I believe that the most affecting, beautiful, and grave message ever written from a death-bed is John Sterling's last letter to Carlyle. It reflects, perhaps, something of Carlyle's own fine manner, but then Sterling had long been Carlyle's friend and confidant.
Before I give it, let me add a brief account of Sterling. He was some ten years Carlyle's junior, the son of the redoubtable Edward Sterling, the leader-writer of the Times, a man who in his day wielded a mighty influence. Carlyle describes the father's way of life, how he spent the day in going about London, rolling into clubs, volubly questioning and talking; then returned home in the evening, and condensed it all into a leader, "and is found," said Carlyle, "to have hit the essential purport of the world's immeasurable babblement that day with an accuracy above all other men."
The younger Sterling, Carlyle's friend, was at Cambridge for a time, but never took his degree; he became a journalist, wrote a novel, tales, plays, endless poems—all of thin and vapid quality. His brief life, for he died at thirty-eight, was a much disquieted one; he travelled about in search of health, for he was early threatened with consumption; for a short time he was a curate in the English Church, but drifted away from that. He lived for a time at Falmouth, and afterwards at Ventnor. He must have been a man of extraordinary charm, and with quite unequalled powers of conversation. Even Carlyle seems to have heard him gladly, and that is no ordinary compliment, considering Carlyle's own volubility, and the agonies, occasionally suppressed but generally trenchantly expressed, with which Carlyle listened to other well-known talkers like Coleridge and Macaulay.
Carlyle certainly had a very deep affection and admiration for Sterling; he rains down praises upon him, in that wonderful little biography, which is probably the finest piece of work that Carlyle ever did.
He speaks of Sterling as "brilliant, beautiful, cheerful with an ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, imaginations . . . with frank affections, inexhaustible hopes, audacities, activities, and general radiant vivacity of heart and intelligence, which made the presence of him an illumination and inspiration wherever he went."
But all Carlyle's love and admiration for his friend did not induce him to praise Sterling's writings; he looked upon him as a poet, but without the gift of expression. He says that all Sterling's work was spoilt by over-haste, and "a lack of due inertia." The fact is that Sterling was a sort of improvisatore, and what was beautiful and natural enough when poured out in talk, and with the stimulus of congenial company, grew pale and indistinct when he wrote it down; he had, in fact, no instinct for art or for design, and he failed whenever he tried to mould ideas into form.
The shadow of illness darkened about him, and he spent long periods in prostrate seclusion, tended by his wife and children, unable to write or talk or receive his friends. Then a terrible calamity befell him. His mother, to whom he was devotedly attached, died after a long illness, Sterling not being allowed to go to her, or to leave his own sick-room. He received the news one morning by letter, that all was over, went in to tell his wife, who was ill; while they were talking, his wife became faint, and died two hours later. So that within a few hours he lost the two human beings whom he most devotedly loved, and on whom he most depended for sympathy and help.
But in all Sterling's sorrows and illnesses, he never seems to have lost his interest in life and thought, in ideas, questions, and problems. Again and again he came back to the surface, with an irrepressible zest and freshness, and even gaiety, until at last all hope of life was extinguished. He lay dying for many weeks, and it was then that he wrote his last letter to Carlyle, which must be given in full:—
HILLSIDE, VENTNOR,10th August 1844.
MY DEAR CARLYLE,—For the first time for many months it seems possible to send you a few words; merely, however, for Remembrance and Farewell. On higher matters there is nothing to say. I tread the common road into the great darkness, without any thought of fear, and with very much of hope. Certainty indeed I have none. With regard to you and me I cannot begin to write; having nothing for it but to keep shut the lid of those secrets with all the iron weights that are in my power. Towards me it is still more true than towards England that no man has been and done like you. Heaven bless you! If I can lend a hand when THERE, that will not be wanting. It is all very strange, but not one hundredth part so sad as it seems to the standers-by.
Your Wife knows my mind towards her, and will believe it without asseverations.—Yours to the last, JOHN STERLING.
That letter may speak for itself. In its dignity, its nobleness, its fearlessness, it is one of the finest human documents I know. But let it be remembered that it is not the letter of a mournful and heart-broken man, turning his back on life in an ecstasy of despair; but the letter of one who had taken a boundless delight in life, had known upon equal terms most of the finest intellects of the day, and had been frankly recognised by them as a chosen spirit. All Sterling's designs for life and work had been slowly and surely thwarted by the pressure of hopeless illness; yet he had never complained or fretted or brooded, or indulged in any bitter recriminations against his destiny. That seems to me a very heroic attitude; while the letter itself, in its perfect frankness and courage, without a touch of solemnity or affectation, or any trace of craven shrinking from his doom, makes it in its noble simplicity one of the finest "last words" that I have ever read, and finer, I verily believe, than any flight of poetical imagination.
A few days later he sent Carlyle some stanzas of verse, "written," says Carlyle, "as if in star-fire and immortal tears; which are among my sacred possessions, to be kept for myself alone."
