But as we journey through the world, as we become aware of the meanness and selfishness of men, as we learn to fight for our own hand, the high vision is apt to fade. Who then can be more sad than the man who has felt in the depths of his soul the thrill of that opening light, and the further that he journeys, finds more and more weary persons who tell him insistently that it was nothing but a foolish incident of youth, a trick of fancy, a passing mood, and that life must be given to harder and more sordid things? It is well for him if he can resist these ugly voices; if he can continue to discern what there is of generous and pure in the hearts of those about him, if he can persevere in believing that life does hold a holy and sweet mystery, and that it is not a mere dreary struggle for a little comfort, a little respect, a little pleasure by the way. It is upon a man's power of holding fast to undimmed beauty that his inner hopefulness, his power of inspiring others, depends. But though it is sad to see some artist who has tasted of the morning dew, and whose heart has been filled with rapture, trading and trafficking, in conventional expression and laborious seriousness, with the memories of those bright visions, it is sadder far to see a man turn his back cynically upon the first hope, and declare his conviction that he has found the unreality of it all. The artist must pray daily that his view may not grow clouded and soiled; and he must be ready, too, if he finds the voice grow faint, to lay his outworn music by, though he does it in utter sadness of soul, only glad if he can continue sorrowful.
I have been thinking all to-day, for no particular reason that I can discover, of a house where I spent many of the happiest days of my life. It belonged for some years to an old friend of mine a bachelor, a professional man, who used to go there for his holidays, and delighted to gather round him a few familiar friends. Year after year I used to go there, sometimes twice in the year, for long periods together. The house was in North Wales: it stood somewhat above the plain on a terrace among woods, at the base of a long line of dark crags, which showed their scarped fronts, with worn fantastic outlines, above the trees that clustered at their feet and straggled high up among the shoots of stone. The view from the house was of extraordinary beauty. There was a flat rich plain below, dotted with clumps of trees; a mountain rose at one side, a rocky ridge. Through the plain a slow river broadened to the sea, and at the mouth stood a little town, the smoke of which went up peacefully on still days. Across the sea, shadowy headlands of remote bays stood out one after another to the south. The house had a few sloping fields below it; a lawn embowered in trees, and a pretty old walled garden, where the sun-warmed air was redolent with the homely scent of old-fashioned herbs and flowers. Several little steep paths meandered through the wood, crossing and recrossing tiny leaping streams, and came out on a great tract of tumbled moorland above, with huge broad-backed mountains couched about it.
The house itself was full of low, pleasant rooms, looking out on to a wide verandah. It was almost austerely furnished, and the life was simple and serene. We used to go for vague walks on the moor or by the sea, and sometimes took long driving and walking expeditions among the hills. It was a rainy region, and we were often confined to the house, except for a brisk walk in the soft rain. The climate never suited me; I was always languid in body there, greedy of sleep and food. There was no great brilliance of talk, only a quiet ease of communication such as takes place among people of the same interests. I was ill there, more than once, and often anxious and perplexed. And yet, for all that, my memory persists in investing it all with a singular radiance, and tells me over and over again that I was never so happy in any place in my life. I must say that my friend was an ideal host, quiet, benevolent, anxious that people should enjoy themselves in their own way, and yet with a genial firmness of administration which is the greatest of all luxuries if it co-exists with much liberty. He was not a great talker, though he occasionally uttered a witty epigram, often of a somewhat caustic kind; but the air of serene benevolence with which he used to preside always set people at their ease. There was, too, another friend, who was there less often, but who shared the expense of the house, who was a singularly charming and stimulating talker, full of acute observation and emotional appreciation of character. The combination of the two was perfection.
It is pleasant to recollect the long, vague summer days there, the mornings spent in reading in the verandah, the afternoons in a quiet ramble; not less delightful were the short winter days, when the twilight set in early, and the house was warm and softly lit. One agreeable rule was that after dinner anyone who felt inclined should read rather than talk; and we have often sate in an amiable silence, with the fire rustling in the grate, and the leaves of books being softly turned. The charm was the absence of constraint, and the feeling that one could say exactly what came into one's mind without any danger of being misunderstood. But for all that I cannot quite explain the golden content that seems in retrospect to have overspread the whole house. We were often frankly critical. We did not spare each other's weaknesses; but no resentment, no dissatisfaction, no strife seems to me ever to have clouded the sunny atmosphere.
It all came to an end some years ago; circumstances made it necessary for my friends to give up the house; and one of the most beautiful instances of the spirit of the place was on the occasion of our last visit. We knew that the good days were over, and that our lives could never be quite so pleasantly united again; but the place held us under its spell; and I remember as I drove away through the woods, in a soft moist dawn, I felt nothing but a deep and uncomplaining gratitude for all the happiness that I had enjoyed there; the trees, the crags, the embowered lawn with its smiling flowers, the verandah with its chairs piled up for departure, the dismantled library, all seemed to say farewell with the same tenderness with which they had always welcomed us. It seemed impossible to regret or repine. The house would receive and guard and comfort other pilgrims in their turn. I felt that any sense of sorrowful loss would be somehow like a kind of treachery, a peevish ingratitude, not even to be entertained in thought, much less expressed; to have yielded to any form of repining would have been, it seemed to me, like spending the last few minutes of a visit, where one had been received with a cordial and simple hospitality, in pointing out to one's host the inconvenience of his house.
I think that where one so often makes a mistake in life is in thinking of the beautiful past as over and done with. One ought to think of it rather as existing. It can no more be lost than any other beautiful thing or fine feeling can be lost. The flower may fade, the tree may shed its leaf, the work of art may perish, the great poem may be forgotten; the lovely ancient building, with all the grace of tradition and memory, all the sweet mellowing of outline and detail, may be dismantled or restored; yet the beauty is not in the passing form, but in the spirit that expresses itself in the form on the one hand—the great, subtle, tender, powerful spirit that is for ever working and creating and producing—and, on the other hand, it lies no less in the desire and worship that thrills and beats, deep in the spirit, leaning out like one who gazes upon the sunset from the window of a tower, listening to the appeal of beauty, looking out for it, welcoming it, thirsting for it. Both these powers are there, the spirit that calls and the spirit that answers the call. The mistake we make is to anchor ourselves timidly and persistently to one set of beautiful forms, and if they are destroyed, to feel that the world is made desolate for us. We are apt to think that there is a sort of loyalty about this, and that an ineffectual repining for the beautiful thing that has passed proves the intensity of our regard and love. It is not so; we might as well repine if we have loved a child, to find it growing up to strength and manhood. Because we have loved the rosebud, we need not despise the rose, and when the child loses its tender charm, when the rose drops her loosened petals on the grass, our love is a mere sentiment, an aesthetic appreciation, if we can only regret what is past. It is the fragrant charm, the echoing harmony of the spirit that matters; and if the charm passes out of our ken, if the song dies upon the air, if the sunset hue fades, it is all there none the less, both the beauty and the love we bore it. I do not mean that the conquest is an easy one, because our perceptions are so narrow and so finite that when the sweet sound or the delicate light passes out of our horizon, it is hard to feel that it is not dead. But we ought, I am sure, to remind ourselves more constantly that both the quality of beauty itself and the desirous love that it evokes are the unchangeable things; and that though they shift and fuse, ebb and flow, they are assuredly there. "When they persecute you in one city, flee into another," said the Saviour of men in a dim allegory. It is true of all things; and the secret is to realise that we have no continuing city. Of course there sometimes fall shattering blows upon us, when someone who was half the world to us, on whom we have leant and depended, whose mind and heart have cast a glow of hope and comfort upon every detail of life, steps past the veil into the unseen. Then comes the darkest hour of struggling bewilderment; but even then we make a miserable mistake, if we withdraw into the silence of our own hearts and refuse to be comforted, priding ourselves, it may be, upon the abiding faithfulness of our love. But to yield to that is treachery; and then, most of all, we ought to stretch out our hands to all about us and welcome every gift of love. It is impossible not to suffer, yet we are perhaps but tenderly punished for having loved the image better than the thing it signified. We are punished because our idolising love has rested content with the form that it has borne, and has not gone further and deeper into the love which it typified.
