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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Where No Fear Was:  A Book About Fear
+by Arthur Christopher Benson
+(#2 in our series by Arthur Christopher Benson)
+
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+Title: Where No Fear Was:  A Book About Fear
+
+Author: Arthur Christopher Benson
+
+Release Date: November, 2003  [Etext #4611]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 19, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Where No Fear Was:  A Book About Fear
+by Arthur Christopher Benson
+******This file should be named wnfwa10.txt or wnfwa10.zip******
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+
+WHERE NO FEAR WAS
+
+A BOOK ABOUT FEAR
+
+
+
+By ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON
+
+1914
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"Thus they went on till they came to about the middle of the
+galley, and then Christiana said, 'Methinks I see something yonder
+on the read before us, a thing of such a shape such as I have not
+seen.' Then said Joseph, 'Mother, what is it?' 'An ugly thing,
+Child, an ugly thing,' said she. 'But, Mother, what is it like?'
+said he. ''Tis like I cannot tell what,' said she. And now it was
+but a little way off. Then said she, 'It is nigh.'"
+
+"Pilgrim's Progress," Part II.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Where No Fear Was
+
+I
+
+THE SHADOW
+
+
+
+
+
+There surely may come a time for each of us, if we have lived with
+any animation or interest, if we have had any constant or even
+fitful desire to penetrate and grasp the significance of the
+strange adventure of life, a time, I say, when we may look back a
+little, not sentimentally or with any hope of making out an
+impressive case for ourselves, and interrogate the memory as to
+what have been the most real, vivid, and intense things that have
+befallen us by the way. We may try to separate the momentous from
+the trivial, and the important from the unimportant; to discern
+where and how and when we might have acted differently; to see and
+to say what has really mattered, what has made a deep mark on our
+spirit; what has hampered or wounded or maimed us. Because one of
+the strangest things about life seems to be our incapacity to
+decide beforehand, or even at the time, where the real and fruitful
+joys, and where the dark dangers and distresses lie. The things
+that at certain times filled all one's mind, kindled hope and aim,
+seemed so infinitely desirable, so necessary to happiness, have
+faded, many of them, into the lightest and most worthless of husks
+and phantoms, like the withered flowers that we find sometimes shut
+in the pages of our old books, and cannot even remember of what
+glowing and emotional moment they were the record!
+
+How impossible it is ever to learn anything by being told it! How
+necessary it is to pay the full price for any knowledge worth
+having! The anxious father, the tearful mother, may warn the little
+boy before he goes to school of the dangers that await him. He does
+not understand, he does not attend, he is looking at the pattern of
+the carpet, and wondering for the hundredth time whether the oddly-
+shaped blue thing which appears and reappears at intervals is a
+bird or a flower--yes, it is certainly meant for a bird perched on
+a bough! He wishes the talk were over, he looks at the little scar
+on his father's hand, and remembers that he has been told that he
+cut it in a cucumber-frame when he was a boy. And then, long
+afterwards perhaps, when he has made a mistake and is suffering for
+it, he sees that it was THAT of which they spoke, and wonders that
+they could not have explained it better.
+
+And this is so all along! We cannot recognise the dark tower, to
+which in the story Childe Roland came, by any description. We must
+go there ourselves; and not till we feel the teeth of the trap
+biting into us, do we see that it was exactly in such a place that
+we had been warned that it would be laid.
+
+There is an episode in that strange and beautiful book Phantastes,
+by George Macdonald, which comes often to my mind. The boy is
+wandering in the enchanted forest, and he is told to avoid the
+house where the Daughter of the Ogre lives. His morose young guide
+shows him where the paths divide, and he takes the one indicated to
+him with a sense of misgiving.
+
+A little while before he had been deceived by the Alder-maiden, and
+had given her his love in error. This has taken some of the old joy
+out of his heart, but he has made his escape from her, and thinks
+he has learned his lesson.
+
+But he comes at last to the long low house in the clearing; he
+finds within it an ancient woman reading out of an old volume; he
+enters, he examines the room in which she sits, and yielding to
+curiosity, he opens the door of the great cupboard in the corner,
+in spite of a muttered warning. He thinks, on first opening it,
+that it is just a dark cupboard; but he sees with a shock of
+surprise that he is looking into a long dark passage, which leads
+out, far away from where he stands, into the starlit night. Then a
+figure, which seems to have been running from a long distance,
+turns the corner, and comes speeding down towards him. He has not
+time to close the door, but stands aside to let it pass; it passes,
+and slips behind him; and soon he sees that it is a shadow of
+himself, which has fallen on the floor at his feet. He asks what
+has happened, and then the old woman says that he has found his
+shadow, a thing which happens to many people; and then for the
+first time she raises her head and looks at him, and he sees that
+her mouth is full of long white teeth; he knows where he is at
+last, and stumbles out, with the dark shadow at his heels, which is
+to haunt him so miserably for many a sad day.
+
+That is a very fine and true similitude of what befalls many men
+and women. They go astray, they give up some precious thing--their
+innocence perhaps--to a deluding temptation. They are delivered for
+a time; and then a little while after they find their shadow, which
+no tears or anguish of regret can take away, till the healing of
+life and work and purpose annuls it. Neither is it always annulled,
+even in length of days.
+
+But it is a paltry and inglorious mistake to let the shadow have
+its disheartening will of us. It is only a shadow, after all! And
+if we capitulate after our first disastrous encounter, it does not
+mean that we shall be for ever vanquished, though it means perhaps
+a long and dreary waste of shame-stained days. That is what we
+must try to avoid--any WASTE of time and strength. For if anything
+is certain, it is that we have all to fight until we conquer, and
+the sooner we take up the dropped sword again the better.
+
+And we have also to learn that no one can help us except ourselves.
+Other people can sympathise and console, try to soothe our injured
+vanity, try to persuade us that the dangers and disasters ahead are
+not so dreadful as they appear to be, and that the mistakes we have
+made are not irreparable. But no one can remove danger or regret
+from us, or relieve us of the necessity of facing our own troubles;
+the most that they can do, indeed, is to encourage us to try again.
+
+But we cannot hope to change the conditions of life; and one of its
+conditions is, as I have said, that we cannot foresee dangers. No
+matter how vividly they are described to us, no matter how eagerly
+those who love us try to warn us of peril, we cannot escape. For
+that is the essence of life--experience; and though we cannot
+rejoice when we are in the grip of it, and when we cannot see what
+the end will be, we can at least say to ourselves again and again,
+"this is at all events reality--this is business!" for it is the
+moments of endurance and energy and action which after all justify
+us in living, and not the pleasant spaces where we saunter among
+flowers and sunlit woods. Those are conceded to us, to tempt us to
+live, to make us desire to remain in the world; and we need not be
+afraid to take them, to use them, to enjoy them; because all things
+alike help to make us what we are.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+SHAPES OF FEAR
+
+
+
+
+
+Now as I look back a little, I see that some of my worst experiences
+have not hurt or injured me at all. I do not claim more than my
+share of troubles, but "I have had trouble enough for one," as
+Browning says,--bereavements, disappointments, the illness of those
+I have loved, illness of my own, quarrels, misunderstandings,
+enmities, angers, disapprovals, losses; I have made bad mistakes, I
+have failed in my duty, I have done many things that I regret, I
+have been unreasonable, unkind, selfish. Many of these things have
+hurt and wounded me, have brought me into sorrow, and even into
+despair. But I do not feel that any of them have really injured me,
+and some of them have already benefited me. I have learned to be a
+little more patient and diligent, and I have discovered that there
+are certain things that I must at all costs avoid.
+
+But there is one thing which seems to me to have always and
+invariably hampered and maimed me, whenever I have yielded to it,
+and I have often yielded to it; and that is Fear. It can be called
+by many names, and all of them ugly names--anxiety, timidity, moral
+cowardice. I can never trace the smallest good in having given way
+to it. It has been from my earliest days the Shadow; and I think it
+is the shadow in the lives of many men and women. I want in this
+book to track it, if I can, to its lair, to see what it is, where
+its awful power lies, and what, if anything, one can do to resist
+it. It seems the most unreal thing in the world, when one is on the
+other side of it; and yet face to face with it, it has a strength,
+a poignancy, a paralysing power, which makes it seem like a
+personal and specific ill-will, issuing in a sort of dreadful
+enchantment or spell, which renders it impossible to withstand.
+Yet, strange to say, it has not exercised its power in the few
+occasions in my life when it would seem to have been really
+justified. Let me quote an instance or two which will illustrate
+what I mean.
+
+I was confronted once with the necessity of a small surgical
+operation, quite unexpectedly. If I had known beforehand that it
+was to be done, I should have depicted every incident with horror
+and misery. But the moment arrived, and I found myself marching to
+my bedroom with a surgeon and a nurse, with a sense almost of
+amusement at the adventure.
+
+I was called upon once in Switzerland to assist with two guides in
+the rescue of an unfortunate woman who had fallen from a precipice,
+and had to be brought down, dead or alive. We hurried up through
+the pine-forest with a chair, and found the poor creature alive
+indeed, but with horrible injuries--an eye knocked out, an arm and
+a thigh broken, her ulster torn to ribbons, and with more blood
+about the place in pools than I should have thought a human body
+could contain. She was conscious; she had to be lifted into the
+chair, and we had to discover where she belonged; she fainted away
+in the middle of it, and I had to go on and break the news to her
+relations. If I had been told beforehand what would have had to be
+done, I do not think I could have faced it; but it was there to do,
+and I found myself entirely capable of taking part, and even of
+wondering all the time that it was possible to act.
+
+Again, I was once engulfed in a crevasse, hanging from the ice-
+ledge with a portentous gulf below, and a glacier-stream roaring
+in the darkness. I could get no hold for foot or hand, my
+companions could not reach me or extract me; and as I sank into
+unconsciousness, hearing my own expiring breath, I knew that I was
+doomed; but I can only say, quite honestly and humbly, that I had
+no fear at all, and only dimly wondered what arrangements would be
+made at Eton, where I was then a master, to accommodate the boys of
+my house and my pupils. It was not done by an effort, nor did I
+brace myself to the situation: fear simply did not come near to me.
+
+Once again I found myself confronted, not so long ago, with an
+incredibly painful and distressing interview. That indeed did
+oppress me with almost intolerable dread beforehand. I was to go to
+a certain house in London, and there was just a chance that the
+interview might not take place after all. As I drove there, I
+suddenly found myself wondering whether the interview could REALLY
+be going to take place--how often had I rehearsed it beforehand
+with anguish--and then as suddenly became aware that I should in
+some strange way be disappointed if it did not take place. I wanted
+on the whole to go through with it, and to see what it would be
+like. A deep-seated curiosity came to my aid. It did take place,
+and it was very bad--worse than I could have imagined; but it was
+not terrible!
+
+These are just four instances which come into my mind. I should be
+glad to feel that the courage which undoubtedly came had been the
+creation of my will; but it was not so. In three cases, the events
+came unexpectedly; but in the fourth case I had long anticipated
+the moment with extreme dread. Yet in that last case the fear
+suddenly slipped away, without the smallest effort on my part; and
+in all four cases some strange gusto of experience, some sense of
+heightened life and adventure, rose in the mind like a fountain--so
+that even in the crevasse I said to myself, not excitedly but
+serenely, "So this is what it feels like to await death!"
+
+It was this particular experience which gave me an inkling into
+that which in so many tragic histories seems incredible--that men
+often do pass to death, by scaffold and by stake, at the last
+moment, in serenity and even in joy. I do not doubt for a moment
+that it is the immortal principle in man, the sense of
+deathlessness, which comes to his aid. It is the instinct which, in
+spite of all knowledge and experience, says suddenly, in a moment
+like that, "Well, what then?" That instinct is a far truer thing
+than any expectation or imagination. It sees things, in supreme
+moments, in a true proportion. It asserts that when the rope jerks,
+or the flames leap up, or the benumbing blow falls, there is
+something there which cannot possibly be injured, and which indeed
+is rather freed from the body of our humiliation. It is but an
+incident, after all, in a much longer and more momentous voyage. It
+means only the closing of one chapter of experience and the
+beginning of another. The base element in it is the fear which
+dreads the opening of the door, and the quitting of what is
+familiar. And I feel assured of this, that the one universal and
+inevitable experience, known to us as death, must in reality be a
+very simple and even a natural affair, and that when we can look
+back upon it, it will seem to us amazing that we can ever have
+regarded it as so momentous and appalling a thing.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE DARKEST DOUBT
+
+
+
+
+
+Now we can make no real advance in the things of the spirit until we
+have seen what lies on the other side of fear; fear cannot help us
+to grow, at best it can only teach us to be prudent; it does not of
+itself destroy the desire to offend--only shame can do that; if our
+wish to be different comes merely from our being afraid to
+transgress, then, if the fear of punishment were to be removed, we
+should go back with a light heart to our old sins. We may obey
+irresponsible power, because we know that it can hurt us if we
+disobey; but unless we can perceive the reason why this and that is
+forbidden, we cannot concur with law. We learn as children that
+flame has power to hurt us, but we only dread the fire because it
+can injure us, not because we admire the reason which it has for
+burning. So long as we do not sin simply because we know the laws of
+life which punish sin, we have not learned any hatred of sin; it is
+only because we hate the punishment more than we love the sin, that
+we abstain.
+
+Socrates once said, in one of his wise paradoxes, that it was
+better to sin knowingly than ignorantly. That is a hard saying, but
+it means that at least if we sin knowingly, there is some purpose,
+some courage in the soul. We take a risk with our eyes open, and
+our purpose may perhaps be changed; whereas if we sin ignorantly,
+we do so out of a mere base instinct, and there is no purpose that
+may be educated. Anyone who has ever had the task of teaching boys
+or young men to write will know how much easier it is to teach
+those who write volubly and exuberantly, and desire to express
+themselves, even if they do it with many faults and lapses of
+taste; taste and method may be corrected, if only the instinct of
+expression is there. But the young man who has no impulse to write,
+who says that he could think of nothing to say, it is impossible to
+teach him much, because one cannot communicate the desire for
+expression.
+
+And the same holds good of life. Those who have strong vital
+impulses can learn restraint and choice; but the people who have no
+particular impulses and preferences, who just live out of mere
+impetus and habit, who plod along, doing in a dispirited way just
+what they find to do, and lapsing into indolence and indifference
+the moment that prescribed work ceases, those are the spirits that
+afford the real problem, because they despise activity, and think
+energy a mere exhibition of fussy diffuseness.
+
+But the generous, eager, wilful nature, who has always some aim in
+sight, who makes mistakes perhaps, gives offence, collides high-
+heartedly with others, makes both friends and enemies, loves and
+hates, is anxious, jealous, self-absorbed, resentful, intolerant--
+there is always hope for such an one, for he is quick to despair,
+capable of shame, swift to repent, and even when he is worsted and
+wounded, rises to fight again. Such a nature, through pain and
+love, can learn to chasten his base desires, and to choose the
+nobler and worthier way.
+
+But what does really differentiate men and women is not their power
+of fearing and suffering, but their power of caring and admiring.
+The only real and vital force in the world is the force which
+attracts, the beauty which is so desirable that one must imitate it
+if one can, the wisdom which is so calm and serene that one must
+possess it if one may.
+
+And thus all depends upon our discerning in the world a loving
+intention of some kind, which holds us in view, and draws us to
+itself. If we merely think of God and nature as an inflexible
+system of laws, and that our only chance of happiness is to slip in
+and out of them, as a man might pick his way among red-hot
+ploughshares, thankful if he can escape burning, then we can make
+no sort of advance, because we can have neither faith nor trust.
+The thing from which one merely flees can have no real power over
+our spirit; but if we know God as a fatherly Heart behind nature,
+who is leading us on our way, then indeed we can walk joyfully in
+happiness, and undismayed in trouble; because troubles then become
+only the wearisome incidents of the upward ascent, the fatigue, the
+failing breath, the strained muscles, the discomfort which is
+actually taking us higher, and cannot by any means be avoided.
+
+But fear is the opposite of all this; it is the dread of the
+unknown, the ghastly doubt as to whether there is any goal before
+us or not; when we fear, we are like the butterfly that flutters
+anxiously away from the boy who pursues it, who means out of mere
+wantonness to strike it down tattered and bruised among the grass-
+stems.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+VULNERABILITY
+
+
+
+
+
+There have been many attempts in the history of mankind to escape
+from the dominion of fear; the essence of fear, that which prompts
+it, is the consciousness of our vulnerability. What we all dread is
+the disease or the accident that may disable us, the loss of money
+or credit, the death of those whom we love and whose love makes the
+sunshine of our life, the anger and hostility and displeasure and
+scorn and ill-usage of those about us. These are the definite things
+which the anxious mind forecasts, and upon which it mournfully
+dwells.
+
+The object then in the minds of the philosophers or teachers who
+would fain relieve the unhappiness of the world, has been always to
+suggest ways in which this vulnerability may be lessened; and thus
+their object has been to disengage as far as possible the hopes and
+affections of men from things which must always be fleeting. That
+is the principle which lies behind all asceticism, that, if one can
+be indifferent to wealth and comfort and popularity, one has a
+better chance of serenity. The essence of that teaching is not that
+pleasant things are not desirable, but that one is more miserable
+if one loses them than if one never cares for them at all. The
+ascetic trains himself to be indifferent about food and drink and
+the apparatus of life; he aims at celibacy partly because love
+itself is an overmastering passion, and partly because he cannot
+bear to engage himself with human affections, the loss of which may
+give him pain. There is, of course, a deeper strain in asceticism
+than this, which is a suspicious mistrust of all physical joys and
+a sense of their baseness; but that is in itself an artistic
+preference of mental and spiritual joys, and a defiance to
+everything which may impair or invade them.
+
+The Stoic imperturbability is an attempt to take a further step;
+not to fly from life, but to mingle with it, and yet to grow to be
+not dependent on it. The Stoic ideal was a high one, to cultivate a
+firmness of mind that was on the one hand not to be dismayed by
+pain or suffering, and on the other to use life so temperately and
+judiciously as not to form habits of indulgence which it would be
+painful to discontinue. The weakness of Stoicism was that it
+despised human relations; and the strength of primitive
+Christianity was that, while it recommended a Stoical simplicity of
+life, it taught men not to be afraid of love, but to use and lavish
+love freely, as being the one thing which would survive death and
+not be cut short by it. The Christian teaching came to this, that
+the world was meant to be a school of love, and that love was to be
+an outward-rippling ring of affection extending from the family
+outwards to the tribe, the nation, the world, and on to God
+Himself. It laid all its emphasis on the truth that love is the one
+immortal thing, that all the joys and triumphs of the world pass
+away with the decay of its material framework, but that love passes
+boldly on, with linked hands, into the darkness of the unknown.
+
+The one loss that Christianity recognised was the loss of love; the
+one punishment it dreaded was the withholding of love.
+
+As Christianity soaked into the world, it became vitiated, and drew
+into itself many elements of human weakness. It became a social
+force, it learned to depend on property, it fulminated a code of
+criminality, and accepted human standards of prosperity and wealth.
+It lost its simplicity and became sophisticated. It is hard to say
+that men of the world should not, if they wish, claim to be
+Christians, but the whole essence of Christianity is obscured if it
+is forgotten that its vital attributes are its indifference to
+material conveniences, and its emphatic acceptance of sympathy as
+the one supreme virtue.
+
+This is but another way of expressing that our troubles and our
+terrors alike are based on selfishness, and that if we are really
+concerned with the welfare of others we shall not be much concerned
+with our own.
+
+The difficulty in adopting the Christian theory is that God does
+not apparently intend to cure the world by creating all men
+unselfish. People are born selfish, and the laws of nature and
+heredity seem to ordain that it shall be so. Indeed a certain
+selfishness seems to be inseparable from any desire to live. The
+force of asceticism and of Stoicism is that they both appeal to
+selfishness as a motive. They frankly say, "Happiness is your aim,
+personal happiness; but instead of grasping at pleasure whenever it
+offers, you will find it more prudent in the end not to care too
+much about such things." It is true that popular Christianity makes
+the same sort of appeal. It says, or seems to say, "If you grasp at
+happiness in this world, you may secure a great deal of it
+successfully; but it will be worse for you eventually."
+
+The theory of life as taught and enforced, for instance, in such a
+work as Dante's great poem is based upon this crudity of thought.
+Dante, by his Hell and his Purgatory, expressed plainly that the
+chief motive of man to practise morality must be his fear of
+ultimate punishment. His was an attempt to draw away the curtain
+which hides this world from the next, and to horrify men into
+living purely and kindly. But the mind only revolts against the
+dastardly injustice of a God, who allows men to be born into the
+world so corrupt, with so many incentives to sin, and deliberately
+hides from them the ghastly sight of the eternal torments, which
+might have saved them from recklessness of life. No one who had
+trod the dark caverns of Hell or the flinty ridges of Purgatory, as
+Dante represented himself doing, who had seen the awful sights and
+heard the heart-broken words of the place, could have returned to
+the world as a light-hearted sinner! Whatever we may believe of
+God, we must not for an instant allow ourselves to believe that
+life can be so brief and finite, so small and hampered an
+opportunity, and that punishment could be so demoniacal and so
+infinite. A God who could design such a scheme must be essentially
+evil and malignant. We may menace wicked men with punishment for
+wanton misdeeds, but it must be with just punishment. What could we
+say of a human father who exposed a child to temptation without
+explaining the consequences, and then condemned him to lifelong
+penalties for failing to make the right choice? We must firmly
+believe that if offences are finite, punishment must be finite too;
+that it must be remedial and not mechanical. We must believe that
+if we deserve punishment, it will be because we can hope for
+restoration. Hell is a monstrous and insupportable fiction, and the
+idea of it is simply inconsistent with any belief in the goodness
+of God. It is easy to quote texts to support it, but we must not
+allow any text, any record in the world, however sacred, to shatter
+our belief in the Love and Justice of God. And I say as frankly and
+directly as I can that until we can get rid of this intolerable
+terror, we can make no advance at all.
+
+The old, fierce Saints, who went into the darkness exulting in the
+thought of the eternal damnation of the wicked, had not spelt the
+first letter of the Christian creed, and I doubt not have
+discovered their mistake long ago! Yet there are pious people in
+the world who will neither think nor speak frankly of the subject,
+for fear of weakening the motives for human virtue. I will at least
+speak frankly, and though I believe with all my heart in a life
+beyond the grave, in which suffering enough may exist for the cure
+of those who by wilful sin have sunk into sloth and hopelessness
+and despair, and even into cruelty and brutality, I do not for an
+instant believe that the conduct of the vilest human being who ever
+set foot on the earth can deserve more than a term of punishment,
+or that such punishment will have anything that is vindictive about
+it.
+
+It may be said that I am here only combating an old-fashioned idea,
+and that no one believes in the old theory of eternal punishment,
+or that if they believe that the possibility exists, they do not
+believe that any human being can incur it. But I feel little doubt
+that the belief does exist, and that it is more widespread than one
+cares to believe. To believe it is to yield to the darkest and
+basest temptation of fear, and keeps all who hold it back from the
+truth of God.
+
+What then are we to believe about the punishment of our sins? I
+look back upon my own life, and I see numberless occasions--they
+rise up before me, a long perspective of failures--when I have
+acted cruelly, selfishly, self-indulgently, basely, knowing
+perfectly well that I was so behaving. What was wrong with me? Why
+did I so behave? Because I preferred the baser course, and thought
+at the time that it gave me pleasure.
+
+Well then, what do I wish about all that? I wish it had not
+happened so, I wish I had been kinder, more just, more self-
+restrained, more strong. I am ashamed, because I condemn myself,
+and because I know that those whom I love and honour would condemn
+me, if they knew all. But I do not, therefore, lose all hope of
+myself, nor do I think that God will not show me how to be
+different. If it can only be done by suffering, I dread the
+suffering, but I am ready to suffer if I can become what I should
+wish to be. But I do not for a moment think that God will cast me
+off or turn His face away from me because I have sinned; and I can
+pray that He will lead me into light and strength.
+
+And thus it is not my vulnerability that I dread; I rather welcome
+it as a sign that I may learn the truth so. And I will not look
+upon my desire for pleasant things as a proof that I am evil, but
+rather as a proof that God is showing me where happiness lies, and
+teaching me by my mistakes to discern and value it. He could make
+me perfect if He would, in a single instant. But the fact that He
+does not, is a sign that He has something better in store for me
+than a mere mechanical perfection.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE USE OF FEAR
+
+
+
+
+
+The advantages of the fearful temperament, if it is not a mere
+unmanning and desolating dread, are not to be overlooked. Fear is
+the shadow of the imaginative, the resourceful, the inventive
+temperament, but it multiplies resource and invention a hundredfold.
+Everyone knows the superstition which is deeply rooted in humanity,
+that a time of exaltation and excitement and unusual success is held
+to be often the prelude to some disaster, just as the sense of
+excitement and buoyant health, when it is very consciously
+perceived, is thought to herald the approach of illness. "I felt so
+happy," people say, "that I was sure that some misfortune was going
+to befall me--it is not lucky to feel so secure as that!" This
+represented itself to the Greeks as part of the divine government of
+the world; they thought that the heedless and self-confident man
+was beguiled by success into what they called ubris, the insolence
+of prosperity; and that then atae, that is, disaster, followed. They
+believed that the over-prosperous man incurred the envy and jealousy
+of the gods. We see this in the old legend of Polycrates of Samos,
+whose schemes all succeeded, and whose ventures all turned out well.
+He consulted a soothsayer about his alarming prosperity, who advised
+him to inflict some deliberate loss or sacrifice upon himself; so
+Polycrates drew from his finger and flung into the sea a signet-ring
+which he possessed, with a jewel of great rarity and beauty in it.
+Soon afterwards a fish was caught by the royal fisherman, and was
+served up at the king's table--there, inside the body of the fish,
+was the ring; and when Polycrates saw that, he felt that the gods
+had restored him his gift, and that his destruction was determined
+upon; which came true, for he was caught by pirates at sea, and
+crucified upon a rocky headland.