A few weeks before he wrote his last letter to Carlyle, Sterling had written a letter to his son, who was then a boy at school in London. In that he says:
"When I fancy how you are walking in the same streets, and moving along the same river, that I used to watch so intently, as if in a dream, when younger than you are—I could gladly burst into tears, not of grief, but with a feeling that there is no name for. Everything is so wonderful, great and holy, so sad and yet not bitter, so full of Death and so bordering on Heaven. Can you understand anything of this? If you can, you will begin to know what a serious matter our Life is; how unworthy and stupid it is to trifle it away without heed; what a wretched, insignificant, worthless creature anyone comes to be, who does not as soon as possible bend his whole strength, as in stringing a stiff bow, to doing whatever task lies first before him."
That again is a noble letter; but over it I think there lies a little shadow of regret, a sense that he had himself wasted some of the force of life in vague trifling; but even that mood had passed away in the nearness of the great impending change, leaving him upborne upon the greatness of God, in deep wonder and hope, knowing nothing more, in his weariness and his suffering, but the calmness of the Eternal Will.
The fears then from which men suffer, and even the greatest men not least, seem to be strangely complicated by the fact that nature does not seem to work as fast in the physical world as in the mental world. The mosquitoes of South American swamps are all fitted with a perfect tool-box of implements for piercing the hides of warm-blooded animals and drawing blood, although warm-blooded animals have long ceased to exist in those localities. But as the mosquito is one of the few creatures which can propagate its kind without ever partaking of food, the mosquito has therefore not died out; and though for many generations billions upon billions of mosquitoes have never had a chance of doing what they seem born to do, they have not discarded their apparatus. If mosquitoes could reason and philosophise, the prospect of such a meal might remain as a far-off and inspiring ideal of life and conduct, a thing which heroes in the past had achieved, and which might be possible again if they remained true to their highest instincts. So it is with humanity. Many of our fears do not correspond to any real danger; they are part of a panoply which we inherit, and have to do with the instinct of self-preservation. We are exposed to dangers still, dangers of infection for instance, but we have developed no instinctive fear which helps us to recognise the presence of infection. We take rational precautions against it when we recognise it, but the vast prevalence and mortality of consumption a generation or two ago was due to the fact that men did not recognise consumption as infectious; and many fine lives—Keats and Emily Bronte, to name but two—were sacrificed to careless proximity as well as to devoted tendance; but here nature, with all her instinct of self-preservation, did not hang out any danger signal, or provide human beings with any instinctive fear to protect them. Our instinctive fears, such as our fear of darkness and solitude, and our suspicion of strangers, seem to date from a time when such conditions were really dangerous, though they are so no longer.
At the same time the development of the imaginative faculty has brought with it a whole series of new terrors, through our power of anticipating and picturing possible calamities; while our increased sensitiveness as well as our more sentimental morality expose us to yet another range of fears. Consider the dread which many of us feel at the prospect of a painful interview, our avoidance of an unpleasant scene, our terror of arousing anger. The basis of all this is the primeval dread of personal violence. We are afraid of arousing anger, not because we expect to be assailed by blows and wounds, but because our far-off ancestors expected anger to end in an actual assault. We may know that we shall emerge from an unpleasant interview unscathed in fortune and in limb, but we anticipate it with a quite irrational terror, because we are still haunted by fears which date from a time when injury was the natural outcome of wrath. It may be our duty, and we may recognise it to be our duty, to make a protest of an unpleasant kind, or to withstand the action of an irritable person; but though we know well enough that he has no power to injure us, the flashing eye, the distended nostril, the rising pallor, the uplifted voice have a disagreeable effect on our nerves, although we know well that no physical disaster will result from it. Mrs. Browning, for instance, though she had high moral courage and tenacity of purpose, could not face an interview with her father, because an exhibition of his anger caused her to faint away on the spot. One does not often experience this whiff of violent anger in middle life; but the other day I had occasion to speak to a colleague of mine on a Board of which I am a member, at the conclusion of a piece of business in which I had proposed and carried a certain policy. I did not know that he disapproved of the policy in question, but I found on speaking to him that he was in a towering passion at my having opposed the policy which he preferred. He grew pale with rage; the hair on his head seemed to bristle, his eyes flashed fire; he slammed down a bundle of papers in his hand on the table, he stamped with passion; and I confess that it was profoundly disturbing and disconcerting. I felt for a moment that sickening sense of misgiving with which as a little boy one confronted an angry schoolmaster. Though I knew that I had a perfect right to my opinion, though I recognised that my sensations were quite irrational, I felt myself confronted with something demoniacal and insane, and the basis of it was, I am sure, physical and not moral terror. If I had been bullied or chastised as a child, I should be able to refer the discomfort I felt to old associations. But I feel no doubt that my emotion was something far more primeval than that, and that the dumb and atrophied sense of self-preservation was at work. The fear then that I felt was an instinctive thing, and was experienced in the inner nature and not in the rational mind; and the perplexity of the situation arises from the fact that such fear cannot be combated by rational considerations. Though no harm whatever resulted or could result from such an interview, yet I am certain that the prospect of such an outbreak would make me in the future far more cautious in dealing with this particular man, more anxious to conciliate him, and probably more disposed to compromise a matter.