What we have to beware of is a timid and cautious loitering in the little experience we have ourselves selected, in the little garden we have fenced off from the plain and the wood. And thus the old house that I loved in my pleasant youth, the good days that I spent there year by year, are an earnest of the tender care that surrounds me. I will not regard them as past and gone; I will rather regard them as the slow sweet prelude of the great symphony; if I am now tossed upon the melancholy and broken waves of some vehement scherzo of life, the subject is but working itself out, and I will strive to apprehend it even here. There are other movements that await me, as wonderful, as sweet.
"And now that it is all over," said an old, wearied, and dying statesman, after a day of sad farewells, "it is not so bad after all." The terror, the disquietude, is not in the thing suffered, but in our own faithless hearts. But if we look back at the past and see how portion after portion has become dear and beautiful, can we not look forward with a more steadfast tranquillity and believe that the love and beauty are all there waiting for us, though the old light seems to have been withdrawn?
What a strange, illusory power memory has in dealing with the past, of creating a scene and an emotion that not only never existed, but that could not possibly ever have existed. When I look back to my own commonplace, ordinary, straightforward boyhood, wrapped up in tiny ambitions, vexed with trivial cares, full of trifling events, with a constant sense of small dissatisfaction, I am amazed at the colours with which memory tints the scene. She selects a few golden hours, scenes of peculiar and instantaneous radiance, when the old towers and trees were touched with a fine sunshine, when the sky was unclouded, the heart light, and when one lived for a moment in a sense of some romance of ambition or friendship; and she bids one believe that all one's boyhood was thus bright and goodly, although one knows in one's heart that the texture of it was often mean, pitiful, and selfish; though reason at the same time overwhelms one with reproach and shame for not having made a brighter and braver thing of it, when all the conditions were so favourable.
It is so too with pathos—that pathos which centres so firmly upon the smallest details, and neglects the larger sadnesses. I had so curious an instance of this the other day that I cannot refrain from telling it, because I suppose it can hardly ever have happened to anyone before.
I have an old friend who lives by himself in London, where I sometimes visit him. He is a studious, unmethodical, untidy man. His rooms are dusty and neglected, and he is quite unaware of his surroundings. By his favourite arm-chair stands a table covered with papers, books, cigar-boxes, paper-knives, pencils, in horrible confusion; a condition of things which causes him great discomfort and frequent loss of time. I have often exhorted him to sort the mess; he has always smilingly undertaken to do so, but has never succeeded.
A few weeks ago I called to see him; the servant who let me in, whose face was new to me, looked very grave; and when I asked if my friend was in, turned pale and said: "I suppose you do not know what has happened, sir—Mr. A— died yesterday at Brighton. I think that Mr. B—" (naming the owner of the house, who lets lodgings) "can tell you all about it—will you go upstairs? I will tell him you are here."
I went up: the sun was streaming into the room, with its well-known furniture and pictures, shabby and yet somehow home-like. There was the familiar table, with all its litter. I was stunned with the news, unable to realise it; and the sight of the table, with all the customary details in the old disorder, fairly unmanned me; so it was all over and done with, and my friend was gone without a word or sign.
I heard rapid steps along the passage; Mr. B—, the owner of the house, entered with an apologetic smile. "I am afraid that there has been a mistake, sir," he said. "Mr. A— is not dead, as the servant informed you; it is the gentleman who lives on the floor above, who has been an invalid for some time, who is dead; the servant is new to the place, and has made a confusion; we only had a wire a few minutes ago. Mr. A— is perfectly well, and will be in in a few minutes if you will wait"
I waited, in a strange revulsion of spirit; but the most singular thing is that the crowded table, which had been a few minutes before the most pathetic thing in the world, had become by the time that A— entered smiling, as irritating and annoying as ever; changed from the poor table where his earthly litter had accumulated, which he could touch no more for ever, into the table which he ought to have put straight long ago and should be ashamed of leaving in so vile a condition.
I have had a night of strange and terror-haunted dreams. Yesterday I was forced to work at full speed, feverishly and furiously for a great many hours, at a piece of work that admitted of no delay. By the evening I was considerably exhausted, yet the work was not done. I slept for an hour, and then settled down again and worked very late in the night, until it was finished. Such a strain cannot be borne with impunity, and I never do such a thing except under pressure of absolute necessity. I suppose that I contrived to inflame some delicate tissue of the brain, as the result was a series of intensely vivid dreams, with a strange quality of horror about them. It was not so much that the incidents themselves were of a dreadful type, but I was overshadowed by a deep boding, a dull ache of the mind, which charged everything that I saw with a sense of fortuitous dismay. I woke in that painful mood in which the mind is filled with a formless dread; and the sensation has hung about me, more or less, all day.
What a strange phenomenon it is that the sick mind should be able thus to paint its diseased fancies in the dark, and then to be dismayed at its own creations. In one of my dreams, for instance, I seemed to wander in the bare and silent corridors of a great house. I passed a small and sinister door, and was impelled to open it. I found myself in a large oak-panelled room, with small barred windows admitting a sickly light. The floor was paved with stone; and in the centre, built into the pavement, stood a large block of basalt, black and smooth, which was roughly carved into the semblance of a gigantic human head. I stared at this for a long time, and then swiftly withdrew, overcome with horror which I could not translate into words. All that I seemed to know was that some kind of shocking rites were here celebrated: I did not know what they were, and there were no signs of anything; no instruments of death, no trace of slaughter; yet for all that I knew that the place stood for some evil mystery, and the very walls and floor seemed soaked with fear and pain.
That is the inexplicable part of dreams, that one should invent incidents and scenes of every kind, with no sense of invention or creation, with no feeling that one is able to control what one appears to hear or see; and then that in some other part of one's mind, one should be moved and stirred by the appropriate emotions awakened by word or sight. In waking hours one can be stirred, amused, grieved by the exercise of one's imagination, but one is aware that it is imagination, and one does not lose the sense of responsibility, the consciousness of creation.
