All this finished science of illusion is like an east wind to the confidences of the shy, and if they stay within its range they are blighted before their hearts have time to unfold. They long for a less biting air, for vernal hours in sheltered dells, where without sheaths and unguarded the hearts of flowers lie open to their neighbours and to heaven. There was once a simple day when religion set hearts interflowing, but now it can melt them only within the precincts; the fire which is carried from the altar is dead at the church door. The brotherliness of those early days is indeed often found in humble walks of life, but these we cannot continually tread, because our intellectual and artistic tastes find there no sufficient nurture. Among the cultured a cold convention often reigns, behind which only a more persistent nature than ours can pass. Unless, therefore, we find our way into some circle of gentle scholars or lovers of thebeautiful quite simple in their tastes, a thing possible but not often granted by a niggard fortune, we are perforce thrown back upon our own company, and move towards the grave alone. For this we accuse none; nothing is more at fault than our own constitution. But to us society is a school of dames, who are not to be blamed if amid the crowd that clamours for their teaching, they find no time for the backward scholar. We are the dunces of the school, and are dismissed without learning the accomplishments set forth upon the prospectus. That is why in our northern streets so many seeming hats are cowls.
In England the loss of congenial intercourse is perhaps more certain than in other lands. For through his national reserve the highly-cultured Englishman has a cold perfection of good breeding to which heartiness is vulgarity; he emanates intimidation, and in courtesy is rather studious than spontaneous, seldom genial but in an ancient friendship. If you knew him to the concealed heart, and were suffered to assay the fine metal beneath this polished surface, youwould win a golden friendship; but only on a desert island would he permit the operation. To the shy who may encumber his path his bearing seems marked by an indifference which they magnify into aversion, and are thereby the worse confounded. In a land where such convention reigns they go through life like persons afflicted with a partial deafness; between them and the happier world there is as it were a crystalline wall which the pleasant low voices of confidence can never traverse.
I say, then, that the real, the enduring shyness is that inveteration of reserve to which a few men in a few countries are miserably condemned. Others know it as a transient inconvenience, as the croup or measles of childhood; but in us it is obstinate and ineradicable as grave disease. If out of the long frustration of our efforts to be whole some strain of bitterness passes into our nature; if sometimes we burn with unjust resentment against the fate which, suffers such lives as ours to be prolonged, let it be remembered in extenuation that to those who bear a double burden humancharity owes the larger kindliness. For though like you we bear our share of common troubles, O happier men and women, the common pleasures and compensations which are as wings upon your shoulders are heavy packs on ours. The cheerful contrasts are for you alone; for us the bright threads interwoven in the dark stuff of life were faded before they reached the loom.
You who have the friendships and affections without which you would not care to live a day, think more kindly of those to whom the interludes of toil are often harder than the toil itself. Of your charity believe our fate ordained and not the choice of our own perversity; for what man born of woman would choose a path so sad, were there not within him some guiding and possessing devil which he could in nowise cast out? Never will in maddest hours of freedom consented to such doom; we were condemned at birth, our threads were spoiled upon the fingers of the Norns.
Such in its broader outlines seemed the infirmity which had grown with my growth,and now had to be reckoned with, like the bridle of Theages, as a permanent hindrance to a reasonable happiness. Old hopes lay shattered about me—well, I had to pick up the fragments and piece together a less ambitious ideal.
I will not linger over the forces which helped my resolution, the great and general remedies which come to the relief of men in like evil case. Religion, philosophy, art, science, literature—all promised their anodynes against despair; slowly they stirred in me anew those springs of interest in life which disillusion seemed to have choked for ever. I rose up, and looking round upon the world saw that it was still good; and there came into my memory brave words which a golden book puts in the mouths of its indomitable knights: "I will take the adventure which God shall ordain me." I now perceived that if evil fortune had unhorsed me it had yet left me endurance to continue the combat on foot. My second failure was more final and disastrous than the first discomfiture in earlier life, but now the plague of pessimism was stayedby a greater recuperative power. Those long hours of the long eastern day, spent under the verandah with books of many ages and languages, had not been altogether fruitless; they had helped to mature a wider and more catholic taste than that of restless youth, the kind of culture that brings not rebellion but peace.
In my eastern watch-tower I had re-read the great books from a new point of vantage, and let the eye roam over fields of literature which lie beyond the undergraduate's bounds; by a still permeation of fine influence, my crude philosophy was unconsciously mellowed, as the surface of ivory, according to Roman belief, by the bland air of Tibur. For by the mere being in an atmosphere of serenity our nature grows porous to gracious influences streaming in we know not how or when, and taking their abode in our very grain and structure. And so without consciousness of good desert, I found myself confident in a new discipline, and looking for the word of command from wiser leaders than Byron or the youthful Shelley. Queen Mab was now the saddestrhetoric, and Childe Harold's plaint unseemly lamentation; I had erased from my calendar of saints the names of apostles of affliction once held in honour; the Caliph Amurath with his tale of fourteen happy days out of a long life of royal opportunity; Swift with his birthday lection from Jeremiah. Rather there trooped into memory with a quiet pomp and induction of joy, forms of men who, though justified in rebellion by every human suffrage, remained loyal to the end and proved by endurance a more imperial humanity. Socrates unperturbed by mortal injustice; Dante a deep harmonious voice amid jangling destinies; William the Silent serene in every desperate conjecture—these seemed now the more perfect captains. If exile had done no more than transfer my allegiance to such as these, I had not borne the lash in vain.
