children themselves must be 
 allowed to humanise these pedagogic houses 
 of correction. They must be given all manner 
 of power of initiation in educating themselves. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 105 
 
 I like that custom which exists in one of the 
 public schools of Britain, of granting sanctuary 
 to the boy during the first fortnight of his 
 school life. During that first fortnight at school 
 he may commit any crime he likes — against 
 the school laws, against his masters, against 
 his fellow-pupils — and no punishment whatever 
 will come to him from the school authorities. 
 In that fortnight the boy realises, as a rule, 
 that the wrong he does merely injures his fellow 
 and does not do him personally any good what- 
 ever. After the first fortnight he keeps the 
 school rules much better than he would have 
 done if he had not learned what it meant to 
 break them. That is a good start. 
 
 To believe practically in the inherent good- 
 ness of the child is a long step toward believing 
 in the goodness of humanity. As at a turn in 
 my quest I part company with a friend and I 
 seek the Christ in the passing crowd, he the 
 superman, devil or animal, so he who trusts the 
 child, even the child-criminal, is with us, and 
 he is co-operating with the eternal spiritual 
 tendencies. 
 
 We set out, therefore, to find teachers and 
 school inspectors who have faith, and we 
 
io6 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 acquaint them with one another and with 
 the larger vision of which their little parts are 
 essential portions. And it greatly rejoices those 
 whom we find : the message is one for which 
 they have been yearning. Living in isolation, 
 often condemned by those around them, they 
 have often despaired and almost given up. 
 But the practical realisation that many are 
 working with them and that they belong to a 
 great company confirms them and nourishes 
 them. Our message is Christ the living bread, 
 which must come to those working, as the poet 
 said, " in the squalid streets of Bethnal Green." 
 
 One day a political agent came to one whom 
 we know and wished him to have his name 
 placed on a register so that he might have 
 full rights of citizenship and vote at the next 
 election. It was an extraordinary bathos ; for 
 he had just obtained enfranchisement of the 
 Kingdom and had turned his face toward a 
 different capital and seat of government. 
 
 The attitude towards children is bed-rock. 
 For the child comes before the man. But 
 when school life gives way to the freer and 
 more responsible existence there is a similar 
 new Christian attitude toward one's fellow- 
 
r THE FACE OF CHRIST ' 107 
 
 man, towards society as a whole, a new social 
 criterion or standard. 
 
 Dushan told me that as a child he was not 
 brought up on Christian principles, but obtained 
 his joys by stealth like a little Spartan, and his 
 joys were in breaking laws. Laws were made 
 to be broken, and the resultant punishments 
 were the obvious hazards for a game. He 
 learned in the larger school of life — is learning 
 in that school. And we may fittingly ask at 
 this stage of the quest, " What exactly is wrong 
 with this larger school of the world ? What is 
 really old-fashioned, out of date there ? " 
 
 Be it remarked in passing that whatever is 
 wrong is really old-fashioned, very old-fashioned. 
 We can safely reproach the criminal in that he 
 is very old-fashioned and out of date in his 
 doings — "Oh dear, you are terribly old- 
 fashioned, fearfully out of date, shockingly un- 
 original — like the story of Cain and Abel, or 
 of David and Uriah." 
 
 What are the old-fashioned things in the 
 school of the world? We recognise them at 
 once : 
 
 Hate. 
 Punishment. 
 
io8 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 Readiness to condemn : intolerance. 
 
 Mechanical control of individuals. 
 
 The servility of the masses. 
 
 The consequent vulgarity. 
 
 Man not living according to his true dignity. 
 
 The feeling of being responsible for oneself 
 
 alone and not in any way responsible for 
 
 what others do. 
 
 These things are not separate, but part of an 
 old ramshackle system according to which man 
 has hitherto lived. 
 
 The righteous magistrate is of opinion that 
 Mr. X, who lives on the immoral earnings of a 
 woman, must be severely flogged. He does not 
 see that if that is so, he, the magistrate, ought 
 also to be flogged, and so ought I — indeed, 
 who ought not ? As when Christ defended the 
 woman accused of adultery, there is no one 
 without sin in this matter. Mr. X exists, there- 
 fore I partly live on the immoral earnings of a 
 woman, so does the righteous magistrate. 
 
 Mrs. J. has been convicted of fiendish cruelty 
 to children. "Is she not to be punished, 
 then?" asks the magistrate. In Mrs. J. the 
 fiend is predominant, the devil has got a-top. 
 And, as we know, there is a devil in all of us — 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 109 
 
 only most of us strive away from it toward the 
 Christ in us. Humanity on the whole tends 
 toward Christ, not toward the devil. Still 
 Mrs. J. and her like exist in the midst of us. 
 What is to be done with her ? She cannot be 
 allowed to go on torturing children. On the 
 other hand, it is no use lashing her or giving 
 her penal servitude. Most probably she could 
 not be otherwise than she is. Through fear of 
 consequences we might force her to keep her 
 hands off the children. But then she would go 
 about the world with hating and malignant eyes. 
 Her voice would obtain a new wickedness. 
 She would bring out the devil of cruelty in 
 others, suggest the lust of torture to minds 
 where Christ and devil are only just balanced. 
 It is better to make for her a special sort of 
 asylum, have horror at the devil, and stand in 
 an attitude of patient love towards her. For 
 her true ego is not this hating, torturing spirit. 
 An old devil, from which humanity as a 'whole 
 is moving away, is localised in her and has 
 terrific power. The devil, being purged from 
 the body politic, has come to a loathsome head 
 at one spot — that spot is this Mrs. J. 
 
 The problem cannot be solved right out. 
 
no THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 but it will be solved in time. We can best help 
 by understanding what subconscious spiritual 
 suffering goes on in the being of the cruel 
 person, by remaining in an attitude of love, 
 remembering that in the cruel one we also are 
 cruel, we have an ex-physical strain of cruelty 
 localised in Mrs. J. or in her like. 
 
 Individual wisdom prompted by love must 
 be allowed to deal with such cases. It does 
 not matter what the treatment is as long as the 
 attitude is true. Getting rid of the devil or 
 animal or lower being altogether is a difficult 
 problem and a long problem, but we are more 
 on the way to it when we are prejudiced by the 
 spirit of love and the sense of unity. 
 
 We loathe the procurer, the child-torturer, 
 the street woman, the person who for any reason 
 has ever been in prison, the divorced, the 
 bankrupt, the publicly disgraced, the quack 
 prophet, the hypocrite, the person belonging to 
 the opposite party, the publican, the drunkard, 
 the gambler, the fraudulent company-promoter, 
 the self-advertiser, the person who belongs to 
 a different sect of the Church, the man who 
 loves incense and ritual, the dull Puritan, the 
 eccentric believer, the psychic, the spiritualist. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST in 
 
 the Theosophist, the person who says he be- 
 lieves but understands nothing, the person who 
 seems to understand but does not believe, 
 the person who dresses differently, lives in a 
 different type of house, the person " mad " for 
 a different hobby, the vegetarian, the meat- 
 eater ... to an infinity of diversified dislike 
 or disgust. 
 
 It's all very old-fashioned. Instead of this 
 intolerance let us seek joy in difference, joy 
 in God's handiwork, delight in manifold ex- 
 pression ; instead of condemnation and hate, 
 understanding and love ; instead of punishments 
 and deterrents, means of putting in the true 
 way of life and understanding. 
 
 It is said that hate gives life a zest and an 
 interest. It may be so, but it is nothing to the 
 zest and interest which come through under- 
 standing. Even the study of natural history 
 gives a satisfying joy, and if the ways of men 
 and women be studied merely on the low level 
 of natural history, there is a greater joy than 
 in intolerance and hate. And natural history 
 is a stepping-stone to Divine history. 
 
 There are two paths : one, the path of 
 mechanical control ; the other, the path of self- 
 
112 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 realisation.^ The first path is the old, the 
 second the new. The first is checked by 
 condemnation of error and punishment ; the 
 second must be allowed to be checked by the 
 promptings of the individual human heart with 
 infinite allowance made. 
 
 In the great community of humanity — I do 
 not mean merely the crowd, but in the great 
 community of which the passing crowd is a 
 part — there is a becoming, a changing. New 
 types are being cast up and may be found. 
 These new types are not the supermen so 
 confidently expected a while ago, but Christ- 
 types. I do not mean prophet-types, though 
 the character and life of these new types has 
 in it something of the prophetical. The types 
 of which I speak are those we seek — the men 
 and women whose steps are turning naturally 
 along the new path. For instance, all who 
 make spiritual choice are of the new ; those 
 who simply obey are of the old. Those who 
 go out on adventures involving pain and hard- 
 ship are of the new ; those who cling to the 
 comfort of the obvious are of the old. Those 
 
 ^ Developed with literary power in — What Is and What Might Be, 
 by Edmond Holmes. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 113 
 
 who take their stand as animals, even cheerful 
 and intellectual animals, are of the old; but 
 those who deny the animal are of the new. 
 The egoist is of the old, the altruist of the 
 new, the narrow family man and family woman 
 are of the old, the one who can extend his 
 kinship is of the new ; the merely national is 
 of the old, the universal of the new. Those 
 who hate, separate off, standardise human 
 beings for commercial or military ends are of 
 the old ; those who love, join together, and 
 delight in diversity are of the new. Those 
 who stand on their human dignity are of the 
 old ; those who understand their spiritual 
 dignity are of the new. Those who blame 
 others or seek to exonerate themselves are of 
 the old ; those who take sins upon themselves 
 are of the new. Those who wish the world to 
 be controlled by justice are of the old ; those 
 who are ready to solve any legal count against 
 them by love and sacrifice are of the new. 
 " For the law was given by Moses, but grace 
 and truth came by Jesus Christ." And out of 
 all the new the invisible company of the Church 
 is forming, coming into being, into a mutual 
 consciousness ; and I see the old receding and 
 
 I 
 
114 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 the new increasing, as it were morning light 
 pouring into a night which has been partly 
 of sleep and partly of troubled dreams and 
 meditations. 
 
 Not that the old does not seem to return, 
 and midnight darkness seem to threaten dawn. 
 In church one Sunday Dushan and I hear a 
 preacher say : " When I was young I dwelt 
 mostly in the New Testament, but the older 
 I get the more do I return to the Old. And 
 the time in which we live seems to be an Old 
 Testament time. We are now two thousand 
 five hundred years before Christ, in the reign of 
 King Hezekiah." He did not understand the 
 naiveU of the confession that for him it would 
 be two thousand five hundred years before 
 Christ was even born ! " But that is nothing," 
 says the Serb. " There are many who are 
 much further back than Hezekiah, many who 
 have not even reached the Old Testament. 
 We must not despair if even the Pope himself 
 were to preach that sermon. The Pope has 
 said that the force of right should displace the 
 force of might, and that the world quarrel 
 should be settled on lines of equity and justice.^ 
 
 ' Papal Note of August i, 191 7. 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 115 
 
 That is really an Old Testament utterance, 
 though it has seemed too advanced for half 
 Europe, even so. But we should not doubt 
 that the real date is a.d, 191 8 and not 2500 B.C." 
 
 "Why do you think the Pope is Old 
 Testament ? " I ask. 
 
 " Well," says Dushan, " the force of might, 
 the ordinary force of the war, is barbarian, is 
 it not ? It is pre-Old Testament. Right came 
 by Moses with the Commandments. That is 
 Old Testament. But the only force that can 
 solve problems to-day is that of love. Love 
 is New Testament, and instead of equity and 
 justice and condemnation and indemnity, and 
 the like, there is sacrifice. 
 
 " Barbarian — might. 
 
 " Judaic — justice and right, condemnation, 
 punishment. 
 
 " Christian — love, sacrifice, understanding, 
 joy in diversity, forgiveness. 
 
 " But it is almost impossible for an organ- 
 ised body to regulate life in the Christian spirit. 
 The fact of organisation drives Christian men 
 and women back upon the seemingly more 
 practical and simple basis of right and law and 
 justice. That basis, however, has proved a 
 
ii6 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 failure and is an anachronism, as the uneasy 
 Pope himself probably knows. Probably in 
 his heart his passion is to reconcile the world 
 through love, but backward humanity drags 
 him back to ' right.' " 
 
 " The Socialists are full of faith, however," 
 I urge. "They are in full cry to save the 
 world by a system of social yusiz'ce." 
 
 "That will visibly fail," says Dushan. "The 
 world can only be saved and made at one by 
 social sacrifice." 
 
 "You do not think we are in a hopeless 
 minority nursing this thought ? " 
 
 " A minority, perhaps, but not hopeless. 
 There are many moving, the whole world is 
 moving, with Popes and priests and organisa- 
 tions and myriad -hearted humanity. Christ 
 said that he who was not against Him was for 
 Him. It is now nearly two thousand years 
 later. Now He would say. He who is for Me 
 is for Me, and he who is against Me will be 
 for Me. Certain things have come to pass in 
 two thousand years." 
 
 So Dushan and I, wandering aniong 
 magistrates, preachers, and teachers, seek 
 those who are clearly " for " and have the 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 117 
 
 new faith. And nowadays every one has be- 
 come a magistrate and mounts the bench to 
 pass judgment. But among magistrates as 
 among teachers we find also the beginnings of 
 the Kingdom which our faith bids us seek, 
 and begin to find the unseen walls of the 
 true Church. 
 
 And what we apply to human society 
 around us we apply also to Europe at large 
 and to the world. The nations are a school 
 hitherto run on old-fashioned lines with endless 
 condemnation and bitterness and strife and 
 little learning. Now Europe itself might be a 
 sort of Montessori school where the nations 
 are the children. If that is too childish a con- 
 ception, remember the Christ's saying about 
 children — of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 A happy Europe would still be far from being 
 the Kingdom, but it must be young Europe, 
 unfinished Europe, Europe learning still, Europe 
 on the way, not conceited, self-satisfied Europe, 
 Europe enough unto itself. Yes, Europe as a 
 perfect Montessori school — that is the inward- 
 ness of the League of Nations idea. Not a 
 league to enforce peace, which is an illiberal 
 idea, but a league to allow freedom and self- 
 
ii8 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 realisation and immunity from the condemnation 
 of neighbours. 
 
 I am present at a meeting of professors and 
 philosophers discussing social reconstruction 
 after the War. All manner of precautions 
 against war breaking out afresh are suggested, 
 and it is curious that the whole solemn dis- 
 cussion gives way at the end to a plea for 
 better manners and a spirit of mutual tolerance 
 and kindness. The best way to avert war is 
 by understanding foreign nations and allowing 
 their right to exist and develop to the self- 
 realisation of man and the glory of God the 
 Creator. The man who makes this plea has 
 the faith of the new era, of the coming of the 
 Kingdom. 
 
 We search among publicists and politicians 
 for those who have this spirit of mutual toler- 
 ance and kindness, who do not cry, " God punish 
 Germany, God punish England," and the like ; 
 for those who love any particular other race, 
 who understand and can interpret, for those 
 who write about foreign peoples positively, 
 who are not ready to turn a penny by appeal- 
 ing to the traditional distrust of the foreigner 
 but who can see and will tell of the bright 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 119 
 
 though different life of the foreigner. And 
 we find more than are expected by those who 
 are pessimists regarding humanity — lovers of 
 France, Russia, Italy, Germany, Bulgaria, 
 America, Japan, China, Turkey. . . . 
 
 We seek also those who are ready to erase 
 the colour bar. Wl>ite man must love and 
 understand black man, yellow man. Americans 
 learn to be good Europeans and not merely 
 Americans when they rejoin Britain in her 
 struggle. But America comes laden with the 
 sadness of the plight of the black man, her 
 ten millions of liberated slaves, many of whom 
 will also have shed their blood and mingled it 
 in death with the blood of whites for the same 
 cause. She comes laden also with enmity 
 toward the yellow man, and is predisposed to 
 settle a dispute with Japan by the same ana- 
 chronistic force of arms and appeal for justice 
 and right. She will not readily give to Japan 
 over and above what Japan wants in the West, 
 and so win more goodwill in the grand common- 
 alty of humanity. But if America comes thus 
 encumbered, we come to her not less so. We 
 English have India on our conscience and the 
 denial of the brotherhood of the most wonderful 
 
I20 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 peoples of the East. India has mingled her 
 blood with ours also on the field of death for 
 the same ideals ; it is for us to meet her now 
 with love and sacrifice and the convincing 
 reality of our religion. And in Africa it must 
 no longer be possible to reproach us as King 
 Cetewayo said : " First come missionary, then 
 come rum, then come trader, then come soldiers " 
 — nor for the soldier to yearn to be shipped 
 east of Suez that he may raise a thirst for sin. 
 
 Our civilising mission ought to have been 
 to have won the coloured peoples, not to find 
 means of basely using them or of enslaving 
 them. 
 
 Russia brings the burden of the hate of 
 the Jews. The Jews must be won also to 
 Christ, as indeed we confidently know they will 
 be won in time. There are still great numbers 
 not of Jewish nationality who are Judaic in 
 their religion, even whilst calling themselves 
 Christian. They must all be won to Christ. 
 Our Christian example is too faint. We meet 
 the Jews on their own ground of law and right 
 instead of in the spirit of sacrifice and love. In 
 any case we must tolerate their Judaism and 
 Jewish ways, and know and expect that as 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 121 
 
 Christ arose from them two thousand years ago, 
 so Christians can and must spring from them 
 now and hereafter. 
 
 It was Christ who discovered for us that 
 there was only one law — love — and that all other 
 true laws, though seen as separate, were part 
 of one and the same law. In science a similar 
 discovery was made by the Russian Mendeleeff, 
 namely, that there was only one substance, and 
 that all the elements, so definite in their 
 separateness, were aspects of one and the same 
 substance, that all. the elements in Nature are 
 related to one another in a grand design, and 
 that put into that relationship in that design 
 they make a unity. All the marvellous indi- 
 viduality of the elements can be accommodated 
 in a higher collective unity. And that unity, 
 when realised, covers all the diversity of the 
 elements. 
 
 The time has come for the elements of 
 humanity to realise the same. In a few living 
 it is realised. Two things are needed : a love 
 of the diversity and an understanding of the 
 unity. 
 
 The excitement of the chemist in allocating 
 the places of the elements in the one circle of 
 
122 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 the common substance may be imagined, the 
 thrill with which true neighbours were under- 
 stood as adjacent colours in the spectrum, 
 the greater thrill caused by the blanks left by 
 the ignorance of certain elements not yet 
 discovered. The thrill of the seer is not less 
 in gazing at the spectrum of humanity. To 
 realise that the truism, It takes all sorts to make 
 a world, is really true ! That it takes all sorts 
 not merely here and now but about the eternal 
 throne of God ! 
 
 The idea of the last judgment as a roll-call 
 goes, and we see instead a humanity all diverse 
 and yet one before God. The shepherd who 
 leaves the ninety-nine in the fold and goes out 
 into the wilderness to seek the lost one is like 
 the scientist seeking the undiscovered metal of 
 the spectrum. Some very insignificant non- 
 useful element is needed, and there is no 
 complete peace or harmony till it be found. 
 Every individuality is precious "in the vast 
 and perfect plan," every minority counts. The 
 word "judgment" is probably wrong. The 
 finale of man's existence cannot be a judgment. 
 On the other hand, can it be merely a gloria, 
 a prolonged, indefinite, but infinitely sincere 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 123 
 
 alleluia ? The human mind stops short, re- 
 cognising its own incapacity. We are blind 
 and deaf and dumb as to the significance of the 
 grand finale of history. 
 
 But the thought comes to me that \}a.2X finale, 
 whether it be Last Judgment or an ultimate 
 gloria on the lips of all mankind, is not some- 
 thing afar off in time. It is something happen- 
 ing now — and it always has been happening, 
 always will be happening, all the time. 
 
 The spectrum of light shows an infinite 
 blending of tints, polarised for our eyes in the 
 seven primary colours, and there is a vision of 
 Creation as just such a spectrum — the rainbow 
 which comes about when the creative light of 
 God's being shines through the one substance. 
 
 The spectrum of humanity, as the recording 
 angel beholds it, shows an infinite blending 
 of individuals polarised possibly for angelic as 
 well as human eyes in races and nations, and 
 as we all whirl before God we become the 
 whiteness of the Church. 
 
 What then of space and time ? 
 
 Has not infinite space, as we weakly call it, 
 a spectrum which is an infinite series of places 
 polarised in worlds and universes ? 
 
124 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 And time ? Eternity ? 
 
 The spectrum of eternity is the infinite 
 blending of times which we understand as 
 hours, days, eras, just as the spectrum of im- 
 mortaHty must be our mortality, and of the 
 infinite mind our minds, and of the Father's 
 love our love. 
 
 Time is not a straight line or a river ; it is a 
 sphere and God is at the centre. He looks at 
 past, present, and future at will. And mankind, 
 as it was in error thinking the world flat, has 
 been similarly in error thinking of time as 
 something which is going on, some infinite 
 straight line or river. 
 
 The whole Kingdom, in all its aspects, is 
 changing, changing, blending, blending. There 
 is movement encircling and involving lesser 
 movement ; there are greater movements still 
 and greater, and that which is greater under- 
 stands that which is less, but that which is less 
 only vaguely apprehends that which is greater ; 
 greater and ever greater movements, diverse in 
 plane and in direction. And yet I suppose the 
 sum of all is absolute and motionless stability. 
 God is at the centre in the Eternal Now, and 
 as it were looks in the mirror, seeing I -am- 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 125 
 
 that- 1 -am. That is the last judgment for ever 
 going on. 
 
 " That is the greatest vision," says Dushan. 
 " If we could see it all and see it clearly, and if 
 we could all see it all the time, a universal con- 
 sciousness of the highest would be realised. 
 You do not see it clearly, I do not see it clearly. 
 No individual or group can see it clearly or 
 understand in fulness what it means. But 
 perhaps all humanity reconciled and at one 
 could see. The Argus-eyed body politic of all 
 who are alive or dead could realise it." 
 
 " But where in all this is Christ ? Where is 
 the face that I seek ? " I ask. 
 
 " Christ sees," he replies. 
 
 " I am losing sight of Christ. He is becom- 
 ing too theoretical," say I. 
 
 " He is not theoretical," says Dushan. " He 
 is the ideal side of our personality, of all men's 
 personality. And that is the greatest reality 
 of our life." 
 
 "It is real," say I. " But is that ideal side 
 of you and me the same which sees the last 
 judgment for ever going ? is he the Argus-eyed 
 of whom you spoke ? " 
 
126 THE QUEST OF THE FACE i 
 
 " The same." 
 
 "Who then was Jesus Christ who walked in 
 Palestine, the actual historical figure ? " 
 
 "He was the ideal side of our personality." 
 
 "If so, we have made a historical reality 
 into an abstraction." 
 