It is this sensation, that dreams arise from some power or influence exterior to oneself, which them the significance which they used to possess, and indeed still possess, for the unreasoning mind. They seem communications from some other sphere of life, experiences external to oneself, messages from some hidden agency. When they correspond, as by coincidence they are almost bound on occasions to do, with some unforeseen and unexpected event that follows them, it is very difficult for unphilosophical minds not to believe that they are visions sent from some power that can foresee the future. It would be strange if dreams, trafficking as they do with such wide and various experiences, did not occasionally seem to be related to events of the following day, however little anticipated those events may be; but no theory of dreams would be satisfactory or scientific which did not take account of the vast number of occasions on which they do not in the least correspond with what followed in the day. The natural temper of man is so pre-eminently unscientific that a single occasion on which a dream does seem to correspond in a curious manner with subsequent events outweighs a thousand occasions on which no such correspondence is traceable. Yet nothing but a long series of premonitory dreams could suffice for the basis of a scientific theory.
The main interest of dreams to myself is that they serve to show the essential texture of the mind. In waking hours I am conscious of many natural phenomena which make a strong impression on my mind; but my dreaming mind makes, it seems, a whimsical selection among these incidents, and discards some, while it makes a liberal use of others. For instance, in real life, the sight of a beautiful sunset is a common experience, and stirs in me the most profound emotion; yet I have never seen a sunset in dreams. All my dreams are enacted in a pale and clear light of which the source is never visible. I have never seen sun, moon, or star in a dream. Again, to step into a farther region, I am a good deal occupied in real life by ethical considerations; but in dreams I have absolutely no sense of morality. I am afraid, in my dreams, of the consequences of my acts; but I commit a murder or a theft in a dream without the least scruple of conscience.
Whether this proves that my morality, my conscience, in real life, is a purely conventional thing, acquired by habit, I do not know; it would appear to be so. Again, some of my most habitual actions in real life are never repeated in dreams; I have for many years devoted much time and energy to literary work in real life, but in dreams I have never written anything; though I have heard poems repeated or read from books which are purely imaginary, and I have even read my own compositions aloud from what appeared in dreams to be a previously written manuscript; but I am never conscious, in dreams, of ever having put pen to paper for any purpose whatever, even to write a letter. Yet, again, it is not as though all the materials were drawn from a time before I had begun to write; because sometimes dreams will repeat, or interweave into their texture, quite recent experiences.
It appears to me as though the only part of the brain that is active in dreams is the spectatorial and dramatic part; and even so it is quite beyond me to solve the problem of how it comes about that my visualising faculty in dreams can bring upon the stage, as it often does, some personage who is perfectly well known to me in real life, and cause him to behave in so unaccountable and grotesque a fashion that I appear to be entirely bewildered and even shocked by the occurrence. For instance, I dreamt the other night that I went to see a high ecclesiastical dignitary, whom I have known for many years, whom I knew in my dream to have been undergoing a rest-cure, though the person in question has never to my knowledge undergone any such experience. I was greatly surprised and even distressed when he entered the room arrayed in a short jacket, with an Eton collar, carrying some childish toys, and saying, "I am completely rejuvenated." I was not in the least amused by this at the time, but only lost in wonder as to how I could communicate to him that it would be a great misfortune if he went back to his dignified post in such a guise and with such avocations as his toys implied.
The whole thing is an insoluble mystery. I often wish that some scientific person would investigate the matter in a strictly rational spirit; though it is certainly difficult to see in what directions such investigations could be fruitful. Still it seems to me strange and unsatisfactory that so little should be known about the origin and nature of so universal a phenomenon.
I have had sometimes dreams of a solemnity and beauty that appear to transcend my powers of imagination. I have seen landscapes in dreams of a kind that I have never seen in real life; I have held long, intimate, and tender conversations with persons long since dead, which I might, if I were inclined, consider to be real contact with disembodied spirits, did I not also sometimes hold trivial, absurd, and even painful intercourse, of an entirely uncharacteristic kind, with the same people, intercourse which all sense of affection and reverence would lead me unhesitatingly to regard as purely imaginary. The strangest thing in such dreams is that the memory is wholly at fault, because, though one is not conscious that the people have died long ago, the mind is apt to wrestle with the wonder as to why one has seen so little of them of recent years. The memory seems to be perfectly aware that one has not seen much of them of late, but the effort to recall the fact that they are dead, even when their deaths have been some of the most vivid and grievous experiences of one's life, seems to be quite beyond its power.
One of the most curious facts of all is this. I sometimes have had extremely affectionate and confidential interviews with people in dreams whom I have not known well—so vivid, indeed, that the dream interview has proved a real step in a friendship, because when, as has more than once occurred, I have met the same people in real life while the dream is still fresh in my mind, I have met them with a sense of confidential relations that has made it easier for me to advance in intimacy and to take a certain sympathy for granted. I have one particular friend in mind whose friendship I can honestly say I gained in a dream.
On the other hand, I have occasionally had in a dream so painful and unsatisfactory an interview with a friend, rousing in my mind such anger and resentment, that it has proved a cloud over my acquaintance. It is not that on awaking I believe in the reality of the experience; but it seems to have given a real shock to a delicate sympathy, so that there has been an actual difficulty on meeting the friend upon the same terms as formerly, even though one may relate the dream incident and laugh over it with him.
These are indubitably very mysterious experiences; and I cannot say that I think that they are explicable upon any ordinary hypothesis; that one should thus create a sense of sympathy or misunderstanding by the exercise of involuntary imagination which should have a real power to affect one's relations with a person—here I feel myself on the threshold of a very deep mystery indeed.
It is generally taken for granted nowadays by fervent educationalists that the important thing to encourage in boys is keenness in every department of school life. As a matter of fact, the keenness which is as a rule most developed in the public school product is keenness about athletic exercises. In the intellectual region, a boy is encouraged to do his duty, but there is no question that a boy who manifested an intense enthusiasm for his school work, who talked, thought, dreamed of nothing but success in examinations, would be considered rather abnormal and eccentric both by his instructors and his schoolfellows, though he would not be thought singular by any one if he did the same about his athletic prospects. What one cannot help wondering is whether this kind of enthusiasm is valuable to the character under its influence, whatever the subject of that enthusiasm may be. The normal boy, who is enthusiastic about athletics, tends to be cynical about intellectual success; and indeed even eminent men are not ashamed to encourage this by uttering, as a Lord Chancellor lately did, good-humoured gibes about the futility of dons and schoolmasters, and the uselessness of lectures. The other day a young friend of mine indulged in a glowing description, in my presence, of the methods and form of a certain short-distance runner. It was a generous panegyric, full of ingenuous admiration. He spoke of the runner's devices—I fear I cannot reproduce the technical terms—with the same thrilled and awestruck emotion which Shelley might have used, as an undergraduate, in speaking of Homer or Shakespeare. I suppose it is a desirable thing, on the whole, to be able to run faster than other people, though the practical utility of being able to do a hundred yards in a fraction of a second less than other runners is not easily demonstrable. But for all that I cannot help wondering whether such enthusiasm is not thrown away or misapplied. Perhaps the same indictment might be made against all warmly expressed admiration for human performances. The greatest philosopher or poet in the world is, after all, a very limited being. The knowledge possessed by the wisest man of science is a very minute affair when compared with what there remains in the universe to know; the finest picture ever painted compares very unfavourably with the beauty that surrounds us every minute of every day. The question, to my mind, is whether we do not do ourselves harm in the long-run by losing ourselves in frantic admiration for any human performance. The Psalmist expressed this feeling very cogently and humorously when he said that the Creator did not delight in any man's legs. The question is not whether it is not a natural temptation to limit our dreams of ultimate possibilities by the standard of human effort, but whether we ought to try and resist that temptation. When I was at a private school, I heard a boy express the most fervent and unfeigned admiration for our head-master, because he caned culprits so hard, and I suppose that one of the germs of religious feeling is the admiration of the Creator because the forces of nature make such havoc of human precautions. Perhaps it is a necessary stage through which we all must pass, the stage of admiring something that is just a little stronger and more effective than ourselves. Our admiration is based upon the fact that such strength and effectiveness is not wholly outside our own powers of attainment, but that we can hope that under favourable circumstances we may acquire equal or similar energies. But even if it is a necessary stage of progress, I am quite sure that it ought not to be an ultimate stage, and that a man ought not to spend the whole of his life admiring limited human performances, however august they may be. That is the great and essential force of religion in human lives, that it tends to set a higher standard, and to concentrate admiration upon Divine rather than upon human forces. Even when we are dealing with emotions, the same holds good. The writer of romances who lavishes the whole force of his enthusiasm upon the possibilities of human love, its depth, its loyalty, its faithfulness, is apt to lose the sense of proportion. One ought to employ one's sense of admiration for the august achievements of humanity as a species of symbolism. Our admiration for athletic prowess, for art, for literature, ought not to limit itself to these, but ought to regard them as symbols of vaster, larger, more beautiful truths.
