I desire to do a very sacred thing to-day: to enunciate a couple of platitudes and attest them. It is always a solemn moment in life when one can sincerely subscribe to a platitude. Platitudes are the things which people of plain minds shout from the steps of the staircase of life as they ascend; and to discover the truth of a platitude by experience means that you have climbed a step higher.
The first enunciation is, that in this world we most of us do what we like. And the corollary to that is, that we most of us like what we do.
Of course, we must begin by taking for granted that we most of us are obliged to do something. But that granted, it seems to me that it is very rare to find people who do not take a certain pleasure in their work, and even secretly congratulate themselves on doing it with a certain style and efficiency. To find a person who has not some species of pride of this nature is very rare. Other people may not share our opinion of our own work. But even in the case of those whose work is most open to criticism, it is almost invariable to find that they resent criticism, and are very ready to appropriate praise. I had a curiously complete instance of this the other day. In a parish which I often visit, the organ in the church is what is called presided over by the most infamous executant I have ever heard—an elderly man, who seldom plays a single chord correctly, and whose attempts to use the pedals are of the nature of tentative and unsuccessful experiments. His performance has lately caused a considerable amount of indignation in the parish, for a new organ has been placed in the church, of far louder tone than the old instrument, and my friend the organist is hopelessly adrift upon it. The residents in the place have almost made up their minds to send a round-robin to the Vicar to ask that thepulsator organorum, the beater of the organ, as old Cathedral statutes term him, may be deposed. The last time I attended service, one of those strangely appropriate verses came up in the course of the Psalms, which make troubled spirits feel that the Psalter does indeed utter a message to faithful individual hearts. "I have desired that they, even my enemies," ran the verse, "should not triumph over me; for when my foot slipped, they rejoiced greatly against me." In the course of the verse the unhappy performer executed a perfect fandango on the pedals. I looked guiltily at the senior churchwarden, and saw his mouth twitch.
In the same afternoon I fell in with the organist, in the course of a stroll, and discoursed to him in a tone of gentle condolence about the difficulties of a new instrument. He looked blankly at me, and then said that he supposed that some people might find a change of instrument bewildering, but that for himself he felt equally at home on any instrument. He went on to relate a series of compliments that well-known musicians had paid him, which I felt must either have been imperfectly recollected, or else must have been of a consolatory or even ironical nature. In five minutes, I discovered that my friend was the victim of an abundant vanity, and that he believed that his vocation in life was organ-playing.
Again, I remember that, when I was a schoolmaster, one of my colleagues was a perfect byword for the disorder and noise that prevailed in his form. I happened once to hold a conversation with him on disciplinary difficulties, thinking that he might have the relief of confiding his troubles to a sympathising friend. What was my amazement when I discovered that his view of the situation was, that every one was confronted with the same difficulties as himself, and that he obviously believed that he was rather more successful than most of us in dealing with them tactfully and strictly.
I believe my principle to be of almost universal application; and that if one could see into the heart of the people who are accounted, and rightly accounted, to be gross and conspicuous failures, we should find that they were not free from a certain pleasant vanity about their own qualifications and efficiency. The few people whom I have met who are apt to despond over their work are generally people who do it remarkably well, and whose ideal of efficiency is so high that they criticise severely in themselves any deviation from their standard. Moreover, if one goes a little deeper—if, for instance, one cordially re-echoes their own criticisms upon their work—such criticisms are apt to be deeply resented.
I will go further, and say that only once in the course of my life have I found a man who did his work really well, without any particular pride and pleasure in it. To do that implies an extraordinary degree of will-power and self-command.
I do not mean to say that, if any professional person found himself suddenly placed in the possession of an independent income, greater than he had ever derived from his professional work, his pleasure in his work would be sufficient to retain him in the exercise of it. We have most of us an unhappy belief in our power of living a pleasurable and virtuous life of leisure; and the desire to live what is called the life of a gentleman, which character has lately been defined as a person who has no professional occupation, is very strong in the hearts of most of us.
But, for all that, we most of us enjoy our work; the mere fact that one gains facility, and improves from day to day, is a source of sincere pleasure, however far short of perfection our attempts may fall; and, generally speaking, our choice of a profession is mainly dictated by a certain feeling of aptitude for and interest in what we propose to undertake.
It is, then, a happy and merciful delusion by which we are bound. We grow, I think, to love our work, and we grow, too, to believe in our method of doing it. We cannot, a great preacher once said, all delude ourselves into believing that we are richer, handsomer, braver, more distinguished than others; but there are few of us who do not cherish a secret belief that, if only the truth were known, we should prove to be more interesting than others.
To leave our work for a moment, and to turn to ordinary social intercourse. I am convinced that the only thing that can account for the large number of bad talkers in the world is the wide-spread belief that prevails among individuals as to their power of contributing interest and amusement to a circle. One ought to keep this in mind, and bear faithfully and patiently the stream of tiresome talk that pours, as from a hose, from the lips of diffuse and lengthy conversationalists. I once made a terrible mistake. I complimented, from the mere desire of saying something agreeable, and finding my choice of praiseworthy qualities limited, an elderly, garrulous acquaintance on his geniality, on an evening when I had writhed uneasily under a steady downpour of talk. I have bitterly rued my insincerity. Not only have I received innumerable invitations from the man whom the Americans would call my complimentee, but when I am in his company I see him making heroic attempts to make his conversation practically continuous. How often since that day have I sympathised with St James in his eloquent description of the deadly and poisonous power of the tongue! A bore is not, as is often believed, a merely selfish and uninteresting person. He is often a man who labours conscientiously and faithfully at an accomplishment, the exercise of which has become pleasurable to him. And thus a bore is the hardest of all people to convert, because he is, as a rule, conscious of virtue and beneficence.