Such an incident makes one unpleasantly aware of the quality of one's nature and temperament. It shows one that though one may have a strong moral and intellectual sense of what is the right and sensible course to take, one may be sadly hampered in carrying it out, by this secret and hidden instinct of which one may be rationally ashamed, but which is characteristic of what seems to be the stronger and more vital part of one's self.
The whole of civilisation is a combat between these two forces, a struggle between the rational and the instinctive parts of the mind. The instinctive mind bids one follow profit, need, advantage, the pleasure of the moment; the rational part of the mind bids one abstain, resist, balance contingencies, act in accordance with a moral standard. Many such abstentions become a mere matter of habit. If one is hungry and thirsty, and meets a child carrying bread or milk, one has no impulse to seize the food and eat it. One does not reflect upon the possible outcome of following the impulse of plunder; it simply does not enter one's head so to act. And there is of course a slow process going on in the world by which this moral restraint is becoming habitual and instinctive; but notably in the case of fear our instinct is a belated one, and results in many causeless and baseless anxieties which our reason in vain assures us are wholly false.
What then is our practical way of escape from the dominion of these shadows? Not, I am sure, in any resolute attempt to combat them by rational weapons; the rational argument, the common-sense consolation, only touches the rational part of the mind; we have got to get behind and below that, we have got somehow to fight instinct by instinct, and quell the terror in its proper home. By our finite nature we are compelled to attend to one thing at a time, and thus if we use rational argument, we are recognising the presence of the irrational fear; it is of little use then to array our advantages against our disadvantages, our blessings against our sufferings, as Michael Finsbury did with such small effect in The Wrong Box; our only chance is to turn tail altogether, and try to set some other dominant instinct at work; while we remember, we shall continue to suffer; our best chance lies in forgetting, and we can only do that by calling some other dominant emotion into play.
And here comes in the peculiarly paralysing effect of these baser emotions. As Victor Hugo once said, in a fine apophthegm, "Despair yawns." Fear and anxiety bring with them a particular kind of physical fatigue which makes us listless and inert. They lie on the spirit with a leaden dullness, which takes from us all possibility of energy and motion. Who does not know the instinct, when one is crushed and tortured by depression, to escape into solitude and silence, and to let the waves and streams flow over one. That is a universal instinct, and it is not wholly to be disregarded; it shows that to torture oneself into rational activity is of little use, or worse than useless.
When I was myself a sufferer from long nervous depression, and had to face a social gathering, I used out of very shame, and partly I think out of a sense of courtesy due to others, to galvanise myself into a sort of horrid merriment. The dark tide flowed on beneath in its sore and aching channels. It was common enough then for some sympathetic friend to say, "You seemed better to-night—you were quite yourself; that is what you want; if you would only make the effort and go out more into society, you would soon forget your troubles." There is something in it, because the sick mind must be persuaded if possible not to grave its dolorous course too indelibly in the temperament; but no one else could see the acute and intolerable reaction which used to follow such a strain, or how, the excitement over, the suffering resumed its sway over the exhausted self with an insupportable agony. I am sure that in my long affliction I never suffered more than after occasions when I was betrayed by excitement into argument or lively talk, and the worst spasms of melancholy that I ever endured were the direct and immediate results of such efforts.
The counteracting force in fact must be an emotional and instinctive one, not a rational and deliberate one; and this must be our next endeavour, to see in what direction the counterpoise must lie.
In depression then, and when causeless fears assail us, we must try to put the mind in easier postures, to avoid excess and strain, to live more in company, to do something different. Human beings are happiest in monotony and settled ways of life; but these also develop their own poisons, like sameness of diet, however wholesome it may be. It is, I believe, an established fact that most people cannot eat a pigeon a day for fourteen days in succession; a pigeon is not unwholesome, but the digestion cannot stand iteration. There is an old and homely story of a man who went to a great doctor suffering from dyspepsia. The doctor asked him what he ate, and he said that he always lunched off bread and cheese. "Try a mutton chop," said the doctor. He did so with excellent results. A year later he was ill again and went to the same doctor, who put him through the same catechism. "What do you have for luncheon?" said the doctor. "A chop," said the patient, conscious of virtuous obedience. "Try bread and cheese," said the doctor. "Why," said the patient, "that was the very thing you told me to avoid." "Yes," said the doctor, "and I tell you to avoid a chop now. You, are suffering not from diet, but from monotony of diet—and you want a change."
