Sad Associations
I have sometimes climbed to the top of a hill and looked into some unknown and placidvalley, with field and wood and rivulet and the homes of men. I have seen the figures of men and oxen move sedately about those quiet fields. Often, too, gliding at evening in a train through a pastoral country when the setting sun bathes all things in genial light and contented shade, I have felt the same thought. “How peaceful, how simple life would be, nay, must be, here.” Only very gradually, as life goes on, does it dawn upon the soul that the trouble lies deeper, and that though surrounded by the most unimagined peace, the same fret, the same beating of restless wings, the same delays attend. That dreamt-of peace can hardly be attained. The most we can do is to enjoy it to the utmost when it is with us; and when it takes its flight, and leaves us dumb, discontented, peevish, to quench the sordid thought in resolutesilence, to curb the grating mood, to battle mutely with the cowering fear; and so to escape investing the house and the garden that we love with the poisonous and bitter associations that strike the beauty out of the fairest scene.
September 20, 1894.
I had to-day a strange little instance of the patient, immutable habit of nature. Some years ago there was a particular walk of which I was fond; it led through pastures, by shady wood-ends, and came out eventually on a bridge that spanned the line. Here I often went to see a certain express pass; there was something thrilling in the silent cutting, the beckoning, ghostly arm of the high signal, the faint far-off murmur, and then the roar of the great train forging past. It was a breath from the world.
The Red Spider
On the parapet of the bridge, grey with close-grained lichen, there lived a numerous colony of little crimson spiders. What they did I never could discern; they wandered aimlessly about hither and thither, in a sort of feeble, blind haste; if they ever encountered each other on their rambles, they stopped, twiddled horns, and fled in a sudden horror; they never seemed to eat or sleep, and even continuedtheir endless peregrinations in the middle of heavy showers, which flicked them quivering to death.
I used to amuse myself with thinking how one had but to alter the scale, so to speak, and what appalling, intolerable monsters these would become. Think of it! huge crimson shapeless masses, with strong wiry legs, and waving mandibles, tramping silently over the grey veldt, and perhaps preying on minute luckless insects, which would flee before them in vain.
One day I walked on ahead, leaving a companion to follow. He did follow, and joined me on the bridge—bringing heavy tidings which had just arrived after I left home.
The place grew to me so inseparably connected with the horror of the news that I instinctively abandoned it; but to-day, finding myself close to the place—nearly ten years had passed without my visiting it—I turned aside, musing on the old sadness, with something in my heart of the soft regret that a sorrow wears when seen through the haze of years.
There was the place, just the same; I bent to see a passing train and (I had forgottenall about them) there were my red spiders still pursuing their aimless perambulations. But who can tell the dynasties, the genealogies that had bridged the interval?
The red spider has no great use in the world, as far as I know. But he has every right to be there, and to enjoy the sun falling so warm on the stone. I wonder what he thinks about it all? For me, he has become the type of the patient, pretty fancies of nature, so persistently pursued, so void of moral, so deliciously fantastic and useless—but after all, what am I to talk of usefulness?
Spider and man, man and spider—and to the pitying, tender mind of God, the brisk spider on his ledge, and the dull, wistful, middle-aged man who loiters looking about him, wondering and waiting, are much the same. He has a careful thought of each, I know:—
To both alike the darkness and the day,The sunshine and the flowers,We draw sad comfort, thinking we obeyA deeper will than ours.
To both alike the darkness and the day,The sunshine and the flowers,We draw sad comfort, thinking we obeyA deeper will than ours.
To both alike the darkness and the day,
The sunshine and the flowers,
We draw sad comfort, thinking we obey
A deeper will than ours.
August 4, 1895.
