THE STAR

THE STARTHE STARWELL might it be said that, from century to century, a tragic poet ‘has wandered through the labyrinths of destiny with the torch of poesy in his hand.’ For in this way has each one, according to the forces of his hour, fixed the souls of the annals of man, and it is divine history that has thus been composed. It is in the poets alone that we can follow the countless variations of the great unchanging power; and to follow them is indeed interesting, for at the root of the idea that they have formed of this power is to be found, perhaps, the purest essence of a nation’s soul. It is a power that hasnever entirely ceased to be, yet moments there are when it scarcely seems to stir; and at such moments one feels that life is neither very active nor very profound. Once only has it been the object of undivided worship; then was it, even for the gods, an awe-inspiring mystery. And there is a thing that is passing strange—it was the very period when the featureless divinity seemed most terrible and most incomprehensible that was the most beautiful period of mankind, and the people to whom destiny wore the most formidable aspect were the happiest people of all.It would seem that a secret force must underlie this idea, or that the idea is itself the manifestation of a force. Does man develop in the measure that he recognises the greatness of the unknown that sways him, or is it the unknown that develops in proportion to the man? To-day the idea of destiny would seem to be againawakening, and to go forth in search of it were perhaps no unprofitable quest. But where shall it be found? To go in search of destiny—what is this but to seek all the sorrows of man? There is no destiny of joy, no star that bodes of happiness. The star that is so called is only a star of forbearance. Yet is it well that we should sally forth at times in search of our sorrows, so that we may learn to know them and admire them; and this even though the great shapeless mass of destiny be not encountered at the end.Seeking our sorrows, we shall be the most effectively seeking ourselves, for truly may it be said that the value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet. As we progress, so do they become deeper, nobler and more beautiful; and Marcus Aurelius is to be admired above all men, because, better than all men, has he understood how much thereis of the soul in the meek resigned smile it must wear, at the depths of us. Thus is it, too, with the sorrows of humanity. They follow a road which resembles the road of our own sorrows; but it is longer, and surer, and must lead to fatherlands that the last comers alone shall know. This road also has physical sorrow for its starting-point; it has only just rounded the fear of the gods, and to-day it halts by a new abyss, whose depths the very best of us have not yet sounded.Each century holds another sorrow dear, for each century discerns another destiny. Certain it is that we no longer interest ourselves, as was formerly the case, in the catastrophes of passion; and the quality of the sorrow revealed in the most tragic masterpieces of the past is inferior to the quality of the sorrows of to-day. It is only indirectly that these tragedies affect us now; only by means of that which isbrought to bear on the simple accidents of love or hatred they reproduce, by the reflection and new nobility of sentiment that the pain of living has created within us.There are moments when it would seem as though we were on the threshold of a new pessimism, mysterious and, perhaps, very pure. The most redoubtable sages, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, the Russians, the Scandinavians, and the good optimist Emerson, too (for than a wilful optimist there is nothing more discouraging), all these have passed our melancholy by, unexplained. We feel that, underlying all the reasons they have essayed to give us, there are many other profounder reasons, whose discovery has been beyond them. The sadness of man which seemed beautiful even to them, is still susceptible of infinite ennobling, until at last a creature of genius shall have uttered the final wordof the sorrow that shall, perhaps, wholly purify....In the meanwhile, we are in the hands of strange powers, whose intentions we are on the eve of divining. At the time of the great tragic writers of the new era, at the time of Shakespeare, Racine, and their successors, the belief prevailed that all misfortunes came from the various passions of the heart. Catastrophes did not hover between two worlds: they came hence to go thither, and their point of departure was known. Man was always the master. Much less was this the case at the time of the Greeks, for then did fatality reign on the heights; but it was inaccessible, and none dared interrogate it. To-day it is fatality that we challenge, and this is perhaps the distinguishing note of the new theatre. It is no longer the effects of disaster that arrest our attention; it is disaster itself, and we are eager to know itsessence and its laws. It was thenatureof disaster with which the earliest tragic writers were, all unconsciously, preoccupied, and this it was that, though they knew it not, threw a solemn shadow round the hard and violent gestures of external death; and it is this, too, that has become the rallying-point of the most recent dramas, the centre of light with strange flames gleaming, about which revolve the souls of women and of men. And a step has been taken towards the mystery so that life’s terrors may be looked in the face.It would be interesting to discover from what point of view our latest tragic writers appear to regard the disaster that forms the basis of all dramatic poems. They see it from a nearer point of vision than the Greeks, and they have penetrated deeper into the fertile darknesses of its inner circle. The divinity is perhaps the same; they know nothing of it, yet do they studyit more closely. Whence does it come, whither does it go, why does it descend upon us? These were problems to which the Greeks barely gave a thought. Is it written within us, or is it born at the same time as ourselves? Does it of its own accord start forward to meet us, or is it summoned by conniving voices that we cherish at the depths of us? If we could but follow, from the heights of another world, the ways of the man over whom a great sorrow is impending! And what man is there that does not laboriously, though all unconsciously, himself fashion the sorrow that is to be the pivot of his life!The Scotch peasants have a word that might be applied to every existence. In their legends they give the name of ‘Fey’ to the frame of mind of a man who, notwithstanding all his efforts, notwithstanding all help and advice, is forced by someirresistible impulse, towards an inevitable catastrophe. It is thus that James I., the James of Catherine Douglas, was ‘fey’ when he went, notwithstanding the terrible omens of earth, heaven and hell, to spend the Christmas holidays in the gloomy castle of Perth, where his assassin, the traitor Robert Graeme, lay in wait for him. Which of us, recalling the circumstances of the most decisive misfortune of his life, but has felt himself similarly possessed? Be it well understood that I speak here only of active misfortunes, of those that might have been prevented: for there are passive misfortunes (such as the death of a person we adore) which simply come towards us, and cannot be influenced by any movement of ours. Bethink you of the fatal day of your life. Have we not all been forewarned; and though it may seem to us now that destiny might have been changed by a step we did not take, a doorwe did not open, a hand we did not raise, which of us but has struggled vainly on the topmost walls of the abyss, struggled without vigour and without hope, against a force that was invisible and apparently without power?The breath of air stirred by the door I opened, one evening, was for ever to extinguish my happiness, as it would have extinguished a flickering lamp; and now, when I think of it, I cannot tell myself that I did not know.... And yet, it was nothing important that had taken me to the threshold. I could have gone away, shrugging my shoulders: there was no human reason that could force me to knock on the panel. No human reason, nothing but destiny....*Herein there is still some resemblance to the fatality of Œdipus, and yet it is already different. One might say that it is thissame fatality seenab intra. Mysterious powers hold sway within us, and these would seem to be in league with adventures. We all cherish enemies within our soul. They know what they do and what they force us to do, and when they lead us to the event, they let fall half-uttered words of warning—too few to stop us on the road—but sufficient to make us regret, when it is too late, that we did not listen more attentively to their wavering, ironical advice. What object can they have, these powers that seek our destruction as though they were self-existing and did not perish with us, seeing that it is in us only that they have life? What is it that sets in motion all the confederates of the universe, who fatten on our blood?The man for whom the hour of misfortune has sounded is caught up by an invisible whirlwind, and for years back have these powers been combining theinnumerable incidents that must bring him to the necessary moment, to the exact spot where tears lie in wait for him. Remember all your efforts, all your presentiments, all the unavailing offers of help. Remember, too, the kindly circumstances that pitied you, and tried to bar your passage, but you thrust them aside like so many importunate beggars. And yet were they humble, timid sisters, who desired but to save you, and they went away without saying a word, too weak and too helpless to struggle against decided things—where decided it is known to God alone....Scarcely has the disaster befallen us than we have the strange sensation of having obeyed an eternal law; and, in the midst of the greatest sorrow, there is I know not what mysterious comfort that rewards us for our obedience. Never do we belong more completely to ourselves than on the morrow of an irreparable catastrophe. Itseems, then, as though we had found ourselves again, as though we had won back a part of ourselves that was necessary and unknown. A curious calm steals over us. For days past, almost without our knowledge, notwithstanding that we were able to smile at faces and flowers, the rebel forces of our soul had been waging terrible battle on the borders of the abyss, and now that we are at the depths of it, all breathes freely.Even thus, without respite, do these rebel forces struggle in the soul of every one of us; and there are times when we may see the shadow of these combats wherein our soul may not intervene, but we pay no heed, for to all save the unimportant do we shut our eyes. At a time when my friends are about me it may happen that, in the midst of talk and shouts of laughter, there shall suddenly steal over the face of one of them something that is not of thisworld. A motiveless silence shall instantly prevail, and for a second’s space all shall be unconsciously looking forth with the eyes of the soul. Whereupon, the words and smiles, that had disappeared like frightened frogs in a lake, will again mount to the surface, more violent than before. But the invisible, here as everywhere, has gathered its tribute. Something has understood that a fight was over, that a star was rising or falling and that a destiny had just been decided....Perhaps it had been decided before; and who knows whether the struggle be not a mere simulacrum? If I push open to-day the door of the house wherein I am to meet the first smiles of a sorrow that shall know no end, I do these things for a longer time than one imagines. Of what avail to cultivate an ego on which we have so little influence? It is our star which it behoves us to watch. It is good or bad, pallid orpuissant, and not by all the might of the sea can it be changed. Some there are who may confidently play with their star as one might play with a glass ball. They may throw it and hazard it where they list; faithfully will it ever return to their hands. They know full well that it cannot be broken. But there are many others who dare not even raise their eyes towards their star, without it detach itself from the firmament and fall in dust at their feet....But it is dangerous to speak of the star, dangerous even to think of it; for it is often the sign that it is on the point of extinction....We find ourselves here in the abysses of night, where we await what has to be. There is no longer question of free will, which we have left thousands of leagues below: we are in a region where the will itself is but destiny’s ripest fruit. Wemust not complain; something is already known to us, and we have discovered a few of the ways of fortune. We lie in wait like the birdcatcher studying the habits of migratory birds, and when an event is signalled on the horizon we know full well that it will not remain there alone, but that its brothers will flock in troops to the same spot. Vaguely have we learned that there are certain thoughts, certain souls, that attract events; that some beings there are who divert events in their flight, as there are others who cause them to congregate from the four quarters of the globe.Above all do we know that certain ideas are fraught with extreme danger; that do we but for an instant deem ourselves in safety, this alone suffices to draw down the thunderbolt; we know that happiness creates a void, into which tears will speedily be hurled. After a time, too, we learnsomething of the preferences of events. It is soon borne home to us that if we take a few steps along the path of life by the side of this one of our brothers, the ways of fortune will no longer be the same, whereas, with this other, our existence will encounter unvarying events, coming in regular order. We feel that some beings there are who protect in the unknown, others who drag us into danger there; we feel that there are some who awaken the future, others who lull it into slumber. We suspect, further, that things at their birth are but feeble, that they draw their force from within us, and that, in every adventure, there is a brief moment when our instinct warns us that we are still the lords of destiny. In fine, there are some who dare assert that we can learn to be happy, that, as we become better, so do we meet men of loftier mind; that a man who is good attracts, with irresistible force, events as good as he,and that, in a beautiful soul, the saddest fortune is transformed into beauty....Indeed, is it not within the knowledge of us all that goodness beckons to goodness, and that those for whom we devote ourselves are always the same; that they are always the same, those whom we betray? When the same sorrow knocks at two adjoining doors, at the houses of the just and the unjust, will its method of action be identical in both? If you are pure, will not your misfortunes be pure? To have known how to change the past into a few saddened smiles—is this not to master the future? And does it not seem that, even in the inevitable, there is something we can keep back? Do not great hazards lie dormant that a too sudden movement of ours may awaken on the horizon; and would this misfortune have befallen you to-day, but for the thoughts that this morning kept too noisy festival in your soul? Isthis all that our wisdom has been able to glean in the darkness? Who would dare affirm that in these regions there be more substantial truths? In the meanwhile, let us learn how to smile, let us learn how to weep, in the silence of humblest kindliness. Slowly there rises above these things the shrouded face of the destiny of to-day. Of the veil that formerly covered it, a minute corner has been lifted, and there, where the veil is not, do we recognise, to our disquiet, on the one side,the power of those who live not yet, on the other,the power of the dead. The mystery has again been shifted further from us—that is all. We have enlarged the icy hand of destiny; and we find that, in its shadow, the hands of our ancestors are clasped by the hands of our sons yet unborn. One act there was that we deemed the sanctuary of all our rights, and love remained the supreme refuge of all those on whom the chains of life weighed tooheavily. Here, at least, in the isolation of this secret temple, we told ourselves that no one entered with us. Here, for an instant, we could breathe; here, at last, it was our soul that reigned, and free was its choice in that which was the centre of liberty itself! But now we are told that it is not for our own sake that we love. We are told that in the very temple of love we do but obey the unvarying orders of an invisible throng. We are told that a thousand centuries divide us from ourselves when we choose the woman we love, and that the first kiss of the betrothed is but the seal that thousands of hands, craving for birth, impress upon the lips of the mother they desire. And, further, we know that the dead do not die. We know now that it is not in our churches that they are to be found, but in the houses, the habits, of us all. That there is not a gesture, a thought, a sin, a tear, an atom of acquired consciousnessthat is lost in the depths of the earth; and that at the most insignificant of our acts our ancestors arise, not in their tombs where they move not, but in ourselves, where they always live....Thus are we led by past and future. And the present, which is the substance of us, sinks to the bottom of the sea, like some tiny island at which two irreconcilable oceans have been unceasingly gnawing. Heredity, will, destiny, all mingle noisily in our soul; but, notwithstanding everything, far above everything, it is the silent star that reigns. No matter with what temporary labels we may bedeck the monstrous vases that contain the invisible, words can tell us scarcely anything of that which should be told. Heredity, nay destiny itself, what are these but a ray of this star, a ray that is lost in the mysterious night? And all that is might well be more mysterious still. ‘We give the name ofdestiny to all that limits us,’ says one of the great sages of our time: wherefore it behoves us to be grateful to all those who tremblingly grope their way the side of the frontier. ‘If we are brutal and barbarous,’ he goes on, ‘fatality takes a form that is brutal and barbarous. As refinement comes to us, so do our mishaps become refined. If we rise to spiritual culture, antagonism takes unto itself a spiritual form.’ It is perhaps true that even as our soul soars aloft, so does it purify destiny, although it is also true that we are menaced by the self-same sorrows that menace the savages. But we have other sorrows of which they have no suspicion; and the spirit, as it rises, does but discover still more, at every horizon. ‘We give the name of destiny to all that limits us.’ Let us do our utmost that destiny become not too circumscribed. It is good to enlarge one’s sorrows, since thus does enlargement come to ourconsciousness, and there, there alone do we truly feel that we live. And it is also the only means of fulfilling our supreme duty towards other worlds; since it is probably on us alone that it is incumbent to augment the consciousness of the earth.THE INVISIBLE GOODNESSTHE INVISIBLE GOODNESSIT is a thing, said to me one evening the sage I had chanced to meet by the sea shore, whereon the waves were breaking almost noiselessly—it is a thing that we scarcely notice, that none seem to take into account, and yet do I conceive it to be one of the forces that safeguard mankind. In a thousand diverse ways do the gods from whom we spring reveal themselves within us, but it may well be that this unnoticed secret goodness, to which sufficiently direct allusion has never yet been made, is the purest token of their eternal life. Whence it comes we know not. It is there in its simplicity, smiling on the threshold of oursoul; and those in whom its smiles lie deepest, or shine forth most frequently, may make us suffer day and night and they will, yet shall it be beyond our power to cease to love them....It is not of this world, and still are there few agitations of ours in which it takes not part. It cares not to reveal itself even in look or tear. Nay, it seeks concealment, for reasons one cannot divine. It is as though it were afraid to make use of its power. It knows that its most involuntary movement will cause immortal things to spring to life about it; and we are miserly with immortal things. Why are we so fearful lest we exhaust the heaven within us? We dare not act upon the whisper of the God who inspires us. We are afraid of everything that cannot be explained by word or gesture: and we shut our eyes to all that we do, ourselves notwithstanding, in the empire where explanations are vain!Whence comes the timidity of the divine in man? For truly might it be said that the nearer a movement of our soul approaches the divine, so much the more scrupulously do we conceal it from the eyes of our brethren. Can it be that man is nothing but a frightened god? Or has the command been laid upon us that the superior powers must not be betrayed? Upon all that does not form part of this too visible world there rests the tender meekness of the little ailing girl, for whom her mother will not send when strangers come to the house. And therefore it is that this secret goodness of ours has never yet passed through the silent portals of our soul. It lives within us like a prisoner forbidden to approach the barred window of her cell. But indeed, what matter though it do not approach? Enough that it be there. Hide as it may, let it but raise its head, move a link of its chain oropen its hand, and the prison is illumined, the pressure of radiance from within bursts open the iron barrier, and then, suddenly, there yawns a gulf between words and beings, a gulf peopled with agitated angels: silence falls over all: the eyes turn away for a moment and two souls embrace tearfully on the threshold....It is not a thing that comes from this earth of ours, and all descriptions can be of no avail. They who would understand must have, in themselves too,the same point of sensibility. If you have never in your life felt the power ofyour invisible goodness, go no further; it would be useless. But are there really any who have not felt this power, and have the worst of us never been invisibly good? I know not: of so many in this world does the aim seem to be the discouragement of the divine in their soul. And yet there needs but one instant of respite for the divine to springup again, and even the wickedest are not incessantly on their guard; and hence doubtless has it arisen that so many of the wicked are good, unseen of all, whereas divers saints and sages are not invisibly good....More than once have I been the cause of suffering, he went on, even as each being is the cause of suffering about him. I have caused suffering because we are in a world where all is held together by invisible threads, in a world where none are alone, and where the gentlest gesture of love or kindliness may so often wound the innocence by our side!—I have caused suffering, too, because there are times when the best and tenderest are impelled to seek I know not what part of themselves in the grief of others. For, indeed, there are seeds that only spring up in our soul beneath the rain of tears shed because of us, and none the less do these seeds produce good flowersand salutary fruit. What would you? It is no law of our making, and I know not whether I would dare to love the man who had made no one weep. Frequently, indeed, will the greatest suffering be caused by those whose love is greatest, for a strange timid, tender cruelty is most often the anxious sister of love. On all sides does love search for the proofs of love, and the first proofs—who is not prone to discover them in the tears of the beloved?Even death could not suffice to reassure the lover who dared to give ear to the unreasoning claims of love; for to the intimate cruelty of love, the instant of death seems too brief; over beyond death there is yet room for a sea of doubts, and even in those who die together may disquiet still linger as they die. Long, slowly falling tears are needed here. Grief is love’s first food, and every love that has not been fed on a little pure sufferingmust die like the babe that one had tried to nourish on the nourishment of a man. Will the love inspired by the woman who always brought the smile to your lips be quite the same as the love you feel for her who at times called forth your tears? Alas! needs must love weep, and often indeed is it at the very moment when the sobs burst forth that love’s chains are forged and tempered for life....Thus, he continued, I have caused suffering because I loved, and also have I caused suffering because I did not love—but how great was the difference in the two cases! In the one the slowly dropping tears of well-tried love seemed already to know, at the depths of them, that they were bedewing all that was ineffable in our united souls; in the other the poor tears knew that they were falling in solitude on a desert. But it is at those very moments when the soul is all ear—or, haply, allsoul—that I have recognised the might of an invisible goodness that could offer to the wretched tears of an expiring love the divine illusions of a love on the eve of birth. Has there never come to you one of those sorrowful evenings when dejection lay heavy upon your unsmiling kisses, and it at length dawned upon your soul that it had been mistaken? With direst difficulty did your words ring forth in the cold air of the separation that was to be final; you were about to part for ever, and your almost lifeless hands were outstretched for the farewell of a departure that should know no return, when suddenly your soul made an imperceptible movement within itself. On that instant did the soul by the side of you awake on the summits of its being; something sprang to life in regions loftier far than the love of jaded lovers; and for all that the bodies might shrink asunder, henceforth would the souls neverforget that for an instant they had beheld each other high above mountains they had never seen, and that for a second’s space they had been good with a goodness they had never known until that day....What can this be, this mysterious movement that I speak of here in connection with love only, but which may well take place in the smallest events of life? Is it I know not what sacrifice or inner embrace, is it the profoundest desire to be soul for a soul, or the consciousness, ever quickening within us, of the presence of a life that is invisible, but equal to our own? Is it all that is admirable and sorrowful in the mere act of living that, at such moments, floods our being—is it the aspect of life, one and indivisible? I know not; but in truth it is then that we feel that there lurks, somewhere, an unknown force; it is then that we feel that we are the treasures of an unknown God who loves all, that not agesture of this God may pass unperceived, and that we are at length in the region of things that do not betray themselves....Certain it is that, from the day of our birth to the day of our death, we never emerge from this clearly defined region, but wander in God like helpless sleepwalkers, or like the blind who despairingly seek the very temple in which they do indeed befind themselves. We are there in life, man against man, soul against soul, and day and night are spent under arms. We never see each other, we never touch each other. We see nothing but bucklers and helmets, we touch nothing but iron and brass. But let a tiny circumstance, come from the simpleness of the sky, for one instant only cause the weapons to fall, are there not always tears beneath the helmet, childlike smiles behind the buckler, and is not another verity revealed?He thought for a moment, then wenton, more sadly: A woman—as I believe I told you just now—a woman to whom I had caused suffering against my will—for the most careful of us scatter suffering around them without their knowledge—a woman to whom I had caused suffering against my will, revealed to me one evening the sovereign power of this invisible good. To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better. This was brought home to me that evening. I felt that I had arrived, alone, at that sad zone of kisses when it seems to us that we are visiting the hovels of the poor, while she, who had lingered on the road, was still smiling in the palace of the first days. Love, as men understand it, was dying between us like a child stricken with a disease come one knows not whence, a disease that has no pity. We said nothing. It would be impossible for me to recallwhat my thoughts were at that earnest moment. They were doubtless of no significance. I was probably thinking of the last face I had seen, of the quivering gleam of a lantern at a deserted street corner; and, nevertheless,everything took placein a light a thousand times purer, a thousand times higher, than had there intervened all the forces of pity and love which I command in my thoughts and my heart. We parted, and not a word was spoken, but at one and the same moment had we understood our inexpressible thought. We know now that another love had sprung to life, a love that demands not the words, the little attentions and smiles of ordinary love. We have never met again. Perhaps centuries will elapse before we ever do meet again.