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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of At Large
+by Arthur Christopher Benson
+(#4 in our series by Arthur Christopher Benson)
+
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+
+Title: At Large
+
+Author: Arthur Christopher Benson
+
+Release Date: November, 2003  [Etext #4613]
+[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 At Large
+by Arthur Christopher Benson
+******This file should be named atlar10.txt or atlar10.zip******
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+
+AT LARGE
+
+
+
+By ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON
+
+Haec ego mecum
+
+1908
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+I. THE SCENE
+II. CONTENTMENT
+III. FRIENDSHIP
+IV. HUMOUR
+V. TRAVEL
+VI. SPECIALISM
+VII. OUR LACK OF GREAT MEN
+VIII. SHYNESS
+IX. EQUALITY
+X. THE DRAMATIC SENSE
+XI. KELMSCOTT AND WILLIAM MORRIS
+XII. A SPEECH DAY
+XIII. LITERARY FINISH
+XIV. A MIDSUMMER DAY'S DREAM
+XV. SYMBOLS
+XVI. OPTIMISM
+XVII. JOY
+XVIII. THE LOVE OF GOD
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE SCENE
+
+
+
+
+
+Yes, of course it is an experiment! But it is made in corpore vili.
+It is not irreparable, and there is no reason, more's the pity, why
+I should not please myself. I will ask--it is a rhetorical question
+which needs no answer--what is a hapless bachelor to do, who is
+professionally occupied and tied down in a certain place for just
+half the year? What is he to do with the other half? I cannot live
+on in my college rooms, and I am not compelled to do so for
+economy. I have near relations and many friends, at whose houses I
+should be made welcome. But I cannot be like the wandering dove,
+who found no repose. I have a great love of my independence and my
+liberty. I love my own fireside, my own chair, my own books, my own
+way. It is little short of torture to have to conform to the rules
+of other households, to fall in with other people's arrangements,
+to throw my pen down when the gong sounds, to make myself agreeable
+to fortuitous visitors, to be led whither I would not. I do this, a
+very little, because I do not desire to lose touch with my kind;
+but then my work is of a sort which brings me into close touch day
+after day with all sorts of people, till I crave for recollection
+and repose; the prospect of a round of visits is one that fairly
+unmans me. No doubt it implies a certain want of vitality, but one
+does not increase one's vitality by making overdrafts upon it; and
+then too I am a slave to my pen, and the practice of authorship is
+inconsistent with paying visits. Of course the obvious remedy is
+marriage; but one cannot marry from prudence, or from a sense of
+duty, or even to increase the birth-rate, which I am concerned to
+see is diminishing. I am, moreover, to be perfectly frank, a
+transcendentalist on the subject of marriage. I know that a happy
+marriage is the finest and noblest thing in the world, and I would
+resign all the conveniences I possess with the utmost readiness for
+it. But a great passion cannot be the result of reflection, or of
+desire, or even of hope. One cannot argue oneself into it; one must
+be carried away. "You have never let yourself go," says a wise and
+gentle aunt, when I bemoan my unhappy fate. To which I reply that I
+have never done anything else. I have lain down in streamlets, I
+have leapt into silent pools, I have made believe I was in the
+presence of a deep emotion, like the dear little girl in one of
+Reynolds's pictures, who hugs a fat and lolling spaniel over an
+inch-deep trickle of water, for fear he should be drowned. I do not
+say that it is not my fault. It is my fault, my own fault, my own
+great fault, as we say in the Compline confession. The fault has
+been an over-sensibility. I have desired close and romantic
+relations so much that I have dissipated my forces; yet when I read
+such a book as the love-letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth
+Barrett, I realise at once both the supreme nature of the gift, and
+the hopelessness of attaining it unless it be given; but I try to
+complain, as the beloved mother of Carlyle said about her health,
+as little as possible.
+
+Well, then, as I say, what is a reluctant bachelor who loves his
+liberty to do with himself? I cannot abide the life of towns,
+though I live in a town half the year. I like friends, and I do not
+care for acquaintances. There is no conceivable reason why, in the
+pursuit of pleasure, I should frequent social entertainments that
+do not amuse me. What have I then done? I have done what I liked
+best. I have taken a big roomy house in the quietest country I
+could find, I have furnished it comfortably, and I have hitherto
+found no difficulty in inducing my friends. one or two at a time,
+to come and share my life. I shall have something to say about
+solitude presently, but meanwhile I will describe my hermitage.
+
+The old Isle of Ely lies in the very centre of the Fens. It is a
+range of low gravel hills, shaped roughly like a human hand. The
+river runs at the wrist, and Ely stands just above it, at the base
+of the palm, the fingers stretching out to the west. The fens
+themselves, vast peaty plains, the bottoms of the old lagoons, made
+up of the accumulation of centuries of rotting water-plants,
+stretch round it on every side; far away you can see the low
+heights of Brandon, the Newmarket Downs, the Gogmagogs behind
+Cambridge, the low wolds of Huntingdon. To the north the
+interminable plain, through which the rivers welter and the great
+levels run, stretches up to the Wash. So slight is the fall of the
+land towards the sea, that the tide steals past me in the huge
+Hundred-foot cut, and makes itself felt as far south as Earith
+Bridge, where the Ouse comes leisurely down with its clear pools
+and reed-beds. At the extremity of the southernmost of all the
+fingers of the Isle, a big hamlet clusters round a great ancient
+church, whose blunt tower is visible for miles above its grove of
+sycamores. More than twelve centuries ago an old saint, whose name
+I think was Owen, though it was Latinised by the monks into Ovinus,
+because he had the care of the sheep, kept the flocks of St.
+Etheldreda, queen and abbess of Ely, on these wolds. One does not
+know what were the visions of this rude and ardent saint, as he
+paced the low heights day by day, looking over the monstrous lakes.
+At night no doubt he heard the cries of the marsh-fowl and saw the
+elfin lights stir on the reedy flats. Perhaps some touch of fever
+kindled his visions; but he raised a tiny shrine here, and here he
+laid his bones; and long after, when the monks grew rich, they
+raised a great church here to the memory of the shepherd of the
+sheep, and beneath it, I doubt not, he sleeps.
+
+What is it I see from my low hills? It is an enchanted land for me,
+and I lose myself in wondering how it is that no one, poet or
+artist, has ever wholly found out the charm of these level plains,
+with their rich black soil, their straight dykes, their great
+drift-roads, that run as far as the eye can reach into the
+unvisited fen. In summer it is a feast of the richest green from
+verge to verge; here a clump of trees stands up, almost of the hue
+of indigo, surrounding a lonely shepherd's cote; a distant church
+rises, a dark tower over the hamlet elms; far beyond, I see low
+wolds, streaked and dappled by copse and wood; far to the south, I
+see the towers and spires of Cambridge, as of some spiritual city--
+the smoke rises over it on still days, hanging like a cloud; to the
+east lie the dark pine-woods of Suffolk, to the north an
+interminable fen; but not only is it that one sees a vast extent of
+sky, with great cloud-battalions crowding up from the south, but
+all the colour of the landscape is crowded into a narrow belt to
+the eye, which gives it an intensity of emerald hue that I have
+seen nowhere else in the world. There is a sense of deep peace
+about it all, the herb of the field just rising in its place over
+the wide acres; the air is touched with a lazy fragrance, as of
+hidden flowers; and there is a sense, too, of silent and remote
+lives, of men that glide quietly to and fro in the great pastures,
+going quietly about their work in a leisurely calm. In the winter
+it is fairer still, if one has a taste for austerity. The trees are
+leafless now; and the whole flat is lightly washed with the most
+delicate and spare tints, the pasture tinted with the yellowing
+bent, the pale stubble, the rich plough-land, all blending into a
+subdued colour; and then, as the day declines and the plain is
+rimmed with a frosty mist, the smouldering glow of the orange
+sunset begins to burn clear on the horizon, the grey laminated
+clouds becoming ridged with gold and purple, till the whole fades,
+like a shoaling sea, into the purest green, while the cloud-banks
+grow black and ominous, and far-off lights twinkle like stars in
+solitary farms.
+
+Of the house itself, exteriorly, perhaps the less said the better;
+it was built by an earl, to whom the estate belonged, as a
+shooting-box. I have often thought that it must have been ordered
+from the Army and Navy Stores. It is of yellow brick, blue-slated,
+and there has been a pathetic feeling after giving it a meanly
+Gothic air; it is ill-placed, shut in by trees, approached only by
+a very dilapidated farm-road; and the worst of it is that a curious
+and picturesque house was destroyed to build it. It stands in what
+was once a very pretty and charming little park, with an ancient
+avenue of pollard trees, lime and elm. You can see the old terraces
+of the Hall, the mounds of ruins, the fish-ponds, the grass-grown
+pleasance. It is pleasantly timbered, and I have an orchard of
+honest fruit-trees of my own. First of all I expect it was a Roman
+fort; for the other day my gardener brought me in half of the
+handle of a fine old Roman water-jar, red pottery smeared with
+plaster, with two pretty laughing faces pinched lightly out under
+the volutes. A few days after I felt like Polycrates of Samos, that
+over-fortunate tyrant, when, walking myself in my garden, I
+descried and gathered up the rest of the same handle, the fractures
+fitting exactly. There are traces of Roman occupation hereabouts in
+mounds and earthworks. Not long ago a man ploughing in the fen
+struck an old red vase up with the share, and searching the place
+found a number of the same urns within the space of a few yards,
+buried in the peat, as fresh as the day they were made. There was
+nothing else to be found, and the place was under water till fifty
+years ago; so that it must have been a boatload of pottery being
+taken in to market that was swamped there, how many centuries ago!
+But there have been stranger things than that found; half a mile
+away, where the steep gravel hill slopes down to the fen, a man
+hoeing brought up a bronze spear-head. He took it to the lord of
+the manor, who was interested in curiosities. The squire hurried to
+the place and had it all dug out carefully; quite a number of
+spear-heads were found, and a beautiful bronze sword, with the
+holes where the leather straps of the handle passed in and out. I
+have held this fine blade in my hands, and it is absolutely
+undinted. It may be Roman, but it is probably earlier. Nothing else
+was found, except some mouldering fragments of wood that looked
+like spear-staves; and this, too, it seems, must have been a
+boatload of warriors, perhaps some raiding party, swamped on the
+edge of the lagoon with all their unused weapons, which they were
+presumably unable to recover, if indeed any survived to make the
+attempt. Hard by is the place where the great fight related in
+Hereward the Wake took place. The Normans were encamped southwards
+at Willingham, where a line of low entrenchments is still known as
+Belsar's Field, from Belisarius, the Norman Duke in command. It is
+a quiet enough place now, and the yellow-hammers sing sweetly and
+sharply in the thick thorn hedges. The Normans made a causeway of
+faggots and earth across the fen, but came at last to the old
+channel of the Ouse, which they could not bridge; and here they
+attempted to cross in great flat-bottomed boats, but were foiled by
+Hereward and his men, their boats sunk, and hundreds of stout
+warriors drowned in the oozy river-bed. There still broods for me a
+certain horror over the place, where the river in its confined
+channel now runs quietly, by sedge and willow-herb and golden-rod,
+between its high flood banks, to join the Cam to the east.
+
+But to return to my house. It was once a monastic grange of Ely, a
+farmstead with a few rooms, no doubt, where sick monks and ailing
+novices were sent to get change of air and a taste of country life.
+There is a bit of an old wall still bordering my garden, and a
+strip of pale soil runs across the gooseberry beds, pale with dust
+of mortar and chips of brick, where another old wall stood. There
+was a great pigeon-house here, pulled down for the shooting-box,
+and the garden is still full of old carved stones, lintels, and
+mullions, and capitals of pillars, and a grotesque figure of a
+bearded man, with a tunic confined round the waist by a cord, which
+crowns one of my rockeries. But it is all gone now, and the pert
+cockneyfied house stands up among the shrubberies and walnuts,
+surveying the ruins of what has been.
+
+But I must not abuse my house, because whatever it is outside, it
+is absolutely comfortable and convenient within: it is solid, well
+built, spacious, sensible, reminding one of the "solid joys and
+lasting treasure" that the hymn says "none but Zion's children
+know." And, indeed, it is a Zion to be at ease in.
+
+One other great charm it has: from the end of my orchard the ground
+falls rapidly in a great pasture. Some six miles away, over the
+dark expanse of Grunty Fen, the towers of Ely, exquisitely delicate
+and beautiful, crown the ridge; on clear sunny days I can see the
+sun shining on the lead roofs, and the great octagon rises with all
+its fretted pinnacles. Indeed, so kind is Providence, that the huge
+brick mass of the Ely water-tower, like an overgrown Temple of
+Vesta, blends itself pleasantly with the cathedral, projecting from
+the western front like a great Galilee.
+
+The time to make pious pilgrimage to Ely is when the apple-orchards
+are in bloom. Then the grim western tower, with its sombre windows,
+the gabled roofs of the canonical houses, rise in picturesque
+masses over acres of white blossom. But for me, six miles away, the
+cathedral is a never-ending sight of beauty. On moist days it draws
+nearer, as if carved out of a fine blue stone; on a grey day it
+looks more like a fantastic crag, with pinnacles of rock. Again it
+will loom a ghostly white against a thunder-laden sky. Grand and
+pathetic at once, for it stands for something that we have parted
+with. What was the outward and stately form of a mighty idea, a
+rich system, is now little more than an aesthetic symbol. It has
+lost heart, somehow, and its significance only exists for
+ecclesiastically or artistically minded persons; it represents a
+force no longer in the front of the battle.
+
+One other fine feature of the countryside there is, of which one
+never grows tired. If one crosses over to Sutton, with its huge
+church, the tower crowned with a noble octagon, and the village
+pleasantly perched along a steep ridge of orchards, one can drop
+down to the west, past a beautiful old farmhouse called Berristead,
+with an ancient chapel, built into the homestead, among fine elms.
+The road leads out upon the fen, and here run two great Levels, as
+straight as a line for many miles, up which the tide pulsates day
+by day; between them lies a wide tract of pasture called the Wash,
+which in summer is a vast grazing-ground for herds, in rainy
+weather a waste of waters, like a great estuary--north and south it
+runs, crossed by a few roads or black-timbered bridges, the fen-
+water pouring down to the sea. It is a great place for birds this.
+The other day I disturbed a brood of redshanks here, the parent
+birds flying round and round, piping mournfully, almost within
+reach of my hand. A little further down, not many months ago, there
+was observed a great commotion in the stream, as of some big beast
+swimming slowly; the level was netted, and they hauled out a great
+sturgeon, who had somehow lost his way, and was trying to find a
+spawning-ground. There is an ancient custom that all sturgeon,
+netted in English waters, belong by right to the sovereign; but no
+claim was advanced in this case. The line between Ely and March
+crosses the level, further north, and the huge freight-trains go
+smoking and clanking over the fen all day. I often walk along the
+grassy flood-bank for a mile or two, to the tiny decayed village of
+Mepal, with a little ancient church, where an old courtier lies, an
+Englishman, but with property near Lisbon, who was a gentleman-in-
+waiting to James II. in his French exile, retired invalided, and
+spent the rest of his days "between Portugal and Byall Fen"--an odd
+pair of localities to be so conjoined!
+
+And what of the life that it is possible to live in my sequestered
+grange? I suppose there is not a quieter region in the whole of
+England. There are but two or three squires and a few clergy in the
+Isle, but the villages are large and prosperous; the people
+eminently friendly, shrewd and independent, with homely names for
+the most part, but with a sprinkling both of Saxon appellations,
+like Cutlack, which is Guthlac a little changed, and Norman names,
+like Camps, inherited perhaps from some invalided soldier who made
+his home there after the great fight. There is but little
+communication with the outer world; on market-days a few trains
+dawdle along the valley from Ely to St. Ives and back again. They
+are fine, sturdy, prosperous village communities, that mind their
+own business, and take their pleasure in religion and in song, like
+their forefathers the fenmen, Girvii, who sang their three-part
+catches with rude harmony.
+
+Part of the charm of the place is, I confess, its loneliness. One
+may go for weeks together with hardly a caller; there are no social
+functions, no festivities, no gatherings. One may once in a month
+have a chat with a neighbour, or take a cup of tea at a kindly
+parsonage. But people tend to mind their own business, and live
+their own lives in their own circle; yet there is an air of
+tranquil neighbourliness all about. The inhabitants of the region
+respect one's taste in choosing so homely and serene a region for a
+dwelling-place, and they know that whatever motive one may have
+had for coming, it was not dictated by a feverish love of society.
+I have never known a district--and I have lived in many parts of
+England--where one was so naturally and simply accepted as a part
+of the place. One is greeted in all directions with a comfortable
+cordiality, and a natural sort of good-breeding; and thus the life
+comes at once to have a precise quality, a character of its own.
+Every one is independent, and one is expected to be independent
+too. There is no suspicion of a stranger; it is merely recognised
+that he is in search of a definite sort of life, and he is made
+frankly and unostentatiously at home.
+
+And so the days race away there in the middle of the mighty plain.
+No plans are ever interrupted, no one questions one's going and
+coming as one will, no one troubles his head about one's
+occupations or pursuits. Any help or advice that one needs is
+courteously and readily given, and no favours asked or expected in
+return. One little incident gave me considerable amusement. There
+is a private footpath of my own which leads close to my house;
+owing to the house having stood for some time unoccupied, people
+had tended to use it as a short cut. The kindly farmer obviated
+this by putting up a little notice-board, to indicate that the
+path was private. A day or two afterwards it was removed and thrown
+into a ditch. I was perturbed as well as surprised by this,
+supposing that it showed that the notice had offended some local
+susceptibility; and being very anxious to begin my tenure on
+neighbourly terms, I consulted my genial landlord, who laughed, and
+said that there was no one who would think of doing such a thing;
+and to reassure me he added that one of his men had seen the
+culprit at work, and that it was only an old horse, who had rubbed
+himself against the post till he had thrown it down.
+
+The days pass, then, in a delightful monotony; one reads, writes,
+sits or paces in the garden, scours the country on still sunny
+afternoons. There are many grand churches and houses within a
+reasonable distance, such as the great churches near Wisbech and
+Lynn--West Walton, Walpole St. Peter, Tilney, Terrington St.
+Clement, and a score of others--great cruciform structures, in
+every conceivable style, with fine woodwork and noble towers, each
+standing in the centre of a tiny rustic hamlet, built with no idea
+of prudent proportion to the needs of the places they serve, but
+out of pure joy and pride. There are houses like Beaupre, a pile of
+fantastic brick, haunted by innumerable phantoms, with its stately
+orchard closes, or the exquisite gables of Snore Hall, of rich
+Tudor brickwork, with fine panelling within. There is no lack of
+shrines for pilgrimage--then, too, it is not difficult to persuade
+some like-minded friend to share one's solitude. And so the quiet
+hours tick themselves away in an almost monastic calm, while one's
+book grows insensibly day by day, as the bulrush rises on the edge
+of the dyke.
+
+I do not say that it would be a life to live for the whole of a
+year, and year by year. There is no stir, no eagerness, no brisk
+interchange of thought about it. But for one who spends six months
+in a busy and peopled place, full of duties and discussions and
+conflicting interests, it is like a green pasture and waters of
+comfort. The danger of it, if prolonged, would be that things would
+grow languid, listless, fragrant like the Lotos-eaters' Isle; small
+things would assume undue importance, small decisions would seem
+unduly momentous; one would tend to regard one's own features as in
+a mirror and through a magnifying glass. But, on the other hand, it
+is good, because it restores another kind of proportion; it is like
+dipping oneself in the seclusion of a monastic cell. Nowadays the
+image of the world, with all its sheets of detailed news, all its
+network of communications, sets too deep a mark upon one's spirit.
+We tend to believe that a man is lost unless he is overwhelmed with
+occupation, unless, like the conjurer, he is keeping a dozen balls
+in the air at once. Such a gymnastic teaches a man alertness,
+agility, effectiveness. But it has got to be proved that one was
+sent into the world to be effective, and it is not even certain
+that a man has fulfilled the higher law of his being if he has made
+a large fortune by business. A sagacious, shrewd, acute man of the
+world is sometimes a mere nuisance; he has made his prosperous
+corner at the expense of others, and he has only contrived to
+accumulate, behind a little fence of his own, what was meant to be
+the property of all. I have known a good many successful men, and I
+cannot honestly say that I think that they are generally the better
+for their success. They have often learnt self-confidence, the
+shadow of which is a good-natured contempt for ineffective people;
+the shadow, on the other hand, which falls on the contemplative man
+is an undue diffidence, an indolent depression, a tendency to think
+that it does not very much matter what any one does. But, on the
+other hand, the contemplative man sometimes does grasp one very
+important fact--that we are sent into the world, most of us, to
+learn something about God and ourselves; whereas if we spend our
+lives in directing and commanding and consulting others, we get so
+swollen a sense of our own importance, our own adroitness, our own
+effectiveness, that we forget that we are tolerated rather than
+needed. it is better on the whole to tarry the Lord's leisure, than
+to try impatiently to force the hand of God, and to make amends for
+His apparent slothfulness. What really makes a nation grow, and
+improve, and progress, is not social legislation and organisation.
+That is only the sign of the rising moral temperature; and a man
+who sets an example of soberness, and kindliness, and contentment
+is better than a pragmatical district visitor with a taste for
+rating meek persons.
+
+It may be asked, then, do I set myself up as an example in this
+matter? God forbid! I live thus because I like it, and not from any
+philosophical or philanthropical standpoint. But if more men were
+to follow their instincts in the matter, instead of being misled
+and bewildered by the conventional view that attaches virtue to
+perspiration, and national vigour to the multiplication of
+unnecessary business, it would be a good thing for the community.
+What I claim is that a species of mental and moral equilibrium is
+best attained by a careful proportion of activity and quietude.
+What happens in the case of the majority of people is that they are
+so much occupied in the process of acquisition that they have no
+time to sort or dispose their stores; and thus life, which ought to
+be a thing complete in itself, and ought to be spent, partly in
+gathering materials, and partly in drawing inferences, is apt to be
+a hurried accumulation lasting to the edge of the tomb. We are put
+into the world, I cannot help feeling, to BE rather than to DO. We
+excuse our thirst for action by pretending to ourselves that our
+own doing may minister to the being of others; but all that it
+often effects is to inoculate others with the same restless and
+feverish bacteria.
+
+And anyhow, as I said, it is but an experiment. I can terminate it
+whenever I have the wish to do so. Even if it is a failure, it will
+at all events have been an experiment, and others may learn wisdom
+by my mistake; because it must be borne in mind that a failure in a
+deliberate experiment in life is often more fruitful than a
+conventional success. People as a rule are so cautious; and it is
+of course highly disagreeable to run a risk, and to pay the
+penalty. Life is too short, one feels, to risk making serious
+mistakes; but, on the other hand, the cautious man often has the
+catastrophe, without even having had the pleasure of a run for his
+money. Jowett, the high priest of worldly wisdom, laid down as a
+maxim, "Never resign"; but I have found myself that there is no
+pleasure comparable to disentangling oneself from uncongenial
+surroundings, unless it be the pleasure of making mild experiments
+and trying unconventional schemes.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+CONTENTMENT
+
+
+
+
+
+I have attempted of late, in more than one book, to depict a
+certain kind of tranquil life, a life of reflection rather than of
+action, of contemplation rather than of business; and I have tried
+to do this from different points of view, though the essence has
+been the same. I endeavoured at first to do it anonymously, because
+I have no desire to recommend these ideas as being my own theories.
+The personal background rather detracts from than adds to the value
+of the thoughts, because people can compare my theories with my
+practice, and show how lamentably I fail to carry them out. But
+time after time I have been pulled reluctantly out of my burrow, by
+what I still consider a wholly misguided zeal for publicity, till I
+have decided that I will lurk no longer. It was in this frame of
+mind that I published, under my own name, a book called Beside
+Still Waters, a harmless enough volume, I thought, which was meant
+to be a deliberate summary or manifesto of these ideas. It depicted
+a young man who, after a reasonable experience of practical life,
+resolved to retire into the shade, who in that position indulged
+profusely in leisurely reverie. The book was carefully enough
+written, and I have been a good deal surprised to find that it has
+met with considerable disapproval, and even derision, on the part
+of many reviewers. It has been called morbid and indolent, and
+decadent, and half a hundred more ugly adjectives. Now I do not for
+an instant question the right of a single one of these
+conscientious persons to form whatever opinion they like about my
+book, and to express it in any terms they like; they say, and
+obviously feel, that the thought of the book is essentially thin,
+and that the vein in which it is written is offensively
+egotistical. I do not dispute the possibility of their being
+perfectly right. An artist who exhibits his paintings, or a writer
+who publishes his books, challenges the criticisms of the public;
+and I am quite sure that the reviewers who frankly disliked my
+book, and said so plainly, thought that they were doing their duty
+to the public, and warning them against teaching which they
+believed to be insidious and even immoral. I honour them for doing
+this, and I applaud them, especially if they did violence to their
+own feelings of courtesy and urbanity in doing so. Then there were
+some good-natured reviewers who practically said that the book was
+simply a collection of amiable platitudes; but that if the public
+liked to read such stuff, they were quite at liberty to do so. I
+admire these reviewers for a different reason, partly for their
+tolerant permission to the public to read what they choose, and
+still more because I like to think that there are so many
+intelligent people in the world who are wearisomely familiar with
+ideas which have only slowly and gradually dawned upon myself. I
+have no intention of trying to refute or convince my critics, and I
+beg them with all my heart to say what they think about my books,
+because only by the frank interchange of ideas can we arrive at the
+truth.
+
+But what I am going to try to do in this chapter is to examine the
+theory by virtue of which my book is condemned, and I am going to
+try to give the fullest weight to the considerations urged against
+it. I am sure there is something in what the critics say, but I
+believe that where we differ is in this. The critics who disapprove
+of my book seem to me to think that all men are cast in the same
+mould, and that the principles which hold good for some necessarily
+hold good for all. What I like best about their criticisms is that
+they are made in a spirit of moral earnestness and ethical
+seriousness. I am a serious man myself, and I rejoice to see others
+serious. The point of view which they seem to recommend is the
+point of view of a certain kind of practical strenuousness, the
+gospel of push, if I may so call it. They seem to hold that people
+ought to be discontented with what they are, that they ought to try
+to better themselves, that they ought to be active, and what they
+call normal; that when they have done their work as energetically
+as possible, they should amuse themselves energetically too, take
+hard exercise, shout and play,
+
+
+     "Pleased as the Indian boy to run
+      And shoot his arrows in the sun,"
+
+
+and that then they should recreate themselves like Homeric heroes,
+eating and drinking, listening comfortably to the minstrel, and
+take their fill of love in a full-blooded way.
+
+That is, I think, a very good theory of life for some people,
+though I think it is a little barbarous; it is Spartan rather than
+Athenian.
+
+Some of my critics take a higher kind of ground, and say that I
+want to minimise and melt down the old stern beliefs and principles
+of morality into a kind of nebulous emotion. They remind me a
+little of an old country squire of whom I have heard, of the John
+Bull type, whose younger son, a melancholy and sentimental youth,
+joined the Church of Rome. His father was determined that this
+should not separate them, and asked him to come home and talk it
+over. He told his eldest son that he was going to remonstrate with
+the erring youth in a simple and affectionate way. The eldest son
+said that he hoped his father would do it tactfully and gently, as
+his brother was highly sensitive, to which his father replied that
+he had thought over what he meant to say, and was going to be very
+reasonable. The young man arrived, and was ushered into the study
+by his eldest brother. "Well," said the squire, "very glad to see
+you, Harry; but do you mean to tell me that your mother's religion
+is not good enough for a damned ass like you?"
+
+Now far from desiring to minimise faith in God and the Unseen, I
+think it is the thing of which the world is more in need than
+anything else. What has made the path of faith a steep one to tread
+is partly that it has got terribly encumbered with ecclesiastical
+traditions; it has been mended, like the Slough of Despond, with
+cartloads of texts and insecure definitions. And partly too the old
+simple undisturbed faith in the absolute truth and authority of the
+Bible has given way. It is admitted that the Bible contains a
+considerable admixture of the legendary element; and it requires a
+strong intellectual and moral grip to build one's faith upon a
+collection of writings, some of which, at all events, are not now
+regarded as being historically and literally true. "If I cannot
+believe it all," says the simple bewildered soul, "how can I be
+certain that any of it is indubitably true?" Only the patient and
+desirous spirit can decide; but whatever else fades, the perfect
+insight, the Divine message of the Son of Man cannot fade; the
+dimmer that the historical setting becomes, the brighter shine the
+parables and the sayings, so far beyond the power of His followers
+to have originated, so utterly satisfying to our deepest needs.
+What I desire to say with all my heart is that we pilgrims need not
+be dismayed because the golden clue dips into darkness and mist; it
+emerges as bright as ever upon the upward slope of the valley. If
+one disregards all that is uncertain, all that cannot be held to be
+securely proved in the sacred writings, there still remain the
+essential facts of the Christian revelation, and more deep and
+fruitful principles than a man can keep and make his own in the
+course of a lifetime, however purely and faithfully he lives and
+strives. To myself the doubtful matters are things absolutely
+immaterial, like the debris of the mine, while the precious ore
+gleams and sparkles in every boulder.
+
+What, in effect, these critics say is that a man must not discuss
+religion unless he is an expert in theology. When I try, as I have
+once or twice tried, to criticise some current conception of a
+Christian dogma, the theological reviewer, with a titter that
+resembles the titter of Miss Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby, says
+that a writer who presumes to discuss such questions ought to be
+better acquainted with the modern developments of theology. To that
+I demur, because I am not attempting to discuss theology, but
+current conceptions of theology. If the advance in theology has
+been so enormous, then all I can say is that the theologians fail
+to bring home the knowledge of that progress to the man in the
+street. To use a simple parable, what one feels about many modern
+theological statements is what the eloquent bagman said in praise
+of the Yorkshire ham: "Before you know where you are, there--it's
+wanished!" This is not so in science; science advances, and the
+ordinary man knows more or less what is going on; he understands
+what is meant by the development of species, he has an inkling of
+what radio-activity means, and so forth; but this is because
+science is making discoveries, while theological discoveries are
+mainly of a liberal and negative kind, a modification of old
+axioms, a loosening of old definitions. Theology has made no
+discoveries about the nature of God, or the nature of the soul; the
+problem of free will and necessity is as dark as ever, except that
+scientific discovery tends to show more and more that an immutable
+law regulates the smallest details of life. I honour, with all my
+heart, the critics who have approached the Bible in the same spirit
+in which they approach other literature; but the only definite
+result has been to make what was considered a matter of blind faith
+more a matter of opinion. But to attempt to scare men away from
+discussing religious topics, by saying that it is only a matter for
+experts, is to act in the spirit of the Inquisition. It is like
+saying to a man that he must not discuss questions of diet and
+exercise because he is not acquainted with the Pharmacopoeia, or
+that no one may argue on matters of current politics unless he is a
+trained historian. Religion is, or ought to be, a matter of vital
+and daily concern for every one of us; if our moral progress and
+our spiritual prospects are affected by what we believe,
+theologians ought to be grateful to any one who will discuss
+religious ideas from the current point of view, if it only leads
+them to clear up misconceptions that may prevail. If I needed to
+justify myself further, I would only add that since I began to
+write on such subjects I have received a large number of letters
+from unknown people, who seem to be grateful to any one who will
+attempt to speak frankly on these matters, with the earnest desire,
+which I can honestly say has never been absent from my mind, to
+elucidate and confirm a belief in simple and essential religious
+principles.
+
+And now I would go on to say a few words as to the larger object
+which I have had in view. My aim has been to show how it is
+possible for people living quiet and humdrum lives, without any
+opportunities of gratifying ambition or for taking a leading part
+on the stage of the world, to make the most of simple conditions,
+and to live lives of dignity and joy. My own belief is that what is
+commonly called success has an insidious power of poisoning the
+clear springs of life; because people who grow to depend upon the
+stimulus of success sink into dreariness and dulness when that
+stimulus is withdrawn. Here my critics have found fault with me for
+not being more strenuous, more virile, more energetic. It is
+strange to me that my object can have been so singularly
+misunderstood. I believe, with all my heart, that happiness depends
+upon strenuous energy; but I think that this energy ought to be
+expended upon work, and everyday life, and relations with others,
+and the accessible pleasures of literature and art. The gospel that
+I detest is the gospel of success, the teaching that every one
+ought to be discontented with his setting, that a man ought to get
+to the front, clear a space round him, eat, drink, make love, cry,
+strive, and fight. It is all to be at the expense of feebler
+people. That is a detestable ideal, because it is the gospel of
+tyranny rather than the gospel of equality. It is obvious, too,
+that such success depends upon a man being stronger than his
+fellows, and is only made possible by shoving and hectoring, and
+bullying the weak. The preaching of this violent gospel has done us
+already grievous harm; it is this which has tended to depopulate
+country districts, to make people averse to discharging all honest
+subordinate tasks, to make men and women overvalue excitement and
+amusement. The result of it is the lowest kind of democratic
+sentiment, which says, "Every one is as good as every one else, and
+I am a little better," and the jealous spirit, which says, "If I
+cannot be prominent, I will do my best that no one else shall be."
+Out of it develops the demon of municipal politics, which makes a
+man strive for a place, in the hope being able to order things for
+which others have to pay. It is this teaching which makes power
+seem desirable for the sake of personal advantages, and with no
+care for responsibility. This spirit seems to me an utterly vile
+and detestable spirit. It tends to disguise its rank individualism
+under a pretence of desiring to improve social conditions. I do not
+mean for a moment to say that all social reformers are of this
+type; the clean-handed social reformer, who desires no personal
+advantage, and whose influence is a matter of anxious care, is one
+of the noblest of men; but now that schemes of social reform are
+fashionable, there are a number of blatant people who them for
+purposes of personal advancement.
+
+What I rather desire is to encourage a very different kind of
+individualism, the individualism of the man who realises that the
+hope of the race depends upon the quality of the life, upon the
+number of people who live quiet, active, gentle, kindly, faithful
+lives, enjoying their work and turning for recreation to the nobler
+and simpler sources of pleasure--the love of nature, poetry,
+literature, and art. Of course the difficulty is that we do not,
+most of us, find our pleasures in these latter things, but in the
+excitement and amusement of social life. I mournfully admit it, and
+I quite see the uselessness of trying to bring pleasures within the
+reach of people when they have no taste for them; but an increasing
+number of people do care for such things, and there are still more
+who would care for them, if only they could be introduced to them
+at an impressionable age.
+
+If it is said that this kind of simplicity is a very tame and
+spiritless thing, I would answer that it has the advantage of being
+within the reach of all. The reason why the pursuit of social
+advancement and success is so hollow, is that the subordinate life
+is after all the life that must fall to the majority of people. We
+cannot organise society on the lines of the army of a lesser German
+state, which consisted of twenty-four officers, covered with
+military decorations, and eight privates. The successful men,
+whatever happens, must be a small minority; and what I desire is
+that success, as it is called, should fall quietly and inevitably
+on the heads of those who deserve it, while ordinary people should
+put it out of their thoughts. It is no use holding up an ideal
+which cannot be attained, and which the mere attempt to attain is
+fruitful in disaster and discontent.
+
+I do not at all wish to teach a gospel of dulness. I am of the
+opinion of the poet who said:
+
+
+     "Life is not life at all without delight,
+         Nor hath it any might."
+
+
+But I am quite sure that the real pleasures of the world are those
+which cannot be bought for money, and which are wholly independent
+of success.
+
+Every one who has watched children knows the extraordinary amount
+of pleasure that they can extract out of the simplest materials. To
+keep a shop in the corner of a garden, where the commodities are
+pebbles and thistle-heads stored in old tin pots, and which are
+paid for in daisies, will be an engrossing occupation to healthy
+children for a long summer afternoon. There is no reason why that
+kind of zest should not be imported into later life; and, as a
+matter of fact, people who practise self-restraint, who are
+temperate and quiet, do retain a gracious kind of contentment in
+all that they do or say, or think, to extreme old age; it is the
+jaded weariness of overstrained lives that needs the stimulus of
+excitement to carry them along from hour to hour. Who does not
+remember the rigid asceticism of Ruskin's childhood? A bunch of
+keys to play with, and a little later a box of bricks; the Bible
+and The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe to read; a summary
+whipping if he fell down and hurt himself, or if he ever cried. Yet
+no one would venture to say that this austerity in any way stunted
+Ruskin's development or limited his range of pleasures; it made him
+perhaps a little submissive and unadventurous. But who that ever
+saw him, as the most famous art-critic of the day, being
+mercilessly snubbed, when he indulged in paradoxes, by the old
+wine-merchant, or being told to hold his tongue by the grim old
+mother, and obeying cheerfully and sweetly, would have preferred
+him to have been loud, contradictory, and self-assertive? The
+mischief of our present system of publicity is that we cannot enjoy
+our own ideas, unless we can impress people with them, or, at all
+events, impress people with a sense of our enjoyment of them. There
+is a noble piece of character-drawing in one of Mr. Henry James's
+novels, The Portrait of a Lady, where Gilbert Osmond, a selfish
+dilettante, finding that he cannot make a great success or attain a
+great position, devotes himself to trying to mystify and provoke
+the curiosity of the world by retiring into a refined seclusion,
+and professing that it affords him an exquisite kind of enjoyment.
+The hideous vulgarity of his attitude is not at first sight
+apparent; he deceives the heroine, who is a considerable heiress,
+into thinking that here, at last, is a man who is living a quiet
+and sincere life among the things of the soul; and having obtained
+possession of her purse, he sets up house in a dignified old palace
+in Rome, where he continues to amuse himself by inviting
+distinguished persons to visit him, in order that he may have the
+pleasure of excluding the lesser people who would like to be
+included.
+
+This is, of course, doing the thing upon an almost sublime scale;
+but the fact remains that in an age which values notoriety above
+everything except property, a great many people do suffer from the
+disease of not enjoying things, unless they are aware that others
+envy their enjoyment. To people of an artistic temperament this is
+a sore temptation, because the essence of the artistic temperament
+is its egotism, and egotism, like the Bread-and-butter fly,
+requires a special nutriment, the nutriment of external admiration.
+
+And here, I think, lies one of the pernicious results of an over-
+developed system of athletics. The more games that people play, the
+better; but I do not think it is wholesome to talk about them for
+large spaces of leisure time, any more than it is wholesome to talk
+about your work or your meals. The result of all the talk about
+athletics is that the newspapers get full of them too. That is only
+natural. It is the business of newspapers to find out what
+interests people, and to tell them about it; but the bad side of it
+is that young athletes get introduced to the pleasures of
+publicity, and that ambitious young men think that athletics are a
+short cut to fame. To have played in a University eleven is like
+accepting a peerage; you wear for the rest of your life an
+agreeable and honourable social label, and I do not think that a
+peerage is deserved, or should be accepted, at the age of twenty. I
+do not think it is a good kind of fame which depends on a personal
+performance rather than upon a man's usefulness to the human race.
+
+The kind of contentment that I should like to see on the increase
+is the contentment of a man who works hard and enjoys work, both in
+itself and in the contrast it supplies to his leisure hours; and,
+further, whose leisure is full of varied interests, not only
+definite pursuits, but an interest in his relations with others,
+not only of a spectatorial kind, but with the natural and
+instinctive desire to contribute to their happiness, not in a
+priggish way, but from a sense of cordial good-fellowship.
+
+This programme may seem, as I have said, to be unambitious and
+prosaic, and to have very little that is stirring about it. But my
+belief is that it can be the most lively, sensitive, fruitful, and
+enjoyable programme in the world, because the enjoyment of it
+depends upon the very stuff of life itself, and not upon skimming
+the cream off and throwing away the milk.
+
+My critics will say that I am only appearing again from my cellar,
+with my hands filled with bottled platitudes; but if they are
+platitudes, by which I mean plain and obvious truths, why do we not
+find more people practising them? What I mean by a platitude is a
+truth so obvious that it is devoid of inspiration, and has become
+one of the things that every one does so instinctively, that no
+reminder of them is necessary. Would that it were so in the present
+case! All I can say is that I know very few people who live their
+lives on these lines, and that most of the people I know find
+inspiration anywhere but in the homely stuff of life. Of course
+there are a good many people who take life stolidly enough, and do
+not desire inspiration at all; but I do not mean that sort of life
+in the least. I mean that it ought to be possible and delightful
+for people to live lives full of activity and perception and
+kindliness and joy, on very simple lines indeed; to take up their
+work day by day with an agreeable sense of putting out their
+powers, to find in the pageant of nature an infinite refreshment,
+and to let art and poetry lift them up into a world of hopes and
+dreams and memories; and thus life may become a meal to be eaten
+with appetite, with a wholesome appreciation of its pleasant
+savours, rather than a meal eaten in satiety or greediness, with a
+peevish repining that it is not more elaborate and delicate.
+
+I do not claim to live my own life on these lines. I started, as
+all sensitive and pleasure-loving natures do, with an expectation
+of finding life a much more exciting, amusing, and delightful thing
+than I have found it. I desired to skip from peak to peak, without
+troubling to descend into the valleys. But now that I have
+descended, partly out of curiosity and partly out of inefficiency,
+no doubt, into the low-lying vales, I have found them to be
+beautiful and interesting places, the hedgerows full of flower and
+leaf, the thickets musical with the voices of birds, the orchards
+loaded with fruit, the friendly homesteads rich with tranquil life
+and abounding in quiet friendly people; and then the very peaks
+themselves, past which my way occasionally conducts me, have a
+beautiful solemnity of pure outline and strong upliftedness, seen
+from below, which I think they tend to lose, seen from the summit;
+and if I have spoken of the quieter joys, it is--I can say this
+with perfect honesty--because I have been pleased with them, as a
+bird is pleased with the sunshine and the berries, and sings, not
+that the passers-by may admire his notes, but out of simple joy of
+heart; and, after all, it is enough justification, if a pilgrim or
+two have stopped upon their way to listen with a smile. That alone
+persuades me that one does no harm by speaking, even if there are
+other passers-by who say what a tiresome note it is, that they have
+heard it a hundred times before, and cannot think why the stupid
+bird does not vary his song. Personally, I would rather hear the
+yellow-hammer utter his sharp monotonous notes, with the dropping
+cadence at the end, than that he should try to imitate the
+nightingale.
+
+However, as I have said, I am quite willing to believe that the
+critics speak, or think they speak, in the interests of the public,
+and with a tender concern that the public should not be bored. And
+I will take my leave of them by saying, like Miss Flite, that I
+will ask them to accept a blessing, and that when I receive a
+judgment, I shall confer estates impartially.
+
+But my last word shall be to my readers, and I will beg of them not
+to be deceived either by experts or by critics; on the one hand,
+not to be frightened away from speculating and reflecting about the
+possible meanings of life by the people who say that no one under
+the degree of a Bachelor of Divinity has any right to tackle the
+matter; and, on the other hand, I would implore them to believe
+that a quiet life is not necessarily a dull life, and that the
+cutting off of alcohol does not necessarily mean a lowering of
+physical vitality; but rather that if they will abstain for a
+little from dependence upon excitement, they will find their lives
+flooded by a new kind of quality, which heightens perception and
+increases joy. Of course souls will ache and ail, and we have to
+bear the burden of our ancestors' weaknesses as well as the burden
+of our own; but just as, in the physical region, diet and exercise
+and regularity can effect more cures than the strongest medicines,
+so, in the life of the spirit, self-restraint and deliberate
+limitation and tranquil patience will often lead into a vigorous
+and effective channel the stream that, left to itself, welters and
+wanders among shapeless pools and melancholy marshes.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+FRIENDSHIP
+
+
+
+
+
+To make oneself beloved, says an old French proverb, this is, after
+all, the best way to be useful. That is one of the deep sayings
+which children think flat, and which young men, and even young
+women, despise; and which a middle-aged man hears with a certain
+troubled surprise, and wonders if there is not something in it
+after all; and which old people discover to be true, and think with
+a sad regret of opportunities missed, and of years devoted, how
+unprofitably, to other kinds of usefulness! The truth is that most
+of us who have any ambitions at all, do not start in life with a
+hope of being useful, but rather with an intention of being
+ornamental. We think, like joseph in his childish dreams, that the
+sun and moon and the eleven stars, to say nothing of the sheaves,
+are going to make obeisance to us. We want to be impressive, rich,
+beautiful, influential, admired, envied; and then, as we move
+forward, the visions fade. We have to be content if, in a quiet
+corner, a single sheaf gives us a nod of recognition; and as for
+the eleven stars, they seem unaware of our very existence! And then
+we make further discoveries; that when we have seemed to ourselves
+most impressive, we have only been pretentious; that riches are
+only a talisman against poverty, and even make suffering and pain
+and grief more unendurable; that beauty fades into stolidity or
+weariness; that influence comes mostly to people who do not pursue
+it, and that the best kind of influence belongs to those who do not
+even know that they possess it; that admiration is but a brilliant
+husk, which may or may not contain a wholesome kernel; and as for
+envy, there is poison in that cup! And then we become aware that
+the best crowns have fallen to those who have not sought them, and
+that simple-minded and unselfish people have won the prize which
+has been denied to brilliance and ambition.
+
+That is the process which is often called disillusionment; and it
+is a sad enough business for people who only look at one side of
+the medal, and who brood over the fact that they have been
+disappointed and have failed. For such as these, there follow the
+faded years of cynicism and dreariness. But that disillusionment,
+that humiliation, are the freshest and most beautiful things in the
+world, for people who have real generosity of spirit, and whose
+vanity has been of a superficial kind; because they thus realise
+that these great gifts are real and true things, but that they must
+be deserved and not captured; and then perhaps such people begin
+their life-work afresh, in a humble and hopeful spirit; and if it
+be too late for them to do what they might have once done, they do
+not waste time in futile regret, but are grateful for ever so
+little love and tenderness. After all, they have lived, they have
+learnt by experience; and it does not yet appear what we shall be.
+Somewhere, far hence--who knows?--we shall make a better start.
+
+Some philosophers have devoted time and thought to tracing
+backwards all our emotions to their primal origin; and it is
+undoubtedly true that in the intensest and most passionate
+relationships of life--the love of a man for a woman, or a mother
+for a child--there is a large admixture of something physical,
+instinctive, and primal. But the fact also remains that there are
+unnumbered relationships between all sorts of apparently
+incongruous persons, of which the basis is not physical desire, or
+the protective instinct, and is not built up upon any hope of gain
+or profit whatsoever. All sorts of qualities may lend a hand to
+strengthen and increase and confirm these bonds; but what lies at
+the base of all is simply a sort of vital congeniality. The friend
+is the person whom one is in need of, and by whom one is needed.
+Life is a sweeter, stronger, fuller, more gracious thing for the
+friend's existence, whether he be near or far: if the friend is
+close at hand, that is best; but if he is far away, he is still
+there, to think of, to wonder about, to hear from, to write to, to
+share life and experience with, to serve, to honour, to admire, to
+love. But again it is a mistake to think that one makes a friend
+because of his or her qualities; it has nothing to do with
+qualities at all. If the friend has noble qualities, we admire them
+because they are his; if he has obviously bad and even noxious
+faults, how readily we condone them or overlook them! It is the
+person that we want, not what he does or says, or does not do or
+say, but what he is: that is eternally enough.
+
+Of course, it does sometimes happen that we think we have made a
+friend, and on closer acquaintance we find things in him that are
+alien to our very being; but even so, such a friendship often
+survives, if we have given our heart, or if affection has been
+bestowed upon us--affection which we cannot doubt. Some of the
+richest friendships of all are friendships between people whose
+whole view of life is sharply contrasted; and then what blessed
+energy can be employed in defending one's friend, in explaining him
+to other people, in minimising faults, in emphasising virtues!
+"While the thunder lasted," says the old Indian proverb, "two bad
+men were friends." That means that a common danger will sometimes
+draw even malevolent people together. But, for most of us, the only
+essential thing to friendship is a kind of mutual trust and
+confidence. It does not even shake our faith to know that our
+friend may play other people false: we feel by a kind of secret
+instinct that he will not play us false; and even if it be proved
+incontestably that he has played us false, why, we believe that he
+will not do so again, and we have all the pleasure of forgiveness.
+
+Who shall explain the extraordinary instinct that tells us, perhaps
+after a single meeting, that this or that particular person in some
+mysterious way matters to us? The person in question may have no
+attractive gifts of intellect or manner or personal appearance; but
+there is some strange bond between us; we seem to have shared
+experience together, somehow and somewhere; he is interesting,
+whether he speaks or is silent, whether he agrees or disagrees. We
+feel that in some secret region he is congenial. Est mihi nescio
+quid quod me tibi temperat astrum, says the old Latin poet--"There
+is something, I know not what, which yokes our fortunes, yours and
+mine." Sometimes indeed we are mistaken, and the momentary nearness
+fades and grows cold. But it is not often so. That peculiar motion
+of the heart, that secret joining of hands, is based upon something
+deep and vital, some spiritual kinship, some subtle likeness.