 " Not in the least. All humanity is one 
 physically, we are all out of Adam and Eve. 
 All humanity, though less obviously, is also 
 spiritually one. In all of us the physical side 
 predominates and the spiritual is hidden. But 
 Jesus Christ was the redeeming case. In Him 
 the hidden side of our common spirituality was 
 focussed. As a historical figure He was at the 
 centre of the racial process. He was at the 
 heart of corporate humanity, and in Him we 
 see reflected our ideal personality. He reflects 
 the ideal personality of all mankind visibly on 
 the earth. From all points of the hidden and 
 mysterious background of mankind lines were 
 drawn to one point and the resultant came 
 through to our material plane in Him. In Him 
 the whole of our spiritual side blossomed and 
 took features and form. No, no theory, I assure 
 you : actual fact. That is how it was possible 
 to say that as in Adam all die, so in Christ 
 
I THE FACE OF CHRIST 127 
 
 should all be made alive ; when He appears we 
 shall be like Him ; I am the Vine, ye are the 
 branches. ... I am the Door, by Me if any 
 man enter in he shall be saved. 
 
 " Through Christ is the way to the spiritual 
 unity which is at the background of us all. 
 When you realise that, then if you will you can 
 exchange bodies and become me, or your neigh- 
 bour in the street, or any one at will. You can 
 exchange personality and being at will, and go 
 in and out among humanity." 
 
 " The dead as well as the living ? " 
 
 "Yes, certainly." 
 
 " And those who will be born ? " 
 
 ' ' They are already alive in us. You can go 
 backward or forward in time. So you become 
 one with Christ and have the Face you seek 
 for, you become the changing one yourself and 
 the redeemer. Whenever you understand a 
 fellow-man you redeem him. And you cannot 
 understand him fully without understanding all." 
 
THE IMMORTAL 
 
 K 
 
Christ is the whole significance of our mortality. Were we 
 not mortals we should not have Christ. If we did not die we 
 should all remain separate individualities, persistent and selfish. 
 But because we all die we can understand our unity — our being 
 one flesh and one spirit. We can love. It is the look of mortal- 
 ity in the eyes that beckons to us to love one another. The im- 
 mortals have clear, hard eyes and they cannot be loved. Their 
 faces would be terrible to us if we could look upon them. Yet 
 how men cling to the length of this life and see an absolute evil 
 in mortality/ To seek to be perpetuated as we are is the 
 opposite of seeking Christ. He lives the best who is always 
 ready to die. 
 
II 
 
 THE IMMORTAL 
 
 There are possibly several mortals living, 
 several men who though they were born 
 thousands of years ago have never died. Not 
 that their immortality is more real than ours. 
 It is different, that is all. We pass through 
 the gate of death, pass perhaps often through 
 death on our long way. They simply never 
 die. By now probably they have become in- 
 visible to ordinary human gaze, completely 
 transparent, translucent, and it is in vain that 
 pilgrims having the clue to their existence still 
 seek them on the remote peaks of Hindu 
 Kush. I have the story of Celeus, or Cilfa 
 as he was called by another generation, who 
 discovered the infinitely rare drug which alters 
 the psychic state and liberates the partial 
 human soul from the chain of death. 
 
 131 
 
132 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ii 
 
 Cilfa obtained the secret from his aged 
 father, who, as a result of a life-long task, had 
 discovered the element of the elixir and also 
 means of obtaining the rarefied magnetic force 
 without the application of which the drug is use- 
 less. Cilfa's father, the old sorcerer, was afraid 
 of being perpetuated as a half-blind tottering 
 hunchback with one foot eternally in the grave, 
 and perhaps experience had given him strange 
 wisdom. He bequeathed the elixir to his son, 
 bidding him think well before he applied it. 
 There was only enough for one person, and 
 possibly the whole world did not contain sufficient 
 to make a second dose. So the aged father 
 bade him imagine his loneliness, the danger of 
 humanity finding him out and imprisoning him 
 from generation to generation, perhaps for ever. 
 
 But Cilfa had no doubts. It appealed to 
 him as the most wonderful adventure — to live 
 for ever. Once he had been under sentence of 
 death and had stood bound in front of an execu- 
 tioner, and he knew what it was to face parting 
 with sweet life, the anguish of it. And then 
 when reprieve had come he had remembered 
 that all the same a day of death had to come 
 to him some time. So he accepted the elixir. 
 
II THE IMMORTAL 133 
 
 Only he determined to keep it a secret ; the 
 rest of humanity must not know. For if they 
 did a great deal of the zest would be gone. 
 He would become the richest and wisest man 
 in the world. No one should know his age. 
 But when the records showed him inconveniently 
 old he would go to another clime with a great 
 amount of wealth and start again as a nobody. 
 And so on — for an eternity in a straight line. 
 It was maddeningly thrilling. 
 
 Lest he should lose his mental balance in 
 his excitement, he decided to take the potion at 
 once. He did so. But not a moment too 
 soon. For as he held the fatal glass distraction 
 was already in his eyes, his brain reeled, and 
 his hand went to and fro like a branch in the 
 wind. Even his lips refused at first to open, 
 and when he by luck, as it were, got the vessel 
 to his mouth and drank the few drops, he bit 
 and broke the glass. But then at once a great 
 relief: 'twas done, 'twas not missed, he was 
 immortal, he would never die. He lay down 
 at once where he was and slept. 
 
 When Cilfa awoke, he at once remembered 
 that he had taken the elixir, but he had an un- 
 easy feeling that he had slept a thousand years, 
 
134 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ii 
 
 the light about him seemed new and everything 
 seemed to have altered. It was with a great 
 deal of relief that he realised that he could not 
 have been asleep more than an hour and that 
 he had lost very little of eternity. His father's 
 funeral was going past and he heard the wailing 
 of those people he had paid to mourn. It was 
 the same world as a moment before : the only 
 difference was he had become immortal. 
 
 So he sat down and began to think of life. 
 He thought of his grudges and was consumed 
 with mirth at the thought of his secret superior- 
 ity to his enemies. He thought of a certain 
 man who had him in his power, Balbo, whom 
 he had feared for ten years. He thought of 
 many pleasant acquaintances and their friendly 
 rivalry, and he thought of a woman whose 
 favour he had been mad to have — of whose 
 true lover he had been mortally jealous, but he 
 did not think long of them. • 
 
 " Was my father right ? " he asked himself. 
 " Was he right in thinking he would have been 
 perpetuated in the form of an old man .■* Would 
 he not have returned to his prime ? " 
 
 Cilfa considered himself. Nothing seemed 
 to have changed. He was forty. It was rather 
 
II THE IMMORTAL 135 
 
 staggering to think that at forty thousand he 
 would look the same — a little grey, a little 
 tired about the eyes, pallid, weak at the knees 
 and rather easily tired. 
 
 Whether it was the draught of immortality 
 or the nervous stimulus of a new idea, Cilfa felt 
 less predisposed to tiredness, felt in fact a 
 certain alacrity and energy in his body. He 
 decided to visit Yooxa, though he did not want 
 her so much now that he was immortal. 
 
 "In order to love a woman well, one ought 
 to remain eternally at twenty-five," Cilfa re- 
 flected. " A woman never forgives a man 
 being less than his prime." 
 
 But he was in no way mortified by the 
 thought. He walked along the Olive way to 
 the familiar domain associated with so many 
 heartburnings. And the little olive leaves were 
 dropping yellow and red. All Nature was 
 turning towards death, and though Cilfa had 
 little poetry in his soul, it touched him now to 
 think that everything else went inexorably on 
 toward death but he remained changeless. 
 
 He took to Yooxa a gold ornament, a gift 
 she had already scornfully refused, and he 
 brought it again. 
 
136 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ii 
 
 He came to her bower and she bade him 
 wait. Her true lover held her in his arms and 
 she told him who it was had come. And they 
 laughed together and let him wait. " Let him 
 wait," said Yooxa. 
 
 So Cilfa waited. For, as he reflected, he 
 had plenty of time. He waited so patiently 
 that at last Yooxa was enraged. She flung 
 out to him in a fury, and, seizing the proffered 
 ornament from his hand, dashed it on his brow. 
 
 Cilfa felt no pain. It was as if a leaf had 
 struck him. And he did not care for Yooxa. 
 
 He stood facing her, smiling, and asked 
 gently when she would have leisure. 
 
 And Yooxa, in astonishment, fled within. 
 Cilfa had never treated her in this way before. 
 
 He went now toward the city and the mer- 
 chants. He had decided to give up his old 
 life of hunting and farming and to become a 
 man of gold. He decided to sell his patrimony 
 and open money -changing tables. With money- 
 changing as a foundation he would become a 
 secret money-lender, first on a small scale, and 
 later on a large scale. His wealth would 
 become fabulous but his actual resources he 
 would keep secret, and certainly in course of 
 
n THE IMMORTAL 137 
 
 time they must be even greater than any silly 
 fable or legend would suggest. He would buy 
 men ; some female slaves, some military cap- 
 tives. But that would be awkward : he could 
 not have thousands of slaves. Such property 
 would be too obvious and cumbrous. He 
 would buy the opinions and actions of important 
 men. The Grand Vizier would need perhaps 
 ten thousand pieces of gold to change his 
 opinion when the Sultan consulted him. He 
 had better become Vizier himself in time. And 
 then Sultan. 
 
 With this in view he bought a little kiosk 
 for changing money, and the alien foreigners 
 who sat at the other tables laughed among 
 themselves to see a hunter and farmer think of 
 breaking in upon their business. 
 
 It was now six hours since Cilfa had taken 
 the elixir, and as he thought he ought to feel 
 hungry he repaired to a tavern and ordered a 
 large meal. When it appeared he ate a very 
 little and felt completely sated, could not touch 
 anything more. 
 
 So he turned once more into the city and 
 chose the house he would live in in fifty years' 
 time, and then a much larger for a hundred 
 
138 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ir 
 
 years. " I shall be one hundred and forty 
 years old but may perhaps pretend to be eighty 
 and wear a grey wig," thought he to himself. 
 " At one hundred and forty I ought to be rich 
 enough to be buying large souls. But probably 
 I had better not begin in this city. I ought 
 to arrange for my death and disappearance, 
 and then appear in another city without wig 
 and with a new name and a very considerable 
 quantity of gold." 
 
 He began to think out the luxury of the 
 house that he would buy fifty years hence, its 
 silks and carpets, its beds and canopies, the 
 elegance of his servants, the beauty of his 
 wives. Then a malicious thought seized him — 
 the idea of buying Yooxa. With untold wealth 
 he could no doubt contrive to get any woman 
 into his power. The problem of buying Yooxa 
 would be comparatively simple if he had enough 
 money. But of course in fifty years she would 
 be sixty-seven. So that was really out of the 
 question, and he did not care for her much now 
 as it was. Having immortality, how could he 
 possibly concern himself long with the grace of 
 a puny, wasting girl ! 
 
 His steps now bore him to the district of the 
 
II THE IMMORTAL 139 
 
 scholars and disputers, where was always endless 
 wrangling over ideas. Never had Cilfa dreamed 
 of taking a part there. Hunter and farmer were 
 too stupid occupations to qualify him to say a 
 word in this arena. But he was tickled now with 
 the idea that he could silence every one of them, 
 if not in one moment, at least in course of time. 
 So he went up to a noisy throng and interrupted 
 the disputers, and claimed to say his word. 
 
 One in the crowd recognised Cilfa and told 
 the others it was a farmer, and with much mirth 
 they let him climb to the speaker's eminence 
 to make a speech. All expected a long and 
 monstrously foolish speech, and were ready to 
 pull him down or pull the boards from under 
 him when he exceeded their patience. 
 
 Cilfa stood in front of them like a statue 
 and said not a word. 
 
 The disputers became silent, and then 
 violently impatient. 
 
 "Time is precious to them," thought Cilfa 
 maliciously. 
 
 "Pull the fool down," said some one. And 
 then Cilfa raised his hand and, smiling, gently 
 uttered his speech — only four words — and then 
 bowed solemnly and descended. 
 
I40 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ii 
 
 " All men are fools," said Cilfa, and bowed, 
 and that was all. 
 
 There was silence for a moment, and it 
 almost seemed as if the hunter had made an 
 impression. But some one suddenly whispered 
 the joke, " He knows, he knows," and every 
 one laughed at him. 
 
 But Cilfa reflected to himself, I shall come 
 back regularly and say it for the next hundred 
 years. By then my victory will have come. 
 
 "It would be good to become wise," thought 
 Cilfa. " I am too stupid to become so in an 
 ordinary lifetime, but I'm young enough in 
 eternity to begin. I ought to learn all there is 
 to know. I could learn every important book 
 by heart. Mortal humanity throughout all time 
 might be my slaves, working just for me." 
 
 And he returned to his home to rest, did so 
 mechanically from long habit, just because the 
 hour was late. But he had no need to rest, 
 and though he lay down to sleep he only slept 
 half an hour. The next night following he only 
 slept a quarter of an hour ; the night following 
 that, seven minutes and thirty seconds or there- 
 abouts. On the eighth night he slept twelve 
 seconds, and a week later still all the sleep he 
 
II THE IMMORTAL 141 
 
 needed was one-tenth of a second. So there 
 was no doubt about it, the elixir had begun to 
 work in some way and was likely to be genuine. 
 Cilfa had infinite faith in his old father's research 
 and never doubted his immortality. 
 
 What happened with regard to his sleep 
 found a counterpart in his appetite. It rapidly 
 decreased, and it was soon evident that he had 
 extremely little need of food. He did not get 
 tired and he did not get hungry. He did not 
 suffer from indigestion or liver, and was indeed 
 aware of a steady constitutional change for the 
 better. 
 
 He sold his farm and his estate and became 
 a townsman. The swarthy aliens who did the 
 money business did not laugh at him long, for 
 he was remarkably successful as a money- 
 changer. He was unusually sharp and per- 
 spicacious, and developed what is called a firm 
 upper lip and a strong chin. He had a growing 
 hard contempt for his fellow-beings, and brow- 
 beat them in all transactions with them. When- 
 ever he met a man, even were he the cunningest 
 or hardest of the town, Cilfa would be the 
 harder, and the other would be conscious of a 
 sort of ineffectiveness, a furtiveness, an inability 
 
142 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ii 
 
 to look facts in the face. But Cilfa would say 
 what he meant and intended forthwith, and 
 would win. 
 
 Cilfa's old friends of the hunt looked a little 
 askance at him, but he had many new friends 
 who flattered and wondered, and stood by to 
 be helped by him. 
 
 And Yooxa, who had despised him, came 
 round in her views, and he did not need to 
 compass the possession of her by bribery. She 
 came to him, and after some little show of 
 playfulness came into his household and was 
 his wife. Cilfa doubtless had become finer in 
 appearance as a result of his perfect health, and 
 when Yooxa came to him he began to consider 
 his personal appearance, which had certainly 
 changed. His brow, which had been lined and 
 not very good in tint, fleshy in parts, grey in 
 parts, was now smooth and white and massive, 
 the brow of a man against whom it would be 
 difficult to prevail. His eyes were larger and 
 clearer ; his lips tended to be set as if carved ; 
 his body was a little sparer and more supple. 
 The grey hairs from his head were disappearing, 
 and the only change that went against his 
 appearance was a sort of moulting of his 
 
II THE IMMORTAL 143 
 
 moustache and beard — these seemed to become 
 thinner every day. 
 
 Yooxa came in, and he had the same triumph 
 over her that he had daily over the poor mortal 
 money-grubbers of the market who strove 
 against him. "He had her furnished fittingly 
 with a boudoir of all softness and luxury, and 
 put slaves at her disposal ; slaves also to watch 
 her, for he intended to keep her his prisoner, 
 even though she might tire of him and wish to 
 run away. He would have been content to 
 share immortality with her in order to keep her 
 eternally prisoner, though he had no manner of 
 love for her. 
 
 He could not eat with her for the good 
 reason he had practically ceased eating, and 
 though he could share her couch he could never 
 sleep with her, must remain sleepless at her 
 side. Neither could he have much interest in 
 her doubts and frets and anxieties and piques, 
 for he would live for ever, and in the light of 
 immortality such things were absurd. 
 
 He came to Yooxa on his first nuptial night 
 with this thought in his heart : " I have outlived 
 your scorn " ; and his second thought was more 
 malicious and even cruel. It might be put in 
 
144 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ii 
 
 these words : " An immortal is coming to you 
 and will ruin you." 
 
 The question might be asked, and it did 
 present itself to his mind: "What sort of a child 
 would an immortal beget in a mortal woman ? " 
 The question gave him pause, for he might 
 beget a troublesome son who would rival him 
 in immortality, and then perhaps a daughter, 
 and lay the foundation of a whole race of 
 immortals which would rob him of his isolated 
 glory. But the cruel thought alone remained 
 in power that in bearing such a child the 
 mortal woman must be broken. His revenge 
 in marriage would be his secret, terrible 
 personality. 
 
 And when with this thought he came into 
 the presence of Yooxa she was smitten by a 
 terror of him, as is a little bird when the eyes 
 of the eagle are upon it. And the great strong 
 Cilfa, with his infinite reserve and resource, 
 bent his eyes upon his little white prey, and as 
 he came toward her he thought interiorly : 
 Behold how eternity will revenge itself on time. 
 Then he stopped. 
 
 'Tis true one speck of lust remained in him, 
 one speck, that is all. And now for the first 
 
II THE IMMORTAL 145 
 
 time a sort of horror possessed his mind. For 
 he had not reahsed till that moment that as his 
 need for sleep and food had passed, so also had 
 passed the third great human appetite, the 
 desire and need of the flesh. His attitude 
 toward Yooxa was only an intellectual thirst 
 for revenge, and in his idea of possessing her 
 he had only been pursuing mechanically the 
 course of thought which had been his before 
 taking the elixir. 
 
 So Cilfa left the bridal chamber and re- 
 solved to give himself the more to the greater 
 task of grasping human power. 
 
 Weeks and months passed, and he grew 
 rich so rapidly that he would have been able 
 to enjoy great wealth even in his normal life- 
 time had he remained an ordinary mortal. But 
 it must be remembered that without the hard 
 faith which a sense of immortality gave him 
 it is unlikely that he would have done so well. 
 He began to have it in his power to affect the 
 course of State affairs, and was able to make a 
 beginning at purchasing the words and actions 
 of politicians. His zest for money-making 
 palled a little, but the buying of souls flattered 
 a boundless intellectual pride which had grown 
 
 L 
 
146 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ii 
 
 up in him. He gloated on the spectacle of the 
 most powerful and wisest of mortals trans- 
 formed into puppets which he worked on 
 hidden wires. 
 
 He had become a sufficiently remarkable 
 man by now, and it needed all his care to keep 
 in the background. It was always said, and 
 with perfect truth, that he hated publicity, and 
 even when he heard his age understated by 
 twenty years it caused him some mental 
 anxiety. For it was not well that his age 
 should be considered at all. 
 
 One day he absolutely checkmated a 
 scheme of a clever young nobleman of about 
 eighteen years. The latter was exceedingly 
 mortified, but looked at him and smiled : 
 
 " I have plenty of time in front of me," he 
 said. " My turn will come." 
 
 And on the anniversary of that day the 
 young man sent him a token with the repeated 
 words, " My turn will come," and went on 
 doing that each year with annoying regularity. 
 
 Cilfa, however, showed no sign of age. The 
 hair on his head was short and black, and 
 though it never grew it did not fall out. The 
 nails on his hands did not grow. His forehead 
 
II THE IMMORTAL 147 
 
 had become somewhat dome - shaped. His 
 eyes were large and blank, and from the lower 
 eyelids and the cheek-bones the skin was pure 
 and strong. His beard and moustache had 
 completely fallen away. His lips and teeth 
 and tongue had modified, as their need was 
 only to aid speech. His ears were decidedly 
 finer. His body was changed in tone, for 
 everything gross had departed from it. On 
 his chest breasts had grown, but they were 
 rather the breasts of Athene than of Aphrodite, 
 and were marvellously pure, rising in a sweep- 
 ing curve to the proud column of his neck. 
 But his belly was curved inward and his thighs 
 and legs seemed somewhat rudimentary. 
 
 For twenty years he sweated something out 
 of his system every day. If he lay on a bed 
 for a few hours, a reddish-grey deposit could 
 be collected from the sheets. Something was 
 continually dropping away from him, and that 
 was no doubt the substance of our mortality. 
 
 At last he was forced to become a recluse, 
 and wear a grey wig, and walk with a stick in 
 order to keep his secret of immortality, and he 
 constantly hoped for the death of the young 
 man (now middle - aged) who sent him the 
 
148 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ii 
 
 annoying message that his turn would come. 
 For the young man had also done well in life, 
 was well married, and had real power. So 
 Cilfa, who could well afford to await his death, 
 did wait ; but though mortals must die, they 
 sometimes take an unconscionable long time 
 about it. 
 
 Indeed when he was one hundred and ten 
 Cilfa was obliged to quit the field. He hid 
 200,000 pieces of gold in a distant though 
 accessible cave, and, casting aside his wig and 
 his stick, he disguised himself as a youth start- 
 ing out on life with a small bundle on his back 
 to seek his fortune. 
 
 And in this way he passed out of his 
 Sultan's dominions into the dominion of an 
 alien Sultan whose capital was fifty days' 
 journey from the capital of the other. And 
 there he determined to have war waged on his 
 native land, and if possible to get his enemy 
 into his power. 
 
 He arrayed himself fittingly, and brought 
 in the great treasure, and established himself 
 as a prince of foreign lineage ; indeed he made 
 such a show that the Sultan was ready to see 
 him married into his household, and he pressed 
 
II THE IMMORTAL 149 
 
 a princess upon him for a wife, though, as 
 may be imagined, after Yooxa, Cilfa wanted no 
 more experience of married happiness. 
 
 Hardly, however, were the nuptials solem- 
 nised before he had managed to stir up cause 
 for strife with his old country. And he went 
 out with hosts to fight, determining with all 
 the power of his immortality to take his enemy 
 prisoner, and to look him in the face on the 
 next anniversary and ask him maliciously did 
 he think his turn would ever come. 
 
 But Cilfa greatly miscalculated the chances 
 of the day. His old country won, and instead 
 of his capturing his enemy he was slain by him 
 — slain, but not killed. 
 
 In this wise : he sought him out in the field, 
 and though he had little skill of arms, he 
 reckoned that as he could not be killed he 
 would also be invulnerable and must win. He 
 received several cuts from lesser foes, but even 
 the deepest seemed to turn to scratches and 
 gave him no pain. So he engaged to face the 
 brilliant warrior who had thwarted him so long, 
 and in order to terrify him he called out to 
 him in familiar language, "Your turn at last," 
 and let him know who he was. But his enemy 
 
ISO THE QUEST OF THE FACE ii 
 
 struck at him valiantly, and with his whirling 
 strokes deprived Cilfa of both arms. The 
 immortal thus stood helpless, his arms lying 
 on the field of battle. He felt no pain, but he 
 felt a great deal of surprise and some anxiety. 
 His enemy had fetters put on his feet, trans- 
 ferred him to a great train of slaves, and then 
 continued the battle. 
 