The difficulty is to know at what point to draw the line. These limited enthusiasms may have an educative effect upon the persons who indulge them, but they may also have a stunting effect if they are pursued too long. A boy passes my window whistling shrill a stave of a popular song. He is obviously delighted with and intent upon his performance, and he is experiencing, no doubt, the artistic joy of creation; but if that boy goes on in life, as many artists do, limiting his musical aspirations to the best whistle that he can himself emit, his ideal will be a low one, however faithfully pursued. The ugly part of thus limiting our aspirations is that such petty enthusiasm is generally accompanied by an intense craving for the admiration of other people, and it is this which vitiates and poisons our own admirations. We do not merely think how fine a performance it is; we think how much we should like to impress and astonish other people, to arouse their envy and jealousy by a similar performance. The point is rather that we should enjoy effort, and that our aim should be rather to improve our own performances than to surpass the performances of others. The right spirit is that which Matthew Arnold displays in one of his letters. He was writing at a time when his own literary fame was securely established, yet he said that the longer he lived the more grateful he was for his own success. He added that the more people he came to know, the more strongly he felt the comparative equality of human endowments, and the more clearly he perceived that the successful writerfoundrather thaninventedthe telling phrase, the stimulating thought. That is a very rare attitude of mind, and it is as noble as it is rare. The successful writer, as a rule, instead of being grateful for his good fortune in perceiving what others have not perceived, takes the credit to himself for having originated it, whereas he ought rather to conceive of himself as one of a company of miners, and be thankful for having lighted upon a richer pocket of auriferous soil than the rest.
Of course it sounds what is commonly called priggish when a man, in the style of Mr. Barlow, is always imploring the boy who wins a race or gets a prize to turn his thoughts higher and to take no credit to himself for what is only a piece of good fortune, and is not so great a performance after all. It is easy to say that this is but a pietistic quenching of natural and youthful delight; but much depends upon the way in which it is done, and it is probably the right line to take, though it is supposed to be merely the old-fashioned parental attitude of little goody books. The really modest and ingenuous boy does it for himself, and the boy who "puts on side" because of his triumphs is universally disapproved of. Moreover, as a rule, in the larger world, the greatest men are really apt to be among the most modest; and it is generally only the second-rate people who try to extort deference and admiration.
False enthusiasm is probably only one degree better than cynicism. Cynicism is generally the refuge of the disappointed and indolent, but there is, after all, a nobler kind of cynicism, which even religion must strive to develop, the cynicism which realises the essential worthlessness and pettiness of human endeavour. The cynicism that stops short at this point is the evil kind of cynicism, and becomes purely contemptuous and derisive. But there is a fruitful kind of cynicism, which faithfully contrasts the aspirations and possibilities of humanity with its actual performances and its failures, which makes the poet and the philosopher humble in the presence of infinite beauty and infinite knowledge.
It is the quality, the spirit, of a performance that matters. If a performance is the best of which a man is capable, and better than what he has hitherto done, he has achieved all that is possible. If he begins to reflect that it is better than what others have done, then his satisfaction is purely poisonous. But to estimate human possibilities high and human performances low, and to class one's own performances with the latter rather than the former, this is temperate and manly and strong.
There is a picture of Rossetti's, very badly painted, I think, from the technical point of view, of Lucrezia Borgia. There are apologists who say that the wickedness of the Borgia family is grossly exaggerated, and that they were in reality very harmless and respectable people. But Rossetti thought of them, in painting this picture, as people stained with infamous and unspeakable crime, and he has contrived to invest the scene with a horror of darkness. Lucrezia sits in what is meant to be an attitude of stately beauty, and the figure contrives somehow to symbolise that; though she appears to be both stout and even blowsy in appearance. Her evil father, the Pope Alexander, sits leering beside her, while her brother Caesar leans over her and blows rose-leaves from her hair. There certainly hangs a hideous suggestiveness of evil over the group. In the foreground, a page of ten or twelve is dancing, together with a little girl of perhaps nine or ten. The page is slim and delicate, and watches his small companion with a tender and brotherly sort of air; both children are entirely absorbed in their performance, which they seem to have been bidden to enact for the pleasure of the three watchers. The children look innocent enough, though they too are rather dimly and clumsily painted; but one feels that they are somehow in the net, that they are growing up in a pestilential and corrupting atmosphere, and that the flowers of evil will soon burst into premature bloom in their tender souls. The whole scene is overhung with a close and enervating gloom; one apprehends somehow that the air swims with a heavy fragrance; and though one feels that the artist's hand failed to represent his thought, he was painting with a desperate intentness, and the dark quality of the conception contrives to struggle out. The art of it is great rather than good; it is the art of a man who realises the scene with a terrible insight, and in spite of a clumsy and smudgy handling, manages to bring it home perhaps even more impressively than if he had been fully master of his medium. There is a mingling of horror and pathos over it all, and the pretty, innocent gaiety of the children seems obscured as by a gathering thunder-cloud; as when the air grows close and still over some scene of rustic merriment, and the blitheness of the revellers sinks into torpor and faintness, not knowing what ails them. One feels that the performers of the dance will be rewarded with kisses and sweetmeats, and that they will draw the poison into their souls.
It is surely very difficult to analyse what this shadow of sin upon the world may be, because there is so large an element of subjectivity mingled with it. So much of it seems to depend upon the temper and beliefs of the time, so much of the shadow of conscience to be the fear of social and even legal penalty. Not to travel far for instances, one finds Plato speaking in a guileless and romantic fashion of a whole range of passions and emotions that we have grown to consider as inherently degrading and repulsive. Yet no shadow of the sense of sin seems to have brooded over that bright and clear Greek life, the elements of which, except in the regions which our morality condemns, seem so intensely desirable and ennobling. In ages, too, when life was more precarious, and men were so much less sensitive to the idea of human suffering, one finds a light-hearted cruelty practised which is insupportable to modern ideals. Those wars of extermination among the Israelites, when man and woman, boy and girl, were ruthlessly and sternly slain, because they were held to belong to some tribe abhorred by the God of Sabaoth; or when, in their own polity, some notorious sinner was put to death with all his unhappy family, however innocent—no shadow of conscience seems to have brooded over those destroyers: they rather had the inspiriting and ennobling sense of having performed a sacred duty, and carried out the commands of a jealous God. Viewing the matter, indeed, as dispassionately and philosophically as possible, it is hard to justify the ways of a Creator who slowly developed and matured a race, keeping them deliberately ignorant of light and truth, in order that they might at last be exterminated, in blood and pain, by a dominant and righteous race of invaders.
