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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Joyous Gard, by Arthur Christopher Benson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Joyous Gard
+
+Author: Arthur Christopher Benson
+
+Release Date: January 22, 2007 [EBook #20423]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOYOUS GARD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by R. Cedron, Diane Monico, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+JOYOUS GARD
+
+
+ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON
+
+
+LONDON
+
+JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
+
+1913
+
+
+
+
+TO
+ALL MY FRIENDS
+KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
+I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+_It is a harder thing than it ought to be to write openly and frankly
+of things private and sacred. "Secretum meum mihi!"--"My secret is my
+own!"--cried St. Francis in a harrowed moment. But I believe that the
+instinct to guard and hoard the inner life is one that ought to be
+resisted. Secrecy seems to me now a very uncivilised kind of virtue,
+after all! We have all of us, or most of us, a quiet current of
+intimate thought, which flows on, gently and resistlessly, in the
+background of our lives, the volume and spring of which we cannot
+alter or diminish, because it rises far away at some unseen source,
+like a stream which flows through grassy pastures, and is fed by rain
+which falls on unknown hills from the clouds of heaven. This inner
+thought is hardly affected by the busy incidents of life--our work,
+our engagements, our public intercourse; but because it represents the
+self which we are always alone with, it makes up the greater part of
+our life, and is much more our real and true life than the life which
+we lead in public. It contains the things which we feel and hope,
+rather than what we say; and the fact that we do not speak our inner
+thoughts is what more than anything else keeps us apart from each
+other.
+
+In this book I have said, or tried to say, just what I thought, and as
+I thought it; and since it is a book which recommends a studied
+quietness and a cheerful serenity of life, I have put my feelings to a
+vigorous test, by writing it, not when I was at ease and in leisure,
+but in the very thickest and fullest of my work. I thought that if the
+kind of quiet that I recommended had any force or weight at all, it
+should be the sort of quiet which I still could realise and value in a
+life full of engagements and duties and business, and that if it could
+be developed on a background of that kind, it might have a worth which
+it could not have if it were gently conceived in peaceful days and
+untroubled hours.
+
+So it has all been written in spaces of hard-driven work, when the day
+never seemed long enough for all I had to do, between interruptions
+and interviews and teaching and meetings. But the sight and scent that
+I shall always connect with it, is that of a great lilac-bush which
+stands just outside my study window, and which day by day in this
+bright and chilly spring has held up its purple clusters, overtopping
+the dense, rich, pale foliage, against a blue and cloudless sky; and
+when the wind has been in the North, as it has often been, has filled
+my room with the scent of breaking buds. How often, as I wrote, have I
+cast a sidelong look at the lilac-bush! How often has it appeared to
+beckon me away from my papers to a freer and more fragrant air
+outside! But it seemed to me that I was perhaps obeying the call of
+the lilac best--though how far away from its freshness and
+sweetness!--if I tried to make my own busy life, which I do not
+pretend not to enjoy, break into such flower as it could, and give out
+what the old books call its 'spicery,' such as it is.
+
+Because the bloom, the colour, the scent, are all there, if I could
+but express them. That is the truth! I do not claim to make them, to
+cause them, to create them, any more than the lilac could engender the
+scent of roses or of violets. Nor do I profess to do faithfully all
+that I say in my book that it is well to do. That is the worst, and
+yet perhaps it is the best, of books, that one presents in them one's
+hopes, dreams, desires, visions; more than one's dull and mean
+performances. 'Als ich kann!' That is the best one can do and say.
+
+It is our own fault, and not the fault of our visions, that we cannot
+always say what we think in talk, even to our best friends. We begin
+to do so, perhaps, and we see a shadow gather. Either the friend does
+not understand, or he does not care, or he thinks it all unreal and
+affected; and then there falls on us a foolish shyness, and we become
+not what we are, but what we think the friend would like to think us;
+and so he 'gets to know' as he calls it, not what is really there, but
+what he chooses should be there.
+
+But with pen in hand, and the blessed white paper before one, there is
+no need to be anything in the world but what one is. Our dignity must
+look after itself, and the dignity that we claim is worth nothing,
+especially if it is falsely claimed. But even the meanest flower that
+blows may claim to blossom as it can, and as indeed it must. In the
+democracy of flowers, even the dandelion has a right to a place, if it
+can find one, and to a vote, if it can get one; and even if it cannot,
+the wind is kind to it, and floats its arrowy down far afield, by wood
+and meadow, and into the unclaimed waste at last._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                           PAGE
+
+I. JOYOUS GARD, PRELUDE                             1
+
+II. IDEAS                                           7
+
+III. POETRY                                        10
+
+IV. POETRY AND LIFE                                15
+
+V. ART                                             22
+
+VI. ART AND MORALITY                               35
+
+VII. INTERPRETATION                                46
+
+VIII. EDUCATION                                    54
+
+IX. KNOWLEDGE                                      59
+
+X. GROWTH                                          69
+
+XI. EMOTION                                        77
+
+XII. MEMORY                                        86
+
+XIII. RETROSPECT                                   98
+
+XIV. HUMOUR                                       107
+
+XV. VISIONS                                       119
+
+XVI. THOUGHT                                      126
+
+XVII. ACCESSIBILITY                               136
+
+XVIII. SYMPATHY                                   148
+
+XIX. SCIENCE                                      157
+
+XX. WORK                                          166
+
+XXI. HOPE                                         173
+
+XXII. EXPERIENCE                                  184
+
+XXIII. FAITH                                      193
+
+XXIV. PROGRESS                                    204
+
+XXV. THE SENSE OF BEAUTY                          212
+
+XXVI. THE PRINCIPLE OF BEAUTY                     220
+
+XXVII. LIFE                                       228
+
+
+
+
+JOYOUS GARD
+
+I
+
+PRELUDE
+
+
+The Castle of _Joyous Gard_ in the _Morte D'Arthur_ was Sir Lancelot's
+own castle, that he had won with his own hands. It was full of
+victual, and all manner of mirth and disport. It was hither that the
+wounded knight rode as fast as his horse might run, to tell Sir
+Lancelot of the misuse and capture of Sir Palamedes; and hence
+Lancelot often issued forth, to rescue those that were oppressed, and
+to do knightly deeds.
+
+It was true that Lancelot afterwards named it _Dolorous Gard_, but
+that was because he had used it unworthily, and was cast out from it;
+but it recovered its old name again when they conveyed his body
+thither, after he had purged his fault by death. It was on the
+morning of the day when they set out, that the Bishop who had been
+with him when he died, and had given him all the rites that a
+Christian man ought to have, was displeased when they woke him out of
+his sleep, because, as he said, he was so merry and well at ease. And
+when they inquired the reason of his mirth, the Bishop said, "Here was
+Lancelot with me, with more angels than ever I saw men upon one day."
+So it was well with that great knight at the last!
+
+I have called this book of mine by the name of _Joyous Gard_, because
+it speaks of a stronghold that we can win with our own hands, where we
+can abide in great content, so long as we are not careful to linger
+there in sloth and idleness, but are ready to ride abroad at the call
+for help. The only time in his life when Lancelot was deaf to that
+call, was when he shut himself up in the castle to enjoy the love that
+was his single sin. And it was that sin that cost him so dear, and
+lost the Castle its old and beautiful name. But when the angels made
+glad over the sinner who repented, as it is their constant use to do,
+and when it was only remembered of Lancelot that he had been a
+peerless knight, the name came back to the Castle; and that name is
+doubtless hidden now under some name of commoner use, whatever and
+wherever it may be.
+
+In the _Pilgrim's Progress_ we read how willing Mr. Interpreter was,
+in the House that was full of so many devices and surprises, to
+explain to the pilgrims the meaning of all the fantastic emblems and
+comfortable sights that he showed them. And I do not think it spoils a
+parable, but rather improves it, that it should have its secret
+meaning made plain.
+
+The Castle of _Joyous Gard_ then, which each of us can use, if we
+desire it, is the fortress of beauty and joy. We cannot walk into it
+by right, but must win it; and in a world like this, where there is
+much that is anxious and troublesome, we ought, if we can, to gain
+such a place, and provide it with all that we need, where we may have
+our seasons of rest and refreshment. It must not be idle and selfish
+joyance that we take there; it must be the interlude to toil and fight
+and painful deeds, and we must be ready to sally out in a moment when
+it is demanded of us. Now, if the winning of such a fortress of
+thought is hard, it is also dangerous when won, because it tempts us
+to immure ourselves in peace, and only observe from afar the plain of
+life, which lies all about the Castle, gazing down through the high
+windows; to shut out the wind and the rain, as well as the cries and
+prayers of those who have been hurt and dismayed by wrongful usage. If
+we do that, the day will come when we shall be besieged in our Castle,
+and ride away vanquished and disgraced, to do what we have neglected
+and forgotten.
+
+But it is not only right, it is natural and wise, that we should have
+a stronghold in our minds, where we should frequent courteous and
+gentle and knightly company--the company of all who have loved beauty
+wisely and purely, such as poets and artists. Because we make a very
+great mistake if we allow the common course and use of the world to
+engulph us wholly. We must not be too dainty for the work of the
+world, but we may thankfully believe that it is only a mortal
+discipline, and that our true life is elsewhere, hid with God. If we
+grow to believe that life and its cares and business are all, we lose
+the freshness of life, just as we lose the strength of life if we
+reject its toil. But if we go at times to our _Joyous Gard_, we can
+bring back into common life something of the grace and seemliness and
+courtesy of the place. For the end of life is that we should do humble
+and common things in a fine and courteous manner, and mix with simple
+affairs, not condescendingly or disdainfully, but with all the
+eagerness and modesty of the true knight.
+
+This little book then is an account, as far as I can give it, of what
+we may do to help ourselves in the matter, by feeding and nurturing
+the finer and sweeter thought, which, like all delicate things, often
+perishes from indifference and inattention. Those of us who are
+sensitive and imaginative and faint-hearted often miss our chance of
+better things by not forming plans and designs for our peace. We
+lament that we are hurried and pressed and occupied, and we cry,
+
+    _"Yet, oh, the place could I but find!"_
+
+But that is because we expect to be conducted thither, without the
+trouble of the journey! Yet we can, like the wise King of Troy, build
+the walls of our castle to music, if we will, and see to the fit
+providing of the place; it only needs that we should set about it in
+earnest; and as I have often gratefully found that a single word of
+another can fall into the mind like a seed, and quicken to life while
+one sleeps, breaking unexpectedly into bloom, I will here say what
+comes into my mind to say, and point out the towers that I think I
+discern rising above the tangled forest, and glimmering tall and
+shapely and secure at the end of many an open avenue.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+IDEAS
+
+
+There are certain great ideas which, if we have any intelligence and
+thoughtfulness at all, we cannot help coming across the track of, just
+as when we walk far into the deep country, in the time of the
+blossoming of flowers, we step for a moment into a waft of fragrance,
+cast upon the air from orchard or thicket or scented field of bloom.
+
+These ideas are very various in quality; some of them deliciously
+haunting and transporting, some grave and solemn, some painfully sad
+and strong. Some of them seem to hint at unseen beauty and joy, some
+have to do with problems of conduct and duty, some with the relation
+in which we wish to stand or are forced to stand with other human
+beings; some are questionings born of grief and pain, what the
+meaning of sorrow is, whether pain has a further intention, whether
+the spirit survives the life which is all that we can remember of
+existence; but the strange thing about all these ideas is that we find
+them suddenly in the mind and soul; we do not seem to invent them,
+though we cannot trace them; and even if we find them in books that we
+read or words that we hear, they do not seem wholly new to us; we
+recognise them as things that we have dimly felt and perceived, and
+the reason why they often have so mysterious an effect upon us is that
+they seem to take us outside of ourselves, further back than we can
+recollect, beyond the faint horizon, into something as wide and great
+as the illimitable sea or the depths of sunset sky.
+
+Some of these ideas have to do with the constitution of society, the
+combined and artificial peace in which human beings live, and then
+they are political ideas; or they deal with such things as numbers,
+curves, classes of animals and plants, the soil of the earth, the
+changes of the seasons, the laws of weight and mass, and then they are
+scientific ideas; some have to do with right and wrong conduct,
+actions and qualities, and then they are religious or ethical ideas.
+But there is a class of thoughts which belong precisely to none of
+these things, but which are concerned with the perception of beauty,
+in forms and colours, musical sounds, human faces and limbs, words
+majestic or sweet; and this sense of beauty may go further, and may be
+discerned in qualities, regarded not from the point of view of their
+rightness and justice, but according as they are fine and noble,
+evoking our admiration and our desire; and these are poetical ideas.
+
+It is not of course possible exactly to classify ideas, because there
+is a great overlapping of them and a wide interchange. The thought of
+the slow progress of man from something rude and beastlike, the
+statement of the astronomer about the swarms of worlds swimming in
+space, may awaken the sense of poetry which is in its essence the
+sense of wonder. I shall not attempt in these few pages to limit and
+define the sense of poetry. I shall merely attempt to describe the
+kind of effect it has or may have in life, what our relation is or may
+be to it, what claim it may be said to have upon us, whether we can
+practise it, and whether we ought to do so.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+POETRY
+
+
+I was reading the other day a volume of lectures delivered by Mr.
+Mackail at Oxford, as Professor of Poetry there. Mr. Mackail began by
+being a poet himself; he married the daughter of a great and poetical
+artist, Sir Edward Burne-Jones; he has written the _Life of William
+Morris_, which I think is one of the best biographies in the language,
+in its fine proportion, its seriousness, its vividness; and indeed all
+his writing has the true poetical quality. I hope he even contrives to
+communicate it to his departmental work in the Board of Education!
+
+He says in the preface to his lectures, "Poetry is the controller of
+sullen care and frantic passion; it is the companion in youth of
+desire and love; it is the power which in later years dispels the ills
+of life--labour, penury, pain, disease, sorrow, death itself; it is
+the inspiration, from youth to age, and in all times and lands, of the
+noblest human motives and ardours, of glory, of generous shame, of
+freedom and the unconquerable mind."
+
+In these fine sentences it will be seen that Mr. Mackail makes a very
+high and majestic claim indeed for poetry: no less than the claim of
+art, chivalry, patriotism, love, and religion all rolled into one! If
+that claim could be substantiated, no one in the world could be
+excused for not putting everything else aside and pursuing poetry,
+because it would seem to be both the cure for all the ills of life,
+and the inspirer of all high-hearted effort. It would be indeed the
+one thing needful!
+
+But what I do not think Mr. Mackail makes quite clear is whether he
+means by poetry the expression in verse of all these great ideas, or
+whether he means a spirit much larger and mightier than what is
+commonly called poetry; which indeed only appears in verse at a single
+glowing point, as the electric spark leaps bright and hot between the
+coils of dark and cold wire.
+
+I think it is a little confusing that he does not state more
+definitely what he means by poetry. Let us take another interesting
+and suggestive definition. It was Coleridge who said, "The opposite of
+poetry is not prose but science; the opposite of prose is not poetry
+but verse." That seems to me an even more fertile statement. It means
+that poetry is a certain sort of emotion, which may be gentle or
+vehement, but can be found both in verse and prose; and that its
+opposite is the unemotional classification of phenomena, the accurate
+statement of material laws; and that poetry is by no means the
+rhythmical and metrical expression of emotion, but emotion itself,
+whether it be expressed or not.
+
+I do not wholly demur to Mr. Mackail's statement, if it may be held to
+mean that poetry is the expression of a sort of rapturous emotion,
+evoked by beauty, whether that beauty is seen in the forms and colours
+of earth, its gardens, fields, woods, hills, seas, its sky-spaces and
+sunset glories; or in the beauty of human faces and movements; or in
+noble endurance or generous action. For that is the one essential
+quality of poetry, that the thing or thought, whatever it is, should
+strike the mind as beautiful, and arouse in it that strange and
+wistful longing which beautiful things arouse. It is hard to define
+that longing, but it is essentially a desire, a claim to draw near to
+something desirable, to possess it, to be thrilled by it, to continue
+in it; the same emotion which made the apostle say at the sight of his
+Lord transfigured in glory, "Master, it is good for us to be here!"
+
+Indeed we know very well what beauty is, or rather we have all within
+us a standard by which we can instinctively test the beauty of a sight
+or a sound; but it is not that we all agree about the beauty of
+different things. Some see a great deal more than others, and some
+eyes and ears are delighted and pleased by what to more trained and
+fastidious senses seems coarse and shocking and vulgar. But that makes
+little difference; the point is that we have within us an apprehension
+of a quality which gives us a peculiar kind of delight; and even if it
+does not give us that delight when we are dull or anxious or
+miserable, we still know that the quality is there. I remember how
+when I had a long and dreary illness, with much mental depression, one
+of my greatest tortures was to be for ever seeing the beauty in
+things, but not to be able to enjoy it. The part of the brain that
+enjoyed was sick and uneasy; but I was never in any doubt that beauty
+was there, and had power to please the soul, if only the physical
+machinery were not out of gear, so that the pain of transmission
+overcame the sense of delight.
+
+Poetry is then in its essence the discerning of beauty; and that
+beauty is not only the beauty of things heard and seen, but may dwell
+very deep in the mind and soul, and be stirred by visions which seem
+to have no connection with outside things at all.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+POETRY AND LIFE
+
+
+Now I will try to say how poetry enters into life for most of us; and
+this is not an easy thing to express, because one can only look into
+the treasure of one's own experience, wander through the corridors and
+halls of memory, and see the faded tapestries, the pictures, and,
+above all, the portraits which hang upon the walls. I suppose that
+there are many people into whose spirits poetry only enters in the
+form of love, when they suddenly see a face that they have beheld
+perhaps often before, and have vaguely liked, and realise that it has
+suddenly put on some new and delicate charm, some curve of cheek or
+floating tress; or there is something in the glance that was surely
+never there before, some consciousness of a secret that may be shared,
+some signal of half-alarmed interest, something that shows that the
+two lives, the two hearts, have some joyful significance for each
+other; and then there grows up that marvellous mood which men call
+love, which loses itself in hopes of meeting, in fears of coldness, in
+desperate desires to please, to impress; and there arise too all sorts
+of tremulous affectations, which seem so petty, so absurd, and even so
+irritating, to the spectators of the awakening passion; desires to
+punish for the pleasure of forgiving, to withdraw for the joy of being
+recalled; a wild elated drama in which the whole world recedes into
+the background, and all life is merged for the lover in the
+half-sweet, half-fearful consciousness of one other soul,
+
+    Whose lightest whisper moves him more
+    Than all the rang�d reasons of the world.
+
+And in this mood it is curious to note how inadequate common speech
+and ordinary language appear, to meet the needs of expression. Even
+young people with no literary turn, no gift of style, find their
+memory supplying for them all sorts of broken echoes and rhetorical
+phrases, picked out of half-forgotten romances; speech must be
+_soigneux_ now, must be dignified, to meet so uplifting an experience.
+How oddly like a book the young lover talks, using so naturally the
+loud inflated phrases that seem so divorced from common-sense and
+experience! How common it is to see in law-reports, in cases which
+deal with broken engagements of marriage, to find in the excited
+letters which are read and quoted an irresistible tendency to drop
+into doggerel verse! It all seems to the sane reader such a grotesque
+kind of intoxication. Yet it is as natural as the airs and graces of
+the singing canary, the unfurling of the peacock's fan, the held
+breath and hampered strut of the turkey--a tendency to assume a
+greatness and a nobility that one does not possess, to seem
+impressive, tremendous, desirable. Ordinary talk will not do; it must
+rhyme, it must march, it must glitter, it must be stuck full of gems;
+accomplishments must be paraded, powers must be hinted at. The victor
+must advance to triumph with blown trumpets and beaten drums; and in
+solitude there must follow the reaction of despair, the fear that one
+has disgraced oneself, seemed clumsy and dull, done ignobly. Every
+sensitive emotion is awake; and even the most serene and modest
+natures, in the grip of passion, can become suspicious and
+self-absorbed, because the passion which consumes them is so fierce
+that it shrivels all social restraints, and leaves the soul naked, and
+bent upon the most uncontrolled self-emphasis.
+
+But apart from this urgent passion, there are many quieter ways in
+which the same spirit, the same emotion, which is nothing but a sense
+of self-significance, comes into the soul. Some are so inspired by
+music, the combinations of melodies, the intricate conspiracy of
+chords and ordered vibrations, when the orchestra is at work, the
+great droning horns with their hollow reluctant voices sustaining the
+shiver and ripple of the strings; or by sweeter, simpler cadences
+played at evening, when the garden scents wafted out of the fragrant
+dusk, the shaded lamps, the listening figures, all weave themselves
+together into a mysterious tapestry of the sense, till we wonder what
+strange and beautiful scene is being enacted, and wherever we turn,
+catch hints and echoes of some bewildering and gracious secret, just
+not revealed!
+
+Some find it in pictures and statues, the mellow liquid pageant of
+some old master-hand, a stretch of windspent moor, with its leaning
+grasses and rifted crags, a dark water among glimmering trees at
+twilight, a rich plain running to the foot of haze-hung mountains, the
+sharp-cut billows of a racing sea; or a statue with its shapely limbs
+and its veiled smile, or of the suspended strength of some struggling
+Titan: all these hold the same inexplicable appeal to the senses,
+indicating the efforts of spirits who have seen, and loved, and
+admired, and hoped, and desired, striving to leave some record of the
+joy that thrilled and haunted, and almost tortured them; and to many
+people the emotion comes most directly through the words and songs of
+poetry, that tell of joys lived through, and sorrows endured, of hopes
+that could not be satisfied, of desires that could not know
+fulfilment; pictures, painted in words, of scenes such as we ourselves
+have moved through in old moods of delight, scenes from which the
+marvellous alchemy of memory has abstracted all the base and dark
+elements, leaving only the pure gold of remembered happiness--the wide
+upland with the far-off plain, the garden flooded with sun, the
+grasses crisped with frost, the snow-laden trees, the flaming autumn
+woods, the sombre forest at shut of day, when the dusk creeps
+stealthily along the glimmering aisles, the stream passing clear among
+large-leaved water-plants and spires of bloom; and the mood goes
+deeper still, for it echoes the marching music of the heart, its
+glowing hopes, its longing for strength and purity and peace, its
+delight in the nearness of other hearts, its wisdom, its nobility.
+
+But the end and aim of all these various influences is the same; their
+power lies in the fact that they quicken in the spirit the sense of
+the energy, the delight, the greatness of life, the share that we can
+claim in them, the largeness of our own individual hope and destiny;
+and that is the real work of all the thoughts that may be roughly
+called poetical; that they reveal to us something permanent and strong
+and beautiful, something which has an irrepressible energy, and which
+outlines itself clearly upon the dark background of days, a spirit
+with which we can join hands and hold deep communication, which we
+instinctively feel is the greatest reality of the world. In such
+moments we perceive that the times when we descend into the meaner
+and duller and drearier businesses of life are interludes in our real
+being, into which we have to descend, not because of the actual worth
+of the baser tasks, but that we may practise the courage and the hope
+we ought to bring away from the heavenly vision. The more that men
+have this thirst for beauty, for serene energy, for fulness of life,
+the higher they are in the scale, and the less will they quarrel with
+the obscurity and humility of their lives, because they are
+confidently waiting for a purer, higher, more untroubled life, to
+which we are all on our way, whether we realise it or no!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+ART
+
+
+It is not uncommon for me to receive letters from young aspirants,
+containing poems, and asking me for an opinion on their merits. Such a
+letter generally says that the writer feels it hardly worth while to
+go on writing poetry unless he or she is assured that the poems are
+worth something. In such cases I reply that the answer lies there!
+Unless it seems worth while, unless indeed poetry is the outcome of an
+irrepressible desire to express something, it is certainly not worth
+while writing. On the other hand, if the desire is there, it is just
+as well worth practising as any other form of artistic expression. A
+man who liked sketching in water-colours would not be restrained from
+doing so by the fear that he might not become an Academician, a person
+who liked picking out tunes on a piano need not desist because there
+is no prospect of his earning money by playing in public!
+
+Poetry is of all forms of literary expression the least likely to
+bring a man credit or cash. Most intelligent people with a little gift
+of writing have a fair prospect of getting prose articles published.
+But no one wants third-rate poetry; editors fight shy of it, and
+volumes of it are unsaleable.
+
+I have myself written so much poetry, have published so many volumes
+of verse, that I can speak sympathetically on the subject. I worked
+very hard indeed at poetry for seven or eight years, wrote little
+else, and the published volumes form only a small part of my output,
+which exists in many manuscript volumes. I achieved no particular
+success. My little books were fairly well received, and I sold a few
+hundred copies; I have even had a few pieces inserted in anthologies.
+But though I have wholly deserted the practice of poetry, and though I
+can by no means claim to be reckoned a poet, I do not in the least
+regret the years I gave to it. In the first place it was an intense
+pleasure to write. The cadences, the metres, the language, the
+rhymes, all gave me a rapturous delight. It trained minute
+observation--my poems were mostly nature-poems--and helped me to
+disentangle the salient points and beauties of landscapes, hills,
+trees, flowers, and even insects. Then too it is a very real training
+in the use of words; it teaches one what words are musical, sonorous,
+effective; while the necessity of having to fit words to metre
+increases one's stock of words and one's power of applying them. When
+I came back to writing prose, I found that I had a far larger and more
+flexible vocabulary than I had previously possessed; and though the
+language of poetry is by no means the same as that of prose--it is a
+pity that the two kinds of diction are so different in English,
+because it is not always so in other languages--yet it made the
+writing of ornamental and elaborate prose an easier matter; it gave
+one too a sense of form; a poem must have a certain balance and
+proportion; so that when one who has written verse comes to write
+prose, a subject falls easily into divisions, and takes upon itself a
+certain order of course and climax.
+
+But these are only consequences and resulting advantages. The main
+reason for writing poetry is and must be the delight of doing it, the
+rapture of perceiving a beautiful subject, and the pleasure of
+expressing it as finely and delicately as one can. I have given it up
+because, as William Morris once said of himself, "to make poetry just
+for the sake of making it is a crime for a man of my age and
+experience!"
+
+    One's feelings lose poetic flow
+    Soon after twenty-seven or so!
+
+One begins to think of experience in a different sort of way, not as a
+series of glowing points and pictures, which outline themselves
+radiantly upon a duller background, but as a rich full thing, like a
+great tapestry, all of which is important, if it is not all beautiful.
+It is not that the marvel and wonder of life is less; but it is more
+equable, more intricate, more mysterious. It does not rise at times,
+like a sea, into great crested breakers, but it comes marching in
+evenly, roller after roller, as far as the eye can reach.
