The Project Gutenberg eBook ofLures of Life

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofLures of LifeThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Lures of LifeCreator: Joseph LucasRelease date: July 25, 2013 [eBook #43303]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Al Haines*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LURES OF LIFE ***LURES OF LIFEBYJOSEPH LUCASAUTHOR OF "OUR VILLA IN ITALY"T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDONFirst published . . . . January, 1919.Second Impression . . . . June, 1919.CONTENTSCHAPTERTHE LURE OF LIFE'S AFTERGLOWTHE LURE OF HAPPINESSTHE LURE OF SELF-DENIALTHE LURE OF MAGIC WORDSTHE LURE OF AN OLD TUSCAN GARDENTHE LURE OF THE MONTELUPO PLATETHE LURE OF PLUCKTHE LURE OF OLD FURNITURETHE LURE OF PERSONALITYTHE LURE OF NICE PEOPLETHE LURE OF THE NEW DEMOCRACYJESUS CHRIST THE LURE OF THE AGESTHE LURE OF THE LIVING WORDTHE LURE OF THE EUCHARISTLURES OF LIFEITHE LURE OF LIFE'S AFTERGLOWA friend put me in remembrance that I had a birthday recently. Birthday emotion with an old man is an extinct crater. When I was young a coming birthday set my pulse throbbing to mad music weeks beforehand; it filled me with delightful anticipations. Romance gathered round the happy event. Our thoughts tripped capriciously along the primrose paths of the future. I felt myself preordained to greatness. The hoarded treasure held in bond for me was surely there awaiting delivery, and Time the magician's wand would wave its largesse into my outstretched eager hands, and, clothed in honour, I should ride prosperously all the days of my life.To the youngster starting on the grand tour of life, the journey is a splendid venture. The cup held to the lips overflows with rich, ripe, sparkling liquor; every draught of it is nectar, exhilarating the spirits, expanding the experience, and discoursing music on every chord of the harp of a thousand strings. It is superb doing, riding life on a flowing tide when the warm south wind blows, and the air is redolent with aromatic spices, when driftwood floats from distant climes, and shore-birds sail in the central blue signalling that the Land of Heart's Desire will soon be reached. Truly youth takes life with a zest of its own.Yes, the birthday is a happy day to the young. You rejoice that you are a year older and of added consequence and stature in the world of men, and a step nearer realizing the daydreams sweetly dreamed in school, when the magic of life filled you with wonder and awe. Birthday joy increases immensely until the period of ecstatic joy crowns all, when you score twenty-one years and write yourself down a man. You are no longer a flower in the bud worn in anybody's buttonhole, but a well-developed plant on your own root growing in the open. When you get twice twenty-one birthday joy cloys on your palate, and you begin to resent the intrusion of the natal day as an unwelcome guest that you have seen too often. He reminds you that you are growing old and growing older. Your friends may crown the day with roses and toast you at the evening dinner in your best champagne let loose for the occasion, but the obvious remains, and your response to their unblushing flattery is not gushing as of yore. You tire of birthday greetings and birthday festivities; your vivacity flags; your digestion suffers. The thoughts that adorn the occasion are chiefly reminiscent, for the horizon of the future is narrowing down and leaves less space for Fancy in which to fly her kite.When I had covered my half-century a curious feeling like an electric shock chased along every fibre of my being on facing the cold, hard fact for the first time; I had grown old, and done it surreptitiously. Time glides smoothly, silently, swiftly, and startled as from a deep sleep, one marvels at the hot haste of the rolling years. You dread nearing the vortex of the great unknown to which we all inevitably steer, and finally sink beneath its swirling surface. The outlook is disturbing. Can't you put down the brake and gentle the pace? Will no opiate drug Time into forgetfulness? You try the rejuvenating influences of Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer, but nothing happens. The bald spot on the crown of your head increases in baldness and shining splendour. The longer you watch it, the larger it grows. Time baffles your artful devices, smiles at your wild alarms, and drives from you the crimson days of youth, with their vigour and vivacity, leaving in your possession a feeling of comfortable lethargy which solidifies into pacific blissfulness. Insensibly a change has passed over you with the mounting years. How the change wrought you do not know. Where you crossed the frontier which in the twinkling of an eye ranked you amongst the elders you cannot say. Who can tell the moment when summer ends and autumn commences? Who can cut a clean cleavage between afternoon and evening hours?However, you settle down to an old man's pleasures. You dislike being hustled after dinner. You prefer a quiet rubber at Bridge in a cosy room, with shaded lights, and a silent cigar with cronies of a choice, familiar brand as playmates. You prefer it to strenuously dancing in a stuffy, glaring ball-room till morning hours chase the stale and weary dancers to their homes. It is too fatiguing an amusement to make pleasure for you, as there is no new romance to be looked for after fifty. Anticipation at your ripe age is wasted stimulant. Boys dream of the future, old men live in the present. Youth, once upon a time, was an asset held in hand, a rich inheritance to be proud of, but now the treasury of youth is spent to the last coin and only the empty coffer remains, a memento of the vanished wealth of early days. You are a middle-aged man aged fifty, and you settle down to it solidly and squarely and comfortably. You will never be young and flippant again this side the harbour-bar.As we steer cautiously into the sixties and face the grand climacteric, life grows pensive. Sober reflections automatically cast their lengthening shadows over us. We have drunk copiously of the wine of life, and are now coming to the dregs of the bottle. We get moody. Meridian sunshine has not fructified the promise of youth as we appointed it. Lean years have eaten up years of plenty. We have gathered tares with the wheat which brought disappointment into the storehouse. Varied experiences have chequered life with cross lights and shadows. The grand ideals of sanguine youth have dissolved like dreams at daybreak, and instead of the great achievement ours is the common lot. Rates and taxes are hardy annuals that flourish undisturbed amidst the ruins. Are we downhearted because the romance of life has fizzled out like spent fireworks and left us in darkness? We did not expect to finish up in obscurity. Are we downhearted? No; after the struggle and stress of conflict we get our second breath; and the calm of age overtakes us. The halcyon hours set in to cheer us. I now move airily along the line of least resistance, and this brings tranquillity of mind in my advancing years. We are no longer broody. Experience breaks one in gently to the monotony of daily routine, and the collar neither frets nor rubs the shoulder, for the velvet lining of contentment softens the friction and we trudge along serenely going West.Everything contributes to make an old man's lot happy if the salt of life has not lost its savour. We have played the game, and now we watch others take their innings. It is good fun to watch. I tell you it is music to the eye watching the gay young world go its own way. The swagger, thebravoure, the buoyancy of its manners, stagger the dull parental mind. There is rhythm in its movements, there is character in its gaiety. It tops the record of the far-off days of splendour when we, their portly ancestors, were down in the arena beating up the dust of conflict, and considered ourselves the cream of modernity and the finest goods in the market. The youth of to-day has its hand on the wheel and the joy-car pads merrily, heedless of speed limits, for time has no limit and life sings a pleasant song to boys of the new régime.Life's afterglow is the period when the past is viewed through the golden haze of memory and we live over again the days of our youth, the splendid days of hope and promise. Pleasant things and pleasant people are remembered, and disagreeable events that vexed us are forgotten. We wipe clean from the slate memories that are unwelcome. From the mellowy distance we admire the picture in its broad outlines; its uninteresting details drop out of sight. It is the vivid patches of colour upon the canvas where the eye lingers lovingly and long. It is the happy past that enchants the memory to-day.An old man glances over his shoulder adown the long pathway of receding years hungrily, and muses to himself, "Oh, to be out in the world again as I knew it fifty years ago, with the same sunny people about me; to meet them on the old familiar footing. We had capacious times together; we understood one another and loved one another with kindred hearts and flowing speech. I talk with people nowadays, but these new friends of mine are not responsive. There is a glass screen between us as we talk together; we sit near one another, but we are far apart. I catch a far-off glint in their eye which holds me at arm's-length. Our lips are restrained, our thoughts are bottled up. It seems like sitting together in a room with blinds drawn, talking in the dark. Yes; new friends at best are but amiable strangers, for we met one another only when the flower of life had wilted and the leaf was sere and yellow on the tree. The full, unrestrained days when the sap was rising, the blossoming days of youth, were lived apart. I do not know these good people intimately, and I never can, and they can never know me. We each have a buried past which is sacred ground where the other never treads."I met recently a grey-haired man who was a schoolboy friend of mine. A wide sundering gap of years lies between us since our previous meeting, but at once we grasped hands and knew each other intimately, although mid-life with each had been filled with a fulness the other knew nothing of. As boys we chummed together, and now we renewed our ancient friendship on olden lines. We had studied the same lessons, slept in the same dormitory, sculled in the same boat, fought in the same playground scrimmages, and, having met again after long intervening years, we had endless youthful reminiscences in common to discuss and life-histories to relate. There was no need to sit on the safety-valve to throttle down the conversation. Talk came, a flowing stream bubbling up from the hot springs of the heart. Our meeting had the perfume of romance clinging to it, which made golden the precious hours in the spending. Two grey-haired men chattering with their heads together for the nonce were merry schoolboys. The present was forgotten; the past was everything to them while the old enthusiasms flared up brightly and shot a warm rosy afterglow athwart life's pleasant evening hour.Loafing is a privilege of one's declining years. It is an agreeable form of laziness which sits well upon old shoulders. It is that mellow state of stagnant content which pervades the mind when the natural force abates. I do not extol it as a virtue, I claim it as a privilege. It helps to fill gaps in the daily round when business no longer engages your attention and office hours are a dread ordeal done with for ever. Having dropped out of the marching line and become a spectator of the passing show, what more natural than that you manifest a livelier curiosity in other people's activities than in your own sluggish movements. I love to spend a sunny morning lingering on the old garden seat, chatting to a friend, or watching the energetic youngsters at play amongst the roses. I find it enjoyable to take my pitch on the pierhead with the gay summer crowd ambling along, passing and repassing my post of observation, and watch the pretty and well-accoutred girls angling for admiration, and the budding men in spotless flannels flashing answering glances to catch the lasses' eyes; an endless conversation going on without voices whispering a word; they look at each other and laugh, and the incipient mystery of the thing slips into their blood.I was once reluctant to relinquish youth. Its passions and pleasure made my life intensely joyous in a clean, healthy way. I resented the horrid fact that with encroaching years I was no longer able to wake the old thrill of existence by any of the old methods. The call came to me, but nature responded not to its alluring voice. The spent fires could not be rekindled; and in a tragic moment the truth stood uncovered in its stark nakedness: "I am growing old!" I had to readjust my bearings in life to meet the new situation. I found it better to walk in step with the years and melt into middle life with all the gentle conciliations of an easy mind than to clutch at the hem of the garment of departing youth and hold on frantically to a corpse; and so it came to pass youth, with its frank, jovial, devil-may-care lightheartedness, was surrendered ground, and I put on a splendid face, taking up a new position in the rear as an old fogy, a little moss-grown, but still alive, healthy, happy, and hearty.IITHE LURE OF HAPPINESSThe joy of living is to grasp life in its fullness just as it comes to us clean and sweet from the hand of God; to eat the grapes that grow in our own vineyard; to feed on the honey captured from our own hives; and to bask in the sunshine blessing our own garden plot. Some people cannot do this. They were born sour and fail to ripen. They remind me of the Church of St. Lorenzo at Florence, built but never finished, and showing a dejected mien to the passer-by. They hold on to life timidly with cold and clammy hands, and smile with glum visage and call it all vanity and vexation of spirit. Happiness frets them like a lump of undigested pickle lying heavy on their chest; they want to throw it off and be at ease in their misery. They consider it wickedness to enjoy things--to wallow in sunshine. They say we ought to content ourselves with bare commodities needful for existence. The primitive man was happy. He had no shirt to wash, no taxes to pay, no barns to fill with plenty. We must be primitive to be happy. Deplete the wealthy of their wealth; sink society to a common ground-level (allow us boots to wear in this muddy climate, if you please), and then everyone will be healthy, happy, and poor. Stepping out of his well-appointed