The Dawn
Just another picture lingers with me, for no very defined reason. It was an August night; I had gone to rest with the wind sighing and buffeting against my windows, but when I awoke with a start, deep in the night, roused, it seemed, as by footsteps in the air and a sudden hollow calling of airy voices, it was utterly still outside. I drew aside my heavy tapestry curtain, and lo! it was the dawn. A faint upward gush of lemon-coloured light edged the eastern hills. The air as I threw the casement wide was unutterably sweet and cool. In the faint light, over the roof of the great barn, I saw what I had seen a hundred times before, a quiet wood-end, upon which the climbing hedges converge. But now it seemed to lie there in a pure and silent dream, sleeping a light sleep, waiting contentedly for the dawn and smiling softly to itself. Over the fields lay little wreaths of mist, and beyond the wood, hills of faintest blue, the hillsof dreamland, where it seems as if no harsh wind could blow or cold rain fall. I felt as though I stood to watch the stainless slumber of one I loved, and was permitted by some happy and holy chance to see for once the unuttered peace that earth enjoys in her lonely and unwatched hours. Too often, alas! one carries into the fairest scenes a turmoil of spirit, a clouded mind that breaks and mars the spell. But here it was not so; I gazed upon the hushed eyes of the earth, and heard her sleeping breath; and, as the height of blessing, I seemed myself to have left for a moment the past behind, to have no overshadowing from the future, but to live only in the inviolate moment, clear-eyed and clean-hearted, to see the earth in her holiest and most secluded sanctuary, unsuspicious and untroubled, bathed in the light and careless slumber of eternal youth, in that delicious oblivion that fences day from weary day.
In the jaded morning light the glory was faded, and the little wood wore its usual workaday look, the face it bears before the world; but I, I had seen it in its golden dreams; I knew its secret, and it could not deceive me; it had yielded to me unawares its sublimest confidence,and however it might masquerade as a commonplace wood, a covert for game, a commercial item in an estate-book, known by some homely name, I had seen it once undisguised, and knew it as one of the porches of heaven.
April 4, 1896.
It seems a futile task to say anything about the spring; yet poets and romancers make no apologies for treating of love, which is an old and familiar phenomenon enough. And I declare that the wonder of spring, so far from growing familiar, strikes upon the mind with a bewildering strangeness, a rapturous surprise, which is greater every year. Every spring I say to myself that I never realised before what a miraculous, what an astounding thing is the sudden conspiracy of trees and flowers, hatched so insensibly, and carried out so punctually, to leap into life and loveliness together. The velvety softness of the grass, the mist of green that hangs about the copse, the swift weaving of the climbing tapestry that screens the hedgerow-banks, the jewellery of flowers that sparkle out of all sequestered places; they are adorable. But this early day of spring is close and heavy, with a slow rain dropping reluctantly out of the sky, a daywhen an insidious melancholy lies in wait for human beings, a sense of inadequacy, a meek rebellion against all activity, bodily or mental. I walk slowly and sedately along the sandy roads fast oozing into mire. There is a sense of expectancy in the air; tree and flower are dispirited too, oppressed with heaviness, and yet gratefully conscious, as I am not, of the divine storage of that pure and subtle element that is taking place for their benefit. “Praise God,” said Saint Francis, “for our sister the water, for she is very serviceable to us and humble and clean.” Yes, we give thanks! but, alas! to sit still and be pumped into, as Carlyle said of Coleridge’s conversation, can never be an enlivening process.
Yet would that the soul could gratefully recognise her own rainy days; could droop, like Nature, with patient acquiescence, with wise passivity, till the wells of strength and freshness are stored!
Subtle Superiorities
The particular form of melancholy which I find besets me on these sad reflective mornings, is to compare my vague ambitions with my concrete performances. I will not say that in my dreamful youth I cherished the idea of swaying the world. I never expected to play abrave part on the public stage. Political and military life—the two careers which ripple communities to the verge, never came within the range of my possibilities. But I think that I was conscious—as most intelligent young creatures undoubtedly are—of a subtle superiority to other people. An ingenious preacher once said that we cannot easily delude ourselves into the belief that we are richer, taller, more handsome, or even wiser, better, abler, and more capable than other people, but we can and do very easily nourish a secret belief that we are moreinterestingthan others. Such an illusion has a marvellous vitality; it has a delicate power of resisting the rude lessons to the contrary which contact with the world would teach us; and I should hardly like to confess how ill I have learned my lesson. I realise, of course, that I have done little to establish this superiority in the eyes of others; but I find it hard to disabuse myself of the vague belief that if only I had the art of more popular and definite expression, if only the world had a little more leisure to look in sequestered nooks for delicate flowers of thought and temperament, then it might berealized how exquisite a nature is here neglected.