On the whole, it is better not to disturb the amiable delusions of our fellow-men, unless we are certain that we can improve them. To break the spring of happiness in a virtuous bore is a serious responsibility. It is better, perhaps, both in matters of work and in matters of social life, to encourage our friends to believe in themselves. We must not, of course, encourage them in vicious and hurtful enjoyment, and there are, of course, bores whose tediousness is not only not harmless, but a positively noxious and injurious quality. There are bores who have but to lay a finger upon a subject of universal or special interest, to make one feel that under no circumstances will one ever be able to allow one's thoughts to dwell on the subject again; and such a person should be, as far as possible, isolated from human intercourse, like a sufferer from a contagious malady. But this extremity of noxiousness is rare. And it may be said that, as a rule, one does more to increase happiness by a due amount of recognition and praise, even when one is recognising rather the spirit of a performance than the actual result; and such a course of action has the additional advantage of making one into a person who is eagerly welcomed and sought after in all kinds of society.
The fresh wind blew cheerily as we raced, my friend and I, across a long stretch of rich fen-land. The sunlight, falling somewhat dimly through a golden haze, lay very pleasantly on the large pasture-fields. There are few things more beautiful, I think, than these great level plains; they give one a delightful sense of space and repose. The distant lines of trees, the far-off church towers, the long dykes, the hamlets half-hidden in orchards, the "sky-space and field-silence," give one a feeling of quiet rustic life lived on a large and simple scale, which seems the natural life of the world.
Our goal was the remains of an old religious house, now a farm. We were soon at the place; it stood on a very gentle rising ground, once an island above the fen. Two great columns of the Abbey Church served as gate-posts. The house itself lay a little back from the road, a comfortable cluster of big barns and outhouses, with great walnut trees all about, in the middle of an ancient tract of pasture, full of dimpled excavations, in which the turf grew greener and more compact. The farm-house itself, a large irregular Georgian building covered with rough orange plaster, showed a pleasant tiled roof among the barns, over a garden set with venerable sprawling box-trees. We found a friendly old labourer, full of simple talk, who showed us the orchard, with its mouldering wall of stone, pierced with niches, the line of dry stew-ponds, the refectory, now a great barn, piled high with heaps of grain and straw. We walked through byres tenanted by comfortable pigs routing in the dirt. We hung over a paling to watch the creased and discontented face of an old hog, grunting in shrill anticipation of a meal. Our guide took us to the house, where we found a transept of the church, now used as a brew-house, with the line of the staircase still visible, rising up to a door in the wall that led once to the dormitory, down the steps of which, night after night, the shivering and sleepy monks must have stumbled into their chilly church for prayers. The hall of the house was magnificent with great Norman arches, once the aisle of the nave.
The whole scene had the busy, comfortable air of a place full of patriarchal life, the dignity of a thing existing for use and not for show, of quiet prosperity, of garnered provender and well-fed stock. Though it made no deliberate attempt at beauty, it was full of a seemly and homely charm. The face of the old fellow that led us about, chirping fragments of local tradition, with a mild pride in the fact that strangers cared to come and see the place, wore the contented, weather-beaten look that comes of a life of easy labour spent in the open air. His patched gaiters, the sacking tied round him with a cord to serve as an apron, had the same simple appropriateness. We walked leisurely about, gathering a hundred pretty impressions,—as the old filbert-trees that fringed the orchard, the wall-flowers, which our guide called the blood-warriors, on the ruined coping, a flight of pigeons turning with a sharp clatter in the air. At last he left us to go about his little business; and we, sitting on a broken mounting-block in the sunshine, gazed lazily and contentedly at the scene.
We attempted to picture something of the life of the Benedictines who built the house. It must have been a life of much quiet happiness. We tried to see in imagination the quaint clustered fabrics, the ancient church, the cloister, the barns, the out-buildings. The brethren must have suffered much from cold in winter. The day divided by services, the nights broken by prayers; probably the time was dull enough, but passed quickly, like all lives full of monotonous engagements. They were not particularly ascetic, these Benedictines, and insisted much on manual labour in the open air. Probably at first the monks did their farm-work as well; but as they grew richer, they employed labourers, and themselves fell back on simpler and easier garden-work. Perhaps some few were truly devotional spirits, with a fire of prayer and aspiration burning in their hearts; but the majority would be quiet men, full of little gossip about possible promotions, about lands and crops, about wayfarers and ecclesiastics who passed that way and were entertained. Very few, except certain officials like the Cellarer, who would have to ride to market, ever left the precincts of the place, but laid their bones in the little graveyard east of the church. We make a mistake in regarding the life and the buildings as having been so picturesque, as they now appear after the long lapse of time. The church was more venerable than the rest; but the refectory, at the time of the dissolution, cannot have been long built; still, the old tiled place, with its rough stone walls, must have always had a quaint and irregular air.