motor-car, the up-to-date man spurns the primitive craze and blazes forth, "Is thy servant a dog that he should house in a kennel?" Surely civilization means creature comfort; everyone wants something larger than bare necessities to embellish life. The Creator rears us on finer lines than He raises cattle on the marshes. Year by year He lavishes before our eyes Nature's prodigal store of ornament. Every yard of hedgerow, "those liberal homes of unmarketable beauty," contradict the crank who would confine us to the needful.The dusty utilitarian sees the world only as a crowded granary, a chattering marketplace in which to buy and sell and get gain. The Divine Artist enriches the picture by painting in exquisitely the flowering hawthorn and fragrant violets, and by tuning the throat of the skylark to rarest melody; and concurrently He attunes the soul of man, which thrills appreciation, and delights in these manifestations of Sovereign goodness. He not merely appeases the hunger of the human body, but feeds the rarer appetites of the human mind with radiant viands; and the more godlike in stature man grows, the more fully he appreciates God-given art and beauty flung like flowers across his pathway.Everybody is happy in his own order. The history of many a man's life is the story of a soul's wandering in search of happiness. Some people are happy in their misery. Even when nursing their spleen they do it comfortably. They dilate on their grief with real zest of morbid enthusiasm that it flings a blazing cheerfulness over their cold grey lives. It sets them purring with sweet content when an auditor listens to their woeful outpourings. This is the cheapest form of happiness, and reflects an impoverished mind thrown back upon itself.Hazlitt, the essayist, gently prods these crazy egoists with a sharp pen and says, "Pure pleasures are in their judgment cloying and insipid; an ounce of sour is worth a pound of sweet." Farquhar, the lively dramatist, mocks their folly when portraying the gushing Lady Constance, who, on finding the miniature of her absent lover lying on the floor, picks it up and exclaims: "Now I am fitted out for sorrow. With this I'll sigh, with this converse, gaze on his image till I grow blind with weeping. It is the only thing could give me joy, because it will increase my grief."Happiness is a gift of temperament. The occupation that makes one man happy the day long would be capital punishment to another man. I have known people to possess everything and enjoy nothing; others, who possess little, dwell in paradise. It is a braver thing to extract honey from the hive of life than to leave it rotting in the comb. Alas! these weak-kneed, nervous mortals who are afraid of being too happy: they tremble as they sit at the banquet. They toy with a lean and hungry fate and dare not clasp a full-bosomed blessing. They prefer misery as a diet, with a spice of religion thrown in to flavour it. They fancy self-inflicted misery is a virtue to be cultivated, and a grace to be counted for righteousness. We shrewdly detect in such conduct a pose. It lacks the grace of sincerity. Such people, overfed on misery, fatten on it incontinently. It is the diet of a low, melancholy temperament.There is no standard-pattern happiness planned to suit the temperament of everybody like the map of a city which all travellers follow to find their bearings. Happiness is a city that each person maps out for himself; its highways and byways are of his own engineering and grow to match his own requirements. Happiness is not a sloppy garment like a ready-made coat that you buy in a store. Happiness must be made to fit. In fact, every man makes his own happiness.We all distil pleasure out of life in our peculiar way. Only our ways differ as the poles asunder. One man cannot understand where the other man's relish for life comes in. What is nauseous as bitter herbs in one mouth tastes delicate as the wines of Orvieto on another palate. A famous American millionaire found greater satisfaction in the simple pleasure of attending funerals than in all the superb luxuries which his millions brought him. We do not envy his simple pleasure. It was an innocent method of enjoyment peculiarly his own.I knew a man who made an income of over £10,000 a year by hard work, and his pleasure was immense in doing it. One half of his relaxation in life was making more income, and the other half his amusement consisted in lecturing people on the evil of extravagance if they spent "tuppence" on a bus fare instead of walking three-pennyworth of leather off the soles of their boots. He never spent "tuppence" himself if he could save it. He drove life at high pressure, and enjoyed the sensations of a quick run. People called him a money-making machine devoid of fine feeling. People made a mistake. His nature was highly strung. He was keenly sensitive to pleasure--the pleasure of money-making. It was the poetry, the luxury, the fine art of life all rolled into one, and it quickened the gay emotions within him that seeing a good play, hearing an eloquent sermon or driving a spanking four-in-hand to Ascot on a fine June morning, excites in other people. There are various buttons to press, but they all send the same thrill of earthly pleasure tingling through the human frame. Different hands strike the same chords on the harp of life, and they tremble into song.Some heroically minded people assert there are only two things in life: duty and happiness. It is not everybody who wants to do his duty--that is a special gift of Providence few enjoy. But everyone wants to be happy, and happiness is the greatest thing of all: other people's happiness as well as our own. We are not all sagacious to discern the angel of duty when she comes mixed in a promiscuous assembly of spirits less honourable than she. They all dress becomingly and smile bewitchingly that you cannot mark her down; her radiance shines no brighter than other luminous spirits that accompany her. We should try the spirits whether they be good or evil ones. However, they move first, and try us with their beauty, their flattery, and their gilded promises. According to the gospel of St. Robert Louis Stevenson, there is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.A third thing some people suggest makes life worth living is experience. Experience, they maintain, is a more valuable treasure than happiness; experience is a pearl of great price, and we must sell all we have to possess it. The world is spacious; range it widely, breathe its bracing airs, sail its deep seas in search of experience. Pursue it, and if in the pursuit you are blown about by the fickle winds of fate, the buffeting may be disagreeable, but it is most exhilarating and healthy to the earnest seeker after experience. Provided you are blown, and blown violently, the direction of the gale matters not; the north-easter and the zephyr both teach. Experience builds up character and increases knowledge, though during building operations your wisdom may remain a stationary virtue. If you come out of the conflict with only experience to your credit at the other end of the struggle be thankful. Life is very good. Its chief spoils may be anguish and sorrow, yet experience makes it full and rich.The logic of this cold philosophy needs consideration before adopting it as gospel. If a dinted shield and a broken sword are the only spoils you bring home from the wars and hang up in the family parlour as trophies of victory, it is not an adequate recompense for the rich and vital experience gained in the fight. Experience was what Don Quixote in the slippered comfort of his home hungered after. It was what he found on his travels, and after passing through much tribulation it was the one prize he brought home with him at the journey's end. Experience many an ambitious man has found to be as an empty goblet to his thirsty lips.When the Creator was busy in the minting-house He did not cast his creatures all in the same mould, or coin them of the same metal. Some people are of fine temperament, cram full of emotion; they are all feeling, and express their feeling vigorously. Other people are of baser metal. They are stolid, and pass through life neither contented nor discontented with their lot; they are neither happy nor miserable. They are well-regulated clocks running slowly down to the last tick, and then ceasing to tick at all. Monotony is the bane of their existence, blighting it with double dulness. They feel little and say nothing about it. One never knows what hidden compensations life provides for its multitudinous offspring. These torpid people must have a secret well of satisfaction from which they dip refreshing draughts in thirsty moments.The child of emotion is more vivacious; he has colour, romance, movement. He is of a rarer vintage; there is sparkle in the wine of life. Occasionally the wine turns sour and drops flavour. Disagreeable people do exist for some veiled purpose of Providence, as the species never becomes extinct in the land. In infancy they were rocked in the cradle of discontent, and they have seldom slept out of it since. They have grown up in a nursery of their own. They are highly strung, and have a genius for living in the moment--irritably. Their wit is brilliant, it scintillates like running water in the sunshine, but it cuts like a razor. Everybody within reach of their tongue, even innocent people, feel the whip of their capricious temper. I suppose some grim pleasure feeds their fiery nature when they subdue friend and enemy under them. It is an unenviable pleasure which they enjoy; nobody shares with them, and when their ill-humour dies down it must leave a nasty taste in their mouth.If you want to be happy, do not expect too much from life. Do not ask more from friendship than you give, for eventually the balance is sure to adjust itself. Do not ask more than your share of good things; if you do exceed the limit, disappointment will dog your footsteps all the day. You cannot expect to be always happy. Trouble and sorrow come to all of us, with a difference. Some people extract comfort out of trouble, and it assuages their grief; others add worry to their woe, and it aggravates their vexation of spirit.Motor-cars carry a little dynamo on board and generate their own electric current as they travel, and after dark, with the great headlights glowing, they travel pleasantly and safe. A contented mind is a dynamo we can carry with us, and it generates its own happiness as we travel. It illumines the journey of life and makes it pleasant to ourselves and agreeable to friends travelling in our company.Do not grizzle over chances missed in life and "might have beens" which sprinkle your past like gravestones dotting a churchyard, inscribed "sacred to the memory of cherished griefs still hugged and spasmodically wept over." Convert the mossy tombstones into wayside shrines which loving hands garland with fresh flowers, while grateful hearts fondly linger there, recalling pleasant things and sweet companionship which gladdened your pilgrim way. Do not erect mural tablets to dead ambitions in the little sanctuary of your memory; build altars there instead whereon you can offer acceptable oblations of praise for evils escaped and for the crown of loving-kindness with which the Everlasting Arms encircle you.If we only had the gift of humour on us it would make "life more amusing than we thought." Our eyes would open to a new world wherein kinder people dwell and where brighter sunshine warms the heart's red blood and chases down the gloom we anticipate to-morrow that may never come.IIITHE LURE OF SELF-DENIALSelf-denial is not the highest form of virtue, nor is it a permanent condition of life for man to live in; yet it is a lure that draws men to martyrdoms as the flame collects moths to the burning. Man was not predestinated to a life of self-abnegation. Self-denial is a compromise between misery and happiness. Human nature does not thrive on compromise; it does not develop in austerities. Self-denial has its value in the scheme of moral education. Training is good for man if he does not carry it too far. You can overtrain. The scholar trains; he discreetly withdraws from gay life and inflicts on himself long hours of lonely study that he may rank in the list of University honours. The jockey trains, and punishes himself in so doing that he may ride to win. It is the same the world over: pain is joy in the making. Where self-denial is the driving power in religious life it leads, not to happiness, but to asceticism: to the lonely cell of the misanthropic monk, the pedestal of St. Simon Stylates, or the self-torture of the Indian fakir. Deluded people these, who build up life on self-denial as the pinnacle virtue to which man can soar while on earth. None of these people set self-denial in its proper place in the human economy--viz., a means to an end. It is the end-all in their vision of life, and so their life is dismal in the living and disappointing in its purpose.Self-denial is necessary and serves a healthy purpose. It is necessary to man's spiritual welfare as medicine or the surgeon's knife may be necessary to his physical health.Man is of twofold nature: the animal and the spiritual, the good and the bad, the superior and the inferior--label it as you please. Self-denial is putting the inferior quality under the superior one; self-denial is following the higher inspiration at the expense of the lower instincts. "Self-denial": the very word implies, repressing desires, renouncing pleasures, suffering pain. It means living from choice on the shady, dank side of the street rather than basking in the open sunny piazza when only a few steps place you there, where the children play and the old men foregather deep in the hallowed sunshine. Self-denial is not the crowning virtue--it is just the market price we pay that we may garner a harvest of happiness in the recompensing days of autumn.The Divine purpose in man is growth, not repression of growth; it is to expand, to unfold, to develop character. To pass from bud to flower in moral and spiritual excellence, not to stunt manhood till its fairest features are arrested in growth, and moral atrophy sets up a canker in the bud, and ugliness usurps the seat of beauty in a man's character. Ugliness everywhere may be left to the devil as his monopoly. Self-denial is the grubby chrysalis; happiness is the golden butterfly on the wing.Not self-denial, but enjoyment, is the highest good and the truest test of character. Enjoyment; rejoicing in that which ought to delight us in this our earthly life--this is a finer