 Then Cilfa's shoulders began to ache, and 
 for three hours gave him unpleasant growing- 
 pains. Night came, and the pains were trans- 
 ferred to his elbows, and then along his fore- 
 arms to his wrists, and then to his fingers. He 
 put forth his limbs, they were entire. The 
 arms had grown on again. And he undid his 
 fetters and escaped. 
 
 He escaped completely from the battle, and 
 did not return to the Sultan and his new bride, 
 but, seriously disillusioned, began to wander 
 aimlessly as a poor man and muse on life. 
 Money and power were a failure, sensual 
 delights were not for him, revenge was neither 
 satisfying nor certain. Although he was im- 
 mortal there were dangers. He might be 
 captured and tortured. He would not feel the 
 torture, but continual growing-pains would be 
 
II THE IMMORTAL 151 
 
 trying. He might be burned at the stake if 
 he fell into his enemy's hands. 
 
 Cilfa made a fire and put his hand in it to 
 see what the effect would be. He would not 
 burn. The heat was not pleasant, but his 
 body had now become indestructible by fire. 
 Undoubtedly his father had been right in his 
 forecast of danger. If humanity found out his 
 secret he would be simply imprisoned for life, 
 and orders would be given from generation to 
 generation that he was a human monster and 
 must be carefully guarded. He might thus be 
 sealed up for a thousand years. It would not 
 be long but it would be tedious. He would be 
 like the genie in the fisherman's haul of lead, 
 and the genie was sufficiently athirst to be free 
 from his imprisonment. 
 
 He decided to live an ordinary life for a 
 while, and be as human as possible, and be 
 taken for an ordinary fellow-human. " One 
 never knows whom one jostles in the street," 
 he once heard a man say. " Quite true," he 
 thought ; " it is amusing that it never occurs 
 to any man I meet that he is talking to an 
 immortal." 
 
 But life was unspeakably dull. None of the 
 
152 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ii 
 
 ordinary occupations taken so seriously by 
 himself in the past appeared as more than a 
 game, and a tedious game at that. Even 
 learning and wisdom failed to be worth while, 
 since all the learning and wisdom in the world 
 could not be put into the scale against his 
 immortality. He no longer envied any one any 
 kind of success. What he did envy was the 
 power to be interested and get excited, the 
 power not to despise ordinary human interest. 
 " I believe I would cut down my immortality 
 to 10,000 years," he said, " if only I could be 
 simply human all the time." A vain thought. 
 There were even times when he doubted the 
 practical wisdom of having taken the elixir. He 
 now mingled more and more with humanity, pre- 
 ferring a gregarious life to his former seclusion, 
 and pretended to be interested in the world and 
 the flesh. It was his lot to live with a man 
 who committed suicide, a student who banished 
 Hamlet's doubts from his mind, deciding that 
 "not to be" was better than "to be." The 
 student put down the half-finished glass of 
 poison and died. And Cilfa came and looked 
 at him and at the glass. The event reminded 
 him mournfully of the day when he took the 
 
II THE IMMORTAL 153 
 
 elixir. He picked up the glass of poison and 
 tasted it, but it made no more impression on 
 him than a drop of water falling on his head. 
 He would fain have followed the student and 
 been "quit of it all." 
 
 Cilfa had always been a materialist. The 
 old sorcerer, his father, had not believed in 
 gods, and Cilfa had been brought up without 
 religion. His temperament was such that he 
 thrived on godlessness. And in the wisdom 
 gained by three lifetimes' experience he had 
 come to associate all gods and religiousness 
 and prayers with mortality ; it was all part of 
 being doomed to die. If he could get on 
 without gods as a mortal, certainly he found 
 no need of them as an immortal. Indeed, one 
 of the dangers inherent in the eternity of his 
 immortality was that some day some tribe 
 would discover his secret and force him to be 
 their god. And he realised it was in his power 
 to be a far more satisfactory god than most of 
 the gods which men in one part or another of 
 the world professed. The only god that he 
 found as great as himself was the God of the 
 Israelites. And once he addressed himself to 
 the blank heavens in these words: "If You 
 
154 THE QUEST OF THE FACE n 
 
 exist, then You and I are immortal. Come out 
 of the sky and let us embrace." But no answer 
 came, and he concluded that if such a God 
 existed He might be greater than he — might be, 
 in fact, omnipotent. And he considered the 
 subject of God with his intellect, which had now 
 grown to be very mighty. He even framed a 
 set of words as a prayer to his God, a reason- 
 able prayer, a prayer which had none of the 
 character of human prayer, none of the feeling, 
 the anguish. 
 
 But Cilfa prayed in his way, which was a just 
 way according to many standards. He prayed 
 at last that his immortality might be taken away 
 and he might have the grace to die. He went 
 up into the mountains, and kneeled, and struck 
 his mighty brow on the rocks, and with all the 
 might of his intellect and will he said to God, 
 " Decree my death." He said it once — it was 
 the most terrible moment of his life. 
 
 But Cilfa did not realise that he was not 
 completely enfranchised yet. He was still 
 dropping mortality from him, still changing. 
 Every cell of his flesh was being created anew 
 of a new substance, his organs were all slowly 
 modifying, and his psychism was purging itself 
 
II THE IMMORTAL 155 
 
 still under the influence of the elixir and striving 
 to affirm the absolute. His prayer was part of 
 the sickness of a perpetual moult. He arose 
 from the rocks purer, harder, more terrible, 
 less compromised than ever. His mind grew 
 stronger. It was difficult for him to explain 
 how it was he had been so strongly interested 
 in power at one time. But now his interests 
 grew more rarefied if more certain. The desire 
 to be among humanity began to recede, and 
 with it all human care whatsoever. His face 
 became so preoccupied that there was some 
 danger of his being thought possessed of a devil 
 and put in durance. But his wanderings were 
 not among men. He went into the wilderness, 
 crossed the most desolate mountain ranges, 
 walked all day, all night, in whirling snowstorms, 
 never experiencing any tiredness, or pain of 
 cold or heat, or any hunger. He went to the 
 Pole ; he went to the Equator. He was indeed 
 
 imprison'd in the viewless winds. 
 And blown with restless violence round about 
 This pendent world. 
 
 He went to the heart of the great African desert 
 and was buried in the sand and struggled out 
 again ; he went to the bottom of the sea and 
 
156 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ir 
 
 along it and did not drown. He jumped the 
 greatest precipices and did not hurt himself; he 
 went into the craters of volcanoes and did not 
 burn. All to no avail. He tried another dull 
 lifetime among men at a lascivious court ; he 
 tried another as a scholar and a wise man ; he 
 wrote books and proved the truth that of the 
 writing of them there is no end. 
 
 He was already much older than Methuselah 
 when we lose sight of him ; and that was some 
 thousands of years ago, though he must be living 
 somewhere, somehow, now. He decided that he 
 would muse a thousand years on his fate, sitting 
 on the same spot, untroubled by his fellow-men, 
 not troubling them. With that in view he 
 went to India and commenced to climb the 
 Himalayas. Of these great mountains he 
 sought the highest and most inaccessible, pre- 
 sumably Mount Everest, and after indescribable 
 difficulty and effort he got through the snow 
 even to the topmost summit. In the clear 
 weather he saw that he was at the supremest 
 height, so he carefully cut a throne in the 
 snow and crossed his legs and sat there ; and 
 when night came he chose a point in the 
 heavens and fixed his gaze upon it, and did not 
 
II THE IMMORTAL 157 
 
 depart from that point by day. Thus he began 
 to muse for a thousand years. 
 
 It is correct to say that not one single 
 ordinary human thought traversed his brain. 
 Indeed, there is nothing that we can get down 
 into ordinary human language unless it is one 
 word, the first and the last. 
 
 Cilfa settled himself to think for a millennium. 
 He was at perfect ease. He looked at the point 
 decided upon and he "thought with a strange 
 breath, " I . . ." 
 
 The rest is lost, was not audible here. Cilfa 
 bending his eyes on one point is therefore lost in 
 an eternal " I." He sat there unmoving a lunar 
 month, a year, a decade, a century, centuries, 
 and all the while he changed toward the 
 absolute. Still his body modified itself, and 
 the cells of his flesh, and the composition of his 
 soul — ^just in the same way that his intellect 
 slid on to a new plane incomprehensible to us 
 except for the vanishing word " I " — so his body 
 became more and more remote in type, lost its 
 palpability, lost its opaqueness, till at last it 
 became transparent and the sun shone through 
 it as through glass — then completely invisible. 
 
 At that point I lose sight of him myself 
 
158 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ii 
 
 And whether he is still at the top of Mount 
 Everest, or came down after his thousand years 
 and walks again disguised among us, I cannot 
 say. The last real thing I report of him is the 
 word "I." For us poor mortals the last word 
 would always be We, but for the immortal it 
 was /. 
 
THE CHANGELESS GOD 
 
Our God is the God of change. It is therefore that 
 mortality is sweet and all our living is mortality. An infinite 
 tenderness is diffused through the world through the pathos of 
 change. Only the changeless is terrible. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE CHANGELESS GOD 
 
 The sun rose and set, the seasons changed. 
 Flowers blossomed and faded, children were 
 born and grew. Winds blew, rains fell, colours 
 passed over the land. Messages arrived from 
 far away, and messages were sent. Men and 
 animals moved to and fro upon the earth, 
 obeying and commanding. Every night bright 
 stars shone in the sky above all clouds and a 
 fair moon rose and swam across the heavens. 
 
 There was One greater than all of us, than 
 sun and moon and child and flower and wind 
 and rain and earth and star. We all depended 
 on one another, and watched one another like 
 slaves and masters, but there was one Over- 
 Master at whose will all moved. He was 
 called God. We knew no other God. 
 
 Our prayers steamed up to that God ; prayers 
 
 l6i M 
 
i62 THE QUEST OF THE FACE in 
 
 that were thoughts, prayers that were songs, 
 prayers that were deeds, prayers that were joy. 
 There was the sunrise prayer of red and silver, 
 the sunset prayer of red and gold, the deep 
 meditation of the night. There was the inter- 
 change of command, of message, of glance, the 
 interchange of smile. The breath of power 
 whereby that God kept us together in a unity 
 with Him passed through our secret veins, and 
 ascended and vivified us all. We had our 
 histories of lives and changes ; the little things 
 had little histories, the sun had its great history, 
 and the great God behind us all — He knew. 
 We had our notions of time, the sun had its 
 notion of time ; we counted time from a hypo- 
 thetical beginning, and said it was an illusion. 
 For God it was no illusion. He knew what 
 the Time was. 
 
 One day the Great One looked down upon 
 the beautiful earth, upon a rose garden where 
 a child played. It was a slender, delicate girl. 
 She was so slender and delicate that her 
 existence heightened the glory of God's grand 
 design. The workings of the universe were so 
 diverse that they gave welcome even to the 
 finest, the strangest, and the rarest. It was joy 
 
Ill THE CHANGELESS GOD 163 
 
 to the strength of God that it could handle and 
 use the subtle shades of being. He lay at 
 length therefore in the morning of His great 
 day when our little morning was passing His. 
 The sun shone brightly and hotly over the 
 white stone walls of the garden. A gentle 
 breeze wandered among the rose trees, and the 
 blossoms nodded and bowed to one another. 
 The many bees and flies buzzed back and 
 forward as if making netting of the air. White 
 and brown butterflies flitted to and fro, some- 
 times settling on a flower, sometimes alighting 
 on the paths, opening and shutting their wings 
 to the sky. Day moths on poised wings shot 
 out long tongues into the honeyed depths of 
 flowers. Helena, the girl, sat upon a grass 
 plot and ran her fingers through her golden 
 hair. She sat, thoughtless, looking upon beauty, 
 undisturbed. 
 
 The great Eye was pleased to look down, 
 and recognise, though printed small, the mess- 
 ages He had long since entrusted to fore- 
 runners, to the sun and the stars and the winds. 
 He was glad to see in what little ways the 
 garden bore His marks upon it. There was not 
 a line or an angle or a curve that was not a 
 
i64 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iii 
 
 letter of His own writing. The lines of the 
 bee's flight in the air, the bend of the rose-tree 
 stems, the lines of the form of the girl were the 
 same as He had intended from the first. The 
 patterns of their tracery were framed in His 
 supernal dwelling. No other God could ever 
 dispute His claim to His beautiful universe. 
 So He looked upon the garden and loved it. 
 And the garden looked upon Him and grew 
 more beautiful. What time that might be in 
 Universal Time by which the Gods count, no 
 mortal knows. But it was upon a day, and 
 even a day counts in Eternity. It was the day 
 of the weakness of that God. 
 
 The God became enamoured of the garden, 
 the garden became enamoured of the God. 
 The bees and flies buzzed more fast, the sun 
 shone more intensely, the white walls gleamed, 
 the roses trembled in the air. The roses 
 became motionless as if enchanted. Helena 
 ceased to wave her fingers in her tresses. She 
 gazed. The God moved towards the garden, 
 and the garden moved towards the God. So 
 His Throne was left empty and unguarded. 
 
 The girl gazed into a transcendent beauty ; 
 her lips parted with wonder which even her 
 
Ill THE CHANGELESS GOD 165 
 
 being had never divined, her cheeks crimsoned, 
 her breast moved forward. For the swarm of 
 flies and bees had for her lost their distinctive 
 form, and had been inbreathed by some power 
 of Beauty that held them as one, as the magical 
 dreadful brows and hair of the God ; and the 
 enchanted roses had faded to a shadowy Face, 
 to which in a moment the sun, shining 
 through, added an all-sparkling lustre. The 
 girl stood up : the roses had gone ; at her 
 breast were all the roses. 
 
 Nearer and nearer came the garden to the 
 God, and more awful became the garden. 
 Helena rose with outstretched arms, with 
 parted lips, with eyes too wide, with a breast 
 and soul that gave itself away. . . . 
 
 She moved forward and cried and fell . . . 
 and then, as it were, she ceased to exist. 
 
 All things for a moment ceased to exist, 
 and fell from the grasp of the God. The sun 
 fell out. The stars stepped inside the sky, the 
 moon effaced itself and disappeared. The 
 earth beneath our feet, the garden, the walls 
 and walks and lawn, the trees and flies and 
 bees changed to invisible vapour and vanished. 
 And Helena herself shrank within the compass 
 
i66 THE QUEST OF THE FACE in 
 
 of her inmost cell, and opened the door which 
 is inside of that, and disappeared. 
 
 A moment later all things reappeared and 
 passed back into existence. The sun came 
 back, and under cover of its light the moon 
 and stars and the world returned, and the 
 garden with its walls and the girl. But they 
 did not return the same as they had been, but 
 rather as if owing a new allegiance, as an 
 estate and slaves that had changed masters. 
 They had returned at the bidding of a differ- 
 ent God, at the bidding of a Changeless God, 
 and they became bound in an iron obedience 
 beneath His throne. 
 
 There was a different world under the 
 different dominion. The sun no longer rose 
 and set, the seasons changed not, the blossoms 
 and the children and men remained as they 
 were, and moved not, and grew not. No wind 
 blew or rain fell, nor passed the colour over 
 the land. No messages were received, none 
 sent, but all lay preserved and fixed and silent 
 as if modelled in marble. One decree, once 
 uttered, held all the worlds together. The 
 light of the sun moved not into the earth. 
 It was fixed like an unmoving bridge. The 
 
Ill THE CHANGELESS GOD 167 
 
 prayers that went up to God reached Him but 
 were not received. They extended from earth 
 to heaven like a bridge, like the frozen gleams 
 of the sun's light. The night meditated not. 
 The lodestone held captive, but attracted not. 
 And Helena looked up out of eyes that had 
 been widened by strain — looked up with cease- 
 less adoration at the Changeless God. The 
 Universe which had changed masters was the 
 universe of her soul. 
 
THE LIGHT 
 
Our Western civilisation is unconvincing as an expression 
 of Christianity. We send our missionaries from London and 
 New York to the East to preach Jesus. But if the Eastern is 
 moved by the Word and seeks us in our own clamorous homes, 
 how great is his disillusion ! Jesus is in our midst, but He is 
 difficult to find except among the despised and rejected. 
 
IV 
 THE LIGHT 
 
 Each of us has his own particular Kingdom of 
 Heaven, for the Word of God grows differently 
 in each heart where it is planted. Missionaries 
 and broadcast sowers of the seed take little 
 thought of this — they reckon on a certain uni- 
 formity of effect. If the heathen becomes 
 baptized or verbally confesses Christ, they are 
 fairly satisfied and pass on. It is not theirs 
 to search the earth, and watch and note the 
 wonderful ways of God. Perhaps they would 
 deny that whenever the idea of Christianity 
 actually reached a man's heart he would be 
 likely to start up and do something unusual. 
 
 A Turk once received the Word by chance 
 into his very heart. The sower was an American 
 Baptist missionary who, one sultry afternoon, 
 
 overtook the Turk riding with attendants and 
 
 171 
 
172 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 camels to his home settlement just outside a 
 large Turkish city. The American hastened 
 to make him a present of a translation of the 
 Gospel. The Moslem received the present 
 with great courtesy according to the ways of 
 his nation ; and in return, for it is considered 
 impolite not to exchange, he gave him a present 
 of a little seal. The American then explained 
 that he was obeying the command of his Master, 
 that he go into all the world and carry the Light 
 to those who were in darkness. The Turk 
 thought the American very noble ; he surmised 
 that the religion which would make a man go 
 so many miles to present a little book to a 
 stranger on the road must be something worth 
 knowing and understanding, perhaps worth 
 embracing even. The Turk was not unready 
 to embrace a new religion, for he belonged 
 to the New Turkey that turns yearningly, if 
 impractically, to the West. 
 
 The American allowed himself to feel a glow 
 of pride in his religion and the romance of the 
 mission-field. Then he said good-bye, hoped 
 the Turk would be brought to the Light, and 
 went on to the city. The Turk promised to 
 read the Gospel and try and find the Light. 
 
IV THE LIGHT 173 
 
 As soon as the Turk got home he sat down 
 to study the little book. It was a translation 
 of the Gospel of St. John, and he read, " In Him 
 was life ; and the life was the light of men. . . . 
 That was the true Light, which lighteth every 
 man that cometh into the world," and on through 
 all those wonderful pages of the most beautiful 
 history in the world. 
 
 Not through all. 
 
 Before he was half-way through the Gospel, 
 the Turk put down the book and went out of 
 his chamber, crying, "Where is the man who 
 hath given me this wonderful doctrine ? Surely 
 he of all men is the one it would be well to 
 know and honour." 
 
 They told him that the missionary was by 
 that time in the city, and they saddled three 
 swift horses, and the Turk with two servants 
 set off to bring the American back. They 
 brought the missionary to the settlement once 
 more, and to the mansion among the shady 
 cypress trees by the side of the wide river, 
 and they would have done him much honour. 
 
 " Tell me," said the Turk, " do you have the 
 light of which the book doth tell ? " 
 
 " I have it," said the Baptist. " I carry it 
 
174 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 into distant lands. I have to-day brought it 
 to you." 
 
 " But do you live according to the beautiful 
 wise words I have read ? Are there many like 
 you } Where do you live ? " 
 
 " I am an American. In America we are 
 Christians." 
 
 " How far away is America ? " 
 
 " Five thousand miles, I guess." 
 
 " And America is founded on the Gospel ? " 
 
 " America is the land of freedom. We are 
 the, refuge of the oppressed of all nations. To 
 us come the Jews, the Russians, the Poles, the 
 Germans, the Irish. We give them new life. 
 I should say if any country is Christian, America 
 is that country. As our President Lincoln said, 
 ' We are the hope of the world and of all 
 peoples.' " 
 
 The Moslem opened his gentle eyes and 
 believed ; he loaded the American with honours 
 and thanks, and escorted him back once more 
 to the city. Then he returned home and sat 
 down in earnest to St. John's Gospel and 
 mastered it, or rather tried to master it, for that 
 extraordinary document has baffled the wisest 
 and most scholarly as well as the simplest and 
 
IV THE LIGHT 175 
 
 most illiterate. The Turk learned English, a 
 smattering of the tongue that was spoken by 
 the nation who based their worldly life on the 
 Gospel of St. John. He found out the cost of 
 a steerage passage. He took all his possessions 
 and made them into lots and sold them, and 
 sped away, following the setting sun, a-searching 
 for the light that never was on sea or land. 
 
 His emotions on Columbus' journey may be 
 imagined, his suspense when the ship stood still 
 at last off Long Island at the quarantine dock, 
 his stilled, homeful bosom expecting in the 
 immediate future the vision of the New Jeru- 
 salem. When he saw the green, sun-glorified 
 statue of Liberty in the harbour the tears rolled 
 down his cheeks, and he cried out excitedly in 
 his own language, astonishing the stolid emi- 
 grants wedged around him in the crush gazing 
 at the statue and New York. 
 
 At Ellis Island, where all the steerage people 
 are medically, financially, and inquisitorially 
 examined, in the imbroglio of inspection might 
 have been heard the following conversation : 
 
 " What is your profession ?" 
 
 " What do I profess ? " 
 
 " Yes, go on." 
 
176 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 " I profess to be a servant of Jesus." 
 
 " I don't mean that. Wha' yer going to do 
 here ? " 
 
 " Do ? I've come to find the Light." 
 
 " He's batty. Look here, Turko, wha's yer 
 jahb?" 
 
 " In Turkey — farmer." 
 
 "Your ticket's to New York. Do you want 
 to book out to the country ? " 
 
 " No, I'm going into the city." 
 
 " You won't farm any in New York. How 
 much money yer got ? He's got four hundred 
 dollars. You can go. Next ! " 
 
 So Turko was made free of the American 
 strand, and was landed at the Battery and 
 driven in a rickety horse-cab to the Turkish 
 and Syrian quarter on Tenth Avenue, and 
 charged three dollars by the Christian cabman. 
 His fellow-countrymen tried to put him right 
 about America. They gave him a second- 
 hand bowler hat, and made him exchange his 
 vast, loose trousers for tight ones that avoided 
 the shame of looking home-made. They could 
 not, however, give him the corresponding con- 
 ception of American Christianity. The Turk 
 had faith in the Baptist missionary, and he had 
 
IV THE LIGHT 177 
 
 more faith still in the Gospel of St. John. He 
 used to say that since St. John had made a 
 Christian of him it must have made Christians 
 of thousands of others. He disbelieved in 
 the outward semblances of New York. At a 
 fashionable Fifth Avenue church they turned 
 him out as an undesirable worshipper. His 
 friends laughed. "That's the sort of Christians 
 they are," said they. 
 
 "They are not Christians at all," said the 
 Turk. "If their Lord and Master came to 
 them dressed as a carpenter they'd turn Him 
 away just as they did me." 
 
