Our Insignificance
But the fault, if I may so phrase it, of this faith, is the vastness of the conception to which it opens the mind. When I contemplate this earth with its continents and islands, its mountains and plains, all stored with histories of life and death, the bones of dead monsters, the shattered hulks of time; the vast briny ocean with all the mysterious life that stirs beneath the heaving crests; when I realise that even this world, with all its infinite records of life, is but a speck in the heavens, and that every one of the suns of space may be surrounded with the same train of satellites, in which some tumultuous drama of life may be, nay, must be enacting itself—that even on the fiery orbs themselves some appalling Titan forms may be putting forth their prodigious energies, suffering and dying—the mind ofman reels before the thought;—and yet all is in the mind of God. The consciousness of the microscopic minuteness of my own life and energies, which yet are all in all to me, becomes crushing and paralysing in the light of such a thought. It seems impossible to believe, in the presence of such a spectacle, that the single life can have any definite importance, and the temptation comes to resign all effort, to swim on the stream, just planning life to be as easy and as pleasant as possible, before one sinks into the abyss.
From such a paralysis of thought and life two beliefs have saved me.
The Master
First, it may be confessed, came the belief in the Spirit of God, the thought of inner holiness, not born from any contemplation of the world around, which seems indeed to point to far different ideals. Yet as true and truer than the bewildering example of nature is the inner voice which speaks, after the wind and storm, in the silent solitudes of the soul. That this voice exists and is heard can admit of no tangible demonstration; each must speak for himself; but experience forbids me to doubt that there is something which contradicts the seduction of appetite, something which calls, as it were, a flush to the face of the soul at the thought of triumphs of sense, a voice that without being derisive or harsh, yet has a terrible and instantaneous severity; and wields a mental scourge, the blows of which are no less fearful to receive becausethey are accompanied with no physical disaster. To recognise this voice as the very voice and word of the Father to sentient souls, is the inevitable result of experience and thought.
Then came the triumphant belief, weak at first, but taking slow shape, that the attitude of the soul to its Maker can be something more than a distant reverence, an overpowering awe, a humble worship; the belief, the certainty that it can be, as it were, a personal link—that we can indeed hold converse with God, speak with Him, call upon Him, put to use a human phrase, our hand in His, only desiring to be led according to His will.
Then came the further step; after some study of the systems of other teachers of humanity, after a desire to find in the great redeemers of mankind, in Buddha, Socrates, Mahomet, Confucius, Shakespeare, the secret of self-conquest, of reconciliation, the knowledge slowly dawns upon the mind that in Jesus of Galilee alone we are in the presence of something which enlightens man not from within but from without. The other great teachers of humanity seem to have looked upon the world and into their own hearts, anddeduced from thence, by flashes of indescribable genius, some order out of the chaos, some wise and temperate scheme, but with Jesus—though I long resisted the conviction—it is different. He comes, not as a man speaking by observation and thought, but as a visitant from some secret place, who knows the truth rather than guesses at it. I need not say that his reporters, the Gospel writers, had but an imperfect conception of His majesty. His ineffable greatness—it could not well be otherwise; the mystery rather is that with such simple views of life, such elementary conceptions of the scheme of things, they yet gave so much of the stupendous truth, and revealed Jesus in his words and acts as the Divine Man, who spoke to man not by spiritual influences but by the very authentic utterance of God. Such teaching as the parables, such scenes as the raising of Lazarus, or the midday talk by the wayside well of Sychar, emerge from all art and history with a dignity that lays no claim to the majesty that they win; and as the tragedy darkens and thickens to its close, such scenes as the trial, recorded by St. John, and the sacred death, bring home to the mind the fact that no mere humanity could bear itselfwith such gentle and tranquil dignity, such intense and yet such unselfish suffering as were manifested in the Son of Man.
The Return
And so, as the traveller goes out and wanders through the cities of men, among stately palaces, among the glories of art, or climbs among the aching solitudes of lonely mountains, or feasts his eyes upon green isles floating in sapphire seas, and returns to find that the old strait dwelling-place, the simple duties of life, the familiar friends, homely though they be, are the true anchors of the spirit; so, after a weary pilgrimage, the soul comes back, with glad relief, with wistful tenderness, to the old beliefs of childhood, which, in its pride and stubbornness, it cast aside, and rejected as weak and inadequate and faded; finds after infinite trouble and weariness that it has but learnt afresh what it knew; and that though the wanderer has ransacked the world, digged and drunk strange waters, trafficked for foreign merchandise, yet the Pearl of Price, the White Stone is hidden after all in his own garden-ground, and inscribed with his own new name.