attainment than self-denial. Enjoyment means a full life, living upon our whole nature, and well-balanced withal in the living. It seems an attractive and sinless programme to subscribe to, yet it is difficult to draw a boundary-line between enjoyment and excess. This is where the crux comes in. This is verily the fire that tries every man's work of what sort it is. It is cruel punishment to crush your passions and pleasures out of existence--that is self-denial. It is splendid discipline to give them play and at the same time hold them in control--that is enjoyment. Success in this great endeavour brings the victor into marching-line with the angels, and yields a finer exaltation and a larger recompense than trampling on the lilies.It is more difficult to hold steadily a full cup than to carry an empty flagon. It is a doleful religion that uproots every flower in the garden as a noxious weed until only the naked brown earth remains to gaze upon in the blessed sunshine. It is a scurvy trick of virtue to spill the heady liquor on the ground and then with a flourish place the empty chalice an offering on the altar. Abstinence is the morality of the weak, temperance is the morality of the strong.A deep enjoying nature is one of God's best gifts to man. The happy man is generally the best of his breed. The good are usually happy, and the happy are usually good. There are no short cuts to being happy, you must be really good to win through. If our daily occupation is congenial to our taste and disposition, our mind dwells at ease and our nature mellows in the sunshine of agreeable surroundings. Our sense of contentment radiates good humour and makes us kindly and benevolent to others. We are not chafed and fretted by duties irksome to us, because uncongenial. We are fulfilling destiny, and fulfilling it with completeness of purpose. Those around us feel the warm, penetrating sunshine of our hearts, and they grow warm under the mystic touch of the sun. It is for this reason that happiness becomes a holy quest with us, for out of it spring the virtues which robe life in beauty and gladness. One of the most precious of human faculties is the power to enjoy.Self-denial is either a tyranny or a virtue, and should be praised with circumspection. Many feverishly religious people debase its moral currency. They hinder their own happiness and thwart the happiness of others as far as in them lies, and fancy in so doing they keep the whole ten commandments of God.Self-denial for the sake of self-denial is a pagan rite: cold, pitiless, sterile. Renunciation and suffering prove nothing. Men have renounced and suffered for the greed of gold, for the lust of ambition, for the honour of a blood-stained idol, and lost moral stamina in so doing. The experience of ages brands deep the flaming truth upon us that sacrifice must be valued according to the object for which the sacrifice is made. Sacrifice for its own sake weaves no crown of glory for the martyr's brow. It is a form of amiable suicide. If you starve yourself for the sake of showing mastery over self, what thank have ye? The heathen do even the same--and do it better. It is an act of self-torture, and ministers to your pride of purpose. But to give up a meal when hungry that one you love may have it puts a better complexion on the deed. To bear pain for the grim joy of bearing it brings no reward. Do not even the Stoics the same? But to bear pain rather than surrender truth or to cover a suffering friend is a loving and heroic act, meriting a V.C. when spiritual honours are distributed.The old painters pictured in glowing witchery of colour the ordeal by suffering as the master-key that opened the gates of paradise to macerated mortals. The old writers drove home the same insidious error with all the pious fervour of their fluent pen, and thus men became fascinated with the doctrine of self-immolation as the highest good. In mediæval times thevia dolorosawas the well-trodden public way travelled by sainted pilgrims seeking a better country.Meritorious misery won through, for it was aureoled with the Church's benediction and rendered attractive by her promise of eternal rewards. Surely this daily human life of ours was not ordained to be a pageant of austerity reaching from the cradle to the grave. The Creator, having given this beautiful world as a temporary home for His children to dwell in, expects agreeable people to occupy its furnished splendours for a space of three score years and ten, more or less. If not, then the Creator's gift is wasted bounty flung to dull and unappreciative mortals.Brighter and healthier views of life emerge out of the crude misconceptions which enveloped the past in religious gloom, although there yet remain amongst us people who revel in the luxury of self-denial as in a feast of fat things, while the genial side of their nature remains dormant, starved, stunted. I have seen such-like in the flesh, spoken with them and touched their cold hands. They are unattractive people to know, and not companionable to travel with. They are faultless, methodical, patient, but they have no endearing friendships, no entwining intimacies by which you can fasten on them and love them. They are isolated and self-contained, lacking the charm of some little human weakness which makes us all akin. They may have a warm heart, but chilled blood circulates round it. Their eyes glitter like glaciers at the call of duty. They hurry from committee meeting to committee meeting, and forget to lunch between engagements. They shine in the performance of self-imposed errands of mercy, and live by rule relentlessly at any cost to pocket, health, or reputation. They minister to the sick and poor assiduously, and mother a class of poor factory girls in the evening, but their home is shivery to enter as a cold storage. A cold storage is a curious place to visit, but an impossible place to dwell in, except for frozen goods.It is possible to make the best of both worlds without an uncomfortable sense of sin nagging you like toothache; it is possible to work for others and yet tend your own vineyard with whole-hearted joy garnered from the wonder and beauty and sunshine of this our earthly home. The man is not a miscreant who laughs heartily and often: the person is not a saint who starves his body to save his soul.The harassing question is, How can we make the best of life as it comes to us a day at a time, and yet sail on an even keel? It is the problem that prophets, savants, and theologians have hammered at through the ages, but have not yet forged in fine gold the key that unlocks the mystery; thus there is an opening for us to cut in before the final word is uttered and the discussion battens down under a unanimous show of hands, which crowning mercy will be the last far-off result of time. The question agitating the moment is, What shall we do with the fair flower of our earthly life? Shall we enjoy it as we would the beauty and fragrance of a rose, thanking the good God for a gift so sweet and precious, or shall we with peevish fingers pick the rose to pieces petal by petal and crush it under foot, fearing its beauty may seduce our virtue and its perfume poison our soul?Let us preserve the rose inviolate. Its role is to be joy-giver on the earth. I would sooner sit with Jesus Christ at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee and drink with Him wine of the best vintage that ever flowed on festive board than sup with John Baptist in the wilderness on his menu of locusts and wild honey. The exquisite scene my imagination quaintly pictures is Jesus Christ and John the Baptist sitting together at the banquet, and each enjoying the meal with equal zest.The Renaissance which fascinated half Europe in the fifteenth century, like a carillon of joy-bells ringing through the land, stirring the dull pulses of the people and reviving generous and graceful ideals of life, was just open rebellion against the crabbed austerities of the Church, practised in the name of religion falsely so called. The people threw off the galling yoke of forced asceticism and found liberty of spirit and peace of mind in literature and art, and in the spontaneous and natural flow of healthy human life. Unfortunately, there was a fly in the amber; the people borrowed most of their new pleasures from pagan Greece, and the old Greek gods came tripping back from fairyland hand in glove with Greek culture, which was embarrassing.The advent of the light-hearted Cavaliers in England, flinging colour and warmth and gaiety over the land, was a sharp recoil from the drab severity of Puritan rule. The Puritans were men of strong personality: half soldiers and half preachers. They were honest without charm; strong-minded without pose; mighty in conscience, but mean in heart qualities. They were clean livers, but as they aged their visage grew hard and sour as unripe fruit, and their geniality of temper withered like a winter apple. They forgot to smile; the solemnities of life crushed them. They were grave and sagacious citizens lacking vivacity and humour, with plenty of flavour, but no sweetness. They dreamed of invisible kingdoms and fought for eternal verities. They command our admiration, but do not win our love. Their God was of the best theology mechanically constructed at Geneva by John Calvin, built up in parts composed of Righteousness, Justice, Holiness. Beauty was barred as a Divine attribute. The dismal meeting-house where they worshipped was the whitewashed prison in which the captured Deity dwelt. The burning light of this dread Presence enraptured the elect souls and intimidated the uncovenanted and graceless sinners, while the vast multitude of the nation held aloof, dreading contact with a religion so fierce and yet so gloomy, and they waited patiently through the shivering night of Roundhead rule, like watchmen on the city walls, for the coming of the king to set English homes once again humming with joy.These two strong currents of life--Self-denial and Enjoyment--are flowing side by side in our midst to-day, dividing men in thought and purpose, driving men into open collision, only to relax their strangle-hold on one another to get firmer grip and fight again another day. These two different ideals of life represent two antagonistic sides of a man's nature that clash with each other, and the man has a stand-up fight with himself, which is an experience fiery temperaments often plunge into. Each side carries a half-truth and half an error. Blend the two half-truths into an intimate and harmonious whole and sink the errors into the bottomless pit from whence they came, and you discover human nature touching its highest and ripest form, approaching the Christlike in character, which combines the two elements in true and everlasting union.Jesus of Nazareth, whose knightly character embodied all that the sweet romancists of the Middle Ages dreamed of and pictured in the faultless knight-errant of their day which won their hearts' devotion and consent (preux chevalier sans peur et sans reproche), and all that our own age typifies and holds dear in modern character of good repute when in a single phrase it proclaims the man a perfect gentleman--Jesus Christ means all that and more to us. Christ is not a withered flower on a broken stem torn from the Tree of Life; He is not a damaged idol of an effete civilization which modern progress sweeps aside in its forward march; He is not the Lord of an ancient faith whom the fires of scientific criticism have burnt up and left only His ashes in a cinerary urn reposing on the altar of our heart. He is the world's one fulfilment of the faultless and the ideal in human nature, blending all that is beautiful and enjoyable with all that is holy and vigorous.IVTHE LURE OF MAGIC WORDSBeautiful language is the flower of poetry. The magic of diction, of enchanted words transformed into radiant, marvellous sentient things pulsing with life and passion, capture our attention, and deep within us something vibrates in answer to their mastering call.A writer with perfect felicity of expression voices thoughts and emotions of our own heart that we cannot give utterance to, yet of which we are dimly conscious. These ghostly creatures of our mind, half a memory and half a thing, peep and mutter within us; we try to hold them, but they are illusive as shadows on the wall. From the well-written words there leaps out something that has life and form and comeliness in it, and instantly we recognize an intimate returning from a far country laden with spoil. Words liberate the imprisoned thought that fretted within us and set it free: gloriously free for you and me and all the world to make familiar with.There are words--spectacular words that print indelibly pleasant pictures on the mind, reveal in a sabre-flash thoughts that burn and things that were hidden. There are words--vivid, striking, portentous words that unfold noble vistas of truth in which happy, emancipated people walk freely in sunlight and song. There are melodious, aromatic words that ring tunefully through corridors of the mind like a carillon of merry bells charming the heart with far-reaching joy. There are strong, fiery, tempestuous words that crash and rattle and reverberate like rolling thunder through your being, and kindle the spirit of man into blazing passion and heroic fervour. There are dull, prosy, somnolent words that baffle like a London fog, envelop the writer's meaning in dense obscurity, and lure the reader's mentality into quagmires of perplexity and doubt.There are ambrosial, honeyed, ornate words that regale us with fair visions of life, and steep the mind in dreams of romance and intoxicate with amorous delight. There are treacherous, lying words that distil murder in the air as they wing their evil flight. They strike deadly as a keen stiletto, or spit poison like a venomous adder in the grass.There are discordant words that harrow up the feelings, and there are smooth, velvety, caressing words whose sweet sorcery holds us in their thrall, and that flow on and on harmoniously like the rippling of many waters that never fall out of tune.Words cannot be measured with the measuring-reed of a man; they are spiritual forces; "they are angels of blessing or cursing. Unuttered we control them, uttered they control us." A man may have much wisdom packed into his capacious mind, but to unfold it attractively so that it glitters in the public eye and arrests attention is where the master art of handling words comes in.One secret of successful writing is to express your thoughts in as few words as possible. Be frugal in your expenditure of words as a miser over the outlay of his hoarded gold. Write clearly, tersely, compactly, for words, like coins of the realm, are most esteemed when they contain large value in little space. The more briefly a thing is said, the more brilliantly it is put. The rarest of all qualities in a writer is--measure, saying exactly as much as you mean to say and not a word more or less. If a picture is complete, everything added is something taken away.The "command of language" is often a snare of the devil into which men fall and do themselves grievous hurt. A redundancy of flowery words and empty fluency of speech confuse the thought and confound the meaning; skip half the telling and you know more of the tale. Oh the dreariness of some solid reading I have done in my time!