It would seem, indeed, as though the sense of sin did not reside in the act at all, but only in the sense that the act is committed in defiance of light and higher instinct. Even our own morality, on which we pride ourselves, how confused and topsy-turvy it is in many respects! How monstrous it is that a hungry man should be punished legally for theft, while an ill-tempered and unjust parent or schoolmaster should be allowed, year after year, to make the lives of the children about them into misery and heaviness. Life is full of such examples, where no agency whatever is, or can be, brought to bear by society upon a notorious wrecker of human happiness, so long as he is prudent and wary.
It is the slowness of it all that is so disheartening; the impossibility that dogs the efforts of the high-minded, the kind, the just, of prevailing against tradition and prejudice and stupidity; the grim acquiescence in sanctioned oppression that characterises a certain type of respectable virtue; the melancholy ineffectiveness of kindly persons, the lamentable lack of proportion that mars the work of the enthusiastic faddist—these things tempt one at times, in moments of despair and dreariness, to believe that the one lesson of life is meant to be a hopeless patience, a dull acquiescence in deeply-rooted evil. It is bewildering to see a world so out of joint, and to feel that the one force that has worked wonders is the discontent with things as they are. And even so the lesson is a hard one, because it has been the lot of so few of the great conquerors of humanity ever to see the hour of their triumph, which comes long after and late, when they have breathed out their ardent spirit in agony and despair.
But, after all, however much we may philosophise about sin or attempt to analyse its essence, there is some dark secret there, of which from time to time we are grievously conscious. Who does not know the sense of failure to overcome, of lapsing from a hope or a purpose, the burden of the thought of some cowardice or unkindness which we cannot undo and which we need not have committed? No resolute determinism can ever avail us against the stern verdict of that inner tribunal of the soul, which decides, too, by some instinct that we cannot divine, to sting and torture us with the memory of deeds, the momentousness and importance of which we should utterly fail to explain to others. There are things in my own past, which would be met with laughter and ridicule if I attempted to describe them, that still make me blush to recollect with a sense of guilt and shame, and seem indelibly branded upon the mind. There are things, too, of which I do not feel ashamed, which, if I were to describe them to others, would be received with a sort of incredulous consternation, to think that I could have performed them. That is the strange part of the inner conscience, that it seems so wholly independent of tradition or convention.
And it is from this sense of a burden, borne without hope of redemption, that we would all of us give our most prized possessions to be free; it is this which has cast such an awful power into the hands of the unscrupulous people who have claimed to be able to atone for, to loose, to set free the ailing soul. Face to face with the terror of darkness, there is hardly anything of which mankind will not repent; and I have sometimes thought that the darkest and heaviest temptation in the whole world is the temptation to yield to a craven fear, when the sincere conscience does not condemn.
I listened the other day, at a public function, to an eloquent panegyric, pronounced by a man of great ability and sympathetic cultivation, on the Greek spirit. I fell for the moment entirely under the spell of his lofty rhetoric, his persuasive and illuminating argument. I wish I could reproduce what he said; but it was like a strain of beautiful music, and my mind was so much delighted by his rich eloquence, his subtle transitions, his deft modulations, that I had neither time nor opportunity to commit what he said to memory. One thing he said which struck me very much, that the Greek spirit resembled rather the modern scientific spirit than any other of the latter-day developments of thought. I think that this is true in a sense, that the Greeks were penetrated by an insatiable curiosity, and desired to study the principles and arrive at the truth of things. But I do not, upon reflection, think that it is wholly true, because the modern spirit is greatly in love with classification and with detail, while the Greek spirit rather aimed at beauty, and investigated the causes of things with wonder and delight, in what may be called the romantic, the poetical spirit.
The mistake that the orator seemed to me to make was that he implied, or appeared to imply, that the Greek spirit could be attained by the study of Greek. My own belief is that the essence of the Greek spirit was its originality, its splendid absence of deference, its disregard of what was traditional. The Greeks owed nothing to outside influences. If the dim origins of their art were Egyptian, they strode forward for themselves, and spent no time in investigating the earlier traditions. Again, in literature, they wasted no force in attempting to imbibe culture from outside influences; they merely developed the capacities of their own sonorous and graceful language; they infused it with their own vivid and beautiful personality.
Of course, it may be urged that there probably did not exist in the world at that date treasures of ancient literature and art. The question is what the Greeks would have done if they had found themselves in a later world, stocked, and even overstocked, with old masterpieces and monuments of human intellect and energy and skill. The doubt is whether the creative impulse would have died away, and whether the Greeks would have tended to fling themselves into the passionate study, the eager apprehension, of the beautiful inheritance of the ages. I cannot myself believe it. They would have had, I believe, an intense and ardent appreciation of what had been, but the desire to see and hear some new thing of which St. Paul spoke, the deep-seated desire for self-expression, would have kept them free from any tame surrender to tradition, any danger of basing their cultivation on what had been represented or thought or sung by their human predecessors. I cannot, for instance, conceive of the Greeks as devoting themselves to erudition; I cannot imagine their giving themselves up to the same minute appreciation of ancient forms of expression which we give to the Greek literature itself.
Moreover, unless we concede to the Greek literature the position of the high-water mark of human expression, and believe that the intellect of man had since that day suffered decline and eclipse, we ought not to allow an ancient literature to overshadow our own energies, or to give up the hope of creating a vivid literature, at once classical and romantic, of our own.
And even if we did concede to Greek literature this august supremacy, I cannot believe that our best intellect ought to be practised in the awestruck submissiveness of mind that too often results from our classical education. That is why I admire the American spirit in literature. The Americans seem to have little of the reverent, exclusive attitude which we value so highly. They are preoccupied in their own native inspiration. They will speak, without any sense of absurdity, of Shakespeare and E.A. Poe, of Walter Scott and Hawthorne, as comparable influences. They are like children, entirely absorbed in the interest and delight of intent creation. But though their productions are at present, with certain notable exceptions, lacking in vitality and quality, this spirit is, I believe, the spirit in which new ideas and new literatures are produced. I do not desire to see the Americans more critical of the present or more deferential to the past. I do not desire to see them turn with a hopeless wonder to the study of the great English masterpieces. Indeed, I think that our own tendency in England to reverence, our constant appeal to classical standards, is an obstacle to our intellectual and artistic progress. We are like elderly writers who tend to repeat their own beloved mannerisms, and who contemn and decry the work of younger men, despairing of the future. A nation may reach a point, like an ancient and noble dynasty of princes, where it is overshadowed and overweighted by its own past glories, and where it learns to depend upon prestige rather than upon vigour, to wrap itself in its own dignity. What I would rather see is an elasticity, a recklessness, a prodigal trying of experiments, a discontented underrating of past traditions, than a meek acquiescence in their supremacy. What is our present condition? We have few poets of the first rank, few essayists or reflective writers, few dramatists, few biographers. I do not at all wish to underrate the immense vitality of our imaginative faculties, which shows itself in our vast output of fiction; but even here we have few masters, and our critics know and care little for style; they are entirely preoccupied with plot and incident and situation. What we lack is true originality, tranquil force; we are all occupied in trying to startle and surprise, to make a sensation. How little the Greeks cared for that! It was beauty and charm, delicate colour, fine subtlety of which they were, in search; they held all things holy, yet nothing solemn. Their dignity was not a pompous dignity, but the dignity of high tragedy, of unconquerable courage and ruthless fate; not the dignity of the well-appointed house and the tradition of excellent manners.