But at the first setting out upon this later stage I had still mistakes to make, and the ascent to tranquillity was not to be accomplished without stumbling. It was the old Roman creed which first drew meaway from fretting memories; in its high restraint, as of a hushed yet mighty wind, it breathed a power of valiant endurance, and promised before nightfall the respite of a twilight hour. For stoicism has qualities which seem foreordained for the bracing of shy souls, as if the men who framed its austere laws had prescience of our frailty and consciously legislated to its intention. It is the philosophy of the individual standing by himself, as the shy must always stand, over against a world which he likes not but may not altogether shun. And in this proud estrangement it promises release from all the inquisition of morbid fears, and an imperturbable calm above the need of earthly friends or comfort or happiness; it plants the feet upon that path of nature along which a man may go strongly, consoled in solitude by a god-like sense of self-reliance. This immutable confidence is the essential power of stoicism, which does not, like the great oriental religions, tame personality by ruthless maiming, but teaches it to bear the brunt of adversities erect, like an athlete finely trained. Its very arrogance,its sufficiency, perforce commend it to those whose instinct urges to self-abasement: its lofty disregard of adverse circumstance is medical to their timidity.
And so in the hour of my bereavement its voice inspired to resistance like a bugle sounding the advance; its echoes rang with the assurance that man was not made to be the worm of Eden, darkly creeping in the dust, but rather its noblest creature, with the light crowning his head and the winds tossing his hair. And then its strong simplicity, so masculine and unemotional, was grateful to one now finally dismated, and so cruelly handled as to have, it seemed, no use for a heart any more. Better let feeling die than be betrayed by diffidence into the denial of its true allegiance, or into expressions of the inner life false and wry as the strange laughter which the doomed suitors in Ithaca could not control. Though it stifled feeling, the creed of Cleanthes exalted the intellect, which was all that now remained to me unimpaired; surely it was the appointed rule for one henceforth to be severed from the passions andenthusiasms through which humanity errs and is happy.
"The world," the wise Stoic seemed to say, "is twofold in its nature. Some things may be changed by man, others are by his utmost effort immutable. God has implanted in you a right reason by which, when it is well trained, you can infallibly distinguish between the two, avoiding thus all unworthy fretfulness and all idle kicking against the pricks. Therefore he has made you for happiness; for the joy of men is an achievement; and their misery in the coveting of the unattainable end. If you would fulfil his benevolent design, seek only what has been placed in your power, frankly resigning all that lies beyond; but be ever difficult in renunciation; test and sound well every issue, lest you leave a permitted good undone, than which nothing is a greater sin. To be loyal, to be contented, to acquiesce in all things save only in ameliorable evil, this is to live according to nature, which is God's administration. If you are assiduous in careful choosing, you will learn at last to make a right use of everyevent; you will be harassed no more by vain desire or unreasoning aversion, but will become God's coadjutor and be always of his mind. So, when external things have ceased to trouble your spirit, you will no longer be a competitor for vanities; but, enfranchised from all solicitude, you will have discarded envy and conceit and intolerance, which are the ill fruits of that vain rivalry. You will neither cringe before power nor covet great place, for alike from inordinate affection and from the fear of pain or death you will be free. Disenamoured of mundane things, you will live simply and unperturbed, in kindness and cheerfulness and in gratitude to Providence. Life will be to you as a feast or solemnity, and when it comes to a close, you will rise up saying, 'I have been well and nobly entertained, it is fit that I give place to another guest.'"
The strength and mastery thus promised raised my dejected spirits, as the words of a new and sanguine physician may hearten one who had long lain stricken yet now dares to hope for the day of recovery. Thiswas a law which did not denounce the world as illusion or enjoin a cloistral seclusion upon the mind, but rather proposed each and every appearance as a touchstone on which the quality of personality should be unceasingly tried. By the constant application of a high standard to life, it seemed to implant an incorrupt seed of manliness, and to create in its disciples that saner mood which holds in equal aversion a Heliogabalus and a Simeon Stylites. So persuaded, I could join with the fervour of a neophyte in the Stoic's profession: "Good and evil are in choice alone, and there is no cause of sorrowing save in my own errant and wilful desires. When these shall have been overcome, I shall possess my soul in tranquillity, vexing myself in nowise if, in the world's illusive good, all men have the advantage over me. For all outward things I will bear with equal mind, even chains or insults or great pain, ashamed of this only, if reason shall not wholly free me from the servitude of care. Let others boast of material goods; mine is the privilege of not needing these or stooping to their control. I will havebut a temperate desire of things open to choice, as they are good and present, and the tempter shall find no hold for his hands by which to draw me astray. I will be content with any sojourn or any company, for there is none, howsoever perilous, which may not prove and strengthen the defences of my soul. For I have built an impregnable citadel whence, if only I am true to myself, I can repel assaults from the four quarters of heaven. Who shall console one lifted above the range of grief, whom neither privation nor insolence can annoy? for he has peace as an inalienable possession, and by no earthly tyranny shall be perturbed. Bearing serenely all natural impediments to action, trespassing beyond no eternal landmark, by no foolishness provoked, he shall become a spectator and interpreter of God's works; he shall ripen to the harvest in the sunshine and wait tranquilly for the sickle, knowing that corn is only sown that it may be reaped, and man only born to die."