Probably it was as a rule a contented and amiable society. The regular hours, the wholesome fatigue which the rule entailed, must have tended to keep the inmates in health and good-humour. But probably there was much tittle-tattle; and a disagreeable, jealous, or scheming inmate must have been able to stir up a good deal of strife in a society living at such close quarters. One thinks loosely that it must have resembled the life of a college at the University, but that is an entire misapprehension; for the idea of a college is liberty with just enough discipline to hold it together, while the idea of a monastery was discipline with just enough liberty to make life tolerable.
Well, it is all over now! the idea of the monastic life, which was to make a bulwark for quiet-minded people against the rougher world, is no longer needed. The work of the monks is done. Yet I gave an affectionate thought across the ages to the old inmates of the place, whose bones have mouldered into the dust of the yard where we sat. It seemed half-pleasant, half-pathetic to think of them as they went about their work, sturdy, cheerful figures, looking out over the wide fen with all its clear pools and reed-beds, growing old in the familiar scene, passing from the dormitory to the infirmary, and from the infirmary to the graveyard, in a sure and certain hope. They too enjoyed the first breaking of spring, the return of balmy winds, the pushing up of the delicate flowers in orchard and close, with something of the same pleasure that I experience to-day. The same wonder that I feel, the same gentle thrill speaking of an unattainable peace, an unruffled serenity that lies so near me in the spring sunshine, flashed, no doubt, into those elder spirits. Perhaps, indeed, their heart went out to the unborn that should come after them, as my heart goes out to the dead to-day.
And even the slow change that has dismantled that busy place, and established it as the quiet farmstead that I see, holds a hope within it. There must indeed have been a sad time when the buildings were slipping into decay, and the church stood ruined and roofless. But how soon the scars are healed! How calmly nature smiles at the eager schemes of men, breaks them short, and then sets herself to harmonise and adorn the ruin, till she makes it fairer than before, writing her patient lesson of beauty on broken choir and tottering wall, flinging her tide of fresh life over the rents, and tenderly drawing back the broken fragments into her bosom. If we could but learn from her not to fret or grieve, to gather up what remains, to wait patiently and wisely for our change!
So I reasoned softly to myself in a train of gentle thought, till the plough-horses came clattering in, and the labourers plodded gratefully home; and the sun went down over the flats in a great glory of orange light.
I believe that I was once taken to Rydal Mount as a small boy, led there meekly, no doubt, in a sort of dream; but I retain not the remotest recollection of the place, except of a small flight of stone steps, which struck me as possessing some attractive quality or other. And I have since read, I suppose, a good many descriptions of the place; but on visiting it, as I recently did, I discovered that I had not the least idea of what it was like. And I would here shortly speak of the extraordinary kindness which I received from the present tenants, who are indeed of the hallowed dynasty; it may suffice to say that I could only admire the delicate courtesy which enabled people, who must have done the same thing a hundred times before, to show me the house with as much zest and interest, as if I was the first pilgrim that had ever visited the place.
In the first place, the great simplicity of the whole struck me. It is like a little grange or farm. The rooms are small and low, and of a pleasant domesticity; it is a place apt for a patriarchal life, where simple people might live at close quarters with each other. The house is hardly visible from the gate. You turn out of a steep lane, embowered by trees, into a little gravel sweep, approaching the house from the side. But its position is selected with admirable art; the ground falls steeply in front of it, and you look out over a wide valley, at the end of which Windermere lies, a tract of sapphire blue, among wooded hills and dark ranges. Behind, the ground rises still more steeply, to the rocky, grassy heights of Nab Scar; and the road leads on to a high green valley among the hills, a place of unutterable peace.
In this warm, sheltered nook, hidden in woods, with its southerly aspect, the vegetation grows with an almost tropical luxuriance, so that the general impression of the place is by no means typically English. Laurels and rhododendrons grow in dense shrubberies; the trees are full of leaf; flowers blossom profusely. There is a little orchard beneath the house, and everywhere there is the fragrant and pungent smell of sun-warmed garden-walks and box-hedges. There are little terraces everywhere, banked up with stone walls built into the steep ground, where stonecrops grow richly. One of these leads to a little thatched arbour, where the poet often sat; below it, the ground falls very rapidly, among rocks and copse and fern, so that you look out on to the tree-tops below, and catch a glimpse of the steely waters of the hidden lake of Rydal.
Wordsworth lived there for more than thirty years; and half a century has passed since he died. He was a skilful landscape gardener; and I suppose that in his lifetime, when the walks were being constructed and the place laid out, it must have had a certain air of newness, of interference with the old wild peace of the hillside, which it has since parted with. Now it is all as full of a quiet and settled order, as if it had been thus for ever. One little detail deserves a special mention; just below the house, there is an odd, circular, low, grassy mound, said to be the old meeting-place for the village council, in primitive and patriarchal days,—the Mount, from which the place has its name.
I thought much of the stately, simple, self-absorbed poet, whom somehow one never thinks of as having been young; the lines of Milton haunted me, as I moved about the rooms, the garden-terraces:—
"In this mount he appeared; under this treeStood visible; among these pines his voiceI heard; here with him at this fountain talked."
The place is all permeated with the thought of him, his deep and tranquil worship of natural beauty, his love of the kindly earth.
I do not think that Wordsworth is one whose memory evokes a deep personal attachment. I doubt if any figures of bygone days do that, unless there is a certain wistful pathos about them; unless something of compassion, some wish to proffer sympathy or consolation, mingles with one's reverence. I have often, for instance, stayed at a house where Shelley spent a few half-rapturous, half-miserable months. There, meditating about him, striving to reconstruct the picture of his life, one felt that he suffered much and needlessly; one would have wished to shelter, to protect him if it had been possible, or at least to have proffered sympathy to that inconsolable spirit. One's heart goes out to those who suffered long years ago, whose love of the earth, of life, of beauty, was perpetually overshadowed by the pain that comes from realising transitoriness and decay.