--very learned and logical dissertations, but dulness crowned it all; even the dry bones of scientific matter clogged with technicalities can be made to live by a touch of style. Cartloads of words rumbling along the rutty road of argument slowly to their destination are not half so forceful as an apt image which flies straight to the point on wings of inspiration, and gets there first.No subject is uninteresting if discoursed with an engaging pen, for words throw colour-magic on things that are common-place and give charm to them. I have watched Italian sunlight playing on the crumbling plaster walls of a peasant's cottage on the Tuscan hills, drenching them in opal and rose-carmine splendours, changing them into the image of a fairy palace. Words cast sunlight on commonplace, familiar things, flushing them with a radiance all their own, and so awaking our mind to see new beauties, or old beauties made manifest in a new light which had been staled by the lethargy of custom. Miss Mitford's village was an ordinary Berkshire village mute in the annals of English history, but it was surprised into fame by the romantic pen of its lady historian. A splendid accident of literary achievement adorned it with immortality, for it unfolds vividly before our wondering eyes the beauty of petty things and plain people in village life. The world owes to her genial pen a debt of gratitude; for it has won our sympathies, and in reading her book we can read our own village with interest instead of boredom, and see for ourselves the beauty and pathos and comedy of common people and homely things around us.Art is the gift of God to man. It is impossible to buy or barter for the possession of it. You may cultivate, improve, perfect the indwelling talent, but the Divine seed is sown mysteriously in the life of the child when brought to birth. In whom the secret power lies dormant none know until the appointed hour reveals its budding graces. Inscrutable is the Divine favour; none can tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. It is not inherited like gold or lands; it is not an entailed honour which accompanies the family title. Genius seldom, like an heirloom, passes from sire to son in direct succession.A man may possess the advantages that education, training, culture give, yet all these excellent acquirements combined cannot manufacture an artist. It needs the live coal taken from off the altar to kindle the sacred flame which illumines the artist's soul.The painter's art is subject to this very mysterious law. Philip Gilbert Hamerton describes the working of the artistic spirit in man. He says: "Painting is a pursuit in which thought, scholarship, information, go for little; whereas a strange, unaccountable talent working in obscure ways achieves the only results worth having. Here is a field in which neither birth nor condition is of any use, and wealth itself of exceeding little; here faculty alone avails, and a kind of faculty so subtle and peculiar, so difficult to estimate before years have been spent in developing it, or wasted in the vain attempt to develop where it does not exist."There are pictures you and I dearly love, and they are priceless treasures in the market; yet there is no deep thought or display of learning in them to win our admiration. They violate facts of history, they outrage the grammar of academic art, and even their drawing may be inaccurate. Why, then, are such works cherished and treasured? Because, with all their faults, they have power, they have feeling; they speak to the heart. The men who painted them were unlearned and ignorant, but they were artists to the finger-tips. There is a spiritual something breathing beneath the surface of the true painter's work which leaps to the eye and draws upon us and bestirs our emotions. Other pictures--laboured, scholastic, monumental, they leave us cold and passionless, and we pass them by on the other side.A good architect also is to the manner born. The principles of proportion in designing a building are difficult to adjust to give pleasure to the eye. Now, the sense of proportion is a gift which some men possess and others lack; although they are architects by profession, they are amateurs in construction. Without that subtle sense of proportion a man blunders through his designs, and puts no feeling of beauty or joy in the finished structure which is the work of his hands. Ruskin says: "It is just as rational an attempt to teach a young architect how to proportion truly and well by calculating for him the proportions of fine works as it would be to teach him to compare melodies by calculating the mathematical relations of the notes in Beethoven's 'Adelaide' or Mozart's 'Requiem.' The man who has eye and intellect will invent beautiful proportions, and cannot help it; but he can no more tell us how to do it than Wordsworth could tell us how to write a sonnet, or than Scott could have told us how to plan a romance."What the faculty of feeling is to the artist, what the sense of proportion is to the architect, the gift of style is to the writer. Style is the witchery of words; style is clothing thought in captivating language. Style is the setting of the gem. The gem may be rare, but it needs the aid of the goldsmith's art to make the most of it. It is the skilful setting that holds up the sparkling gem to our admiration. Style is everything in writing; it makes the thoughts sparkle. Niceties of style you cannot explain by rule-of-three, nor dissect its individuality by the drastic deed of vivisection; you cannot slash the heart out of it with a critickin's reckless knife. You can unravel a piece of rare old Flemish tapestry, and destroy the beautiful design and harmonious colouring of it. In fact, you can reduce the tapestry to a heap of valueless threads of worsted fit only for burning; but style in literature you cannot pick to pieces. You cannot find the master-thread on which the secret of the pattern runs, and which reveals the cunning of the workman's craft. By some mysterious process the writer weaves words together that the chambers of our imagination may be hung with tapestries rare and pleasant to behold. No explanation of the gift of penmanship is possible. Moulding words into forms of beauty is not an achievement: it is a gift of the gods, and no handbook of literature, however diligently pursued, can turn an artisan into an artist cunning in gold-minted phrases.When Castiglione sent the manuscript of his book, "The Perfect Courtier," to Vittoria Colonna for her approval, she replied in a flattering letter thanking the author, saying: "The subject is new and beautiful, but the excellence of the style is such that, with a sweetness never before felt, it leads us up a most pleasant and fertile slope, which we gradually ascend without perceiving that we are no longer on the level ground from which we started; and the way is so well cultivated and adorned that we scarce can tell whether Art or Nature has done most to make it fair."It is expression that counts, and the writer who expresses himself simply, vividly, concisely, boldly, and plays upon our heart-strings at pleasure, is naturally a "gifted" man. He not only sees in clear, full vision himself, but he brings his vision home to our cloudy brains and makes us see clearly; that is the wonder of it. It needs all the art and magic and persuasion of language to accomplish this difficult task. Weseethe subject presented as a picture when he writes with a graphic pen; wefeelpoignantly when his sharp and polished periods pierce like a rapier our understanding; we arefascinatedwhen his impassioned eloquence flows, glittering like running water in the sunlight, dazzling our bewildered brains. And when he scores by his native wit and writes in his trenchant, racy mother-tongue there is a smile in the stalls and loud laughter in the pit.How mysteriously beauty steals into language and warms up the radiant face of poetry with glowing vitality. There is no beauty in stale prosaic sentences like "Trespassers will be prosecuted" or "Rubbish may be shot here," because they say exactly and completely all that they have to say and nothing more can be squeezed out of them. There is beauty in a sentence like "The bright day is done. And we are for the night," or "He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass," because in them, although they seem quite simple, the poet is trying to say infinitely more than he can pack into words. It is the effort to do something beyond the power of words; it is the effort to investigate the alluring Infinite with a mind closely fettered within the cramped and narrow finite that can only stretch forth a hand here and there between prison bars and touch the azure of infinitude which is the dreamland of the soul; it is this reaching out that brings beauty into language: it enflames the imagination; it ruffles the emotions; unutterable thoughts linger on the lips and fail to break away. There is a greatness in these winged words feathered with beauty because they mean a thousand times more than speaks on the surface.When I was young the magic of words took possession of my virgin mind. The first master of language that I served under was John Ruskin. The aim of good writing is to communicate feeling; Ruskin did this intensely. The indefinable richness and power of words as they flowed from his pen, the musical and measured cadence of his prose, and the limpid clearness of his thoughts when cast on paper, placed an hypnotic spell upon me. When reading one of his books, I dwelt in dreamland. Another reading that I enjoyed with avidity in the seventies and eighties of the last century was the long literary leaders, never too long for me, in theDaily Telegraph. The best literary talent of the day wrote them. Many of them I cut out and placed in my scrap-book; alas! to be buried in decent sepulchre, for I never see them now. Lord Burnham, the proprietor of theDaily Telegraph, put himself into these leaders, although other pens wrote them. They were his special hobby, and grew under his inspiration. His biographer tells us: "He had the rhetorical sense strongly developed. He liked full-blooded writing, and had a tenderness for big words and big adjectives, well-matched and in pairs. He revelled in the warmth and colour of certain words, and the more resonant they were, the better he liked them." Words carry not only meaning, but atmosphere with them. Sometimes a single word well chosen and well placed in a sentence gives feeling, and lights it up with a glow of beauty. J. A. Symonds says: "The right word used in the right place constitutes the perfection of style." In my youth a literary friend was pruning a crude essay I had written; he paused in his reading on the word "fallacious," and he said: "That's a good word and well chosen; it's the right word." It was a revelation to me at the time that one word was better than another if they both meant the same thing. On thinking it over, I saw that no two words do mean exactly the same thing, and that there is only one right word in a hundred to express exactly your meaning and to give life to it. The other ninety-and-nine words are but poor relations--nay! they are all dead corpses.Perhaps you remember Millais' wonderfully popular picture called "Cinderella." A beautiful healthy English child, with deep dreamy eyes and long wavy golden hair sits on a stool by the kitchen fire holding in her hand a birch broom emblem of her kitchen toil. It is a fascinating picture. At home I look on a coloured print of it nearly every day of the week. The most brilliant thing on the canvas is the patch of scarlet in the dainty cap the child wears. That single dab of red seems to concentrate in itself the whole colour-scheme of the picture. It is the keynote. Now a single word in a sentence sometimes gives a startling effect. It strikes a strong, clear, ringing note which keys the writer's passing mood, fascinates us with its vividness, and sticks in the memory ever after. It is a colour-patch in literary art which dominates the picture and arrests attention, as in Shakespeare's"Every yesterday hath lighted foolsThe way todustydeath!"Or,"Theprimrosepath to the eternal bonfire."Or Pope's"Quick effluvia darting through the brainDie of a rose inaromaticpain."Also"Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,And let melanguishinto life."And Gray's inimitable couplet:"There pipes the song-thrush, and the skylark thereScatters hisloosenotes in the waste of air."It is the height of literary skill to gather up your thought into a single word and fling it flaming on canvas. It is more convincing than a long chapter of dull argument which drugs the senses. Tennyson knew the magic of a single epithet in the thought scheme of the moment when he sang: "All the charm of all the muses often flowering in a lonely word." It is not as easily done as eating hot cakes for tea, for it is not the first word that comes sailing into a man's head that is the right word. "The comely phrase, the well-born word," is a prince of high degree, and you may wait in his anteroom days before an audience is granted. The elect word does not sit on the tip of the tongue and drop into its place at call. You may search diligently and not find it, and presently of its own free will it comes to you, a happy thought flashed from the void where whispering spirits dwell. Gray's Elegy is the most perfect poem in the English language. It was not thrown together carelessly in an idle hour one sleepy summer afternoon. Every word and every line of it cost thought, was written and rewritten, and patiently polished over again. For eight years the author held the poem between the hammer and the anvil, beating it into shape before he passed it into print. He damaged reams of paper developing a fair copy of those immortal verses.