The mere repetition of these words, so instinct with the spirit of old Romanfortitude, roused me to a more immediate resolution than any other form of solace. There are times when a splendour of exaggeration is the best foil to truth. The Roman's pride is the best corrective to the earthward bias of the diffident; by its excess of an opposite defect it drives us soonest into the mean of a simple and manly confidence. It is better for us first to repeat, "Dare to look up to God and say: Make use of me for the future as Thou wilt, I am of the same mind, I am equal with Thee.... Lead me whither Thou wilt," than to dwell upon such words as these: "It is altogether necessary that thou have a true contempt for thyself if thou desire to prevail against flesh and blood"—or these: "If I abase myself ... and grind myself to the dust which I am, Thy grace will be favourable to me, and Thy light near unto my head.... By seeking Thee alone and purely loving Thee I have found both myself and Thee, and by that love have more deeply reduced myself to nothing."
This supreme abnegation may leave thesaint unharmed, but it is ill fitted for those who droop already with the malady of dejection. The divine wisdom which knows the secrets of all hearts and their necessities infinitely various, shall exact obedience according to no adamantine law: it loves not the jots and tittles of formalism, nor the pretensions of those who would cast all things in one mould. From those made perfect, from the saints whose links with earth are almost severed, whose sight begins to pierce gross matter through, it may accept prostration and endless contrite tears, knowing that to these, upon the very verge of illumination, the forms of slavery have lost their vileness. But to those who are still of earth and can but conceive God's fatherhood according to earthly similitudes, it will not ordain a prone obeisance. Such it will require to stand erect even in contrition, in that posture which is the privilege of sons. We who are unperfected affront God supposing him pleased with the prostration of his children. It is the ignorance of a feudal age that ascribes to him a Byzantine love of adulation; but that ageis no more, and he disserves the divine majesty who imputes to it a liking for theesprit d'antichambre.
I did not need to dwell upon my weakness and misery but rather upon the grandeur of humanity, whose kinship and collaboration God himself does not reject. The Stoic phase was a useful stage on the road of convalescence, and the majestic words of Epictetus more helpful to a manlier bearing than the confessions of the saintliest souls. If, as is not to be doubted, there are others who seek an issue from the same dark region where I wandered, I do not fear to point them to the Stoic way, which like a narrow gorge cold with perpetual shadow is yet their shortest path upward to the high slopes lit with sunlight. Let them enter it without fear and endure its shadows a while, for by other ways they will fetch a longer compass and come later to their release.
But when some interval had passed I became aware that this cold ideal was not the end, and that out of the gall of austerity sweetness should yet come forth. Wisemen have said that all great systems of ethics meet upon a higher plane, as the branches of forest trees rustle together in the breeze; for though in the dark earth their roots creep apart, their summits are joined in the freedom of clear air. As I now struck inland from the iron shores of shipwreck, my heart warmed to a brighter and softer landscape, and with Landor I began to wish that I might walk with Epicurus on the right hand and Epictetus on the left. With a later thinker I reflected that if the Stoic knew more of the faith and hope of Christianity, the Epicurean came nearer to its charity. For it is true that Stoicism commands admiration rather than love. It was indeed too harsh a saying that "the ruggedness of the Stoic is only a silly affectation of being a god, to wind himself up by pulleys to an insensibility of suffering": that is the judgment of the bluff partisan, so shocked by the adversary's opinions that he feels absolved from any effort to understand them. But even those who in extremity have been roused to new valour by the precepts as by a Tyrtæan ode,for all the gratitude which they owe, will not impute to their deliverers an inhuman perfection. The Stoic does in truth wear a semblance of academic conceit, as though related to God not as a child to its father, but as a junior to a senior colleague. And with all its sufficiency, his philosophy seems too Fabian in its counsels; it is always withdrawing, passing by on the other side, avoiding battle—so that as a preparation for the uttermost ordeal it will often prove inferior to the reckless pugnacity of a narrow zealot.