But Wordsworth is touched by no such pathos. He was extraordinarily prosperous and equable; he was undeniably self-sufficient. Even the sorrows and bereavements that he had to bear were borne gently and philosophically. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, and did it. Those sturdy, useful legs of his bore him many a pleasant mile. He always had exactly as much money as he needed, in order to live his life as he desired. He chose precisely the abode he preferred; his fame grew slowly and solidly. He became a great personage; he was treated with immense deference and respect. He neither claimed nor desired sympathy; he was as strong and self-reliant as the old yeomen of the hills, of whom he indeed was one; his vocation was poetry, just as their vocation was agriculture; and this vocation he pursued in as business-like and intent a spirit as they pursued their farming.
Wordsworth, indeed, was armed at all points by a strong and simple pride, too strong to be vanity, too simple to be egotism. He is one of the few supremely fortunate men in the history of literature, because he had none of the sensitiveness or indecision that are so often the curse of the artistic temperament. He never had the least misgivings about the usefulness of his life; he wrote because he enjoyed it; he ate and drank, he strolled and talked, with the same enjoyment. He had a perfect balance of physical health. His dreams never left him cold; his exaltations never plunged him into depression. He felt the mysteries of the world with a solemn awe, but he had no uneasy questionings, no remorse, no bewilderment, no fruitless melancholy.
He bore himself with the same homely dignity in all companies alike; he was never particularly interested in any one; he never had any fear of being thought ridiculous or pompous. His favourite reading was his own poetry; he wished every one to be interested in his work, because he was conscious of its supreme importance. He probably made the mistake of thinking that it was his sense of poetry and beauty that made him simple and tranquil. As a matter of fact, it was the simplicity and tranquillity of his temperament that gave him the power of enjoyment in so large a measure. There is no growth or expansion about his life; he did not learn his serene and impassioned attitude through failures and mistakes: it was his all along.
And yet what a fine, pure, noble, gentle life it was! The very thought of him, faring quietly about among his hills and lakes, murmuring his calm verse, in a sober and temperate joy, looking everywhere for the same grave qualities among quiet homekeeping folk, brings with it a high inspiration. But we tend to think of Wordsworth as a father and a priest, rather than as a brother and a friend. He is a leader and a guide, not a comrade. We must learn that, though he can perhaps turn our heart the right way, towards the right things, we cannot necessarily acquire that pure peace, that solemn serenity, by obeying his precepts, unless we too have something of the same strong calmness of soul. In some moods, far from sustaining and encouraging us, the thought of his equable, impassioned life may only fill us with unutterable envy. But still to have sat in his homely rooms, to have paced his little terraces, does bring a certain imagined peace into the mind, a noble shame for all that is sordid or mean, a hatred for the conventional aims, the pitiful ambitions of the world.
Alas, that the only sound from the little hill-platform, the embowered walks, should be the dull rolling of wheels—motors, coaches, omnibuses—in the road below! That is the shadow of his greatness. It is a pitiable thought that one of the fruits of his genius is that it has made his holy retreat fashionable. The villas rise in rows along the edges of the clear lakes, under the craggy fell-sides, where the feathery ashes root among the mimic precipices. A stream of chattering, vacuous, indifferent tourists pours listlessly along the road fromtable-d'hôtetotable-d'hôte. The turbid outflow of the vulgar world seems a profanation of these august haunts. One hopes despairingly that something of the spirit of lonely beauty speaks to these trivial heads and hearts. But is there consolation in this? What would the poet himself have felt if he could have foreseen it all?
I descended the hill-road and crossed the valley highway; it was full of dust; the vehicles rolled along, crowded with men smoking cigars and reading newspapers, tired women, children whose idea of pleasure had been to fill their hands with ferns and flowers torn from cranny and covert. I climbed the little hill opposite the great Scar; its green towering head, with its feet buried in wood, the hardy trees straggling up the front wherever they could get a hold among the grey crags, rose in sweet grandeur opposite to me. I threaded tracks of shimmering fern, out of which the buzzing flies rose round me; I went by silent, solitary places where the springs soak out of the moorland, while I pondered over the bewildering ways of the world. The life, the ideals of the great poet, set in the splendid framework of the great hills, seemed so majestic and admirable a thing. But the visible results—the humming of silly strangers round his sacred solitudes, the contaminating influence of commercial exploitation—made one fruitlessly and hopelessly melancholy.
But even so the hills were silent; the sun went down in a great glory of golden haze among the shadowy ridges. The valleys lay out at my feet, the rolling woodland, the dark fells. There fell a mood of strange yearning upon me, a yearning for the peaceful secret that, as the orange sunset slowly waned, the great hills seemed to guard and hold. What was it that was going on there, what solemn pageant, what sweet mystery, that I could only desire to behold and apprehend? I know not! I only know that if I could discern it, if I could tell it, the world would stand to listen; its littleness, its meanness, would fade in that august light; the peace of God would go swiftly and secretly abroad.
I am travelling just now, and am this week atDorchester, in the company of my oldest and best friend. We like the same things; and I can be silent if I will, while I can also say anything, however whimsical, that comes into my mind; there are few things better than that in the world, and I count the precious hours very gratefully;appono lucro.