+
+And then too poetry becomes cramped and confined for all that one
+desires to say. One lived life, as a young man, rather for the sake
+of the emotions which occasionally transfigured it, with a priestly
+sense of its occasional splendour; there was not time to be leisurely,
+humorous, gently interested. But as we grow older, we perceive that
+poetical emotion is but one of many forces, and our sympathy grows and
+extends itself in more directions. One had but little patience in the
+old days for quiet, prosaic, unemotional people; but now it becomes
+clear that a great many persons live life on very simple and direct
+lines; one wants to understand their point of view better, one is
+conscious of the merits of plainer stuff; and so the taste broadens
+and deepens, and becomes like a brimming river rather than a leaping
+crystal fount. Life receives a hundred affluents, and is tinged with
+many new substances; and one begins to see that if poetry is the
+finest and sweetest interpretation of life, it is not always the
+completest or even the largest.
+
+If we examine the lives of poets, we too often see how their
+inspiration flagged and failed. Milton indeed wrote his noblest verse
+in middle-age, after a life immersed in affairs. Wordsworth went on
+writing to the end, but all his best poetry was written in about five
+early years. Tennyson went on to a patriarchal age, but there is
+little of his later work that bears comparison with what he wrote
+before he was forty. Browning produced volume after volume, but, with
+the exception of an occasional fine lyric, his later work is hardly
+more than an illustration of his faults of writing. Coleridge deserted
+poetry very early; Byron, Shelley, Keats, all died comparatively
+young.
+
+The Letters of Keats give perhaps a more vivid and actual view of the
+mind and soul of a poet than any other existing document. One sees
+there, na�vely and nobly expressed, the very essence of the poetical
+nature, the very soil out of which poetry flowers. It is wonderful,
+because it is so wholly sane, simple, and unaffected. It is usual to
+say that the Letters give one a picture of rather a second-rate and
+suburban young man, with vulgar friends and _banal_ associations, with
+one prodigious and matchless faculty. But it is that very background
+that constitutes the supreme force of the appeal. Keats accepted his
+circumstances, his friends, his duties with a singular modesty. He was
+not for ever complaining that he was unappreciated and underestimated.
+His commonplaceness, when it appears, is not a defect of quality, but
+an eager human interest in the personalities among whom his lot was
+cast. But every now and then there swells up a poignant sense of
+passion and beauty, a sacred, haunting, devouring fire of inspiration,
+which leaps high and clear upon the homely altar.
+
+Thus he writes: "This morning poetry has conquered--I have relapsed
+into those abstractions which are my only life--I feel escaped from a
+new, strange, and threatening sorrow.... There is an awful warmth
+about my heart, like a load of immortality." Or again: "I feel more
+and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live
+in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds." And again: "I have
+loved the principle of beauty in all things."
+
+One sees in these passages that there not only is a difference of
+force and passion, but an added quality of some kind in the mind of a
+poet, a combination of fine perception and emotion, which
+instantaneously and instinctively translates itself into words.
+
+For it must never be forgotten how essential a part of the poet is the
+knack of words. I do not doubt that there are hundreds of people who
+are haunted and penetrated by a lively sense of beauty, whose emotions
+are fiery and sweet, but who have not just the intellectual store of
+words, which must drip like honey from an overflowing jar. It is a
+gift as definite as that of the sculptor or the musician, an exuberant
+fertility and swiftness of brain, that does not slowly and painfully
+fit a word into its place, but which breathes thought direct into
+music.
+
+The most subtle account of this that I know is given in a passage in
+Shelley's _Defence of Poetry_. He says: "A man cannot say 'I will
+compose poetry'--the greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in
+creation is like a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like
+an inconstant wind, awakes to transitory brightness. The power arises
+from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it
+is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic
+either of its approach or its departure. When composition begins,
+inspiration is already on the decline."
+
+That I believe is as true as it is beautiful. The best poetry is
+written in a sudden rapture, and probably needs but little
+reconsideration or retouching. One knows for instance how the _Ode to
+the Nightingale_ was scribbled by Keats on a spring morning, in an
+orchard at Hampstead, and so little regarded that it was rescued by a
+friend from the volume into which he had crammed the slips of
+manuscript. Of course poets vary greatly in their method; but one may
+be sure of this, that no poem which was not a great poem in its first
+transcript, ever becomes a great poem by subsequent handling. There
+are poets indeed like Rossetti and FitzGerald who made a worse poem
+out of a better by scrupulous correction; and the first drafts of
+great poems are generally the finest poems of all. A poem has
+sometimes been improved by excision, notably in the case of Tennyson,
+whose abandoned stanzas, printed in his Life, show how strong his
+instinct was for what was best and purest. A great poet, for instance,
+never, like a lesser poet, keeps an unsatisfactory stanza for the sake
+of a good line. Tennyson, in a fine homely image, said that a poem
+must have a certain curve of its own, like the curve of the rind of a
+pared apple thrown on the floor. It must have a perfect evolution and
+progress, and this can sometimes be best arrived at by the omission
+of stanzas in which the inconstant or flagging mind turned aside from
+its design.
+
+But it is certain that if the poet gets so much into the habit of
+writing poetry, that even when he has no sense of inspiration he must
+still write to satisfy a craving, the result will be worthless, as it
+too often was in the case of Wordsworth. Because such poems become
+literary instead of poetical; and literary poetry has no
+justification.
+
+If we take a book like Rossetti's _House of Life_, we shall find that
+certain sonnets stand out with a peculiar freshness and brightness, as
+in the golden sunlight of an autumn morning; while many of the sonnets
+give us the sense of slow and gorgeous evolution, as if contrived by
+some poetical machine. I was interested to find, in studying the
+_House of Life_ carefully, that all the finest poems are early work;
+and when I came to look at the manuscripts, I was rather horrified to
+see what an immense amount of alternatives had been produced. There
+would be, for instance, no less than eight or nine of those great
+slowly moving words, like 'incommunicable' or 'importunate' written
+down, not so much to express an inevitable idea as to fill an
+inevitable space; and thus the poems seem to lose their pungency by
+the slow absorption of painfully sought agglutinations of syllables,
+with a stately music of their own, of course, but garnered rather than
+engendered. Rossetti's great dictum about the prime necessity for
+poetry being 'fundamental brainwork' led him here into error. The
+brainwork must be fundamental and instinctive; it must all have been
+done before the poem is conceived; and very often a poet acquires his
+power through sacrificing elaborate compositions which have taught him
+certainty of touch, but are not in themselves great poetry. Subsequent
+brainwork often merely clouds the effect, and it was that on which
+Rossetti spent himself in vain.
+
+The view which Keats took of his own _Endymion_ is a far larger and
+bolder one. "I will write independently," he said. "I have written
+independently _without judgment_. I may write independently and _with
+judgment_ hereafter. The genius of poetry must work out its own
+salvation in a man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by
+sensation and watchfulness in itself."
+
+Of course, fine craftsmanship is an absolute necessity; but it is
+craftsmanship which is not only acquired by practice, but which is
+actually there from the first, just as Mozart, as a child of eight,
+could play passages which would tax the skill of the most accomplished
+virtuoso. It was not learnt by practice, that swift correspondence of
+eye and hand, any more than the little swallow learns to fly; it knows
+it all already, and is merely finding out what it knows.
+
+And therefore there is no doubt that a man cannot become a poet by
+taking thought. He can perhaps compose impressive verse, but that is
+all. Poetry is, as Plato says, a divine sort of experience, some
+strange blending of inherited characteristics, perhaps the fierce
+emotion of some dumb ancestress combining with the verbal skill of
+some unpoetical forefather. The receipt is unknown, not necessarily
+unknowable.
+
+Of course if one has poetry in one's soul, it is a tremendous
+temptation to desire its expression, because the human race, with its
+poignant desire for transfiguring visions, strews the path of the
+great poet with bays, and remembers him as it remembers no other human
+beings. What would one not give to interpret life thus, to flash the
+loveliness of perception into desirous minds, to set love and hope
+and yearning to music, to inspire anxious hearts with the sense that
+there is something immensely large, tender, and significant behind it
+all! That is what we need to be assured of--our own significance, our
+own share in the inheritance of joy; and a poet can teach us to wait,
+to expect, to arise, to adore, when the circumstances of our lives are
+wrapped in mist and soaked with dripping rain. Perhaps that is the
+greatest thing which poetry does for us, to reassure us, to enlighten
+us, to send us singing on our way, to bid us trust in God even though
+He is concealed behind calamity and disaster, behind grief and
+heaviness, misinterpreted to us by philosophers and priests, and
+horribly belied by the wrongful dealings of men.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+ART AND MORALITY
+
+
+There is a perpetual debate going on--one of those moulting
+shuttlecocks that serve to make one's battledore give out a merry
+sound--about the relation of art to morals, and whether the artist or
+the poet ought to attempt to _teach_ anything. It makes a good kind of
+debate, because it is conducted in large terms, to which the
+disputants attach private meanings. The answer is a very simple one.
+It is that art and morality are only beauty realised in different
+regions; and as to whether the artist ought to attempt to teach
+anything, that may be summarily answered by the simple dictum that no
+artist ought ever to attempt to teach anything, with which must be
+combined the fact that no one who is serious about anything can
+possibly help teaching, whether he wishes or no!
+
+High art and high morality are closely akin, because they are both but
+an eager following of the law of beauty; but the artist follows it in
+visible and tangible things, and the moralist follows it in the
+conduct and relations of life. Artists and moralists must be for ever
+condemned to misunderstand each other, because the votary of any art
+cannot help feeling that it is the one thing worth doing in the world;
+and the artist whose soul is set upon fine hues and forms thinks that
+conduct must take care of itself, and that it is a tiresome business
+to analyse and formulate it; while the moralist who loves the beauty
+of virtue passionately, will think of the artist as a child who plays
+with his toys, and lets the real emotions of life go streaming past.
+
+This is a subject upon which it is as well to hear the Greeks, because
+the Greeks were of all people who ever lived the most absorbingly
+interested in the problems of life, and judged everything by a
+standard of beauty. The Jews, of course, at least in their early
+history, had the same fiery interest in questions of conduct; but it
+would be as absurd to deny to Plato an interest in morals as to
+withhold the title of artist from Isaiah and the author of the Book
+of Job!
+
+Plato, as is well known, took a somewhat whimsical view of the work of
+the poet. He said that he must exclude the poets from his ideal State,
+because they were the prophets of unreality. But he was thinking of a
+kind of man very different from the men whom we call poets. He thought
+of the poet as a man who served a patron, and tried to gloze over his
+patron's tyranny and baseness, under false terms of glory and majesty;
+or else he thought of dramatists, and considered them to be men who
+for the sake of credit and money played skilfully upon the sentimental
+emotions of ordinary people; and he fought shy of the writers who used
+tragic passions for the amusement of a theatre. Aristotle disagreed
+with Plato about this, and held that poetry was not exactly moral
+teaching, but that it disposed the mind to consider moral problems as
+interesting. He said that in looking on at a play, a spectator
+suffered, so to speak, by deputy, but all the same learned directly,
+if unconsciously, the beauty of virtue. When we come to our own
+Elizabethans, there is no evidence that in their plays and poetry they
+thought about morals at all. No one has any idea whether Shakespeare
+had any religion, or what it was; and he above all great writers that
+ever lived seems to have taken an absolutely impersonal view of the
+sins and affections of men and women. No one is scouted or censured or
+condemned in Shakespeare; one sees and feels the point of view of his
+villains and rogues; one feels with them that they somehow could
+hardly have done otherwise than they did; and to effect that is
+perhaps the crown of art.
+
+But nowadays the poet, with whom one may include some few novelists,
+is really a very independent person. I am not now speaking of those
+who write basely and crudely, to please a popular taste. They have
+their reward; and after all they are little more than mountebanks, the
+end of whose show is to gather up pence in the ring.
+
+But the poet in verse is listened to by few people, unless he is very
+great indeed; and even so his reward is apt to be intangible and
+scanty; while to be deliberately a lesser poet is perhaps the most
+unworldly thing that a man can do, because he thus courts derision;
+indeed, if there is a bad sign of the world's temper just now, it is
+that men will listen to politicians, scientists, men of commerce, and
+journalists, because these can arouse a sensation, or even confer
+material benefits; but men will not listen to poets, because they have
+so little use for the small and joyful thoughts that make up some of
+the best pleasures of life.
+
+It is quite true, as I have said, that no artist ought ever
+deliberately to try to teach people, because that is not his business,
+and one can only be a good artist by minding one's business, which is
+to produce beautiful things; and the moment one begins to try to
+produce improving things, one goes off the line. But in England there
+has been of late a remarkable fusion of morality and art. Ruskin and
+Browning are clear enough proof that it is possible to be passionately
+interested in moral problems in an artistic way; while at the same
+time it is true, as I have said, that if any man cares eagerly for
+beauty, and does his best to present it, he cannot help teaching all
+those who are searching for beauty, and only require to be shown the
+way.
+
+The work of all real teachers is to make great and arduous things seem
+simple and desirable and beautiful. A teacher is not a person who
+provides short-cuts to knowledge, or who only drills a character out
+of slovenly intellectual faults. The essence of all real teaching is a
+sort of inspiration. Take the case of a great teacher, like Arnold or
+Jowett; Arnold lit in his pupils' minds a kind of fire, which was
+moral rather than intellectual; Jowett had a power of putting a
+suggestive brilliancy into dull words and stale phrases, showing that
+they were but the crystallised formulas of ideas, which men had found
+wonderful or beautiful. The secret of such teaching is quite
+incommunicable, but it is a very high sort of art. There are many men
+who feel the inspiration of knowledge very deeply, and follow it
+passionately, who yet cannot in the least communicate the glow to
+others. But just as the great artist can paint a homely scene, such as
+we have seen a hundred times, and throw into it something mysterious,
+which reaches out hands of desire far beyond the visible horizon, so
+can a great teacher show that ideas are living things all bound up
+with the high emotions of men.
+
+And thus the true poet, whether he writes verses or novels, is the
+greatest of teachers, not because he trains and drills the mind, but
+because he makes the thing he speaks of appear so beautiful and
+desirable that we are willing to undergo the training and drilling
+that are necessary to be made free of the secret. He brings out, as
+Plato beautifully said, "the beauty which meets the spirit like a
+breeze, and imperceptibly draws the soul, even in childhood, into
+harmony with the beauty of reason." The work of the poet then is "to
+elicit the simplest principles of life, to clear away complexity, by
+giving a glowing and flashing motive to live nobly and generously, to
+renew the unspoiled growth of the world, to reveal the secret hope
+silently hidden in the heart of man."
+
+_Renovabitur ut aquila juventus tua_--thy youth shall be renewed as an
+eagle--that is what we all desire! Indeed it would seem at first sight
+that, to gain happiness, the best way would be, if one could, to
+prolong the untroubled zest of childhood, when everything was
+interesting and exciting, full of novelty and delight. Some few people
+by their vitality can retain that freshness of spirit all their life
+long. I remember how a friend of R. L. Stevenson told me, that
+Stevenson, when alone in London, desperately ill, and on the eve of a
+solitary voyage, came to see him; he himself was going to start on a
+journey the following day, and had to visit the lumber-room to get out
+his trunks; Stevenson begged to be allowed to accompany him, and,
+sitting on a broken chair, evolved out of the drifted accumulations of
+the place a wonderful romance. But that sort of eager freshness we
+most of us find to be impossible as we grow older; and we are
+confronted with the problem of how to keep care and dreariness away,
+how to avoid becoming mere trudging wayfarers, dully obsessed by all
+we have to do and bear. Can we not find some medicine to revive the
+fading emotion, to renew the same sort of delight in new thoughts and
+problems which we found in childhood in all unfamiliar things, to
+battle with the dreariness, the daily use, the staleness of life?
+
+The answer is that it is possible, but only possible if we take the
+same pains about it that we take to provide ourselves with comforts,
+to save money, to guard ourselves from poverty. Emotional poverty is
+what we most of us have to dread, and we must make investments if we
+wish for revenues. We are many of us hampered, as I have said, by the
+dreariness and dulness of the education we receive. But even that is
+no excuse for sinking into melancholy bankruptcy, and going about the
+world full of the earnest capacity for woe, disheartened and
+disheartening.
+
+A great teacher has the extraordinary power, not only of evoking the
+finest capacities from the finest minds, but of actually giving to
+second-rate minds a belief that knowledge is interesting and worth
+attention. What we have to do, if we have missed coming under the
+influence of a great teacher, is resolutely to put ourselves in touch
+with great minds. We shall not burst into flame at once perhaps, and
+the process may seem but the rubbing of one dry stick against another;
+one cannot prescribe a path, because we must advance upon the slender
+line of our own interests; but we can surely find some one writer who
+revives us and inspires us; and if we persevere, we find the path
+slowly broadening into a road, while the landscape takes shape and
+design around us. The one thing fortunately of which there is enough
+and to spare in the world is good advice, and if we find ourselves
+helpless, we can consult some one who seems to have a view of finer
+things, whose delight is fresh and eager, whose handling of life
+seems gracious and generous. It is as possible to do this, as to
+consult a doctor if we find ourselves out of health; and here we stiff
+and solitary Anglo-Saxons are often to blame, because we cannot bring
+ourselves to speak freely of these things, to be importunate, to ask
+for help; it seems to us at once impertinent and undignified; but it
+is this sort of dreary consideration, which is nothing but distorted
+vanity, and this still drearier dignity, which withholds from us so
+much that is beautiful.
+
+The one thing then that I wish to urge is that we should take up the
+pursuit in an entirely practical way; as Emerson said, with a splendid
+mixture of common sense and idealism, "hitch our waggon to a star." It
+is easy enough to lose ourselves in a vague sentimentalism, and to
+believe that only our cramped conditions have hindered us from
+developing into something very wonderful. It is easy too to drift into
+helpless materialism, and to believe that dulness is the natural lot
+of man. But the realm of thought is a very free citizenship, and a
+hundred doors will open to us if we only knock at them. Moreover, that
+realm is not like an over-populated country; it is infinitely large,
+and virgin soil; and we have only to stake out our claim; and then, if
+we persevere, we shall find that our _Joyous Gard_ is really rising
+into the air about us--where else should we build our castles?--with
+all the glory of tower and gable, of curtain-wall and battlement,
+terrace and pleasaunce, hall and corridor; our own self-built
+paradise; and then perhaps the knight, riding lonely from the sunset
+woods, will turn in to keep us company, and the wandering minstrel
+will bring his harp; and we may even receive other visitors, like the
+three that stood beside the tent of Abraham in the evening, in the
+plain of Mamre, of whom no one asked the name or lineage, because the
+answer was too great for mortal ears to hear.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+INTERPRETATION
+
+
+Is the secret of life then a sort of literary rapture, a princely
+thing, only possible through costly outlay and jealously selected
+hours, like a concert of stringed instruments, whose players are
+unknown, bursting on the ear across the terraces and foliaged walls of
+some enchanted garden? By no means! That is the shadow of the artistic
+nature, that the rare occasions of life, where sound and scent and
+weather and sweet companionship conspire together, are so exquisite,
+so adorable, that the votary of such mystical raptures begins to plan
+and scheme and hunger for these occasions, and lives in discontent
+because they arrive so seldom.
+
+No art, no literature, are worth anything at all unless they send one
+back to life with a renewed desire to taste it and to live it.
+Sometimes as I sit on a sunny day writing in my chair beside the
+window, a picture of the box-hedge, the tall sycamores, the
+stone-tiled roof of the chapel, with the blue sky behind, globes
+itself in the lense of my spectacles, so entrancingly beautiful, that
+it is almost a disappointment to look out on the real scene. We like
+to see things mirrored thus and framed, we strangely made creatures of
+life; why, I know not, except that our finite little natures love to
+select and isolate experiences from the mass, and contemplate them so.
+But we must learn to avoid this, and to realise that if a particle of
+life, thus ordered and restricted, is beautiful, the thing itself is
+more beautiful still. But we must not depend helplessly upon the
+interpretations, the skilled reflections, of finer minds than our own.
+If we learn from a wise interpreter or poet the quality and worth of a
+fraction of life, it is that we may gain from him the power to do the
+same for ourselves elsewhere; we must learn to walk alone, not crave,
+like a helpless child, to be for ever led and carried in kindly arms.
+The danger of culture, as it is unpleasantly called, is that we get to
+love things because poets have loved them, and as they loved them;
+and there we must not stay; because we thus grow to fear and mistrust
+the strong flavours and sounds of life, the joys of toil and
+adventure, the desire of begetting, giving life, drawing a soul from
+the unknown; we come to linger in a half-lit place, where things reach
+us faintly mellowed, as in a vision, through enfolding trees and at
+the ends of enchanted glades. This book of mine lays no claim to be a
+pageant of all life's joys; it leaves many things untouched and
+untold; but it is a plea for this; that those who have to endure the
+common lot of life, who cannot go where they would, whose leisure is
+but a fraction of the day, before the morning's toil and after the
+task is done, whose temptation it is to put everything else away
+except food and sleep and work and anxiety, not liking life so but
+finding it so;--it is a plea that such as these should learn how
+experience, even under cramped conditions, may be finely and
+beautifully interpreted, and made rich by renewed intention. Because
+the secret lies hid in this, that we must observe life intently,
+grapple with it eagerly; and if we have a hundred lives before us, we
+can never conquer life till we have learned to ride above it, not
+welter helplessly below it. And the cramped and restricted life is all
+the grander for this, that it gives us a nobler chance of conquest
+than the free, liberal, wealthy, unrestrained life.
+
+In the _Romaunt of the Rose_ a little square garden is described, with
+its beds of flowers, its orchard-trees. The beauty of the place lies
+partly in its smallness, but more still in its running waters, its
+shadowy wells, wherein, as the writer says quaintly enough, are "_no
+frogs_," and the conduit-pipes that make a "noise full-liking." And
+again in that beautiful poem of Tennyson's, one of his earliest, with
+the dew of the morning upon it, he describes _The Poet's Mind_ as a
+garden:
+
+      In the middle leaps a fountain
+        Like sheet lightning,
+        Ever brightening
+      With a low melodious thunder;
+    All day and all night it is ever drawn
+      From the brain of the purple mountain
+      Which stands in the distance yonder: ...
+    And the mountain draws it from Heaven above,
+    And it sings a song of undying love.
+
+That is a power which we all have, in some degree, to draw into our
+souls, or to set running through them, the streams of Heaven--for
+like water they will run in the dullest and darkest place if only they
+be led thither; and the lower the place, the stronger the stream! I am
+careful not to prescribe the source too narrowly, for it must be to
+our own liking, and to our own need. And so I will not say "love this
+and that picture, read this and that poet!" because it is just thus,
+by following direction too slavishly, that we lose our own particular
+inspiration. Indeed I care very little about fineness of taste,
+fastidious critical rejections, scoffs and sneers at particular
+fashions and details. One knows the epicure of life, the man who
+withdraws himself more and more from the throng, cannot bear to find
+himself in dull company, reads fewer and fewer books, can hardly eat
+and drink unless all is exactly what he approves; till it becomes
+almost wearisome to be with him, because it is such anxious and
+scheming work to lay out everything to please him, and because he will
+never take his chance of anything, nor bestir himself to make anything
+out of a situation which has the least commonness or dulness in it. Of
+course only with the command of wealth is such life possible; but the
+more delicate such a man grows, the larger and finer his maxims
+become, and the more he casts away from his philosophy the need of
+practising anything. One must think, such men say, clearly and finely,
+one must disapprove freely, one must live only with those whom one can
+admire and love; till they become at last like one of those sad
+ascetics, who spent their time on the top of pillars, and for ever
+drew up stones from below to make the pillar higher yet.
+
+One is at liberty to mistrust whatever makes one isolated and
+superior; not of course that one's life need be spent in a sort of
+diffuse sociability; but one must practise an ease that is never
+embarrassed, a frankness that is never fastidious, a simplicity that
+is never abashed; and behind it all must spring the living waters,
+with the clearness of the sky and the cleanness of the hill about
+them, running still swiftly and purely in our narrow garden-ground,
+and meeting the kindred streams that flow softly in many other glad
+and desirous hearts.
+
+In the beautiful old English poem, _The Pearl_, where the dreamer
+seems to be instructed by his dead daughter Marjory in the heavenly
+wisdom, she tells him that "all the souls of the blest are equal in
+happiness--that they are all kings and queens."[1] That is a heavenly
+kind of kingship, when there are none to be ruled or chidden, none to
+labour and serve; but it means the fine frankness and serenity of mind
+which comes of kingship, the perfect ease and dignity which springs
+from not having to think of dignity or pre-eminence at all.
+
+Long ago I remember how I was sent for to talk with Queen Victoria in
+her age, and how much I dreaded being led up to her by a majestic
+lord-in-waiting; she sate there, a little quiet lady, so plainly
+dressed, so simple, with her hands crossed on her lap, her sanguine
+complexion, her silvery hair, yet so crowned with dim history and
+tradition, so great as to be beyond all pomp or ceremony, yet wearing
+the awe and majesty of race and fame as she wore her plain dress. She
+gave me a little nod and smile, and began at once to talk in the sweet
+clear voice that was like the voice of a child. Then came my
+astonishment. She knew, it seemed, all about me and my doings, and
+the doings of my relations and friends--not as if she had wished to be
+prepared to surprise me; but because her motherly heart had wanted to
+know, and had been unable to forget. The essence of that charm, which
+flooded all one's mind with love and loyalty, was not that she was
+great, but that she was entirely simple and kind; because she loved,
+not her great part in life, but life itself.
+
+That kingship and queenship is surely not out of the reach of any of
+us; it depends upon two things: one, that we keep our minds and souls
+fresh with the love of life, which is the very dew of heaven; and the
+other that we claim not rights but duties, our share in life, not a
+control over it; if all that we claim is not to rule others, but to be
+interested in them, if we will not be shut out from love and care,
+then the sovereignty is in sight, and the nearer it comes the less
+shall we recognise it; for the only dignity worth the name is that
+which we do not know to be there.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: See Professor W. P. Ker's _English Literature, Medi�val_,
+p. 194.]
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+EDUCATION
+
+
+It is clear that the progress of the individual and the world alike
+depends upon the quickening of ideas. All civilisation, all law, all
+order, all controlled and purposeful life, will be seen to depend on
+these ideas and emotions. The growing conception of the right of every
+individual to live in some degree of comfort and security is nothing
+but the taking shape of these ideas and emotions; for the end of all
+civilisation is to ensure that there shall be freedom for all from
+debasing and degrading conditions, and that is perhaps as far as we
+have hitherto advanced; but the further end in sight is to set all men
+and women free to some extent from hopeless drudgery, to give them
+leisure, to provide them with tastes and interests; and further still,
+to contrive, if possible, that human beings shall not be born into
+the world of tainted parentage, and thus to stamp out the tyranny of
+disease and imbecility and criminal instinct. More and more does it
+become clear that all the off-scourings and failures of civilisation
+are the outcome of diseased brains and nerves, and that self-control
+and vigour are the results of nature rather than nurture. All this is
+now steadily in sight. The aim is personal freedom, the freedom which
+shall end where another's freedom begins; but we recognise now that it
+is no use legislating for social and political freedom, if we allow
+the morally deficient to beget offspring for whom moral freedom is an
+impossibility. And perhaps the best hope of the race lies in firmly
+facing this problem.