I need not enter very closely into the period of my life which followed the university. After a good deal of hesitation and uncertainty I decided to enter for the Home Civil Service, and obtained a post in a subordinate office. The work I found not wholly uninteresting, but it needs no special record here. I acquired the knowledge of how to conduct business, a certain practical power of foreseeing contingencies, a certain acquaintance with legal procedure, and some knowledge of human nature in its official aspect.
Intellectually and morally this period of my life was rather stagnant. I had been through a good deal of excitement, of mental and moral malady, of generalbouleversement. Nature exacted a certain amount of quiescence, melancholy quiescence for the most part, because I felt myself singularly without energy to carry out my hopes and schemes, and at the same time it seemed that time was ebbingaway purposelessly, and that I was not driving, so to speak, any piles in the fluid and oozy substratum of ideas on which my life seemed built. To revel in metaphors, I was like a snake which has with a great strain bolted a quadruped, and needs a long space of uneasy and difficult digestion. But at the time I did not see this; I only thought I was losing time: I felt with Milton—
“How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth,Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year.”
“How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth,Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year.”
“How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year.”
But beset as I was by the sublime impatience of youth, I had not serenity enough to follow out the thoughts which Milton works out in the rest of the sonnet.
Literary Work
At the same time, so far as literary work went, to which I felt greatly drawn, I was not so impatient. I wrote a great deal for my private amusement, and to practise facility of expression, but with little idea of hurried publication. A story which I sent to a well-known editor was courteously returned to me, with a letter in which he stated that he had read my work carefully, and that he felt it a duty to tell me that it was “sauce without meat.” This kind and wholesome advice made a greatdifference to me; I determined that I would attempt to live a little before I indulged in baseless generalisation, or lectured other people on the art of life. I soon gained great facility in writing, and developed a theory, which I have ever since had no reason to doubt, that performance is simply a matter of the intensity of desire. If one only wants enough to complete a definite piece of work, be it poem, essay, story, or some far more definite and prosaic task, I have found that it gets itself done in spite of the insistent pressure of other businesses and the deadening monotony of heavy routine, simply because one goes back to it with delight, schemes to clear time for it, waits for it round corners, and loses no time in spurring and whipping the mind to work, which is necessary in the case of less attractive tasks. The moment that there comes a leisurely gap, the mind closes on the beloved work like a limpet; when this happens day after day and week after week, the accumulations become prodigious.
I thus felt gradually more and more, that when themagnum opusdid present itself to be done, I should probably be able to carry it through; and meanwhile I had sufficient self-respect,although I suffered twinges of thwarted ambition, not to force my crude theories, my scrambling prose, or my faltering verse upon the world.
London
Meanwhile I lived a lonely sort of life, with two or three close intimates. I never really cared for London, but it is at the same time idle to deny its fascination. In the first place it is full from day to day of prodigious, astounding, unexpected beauties—sometimes beauty on a noble scale, in the grand style, such as when the sunset shakes its hair among ragged clouds, and the endless leagues of house-roofs and the fronts of town palaces dwindle into a far-off steely horizon-line under the huge and wild expanse of sky. Sometimes it is the smaller, but no less alluring beauty of subtle atmospherical effects; and so conventional is the human appreciation of beauty that the constant presence, in these London pictures, of straight framing lines, contributed by house-front and street-end, is an aid to the imagination. Again, there is the beauty of contrasts; the vignettes afforded by the sudden blossoming of rustic flowers and shrubs in unexpected places; the rustle of green leaves at the end of a monotonousstreet. And then, apart from natural beauty, there is the vast, absorbing, incredible pageant of humanity, full of pathos, of wistfulness, and of sweetness. But of this I can say but little; for it always moved me, and moves me yet, with a sort of horror. I think it was always to me a spectacular interest; I never feltonewith the human beings whom I watched, or even in the same boat, so to speak, with them; the contemplation of the fact that I am one of so many millions has been to me a humiliating rather than an inspiring thought; it dashes the pleasures of individuality; it arraigns the soul before a dark and inflexible bar. Passing daily through London, there is little possibility in the case of an imaginative man for hopeful expansion of the heart, little ground for anything but an acquiescent acceptance. Under these conditions it is too rudely brought home to me to be wholesome, how ineffective, undistinguished, typical, minute, uninteresting any one human being is after all: and though the sight of humanity in every form is attractive, bewildering, painfully interesting, thrilling, and astounding—though one finds unexpected beauty and goodness everywhere—yet I recognise that city lifehad a deadening effect on my consciousness, and hindered rather than helped the development of thought and life.
