Ought we then, it may be asked, to decide that if people are incapable of sustained effort, no effort is to be expected of them? Are we to decline upon a genial determinism, and to sweep away all belief in moral responsibility? No! because even if we are determinists, we have to take into account the fact that society does for some reason advance. When we consider the fact that the rightness of humanitarian principles, of anti-slavery movements, of popular education, of Factory Acts, of public hospitals is universally admitted; when we compare the current principles of the nineteenth-century man with the current principles, say, of the fourteenth-century man, it is plain that there has been a remarkable rise of the moral temperature, and that our optimistic view of progress is a rational one.
The ordinary person is to-day quite as strongly convinced of the rights of other men as he is of their duties; and thus the determinist is bound to confess that there is an ameliorating and humanising principle at work, if not in the world at large, at least in the Western races. It is inconsistent to acquiesce in faulty practice and not to acquiesce in the growth of ideals, even though one may believe that the advance is due to some external cause and is not self-developed. If performance is always more or less straining after the ideal, the determinist is justified in expecting a higher standard of performance, and his fatalism may take the direction of removing the obstacles to further improvement. But in dealing with individuals the moralist does well to temper his hopes with a wise determinism, and not to be too much cast down if one to whom he has made clear the disastrous effects of yielding to temptation cannot at once harmonise his purpose and his practice. If it were true, as too many preachers take for granted, that we have all, whatever our difference of physical and mental equipment, an equal sense of moral responsibility, the result would be to plunge us into hopeless pessimism. The question is whether the moralist is justified in pretending, for the sake of the effort that it may produce, to the victim of some moral weakness, that he really has the power of conquering his fault. He may say to himself, "Some people have the power of self-mastery, and it is better to assume that all have, because it tends to produce a greater effort than if one merely tries to console a moral weakling for his deficiencies." But this is a dangerous and casuistical path to tread.
It may be justified perhaps on the medical theory that if you tell a man he will get well, even if you consider him to be doomed, he is more likely to get well than if you tell him that you consider him to be doomed. But it is surely wrong to display no more moral indignation in the case of a vigorous person who has perversely indulged some temptation which he might have resisted, than in the case of one who is hampered by inheritance with a violent predisposition to moral evil. Even the most ardent moralist ought to be true to what he knows to be the truth. The method of Christ seems here again to differ from the method of the Christian teacher. Christ reserved his denunciations for the complacency of virtuous people. We do not see him rebuking the sinner; his rebukes are rather heaped upon the righteous. He seems to have had nothing but compassion for the sins that brought their own obvious punishment, and to have been indignant only with the sins that brought material prosperity with them. He treated the outcast as his friend, the respectable as his enemy. He seems to have held that sin at least taught people to make allowances, to forgive, to love, and that this was the nearest way to the Father's heart. Christ was very critical, and relentlessly exposed those of whom he disapproved, but he was never critical of weakness.
But, we may say, the moral principles which we have won with such difficulty will collapse and fail if we do not make a resolute stand against gross faults and strike at them wherever they show their heads. It is true that we have not got on very fast, but may it not be that we have mistaken the right method? Perhaps we should have got on faster still if we had reserved our indignation for the right things—self-satisfaction, complacency, injustice, cruelty. What we have done is to fight against the faults of the weak, against the faults of which no defence is possible, rather than against the faults of the strong, who can resent and revenge themselves for our criticism. Christ himself seems not to have been afraid of the sins of the flesh, but to have shown his severity rather against the sins of the world. Would it be rash to follow his example? We can all see the havoc wrought by impurity and intemperance, and there are plenty of rich respectable people, chaste and moderate by instinct, who are ready to join in what are called crusades against them. But as long as sins do not menace health or prosperity or comfort, we easily and glibly condone them. As long as Christian teachers pursue wealth and preferment, indulge ambition, seek the society of the respectable, practise pharisaical virtues, we are not likely to draw much nearer to the ideals of Christ.
There is one step of supreme importance from which a man must not shrink, however difficult it may seem to be; and that is to search and probe the depths of his soul, that he may find out what it is that he really and deeply and whole-heartedly and instinctively loves and admires and desires. Without this first step no progress is possible or conceivable, because whatever external revelations of God there may be, through nature, through beauty, through work, through love, there is always a direct and inner revelation from God to every individual soul; and, strange as it may appear, this is not always easy to discern, because of the influences, the ideas, the surroundings that have been always at work upon us, moulding us, for good and for evil, from our earliest days. We have been told that we ought to admire this and desire that, until very often our own inspiration, our true life, has been clumsily obscured. All these conventional beliefs we must discard; we may indeed resolve that it is better in some cases to comply with them to a certain extent for the sake of tranquillity, if they are widely accepted in the society in which we live; that is to say, we may decide to abstain from certain things which we do not believe to be wrong, because the world regards them as being wrong, and because to be misunderstood in such things may damage our relations with others. Thus, to use a familiar instance, we might think it unjust that a landowner should be permitted by the State to have the sole right of fishing in a certain river, and though one's conscience would not in the least rebuke one for fishing in that river, one might abstain from doing so because of the inconvenience which might ensue. Or, again, if society considers a certain practice to be morally meritorious, one might acquiesce in performing it even though one disbelieved in its advisability; thus a man might believe that a marriage ceremony was a meaningless thing, and that mutual love was a far higher consecration than the consecration of a priest; and yet he might rightly acquiesce in having his own wedding celebrated according to the rites of a particular church, for the sake of compliance with social traditions, and because no principle was involved in his standing out against it, or even because he thought it a seemly and beautiful thing. The only compliance which is immoral is the compliance with a practice which one believes to be immoral and which yet is sanctioned by society. Thus if a man believes hunting to be immoral, he must not take part in it for the sake of such enjoyment as he may find in it, or for the sake of friendly intercourse, simply because no penalty awaits him for doing what he knows to be wrong.
The only criterion in the matter is this: one must ask oneself what are the things that one is ashamed of doing, the things for which, when done, one's own conscience smites one in secret, even if they are accompanied by no social penalty whatever, even if they are forgiven and forgotten. These are not the things which one would simply dislike others to know that one has done. One might fear the condemnation of others, even though one did not believe that a particular act was in itself wrong; because of the misunderstandings and vexation and grief and derision that the knowledge of one's action might create. To take an absurd instance, a man might think it pleasant and even beneficial to sit or walk naked in the open air; but it would not be worth his while to do it, because he would be thought eccentric and indecent. There would be people who would condemn it as immoral; but it is not our duty, unless we believe it to be so, to convert others to a simpler kind of morality in wholly indifferent matters.
The sort of offences for which conscience condemns one, but to which no legal penalty is attached, are things like petty cruelty, unnecessary harshness, unkindness, introducing innocent people to evil thoughts and ideas, disillusioning others, disappointing them. A man may do these things and not only not be thought the worse of for them, but may actually be thought the better of, as a person of spirit and manliness; but if for any motive whatever, or even out of the strange duality of nature that besets us, he yields to these things, then he is living by the light of conventional morality and quenching his inner light, as deliberately as if he blew out for mere wantonness a lantern in a dark and precipitous place.
But if a man, looking narrowly and nearly into his own soul, says to himself in perfect candour, I do not desire truth; I do not admire self-sacrifice; I do not wish to be loved; I only wish to be healthy and rich and popular: what then? What if he says to himself in entire frankness that the only reason why he admires what are called virtues is because there seem to be enough people in the world to admire them to add to his credit if such virtues are attributed to him—what of his case? Well, I would have him look closer yet and see if there is not perhaps someone in the world, a mother, a sister, a child, whom he loves with an unselfish love, whom he would willingly please if he could, and would forbear to grieve though he could gain nothing by doing so or abstaining from doing so. I do not honestly think that there is any living being who would not discover this minimum of disinterestedness in his spirit, and upon this slender foundation he must try to build, for upon no other basis than genuine and native truth can any life be built at all.