+
+But, as I say, we have hardly entered upon this stage. We have to deal
+with things as they are, with many natures tainted by moral
+feebleness, by obliquity of vision, by lack of proportion. The hope at
+present lies in the endeavour to find some source of inspiration, in a
+determination not to let men and women grow up with fine emotions
+atrophied; and here the whole system of education is at fault. It is
+all on the lines of an intellectual gymnastic; little or nothing is
+done to cultivate imagination, to feed the sense of beauty, to arouse
+interest, to awaken the sleeping sense of delight. There is no doubt
+that all these emotions are dormant in many people. One has only to
+reflect on the influence of association, to know how children who grow
+up in a home atmosphere which is fragrant with beautiful influences,
+generally carry on those tastes and habits into later life. But our
+education tends neither to make men and women efficient for the simple
+duties of life, nor to-arouse the gentler energies of the spirit. "You
+must remember you are translating poetry," said a conscientious master
+to a boy who was construing Virgil. "It's not poetry when I translate
+it!" said the boy. I look back at my own schooldays, and remember the
+bare, stately class-rooms, the dry wind of intellect, the dull murmur
+of work, neither enjoyed nor understood; and I reflect how small a
+part any fanciful or beautiful or leisurely interpretation ever played
+in our mental exercises; the first and last condition of any fine sort
+of labour--that it should be enjoyed--was put resolutely out of sight,
+not so much as an impossible adjunct, as a thing positively
+enervating and contemptible. Yet if one subtracts the idea of
+enjoyment from labour, there is no beauty-loving spirit which does not
+instantly and rightly rebel. There must be labour, of course,
+effective, vigorous, brisk labour, overcoming difficulties, mastering
+uncongenial details; but the end should be enjoyment; and it should be
+made clear that the greater the mastery, the richer the enjoyment; and
+that if one cannot enjoy a thing without mastering it, neither can one
+ever really master it without enjoying it.
+
+What we need, in education, is some sense of far horizons and
+beautiful prospects, some consciousness of the largeness and mystery
+and wonder of life. To take a simple instance, in my own education. I
+read the great books of Greece and Rome; but I knew hardly anything of
+the atmosphere, the social life, the human activity out of which they
+proceeded. One did not think of the literature of the Greeks as of a
+fountain of eager beauty springing impulsively and instinctively out
+of the most ardent, gracious, sensitive life that any nation has ever
+lived. One knew little of the stern, businesslike, orderly, grasping
+Roman temperament, in which poetry flowered so rarely, and the arts
+not at all, until the national fibre began to weaken and grow
+dissolute. One studied history in those days, as if one was mastering
+statute-books, blue-books, gazettes, office-files; one never grasped
+the clash of individualities, or the real interests and tastes of the
+nations that fought and made laws and treaties. It was all a dealing
+with records and monuments, just the things that happened to survive
+decay--as though one's study of primitive man were to begin and end
+with sharpened flints!
+
+What we have now to do, in this next generation, is not to leave
+education a dry conspectus of facts and processes, but to try rather
+that children should learn something of the temper and texture of the
+world at certain vivid points of its history; and above all perceive
+something of the nature of the world as it now is, its countries, its
+nationalities, its hopes, its problems. That is the aim, that we
+should realise what kind of a thing life is, how bright and yet how
+narrow a flame, how bounded by darkness and mystery, and yet how vivid
+and active within its little space of sun.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+KNOWLEDGE
+
+
+"Knowledge is power," says the old adage; and yet so meaningless now,
+in many respects, do the words sound, that it is hard even to
+recapture the mental outlook from which it emanated. I imagine that it
+dates from a time when knowledge meant an imagined acquaintance with
+magical secrets, short cuts to wealth, health, influence, fame. Even
+now the application of science to the practical needs of man has some
+semblance of power about it; the telephone, wireless telegraphy, steam
+engines, an�sthetics--these are powerful things. But no man is
+profited by his discoveries; he cannot keep them to himself, and use
+them for his own private ends. The most he can do is to make a large
+fortune out of them. And as to other kinds of knowledge, erudition,
+learning, how do they profit the possessor? "No one knows anything
+nowadays," said an eminent man to me the other day; "it is not worth
+while! The most learned man is the man who knows best where to find
+things." There still appears, in works of fiction, with pathetic
+persistence, a belief that learning still lingers at Oxford and
+Cambridge; those marvellous Dons, who appear in the pages of novels,
+men who read folios all the morning and drink port all the evening,
+where are they in reality? Not at Cambridge, certainly. I would travel
+many miles, I would travel to Oxford, if I thought I could find such
+an adorable figure. But the Don is now a brisk and efficient man of
+business, a paterfamilias with provision to make for his family. He
+has no time for folios and no inclination for port. Examination papers
+in the morning, and a glass of lemonade at dinner, are the notes of
+his leisure days. The belief in uncommercial knowledge has indeed died
+out of England. Eton, as Mr. Birrell said, can hardly be described as
+a place of education; and to what extent can Oxford and Cambridge be
+described as places of literary research? A learned man is apt to be
+considered a bore, and the highest compliment that can be paid him is
+that one would not suspect him of being learned.
+
+There is, indeed, a land in which knowledge is respected, and that is
+America. If we do not take care, the high culture will desert our
+shores, like Astr�a's flying hem, and take her way Westward, with the
+course of Empire.
+
+A friend of mine once told me that he struggled up a church-tower in
+Florence, a great lean, pale brick minaret, designed, I suppose, to be
+laminated with marble, but cheerfully abandoned to bareness; he came
+out on to one of those high balustraded balconies, which in medi�val
+pictures seem to have been always crowded with fantastically dressed
+persons, and are now only visited by tourists. The silvery city lay
+outspread beneath him, with the rapid mud-stained river passing to the
+plain, the hill-side crowded with villas embowered in green gardens,
+and the sad-coloured hills behind. While he was gazing, two other
+tourists, young Americans, came quietly out on to the balcony, a
+brother and sister, he thought. They looked out for a time in silence,
+leaning on the parapet; and then the brother said softly, "How much
+we should enjoy all this, if we were not so ignorant!" Like all
+Americans, they wanted to know! It was not enough for them to see the
+high houses, the fantastic towers, the great blind blocks of medi�val
+palaces, thrust so grimly out above the house-tops. It all meant life
+and history, strife and sorrow, it all needed interpreting and
+transfiguring and re-peopling; without that it was dumb and silent,
+vague and bewildering. One does not know whether to admire or to sigh!
+Ought one not to be able to take beauty as it comes? What if one does
+not want to know these things, as Shelley said to his lean and
+embarrassed tutor at Oxford? If knowledge makes the scene glow and
+live, enriches it, illuminates it, it is well. And perhaps in England
+we learn to live so incuriously and naturally among historical things
+that we forget the existence of tradition, and draw it in with the air
+we breathe, just realising it as a pleasant background and not caring
+to investigate it or master it. It is hard to say what we lose by
+ignorance, is hard to say what we should gain by knowledge. Perhaps to
+want to know would be a sign of intellectual and emotional activity;
+but it could not be done as a matter of duty--only as a matter of
+enthusiasm.
+
+The poet Clough once said, "It makes a great difference to me that
+Magna Charta was signed at Runnymede, but it does not make much
+difference to me to know that it was signed." The fact that it was so
+signed affects our liberties, the knowledge only affects us, if it
+inspires us to fresh desire of liberty, whatever liberty may be. It is
+even more important to be interested in life than to be interested in
+past lives. It was Scott, I think, who asked indignantly,
+
+    Lives there the man with soul so dead,
+    Who never to himself hath said
+    This is my own, my native land?
+
+I do not know how it may be in Scotland! Dr. Johnson once said rudely
+that the finest prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the high road that
+might take him to England; but I should think that if Scott's is a
+fair test of deadness of soul, there must be a good many people in
+England who are as dead as door-nails! The Englishman is not very
+imaginative; and a farmer who was accustomed to kneel down like
+Ant�us, and kiss the soil of his orchard, would be thought an
+eccentric!
+
+Shall we then draw a cynical conclusion from all this, and say that
+knowledge is a useless burden; or if we think so, why do we think it?
+I have very little doubt in my own mind that why so many young men
+despise and even deride knowledge is because knowledge has been
+presented to them in so arid a form, so little connected with anything
+that concerns them in the remotest degree. We ought, I think, to wind
+our way slowly back into the past from the present; we ought to start
+with modern problems and modern ideas, and show people how they came
+into being; we ought to learn about the world, as it is, first, and
+climb the hill slowly. But what we do is to take the history of the
+past, Athens and Rome and Jud�a, three glowing and shining realms, I
+readily admit; but we leave the gaps all unbridged, so that it seems
+remote, abstruse, and incomprehensible that men should ever have lived
+and thought so.
+
+Then we deluge children with the old languages, not teaching them to
+read, but to construe, and cramming the little memories with hideous
+grammatical forms. So the whole process of education becomes a dreary
+wrestling with the uninteresting and the unattainable; and when we
+have broken the neck of infantile curiosity with these uncouth
+burdens, we wonder that life becomes a place where the only aim is to
+get a good appointment, and play as many games as possible.
+
+Yet learning need not be so cumbrously carried after all! I was
+reading a few days ago a little book by Professor Ker, on medi�val
+English, and reading it with a species of rapture. It all came so
+freshly and pungently out of a full mind, penetrated with zest and
+enjoyment. One followed the little rill of literary craftsmanship so
+easily out of the plain to its high source among the hills, till I
+wondered why on earth I had not been told some of these delightful
+things long ago, that I might have seen how our great literature took
+shape. Such scraps of knowledge as I possess fell into shape, and I
+saw the whole as in a map outspread.
+
+And then I realised that knowledge, if it was only rightly directed,
+could be a beautiful and attractive thing, not a mere fuss about
+nothing, dull facts reluctantly acquired, readily forgotten.
+
+All children begin by wanting to know, but they are often told not to
+be tiresome, which generally means that the elder person has no answer
+to give, and does not like to appear ignorant. And then the time comes
+for Latin Grammar, and Cicero de Senectute, and C�sar's Commentaries,
+and the bewildered stripling privately resolves to have no more than
+he can help to do with these antique horrors. The marvellous thing
+seems to him to be that men of flesh and blood could have found it
+worth their while to compose such things.
+
+Erudition, great is thy sin! It is not that one wants to deprive the
+savant of his knowledge; one only wants a little common-sense and
+imaginative sympathy. How can a little boy guess that some of the most
+beautiful stories in the world lie hid among a mass of wriggling
+consonants, or what a garden lurks behind the iron gate, with [Greek:
+bl�sk�] and [Greek: moloumai] to guard the threshold?
+
+I am not going here to discuss the old curriculum. "Let 'em 'ave it!"
+as the parent said to the schoolmaster, under the impression that it
+was some instrument of flagellation--as indeed it is, I look round my
+book-lined shelves, and reflect how much of interest and pleasure
+those parallel rows have meant to me, and how I struggled into the use
+of them outside of and not because of my so-called education; and how
+much they might mean to others if they had not been so conscientiously
+bumped into paths of peace.
+
+"Nothing," said Pater, speaking of art in one of his finest passages,
+"nothing which has ever engaged the great and eager affections of men
+and women can ever wholly lose its charm." Not to the initiated,
+perhaps! But I sometimes wonder if anything which has been taught with
+dictionary and grammar, with parsing and construing, with detention
+and imposition, can ever wholly regain its charm. I am afraid that we
+must make a clean sweep of the old processes, if we have any intention
+of interesting our youth in the beauty of human ideas and their
+expression. But while we do not care about beauty and interest in
+life, while we conscientiously believe, in spite of a cataract of
+helpless facts, in the virtues of the old grammar-grind, so long shall
+we remain an uncivilised nation. Civilisation does not consist in
+commercial prosperity, or even in a fine service of express trains.
+It resides in quick apprehension, lively interest, eager sympathy ...
+at least I suspect so.
+
+"Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter!" said the rueful
+prophet. I do not write as a pessimist, hardly as a critic; still less
+as a censor; to waste time in deriding others' theories of life is a
+very poor substitute for enjoying it! I think we do very fairly well
+as we are; only do not let us indulge in the cant in which educators
+so freely indulge, the claim that we are interested in ideas
+intellectual or artistic, and that we are trying to educate our youth
+in these things. We do produce some intellectual athletes, and we
+knock a few hardy minds more or less into shape; but meanwhile a great
+river of opportunities, curiosity, intelligence, taste, interest,
+pleasure, goes idly weltering, through mud-flats and lean promontories
+and bare islands to the sea. It is the loss, the waste, the folly, of
+it that I deplore.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+GROWTH
+
+
+As the years go on, what one begins to perceive about so many
+people--though one tries hard to believe it is not so--is that somehow
+or other the mind does not grow, the view does not alter; life ceases
+to be a pilgrimage, and becomes a journey, such as a horse takes in a
+farm-cart. He is pulling something, he has got to pull it, he does not
+care much what it is--turnips, hay, manure! If he thinks at all, he
+thinks of the stable and the manger. The middle-aged do not try
+experiments, they lose all sense of adventure. They make the usual
+kind of fortification for themselves, pile up a shelter out of
+prejudices and stony opinions. It is out of the wind and rain, and the
+prospect is safely excluded. The landscape is so familiar that the
+entrenched spirit does not even think about it, or care what lies
+behind the hill or across the river.
+
+Now of course I do not mean that people can or should play fast and
+loose with life, throw up a task or a position the moment they are
+bored with it, be at the mercy of moods. I am speaking here solely of
+the possible adventures of mind and soul; it is good, wholesome,
+invigorating, to be tied to a work in life, to have to discharge it
+whether one likes it or no, through indolence and disinclination,
+through depression and restlessness. But we ought not to be immured
+among conventions and received opinions. We ought to ask ourselves why
+we believe what we take for granted, and even if we do really believe
+it at all. We ought not to condemn people who do not move along the
+same lines of thought; we ought to change our minds a good deal, not
+out of mere levity, but because of experience. We ought not to think
+too much of the importance of what we are doing, and still less of the
+importance of what we have done; we ought to find a common ground on
+which to meet distasteful people; we ought to labour hard against
+self-pity as well as against self-applause; we ought to feel that if
+we have missed chances, it is out of our own heedlessness and
+stupidity. Self-applause is a more subtle thing even than self-pity,
+because, if one rejects the sense of credit, one is apt to
+congratulate oneself on being the kind of person who does reject it,
+whereas we ought to avoid it as instinctively as we avoid a bad smell.
+Above all, we ought to believe that we can do something to change
+ourselves, if we only try; that we can anchor our conscience to a
+responsibility or a personality, can perceive that the society of
+certain people, the reading of certain books, does affect us, make our
+mind grow and germinate, give us a sense of something fine and
+significant in life. The thing is to say, as the prim governess says
+in Shirley, "You acknowledge the inestimable worth of principle?"--it
+is possible to get and to hold a clear view, as opposed to a muddled
+view, of life and its issues; and the blessing is that one can do this
+in any circle, under any circumstances, in the midst of any kind of
+work. That is the wonderful thing about thought, that it is like a
+captive balloon which is anchored in one's garden. It is possible to
+climb into it and to cast adrift; but so many people, as I have said,
+seem to end by pulling the balloon in, letting out the gas, and
+packing the whole away in a shed. Of course the power of doing all
+this varies very much in different temperaments; but I am sure that
+there are many people who, looking back at their youth, are conscious
+that they had something stirring and throbbing within them which they
+have somehow lost; some vision, some hope, some faint and radiant
+ideal. Why do they lose it, why do they settle down on the lees of
+life, why do they snuggle down among comfortable opinions? Mostly, I
+am sure, out of a kind of indolence. There are a good many people who
+say to themselves, "After all, what really matters is a solid defined
+position in the world; I must make that for myself, and meanwhile I
+must not indulge myself in any fancies; it will be time to do that
+when I have earned my pension and settled my children in life." And
+then when the time arrives, the frail and unsubstantial things are all
+dead and cannot be recovered; for happiness cannot be achieved along
+these cautious and heavy lines.
+
+And so I say that we must deliberately aim at something different
+from the first. We must not block up the further views and wider
+prospects; we must keep the horizon open. What I here suggest has
+nothing whatever that is unpractical about it; it is only a deeper
+foresight, a more prudent wisdom. We must say to ourselves that
+whatever happens, the soul shall not be atrophied; and we should be as
+anxious about it, if we find that it is losing its zest and freedom,
+as we should be if we found that the body were losing its appetite!
+
+It is no metaphor then, but sober earnest, when I say that when we
+take our place in the working world, we ought to lay the foundations
+of that other larger stronghold of the soul, _Joyous Gard_. All that
+matters is that we should choose a fair site for it in free air and
+beside still waters; and that we should plan it for ourselves, set out
+gardens and plantations, with as large a scheme as we can make for it,
+expecting the grace and greenery that shall be, and the increase which
+God gives. It may be that we shall have to build it slowly, and we may
+have to change the design many times; but it will be all built out of
+our own mind and hope, as the nautilus evolves its shell.
+
+I am not speaking of a scheme of self-improvement, of culture followed
+that it may react on our profession or bring us in touch with useful
+people, of mental discipline, of correct information. The _Gard_ is
+not to be a factory or an hotel; it must be frankly built _for our
+delight_. It is delight that we must follow, everything that brims the
+channel of life, stimulates, freshens, enlivens, tantalises, attracts.
+It must at all costs be beautiful. It must embrace that part of
+religion that glows for us, the thing which we find beautiful in other
+souls, the art, the poetry, the tradition, the love of nature, the
+craft, the interests we hanker after. It need not contain all these
+things, because we can often do better by checking diffuseness, and by
+resolute self-limitation. It is not by believing in particular books,
+pictures, tunes, tastes, that we can do it. That ends often as a mere
+prison to the thought; it is rather by meeting the larger spirit that
+lies behind life, recognising the impulse which meets us in a thousand
+forms, which forces us not to be content with narrow and petty things,
+but emerges as the energy, whatever it is, that pushes through the
+crust of life, as the flower pushes through the mould. Our dulness,
+our acquiescence in monotonous ways, arise from our not realising how
+infinitely important that force is, how much it has done for man, how
+barren life is without it. Here in England many of us have a dark
+suspicion of all that is joyful, inherited perhaps from our Puritan
+ancestry, a fear of yielding ourselves to its influence, a terror of
+being grimly repaid for indulgence, an old superstitious dread of
+somehow incurring the wrath of God, if we aim at happiness at all. We
+must know, many of us, that strange shadow which falls upon us when we
+say, "I feel so happy to-day that some evil must be going to befal
+me!" It is true that afflictions must come, but they are not to spoil
+our joy; they are rather to refine it and strengthen it. And those who
+have yielded themselves to joy are often best equipped to get the best
+out of sorrow.
+
+We must aim then at fulness of life; not at husbanding our resources
+with meagre economy, but at spending generously and fearlessly,
+grasping experience firmly, nurturing zest and hope. The frame of mind
+we must be beware of, which is but a stingy vanity, is that which
+makes us say, "I am sure I should not like that person, that book,
+that place!" It is that closing-in of our own possibilities that we
+must avoid.
+
+There is a verse in the Book of Proverbs that often comes into my
+mind; it is spoken of a reprobate, whose delights indeed are not those
+that the soul should pursue; but the temper in which he is made to
+cling to the pleasure which he mistakes for joy, is the temper, I am
+sure, in which one should approach life. He cries, "_They have
+stricken me, and I was not sick; they have beaten me, and I felt it
+not. When shall I awake? I will seek it yet again._"
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+EMOTION
+
+
+We are a curious nation, we English! Stendhal says that our two most
+patent vices are bashfulness and cant. That is to say, we are afraid
+to say what we think, and when we have gained the courage to speak, we
+say more than we think. We are really an emotional nation at heart,
+easily moved and liking to be moved; we are largely swayed by feeling,
+and much stirred by anything that is picturesque. But we are strangely
+ashamed of anything that seems like sentiment; and so far from being
+bluff and unaffected about it, we are full of the affectation, the
+pretence of not being swayed by our emotions. We have developed a
+curious idea of what men and women ought to be; and one of our
+pretences is that men should affect not to understand sentiment, and
+to leave, as we rudely say, "all that sort of thing to the women." Yet
+we are much at the mercy of clap-trap and mawkish phrases, and we like
+rhetoric partly because we are too shy to practise it. The result of
+it is that we believe ourselves to be a frank, outspoken, good-natured
+race; but we produce an unpleasant effect of stiffness, angularity,
+discourtesy, and self-centredness upon more genial nations. We defend
+our bluffness by believing that we hold emotion to be too rare and
+sacred a quality to be talked about, though I always have a suspicion
+that if a man says that a subject is too sacred to discuss, he
+probably also finds it too sacred to think about very much either; yet
+if one can get a sensible Englishman to talk frankly and unaffectedly
+about his feelings, it is often surprising to find how delicate they
+are.
+
+One of our chief faults is our love of property, and the consequence
+of that is our admiration for what we call "businesslike" qualities.
+It is really from the struggle between the instinct of possession and
+the emotional instinct that our bashfulness arises; we are afraid of
+giving ourselves away, and of being taken advantage of; we value
+position and status and respectability very high; we like to know who
+a man is, what he stands for, what his influence amounts to, what he
+is worth; and all this is very injurious to our simplicity, because we
+estimate people so much not by their real merits but by their
+accumulated influence. I do not believe that we shall ever rise to
+true greatness as a nation until we learn not to take property so
+seriously. It is true that we prosper in the world at present, we keep
+order, we make money, we spread a bourgeois sort of civilisation, but
+it is not a particularly fine or fruitful civilisation, because it
+deals so exclusively with material things. I do not wish to decry the
+race, because it has force, toughness, and fine working qualities; but
+we do not know what to do with our prosperity when we have got it; we
+can make very little use of leisure; and our idea of success is to
+have a well-appointed house, expensive amusements, and to distribute a
+dull and costly hospitality, which ministers more to our own
+satisfaction than to the pleasure of the recipients.
+
+There really can be few countries where men are so contented to be
+dull! There is little speculation or animation or intelligence or
+interest among us, and people who desire such an atmosphere are held
+to be fanciful, eccentric, and artistic. It was not always so with our
+race. In Elizabethan times we had all the inventiveness, the love of
+adventure, the pride of dominance that we have now; but there was then
+a great interest in things of the mind as well, a lively taste for
+ideas, a love of beautiful things and thoughts. The Puritan uprising
+knocked all that on the head, but Puritanism was at least preoccupied
+with moral ideas, and developed an excitement about sin which was at
+all events a sign of intellectual ferment. And then we did indeed
+decline into a comfortable sort of security, into a stale classical
+tradition, with pompous and sonorous writing on the one hand, and with
+neatness, literary finish, and wit rather than humour on the other.
+That was a dull, stolid, dignified time; and it was focussed into a
+great figure of high genius, filled with the combative common-sense
+which Englishmen admire, the figure of Dr. Johnson. His influence, his
+temperament, portrayed in his matchless biography, did indeed dominate
+literary England to its hurt; because the essence of Johnson was his
+freshness, and in his hands the great rolling Palladian sentences
+contrived to bite and penetrate; but his imitators did not see that
+freshness was the one requisite; and so for a generation the pompous
+rotund tradition flooded English prose; but for all that, England was
+saved in literature from mere stateliness by the sudden fierce
+interest in life and its problems which burst out like a spring in
+eighteenth-century fiction; and so we come to the Victorian era, when
+we were partially submerged by prosperity, scientific invention,
+commerce, colonisation. But the great figures of the century arose and
+had their say--Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Ruskin, William Morris; it
+was there all the time, that spirit of fierce hope and discontent and
+emotion, that deep longing to penetrate the issues and the
+significance of life.
+
+It may be that the immense activity of science somewhat damped our
+interest in beauty; but that is probably a temporary thing. The
+influence exerted by the early scientists was in the direction of
+facile promises to solve all mysteries, to analyse everything into
+elements, to classify, to track out natural laws; and it was believed
+that the methods and processes of life would be divested of their
+secrecy and their irresponsibility; but the effect of further
+investigation is to reveal that life is infinitely more complex than
+was supposed, and that the end is as dim as ever; though science did
+for a while make havoc of the stereotyped imaginative systems of faith
+and belief, so that men supposed that beauty was but an accidental
+emphasis of law, and that the love of it could be traced to very
+material preferences.
+
+The artist was for a time dismayed, at being confronted by the chemist
+who held that he had explained emotion because he had analysed the
+substance of tears; and for a time the scientific spirit drove the
+spirit of art into cliques and coteries, so that artists were hidden,
+like the Lord's prophets, by fifties in caves, and fed upon bread and
+water.
+
+What mostly I would believe now injures and overshadows art, is that
+artists are affected by the false standard of prosperous life, are not
+content to work in poverty and simplicity, but are anxious, as all
+ambitious natures who love applause must be, to share in the spoils
+of the Philistines. There are, I know, craftsmen who care nothing at
+all for these things, but work in silence and even in obscurity at
+what seems to them engrossing and beautiful; but they are rare; and
+when there is so much experience and pleasure and comfort abroad, and
+when security and deference so much depend upon wealth, the artist
+desires wealth, more for the sake of experience and pleasure than for
+the sake of accumulation.
+
+But the spirit which one desires to see spring up is the Athenian
+spirit, which finds its satisfaction in ideas and thoughts and
+beautiful emotions, in mental exploration and artistic expression; and
+is so absorbed, so intent upon these things that it can afford to let
+prosperity flow past like a muddy stream. Unfortunately, however, the
+English spirit is solitary rather than social, and the artistic spirit
+is jealous rather than inclusive; and so it comes about that instead
+of artists and men of ideas consorting together and living a free and
+simple life, they tend to dwell in lonely fortresses and paradises,
+costly to create, costly to maintain. The English spirit is against
+communities. If it were not so, how easy it would be for people to
+live in groups and circles, with common interests and tastes, to
+encourage each other to believe in beautiful things, and to practise
+ardent thoughts and generous dreams. But this cannot be done
+artificially, and the only people who ever try to do it are artists,
+who do occasionally congregate in a place, and make no secret to each
+other of what they are pursuing. I have sometimes touched the fringe
+of a community like that, and have been charmed by the sense of a more
+eager happiness, a more unaffected intercourse of spirits than I have
+found elsewhere. But the world intervenes! domestic ties, pecuniary
+interests, civic claims disintegrate the group. It is sad to think how
+possible such intercourse is in youth, and in youth only, as one sees
+it displayed in that fine and moving book _Trilby_, which does
+contrive to reflect the joy of the buoyant companionship of art. But
+the flush dies down, the insouciance departs, and with it the ardent
+generosity of life. Some day perhaps, when life has become simpler and
+wealth more equalised, when work is more distributed, when there is
+less production of unnecessary things, these groups will form
+themselves, and the frank, eager, vivid spirit of youth will last on
+into middle-age, and even into age itself. I do not think that this is
+wholly a dream; but we must first get rid of much of the pompous
+nonsense about money and position, which now spoils so many lives; and
+if we could be more genuinely interested in the beauty and complex
+charm and joy of life, we should think less and less of material
+things, be content with shelter, warmth, and food, and grudge the time
+we waste in providing things for which we have no real use, simply in
+order that, like the rich fool, we may congratulate ourselves on
+having much goods laid up for many years, when the end was hard at
+hand!