The Artist
Still, in other ways this period was most valuable—it made me practical instead of fanciful; alert instead of dreamy; it made me feel what I had never known before, the necessity for grasping theexactpoint of a matter, and not losing oneself among side issues. It helped me out of the entirely amateurish condition of mind into which I had been drifting—and, moreover, it taught me one thing which I had never realised, a lesson for which I am profoundly grateful, namely that literature and art play a very small part in the lives of the majority of people; that most men have no sort of an idea that they are serious matters, but look upon them as more or less graceful amusements; that in such regions they have no power of criticism, and no judgment; but that these are not nearly such serious defects as the defect of vision which the artist and the man of letters suffer from and encourage—the defect, I mean, of treating artistic ideals as matters of pre-eminent national, even of moral importance. They must be content to range themselvesfrankly with other craftsmen; they may sustain themselves by thinking that they may help, a very little, to ameliorate conditions, to elevate the tone of morality and thought, to provide sources of recreation, to strengthen the sense of beauty; but they must remember that they cannot hope to belong to the primal and elemental things of life. Not till the primal needs are satisfied does the work of the poet and artist begin—“After the banquet, the minstrel.”
The poet and the artist too often live, like the Lady of Shalott, weaving a magic web of fair and rich colour, but dealing not with life itself, and not even with life viewedipsis oculis, but in the magic mirror. The Lady of Shalott is doubly secluded from the world; she does not mingle with it, she does not even see it; so the writer sometimes does not even see the life which he describes, but draws his knowledge secondhand, through books and bookish secluded talk. I do not think that I under-rate the artistic vocation; but it is only one of many, and, though different in kind, certainly not superior to the vocations of those who do the practical work of the world.
From this dangerous heresy I was savedjust at the moment when it was waiting to seize upon me, and at a time when a man’s convictions are apt to settle themselves for life, by contact with the prosaic, straightforward and commonplace world.
At one time I saw a certain amount of society; my father’s old friends were very kind to me, and I was thus introduced to what is a far more interesting circle of society than the circle which would rank itself highest, and which spends an amount of serious toil in the search of amusement, with results which to an outsider appear to be unsatisfactory. The circle to which I gained admittance was the official set—men who had definite and interesting work in the world—barristers, government officials, politicians and the like, men versed in affairs, and with a hard and definite knowledge of what was really going on. Here I learnt how different is the actual movement of politics from the reflection of it which appears in the papers, which often definitely conceals the truth from the public.
Diversions
My amusements at this period were of the mildest character; I spent Sundays in the summer months at Golden End; Sundays in the winter as a rule at my lodgings; and devotedthe afternoons on which I was free, to long aimless rambles in London, or even farther afield. I have an absurd pleasure in observing the details of domestic architecture; and there is a variety of entertainment to be derived, for a person with this low and feeble taste, from the exploration of London, which would probably be inconceivable to persons of a more conscientious artistic standard.
A Rude Shock
At this period I had few intimates; and sociable as I had been at school and college, I was now thrown far more on my own resources; I sometimes think it was a wise and kindly preparation for what was coming; and I certainly learnt the pleasures to be derived from reading and lonely contemplation and solitary reflection, pleasures which have stood me in good stead in later days. I used indeed to think that the enforced spending of so many hours of the day with other human beings gave a peculiar zest to these solitary hours. Whether this was wholesome or natural I know not, but I certainly enjoyed it, and lived for several years a life of interior speculation which was neither sluggish nor morbid. I learnt my business thoroughly, and in all probability I should have settleddown quietly and comfortably to the life of a bachelor official, rotating from chambers to office and from office to club, had it not been that just at the moment when I was beginning to crystallise into sluggish, comfortable habits, I was flung by a rude shock into a very different kind of atmosphere.