Then, too, it acts like a frost not merely upon personal, but upon national ambition, and so keeps the wellspring from the root. Its assumption of a superhuman fortitude accords but ill with scientific truth, for if with one bound every man may become as God, he will despise that infinitely slow upward progression which is the only real advance. But, above all, it lives estranged from tenderness, in which alone at certain hours of torment the distracted mind finds God's face reflected. It preaches renunciation of all vain aversions and desires; butit repels sweet impulses that are not vain. By exalting apathy in regard to personal suffering, it becomes insensible to others' pain also. In the conviction that appeals for sympathy are avowals of unworthiness, it will have no part in the love of comrades, and it never discovered the truth that the strength and the compassion of the Divine are one perfection.
There is a favourite mediæval legend depicted in one of the windows of the cathedral at Bourges, which exposes in a characteristic fashion this weakness of the Stoic's creed. The Evangelist St John, when at Ephesus, remarked in the forum the philosopher Cratinus giving a lesson of abnegation to certain rich young men. At the teacher's bidding the youths had converted all their wealth into precious stones, and these they were now bidden crush to dust with a heavy hammer in the presence of the assembled people, that so they might make public profession of their contempt for riches. But St John was angered at so wasteful a renunciation. "It is written," he said, "that whoso would be perfectshould not destroy his possessions, but sell them, and give the proceeds to the poor." "If your master is the true God," replied Cratinus scornfully, "restore these gems again to their original form, and then they shall be bestowed according to your desire." St John prayed, and the precious stones lay there once more perfect in all their brilliance and splendour. The moral of the old tale is clear—that all virtue without charity is nothing worth; and that of virtue without charity, the Stoic's cold renunciation is the chief type and ensample.
The insight into this higher truth did not come by inspiration, but was gradually imparted during long summer days, when I wandered from dawn to dark among the fields and woods. Hoping at first no more than to tire the mind with the body and so win a whole repose, I became by degrees receptive of a new learning from nature, which created new sympathies and kindled fresh ambitions. Naturally I again read Wordsworth, and now for the first time since childhood I knew what joys intimacy brings. I was one of a brotherhood, andwherever I went was sure of a friendly salutation. Things that grew in silence became my friends; I was with them at all hours, in light and shadow, in warmth and cold, watching their gracious and responsive existences, which reject no good gift, but radiantly grow towards the light while it endures. Insensibly the spirit of this gentle expansive life was infused within me, until the heart which I had deemed useless and outworn, began to open like a flower scathed by frost, at the full coming of spring. The plants and trees were human to me, the brooks spoke with articulate voice; by that ancient witchery of animism, old as the relationship of man and nature, I was put to school again: until at last, absorbed in the vicissitudes of small things and surrendering reason to a host of pathetic fallacies, I was taught the great secret that life may not be centred in itself, but in the going out of the heart is wisdom. And as among human friends there are some to whom a man is bound by deeper and tenderer links than to the rest, so it is with these other friends which have nolanguage, but only the wild-wood power of growing about the heart. Among their gracious company each man will discover his own affinity, and having found it will look on the rest of nature with brighter eyes. Some learn the great lessons from mountains, lakes, and sounding cataracts; others from broad rivers peacefully flowing to the sea. To me there spoke no such romantic voices. My wanderings led me through a country of simple rural charm, and the friends that became dearest to me were just our English elms.
Who but the solitary, artists alone excepted, understand the full charm of elms in an English landscape? To us there is an especial appeal in their loneliness, as they range apart along the hedgerows, embayed in blue air and sunlight which do but play upon the fringe of your huddling forest. See them on a breezy August morning across a tawny corn-field, printing their dark feathery contours on a blue sky and holding the shadows to their bosoms; or on a June evening get them between you and the setting sun, and mark the droop andpoise of the upper foliage fretted black upon a ground of red fire. Here are no cones or hemispheres, or shapeless bulks of green, but living beings of articulated form, clothed in verdure as with the fine-wrought drapery that enhances rather than conceals the beauty of the statue.
Or at a still later hour, over against the harvest moon, see them rise congruous with the gentle night, casting round them not palls of ominous gloom, but clear translucent shadows sifted through traceries of leafage which do but veil the light. And what variety of form and structure sunders them from other trees, what irregular persuasive grace. Some are tall and straight, springing like fountains arrested in the moment when they turn to fall; others bend oblique without one perpendicular line, every branch by some subtle instinct evading the hard angles of earth-measurement as unmeet for that which frames the sky; others again spread to all the quarters of heaven their vast umbrageous arms. No trees are so companionable as the elms to the red-roofed homestead which nestlesat their feet and is glad for them. Seen from a distance, how delightful is this association, how delicate the contrast of tile and leaf and timbered barn, each lending some complement to the other's fairest imperfection. Perhaps there will be a whole line of distinct trees, and then you will see as it were a cliff-side of verdure in which, beneath the billowy curves of lit foliage, there open caverns and cool deeps of shadow fit for a Dryad's rest.