Of course our love of wealth and comfort is to a certain extent responsible for this. We have been thrown off our balance by the vast and rapid development of the resources of the earth, the binding of natural forces to do our bidding; it is the most complicated thing in the world nowadays to live the simple life; and not until we can gain a rich simplicity, not until we can recover an interest in ideas rather than an appetite for comforts, will our force and vitality return to us.
We are all too anxious to do the right thing and to be known to the right people; but unfortunately for us the right people are not the people of vivacity and intellectual zest, but the possessors of industrial wealth or the inheritors of scrupulous traditions and historical names. The sad fact, the melancholy truth, is that we have become vulgar; and until we can purge ourselves of vulgarity, till we can realise the ineffable ugliness of pomposity and pretension and ostentation, we shall effect nothing. Even our puritan forefathers, with their hatred of art, were in love with ideas. They sipped theology with the air of connoisseurs; they drank down Hebrew virtues with a vigorous relish. Then came a rococo and affected age, neat, conceited, and trim; yet in the middle of that stood out a great rugged figure like Johnson, full to the brim of impassioned force. Then again the intellect, the poetry of the nation stirred and woke. In Wordsworth, in Scott, in Keats and Shelley and Byron, in Tennyson and Browning, in Carlyle and Ruskin, came an age of passionate sincerity of protest against the dulness of prosperity. But now we seem to have settled down comfortably to sleep again, and are content to fiddle melodiously on delicate instruments. The trumpet and the horn are silent.
Perhaps we must content ourselves with the vigorous advance of science, the determination to penetrate secrets, to know all that is to be known, not to form conclusions without evidence. But the scientific attitude tends, except in the highest minds, to develop a certain dryness, a scepticism about spiritual and imaginative forces, a dulness of the inner apprehension, a hard quality of judgment. Not in such a mood as this does humanity fare further and higher. Men become cautious, prudent, and decisive thus, instead of generous, hopeful, and high-hearted.
But to despair too soon of an era, to despise and satirise an age, a national temper, is a deep and fatal mistake. The world moves onwards patiently and inevitably, obeying a larger and a mightier law. What is rather the duty of all who love what is noble and beautiful is not to carp and bicker over faulty conditions, but to realise their aims and hopes, to labour abundantly and patiently, to speak and feel sincerely, to encourage rather than to condemn,Serviendum lietandumsays the brave motto. To serve, one cannot avoid that; but to serve with blitheness, that is the secret.
I cannot help wondering what the substance was which my fellow-traveller to-day was consuming under the outward guise of cigarettes. It had a scent that was at once strange and afflicting. It was no more like tobacco than tobacco is like violets. It seemed as though it must have been carefully prepared and procured for some unknown purpose, but it was impossible to connect pleasure with it. It had a corroding mineral scent, and must have been digged, I think, out of the bowels of the surely not harmless earth. And the man himself! He was primly and precisely dressed, but he had an indefinable resemblance to a goat; his hair curled like horns; and he had the thin, restless, sneering lips, the impudent, inexpressive eyes of the goat. I found myself curiously oppressed by him. I hated his slow, deliberate movements; the idea that the air he breathed should mingle with the air of the carriage, and be transferred to my own lungs and blood, was horrible to me. I pitied those who had to serve him, and the relations compelled to own him. Yet I cannot trace the origin of this deep repugnance. There are innumerable natural objects far more hideous and outwardly repellent, but which yet do not possess this nauseating quality. Such shuddering hostility may lie far deeper than the outward appearance, and arise from some innate enmity of soul. It is a wholly unreasonable thing, no doubt, and yet it transcends all reason and surmounts all moral principle. I should not, I hope, refuse to help or succour such a man if he were in need or pain; but I do not wish to see him or to be near him, nor can I desire that he should continue to exist.
It is an interesting question how far it is allowable to dislike other people. Of course we are bound to love our enemies if we can, but even the Gospel sets us an example of unbounded and uncompromising denunciation, in the case of the Pharisees. It is the habit of preachers to say that when we are dealing with detestable and impossible people we should perform that subtle metaphysical process that is described as hating the sin and loving the sinner. But that is surely a very difficult thing to do? It is like saying that when one is contemplating a very ugly and repulsive face, we are to dislike the ugliness of it but admire the face; and the fact remains that it is an extremely difficult and complicated thing to do to separate an individual from his qualities. The most one can say is that one might like him if he were different from what he is; but as long as that remains what the grammarians call an unfulfilled condition, one's liking is of a very impersonal nature. Such a statement as that one would like a person well enough if he were only not what he is, is like the speech that was parodied by Archbishop Whately in the House of Lords. A speaker was recommending a measure on the ground that it would be a very satisfactory one if only the conditions which it was meant to meet were different. "As much as to say," said Whately to his neighbour on the conclusion of the speech, "that if my aunt were a man, he would be my uncle."
Of course the thing is easy enough when one is dealing, say, with a fine and generous nature which is disfigured by a conspicuous fault. If a man who is otherwise lovable and admirable has occasional outbursts of spiteful and vicious ill-temper, it is possible to love him, because one can conceive of him without the particular fault. But there are some faults that permeate and soak through a man's whole character, as in the Cornishsquab pie, where an excellent pasty of bacon, potatoes, and other agreeable commodities is penetrated throughout with the oily flavour of a young cormorant which is popped in at the top just before the pie is baked.
If a man is malignant or unreliable or mean or selfish, the savour of his fault has a way of noisomely imbuing all his qualities, especially if he is not aware of the deficiency. If a man is humbly and sadly aware of the thing that is vile, if he makes clumsy and lamentable attempts to get rid of it, one may pity him so much that one may almost find oneself admiring him. One feels that he is made so, that he cannot wholly help it, and we lose ourselves in wondering why a human being should be so strangely hampered. But if a man displays an odious fault complacently; if he takes mean advantage of other people, and frankly considers people fools who do not condescend to the same devices; if he gives one to understand that he dislikes and despises one; if he reserves a spiteful respect only for those who can beat him with his own weapons; if he is vulgar, snobbish, censorious, unkind, and self-satisfied into the bargain, it is very hard to say what the duty of a Christian is in the matter. I met the other day, at a country house, a man whom I will frankly confess that I disliked. He was a tall, grim-looking man, of uncompromising manners, who told interminable stories, mostly to the discredit of other people—"not leaving Lancelot brave or Galahad clean." His chief pleasure seemed to be in making his hearers uncomfortable. His stories were undeniably amusing, but left a bad taste in the mouth. He had an attentive audience, mainly, I think, because most of us were afraid to say what we thought in his presence. He was a man of wide and accurate knowledge, and delighted in showing up other people's ignorance. I suppose the truest courage would have been to withstand him boldly, or, better still, to attempt to convert him to a more generous view of life. But it did not seem worth the trouble; it was impossible to argue with him successfully, and his conversion seemed more a thing to be prayed for than to be attempted. One aged and genial statesman who was present did indeed, by persistent courtesy, contrive to give him a few moments of uneasiness; and the sympathies of the party were so plainly on the side of the statesman that even our tyrant appeared to suspect that urbanity was sometimes a useful quality. We all breathed more freely when he took his departure, and there was a general sense of heightened enjoyment abroad.