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+MEMORY
+
+
+Memory is for many people the only form of poetry which they indulge.
+If a soul turns to the future for consolation in a sad or wearied or
+disappointed present, it is in religion that hope and strength are
+sometimes found; but if it is a retrospective nature--and the poetical
+nature is generally retrospective, because poetry is concerned with
+the beauty of actual experience and actual things, rather than with
+the possible and the unknown--then it finds its medicine for the
+dreariness of life in memory. Of course there are many simple and
+healthy natures which do not concern themselves with visions at
+all--the little businesses, the daily pleasures, are quietly and even
+eagerly enjoyed. But the poetical nature is the nature that is not
+easily contented, because it tends to idealisation, to the thought
+that the present might easily be so much happier, brighter, more
+beautiful, than it is.
+
+    An eager soul that looks beyond
+    And shivers in the midst of bliss,
+    That cries, "I should not need despond,
+    If this were otherwise, and this!"
+
+And so the soul that has seen much and enjoyed much and endured much,
+and whose whole life has been not spoiled, of course, but a little
+shadowed by the thought that the elements of happiness have never been
+quite as pure as it would have wished, turns back in thought to the
+old scenes of love and companionship, and evokes from the dark, as
+from the pages of some volume of photographs and records, the pictures
+of the past, retouching them, it is true, and adapting them, by deftly
+removing all the broken lights and intrusive anxieties, not into what
+they actually were, but into what they might have been. Carlyle laid
+his finger upon the truth of this power, when he said that the reason
+why the pictures of the past were always so golden in tone, so
+delicate in outline, was because the quality of fear was taken from
+them. It is the fear of what may be and what must be that overshadows
+present happiness; and if fear is taken from us we are happy. The
+strange thing is that we cannot learn not to be afraid, even though
+all the darkest and saddest of our experiences have left us unscathed;
+and if we could but find a reason for the mingling of fear with our
+lives, we should have gone far towards solving the riddle of the
+world.
+
+This indulgence of memory is not necessarily a weakening or an
+enervating thing, so long as it does not come to us too early, or
+disengage us from needful activities. It is often not accompanied by
+any shadow of loss or bitterness. I remember once sitting with my
+beloved old nurse, when she was near her ninetieth year, in her little
+room, in which was gathered much of the old nursery furniture, the
+tiny chairs of the children, the store-cupboard with the farmyard
+pictures on the panel, the stuffed pet-birds--all the homely wrack of
+life; and we had been recalling many of the old childish incidents
+with laughter and smiles. When I rose to go, she sate still for a
+minute, and her eyes filled with quiet tears, "Ah, those were happy
+days!" she said. But there was no repining about it, no sense that it
+was better to forget old joys--rather a quiet pleasure that so much
+that was beautiful and tender was laid away in memory, and could
+neither be altered nor taken away. And one does not find in old
+people, whose memory of the past is clear, while their recollection of
+the present grows dim, any sense of pathos, but rather of pride and
+eagerness about recalling the minutest details of the vanished days.
+To feel the pathos of the past, as Tennyson expressed it in that
+wonderful and moving lyric, _Tears, idle tears_, is much more
+characteristic of youth. There is rather in serene old age a sense of
+pleasant triumph at having safely weathered the storms of fate, and
+left the tragedies of life behind. The aged would not as a rule live
+life over again, if they could. They are not disappointed in life.
+They have had, on the whole, what they hoped and desired. As Goethe
+said, in that deep and large maxim, "Of that which a man desires in
+his youth, he shall have enough in his age." That is one of the most
+singular things in life--at least this is my experience--how the
+things which one really desired, not the things which one ought to
+have desired, are showered upon one. I have been amazed and even
+stupefied sometimes to consider how my own little petty, foolish,
+whimsical desires have been faithfully and literally granted me. We
+most of us do really translate into fact what we desire, and as a rule
+we only fail to get the things which we have not desired enough. It is
+true indeed that we often find that what we desired was not worth
+getting; and we ought to be more afraid of our desires, not because we
+shall not get them, but because we shall almost certainly have them
+fulfilled. For myself I can only think with shame how closely my
+present conditions do resemble my young desires, in all their petty
+range, their trivial particularity. I suppose I have unconsciously
+pursued them, chosen them, grasped at them; and the shame of it is
+that if I had desired better things, I should assuredly have been
+given them. I see, or seem to see, the same thing in the lives of many
+that I know. What a man sows he shall reap! That is taken generally to
+mean that if he sows pleasure, he shall reap disaster; but it has a
+much truer and more terrible meaning than that--namely, that if a man
+sows the seed of small, trivial, foolish joys, the grain that he
+reaps is small, trivial, and foolish too. God is indeed in many ways
+an indulgent Father, like the Father in the parable of the Prodigal
+Son; and the best rebuke that He gives, if we have the wisdom to see
+it, is that He so often does hand us, with a smile, the very thing we
+have desired. And thus it is well to pray that He should put into our
+minds good desires, and that we should use our wills to keep ourselves
+from dwelling too much upon small and pitiful desires, for the fear is
+that they will be abundantly gratified.
+
+And thus when the time comes for recollection, it is a very wonderful
+thing to look back over life, and see how eagerly gracious God has
+been to us. He knows very well that we cannot learn the paltry value
+of the things we desire, if they are withheld from us, but only if
+they are granted to us; and thus we have no reason to doubt His
+fatherly intention, because He does so much dispose life to please us.
+And we need not take it for granted that He will lead us by harsh and
+provocative discipline, though when He grants our desire, He sometimes
+sends leanness withal into our soul. Yet one of the things that
+strikes one most forcibly, as one grows older and learns something of
+the secrets of other lives, is how lightly and serenely men and women
+do often bear what might seem to be intolerable calamities. How
+universal an experience it is to find that when the expected calamity
+does come, it is an easier affair than we thought it, so that we say
+under the blow, "Is that really all?" In that wonderful book, the
+Diary of Sir Walter Scott, when his bankruptcy fell upon him, and all
+the schemes and designs that he had been carrying out, with the joyful
+zest of a child--his toy-castle, his feudal circle, his wide
+estate--were suddenly suspended, he wrote with an almost amused
+surprise that he found how little he really cared, and that the people
+who spoke tenderly and sympathetically to him, as though he must be
+reeling under the catastrophe, would themselves be amazed to find that
+he found himself as cheerful and undaunted as ever. Life is apt, for
+all vivid people, to be a species of high-hearted game: it is such fun
+to play it as eagerly as one can, and to persuade oneself that one
+really cares about the applause, the money, the fine house, the
+comforts, the deference, the convenience of it all. And yet, if there
+is anything noble in a man or woman, when the game is suddenly
+interrupted and the toys swept aside, they find that there is
+something exciting and stimulating in having to do without, in
+adapting themselves with zest to the new conditions. It was a good
+game enough, but the new game is better! The failure is to take it all
+heavily and seriously, to be solemn about it; for then failure is
+disconcerting indeed. But if one is interested in experience, but yet
+has the vitality to see how detached one really is from material
+things, how little they really affect us, then the change is almost
+grateful. It is the spirit of the game, the activity, the energy, that
+delights us, not the particular toy. And so the looking back on life
+ought never to be a mournful thing; it ought to be light-hearted,
+high-spirited, amusing. The spirit survives, and there is yet much
+experience ahead of us. We waste our sense of pathos very strangely
+over inanimate things. We get to feel about the things that surround
+us, our houses, our very chairs and tables, as if they were somehow
+things that were actually attached to us. We feel, when the old house
+that has belonged to our family passes into other hands, as though
+the rooms resented the intruders; as though our sofas and cabinets
+could not be at ease in other hands, as if they would almost prefer
+shabby and dusty inaction in our own lumber-room, to cheerful use in
+some other circle. This is a delusion of which we must make haste to
+get rid. It is the weakest sort of sentiment, and yet it is treasured
+by many natures as if it were something refined and noble. To yield to
+it, is to fetter our life with self-imposed and fantastic chains.
+There is no sort of reason why we should not love to live among
+familiar things; but to break our hearts over the loss of them is a
+real debasing of ourselves. We must learn to use the things of life
+very lightly and detachedly; and to entrench ourselves in trivial
+associations is simply to court dreariness and to fall into a stupor
+of the spirit.
+
+And thus even our old memories must be treated with the same lightness
+and unaffectedness. We must do all we can to forget grief and
+disaster. We must not consecrate a shrine to sorrow and make the
+votive altar, as Dido did, into a _causa doloris_, an excuse for
+lamentation. We must not think it an honourable and chivalrous and
+noble thing to spend our time in broken-hearted solemnity in the
+vaults of perished joys. Or if we do it, we must frankly confess it to
+be a weakness and a languor of spirit, not believe it to be a thing
+which others ought to admire and respect. It was one of the base
+sentimentalities of the last century, a real sign of the decadence of
+life, that people felt it to be a fine thing to cherish grief, and to
+live resolutely with sighs and tears. The helpless widow of
+nineteenth-century fiction, shrouded in crape, and bursting into tears
+at the smallest sign of gaiety, was a wholly unlovely, affected,
+dramatic affair. And one of the surest signs of our present vitality
+is that this attitude has become not only unusual, but frankly absurd
+and unfashionable. There is an intense and gallant pathos about a
+nature broken by sorrow, making desperate attempts to be cheerful and
+active, and not to cast a shadow of grief upon others. There is no
+pathos at all in the sight of a person bent on emphasising his or her
+grief, on using it to make others uncomfortable, on extracting a
+recognition of its loyalty and fidelity and emotional fervour.
+
+Of course there are some memories and experiences that must grave a
+deep and terrible mark upon the heart, the shock of which has been so
+severe, that the current of life must necessarily be altered by them.
+But even then it is better as far as possible to forget them and to
+put them away from us--at all events, not to indulge them or dwell in
+them. To yield is simply to delay the pilgrimage, to fall exhausted in
+some unhappy arbour by the road. The road has to be travelled, every
+inch of it, and it is better to struggle on in feebleness than to
+collapse in despair.
+
+Mrs. Charles Kingsley, in her widowhood, once said to a friend,
+"Whenever I find myself thinking too much about Charles, I simply
+force myself to read the most exciting novel I can. He is there, he is
+waiting for me; and hearts were made to love with, not to break."
+
+And as the years go on, even the most terrible memories grow to have
+the grace and beauty which nature lavishes on all the relics of
+extinct forces and spent agonies. They become like the old grey broken
+castle, with the grasses on its ledges, and the crows nesting in its
+parapets, rising blind and dumb on its green mound, with the hamlet
+at its feet; or like the craggy islet, severed by the raging sea from
+the towering headland, where the samphire sprouts in the rift, and the
+sea-birds roost, at whose foot the surges lap, and over whose head the
+landward wind blows swiftly all the day.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+RETROSPECT
+
+
+But one must not forget that after all memory has another side, too
+often a rueful side, and that it often seems to turn sour and
+poisonous in the sharp decline of fading life; and this ought not to
+be. I would like to describe a little experience of my own which came
+to me as a surprise, but showed me clearly enough what memory can be
+and what it rightly is, if it is to feed the spirit at all.
+
+Not very long ago I visited Lincoln, where my father was Canon and
+Chancellor from 1872 to 1877. I had only been there once since then,
+and that was twenty-four years ago. When we lived there I was a small
+Eton boy, so that it was always holiday time there, and a place which
+recalls nothing but school holidays has perhaps an unfair advantage.
+Moreover it was a period quite unaccompanied, in our family life, by
+any sort of trouble, illness, or calamity. The Chancery of Lincoln is
+connected in my mind with no tragic or even sorrowful event whatever,
+and suggests no painful reminiscence. How many people, I wonder, can
+say that of any home that has sheltered them for so long?
+
+Of course Lincoln itself, quite apart from any memories or
+associations, is a place to kindle much emotion. It was a fine sunny
+day there, and the colour of the whole place was amazing--the rich
+warm hue of the stone of which the Minster is built, which takes on a
+fine ochre-brown tinge where it is weathered, gives it a look of
+homely comfort, apart from the matchless dignity of clustered transept
+and soaring towers. Then the glowing and mellow brick of Lincoln, its
+scarlet roof tiles--what could be more satisfying for instance than
+the dash of vivid red in the tiling of the old Palace as you see it on
+the slope among its gardens from the opposite upland?--its
+smoke-blackened fa�ades, the abundance, all over the hill, of old
+embowered gardens, full of trees and thickets and greenery, its grassy
+spaces, its creeper-clad houses; the whole effect is one of
+extraordinary richness of hue, of age vividly exuberant, splendidly
+adorned.
+
+I wandered transported about Cathedral and close, and became aware
+then of how strangely unadventurous in the matter of exploration one
+had always been as a boy. It was true that we children had scampered
+with my father's master-key from end to end of the Cathedral--wet
+mornings used constantly to be spent there--so that I know every
+staircase, gallery, clerestory, parapet, triforium, and roof-vault of
+the building--but I found in the close itself many houses, alleys,
+little streets, which I had actually never seen, or even suspected
+their existence.
+
+It was all full of little ghosts, and a tiny vignette shaped itself in
+memory at every corner, of some passing figure--a good-natured Canon,
+a youthful friend, Levite or Nethinim, or some deadly enemy, the son
+perhaps of some old-established denizen of the close, with whom for
+some unknown reason the Chancery schoolroom proclaimed an inflexible
+feud.
+
+But when I came to see the old house itself--so little changed, so
+distinctly recollected--then I was indeed amazed at the torrent of
+little happy fragrant memories which seemed to pour from every doorway
+and window--the games, the meals, the plays, the literary projects,
+the readings, the telling of stories, the endless, pointless,
+enchanting wanderings with some breathless object in view, forgotten
+or transformed before it was ever attained or executed, of which
+children alone hold the secret.
+
+Best of all do I recollect long summer afternoons spent in the great
+secluded high-walled garden at the back, with its orchard, its mound
+covered with thickets, and the old tower of the city wall, which made
+a noble fortress in games of prowess or adventure. I can see the
+figure of my father in his cassock, holding a little book, walking up
+and down among the gooseberry-beds half the morning, as he developed
+one of his unwritten sermons for the Minster on the following day.
+
+I do not remember that very affectionate relations existed between us
+children; it was a society, based on good-humoured tolerance and a
+certain democratic respect for liberty, that nursery group; it had its
+cliques, its sections, its political emphasis, its diplomacies; but it
+was cordial rather than emotional, and bound together by common
+interests rather than by mutual devotion.
+
+This, for instance, was one of the ludicrous incidents which came back
+to me. There was an odd little medi�val room on the ground-floor,
+given up as a sort of study, in the school sense, to my elder brother
+and myself. My younger brother, aged almost eight, to show his power,
+I suppose, or to protest against some probably quite real grievance or
+tangible indignity, came there secretly one morning in our absence,
+took a shovelful of red-hot coals from the fire, laid them on the
+hearth-rug, and departed. The conflagration was discovered in time,
+the author of the crime detected, and even the most tolerant of
+supporters of nursery anarchy could find nothing to criticise or
+condemn in the punishment justly meted out to the offender.
+
+But here was the extraordinary part of it all. I am myself somewhat
+afraid of emotional retrospect, which seems to me as a rule to have a
+peculiarly pungent and unbearable smart about it. I do not as a rule
+like revisiting places which I have loved and where I have been happy;
+it is simply incurring quite unnecessary pain, and quite fruitless
+pain, deliberately to unearth buried memories of happiness.
+
+Now at Lincoln the other day I found, to my wonder and relief, that
+there was not the least touch of regret, no sense of sorrow or loss in
+the air. I did not want it all back again, nor would I have lived
+through it again, even if I could have done so. The thought of
+returning to it seemed puerile; it was charming, delightful, all full
+of golden prospects and sunny mornings, but an experience which had
+yielded up its sweetness as a summer cloud yields its cooling rain,
+and passes over. Yet it was all a perfectly true, real, and actual
+part of my life, something of which I could never lose hold and for
+which I could always be frankly grateful. Life has been by no means a
+scene of untroubled happiness since then; but there came to me that
+day, walking along the fragrant garden-paths, very clearly and
+distinctly, the knowledge that one would not wish one's life to have
+been untroubled! Halcyon calm, heedless innocence, childish joy, was
+not after all the point--pretty things enough, but only as a change
+and a relief, or perhaps rather as a prelude to more serious business!
+I was, as a boy, afraid of life, hated its noise and scent, suspected
+it of cruelty and coarseness, wanted to keep it at arm's length. I
+feel very differently about life now; it's a boisterous business
+enough, but does not molest one unduly; and a very little courage goes
+a long way in dealing with it!
+
+True, on looking back, the evolution was dim and obscure; there seemed
+many blind alleys and passages, many unnecessary winds and turns in
+the road; but for all that the trend was clear enough, at all events,
+to show that there was some great and not unkindly conspiracy about me
+and my concerns, involving every one else's concerns as well, some
+good-humoured mystery, with a dash of shadow and sorrow across it
+perhaps, which would be soon cleared up; some secret withheld as from
+a child, the very withholder of which seems to struggle with
+good-tempered laughter, partly at one's dulness in not being able to
+guess, partly at the pleasure in store.
+
+I think it is our impatience, our claim to have everything
+questionable made instantly and perfectly plain to us, which does the
+mischief--that, and the imagination which never can forecast any
+relief or surcease of pain, and pays no heed whatever to the
+astounding brevity, the unutterable rapidity of human life.
+
+So, as I walked in the old garden, I simply rejoiced that I had a
+share in the place which could not be gainsaid; and that, even if the
+high towers themselves, with their melodious bells, should crumble
+into dust, I still had my dear memory of it all: the old life, the old
+voices, looks, embraces, came back in little glimpses; yet it was far
+away, long past, and I did not wish it back; the present seemed a
+perfectly natural and beautiful sequence, and that past life an old
+sweet chapter of some happy book, which needs no rewriting.
+
+So I looked back in joy and tenderness--and even with a sort of
+compassion; the child whom I saw sauntering along the grass paths of
+the garden, shaking the globed rain out of the poppy's head, gathering
+the waxen apples from the orchard grass, he was myself in very
+truth--there was no doubting that; I hardly felt different. But I had
+gained something which he had not got, some opening of eye and heart;
+and he had yet to bear, to experience, to pass through, the days which
+I had done with, and which, in spite of their much sweetness, had yet
+a bitterness, as of a healing drug, underneath them, and which I did
+not wish to taste again. No, I desired no renewal of old things, only
+the power of interpreting the things that were new, and through which
+even now one was passing swiftly and carelessly, as the boy ran among
+the fruit-trees of the garden; but it was not the golden fragrant husk
+of happiness that one wanted, but the seed hidden within
+it--experience was made sweet just that one might be tempted to live!
+Yet the end of it all was not the pleasure or the joy that came and
+passed, the gaiety, even the innocence of childhood, but something
+stern and strong, which hardly showed at all at first, but at last
+seemed like the slow work of the graver of gems brushing away the
+glittering crystalline dust from the intaglio.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+HUMOUR
+
+
+The Castle of _Joyous Gard_ was always full of laughter; not the wild
+giggling, I think, of reckless people, which the writer of Proverbs
+said was like the crackling of thorns under a pot; that is a wearisome
+and even an ugly thing, because it does not mean that people are
+honestly amused, but have some basely exciting thing in their minds.
+Laughter must be light-hearted, not light-minded. Still less was it
+the dismal tittering of ill-natured people over mean gossip, which is
+another of the ugly sounds of life. No, I think it was rather the
+laughter of cheerful people, glad to be amused, who hardly knew that
+they were laughing; that is a wholesome exercise enough. It was the
+laughter of men and women, with heavy enough business behind them and
+before them, but yet able in leisurely hours to find life full of
+merriment--the voice of joy and health! And I am sure too that it was
+not the guarded condescending laughter of saints who do not want to be
+out of sympathy with their neighbours, and laugh as precisely and
+punctually as they might respond to a liturgy, if they discover that
+they are meant to be amused!
+
+Humour is one of the characteristics of _Joyous Gard_, not humour
+resolutely cultivated, but the humour which comes from a sane and
+healthy sense of proportion; and is a sign of light-heartedness rather
+than a thing aimed at; a thing which flows naturally into the easy
+spaces of life, because it finds the oddities of life, the
+peculiarities of people, the incongruities of thought and speech, both
+charming and delightful.
+
+It is a great misfortune that so many people think it a mark of
+saintliness to be easily shocked, whereas the greatest saints of all
+are the people who are never shocked; they may be distressed, they may
+wish things different; but to be shocked is often nothing but a mark
+of vanity, a self-conscious desire that others should know how high
+one's standard, how sensitive one's conscience is. I do not of course
+mean that one is bound to join in laughter, however coarse a jest may
+be; but the best-bred and finest-tempered people steer past such
+moments with a delicate tact; contrive to show that an ugly jest is
+not so much a thing to be disapproved of and rebuked, as a sign that
+the jester is not recognising the rights of his company, and
+outstepping the laws of civility and decency.
+
+It is a very difficult thing to say what humour is, and probably it is
+a thing that is not worth trying to define. It resides in the
+incongruity of speech and behaviour with the surrounding
+circumstances.
+
+I remember once seeing two tramps disputing by the roadside, with the
+gravity which is given to human beings by being slightly overcome with
+drink. I suppose that one ought not to be amused by the effects of
+drunkenness, but after all one does not wish people to be drunk that
+one may be amused. The two tramps in question were ragged and
+infinitely disreputable. Just as I came up, the more tattered of the
+two flung his hat on the ground, with a lofty gesture like that of a
+king abdicating, and said, "I'll go no further with you!" The other
+said, "Why do you say that? Why will you go no further with me?" The
+first replied, "No, I'll go no further with you!" The other said, "I
+must know why you will go no further with me--you must tell me that!"
+The first replied, with great dignity, "Well, I will tell you that! It
+lowers my self-respect to be seen with a man like you!"
+
+That is the sort of incongruity I mean. The tragic solemnity of a man
+who might have changed clothes with the nearest scarecrow without a
+perceptible difference, and whose life was evidently not ordered by
+any excessive self-respect, falling back on the dignity of human
+nature in order to be rid of a companion as disreputable as himself,
+is what makes the scene so grotesque, and yet in a sense so
+impressive, because it shows a lurking standard of conduct which no
+pitiableness of degradation could obliterate. I think that is a good
+illustration of what I mean by humour, because in the presence of such
+a scene it is possible to have three perfectly distinct emotions. One
+may be sorry with all one's heart that men should fall to such
+conditions, and feel that it is a stigma on our social machinery that
+it should be so. Those two melancholy figures were a sad blot upon
+the wholesome countryside! Yet one may also discern a hope in the mere
+possibility of framing an ideal under such discouraging circumstances,
+which will be, I have no sort of doubt, a seed of good in the upward
+progress of the poor soul which grasped it; because indeed I have no
+doubt that the miserable creature _is_ on an upward path, and that
+even if there is no prospect for him in this life of anything but a
+dismal stumbling down into disease and want, yet I do not in the least
+believe that that is the end of his horizon or his pilgrimage; and
+thirdly, one may be genuinely and not in the least evilly amused at
+the contrast between the disreputable squalor of the scene and the
+lofty claim advanced. The three emotions are not at all inconsistent.
+The pessimistic moralist might say that it was all very shocking, the
+optimistic moralist might say that it was hopeful, the unreflective
+humourist might simply be transported by the absurdity; yet not to be
+amused at such a scene would appear to me to be both dull and
+priggish. It seems to me to be a false solemnity to be shocked at any
+lapses from perfection; a man might as well be shocked at the
+existence of a poisonous snake or a ravening tiger. One must "see life
+steadily and see it whole," and though we may and must hope that we
+shall struggle upwards out of the mess, we may still be amused at the
+dolorous figures we cut in the mire.
+
+I was once in the company of a grave, decorous, and well-dressed
+person who fell helplessly into a stream off a stepping-stone. I had
+no wish that he should fall, and I was perfectly conscious of intense
+sympathy with his discomfort; but I found the scene quite
+inexpressibly diverting, and I still simmer with laughter at the
+recollection of the disappearance of the trim figure, and his furious
+emergence, like an oozy water-god, from the pool. It is not in the
+least an ill-natured laughter. I did not desire the catastrophe, and I
+would have prevented it if I could; but it was dreadfully funny for
+all that; and if a similar thing had happened to myself, I should not
+resent the enjoyment of the scene by a spectator, so long as I was
+helped and sympathised with, and the merriment decently repressed
+before me.
+
+I think that what is called practical joking, which aims at
+deliberately producing such situations, is a wholly detestable thing.
+But it is one thing to sacrifice another person's comfort to one's
+laughter, and quite another to be amused at what a fire-insurance
+policy calls the act of God.
+
+And I am very sure of this, that the sane, healthy, well-balanced
+nature must have a fund of wholesome laughter in him, and that so far
+from trying to repress a sense of humour, as an unkind, unworthy,
+inhuman thing, there is no capacity of human nature which makes life
+so frank and pleasant a business. There are no companions so
+delightful as the people for whom one treasures up jests and
+reminiscences, because one is sure that they will respond to them and
+enjoy them; and indeed I have found that the power of being
+irresponsibly amused has come to my aid in the middle of really tragic
+and awful circumstances, and has relieved the strain more than
+anything else could have done.
+
+I do not say that humour is a thing to be endlessly indulged and
+sought after; but to be genuinely amused is a sign of courage and
+amiability, and a sign too that a man is not self-conscious and
+self-absorbed. It ought not to be a settled pre-occupation. Nothing
+is more wearisome than the habitual jester, because that signifies
+that a man is careless and unobservant of the moods of others. But it
+is a thing which should be generously and freely mingled with life;
+and the more sides that a man can see to any situation, the more rich
+and full his nature is sure to be.
+
+After all, our power of taking a light-hearted view of life is
+proportional to our interest in it, our belief in it, our hopes of it.
+Of course, if we conclude from our little piece of remembered
+experience, that life is a woeful thing, we shall be apt to do as the
+old poets thought the nightingale did, to lean our breast against a
+thorn, that we may suffer the pain which we propose to utter in liquid
+notes. But that seems to me a false sentiment and an artificial mode
+of life, to luxuriate in sorrow; even that is better than being
+crushed by it; but we may be sure that if we wilfully allow ourselves
+to be one-sided, it is a delaying of our progress. All experience
+comes to us that we may not be one-sided; and if we learn to weep with
+those that weep, we must remember that it is no less our business to
+rejoice with those that rejoice. We are helped beyond measure by
+those who can tell us and convince us, as poets can, that there is
+something beautiful in sorrow and loss and severed ties; by those who
+show us the splendour of courage and patience and endurance; but the
+true faith is to believe that the end is joy; and we therefore owe
+perhaps the largest debt of all to those who encourage us to enjoy, to
+laugh, to smile, to be amused.