The principle holds good of ordinary life; it is humiliating to confess it, but these depressions and despondencies which beset us are often best met by very ordinary physical remedies. It is not uncommon for people who suffer from them to examine their consciences, rake up forgotten transgressions, and feel themselves to be under the anger of God. I do not mean that such scrutiny of life is wholly undesirable; depression, though it exaggerates our sinfulness, has a wonderful way of laying its finger on what is amiss, but we must not wilfully continue in sadness; and sadness is often a combination of an old instinct with the staleness which comes of civilised life; and a return to nature, as it is called, is often a cure, because civilisation has this disadvantage, that it often takes from us the necessity of doing many of the things which it is normal to man by inheritance to do—fighting, hunting, preparing food, working with the hands. We combat these old instincts artificially by games and exercises. It is humiliating again to think that golf is an artificial substitute for man's need to hunt and plough, but it is undoubtedly true; and thus to break with the monotony of civilisation, and to delude the mind into believing that it is occupied with primal needs is often a great refreshment. Anyone who fishes and shoots knows that the joy of securing a fish or a partridge is entirely out of proportion to any advantages resulting. A lawyer could make money enough in a single week to buy the whole contents of a fishmonger's shop, but this does not give him half the satisfaction which comes from fishing day after day for a whole week, and securing perhaps three salmon. The fact is that the old savage mind, which lies behind the rational and educated mind, is having its fling; it believes itself to be staving off starvation by its ingenuity and skill, and it unbends like a loosened bow.
We may be enjoying our work, and we may even take glad refuge in it to stave off depression, but we are then often adding fuel to the fire, and tiring the very faculty of resistance, which hardly knows that it needs resting.
The smallest change of scene, of company, of work may effect a miraculous improvement when we are feeling low-spirited and listless. It is not idleness as a rule that we want, but the use of other faculties and powers and muscles.
And thus though our anxieties may be a real factor in our success, and may give us the touch of prudence and vigilance we want, it does not do to allow ourselves to drift into vague fears and dull depressions, and we must fight them in a practical way. We must remember the case of Naaman, who was vexed at being told to go and dip himself in a mud-stained stream running violently in rocky places, when he might have washed in Abana and Pharpar, the statelier, purer, fuller streams of his native land. It is just the little homely torrent that we need, and part of our cares come from being too dignified about them. It is pleasanter to think oneself the battle-ground for high and tragical forces of a spiritual kind, than to realise that some little homely bit of common machinery is out of gear. But we must resist the temptation to feel that our fears have a dark and great significance. We must simply treat them as little sicknesses and ailments of the soul.
I therefore believe that fears are like those little fugitive gliding things that seem to dart across the field of the eye when it is weak and ailing, vague clusters and tangles and spidery webs, that float and fly, and can never be fixed and truly seen; and that they are best treated as we learn to treat common ailments, by not concerning ourselves very much about them, by enduring and evading them and distracting the mind, and not by facing them, because they will not be faced; nor can they be dispelled by reason, because they are not in the plane of reason at all, but phantoms gathered by the sick imagination, distorted out of their proper shape, evil nightmares, the horror of which is gone with the dawn. They are the shadows of our childishness, and they show that we have a long journey before us; and they gain their strength from the fact that we gather them together out of the future like the bundle of sticks in the fable, when we shall have the strength to snap them singly as they come.
The real way to fight them is to get together a treasure of interests and hopes and beautiful visions and emotions, and above all to have some definite work which lies apart from our daily work, to which we can turn gladly in empty hours; because fears are born of inaction and idleness, and melt insensibly away in the warmth of labour and duty.
Nothing can really hurt us except our own despair. But the problem which is difficult is how to practise a real fulness of life, and yet to keep a certain detachment, how to realise that what we do is small and petty enough, but that the greatness lies in our energy and briskness of action; we should try to be interested in life as we are interested in a game, not believing too much in the importance of it, but yet intensely concerned at the moment in playing it as well and skilfully as possible. The happiest people of all are those who can shift their interest rapidly from point to point, and throw themselves into the act of the moment, whatever it may be. Of course this is largely at first a matter of temperament, but temperament is not unalterable; and self-discipline working along the lines of habit has a great attractiveness, the moment we feel that life is beginning to shape itself upon real lines.
Let us divide our fears up into definite divisions, and see how it is best to deal with them. Lowest and worst of all is the shapeless and bodiless fear, which is a real disease of brain and nerves. I know no more poignant description of this than in the strange book Lavengro:
"'What ails you, my child,' said a mother to her son, as he lay on a couch under the influence of the dreadful one; 'what ails you? you seem afraid!'
"Boy. And so I am; a dreadful fear is upon me.
"Mother. But of what? there is no one can harm you; of what are you apprehensive?
"Boy. Of nothing that I can express; I know not what I am afraid of, but afraid I am.
"Mother. Perhaps you see sights and visions; I knew a lady once who was continually thinking that she saw an armed man threaten her, but it was only an imagination, a phantom of the brain.
"Boy. No armed man threatens me; and 'tis not a thing that would cause me any fear. Did an armed man threaten me, I would get up and fight him; weak as I am, I would wish for nothing better, for then, perhaps, I should lose this fear; mine is a dread of I know not what, and there the horror lies.
"Mother. Your forehead is cool, and your speech collected. Do you know where you are?