+
+Of course, we differ vastly in our power of attracting and feeling
+attraction. I confess that, for myself, I never enter a new company
+without the hope that I may discover a friend, perhaps THE friend,
+sitting there with an expectant smile. That hope survives a
+thousand disappointments; yet most of us tend to make fewer friends
+as time goes on, partly because we have not so much emotional
+activity to spare, partly because we become more cautious and
+discreet; and partly, too, because we become more aware of the
+responsibilities which lie in the background of a friendship, and
+because we tend to be more shy of responsibility. Some of us become
+less romantic and more comfortable; some of us become more
+diffident about what we have to give in return; some of us begin to
+feel that we cannot take up new ideas--none of them very good
+reasons perhaps; but still, for whatever reason, we make friends
+less easily. The main reason probably is that we acquire a point of
+view, and it is easier to keep to that, and fit people in who
+accommodate themselves to it, than to modify the point of view with
+reference to the new personalities. People who deal with life
+generously and large-heartedly go on multiplying relationships to
+the end.
+
+Of course, as I have said, there are infinite grades of friendship,
+beginning with the friendship which is a mere camaraderie arising
+out of habit and proximity; and every one ought to be capable of
+forming this last relationship. The modest man, said Stevenson,
+finds his friendships ready-made; by which he meant that if one is
+generous, tolerant, and ungrudging, then, instead of thinking the
+circle in which one lives inadequate, confined, and unsympathetic,
+one gets the best out of it, and sees the lovable side of ordinary
+human beings. Such friendships as these can evoke perhaps the best
+and simplest kind of loyalty. It is said that in countries where
+oxen are used for ploughing in double harness, there are touching
+instances of an ox pining away, and even dying, if he loses his
+accustomed yoke-fellow. There are such human friendships, sometimes
+formed on a blood relationship, such as the friendship of a brother
+and a sister; and sometimes a marriage transforms itself into this
+kind of camaraderie, and is a very blessed, quiet, beautiful thing.
+
+And then there are infinite gradations, such as the friendships of
+old and young, pupils and masters, parents and children, nurses and
+nurslings, employers and servants, all of them in a way unequal
+friendships, but capable of evoking the deepest and purest kinds of
+devotion: such famous friendships have been Carlyle's devotion to
+his parents, Boswell's to Johnson, Stanley's to Arnold; till at
+last one comes to the typical and essential thing known specially
+as friendship--the passionate, devoted, equal bond which exists
+between two people of the same age and sex; many of which
+friendships are formed at school and college, and which often fade
+away in a sort of cordial glow, implying no particular communion of
+life and thought. Marriage is often the great divorcer of such
+friendships, and circumstances generally, which sever and estrange;
+because, unless there is a constant interchange of thought and
+ideas, increasing age tends to emphasise differences. But there are
+instances of men, like Newman and FitzGerald, who kept up a sort of
+romantic quality of friendship to the end.
+
+I remember the daughter of an old clergyman of my acquaintance
+telling me a pathetic and yet typical story of the end of one of
+these friendships. Her father and another elderly clergyman had
+been devoted friends in boyhood and youth. Circumstances led to a
+suspension of intercourse, but at last, after a gap of nearly
+thirty years, during which the friends had not met, it was arranged
+that the old comrade should come and stay at the vicarage. As the
+time approached, her father grew visibly anxious, and coupled his
+frequent expression of the exquisite pleasure which the visit was
+going to bring him with elaborate arrangements as to which of his
+family should be responsible for the entertainment of the old
+comrade at every hour of the day: the daughters were to lead him
+out walking in the morning, his wife was to take him out drives in
+the afternoon, and he was to share the smoking-room with a son, who
+was at home, in the evenings--the one object being that the old
+gentleman should not have to interrupt his own routine, or bear the
+burden of entertaining a guest; and he eventually contrived only to
+meet him at meals, when the two old friends did not appear to have
+anything particular to say to each other. When the visit was over,
+her father used to allude to his guest with a half-compassionate
+air: "Poor Harry, he has aged terribly--I never saw a man so
+changed, with such a limited range of interests; dear fellow, he
+has quite lost his old humour. Well, well! it was a great pleasure
+to see him here. He was very anxious that we should go to stay with
+him, but I am afraid that will be rather difficult to manage; one
+is so much at a loose end in a strange house, and then one's
+correspondence gets into arrears. Poor old Harry! What a lively
+creature he was up at Trinity, to be sure!" Thus with a sigh dust
+is committed to dust.
+
+"What passions our friendships were!" said Thackeray to FitzGerald,
+speaking of University days. There is a shadow of melancholy in the
+saying, because it implies that for Thackeray at all events that
+kind of glow had faded out of life. Perhaps--who knows?--he had
+accustomed himself, with those luminous, observant, humorous eyes,
+to look too deep into the heart of man, to study too closely and
+too laughingly the seamy side, the strange contrast between man's
+hopes and his performances, his dreams and his deeds. Ought one to
+be ashamed if that kind of generous enthusiasm, that intensity of
+admiration, that vividness of sympathy die out of one's heart? Is
+it possible to keep alive the warmth, the colour of youth,
+suffusing all the objects near it with a lively and rosy glow? Some
+few people seem to find it possible, and can add to it a kind of
+rich tolerance, a lavish affectionateness, which pierces even
+deeper, and sees even more clearly, than the old partial
+idealisation. Such a large-hearted affection is found as a rule
+most often in people whose lives have brought them into intimate
+connection with their fellow-creatures--in priests, doctors,
+teachers, who see others not in their guarded and superficial
+moments, but in hours of sharp and poignant emotion. In many cases
+the bounds of sympathy narrow themselves into the family and the
+home--because there only are men brought into an intimate
+connection with human emotion; because to many people, and to the
+Anglo-Saxon race in particular, emotional situations are a strain,
+and only professional duty, which is a strongly rooted instinct in
+the Anglo-Saxon temperament, keeps the emotional muscles agile and
+responsive.
+
+Another thing which tends to extinguish friendships is that many of
+the people who desire to form them, and who do form them, wish to
+have the pleasures of friendship without the responsibilities. In
+the self-abandonment of friendship we become aware of qualities and
+strains in the friend which we do not wholly like. One of the most
+difficult things to tolerate in a friend are faults which are
+similar without being quite the same. A common quality, for
+instance, in the Anglo-Saxon race, is a touch of vulgarity, which
+is indeed the quality that makes them practically successful. A
+great many Anglo-Saxon people have a certain snobbishness, to give
+it a hard name; it is probably the poison of the feudal system
+lurking in our veins. We admire success unduly; we like to be
+respected, to have a definite label, to know the right people.
+
+I remember once seeing a friendship of a rather promising kind
+forming between two people, one of whom had a touch of what I may
+call "county" vulgarity, by which I mean an undue recognition of
+"the glories of our birth and state." It was a deep-seated fault,
+and emerged in a form which is not uncommon among people of that
+type--namely, a tendency to make friends with people of rank,
+coupled with a constant desire to detect snobbishness in other
+people. There is no surer sign of innate vulgarity than that; it
+proceeds, as a rule, from a dim consciousness of the fault,
+combined with the natural shame of a high-minded nature for being
+subject to it. In this particular case the man in question
+sincerely desired to resist the fault, but he could not avoid
+making himself slightly more deferential, and consequently slightly
+more agreeable, to persons of position. If he had not suffered from
+the fault, he would never have given the matter a thought at all.
+
+The other partner in the friendly enterprise had a touch of a
+different kind of snobbishness--the middle-class professional
+snobbishness, which pays an undue regard to success, and gravitates
+to effective and distinguished people. As the friendship matured,
+each became unpleasantly conscious of the other's defect, while
+remaining unconscious of his own. The result was a perpetual little
+friction on the point. If both could have been perfectly sincere,
+and could have confessed their weakness frankly, no harm would have
+been done. But each was so sincerely anxious to present an
+unblemished soul to the other's view, that they could not arrive at
+an understanding on the point; each desired to appear more
+disinterested than he was; and so, after coming together to a
+certain extent--both were fine natures--the presence of grit in the
+machinery made itself gradually felt, and the friendship melted
+away. It was a case of each desiring the unalloyed pleasure of an
+admiring friendship, without accepting the responsibility of
+discovering that the other was not perfection, and bearing that
+discovery loyally and generously. For this is the worst of a
+friendship that begins in idealisation rather than in comradeship;
+and this is the danger of all people who idealise. When two such
+come together and feel a mutual attraction, they display
+instinctively and unconsciously the best of themselves; but
+melancholy discoveries supervene; and then what generally happens
+is that the idealising friend is angry with the other for
+disappointing his hopes, not with himself for drawing an
+extravagant picture.
+
+Such friendships have a sort of emotional sensuality about them;
+and to be dismayed by later discoveries is to decline upon
+Rousseau's vice of handing in his babies to the Foundling Hospital,
+instead of trying to bring them up honestly; what lies at the base
+of it is the indolent shirking of the responsibilities for the
+natural consequences of friendship. The mistake arises from a kind
+of selfishness, the selfishness that thinks more of what it wants
+and desires to get, than of taking what there is soberly and
+gratefully.
+
+It is often said that it is the duty and privilege of a friend to
+warn his friend faithfully against his faults. I believe that this
+is a wholly mistaken principle. The essence of the situation is
+rather a cordial partnership, of which the basis is liberty. What I
+mean by liberty is not a freedom from responsibility, but an
+absence of obligation. I do not, of course, mean that one is to
+take all one can get and give as little as one likes, but rather
+that one must respect one's friend enough--and that is implied in
+the establishment of the relation--to abstain from directing him,
+unless he desires and asks for direction. The telling of faults may
+be safely left to hostile critics, and to what Sheridan calls
+"damned good-natured" acquaintances. But the friend must take for
+granted that his friend desires, in a general way, what is good and
+true, even though he may pursue it on different lines. One's duty
+is to encourage and believe in one's friend, not to disapprove of
+and to censure him. One loves him for what he is, not for what he
+might be if he would only take one's advice. The point is that it
+must be all a free gift, not a mutual improvement society--unless
+indeed that is the basis of the compact. After all, a man can only
+feel responsible to God. One goes astray, no doubt, like a sheep
+that is lost; but it is not the duty of another sheep to butt one
+back into the right way, unless indeed one appeals for help. One
+may have pastors and directors, but they can never be equal
+friends. If there is to be superiority in friendship, the lesser
+must willingly crown the greater; the greater must not ask to be
+crowned. The secure friendship is that which begins in comradeship,
+and moves into a more generous and emotional region. Then there is
+no need to demand or to question loyalty, because the tie has been
+welded by many a simple deed, many a frank word. The ideal is a
+perfect frankness and sincerity, which lays bare the soul as it is,
+without any false shame or any fear of misunderstanding. A
+friendship of this kind can be one of the purest, brightest, and
+strongest things in the world. Yet how rare it is! What far oftener
+happens is that two people, in a sensitive and emotional mood, are
+brought together. They begin by comparing experiences, they search
+their memories for beautiful and suggestive things, and each feels,
+"This nature is the true complement of my own; what light it seems
+to shed on my own problems; how subtle, how appreciative it is!"
+Then the process of discovery begins. Instead of the fair distant
+city, all spires and towers, which we discerned in the distance in
+a sort of glory, we find that there are crooked lanes, muddy
+crossings, dull market-places, tiresome houses. Odd misshapen
+figures, fretful and wearied, plod through the streets or look out
+at windows; here is a ruin, with doleful creatures moping in the
+shade; we overturn a stone, and blind uncanny things writhe away
+from the light. We begin to reflect that it is after all much like
+other places, and that our fine romantic view of it was due to some
+accident of light and colour, some transfiguring mood of our own
+mind; and then we set out in search of another city which we see
+crowning a hill on the horizon, and leave the dull place to its own
+commonplace life. But to begin with comradeship is to explore the
+streets and lanes first; and then day by day, as we go up and down
+in the town, we become aware of its picturesqueness and its charm;
+we realise that it has an intense and eager life of its own, which
+we can share as a dweller, though we cannot touch it as a visitor;
+and so the wonder grows, and the patient love of home. And we have
+surprises, too: we enter a door in a wall that we have not seen
+before, and we are in a shrine full of fragrant incense-smoke; the
+fallen day comes richly through stained windows; figures move at
+the altar, where some holy rite is being celebrated. The truth is
+that a friendship cannot be formed in the spirit of a tourist, who
+is above all in search of the romantic and the picturesque.
+Sometimes, indeed, the wandering traveller may become the patient
+and contented inhabitant; but it is generally the other way, and
+the best friendships are most often those that seem at first sight
+dully made for us by habit and proximity, and which reveal to us by
+slow degrees their beauty and their worth.
+
+
+         *        *        *        *        *        *
+
+
+Thus far had I written, when it came into my mind that I should
+like to see the reflection of my beliefs in some other mind, to
+submit them to the test of what I may perhaps be forgiven for
+calling a spirit-level! And so I read my essay to two wise, kindly,
+and gracious ladies, who have themselves often indeed graduated in
+friendship, and taken the highest honours. I will say nothing of
+the tender courtesy with which they made their head-breaking balms
+precious; I told them that I had not finished my essay, and that
+before I launched upon my last antistrophe, I wanted inspiration. I
+cannot here put down the phrases they used, but I felt that they
+spoke in symbols, like two initiated persons, for whom the corn and
+the wine and the oil of the sacrifice stand for very secret and
+beautiful mysteries; but they said in effect that I had been
+depicting, and not untruly, the outer courts and corridors of
+friendship. What they told me of the inner shrine I shall presently
+describe; but when I asked them to say whether they could tell me
+instances of the best and highest kind of friendship, existing and
+increasing and perfecting itself between two men, or between a man
+and a woman, not lovers or wedded, they found a great difficulty in
+doing so. We sifted our common experiences of friendships, and we
+could find but one or two such, and these had somewhat lost their
+bloom. It came then to this: that in the emotional region, many
+women, but very few men, can form the highest kind of tie; and we
+agreed that men tended to find what they needed in marriage,
+because they were rather interested in than dependent upon personal
+emotion, and because practical life, as the years went on--the life
+of causes, and movements, and organisations, and ideas, and
+investigations--tended to absorb the energies of men; and that they
+found their emotional life in home ties; and that the man who lived
+for emotional relations would tend to be thought, if not to be, a
+sentimentalist; but that the real secret lay with women, and with
+men of perhaps a feminine fibre. And all this was transfused by a
+kind of tender pity, without any touch of complacency or
+superiority, such as a mother might have for the whispered hopes of
+a child who is lost in tiny material dreams. But I gathered that
+there was a region in which the heart could be entirely absorbed in
+a deep and beautiful admiration for some other soul, and rejoice
+whole-heartedly in its nobleness and greatness; so that no
+question of gaining anything, or even of being helped to anything,
+came in, any more than one who has long been pent in shadow and
+gloom and illness, and comes out for the first time into the sun,
+thinks of any benefits that he may receive from the caressing
+sunlight; he merely knows that it is joy and happiness and life to
+be there, and to feel the warm light comfort him and make him glad;
+and all this I had no difficulty in understanding, for I knew the
+emotion that they spoke of, though I called it by a different name.
+I saw that it was love indeed, but love infinitely purified, and
+with all the sense of possession that mingles with masculine love
+subtracted from it; and how such a relation might grow and
+increase, until there arose a sort of secret and vital union of
+spirit, more real indeed than time and space, so that, even if this
+were divorced and sundered by absence, or the clouded mind, or
+death itself, there could be no shadow of doubt as to the
+permanence of the tie; and a glance passed between the two as they
+spoke, which made me feel like one who hears an organ rolling, and
+voices rising in sweet harmonies inside some building, locked and
+barred, which he may not enter. I could not doubt that the music
+was there, while I knew that for some dulness or belatedness I was
+myself shut out; not, indeed, that I doubted of the truth of what
+was said, but I was in the position of the old saint who said that
+he believed, and prayed to One to help his unbelief. For I saw that
+though I projected the lines of my own experience infinitely,
+adding loyalty to loyalty, and admiration to admiration, it was all
+on a different plane. This interfusion of personality, this vital
+union of soul, I could not doubt it! but it made me feel my own
+essential isolation still more deeply, as when the streaming
+sunlight strikes warmth and glow out of the fire, revealing
+crumbling ashes where a moment before had been a heart of flame.
+
+
+     "Ah te meae si partem animae rapit
+      Maturior vis, quid moror altera?"--
+
+
+"Ah, if the violence of fate snatch thee from me, thou half of my
+soul, how can I, the other half, still linger here?" So wrote the
+old cynical, worldly, Latin poet of his friend--that poet whom, for
+all his deftness and grace, we are apt to accuse of a certain
+mundane heartlessness, though once or twice there flickers up a
+sharp flame from the comfortable warmth of the pile. Had he the
+secret hidden in his heart all the time? If one could dream of a
+nearness like that, which doubts nothing, and questions nothing,
+but which teaches the soul to move in as unconscious a unison with
+another soul as one's two eyes move, so that the brain cannot
+distinguish between the impressions of each, would not that be
+worth the loss of all that we hold most sweet? We pay a price for
+our qualities; the thistle cannot become the vine, or the oak the
+rose, by admiration or desire. But we need not doubt of the divine
+alchemy that gives good gifts to others, and denies them to
+ourselves. And thus I can gratefully own that there are indeed
+these high mysteries of friendship, and I can be glad to discern
+them afar off, as the dweller on the high moorland, in the wind-
+swept farm, can see, far away in the woodland valley, the smoke go
+up from happy cottage-chimneys, nestled in leaves, and the spire
+point a hopeful finger up to heaven. Life would be a poorer thing
+if we had all that we desired, and it is permitted to hope that if
+we are faithful with our few things, we may be made rulers over
+many things!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+HUMOUR
+
+
+
+
+
+There is a pleasant story of a Cambridge undergraduate finding it
+necessary to expound the four allegorical figures that crown the
+parapet of Trinity Library. They are the Learned Muses, as a matter
+of fact. "What are those figures, Jack?" said an ardent sister,
+labouring under the false feminine impression that men like
+explaining things. "Those," said Jack, observing them for the first
+time in his life--"those are Faith, Hope, and Charity, of course."
+"Oh! but there are FOUR of them," said the irrepressible fair one.
+"What is the other?" Jack, not to be dismayed, gave a hasty glance;
+and, observing what may be called philosophical instruments in the
+hands of the statue, said firmly, "that is Geography." It made a
+charming quaternion.
+
+I have often felt myself that the time has come to raise another
+figure to the hierarchy of Christian Graces. Faith, Hope, and
+Charity, were sufficient in a more elementary and barbarous age;
+but, now that the world has broadened somewhat, I think an addition
+to the trio is demanded. A man may be faithful, hopeful, and
+charitable, and yet leave much to be desired. He may be useful, no
+doubt, with that equipment, but he may also be both tiresome, and
+even absurd. The fourth quality that I should like to see raised to
+the highest rank among Christian graces is the Grace of Humour.
+
+I do not think that Humour has ever enjoyed its due repute in the
+ethical scale. The possession of it saves a man from priggishness;
+and the possession of faith, hope, and charity does not. Indeed,
+not only do these three virtues not save a man from priggishness--
+they sometimes even plunge him in irreclaimable depths of
+superiority. I suppose that when Christianity was first making
+itself felt in the world, the one quality needful was a deep-
+seated and enthusiastic earnestness. There is nothing that makes
+life so enjoyable as being in earnest. It is not the light,
+laughter-loving, jocose people who have the best time in the world.
+They have a chequered career. They skip at times upon the hills of
+merriment, but they also descend gloomily at other times into the
+valleys of dreariness. But the man who is in earnest is generally
+neither merry nor dreary. He has not time to be either. The early
+Christians, engaged in leavening the world, had no time for levity
+or listlessness. A pioneer cannot be humorous. But now that the
+world is leavened and Christian principles are theoretically, if
+not practically, taken for granted, a new range of qualities comes
+in sight. By humour I do not mean a taste for irresponsible
+merriment; for though humour is not a necessarily melancholy thing,
+in this imperfect world the humorist sighs as often as he smiles.
+What I mean by it is a keen perception of the rich incongruities
+and absurdities of life, its undue solemnity, its guileless
+pretentiousness. To be true humour, it must not be at all a cynical
+thing--as soon as it becomes cynical, it loses all its natural
+grace; it is an essentially tender-hearted quality, apt to find
+excuse, ready to condone, eager to forgive. The possessor of it can
+never be ridiculous, or heavy, or superior. Wit, of course, is a
+very small province of humour: wit is to humour what lightning is
+to the electric fluid--a vivid, bright, crackling symptom of it in
+certain conditions; but a man may be deeply and essentially
+humorous, and never say a witty thing in his life. To be witty, one
+has to be fanciful, intellectual, deft, light-hearted; and the
+humorist need be none of these things.
+
+In religion, the absence of a due sense of humour has been the
+cause of some of our worst disasters. All rational people know that
+what has done most to depress and discount religion is
+ecclesiasticism. The spirit of ecclesiasticism is the spirit that
+confuses proportions, that loves what is unimportant, that hides
+great principles under minute rules, that sacrifices simplicity to
+complexity, that adores dogma, and definition, and labels of every
+kind, that substitutes the letter for the spirit. The greatest
+misfortune that can befall religion is that it should become
+logical, that it should evolve a reasoned system from insufficient
+data; but humour abhors logic, and cannot pin its faith on insecure
+deductions. The heaviest burden which religion can have to bear is
+the burden of tradition, and humour is the determined foe of
+everything that is conventional and traditional. The Pharisaical
+spirit loves precedent and authority; the humorous spirit loves all
+that is swift and shifting and subversive and fresh. One of the
+reasons why the orthodox heaven is so depressing a place is that
+there seems to be no room in it for laughter; it is all harmony and
+meekness, sanctified by nothing but the gravest of smiles. What
+wonder that humanity is dejected at the thought of an existence
+from which all possibility of innocent absurdity and kindly mirth
+is subtracted--the only things which have persistently lightened
+and beguiled the earthly pilgrimage! That is why the death of a
+humorous person has so deep an added tinge of melancholy about it,
+because it is apt to seem indecorous to think of what was his most
+congenial and charming trait still finding scope for its exercise.
+We are never likely to be able to tolerate the thought of Death,
+while we continue to think of it as a thing which will rob humanity
+of some of its richest and most salient characteristics.
+
+Even the ghastly humour of Milton is a shade better than this. It
+will be remembered that he makes the archangel say to Adam that
+astronomy has been made by the Creator a complicated subject, in
+order that the bewilderment of scientific men may be a matter of
+entertainment to Him!
+
+
+               "He His fabric of the Heavens
+     Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move
+     His laughter at their quaint opinions wide."
+
+
+Or, again, we may remember the harsh contortions of dry
+cachinnation indulged in by the rebel spirits, when they have
+succeeded in toppling over with their artillery the armed hosts of
+Seraphim. Milton certainly did not intend to subtract all humour
+from the celestial regions. The only pity was that he had not
+himself emerged beyond the childish stage, which finds its deepest
+amusement in the disasters and catastrophes of stately persons.
+
+It may be asked whether we have any warrant in the Gospel for the
+Christian exercise of humour. I have no doubt of it myself. The
+image of the children in the market-place who cannot get their
+peevish companions to join in games, whether merry or mournful, as
+illustrating the attitude of the Pharisees who blamed John the
+Baptist for asceticism and Christ for sociability, is a touch of
+real humour; and the story of the importunate widow with the unjust
+judge, who betrayed so naively his principle of judicial action by
+saying "Though I fear not God, neither regard men, yet will I
+avenge this widow, lest by her continual coming she weary me,"
+must--I cannot believe otherwise--have been intended to provoke the
+hearers' mirth. There is not, of course, any superabundance of such
+instances, but Christ's reporters were not likely to be on the
+look-out for sayings of this type. Yet I find it impossible to
+believe that One who touched all the stops of the human heart, and
+whose stories are among the most beautiful and vivid things ever
+said in the world, can have exercised His unequalled power over
+human nature without allowing His hearers to be charmed by many
+humorous and incisive touches, as well as by more poetical and
+emotional images. No one has ever swayed the human mind in so
+unique a fashion, without holding in his hand all the strings that
+move and stir the faculties of delighted apprehension; and of these
+faculties humour is one of the foremost. The amazing lightness of
+Christ's touch upon life, the way in which His words plumbed the
+depths of personality, make me feel abundantly sure that there was
+no dreary sense of overwhelming seriousness in His relations with
+His friends and disciples. Believing as we do that He was Perfect
+Man, we surely cannot conceive of one of the sweetest and most
+enlivening of all human qualities as being foreign to His
+character.
+
+Otherwise there is little trace of humour in the New Testament.
+St. Paul, one would think, would have had little sympathy with
+humorists. He was too fiery, too militant, too much preoccupied
+with the working out of his ideas, to have the leisure or the
+inclination to take stock of humanity. Indeed I have sometimes
+thought that if he had had some touch of the quality, he might have
+given a different bias to the faith; his application of the method
+which he had inherited from the Jewish school of theology, coupled
+with his own fervid rhetoric, was the first step, I have often
+thought, in disengaging the Christian development from the
+simplicity and emotion of the first unclouded message, in
+transferring the faith from the region of pure conduct and sweet
+tolerance into a province of fierce definition and intellectual
+interpretation.
+
+I think it was Goethe who said that Greek was the sheath into which
+the dagger of the human mind fitted best; and it is true that one
+finds among the Greeks the brightest efflorescence of the human
+mind. Who shall account for that extraordinary and fragrant flower,
+the flower of Greek culture, so perfect in curve and colour, in
+proportion and scent, opening so suddenly, in such a strange
+isolation, so long ago, upon the human stock? The Greeks had the
+wonderful combination of childish zest side by side with mature
+taste; charis, as they called it--a perfect charm, an instinctive
+grace--was the mark of their spirit. And we should naturally expect
+to find, in their literature, the same sublimation of humour that
+we find in their other qualities. Unfortunately the greater number
+of their comedies are lost. Of Menander we have but a few tiny
+fragments, as it were, of a delectable vase; but in Aristophanes
+there is a delicious levity, an incomparable prodigality of
+laughter-moving absurdities, which has possibly never been
+equalled. Side by side with that is the tender and charming irony
+of Plato, who is even more humorous, if less witty, than
+Aristophanes. But the Greeks seem to have been alone in their
+application of humour to literature. In the older world literature
+tended to be rather a serious, pensive, stately thing, concerned
+with human destiny and artistic beauty. One searches in vain for
+humour in the energetic and ardent Roman mind. Their very comedies
+were mostly adaptations from the Greek. I have never myself been
+able to discern the humour of Terence or Plautus to any great
+extent. The humour of the latter is of a brutal and harsh kind; and
+it has always been a marvel to me that Luther said that the two
+books he would take to be his companions on a desert island would
+be Plautus and the Bible. Horace and Martial have a certain deft
+appreciation of human weakness, but it is of the nature of
+smartness rather than of true humour--the wit of the satirist
+rather; and then the curtain falls on the older world. When humour
+next makes its appearance, in France and England pre-eminently, we
+realise that we are in the presence of a far larger and finer
+quality; and now we have, so to speak, whole bins full of liquors,
+of various brands and qualities, from the mirthful absurdities of
+the English, the pawky gravity of the Scotch, to the dry and
+sparkling beverage of the American. To give an historical sketch of
+the growth and development of modern Humour would be a task that
+might well claim the energies of some literary man; it seems to me
+surprising that some German philosopher has not attempted a
+scientific classification of the subject. It would perhaps be best
+done by a man without appreciation of humour, because only then
+could one hope to escape being at the mercy of preferences; it
+would have to be studied purely as a phenomenon, a symptom of the
+mind; and nothing but an overwhelming love of classification would
+carry a student past the sense of its unimportance. But here I
+would rather attempt not to find a formula or a definition for
+humour, but to discover what it is, like argon, by eliminating
+other characteristics, until the evasive quality alone remains.
+
+It lies deep in nature. The peevish mouth and the fallen eye of the
+plaice, the helpless rotundity of the sunfish, the mournful gape
+and rolling glance of the goldfish, the furious and ineffective
+mien of the barndoor fowl, the wild grotesqueness of the babyroussa
+and the wart-hog, the crafty solemn eye of the parrot,--if such
+things as these do not testify to a sense of humour in the Creative
+Spirit, it is hard to account for the fact that in man a perception
+is implanted which should find such sights pleasurably entertaining
+from infancy upwards. I suppose the root of the matter is that,
+insensibly comparing these facial attributes with the expression of
+humanity, one credits the animals above described with the emotions
+which they do not necessarily feel; yet even so it is hard to
+analyse, because grotesque exaggerations of human features, which
+are perfectly normal and natural, seem calculated to move the
+amusement of humanity quite instinctively. A child is apt to be
+alarmed at first by what is grotesque, and, when once reassured, to
+find in it a matter of delight. Perhaps the mistake we make is to
+credit the Creative Spirit with human emotions; but, on the other
+hand, it is difficult to see how complex emotions, not connected
+with any material needs and impulses, can be found existing in
+organisms, unless the same emotions exist in the mind of their
+Creator. If the thrush bursts into song on the bare bush at
+evening, if the child smiles to see the bulging hairy cactus, there
+must be, I think, something joyful and smiling at the heart, the
+inmost cell of nature, loving beauty and laughter; indeed, beauty
+and mirth must be the natural signs of health and content. And then
+there strike in upon the mind two thoughts. Is, perhaps, the basis
+of humour a kind of selfish security? Does one primarily laugh at
+all that is odd, grotesque, broken, ill at ease, fantastic, because
+such things heighten the sense of one's own health and security? I
+do not mean that this is the flower of modern humour; but is it
+not, perhaps, the root? Is not the basis of laughter perhaps the
+purely childish and selfish impulse to delight, not in the
+sufferings of others, but in the sense which all distorted things
+minister to one--that one is temporarily, at least, more blest than
+they? A child does not laugh for pure happiness--when it is
+happiest, it is most grave and solemn; but when the sense of its
+health and soundness is brought home to it poignantly, then it
+laughs aloud, just as it laughs at the pleasant pain of being
+tickled, because the tiny uneasiness throws into relief its sense
+of secure well-being.
+
+And the further thought--a deep and strange one--is this: We see
+how all mortal things have a certain curve or cycle of life--youth,
+maturity, age. May not that law of being run deeper still? we think
+of nature being ever strong, ever young, ever joyful; but may not
+the very shadow of sorrow and suffering in the world be the sign
+that nature too grows old and weary? May there have been a dim age,
+far back beyond history or fable or scientific record, when she,
+too, was young and light-hearted? The sorrows of the world are at
+present not like the sorrows of age, but the sorrows of maturity.
+There is no decrepitude in the world: its heart is restless, vivid,
+and hopeful yet; its melancholy is as the melancholy of youth--a
+melancholy deeply tinged with beauty; it is full of boundless
+visions and eager dreams; though it is thwarted, it believes in its
+ultimate triumph; and the growth of humour in the world may be just
+the shadow of hard fact falling upon the generous vision, for that
+is where humour resides; youth believes glowingly that all things
+are possible, but maturity sees that to hope is not to execute, and
+acquiesces smilingly in the incongruity between the programme and
+the performance.
+
+Humour resides in the perception of limitation, in discerning how
+often the conventional principle is belied by the actual practice.
+The old world was full of a youthful sense of its own importance;
+it held that all things were created for man--that the flower was
+designed to yield him colour and fragrance, that the beast of the
+earth was made to give him food and sport. This philosophy was
+summed up in the phrase that man was the measure of all things; but
+now we have learnt that man is but the most elaborate of created
+organisms, and that just as there was a time when man did not
+exist, so there may be a time to come when beings infinitely more
+elaborate may look back to man as we look back to trilobites--those
+strange creatures, like huge wood-lice, that were in their day the
+glory and crown of creation. Perhaps our dreams of supremacy and
+finality may be in reality the absurdest things in the world for
+their pomposity and pretentiousness. Who can say?
+
+But to retrace our steps awhile. It seems that the essence of
+humour is a certain perception of incongruity. Let us take a single
+instance. There is a story of a drunken man who was observed to
+feel his way several times all round the railings of a London
+square, with the intention apparently of finding some way of
+getting in. At last he sat down, covered his face with his hands,
+and burst into tears, saying, with deep pathos, "I am shut in!" In
+a sense it was true: if the rest of the world was his prison, and
+the garden of the square represented liberty, he was undoubtedly
+incarcerated. Or, again, take the story of the Scotchman returning
+from a convivial occasion, who had jumped carefully over the
+shadows of the lamp-posts, but on coming to the shadow of the
+church-tower, ruefully took off his boots and stockings, and turned
+his trousers up, saying, "I'll ha'e to wade." The reason why the
+stories of drunken persons are often so indescribably humorous,
+though, no doubt, highly deplorable in a Christian country, is that
+the victim loses all sense of probability and proportion, and
+laments unduly over an altogether imaginary difficulty. The
+appreciation of such situations is in reality the same as the
+common and barbarous form of humour, of which we have already
+spoken, which consists in being amused at the disasters which
+befall others. The stage that is but slightly removed from the
+lowest stage is the theory of practical jokes, the humour of which
+is the pleasure of observing the actions of a person in a
+disagreeable predicament which is not so serious as the victim
+supposes. And thus we get to the region illustrated by the two
+stories I have told, where the humour lies in the observation of
+one in a predicament that appears to be of a tragic character, when
+the tragic element is purely imaginary. And so we pass into the
+region of intellectual humour, which may be roughly illustrated by
+such sayings as that of George Sand that nothing is such a
+restorative as rhetoric, or the claim advanced by a patriot that
+Shakespeare was undoubtedly a Scotchman, on the ground that his
+talents would justify the supposition. The humour of George Sand's
+epigram depends upon the perception that rhetoric, which ought to
+be based upon a profound conviction, an overwhelming passion, an
+intense enthusiasm, is often little more than the abandonment of a
+personality to a mood of intoxicating ebullience; while the humour
+of the Shakespeare story lies in a sense of the way in which a
+national predilection will override all reasonable evidence.
+
+It will be recognised how much of our humour depends upon our keen
+perception of the weaknesses and imperfections of other
+nationalities. A great statesman once said that if a Scotchman
+applied for a post and was unsuccessful, his one object became to
+secure the post for another Scotchman; while if an Irishman made an
+unsuccessful application, his only aim was to prevent any other
+Irishman from obtaining the post. That is a humorous way of
+contrasting the jealous patriotism of the Scot with the passionate
+individualism of the Celt. The curious factor of this species of
+humour is that we are entirely unable to recognise the typicality
+of the caricatures which other nations draw of ourselves. A German
+fails to recognise the English idea of the German as a man who,
+after a meal of gigantic proportions and incredible potations,
+among the smoke of endless cigars, will discuss the terminology of
+the absolute, and burst into tears over a verse of poetry or a
+strain of music. Similarly the Englishman cannot divine what is
+meant by the Englishman of the French stage, with his long
+whiskers, his stiff pepper-and-salt clothes, walking arm-in-arm
+with a raw-boned wife, short-skirted and long-toothed, with a bevy
+of short-skirted and long-toothed daughters walking behind.
+
+But if it requires a robust humorist to perceive the absurdity of
+his own nation, what intensity of humour is required for a man to
+see the absurdity of himself! To acquiesce in appearing ridiculous
+is the height of philosophy. We are glad enough to amuse other
+people intentionally, but how many men does one know who do not
+resent amusing other people unintentionally? Yet if one were a true
+philanthropist, how delighted we ought to be to afford to others a
+constant feast of innocent and joyful contemplation.
+
+But the fact which emerges from all these considerations is the
+fact that we do not give humour its place of due dignity in the
+moral and emotional scale. The truth is that we in England have
+fallen into a certain groove of humour of late, the humour of
+paradox. The formula which lies at the base of our present output
+of humour is the formula, "Whatever is, is wrong." The method has
+been over-organised, and the result is that humour can be
+manufactured in unlimited quantities. The type of such humour is
+the saying of the humorist that he went about the world with one
+dread constantly hanging over him--"the dread of not being
+misunderstood." I would not for a moment deny the quality of such
+humour, but it grows vapid and monotonous. It is painful to observe
+the clever young man of the present day, instead of aiming at the
+expression of things beautiful and emotional, which he is often
+well equipped to produce, with all the charm of freshness and
+indiscretion, turn aside to smart writing of a cynical type,
+because he cannot bear to be thought immature. He wants to see the
+effect of his cleverness, and the envious smile of the slower-
+witted is dearer to him than the secret kindling of a sympathetic
+mind. Real humour is a broader and a deeper thing, and it can
+hardly be attained until a man has had some acquaintance with the
+larger world; and that very experience, in natures that are
+emotional rather than patient, often tends to extinguish humour,
+because of the knowledge that life is really rather too sad and
+serious a business to afford amusement. The man who becomes a
+humorist is the man who contrives to retain a certain childlike
+zest and freshness of mind side by side with a large and tender
+tolerance. This state of mind is not one to be diligently sought
+after. The humorist nascitur non fit. One sees young men of
+irresponsible levity drawn into the interest of a cause or a
+profession, and we say sadly of them that they have lost their
+sense of humour. They are probably both happier and more useful for
+having lost it. The humorist is seldom an apostle or a leader. But
+one does occasionally find a man of real genius who adds to a deep
+and vital seriousness a delightful perception of the superficial
+absurdities of life; who is like a river, at once strong and silent
+beneath, with sunny ripples and bright water-breaks upon the
+surface. Most men must be content to flow turbid and sullen,
+turning the mills of life or bearing its barges; others may dash
+and flicker through existence, like a shallow stream. Perhaps,
+indeed, it may be said that to be a real humorist there must be a
+touch of hardness somewhere, a bony carapace, because we seldom see
+one of very strong and ardent emotions who is a true humorist; and
+this is, I suppose, the reason why women, as a rule, are so far
+less humorous than men. We have to pay a price for our good
+qualities; and though I had rather be strong, affectionate, loyal,
+noble-minded, than be the best humorist in the world, yet if a gift
+of humour be added to these graces, you have a combination that is
+absolutely irresistible, because you have a perfect sense of
+proportion that never allows emotion to degenerate into gush, or
+virtue into rigidity; and thus I say that humour is a kind of
+divine and crowning grace in a character, because it means an
+artistic sense of proportion, a true and vital tolerance, a power
+of infinite forgiveness.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+TRAVEL
+
+
+
+
+
+There are many motives that impel us to travel, to change our sky,
+as Horace calls it--good motives and bad, selfish and unselfish,
+noble and ignoble. With some people it is pure restlessness; the
+tedium of ordinary life weighs on them, and travel, they think,
+will distract them; people travel for the sake of health, or for
+business reasons, or to accompany some one else, or because other
+people travel. And these motives are neither good nor bad, they are
+simply sufficient. Some people travel to enlarge their minds, or to
+write a book; and the worst of travelling for such reasons is that
+it so often implants in the traveller, when he returns, a desperate
+desire to enlarge other people's minds too. Unhappily, it needs an
+extraordinary gift of vivid description and a tactful art of
+selection to make the reflections of one's travels interesting to
+other people. It is a great misfortune for biographers that there
+are abundance of people who are stirred, partly by unwonted leisure
+and partly by awakened interest, to keep a diary only when they are
+abroad. These extracts from diaries of foreign travel, which
+generally pour their muddy stream into a biography on the threshold
+of the hero's manhood, are things to be resolutely skipped. What
+one desires in a biography is to see the ordinary texture of a
+man's life, an account of his working days, his normal hours; and
+to most people the normal current of their lives appears so
+commonplace and uninteresting that they keep no record of it; while
+they often keep an elaborate record of their impressions of foreign
+travel, which are generally superficial and picturesque, and
+remarkably like the impressions of all other intelligent people. A
+friend of mine returned the other day from an American tour, and
+told me that he received a severe rebuke, out of the mouth of a
+babe, which cured him of expatiating on his experiences. He lunched
+with his brother soon after his return, and was holding forth with
+a consciousness of brilliant descriptive emphasis, when his eldest
+nephew, aged eight, towards the end of the meal, laid down his
+spoon and fork, and said piteously to his mother, "Mummy, I MUST
+talk; it does make me so tired to hear Uncle going on like that." A
+still more effective rebuke was administered by a clever lady of my
+acquaintance to a cousin of hers, a young lady who had just
+returned from India, and was very full of her experiences. The
+cousin had devoted herself during breakfast to giving a lively
+description of social life in India, and was preparing to spend the
+morning in continuing her lecture, when the elder lady slipped out
+of the room, and returned with some sermon-paper, a blotting-book,
+and a pen. "Maud," she said, "this is too good to be lost: you must
+write it all down, every word!" The projected manuscript did not
+come to very much, but the lesson was not thrown away.
+
+Perhaps, for most people, the best results of travel are that they
+return with a sense of grateful security to the familiar scene: the
+monotonous current of life has been enlivened, the old
+relationships have gained a new value, the old gossip is taken up
+with a comfortable zest; the old rooms are the best, after all; the
+homely language is better than the outlandish tongue; it is a
+comfort to have done with squeezing the sponge and cramming the
+trunk: it is good to be at home.
+
+But to people of more cultivated and intellectual tastes there is
+an abundance of good reasons for the pursuit of impressions. It is
+worth a little fatigue to see the spring sun lie softly upon the
+unfamiliar foliage, to see the delicate tints of the purple-
+flowered Judas-tree, the bright colours of Southern houses, the old
+high-shouldered chateau blinking among its wooded parterres; it is
+pleasant to see mysterious rites conducted at tabernacled altars,
+under dark arches, and to smell the "thick, strong, stupefying
+incense-smoke"; to see well-known pictures in their native
+setting, to hear the warm waves of the canal lapping on palace-
+stairs, with the exquisite moulded cornice overhead. It gives one a
+strange thrill to stand in places rich with dim associations, to
+stand by the tombs of heroes and saints, to see the scenes made
+familiar by art or history, the homes of famous men. Such travel is
+full of weariness and disappointment. The place one had desired
+half a lifetime to behold turns out to be much like other places,
+devoid of inspiration. A tiresome companion casts dreariness as
+from an inky cloud upon the mind. Do I not remember visiting the
+Palatine with a friend bursting with archaeological information, who
+led us from room to room, and identified all by means of a folding
+plan, to find at the conclusion that he had begun at the wrong end,
+and that even the central room was not identified correctly,
+because the number of rooms was even, and not odd?
+
+But, for all that, there come blessed unutterable moments, when the
+mood and the scene and the companion are all attuned in a soft
+harmony. Such moments come back to me as I write. I see the
+mouldering brickwork of a crumbling tomb all overgrown with grasses
+and snapdragons, far out in the Campagna; or feel the plunge of the
+boat through the reed-beds of the Anapo, as we slid into the silent
+pool of blue water in the heart of the marsh, where the sand danced
+at the bottom, and the springs bubbled up, while a great bittern
+flew booming away from a reedy pool hard by. Such things are worth
+paying a heavy price for, because they bring a sort of aerial
+distance into the mind, they touch the spirit with a hope that the
+desire for beauty and perfection is not, after all, wholly
+unrealisable, but that there is a sort of treasure to be found even
+upon earth, if one diligently goes in search of it.
+
+Of one thing, however, I am quite certain, and that is that travel
+should not be a feverish garnering of impressions, but a delicious
+and leisurely plunge into a different atmosphere. It is better to
+visit few places, and to become at home in each, than to race from
+place to place, guide-book in hand. A beautiful scene does not
+yield up its secrets to the eye of the collector. What one wants is
+not definite impressions but indefinite influences. It is of little
+use to enter a church, unless one tries to worship there, because
+the essence of the place is worship, and only through worship can
+the secret of the shrine be apprehended. It is of little use to
+survey a landscape, unless one has an overpowering desire to spend
+the remainder of one's days there; because it is the life of the
+place, and not the sight of it, in which one desires to have a
+part. Above all, one must not let one's memories sleep as in a
+dusty lumber-room of the mind. In a quiet firelit hour one must
+draw near, and scrutinise them afresh, and ask oneself what
+remains. As I write, I open the door of my treasury and look round.
+What comes up before me? I see an opalescent sky, and the great
+soft blue rollers of a sapphire sea. I am journeying, it seems, in
+no mortal boat, though it was a commonplace vessel enough at the
+time, twenty years ago, and singularly destitute of bodily
+provision. What is that over the sea's rim, where the tremulous,
+shifting, blue line of billows shimmers and fluctuates? A long, low
+promontory, and in the centre, over white clustered houses and
+masts of shipping, rises a white dome like the shrine of some
+celestial city. That is Cadiz for me. I dare say the picture is all
+wrong, and I shall be told that Cadiz has a tower and is full of
+factory chimneys; but for me the dome, ghostly white, rises as
+though moulded out of a single pearl, upon the shifting edges of
+the haze. Whatever I have seen in my life, that at least is
+immortal.
+
+Or again the scene shifts, and now I stumble to the deck of another
+little steamer, very insufficiently habited, in the sharp freshness
+of the dawn of a spring morning. The waves are different here--not
+the great steely league-long rollers of the Atlantic, but the sharp
+azure waves, marching in rhythmic order, of the Mediterranean; what
+is the land, with grassy downs and folded valleys falling to grey
+cliffs, upon which the brisk waves whiten and leap? That is Sicily;
+and the thought of Theocritus, with the shepherd-boy singing light-
+heartedly upon the headland a song of sweet days and little eager
+joys, comes into my heart like wine, and brings a sharp touch of
+tears into the eyes. Theocritus! How little I thought, as I read
+the ugly brown volume with its yellow paper, in the dusty
+schoolroom at Eton ten years before, that it was going to mean that
+to me, sweetly as even then, in a moment torn from the noisy tide
+of schoolboy life, came the pretty echoes of the song into a little
+fanciful and restless mind! But now, as I saw those deserted
+limestone crags, that endless sheep-wold, with no sign of a
+habitation, rising and falling far into the distance, with the
+fresh sea-breeze upon my cheek--there came upon me that tender
+sorrow for all the beautiful days that are dead, the days when the
+shepherds walked together, exulting in youth and warmth and good-
+fellowship and song, to the village festival, and met the wandering
+minstrel, with his coat of skin and his kind, ironical smile, who
+gave them, after their halting lays, a touch of the old true melody
+from a master's hand. What do all those old and sweet dreams mean
+for me, the sunlight that breaks on the stream of human souls,
+flowing all together, alike through dark rocks where the water
+chafes and thunders, and spreading out into tranquil shining
+reaches, where the herons stand half asleep? What does that strange
+drift of kindred spirits, moving from the unknown to the unknown,
+mean for me? I only know that it brings into my mind a strange
+yearning, and a desire of almost unearthly sweetness for all that
+is delicate and beautiful and full of charm, together with a sombre
+pity for the falling mist of tears, the hard discipline of the
+world, the cries of anguish, as life lapses from the steep into the
+silent tide of death.
+
+Or, again, I seem once more to sit in the balcony of a house that
+looks out towards Vesuvius. It is late; the sky is clouded, the air
+is still; a grateful coolness comes up from acre after acre of
+gardens climbing the steep slope; a fluttering breeze, that seems
+to have lost his way in the dusk, comes timidly and whimsically
+past, like Ariel, singing as soft as a far-off falling sea in the
+great pine overhead, making a little sudden flutter in the dry
+leaves of the thick creeper; like Ariel comes that dainty spirit of
+the air, laden with balmy scents and cool dew. A few lights twinkle
+in the plain below. Opposite, the sky has an added blackness, an
+impenetrability of shade; but what is the strange red eye of light
+that hangs between earth and heaven? And, stranger still, what is
+that phantasmal gleam of a lip of crags high in the air, and that
+mysterious, moving, shifting light, like a pale flame, above it?
+The gloomy spot is a rent in the side of Vesuvius where the
+smouldering heat has burnt through the crust, and where a day or
+two before I saw a viscid stream of molten liquor, with the flames
+playing over it, creeping, creeping through the tunnelled ashes;
+and in the light above is the lip of Vesuvius itself, with its
+restless furnace at work, casting up a billowy swell of white oily
+smoke, while the glare of the fiery pit lights up the underside of
+the rising vapours. A ghastly manifestation, that, of sleepless and
+stern forces, ever at work upon some eternal and bewildering task;
+and yet so strangely made am I, that these fierce signal-fires,
+seen afar, but blend with the scents of the musky alleys for me
+into a thrill of unutterable wonder.