+
+And so we must not retire into our fortress simply for lonely visions,
+sweet contemplation, gentle imagination; there are rooms in our castle
+fit for that, the little book-lined cell, facing the sunset, the high
+parlour, where the gay, brisk music comes tripping down from the
+minstrels' gallery, the dim chapel for prayer, and the chamber called
+_Peace_--where the pilgrim slept till break of day, "and then he awoke
+and sang"; but there is also the well-lighted hall, with cheerful
+company coming and going; where we must put our secluded, wistful,
+sorrowful thought aside, and mingle briskly with the pleasant throng,
+not steeling ourselves to mirth and movement, but simply glad and
+grateful to be there.
+
+It was while I was writing these pages that a friend told me that he
+had recently met a man, a merchant, I think, who did me the honour to
+discuss my writings at a party and to pronounce an opinion upon them.
+He said that I wrote many things which I did not believe, and then
+stood aside, and was amused in a humorous mood to see that other
+people believed them. It would be absurd to be, or even to feel,
+indignant at such a travesty of my purpose as this, and indeed I think
+that one is never very indignant at misrepresentation unless one's
+mind accuses itself of its being true or partially true.
+
+It is indeed true that I have said things about which I have since
+changed my mind, as indeed I hope I shall continue to change it, and
+as swiftly as possible, if I see that the former opinions are not
+justified. To be thus criticised is, I think, the perfectly natural
+penalty of having tried to be serious without being also solemn; there
+are many people, and many of them very worthy people, like our friend
+the merchant, who cannot believe one is in earnest if one is not also
+heavy-handed. Earnestness is mixed up in their minds with bawling and
+sweating; and indeed it is quite true that most people who are willing
+to bawl and sweat in public, feel earnestly about the subjects to
+which they thus address themselves. But I do not see that earnestness
+is in the least incompatible with lightness of touch and even with
+humour, though I have sometimes been accused of displaying none.
+Socrates was in earnest about his ideas, but the penalty he paid for
+treating them lightly was that he was put to death for being so
+sceptical. I should not at all like the idea of being put to death for
+my ideas; but I am wholly in earnest about them, and have never
+consciously said anything in which I did not believe.
+
+But I will go one step further and say that I think that many earnest
+men do great harm to the causes they advocate, because they treat
+ideas so heavily, and divest them of their charm. One of the reasons
+why virtue and goodness are not more attractive is because they get
+into the hands of people without lightness or humour, and even without
+courtesy; and thus the pursuit of virtue seems not only to the young,
+but to many older people, to be a boring occupation, and to be
+conducted in an atmosphere heavy with disapproval, with dreariness and
+dulness and tiresomeness hemming the neophyte in, like fat bulls of
+Bashan. It is because I should like to rescue goodness, which is the
+best thing in the world, next to love, from these growing influences,
+that I have written as I have done; but there is no lurking cynicism
+in my books at all, and the worst thing I can accuse myself of is a
+sense of humour, perhaps whimsical and childish, which seems to me to
+make a pleasant and refreshing companion, as one passes on pilgrimage
+in search of what I believe to be very high and heavenly things
+indeed.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+VISIONS
+
+
+I used as a child to pore over the Apocalypse, which I thought by far
+the most beautiful and absorbing of all the books of the Bible; it
+seemed full of rich and dim pictures, things which I could not
+interpret and did not wish to interpret, the shining of clear gem-like
+walls, lonely riders, amazing monsters, sealed books, all of which
+took perfectly definite shape in the childish imagination. The
+consequence is that I can no more criticise it than I could criticise
+old tapestries or pictures familiar from infancy. They are there, just
+so, and any difference of form is inconceivable.
+
+In one point, however, the strange visions have come to hold for me an
+increased grandeur; I used to think of much of it as a sort of
+dramatic performance, self-consciously enacted for the benefit of the
+spectator; but now I think of it as an awful and spontaneous energy of
+spiritual life going on, of which the prophet was enabled to catch a
+glimpse. Those 'voices crying day and night' 'the new song that was
+sung before the throne,' the cry of "Come and see"--these were but
+part of a vast and urgent business, which the prophet was allowed to
+overhear. It is not a silent place, that highest heaven, of indolence
+and placid peace, but a scene of fierce activity and the clamour of
+mighty voices.
+
+And it is the same too of another strange scene--the Transfiguration;
+not an impressive spectacle arranged for the apostles, but a peep into
+the awful background behind life. Let me use a simple parable: imagine
+a man who had a friend whom he greatly admired and loved, and suppose
+him to be talking with his friend, who suddenly excuses himself on the
+plea of an engagement and goes out; and the other follows him, out of
+curiosity, and sees him meet another man and talk intently with him,
+not deferentially or humbly, but as a man talks with an equal. And
+then drawing nearer he might suddenly see that the man his friend has
+gone out to meet, and with whom he is talking so intently, is some
+high minister of State, or even the King himself!
+
+That is a simple comparison, to make clear what the apostles might
+have felt. They had gone into the mountain expecting to hear their
+Master speak quietly to them or betake himself to silent prayer; and
+then they find him robed in light and holding converse with the
+spirits of the air, telling his plans, so to speak, to two great
+prophets of the ancient world.
+
+If this had been but a pageant enacted for their benefit to dazzle and
+bewilder them, it would have been a poor and self-conscious affair;
+but it becomes a scene of portentous mystery, if one thinks of them as
+being permitted to have a glimpse of the high, urgent, and terrifying
+things that were going on all the time in the unseen background of the
+Saviour's mind. The essence of the greatness of the scene is that it
+was _overheard_. And thus I think that wonder and beauty, those two
+mighty forces, take on a very different value for us when we can come
+to realise that they are small hints given us, tiny glimpses conceded
+to us, of some very great and mysterious thing that is pressingly and
+speedily proceeding, every day and every hour, in the vast background
+of life; and we ought to realise that it is not only human life as we
+see it which is the active, busy, forceful thing; that the world with
+all its noisy cities, its movements and its bustle, is not a burning
+point hung in darkness and silence, but that it is just a little
+fretful affair with infinitely larger, louder, fiercer, stronger
+powers, working, moving, pressing onwards, thundering in the
+background; and that the huge forces, laws, activities, behind the
+world, are not perceived by us any more than we perceive the vast
+motion of great winds, except in so far as we see the face of the
+waters rippled by them, or the trees bowed all one way in their
+passage.
+
+It is very easy to be so taken up with the little absorbing
+businesses, the froth and ripple of life, that we forget what great
+and secret influences they must be that cause them; we must not forget
+that we are only like children playing in the nursery of a palace,
+while in the Council-room beneath us a debate may be going on which is
+to affect the lives and happiness of thousands of households.
+
+And therefore the more that we make up our little beliefs and ideas,
+as a man folds up a little packet of food which he is to eat on a
+journey, and think in so doing that we have got a satisfactory
+explanation of all our aims and problems, the more utterly we are
+failing to take in the significance of what is happening. We must
+never allow ourselves to make up our minds, and to get our theories
+comfortably settled, because then experience is at an end for us, and
+we shall see no more than we expect to see. We ought rather to be
+amazed and astonished, day by day, at all the wonderful and beautiful
+things we encounter, the marvellous hints of loveliness which we see
+in faces, woods, hills, gardens, all showing some tremendous force at
+work, often thwarted, often spoiled, but still working, with an
+infinity of tender patience, to make the world exquisite and fine.
+There are ugly, coarse, disgusting things at work too--we cannot help
+seeing that; but even many of them seem to be destroying, in
+corruption and evil odour, something that ought not to be there, and
+striving to be clean and pure again.
+
+I often wonder whose was the mind that conceived the visions of the
+Apocalypse; if we can trust tradition, it was a confined and exiled
+Christian in a lonely island, whose spirit reached out beyond the
+little crags and the beating seas of his prison, and in the seeming
+silent heaven detected the gathering of monsters, the war of
+relentless forces--and beyond it all the radiant energies of saints,
+glad to be together and unanimous, in a place where light and beauty
+at last could reign triumphant.
+
+I know no literature more ineffably dreary than the parcelling out of
+these wild and glorious visions, the attaching of them to this and
+that petty human fulfilment. That is not the secret of the Apocalypse!
+It is rather as a painter may draw a picture of two lovers sitting
+together at evening in a latticed chamber, holding each other's hands,
+gazing in each other's eyes. He is not thinking of particular persons
+in an actual house; it is rather a hint of love making itself
+manifest, recognising itself to be met with an answering rapture. And
+what I think that the prophet meant was rather to show that we must
+not be deceived by cares and anxieties and daily business; but that
+behind the little simmering of the world was a tumult of vast forces,
+voices crying and answering, thunder, fire, infinite music. It is all
+a command to recognise unseen greatness, to take every least
+experience we can, and crush from it all its savour; not to be afraid
+of the great emotions of the world, love and sorrow and loss; but only
+to be afraid of what is petty and sordid and mean. And then perhaps,
+as in that other vision, we may ascend once into a mountain, and there
+in weariness and drowsiness, dumbly bewildered by the night and the
+cold and the discomforts of the unkindly air, life may be for a moment
+transfigured into a radiant figure, still familiar though so
+glorified; and we may see it for once touch hands and exchange words
+with old and wise spirits; and all this not only to excite us and
+bewilder us, but so that by the drawing of the veil aside, we may see
+for a moment that there is some high and splendid secret, some
+celestial business proceeding with solemn patience and strange
+momentousness, a rite which if we cannot share, we may at least know
+is there, and waiting for us, the moment that we are strong enough to
+take our part!
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+THOUGHT
+
+
+A friend of mine had once a strange dream; he seemed to himself to be
+walking in a day of high summer on a grassy moorland leading up to
+some fantastically piled granite crags. He made his way slowly
+thither; it was terribly hot there among the sun-warmed rocks, and he
+found a little natural cave, among the great boulders, fringed with
+fern. There he sate for a long time while the sun passed over, and a
+little breeze came wandering up the moor. Opposite him as he sate was
+the face of a great pile of rocks, and while his eye dwelt upon it it
+suddenly began to wink and glisten with little moving points, dots so
+minute that he could hardly distinguish them. Suddenly, as if at a
+signal, the little points dropped from the rock, and the whole surface
+seemed alive with gossamer threads, as if a silken, silvery curtain
+had been let down; presently the little dots reached the grass and
+began to crawl over it; and then he saw that each of them was attached
+to one of the fine threads; and he thought that they were a colony of
+minute spiders, living on the face of the rocks. He got up to see this
+wonder close at hand, but the moment he moved, the whole curtain was
+drawn up with incredible swiftness, as if the threads were highly
+elastic; and when he reached the rock, it was as hard and solid as
+before, nor could he discover any sign of the little creatures. "Ah,"
+he said to himself in the dream, "that is the meaning of the _living_
+rock!" and he became aware, he thought, that all rocks and stones on
+the surface of the earth must be thus endowed with life, and that the
+rocks were, so to speak, but the shell that contained these
+innumerable little creatures, incredibly minute, living, silken
+threads, with a small head, like boring worms, inhabiting burrows
+which went far into the heart of the granite, and each with a strong
+retractile power.
+
+I told this dream to a geologist the other day, who laughed, "An
+ingenious idea," he said, "and there may even be something in it! It
+is not by any means certain that stones do not have a certain obscure
+life of their own; I have sometimes thought that their marvellous
+cohesion may be a sign of life, and that if life were withdrawn, a
+mountain might in a moment become a heap of sliding sand."
+
+My friend said that the dream made such an impression upon him that
+for a time he found it hard to believe that stones and rocks had not
+this strange and secret life lurking in their recesses; and indeed it
+has since stood to me as a symbol of life, haunting and penetrating
+all the very hardest and driest things. It seems to me that just as
+there are almost certainly more colours than our eyes can perceive,
+and sounds either too acute or too deliberate for our ears to hear, so
+the domain of life may be much further extended in the earth, the air,
+the waters, than we can tangibly detect.
+
+It seems too to show me that it is our business to try ceaselessly to
+discover the secret life of thought in the world; not to conclude that
+there is no vitality in thought unless we can ourselves at once
+perceive it. This is particularly the case with books. Sometimes, in
+our College Library, I take down an old folio from the shelves, and
+as I turn the crackling, stained, irregular pages--it may be a volume
+of controversial divinity or outworn philosophy--it seems impossible
+to imagine that it can ever have been woven out of the live brain of
+man, or that any one can ever have been found to follow those old,
+vehement, insecure arguments, starting from unproved data, and leading
+to erroneous and fanciful conclusions. The whole thing seems so faded,
+so dreary, so remote from reality, that one cannot even dimly imagine
+the frame of mind which originated it, and still less the mood which
+fed upon such things.
+
+Yet I very much doubt if the aims, ideas, hopes of man, have altered
+very much since the time of the earliest records. When one comes to
+realise that geologists reckon a period of thirty million years at
+least, while the Triassic rocks, that is the lowest stratum that shows
+signs of life, were being laid down; and that all recorded history is
+but an infinitesimal drop in the ocean of unrecorded time, one sees at
+least that the force behind the world, by whatever name we call it, is
+a force that cannot by any means be hurried, but that it works with a
+leisureliness which we with our brief and hasty span of life cannot
+really in any sense conceive. Still it seems to have a plan! Those
+strange horned, humped, armoured beasts of prehistoric rocks are all
+bewilderingly like ourselves so far as physical construction goes;
+they had heart, brain, eyes, lungs, legs, a similarly planned
+skeleton; it seems as if the creative spirit was working by a
+well-conceived pattern, was trying to make a very definite kind of
+thing; there is not by any means an infinite variety, when one
+considers the sort of creatures that even a man could devise and
+invent, if he tried.
+
+There is the same sort of continuity and unity in thought The
+preoccupations of man are the same in all ages--to provide for his
+material needs, and to speculate what can possibly happen to his
+spirit, when the body, broken by accident or disease or decay, can no
+longer contain his soul. The best thought of man has always been
+centred on trying to devise some sort of future hope which could
+encourage him to live eagerly, to endure patiently, to act rightly. As
+science opens her vast volume before us, we naturally become more and
+more impatient of the hasty guesses of man, in religion and
+philosophy, to define what we cannot yet know; but we ought to be very
+tender of the old passionate beliefs, the intense desire to credit
+noble and lofty spirits, such as Buddha and Mahomet, with some source
+of divinely given knowledge. Yet of course there is an inevitable
+sadness when we find the old certainties dissolving in mist; and we
+must be very careful to substitute for them, if they slip from our
+grasp, some sort of principle which will give us freshness and
+courage. To me, I confess, the tiny certainties of science are far
+more inspiring than the most ardent reveries of imaginative men. The
+knowledge that there is in the world an inflexible order, and that we
+shall see what we shall see, and not what we would like to believe, is
+infinitely refreshing and sustaining. I feel that I am journeying
+onwards into what is unknown to me, but into something which is
+inevitably there, and not to be altered by my own hopes and fancies.
+It is like taking a voyage, the pleasure of which is that the sights
+in store are unexpected and novel; for a voyage would be a very poor
+thing if we knew exactly what lay ahead, and poorer still if we could
+determine beforehand what we meant to see, and could only behold the
+pictures of our own imaginations. That is the charm and the use of
+experience, that it is not at all what we expect or hope. It is in
+some ways sadder and darker; but it is in most ways far more rich and
+wonderful and radiant than we had dreamed.
+
+What I grow impatient of are the censures of rigid people, who desire
+to limit the hopes and possibilities of others by the little foot-rule
+which they have made for themselves. That is a very petty and even a
+very wicked thing to do, that old persecuting instinct which says, "I
+will make it as unpleasant for you as I can, if you will not consent
+at all events to pretend to believe what I think it right to believe."
+A man of science does not want to persecute a child who says
+petulantly that he will not believe the law of gravity. He merely
+smiles and goes on his way. The law of gravity can look after itself!
+Persecution is as often as not an attempt to reassure oneself about
+one's own beliefs; it is not a sign of an untroubled faith.
+
+We must not allow ourselves to be shaken by any attempt to dictate to
+us what we should believe. We need not always protest against it,
+unless we feel it a duty to do so; we may simply regard another's
+certainties as things which are not and cannot be proved. Argument on
+such subjects is merely a waste of time; but at the same time we ought
+to recognise the vitality which lies behind such tenacious beliefs,
+and be glad that it is there, even if we think it to be mistaken.
+
+And this brings me back to my first point, which is that it is good
+for us to try to realise the hidden life of the world, and to rejoice
+in it even though it has no truth for us. We must never disbelieve in
+life, even though in sickness and sorrow and age it may seem to ebb
+from us; and we must try at all costs to recognise it, to sympathise
+with it, to put ourselves in touch with it, even though it takes forms
+unintelligible and even repugnant to ourselves.
+
+Let me try to translate this into very practical matters. We many of
+us find ourselves in a fixed relation to a certain circle of people.
+We cannot break with them or abandon them. Perhaps our livelihood
+depends upon them, or theirs upon us. Yet we may find them harsh,
+unsympathetic, unkind, objectionable. What are we to do? Many people
+let the whole tangle go, and just creep along, doing what they do not
+like, feeling unappreciated and misunderstood, just hoping to avoid
+active collisions and unpleasant scenes. That is a very spiritless
+business! What we ought to do is to find points of contact, even at
+the cost of some repression of our own views and aims. And we ought
+too to nourish a fine life of our own, to look into the lives of other
+people, which can be done perhaps best in large books, fine
+biographies, great works of imagination and fiction. We must not
+drowse and brood in our own sombre corner, when life is flowing free
+and full outside, as in some flashing river. However little chance we
+may seem to have of _doing_ anything, we can at least determine to
+_be_ something; not to let our life be filled, like some base vessel,
+with the offscourings and rinsings of other spirits, but to remember
+that the water of life is given freely to all who come. That is the
+worst of our dull view of the great Gospel of Christ. We think--I do
+not say this profanely but seriously--of that water of life as a
+series of propositions like the Athanasian Creed!
+
+Christ meant something very different by the water of life. He meant
+that the soul that was athirst could receive a draught of a spring of
+cool refreshment and living joy. He did not mean a set of doctrines;
+doctrines are to life what parchments and title-deeds are to an estate
+with woods and waters, fields and gardens, houses and cottages, and
+live people moving to and fro. It is of no use to possess the
+title-deed if one does not visit one's estate. Doctrines are an
+attempt to state, in bare and precise language, ideas and thoughts
+dear and fresh to the heart. It is in qualities, hopes, and affections
+that we live; and if our eyes are opened, we can see, as my friend
+dreamed he saw, the surface of the hard rock full of moving points,
+and shimmering with threads of swift life, when the sun has fallen
+from the height, and the wind comes cool across the moor from the open
+gates of the evening.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+ACCESSIBILITY
+
+
+I was greatly interested the other day by seeing a photograph, in his
+old age, of Henry Phillpotts, the redoubtable Bishop of Exeter, who
+lost more money in lawsuits with clergymen than any Bishop, I suppose,
+who ever lived. He sate, the old man, in his clumsily fitting gaiters,
+bowed or crouched in an arm-chair, reading a letter. His face was
+turned to the spectator; with his stiff, upstanding hair, his
+out-thrust lip, his corrugated brow, and the deep pouched lines
+beneath his eyes, he looked like a terrible old lion, who could no
+longer spring, but who had not forgotten how to roar. His face was
+full of displeasure and anger. I remembered that a clergyman once told
+me how he had been sitting next the Bishop at a dinner of parsons, and
+a young curate, sitting on the other side of the Bishop, affronted
+him by believing him to be deaf, and by speaking very loudly and
+distinctly to him. The Bishop at last turned to him, with a furious
+visage, and said, "I would have you to understand, sir, that I am not
+deaf!" This disconcerted the young man so much that he could neither
+speak nor eat. The old Bishop turned to my friend, and said, in a
+heavy tone, "I'm not fit for society!" Indeed he was not, if he could
+unchain so fierce a beast on such slight provocation.
+
+And there are many other stories of the bitter things he said, and how
+his displeasure could brood like a cloud over a whole company. He was
+a gallant old figure, it is true, very energetic, very able,
+determined to do what he thought right, and infinitely courageous. I
+mused over the portrait, thought how lifelike and picturesque it was,
+and how utterly unlike one's idea of an aged Christian or a chief
+shepherd. In his beautiful villa by the sea, with its hanging woods
+and gardens, ruling with diligence, he seemed to me more like a
+stoical Roman Emperor, or a tempestuous Sadducee, the spirit of the
+world incarnate. One wondered what it could have been that had drawn
+him to Christ, or what part he would have taken if he had been on the
+Sanhedrin that judged Him!
+
+It seems to me that one of the first characteristics which one ought
+to do one's best to cast out of one's life is that of formidableness.
+Yet to tell a man that he is formidable is not an accusation that is
+often resented. He may indulgently deprecate it, but it seems to most
+people a sort of testimonial to their force and weight and influence,
+a penalty that they have to pay for being effective, a matter of
+prestige and honour. Of course, an old, famous, dignified man who has
+played a great part on the stage of life must necessarily be
+approached by the young with a certain awe. But there is no charm in
+the world more beautiful than the charm which can permeate dignity,
+give confidence, awake affection, dissipate dread. But if a man of
+that sort indulges his moods, says what he thinks bluntly and
+fiercely, has no mercy on feebleness or ignorance, he can be a very
+dreadful personage indeed!
+
+Accessibility is one of the first of Christian virtues; but it is not
+always easy to practise, because a man of force and ability, who is
+modest and shy, forgets as life goes on how much more his influence is
+felt. He himself does not feel at all different from what he was when
+he was young, when he was snubbed and silenced and set down in
+argument. Perhaps he feels that the world is a kinder and an easier
+place, as he grows into deference and esteem, but it is the surest
+sign of a noble and beautiful character if the greater he becomes the
+more simple and tender he also becomes.
+
+I was greatly interested the other day in attending a meeting at
+which, among other speakers, two well-known men spoke. The first was a
+man of great renown and prestige, and he made a very beautiful, lofty,
+and tender discourse; but, from some shyness or gravity of nature, he
+never smiled nor looked at his audience; and thus, fine though his
+speech was, he never got into touch with us at all. The second speech
+was far more obvious and commonplace, but the speaker, on beginning,
+cast a friendly look round and smiled on the audience; and he did the
+same all the time, so that one had at once a friendly sense of contact
+and geniality, and I felt that every word was addressed to me
+personally. That is what it is to be accessible!
+
+One of the best ways in which we can keep the spirit of poetry--by
+which I mean the higher, sweeter, purer influences of thought--alive
+in one's heart, is by accessibility--by determining to speak freely of
+what one admires and loves, what moves and touches one, what keeps
+one's mind upon the inner and finer life. It is not always possible or
+indeed convenient for younger people to do this, for reasons which are
+not wholly bad reasons. Young people ought not to be too eager to take
+the lead in talk, nor ought they to be too openly impatient of the
+more sedate and prosaic discourse of their elders; and then, too,
+there is a time for all things; one cannot keep the mind always on the
+strain; and the best and most beautiful things are apt to come in
+glimpses and hints, and are not always arrived at by discussion and
+argument.
+
+There is a story of a great artist full of sympathy and kindness, to
+whom in a single day three several people came to confide sad troubles
+and trials. The artist told the story to his wife in the evening. He
+said that he was afraid that the third of the visitors thought him
+strangely indifferent and even unkind. "The fact was," he said, "that
+my capacity for sympathy was really exhausted. I had suffered so much
+from the first two recitals that I could not be sorry any more. I
+_said_ I was sorry, and I _was_ sorry far down in my mind, but I could
+not _feel_ sorry. I had given all the sympathy I had, and it was no
+use going again to the well when there was no more water." This shows
+that one cannot command emotion, and that one must not force even
+thoughts of beauty upon others. We must bide our time, we must adapt
+ourselves, and we must not be instant in season and out of season. Yet
+neither must we be wholly at the mercy of moods. In religion, the
+theory of liturgical worship is an attempt to realise that we ought to
+practise religious emotion with regularity. We do not always feel we
+are miserable sinners when we say so, and we sometimes feel that we
+are when we do not say it; but it is better to confess what we know to
+be true, even if at that moment we do not feel it to be true.
+
+We ought not then always, out of modesty, to abstain from talking
+about the things for which we care. A foolish shyness will sometimes
+keep two sympathetic people from ever talking freely together of their
+real hopes and interests. We are terribly afraid in England of what we
+call priggishness. It is on the whole a wholesome tendency, but it is
+the result of a lack of flexibility of mind. What we ought to be
+afraid of is not seriousness and earnestness, but of solemnity and
+pomposity. We ought to be ready to vary our mood swiftly, and even to
+see the humorous side of sacred and beautiful things. The
+oppressiveness of people who hold a great many things sacred, and
+cannot bear that they should be jested about, is very great. There is
+nothing that takes all naturalness out of intercourse more quickly
+than the habit which some people have of begging that a subject may
+not be pursued "because it is one on which I feel very deeply." That
+is the essence of priggishness, to feel that our reasons are better,
+our motives purer, than the reasons of other people, and that we have
+the privilege of setting a standard. Conscious superiority is the note
+of the prig; and we have the right to dread it.
+
+But the Gospel again is full of precepts in favour of frankness,
+outspokenness, letting light shine out, speaking sincerely; only it
+must not be done provokingly, condescendingly, solemnly. It is well
+for every one to have a friend or friends with whom he can talk quite
+unaffectedly about what he cares for and values; and he ought to be
+able to say to such a friend, "I cannot talk about these things now; I
+am in a dusty, prosaic, grubby mood, and I want to make mud-pies"; the
+point is to be natural, and yet to keep a watch upon nature; not to
+force her into cramped postures, and yet not to indulge her in rude,
+careless, and vulgar postures. It is a bad sign in friendship, if
+intimacy seems to a man to give him the right to be rude, coarse,
+boisterous, censorious, if he will. He may sometimes be betrayed into
+each and all of these things, and be glad of a safety-valve for his
+ill-humours, knowing that he will not be permanently misunderstood by
+a sympathetic friend. But there must be a discipline in all these
+things, and nature must often give way and be broken in; frankness
+must not degenerate into boorishness, and liberty must not be the
+power of interfering with the liberty of the friend. One must force
+oneself to be courteous, interested, sweet-tempered, when one feels
+just the contrary; one must keep in sight the principle, and if
+violence must be done, it must not be done to the better nature. Least
+of all must one deliberately take up the r�le of exercising influence.
+That is a sad snare to many fine natures. One sees a weak, attractive
+character, and it seems so tempting to train it up a stick, to fortify
+it, to mould it. If one is a professed teacher, one has to try this
+sometimes; but even then, the temptation to drive rather than lead
+must be strenuously resisted.