"Boy. I know where I am, and I see things just as they are; you are beside me, and upon the table there is a book which was written by a Florentine. All this I see, and that there is no ground for being afraid. I am, moreover, quite cool, and feel no pain—but—but—
"And then there was a burst of 'gemiti, sospiri ed alti guai.' Alas, alas, poor child of clay! as the sparks fly upward, so wast thou born to sorrow—Onward!"
That is a description of amazing power, but of course we are here dealing with a definite brain-malady, in which the emotional centres are directly affected. This in a lesser degree no doubt affects more people than one would wish to think; but it may be considered a physical malady of which fear is the symptom and not the cause.
Let us then frankly recognise the physical element in these irrational terrors; and when one has once done this, a great burden is taken off the mind, because one sees that such fear may be a real illusion, a sort of ghastly mockery, which by directly affecting the delicate machinery through which emotion is translated into act, may produce a symptom of terror which is both causeless and baseless, and which may imply neither a lack of courage nor self-control.
And, therefore, I feel, as against the Ascetic and the Stoic, that I am meant to live and to taste the fulness of life; and that if I begin by choosing the wrong joys, it is that I may learn their unreality. I have learned already to compromise about many things, to be content with getting much less than I desire, to acquiesce in missing many good things altogether. But asceticism for the sake of prudence seems to me a wilful error, as though a man practised starvation through uneasy days, because of the chance that he might some day find himself with not enough to eat. The only self-denial worth practising is the self-denial that one admires, and that seems to one to be fine and beautiful.
For we must emphatically remember that the saint is one who lives life with high enjoyment, and with a vital zest; he chooses holiness because of its irresistible beauty, and because of the appeal it makes to his mind. He does not creep through life ashamed, depressed, anxious, letting ordinary delights slip through his nerveless fingers; and if he denies himself common pleasures, it is because, if indulged, they thwart and mar his purer and more lively joys.
The fear of life, the frame of mind which says, "This attractive and charming thing captivates me, but I will mistrust it and keep it at arm's length, because if I lose it, I shall experience discomfort," seems to me a poor and timid handling of life. I would rather say, "I will use it generously and freely, knowing that it may not endure; but it is a sign to me of God's care for me, that He gives me the desire and the gratification; and even if He means me to learn that it is only a small thing, I can learn that only by using it and trying its sweetness."
This may be held a dangerous doctrine; but I do not mean that life must be a foolish and ingenuous indulgence of every appetite and whim. One must make choices; and there are many appetites which come hand in hand with their own shadow. I am not here speaking of tampering with sin; I think that most people burn their fingers over that in early life. But I am speaking rather of the delights of the body that are in no way sinful, food and drink, games and exercise, love itself; and of the joys of the mind and the artistic sense; free and open relations with men and women of keen interests and eager fancies; the delights of work, professional success, the doing of pleasant tasks as vigorously and as perfectly as one can—all the stir and motion and delight of life.
To shrink back in terror from all this seems to me a sort of cowardice; and it is a cowardice too to go on indulging in things which one does not enjoy for the sake of social tradition. One must not be afraid of breaking with social custom, if one finds that it leads one into dreary and useless formalities, stupid and expensive entertainments, tiresome gatherings, dull and futile assemblies. I think that men and women ought gaily and delightedly to choose the things that minister to their vigour and joy, and to throw themselves willingly into these things, so long as they do not interfere with plainer and simpler duties.
Another way of escape from the importunities of fear is to be very resolute in fighting against our personal claims to honour and esteem. We are sorely wounded through our ambitions, whether they be petty or great; and it is astonishing to find how frail a basis often serves for a sense of dignity. I have known lowly and unimportant people who were yet full of pragmatical self-concern, and whose pride took the form not so much of exalting their own consequence as of thinking meanly of other people. It is easy to restore one's own confidence by dwelling with bitter emphasis on the faults and failings of those about one, by cataloguing the deficiencies of those who have achieved success, by accustoming oneself to think of one's own lack of success as a sign of unworldliness, and by attributing the success of others to a cynical and unscrupulous pursuit of reputation. There is nothing in the world which so differentiates men and women as the tendency to suspect and perceive affronts, and to nurture grievances. It is so fatally easy to think that one has been inconsiderately treated, and to mistake susceptibility for courage. Let us boldly face the fact that we get in this world very much what we earn and deserve, and there is no surer way of being excluded and left out from whatever is going forward than a habit of claiming more respect and deference than is due to one. If we are snubbed and humiliated, it is generally because we have put ourselves forward and taken more than our share. Whereas if we have been content to bear a hand, to take trouble, and to desire useful work rather than credit, our influence grows silently and we become indispensable. A man who does not notice petty grumbling, who laughs away sharp comments, who does not brood over imagined insults, who forgets irritable passages, who makes allowance for impatience and fatigue, is singularly invulnerable. The power of forgetting is infinitely more valuable than the power of forgiving, in many conjunctions of life. In nine cases out of ten, the wounds which our sensibilities receive are the merest pin-pricks, enlarged and fretted by our own hands; we work the little thorn about in the puncture till it festers, instead of drawing it out and casting it away.