But as a rule, in most hearts, however hampered by habit and material desires, there is a deep-seated desire to be worthier and better. And all who discern such a desire in their hearts should endeavour to fan it into flame, should warm their shivering hands at it, should frame it as a constant aspiration, should live as far as possible with the people and the books and the art which touches that frail desire into life and makes them feel their possibilities. They may fail a thousand times; but for all that, this is the seed of hope and love, the tree of life that grows in the midst of the garden. God will not let any of us stay where we are, and yet the growth and progress must be our own. We may delay it and hamper it, but we yet may dare to hope that through experiences we cannot imagine, through existences we cannot foresee, that little seed may grow into a branching tree, and fill the garden with shade and fragrance.
But if we are indeed desirous to do better, to grow in grace, and yet feel ourselves terribly weak and light-minded, what practical steps can we take to the goal that we see far off? The one thing that we can do in moments of insight is to undertake some little responsibility which we shall be ashamed to discard. We can look round our circle, and it will be strange if we cannot find at least one person whom we can help; and the best part of assuming such a responsibility is that it tends to grow and ramify; but in any case there is surely one person whom we can relieve, or encourage, or listen to, or make happier; if we can find the strength to come forward, to lead such a one to depend upon us, we shall have little inclination to desert or play false one whom we have encouraged to trust us. And thus we can take our first trembling step out of the mire.
It is an error either to glorify or degrade the body. If we worship it or pamper it, when it fails us, we are engulfed and buried in its ruins; if we misuse it, and we can misuse it alike by obeying it and disregarding it, it becomes our master and tyrant, or it fails us as an instrument. We must regard it rather as our prison, serving us for shelter and security, to be kept as fair and wholesome and cleanly as may be. When we are children, we are hardly conscious of it—or rather we are hardly conscious of anything else; in youth and maturity we are perhaps conscious of its joy and strength; but even so we must also at times be sadly aware that it is indeed the body of our humiliation; we must be aware of its dishonour, its uncleanly processes, its ugliness and feebleness, its slothfulness and perversity. There are times when the soul sighs to think of itself as chained to a sort of brute; it tugs at its chain, it snaps and growls, it tears and rends us; at another time it is content and serviceable; at another it grows spent and faint, and keeps the soul loitering, heart-sick and reluctant, on its pilgrimage.
But when once we have perceived the truth, that the body is not ourselves, but the habitation of the soul, we can make it into an instrument of our development. We can curb it when it is headstrong, we can goad it when it is indolent, and when it fails and thwarts us, as sooner or later it must do to all of us, the soul can sit beside it, neither heeding it nor compassionating it, but just triumphing over it in hope and patience.
There are seasons in the lives of most of us when the soul is full of zeal and insight, when it would like to work joyfully, to cheer and console and help others, to utter its song of praise, to make a happy stir in the world, when the body is morose and feeble and ill at ease, checks our work and utterance, makes us timid when we should be bold, and mournful when we wish to be amiable and genial; but these are the very hours when the soul grows most speedily and surely, if we do not allow the body to check and restrain us; we must perhaps husband its resources, but we can stifle our complaints, we can be brave and cheerful and kind.
And even if the disasters of the body have been in a sense our own fault; if we have lived prodigally and carelessly, either yielding to base desires or recklessly overworking and overstraining the mortal frame, for however high a motive, we can still triumph if we never yield for a moment to regret or remorse, but accept the conditions humbly and quietly, using such strength as we have to the uttermost. For here lies one of our strongest delusions, our belief in our own effectiveness. God's concern with each of us is direct and individual; the influences and personalities he brings us into contact with are all of his designing; and we may be sure of this, that God will make us just as effective as he intends, and that we are often more effective in silence and dejection than we are in activity and courage. We mourn faithlessly over lives cut short, activity suspended, promise unfulfilled; but we may be sure that in every case God is dealing faithfully with each soul, and using it as an instrument as far as it is fitted to be used; and thus for an active man disabled by illness to mourn over his wasted power is a grievous mistake, and no less a mistake to mourn over the unprofitableness of our lives, for they have been as profitable as God willed them to be. We can only be profitable to those for contact with whom God has prepared both them and us; and thus our duty in the matter is not to indulge in any anticipations of what our body may be able to do or unable to do, but simply to undertake what seems our plain duty; and then we shall find that the body can often do more than we could have imagined, and especially if it be directed by a tranquil mind; and if it fails us, that very failure is but the pressure of God's hand upon our shoulder, saying, "Continue in weakness and be not dismayed." If it is an error to increase our own limitations, it is equally an error not to give heed to them and to profit by them; and, after all, the body is more apt to rebel in carrying out the duties we dislike than in enjoying the pleasures on which we have set our mind. The real reason of our faithlessness is that we are so apt to look upon the one life in which we find ourselves as our only chance of expression and effectuation. If it were so, it would matter little what we did or said, if the soul is to be extinguished as a blown-out flame when the body is mingled with the dust.
I stood once upon the deck of a ship watching a shoal of porpoises following us and racing round us: every now and then the brown, sleek, shining bodies of the great creatures rose from the blue waves and entered them again with a soft plunge. Our life is like that: we rise for an instant into the light of life, we fall again beneath the waves; but all the while the soul pursues her real track unseen and unsuspected, as the gliding sea-beast cuts the green ocean twilight, or wanders among rocks and hidden slopes fringed with the branching ribbons, the delicate tangles of brine-fed groves.
Religion, as it is often taught and practised, has a dangerous tendency to become a merely mechanical and conventional thing. Worse still, it may even become a delusion, either when it is made an end in itself, or when it is regarded as a solution of all mysteries. The religious life is a vocation for some, just as the artistic life is a vocation for others, but it is not to be hoped or even desired that all should embrace and follow the religious vocation; it is just one of the paths to God, neither more nor less; and the mistake that the technically religious make is to regard it as a kind of life that is or ought to be universal. One who has the vocation is right to follow it, but he is not right to force it upon others, any more than an artist would be right in forcing the artistic life on others. It is too commonly held by the religious that formal worship is a necessity for all; they compare the relation of worship to the spiritual life to the relation of eating and drinking to the physical life. But this is not true of all human beings. Public liturgical worship is a kind of art, a very delicate and beautiful art; and just as the appeal of what is spiritual comes to some through worship, it comes to others through art, or poetry, or affection, or even through some kinds of action. There is no hint that Christ laid any stress on liturgical or public worship at all; he attended the synagogue, and went up to Jerusalem to the sacrifices; but he nowhere laid it down as a duty, or reproached those who did not practise it. He spoke vehemently of the practice of prayer, but recommended that it should be made as secret as possible; he chose a social meal for his chief rite, and the act of washing as his secondary rite. He did indeed warn his followers very sternly against the dangers of formalism; he never warned them against the danger of neglecting rites and ceremonies. On the other hand, it may be confidently stated that when religious worship has become a customary social act, a man who sympathises with the religious idea is right to show public sympathy with it; he ought to weigh very carefully his motives for abstaining. If it is indolence, or a fear of being thought precise, or a desire to be thought independent, or a contempt for sentiment that keeps him back, he is probably in the wrong; nothing but a genuine and deep-seated horror of formalism justifies him in protesting against a practice which is to many an avenue of the spiritual life. A lack of sympathy with certain liturgical expressions, a fear of being hypocritical, of being believed to hold the orthodox position in its entirety, justifies a man in not entering the ministry of the Church, even if he desires on general grounds to do so, but these are paltry motives for cutting oneself off from communion with believers. It is clear that Christ himself thought many of the orthodox practices of the exponents of the popular religion wrong, but he did not for that reason abjure attendance upon accustomed rites; and it is far more important to show sympathy with an idea, even if one does not agree with all the details, than to seem, by protesting against erroneous detail, to be out of sympathy with the idea. The mistake is when a man drifts into thinking of ceremonial worship as a practice specially and uniquely dear to God; every practice by which the spiritual principle is asserted above the material principle is dear to God, and a man who reads a beautiful poem and is thrilled with a desire for purity, goodness, and love thereby, is a truer worshipper of the Spirit than a man who mutters responses in a prescribed posture without deriving any inspiration from them.