The Doctor
I must now relate, however briefly, the event which once for all determined the conditions of my present life. For the last six months of my professional work I had been feeling indefinitely though not decidedly unwell. I found myself disinclined to exertion, bodily or mental, easily elated, easily depressed, at times strangely somnolent, at others irritably wakeful; at last some troublesome symptoms warned me that I had better put myself in the hands of a doctor. I went to a local practitioner whose account disquieted me; he advised me to apply to an eminent specialist, which I accordingly did.
The Verdict
I am not likely to forget the incidents of that day. I went up to London, and made my way to the specialist’s house. After a dreary period of waiting, in a dark room looking out on a blank wall, the table abundantly furnished with periodicals whose creased and battered aspect betokened the nervous handlingto which they had been subjected, I was at last summoned to the presence of the great man himself. He presented an appearance of imperturbable good-nature; his rosy cheeks, his little snub nose, his neatly groomed appearance, his gold-rimmed spectacles, wore an air of commonplace prosperity that was at once reassuring. He asked me a number of questions, made a thorough examination, writing down certain details in a huge volume, and finally threw himself back in his chair with a deliberate air that somewhat disconcerted me. At last my sentence came. I was undoubtedly suffering from the premonitory symptoms of a serious, indeed dangerous complaint, and I must at once submit myself to the condition of an invalid life. He drew out a table diet, and told me to live a healthy, quiet life under the most restful conditions attainable. He asked me about my circumstances, and I told him with as much calmness as I could muster. He replied that I was very fortunate, that I must at once give up professional work and be content tovegetate. “Mind,” he said, “I don’t want you to bebored—that will be as bad for you as to be overworked. But you must avoid all kindsof worry and fatigue—all extremes. I should not advise you to travel at present, if youlikea country life—in fact I should say, live the life that attracts you, apart from any professional exertions; don’t do anything you don’t like. Now, Mr. ——,” he continued, “I have told you the worst—the very worst. I can’t say whether your constitution will triumph over this complaint: to be candid, I do not think it will; but there is no question of any immediate risk whatever. Indeed, if you were dependent on your own exertions for a livelihood, I could promise you some years of work—though that would render it almost impossible for you ever to recover. As it is, you may consider that you have a chance of entire recovery, and if you can follow my directions, and no unforeseen complications intervene, I think you may look forward to a fairly long life; but mind that any work you do must be of the nature of amusement. Once and for all,strainof any sort is out of the question, and if you indulge in any excessive or exciting exertions, you will inevitably shorten your life. There, I have told you a disagreeable truth—make the best of it—remember that I see many people every week who have to bear farmore distressing communications. You had better come to see me every three months, unless you have any marked symptoms, such as”—(there followed medical details with which I need not trouble the reader)—“in that case come to me at once; but I tell you plainly that I do not anticipate them. You seem to have what I call the patient temperament—to have a vocation, if I may say so,” (here he smiled benevolently) “for the invalid life.” He rose as he spoke, shook hands kindly, and opened the door.
New Perceptions
I will confess that at first this communication was a great shock to me; I was for a time bewildered and plunged into a deep dejection. To say farewell to the bustle and activity of life—to be laid aside on a shelf, like a cracked vase, turning as far as possible my ornamental front to the world, spoilt for homely service. To be relegated to the failures; to be regarded and spoken of as an invalid—to live the shadowed life, a creature of rules and hours, fretting over drugs and beef tea—a degrading, a humiliating rôle. I admit that the first weeks of my enforced retirement were bitter indeed. The perpetual fret of small restrictions had at first the effect of making me feel physically and mentally incapable. Only very gradually did the sad cloud lift. The first thing that came to my help was a totally unexpected feeling. When I had got used to the altered conditions of life, when I found that the regulated existence had become to alarge extent mechanical, when I had learnt to decide instinctively what I could attempt and what I must leave alone, I found my perceptions curiously heightened and intensified by the shadowy background which enveloped me. Sounds and sights thrilled me in an unaccustomed way—the very thought, hardly defined, but existing like a quiet subconsciousness, that my tenure of life was certainly frail, and might be brief, seemed to bring out into sharp relief the simple and unnoticed sensations of ordinary life. The pure gush of morning air through the opened casement, the delicious coolness of water on the languid body, the liquid song of birds, the sprouting of green buds upon the hedge, the sharp and aromatic scent of rosy larch tassels, the monotonous babble of the stream beneath its high water plants, the pearly laminæ of the morning cloudland, the glowing wrack of sunset with the liquid bays of intenser green—all these stirred my spirit with an added value of beauty, an enjoyment at once passionate and tranquil, as though they held some whispered secret for the soul.