+
+There are hundreds of such pictures stored in my mind, each stamped
+upon some sensitive particle of the brain, that cannot be
+obliterated, and each of which the mind can recall at will. And
+that, too, is a fact of surpassing wonder: what is the delicate
+instrument that registers, with no seeming volition, these amazing
+pictures, and preserves them thus with so fantastic a care,
+retouching them, fashioning them anew, detaching from the picture
+every sordid detail, till each is as a lyric, inexpressible,
+exquisite, too fine for words to touch?
+
+Now it is useless to dictate to others the aims and methods of
+travel: each must follow his own taste. To myself the acquisition
+of knowledge and information is in these matters an entirely
+negligible thing. To me the one and supreme object is the gathering
+of a gallery of pictures; and yet that is not a definite object
+either, for the whimsical and stubborn spirit refuses to be bound
+by any regulations in the matter. It will garner up with the most
+poignant care a single vignette, a tiny detail. I see, as I write,
+the vision of a great golden-grey carp swimming lazily in the clear
+pool of Arethusa, the carpet of mesembryanthemum that, for some
+fancy of its own, chose to involve the whole of a railway viaduct
+with its flaunting magenta flowers and its fleshy leaves. I see the
+edge of the sea, near Syracuse, rimmed with a line of the intensest
+yellow, and I hear the voice of a guide explaining that it was
+caused by the breaking up of a stranded orange-boat, so that the
+waves for many hundred yards threw up on the beach a wrack of
+fruit; yet the same wilful and perverse mind will stand
+impenetrably dumb and blind before the noblest and sweetest
+prospect, and decline to receive any impression at all. What is
+perhaps the oddest characteristic of the tricksy spirit is that it
+often chooses moments of intense discomfort and fatigue to master
+some scene, and take its indelible picture. I suppose that the
+reason of this is that the mind makes, at such moments, a vigorous
+effort to protest against the tyranny of the vile body, and to
+distract itself from instant cares.
+
+But another man may travel for archaeological or even statistical
+reasons. He may wish, like Ulysses, to study "manners, councils,
+customs, governments." He may be preoccupied with questions of
+architectural style or periods of sculpture. I have a friend who
+takes up at intervals the study of the pictures of a particular
+master, and will take endless trouble and undergo incredible
+discomfort, in order to see the vilest daubs, if only he can make
+his list complete, and say that he has seen all the reputed works
+of the master. This instinct is, I believe, nothing but the
+survival of the childish instinct for collecting, and though I can
+reluctantly admire any man who spares no trouble to gain an end,
+the motive is dark and unintelligible to me.
+
+There are some travellers, like Dean Stanley, who drift from the
+appreciation of natural scenery into the pursuit of historical
+associations. The story of Stanley as a boy, when he had his first
+sight of the snowy Alps on the horizon, always delights me. He
+danced about saying, "Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do?" But,
+in later days, Stanley would not go a mile to see a view, while he
+would travel all night to see a few stones of a ruin, jutting out
+of a farmyard wall, if only there was some human and historical
+tradition connected with the place. I do not myself understand
+that. I should not wish to see Etna merely because Empedocles is
+supposed to have jumped down the crater, nor the site of Jericho
+because the walls fell down at the trumpets of the host. The only
+interest to me in an historical scene is that it should be in such
+a condition as that one can to a certain extent reconstruct the
+original drama, and be sure that one's eyes rest upon very much the
+same scene as the actors saw. The reason why Syracuse moved me by
+its acquired beauty, and not for its historical associations, was
+because I felt convinced that Thucydides, who gives so picturesque
+a description of the sea-fight, can never have set eyes on the
+place, and must have embroidered his account from scanty hearsay.
+But, on the other hand, there are few things in the world more
+profoundly moving than to see a place where great thoughts have
+been conceived and great books written, when one is able to feel
+that the scene is hardly changed. The other day, as I passed before
+the sacred gate of Rydal Mount, I took my hat off my head with a
+sense of indescribable reverence. My companion asked me laughingly
+why I did so. "Why?" I said. "From natural piety, of course! I know
+every detail here as well as if I had lived here, and I have walked
+in thought a hundred times with the poet, to and fro in the
+laurelled walks of the garden, up the green shoulder of Nab Scar,
+and sat in the little parlour, while the fire leapt on the hearth,
+and heard him 'booing' his verses, to be copied by some friendly
+hand."
+
+I thrill to see the stately rooms of Abbotsford, with all their
+sham feudal decorations, the little staircase by which Scott stole
+away to his solitary work, the folded clothes, the shapeless hat,
+the ugly shoes, laid away in the glass case; the plantations where
+he walked with his shrewd bailiff, the place where he stopped so
+often on the shoulder of the slope, to look at the Eildon Hills,
+the rooms where he sat, a broken and bereaved man, yet with so
+gallant a spirit, to wrestle with sorrow and adversity. I wept, I
+am not ashamed to say, at Abbotsford, at the sight of the stately
+Tweed rolling his silvery flood past lawns and shrubberies, to
+think of that kindly, brave, and honourable heart, and his
+passionate love of all the goodly and cheerful joys of life and
+earth.
+
+Or, again, it was a solemn day for me to pass from the humble
+tenement where Coleridge lived, at Nether Stowey, before the cloud
+of sad habit had darkened his horizon, and turned him away from the
+wells of poetry into the deserts of metaphysical speculation, to
+find, if he could, some medicine for his tortured spirit. I walked
+with a holy awe along the leafy lanes to Alfoxden, where the
+beautiful house nestles in the green combe among its oaks, thinking
+how here, and here, Wordsworth and Coleridge had walked together in
+the glad days of youth, and planned, in obscurity and secluded joy,
+the fresh and lovely lyrics of their matin-prime.
+
+I turn, I confess, more eagerly to scenes like these than to scenes
+of historical and political tradition, because there hangs for me a
+glory about the scene of the conception and genesis of beautiful
+imaginative work that is unlike any glory that the earth holds. The
+natural joy of the youthful spirit receiving the impact of mighty
+thoughts, of poignant impressions, has for me a liberty and a grace
+which no historical or political associations could ever possess. I
+could not glow to see the room in which a statesman worked out the
+details of a Bill for the extension of the franchise, or a
+modification of the duties upon imports and exports, though I
+respect the growing powers of democracy and the extinction of
+privilege and monopoly; but these measures are dimmed and tainted
+with intrigue and manoeuvre and statecraft. I do not deny their
+importance, their worth, their nobleness. But not by committees and
+legislation does humanity triumph. In the vanguard go the blessed
+adventurous spirits that quicken the moral temperature, and uplift
+the banner of simplicity and sincerity. The host marches heavily
+behind, and the commissariat rolls grumbling in the rear of all;
+and though my place may be with the work-a-day herd, I will send my
+fancy afar among the leafy valleys and the far-off hills of hope.
+
+But I would not here quarrel with the taste of any man. If a mortal
+chooses to travel in search of comfortable rooms, new cookery and
+wines, the livelier gossip of unknown people, in heaven's name let
+him do so. If another wishes to study economic conditions,
+standards of life, rates of wages, he has my gracious leave for his
+pilgrimage. If another desires to amass historical and
+archaeological facts, measurements of hypaethral temples, modes of
+burial, folk-lore, fortification, God forbid that I should throw
+cold water on the quest. But the only traveller whom I recognise as
+a kindred spirit is the man who goes in search of impressions and
+effects, of tone and atmosphere, of rare and curious beauty, of
+uplifting association. Nothing that has ever moved the interest, or
+the anxiety, or the care, or the wonder, of human beings can ever
+wholly lose its charm. I have felt my skin prickle and creep at the
+sight of that amazing thing in the Dublin museum, a section dug
+bodily out of a claypit, and showing the rough-hewn stones of a
+cist, deep in the earth, the gravel over it and around it, the
+roots of the withered grass forming a crust many feet above, and,
+inside the cist, the rude urn, reversed over a heap of charred
+ashes; it was not the curiosity of the sight that moved me, but the
+thought of the old dark life revealed, the dim and savage world,
+that was yet shot through and pierced, even as now, with sorrow for
+death, and care for the beloved ashes of a friend and chieftain.
+Such a sight sets a viewless network of emotion, which seems to
+interlace far back into the ages, all pulsating and stirring. One
+sees in a flash that humanity lived, carelessly and brutally
+perhaps, as we too live, and were confronted, as we are confronted,
+with the horror of the gap, the intolerable mystery of life lapsing
+into the dark. Ah, the relentless record, the impenetrable mystery!
+I care very little, I fear, for the historical development of
+funereal rites, and hardly more for the light that such things
+throw on the evolution of society. I leave that gratefully enough
+to the philosophers. What I care for is the touch of nature that
+shows me my ancient brethren of the dim past--who would have mocked
+and ridiculed me, I doubt not, if I had fallen into their hands,
+and killed me as carelessly as one throws aside the rind of a
+squeezed fruit--yet I am one of them, and perhaps even something of
+their blood flows in my veins yet.
+
+As I grow older, I tend to travel less and less, and I do not care
+if I never cross the Channel again. Is there a right and a wrong in
+the matter, an advisability or an inadvisability, an expediency or
+an inexpediency? I do not think so. Travelling is a pleasure, if it
+is anything, and a pleasure pursued from a sense of duty is a very
+fatuous thing. I have no good reason to give, only an accumulation
+of small reasons. Dr. Johnson once said that any number of
+insufficient reasons did not make a sufficient one, just as a
+number of rabbits did not make a horse. A lively but misleading
+illustration: he might as well have said that any number of
+sovereigns did not make a cheque for a hundred pounds. I suppose
+that I do not like the trouble, to start with; and then I do not
+like being adrift from my own beloved country. Then I cannot
+converse in any foreign language, and half the pleasure of
+travelling comes from being able to lay oneself alongside of a new
+point of view. Then, too, I realise, as I grow older, how little I
+have really seen of my own incomparably beautiful and delightful
+land, so that, like the hero of Newman's hymn,
+
+
+                 "I do not ask to see
+     The distant scene; one step enough for me."
+
+
+And, lastly, I have a reason which will perhaps seem a far-fetched
+one. Travel is essentially a distraction, and I do not want to be
+distracted any more. One of the mistakes that people make, in these
+Western latitudes, is to be possessed by an inordinate desire to
+drown thought. The aim of many men whom I know seems to me to be
+occupied in some absolutely definite way, so that they may be as
+far as possible unaware of their own existence. Anything to avoid
+reflection! A normal Englishman does not care very much what the
+work and value of his occupation is, as long as he is occupied; and
+I am not at all sure that we came into the world to be occupied.
+Christ, in the Gospel story, rebuked the busy Martha for her
+bustling anxieties, her elaborate attentions to her guests, and
+praised the leisurely Mary for desiring to sit and hear Him talk.
+Socrates spent his life in conversation. I do not say that
+contemplation is a duty, but I cannot help thinking that we are not
+forbidden to scrutinise life, to wonder what it is all about, to
+study its problems, to apprehend its beauty and significance. We
+admire a man who goes on making money long after he has made far
+more than he needs; we think a life honourably spent in editing
+Greek books. Socrates in one of Plato's dialogues quotes the
+opinion of a philosopher to the effect that when a man has made
+enough to live upon, he should begin to practise virtue. "I think
+he should begin even earlier," says the interlocutor; and I am
+wholly in agreement with him. Travel is one of the expedients to
+which busy men resort, in order that they may forget their
+existence. I do not venture to think this exactly culpable, but I
+feel sure that it is a pity that people do not do less and think
+more. If a man asks what good comes from thinking, I can only
+retort by asking what good comes from the multiplication of
+unnecessary activity. I am quite as much at a loss as any one else
+to say what is the object of life, but I do not feel any doubt that
+we are not sent into the world to be in a fuss. Like the lobster in
+The Water-Babies, I cry, "Let me alone; I want to think!" because I
+believe that that occupation is at least as profitable as many
+others.
+
+And then, too, without travelling more than a few miles from my
+door, I can see things fully as enchanting as I can see by ranging
+Europe. I went to-day along a well-known road; just where the
+descent begins to fall into a quiet valley, there stands a
+windmill--not one of the ugly black circular towers that one
+sometimes sees, but one of the old crazy boarded sort, standing on
+a kind of stalk; out of the little loopholes of the mill the flour
+had dusted itself prettily over the weather-boarding. From a
+mysterious hatch half-way up leaned the miller, drawing up a sack
+of grain with a little pulley. There is nothing so enchanting as to
+see a man leaning out of a dark doorway high up in the air. He drew
+the sack in, he closed the panel. The sails whirled, flapping and
+creaking; and I loved to think of him in the dusty gloom, with the
+gear grumbling among the rafters, tipping the golden grain into its
+funnel, while the rattling hopper below poured out its soft stream
+of flour. Beyond the mill, the ground sank to a valley; the roofs
+clustered round a great church tower, the belfry windows blinking
+solemnly. Hard by the ancient Hall peeped out from its avenue of
+elms. That was a picture as sweet as anything I have ever seen
+abroad, as perfect a piece of art as could be framed, and more
+perfect than anything that could be painted, because it was a piece
+out of the old kindly, quiet life of the world. One ought to learn,
+as the years flow on, to love such scenes as that, and not to need
+to have the blood and the brain stirred by romantic prospects,
+peaked hills, well-furnished galleries, magnificent buildings:
+mutare animum, that is the secret, to grow more hopeful, more alive
+to delicate beauties, more tender, less exacting. Nothing, it is
+true, can give us peace; but we get nearer it by loving the
+familiar scene, the old homestead, the tiny valley, the wayside
+copse, than we do by racing over Europe on the track of Giorgione,
+or over Asia in pursuit of local colour. After all, everything has
+its appointed time. It is good to range in youth, to rub elbows
+with humanity, and then, as the days go on, to take stock, to
+remember, to wonder, "To be content with little, to serve beauty
+well."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SPECIALISM
+
+
+
+
+
+It is a very curious thing to reflect how often an old platitude or
+axiom retains its vitality, long after the conditions which gave it
+birth have altered, and it no longer represents a truth. It would
+not matter if such platitudes only lived on dustily in vapid and
+ill-furnished minds, like the vases of milky-green opaque glass
+decorated with golden stars, that were the joy of Early Victorian
+chimney-pieces, and now hold spills in the second-best spare
+bedroom. But like the psalmist's enemies, platitudes live and are
+mighty. They remain, and, alas! they have the force of arguments in
+the minds of sturdy unreflective men, who describe themselves as
+plain, straightforward people, and whose opinions carry weight in a
+community whose feelings are swayed by the statements of successful
+men rather than by the conclusions of reasonable men.
+
+One of these pernicious platitudes is the statement that every one
+ought to know something about everything and everything about
+something. It has a speciously epigrammatic air about it, dazzling
+enough to persuade the common-sense person that it is an
+intellectual judgment.
+
+As a matter of fact, under present conditions, it represents an
+impossible and even undesirable ideal. A man who tried to know
+something about everything would end in knowing very little about
+anything; and the most exhaustive programme that could be laid down
+for the most erudite of savants nowadays would be that he should
+know anything about anything, while the most resolute of
+specialists must be content with knowing something about something.
+
+A well-informed friend told me, the other day, the name and date of
+a man who, he said, could be described as the last person who knew
+practically everything at his date that was worth knowing. I have
+forgotten both the name and the date and the friend who told me,
+but I believe that the learned man in question was a cardinal in
+the sixteenth century. At the present time, the problem of the
+accumulation of knowledge and the multiplication of books is a very
+serious one indeed. It is, however, morbid to allow it to trouble
+the mind. Like all insoluble problems, it will settle itself in a
+way so obvious that the people who solve it will wonder that any
+one could ever have doubted what the solution would be, just as the
+problem of the depletion of the world's stock of coal will no doubt
+be solved in some perfectly simple fashion.
+
+The dictum in question is generally quoted as an educational
+formula in favour of giving every one what is called a sound
+general education. And it is probably one of the contributory
+causes which account for the present chaos of curricula. All
+subjects are held to be so important, and each subject is thought
+by its professors to be so peculiarly adapted for educational
+stimulus, that a resolute selection of subjects, which is the only
+remedy, is not attempted; and accordingly the victim of educational
+theories is in the predicament of the man described by Dr. Johnson
+who could not make up his mind which leg of his breeches he would
+put his foot into first. Meanwhile, said the Doctor, with a
+directness of speech which requires to be palliated, the process of
+investiture is suspended.
+
+But the practical result of the dilemma is the rise of specialism.
+The savant is dead and the specialist rules. It is interesting to
+try to trace the effect of this revolution upon our national
+culture.
+
+Now, I have no desire whatever to take up the cudgels against the
+specialists: they are a harmless and necessary race, so long as
+they are aware of their limitations. But the tyranny of an
+oligarchy is the worst kind of tyranny, because it means the
+triumph of an average over individuals, whereas the worst that can
+be said of a despotism is that it is the triumph of an individual
+over an average. The tyranny of the specialistic oligarchy is
+making itself felt to-day, and I should like to fortify the
+revolutionary spirit of liberty, whose boast it is to detest
+tyranny in all its forms, whether it is the tyranny of an
+enlightened despot, or the tyranny of a virtuous oligarchy, or the
+tyranny of an intelligent democracy.
+
+The first evil which results from the rule of the specialist is the
+destruction of the AMATEUR. So real a fact is the tyranny of the
+specialist that the very word "amateur," which means a leisurely
+lover of fine things, is beginning to be distorted into meaning an
+inefficient performer. As an instance of its correct and idiomatic
+use, I often think of the delightful landlord whom Stevenson
+encountered somewhere, and upon whom he pressed some Burgundy which
+he had with him. The generous host courteously refused a second
+glass, saying, "You see I am an amateur of these things, and I am
+capable of leaving you not sufficient." Now, I shall concern myself
+here principally with literature, because, in England at all
+events, literature plays the largest part in general culture. It
+may be said that we owe some of the best literature we have to
+amateurs. To contrast a few names, taken at random, Shakespeare,
+Dryden, Pope, Dr. Johnson, De Quincey, Tennyson, and Carlyle were
+professionals, it is true; but, on the other hand, Milton, Gray,
+Boswell, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Shelley, Browning, and Ruskin
+were amateurs. It is not a question of how much a man writes or
+publishes, it is a question of the spirit in which a man writes.
+Walter Scott became a professional in the last years of his life,
+and for the noblest of reasons; but he also became a bad writer. A
+good pair to contrast are Southey and Coleridge. They began as
+amateurs. Southey became a professional writer, and his sun set in
+the mists of valuable information. Coleridge, as an amateur,
+enriched the language with a few priceless poems, and then got
+involved in the morass of dialectical metaphysics. The point is
+whether a man writes simply because he cannot help it, or whether
+he writes to make an income. The latter motive does not by any
+means prevent his doing first-rate artistic work--indeed, there
+are certain persons who seem to have required the stimulus of
+necessity to make them break through an initial indolence of
+nature. When Johnson found fault with Gray for having times of the
+year when he wrote more easily, from the vernal to the autumnal
+equinox, he added that a man could write at any time if he set
+himself doggedly to it. True, no doubt! But to write doggedly is
+not to court favourable conditions for artistic work. It may be a
+finer sight for a moralist to see a man performing an appointed
+task heavily and faithfully, with grim tenacity, than it is to see
+an artist in a frenzy of delight dashing down an overpowering
+impression of beauty; but what has always hampered the British
+appreciation of literature is that we cannot disentangle the moral
+element from it: we are interested in morals, not in art, and we
+require a dash of optimistic piety in all writing that we propose
+to enjoy.
+
+The real question is whether, if a man sets himself doggedly to
+work, the appetite comes with eating, and whether the caged bird
+begins to flutter its wings and to send out the song that it learnt
+in the green heart of the wood. When Byron said that easy writing
+made damned hard reading, he meant that careless conception and
+hasty workmanship tend to blur the pattern and the colour of work.
+The fault of the amateur is that he can make the coat, but he
+cannot be bothered to make it fit. But it is not by any means true
+that hard writing makes easy reading. The spirit of the amateur is
+the spirit of the lover, who trembles at the thought that the
+delicate creature he loves may learn to love him in return, if he
+can but praise her worthily. The professional spirit is the spirit
+in which a man carefully and courteously woos an elderly spinster
+for the sake of her comfortable fortune. The amateur has an
+irresponsible joy in his work; he is like the golfer who dreams of
+mighty drives, and practises "putting" on his back lawn: the
+professional writer gives his solid hours to his work in a
+conscientious spirit, and is glad in hours of freedom to put the
+tiresome business away. Yet neither the amateur nor the
+professional can hope to capture the spirit of art by joy or
+faithfulness. It is a kind of divine felicity, when all is said and
+done, the kindly gift of God.
+
+Now into this free wild world of art and literature and music comes
+the specialist and pegs out his claim, fencing out the amateur, who
+is essentially a rambler, from a hundred eligible situations. In
+literature this is particularly the case: the amateur is told by
+the historian that he must not intrude upon history; that history
+is a science, and not a province of literature; that the time has
+not come to draw any conclusions or to summarise any tendencies;
+that picturesque narrative is an offence against the spirit of
+Truth; that no one is as black or as white as he is painted; and
+that to trifle with history is to commit a sin compounded of the
+sin of Ananias and Simon Magus. The amateur runs off, his hands
+over his ears, and henceforth hardly dares even to read history, to
+say nothing of writing it. Perhaps I draw too harsh a picture, but
+the truth is that I did, as a very young man, with no training
+except that provided by a sketchy knowledge of the classics, once
+attempt to write an historical biography. I shudder to think of my
+method and equipment; I skipped the dull parts, I left all tiresome
+documents unread. It was a sad farrago of enthusiasm and levity and
+heady writing. But Jove's thunder rolled and the bolt fell. A just
+man, whom I have never quite forgiven, to tell the truth, told me
+with unnecessary rigour and acrimony that I had made a pitiable
+exhibition of myself. But I have thanked God ever since, for I
+turned to literature pure and simple.
+
+Then, too, it is the same with art-criticism; here the amateur
+again, who, poor fool, is on the look-out for what is beautiful, is
+told that he must not meddle with art unless he does it seriously,
+which means that he must devote himself mainly to the study of
+inferior masterpieces, and schools, and tendencies. In literature
+it is the same; he must not devote himself to reading and loving
+great books, he must disentangle influences; he must discern the
+historical importance of writers, worthless in themselves, who form
+important links. In theology and in philosophy it is much the same:
+he must not read the Bible and say what he feels about it; he must
+unravel Rabbinical and Talmudic tendencies; he must acquaint
+himself with the heretical leanings of a certain era, and the
+shadow cast upon the page by apocryphal tradition. In philosophy he
+is still worse off, because he must plumb the depths of
+metaphysical jargon and master the criticism of methods.
+
+Now, this is in a degree both right and necessary, because the
+blind must not attempt to lead the blind; but it is treating the
+whole thing in too strictly scientific a spirit for all that. The
+misery of it is that the work of the specialist in all these
+regions tends to set a hedge about the law; it tends to accumulate
+and perpetuate a vast amount of inferior work. The result of it is,
+in literature, for instance, that an immense amount of second-rate
+and third-rate books go on being reprinted; and instead of the
+principle of selection being applied to great authors, and their
+inferior writings being allowed to lapse into oblivion, they go on
+being re-issued, not because they have any direct value for the
+human spirit, but because they have a scientific importance from
+the point of view of development. Yet for the ordinary human being
+it is far more important that he should read great masterpieces in
+a spirit of lively and enthusiastic sympathy than that he should
+wade into them through a mass of archaeological and philological
+detail. As a boy I used to have to prepare, on occasions, a play of
+Shakespeare for a holiday task. I have regarded certain plays with
+a kind of horror ever since, because one ended by learning up the
+introduction, which concerned itself with the origin of the play,
+and the notes which illustrated the meaning of such words as "kerns
+and gallowglasses," and left the action and the poetry and the
+emotion of the play to take care of themselves. This was due partly
+to the blighting influence of examination-papers set by men of
+sterile, conscientious brains, but partly to the terrible value set
+by British minds upon correct information. The truth really is that
+if one begins by caring for a work of art, one also cares to
+understand the medium through which it is conveyed; but if one
+begins by studying the medium first, one is apt to end by loathing
+the masterpiece, because of the dusty apparatus that it seems
+liable to collect about itself.
+
+The result of the influence of the specialist upon literature is
+that the amateur, hustled from any region where the historical and
+scientific method can be applied, turns his attention to the field
+of pure imagination, where he cannot be interfered with. And this,
+I believe, is one of the reasons why belles-lettres in the more
+precise sense tend to be deserted in favour of fiction. Sympathetic
+and imaginative criticism is so apt to be stamped upon by the
+erudite, who cry out so lamentably over errors and minute slips,
+that the novel seems to be the only safe vantage-ground in which
+the amateur may disport himself.
+
+But if the specialist is to the amateur what the hawk is to the
+dove, let us go further, and in a spirit of love, like Mr.
+Chadband, inquire what is the effect of specialism on the mind of
+the specialist. I have had the opportunity of meeting many
+specialists, and I say unhesitatingly that the effect largely
+depends upon the natural temperament of the individual. As a
+general rule, the great specialist is a wise, kindly, humble,
+delightful man. He perceives that though he has spent his whole
+life upon a subject or a fraction of a subject, he knows hardly
+anything about it compared to what there is to know. The track of
+knowledge glimmers far ahead of him, rising and falling like a road
+over solitary downs. He knows that it will not be given to him to
+advance very far upon the path, and he half envies those who shall
+come after, to whom many things that are dark mysteries to himself
+will be clear and plain. But he sees, too, how the dim avenues of
+knowledge reach out in every direction, interlacing and combining,
+and when he contrasts the tiny powers of the most subtle brain with
+all the wide range of law--for the knowledge which is to be, not
+invented, but simply discovered, is all assuredly there, secret and
+complex as it seems--there is but little room for complacency or
+pride. Indeed, I think that a great savant, as a rule, feels that
+instead of being separated by his store of knowledge, as by a wide
+space that he has crossed, from smaller minds, he is brought closer
+to the ignorant by the presence of the vast unknown. Instead of
+feeling that he has soared like a rocket away from the ground, he
+thinks of himself rather as a flower might think whose head was an
+inch or two higher than a great company of similar flowers; he has
+perhaps a wider view; he sees the bounding hedgerow, the distant
+line of hills, whereas the humbler flower sees little but a forest
+of stems and blooms, with the light falling dimly between. And a
+great savant, too, is far more ready to credit other people with a
+wider knowledge than they possess. It is the lesser kind of savant,
+the man of one book, of one province, of one period, who is
+inclined to think that he is differentiated from the crowd. The
+great man is far too much preoccupied with real progress to waste
+time and energy in showing up the mistakes of others. It is the
+lesser kind of savant, jealous of his own reputation, anxious to
+show his superiority, who loves to censure and deride the feebler
+brother. If one ever sees a relentless and pitiless review of a
+book--an exposure, as it is called, by one specialist of another's
+work--one may be fairly certain that the critic is a minute kind of
+person. Again, the great specialist is never anxious to obtrude his
+subject; he is rather anxious to hear what is going on in other
+regions of mental activity, regions which he would like to explore
+but cannot. It is the lesser light that desires to dazzle and
+bewilder his company, to tyrannise, to show off. It is the most
+difficult thing to get a great savant to talk about his subject,
+though, if he is kind and patient, will answer unintelligent
+questions, and help a feeble mind along, it is one of the most
+delightful things in the world. I seized the opportunity some
+little while ago, on finding myself sitting next to a great
+physicist, of asking him a series of fumbling questions on the
+subject of modern theories of matter; for an hour I stumbled like a
+child, supported by a strong hand, in a dim and unfamiliar world,
+among the mysterious essences of things. I should like to try to
+reproduce it here, but I have no doubt I should reproduce it all
+wrong. Still, it was deeply inspiring to look out into chaos, to
+hear the rush and motion of atoms, moving in vast vortices, to
+learn that inside the hardest and most impenetrable of substances
+there was probably a feverish intensity of inner motion. I do not
+know that I acquired any precise knowledge, but I drank deep
+draughts of wonder and awe. The great man, with his amused and
+weary smile, was infinitely gentle, and left me, I will say, far
+more conscious of the beauty and the holiness of knowledge. I said
+something to him about the sense of power that such knowledge must
+give. "Ah!" he said, "much of what I have told you is not proved,
+it is only suspected. We are very much in the dark about these
+things yet. Probably if a physicist of a hundred years hence could
+overhear me, he would be amazed to think that a sensible man could
+make such puerile statements. Power--no, it is not that! It rather
+makes one realise one's feebleness in being so uncertain about
+things that are absolutely certain and precise in themselves, if we
+could but see the truth. It is much more like the apostle who said,
+'Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief.' The thing one wonders at
+is the courage of the men who dare to think they KNOW."
+
+In one region I own that I dread and dislike the tyranny of the
+specialist, and that is the region of metaphysical and religious
+speculation. People who indulge themselves in this form of
+speculation are apt to be told by theologians and metaphysicians
+that they ought to acquaint themselves with the trend of
+theological and metaphysical criticism. It seems to me like telling
+people that they must not ascend mountains unless they are
+accompanied by guides, and have studied the history of previous
+ascents. "Yes," the professional says, "that is just what I mean;
+it is mere foolhardiness to attempt these arduous places unless you
+know exactly what you are about."
+
+To that I reply that no one is bound to go up hills, but that every
+one who reflects at all is confronted by religious and
+philosophical problems. We all have to live, and we are all more or
+less experts in life. When one considers the infinite importance to
+every human spirit of these problems, and when one further
+considers how very little theologians and philosophers have ever
+effected in the direction of enlightening us as to the object of
+life, the problem of pain and evil, the preservation of identity
+after death, the question of necessity and free-will, surely, to
+attempt to silence people on these matters because they have not
+had a technical training is nothing more than an attempt wilfully
+to suppress evidence on these points? The only way in which it may
+be possible to arrive at the solution of these things is to know
+how they appeal to and affect normal minds. I would rather hear the
+experience of a life-long sufferer on the problem of pain, or of a
+faithful lover on the mystery of love, or of a poet on the
+influence of natural beauty, or of an unselfish and humble saint on
+the question of faith in the unseen, than the evidence of the most
+subtle theologian or metaphysician in the world. Many of us, if we
+are specialists in nothing else, are specialists in life; we have
+arrived at a point of view; some particular aspect of things has
+come home to us with a special force; and what really enriches the
+hope and faith of the world is the experience of candid and sincere
+persons. The specialist has often had no time or opportunity to
+observe life; all he has observed is the thought of other secluded
+persons, persons whose view has been both narrow and conventional,
+because they have not had the opportunity of correcting their
+traditional preconceptions by life itself.
+
+I call, with all the earnestness that I can muster, upon all
+intelligent, observant, speculative people, who have felt the
+problems of life weigh heavily upon them, not to be dismayed by the
+disapproval of technical students, but to come forward and tell us
+what conclusions they have formed. The work of the trained
+specialist is essentially, in religion and philosophy, a negative
+work. He can show us how erroneous beliefs, which coloured the
+minds of men at certain ages and eras, grew up. He can show us what
+can be disregarded, as being only the conventional belief of the
+time; he can indicate, for instance, how a false conception of
+supernatural interference with natural law grew up in an age when,
+for want of trained knowledge, facts seemed fortuitous occurrences
+which were really conditioned by natural laws. The poet and the
+idealist make and cast abroad the great vital ideas, which the
+specialist picks up and analyses. But we must not stop at analysis;
+we want positive progress as well. We want people to tell us,
+candidly and simply, how their own soul grew, how it cast off
+conventional beliefs, how it justified itself in being hopeful or
+the reverse. There never was a time when more freedom of thought
+and expression was conceded to the individual. A man is no longer
+socially banned for being heretical, schismatic, or liberal-
+minded. I want people to say frankly what real part spiritual
+agencies or religious ideas have played in their lives, whether
+such agencies and ideas have modified their conduct, or have been
+modified by their inclinations and habits. I long to know a
+thousand things about my fellow-men--how they bear pain, how they
+confront the prospect of death, the hopes by which they live, the
+fears that overshadow them, the stuff of their lives, the influence
+of their emotions. It has long been thought, and it is still
+thought by many narrow precisians, indelicate and egotistical to do
+this. And the result is that we can find in books all the things
+that do not matter, while the thoughts that are of deep and vital
+interest are withheld.
+
+Such books as Montaigne's Essays, Rousseau's Confessions, Mrs.
+Carlyle's Letters, Mrs. Oliphant's Memoirs, the Autobiography of B.
+R. Haydon, to name but a few books that come into my mind, are the
+sort of books that I crave for, because they are books in which one
+sees right into the heart and soul of another. Men can confess to a
+book what they cannot confess to a friend. Why should it be
+necessary to veil this essence of humanity in the dreary melodrama,
+the trite incident of a novel or a play? Things in life do not
+happen as they happen in novels or plays. Oliver Twist, in real
+life, does not get accidentally adopted by his grandfather's oldest
+friend, and commit his sole burglary in the house of his aunt. We
+do not want life to be transplanted into trim garden-plots; we want
+to see it at home, as it grows in all its native wildness, on the
+one hand; and to know the idea, the theory, the principle that
+underlie it on the other. How few of us there are who MAKE our
+lives into anything! We accept our limitations, we drift with them,
+while we indignantly assert the freedom of the will. The best
+sermon in the world is to hear of one who has struggled with life,
+bent or trained it to his will, plucked or rejected its fruit, but
+all upon some principle. It matters little what we do; it matters
+enormously how we do it. Considering how much has been said, and
+sung, and written, and recorded, and prated, and imagined, it is
+strange to think how little is ever told us directly about life; we
+see it in glimpses and flashes, through half-open doors, or as one
+sees it from a train gliding into a great town, and looks into back
+windows and yards sheltered from the street. We philosophise, most
+of us, about anything but life; and one of the reasons why
+published sermons have such vast sales is because, however clumsily
+and conventionally, it is with life that they try to deal.
+
+This kind of specialising is not recognised as a technical form of
+it at all, and yet how far nearer and closer and more urgent it is
+for us than any other kind. I have a hope that we are at the
+beginning of an era of plain-speaking in these matters. Too often,
+with the literary standard of decorum which prevails, such self-
+revelations are brushed aside as morbid, introspective,
+egotistical. They are no more so than any other kind of
+investigation, for all investigation is conditioned by the
+personality of the investigator. All that is needed is that an
+observer of life should be perfectly candid and sincere, that he
+should not speak in a spirit of vanity or self-glorification, that
+he should try to disentangle what are the real motives that make
+him act or refrain from acting.
+
+As an instance of what I mean by confession of the frankest order,
+dealing in this case not only with literature but also with
+morality, let me take the sorrowful words which Ruskin wrote in his
+Praeterita, as a wearied and saddened man, when there was no longer
+any need for him to pretend anything, or to involve any of his own
+thoughts or beliefs in any sort of disguise. He took up Shakespeare
+at Macugnaga, in 1840, and he asks why the loveliest of
+Shakespeare's plays should be "all mixed and encumbered with
+languid and common work--to one's best hope spurious certainly, so
+far as original, idle and disgraceful--and all so inextricably and
+mysteriously that the writer himself is not only unknowable, but
+inconceivable; and his wisdom so useless, that at this time of
+being and speaking, among active and purposeful Englishmen, I know
+not one who shows a trace of ever having felt a passion of
+Shakespeare's, or learnt a lesson from him."
+
+That is of course the sad cry of one who is interested in life
+primarily, and in art only so far as it can minister to life. It
+may be strained and exaggerated, but how far more vital a saying
+than to expand in voluble and vapid enthusiasm over the insight and
+nobleness of Shakespeare, if one has not really felt one's life
+modified by that mysterious mind!
+
+Of course such self-revelation as I speak of will necessarily fall
+into the hands of unquiet, dissatisfied, melancholy people. If life
+is a common-place and pleasant sort of business, there is nothing
+particular to say or to think about it. But for all those--and they
+are many--who feel that life misses, by some blind, inevitable
+movement, being the gracious and beautiful thing it seems framed to
+be, how can such as these hold their peace? And how, except by
+facing it all, and looking patiently and bravely at it, can we find
+a remedy for its sore sicknesses? That method has been used, and
+used with success in every other kind of investigation, and we must
+investigate life too, even if it turns out to be all a kind of
+Mendelism, moved and swayed by absolutely fixed laws, which take no
+account of what we sorrowfully desire.
+
+Let us, then, gather up our threads a little. Let us first confront
+the fact that, under present conditions, in the face of the mass of
+records and books and accumulated traditions, arts and sciences
+must make progress little by little, line by line, in skilled
+technical hands. Fine achievement in every region becomes more
+difficult every day, because there is so much that is finished and
+perfected behind us; and if the conditions of our lives call us to
+some strictly limited path, let us advance wisely and humbly, step
+by step, without pride or vanity. But let us not forget, in the
+face of the frigidities of knowledge, that if they are the
+mechanism of life, emotion and hope and love and admiration are the
+steam. Knowledge is only valuable in so far as it makes the force
+of life effective and vigorous. And thus if we have breasted the
+strange current of life, or even if we have been ourselves
+overpowered and swept away by it, let us try, in whatever region we
+have the power, to let that experience have some value for
+ourselves and others. If we can say it or write it, so much the
+better. There are thousands of people moving through the world who
+are wearied and bewildered, and who are looking out for any message
+of hope and joy that may give them courage to struggle on; but if
+we cannot do that, we can at least live life temperately and
+cheerfully and sincerely: if we have bungled, if we have slipped,
+we can do something to help others not to go light-heartedly down
+the miry path; we can raise them up if they have fallen, we can
+cleanse the stains, or we can at least give them the comfort of
+feeling that they are not sadly and insupportably alone.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+OUR LACK OF GREAT MEN
+
+
+
+
+
+It is often mournfully reiterated that the present age is not an
+age of great men, and I have sometimes wondered if it is true. In
+the first place I do not feel sure that an age is the best judge of
+its own greatness; a great age is generally more interested in
+doing the things which afterwards cause it to be considered great,
+than in wondering whether it is great. Perhaps the fact that we are
+on the look-out for great men, and complaining because we cannot
+find them, is the best proof of our second-rateness; I do not
+imagine that the Elizabethan writers were much concerned with
+thinking whether they were great or not; they were much more
+occupied in having a splendid time, and in saying as eagerly as
+they could all the delightful thoughts which came crowding to the
+utterance, than in pondering whether they were worthy of
+admiration. In the annals of the Renaissance one gets almost weary
+of the records of brilliant persons, like Leo Battista Alberti and
+Leonardo da Vinci, who were architects, sculptors, painters,
+musicians, athletes, and writers all in one; who could make crowds
+weep by twanging a lute, ride the most vicious horses, take
+standing jumps over the heads of tall men, and who were, moreover,
+so impressionable that books were to them as jewels and flowers,
+and who "grew faint at the sight of sunsets and stately persons."
+Such as these, we may depend upon it, had little time to give to
+considering their own effect upon posterity. When the sun rules the
+day, there is no question about his supremacy; it is when we are
+concerned with scanning the sky for lesser lights to rule the night
+that we are wasting time. To go about searching for somebody to
+inspire one testifies, no doubt, to a certain lack of fire and
+initiative. But, on the other hand, there have been many great men
+whose greatness their contemporaries did not recognise. We tend at
+the present time to honour achievements when they have begun to
+grow a little mouldy; we seldom accord ungrudging admiration to a
+prophet when he is at his best. Moreover, in an age like the
+present, when the general average of accomplishment is remarkably
+high, it is more difficult to detect greatness. It is easier to see
+big trees when they stand out over a copse than when they are lost
+in the depths of the forest.
+
+Now there are two modes and methods of being great; one is by
+largeness, the other by intensity. A great man can be cast in a
+big, magnanimous mould, without any very special accomplishments or
+abilities; it may be very difficult to praise any of his faculties
+very highly, but he is there. Such men are the natural leaders of
+mankind; they effect what they effect not by any subtlety or
+ingenuity. They see in a wide, general way what they want, they
+gather friends and followers and helpers round them, and put the
+right man on at the right piece of work. They perform what they
+perform by a kind of voluminous force, which carries other
+personalities away; for lesser natures, as a rule, do not like
+supreme responsibility; they enjoy what is to ordinary people the
+greatest luxury in the world, namely, the being sympathetically
+commandeered, and duly valued. Inspiration and leadership are not
+common gifts, and there are abundance of capable people who cannot
+strike out a novel line of their own, but can do excellent work if
+they can be inspired and led. I was once for a short time brought
+into close contact with a man of this kind; it was impossible to
+put down on paper or to explain to those who did not know him what
+his claim to greatness was. I remember being asked by an
+incredulous outsider where his greatness lay, and I could not name
+a single conspicuous quality that my hero possessed. But he
+dominated his circle for all that, and many of them were men of far
+greater intellectual force than himself. He had his own way; if he
+asked one to do a particular thing, one felt proud to be entrusted
+with it, and amply rewarded by a word of approval. It was possible
+to take a different view from the view which he took of a matter or
+a situation, but it was impossible to express one's dissent in his
+presence. A few halting, fumbling words of his were more weighty
+than many a facile and voluble oration. Personally I often
+mistrusted his judgment, but I followed him with an eager delight.
+With such men as these, posterity is often at a loss to know why
+they impressed their contemporaries, or why they continue to be
+spoken of with reverence and enthusiasm. The secret is that it is a
+kind of moral and magnetic force, and the lamentable part of it is
+that such men, if they are not enlightened and wise, may do more
+harm than good, because they tend to stereotype what ought to be
+changed and renewed.
+
+That is one way of greatness; a sort of big, blunt force that
+overwhelms and uplifts, like a great sea-roller, yielding at a
+hundred small points, yet crowding onwards in soft volume and
+ponderous weight.
+
+Two interesting examples of this impressive and indescribable
+greatness seem to have been Arthur Hallam and the late Mr. W. E.
+Henley. In the case of Arthur Hallam, the eulogies which his
+friends pronounced upon him seem couched in terms of an intemperate
+extravagance. The fact that the most splendid panegyrics upon him
+were uttered by men of high genius is not in itself more conclusive
+than if such panegyrics had been conceived by men of lesser
+quality, because the greater that a man is the more readily does he
+perceive and more magniloquently acknowledge greatness. Apart from
+In Memoriam, Tennyson's recorded utterances about Arthur Hallam are
+expressed in terms of almost hyperbolical laudation. I once was
+fortunate enough to have the opportunity of asking Mr. Gladstone
+about Arthur Hallam. Mr. Gladstone had been his close friend at
+Eton and his constant companion. His eye flashed, his voice
+gathered volume, and with a fine gesture of his hand he said that
+he could only deliberately affirm that physically, intellectually,
+and morally, Arthur Hallam approached more nearly to an ideal of
+human perfection than any one whom he had ever seen. And yet the
+picture of Hallam at Eton represents a young man of an apparently
+solid and commonplace type, with a fresh colour, and almost wholly
+destitute of distinction or charm; while his extant fragments of
+prose and poetry are heavy, verbose, and elaborate, and without any
+memorable quality. It appears indeed as if he had exercised a sort
+of hypnotic influence upon his contemporaries. Neither does he seem
+to have produced a very gracious impression upon outsiders who
+happened to meet him. There is a curious anecdote told by some one
+who met Arthur Hallam travelling with his father on the Continent
+only a short time before his sudden death. The narrator says that
+he saw with a certain satisfaction how mercilessly the young man
+criticised and exposed his father's statements, remembering how
+merciless the father had often been in dealing summarily with the
+arguments and statements of his own contemporaries. One asks
+oneself in vain what the magnetic charm of his presence and
+temperament can have been. It was undoubtedly there, and yet it
+seems wholly irrecoverable. The same is true, in a different
+region, with the late Mr. W. E. Henley. His literary performances,
+with the exception of some half-a-dozen poetical pieces, have no
+great permanent value. His criticisms were vehement and complacent,
+but represent no great delicacy of analysis nor breadth of view.
+His treatment of Stevenson, considering the circumstances of the
+case, was ungenerous and irritable. Yet those who were brought into
+close contact with Henley recognised something magnanimous, noble,
+and fiery about him, which evoked a passionate devotion. I remember
+shortly before his death reading an appreciation of his work by a
+faithful admirer, who described him as "another Dr. Johnson," and
+speaking of his critical judgment, said, "Mr. Henley is pontifical
+in his wrath; it pleased him, for example, to deny to De Quincey
+the title to write English prose." That a criticism so arrogant, so
+saugrenu, should be re-echoed with such devoted commendation is a
+proof that the writer's independent judgment was simply swept away
+by Henley's personality; and in both these cases one is merely
+brought face to face with the fact that though men can earn the
+admiration of the world by effective performance, the most
+spontaneous and enduring gratitude is given to individuality.
+
+The other way of greatness is the way of intensity, that focuses
+all its impact at some brilliant point, like a rapier-thrust or a
+flash of lightning. Men with this kind of greatness have generally
+some supreme and dazzling accomplishment, and the rest of their
+nature is often sacrificed to one radiant faculty. Their power, in
+some one single direction, is absolutely distinct and unquestioned;
+and these are the men who, if they can gather up and express the
+forces of some vague and widespread tendency, some blind and
+instinctive movement of men's minds, form as it were the cutting
+edge of a weapon. They do not supply the force, but they
+concentrate it; and it is men of this type who are often credited
+with the bringing about of some profound and revolutionary change,
+because they summarise and define some huge force that is abroad.
+Not to travel far for instances, such a man was Rousseau. The air
+of his period was full of sentiments and emotions and ideas; he was
+not himself a man of force; he was a dreamer and a poet; but he had
+the matchless gift of ardent expression, and he was able to say
+both trenchantly and attractively exactly what every one was
+vaguely meditating.
+
+Now let us take some of the chief departments of human effort, some
+of the provinces in which men attain supreme fame, and consider
+what kinds of greatness we should expect the present day to evoke.
+In the department of warfare, we have had few opportunities of late
+to discover high strategical genius. Our navy has been practically
+unemployed, and the South African war was just the sort of campaign
+to reveal the deficiencies of an elaborate and not very practical
+peace establishment. Though it solidified a few reputations and
+pricked the bubble of some few others, it certainly did not reveal
+any subtle adaptability in our generals. It was Lord North, I
+think, who, when discussing with his Cabinet a list of names of
+officers suggested for the conduct of a campaign, said, "I do not
+know what effect these names produce upon you, gentlemen, but I
+confess they make me tremble." The South African war can hardly be
+said to have revealed that we have many generals who closely
+corresponded to Wordsworth's description of the Happy Warrior, but
+rather induced the tremulousness which Lord North experienced.
+Still, if, in the strategical region, our solitary recent campaign
+rather tends to prove a deficiency of men of supreme gifts, it at
+all events proved a considerable degree of competence and devotion.
+I could not go so far as a recent writer who regretted the
+termination of the Boer War because it interrupted the evolution of
+tactical science, but it is undoubtedly true that the growing
+aversion to war, the intense dislike to the sacrifice of human
+life, creates an atmosphere unfavourable to the development of high
+military genius; because great military reputations in times past
+have generally been acquired by men who had no such scruples, but
+who treated the material of their armies as pawns to be freely
+sacrificed to the attainment of victory.
+
+Then there is the region of statesmanship; and here it is
+abundantly clear that the social conditions of the day, the
+democratic current which runs with increasing spirit in political
+channels, is unfavourable to the development of individual genius.
+The prize falls to the sagacious opportunist; the statesman is less
+and less of a navigator, and more and more of a pilot, in times
+when popular feeling is conciliated and interpreted rather than
+inspired and guided. To be far-seeing and daring is a disadvantage;
+the most approved leader is the man who can harmonise discordant
+sections, and steer round obvious and pressing difficulties.
+Geniality and bonhomie are more valuable qualities than prescience
+or nobility of aim. The more representative that government
+becomes, the more does originality give place to malleability. The
+more fluid that the conceptions of a statesman are, the greater
+that his adaptability is, the more acceptable he becomes. Since
+Lord Beaconsfield, with all his trenchant mystery, and Mr.
+Gladstone, with his voluble candour, there have been no figures of
+unquestioned supremacy on the political stage. Even so, the effect
+in both cases was to a great extent the effect of personality. The
+further that these two men retire into the past, the more that they
+are judged by the written record, the more does the tawdriness of
+Lord Beaconsfield's mind, his absence of sincere convictions
+appear, as well as the pedestrianism of Mr. Gladstone's mind, and
+his lack of critical perception. I have heard Mr. Gladstone speak,
+and on one occasion I had the task of reporting for a daily paper a
+private oration on a literary subject. I was thrilled to the very
+marrow of my being by the address. The parchment pallor of the
+orator, his glowing and blazing eyes, his leonine air, the voice
+that seemed to have a sort of physical effect on the nerves, his
+great sweeping gestures, all held the audience spellbound. I felt
+at the time that I had never before realised the supreme and vital
+importance of the subject on which he spoke. But when I tried to
+reconstruct from the ashes of my industrious notes the mental
+conflagration which I had witnessed, I was at a complete loss to
+understand what had happened. The records were not only dull, they
+seemed essentially trivial, and almost overwhelmingly unimportant.