The essence of religion is to desire to draw near to God, to receive the Spirit of God. It does not in the least degree matter how the individual expresses that essential truth. He may love some consecrated rite as being pure and beautiful, or even because other hearts have loved it,—the rite is permitted, not commanded by God—he may express God by terms of co-equality and consubstantiality, and even desire to proclaim such expressions, in concert with like-minded persons, to the harmonies of an organ, so long as it uplifts him in spirit; but such a man falls into a grievous error when he vilifies or condemns others for not seeing as he does, or enunciates that thus and thus only can a man apprehend God. The more firmly that a Church holds the necessity of what is unessential, the more it diverges from the Spirit of Christ.
It is by the essentials that we live and make progress. The man who apprehends such a statement of doctrine as the Athanasian creed affords, as a sweet and gracious mystery, thereby draws nearer to God. But if he goes further and says, "The essence of my finding inspiration in any particular creed is that I should believe it to be absolutely and literally true, and that all outside it are thieves and robbers, or at the best ignorant and misguided persons," then he stumbles at the very outset. His own belief is probably true in the sense that the truth doubtless transcends and embraces all spiritual light hopefully discerned; but the moment that a man condemns those who do not exactly agree with himself, he sins against the Spirit. Is it not a ghastly and inconceivable thought that Christ should have authorised that men should be brought to the light by persecution? Or that any of his words could be so foully distorted as to lend the least excuse to such a principle of action? It matters not what kind of persecution is employed, whether it be mental or physical. The essence is that men should so apprehend God as to desire to draw nearer to him, and that they should be goaded or coerced or terrified into submission is intolerable.
The true worshipper is the man who at no specified place or time, but as naturally as he breathes or sleeps, opens his heart to God and prays for holy influences to guard and guide him. There are some who have a quickened sense of fellowship and unity, when such prayers and aspirations are uttered in concert; but the error is to desire merely the bodily presence of one's fellow-creatures for such a purpose, rather than their mental and spiritual acquiescence. The result of such a desire is that it is often taught, or at all events believed, that there is a kind of merit in the attendance at public worship. The only merit of it lies in the case of those who sacrifice a personal disinclination to the desire to testify sympathy for the religious life. It is no more meritorious for those who personally enjoy it, than it is for a lover of pictures to go to a picture-gallery, for thus the hunger of the spirit is satisfied.
It would be better, perhaps, if it were frankly realised and recognised that it is a special taste, a peculiar vocation. It would be better if those who loved liturgical worship desired only the companionship of like-minded people; better still if it were recognised that there is no necessary connection between liturgical worship and morality at all, except in so far that all pure spiritual instincts are on the side of morality. But so far from holding it to be a duty for a man to protest against the importance attached to worship by liturgically-minded people, I should hold it to be a duty for all spiritually-minded men to show as much active sympathy as they can for a practice which is to many persons a unique and special channel of spiritual grace.
It is not the business of those who are enlightened to protest against conventional things, unless those conventions obscure and distort the truth. It is rather their duty to fall in with the existing framework of life, and live as simply and faithfully inside it as they can. To myself the plainest service is beautiful and uplifting, if it obviously evokes the spiritual ardour of the worshippers; and, on the other hand, a service in some majestic church, consecrated by age and tradition and association, and enriched by sacred art and heart-thrilling music, appeals as purely and graciously as anything in the world to my spiritual instinct. But I would frankly realise that to some such ceremonies appear merely as unmeaning and uninspiring; and the presence of such people is a mere discord in the harmony of sweetness.
The one essential thing is that we should desire to draw near to God, that we should faithfully determine by what way and in what manner we can approach him best, and that we should pursue that path as faithfully and as quietly as we can.
It is Good Friday to-day. This morning I wandered through a clean, rain-washed world; among budding hedges, making for the great Cathedral towers that loom across the flat. It was noon when I passed through the little streets. Entering the great western portals, I found the huge Cathedral all lit by shafts of golden sunshine. There was a little company of worshippers under the central lantern; and a grave and dignified priest, with a tender sympathy of mien, solemnly vested, was leading the little throng through the scenes of the Passion. I sate for a long time among the congregation; and what can I say of the message there delivered? It was subtle and serious enough, full of refinement and sweetness, but it seemed to me to have little or nothing to do with life. I will not here go into the whole of the teaching that I heard—but it was for me all vitiated by one thought. The preacher seemed to desire us to feel that the sad and wasted form of the Redeemer, hanging in his last agony on the cross among the mocking crowd, was conscious at once of his humanity and his Divinity. But the thought is meaningless and inconceivable to me. If he was conscious then of his august origin and destiny, if he knew that, to use a material metaphor enough, he would shortly pass through lines of kneeling angels amid triumphant pealing music to the very Throne and Heart of God, the sufferings of his Passion can have been as nothing. There is no touch of example or help for me in the scene. Even the despairing cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" becomes a piece of unworthy drama; and yet if one presses the words of Jesus, and remembers that he had said but a few short hours before that he had but to speak the word, and legions of angels were at hand to succour him, it is impossible to resist the feeling that he knew who he was and whither he was bound. I do not say that the thesis is untrue; I only say that if he knew the truth, then there is no medicine in his sufferings for human despair.
The preacher seemed to feel the difficulty dimly, for he fell back upon the thought that the agony was caused by Christ's bearing the load of the world's sin. But here again I felt that, after all, sin must have been in a sense permitted by God. If God is omnipotent and all-embracing, no amount of freewill in man could enable him to choose what was not there already in the Mind of God.
And then, too, the lesson of science is that man is slowly struggling upwards out of his bestial inheritance into purity and light; and thus if a man can inherit evil from evil progenitors by the law of God, he is not a free agent in the matter; and it thus becomes a piece of sad impiety, or worse, to say that it was inconceivable agony to God to bear the sins which his own awful law perpetuated.
And to go deeper, what did the sacrifice effect? It effected no instant change in the disposition of man; it appears to me to be a dark profanity to believe that the human death of Christ effected any change in the purpose and Love of God to the world. That God should come himself on earth to die, in order that he might thereafter regard the human race more mercifully, seems to me, if it were true, to be a helpless piece of metaphysical jugglery. If that were true of God, there is nothing that I could not believe of him.
And so the words of the preacher, a man, as I knew, of faithful energy and unbroken prosperity of virtue, brought me no more hint of the truth than did the voice of a hidden dove which cooed contentedly in the stillness in some sun-warmed window of the clerestory. Dove and preacher alike had lived secure and contented lives under the shadow of the great Church, and equally, no doubt, if unconsciously, approved of the system which made such tranquil lives possible.