The same quickening effect passed, I noticed, over intellectual perceptions. Picturesin which there was some latent quality, some hidden brooding, some mystery lying beneath and beyond superficial effect, gave up their secrets to my eye. Music came home to me with an intensity of pathos and passion which I had before never even suspected, and even here the same subtle power of appreciation seemed to have been granted me. It seemed that I was no longer taken in by technical art or mechanical perfection. The hard rippling cascades which had formerly attracted me, where a musician was merely working out, if I may use the word, some subject with a mathematical precision, seemed to me hollow and vain; all that was pompous and violent followed suit, and what I now seemed to be able to discern was all that endeavoured, however faultily, to express some ardour of the spirit, some indefinable delicacy of feeling.
Something of the same power seemed to be mine in dealing with literature. All hard brilliance, all exaggerated display, all literary agility and diplomacy that might have once deceived me, appeared to ring cracked and thin;merestyle, style that concealed rather than expressed thought, fell as it were in glassy tingling showers on my initiated spirit; while,on the other hand, all that was truthfully felt, sincerely conceived or intensely desired, drew me as with a magical compulsion. It was then that I first perceived what the sympathy, the perception born of suffering might be, when that suffering was not so intrusive, so severe, as to throw the sick spirit back upon itself—then that I learnt what detachment, what spectatorial power might be conferred by a catastrophe not violent, but sure, by a presage of distant doom. I felt like a man who has long stumbled among intricate lanes, his view obscured by the deep-cut earth-walls of his prison, and by the sordid lower slopes with their paltry details, when the road leads out upon the open moor, and when at last he climbs freely and exultingly upon the broad grassy shoulders of the hill. The true perspective—the map of life opened out before me; I learnt that all art is only valuable when it is the sedulous flowering of the sweet and gracious spirit, and that beyond all power of human expression lies a province where the deepest thoughts, the highest mysteries of the spirit sleep—only guessed at, wrestled with, hankered after by the most skilled master of all the arts of mortal subtlety.
Perhaps the very thing that made these fleeting impressions so perilously sweet, was the sense of their evanescence.
But oh, the very reason whyI love them, is because they die.
But oh, the very reason whyI love them, is because they die.
But oh, the very reason why
I love them, is because they die.
The Shadow
In this exalted mood, with this sense of heightened perception all about me, I began for awhile to luxuriate. I imagined that I had learnt a permanent lesson, gained a higher level of philosophy, escaped from the grip of material things. Alas! it was but transitory. I had not triumphed. What I did gain, what did stay with me, was a more deliberate intention of enjoying simple things, a greater expectation of beauty in homely life. This remained, but in a diminished degree. I suppose that the mood was one of intense nervous tension, for by degrees it was shadowed and blotted, until I fell into a profound depression. At best what could I hope for?—a shadowed life, an inglorious gloom? The dull waste years stretched before me—days, weeks, months of wearisome little duties; dreary tending of the lamp of life; and what a life! life without service, joy, brightness, or usefulness. I was to be stranded like a hulkon an oozy shore, only thankful for every month that the sodden timbers still held together. I saw that something larger and deeper was required; I saw that religion and philosophy must unite to form some definite theory of life, to build a foundation on which I could securely rest.
The service of others, in some form or another, must sustain me. Philosophy pointed out that to narrow my circle every year, to turn the microscope of thought closer and closer upon my frail self, would be to sink month by month deeper into egotism and self-pity. Religion gave a more generous impulse still.