‘Much is to learn, much to forget,Through worlds I shall traverse not a few’before we shall again find ourselvesin thesame movement of the soulas on that evening: but we can well afford to wait....And thus, ever since that day, have I greeted, in all places, even in the very bitterest of moments, the beneficent presence of this marvellous power. He who has but once clearly seen it, shall never again find it possible to turn away from its face. You will often behold it smiling in the last retreat of hatred, in the depths of the cruellest tears. And yet does it not reveal itself to the eyes of the body. Its nature changes from the moment that it manifests itself by means of an exterior act; and we are no longer in the truth according to the soul, but in a kind of falsehood as conceived by man. Goodness and love that are self-conscious have no influence on the soul, for they have departed from the kingdoms where they have their dwelling; but, do they only remain blind, they can soften Destiny itself. I have knownmore than one man who performed every act of kindness and mercy without touching a single soul; and I have known others, who seemed to live in falsehood and injustice, yet were no souls driven from them nor did any for an instant even believe that these men were not good. Nay, more, even those who do not know you, who are merely told of your acts of goodness and deeds of love—if you be not good according to the invisible goodness, these, even, will feel that something is lacking, and they will never be touched in the depths of their being. One might almost believe that there exists, somewhere, a place where all is weighed in the presence of the spirits, or perhaps, out yonder, the other side of the night, a reservoir of certitudes whither the silent herd of souls flock every morning to slake their thirst.Perhaps we do not yet know what the word ‘to love’ means. There are withinus lives in which we love unconsciously. To love thus means more than to have pity, to make inner sacrifices, to be anxious to help and give happiness; it is a thing that lies a thousand fathoms deeper, where our softest, swiftest, strongest words cannot reach it. At moments we might believe it to be a recollection, furtive but excessively keen, of the great primitive unity. There is in this love a force that nothing can resist. Which of us—an’ he question himself the side of the light, from which our gaze is habitually averted—which of us but will find in himself the recollection of certain strange workings of this force? Which of us, when by the side of the most ordinary person perhaps, but has suddenly become conscious of the advent of something that none had summoned? Was it the soul, or perhaps life, that had turned within itself like a sleeper on the point of awakening? I know not; nor did youknow, and no one spoke of it; but you did not separate from each other as though nothing had happened.To love thus is to love according to the soul; and there is no soul that does not respond to this love. For the soul of man is a guest that has gone hungry these centuries back, and never has it to be summoned twice to the nuptial feast.The souls of all our brethren are ever hovering about us, craving for a caress, and only waiting for the signal. But how many beings there are who all their life long have not dared make such a signal! It is the disaster of our entire existence that we live thus away from our soul, and stand in such dread of its slightest movement. Did we but allow it to smile frankly in its silence and its radiance, we should be already living an eternal life. We have only to think for an instant how much it succeeds in accomplishing during those raremoments when we knock off its chains—for it is our custom to enchain it as though it were distraught—what it does in love, for instance, for there we do permit it at times to approach the lattices of external life. And would it not be in accordance with the primal truth if all men were to feel that they were face to face with each other, even as the woman feels with the man she loves?This invisible and divine goodness, of which I only speak here because of its being one of the surest and nearest signs of the unceasing activity of our soul, this invisible and divine goodness ennobles, in decisive fashion, all that it has unconsciously touched. Let him who has a grievance against his fellow, descend into himself and seek out whether he never has been good in the presence of that fellow. For myself, I have never met any one by whose side I have felt my invisible goodness bestir itself, without he has become, at that veryinstant, better than myself. Be good at the depths of you, and you will discover that those who surround you will be good even to the same depths. Nothing responds more infallibly to the secret cry of goodness than the secret cry of goodness that is near. While you are actively good in the invisible, all those who approach you will unconsciously do things that they could not do by the side of any other man. Therein lies a force that has no name; a spiritual rivalry that knows no resistance. It is as though this were the actual place where is the sensitive spot of our soul; for there are souls that seem to have forgotten their existence and to have renounced everything that enables the being to rise; but, once touched here, they all draw themselves erect; and in the divine plains of the secret goodness, the most humble of souls cannot endure defeat.And yet it is possible that nothing ischanging in the life one sees; but is it only that which matters, and is our existence indeed confined to actions we can take in our hand like stones on the high road? If you ask yourself, as we are told we should ask every evening, ‘What of immortal have I done to-day?’ Is it always on the material side that we can count, weigh and measure unerringly; is it there that you must begin your search? It is possible for you to cause extraordinary tears to flow; it is possible that you may fill a heart with unheard of certitudes, and give eternal life unto a soul, and no one shall know of it, nor shall you even know yourself. It may be that nothing is changing; it may be that were it put to the test all would crumble, and that this goodness we speak of would yield to the smallest fear. It matters not. Something divine has happened; and somewhere must our God have smiled. May it not be the supreme aim oflife thus to bring to birth the inexplicable within ourselves; and do we know how much we add to ourselves when we awake something of the incomprehensible that slumbers in every corner? Here you have awakened love which will not fall asleep again. The soul that your soul has regarded, that has wept with you the holy tears of the solemn joy that none may behold, will bear you no resentment, not even in the midst of torture. It will not even feel the need of forgiving. So convinced is it of one knows not what, that nothing can henceforth dim or efface the smile that it wears within; for nothing can ever separate two souls which, for an instant, ‘have been good together.’THE DEEPER LIFETHE DEEPER LIFEIT is well that men should be reminded that the very humblest of them has the power to ‘fashion, after a divine model that he chooses not, a great moral personality, composed in equal parts of himself and the ideal; and that if anything lives in fullest reality, of a surety it is that.’Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. Than this there can be no nobler aim in life. It is only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other. If the hero is greater than thewretch who marches by his side, it is because at a certain moment of his existence there has come to him a fuller consciousness of one of these communications. If it is true that creation does not stop at man and that we are surrounded by invisible beings who are superior to us, their superiority can only consist in that they have, with the infinite, communications whose nature we cannot even imagine.It lies within our power to increase these communications. In the life of every man has there been a day when the heavens opened of their own accord, and it is almost always from that very instant that dates his true spiritual personality. It is doubtless at that instant that are formed the invisible, eternal features that we reveal, though we know it not, to angels and to souls. But with most men it is chance alone that has caused the heavens to open; and they have not chosen the facewhereby the angels know them in the infinite, nor have they understood how to ennoble and purify its features—which do indeed but owe their being to an accidental joy or sadness, an accidental thought or fear.Our veritable birth dates from the day when, for the first time, we feel at the deepest of us that there is something grave and unexpected in life. Some there are who realise suddenly that they are not alone under the sky. To others will it be brusquely revealed, while shedding a tear or giving a kiss, that ‘the source of all that is good and holy from the universe up to God is hidden behind a night, full of too distant stars’; a third will see a divine hand stretched forth between his joy and his misfortune; and yet another will have understood that it is the dead who are in the right. One will have had pity, another will have admired or been afraid. Oftendoes it need almost nothing, a word, a gesture, a little thing that is not even a thought. ‘Before, I loved thee as a brother, John,’ says one of Shakespeare’s heroes, admiring the other’s action, ‘but now I do respect thee as my soul.’ On that day it is probable that a being will have come into the world.We can be born thus more than once; and each birth brings us a little nearer to our God. But most of us are content to wait till an event, charged with almost irresistible radiance, intrudes itself violently upon our darkness, and enlightens us, in our despite. We await I know not what happy coincidence, when it may so come about that the eyes of our soul shall be open at the very moment that something extraordinary takes place. But in everything that happens is there light; and the greatness of the greatest of men has but consisted in that they had trained theireyes to be open to every ray of this light. Is it indeed essential that your mother should breathe her last in your arms, that your children should perish in a shipwreck, and that you yourself should pass by the side of death, for you at length to understand that you have your being in an incomprehensible world where you shall be for ever, where an unseen God, who is eternally alone, dwells with His creatures? Must your betrothed die in a fire, or disappear before your eyes in the green depths of the ocean, for it to be revealed to you for an instant that the last limits of the kingdom of love transcend perhaps the scarcely visible flames of Mira, Altair or Berenice’s tresses? Had your eyes been open, might you not have beheld in a kiss that which to-day you perceive in a catastrophe? Are the divine recollections that slumber in our souls to be awakened only by the lance-thrusts of grief? Thesage needs no such violent arousing. He sees a tear, a maiden’s gesture, a drop of water that falls; he listens to a passing thought, presses a brother’s hand, approaches a lip, with open eyes and open soul. He never ceases to behold that of which you have caught but a passing glimpse; and a smile will readily tell him all that it needed a tempest, or even the hand of death, to reveal to you.For what are in reality the things we call ‘Wisdom,’ ‘Virtue,’ ‘Heroism,’ ‘sublime hours,’ and ‘great moments of life,’ but the moments when we have more or less issued forth from ourselves, and have been able to halt, be it only for an instant, on the step of one of the eternal gates whence we see that the faintest cry, the most colourless thought, and most nerveless gestures do not drop into nothingness; or that if they do indeed thus drop, the fall itself is so immense that it sufficesto give an august character to our life? Why wait till the firmament shall open amid the roar of the thunderbolt? We must watch for the happy moments when it opens in silence; and it is ever thus opening. You seek God in your life, and you say God appears not. But in what life are there not thousands of hours akin to the hour in that drama where all are waiting for the divine intervention, and none perceive it, till an invisible thought that has flitted across the consciousness of a dying man suddenly reveals itself, and an old man cries out, sobbing for joy and terror, ‘But God, there is God!’....Must we always be warned, and can we only fall on our knees when some one is there to tell us that God is passing by? If you have loved profoundly you have needed no one to tell you that your soul was a thing as great in itself as the world; that the stars, the flowers, the waves ofnight and sea were not solitary; that it was on the threshold of appearances that everything began, but nothing ended, and that the very lips you kissed belonged to a creature who was loftier, much purer, and much more beautiful than the one whom your arms enfolded. You have beheld that which in life cannot be seen without ecstasy. But cannot we live as though we always loved? It was this that the saints and heroes did; this and nothing more. Ah! truly too much of our life is spent in waiting, like the blind men in the legend who had travelled far so that they might hear their God. They were seated on the steps, and when asked what they were doing in the courtyard of the sanctuary, ‘We are waiting,’ they replied, shaking their heads, ‘and God has not yet said a single word.’ But they had not seen that the brass doors of the temple were closed, and they knew not that theedifice was resounding with the voice of their God. Never for an instant does God cease to speak; but no one thinks of opening the doors. And yet, with a little watchfulness, it were not difficult to hear the word that God must speak concerning our every act.We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life. And if aught be lacking, it is not the chance of living in heaven, rather is it watchfulness and meditation, also perhaps a little ecstasy of soul. Though you have but a little room, do you fancy that God is not there, too, and that it is impossible to live therein a life that shall be somewhat lofty? If you complain of being alone, of the absence of events, of loving no one and being unloved, do you think that the words are true? Do you imagine that one can possibly be alone, that love can be a thing one knows, a thing one sees; thatevents can be weighed like the gold and silver of ransom? Cannot a living thought—proud or humble, it matters not; so it come but from your soul, it is great for you—cannot a lofty desire, or simply a moment of solemn watchfulness to life, enter a little room? And if you love not, or are unloved, and can yet see with some depth of insight that thousands of things are beautiful, that the soul is great and life almost unspeakably earnest, is that not as beautiful as though you loved or were loved? And if the sky itself is hidden from you, ‘does not the great starry sky,’ asks the poet, ‘spread over our soul, in spite of all, under guise of death?’ ... All that happens to us is divinely great, and we are always in the centre of a great world. But we must accustom ourselves to live like an angel who has just sprung to life, like a woman who loves, or a man on the point of death. If you knewthat you were going to die to-night, or merely that you would have to go away and never return, would you, looking upon men and things for the last time, see them in the same light that you have hitherto seen them? Would you not love as you never yet have loved? Is it the virtue or evil of the appearances around you that would be magnified? Would it be given you to behold the beauty or the ugliness of the soul? Would not everything, down to actual evil and suffering, be transformed into love, overflowing with gentlest tears? Does not, to quote the sage, each opportunity for pardon rob departure or death of something of its bitterness? And yet, in the radiance or sorrow or death, is it towards truth or error that one has taken the last steps one is allowed to take?Is it the living or the dying who can see and are in the right? Ah! thrice happythey who have thought, spoken, and acted so as to receive the approval of those who are about to die, or to whom a great sorrow has given clearer insight! The sage, to whom none would hearken in life, can meet with no sweeter reward. If you have lived in obscure beauty, you have no cause for disquiet. At the end there must always sound within the heart of man an hour of supreme justice; and misfortune opens eyes that were never open before. Who knows whether at this very moment your shadow be not passing over the soul of a dying man and be not recognised by him as the shadow of one who already knew the truth? May it not be at the bedside of the last agony that is woven the veritable and most precious crown of sage and hero, and of all who have known how to live earnestly amid the sorrows, lofty, pure, and discreet, of life according to the soul?‘Death,’ says Lavater, ‘does not only beautify our inanimate form; nay, the mere thought of death gives a more beautiful form to life itself.’ And even so does every thought, that is infinite as death, beautify our life. But we must not deceive ourselves. To every man there come noble thoughts, that pass across his heart like great white birds. Alas! they do not count; they are strangers whom we are surprised to see, whom we dismiss with importunate gesture. Their time is too short to touch our life. Our soul will not become earnest and deep-searching, as is the soul of the angels, for that we have, for one fleeting instant, beheld the universe in the shadow of death or eternity, in the radiance of joy or the flames of beauty and love. We have all known moments such as these, moments that have but left worthless ashes behind. These things must be habitual with us; it is of no avail that theyshould come by chance. We must learn to live in a beauty, an earnestness, that shall have become part of ourselves. In life, there is no creature so degraded but knows full well which is the noble and beautiful thing that he should do; but this noble and beautiful thing is not strong enough within him. It is this invisible and abstract strength that it must be our endeavour to increase, first of all. And this strength increases only in those who have acquired the habit of resting, more frequently than others, upon the summits where life absorbs the soul, upon the heights whence we see that every act and every thought are infallibly bound up with something great and immortal. Look upon men and things with the inner eye, with its form and desire, never forgetting that the shadow they throw as they pass by, upon hillock or wall, is but the fleeting image of a mightier shadow, which, like the wing of an imperishableswan, floats over every soul that draws near to their soul. Do not believe that thoughts such as these can be mere ornaments, and without influence upon the lives of those who admit them. It is far more important that one’s life should be perceived than that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived, than it transforms itself of its own accord. These thoughts of which I speak make up the secret treasure of heroism; and, on the day that life compels us to disclose this treasure, we are startled to find therein no forces other than those by which we are impelled towards perfect beauty. Then it is no longer necessary that a great king should die for us to remember that ‘the world does not end at the house-doors,’ and not an evening passes but the smallest thing suffices to ennoble the soul.Yet it is not by telling yourself that God is great and that you move in His radiance,that you will be able to live in the beauty and fertile depths where the heroes dwelt. You may perhaps remind yourself, day and night, that the hands of all the invisible powers are waving over your head like a tent with countless folds, and yet shall the least gesture of these hands be imperceptible to you. It behoves you to be keenly vigilant; and better had you watch in the market-place than slumber in the temple. Beauty and grandeur are everywhere; for it needs but an unexpected incident to reveal them to us. This is known to nearly all men; but know it though they may, it is only when fortune or death lashes them that they grope around the wall of life in search of the crevices through which God may be seen. They know full well that there are eternal crevices even in the humble walls of a hovel, and that the smallest window cannot take away a line or a star from the immensity of heavenly space.But it is not enough to possess a truth; it is essential that the truth should possess us.And yet are we in a world where the smallest events assume, spontaneously, a beauty that ever becomes purer and loftier. There is nothing that coalesces more readily than earth and sky; if your eyes have rested upon the stars, before enfolding in your arms the woman you love, your embrace will not be the same as though you had merely looked at the walls of your room. Be sure that the day you lingered to follow a ray of light through a crevice in the door of life, you did something as great as though you had bandaged the wounds of your enemy, for at that moment did you no longer have any enemies.Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness ofour life depends on so little! Even thus may the verse of a poet, in the midst of the humble incidents of ordinary days, suddenly reveal to us something that is stupendous. No solemn word has been pronounced, and we feel that nothing has been called forth; and yet, why has an ineffable face beckoned to us from behind an old man’s tears, why does a vast night, starred with angels, extend over the smile of a child, and why, around a yes or no, murmured by a soul that sings and busies itself with other matters, do we suddenly hold our breath for an instant and say to ourselves, ‘Here is the house of God, and this one of the approaches to heaven’?It is because these poets have been more heedful than we to the ‘never-ending shadow.’ ... That is the essence of supreme poetry, that, and that alone, and its sole aim is to keep open ‘the great road that leads from the seen to the unseen.’ Butthat is life’s supreme aim, too, and it is easier far to attain in life than in the noblest of poems, for these have had to abandon the two great wings of silence. Not a single day is trivial. It is essential that this idea should sink into our life and take root therein. There is no question of being sad. Small joys, faint smiles, and great tears, all these fill up the same nook in time and space. You can play in life as innocently ‘as a child about a death-bed,’ and it is not the tears that are indispensable. Smiles as well as tears open the gates of the other world. Go or come, you will find all you need in the darkness, but never forget that you are close to the gate.*After this lengthy digression, I return to my starting-point, which was that ‘it is well that men should be reminded that the very humblest of them has the power to fashion, after a divine model that hechooses not, a great moral personality, composed in equal parts of himself and the ideal.’ It is only in the depths of life that this ‘great moral personality’ can be carved out; and only by means of incessant ‘revelations of the divine’ can we add to the stores of the ideal we require. To every man is it given to attain in spirit to the heights of virtuous life, and to know at all times what his conduct should be, would he act like a hero or a saint. But more than this is needed. It is essential that the spiritual atmosphere about us should be transformed to such a degree that it ends by resembling the atmosphere of Swedenborg’s beautiful countries of the age of gold, wherein the air permitted not a falsehood to leave the lips. An instant comes then, when the smallest ill that we fain would commit falls at our feet like a leaden ball upon a disc of bronze; when everything changes, though we know itnot, into beauty, love, or truth. But this atmosphere enwraps those only who have been heedful to ventilate their life sufficiently by at times flinging open the gates of the other world. It is when we are near to those gates that we see; it is when we are near to those gates that we love. For to love one’s neighbour does not mean only to give oneself to him, to serve, help, and sustain others. We may possibly be neither good, nor noble, nor beautiful, even in the midst of the greatest sacrifice; and the sister of charity who dies by the bedside of a typhoid patient may perchance have a mean, rancorous, miserable soul. To love one’s neighbour in the immovable depths means to love in others that which is eternal; for one’s neighbour, in the truest sense of the term, is that which approaches the nearest to God; in other words, all that is best and purest in man; and it is only by ever lingeringnear the gates I spoke of, that you can discover the divine in the soul. Then will you be able to say with the great Jean Paul: ‘When I desire to love most tenderly one who is dear to me, and wish to forgive him everything, I have but to look at him for a few moments in silence.’ To learn to love, one must first learn to see. ‘I lived for twenty years by my sister’s side,’ said a friend to me, one day, ‘andI saw herfor the first time at the moment of our mother’s death.’ Here, too, it had been necessary that death should violently fling open an eternal gate, so that two souls might behold each other in a ray of the primeval light. Is there one amongst us who has not near to him sisters he has never seen?Happily, even in those whose vision is most limited, there is always something that acts in silence as though they had seen. It is possible, perhaps, that to begood is only to be in a little light what all are in darkness. Therefore, doubtless, is it well that we should endeavour to raise our life, and should strive towards summits where ill-doing becomes impossible. And therefore, too, is it well to accustom the eye to behold events and men in a divine atmosphere. But even that is not indispensable; and how small must the difference seem to the eyes of a God! We are in a world where truth reigns at the bottom of things, and where it is not truth but falsehood that needs to be explained. If the happiness of your brother sadden you, do not despise yourself; you will not have to travel far along the road before you will come across something in yourself that will not be saddened. And even though you do not travel the road, it matters little: something there was that was not sad....Those who think of nothing have thesame truth as those who think of God; the truth is a little further from the threshold, that is all. ‘Even in the life that is most ordinary,’ says Renan, ‘the part that is done for God is enormous. The lowest of men would rather be just than unjust: we all worship, we all pray, numbers of times every day, without knowing it.’ And we are surprised when chance suddenly reveals to us the importance of this divine part. There are about us thousands and thousands of poor creatures who have nothing of beauty in their lives: they come, they go, in obscurity, and we believe that all is dead within them; and no one pays any heed. And then one day a simple word, an unexpected silence, a little tear that springs from the source of beauty itself, tell us that they have found the means of raising aloft, in the shadow of their soul, an ideal a thousand times more beautiful than the most beautiful thingstheir ears have ever heard, or their eyes ever seen. Oh, noble and pallid ideals of silence and shadow! It is you, above all, who call forth the smile of the angels, it is you, above all, who soar direct to God! In what myriads of hovels, in what dens of misery, in what prisons, perhaps, are you not being cherished at this moment, cherished with the purest blood and tears of an unhappy soul that has never smiled; even as the bees, at the time when all the flowers are dead about them, still offer to her who is to be their queen a honey a thousand times more precious than the honey they give to their little sisters of daily life.... Which of us has not met, more than once, along the paths of life, a forsaken soul that has yet not lost the courage to cherish, in the darkness, a thought diviner and purer than all those that so many others had the power to choose in the light? Here, too, it is simplicity that is God’s favouriteslave; and it is enough, perhaps, that a few sages should know what has to be done, for the rest of us to act as though we knew too....