Once, it seemed to me, the human accent broke urgently through, when the preacher spoke of dark hours of spiritual dryness, when the soul seemed shut out from God—"When we know," he said in heart-felt tones, "that the Love of God is all about us, but we cannot enter into it; it seems to be outside of us." Had he indeed suffered thus, this courteous, kindly priest? I felt that he had, and that he was one of the sorrowful fellowship.
One word he said that dwells with me, that "Faith overleaps all visible horizons." That was a golden thought; so that as I walked back in the cool of the afternoon, and saw the prodigious plain stretch on all hands, and thought how strangely my own tiny life was limited and bound, I felt that the message of Christ was a mysterious trust, an undefined hope; not a mechanical process of forgiveness and atonement, but an assurance that there is something in the world which calls lovingly to the soul, and that while we stretch out yearning hands and desirous hearts to that, we are indeed very near to the unknown Mind of God.
I have often wondered how it has come about that Job has become proverbial for patience. I suppose that it has arisen out of the verse in the Epistle of St. James about the patience of Job; but, like the passage in the Book of Numbers which attributes an extreme meekness to Moses, it seems to me to be either a very infelicitous description, or else a case where both adjectives have shifted their meaning. Moses is notable for an almost fiery vehemence of character, and the punishment that was laid upon him was the outcome of a display of intemperate wrath. Just as we associate meekness with the worm that never turns, so the typically patient animal is the ass who is too phlegmatic to resent the most unjust chastisement, and ready to accommodate itself to the most overtaxing burdens. But Job is the very opposite of this; he endures, because there is no way out; but he never for a moment acquiesces in the justice of his affliction, and his complaints are both specific and protracted. He does not even display any very conspicuous fortitude under his afflictions. He is not indomitable so much as persistent. He is rather stubbornly self-righteous. It could not, of course, be otherwise, for the essence of the situation is that the sufferer should be aware that his deeds do not deserve punishment, and that the sufferings he endures should be permitted in order that his faith in God as well as his faith in his own integrity should be tested.
The truth is that the word patience is used in English in a double sense; it is applied to a sort of unreasoning stupidity, which accepts suffering and pain without adding to it by imaginative comparison; such patience knows nothing of the pain of which Dante speaks, the pain of contrasting present unhappiness with past delight; and similarly, it does not suffer the pangs of anticipation, the terrors of which Lord Beaconsfield spoke, when he said that the worst calamities in his life were the calamities which never happened. Nine-tenths of the misery of suffering lies in the power of forecasting its continuance and its increase, and the lesser patience of which I have spoken is the patience which, by no effort of reason, but by pure instinct, hears the burden of the moment in the spirit of the proverb that "sufficient for the day is the evil thereof."
But there is a nobler and a purer quality of patience which is perhaps one of the highest and most hopeful attributes of humanity, because it is nurtured in so strong a soil, and watered with the dew of tears; this is a certain tranquil, courageous, and unembittered sweetness in the presence of an irreparable calamity, which is in its very essence divine, and preaches more forcibly the far-reaching permanence of the spiritual clement in mankind than a thousand rhapsodies and panegyrics extolling human ingenuity and human greatness. Mankind has a deeply rooted and childlike instinct that apology and repentance ought to be met with the suspension of pains and penalties, and the hardest lesson in the world to learn is that guilt may be forgiven, but that the consequences of guilt may yet have to be endured. When we have really learnt that, we are indeed perfected. St. Peter in one of his epistles says that it is less creditable to be patient when one is buffeted for one's faults than when one suffers for one's virtues. I fear that I cannot agree with this. One may be convinced of the justice of a sentence, but the more one is convinced of it, the more does one regret the course of conduct that made the sentence necessary. The sinner who suffers for his sin bears not only the pain of the punishment but also the sense of shame and self-condemnation. The good man who suffers for his goodness does indeed have to bear the burden of an awful mystery, a doubt whether God is indeed on the side of the righteous; but he is not crushed beneath the additional burden of self-contempt, he has not the humiliating sense of folly and weakness which the transgressor has to bear; and thus it so often happens that the well-meaning transgressor is slow to learn the lesson of patience, because he takes refuge in a vague sort of metaphysics, and attributes to heredity and environment what is really the outcome of his own wilfulness and perversity.
But the true patience, whatever the cause of its sufferings, brings with it a blessed sense of the faithful sternness, the fruitful lovingness of God, who will not let even the feeblest of sinners be satisfied with less than he can attain, in whose hands the punishment, like fire, runs swiftly and agonisingly to and fro, consuming the baser elements of passion and desire.
I am quite sure that I like solitude. There is no pleasure in the world like waking up in the morning and feeling that absolutely the whole day is at one's disposal; that one can work when one likes, go out when it is fine, have one's meals when one prefers, even when one is hungry. There is no one near enough to drop in, in this blissful corner of the world, and a caller is a rare bird. I have too much to do ever to be bored, and indeed the day is seldom long enough for all I have designed. Best of all, my work, though abundant, is seldom pressing. I have hardly ever anything to do that must be done that moment. With some people that would end in putting off everything till the last moment, but that is not the case with me. The greatest luxury I know is to have accumulated stores of work on which one can draw; and my tendency is, if ever a piece of work is entrusted to me, to do it at once. I have few gregarious instincts, I suppose. I like eating alone, reading alone, and walking alone. There is also a good deal to be said for learning to enjoy solitude, for it is the one luxury that a man without any close home ties can command. An independent bachelor is sure, whether he likes it or not, to have, as life goes on, more and more enforced solitude—that is, if he detests living in a town. I have not even nephews and nieces whom it would be natural to see something of; and thus it is a wise economy to practise for solitude.
From the point of view of work, too, it is undeniably delightful. I need never suspend a train of thought; I can write till I have finished a subject. There is never the abominable necessity of stopping in the middle of a sentence, with the prospect of having laboriously to recapture the mood; and it is the same with reading. If I am interested in a book, I can read on till I am satiated. Never before in my life have I had the chance of reading, as Theocrite praised God, "morning, evening, noon, and night." But now, if I get really absorbed in a volume, I can let the whole story, tragedy or comedy, open before me, take its course, and draw to a close. The result is that I find I can apprehend a book in a way that I have never apprehended one before, in its entirety; one can enter wholly and completely into the mind of an author, into the progress of a biography; so that to read a book now is like sitting out a play.
All this is very delightful; and no less delightful, too, is it, if the mood takes me, to wander off for a whole day in the country; to moon onwards entirely oblivious of time; to stop on a hill-top and survey a scene, to turn into a village church and sit long in the cool gloom; to seek out the heart of a copse, all carpeted with spring flowers, and to lie on a green bank, with the whisper of the leaves in one's ear; or to sit beside a stream, near a crystal pool, half-hidden in sedges, and to see hour by hour what goes on in the dim waterworld. I do not mean to say that it would not be pleasanter to share one's rambles with a congenial companion; but it is not easy to find one; either there are differences of opinion, or the subtle barriers of age to overleap, or one is conscious that there are regions of one's mind in which a friend will inevitably and fretfully miss his way—there are not many friends, for anyone, to whom his mind can lie perfectly and unaffectedly open; and thus, though I do not hesitate to say that I would prefer the society of the perfect friend to my loneliness, yet I prefer my loneliness to the incursions of the imperfect friend.
Then at the close of day there is a prospect of a long, quiet evening; one can go to bed when one wishes, with the thought of another unclouded and untroubled day before one. Liberty is, after all, the richest gift that life can give.
And now, having made this panegyric on solitude, I will be just and fair-minded, and I will say exactly what I have found the disadvantages to be.