Dorsetshire gives me the feeling of being a very old country. The big downs seem like the bases of great rocky hills which have through long ages been smoothed and worn away, softened and mellowed, the rocks, grain by grain, carried downwards into the flat alluvial meadowlands beneath. In these rich pastures, all intersected with clear streams, runnels and water-courses, full at this season of rich water-plants, the cattle graze peacefully. The downs have been ploughed and sown up to the sky-line. Then there are fine tracts of heather and pines in places. And then, too, there is a sense of old humanity, of ancient wars about the land. There are great camps and earthworks everywhere, with ramparts and ditches, both British and Roman. The wolds from which the sea is visible are thickly covered with barrows, each holding the mouldering bones of some forgotten chieftain, laid to rest, how many centuries ago, with the rude mourning of a savage clan. I stood on one of the highest of these the other day, on a great gorse-clad headland, and sent my spirit out in quest of the old warrior that lay below—"Audisne haec, Amphiaräe, sub terram condite?" But there was no answer from the air; though in my sleep one night I saw a wild, red-bearded man, in a coat of skins, with rude gaiters, and a hat of foxes' fur on his head; he carried a long staff in his hand, pointed with iron, and looked mutely and sorrowfully upon me. Who knows if it was he?
And then of later date are many ruinous strongholds, with Cyclopean walls, like the huge shattered bulk ofCorfe, upon its green hill, between the shoulders of great downs. There are broken abbeys, pinnacled church-towers in village after village. And then, too, in hamlet after hamlet, rise quaint stone manors, high-gabled, many-mullioned, in the midst of barns and byres. One of the sweetest places I have seen isCerne Abbas. The road to it winds gently up among steep downs, a full stream gliding through flat pastures at the bottom. The hamlet has a forgotten, wistful air; there are many houses in ruins. Close to the street rises the church-tower, of rich and beautiful design, with gurgoyles and pinnacles, cut out of a soft orange stone and delicately weathered. At the end of the village stands a big farm-house, built out of the abbey ruins, with a fine oriel in one of the granaries. In a little wilderness of trees, the ground covered with primroses, stands the exquisite old gatehouse with mullioned windows. I have had for years a poor little engraving of the place, and it seemed to greet me like an old friend. Then, in the pasture above, you can see the old terraces and mounds of the monastic garden, where the busy Benedictines worked day by day; further still, on the side of the down itself, is cut a very strange and ancient monument. It is the rude and barbarous figure of a naked man, sixty yards long, as though moving northwards, and brandishing a huge knotted club. It is carved deep into the turf, and is overgrown with rough grass. No one can even guess at the antiquity of the figure, but it is probably not less than three thousand years old. Some say that it records the death of a monstrous giant of the valley. The good monks Christianised it, and named itAugustine. But it seems to be certainly one of the frightful figures of which Caesar speaks, on which captives were bound with twisted osiers, and burnt to death for a Druidical sacrifice. The thing is grotesque, vile, horrible; the very stones of the place seemed soaked with terror, cruelty and death. Even recently foul and barbarous traditions were practised there, it is said, by villagers, who were Christian only in name. Yet it lay peacefully enough to-day, the shadows of the clouds racing over it, the wind rustling in the grass, with nothing to break the silence but the twitter of birds, the bleat of sheep on the down, and the crying of cocks in the straw-thatched village below.
What a strange fabric of history, memory, and tradition is here unrolled, of old unhappy far-off things! How bewildering to think of the horrible agonies of fear, the helpless, stupefied creatures lying bound there, the smoke sweeping over them and the flames crackling nearer, while their victorious foes laughed and exulted round them, and the priests performed the last hideous rites. And all the while God watched the slow march of days from the silent heaven, and worked out his mysterious purposes! And yet, surveying the quiet valley to-day, it seems as though there were no memory of suffering or sorrow in it at all.
We climbed the down; and there at our feet the world lay like a map, with its fields, woods, hamlets and church-towers, the great rich plain rolling to the horizon, till it was lost in haze. How infinitely minute and unimportant seemed one's own life, one's own thoughts, the schemes of one tiny moving atom on the broad back of the hills. And yet my own small restless identity is almost the only thing in the world of which I am assured!
There came to me at that moment a thrill of the spirit which comes but rarely; a deep hope, the sense of a secret lying very near, if one could only grasp it; an assurance that we are safe and secure in the hand of God, and a certainty that there is a vast reality behind, veiled from us only by the shadows of fears, ambitions, and desires. And the thought, too, came that all the tiny human beings that move about their tasks in the plain beneath—nay, the animals, the trees, the flowers, every blade of grass, every pebble—each has its place in the great and awful mystery. Then came the sense of the vast fellowship of created things, the tender Fatherhood of the God who made us all. I can hardly put the thought into words; but it was one of those sudden intuitions that seem to lie deeper even than the mind and the soul, a message from the heart of the world, bidding one wait and wonder, rest and be still.