THE STARTHE STARWELL might it be said that, from century to century, a tragic poet ‘has wandered through the labyrinths of destiny with the torch of poesy in his hand.’ For in this way has each one, according to the forces of his hour, fixed the souls of the annals of man, and it is divine history that has thus been composed. It is in the poets alone that we can follow the countless variations of the great unchanging power; and to follow them is indeed interesting, for at the root of the idea that they have formed of this power is to be found, perhaps, the purest essence of a nation’s soul. It is a power that hasnever entirely ceased to be, yet moments there are when it scarcely seems to stir; and at such moments one feels that life is neither very active nor very profound. Once only has it been the object of undivided worship; then was it, even for the gods, an awe-inspiring mystery. And there is a thing that is passing strange—it was the very period when the featureless divinity seemed most terrible and most incomprehensible that was the most beautiful period of mankind, and the people to whom destiny wore the most formidable aspect were the happiest people of all.It would seem that a secret force must underlie this idea, or that the idea is itself the manifestation of a force. Does man develop in the measure that he recognises the greatness of the unknown that sways him, or is it the unknown that develops in proportion to the man? To-day the idea of destiny would seem to be againawakening, and to go forth in search of it were perhaps no unprofitable quest. But where shall it be found? To go in search of destiny—what is this but to seek all the sorrows of man? There is no destiny of joy, no star that bodes of happiness. The star that is so called is only a star of forbearance. Yet is it well that we should sally forth at times in search of our sorrows, so that we may learn to know them and admire them; and this even though the great shapeless mass of destiny be not encountered at the end.Seeking our sorrows, we shall be the most effectively seeking ourselves, for truly may it be said that the value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet. As we progress, so do they become deeper, nobler and more beautiful; and Marcus Aurelius is to be admired above all men, because, better than all men, has he understood how much thereis of the soul in the meek resigned smile it must wear, at the depths of us. Thus is it, too, with the sorrows of humanity. They follow a road which resembles the road of our own sorrows; but it is longer, and surer, and must lead to fatherlands that the last comers alone shall know. This road also has physical sorrow for its starting-point; it has only just rounded the fear of the gods, and to-day it halts by a new abyss, whose depths the very best of us have not yet sounded.Each century holds another sorrow dear, for each century discerns another destiny. Certain it is that we no longer interest ourselves, as was formerly the case, in the catastrophes of passion; and the quality of the sorrow revealed in the most tragic masterpieces of the past is inferior to the quality of the sorrows of to-day. It is only indirectly that these tragedies affect us now; only by means of that which isbrought to bear on the simple accidents of love or hatred they reproduce, by the reflection and new nobility of sentiment that the pain of living has created within us.There are moments when it would seem as though we were on the threshold of a new pessimism, mysterious and, perhaps, very pure. The most redoubtable sages, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, the Russians, the Scandinavians, and the good optimist Emerson, too (for than a wilful optimist there is nothing more discouraging), all these have passed our melancholy by, unexplained. We feel that, underlying all the reasons they have essayed to give us, there are many other profounder reasons, whose discovery has been beyond them. The sadness of man which seemed beautiful even to them, is still susceptible of infinite ennobling, until at last a creature of genius shall have uttered the final wordof the sorrow that shall, perhaps, wholly purify....In the meanwhile, we are in the hands of strange powers, whose intentions we are on the eve of divining. At the time of the great tragic writers of the new era, at the time of Shakespeare, Racine, and their successors, the belief prevailed that all misfortunes came from the various passions of the heart. Catastrophes did not hover between two worlds: they came hence to go thither, and their point of departure was known. Man was always the master. Much less was this the case at the time of the Greeks, for then did fatality reign on the heights; but it was inaccessible, and none dared interrogate it. To-day it is fatality that we challenge, and this is perhaps the distinguishing note of the new theatre. It is no longer the effects of disaster that arrest our attention; it is disaster itself, and we are eager to know itsessence and its laws. It was thenatureof disaster with which the earliest tragic writers were, all unconsciously, preoccupied, and this it was that, though they knew it not, threw a solemn shadow round the hard and violent gestures of external death; and it is this, too, that has become the rallying-point of the most recent dramas, the centre of light with strange flames gleaming, about which revolve the souls of women and of men. And a step has been taken towards the mystery so that life’s terrors may be looked in the face.It would be interesting to discover from what point of view our latest tragic writers appear to regard the disaster that forms the basis of all dramatic poems. They see it from a nearer point of vision than the Greeks, and they have penetrated deeper into the fertile darknesses of its inner circle. The divinity is perhaps the same; they know nothing of it, yet do they studyit more closely. Whence does it come, whither does it go, why does it descend upon us? These were problems to which the Greeks barely gave a thought. Is it written within us, or is it born at the same time as ourselves? Does it of its own accord start forward to meet us, or is it summoned by conniving voices that we cherish at the depths of us? If we could but follow, from the heights of another world, the ways of the man over whom a great sorrow is impending! And what man is there that does not laboriously, though all unconsciously, himself fashion the sorrow that is to be the pivot of his life!The Scotch peasants have a word that might be applied to every existence. In their legends they give the name of ‘Fey’ to the frame of mind of a man who, notwithstanding all his efforts, notwithstanding all help and advice, is forced by someirresistible impulse, towards an inevitable catastrophe. It is thus that James I., the James of Catherine Douglas, was ‘fey’ when he went, notwithstanding the terrible omens of earth, heaven and hell, to spend the Christmas holidays in the gloomy castle of Perth, where his assassin, the traitor Robert Graeme, lay in wait for him. Which of us, recalling the circumstances of the most decisive misfortune of his life, but has felt himself similarly possessed? Be it well understood that I speak here only of active misfortunes, of those that might have been prevented: for there are passive misfortunes (such as the death of a person we adore) which simply come towards us, and cannot be influenced by any movement of ours. Bethink you of the fatal day of your life. Have we not all been forewarned; and though it may seem to us now that destiny might have been changed by a step we did not take, a doorwe did not open, a hand we did not raise, which of us but has struggled vainly on the topmost walls of the abyss, struggled without vigour and without hope, against a force that was invisible and apparently without power?The breath of air stirred by the door I opened, one evening, was for ever to extinguish my happiness, as it would have extinguished a flickering lamp; and now, when I think of it, I cannot tell myself that I did not know.... And yet, it was nothing important that had taken me to the threshold. I could have gone away, shrugging my shoulders: there was no human reason that could force me to knock on the panel. No human reason, nothing but destiny....*Herein there is still some resemblance to the fatality of Œdipus, and yet it is already different. One might say that it is thissame fatality seenab intra. Mysterious powers hold sway within us, and these would seem to be in league with adventures. We all cherish enemies within our soul. They know what they do and what they force us to do, and when they lead us to the event, they let fall half-uttered words of warning—too few to stop us on the road—but sufficient to make us regret, when it is too late, that we did not listen more attentively to their wavering, ironical advice. What object can they have, these powers that seek our destruction as though they were self-existing and did not perish with us, seeing that it is in us only that they have life? What is it that sets in motion all the confederates of the universe, who fatten on our blood?The man for whom the hour of misfortune has sounded is caught up by an invisible whirlwind, and for years back have these powers been combining theinnumerable incidents that must bring him to the necessary moment, to the exact spot where tears lie in wait for him. Remember all your efforts, all your presentiments, all the unavailing offers of help. Remember, too, the kindly circumstances that pitied you, and tried to bar your passage, but you thrust them aside like so many importunate beggars. And yet were they humble, timid sisters, who desired but to save you, and they went away without saying a word, too weak and too helpless to struggle against decided things—where decided it is known to God alone....Scarcely has the disaster befallen us than we have the strange sensation of having obeyed an eternal law; and, in the midst of the greatest sorrow, there is I know not what mysterious comfort that rewards us for our obedience. Never do we belong more completely to ourselves than on the morrow of an irreparable catastrophe. Itseems, then, as though we had found ourselves again, as though we had won back a part of ourselves that was necessary and unknown. A curious calm steals over us. For days past, almost without our knowledge, notwithstanding that we were able to smile at faces and flowers, the rebel forces of our soul had been waging terrible battle on the borders of the abyss, and now that we are at the depths of it, all breathes freely.Even thus, without respite, do these rebel forces struggle in the soul of every one of us; and there are times when we may see the shadow of these combats wherein our soul may not intervene, but we pay no heed, for to all save the unimportant do we shut our eyes. At a time when my friends are about me it may happen that, in the midst of talk and shouts of laughter, there shall suddenly steal over the face of one of them something that is not of thisworld. A motiveless silence shall instantly prevail, and for a second’s space all shall be unconsciously looking forth with the eyes of the soul. Whereupon, the words and smiles, that had disappeared like frightened frogs in a lake, will again mount to the surface, more violent than before. But the invisible, here as everywhere, has gathered its tribute. Something has understood that a fight was over, that a star was rising or falling and that a destiny had just been decided....Perhaps it had been decided before; and who knows whether the struggle be not a mere simulacrum? If I push open to-day the door of the house wherein I am to meet the first smiles of a sorrow that shall know no end, I do these things for a longer time than one imagines. Of what avail to cultivate an ego on which we have so little influence? It is our star which it behoves us to watch. It is good or bad, pallid orpuissant, and not by all the might of the sea can it be changed. Some there are who may confidently play with their star as one might play with a glass ball. They may throw it and hazard it where they list; faithfully will it ever return to their hands. They know full well that it cannot be broken. But there are many others who dare not even raise their eyes towards their star, without it detach itself from the firmament and fall in dust at their feet....But it is dangerous to speak of the star, dangerous even to think of it; for it is often the sign that it is on the point of extinction....We find ourselves here in the abysses of night, where we await what has to be. There is no longer question of free will, which we have left thousands of leagues below: we are in a region where the will itself is but destiny’s ripest fruit. Wemust not complain; something is already known to us, and we have discovered a few of the ways of fortune. We lie in wait like the birdcatcher studying the habits of migratory birds, and when an event is signalled on the horizon we know full well that it will not remain there alone, but that its brothers will flock in troops to the same spot. Vaguely have we learned that there are certain thoughts, certain souls, that attract events; that some beings there are who divert events in their flight, as there are others who cause them to congregate from the four quarters of the globe.Above all do we know that certain ideas are fraught with extreme danger; that do we but for an instant deem ourselves in safety, this alone suffices to draw down the thunderbolt; we know that happiness creates a void, into which tears will speedily be hurled. After a time, too, we learnsomething of the preferences of events. It is soon borne home to us that if we take a few steps along the path of life by the side of this one of our brothers, the ways of fortune will no longer be the same, whereas, with this other, our existence will encounter unvarying events, coming in regular order. We feel that some beings there are who protect in the unknown, others who drag us into danger there; we feel that there are some who awaken the future, others who lull it into slumber. We suspect, further, that things at their birth are but feeble, that they draw their force from within us, and that, in every adventure, there is a brief moment when our instinct warns us that we are still the lords of destiny. In fine, there are some who dare assert that we can learn to be happy, that, as we become better, so do we meet men of loftier mind; that a man who is good attracts, with irresistible force, events as good as he,and that, in a beautiful soul, the saddest fortune is transformed into beauty....Indeed, is it not within the knowledge of us all that goodness beckons to goodness, and that those for whom we devote ourselves are always the same; that they are always the same, those whom we betray? When the same sorrow knocks at two adjoining doors, at the houses of the just and the unjust, will its method of action be identical in both? If you are pure, will not your misfortunes be pure? To have known how to change the past into a few saddened smiles—is this not to master the future? And does it not seem that, even in the inevitable, there is something we can keep back? Do not great hazards lie dormant that a too sudden movement of ours may awaken on the horizon; and would this misfortune have befallen you to-day, but for the thoughts that this morning kept too noisy festival in your soul? Isthis all that our wisdom has been able to glean in the darkness? Who would dare affirm that in these regions there be more substantial truths? In the meanwhile, let us learn how to smile, let us learn how to weep, in the silence of humblest kindliness. Slowly there rises above these things the shrouded face of the destiny of to-day. Of the veil that formerly covered it, a minute corner has been lifted, and there, where the veil is not, do we recognise, to our disquiet, on the one side,the power of those who live not yet, on the other,the power of the dead. The mystery has again been shifted further from us—that is all. We have enlarged the icy hand of destiny; and we find that, in its shadow, the hands of our ancestors are clasped by the hands of our sons yet unborn. One act there was that we deemed the sanctuary of all our rights, and love remained the supreme refuge of all those on whom the chains of life weighed tooheavily. Here, at least, in the isolation of this secret temple, we told ourselves that no one entered with us. Here, for an instant, we could breathe; here, at last, it was our soul that reigned, and free was its choice in that which was the centre of liberty itself! But now we are told that it is not for our own sake that we love. We are told that in the very temple of love we do but obey the unvarying orders of an invisible throng. We are told that a thousand centuries divide us from ourselves when we choose the woman we love, and that the first kiss of the betrothed is but the seal that thousands of hands, craving for birth, impress upon the lips of the mother they desire. And, further, we know that the dead do not die. We know now that it is not in our churches that they are to be found, but in the houses, the habits, of us all. That there is not a gesture, a thought, a sin, a tear, an atom of acquired consciousnessthat is lost in the depths of the earth; and that at the most insignificant of our acts our ancestors arise, not in their tombs where they move not, but in ourselves, where they always live....Thus are we led by past and future. And the present, which is the substance of us, sinks to the bottom of the sea, like some tiny island at which two irreconcilable oceans have been unceasingly gnawing. Heredity, will, destiny, all mingle noisily in our soul; but, notwithstanding everything, far above everything, it is the silent star that reigns. No matter with what temporary labels we may bedeck the monstrous vases that contain the invisible, words can tell us scarcely anything of that which should be told. Heredity, nay destiny itself, what are these but a ray of this star, a ray that is lost in the mysterious night? And all that is might well be more mysterious still. ‘We give the name ofdestiny to all that limits us,’ says one of the great sages of our time: wherefore it behoves us to be grateful to all those who tremblingly grope their way the side of the frontier. ‘If we are brutal and barbarous,’ he goes on, ‘fatality takes a form that is brutal and barbarous. As refinement comes to us, so do our mishaps become refined. If we rise to spiritual culture, antagonism takes unto itself a spiritual form.’ It is perhaps true that even as our soul soars aloft, so does it purify destiny, although it is also true that we are menaced by the self-same sorrows that menace the savages. But we have other sorrows of which they have no suspicion; and the spirit, as it rises, does but discover still more, at every horizon. ‘We give the name of destiny to all that limits us.’ Let us do our utmost that destiny become not too circumscribed. It is good to enlarge one’s sorrows, since thus does enlargement come to ourconsciousness, and there, there alone do we truly feel that we live. And it is also the only means of fulfilling our supreme duty towards other worlds; since it is probably on us alone that it is incumbent to augment the consciousness of the earth.