Very few of the prizes of life that we covet are worth winning, if we scheme to get them; it is the honour or the task that comes to us unexpectedly that we deserve. I have heard discontented men say that they never get the particular work that they desire and for which they feel themselves to be suited; and meanwhile life flies swiftly, while we are picturing ourselves in all sorts of coveted situations, and slighting the peaceful happiness, the beautiful joys which lie all around us, as we go forward in our greedy reverie.
I have been much surprised, since I began some years ago to receive letters from all sorts of unknown people, to realise how many persons there are in the world who think themselves unappreciated. Such are not generally people who have tried and failed;—an honest failure very often brings a wholesome sense of incompetence;—but they are generally persons who think that they have never had a chance of showing what is in them, speakers who have found their audiences unresponsive, writers who have been discouraged by finding their amateur efforts unsaleable, men who lament the unsuitability of their profession to their abilities, women who find themselves living in what they call a thoroughly unsympathetic circle. The failure here lies in an incapacity to believe in one's own inefficiency, and a sturdy persuasion of the malevolence of others.
Here is a soil in which fears spring up like thorns and briars. "Whatever I do or say, I shall be passed over and slighted, I shall always find people determined to exclude and neglect me!" I know myself, only too well, how fertile the brain is in discovering almost any reason for a failure except what is generally the real reason, that the work was badly done. And the more eager one is for personal recognition and patent success, the more sickened one is by any hint of contempt and derision.
But it is quite possible, as I also know from personal experience, to go patiently and humbly to work again, to face the reasons for failure, to learn to enjoy work, to banish from the mind the uneasy hope of personal distinction. We may try to discern the humour of Providence, because I am as certain as I can be of anything that we are humorously treated as well as lovingly regarded. Let me relate two small incidents which did me a great deal of good at a time of self-importance. I was once asked to give a lecture, and it was widely announced. I saw my own name in capital letters upon advertisements displayed in the street. On the evening appointed, I went to the place, and met the chairman of the meeting and some of the officials in a room adjoining the hall where I was to speak. We bowed and smiled, paid mutual compliments, congratulated each other on the importance of the occasion. At last the chairman consulted his watch and said it was time to be beginning. A procession was formed, a door was majestically thrown open by an attendant, and we walked with infinite solemnity on to the platform of an entirely empty hall, with rows of benches all wholly unfurnished with guests. I think it was one of the most ludicrous incidents I ever remember. The courteous confusion of the chairman, the dismay of the committee, the colossal nature of the fiasco filled me, I am glad to say, not with mortification, but with an overpowering desire to laugh.
I may add that there had been a mistake about the announcement of the hour, and ten minutes later a minute audience did arrive, whom I proceeded to address with such spirit as I could muster; but I have always been grateful for the humorous nature of the snub administered to me.
Again on another occasion I had to pay a visit of business to a remote house in the country. A good-natured friend descanted upon the excitement it would be to the household to entertain a living author, and how eagerly my utterances would be listened to. I was received not only without respect but with obvious boredom. In the course of the afternoon I discovered that I was supposed to be a solicitor's clerk, but when a little later it transpired what my real occupations were, I was not displeased to find that no member of the party had ever heard of my existence, or was aware that I had ever published a book, and when I was questioned as to what I had written, no one had ever come across anything that I had printed, until at last I soared into some transient distinction by the discovery that my brother was the author of Dodo.
I cannot help feeling that there is something gently humorous about this good-humoured indication that the whole civilised world is not engaged in the pursuit of literature, and that one's claims to consideration depend upon one's social merits. I do honestly think that Providence was here deliberately poking fun at me, and showing me that a habit of presenting one's opinions broadcast to the world does not necessarily mean that the world is much aware either of oneself or of one's opinions.
The cure then, it seems to me, for personal ambition, is the humorous reflection that the stir and hum of one's own particular teetotum is confined to a very small space and range; and that the witty description of the Greek politician who was said to be well known throughout the whole civilised world and at Lampsacus, or of the philosopher who was announced as the author of many epoch-making volumes and as the second cousin of the Earl of Cork, represents a very real truth,—that reputation is not a thing which is worth bothering one's head about; that if it comes, it is apt to be quite as inconvenient as it is pleasant, while if one grows to depend upon it, it is as liable to part with its sparkle as soda-water in an open glass.
And then if one comes to consider the commoner claim, the claim to be felt and respected and regarded in one's own little circle, it is wholesome and humiliating to observe how generously and easily that regard is conceded to affectionateness and kindness, and how little it is won by any brilliance or sharpness. Of course irritable, quick-tempered, severe, discontented people can win attention easily enough, and acquire the kind of consideration which is generally conceded to anyone who can be unpleasant. How often families and groups are drilled and cautioned by anxious mothers and sisters not to say or do anything which will vex so-and-so! Such irritable people get the rooms and the chairs and the food that they like, and the talk in their presence is eagerly kept upon subjects on which they can hold forth. But how little such regard lasts, and how welcome a relief it is, when one that is thus courted and deferred to is absent! Of course if one is wholly indifferent whether one is regarded, needed, missed, loved, so long as one can obtain the obedience and the conveniences one likes, there is no more to be said. But I often think of that wonderful poem of Christina Rossetti's about the revenant, the spirit that returns to the familiar house, and finds himself unregretted:
"'To-morrow' and 'to-day,' they cried;I was of yesterday!"