+
+No nation, and least of all the Greeks, would have arrived at this
+theory of life and fate, if they had not felt that it was supported
+by actual instances. It was of the nature of an inference from the
+facts of life; and the explanation undoubtedly is that men do get
+betrayed, by a constant experience of good fortune, into rashness
+and heedlessness, because they trust to their luck and depend upon
+their fortunate star.
+
+But the man who is of an energetic and active type, if he is
+haunted by anxiety, if his imagination paints the possibilities of
+disaster, takes every means in his power to foresee contingencies,
+and to deal cautiously and thoroughly with the situation which
+causes him anxiety. If he is a man of keen sensibilities, the
+pressure of such care is so insupportable that he takes prompt and
+effective measures to remove it; and his fear thus becomes an
+element in his success, because it urges him to action, and at the
+same time teaches him the need of due precaution. As Horace wrote:
+
+
+     "Sperat infestis, metuit secundis
+      Alteram sortem."
+
+
+"He hopes for a change of fortune when things are menacing, he
+fears a reverse when things are prosperous." And if we look at the
+facts of life, we see that it is not by any means the confident and
+optimistic people who succeed best in their designs. It is rather
+the man of eager and ambitious temperament, who dreads a repulse and
+anticipates it, and takes all possible measures beforehand to avoid
+it.
+
+We see the same principle underlying the scientific doctrine of
+evolution. People often think loosely that the idea of evolution,
+in the case, let us say, of a bird like a heron, with his
+immobility, his long legs, his pointed beak, his muscular neck, is
+that such characteristics have been evolved through long ages by
+birds that have had to get their food in swamps and shallow lakes,
+and were thus gradually equipped for food-getting through long ages
+of practice. But of course no particular bird is thus modified by
+circumstances. A pigeon transferred to a fen would not develop the
+characteristics of the heron; it would simply die for lack of food.
+It is rather that certain minute variations take place, for unknown
+reasons, in every species; and the bird which happened to be
+hatched out in a fenland with a rather sharper beak or rather
+longer legs than his fellows, would have his power of obtaining
+food slightly increased, and would thus be more likely to
+perpetuate in his offspring that particular advantage of form. This
+principle working through endless centuries would tend slowly to
+develop the stock that was better equipped for life under such
+circumstances, and to eliminate those less suited to the locality;
+and thus the fittest would tend to survive. But it does not
+indicate any design on the part of the birds themselves, nor any
+deliberate attempt to develop those characteristics; it is rather
+that such characteristics, once started by natural variation, tend
+to emphasize themselves in the lapse of time.
+
+No doubt fear has played an enormous part in the progress of the
+human race itself. The savage whose imagination was stronger than
+that of other savages, and who could forecast the possibilities of
+disaster, would wander through the forest with more precaution
+against wild beasts, and would make his dwelling more secure
+against assault; so that the more timid and imaginative type would
+tend to survive longest and to multiply their stock. Man in his
+physical characteristics is a very weak, frail, and helpless
+animal, exposed to all kinds of dangers; his infancy is protracted
+and singularly defenceless; his pace is slow, his strength is
+insignificant; it is his imagination that has put him at the top of
+creation, and has enabled him both to evade dangers and to use
+natural forces for his greater security. Though he is the youngest
+of all created forms, and by no means the best equipped for life,
+he has been able to go ahead in a way denied to all other animals;
+his inventiveness has been largely developed by his terrors; and
+the result has been that whereas all other animals still preserve,
+as a condition of life, their ceaseless attitude of suspicion and
+fear, man has been enabled by organisation to establish communities
+in which fear of disaster plays but little part. If one watches a
+bird feeding on a lawn, it is strange to observe its ceaseless
+vigilance. It takes a hurried mouthful, and then looks round in an
+agitated manner to see that it is in no danger of attack. Yet it is
+clear that the terror in which all wild animals seem to live, and
+without which self-preservation would be impossible, does not in
+the least militate against their physical welfare. A man who had to
+live his life under the same sort of risks that a bird in a garden
+has to endure from cats and other foes, would lose his senses from
+the awful pressure of terror; he would lie under the constant
+shadow of assassination.
+
+But the singular thing in Nature is that she preserves
+characteristics long after they have ceased to be needed; and so,
+though a man in a civilised community has very little to dread, he
+is still haunted by an irrational sense of insecurity and
+precariousness. And thus many of our fears arise from old
+inheritance, and represent nothing rational or real at all, but
+only an old and savage need of vigilance and wariness.
+
+One can see this exemplified in a curious way in level tracts of
+country. Everyone who has traversed places like the plain of
+Worcestershire must remember the irritating way in which the roads
+keep ascending little eminences, instead of going round at the
+foot. Now these old country roads no doubt represent very ancient
+tracks indeed, dating from times when much of the land was
+uncultivated. They get stereotyped, partly because they were
+tracks, and partly because for convenience the first enclosures and
+tillages were made along the roads for purposes of communication.
+But the perpetual tendency to ascend little eminences no doubt
+dates from a time when it was safer to go up, in order to look
+round and to see ahead, partly in order to be sure of one's
+direction, and partly to beware of the manifold dangers of the
+road.
+
+And thus many of the fears by which one is haunted are these old
+survivals, these inherited anxieties. Who does not know the frame
+of mind when perhaps for a day, perhaps for days together, the mind
+is oppressed and uneasy, scenting danger in the air, forecasting
+calamity, recounting all the possible directions in which fate or
+malice may have power to wound and hurt us? It is a melancholy
+inheritance, but it cannot be combated by any reason. It is of no
+use then to imitate Robinson Crusoe, and to make a list of one's
+blessings on a piece of paper; that only increases our fear,
+because it is just the chance of forfeiting such blessings of which
+we are in dread! We must simply remind ourselves that we are
+surrounded by old phantoms, and that we derive our weakness from
+ages far back, in which risks were many and security was rare.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+FEARS OF CHILDHOOD
+
+
+
+
+
+If I look back over my own life, I can discern three distinct stages
+of fear and anxieties, and I expect it is the same with most people.
+The terrors of childhood are very mysterious things, and their
+horror consists in the child's inability to put the dread into
+words. I remember how one night, when we were living in the Master's
+Lodge at Wellington College, I had gone to bed, and waking soon
+afterwards heard a voice somewhere outside. I got out of bed, went
+to the door, and looked out. Close to my door was an archway which
+looked into the open gallery that ran round the big front hall,
+giving access to the bedrooms. At the opposite end of the hall, in
+the gallery, burnt a gaslight: to my horror I observed close to the
+gas what seemed to me a colossal shrouded statue, made of a black
+bronze, formless, silent, awful. I crept back to my bed, and there
+shivered in an ecstasy of fear, till at last I fell asleep. There
+was no statue there in the morning! I told my old nurse, after a day
+or two of dumb dread, what I had seen. She laughed, and told me that
+a certain Mrs. Holder, an elderly widow who was a dressmaker, had
+been to see her, about some piece of work. They had turned out the
+nursery lights and were going downstairs, when some question arose
+about the stuff of the frock, whatever it was. Mrs. Holder had
+mounted on a chair to look close at the stuff by the gaslight; and
+this was my bogey!
+
+We had a delightful custom in nursery days, devised by my mother,
+that on festival occasions, such as birthdays or at Christmas, our
+presents were given us in the evening by a fairy called
+Abracadabra.
+
+The first time the fairy appeared, we heard, after tea, in the
+hall, the hoarse notes of a horn. We rushed out in amazement. Down
+in the hall, talking to an aunt of mine who was staying in the
+house, stood a veritable fairy, in a scarlet dress, carrying a wand
+and a scarlet bag, and wearing a high pointed scarlet hat, of the
+shape of an extinguisher. My aunt called us down; and we saw that
+the fairy had the face of a great ape, dark-brown, spectacled, of a
+good-natured aspect, with a broad grin, and a curious crop of white
+hair, hanging down behind and on each side. Unfortunately my eldest
+brother, a very clever and imaginative child, was seized with a
+panic so insupportable at the sight of the face, that his present
+had to be given him hurriedly, and he was led away, blanched and
+shuddering, to the nursery. After that, the fairy never appeared
+except when he was at school: but long after, when I was looking in
+a lumber-room with my brother for some mislaid toys, I found in a
+box the mask of Abracadabra and the horn. I put it hurriedly on,
+and blew a blast on the horn, which seemed to be of tortoise-shell
+with metal fittings. To my amazement, he turned perfectly white,
+covered his face with his hands, and burst out with the most
+dreadful moans. I thought at first that he was making believe to be
+frightened, but I saw in a minute or two that he had quite lost
+control of himself, and the things were hurriedly put away. At the
+time I thought it a silly kind of affectation. But I perceive now
+that he had had a real shock the first time he had seen the mask;
+and though he was then a big schoolboy, the terror was indelible.
+Who can say of what old inheritance of fear that horror of the
+great ape-like countenance was the sign? He had no associations of
+fear with apes, but it must have been, I think, some dim old
+primeval terror, dating from some ancestral encounter with a forest
+monster. In no other way can I explain it.
+
+Again, as a child, I was once sitting at dinner with my parents,
+reading an old bound-up Saturday Magazine, looking at the pictures,
+and waiting for dessert. I turned a page, and saw a picture of a
+Saint, lying on the ground, holding up a cross, and a huge and
+cloudy fiend with vast bat-like wings bending over him, preparing
+to clutch him, but deterred by the sacred emblem. That was a really
+terrible shock. I turned the page hastily, and said nothing, though
+it deprived me of speech and appetite. My father noticed my
+distress, and asked if I felt unwell, but I said "No." I got
+through dessert somehow; but then I had to say good-night, go out
+into the dimly-lit hall, slip the volume back into the bookcase,
+and get upstairs. I tore up the staircase, feeling the air full of
+wings and clutching hands. That was too bad ever to be spoken of;
+and as I did not remember which volume it was, I was never able to
+look at the set of magazines again for fear of encountering it; and
+strange to say some years afterwards, when I was an Eton boy, I
+looked curiously for the picture, and again experienced the same
+overwhelming horror.
+
+My youngest brother, too, an imaginative child, could never be
+persuaded by any bribes or entreaties to go into a dark room to
+fetch anything out. Nothing would induce him. I remember that he
+was catechised at the tea-table as to what he expected to find, to
+which he replied at once, with a horror-stricken look and a long
+stammer, "B--b--b--bloodstained corpses!"
+
+It seems fantastic and ridiculous enough to older people, but the
+horror of the dark and of the unknown which some children have is
+not a thing to be laughed at, nor should it be unsympathetically
+combated. One must remember that experience has not taught a child
+scepticism; he thinks that anything in the world may happen; and
+all the monsters of nursery tales, goblins, witches, evil fairies,
+dragons, which a child in daylight will know to be imaginary,
+begin, as the dusk draws on, to become appalling possibilities.
+They may be somewhere about, lurking in cellars and cupboards and
+lofts and dark entries by day, and at night they may slip out to do
+what harm they can. For children, not far from the gates of birth,
+are still strongly the victims of primeval and inherited fears, not
+corrected by the habitual current of life. It is not a reason for
+depriving children of the joys of the old tales and the exercise of
+the faculty of wonder; but the tendency should be very carefully
+guarded and watched, because these sudden shocks may make indelible
+marks, and leave a little weak spot in the mind which may prove
+difficult to heal.
+
+It is not only these spectral terrors against which children have
+to be guarded. All severity and sharp indignity of punishment, all
+intemperate anger, all roughness of treatment, should be kept in
+strict restraint. There are noisy, boisterous, healthy children, of
+course, who do not resent or even dread sharp usage. But it is not
+always easy to discover the sensitive child, because fear of
+displeasure will freeze him into a stupor of apparent dullness and
+stubbornness. I am always infuriated by stupid people who regret
+the disappearance of sharp, stern, peremptory punishments, and
+lament the softness of the rising generation. If punishment must be
+inflicted, it should be done good-naturedly and robustly as a
+natural tit-for-tat. Anger should be reserved for things like
+spitefulness and dishonesty and cruelty. There is nothing more
+utterly confusing to the childish mind than to have trifling faults
+treated with wrath and indignation. It is true that, in the world
+of nature, punishment seems often wholly disproportionate to
+offences. Nature will penalise carelessness in a disastrous
+fashion, and spare the cautious and prudent sinner. But there is no
+excuse for us, if we have any sense of justice and patience at all,
+for not setting a better example. We ought to show children that
+there is a moral order which we are endeavouring to administer. If
+parents and schoolmasters, who are both judges and executioners,
+allow their own rule to be fortuitous, indulge their own irritable
+moods, punish severely a trifling fault, and sentimentalise or
+condone a serious one, a child is utterly confused. I know several
+people who have had their lives blighted, have been made
+suspicious, cynical, crafty, and timid, by severe usage and
+bullying and open contempt in childhood. The thing to avoid, for
+all who are responsible in the smallest degree for the nurture of
+children, is to call in the influence of fear; one may speak
+plainly of consequences, but even there one must not exaggerate, as
+schoolmasters often do, for the best of motives, about moral
+faults; one may punish deliberate and repeated disobedience, wanton
+cruelty, persistent and selfish disregard of the rights of others,
+but one must warn many times, and never try to triumph over a fault
+by the infliction of a shock of any kind. The shock is the most
+cruel and cowardly sort of punishment, and if we wilfully use it,
+then we are perpetuating the sad tyranny of instinctive fear, and
+using the strength of a great angel to do the work of a demon, such
+as I saw long ago in the old magazine, and felt its tyranny for
+many days.
+
+As a child the one thing I was afraid of was the possibility of my
+father's displeasure. We did not see a great deal of him, because
+he was a much occupied headmaster; and he was to me a stately and
+majestic presence, before whom the whole created world seemed
+visibly to bow. But he was deeply anxious about our upbringing, and
+had a very strong sense of his responsibility; and he would
+sometimes reprove us rather sternly for some extremely trifling
+thing, the way one ate one's food, or spoke, or behaved. This
+descended upon me as a cloud of darkness; I attempted no excuses, I
+did not explain or defend myself; I simply was crushed and
+confounded. I do not think it was the right method. He never
+punished us, but we were not at ease with him. I remember the agony
+with which I heard a younger sister once repeat to him some silly
+and profane little jokes which a good-natured and absurd old lady
+had told us in the nursery. I felt sure he would disapprove, as he
+did. I knew quite well in my childish mind that it was harmless
+nonsense, and did not give us a taste for ungodly mirth. But I
+could not intervene or expostulate. I am sure that my father had
+not the slightest idea how weighty and dominant he was; but many of
+the things he rebuked would have been better not noticed, or if
+noticed only made fun of, while I feel that he ought to have given
+us more opportunity of stating our case. He simply frightened me
+into having a different morality when I was in his presence to what
+I had elsewhere. But he did not make me love goodness thereby, and
+only gave me a sense that certain things, harmless in themselves,
+must not be done or said in the presence of papa. He did not always
+remember his own rules, and there was thus an element of injustice
+in his rebukes, which one merely accepted as part of his awful and
+unaccountable greatness.
+
+When I was transferred to a private school, a great big place, very
+well managed in every way, I lived for a time in atrocious terror
+of everything and everybody. I was conscious of a great code of
+rules which I did not know or understand, which I might quite
+unwittingly break, and the consequences of which might be fatal. I
+was never punished or caned, nor was I ever bullied. But I simply
+effaced myself as far as possible, and lived in dread of disaster.
+The thought even now of certain high blank walls with lofty barred
+windows, the remembered smells of certain passages and corners, the
+tall form and flashing eye of our headmaster and the faint
+fragrance of Havana cigars which hung about him, the bare corridors
+with their dark cupboards, the stone stairs and iron railings--all
+this gives me a far-off sense of dread. I can give no reason for my
+unhappiness there; but I can recollect waking in the early summer
+mornings, hearing the screams of peacocks from an adjoining garden,
+and thinking with a dreadful sense of isolation and despair of all
+the possibilities of disaster that lay hid in the day. I am sure it
+was not a wholesome experience. One need not fear the world more
+than is necessary--but my only dream of peace was the escape to
+the delights of home, and the thought of the larger world was only
+a thing that I shrank from and shuddered at.
+
+No, it is wrong to say one had no friends, but how few they seemed
+and how clearly they stand out! I did not make friends among the
+boys; they were pleasant enough acquaintances, some of them, but
+not to be trusted or confided in; they had to be kept at arm's
+length, and one's real life guarded and hoarded away from them;
+because if one told them anything about one's home or one's ideas,
+it might be repeated, and the sacred facts shouted in one's ears as
+taunts and jests. But there was a little bluff master, a clergyman,
+with shaggy rippled red-brown hair and a face like a pug-dog. He
+was kind to me, and had me to lunch one Sunday in a villa out at
+Barnes--that was a breath of life, to sit in a homelike room and
+look at old Punches half the afternoon; and there was another young
+man, a master, rather stout and pale, with whom I shared some
+little jokes, and who treated me as he might treat a younger
+brother; he was pledged, I remember, to give me a cake if I won an
+Eton Scholarship, and royally he redeemed his promise. He died of
+heart disease a little while after I left the school. I had
+promised to write to him from Eton and never did so, and I had a
+little pang about that when I heard of his death. And then there
+was the handsome loud-voiced maid of my dormitory, Underwood by
+name, who was always just and kind, and who, even when she rated
+us, as she did at times, had always something human beckoning from
+her handsome eye. I can see her now, with her sleeves tucked up,
+and her big white muscular arms, washing a refractory little boy
+who fought shy of soap and water. I had a wild idea of giving her a
+kiss when I went away, and I think she would have liked that. She
+told me I had always been a good boy, and that she was sorry that I
+was going; but I did not dare to embrace her.
+
+And then there was dear Louisa, the matron of the little sanatorium
+on the Mortlake road. She had been a former housemaid of ours; she
+was a strong sturdy woman, with a deep voice like a man, and when I
+arrived there ill--I was often ill in those days--she used to hug
+and kiss me and even cry over me; and the happiest days I spent at
+school were in that poky little house, reading in Louisa's little
+parlour, while she prepared some special dish as a treat for my
+supper; or sitting hour by hour at the window of my room upstairs,
+watching a grocer opposite set out his window. I certainly did love
+Louisa with all my heart; and it was almost pleasant to be ill, to
+be welcomed by her and petted and made much of. "My own dear boy,"
+she used to say, and it was music in my ears.
+
+I feel on looking back that, if I had children of my own, I should
+study very carefully to avoid any sort of terrorism. Psychologists
+tell us that the nervous shocks of early years are the things that
+leave indelible marks throughout life. I believe that mental
+specialists often make a careful study of the dreams of those whose
+minds are afflicted, because it is held that dreams very often
+continue to reproduce in later life the mental shocks of childhood.
+Anger, intemperate punishment, any attempt to produce instant
+submission and dismay in children, is very apt to hurt the nervous
+organisation. Of course it is easy enough to be careful about these
+things in sheltered environments, where there is some security and
+refinement of life. And this opens up a vast problem which cannot
+be touched on here, because it is practically certain that many
+children in poor and unsatisfactory homes sustain shocks to their
+mental organisation in early life which damage them irreparably,
+and which could be avoided if they could be brought up on more
+wholesome and tender lines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+FEARS OF BOYHOOD
+
+
+
+
+
+There is a tendency, I am sure, in books, to shirk the whole subject
+of fear, as though it were a thing disgraceful, shameful, almost
+unmentionable. The coward, the timid person, receives very little
+sympathy; he is rather like one tainted with a shocking disease, of
+which the less said the better. He is not viewed with any sympathy
+or commiseration, but as something almost lower in the scale of
+humanity. Take the literature that deals with school life, for
+instance. I do not think that there is any province of our
+literature so inept, so conventional, so entirely lacking in
+reality, as the books which deal with the life of schools. The
+difficulty of writing them is very great, because they can only be
+reconstructed by an effort of memory. The boy himself is quite
+unable to give expression to his thoughts and feelings; school life
+is a time of sharp, eager, often rather savage emotions, lived by
+beings who have no sense of proportion, no knowledge of life, no
+idea of what is really going on in the world. The actual incidents
+which occur are very trivial, and yet to the fresh minds and spirits
+of boyhood they seem all charged with an intense significance. Then
+again the talk of schoolboys is wholly immature and shapeless. They
+cannot express themselves, and moreover there is a very strict and
+peremptory convention which dictates what may be talked about and
+what may not. No society in the world is under so oppressive a
+taboo. They must not speak of anything emotional or intellectual, at
+the cost of being thought a fool or a prig. They talk about games,
+they gossip about boys and masters, sometimes their conversation is
+nasty and bestial. But it conceals very real if very fitful
+emotions; yet it is impossible to recall or to reconstruct; and when
+older people attempt to reconstruct it, they remember the emotions
+which underlay it, and the eager interests out of which it all
+sprang; and they make it something picturesque, epigrammatic, and
+vernacular which is wholly untrue to life. The fact is that the talk
+of schoolboys is very trivial and almost wholly symbolical; emotion
+reveals itself in glance and gesture, not in word at all. I suppose
+that most of us remember our boyish friendships, ardent and eager
+personal admirations, extraordinary deifications of quite
+commonplace boys, emotions none of which were ever put into words at
+all, hardly even into coherent thought, and were yet a swift and
+vital current of the soul.
+
+Now the most unreal part of the reconstructions of school life is
+the insistence on the boyish code of honour. Neither as a boy nor
+as a schoolmaster did I ever have much evidence of this. There were
+certain hard and fast rules of conduct, like the rule which
+prevented any boy from giving information to a master against
+another boy. But this was not a conscientious thing. It was part of
+the tradition, and the social ostracism which was the penalty of
+its infraction was too severe to risk incurring. But the boys who
+cut a schoolfellow for telling tales, did not do it from any high-
+minded sense of violated honour. It was simply a piece of self-
+defence, and the basis of the convention was merely this, that, if
+the rule were broken, it would produce an impossible sense of
+insecurity and peril. However much boys might on the whole approve
+of, respect, and even like their masters, still they could not make
+common cause with them. The school was a perfectly definite
+community, inside of which it was often convenient and pleasant to
+do things which would be penalised if discovered; and thus the
+whole stability of that society depended upon a certain secrecy.
+The masters were not disliked for finding out the infractions of
+rules, if only such infractions were patent and obvious. A master
+who looked too closely into things, who practised any sort of
+espionage, who tried to extort confession, was disapproved of as a
+menace, and it was convenient to label him a sneak and a spy, and
+to say that he did not play the game fair. But all this was a mere
+tradition. Boys do not reflect much, or look into the reasons of
+things. It does not occur to them to credit masters with the motive
+of wishing to protect them against themselves, to minimise
+temptation, to shelter them from undesirable influences; that
+perhaps dawns on the minds of sensible and high-minded prefects,
+but the ordinary boy just regards the master as an opposing power,
+whom he hoodwinks if he can.
+
+And then the boyish ideal of courage is a very incomplete one. He
+does not recognise it as courage if a sensitive, conscientious, and
+right-minded boy risks unpopularity by telling a master of some
+evil practice which is spreading in a school. He simply regards it
+as a desire to meddle, a priggish and pragmatical act, and even as
+a sneaking desire to inflict punishment by proxy.
+
+Courage, for the schoolboy, is merely physical courage, aplomb,
+boldness, recklessness, high-handedness. The hero of school life is
+one like Odysseus, who is strong, inventive, daring, full of
+resource. The point is to come out on the top. Odysseus yields to
+sensual delight, he is cruel, vindictive, and incredibly deceitful.
+It is evident that successful beguiling, the power of telling an
+elaborate, plausible, and imperturbable lie on occasions, is an
+heroic quality in the Odyssey. Odysseus is not a man who scorns to
+deceive, or who would rather take the consequences than utter a
+falsehood. His strength rather lies in his power, when at bay, of
+flashing into some monstrous fiction, dramatising the situation,
+playing an adopted part, with confidence and assurance. One sees
+traces of the same thing in the Bible. The story of Jacob deceiving
+Isaac, and pretending to be Esau in order to secure a blessing is
+not related with disapprobation. Jacob does not forfeit his
+blessing when his deceit is discovered. The whole incident is
+regarded rather as a master-stroke of cunning and inventiveness.
+Esau is angry not because Jacob has employed such trickery, but
+because he has succeeded in supplanting him.
+
+I remember, as a boy at Eton, seeing a scene which left a deep
+impression on me. There was a big unpleasant unscrupulous boy of
+great physical strength, who was a noted football player. He was
+extremely unpopular in the school, because he was rude, sulky, and
+overbearing, and still more because he took unfair advantages in
+games. There was a hotly contested house-match, in which he tried
+again and again to evade rules, while he was for ever appealing to
+the umpires against violations of rule by the opposite side. His
+own house was ultimately victorious, but feeling ran very high
+indeed, because it was thought that the victory was unfairly won.
+The crowd of boys who had been watching the match drifted away in a
+state of great exasperation, and finally collected in front of the
+house of the unpopular player, hissed and hooted him. He took very
+little notice of the demonstration and walked in, when there arose
+a babel of howls. He turned round and came out again, facing the
+crowd. I can see him now, all splashed and muddy, with his shirt
+open at the neck. He was pale, ugly, and sinister; but he surveyed
+us all with entire effrontery, drew out a pince-nez, being very
+short-sighted, and then looked calmly round as if surprised. I have
+certainly never seen such an exhibition of courage in my life. He
+knew that he had not a single friend present, and he did not know
+that he would not be maltreated--there were indications of a rush
+being made. He did not look in the least picturesque; he was ugly,
+scowling, offensive. But he did not care a rap, and if he had been
+attacked, he would have defended himself with a will. It did not
+occur to me then, nor did it, I think, occur to anyone else, what
+an amazing bit of physical and moral courage it was. No one, then
+or after, had the slightest feeling of admiration for his pluck.
+"Did you ever see such a brute as P-- looked?" was the only sort
+of comment made.
+
+This just serves to illustrate my point, that boys have no real
+discernment for what is courageous. What they admire is a certain
+grace and spirit, and the hero is not one who constrains himself to
+do an unpopular thing from a sense of duty, not even the boy who,
+being unpopular like P--, does a satanically brave thing. Boys
+have no admiration for the boy who defies them; what they like to
+see is the defiance of a common foe. They admire gallant, modest,
+spirited, picturesque behaviour, not the dull and faithful
+obedience to the sense of right.