Yet it is impossible to compassionate such a man, because he does not need compassion. He is perfectly satisfied with his position; he does not want people to like him—he would consider that to be sentimental, and for sentiment of every kind he has a profound abhorrence. His view of himself is, I suppose, of a brilliant and capable man who holds his own and makes himself felt. The only result on the mind, from contemplating him, is that one revels in the possibility of metempsychosis and pictures him as being born again to some dreary and thankless occupation, a scavenger or a sewer-cleaner, or, better still, penned in the body of some absurd and inefficient animal, a slug or a jelly-fish, where he might learn to be passive and contemptible.
Meanwhile it is true, of course, that the most detestable people generally do improve upon acquaintance. I have seldom spent any length of time in the enforced society of a disagreeable person without finding that I liked him better at the end than at the beginning. Very often one finds that the disagreeable qualities are used as a sort of defensive panoply, and that they are the result, to a certain extent, of unhappy experiences. Since I met our friend I have learnt a fact about him, which makes me view him in a somewhat different light, I have discovered that he was bullied at school. I am inclined to believe that his fondness for bullying other people is mainly the result of this, and that it arises partly from a rooted belief that other people are malevolent, and that the only method is to exhibit his own spines; partly also from a perverted sense of justice; on the ground that, as he had to bear undeserved persecution in the days when he was defenceless, it is but just that others should bear it in their turn. He is like the cabin-boy Ransome inKidnapped, who, being treated with the grossest brutality by the officers, kept a rope's end of his own to wallop the little ones with. I do not say that this is a generous or high-hearted view of life. It would be better if he could sayMiseris succurrere disco. What he rather says, to parody the words of the hermit inEdwin and Angelina, is—
"The flocks that range the valley free,To slaughter I condemn;Taught by the Power that bullies me,I learn to bully them."
It is a poor consolation to say that the man who is not loved is miserable. He is, if he desires to be loved and cannot attain it; if he says, as Hazlitt said, "I cannot make out why everybody should dislike me so." But if he does not want love in the least, while he gets what he does desire—money, a place in the world, influence of a sort—then he is not miserable at all, and it is idle to pretend that he is.
But if, as I say, one is condemned to the society of a disagreeable person, it generally happens that on his discovering one to be harmless and friendly he will furl his spines and become, if not an animal that one can safely stroke, at least an animal whose proximity it is not necessary to dread and avoid. One can generally establish amodus vivendi, and unless the man is untrustworthy as well, one may hope to live peacefully with him. The worst point about our friend is that he is frankly jealous, and woe betide you if you gain any species of reputation on lines that he does not approve. Then indeed nothing can save you, because he resents your success as a personal injury done to his own.
The truth is that anyone who has any pronounced views at all, any definite strain of temperament, is sure to encounter people who are entirely uncongenial. What one is bound to do is to realise that there is abundant room for all kinds of personalities in the world, and it is much better not to protest and censure unless one is absolutely certain that the temperament one dislikes is a mischievous one. It is not necessarily mischievous to be quarrelsome, though a peaceable person may dislike it. There is no reason whatever why two quarrelsome people, if they enjoy it, should not have a good set-to. What is mischievous is if a man is brutal and tyrannical, and prefers a tussle with an inoffensive person who is no match for him. That is a piece of cowardice, and protest is more than justifiable. There is a fine true story of a famous head-master, who disliked a weakling, putting on a stupid, shy, and ungainly boy to construe, and making deliberate fun of him. There was a boy present, of the stuff of which heroes are made, who got up suddenly in his place and said, "You are not teaching that boy, sir; you are bullying him." The head-master had the generosity to bear his censurer no grudge for his outspokenness. But even if one is sure that one's indignation is justified and that one's contempt is deserved, it is a very dangerous thing to assume the disapproving attitude. One may know enough of a man to withstand him to the face, if one is sure that his action is base or cruel; one can hardly ever know enough of a man's temperament and antecedents to condemn him unreservedly. It is scarcely possible to be sure that a man is worse than he need have been, or that one would have done better if one had been in his place; and thus one must try to resist any expression of personal disapproval, because such an expression implies a consciousness of moral superiority, and the moment that one is conscious of that, as in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, the position of the condemner and the condemned is instantaneously reversed. To hate people is the most dangerous luxury that one can indulge in, and the most that one is justified in doing is to avoid the society of entirely uncongenial people. It is not a duty to force yourself to try to admire and like everyone who repels you. The truth is that life is not long enough for such experiments. But one can resolutely abstain from condemning them and from dwelling in thought and speech upon their offensive qualities.Nous sommes tous condamnés, says the sad proverb, and we have most of us enough to do in rooting up the tares in our own field, without pointing out other people's tares exultantly to passers-by.
The great fen to-day was full, far and wide, of little smouldering fires. On fallow after fallow, there lay small burning heaps of roots and fibres, carefully collected, kindled, tended. I tried to learn from an old labourer what it was that he was burning, but I could not understand his explanation, and I am not sure that he knew himself. Perhaps it was the tares, as in the parable, that were at length gathered into heaps and burned! Anyhow, it was a pretty sight to see the white smoke, all at one delicate angle, rising into the clear, cloudless sky on the soft September breeze. The village on the wooded ridge, with the pale, irregular houses rising among the orchards, gained a gentle richness of outline from the drifting smoke. It reminded me, too, of the Isle of Voices, and the little magic fires that rose and were extinguished again, while the phantom voices rang in the sea-breeze.
It made for me, as I passed slowly across the great flat, a soft parable of the seasons of the soul, when gratefully and joyfully it burns its gathered failures when the harvest time is over. Failures in aim, indolence, morbid glooms, doubts of capacity, unwise words, irritable interferences—what a vista of mistakes as one looks back! But there come days when, with a grateful, sober joy—the joy of feeling thankful that things have not been worse, that one has somehow emerged, and that there is after all a little good grain in the garner—one gathers one's faults and misdeeds into heaps for the burning.
The difficulty is to believe that they are burned; one thinks of the old fault, with evil fertility, ever ripening and seeding, ever increasing its circle. Well, it is so in a sense, however diligently we gather and burn. But there is enough hopefulness left for us to begin our ploughing and sowing afresh, I think.