One sometimes sees, in the faces of old family servants, in unregarded elderly relatives, bachelor uncles, maiden aunts, who are entertained as a duty, or given a home in charity, a very beautiful and tender look, indescribable in words but unmistakable, when it seems as if self, and personal claims, and pride, and complacency had really passed out of the expression, leaving nothing but a hope of being loved, and a desire to do some humble service.
I saw it the other day in the face of a little old lady, who lived in the house of a well-to-do cousin, with rather a bustling and vigorous family pervading the place. She was a small frail creature, with a tired worn face, but with no look of fretfulness or discontent. She had a little attic as a bedroom, and she was not considered in any way. She effaced herself, ate about as much as a bird would eat, seldom spoke, uttering little ejaculations of surprise and amusement at what was said; if there was a place vacant in the carriage, she drove out. If there was not, she stopped at home. She amused herself by going about in the village, talking to the old women and the children, who half loved and half despised her for being so very unimportant, and for having nothing she could give away. But I do not think the little lady ever had a thought except of gratitude for her blessings, and admiration for the robustness and efficiency of her relations. She claimed nothing from life and expected nothing. It seemed a little frail and vanquished existence, and there was not an atom of what is called proper pride about her; but it was fine, for all that! An infinite sweetness looked out of her eyes; she suffered a good deal, but never complained. She was glad to live, found the world a beautiful and interesting place, and never quarrelled with her slender share of its more potent pleasures. And she will slip silently out of life some day in her attic room; and be strangely mourned and missed. I do not consider that a failure in life, and I am not sure that it is not something much more like a triumph. I know that as I watched her one evening knitting in the corner, following what was said with intense enjoyment, uttering her little bird-like cries, I thought how few of the things that could afflict me had power to wound her, and how little she had to fear. I do not think she wanted to take flight, but yet I am sure she had no dread of death; and when she goes thitherward, leaving the little tired and withered frame behind, it will be just as when the crested lark springs up from the dust of the roadway, and wings his way into the heart of the dewy upland.
If we are to avoid the dark onset of fear, we must at all costs simplify life, because the more complicated and intricate our life is, and the more we multiply our defences, the more gates and posterns there are by which the enemy can creep upon us. Property, comforts, habits, conveniences, these are the vantage-grounds from which fears can organise their invasions. The more that we need excitement, distraction, diversion, the more helpless we become without them. All this is very clearly recognised and stated in the Gospel. Our Saviour does not seem to regard the abandonment of wealth as a necessary condition of the Christian life, but He does very distinctly say that rich men are beset with great difficulties owing to their wealth, and He indicates that a man who trusts complacently in his possessions is tempted into a disastrous security. He speaks of laying up treasure in heaven as opposed to the treasures which men store up on earth; and He points out that whenever things are put aside unused, in order that the owner may comfort himself by the thought that they are there if he wants them, decay and corruption begin at once to undermine and destroy them. What exactly the treasure in heaven can be it is hard to define. It cannot be anything quite so sordid as good deeds done for the sake of spiritual investment, because our Saviour was very severe on those who, like the Pharisees, sought to acquire righteousness by scrupulosity. Nothing that is done just for the sake of one's own future benefit seems to be regarded in the Gospel as worth doing. The essence of Christian giving seems to be real giving, and not a sort of usurious loan. There is of course one very puzzling parable, that of the unjust steward, who used his last hours in office, before the news of his dismissal could get abroad, in cheating his master, in order to win the favour of the debtors by arbitrarily diminishing the amount of their debts. It seems strange that our Saviour should have drawn a moral out of so immoral an incident. Perhaps He was using a well-known story, and even making allowances for the admiration with which in the East resourcefulness, even of a fraudulent kind, was undoubtedly regarded. But the principle seems clear enough, that if the Christian chooses to possess wealth, he runs a great risk, and that it is therefore wiser to disembarrass oneself of it. Property is regarded in the Gospel as an undoubtedly dangerous thing; but so far from our Lord preaching a kind of socialism, and bidding men to co-operate anxiously for the sake of equalising wealth, He recommends an individualistic freedom from the burden of wealth altogether. But, as always in the Gospel, our Lord looks behind practice to motive; and it is clear that the motive for the abandonment of wealth is not to be a desire to act with a selfish prudence, in order to lay an obligation upon God to repay one generously in the future for present sacrifices, but rather the attainment of an individual liberty, which leaves the spirit free to deal with the real interests of life. And one must not overlook the definite promise that if a man seeks virtue first, even at the cost of earthly possessions and comforts, he will find that they will be added as well.