+
+Of course things have altered for the better. Masters are no longer
+stern, severe, abrupt, formidable, unreasonable. They know that
+many a boy, who would be inclined on the whole to tell the truth,
+can easily be frightened into telling a lie; but they have not yet
+contrived to put the sense of honour among boys in the right
+proportion. Such stories as that of George Washington--when the
+children were asked who had cut down the apple-tree, and he rose
+and said, "Sir, I cannot tell a lie; it was I who did it with my
+little hatchet"--do not really take the imagination of boys
+captive. How constantly did worthy preachers at Eton tell the story
+of how Bishop Selwyn, as a boy, rose and left the room at a boat-
+supper because an improper song was sung! That anecdote was
+regarded with undisguised amusement, and it was simply thought to
+be a piece of priggishness. I cannot imagine that any boy ever
+heard the story and went away with a glowing desire to do likewise.
+The incident really belongs to the domain of manners rather than to
+that of morals.
+
+The truth is really that boys at school have a code which resembles
+that of the old chivalry. The hero may be sensual, unscrupulous,
+cruel, selfish, indifferent to the welfare of others. But if he
+bears himself gallantly, if he has a charm of look and manner, if
+he is a deft performer in the prescribed athletics, he is the
+object of profound and devoted admiration. It is really physical
+courage, skill, prowess, personal attractiveness which is envied
+and praised. A dull, heavy, painstaking, conscientious boy with a
+sturdy sense of duty may be respected, but he is not followed;
+while the imaginative, sensitive, nervous, highly-strung boy, who
+may have the finest qualities of all within him, is apt to be the
+most despised. Such a boy is often no good at games, because public
+performance disconcerts him; he cannot make a ready answer, he has
+no aplomb, no cheek, no smartness; and he is consequently thought
+very little of.
+
+To what extent this sort of instinctive preference can be altered,
+I do not know; it certainly cannot be altered by sermons, and still
+less by edicts. Old Dr. Keate said, when he was addressing the
+school on the subject of fighting, "I must say that I like to see a
+boy return a blow!" It seems, if one considers it, to be a curious
+ideal to start life with, considering how little opportunity
+civilisation now gives for returning blows! Boys in fact are still
+educated under a system which seems to anticipate a combative and
+disturbed sort of life to follow, in which strength and agility,
+violence and physical activity, will have a value. Yet, as a matter
+of fact, such things have very little substantial value in an
+ordinary citizen's life at all, except in so far as they play their
+part in the elaborate cult of athletic exercises, with which we
+beguile the instinct which craves for manual toil. All the races,
+and games, and athletics cultivated so assiduously at school seem
+now to have very little aim in view. It is not important for
+ordinary life to be able to run a hundred yards, or even three
+miles, faster than another man; the judgment, the quickness of eye,
+the strength and swiftness of muscle needed to make a man a good
+batsman were all well enough in days when a man's life might
+afterwards depend on his use of sword and battle-axe. But now it
+only enables him to play games rather longer than other people, and
+to a certain extent ministers to bodily health, although the
+statistics of rowing would seem clearly to prove that it is a
+pursuit which is rather more apt to damage the vitality of strong
+boys than to increase the vitality of weak ones.
+
+So, if we look facts fairly in the face, we see that much of the
+training of school life, especially in the direction of athletics,
+is really little more than the maintenance of a thoughtless old
+tradition, and that it is all directed to increase our admiration
+of prowess and grace and gallantry, rather than to fortify us in
+usefulness and manual skill and soundness of body. A boy at school
+may be a skilful carver or carpenter; he may have a real gift for
+engineering or mechanics; he may even be a good rider, a first-rate
+fisherman, an excellent shot. He may have good intellectual
+abilities, a strong memory, a power of expression; he may be a
+sound mathematician, a competent scientist; he may have all sorts
+of excellent moral qualities, be reliable, accurate, truthful,
+punctual, duty-loving; he may in fact be equipped for life and
+citizenship, able to play his part sturdily and manfully, and to do
+the world good service; but yet he may never win the smallest
+recognition or admiration in his school-days, while all the glory
+and honour and credit is still reserved for the graceful,
+attractive, high-spirited athlete, who may have nothing else in the
+background.
+
+That is certainly the ideal of the boy, and the disconcerting thing
+is that it is also the ideal, practically if not theoretically, of
+the parent and the schoolmaster. The school still reserves all its
+best gifts, its sunshine and smiles, for the knightly and the
+skilful; it rewards all the qualities that are their own reward.
+Why, if it wishes to get the right scale adopted, does it not
+reward the thing which it professes to uphold as its best result,
+worth of character namely? It claims to be a training-ground for
+character first, but it does little to encourage secret and
+unobtrusive virtues. That is, it adds its prizes to the things
+which the natural man values, and it neglects to crown the one
+thing at which it professes first to aim. In doing this it only
+endorses the verdict of the world, and while it praises moral
+effort, it rewards success.
+
+The issue of all this is that the sort of courage which it enforces
+is essentially a graceful and showy sort of courage, a lively
+readiness, a high-hearted fearlessness--so that timidity and
+slowness and diffidence and unreadiness become base and feeble
+qualities, when they are not the things of which anyone need be
+ashamed! Let me say then that moral courage, the patient and
+unrecognised facing of difficulties, the disregard of popular
+standards, solidity and steadfastness of purpose, the tranquil
+performance of tiresome and disagreeable duties, homely
+perseverance, are not the things which are regarded as supreme in
+the ideal of the school; so that the fear which is the shadow of
+sensitive and imaginative natures is turned into the wrong
+channels, and becomes a mere dread of doing the unpopular and
+unimpressive thing, or a craven determination not to be found out.
+And the dread of being obscure and unacceptable is what haunts the
+minds of boys brought up on these ambitious and competitive lines,
+rather than the fear which is the beginning of wisdom.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+FEARS OF YOUTH
+
+
+
+
+
+The fears of youth are as a rule just the terrors of
+self-consciousness and shyness. They are a very irrational thing,
+something purely instinctive and of old inheritance. How irrational
+they are is best proved by the fact that shyness is caused mostly by
+the presence of strangers; there are many young people who are
+bashful, awkward, and tongue-tied in the presence of strangers,
+whose tremors wholly disappear in the family circle. If these were
+rational fears, they might be caused by the consciousness of the
+inspection and possible disapproval of those among whom one lives,
+and whose annoyance and criticism might have unpleasant practical
+effects. Yet they are caused often by the presence of those whose
+disapproval is not of the smallest consequence, those, in fact, whom
+one is not likely to see again. One must look then for the cause of
+this, not in the fact that one's awkwardness and inefficiency is
+likely to be blamed by those of one's own circle, but simply in the
+terror of the unknown and the unfamiliar. It is probably therefore
+an old inherited instinct, coming from a time when the sight of a
+stranger might contain in it a menace of some hostile usage. If one
+questions a shy boy or girl as to what it is they are afraid of in
+the presence of strangers, they are quite unable to answer. They are
+not afraid of anything that will be said or done; and yet they will
+have become intensely conscious of their own appearance and
+movements and dress, and will be quite unable to command themselves.
+That it is a thing which can be easily cured is obvious from the
+fact which I often observed when I was a schoolmaster, that as a
+rule the boys who came from houses where there was much
+entertaining, and a constant coming and going of guests, very rarely
+suffered from such shyness. They had got used to the fact that
+strangers could be depended upon to be kind and friendly, and
+instead of looking upon a new person as a possible foe, they
+regarded him as a probable friend.
+
+I often think that parents do not take enough trouble in this
+respect to make children used to strangers. What often happens is
+that parents are themselves shy and embarrassed in the presence of
+strangers, and when they notice that their children suffer from the
+same awkwardness, they criticise them afterwards, partly because
+they are vexed at their own clumsy performance; and thus the
+shyness is increased, because the child, in addition to his sense
+of shyness before strangers, has in the background of his mind the
+feeling that any mauvaise honte that he may display may he
+commented upon afterwards. No exhibition of shyness on the part of
+a boy or girl should ever be adverted upon by parents. They should
+take for granted that no one is ever willingly shy, and that it is
+a misery which all would avoid if they could. It is even better to
+allow children considerable freedom of speech with strangers, than
+to repress and silence them. Of course impertinence and unpleasant
+comments, such as children will sometimes make on the appearance or
+manners of strangers, must be checked, but it should be on the
+grounds of the unpleasantness of such remarks, and not on the
+ground of forwardness. On the other hand, all attempts on the part
+of a child to be friendly and courteous to strangers should be
+noted and praised; a child should be encouraged to look upon itself
+as an integral part of a circle, and not as a silent and lumpish
+auditor.
+
+Probably too there are certain physical and psychological laws,
+which we do not at all understand, which account for the curious
+subjective effects which certain people have at close quarters;
+there is something hypnotic and mesmeric about the glance of
+certain eyes; and there is in all probability a curious blending of
+mental currents in an assembly of people, which is not a mere
+fancy, but a very real physical fact. Personalities radiate very
+real and unmistakable influences, and probably the undercurrent of
+thought which happens to be in one's mind when one is with others
+has an effect, even if one says or does nothing to indicate one's
+preoccupation. A certain amount of this comes from an unconscious
+inference on the part of the recipients. We often augur, without
+any very definite rational process, from the facial expressions,
+gestures, movements, tones of others, what their frame of mind is.
+But I believe that there is a great deal more than that. We must
+all know that when we are with friends to whose moods and emotions
+we are attuned, there takes place a singular degree of thought-
+transference, quite apart from speech. I had once a great friend
+with whom I was accustomed to spend much time tete-a-tete. We used
+to travel together and spend long periods, day after day, in close
+conjunction, often indeed sharing the same bedroom. It became a
+matter at first of amusement and interest, but afterwards an
+accepted fact, that we could often realise, even after a long
+silence, in what direction the other's thought was travelling. "How
+did you guess I was thinking of that?" would be asked. To which the
+reply was, "I did not guess--I knew." On the other hand I have an
+old and familiar friend, whom I know well and regard with great
+affection, but whose presence, and particularly a certain fixity of
+glance, often, even now, causes me a curious subjective disturbance
+which is not wholly pleasant, a sense of some odd psychical control
+which is not entirely agreeable.
+
+I have another friend who is the most delightful and easy company
+in the world when we are, alone together; but he is a sensitive and
+highly-strung creature, much affected by personal influences, and
+when I meet him in the company of other people he is often almost
+unrecognisable. His mind becomes critical, combative, acrid; he
+does not say what he means, he is touched by a vague excitement,
+and there passes over him an unnatural sort of brilliance, of a
+hard and futile kind, which makes him sacrifice consideration and
+friendliness to the instinctive desire to produce an effect and to
+score a point. I sometimes actually detest him when he is one of a
+circle. I feel inclined to say to him, "If only you could let your
+real self appear, and drop this tiresome posturing and fencing, you
+would be as delightful as you are to me when I am alone with you;
+but this hectic tittering and feverish jocosity is not only not
+your real self, but it gives others an impression of a totally
+unreal and not very agreeable person." But, alas, this is just the
+sort of thing one cannot say to a friend!
+
+As one goes on in life, this terrible and disconcerting shyness of
+youth disappears. We begin to realise, with a wholesome loss of
+vanity and conceit, how very little people care or even notice how
+we are dressed, how we look, what we say. We learn that other
+people are as much preoccupied with their thoughts and fancies and
+reflections as we are with our own. We realise that if we are
+anxious to produce an agreeable impression, we do so far more by
+being interested and sympathetic, than by attempting a brilliance
+which we cannot command. We perceive that other people are not
+particularly interested in our crude views, nor very grateful for
+the expression of them. We acquire the power of combination and co-
+operation, in losing the desire for splendour and domination. We
+see that people value ease and security, more than they admire
+originality and fantastic contradiction. And so we come to the
+blessed time when, instead of reflecting after a social occasion
+whether we did ourselves justice, we begin to consider rather the
+impression we have formed of other personalities.
+
+I believe that we ought to have recourse to very homely remedies
+indeed for combating shyness. It is of no use to try to console and
+distract ourselves with lofty thoughts, and to try to keep eternity
+and the hopes of man in mind. We so become only more self-conscious
+and superior than ever. The fact remains that the shyness of youth
+causes agonies both of anticipation and retrospect; if one really
+wishes to get rid of it, the only way is to determine to get used
+somehow to society, and not to endeavour to avoid it; and as a
+practical rule to make up one's mind, if possible, to ask people
+questions, rather than to meditate impressive answers. Asking other
+people questions about things to which they are likely to know the
+answers is one of the shortest cuts to popularity and esteem. It is
+wonderful to reflect how much distress personal bashfulness causes
+people, how much they would give to be rid of it, and yet how very
+little trouble they ever take to acquiring any method of dealing
+with the difficulty. I see a good deal of undergraduates, and am
+often aware that they are friendly and responsive, but without any
+power of giving expression to it. I sometimes see them suffering
+acutely from shyness before my eyes. But a young man who can bring
+himself to ask a perfectly simple question about some small matter
+of common interest is comparatively rare; and yet it is generally
+the simplest way out of the difficulty.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+FEARS OF MIDDLE AGE
+
+
+
+
+
+Now with all the tremors, reactions, glooms, shadows, and despairs
+of youth--it is easy enough to forget them, but they were there--
+goes a power of lifting and lighting up in a moment at a chord of
+music, a glance, a word, the song of a bird, the scent of a flower,
+a flying sunburst, which fills life up like a cup with bubbling and
+sparkling liquor.
+
+
+  "My soul, be patient! Thou shalt find
+   A little matter mend all this!"
+
+
+And that is the part of youth which we remember, till on looking
+back it seems like a time of wandering with like-hearted comrades
+down some sweet-scented avenue of golden sun and green shade. Our
+memory plays us beautifully false--splendide mendax--till one wishes
+sometimes that old and wise men, retelling the story of their life,
+could recall for the comfort of youth some part of its languors and
+mischances, its bitter jealousies, its intense and poignant sense of
+failure.
+
+And then in a moment the door of life opens. One day I was an
+irresponsible, pleasure-loving, fantastic youth, and a week later I
+was, or it seemed to me that I was, a professional man with all the
+cares of a pedagogue upon my back. It filled me at first, I
+remember, with a gleeful amazement, to find myself in the desk,
+holding forth, instead of on the form listening. It seemed
+delicious at first to have the power of correcting and slashing
+exercises, and placing boys in order, instead of being corrected
+and examined, and competing for a place. It was a solemn game at
+the outset. Then came the other side of the picture. One's pupils
+were troublesome, they did badly in examinations, they failed
+unaccountably; and one had a glimpse too of some of the tragedies
+of school life. Almost insensibly I became aware that I had a task
+to perform, that my mistakes involved boys in disaster, that I had
+the anxious care of other destinies; and thus, almost before I knew
+it, came a new cloud on the horizon, the cloud of anxiety. I could
+not help seeing that I had mismanaged this boy and misdirected
+that; that one could not treat them as ingenuous and lively
+playthings, but that what one said and did set a mark which perhaps
+could not be effaced. Gradually other doubts and problems made
+themselves felt. I had to administer a system of education in which
+I did not wholly believe; I saw little by little that the rigid old
+system of education was a machine which, if it made a highly
+accomplished product out of the best material, wasted an enormous
+amount of boyish interest and liveliness, and stultified the
+feebler sort of mind. Then came the care of a boarding-house, close
+relations with parents, a more real knowledge of the infinite
+levity of boy nature. I became mixed up with the politics of the
+place, the chance of more ambitious positions floated before me;
+the need for tact, discretion, judiciousness, moderation, tolerance
+emphasized itself. I am here outlining my own experience, but it is
+only one of many similar experiences. I became a citizen without
+knowing it, and my place in the world, my status, success, all
+became definite things which I had to secure.
+
+The cares, the fears, the anxieties of middle life lie for most men
+and women in this region; if people are healthy and active, they
+generally arrive at a considerable degree of equanimity; they do
+not anticipate evil, and they take the problems of life cheerfully
+enough as they come; but yet come they do, and too many men and
+women are tempted to throw overboard scornfully and disdainfully
+the dreams of youth as a luxury which they cannot afford to
+indulge, and to immerse themselves in practical cares, month after
+month, with perhaps the hope of a fairly careless and idle holiday
+at intervals. What I think tends to counteract this for many people
+is love and marriage, the wonder and amazement of having children
+of their own, and all the offices of tenderness that grow up
+naturally beside their path. But this again brings a whole host of
+fears and anxieties as well--arrangements, ways and means,
+household cares, illnesses, the homely stuff of life, much of it
+enjoyed, much of it cheerfully borne, and often very bravely and
+gallantly endured. It is out of this simple material that life has
+to be constructed. But there is a twofold danger in all this. There
+is a danger of cynicism, the frame of mind in which a man comes to
+face little worries as one might put up an umbrella in a shower--
+"Thou know'st 'tis common!" Out of that grows up a rude dreariness,
+a philosophy which has nothing dignified about it, but is merely a
+recognition of the fact that life is a poor affair, and that one
+cannot hope to have things to one's mind. Or there is a dull frame
+of mind which implies a meek resignation, a sense of disappointment
+about life, borne with a mournful patience, a sense of one's sphere
+having somehow fallen short of one's deserts. This produces the
+grumpy paterfamilias who drowses over a paper or grumbles over a
+pipe; such a man is inimitably depicted by Mr. Wells in Marriage.
+That sort of ugly disillusionment, that publicity of
+disappointment, that frank disregard of all concerns except one's
+own, is one of the most hideous features of middle-class life, and
+it is rather characteristically English. It sometimes conceals a
+robust good sense and even kindliness; but it is a base thing at
+best, and seems to be the shadow of commercial prosperity. Yet it
+at least implies a certain sturdiness of character, and a stubborn
+belief in one's own merits which is quite impervious to the lessons
+of experience. On sensitive and imaginative people the result of
+the professional struggle with life, the essence of which is often
+social pretentiousness, is different. It ends in a mournful and
+distracted kind of fatigue, a tired sort of padding along after
+life, a timid bewilderment at conditions which one cannot alter,
+and which yet have no dignity or seemliness.
+
+What is there that is wrong with all this? The cause is easy enough
+to analyse. It is the result of a system which develops
+conventional, short-sighted, complicated households, averse to
+effort, fond of pleasure, and with tastes which are expensive
+without being refined. The only cure would seem to be that men and
+women should be born different, with simple active generous
+natures; it is easy to say that! But the worst of the situation is
+that the sordid banality and ugly tragedy of their lot do not dawn
+on the people concerned. Greedy vanity in the more robust, lack of
+moral courage and firmness in the more sensitive, with a social
+organisation that aims at a surface dignity and a cheap showiness,
+are the ingredients of this devil's cauldron. The worst of it is
+that it has no fine elements at all. There is a nobility about real
+tragedy which evokes a quality of passionate and sincere emotion.
+There is something essentially exalted about a fierce resistance, a
+desperate failure. But this abject, listless dreariness, which can
+hardly be altered or expressed, this miserable floating down the
+muddy current, where there is no sharp repentance or fiery
+battling, nothing but a mean abandonment to a meaningless and
+unintelligible destiny, seems to have in it no seed of recovery at
+all.
+
+The dark shadow of professional anxiety is that it has no tragic
+quality; it is like ploughing on day by day through endless mud-
+flats. One does not feel, in the presence of sharp suffering or
+bitter loss, that they ought not to exist. They are there, stern,
+implacable, august; stately enemies, great combatants. There is a
+significance about their very awfulness. One may fall before them,
+but they pass like a great express train, roaring, flashing, things
+deliberately and intently designed; but these dull failures which
+seem not the outgrowth of anyone's fierce longing or wilful
+passion, but of everyone's laziness and greediness and stupidity,
+how is one to face them? It is the helpless death of the quagmire,
+not the death of the fight or the mountain-top. Is there, we ask
+ourselves, anything in the mind of God which corresponds to
+comfort-loving vulgarity, if so strong and yet so stagnant a stream
+can overflow the world? The bourgeois ideal! One would rather have
+tyranny or savagery than anything so gross and smug.
+
+And yet we see high-spirited and ardent husbands drawn into this by
+obstinate and vulgar-minded wives. We see fine-natured and
+sensitive women engulfed in it by selfish and ambitious husbands.
+The tendency is awfully and horribly strong, and it wins, not by
+open combat, but by secret and dull persistence. And one sees too--
+I have seen it many times--children of delicate and eager natures,
+who would have flourished and expanded in more generous air, become
+conventional and commonplace and petty, concerned about knowing the
+right people and doing the right things, and making the same stupid
+and paltry show, which deceives no one.
+
+There is nothing for it but independence and simplicity and,
+perhaps best of all, a love of beauty. William Morris asserted
+passionately enough that art was the only cure for all this
+dreariness--the love of beautiful sounds and sights and words; and
+I think that is true, if it be further extended to a perception of
+the quality of beauty in the conduct and relations of life. For
+those are the cheap and reasonable pleasures of life, accessible to
+all; and if men and women cared for work first and the decent
+simplicities of wholesome living, and could further find their
+pleasure in art, in whatever form, then I believe that many of
+these fears and anxieties, so maiming and impairing to all that is
+fine in life, would vanish quietly out of being. The thing seems
+both beautiful and possible, because one knows of households where
+it is so, and where it grows up naturally and easily enough. I know
+households of both kinds--where on the one hand the standard is
+ambitious and mean, where the inmates calculate everything with a
+view to success, or rather to producing an impression of success;
+and there all talk and intercourse is an unreal thing, not the
+outflow of natural interests and pleasant tastes, but a sham
+culture and a refinement that is only pursued because it is the
+right sort of surface to present to the world. One submits to it
+with boredom, one leaves it with relief. They have got the right
+people together, they have shown that they can command their
+attendance; it is all ceremony and waste.
+
+And then I know households where one sees in the books, the
+pictures, the glances, the gestures, the movements of the inmates,
+a sort of grace and delicacy which comes of really caring about
+things that are beautiful and fine. Sincere things are simply said,
+humour bubbles up and breaks in laughter; one feels that light is
+thrown on a hundred topics and facts and personalities. The whole
+of life then becomes a garden teeming with strange and wonderful
+secrets, and influences that flash and radiate, passing on into
+some mysterious and fragrant gloom. Everything there seems charged
+with significance and charm; there are no pretences--there are
+preferences, prejudices if you will; but there is tolerance and
+sympathy, and a desire to see the point of view of others. The
+effect of such an atmosphere is to set one wondering how one has
+contrived to miss the sense of so much that is beautiful and
+interesting in life, and sends one away longing to perceive more,
+and determined if possible to interpret life more truly and more
+graciously.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+FEARS OF AGE
+
+
+
+
+
+And then age creeps on; and that brings fears of its own, and fears
+that are all the more intolerable because they are not definite
+fears at all, merely a loss of nervous vigour, which attaches itself
+to the most trivial detail and magnifies it into an insuperable
+difficulty. A friend of mine who was growing old once confided to me
+that foreign travel, which used to be such a delight to him, was now
+getting burdensome. "It is all right when I have once started," he
+said, "but for days before I am the prey of all kinds of
+apprehensions." "What sort of apprehensions?" I said. He laughed,
+and replied, "Well, it is almost too absurd to mention, but I find
+myself oppressed with anxiety for weeks beforehand as to whether,
+when we get to Calais, we shall find places in the train." And I
+remember, too, how a woman friend of mine once told me that she
+called at the house of an elderly couple in London, people of rank
+and wealth. Their daughter met her in the drawing-room and said, "I
+am glad you are come--you may be able to cheer my mother up. We are
+going down to-morrow to our place in the country; the servants and
+the luggage went this morning, and my mother and father are to drive
+down this afternoon--my mother is very low about it." "What is the
+matter?" said my friend. The daughter replied, "She is afraid that
+they will not get there in time!" "In time for what?" said my
+friend, thinking that there was some important engagement. "In time
+for tea!" said the daughter gravely.
+
+It is all very well to laugh at such fears, but they are not
+natural fears at all, they just indicate a low vitality; they are
+the symptoms and not the causes of a disease. It is the frame of
+mind of the sluggard in the Bible who says, "There is a lion in the
+way." Younger people are apt to be irritated by what seems a wilful
+creating of apprehensions. They ought rather to be patient and
+reassuring, and compassionate to the weakness of nerve for which it
+stands.
+
+With such fears as these may be classed all the unreal but none the
+less distressing fears about health which beset people all their
+lives, in some cases; it is extremely annoying to healthy people to
+find a man reduced to depression and silence at the possibility of
+taking cold, or at the fear of having eaten something unwholesome.
+I remember an elderly gentleman who had lived a vigorous and
+unselfish life, and was indeed a man of force and character, whose
+activity was entirely suspended in later years by his fear of
+catching cold or of over-tiring himself. He was a country
+clergyman, and used to spend the whole of Sunday between his
+services, in solitary seclusion, "resting," and retire to bed the
+moment the evening service was over; moreover his dread of taking
+cold was such that he invariably wore a hat in the winter months to
+go from the drawing-room to the dining-room for dinner, even if
+there were guests in his house. He used to jest about it, and say
+that it no doubt must look curious; but he added that he had found
+it a wise precaution, and that we had no idea how disabling his
+colds were. Even a very healthy friend of my own standing has told
+me that if he ever lies awake at night he is apt to exaggerate the
+smallest and most trifling sense of discomfort into the symptom of
+some dangerous disease. Let me quote the well-known case of Hans
+Andersen, whose imagination was morbidly strong. He found one
+morning when he awoke that he had a small pimple under his left
+eyebrow. He reflected with distress upon the circumstance, and soon
+came to the rueful conclusion that the pimple would probably
+increase in size, and deprive him of the sight of his left eye. A
+friend calling upon him in the course of the morning found him
+writing, in a mood of solemn resignation, with one hand over the
+eye in question, "practising," as he said, "how to read and write
+with the only eye that would soon be left him."
+
+One's first impulse is to treat these self-inflicted sufferings as
+ridiculous and almost idiotic. But they are quite apt to beset
+people of effectiveness and ability. To call them irrational does
+not cure them, because they lie deeper than any rational process,
+and are in fact the superficial symptoms of some deep-seated
+weakness of nerve, while their very absurdity, and the fact that
+the mind cannot throw them off, only proves how strong they are.