+
+I have always a very dark suspicion of people who talk of spheres of
+influence, and who enjoy consciously affecting other lives. If this is
+done professionally, as a joyful sort of exercise, it is deadly. The
+only excuse for it is that one really cares for people and longs to be
+of use; one cannot pump one's own tastes and character into others.
+The only hope is that they should develop their own qualities. Other
+people ought not to be 'problems' to us; they may be mysteries, but
+that is quite another thing. To love people, if one can, is the only
+way. To find out what is lovable in them and not to try to discover
+what is malleable in them is the secret. A wise and witty lady, who
+knows that she is tempted to try to direct other lives, told me that
+one of her friends once remonstrated with her by saying that she ought
+to leave something for God to do!
+
+I know a very terrible and well-meaning person, who once spoke
+severely to me for treating a matter with levity. I lost my temper,
+and said, "You may make me ashamed of it, if you can, but you shall
+not bully me into treating a matter seriously which I think is wholly
+absurd." He said, "You do not enough consider the grave issues which
+may be involved." I replied that to be for ever considering graver
+issues seemed to me to make life stuffy and unwholesome. My censor
+sighed and shook his head.
+
+We cannot coerce any one into anything good. We may salve our own
+conscience by trying to do so, we may even level an immediate
+difficulty; but a free and generous desire to be different is the only
+hope of vital change. The detestable Puritan fibre that exists in many
+of us, which is the most utterly unchristian thing I know, tempts us
+to feel that no discipline is worth anything unless it is dark and
+gloomy; but that is the discipline of the law-court and the prison,
+and has never remedied anything since the world began. Wickedness is
+nearly always, perhaps always, a moral invalidism, and we shall see
+some day that to punish men for crime by being cruel to them is like
+condemning a man to the treadmill for having typhoid fever. I can only
+say that the more I have known of human beings, and the older I grow,
+the more lovable, gentle, sweet-tempered I have found them to be.
+
+The life of Carlyle seems to me to be one of the most terrible and
+convincing documents in the world in proof of what I have been saying.
+The old man was so bent on battering and bumping people into
+righteousness, so in love with spluttering and vituperating and
+thundering all over the place, that he missed the truest and sweetest
+ministry of love. He broke his wife's heart, and it is idle to pretend
+he did not. Mrs. Carlyle was a sharp-edged woman too, and hurt her own
+life by her bitter trenchancy. But there was enough true love and
+loyalty and chivalry in the pair to furnish out a hundred marriages.
+Yet one sees Carlyle stamping and cursing through life, and never
+seeing what lay close to his hand. I admire his life not because it
+was a triumph, but because it was such a colossal failure, and so
+finely atoned for by the noble and great-minded repentance of a man
+who recognised at last that it was of no use to begin by trying to be
+ruler over ten cities, unless he was first faithful in a few things.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+SYMPATHY
+
+
+But there is one thing which we must constantly bear in mind, and
+which all enthusiastic people must particularly recollect, namely,
+that our delight and interest in life must be large, tolerant, and
+sympathetic, and that we must not only admit but welcome an immense
+variety of interest. We must above all things be just, and we must be
+ready to be both interested and amused by people whom we do not like.
+The point is that minds should be fresh and clear, rather than
+stagnant and lustreless. Enthusiastic people, who feel very strongly
+and eagerly the beauty of one particular kind of delight, are sadly
+apt to wish to impose their own preferences upon other minds, and not
+to believe in the worth of others' preferences. Thus the men who feel
+very ardently the beauty of the Greek Classics are apt to insist that
+all boys shall be brought up upon them; and the same thing happens in
+other matters. We must not make a moral law out of our own tastes and
+preferences, and we must be content that others should feel the appeal
+of other sorts of beauty; that was the mistake which dogged the
+radiant path of Ruskin from first to last, that he could not bear that
+other people should have their own preferences, but considered that
+any dissidence from his own standards was of the nature of sin. If we
+insist on all agreeing with ourselves it is sterile enough; but if we
+begin to call other people hard names, and suspecting or vituperating
+their motives for disagreeing with us, we sin both against Love and
+Light. It was that spirit which called forth from Christ the sternest
+denunciation which ever fell from his lips. The Pharisees tried to
+discredit His work by representing Him as in league with the powers of
+evil; and this sin, which is the imputing of evil motives to actions
+and beliefs that appear to be good, because our own beliefs are too
+narrow to include them, is the sin which Christ said could find no
+forgiveness.
+
+I had a personal instance of this the other day which illustrates so
+clearly what I mean that I will quote it. I wrote a book called _The
+Child of the Dawn_, the point of which was to represent, in an
+allegory, my sincere belief that the after-life of man must be a life
+of effort, and experience, and growth. A lady wrote me a very
+discourteous letter to say that she believed the after-life to be one
+of Rest, and that she held what she believed to be my view to be
+unchristian and untrue. The notion that ardent, loving, eager spirits
+should be required to spend eternity in a sort of lazy contentment,
+forbidden to stir a finger for love and truth and right, is surely an
+insupportable one! What would be the joy of heaven to a soul full of
+energy and love, condemned to such luxurious apathy, forced to drowse
+through the ages in epicurean ease? If heaven has any meaning at all,
+it must satisfy our best and most active aspirations; and a paradise
+of utter and eternal indolence would be purgatory or hell to all noble
+natures. But this poor creature, tired no doubt by life and its
+anxieties, overcome by dreariness and sorrow, was not only desirous of
+solitary and profound repose, but determined to impose her own theory
+upon all the world as well. I blame no one for desiring rest; but to
+wish, as she made no secret that she wished, to crush and confound one
+who thought and hoped otherwise, does seem to me a very mean and
+wretched point of view. That, alas, is what many people mean when they
+say that they _believe_ a thing, namely that they would be personally
+annoyed if it turned out to be different from what they hoped.
+
+I am sure that we ought rather to welcome with all our might any
+evidence of strength and energy and joy, even if they seem to spring
+from principles entirely opposite to our own. The more we know of men
+and women, the more we ought to perceive that half the trouble in the
+world comes from our calling the same principles by different names.
+We are not called upon to give up our own principles, but we must
+beware of trying to meddle with the principles of other people.
+
+And therefore we must never be disturbed and still less annoyed by
+other people finding fault with our tastes and principles, calling
+them fantastic and sentimental, weak and affected, so long as they do
+not seek to impose their own beliefs upon us. That they should do so
+is of course a mistake; but we must recognise that it comes either
+from the stupidity which is the result of a lack of sympathy, or else
+from the nobler error of holding an opinion strongly and earnestly. We
+must never be betrayed into making the same mistake; we may try to
+persuade, and it is better done by example than by argument, but we
+must never allow ourselves to scoff and deride, and still less to
+abuse and vilify. We must rather do our best to understand the other
+point of view, and to acquiesce in the possibility of its being held,
+even if we cannot understand it. We must take for granted that every
+one whose life shows evidence of energy, unselfishness, joyfulness,
+ardour, peacefulness, is truly inspired by the spirit of good. We must
+believe that they have a vision of beauty and delight, born of the
+spirit. We must rejoice if they are making plain to other minds any
+interpretation of life, any enrichment of motive, any protest against
+things coarse and low and mean. We may wish--and we may try to
+persuade them--that their hopes and aims were wider, more bountiful,
+and more inclusive, but if we seek to exclude those hopes and aims,
+however inconsistent they may be with our own, that moment the shadow
+involves our own hopes, because our desire must be that the world may
+somehow become happier, fuller, more joyful, even if it is not on the
+lines which we ourselves approve.
+
+I know so many good people who are anxious to increase happiness, but
+only on their own conditions; they feel that they estimate exactly
+what the quantity and quality of joy ought to be, and they treat the
+joy which they do not themselves feel as an offence against truth. It
+is from these beliefs, I have often thought, that much of the
+unhappiness of family circles arises, the elders not realising how the
+world moves on, how new ideas come to the front, how the old hopes
+fade or are transmuted. They see their children liking different
+thoughts, different occupations, new books, new pleasures; and instead
+of trying to enter into these things, to believe in their innocence
+and their naturalness, they try to crush and thwart them, with the
+result that the boys and girls just hide their feelings and desires,
+and if they are not shamed out of them, which sometimes happens, they
+hold them secretly and half sullenly, and plan how to escape as soon
+as they can from the tender and anxious constraint into a real world
+of their own. And the saddest part of all is that the younger
+generation learn no experience thus; but when they form a circle of
+their own and the same expansion happens, they do as their parents
+did, saying to themselves, "My parents lost my confidence by insisting
+on what was not really important; but _my_ objections are reasonable
+and justifiable, and my children must trust me to know what is right."
+
+We must realise then that elasticity and sympathy are the first of
+duties, and that if we embark upon the crusade of joy, we must do it
+expecting to find many kinds of joy at work in the world, and some
+which we cannot understand. We may of course mistrust destructive joy,
+the joy of selfish pleasure, rough combativeness, foolish
+wastefulness, ugly riot--all the joys that are evidently dogged by
+sorrow and pain; but if we see any joy that leads to self-restraint
+and energy and usefulness and activity, we must recognise it as
+divine.
+
+We may have then our private fancies, our happy pursuits, our sweet
+delights; we may practise them, sure that the best proof of their
+energy is that they obviously and plainly increase and multiply our
+own happiness. But if we direct others at all, it must be as a
+signpost, pointing to a parting of roads and making the choice clear,
+and not as a policeman enforcing the majesty of our self-invented
+laws.
+
+Everything that helps us, invigorates us, comforts us, sustains us,
+gives us life, is right for us; of that we need never be in any doubt,
+provided always that our delight is not won at the expense of others;
+and we must allow and encourage exactly the same liberty in others to
+choose their own rest, their own pleasure, their own refreshment. What
+would one think of a host, whose one object was to make his guests eat
+and drink and do exactly what he himself enjoyed? And yet that is
+precisely what many of the most conscientious people are doing all day
+long, in other regions of the soul and mind.
+
+The one thing which we have to fear, in all this, is of lapsing into
+indolence and solitary enjoyment, guarding and hoarding our own
+happiness. We must measure the effectiveness of our enjoyment by one
+thing and one thing alone--our increase of affection and sympathy,
+our interest in other minds and lives. If we only end by desiring to
+be apart from it all, to gnaw the meat we have torn from life in a
+secret cave of our devising, to gain serenity by indifference, then we
+must put our desires aside; but if it sends us into the world with
+hope and energy and interest and above all affection, then we need
+have no anxiety; we may enter like the pilgrims into comfortable
+houses of refreshment, where we can look with interest at pictures and
+spiders and poultry and all the pleasant wonders of the place; we may
+halt in wayside arbours to taste cordials and confections, and enjoy
+from the breezy hill-top the pleasant vale of Beulah, with the
+celestial mountains rising blue and still upon the far horizon.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+SCIENCE
+
+
+I read the other day a very downright book, with a kind of dry
+insolence about it, by a man who was concerned with stating what he
+called the _mechanistic_ theory of the universe. The worlds, it
+seemed, were like a sandy desert, with a wind that whirled the sands
+about; and indeed I seemed, as I looked out on the world through the
+writer's eyes, to see nothing but wind and sand! One of his points was
+that every thought that passed through the mind was preceded by a
+change in the particles of the brain; so that philosophy, and
+religion, and life itself were nothing but a shifting of the sand by
+the impalpable wind--matter and motion, that was all! Again and again
+he said, in his dry way, that no theory was of any use that was not
+supported by facts; and that though there was left a little corner of
+thought, which was still unexplained, we should soon have some more
+facts, and the last mystery would be hunted down.
+
+But it seemed to me, as I read it, that the thoughts of man were just
+as much facts as any other facts, and that when a man had a vision of
+beauty, or when a hope came to him in a bitter sorrow, it was just as
+real a thing as the little particle of the brain which stirred and
+crept nearer to another particle. I do not say that all theories of
+religion and philosophy are necessarily true, but they are real
+enough; they have existed, they exist, they cannot die. Of course, in
+making out a theory, we must not neglect one set of facts and depend
+wholly on another set of facts; but I believe that the intense and
+pathetic desire of humanity to know why they are here, why they feel
+as they do, why they suffer and rejoice, what awaits them, are facts
+just as significant as the blood that drips from the wound, or the
+leaf that unfolds in the sun. The comforting and uplifting conclusion
+which the writer came to was that we were just a set of animated
+puppets, spun out of the drift of sand and dew by the thing that he
+called force. But if that is so, why are we not all perfectly
+complacent and contented, why do we love and grieve and wish to be
+different? I do still believe that there is a spirit that mingles with
+our hopes and dreams, something personal, beautiful, fatherly, pure,
+something which is unwillingly tied to earth and would be free if it
+could. The sense that we are ourselves wholly separate and distinct,
+with experience behind us and experience before us, seems to me a fact
+beside which all other facts pale into insignificance. And next in
+strength to that seems the fact that we can recognise, and draw near
+to, and be amazingly desirous of, as well as no less strangely hostile
+to, other similar selves; that our thought can mingle with theirs,
+pass into theirs, as theirs into ours, forging a bond which no
+accident of matter can dissolve.
+
+Does it really satisfy the lover, when he knows that his love is
+answered, to realise that it is all the result of some preceding
+molecular action of the brain? That does not seem to me so much a
+truculent statement as a foolish statement, shirking, like a glib and
+silly child, the most significant of data. And I think we shall do
+well to say to our scientist, as courteously as Sir Lancelot said to
+the officious knight, who proffered unnecessary service, that we have
+no need for him at this time.
+
+Now, I am not saying, in all this, that the investigation of science
+is wrong or futile. It is exactly the reverse; the message of God is
+hidden in all the minutest material things that lie about us; and it
+is a very natural and even noble work to explore it; but it is wrong
+if it leads us to draw any conclusions at present beyond what we can
+reasonably and justly draw. It is the inference that what explains the
+visible scheme of things can also explain the invisible. That is
+wrong!
+
+Let me here quote a noble sentence, which has often given me
+much-needed help, and served to remind me that thought is after all as
+real a thing as matter, when I have been tempted to feel otherwise. It
+was written by a very wise and tender philosopher, William James, who
+was never betrayed by his own severe standard of truth and reality
+into despising the common dreams and aspirations of simpler men. He
+wrote:
+
+     "I find it preposterous to suppose that if there be a
+     feeling of unseen reality, shared by numbers of the best
+     men in their best moments, responded to by other men in
+     their deep moments, good to live by, strength-giving--I find
+     it preposterous, I say, to suppose that the goodness of that
+     feeling for living purposes should be held to carry no
+     objective significance, and especially preposterous if it
+     combines harmoniously with an otherwise grounded philosophy
+     of objective truth."
+
+That is a very large and tolerant utterance, both in its suspension of
+impatient certainties and in its beautiful sympathy with all ardent
+visions that cannot clearly and convincingly find logical utterance.
+
+What I am trying to say in this little book is not addressed to
+professional philosophers or men of science, who are concerned with
+intellectual investigation, but to those who have to live life as it
+is, as the vast majority of men must always be. What I rather beg of
+them is not to be alarmed and bewildered by the statements either of
+scientific or religious dogmatists. No doubt we should like to know
+everything, to have all our perplexities resolved; but we have reached
+that point neither in religion nor in philosophy, nor even in science.
+We must be content not to know. But because we do not know, we need
+not therefore refuse to feel; there is no excuse for us to thrust the
+whole tangle away and out of sight, and just to do as far as possible
+what we like. We may admire and hope and love, and it is our business
+to do all three. The thing that seems to me--and I am here only
+stating a personal view--both possible and desirable, is to live as
+far as we can by the law of beauty, not to submit to anything by which
+our soul is shamed and insulted, not to be drawn into strife, not to
+fall into miserable fault-finding, not to allow ourselves to be
+fretted and fussed and agitated by the cares of life; but to say
+clearly to ourselves, "that is a petty, base, mean thought, and I will
+not entertain it; this is a generous and kind and gracious thought,
+and I will welcome it and obey it."
+
+One of the clearly discernible laws of life is that we can both check
+and contract habits; and when we begin our day, we can begin it if we
+will by prayer and aspiration and resolution, as much as we can begin
+it with bath and toilet. We can say, "I will live resolutely to-day in
+joy and good-humour and energy and kindliness." Those powers and
+possibilities are all there; and even if we are overshadowed by
+disappointment and anxiety and pain, we can say to ourselves that we
+will behave as if it were not so; because there is undoubtedly a very
+real and noble pleasure in putting off shadows and troubles, and not
+letting them fall in showers on those about us. We need not be stoical
+or affectedly bright; we often cannot give those who love us greater
+joy than to tell them of our troubles and let them comfort us. And we
+can be practical too in our outlook, because much of the grittiest
+irritation of life is caused by indulging indolence when we ought not,
+and being hurried when we might be leisurely. It is astonishing how a
+little planning will help us in all this, and how soon a habit is set
+up. We do not, it is true, know the limits of our power of choice. But
+the illusion, if it be an illusion, that we have a power of choice, is
+an infinitely more real fact to most of us than the molecular motion
+of the brain particles.
+
+And then too there is another fact, which is becoming more and more
+clear, namely, what is called the power of suggestion. That if we can
+put a thought into our mind, not into our reason, but into our inner
+mind of instinct and force, whether it be a base thought or a noble
+thought, it seems to soak unconsciously into the very stuff of the
+mind, and keep reproducing itself even when we seem to have forgotten
+all about it. And this is, I believe, one of the uses of prayer, that
+we put a thought into the mind, which can abide with us, secretly it
+may be, all the day; and that thus it is not a mere pious habit or
+tradition to have a quiet period at the beginning of the day, in which
+we can nurture some joyful and generous hope, but as real a source of
+strength to the spirit as the morning meal is to the body. I have
+myself found that it is well, if one can, to read a fragment of some
+fine, generous, beautiful, or noble-minded book at such an hour.
+
+There is in many people who work hard with their brains a curious and
+unreal mood of sadness which hangs about the waking hour, which I have
+thought to be a sort of hunger of the mind, craving to be fed; and
+this is accompanied, at least in me, by a very swift, clear, and
+hopeful apprehension, so that a beautiful thought comes to me as a
+draught of water to a thirsty man. So I make haste, as often as may
+be, just to drop such a thought at those times into the mind; it falls
+to the depths, as one may see a bright coin go gleaming and shifting
+down to the depths of a pool; or to use a homelier similitude, like
+sugar that drops to the bottom of a cup, sweetening the draught.
+
+These are little homely things; but it is through simple use and not
+through large theory that one can best practise joy.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+WORK
+
+
+I came out of the low-arched door with a sense of relief and passed
+into the sunshine; the meeting had broken up, and we went our ways. We
+had sate there an hour or two in the old panelled room, a dozen
+full-blooded friendly men discussing a small matter with wonderful
+ingenuity and zest; and I had spoken neither least nor most mildly,
+and had found it all pleasant enough. Then I mounted my bicycle and
+rode out into the fragrant country alone, with all its nearer green
+and further blue; there in that little belt of space, between the thin
+air above and the dense-dark earth beneath, was the pageant of
+conscious life enacting itself so visibly and eagerly. In the sunlit
+sky the winds raced gaily enough, with the void silence of moveless
+space above it; below my feet what depths of cold stone, with the
+secret springs; below that perhaps a core of molten heat and
+imprisoned fire!
+
+What was it all about? What were we all doing there? What was the
+significance of the little business that had been engaging our minds
+and tongues? What part did it play in the mighty universe?
+
+The thorn-tree thick with bloom, pouring out its homely spicy
+smell--it was doing too, beautifully enough, what we had been doing
+clumsily. It was living, intent on its own conscious life, the sap
+hurrying, the scent flowing, the bud waxing. The yellow-hammer poising
+and darting along the hedge, the sparrow twittering round the rick,
+the cock picking and crowing, were all intent on life, proclaiming
+that they were alive and busy. Something vivid, alert, impassioned was
+going forward everywhere, something being effected, something
+uttered--and yet the cause how utterly hidden from me and from every
+living thing!
+
+The memory of old poetry began to flicker in my mind like summer
+lightning. In the orchard, crammed with bloom, two unseen children
+were calling to each other; a sunburned, careless, graceful boy,
+whose rough clothes could not conceal his shapely limbs and easy
+movements, came driving some cows along the lane. He asked me the time
+in Dorian speech. The shepherds piping together on the Sicilian
+headland could not have made a fairer picture; and yet the boy and I
+could hardly have had a thought in common!
+
+All the poets that ever sang in the pleasant springtime can hardly
+have felt the joyful onrush of the season more sweetly than I felt it
+that day; and yet no philosopher or priest could have given me a hint
+of what the mystery was, why so ceaselessly renewed; but it was clear
+to me at least that the mind behind it was joyful enough, and wished
+me to share its joy.
+
+And then an hour later I was doing for no reason but that it was my
+business the dullest of tasks--no less than revising a whole sheaf of
+the driest of examination papers. Elaborate questions to elicit
+knowledge of facts arid and meaningless, which it was worth no human
+being's while to know, unless he could fill out the bare outlines with
+some of the stuff of life. Hundreds of boys, I dare say, in crowded
+schoolrooms all over the country were having those facts drummed into
+them, with no aim in sight but the answering of the questions which I
+was manipulating. That was a bewildering business, that we should
+insist on that sort of drilling becoming a part of life. Was that a
+relation it was well to establish? As the fine old, shrewd, indolent
+Dr. Johnson said, he for his part, while he lived, never again desired
+even to hear of the Punic War! And again he said, "You teach your
+daughters the diameters of the planets, and wonder, when you have
+done, why they do not desire your company."
+
+Cannot we somehow learn to simplify life? Must we continue to think
+that we can inspire children in rows? Is it not possible for us to be
+a little less important and pompous and elaborate about it all, to aim
+at more direct relations, to say more what we feel, to do more what
+nature bids us do?
+
+The heart sickens at the thought of how we keep to the grim highways
+of life, and leave the pleasant spaces of wood and field unvisited!
+And all because we want more than we need, and because we cannot be
+content unless we can be envied and admired.
+
+The cure for all this, it seems to me, is a resolute avoidance of
+complications and intricacies, a determination to live life more on
+our own terms, and to open our eyes to the simpler pleasures which lie
+waiting in our way on every side.
+
+I do not believe in the elaborate organisation of life; and yet I
+think it is possible to live in the midst of it, and yet not to be
+involved in it. I do not believe in fierce rebellion, but I do believe
+in quiet transformation; and here comes in the faith that I have in
+_Joyous Gard_. I believe that day by day we should clear a space to
+live with minds that have felt, and hoped, and enjoyed. That is the
+first duty of all; and then that we should live in touch with the
+natural beauty of the earth, and let the sweetness of it enter into
+our minds and hearts; for then we come out renewed, to find the beauty
+and the fulness of life in the hearts and minds of those about us.
+Life is complicated, not because its issues are not simple enough, but
+because we are most of us so afraid of a phantom which we create--the
+criticism of other human beings.
+
+If one reads the old books of chivalry, there seems an endless waste
+of combat and fighting among men who had the same cause at heart, and
+who yet for the pettiest occasions of dispute must need try to inflict
+death on each other, each doing his best to shatter out of the world
+another human being who loved life as well. Two doughty knights, Sir
+Lamorak and Sir Meliagraunce, must needs hew pieces off each other's
+armour, break each other's bones, spill each other's blood, to prove
+which of two ladies is the fairer; and when it is all over, nothing
+whatever is proved about the ladies, nothing but which of the two
+knights is the stronger! And yet we seem to be doing the same thing to
+this day, except that we now try to wound the heart and mind, to make
+a fellow-man afraid and suspicious, to take the light out of his day
+and the energy out of his work. For the last few weeks a handful of
+earnest clergymen have been endeavouring in a Church paper, with
+floods of pious Billingsgate, to make me ridiculous about a technical
+question of arch�ological interest, and all because my opinion differs
+from their own! I thankfully confess that as I get older, I care not
+at all for such foolish controversy, and the only qualms I have are
+the qualms I feel at finding human beings so childish and so fretful.
+
+Well, it is all very curious, and not without its delight too! What I
+earnestly desire is that men and women should not thus waste precious
+time and pleasant life, but go straight to reality, to hope. There are
+a hundred paths that can be trodden; only let us be sure that we are
+treading our own path, not feebly shifting from track to track, not
+following too much the bidding of others, but knowing what interests
+us, what draws us, what we love and desire; and above all keeping in
+mind that it is our business to understand and admire and conciliate
+each other, whether we do it in a panelled room, with pens and paper
+on the table, and the committee in full cry; or out on the quiet road,
+with one whom we trust entirely, where the horizon runs, field by
+field and holt by holt, to meet the soft verge of encircling sky.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+HOPE
+
+
+The other day I took up idly some magazine or other, one of those
+great lemon-coloured, salmon-hued, slaty paper volumes which lie in
+rows on the tables of my club. I will not stop now to enquire why
+English taste demands covers which show every mean stain, every soiled
+finger-print; but these volumes are always a reproach to me, because
+they show me, alas! how many subjects, how many methods of presenting
+subjects, are wholly uninteresting and unattractive to my trivial
+mind. This time, however, my eye fell upon a poem full of light and
+beauty, and of that subtle grace which seems so incomprehensible, so
+uncreated--a lyric by Mr. Alfred Noyes. It was like a spell which
+banished for an instant the weariness born of a long, hot, tedious
+committee, the oppression which always falls on me at the sight and
+sound of the cataract of human beings and vehicles, running so
+fiercely in the paved channels of London. A beautiful poem, but how
+immeasurably sad, an invocation to the memory and to the spirit of
+Robert Browning, not speaking of him in an elegiac strain as of a
+great poet who had lived his life to the full and struck his
+clear-toned harp, solemnly, sweetly, and whimsically too, year after
+year; but as of something great and noble wholly lost and separated
+from the living world.
+
+This was a little part of it:
+
+    Singer of hope for all the world,
+      Is it still morning where thou art,
+    Or are the clouds that hide thee furled
+      Around a dark and silent heart?
+
+    The sacred chords thy hand could wake
+      Are fallen on utter silence here,
+    And hearts too little even to break
+      Have made an idol of despair.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Come back to England, where thy May
+      Returns, but not that rapturous light;
+    God is not in His heaven to-day,
+      And with thy country nought is right.
+
+I think that almost magically beautiful! But is it true? I hope not
+and I think not. The poet went on to say that Paradox had destroyed
+the sanctity of Truth, and that Science had done nothing more than
+strip the skeleton of the flesh and blood that vested it, and crown
+the anatomy with glory. One cannot speak more severely, more gloomily,
+of an age than to say that it is deceived by analysis and paradox, and
+cares nothing for nobler and finer things. It seems to me to be a
+sorrowful view of life that, to have very little faith or prospect
+about it. It is true indeed that the paradox-maker is popular now; but
+that is because men are interested in interpretations of life; and it
+is true too that we are a little impatient now of fancy and
+imagination, and want to get at facts, because we feel that fancy and
+imagination, which are not built on facts, are very tricksy guides to
+life. But the view seems to me both depressed and morbid which cannot
+look beyond, and see that the world is passing on in its own great
+unflinching, steady manner. It is like the view of a child who,
+confronted with a pain, a disagreeable incident, a tedious day of
+drudgery, wails that it can never be happy again.