Those who would discredit the morality of the Gospel would have one believe that our Saviour in dealing with shrewd, homely, literal folk was careful to promise substantial future rewards for any worldly sacrifices they might make; but not so can I read the Gospel. Our Saviour does undoubtedly say plainly that we shall find it worth our while to escape from the burdens and anxieties of wealth, but the reward promised seems rather to be a lightness and contentment of spirit, and a freedom from heavy and unnecessary bonds.
In our complicated civilisation it is far more difficult to say what simplicity of life is. It is certainly not that expensive and dramatic simplicity which is sometimes contrived by people of wealth as a pleasant contrast to elaborate living. I remember the son of a very wealthy man, who had a great mansion in the country and a large house in London, telling me that his family circle were never so entirely happy as when they were living at close quarters in a small Scotch shooting-lodge, where their life was comparatively rough, and luxuries unattainable. But I gathered that the main delight of such a period was the sense of laying up a stock of health and freshness for the more luxurious life which intervened. The Anglo-Saxon naturally loves a kind of feudal dignity; he likes a great house, a crowd of servants and dependants, the impression of power and influence which it all gives; and the delights of ostentation, of having handsome things which one does not use and indeed hardly ever sees, of knowing that others are eating and drinking at one's expense, which is a thing far removed from hospitality, are dear to the temperament of our race. We may say at once that this is fatal to any simplicity of life; it may be that we cannot expect anyone who is born to such splendours deliberately to forego them; but I am sure of this, that a rich man, now and here, who spontaneously parted with his wealth, and lived sparely in a small house, would make perhaps as powerful an appeal to the imagination of the English world as could well be made. If a man had a message to deliver, there could be no better way of emphasizing it. It must not be a mere flight from the anxiety of worldly life into a more congenial seclusion. It should be done as Francis of Assisi did it, by continuing to live the life of the world without any of its normal conveniences. Patent and visible self-sacrifice, if it be accompanied by a tender love of humanity, will always be the most impressive attitude in the world.
But if one is not capable of going to such lengths, if indeed one has nothing that one can resign, how is it possible to practise simplicity of life? It can be done by limiting one's needs, by avoiding luxuries, by having nothing in one's house that one cannot use, by being detached from pretentiousness, by being indifferent to elaborate comforts. There are people whom I know who do this, and who, even though they live with some degree of wealth, are yet themselves obviously independent of comfort to an extraordinary degree. There is a Puritanical dislike of waste which is a very different thing, because it often coexists with an extreme attachment to the particular standard of comfort that the man himself prefers. I know people who believe that a substantial midday meal and a high tea are more righteous than a simple midday meal and a substantial dinner. But the right attitude is one of unconcern and the absence of uneasy scheming as to the details of life. There is no reason why people should not form habits, because method is the primary condition of work; but the moment that habit becomes tyrannous and elaborate, then the spirit is at once in bondage to anxiety. The real victory over these little cares is not for ever to have them on one's mind; or one becomes like the bread-and-butter fly in Through the Looking-Glass, whose food was weak tea with cream in it. "But supposing it cannot find any?" said Alice. "Then it dies," says the gnat, who is acting the part of interpreter. "But that must happen very often?" said Alice. "It ALWAYS happens!" says the gnat with sombre emphasis.
Simplicity is, in fact, a difficult thing to lay down rules for, because the essence of it is that it is free from rules; and those who talk and think most about it, are often the most uneasy and complicated natures. But it is certain that if one finds oneself growing more and more fastidious and particular, more and more easily disconcerted and put out and hampered by any variation from the exact scheme of life that one prefers, even if that scheme is an apparently simple one, it is certain that simplicity is at an end. The real simplicity is a sense of being at home and at ease in any company and mode of living, and a quiet equanimity of spirit which cannot be content to waste time over the arrangements of life. Sufficient food and exercise and sleep may be postulated; but these are all to be in the background, and the real occupations of life are to be work and interests and talk and ideas and natural relations with others. One knows of houses where some trifling omission of detail, some failure of service in a meal, will plunge the hostess into a dumb and incommunicable despair. The slightest lapse of the conventional order becomes a cloud that intercepts the sun. But the right attitude to life, if we desire to set ourselves free from this self-created torment, is a resolute avoidance of minute preoccupations, a light-hearted journeying, with an amused tolerance for the incidents of the way. A conventional order of life is useful only in so far as it removes from the mind the necessity of detailed planning, and allows it to flow punctually and mechanically in an ordered course. But if we exalt that order into something sacred and solemn, then we become pharisaical and meticulous, and the savour of life is lost.
One remembers the scene in David Copperfield which makes so fine a parable of life; how the merry party who were making the best of an ill-cooked meal, and grilling the chops over the lodging-house fire, were utterly disconcerted and reduced to miserable dignity by the entry of the ceremonious servant with his "Pray, permit me," and how his decorous management of the cheerful affair cast a gloom upon the circle which could not even be dispelled when he had finished his work and left them to themselves.