The Hard Truth
In saying this I am admitting the reader to the inmostpenetraliaof thought. I frankly confess that in my robust and equable moments I do recognise the broken edge of my life, and what a very poor thing I have made of it—but, for all that, it is my honest belief that we most of us have in our hearts that inmost shrine of egotism, where the fire burns clear and fragrant before an idealised image of self; and I go further, and say that I believe this to be a wholesome and valuable thing, because it is of the essence of self-respect, and gives us a feeble impulse in the direction of virtue and faith. If a man ever came to realise exactly his place in the world, as others realise it, how feeble, how uninteresting, how ludicrously unnecessary he is, and with what a speedy unconcern others would accommodate themselves to his immediate disappearance, he would sink into an abyss of gloom out of which nothing would lift him. It is one of the divine uses of love, that it glorifies life by restoring and raising one’s self-esteem.
In the dejected reveries of such languorous spring days as these, no such robust egotism asI have above represented comes to my aid. I see myself stealing along, a shy, tarnished thing, a blot among the fresh hopes and tender dreams that smile on every bank. The pitiful fabric of my life is mercilessly unveiled; here I loiter, a lonely, shabby man, bruised by contact with the word, dilatory, dumb, timid, registering tea-table triumphs, local complacencies, provincial superiorities—spending sheltered days in such comfortable dreams as are born of warm fires, ample meals, soft easy-chairs, and congratulating myself on poetical potentialities, without any awkward necessities of translating my dreams into corrective action—or else discharging homely duties with an almost sacerdotal solemnity, and dignifying with the title of religious quietism what is done by hundreds of people instinctively and simply and without pretentiousness. If I raved against my limitations, deemed my cage a prison, beat myself sick against the bars, I might then claim to be a fiery and ardent soul; but I cannot honestly do this; and I must comfort myself with the thought that possibly the ill-health, which necessitates my retirement, compensates for the disabilities it inflicts onme, by removing the stimulus which would make my prison insupportable.
In this agreeable frame of mind I drew near home and stood awhile on the deserted bowling-green with its elder-thickets, its little grassy terraces, its air of regretful wildness, so often worn by a place that has been tamed by civilisation and has not quite reverted to its native savagery. A thrush sang with incredible clearness, repeating a luscious phrase often enough to establish its precision of form, and yet not often enough to satiate—a triumph of instinctive art.
These thrushes are great favourites of mine; I often sit, on a dewy morning, to watch them hunting. They hop lightly along, till they espy a worm lying in blissful luxury out of his hole; two long hops, and they are upon him; he, using all his retractile might, clings to his home, but the thrush sets his feet firm in the broad stride of the Greek warrior, gives a mighty tug—you can see the viscous elastic thread strain—and the worm is stretched writhing on the grass. What are the dim dreams of the poor reptile, I wonder; does he regret his cool burrow, “and youth and strength and this delightful world?”—no, Ithink it is a stoical resignation. For a moment the thrush takes no notice of him, but surveys the horizon with a caution which the excitement of the chase has for an instant imprudently diverted. Then the meal begins, with horrid leisureliness.
But it is strange to note the perpetual instinctive consciousness of danger which besets birds thus in the open; they must live in a tension of nervous watchfulness which would depress a human being into melancholia. There is no absorbed gobbling; between every mouthful the little head with its beady eyes swings right and left to see that all is clear; and he is for ever changing his position and seldom fronts the same way for two seconds together.
Do we realise what it must be to live, as even these sheltered birds do in a quiet garden, with the fear of attack and death hanging over them from morning to night?
The Bondage of a Bird
Another fact that these thrushes have taught me is the extreme narrowness of their self-chosen world. They are born and live within the compass of a few yards. We are apt to envy a bird the power of changing his horizon, of soaring above the world, and choosing forhis home the one spot he desires. Think what our life would be if, without luggage, without encumbrances, we could rise in the air and, winging our way out to the horizon, choose some sequestered valley, and there, without house, without rates and taxes, abide, with water babbling in its channel and food abundant. Yet it is far otherwise. One of my thrushes has a white feather in his wing; he was hatched out in a big syringa which stands above the bowling-green; and though I have observed the birds all about my few acres carefully enough I have never seen this particular thrush anywhere but on the lawn. He never seems even to cross the wall into the garden; he has a favourite bush to roost in, and another where he sometimes sings: at times he beats along the privet hedge, or in the broad border, but he generally hops about the lawn, and I do not think he has ever ventured beyond it. He works hard for his living too; he is up at dawn, and till early afternoon he is generally engaged in foraging. He will die, I suppose, in the garden, though how his body is disposed of is a mystery to me.