In the first place, though I do not grow morbid, I find a loss of proportion creeping over me. I attach an undue importance to small things. A troublesome letter, which in a busy life one would answer and forget, rattles in the mind like a pea in a bladder. A little incident—say, for instance, that one has to find fault with a servant—assumes altogether unreal importance. In a busy life one would make up one's mind as well as one could, and act. But here it is not easy to make up one's mind. One weighs all contingencies too minutely; one is too considerate, if that is possible; and if one makes up one's mind, perhaps, to find fault, the presence in the house of a dissatisfied person is an undue weight on the mind. Or one reads an unfavourable review, and is too much occupied with its possible results on one's literary prospects. It is not depression that these things induce, but one expends too much energy and thought upon them.
But this on the whole matters little. There is time to be slow in decision; there is time to forecast possibilities. Indeed, it is an advantage for the solitary man to cultivate an over-elaborate way of considering a subject, a slow picking-up and matching of patterns, a maddening deliberation, simply by way of recreation. For a danger of solitude, if one likes one's work, is that one works too much and too hard. Then one writes too much, forgets to fill the cistern; one uses up the old phrases, the old ideas. All which is a sore temptation to a forgetful writer like myself, who re-invents and re-discovers the old sentences with a shock of pleasing novelty and originality, only to find it all written in an earlier book.
But these are all superficial material difficulties such as have to be faced in every life. The real and dark danger of solitude is the self-absorption that is bound to follow. With one like myself, to whom the meeting of a new person is a kind of momentous terror, who feels forced instinctively to use all possible arts to render a clumsy presence and a heavy manner bearable, whose only hope is to be respectfully tolerated, to whom society is not an easy recreation but an arduous game, who would always sooner write a dozen letters than have an interview, with such an one the solitary life tends to make one ghost-like and evasive before one's time. Yet it is not for nothing, I reflect, that Providence has never pushed a pawn to me in the shape of an official wife, and has markedly withheld me from nephews and nieces. It is not for nothing that relationships with others appear to me in the light of a duty, at least in the initial stages, rather than a pleasure.
And yet I reflect that I should doubtless be a better man, even with a shrewish wife and a handful of heavy, unattractive children. I should have to scheme for them, to make things easier for them, to work for them, to recommend them, to cherish them, to love them. These dear transforming burdens are denied me. And yet would the sternest and severest mentor in the world bid me marry without love, for the sake of its effect on my character? "No," he would say, "not that! but let yourself go, be rash, fall in love, marry in haste! It is your only salvation." But that is like telling a dwarf that it is his only salvation to be six feet high—it cannot be done by taking thought. No one can see more acutely and clearly, in more terrible and melancholy detail, than myself what one misses. Call it coldness, call it indifference, call it cowardice—the matter is not mended. If one is cold, one does not grow hot by pretending to perspire; if one is indifferent, one does not become enthusiastic by indulging in hollow rhetoric. If one is cowardly, one can only improve by facing a necessary danger, not by thrusting oneself into perilous situations. To marry without love, for the sake of the discipline, is as if a dizzy man should adventure himself alone upon the Matterhorn; the rashness of proved incapacity is not courage, but a detestable snobbishness. One must make the best of the hard problem of God, not add to its complexity, in order to increase one's patience. Neither men nor angels have any patience with a fool, and it is the deed of a fool to cultivate occasions of folly. One serves best by making the most of one's faculties, not by choosing a life where one's disabilities have full play, in order to correct them. I might as well tell the Pharisee, who bids me let myself go, to take to drink, in order that he may learn moral humility, or to do dishonest things for the discipline of reprobation. I do not think so ill of God as not to believe that he is trying to help me; as the old poet said, "The Gods give to each man whatever is most appropriate to him. Man is dearer to the Gods than to himself." God has sent me many gifts, both good and evil; but he has not sent me a wife, perhaps in pity for a frail creature of his hand, who might have had to bear that tedious fate! But I know what I miss, and see that loveless self-interest is the dark bane of solitude. One may call it a moral leprosy if one loves hard names; but no leper would choose to be a leper if he could avoid it. Whatever happens in this dim world, we should be tender and compassionate of one another. It is a mere stupidity, that stupidity which is of the nature of sin, to compassionate a man for being ill or poor, and not to compassionate him for being cold and lonely. The solitary man must dwell within his own shadow, and make what sport he can; and it is the saddest of all the privileges of reasoning beings, that reason can thus debar a man from wholesome experience. Even in the desolation of ruined Babylon the satyr calls to his fellow and the great owl rears her brood; but the narrow and shivering soul must sit in solitude, till perhaps on a day of joy he may see the background of his dark heart all alive with a tapestry of shining angels, bearing vials in their hands of the water of Life.
I wonder if others experience a very peculiar sensation, which comes upon me at intervals unexpectedly and inexplicably in a certain kind of scene, and on reading a certain type of book—I have known it from my early childhood, as far back as I can recollect anything. It is the sensation of being quite close to some beautiful and mysterious thing which I have lost, and for which in a blind way I am searching. It contains within it a vague yet poignant happiness, a rich and unknown experience. It is the nearest I ever come to a sense of pre-existence; and I have sometimes wondered if it might not be, not perhaps my own pre-existence, but some inherited recollection of happiness in which I myself had no part, but which was part of the mind of one, or of many, from whom I derive my origin. If limbs and features, qualities and desires, are derived from one's ancestors, why should one not also derive a touch of their happy dreams, their sweet remembrances?
The first time it ever came to me was when we were taken, quite as small children, to a little cottage which stood in a clearing of a great pine-wood near Wellington College. I suppose that the cottage was really older than the wood; it was guarded by great sprawling laurels, and below the house was a privet-hedged garden, sheltered all round by the pines, with a stream at the foot. The sun lay very warm on the vegetable beds and orchard trees, and there was a row of hives—not painted cupboards such as one now sees, but big egg-shaped things made of a rope of twisted straw—round which on warm days the humming bees made a low musical note, that rose and fell as the numbers increased or diminished. I suppose my nurse went to buy honey there—we called it The Honey-woman's Cottage. I dimly remember an old, smiling, wrinkled woman opening the door to us, summoning my nurse in to a mysterious talk, and inviting us to go into the garden meanwhile. The whole proceeding was intensely mysterious and beautiful. Through the red pine stems one could see the sandy soil rising and falling in low ridges, strewn with russet needles. Down below, nearer to the stream, a tough green sword-grass grew richly; and beyond lay the deep wood, softly sighing, and containing all sorts of strange scents and haunting presences. In the garden there was a penetrating aromatic smell from the box-hedges and the hot vegetable-beds. We wandered about, and it used to seem to me, I remember, like the scenes in which some of Grimm's fairy-tales were enacted I suppose that the honey-woman was the wife of a woodman and was a simple soul enough; but there was something behind it all; she knew more than she would say. Strange guests drew nigh to the cottage at nightfall, and the very birds of the place had sad tales to tell. But it was not that I connected it with anything definite—it was just the sense of something narrowly eluding me, which was there, but which I could not quite perceive. There were other places, too, that gave me the same sense—one a big dark pool in the woods, with floating water-lilies; it was there, too, that mysterious presence; and it was to be experienced also at the edge of a particular covert, a hanging wood that fell steeply from the road, where the ferns glittered with a metallic light and the flies buzzed angrily in the thicket.