To know the elm-tree you must not come too near, for it too is wild and does not reveal its nature lightly; you may be cooler in the shadow of the beech or stand drier beneath the red-stemmed leaves of the sycamore. Yet it suffers the clinging ivy; it was beloved of poets in old days, and painters love it still. It has not the walnut's vivid green nor the rare flush that lights up the pine-stem. Its leaves are rough and of no brilliance; its bark is rugged also. But in life the familiar guardian of home meadows, it has stood by our fathers' landmarks from generation to generation, and when fallen and hewn and stacked it shedsa fragrance which, wherever perceived in after years, brings back memories of wanderings in deep lanes and of the great dim barns where we played in childhood. In the dull winter days when only yews and cypresses wear their leaves, I sometimes wander to a place whose walls are hung with the works of many a seer and lover of elms; there seated before a few small frames I give them thanks for having read the dear trees truly, and glorified a close and barren gallery with all the breezes and colours of the fields: I am beyond all noise and murkiness, walking in the peace and spaciousness of unsullied air.
To a mind now happily reverted to the primitive confidence in souls everywhere indwelling and creating sympathies between all things, the bonds of kinship between man and nature were drawn ever closer, and it seemed a wholly natural belief that the changes of the visible universe, affecting things which lived an almost personal existence, should be instinct with the deeper meaning of events in the drama of human existence.
Like the every-day life of men with its imperceptible attritions was the insensible growth and decay of things; as the tumult of his emotions were the storms and catastrophes that convulse the face of nature. The movement never ceased; the transforming power was never wearied; the spectator had but to give rapt attention, to be carried beyond his poor solicitudes to a participation in elemental processes of change in which the fates of humanity were mysteriously involved. The thought of this indissoluble union kept alive the sense of brotherhood within me, of responsibility in life, of interest in all that happens; and whether it was the daily contraction of a pond in drought, or a battle of ants by the wayside, or the first tinge of autumn upon the woods, all was ennobled by symbolic relationships to man's experience, which in the unceasing flow of their perception were lustral to a solitary heart, without them choked and stagnant.
There was a certain heath-clad ridge which like a watch-tower set above a city never failed to bring before the ranging eyesome vision pregnant of those emotions by which the sense of humanity is quickened to a deeper consciousness of itself. The witchery of space was there always, and seemed to draw from the soul the clinging mists of her indifference. It was there that I saw nature in all her moods, and felt that to each my own moods responded; there that despondency, imagining her monotony of woe, was confuted by the saving changefulness of created things. I remember one day, when a summer storm was spending its fury, I stood upon this ridge and looked across the low lands that stretched away beneath me. They lay with all their boundaries confused by a pall of purple gloom, then darkly transparent, and dissolving before the returning sun, whose penetrative influence was felt rather than actually perceived. As I gazed, high in the veil of cloud there began faintly to gleam a spot of palest gold, so high that it seemed to belong to the sky and to have no part in an earthly landscape. Gradually it expanded, grew more vivid, and assumed form, other forms and tints emerged beside it,until at last it was revealed as a ripe corn-field on the high slopes across the valley, and before many moments had passed, a long line of downs stood out in the pure air with a sculptural clearness, as if during the storm all had been uprooted and moved a whole league towards the spot where I stood. While the rainbow spanned the plain, and the thunder still rolled in the distance, all the opposite heaven cleared almost to the furthest horizon; but there a remoter range yet lay half-covered by a billowy mass of clouds, like the hull of a dismasted ship in the folds of her fallen sails. At last even this trace of the battle was gone; the sun shone unopposed; the wet lands and clear sky were lit with an intenser brightness for their transient eclipse.
Then the humanity of all these things was borne in upon my mind, and I was affected by these vicissitudes shadowing forth the destiny of man, and reminding him in their beautiful and majestic procession that nature endures no perpetual gloom. The sudden ruin of a bright day in deluge and darkness and sonorous thunder,the timid reappearance of faint light, the natural forms strangely emerging from the perplexed wrack infesting the heaven, and at last seen as never before through leagues of pellucid air; the thunder's silence, the final and supreme triumph of light;—these swift yet utter revolutions of the visible world, by very grace of mutability, were rich with instant consolations for the soul's misgiving. They served to remind me that the fears, the spiritual conflicts, the darkness that seems eternal, are mere incidents of a summer noon and leave behind them a purer and serener day. Through all this close intercourse with nature my mind was being prepared for a healthier relation to my fellow-man, and my heart saved from the petrification of melancholy self-regard. The ever-growing delight in these inanimate things, the constant discovery of new charms as knowledge widened with experience, united to prevent stagnation and despair; they kept heart and mind alert for the perception of new glories; and it is from a clear sense of their salutary power that I dwell upon them in thisrecord of a self-tormented life. How should he find life colourless whose eyes are often fixed upon the sky, who sees grey zones of cloud flush crimson before the sunrise, and at evening the wide air richly glowing, moted as with the bloom of plums and the golden pollen of all flowers?