Beginnings
What is our duty with respect to philanthropy? It is obviously absurd to think that every one is bound to tie themselves hand and foot to some thoroughly uncongenial task. Fitness and vocation must come in. Clergy, doctors, teachers are perhaps the most obvious professional philanthropists; for either of the two latter professions I was incapacitated. Some hovering thought of attempting to take orders, and to become a kind of amateur, unprofessional curate, visited me; but my religious views made that difficult, and the position of a man who preaches what he does notwholly believe is inconsistent with self-respect. Christianity as taught by the sects seemed to me to have drifted hopelessly away from the detached simplicity inculcated by Christ; to have become a mere part of the social system, fearfully invaded and overlaid by centuries of unintelligent tradition. To work, for instance, even with Mr. Woodward, at his orders, on his system, would have been an impossibility both for him and for myself. I had, besides, a strong feeling that work, to be of use, must be done, not in a spirit of complacent self-satisfaction, but at least with some energy of enjoyment, some conviction. It seemed moreover clear that, for a time at all events, my place and position in the world was settled: I must live a quiet home life, and endeavour, at all events, to restore some measure of effective health. How could I serve my neighbours best? They were mostly quiet country people—a few squires and clergy, a few farmers, and many farm labourers. Should I accept a country life as my sphere, or was I bound to try and find some other outlet for whatever effectiveness I possessed? I came deliberately to the conclusion that I was not only not bound to go elsewhere, but thatit was the most sensible, wisest, and Christian solution to stay where I was and make some experiments.
My Schemes
The next practical difficulty washowI could help. English people have a strong sense of independence. They would neither understand nor value a fussy, dragooning philanthropist, who bustled about among them, finding fault with their domestic arrangements, lecturing, dictating. I determined that I would try to give them the help they wanted; not the help I thought they ought to want. That I would go among them with no idea ofimproving, but of doing, if possible, neighbourly and unobtrusive kindnesses, and that under no circumstances would I diminish their sense of independence by weak generosity.
About this time, my mother at luncheon happened to mention that the widow of a small farmer, who was living in a cottage not fifty yards from our gate, was in trouble about her eldest boy, who was disobedient, idle, and unsatisfactory. He had been employed by more than one neighbour in garden work, but had lost two places by laziness and impertinence. Here was apoint d’appui. In theafternoon I strolled across; nervous and shy, I confess, to a ridiculous degree. I knew the woman by sight, and little more. I felt thoroughly unfitted for my rôle, and feared that patronage would be resented. However, I went and found Mrs. Dewhurst at home. I was received with real geniality and something of delicate sympathy—the news of my illness had got about. I determined I would ask no leading questions, but bit by bit her anxieties were revealed: the boy was a trouble to her. “What did he want?” She didn’t know; but he was discontented and naughty, had got into bad company. I asked if it would be any good my seeing the boy, and found that it would evidently be a relief. I asked her to send the boy to me that evening, and went away with a real and friendly handshake, and an invitation to come again. In the evening Master Dewhurst turned up—a shy, uninteresting, rather insolent boy, strong and well-built, and with a world of energy in his black eyes. I asked him what he wanted to do, and after a little talk it all came out: he was sick of the place; he did not want garden work. “What would he do? Whatdidhe like?” I found that he wanted to seesomething of the world. Would he go to sea? The boy brightened up at once, and then said he didn’t want to leave his mother. Our interview closed, and this necessitated my paying a further call on the mother, who was most sensible, and evidently felt that what the boy wanted was a thorough change.
To make a long story short, it cost me a few letters and a very little money, defined as a loan; the boy went off to a training ship, and after a few weeks found that he had the very life he wanted; indeed, he is now a promising young sailor, who never fails to write to me at intervals, and who comes to see me whenever he comes home. The mother is a firm friend. Now that I am at my ease with her, I am astonished at the shrewdness and sense of her talk.
It would be tedious to recount, as I could, fifty similar adventures; my enterprises include a village band, a cricket club, a co-operative store; but the personal work, such as it is, has broadened every year: I am an informal adviser to thirty or forty families, and the correspondence entailed, to say nothing of my visits, gives me much pleasant occupation. The circle now insensibly widens; I do notpretend that there are not times of weariness, and even disagreeable experiences connected with it. I am a poor hand in a sick-room, I confess it with shame; my mother, who is not particularly interested in her neighbours, is ten times as effective.