I have had a great burning lately! I saw, in the mirror of a book, written by one who knew me well, and who yet wrote, I am sure, in no vindictive or personal spirit, how ugly and mean a thing a temperament like mine could be. One needs a shock like that every now and then, because it is so easy to drift into a mild complacency, to cast up a rough sum of one's qualities, and to conclude that though there is much to be ashamed of, yet that the total, for any who knew all the elements of the problem, is on the whole a creditable one. But here in my friend's book, who knew as much of the elements of the problem as any one could, the total was a minus quantity!
How is one to make it otherwise? Alas, I know how little one can do, but so long as one is humiliated and ashamed, and feels the keen flame scorching the vicious fibre, something, we may be sure, is being done for us, some heavenly alchemy that shall make all things new.
How shall I tell my friend that I am grateful? The very telling of it will make him feel guilty of a sort of treachery, which he did not design. So I must be silent for awhile; and, above all, resist the feeling, natural enough in the first humiliation, that one would like to send some fire-tailed fox into his standing-corn as well.
There is no impulse to be more carefully and jealously guarded than the impulse which tells us that we are bound to speak unpleasant truths to one's friends. It must be resisted until seventy times seven! It can only be yielded to if there is nothing but pure pain in the doing of it; if there is the least touch of satisfaction or zest about it, it may be safely put aside.
And so to-day I will stand for a little and watch the slow smoke drifting heavenwards from the dry weeds of my soul. It is not a sad experience, though the fingers of the fire are sharp! Rather as the rich smoke rolls into the air, and then winds and hangs in airy veils, there comes a sense of relief, of lightness, of burdens not stricken harshly off, but softly and cleanly purged away.
One meets a great many people of various kinds, old and young, kind and severe, amiable and harsh, gentle and dry, rude and polite, tiresome and interesting. One meets men who are, one recognises, virtuous, honourable, conscientious, and able; one meets women of character, and ingenuousness, and charm, and beauty. But the thing that really interests me is to meet a person—and it is not a common experience—who has made something of himself or herself; who began with one set of qualities, and who has achieved another set of qualities, by desiring them and patiently practising them; who, one is sure, has a peculiar sympathy drawn from experience, and a wisdom matured by conflict and effort.
As a rule, one feels that people are very much the same as they began by being. They are awkward and have not learned to be easy; they are dull and have not learned to be interesting; or they are clever and have not learned to be sympathetic; or charming and have not learned to be loyal; who are satisfied, in fact, with being what they are. But what a delightful and reviving thing it is to meet one whose glance betrays a sort of tenderness, a gentleness, a desire to establish a relationship; who means to like one, if he can; whose face bears signs of the conflict of spirit, in which selfishness and complacency have been somehow eradicated; who understands one's clumsy hints and interprets one's unexpressed feelings; who goes about, one knows, looking out for beautiful qualities and for subtle relationships; who evokes the best of people, their confidence, their true and natural selves; who is not in the least concerned with making an impression or being thought wise or clever or brilliant, but who just hopes for companionship and equality of soul.
Sometimes, indeed, one does not discern this largeness and wisdom of spirit quite at first sight, though it is generally revealed by aspect even more than by words. Sometimes these brotherly and sisterly persons have a fence of shyness which cannot be instantly overleapt; but one generally can discern the beautiful creature waiting gently within. But as a rule these gracious people have nothing that is formidable or daunting about them; they are quiet and simple; and having no cards to play and no game to win, they are at leisure to make the best of other people.
I have met both men and women of this apostolic kind, and one feels that they understand; that in their tranquil maturity they can make allowances for crude immaturity; that they do not at once dismiss one as being foolishly young or tiresomely elderly: they have no subjects of their own which they are vexed at finding misunderstood or not comprehended. They do not think the worse of a person for having preferences or prejudices; though when one has uttered a raw preference or an unreasonable prejudice in their presence one is ashamed, as one is for hurling a stone into a sleeping pool. One comes away from them desiring to appreciate rather than to contemn, with horizons and vistas of true and beautiful things opening up on all sides, with a wish to know more and to understand more, and to believe more; with the sense of a desirable secret of which they have the possession.
One meets sometimes exactly the opposite of all this, a lively, brilliant, contemptuous specialist, who talks briskly and lucidly about his own subject, and makes one feel humble and clumsy and drowsy. One sees that he is pleased to talk, and when the ball rolls to one's feet, one makes a feeble effort to toss it back, whereupon he makes a fine stroke, with an ill-concealed contempt for a person who is so ill-informed. Perhaps it is good to be humiliated thus; but it is not pleasant, and the worst of it is that one confuses the subject with the personality behind it, and thinks that the subject is dreary when it is only the personality that is repellent.
Such a man is repellent, because he is self-absorbed, conceited, contemptuous. He has grown up inside a sort of walled fortress, and he thinks that everyone outside is a knave or a fool. He has notchanged. It is this change, this progress of the soul that is adorable.
The question for most of us—a sad question too—is whether this change, this progress, is attainable, or whether a power of growth is given to some people and denied to others. I am afraid that this is partially true. A good many people seem to be born inside a hard carapace which cannot expand; and it protects them from the sensitive apprehension of injury and hurt, which is in reality the only condition of growth. If we feel our failures, if we see, every now and then, how unjustly, unkindly, perversely we have behaved, we try to be different next time. Perhaps the motive is not a very high one, because it is to avoid similar suffering; but we improve a little and a little.
Of course, occasionally, one meets people who have not changed much, because they started on so high a plane—it is commoner to find this among women than among men; they have begun life tender, loyal, unselfish; it has always been a greater happiness to see that people round them are pleased than to find their own satisfaction. Such people are often what the world calls ineffective, because they have no selfish object to attain. I have a friend who is like that. He is what would be called an unsuccessful man; he has never had time to do his own talents justice, because his energies have always been at the service of other people; if you ask him to do something for you, he does it as exactly, as punctually, as faithfully as if his own reputation depended upon it. He is now a middle-aged man with hundreds of friends and a small income. He lives in a poky house in a suburb, and works harder than anyone I know. If one meets him he has always the same beautiful, tired smile; and he has fifty things to ask one, all about oneself. I can't describe what good it does one to meet him. The other day I met a cousin of his, a prosperous man of business. "Yes," he said, "poor Harry goes on in his feckless way. I gave him a bit of my mind the other day. I said, 'Oh, it's all very well to be always at everyone's beck and call, and ready to give up your time to anyone who asks you—it is very pleasant, of course, and everyone speaks well of you—but it doesn't pay, my dear fellow; and you really ought to be thinking about making a position for yourself, though I am very much afraid it is too late.'"
The prosperous cousin did not tell me how Harry received his advice; but I have no doubt that he thought his cousin very kind to interest himself in his position, and went away absurdly grateful. But I would rather, for all that, be in Harry's poky lodgings, with a treasure of love and service in my heart, than in his cousin's fine house in the country, the centre of a respectful and indifferent circle.
Of course there is one sad reflection that rises in one's mind at the thought of such a life as my friend lives. When one sees what a difference he makes to so many people, and what a beautiful thing his life is, one wonders vaguely why, if God makes men as he wills, he does not make more of such natures. They are rare; they are the salt of the world; and I suppose that if the world were all salt, it would not be so rich and beautiful a place. If everyone were like Harry there would be no one left to help; and I suppose that God has some reason for leaving the world imperfect, which even we, in our infinite wisdom, cannot precisely detect.