The Soul of a Thrush
He takes the limitations of his life just as he finds them; he never seems to think hewould like to be otherwise; but he works diligently for his living, he sings a grateful song, he sleeps well, he does not compare himself with other birds or wish his lot was different—he has no regrets, no hopes, and few cares. Still less has he any philanthropic designs of raising the tone of his brother thrushes, or directing a mission among the quarrelsome sparrows. Sometimes he fights a round or two, and when the spring comes, stirred by delicious longings, he will build a nest, devote the food he would like to devour to his beady-eyed, yellow-lipped young, and die as he has lived. There is a good deal to be said for this brave and honest life, and especially for the bright and wholesome music which he makes within the thickets. I do not know that it can be improved upon.
Aug. 19, 1898.
God’s Acre
There is a simple form of expedition of which I am very fond; that is the leisurely visiting of some rustic church in the neighbourhood. They are often very beautifully placed—sometimes they stand high on the ridges and bear a bold testimony to the faith; sometimes they lie nestled in trees, hidden in valleys, as if to show it is possible to be holy and beautiful, though unseen. Sometimes they are the central ornament of a village street; there generally seems some simple and tender reason for their position; but the more populous their neighbourhood, the more they have suffered from the zeal of the restorer. What I love best of all is a church that stands a little apart, sheltered in wood, dreaming by itself, and guarding its tranquil and grateful secret—“secretum meum mihi,” it seems to say.
I like to loiter in the churchyard ground to step over the hillocks, to read the artless epitaphson slanting tombs; it is not a morbid taste, for if there is one feeling more than another that such a visit removes and tranquillises, it is the fear of death. Death here appears in its most peaceful light; it seems so necessary, so common, so quiet and inevitable an end, like a haven after a troubled sea. Here all the sad and unhappy incidents of mortality are forgotten, and death appears only in the light of a tender and dreamful sleep.
Better still is the grateful coolness of the church itself; here one can trace in the epitaphs the fortunes of a family—one can see the graves of old squires who have walked over their own fields, talked with their neighbours, shot, hunted, eaten, drunk, have loved and been loved, and have yielded their place in the fulness of days to those that have come after them. Very moving, too, are the evidences of the sincere grief, which underlies the pompous phraseology of the marble monument with its urns and cherubs. I love to read the long list of homely virtues attributed by the living to the dead in the depth of sorrow, and to believe them true. Then there are records of untimely deaths,—the young wife, the soldier inhis prime, the boy or girl who have died unstained by life, and about whom clings the passionate remembrance of the happy days that are no more. Such records as those do not preach the lesson of vanity and decay, but the lesson of pure and grateful resignation, the faith that the God who made the world so beautiful, and filled it so full of happiness, has surprises in store for His children, in a world undreamed of.
The Monument
One monument in a church not far from Golden End always brings tears to my eyes; there is a chapel in the aisle, the mausoleum of an ancient family, where mouldering banners and pennons hang in the gloom; in the centre of the chapel is an altar-tomb, on which lies the figure of a young boy, thirteen years old, the inscription says. He reclines on one arm, he has a delicately carved linen shirt that leaves the slender neck free, and he is wrapped in a loose gown; he looks upward toward the east, his long hair falling over his shoulders, his thin and shapely hand upon his knee. On each side of the tomb, kneeling on marble cushions on the ledge, are his father and mother, an earl and countess. The mother, in the stately costume of a bygonecourt, with hair carefully draped, watches the face of the child with a look in which love seems to have cast out grief. The earl in armour, a strongly-built, soldier-like figure, looks across the boy’s knee at his wife’s face, but in his expression—I know not if it be art—there seems to be a look of rebellious sorrow, of thwarted pride. All his wealth and state could not keep his darling with him, and he does not seem to understand. There have they knelt, the little group, for over two centuries, waiting and watching, and one is glad to think that they know now whatever there is to know. Outside the golden afternoon slants across the headstones, and the birds twitter in the ivy, while a full stream winds below through the meadows that once were theirs.