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofLures of LifeThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Lures of LifeCreator: Joseph LucasRelease date: July 25, 2013 [eBook #43303]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Al Haines*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LURES OF LIFE ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Lures of LifeCreator: Joseph LucasRelease date: July 25, 2013 [eBook #43303]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Al Haines

Title: Lures of Life

Creator: Joseph Lucas

Creator: Joseph Lucas

Release date: July 25, 2013 [eBook #43303]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LURES OF LIFE ***

LURES OF LIFEBYJOSEPH LUCASAUTHOR OF "OUR VILLA IN ITALY"T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON

LURES OF LIFE

BY

JOSEPH LUCAS

AUTHOR OF "OUR VILLA IN ITALY"

T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON

First published . . . . January, 1919.Second Impression . . . . June, 1919.

First published . . . . January, 1919.Second Impression . . . . June, 1919.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

THE LURE OF LIFE'S AFTERGLOW

THE LURE OF HAPPINESS

THE LURE OF SELF-DENIAL

THE LURE OF MAGIC WORDS

THE LURE OF AN OLD TUSCAN GARDEN

THE LURE OF THE MONTELUPO PLATE

THE LURE OF PLUCK

THE LURE OF OLD FURNITURE

THE LURE OF PERSONALITY

THE LURE OF NICE PEOPLE

THE LURE OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY

JESUS CHRIST THE LURE OF THE AGES

THE LURE OF THE LIVING WORD

THE LURE OF THE EUCHARIST

LURES OF LIFE

I

THE LURE OF LIFE'S AFTERGLOW

A friend put me in remembrance that I had a birthday recently. Birthday emotion with an old man is an extinct crater. When I was young a coming birthday set my pulse throbbing to mad music weeks beforehand; it filled me with delightful anticipations. Romance gathered round the happy event. Our thoughts tripped capriciously along the primrose paths of the future. I felt myself preordained to greatness. The hoarded treasure held in bond for me was surely there awaiting delivery, and Time the magician's wand would wave its largesse into my outstretched eager hands, and, clothed in honour, I should ride prosperously all the days of my life.

To the youngster starting on the grand tour of life, the journey is a splendid venture. The cup held to the lips overflows with rich, ripe, sparkling liquor; every draught of it is nectar, exhilarating the spirits, expanding the experience, and discoursing music on every chord of the harp of a thousand strings. It is superb doing, riding life on a flowing tide when the warm south wind blows, and the air is redolent with aromatic spices, when driftwood floats from distant climes, and shore-birds sail in the central blue signalling that the Land of Heart's Desire will soon be reached. Truly youth takes life with a zest of its own.

Yes, the birthday is a happy day to the young. You rejoice that you are a year older and of added consequence and stature in the world of men, and a step nearer realizing the daydreams sweetly dreamed in school, when the magic of life filled you with wonder and awe. Birthday joy increases immensely until the period of ecstatic joy crowns all, when you score twenty-one years and write yourself down a man. You are no longer a flower in the bud worn in anybody's buttonhole, but a well-developed plant on your own root growing in the open. When you get twice twenty-one birthday joy cloys on your palate, and you begin to resent the intrusion of the natal day as an unwelcome guest that you have seen too often. He reminds you that you are growing old and growing older. Your friends may crown the day with roses and toast you at the evening dinner in your best champagne let loose for the occasion, but the obvious remains, and your response to their unblushing flattery is not gushing as of yore. You tire of birthday greetings and birthday festivities; your vivacity flags; your digestion suffers. The thoughts that adorn the occasion are chiefly reminiscent, for the horizon of the future is narrowing down and leaves less space for Fancy in which to fly her kite.

When I had covered my half-century a curious feeling like an electric shock chased along every fibre of my being on facing the cold, hard fact for the first time; I had grown old, and done it surreptitiously. Time glides smoothly, silently, swiftly, and startled as from a deep sleep, one marvels at the hot haste of the rolling years. You dread nearing the vortex of the great unknown to which we all inevitably steer, and finally sink beneath its swirling surface. The outlook is disturbing. Can't you put down the brake and gentle the pace? Will no opiate drug Time into forgetfulness? You try the rejuvenating influences of Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer, but nothing happens. The bald spot on the crown of your head increases in baldness and shining splendour. The longer you watch it, the larger it grows. Time baffles your artful devices, smiles at your wild alarms, and drives from you the crimson days of youth, with their vigour and vivacity, leaving in your possession a feeling of comfortable lethargy which solidifies into pacific blissfulness. Insensibly a change has passed over you with the mounting years. How the change wrought you do not know. Where you crossed the frontier which in the twinkling of an eye ranked you amongst the elders you cannot say. Who can tell the moment when summer ends and autumn commences? Who can cut a clean cleavage between afternoon and evening hours?

However, you settle down to an old man's pleasures. You dislike being hustled after dinner. You prefer a quiet rubber at Bridge in a cosy room, with shaded lights, and a silent cigar with cronies of a choice, familiar brand as playmates. You prefer it to strenuously dancing in a stuffy, glaring ball-room till morning hours chase the stale and weary dancers to their homes. It is too fatiguing an amusement to make pleasure for you, as there is no new romance to be looked for after fifty. Anticipation at your ripe age is wasted stimulant. Boys dream of the future, old men live in the present. Youth, once upon a time, was an asset held in hand, a rich inheritance to be proud of, but now the treasury of youth is spent to the last coin and only the empty coffer remains, a memento of the vanished wealth of early days. You are a middle-aged man aged fifty, and you settle down to it solidly and squarely and comfortably. You will never be young and flippant again this side the harbour-bar.

As we steer cautiously into the sixties and face the grand climacteric, life grows pensive. Sober reflections automatically cast their lengthening shadows over us. We have drunk copiously of the wine of life, and are now coming to the dregs of the bottle. We get moody. Meridian sunshine has not fructified the promise of youth as we appointed it. Lean years have eaten up years of plenty. We have gathered tares with the wheat which brought disappointment into the storehouse. Varied experiences have chequered life with cross lights and shadows. The grand ideals of sanguine youth have dissolved like dreams at daybreak, and instead of the great achievement ours is the common lot. Rates and taxes are hardy annuals that flourish undisturbed amidst the ruins. Are we downhearted because the romance of life has fizzled out like spent fireworks and left us in darkness? We did not expect to finish up in obscurity. Are we downhearted? No; after the struggle and stress of conflict we get our second breath; and the calm of age overtakes us. The halcyon hours set in to cheer us. I now move airily along the line of least resistance, and this brings tranquillity of mind in my advancing years. We are no longer broody. Experience breaks one in gently to the monotony of daily routine, and the collar neither frets nor rubs the shoulder, for the velvet lining of contentment softens the friction and we trudge along serenely going West.

Everything contributes to make an old man's lot happy if the salt of life has not lost its savour. We have played the game, and now we watch others take their innings. It is good fun to watch. I tell you it is music to the eye watching the gay young world go its own way. The swagger, thebravoure, the buoyancy of its manners, stagger the dull parental mind. There is rhythm in its movements, there is character in its gaiety. It tops the record of the far-off days of splendour when we, their portly ancestors, were down in the arena beating up the dust of conflict, and considered ourselves the cream of modernity and the finest goods in the market. The youth of to-day has its hand on the wheel and the joy-car pads merrily, heedless of speed limits, for time has no limit and life sings a pleasant song to boys of the new régime.

Life's afterglow is the period when the past is viewed through the golden haze of memory and we live over again the days of our youth, the splendid days of hope and promise. Pleasant things and pleasant people are remembered, and disagreeable events that vexed us are forgotten. We wipe clean from the slate memories that are unwelcome. From the mellowy distance we admire the picture in its broad outlines; its uninteresting details drop out of sight. It is the vivid patches of colour upon the canvas where the eye lingers lovingly and long. It is the happy past that enchants the memory to-day.

An old man glances over his shoulder adown the long pathway of receding years hungrily, and muses to himself, "Oh, to be out in the world again as I knew it fifty years ago, with the same sunny people about me; to meet them on the old familiar footing. We had capacious times together; we understood one another and loved one another with kindred hearts and flowing speech. I talk with people nowadays, but these new friends of mine are not responsive. There is a glass screen between us as we talk together; we sit near one another, but we are far apart. I catch a far-off glint in their eye which holds me at arm's-length. Our lips are restrained, our thoughts are bottled up. It seems like sitting together in a room with blinds drawn, talking in the dark. Yes; new friends at best are but amiable strangers, for we met one another only when the flower of life had wilted and the leaf was sere and yellow on the tree. The full, unrestrained days when the sap was rising, the blossoming days of youth, were lived apart. I do not know these good people intimately, and I never can, and they can never know me. We each have a buried past which is sacred ground where the other never treads."

I met recently a grey-haired man who was a schoolboy friend of mine. A wide sundering gap of years lies between us since our previous meeting, but at once we grasped hands and knew each other intimately, although mid-life with each had been filled with a fulness the other knew nothing of. As boys we chummed together, and now we renewed our ancient friendship on olden lines. We had studied the same lessons, slept in the same dormitory, sculled in the same boat, fought in the same playground scrimmages, and, having met again after long intervening years, we had endless youthful reminiscences in common to discuss and life-histories to relate. There was no need to sit on the safety-valve to throttle down the conversation. Talk came, a flowing stream bubbling up from the hot springs of the heart. Our meeting had the perfume of romance clinging to it, which made golden the precious hours in the spending. Two grey-haired men chattering with their heads together for the nonce were merry schoolboys. The present was forgotten; the past was everything to them while the old enthusiasms flared up brightly and shot a warm rosy afterglow athwart life's pleasant evening hour.

Loafing is a privilege of one's declining years. It is an agreeable form of laziness which sits well upon old shoulders. It is that mellow state of stagnant content which pervades the mind when the natural force abates. I do not extol it as a virtue, I claim it as a privilege. It helps to fill gaps in the daily round when business no longer engages your attention and office hours are a dread ordeal done with for ever. Having dropped out of the marching line and become a spectator of the passing show, what more natural than that you manifest a livelier curiosity in other people's activities than in your own sluggish movements. I love to spend a sunny morning lingering on the old garden seat, chatting to a friend, or watching the energetic youngsters at play amongst the roses. I find it enjoyable to take my pitch on the pierhead with the gay summer crowd ambling along, passing and repassing my post of observation, and watch the pretty and well-accoutred girls angling for admiration, and the budding men in spotless flannels flashing answering glances to catch the lasses' eyes; an endless conversation going on without voices whispering a word; they look at each other and laugh, and the incipient mystery of the thing slips into their blood.

I was once reluctant to relinquish youth. Its passions and pleasure made my life intensely joyous in a clean, healthy way. I resented the horrid fact that with encroaching years I was no longer able to wake the old thrill of existence by any of the old methods. The call came to me, but nature responded not to its alluring voice. The spent fires could not be rekindled; and in a tragic moment the truth stood uncovered in its stark nakedness: "I am growing old!" I had to readjust my bearings in life to meet the new situation. I found it better to walk in step with the years and melt into middle life with all the gentle conciliations of an easy mind than to clutch at the hem of the garment of departing youth and hold on frantically to a corpse; and so it came to pass youth, with its frank, jovial, devil-may-care lightheartedness, was surrendered ground, and I put on a splendid face, taking up a new position in the rear as an old fogy, a little moss-grown, but still alive, healthy, happy, and hearty.

II

THE LURE OF HAPPINESS

The joy of living is to grasp life in its fullness just as it comes to us clean and sweet from the hand of God; to eat the grapes that grow in our own vineyard; to feed on the honey captured from our own hives; and to bask in the sunshine blessing our own garden plot. Some people cannot do this. They were born sour and fail to ripen. They remind me of the Church of St. Lorenzo at Florence, built but never finished, and showing a dejected mien to the passer-by. They hold on to life timidly with cold and clammy hands, and smile with glum visage and call it all vanity and vexation of spirit. Happiness frets them like a lump of undigested pickle lying heavy on their chest; they want to throw it off and be at ease in their misery. They consider it wickedness to enjoy things--to wallow in sunshine. They say we ought to content ourselves with bare commodities needful for existence. The primitive man was happy. He had no shirt to wash, no taxes to pay, no barns to fill with plenty. We must be primitive to be happy. Deplete the wealthy of their wealth; sink society to a common ground-level (allow us boots to wear in this muddy climate, if you please), and then everyone will be healthy, happy, and poor. Stepping out of his well-appointed motor-car, the up-to-date man spurns the primitive craze and blazes forth, "Is thy servant a dog that he should house in a kennel?" Surely civilization means creature comfort; everyone wants something larger than bare necessities to embellish life. The Creator rears us on finer lines than He raises cattle on the marshes. Year by year He lavishes before our eyes Nature's prodigal store of ornament. Every yard of hedgerow, "those liberal homes of unmarketable beauty," contradict the crank who would confine us to the needful.