I will put another little sketch side by side with the last, for the sake of contrast; I think it is hardly possible within the compass of a few days to have seen two scenes of such minute and essential difference. AtCerneI had the tranquil loneliness of the countryside, the silent valley, the long faintly-tinted lines of pasture, space and stillness; the hamlets nestled among trees in the dingles of the down. To-day I went south along a dusty road; at first there were quiet ancient sights enough, such as the huge grass-grown encampment ofMaiden Castle, now a space of pasture, but still guarded by vast ramparts and ditches, dug in the chalk, and for a thousand years or more deserted. The downs, where they faced the sea, were dotted with grassy barrows, air-swept and silent. We topped the hill, and in a moment there was a change; through the haze we saw the roofs ofWeymouthlaid out like a map before us, with the smoke drifting west from innumerable chimneys; in the harbour, guarded by the slender breakwaters, floated great ironclads, black and sinister bulks; and beyond them frowned the dark front ofPortland. Very soon the houses began to close in upon the road,—brick-built, pretentious, bow-windowed villas; then we were in the streets, showing a wholesome antiquity in the broad-windowed mansions of mellow brick, which sprang into life when the honest king George III. made the quiet port fashionable by spending his simple summers there. There was the king's lodging itself, Gloucester House, now embedded in a hotel, with the big pilastered windows of its saloons giving it a faded courtly air. Soon we were by the quays, with black red-funnelled steamers unloading, and all the quaint and pretty bustle of a port. We went out to a promontory guarded by an old stone fort, and watched a red merchant steamer roll merrily in, blowing a loud sea-horn. Then over a low-shouldered ridge, and we were by the great inner roads, full of shipping; we sat for a while by the melancholy walls of an ancient Tudor castle, now crumbling into the sea; and then across the narrow causeway that leads on toPortland. On our right rose theChesil Bank, that mysterious mole of orange shingle, which the sea, for some strange purpose of its own, has piled up, century after century, for eighteen miles along the western coast. And then the grim front ofPortland Islanditself loomed out above us. The road ran up steeply among the bluffs, through line upon line of grey-slated houses; to the left, at the top of the cliff, were the sunken lines of the huge fort, with the long slopes of its earthworks, the glacis overgrown with grass, and the guns peeping from their embrasures; to the left, dipping to the south, the steep grey crags, curve after curve. The streets were alive with an abundance of merry young sailors and soldiers, brisk, handsome boys, with the quiet air of discipline that converts a country lout into a self-respecting citizen. An old bronzed sergeant led a child with one hand, and with the other tried to obey her shrill directions about whirling a skipping-rope, so that she might skip beside him; he looked at us with a half-proud, half-shamefaced smile, calling down a rebuke for his inattention from the girl.
We wound slowly up the steep roads smothered in dust; landwards the view was all drowned in a pale haze, but the steep grey cliffs byLulworthgleamed with a tinge of gold across the sea.
At the top, one of the dreariest landscapes I have ever seen met the sight. The island lies, so to speak, like a stranded whale, the great head and shoulders northwards to the land. The moment you surmount the top, the huge, flat side of the monster is extended before you, shelving to the sea. Hardly a tree grows there; there is nothing but a long perspective of fields, divided here and there by stone walls, with scattered grey houses at intervals. There is not a feature of any kind on which the eye can rest. In the foreground the earth is all tunnelled and tumbled; quarries stretch in every direction, with huge, gaunt, straddling, gallows-like structures emerging, a wheel spinning at the top, and ropes travelling into the abyss; heaps of greydébris, interspersed with stunted grass, huge excavations, ugly ravines with a spout of grim stone at the seaward opening, like the burrowings of some huge mole. The placid green slopes of the fort give an impression of secret strength, even grandeur. Otherwise it is but a ragged, splashed aquarelle of grey and green. Over thedébrisappear at a distance the blunt ominous chimneys of the convict prison, which seems to put the finishing touch on the forbidding character of the scene.
To-day the landward view was all veiled in haze, which seemed to shut off the sad island from the world. On a clear day, no doubt, the view must be full of grandeur, the inland downs, edged everywhere with the tall scarped cliffs, headland after headland, with the long soft line of theChesil Bankbelow them. But on a day of sea mist, it must be, I felt, one of the saddest and most mournful regions in the world, with no sound but the wail of gulls, and the chafing of the surge below.
To-day I had a singular pleasure heightened by an intermingled strangeness and even terror—qualities which bring out the quality of pleasure in the same way that a bourdon in a pedal-point passage brings out the quality of what a German would, I think, call theover-work. I was atCanterbury, where the great central tower is wreathed with scaffolding, and has a dim, blurred outline from a distance, as though it were being rapidly shaken to and fro. I found a friendly and communicable man who offered to take me over it; we climbed a dizzy little winding stair, with bright glimpses at intervals, through loop-holes, of sunlight and wheeling birds; then we crept along the top of a vaulted space with great pockets of darkness to right and left. Soon we were in the gallery of the lantern, from which we could see the little people crawling on the floor beneath, like slow insects. And then we mounted a short ladder which took us out of one of the great belfry windows, on to the lowest of the planked galleries. What a frail and precarious structure it seemed: the planks bent beneath our feet. And here came the first exquisite delight—that of being close to the precipitous face of the tower, of seeing the carved work which had never been seen close at hand since its erection except by the jackdaws and pigeons. I was moved and touched by observing how fine and delicate all the sculpture was. There were rows and rows of little heraldic devices, which from below could appear only as tiny fretted points; yet every petal of rose orfleur-de-lyswas as scrupulously and cleanly cut as if it had been meant to be seen close at hand; a waste of power, I suppose; but what a pretty and delicate waste! and done, I felt, in faithful days, when the carving was done as much to delight, if possible, the eye of God, as to please the eye of man. Higher and higher we went, till at last we reached the parapet. And then by a dizzy perpendicular ladder to which I committed myself in faith, we reached a little platform on the very top of one of the pinnacles. The vane had just been fixed, and the stone was splashed with the oozing solder. And now came the delight of the huge view all round: the wooden heights, the rolling hills; old church towers rose from flowering orchards; a mansion peeped through immemorial trees; and far to the north-east we could see the white cliff ofPegwell Bay; endeared to me through the beautiful picture by Dyce, where the pale crags rise from the reefs green with untorn weeds. There on the horizon I could see shadowy sails on the steely sea-line.