 Turko did not mind. He wandered from 
 church to church over the vast metropolis, and 
 whenever any one questioned him at a church 
 door, he told them he was seeking the Light. 
 But he felt there were very few Christians 
 about. At a mission-hall Sunday school, where 
 a lay preacher gave a long address on the 
 feeding of the five thousand, pointing out how 
 wonderful it was that five loaves and two small 
 fishes could be made to go so far, the Turk got 
 up and rather bewildered both pupils and 
 teacher by saying that he thought the great- 
 ness of the miracle lay not in the fact that 
 
 N 
 
178 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 the loaves and fishes sufficed, but In that five 
 thousand were found ready to partake of them. 
 The Gospel of St. John was just such a meal 
 of loaves and fishes, but where were the 
 five thousand who would eat of it and be 
 filled? 
 
 At last, one night, wandering through 
 China-town, the gentle Eastern came upon a 
 shop whose window was painted black : a little 
 dingy place that might one time have been a 
 Jewish cobbler's or a little candy store. On 
 the window was printed in white letters — 
 
 Have you found the Light? 
 Come in. 
 
 He tried the door, but it was locked ; he looked 
 through a scratch in the glass and saw a row of 
 forms and seats in an empty room. What did 
 it mean ? 
 
 Incurious Chinamen in blue slops and pig- 
 tails wandered to and fro between their 
 mysterious wash-shops, restaurants, and cellars. 
 A vigilant policeman stood on the corner. 
 The Turk looked round for some one to inter- 
 rogate, and as he stood hesitating whether to 
 go to the policeman or no, a waxen-faced man, 
 
IV THE LIGHT , 179 
 
 lean, out-at-elbows, stooping and staring, came 
 staggering past him. 
 
 "Why isn't this open? " asked the Turk. 
 
 The opium-eater stopped. 
 
 "Wha'sthat?" 
 
 "Why is this place shut? It says 'Come 
 in,' and it's shut." 
 
 " Wait a minute," said the opium-eater. 
 "Now what is it ? Whom do you want ? 
 Mary, is it, or the old feller ? Gone home . . . 
 you find them . . . Division Street. Say, you're 
 all ri', I guess ; take me 'long, take m'arm, 
 C'lumbia Stree', next Dave's pool parlour." 
 
 The Turk took his arm. 
 
 " D'you know what I am? I'm what they 
 call a dope-fiend. Say, that's a nys name fer 
 a man, hey ? Say, baws, ye know the way, I 
 s'pose. You wouldn't think it, but I'm in a 
 God-damn hurry." 
 
 " Why do you say ' God-damn ' ? " said the 
 Turk. " I thought you belonged in there. 
 Haven't you ever come there when it was open 
 and gone in ? " 
 
 " Wha's that ? Stop a minute. . . . Lemme 
 see. Yes, that's ri'. You b'long to that 
 bunch ; well s'do I. I don' remember ye." 
 
i8o THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 " What do they give you there ? " asked the 
 Turk. "You don't smell of whisky, how is it 
 you get like this ? " 
 
 "Tha's the dope. Hold on. You wan' 
 Mary. Tha's ri', isn' it? She lives on 
 Division Street, saintly 'ooman." 
 
 At length they reached Columbia Street. 
 
 " Yes, I'm more'n hurry than you'd think. 
 Thanks, pardner. Come f'r me to-morrow at 
 seven. I'll take ye to Mary. She'll be real 
 pleased to see you. I'm in a hurry to get to 
 sleep, b'gosh. ..." 
 
 Next night at seven the Turk called for the 
 opium-eater and they went along to Mary's 
 mission-room. There the dope-fiend was well 
 known. He had been saved there by Mary's 
 father, and though he might be a backslider 
 morally, yet he had become a believer, and had 
 washed in the fountain. In the old man's 
 words, he had got a firm grasp of eternity and 
 would never let go. 
 
 There were four people in the room besides 
 Mary and her father, a drunken street-woman 
 who thought she was in the police-station, an 
 ecstatic old man who prayed independently and 
 audibly, shouting every now and then : 
 
IV THE LIGHT i8i 
 
 " Hallelujah ! 'tis done ! 
 
 I believe on the Son ; 
 
 I am saved by the blood of the Crucified One," 
 
 and there were the dope-fiend and Turko. 
 
 There was a sweet little service, and the two 
 friends sang a duet together, " Onward, Chris- 
 tian soldiers," Mary accompanying them on the 
 hand-organ. The old father prayed for those in 
 that room that night, and also, thoughtfully, for 
 all those outside. Might they be brought to the 
 Light ! The light shone in darkness and the 
 darkness comprehended it not. Make the dark- 
 ness comprehend ! The preacher was illiterate, 
 but he was simple and gentle. Every evening 
 for years and years and years he had kept open 
 his little room in the depths of the East Side, 
 and had stood ready to help to salvation all who 
 might be tempted in. Alas, it was only on the 
 rainy and frosty nights that the people of the 
 streets came in in numbers. Still the old man 
 used to say that the rain was part of God's 
 providence, and every raindrop was an angel. 
 
 Mary shook hands with the Turk, said she 
 was glad to see him, hoped he would come often. 
 She shook hands with the poor old dope fiend 
 also and looked tenderly at the two new- 
 
i82 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 found acquaintances, uniting them together, as 
 it seemed, by a smile. And they were really 
 united, and came together regularly after that. 
 On rainy and frosty days, when the room was 
 full, the dope-fiend and the Turk distributed 
 hymn - books among the drunkards, street- 
 women, tramps, cripples who had squirmed 
 into shelter. They held semi-official positions. 
 They witnessed with edification the breaking 
 into tears of hardened old sinners moved by 
 the tender eloquence of the old father. 
 
 The Turk believed in the mission-room. He 
 saw that those who came in became gentler ; 
 they left behind them their foul language, they 
 were reasonable, they sang sweetly, they seldom 
 or never insulted Mary and the old man. So he 
 was in a way satisfied, though there was in him 
 a great feeling of dissatisfaction about the world 
 outside. 
 
 His four hundred dollars, which would have 
 kept him years in the old country, swiftly dis- 
 appeared in a city where the price of living is 
 treble that of the unprosperous countries of 
 Europe. He was obliged to find a job. He 
 got work on a road, repairing the surface. It 
 was scarcely a come-down ; for he found one 
 
IV THE LIGHT 183 
 
 of his neighbours in the gang was a prince 
 of Roumania, and another was the latest de- 
 scendant of Robert Bruce, one had been to 
 college, and another was an ex-clergyman. He 
 earned only two dollars a day, but he learned to 
 be economical with the money he won by his 
 work, and he escaped many frauds and swindles 
 and began to live like an American. 
 
 In a pathetic way he came to expect a great 
 deal from the American Christmas. He saw the 
 excitement of all the shopkeepers and thought 
 something really unusual was going to happen — 
 a revelation, perhaps. On Christmas Eve he 
 and the dope-fiend went to Madison Square 
 Garden and saw the immense Christmas tree set 
 up for all the children who had no little Christmas 
 tree of their own at home. It was glittering with 
 lamps and hung with toys and packets of sweets. 
 A great crowd of open-eyed boys and girls were 
 staring at it from the railing that enclosed it. 
 On Christmas night the toys and sweets were 
 going to be taken down and given to the 
 children, and carols would be sung. The 
 children stamped their feet in the snow. It 
 was all very wonderful ; what did frost and snow 
 matter with such a beautiful thing in view ? 
 
i84 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 From the Christmas tree the dope-fiend and 
 the Turk went back to China-town to the 
 mission-room, and there they sang with a crowd 
 of women who had come in to receive Mary's 
 gifts. A great basket full of Christmas puddings 
 was on hand, and many a poor old woman felt 
 that Jesus was born that night indeed when 
 she received a plum-pudding and a mince-pie 
 from the hands of the old man's daughter. 
 
 At midnight the mission-room closed. All 
 the puddings and pies were given away, and 
 hundreds of folk with outstretched hands were 
 turned away. 
 
 " A bin in your room and sang mos' ev'ry 
 nahit, an' you han't give me no pudding," said 
 a negress reproachfully. "You cahnt have 
 forgot us," said a young Jew, coming for the 
 fifth time. "If Christ would only open my 
 eyes ! " said a blind man who had got in his 
 possession both a pudding and a pie. " Cut 
 that out," said a cripple, "you've got your teeth 
 in the eats. I haven't got anything, and I 
 guess God won't straighten my back." " You'd 
 have to work if He did," said another, " and I 
 reckon that wouldn't suit you." 
 
 It was clear the world could not be saved by 
 
IV THE LIGHT 185 
 
 puddings and pies, even were they distributed 
 thrice as liberally. 
 
 The dope-fiend and the Turk said good-bye 
 to Mary at the door, and she greeted them " A 
 happy Christmas ! " 
 
 "You don't open this place to-morrow, I 
 suppose ? " asked the Turk. 
 
 " No, we take our one holiday on Christmas 
 night." 
 
 " Then it won't be quite so happy for me," 
 said Turko pathetically. He had been there 
 every night since he found it. 
 
 The opium-eater and he moved away. A 
 strange couple they were ; the one long, gaunt, 
 stooping, disreputable, the other short and fat, 
 toddling on his short legs, neatly if poorly 
 dressed, and with a simple, contented, but rather 
 pathetic look on his square face. 
 
 The East Side of New York was going to 
 sleep. Thousands of Christian boys and girls 
 had hung their stockings for Santa Claus, and 
 even Jew children had gone to bed in the ex- 
 pectation of presents in the morning. The 
 streets were emptying and becoming darker. 
 Scarcely a shop was open. There were no 
 night-stalls and eating-places ; even the all- 
 
i86 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 night resorts were closed, and the musical boxes 
 were silent in those blue palaces where the 
 Chinese provide chop-suey and make low-life 
 gay in the East Side. It had been snowing in 
 occasional showers ever since nightfall. In the 
 quiet, untrodden cul-de-sacs which led down to 
 the Hudson River there was an even coating of 
 an inch of snow. And now the flakes came so 
 thickly and unabatingly that even populous and 
 filthy Rivington Street became slowly trans- 
 figured. Where the stall-keepers, hawkers, 
 and push-cart men had been trafficking all 
 day, selling apples and oranges, toys, candles, 
 presents, clothes, Christmas groceries, all was 
 silent. The barrows were gone with the sellers 
 and the customers, and all the refuse of the 
 market was being covered over with whiteness. 
 Far up in the dingy houses the light of oil- 
 lamps glimmered in the windows. Occasionally a 
 woman would come out on the iron fire-escape 
 fixed to each building and bawl to some one on 
 an upper or lower story, or she would bawl 
 across the street and would be answered by some 
 one opposite. But night and the Christmas 
 snow were gaining a great victory. Some- 
 where far away in Syria it was a clear night. 
 
IV THE LIGHT 187 
 
 the stars . . . one star especially was shining, 
 and in a house of poor parents a child was born. 
 Foaming, freshening rivers were flowing in that 
 country. Wise kings were stalking through the 
 night carrying gifts of frankincense and myrrh. 
 Yes, it is strange how large this world is we call 
 a stage. There is a majesty in the diversity of 
 things which are happening upon it. Sad that 
 sometimes a city like New York or London 
 thinks that it is the world, it alone. Often when 
 a man feels wretched it is because he is forgetting 
 the immensity and the diversity outside. 
 
 The Turk and the opium-eater turned down 
 Sheriff Street and Stanton Street. All these 
 streets are outside the original city of New 
 York. That is why they are not numbered. 
 They come before First Street and extend to 
 the docks. They are the dirtiest and most 
 populous streets in the whole world ; they close 
 in also more squalor and unhappiness than any 
 other streets, the dumping and huddling ground 
 of bewildered foreign immigrants who are 
 oblivious or ignorant of the vast urban and 
 agricultural America outside thirsting for labour, 
 any labour, even that of the weak hands of the 
 decrepit and feeble. 
 
i88 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 In Stanton Street, lying in the gutter half 
 snowed over, lay a sleeping or dying woman 
 with a baby in her shawl, and the dope-fiend 
 and the Turk stood in front of her and stared. 
 Snow-flakes were settling fast on the woman's 
 hair and scarcely dissolving on her pallid cheeks. 
 In her shawl was a furrow of snow ; the baby 
 seemed lifeless, and indeed it was frozen. 
 
 The dope-fiend leaned down and put an arm 
 under her and raised her. She opened her eyes 
 and looked at him. As he raised her body her 
 head fell back weakly and showed her white 
 throat. 
 
 "Oh, go away, go away," she moaned. 
 " Leave me alone, leave me where I am and 
 go away." 
 
 " But if you lie there you'll die." 
 
 " I wan' to die. I wan' to die. I don' wan' 
 to live. I haven't anything to live for, and 
 nobody wants me." 
 
 The two brothers of Mary's mission-room 
 stared at one another and asked speechless 
 questions. 
 
 "Strange, strange !" said the Turk. "This is 
 something that could not possibly happen in my 
 country. There each woman belongs to some 
 
IV THE LIGHT 189 
 
 one and is precious. America has Christianity, 
 a higher religion than ours, and yet this can 
 happen to a woman. I do not understand it." 
 
 " Where d'you Hve ? " asked the opium-eater 
 of the woman. 
 
 "Nowhere. If I go home my husband 'II 
 kill me. But there's nothing to eat there, no 
 job, no money, nothing. I've finished. You 
 go along and leave me. I'll only get you into 
 trouble. Leave me here in the snow. It's 
 quiet. I shall fall asleep, the snow will cover 
 me, and to-morrow they'll find me and my babe 
 asleep, fast asleep." 
 
 " No, no, that can't be," said the opium-eater, 
 " on Christmas Eve too of all nights in the 
 year. We'll look after you. Jesus' birthday, 
 think of that ! You thought of dying. To-night 
 instead you'll begin again. You'll start a new 
 life. It'll be your birthday too. D'you believe 
 in Jesus?" 
 
 " Have you found the Light ? " asked Turko. 
 
 But the woman they pitifully raised had no 
 words to give them. Her face was one unutter- 
 able ennui. " What shall we do with her ? " 
 asked the opium-eater. "Let us take her 
 to the Adams Street Home. It is a shelter 
 
I90 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 for women ; they can't refuse her and it's not 
 far." 
 
 The two of them supported the feeble woman 
 and took her four or five blocks to the Adams 
 Refuge. Let us call it the Adams Refuge ; 
 obviously one cannot call such institutions by 
 their correct name in a story which reflects on 
 their character. A remarkably blank and dreary 
 house was placarded "Adams Home for Women. 
 House of Charity." The windows were all 
 dark, the doorstep deep in snow proclaimed an 
 absence of visitors during many hours. Evi- 
 dently the daughters of Eve did not throng 
 there. 
 
 The Turk rang the bell four times, and then 
 continued ringing with his finger on the electric 
 button. At last, after the opium-eater had made 
 snowballs and thrown them at many windows, 
 a woman came out on the fire-escape on the 
 first floor and asked them what they wanted. 
 
 "We've found a woman perishing of cold 
 lying in the snow. We thought you would take 
 her in here," said the opium-eater. "She has 
 a baby," he added thoughtfully. 
 
 " What you say, she has a baby ? " asked 
 the woman, " Is she married ? " 
 
IV THE LIGHT 191 
 
 "Yes, a respectable married woman. Her 
 husband's out of a job and mad with hunger." 
 
 " But this is only for fallen women. We 
 only take in fallen women here." 
 
 "Yes, she'd fallen," said the simple Turk. 
 " I reckon she fall, that's it, she fall in the snow 
 and lie there, poor woman with baby, so cold, 
 she so hungry, snow so soft, people's hearts so 
 hard, she lie and not get up, she want to stay. 
 Fred and I come along, respectable men sure, 
 from Mary's mission-room. We see the woman 
 and baby lying in the snow. No people any- 
 where, all gone to bed. We try lift her up. 
 She say, ' No, leave me, leave me, let me lie 
 here, I wan' to die.' On Christmas Eve when 
 my Master became a little baby. I look at her 
 baby and remember Him. We're good Chris- 
 tians sure, yes, we don't leave a woman to die, 
 any night. Fred remembers Adams Refuge 
 and we help her along here." 
 
 The woman shook her head violently, 
 shivered, pulled her shawl round her and pre- 
 pared to re-enter. 
 
 " You've come to the wrong place," said she. 
 " We only take cases from the Police Station. 
 You'd better take her to the Felix Home for 
 
192 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 respectable women in East Broadway. It's 
 against the rules to take respectable women in 
 here." 
 
 So saying she cut argument short by dis- 
 appearing. 
 
 The poor Turk thought they might take the 
 woman to the Police Station and so make her 
 eligible for Adams Refuge. But the dope-fiend 
 pointed out his mistake. There was nothing 
 to do but take her two miles across the city to 
 the Felix Home. 
 
 The woman did not utter a word. They 
 practically carried her. They said nothing to 
 one another, and all the time it snowed and 
 snowed. Peace was supreme. They passed 
 no one. Even the police had disappeared. The 
 snow came down so thick and lights were so 
 few that they missed their way for a while 
 among the alleys of the Jewish quarter. But 
 they emerged at last on the vast broad East- 
 end highway, the Mile End Road of New York. 
 They grew taller by the cones of snow on their 
 heels, and by the time they reached the so-called 
 Fortunate home they were white from head to 
 foot with snowflakes. Well, well ! Darkness 
 again, no open doors nor open arms, no look of 
 
IV THE LIGHT 193 
 
 warmth or welcome. The opium-eater's heart 
 sank within him ; he knew in advance that 
 another refusal was coming. 
 
 They wakened up the porter and he was 
 very cross. He came to the door in trousers 
 and shirt, rubbed his eyes and stared at them. 
 
 " Wha' yer want ?" 
 
 " We've brought a woman who needs 
 shelter." 
 
 "At this hour of the night? Have you 
 brought a recommendation .-' " 
 
 " She's freezing to death," said Turko. 
 
 " No, we brought no recommendation," said 
 the opium-eater. "We found her lying asleep 
 in the road. Her baby, I'm afraid, is frozen." 
 
 At this point the baby cried feebly. It was 
 not dead. The exercise had brought warmth 
 to both woman and child, and the little one 
 had revived. 
 
 "The baby's starving. I can' feed it. I'm 
 empty," said the woman supplicatingly. This 
 was the first word of hope from her lips. 
 
 The porter rubbed his thigh with his palm, 
 made a long mouth and said they'd made a 
 mistake. They ought to have taken her to the 
 Home of Charity or such a place where women 
 
 o 
 
194 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 on the streets were taken in. The Felix Home 
 was only for respectable married women or 
 single females of virtue. Sorry to turn them 
 away, but it was their fault coming to the wrong 
 place. 
 
 "But she's dying," said the Turk. "The 
 baby will die." 
 
 "Soon be morning," said the porter non- 
 chalantly, and shut the door. 
 
 " Say, where can we get a recommendation ?" 
 asked the opium-eater unprofitably. 
 
 No answer. Never mind. At that hour no 
 one would get up and write a recommendation. 
 
 " Let's take her down the Bowery," said the 
 Turk. " There I have seen you can get a room 
 for twenty cents." 
 
 They took her to the Bowery, wakened up 
 a lodging-house keeper and hired a room on 
 the ninth story. There was a bed in it, a 
 table and a chair. The woman, gasping from 
 climbing the stairs, lay down on the bed. It 
 was cold and dreary. They spread a quilt over 
 her. Whilst they were doing so the door 
 opened and an evil face looked in, looked round, 
 grinned and withdrew. "This is not a safe 
 place for a woman," said the opium-eater. 
 
IV THE LIGHT 195 
 
 " You sit here and watch her whilst I go and 
 waken somebody and buy some milk." 
 
 The dope-fiend disappeared. The woman 
 lay unmoving. The baby whimpered now and 
 then. Heavy steps sounded on the stairs, 
 there was a sound of furniture being moved, 
 and far away some one was playing on a viol. 
 The Turk sat dreaming. The tiny gas flame, 
 the merest match-light it was, scarcely saved 
 the room from darkness ; he could have slept. 
 But he kept saying to himself, " The light 
 shineth in darkness, and the darkness compre- 
 hendeth it not," and he thought of the old man's 
 prayer, " Make the darkness comprehend ! " and 
 he thought of the two homes and of Mary the 
 mother of Jesus and of Mary of the mission- 
 room, and of the woman they had found. Her 
 name was Mary, no doubt. All such women 
 were named Mary. " Strange thing, this 
 Christianity," he said to himself. " Now, in 
 Turkey ..." 
 
 He was interrupted by the opening of the 
 door and the apparition of the tall, gaunt, ragged, 
 stooping opium-fiend, carrying in one hand a 
 steaming saucepan and in the other an earthen- 
 ware mug. He came in on tiptoe, assuming 
 
196 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 that the woman was asleep, though he intended 
 to waken her anyway. He put the saucepan 
 and the mug dehberately on the table and drew 
 from his pocket a chunk of white bread. It 
 perhaps tells something of the man when I say 
 he had brought a teaspoon also. 
 
 He put the woman up in bed and sat beside 
 her with one arm round her, and, with the mug 
 full of bread and milk, he fed her with the tea- 
 spoon, fed her and the poor little baby alter- 
 nately, and the Turk sat watching them. 
 
 When one mugful had been eaten and the 
 opium-eater moved to the table to break bread 
 again and pour on warm milk the woman looked 
 at him, cried out, " God bless you," and collapsed 
 into tears. 
 
 The Turk offered his handkerchief, and the 
 opium-eater wiped her tears away and told her 
 to bear up. The baby showed its toothless 
 gums, and a faint smile passed over its wee lips. 
 The baby was all right ; it would live — a strong 
 baby. 
 
 The woman received the second helping. 
 When it was finished and the opium-eater turned 
 to make up a third mugful he found the Turk 
 kneeling on the floor. 
 
IV THE LIGHT 197 
 
 " Wha's that for ? " asked he. 
 
 " I am giving thanks to my Master," said 
 the Turk, " that we have saved the woman and 
 the baby, and that I have found a man who lives 
 according to the Gospel of St. John. I was told 
 there were Christians in this country, and though 
 nearly all Americans told me there were not, I 
 believed. I didn't believe in the Americans, I 
 believed in St. John's Gospel. It existed ; it 
 was alive*; it must make Christians." 
 
 The dope-fiend administered the third help- 
 ing, and then the woman and her baby lay 
 back and fell asleep. The two men sat in 
 silence and watched her till morning, till late in 
 the morning. Then the woman who had sold 
 the milk and allowed it to be heated on her gas 
 promised to look after the other, and the dope- 
 fiend and the Turk made themselves responsible 
 for the rent. 
 
 At the New Year the woman was reconciled 
 to her husband. He had found a job and was 
 happy again and wanted her back to share his 
 happiness. 
 
 The Turk and the opium-eater continued to 
 give out hymn-books at Mary's mission-room. 
 They were stand-bys of the place. They were 
 
198 THE QUEST OF THE FACE iv 
 
 sure to be there every evening. One evening 
 when the old man had a swollen throat they 
 were even given charge of the room and con- 
 ducted the service themselves. Another even- 
 ing Mary gave the Turk the keys and he came 
 early. When she and her father came later 
 they were astonished to see the electric light 
 being switched off and on as if some one were 
 playing with it. When they got in they found 
 the Turk placidly and childishly happy turning 
 the light button up and down. The dope-fiend 
 was sitting half asleep in the front seat. 
 