The dusty utilitarian sees the world only as a crowded granary, a chattering marketplace in which to buy and sell and get gain. The Divine Artist enriches the picture by painting in exquisitely the flowering hawthorn and fragrant violets, and by tuning the throat of the skylark to rarest melody; and concurrently He attunes the soul of man, which thrills appreciation, and delights in these manifestations of Sovereign goodness. He not merely appeases the hunger of the human body, but feeds the rarer appetites of the human mind with radiant viands; and the more godlike in stature man grows, the more fully he appreciates God-given art and beauty flung like flowers across his pathway.

Everybody is happy in his own order. The history of many a man's life is the story of a soul's wandering in search of happiness. Some people are happy in their misery. Even when nursing their spleen they do it comfortably. They dilate on their grief with real zest of morbid enthusiasm that it flings a blazing cheerfulness over their cold grey lives. It sets them purring with sweet content when an auditor listens to their woeful outpourings. This is the cheapest form of happiness, and reflects an impoverished mind thrown back upon itself.

Hazlitt, the essayist, gently prods these crazy egoists with a sharp pen and says, "Pure pleasures are in their judgment cloying and insipid; an ounce of sour is worth a pound of sweet." Farquhar, the lively dramatist, mocks their folly when portraying the gushing Lady Constance, who, on finding the miniature of her absent lover lying on the floor, picks it up and exclaims: "Now I am fitted out for sorrow. With this I'll sigh, with this converse, gaze on his image till I grow blind with weeping. It is the only thing could give me joy, because it will increase my grief."

Happiness is a gift of temperament. The occupation that makes one man happy the day long would be capital punishment to another man. I have known people to possess everything and enjoy nothing; others, who possess little, dwell in paradise. It is a braver thing to extract honey from the hive of life than to leave it rotting in the comb. Alas! these weak-kneed, nervous mortals who are afraid of being too happy: they tremble as they sit at the banquet. They toy with a lean and hungry fate and dare not clasp a full-bosomed blessing. They prefer misery as a diet, with a spice of religion thrown in to flavour it. They fancy self-inflicted misery is a virtue to be cultivated, and a grace to be counted for righteousness. We shrewdly detect in such conduct a pose. It lacks the grace of sincerity. Such people, overfed on misery, fatten on it incontinently. It is the diet of a low, melancholy temperament.

There is no standard-pattern happiness planned to suit the temperament of everybody like the map of a city which all travellers follow to find their bearings. Happiness is a city that each person maps out for himself; its highways and byways are of his own engineering and grow to match his own requirements. Happiness is not a sloppy garment like a ready-made coat that you buy in a store. Happiness must be made to fit. In fact, every man makes his own happiness.

We all distil pleasure out of life in our peculiar way. Only our ways differ as the poles asunder. One man cannot understand where the other man's relish for life comes in. What is nauseous as bitter herbs in one mouth tastes delicate as the wines of Orvieto on another palate. A famous American millionaire found greater satisfaction in the simple pleasure of attending funerals than in all the superb luxuries which his millions brought him. We do not envy his simple pleasure. It was an innocent method of enjoyment peculiarly his own.

I knew a man who made an income of over £10,000 a year by hard work, and his pleasure was immense in doing it. One half of his relaxation in life was making more income, and the other half his amusement consisted in lecturing people on the evil of extravagance if they spent "tuppence" on a bus fare instead of walking three-pennyworth of leather off the soles of their boots. He never spent "tuppence" himself if he could save it. He drove life at high pressure, and enjoyed the sensations of a quick run. People called him a money-making machine devoid of fine feeling. People made a mistake. His nature was highly strung. He was keenly sensitive to pleasure--the pleasure of money-making. It was the poetry, the luxury, the fine art of life all rolled into one, and it quickened the gay emotions within him that seeing a good play, hearing an eloquent sermon or driving a spanking four-in-hand to Ascot on a fine June morning, excites in other people. There are various buttons to press, but they all send the same thrill of earthly pleasure tingling through the human frame. Different hands strike the same chords on the harp of life, and they tremble into song.

Some heroically minded people assert there are only two things in life: duty and happiness. It is not everybody who wants to do his duty--that is a special gift of Providence few enjoy. But everyone wants to be happy, and happiness is the greatest thing of all: other people's happiness as well as our own. We are not all sagacious to discern the angel of duty when she comes mixed in a promiscuous assembly of spirits less honourable than she. They all dress becomingly and smile bewitchingly that you cannot mark her down; her radiance shines no brighter than other luminous spirits that accompany her. We should try the spirits whether they be good or evil ones. However, they move first, and try us with their beauty, their flattery, and their gilded promises. According to the gospel of St. Robert Louis Stevenson, there is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

A third thing some people suggest makes life worth living is experience. Experience, they maintain, is a more valuable treasure than happiness; experience is a pearl of great price, and we must sell all we have to possess it. The world is spacious; range it widely, breathe its bracing airs, sail its deep seas in search of experience. Pursue it, and if in the pursuit you are blown about by the fickle winds of fate, the buffeting may be disagreeable, but it is most exhilarating and healthy to the earnest seeker after experience. Provided you are blown, and blown violently, the direction of the gale matters not; the north-easter and the zephyr both teach. Experience builds up character and increases knowledge, though during building operations your wisdom may remain a stationary virtue. If you come out of the conflict with only experience to your credit at the other end of the struggle be thankful. Life is very good. Its chief spoils may be anguish and sorrow, yet experience makes it full and rich.

The logic of this cold philosophy needs consideration before adopting it as gospel. If a dinted shield and a broken sword are the only spoils you bring home from the wars and hang up in the family parlour as trophies of victory, it is not an adequate recompense for the rich and vital experience gained in the fight. Experience was what Don Quixote in the slippered comfort of his home hungered after. It was what he found on his travels, and after passing through much tribulation it was the one prize he brought home with him at the journey's end. Experience many an ambitious man has found to be as an empty goblet to his thirsty lips.

When the Creator was busy in the minting-house He did not cast his creatures all in the same mould, or coin them of the same metal. Some people are of fine temperament, cram full of emotion; they are all feeling, and express their feeling vigorously. Other people are of baser metal. They are stolid, and pass through life neither contented nor discontented with their lot; they are neither happy nor miserable. They are well-regulated clocks running slowly down to the last tick, and then ceasing to tick at all. Monotony is the bane of their existence, blighting it with double dulness. They feel little and say nothing about it. One never knows what hidden compensations life provides for its multitudinous offspring. These torpid people must have a secret well of satisfaction from which they dip refreshing draughts in thirsty moments.

The child of emotion is more vivacious; he has colour, romance, movement. He is of a rarer vintage; there is sparkle in the wine of life. Occasionally the wine turns sour and drops flavour. Disagreeable people do exist for some veiled purpose of Providence, as the species never becomes extinct in the land. In infancy they were rocked in the cradle of discontent, and they have seldom slept out of it since. They have grown up in a nursery of their own. They are highly strung, and have a genius for living in the moment--irritably. Their wit is brilliant, it scintillates like running water in the sunshine, but it cuts like a razor. Everybody within reach of their tongue, even innocent people, feel the whip of their capricious temper. I suppose some grim pleasure feeds their fiery nature when they subdue friend and enemy under them. It is an unenviable pleasure which they enjoy; nobody shares with them, and when their ill-humour dies down it must leave a nasty taste in their mouth.

If you want to be happy, do not expect too much from life. Do not ask more from friendship than you give, for eventually the balance is sure to adjust itself. Do not ask more than your share of good things; if you do exceed the limit, disappointment will dog your footsteps all the day. You cannot expect to be always happy. Trouble and sorrow come to all of us, with a difference. Some people extract comfort out of trouble, and it assuages their grief; others add worry to their woe, and it aggravates their vexation of spirit.

Motor-cars carry a little dynamo on board and generate their own electric current as they travel, and after dark, with the great headlights glowing, they travel pleasantly and safe. A contented mind is a dynamo we can carry with us, and it generates its own happiness as we travel. It illumines the journey of life and makes it pleasant to ourselves and agreeable to friends travelling in our company.

Do not grizzle over chances missed in life and "might have beens" which sprinkle your past like gravestones dotting a churchyard, inscribed "sacred to the memory of cherished griefs still hugged and spasmodically wept over." Convert the mossy tombstones into wayside shrines which loving hands garland with fresh flowers, while grateful hearts fondly linger there, recalling pleasant things and sweet companionship which gladdened your pilgrim way. Do not erect mural tablets to dead ambitions in the little sanctuary of your memory; build altars there instead whereon you can offer acceptable oblations of praise for evils escaped and for the crown of loving-kindness with which the Everlasting Arms encircle you.

If we only had the gift of humour on us it would make "life more amusing than we thought." Our eyes would open to a new world wherein kinder people dwell and where brighter sunshine warms the heart's red blood and chases down the gloom we anticipate to-morrow that may never come.

III

THE LURE OF SELF-DENIAL

Self-denial is not the highest form of virtue, nor is it a permanent condition of life for man to live in; yet it is a lure that draws men to martyrdoms as the flame collects moths to the burning. Man was not predestinated to a life of self-abnegation. Self-denial is a compromise between misery and happiness. Human nature does not thrive on compromise; it does not develop in austerities. Self-denial has its value in the scheme of moral education. Training is good for man if he does not carry it too far. You can overtrain. The scholar trains; he discreetly withdraws from gay life and inflicts on himself long hours of lonely study that he may rank in the list of University honours. The jockey trains, and punishes himself in so doing that he may ride to win. It is the same the world over: pain is joy in the making. Where self-denial is the driving power in religious life it leads, not to happiness, but to asceticism: to the lonely cell of the misanthropic monk, the pedestal of St. Simon Stylates, or the self-torture of the Indian fakir. Deluded people these, who build up life on self-denial as the pinnacle virtue to which man can soar while on earth. None of these people set self-denial in its proper place in the human economy--viz., a means to an end. It is the end-all in their vision of life, and so their life is dismal in the living and disappointing in its purpose.

Self-denial is necessary and serves a healthy purpose. It is necessary to man's spiritual welfare as medicine or the surgeon's knife may be necessary to his physical health.

Man is of twofold nature: the animal and the spiritual, the good and the bad, the superior and the inferior--label it as you please. Self-denial is putting the inferior quality under the superior one; self-denial is following the higher inspiration at the expense of the lower instincts. "Self-denial": the very word implies, repressing desires, renouncing pleasures, suffering pain. It means living from choice on the shady, dank side of the street rather than basking in the open sunny piazza when only a few steps place you there, where the children play and the old men foregather deep in the hallowed sunshine. Self-denial is not the crowning virtue--it is just the market price we pay that we may garner a harvest of happiness in the recompensing days of autumn.

The Divine purpose in man is growth, not repression of growth; it is to expand, to unfold, to develop character. To pass from bud to flower in moral and spiritual excellence, not to stunt manhood till its fairest features are arrested in growth, and moral atrophy sets up a canker in the bud, and ugliness usurps the seat of beauty in a man's character. Ugliness everywhere may be left to the devil as his monopoly. Self-denial is the grubby chrysalis; happiness is the golden butterfly on the wing.