Such a contemplation does not withdraw one from life or tend to give a false view of its energies; it does not forbid one to act, to love, to live; it only gilds with a solemn radiance the cloud that overshadows us all, the darkness of the inevitable end. Face to face with thelacrimæ rerumin so simple and tender a form, the heavy wordsMemento Morifall upon the heart not as a sad and harsh interruption of wordly dreams and fancies, but as a deep pedalnote upon a sweet organ, giving strength and fulness and balance to the dying away of the last grave and gentle chord.
If any one whose eye may fall upon these pages be absolutely equable of temperament, serene, contented, the same one day as another, as Dr. Johnson said of Reynolds, let him not read this chapter—he will think it a mere cry in the dark, better smothered in the bed-clothes, an unmanly piece of morbid pathology, a secret and sordid disease better undivulged, on which all persons of proper pride should hold their peace.
Well, it is not for him that I write; there are books and books, and even chapters and chapters, just as there are people and people. I myself avoid books dealing with health and disease. I used when younger to be unable to resist the temptation of a medical book; but now I am wiser, and if I sometimes yield to the temptation, it is with a backward glancing eye and a cautious step. And I will say that I generally put back the book with a snap, in a moment, as though a snake hadstung me. But there will be no pathology here—nothing but a patient effort to look a failing in the face, and to suggest a remedy.
Fears
I speak to the initiated, to those who have gone down into the dark cave, and seen the fire burn low in the shrine, and watched aghast the formless, mouldering things—hideous implements are they, or mere weapons?—that hang upon the walls.
Do you know what it is to dwell, perhaps for days together, under the shadow of a fear? Perhaps a definite fear—a fear of poverty, or a fear of obloquy, or a fear of harshness, or a fear of pain, or a fear of disease—or, worse than all, a boding, misshapen, sullen dread which has no definite cause, and is therefore the harder to resist.
Dreams
These moods, I say it with gratitude for myself and for the encouragement of others, tend to diminish in acuteness and in frequency as I grow older. They are now, as ever, preluded by dreams of a singular kind, dreams of rapid and confused action, dreams of a romantic and exaggerated pictorial character—huge mountain ranges, lofty and venerable buildings, landscapes of incredible beauty, gardens of unimaginable luxuriance, whichpass with incredible rapidity before the mind. I will indicate two of these in detail. I was in a vessel like a yacht, armed with a massive steel prow like a ram, which moved in some aerial fashion over a landscape, skimming it seemed to me but a few feet above the ground. A tall man of benignant aspect stood upon the bridge, and directed the operations of the unseen navigator. We ascended a heathery valley, and presently encountered snow-drifts, upon which the vessel seemed to settle down to her full speed; at last we entered a prodigious snowfield, with vast ridged snow-waves extending in every direction for miles; the vessel ran not over but through these waves, sending up huge spouts of snow which fell in cool showers upon my head and hands, while the tinkle of dry ice fragments made a perpetual low music. At last we stopped and I descended on to the plateau. Far ahead, through rolling clouds, I saw the black snow-crowned heights of a mountain, loftier than any seen by human eye, and for leagues round me lay the interminable waste of snow. I was aroused from my absorption by a voice behind me; the vessel started again on her course with a leap like a porpoise, and though I screamedaloud to stop her, I saw her, in a few seconds, many yards ahead, describing great curves as she ran, with the snow spouting over her like a fountain.
The second was a very different scene. I was in the vine-clad alleys of some Italian garden; against the still blue air a single stone pine defined itself; I walked along a path, and turning a corner an exquisite conventual building of immense size, built of a light brown stone, revealed itself. From all the alleys round emerged troops of monastic figures in soft white gowns, and a mellow chime of exceeding sweetness floated from the building. I saw that I too was robed like the rest; but the gliding figures outstripped me; and arriving last at a great iron portal I found it closed, and the strains of a great organ came drowsily from within.
Then into the dream falls a sudden sense of despair like an ashen cloud; a feeling of incredible agony, intensified by the beauty of the surrounding scene, that agony which feverishly questions as to why so dark a stroke should fall when the mind seems at peace with itself and lost in dreamy wonder at the loveliness all about it. Then the vision closes, andfor a time the mind battles with dark waves of anguish, emerging at last, like a diver from a dim sea, into the waking consciousness. The sickly daylight filters through the window curtains and the familiar room swims into sight. The first thought is one of unutterable relief, which is struck instantly out of the mind by the pounce of the troubled mood; and then follows a ghastly hour, when every possibility of horror and woe intangible presses in upon the battling mind. At such moments a definite difficulty, a practical problem would be welcome—but there is none; the misery is too deep for thought, and even, when after long wrestling, the knowledge comes that it is all a subjective condition, and that there is no adequate cause in life or circumstances for this unmanning terror—even then it can only be silently endured, like the racking of some fierce physical pain.