 " Why are you doing that ? " asked Mary. 
 
 " It's a miracle," said the Turk, " isn't it ?" 
 
 " What is ? " 
 
 "Why, the light. You press this and then 
 comes splendid light ; we don't have this in 
 Turkey ; we are only poor Moslems." 
 
 " But that's got nothing to do with religion." 
 
 " It is Christian," said the Turk. " So I 
 love it." 
 
 Mary laughed, 
 
 " You ought to go to classes and learn about 
 it and understand," said she. "It is made by 
 waterfalls." 
 
 The Turk looked puzzled. 
 
IV THE LIGHT 199 
 
 " You go to classes ! " said she. " You will 
 learn to make it yourself." 
 
 " Oh, I should like to," said the Turk. 
 
 The upshot was that the Eastern saved 
 money and went to a science class and mastered 
 the mysteries of electricity. 
 
 He has now returned to Turkey with the 
 electric light, an instalment of the light that 
 never was on sea or land. 
 
 He will surely return. For the poor old 
 dope-fiend has become an infrequent visitor at 
 Mary's mission-room. He staggers down the 
 street, waxen-faced, delirious-eyed. His soul 
 must be calling to the Turk, and the Turk 
 must yearn for him, for the gentle heart of the 
 only Christian he found in America, the gaunt, 
 stooping, ragged opium-fiend who must forget 
 the evil city somewhere, either with the Turk 
 and Mary or in a Chinese parlour. 
 
A RUSSIAN BEGGAR 
 
Unhappy Martha goes in quest of the Face also — -from the 
 sordid misery of the starving poor to the spacious places where 
 live the rich. To her, Jesus is the one most unlike her present 
 state ; to her, Jesus is the one who would have mercy. 
 
V 
 A RUSSIAN BEGGAR 
 
 Unhappy Martha! I saw her to-day at the 
 
 porch of a rich church. The church was full 
 
 of people, and the priests in purple robes 
 
 moved to and fro among the ikons, whilst little 
 
 surpliced boys, white as angels, swayed the 
 
 censers. The rich images, deep set in jewels, 
 
 exhaled strange influences out of the gloom. 
 
 The famous wonder-working Virgin looked 
 
 over her flowers at the grove of wasting 
 
 candles around her. Voronof, the merchant, 
 
 clad in furs, held a taper in his well-worn 
 
 fingers and stood before the ikon. Did Mary 
 
 see him as he placed his votive light among 
 
 those others ? He bowed to the ground and 
 
 crossed himself in deep devotion. 
 
 Martha, the beggar, stood outside in the 
 
 porch among others who, like herself, were 
 
 203 
 
204 THE QUEST OF THE FACE v 
 
 tattered and starved. She was there before 
 the service began, and she watched the people 
 going in to pray — the rich Moscow matrons 
 in heavy silks, the elegant young ladies who 
 tripped daintily up the steps in their new 
 goloshes, the young men in high collars and 
 smart German ties, the portly business men in 
 deep overcoats. She saw these pass by and 
 prayed them with unavail. Then in his 
 carriage came Voronof, the merchant ; the 
 fine black horses knew whom they were carry- 
 ing, and the driver, looking impossibly large 
 and important, knew that the one who sat 
 behind him was no ordinary man. Slowly, and 
 with dignity, the merchant alighted on to the 
 pavement and made his way to the church door, 
 whilst the beggars, half awed, half desperate, 
 almost barred his way with supplicating hands. 
 None of the worshippers had looked at 
 Martha ; if by chance they glanced at her 
 face, they took away their eyes immediately. 
 Martha was not pleasant to look upon, she 
 had no nose, her eyes looked like the handles 
 of a pair of scissors. There were the marks 
 of sin on her face, evil features, lines of hunger 
 and crime and dark abysses where horror 
 
V A RUSSIAN BEGGAR 205 
 
 lurked. The eyes of the worshippers going to 
 Mass avoided the defilement of looking upon 
 an evil sight. But Voronof, the merchant, 
 with his suave, grave eyes looked at her, and, 
 as it were, started. A tremor passed along his 
 lip, but he passed, and even he gave nothing ; 
 he walked straight by every beggar away into 
 the church, and not one of them was a farthing 
 the richer. It is not a custom to give alms 
 before Mass, but there are copecks for many 
 when the worshippers come out. Other people 
 followed Voronof, till finally .the church was 
 full, and the beggars knew by the singing and 
 the incense that the service had commenced. 
 
 Martha waited, Martha with her few rags 
 about her, not enough to hide her grey breast, 
 her poor, grey, withered, outcast breast, itself 
 a rag. She stood at the door with the others, 
 stood there with a blank mind and lived strange 
 lives under an unmoving suspense of rags. 
 
 She had no words. When the people went in, 
 her life flame faded low and dull, her brain was 
 too starved to yield even thought words. She 
 only waited there unmoving, scarce a finger 
 twitching. You would have said she was sleep- 
 ing as an over-tired sentry slumbers at his post. 
 
2o6 THE QUEST OF THE FACE v 
 
 But one soul of hers was looking through its eyes 
 quietly and without exertion. One soul, and 
 before it on a grey disc it watched two spots 
 that moved together and apart fretfully. Martha 
 stood with her shrunk body loose in her rags, 
 her poor feet flat on the stones, her lips dried 
 together, every word starved out of her mind. 
 She looked into herself silently at the black 
 spots on the grey disc — will they come out, 
 won't they come out ? . . . 
 
 Those who were nearest the church door 
 would stand best chance. The beggars fur- 
 tively eyed the gendarme at the corner and 
 fought for places. A turbulent cripple squirm- 
 ing at Martha's knees shuffled over her feet, 
 but she did not notice him. She watched the 
 grey discs, and now there appeared on it little 
 sharp zigzags playing nervously ; then other 
 zigzags appeared, opposing ones, fast moving ; 
 the picture was full of fretfulness. Martha in 
 the church porch shut her eyes — devils catch 
 them, fiery devils burn them, grind them to 
 powder, burn them, strike them down, catch 
 them, — burn them. . . . 
 
 Voronof was kneeling at the altar. A priest 
 consecrated and broke the holy Bread, another 
 
V A RUSSIAN BEGGAR 207 
 
 priest prepared the wine-cup, in which the Bread 
 was put, and the worshippers partook of the 
 sacrifice which shows us One in Christ. " This 
 is the Bread of Life and the Body of Christ, 
 the Wine and Blood. Whoso eateth of the 
 Body of Christ entereth into His portion and 
 taketh His cross ; whoso tasteth the Wine 
 drinketh of His cup." The choir sang the 
 chorus of the Mass. Then some one half- 
 opened the church door. 
 
 There was a whiff of incense and a burst of 
 music. Martha started. But it was long before 
 the end of the service. She was cold. She 
 would have stamped her feet and run about, 
 but she was too hungry ; if she moved a muscle 
 she would feel more hungry. The spots and 
 the zigzags and the grey disc had vanished 
 now, and Martha opened her eyes. A dreamy 
 film was before her and a soul looked into it 
 and listened, listened to the ghost of a song — 
 quite a starved little song, and far away : 
 
 " Poor Martha, 
 Unhappy Martha ..." 
 
 What then ? Was she pitying herself ? How 
 
 had she come to sing that little song ? Over 
 
 and over again, hastily and in thin notes, the 
 
2o8 THE QUEST OF THE FACE v 
 
 little tune ran. Now it was full of excitement 
 and then in a minute it was slow and melancholy 
 again, first as if she were sobbing to herself, 
 then as if she were singing a child to sleep, 
 rocking it up and down in her arms, and then 
 again madly and frantically in breathless repeti- 
 tion. After a moment the excitement was over, 
 and she was back again listening to some one 
 gently crooning. She trembled and looked at 
 the door. Over and over again, and then faster 
 and faster sounded the song, and then shorter, 
 so, " Poor unhappy Martha, poor unhappy 
 Martha." Suddenly the other beggars looked 
 at her, for she broke into an excited shudder 
 — eugh, heugh, heugh, heugh. . . . 
 
 Then all was calm again. She saw a space 
 cleared away in her mind ; there was a little 
 room and a table in it, and she kissed the table. 
 It was a little empty table. Martha fell quite 
 flat upon it and could not raise herself. . . . 
 Then suddenly she had raised herself, and the 
 table had disappeared, and she saw her sister 
 Vera, and again the plaintive little song was 
 humming in her mind. 
 
 And the song was full of wistfulness and tears, 
 she would have wept if she could. But suddenly 
 
V A RUSSIAN BEGGAR 209 
 
 she saw piled baskets of white bread, baskets, 
 baskets. . . . The church door opened, some 
 one was coming out ; at least the music and the 
 incense burst out and the voiceof a priest sounded 
 also : " And Jesus loved " ; the other beggars 
 smartened up and rubbed their hands. Martha 
 half awakened. But at the word "loved" the 
 door closed. No one was coming out. 
 
 " Jesus loved ! " 
 
 " That Jesus gave away piles of money," 
 said ugly Peter, the paralytic. " I wish he would 
 come to church, we should all get roubles." 
 
 No one paid' any attention, but Martha 
 blinked. Jesus, who was he .'' Was there a 
 man called Jesus ? Martha saw a face in front 
 of her, suave, grave. 
 
 A policeman was staring at them, one by one, 
 as if searching for a criminal. 
 
 " I've seen Jesus," said Martha calmly. 
 
 Ugly Peter grinned. The policeman stared 
 as if in doubt whether he ought to arrest any 
 one. " One of her customers," said a street 
 arab, smearing the glass of one of the ikons 
 with his dirty coat. " Here, I want you," said 
 the official, pretending to dive among the 
 tatterdemalions in chase of the urchin. A smile 
 
 p 
 
2IO THE QUEST OF THE FACE v 
 
 and a frown dwelt together on the policeman's 
 face, he had forgotten Martha. 
 
 " I've seen Jesus," thought Martha to her- 
 self, as the face of Voronof the merchant hovered 
 before her imagination. " I've seen Jesus." 
 Then the grey disc again appeared and a lump 
 of stale bread whirled about on it ; it fell towards 
 Martha, then rolled back, came to her, ran 
 away impishly. Martha was' full of fretfulness 
 and hope — what would it be, then, a piece of 
 white bread at Smolin's, a piece of white bread, 
 a long piece of white bread, or would it be only 
 a lump of black bread .-* Lumps of white and 
 black bread danced and jumped up and down 
 before her on the disc. In a minute they would 
 be coming out. " Lord God, be merciful." 
 
 So it happened ; the priest pronounced 
 benediction and raised the gold cross above the 
 people. All bowed and crossed themselves and 
 kissed the sign, and thereupon shuffled along 
 the passages of exit. The church door opened 
 and the worshippers issued forth, and to right 
 and to left, and according to custom, distributed 
 farthings to God's poor collected there. But 
 the crowd of beggars without had become 
 almost as numerous as the worshippers within. 
 
V A RUSSIAN BEGGAR 211 
 
 Martha moved forward and stretched two 
 skinny yellow hands — two, that she might have 
 two chances. Poor Martha, one, two, three 
 passed her. She trembled, the zigzags played 
 on the grey disc — " catch them, burn them, 
 grind them to powder, burn them." But she 
 found sounds and words. " For Christ's sake, 
 for Christ's sake spare me one farthing, one little 
 copeck, a copechka, for Christ's sake, O Lord, 
 O Lord God, a poor sinner begs, a poor old 
 sinner. Bread for the love of God, bread for 
 an old sinner ! " And the wild zigzags still 
 meant, " Burn them, kill them, damn, grind, 
 burn." "Be so good, kind lady. Remember 
 Christ, remember a sinner. Ah ! good prince, 
 God bless you, God remember this to you on 
 your day." A man in furs was fumbling in his 
 pocket. He would evidently find something 
 for the old woman ; he found a large coin, and 
 put it in Martha's hands mumbling a blessing. 
 The skinny fingers closed and she looked up. 
 She looked up and saw the face, and exclaimed, 
 "Jesus!" And Voronof, for it was he, hurried 
 across to his carriage and in a few seconds 
 was gone. Martha was left standing ; she 
 opened her hand and saw the coin — it was 
 
212 THE QUEST OF THE FACE v 
 
 bright and silver. ' She had never seen the 
 like before, a silver rouble, a large and wonder- 
 ful coin. " Jesus," she said, staring at the 
 delicately engraved portrait of Nicholas the 
 Second. She put the coin to her lips, felt it 
 all round with her fingers, looked at it, gloated 
 over it, and there was joy which found no 
 words, only she saw absurd pictures of tables 
 with piles of flour upon them. But as the coin 
 lay in her palm a red, hairy, hungry hand 
 rushed in and snatched and the coin was gone. 
 
 "Rrr! Give me that money, devil, beast, 
 give it back, give it back before I tear out 
 your eyes, cross eyes, scabby beast, you 
 starved beggar, you beast ! " Martha tried 
 to get back her money from the grinning fellow 
 who had stolen it, she threatened, pulled, 
 scratched, agonised. . . . 
 
 Then suddenly in her heart the zigzags 
 were gone, and she simply saw Vera and her 
 mother, and she heard again the ghost of that 
 unhappy song — poor Martha, unhappy Martha. 
 Something had broken in her. The beggar 
 struck her in the mouth. 
 
 " It was silver money. Give it back," she 
 spluttered. 
 
V A RUSSIAN BEGGAR 213 
 
 " Now then, you diseases, you maggot 
 beds," said the gendarme, hurrying up. He 
 pushed the thief into the roadway. The latter 
 slunk away quietly, and Martha, recognising the 
 dreaded voice of the policeman, also passed out 
 humbly. The beggar shook his fist and swiftly 
 disappeared, Martha was left. 
 
 The afternoon passed fruitlessly. She left 
 the tavern at dusk and moved unsteadily along 
 . the high road. That was the road along which 
 Voronof's carriage rolled easily away. It led 
 into the West End, to the clean streets and 
 the large white houses. The beggars are not 
 allowed up there, 
 
 A handsome equipage came quickly round 
 a corner into one of the fashionable squares, 
 black horses, a fine driver, and, sitting at his 
 ease, an elderly gentleman. It might have 
 been he. Martha reeled on the pavement and 
 clutched at a lamp-post. The carriage crossed 
 the square and was gone. An irate policeman 
 strode over and asked what she wanted there. 
 
 " Jesus," she whispered, 
 
 "You won't find Jesus here," said he with 
 a grin, and turned her back. 
 
THE STUDENT 
 
The face of Him who wipes away the tears from our eyes, 
 the Joy of all the afflicted. 
 
VI 
 THE STUDENT 
 
 Imagine the town at night and the horror of 
 it in the heart of a man who is seeking a place 
 where he may commit suicide. 
 
 Yonder is the steeple clock with fiery face. 
 Splendidly and triumphantly that angry face 
 looks out over the sleeping town, and would 
 take offence, but cannot since it rules alone. 
 Superbly the face glares out into the night, and 
 the stonework above the clock frowns like dense 
 hair upon a low white brow. The town sleeps, 
 but the face looks out vigilantly and steadfastly, 
 as if ever expectant of menace. Every quarter- 
 hour the stress becomes intense — expectation, 
 in which seems mingled not a little pale terror, 
 ranges so high. 
 
 It is fourteen minutes past one ; nightmare 
 
 broods upon the city. An eternity of stillness 
 
 217 
 
2i8 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vi 
 
 in a minute, and then suddenly the danger is 
 past. A quarter past one ! The chime out- 
 breaks. Time in the tower chuckles to himself 
 in relief, "Ah, so there was no danger." The 
 chime ceases : its exclamation was unremarked, 
 or is felt to have been out of place. There is 
 an ominous silence as it were behind the tower. 
 The clock looks full of anxiety, the face strains 
 every power to hear movements behind, move- 
 ment in that sibilant stillness so pregnant with 
 mystery. The conspirators are manoeuvring, 
 they are discussing almost inaudibly who it is 
 shall strike the blow. The face is full of anger 
 and dread. Surely it will raise one of those 
 long dark arms that hang in dark shadow on 
 each side of the tower! Dread, anger, suspense, 
 dread, rage, proud rage, indifference but anger, 
 dread. . . . Surely the face will suddenly turn 
 round and look the other way. Just for a 
 moment it will look to assure itself. This 
 cannot last — no, and will not. One reflective 
 moment, the face clears with comprehension of 
 the mystery. Half past one ! — ah, so that was 
 what it was — so now there is no danger 1 No 
 doubt of it this time. There is no more to be 
 feared from behind. Most angrily the eyes flash 
 
VI THE STUDENT 219 
 
 out far away to the low hills beyond the city. 
 To east and to west they look, and clasp the 
 whole town in a vice. The eyes narrow with 
 cruelty and the light is sharp and keen. No 
 comfort comes from the hills, only the morning 
 air a little dank, with its unwelcome message. 
 Time sulks, and will sulk more and more till 
 morning now, for as the new work-day com- 
 mences, the light will go from his features, and 
 men with dull eyes will scan his pale grey 
 morning face with its daily sulk upon it. The 
 face broods on this, and there comes a moment 
 when one expects it to abdicate in disgust, and 
 one fancies that next moment the fire will go 
 out, and that in plain grey garb the shrunken, 
 humble face will slowly climb down the tower 
 and disappear. And whilst one's fancy con- 
 templates the phantasmal vision of an eye-socket 
 looking out evilly and enigmatically into the 
 night, one is suddenly startled by loud laughter. 
 A quarter to two ! Long laughter, three times 
 too long; surely a smile would have sufficed. 
 One cannot believe in that laughter ; that is 
 not the final comment on the thoughts of Time. 
 Time unpacks his heart with laughter. Time 
 is bluffing himself And not too successfully. 
 
220 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vi 
 
 for mark with what uneasiness he is now sitting 
 there on his shadow throne. But a certain 
 comfort comes to him, and all at once he seems 
 to whisper, "Am I not Matthew, Mark, Luke, 
 John ? " There is no answer. So Time also 
 needs to deceive himself and have his little 
 sentimentalism. Thereby certainly he gets 
 peace of soul to nerve himself for coming duty. 
 One sees it written in the face, " Soon it will be 
 two o'clock, let no one breathe, let no one dis- 
 turb me in the discharge of my office." Time 
 nerves himself for the effort. He gathers 
 strength, then telling forth the whole experience 
 of the hour, he gives his verdict and marks off 
 — One, Two. 
 
 Time rules and glares in the darkness. Far 
 away the dark river water wallows and in- 
 cessantly turns and waves the light -beams 
 which it catches from the tower. Heavy river- 
 boats, in dank dulled red and green, lie moored 
 at the bank and hobnob together. Theirs also 
 is the night, they have stolen a solitude for 
 themselves, and even the glaring steeple eye 
 overlooks them. They seem to say to one 
 another, " He was here to-night." The red 
 and green hulks rock sideways to one another. 
 
VI THE STUDENT 221 
 
 "Who?"— "The student. His eye was dull, 
 his legs trembled on the brink ..." 
 
 Along the towing-path one dim lamp shines 
 in a night shop — for whom is that light ? On 
 the other side of the river the wooden mill- 
 wheel stands inactive, and but for that the eye 
 finds no rest in looking over the water. The 
 wheel is far away and shadowy, but at this 
 moment still seems to reflect on the recollection 
 of a grey human form that paused at the water's 
 edge and balanced an idea, and seemed about 
 to act — the form of a young man whose eye 
 wandered over the darkness and found no 
 resting-place till it suddenly settled on the 
 wheel. Then the idea had been outweighed. 
 
 A pale moon swims out of the clouds and 
 sheds peculiar light on the long ripples of the 
 murky water. Broad and calm and dirty is the 
 water, and the great ooze bed on which it rests 
 IS far below the surface. There is a smell of 
 fish — plates of fish-bones lie unwashed on the 
 coarse tables of riverside eating-rooms. The 
 grimy women who served the meals now sleep 
 in dark back rooms. There is an odour of 
 spirits and stale food. That ugly dwindling 
 line of squat dwellings looks like a reptile's tail. 
 
222 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vi 
 
 There the common people sleep ; these are the 
 theatres of ill dreams. There by the stone steps 
 he, that is, the student, paused angry. Grey 
 and calm and deep is the pool below. The 
 angry Persian lion's face of the tower is flouted 
 by a sooty factory shaft. Softly the ooze washes. 
 And within hearing of the ish-ish-ish-wash of 
 the water lie huddled together below the coping 
 poor, ugly, tattered sleepers. 
 
 " So they can sleep," he had thought. 
 " They can sleep, and they have their share in 
 all the comfort of the night. These are the 
 most unhappy, and close by the stream they 
 lie. Should I prove myself less happy by 
 seeking refuge in the stream itself.-* But am I 
 not forced here ? " 
 
 Not far away is that spot, though from the 
 student's window it cannot be seen. His lodg- 
 ing is not upon the riverside, but separated 
 from it by some rows of squalid dwellings. 
 This is the students' quarter, the place of young 
 men, poorer than the poorest of those who lie 
 in riverside slums. The eye of the steeple 
 scarcely takes cognisance of these dark roofs, 
 so eager it seems to flash in the spacious places 
 of the grander city beyond. But below these 
 
VI THE STUDENT 223 
 
 huddled roofs lie the strong, the young, the 
 new. Those high, black houses, subdivided 
 to cells, close in room by room all the young 
 learning, the wit, the life of which this city will 
 be proud to boast in the days to come. Some 
 have rooms to themselves, some share single 
 rooms, and in some dens three or four lie 
 together among the litter of cigarette-ends, 
 volumes on law and medicine and philosophy, 
 dust of past ages, whisky-droppings of the last 
 students' gathering, old clothes, newspapers, 
 picture postcards. Two or three of every 
 four lie in twisted heaps and snore plaintively. 
 In body, weak through lack of nourishment ; 
 in mind, stupid through excess of university 
 " cram " ; in heart, confused, tinging their 
 dreams alternately with melancholy and with 
 gaiety, with suspicion and with hilarity, with 
 dread and with serenity — they sleep. 
 
 Happy they ! One may be solitary, but for 
 four it is impossible. A companion is a buoy 
 that keeps one afloat, dancing in the sun upon 
 the surface of the deep and bitter sea. But 
 what of those solitary ones who have naught 
 but work to save themselves from themselves, 
 those who by chance are without companions, 
 
224 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vi 
 
 those who for shame and pride and the necessity 
 of their souls may not share their dwelling-room 
 with any other ? These are they who do great 
 things, who toil while others sleep, who find 
 and spend the savings of energy that lie hidden 
 in themselves — who live on their capital. 
 
 The student who paused by the rocking 
 river tubs, who thought to find out death in the 
 muddy water, but who at last wearily returned 
 to the little room he had nearly left for ever, is 
 one of those who have, as it were, taken out an 
 annuity for themselves. His heritage, all that 
 was passed over to him in body, strength, secret 
 strength, soul and mind, force and glory of soul 
 and mind, he had, as it were, realised and 
 exchanged for an annuity. Life had forced 
 him to this. He had been unable to find 
 conditions under which he could thrfve and 
 blossom and live on his annual fruits. That 
 which men call life, that is, conditions of 
 modern life which were for him also conditions 
 of death, had forced him back upon himself. 
 