THE STAR

WELL might it be said that, from century to century, a tragic poet ‘has wandered through the labyrinths of destiny with the torch of poesy in his hand.’ For in this way has each one, according to the forces of his hour, fixed the souls of the annals of man, and it is divine history that has thus been composed. It is in the poets alone that we can follow the countless variations of the great unchanging power; and to follow them is indeed interesting, for at the root of the idea that they have formed of this power is to be found, perhaps, the purest essence of a nation’s soul. It is a power that hasnever entirely ceased to be, yet moments there are when it scarcely seems to stir; and at such moments one feels that life is neither very active nor very profound. Once only has it been the object of undivided worship; then was it, even for the gods, an awe-inspiring mystery. And there is a thing that is passing strange—it was the very period when the featureless divinity seemed most terrible and most incomprehensible that was the most beautiful period of mankind, and the people to whom destiny wore the most formidable aspect were the happiest people of all.

It would seem that a secret force must underlie this idea, or that the idea is itself the manifestation of a force. Does man develop in the measure that he recognises the greatness of the unknown that sways him, or is it the unknown that develops in proportion to the man? To-day the idea of destiny would seem to be againawakening, and to go forth in search of it were perhaps no unprofitable quest. But where shall it be found? To go in search of destiny—what is this but to seek all the sorrows of man? There is no destiny of joy, no star that bodes of happiness. The star that is so called is only a star of forbearance. Yet is it well that we should sally forth at times in search of our sorrows, so that we may learn to know them and admire them; and this even though the great shapeless mass of destiny be not encountered at the end.

Seeking our sorrows, we shall be the most effectively seeking ourselves, for truly may it be said that the value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet. As we progress, so do they become deeper, nobler and more beautiful; and Marcus Aurelius is to be admired above all men, because, better than all men, has he understood how much thereis of the soul in the meek resigned smile it must wear, at the depths of us. Thus is it, too, with the sorrows of humanity. They follow a road which resembles the road of our own sorrows; but it is longer, and surer, and must lead to fatherlands that the last comers alone shall know. This road also has physical sorrow for its starting-point; it has only just rounded the fear of the gods, and to-day it halts by a new abyss, whose depths the very best of us have not yet sounded.

Each century holds another sorrow dear, for each century discerns another destiny. Certain it is that we no longer interest ourselves, as was formerly the case, in the catastrophes of passion; and the quality of the sorrow revealed in the most tragic masterpieces of the past is inferior to the quality of the sorrows of to-day. It is only indirectly that these tragedies affect us now; only by means of that which isbrought to bear on the simple accidents of love or hatred they reproduce, by the reflection and new nobility of sentiment that the pain of living has created within us.

There are moments when it would seem as though we were on the threshold of a new pessimism, mysterious and, perhaps, very pure. The most redoubtable sages, Schopenhauer, Carlyle, the Russians, the Scandinavians, and the good optimist Emerson, too (for than a wilful optimist there is nothing more discouraging), all these have passed our melancholy by, unexplained. We feel that, underlying all the reasons they have essayed to give us, there are many other profounder reasons, whose discovery has been beyond them. The sadness of man which seemed beautiful even to them, is still susceptible of infinite ennobling, until at last a creature of genius shall have uttered the final wordof the sorrow that shall, perhaps, wholly purify....

In the meanwhile, we are in the hands of strange powers, whose intentions we are on the eve of divining. At the time of the great tragic writers of the new era, at the time of Shakespeare, Racine, and their successors, the belief prevailed that all misfortunes came from the various passions of the heart. Catastrophes did not hover between two worlds: they came hence to go thither, and their point of departure was known. Man was always the master. Much less was this the case at the time of the Greeks, for then did fatality reign on the heights; but it was inaccessible, and none dared interrogate it. To-day it is fatality that we challenge, and this is perhaps the distinguishing note of the new theatre. It is no longer the effects of disaster that arrest our attention; it is disaster itself, and we are eager to know itsessence and its laws. It was thenatureof disaster with which the earliest tragic writers were, all unconsciously, preoccupied, and this it was that, though they knew it not, threw a solemn shadow round the hard and violent gestures of external death; and it is this, too, that has become the rallying-point of the most recent dramas, the centre of light with strange flames gleaming, about which revolve the souls of women and of men. And a step has been taken towards the mystery so that life’s terrors may be looked in the face.

It would be interesting to discover from what point of view our latest tragic writers appear to regard the disaster that forms the basis of all dramatic poems. They see it from a nearer point of vision than the Greeks, and they have penetrated deeper into the fertile darknesses of its inner circle. The divinity is perhaps the same; they know nothing of it, yet do they studyit more closely. Whence does it come, whither does it go, why does it descend upon us? These were problems to which the Greeks barely gave a thought. Is it written within us, or is it born at the same time as ourselves? Does it of its own accord start forward to meet us, or is it summoned by conniving voices that we cherish at the depths of us? If we could but follow, from the heights of another world, the ways of the man over whom a great sorrow is impending! And what man is there that does not laboriously, though all unconsciously, himself fashion the sorrow that is to be the pivot of his life!

The Scotch peasants have a word that might be applied to every existence. In their legends they give the name of ‘Fey’ to the frame of mind of a man who, notwithstanding all his efforts, notwithstanding all help and advice, is forced by someirresistible impulse, towards an inevitable catastrophe. It is thus that James I., the James of Catherine Douglas, was ‘fey’ when he went, notwithstanding the terrible omens of earth, heaven and hell, to spend the Christmas holidays in the gloomy castle of Perth, where his assassin, the traitor Robert Graeme, lay in wait for him. Which of us, recalling the circumstances of the most decisive misfortune of his life, but has felt himself similarly possessed? Be it well understood that I speak here only of active misfortunes, of those that might have been prevented: for there are passive misfortunes (such as the death of a person we adore) which simply come towards us, and cannot be influenced by any movement of ours. Bethink you of the fatal day of your life. Have we not all been forewarned; and though it may seem to us now that destiny might have been changed by a step we did not take, a doorwe did not open, a hand we did not raise, which of us but has struggled vainly on the topmost walls of the abyss, struggled without vigour and without hope, against a force that was invisible and apparently without power?

The breath of air stirred by the door I opened, one evening, was for ever to extinguish my happiness, as it would have extinguished a flickering lamp; and now, when I think of it, I cannot tell myself that I did not know.... And yet, it was nothing important that had taken me to the threshold. I could have gone away, shrugging my shoulders: there was no human reason that could force me to knock on the panel. No human reason, nothing but destiny....

*

Herein there is still some resemblance to the fatality of Œdipus, and yet it is already different. One might say that it is thissame fatality seenab intra. Mysterious powers hold sway within us, and these would seem to be in league with adventures. We all cherish enemies within our soul. They know what they do and what they force us to do, and when they lead us to the event, they let fall half-uttered words of warning—too few to stop us on the road—but sufficient to make us regret, when it is too late, that we did not listen more attentively to their wavering, ironical advice. What object can they have, these powers that seek our destruction as though they were self-existing and did not perish with us, seeing that it is in us only that they have life? What is it that sets in motion all the confederates of the universe, who fatten on our blood?

The man for whom the hour of misfortune has sounded is caught up by an invisible whirlwind, and for years back have these powers been combining theinnumerable incidents that must bring him to the necessary moment, to the exact spot where tears lie in wait for him. Remember all your efforts, all your presentiments, all the unavailing offers of help. Remember, too, the kindly circumstances that pitied you, and tried to bar your passage, but you thrust them aside like so many importunate beggars. And yet were they humble, timid sisters, who desired but to save you, and they went away without saying a word, too weak and too helpless to struggle against decided things—where decided it is known to God alone....