+They are in fact signs of some profound uneasiness of mind; and the
+rational brain of such people, casting about for some reason to
+explain the fear with which they are haunted, fixes on some detail
+which is not worthy of serious notice. It is of course a species of
+local insanity and monomania, but it does not imply any general
+obscuration of faculties at all. Some of the most intellectual
+people are most at the mercy of such trials, and indeed they are
+rather characteristic of men and women whose brain is apt to work
+at high pressure. One recollects in the life of Shelley, how he
+used to be haunted by these insupportable fears. He was at one time
+persuaded that he had contracted leprosy, and he used to disconcert
+his acquaintances by examining solicitously their wrists and necks
+to see if he could detect symptoms of the same disease.
+
+There is very little doubt that as medical knowledge progresses we
+shall know more about the cause of such hallucinations. To call
+them unreal is mere stupidity. Sensible people who suffer from them
+are often perfectly well aware of their unreality, and are
+profoundly humiliated by them. They are some disease or weakness of
+the imaginative faculty; and a friend of mine who suffered from
+such things told me that it was extraordinary to him to perceive
+the incredible ingenuity with which his brain under such
+circumstances used to find confirmation for his fears from all
+sorts of trivial incidents which at other times passed quite
+unnoticed. It is generally quite useless to think of removing the
+fear by combating the particular fancy; the affected centre,
+whatever it is, only turns feverishly to some other similar
+anxiety. Occupation of a quiet kind, exercise, rest, are the best
+medicine.
+
+Sometimes these anxieties take a different form, and betray
+themselves by suspicion of other people's conduct and motives. That
+is of course allied to insanity. In sane and sound health we
+realise that we are not, as a rule, the objects of the malignity
+and spitefulness of others. We are perhaps obstacles to the
+carrying out of other people's plans; but men and women as a rule
+mind their own business, and are not much concerned to intervene in
+the designs and activities of others. Yet a man whose mental
+equilibrium is unstable is apt to think that if he is disappointed
+or thwarted it is the result of a deliberate conspiracy on the part
+of other people. If he is a writer, he thinks that other writers
+are aware of his merits, but are determined to prevent them being
+recognised out of sheer ill-will. A man in robust health realises
+that he gets quite as much credit or even more credit than he
+deserves, and that his claims to attention are generously
+recognised; one has exactly as much influence and weight as one can
+get, and other people as a rule are much too much occupied in their
+own concerns to have either the time or the inclination to
+interfere. But as a man grows older, as his work stiffens and
+weakens, he falls out of the race, and he must be content to do so;
+and he is well advised if he puts his failure down to his own
+deficiencies, and not to the malice of others. The world is really
+very much on the look out for anything which amuses, delights,
+impresses, moves, or helps it; it is quick and generous in
+recognition of originality and force; and if a writer, as he gets
+older, finds his books neglected and his opinions disdained, he may
+be fairly sure that he has said his say, and that men are
+preoccupied with new ideas and new personalities. Of course this is
+a melancholy and disconcerting business, especially if one has been
+more concerned with personal prominence than with the worth and
+weight of one's ideas; mortified vanity is a sore trial. I remember
+once meeting an old author who, some thirty years before the date
+at which I met him, had produced a book which attracted an
+extraordinary amount of attention, though it has long since been
+forgotten. The old man had all the airs of solemn greatness, and I
+have seldom seen a more rueful spectacle than when a young and
+rising author was introduced to him, and when it became obvious
+that the young man had not only never heard of the old writer, but
+did not know the name of his book.
+
+The question is what we can do to avoid falling under the dominion
+of these uncanny fears and fancies, as we fall from middle age to
+age. A dreary, dispirited, unhappy, peevish old man or old woman is
+a very miserable spectacle; while, at the same time, generous,
+courteous, patient, modest, tender old age is one of the most
+beautiful things in the world. We may of course resolve not to
+carry our dreariness into all circles, and if we find life a poor
+and dejected business, we can determine that we will not enlarge
+upon the theme. But the worst of discouragement is that it removes
+even the desire to play a part, or to make the most and best of
+ourselves. Like Mrs. Gummidge in David Copperfield, if we are
+reminded that other people have their troubles, we are apt to reply
+that we feel them more. One does not desire that people should
+unduly indulge themselves in self-dramatisation. There is something
+very repugnant in an elderly person who is bent on proving his
+importance and dignity, in laying claim to force and influence, in
+affecting to play a large part in the world. But there is something
+even more afflicting in the people who drop all decent pretence of
+dignity, and pour the product of an acrid and disappointed spirit
+into all conversations.
+
+Age can establish itself very firmly in the hearts of its circle,
+if it is kind, sympathetic, appreciative, ready to receive
+confidences, willing to encourage the fitful despondencies of
+youth. But here again we are met by the perennial difficulty as to
+how far we can force ourselves to do things which we do not really
+want to do, and how far again, if we succeed in forcing ourselves
+into action, we can give any accent of sincerity and genuineness to
+our comments and questions.
+
+In this particular matter, that of sympathy, a very little effort
+does undoubtedly go a long way, because there are a great many
+people in the world eagerly on the look out for any sign of
+sympathy, and not apt to scrutinise too closely the character of
+the sympathy offered. And the best part of having once forced
+oneself to exhibit sympathy, at whatever cost of strain and effort,
+is that one is at least ashamed to withdraw it.
+
+I remember a foolish woman who was very anxious to retain the hold
+upon the active world which she had once possessed. She very seldom
+spoke of any subject but herself, her performances, her activities,
+the pressure of the claims which she was forced to try to satisfy.
+I can recall her now, with her sanguine complexion, her high voice,
+her anxious and restless eye wandering in search of admiration.
+"The day's post!" she cried, "that is one of my worst trials--so
+many duties to fulfil, so many requests for help, so many
+irresistible claims come before me in the pile of letters--that
+high," indicating about a foot and a half of linear measurement
+above the table. "It is the same story every day--a score of people
+bringing their little mugs of egotism to be filled at my pump of
+sympathy!"
+
+It was a ridiculous exhibition, because one was practically sure
+that there was nothing of the kind going on. One was inclined to
+believe that they were mugs of sympathy filled at the pump of
+egotism! But if the thing were really being done, it was certainly
+worth doing!
+
+One of the causes of the failure of nerve-force in age, which lies
+behind so much of these miseries, is that people who have lived at
+all active lives cannot bring themselves to realise their loss of
+vigour, and try to prolong the natural energies of middle age into
+the twilight of elderliness. Men and women cling to activities, not
+because they enjoy them, but to delude themselves into believing
+that they are still young. That terrible inability to resign
+positions, the duties of which one cannot adequately fulfil, which
+seems so disgraceful and unconscientious a handling of life to the
+young, is often a pathetic clinging to youth. Such veterans do not
+reflect that the only effect of such tenacity is partly that other
+people do their work, and partly also that the critic observes that
+if a post can be adequately filled by so old a man it is a proof
+that such a post ought not to exist. The tendency ought to be met
+as far as possible by fixing age-limits to all positions. Because
+even if the old and weary do consult their friends as to the
+advisability of retirement, it is very hard for the friends
+cordially to recommend it. A public man once told me that a very
+aged official consulted him as to the propriety of resignation. He
+said in his reply something complimentary about the value of the
+veteran's services. Whereupon the old man replied that as he set so
+high an estimation upon his work, he would endeavour to hold on a
+little longer!
+
+The conscientious thing to do, as we get older and find ourselves
+slower, more timid, more inactive, more anxious, is to consult a
+candid friend, and to follow his advice rather than our own
+inclination; a certain fearfulness, an avoidance of unpleasant
+duty, a dreary foreboding, is apt to be characteristic of age. But
+we must meet it philosophically. We must reflect that we have done
+our work, and that an attempt to galvanise ourselves into activity
+is sure to result in depression. So we must condense our energies,
+be content to play a little, to drowse a little, to watch with
+interest the game of life in which we cannot take a hand, until
+death falls as naturally upon our wearied eyes as sleep falls upon
+the eyes of a child tired with a long summer day of eager pleasure
+and delight.
+
+But there is one practical counsel that may here be given to all
+who find a tendency to dread and anxiety creeping upon them as life
+advances. I have known very truly and deeply religious people who
+have been thus beset, and who make their fears the subject of
+earnest prayer, asking that this particular terror may be spared
+them, that this cup may be withdrawn from their shuddering lips. I
+do not believe that this is the right way of meeting the situation.
+One may pray as whole-heartedly as one will against the tendency to
+fear; but it is a great help to realise that the very experiences
+which seem now so overwhelming had little or no effect upon one in
+youthful and high-hearted days. It is not really that the quality
+of events alter; it is merely that one is losing vitality, and
+parting with the irresponsible hopefulness that did not allow one
+to brood, simply because there were so many other interesting and
+delightful things going on.
+
+One must attack the disease, for it is a disease, at the root; and
+it is of little use to shrink timidly from the particular evil,
+because when it is gone, another will take its place. We may pray
+for courage, but we must practise it; and the best way of meeting
+particular fears is to cultivate interests, distractions,
+amusements, which may serve to dispel them. We cannot begin to do
+that while we are under the dominion of a particular fear, for the
+strength of fear lies in its dominating and nauseating quality, so
+that it gives us a dreary disrelish for life; but if we really wish
+to combat it, we must beware of inactivity; it may be comfortable,
+as life goes on, to cultivate a habit of mild contemplation, but it
+is this very habit of mind which predisposes us to anxiety when
+anxiety comes. Dr. Johnson pointed out how comparatively rare it
+was for people who had manual labour to perform, and whose work lay
+in the open air, to suffer from hypochondriacal terrors. The truth
+is that we are made for labour, and we have by no means got rid of
+the necessity for it. We have to pay a price for the comforts of
+civilisation, and above all for the pleasures of inactivity. It is
+astonishing how quickly a definite task which one has to perform,
+whether one likes it or not, draws off a cloud of anxiety from
+one's spirit. I am myself liable to attacks of depression, not
+causeless depression, but a despondent exaggeration of small
+troubles. Yet in times of full work, when meetings have to be
+attended, papers tackled, engagements kept, I seldom find myself
+suffering from vague anxieties. It is simply astonishing that one
+cannot learn more common sense! I suppose that all people of
+anxious minds tend to find the waking hour a trying one. The mind,
+refreshed by sleep, turns sorrowfully to the task of surveying the
+difficulties which lie before it. And yet a hundred times have I
+discovered that life, which seemed at dawn nothing but a tangle of
+intolerable problems, has become at noon a very bearable and even
+interesting affair; and one should thus learn to appreciate the
+tonic value of occupation, and set oneself to discern some pursuit,
+if we have no compulsory duties, which may set the holy mill
+revolving, as Dante says; for it is the homely grumble of the gear
+which distracts us from the other sort of grumbling, the self-
+pitying frame of mind, which is the most fertile seed-plot of fear.
+
+"How happy I was long ago; how little I guessed my happiness; how
+little I knew all that lay before me; how sadly and strangely
+afflicted I am!" These are the whispers of the evil demon of
+fearfulness; and they can only be checked by the murmur of
+wholesome and homely voices.
+
+The old motto says, "Orare est laborare," "prayer is work"--and it
+is no less true that "laborare est orare," "work is prayer." The
+truth is that we cannot do without both; and when we have prayed
+for courage, and tried to rejoice in our beds, as the saints who
+are joyful in glory do, we had better spend no time in begging that
+money may be sent us to meet our particular need, or that health
+may return to us, or that this and that person may behave more
+kindly and considerately, but go our way to some perfectly
+commonplace bit of work, do it as thoroughly as we can, and simply
+turn our back upon the hobgoblin whose grimaces fill us with such
+uneasiness. He melts away in the blessed daylight over the volume
+or the account-book, in the simple talk about arrangements or
+affairs, and above all perhaps in trying to disentangle and relieve
+another's troubles and anxieties. We cannot get rid of fear by
+drugs or charms; we have to turn to the work which is the appointed
+solace of man, and which is the reward rather than the penalty of
+life.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+DR. JOHNSON
+
+
+
+
+
+There is one great and notable instance in our annals which ought
+once and for all to dispose of the idea that there is anything weak
+or unmanly in finding fear a constant temptation, and that is the
+case of Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson holds his supreme station as the
+"figure" par excellence of English life for a number of reasons. His
+robustness, his wit, his reverence for established things, his
+secret piety are all contributory causes; but the chief of all
+causes is that the proportion in which these things were mixed is
+congenial to the British mind. The Englishman likes a man who is
+deeply serious without being in the least a prig; a man who is
+tender-hearted without being sentimental; he likes a rather
+combative nature, and enjoys repartee more than he enjoys humour.
+The Englishman values good sense above almost all qualities; by a
+sensible man he means a man with a clear judgment of right and
+wrong, a man who is not taken in by pretences nor gulled by
+rhetoric; a man who can instinctively see what is important and what
+is unimportant. But of course the chief external reason, apart from
+the character of Johnson himself, for his supremacy of fame, is that
+his memory is enshrined in an incomparable biography. It shows the
+strange ineptness of Englishmen for literary and artistic criticism,
+their incapacity for judging a work of art on its own merits, their
+singular habit of allowing their disapprobation of a man's private
+character to depreciate his work, that an acknowledged critic like
+Macaulay could waste time in carefully considering whether Boswell
+was more fool or more knave, and triumphantly announce that he
+produced a good book by accident. Probably Boswell did not realise
+how matchless a biographer he was, though he was not disposed to
+belittle his own performances. But his unbridled interest in the
+smallest details, his power of hero-worship, his amazing style, his
+perception, his astonishing memory and the training he gave it, his
+superb dramatic faculty, which enabled him to arrange his other
+characters around the main figure, and to subordinate them all to
+his central emphasis--all these qualities are undeniable. Moreover
+he was himself the most perfect foil and contrast to Johnson that
+could be imagined, while he possessed in a unique degree the power
+of both stimulating and provoking his hero to animation and to
+wrath. Boswell may not have known what an artist he was, but he is
+probably one of the best literary artists who has ever lived.
+
+But the supreme quality of his great book is this--that his
+interest in every trait of his hero, large and small, is so strong
+that he had none of that stiff propriety or chilly reserve which
+mars almost all English biographies. He did not care a straw
+whether this characteristic or that would redound to Johnson's
+credit. He saw that Johnson was a large-minded, large-hearted man,
+with an astonishing power of conversational expression, and an
+extremely picturesque figure as well. He perceived that he was big
+enough to be described in full, and that the shadows of his
+temperament only brought out the finer features into prominence.
+
+Since the days of Johnson there are but two Englishmen whose lives
+we know in anything like the same detail--Ruskin and Carlyle. We
+know the life of Ruskin mainly from his own power of impassioned
+autobiography, and because he had the same sort of power of
+exhibiting both his charm and his weakness as Boswell had in
+dealing with Johnson. But Ruskin was not at all a typical
+Englishman; he had a very feminine side to his character, and
+though he was saved from sentimentality by his extreme trenchancy,
+and by his irritable temper, yet his whole temperament is
+beautiful, winning, attractive, rather than salient and
+picturesque. He had the qualities of a poet, a quixotic ideal, and
+an exuberant fancy; but though his spell over those who understand
+him is an almost magical one, his point of view is bound to be
+misunderstood by the ordinary man.
+
+Carlyle's case is a different one again. There the evidence is
+mainly documentary. We know more about the Carlyle interior than we
+know of the history of any married pair since the world began.
+There is little doubt that if Carlyle could have had a Boswell, a
+biographer who could have rendered the effect of his splendid power
+of conversation, we might have had a book which could have been put
+on the same level as the life of Johnson, because Carlyle again was
+pre-eminently a "figure," a man made by nature to hold the
+enraptured attention of a circle. But it would have been a much
+more difficult task to represent Carlyle's talk than it was to
+represent Johnson's, because Carlyle was an inspired soliloquist,
+and supplied both objection and repartee out of his own mind. I
+think it probable that Carlyle was a typical Scotchman; he was more
+impassioned in his seriousness than Johnson, but he had a grimness
+which Johnson did not possess, and he had not Johnson's good-
+natured tolerance for foolish and well-meaning people. Carlyle
+himself had a good deal of Boswell's own gift, a power of minute
+and faithful observation, and a memory which treasured and
+reproduced characteristic details. If Carlyle had ever had the time
+or the taste to admire any human being as Boswell admired Johnson,
+he might have produced fully as great a book; but Carlyle had a
+prophetic impulse, an instinct for inverting tubs and preaching
+from them, a desire for telling the whole human race what to do and
+how to do it, which Johnson was too modest to claim.
+
+There is but one other instance that I know in English literature
+of a man who had the Boswellian gift to the full, but who never had
+complete scope, and that was Hogg. If Hogg could have spent more of
+his life with Shelley, and had been allowed to complete his book,
+we might, I believe, have had a monument of the same kind.
+
+But in the case of Boswell and Johnson, it is Boswell's magnificent
+scorn of reticence which has done the trick, like the spurt of
+acid, of which Browning speaks in one of his best similes. The
+final stroke of genius which has established the Life of Johnson so
+securely in the hearts of English readers, lies in the fact that
+Boswell has given us something to compassionate. As a rule the
+biographer cannot bear to evoke the smallest pity for his hero. The
+absence of female relatives in the case of Johnson was probably a
+part of his good fortune. No biographer likes, and seldom dares, to
+torture the sensibilities of a great man's widow and daughters. And
+the strength as well as the weakness of the feminine point of view
+is that women have a power not so much of not observing, as of
+actually obliterating the weaknesses of those whom they love. It is
+sentiment which ruins biographies, the sentiment that cannot bear
+the truth.
+
+Boswell did not shrink from admitting the reader to a sight of
+Johnson's hypochondria, his melancholy fears, his dreary miseries,
+his dread of illness, his terror of death. Johnson's horror of
+annihilation was insupportable. He so revelled in life, in the
+contact and company of other human beings, that he once said that
+the idea of an infinity of torment was preferable to the thought of
+annihilation. He wrote, in his last illness, to his old friend Dr.
+Taylor:
+
+
+"Oh! my friend, the approach of death is very dreadful. I am afraid
+to think on that which I know I cannot avoid. It is vain to look
+round and round for that help which cannot be had. Yet we hope and
+hope, and fancy that he who has lived to-day may live to-morrow.
+But let us learn to derive our hope only from God.
+
+"In the meantime, let us be kind to one another. I have no friend
+now living but you and Mr. Hector that was the friend of my youth.--
+Do not neglect, sir, yours affectionately, SAM. JOHNSON."
+
+
+Was ever the last fear put into such simple and poignant words as
+in the above letter? It is like that other saying of Johnson's,
+when all sorts of good reasons had been given why men should wish
+to be released from their troubles by death, "After all, it is a
+sad thing for a man to lie down and die." There is no more that can
+be said, and not the best reasons in the world for desiring to
+depart and have done with life can ever do away with that sadness.
+
+Dr. Johnson supplies the clearest proof, if proof were needed, that
+no robustness of temperament, no genius of common sense, no array
+of rationality, no degree of courage, can save a man from the
+assaults of fear, and even of fear which the sufferer knows to be
+unreal. Some of the most severe and angry things which Johnson ever
+said were said to Boswell and others who persisted in discussing
+the question of death. Yet Johnson had no rational doubt of
+immortality, and believed with an almost childlike simplicity in
+the Christian faith. He was not afraid of pain, or of the act of
+dying; it was of the unknown conditions beyond the grave that he
+was afraid. Probably as a rule very robust people are so much
+occupied in living that they have little time to think of the
+future, while men and women who hold to life by a frail tenure are
+not much concerned at quitting a scene which is phantasmal and full
+of pain. But in Johnson we have the two extremes brought together.
+He was the most gregarious of men; he loved company so well that he
+would follow his friends to the very threshold, in the hope, as he
+once told Boswell, that they might perhaps return. When he was
+alone and undistracted, his melancholy came back upon him like a
+cloud. He tortured himself over the unprofitableness of his life,
+over his failure to achieve official prominence. He does not seem
+to have brooded over the favourite subject for Englishmen to lose
+heart over, namely, his financial position. It is a very
+significant fact in our English life that if at an inquest upon a
+suicide it can be established that a man has financial
+difficulties, a verdict of temporary insanity is instantly
+conceded. Loss of property rather than loss of affection is the
+thing which the Englishman thinks is likely to derange a man. But
+Johnson seems never to have been afraid of poverty, nor to have
+ever troubled about fame. He was very angry once when it was
+laughingly suggested to him that if he had gone to the Bar he might
+have been Lord Chancellor; and I have no doubt, as I have said,
+that one of his uncomfortable reflections was that he did not seem
+to himself to be in a position of influence and authority. But,
+apart from that, it is obvious that Johnson's broodings took the
+form of lamenting his own sinfulness and moral worthlessness: what
+the faults which troubled him were, it is hard to say. He does not
+seem to have been repentant about the mortification he caused
+others by his witty bludgeoning--indeed he considered himself a
+polite man! But I believe, from many slight indications, that
+Johnson was distressed by the consciousness of sensual impulses,
+though he held them in severe restraint. His habit of ejaculatory
+prayer was, I think, directed against this tendency. The agitation
+with which he once said that corruption had entered into his heart
+by means of a dream seems to me a proof of this. He took a tolerant
+view of the lapses of others, and of course the standard of the age
+was lax in this respect. But I have little doubt myself that here
+Johnson found himself often confronted with a sensuous tendency
+which he thought degrading, and which he constantly combated.
+
+Apart from this, he was not afraid of illness in itself, except as
+a prelude of mortality. Indeed I believe that he took a
+hypochondriac pleasure in observing his symptoms minutely, and in
+dosing himself in all sorts of ways. His mysterious preoccupations
+with dried orange-peel had no doubt a medicinal end in view. But
+when it came to suffering pain and even to enduring operations, he
+had no tremors. His one constant fear was the fear of death. He
+kept it at arm's length, he loved any social amusement that
+banished it, but it is obvious, in several of his talks, when the
+subject was under discussion, that the cloud descended upon him
+suddenly and made him miserable. It was all summed up in this, that
+life was to his taste, that even when oppressed with gloom and
+depression, he never desired to escape. I have heard a great doctor
+say that he believed that human beings were very sharply divided in
+this respect, that there were some people in whom any extremity of
+prolonged anguish, bodily or mental, never produced the smallest
+desire to quit life; while there were others whose attachment to
+life was slight, and that a very little pressure of care or
+calamity developed a suicidal impulse. This is, I suppose, a
+question of vitality, not necessarily of activity of mind and body,
+but a deep instinctive desire to live; the thought of deliberate
+suicide was wholly unintelligible to Johnson, death was his
+ultimate fear, and however much he suffered from disease or
+depression, his intention to live was always inalienable.
+
+His fear then was one which no devoutness of faith, no resolute
+tenacity of hope, no array of reasons could ever touch. It was
+simply the unknown that he feared. Life had not been an easy
+business for Johnson; he had known all the calamities of life, and
+he was familiar with the worst calamity of all, the causeless
+melancholy which makes life weary and distasteful without ever
+removing the certainty that it is in itself desirable.
+
+We may see from all this that to attempt to seek a cure for fear in
+reason is foredoomed to failure, because fear lies in a region that
+is behind all reason. It exists in the depth of the spirit, as in
+the fallen gloom of the glimmering sea-deeps, and it can be touched
+by no activity of life and joy and sunlight on the surface, where
+the speeding sail moves past wind-swept headlands. We must follow
+it into those depths if we are to deal with it at all, and it must
+be vanquished in the region where it is born, and where it skulks
+unseen.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+TENNYSON, RUSKIN, CARLYLE
+
+
+
+
+
+There were three great men of the nineteenth century of whom we know
+more than we know of most men, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Tennyson, in
+whose lives fear was a prominent element.
+
+Tennyson has suffered no loss of fame, but he has suffered of late
+a certain loss of influence, which was bound to come, if simply
+from the tremendous domination which his writings exercised in his
+lifetime. He was undoubtedly one of the first word-artists who ever
+lived and wrote, but he was a great deal more than that; he was a
+great mystic, a man whose mind moved in a shining cloud of
+inspiration. He had the constitution and the temperament of a big
+Lincolnshire yeoman, with that simple rusticity that is said to
+have characterised Vergil. But his spirit dwelt apart, revolving
+dim and profound thoughts, brooding over mysteries; if he is
+lightly said to be Early Victorian, it is not because he was
+typical of his age, but because he contributed so much to make it
+what it was. While Browning lived an eager personal life, full of
+observation, zest, and passion, Tennyson abode in more impersonal
+thoughts. In the dawn of science, when there was a danger of life
+becoming over-materialised, contented with the first steps of
+swiftly apprehended knowledge, and with solutions which were no
+solutions at all, but only the perception of laws, Tennyson was the
+man of all others who saw that science had a deeply poetical side,
+and could enforce rather than destroy the religious spirit; he saw
+that a knowledge of processes was not the same thing as an
+explanation of impulses, and that while it was a little more clear
+in the light of science what was actually happening in the world,
+men were no nearer the perception of why it happened so, or why it
+happened at all. Tennyson saw clearly the wonders of astronomy and
+geology, and discerned that the laws of nature were nothing more
+than the habits, so to speak, of a power that was incredibly dim
+and vast, a power which held within itself the secrets of motion
+and rest, of death and life. Thus he claimed for his disciples not
+only the average thoughtful men, but the very best and finest minds
+of his generation who wished to link the past and the present
+together, and not to break with the old sanctities.
+
+Tennyson's art suffered from the consciousness of his enormous
+responsibility, and where he failed was from his dread of
+unpopularity, or his fear of alienating the ordinary man. Browning
+was interested in ethical problems; his robust and fortunate
+temperament allowed him to bridge over with a sort of buoyant
+healthiness the gaps of his philosophy. But Tennyson's ethical
+failure lay in his desire to improve the occasion, and to rule out
+all impulses that had not a social and civic value. In the later
+"Idylls" he did his best to represent the prig trailing clouds of
+glory, and to discourage lawlessness in every form; but he was more
+familiar with the darker and grosser sides of life than he allowed
+to appear in his verse, which suffers from an almost prudish
+delicacy, which is more akin to respectability than to moral
+courage.