Woe
The day that succeeds to such a waking mood is almost the worst part of the experience. Shaken and dizzied by the inrush of woe, the mind straggles wearily through hour after hour; the familiar duties are intolerable; food has no savour; action and thought no interest; and if for an hour the tired head isdiverted by some passing event, or if, oppressed with utter exhaustion, it sinks into an unrefreshing slumber, repose but gives the strength to suffer—the accursed mood leaps again, as from an unseen lair, upon the unnerved consciousness, and tears like some strange beast the helpless and palpitating soul.
When first, at Cambridge, I had the woeful experiences above recorded, I was so unused to endurance, so bewildered by suffering, that I think for awhile I was almost beside myself. I recollect going down with some friends, in a brief lull of misery, to watch a football match, when the horror seized me in the middle of a cheerful talk with such vehemence, that I could only rush off with a muttered word, and return to my rooms, in which I immured myself to spend an hour in an agony of prayer. Again I recollect sitting with some of the friends of my own age after hall; we were smoking and talking peacefully enough—for some days my torment had been suspended—when all at once, out of the secret darkness the terror leapt upon me, and after in vain resisting it for a few moments, I hurried away, having just enough self-respect to glance at my watch and mutter somethingabout a forgotten engagement. But worst of all was a walk taken with my closest friend on a murky November day. We started in good spirits, when in a moment the accursed foe was upon me; I hardly spoke except for fitful questions. Our way led us to a level crossing, beside a belt of woodland, where a huge luggage train was jolting and bumping backwards and forewards. We hung upon the gate; and then, and then only, came upon me in a flash an almost irresistible temptation to lay my head beneath the ponderous wheels, and end it all; I could only pray in silence, and hurry from the spot in speechless agitation. What wonder if I heard on the following day that my friend complained that I was altering for the worse—that I had become so sullen and morose that it was no use talking to me.
Gradually, very gradually, the aching frost of the soul broke up and thawed; little trifling encouraging incidents—a small success or two, an article accepted by a magazine, a friendship, an athletic victory, raised me step by step out of the gloom. One benefit, even at the time, it brought me—an acute sensitiveness to beauty both of sight and sound. I used to steal at even-song into the dark nave ofKing’s Chapel, and the sight of the screen, the flood of subdued light overflowing from the choir, the carven angels with their gilded trumpets, penetrated into the soul with an exquisite sweetness; and still more the music—whether the low prelude with the whispering pedals, the severe monotone breaking into freshets of harmony, the swing and richness of the chants, or the elaborate beauty of some familiar magnificat or anthem—all fell like showers upon the arid sense. The music at King’s had one characteristic that I have never heard elsewhere; the properties of the building are such that the echo lingers without blurring the successive chords—not “loth to die,” I used to think, as Wordsworth says, but sinking as it were from consciousness to dream, and from dream to death.
The Brotherhood of Sorrow
One further gain—the greater—was that my suffering did not, I think, withdraw me wholly into myself and fence me from the world; rather it gave me a sense of the brotherhood of grief. I was one with all the agonies that lie silent in the shadow of life; and though my suffering had no tangible cause, yet I was initiated into the fellowship of those whobear. Iunderstood;—weak,faithless, and faulty as I was, I was no longer in the complacent isolation of the strong, the successful, the selfish, and even in my darkest hour I had strength to thank God for that.
Oct. 21, 1898.
I have been reading some of my old diaries to-day; and I am tempted to try and disentangle, as far as I can, themotifthat seems to me to underlie my simple life.
One question above all others has constantly recurred to my mind; and the answer to it is the sum of my slender philosophy.
The question then is this: is a simple, useful, dignified, happy life possible to most of us without the stimulus of affairs, of power, of fame? I answer unhesitatingly that such a life is possible. The tendency of the age is to measure success by publicity, not to think highly of any person or any work unless it receives “recognition,” to think it essential to happinessmonstrari digito, to be in the swim, to be a personage.