Scarcely has the disaster befallen us than we have the strange sensation of having obeyed an eternal law; and, in the midst of the greatest sorrow, there is I know not what mysterious comfort that rewards us for our obedience. Never do we belong more completely to ourselves than on the morrow of an irreparable catastrophe. Itseems, then, as though we had found ourselves again, as though we had won back a part of ourselves that was necessary and unknown. A curious calm steals over us. For days past, almost without our knowledge, notwithstanding that we were able to smile at faces and flowers, the rebel forces of our soul had been waging terrible battle on the borders of the abyss, and now that we are at the depths of it, all breathes freely.

Even thus, without respite, do these rebel forces struggle in the soul of every one of us; and there are times when we may see the shadow of these combats wherein our soul may not intervene, but we pay no heed, for to all save the unimportant do we shut our eyes. At a time when my friends are about me it may happen that, in the midst of talk and shouts of laughter, there shall suddenly steal over the face of one of them something that is not of thisworld. A motiveless silence shall instantly prevail, and for a second’s space all shall be unconsciously looking forth with the eyes of the soul. Whereupon, the words and smiles, that had disappeared like frightened frogs in a lake, will again mount to the surface, more violent than before. But the invisible, here as everywhere, has gathered its tribute. Something has understood that a fight was over, that a star was rising or falling and that a destiny had just been decided....

Perhaps it had been decided before; and who knows whether the struggle be not a mere simulacrum? If I push open to-day the door of the house wherein I am to meet the first smiles of a sorrow that shall know no end, I do these things for a longer time than one imagines. Of what avail to cultivate an ego on which we have so little influence? It is our star which it behoves us to watch. It is good or bad, pallid orpuissant, and not by all the might of the sea can it be changed. Some there are who may confidently play with their star as one might play with a glass ball. They may throw it and hazard it where they list; faithfully will it ever return to their hands. They know full well that it cannot be broken. But there are many others who dare not even raise their eyes towards their star, without it detach itself from the firmament and fall in dust at their feet....

But it is dangerous to speak of the star, dangerous even to think of it; for it is often the sign that it is on the point of extinction....

We find ourselves here in the abysses of night, where we await what has to be. There is no longer question of free will, which we have left thousands of leagues below: we are in a region where the will itself is but destiny’s ripest fruit. Wemust not complain; something is already known to us, and we have discovered a few of the ways of fortune. We lie in wait like the birdcatcher studying the habits of migratory birds, and when an event is signalled on the horizon we know full well that it will not remain there alone, but that its brothers will flock in troops to the same spot. Vaguely have we learned that there are certain thoughts, certain souls, that attract events; that some beings there are who divert events in their flight, as there are others who cause them to congregate from the four quarters of the globe.

Above all do we know that certain ideas are fraught with extreme danger; that do we but for an instant deem ourselves in safety, this alone suffices to draw down the thunderbolt; we know that happiness creates a void, into which tears will speedily be hurled. After a time, too, we learnsomething of the preferences of events. It is soon borne home to us that if we take a few steps along the path of life by the side of this one of our brothers, the ways of fortune will no longer be the same, whereas, with this other, our existence will encounter unvarying events, coming in regular order. We feel that some beings there are who protect in the unknown, others who drag us into danger there; we feel that there are some who awaken the future, others who lull it into slumber. We suspect, further, that things at their birth are but feeble, that they draw their force from within us, and that, in every adventure, there is a brief moment when our instinct warns us that we are still the lords of destiny. In fine, there are some who dare assert that we can learn to be happy, that, as we become better, so do we meet men of loftier mind; that a man who is good attracts, with irresistible force, events as good as he,and that, in a beautiful soul, the saddest fortune is transformed into beauty....

Indeed, is it not within the knowledge of us all that goodness beckons to goodness, and that those for whom we devote ourselves are always the same; that they are always the same, those whom we betray? When the same sorrow knocks at two adjoining doors, at the houses of the just and the unjust, will its method of action be identical in both? If you are pure, will not your misfortunes be pure? To have known how to change the past into a few saddened smiles—is this not to master the future? And does it not seem that, even in the inevitable, there is something we can keep back? Do not great hazards lie dormant that a too sudden movement of ours may awaken on the horizon; and would this misfortune have befallen you to-day, but for the thoughts that this morning kept too noisy festival in your soul? Isthis all that our wisdom has been able to glean in the darkness? Who would dare affirm that in these regions there be more substantial truths? In the meanwhile, let us learn how to smile, let us learn how to weep, in the silence of humblest kindliness. Slowly there rises above these things the shrouded face of the destiny of to-day. Of the veil that formerly covered it, a minute corner has been lifted, and there, where the veil is not, do we recognise, to our disquiet, on the one side,the power of those who live not yet, on the other,the power of the dead. The mystery has again been shifted further from us—that is all. We have enlarged the icy hand of destiny; and we find that, in its shadow, the hands of our ancestors are clasped by the hands of our sons yet unborn. One act there was that we deemed the sanctuary of all our rights, and love remained the supreme refuge of all those on whom the chains of life weighed tooheavily. Here, at least, in the isolation of this secret temple, we told ourselves that no one entered with us. Here, for an instant, we could breathe; here, at last, it was our soul that reigned, and free was its choice in that which was the centre of liberty itself! But now we are told that it is not for our own sake that we love. We are told that in the very temple of love we do but obey the unvarying orders of an invisible throng. We are told that a thousand centuries divide us from ourselves when we choose the woman we love, and that the first kiss of the betrothed is but the seal that thousands of hands, craving for birth, impress upon the lips of the mother they desire. And, further, we know that the dead do not die. We know now that it is not in our churches that they are to be found, but in the houses, the habits, of us all. That there is not a gesture, a thought, a sin, a tear, an atom of acquired consciousnessthat is lost in the depths of the earth; and that at the most insignificant of our acts our ancestors arise, not in their tombs where they move not, but in ourselves, where they always live....

Thus are we led by past and future. And the present, which is the substance of us, sinks to the bottom of the sea, like some tiny island at which two irreconcilable oceans have been unceasingly gnawing. Heredity, will, destiny, all mingle noisily in our soul; but, notwithstanding everything, far above everything, it is the silent star that reigns. No matter with what temporary labels we may bedeck the monstrous vases that contain the invisible, words can tell us scarcely anything of that which should be told. Heredity, nay destiny itself, what are these but a ray of this star, a ray that is lost in the mysterious night? And all that is might well be more mysterious still. ‘We give the name ofdestiny to all that limits us,’ says one of the great sages of our time: wherefore it behoves us to be grateful to all those who tremblingly grope their way the side of the frontier. ‘If we are brutal and barbarous,’ he goes on, ‘fatality takes a form that is brutal and barbarous. As refinement comes to us, so do our mishaps become refined. If we rise to spiritual culture, antagonism takes unto itself a spiritual form.’ It is perhaps true that even as our soul soars aloft, so does it purify destiny, although it is also true that we are menaced by the self-same sorrows that menace the savages. But we have other sorrows of which they have no suspicion; and the spirit, as it rises, does but discover still more, at every horizon. ‘We give the name of destiny to all that limits us.’ Let us do our utmost that destiny become not too circumscribed. It is good to enlarge one’s sorrows, since thus does enlargement come to ourconsciousness, and there, there alone do we truly feel that we live. And it is also the only means of fulfilling our supreme duty towards other worlds; since it is probably on us alone that it is incumbent to augment the consciousness of the earth.

THE INVISIBLE GOODNESSTHE INVISIBLE GOODNESSIT is a thing, said to me one evening the sage I had chanced to meet by the sea shore, whereon the waves were breaking almost noiselessly—it is a thing that we scarcely notice, that none seem to take into account, and yet do I conceive it to be one of the forces that safeguard mankind. In a thousand diverse ways do the gods from whom we spring reveal themselves within us, but it may well be that this unnoticed secret goodness, to which sufficiently direct allusion has never yet been made, is the purest token of their eternal life. Whence it comes we know not. It is there in its simplicity, smiling on the threshold of oursoul; and those in whom its smiles lie deepest, or shine forth most frequently, may make us suffer day and night and they will, yet shall it be beyond our power to cease to love them....It is not of this world, and still are there few agitations of ours in which it takes not part. It cares not to reveal itself even in look or tear. Nay, it seeks concealment, for reasons one cannot divine. It is as though it were afraid to make use of its power. It knows that its most involuntary movement will cause immortal things to spring to life about it; and we are miserly with immortal things. Why are we so fearful lest we exhaust the heaven within us? We dare not act upon the whisper of the God who inspires us. We are afraid of everything that cannot be explained by word or gesture: and we shut our eyes to all that we do, ourselves notwithstanding, in the empire where explanations are vain!Whence comes the timidity of the divine in man? For truly might it be said that the nearer a movement of our soul approaches the divine, so much the more scrupulously do we conceal it from the eyes of our brethren. Can it be that man is nothing but a frightened god? Or has the command been laid upon us that the superior powers must not be betrayed? Upon all that does not form part of this too visible world there rests the tender meekness of the little ailing girl, for whom her mother will not send when strangers come to the house. And therefore it is that this secret goodness of ours has never yet passed through the silent portals of our soul. It lives within us like a prisoner forbidden to approach the barred window of her cell. But indeed, what matter though it do not approach? Enough that it be there. Hide as it may, let it but raise its head, move a link of its chain oropen its hand, and the prison is illumined, the pressure of radiance from within bursts open the iron barrier, and then, suddenly, there yawns a gulf between words and beings, a gulf peopled with agitated angels: silence falls over all: the eyes turn away for a moment and two souls embrace tearfully on the threshold....It is not a thing that comes from this earth of ours, and all descriptions can be of no avail. They who would understand must have, in themselves too,the same point of sensibility. If you have never in your life felt the power ofyour invisible goodness, go no further; it would be useless. But are there really any who have not felt this power, and have the worst of us never been invisibly good? I know not: of so many in this world does the aim seem to be the discouragement of the divine in their soul. And yet there needs but one instant of respite for the divine to springup again, and even the wickedest are not incessantly on their guard; and hence doubtless has it arisen that so many of the wicked are good, unseen of all, whereas divers saints and sages are not invisibly good....More than once have I been the cause of suffering, he went on, even as each being is the cause of suffering about him. I have caused suffering because we are in a world where all is held together by invisible threads, in a world where none are alone, and where the gentlest gesture of love or kindliness may so often wound the innocence by our side!—I have caused suffering, too, because there are times when the best and tenderest are impelled to seek I know not what part of themselves in the grief of others. For, indeed, there are seeds that only spring up in our soul beneath the rain of tears shed because of us, and none the less do these seeds produce good flowersand salutary fruit. What would you? It is no law of our making, and I know not whether I would dare to love the man who had made no one weep. Frequently, indeed, will the greatest suffering be caused by those whose love is greatest, for a strange timid, tender cruelty is most often the anxious sister of love. On all sides does love search for the proofs of love, and the first proofs—who is not prone to discover them in the tears of the beloved?Even death could not suffice to reassure the lover who dared to give ear to the unreasoning claims of love; for to the intimate cruelty of love, the instant of death seems too brief; over beyond death there is yet room for a sea of doubts, and even in those who die together may disquiet still linger as they die. Long, slowly falling tears are needed here. Grief is love’s first food, and every love that has not been fed on a little pure sufferingmust die like the babe that one had tried to nourish on the nourishment of a man. Will the love inspired by the woman who always brought the smile to your lips be quite the same as the love you feel for her who at times called forth your tears? Alas! needs must love weep, and often indeed is it at the very moment when the sobs burst forth that love’s chains are forged and tempered for life....Thus, he continued, I have caused suffering because I loved, and also have I caused suffering because I did not love—but how great was the difference in the two cases! In the one the slowly dropping tears of well-tried love seemed already to know, at the depths of them, that they were bedewing all that was ineffable in our united souls; in the other the poor tears knew that they were falling in solitude on a desert. But it is at those very moments when the soul is all ear—or, haply, allsoul—that I have recognised the might of an invisible goodness that could offer to the wretched tears of an expiring love the divine illusions of a love on the eve of birth. Has there never come to you one of those sorrowful evenings when dejection lay heavy upon your unsmiling kisses, and it at length dawned upon your soul that it had been mistaken? With direst difficulty did your words ring forth in the cold air of the separation that was to be final; you were about to part for ever, and your almost lifeless hands were outstretched for the farewell of a departure that should know no return, when suddenly your soul made an imperceptible movement within itself. On that instant did the soul by the side of you awake on the summits of its being; something sprang to life in regions loftier far than the love of jaded lovers; and for all that the bodies might shrink asunder, henceforth would the souls neverforget that for an instant they had beheld each other high above mountains they had never seen, and that for a second’s space they had been good with a goodness they had never known until that day....What can this be, this mysterious movement that I speak of here in connection with love only, but which may well take place in the smallest events of life? Is it I know not what sacrifice or inner embrace, is it the profoundest desire to be soul for a soul, or the consciousness, ever quickening within us, of the presence of a life that is invisible, but equal to our own? Is it all that is admirable and sorrowful in the mere act of living that, at such moments, floods our being—is it the aspect of life, one and indivisible? I know not; but in truth it is then that we feel that there lurks, somewhere, an unknown force; it is then that we feel that we are the treasures of an unknown God who loves all, that not agesture of this God may pass unperceived, and that we are at length in the region of things that do not betray themselves....Certain it is that, from the day of our birth to the day of our death, we never emerge from this clearly defined region, but wander in God like helpless sleepwalkers, or like the blind who despairingly seek the very temple in which they do indeed befind themselves. We are there in life, man against man, soul against soul, and day and night are spent under arms. We never see each other, we never touch each other. We see nothing but bucklers and helmets, we touch nothing but iron and brass. But let a tiny circumstance, come from the simpleness of the sky, for one instant only cause the weapons to fall, are there not always tears beneath the helmet, childlike smiles behind the buckler, and is not another verity revealed?He thought for a moment, then wenton, more sadly: A woman—as I believe I told you just now—a woman to whom I had caused suffering against my will—for the most careful of us scatter suffering around them without their knowledge—a woman to whom I had caused suffering against my will, revealed to me one evening the sovereign power of this invisible good. To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better. This was brought home to me that evening. I felt that I had arrived, alone, at that sad zone of kisses when it seems to us that we are visiting the hovels of the poor, while she, who had lingered on the road, was still smiling in the palace of the first days. Love, as men understand it, was dying between us like a child stricken with a disease come one knows not whence, a disease that has no pity. We said nothing. It would be impossible for me to recallwhat my thoughts were at that earnest moment. They were doubtless of no significance. I was probably thinking of the last face I had seen, of the quivering gleam of a lantern at a deserted street corner; and, nevertheless,everything took placein a light a thousand times purer, a thousand times higher, than had there intervened all the forces of pity and love which I command in my thoughts and my heart. We parted, and not a word was spoken, but at one and the same moment had we understood our inexpressible thought. We know now that another love had sprung to life, a love that demands not the words, the little attentions and smiles of ordinary love. We have never met again. Perhaps centuries will elapse before we ever do meet again.‘Much is to learn, much to forget,Through worlds I shall traverse not a few’before we shall again find ourselvesin thesame movement of the soulas on that evening: but we can well afford to wait....And thus, ever since that day, have I greeted, in all places, even in the very bitterest of moments, the beneficent presence of this marvellous power. He who has but once clearly seen it, shall never again find it possible to turn away from its face. You will often behold it smiling in the last retreat of hatred, in the depths of the cruellest tears. And yet does it not reveal itself to the eyes of the body. Its nature changes from the moment that it manifests itself by means of an exterior act; and we are no longer in the truth according to the soul, but in a kind of falsehood as conceived by man. Goodness and love that are self-conscious have no influence on the soul, for they have departed from the kingdoms where they have their dwelling; but, do they only remain blind, they can soften Destiny itself. I have knownmore than one man who performed every act of kindness and mercy without touching a single soul; and I have known others, who seemed to live in falsehood and injustice, yet were no souls driven from them nor did any for an instant even believe that these men were not good. Nay, more, even those who do not know you, who are merely told of your acts of goodness and deeds of love—if you be not good according to the invisible goodness, these, even, will feel that something is lacking, and they will never be touched in the depths of their being. One might almost believe that there exists, somewhere, a place where all is weighed in the presence of the spirits, or perhaps, out yonder, the other side of the night, a reservoir of certitudes whither the silent herd of souls flock every morning to slake their thirst.Perhaps we do not yet know what the word ‘to love’ means. There are withinus lives in which we love unconsciously. To love thus means more than to have pity, to make inner sacrifices, to be anxious to help and give happiness; it is a thing that lies a thousand fathoms deeper, where our softest, swiftest, strongest words cannot reach it. At moments we might believe it to be a recollection, furtive but excessively keen, of the great primitive unity. There is in this love a force that nothing can resist. Which of us—an’ he question himself the side of the light, from which our gaze is habitually averted—which of us but will find in himself the recollection of certain strange workings of this force? Which of us, when by the side of the most ordinary person perhaps, but has suddenly become conscious of the advent of something that none had summoned? Was it the soul, or perhaps life, that had turned within itself like a sleeper on the point of awakening? I know not; nor did youknow, and no one spoke of it; but you did not separate from each other as though nothing had happened.To love thus is to love according to the soul; and there is no soul that does not respond to this love. For the soul of man is a guest that has gone hungry these centuries back, and never has it to be summoned twice to the nuptial feast.The souls of all our brethren are ever hovering about us, craving for a caress, and only waiting for the signal. But how many beings there are who all their life long have not dared make such a signal! It is the disaster of our entire existence that we live thus away from our soul, and stand in such dread of its slightest movement. Did we but allow it to smile frankly in its silence and its radiance, we should be already living an eternal life. We have only to think for an instant how much it succeeds in accomplishing during those raremoments when we knock off its chains—for it is our custom to enchain it as though it were distraught—what it does in love, for instance, for there we do permit it at times to approach the lattices of external life. And would it not be in accordance with the primal truth if all men were to feel that they were face to face with each other, even as the woman feels with the man she loves?This invisible and divine goodness, of which I only speak here because of its being one of the surest and nearest signs of the unceasing activity of our soul, this invisible and divine goodness ennobles, in decisive fashion, all that it has unconsciously touched. Let him who has a grievance against his fellow, descend into himself and seek out whether he never has been good in the presence of that fellow. For myself, I have never met any one by whose side I have felt my invisible goodness bestir itself, without he has become, at that veryinstant, better than myself. Be good at the depths of you, and you will discover that those who surround you will be good even to the same depths. Nothing responds more infallibly to the secret cry of goodness than the secret cry of goodness that is near. While you are actively good in the invisible, all those who approach you will unconsciously do things that they could not do by the side of any other man. Therein lies a force that has no name; a spiritual rivalry that knows no resistance. It is as though this were the actual place where is the sensitive spot of our soul; for there are souls that seem to have forgotten their existence and to have renounced everything that enables the being to rise; but, once touched here, they all draw themselves erect; and in the divine plains of the secret goodness, the most humble of souls cannot endure defeat.And yet it is possible that nothing ischanging in the life one sees; but is it only that which matters, and is our existence indeed confined to actions we can take in our hand like stones on the high road? If you ask yourself, as we are told we should ask every evening, ‘What of immortal have I done to-day?’ Is it always on the material side that we can count, weigh and measure unerringly; is it there that you must begin your search? It is possible for you to cause extraordinary tears to flow; it is possible that you may fill a heart with unheard of certitudes, and give eternal life unto a soul, and no one shall know of it, nor shall you even know yourself. It may be that nothing is changing; it may be that were it put to the test all would crumble, and that this goodness we speak of would yield to the smallest fear. It matters not. Something divine has happened; and somewhere must our God have smiled. May it not be the supreme aim oflife thus to bring to birth the inexplicable within ourselves; and do we know how much we add to ourselves when we awake something of the incomprehensible that slumbers in every corner? Here you have awakened love which will not fall asleep again. The soul that your soul has regarded, that has wept with you the holy tears of the solemn joy that none may behold, will bear you no resentment, not even in the midst of torture. It will not even feel the need of forgiving. So convinced is it of one knows not what, that nothing can henceforth dim or efface the smile that it wears within; for nothing can ever separate two souls which, for an instant, ‘have been good together.’