+
+But all this was the shadow of a very sensitive and melancholy
+temperament. Comparatively little is known of the first forty years
+of his life; it is after that time that the elaborate legend
+begins. Till the time of his marriage, he must have been a constant
+anxiety to his friends; his gloom, his inertia, his drifting
+mooning ways, his hypochondria, his incapacity for any settled plan
+of life, all seemed to portend an ultimate failure. But this
+troubled inertness was the soil of his inspiration; his conceptions
+took slow and stately shape. He never suffered from the haste,
+which as Dante says "mars all decency of act." After that time he
+enjoyed a great domestic happiness, and practised considerable
+sociability. His terrifying demeanour, his amazing personal dignity
+and majesty, the certainty that he would say whatever came into his
+head, whether it was profound and solemn, or testy and
+discourteous, gave him a personal ascendancy that never
+disappointed a pilgrim.
+
+But he lived all his life in a perpetual melancholy, feeling the
+smallest slights acutely, hating at once obscurity and publicity,
+aware of his renown, yet shrinking from the evidences of it. He
+could be distracted by company, soothed by wine and tobacco; but
+left to itself, his mind fell helplessly down the dark slope into a
+sadness and a dreariness which deprived life of its savour. It was
+not that his dread was a definite one; he was strong and tough
+physically, and he regarded death with a solemn curiosity; but he
+had a sense of the profitlessness of vacant hours, unthrilled by
+beauty and delight, and had also a morbid pride, of the nature of
+vanity, which caused him to resent the smallest criticism of his
+works from the humblest reader. There are many stories of this, how
+he declaimed against the lust of gossip, which he called with rough
+appositeness "ripping up a man like a pig," and thanked God with
+all his heart and soul that he knew nothing of Shakespeare's
+private life; and in the same breath went on to say that he thought
+that his own fame was suffering from a sort of congestion, because
+he had received no letters about his poems for several days.
+
+In later life he became very pessimistic, and believed that the
+world was sinking fast into dull materialism, petty selfishness,
+and moral anarchy. He had less opportunity of knowing what was
+going on in the world than most people, in his sheltered and
+secluded life, with his court of friends and worshippers. And
+indeed it was not a rational pessimism; it was but the shadow of
+his fear. And the fact remains that in spite of a life of great
+good fortune, and an undimmed supremacy of fame, he spent much of
+his time in fighting shadows, involved in clouds of darkness and
+dissatisfaction. That was no doubt the price he paid for his
+exquisite perception of beauty and his power of melodious
+expression. But we make a great mistake if we merely think of
+Tennyson as a rich and ample nature moving serenely through life.
+He was "black-blooded," he once said, adding, "like all the
+Tennysons." Doubtless he had in his mind his father, a man often
+deeply in the grip of melancholy. And the absurd legend, invented
+probably by Rossetti, contains a truth in it and may be quoted
+here. Rossetti said that he once went to dine with a friend in
+London, and was shown into a dimly lit drawing-room with no one to
+receive him. He went towards the fireplace, and suddenly to his
+surprise discovered an immensely tall man in evening dress lying
+prostrate on the hearthrug, his face downwards, in an attitude of
+prone despair. While he gazed, the stranger rose to his feet,
+looked fixedly at him, and said, "I must introduce myself; I am
+Octavius, the most morbid of the Tennysons."
+
+With Ruskin we have a different case. He was brought up in the most
+secluded fashion, and though he was sharply enough disciplined into
+decorous behaviour by his very grim and positive mother, he was
+guarded like a precious jewel, and as he grew up he was endlessly
+petted and indulged. The Ruskins lived a very comfortable life in a
+big villa with ample grounds at Denmark Hill. Whatever the
+wonderful boy did was applauded and even dangerously encouraged,
+both in the way of drawing and of writing. Though he seems to have
+been often publicly snubbed by both his parents, it was more a
+family custom than anything else, and was accompanied by
+undisguised admiration and patent pride. They were his stupefied
+critics, when he read aloud his works in the family circle, and his
+father obediently produced large sums of money to gratify his
+brilliant son's artistic desire for the possession of Turner's
+paintings. Ruskin in his morbid moments, in later life, turned
+fiercely and unjustly against his fond and tender father. He
+accused him with an in temperate bitterness of having lavished
+everything upon him except the intelligent sympathy of which he
+stood in need, and his father's gentle and mournful apologies have
+an extraordinary beauty of puzzled and patient dignity about them.
+
+When Ruskin went to Oxford, his mother went to reside there too, to
+look after her darling. One might have supposed that this would
+have involved Ruskin in ridicule, but he was petted and indulged by
+his fellow-undergraduates, who found his charm, his swift wit, his
+childlike waywardness, his freakish humour irresistible. Then he
+had a serious illness, and his first taste of misery; he was afraid
+of death, he hated the constraints of invalid life and the grim
+interruption to his boundless energies and plans. Then came his
+first great book, and he strode full-fledged into fame. His amazing
+attractiveness, his talk, which combined incisiveness and fancy and
+humour and fire and gentleness, made him a marked figure from the
+first. Moreover, he had the command of great wealth, yet no
+temptation to be idle. The tale of Ruskin's industry for the next
+fifty years is one that would be incredible if it were not true.
+His brief and dim experience of married life seems hardly to have
+affected him. As a critic of art and ethics, as the writer of
+facile magnificent sentences, full of beauty and rhythm, as the
+composer of word-structures, apparently logical in form but deeply
+prejudiced and inconsequent in thought, he became one of the great
+influences of the day, and wielded not only power but real
+domination. The widespread delusion of the English educated
+classes, that they are interested in art, was of Ruskin's making.
+Then something very serious happened to him; a baffled passion of
+extraordinary intensity, a perception of the realities of life, the
+consciousness that his public indulged and humoured him as his
+parents had done, and admired his artistic advice without paying
+the smallest heed to his ethical principles--all these experiences
+broke over him, wearied as he was with excessive strain, like a
+bitter wave. But his pessimism took the noble form of an intense
+concern with the blindness and impenetrability of the world at
+large. He made a theory of political economy, which, peremptory and
+prejudiced as it is, is yet built on large lines, and has been
+fruitful in suggestiveness. But he tasted discouragement and
+failure in deep draughts. His parents frankly expressed their
+bewildered disappointment, his public looked upon him as a perverse
+man who was throwing away a beautiful message for the sake of a
+crabbed whim; and he fell into a fierce depression, alternating
+between savage energy and listless despondency, which lasted for
+several years, till at last the overwrought brain and mind gave
+way; and for the rest of his life he was liable to recurrent
+attacks of insanity, which cleared off and left him normal again,
+or as normal as he ever had been. Wide and eager as Ruskin's
+tenderness was, one feels that his heart was never really engaged;
+he was always far away, in a solitude full of fear, out of the
+reach of affection, always solemnly and mournfully alone. Ruskin
+was never really allied with any other human soul; he knew most of
+the great men of the day; he baited Rossetti, he petted Carlyle; he
+had correspondents like Norton, to whom he poured out his
+overburdened heart; but he was always the spoiled and indulged
+child of his boyhood, infinitely winning, provoking, wilful. He
+could not be helped, because he could never get away from himself;
+he could admire almost frenziedly, but he could not worship; he
+could not keep himself from criticism even when he adored, and he
+had a bitter superiority of spirit, a terrible perception of the
+imperfections and faults of others, a real despair of humanity.
+
+I do not know exactly what the terrors which Ruskin suffered were--
+very few people will tell the tale of the valley of hobgoblins, or
+probably cannot! In the Pilgrim's Progress itself, the unreality of
+the spirits of fear, their secrecy and leniency, is very firmly and
+wittily told. They scream in their dens, sitting together, I have
+thought, like fowls in a roost. They come padding after the
+pilgrim, they show themselves obscurely, swollen by the mist at the
+corners of the road. They give the sense of being banded together
+in a numerous ambush, they can deceive eye and ear, and even nose
+with noisome stenches; but they cannot show themselves, and they
+cannot hurt. If they could be seen, they would be nothing but limp
+ungainly things that would rouse disdain and laughter and even
+pity, at anything at once so weak and so malevolent. But they are
+not like the demons of sin that can hamper and wound; they are just
+little gnomes and elves that can make a noise, and their strength
+is a spiteful and a puny thing.
+
+Ruskin had no sordid or material fears; he had no fear of poverty,
+for he flung his father's hard-earned wealth profusely away; nor
+did he fear illness; indeed one of the bravest and most gallant
+things about him was the way in which he talked and wrote about his
+insane fits, described his haunted visions, told, half-ruefully,
+half-humorously, how he fought and struggled with his nurses, and
+made fun of the matter. That was a very courageous thing to do,
+because most people are ashamed of insanity, no doubt from the old
+sad ignorant tradition that it was the work of demoniacal agencies,
+and not a mere disease like other diseases. Half the tragedy of
+insanity is that it shocks people, and cannot be alluded to or
+spoken about; but one can take the sting out of almost any calamity
+if one can make fun of it, and this Ruskin did.
+
+But he was wounded by his fears, as we most of us are, not only
+through his vanity but through his finest emotions. He felt his
+impotence and his failure. He had thought of his gift of language
+as one might think of a magic wand which one can wave, and thus
+compel duller spirits to do one's bidding. Ruskin began by thinking
+that there was not much amiss with the world except a sort of
+pathetic stupidity; and he thought that if only people could be
+told, clearly and loudly enough, what was right, they would do it
+gladly; and then it dawned upon him by slow degrees that the
+confusion was far deeper than that, that men mostly did not live in
+motives but in appetites. And so he fell into a sort of noble rage
+with the imperfection of mortal things; and one of the clearest
+signs, as he himself knew, that he was drifting into one of the
+mind-storms which swept across him, was that in these moods
+everything that people said or wrote had power to arouse his
+irritation, to interrupt his work, to break his sleep, and to show
+him that he was powerless indeed. What he feared was derision, and
+the good-natured indifferent stolidity that is worse than any
+derision, and the knowledge that, with all his powers and
+perceptions, his common-sense, which was great, and his sense of
+responsibility, he was treated by the world like a spoilt child,
+charming even in his wrath, who had full license to be as vehement
+as he liked, with the understanding that no one would act on his
+advice.
+
+I often go to Brantwood, which is a sacred place indeed, and see
+with deep emotion the little rooms, with all their beautiful
+treasures, and all the great accumulations of that fierce industry
+of mind, and remember that in that peaceful background a man of
+exquisite genius fought with sinister shadows, and was worsted in
+the fight, for a time; because the last ten years of that long life
+were a time of serene waiting for death, a beguiling by little
+childish and homely occupations the heavy hours: he could uplift
+his voice no more, often could hardly frame an intelligible
+thought. But meanwhile his great message went on rippling out to
+the world, touching heart after heart into light and hope, and
+doing, insensibly and graciously, by the spirit, the very thing he
+had failed to do by might and power.
+
+And then we come to Carlyle, and here we are on somewhat different
+ground. Carlyle had a colossal quarrel with the age, but he thought
+very little of the message of beauty and peace. His idea of the
+world was that of a stern combative place, with the one hope a
+strenuous and grim righteousness; Carlyle thought of the world as a
+place where cheats and liars cozened and beguiled men, for their
+own advantage, with all sorts of shams and pretences: but he did
+not really know the world; he put down to individual action and
+deliberate policy much that was due simply to the prevalence of
+tradition and system, and to the complexity of civilisation. He was
+so fierce an individualist himself that he credited everyone else
+with purpose and prejudice. He did not realise the vast
+preponderance of helpless good-nature and muddled kindliness. The
+mistake of much of Carlyle's work is that it is too poignantly
+dramatic, and bristles with intention and significance; and he did
+not allow sufficiently for the crowd of vague supers who throng the
+background of the stage. Neither did he ever go about the world
+with his eyes open for general facts. Wherever he was, he was
+intensely observant, but he spent his days either in a fierce
+absorption of work, blind even to the sorrow and discomfort of his
+wife, or taking rapid tours to store his mind with the details of
+historical scenes, or in the big houses of wealthy people, where he
+kept much to himself, stored up irresistibly absurd caricatures of
+the other guests, and lamented his own inaction. I have never been
+able to discover exactly why Carlyle spent so much time in staying
+at great houses, deriding and satirising everything he set eyes
+upon; it was, I believe, vaguely gratifying to him to have raised
+himself unaided into the highest social stratum; and the old man
+was after all a tremendous aristocrat at heart. Or else he skulked
+with infinite melancholy in his mother's house, being waited upon
+and humoured, and indulging his deep and true family affection. But
+he was a solitary man for the most part, and mixed with men,
+involved in a cloud of his own irresistibly fantastic and whimsical
+talk; for his real gift was half-humorous, half-melancholy
+improvisation rather than deliberate writing.
+
+But it is difficult to discern in all this what his endless and
+plangent melancholy was concerned with. He had a very singular
+physical frame, immensely tough and wiry, with an imagination which
+emphasized and particularised every slight touch of bodily
+disorder. When he was at work, he toiled like a demon day after
+day, entirely and vehemently absorbed. When he was not at work he
+suffered from dreary reaction. He fought out in early days a severe
+moral combat, and found his way to a belief in God which was very
+different from his former Calvinism. Carlyle can by no stretch of
+the word be called a Christian, but he was one of the most
+thoroughgoing Deists that ever lived. The terror that beset him in
+that first great conflict was a ghastly fear of his own
+insignificance, and a horrible suspicion that the world was made on
+fortuitous and indifferent lines. His dread was that of being
+worsted, in spite of all his eager sensibility and immense desire
+to do a noble work, of being crushed, silenced, thrown ruthlessly
+on the dust-heap of the world. He learned a fiery sort of
+Determinism, and a faith in the stubborn power of the will, not to
+achieve anything, but to achieve something.
+
+Yet after this tremendous conflict, described in Sartor Resartus,
+where he found himself at bay with his back to the wall, he never
+had any ultimate doubt again of his own purpose. Still, it brought
+him no serenity; and I suppose there is no writer in the world
+whose letters and diaries are so full of cries of anguish and
+hopelessness. He was crushed under the sense of the world's
+immensity; his own observation was so microscopic, his desire to
+perceive and know so strong, his appetite for definiteness so
+profound, that I feel that Carlyle's terror was like that of a mite
+in an enormous cheese, longing to explore it all, lost in the high-
+flavoured dusk, and conscious of a scale of mystery so vast that it
+humiliated a brain that wanted to know the truth about everything.
+In these sad hours--and they were numerous and protracted--he felt
+like a knight worn out by conflict, under a listless enchantment
+which he could not break. I know few confessions that are so filled
+with gleams of high poetry and beauty as many of these solitary
+lamentations. But I believe that the terrors that Carlyle had to
+face were the terrors of a swift, clear-sighted, feverishly active,
+intuitive brain, prevented by mortal weakness and frailty from
+dealing as he desired with the dazzling immensity and intricacy of
+the world's life and history.
+
+I feel no real doubt of this, because Carlyle's passion for
+accurate and minute knowledge, his intense interest in temperament
+and character, his almost unequalled power of observation--which is
+really the surest sign of genius--come out so clearly all through
+his life, that his finite limitations must have been of the nature
+of a torture to him. One who desired to know the truth about
+everything so vehemently, was crushed and bewildered by the narrow
+range and limited scope of his own insatiable thought. His power of
+expressing all that he saw and felt, so delicately, so humorously,
+and at times so tenderly, must have beguiled his sadness more than
+he knew. It was Ruskin who said that he could never fit the two
+sides of the puzzle together--on the one side the awful dejection
+and despondency which Carlyle always claimed to feel in the
+presence of his work, as a dredger in lakes of mud and as a sorter
+of mountains of rubbish, and on the other side the endless relish
+for salient traits, and the delighted apprehension of quality which
+emerges so clearly in all he wrote.
+
+But it is clear that Carlyle suffered ceaselessly, though never
+unutterably. He was a matchless artist, with an unequalled gift of
+putting into vivid words everything he experienced; but his sadness
+was a disease of the imagination, a fear, not of anything definite--
+for he never even saw the anxieties that were nearest to him--but
+a nightmare dream of chaos and whirling forces all about him, a
+dread of slipping off his own very fairly comfortable perch into
+oceans of confusion and dismay.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+CHARLOTTE BRONTE
+
+
+
+
+
+I doubt if the records of intimate biography contain a finer
+object-lesson against fear and all its obsessions than the life of
+Charlotte Bronte. She was of a temperament which in many ways was
+more open to the assaults of fear than any which could well be
+devised. She was frail and delicate, liable to acute nervous
+depression, intensely shy and sensitive, and susceptible as well;
+that is to say that her shyness did not isolate her from her kind;
+she wanted to be loved, respected, even admired. When she did love,
+she loved with fire and passion and desperate loyalty.
+
+Her life was from beginning to end full of sharp and tragic
+experiences. She was born and brought up in a bleak moorland
+village, climbing steeply and grimly to the edge of heathery
+uplands. The bare parsonage, with its little dark rooms, looks out
+on a churchyard paved with graves. Her father was a kindly man, but
+essentially moody and solitary. He took all his meals alone, walked
+alone, sate alone. Her mother died of cancer, when she was but a
+child. Then she was sent to an ill-managed austere school, and here
+when she was nine years old her two elder sisters died. She took
+service two or three times as a governess, and endured agonies of
+misunderstanding, suspicious of her employers, afraid of her
+pupils, longing for home with an intense yearning. Then she went
+out to a school at Brussels, where under the teaching of M. Heger,
+a gifted professor, her mind and heart awoke, and she formed for
+him a strange affection, half an intellectual devotion, half an
+unconscious passion, which deprived her of her peace of mind. Her
+sad and wistful letters to him, lately published, were disregarded
+by him, partly because his wife was undoubtedly jealous of the
+relation, partly because he was disconcerted by the emotion he had
+aroused. Her brother, a brilliant, wayward, and in some ways
+attractive boy, got into disgrace, and drifted home, where he tried
+to console himself with drink and opium. After three years of this
+horrible life, he died, and within twelve months her two surviving
+sisters, Emily and Anne, developed consumption and died. As Robert
+Browning says, there indeed was "trouble enough for one!"
+
+Now it must be borne in mind that her temperament was naturally
+hypochondriacal.
+
+Let me quote a passage dealing with the same experience; it is
+undoubtedly autobiographical, though it comes from Villette, into
+which Charlotte Bronte threw the picture of her own solitary
+experiences in Brussels. She is left alone at the pensionnat in the
+vacation, strained by work and anxiety, and tortured by exhaustion,
+restlessness, and sleeplessness:--
+
+
+"One day, perceiving this growing illusion, I said, 'I really
+believe my nerves are getting overstretched: my mind has suffered
+somewhat too much; a malady is growing upon it--what shall I do?
+How shall I keep well?'
+
+"Indeed there was no way to keep well under the circumstances. At
+last a day and night of peculiarly agonising depression were
+succeeded by physical illness; I took perforce to my bed. About
+this time the Indian summer closed, and the equinoctial storms
+began; and for nine dark and wet days, of which the hours rushed on
+all turbulent, deaf, dishevelled--bewildered with sounding
+hurricane--I lay in a strange fever of the nerves and blood. Sleep
+went quite away. I used to rise in the night, look round for her,
+beseech her earnestly to return. A rattle of the window, a cry of
+the blast only replied--Sleep never came!
+
+"I err. She came once, but in anger. Impatient of my importunity
+she brought with her an avenging dream. By the clock of St. Jean
+Baptiste, that dream remained scarce fifteen minutes--a brief
+space, but sufficing to wring my whole frame with unknown anguish;
+to confer a nameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the
+terror, the very tone of a visitation from eternity. Between twelve
+and one that night a cup was forced to my lips, black, strong,
+strange, drawn from no well, but filled up seething from a
+bottomless and boundless sea. Suffering, brewed in temporal or
+calculable measure, and mixed for mortal lips, tastes not as this
+suffering tasted. Having drank [sic] and woke, I thought all was
+over: the end come and passed by. Trembling fearfully--as
+consciousness returned--ready to cry out on some fellow-creature to
+help me, only that I knew no fellow-creature was near enough to
+catch the wild summons--Goton in her far distant attic could not
+hear--I rose on my knees in bed. Some fearful hours went over me;
+indescribably was I torn, racked and oppressed in mind. Amidst the
+horrors of that dream I think the worst lay here. Methought the
+well-loved dead, who had loved ME well in life, met me elsewhere
+alienated; galled was my inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of
+despair about the future. Motive there was none why I should try to
+recover or wish to live; and yet quite unendurable was the pitiless
+and haughty voice in which Death challenged me to engage his
+unknown terrors. When I tried to pray I could only utter these
+words:--
+
+"'From my youth up Thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled
+mind.'"
+
+
+The deep interest of this experience is that it was endured by one
+who was not only intellectually endowed beyond most women of her
+time, but whose sanity, reasonableness, and moral force were
+conspicuously strong. Charlotte Bronte was not one of those
+impulsive and imaginative women who are the prey of every fancy.
+Throughout the whole of her career, she was for ever compelling her
+frail and sensitive temperament, with indomitable purpose, to
+perform whatever she had undertaken to do. There never was anyone
+who lived so sternly by principle and reason, or who so maintained
+her self-control in the face of sorrow, disaster, unhappiness, and
+bereavement. She never gave way to feeble or morbid self-
+accusation, and therefore the fact that she could thus have
+suffered is a sign that this unnamed terror can coexist with a
+dauntless courage and an essential self-command.
+
+Here again is the cry of a desolate heart! She had been going
+through her sisters' papers not long after their death, and wrote
+to her great friend:
+
+
+"I am both angry and surprised at myself for not being in better
+spirits; for not growing accustomed, or at least resigned, to the
+solitude and isolation of my lot. But my late occupation left a
+result, for some days and indeed still, very painful. The reading
+over of papers, the renewal of remembrances, brought back the pangs
+of bereavement and occasioned a depression of spirits well-nigh
+intolerable. For one or two nights I hardly knew how to get on till
+morning; and when morning came I was still haunted by a sense of
+sickening distress. I tell you these things because it is
+absolutely necessary to me to have SOME relief. You will forgive me
+and not trouble yourself, or imagine that I am one whit worse than
+I say. It is quite a mental ailment, and I believe and hope is
+better now. I think so, because I can speak about it, which I never
+can when grief is at its worst. I thought to find occupation and
+interest in writing when alone at home, but hitherto my efforts
+have been in vain: the deficiency of every stimulus is so complete.
+You will recommend me, I dare say, to go from home; but that does
+no good, even could I again leave papa with an easy mind. . . . I
+cannot describe what a time of it I had after my return from London
+and Scotland. There was a reaction that sank me to the earth, the
+deadly silence, solitude, depression, desolation were awful; the
+craving for companionship, the hopelessness of relief were what I
+should dread to feel again."
+
+
+Or again, in a somewhat calmer mood, she writes:
+
+
+"I feel to my deep sorrow, to my humiliation, that it is not in my
+power to bear the canker of constant solitude. I had calculated
+that when shut out from every enjoyment, from every stimulus but
+what could be desired from intellectual exertion, my mind would
+rouse itself perforce. It is not so. Even intellect, even
+imagination will not dispense with the ray of domestic
+cheerfulness, with the gentle spur of family discussions. Late in
+the evening and all through the nights, I fall into a condition of
+mind which turns entirely to the past--to memory, and memory is
+both sad and relentless. This will never do, and will produce no
+good. I tell you this that you may check false anticipations. You
+cannot help me, and must not trouble yourself in any shape to
+sympathise with me. It is my cup, and I must drink it as others do
+theirs."
+
+
+It would be difficult to create a picture of more poignant
+suffering; yet she was at this time a famous writer. She had
+published Jane Eyre and Shirley, and on her visits to London, to
+her hospitable publisher, had found herself welcomed, honoured,
+feted. The great lions of the literary world had flocked eagerly to
+meet her. Even these simple festivities were accompanied by a
+deadly sense of strain, anxiety, and exhaustion. Mrs. Gaskell
+describes how a little later she met Charlotte Bronte at a quiet
+country-house, and how Charlotte was reduced from tolerable health
+to a bad nervous headache by the announcement that they were going
+to drive over in the afternoon to have tea at a neighbour's house--
+the prospect of meeting strangers was so alarming to her.
+
+But in spite of this agonising susceptibility and vulnerability,
+there is never the least touch either of sentimentality or self-
+pity about Charlotte Bronte. She stuck to her duty and faced life
+with an infinity of patient courage. One of her friends said of her
+that no one she had ever known had sacrificed more to others, or
+done it with a fuller consciousness of what she was sacrificing. If
+duty and affection bade her act, no sense of weakness or of
+inclination had any power over her. She was afraid of life, but she
+stood up to it; she was never crushed or broken. Consider the
+circumstances under which she began to write Jane Eyre. She had
+written her novel The Professor, and it was returned to her nine
+several times, by publisher after publisher. Her father was
+threatened with blindness. She had taken him to Manchester for an
+operation, installed him in lodgings, and settled down alone to
+nurse him. The ill-fated Professor came back to her once more with
+a polite refusal. That very day she wrote the first lines of Jane
+Eyre. Later on too, with her brother dying of opium and drink, she
+had begun Shirley, and she finished it after the deaths of her
+sisters. She was perfectly merciless to herself, saw no reason why
+she should be spared any sorrow or suffering or ill-health, but
+looked upon it all as a stern but not unjust discipline. She had
+one of the most passionately affectionate natures both in
+friendship and home relations--"my hot tenacious heart," she once
+says! But there was no touch of softness or sentimentality about
+her; she never feebly condoned weaknesses; her observation of
+people was minute, her judgment of them severe and even satirical.
+Her letters abound in pungent humour and acute perception; and her
+idea of charity was not that of mild and muddled tolerance. She had
+a vein of frank and rather bitter irony when she was indignant, and
+she could return stroke for stroke.