The Reward
But what I feel most strongly about the whole, is the intense interest which has grown up about it. The trust which these simple folk repose in me is the factor which rescues me from the indolent impulse to leave matters alone; even if I desired to do so, I could not for very shame disappoint them. Moreover, I cannot pretend that it takes up very much time. The institutions run themselves for the most part. I don’t overdo my visits; indeed, I seldom go to call on my friends unless there is something specific to be done. But I am always at home for them between seven and eight. My downstairs smoking-room, once an office, has a door which opens on the drive, so that it is not necessary for these Nicodemite visitors to come through the house. Sometimes for days together I have no one; sometimes I have three or four callers in the evening. I don’t talk religion as a rule, unless I am asked; but we discuss politics andlocal matters with avidity. I have persistently refused to take any office, and I fear that our neighbours think me a very lazy kind of dilettante, who happens to be interested in the small-talk of rustics. I will not be a Guardian, as I have little turn for business; and when it was suggested to me that I might be a J. P., I threw cold water on the scheme. Any official position would alter my relation to my friends, and I should often be put in a difficulty; but by being absolutely unattached, I find that confidential dealings are made easy.
I fear that this will sound a very shabby, unromantic, and gelatinous form of philanthropy, and I am quite unable to defend it on utilitarian principles. I can only say that it is deeply absorbing; that it pays, so to speak, a large interest on a small investment of trouble, and that it has given me a sense of perspective in human things which I never had before. The difficulty in writing about it is to abstain from platitudes; I can only say that it has revealed to me how much more emotion and experience go to make up a platitude than I ever suspected before in my ambitious days.
Ennui is, after all, the one foe that we all fear; and in arranging our life, the most serious preoccupation is how to escape it. The obvious reply is, of course, “plenty of cheerful society.” But is not general society to a man with a taste for seclusion the most irritating, wearing,ennuyeuxmethod of filling the time? It is not the actual presence of people that is distressing, though that in some moods is unbearable, but it is the consciousness of duties towards them, whether as host or guest, that sits, like the Old Man of the Sea, upon one’s shoulders. A considerable degree of seclusion can be attained by a solitary-minded man at a large hotel. The only time of the day when you are compelled to be gregarious is the table d’hôte dinner; and then, even if you desire to talk, it is often made impossible by the presence of foreigners among whom one is sandwiched. But take a visit at a large English country-house; a mixed partywith possibly little in common; the protracted meals, the vacuous sessions, the interminable promenades. Men are better off than women in this respect, as at most periods of the year they are swept off in the early forenoon to some vigorous employment, and are not expected to return till tea-time. But take such a period in August, a month in which many busy men are compelled to pay visits if they pay them at all. Think of the desultory cricket matches, the futile gabble of garden parties.
Of course the desire of solitude, or rather, the nervous aversion to company, may become so intense as to fall under the head of monomania; doctors give it an ugly name, I know not exactly what it is, like the agoraphobia, which is one of the subsections of a certain form of madness. Agoraphobia is the nervous horror of crowds, which causes persons afflicted by it to swoon away at the prospect of having to pass through a square or street crowded with people.
But the dislike of visitors is a distinct, but quite as specific form of nervous mania. One lady of whom I have heard was in the habit of darting to the window and involving herselfin the window-curtain the moment she heard a ring at the bell; another, more secretive still, crept under the sofa. Not so very long ago I went over a great house in the North; my host took me to a suite of upper rooms with a charming view. “These,” he said, “were inhabited by my old aunt Susan till her death some months ago; she was somewhat eccentric in her habits”—here he thrust his foot under a roomy settee which stood in the window, and to my intense surprise a bell rang loudly underneath—“Ah,” he said, rather shamefacedly, “they haven’t taken it off.” I begged for an explanation, and he said that the old lady had formed an inveterate habit of creeping under the settee the moment she heard a knock at the door; to cure her of it, they hung a bell on a spring beneath it, so that she gave warning of her whereabouts.
Solitude
Society is good for most of us; but solitude is equally good, as a tonic medicine, granted that sociability is accepted as a factor in our life. A certain deliberate solitude, like the fast days in the Roman Church, is useful, even if only by way of contrast, and that we may return with fresh zest to ordinary intercourse.