THE INVISIBLE GOODNESS

IT is a thing, said to me one evening the sage I had chanced to meet by the sea shore, whereon the waves were breaking almost noiselessly—it is a thing that we scarcely notice, that none seem to take into account, and yet do I conceive it to be one of the forces that safeguard mankind. In a thousand diverse ways do the gods from whom we spring reveal themselves within us, but it may well be that this unnoticed secret goodness, to which sufficiently direct allusion has never yet been made, is the purest token of their eternal life. Whence it comes we know not. It is there in its simplicity, smiling on the threshold of oursoul; and those in whom its smiles lie deepest, or shine forth most frequently, may make us suffer day and night and they will, yet shall it be beyond our power to cease to love them....

It is not of this world, and still are there few agitations of ours in which it takes not part. It cares not to reveal itself even in look or tear. Nay, it seeks concealment, for reasons one cannot divine. It is as though it were afraid to make use of its power. It knows that its most involuntary movement will cause immortal things to spring to life about it; and we are miserly with immortal things. Why are we so fearful lest we exhaust the heaven within us? We dare not act upon the whisper of the God who inspires us. We are afraid of everything that cannot be explained by word or gesture: and we shut our eyes to all that we do, ourselves notwithstanding, in the empire where explanations are vain!Whence comes the timidity of the divine in man? For truly might it be said that the nearer a movement of our soul approaches the divine, so much the more scrupulously do we conceal it from the eyes of our brethren. Can it be that man is nothing but a frightened god? Or has the command been laid upon us that the superior powers must not be betrayed? Upon all that does not form part of this too visible world there rests the tender meekness of the little ailing girl, for whom her mother will not send when strangers come to the house. And therefore it is that this secret goodness of ours has never yet passed through the silent portals of our soul. It lives within us like a prisoner forbidden to approach the barred window of her cell. But indeed, what matter though it do not approach? Enough that it be there. Hide as it may, let it but raise its head, move a link of its chain oropen its hand, and the prison is illumined, the pressure of radiance from within bursts open the iron barrier, and then, suddenly, there yawns a gulf between words and beings, a gulf peopled with agitated angels: silence falls over all: the eyes turn away for a moment and two souls embrace tearfully on the threshold....

It is not a thing that comes from this earth of ours, and all descriptions can be of no avail. They who would understand must have, in themselves too,the same point of sensibility. If you have never in your life felt the power ofyour invisible goodness, go no further; it would be useless. But are there really any who have not felt this power, and have the worst of us never been invisibly good? I know not: of so many in this world does the aim seem to be the discouragement of the divine in their soul. And yet there needs but one instant of respite for the divine to springup again, and even the wickedest are not incessantly on their guard; and hence doubtless has it arisen that so many of the wicked are good, unseen of all, whereas divers saints and sages are not invisibly good....

More than once have I been the cause of suffering, he went on, even as each being is the cause of suffering about him. I have caused suffering because we are in a world where all is held together by invisible threads, in a world where none are alone, and where the gentlest gesture of love or kindliness may so often wound the innocence by our side!—I have caused suffering, too, because there are times when the best and tenderest are impelled to seek I know not what part of themselves in the grief of others. For, indeed, there are seeds that only spring up in our soul beneath the rain of tears shed because of us, and none the less do these seeds produce good flowersand salutary fruit. What would you? It is no law of our making, and I know not whether I would dare to love the man who had made no one weep. Frequently, indeed, will the greatest suffering be caused by those whose love is greatest, for a strange timid, tender cruelty is most often the anxious sister of love. On all sides does love search for the proofs of love, and the first proofs—who is not prone to discover them in the tears of the beloved?

Even death could not suffice to reassure the lover who dared to give ear to the unreasoning claims of love; for to the intimate cruelty of love, the instant of death seems too brief; over beyond death there is yet room for a sea of doubts, and even in those who die together may disquiet still linger as they die. Long, slowly falling tears are needed here. Grief is love’s first food, and every love that has not been fed on a little pure sufferingmust die like the babe that one had tried to nourish on the nourishment of a man. Will the love inspired by the woman who always brought the smile to your lips be quite the same as the love you feel for her who at times called forth your tears? Alas! needs must love weep, and often indeed is it at the very moment when the sobs burst forth that love’s chains are forged and tempered for life....

Thus, he continued, I have caused suffering because I loved, and also have I caused suffering because I did not love—but how great was the difference in the two cases! In the one the slowly dropping tears of well-tried love seemed already to know, at the depths of them, that they were bedewing all that was ineffable in our united souls; in the other the poor tears knew that they were falling in solitude on a desert. But it is at those very moments when the soul is all ear—or, haply, allsoul—that I have recognised the might of an invisible goodness that could offer to the wretched tears of an expiring love the divine illusions of a love on the eve of birth. Has there never come to you one of those sorrowful evenings when dejection lay heavy upon your unsmiling kisses, and it at length dawned upon your soul that it had been mistaken? With direst difficulty did your words ring forth in the cold air of the separation that was to be final; you were about to part for ever, and your almost lifeless hands were outstretched for the farewell of a departure that should know no return, when suddenly your soul made an imperceptible movement within itself. On that instant did the soul by the side of you awake on the summits of its being; something sprang to life in regions loftier far than the love of jaded lovers; and for all that the bodies might shrink asunder, henceforth would the souls neverforget that for an instant they had beheld each other high above mountains they had never seen, and that for a second’s space they had been good with a goodness they had never known until that day....

What can this be, this mysterious movement that I speak of here in connection with love only, but which may well take place in the smallest events of life? Is it I know not what sacrifice or inner embrace, is it the profoundest desire to be soul for a soul, or the consciousness, ever quickening within us, of the presence of a life that is invisible, but equal to our own? Is it all that is admirable and sorrowful in the mere act of living that, at such moments, floods our being—is it the aspect of life, one and indivisible? I know not; but in truth it is then that we feel that there lurks, somewhere, an unknown force; it is then that we feel that we are the treasures of an unknown God who loves all, that not agesture of this God may pass unperceived, and that we are at length in the region of things that do not betray themselves....

Certain it is that, from the day of our birth to the day of our death, we never emerge from this clearly defined region, but wander in God like helpless sleepwalkers, or like the blind who despairingly seek the very temple in which they do indeed befind themselves. We are there in life, man against man, soul against soul, and day and night are spent under arms. We never see each other, we never touch each other. We see nothing but bucklers and helmets, we touch nothing but iron and brass. But let a tiny circumstance, come from the simpleness of the sky, for one instant only cause the weapons to fall, are there not always tears beneath the helmet, childlike smiles behind the buckler, and is not another verity revealed?

He thought for a moment, then wenton, more sadly: A woman—as I believe I told you just now—a woman to whom I had caused suffering against my will—for the most careful of us scatter suffering around them without their knowledge—a woman to whom I had caused suffering against my will, revealed to me one evening the sovereign power of this invisible good. To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better. This was brought home to me that evening. I felt that I had arrived, alone, at that sad zone of kisses when it seems to us that we are visiting the hovels of the poor, while she, who had lingered on the road, was still smiling in the palace of the first days. Love, as men understand it, was dying between us like a child stricken with a disease come one knows not whence, a disease that has no pity. We said nothing. It would be impossible for me to recallwhat my thoughts were at that earnest moment. They were doubtless of no significance. I was probably thinking of the last face I had seen, of the quivering gleam of a lantern at a deserted street corner; and, nevertheless,everything took placein a light a thousand times purer, a thousand times higher, than had there intervened all the forces of pity and love which I command in my thoughts and my heart. We parted, and not a word was spoken, but at one and the same moment had we understood our inexpressible thought. We know now that another love had sprung to life, a love that demands not the words, the little attentions and smiles of ordinary love. We have never met again. Perhaps centuries will elapse before we ever do meet again.

‘Much is to learn, much to forget,Through worlds I shall traverse not a few’

before we shall again find ourselvesin thesame movement of the soulas on that evening: but we can well afford to wait....

And thus, ever since that day, have I greeted, in all places, even in the very bitterest of moments, the beneficent presence of this marvellous power. He who has but once clearly seen it, shall never again find it possible to turn away from its face. You will often behold it smiling in the last retreat of hatred, in the depths of the cruellest tears. And yet does it not reveal itself to the eyes of the body. Its nature changes from the moment that it manifests itself by means of an exterior act; and we are no longer in the truth according to the soul, but in a kind of falsehood as conceived by man. Goodness and love that are self-conscious have no influence on the soul, for they have departed from the kingdoms where they have their dwelling; but, do they only remain blind, they can soften Destiny itself. I have knownmore than one man who performed every act of kindness and mercy without touching a single soul; and I have known others, who seemed to live in falsehood and injustice, yet were no souls driven from them nor did any for an instant even believe that these men were not good. Nay, more, even those who do not know you, who are merely told of your acts of goodness and deeds of love—if you be not good according to the invisible goodness, these, even, will feel that something is lacking, and they will never be touched in the depths of their being. One might almost believe that there exists, somewhere, a place where all is weighed in the presence of the spirits, or perhaps, out yonder, the other side of the night, a reservoir of certitudes whither the silent herd of souls flock every morning to slake their thirst.

Perhaps we do not yet know what the word ‘to love’ means. There are withinus lives in which we love unconsciously. To love thus means more than to have pity, to make inner sacrifices, to be anxious to help and give happiness; it is a thing that lies a thousand fathoms deeper, where our softest, swiftest, strongest words cannot reach it. At moments we might believe it to be a recollection, furtive but excessively keen, of the great primitive unity. There is in this love a force that nothing can resist. Which of us—an’ he question himself the side of the light, from which our gaze is habitually averted—which of us but will find in himself the recollection of certain strange workings of this force? Which of us, when by the side of the most ordinary person perhaps, but has suddenly become conscious of the advent of something that none had summoned? Was it the soul, or perhaps life, that had turned within itself like a sleeper on the point of awakening? I know not; nor did youknow, and no one spoke of it; but you did not separate from each other as though nothing had happened.

To love thus is to love according to the soul; and there is no soul that does not respond to this love. For the soul of man is a guest that has gone hungry these centuries back, and never has it to be summoned twice to the nuptial feast.

The souls of all our brethren are ever hovering about us, craving for a caress, and only waiting for the signal. But how many beings there are who all their life long have not dared make such a signal! It is the disaster of our entire existence that we live thus away from our soul, and stand in such dread of its slightest movement. Did we but allow it to smile frankly in its silence and its radiance, we should be already living an eternal life. We have only to think for an instant how much it succeeds in accomplishing during those raremoments when we knock off its chains—for it is our custom to enchain it as though it were distraught—what it does in love, for instance, for there we do permit it at times to approach the lattices of external life. And would it not be in accordance with the primal truth if all men were to feel that they were face to face with each other, even as the woman feels with the man she loves?

This invisible and divine goodness, of which I only speak here because of its being one of the surest and nearest signs of the unceasing activity of our soul, this invisible and divine goodness ennobles, in decisive fashion, all that it has unconsciously touched. Let him who has a grievance against his fellow, descend into himself and seek out whether he never has been good in the presence of that fellow. For myself, I have never met any one by whose side I have felt my invisible goodness bestir itself, without he has become, at that veryinstant, better than myself. Be good at the depths of you, and you will discover that those who surround you will be good even to the same depths. Nothing responds more infallibly to the secret cry of goodness than the secret cry of goodness that is near. While you are actively good in the invisible, all those who approach you will unconsciously do things that they could not do by the side of any other man. Therein lies a force that has no name; a spiritual rivalry that knows no resistance. It is as though this were the actual place where is the sensitive spot of our soul; for there are souls that seem to have forgotten their existence and to have renounced everything that enables the being to rise; but, once touched here, they all draw themselves erect; and in the divine plains of the secret goodness, the most humble of souls cannot endure defeat.

And yet it is possible that nothing ischanging in the life one sees; but is it only that which matters, and is our existence indeed confined to actions we can take in our hand like stones on the high road? If you ask yourself, as we are told we should ask every evening, ‘What of immortal have I done to-day?’ Is it always on the material side that we can count, weigh and measure unerringly; is it there that you must begin your search? It is possible for you to cause extraordinary tears to flow; it is possible that you may fill a heart with unheard of certitudes, and give eternal life unto a soul, and no one shall know of it, nor shall you even know yourself. It may be that nothing is changing; it may be that were it put to the test all would crumble, and that this goodness we speak of would yield to the smallest fear. It matters not. Something divine has happened; and somewhere must our God have smiled. May it not be the supreme aim oflife thus to bring to birth the inexplicable within ourselves; and do we know how much we add to ourselves when we awake something of the incomprehensible that slumbers in every corner? Here you have awakened love which will not fall asleep again. The soul that your soul has regarded, that has wept with you the holy tears of the solemn joy that none may behold, will bear you no resentment, not even in the midst of torture. It will not even feel the need of forgiving. So convinced is it of one knows not what, that nothing can henceforth dim or efface the smile that it wears within; for nothing can ever separate two souls which, for an instant, ‘have been good together.’

