CHAPTER XVII.A MEDITATION.
So now, I think, I begin to see why I have been sent here—not to give lessons, but to take them. My education has been neglected, and I am coaching for a pass in the higher learning of life. I am reading with Victoria—reading in the deep eyes, without book. It is a course of social economy by a new method. The method is to look on this image of the Divine, as intently as may be without being caught in the act. I must not be caught; half of the gusty anger of the gods with adoring mortals comes of their dislike of being stared at. And, besides looking, there must be listening—listening with the heart. The ear will not do; the true message of this exquisite piece of being is only for a finer organ. Put a microphone in a cave, and it will register the beat of the earth’sbreathing: with a still more delicate instrument, perhaps, this girl’s elemental nature, at its stillest, will be heard to speak. As soon as my heart was stirred, then truly she began to be audible to me—blessed day!
And to give me delight, as well as profit, she has not the faintest idea of her function. Often I get the benefit of a whole morning’s lecture, requiring copious notes, while, for all she knows of it, I have but watched her as she manœuvred a battalion of fowls.
A grand provision of leisure for the true work of life seems to be her chief instinctive aim. She has the genius of indifference to trivial things; she is never busy with aught that does not truly count. The idleness of hurry is unknown to her; she is always free for essentials—a true word, a noble action, a great thought.
But this is lover’s talk. I cannot help that; lover’s talk let it be, so only she cannot overhear.
I am a true lover in this, that the things she says to me are as nothing to the things she seems to say. I do not want her to say much. I can say for her all I most want tohear. She idealises the world for me. She is a sublime suggestion. She only starts the game; I play. Worship is in the worshipper. She brings out my highest, truest, best. A something is within me; she is its mystical correspondence in warm life. She seems to speak things to me, she seems to be things to me. Are these things true of her? What care I: they are true of me!
So, then, for me, she is a great artist in being. She lives to beauty, the sole end. She does naught only for the thing done; there is also the way of doing it. I note her placid disdain of a certain hen, that has an absurd habit of hatching by quantity, and addles half the brood. The other half, for want of due maternal care, are a species of bush-fowl that have lost their way in civilisation, and Victoria spends days over their bags of bone and feathers, to bring them into harmony with her great law. I am sure she thinks, though she might never know how to say it, that every problem of being is, in the profoundest sense, a problem of manner.Howdo you love, hate, suffer, and rejoice; nay, how do you eat and drink? There are higherproprieties, even in this art, than the management of peas with the fork. Is it after the manner of thefarm-yard, or after the other? I remember her little touch about the pasturing brutes. The brutes, too, renounce, but not as a fine art. It is only their ‘needs must when the devil drives.’ That was her meaning. They only do without; mangives up, because man alone is the artist, and art is choice. Living or dying, how slight as ends in themselves! but how you live, how you die! Is the piece well acted, or have you but got through your part? Who wants it, merely as a part got through? Not that greater than Theseus, for certain, before whom this dream-play is played.
That picture of the old life troubled me so, that grand composition of the Exchange steps. It would not come right. Here is one whose mere presence brings everything into its place. Let her but stand beside the easel, and I get the key at once. Now I see where it was wrong; now could I go among the rushing, blurred figures of my sitters, and ask them, for the love of God, and, still more, for the love of man, to keep still. I could say tothem, as at her bidding, ‘Piano! piano! you are perishing of over strain. You, the higher up, why this frantic scraping for useless currency? What can it do for you? How much of peace comes out of it, how much of fineness of life? What are you when all is done—when you have sat at meat with my Lord, and added the Hall in the country to the mansion in town? Have you yet found out the faintest inner meaning of one of the pictures on your wall, of one of the books on your shelf? You think Walter Map is for monkish Latin, and that other’s vision of “all the wealth of this world, and the woe, both” merely for a scholar’s treat.Malheureux!rushing away to your daily drive for more canvases, more bindings, more horses of swiftness, more furniture, in a word, and more dinners of the stalled ox. The greed makes the hurry, and the wasteful idle hurry spoils the life. Oh, the grim set of your jaws, the thinly veiled hardness of your eye, even at the sacred hour of rest and relaxation! What are you but a huge river-pike in black and white! More leisure, friend, less lust of gear. Cut away the hindrancesto living, and begin to live. Take nothing in but what you can digest to true use, which is beauty of life. What a scandal, if you were caught and opened in an unguarded hour, and half your stomach were found lined with vanities as profitless as the bits of shoe leather and old corks so often found in the maw of your prototype—vanities of things bolted to the end of bolting, titles of park and meadow whereyoucan never find a flower, visiting-lists where you can never find a friend, cards for music where you may never hear a note that breathes one of the secrets of Heaven. Your bolting for waste takes so much out of the common stock for use. Your grab for superfluity baulks so much honest craving for need!’