Near at hand there were the streets, and then the Close, with its comfortable canonical houses, in green trim gardens, spread out like a map at my feet. We looked down on to the tops of tall elm-trees, and saw the rooks walking and sitting on the grey-splashed platforms of twigs, that swayed horribly in the breeze. It was pleasant to see, as I did, the tiny figure of my reverend host walking, a dot of black, in his garden beneath, reading in a book. The long grey-leaded roof ran broad and straight, a hundred feet below. One felt for a moment as a God might feel, looking on a corner of his created world, and seeing that it was good. One seemed to have surmounted the earth, and to watch the little creeping orbits of men with a benevolent compassion, perceiving how strait they were. The large air hissed briskly in the pinnacles, and roared through the belfry windows beneath. I cannot describe the eager exhilaration which filled me; but I guessed that the impulse which bids men fling themselves from such heights is not a morbid prepossession, not a physical dizziness, but an intemperate and overwhelming joy. It seems at such a moment so easy to float and swim through the viewless air, as if one would be borne up on the wings of angels.
But, alas! the hour warned us to return. On our way down we disturbed a peevish jackdaw from her nest; she had dragged up to that intolerable height a pile of boughs that would have made a dozen nests; she had interwoven for the cup to hold her eggs a number of strips of purloined canvas. There lay the three speckled eggs, the hope of the race, while the chiding mother stood on a pinnacle hard by, waiting for the intruder to begone.
A strange sense of humiliation and smallness came upon me as we emerged at last into the nave; the people that had seemed so small and insignificant, were, alas! as big and as important as myself; I felt as an exile from the porches of heaven, a fallen spirit.
I am often baffled when I try to think what prayer is; if our thoughts do indeed lie open before the eyes of the Father, like a little clear globe of water which a man may hold in his hand—and I am sure they do—it certainly seems hardly worth while to put those desires into words. Many good Christians seem to me to conceive of prayers partly as a kind of tribute they are bound to pay, and partly as requests that are almost certain to be refused. With such people religion, then, means the effort which they make to trust a Father who hears prayers, and very seldom answers them. But this does not seem to be a very reasonable attitude.
I confess that liturgical prayer does not very much appeal to me. It does not seem to me to correspond to any particular need in my mind. It seems to me to sacrifice almost all the things that I mean by prayer—the sustained intention of soul, the laying of one's own problems before the Father, the expression of one's hopes for others, the desire that the sorrows of the world should be lightened. Of course, a liturgy touches these thoughts at many points; but the exercise of one's own liberty of aspiration and wonder, the pursuing of a train of thought, the quiet dwelling upon mysteries, are all lost if one has to stumble and run in a prescribed track. To follow a service with uplifted attention requires more mental agility than I possess; point after point is raised, and yet, if one pauses to meditate, to wonder, to aspire, one is lost, and misses the thread of the service. I suppose that there is or ought to be something in the united act of intercession. But I dislike all public meetings, and think them a waste of time. I should make an exception in favour of the Sacrament, but the rapid disappearance of the majority of a congregation before the solemn act seems to me to destroy the sense of unity with singular rapidity. As to the old theory that God requires of his followers that they should unite at intervals in presenting him with a certain amount of complimentary effusion, I cannot even approach the idea. The holiest, simplest, most benevolent being of whom I can conceive would be inexpressibly pained and distressed by such an intention on the part of the objects of his care; and to conceive of God as greedy of recognition seems to me to be one of the conceptions which insult the dignity of the soul.
I have heard lately one or two mediaeval stories which illustrate what I mean. There is a story of a pious monk, who, worn out by long vigils, fell asleep, as he was saying his prayers before a crucifix. He was awakened by a buffet on the head, and heard a stern voice saying, "Is this an oratory or a dormitory?" I cannot conceive of any story more grotesquely human than the above, or more out of keeping with one's best thoughts about God. Again, there is a story which is told, I think, of one of the first monasteries of the Benedictine order. One of the monks was a lay brother, who had many little menial tasks to fulfil; he was a well-meaning man, but extremely forgetful, and he was often forced to retire from some service in which he was taking part, because he had forgotten to put the vegetables on to boil, or omitted other duties which would lead to the discomfort of the brethren. Another monk, who was fond of more secular occupations, such as wood-carving and garden-work, and not at all attached to habits of prayer, seeing this, thought that he would do the same; and he too used to slip away from a service, in order to return to the business that he loved better. The Prior of the monastery, an anxious, humble man, was at a loss how to act; so he called in a very holy hermit, who lived in a cell hard by, that he might have the benefit of his advice. The hermit came and attended an Office. Presently the lay brother rose from his knees and slipped out. The hermit looked up, followed him with his eyes, and appeared to be greatly moved. But he took no action, and only addressed himself more assiduously to his prayers. Shortly after, the other brother rose and went out. The hermit looked up, and seeing him go, rose too, and followed him to the door, where he fetched him a great blow upon the head that nearly brought him to the ground. Thereupon the stricken man went humbly back to his place and addressed himself to his prayers; and the hermit did the same.