+But the magic had been there. Apart from the substance, the
+performance had been literally enchanting. I do not honestly
+believe that Mr. Gladstone was a man of great intellectual force,
+or even of very deep emotions. He was a man of extraordinarily
+vigorous and robust brain, and he was a supreme oratorical artist.
+
+There is intellect, charm, humour in abundance in the parliamentary
+forces; there was probably never a time when there were so many
+able and ambitious men to be found in the rank and file of
+parliamentarians. But that is not enough. There is no supremely
+impressive and commanding figure on the stage; greatness seems to
+be distributed rather than concentrated; but probably neither this,
+nor political conditions, would prevent the generous recognition of
+supreme genius, if it were there to recognise.
+
+In art and literature, I am inclined to believe that we shall look
+back to the Victorian era as a time of great activity and high
+performance. The two tendencies here which militate against the
+appearance of the greatest figures are, in the first place, the
+great accumulations of art and literature, and in the second place
+the democratic desire to share those treasures. The accumulation of
+pictures, music, and books makes it undoubtedly very hard for a new
+artist, in whatever region, to gain prestige. There is so much that
+is undoubtedly great and good for a student of art and literature
+to make acquaintance with, that we are apt to be content with the
+old vintages. The result is that there are a good many artists who
+in a time of less productivity would have made themselves an
+enduring reputation, and who now must be content to be recognised
+only by a few. The difficulty can, I think, only be met by some
+principle of selection being more rigidly applied. We shall have to
+be content to skim the cream of the old as well as of the new, and
+to allow the second-rate work of first-rate performers to sink into
+oblivion. But at the same time there might be a great future before
+any artist who could discover a new medium of utterance. It seems
+at present, to take literature, as if every form of human
+expression had been exploited. We have the lyric, the epic, the
+satire, the narrative, the letter, the diary, conversation, all
+embalmed in art. But there is probably some other medium possible
+which will become perfectly obvious the moment it is seized upon
+and used. To take an instance from pictorial art. At present,
+colour is only used in a genre manner, to clothe some dramatic
+motive. But there seems no prima facie reason why colour should not
+be used symphonically like music. In music we obtain pleasure from
+an orderly sequence of vibrations, and there seems no real reason
+why the eye should not be charmed with colour-sequences just as the
+ear is charmed with sound-sequences. So in literature it would seem
+as though we might get closer still to the expression of mere
+personality, by the medium of some sublimated form of reverie, the
+thought blended and tinged in the subtlest gradations, without the
+clumsy necessity of sacrificing the sequence of thought to the
+barbarous devices of metre and rhyme, or to the still more childish
+devices of incident and drama. Flaubert, it will be remembered,
+looked forward to a time when a writer would not require a subject
+at all, but would express emotion and thought directly rather than
+pictorially. To utter the unuttered thought--that is really the
+problem of literature in the future; and if a writer could be found
+to free himself from all stereotyped forms of expression, and to
+give utterance to the strange texture of thought and fancy, which
+differentiates each single personality so distinctly, so
+integrally, from other personalities, and which we cannot
+communicate to our dearest and nearest, he might enter upon a new
+province of art.
+
+But the second tendency which at the present moment dominates
+writers is, as I have said, the rising democratic interest in the
+things of the mind. This is at present a very inchoate and
+uncultivated interest: but in days of cheap publication and large
+audiences it dominates many writers disastrously. The temptation is
+a grievous one--to take advantage of a market--not to produce what
+is absolutely the best, but what is popular and effective. It is
+not a wholly ignoble temptation. It is not only the temptation of
+wealth, though in an age of comfort, which values social
+respectability so highly, wealth is a great temptation. But the
+temptation is rather to gauge success by the power of appeal. If a
+man has ideas at all, he is naturally anxious to make them felt;
+and if he can do it best by spreading his ideas rather thinly, by
+making them attractive to enthusiastic people of inferior
+intellectual grip, he feels he is doing a noble work. The truth is
+that in literature the democracy desires not ideas but morality.
+All the best-known writers of the Victorian age have been
+optimistic moralists, Browning, Ruskin, Carlyle, Tennyson. They
+have been admired because they concealed their essential
+conventionality under a slight perfume of unorthodoxy. They all in
+reality pandered to the complacency of the age, in a way in which
+Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats did not pander. The democracy
+loves to be assured that it is generous, high-minded, and sensible.
+It is in reality timid, narrow-minded, and Pharisaical. It hates
+independence and originality, and loves to believe that it adores
+both. It loves Mr. Kipling because he assures them that vulgarity
+is not a sin; it loves Mr. Bernard Shaw because he persuades them
+that they are cleverer than they imagined. The fact is that great
+men, in literature at all events, must be content, at the present
+time, to be unrecognised and unacclaimed. They must be content to
+be of the happy company of whom Mr. Swinburne writes:--
+
+
+"In the garden of death, where the singers, whose names are deathless,
+ One with another make music unheard of men."
+
+
+   Then there is the region of Science, and here I am not qualified
+to speak, because I know no science, and have not even taught it,
+as Mr. Arthur Sidgwick said. I do not really know what constitutes
+greatness in science. I suppose that the great man of science is
+the man who to a power of endlessly patient investigation joins a
+splendid imaginative, or perhaps deductive power, like Newton or
+Darwin. But we who stand at the threshold of the scientific era are
+perhaps too near the light, and too much dazzled by the results of
+scientific discovery to say who is great and who is not great. I
+have met several distinguished men of science, and I have thought
+some of them to be men of obviously high intellectual gifts, and
+some of them men of inert and secretive temperaments. But that is
+only natural, for to be great in other departments generally
+implies a certain knowledge of the world, or at all events of the
+thought of the world; whereas the great man of science may be
+moving in regions of thought that may be absolutely incommunicable
+to the ordinary person. But I do not suppose that scientific
+greatness is a thing which can be measured by the importance of the
+practical results of a discovery. I mean that a man may hit upon
+some process, or some treatment of disease, which may be of
+incalculable benefit to humanity, and yet not be really a great man
+of science, only a fortunate discoverer, and incidentally a great
+benefactor to humanity. The unknown discoverers of things like the
+screw or the wheel, persons lost in the mists of antiquity, could
+not, I suppose, be ranked as great men of science. The great man of
+science is the man who can draw some stupendous inference, which
+revolutionises thought and sets men hopefully at work on some
+problem which does not so much add to the convenience of humanity
+as define the laws of nature. We are still surrounded by
+innumerable and awful mysteries of life and being; the evidence
+which will lead to their solution is probably in our hands and
+plain enough, if any one could but see the bearing of facts which
+are known to the simplest child. There is little doubt, I suppose,
+that the greatest reputations of recent years have been made in
+science; and perhaps when our present age has globed itself into a
+cycle, we shall be amazed at the complaint that the present era is
+lacking in great men. We are busy in looking for greatness in so
+many directions, and we are apt to suppose, from long use, that
+greatness is so inseparably connected with some form of human
+expression, whether it be the utterance of thought, or the
+marshalling of armies, that we may be overlooking a more stable
+form of greatness, which will be patent to those that come after.
+My own belief is that the condition of science at the present day
+answers best to the conditions which we have learnt to recognise in
+the past as the fruitful soil of greatness. I mean that when we put
+our finger, in the past, on some period which seems to have been
+producing great work in a great way, we generally find it in some
+knot or school of people, intensely absorbed in what they were
+doing, and doing it with a whole-hearted enjoyment, loving the work
+more than the rewards of it, and indifferent to the pursuit of
+fame. Such it seems to me is the condition of science at the
+present time, and it is in science, I am inclined to think, that
+our heroes are probably to be found.
+
+I do not, then, feel at all sure that we are lacking in great men,
+though it must be admitted that we are lacking in men whose
+supremacy is recognised. I suppose we mean by a great man one who
+in some region of human performance is confessedly pre-eminent; and
+he must further have a theory of his own, and a power of pursuing
+that theory in the face of depreciation and even hostility. I do
+not think that great men have often been indifferent to criticism.
+Often, indeed, by virtue of a greater sensitiveness and a keener
+perception, they have been profoundly affected by unpopularity and
+the sense of being misunderstood. Carlyle, Tennyson, Ruskin, for
+instance, were men of almost morbid sensibility, and lived in
+sadness; and, on the other hand, there are few great men who have
+not been affected for the worse by premature success. The best soil
+for greatness to grow up in would seem to be an early isolation,
+sustained against the disregard of the world by the affection and
+admiration of a few kindred minds. Then when the great man has
+learned his method and his message, and learned too not to over-
+value the popular verdict, success may mature and mellow his
+powers. Yet of how many great men can this be said? As a rule,
+indeed, a great man's best work has been done in solitude and
+disfavour, and he has attained his sunshine when he can no longer
+do his best work.
+
+The question is whether the modern conditions of life are
+unfavourable to greatness; and I think that it must be confessed
+that they are. In the first place, we all know so much too about
+each other, and there is so eager a personal curiosity abroad, a
+curiosity about the smallest details of the life of any one who
+seems to have any power of performance, that it encourages men to
+over-confidence, egotism, and mannerism. Again, the world is so
+much in love with novelty and sensation of all kinds, that facile
+successes are easily made and as easily obliterated. What so many
+people admire is not greatness, but the realisation of greatness
+and its tangible rewards. The result of this is that men who show
+any faculty for impressing the world are exploited and caressed,
+are played with as a toy, and as a toy neglected. And then, too,
+the age is deeply permeated by social ambitions. Men love to be
+labelled, ticketed, decorated, differentiated from the crowd.
+Newspapers pander to this taste; and then the ease and rapidity of
+movement tempt men to a restless variety of experience, of travel,
+of society, of change, which is alien to the settled and sober
+temper in which great designs are matured. There is a story, not
+uncharacteristic, of modern social life, of a hostess who loved to
+assemble about her, in the style of Mrs. Leo Hunter, notabilities
+small and great, who was reduced to presenting a young man who made
+his appearance at one of her gatherings as "Mr. ----, whose uncle,
+you will remember, was so terribly mangled in the railway accident
+at S----." It is this feverish desire to be distinguished at any
+price which has its counterpart in the feverish desire to find
+objects of admiration. Not so can solid greatness be achieved.
+
+The plain truth is that no one can become great by taking thought,
+and still less by desiring greatness. It is not an attainable
+thing; fame only is attainable. A man must be great in his own
+quiet way, and the greater he is, the less likely is he to concern
+himself with fame. It is useless to try and copy some one else's
+greatness; that is like trying to look like some one else's
+portrait, even if it be a portrait by Velasquez. Not that modesty
+is inseparable from greatness; there are abundance of great men who
+have been childishly and grotesquely vain; but in such cases it has
+been a greatness of performance, a marvellous faculty, not a
+greatness of soul. Hazlitt says somewhere that modesty is the
+lowest of the virtues, and a real confession of the deficiency
+which it indicates. He adds that a man who underrates himself is
+justly undervalued by others. This is a cynical and a vulgar maxim.
+It is true that a great man must have a due sense of the dignity
+and importance of his work; but if he is truly great, he will have
+also a sense of relation and proportion, and not forget the
+minuteness of any individual atom. If he has a real greatness of
+soul, he will not be apt to compare himself with others, and he
+will be inclined to an even over-generous estimate of the value of
+the work of others. In no respect was the greatness of D. G.
+Rossetti more exemplified than in his almost extravagant
+appreciation of the work of his friends; and it was to this royalty
+of temperament that he largely owed his personal supremacy.
+
+I would believe then that the lack of conspicuous greatness is due
+at this time to the overabundant vitality and eagerness of the
+world, rather than to any languor or listlessness of spirit. The
+rise of the decadent school in art and literature is not the least
+sign of any indolent or corrupt deterioration. It rather shows a
+desperate appetite for testing sensation, a fierce hunger for
+emotional experience, a feverish ambition to impress a point-of-
+view. It is all part of a revolt against settled ways and
+conventional theories. I do not mean that we can expect to find
+greatness in this direction, for greatness is essentially well-
+balanced, calm, deliberate, and decadence is a sign of a neurotic
+and over-vitalised activity.
+
+Our best hope is that this excessive restlessness of spirit will
+produce a revolt against itself. The essence of greatness is
+unconventionality, and restlessness is now becoming conventional.
+In education, in art, in literature, in politics, in social life,
+we lose ourselves in denunciations of the dreamer and the loafer.
+We cannot bear to see a slowly-moving, deliberate, self-contained
+spirit, advancing quietly on its discerned path. Instead of being
+content to perform faithfully and conscientiously our allotted
+task, which is the way in which we can best help the world, we
+demand that every one should want to do good, to be responsible for
+some one else, to exhort, urge, beckon, restrain, manage. That is
+all utterly false and hectic. Our aim should be patience rather
+than effectiveness, sincerity rather than adaptability, to learn
+rather than to teach, to ponder rather than to persuade, to know
+the truth rather than to create illusion, however comforting,
+however delightful such illusion may be.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+SHYNESS
+
+
+
+
+
+I have no doubt that shyness is one of the old, primitive,
+aboriginal qualities that lurk in human nature--one of the crude
+elements that ought to have been uprooted by civilisation, and
+security, and progress, and enlightened ideals, but which have not
+been uprooted, and are only being slowly eliminated. It is seen, as
+all aboriginal qualities are seen, at its barest among children,
+who often reflect the youth of the world, and are like little wild
+animals or infant savages, in spite of all the frenzied
+idealisation that childhood receives from well-dressed and amiable
+people.
+
+Shyness is thus like those little bits of woods and copses which
+one finds in a country-side that has long been subdued and
+replenished, turned into arable land and pasture, with all the
+wildness and the irregularity ploughed and combed out of it; but
+still one comes upon some piece of dingle, where there is perhaps
+an awkward tilt in the ground, or some ancient excavation, or where
+a stream-head has cut out a steep channel, and there one finds a
+scrap of the old forest, a rood or two that has never been anything
+but woodland. So with shyness; many of our old, savage qualities
+have been smoothed out, or glazed over, by education and
+inheritance, and only emerge in moments of passion and emotion. But
+shyness is no doubt the old suspicion of the stranger, the belief
+that his motives are likely to be predatory and sinister; it is the
+tendency to bob the head down into the brushwood, or to sneak
+behind the tree-bole on his approach. One sees a little child,
+washed and brushed and delicately apparelled, with silken locks and
+clear complexion, brought into a drawing-room to be admired; one
+sees the terror come upon her; she knows by experience that she has
+nothing to expect but attention, and admiration, and petting; but
+you will see her suddenly cover her face with a tiny hand, relapse
+into dismal silence, even burst into tears and refuse to be
+comforted, till she is safely entrenched upon some familiar knee.
+
+I have a breezy, boisterous, cheerful friend, of transparent
+simplicity and goodness, who has never known the least touch of
+shyness from his cradle, who always says, if the subject is
+introduced, that shyness is all mere self-consciousness, and that
+it comes from thinking about oneself. That is true, in a limited
+degree; but the diagnosis is no remedy for the disease, because
+shyness is as much a disease as a cold in the head, and no amount
+of effort can prevent the attacks of the complaint; the only remedy
+is either to avoid the occasions of the attacks,--and that is
+impossible, unless one is to abjure the society of other people for
+good and all;--or else to practise resolutely the hardening process
+of frequenting society, until one gets a sort of courage out of
+familiarity. Yet even so, who that has ever really suffered from
+shyness does not feel his heart sink as he drives up in a brougham
+to the door of some strange house, and sees a grave butler
+advancing out of an unknown corridor, with figures flitting to and
+fro in the background; what shy person is there who at such a
+moment would not give a considerable sum to be able to go back to
+the station and take the first train home? Or who again, as he
+gives his name to a servant in some brightly-lighted hall, and
+advances, with a hurried glance at his toilet, into a roomful of
+well-dressed people, buzzing with what Rossetti calls a "din of
+doubtful talk," would not prefer to sink into the earth like Korah,
+Dathan, and Abiram, and be reckoned no more among the living?
+
+It is recorded in Tennyson's Life that he used to recommend to a
+younger brother the thought of the stellar spaces, swarming with
+constellations and traversed by planets at ineffable distances, as
+a cure for shyness; and a lady of my acquaintance used to endeavour
+as a girl to stay her failing heart on the thought of Eternity at
+such moments. It is all in vain; at the urgent moment one cares
+very little about the stellar motions, or the dim vistas of
+futurity, and very much indeed about the cut of one's coat, and the
+appearance of one's collar, and the glances of one's enemies; the
+doctrines of the Church, and the prospects of ultimate salvation,
+are things very light in the scales in comparison with the pressing
+necessities of the crisis, and the desperate need to appear wholly
+unconcerned!
+
+The wild and fierce shyness of childhood is superseded in most
+sensitive people, as life goes on, by a very different feeling--the
+shyness of adolescence, of which the essence, as has been well
+said, is "a shamefaced pride." The shyness of early youth is a
+thing which springs from an intense desire to delight, and impress,
+and interest other people, from wanting to play a far larger and
+brighter part in the lives of every one else than any one in the
+world plays in any one else's life. Who does not recognise, with a
+feeling that is half contempt and half compassion, the sight of the
+eager pretentiousness of youth, the intense shame of confessing
+ignorance on any point, the deep desire to appear to have a stake
+in the world, and a well-defined, respected position? I met the
+other day a young man, of no particular force or distinction, who
+was standing in a corner at a big social gathering, bursting with
+terror and importance combined. He was inspired, I would fain
+believe, by discerning a vague benevolence in my air and demeanour,
+to fix his attention on me. He had been staying at a house where
+there had been some important guests, and by some incredibly rapid
+transition of eloquence he was saying to me in a minute or two,
+"The Commander-in-Chief said to me the other day," and "The
+Archbishop pointed out to me a few days ago," giving, as personal
+confidences, scraps of conversation which he had no doubt overheard
+as an unwelcome adjunct to a crowded smoking-room, with the busy
+and genial elders wondering when the boys would have the grace to
+go to bed. My heart bled for him as I saw the reflection of my own
+pushing and pretentious youth, and I only desired that the curse
+should not fall upon him which has so often fallen upon myself, to
+recall ineffaceably, with a blush that still mantles my cheek in
+the silence and seclusion of my bedroom, in a wakeful hour, the
+thought of some such piece of transparent and ridiculous self-
+importance, shamefully uttered by myself, in a transport of
+ambitious vanity, long years ago. How out of proportion to the
+offence is the avenging phantom of memory which dogs one through
+the years for such stupidities! I remember that as a youthful
+undergraduate I went to stay in the house of an old family friend
+in the neighbourhood of Cambridge. The only other male guest was a
+grim and crusty don, sharp and trenchant in speech, and with a
+determination to keep young men in their place. At Cambridge he
+would have taken no notice whatever of me; but there, on alien
+ground, with some lurking impulse of far-off civility, he said to
+me when the ladies retired, "I am going to have a cigar; you know
+your way to the smoking-room?" I did not myself smoke in those
+days, so foolish was I and innocent; but recalling, I suppose, some
+similar remark made by an elderly and genial non-smoker under the
+same circumstances, I said pompously--I can hardly bring myself
+even now to write the words--"I don't smoke, but I will come and
+sit with you for the pleasure of a talk." He gave a derisive snort,
+looked at me and said, "What! not allowed to smoke yet? Pray don't
+trouble to come on my account." It was not a genial speech, and it
+made me feel, as it was intended to do, insupportably silly. I did
+not make matters better, I recollect, on the following day, when on
+returning to Cambridge I offered to carry his bag up from the
+station, for he insisted on walking. He refused testily, and no
+doubt thought me, as in fact I was, a very spiritless young man.
+
+I remember, too, another incident of the same kind, happening about
+the same time. I was invited by a fellow-undergraduate to come to
+tea in his rooms, and to meet his people. After tea, in the
+lightness of his heart, my friend performed some singular antics,
+such as standing on his head like a clown, and falling over the
+back of his sofa, alighting on his feet. I, who would not have
+executed such gambols for the world in the presence of the fairer
+sex, but anxious in an elderly way to express my sympathy with the
+performer, said, with what was meant to be a polite admiration: "I
+can't think how you do that!" Upon which a shrewd and trenchant
+maiden-aunt who was present, and was delighting in the exuberance
+of her nephew, said to me briskly, "Mr. Benson, have you never been
+young?" I should be ashamed to say how often since I have arranged
+a neat repartee to that annoying question. At the same time I think
+that the behaviour both of the don and the aunt was distinctly
+unjust and unadvisable. I am sure that the one way to train young
+people out of the miseries of shyness is for older people never to
+snub them in public, or make them appear in the light of a fool.
+Such snubs fall plentifully and naturally from contemporaries. An
+elder person is quite within his rights in inflicting a grave and
+serious remonstrance in private. I do not believe that young people
+ever resent that, if at the same time they are allowed to defend
+themselves and state their case. But a merciless elder who inflicts
+a public mortification is terribly unassailable and impregnable.
+For the shy person, who is desperately anxious to bear a
+sympathetic part, is quite incapable of retort; and that is why
+such assaults are unpardonable, because they are the merest
+bullying.
+
+The nicest people that I have known in life have been the people of
+kindly and sensible natures, who have been thoroughly spoilt as
+children, encouraged to talk, led to expect not only toleration,
+but active kindness and sympathy from all. The worst of it is that
+such kindness is generally reserved for pretty and engaging
+children, and it is the awkward, unpleasing, ungainly child who
+gets the slaps in public. But, as in Tennyson-Turner's pretty poem
+of "Letty's Globe," a child's hand should be "welcome at all
+frontiers." Only deliberate rudeness and insolence on the part of
+children should be publicly rebuked; and as a matter of fact both
+rudeness and insolence are far oftener the result of shyness than
+is easily supposed.
+
+After the shyness of adolescence there often follows a further
+stage. The shy person has learnt a certain wisdom; he becomes aware
+how easily he detects pretentiousness in other people, and realises
+that there is nothing to be gained by claiming a width of
+experience which he does not possess, and that the being unmasked
+is even more painful than feeling deficient and ill-equipped. Then
+too he learns to suspect that when he has tried to be impressive,
+he has often only succeeded in being priggish; and the result is
+that he falls into a kind of speechlessness, comforting himself, as
+he sits mute and awkward, unduly elongated, and with unaccountable
+projections of limb and feature, that if only other people were a
+little less self-absorbed, had the gift of perceiving hidden worth
+and real character, and could pierce a little below the surface,
+they would realise what reserves of force and tenderness lay
+beneath the heavy shapelessness of which he is still conscious.
+Then is the time for the shy person to apply himself to social
+gymnastics. He is not required to be voluble; but if he will
+practise bearing a hand, seeing what other people need and like,
+carrying on their line of thought, constructing small
+conversational bridges, asking the right questions, perhaps
+simulating an interest in the pursuits of others which he does not
+naturally feel, he may unloose the burden from his back. Then is
+the time to practise a sympathetic smile, or better still to allow
+oneself to indicate and even express the sympathy one feels; and
+the experimentalist will soon become aware how welcome such
+unobtrusive sympathy is. He will be amazed at first to find that,
+instead of being tolerated, he will be confided in; he will be
+regarded as a pleasant adjunct to a party, and he will soon have
+the even pleasanter experience of finding that his own opinions and
+adventures, if they are not used to cap and surpass the opinions
+and adventures of others, but to elicit them, will be duly valued.
+Yet, alas, a good many shy people never reach that stage, but take
+refuge in a critical and fastidious attitude. I had an elderly
+relative of this kind--who does not know the type?--who was a man
+of wide interests and accurate information, but a perfect terror in
+the domestic circle. He was too shy to mingle in general talk, but
+sat with an air of acute observation, with a dry smile playing over
+his face; later on, when the circle diminished, it pleased him to
+retail the incautious statements made by various members of the
+party, and correct them with much acerbity. There are few things
+more terrific than a man who is both speechless and distinguished.
+I have known several such, and their presence lies like a blight
+over the most cheerful party. It is unhappily often the case that
+shyness is apt to exist side by side with considerable ability, and
+a shy man of this type regards distinction as a kind of defensive
+armour, which may justify him in applying to others the contempt
+which he has himself been conscious of incurring. One of the most
+disagreeable men I know is a man of great ability, who was bullied
+in his youth. The result upon him has been that he tends to believe
+that most people are inspired by a vague malevolence, and he uses
+his ability and his memory, not to add to the pleasure of a party,
+but to make his own power felt. I have seen this particular man
+pass from an ungainly speechlessness into brutal onslaughts on
+inoffensive persons; and it is one of the most unpleasant
+transformations in the world. On the other hand, the modest and
+amiable man of distinction is one of the most agreeable figures it
+is possible to encounter. He is kind and deferential, and the
+indulgent deference of a distinguished man is worth its weight in
+gold.
+
+I was lately told a delightful story of a great statesman staying
+with a humble and anxious host, who had invited a party of simple
+and unimportant people to meet the great man. The statesman came in
+late for dinner, and was introduced to the party; he made a series
+of old-fashioned bows in all directions, but no one felt in a
+position to offer any observations. The great man, at the
+conclusion of the ceremony, turned to his host, and said, in tones
+that had often thrilled a listening senate: "What very convenient
+jugs you have in your bedrooms! They pour well!" The social frost
+broke up; the company were delighted to find that the great man was
+interested in mundane matters of a kind on which every one might be
+permitted to have an opinion, and the conversation, starting from
+the humblest conveniences of daily life, melted insensibly into
+more liberal subjects. The fact is that, in ordinary life, kindness
+and simplicity are valued far more than brilliance; and the best
+brilliance is that which throws a novel and lambent light upon
+ordinary topics, rather than the brilliance which disports itself
+in unfamiliar and exalted regions. The hero only ceases to be a
+hero to his valet if he is too lofty-minded to enter into the
+workings of his valet's mind, and cannot duly appraise the quality
+of his services.
+
+And then, too, to go back a little, there are certain defects,
+after all, which are appropriate at different times of life. A
+certain degree of shyness and even awkwardness is not at all a
+disagreeable thing--indeed it is rather a desirable quality--in the
+young. A perfectly self-possessed and voluble young man arouses in
+one a vague sense of hostility, unless it is accompanied by great
+modesty and ingenuousness. The artless prattler, who, in his teens,
+has an opinion on all subjects, and considers that opinion worth
+expressing, is pleasant enough, and saves one some embarrassment;
+but such people, alas, too often degenerate into the bores of later
+life. If a man's opinion is eventually going to be worth anything,
+he ought, I think, to pass through a tumultuous and even prickly
+stage, when he believes that he has an opinion, but cannot find the
+aplomb to formulate it. He ought to be feeling his way, to be in a
+vague condition of revolt against what is conventional. This is
+likely to be true not only in his dealings with his elders, but
+also in his dealings with his contemporaries. Young people are apt
+to regard a youthful doctrinaire, who has an opinion on everything,
+with sincere abhorrence. He bores them, and to the young boredom is
+not a condition of passive suffering, it is an acute form of
+torture. Moreover, the stock of opinions which a young man holds
+are apt to be parrot-cries repeated without any coherence from
+talks overheard and books skimmed. But in a modest and ingenuous
+youth, filled to the brim with eager interest and alert curiosity,
+a certain deference is an adorable thing, one of the most delicate
+of graces; and it is a delightful task for an older person, who
+feels the sense of youthful charm, to melt stiffness away by kindly
+irony and gentle provocation, as Socrates did with his sweet-
+natured and modest boy-friends, so many centuries ago.
+
+The aplomb of the young generally means complacency; but one who is
+young and shy, and yet has the grace to think about the convenience
+and pleasure of others, can be the most perfect companion in the
+world. One has then a sense of the brave and unsophisticated
+freshness of youth, that believes all things and hopes all things,
+the bloom of which has not been rubbed away by the rough touch of
+the world. It is only when that shyness is prolonged beyond the
+appropriate years, when it leaves a well-grown and hard-featured
+man gasping and incoherent, jerky and ungracious, that it is a
+painful and disconcerting deformity. The only real shadow of early
+shyness is the quite disproportionate amount of unhappiness that
+conscious gaucherie brings with it. Two incidents connected with a
+ceremony most fruitful in nervousness come back to my mind.
+
+When I was an Eton boy, I was staying with a country squire, a most
+courteous old gentleman with a high temper. The first morning, I
+contrived to come down a minute or two late for prayers. There was
+no chair for me. The Squire suspended his reading of the Bible with
+a deadly sort of resignation, and made a gesture to the portly
+butler. That functionary rose from his own chair, and with loudly
+creaking boots carried it across the room for my acceptance. I sat
+down, covered with confusion. The butler returned; and two footmen,
+who were sitting on a little form, made reluctant room for him. The
+butler sat down on one end of the form, unfortunately before his
+equipoise, the second footman, had taken his place at the other
+end. The result was that the form tipped up, and a cataract of
+flunkies poured down upon the floor. There was a ghastly silence;
+then the Gadarene herd slowly recovered itself, and resumed its
+place. The Squire read the chapter in an accent of suppressed fury,
+while the remainder of the party, with handkerchiefs pressed to
+their faces, made the most unaccountable sounds and motions for the
+rest of the proceeding. I was really comparatively guiltless, but
+the shadow of that horrid event sensibly clouded the whole of my
+visit.
+
+I was only a spectator of the other event. We had assembled for
+prayers in the dimly-lighted hall of the house of a church
+dignitary, and the chapter had begun, when a man of almost
+murderous shyness, who was a guest, opened his bedroom door and
+came down the stairs. Our host suspended his reading. The unhappy
+man came down, but, instead of slinking to his place, went and
+stood in front of the fire, under the impression that the
+proceedings had not taken shape, and addressed some remarks upon
+the weather to his hostess. In the middle of one of his sentences,
+he suddenly divined the situation, on seeing the row of servants
+sitting in a thievish corner of the hall. He took his seat with the
+air of a man driving to the guillotine, and I do not think I ever
+saw any one so much upset as he was for the remainder of his stay.
+Of course it may be said that a sense of humour should have saved a
+man from such a collapse of moral force, but a sense of humour
+requires to be very strong to save a man from the sense of having
+made a conspicuous fool of himself.
+
+I would add one more small reminiscence, of an event from which I
+can hardly say with honesty that I have yet quite recovered,
+although it took place nearly thirty years ago. I went, as a
+schoolboy, with my parents, to stay at a very big country house,
+the kind of place to which I was little used, where the advent of a
+stately footman to take away my clothes in the morning used to fill
+me with misery. The first evening there was a big dinner-party. I
+found myself sitting next my delightful and kindly hostess, my
+father being on the other side of her. All went well till dessert,
+when an amiable, long-haired spaniel came to my side to beg of me.
+I had nothing but grapes on my plate, and purely out of compliment
+I offered him one. He at once took it in his mouth, and hurried to
+a fine white fur rug in front of the hearth, where he indulged in
+some unaccountable convulsions, rolling himself about and growling
+in an ecstasy of delight. My host, an irascible man, looked round,
+and then said: "Who the devil has given that dog a grape?" He added
+to my father, by way of explanation, "The fact is that if he can
+get hold of a grape, he rolls it on that rug, and it is no end of a
+nuisance to get the stain out." I sat crimson with guilt, and was
+just about to falter out a confession, when my hostess looked up,
+and, seeing what had happened, said, "It was me, Frank--I forgot
+for the moment what I was doing." My gratitude for this angelic
+intervention was so great that I had not even the gallantry to own
+up, and could only repay my protectress with an intense and lasting
+devotion. I have no doubt that she explained matters afterwards to
+our host; and I contrived to murmur my thanks later in the evening.
+But the shock had been a terrible one, and taught me not only
+wisdom, but the Christian duty of intervening, if I could, to save
+the shy from their sins and sufferings.
+
+
+     "Taught by the Power that pities me,
+       I learn to pity them."
+
+
+But the consideration that emerges from these reminiscences is the
+somewhat bewildering one, that shyness is a thing which seems to be
+punished, both by immediate discomfort and by subsequent fantastic
+remorse, far more heavily than infinitely more serious moral
+lapses. The repentance that follows sin can hardly be more poignant
+than the agonising sense of guilt which steals over the waking
+consciousness on the morning that follows some such social lapse.
+In fact it must be confessed that most of us dislike appearing
+fools far more than we dislike feeling knaves; so that one wonders
+whether one does not dread the ridicule and disapproval of society
+more than one dreads the sense of a lapse from morality; the
+philosophical outcome of which would seem to be that the verdict of
+society upon our actions is at the base of morality. We may feel
+assured that the result of moral lapses will ultimately be that we
+shall have to face the wrath of our Creator; but one hopes that
+side by side with justice will be found a merciful allowance for
+the force of temptation. But the final judgment is in any case not
+imminent, while the result of a social lapse is that we have to
+continue to face a disapproving and even a contemptuous circle, who
+will remember our failure with malicious pleasure, and whose sense
+of justice will not be tempered by any appreciable degree of mercy.
+Here again is a discouraging circumstance, that when we call to
+mind some similarly compromising and grotesque adventure in the
+life of one of our friends, in spite of the fact that we well know
+the distress that the incident must have caused him, we still
+continue to hug, and even to repeat, our recollection of the
+occasion with a rich sense of joy. Is it that we do not really
+desire the peace and joy of others? It would seem so. How many of
+us are not conscious of feeling extremely friendly and helpful when
+our friend is in sorrow, or difficulty, or discredit, and yet of
+having no taste for standing by and applauding when our friend is
+joyful and successful! There is nothing, it seems, that we can
+render to our friend in the latter case, except the praise of which
+he has already had enough!
+
+It seems then that the process of anatomising the nature and
+philosophy of shyness only ends in stripping off, one by one, as
+from an onion, the decent integuments of the human spirit, and
+revealing it every moment more and more in its native rankness. Let
+me forbear, consoling myself with the thought that the qualities of
+human beings are not meant to be taken up one by one, like coins
+from a tray, and scrutinised; but that what matters is the general
+effect, the blending, the grouping, the mellowed surface, the
+warped line. I was only yesterday in an old church, where I saw an
+ancient font-cover--a sort of carved extinguisher--and some dark
+panels of a rood-screen. They had been, both cover and panels,
+coarsely and brightly painted and gilt; and, horrible to reflect,
+it flashed upon me that they must have once been both glaring and
+vulgar. Yet to-day the dim richness of the effect, the dints, the
+scaling-off of the flakes, the fading of the pigment, the dulling
+of the gold, were incomparable; and I began to wonder if perhaps
+that was not what happened to us in life; and that though we
+foolishly regretted the tarnishing of the bright surfaces of soul
+and body with our passions and tempers and awkwardnesses and
+feeblenesses, yet perhaps it was, after all, that we were taking on
+an unsuspected beauty, and making ourselves fit, some far-off day,
+for the Communion of Saints!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+EQUALITY
+
+
+
+
+
+It is often said that the Anglo-Saxon races suffer from a lack of
+ideals, that they do not hold enough things sacred. But there is
+assuredly one thing which the most elementary and barbarous Anglo-
+Saxon holds sacred, beyond creed and Decalogue and fairplay and
+morality, and that is property. At inquests, for instance, it may
+be noted how often inquiries are solicitously made, not whether the
+deceased had religious difficulties or was disappointed in love,
+but whether he had any financial worries. We hold our own property
+to be very sacred indeed, and our respect for other men's rights in
+the matter is based on the fact that we wish our own rights to be
+respected. If I were asked what other ideals were held widely
+sacred in England and America I should find it very difficult to
+reply. I think that there is a good deal of interest taken in
+America in education and culture; whereas in England I do not
+believe that there is very much interest taken in either; almost
+the only thing which is valued in England, romantically, and with a
+kind of enthusiasm, besides property, is social distinction; the
+democracy in England is sometimes said to be indignant at the
+existence of so much social privilege; the word "class" is said to
+be abhorrent to the democrat; but the only classes that he detests
+are the classes above him in the social scale, and the democrat is
+extremely indignant if he is assigned to a social station which he
+considers to be below his own. I have met democrats who despise and
+contemn the social tradition of the so-called upper classes, but I
+have never met a democrat who is not much more infuriated if it is
+supposed that he has not social traditions of his own vastly
+superior to the social traditions of the lowest grade of precarious
+mendicity. The reason why socialism has never had any great hold in
+England is because equality is only a word, and in no sense a real
+sentiment in England. The reason why members of the lowest class in
+England are not as a rule convinced socialists is because their one
+ambition is to become members of the middle-class, and to have
+property of their own; and while the sense of personal possession
+is so strong as it is, no socialism worthy of the name has a
+chance. It is possible for any intelligent, virtuous, and capable
+member of the lower class to transfer himself to the middle class;
+and once there he does not favour any system of social equality.
+Socialism can never prevail as a political system, until we get a
+majority of disinterested men, who do not want to purchase freedom
+from daily work by acquiring property, and who desire the
+responsibility rather than the influence of administrative office.
+But administrative office is looked upon in England as an important
+if indirect factor in acquiring status and personal property for
+oneself and one's friends.
+
+I am myself a sincere believer in socialism; that is to say, I do
+not question the right of society to deprive me of my private
+property if it chooses to do so. It does choose to do so to a
+certain extent through the medium of the income-tax. Such property
+as I possess has, I think it as well to state, been entirely
+acquired by my own exertions. I have never inherited a penny, or
+received any money except what I have earned. I am quite willing to
+admit that my work was more highly paid than it deserved; but I
+shall continue to cling tenaciously to that property until I am
+convinced that it will be applied for the benefit of every one; I
+should not think it just if it was taken from me for the benefit of
+the idle and incompetent; and I should be reluctant to part with it
+unless I felt sure that it would pass into the hands of those who
+are as just-minded and disinterested as myself, and be fairly
+administered. I should not think it just if it were taken from me
+by people who intended to misuse it, as I have misused it, for
+their own personal gratification.
+
+It was made a matter of merriment in the case of William Morris
+that he preached the doctrines of socialism while he was a
+prosperous manufacturer; but I see that he was perfectly
+consistent. There is no justice, for instance, about the principle
+of disarmament, unless all nations loyally disarm at the same time.
+A person cannot be called upon to strip himself of his personal
+property for disinterested reasons, if he feels that he is
+surrounded by people who would use the spoils for their own
+interest. The process must be carried out by a sincere majority,
+who may then coerce the selfish minority. I have no conception what
+I should do with my money if I determined that I ought not to
+possess it. It ought not to be applied to any public purpose,
+because under a socialist regime all public institutions would be
+supported by the public, and they ought not to depend upon private
+generosity. Still less do I think that it ought to be divided among
+individuals, because, if they were disinterested persons, they
+ought to refuse to accept it. The only good reason I should have
+for disencumbering myself of my possessions would be that I might
+set a good example of the simple life, by working hard for a
+livelihood, which is exactly what I do; and my only misfortune is
+that my earnings and the interest of my accumulated earnings
+produce a sum which is far larger than the average man ought to
+possess. Thus the difficulty is a very real one. Moreover the evil
+of personal property is that it tends to emphasise class-
+distinctions and to give the possessors of it a sense of undue
+superiority. Now I am democratic enough to maintain that I have no
+sense whatever of personal superiority. I do not allow my
+possession of property to give me a life of vacuous amusement, for
+the simple reason that my work amuses me far more than any other
+form of occupation, If it is asked why I tend to live by preference
+among what may be called my social equals, I reply that the only
+people one is at ease with are the people whose social traditions
+are the same as one's own, for the simple reason that one does not
+then have to think about social traditions at all. I do not think
+my social traditions are better than the social traditions of any
+other stratum of society, whether it be described as above or below
+my own; all I would say is that they are different from the social
+traditions of other strata, and I much prefer to live without
+having to consider such matters at all. The manners of the upper
+middle-class to which scientifically I belong, are different from
+the manners of the upper, lower-middle, and lower class, and I feel
+out of my element in the upper class, just as I feel out of my
+element in the lower class. Of course if I were perfectly simple-
+minded and sincere, this would not be so; but, as it is, I am at
+ease with professional persons of my own standing; I understand
+their point-of-view without any need of explanation; in any class
+but my own, I am aware of the constant strain of trying to grasp
+another point-of-view; and to speak frankly, it is not worth the
+trouble. I do not at all desire to migrate out of my own class, and
+I have never been able to sympathise with people who did. The
+motive for doing so is not generally a good one, though it is of
+course possible to conceive a high-minded aristocrat who from
+motives based upon our common humanity might desire to apprehend
+the point-of-view of an artisan, or a high-minded artisan who for
+the same motive desired to apprehend the point-of-view of an earl.
+But one requires to feel sure that this is based upon a strong
+sense of charity and responsibility, and I can only say that I have
+not found that the desire to migrate into a different class is
+generally based upon these qualities.
+
+The question is, what ought a man who believes sincerely in the
+principle of equality to do in the matter, if he is situated as I
+am situated? What I admire and desire in life is friendly contact
+with my fellows, interesting work, leisure for following the
+pursuits I enjoy, such as art and literature. I honestly confess
+that I am not interested in what are called Social Problems, or
+rather I am not at all interested in the sort of people who study
+them. Such problems have hardly reached the vital stage; they are
+in the highly technical stage, and are mixed up with such things as
+political economy, politics, organisation, and so forth, which, to
+be perfectly frank, are to me blighting and dreary objects of
+study. I honour profoundly the people who engage in such pursuits;
+but life is not long enough to take up work, however valuable, from
+a sense of duty, if one realises one's own unfitness for such
+labours. I wish with all my heart that all classes cared equally
+for the things which I love. I should like to be able to talk
+frankly and unaffectedly about books, and interesting people, and
+the beauties of nature, and abstract topics of a mild kind, with
+any one I happened to meet. But, as a rule, to speak frankly, I
+find that people of what I must call the lower class are not
+interested in these things; people in what I will call the upper
+class are faintly interested, in a horrible and condescending way,
+in them--which is worse than no interest at all. A good many people
+in my own class are impatient of them, and think of them as
+harmless recreations; I fall back upon a few like-minded friends,
+with whom I can talk easily and unreservedly of such things,
+without being thought priggish or donnish or dilettanteish or
+unintelligible. The subjects in which I find the majority of people
+interested are personal gossip, money, success, business, politics.
+I love personal gossip, but that can only be enjoyed in a circle
+well acquainted with each other's faults and foibles; and I do not
+sincerely care for talking about the other matters I have
+mentioned. Hitherto I have always had a certain amount of
+educational responsibility, and that has furnished an abundance of
+material for pleasant talk and interesting thoughts; but then I
+have always suffered from the Anglo-Saxon failing of disliking
+responsibility except in the case of those for whom one's efforts
+are definitely pledged on strict business principles. I cannot
+deliberately assume a sense of responsibility towards people in
+general; to do that implies a sense of the value of one's own
+influence and example, which I have never possessed; and, indeed, I
+have always heartily disliked the manifestation of it in others.
+Indeed, I firmly believe that the best and most fruitful part of a
+man's influence, is the influence of which he is wholly
+unconscious; and I am quite sure that no one who has a strong sense
+of responsibility to the world in general can advance the cause of
+equality, because such a sense implies at all events a
+consciousness of moral superiority. Moreover, my educational
+experience leads me to believe that one cannot do much to form
+character. The most one can do is to guard the young against
+pernicious influences, and do one's best to recommend one's own
+disinterested enthusiasms. One cannot turn a violet into a rose by
+any horticultural effort; one can only see that the violet or the
+rose has the best chance of what is horribly called self-
+effectuation.
+
+My own belief is that these great ideas like Equality and Justice
+are things which, like poetry, are born and cannot be made. That a
+number of earnest people should be thinking about them shows that
+they are in the air; but the interest felt in them is the sign and
+not the cause of their increase. I believe that one must go
+forwards, trying to avoid anything that is consciously harsh or
+pompous or selfish or base, and the great ideas will take care of
+themselves.
+
+The two great obvious difficulties which seem to me to lie at the
+root of all schemes for producing a system of social equality are
+first the radical inequality of character, temperament, and
+equipment in human beings. No system can ever hope to be a
+practical system unless we can eliminate the possibility of
+children being born, some of them perfectly qualified for life and
+citizenship, and others hopelessly disqualified. If such
+differences were the result of environment it would be a remediable
+thing. But one can have a strong, vigorous, naturally temperate
+child born and brought up under the meanest and most sordid
+conditions, and, on the other hand, a thoroughly worthless and
+detestable person may be the child of high-minded, well-educated
+people, with every social advantage. My work as a practical
+educationalist enforced this upon me. One would find a boy, born
+under circumstances as favourable for the production of virtue and
+energy as any socialistic system could provide, who was really only
+fitted for the lowest kind of mechanical work, and whose instincts
+were utterly gross. Even if the State could practise a kind of
+refined Mendelism, it would be impossible to guard against the
+influences of heredity. If one traces back the hereditary
+influences of a child for ten generations, it will be found that he
+has upwards of two thousand progenitors, any one of whom may give
+him a bias.
+
+And secondly, I cannot see that any system of socialism is
+consistent with the system of the family. The parents in a
+socialistic state can only be looked upon as brood stock, and the
+nurture of the rising generation must be committed to some State
+organisation, if one is to secure an equality of environing
+influences. Of course, this is done to a certain extent by the
+boarding-schools of the upper classes; and here again my experience
+has shown me that the system, though a good one for the majority,
+is not the best system invariably for types with marked
+originality--the very type that one most desires to propagate.
+
+These are, of course, very crude and elementary objections to the
+socialistic scheme; all that I say is that until these difficulties
+seem more capable of solution, I cannot throw myself with any
+interest into the speculation; I cannot continue in the path of
+logical deduction, while the postulates and axioms remain so
+unsound.
+
+What then can a man who has resources that he cannot wisely dispose
+of, and happiness that he cannot impart to others, but yet who
+would only too gladly share his gladness with the world, do to
+advance the cause of the general weal? Must he plunge into
+activities for which he has no aptitude or inclination, and which
+have as their aim objects for which he does not think that the
+world is ripe? Every one will remember the figure of Mrs. Pardiggle
+in Bleak House, that raw-boned lady who enjoyed hard work, and did
+not know what it was to be tired, who went about rating inefficient
+people, and "boned" her children's pocket-money for charitable
+objects. It seems to me that many of the people who work at social
+reforms do so because, like Mrs. Pardiggle, they enjoy hard work
+and love ordering other people about. In a society wisely and
+rationally organised, there would be no room for Mrs. Pardiggle at
+all; the question is whether things must first pass through the
+Pardiggle stage. I do not in my heart believe it. Mrs. Pardiggle
+seems to me to be not part of the cure of the disease, but rather
+one of the ugliest of its symptoms. I think that she is on the
+wrong tack altogether, and leading other people astray. I do know
+some would-be social reformers, whom I respect and commiserate with
+all my heart, who see what is amiss, and have no idea how to mend
+it, and who lose themselves, like Hamlet, in a sort of hopeless
+melancholy about it all, with a deep-seated desire to give others a
+kind of happiness which they ought to desire, but which, as a
+matter of fact, they do not desire. Such men are often those upon
+whom early youth broke, like a fresh wave, with an incomparable
+sense of rapture, in the thought of all the beauty and loveliness
+of nature and art; and who lived for a little in a Paradise of
+delicious experiences and fine emotions, believing that there must
+be some strange mistake, and that every one must in reality desire
+what seemed so utterly desirable; and then, as life went on, there
+fell upon these the shadow of the harsh facts of life; the
+knowledge that the majority of the human race had no part or lot in
+such visions, but loved rather food and drink and comfort and money
+and rude mirth; who did not care a pin what happened to other
+people, or how frail and suffering beings spent their lives, so
+long as they themselves were healthy and jolly. Then that shadow
+deepens and thickens, until the sad dreamers do one of two things--
+either immure themselves in a tiny scented garden of their own, and
+try to drown the insistent noises without; or, on the other hand,
+if they are of the nobler sort, lose heart and hope, and even
+forfeit their own delight in things that are sweet and generous and
+pleasant and pure. A mournful and inextricable dilemma!
+
+Perhaps one or two of such visionaries, who are made of sterner
+stuff, have deliberately embarked, hopefully and courageously, upon
+the Pardiggle path; they have tried absurd experiments, like
+Ruskin, in road-making and the formation of Guilds; they have taken
+to journalism and committees like William Morris. But they have
+been baffled. I do not mean to say that such lives of splendid
+renunciation may not have a deep moral effect; but, on the other
+hand, it is little gain to humanity if a richly-endowed spirit
+deserts a piece of work that he can do, to toil unsuccessfully at a
+piece of work that cannot yet be done at all.
+
+I myself believe that when Society is capable of using property and
+the better pleasures, it will arise and take them quietly and
+firmly: and as for the fine spirits who would try to organise
+things before they are even sorted, well, they have done a noble,
+ineffectual thing, because they could not do otherwise; and their
+desire to mend what is amiss is at all events a sign that the
+impulse is there, that the sun has brightened upon the peaks before
+it could warm the valleys.