You work for it! Will no one deliver us from the tyranny of that cry? Work for what?—to have and to hold, to leave less and less for the weaker, till finally, in the lowest hell of it, the huge crowd of the uncanny have to learn to call their base scramble for your leavings the battle of life? More leisure for these, from the obsession of the one degrading thought—how to get the dry crust and thecold potato for the day’s meal. For, true living begins only when such things are done with, when the belly is timbered with victual, and the back clothed, and when the spirit, that is the all-in-all, is left free for its shaping work. More leisure for love and friendship, and kindly deeds, and joy—the true business, which, if we were not blinded, would have their banks and their depôts, and their pushing agents in every street. The real ‘Theory of Exchanges,’ what is it but the philosophy of the diffusion of the humane self? Oh, the hard world of the self-helpers, with their Smiling apostle! oh, the hard world!—the hard world of all the workers, high and low, leisureless for profitable toil, the real task hardly so much as begun—too hard even for the very martyrs, robbed of their right to smile in the death-hour, by the horrid fear that all eternity will never set the muddle straight! Jesus, what a sight! the sight of the factories, right through, from the tiniest monkey-faced minder, up to the gaudy boss-bird in his mahogany cage. This organised labour? fie! oh fie! Organised? for what? for the sake of the labour, or forthe sake of the labourer—the only product that really counts—for the sake of the cottons, or for the sake of the garment-stuff for the souls of men? Is labour man’s end, or his means? his master, or his ministrant? Surely the first true end of making cottons well is to make the maker better. And, if one must be spoiled in the process, for Heaven’s sake let it be the cottons, though, of that, no need. Every thread of their fineness must come out of some inner fineness in him. How pathetically absurd to have them smooth, and white, and close-textured, and firm in the pull, and him coarse, foul, loose-minded, tearing in the Devil’s hand under any strain of lust or rage! But why insist on a commonplace when all the wisest feel that truth, and speak it now? The work exists for the worker; let us never cease to proclaim it, and have done with the old lie—the worker for the work. How sad the sight when you pass from one to the other! The expectation born naturally of the fine thing is always of some finer animate thing behind. Hence the craving for sight and knowledge of heroes. But see the slop-made piece of humanhandiwork that skulks as maker, behind the screen of drawing-room intrigue, or behind my lady’s fan—shabby, shambling, beer-bedewed, only so much of him washed as might soil the satins and brocades he shapes for others’ uses! Go into the dismal slums that manufacture for Mayfair, and follow the dainty casket for jewels from one end to the other of the line—from the rickety workshop, airless, and only not lightless, too, because the light is wanted for the labour, to the still daintier casket for men and women, in which it finds its cushioned rest. If this beautiful correspondence, why that grotesque incongruity? If these who touch it as owners are as fine as itself, why not, also, they who touch it as makers, at least with the inner fineness, and a certain amplitude of material life? But no: a dozen have died to all the true ends of being to make that pretty toy, have been reared in the belief that all the fineness they have is to go into that direct, and not, in the first place, into their own lives.
For nothing sanctifies a wrong, not even a headache in doing it; and ‘honest industry,’which makes of patience and thrift but the foothold for its spring upon the back of stupidity or improvidence, is the sinfullest sin of all. Be not so sanctified of air, O new hot-gospeller of work! Your sole right over knaves and fools is but the right to help them to better wisdom out of your heart and hand. Your virtue was not given to you for investment at forty per cent. The knaves and fools are diseased—that is all; and you, when you stoop to personal profit out of their infirmity, are worse diseased than they. A terrible malady, yours, of hard work to self-regarding ends; infectious to the last degree; a sort of dry rot of life.
Believe this—individualism, self-help, to any other end than the help of all, is the great untruth. Believe it, in spite of the Smiling apostle, who has done more harm with the nostrum of his title than Abernethy with his invention of blue-pill. Go on being self-helpful, if you must, for thirty, forty centuries more; only not for ever! Take a lease of five times nine hundred and ninety-nine years, yet fix some term! Give us a little hope, andname the happy day when the freehold of light and life and jouissance shall revert to all.
Try the other thing as a regimen, once in a way, as a new diet for your soul’s health—as a new quack medicine, then, powerfully recommended by a sufferer: will that appeal? One poor little pill—it cannot hurt overmuch. Cut off some of the work that ministers but to your ease and luxury, and that, with interest piled on interest of infamous wrong, makes the ever-growing load of sorrow for the mass. Cease to be competitive and self-helping, at least in precious moments when you feel your heart sick. Go back to it, if you will, if you can, when you feel a man again, as convalescents resume their mulligatawny and hot lobster when the plainer roast and boiled have set them right. Treat your mind like a stomach, and give it a touch of nature once in a while. Then, if you have a taste that way, still return for your gorge at the banquet of work. Only, try to include in it some concern for the most truly helpless, the stupid and the base, and to find the relish in the end rather than the means. For theend is not to make riches of mind, body, or estate for yourself, but to lift up life for one and for all.
This is how I interpret Victoria. This is what I think she means. Let me put it to the proof.