+
+She knew well that, whatever life was meant to be, it was not
+intended to be an easy business; but she did not face it stoically
+or indifferently; she had a fierce desire for knowledge, culture,
+ideas; she was ambitious; and above everything she desired to be
+loved; yet she did not think of love in the way in which all
+English romancers had treated it for over a century, as a
+condescending hand held out by a superior being, for the glory of
+which a woman submitted to a more or less contented servitude; but
+as a glowing equality of passion and worship, in which two hearts
+clasped each other close, with a sacred concurrence of soul. And
+thus it was that she and Robert Browning, above all other writers
+of the century, put the love of man and woman in the true light, as
+the supreme worth of life; not as a half-sensuous excitement, with
+lapses and reactions, but as a great and holy mystery of devotion
+and service and mutual help. She too had her little taste of love.
+Mr. Nicholls, her father's curate, a man of deep tenderness behind
+his quiet homely ways, had proposed to her; she had refused him;
+but his suffering and bewilderment had touched her deeply, and at
+last she consented, though she went to her wedding in fear and
+dread; but she was rewarded, and for a few short months tasted a
+calm and sweet happiness, the joy of being needed and desired, and
+at the same time guarded and tended well. Her pathetic words, when
+she knew from his lips that she must die, "God will not part us--we
+have been so happy," are full of the deepest tragedy.
+
+I say again that I know of no instance among the most intimate
+records of the human heart, in which life was faced with such
+splendid courage as it was by Charlotte Bronte. It contained so
+many things which she desired--art, beauty, thought, peace, deep
+and tender relations, and the supreme crown of love. But she never
+dreamed of trying to escape or shirk her lot. After her first great
+success with Jane Eyre, she might have lived life on her own lines;
+her writing meant wealth to one of her simple tastes; and as her
+closest friend said, if she had chosen to set up a house of her
+own, she would have been gratefully thanked for any kindness she
+might have shown to her household, instead of being, as she was,
+ruthlessly employed and even tyrannised over. Consider how a young
+authoress, with that splendid success to her credit, would nowadays
+be made much of and tended, begged to consult her own wishes and
+make, her own arrangements. But Charlotte Bronte hated notoriety,
+and took her fame with a shrinking and modest amazement. She never
+gave herself airs, or displayed any affectation, or caught at any
+flattery. She just went back to her tragic home, and carried the
+burden of housekeeping on her frail shoulders. The simplicity, the
+delicacy, the humility of it all is above praise. If ever there was
+a human being who might have pleaded to be excused from any gallant
+battling with life because of her bleak, comfortless, unhappy
+surroundings, and her own sensitive temperament, it was Charlotte
+Bronte. But instead of that she fought silently with disaster and
+unhappiness, neither pitying herself for her destiny, nor taking
+the smallest credit for her tough resistance. It does not
+necessarily prove that all can wage so equal a fight with fears and
+sorrows; but it shows at least that an indomitable resolution can
+make a noble thing out of a life from which every circumstance of
+romance and dignity seems to be purposely withdrawn.
+
+I do not think that there is in literature a more inspiring and
+heartening book than Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. The
+book was written with a fine frankness and a daring indiscretion
+which cost Mrs. Gaskell very dear. It remains as one of the most
+matchless and splendid presentments of duty and passion and genius,
+waging a perfectly undaunted fight with life and temperament, and
+carrying off the spoils not only of undying fame, but the far more
+supreme crown of moral force. Charlotte Bronte never doubted that
+she had been set in the forefront of the battle, and that her first
+concern was with the issues of life and sorrow and death. She died
+at thirty-eight, at a time when many men and women have hardly got
+a firm hold of life at all, or have parted with weak illusions. Yet
+years before she had said sternly to a friend who was meditating a
+flight from hard conditions of life: "The right course is that
+which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest." Many
+people could have said that, but I know no figure who more
+relentlessly and loyally carried out the principle than Charlotte
+Bronte, or who waged a more vigorous and tenacious battle with
+every onset of fear. "My conscience tells me," she once wrote about
+an anxious decision, "that it would be the act of a moral poltroon
+to let the fear of suffering stand in the way of improvement. But
+suffer I shall. No matter!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+JOHN STERLING
+
+
+
+
+
+I believe that the most affecting, beautiful, and grave message ever
+written from a death-bed is John Sterling's last letter to Carlyle.
+It reflects, perhaps, something of Carlyle's own fine manner, but
+then Sterling had long been Carlyle's friend and confidant.
+
+Before I give it, let me add a brief account of Sterling. He was
+some ten years Carlyle's junior, the son of the redoubtable Edward
+Sterling, the leader-writer of the Times, a man who in his day
+wielded a mighty influence. Carlyle describes the father's way of
+life, how he spent the day in going about London, rolling into
+clubs, volubly questioning and talking; then returned home in the
+evening, and condensed it all into a leader, "and is found," said
+Carlyle, "to have hit the essential purport of the world's
+immeasurable babblement that day with an accuracy above all other
+men."
+
+The younger Sterling, Carlyle's friend, was at Cambridge for a
+time, but never took his degree; he became a journalist, wrote a
+novel, tales, plays, endless poems--all of thin and vapid quality.
+His brief life, for he died at thirty-eight, was a much disquieted
+one; he travelled about in search of health, for he was early
+threatened with consumption; for a short time he was a curate in
+the English Church, but drifted away from that. He lived for a time
+at Falmouth, and afterwards at Ventnor. He must have been a man of
+extraordinary charm, and with quite unequalled powers of
+conversation. Even Carlyle seems to have heard him gladly, and that
+is no ordinary compliment, considering Carlyle's own volubility,
+and the agonies, occasionally suppressed but generally trenchantly
+expressed, with which Carlyle listened to other well-known talkers
+like Coleridge and Macaulay.
+
+Carlyle certainly had a very deep affection and admiration for
+Sterling; he rains down praises upon him, in that wonderful little
+biography, which is probably the finest piece of work that Carlyle
+ever did.
+
+He speaks of Sterling as "brilliant, beautiful, cheerful with an
+ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, imaginations . . . with
+frank affections, inexhaustible hopes, audacities, activities, and
+general radiant vivacity of heart and intelligence, which made the
+presence of him an illumination and inspiration wherever he went."
+
+But all Carlyle's love and admiration for his friend did not induce
+him to praise Sterling's writings; he looked upon him as a poet,
+but without the gift of expression. He says that all Sterling's
+work was spoilt by over-haste, and "a lack of due inertia." The
+fact is that Sterling was a sort of improvisatore, and what was
+beautiful and natural enough when poured out in talk, and with the
+stimulus of congenial company, grew pale and indistinct when he
+wrote it down; he had, in fact, no instinct for art or for design,
+and he failed whenever he tried to mould ideas into form.
+
+The shadow of illness darkened about him, and he spent long periods
+in prostrate seclusion, tended by his wife and children, unable to
+write or talk or receive his friends. Then a terrible calamity
+befell him. His mother, to whom he was devotedly attached, died
+after a long illness, Sterling not being allowed to go to her, or
+to leave his own sick-room. He received the news one morning by
+letter, that all was over, went in to tell his wife, who was ill;
+while they were talking, his wife became faint, and died two hours
+later. So that within a few hours he lost the two human beings whom
+he most devotedly loved, and on whom he most depended for sympathy
+and help.
+
+But in all Sterling's sorrows and illnesses, he never seems to have
+lost his interest in life and thought, in ideas, questions, and
+problems. Again and again he came back to the surface, with an
+irrepressible zest and freshness, and even gaiety, until at last
+all hope of life was extinguished. He lay dying for many weeks, and
+it was then that he wrote his last letter to Carlyle, which must be
+given in full:--
+
+
+HILLSIDE, VENTNOR,
+10th August 1844.
+
+MY DEAR CARLYLE,--For the first time for many months it seems
+possible to send you a few words; merely, however, for Remembrance
+and Farewell. On higher matters there is nothing to say. I tread
+the common road into the great darkness, without any thought of
+fear, and with very much of hope. Certainty indeed I have none.
+With regard to you and me I cannot begin to write; having nothing
+for it but to keep shut the lid of those secrets with all the iron
+weights that are in my power. Towards me it is still more true than
+towards England that no man has been and done like you. Heaven
+bless you! If I can lend a hand when THERE, that will not be
+wanting. It is all very strange, but not one hundredth part so sad
+as it seems to the standers-by.
+
+Your Wife knows my mind towards her, and will believe it without
+asseverations.--Yours to the last, JOHN STERLING.
+
+
+That letter may speak for itself. In its dignity, its nobleness,
+its fearlessness, it is one of the finest human documents I know.
+But let it be remembered that it is not the letter of a mournful
+and heart-broken man, turning his back on life in an ecstasy of
+despair; but the letter of one who had taken a boundless delight in
+life, had known upon equal terms most of the finest intellects of
+the day, and had been frankly recognised by them as a chosen
+spirit. All Sterling's designs for life and work had been slowly
+and surely thwarted by the pressure of hopeless illness; yet he had
+never complained or fretted or brooded, or indulged in any bitter
+recriminations against his destiny. That seems to me a very heroic
+attitude; while the letter itself, in its perfect frankness and
+courage, without a touch of solemnity or affectation, or any trace
+of craven shrinking from his doom, makes it in its noble simplicity
+one of the finest "last words" that I have ever read, and finer, I
+verily believe, than any flight of poetical imagination.
+
+A few days later he sent Carlyle some stanzas of verse, "written,"
+says Carlyle, "as if in star-fire and immortal tears; which are
+among my sacred possessions, to be kept for myself alone."
+
+A few weeks before he wrote his last letter to Carlyle, Sterling
+had written a letter to his son, who was then a boy at school in
+London. In that he says:
+
+
+"When I fancy how you are walking in the same streets, and moving
+along the same river, that I used to watch so intently, as if in a
+dream, when younger than you are--I could gladly burst into tears,
+not of grief, but with a feeling that there is no name for.
+Everything is so wonderful, great and holy, so sad and yet not
+bitter, so full of Death and so bordering on Heaven. Can you
+understand anything of this? If you can, you will begin to know
+what a serious matter our Life is; how unworthy and stupid it is to
+trifle it away without heed; what a wretched, insignificant,
+worthless creature anyone comes to be, who does not as soon as
+possible bend his whole strength, as in stringing a stiff bow, to
+doing whatever task lies first before him."
+
+
+That again is a noble letter; but over it I think there lies a
+little shadow of regret, a sense that he had himself wasted some of
+the force of life in vague trifling; but even that mood had passed
+away in the nearness of the great impending change, leaving him
+upborne upon the greatness of God, in deep wonder and hope, knowing
+nothing more, in his weariness and his suffering, but the calmness
+of the Eternal Will.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+INSTINCTIVE FEAR
+
+
+
+
+
+The fears then from which men suffer, and even the greatest men not
+least, seem to be strangely complicated by the fact that nature does
+not seem to work as fast in the physical world as in the mental
+world. The mosquitoes of South American swamps are all fitted with a
+perfect tool-box of implements for piercing the hides of
+warm-blooded animals and drawing blood, although warm-blooded
+animals have long ceased to exist in those localities. But as the
+mosquito is one of the few creatures which can propagate its kind
+without ever partaking of food, the mosquito has therefore not died
+out; and though for many generations billions upon billions of
+mosquitoes have never had a chance of doing what they seem born to
+do, they have not discarded their apparatus. If mosquitoes could
+reason and philosophise, the prospect of such a meal might remain as
+a far-off and inspiring ideal of life and conduct, a thing which
+heroes in the past had achieved, and which might be possible again
+if they remained true to their highest instincts. So it is with
+humanity. Many of our fears do not correspond to any real danger;
+they are part of a panoply which we inherit, and have to do with the
+instinct of self-preservation. We are exposed to dangers still,
+dangers of infection for instance, but we have developed no
+instinctive fear which helps us to recognise the presence of
+infection. We take rational precautions against it when we recognise
+it, but the vast prevalence and mortality of consumption a
+generation or two ago was due to the fact that men did not recognise
+consumption as infectious; and many fine lives--Keats and Emily
+Bronte, to name but two--were sacrificed to careless proximity as
+well as to devoted tendance; but here nature, with all her instinct
+of self-preservation, did not hang out any danger signal, or provide
+human beings with any instinctive fear to protect them. Our
+instinctive fears, such as our fear of darkness and solitude, and
+our suspicion of strangers, seem to date from a time when such
+conditions were really dangerous, though they are so no longer.
+
+At the same time the development of the imaginative faculty has
+brought with it a whole series of new terrors, through our power of
+anticipating and picturing possible calamities; while our increased
+sensitiveness as well as our more sentimental morality expose us to
+yet another range of fears. Consider the dread which many of us
+feel at the prospect of a painful interview, our avoidance of an
+unpleasant scene, our terror of arousing anger. The basis of all
+this is the primeval dread of personal violence. We are afraid of
+arousing anger, not because we expect to be assailed by blows and
+wounds, but because our far-off ancestors expected anger to end in
+an actual assault. We may know that we shall emerge from an
+unpleasant interview unscathed in fortune and in limb, but we
+anticipate it with a quite irrational terror, because we are still
+haunted by fears which date from a time when injury was the natural
+outcome of wrath. It may be our duty, and we may recognise it to be
+our duty, to make a protest of an unpleasant kind, or to withstand
+the action of an irritable person; but though we know well enough
+that he has no power to injure us, the flashing eye, the distended
+nostril, the rising pallor, the uplifted voice have a disagreeable
+effect on our nerves, although we know well that no physical
+disaster will result from it. Mrs. Browning, for instance, though
+she had high moral courage and tenacity of purpose, could not face
+an interview with her father, because an exhibition of his anger
+caused her to faint away on the spot. One does not often experience
+this whiff of violent anger in middle life; but the other day I had
+occasion to speak to a colleague of mine on a Board of which I am a
+member, at the conclusion of a piece of business in which I had
+proposed and carried a certain policy. I did not know that he
+disapproved of the policy in question, but I found on speaking to
+him that he was in a towering passion at my having opposed the
+policy which he preferred. He grew pale with rage; the hair on his
+head seemed to bristle, his eyes flashed fire; he slammed down a
+bundle of papers in his hand on the table, he stamped with passion;
+and I confess that it was profoundly disturbing and disconcerting.
+I felt for a moment that sickening sense of misgiving with which as
+a little boy one confronted an angry schoolmaster. Though I knew
+that I had a perfect right to my opinion, though I recognised that
+my sensations were quite irrational, I felt myself confronted with
+something demoniacal and insane, and the basis of it was, I am
+sure, physical and not moral terror. If I had been bullied or
+chastised as a child, I should be able to refer the discomfort I
+felt to old associations. But I feel no doubt that my emotion was
+something far more primeval than that, and that the dumb and
+atrophied sense of self-preservation was at work. The fear then
+that I felt was an instinctive thing, and was experienced in the
+inner nature and not in the rational mind; and the perplexity of
+the situation arises from the fact that such fear cannot be
+combated by rational considerations. Though no harm whatever
+resulted or could result from such an interview, yet I am certain
+that the prospect of such an outbreak would make me in the future
+far more cautious in dealing with this particular man, more anxious
+to conciliate him, and probably more disposed to compromise a
+matter.
+
+Such an incident makes one unpleasantly aware of the quality of
+one's nature and temperament. It shows one that though one may have
+a strong moral and intellectual sense of what is the right and
+sensible course to take, one may be sadly hampered in carrying it
+out, by this secret and hidden instinct of which one may be
+rationally ashamed, but which is characteristic of what seems to be
+the stronger and more vital part of one's self.
+
+The whole of civilisation is a combat between these two forces, a
+struggle between the rational and the instinctive parts of the
+mind. The instinctive mind bids one follow profit, need, advantage,
+the pleasure of the moment; the rational part of the mind bids one
+abstain, resist, balance contingencies, act in accordance with a
+moral standard. Many such abstentions become a mere matter of
+habit. If one is hungry and thirsty, and meets a child carrying
+bread or milk, one has no impulse to seize the food and eat it. One
+does not reflect upon the possible outcome of following the impulse
+of plunder; it simply does not enter one's head so to act. And
+there is of course a slow process going on in the world by which
+this moral restraint is becoming habitual and instinctive; but
+notably in the case of fear our instinct is a belated one, and
+results in many causeless and baseless anxieties which our reason
+in vain assures us are wholly false.
+
+What then is our practical way of escape from the dominion of these
+shadows? Not, I am sure, in any resolute attempt to combat them by
+rational weapons; the rational argument, the common-sense
+consolation, only touches the rational part of the mind; we have
+got to get behind and below that, we have got somehow to fight
+instinct by instinct, and quell the terror in its proper home. By
+our finite nature we are compelled to attend to one thing at a
+time, and thus if we use rational argument, we are recognising the
+presence of the irrational fear; it is of little use then to array
+our advantages against our disadvantages, our blessings against our
+sufferings, as Michael Finsbury did with such small effect in The
+Wrong Box; our only chance is to turn tail altogether, and try to
+set some other dominant instinct at work; while we remember, we
+shall continue to suffer; our best chance lies in forgetting, and
+we can only do that by calling some other dominant emotion into
+play.
+
+And here comes in the peculiarly paralysing effect of these baser
+emotions. As Victor Hugo once said, in a fine apophthegm, "Despair
+yawns." Fear and anxiety bring with them a particular kind of
+physical fatigue which makes us listless and inert. They lie on the
+spirit with a leaden dullness, which takes from us all possibility
+of energy and motion. Who does not know the instinct, when one is
+crushed and tortured by depression, to escape into solitude and
+silence, and to let the waves and streams flow over one. That is a
+universal instinct, and it is not wholly to be disregarded; it
+shows that to torture oneself into rational activity is of little
+use, or worse than useless.
+
+When I was myself a sufferer from long nervous depression, and had
+to face a social gathering, I used out of very shame, and partly I
+think out of a sense of courtesy due to others, to galvanise myself
+into a sort of horrid merriment. The dark tide flowed on beneath in
+its sore and aching channels. It was common enough then for some
+sympathetic friend to say, "You seemed better to-night--you were
+quite yourself; that is what you want; if you would only make the
+effort and go out more into society, you would soon forget your
+troubles." There is something in it, because the sick mind must be
+persuaded if possible not to grave its dolorous course too
+indelibly in the temperament; but no one else could see the acute
+and intolerable reaction which used to follow such a strain, or
+how, the excitement over, the suffering resumed its sway over the
+exhausted self with an insupportable agony. I am sure that in my
+long affliction I never suffered more than after occasions when I
+was betrayed by excitement into argument or lively talk, and the
+worst spasms of melancholy that I ever endured were the direct and
+immediate results of such efforts.
+
+The counteracting force in fact must be an emotional and
+instinctive one, not a rational and deliberate one; and this must
+be our next endeavour, to see in what direction the counterpoise
+must lie.
+
+In depression then, and when causeless fears assail us, we must try
+to put the mind in easier postures, to avoid excess and strain, to
+live more in company, to do something different. Human beings are
+happiest in monotony and settled ways of life; but these also
+develop their own poisons, like sameness of diet, however wholesome
+it may be. It is, I believe, an established fact that most people
+cannot eat a pigeon a day for fourteen days in succession; a pigeon
+is not unwholesome, but the digestion cannot stand iteration. There
+is an old and homely story of a man who went to a great doctor
+suffering from dyspepsia. The doctor asked him what he ate, and he
+said that he always lunched off bread and cheese. "Try a mutton
+chop," said the doctor. He did so with excellent results. A year
+later he was ill again and went to the same doctor, who put him
+through the same catechism. "What do you have for luncheon?" said
+the doctor. "A chop," said the patient, conscious of virtuous
+obedience. "Try bread and cheese," said the doctor. "Why," said the
+patient, "that was the very thing you told me to avoid." "Yes,"
+said the doctor, "and I tell you to avoid a chop now. You, are
+suffering not from diet, but from monotony of diet--and you want a
+change."
+
+The principle holds good of ordinary life; it is humiliating to
+confess it, but these depressions and despondencies which beset us
+are often best met by very ordinary physical remedies. It is not
+uncommon for people who suffer from them to examine their
+consciences, rake up forgotten transgressions, and feel themselves
+to be under the anger of God. I do not mean that such scrutiny of
+life is wholly undesirable; depression, though it exaggerates our
+sinfulness, has a wonderful way of laying its finger on what is
+amiss, but we must not wilfully continue in sadness; and sadness is
+often a combination of an old instinct with the staleness which
+comes of civilised life; and a return to nature, as it is called,
+is often a cure, because civilisation has this disadvantage, that
+it often takes from us the necessity of doing many of the things
+which it is normal to man by inheritance to do--fighting, hunting,
+preparing food, working with the hands. We combat these old
+instincts artificially by games and exercises. It is humiliating
+again to think that golf is an artificial substitute for man's need
+to hunt and plough, but it is undoubtedly true; and thus to break
+with the monotony of civilisation, and to delude the mind into
+believing that it is occupied with primal needs is often a great
+refreshment. Anyone who fishes and shoots knows that the joy of
+securing a fish or a partridge is entirely out of proportion to any
+advantages resulting. A lawyer could make money enough in a single
+week to buy the whole contents of a fishmonger's shop, but this
+does not give him half the satisfaction which comes from fishing
+day after day for a whole week, and securing perhaps three salmon.
+The fact is that the old savage mind, which lies behind the
+rational and educated mind, is having its fling; it believes itself
+to be staving off starvation by its ingenuity and skill, and it
+unbends like a loosened bow.
+
+We may be enjoying our work, and we may even take glad refuge in it
+to stave off depression, but we are then often adding fuel to the
+fire, and tiring the very faculty of resistance, which hardly knows
+that it needs resting.
+
+The smallest change of scene, of company, of work may effect a
+miraculous improvement when we are feeling low-spirited and
+listless. It is not idleness as a rule that we want, but the use of
+other faculties and powers and muscles.
+
+And thus though our anxieties may be a real factor in our success,
+and may give us the touch of prudence and vigilance we want, it
+does not do to allow ourselves to drift into vague fears and dull
+depressions, and we must fight them in a practical way. We must
+remember the case of Naaman, who was vexed at being told to go and
+dip himself in a mud-stained stream running violently in rocky
+places, when he might have washed in Abana and Pharpar, the
+statelier, purer, fuller streams of his native land. It is just the
+little homely torrent that we need, and part of our cares come from
+being too dignified about them. It is pleasanter to think oneself
+the battle-ground for high and tragical forces of a spiritual kind,
+than to realise that some little homely bit of common machinery is
+out of gear. But we must resist the temptation to feel that our
+fears have a dark and great significance. We must simply treat them
+as little sicknesses and ailments of the soul.
+
+I therefore believe that fears are like those little fugitive
+gliding things that seem to dart across the field of the eye when
+it is weak and ailing, vague clusters and tangles and spidery webs,
+that float and fly, and can never be fixed and truly seen; and that
+they are best treated as we learn to treat common ailments, by not
+concerning ourselves very much about them, by enduring and evading
+them and distracting the mind, and not by facing them, because they
+will not be faced; nor can they be dispelled by reason, because
+they are not in the plane of reason at all, but phantoms gathered
+by the sick imagination, distorted out of their proper shape, evil
+nightmares, the horror of which is gone with the dawn. They are the
+shadows of our childishness, and they show that we have a long
+journey before us; and they gain their strength from the fact that
+we gather them together out of the future like the bundle of sticks
+in the fable, when we shall have the strength to snap them singly
+as they come.
+
+The real way to fight them is to get together a treasure of
+interests and hopes and beautiful visions and emotions, and above
+all to have some definite work which lies apart from our daily
+work, to which we can turn gladly in empty hours; because fears are
+born of inaction and idleness, and melt insensibly away in the
+warmth of labour and duty.
+
+Nothing can really hurt us except our own despair. But the problem
+which is difficult is how to practise a real fulness of life, and
+yet to keep a certain detachment, how to realise that what we do is
+small and petty enough, but that the greatness lies in our energy
+and briskness of action; we should try to be interested in life as
+we are interested in a game, not believing too much in the
+importance of it, but yet intensely concerned at the moment in
+playing it as well and skilfully as possible. The happiest people
+of all are those who can shift their interest rapidly from point to
+point, and throw themselves into the act of the moment, whatever it
+may be. Of course this is largely at first a matter of temperament,
+but temperament is not unalterable; and self-discipline working
+along the lines of habit has a great attractiveness, the moment we
+feel that life is beginning to shape itself upon real lines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+FEAR OF LIFE
+
+
+
+
+
+Let us divide our fears up into definite divisions, and see how it
+is best to deal with them. Lowest and worst of all is the shapeless
+and bodiless fear, which is a real disease of brain and nerves. I
+know no more poignant description of this than in the strange book
+Lavengro:
+
+
+"'What ails you, my child,' said a mother to her son, as he lay on
+a couch under the influence of the dreadful one; 'what ails you?
+you seem afraid!'
+
+"Boy. And so I am; a dreadful fear is upon me.
+
+"Mother. But of what? there is no one can harm you; of what are you
+apprehensive?
+
+"Boy. Of nothing that I can express; I know not what I am afraid
+of, but afraid I am.
+
+"Mother. Perhaps you see sights and visions; I knew a lady once who
+was continually thinking that she saw an armed man threaten her,
+but it was only an imagination, a phantom of the brain.
+
+"Boy. No armed man threatens me; and 'tis not a thing that would
+cause me any fear. Did an armed man threaten me, I would get up and
+fight him; weak as I am, I would wish for nothing better, for then,
+perhaps, I should lose this fear; mine is a dread of I know not
+what, and there the horror lies.
+
+"Mother. Your forehead is cool, and your speech collected. Do you
+know where you are?
+
+"Boy. I know where I am, and I see things just as they are; you are
+beside me, and upon the table there is a book which was written by
+a Florentine. All this I see, and that there is no ground for being
+afraid. I am, moreover, quite cool, and feel no pain--but--but--
+
+"And then there was a burst of 'gemiti, sospiri ed alti guai.'
+Alas, alas, poor child of clay! as the sparks fly upward, so wast
+thou born to sorrow--Onward!"
+
+
+That is a description of amazing power, but of course we are here
+dealing with a definite brain-malady, in which the emotional
+centres are directly affected. This in a lesser degree no doubt
+affects more people than one would wish to think; but it may be
+considered a physical malady of which fear is the symptom and not
+the cause.