+
+I was reading to-day The Irrational Knot, an early book by Mr.
+Bernard Shaw, whom I whole-heartedly admire because of his courage
+and good-humour and energy. That book represents a type of the New
+Man, such as I suppose Mr. Shaw would have us all to be; the book,
+in spite of its radiant wit, is a melancholy one, because the
+novelist penetrates so clearly past the disguises of humanity, and
+takes delight in dragging the mean, ugly, shuddering, naked
+creature into the open. The New Man himself is entirely vigorous,
+cheerful, affectionate, sensible, and robust. He is afraid of
+nothing and shocked by nothing. I think it would have been better
+if he had been a little more shocked, not in a conventional way,
+but at the hideous lapses and failures of even generous and frank
+people. He is too hard and confident to be an apostle. He does not
+lead the flock like a shepherd, but helps them along, like Father-
+o'-Flynn, with his stick. I would have gone to Conolly, the hero of
+the book, to get me out of a difficulty, but I could not have
+confided to him what I really held sacred. Moreover the view of
+money, as the one essential world-force, so frankly confessed in
+the book, puzzled me. I do not think that money is ever more than a
+weapon in the hands of a man, or a convenient screening wall, and
+the New Man ought to have neither weapons nor walls, except his
+vigour and serenity of spirit. Again the New Man is too fond of
+saying what he thinks, and doing what he chooses; and, in the new
+earth, that independent instinct will surely be tempered by a
+sense, every bit as instinctive, of the rights of other people. But
+I suppose Mr. Shaw's point is that if you cannot mend the world,
+you had better make it serve you, as in its folly and debility it
+will, if you bully it enough. I suppose that Mr. Shaw would say
+that the brutality of his hero is the shadow thrown on him by the
+vileness of the world, and that if we were all alike courageous and
+industrious and good-humoured, that shadow would disappear.
+
+And this, I suppose, is after all the secret; that the world is not
+going to be mended from without, but is mending itself from within;
+and thus that the best kind of socialism is really the highest
+individualism, in which a man leaves legislation to follow and
+express, as it assuredly does, the growth of emotion, and sets
+himself, in his own corner, to be as quiet and disinterested and
+kindly as he can, choosing what is honest and pure, and rejecting
+what is base and vile; and this is after all the socialism of
+Christ; only we are all in such a hurry, and think it more
+effective to clap a ruffian into gaol than to suffer his violence--
+the result of which process is to make men sympathise with the
+ruffian--while, if we endure his violence, we touch a spring in the
+hearts of ruffian and spectators alike, which is more fruitful of
+good than the criminal's infuriated seclusion, and his just quarrel
+with the world. Of course the real way is that we should each of us
+abandon our own desires for private ease and convenience, in the
+light of the hope that those who come after will be easier and
+happier; whereas the Pardiggle reformer literally enjoys the
+presence of the refuse, because his broom has something to sweep
+away.
+
+And the strangest thing of all is that we move forward, in a
+bewildered company, knowing that our every act and word is the
+resultant of ancient forces, not one of which we can change or
+modify in the least degree, while we live under the instinctive
+delusion, which survives the severest logic, that we can always and
+at every moment do to a certain extent what we choose to do. What
+the truth is that connects and underlies these two phenomena, we
+have not the least conception; but meanwhile each remains perfectly
+obvious and apparently true. To myself, the logical belief is
+infinitely the more hopeful and sustaining of the two; for if the
+movement of progress is in the hands of God, we are at all events
+taking our mysterious and wonderful part in a great dream that is
+being evolved, far more vast and amazing than we can comprehend;
+whereas if I felt that it was left to ourselves to choose, and
+that, hampered as we feel ourselves to be by innumerable chains of
+circumstance, we could yet indeed originate action and impede the
+underlying Will, I should relapse into despair before a problem
+full of sickening complexities and admitted failures. Meanwhile, I
+do what I am given to do; I perceive what I am allowed to perceive;
+I suffer what is appointed for me to suffer; but all with a hope
+that I may yet see the dawn break upon the sunlit sea, beyond the
+dark hills of time.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE DRAMATIC SENSE
+
+
+
+
+
+The other day I was walking along a road at Cambridge, engulfed in
+a torrent of cloth-capped and coated young men all flowing one way--
+going to see or, as it is now called, to "watch" a match. We met a
+little girl walking with her governess in the opposite direction.
+There was a baleful light of intellect in the child's eye, and a
+preponderance of forehead combined with a certain lankness of hair
+betrayed, I fancy, an ingenuous academical origin. The girl was
+looking round her with an unholy sense of superiority, and as we
+passed she said to her governess in a clear-cut, complacent tone,
+"We're quite exceptional, aren't we?" To which the governess
+replied briskly, "Laura, don't be ridiculous!" To which exhortation
+Laura replied with self-satisfied pertinacity, "No, but we ARE
+exceptional, aren't we?"
+
+Ah, Miss Laura, I thought to myself, you are one of those people
+with a dramatic sense of your own importance. It will probably make
+you very happy, and an absolutely insufferable person! I have
+little doubt that the tiny prig was saying to herself, "I dare say
+that all these men are wondering who is the clever-looking little
+girl who is walking in the opposite direction to the match, and has
+probably something better to do than look on at matches." It is a
+great question whether one ought to wish people to nourish
+illusions about themselves, or whether one ought to desire such
+illusions to be dispelled. They certainly add immensely to people's
+happiness, but on the other hand, if life is an educative progress,
+and if the aim of human beings is or ought to be the attainment of
+moral perfection, then the sooner that these illusions are
+dispelled the better. It is one of the many questions which depend
+upon the great fact as to whether our identity is prolonged after
+death. If identity is not prolonged, then one would wish people to
+maintain every illusion which makes life happier; and there is
+certainly no illusion which brings people such supreme and
+unfailing contentment as the sense of their own significance in the
+world. This illusion rises superior to all failures and
+disappointments. It makes the smallest and simplest act seem
+momentous. The world for such persons is merely a theatre of gazers
+in which they discharge their part appropriately and successfully.
+I know several people who have the sense very strongly, who are
+conscious from morning till night, in all that they do or say, of
+an admiring audience; and who, even if their circle is wholly
+indifferent, find food for delight in the consciousness of how
+skilfully and satisfactorily they discharge their duties. I
+remember once hearing a worthy clergyman, of no particular force,
+begin a speech at a missionary meeting by saying that people had
+often asked him what was the secret of his smile; and that he had
+always replied that he was unaware that his smile had any special
+quality; but that if it indeed was so, and it would be idle to
+pretend that a good many people had not noticed it, it was that he
+imported a resolute cheerfulness into all that he did. The man, as
+I have said, was not in any way distinguished, but there can be no
+doubt that the thought of his heavenly smile was a very sustaining
+one, and that the sense of responsibility that the possession of
+such a characteristic gave him, undoubtedly made him endeavour to
+smile like the Cheshire Cat, when he did not feel particularly
+cheerful.
+
+It is not, however, common to find people make such a frank and
+candid confession of their superiority. The feeling is generally
+kept for more or less private consumption. The underlying self-
+satisfaction generally manifests itself, for instance, with people
+who have no real illusions, say, about their personal appearance,
+in leading them to feel, after a chance glance at themselves in a
+mirror, that they really do not look so bad in certain lights. A
+dull preacher will repeat to himself, with a private relish, a
+sentence out of a very commonplace discourse of his own, and think
+that that was really an original thought, and that he gave it an
+impressive emphasis; or a student will make a very unimportant
+discovery, press it upon the attention of some great authority on
+the subject, extort a half-hearted assent, and will then go about
+saying, "I mentioned my discovery to Professor A----; he was quite
+excited about it, and urged the immediate publication of it." Or a
+commonplace woman will give a tea-party, and plume herself upon the
+eclat with which it went off. The materials are ready to hand in
+any life; the quality is not the same as priggishness, though it is
+closely akin to it; it no doubt exists in the minds of many really
+successful people, and if it is not flagrantly betrayed, it is
+often an important constituent of their success. But the happy part
+of it is that the dramatic sense is often freely bestowed upon the
+most inconspicuous and unintelligent persons, and fills their lives
+with a consciousness of romance and joy. It concerns itself mostly
+with public appearances, upon however minute a scale, and thus it
+is a rich source of consolation and self-congratulation. Even if it
+falls upon one who has no social gifts whatever, whose circle of
+friends tends to diminish as life goes on, whose invitations tend
+to decrease, it still frequently survives in a consciousness of
+being profoundly interesting, and consoles itself by believing that
+under different circumstances and in a more perceptive society the
+fact would have received a wider recognition.
+
+But, after all, as with many things, much depends upon the way that
+illusions are cherished. When this dramatic sense is bestowed upon
+a heavy-handed, imperceptive, egotistical person, it becomes a
+terrible affliction to other people, unless indeed the onlooker
+possesses the humorous spectatorial curiosity; when it becomes a
+matter of delight to find a person behaving characteristically,
+striking the hour punctually, and being, as Mr. Bennet thought of
+Mr. Collins, fully as absurd as one had hoped. It then becomes a
+pleasure, and not necessarily an unkind one, because it gives the
+deepest satisfaction to the victim, to tickle the egotist as one
+might tickle a trout, to draw him on by innocent questions, to
+induce him to unfold and wave his flag high in the air. I had once
+a worthy acquaintance whose occasional visits were to me a source
+of infinite pleasure--and I may add that I have no doubt that they
+gave him a pleasure quite as acute--because he only required the
+simplest fly to be dropped on the pool, when he came heavily to the
+top and swallowed it. I have heard him deplore the vast size of his
+correspondence, the endless claims made upon him for counsel. I
+have heard him say with a fatuous smile that there were literally
+hundreds of people who day by day brought their pitcher of self-
+pity to be filled at his pump of sympathy: that he wished he could
+have a little rest, but that he supposed that it was a plain duty
+for him to minister thus to human needs, though it took it out of
+him terribly. I suppose that some sort of experience must have lain
+behind this confession, for my friend was a decidedly moral man,
+and would not tell a deliberate untruth; the only difficulty was
+that I could not conceive where he kept his stores of sympathy,
+because I had never heard him speak of any subject except himself,
+and I suppose that his method of consolation, if he was consulted,
+was to relate some striking instance out of his own experience in
+which grace triumphed over nature.
+
+Sometimes, again, the dramatic sense takes the form of an
+exaggerated self-depreciation. I was reading the other day the
+life of a very devoted clergyman, who said on his death-bed to one
+standing by him, "If anything is done in memory of me, let a plain
+slab be placed on my grave with my initials and the date, and the
+words, 'the unworthy priest of this parish'--that must be all."
+
+The man's modesty was absolutely sincere; yet what a strange
+confusion of modesty and vanity after all! If the humility had been
+PERFECTLY unaffected, he would have felt that the man who really
+merited such a description deserved no memorial at all; or again,
+if he had had no sense of credit, he would have left the choice of
+a memorial to any who might wish to commemorate him. If one
+analyses the feeling underneath the words, it will be seen to
+consist of a desire to be remembered, a hope almost amounting to a
+belief that his work was worthy of commemoration, coupled with a
+sincere desire not to exaggerate its value. And yet silence would
+have attested his humility far more effectually than any calculated
+speech!
+
+The dramatic sense is not a thing which necessarily increases as
+life goes on; some people have it from the very beginning. I have
+an elderly friend who is engaged on a very special sort of
+scientific research of a wholly unimportant kind. He is just as
+incapable as my sympathetic friend of talking about anything except
+his own interests; "You don't mind my speaking about my work?" he
+says with a brilliant smile; "you see it means so much to me." And
+then, after explaining some highly technical detail, he will add:
+"Of course this seems to you very minute, but it is work that has
+got to be done by some one; it is only laying a little stone in the
+temple of science. Of course I often feel I should like to spread
+my wings and take a wider flight, but I do seem to have a special
+faculty for this kind of work, and I suppose it is my duty to stick
+to it." And he will pass his hand wearily over his brow, and
+expound another technical detail. He apologises ceaselessly for
+dwelling on his own work; but in no place or company have I ever
+heard him do otherwise; and he is certainly one of the happiest
+people I know.
+
+But, on the other hand, it is a rather charming quality to find in
+combination with a certain balance of mind. Unless a man is
+interesting to himself he cannot easily be interesting to others;
+there is a youthful and ingenuous sense of romance and drama which
+can exist side by side with both modesty and sympathy, somewhat
+akin to the habit common to imaginative children of telling
+themselves long stories in which they are the heroes of the tale.
+But people who have this faculty are generally mildly ashamed of
+it; they do not believe that their fantastic adventures are likely
+to happen. They only think how pleasant it would be if things
+arranged themselves so. It all depends whether such dramatisation
+is looked upon in the light of an amusement, or whether it is
+applied in a heavy-handed manner to real life. Imaginative
+children, who have true sympathy and affection as well, generally
+end by finding the real world, as they grow up into it, such an
+astonishing and interesting place, that their horizon extends, and
+they apply to other people, to their relationships and meetings,
+the zest and interest that they formerly applied only to
+themselves. The kind of temperament that falls a helpless victim to
+dramatic egotism is generally the priggish and self-satisfied man,
+who has a fervent belief in his own influence, and the duty of
+exercising it on others. Most of us, one may say gratefully, are
+kept humble by our failures and even by our sins. If the path of
+the transgressor is hard, the path of the righteous man is often
+harder. If a man is born free from grosser temptations, vigorous,
+active, robust, the chances are ten to one that he falls into the
+snare of self-righteousness and moral complacency. He passes
+judgment on others, he compares himself favourably with them. A
+spice of unpopularity gives him a still more fatal bias, because he
+thinks that he is persecuted for his goodness, when he is only
+disliked for his superiority. He becomes content to warn people,
+and if they reject his advice and get into difficulties, he is not
+wholly ill-pleased. Whereas the diffident person, who tremblingly
+assumes the responsibility for some one else's life, is beset by
+miserable regrets if his penitent escapes him, and attributes it to
+his own mismanagement. The truth is that moral indignation is a
+luxury that very few people can afford to indulge in. And if it is
+true that a rich man can with difficulty enter the kingdom of
+heaven, it is also true that the dramatic man finds it still more
+difficult. He is impervious to criticism, because he bears it with
+meekness. He has so good a conscience that he cannot believe
+himself in the wrong. If he makes an egregious blunder, he says to
+himself with infinite solemnity that it is right that his self-
+satisfaction should be tenderly purged away, and glories in his own
+humility. A far wholesomer frame of mind is that of the philosopher
+who said, when complimented on the mellowness that advancing years
+had brought him, that he still reserved to himself the right of
+damning things in general. Because the truth is that the things
+which really discipline us are the painful, dreary, intolerable
+things of life, the results of one's own meanness, stupidity, and
+weakness, or the black catastrophes which sometimes overwhelm us,
+and not the things which we piously and cheerfully accept as
+ministering to our consciousness of worth and virtue.
+
+If I say that the dramatic failing is apt to be more common among
+the clergy than among ordinary mortals, it is because the clerical
+vocation is one that tempts men who have this temperament strongly
+developed to enter it, and afterwards provides a good deal of
+sustenance to the particular form of vanity that lies behind the
+temptation. The dramatic sense loves public appearances and
+trappings, processions and ceremonies. The instinctive dramatist,
+who is also a clergyman, tends to think of himself as moving to his
+place in the sanctuary in a solemn progress, with a worn spiritual
+aspect, robed as a son of Aaron. He likes to picture himself as
+standing in the pulpit pale with emotion, his eye gathering fire as
+he bears witness to the truth or testifies against sin. He likes to
+believe that his words and intonations have a thrilling quality, a
+fire or a delicacy, as the case may be, which scorch or penetrate
+the sin-burdened heart. It may be thought that this criticism is
+unduly severe; I do not for a moment say that the attitude is
+universal, but it is commoner, I am sure, than one would like to
+believe; and neither do I say that it is inconsistent with deep
+earnestness and vital seriousness. I would go further, and maintain
+that such a dramatic consciousness is a valuable quality for men
+who have to sustain at all a spectacular part. It very often lends
+impressiveness to a man, and convinces those who hear and see him
+of his sincerity; while a man who thinks nothing of appearances
+often fails to convince his audience that he cares more for his
+message than for the fact that he is the mouthpiece of it. I find
+it very difficult to say whether it is well for people who cherish
+such illusions about their personal impressiveness to get rid of
+such illusions, when personal impressiveness is a real factor in
+their success. To do a thing really well it is essential to have a
+substantial confidence in one's aptitude for the task. And
+undoubtedly diffidence and humility, however sincere, are a bad
+outfit for a man in a public position. I am inclined to think that
+self-confidence, and a certain degree of self-satisfaction, are
+valuable assets, so long as a man believes primarily in the
+importance of what he has to say and do, and only secondarily in
+his own power of, and fitness for, saying and doing it.
+
+There is an interesting story--I do not vouch for the truth of it--
+that used to be told of Cardinal Manning, who undoubtedly had a
+strong sense of dramatic effect. He was putting on his robes one
+evening in the sacristy of the Cathedral at Westminster, when a
+noise was heard at the door, as of one who was determined on
+forcing an entrance in spite of the remonstrances of the
+attendants. In a moment a big, strongly-built person, looking like
+a prosperous man of business, labouring under a vehement and
+passionate emotion, came quickly in, looked about him, and
+advancing to Manning, poured out a series of indignant reproaches.
+"You have got hold of my boy," he said, "with your hypocritical and
+sneaking methods; you have made him a Roman Catholic; you have
+ruined the happiness and peace of our home; you have broken his
+mother's heart, and overwhelmed us in misery." He went on in this
+strain at some length. Manning, who was standing in his cassock,
+drew himself up in an attitude of majestic dignity, and waited
+until the intruder's eloquence had exhausted itself, and had ended
+with threatening gestures. Some of those present would have
+intervened, but Manning with an air of command waved them back, and
+then, pointing his hand at the man, he said: "Now, sir, I have
+allowed you to have your say, and you shall hear me in reply. You
+have traduced Holy Church, you have broken in upon the Sanctuary,
+you have uttered vile and abominable slanders against the Faith;
+and I tell you," he added, pausing for an instant with flashing
+eyes and marble visage, "I tell you that within three months you
+will be a Catholic yourself." He then turned sharply on his heel
+and went on with his preparations. The man was utterly discomfited;
+he made as though he would speak, but was unable to find words; he
+looked round, and eventually slunk out of the sacristy in silence.
+
+One of those present ventured to ask Manning afterwards about the
+strange scene. "Had the Cardinal," he inquired, "any sudden
+premonition that the man himself would adopt the Faith in so short
+a time?" Manning smiled indulgently, putting his hand on the
+other's shoulder, and said: "Ah, my dear friend, who shall say? You
+see, it was a very awkward moment, and I had to deal with the
+situation as I best could."
+
+That was an instance of supreme presence of mind and great dramatic
+force; but one is not sure whether it was a wholly apostolical
+method of handling the position.
+
+But to transfer the question from the ecclesiastical region into
+the region of common life, it is undoubtedly true that if a man or
+a woman has a strong sense of moral issues, a deep feeling of
+responsibility and sympathy, an anxious desire to help things
+forward, then a dramatic sense of the value of manner, speech,
+gesture, and demeanour is a highly effective instrument. It is
+often said that people who wield a great personal influence have
+the gift of making the individual with whom they are dealing feel
+that his case is the most interesting and important with which they
+have ever come in contact, and of inspiring and maintaining a
+special kind of relationship between themselves and their
+petitioner. That is no doubt a very encouraging thing for the
+applicant to feel, even though he is sensible enough to realise
+that his case is only one among many with which his adviser is
+dealing, and probably not the most significant. Upon such a quality
+as this the success of statesmen, lawyers, physicians largely
+depends. But where the dramatic sense is combined with egotism,
+selfishness, and indifference to the claims of others, it is a
+terrible inheritance. It ministers, as I have said before, to its
+possessor's self-satisfaction; but on the other hand it is a
+failing which goes so deep and which permeates so intimately the
+whole moral nature, that its cure is almost impossible without the
+gift of what the Scripture calls "a new heart." Such self-
+complacency is a fearful shield against criticism, and particularly
+so because it gives as a rule so few opportunities for any outside
+person, however intimate, to expose the obliquity of such a
+temperament. The dramatic egotist is careful as a rule not to let
+his egotism appear, but to profess to be, and even to believe that
+he is, guided by the highest motives in all his actions and words.
+A candid remonstrance is met by a calm tolerance, and by the reply
+that the critic does not understand the situation, and is trying to
+hinder rather than to help the development of beneficent designs.
+
+I used to know a man of this type, who was insatiably greedy of
+influence and recognition. It is true that he was ready to help
+other people with money or advice. He was wealthy, and of a good
+position; and he would take a great deal of trouble to obtain
+appointments for friends who appealed to him, or to unravel a
+difficult situation; though the object of his diligence was not to
+help his applicants, but to obtain credit and power for himself. He
+did not desire that they should be helped, but that they should
+depend upon him for help. Nothing could undeceive him as to his own
+motive, because he gave his time and his money freely; yet the
+result was that most of the people whom he helped tended to resent
+it in the end, because he demanded services in return, and was
+jealous of any other interference. Chateaubriand says that it is
+not true gratitude to wish to repay favours promptly and still less
+is it true benevolence to wish to retain a hold over those whom one
+has benefited.
+
+Sometimes indeed the two strains are almost inextricably
+intertwined, real and vital sympathy with others, combined with an
+overwhelming sense of personal significance; and then the problem
+is an inconceivably complicated one. For I suppose it must be
+frankly confessed that the basis of the dramatic sense is not a
+very wholesome one; it is, of course, a strong form of
+individualism. But while it is true that we suffer from taking
+ourselves too seriously, it is also possible to suffer from not
+taking ourselves seriously enough. If effectiveness is the end of
+life, there is no question that a strong sense of what we like to
+call responsibility, which is generally nothing more than a sense
+of one's own importance, decorously framed and glazed, is an
+immense factor in success. I myself cherish the heresy that
+effectiveness is very far from being the end of life, and that the
+only effectiveness that is worth anything is unintentional
+effectiveness. I believe that a man or woman who is humble and
+sincere, who loves and is loved, is higher on the steps of heaven
+than the adroitest lobbyist; but it may be that the world's
+criterion of what it admires and respects is the right one; and
+indeed it is hard to see how so strong an instinct is implanted in
+the human race, the instinct to value strength and success above
+everything, unless it is put there by our Maker. At the same time
+one cherishes the hope that there is a better criterion somewhere,
+in the Divine Mind, in the fruitful future; the criterion that it
+is not what a man actually effects that matters, but what he makes
+of the resources that are given him to work with.
+
+The effectiveness of the dramatic sense is beyond question. One can
+see a supreme instance of it in the case of the Christian Science
+movement, in which a woman of strong personality, by lighting upon
+an idea latent in a large number of minds, an idea moreover of real
+and practical vitality, and by putting it in a form which has all
+the definiteness required by brains of a hazy and emotional order,
+has contrived to effect an immense amount of good, besides amassing
+a colossal fortune, and assuming almost Divine pretensions, without
+being widely discredited. The human race is, speaking generally, so
+anxious for any leading that it can get, that if a man or woman can
+persuade themselves that they have a mission to humanity, and
+maintain a pontifical air, they will generally be able to attract a
+band of devoted adherents, whose faith, rising superior to both
+intelligence and common-sense, will endorse almost any claim that
+the prophet or prophetess likes to advance.
+
+But the danger for the prophet himself is great. Arrogance,
+complacency, self-confidence, all the Pharisaical vices flourish
+briskly in such a soil. He loses all sense of proportion, all sense
+of dependence. Instead of being a humble learner in a mysterious
+world, he expects to find everything made after the pattern
+revealed to him in the Mount. The good that he does may be
+permanent and fruitful; but in some dark valley of humiliation and
+despair he will have to learn that God tolerates us and uses us; He
+does not need us, "He delighteth not in any man's legs," as the
+Psalmist said with homely vigour. To save others and be oneself a
+castaway is the terrible fate of which St. Paul saw so clearly the
+possibility; and thus any one who is conscious of the dramatic
+sense, or even dimly suspects that it is there, ought to pray very
+humbly to be delivered from it, as he would from any other darling
+bosom-sin. He ought to eschew diplomacy and practise frankness, he
+ought to welcome failure and to rejoice when he makes humiliating
+mistakes. He ought to be grateful even for palpable faults and
+weaknesses and sins and physical disabilities. For if we have the
+hope that God is educating us, is moulding a fair statue out of the
+frail and sordid clay, such a faith forbids us to reject any
+experience, however disagreeable, however painful, however self-
+revealing it may be, as of no import; and thus we can grow into a
+truer sense of proportion, till at last we may come
+
+
+                      "to learn that Man
+     Is small, and not forget that Man is great."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+KELMSCOTT AND WILLIAM MORRIS
+
+
+
+
+
+I had been at Fairford that still, fresh, April morning, and had
+enjoyed the sunny little piazza, with its pretty characteristic
+varieties of pleasant stone-built houses, solid Georgian fronts
+interspersed with mullioned gables. But the church! That is a
+marvellous place; its massive lantern-tower, with solid, softly-
+moulded outlines--for the sandy oolite admits little fineness of
+detail--all weathered to a beautiful orange-grey tint, has a mild
+dignity of its own. Inside it is a treasure of mediaevalism. The
+screens, the woodwork, the monuments, all rich, dignified, and
+spacious. And the glass! Next to King's College Chapel, I suppose,
+it is the noblest series of windows in England, and the colour of
+it is incomparable. Azure and crimson, green and orange, yet all
+with a firm economy of effect, the robes of the saints set and
+imbedded in a fine intricacy of white tabernacle-work. As to the
+design, I hardly knew whether to smile or weep. The splendid, ugly
+faces of the saints, depicted, whether designedly or artlessly I
+cannot guess, as men of simple passions and homely experience,
+moved me greatly, so unlike the mild, polite, porcelain visages of
+even the best modern glass. But the windows are as thick with
+demons as a hive with bees; and oh! the irresponsible levity
+displayed in these merry, grotesque, long-nosed creatures, some
+flame-coloured and long-tailed, some green and scaly, some plated
+like the armadillo, all going about their merciless work with
+infinite gusto and glee! Here one picked at the white breast of a
+languid, tortured woman who lay bathed in flame; one with a glowing
+hook thrust a lamentable big-paunched wretch down into a bath of
+molten liquor; one with pleased intentness turned the handle of a
+churn, from the top of which protruded the head of a fair-haired
+boy, all distorted with pain and terror. What could have been in
+the mind of the designer of these hateful scenes? It is impossible
+to acquit him of a strong sense of the humorous. Did he believe
+that such things were actually in progress in some infernal cavern,
+seven times heated? I fear it may have been so. And what of the
+effect upon the minds of the village folk who saw them day by day?
+It would have depressed, one would think, an imaginative girl or
+boy into madness, to dream of such things as being countenanced by
+God for the heathen and the unbaptized, as well as for the cruel
+and sinful. If the vile work had been represented as being done by
+cloudy, sombre, relentless creatures, it would have been more
+tolerable. But these fantastic imps, as lively as grigs and full to
+the brim of wicked laughter, are certainly enjoying themselves with
+an extremity of delight of which no trace is to be seen in the
+mournful and heavily lined faces of the faithful. Autres temps,
+autres moeurs! Perhaps the simple, coarse mental palates of the
+village folk were none the worse for this realistic treatment of
+sin. One wonders what the saintly and refined Keble, who spent many
+years of his life as his father's curate here, thought of it all.
+Probably his submissive and deferential mind accepted it as in some
+ecclesiastical sense symbolical of the merciless hatred of God for
+the desperate corruption of humanity. It gave me little pleasure to
+connect the personality of Keble with the place, patient, sweet-
+natured, mystical, serviceable as he was. It seems hard to breathe
+in the austere air of a mind like Keble's, where the wind of the
+spirit blows chill down the narrow path, fenced in by the high,
+uncompromising walls of ecclesiastical tradition on the one hand,
+and stern Puritanism on the other. An artificial type, one is
+tempted to say!--and yet one ought never, I suppose, so to describe
+any flower that has blossomed fragrantly upon the human stock; any
+system that seems to extend a natural and instinctive appeal to
+certain definite classes of human temperament.
+
+I sped pleasantly enough along the low, rich pastures, thick with
+hedgerow elms, to Lechlade, another pretty town with an infinite
+variety of habitations. Here again is a fine ancient church with a
+comely spire, "a pretty pyramis of stone," as the old Itinerary
+says, overlooking a charming gabled house, among walled and
+terraced gardens, with stone balls on the corner-posts and a
+quaint pavilion, the river running below; and so on to a bridge
+over the yet slender Thames, where the river water spouted clear
+and fragrant into a wide pool; and across the flat meadows, bright
+with kingcups, the spire of Lechlade towered over the clustered
+house-roofs to the west.
+
+Then further still by a lonely ill-laid road. And thus, with a mind
+pleasantly attuned to beauty and a quickening pulse, I drew near to
+Kelmscott. The great alluvial flat, broadening on either hand, with
+low wooded heights, "not ill-designed," as Morris said, to the
+south. Then came a winding cross-track, and presently I drew near
+to a straggling village, every house of which had some charm and
+quality of style, with here and there a high gabled dovecot, and
+its wooden cupola, standing up among solid barns and stacks. Here
+was a tiny and inconspicuous church, with a small stone belfry; and
+then the road pushed on, to die away among the fields. But there,
+at the very end of the village, stood the house of which we were in
+search; and it was with a touch of awe, with a quickening heart,
+that I drew near to a place of such sweet and gracious memories, a
+place so dear to more than one of the heroes of art.
+
+One comes to the goal of an artistic pilgrimage with a certain
+sacred terror; either the place is disappointing, or it is utterly
+unlike what one anticipates. I knew Kelmscott so well from
+Rossetti's letters, from Morris's own splendid and loving
+description, from pictures, from the tales of other pilgrims, that
+I felt I could not be disappointed; and I was not. It was not only
+just like what I had pictured it to be, but it had a delicate and
+natural grace of its own as well. The house was larger and more
+beautiful, the garden smaller and not less beautiful, than I had
+imagined. I had not thought it was so shy, so rustic a place. It is
+very difficult to get any clear view of the Manor. By the road are
+cottages, and a big building, half storehouse, half wheelwright's
+shop, to serve the homely needs of the farm. Through the open door
+one could see a bench with tools; and planks, staves, spokes,
+waggon-tilts, faggots, were all stacked in a pleasant confusion.
+Then came a walled kitchen-garden, with some big shrubs, bay and
+laurustinus, rising plumply within; beyond which the grey house,
+spread thin with plaster, held up its gables and chimneys over a
+stone-tiled roof. To the left, big barns and byres--a farm-man
+leading in a young bull with a pole at the nose-ring; beyond that,
+open fields, with a dyke and a flood-wall of earth, grown over with
+nettles, withered sedges in the watercourse, and elms in which the
+rooks were clamorously building. We met with the ready, simple
+Berkshire courtesy; we were referred to a gardener who was in
+charge. To speak with him, we walked round to the other side of the
+house, to an open space of grass, where the fowls picked merrily,
+and the old farm-lumber, broken coops, disused ploughs, lay
+comfortably about. "How I love tidiness!" wrote Morris once. Yet I
+did not feel that he would have done other than love all this
+natural and simple litter of the busy farmstead.
+
+Here the venerable house appeared more stately still. Through an
+open door in a wall we caught a sight of the old standards of an
+orchard, and borders with the spikes of spring-flowers pushing
+through the mould. The gardener was digging in the gravelly soil.
+He received us with a grave and kindly air; but when we asked if we
+could look into the house, he said, with a sturdy faithfulness,
+that his orders were that no one should see it, and continued his
+digging without heeding us further.
+
+Somewhat abashed we retraced our steps; we got one glimpse of the
+fine indented front, with its shapely wings and projections. I
+should like to have seen the great parlour, and the tapestry-room
+with the story of Samson that bothered Rossetti so over his work. I
+should like to have seen the big oak bed, with its hangings
+embroidered with one of Morris's sweetest lyrics:
+
+
+     "The wind's on the wold,
+      And the night is a-cold."
+
+
+I should like to have seen the tapestry-chamber, and the room where
+Morris, who so frankly relished the healthy savour of meat and
+drink, ate his joyful meals, and the peacock yew-tree that he found
+in his days of failing strength too hard a task to clip. I should
+like to have seen all this, I say; and yet I am not sure that
+tables and chairs, upholsteries and pictures, would not have come
+in between me and the sacred spirit of the place.
+
+So I turned to the church. Plain and homely as its exterior is,
+inside it is touched with the true mediaeval spirit, like the "old
+febel chapel" of the Mort d'Arthur. Its bare walls, its half-
+obliterated frescoes, its sturdy pillars, gave it an ancient,
+simple air. But I did not, to my grief, see the grave of Morris,
+though I saw in fancy the coffin brought from Lechlade in the
+bright farm-waggon, on that day of pitiless rain. For there was
+going on in the churchyard the only thing I saw that day that
+seemed to me to strike a false note; a silly posing of village
+girls, self-conscious and overdressed, before the camera of a
+photographer--a playing at aesthetics, bringing into the village
+life a touch of unwholesome vanity and the vulgar affectation of
+the world. That is the ugly shadow of fame; it makes conventional
+people curious about the details of a great man's life and
+surroundings, without initiating them into any sympathy with his
+ideals and motives. The price that the real worshippers pay for
+their inspiration is the slavering idolatry of the unintelligent;
+and I withdrew in a mournful wonder from the place, wishing I could
+set an invisible fence round the scene, a fence which none should
+pass but the few who had the secret and the key in their hearts.
+
+And here, for the pleasure of copying the sweet words, let me
+transcribe a few sentences from Morris's own description of the
+house itself:
+
+
+"A house that I love with a reasonable love, I think; for though my
+words may give you no idea of any special charm about it, yet I
+assure you that the charm is there; so much has the old house grown
+up out of the soil and the lives of those that lived on it: some
+thin thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of
+meadow and acre and wood and river; a certain amount (not too much,
+let us hope) of common-sense, a liking for making materials serve
+one's turn, and perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment--
+this, I think, was what went to the making of the old house."
+
+
+And again:
+
+
+"My feet moved along the road they knew. The raised way led us into
+a little field, bounded by a backwater of the river on one side; on
+the right hand we could see a cluster of small houses and barns,
+and before us a grey stone barn and a wall partly overgrown with
+ivy, over which a few grey gables showed. The village road ended in
+the shallow of the backwater. We crossed the road, and my hand
+raised the latch of a door in the wall, and we stood presently on a
+stone path which led up to the old house. The garden between the
+wall and the house was redolent of the June flowers, and the roses
+were rolling over one another with that delicious superabundance of
+small well-tended gardens which at first sight takes away all
+thought save that of beauty. The blackbirds were singing their
+loudest, the doves were cooing on the roof-ridge, the rooks in the
+high elm trees beyond were garrulous among the young leaves, and
+the swifts wheeled whirring about the gables. And the house itself
+was a fit guardian for all the beauty of this heart of summer.
+
+"O me! O me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather,
+and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it--as
+this has done! The earth and the growth of it and the life of it!
+If I could but say or show how I love it!"
+
+
+The pure lyrical beauty of these passages makes one out of conceit
+with one's own clumsy sentences. But still, I will say how all that
+afternoon, among the quiet fields, with the white clouds rolling up
+over the lip of the wolds, I was haunted with the thought of that
+burly figure; the great head with its curly hair and beard; the
+eyes that seemed so guarded and unobservant, and that yet saw and
+noted every smallest detail; the big clumsy hands, apt for such
+delicacy of work; to see him in his rough blue suit, his easy
+rolling gait, wandering about, stooping to look at the flowers in
+the beds, or glancing up at the sky, or sauntering off to fish in
+the stream, or writing swiftly in the parlour, or working at his
+loom; so bluff, so kindly, so blunt in address, so unaffected,
+loving all that he saw, the tide of full-blooded and restless life
+running so vigorously in his veins; or, further back, Rossetti,
+with his wide eyes, half bright, half languorous, pale, haunted
+with impossible dreams, pacing, rapt in feverish thought, through
+the lonely fields. The ghosts of heroes! And whether it was that my
+own memories and affections and visions stirred my brain, or that
+some tide of the spirit still sets from the undiscovered shores to
+the scenes of life and love, I know not, but the place seemed
+thronged with unseen presences and viewless mysteries of hope.
+Doubtless, loving as we do the precise forms of earthly beauty, the
+wide green pastures, the tender grace of age on gable and wall, the
+springing of sweet flowers, the clear gush of the stream, we are
+really in love with some deeper and holier thing; yet even about
+the symbols themselves there lingers a consecrating power; and that
+influence was present with me to-day, as I went homewards in the
+westering light, with the shadows of house and tree lengthening
+across the grass in the still afternoon.
+
+Heroes, I said? Well, I will not here speak of Rossetti, though his
+impassioned heart and wayward dreams were made holy, I think,
+through suffering: he has purged his fault. But I cannot deny the
+name of hero to Morris. Let me put into words what was happening to
+him at the very time at which he had made this sweet place his
+home. He had already done as much in those early years as many men
+do in a lifetime. He had written great poems, he had loved and
+wedded, he had made abundant friends, his wealth was growing fast;
+he loved every detail of his work, designing, weaving, dyeing; he
+had a band of devoted workers and craftsmen under him. He could
+defy the world; he cared nothing at all for society or honours. He
+had magnificent vitality, a physique which afforded him every kind
+of wholesome momentary enjoyment.
+
+In the middle of all this happy activity a cloud came over his
+mind, blotting out the sunshine. Partly, perhaps, private sorrows
+had something to do with it; partly, perhaps, a weakening of
+physical fibre, after a life of enormous productivity and restless
+energy, made itself felt. But these were only incidental causes.
+What began to weigh upon him was the thought of all the toiling
+thousands of humanity, whose lives of labour precluded them from
+the enjoyment of all or nearly all of the beautiful things that
+were to him the very essence of life; and, what was worse still, he
+perceived that the very faculty of higher enjoyment was lacking,
+the instinct for beauty having been atrophied and almost eradicated
+by sad inheritance, He saw that not only did the workers not feel
+the joyful love of art and natural beauty, but that they could not
+have enjoyed such pleasures, even if they were to be brought near
+to them; and then came the further and darker thought, that modern
+art was, after all, a hollow and a soulless thing. He saw around
+him beautiful old houses like his own, old churches which spoke of
+a high natural instinct for fineness of form and detail. These
+things seemed to stand for a widespread and lively joy in simple
+beauty which seemed to have vanished out of the world. In ancient
+times it was natural to the old builders if they had, say, a barn
+to build, to make it strong and seemly and graceful; to buttress it
+with stone, to bestow care and thought upon coign and window-ledge
+and dripstone, to prop the roof on firm and shapely beams, and to
+cover it with honest stone tiles, each one of which had an
+individuality of its own. But now he saw that if people built
+naturally, they ran up flimsy walls of brick, tied them together
+with iron rods, and put a curved roof of galvanised iron on the
+top. It was bad enough that it should be built so, but what was
+worse still was that no one saw or heeded the difference; they
+thought the new style was more convenient, and the question of
+beauty never entered their minds at all. They remorselessly pulled
+down, or patched meanly and sordidly, the old work. And thus he
+began to feel that modern art was an essentially artificial thing,
+a luxury existing for a few leisurely people, and no longer based
+on a deep universal instinct. He thought that art was wounded to
+death by competition and hurry and vulgarity and materialism, and
+that it must die down altogether before a sweet natural product
+could arise from the stump.
+
+Then, too, Morris was not an individualist; he cared, one may
+think, about things more than people. A friend of his once
+complained that, if he were to die, Morris would no doubt grieve
+for him and even miss him, but that it would make no gap in his
+life, nor interrupt his energy of work. He cared for movements, for
+classes, for groups of men, more than he cared for persons. And
+thus the idea came to him, in a mournful year of reflection, that
+it was not only a mistake, but of the nature of sin, to isolate
+himself in a little Paradise of art of his own making, and to allow
+the great noisy, ugly, bewildered world to go on its way. It was a
+noble grief. The thought of the bare, uncheered, hopeless lives of
+the poor came to weigh on him like an obsession, and he began to
+turn over in his mind what he could do to unravel the knotted
+skein.
+
+
+"I am rather in a discouraged mood," he wrote on New Year's Day
+1880, "and the whole thing seems almost too tangled to see through
+and too heavy to move." And again:
+
+"I have of late been somewhat melancholy (rather too strong a word,
+but I don't know another); not so much so as not to enjoy life in a
+way, but just so much as a man of middle age who has met with rubs
+(though less than his share of them) may sometimes be allowed to
+be. When one is just so much subdued one is apt to turn more
+specially from thinking of one's own affairs to more worthy
+matters; and my mind is very full of the great change which I hope
+is slowly coming over the world."
+
+
+And so he plunged into Socialism. He gave up his poetry and much of
+his congenial work. He attended meetings and committees; he wrote
+leaflets and pamphlets; he lavished money; he took to giving
+lectures and addresses; he exposed himself to misunderstandings and
+insults. He spoke in rain at street corners to indifferent
+loungers; he pushed a little cart about the squares selling
+Socialist literature; he had collisions with the police; he was
+summoned before magistrates: the "poetic upholsterer," as he was
+called, became an object of bewildered contempt to friends and foes
+alike. The work was not congenial to him, but he did it well,
+developing infinite tolerance and good-humour, and even
+tactfulness, in his relations with other men. The exposure to the
+weather, the strain, the neglect of his own physical needs, brought
+on, undoubtedly, the illness of which he eventually died; and worst
+of all was the growing shadow of discouragement, which made him
+gradually aware that the times were not ripe, and that even if the
+people could seize the power they desired, they could not use it.
+He became aware that the worker's idea of rising in the social
+scale was not the idea of gaining security, leisure, independence,
+and love of honest work, but the hope of migrating to the middle
+class, and becoming a capitalist on a small scale. That was the
+last thing that Morris desired. Most of all he felt the charge of
+inconsistency that was dinned into his ears. It was held ridiculous
+that a wealthy capitalist and a large employer of labour, living,
+if not in luxury, at least in considerable stateliness, should
+profess Socialist ideas without attempting to disencumber himself
+of his wealth. He wrote in answer to a loving remonstrance:
+
+
+"You see, my dear, I can't help it. The ideas which have taken hold
+of me will not let me rest; nor can I see anything else worth
+thinking of. How can it be otherwise, when to me society, which to
+many seems an orderly arrangement for allowing decent people to get
+through their lives creditably and with some pleasure, seems mere
+cannibalism; nay, worse (for there ought to be hope in that), is
+grown so corrupt, so steeped in hypocrisy and lies, that one turns
+from one stratum of it to another with hopeless loathing. . . .
+Meantime, what a little ruffles me is this, that if I do a little
+fail in my duty some of my friends will praise me for failing
+instead of blaming me."
+
+
+And then at last, after every sordid circumstance of intrigue and
+squabble and jealousy, one after another of the organisations he
+joined broke down. Half gratefully and half mournfully he
+disengaged himself, not because he did not believe in his
+principles, but because he saw that the difficulties were
+insuperable. He came back to the old life; he flung himself with
+renewed ardour into art and craftsmanship. He began to write the
+beautiful and romantic prose tales, with their enchanting titles,
+which are, perhaps, his most characteristic work. He learnt by slow
+degrees that a clean sweep of an evil system cannot be made in a
+period or a lifetime by an individual, however serious or strenuous
+he may be; he began to perceive that, if society is to put ideas in
+practice, the ideas must first be there, clearly defined and widely
+apprehended; and that it is useless to urge men to a life of which
+they have no conception and for which they have no desire. He had
+always held it to be a sacred duty for people to live, if possible,
+in whatever simplicity, among beautiful things; and it may be said
+that no one man in one generation has ever effected so much in this
+direction. He has, indeed, leavened and educated taste; he has
+destroyed a vile and hypocritical tradition of domestic art; by his
+writings he has opened a door for countless minds into a remote and
+fragrant region of unspoilt romance; and, still more than this, he
+remains an example of one who made a great and triumphant
+resignation of all that he held most dear, for the sake of doing
+what he thought to be right. He was not an ascetic, giving up what
+is half an incumbrance and half a terror; nor was he naturally a
+melancholy and detached person; but he gave up work which he loved
+passionately, and a life which he lived in a full-blooded, generous
+way, that he might try to share his blessings with others, out of a
+supreme pity for those less richly endowed than himself.
+
+How, then, should not this corner of the world, which he loved so
+dearly, speak to the spirit with a voice and an accent far louder
+and more urgent than its own tranquil habit of sunny peace and
+green-shaded sweetness! "You know my faith," wrote Morris from
+Kelmscott in a bewildered hour, "and how I feel I have no sort of
+right to revenge myself for any of my private troubles on the kind
+earth; and here I feel her kindness very specially, and am bound
+not to meet it with a long face." Noble and high-hearted words! for
+he of all men seemed made by nature to enjoy security and beauty
+and the joys of living, if ever man was so made. His very lack of
+personal sensitiveness, his unaptness to be moved by the pathetic
+appeal of the individual, might have been made a shield for his own
+peace; but he laid that shield down, and bared his breast to the
+sharp arrows; and in his noble madness to redress the wrongs of the
+world he was, perhaps, more like one of his great generous knights
+than he himself ever suspected.
+
+This, then, I think is the reason why this place--a grey grange at
+the end of a country lane, among water meadows--has so ample a call
+for the spirit. A place of which Morris wrote, "The scale of
+everything of the smallest, but so sweet, so unusual even; it was
+like the background of an innocent fairy-story." Yes, it might have
+been that! Many of the simplest and quietest of lives had been
+lived there, no doubt, before Morris came that way. But with him
+came a realisation of its virtues, a perception that in its
+smallness and sweetness it yet held imprisoned, like the gem that
+sits on the smallest finger of a hand, an ocean of light and
+colour. The two things that lend strength to life are, in the first
+place, an appreciation of its quality, a perception of its intense
+and awful significance--the thought that we here hold in our hands,
+if we could but piece it all together, the elements and portions of
+a mighty, an overwhelming problem. The fragments of that mighty
+mystery are sorrow, sin, suffering, joy, hope, life, death. Things
+of their nature sharply opposed, and yet that are, doubtless,
+somehow and somewhere, united and composed and reconciled. It is at
+this sad point that many men and most artists stop short. They see
+what they love and desire; they emphasise this and rest upon it;
+and when the surge of suffering buffets them away, they drown,
+bewildered, struggling for breath, complaining.
+
+But for the true man it is otherwise. He is penetrated with the
+desire that all should share his joy and be emboldened by it. It
+casts a cold shadow over the sunshine, it mars the scent of the
+roses, it wails across the cooing of the doves--the sense that
+others suffer and toil unhelped; and still more grievous to him is
+the thought that, were these duller natures set free from the
+galling yoke, their mirth would be evil and hideous, they would
+have no inkling of the sweeter and the purer joy. And then, if he
+be wise, he tries his hardest, in slow and wearied hours, to
+comfort, to interpret, to explain; in much heaviness and dejection
+he labours, while all the time, though he knows it not, the sweet
+ripple of his thoughts spreads across the stagnant pool. He may be
+flouted, contemned, insulted, but he heeds it not; while all the
+strands of the great mystery, dark and bright alike, work
+themselves, delicately and surely, into the picture of his life,
+and the picture of other lives as well. Larger and richer grows the
+great design, till it is set in some wide hall or corridor of the
+House of Life; and the figure of the toil-worn knight, with armour
+dinted and brow dimmed with dust and sweat, kneeling at the shrine,
+makes the very silence of the place beautiful; while those that go
+to and fro rejoice, not in the suffering and weariness, not in the
+worn face and the thin, sun-browned hands, but in the thought that
+he loved all things well; that his joy was pure and high, that his
+clear eyes pierced the dull mist that wreathed cold field and
+dripping wood, and that, when he sank, outworn and languid after
+the day's long toil, the jocund trumpets broke out from the high-
+walled town in a triumphant concert, because he had done worthily,
+and should now see greater things than these.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+A SPEECH-DAY
+
+
+
+
+
+In the course of the summer it was my lot to attend the Speech-Day
+festivities of a certain school--indeed, I attended at more than
+one such gathering, vocatus atque non vocatus, as Horace says. They
+are not the sort of entertainments I should choose for pleasure;
+one feels too much like a sheep, driven from pen to pen, kindly and
+courteously driven, but still driven. One is fed rather than eats.
+One meets a number of charming and interesting people, and one has
+no time to talk to them. But I am always glad to have gone, and one
+carries away pleasant memories of kindness and courtesy, of youth
+and hope.