 So it was that from an ordinary happy 
 boy who lived as careless as the bird of the 
 forest, he had slowly begun to change to 
 a self- questioning, self-absorbed young man. 
 
VI THE STUDENT 225 
 
 Boyhood had passed, then came the stress of 
 self-responsibility, the taking up of a " means 
 of life." To earn a livelihood he must needs 
 rise with the hour when the light died from the 
 steeple clock, and all day within sight of the 
 sulky face he needs must keep mind and soul 
 and face fixed in one will. At night, when the 
 fiery face glared friskily and impatiently over 
 the evening throngs, he would come home and 
 eat and talk, and smile a little and then sleep. 
 
 He had become troubled. Because he was 
 not at ease, he was bound to think. And 
 because he remained constantly in dis-ease, 
 thinking became a habit. The more disease 
 ate into his soul, the keener and more profound 
 became the thinking and the questioning, till 
 folk began to exclaim over him, " How clever ! 
 Why, what an intellect he has ! " 
 
 The disintegration of his being forced him to 
 seek salvation in all manner of ways, his disease 
 took new aspects, new developments. It sent 
 him to women and made him the most wonder- 
 ful of lovers, the most melancholy of poets, the 
 cleverest of mockers. Vanity was an aggrava- 
 tion of his disease ; it flushed across his dis- 
 ordered and bared self and stirred all to fever. 
 
 Q 
 
226 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vi 
 
 And he sought salvation in books, and his 
 being found all books to be the memoirs of 
 people who had suffered as himself. Then it 
 seemed that he also had experiences, had 
 knowledges that no one had written down, and 
 he wished to save the world. " Am I not a 
 genius ? " he asked of himself Others who 
 knew him were almost ready to call him such. 
 The great world in which he earned a livelihood 
 became to his mind a great heartless machine 
 that used souls like fuel, and used them for no 
 end but for the multiplication of cases like his 
 own. All around he saw eighths of men who 
 had been born of mothers stronger, richer than 
 themselves. Now he discerned nothing that 
 would grow larger. Men rubbed together in 
 the press of civilisation and, like rocks, wasted 
 one another away to desert sand. Sahara dust 
 was the children of rocks as the pigmies were 
 the children of men. 
 
 The student gave up the machine, left it as 
 far as possible, went apart and resolved to 
 build himself whole again — then to rescue whom 
 he could from the great death-system whence 
 he hoped he had himself escaped. 
 
 See him now ; the gleam of the steeple 
 
VI THE STUDENT 227 
 
 clock strikes across his pale face as he sits in 
 his room alone, this last night. Everywhere it 
 is grey and dark, scarcely a form is visible 
 except the shadowy bulk of the student, and 
 the gleam of his white fingers in his thick black 
 hair. Only the tall books in serried ranks 
 upon dusty shelves on the wall look profound 
 and secret, and deep in consultation among them- 
 selves. Grey are the walls, and black above and 
 below — and darker than elsewhere, there on the 
 floor, the student's bed is spread out. 
 
 Great is the unhappiness of all lonely ones ; 
 fierce the battle of the many against the one, 
 of the rule against the exceptions. The rules 
 of Progress will not tolerate exceptions. If 
 one be an exception, one had better not be an 
 exception to a rule. Happy those who lie in 
 the sun of the old world, those who have not 
 yet been called in for fuel. Unhappy, incurable, 
 remains the part-consumed one who escapes. 
 It is better that the singed moth die, since it 
 can never fly again. 
 
 The student sits with cold face in cold hands, 
 and the pain of his soul is sometimes thoughts, 
 and sometimes thoughts are the pain. Not once 
 has he looked out and remarked the brazen 
 
228 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vi 
 
 stare of the steeple clock : it nears three, and 
 the face looks sulkier, less sharp, more dream- 
 like. At a thought, the young man raises his 
 eyes and sees it. A white hand goes forward 
 in the darkness and a blind moves softly down. 
 Now darkness itself seems curtained. The 
 student sits down once more and his head 
 rests in his hands. Pain and thought are in 
 harmony, and he is softly moving away from 
 the town and his life ; he slides softly, easily 
 forward into sleep, when suddenly, gently, 
 equably, almost incredibly, the door steals open 
 and a form appears. 
 
 The man in the chair does not move, but 
 after a moment his head rises and he leans back. 
 
 "Who is it — a friend.?" Swiftly, almost 
 hurriedly, the visitor comes across the room, 
 and then opens his arms. In full-arm embrace 
 he gathers the young man to himself Then 
 answering in movement, the unhappy one comes 
 nearer and presses close to the other, nervously. 
 There is a long silence. Then comes a soft 
 whisper : " All men suffer ; they are all weary. 
 All men need sleep, and all need love. A man 
 comes to a man with love, and there is no 
 longer any sorrow in all the world. Every one 
 
VI THE STUDENT 229 
 
 is full of secret weariness and sorrow which is 
 uncomforted. There is no man who would not 
 weep if he could find the bosom wherein to 
 shed the tears. The whole world is sad, and 
 looks sadly from every eye. The whole world 
 is like a woman who for one long cloudy day 
 yearns for the kiss of a lover who has turned 
 away from her. Every one needs to hear the 
 voice, ' You are unhappy, you are weary ; so 
 are we all, but sleep comes, death comes, and 
 love is here . . .' " 
 
 Less vigilantly towards the morning the 
 tower-face scanned the town ; and as the dawn 
 drew up, the spite and fire seemed to pass away 
 innocuously. 
 
 In the early morning light the student sat 
 asleep, head in hand, at his little table. The 
 light came greyly into the room. He wakened, 
 rubbed his eyes, started up, and drew the blind. 
 " Evening and morning are not alike," he said, 
 and smiled. Then a thought came to his lips : 
 
 Jesu, Lover of my soul, 
 Let me to Thy bosom fly. 
 
 " I used not to believe in that, did 1 ? But 
 
 now," ... he smiled, "now I go forward as a 
 
 comforter." 
 
THE SHADOW 
 
His habitation will not be found on this world, for he seeketh 
 the City, and all his resting-places, even his grave, are but inns 
 on the pilgrim's road. 
 
VII 
 THE SHADOW 
 
 " I HAVE determined to give up my work in 
 the Office of Ways and Means, and to exchange 
 it for a roving life. I am going to take a big 
 jump out of all these surroundings and begin to 
 live, get out and see . Nature and the world, 
 sleep under the open sky, write poetry, say my 
 prayers again ..." 
 
 " I know, I know," said the Hon. Richard 
 Leverlast, the head of that particular branch of 
 the Department where Saxby served. " But I 
 put it to you — are you not throwing away the 
 substance for the shadow ? You have a hundred 
 and fifty a year, rising by twenty-five to three 
 hundred pounds, is that not so ? after which 
 you may be promoted on to a higher grade and 
 eventually retire on a good pension ; there is 
 little to do and the post is safe. No one is ever 
 
 233 
 
234 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vii 
 
 turned out for anything short of crime. You 
 are enabled to dress well. Your position here 
 gives you a certain standing in society. The 
 hours are light, you can easily take up a hobby 
 such as poetry in your spare time. I daresay 
 many Civil Service poets have written of their 
 best in ofifice hours — those hurriedly scribbled 
 sheets popped hastily under a blotting-pad or 
 into a drawer of the desk when some one else 
 goes by. Your post is a good thing and many 
 thousands would be glad to get it. You won't 
 get anything half as good by leaving us," 
 
 "I shall be free," said Saxby. "This Hfe 
 here seems to be a still-born life. It is a 
 comfortable and safe billet, I know, but pardon 
 me if I say that I don't fit it, and it doesn't 
 fit me." 
 
 "Well, you know best," replied the Hon. 
 Richard Leverlast, feeling that perhaps he had 
 said more than good taste would allow, but 
 unable to deny himself a parting repetition of 
 phrase. " Believe me, you are throwing away 
 the substance for the shadow," 
 
 Saxby went out from the great man's pres- 
 ence, and he said to himself joyfully, " I have 
 thrown away the substance for the shadow. 
 
vii THE SHADOW 235 
 
 Darling shadow ! Let that be my motto as I 
 go out into the vast untried experienced world. 
 . . . Darling shadow ! for whom I would give 
 up any material thing that did not seem to fit." 
 
 This was the beginning of Saxby's new life. 
 His father before him had died in the service 
 of the Office of Ways and Means. He himself 
 had been carefully trained for a clerical post 
 there. Old Mr. and Mrs. Saxby had asked 
 their boy no questions as to what destiny 
 would be his, though if they had he would not 
 have been able to give them a satisfactory reply. 
 He had never chosen anything in his life, all 
 had been carefully planned and the plans had 
 been realised. 
 
 But a spiritual passion grew in him and 
 urged him out of the safety and comfort of 
 his carefully chosen destiny. He wanted to 
 taste danger, wanted to take risks, to see life, 
 and to get out of the world where every- 
 thing was arranged. He had a soul which 
 yearned naturally for self-expression, and the 
 strange thing was that he seemed to have no 
 self to express. He tended towards poetry, but 
 the verses he wrote were immature, crude. No 
 one cared to read them, not even Saxby himself. 
 
236 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vii 
 
 He would keep them a little while and look at 
 them wonderingly and lovingly, but at last in 
 distaste tear them up or burn them — as hope- 
 lessly inadequate and misrepresentative of his 
 thought and passion. Yet one might very fairly 
 have said to him in the moment of his disgust : 
 
 " Why do you burn them ? The verses are 
 not very good, but they do express you. You 
 are not Shakespeare, you know." 
 
 Perhaps Saxby himself had some inkling of 
 that, for when his poems were burnt he would 
 frequently harp back to them and say : 
 
 " You know I wrote some wonderful poems 
 last year, but I burnt them. How foolish I 
 was ! " 
 
 But he never had any verses to show, 
 anything to which to draw attention, and he 
 sent nothing to the press in the hope of publica- 
 tion. He did not seem to be ambitious, and yet 
 of course he was ambitious in a way, if wish- 
 ing to get a larger life were ambition. Hence 
 his revolt against his pre-ordained safe post 
 and destiny in life. His ambition was spiritual 
 ambition, not material ambition. Worldly am- 
 bition would have prompted him to remain at 
 the Office of Ways and Means and excel, but 
 
VII THE SHADOW 237 
 
 spiritual ambition against all wise counsel drove 
 him out into the wilderness. 
 
 So he gave up all for what he called the 
 darling shadow. And the soft life was ex- 
 changed for a hard one. He wrote some 
 wonderful poems just before he took the final, 
 irretrievable step. His decision became a 
 sacred choice, and his breast was full of singing 
 birds. 
 
 " I feel as if in me a child were being born," 
 said he. " This Christmas is a spiritual birth- 
 day for me, and I shall always look back to it. 
 Next year will be the year One for me." And 
 his poetry proclaimed that he had heard the 
 angels sing. 
 
 But once he had taken the step he soon 
 found himself naked and trembling and solitary 
 and friendless. Clothes became shabby, money 
 grew less. He looked less important, people 
 in the streets gave him less respect — ^^he was 
 clearly less respectable. He starved. He was 
 insulted, spat upon, kicked. He could write no 
 poems : he was plunged in grief. And yet he 
 did not consider himself to have been wrong in 
 his choice, never regretted what he had done. 
 But the meanness of the world constantly 
 
238 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vii 
 
 preyed on his mind. He suffered greatly. 
 And there was little comfort forthcoming for 
 him from men. " What an orphan I am ! " 
 said he to himself and smiled. 
 
 His life was still cast in towns, but he 
 escaped. When the winter was over there was 
 no restraint on him to keep among the settle- 
 ments and trading-places which he had indeed 
 * renounced in renouncing the post in the Office 
 of Ways and Means. And he discovered this 
 in the spring and gave a great sigh of relief. It 
 takes some time getting out of the machine, 
 and often you think you are out when you 
 have merely taken a step from that familiar 
 portion where you fulfil a part to a less familiar 
 portion where you have no part to fulfil. 
 Saxby turned to the country, to Nature, and 
 found a freer life, and once more singing birds 
 were in his breast. He had got from Giant 
 Despair's Castle out away on to the Delectable 
 Mountains. 
 
 It would be a long matter to trace the 
 history of his self-expression, that is, the 
 progress of his spiritual life. In the presence 
 of the beauty of Nature — the majestical hills 
 and sunrise, the infinite sea — its chorus upon 
 
VII THE SHADOW 239 
 
 the shore, the lovely verdant and blossoming 
 breast of the world, white, wan rivers, dark, 
 mysterious forests — his first thought was : 
 " How all this expresses me ! " He seemed 
 to find a kindred. He was nearer akin to 
 Nature than to the brick and stone of Down- 
 ing Street, Whitehall, Charing Cross. The 
 society of the stars and clouds and flowers 
 and birds was more his society than that 
 over which the urbane Leverlast presided. It 
 was the society where "none intrudes," which 
 Byron found. 
 
 He began to give praise to God for his 
 escape. The poems which he wrote now he 
 did not burn, but rather chose to give them an 
 immortality. He succeeded as a poet. 
 
 But he did not find rest in his new happi- 
 ness. From learning that Nature expressed 
 him, that it was akin to him, he went on to 
 a new spiritual realisation. He felt the sad- 
 ness of Nature. And after that he discerned 
 that Nature was not at all sad in itself but 
 supremely, perfectly happy, and only he was sad 
 regarding it. The sunshine was vainly sweet, 
 and because he was himself eternally sad he dis- 
 tinguished in the music of the sea a moan and 
 
240 THE QUEST OF THE F^CE vii 
 
 a lament, the note of sadness of which Matthew 
 Arnold wrote. He ascribed sadness and an 
 expression of plaintive melancholy to the 
 nightingale's song, whereas it was in reality a 
 simple song of courtship, and the bird might 
 say to him : 
 
 " Nay, wanderer, nay, be comforted, 
 My voice is rife 
 To tempt anear a little wife. 
 What is't to thee ? 
 Alone is night not fair to me.'' 
 
 And now many of the poems which Saxby 
 had given to be printed he would fain have 
 recalled and burned. " These earlier ■ poems 
 do not express me," he would say. 
 
 Still, for those who could guess his life and 
 his passion, they were true poems, and were 
 prized by thousands who were striving in 
 various ways to be free. 
 
 Saxby was recognised as a poet, and the 
 first new money of the world began to flow to 
 him. Then Saxby said to himself : 
 
 " Now let me affirm that in tatters and rags as 
 I walk these foreign roads, bespattered with mire, 
 unshorn, penniless, half-starved, I am yet more 
 fittingly clothed, my exterior is more in keeping 
 
VII THE SHADOW 241 
 
 with my soul than it was in the old days of silk 
 hat, perfect black dress, white hands, gold watch, 
 and walking-stick. I look a queer figure, but 
 this is more nearly me than that other." 
 
 And nevertheless he returned to London. 
 He made many mistakes, fell into many errors 
 and pitfalls, was lured into many charming 
 ways which turned out to be false, but he 
 always escaped. He was asked to edit a 
 review, to start a poetry shop, to lecture on 
 poetry, to give professional readings of con- 
 temporary poetry in drawing - rooms ; was 
 offered an official post at the British Museum ; 
 and finally, twenty years after his first renuncia- 
 tion, he was privately offered the poet-laureate- 
 ship. All these were baits thrown out by the 
 world to a spiritual rebel, and some of them 
 were tempting. Saxby was tempted and 
 seemed to fall. But he never lay flat. He 
 always started up again, and was away before 
 the snarer could put a net over him. Large 
 salaries were offered him, salaries compared 
 with which the old hundred and fifty rising by 
 twenty-five to three hundred pounds seemed 
 silly enough, and fees were offered him, but 
 again and again he escaped. 
 
242 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vii 
 
 He tried not to attach any importance to 
 money, and, as often happens in such cases, 
 money loved him ; it sought him out and flowed 
 into his pockets in a way in which it seldom 
 comes to those who seek it all their lives. 
 
 He lived a simple, undecorated life — as if 
 waiting for some true raiment and heavenly 
 fittingness. It was said that he was humble, 
 and yet I discern a superlative noble pride in 
 him. And a great gulf separated him from 
 the insipid youth he looked when he made his 
 first renunciation. His spiritual gain expressed 
 itself in all his movements, and lent a true 
 grace to his ways ; his face had modified, or 
 dull masks had fallen away revealing a strong, 
 fearless, expressive countenance. He had the 
 look of a man, and might have been pointed to 
 as a fair expression of what man really is. He 
 was typical of man as he really is, and how far 
 removed is the characteristic average man of 
 our age from such a type. In the latter sense 
 Shakespeare and Dante and Homer and, may 
 we say it, even Jesus, were typical. 
 
 A man humble in the world because he was 
 not of the world and could not accept a place 
 there, but a man of unlimited spiritual claims ! 
 
VII THE SHADOW 243 
 
 In later years he loved to travel. He 
 wandered far and wide over the world. I say 
 far and wide, but it should be admitted that he 
 did not himself consider his journeyings as far. 
 
 " How far away you've been 1 " people 
 would say. 
 
 " Oh, don't say far" he would reply. "It 
 is quite near. The world is a little place. 
 There's no far away in it. I can imagine a 
 ' far away,' but that's only when I look up at 
 the stars at night and think of a beyond." 
 
 But he liked the sensation of travelling ; it 
 was more congenial to his soul than sitting still. 
 He tramped the mountains, went on long river 
 journeys, ocean journeys in great liners, went 
 up in aeroplanes. 
 
 He did not care, however, for the aeroplane, 
 and considered it disappointing. He was ab- 
 solutely fearless, and that sense of danger which 
 is like champagne to some simply did not exist 
 for him. The sad and unsatisfying thing about 
 an aeroplane was that it had always to come to 
 earth somewhere, it could not go on. 
 
 He liked long train journeys, the sort that 
 can be obtained in Russia, Siberia, America, of 
 thousands of miles. He never had what may 
 
244 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vii 
 
 be called a lasting home or abiding-place, and 
 if one of those friends who knew him whispered 
 in the midst of a dance or asked of another on 
 the way to a place of business : " Where do you 
 think old Saxby is now ? " the answer would be : 
 " Oh, probably wandering along in some fear- 
 fully slow train from God-knows-where to any- 
 where." Others would remark disdainfully: 
 " There'd be some sense if he were likely to 
 find something, if he would bring something 
 back from these remote places. As the Japanese 
 said when told of all the trouble Shackleton took 
 to reach the South Pole, ' What does he expect 
 to find there ? ' " 
 
 One of those rare times when Saxby was 
 back in London I called on him at his poor 
 rooms. He had only been there a fortnight, 
 and yet one of the first things he said to me 
 was : 
 
 " You don't know how homesick I feel ! " 
 
 " Why," said I, " where do you consider 
 your home to be now ? Have you settled down 
 somewhere in a distant land ? " , 
 
 " No," he replied, " I haven't settled down 
 yet. I meant that the ' wander fever ' as they 
 call it, is on me again. I'd like to be in a train. 
 
VII THE SHADOW 245 
 
 I am nearest to being at home when I am in a 
 train, in one of those long-distance trains in 
 Eastern Europe, where one lives while one 
 travels. Here in England, alas, there is always 
 the feeling that a train journey is so much time 
 subtracted from life. That is why you cut your 
 journeys shorter and shorter when rather you 
 should lengthen them out for delight. 
 
 " Directly the train rolls off I feel at home. 
 Suppose it is night, and I compose myself to 
 sleep and dream. I waken when the train stops, 
 and am in torment whilst it waits in a station 
 or before a signal, but when it moves again 
 I give a sigh of relief, and snuggle up in my 
 sleeping things and fall asleep again. So it will 
 be with me on my death-bed perhaps. Suddenly 
 I shall feel myself moving and be at rest." 
 
 And this characteristicpiece of self-expression 
 takes me to one of the last errors that crept 
 into the life of Saxby, and to tell of his triumph 
 over it. 
 
 As the poet grew older rheumatism attacked 
 his joints, and it was considerably less easy for 
 him to move about over the face of the globe 
 and remain a wanderer to the end. Friends 
 suggested to him that he should try to find a 
 
246 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vii 
 
 house somewhere in the country. He had the 
 money to buy a house if he wanted, and one 
 long evening at Saxby's rooms the poet and his 
 friends talked and planned a perfect home in 
 the country. They allowed themselves to dream 
 of the sort of place which in sober earnest does 
 not exist on this planet. Saxby was pleased, 
 and as ever when an idea found his heart he 
 was extremely enthusiastic and his mind fruitful 
 of projects. 
 
 His first thought was of a home in England, 
 so that when he died he might be buried in an 
 English churchyard. He visited a delightful 
 new house in a wood on the fringe of Stoke 
 Common — decorations by Dupeigne, electric 
 light by Howlett, complete in its own grounds, 
 eminently desirable. What attracted him were 
 the natural trees and bushes and wildness of 
 the wood creeping up to the very door. One 
 could have all the doors and windows open all 
 day in summer. Its price was three thousand 
 pounds, and it would obviously be necessary to 
 have several servants to look after it for him. 
 Saxby's mind was in labour for some days. 
 But at last with a sigh of relief he decided in 
 the negative. 
 
VII THE SHADOW 247 
 
 Then he was recommended to go and see a 
 simply perfect cottage on the Sussex Downs. 
 But he found it far from perfect. 
 
 He motored to West Hendred to see a 
 seventeenth-century mansion, but when he saw 
 its damp old walls he remarked simply, " This 
 is not for me." 
 
 He saw five empty houses on the Surrey 
 Hills in one day, each one of them advertised 
 vaguely as eligible. But not one would do. 
 
 Then he was just too late to obtain a lovely 
 house in an orchard near Maidstone. It had 
 been bought the day before by a lawyer. 
 " Perhaps it will not suit him," said Saxby to 
 the owner. 
 
 " On the contrary," said the latter, "he said 
 that it suited him down to the ground." 
 
 "Well, I suppose then it wouldn't have 
 suited me after all," said Saxby humbly. 
 
 He scanned the advertisement columns of 
 The Times and the estate agents' lists in Country 
 Life. He entrusted himself to agents, called 
 in Harrods, made innumerable visits to country 
 places with " Orders to View," but with no 
 success. 
 
 " I have shed one illusion," said Saxby to a 
 
248 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vii 
 
 bishop to whom he had applied for knowledge 
 of anything specially good in his diocese. ' ' The 
 houses which are for sale are not the beautiful 
 houses. Of all the places I have been induced 
 to visit half could be made into prisons with 
 but little alteration."; 
 
 " I am afraid you are hard to please," said 
 the bishop. 
 
 "Yes, I suppose I am," said Saxby, and 
 rubbed his hands cheerfully. 
 