+
+Let us then frankly recognise the physical element in these
+irrational terrors; and when one has once done this, a great burden
+is taken off the mind, because one sees that such fear may be a
+real illusion, a sort of ghastly mockery, which by directly
+affecting the delicate machinery through which emotion is
+translated into act, may produce a symptom of terror which is both
+causeless and baseless, and which may imply neither a lack of
+courage nor self-control.
+
+And, therefore, I feel, as against the Ascetic and the Stoic, that
+I am meant to live and to taste the fulness of life; and that if I
+begin by choosing the wrong joys, it is that I may learn their
+unreality. I have learned already to compromise about many things,
+to be content with getting much less than I desire, to acquiesce in
+missing many good things altogether. But asceticism for the sake of
+prudence seems to me a wilful error, as though a man practised
+starvation through uneasy days, because of the chance that he might
+some day find himself with not enough to eat. The only self-denial
+worth practising is the self-denial that one admires, and that
+seems to one to be fine and beautiful.
+
+For we must emphatically remember that the saint is one who lives
+life with high enjoyment, and with a vital zest; he chooses
+holiness because of its irresistible beauty, and because of the
+appeal it makes to his mind. He does not creep through life
+ashamed, depressed, anxious, letting ordinary delights slip through
+his nerveless fingers; and if he denies himself common pleasures,
+it is because, if indulged, they thwart and mar his purer and more
+lively joys.
+
+The fear of life, the frame of mind which says, "This attractive
+and charming thing captivates me, but I will mistrust it and keep
+it at arm's length, because if I lose it, I shall experience
+discomfort," seems to me a poor and timid handling of life. I would
+rather say, "I will use it generously and freely, knowing that it
+may not endure; but it is a sign to me of God's care for me, that
+He gives me the desire and the gratification; and even if He means
+me to learn that it is only a small thing, I can learn that only by
+using it and trying its sweetness."
+
+This may be held a dangerous doctrine; but I do not mean that life
+must be a foolish and ingenuous indulgence of every appetite and
+whim. One must make choices; and there are many appetites which
+come hand in hand with their own shadow. I am not here speaking of
+tampering with sin; I think that most people burn their fingers
+over that in early life. But I am speaking rather of the delights
+of the body that are in no way sinful, food and drink, games and
+exercise, love itself; and of the joys of the mind and the artistic
+sense; free and open relations with men and women of keen interests
+and eager fancies; the delights of work, professional success, the
+doing of pleasant tasks as vigorously and as perfectly as one can--
+all the stir and motion and delight of life.
+
+To shrink back in terror from all this seems to me a sort of
+cowardice; and it is a cowardice too to go on indulging in things
+which one does not enjoy for the sake of social tradition. One must
+not be afraid of breaking with social custom, if one finds that it
+leads one into dreary and useless formalities, stupid and expensive
+entertainments, tiresome gatherings, dull and futile assemblies. I
+think that men and women ought gaily and delightedly to choose the
+things that minister to their vigour and joy, and to throw
+themselves willingly into these things, so long as they do not
+interfere with plainer and simpler duties.
+
+Another way of escape from the importunities of fear is to be very
+resolute in fighting against our personal claims to honour and
+esteem. We are sorely wounded through our ambitions, whether they
+be petty or great; and it is astonishing to find how frail a basis
+often serves for a sense of dignity. I have known lowly and
+unimportant people who were yet full of pragmatical self-concern,
+and whose pride took the form not so much of exalting their own
+consequence as of thinking meanly of other people. It is easy to
+restore one's own confidence by dwelling with bitter emphasis on
+the faults and failings of those about one, by cataloguing the
+deficiencies of those who have achieved success, by accustoming
+oneself to think of one's own lack of success as a sign of
+unworldliness, and by attributing the success of others to a
+cynical and unscrupulous pursuit of reputation. There is nothing in
+the world which so differentiates men and women as the tendency to
+suspect and perceive affronts, and to nurture grievances. It is so
+fatally easy to think that one has been inconsiderately treated,
+and to mistake susceptibility for courage. Let us boldly face the
+fact that we get in this world very much what we earn and deserve,
+and there is no surer way of being excluded and left out from
+whatever is going forward than a habit of claiming more respect and
+deference than is due to one. If we are snubbed and humiliated, it
+is generally because we have put ourselves forward and taken more
+than our share. Whereas if we have been content to bear a hand, to
+take trouble, and to desire useful work rather than credit, our
+influence grows silently and we become indispensable. A man who
+does not notice petty grumbling, who laughs away sharp comments,
+who does not brood over imagined insults, who forgets irritable
+passages, who makes allowance for impatience and fatigue, is
+singularly invulnerable. The power of forgetting is infinitely more
+valuable than the power of forgiving, in many conjunctions of life.
+In nine cases out of ten, the wounds which our sensibilities
+receive are the merest pin-pricks, enlarged and fretted by our own
+hands; we work the little thorn about in the puncture till it
+festers, instead of drawing it out and casting it away.
+
+Very few of the prizes of life that we covet are worth winning, if
+we scheme to get them; it is the honour or the task that comes to
+us unexpectedly that we deserve. I have heard discontented men say
+that they never get the particular work that they desire and for
+which they feel themselves to be suited; and meanwhile life flies
+swiftly, while we are picturing ourselves in all sorts of coveted
+situations, and slighting the peaceful happiness, the beautiful
+joys which lie all around us, as we go forward in our greedy
+reverie.
+
+I have been much surprised, since I began some years ago to receive
+letters from all sorts of unknown people, to realise how many
+persons there are in the world who think themselves unappreciated.
+Such are not generally people who have tried and failed;--an honest
+failure very often brings a wholesome sense of incompetence;--but
+they are generally persons who think that they have never had a
+chance of showing what is in them, speakers who have found their
+audiences unresponsive, writers who have been discouraged by
+finding their amateur efforts unsaleable, men who lament the
+unsuitability of their profession to their abilities, women who
+find themselves living in what they call a thoroughly unsympathetic
+circle. The failure here lies in an incapacity to believe in one's
+own inefficiency, and a sturdy persuasion of the malevolence of
+others.
+
+Here is a soil in which fears spring up like thorns and briars.
+"Whatever I do or say, I shall be passed over and slighted, I shall
+always find people determined to exclude and neglect me!" I know
+myself, only too well, how fertile the brain is in discovering
+almost any reason for a failure except what is generally the real
+reason, that the work was badly done. And the more eager one is for
+personal recognition and patent success, the more sickened one is
+by any hint of contempt and derision.
+
+But it is quite possible, as I also know from personal experience,
+to go patiently and humbly to work again, to face the reasons for
+failure, to learn to enjoy work, to banish from the mind the uneasy
+hope of personal distinction. We may try to discern the humour of
+Providence, because I am as certain as I can be of anything that we
+are humorously treated as well as lovingly regarded. Let me relate
+two small incidents which did me a great deal of good at a time of
+self-importance. I was once asked to give a lecture, and it was
+widely announced. I saw my own name in capital letters upon
+advertisements displayed in the street. On the evening appointed, I
+went to the place, and met the chairman of the meeting and some of
+the officials in a room adjoining the hall where I was to speak. We
+bowed and smiled, paid mutual compliments, congratulated each other
+on the importance of the occasion. At last the chairman consulted
+his watch and said it was time to be beginning. A procession was
+formed, a door was majestically thrown open by an attendant, and we
+walked with infinite solemnity on to the platform of an entirely
+empty hall, with rows of benches all wholly unfurnished with
+guests. I think it was one of the most ludicrous incidents I ever
+remember. The courteous confusion of the chairman, the dismay of
+the committee, the colossal nature of the fiasco filled me, I am
+glad to say, not with mortification, but with an overpowering
+desire to laugh.
+
+I may add that there had been a mistake about the announcement of
+the hour, and ten minutes later a minute audience did arrive, whom
+I proceeded to address with such spirit as I could muster; but I
+have always been grateful for the humorous nature of the snub
+administered to me.
+
+Again on another occasion I had to pay a visit of business to a
+remote house in the country. A good-natured friend descanted upon
+the excitement it would be to the household to entertain a living
+author, and how eagerly my utterances would be listened to. I was
+received not only without respect but with obvious boredom. In the
+course of the afternoon I discovered that I was supposed to be a
+solicitor's clerk, but when a little later it transpired what my
+real occupations were, I was not displeased to find that no member
+of the party had ever heard of my existence, or was aware that I
+had ever published a book, and when I was questioned as to what I
+had written, no one had ever come across anything that I had
+printed, until at last I soared into some transient distinction by
+the discovery that my brother was the author of Dodo.
+
+I cannot help feeling that there is something gently humorous about
+this good-humoured indication that the whole civilised world is not
+engaged in the pursuit of literature, and that one's claims to
+consideration depend upon one's social merits. I do honestly think
+that Providence was here deliberately poking fun at me, and showing
+me that a habit of presenting one's opinions broadcast to the world
+does not necessarily mean that the world is much aware either of
+oneself or of one's opinions.
+
+The cure then, it seems to me, for personal ambition, is the
+humorous reflection that the stir and hum of one's own particular
+teetotum is confined to a very small space and range; and that the
+witty description of the Greek politician who was said to be well
+known throughout the whole civilised world and at Lampsacus, or of
+the philosopher who was announced as the author of many epoch-
+making volumes and as the second cousin of the Earl of Cork,
+represents a very real truth,--that reputation is not a thing which
+is worth bothering one's head about; that if it comes, it is apt to
+be quite as inconvenient as it is pleasant, while if one grows to
+depend upon it, it is as liable to part with its sparkle as soda-
+water in an open glass.
+
+And then if one comes to consider the commoner claim, the claim to
+be felt and respected and regarded in one's own little circle, it
+is wholesome and humiliating to observe how generously and easily
+that regard is conceded to affectionateness and kindness, and how
+little it is won by any brilliance or sharpness. Of course
+irritable, quick-tempered, severe, discontented people can win
+attention easily enough, and acquire the kind of consideration
+which is generally conceded to anyone who can be unpleasant. How
+often families and groups are drilled and cautioned by anxious
+mothers and sisters not to say or do anything which will vex so-
+and-so! Such irritable people get the rooms and the chairs and the
+food that they like, and the talk in their presence is eagerly kept
+upon subjects on which they can hold forth. But how little such
+regard lasts, and how welcome a relief it is, when one that is thus
+courted and deferred to is absent! Of course if one is wholly
+indifferent whether one is regarded, needed, missed, loved, so long
+as one can obtain the obedience and the conveniences one likes,
+there is no more to be said. But I often think of that wonderful
+poem of Christina Rossetti's about the revenant, the spirit that
+returns to the familiar house, and finds himself unregretted:
+
+
+  "'To-morrow' and 'to-day,' they cried;
+     I was of yesterday!"
+
+
+One sometimes sees, in the faces of old family servants, in
+unregarded elderly relatives, bachelor uncles, maiden aunts, who
+are entertained as a duty, or given a home in charity, a very
+beautiful and tender look, indescribable in words but unmistakable,
+when it seems as if self, and personal claims, and pride, and
+complacency had really passed out of the expression, leaving
+nothing but a hope of being loved, and a desire to do some humble
+service.
+
+I saw it the other day in the face of a little old lady, who lived
+in the house of a well-to-do cousin, with rather a bustling and
+vigorous family pervading the place. She was a small frail
+creature, with a tired worn face, but with no look of fretfulness
+or discontent. She had a little attic as a bedroom, and she was not
+considered in any way. She effaced herself, ate about as much as a
+bird would eat, seldom spoke, uttering little ejaculations of
+surprise and amusement at what was said; if there was a place
+vacant in the carriage, she drove out. If there was not, she
+stopped at home. She amused herself by going about in the village,
+talking to the old women and the children, who half loved and half
+despised her for being so very unimportant, and for having nothing
+she could give away. But I do not think the little lady ever had a
+thought except of gratitude for her blessings, and admiration for
+the robustness and efficiency of her relations. She claimed nothing
+from life and expected nothing. It seemed a little frail and
+vanquished existence, and there was not an atom of what is called
+proper pride about her; but it was fine, for all that! An infinite
+sweetness looked out of her eyes; she suffered a good deal, but
+never complained. She was glad to live, found the world a beautiful
+and interesting place, and never quarrelled with her slender share
+of its more potent pleasures. And she will slip silently out of
+life some day in her attic room; and be strangely mourned and
+missed. I do not consider that a failure in life, and I am not sure
+that it is not something much more like a triumph. I know that as I
+watched her one evening knitting in the corner, following what was
+said with intense enjoyment, uttering her little bird-like cries, I
+thought how few of the things that could afflict me had power to
+wound her, and how little she had to fear. I do not think she
+wanted to take flight, but yet I am sure she had no dread of death;
+and when she goes thitherward, leaving the little tired and
+withered frame behind, it will be just as when the crested lark
+springs up from the dust of the roadway, and wings his way into the
+heart of the dewy upland.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+SIMPLICITY
+
+
+
+
+
+If we are to avoid the dark onset of fear, we must at all costs
+simplify life, because the more complicated and intricate our life
+is, and the more we multiply our defences, the more gates and
+posterns there are by which the enemy can creep upon us. Property,
+comforts, habits, conveniences, these are the vantage-grounds from
+which fears can organise their invasions. The more that we need
+excitement, distraction, diversion, the more helpless we become
+without them. All this is very clearly recognised and stated in the
+Gospel. Our Saviour does not seem to regard the abandonment of
+wealth as a necessary condition of the Christian life, but He does
+very distinctly say that rich men are beset with great difficulties
+owing to their wealth, and He indicates that a man who trusts
+complacently in his possessions is tempted into a disastrous
+security. He speaks of laying up treasure in heaven as opposed to
+the treasures which men store up on earth; and He points out that
+whenever things are put aside unused, in order that the owner may
+comfort himself by the thought that they are there if he wants them,
+decay and corruption begin at once to undermine and destroy them.
+What exactly the treasure in heaven can be it is hard to define. It
+cannot be anything quite so sordid as good deeds done for the sake
+of spiritual investment, because our Saviour was very severe on
+those who, like the Pharisees, sought to acquire righteousness by
+scrupulosity. Nothing that is done just for the sake of one's own
+future benefit seems to be regarded in the Gospel as worth doing.
+The essence of Christian giving seems to be real giving, and not a
+sort of usurious loan. There is of course one very puzzling parable,
+that of the unjust steward, who used his last hours in office,
+before the news of his dismissal could get abroad, in cheating his
+master, in order to win the favour of the debtors by arbitrarily
+diminishing the amount of their debts. It seems strange that our
+Saviour should have drawn a moral out of so immoral an incident.
+Perhaps He was using a well-known story, and even making allowances
+for the admiration with which in the East resourcefulness, even of a
+fraudulent kind, was undoubtedly regarded. But the principle seems
+clear enough, that if the Christian chooses to possess wealth, he
+runs a great risk, and that it is therefore wiser to disembarrass
+oneself of it. Property is regarded in the Gospel as an undoubtedly
+dangerous thing; but so far from our Lord preaching a kind of
+socialism, and bidding men to co-operate anxiously for the sake of
+equalising wealth, He recommends an individualistic freedom from the
+burden of wealth altogether. But, as always in the Gospel, our Lord
+looks behind practice to motive; and it is clear that the motive for
+the abandonment of wealth is not to be a desire to act with a
+selfish prudence, in order to lay an obligation upon God to repay
+one generously in the future for present sacrifices, but rather the
+attainment of an individual liberty, which leaves the spirit free to
+deal with the real interests of life. And one must not overlook the
+definite promise that if a man seeks virtue first, even at the cost
+of earthly possessions and comforts, he will find that they will be
+added as well.
+
+Those who would discredit the morality of the Gospel would have one
+believe that our Saviour in dealing with shrewd, homely, literal
+folk was careful to promise substantial future rewards for any
+worldly sacrifices they might make; but not so can I read the
+Gospel. Our Saviour does undoubtedly say plainly that we shall find
+it worth our while to escape from the burdens and anxieties of
+wealth, but the reward promised seems rather to be a lightness and
+contentment of spirit, and a freedom from heavy and unnecessary
+bonds.
+
+In our complicated civilisation it is far more difficult to say
+what simplicity of life is. It is certainly not that expensive and
+dramatic simplicity which is sometimes contrived by people of
+wealth as a pleasant contrast to elaborate living. I remember the
+son of a very wealthy man, who had a great mansion in the country
+and a large house in London, telling me that his family circle were
+never so entirely happy as when they were living at close quarters
+in a small Scotch shooting-lodge, where their life was
+comparatively rough, and luxuries unattainable. But I gathered that
+the main delight of such a period was the sense of laying up a
+stock of health and freshness for the more luxurious life which
+intervened. The Anglo-Saxon naturally loves a kind of feudal
+dignity; he likes a great house, a crowd of servants and
+dependants, the impression of power and influence which it all
+gives; and the delights of ostentation, of having handsome things
+which one does not use and indeed hardly ever sees, of knowing that
+others are eating and drinking at one's expense, which is a thing
+far removed from hospitality, are dear to the temperament of our
+race. We may say at once that this is fatal to any simplicity of
+life; it may be that we cannot expect anyone who is born to such
+splendours deliberately to forego them; but I am sure of this, that
+a rich man, now and here, who spontaneously parted with his wealth,
+and lived sparely in a small house, would make perhaps as powerful
+an appeal to the imagination of the English world as could well be
+made. If a man had a message to deliver, there could be no better
+way of emphasizing it. It must not be a mere flight from the
+anxiety of worldly life into a more congenial seclusion. It should
+be done as Francis of Assisi did it, by continuing to live the life
+of the world without any of its normal conveniences. Patent and
+visible self-sacrifice, if it be accompanied by a tender love of
+humanity, will always be the most impressive attitude in the world.
+
+But if one is not capable of going to such lengths, if indeed one
+has nothing that one can resign, how is it possible to practise
+simplicity of life? It can be done by limiting one's needs, by
+avoiding luxuries, by having nothing in one's house that one cannot
+use, by being detached from pretentiousness, by being indifferent
+to elaborate comforts. There are people whom I know who do this,
+and who, even though they live with some degree of wealth, are yet
+themselves obviously independent of comfort to an extraordinary
+degree. There is a Puritanical dislike of waste which is a very
+different thing, because it often coexists with an extreme
+attachment to the particular standard of comfort that the man
+himself prefers. I know people who believe that a substantial
+midday meal and a high tea are more righteous than a simple midday
+meal and a substantial dinner. But the right attitude is one of
+unconcern and the absence of uneasy scheming as to the details of
+life. There is no reason why people should not form habits, because
+method is the primary condition of work; but the moment that habit
+becomes tyrannous and elaborate, then the spirit is at once in
+bondage to anxiety. The real victory over these little cares is not
+for ever to have them on one's mind; or one becomes like the bread-
+and-butter fly in Through the Looking-Glass, whose food was weak
+tea with cream in it. "But supposing it cannot find any?" said
+Alice. "Then it dies," says the gnat, who is acting the part of
+interpreter. "But that must happen very often?" said Alice. "It
+ALWAYS happens!" says the gnat with sombre emphasis.
+
+Simplicity is, in fact, a difficult thing to lay down rules for,
+because the essence of it is that it is free from rules; and those
+who talk and think most about it, are often the most uneasy and
+complicated natures. But it is certain that if one finds oneself
+growing more and more fastidious and particular, more and more
+easily disconcerted and put out and hampered by any variation from
+the exact scheme of life that one prefers, even if that scheme is
+an apparently simple one, it is certain that simplicity is at an
+end. The real simplicity is a sense of being at home and at ease in
+any company and mode of living, and a quiet equanimity of spirit
+which cannot be content to waste time over the arrangements of
+life. Sufficient food and exercise and sleep may be postulated; but
+these are all to be in the background, and the real occupations of
+life are to be work and interests and talk and ideas and natural
+relations with others. One knows of houses where some trifling
+omission of detail, some failure of service in a meal, will plunge
+the hostess into a dumb and incommunicable despair. The slightest
+lapse of the conventional order becomes a cloud that intercepts the
+sun. But the right attitude to life, if we desire to set ourselves
+free from this self-created torment, is a resolute avoidance of
+minute preoccupations, a light-hearted journeying, with an amused
+tolerance for the incidents of the way. A conventional order of
+life is useful only in so far as it removes from the mind the
+necessity of detailed planning, and allows it to flow punctually
+and mechanically in an ordered course. But if we exalt that order
+into something sacred and solemn, then we become pharisaical and
+meticulous, and the savour of life is lost.
+
+One remembers the scene in David Copperfield which makes so fine a
+parable of life; how the merry party who were making the best of an
+ill-cooked meal, and grilling the chops over the lodging-house
+fire, were utterly disconcerted and reduced to miserable dignity by
+the entry of the ceremonious servant with his "Pray, permit me,"
+and how his decorous management of the cheerful affair cast a gloom
+upon the circle which could not even be dispelled when he had
+finished his work and left them to themselves.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+AFFECTION
+
+
+
+
+
+One of the ways in which our fears have power to wound us most
+grievously is through our affections, and here we are confronted
+with a real and crucial difficulty. Are we to hold ourselves in, to
+check the impulses of affection, to use self-restraint, not
+multiply intimacies, not extend sympathies? One sees every now and
+then lives which have entwined themselves with every tendril of
+passion and love and companionship and service round some one
+personality, and have then been bereaved, with the result that the
+whole life has been palsied and struck into desolation by the loss.
+I am thinking now of two instances which I have known; one was a
+wife, who was childless, and whose whole nature, every motive and
+every faculty, became centred upon her husband, a man most worthy
+of love. He died suddenly, and his wife lost everything at one
+blow; not only her lover and comrade, but every occupation as well
+which might have helped to distract her, because her whole life had
+been entirely devoted to her husband; and even the hours when he
+was absent from her had been given to doing anything and everything
+that might save him trouble or vexation. She lived on, though she
+would willingly have died at any moment, and the whole fabric of
+her life was shattered. Again, I think of a devoted daughter who
+had done the same office for an old and not very robust father. I
+heard her once say that the sorrow of her mother's death had been
+almost nullified for her by finding that she could do everything
+for and be everything to her father, whom she almost adored. She
+had refused an offer of marriage from a man whom she sincerely
+loved, that she might not leave her father, and she never even told
+her father of the incident, for fear that he might have felt that
+he had stood in the way of her happiness. When he died, she too
+found herself utterly desolate, without ties and without
+occupation, an elderly woman almost without friends or companions.
+
+Ought one to feel that this kind of jealous absorption in a single
+individual affection is a mistake? It certainly brought both the
+wife and daughter an intense happiness, but in both cases the
+relation was so close and so intimate that it tended gradually to
+seclude them from all other relations. The husband and the father
+were both reserved and shy men, and desired no other companionship.
+One can see so easily how it all came about, and what the
+inevitable result was bound to be, and yet it would have been
+difficult at any point to say what could have been done. Of course
+these great absorbed emotions involve large risks; and it may be
+doubted whether life can be safely lived on these intensive lines.
+These are of course extreme instances, but there are many cases in
+the world, and especially in the case of women whose life is
+entirely built up on certain emotions like the love and care of
+children; and when that is so, a nature becomes liable to the
+sharpest incursions of fear. It is of little use arguing such cases
+theoretically, because, as the proverb says, as the land lies the
+water flows,--and love makes very light of all prudential
+considerations.
+
+The difficulty does not arise with large and generous natures which
+give love prodigally in many directions, because if one such
+relation is broken by death, love can still exercise itself upon
+those that remain. It is the fierce and jealous sort of love that
+is so hard to deal with, a love that exults in solitariness of
+devotion, and cannot bear any intrusion of other relations.
+
+Yet if one believes, as I for one believe, that the secret of the
+world is somehow hidden in love, and can be interpreted through
+love alone, then one must run the risks of love, and seek for
+strength to bear the inevitable suffering which love must bring.
+
+But men and women are very differently made in this respect. Among
+innumerable minor differences, certain broad divisions are clear.
+Men, in the first place, both by training and temperament, are far
+less dependent upon affection than women. Career and occupation
+play a much larger part in their thoughts. If one could test and
+intercept the secret and unoccupied reveries of men, when the mind
+moves idly among the objects which most concern it, it would be
+found, I do not doubt, that men's minds occupy themselves much more
+about definite and tangible things--their work, their duties, their
+ambitions, their amusements--and centre little upon the thought of
+other people; an affection, an emotional relation, is much more of
+an incident than a settled preoccupation; and then with men there
+are two marked types, those who give and lavish affection freely,
+who are interested and attracted by others and wish to attach and
+secure close friends; and there are others who respond to advances,
+yet do not go in search of friendship, but only accept it when it
+comes; and the singular thing is that such natures, which are often
+cold and self-absorbed, have a power of kindling emotion in others
+which men of generous and eager feeling sometimes lack. It is
+strange that it should be so, but there is some psychological law
+at the back of it; and it is certainly true in my experience that
+the men who have been most eagerly sought in friendship have not as
+a rule been the most open-hearted and expansive natures. I suppose
+that a certain law of pursuit holds good, and that people of self-
+contained temperament, with a sort of baffling charm, who are
+critical and hard to please, excite a certain ambition in those who
+would claim their affection.
+
+Women, I have no doubt, live far more in the thought of others, and
+desire their intention; they wish to arrive at mutual understanding
+and confidence, to explore personality, to pierce behind the
+surface, to establish a definite relation. Yet in the matter of
+relations with others, women are often, I believe, less
+sentimental, and even less tender-hearted than men, and they have a
+far swifter and truer intuition of character. Though the two sexes
+can never really understand each other's point of view, because no
+imagination can cross the gulf of fundamental difference, yet I am
+certain that women understand men far better than men understand
+women. The whole range of motives is strangely different, and men
+can never grasp the comparative unimportance with which women
+regard the question of occupation. Occupation is for men a definite
+and isolated part of life, a thing important and absorbing in
+itself, quite apart from any motives or reasons. To do something,
+to make something, to produce something--that desire is always
+there, whatever ebb and flow of emotions there may be; it is an end
+in itself with men, and with many women it is not so; for women
+mostly regard work as a necessity, but not an interesting
+necessity. In a woman's occupation, there is generally someone at
+the end of it, for whom and in connection with whom it is done.