THE DEEPER LIFETHE DEEPER LIFEIT is well that men should be reminded that the very humblest of them has the power to ‘fashion, after a divine model that he chooses not, a great moral personality, composed in equal parts of himself and the ideal; and that if anything lives in fullest reality, of a surety it is that.’Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. Than this there can be no nobler aim in life. It is only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other. If the hero is greater than thewretch who marches by his side, it is because at a certain moment of his existence there has come to him a fuller consciousness of one of these communications. If it is true that creation does not stop at man and that we are surrounded by invisible beings who are superior to us, their superiority can only consist in that they have, with the infinite, communications whose nature we cannot even imagine.It lies within our power to increase these communications. In the life of every man has there been a day when the heavens opened of their own accord, and it is almost always from that very instant that dates his true spiritual personality. It is doubtless at that instant that are formed the invisible, eternal features that we reveal, though we know it not, to angels and to souls. But with most men it is chance alone that has caused the heavens to open; and they have not chosen the facewhereby the angels know them in the infinite, nor have they understood how to ennoble and purify its features—which do indeed but owe their being to an accidental joy or sadness, an accidental thought or fear.Our veritable birth dates from the day when, for the first time, we feel at the deepest of us that there is something grave and unexpected in life. Some there are who realise suddenly that they are not alone under the sky. To others will it be brusquely revealed, while shedding a tear or giving a kiss, that ‘the source of all that is good and holy from the universe up to God is hidden behind a night, full of too distant stars’; a third will see a divine hand stretched forth between his joy and his misfortune; and yet another will have understood that it is the dead who are in the right. One will have had pity, another will have admired or been afraid. Oftendoes it need almost nothing, a word, a gesture, a little thing that is not even a thought. ‘Before, I loved thee as a brother, John,’ says one of Shakespeare’s heroes, admiring the other’s action, ‘but now I do respect thee as my soul.’ On that day it is probable that a being will have come into the world.We can be born thus more than once; and each birth brings us a little nearer to our God. But most of us are content to wait till an event, charged with almost irresistible radiance, intrudes itself violently upon our darkness, and enlightens us, in our despite. We await I know not what happy coincidence, when it may so come about that the eyes of our soul shall be open at the very moment that something extraordinary takes place. But in everything that happens is there light; and the greatness of the greatest of men has but consisted in that they had trained theireyes to be open to every ray of this light. Is it indeed essential that your mother should breathe her last in your arms, that your children should perish in a shipwreck, and that you yourself should pass by the side of death, for you at length to understand that you have your being in an incomprehensible world where you shall be for ever, where an unseen God, who is eternally alone, dwells with His creatures? Must your betrothed die in a fire, or disappear before your eyes in the green depths of the ocean, for it to be revealed to you for an instant that the last limits of the kingdom of love transcend perhaps the scarcely visible flames of Mira, Altair or Berenice’s tresses? Had your eyes been open, might you not have beheld in a kiss that which to-day you perceive in a catastrophe? Are the divine recollections that slumber in our souls to be awakened only by the lance-thrusts of grief? Thesage needs no such violent arousing. He sees a tear, a maiden’s gesture, a drop of water that falls; he listens to a passing thought, presses a brother’s hand, approaches a lip, with open eyes and open soul. He never ceases to behold that of which you have caught but a passing glimpse; and a smile will readily tell him all that it needed a tempest, or even the hand of death, to reveal to you.For what are in reality the things we call ‘Wisdom,’ ‘Virtue,’ ‘Heroism,’ ‘sublime hours,’ and ‘great moments of life,’ but the moments when we have more or less issued forth from ourselves, and have been able to halt, be it only for an instant, on the step of one of the eternal gates whence we see that the faintest cry, the most colourless thought, and most nerveless gestures do not drop into nothingness; or that if they do indeed thus drop, the fall itself is so immense that it sufficesto give an august character to our life? Why wait till the firmament shall open amid the roar of the thunderbolt? We must watch for the happy moments when it opens in silence; and it is ever thus opening. You seek God in your life, and you say God appears not. But in what life are there not thousands of hours akin to the hour in that drama where all are waiting for the divine intervention, and none perceive it, till an invisible thought that has flitted across the consciousness of a dying man suddenly reveals itself, and an old man cries out, sobbing for joy and terror, ‘But God, there is God!’....Must we always be warned, and can we only fall on our knees when some one is there to tell us that God is passing by? If you have loved profoundly you have needed no one to tell you that your soul was a thing as great in itself as the world; that the stars, the flowers, the waves ofnight and sea were not solitary; that it was on the threshold of appearances that everything began, but nothing ended, and that the very lips you kissed belonged to a creature who was loftier, much purer, and much more beautiful than the one whom your arms enfolded. You have beheld that which in life cannot be seen without ecstasy. But cannot we live as though we always loved? It was this that the saints and heroes did; this and nothing more. Ah! truly too much of our life is spent in waiting, like the blind men in the legend who had travelled far so that they might hear their God. They were seated on the steps, and when asked what they were doing in the courtyard of the sanctuary, ‘We are waiting,’ they replied, shaking their heads, ‘and God has not yet said a single word.’ But they had not seen that the brass doors of the temple were closed, and they knew not that theedifice was resounding with the voice of their God. Never for an instant does God cease to speak; but no one thinks of opening the doors. And yet, with a little watchfulness, it were not difficult to hear the word that God must speak concerning our every act.We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life. And if aught be lacking, it is not the chance of living in heaven, rather is it watchfulness and meditation, also perhaps a little ecstasy of soul. Though you have but a little room, do you fancy that God is not there, too, and that it is impossible to live therein a life that shall be somewhat lofty? If you complain of being alone, of the absence of events, of loving no one and being unloved, do you think that the words are true? Do you imagine that one can possibly be alone, that love can be a thing one knows, a thing one sees; thatevents can be weighed like the gold and silver of ransom? Cannot a living thought—proud or humble, it matters not; so it come but from your soul, it is great for you—cannot a lofty desire, or simply a moment of solemn watchfulness to life, enter a little room? And if you love not, or are unloved, and can yet see with some depth of insight that thousands of things are beautiful, that the soul is great and life almost unspeakably earnest, is that not as beautiful as though you loved or were loved? And if the sky itself is hidden from you, ‘does not the great starry sky,’ asks the poet, ‘spread over our soul, in spite of all, under guise of death?’ ... All that happens to us is divinely great, and we are always in the centre of a great world. But we must accustom ourselves to live like an angel who has just sprung to life, like a woman who loves, or a man on the point of death. If you knewthat you were going to die to-night, or merely that you would have to go away and never return, would you, looking upon men and things for the last time, see them in the same light that you have hitherto seen them? Would you not love as you never yet have loved? Is it the virtue or evil of the appearances around you that would be magnified? Would it be given you to behold the beauty or the ugliness of the soul? Would not everything, down to actual evil and suffering, be transformed into love, overflowing with gentlest tears? Does not, to quote the sage, each opportunity for pardon rob departure or death of something of its bitterness? And yet, in the radiance or sorrow or death, is it towards truth or error that one has taken the last steps one is allowed to take?Is it the living or the dying who can see and are in the right? Ah! thrice happythey who have thought, spoken, and acted so as to receive the approval of those who are about to die, or to whom a great sorrow has given clearer insight! The sage, to whom none would hearken in life, can meet with no sweeter reward. If you have lived in obscure beauty, you have no cause for disquiet. At the end there must always sound within the heart of man an hour of supreme justice; and misfortune opens eyes that were never open before. Who knows whether at this very moment your shadow be not passing over the soul of a dying man and be not recognised by him as the shadow of one who already knew the truth? May it not be at the bedside of the last agony that is woven the veritable and most precious crown of sage and hero, and of all who have known how to live earnestly amid the sorrows, lofty, pure, and discreet, of life according to the soul?‘Death,’ says Lavater, ‘does not only beautify our inanimate form; nay, the mere thought of death gives a more beautiful form to life itself.’ And even so does every thought, that is infinite as death, beautify our life. But we must not deceive ourselves. To every man there come noble thoughts, that pass across his heart like great white birds. Alas! they do not count; they are strangers whom we are surprised to see, whom we dismiss with importunate gesture. Their time is too short to touch our life. Our soul will not become earnest and deep-searching, as is the soul of the angels, for that we have, for one fleeting instant, beheld the universe in the shadow of death or eternity, in the radiance of joy or the flames of beauty and love. We have all known moments such as these, moments that have but left worthless ashes behind. These things must be habitual with us; it is of no avail that theyshould come by chance. We must learn to live in a beauty, an earnestness, that shall have become part of ourselves. In life, there is no creature so degraded but knows full well which is the noble and beautiful thing that he should do; but this noble and beautiful thing is not strong enough within him. It is this invisible and abstract strength that it must be our endeavour to increase, first of all. And this strength increases only in those who have acquired the habit of resting, more frequently than others, upon the summits where life absorbs the soul, upon the heights whence we see that every act and every thought are infallibly bound up with something great and immortal. Look upon men and things with the inner eye, with its form and desire, never forgetting that the shadow they throw as they pass by, upon hillock or wall, is but the fleeting image of a mightier shadow, which, like the wing of an imperishableswan, floats over every soul that draws near to their soul. Do not believe that thoughts such as these can be mere ornaments, and without influence upon the lives of those who admit them. It is far more important that one’s life should be perceived than that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived, than it transforms itself of its own accord. These thoughts of which I speak make up the secret treasure of heroism; and, on the day that life compels us to disclose this treasure, we are startled to find therein no forces other than those by which we are impelled towards perfect beauty. Then it is no longer necessary that a great king should die for us to remember that ‘the world does not end at the house-doors,’ and not an evening passes but the smallest thing suffices to ennoble the soul.Yet it is not by telling yourself that God is great and that you move in His radiance,that you will be able to live in the beauty and fertile depths where the heroes dwelt. You may perhaps remind yourself, day and night, that the hands of all the invisible powers are waving over your head like a tent with countless folds, and yet shall the least gesture of these hands be imperceptible to you. It behoves you to be keenly vigilant; and better had you watch in the market-place than slumber in the temple. Beauty and grandeur are everywhere; for it needs but an unexpected incident to reveal them to us. This is known to nearly all men; but know it though they may, it is only when fortune or death lashes them that they grope around the wall of life in search of the crevices through which God may be seen. They know full well that there are eternal crevices even in the humble walls of a hovel, and that the smallest window cannot take away a line or a star from the immensity of heavenly space.But it is not enough to possess a truth; it is essential that the truth should possess us.And yet are we in a world where the smallest events assume, spontaneously, a beauty that ever becomes purer and loftier. There is nothing that coalesces more readily than earth and sky; if your eyes have rested upon the stars, before enfolding in your arms the woman you love, your embrace will not be the same as though you had merely looked at the walls of your room. Be sure that the day you lingered to follow a ray of light through a crevice in the door of life, you did something as great as though you had bandaged the wounds of your enemy, for at that moment did you no longer have any enemies.Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness ofour life depends on so little! Even thus may the verse of a poet, in the midst of the humble incidents of ordinary days, suddenly reveal to us something that is stupendous. No solemn word has been pronounced, and we feel that nothing has been called forth; and yet, why has an ineffable face beckoned to us from behind an old man’s tears, why does a vast night, starred with angels, extend over the smile of a child, and why, around a yes or no, murmured by a soul that sings and busies itself with other matters, do we suddenly hold our breath for an instant and say to ourselves, ‘Here is the house of God, and this one of the approaches to heaven’?It is because these poets have been more heedful than we to the ‘never-ending shadow.’ ... That is the essence of supreme poetry, that, and that alone, and its sole aim is to keep open ‘the great road that leads from the seen to the unseen.’ Butthat is life’s supreme aim, too, and it is easier far to attain in life than in the noblest of poems, for these have had to abandon the two great wings of silence. Not a single day is trivial. It is essential that this idea should sink into our life and take root therein. There is no question of being sad. Small joys, faint smiles, and great tears, all these fill up the same nook in time and space. You can play in life as innocently ‘as a child about a death-bed,’ and it is not the tears that are indispensable. Smiles as well as tears open the gates of the other world. Go or come, you will find all you need in the darkness, but never forget that you are close to the gate.*After this lengthy digression, I return to my starting-point, which was that ‘it is well that men should be reminded that the very humblest of them has the power to fashion, after a divine model that hechooses not, a great moral personality, composed in equal parts of himself and the ideal.’ It is only in the depths of life that this ‘great moral personality’ can be carved out; and only by means of incessant ‘revelations of the divine’ can we add to the stores of the ideal we require. To every man is it given to attain in spirit to the heights of virtuous life, and to know at all times what his conduct should be, would he act like a hero or a saint. But more than this is needed. It is essential that the spiritual atmosphere about us should be transformed to such a degree that it ends by resembling the atmosphere of Swedenborg’s beautiful countries of the age of gold, wherein the air permitted not a falsehood to leave the lips. An instant comes then, when the smallest ill that we fain would commit falls at our feet like a leaden ball upon a disc of bronze; when everything changes, though we know itnot, into beauty, love, or truth. But this atmosphere enwraps those only who have been heedful to ventilate their life sufficiently by at times flinging open the gates of the other world. It is when we are near to those gates that we see; it is when we are near to those gates that we love. For to love one’s neighbour does not mean only to give oneself to him, to serve, help, and sustain others. We may possibly be neither good, nor noble, nor beautiful, even in the midst of the greatest sacrifice; and the sister of charity who dies by the bedside of a typhoid patient may perchance have a mean, rancorous, miserable soul. To love one’s neighbour in the immovable depths means to love in others that which is eternal; for one’s neighbour, in the truest sense of the term, is that which approaches the nearest to God; in other words, all that is best and purest in man; and it is only by ever lingeringnear the gates I spoke of, that you can discover the divine in the soul. Then will you be able to say with the great Jean Paul: ‘When I desire to love most tenderly one who is dear to me, and wish to forgive him everything, I have but to look at him for a few moments in silence.’ To learn to love, one must first learn to see. ‘I lived for twenty years by my sister’s side,’ said a friend to me, one day, ‘andI saw herfor the first time at the moment of our mother’s death.’ Here, too, it had been necessary that death should violently fling open an eternal gate, so that two souls might behold each other in a ray of the primeval light. Is there one amongst us who has not near to him sisters he has never seen?Happily, even in those whose vision is most limited, there is always something that acts in silence as though they had seen. It is possible, perhaps, that to begood is only to be in a little light what all are in darkness. Therefore, doubtless, is it well that we should endeavour to raise our life, and should strive towards summits where ill-doing becomes impossible. And therefore, too, is it well to accustom the eye to behold events and men in a divine atmosphere. But even that is not indispensable; and how small must the difference seem to the eyes of a God! We are in a world where truth reigns at the bottom of things, and where it is not truth but falsehood that needs to be explained. If the happiness of your brother sadden you, do not despise yourself; you will not have to travel far along the road before you will come across something in yourself that will not be saddened. And even though you do not travel the road, it matters little: something there was that was not sad....Those who think of nothing have thesame truth as those who think of God; the truth is a little further from the threshold, that is all. ‘Even in the life that is most ordinary,’ says Renan, ‘the part that is done for God is enormous. The lowest of men would rather be just than unjust: we all worship, we all pray, numbers of times every day, without knowing it.’ And we are surprised when chance suddenly reveals to us the importance of this divine part. There are about us thousands and thousands of poor creatures who have nothing of beauty in their lives: they come, they go, in obscurity, and we believe that all is dead within them; and no one pays any heed. And then one day a simple word, an unexpected silence, a little tear that springs from the source of beauty itself, tell us that they have found the means of raising aloft, in the shadow of their soul, an ideal a thousand times more beautiful than the most beautiful thingstheir ears have ever heard, or their eyes ever seen. Oh, noble and pallid ideals of silence and shadow! It is you, above all, who call forth the smile of the angels, it is you, above all, who soar direct to God! In what myriads of hovels, in what dens of misery, in what prisons, perhaps, are you not being cherished at this moment, cherished with the purest blood and tears of an unhappy soul that has never smiled; even as the bees, at the time when all the flowers are dead about them, still offer to her who is to be their queen a honey a thousand times more precious than the honey they give to their little sisters of daily life.... Which of us has not met, more than once, along the paths of life, a forsaken soul that has yet not lost the courage to cherish, in the darkness, a thought diviner and purer than all those that so many others had the power to choose in the light? Here, too, it is simplicity that is God’s favouriteslave; and it is enough, perhaps, that a few sages should know what has to be done, for the rest of us to act as though we knew too....