 I really believe he had a certain pleasure in 
 giving the verdict of " No " against a house 
 which was to let. It filled him with happiness 
 when after long and serious consideration he 
 came to the conclusion that such and such a 
 place was not for him. 
 
 People came to him and said, "We've found 
 just the very thing for you," and the old poet 
 smiled incredulously and yet hopefully, and 
 was all agog tq visit it. He would come to it, 
 would admire the thousand-year-old yew tree 
 mentioned in Domesday Book, and the fine 
 beams and the chimney-corner, the old oak- 
 panelled walls, the "old-world" garden, the view 
 of the old church, and yet he would mysteriously 
 decide against it. 
 
vn THE SHADOW 249 
 
 Or some one would say, "We've found an 
 old farmhouse that has some very good.points "; 
 and he would reply, " I shouldn't take a cottage 
 on points, you know ; it's something about its 
 ' altogether ' that I am looking for, but still ..." 
 
 Yes, an unpractical old fellow and yet so 
 lovable, more lovable than ever in his grey 
 hairs. 
 
 He visited castles and abbeys in Yorkshire 
 and windmills in East Anglia, river palaces and 
 bungalows on the Thames and the Severn, 
 picturesquely and romantically situated resi- 
 dences galore, and did not tire. He went abroad 
 again for a while and carried his quest with 
 him, but somehow could not tolerate the idea 
 of finding a home in Italy or Switzerland or 
 Greece, or in any of those delightful lands 
 where upon occasion our poets have loved to 
 dwell, and he returned home and resumed his 
 quest in the old country. 
 
 An expression of pleasure perhaps gives the 
 clue both to his life as a whole and to this 
 "cottage-hunting mania," as some called it. 
 "You know," said he to a particular friend, 
 " this quest of a suitable abode tickles my fancy 
 immensely — my spiritual fancy, I mean. I love 
 
250 THE QUEST OF THE FACE vii 
 
 this going about from place to place seeking a 
 perfectly suitable home, a place that I could 
 with a good conscience buy and make my very 
 own. And it is glorious that I can again and 
 again say No. It is something like this that 
 I have been doing all my life, something like 
 this which has impelled me to wander — the 
 seeking of a milieu that would fit, this trying to 
 match the pattern of the soul which we know in 
 ourselves cannot be matched in this world and 
 this life. I should be mortified past belief and 
 lie in deep dudgeon if one of these beautiful 
 English houses were found to suit me and I 
 could buy it and say, 'This is Saxby's home.'" 
 
 " You would soon leave it and go on, ' Once 
 more on your adventure brave and new,' " said 
 the friend. 
 
 Which was a true saying, and the old man 
 smiled. 
 
 It was not long after this that on one of his 
 long journeys he fell ill in the train and was 
 carried out and died at a wayside village. 
 
 Several friends were called to his side, but 
 they were too late. The one friend who was 
 accompanying him on the journey read to him 
 at his request a chapter of St. John's Gospel. 
 
VII THE SHADOW 251 
 
 The friends, most of whom had tried to find 
 the old poet a house, were deeply moved when 
 they heard that Saxby had already passed 
 away. A newspaper man said, " England has 
 lost her greatest poet ; we must look in the 
 sky to-night for a new star." A very near 
 friend, also a poet, said, "He has got out at 
 last," and a clergyman who was present ex- 
 pressed a common thought, " Now he has found 
 rest." I picked up the open Gospel and read 
 — " Let not your heart be troubled : ye believe 
 in God, believe also in me. In my Father's 
 house are many mansions." 
 
 " He has given up the substance for the 
 shadow," said I, looking at the calm and beauti- 
 ful but empty face of the dead, ' ' and we love 
 him the more." 
 
ALICE 
 
Beautiful Alice must change^ must die, but the beauty is not 
 lost; her beauty which passes from her goes on. The face that 
 you loved is loved for ever. 
 
VIII 
 ALICE 
 
 She had a calm strong heart. Her spirit's 
 habitation was secure ; no part of it had felt a 
 strain during fifty years of royal life. It had 
 borne the storms and the silences ; bending 
 equably to the gales or slackening restfully to 
 the calms, and now she felt herself upon the 
 unruffled bosom of an infinite peace. In her 
 heart she knew no storm could ever rage again, 
 no tumultuous passion could ever fuse her 
 being in the glow of joy or grief. And in 
 the twilight hour it was to her as if there 
 approached her the outstretched wings of a 
 great grey bird alighting on the earth, the 
 wings lengthening out to take in the East and 
 the West, and it was as if the whole earth were 
 clasped to the breast of a dove. She shut her 
 eyes and felt herself drawn forward, forward 
 
 255 
 
256 THE QUEST OF THE FACE viii 
 
 into the greyness and the silence of the un- 
 known, and of the place where she will not 
 know. So it will be with her to the end. 
 
 In a kingdom which is within this universe 
 a sun shines so brightly that our sun cannot be 
 seen, and the very moon there is so bright that 
 it obscures our moon and stars and light. The 
 eye of man looking at that broad day cannot 
 raise any lens through which the soul can com- 
 prehend. So to man that day is night, and 
 the things of that day unseen. The sun of 
 that realm dips into this world unseen, and 
 unseen in this world, it dips seen into its own. 
 It is there that the other children of man are 
 living. 
 
 Upon a day years ago, Alice, for so she was 
 then called, lay upon a new bed in a brightly 
 furnished room in the early morning. Luxuri- 
 antly warm, with pleasant caressing sheets 
 about her, she lay resting her head on the soft 
 flesh of her arm. She looked out into the 
 room. Last night had been a wild one. To 
 her it had been the one great night of her life. 
 For through hours she had mounted from 
 
vm ALICE 257 
 
 pleasure to pleasure, until she dared not think 
 for joy. She had lived in the fulness of her 
 life, and her beauty had been one, both within 
 and without and in the eyes of those that 
 beheld. For the night had begun in the 
 pleasure of the unexpected, and the glow of 
 new-met friends. And, as it were, she had in 
 those earliest moments divined a highest orbit 
 for her life. So she began in equanimity and 
 lived equably through the minutes and the 
 hours as towards a great goal. There were 
 upon her lips words, a whispered secret, but 
 whence she knew not. 
 
 " Only grant my soul may carry high 
 through death its cup unspilled." She had 
 conceived a thought, but knew not its name. 
 From point to point her soul had risen, and 
 her joy became more unthinkable, and through- 
 out she had held herself as if for an end. In 
 the wild rapture of the dance, in the languish- 
 ment and passion of her song, she knew in her 
 heart some great goal. And the man she 
 loved had come to her and he was transfigured 
 in her eyes. He also saw her in the fulness of 
 her beauty. It appeared to her that in all the 
 universe there were only herself and this man. 
 
 s 
 
258 THE QUEST OF THE FACE viii 
 
 Still she mounted, and more and more she 
 glowed in beauty as her soul fused her being 
 — and then as it were she forgot. She forgot 
 the names of the stars outside, and of the 
 people about her, and of the gaiety and the 
 light, and of the man she loved, and she forgot 
 the parts of herself . . . 
 
 The incomprehensible fulness of joy, the 
 flash of whose fire blinded her sense, the 
 intolerable perfection of her happiness, meant 
 death — one death— and then life again, the life 
 burst and relief Dread and pain whispered 
 in her heart. She felt abandoned through 
 fire. . . . 
 
 Into sleep. 
 
 Now she had awakened ; and in a strange 
 uncomprehended calm she looked out from her 
 bed at the blank door which was a little open. 
 Some cords were hanging from a nail in the 
 door, and in the twisting of these cords she 
 felt the sense of an interrogation mark. The 
 commonest objects in the room seemed charged 
 with new meaning. She was in a room of 
 mystery, in the web of a labyrinth, as in a 
 chamber of the Pyramids. The kaleidoscope 
 of life had turned a phase, and grouped the 
 
VIII ALICE 259 
 
 colours in figures with which she was un- 
 familiar. She could not read the writing on 
 the wall. The twisting of the cords was a 
 cypher in the perfect Sanskrit, that language 
 which has been written by God upon all visible 
 things as an indication of the direction of His 
 purpose. 
 
 She lay in her bed and stared around her 
 as one might stare who in his sleep had been 
 transported in the night into a strange apart- 
 ment. An unnamed questioning was in her 
 heart. Not only was her world created anew, 
 but the centre of that world was new. There 
 was new life, new meaning, deep at the very 
 core of her being. 
 
 She felt as if she had tossed on a wild ocean, 
 but had been lifted by some last wave right 
 beyond the storm to some safe inland place. 
 But that storm had been herself; she had left 
 herself in that. Here she was, new becalmed, 
 half lost, questioning. And she knew she could 
 never be again what she had been. 
 
 In the grey-blue of a perfect sky of that 
 other world is seen a cloud. The soft bosom 
 of an unseen body, as faint as a breath in 
 
26o THE QUEST OF THE FACE viii 
 
 colour, breasts the sky of that inner world, and 
 the cloud takes form, and the physiognomy of 
 passion. The deep, downy, rifted, grey-white 
 cloud breathes into that unseen world and a 
 woman's bosom heaves — heaves high and 
 trembles with the breasts flung wide — trembles 
 to the breaking-point, dissolves and disappears. 
 
 And it cannot be known to man how another 
 child has been born to him, how a spirit has 
 detached itself from a woman in the wild fulness 
 of her joy. 
 
 But in this realm the spirit exists ; exhaled 
 from the breast of a woman, and Alice lives 
 onward there in a life where the joy of the new 
 obscures the joy of the old, and our mid-day of 
 joy is a dawn. 
 
 One night twenty years later, Alicq was 
 again in the same room. In her heart was a dull 
 questioning and a new-born hope. She looked 
 about her with interest, as upon a new world. 
 For again she had slept through darkness, and 
 had awakened to unfamiliar light. By her bed, 
 kneeling in sorrow, she had fallen asleep, and 
 now, looking around her, she realised a change 
 — a change that she construed as mercy and for- 
 
VIII ALICE 261 
 
 giveness. A new-born thankfulness was in her 
 heart, and a joy of relief from pain. 
 
 The day had been one of sobbing : she had 
 felt it to be the very greatest and the hardest of 
 her life. For years since the day of her great 
 joy, her hopes had been dying. Less and less 
 had she been joyful, more and more had she 
 been full of grief. For months hope after hope 
 had been disappearing ; grief had been re- 
 inforcing grief, and day by day the last minute 
 had been coming. She had prayed God, 
 " Keep this for me ; restore that to me ; what 
 is there left in life ? Take not everything away 
 from me ! " But in her heart had been the 
 foreknowledge of complete deprivation. The 
 chances were going out of her life. The life that 
 is in life was leaving it, and the colours were 
 being withdrawn, threatening to leave behind 
 only cold, monotonous grey — a twilight world. 
 
 This last day she had fought and struggled 
 and fallen helpless in unnameable grief For 
 it was to-day that she had realised completely 
 that the last joys in life were finally severed, 
 and that the treasures she had'had in husband 
 and son were lost for ever. Restrainedly and 
 in mastery of herself she had lived through the 
 
262 THE QUEST OF THE FACE viii 
 
 earlier hours till the temptation of despair over- 
 came her. Kneeling upon the ground, she had 
 thrown her head and arms upon her old bed in 
 perfect agony. There she had exhausted her 
 thoughts and her hopes. The world with its 
 sun and moon and stars moved away from her, 
 like canvas scenery across a vast stage. She 
 was left kneeling outside in the dark. Light 
 had faded from the room, and from outside and 
 from within, from time and from memory and 
 from sense. She had forgotten . . . and slept. 
 Now she was awake and knew herself 
 changed. All the passion had fled. A new 
 light was in the room and in her memory and 
 in her heart. In her eyes everything about 
 her was grey and phantasmal. From the open 
 window, through which the moon shone, veiled 
 in clouds, was wafted the sense of an interroga- 
 tion mark. Once again the kaleidoscope had 
 turned a phase, and the colours were 'grouped 
 in new figures. In the fireplace the embers 
 glowed dully among the grey ash, and, as it 
 were, mystic figures moved to and fro in strange 
 rites there. Life was new. A world lay before 
 her new veiled, or a world from which a veil 
 had been withdrawn. Or a film had risen from 
 
viii ALICE 263 
 
 her eyes, or a light curtain had rolled down 
 over them. For the mercy of God, the woman 
 Alice, as she was to-day, knelt before a power 
 unnamed in her soul in thankfulness. But she 
 will never be again what she has been. 
 
 And to the darkness of that inner world a 
 spirit of grief has escaped, a spirit of grief with 
 our midnight of grief as its twilight, and there 
 lives a new child of man exhaled from a woman 
 in her grief. 
 
 In an untenanted house the twilight was 
 reflected in the blank windows. All was still, 
 empty, dead. There lay in one room the body 
 of a woman. As an old inland shore, from 
 which the whole sea had long departed, the life- 
 less body lay. Emptied of its last still life by 
 the inbreathing twilight of another world, there 
 was nothing here remaining that any one would 
 call alive. The woman who was called Alice 
 had made the course of the whole of that space 
 which lies between the two darknesses. 
 
 In other realms, the unlost life of Man passes 
 onward to the undivined. 
 
MATHILDE 
 
The face which the artist sees before the rhapsody of 
 creating. 
 
IX 
 MATHILDE 
 
 The gentleness of pure pearls pendent on in- 
 visible ears. And then celestial eyes looking 
 from an invisible face. A heart beating. Un- 
 seen hands feeling through the air and unseen 
 feet barely touching the earth. It is the 
 presence of Mathilde. She is all loveliness 
 and spiritual ardour, and a mysterious, Ariel- 
 like personality. She goes to meet Henri her 
 lover, tigerish Henri, passionate, daring, aspir- 
 ing artist and man, man and animal that he is. 
 The weather is hot and the air leaves one 
 languid. Humid and acrid currents fan the 
 nerves, begetting restlessness and desire, and 
 earth as it were envies the spirits who move 
 over her and sucks them to herself. But 
 celestial and peerless Mathilde is immune from 
 
 the power of the earth, and barely touching it 
 
 267 
 
268 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ix 
 
 she goes forward to the tryst, Mathilde with 
 her dark eyebrows and flashing eyes. 
 
 She is not restless in soul, but thinks imperi- 
 ously of her lover and of the idea to which he has 
 consecrated his life, of the lost cathedral he will 
 rebuild, of the need to save money, to save 
 interest, to save love to be enabled to build an 
 absolute replica of the great but lost cathedral. 
 
 It glimmers over their heads, the great white- 
 walled citadel and temple of God, with its mighty 
 supports clasping it about and its glory of pin- 
 nacle and tower, its spires and crosses and its 
 immensity of space and height of praise. They 
 hear its music even before it has come to be. 
 
 But Henri comes, dark and swarthy Henri 
 with eyes and brain aflame, with his long arms 
 and beautiful hands, strong body and beautiful 
 head, Henri, artist, maker and doer, with head 
 in the blue sky and feet firm upon the earth. 
 
 And the loveliness of Mathilde is the loveli- 
 ness of the cathedral, inspiring, enchanting, 
 causing him to fall on his knees. 
 
 So the invisible and lovely one stands above 
 him, and he, all too visible, kneels at her feet. 
 He adores, she inspires. He dreams, she is 
 his dream. He dreams more, she is more than 
 
IX MATHILDE 269 
 
 his dream. He aspires, she receives him into 
 her invisible being. He for a moment almost 
 ceases to exist, is hers entirely and for ever. 
 
 And then, and then, because it is only almost, 
 because there was a shred of identity left in 
 separateness behind, the change began, the 
 mood altered and the spell unbound, and a new 
 spell arose, this time from the earth. 
 
 Earth rose through the artist to pull Psyche 
 down ; earth plunged its sense into Henri and 
 prompted her desire, and he rose from his knees 
 and stood equal with Mathilde. 
 
 His hands grew hot, and his eyes which had 
 blazed with light blazed with heat. He desired 
 to see and to feel and to know. He put his 
 arms about her and made her to have a body. 
 Lips found her cheeks and her eyes and her 
 lips. Hands gave her shoulders, and side and 
 waist, kindred hands, kindred knees, and kindred 
 feet. He brought her down to earth and forgot 
 her whom he worshipped, forgot cathedral and 
 dream, whilst she swooned in the spell. 
 
 Then Mathilde returned heavily the way 
 she came, not thinking, still half-entranced by 
 the spell of the earth. But a shame began to 
 grow on her and she looked sadly on her 
 
270 THE QUEST OF THE FACE ix 
 
 opaque white hands which had lately been 
 translucent. She unbent her lips whose shape 
 her lover had seemingly been trying to change. 
 She came to her chamber and knew her body 
 moist and heavy after the embrace, knew her- 
 self tired, knew that the day had been hot. 
 And she bathed and perfumed herself, put on 
 new linen, read a beautiful poem. But still she 
 was not as before. Her pearls hang from most 
 dainty but visible ears. Her dark eyes, now 
 filmed, are set in the loveliness of a pale human 
 face. Her neck rises poised between her 
 shoulders. She has grace and bearing and 
 womanhood. She is not as before. 
 
 But then night comes and she sleeps, and in 
 her sleep casts off the spell of earth. Next 
 day once more she is as before. Lovely in- 
 visible Mathilde. 
 
 And then the tryst once more. 
 
 And the spell once more. 
 
 And evening once more. 
 
 And sleep once more. 
 
 And once more the gentleness of soft pearls 
 pendent on invisible ears. 
 
 And with Henri the cathedral dream is the 
 celestial loveliness of her face. 
 
SERAPION THE SINDONITE 
 
Wonderful Serapion, the antique hermit, did not desire to 
 be thought a man; he was content to be a limb. For the 
 service of Christ he sold himself to be a slave, and he said 
 reproachfully to the crowd that was ready to spit on a slave, 
 "/ am yours, I am not mine." In spitting on him, they 
 were spitting on a limb of themselves, spitting in humanity's 
 face and the face of the Creator, though they did not know. 
 Serapion found Christ in this way, that he made himself one 
 with Him, a part of Him. 
 
X 
 
 SERAPION THE SINDONITE 
 
 His idea of service was to sell himself to be a 
 slave so that he might win his master or mis- 
 tress to Christ. He was called the Sindonite 
 because he wore but a swathing of linen, and 
 that was his only garment, being clothed other- 
 wise sufficiently in the love of God. His body 
 he called his cell in which his soul was always 
 kneeling. 
 
 Serapion was an Egyptian, that is a Copt, 
 not an Arab, and he lived in that era of faith 
 when the deserts of Nitria and Scete and the 
 Sahara were more populated by hermits and 
 holy men than the great cities of Alexandria or 
 Jerusalem. In his day thousands of votive men 
 and women had the impulse to go out from the 
 striving and secular cities of the empire of 
 Rome and endeavour to become part here and 
 
 273 T 
 
274 THE QUEST OF THE FACE x 
 
 now of the Kingdom of God. And among 
 them came the young Copt Serapion with the 
 glory of Christ in his eyes, full of grace and 
 truth, to live in the desert with God, commun- 
 ing with the Word of the Scriptures. He was 
 clothed in one piece of linen and in his own 
 spiritual radiance, and he knelt humbly before 
 God, and humbly and yet joyfully read the 
 Book of Books. 
 
 There were about him in the desert hermits 
 whose denial of the world expressed itself in 
 various ways ; some who had scooped holes 
 in the sand, some living in the tombs and ruins 
 of old Egypt ; others in monastery build- 
 ings, others again without any shelter whatso- 
 ever ; some humbly pious, some fanatical and 
 hysterical, some loving and gentle, some bitter 
 and severe. There were undoubtedly both 
 evil and ambitious men as well as humble and 
 holy men of God, and if the many did cause 
 the desert to blossom with spiritual blossoms, 
 there were those also whose presence was 
 searing and mortifying even to miraculous 
 flowers. 
 
 On the right and on the left were disputa- 
 tious hermits, destined to be depicted with 
 
X SERAPION THE SINDONITE 275 
 
 halos after their death, yet often dwelling in the 
 darkness of pride and ambition in their lives. 
 They averred they had come to save their own 
 souls, kn^w they had saved them by their act of 
 renunciation, and now only sought a greater and 
 greater glory in God's eyes, by out-doing one 
 another in spiritual feats, in singing and praying 
 against one another and mortifying the flesh. 
 
 They attracted great crowds of pilgrims and 
 religious sightseers, but Serapion none knew, 
 neither did he know them, and he dwelt in a 
 sweet morning solitude wherein nothing was 
 evil and all was innocent and full of grace. 
 Yet there was care in the desert for him, he was 
 troubled in heart at the recollection of the un- 
 happy world he had left behind, but as like goes 
 to like, so the holy and the true mysteriously 
 learned of him and knew of him. And there 
 were wiser than he to whom he could submit 
 for advice. They for their part knew that 
 Serapion was near to God and directly in touch 
 with his Lord. 
 
 So when the message came to Serapion to 
 forsake the desert they did not say him nay. 
 From the living Gospel he learned that God 
 would love him to go back to the world which 
 
276 THE QUEST OF THE FACE x 
 
 in many ways was more dead and barren than 
 the desert itself, go back to the world and be 
 servant of all, for the Word's sake. 
 
 God thus chose him and marked him out 
 among his fellow-hermits, and he left the wise 
 and the holy, left also the emulous, and went 
 back to the world, whence he had come, to be 
 servant of all. 
 
 He went up to Alexandria and sailed on 
 the sea to Greece, of which he had heard as 
 being in as great need of spiritual life as in St. 
 Paul's day. He came to the gay city of Corinth, 
 and his heart being first touched by a showman 
 and his wife, living in sordid ignorance of 
 Christ, he went to them and sold himself to be 
 their slave. The twenty pieces of silver which 
 he received in exchange for his freedom he put 
 away in a crevice in a rock. For in common 
 with other hermits he did not acknowledge that 
 money had power, and he knew that his pay- 
 ments and receipts must be rather in God's 
 currency, the coinage of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. The home of the showman was a 
 centre of sin, and much happened there that 
 Serapion did not understand. But he fulfilled 
 every duty laid upon him, even the most menial 
 
X SERAPION THE SINDONITE ^']^ 
 
 and least worthy that a man should do ; and 
 whenever anything went wrong in the house 
 Serapion took the fault upon himself and never 
 complained. He took upon himself all manner 
 of fault that the showman and the showman's 
 wife knew to be their own. They for their 
 part learned greatly to respect their tireless 
 servant but did not understand his humility, till 
 one day Serapion explained. 
 
 A fire had broken out in a room in the 
 house of the showman, brought about one 
 night after a successful performance through 
 the incaution of frivolous visitors. 
 
 Said Serapion, " I pray God's love and 
 care for you, and for me that I may be vigilant. 
 But I did not pray fervently enough, there- 
 fore the fire came to you. Alas, I am weak and 
 sinful." 
 
 Such explanation won the admiration and 
 love of these two Greeks and made them think 
 of God and Christ. They became aware of 
 the great blessing they had in their wonderful 
 slave. For indeed even in a material way 
 Serapion seemed to have brought fortune. 
 And as they watched him they were won by 
 his bright spiritual personality and resolved one 
 
278 THE QUEST OF THE FACE x 
 
 day to become Christian and give up their 
 meaningless Greek gods. 
 