+This is probably largely the result of training and tradition, and
+great changes are now going on in the direction of women finding
+occupations for themselves. But take the case of such a profession
+as teaching; it is quite possible for a man to be an effective and
+competent teacher, without feeling any particular interest in the
+temperaments of his pupils, except in so far as they react upon the
+work to be done. But a woman can hardly take this impersonal
+attitude; and this makes women both more and less effective,
+because human beings invariably prefer to be dealt with
+dispassionately; and this is as a rule more difficult for women;
+and thus in a complicated matter affecting conduct, a woman as a
+rule forms a sounder judgment on what has actually occurred than a
+man, and is perhaps more likely to take a severe view. The attitude
+of a Galileo is often a useful one for a teacher, because boys and
+girls ought in matters that concern themselves to learn how to
+govern themselves.
+
+Thus in situations involving relation with others women are more
+liable to feel anxiety and the pressure of personal responsibility;
+and the question is to what extent this ought to be indulged, in
+what degree men and women ought to assume the direction of other
+lives, and whether it is wholesome for the director to allow a
+desire for personal dominance to be substituted for more
+spontaneous motives.
+
+It very often happens that the temperaments which most claim help
+and support are actuated by the egotistical desire to find
+themselves interesting to others, while those who willingly assume
+the direction of other lives are attracted more by the sense of
+power than by genuine sympathy.
+
+But it is clear that it is in the region of our affections that the
+greatest risks of all have to be run. By loving, we render
+ourselves liable to the darkest and heaviest fears. Yet here, I
+believe, we ought to have no doubt at all; and the man who says to
+himself, "I should like to bestow my affection on this person and
+on that, but I will keep it in restraint, because I am afraid of
+the suffering which it may entail,"--such a man, I say, is very far
+from the kingdom of God. Because love is the one quality which, if
+it reaches a certain height, can altogether despise and triumph
+over fear. When ambition and delight and energy fail, love can
+accompany us, with hope and confidence, to the dark gate; and thus
+it is the one thing about which we can hardly be mistaken. If love
+does not survive death, then life is built upon nothingness, and we
+may be glad to get away; but it is more likely that it is the only
+thing that does survive.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+SIN
+
+
+
+
+
+It is every one's duty to take himself seriously--that is the right
+mean between taking oneself either solemnly or apologetically. There
+is no merit in being apologetic about oneself. One has a right to be
+there, wherever one is, a right to an opinion, a right to take some
+kind of a hand in whatever is going on; natural tact is the only
+thing which can tell us exactly how far those rights extend; but it
+is inconvenient to be apologetic, because if one insists on
+explaining how one comes to be there, or how one comes to have an
+opinion, other people begin to think that one needs explanation and
+excuse; but it is even worse to be solemn about oneself, because
+English people are very critical in private, though they are
+tolerant in public, because they dislike a scene, and have not got
+the art of administering the delicate snub which indicates to a man
+that his self-confidence is exuberant without humiliating him; when
+English people inflict a snub, they do it violently and
+emphatically, like Dr. Johnson, and it generally means that they are
+relieving themselves of accumulated disapproval. An Englishman is
+apt to be deferential, and one of the worst temptations of official
+life is the temptation to be solemn. There is an old story about
+Scott and Wordsworth, when the latter stayed at Abbotsford; Scott,
+during the whole visit, was full of little pleasant and courteous
+allusions to Wordsworth's poems; and one of the guests present
+records how at the end of the visit not a single word had ever
+passed Wordsworth's lips which could have indicated that he knew his
+host to have ever written a line of poetry or prose.
+
+I was sitting the other day at a function next a man of some
+eminence, and I was really amazed at the way in which he discoursed
+of himself and his habits, his diet, his hours of work, and the
+blank indifference with which he received similar confidences. He
+merely waited till the speaker had finished, and then resumed his
+own story.
+
+It is this sort of solemn egotism which makes us overvalue our
+anxieties quite out of all proportion to their importance, because
+they all appear to us as integral elements of a dignified drama in
+which we enact the hero's part. We press far too heavily on the
+sense of responsibility; and if we begin by telling boys, as is too
+often done in sermons, that whatever they do or say is of far-
+reaching consequence, that every lightest word may produce an
+effect, that any carelessness of speech or example may have
+disastrous effects upon the character of another, we are doing our
+best to encourage the self-emphasis which is the very essence of
+priggishness.
+
+There is a curious conflict going on at the present time in English
+life between light-mindedness and solemnity; there is a great
+appetite for living, a love of amusement, a tendency to subordinate
+the interests of the future to the pleasure of the moment, and to
+think that the one serious evil is boredom; that is a healthy
+manifestation enough in its way, because it stands for interest and
+delight in life; but there is another strain in our nature, that of
+a rather heavy pietism, inherited from our Puritan ancestors. It
+must not be forgotten that the Puritan got a good deal of interest
+out of his sense of sin; as the old combative elements of feudal
+ages disappeared, the soldierly blood retained the fighting
+instinct, and turned it into moral regions. The sense of adventure
+is impelled to satiate itself, and the Pilgrim's Progress is a
+clear enough proof that the old combativeness was all there,
+revelling in danger, and exulting in the thought that the human
+being was in the midst of foes. Sin represented itself to the
+Puritan as a thing out of which he could get a good deal of fun;
+not the fun of yielding to it, but the fun of whipping out his
+sword and getting in some shrewd blows. When preachers nowadays
+lament that we have lost the sense of sin, what they really mean is
+that we have lost our combativeness: we no longer believe that we
+must treat our foes with open and brutal violence, and we perceive
+that such conduct is only pitting one sin against another. There is
+no warrant in the Gospel for the combative idea of the Christian
+life; all such metaphors and suggestions come from St. Paul and the
+Apocalypse. The fact is that the world was not ready for the utter
+peaceableness of the Gospel, and it had to be accommodated to the
+violence of the world.
+
+Now again the Christian idea is coloured by scientific and medical
+knowledge, and sin, instead of an enemy which we must fight, has
+become a disease which we must try to cure.
+
+Sins, the ordinary sins of ordinary life, are not as a rule
+instincts which are evil in themselves, so much as instincts which
+are selfishly pursued to the detriment of others; sin is in its
+essence the selfishness which will not cooperate, and which secures
+advantages unjustly, without any heed to the disadvantage of
+others. SYMPATHETIC IMAGINATION is the real foe of sin, the power
+of putting oneself in the place of another; and much of the
+sentiment which is so prevalent nowadays is the evidence of the
+growth of sympathy.
+
+The old theory of sin lands one in a horrible dilemma, because it
+implies a treacherous enmity on the part of God, to create man weak
+and unstable, and to pit his weakness against tyrannous desires; to
+allow his will to do evil to be stronger than his power to do
+right, is a satanical device. One must not sacrifice the truth to
+the desire for simplicity and effective statement. The truth is
+intricate and obscure, and to pretend that it is plain and obvious
+is mere hypocrisy. The strength of Calvinism is its horrible
+resemblance to a natural inference from the facts of life; but if
+any sort of Calvinism is true, then it is a mere insult to the
+intelligence to say that God is loving or just. The real basis for
+all deep-seated fear about life is the fear that one will not be
+dealt with either lovingly or justly. But we have to make a simple
+choice as to what we will believe, and the only hope is to believe
+that immediate harshness and injustice is not ultimately
+inconsistent with Love. No one who knows anything of the world and
+of life can pretend to think or say that suffering always results
+from, or is at all proportioned to, moral faults; and if we are
+tempted to regard all our disasters as penal consequences, then we
+are tempted to endure them with gloomy and morbid immobility.
+
+It is far more wholesome and encouraging to look upon many
+disasters that befall us as opportunities to show a little spirit,
+to evoke the courage which does not come by indolent prosperity, to
+increase our sympathy, to enlarge our experience, to make things
+clearer to us, to develop our mind and heart, to free us from
+material temptations. Past suffering is not always an evil, it is
+often an exciting reminiscence. It is good to take life
+adventurously, like Odysseus of old. What would one feel about
+Odysseus if, instead of contriving a way out of the Cyclops' cave,
+he had set himself to consider of what forgotten sin his danger was
+the consequence? Suffering and disaster come to us to develop our
+inventiveness and our courage, not to daunt and dismay us; and we
+ought therefore to approach experience with a sense of humour, if
+possible, and with a lively curiosity. I recollect hearing a man
+the other day describing an operation to which he had been
+subjected. "My word," he said, his eyes sparkling with delight at
+the recollection, "that was awful, when I came into the operating-
+room, and saw the surgeons in their togs, and the pails and basins
+all about, and was invited to step up to the table!" There is
+nothing so agreeable as the remembrance of fears through which we
+have passed; and we can only learn to despise them by finding out
+how unbalanced they were.
+
+I do not mean that fears can ever be pleasant at the time, but we
+do them too much honour if we court them and defer to them. However
+much we may be tortured by them, there is always something at the
+back of our mind which despises our own susceptibility to them; and
+it is that deeper instinct which we ought to trust.
+
+But we cannot even begin to trust it, as long as we allow ourselves
+to believe pietistically that the Mind of God is set on punishment.
+That is the ghastly error which humanity tends to make. It has been
+dinned into us, alas, from our early years, and religious
+phraseology is constantly polluted by it. Our Saviour lent no
+countenance to this at all; He spoke perfectly plainly against the
+theory of "judgments." Of course suffering is sometimes a
+consequence of sin, but it is not a vindictive punishment; it is
+that we may learn our mistake. But we must give up the revengeful
+idea of God: that is imported into our scale of values by the
+grossest anthropomorphism. Only the weak man, who fears that his
+safety will be menaced if he does not make an example, deals in
+revenge. He is indignant at anything which mortifies his vanity,
+which implies any doubt of his power or any disregard of his
+wishes. Revenge is born of terror, and to think of God as
+vindictive is to think of Him as subject to fear. Serene and
+unquestioned strength can have nothing to do with fear. Milton is
+largely responsible for perpetuating this belief. He makes the
+Almighty say to the Son--
+
+
+  "Let us advise, and to this hazard draw
+   With speed what force is left, and all employ
+   In our defence, lest unawares we lose
+   This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill."
+
+
+Milton's idea of the Almighty was frankly that of a Power who had
+undertaken more than he could manage, and who had allowed things to
+go too far. But it is a puerile conception of God; and to allow
+ourselves to think or speak of God as a Power that has to take
+precautions, or that has anything to fear from the exercise of
+human volition, is to cloud the whole horizon at once.
+
+But we ought rather to think of God as a Power which for some
+reason works through imperfection. The battle of the world is that
+of force against inertness: and our fears are the shadow of that
+combat.
+
+Fear should then rather show us that we are being confronted with
+experience; and that our duty is to disregard it, to march forward
+through it, to come out on the other side of it. It is all an
+adventure, in fact! The disaster in which we are involved is not
+sent to show us that the Eternal Power which created us is vexed at
+our failures, or bent on crushing us. It is exactly the opposite;
+it is to show us that we are worth testing, worth developing, and
+that we are to have the glory of going on; the very fear of death
+is the last test of our belief in Love. We are assuredly meant to
+believe that the coward is to learn the beauty of courage, that the
+laggard is to perceive the worth of energy, that the selfish man is
+to be taught sympathy. If we must take a metaphor, let us rather
+think of God as the graver of the gem than as the child that beats
+her doll for collapsing instead of sitting upright.
+
+It is our dishonouring thought of God as jealous, suspicious, fond
+of exhibiting power, revengeful, cruel, that does us harm. We must
+rather think of His Heart as full of courage, energy, and hope; as
+teeming with joy, lightness, zest, mirth; and then we can begin to
+think of failures, fears, delays as things small and unimportant,
+not as malicious ambushes, but as rough bits of road, as obstacles
+to reveal and to develop our strength and gaiety. There is no joy
+in the world so great as the joy of finding ourselves stronger than
+we know; and that is what God is bent upon showing us, and not upon
+proving to us that we are vile and base, in the spirit of the old
+Calvinist who said to his own daughter when she was dying of a
+painful disease, that she must remember that all short of Hell was
+mercy. It is so; but Hell is rather what we start from, and out of
+which we have to find our way, than the waste-paper basket of life,
+the last receptacle for our shattered purposes.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+SERENITY
+
+
+
+
+
+To achieve serenity we must have the power of keeping our hearts and
+minds fixed upon something which is beyond and above the passing
+incidents of life, which so disconcert and overshadow us, and which
+are after all but as clouds in the sky, or islets in a great ocean.
+Think with what smiling indifference a man would meet indignation
+and abuse and menace, if he were aware that an hour hence he would
+be triumphantly vindicated and applauded. How calmly would a man
+sleep in a condemned cell if he knew that a free pardon were on its
+way to him! Of course the more eagerly and enjoyably we live, so
+much the more we are affected by little incidents, beyond which we
+can hardly look when they bring us so much pleasure or so much
+discomfort; and thus it is always the men and women of keen and
+highly-strung natures, who taste the quality of every moment, in its
+sweetness and its bitterness, who will most feel the influence of
+fear. Edward FitzGerald once sadly confessed that, as life went on,
+days of perfect delight--a beautiful scene, a melodious music, the
+society of those whom he loved best--brought him less and less joy,
+because he felt that they were passing swiftly, and could not be
+recalled. And of course the imaginative nature which lives
+tremulously in delight will be most apt to portend sadness in hours
+of happiness, and in sorrow to anticipate the continuance of sorrow.
+That is an inevitable effect of temperament; but we must not give
+way helplessly to temperament, or allow ourselves to drift wherever
+the mind bears us. Just as the skilled sailor can tack up against
+the wind, and use ingenuity to compel a contrary breeze to bring him
+to the haven of his desire, so we must be wise in trimming our sails
+to the force of circumstance; while there is an eager delight in
+making adverse conditions help us to realise our hopes.
+
+The timid soul that loves delight is apt to say to itself, "I am
+happy now in health and circumstances and friends, but I lean out
+into the future, and see that health must fail and friends must
+drift away; death must part me from those I love; and beyond all
+this, I see the cloudy gate through which I must myself pass, and I
+do not know what lies beyond it." That is true enough! It is like
+the story of the old prince, as told by Herodotus, who said in his
+sorrowful age that the Gods gave man only a taste of life, just
+enough to let him feel that life was sweet, and then took the cup
+from his lips. But if we look fairly at life, at our own life, at
+other lives, we see that pleasure and contentment, even if we
+hardly realised that it was contentment at the time, have largely
+predominated over pain and unhappiness; a man must be very rueful
+and melancholy before he will deliberately say that life has not
+been worth living, though I suppose that there have probably been
+hours in the lives of all of us when we have thought and said and
+even believed that we would rather not have lived at all than
+suffer so. Neither must we pass over the fact that every day there
+are men and women who, under the pressure of calamity and dismay,
+bring their lives to a voluntary end.
+
+But we have to be very dull and thankless and slow of heart not to
+feel that by being allowed to live, for however short a time, we
+have been allowed to take part in a very beautiful and wonderful
+thing. The loveliness of earth, its colours, its lights, its
+scents, its savours, the pleasures of activity and health, the
+sharp joys of love and friendship, these are surely very great and
+marvellous experiences, and the Mind which planned them must be
+full of high purpose, eager intention, infinite goodwill. And we
+may go further than that, and see that even our sorrows and
+failures have often brought something great to our view, something
+which we feel we have learned and apprehended, something which we
+would not have missed, and which we cannot do without. If we will
+frankly recognise all this, we cannot feebly crumple up at the
+smallest touch of misery, and say suspiciously and vindictively
+that we wish we had never opened our eyes upon the world; and even
+if we do say that, even if we abandon ourselves to despair, we yet
+cannot hope to escape; we did not enter life by our own will, it is
+not our own prudence that has kept us there, and even if we end it
+voluntarily, as Carlyle said, by noose or henbane, we cannot for an
+instant be sure that we are ending it; every inference in the
+world, in fact, would tend to indicate that we do not end it. We
+cannot destroy matter, we can only disperse and rearrange it; we
+cannot generate a single force, we can only summon it from
+elsewhere, and concentrate it, as we concentrate electricity, at a
+single glowing point. Force seems as indestructible as matter, and
+there is no reason to think that life is destructible either. So
+that if we are to resign ourselves to any belief at all, it must be
+to the belief that "to be, or not to be" is not a thing which is in
+our power at all. We may extinguish life, as we put out a light;
+but we do not destroy it, we only rearrange it.
+
+And we can thus at least practise and exercise ourselves in the
+belief that we cannot bring our experiences to an end, however
+petulantly and irritably we desire to do so, because it simply is
+not in our power to effect it. We talk about the power of the will,
+but no effort of will can obliterate the life that we have lived,
+or add a cubit to our stature; we cannot abrogate any law of
+nature, or destroy a single atom of matter. What it seems that we
+can do with the will is to make a certain choice, to select a
+certain line, to combine existing forces, to use them within very
+small limits. We can oblige ourselves to take a certain course,
+when every other inclination is reluctant to do it; and even so the
+power varies in different people. It is useless then to depend
+blindly upon the will, because we may suddenly come to the end of
+it, as we may come to the end of our physical forces. But what the
+will can do is to try certain experiments, and the one province
+where its function seems to be clear, is where it can discover that
+we have often a reserve of unsuspected strength, and more courage
+and power than we had supposed. We can certainly oppose it to
+bodily inclinations, whether they be seductions of sense or
+temptations of weariness. And in this one respect the will can give
+us, if not serenity, at least a greater serenity than we expect. We
+can use the will to endure, to wait, to suspend a hasty judgment;
+and impulse is the thing which menaces our serenity most of all.
+The will indeed seems to be like a little weight which we can throw
+into either scale. If we have no doubt how we ought to act, we can
+use the will to enforce our judgment, whether it is a question of
+acting or of abstaining; if we are in doubt how to act, we can use
+our will to enforce a wise delay.
+
+The truth then about the will is that it is a force which we cannot
+measure, and that it is as unreasonable to say that it does not
+exist as to say that it is unlimited. It is foolish to describe it
+as free; it is no more free than a prisoner in a cell is free; but
+yet he has a certain power to move about within his cell, and to
+choose among possible employments.
+
+Anyone who will deliberately test his will, will find that it is
+stronger than he suspects; what often weakens our use of it is that
+we are so apt to look beyond the immediate difficulty into a long
+perspective of imagined obstacles, and to say within ourselves,
+"Yes, I may perhaps achieve this immediate step, but I cannot take
+step after step--my courage will fail!" Yet if one does make the
+immediate effort, it is common to find the whole range of obstacles
+modified by the single act; and thus the first step towards the
+attainment of serenity of life is to practise cutting off the vista
+of possible contingencies from our view, and to create a habit of
+dealing with a case as it occurs.
+
+I am often tempted myself to send my anxious mind far ahead in
+vague dismay; at the beginning of a week crammed with various
+engagements, numerous tasks, constant labour, little businesses,
+many of them with their own attendant anxiety, it is easy to say
+that there is no time to do anything that one wants to do, and to
+feel that the matters themselves will be handled amiss and bungled.
+But if one can only keep the mind off, or distract it by work, or
+beguile it by a book, a walk, a talk, how easily the thread spins
+off the reel, how quietly one comes to harbour on the Saturday
+evening, with everything done and finished!
+
+Again, I am personally much disposed to dread the opposition and
+the displeasure of colleagues, and to shrink nervously from
+anything which involves dealing with a number of people. I ought to
+have found out before now how futile such dread is; other people
+forget their vexation and even grow ashamed of it, much as one does
+oneself; and looking back I can recall no crisis which turned out
+either as intricate or as difficult as one expected.
+
+Let me admit that I have more than once in life made grave mistakes
+through this timidity and indolence, or through an imaginativeness
+which could see in a great opportunity nothing but a sea of
+troubles, which would, I do not doubt, have melted away as one
+advanced. But no one has suffered except myself! Institutions do
+not depend upon individuals; and I regard such failures now just as
+the petulant casting away of a chance of experience, as a lesson
+which I would not learn; but there is nothing irreparable about it;
+one only comes, more slowly and painfully, to the same goal at
+last. I dare not say that I regret it all, for we are all of us,
+whether small or great, being taught a mighty truth, whether we
+wish it or know it; and all that we can do to hasten it is to put
+our will into the right scale. I do not think mistakes and failures
+ought to trouble one much; at all events there is no fear mingled
+with them. But I do not here claim to have attained any real
+serenity--my own heart is too impatient, too fond of pleasure for
+that!--yet I can see clearly enough that it is there, if I could
+but grasp it; and I know well enough how it is to be attained, by
+being content to wait, and by realising at every instant and moment
+of life that, in spite of my tremors and indolences, my sharp
+impatiences, my petulant disgusts, something very real and great is
+being shown me, which I shall at last, however dimly, perceive; and
+that even so the goal of the journey is far beyond any horizon that
+I can conceive, and built up like the celestial city out of
+unutterable brightness and clearness, upon a foundation of peace
+and joy.
+
+It is very difficult to determine, by any exercise of the intellect
+or imagination, what fears would remain to us if we were freed from
+the dominion of the body. All material fears and anxieties would
+come to an end; we should no longer have any poverty to dread, or
+any of the limitations or circumscriptions which the lack of the
+means of life inflicts upon us; we should have no ambitions left,
+because the ambitions which centre on influence--that is, upon the
+desire to direct and control the interests of a nation or a group
+of individuals--have no meaning apart from the material framework
+of civil life. The only kind of influence which would survive would
+be the influence of emotion, the direct appeal which one who lives
+a higher and more beautiful life can make to all unsatisfied souls,
+who would fain find the way to a greater serenity of mood. Even
+upon earth we can see a faint foreshadowing of this in the fact
+that the only personalities who continue to hold the devotion and
+admiration of humanity are the idealists. Men and women do not make
+pilgrimages to the graves and houses of eminent jurists and
+bankers, political economists or statisticians: these have done
+their work, and have had their reward. Even the monuments of
+statesmen and conquerors have little power to touch the
+imagination, unless some love for humanity, some desire to uplift
+and benefit the race, have entered into their schemes and policies.
+No, it is rather the soil which covers the bones of dreamers and
+visionaries that is sacred yet, prophets and poets, artists and
+musicians, those who have seen through life to beauty, and have
+lived and suffered that they might inspire and tranquillise human
+hearts. The princes of the earth, popes and emperors, lie in
+pompous sepulchres, and the thoughts of those who regard them, as
+they stand in metal or marble, dwell most on the vanity of earthly
+glory. But at the tombs of men like Vergil and Dante, of
+Shakespeare and Michelangelo, the human heart still trembles into
+tears, and hates the death that parts soul from soul. So that if,
+like Dante, we could enter the shadow-land, and hold converse with
+the spirits of the dead, we should seek out to consort with, not
+those who have subdued and wasted the earth, or have terrified men
+into obedience and service, but those whose hearts were touched by
+dreams of impossible beauty, and who have taught us to be kind and
+compassionate and tender-hearted, to love God and our neighbour,
+and to detect, however faintly, the hope of peace and joy which
+binds us all together.
+
+And thus if emotion, by which I mean the power of loving, is the
+one thing which survives, the fears which may remain will be
+concerned with all the thoughts which cloud love, the anger and
+suspicion that divide us; so that perhaps the only fears which will
+survive at all will be the fears of our own selfishness and
+coldness, that inner hardness which has kept us from the love of
+God and isolated us from our neighbour. The pride which kept us
+from admitting that we were wrong, the jealousy that made us hate
+those who won the love we could not win, the baseness which made us
+indifferent to the discomfort of others if we could but secure our
+own ease, these are the thoughts which may still have the power to
+torture us; and the hell that we may have to fear may be the hell
+of conscious weakness and the horror of retrospect, when we
+recollect how under these dark skies of earth we went on our way
+claiming and taking all that we could get, and disregarding love
+for fear of being taken advantage of. One of the grievous fears of
+life is the fear of seeing ourselves as we really are, in all our
+baseness and pettiness; yet that will assuredly be shown us in no
+vindictive spirit, but that we may learn to rise and soar.
+
+There is no hope that death will work an immediate moral change in
+us; it may set us free from some sensual and material temptations,
+but the innermost motives will indeed survive, that instinct which
+makes us again and again pursue what we know to be false and
+unsatisfying.
+
+The more that we shrink from self-knowledge, the more excuses that
+we make for ourselves, the more that we tend to attribute our
+failures to our circumstances and to the action of others, the more
+reason we have to fear the revelation of death. And the only way to
+face that is to keep our minds open to any light, to nurture and
+encourage the wish to be different, to pray hour by hour that at
+any cost we may be taught the truth; it is useless to search for
+happy illusions, to look for short cuts, to hope vaguely that
+strength and virtue will burst out like a fountain beside our path.
+We have a long and toilsome way to travel, and we can by no device
+abbreviate it; but when we suffer and grieve, we are walking more
+swiftly to our goal; and the hours we spend in fear, in sending the
+mind in weariness along the desolate track, are merely wasted, for
+we can alter nothing so. We use life best when we live it eagerly,
+exulting in its fulness and its significance, casting ourselves
+into strong relations with others, drinking in beauty, making high
+music in our hearts. There is an abundance of awe in the
+experiences through which we pass, awe at the greatness of the
+vision, at the vastness of the design, as it embraces and enfolds
+our weakness. But we are inside it all, an integral and
+indestructible part of it; and the shadow of fear falls when we
+doubt this, when we dread being overlooked or disregarded. No such
+thing can happen to us; our inheritance is absolute and certain,
+and it is fear that keeps us away from it, and the fear of
+fearlessness. For we are contending not with God, but with the fear
+which hides Him from our shrinking eyes; and our prayer should be
+the undaunted prayer of Moses in the clefts of the mountain, "I
+beseech Thee, show me Thy Glory!"
+
+THE END
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Where No Fear Was:  A Book About Fear
+by Arthur Christopher Benson
+******This file should be named wnfwa10.txt or wnfwa10.zip******
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+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, wnfwa11.txt
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+This etext was created by Don Lainson (dlainson@sympatico.ca) & Charles Aldarondo (Aldarondo@yahoo.com)
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+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Where No Fear Was:  A Book About Fear
+by Arthur Christopher Benson
+
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