+
+The poem ends with a fine apostrophe to Browning as one "who stormed
+through death, and laid hold of Eternity." Did he indeed do that? I
+wish I felt it! He had, of course, an unconquerable optimism, which
+argued promise from failure and perfection from incompleteness. But I
+cannot take such hopes on the word of another, however gallant and
+noble he may be. I do not want hopes which are only within the reach
+of the vivid and high-hearted; the crippled, drudging slave cannot
+rejoice because he sees his warrior-lord gay, heroic, and strong. I
+must build my creed on my own hopes and possibilities, not on the
+strength and cheerfulness of another.
+
+And then my eye fell on a sentence opposite, out of an article on our
+social problems; and this was what I read:
+
+     "... the tears of a hunger-bitten philosophy, which is so
+     appalled by the common doom of man--that he must eat his
+     bread by the sweat of his brow--that it can talk, write, and
+     think of nothing else."
+
+I think there is more promise in that, rough and even rude as the
+statement is, because it opens up a real hope for something that is
+coming, and is not a mere lamentation over a star that is set.
+
+"A hunger-bitten philosophy"--is it not rather that there is creeping
+into the world an uneasy sense that we must, if we are to be happy,
+_share_ our happiness? It is not that the philosopher is hungry, it is
+that he cannot bear to think of all the other people who are condemned
+to hunger; and why it occupies his tongue and his pen, is that it
+clouds his serenity to know that others cannot now be serene. All this
+unrest, this grasping at the comfort of life on the one hand, and the
+patience, the justice, the tolerance, with which such claims are
+viewed by many possessors on the other, is because there is a spirit
+of sympathy growing up, which has not yet become self-sacrifice, but
+is on its way to become so.
+
+Then we must ask ourselves what our duty is. Not, I think, with all
+our comforts about us, to chant loud odes about its being all right
+with the world, but to see what we can do to make it all right, to
+equalise, to share, to give.
+
+The finest thing, of course, would be if those who are set in the
+midst of comfort could come calmly out of it, and live simpler,
+kinder, more direct lives; but apart from that, what can we do? Is it
+our duty, in the face of all that, to surrender every species of
+enjoyment and delight, to live meanly and anxiously because others
+have to live so? I am not at all sure that it would not prove our
+greatness if the thought of all the helpless pain and drudgery of the
+world, the drift of falling tears, were so intolerable to us that we
+simply could not endure the thought; but I think that would end in
+quixotism and pessimism of the worst kind, if one would not eat or
+drink, because men starve in Russia or India, if one would not sleep
+because sufferers toss through the night in pain. That seems a morbid
+and self-sought suffering.
+
+No, I believe that we must share our joy as far as we can, and that it
+is our duty rather to have joy to share, and to guard the quality of
+it, make it pure and true. We do best if we can so refine our
+happiness as to make it a thing which is not dependent upon wealth or
+ease; and the more natural our life is, the more can we be of use by
+the example which is not self-conscious but contagious, by showing
+that joy does not depend upon excitement and stimulus, but upon vivid
+using of the very stuff of life.
+
+Where we fail, many of us, is in the elaborateness of our pleasures,
+in the fact that we learn to be connoisseurs rather than viveurs, in
+losing our taste for the ancient wholesome activities and delights.
+
+I had caught an hour, that very day, to visit the Academy; it was a
+doubtful pleasure, though if I could have had the great rooms to
+myself it would have been a delightful thing enough; but to be crushed
+and elbowed by such numbers of people who seemed intent not on looking
+at anything, but on trying to see if they could recognise any of their
+friends! It was a curious collection certainly! So many pictures of
+old disgraceful men, whose faces seemed like the faces of toads or
+magpies; dull, blinking, malign, or with the pert brightness of
+acquisition. There were pictures too of human life so-called, silly,
+romantic, insincerely posed; some fatuous allegorical things, like
+ill-staged melodramas; but the strength of English art came out for
+all that in the lovely landscapes, rich fields, summer streams,
+far-off woodlands, beating seas; and I felt in looking at it all that
+the pictures which moved one most were those which gave one a sudden
+hunger for the joy and beauty of earth, not ill-imagined fantastic
+places, but scenes that one has looked upon a hundred times with love
+and contentment, the corn-field, the mill with its brimming leat, the
+bathing-place among quiet pastures, the lake set deep in water-plants,
+the old house in the twilight garden--all the things consecrated
+throughout long ages by use and life and joy.
+
+And then I strayed into the sculpture gallery; and I cannot describe
+the thrill which half a dozen of the busts there gave me--faces into
+which the wonder and the love and the pain of life seemed to have
+passed, and which gave me a sudden sense of that strange desire to
+claim a share in the past and present and future of the form and face
+in which one suddenly saw so much to love. One seemed to feel hands
+held out; hearts crying for understanding and affection, breath on
+one's cheek, words in one's ears; and thus the whole gallery melted
+into a great throng of signalling and beckoning presences, the air
+dense with the voices of spirits calling to me, pressing upon me;
+offering and claiming love, all bound upon one mysterious pilgrimage,
+none able to linger or to stay, and yet willing to clasp one close by
+the roadside, in wonder at the marvellous inscrutable power behind it
+all, which at the same moment seemed to say, "Rest here, love, be
+loved, enjoy," and at the same moment cried, "Go forward, experience,
+endure, lament, come to an end."
+
+There again opened before one the awful mystery of the beauty and the
+grief of life, the double strain which we must somehow learn to
+combine, the craving for continuance, side by side with the knowledge
+of interruption and silence. If one is real, the other cannot be real!
+And I for one have no doubt of which reality I hold to. Death and
+silence may deceive us; life and joy cannot. There may be something
+hidden beneath the seeming termination of mortal experience; indeed, I
+fully believe that there is; but even if it were not so, nothing could
+make love and joy unreal, or destroy the consciousness of what says
+within us, "This Is I." Our one hope then is not to be deceived or
+beguiled or bewildered by the complexity and intricacy of life; the
+path of each of us lies clear and direct through the tangle.
+
+And thus, as I have said, our task is not to be defrauded of our
+interior peace. No power that we know can do more than dissolve and
+transmute our mortal frame; it can melt into the earth, it can be
+carried into the depths of the sea, but it cannot be annihilated; and
+this is infinitely more true of our spirits; they may undergo a
+thousand transformations and transmutations, but they must be
+eternally there.
+
+So let us claim our experience bravely and accept it firmly, never
+daunted by it, never utterly despairing, leaping back into life and
+happiness as swiftly as we can, never doubting that it is assured to
+us. The time that we waste is that which is spent in anxious, trivial,
+conventional things. We have to bear them in our burdens, many of us,
+but do not let us be for ever examining them, weighing them in our
+hands, wishing them away, whining over them; we must not let them
+beguile us of the better part. If the despairing part of us cries out
+that it is frightened, wearied, anxious, we must not heed it; we must
+again and again assure ourselves that the peace is there, and that we
+miss it by our own fault. Above all let us not make pitiable excuses
+for ourselves. We must be like the woman in the parable who, when she
+lost the coin, did not sit down to bewail her ill-luck, but swept the
+house diligently until she found it. There is no such thing as loss in
+the world; what we lose is merely withheld until we have earned the
+right to find it again. We must not cultivate repentance, we must not
+yield to remorse. The only thing worth having is a wholesome sorrow
+for not having done better; but it is ignoble to remember, if our
+remembrance has anything hopeless about it; and we do best utterly to
+forget our failures and lapses, because of this we may be wholly sure,
+that joys are restored to us, that strength returns, and that peace
+beyond measure is waiting for us; and not only waiting for us, but as
+near us as a closed door in the room in which we sit. We can rise up,
+we can turn thither, we can enter if we will and when we will.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+EXPERIENCE
+
+
+It is very strange to contemplate the steady plunge of good advice,
+like a cataract of ice-cold water, into the brimming and dancing pool
+of youth and life, the maxims of moralists and sages, the epigrams of
+cynics, the sermons of priests, the good-humoured warnings of sensible
+men, all crying out that nothing is really worth the winning, that
+fame brings weariness and anxiety, that love is a fitful fever, that
+wealth is a heavy burden, that ambition is a hectic dream; to all of
+which ejaculations youth does not listen and cannot listen, but just
+goes on its eager way, trying its own experiments, believing in the
+delight of triumph and success, determined, at all events, to test all
+for itself. All this confession of disillusionment and disappointment
+is true, but only partially true. The struggle, the effort, the
+perseverance, does bring fine things with it--things finer by far than
+the shining crown and the loud trumpets that attend it.
+
+The explanation of it seems to be that men require to be tempted to
+effort, by the dream of fame and wealth and leisure and imagined
+satisfaction. It is the experience that we need, though we do not know
+it; and experience, by itself, seems such a tedious, dowdy, tattered
+thing, like a flag burnt by sun, bedraggled by rain, torn by the
+onset, that it cannot by itself prove attractive. Men are heavily
+preoccupied with ends and aims, and the recognised values of the
+objects of desire and hope are often false and distorted values. So
+singularly constituted are we, that the hope of idleness is alluring,
+and some people are early deceived into habits of idleness, because
+they cannot know what it is that lies on the further side of work. Of
+course the bodily life has to be supplied, but when a man has all that
+he needs--let us say food and drink, a quiet shelter, a garden and a
+row of trees, a grassy meadow with a flowing stream, a congenial task,
+a household of his own--it seems not enough! Let us suppose all that
+granted to a man: he must consider next what kind of life he has
+gained; he has the cup in his hands; with what liquor is it to be
+filled? That is the point at which the imagination of man seems to
+fail; he cannot set himself to vigorous, wholesome life for its own
+sake. He has to be ever looking past it and beyond it for something to
+yield him an added joy.
+
+Now, what we all have to do, if we can, is to regard life steadily and
+generously, to see that life, experience, emotion, are the real gifts;
+not things to be hurried through, thrust aside, disregarded, as a man
+makes a hasty meal before some occasion that excites him. One must not
+use life like the passover feast, to be eaten with loins girded and
+staff in hand. It is there to be lived, and what we have to do is to
+make the quality of it as fine as we can.
+
+We must provide then, if we can, a certain setting for life, a
+sufficiency of work and sustenance, and even leisure; and then we must
+give that no further thought. How many men do I not know, whose
+thought seems to be "when I have made enough money, when I have found
+my place, when I have arranged the apparatus of life about me, then I
+will live as I should wish to live." But the stream of desires
+broadens and thickens, and the leisure hour never comes!
+
+We must not thus deceive ourselves. What we have to do is to make
+life, instantly and without delay, worthy to be lived. We must try to
+enjoy all that we have to do, and take care that we do not do what we
+do not enjoy, unless the hard task we set ourselves is sure to bring
+us something that we really need. It is useless thus to elaborate the
+cup of life, if we find when we have made it, that the wine which
+should have filled it has long ago evaporated.
+
+Can I say what I believe the wine of life to be? I believe that it is
+a certain energy and richness of spirit, in which both mind and heart
+find full expression. We ought to rise day by day with a certain zest,
+a clear intention, a design to make the most out of every hour; not to
+let the busy hours shoulder each other, tread on each other's heels,
+but to force every action to give up its strength and sweetness. There
+is work to be done, and there are empty hours to be filled as well.
+It is happiest of all, for man and woman, if those hours can be
+filled, not as a duty but as a pleasure, by pleasing those whom we
+love and whose nearness is at once a delight. We ought to make time
+for that most of all. And then there ought to be some occupation, not
+enforced, to which we naturally wish to return. Exercise, gardening,
+handicraft, writing, even if it be only leisurely letters, music,
+reading--something to occupy the restless brain and hand; for there is
+no doubt that both physically and mentally we are not fit to be
+unoccupied.
+
+But most of all, there must be something to quicken, enliven, practise
+the soul. We must not force this upon ourselves, or it will be
+fruitless and dreary; but neither must we let it lapse out of mere
+indolence. We must follow some law of beauty, in whatever way beauty
+appeals to us and calls us. We must not think that appeal a selfish
+thing, because it is upon that and that alone that our power of
+increasing peace and hope and vital energy belongs.
+
+I have a man in mind who has a simple taste for books. He has a
+singularly pure and fine power of selecting and loving what is best
+in books. There is no self-consciousness about him, no critical
+contempt of the fancies of others; but his own love for what is
+beautiful is so modest, so perfectly natural and unaffected, that it
+is impossible to hear him speak of the things that he loves without a
+desire rising up in one's mind to taste a pleasure which brings so
+much happiness to the owner. I have often talked with him about books
+that I had thought tiresome and dull; but he disentangles so deftly
+the underlying idea of the book, the thought that one must be on the
+look-out for the motive of the whole, that he has again and again sent
+me back to a book which I had thrown aside, with an added interest and
+perception. But the really notable thing is the effect on his own
+immediate circle. I do not think his family are naturally people of
+very high intelligence or ability. But his mind and heart seem to have
+permeated theirs, so that I know no group of persons who seem to have
+imbibed so simply, without strain or effort, a delight in what is good
+and profound. There is no sort of dryness about the atmosphere. It is
+not that they keep talk resolutely on their own subjects; it is merely
+that their outlook is so fresh and quick that everything seems alive
+and significant. One comes away from the house with a horizon
+strangely extended, and a sense that the world is full of live ideas
+and wonderful affairs.
+
+I despair of describing an effect so subtle, so contagious. It is not
+in the least that everything becomes intellectual; that would be a
+rueful consequence; there is no parade of knowledge, but knowledge
+itself becomes an exciting and entertaining thing, like a varied
+landscape. The wonder is, when one is with these people, that one did
+not see all the fine things that were staring one in the face all the
+time, the clues, the connections, the links. The best of it is that it
+is not a transient effect; it is rather like the implanting of a seed
+of fire, which spreads and glows, and burns unaided.
+
+It is this sacred fire of which we ought all to be in search. Fire is
+surely the most wonderful symbol in the world! We sit in our quiet
+rooms, feeling safe, serene, even chilly, yet everywhere about us,
+peacefully confined in all our furniture and belongings, is a mass of
+inflammability, stored with gases, which at a touch are capable of
+leaping into flame. I remember once being in a house in which a pile
+of wood in a cellar had caught fire; there was a short delay, while
+the hose was got out, and before an aperture into the burning room
+could be made. I went into a peaceful dining-room, which was just
+above the fire, and it was strangely appalling to see little puffs of
+smoke fly off from the kindled floor, while we tore the carpets up and
+flew to take the pictures down, and to know the room was all crammed
+with vehement cells, ready to burst into vapour at the fierce touch of
+the consuming element.
+
+I saw once a vast bonfire of wood kindled on a grassy hill-top; it was
+curiously affecting to see the great trunks melt into flame, and the
+red cataract pouring so softly, so unapproachably into the air. It is
+so with the minds of men; the material is all there, compressed,
+welded, inflammable; and if the fire can but leap into our spirits
+from some other burning heart, we may be amazed at the prodigal force
+and heat that can burst forth, the silent energy, the possibility of
+consumption.
+
+I hold it to be of supreme value to each of us to try to introduce
+this fire of the heart into our spirits. It is not like mortal fire,
+a consuming, dangerous, truculent element. It is rather like the
+furnace of the engine, which can convert water into steam--the
+softest, feeblest, purest element into irresistible and irrepressible
+force. The materials are all at hand in many a spirit that has never
+felt the glowing contact; and it is our business first to see that the
+elements are there, and then to receive with awe the fiery touch. It
+must be restrained, controlled, guarded, that fierce conflagration;
+but our joy cannot only consist of pure, clear, lambent, quiescent
+elements. It must have a heart of flame.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+FAITH
+
+
+We ought to learn to cultivate, train, regulate emotion, just as we
+train other faculties. The world has hardly reached this point yet.
+First man trains his body that he may be strong, when strength is
+supreme. When almost the only argument is force, the man who is drawn
+to play a fine part in the world must above everything be strong,
+courageous, gallant, so that he may go to combat joyful and serene,
+like a man inspired. Then when the world becomes civilised, when
+weakness combines against strength, when men do not settle differences
+of feeling by combat and war, but by peaceable devices like votes and
+arbitrations, the intellect comes to the front, and strength of body
+falls into the background as a pleasant enough thing, a matter of
+amusement or health, and intellect becomes the dominant force. But we
+shall advance beyond even that, and indeed we have begun to advance.
+Buddhism and the Stoic philosophy were movements dictated more by
+reason than by emotion, which recognised the elements of pain and
+sorrow as inseparable from human life, and suggested to man that the
+only way to conquer evils such as these was by turning the back upon
+them, cultivating indifference to them, and repressing the desires
+which issued in disappointment. Christianity was the first attempt of
+the human spirit to achieve a nobler conquest still; it taught men to
+abandon the idea of conquest altogether; the Christian was meant to
+abjure ambition, not to resist oppression, not to meet violence by
+violence, but to yield rather than to fight.
+
+The metaphor of the Christian soldier is wholly alien to the spirit of
+the Gospel, and the attempt to establish a combative ideal of
+Christian life was one of the many concessions that Christianity in
+the hands of its later exponents made to the instincts of men. The
+conception of the Christian in the Gospel was that of a simple,
+uncomplicated, uncalculating being, who was to be so absorbed in
+caring for others that the sense of his own rights and desires and
+aims was to fall wholly into the background. He is not represented as
+meant to have any intellectual, political, or artistic pursuits at
+all. He is to accept his place in the world as he finds it; he is to
+have no use for money or comforts or accumulated resources. He is not
+to scheme for dignity or influence, nor even much to regard earthly
+ties. Sorrow, loss, pain, evil, are simply to be as shadows through
+which he passes, and if they have any meaning at all for him, they are
+to be opportunities for testing the strength of his emotions. But the
+whole spirit of the Christian revelation is that no terms should be
+made with the world at all. The world must treat the Christian as it
+will, and there are to be no reprisals; neither is there the least
+touch of opportunism about it. The Christian is not to do the best he
+can, but the best; he is frankly to aim at perfection.
+
+How then is this faith to be sustained? It is to be nourished by a
+sense of direct and frank converse with a God and Father. The
+Christian is never to have any doubt that the intention of the Father
+towards him is absolutely, kind and good. He attempts no explanation
+of the existence of sin and pain; he simply endures them; and he looks
+forward with serene certainty to the continued existence of the soul.
+There is no hint given of the conditions under which the soul is to
+continue its further life, of its desires or occupations; the
+intention obviously is that a Christian should live life freely and
+fully; but love, and interest in human relations are to supersede all
+other aims and desires.
+
+It has been often said that if the world were to accept the teaching
+of the Sermon on the Mount literally, the social fabric of the world
+would be dissolved in a month. It is true; but it is not generally
+added that it would be because there would be no need of the social
+fabric. The reason why the social fabric would be dissolved is because
+there would doubtless be a minority which would not accept these
+principles, and would seize upon the things which the world agrees to
+consider desirable. The Christian majority would become the slaves of
+the unchristian minority, and would be at their mercy. Christianity,
+in so far as it is a social system at all, is the purest kind of
+socialism, a socialism not of compulsion but of disinterestedness. It
+is easy, of course, to scoff at the possibility of so far
+disintegrating the vast and complex organisation of society, as to
+arrange life on the simpler lines; but the fact remains that the very
+few people in the world's history, like St. Francis of Assisi, for
+instance, who have ever dared to live literally in the Christian
+manner, have had an immeasurable effect upon the hearts and
+imaginations of the world. The truth is not that life cannot be so
+lived, but that humanity dares not take the plunge; and that is what
+Christ meant when He said that few would find the narrow way. The
+really amazing thing is that such immense numbers of people have
+accepted Christianity in the world, and profess themselves Christians
+without the slightest doubt of their sincerity, who never regard the
+Christian principles at all. The chief aim, it would seem, of the
+Church, has been not to preserve the original revelation, but to
+accommodate it to human instincts and desires. It seems to me to
+resemble the very quaint and simple old Breton legend, which relates
+how the Saviour sent the Apostles out to sell stale fish as fresh;
+and when they returned unsuccessful, He was angry with them, and
+said, "How shall I make you into fishers of men, if you cannot even
+persuade simple people to buy stale fish for fresh?" That is a very
+trenchant little allegory of ecclesiastical methods! And perhaps it is
+even so that it has come to pass that Christianity is in a sense a
+failure, or rather an unfulfilled hope, because it has made terms with
+the world, has become pompous and respectable and mundane and
+influential and combative, and has deliberately exalted civic duty
+above love.
+
+It seems to me that it is the business of all serious Christians
+deliberately to face this fact; and equally it is not their business
+to try to destroy the social organisation of what is miscalled
+Christianity. That is as much a part of the world now as the Roman
+Empire was a part of the world when Christ came; but we must not
+mistake it for Christianity. Christianity is not a doctrine, or an
+organisation, or a ceremonial, or a society, but an atmosphere and a
+life. The essence of it is to train emotion, to believe and to
+practise the belief that all human beings have in them something
+interesting, lovable, beautiful, pathetic; and to make the
+recognition of that fact, the establishment of simple and kind
+relations with every single person with whom one is brought into
+contact, the one engrossing aim of life. Thus the essence of
+Christianity is in a sense artistic, because it depends upon freely
+recognising the beauty both of the natural world and the human spirit.
+There are enough hints of this in the Gospel, in the tender
+observation of Christ, His love of flowers, birds, children, the fact
+that He noted and reproduced in His stories the beauty of the homely
+business of life, the processes of husbandry in field and vineyard,
+the care of the sheepfold, the movement of the street, the games of
+boys and girls, the little festivals of life, the wedding and the
+party; all these things appear in His talk, and if more of it were
+recorded, there would undoubtedly be more of such things. It is true
+that as opposition and strife gathered about Him, there falls a darker
+and sadder spirit upon the page, and the anxieties and ambitions of
+His followers reflect themselves in the record of denunciations and
+censures. But we must not be misled by this into thinking that the
+message is thus obscured.
+
+What then we have to do, if we would follow the pure Gospel, is to
+lead quiet lives, refresh the spirit of joy within us by feeding our
+eyes and minds with the beautiful sounds and sights of nature, the
+birds' song, the opening faces of flowers, the spring woods, the
+winter sunset; we must enter simply and freely into the life about us,
+not seeking to take a lead, to impress our views, to emphasise our own
+subjects; we must not get absorbed in toil or business, and still less
+in plans and intrigues; we must not protest against these things, but
+simply not care for them; we must not be burdensome to others in any
+way; we must not be shocked or offended or disgusted, but tolerate,
+forgive, welcome, share. We must treat life in an eager, light-hearted
+way, not ruefully or drearily or solemnly. The old language in which
+the Gospel comes to us, the formality of the antique phrasing, the
+natural tendency to make it dignified and hieratic, disguise from us
+how utterly natural and simple it all is. I do not think that
+reverence and tradition and awe have done us any more grievous injury
+than the fact that we have made the Saviour into a figure with whom
+frank communication, eager, impulsive talk, would seem to be
+impossible. One thinks of Him, from pictures and from books, as grave,
+abstracted, chiding, precise, mournfully kind, solemnly considerate. I
+believe it in my heart to have been wholly otherwise, and I think of
+Him as one with whom any simple and affectionate person, man, woman,
+or child, would have been entirely and instantly at ease. Like all
+idealistic and poetical natures, he had little use, I think, for
+laughter; those who are deeply interested in life and its issues care
+more for the beauty than the humour of life. But one sees a flash of
+humour here and there, as in the story of the unjust judge, and of the
+children in the market-place; and that He was disconcerting or cast a
+shadow upon natural talk and merriment I do not for an instant
+believe.
+
+And thus I think that the Christian has no right to be ashamed of
+light-heartedness; indeed I believe that he ought to cultivate and
+feed it in every possible way. He ought to be so unaffected, that he
+can change without the least incongruity from laughter to tears,
+sympathising with, entering into, developing the moods of those about
+him. The moment that the Christian feels himself to be out of place
+and affronted by scenes of common resort--the market, the bar, the
+smoking-room--that moment his love of humanity fails him. He must be
+charming, attractive, genial, everywhere; for the severance of
+goodness and charm is a most wretched matter; if he affects his
+company at all, it must be as innocent and beautiful girlhood affects
+a circle, by its guilelessness, its sweetness, its appeal. I have
+known Christians like this, wise, beloved, simple, gentle people,
+whose presence did not bring constraint but rather a perfect ease, and
+was an evocation of all that was best and finest in those near them. I
+am not recommending a kind of silly mildness, interested only in
+improving conversation, but rather a zest, a shrewdness, a bonhomie,
+not finding natural interests common and unclean, but passionately
+devoted to human nature--so impulsive, frail, unequal, irritable,
+pleasure-loving, but yet with that generous, sweet, wholesome fibre
+below, that seems to be evoked in crisis and trial from the most
+apparently worthless human beings. The outcasts of society, the
+sinful, the ill-regulated, would never have so congregated about our
+Saviour if they had felt Him to be shocked or indignant at sin. What
+they must rather have felt was that He understood them, loved them,
+desired their love, and drew out all the true and fine and eager and
+lovable part of them, because he knew it to be there, wished it to
+emerge. "He was such a comfortable person!" as a simple man once said
+to me of one of the best of Christians: "if you had gone wrong, he did
+not find fault, but tried to see the way out; and if you were in pain
+or trouble, he said very little; you only felt it was all right when
+he was by."
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+PROGRESS
+
+
+We must always hopefully and gladly remember that the great movements,
+doctrines, thoughts, which have affected the life of the world most
+deeply, are those which are most truly based upon the best and truest
+needs of humanity. We need never be afraid of a new theory or a new
+doctrine, because such things are never imposed upon an unwilling
+world, but owe their strength to the closeness with which they
+interpret the aims and wants of human beings. Still more hopeful is
+the knowledge which one gains from looking back at the history of the
+world, that no selfish, cruel, sensual, or wicked interpretation of
+life has ever established a vital hold upon men. The selfish and the
+cruel elements of humanity have never been able to band themselves
+together against the power of good for very long, for the simple
+reason that those who are selfish and evil have a natural suspicion of
+other selfish and evil people; and no combination of men can ever be
+based upon anything but mutual trust and affection. And thus good has
+always a power of combination, while evil is naturally solitary and
+disjunctive.
+
+Take such an attempt as that of Nietzsche to establish a new theory of
+life. His theory of the superman is simply this, that the future of
+the world was in the hands of strong, combative, powerful, predatory
+people. Those are the supermen, a natural aristocracy of force and
+unscrupulousness and vigour. But such individuals carry with them the
+seed of their own failure, because even if Nietzsche's view that the
+weak and broken elements of humanity were doomed to perish, and ought
+even to be helped to perish, were a true view, even if his supermen at
+last survived, they must ultimately be matched one against another in
+some monstrous and unflinching combat.