 Then they said to Serapion, "Thou hast 
 redeemed us. Let us, we pray, redeem thee." 
 And they brought to him his token of slavery 
 and gave it him back. Then, holding hands 
 together, as freemen and equals they knelt 
 and prayed aloud. Serapion led them in the 
 Lord's Prayer, phrase by phrase, and called for 
 God's blessing. That done, he hastened and 
 fetched the money that had been paid him for 
 himself, the twenty pieces of silver, and gave 
 them back to his master and mistress, though 
 they besought him with tears that he would 
 keep it still for their sake. But Serapion ex- 
 plained that he had renounced the world and, 
 belonging now to God's Kingdom, could not 
 use money which was currency of Caesar. So, 
 much marvelling, though inwardly at peace, 
 the new-born Christians watched their slave 
 Serapion go on his way, clothed as he was so 
 meagrely in his bit of linen, but with the light 
 of God around him. 
 
 Serapion's heart was next touched by a rich 
 man to whom for the same blessed cause he sold 
 himself, and he did so well that in two years 
 
X SERAPION THE SINDONITE 279 
 
 the whole household was brought to the faith. 
 Liberating him, his master gave him a coat and 
 a cloak and the Gospel, and Serapion, well-clad, 
 journeyed northward in the winter. But he soon 
 gave away coat and cloak to the cold and ragged 
 whom he met on the way, and he journeyed on 
 as he had done before, the Sindonite, but with 
 the holy Gospel in his hands. 
 
 In Athens Serapion starved for want of 
 bread, and there a Stoic who had observed his 
 pitiful state endeavoured to put a Christian to 
 the test. After Serapion had been three days 
 without food the Stoic came to him and offered 
 to buy the Gospel from him for money to buy 
 bread. Serapion refused, and the fourth and 
 the fifth day the Stoic repeated his attempt, 
 but the Coptic hermit bowed humbly, repeat- 
 ing ever, " Man shall not live by bread alone, 
 but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
 mouth of God." This so moved the Stoic 
 that life began to stir in the dry heart of the 
 philosopher, and having from his heart and 
 out of his love given the hermit bread, he 
 knelt beside him and read from the Book and 
 was saved. 
 
 By these and many like divine adventures 
 
28o THE QUEST OF THE FACE x 
 
 Serapion fulfilled his spiritual mission in Greece, 
 and in course of time was moved to go to 
 Rome. And wherever he went he was upborne 
 by the Spirit, and whatever he wished, though 
 fellow-man said it was impossible, yet for him 
 through grace it became possible. Then he 
 sailed on the sea and was cared for by the ship's 
 company, though he never had a farthing to pay 
 his passage. And he was fed though he had 
 no money to buy food. Indeed when it was 
 proposed by the captain that the stowaway 
 hermit be put down at the nearest port the 
 superstitious sailors would not hear of it. But 
 indeed Serapion earned his passage on that 
 ship, for through his serviceableness he did as 
 much menial and necessary work as three extra 
 sailors would have done. 
 
 In Rome he served two long periods of 
 slavery in which he was transferred to others 
 and constantly mingled and intermingled with 
 suffering souls in the great and wicked world. 
 He wore humanity's yoke and said to the 
 crowd that sometimes spat upon a slave, " I 
 am yours, I am not mine ; I am flesh of your 
 flesh, spirit of your spirit ; poor Serapion is not 
 a man, he is happy to be a limb." 
 
X SERAPION THE SINDONITE 281 
 
 And scholars and critics sat at high windows 
 and looked over the wicked city and despaired, 
 not knowing of the leaven working in it, ever 
 humbly and untiringly working, not knowing 
 that spirit of humanity's spirit was Serapion, 
 the beautiful spiritual being, wilfully selling 
 itself to the slavery of the flesh for the greatest 
 of spiritual ends. 
 
 So passed the life of Serapion the Sindonite. 
 But when old age came upon him the Spirit 
 prompted once more : "Go now to Egypt again ; 
 leave Rome in which thou hast laboured for a 
 while and seek the spiritual peace of Egypt." 
 And he returned to his desert and his humble 
 praying -place on the left and on the right of 
 which the disputatious hermits still wrangled 
 for glory. In course of time they died and 
 so did he. But it is said that greater miracles 
 were wrought where his body lay than at the 
 mighty ecclesiastical shrines near-by. 
 
SIMON ON THE PILLAR 
 
" And lif I be lifted up . . will draw all men unto me.'' 
 Heroic Simon made his Imitatio Christi, affirming by his sym- 
 bolic posture that man was above the earth. Christ raised the 
 ideal level of humanity, giving witness to the Divine in m-an. 
 All look towards Christ on the Cross, for from its four corners 
 He raises us ufi to Himself and supports us. All looked toward 
 Simon who made his life a candle before the ideal. 
 
XI 
 SIMON ON THE PILLAR 
 
 Simon was a wonder of the world. In him 
 all hermits gained fame, and humanity itself 
 was raised. By God's grace he was chosen to 
 be a candle to men and tribes and nations. 
 He was a living and continuing miracle, a new 
 marvel of young Christianity, a fixed and 
 steady star in the East. 
 
 Simon's service was an affirmation of the 
 Divine in man. The known world of men in 
 those days was sunk in vice and sensual luxury. 
 Men by their ordinary lives proclaimed them- 
 selves to be little better than animals. The 
 slaves were like jaded horses and mules, the 
 free townsmen were like goats or monkeys, 
 the barbarians like tigers, the sorcerers like 
 serpents, the wise men like elephants. But 
 
 Simon and many brothers of the spirit pro- 
 
 285 
 
286 THE QUEST OF THE FACE xi 
 
 claimed the great counter-cry of Christianity — 
 Ye are parts of God, members of Christ, O ye 
 men, not beasts of the forest and the field. 
 And the beautiful Simon with the light of God 
 in his eyes, the living word on his lips, stood 
 on his pillar in Syria like God's candle in the 
 East. 
 
 He was moved as a boy in the same way as 
 Serapion, and yearned to deny the flesh and 
 the world everlastingly in his body and his life. 
 He was born in Cilicia, in the village of Cis, in 
 the year 388, of Christian parents, and was 
 baptized, and became with years a gentle 
 shepherd boy who said his prayers in the field. 
 And he used to collect sweet gum and resin 
 and burn it so he might see the smoke go up 
 to God, the way his thoughts yearned also 
 from his burning heart. He found communion 
 with God, and God in turn gave him dreams 
 and visions, and prompted his young heart. 
 Simon was prompted and then God confirmed. 
 
 Whilst his companions of the field ate and 
 drank and made merry, the young Simon 
 fasted and expected visions. Whilst they were 
 together he went apart, and his eyes were 
 strained to see something they did not see, his 
 
XI SIMON ON THE PILLAR 287 
 
 ears were set to catch a note of heavenly music 
 which they did not sing. He went up into the 
 mountains and into the chapels and prayed, 
 and whilst all others in Cis slept he knelt in 
 the church at midnight and was told silently 
 of things to be. 
 
 Anon Simon's father died and half of a rich 
 estate became his. But he called in all the 
 poor far and near and made a feast for them, 
 and divided among them all his corn and his 
 gold, and having done so took up the Cross to 
 follow the Master. He set off upon the road 
 that led to Antioch and beyond — his life-road 1 
 of service. And on the way he came to the 
 monastery of Teleda, where a kinsman had 
 lived thirty-five years in a cell. The abbot 
 took Simon in though he was but fifteen, and 
 thus so young he began to carry out the hard 
 rule by which the monks and anchorites denied 
 this life, this world, in the name of that life, 
 that world. Simon received Holy Communion 
 daily, and, except on Sundays, received no other 
 food, so it may be said he was supported even 
 physically by the Living Bread which came 
 down from heaven. 
 
 And from his body there fell away that 
 
288 THE QUEST OF THE FACE xi 
 
 coarser flesh and substance which is made by 
 the ordinary bread on which the animal in us 
 is nourished. And new cells, formed to be the 
 web of his soul, were given him from the living 
 body and blood of our Lord. 
 
 So much did he change and stand out in 
 contrast that the other monks in the monastery 
 could not but notice him, and there were some 
 who were consumed with jealousy — good men 
 in themselves, but not possessed of the fitness 
 of Simon. The angry brothers did not see 
 how Simon glorified the brotherhood and 
 themselves by his fairness and spiritual beauty. 
 They would have attracted God's notice to 
 themselves, and were angry as Cain was at 
 Abel's more acceptable sacrifice. They went 
 unto Heliodorus, their abbot, and clamoured 
 against Simon, and had they been men of the 
 Old Testament rather than of the New, they 
 had certainly slain their brother. But the 
 Christ that died to make us one restrained 
 them thus far. Nevertheless Simon was forced 
 to leave Teleda, and the good man Heliodorus 
 was forced to part with the pearl of great price. 
 
 And Simon at twenty-four years came to 
 the monastery of Telnesche near Antioch, and 
 
XI SIMON ON THE PILLAR 289 
 
 was joyfully received beyond its walls. There 
 he became a complete recluse for the first 
 period of Lent ; he knelt in a small cell with a 
 Cross and a book and a basket of bread and 
 a pitcher of water, and the cell was walled up 
 till Easter morn, when the brothers broke 
 down the wall anxiously and excitedly, fearing 
 he might have died. And they found the 
 fair young man like the shining One in the 
 sepulchre greeting them with the knowledge 
 that Christ had risen indeed. Simon received 
 Communion then, and the loaves and the water 
 which had been put in the cell were found to 
 have been untouched. 
 
 Then they built for their anchorite a 
 mandra, a circle of desert sand with a wall 
 built around it. And he was obscured from 
 his fellow-men, but exposed to wind and 
 weather from above, and heat and cold. But 
 he knelt and prayed, and those who passed by 
 the wall knew that though naught was seen, a 
 holy man continually watched within. 
 
 The thought had come to Simon when he 
 was walled up in the monastery wall : I am just 
 one brick of the Church, a living brick. So 
 must we all be at last, living bricks in the walls 
 
 u 
 
290 THE QUEST OF THE FACE xi 
 
 of the heavenly Jerusalem. And when he was 
 promoted from the closed cell to the mandra he 
 felt he was one stage nearer the great true life 
 of faith when no walls whatever would be 
 needed. 
 
 And indeed if saints can walk in this world 
 in heavenly bodies, Simon was coming to that 
 guise. All earthly and animal dross had de- 
 parted from him. He approached the pure 
 gold of which Jerusalem's streets are paved. 
 His empyreal substance was manifest. 
 
 "Thou art part of the City," avoice whispered 
 to Simon, "thou art part of Sophia and of the 
 Bride. Thou art humanity's candle, thou art 
 part of the light of men." 
 
 Round about the walls of the mandra were 
 many seekers and pilgrims, for the spiritual 
 fame of Simon was already great in Syria. 
 And as Simon thought and knew he was part 
 of the City of God of which all must in time 
 become living brickg each in his place, he was 
 moved to manifest himself to the throngs with- 
 out, and he arose on to a pillar which was in the 
 centre of the mandra till he was just seen. 
 Then he built the pillar higher and grew upon 
 it higher and higher, built it still more high 
 
XI SIMON ON THE PILLAR 291 
 
 with help, and as he rose and knelt upon it 
 it grew higher still. And the city which was set 
 on the hill could not be hid, neither could the 
 light mounted on the candlestick of Simon's 
 high column. 
 
 On a column 90 feet high and 3 feet in 
 breadth he lived thirty years and prayed and 
 preached and prophesied, and never came 
 down, neither in storm nor in cold, night nor 
 day. At first it seemed so narrow a platform 
 he was constantly in danger of falling, but 
 in course of time he got as used to it as a 
 landowner might become to a large estate or a 
 traveller to the world, and he could have halved 
 the standing-ground and still felt free. And he 
 could sleep as he stood. He could bow from 
 his head to his feet without bending his knees, 
 and a disciple once counted one thousand two 
 hundred and forty-four adorations of this kind 
 and then grew tired of counting, though marvel- 
 lous Simon did not grow tired. 
 
 The example and the figure of the hermit on 
 
 the column moved humanity greatly, and many 
 
 were the men and women who turned from the 
 
 world and- sought to affirm the Spirit and the 
 
 Kingdom in monastery cell and desert cave. 
 
 u 2 
 
292 THE QUEST OF THE FACE xi 
 
 The fame of Simon spread to new countries 
 and climes, and the white pillar on which he 
 stood seemed to continue to rise, to rise and to 
 rise like the pale morning light, till the face of 
 the beautiful hermit looked over the dark sea, 
 over snowy mountain ranges, over vast plains, 
 and rivers and towns and cities. And at one 
 moment all humanity looked to him and up 
 to him. 
 
 And throngs of people of all nationalities 
 came to the mandra walls and learned from the 
 lips of the great living statue the new words 
 of Christ, and they knew that the time was 
 changed and could never be again what it had 
 been. The superstitions and idolatries and 
 despairs and ignorances of the night trembled 
 and shook as morning breezes and light beams 
 came over them. 
 
 A certain Greek came to Simon and called 
 up to him, " O marvellous Angel, thou art not 
 a man, thou art a God who hast come down to 
 us from heaven and hast alighted on this pillar." 
 
 "Ah, no," cried Simon, "I am but one of 
 you, a man. I have not come down, I have 
 risen up to this height." 
 
 The Greek would have written on the 
 
XI SIMON ON THE PILLAR 293 
 
 column " Ecce Deus," but of Simon as of 
 Christ it might most fitly be said, " Ecce Homo 
 —Behold the Man." 
 
 Before Simon's day and after men were 
 proud of the fiercenesses or sagacity of the 
 animal in themselves. But Simon in himself 
 raised the ideal level of humanity, and many a 
 man and woman looking to him saw themselves 
 as they wished they were — that Is, as they 
 really were. 
 
 There are an infinite number of stories 
 and legends of the pilgrim men and women 
 and whole tribes of the east and the south 
 that came to Simon to see, hear, or be 
 blessed. One of the most beautiful is that 
 shortly before the holy man's death Christ 
 Himself alighted on the pillar and the saint 
 went up to heaven. 
 
 Simon fell into the coma of death and for three 
 days neither spoke nor moved nor gave token 
 of life. His disciple Antony watched at his 
 side, and on the third day was aware of sweet 
 odours rising from the body and a procession 
 of light as it were a spirit moving. The mandra 
 down below was plunged in gloom and the 
 sound of the wailing of the pilgrims floated 
 
294 THE QUEST OF THE FACE xi 
 
 upward. For Simon's silence was so unwonted. 
 So greatly the people yearned to hear the voice 
 of the hermit again that life was fain to return. 
 A gracious figure stood erect once more on the 
 column, bowed to east and to west, to north and 
 to south, and then gave blessing, "O bless ye 
 my children, bless ye, my poor children." And 
 humanity in the vague morning light heard him, 
 and as the figure melted backward away from 
 them again, all rocked together in the music of 
 a psalm. 
 
 So Simon diedj and we remember and 
 acknowledge that he rose on his pillar that 
 we might have light, even as Christ was lifted 
 up that we might have life. Christian knights 
 and warriors rode over Europe compelling 
 Christianity on tribes and nations, but behind 
 them was the light of Simon and Serapion 
 and many another holy and heroic brother 
 of the East. 
 
 The light which they announced by their 
 lives was the light of the divine in man, it was 
 the tidings of a higher destiny for us all — that 
 we should not perish like the beasts of the field, 
 but be one with God and in God through love. 
 
XI SIMON ON THE PILLAR 295 
 
 Love is the clue to our destiny. And as Love 
 is discovered almighty, almighty be proved 
 
 Thy power that exists with and for it, of being beloved ! 
 He who did most shall bear most ; the strongest shall 
 
 stand the most weak. 
 'Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for ! my flesh that 
 
 I seek 
 In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 
 A Face like my face that receives thee ; a Man like to me 
 Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever : a Hand like 
 
 this hand 
 Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! See the 
 
 Christ stand ! 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed ^ R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinlnrgh. 
 
BOOKS BY STEPHEN GRAHAM 
 
 A TRAMP'S SKETCHES. 
 
 WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS TO JERU- 
 SALEM. 
 
 WITH POOR EMIGRANTS TO AMERICA. 
 
 THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY 
 OF MARY. 
 
 PRIEST OF THE IDEAL. 
 
 THE QUEST OF THE FACE. 
 
 In these six books published by Macmillan & Co. 
 will be found a sequence of religious expression. 
 
 OTHER VOLUMES 
 
 A VAGABOND IN THE CAUCASUS. 
 
 UNDISCOVERED RUSSIA. 
 
 CHANGING RUSSIA. 
 
 THROUGH RUSSIAN CENTRAL ASIA. 
 
 RUSSIA AND THE WORLD| War Diaries 
 RUSSIA IN 1916 j AND Articles, 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED, LONDON. 
 
PRESS OPINIONS 
 
 PRIEST OF THE IDEAL. By Stephen Graham. 
 2nd Impression. 
 
 QUEST. — " An unusual book which will puzzle, exasperate, 
 and even possibly disgust the ordinary reviewer because it 
 eludes his ordinary pigeon-holes. It is not merely a pilgrimage 
 to the holy places of the British Isles, but a spiritual quest of 
 the new ideas abroad in England. ... It is difficult to give 
 an idea of the beauty and fertility of the thought of a book 
 which is not the exposition of a system but a gospel." 
 
 SPECTATOR. — "The dramatic interest of the book lies 
 in the conflict between the men who believe ultimately in the 
 power of money and the men who believe ultimately in the 
 power of God. . . . Although the two leading characters are 
 not so much persons as representatives of two opposed lines 
 of thought, the lesser figures are skilfully and convincingly 
 drawn. But the strength of the book lies in its handling of 
 the vital problem — the conduct of our daily lives ... a high- 
 minded and beautifiil book.'' 
 
 YORKSHIRE OBSERVER.—" Mr. Graham probes more 
 deeply into our national character and spirit and the founda- 
 tions of our patriotic love for our country than any other book 
 one can call to mind ... a noble and inspiring book which 
 will bear reading many times." 
 
 THE DIAL (New York).—" Mr. Wells is the thermometer 
 of current opinion. Mr. Graham is, rather, barometric. He 
 does not tell us what we already know ; he interprets for us 
 the unseen values of the age. ... In him there is a voice as 
 fearless if not as exceptional as Tolstoy's. His book is a 
 review of England. Though it is formless, yet it possesses the 
 most enduring of all form : it transfers its message into the 
 fabric of human imagination and memory." 
 
 NEW YORK TRIBUNE.—" The novelty of the theme, 
 the profound suggestions of the meditations and discussions 
 with which the book abounds, and the descriptions of successive 
 visits to the various shrines, unite to form a work which is 
 distinctly different from all others of the year, and which will 
 abundantly repay the thoughtful reader of it, though it is 
 certain to be much more prized in the study than in the 
 hammock or boudoir." 
 
PRESS OPimONS—Conimued. 
 
 MADRAS MAIL. — " This book will be read not only for 
 its idealism but for its descriptions of England's ' holy places.' 
 Whether exiled or not, the true Briton has always the vast- 
 ness of York Minster, the strength of Durham, the ' all loveli- 
 ness and aspiration ' of Lincoln present to his mind, and 
 appreciates any opportunity of refreshing his memory with a 
 new word-picture." 
 
 TIMES. — "The dream of a poet who is also in his way 
 a humorist, a dream shot with lovely lights and shades, a rain- 
 bow vision . bright with beautiful thoughts and warm with 
 a passion for beautiful living." 
 
 LITERARY WORLD.—'-'- X book hke this cannot be 
 appraised. Its poetic mysticism, its wonderful spirituality, its 
 perpetual crusade against worldliness set it apart." 
 
 PUNCH. — "Quite the queerest novel of the past year, or 
 of any other year." 
 
 THE WORLD. — " It should be fitly included in the 
 libraries of those who like attractive covers but never read 
 the contents of the books they protect." 
 
 THE WAY OF MARTHA AND THE WAY OF 
 MARY. By Stephen Graham, ^th Im- 
 pression. 
 
 HIBBERT JOURNAL.— •■' The book is strikingly written. 
 It consists of a series of chapters which, -though apparently 
 disconnected, are held together by a unity of meaning and of 
 purpose that runs through all of them. It is this inner 
 meaning of the book that makes it of permanent value to 
 students of religious psychology. . . . The value of the book 
 lies not in the concrete illustrations, but in the wonderful 
 insight with which some of the essential features of the 
 national character are brought out. The chapter called 'The 
 Russian Idea ' is a remarkable analysis of what is best in 
 the Russian people. . . . There is, however, another line of 
 thought running through Mr. Graham's book ... a presenta- 
 tion in an artistic form of the world viewed sub specie 
 ceternitatis. ... It is this insistence on the spiritual value of 
 the ordinary things of life, this vision of the world as an 
 
 3 
 
PRESS OPimONS-Conimued. 
 
 eternal now, that seems to me to be the true message of the 
 book." 
 
 WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.— "Th^ deepest thing in 
 Christianity is personal choice. ... To Mr. Graham, then, 
 there is not one orthodoxy, but many, and the test of them all 
 is the measure in which they approach to the universal. . . . 
 That is Mr. Graham's message. How he presents it — in this 
 rapt, ardent, piercing, and creative description of a strange, 
 wonderful, and alien people — is the delight and illumination of 
 his book." 
 
 TIMES OF INDIA. — " Martha was right, but Mary's 
 good part was right also. That sentiment will be recognised 
 at once as thoroughly Asiatic. It is also quite Russian. 
 People in India, who know Christianity only in the pushful 
 and worldly forms in which it has been presented to them 
 by the West, should read Mr. Graham's studies of Eastern 
 Christianity." 
 
 EVENING STANDARD.— '■'C'hnsx:ia.raiy\ you exclaim. 
 Why, the clever men have assured us it is played out. We 
 look for a new revelation — ^or to the reign of reason. Here 
 comes Mr. Graham, however, preaching that Christianity, so 
 far from being played out, has hardly begun. 'This young 
 religion of Christianity,' he tails it, and surmises that 6000 
 years hence it may have crystallised out from the present 
 chaos of its tenets. ' As yet it is in the confused grandeur of 
 youth. It has all possibilities.' If this be not optimism, I do 
 not know what the word can be applied to. Think what it 
 means ! Belief in the youth of the world, in a far-reaching 
 future of belief. Twenty years ago, a man would have been 
 considered a romantic fool who talked so. But make no 
 mistake, Mr. Graham and his like are not regarded in that 
 light by the generation that is coming on. It is not a 
 generation born old. It has the will to live, to affirm rather 
 than deny. Thomas Lloyd." 
 
 MONTROSE STANDARD.— "The. book's unity grows 
 out of its diversity. In chapter after chapter the reader finds 
 himself led on as if by hidden music." 
 
 \ MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED, LONDON. 
 
 4