On the way he cautiously extracts from Jesus, whose memory of his cruel tormentors is halting, parts of his story. He believes him a half-crazy fanatic, deluded with the notion that he is the original Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus gently expounds his theories, though George Moore pulls the wires. A pantheism that ends in Nirvana, Néant, Nada, Nothing! Despairing of ever forcing the world to see the light, he is become a Quietist, almost a Buddhist. He might have quoted the mystic Joachim Flora--of the Third Kingdom--who said that the true ascetic counts nothing his own save only his harp. ("Qui vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citharam.") When a man's cross becomes too heavy a burden to carry then let him cast it away. Jesus cast his cross away--his spiritual ambition--believing that too great love of God leads to propagation of the belief, then to hatred and persecution of them that won't believe.
The Jews, says Jesus, are an intolerant, stiff-necked people; they love God, yet they hate men. Horrified at all this, Paul parts company with the Son of Man, secretly relieved to hear that he is not going, as he had contemplated, to give himself up to Hanan, the High Priest in Jerusalem, to denounce the falseness of the heretical sect named after him. Paul, without crediting the story, saw in Jesus a dangerous rival. The last we hear of the divine shepherd is a rumour that he may join a roving band of East Indians and go to the source of all beliefs, to Asia, impure, mysterious Asia; the mother of mystic cults. Paul too disappears, and on the little coda: "The rest of his story is unknown." We are fain to believe that the "rest of his story" is very well known in the wide world. The book is another milestone along Mr. Moore's road to Damascus.
If, as Charles Baudelaire has said, "Superstition is the reservoir of all truths," then, we have lost our spiritual bearings in the dark forest of modern rationalism. To be sure, we have a Yankee Pope Joan, a Messiah in petticoats who has uttered the illuminating phrase, "My first and for ever message is one and eternal," which is no more a parody of Holy Writ than The Brook Kerith, a book which while it must have given its author pains to write--so full of Talmudic and Oriental lore and the lore of the apocryphal gospels is it--must have been also a joy to him as a literary artist. The poignant irony of Paul's disbelief in the real Jesus is understandable, though it is bound to raise a chorus of protestations. But Mr. Moore never worried over abuse. He has, Celt that he is, followed his vision. In every man's heart there is a lake, he says, and the lake in his heart is a sombre one, a very pool of incertitudes. One feels like quoting to him--though it would be unnecessary, as he knows well the quotation--what Barbey d'Aurévilly once wrote to Baudelaire, and years later of Joris-Karel Huysmans, that he would either blow out his brains or prostrate himself at the foot of the cross. Mr. Moore has in the past made his genuflections. But they were before the Jesus of his native religion; the poetic though not profound image he has created in his new book will never seem the godlike man of whom Browning said in Saul: "Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee. See the Christ stand!"