+
+This particular occasion was so very typical that I am going to try
+and gather up my impressions and ideas. It was an old school and a
+famous school, though not one of the most famous. The buildings
+large and effective, full of modern and up-to-date improvements,
+with a mellow core of antiquity, in the shape of a venerable little
+courtyard in the centre. There were green lawns and pleasant
+gardens and umbrageous trees; and it was a beautiful day, too,
+sunny and fresh, so that one was neither baked nor boiled. The
+first item was a luncheon, at which I sate between two very
+pleasant strangers and exchanged cautious views on education. We
+agreed that the value of the classics as a staple of mental
+training was perhaps a little overrated, and that possibly too much
+attention was nowadays given to athletics; but that after all the
+public-school system was the backbone of the country, and taught
+boys how to behave like gentlemen, and how to govern subject races.
+We agreed that they were ideal training-grounds for character, and
+that our public-schools were the envy of the civilised world. In
+such profound and suggestive interchange of ideas the time sped
+rapidly away.
+
+Then we were gathered into a big hall. It was pleasant to see proud
+parents and charming sisters, wearing their best, clustered
+excitedly round some sturdy and well-brushed young hero, the hope
+of the race; pleasant to see frock-coated masters, beaming with
+professional benevolence, elderly gentlemen smilingly recalling
+tales of youthful prowess, which had grown quite epical in the
+lapse of time; it was inspiriting to feel one of a big company of
+people, all bent on being for once as good-humoured and cheerful as
+possible, and all inspired by a vague desire to improve the
+occasion.
+
+The prizes were given away to the accompaniment of a rolling
+thunder of applause; we had familiar and ingenuous recitations from
+youthful orators, who desired friends, Romans, and countrymen to
+lend them their ears, or accepted the atrocious accusation of being
+a young man; and then a Bishop, who had been a schoolmaster
+himself, delivered an address. It was delightful to see and hear
+the good man expatiate. I did not believe much in what he said, nor
+could I reasonably endorse many of his statements; but he did it
+all so genially and naturally that one felt almost ashamed to
+question the matter of his discourse. Yet I could not help
+wondering why it is thought advisable always to say exactly the
+same things on these occasions. The good man began by asserting
+that the boys would never be so happy or so important again in
+their lives as they were at school, and that all grown-up people
+were envying them. I don't know whether any one believed that; I am
+sure the boys did not, if I can judge by what my own feelings used
+to be on such occasions. Personally I used to think my school a
+very decent sort of place, but I looked forward with excitement and
+interest to the liberty and life of the larger world; and though
+perhaps in a way we elders envied the boys for having the chances
+before them that we had so many of us neglected to seize, I don't
+suppose that with the parable of Vice Versa before us we would
+really have changed places with them. Would any one ever return
+willingly to discipline and barrack-life? [Yes--ed.] Would any one
+under discipline refuse independence if it were offered him on easy
+terms? I doubt it!
+
+Then the Bishop went on to talk about educational things; and he
+said with much emphasis that in spite of all that was said about
+modern education, we most of us realised as we grew older that all
+culture was really based upon the Greek and Latin classics. We all
+stamped on the ground and cheered at that, I as lustily as the
+rest, though I am quite sure it is not true. All that the Bishop
+really meant was that such culture as he himself possessed had been
+based on the classics. Now the Bishop is a robust, genial, and
+sensible man, but he is not a strictly cultured man. He is only
+sketchily varnished with culture. He thinks that German literature
+is nebulous, and French literature immoral. I don't suppose he ever
+reads an English book, except perhaps an ecclesiastical biography;
+he would say that he had no time to read a novel; probably he
+glances at the Christian Year on Sundays, and peruses a Waverley
+novel if he is kept in bed by a cold. Yet he considers himself, and
+would be generally considered, a well-educated man. I believe
+myself that the reason why we as a nation love good literature so
+little is because we are starved at an impressionable age on a diet
+of classics; and to persist in regarding the classics as the high-
+water mark of the human intellect seems to me to argue a melancholy
+want of faith in the progress of the race. However, for the moment
+we all believed ourselves to be men of a high culture, soundly
+based on the corner-stone of Latin and Greek. Then the Bishop went
+on to speak of athletics with a solemn earnestness, and he said,
+with deep conviction, that experience had taught him that whatever
+was worth doing was worth doing well. He did not argue the point as
+to whether all games were worth playing, or whether by filling up
+all the spare time of boys with them, by crowning successful
+athletes with glory and worship, by engaging masters who will talk
+with profound seriousness about bowling and batting, rowing and
+football, one might not be developing a perfectly false sense of
+proportion. He told the boys to play games with all their might,
+and he left on their minds the impression that athletics were
+certainly things to be ranked among the Christian graces. Of course
+he sincerely believed in them himself. He would have maintained
+that they developed manliness and vigour, and discouraged loafing
+and uncleanness. I am not at all sure myself that games as at
+present organised do minister directly to virtue. The popularity of
+the athlete is a dangerous thing if he is not virtuously inclined;
+while the excessive organisation of games discourages
+individuality, and emphasises a very false standard of success in
+the minds of many boys. But the Bishop was not invited that he
+might say unconventional things. He was asked on purpose to bless
+things as they were, and he blessed them with all his might.
+
+Then he went on to say that the real point after all was character
+and conduct; that intellect was a gift of God, and that conspicuous
+athletic capacity was a gift--he did not like to say of God, so he
+said of Providence; but that in one respect we were all equal, and
+that was in our capacity for moral effort; and that the boy who
+came to the front was not always the distinguished scholar or the
+famous athlete, but the industrious, trustworthy, kindly, generous,
+public-spirited boy. This he said with deep emotion, as though it
+were rather a daring and unexpected statement, but discerned by a
+vigilant candour; and all this with the air that he was testifying
+faithfully to the true values of life, and sweeping aside with a
+courageous hand the false glow and glamour of the world. We did not
+like to applaud at this, but we made a subdued drumming with our
+heels, and uttered a sort of murmurous assent to a noble and far
+from obvious proposition.
+
+But here again I felt that the thing was somehow not quite as high-
+minded as it seemed. The goal designated was, after all, the goal
+of success. It was not suggested that the unrewarded and self-
+denying life was perhaps the noblest. The point was to come to the
+front somehow, and it was only indicating a sort of waiting game
+for the boys who were conscious neither of intellectual nor
+athletic capacity. It was a sort of false socialism, this pretence
+of moral equality, a kind of consolation prize that was thus
+emphasised. And I felt that here again the assumption was an untrue
+one. That is the worst of life, if one examines it closely, that it
+is by no means wholly run on moral lines. It is strength that is
+rewarded, rather than good desires. The Bishop seemed to have
+forgotten the ancient maxim that prosperity is the blessing of the
+Old Testament, and affliction the blessing of the New. These
+qualities that were going to produce ultimate success--
+conscientiousness, generosity, modesty, public spirit--they are,
+after all, as much gifts as any other gifts of intellect and bodily
+skill. How often has one seen boys who are immodest, idle,
+frivolous, mean-spirited, and ungenerous attain to the opposite
+virtues? Not often, I confess. Who does not know of abundant
+instances of boys who have been selfish, worthless, grasping,
+unprincipled, who have yet achieved success intellectually and
+athletically, and have also done well for themselves, amassed
+money, and obtained positions for themselves in after life. Looking
+back on my own school days, I cannot honestly say that the prizes
+of life have fallen to the pure-minded, affectionate, high-
+principled boys. The boys I remember who have achieved conspicuous
+success in the world have been hard-hearted, prudent, honourable
+characters with a certain superficial bonhomie, who by a natural
+instinct did the things that paid. Stripped of its rhetoric, the
+Bishop's address resolved itself into a panegyric of success, and
+the morality of it was that if you could not achieve intellectual
+and athletic prominence, you might get a certain degree of credit
+by unostentatious virtue. What I felt was that somehow the goal
+proposed was--dare I hint it?--a vulgar one; that it was a
+glorification of prudence and good-humoured self-interest; and yet
+if the Bishop had preached the gospel of disinterestedness and
+quiet faithfulness and devotion, he would have had few enthusiastic
+hearers. If he had said that an awkward and surly manner, no matter
+what virtues it concealed, was the greatest bar to ultimate mundane
+success, it would have been quite true, though perhaps not
+particularly edifying. But what I desired was not startling paradox
+or cynical comment, but something more really manly, more just,
+more unconventional, more ardent, more disinterested. The boys were
+not exhorted to care for beautiful things for the sake of their
+beauty; but to care for attractive things for the sake of their
+acceptability.
+
+And yet in a way it did us all good to listen to the great man. He
+was so big and kindly and fatherly and ingenuous; he had made
+virtue pay; I do not suppose he had ever had a low or an impure or
+a spiteful thought; but his path had been easy from the first; he
+was a scholar and an athlete, and he had never pursued success, for
+the simple reason that it had fallen from heaven like manna round
+about his dwelling, with perhaps a few dozen quails as well! Boys,
+parents, masters, young and old alike, were assembled that day to
+worship success, and the Bishop prophesied good concerning them. It
+entered no one's head that success, in its simplest analysis, means
+thrusting some one else aside from a place which he desires to
+fill. But why on such a day should one think of the feelings of
+others? we were all bent on virtuously gratifying our own desires.
+The boys who were left out were the weak and the timid, the ailing
+and the erring, the awkward and the unpopular, the clumsy and the
+stupid; they were not bidden to take courage, they were rather
+bidden to envy the unattainable, and to submit with such grace as
+they could muster. But we pushed all such vague and unsatisfactory
+thoughts in the background; we sounded the clarion and filled the
+fife, and were at case in Zion, while we worshipped the great,
+brave, glittering world.
+
+What I desired was that, in the height of our jubilant self-
+gratulation, some sweet and gracious figure, full of heavenly
+wisdom, could have twitched the gaudy curtain aside for a moment
+and shown us other things than these; who could have assured us
+that we all, however stupid and dreary and awkward and indolent,
+however vexed with low dreams and ugly temptations, yet had our
+share and place in the rich inheritance of life; and that even if
+it was to be all a record of dull failure, commonplace sinfulness
+cheered by no joyful triumph, no friendly smile--yet if we fought
+the fault and did the dull task faithfully, and desired to be but a
+little better, a little stronger, a little more unselfish, that the
+pilgrimage with all its sandy tracts and terrifying spectres would
+not be traversed in vain; and then I think we might have been
+brought together with a sense of sweeter and truer unity, and might
+have thought of life as a thing to be shared, and joy as a thing to
+be lavished, and not have rather conceived of the world as a place
+full of fine things, of which we were all to gather sedulously as
+many as we could grasp and retain.
+
+Or even if the good Bishop had taken a simpler line and told the
+boys some old story, like the story of Polycrates of Samos, I
+should have been more comfortable. Polycrates was the tyrant with
+whom everything went well that he set his hand to, so that to avoid
+the punishment of undue prosperity he threw his great signet-ring
+into the sea; but when he was served a day or two later with a
+slice of fish at his banquet, there was the ring sticking in its
+ribs. The Bishop might have said that this should teach us not to
+try and seize all the good things we could, and that the reason of
+it was not, as the old Greeks thought, that the gods envied the
+prosperity of mortals, but that our prosperity was often dashed
+very wisely and tenderly from our lips, because one of the worst
+foes that a man can have, one of the most blinding and bewildering
+of faults, is the sense of self-sufficiency and security. That
+would not have spoilt the pleasure of those brisk boys, but would
+have given them something wholesome to take away and think about,
+like the prophet's roll that was sweet in the mouth and bitter in
+the belly.
+
+It may be thought that I have thus dilated on the Bishop's address
+for the sole purpose of showing what a much better address I could
+have made. That is not the case at all. I could not have done the
+thing at all to start with, and, given both the nerve and the
+presence and the practice of the man, I could not have done it a
+quarter as well, because he was in tune with his audience and I
+should not have been. That was to me part of the tragedy. The
+Bishop's voice fell heavily and steadily, like a stream of water
+from a great iron pipe that fills a reservoir. The audience, too,
+were all in the most elementary mood. Boys of course frankly desire
+success without any disguise. And parents less frankly but no less
+hungrily, in an almost tigerish way, desire it for their children.
+The intensity of belief felt by a parent in a stupid or even
+vicious boy would be one of the most pathetic things I know, if it
+were not also one of the primal forces of the world.
+
+And thus the tide being high the Bishop went into harbour at the
+top of the flood. I don't even complain of the nature of the
+address; it was frankly worldly, such as might have been given by a
+Sadducee in the time of Christ. But the interesting thing about it
+was that most of the people present believed it to be an ethical
+and even a religious address. It was the ethic of a professional
+bowler and the religion of a banker. If a boy had been for all
+intents and purposes a professional bowler to the age of twenty-
+three, and a professional banker afterwards, he would almost
+exactly have fulfilled the Bishop's ideal. I do not think it is a
+bad ideal either. I only say that it is not an exalted ideal, and
+it is not a Christian ideal. It is the world in disguise, the wolf
+in sheep's clothing over again. We were taken in. We said to
+ourselves, "This is an animal certainly clothed as a sheep--and we
+must remember the old proverb and be careful." But as the Bishop's
+address proceeded, and the fragrant oil fell down to the skirts of
+our clothing, we said, "There is certainly a sheep inside."
+
+Then a choir of strong, rough, boyish voices sang an old glee or
+two--"Glorious Apollo" and "Hail smiling Morn," and a school song
+about the old place that made some of us bite our lips and
+furtively brush away an unexpected and inexplicable moisture from
+our eyes, at the thought of the fine fellows we had ourselves sat
+side by side with thirty and forty years ago, now scattered to all
+ends of the earth, and some of them gone from the here to the
+everywhere, as the poet says. And then we adjourned to see the
+School Corps inspected--such solemn little soldiers, marching past
+in their serviceable uniforms, the line rising and falling with the
+inequalities of the ground, and bowing out a good deal in the
+centre, at the very moment that the good-natured old Colonel was
+careful to look the other way. Then there was a leisurely game of
+cricket, with a lot of very old boys playing with really amazing
+agility; and then I fell in with an old acquaintance, and we
+strolled about together, and got a friendly master to show us over
+the schoolrooms and one of the houses, and admired the excellent
+arrangements, and peeped into some studies crowded with pleasant
+boyish litter, and talked to some of the boys with an attempt at
+light juvenility, and enjoyed ourselves in a thoroughly absurd and
+leisurely fashion. And then I was left alone, and walking about,
+abandoned myself to sentiment pure and simple; it was hard to
+analyse that feeling which was stirred by the sight of all those
+fresh-faced boys, flowing like a stream through the old buildings,
+and just leaving their own little mark, for good or evil, on the
+place--a painted name on an Honours board, initials cut in desk or
+panel, a memory or two, how soon to grow dim in the minds of the
+new generation, who would be so full of themselves and of the
+present, turning the sweet-scented manuscript of youth with such
+eager fingers, that they could give but little thought to the
+future and none at all to the past. And then one remembered, with a
+curious sense of wistful pain, how rapidly the cards of life were
+being dealt out to one, and how long it was since one had played
+the card of youth so heedlessly and joyfully away; that at least
+could not return. And then there came the thought of all the hope
+and love that centred upon these children, and all the
+possibilities which lay before them. And I began to think of my own
+contemporaries and of how little on the whole they had done; it was
+not fair perhaps to say that most of them had made a mess of their
+lives, because they were honest, honourable citizens many of them.
+It was not the poor thing called success that I was thinking of,
+but a sort of high-hearted and generous dealing with life, making
+the most of one's faculties and qualities, diffusing a glow of love
+and enthusiasm and brave zest about one--how few of us had done
+that! We had grown indolent and money-loving and commonplace. Some
+of those we looked to to redeem and glorify the world had failed
+most miserably, through unchecked faults of temperament. Some had
+declined with a sort of unambitious comfort, some had fallen into
+the trough of Toryism, and spent their time in holding fast to
+conventional and established things; one or two had flown like
+Icarus so near the sun that their waxen wings had failed them; and
+yet some of us had missed greatness by so little. Was it to be
+always so? Was it always to be a battle against hopeless odds? Was
+defeat, earlier or later, inevitable? The tamest defeat of all was
+to lapse smoothly into easy conventional ways, to adopt the
+standards of the world, and rake together contentedly and seriously
+the straws and dirt of the street. If that was to be the destiny of
+most, why were we haunted in youth with the sight of that cloudy,
+gleaming crown within our reach, that sense of romance, that
+phantom of nobleness? What was the significance of the aspirations
+that made the heart beat high on fresh sunlit mornings, the dim and
+beautiful hopes that came beckoning as we looked from our windows
+in a sunset hour, with the sky flushing red behind the old towers,
+the sense of illimitable power, of stainless honour, that came so
+bravely, when the organ bore the voices aloft in the lighted chapel
+at evensong? Was all that not a real inspiration at all, but a mere
+accident of boyish vigour? No, it was not a delusion--that was life
+as it was meant to be lived, and the best victory was to keep that
+hope alive in the heart amid a hundred failures, a thousand cares.
+
+As I walked thus full of fancies, the boys singly or in groups kept
+passing me, smiling, full of delighted excitement and chatter, all
+intent on themselves and their companions. I heard scraps of their
+talk, inconsequent names, accompanied with downright praise or
+blame, unintelligible exploits, happy nonsense. How odd it is to
+note that when we Anglo-Saxons are at our happiest and most
+cheerful, we expend so much of our steam in frank derision of each
+other! Yet though I can hardly remember a single conversation of my
+school days, the thought of my friendships and alliances is all
+gilt with a sense of delightful eagerness. Now that I am a writer
+of books, it matters even more how I say a thing than what I say.
+But then it was the other way. It was what we felt that mattered,
+and talk was but the sparkling outflow of trivial thought. What
+heroes we made of sturdy, unemphatic boys, how we repeated each
+other's jokes, what merciless critics we were of each other, how
+little allowance we made for weakness or oddity, how easily we
+condoned all faults in one who was good-humoured and strong! How
+the little web of intrigue and gossip, of likes and dislikes, wove
+and unwove itself! What hopeless Tories we were! How we stood upon
+our rights and privileges! I have few illusions as to the innocence
+or the justice or the generosity of boyhood; what boys really
+admire are grace and effectiveness and readiness. And yet, looking
+back, one has parted with something, a sort of zest and intensity
+that one would fain have retained. I felt that I would have given
+much to be able to have communicated a few of the hard lessons of 
+experience that I have learnt by my errors and mistakes, to these
+jolly youngsters; but there again comes in the pathos of boyhood,
+that one can make no one a present of experience, and that virtue
+cannot be communicated, or it ceases to be virtue. They were bound,
+all those ingenuous creatures, to make their own blunders, and one
+could not save them a single one, for all one's hankering to help.
+That is of course the secret, that we are here for the sake of
+experience, and not for the sake of easy happiness. Yet one would
+keep the hearts of these boys pure and untarnished and strong, if
+one could, though even as one walked among them one could see faces
+on which temptation and sin had already written itself in legible
+signs.
+
+The cricket drew to an end; the shadows began to lengthen on the
+turf. The mimic warriors were disbanded. The tea-tables made their
+appearance under the elms, where one was welcomed and waited upon
+by cheerful matrons and neat maidservants, and delightfully zealous
+and inefficient boys. One had but to express a preference to have
+half-a-dozen plates pressed upon one by smiling Ganymedes. If
+schools cannot alter character, they certainly can communicate to
+our cheerful English boys the most delightful manners in the world,
+so unembarrassed, courteous, easy, graceful, without the least
+touch of exaggeration or self-consciousness. I suppose one has
+insular prejudices, for we are certainly not looked upon as models
+of courtesy or consideration by our Continental neighbours. I
+suppose we reserve our best for ourselves. I expressed a wish to
+look at some of the new buildings, and a young gentleman of
+prepossessing exterior became my unaffected cicerone. He was not
+one who dealt in adjectives; his highest epithet of praise was
+"pretty decent," but one detected an honest and unquestioning pride
+in the place for all that.
+
+Perhaps the best point of all about these schools of ours, is that
+the aspect of the place and the tone of the dwellers in it does not
+vary appreciably on days of festival and on working days. The
+beauty of it is a little focused and smartened, but that is all.
+There is no covering up of deficiencies or hiding desolation out of
+sight. If one goes down to a public-school on an ordinary day, one
+finds the same brave life, the same unembarrassed courtesy
+prevailing. There is no sense of being taken by surprise; the life
+is all open to inspection on any day and at any hour. We do not
+reserve ourselves for occasions in England. The meat cuts
+wholesomely and pleasantly wherever it is sampled.
+
+The disadvantage of this is that we are misjudged by foreigners
+because we are seen, not at our best, but as we are. We do not feel
+the need of recommending ourselves to the favourable consideration
+of others; not that that is a virtue, it is rather the shadow of
+complacency and patriotism.
+
+But at last a feeling begins to arise in the minds both of hosts
+and guests that the play is played out for the day, that the little
+festivity is over. On the part of our hosts that feeling manifests
+itself in a tendency to press departing guests to stay a little
+longer. An old acquaintance of mine, a shy man, once gave a large
+garden-party and had a band to play. He did his best for a time and
+times and half-a-time; but at last he began to feel that the strain
+was becoming intolerable. With desperate ingenuity he sought out
+the band-master, told him to leave out the rest of the programme,
+and play "God Save the King,"--the result being a furious exodus of
+his guests. Today no such device is needed. We melt away, leaving
+our kind entertainers to the pleasant weariness that comes of
+sustained geniality, and to the sense that three hundred and sixty-
+four days have to elapse before the next similar festival.
+
+And, for myself, I carry away with me a gracious memory of a day
+thrilled by a variety of conflicting and profound emotions; and if
+I feel that perhaps life would be both easier and simpler, if we
+could throw off a little more of our conventional panoply of
+thought, could face our problems with a little more candour and
+directness, yet I have had a glimpse of a community living an
+eager, full, vigorous life, guarded by sufficient discipline to
+keep the members of it wholesomely and honourably obedient, and yet
+conceding as much personal liberty of thought and action as the
+general interest of the body can admit. I have seen a place full of
+high possibilities and hopes, bestowing a treasure of bright
+memories of work, of play, of friendship, upon the majority of its
+members, and upholding a Spartan ideal of personal subordination to
+the common weal, an ideal not enforced by law so much as sustained
+by honour, an institution which, if it does not encourage
+originality, is yet a sound reflection of national tendencies, and
+one in which the men who work it devote themselves unaffectedly and
+ungrudgingly to the interests of the place, without sentiment
+perhaps, but without ostentation or priggishness. A place indeed to
+which one would wish perhaps to add a certain intellectual
+stimulus, a mental liberty, yet from which there is little that one
+would desire to take away. For if one would like to see our schools
+strengthened, amplified and expanded, yet one would wish the
+process to continue on the existing lines, and not on a different
+method. So, in our zeal for cultivating the further hope, let us
+who would fain see a purer standard of morals, a more vigorous
+intellectual life prevail in our schools, not overlook the
+marvellous progress that is daily and hourly being made, and keep
+the taint of fretful ingratitude out of our designs; and meanwhile
+let us, in the spirit of the old Psalm, wish Jerusalem prosperity
+"for our brethren and companions' sakes."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+LITERARY FINISH
+
+
+
+
+
+I had two literary men staying with me a week ago, both of them
+accomplished writers, and interested in their art, not
+professionally and technically only, but ardently and
+enthusiastically. I here label them respectively Musgrave and
+Herries. Musgrave is a veteran writer, a man of fifty, who makes a
+considerable income by writing, and has succeeded in many
+departments--biography, criticism, poetry, essay-writing; he lacks,
+however, the creative and imaginative gift; his observation is
+acute, and his humour considerable; but he cannot infer and deduce;
+he cannot carry a situation further than he can see it. Herries on
+the other hand is a much younger man, with an interest in human
+beings that is emotional rather than spectacular; while Musgrave is
+interested mainly in the present, Herries lives in the past or the
+future. Musgrave sees what people do and how they behave, while
+Herries is for ever thinking how they must have behaved to produce
+their present conditions, or how they would be likely to act under
+different conditions. Musgrave's one object is to discover what he
+calls the truth; Herries thrives and battens upon illusions.
+Musgrave is fond of the details of life, loves food and drink,
+conviviality and social engagements, new people and unfamiliar
+places--Herries is quite indifferent to the garniture of life,
+lives in great personal discomfort, dislikes mixed assemblies and
+chatter, and has a fastidious dislike of the present, whatever it
+is, from a sense that possibilities are so much richer than
+performances. Musgrave admits that he has been more successful as a
+writer than he deserves; Herries is likely, I think, to disappoint
+the hopes of his friends, and will not do justice to his
+extraordinary gifts, from a certain dreaminess and lack of
+vitality. Musgrave loves the act of writing, and is always full to
+the brim of matter. Herries dislikes composition, and is yet drawn
+to it by a sense of fearful responsibility. Neither have,
+fortunately, the least artistic jealousy. Herries regards a man
+like Musgrave with a sort of incredulous stupefaction, as a stream
+of inexplicable volume. Herries has to Musgrave all the interest of
+a very delicate and beautiful type, whose fastidiousness he can
+almost envy. As a rule, literary men will not discuss their art
+among themselves; they have generally arrived at a sort of method
+of their own, which may not be ideal, but which is the best
+practical solution for themselves, and they would rather not be
+disquieted about it; literary talk, too, tends to partake of the
+nature of shop, and busy men, as a rule, like to talk the shop of
+their recreations rather than the shop of their employment. But
+Musgrave will discuss anything; and as for Herries, writing is not
+an occupation, so much as a divine vocation which he regards with a
+holy awe.
+
+The discussion began at dinner, and I was amused to see how it
+affected the two men. Musgrave, by an incredible mental agility,
+contrived to continue to take a critical interest in the meal and
+the argument at the same time; Herries thrust away an unfinished
+plate, refused what was offered to him, pushed his glasses about as
+if they were chessmen, filled the nearest with water at intervals--
+he is a rigid teetotaller--and drank out of them alternately with
+an abstracted air.
+
+The point was the question of literary finish, and the degree to
+which it can or ought to be practised. Herries is of the school of
+Flaubert, and holds that there may be several ways of saying a
+thing, but only one best way, and that it is alike the duty and the
+goal of the writer to find that way. This he enunciated with some
+firmness.
+
+"No," said Musgrave, "I think that is only a theory, and breaks
+down, as all theories do, when it is put in practice: look at all
+the really big writers: look at Shakespeare--to me his work gives
+the impression of being both hasty and uncorrected. If he says a
+thing in one way, and while he is doing it thinks of a more telling
+form of expression, he doesn't erase the first statement; he merely
+says it over again more effectively. He is full of lapses and
+inappropriate passages--and it is that very thing which gives him
+such an air of reality."
+
+"Well, there is a good deal in that," said Herries, "but I do not
+see how you are going to prove that it is not deliberate.
+Shakespeare wrote like that in his plays, breathlessly and eagerly,
+because that was the aim he had in view; if he makes one of his
+people say a thing tamely, and then more pointedly, it is because
+it is exactly what people do in real life, and Shakespeare was
+thinking with their mind for the time being. He is behind the
+person he has made, moving his arms, looking through his eyes,
+breathing through his mouth; and just as life itself is hurried and
+inconsequent, so the perfection of art is, not to be hurried and
+inconsequent, but to give one the impression of being so. I don't
+believe he left his work uncorrected out of mere impatience. Look
+at the way he wrote when he was writing in a different manner--look
+at the Sonnets, for instance--there is plenty of calculated art
+there!"
+
+"Yes," I said, "there is art there, but I don't think it is very
+deliberate art. I don't believe they were written SLOWLY. Of course
+one can hardly be breathless in a sonnet. The rhymes are all
+stretched across the ground, like wires, and one has to pick one's
+way among them."
+
+"Well, take another instance," said Musgrave. "Look at Scott. He
+speaks himself of his 'hurried frankness of execution.' His proof-
+sheets are the most extraordinary things, full of impossible
+sentences, lapses of grammar, and so forth. He did not do much
+correcting himself, but I believe I am right in saying that his
+publishers did, and spent hours in reducing the chaos to order."
+
+"Oh, of course I don't deny," said Herries, "that volume and
+vitality are what matters most. Scott's imagination was at once
+prodigious and profound. He seems to me to have said to his
+creations, 'Let the young men now arise and play before us.' But I
+don't think his art was the better for his carelessness. Great and
+noble as the result was, I think it would have been greater if he
+had taken more pains. Of course one regards men of genius like
+Scott and Shakespeare with a kind of terror--one can forgive them
+anything; but it is because they do by a sort of prodigal instinct
+what most people have to do by painful effort. If one's imagination
+has the poignant rightness of Scott's or Shakespeare's, one's
+hurried work is better than most people's finished work. But people
+of lesser force and power, if they get their stitches wrong, have
+to unpick them and do it all over again. Sometimes I have an uneasy
+sense, when I am writing, that my characters are feeling as if
+their clothes do not fit. Then they have to be undressed, so to
+speak, that one may see where the garments gall them. Now, take a
+book like Madame Bovary, painfully and laboriously constructed--it
+seems obvious enough, yet the more one reads it the more one
+becomes aware how every stroke and detail tell. What almost appals
+me about that book is the way in which the end is foreseen in the
+beginning, the way in which Flaubert seems to have carried the
+whole thing in his head all the time, to have known exactly where
+he was going and how fast he was going."
+
+"That is perfectly true," I said. "But take an instance of another
+of Flaubert's books, Bouvard et Pecuchet, where the same method is
+pursued with what I can only call deplorable results. Every detail
+is perfect of its kind. The two grotesque creatures take up one
+pursuit after another, agriculture, education, antiquities,
+horticulture, distilling perfumes, making jam. In each they make
+exactly the absurd mistakes that such people would have made; but
+one loses all sense of reality, because one feels that they would
+not have taken up so many things; it is only a collection of
+typical absurdities. Given the men and the particular pursuit, it
+is all natural enough, but one wearies of the same process being
+applied an impossible number of times, just as Flaubert was often
+so intolerable in real life, because he ran a joke to death, and
+never knew when to put it down. The result in Bouvard et Pecuchet
+is a lack of proportion and subordination. It is like one of the
+early Pre-Raphaelite pictures, in which every detail is painted
+with minute perfection. It was all there, no doubt, and it was all
+exactly like that; but that is not how the human eye apprehends a
+scene. The human mind takes a central point, and groups the
+accessories round it. In art, I think everything depends upon
+centralisation. Two lovers part, and the birds' faint chirp from
+the leafless tree, the smouldering rim of the sunset over misty
+fields, are true and symbolical parts of the scene; but if you deal
+in botany and ornithology and meteorology at such a moment, you
+cloud and dim the central point--you digress when you ought only to
+emphasise."
+
+"Oh yes," said Herries with a sigh, "that is all right enough--it
+all depends upon proportion; and the worst of all these discussions
+on points of art is that each person has to find his own standard--
+one can't accept other people's standards. To me Bouvard et
+Pecuchet is a piece of almost flawless art--it is there--it lives
+and breathes. I don't like it all, of course, but I don't doubt
+that it happened so. There must be an absolute rightness behind all
+supreme writing. Art must have laws as real and immutable and
+elaborate as those of science and metaphysics and religion--that is
+the central article of my creed."
+
+"But the worst of that theory is," I said, "that one lays down
+canons of taste, which are very neat and pretty; and then there
+comes some new writer of genius, knocks all the old canons into
+fragments, and establishes a new law. Canons of art seem to me
+sometimes nothing more than classifications of the way that genius
+works. I find it very hard to believe that there is a pattern, so
+to speak, for the snuffers and the candlesticks, revealed to Moses
+in the mount. It was Moses' idea of a pair of snuffers, when all is
+said."
+
+"I entirely agree," said Musgrave; "the only ultimate basis of all
+criticism is, 'I like it because I like it'--and the connoisseurs
+of any age are merely the people who have the faculty of agreeing,
+I won't say with the majority, but with the majority of competent
+critics."
+
+"No, no," said Herries, raising his mournful eyes to Musgrave's
+face, "don't talk like that! You take my faith away from me. Surely
+there must be some central canon of morality in art, just as there
+is in ethics. For instance, in ethics, is it conceivable that
+cruelty might become right, if only enough people thought it was
+right? Is there no absolute principle at all? In art, what about
+the great pictures and the great poems, which have approved
+themselves to the best minds in generation after generation? Their
+rightness and their beauty are only attested by critics, they are
+surely not created by them? My view is that there is an absolute
+law of beauty, and that we grow nearer to it by slow degrees.
+Sometimes, as with the Greeks, people got very near to it indeed.
+Is it conceivable, for instance, that men could ever come to regard
+the Venus of Milo as ugly?"
+
+"Why yes," said Musgrave, laughing, "I suppose that if humanity
+developed on different lines, and a new type of beauty became
+desirable, we might come to look upon the Venus of Milo as a
+barbarous and savage kind of object, a dreadful parody of what we
+had become, like a female chimpanzee. To a male chimpanzee, the
+wrinkled brow, the long upper lip, the deeply indented lines from
+nose to mouth, of a female chimpanzee in the prime of adolescence,
+is, I suppose, almost intolerably dazzling and adorable--beauty can
+only be a relative thing, when all is said."
+
+"We are drifting away from our point," I said. "The question really
+is whether, as art expands, the principles become fewer or more
+numerous. My own belief is that the principles do become fewer, but
+the varieties of expression more numerous. Keats tried to sum it up
+by saying, 'Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty'; but it is not a
+successful maxim, because, as a peevish philosopher said, 'Why in
+that case have two words for the same thing?'"
+
+"But it is true, in a sense, for all that," said Herries. "What we
+HAVE learnt is that the subject is of very little importance in
+art--it is the expression that matters. Genre pictures, plots of
+novels, incidents of plays--they are all rather elementary things.
+Flaubert looked forward to a time in art when there should be no
+subjects at all, when art should aspire to the condition of music,
+and express the intangible."
+
+"I confess," said Musgrave, laughing, "that that statement conveys
+nothing to me. A painter, on that line, would depict nothing, but
+simply produce a sort of harmony of colour. A picture would become
+simply a texture of colour-vibrations. My own view is rather that
+it is a question of accurate observation, followed by an extreme
+delicacy and suggestiveness of expression. Some people would say
+that it was all a question of reality; and that the point is that
+the writer shall suggest a reality to his reader, even though the
+picture he evoked in the reader's mind was not the same as the
+picture in his own mind--but that is to me pure symbolism."
+
+"Exactly," said Herries, "and the more symbolical that art becomes,
+the purer it becomes--that is precisely what I am aiming at."
+
+"Well," I said, "that gives me an opportunity of making a
+confession. I have never really been able to understand what
+technical symbolism in art is. A symbol in the plain sense is
+something which recalls or suggests to you something else; and thus
+the whole of art is pure symbolism. The flick of colour gives you a
+distant woodland, the phrase gives you a scene or an emotion. Five
+printed words upon a page make one suffer or rejoice imaginatively;
+and my idea of the most perfect art is not the art which gives one
+a sense of laborious finish, but the art in which you never think
+of the finish at all, but only of the thing described. The end of
+effort is to conceal effort, as the old adage says. Some people, I
+suppose, attain it through a series of misses; but the best art of
+all goes straight to the heart of the thing."
+
+"Yes," said Musgrave, "my own feeling is that the mistake is to
+consider it can only be done in one way. Each person has his own
+way; but I agree in thinking that the best art is the most
+effortless."
+
+"From the point of view of the onlooker, perhaps," said Herries,
+"but not from the point of view of the craftsman. The pleasure of
+art, for the craftsman, is to see what the difficulty was, and to
+discern how the artist triumphed over it. Think of the delightful
+individual roughness of old work as opposed to modern machine-made
+things. There is an appropriate irregularity, according to the
+medium employed. The workmanship of a gem is not the same as that
+of a building; the essence of the gem is to be flawless; but in the
+building there is a pleasure in the tool-dints, like the pleasure
+of the rake-marks on the gravel path. Of course music must be
+flawless too--firm, resolute, inevitable, because the medium
+demands it; but in a big picture--why, the other day I saw a great
+oil-painting, a noble piece of art--I came upon it in the Academy,
+by a side door close upon it. The background was a great tangled
+mass of raw crude smears, more like coloured rags patched together
+than paint; but a few paces off, the whole melted into a great
+river-valley, with deep water-meadows of summer grass and big
+clumps of trees. That is the perfect combination. The man knew
+exactly what he wanted--he got his effect--the structure was
+complete, and yet there was the added pleasure of seeing how he
+achieved it. That is the kind of finish I desire."
+
+"Yes, of course," said Musgrave, "we should all agree about that;
+but my feeling would be that the way to do it is for the artist to
+fill himself to the brim with the subject, and to let it burst out.
+I do not at all believe in the painful pinching and pulling
+together of a particular bit of work. That sort of process is
+excellent practice, but it seems to me like the receipt in one of
+Edwin Lear's Nonsense Books for making some noisome dish, into
+which all sorts of ingredients of a loathsome kind were to be put;
+and the directions end with the words: 'Serve up in a cloth, and
+throw all out of the window as soon as possible.' It is an
+excellent thing to take all the trouble, if you throw it away when
+it is done; you will do your next piece of real work all the
+better; but for a piece of work to have the best kind of vitality,
+it must flow, I believe, easily and sweetly from the teeming mind.
+Take such a book as Newman's Apologia, written in a few weeks, a
+piece of perfect art--but then it was written in tears."
+
+"But on the other hand," said I, "look at Ariosto's Orlando; it
+took ten years to write and sixteen more to correct--and there is
+not a forced or a languid line in the whole of it."
+
+"Yes," said Musgrave, "it is true, of course, that people must do
+things in their own way. But, on the whole, the best work is done
+in speed and glow, and derives from that swift handling a unity, a
+curve, that nothing else can give. What matters is to have a clear
+sense of structure, and that, at all events, cannot be secured by
+poky and fretful treatment. That is where intellectual grasp comes
+in. But, even so, it all depends upon what one likes, and I confess
+that I like large handling better than perfection of detail."
+
+"I believe," I said, "that we really all agree. We all believe in
+largeness and vitality as the essential qualities. But in the
+lesser kinds of art there is a delicacy and a perfection which are
+appropriate. An attention to minutiae which the graving of a gem or
+the making of a sonnet demands is out of place in a cathedral or an
+epic. We none of us would approve of hasty, slovenly, clumsy work
+anywhere; all that is to be demanded is that such irregularity as
+can be detected should not be inappropriate irregularity. What we
+disagree about is only the precise amount of finish which is
+appropriate to the particular work. Musgrave would hold, in the
+case of Flaubert, that he was, in his novels, trying to give to the
+cathedral the finish of the gem, and polishing a colossal statue as
+though it were a tiny statuette."
+
+"Yes," said Herries mournfully, "I suppose that is right; though
+when I read of Flaubert spending hours of torture in the search for
+a single epithet, I do not feel that the sacrifice was made in vain
+if only the result was achieved."
+
+"But I," said Musgrave, "grudge the time so spent. I would rather
+have more less-finished work than little exquisite work--though I
+suppose that we shall come to the latter sometime, when the
+treasures of art have accumulated even more hopelessly than now,
+and when nothing but perfect work will have a chance of
+recognition. Then perhaps a man will spend thirty years in writing
+a short story, and twenty more in polishing it! But at present
+there is much that is unsaid which may well be said, and I confess
+that I do not hanker after this careful and troubled work. It
+reminds me of the terrible story of the Chinaman who spent fifty
+years in painting a vase which cracked in the furnace. It seems to
+me like the worst kind of waste."
+
+"And I, on the other hand," said Herries gravely, "think that such
+a life is almost as noble a one as I can well conceive."
+
+His words sounded to me like a kind of pontifical blessing
+pronounced at the end of a liturgical service; and, dinner now
+being over, we adjourned to the library. Then Musgrave entertained
+us with an account of a squabble he had lately had with a certain
+editor, who had commissioned him to write a set of papers on
+literary subjects, and then had objected to his treatment. Musgrave
+had trailed his coat before the unhappy man, laid traps for him by
+dint of asking him ingenuous questions, had written an article
+elaborately constructed to parody derisively the editor's point of
+view, had meekly submitted it as one of the series, and then, when
+the harried wretch again objected, had confronted him with
+illustrative extracts from his own letters. It was a mirthful if
+not a wholly good-natured performance. Herries had listened with
+ill-concealed disgust, and excused himself at the end of the
+recital on the plea of work.
+
+As the door closed behind him, Musgrave said with a wink, "I am
+afraid my story has rather disgusted our young transcendentalist.
+He has no pleasure in a wholesome row; he thinks the whole thing
+vulgar--and I believe he is probably right; but I can't live on his
+level, though I am sure it is very fine and all that."
+
+"But what do you really think of his work?" I said. "It is very
+promising, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes," said Musgrave reflectively, "that is just what it is--he has
+got a really fine literary gift; but he is too uncompromising.
+Idealism in art is a deuced fine thing, and every now and then
+there comes a man who can keep it up, and can afford to do so. But
+what Herries does not understand is that there are two sides to
+art--the theory and the practice. It is just the same with a lot of
+things--education, for instance, and religion. But the danger is
+that the theorists become pedantic. They get entirely absorbed in
+questions of form, and the plain truth is that however good your
+form is, you have got to get hold of your matter too. The point
+after all is the application of art to life, and you have got to
+condescend. Things of which the ultimate end is to affect human
+beings must take human beings into account. If you aim at appealing
+only to other craftsmen, it becomes an erudite business: you become
+like a carpenter who makes things which are of no use except to win
+the admiration of other carpenters. Of course it may be worth doing
+if you are content with indicating a treatment which other people
+can apply and popularise. But if you isolate art into a theory
+which has no application to life, you are a savant and not an
+artist. You can't be an artist without being a man, and therefore I
+hold that humanity comes first. I don't mean that one need be
+vulgar. Of course I am a mere professional, and my primary aim is
+to earn an honest livelihood. I frankly confess that I don't pose,
+even to myself, as a public benefactor. But Herries does not care
+either about an income, or about touching other people. Of course I
+should like to raise the standard. I should like to see ordinary
+people capable of perceiving what is good art, and not so wholly at
+the mercy of conventional and melodramatic art. But Herries does
+not care twopence about that. He is like the Calvinist who is sure
+of his own salvation, has his doubts about the minister, and thinks
+every one else irreparably damned. As I say, it is a lofty sort of
+ideal, but it is not a good sign when that sort of thing begins.
+The best art of the world--let us say Homer, Virgil, Dante,
+Shakespeare--was contributed by people who probably did not think
+about it as art at all. Fancy Homer going in for questions of form!
+It is always, I believe, a sign of decadence when formalism begins.
+It is just like religion, which starts with a teacher who has an
+overwhelming sense of the beauty of holiness; and then that
+degenerates into theology. These young men are to art what the
+theologians are to religion. They lose sight of the object of the
+whole thing in codification and definition. My own idea of a great
+artist is a man who finds beauty so hopelessly attractive and
+desirable that he can't restrain his speech. It all has to come
+out; he cannot hold his peace. And then a number of people begin to
+see that it was what they had been vaguely admiring and desiring
+all the time; and then a few highly intellectual people think that
+they can analyse it, and produce the same effects by applying their
+analysis. It can't be done so; art must have a life of its own."
+
+"Yes," I said, "I think you are right. Herries is ascetic and
+eremitical--a beautiful thing in many ways; but there is no
+transmission of life in such art; it is a sterile thing after all,
+a seedless flower."
+
+"Let us express the vulgar hope," said Musgrave, "that he may fall
+in love; that will bring him to his moorings! And now," he added,
+"we will go to the music-room and I will see if I cannot tempt the
+shy bird from his roost." And so we did--Musgrave is an excellent
+musician. We flung the windows open; he embarked upon a great Bach
+"Toccata"; and before many bars were over, our idealist crept
+softly into the room, with an air of apologetic forgiveness.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+A MIDSUMMER DAY'S DREAM
+
+
+
+
+
+I suppose that every one knows by experience how certain days in
+one's life have a power of standing out in the memory, even in a
+tract of pleasant days, all lit by a particular brightness of joy.
+One does not always know at the time that the day is going to be so
+crowned; but the weeks pass on, and the one little space of
+sunlight, between dawn and eve, has orbed itself
+
+
+           "into the perfect star
+     We saw not, when we moved therein."
+
+
+The thing that in my own case most tends to produce this "grace of
+congruity," as the schoolmen say, is the presence of the right
+companion, and it is no less important that he should be in the
+right mood. Sometimes the right companion is tiresome when he
+should be gracious, or boisterous when he should be quiet; but when
+he is in the right mood, he is like a familiar and sympathetic
+guide on a mountain peak. He helps one at the right point; his
+desire to push on or to stop coincides with one's own; he is not a
+hired assistant, but a brotherly comrade. On the day that I am
+thinking of I had just such a companion. He was cheerful,
+accessible, good-humoured. He followed when I wanted to lead, he
+led when I was glad to follow. He was not ashamed of being
+unaffectedly emotional, and he was not vaporous or quixotically
+sentimental. He did not want to argue, or to hunt an idea to death;
+and we had the supreme delight of long silences, during which our
+thoughts led us to the same point, the truest test that there is
+some subtle electrical affinity at work, moving viewlessly between
+heart and brain.
+
+What no doubt heightened the pleasure for me was that I had been
+passing through a somewhat dreary period. Things had been going
+wrong, had tied themselves into knots. Several people whose
+fortunes had been bound up with my own had been acting perversely
+and unreasonably--at least I chose to think so. My own work had
+come to a standstill. I had pushed on perhaps too fast, and I had
+got into a bare sort of moorland tract of life, and could not
+discern the path in the heather. There did not seem any particular
+task for me to undertake; the people whom it was my business to
+help, if I could, seemed unaccountably and aggravatingly prosperous
+and independent. Not only did no one seem to want my opinion, but I
+did not feel that I had any opinions worth delivering. Who does not
+know the frame of mind? When life seems rather an objectless
+business, and one is tempted just to let things slide; when energy
+is depleted, and the springs of hope are low; when one feels like
+the family in one of Mrs. Walford's books, who all go out to dinner
+together, and of whom the only fact that is related is that "nobody
+wanted them." So fared it with my soul.
+
+But that morning, somehow, the delicious sense had returned, of its
+own accord, of a beautiful quality in common things. I had sought
+it in vain for weeks; it had behaved as a cat behaves, the
+perverse, soft, pretty, indifferent creature. It had stared blankly
+at my beckoning hand; it had gambolled away into the bushes when I
+strove to capture it, and looked out at me when I desisted with
+innocent grey eyes; and now it had suddenly returned uncalled, to
+caress me as though I had been a long-lost friend, diligently and
+anxiously sought for in vain. That morning the very scent of
+breakfast being prepared came to my nostrils like the smoke of a
+sacrifice in my honour; the shape and hue of the flowers were full
+of gracious mystery; the green pasture seemed a place where a
+middle-aged man might almost venture to dance. The sharp chirping
+of the birds in the shrubbery seemed a concert arranged for my ear.
+We were soon astir. Like Wordsworth we said that this one day we
+would give to idleness, though the profane might ask to what that
+leisurely poet consecrated the rest of his days.
+
+We found ourselves deposited, by a brisk train--the very stoker
+seemed to be engaged in the joyful conspiracy--at the little town
+of St. Ives. I should like to expatiate upon the charms of St.
+Ives, its clear, broad, rush-fringed river, its quaint brick
+houses, with their little wharf-gardens, where the trailing
+nasturtium mirrors itself in the slow flood, its embayed bridge,
+with the ancient chapel buttressed over the stream--but I must hold
+my hand; I must not linger over the beauties of the City of
+Destruction, which I have every reason to believe was a very
+picturesque place, when our hearts were set on pilgrimage. Suffice
+it to say that we walked along a pretty riverside causeway, under
+enlacing limes, past the fine church, under the hanging woods of
+Houghton Hill--and here we found a mill, a big, timbered place,
+with a tiled roof, odd galleries and projecting pent-houses, all
+pleasantly dusted with flour, where a great wheel turned dripping
+in a fern-clad cavern of its own, with the scent of the weedy
+river-water blown back from the plunging leat. Oh, the joyful place
+of streams! River and leat and back-water here ran clear among
+willow-clad islands, all fringed deep with meadow-sweet and comfrey
+and butterbur and melilot. The sun shone overhead among big, white,
+racing clouds; the fish poised in mysterious pools among trailing
+water-weeds; and there was soon no room in my heart for anything
+but the joy of earth and the beauty of it. What did the weary days
+before and behind matter? What did casuistry and determinism and
+fate and the purpose of life concern us then, my friend and me? As
+little as they concerned the gnats that danced so busily in the
+golden light, at the corner where the alder dipped her red rootlets
+to drink the brimming stream.