At the end of that summer I returned to the occupations of life, appeased and almost happy in this inheritance of new sympathies. And before long I found that these were themselves but precursors of that which was to come, and that like the paranymphs who escort the bride, they did but apparel the heart for a deeper and more abiding joy. They were busied about me in tranquil hours, and speaking not, but seeming to wait in gladness for another, they made me serenely expectant also. They destroyed all sadness of retrospect; they led me always forward; with faces transparent with the light of an inward happiness they seemed to promise a vision at each near bending of the way. From glad looks and gestures assuring imminent joy, I too was charmed into a like faith, and went on blithely inthe confidence of a coming illumination. Nor was that hope vain, for at length the mystery was made plain, and one day they brought me exulting into the presence of the Ideal Love.
There is a place in every heart which must be filled by adoration, or else the whole will grow hard and wither like a garden whose central fountain is grown dry. And though the affection of mortal man or woman may abandon it, there remains yet this other love which by pure and strenuous invocation may be drawn to it, and dwell in it, to the ennoblement of life; so great is the care of providence for mortal need. Love is our need, and it is given, if we despair not of it, even to such as have rarely felt the glow of earthly passion. For love is of many kinds; yet the palest and most subtle of its forms are made real to those who believe, and may become the guiding influences of their lives. Such are the visions of the ideal love to which those glad natural sympathies now led me, leaving me alone awhile that I might worship the orient light. And whenI came out from that presence I rejoiced indeed, for the path was clear for my return, and life was now glad with promise like an orchard burgeoning with white blossoms. Old memories crowded back on me of hours beneath the cedars with the Phædrus and the Vita Nuova, hours made happy with intellectual and austere delights. But now the joy was other than intellectual, though significant tenfold, for then in untried youth I had wondered at the beauty of an imaginary world; now with eyes that had looked on desolation I perceived that these visions were true. For had they been no more than airy fancies, they surely had not endured throughout these long ages in our laden and mortal air.
It was not merely the beauty of a literary setting which had preserved them: the craftsman's skill might indeed have enhanced their natural splendour, but it could not have alone inspired them with this perennial life. The gem with fire in its heart outlives the delicate setting; though it may be maltreated and buried for centuries by the wayside, it will cometo light when the gold that framed it is long battered or lost, and will be desired by new generations for its inherent and unalterable beauty.
Not Plato's or Dante's creative power, but truth surviving all incarnations of genius, has kept this celestial gem aglow: they have but celebrated that which was never mortal, and guided wandering eyes to heaven's most beautiful star. This intangible and unincarnate vision exacts more from its votaries than the love which walks the earth: holding the lover ever in the strain of apprehension, it inures him to unwearying worship, and itself moving in regions incorruptible, never loses the glory of its first hour. The years may pass, but one face, like a hallowed thing, abides continually; years may fret and corrode other ideals, but to this they add beauties of ever fresh significance. The auroral glow is always round it, brightening the world, until it becomes an emblem of illumination and the symbol of eternal truths. This visionary presence wakes aspiration to new effort and touches the intellect withpassion; beleaguered thought sallies out with new strength, and the frontiers of darkness recede before it. From this comes the quickening of the heart without which hope wanes and the mind is barren: the deep pure joy of contemplation awakens all that is best in the soul, which goes towards it on tense wings of desire. And as with time it draws further from the earth, and, following, the soul essays ever higher flights, it is often poised at a great height as in a trance of motion, whence it looks back upon the world it has left, and round it upon other worlds. Then, its love-range being wondrously expanded, it sees beyond that visionary countenance, which dissolves and forms again like a delicate wreath of mist; and clear starlight falls upon it from every side, so that all shadow is destroyed. And when it returns to earth again, and is forced to contemplate meaner things, it is now aware that the very soil is compacted of dust of stars, and that he who looks listlessly upon creation is unworthy of the human name. And so continually flying forth and returning, it weaves endlessbonds between the infinitesimal and the infinite, forgetting how to despise, which is the heavenly science.
All this ardour is awakened and sustained by love, which began in sense and is now transformed. Through each succeeding change it is known for the same divine power which has so attuned the body that it vibrates no more to desire alone, but is now become resonant beneath a faint and spiritual breath.
It is an old story that love is sightless, but that is the love which romps among the roses and is blinded by their thorns. There is another and a better tradition that love's eyes pierce heaven, and this is a great truth; for infinity is cold and vaporous until man projects upon it his mortal ideal, his conception of an earthly love transfigured. When this beloved guide appears throned above him as in the clouds, he dares to lift his eyes, and there he reads through its light the divine purports of his existence. Is it a small thing to stand, though but for a moment, searching infinity undismayed? This is the celestialocean to whose shore he is come; and now "drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom, until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere ... beauty absolute, separate, simple, everlasting, which without diminution, without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever growing and perishing beauties of all other things."