And there have been places since where the same sense has come strongly upon me. One was a glade in Windsor Forest, just to be reached by a rapid walk from Eton on a half-holiday afternoon; it was a wide grassy place, with a few old oaks in it, gnarled and withered; and over the tree-tops was a glimpse of distant blue swelling hills. Even now the same sensation comes back to me, more rarely but not less keenly, at smoke going up from the chimney of an unseen house surrounded by woods, and certain effects of sunset upon lonely woodsides and far-off bright waters. It comes with a sudden yearning, and a sense, too, of some personal presence close at hand, a presence that feels and loves and would manifest itself if it could—one with whom I have shared happiness and peace, one in whose eyes I have looked and in whose arms I have been folded. But the thing is so utterly removed from any sense of desire or passion that I can hardly describe it. It gives a sense of long summer days spent in innocent experience, with no need of word or sign. There is no sense of stirring adventure, of exultation, or pride about it—it is just an infinite untroubled calm, of beautiful things perceived in a serenity untroubled by memory or hope, by sorrow or fear. Its quality lies in its eternity; there is no beginning or end about it, no opening or closing door. There seems nothing to explain or reconcile in it; the heart is content to wonder, and has no desire to understand. There is in it none of the shadow of happy days, past and gone, embalmed in memory; no breath of the world comes near it, no thought of care or anxiety, no ugly shadows of death or silence. It seems when it comes like the only true thing in the world, the only perfectly pure thing, like light or sweet sound. And yet it has always the sense that it is not yet quite found, that it is there waiting for a moment to declare itself, within reach of the hand and yet unattained. It is so real that it makes me doubt the reality of everything else in the world, and it removes for an instant all sense of the jarring and inharmonious elements of life, the pitiful desires, the angers and coldnesses of fellow-mortals, the selfish claims of one's own timid heart and mind.
It came to me for a moment to-day in my little orchard deep in high-seeded grass: a breeze came and went, stirring the leaves of the trees and bowing the tall grasses with its flying footsteps; a bird broke out in a bush into a jocund trill of song, as if triumphing in the joyful sight of something that was hidden from my eyes. If I could but have caught and held the secret, how easily it would have solved my own perplexities, how faithfully would I have whispered it in men's ears; but while I wondered, it was gone like the viewless passage of an angel, and left me with my longing unfulfilled, my yearning unsatisfied.
I have been spending some days in town, on business; I have been sitting on two committees, I have given a lecture, I have attended a public dinner; and now I have come back gratefully to my hermitage. I got home in the evening; it is winter, but unusually warm; and the birds were fluting in the bushes, as I walked round the garden in the twilight, as though they had an inkling of the Spring; to hear them gave me a sort of delicious pain, I hardly know why. They seemed to speak to me of old happy hours that have long folded their wings, of bright pleasant days, lightly regarded, easily spent, shut into the volumes of the past. "I see," as the Psalmist said, "that all things come to an end." There is something artificial about the soft sadness that one feels, and yet it is perfectly natural and instinctive; it is not as if I were melancholy or unhappy; my life is full of active enjoyment, and I am in that mood of delightful tranquillity which comes of having finished a tiresome series of engagements which I had anticipated without pleasure. It is not the sense only of vanished days; nor is it the sense of not having realised their joyfulness at the time; it is a deeper regret than that; it is the shadow of the uncertainty as to what will ultimately become of our individuality. If one was assured of immortality, of permanence, of growth, of progress, these regrets would fall off from one as gently as withered leaves float from a tree; or rather, one would never think of them; but now one has the sense of a certain number of beautiful days dealt out to one by God, and the knowledge that they are spent one by one. Another strange thing about the retrospective sadness of the vanished past is that it is not the memorable days of life, as a rule, whose passing one regrets. One would not, I think, wish to have one's days of triumph, of success, or even the days when one was conscious of an extreme personal happiness, back again. Partly it is that one seems to have appreciated their quality and crushed out their sweetness—partly, too, there mingles with days of extreme and conscious bliss a certain fever of the spirit, a certain strain of excitement, that is not wholly pleasurable. No, the days that one rather desires to have again are the days of tranquil and easy contentment, when the old home-circle was complete, and when one hardly guessed that one was happy at all, and did not perceive—how could one?—as life rose serenely and strongly to its zenith, what the pains and shadows of the declining life might be. And yet more strange is it that the memory, by some subtle alchemy, has the power of involving in a delicate golden mist days of childhood and boyhood which one knows as a matter of fact not to have been happy. For instance, my own memory continues to clothe my early schooldays with a kind of sunlit happiness, though I was not only not consciously happy, but distinctly and consciously unhappy. But memory refuses to retain the elements of unhappiness, the constant apprehension, that hung over one like a cloud, of punishment, and even ill-usage. I was not unduly punished at school, and I was certainly never ill-used. But one saw others suffer, and my own sensitive and timid nature perpetually foreboded disaster. Day after day as a little boy I longed for home surroundings and home affections as eagerly as the hart desires the water-brooks. But memory pushes all that aside, and obstinately insists on regarding the whole period in an idyllic and buoyant light.
I walk round the borders, which are all full of the little glossy spikes of snowdrops pushing up, struggling through the crusted earth. The sad hero ofMaudwalked "in a ghastly glimmer," and found "the shining daffodil dead." I walk in the soft twilight, that is infinitely tender, soothing, and sweet, and find the daffodil taking on his new life; and there rises in my heart an uplifted yearning, not so much for the good days that are dead, but that I may somehow come to possess the peace that underlies the memory of them all—not handle it for a moment and lay it down, but possess it or be possessed by it for ever.
Yet these busy days through which I have been passing are good for me, I believe. I have seen and talked to a number of people; and so far from finding that my solitary life makes me unfit for society, I think that it gives me a good-humoured contentment in the interchange of talk and argument, which I lacked in old days when I was fighting for my position. The things seem to matter so little to me now. I do not care in the least what impression I make, so long as people are kind and friendly. Life is no longer a race, where I wish to get ahead of others; it is a pilgrimage in which we are all alike bound. But it is good for me to be in the middle of it all, not only because of the contrast which it presents to the life I have chosen, but because it is like the strong scour of a current sweeping through the mind and leaving it clean and sweet. The danger of the quiet life is that one gets too comfortable, too indolent. It does me good to have to mix with people, to smile and bow, to try and say the right thing, to argue a point courteously, to weigh an opponent's arguments, to make efforts, to go where I do not desire to go; and I have no longer an axe of my own to grind; I only desire that the right conclusion should be reached.
But the things which people consider amusing and entertaining bewilder me more and more. I went to an evening party on one of the evenings I spent in town. There was a suite of fine rooms, hung with beautiful pictures and full of works of art. A courteous host and hostess received us, said a few amiable words to each, and passed us on into the rooms: we circulated, stood, sate, looked, talked. I suppose it is a question of temperament, but I felt that every single element of social, intellectual, and aesthetic pleasure was absent from the scene. One had no time to look at the beautiful things that leaned and beckoned from the walls. There was no chance of quiet, reasonable talk; one pumped up a few inanities to person after person. I suppose that most of the guests would not have come if they did not at all events think it amused them; but what was the charm? I suppose that to most of the guests it was the stir, the light, the moving figures—for there were many beautiful and stately women and distinguished men present—the sense of company, warmth, success, about it all. To me it was merely distracting—a score of sources of pleasure, and all of them preventing the enjoyment of each. I think I am probably more and not less sensitive to all these fine and rare things than perhaps most people; and I suppose it is this very sensitiveness that makes me averse to them allin mass. It is to me like the jangling of all the strings of some musical instrument. I felt that I could have lingered alone in these fine rooms, wandering from picture to picture with a lively pleasure. There were many people present with whom I should have deeply enjoyed atête-à-tête. But the whole effect was like over-eating oneself, like having to taste a hundred exquisite dishes in a single meal. I do not protest against such gatherings on principle; if they give the guests a sense of pleasure and well-being, I have not a word to say against it all. But I believe in my heart that there are many people who do not really enjoy it, or enjoy it only in a purely conventional way; and what I should like to do is to assist the people whose enjoyment of it is conventional, to find out simpler and more real sources of happiness; because to make these great houses possible there is a vast amount of patient and unpraised human labour wasted. I do not think labour is wasted in producing beautiful things, so long as they can have an effect; but a superabundance of beauty has no effect—no effect, at least, that could not be produced by things less costly of effort and skill. The very refreshments, which hardly any one touched, stand for an amount of wasted labour which might have given pleasure to the poor toilers who produced them. Think of the ransacking of different climates, of the ships speeding over the sea, the toil of gatherers, porters, cooks, servers, that went to fit out that sparkling buffet. I suppose that it is easy for me, who do not value the result, to be mildly socialistic about these things; the pathos is not in the work, but in the waste of the work, not in the delicate things collected for our use and however fitfully enjoyed, but in the things made and collected by unknown toilers, and then either not used at all or not consciously enjoyed.