THE DEEPER LIFE

IT is well that men should be reminded that the very humblest of them has the power to ‘fashion, after a divine model that he chooses not, a great moral personality, composed in equal parts of himself and the ideal; and that if anything lives in fullest reality, of a surety it is that.’

Each man has to seek out his own special aptitude for a higher life in the midst of the humble and inevitable reality of daily existence. Than this there can be no nobler aim in life. It is only by the communications we have with the infinite that we are to be distinguished from each other. If the hero is greater than thewretch who marches by his side, it is because at a certain moment of his existence there has come to him a fuller consciousness of one of these communications. If it is true that creation does not stop at man and that we are surrounded by invisible beings who are superior to us, their superiority can only consist in that they have, with the infinite, communications whose nature we cannot even imagine.

It lies within our power to increase these communications. In the life of every man has there been a day when the heavens opened of their own accord, and it is almost always from that very instant that dates his true spiritual personality. It is doubtless at that instant that are formed the invisible, eternal features that we reveal, though we know it not, to angels and to souls. But with most men it is chance alone that has caused the heavens to open; and they have not chosen the facewhereby the angels know them in the infinite, nor have they understood how to ennoble and purify its features—which do indeed but owe their being to an accidental joy or sadness, an accidental thought or fear.

Our veritable birth dates from the day when, for the first time, we feel at the deepest of us that there is something grave and unexpected in life. Some there are who realise suddenly that they are not alone under the sky. To others will it be brusquely revealed, while shedding a tear or giving a kiss, that ‘the source of all that is good and holy from the universe up to God is hidden behind a night, full of too distant stars’; a third will see a divine hand stretched forth between his joy and his misfortune; and yet another will have understood that it is the dead who are in the right. One will have had pity, another will have admired or been afraid. Oftendoes it need almost nothing, a word, a gesture, a little thing that is not even a thought. ‘Before, I loved thee as a brother, John,’ says one of Shakespeare’s heroes, admiring the other’s action, ‘but now I do respect thee as my soul.’ On that day it is probable that a being will have come into the world.

We can be born thus more than once; and each birth brings us a little nearer to our God. But most of us are content to wait till an event, charged with almost irresistible radiance, intrudes itself violently upon our darkness, and enlightens us, in our despite. We await I know not what happy coincidence, when it may so come about that the eyes of our soul shall be open at the very moment that something extraordinary takes place. But in everything that happens is there light; and the greatness of the greatest of men has but consisted in that they had trained theireyes to be open to every ray of this light. Is it indeed essential that your mother should breathe her last in your arms, that your children should perish in a shipwreck, and that you yourself should pass by the side of death, for you at length to understand that you have your being in an incomprehensible world where you shall be for ever, where an unseen God, who is eternally alone, dwells with His creatures? Must your betrothed die in a fire, or disappear before your eyes in the green depths of the ocean, for it to be revealed to you for an instant that the last limits of the kingdom of love transcend perhaps the scarcely visible flames of Mira, Altair or Berenice’s tresses? Had your eyes been open, might you not have beheld in a kiss that which to-day you perceive in a catastrophe? Are the divine recollections that slumber in our souls to be awakened only by the lance-thrusts of grief? Thesage needs no such violent arousing. He sees a tear, a maiden’s gesture, a drop of water that falls; he listens to a passing thought, presses a brother’s hand, approaches a lip, with open eyes and open soul. He never ceases to behold that of which you have caught but a passing glimpse; and a smile will readily tell him all that it needed a tempest, or even the hand of death, to reveal to you.

For what are in reality the things we call ‘Wisdom,’ ‘Virtue,’ ‘Heroism,’ ‘sublime hours,’ and ‘great moments of life,’ but the moments when we have more or less issued forth from ourselves, and have been able to halt, be it only for an instant, on the step of one of the eternal gates whence we see that the faintest cry, the most colourless thought, and most nerveless gestures do not drop into nothingness; or that if they do indeed thus drop, the fall itself is so immense that it sufficesto give an august character to our life? Why wait till the firmament shall open amid the roar of the thunderbolt? We must watch for the happy moments when it opens in silence; and it is ever thus opening. You seek God in your life, and you say God appears not. But in what life are there not thousands of hours akin to the hour in that drama where all are waiting for the divine intervention, and none perceive it, till an invisible thought that has flitted across the consciousness of a dying man suddenly reveals itself, and an old man cries out, sobbing for joy and terror, ‘But God, there is God!’....

Must we always be warned, and can we only fall on our knees when some one is there to tell us that God is passing by? If you have loved profoundly you have needed no one to tell you that your soul was a thing as great in itself as the world; that the stars, the flowers, the waves ofnight and sea were not solitary; that it was on the threshold of appearances that everything began, but nothing ended, and that the very lips you kissed belonged to a creature who was loftier, much purer, and much more beautiful than the one whom your arms enfolded. You have beheld that which in life cannot be seen without ecstasy. But cannot we live as though we always loved? It was this that the saints and heroes did; this and nothing more. Ah! truly too much of our life is spent in waiting, like the blind men in the legend who had travelled far so that they might hear their God. They were seated on the steps, and when asked what they were doing in the courtyard of the sanctuary, ‘We are waiting,’ they replied, shaking their heads, ‘and God has not yet said a single word.’ But they had not seen that the brass doors of the temple were closed, and they knew not that theedifice was resounding with the voice of their God. Never for an instant does God cease to speak; but no one thinks of opening the doors. And yet, with a little watchfulness, it were not difficult to hear the word that God must speak concerning our every act.

We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life. And if aught be lacking, it is not the chance of living in heaven, rather is it watchfulness and meditation, also perhaps a little ecstasy of soul. Though you have but a little room, do you fancy that God is not there, too, and that it is impossible to live therein a life that shall be somewhat lofty? If you complain of being alone, of the absence of events, of loving no one and being unloved, do you think that the words are true? Do you imagine that one can possibly be alone, that love can be a thing one knows, a thing one sees; thatevents can be weighed like the gold and silver of ransom? Cannot a living thought—proud or humble, it matters not; so it come but from your soul, it is great for you—cannot a lofty desire, or simply a moment of solemn watchfulness to life, enter a little room? And if you love not, or are unloved, and can yet see with some depth of insight that thousands of things are beautiful, that the soul is great and life almost unspeakably earnest, is that not as beautiful as though you loved or were loved? And if the sky itself is hidden from you, ‘does not the great starry sky,’ asks the poet, ‘spread over our soul, in spite of all, under guise of death?’ ... All that happens to us is divinely great, and we are always in the centre of a great world. But we must accustom ourselves to live like an angel who has just sprung to life, like a woman who loves, or a man on the point of death. If you knewthat you were going to die to-night, or merely that you would have to go away and never return, would you, looking upon men and things for the last time, see them in the same light that you have hitherto seen them? Would you not love as you never yet have loved? Is it the virtue or evil of the appearances around you that would be magnified? Would it be given you to behold the beauty or the ugliness of the soul? Would not everything, down to actual evil and suffering, be transformed into love, overflowing with gentlest tears? Does not, to quote the sage, each opportunity for pardon rob departure or death of something of its bitterness? And yet, in the radiance or sorrow or death, is it towards truth or error that one has taken the last steps one is allowed to take?

Is it the living or the dying who can see and are in the right? Ah! thrice happythey who have thought, spoken, and acted so as to receive the approval of those who are about to die, or to whom a great sorrow has given clearer insight! The sage, to whom none would hearken in life, can meet with no sweeter reward. If you have lived in obscure beauty, you have no cause for disquiet. At the end there must always sound within the heart of man an hour of supreme justice; and misfortune opens eyes that were never open before. Who knows whether at this very moment your shadow be not passing over the soul of a dying man and be not recognised by him as the shadow of one who already knew the truth? May it not be at the bedside of the last agony that is woven the veritable and most precious crown of sage and hero, and of all who have known how to live earnestly amid the sorrows, lofty, pure, and discreet, of life according to the soul?

‘Death,’ says Lavater, ‘does not only beautify our inanimate form; nay, the mere thought of death gives a more beautiful form to life itself.’ And even so does every thought, that is infinite as death, beautify our life. But we must not deceive ourselves. To every man there come noble thoughts, that pass across his heart like great white birds. Alas! they do not count; they are strangers whom we are surprised to see, whom we dismiss with importunate gesture. Their time is too short to touch our life. Our soul will not become earnest and deep-searching, as is the soul of the angels, for that we have, for one fleeting instant, beheld the universe in the shadow of death or eternity, in the radiance of joy or the flames of beauty and love. We have all known moments such as these, moments that have but left worthless ashes behind. These things must be habitual with us; it is of no avail that theyshould come by chance. We must learn to live in a beauty, an earnestness, that shall have become part of ourselves. In life, there is no creature so degraded but knows full well which is the noble and beautiful thing that he should do; but this noble and beautiful thing is not strong enough within him. It is this invisible and abstract strength that it must be our endeavour to increase, first of all. And this strength increases only in those who have acquired the habit of resting, more frequently than others, upon the summits where life absorbs the soul, upon the heights whence we see that every act and every thought are infallibly bound up with something great and immortal. Look upon men and things with the inner eye, with its form and desire, never forgetting that the shadow they throw as they pass by, upon hillock or wall, is but the fleeting image of a mightier shadow, which, like the wing of an imperishableswan, floats over every soul that draws near to their soul. Do not believe that thoughts such as these can be mere ornaments, and without influence upon the lives of those who admit them. It is far more important that one’s life should be perceived than that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived, than it transforms itself of its own accord. These thoughts of which I speak make up the secret treasure of heroism; and, on the day that life compels us to disclose this treasure, we are startled to find therein no forces other than those by which we are impelled towards perfect beauty. Then it is no longer necessary that a great king should die for us to remember that ‘the world does not end at the house-doors,’ and not an evening passes but the smallest thing suffices to ennoble the soul.

Yet it is not by telling yourself that God is great and that you move in His radiance,that you will be able to live in the beauty and fertile depths where the heroes dwelt. You may perhaps remind yourself, day and night, that the hands of all the invisible powers are waving over your head like a tent with countless folds, and yet shall the least gesture of these hands be imperceptible to you. It behoves you to be keenly vigilant; and better had you watch in the market-place than slumber in the temple. Beauty and grandeur are everywhere; for it needs but an unexpected incident to reveal them to us. This is known to nearly all men; but know it though they may, it is only when fortune or death lashes them that they grope around the wall of life in search of the crevices through which God may be seen. They know full well that there are eternal crevices even in the humble walls of a hovel, and that the smallest window cannot take away a line or a star from the immensity of heavenly space.But it is not enough to possess a truth; it is essential that the truth should possess us.

And yet are we in a world where the smallest events assume, spontaneously, a beauty that ever becomes purer and loftier. There is nothing that coalesces more readily than earth and sky; if your eyes have rested upon the stars, before enfolding in your arms the woman you love, your embrace will not be the same as though you had merely looked at the walls of your room. Be sure that the day you lingered to follow a ray of light through a crevice in the door of life, you did something as great as though you had bandaged the wounds of your enemy, for at that moment did you no longer have any enemies.

Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness ofour life depends on so little! Even thus may the verse of a poet, in the midst of the humble incidents of ordinary days, suddenly reveal to us something that is stupendous. No solemn word has been pronounced, and we feel that nothing has been called forth; and yet, why has an ineffable face beckoned to us from behind an old man’s tears, why does a vast night, starred with angels, extend over the smile of a child, and why, around a yes or no, murmured by a soul that sings and busies itself with other matters, do we suddenly hold our breath for an instant and say to ourselves, ‘Here is the house of God, and this one of the approaches to heaven’?

It is because these poets have been more heedful than we to the ‘never-ending shadow.’ ... That is the essence of supreme poetry, that, and that alone, and its sole aim is to keep open ‘the great road that leads from the seen to the unseen.’ Butthat is life’s supreme aim, too, and it is easier far to attain in life than in the noblest of poems, for these have had to abandon the two great wings of silence. Not a single day is trivial. It is essential that this idea should sink into our life and take root therein. There is no question of being sad. Small joys, faint smiles, and great tears, all these fill up the same nook in time and space. You can play in life as innocently ‘as a child about a death-bed,’ and it is not the tears that are indispensable. Smiles as well as tears open the gates of the other world. Go or come, you will find all you need in the darkness, but never forget that you are close to the gate.

*

After this lengthy digression, I return to my starting-point, which was that ‘it is well that men should be reminded that the very humblest of them has the power to fashion, after a divine model that hechooses not, a great moral personality, composed in equal parts of himself and the ideal.’ It is only in the depths of life that this ‘great moral personality’ can be carved out; and only by means of incessant ‘revelations of the divine’ can we add to the stores of the ideal we require. To every man is it given to attain in spirit to the heights of virtuous life, and to know at all times what his conduct should be, would he act like a hero or a saint. But more than this is needed. It is essential that the spiritual atmosphere about us should be transformed to such a degree that it ends by resembling the atmosphere of Swedenborg’s beautiful countries of the age of gold, wherein the air permitted not a falsehood to leave the lips. An instant comes then, when the smallest ill that we fain would commit falls at our feet like a leaden ball upon a disc of bronze; when everything changes, though we know itnot, into beauty, love, or truth. But this atmosphere enwraps those only who have been heedful to ventilate their life sufficiently by at times flinging open the gates of the other world. It is when we are near to those gates that we see; it is when we are near to those gates that we love. For to love one’s neighbour does not mean only to give oneself to him, to serve, help, and sustain others. We may possibly be neither good, nor noble, nor beautiful, even in the midst of the greatest sacrifice; and the sister of charity who dies by the bedside of a typhoid patient may perchance have a mean, rancorous, miserable soul. To love one’s neighbour in the immovable depths means to love in others that which is eternal; for one’s neighbour, in the truest sense of the term, is that which approaches the nearest to God; in other words, all that is best and purest in man; and it is only by ever lingeringnear the gates I spoke of, that you can discover the divine in the soul. Then will you be able to say with the great Jean Paul: ‘When I desire to love most tenderly one who is dear to me, and wish to forgive him everything, I have but to look at him for a few moments in silence.’ To learn to love, one must first learn to see. ‘I lived for twenty years by my sister’s side,’ said a friend to me, one day, ‘andI saw herfor the first time at the moment of our mother’s death.’ Here, too, it had been necessary that death should violently fling open an eternal gate, so that two souls might behold each other in a ray of the primeval light. Is there one amongst us who has not near to him sisters he has never seen?

Happily, even in those whose vision is most limited, there is always something that acts in silence as though they had seen. It is possible, perhaps, that to begood is only to be in a little light what all are in darkness. Therefore, doubtless, is it well that we should endeavour to raise our life, and should strive towards summits where ill-doing becomes impossible. And therefore, too, is it well to accustom the eye to behold events and men in a divine atmosphere. But even that is not indispensable; and how small must the difference seem to the eyes of a God! We are in a world where truth reigns at the bottom of things, and where it is not truth but falsehood that needs to be explained. If the happiness of your brother sadden you, do not despise yourself; you will not have to travel far along the road before you will come across something in yourself that will not be saddened. And even though you do not travel the road, it matters little: something there was that was not sad....

Those who think of nothing have thesame truth as those who think of God; the truth is a little further from the threshold, that is all. ‘Even in the life that is most ordinary,’ says Renan, ‘the part that is done for God is enormous. The lowest of men would rather be just than unjust: we all worship, we all pray, numbers of times every day, without knowing it.’ And we are surprised when chance suddenly reveals to us the importance of this divine part. There are about us thousands and thousands of poor creatures who have nothing of beauty in their lives: they come, they go, in obscurity, and we believe that all is dead within them; and no one pays any heed. And then one day a simple word, an unexpected silence, a little tear that springs from the source of beauty itself, tell us that they have found the means of raising aloft, in the shadow of their soul, an ideal a thousand times more beautiful than the most beautiful thingstheir ears have ever heard, or their eyes ever seen. Oh, noble and pallid ideals of silence and shadow! It is you, above all, who call forth the smile of the angels, it is you, above all, who soar direct to God! In what myriads of hovels, in what dens of misery, in what prisons, perhaps, are you not being cherished at this moment, cherished with the purest blood and tears of an unhappy soul that has never smiled; even as the bees, at the time when all the flowers are dead about them, still offer to her who is to be their queen a honey a thousand times more precious than the honey they give to their little sisters of daily life.... Which of us has not met, more than once, along the paths of life, a forsaken soul that has yet not lost the courage to cherish, in the darkness, a thought diviner and purer than all those that so many others had the power to choose in the light? Here, too, it is simplicity that is God’s favouriteslave; and it is enough, perhaps, that a few sages should know what has to be done, for the rest of us to act as though we knew too....

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