+
+There we chartered a boat, and all that hot forenoon rowed lazily
+on, the oars grunting and dripping, the rudder clicking softly
+through avenues of reeds and water-plants, from reach to reach,
+from pool to pool. Here we had a glimpse of the wide-watered valley
+rich in grass, here of silent woods, up-piled in the distance,
+over which quivered the hot summer air. Here a herd of cattle stood
+knee-deep in the shallow water, lazily twitching their tails and
+snuffing at the stream. The birds were silent now in the glowing
+noon; only the reeds shivered and bowed. There, beside a lock with
+its big, battered timbers, the water poured green and translucent
+through a half-shut sluice. Now and then the springs of thought
+brimmed over in a few quiet words, that came and passed like a
+breaking bubble--but for the most part we were silent, content to
+converse with nod or smile. And so we came at last to our goal; a
+house embowered in leaves, a churchyard beside the water, and a
+church that seemed to have almost crept to the brink to see itself
+mirrored in the stream. The place mortals call Hemingford Grey, but
+it had a new name for me that day which I cannot even spell--for
+the perennial difficulty that survives a hundred disenchantments,
+is to feel that a romantic hamlet seen thus on a day of pilgrimage,
+with its clustering roofs and chimneys, its waterside lawns, is a
+real place at all. I suppose that people there live dull and simple
+lives enough, buy and sell, gossip and back-bite, wed and die; but
+for the pilgrim it seems an enchanted place, where there can be no
+care or sorrow, nothing hard, or unlovely, or unclean, but a sort
+of fairy-land, where men seem to be living the true and beautiful
+life of the soul, of which we are always in search, but which seems
+to be so strangely hidden away. It must have been for me and my
+friend that the wise and kindly artist who lives there in a
+paradise of flowers had filled his trellises with climbing roses,
+and bidden the tall larkspurs raise their azure spires in the air.
+How else had he brought it all to such perfection for that golden
+hour? Perhaps he did not even guess that he had done it all for my
+sake, which made it so much more gracious a gift. And then we
+learned too from a little red-bound volume which I had thought
+before was a guide-book, but which turned out to-day to be a volume
+of the Book of Life, that the whole place was alive with the
+calling of old voices. At the little church there across the
+meadows the portly, tender-hearted, generous Charles James Fox had
+wedded his bride. Here, in the pool below, Cowper's dog had dragged
+out for him the yellow water-lily that he could not reach; and in
+the church itself was a little slab where two tiny maidens sleep,
+the sisters of the famous Miss Gunnings, who set all hearts ablaze
+by their beauty, who married dukes and earls, and had spent their
+sweet youth in a little ruined manor-house hard by. I wonder
+whether after all the two little girls, who died in the time of
+roses, had not the better part; and whether the great Duchess, who
+showed herself so haughty to poor Boswell, when he led his great
+dancing Bear through the grim North, did not think sometimes in her
+state of the childish sisters with whom she had played, before they
+came to be laid in the cool chancel beside the slow stream.
+
+And then we sate down for a little on the churchyard wall, and
+watched the water-grasses trail and the fish poise. In that sweet
+corner of the churchyard, at a certain season of the year, grow
+white violets; they had dropped their blooms long ago; but they
+were just as much alive as when they were speaking aloud to the
+world with scent and colour; I can never think of flowers and trees
+as not in a sense conscious; I believe all life to be conscious of
+itself, and I am sure that the flowering time is the happy time for
+flowers as much as it is for artists.
+
+Close to us here was a wall, with a big, solid Georgian house
+peeping over, blinking with its open windows and sun-blinds on to a
+smooth, shaded lawn, full of green glooms and leafy shelters. Why
+did it all give one such a sense of happiness and peace, even
+though one had no share in it, even though one knew that one would
+be treated as a rude and illegal intruder if one stepped across and
+used it as one's own?
+
+This is a difficult thing to analyse. It all lies in the
+imagination; one thinks of a long perspective of sunny afternoons,
+of leisurely people sitting out in chairs under the big sycamore,
+reading perhaps, or talking quietly, or closing the book to think,
+the memory re-telling some old and pretty tale; and then perhaps
+some graceful girl comes out of the house with a world of hopes and
+innocent desires in her wide-open eyes; or a tall and limber boy
+saunters out bare-headed and flannelled, conscious of life and
+health, and steps down to the punt that lies swinging at its chain--
+one hears it rattle as it is untied and flung into the prow; and
+then the dripping pole is plunged and raised, and the punt goes
+gliding away, through zones of glimmering light and shadow, to the
+bathing-pool. All that comes into one's mind; one takes life, and
+subtracts from it all care and anxiety, all the shadow of failure
+and suffering, sees it as it might be, and finds it good. That is
+the first element of the charm. And then there comes into the
+picture a further and more reflective charm, that which Tennyson
+called the passion of the past; the thought that all this beautiful
+life is slipping away, even as it forms itself, that one cannot
+stay it for an instant, but that the shadow creeps across the dial,
+and the church-clock tells the hours of the waning day. It is a
+mistake to think that such a sense comes of age and experience; it
+is rather the other way, for never is the regretful sense of the
+fleeting quality of things realised with greater poignancy than
+when one is young. When one grows older one begins to expect a good
+deal of dissatisfaction and anxiety to be mingled with it all, one
+finds the old Horatian maxim becoming true:
+
+
+     "Vitae summa brevis nos spem vitat inchoare longam,"
+
+
+and one learns to be grateful for the sunny hour; but when one is
+young, one feels so capable of enjoying it all, so impatient of
+shadow and rain, that one cannot bear that the sweet wine of life
+should be diluted.
+
+That is, I believe, the analysis of the charm of such a scene; the
+possibility of joy, and permanence, tinged with the pathos that it
+has no continuance, but rises and falls and fades like a ripple in
+the stream.
+
+The disillusionment of experience is a very different thing from
+the pathos of youth; for in youth the very sense of pathos is in
+itself an added luxury of joy, giving it a delicate beauty which,
+if it were not so evanescent, it could not possess.
+
+But then comes the real trouble, the heavy anxiety, the illness,
+the loss; and those things, which looked so romantic in the pages
+of poets and the scenes of story-writers, turn out not to be
+romantic at all, but frankly and plainly disagreeable and
+intolerable things. The boy who swept down the shining reaches with
+long, deft strokes becomes a man--money runs short, his children
+give him anxiety, his wife becomes ailing and fretful, he has a
+serious illness; and when after a day of pain he limps out in the
+afternoon to the shadow of the old plane-tree, he must be a very
+wise and tranquil and patient man, if he can still feel to the full
+the sweet influences of the place, and be still absorbed and
+comforted by them.
+
+And here lies the weakness of the epicurean and artistic attitude,
+that it assorts so ill with the harder and grimmer facts of life.
+Life has a habit of twitching away the artistic chair with all its
+cushions from under one, with a rude suddenness, so that one has,
+if one is wise, to learn a mental agility and to avoid the
+temptation of drowsing in the land where it is always afternoon.
+The real attitude is to be able to play a robust and manful part in
+the world, and yet to be able to banish the thought of the bank-
+book and the ledger from the mind, and to submit oneself to the
+sweet influences of summer and sun.
+
+
+     "He who of such delights can judge, and spare
+      To interpose them oft is not unwise."
+
+
+So sang the old Puritan poet; and there is a large wisdom in the
+word OFT which I have abundantly envied, being myself an anxious-
+minded man!
+
+The solution is BALANCE--not to think that the repose of art is
+all, and yet on the other hand not to believe that life is always
+jogging and hustling one. The way in which one can test one's
+progress is by considering whether activities and tiresome
+engagements are beginning to fret one unduly, for if so one is
+becoming a hedonist; and on the other hand by being careful to
+observe whether one becomes incapable of taking a holiday; if one
+becomes bored and restless and hipped in a cessation of activities,
+then one is suffering from the disease of Martha in the Gospel
+story; and of the two sisters we may remember that Martha was the
+one who incurred a public rebuke.
+
+What one has to try to perceive is that life is designed not wholly
+for discomfort, or wholly for ease, but that we are here as
+learners, one and all. Sometimes the lesson comes whispering
+through the leaves of the plane-tree, with the scent of violets in
+the air; sometimes it comes in the words and glances of a happy
+circle full of eager talk, sometimes through the pages of a wise
+book, and sometimes in grim hours, when one tosses sleepless on
+one's bed under the pressure of an intolerable thought--but in each
+and every case we do best when we receive the lesson as willingly
+and large-heartedly as we can.
+
+Perhaps, in some of my writings, those who have read them have
+thought that I have unduly emphasised the brighter, sweeter, more
+tranquil side of life. I have done so deliberately, because I
+believe that we should follow innocent joy as far as we can. But it
+is not because I am unaware of the other side. I do not think that
+any of the windings of the dark wood of which Dante speaks are
+unknown to me, and there are few tracts of dreariness that I have
+not trodden reluctantly. I have had physical health and much
+seeming prosperity; but to be acutely sensitive to the pleasures of
+happiness and peace is generally to be morbidly sensitive to the
+burden of cares. Unhappiness is a subjective thing. As Mrs.
+Gummidge so truly said, when she was reminded that other people had
+their troubles, "I feel them more." And if I have upheld the duty
+of seeking peace, it has been like a preacher who preaches most
+urgently against his own bosom-sins. But I am sure of this, that
+however impatiently one mourns one's fault and desires to be
+different, the secret of growth lies in that very sorrow, perhaps
+in the seeming impotence of that sorrow. What one must desire is to
+learn the truth, however much one may shudder at it; and the longer
+that one persists in one's illusions, the longer is one's learning-
+time. Is it not a bitter comfort to know that the truth is there,
+and that what we believe or do not believe about it makes no
+difference at all? Yes, I think it is a comfort; at all events upon
+that foundation alone is it possible to rest.
+
+How far one drifts in thought away from the sweet scene which grows
+sweeter every hour. The heat of the day is over now; the breeze
+curls on the stream, the shadow of the tower falls far across the
+water. My companion rises and smiles, thinking me lost in indolent
+content; he hardly guesses how far I have been voyaging
+
+
+     "On strange seas of thought alone."
+
+
+Does he guess that as I look back over my life, pain has so far
+preponderated over happiness that I would not, if I could, live it
+again, and that I would not in truth, if I could choose, have lived
+it at all? And yet, even so, I recognise that I am glad not to have
+the choice, for it would be made in an indolent and timid spirit,
+and I do indeed believe that the end is not yet, and that the hour
+will assuredly come when I shall rejoice to have lived, and see the
+meaning even of my fears.
+
+And then we retrace our way, and like the Lady of Shalott step down
+into the boat, to glide along the darkling water-way in the
+westering light. Why cannot I speak to my friend of such dark
+things as these? It would be better perhaps if I could, and yet no
+hand can help us to bear our own burden.
+
+But the dusk comes slowly on, merging reed and pasture and gliding
+stream in one indistinguishable shade; the trees stand out black
+against the sunset, thickening to an emerald green. A star comes
+out over the dark hill, the lights begin to peep out in the windows
+of the clustering town as we draw nearer. As we glide beneath the
+dark houses, with their gables and chimneys dark against the
+glowing sky, how everything that is dull and trivial and homely is
+blotted out by the twilight, leaving nothing but a sense of
+romantic beauty of mysterious peace! The little town becomes an
+enchanted city full of heroic folk; the figure that leans silently
+over the bridge to see us pass, to what high-hearted business is he
+vowed, burgher or angel? A spell is woven of shadow and falling
+light, and of chimes floating over meadow and stream. Yet this
+sense of something remotely and unutterably beautiful, this
+transfiguration of life, is as real and vital an experience as the
+daily, dreary toil, and to be welcomed as such. Nay, more! it is
+better, because it gives one a deepened sense of value, of
+significance, of eternal greatness, to which we must cling as
+firmly as we may, because it is there that the final secret lies;
+not in the poor struggles, the anxious delays, which are but the
+incidents of the voyage, and not the serene life of haven and home.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+SYMBOLS
+
+
+
+
+
+The present time is an era when intellectual persons are ashamed of
+being credulous. It is the perfectly natural and desirable result
+of the working of the scientific spirit. Everything is relentlessly
+investigated, the enormous structure of natural law is being
+discovered to underlie all the most surprising, delicate, and
+apparently fortuitous processes, and no one can venture to forecast
+where the systematisation will end. The result is a great inrush of
+bracing and invigorating candour. It is not that our liberty of
+reflection and action is increased. It is rather increasingly
+limited. But at least we are growing to discern where our
+boundaries are, and it is deeply refreshing to find that the
+boundaries erected by humanity are much closer and more cramping
+than the boundaries determined by God. We are no longer bound by
+human authority, by subjective theories, by petty tradition. We are
+no longer required to tremble before thaumaturgy and conjuring and
+occultism. It is true that science has hitherto confined itself
+mainly to the investigation of concrete phenomena; but the same
+process is sure to be applied to metaphysics, to sociology, to
+psychology; and the day will assuredly come when the human race
+will analyse the laws which govern progress, which regulate the
+exact development of religion and morality.
+
+The demolition of credulity is, as I have said, a wholly desirable
+and beneficial thing. Most intelligent people have found some
+happiness in learning that the dealings of God--that is, the
+creative and originative power behind the universe--are at all
+events not whimsical, however unintelligible they may be. No one at
+all events is now required to reconcile with his religious faith a
+detailed belief in the Mosaic cosmogony, or to accept the fact that
+a Hebrew prophet was enabled to summon bears from a wood to tear to
+pieces some unhappy boys who found food for mirth in his personal
+appearance. That is a pure gain. But side by side with this
+entirely wholesome process, there are a good many people who have
+thrown overboard, together with their credulity, a quality of a far
+higher and nobler kind, which may be called faith. Men who have
+seen many mysteries explained, and many dark riddles solved in
+nature, have fallen into what is called materialism, from the
+mistaken idea that the explanation of material phenomena will hold
+good for the discernment of abstract phenomena. Yet any one who
+approaches the results of scientific investigation in a
+philosophical and a poetical spirit, sees clearly enough that
+nothing has been attempted but analysis, and that the mystery which
+surrounds us is only thrust a little further off, while the
+darkness is as impenetrable and profound as ever. All that we have
+learnt is how natural law works; we have not come near to learning
+why it works as it does. All we have really acquired is a knowledge
+that the audacious and unsatisfactory theories, such, for instance,
+as the old-fashioned scheme of redemption, by which men have
+attempted with a pathetic hopefulness to justify the ways of God to
+man, are, and are bound to be, despairingly incomplete. The danger
+of the scientific spirit is not that it is too agnostic, but that
+it is not agnostic enough: it professes to account for everything
+when it only has a very few of the data in its grasp. The
+materialistic philosophy tends to be a tyranny which menaces
+liberty of thought. Every one has a right to deduce what theory he
+can from his own experience. The one thing that we have no sort of
+right to do is to enforce that theory upon people whose experience
+does not confirm it. We may invite them to act upon our
+assumptions, but we must not blame them if they end by considering
+them to be baseless. I was talking the other day to an ardent Roman
+Catholic, who described by a parable the light in which he viewed
+the authority of the Church. He said that it was as if he were
+half-way up a hill, prevented from looking over into a hidden
+valley by the slope of the ground. On the hill-top, he said, might
+be supposed to stand people in whose good faith and accuracy of
+vision he had complete confidence. If they described to him what
+they saw in the valley beyond, he would not dream of mistrusting
+them. But the analogy breaks down at every point, because the
+essence of it is that every one who reached the hill-top would
+inevitably see the same scene. Yet in the case of religion, the
+hill-top is crowded by people, whose good faith is equally
+incontestable, but whose descriptions of what lies beyond are at
+hopeless variance. Moreover all alike confess that the impressions
+they derive are outside the possibility of scientific or
+intellectual tests, and that it is all a matter of inference
+depending upon a subjective consent in the mind of the discerner to
+accept what is incapable of proof. The strength of the scientific
+position is that the scientific observer is in the presence of
+phenomena confirmed by innumerable investigations, and that, up to
+a certain point, the operation of a law has been ascertained, which
+no reasonable man has any excuse for doubting. Whenever that law
+conflicts with religious assumptions, which in any case cannot be
+proved to be more than subjective assumptions, the unverifiable
+theory must go down before the verifiable. Religion may assume, for
+instance, that life is an educative process; but that theory cannot
+be considered proved in the presence of the fact that many human
+beings close their eyes upon the world before they are capable of
+exercising any moral or intellectual choice whatever.
+
+It may prove, upon investigation, that all religious theories and
+all creeds are nothing more than the desperate and pathetic
+attempts of humanity, conscious of an instinctive horror of
+suffering, and of an inalienable sense of their right to happiness,
+to provide a solution for the appalling fact that many human beings
+seem created only to suffer and to be unhappy. The mystery is a
+very dark one; and philosophy is still not within reach of
+explaining how it is that a sense of justice should be implanted in
+man by the Power that appears so often to violate that conception
+of justice.
+
+The fact is that the progress of science has created an immense
+demand for the quality of faith and hopefulness, by revealing so
+much that is pessimistic in the operation of natural law. If we are
+to live with any measure of contentment or tranquillity, we must
+acquire a confidence that God has not, as science tends to
+indicate, made all men for nought. We must, if we can, acquire some
+sort of hope that it is not in mere wantonness and indifference
+that He confronts us with the necessity for bearing the things that
+He has made us most to dread. It may be easy enough for robust,
+vigorous, contented persons to believe that God means us well; but
+the only solution that is worth anything is a solution that shall
+give us courage, patience, and even joy, at times when everything
+about us seems to speak of cruelty and terror and injustice. One of
+the things that has ministered comfort in large measure to souls so
+afflicted is the power of tracing a certain beauty and graciousness
+in the phenomena that surround us. Who is there who in moments of
+bewildered sorrow has not read a hint of some vast lovingness,
+moving dimly in the background of things, in the touch of familiar
+hands or in the glances of dear eyes? Surely, they have said to
+themselves, if love is the deepest, strongest, and most lasting
+force in the world, the same quality must be hidden deepest in the
+Heart of God. This is the unique strength of the Christian
+revelation, the thought of the Fatherhood of God, and His tender
+care for all that he has made. Again, who is there who in
+depression and anxiety has not had his load somewhat lightened by
+the sight of the fresh green of spring foliage against a blue sky,
+by the colour and scent of flowers, by the sweet melody of musical
+chords? The aching spirit has said, "They are there--beauty, and
+peace, and joy--if I could but find the way to them." Who has not
+had his fear of death alleviated by the happy end of some beloved
+life, when the dear one has made, as it were, solemn haste to be
+gone, falling gently into slumber? Who is there, who, speeding
+homewards in the sunset, has seen the dusky orange veil of flying
+light drawn softly westward over misty fields, where the old house
+stands up darkling among the glimmering pastures, and has not felt
+the presence of some sweet secret waiting for him beyond the gates
+of life and death? All these things are symbols, because the
+emotions they arouse are veritably there, as indisputable a
+phenomenon as any fact which science has analysed. The miserable
+mistake that many intellectual people make is to disregard what
+they would call vague emotions in the presence of scientific truth.
+Yet such emotions have a far more intimate concern for us than the
+dim sociology of bees, or the concentric forces of the stars. Our
+emotions are far more true and vivid experiences for us than
+indisputable laws of nature which never cut the line of our life at
+all. We may wish, perhaps, that the laws of such emotions were
+analysed and systematised too, for it is a very timid and faltering
+spirit that thinks that definiteness is the same as profanation. We
+may depend upon it that the deeper we can probe into such secrets,
+the richer will our conceptions of life and God become.
+
+The mistake that is so often made by religious organisations, which
+depend so largely upon symbolism, is the terrible limiting of this
+symbolism to traditional ceremonies and venerable ritual. It has
+been said that religion is the only form of poetry accessible to
+the poor; and it is true in the sense that anything which hallows
+and quickens the most normal and simple experiences of lives
+divorced from intellectual and artistic influences is a very real
+and true kind of symbolism. It may be well to give people such
+symbolism as they can understand, and the best symbols of all are
+those that deal with the commonest emotions. But it is a lean
+wisdom that emphasises a limited range of emotions at the expense
+of a larger range; and the spirit which limits the sacred
+influences of religion to particular buildings and particular rites
+is very far removed from the spirit of Him who said that neither at
+Gerizim nor in Jerusalem was the Father to be worshipped, but in
+spirit and in truth. At the same time the natural impatience of one
+who discerns a symbolism all about him, in tree and flower, in
+sunshine and rain, and who hates to see the range restricted, is a
+feeling that a wise and tolerant man ought to resist. It is ill to
+break the pitcher because the well is at hand! One does not make a
+narrow soul broader by breaking down its boundaries, but by
+revealing the beauty of the further horizon. Even the false feeling
+of compassion must be resisted. A child is more encouraged by
+listening patiently to its tale of tiny exploits, than by casting
+ridicule upon them.
+
+But on the other hand it is a wholly false timidity for one who has
+been brought up to love and reverence the narrower range of
+symbols, to choke and stifle the desires that stir in his heart for
+the wider range, out of deference to authority and custom. One must
+not discard a cramping garment until one has a freer one to take
+its place; but to continue in the confining robe with the larger
+lying ready to one's hand, from a sense of false pathos and
+unreasonable loyalty, is a piece of foolishness.
+
+There are, I believe, hundreds of men and women now alive, who have
+outgrown their traditional faith, through no fault of their own;
+but who out of terror at the vague menaces of interested and
+Pharisaical persons do not dare to break away. One must of course
+weigh carefully whether one values comfort or liberty most. But
+what I would say is that it is of the essence of a faith to be
+elastic, to be capable of development, to be able to embrace the
+forward movement of thought. Now so far am I from wishing to
+suggest that we have outgrown Christianity, that I would assert
+that we have not yet mastered its simplest principles. I believe
+with all my soul that it is still able to embrace the most daring
+scientific speculations, for the simple reason that it is hardly
+concerned with them at all. Where religious faith conflicts with
+science is in the tenacity with which it holds to the literal truth
+of the miraculous occurrences related in the Scriptures. Some of
+these present no difficulty, some appear to be scientifically
+incredible. Yet these latter seem to me to be but the perfectly
+natural contemporary setting of the faith, and not to be of the
+essence of Christianity at all. Miracles, whether they are true or
+not, are at all events unverifiable, and no creed that claims to
+depend upon the acceptance of unverifiable events can have any
+vitality. But the personality, the force, the perception of Christ
+Himself emerges with absolute distinctness from the surrounding
+details. We may not be in a position to check exactly what He said
+and what He did not say, but just as no reasonable man can hold
+that He was merely an imaginative conception invented by people who
+obviously did not understand Him, so the general drift of His
+teaching is absolutely clear and convincing.
+
+What I would have those do who can profess themselves sincerely
+convinced Christians, in spite of the uncertainty of many of the
+recorded details, is to adopt a simple compromise; to claim their
+part in the inheritance of Christ, and the symbols of His
+mysteries, but not to feel themselves bound by any ecclesiastical
+tradition. No one can forbid, by peevish regulations, direct access
+to the spirit of Christ and to the love of God. Christ's teaching
+was a purely individualistic teaching, based upon conduct and
+emotion, and half the difficulties of the position lie in His
+sanction and guidance having been claimed for what is only a human
+attempt to organise a society with a due deference for the secular
+spirit, its aims and ambitions. The sincere Christian should, I
+believe, gratefully receive the simple and sweet symbols of unity
+and forgiveness; but he should make his own a far higher and wider
+range of symbols, the symbols of natural beauty and art and
+literature--all the passionate dreams of peace and emotion that
+have thrilled the yearning hearts of men. Wherever those emotions
+have led men along selfish, cruel, sensual paths, they must be
+distrusted, just as we must distrust the religious emotions which
+have sanctioned such divergences from the spirit of Christ. We must
+believe that the essence of religion is to make us alive to the
+love of God, in whatever writing of light and air, of form and
+fragrance it is revealed; and we must further believe that religion
+is meant to guide and quicken the tender, compassionate, brotherly
+emotions, by which we lean to each other in this world where so
+much is dark. But to denounce the narrower forms of religion, or to
+abstain from them, is utterly alien to the spirit of Christ. He
+obeyed and reverenced the law, though He knew that the expanding
+spirit of His own teaching would break it in pieces. Of course,
+since liberty is the spirit of the Gospel, a liberty conditioned by
+the sense of equality, there may be occasions when a man is bound
+to resist what appears to him to be a moral or an intellectual
+tyranny. But short of that, the only thing of which one must beware
+is a conscious insincerity; and the limits of that a man must
+determine for himself. There are occasions when consideration for
+the feelings of others seems to conflict with one's own sense of
+sincerity; but I think that one is seldom wrong in preferring
+consideration for others to the personal indulgence of one's own
+apparent sincerity.
+
+Peace and gentleness always prevail in the end over vehemence and
+violence, and a peaceful revolution brings about happier results
+for a country, as we have good reason to know, than a revolution of
+force. Even now the narrower religious systems prevail more in
+virtue of the gentleness and goodwill and persuasion of their
+ministers than through the spiritual terrors that they wield--the
+thunders are divorced from the lightning.
+
+Thus may the victories of faith be won, not by noise and strife,
+but by the silent motion of a resistless tide. Even now it creeps
+softly over the sand and brims the stagnant pools with the
+freshening and invigorating brine.
+
+But in the worship of the symbol there is one deep danger; and that
+is that if one rests upon it, if one makes one's home in the palace
+of beauty or philosophy or religion, one has failed in the quest.
+It is the pursuit not of the unattained but of the unattainable to
+which we are vowed. Nothing but the unattainable can draw us
+onward. It is rest that is forbidden. We are pilgrims yet; and if,
+intoxicated and bemused by beauty or emotion or religion, we make
+our dwelling there, it is as though we slept in the enchanted
+ground. Enough is given us, and no more, to keep us moving
+forwards. To be satisfied is to slumber. The melancholy that
+follows hard in the footsteps of art, the sadness haunting the
+bravest music, the aching, troubled longing that creeps into the
+mind at the sight of the fairest scene, is but the warning presence
+of the guide that travels with us and fears that we may linger. Who
+has not seen across a rising ground the gables of the old house,
+the church tower, dark among the bare boughs of the rookery in a
+smiling sunset, and half lost himself at the thought of the
+impossibly beautiful life that might be lived there? To-day, just
+when the western sun began to tinge the floating clouds with purple
+and gold, I saw by the roadside an old labourer, fork on back,
+plodding heavily across a ploughland all stippled with lines of
+growing wheat. Hard by a windmill whirled its clattering arms. How
+I longed for something that would render permanent the scene,
+sight, and sound alike. It told me somehow that the end was not
+yet. What did it stand for? I hardly know; for life, slow and
+haggard with toil, hard-won sustenance, all overhung with the
+crimson glories of waning light, the wet road itself catching the
+golden hues of heaven. A little later, passing by the great pauper
+asylum that stands up so naked among the bare fields, I looked over
+a hedge, and there, behind the engine-house with its heaps of
+scoriae and rubbish, lay a little trim ugly burial-ground, with a
+dismal mortuary, upon which some pathetic and tawdry taste had been
+spent. There in rows lay the mouldering bones of the failures of
+life and old sin; not even a headstone over each with a word of
+hope, nothing but a number on a tin tablet. Nothing more incredibly
+sordid could be devised. One thought of the sad rite, the
+melancholy priest, the handful of relatives glad at heart that the
+poor broken life was over and the wretched associations at an end.
+Yet even that sight too warned one not to linger, and that the end
+was not yet. Presently, in the gathering twilight, I was making my
+way through the streets of the city. The dusk had obliterated all
+that was mean and dreary. Nothing but the irregular housefronts
+stood up against the still sky, the lighted windows giving the
+sense of home and ease. A quiet bell rang for vespers in a church
+tower, and as I passed I heard an organ roll within. It all seemed
+a sweetly framed message to the soul, a symbol of joy and peace.
+
+But then I reflected that the danger was of selecting, out of the
+symbols that crowded around one on every side, merely those that
+ministered to one's own satisfaction and contentment. The sad
+horror of that other place, the little bare place of desolate
+graves--that must be a symbol as well, that must stand as a witness
+of some part of the awful mind of God, of the strange flaw or rent
+that seems to run through His world. It may be more comfortable,
+more luxurious to detach the symbol that testifies to the
+satisfaction of our needs; but not thus do we draw near to truth
+and God. And then I thought that perhaps it was best, when we are
+secure and careless and joyful, to look at times steadily into the
+dark abyss of the world, not in the spirit of morbidity, not with
+the sense of the macabre--the skeleton behind the rich robe, death
+at the monarch's shoulder; but to remind ourselves, faithfully and
+wisely, that for us too the shadow waits; and then that in our
+moments of dreariness and heaviness we should do well to seek for
+symbols of our peace, not thrusting them peevishly aside as only
+serving to remind us of what we have lost and forfeited, but
+dwelling on them patiently and hopefully, with a tender onlooking
+to the gracious horizon with all its golden lights and purple
+shadows. And thus not in a mercantile mood trafficking for our
+delight in the mysteries of life--for not by prudence can we draw
+near to God--but in a childlike mood, valuing the kindly word, the
+smile that lights up the narrow room and enriches the austere fare,
+and paying no heed at all to the jealousies and the covetous
+ingathering that turns the temple of the Father into a house of
+merchandise.
+
+For here, deepest of all, lies the worth of the symbol; that this
+life of ours is not a little fretful space of days, rounded with a
+sleep, but an integral part of an inconceivably vast design,
+flooding through and behind the star-strewn heavens; that there is
+no sequence of events as we conceive, that acts are not done or
+words said, once and for all, and then laid away in the darkness;
+but that it is all an ever-living thing, in which the things that
+we call old are as much present in the mind of God as the things
+that shall be millions of centuries hence. There is no uncertainty
+with Him, no doubt as to what shall be hereafter; and if we once
+come near to that truth, we can draw from it, in our darkest hours,
+a refreshment that cannot fail; for the saddest thought in the mind
+of man is the thought that these things could have been, could be
+other than they are; and if we once can bring home to ourselves the
+knowledge that God is unchanged and unchangeable, our faithless
+doubts, our melancholy regrets melt in the light of truth, as the
+hoar-frost fades upon the grass in the rising sun, when every
+globed dewdrop flashes like a jewel in the radiance of the fiery
+dawn.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+OPTIMISM
+
+
+
+
+
+We Anglo-Saxons are mostly optimists at heart; we love to have
+things comfortable, and to pretend that they are comfortable when
+they obviously are not. The brisk Anglo-Saxon, if he cannot reach
+the grapes, does not say that the grapes are sour, but protests
+that he does not really care about grapes. A story is told of a
+great English proconsul who desired to get a loan from the Treasury
+of the Government over which he practically, though not nominally,
+presided. He went to the Financial Secretary and said: "Look here,
+T----, you must get me a loan for a business I have very much at
+heart." The secretary whistled, and then said: "Well, I will try;
+but it is not the least use." "Oh, you will manage it somehow,"
+said the proconsul, "and I may tell you confidentially it is
+absolutely essential." The following morning the secretary came to
+report: "I told you it was no use, sir, and it wasn't; the Board
+would not hear of it." "Damnation!" said the proconsul, and went on
+writing. A week after he met the secretary, who felt a little shy.
+"By the way, T----," said the great man, "I have been thinking over
+that matter of the loan, and it was a mercy you were not
+successful; it would have been a hopeless precedent, and we are
+much better without it."
+
+That is the true Anglo-Saxon spirit of optimism. The most truly
+British person I know is a man who will move heaven and earth to
+secure a post or to compass an end; but when he fails, as he does
+not often fail, he says genially that he is more thankful than he
+can say; it would have been ruin to him if he had been successful.
+The same quality runs through our philosophy and our religion. Who
+but an Anglo-Saxon would have invented the robust theory, to
+account for the fact that prayers are often not granted, that
+prayers are always directly answered whether you attain your desire
+or not? The Greeks prayed that the gods would grant them what was
+good even if they did not desire it, and withhold what was evil
+even if they did desire it. The shrewd Roman said: "The gods will
+give us what is most appropriate; man is dearer to them than to
+himself." But the faithful Anglo-Saxon maintains that his prayer is
+none the less answered even if it be denied, and that it is made up
+to him in some roundabout way. It is inconceivable to the Anglo-
+Saxon that there may be a strain of sadness and melancholy in the
+very mind of God; he cannot understand that there can be any beauty
+in sorrow. To the Celt, sorrow itself is dear and beautiful, and
+the mournful wailing of winds, the tears of the lowering cloud,
+afford him sweet and even luxurious sensations. The memory of grief
+is one of the good things that remains to him, as life draws to its
+close; for love is to him the sister of grief rather than the
+mother of joy. But this is to the Anglo-Saxon mind a morbid thing.
+The hours in which sorrow has overclouded him are wasted, desolated
+hours, to be forgotten and obliterated as soon as possible. There
+is nothing sacred about them; they are sad and stony tracts over
+which he has made haste to cross, and the only use of them is to
+heighten the sense of security and joy. And thus the sort of
+sayings that satisfy and sustain the Anglo-Saxon mind are such
+irrepressible outbursts of poets as "God's in His heaven; all's
+right with the world"--the latter part of which is flagrantly
+contradicted by experience; and, as for the former part, if it be
+true, it lends no comfort to the man who tries to find his God in
+the world. Again, when Browning says that the world "means
+intensely and means good," he is but pouring oil upon the darting
+flame of optimism, because there are many people to whom the world
+has no particular meaning, and few who can re-echo the statement
+that it means good. That some rich surprise, in spite of palpable
+and hourly experience to the contrary, may possibly await us, is
+the most that some of us dare to hope.
+
+My own experience, the older I grow, and the more I see of life, is
+that I feel it to be a much more bewildering and even terrifying
+thing than I used to think it. To use a metaphor, instead of its
+being a patient educational process, which I would give all that I
+possessed to be able sincerely to believe it to be, it seems to me
+arranged far more upon the principle of a game of cricket--which I
+have always held to be, in theory, the most unjust and fortuitous
+of games. You step to the wicket, you have only a single chance;
+the boldest and most patient man may make one mistake at the
+outset, and his innings is over; the timid tremulous player may by
+undeserved good luck contrive to keep his wicket up, till his heart
+has got into the right place, and his eye has wriggled straight,
+and he is set.
+
+That is the first horrible fact about life--that carelessness is
+often not penalised at all, whereas sometimes it is instantly and
+fiercely penalised. One boy at school may break every law, human
+and divine, and go out into the world unblemished. Another timid
+and good-natured child may make a false step, and be sent off into
+life with a permanent cloud over him. School life often emphasises
+the injustice of the world instead of trying to counteract it.
+Schoolmasters tend to hustle the weak rather than to curb the
+strong.
+
+And then we pass into the larger world, and what do we see? A sad
+confusion everywhere. We see an innocent and beautiful girl struck
+down by a long and painful disease--a punishment perhaps
+appropriate to some robust and hoary sinner, who has gathered
+forbidden fruit with both his hands, and the juices of which go
+down to the skirts of his clothing; or a brave and virtuous man,
+with a wife and children dependent on him, needed if ever man was,
+kind, beneficent, strong, is struck down out of life in a moment.
+On the other hand, we see a mean and cautious sinner, with no touch
+of unselfishness and affection, guarded and secured in material
+contentment. Let any one run over in his mind the memories of his
+own circle, fill up the gaps, and ask himself bravely and frankly
+whether he can trace a wise and honest and beneficent design all
+through. He may try to console himself by saying that the disasters
+of good people, after all, are the exceptions, and that, as a rule,
+courage and purity of heart are rewarded, while cowardice and
+filthiness are punished. But what room is there for exceptions in a
+world governed by God Whom we must believe to be all-powerful, all-
+just, and all-loving? It is the wilful sin of man, says the
+moralist, that has brought these hard things upon him. But that is
+no answer, for the dark shadow lies as sombrely over irresponsible
+nature, which groans over undeserved suffering. And then, to make
+the shadow darker still, we have all the same love of life, the
+same inalienable sense of our right to happiness, the same
+inheritance of love. If we could but see that in the end pain and
+loss would be blest, there is nothing that we would not gladly
+bear. Yet that sight, too, is denied us.
+
+And yet we live and laugh and hope, and forget. We take our fill of
+tranquil days and pleasant companies, though for some of us the
+thought that it is all passing, passing, even while we lean towards
+it smiling, touches the very sunlight with pain. "How morbid, how
+self-tormenting!" says the prudent friend, if such thoughts escape
+us. "Why not enjoy the delight and bear the pain? That is life; we
+cannot alter it." But not on such terms, can I, for one, live. To
+know, to have some assurance--that is the one and only thing that
+matters at all. For if I once believed that God were careless, or
+indifferent, or impotent, I would fly from life as an accursed
+thing; whereas I would give all the peace, and joy, and
+contentment, that may yet await me upon earth, and take up
+cheerfully the heaviest burden that could be devised of darkness
+and pain, if I could be sure of an after-life that will give us all
+the unclouded serenity, and strength, and love, for which we crave
+every moment. Sometimes, in a time of strength and calm weather,
+when the sun is bright and the friend I love is with me, and the
+scent of the hyacinths blows from the wood, I have no doubt of the
+love and tenderness of God; and, again, when I wake in the dreadful
+dawn to the sharp horror of the thought that one I love is
+suffering and crying out in pain and drifting on to death, the
+beauty of the world, the familiar scene, is full of a hateful and
+atrocious insolence of grace and sweetness; and then I feel that we
+are all perhaps in the grip of some relentless and inscrutable law
+that has no care for our happiness or peace at all, and works
+blindly and furiously in the darkness, bespattering some with woe
+and others with joy. Those are the blackest and most horrible
+moments of life; and yet even so we live on.
+
+As I write at my ease I see the velvety grass green on the rich
+pasture; the tall spires of the chestnut perch, and poise, and sway
+in the sun; a thrush sings hidden in the orchard; it is all
+caressingly, enchantingly beautiful, and I am well content to be
+alive. Looking backwards, I discern that I have had my share, and
+more than my share, of good things. But they are over; they are
+mine no longer. And even as I think the thought, the old church
+clock across the fields tells out another hour that is fallen
+softly into the glimmering past. If I could discern any strength or
+patience won from hours of pain and sorrow it would be easier; but
+the memory of pain makes me dread pain the more, the thought of
+past sorrow makes future sorrow still more black. I would rather
+have strength than tranquillity, when all is done; but life has
+rather taught me my weakness, and struck the garland out of my
+reluctant hand.
+
+To-day I have been riding quietly among fields deep with buttercups
+and fringed by clear, slow streams. The trees are in full spring
+leaf, only the oaks and walnuts a little belated, unfurling their
+rusty-red fronds. A waft of rich scent comes from a hawthorn hedge
+where a hidden cuckoo flutes, or just where the lane turns by the
+old water-mill, which throbs and grumbles with the moving gear, a
+great lilac-bush leans out of a garden and fills the air with
+perfume. Yet, as I go, I am filled with a heavy anxiety, which
+plays with my sick heart as a cat plays with a mouse, letting it
+run a little in the sun, and then pouncing upon it in terror and
+dismay. The beautiful sounds and sights round me--the sight of the
+quiet, leisurely people I meet--ought, one would think, to soothe
+and calm the unquiet heart. But they do not; they rather seem to
+mock and flout me with a savage insolence of careless welfare. My
+thoughts go back, I do not know why, to an old house where I spent
+many happy days, now in the hands of strangers. I remember sitting,
+one of a silent and happy party, on a terrace in the dusk of a warm
+summer night, and how one of those present called to the owls that
+were hooting in the hanging wood above the house, so that they drew
+near in answer to the call, flying noiselessly, and suddenly
+uttering their plaintive notes from the heart of the great chestnut
+on the lawn. Below I can see the dewy glimmering fields, the lights
+of the little port, the pale sea-line. It seems now all impossibly
+beautiful and tranquil; but I know that even then it was often
+marred by disappointments, and troubles, and fears. Little
+anxieties that have all melted softly into the past, that were
+easily enough borne, when it came to the point, yet, looming up as
+they did in the future, filled the days with the shadow of fear.
+That is the phantom that one ought to lay, if it can be laid. And
+is there hidden somewhere any well of healing, any pure source of
+strength and refreshment, from which we can drink and be calm and
+brave? That is a question which each has to answer tor himself. For
+myself, I can only say that strength is sometimes given, sometimes
+denied. How foolish to be anxious! Yes, but how inevitable! If the
+beauty and the joy of the world gave one assurance in dark hours
+that all was certainly well, the pilgrimage would be an easy one.
+But can one be optimistic by resolving to be? One can of course
+control oneself, one can let no murmur of pain escape one, one can
+even enunciate deep and courageous maxims, because one would not
+trouble the peace of others, waiting patiently till the golden mood
+returns. But what if the desolate conviction forces itself upon the
+mind that sorrow is the truer thing? What if one tests one's own
+experience, and sees that, under the pressure of sorrow, one after
+another of the world's lights are extinguished, health, and peace,
+and beauty, and delight, till one asks oneself whether sorrow is
+not perhaps the truest and most actual thing of all? That is the
+ghastliest of moments, when everything drops from us but fear and
+horror, when we think that we have indeed found truth at last, and
+that the answer to Pilate's bitter question is that pain is the
+nearest thing to truth because it is the strongest. If I felt that,
+says the reluctant heart, I should abandon myself to despair. No,
+says sterner reason, you would bear it because you cannot escape
+from it. Into whatever depths of despair you fell, you would still
+be upheld by the law that bids you be.
+
+Where, then, is the hope to be found? It is here. One is tempted to
+think of God through human analogies and symbols. We think of Him
+as of a potter moulding the clay to his will; as of a statesman
+that sways a state; as of an artist that traces a fair design. But
+all similitudes and comparisons break down, for no man can create
+anything; he can but modify matter to his ends, and when he fails,
+it is because of some natural law that cuts across his design and
+thwarts him relentlessly. But the essence of God's omnipotence is
+that both law and matter are His and originate from Him; so that,
+if a single fibre of what we know to be evil can be found in the
+world, either God is responsible for that, or He is dealing with
+something He did not originate and cannot overcome. Nothing can
+extricate us from this dilemma, except the belief that what we
+think evil is not really evil at all, but hidden good; and thus we
+have firm ground under our feet at last, and can begin to climb out
+of the abyss. And then we feel in our own hearts how indomitable is
+our sense of our right to happiness, how unconquerable our hope;
+how swiftly we forget unhappiness; how firmly we remember joy; and
+then we see that the one absolutely permanent and vital power in
+the world is the power of love, which wins victories over every
+evil we can name; and if it is so plain that love is the one
+essential and triumphant force in the world, it must be the very
+heartbeat of God; till we feel that when soon or late the day comes
+for us, when our swimming eyes discern ever more faintly the
+awestruck pitying faces round us, and the senses give up their
+powers one by one, and the tides of death creep on us, and the
+daylight dies--that even so we shall find that love awaiting us in
+the region to which the noblest and bravest and purest, as well as
+the vilest and most timid and most soiled have gone.
+
+This, then, is the only optimism that is worth the name; not the
+feeble optimism that brushes away the darker side of life
+impatiently and fretfully, but the optimism that dares to look
+boldly into the fiercest miseries of the human spirit, and to come
+back, as Perseus came, pale and smoke-stained, from the dim
+underworld, and say that there is yet hope brightening on the verge
+of the gloom.
+
+What one desires, then, is an optimism which arises from taking a
+wide view of things as they are, and taking the worst side into
+account, not an optimism which is only made possible by wearing
+blinkers. I was reading a day or two ago a suggestive and brilliant
+book by one of our most prolific critics, Mr. Chesterton, on the
+subject of Dickens. Mr. Chesterton is of opinion that our modern
+tendency to pessimism results from our inveterate realism.
+Contrasting modern fictions with the old heroic stories, he says
+that we take some indecisive clerk for the subject of a story, and
+call the weak-kneed cad "the hero." He seems to think that we ought
+to take a larger and more robust view of human possibilities, and
+keep our eyes steadily fixed upon more vigorous and generous
+characters. But the result of this is the ugly and unphilosophical
+kind of optimism after all, that calls upon God to despise the work
+of His own hands, that turns upon all that is feeble and unsightly
+and vulgar with anger and disdain, like the man in the parable who
+took advantage of his being forgiven a great debt to exact a tiny
+one. The tragedy is that the knock-kneed clerk is all in all to
+himself. In clear-sighted and imaginative moments, he may realise
+in a sudden flash of horrible insight that he is so far from being
+what he would desire to be, so unheroic, so loosely strung, so
+deplorable--and yet that he can do so little to bridge the gap. The
+only method of manufacturing heroes is to encourage people to
+believe in themselves and their possibilities, to assure them that
+they are indeed dear to God; not to reveal relentlessly to them
+their essential lowness and shabbiness. It is not the clerk's fault
+that his mind is sordid and weak, and that his knees knock
+together; and no optimism is worth the name that has not a glorious
+message for the vilest. Or, again, it is possible to arrive at a
+working optimism by taking a very dismal view of everything. There
+is a story of an old Calvinist minister whose daughter lay dying,
+far away, of a painful disease, who wrote her a letter of
+consolation, closing with the words, "Remember, dear daughter, that
+all short of Hell is mercy." Of course if one can take so richly
+decisive a view of the Creator's purpose for His creatures, and
+look upon Hell as the normal destination from which a few, by the
+overpowering condescension of God, are saved and separated, one
+might find matter of joy in discovering one soul in a thousand who
+was judged worthy of salvation. But this again is a clouded view,
+because it takes no account of the profound and universal
+preference for happiness in the human heart, and erects the
+horrible ideal of a Creator who deliberately condemns the vast mass
+of His creatures to a fate which He has no less deliberately
+created them to abhor and dread.
+
+Our main temptation after all lies in the fact that we are so
+impatient of any delay or any uneasiness. We are like the child
+who, when first confronted with suffering, cannot bear to believe
+in its existence, and who, if it is prolonged, cannot believe in
+the existence of anything else. What we have rather to do is to
+face the problem strongly and courageously, to take into account
+the worst and feeblest possibilities of our nature, and yet not to
+overlook the fact that the worst and lowest specimen of humanity
+has a dim inkling of something higher and happier, to which he
+would attain if he knew how.
+
+I had a little object-lesson a few days ago in the subject. It was
+a Bank Holiday, and I walked pensively about the outskirts of a big
+town. The streets were crowded with people of all sorts and sizes.
+I confess that a profound melancholy was induced in me by the
+spectacle of the young of both sexes. They were enjoying
+themselves, it is true, with all their might; and I could not help
+wondering why, as a rule, they should enjoy themselves so
+offensively. The girls walked about, tittering and ogling, the
+young men were noisy, selfish, ill-mannered, enjoying nothing so
+much as the discomfiture of any passer-by. They pushed each other
+into ditches, they tripped up a friend who passed on a bicycle, and
+all roared in concert at the rueful way in which he surveyed a
+muddy coat and torn trousers. There seemed to be not the slightest
+idea among them of contributing to each other's pleasure. The point
+was to be amused at the expense of another, and to be securely
+obstreperous.
+
+But among these there were lovers walking, faint and pale with
+mutual admiration; a young couple led along a hideous over-dressed
+child, and had no eyes for anything except its clumsy movements and
+fatuous questions. Or an elderly couple strolled along, pleased and
+contented, with a married son and daughter. The cure of the vile
+mirth of youth seemed after all to be love and the anxious care of
+other lives.
+
+And thus indeed a gentle optimism did emerge, after all, from the
+tangle. I felt that it was strange that there should be so much to
+breed dissatisfaction. I struck out of the town, and soon was
+passing a mill in broad water-meadows, overhung by great elms; the
+grass was golden with buttercups, the foliage was rich upon the
+trees. The water bubbled pleasantly in the great pool, and an old
+house thrust a pretty gable out over lilacs clubbed with purple
+bloom. The beauty of the place was put to my lips, like a cup of
+the waters of comfort. The sadness was the drift of human life out
+of sweet places such as this, into the town that overflowed the
+meadows with its avenues of mean houses, where the railway station,
+with its rows of stained trucks, its cindery floor, its smoking
+engines, buzzed and roared with life.