To some the great perception comes but late, rising from the ashes of love's common furnace. But they whose hearts have never been consumed in these roaring flames may find it earlier; and purged from all taints of jealousy and covetousness, may pass straightway into the bliss of a higher union. This is that supreme affiance and espousal of the soul wherein they may be released into a larger air, undelayed by the earthward longings and gradual initiations of seemingly happier men. Thus its servants do not decline into slothful service, butare strenuous always; raised above the acquiescence of use, they never know the cloying of fruition or suffer the barbarian conquest of indifference. Their soul is unaffected by material circumstance or misfortune, and illuminates their lives as often as in the silent hour of meditation they concentrate their thoughts upon its grace. The cup of earthly love, even the noblest, is often dipped in Pyriphlegethon, and the draught it offers scathes the palate until its finest sensibility is for ever dulled. Those who have quaffed this liquid fire can no longer understand his mood who leaves the roses and the wine to toil through deserts in search of limpid water. They think him madly ungrateful for God's good gifts, a fool abandoning joy proved and present for a shadow far and incomprehensible. But they who have not denied themselves are no longer fit judges of him who has renounced. They cannot know that by this renunciation the senses are thrice refined, and receive as a vital influence the stellar beam which falls chill and ineffectual upon a grosser frame. Theycannot believe that this love from the infinite distance wields as mighty a force over renunciant lives as the near flame of passion over their own. But, for all their denial, it lives and puissantly reigns. It reigns in very truth predominant, this ideal love to which space exists not and propinquity is nothing; and it will have none for its subjects but those who by bereavement or aspiration or intense purity are inly prepared for its dominion.
Happy therefore are the shy if in the midst of their tribulation they are guided to the gateway of so bright a kingdom. It may well be that we must first be led thither by some dear-remembered and virgin form once almost ours through earthly love, but now joined to us only by an imperishable and mystic union. Our sight may at first need the embodied beauty to give it the finer powers by which the revelation of the ideal grows familiar to us, but is at last attainable without mortal intervention by an immediate flight of the soul. Until that late day of enlightenment we must still be set upon the celestial path by a touchof human tenderness; a pure yet sensuous yearning must be ours when we are first girded to the ascent. If there are beings which attain the fulness of the ideal love without the first inspiration of a fair earthly form I know nothing in creation to which they may be likened, nor had I ever part in so rare an enfranchisement. The vision that now entrances my soul first arose from a living, breathing form radiant with earthly brightness and instinct with every charm which brings men fawning to the feet of women. The sensuous frenzy which lovers sing was also mine, the tremor of the heart, the vibration of the very life; the deep seventh wave of passion rioted through me also. But from the first amazement of the shaken being it was not given me to pass through satisfaction into tranquillity; I was held long in a whirl of trouble; in the anguish of denial I learned initiation into the mystery which is eternal and supreme.
It is good for some of earth's children that passion should be stayed before it makes ashes of the fancy; for if it does but touch for a moment only to be withdrawn for ever, it does not destroy, but by its meteoric passage kindles the imagination with the glow of an incorruptible flame. It is with them long enough to brand upon memory the image which, though never renewed before their bodily eyes, by its very severance from perception puts on an immortality of virginal grace. Love is understanding, said the poet of Heaven and Hell, and love ennobled through renunciant years shall at the last encompass the world. The sensuous glow that first quickened the heart of youth is transmuted into a purer fire akin to that which moves the spheres.
To know this truth is their compensation who are swiftly withdrawn from the warm radiance of earthly love. They are stricken, but before passion blinds them are rapt into a high solitude, whence, if they truly love, an infinite prospect is unrolled before them. They know desire; but as their passion was hopeless in this world, their steps were mercifully set upon a new path, whereby the bodily semblance of the beloved became the symbol of spiritual comeliness, alluringthe beholder into the peace of a serene and unworldly mood. A thin and rarefied ideal, you say, a mirage which no wayfarer can approach: experience rejects these subtleties, and to these creations of a dream human affection was never given. True, to hearts established and content in happy unions, to minds preoccupied with the near cares and pleasures of a home, our distant visions may appear frail structures wrought in mist by homeless fancy. But for the exiled heart they are not such, but verities of abiding inspiration. For the ideal love did not die with Plato, but came again in mediæval Italy, and who shall say that even our material age has banished it from the earth?
No indeed it is not dead, the ideal love, but indwells, a redeeming power, wherever there are desolate hearts and minds to be updrawn and united by its ministry; a power so lustral in its nature, that no abject and despairing thought creeps into its presence but is purified and exalted by its regard. This love brings hope and cheerful constancy; with a shining falchion itaffrights into their natal darkness the monstrous forms of despair, and lends to all work a secret charm of chivalry. It sustains that high anticipatory mood to which life is but a preparation, and the bees buzzing round the honey-flowers seem poor things toiling for an inessential gain. Because it is mystic and transcendental it is the predestined guide of all whom fate holds removed from earthly love. This is the old device of the world's failures, you say, to trick themselves out in Plato's mantle or the schoolman's cowl, and conceal their spite beneath the pretensions of the mystic. But I answer that the causes which moved the Greek and the Florentine are still at work among mankind to-day; they have never ceased, however much obscured by the glare of triumphant luxury or the stress of miserable toil. Often when disillusion has laid bare a soul, this love which did but slumber awakes to contest with envy or despair the possession of a wounded heart. I aver that any exile from the happier earth whose heart is pure, if he invokes this love with ardent faith, may unbar his door andfeel that it has passed his threshold. Let us never be persuaded that the ideal world is far from this earth of ours, or that the way to it may not be daily traversed by him who has submitted to the heavenly guide. Not even the close entanglement of common cares can avail to keep such an one from his love; but as Bishop Berkeley is said to have been able to pass in a moment from the consideration of trifling things to the throne of thrones and the seats of the Trinity, so this lover shall overpass with easy and habitual flight the barriers that hold most men life-long prisoners.