And so it is with a heightened relish for the serener simplicities of life, that I return to my quiet rooms, my old trees, my carelessly ordered garden, as a sailor floats into the calm waters of the well-known haven out of the plunge and surf of the sea. There is no strain here to torment me, no waste to afflict me. I do not have to spend reluctant hours in enjoyments which I do not enjoy; I am not overshadowed by the sense of engagements which I am bound to keep. Moreover, I can return to the beloved work which is unwillingly suspended in the bustle of town. I do not know why it is that I have so deep a sense of the value of time, when what I do matters so little to any one. But at least I have here the sense of doing work that may conceivably minister something to the service of others, while in town I have the sense of spending hours in occupations that cannot in any way benefit others, while they are certainly no satisfaction to myself,
"In hoc portu quiescitSi quis aquas timet inquietas,"
says the wistful poet; and the tossing on the waves of the world thus gives me the tonic sense of contrast to my peaceful life which it would otherwise lack. It is the sail and vinegar of the banquet, lending a brisk and wholesome savour to what might otherwise tend to become vapid and dull.
I have just finished a book and despatched it to the press. It is rather a dreary moment that! At first one has a sense of relief at having finished a task and set down a burden, but that elation lasts only for a day or two, and then one begins to miss one's true and faithful companion. This particular book has been in a special sense a companion to me, because it has been a book out of my own mind and heart, not a book undertaken for the sake of diffusing useful information, but a book of which I conceived the idea, planned the structure, and filled up the detail. It has almost assumed a personality. It has hardly been absent from my thoughts for the last six months. It has darted into my mind when I awoke; it has stood looking over my shoulder as I read, pointing with airy finger at the lines, "There is a thought for you; here is an excellent illustration of that point you could not make clear." It has walked with me as close or closer than my shadow, until it has become a real thing, a being, a friend, like myself but yet not quite myself.
And then my book, as I read it through for the last time, is all full of gentle and tender associations. This chapter brings back to me a day of fierce wind and blustering rain, when I walked by sodden roads and whistling hedges in my oldest clothes, till they hung heavily about me and creaked as I moved; the thought of the chapter came to me, I remember, when I decided that I had been far enough for health and even for glory, and when I fled back before the hooligan wind; then followed a long, quiet, firelit evening when I abandoned myself in luxurious case to my writing, till the drowsy clock struck the small hours of the morning. Then another chapter is all scented with the breath of roses, that stole into my windows on a still summer evening; at another point the page is almost streaked and stained for me with the sorrowful tidings which came to me in the middle of a sentence; when I took up my writing again some days after, it seemed as though there was a deep trench between me and my former self. And again another chapter was written in all the glow of a beautiful and joyful experience, in a day of serene gladness which made me feel that it was worth while to have lived, even if the world should hold nothing else that was happy for me.
Thus, then, and thus has my life transferred itself to these pages, till they are all full for me of joy and sorrow, of experience and delight, I suppose that a painter or a musician have the same tenderness about their work, though it seems to me impossible that their life can have so flowed into picture or song as my life has flowed into my book. The painter has had to transcribe what he sees, the musician to capture the delicate intervals that have thrilled his inner ear—but if the painter's thought has been absorbed in the forms that he is depicting, if the musician has lost himself among the airy harmonies, the sweet progressions, these things must have drawn them away from life, and secluded them in a paradise of emotion; but with me it has been different; for it is life itself that has palpitated in my pages, my very heart's blood has been driven by eager pulsations through sentence and phrase; and the book is thus a part of myself in a way in which no picture and no melody can be. I have something, I think, of the joy of the mother over her child, the child that has lain beneath her bosom and been nourished from her heart; and now that my book is to leave me, it is a part of myself that goes into the world of men.
And now I shall pass vague and dreary days, until the seed of life again quickens within me, and till I know again that I have conceived another creature of the mind. Dreary days, because the mind, relieved of its sweet toil, flaps loose and slack like a drooping sail. I am weary, too, not with a pleasant physical weariness, but with the weariness of one who has spent a part of life too swiftly. For the joy of such work as mine is so great that there seems nothing like it in the world; and the hours are vain and listless that are not so comforted. Now I shall make a dozen beginnings, not foreseeing the end, and I shall abandon them in despair. The beauties of the earth, the golden sunlight, the crimson close of day, the leaping streams, the dewy grass will call in vain. Books and talk alike will seem trivial and meaningless tattle, ministering to nothing.
And then my book will begin to return to me in printed pages. Sometimes that is a joy, when it seems better than one knew; sometimes it is a disgust, if one has passed swiftly out of the creative mood; and then it will be lost to me for a time while it is drest and adorned, to walk abroad; till it comes back like a stranger in its new guise.
And then comes what is the saddest experience of all; it will pass into the hands of friends and readers; echoes of it will come back to me, in talk and print; but it will no longer be the book I knew and loved, only a part of my past. And this is the hardest thing of all for a writer, that when others read one's book they take it for the flash of a present mood, while the writer of it will only see in it a pale reflection of a time long past, and will feel perhaps even farther away from his book than those who criticise it, however severely. If my book is criticised as I write it, or directly after I have written it, it is as though I were myself maltreated; but when it appears so belatedly, I am often the harshest critic of all, because my whole point of view may perhaps have shifted, and I may be no longer the man who wrote the book, but a man of larger experience, who can judge perhaps more securely than any one else how far behind life the book lags. There is no season in the world in which the mind travels faster from its standpoint than when it has finished a book, because during all the writing of it one has kept, as it were, tensely and constrainedly at a certain point; and so when freedom comes, the thought leaps hurriedly forward, like a weight lifted by an elastic cord that has been stretched almost to breaking. "Can I ever have thought or felt so?" the mind says to itself, scanning the pages; and thus a book, which is mistaken for the very soul of a man, is often no more like the man himself than a dusty, sunburnt picture that represents what he was long years before.
But to-day my only thought is that the little companion whom I loved so well, who has walked and sate, eaten and drunk, gone in and out with me, silent and smiling, has left me and departed to try his fortune in the rough world. How will he fare? how will he be greeted? And yet I know that when he returns to me, saying, "I am a part of yourself," I shall be apt to deny it. For whereas now, if my child is lame, or feeble or pitiful or blind, I love him the better that he is not strong and active; when he returns I shall have a clear eye for his faults and weaknesses, and shall wish him other than he will be.