Not self-denial, but enjoyment, is the highest good and the truest test of character. Enjoyment; rejoicing in that which ought to delight us in this our earthly life--this is a finer attainment than self-denial. Enjoyment means a full life, living upon our whole nature, and well-balanced withal in the living. It seems an attractive and sinless programme to subscribe to, yet it is difficult to draw a boundary-line between enjoyment and excess. This is where the crux comes in. This is verily the fire that tries every man's work of what sort it is. It is cruel punishment to crush your passions and pleasures out of existence--that is self-denial. It is splendid discipline to give them play and at the same time hold them in control--that is enjoyment. Success in this great endeavour brings the victor into marching-line with the angels, and yields a finer exaltation and a larger recompense than trampling on the lilies.

It is more difficult to hold steadily a full cup than to carry an empty flagon. It is a doleful religion that uproots every flower in the garden as a noxious weed until only the naked brown earth remains to gaze upon in the blessed sunshine. It is a scurvy trick of virtue to spill the heady liquor on the ground and then with a flourish place the empty chalice an offering on the altar. Abstinence is the morality of the weak, temperance is the morality of the strong.

A deep enjoying nature is one of God's best gifts to man. The happy man is generally the best of his breed. The good are usually happy, and the happy are usually good. There are no short cuts to being happy, you must be really good to win through. If our daily occupation is congenial to our taste and disposition, our mind dwells at ease and our nature mellows in the sunshine of agreeable surroundings. Our sense of contentment radiates good humour and makes us kindly and benevolent to others. We are not chafed and fretted by duties irksome to us, because uncongenial. We are fulfilling destiny, and fulfilling it with completeness of purpose. Those around us feel the warm, penetrating sunshine of our hearts, and they grow warm under the mystic touch of the sun. It is for this reason that happiness becomes a holy quest with us, for out of it spring the virtues which robe life in beauty and gladness. One of the most precious of human faculties is the power to enjoy.

Self-denial is either a tyranny or a virtue, and should be praised with circumspection. Many feverishly religious people debase its moral currency. They hinder their own happiness and thwart the happiness of others as far as in them lies, and fancy in so doing they keep the whole ten commandments of God.

Self-denial for the sake of self-denial is a pagan rite: cold, pitiless, sterile. Renunciation and suffering prove nothing. Men have renounced and suffered for the greed of gold, for the lust of ambition, for the honour of a blood-stained idol, and lost moral stamina in so doing. The experience of ages brands deep the flaming truth upon us that sacrifice must be valued according to the object for which the sacrifice is made. Sacrifice for its own sake weaves no crown of glory for the martyr's brow. It is a form of amiable suicide. If you starve yourself for the sake of showing mastery over self, what thank have ye? The heathen do even the same--and do it better. It is an act of self-torture, and ministers to your pride of purpose. But to give up a meal when hungry that one you love may have it puts a better complexion on the deed. To bear pain for the grim joy of bearing it brings no reward. Do not even the Stoics the same? But to bear pain rather than surrender truth or to cover a suffering friend is a loving and heroic act, meriting a V.C. when spiritual honours are distributed.

The old painters pictured in glowing witchery of colour the ordeal by suffering as the master-key that opened the gates of paradise to macerated mortals. The old writers drove home the same insidious error with all the pious fervour of their fluent pen, and thus men became fascinated with the doctrine of self-immolation as the highest good. In mediæval times thevia dolorosawas the well-trodden public way travelled by sainted pilgrims seeking a better country.

Meritorious misery won through, for it was aureoled with the Church's benediction and rendered attractive by her promise of eternal rewards. Surely this daily human life of ours was not ordained to be a pageant of austerity reaching from the cradle to the grave. The Creator, having given this beautiful world as a temporary home for His children to dwell in, expects agreeable people to occupy its furnished splendours for a space of three score years and ten, more or less. If not, then the Creator's gift is wasted bounty flung to dull and unappreciative mortals.

Brighter and healthier views of life emerge out of the crude misconceptions which enveloped the past in religious gloom, although there yet remain amongst us people who revel in the luxury of self-denial as in a feast of fat things, while the genial side of their nature remains dormant, starved, stunted. I have seen such-like in the flesh, spoken with them and touched their cold hands. They are unattractive people to know, and not companionable to travel with. They are faultless, methodical, patient, but they have no endearing friendships, no entwining intimacies by which you can fasten on them and love them. They are isolated and self-contained, lacking the charm of some little human weakness which makes us all akin. They may have a warm heart, but chilled blood circulates round it. Their eyes glitter like glaciers at the call of duty. They hurry from committee meeting to committee meeting, and forget to lunch between engagements. They shine in the performance of self-imposed errands of mercy, and live by rule relentlessly at any cost to pocket, health, or reputation. They minister to the sick and poor assiduously, and mother a class of poor factory girls in the evening, but their home is shivery to enter as a cold storage. A cold storage is a curious place to visit, but an impossible place to dwell in, except for frozen goods.

It is possible to make the best of both worlds without an uncomfortable sense of sin nagging you like toothache; it is possible to work for others and yet tend your own vineyard with whole-hearted joy garnered from the wonder and beauty and sunshine of this our earthly home. The man is not a miscreant who laughs heartily and often: the person is not a saint who starves his body to save his soul.

The harassing question is, How can we make the best of life as it comes to us a day at a time, and yet sail on an even keel? It is the problem that prophets, savants, and theologians have hammered at through the ages, but have not yet forged in fine gold the key that unlocks the mystery; thus there is an opening for us to cut in before the final word is uttered and the discussion battens down under a unanimous show of hands, which crowning mercy will be the last far-off result of time. The question agitating the moment is, What shall we do with the fair flower of our earthly life? Shall we enjoy it as we would the beauty and fragrance of a rose, thanking the good God for a gift so sweet and precious, or shall we with peevish fingers pick the rose to pieces petal by petal and crush it under foot, fearing its beauty may seduce our virtue and its perfume poison our soul?

Let us preserve the rose inviolate. Its role is to be joy-giver on the earth. I would sooner sit with Jesus Christ at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee and drink with Him wine of the best vintage that ever flowed on festive board than sup with John Baptist in the wilderness on his menu of locusts and wild honey. The exquisite scene my imagination quaintly pictures is Jesus Christ and John the Baptist sitting together at the banquet, and each enjoying the meal with equal zest.

The Renaissance which fascinated half Europe in the fifteenth century, like a carillon of joy-bells ringing through the land, stirring the dull pulses of the people and reviving generous and graceful ideals of life, was just open rebellion against the crabbed austerities of the Church, practised in the name of religion falsely so called. The people threw off the galling yoke of forced asceticism and found liberty of spirit and peace of mind in literature and art, and in the spontaneous and natural flow of healthy human life. Unfortunately, there was a fly in the amber; the people borrowed most of their new pleasures from pagan Greece, and the old Greek gods came tripping back from fairyland hand in glove with Greek culture, which was embarrassing.

The advent of the light-hearted Cavaliers in England, flinging colour and warmth and gaiety over the land, was a sharp recoil from the drab severity of Puritan rule. The Puritans were men of strong personality: half soldiers and half preachers. They were honest without charm; strong-minded without pose; mighty in conscience, but mean in heart qualities. They were clean livers, but as they aged their visage grew hard and sour as unripe fruit, and their geniality of temper withered like a winter apple. They forgot to smile; the solemnities of life crushed them. They were grave and sagacious citizens lacking vivacity and humour, with plenty of flavour, but no sweetness. They dreamed of invisible kingdoms and fought for eternal verities. They command our admiration, but do not win our love. Their God was of the best theology mechanically constructed at Geneva by John Calvin, built up in parts composed of Righteousness, Justice, Holiness. Beauty was barred as a Divine attribute. The dismal meeting-house where they worshipped was the whitewashed prison in which the captured Deity dwelt. The burning light of this dread Presence enraptured the elect souls and intimidated the uncovenanted and graceless sinners, while the vast multitude of the nation held aloof, dreading contact with a religion so fierce and yet so gloomy, and they waited patiently through the shivering night of Roundhead rule, like watchmen on the city walls, for the coming of the king to set English homes once again humming with joy.

These two strong currents of life--Self-denial and Enjoyment--are flowing side by side in our midst to-day, dividing men in thought and purpose, driving men into open collision, only to relax their strangle-hold on one another to get firmer grip and fight again another day. These two different ideals of life represent two antagonistic sides of a man's nature that clash with each other, and the man has a stand-up fight with himself, which is an experience fiery temperaments often plunge into. Each side carries a half-truth and half an error. Blend the two half-truths into an intimate and harmonious whole and sink the errors into the bottomless pit from whence they came, and you discover human nature touching its highest and ripest form, approaching the Christlike in character, which combines the two elements in true and everlasting union.

Jesus of Nazareth, whose knightly character embodied all that the sweet romancists of the Middle Ages dreamed of and pictured in the faultless knight-errant of their day which won their hearts' devotion and consent (preux chevalier sans peur et sans reproche), and all that our own age typifies and holds dear in modern character of good repute when in a single phrase it proclaims the man a perfect gentleman--Jesus Christ means all that and more to us. Christ is not a withered flower on a broken stem torn from the Tree of Life; He is not a damaged idol of an effete civilization which modern progress sweeps aside in its forward march; He is not the Lord of an ancient faith whom the fires of scientific criticism have burnt up and left only His ashes in a cinerary urn reposing on the altar of our heart. He is the world's one fulfilment of the faultless and the ideal in human nature, blending all that is beautiful and enjoyable with all that is holy and vigorous.

IV

THE LURE OF MAGIC WORDS

Beautiful language is the flower of poetry. The magic of diction, of enchanted words transformed into radiant, marvellous sentient things pulsing with life and passion, capture our attention, and deep within us something vibrates in answer to their mastering call.

A writer with perfect felicity of expression voices thoughts and emotions of our own heart that we cannot give utterance to, yet of which we are dimly conscious. These ghostly creatures of our mind, half a memory and half a thing, peep and mutter within us; we try to hold them, but they are illusive as shadows on the wall. From the well-written words there leaps out something that has life and form and comeliness in it, and instantly we recognize an intimate returning from a far country laden with spoil. Words liberate the imprisoned thought that fretted within us and set it free: gloriously free for you and me and all the world to make familiar with.

There are words--spectacular words that print indelibly pleasant pictures on the mind, reveal in a sabre-flash thoughts that burn and things that were hidden. There are words--vivid, striking, portentous words that unfold noble vistas of truth in which happy, emancipated people walk freely in sunlight and song. There are melodious, aromatic words that ring tunefully through corridors of the mind like a carillon of merry bells charming the heart with far-reaching joy. There are strong, fiery, tempestuous words that crash and rattle and reverberate like rolling thunder through your being, and kindle the spirit of man into blazing passion and heroic fervour. There are dull, prosy, somnolent words that baffle like a London fog, envelop the writer's meaning in dense obscurity, and lure the reader's mentality into quagmires of perplexity and doubt.

There are ambrosial, honeyed, ornate words that regale us with fair visions of life, and steep the mind in dreams of romance and intoxicate with amorous delight. There are treacherous, lying words that distil murder in the air as they wing their evil flight. They strike deadly as a keen stiletto, or spit poison like a venomous adder in the grass.

There are discordant words that harrow up the feelings, and there are smooth, velvety, caressing words whose sweet sorcery holds us in their thrall, and that flow on and on harmoniously like the rippling of many waters that never fall out of tune.

Words cannot be measured with the measuring-reed of a man; they are spiritual forces; "they are angels of blessing or cursing. Unuttered we control them, uttered they control us." A man may have much wisdom packed into his capacious mind, but to unfold it attractively so that it glitters in the public eye and arrests attention is where the master art of handling words comes in.

One secret of successful writing is to express your thoughts in as few words as possible. Be frugal in your expenditure of words as a miser over the outlay of his hoarded gold. Write clearly, tersely, compactly, for words, like coins of the realm, are most esteemed when they contain large value in little space. The more briefly a thing is said, the more brilliantly it is put. The rarest of all qualities in a writer is--measure, saying exactly as much as you mean to say and not a word more or less. If a picture is complete, everything added is something taken away.