For to the Spirit that is chastened and endures there is given a power of flight and poise, by which, if it abandon itself to the celestial wind, it may instantly remove from the deeper planes of life, as a bird by the mere slanting of its wings is carried in proud quiescence into an upper region of the air. He shall know instant release from the leaguer of disillusion and vain solicitudes; in the light of one beautiful and compassionate countenance the unquiet memoriesof failure shall give up their exceeding bitterness.
And though the style and instinct of modern life are hostile to such love, though in prosperity it is ignored and in adversity often overborne by a vain uproar of lamentation, yet even in a self-indulgent and furious world it still draws many to the severe exaltation of its service. We cannot approach the heights where a Plato and a Dante walked with ease, but far beneath upon the lower slopes we can draw a breath of new life as we fix our weaker eyes upon the glory which they saw so near. Although the men who have there ascended are a supreme company, we may yet presume to follow; for let it never be said that the gods have reserved for surpassing genius the consolation of which lesser men have so much deeper need. But he who would reach a serener air must press forward strenuously; for as a mountain may have one bare and northern slope, and another sunlit and clothed with verdure, and yet there may be a path on each side to the summit, so it is with the ascent to this felicity. Onelingers amid pleasant groves and laughing waters; another, undistracted by the beauty of any lower zone, but fixing his eyes upon the far summit, crosses the chill rocky slopes, never feeling the warmth of the sun and only seeing his brightness reflected from the highest peak. Though the ways of the two travellers lie far apart until the end, their endurance may be crowned with the same reward; but he who knew no dalliance and plucked no fruit has from the beginning seen the goal clearly, and lived steadfastly in its distant promise. And do you tell me that this is not love or joy, you who saunter in the verdant southern valleys breathing a present happiness with the perfume of a thousand flowers? Your way may lead you upward after long vicissitudes, but endurance will more swiftly fail you for the last most arduous ascent. Very love is of the heights, and he whose thoughts have long been thither exalted will breathe with least pain the attenuate upper air.
To this pilgrimage the diffident are foreordained; it is their happiest hour when they take staff and scrip and set out inearnest for the shrine built among the mountains. The gardens of Armida are not for them, nor the warm breezes fragrant of fruit and flowers; but the vision of a far peak flushed at sundawn draws them onward, and strength and peace are increased upon them throughout the great ascent. He is still too rich for pity to whom renunciation brings these high and enviable hours.
But the heavens are not opened every day, and the adept of these mysteries must walk the dull round of common life like other men, not warmed as they are by the glow of constant friendship, yet cheered by intermittent flames of remembrance and of hope. The real life of the diffident is cunningly hidden from those around them, for whom, indeed, it is wont to have faint interest; but before you who have often sought me out through fair and foul weather, I may venture to undo the pack of small resources which brings variety and distraction into lonely days.
Firstly, I still dare to haunt the forecourts of philosophy. Into her inner courts I maynot penetrate, lacking the leisure which her whole service demands; yet the loiterings which I may still enjoy are to me like voyages into a foreign country, and give my mind the healthful enjoyment of change; they are not long enough to bring that whole detachment from daily life which, in my case, might prove a perilous advantage. All that I need for common use is a simple rule based on a few fundamental thoughts to give me a course upon the wayward ocean, and though it be full of error as the Almagest, yet it shall surpass the thumb-rules of Philistia. It must be a doctrine which allows imagination her right and durable career, and therefore not be monist. For materialism is too wildly imaginative at the start: like a runner who at the outset overstrains his heart and thereafter runs no more, the follower of this creed, by his postulate of a blind impersonal Law, exhausts his power of speed and plods henceforth eyes downward over flattest plains of dulness. That my mind may remain curious and alert in isolation, I must conceive in the universal scheme a powerthat does not alone impel, but also draws me forward. For were it true that the sum of things blunders from change to change, swept by blind force into uncharted voids, I should abandon myself in despair to that hopeless course, and drift indifferent to the direction or the end.
Let me rather believe that if each several idea is compacted by my active intelligence out of some vast system of relations, then only a supreme intelligence akin to man's can brace together the whole system or universal sum of things. For this earth, yes, and all the complex of the spheres, exist to me imperfectly as idea alone, nor can I conceive them any complete existence apart from a kindred but omniscient mind. Each advance in human knowledge should then be an infinitesimal approach towards the supreme comprehension; and the aspiring race of man is justified in that inchoation of long hope which is folly to the single life.
I would also believe that new relations between things may be detected not merely by the staid and ordered process of collatingabstractions, which is science, but by swifter and more genial methods of intuition.