People who are used to sociable life findthe smallest gap, the smallest touch of solitude oppressive andennuyeux; and it may be taken for granted that the avoidance of ennui, in whatever form that whimsical complaint makes itself felt, is one of the most instinctive prepossessions of the human race; but it does not follow that solitude should not be resolutely practised; and any sociable person who has strength of mind to devote, say, one day of the week to absolute and unbroken loneliness would find not only that such times would come to have a positive value of their own, but that they would enhance infinitely the pleasures of social life.
It is a curious thing how fast the instinct for solitude grows. A friend of mine, a clergyman, a man of an inveterately sociable disposition, was compelled by the exigencies of his position to take charge of a lonely sea-coast parish, the incumbent of which had fallen desperately ill. The parish was not very populous, and extremely scattered; the nearest houses, inhabited by educated people were respectively four and five miles away—my friend was poor, an indifferent walker, and had no vehicle at his command.
He went off, he told me, with extreme andacute depression. He found a small rectory-house with three old silent servants. He established himself there with his books, and began in a very heavy-hearted way to discharge the duties of the position; he spent his mornings in quiet reading or strolling—the place lay at the top of high cliffs and included many wild and magnificent prospects. The afternoon he spent in trudging over the parish, making himself acquainted with the farmers and other inhabitants of the region. In the evening he read and wrote again. He had not been there a week before he became conscious that the life had a charm. He had written in the first few days of his depression to several old friends imploring them to have mercy on his loneliness. Circumstances delayed their arrival, and at last when he had been there some six weeks, a letter announcing the arrival of an old friend and his wife for a week’s visit gave him, he confessed, far more annoyance than pleasure. He entertained them, however, but felt distinctly relieved when they departed. At the end of the six months I saw him, and he told me that solitude was a dangerous Circe, seductive, delicious, but one that should be resolutely and deliberatelyshunned, an opiate of which one could not estimate the fascination. And I am not speaking of a torpid or indolent man, but a man of force, intellect, and cultivation, of a restless mind and vivid interests.
[The passages that follow were either extracted by the author himself from his own diaries, or are taken from a notebook containing fragments of an autobiographical character. When the date is ascertainable it is given at the head of the piece.—J. T.]
[The passages that follow were either extracted by the author himself from his own diaries, or are taken from a notebook containing fragments of an autobiographical character. When the date is ascertainable it is given at the head of the piece.—J. T.]
Now I will draw, carefully, faithfully, and lovingly, the portraits of some of my friends; they are not ever likely to set eyes on the delineation: and if by some chance they do, they will forgive me, I think.
I have chosen three or four of the most typical of my not very numerous neighbours, though there are many similar portraits scattered up and down my diaries.
It happened this morning that a small piece of parish business turned up which necessitated my communicating with Sir James, our chief landowner. Staunton is his name, and his rank is baronet. He comes from a typically English stock. As early as the fourteenth century the Stauntons seem to have held land in the parish; they were yeomen, no doubt, owning a few hundred acres of freehold. In the sixteenth century one of them drifted to London, made a fortune, and, dying childless, left his money to the head of thehouse, who bought more land, built a larger house, became esquire, and eventually knight; his brass is in the church. They were unimaginative folk, and whenever the country was divided, they generally contrived to find themselves upon the prosaic and successful side.
The Bishop
Early in the eighteenth century there were two brothers: the younger, a clergyman, by some happy accident became connected with the Court, made a fortunate marriage, and held a deanery first, and then a bishopric. Here he amassed a considerable fortune. His portrait, which hangs at the Park, represents a man with a face of the shape and colour of a ripe plum, with hardly more distinction of feature, shrouded in a full wig. Behind him, under a velvet curtain, stands his cathedral, in a stormy sky. The bishop’s monument is one of the chief disfigurements, or the chief ornaments of our church, according as your taste is severe or catholic. It represents the deceased prelate in a reclining attitude, with a somewhat rueful expression, as of a man fallen from a considerable height. Over him bends a solicitous angel in the attitude of one inquiring what is amiss. One of the prelate’s delicate hands is outstretched from a giganticlawn sleeve, like a haggis, which requires an iron support to sustain it; the other elbow is propped upon some marble volumes of controversial divinity. In an alcove behind is a tumid mitre, quite putting into the shade a meagre celestial crown with marble rays, which is pushed unceremoniously into the top of the recess.