The Office was soon over, and the hermit went to the Prior's room to talk the matter over. The hermit said: "I bore in my mind what you told me, dear Father, and when I saw one of the brethren rise from his prayers, I asked God to show me what I should do; but I saw a wonderful thing; there was a shining figure with our brother, his hand upon the other's sleeve; and this fair comrade, I have no doubt, was an angel of God, that led the brother forth, that he might be about his Father's business. So I prayed the more earnestly. But when our other brother rose, I looked up; and I saw that he had been plucked by the sleeve by a little naked, comely boy, very swarthy of hue, that I saw had no business among our holy prayers; he wore a mocking smile on his face, as though he prevailed in evil. So I rose and followed; and just as they came to the door, I aimed a shrewd blow, for it was told me what to do, at the boy, and struck him on the head, so that he fell to the ground, and presently went to his own place; and then our brother came back to his prayers."
The Prior mused a little over this wonder, and then he said, smiling: "It seemed to me that it was our brother that was smitten." "Very like," said the hermit, "for the two were close together, and I think the boy was whispering in the brother's ear; but give God the glory; for the dear brother will not offend again."
There is an abundance of truth in this wholesome ancient tale; but I will not draw the morals out here. All I will say is that the old theory of prayer, simple and childlike as it is, seems to have a curious vitality even nowadays. It presupposes that the act of prayer is in itself pleasing to God; and that is what I am not satisfied of.
That theory seems to prevail even more strongly in the Roman Church of to-day than in our own. The Roman priest is not a man occupied primarily with pastoral duties; his business is the business of prayer. To neglect his daily offices is a mortal sin, and when he has said them, his priestly duty is at an end. This does not seem to me to bear any relation to the theory of prayer as enunciated in the Gospel. There the practice of constant and secret prayer, of a direct and informal kind, is enjoined upon all followers of Christ; but Our Lord seems to be very hard upon the lengthy and public prayers of the Pharisees, and indeed against all formality in the matter at all. The only united service that he enjoined upon his followers was the Sacrament of the common meal; and I confess that the saying of formal liturgies in an ornate building seems to me to be a practice which has drifted very far away from the simplicity of individual religion which Christ appears to have aimed at.
My own feeling about prayer is that it should not be relegated to certain seasons, or attended by certain postures, or even couched in definite language; it should rather be a constant uplifting of the heart, a stretching out of the hands to God. I do not think we should ask for definite things that we desire; I am sure that our definite desires, our fears, our plans, our schemes, the hope that visits one a hundred times a day, our cravings for wealth or success or influence, are as easily read by God, as a man can discern the tiny atoms and filaments that swim in his crystal globe. But I think we may ask to be led, to be guided, to be helped; we may put our anxious little decisions before God; we may ask for strength to fulfil hard duties; we may put our desires for others' happiness, our hopes for our country, our compassion for sorrowing or afflicted persons, our horror of cruelty and tyranny before him; and here I believe lies the force of prayer; that by practising this sense of aspiration in his presence, we gain a strength to do our own part. If we abstain from prayer, if we limit our prayers to our own small desires, we grow, I know, petty and self-absorbed and feeble. We can leave the fulfilment of our concrete aims to God; but we ought to be always stretching out our hands and opening our hearts to the high and gracious mysteries that lie all about us.
A friend of mine told me that a little Russian peasant, whom he had visited often in a military hospital, told him, at their last interview, that he would tell him a prayer that was always effective, and had never failed of being answered. "But you must not use it," he said, "unless you are in a great difficulty, and there seems no way out." The prayer which he then repeated was this: "Lord, remember King David, and all his grace."
I have never tested the efficacy of this prayer, but I have a thousand times tested the efficacy of sudden prayer in moments of difficulty, when confronted with a little temptation, when overwhelmed with irritation, before an anxious interview, before writing a difficult passage. How often has the temptation floated away, the irritation mastered itself, the right word been said, the right sentence written! To do all we are capable of, and then to commit the matter to the hand of the Father, that is the best that we can do.
Of course, I am well aware that there are many who find this kind of help in liturgical prayer; and I am thankful that it is so. But for myself, I can only say that as long as I pursued the customary path, and confined myself to fixed moments of prayer, I gained very little benefit. I do not forego the practice of liturgical attendance even now; for a solemn service, with all the majesty of an old and beautiful building full of countless associations, with all the resources of musical sound and ceremonial movement, does uplift and rejoice the soul. And even with simpler services, there is often something vaguely sustaining and tranquillising in the act. But the deeper secret lies in the fact that prayer is an attitude of soul, and not a ceremony; that it is an individual mystery, and not a piece of venerable pomp. I would have every one adopt his own method in the matter. I would not for an instant discourage those who find that liturgical usage uplifts them; but neither would I have those to be discouraged who find that it has no meaning for them. The secret lies in the fact that our aim should be a relation with the Father, a frank and reverent confidence, a humble waiting upon God. That the Father loves all his children with an equal love I doubt not. But he is nearest to those who turn to him at every moment, and speak to him with a quiet trustfulness. He alone knows why he has set us in the middle of such a bewildering world, where joy and sorrow, darkness and light, are so strangely intermingled; and all that we can do is to follow wisely and patiently such clues as he gives us, into the cloudy darkness in which he seems to dwell.