Sometimes I have talked with the writers of books, and they have told me of the misery and agony that the composition of a book has brought them. They speak of hot and cold fits; of times when they write fiercely and eagerly, and of times when they cannot set down a line to their mind; days of despair when they hate and despise the book; days when they cannot satisfy themselves about a single word: all this is utterly unknown to me; once embarked upon a book, I have neither hesitation nor fear. To sit down to it, day after day, and to write, is like sitting down to talk with one's nearest friend, where no concealment or diplomacy is necessary, but where one can say exactly what comes into the mind, with no fear of being misunderstood. I have not the smallest difficulty about expressing exactly as I wish to express it, whatever is in my mind. When I fail, it is because the thought itself is incomplete, imperfect, obscure; yet as I write, weariness and dissatisfaction are unknown. I cannot imagine how anyone can write a book without loving the toil, such as it is. Probably that is because I am indolent or pleasure-loving. I do not see how work of this kind can be done at all in a spirit of heaviness, it may be a fine moral discipline to do a dreaded thing heavily and faithfully; but what hope is there of the work being tinged with delight? It is as though a tired man set out to make a butterfly out of cardboard and gum and powdered silks; it would be nothing when it was made. A book must, before all things, have vigour; and vigour cannot be germinated by a sense of duty; it can only spring from hope and confidence and desire.
But now, to-day, my darling has gone from me; he is jolting in some dusty van, or he is propelled through muddy streets in a red box on wheels; or perhaps he is already in the factory among the rattle of type and the throb of the printing-press. I feel like a father whose boy has gone to school, and who sits wondering how the child may be faring in the big, unfamiliar place. Well, I will not grieve; but rather I will thank the Father of all things living, the inspirer of all sweet and delicate thoughts, all pleasant fancies, all glowing words, for the joy that I have had.
In one respect only does the advance of age cast a shadow over my mind; in most matters it is a pure gain. Even though a certain peculiar quality of light-hearted happiness visits me more rarely—a happiness like that of a lark that soars, beats her wings, and trills in the blue sky—yet the loss is more than compensated for by the growth of an equable tranquillity, neither rapturous nor sad, which abides with me for long spaces.
But here is the secret wound—clausum pectore volnus!—I am or would be an artist in words. Well, when I look round at the work of the artists whose quality I envy and adore, I am struck by this alarming fact, that in almost every case their earliest work is their best work.
This is almost invariably true in one particular domain, that of purely imaginative poetical work. By which I do not mean poetry only, but poetical prose like Pater's, poetical fiction like Charlotte Brontë's; I think that a narrative writer, a humorous writer, a critical writer, a biographical writer may continue to improve until his faculties begin to decay. He may get a wider, a more penetrating, a more tolerant view of life; his style gain lucidity, impressiveness, incisiveness, pungency; but in the case of the poetical and the reflective writer it seems to me that something evaporates—some quite peculiar freshness, naïveté, indiscreetness, which, can never be recaptured. Take a few typical instances. Coleridge lost the poetical gift altogether when he left his youth behind; Wordsworth wrote all his best poetry in a few early years; Milton lost his pure lyric gift. But the most salient instance of all is Tennyson; in the two earliest volumes there is a perfectly novel charm, a grace, a daring which he lost in later life. He became solemn, mannerised, conscious of responsibility. Sometimes, as in some of the lyrics ofMaud, he had a flash of the old spirit. But compare theIdylls of the King, for all their dignity and lavish art, their sweet cadences, their mellifluous flow, with the early fragment in the same manner, theMorte d'Arthur, and you become aware that some exquisite haunted quality has slipped away from the later work which made theMorte d'Arthurone of the most perfect poems of the century. TheMorte d'Arthuris seen, theIdyllsare laboriously imagined. TheIdylls, again, are full of an everyday morality—the praise of civic virtues, the evolution of types—and how tiresome they thus become! but in theMorte d'Arthurthere is only a prophetic mysticism, which is all the more noble because it is so remote from common things.
With Browning it is the same in a certain degree; there is a charm aboutPauline, for all its immaturity, which creates an irrepressible, uncalculating mood of undefined longing, utterly absent from his latest work. Perhaps one of the most remarkable instances is that of Rossetti. In the course of theHouse of Life, the dark curtain of the exotic mood, with its strange odours and glimpses, its fallen light, its fevered sense, is raised at intervals upon a sonnet of pure transparency and delicate sweetness, as though the weary, voluptuous soul, in its restless passage among perfumed chambers, looked out suddenly from a window upon some forest glade, full of cool winds and winter sunshine, and stood silent awhile. These sonnets will always be found to be the earlier writings transplanted into the new setting.
I suppose it is to a certain extent a physical thing. It is the shadow of experience, of familiarity, of weariness that creeps over the soul. In youth the spirit expands like an opening rose, and things heard and seen strike upon the senses with an incredible novelty and freshness, hinting at all sorts of sweet surprises, joyful secrets, hopeful mysteries. It is the subtle charm of youth that evaporates, the charm that makes a young and eager boy on the threshold of manhood so interesting, so delightful, even though he may be inarticulate and immature and self-absorbed. Who does not remember friends of college days, graceful and winning creatures, lost in the sense of their own significance, who had nothing, it may be, particular to say, no great intellectual grip, no suggestiveness, yet moving about in a mysterious paradise of their own, full of dumb emotion, undefined longing, and with a deep sense of the romantic possibilities of life. Alas, as the days move on and the crisis delays, as life brings the need of labour, the necessity of earning money, as love and friendship lose their rosy glow and settle down into comfortable relations, the disillusionment spreads and widens. I do not say that the nearer view of life is not more just, more wholesome, more manly. It is but the working of some strictly determined law. The dreams fade, become unreal and unsubstantial; though not rarely, in some glimpse of retrospect, the pilgrim turns, ascends a hillock by the road, and sees the far-off lines, the quiet folds, of the blue heights from which he descended in the blithe air of the morning, and knows that they were desirable. Perhaps the happiest of all are those who, as the weary day advances, can catch a sight of some no less beautiful hills ahead of him, their hollows full of misty gold, where the long journey may end; and then, however wearily the sun falls on the dusty road and the hedged fields to left and right, he knows that the secrets of the earlier day are beautiful secrets still, and that the fine wonder of youth has yet to be satisfied. And yet the shadow does undoubtedly fall heavily on the way for me and for such as me, whose one hope is that before they die they may make some delicate thing of beauty and delight which may remind those that come after that the first beauty of opening light and the song of the awakening bird is a real and true thing, not a mere effect of air and sun and buoyant spirit. Experience and fact and hard truth have a beauty of their own, no doubt. Politics and commerce, the growth of social liberty and law, civic duty and responsibility—dull words for noble things—have their place, their value, their significance. But to the poet they seem only the laborious organising of his dreams, the slow and clumsy manufacture of what ought to be instinctive and natural. If the world must grow upon these lines, if men must toil in smoke-stained factories or wrangle in heated Parliaments, then it is well that the framework of life should be made as firm, as compact, as just as it can. But not here does his hope lie; he looks forward to a far different regeneration than can be effected by law and police. He looks forward to a time when the hearts of men shall be so wise and tender and simple that they shall smile at the thought that life needs all this organising and arranging. For those who labour for social good lose sight too often of the end in the means. They think of education as a business of delightful intricacy, and forget that it is but an elaborate device for teaching men to love quiet labour and to enjoy the delight of leisure. They lose themselves in the dry delight of codifying law, and forget that law is only necessary because men are born brutal and selfish. Morality may be imposed from without, or grace may grow from within; and the poet is on the side of the inner grace, because he thinks that if it can be achieved it will outrun the other lightly and easily.