I admit at once the temptation; to such successful persons comes the consciousness of influence, the feeling of power, the anxious civilities of the undistinguished, the radianceof self-respect, the atmosphere of flattering, subtle deference, the seduction of which not even the most independent and noble characters can escape. Indeed, many an influential man of simple character and unpretending virtue, who rates such conveniences of life at their true value, and does not pursue them as an end, would be disagreeably conscious of the lack of thesepetits soinsif he adopted an unpopular cause or for any reason forfeited the influence which begets them.
A friend of mine came to see me the other day fresh from a visit to a great house. His host was a man of high cabinet rank, the inheritor of an ample fortune and a historic name, who has been held by his nearest friends to cling to political life longer than prudence would warrant. My friend told me that he had been left alone one evening with his host, who had, half humorously, half seriously, indulged in a lengthy tirade against the pressure of social duties and unproductive drudgery that his high position involved. “If they would only let me alone!” he said; “I think it very hard that in the evening of my days I cannot order my life to suit my tastes. I have served the public long enough....I would read—how I would read—and when I was bored I would sleep in my chair.”
Success
“And yet,” my friend said, commenting on these unguarded statements, “I believe he is the only person of his intimate circle who does not know that he would be hopelessly bored—that the things he decries are the very breath of life to him. There is absolutely no reason why he should not at once and forever realise his fancied ideal—and if his wife and children do not urge him to do so, it is only because they know that he would be absolutely miserable.” And this is true of many lives.
If the “recognition,” of which I have spoken above, were only accorded to the really eminent, it would be a somewhat different matter; but nine-tenths of the persons who receive it are nothing more than phantoms, who have set themselves to pursue the glory, without the services that ought to earn it. A great many people have a strong taste for power without work, for dignity without responsibility; and it is quite possible to attain consideration if you set yourself resolutely to pursue it.
The temptation comes in a yet more subtle form to men of a really high-minded type, whose chief preoccupation is earnest work andthe secluded pursuit of some high ideal. Such people, though they do not wish to fetter themselves with the empty social duties that assail the eminent, yet are tempted to wish to have the refusal of them, and to be secretly dissatisfied if they do not receive this testimonial to the value of their work. The temptation is not so vulgar as it seems. Every one who is ambitious wishes to be effective. A man does not write books or paint pictures or make speeches simply to amuse himself, to fill his time; and they are few who can genuinely write, as the late Mark Pattison wrote of a period of his life, that his ideal was at one time “defiled and polluted by literary ambition.”
Nevertheless, if there is to be any real attempt to win the inner peace of the spirit, such ambition must be not sternly but serenely resisted. Not until a man can pass by the rewards of fameoculis irretortis—“nor cast one longing, lingering look behind”—is the victory won.
Pure Ambition
It may be urged, in my case, that the obscurity for which I crave was never likely to be denied me. True; but at the same time ambition in its pettiest and most childishforms has been and is a real temptation to me: the ambition to dominate and dazzle my immediate circle, to stimulate curiosity about myself, to be considered, if not a successful man, at least a man who might have succeeded if he had cared to try—all the temptations which are depicted in so masterly and merciless a way by that acute psychologist Mr. Henry James in the character of Gilbert Osmond in thePortrait of a Lady—to all of these I plead guilty. Had I not been gifted with sufficient sensitiveness to see how singularly offensive and pitiful such pretences are in the case of others, I doubt if I should not have succumbed—if indeed I have not somewhat succumbed—to them.
Indeed, to some morbid natures such pretences are vital—nay, self-respect would be impossible without them. I know a lady who, like Mrs. Wittiterly, is really kept alive by the excitement of being an invalid. If she had not been so ill she would have died years ago. I know a worthy gentleman who lives in London and spends his time in hurrying from house to house lamenting how little time he can get to do what he really enjoys—to read or think. Another has come to my mindwho lives in a charming house in the country, and by dint of inviting a few second-rate literary and artistic people to his house and entertaining them royally, believes himself to be at the very centre of literary and artistic life, and essential to its continuance. These are harmless lives, not unhappy, not useless; based, it is true, upon a false conception of the relative importance of their own existence, but then is there one of us—the most hard-working, influential, useful person in the world—who does not exaggerate his own importance? Does any one realise how little essential he is, or how easily his post is filled—indeed, how many people there are who believe that they could do the same thing better if they only had the chance.