+
+Nietzsche held that the Christian doctrine of renunciation was but a
+translating into terms of a theory the discontent, the disappointment,
+the failure of the weak and diseased element of humanity, the slavish
+herd. He thought that Christianity was a glorification, a consecration
+of man's weakness and not of his strength. But he misjudged it wholly.
+It is based in reality upon the noble element in humanity, the power
+of love and trust and unselfishness which rises superior to the ills
+of life; and the force of Christianity lies in the fact that it
+reveals to men the greatness of which they are capable, and the fact
+that no squalor or wretchedness of circumstances can bind the thought
+of man, if it is set upon what is high and pure. The man or woman who
+sees the beauty of inner purity cannot ever be very deeply tainted by
+corruption either of body or of soul.
+
+Renunciation is not a wholly passive thing; it is not a mere suspicion
+of all that is joyful, a dull abnegation of happiness. It is not that
+self-sacrifice means a frame of mind too despondent to enjoy, so
+fearful of every kind of pleasure that it has not the heart to take
+part in it. It is rather a vigorous discrimination between pleasure
+and joy, an austerity which is not deceived by selfish, obvious,
+apparent pleasure, but sees what sort of pleasure is innocent,
+natural, social, and what sort of pleasure is corroding, barren, and
+unreal.
+
+In the Christianity of the Gospel there is very little trace of
+asceticism. The delight in life is clearly indicated, and the only
+sort of self-denial that is taught is the self-denial that ends in
+simplicity of life, and in the joyful and courageous shouldering of
+inevitable burdens. Self-denial was not to be practised in a
+spiritless and timid way, but rather as a man accepts the fatigues and
+dangers of an expedition, in a vigorous and adventurous mood. One does
+not think of the men who go on some Arctic exploration, with all the
+restrictions of diet that they have to practise, all the uncomfortable
+rules of life they have to obey, as renouncing the joys of life; they
+do so naturally, in order that they may follow a livelier inspiration.
+It is clear from the accounts of primitive Christians that they
+impressed their heathen neighbours not as timid, anxious, and
+despondent people, but as men and women with some secret overflowing
+sense of joy and energy, and with a curious radiance and brightness
+about them which was not an affected pose, but the redundant happiness
+of those who have some glad knowledge in heart and mind which they
+cannot repress.
+
+Let us suppose the case of a man gifted by nature with a great
+vitality, with a keen perception of all that is beautiful in life, all
+that is humorous, all that is delightful. Imagine him extremely
+sensitive to nature, art, human charm, human pleasure, doing
+everything with zest, interest, amusement, excitement. Imagine him,
+too, deeply sensitive to affection, loving to be loved, grateful,
+kindly, fond of children and animals, a fervent lover, a romantic
+friend, alive to all fine human qualities. Suppose, too, that he is
+ambitious, desirous of fame, liking to play an active part in life,
+fond of work, wishing to sway opinion, eager that others should care
+for the things for which he cares. Well, he must make a certain
+choice, no doubt; he cannot gratify all these things; his ambition may
+get in the way of his pleasure, his affections may interrupt his
+ambitions. What is his renunciation to be? It obviously will not be an
+abnegation of everything. He will not feel himself bound to crush all
+enjoyment, to refuse to love and be loved, to enter tamely and
+passively into life. He will inevitably choose what is dearest to his
+heart, whatever that may be, and he will no doubt instinctively
+eliminate from his life the joys which are most clouded by
+dissatisfaction. If he sets affection aside for the sake of ambition,
+and then finds that the thought of the love he has slighted or
+disregarded wounds and pains him, he will retrace his steps; if he
+sees that his ambitions leave him no time for his enjoyment of art or
+nature, and finds his success embittered by the loss of those other
+enjoyments, he will curb his ambition; but in all this he will not act
+anxiously and wretchedly. He will be rather like a man who has two
+simultaneous pleasures offered him, one of which must exclude the
+other. He will not spoil both, but take what he desires most, and
+think no more of what he rejects.
+
+The more that such a man loves life, the less is he likely to be
+deceived by the shows of life; the more wisely will he judge what part
+of it is worth keeping, and the less will he be tempted by anything
+which distracts him from life itself. It is fulness of life, after
+all, that he is aiming at, and not vacuity; and thus renunciation
+becomes not a feeble withdrawal from life, but a vigorous affirmation
+of the worth of it.
+
+But of course we cannot all expect to deal with life on this
+high-handed scale. The question is what most of us, who feel ourselves
+sadly limited, incomplete, fractious, discontented, fitful, unequal to
+the claims upon us, should do. If we have no sense of eager adventure,
+but are afraid of life, overshadowed by doubts and anxieties, with no
+great spring of pleasure, no passionate emotions, no very definite
+ambitions, what are we then to do?
+
+Or perhaps our case is even worse than that; we are meanly desirous of
+comfort, of untroubled ease, we have a secret love of low pleasures, a
+desire to gain rather than to deserve admiration and respect, a
+temptation to fortify ourselves against life by accumulating all sorts
+of resources, with no particular wish to share anything, but aiming to
+be left alone in a circle which we can bend to our will and make
+useful to us; that is the hard case of many men and women; and even if
+by glimpses we see that there is a finer and a freer life outside, we
+may not be conscious of any real desire to issue from our stuffy
+parlour.
+
+In either case our duty and our one hope is clear; that we have got
+somehow, at all costs and hazards, to find our way into the light of
+day. It is such as these, the anxious and the fearful on the one hand,
+the gross and sensual on the other, who need most of all a _Joyous
+Gard_ of their own. Because we are coming to the light, as Walt
+Whitman so splendidly says:--"The Lord advances and yet advances ...
+always the shadow in front, always the reach'd hand bringing up the
+laggards."
+
+Our business, if we know that we are laggards, if we only dimly
+suspect it, is not to fear the shadow, but to seize the outstretched
+hands. We must grasp the smallest clue that leads out of the dark, the
+resolute fight with some slovenly and ugly habit, the telling of our
+mean troubles to some one whose energy we admire and whose disapproval
+we dread; we must try the experiment, make the plunge; all at once we
+realise that the foundations are laid, that the wall is beginning to
+rise above the rubbish and the d�bris; we must build a home for the
+new-found joy, even if as yet it only sings drowsily and faintly
+within our hearts, like the awaking bird in the dewy thicket, when the
+fingers of the dawn begin to raise the curtain of the night.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+THE SENSE OF BEAUTY
+
+
+There is one difficulty which stands at the threshold of dealing with
+the sense of beauty so as to give it due importance and preponderance,
+and that is that it seems with many people to be so frail a thing, and
+to visit the mind only as the last grace of a mood of perfect serenity
+and well-being. Many people, and those not the least thoughtful and
+intelligent, find by experience that it is almost the first thing to
+disappear in moments of stress and pressure. Physical pain, grief,
+pre-occupation, business, anxiety, all seem to have the power of
+quenching it instantaneously, until one is apt to feel that it is a
+thing of infinite delicacy and tenderness, and can only co-exist with
+a tranquillity which it is hard in life to secure. The result of this
+no doubt is that many active-minded and forcible people are ready to
+think little of it, and just regard it as a mood that may accompany a
+well-earned holiday, and even so to be sparingly indulged.
+
+It is also undoubtedly true that in many robust and energetic people
+the sense of what is beautiful is so far atrophied that it can only be
+aroused by scenes and places of almost melodramatic picturesqueness,
+by ancient buildings clustered on craggy eminences, great valleys with
+the frozen horns of mountains, wind-ravaged and snow-streaked, peering
+over forest edges, the thunder and splendour of great sea-breakers
+plunging landward under rugged headlands and cliff-fronts. But all
+this pursuit of sensational beauty is to mistake its quality; the
+moment it is thus pursued it ceases to be the milk and honey of life,
+and it becomes a kind of stimulant which excites rather than
+tranquillises. I do not mean that one should of set purpose avoid the
+sight of wonderful prospects and treasure-houses of art, or act as the
+poet Gray did when he was travelling with Horace Walpole in the Alps,
+when they drew up the blinds of their carriage to exclude the sight of
+such prodigious and unmanning horrors!
+
+Still I think that if one is on the right track, and if beauty has its
+due place and value in life, there will be less and less impulse to go
+far afield for it, in search of something to thrill the dull
+perception and quicken it into life. I believe that people ought to be
+content to live most of their lives in the same place, and to grow to
+love familiar scenes. Familiarity with a scene ought not to result in
+the obliteration of all consciousness of it: one ought rather to find
+in use and affection an increased power of subtle interpretation, a
+closer and finer understanding of the qualities which underlie the
+very simplest of English landscapes. I live, myself, for most of the
+year in a countryside that is often spoken of by its inhabitants as
+dull, tame, and featureless; yet I cannot say with what daily renewal
+of delight I wander in the pastoral Cambridge landscape, with its long
+low lines of wold, its whitewalled, straw-thatched villages embowered
+in orchards and elms, its slow willow-bound streams, its level
+fenland, with the far-seen cloud-banks looming overhead: or again in
+the high-ridged, well-wooded land of Sussex, where I often live, the
+pure lines of the distant downs seen over the richly coloured
+intervening weald grow daily more dear and intimate, and appeal more
+and more closely to the deepest secrets of sweetness and delight. For
+as we train ourselves to the perception of beauty, we become more and
+more alive to a fine simplicity of effect; we find the lavish
+accumulation of rich and magnificent glories bewildering and
+distracting.
+
+And this is the same with other arts; we no longer crave to be dazzled
+and flooded by passionate and exciting sensation, we care less and
+less for studied mosaics of word and thought, and more and more for
+clearness and form and economy and austerity. Restless exuberance
+becomes unwelcome, complexity and intricacy weary us; we begin to
+perceive the beauty of what Fitzgerald called the 'great still books.'
+We do not desire a kaleidoscopic pageant of blending and colliding
+emotions, but crave for something distinctly seen, entirely grasped,
+perfectly developed. Because we are no longer in search of something
+stimulating and exciting, something to make us glide and dart among
+the surge and spray of life, but what we crave for is rather a calm
+and reposeful absorption in a thought which can yield us all its
+beauty, and assure us of the existence of a principle in which we can
+rest and abide. As life goes on, we ought not to find relief from
+tedium only in a swift interchange and multiplication of sensations;
+we ought rather to attain a simple and sustained joyfulness which can
+find nurture in homely and familiar things.
+
+If again the sense of beauty is so frail a thing that it is at the
+mercy of all intruding and jarring elements, it is also one of the
+most patient and persistent of quiet forces. Like the darting fly
+which we scare from us, it returns again and again to settle on the
+spot which it has chosen. There are, it is true, troubled and anxious
+hours when the beauty round us seems a cruel and intrusive thing,
+mocking us with a peace which we cannot realise, and torturing us with
+the reminder of the joy we have lost. There are days when the only way
+to forget our misery is to absorb ourselves in some practical energy;
+but that is because we have not learned to love beauty in the right
+way. If we have only thought of it as a pleasant ingredient in our cup
+of joy, as a thing which we can just use as we can use wine, to give
+us an added flush of unreasonable content, then it will fail us when
+we need it most. When a man is under the shadow of a bereavement, he
+can test for himself how he has used love. If he finds that the loving
+looks and words and caresses of those that are left to him are a mere
+torture to him, then he has used love wrongly, just as a selfish and
+agreeable delight; but if he finds strength and comfort in the
+yearning sympathy of friend and beloved, reassurance in the strength
+of the love that is left him, and confidence in the indestructibility
+of affection, then he has used love wisely and purely, loving it for
+itself, for its beauty and holiness, and not only for the warmth and
+comfort it has brought him.
+
+So, if we have loved beauty well, have seen in it a promise of
+ultimate joy, a sign of a deliberate intention, a message from a power
+that does not send sorrow and anxiety wantonly, cruelly and
+indifferently, an assurance of something that waits to welcome and
+bless us, then beauty is not a mere torturing menace, a heartless and
+unkind parading of joy which we cannot feel, but a faithful pledge of
+something secure and everlasting, which will return to us again and
+again in ever fuller measure, even if the flow of it be sometimes
+suspended.
+
+We ought then to train and practise our sense of beauty, not selfishly
+and luxuriously, but so that when the dark hour comes it may help us
+to realise that all is not lost, may alleviate our pain by giving us
+the knowledge that the darkness is the interruption, but that the joy
+is permanent and deep and certain.
+
+Thus beauty, instead of being for us but as the melody swiftly played
+when our hearts are high, a mere momentary ray, a happy accident that
+befalls us, may become to us a deep and vital spring of love and hope,
+of which we may say that it is there waiting for us, like the home
+that awaits the traveller over the weary upland at the foot of the
+far-looming hill. It may come to us as a perpetual sign that we are
+not forgotten, and that the joy of which it makes mention survives all
+interludes of strife and uneasiness. It is easy to slight and overlook
+it, but if we do that, we are deluded by the passing storm into
+believing that confusion and not peace is the end. As George Meredith
+nobly wrote, during the tragic and fatal illness of his wife, "Here I
+am in the very pits of tragic life.... Happily for me, I have learnt
+to live much in the spirit, and see brightness on the other side of
+life, otherwise this running of my poor doe with the inextricable
+arrow in her flanks would pull me down too." The spirit, the
+brightness of the other side, that is the secret which beauty can
+communicate, and the message which she bears upon her radiant wings.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+THE PRINCIPLE OF BEAUTY
+
+
+"I have loved," said Keats, "the _principle_ of beauty in all things."
+It is that to which all I have said has been leading, as many roads
+unite in one. We must try to use discrimination, not to be so
+optimistic that we see beauty if it is not there, not to overwhelm
+every fling that every craftsman has at beauty with gush and
+panegyric; not to praise beauty in all companies, or to go off like a
+ripe broom-pod, at a touch. When Walter Pater was confronted with
+something which courtesy demanded that he should seem to admire, he
+used to say in that soft voice of his, which lingered over emphatic
+syllables, "Very costly, no doubt!"
+
+But we must be generous to all beautiful intention, and quick to see
+any faintest beckoning of the divine quality; and indeed I would not
+have most people aim at too critical an attitude, for I believe it is
+more important to enjoy than to appraise; still we must keep the
+principle in sight, and not degenerate into mere collectors of
+beautiful impressions. If we simply try to wallow in beauty, we are
+using it sensually; while if on the other hand we aim at correctness
+of taste, which is but the faculty of sincere concurrence with the
+artistic standards of the day, we come to a sterile connoisseurship
+which has no living inspiration about it. It is the temperate use of
+beauty which we must aim at, and a certain candour of observation,
+looking at all things, neither that we may condemn if we can, nor that
+we may luxuriously abandon ourselves to sensation, but that we may
+draw from contemplation something of the inner light of life.
+
+I have not here said much about the arts--music, sculpture, painting,
+architecture--because I do not want to recommend any specialisation in
+beauty. I know, indeed, several high-minded people, diligent,
+unoriginal, faithful, who have begun by recognising in a philosophical
+way the worth and force of beauty, but who, having no direct instinct
+for it, have bemused themselves by conventional and conscientious
+study, into the belief that they are on the track of beauty in art,
+when they have no real appreciation of it at all, no appetite for it,
+but are only bent on perfecting temperament, and whose unconscious
+motive has been but a fear of not being in sympathy with men whose
+ardour they admire, but whose love of beauty they do not really share.
+Such people tend to gravitate to early Italian painting, because of
+its historical associations, and because it can be categorically
+studied. They become what is called 'purists,' which means little more
+than a learned submissiveness. In literature they are found to admire
+Carlyle, Ruskin, and Browning, not because of their method of treating
+thought, but because of the ethical maxims imbedded--as though one
+were to love a conserve of plums for the sake of the stones!
+
+One should love great writers and great artists not because of their
+great thoughts--there are plenty of inferior writers who traffic in
+great thoughts--but because great artists and writers are the people
+who can irradiate with a heavenly sort of light common thoughts and
+motives, so as to show the beauty which underlies them and the
+splendour that breaks from them. It is possible to treat fine thoughts
+in a heavy way so as to deprive them of all their rarity and
+inspiration. The Gospel contains some of the most beautiful thoughts
+in the world, beautiful because they are common thoughts which every
+one recognises to be true, yet set in a certain light, just as the
+sunset with its level, golden, remote glow has the power of
+transfiguring a familiar scene with a glory of mystery and desire. But
+one has but to turn over a volume of dull sermons, or the pages of a
+dreary commentary, to find the thoughts of the Gospel transformed into
+something that seems commonplace and uninspiring. The beauty of
+ordinary things depends upon the angle at which you see them and the
+light which falls upon them; and the work of the great artist and the
+great writer is to show things at the right angle, and to shut off the
+confusing muddled cross-lights which conceal the quality of the thing
+seen.
+
+The recognition of the principle of beauty lies in the assurance that
+many things have beauty, if rightly viewed, and in the determination
+to see things in the true light. Thus the soul that desires to see
+beauty must begin by believing it to be there, must expect to see it,
+must watch for it, must not be discouraged by those who do not see it,
+and least of all give heed to those who would forbid one to discern it
+except in definite and approved forms. The worst of �sthetic prophets
+is that, like the Scribes, they make a fence about the law, and try to
+convert the search for principle into the accumulation of detailed
+tenets.
+
+Let us then never attempt to limit beauty to definite artistic lines;
+that is the mistake of the superstitious formalist who limits divine
+influences to certain sanctuaries and fixed ceremonials. The use of
+the sanctuary and the ceremonial is only to concentrate at one fiery
+point the wide current of impulsive ardour. The true lover of beauty
+will await it everywhere, will see it in the town, with its rising
+roofs and its bleached and blackened steeples, in the seaport with its
+quaint crowded shipping, in the clustered hamlet with its
+orchard-closes and high-roofed barns, in the remote country with its
+wide fields and its converging lines, in the beating of the sea on
+shingle-bank and promontory; and then if he sees it there, he will see
+it concentrated and emphasised in pictures of these things, the
+beauty of which lies so often in the sense of the loving apprehension
+of the mystery of lights and hues; and then he will trace the same
+subtle spirit in the forms and gestures and expressions of those among
+whom he lives, and will go deeper yet and trace the same spirit in
+conduct and behaviour, in the free and gallant handling of life, in
+the suppression of mean personal desires, in doing dull and
+disagreeable things with a fine end in view, in the noble affection of
+the simplest people; until he becomes aware that it is a quality which
+runs through everything he sees or hears or feels, and that the
+eternal difference is whether one views things dully and stupidly,
+regarding the moment hungrily and greedily, as a dog regards a
+plateful of food, or whether one looks at it all as a process which
+has some fine and distant end in view, and sees that all experience,
+whether it be of things tangible and visible, or of things
+intellectual and spiritual, is only precious because it carries one
+forward, forms, moulds, and changes one with a hope of some high and
+pure resurrection out of things base and hurried into things noble and
+serene.
+
+The need, the absolute need for all and each of us, is to find
+something strong and great to rest and repose upon. Otherwise one
+simply falls back on the fact that one exists and on the whole enjoys
+existing, while one shuns the pain and darkness of ceasing to exist.
+As life goes on, there comes such an impulse to say, "Life is
+attractive and might be pleasant, but there is always something
+shadowing it, spoiling it, gnawing at it, a worm in the bud, of which
+one cannot be rid." And so one sinks into a despairing apathy.
+
+What then is one born for? Just to live and forget, to be hurt and
+healed, to be strong and grow weak? That as the spirit falls into
+faintness, the body should curdle into worse than dust? To give each a
+memory of things sharp and sweet, that no one else remembers, and then
+to destroy that?
+
+No, that is not the end! The end is rather to live fully and ardently,
+to recognise the indestructibility of the spirit, to strip off from it
+all that wounds and disables it, not by drearily toiling against
+haunting faults, but by rising as often as we can into serene ardour
+and deep hopefulness. That is the principle of beauty, to feel that
+there is something transforming and ennobling us, which we can lay
+hold of if we wish, and that every time we see the great spirit at
+work and clasp it close to our feeble will, we soar a step higher and
+see all things with a wider and a clearer vision.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+LIFE
+
+
+But in all this, and indeed beyond all this, we must not dare to
+forget one thing; that it is life with which we are confronted, and
+that our business is to live it, and to live it in our own way; and
+here we may thankfully rejoice that there is less and less tendency in
+the world for people to dictate modes of life to us; the tyrant and
+the despot are not only out of date--they are out of fashion, which is
+a far more disabling thing! There is of course a type of person in the
+world who loves to call himself robust and even virile--heaven help us
+to break down that bestial ideal of manhood!--who is of the stuff that
+all bullies have been made since the world began, a compound of
+courage, stupidity, and complacency; to whom the word 'living' has no
+meaning, unless it implies the disturbing and disquieting of other
+people. We are gradually putting him in his right place, and the
+kindlier future will have little need of him; because a sense is
+gradually shaping itself in the world that life is best lived on
+peaceful and orderly lines.
+
+But if the robust _viveur_ is on the wrong tack, so long as he grabs
+and uses, and neither gives nor is used, so too the more peaceable and
+poetical nature makes a very similar mistake, if his whole heart is
+bent upon receiving and enjoying; for he too is filching and conveying
+away pleasure out of life, though he may do it more timidly and
+unobtrusively. Such a man or woman is apt to make too much out of the
+occasions and excitements of life, to over-value the �sthetic kind of
+success, which is the delicate impressing of other people, claiming
+their admiration and applause, and being ill-content if one is not
+noticed and praised. Such an one is apt to overlook the common stuff
+and use of life--the toil, the endurance, the discipline of it; to
+flutter abroad only on sunshiny days, and to sit sullenly with folded
+wing when the sky breaks into rain and chilly winds are blowing. The
+man who lives thus, is in danger of over-valuing the raptures and
+thrills of life, of being fitful and moody and fretful; what he has to
+do is to spread serenity over his days, and above all to be ready to
+combine, to minister, to sympathise, to serve. _Joyous Gard_ is a very
+perilous place, if we grow too indolent to leave it; the essence of it
+is refreshment and not continuance. There are two conditions attached
+to the use of it; one is that we should have our own wholesome work in
+the world, and the second that we should not grow too wholly absorbed
+in labour.
+
+No great moral leaders and inspirers of men have ever laid stress on
+excessive labour. They have accepted work as one of the normal
+conditions of life, but their whole effort has been to teach men to
+look away from work, to find leisure to be happy and good. There is no
+essential merit in work, apart from its necessity. Of course men may
+find themselves in positions where it seems hard to avoid a fierce
+absorption in work. It is said by legislators that the House of
+Commons, for instance, is a place where one can neither work nor rest!
+And I have heard busy men in high administrative office, deplore
+rhetorically the fact that they have no time to read or think. It is
+almost as unwholesome never to read or think as it is to be always
+reading and thinking, because the light and the inspiration fade out
+of life, and leave one a gaunt and wolfish lobbyist, who goes about
+seeking whom he may indoctrinate. But I have little doubt that when
+the world is organised on simpler lines, we shall look back to this
+era, as an era when men's heads were turned by work, and when more
+unnecessary things were made and done and said than has ever been the
+case since the world began.
+
+The essence of happy living is never to find life dull, never to feel
+the ugly weariness which comes of overstrain; to be fresh, cheerful,
+leisurely, sociable, unhurried, well-balanced. It seems to me that it
+is impossible to be these things unless we have time to consider life
+a little, to deliberate, to select, to abstain. We must not help
+ourselves either to work or to joy as if we were helping ourselves to
+potatoes! If life ought not to be perpetual drudgery, neither can it
+be a perpetual feast. What I believe we ought to aim at is to put
+interest and zest into the simplest acts, words, and relations of
+life, to discern the quality of work and people alike. We must not
+turn our whole minds and hearts to literature or art or work, or even
+to religion; but we must go deeper, and look close at life itself,
+which these interpret and out of which they flow. For indeed life is
+nobler and richer than any one interpretation of it. Let us take for a
+moment one of the great interpreters of life, Robert Browning, who was
+so intensely interested above all things in personality. The charm of
+his writing is that he contrives, by some fine instinct, to get behind
+and within the people of whom he writes, sees with their eyes, hears
+with their ears, though he speaks with his own lips. But one must
+observe that the judgment of none of his characters is a final
+judgment; the artist, the lover, the cynic, the charlatan, the sage,
+the priest--they none of them provide a solution to life; they set out
+on their quest, they make their guesses, they reveal their aims, but
+they never penetrate the inner secret. It is all inference and hope;
+Browning himself seems to believe in life, not because of the reasons
+which his characters give for believing in it, but in spite of all
+their reasons. Like little boats, the reasons seem to strand, one by
+one, some sooner, some later, on the sands beneath the shallow sea;
+and then the great serene large faith of the poet comes flooding in,
+and bears them on their way.
+
+It is somewhat thus that we must deal with life; it is no good making
+up a philosophy which just keeps us gay when all is serene and
+prosperous. Unpleasant, tedious, vexing, humiliating, painful,
+shattering things befall us all by the way. That is the test of our
+belief in life, if nothing daunts us, if nothing really mars our
+serenity of mood.
+
+And so what this little book of mine tries to recommend is that we
+should bestir ourselves to design, plan, use, practise life; not drift
+helplessly on its current, shouting for joy when all is bright,
+helplessly bemoaning ourselves when all is dark; and that we should do
+this by guarding ourselves from impulse and whim, by feeding our minds
+and hearts on all the great words, high examples, patient endurances,
+splendid acts, of those whom we recognise to have been the finer sort
+of men. One of the greatest blessings of our time is that we can do
+that so easily. In the dullest, most monotonous life we can stay
+ourselves upon this heavenly manna, if we have the mind. We need not
+feel alone or misunderstood or unappreciated, even if we are
+surrounded by harsh, foolish, dry, discontented, mournful persons. The
+world is fuller now than it ever was of brave and kindly people who
+will help us if we ask for help. Of course if we choose to perish
+without a struggle, we can do that. And my last word of advice to
+people into whose hands this book may fall, who are suffering from a
+sense of dim failure, timid bewilderment, with a vague desire in the
+background to make something finer and stronger out of life, is to
+turn to some one whom they can trust--not intending to depend
+constantly and helplessly upon them--and to get set in the right road.
+
+Of course, as I have said, care and sorrow, heaviness and
+sadness--even disillusionment--must come; but the reason of that is
+because we must not settle too close to the sweet and kindly earth,
+but be ready to unfurl our wings for the passage over sea; and to what
+new country of God, what unknown troops and societies of human
+spirits, what gracious reality of dwelling-place, of which our beloved
+fields and woods and streams are nothing but the gentle and sweet
+symbols, our flight may bear us, I cannot tell; but that we are all in
+the mind of God, and that we cannot wander beyond the reach of His
+hand or the love of His heart, of this I am more sure than I am of
+anything else in this world where familiarity and mystery are so
+strangely entwined.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Joyous Gard, by Arthur Christopher Benson
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