The "command of language" is often a snare of the devil into which men fall and do themselves grievous hurt. A redundancy of flowery words and empty fluency of speech confuse the thought and confound the meaning; skip half the telling and you know more of the tale. Oh the dreariness of some solid reading I have done in my time!--very learned and logical dissertations, but dulness crowned it all; even the dry bones of scientific matter clogged with technicalities can be made to live by a touch of style. Cartloads of words rumbling along the rutty road of argument slowly to their destination are not half so forceful as an apt image which flies straight to the point on wings of inspiration, and gets there first.

No subject is uninteresting if discoursed with an engaging pen, for words throw colour-magic on things that are common-place and give charm to them. I have watched Italian sunlight playing on the crumbling plaster walls of a peasant's cottage on the Tuscan hills, drenching them in opal and rose-carmine splendours, changing them into the image of a fairy palace. Words cast sunlight on commonplace, familiar things, flushing them with a radiance all their own, and so awaking our mind to see new beauties, or old beauties made manifest in a new light which had been staled by the lethargy of custom. Miss Mitford's village was an ordinary Berkshire village mute in the annals of English history, but it was surprised into fame by the romantic pen of its lady historian. A splendid accident of literary achievement adorned it with immortality, for it unfolds vividly before our wondering eyes the beauty of petty things and plain people in village life. The world owes to her genial pen a debt of gratitude; for it has won our sympathies, and in reading her book we can read our own village with interest instead of boredom, and see for ourselves the beauty and pathos and comedy of common people and homely things around us.

Art is the gift of God to man. It is impossible to buy or barter for the possession of it. You may cultivate, improve, perfect the indwelling talent, but the Divine seed is sown mysteriously in the life of the child when brought to birth. In whom the secret power lies dormant none know until the appointed hour reveals its budding graces. Inscrutable is the Divine favour; none can tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. It is not inherited like gold or lands; it is not an entailed honour which accompanies the family title. Genius seldom, like an heirloom, passes from sire to son in direct succession.

A man may possess the advantages that education, training, culture give, yet all these excellent acquirements combined cannot manufacture an artist. It needs the live coal taken from off the altar to kindle the sacred flame which illumines the artist's soul.

The painter's art is subject to this very mysterious law. Philip Gilbert Hamerton describes the working of the artistic spirit in man. He says: "Painting is a pursuit in which thought, scholarship, information, go for little; whereas a strange, unaccountable talent working in obscure ways achieves the only results worth having. Here is a field in which neither birth nor condition is of any use, and wealth itself of exceeding little; here faculty alone avails, and a kind of faculty so subtle and peculiar, so difficult to estimate before years have been spent in developing it, or wasted in the vain attempt to develop where it does not exist."

There are pictures you and I dearly love, and they are priceless treasures in the market; yet there is no deep thought or display of learning in them to win our admiration. They violate facts of history, they outrage the grammar of academic art, and even their drawing may be inaccurate. Why, then, are such works cherished and treasured? Because, with all their faults, they have power, they have feeling; they speak to the heart. The men who painted them were unlearned and ignorant, but they were artists to the finger-tips. There is a spiritual something breathing beneath the surface of the true painter's work which leaps to the eye and draws upon us and bestirs our emotions. Other pictures--laboured, scholastic, monumental, they leave us cold and passionless, and we pass them by on the other side.

A good architect also is to the manner born. The principles of proportion in designing a building are difficult to adjust to give pleasure to the eye. Now, the sense of proportion is a gift which some men possess and others lack; although they are architects by profession, they are amateurs in construction. Without that subtle sense of proportion a man blunders through his designs, and puts no feeling of beauty or joy in the finished structure which is the work of his hands. Ruskin says: "It is just as rational an attempt to teach a young architect how to proportion truly and well by calculating for him the proportions of fine works as it would be to teach him to compare melodies by calculating the mathematical relations of the notes in Beethoven's 'Adelaide' or Mozart's 'Requiem.' The man who has eye and intellect will invent beautiful proportions, and cannot help it; but he can no more tell us how to do it than Wordsworth could tell us how to write a sonnet, or than Scott could have told us how to plan a romance."

What the faculty of feeling is to the artist, what the sense of proportion is to the architect, the gift of style is to the writer. Style is the witchery of words; style is clothing thought in captivating language. Style is the setting of the gem. The gem may be rare, but it needs the aid of the goldsmith's art to make the most of it. It is the skilful setting that holds up the sparkling gem to our admiration. Style is everything in writing; it makes the thoughts sparkle. Niceties of style you cannot explain by rule-of-three, nor dissect its individuality by the drastic deed of vivisection; you cannot slash the heart out of it with a critickin's reckless knife. You can unravel a piece of rare old Flemish tapestry, and destroy the beautiful design and harmonious colouring of it. In fact, you can reduce the tapestry to a heap of valueless threads of worsted fit only for burning; but style in literature you cannot pick to pieces. You cannot find the master-thread on which the secret of the pattern runs, and which reveals the cunning of the workman's craft. By some mysterious process the writer weaves words together that the chambers of our imagination may be hung with tapestries rare and pleasant to behold. No explanation of the gift of penmanship is possible. Moulding words into forms of beauty is not an achievement: it is a gift of the gods, and no handbook of literature, however diligently pursued, can turn an artisan into an artist cunning in gold-minted phrases.

When Castiglione sent the manuscript of his book, "The Perfect Courtier," to Vittoria Colonna for her approval, she replied in a flattering letter thanking the author, saying: "The subject is new and beautiful, but the excellence of the style is such that, with a sweetness never before felt, it leads us up a most pleasant and fertile slope, which we gradually ascend without perceiving that we are no longer on the level ground from which we started; and the way is so well cultivated and adorned that we scarce can tell whether Art or Nature has done most to make it fair."

It is expression that counts, and the writer who expresses himself simply, vividly, concisely, boldly, and plays upon our heart-strings at pleasure, is naturally a "gifted" man. He not only sees in clear, full vision himself, but he brings his vision home to our cloudy brains and makes us see clearly; that is the wonder of it. It needs all the art and magic and persuasion of language to accomplish this difficult task. Weseethe subject presented as a picture when he writes with a graphic pen; wefeelpoignantly when his sharp and polished periods pierce like a rapier our understanding; we arefascinatedwhen his impassioned eloquence flows, glittering like running water in the sunlight, dazzling our bewildered brains. And when he scores by his native wit and writes in his trenchant, racy mother-tongue there is a smile in the stalls and loud laughter in the pit.

How mysteriously beauty steals into language and warms up the radiant face of poetry with glowing vitality. There is no beauty in stale prosaic sentences like "Trespassers will be prosecuted" or "Rubbish may be shot here," because they say exactly and completely all that they have to say and nothing more can be squeezed out of them. There is beauty in a sentence like "The bright day is done. And we are for the night," or "He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass," because in them, although they seem quite simple, the poet is trying to say infinitely more than he can pack into words. It is the effort to do something beyond the power of words; it is the effort to investigate the alluring Infinite with a mind closely fettered within the cramped and narrow finite that can only stretch forth a hand here and there between prison bars and touch the azure of infinitude which is the dreamland of the soul; it is this reaching out that brings beauty into language: it enflames the imagination; it ruffles the emotions; unutterable thoughts linger on the lips and fail to break away. There is a greatness in these winged words feathered with beauty because they mean a thousand times more than speaks on the surface.

When I was young the magic of words took possession of my virgin mind. The first master of language that I served under was John Ruskin. The aim of good writing is to communicate feeling; Ruskin did this intensely. The indefinable richness and power of words as they flowed from his pen, the musical and measured cadence of his prose, and the limpid clearness of his thoughts when cast on paper, placed an hypnotic spell upon me. When reading one of his books, I dwelt in dreamland. Another reading that I enjoyed with avidity in the seventies and eighties of the last century was the long literary leaders, never too long for me, in theDaily Telegraph. The best literary talent of the day wrote them. Many of them I cut out and placed in my scrap-book; alas! to be buried in decent sepulchre, for I never see them now. Lord Burnham, the proprietor of theDaily Telegraph, put himself into these leaders, although other pens wrote them. They were his special hobby, and grew under his inspiration. His biographer tells us: "He had the rhetorical sense strongly developed. He liked full-blooded writing, and had a tenderness for big words and big adjectives, well-matched and in pairs. He revelled in the warmth and colour of certain words, and the more resonant they were, the better he liked them." Words carry not only meaning, but atmosphere with them. Sometimes a single word well chosen and well placed in a sentence gives feeling, and lights it up with a glow of beauty. J. A. Symonds says: "The right word used in the right place constitutes the perfection of style." In my youth a literary friend was pruning a crude essay I had written; he paused in his reading on the word "fallacious," and he said: "That's a good word and well chosen; it's the right word." It was a revelation to me at the time that one word was better than another if they both meant the same thing. On thinking it over, I saw that no two words do mean exactly the same thing, and that there is only one right word in a hundred to express exactly your meaning and to give life to it. The other ninety-and-nine words are but poor relations--nay! they are all dead corpses.

Perhaps you remember Millais' wonderfully popular picture called "Cinderella." A beautiful healthy English child, with deep dreamy eyes and long wavy golden hair sits on a stool by the kitchen fire holding in her hand a birch broom emblem of her kitchen toil. It is a fascinating picture. At home I look on a coloured print of it nearly every day of the week. The most brilliant thing on the canvas is the patch of scarlet in the dainty cap the child wears. That single dab of red seems to concentrate in itself the whole colour-scheme of the picture. It is the keynote. Now a single word in a sentence sometimes gives a startling effect. It strikes a strong, clear, ringing note which keys the writer's passing mood, fascinates us with its vividness, and sticks in the memory ever after. It is a colour-patch in literary art which dominates the picture and arrests attention, as in Shakespeare's

"Every yesterday hath lighted foolsThe way todustydeath!"

"Every yesterday hath lighted foolsThe way todustydeath!"

"Every yesterday hath lighted fools

The way todustydeath!"

Or,

"Theprimrosepath to the eternal bonfire."

"Theprimrosepath to the eternal bonfire."

"Theprimrosepath to the eternal bonfire."

Or Pope's

"Quick effluvia darting through the brainDie of a rose inaromaticpain."

"Quick effluvia darting through the brainDie of a rose inaromaticpain."

"Quick effluvia darting through the brain

Die of a rose inaromaticpain."

Also

"Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,And let melanguishinto life."

"Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,And let melanguishinto life."

"Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,

And let melanguishinto life."

And Gray's inimitable couplet:

"There pipes the song-thrush, and the skylark thereScatters hisloosenotes in the waste of air."

"There pipes the song-thrush, and the skylark thereScatters hisloosenotes in the waste of air."

"There pipes the song-thrush, and the skylark there

Scatters hisloosenotes in the waste of air."

It is the height of literary skill to gather up your thought into a single word and fling it flaming on canvas. It is more convincing than a long chapter of dull argument which drugs the senses. Tennyson knew the magic of a single epithet in the thought scheme of the moment when he sang: "All the charm of all the muses often flowering in a lonely word." It is not as easily done as eating hot cakes for tea, for it is not the first word that comes sailing into a man's head that is the right word. "The comely phrase, the well-born word," is a prince of high degree, and you may wait in his anteroom days before an audience is granted. The elect word does not sit on the tip of the tongue and drop into its place at call. You may search diligently and not find it, and presently of its own free will it comes to you, a happy thought flashed from the void where whispering spirits dwell. Gray's Elegy is the most perfect poem in the English language. It was not thrown together carelessly in an idle hour one sleepy summer afternoon. Every word and every line of it cost thought, was written and rewritten, and patiently polished over again. For eight years the author held the poem between the hammer and the anvil, beating it into shape before he passed it into print. He damaged reams of paper developing a fair copy of those immortal verses.


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