A life to be happy must be compounded in due degree of activity and pleasure, using the word in its best sense. There must be sufficient activity to take off the perilous and acrid humours of the mind which, left to themselves, poison the sources of life, and enough pleasure to make the prospect of life palatable.
The first necessity is to get rid, as life goes on, of all conventional pleasures. By the ageof forty a man should know what he enjoys, and not continue doing things intended to be pleasurable, either because he deludes himself into thinking that he enjoys them, or because he likes others to think that he enjoys them. I know now that I do not care for casual country-house visiting, for dancing, for garden parties, for cricket matches, and many another form of social distraction, but that the pleasures that remain and grow are the pleasures derived from books, from the sights and sounds of nature, from sympathetic conversation, from music, and from active physical exercise in the open air. It is my belief that a man is happiest who is so far employed that he has to scheme to secure a certain share of such pleasures. My own life unhappily is so ordered that it is the other way—that I have to scheme to secure sufficient activities to make such pleasure wholesome. But I am stern with myself. At times when I find the zest of simple home pleasures deserting me, I have sufficient self-control deliberately to spend a week in London, which I detest, or to pay a duty-visit where I am so acutely and sharply bored by a dull society—castigatio mea matutinaest—that I return with delicious enthusiasm to my own trivial round.
Our Own Importance
I do not flatter myself that I hold any very important place in the world’s economy. But I believe that I have humbly contributed somewhat to the happiness of others, and I find that the reward for thwarted, wasted ambitions has come in the shape of a daily increasing joy in quiet things and tender simplicities. I need not reiterate the fact that I draw from Nature, ever more and more, the most unfailing and the purest joy; and if I have forfeited some of the deepest and most thrilling emotions of the human heart, it is but what thousands are compelled to do; and it is something to find that the heart can be sweet and tranquil without them. The only worth of these pages must rest in the fact that the life which I have tried to depict is made up of elements which are within the reach of all or nearly all human beings. And though I cannot claim to have invented a religious system, or to have originated any new or startling theory of existence, yet I have proved by experiment that a life beset by many disadvantages, and deprived of most of the stimulus that to some would seem essential, need not drift into being discontented or evil or cold or hard.
Oct. 22, 1898.
That is, so to speak, the outside of my life, the front that is turned to the world. May I for a brief moment open the doors that lead to the secret rooms of the spirit?
The greater part of mankind trouble themselves little enough about the eternal questions: what we are, and what we shall be hereafter. Life to the strong, energetic, the full-blooded gives innumerable opportunities of forgetting. It is easy to swim with the stream, to take no thought of the hills which feed the quiet source of it, or the sea to which it runs; for such as these it is enough to live. But all whose minds are restless, whose imagination is constructive, who have to face some dreary and aching present, and would so gladly take refuge in the future and nestle in the arms of faith, if they could but find her—for these the obstinate question must come. Like the wind of heaven it rises. We may shut it out, trim the lamp, pile the fire, and lose ourselves inpleasant and complacent activities; but in the intervals of our work, when we drop the book or lay down the pen, the gust rises shrill and sharp round the eaves, the gale buffets in the chimney, and we cannot drown the echo in our hearts.
This is the question:—
Is our life a mere fortuitous and evanescent thing? Is consciousness a mere symptom of matter under certain conditions? Do we begin and end? Are the intense emotions and attachments, the joys and sorrows of life, the agonies of loss, the hungering love with which we surround the faces, the voices, the forms of those we love, the chords which vibrate in us at the thought of vanished days, and places we have loved—the old house, the family groups assembled, the light upon the quiet fields at evening, the red sunset behind the elms—all those purest, sweetest, most poignant memories—are these all unsubstantial phenomena like the rainbow or the dawn, subjective, transitory, moving as the wayfarer moves?
Who can tell us?
Some would cast themselves upon the Gospel—but to me it seems that Jesus spoke of these things rarely, dimly, in parables—andthat though He takes for granted the continuity of existence, He deliberately withheld the knowledge of the conditions under which it continues. He spoke, it is true, in the story of Dives and Lazarus, of a future state, of the bosom of Abraham where the spirit rested like a tired child upon his father’s knee—of the great gulf that could not be crossed except by the voices and gestures of the spirits—but will any one maintain that He was not using the forms of current allegory, and that He intended this parable as an eschatological solution? Again He spoke of the final judgment in a pastoral image.