Meanwhile, under this enforced truce, he does not shrink from outfacing me indirectly. He pre-empts me from the vantage of his pulpit and counters me in his choice of text — I am sure these things are intended especially for me. This Sunday’s sermon: “Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed; and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.”
And still I go and sit in our pew and listen while he thus dares me before the unwitting congregation. And still I kneel and pray, and my heart is uplifted by the words of the Bible, which I cannot believe, no, no, are mere fancy, mere poetry, like the Rector’s Virgil. Dear God, I do not want to hurt the dear old man. And only when I put on again my Sunday hat, do my “thoughts” return. Only at the church gate does my conscience meet me once more and charge me with desertion.
I trust — I know — he will not speak to Elizabeth. Is not that the true measure of my hypocrisy? That I keep from my own wife what I impart to her father, wishing to spare her, being her father’s daughter, the full pain of disclosure, when I daily injure and perplex her with my furtive preoccupation; and she, dear Liz, patiently supposes that periodically I must wrap myself in weighty but necessary “studies.” Surely she suspects. But surely if I were to tell her all, she would only commend me to her father’s counsel. Surely, one day, taking the matter into her own hands, she will speak to her father. And there will be the poor Rector in a fine state of contortion.
6th July 1857:
My dear little Lucy! Such a sweet mixture of trustingness and forwardness. I confess she has become my favourite. I endeavour to instill in her what, increasingly, is absent in me and to teach her to see what I discern less and less: an immanent Divinity in all things. As this morning, when we passed a memorable hour in the sunshine, observing the butterflies on our buddleia bush. I had thought she had no mind for her lost little brother, but today, when I explain how short is the life of the butterfly, she pierces my heart by remarking: “Poor things, like Felix.”
“This is the Large White,” I say, “and this is the Tortoiseshell — you see, each wears its own apparel — and this the Red Admiral, who is called admiral not because he is a naval gentleman but because he is to be admired: do you not agree?” She asks: “But why should each kind be dressed the same?” A big question. I answer. “Why, so we can recognise them and tell one kind from the other and know their names.” Answers: “But that is silly, Papa, they cannot all have the same name. I would rather they had names of their own, like you and me.”
20th August 1857:
To the Rectory for dinner. The first such occasion for some time. I observe the Rector cannot altogether restrain the animosity formerly confined to his study, though his good wife and Elizabeth mark nothing more than an unwonted testiness, for which they chide him, and he, good soul, is duly contrite. I introduce the subject of Brunel’s bridge, the first great truss for which is to be positioned next month; whereupon he adopts the popular stance of fearful and scornful incredulity. “But surely,” he exclaims, “the thing is impossible!” I see his drift: he will not attack me, not before Emily and Liz, but he will attack the bridge, which I defend, for its unholy presumption. “You tell me,” he says, in the manner of an ipso facto denunciation, “that the distance to be spanned is nigh on a thousand feet, and each truss will weigh over a thousand tons!”
How we human beings are so easily dismayed by effects of scale. The Saltash bridge is indeed a thing of vast proportions, but it is no less practicable, no less conformable to the laws of physics, than one of my father’s quietly ticking clocks. With a sketch or two and some mathematics, I could show — I offer to do so, but the Rector forbids such dinner-table science — how such a mighty thing is achieved. To be sure, there are many who take the immensity of I.K.B.’s schemes as a measure of his vainglory and as an omen of his ruin. But it is their calumny which inhibits his success, not the man’s own scrupulous calculations.
I confess that I too, on first meeting I.K.B., had my qualms. I shuddered — not only at the fierce effluvia of his cigars but to encounter one so plainly marked out, so naturally prepared for exceptionality; and my awe converted itself into that unthinking and superstitious suspicion that in some way he transgressed.
Transgressed what? Nothing more, I would say now, than the bounds of normality. Why are some picked by fate and some not? Why are we not all Brunels? That is the conundrum out of which we construct the false charge of impious presumption. And how much more, for me, was that mystery deepened by my observing, on further acquaintance, the ordinary human limits of the man. He is no sorcerer. He has sacrificed his health for his work, which only proves he is flesh and blood; and though he is beset by a thousand obstacles and is prey to a thousand practical anxieties, I do not believe — I do not assert this out of pride — that the roots of his soul have ever been rocked as mine have been or that he could have achieved what he has without the ballast of a steady conscience.
To build a bridge! Is not that one of the noblest of man’s endeavours? To link terra firma with terra firma; to throw a path across a void. The ignorant say it defies nature, yet it rests upon her co-operation. And I might profess to the Rector — if only I might still believe it — that such an enterprise only bespeaks the work of Him whom he serves. That our science attests a greater omniscience; that the Almighty has given to the humblest bird the gift of wings with which to perform the same feat, but only to man has He given the power of Design, which is the first principle of His universe.
6th January 1858:
Illogicality of nature. Lavishes attention on the individual (fall of each sparrow?) but sacrifices individual to species. Cares only for continuation of the stock. Should result in uniformity and conformity. Yet nothing more apparent in nature than diversity, differentiation, distinction. Why this?
Answer. (a) Bounty and inexhaustible resourcefulness of the Creator. So Creation may be wonderful in the sight of man. So we may rejoice in the skill of Him who made us and know Him thereby. “O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom has thou made them alclass="underline" the earth is full of thy riches.”
Objection. We see only what we are pleased to see and are too apt to find in nature’s variety, in the infinite invention of her forms and colours, an aesthetic inspiration. We observe the butterfly but not the grub. We lament its brief, gorgeous life, but not that of the worm snatched by the bird. And what of the pretty plumage of the redbreast and the chaffinch as they go about their murder?
Answer. (b) Diversity makes possible interdependence of creatures, i.e., one would not be without the other: e.g., the spider, the fly; the bee, the flower, etc.
Objection. Makes of all creatures predators, plunderers or parasites — or victims of the same. Even-handedness or blindness of nature? Cares for the field vole and the buzzard?
Further illogicality of nature: Man. Uniformity and conformity firm principles within the species. A crow is a crow is a crow — for all his lack of insignia. Why, then, does individuality and the sense of individuality so profoundly imbue the species man? When I behold a crow I see only a crow. I do not feel the loss of one crow in a score, and it makes little sense to me to speak of a crow’s “identity.” Yet when I look at my little Lucy I see a creature whose identity, I know with absolute conviction, is unique and cannot be replaced. And this would be true even for the man I may meet in the street tomorrow and never see again.