+
+But the pessimism of one who sees the simple life fading out, the
+ancient quietude invaded, the country caught in the feelers of the
+town, is not a real pessimism at all, or rather it is a pessimism
+which results from a deficiency of imagination, and is only a
+matter of personal taste, perhaps of personal belatedness. Twelve
+generations of my own family lived and died as Yorkshire yeomen-
+farmers, and my own preference is probably a matter of instinctive
+inheritance. The point is not what a few philosophers happen to
+like, but what humanity likes, and what it is happiest in liking. I
+should have but small confidence in the Power that rules the world,
+if I did not believe that the vast social development of Europe,
+its civilisation, its network of communications, its bustle, its
+tenser living, its love of social excitement was not all part of a
+great design. I do not believe that humanity is perversely astray,
+hurrying to destruction. I believe rather that it is working out
+the possibilities that lie within it; and if human beings had been
+framed to live quiet pastoral lives, they would be living them
+still. The one question for the would-be optimist is whether
+humanity is growing nobler, wiser, more unselfish; and of that I
+have no doubt whatever. The sense of equality, of the rights of the
+weak, compassion, brotherliness, benevolence, are living ideas,
+throbbing with life; the growth of the power of democracy, much as
+it may tend to inconvenience one personally, is an entirely hopeful
+and desirable thing; and if a man is disposed to pessimism, he
+ought to ask himself seriously to what extent his pessimism is
+conditioned by his own individual prospect of happiness. It is
+quite possible to conceive of a man without any hope of personal
+immortality, or the continuance of individual identity, whose
+future might be clouded, say, by his being the victim of a painful
+and incurable disease, and who yet might be a thoroughgoing
+optimist with regard to the future of humanity. Nothing in the
+world could be so indicative of the rise in the moral and emotional
+temperature of the world as the fact that men are increasingly
+disposed to sacrifice their own ambitions and their own comfort for
+the sake of others, and are willing to suffer, if the happiness of
+the race may be increased; and much of the pessimism that prevails
+is the pessimism of egotists and individualists, who feel no
+interest in the rising tide, because it does not promise to
+themselves any increase in personal satisfaction. No man can
+possibly hold the continuance of personal identity to be an
+indisputable fact, because there is no sort of direct evidence on
+the subject; and indeed all the evidence that exists is rather
+against the belief than for it. The belief is in reality based upon
+nothing but instinct and desire, and the impossibility of
+conceiving of life as existing apart from one's own perception. But
+even if a man cannot hold that it is in any sense a certainty, he
+may cherish a hope that it is true, and he may be generously and
+sincerely grateful for having been allowed to taste, through the
+medium of personal consciousness, the marvellous experience of the
+beauty and interest of life, its emotions, its relationships, its
+infinite yearnings, even though the curtain may descend upon his
+own consciousness of it, and he himself may become as though he had
+never been, his vitality blended afresh in the vitality of the
+world, just as the body of his life, so near to him, so seemingly
+his own, will undoubtedly be fused and blent afresh in the sum of
+matter. A man, even though racked with pain and tortured with
+anxiety, may deliberately and resolutely throw himself into
+sympathy with the mighty will of God, and cherish this noble and
+awe-inspiring thought--the thought of the onward march of humanity;
+righting wrongs, amending errors, fighting patiently against pain
+and evil, until perhaps, far-off and incredibly remote, our
+successors and descendants, linked indeed with us in body and soul
+alike, may enjoy that peace and tranquillity, that harmony of soul,
+which we ourselves can only momentarily and transitorily obtain.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+JOY
+
+
+
+
+
+Dr. Arnold somewhere says that the schoolmaster's experience of
+being continually in the presence of the hard mechanical high
+spirits of boyhood is an essentially depressing thing. It seemed to
+him depressing, just because that happiness was so purely
+incidental to youth and health, and did not proceed from any sense
+of principle, any reserve of emotion, any self-restraint, any
+activity of sympathy. I confess that in my own experience as a
+schoolmaster the particular phenomenon was sometimes a depressing
+thing and sometimes a relief. It was depressing when one was
+overshadowed by a fretful anxiety or a real sorrow, because no
+appeal to it seemed possible: it had a heartless quality. But again
+it was a relief when it distracted one from the pressure of a
+troubled thought, as when, in the Idylls of the King, the sorrowful
+queen was comforted by the little maiden "who pleased her with a
+babbling heedlessness, which often lured her from herself."
+
+One felt that one had no right to let the sense of anxiety
+overshadow the natural cheerfulness of boyhood, and then one made
+the effort to detach oneself from one's preoccupations, with the
+result that they presently weighed less heavily upon the heart.
+
+The blessing would be if one could find in experience a quality of
+joy which should be independent of natural high spirits altogether,
+a cheerful tranquillity of outlook, which should become almost
+instinctive through practice, a mood which one could at all events
+evoke in such a way as to serve as a shield and screen to one's own
+private troubles, or which at least would prevent one from allowing
+the shadow of our discontent from falling over others. But it must
+be to a certain extent temperamental. Just as high animal spirits
+in some people are irrepressible, and bubble up even under the
+menace of irreparable calamity, so gloom of spirit is a very
+contagious thing, very difficult to dissimulate. Perhaps the best
+practical thing for a naturally melancholy person to try and do, is
+to treat his own low spirits, as Charles Lamb did, ironically and
+humorously; and if he must spin conversation incessantly, as Dr.
+Johnson said, out of his own bowels, to make sure that it is the
+best thread possible, and of a gossamer quality.
+
+The temperamental fact upon which the possibility of such a
+philosophical cheerfulness is based is after all an ultimate
+hopefulness. Some people have a remarkable staying power, a power
+of looking through and over present troubles, and consoling
+themselves with pleasant visions of futurity. This is commoner with
+women than with men, because women derive a greater happiness from
+the happiness of those about them than men do. A woman as a rule
+would prefer that the people who surround her should be cheerful,
+even if she were not cheerful herself; whereas a man is often not
+ill-pleased that his moods should be felt by his circle, and
+regards it as rather an insult that other people should be joyful
+when he is ill-at-ease. Some people, too, have a stronger dramatic
+sense than others, and take an artistic pleasure in playing a part.
+I knew a man who was a great invalid and a frequent sufferer, who
+took a great pleasure in appearing in public functions. He would
+drag himself from his bed to make a public appearance of any kind.
+I think that he consoled himself by believing that he did so from a
+strong and sustaining sense of duty; but I believe that the
+pleasure of the thing was really at the root of his effort, as it
+is at the root of most of the duties we faithfully perform. I do
+not mean that he had a strong natural vanity, though his enemies
+accused him of it. But publicity was naturally congenial to him,
+and the only sign, as a rule, that he was suffering, when he made
+such an appearance, was a greater deliberation of movement, and a
+ghastly fixity of smile. As to the latter phenomenon, a man with
+the dramatic sense strongly developed, will no doubt take a
+positive pleasure in trying to obliterate from his face and manner
+all traces of his private discomfort. Such stoicism is a fine
+quality in its way, but the quality that I am in search of is an
+even finer one than that. My friend's efforts were ultimately based
+on a sort of egotism, a profound conviction that a public part
+suited him, and that he performed it well. What one rather desires
+to attain is a more sympathetic quality, an interest in other
+people so vital and inspiring that one's own personal sufferings
+are light in the scale when weighed against the enjoyment of
+others. It is not impossible to develop this in the face of
+considerable bodily suffering. One of the most inveterately
+cheerful people I have ever known was a man who suffered from a
+painful and irritating complaint, but whose geniality and good-will
+were so strong that they not only overpowered his malaise, but
+actually afforded him considerable relief. Some people who suffer
+can only suffer in solitude. They have to devote the whole of their
+nervous energies to the task of endurance; but others find society
+an agreeable distraction, and fly to it as an escape from
+discomfort. I suppose that every one has experienced at times that
+extraordinary rebellion, so to speak, of cheerfulness against an
+attack of physical pain. There have been days when I have suffered
+from some small but acutely disagreeable ailment, and yet found my
+cheerfulness not only not dimmed but apparently enhanced by the
+physical suffering. Of course there are maladies even of a serious
+kind of which one of the symptoms is a great mental depression, but
+there are other maladies which seem actually to produce an
+instinctive hopefulness.
+
+But the question is whether it is possible, by sustained effort, to
+behave independently of one's mood, and what motive is strong
+enough to make one detach oneself resolutely from discomforts and
+woes. Good manners provide perhaps the most practical assistance.
+The people who are brought up with a tradition of highbred
+courtesy, and who learn almost instinctively to repress their own
+individuality, can generally triumph over their moods. Perhaps in
+their expansive moments they lose a little spontaneity in the
+process; they are cheerful rather than buoyant, gentle rather than
+pungent. But the result is that when the mood shifts into
+depression, they are still imperturbably courteous and considerate.
+A near relation of a great public man, who suffered greatly from
+mental depression, has told me that some of the most painful
+minutes he has ever been witness of were, when the great man, after
+behaving on some occasion of social festivity with an admirable and
+sustained gaiety, fell for a moment into irreclaimable and hopeless
+gloom and fatigue, and then again, by a resolute effort, became
+strenuously considerate and patient in the privacy of the family
+circle.
+
+Some people achieve the same mastery over mood by an intensity of
+religious conviction. But the worst of that particular triumph is
+that an attitude of chastened religious patience is, not unusually,
+a rather depressing thing. It is so restrained, so pious, that it
+tends to deprive life of natural and unaffected joy. If it is
+patient and submissive in affliction, it is also tame and mild in
+cheerful surroundings. It issues too frequently in a kind of holy
+tolerance of youthful ebullience and vivid emotions. It results in
+the kind of character that is known as saintly, and is generally
+accompanied by a strong deficiency in the matter of humour. Life is
+regarded as too serious a business to be played with, and the
+delight in trifles, which is one of the surest signs of healthy
+energy, becomes ashamed and abashed in its presence. The atmosphere
+that it creates is oppressive, remote, ungenial. "I declare that
+Uncle John is intolerable, except when there is a death in the
+family--and then he is insupportable," said a youthful nephew of a
+virtuous clergyman of this type in my presence the other day,
+adding, after reflection, "He seems to think that to die is the
+only really satisfactory thing that any one ever does." That is the
+worst of carrying out the precept, "Set your affections on things
+above, not on things of the earth," too literally. It is not so
+good a precept, after all, as "If a man love not his brother, whom
+he hath seen, how shall he love God, Whom he hath not seen?" It is
+somehow an incomplete philosophy to despise the only definite
+existence we are certain of possessing. One desires a richer thing
+than that, a philosophy that ends in temperance, rather than in a
+harsh asceticism.
+
+The handling of life that seems the most desirable is the method
+which the Platonic Socrates employed. Perhaps he was an ideal
+figure; but yet there are few figures more real. There we have an
+elderly man of incomparable ugliness, who is yet delightfully and
+perennially youthful, bubbling over with interest, affection,
+courtesy, humour, admiration. With what a delicious mixture of
+irony and tenderness he treats the young men who surround him! When
+some lively sparks made up their minds to do what we now call "rag"
+him, dressed themselves up as Furies, and ran out upon him as he
+turned a dark corner on his way home, Socrates was not in the least
+degree disturbed, but discoursed with them readily on many matters
+and particularly on temperance; when at the banquet the topers
+disappear, one by one, under the table, Socrates, who, besides
+taking his due share of the wine, had filled and drunk the contents
+of the wine-cooler, is found cheerfully sitting, crowned with
+roses, among the expiring lamps, in the grey of the morning,
+discussing the higher mathematics. He is never sick or sorry; he is
+poor and has a scolding wife; he fasts or eats as circumstances
+dictate; he never does anything in particular, but he has always
+infinite leisure to have his talk out. Is he drawn for military
+service? he goes off, with an entire indifference to the hardships
+of the campaign. When the force is routed, he stalks deliberately
+off the field, looking round him like a great bird, with the kind
+of air that makes pursuers let people alone, as Alcibiades said.
+And when the final catastrophe draws near, he defends himself under
+a capital charge with infinite good-humour; he has cared nothing
+for slander and misrepresentation all his life, and why should he
+begin now? In the last inspired scene, he is the only man of the
+group who keeps his courteous tranquillity to the end; he had been
+sent into the world, he had lived his life, why should he fear to
+be dismissed? It matters little, in the presence of this august
+imagination, if the real Socrates was a rude and prosy person, who
+came by his death simply because the lively Athenians could
+tolerate anything but a bore!
+
+The Socratic attitude is better than the high-bred attitude; it is
+better than the stoical attitude; it is even better than the pious
+attitude, because it depends upon living life to the uttermost,
+rather than upon detaching oneself from what one considers rather a
+poor business. The attitude of Socrates is based upon courage,
+generosity, simplicity. He knows that it is with fear that we
+weight our melancholy sensibilities, that it is with meanness and
+coldness that we poison life, that it is with complicated
+conventional duties that we fetter our weakness. Socrates has no
+personal ambitions, and thus he is rid of all envy and
+uncharitableness; he sees the world as it is, a very bright and
+brave place, teeming with interesting ideas and undetermined
+problems. Where Christianity has advanced upon this--for it has
+advanced splendidly and securely--is in interpreting life less
+intellectually. The intellectual side of life is what Socrates
+adores; the Christian faith is applicable to a far wider circle of
+homely lives. Yet Christianity too, in spite of ecclesiasticism,
+teems with ideas. Its essence is an unprejudiced freedom of soul.
+Its problems are problems of character which the simplest child can
+appreciate. But Christianity, too, is built upon a basis of joy.
+"Freely ye have received, freely give," is its essential maxim.
+
+The secret then is to enjoy; but the enjoyment must not be that of
+the spoiler who carries away all that he can, and buries it in his
+tent; but the joy of relationship, the joy of conspiring together
+to be happy, the joy of consoling and sympathising and sharing,
+because we have received so much. Of course there remain the
+limitations of temperament, the difficulty of preventing our own
+acrid humours from overflowing into other lives; but this cannot be
+overcome by repression; it can only be overcome by tenderness.
+There are very few people who have not the elements of this in
+their character. I can count upon my fingers the malevolent men I
+know, who prefer making others uncomfortable to trying to make them
+glad; and all these men have been bullied in their youth, and are
+unconsciously protecting themselves against bullying still. We grow
+selfish, no doubt, for want of practice; ill-health makes villains
+of some of us. But we can learn, if we desire it, to keep our
+gruffness for our own consumption, and a very few experiments will
+soon convince us that there are few pleasures in the world so
+reasonable and so cheap, as the pleasure of giving pleasure.
+
+But, after all, the resolute cheerfulness that can be to a certain
+extent captured and secured by an effort of the will, though it is
+perhaps a more useful quality than natural joy, and no doubt ranks
+together in the moral scale, is not to be compared with a certain
+unreasoning, incommunicable rapture which sometimes, without
+conscious effort or desire, descends upon the spirit, like sunshine
+after rain. Let me quote a recent experience of my own which may
+illustrate it.
+
+A few days ago, I had a busy tiresome morning hammering into shape
+a stupid prosaic passage, of no suggestiveness; a mere statement,
+the only beauty of which could be that it should be absolutely
+lucid; and this beauty it resolutely refused to assume. Then the
+agent called to see me, and we talked business of a dull kind. Then
+I walked a little way among fields; and when I was in a pleasant
+flat piece of ground, full of thickets, where the stream makes a
+bold loop among willows and alders, the sun set behind a great
+bastion of clouds that looked like a huge fortification. It had
+been one of those days of cloudless skies, all flooded with the
+pale cold honey-coloured light of the winter sun, until a sense
+almost of spring came into the air; and in a sheltered place I
+found a little golden hawk-weed in full flower.
+
+It had not been a satisfactory day at all to me. The statement that
+I had toiled so hard all the morning to make clear was not
+particularly worth making; it could effect but little at best, and
+I had worked at it in a British doggedness of spirit, regardless of
+its value and only because I was determined not to be beaten by it.
+
+But for all that I came home in a rare and delightful frame of
+mind, as if I had heard a brief and delicate passage of music, a
+conspiracy of sweet sounds and rich tones; or as if I had passed
+through a sweet scent, such as blows from a clover-field in summer.
+There was no definite thought to disentangle: it was rather as if I
+had had a glimpse of the land which lies east of the sun and west
+of the moon, had seen the towers of a castle rise over a wood of
+oaks; met a company of serious people in comely apparel riding
+blithely on the turf of a forest road, who had waved me a greeting,
+and left me wondering out of what rich kind of scene they had
+stepped to bless me. It left me feeling as though there were some
+beautiful life, very near me, all around me, behind the mirror,
+outside of the door, beyond the garden-hedges, if I could but learn
+the spell which would open it to me; left me pleasantly and happily
+athirst for a life of gracious influences and of an unknown and
+perfect peace; such as creeps over the mind for the moment at the
+sight of a deep woodland at sunset, when the forest is veiled in
+the softest of blue mist; or at the sound of some creeping sea,
+beating softly all night on a level sand; or at the prospect of a
+winter sun going down into smoky orange vapours over a wide expanse
+of pastoral country; or at the soft close of some solemn music--
+when peace seems not only desirable beyond all things but
+attainable too.
+
+How can one account for this sudden and joyful visitation? I am
+going to try and set down what I believe to be the explanation, if
+I can reduce to words a thought which is perfectly clear to me,
+however transcendental it may seem.
+
+Well, at such a moment as this, one feels just as one may feel when
+from the streets of a dark and crowded city, with the cold shadow
+of a cloud passing over it, one sees the green head of a mountain
+over the housetops, all alone with the wind and the sun, with its
+crag-bastions, its terraces and winding turf ways.
+
+The peace that thus blesses one is not, I think, a merely
+subjective mood, an imagined thing. It is, I believe, a real and
+actual thing which is there. One's consciousness does not create
+its impressions, one does not make for oneself the moral and
+artistic ideas that visit one; one perceives them. Education is not
+a process of invention--it is a process of discovery; a process of
+learning the names given to things that are all present in one's
+own mind. One knows things long before one knows the names for
+them, by instinct and by intuition; and one's own mind is simply a
+part of a large and immortal life, which for a time is fenced by a
+little barrier of identity, just as a tiny pool of sea-water on a
+sea-beach is for a few hours separated from the great tide to which
+it belongs. All our regrets, remorses, anxieties, troubles arise
+from our not realising that we are but a part of this greater and
+wider life, from our delusion that we are alone and apart instead
+of, as is the case, one with the great ocean of life and joy.
+
+Sometimes, I know not why and how, we are for a moment or two in
+touch with the larger life--to some it comes in religion, to some
+in love, to some in art. Perhaps a wave of the onward sweeping tide
+beats for an instant into the little pool we call our own, stirring
+the fringing weed, bubbling sharply and freshly upon the sleeping
+sand,
+
+The sad mistake we make is, when such a moment comes, to feel as
+though it were only the stirring of our own feeble imagination.
+What we ought rather to do is by every effort we can make to
+welcome and comprehend this dawning of the larger life upon us; not
+to sink back peevishly into our own limits and timidly to deplore
+them, but resolutely to open the door again and again--for the door
+can be opened--to the light of the great sun that lies so broadly
+about us. Every now and then we have some startling experience
+which reveals to us our essential union with other individuals. We
+have many of us had experiences which seem to indicate that there
+is at times a direct communication with other minds, independent of
+speech or writing; and even if we have not had such experiences, it
+has been scientifically demonstrated that such things can occur.
+Telepathy, as it is clumsily called, which is nothing more than
+this direct communication of mind, is a thing which has been
+demonstrated in a way which no reasonable person can reject. We may
+call it abnormal if we like, and it is true that we do not as yet
+know under what conditions it exists; but it is as much there as
+electrical communication, and just as the electrician does not
+create the viewless ripples which his delicate instruments can
+catch and record, but merely makes it a matter of mechanics to
+detect them, so the ripple of human intercommunication is
+undoubtedly there; and when we have discovered what its laws are,
+we shall probably find that it underlies many things, such as
+enthusiasms, movements, the spirit of a community, patriotism,
+martial ardour, which now appear to us to be isolated and
+mysterious phenomena.
+
+But there is a larger thing than even that behind. In humanity we
+have merely a certain portion of this large life, which may spread
+for all we know beyond the visible universe, globed and bounded,
+like the spray of a fountain, into little separate individualities.
+Some of the urgent inexplicable emotions which visit us from time
+to time, immense, far-reaching, mysterious, are, I believe with all
+my heart, the pulsations of this vast life outside us, stirring for
+an instant the silence of our sleeping spirit. It is possible, I
+cannot help feeling, that those people live the best of all
+possible lives who devote themselves to receiving these pulsations.
+It may well be that in following anxiously the movement of the
+world, in giving ourselves to politics or business, or technical
+religion, or material cares, we are but delaying the day of our
+freedom by throwing ourselves intently into our limitations, and
+forgetting the wider life. It may be that the life which Christ
+seems to have suggested as the type of Christian life--the life of
+constant prayer, simple and kindly relations, indifference to
+worldly conditions, absence of ambitions, fearlessness, sincerity--
+may be the life in which we can best draw near to the larger
+spirit--for Christ spoke as one who knew some prodigious secret, as
+one in whose soul the larger life leapt and plunged like fresh sea-
+billows; who was incapable of sin and even of temptation, because
+His soul had free and open contact with the all-pervading spirit,
+and to whom the human limitations were no barrier at all.
+
+We do not know as yet the mechanical means, so to speak, by which
+the connection can be established, the door set wide. But we can at
+least open our soul to every breathing of divine influences; and
+when the great wind rises and thunders in our spirits, we can see
+that no claim of business, or weakness, or comfort, or convention
+shall hinder us from admitting it.
+
+And thus when one of these sweet, high, uplifting thoughts draws
+near and visits us, we can but say, as the child Samuel said in the
+dim-lit temple, "Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth." The music
+comes upon the air, in faint and tremulous gusts; it dies away
+across the garden, over the far hill-side, into the cloudless sky;
+but we have heard; we are not the same; we are transfigured.
+
+Why then, lastly, it may be asked, do these experiences befall us
+so faintly, so secretly, so seldom; if it is the true life that
+beats so urgently into our souls, why are we often so careful and
+disquieted, why do we fare such long spaces without the heavenly
+vision, why do we see, or seem to see, so many of our fellows to
+whom such things come rarely or not at all? I cannot answer that;
+yet I feel that the life is there; and I can but fall back upon the
+gentle words of the old saint, who wrote: "I know not how it is,
+but the more the realities of heaven are clothed with obscurity,
+the more they delight and attract; and nothing so much heightens
+longing as such tender refusal."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+THE LOVE OF GOD
+
+
+
+
+
+How strange it is that what is often the latest reward of the
+toiler after holiness, the extreme solace of the outwearied saint,
+should be too often made the first irksome article of a childish
+creed! To tell a child that it is a duty to love God better than
+father or mother, sisters and brothers, better than play, or
+stories, or food, or toys, what a monstrous thing is that! It is
+one of the things that make religion into a dreary and darkling
+shadow, that haunts the path of the innocent. The child's love is
+all for tangible, audible, and visible things. Love for him means
+kind words and smiling looks, ready comfort and lavished kisses;
+the child does not even love things for being beautiful, but for
+being what they ARE--curious, characteristic, interesting. He loves
+the odd frowsy smell of the shut-up attic, the bright ugly
+ornaments of the chimney-piece, the dirt of the street. He has no
+sense of critical taste. Besides, words mean so little to him, or
+even bear quaint, fantastic associations, which no one can divine,
+and which he himself is unable to express; he has no notion of an
+abstract, essential, spiritual thing, apart from what is actual to
+his senses. And then into this little concrete mind, so full of
+small definite images, so faltering and frail, is thrust this vast,
+remote notion--that he is bound to love something hidden and
+terrible, something that looks at him from the blank sky when he is
+alone among the garden beds, something which haunts empty rooms and
+the dark brake of the woodland. Moreover, a child, with its
+preternatural sensitiveness to pain, its bewildered terror of
+punishment, learns, side by side with this, that the God Whom he is
+to love thus tenderly is the God Who lays about Him so fiercely in
+the Old Testament, slaying the innocent with the guilty, merciless,
+harsh, inflicting the irreparable stroke of death, where a man
+would be concerned with desiring amendment more than vengeance. The
+simple questions with which the man Friday poses Robinson Crusoe,
+and to which he receives so ponderous an answer, are the questions
+which naturally arise in the mind of any thoughtful child. Why, if
+God be so kind and loving, does He not make an end of evil at once?
+Yet, because such questions are unanswerable by the wisest, the
+child is, for the convenience of his education, made to feel that
+he is wicked if he questions what he is taught. How many children
+will persevere in the innocent scepticism which is so natural and
+so desirable, under a sense of disapproval? One of my own earliest
+experiences in the ugly path of religious gloom was that I
+recognised quite clearly to myself that I did not love God at all.
+I did not know Him, I had no reason to think Him kind; He was angry
+with me, I gathered, if I was ill-tempered or untruthful. I was
+well enough aware by childish instinct that my mother did not cease
+to love me when I was naughty, but I could not tell about God. And
+yet I knew that, with His terrible power of knowing everything, He
+was well aware that I did not love Him. It was best to forget about
+Him as much as possible, for it spoiled one's pleasure to think
+about it. All the little amusements and idle businesses that were
+so dear to me, He probably disapproved of them all, and was only
+satisfied when I was safe at my lessons or immured in church.
+Sunday was the sort of day He liked, and how I detested it!--the
+toys put away, little ugly books about the Holy Land to read, an
+air of deep dreariness about it all. Thus does religion become a
+weariness from the outset.
+
+How slowly, and after what strange experience, by what infinite
+delay of deduction, does the love of God dawn upon the soul! Even
+then how faint and subtle an essence it is! In deep anxiety, under
+unbearable strain, in the grip of a dilemma of which either issue
+seems intolerable, in weariness of life, in hours of flagging
+vitality, the mighty tide begins to flow strongly and tranquilly
+into the soul. One did not make oneself; one did not make one's
+sorrows, even when they arose from one's own weakness and
+perversity. There was a meaning, a significance about it all; one
+was indeed on pilgrimage; and then comes the running to the
+Father's knee, and the casting oneself in utter broken weakness
+upon the one Heart that understands perfectly and utterly, and
+which does, which must, desire the best and truest. "Give me
+courage, hope, confidence," says the desolate soul.
+
+
+     "I can endure Thy bitterest decrees,
+      If CERTAIN of Thy Love."
+
+
+How would one amend all this if one had the power? Alas! it could
+only be by silencing all stupid and clumsy people, all rigid
+parents, all diplomatic priests, all the horrible natures who lick
+their lips with a fierce zest over the pains that befall the men
+with whom they do not agree. I would teach a child, in defiance
+even of reason, that God is the one Power that loves and
+understands him through thick and thin; that He punishes with
+anguish and sorrow; that He exults in forgiveness and mercy; that
+He rejoices in innocent happiness; that He loves courage, and
+brightness, and kindness, and cheerful self-sacrifice; that things
+mean, and vile, and impure, and cruel, are things that He does not
+love to punish, but sad and soiling stains that He beholds with
+shame and tears. This, it seems to me, is the Gospel teaching about
+God, impossible only because of the hardness of our hearts. But if
+it were possible, a child might grow to feel about sin, not that it
+was a horrible and unpardonable failure, a thing to afflict oneself
+drearily about, but that it was rather a thing which, when once
+spurned, however humiliating, could minister to progress, in a way
+in which untroubled happiness could not operate--to be forgotten,
+perhaps, but certainly to be forgiven; a privilege rather than a
+hindrance, a gate rather than a barrier; a shadow upon the path,
+out of which one would pass, with such speed as one might, into the
+blitheness of the free air and the warm sun. I remember a terrible
+lecture which I heard as a little bewildered boy at school, anxious
+to do right, terrified of oppression, and coldness, and evil alike;
+given by a worthy Evangelical clergyman, with large spectacles, and
+a hollow voice, and a great relish for spiritual terrors. The
+subject was "the exceeding sinfulness of sin," a proposition which
+I now see to be as true as if one lectured on the exceeding
+carnality of flesh. But the lecture spoke of the horrible and
+filthy corruption of the human heart, its determined delight in
+wallowing in evil, its desperate wickedness. I believed it, dully
+and hopelessly, as a boy believes what is told him by a voluble
+elderly person of obvious respectability. But what a detestable
+theory of life, what an ugly picture of Divine incompetence!
+
+Of course there are abundance of facts in the world which look like
+anything but love;--the ruthless and merciless punishment of
+carelessness and ignorance, the dark laws of heredity, the
+wastefulness and cruelty of disease, the dismal acquiescence of
+stupid, healthy, virtuous persons, without sympathy or imagination,
+in the hardships which they were strong enough to bear unscathed.
+One of the prime terrors of religion is the thought of the heavy-
+handed, unintelligent, tiresome men who would make it a monopoly if
+they could, and bear it triumphantly away from the hands of modest,
+humble, quiet, and tender-hearted people, chiding them as nebulous
+optimists.
+
+Who are the people in this short life of ours whom one remembers
+with deep and abiding gratitude? Not those who have rebuked, and
+punished, and satirised, and humiliated us, striking down the
+stricken, and flattening the prostrate--but the people who have
+been patient with us, and kind, who have believed in us, and
+comforted us, and welcomed us, and forgiven us everything; who have
+given us largely of their love, who have lent without requiring
+payment, who have given us emotional rather than prudential
+reasons, who have cared for us, not as a duty but by some divine
+instinct, who have made endless excuses for us, believing that the
+true self was there and would emerge, who have pardoned our
+misdeeds and forgotten our meannesses.
+
+This is what I would believe of God--that He is not our censorious
+and severe critic, but our champion and lover, not loving us in
+spite of what we are, but because of what we are; Who in the days
+of our strength rejoices in our joy, and does not wish to
+overshadow it, like the conscientious human mentor, with
+considerations that we must yet be withered like grass; and Who,
+when the youthful ebullience dies away, and the spring grows weak,
+and we wonder why the zest has died out of simple pleasures, out of
+agreeable noise and stir, is still with us, reminding us that the
+wisdom we are painfully and surely gaining is a deeper and more
+lasting quality than even the hot impulses of youth.
+
+Once in my life have I conceived what might have been, if I had had
+the skill to paint it, an immortal picture. It was thus. I was
+attending a Christmas morning service in a big parish church. I was
+in a pew facing east; close to me, in a transept, in a pew facing
+sideways, there sat a little old woman, who had hurried in just
+before the service began. She was a widow, living, I afterwards
+learnt, in an almshouse hard by. She was old and feeble, very poor,
+and her life had been a series of calamities, relieved upon a
+background of the hardest and humblest drudgery. She had lost her
+husband years ago by a painful and terrible illness. She had lost
+her children one by one; she was alone in the world, save for a few
+distant and indifferent relatives. To get into the almshouse had
+been for her a stroke of incredible and inconceivable good fortune.
+She had a single room, with a tiny kitchen off it. She had very
+little to say for herself; she could hardly read. No one took any
+particular interest in her; but she was a kindly, gallant,
+unselfish old soul, always ready to bear a hand, full of gratitude
+for the kindnesses she had received--and God alone knows how few
+they had been.
+
+She had a small, ugly, homely face, withered and gnarled hands; and
+she was dressed that day in a little old bonnet of unheard-of age,
+and in dingy, frowsy black clothes, shiny and creased, that came
+out of their box perhaps half-a-dozen times a year.
+
+But this morning she was in a festal mood. She had tidied up her
+little room; she was going to have a bit of meat for dinner, given
+her by a neighbour. She had been sent a Christmas card that
+morning, and had pored over it with delight. She liked the stir and
+company of the church, and the cheerful air of the holly-berries.
+She held her book up before her, though I do not suppose she was
+even at the right page. She kept up a little faint cracked singing
+in her thin old voice; but when they came to the hymn "Hark, the
+herald angels sing," which she had always known from childhood, she
+lifted up her head and sang more courageously:
+
+
+     "Join the triumph of the skies!
+      With the angelic host proclaim,
+      Christ is born in Bethlehem!"
+
+
+It was then that I had my vision. I do not know why, but at the
+sight of the wrinkled face and the sound of the plaintive uplifted
+voice, singing such words, a sudden mist of tears came over my
+eyes. Then I saw that close behind the old dame there stood a very
+young and beautiful man. I could see the fresh curling hair thrown
+back from the clear brow. He was clothed in a dim robe, of an
+opalescent hue and misty texture, and his hands were clasped
+together. It seemed that he sang too; but his eyes were bent upon
+the old woman with a look, half of tender amusement, and half of
+unutterable lovingness. The angelic host! This was one of that
+bright company indeed, going about the Father's business, bringing
+a joyful peace into the hearts of those among whom he moved. And of
+all the worshippers in that crowded church he had singled out the
+humblest and simplest for his friend and sister. I saw no more that
+day, for the lines of that presence faded out upon the air in the
+gleams of the frosty sunshine that came and went among the pillars.
+But if I could have painted the scene, the pure, untroubled face so
+close to the old worn features, the robes of light side by side
+with the dingy human vesture, it would be a picture that no living
+eye that had rested on it should forget.
+
+Alas, that one cannot live in moments of inspiration like these! As
+life goes on, and as we begin perhaps to grow a little nearer to
+God by faith, we are confronted in our own lives, or in the life of
+one very near us, by some intolerable and shameful catastrophe. A
+careless sin makes havoc of a life, and shadows a home with shame;
+or some generous or unselfish nature, useful, beneficent, urgently
+needed, is struck down with a painful and hopeless malady. This
+too, we say to ourselves, must come from God; He might have
+prevented it if He had so willed. What are we to make of it? How
+are we to translate into terms of love what seems like an act of
+tyrannous indifference, or deliberate cruelty? Then, I think, it is
+well to remind ourselves that we can never know exactly the
+conditions of any other human soul. How little we know of our own!
+How little we could explain our case to another, even if we were
+utterly sincere! The weaknesses of our nature are often, very
+tenderly I would believe, hidden from us; we think ourselves
+sensitive and weak, when in reality we are armed with a stubborn
+breastplate of complacency and pride; or we think ourselves strong,
+only because the blows of circumstance have been spared us. The
+more one knows of the most afflicted lives, the more often the
+conviction flashes across us that the affliction is not a wanton
+outrage, but a delicately adjusted treatment. I remember once that
+a friend of mine had sent him a rare plant, which was set in a big
+flower-pot, close to a fountain-basin. It never throve; it lived
+indeed, putting out in the spring a delicate stunted foliage,
+though my friend, who was a careful gardener, could never divine
+what ailed it. He was away for a few weeks, and the day after he
+was gone, the flower-pot was broken by a careless garden-boy, who
+wheeled a barrow roughly past it; the plant, earth and all, fell
+into the water; the boy removed the broken pieces of the pot, and
+seeing that the plant had sunk to the bottom of the little pool,
+never troubled his head to fish it out. When my friend returned, he
+noticed one day in the fountain a new and luxuriant growth of some
+unknown plant. He made careful inquiries and found out what had
+happened. It then came out that the plant was in reality a water-
+plant, and that it had pined away in the stifling air for want of
+nourishment, perhaps dimly longing for the fresh bed of the pool.
+
+Even so has it been, times without number, with some starving and
+thirsty soul, that has gone on feebly trying to live a maimed life,
+shut up in itself, ailing, feeble. There has descended upon it what
+looks at first sight like a calamity, some affliction unaccountable
+and irreparable; and then it proves that this was the one thing
+needed; that sorrow has brought out some latent unselfishness, or
+suffering energised some unused faculty of strength and patience.
+
+But even if it is not so, if we cannot trace in our own lives or
+the lives of others the beneficent influence of suffering, we can
+always take refuge in one thought. We can see that the one mighty
+and transforming power on earth is the power of love; we see people
+make sacrifices, not momentary sacrifices, but lifelong patient
+renunciations, for the sake of one whom they love; we see a great
+and passionate affection touch into being a whole range of
+unsuspected powers; we see men and women utterly unconscious of
+pain and weariness, utterly unaware that they are acting without a
+thought of self, if they can but soothe the pain of one dear to
+them, or win a smile from beloved lips; it is not that the
+selfishness, the indolence, is not there, but it is all borne away
+upon a mighty stream, as the river-wrack spins upon the rising
+flood.
+
+If then this marvellous, this amazing power of love can cause men
+to make, with joy and gladness, sacrifices of which in their
+loveless days they would have deemed themselves and confessed
+themselves wholly incapable, can we not feel with confidence that
+the power, which lies thus deepest in the heart of the world, lies
+also deepest in the heart of God, of Whom the world is but a faint
+reflection? It cannot be otherwise. We may sadly ponder, indeed,
+why the love that has been, or that might have been, the strength
+of weary lives should be withdrawn or sternly withheld, but we need
+not be afraid, if we have one generous impulse for another, if we
+ever put aside a delight that may please or attract us, for the
+sake of one who expects or would value any smallest service--and
+there are few who cannot feel this--we need not then, I say, doubt
+that the love which we desire, and which we have somehow missed or
+lost, is there waiting for us, ours all the time, if we but knew
+it.
+
+And even if we miss the sweet influence of love in our lives, is
+there any one who has not, in solitude and dreariness, looked back
+upon the time when he was surrounded by love and opportunities of
+love, in childhood or in youth, with a bitter regret that he did
+not make more of it when it was so near to him, that he was so
+blind and selfish, that he was not a little more tender, a little
+more kind? I will speak frankly for myself and say that the
+memories which hurt me most, when I stumble upon them, are those of
+the small occasions when I showed myself perverse and hard; when
+eyes, long since closed, looked at me with a pathetic expectancy;
+when I warded off the loving impulse by some jealous sense of my
+own rights, some peevish anger at a fancied injustice; when I
+stifled the smile and withheld the hand, and turned away in
+silence, glad, in that poisonous moment, to feel that I could at
+all events inflict that pain in base requital. One may know that it
+is all forgiven, one may be sure that the misunderstanding has
+faded in the light of the other dawn, but still the cold base
+shadow, the thought of one's perverse cruelty, strikes a gloom upon
+the mind.
+
+But with God, when one once begins to draw near to Him, one need
+have no such poignant regrets or overshadowing memories; one may
+say to Him in one's heart, as simply as a child, that He knows what
+one has been and is, what one might have been and what one desires
+to be; and one may cast oneself at His feet in the overwhelming
+hope that He will make of oneself what He would have one to be.
+
+In the parable of the Prodigal Son, it is not the poor wretch
+himself, whose miserable motive for returning is plainly indicated--
+that instead of pining in cold and hunger he may be warmed and
+clothed--who is the hero of the story; still less is it the hard
+and virtuous elder son. The hero of the tale is the patient,
+tolerant, loving father, who had acted, as a censorious critic
+might say, foolishly and culpably, in supplying the dissolute boy
+with resources, and taking him back without a word of just
+reproach. A sad lack of moral discipline, no doubt! If he had kept
+the boy in fear and godliness, if he had tied him down to honest
+work, the disaster need never have happened. Yet the old man, who
+went so often at sundown, we may think, to the crest of the hill,
+from which he could see the long road winding over the plain to the
+far-off city, the road by which he had seen his son depart, light-
+heartedly and full of fierce joyful impulses, and along which he
+was to see the dejected figure, so familiar, so sadly marred,
+stumbling home--he is the master-spirit of the sweet and comforting
+scene. His heart is full of utter gladness, for the lost is found.
+He smiles upon the servants; he bids the household rejoice; he can
+hardly, in his simple joy of heart, believe that the froward elder
+brother is vexed and displeased; and his words of entreaty that the
+brother, too, will enter into the spirit of the hour, are some of
+the most pathetic and beautiful ever framed in human speech: "Son,
+thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine; it was meet
+that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was
+dead, and is alive again, and was lost, and is found."
+
+And this is, after all, the way in which God deals with us. He
+gives us our portion to spend as we choose; He holds nothing back;
+and when we have wasted it and brought misery upon ourselves, and
+return to Him, even for the worst of reasons, He has not a word of
+rebuke or caution; He is simply and utterly filled with joy and
+love. There are a thousand texts that would discourage us, would
+bid us believe that God deals hardly with us, but it is men that
+deal hardly with us, it is we that deal hardly with ourselves. This
+story, which is surely the most beautiful story in the world, gives
+us the deliberate thought of the Saviour, the essence of His
+teaching; and we may fling aside the bitter warnings of jealous
+minds, and cast ourselves upon the supreme hope that, if only we
+will return, we are dealt with even more joyfully than if we had
+never wandered at all.
+
+And then perhaps at last, when we have peeped again and again,
+through loss and suffering, at the dark background of life; when we
+have seen the dreariest corner of the lonely road, where the path
+grows steep and miry, and the light is veiled by scudding cloud and
+dripping rain, there begins to dawn upon us the sense of a
+beautiful and holy patience, the thought that these grey ashes of
+life, in which the glowing cinders sink, which once were bright
+with leaping flame, are not the end--that the flame and glow are
+there, although momently dispersed. They have done their work; one
+is warmed and enlivened; one can sit still, feeding one's fancy on
+the lapsing embers, just as one saw pictures in the fire as an
+eager child long ago. That high-hearted excitement and that
+curiosity have faded. Life is very different from what we expected,
+more wholesome, more marvellous, more brief, more inconclusive; but
+there is an intenser, if quieter and more patient, curiosity to
+wait and see what God is doing for us; and the orange stain and
+green glow of the sunset, though colder and less jocund, is yet a
+far more mysterious, tender, and beautiful thing than the steady
+glow of the noonday sun, when the shining flies darted hither and
+thither, and the roses sent out their rich fragrance. There is
+fragrance still, the fragrance of the evening flowers, where the
+western windows look across the misty fields to the thickening
+shadows of the tall trees. But there is something that speaks in
+the gathering gloom, in the darkening sky with its flush of crimson
+fire, that did not speak in the sun-warmed garden and the dancing
+leaves; and what speaks is the mysterious love of God, a thing
+sweeter and more remote than the urgent bliss of the fiery noon,
+full of delicate mysteries and appealing echoes. We have learnt
+that the darkness is no darkness with Him; and the soul which beat
+her wings so passionately in the brighter light of the hot morning,
+now at last begins to dream of whither she is bound, and the dear
+shade where she will fold her weary wing.
+
+How often has the soul in her dreariness cried out, "One effort
+more!" But that is done with for ever. She is patient now; she
+believes at last; she labours no longer at the oar, but she is
+borne upon the moving tide; she is on her way to the deep Heart of
+God.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+
+
+
+I have wandered far enough in my thought, it would seem, from the
+lonely grange in its wide pastures, and the calm expanse of fen;
+and I should wish once more to bring my reader back home with me to
+the sheltered garden, and the orchard knee-deep in grass, and the
+embowering elms; for there is one word more to be said, and that
+may be best said at home; though our experience is not limited by
+time or place. It was on the lonely ridge, strewn with boulders and
+swept by night-winds, when the darkness closed in drearily about
+him, that Jacob, a homeless exile, in the hour of his utmost
+desolation, saw the ladder whose golden head was set at the very
+foot of God, thronged with bright messengers of strength and hope.
+And again it was in the familiar homestead, with every corner rich
+in gentle memories, that the spirit of terror turned the bitter
+stream of anguish, as from the vent of some thunderous cloud, upon
+the sad head of Job. We may turn a corner in life, and be
+confronted perhaps with an uncertain shape of grief and despair,
+whom we would fain banish from our shuddering sight, perhaps with
+some solemn form of heavenly radiance, whom we may feel reluctant
+in our unworthiness to entertain. But in either case, such times as
+those, when we wrestle all night with the angel, not knowing if he
+wishes us well or ill, ignorant of his name and his mien alike, are
+better than hours spent in indolent contentment, in the realisation
+of our placid and petty designs. For, after all, it is the quality
+rather than the quantity of our experience that matters; it is easy
+enough to recognise that, when we are working light-heartedly and
+eagerly at some brave design, and seeing the seed we plant
+springing up all about us in fertile rows in the garden of God. But
+what of those days when our lot seems only to endure, when we can
+neither scheme nor execute, when the old volubility and vitality
+desert us, and our one care is just to make our dreary presence as
+little of a burden and a shadow as possible to those whom we love?
+We must then remind ourselves, not once or twice, that nothing can
+separate us from the Father of all, even though our own wilfulness
+and perversity may have drawn about us a cloud of sorrow. We are
+perhaps most in God's mind when we seem most withdrawn from Him. He
+is nearer us when we seek for Him and cannot find Him, than when we
+forget Him in laughter and self-pleasing. And we must remember too
+that it is neither faithful nor fruitful to abide wilfully in
+sadness, to clasp our cares close, to luxuriate in them. There is a
+beautiful story of Mrs. Charles Kingsley, who long survived her
+husband. Never perhaps had two souls been united by so close a bond
+of chivalry and devotion. "Whenever I find myself thinking too much
+about Charles," she said in the days of her grief, "I find and read
+the most sensational novel I can. People may think it heartless,
+but hearts were given us to love with, not to break." And we must
+deal with our sorrows as we deal with any other gift of God,
+courageously and temperately, not faint-heartedly or wilfully; not
+otherwise can they be blest to us. We must not pettishly reject
+consolation and distraction. Pain is a great angel, but we must
+wrestle with him, until he bless us! and the blessings he can bring
+us are first a wholesome shame at our old selfish ingratitude in
+the untroubled days, when we took care and pleasure greedily; and
+next, if we meet him faithfully, he can make our heart go out to
+all our brothers and sisters who suffer in this brief and troubled
+life of ours. For we are here to learn something, if we can but
+spell it out; and thus it is morbid to indulge regrets and remorse
+too much over our failures and mistakes; for it is through them
+that we learn. We must be as brave as we can, and dare to grudge no
+pang that brings us nearer to the reality of things.
+
+Reality! that is the secret; for we who live in dreams, who pursue
+beauty, who are haunted as by a passion for that sweet quality that
+thrills alike in the wayside flower and the orange pomp of the
+setting sun, that throbs in written word and uttered melody, that
+calls to us suddenly and secretly in the glance of an eye and the
+gesture of a hand,--we, I say, who discern these gracious motions,
+tend to live in them too luxuriously, to idealise life, to make out
+of our daily pilgrimage, our goings and comings, a golden
+untroubled picture; it need not be a false or a base effort to
+escape from what is sordid or distasteful; but for all that we run
+a sore risk in yielding too placidly to our visions; and as with
+the Lady of Shalott, it may be well for us if our woven web be rent
+aside, and our magic mirror broken; nay, even if death comes to us
+at the close of the mournful song. Thus then we draw near and look
+reluctant and dismayed into the bare truth of things. We see, it
+may be, our poor pretences tossed aside, and the embroidered robe
+in which we have striven to drape our leanness torn from us; but we
+must gaze as steadily as we can, and pray that the vision be not
+withdrawn till it has wrought its perfect work within us; and then,
+with energies renewed, we may set out again on pilgrimage, happy in
+this, that we no longer mistake the arbour of refreshment for the
+goal of our journey, or the quiet house of welcome, that receives
+us in the hour of weariness, for the heavenly city, with all its
+bright mansions and radiant palaces.
+
+It is experience that matters, as I have said; not what we do, but
+how we do it. The material things that we collect about us in our
+passage through life, that we cling to so pathetically, and into
+which something of our very selves seems to pass, these things are
+little else than snares and hindrances to our progress--like the
+clay that sticks to the feet of the traveller, like the burden of
+useless things that he carries painfully with him, things which he
+cannot bring himself to throw away because they might possibly turn
+out to be useful, and which meanwhile clank and clatter fruitlessly
+about the laden beast, and weigh him down. What we have rather to
+do is to disengage ourselves from these things: from the money
+which we do not need, but which may help us some day; from the
+luxuries we do not enjoy; from the furniture we trail about with us
+from home to home. All those things get a hold of us and tie us to
+earth, even when the associations with them are dear and tender
+enough. The mistake we make is not in loving them--they are or can
+be signs to us of the love and care of God--but we must refrain
+from loving the possession of them.
+
+Take, for instance, one of the least mundane of things, the
+knowledge we painfully acquire, and the possession of which breeds
+in us such lively satisfaction. If it is our duty to acquire
+knowledge and to impart it, we must acquire it; but it is the
+faithfulness with which we toil, not the accumulations we gain that
+are blessed to us--"knowledge comes but wisdom lingers," says the
+poet--and it is the heavenly wisdom of which we ought to be in
+search; for what remains to us of our equipment, when we part from
+the world and migrate elsewhere, is not the actual stuff that we
+have collected, whether it be knowledge or money, but the patience,
+the diligence, the care which we have exercised in gaining these
+things, the character, as affected by the work we have done; but
+our mistake is to feel that we are idle and futile, unless we have
+tangible results to show; when perhaps the hours in which we sat
+idle, out of misery or mere feebleness, are the most fruitful hours
+of all for the growth of the soul.
+
+The great savant dies. What is lost? Not a single fact or a single
+truth, but only his apprehension, his collection of certain truths;
+not a single law of nature perishes or is altered thereby. We
+measure worth by prominence and fame; but the destiny of the
+simplest and vilest of the human race is as august, as momentous as
+the destiny of the mightiest king or conqueror; it is not our
+admiration of each other that weighs with God, but our nearness to,
+our dependence on Him. Yet, even so, we must not deceive ourselves
+in the matter. We must be sure that it is the peace of God that we
+indeed desire, and not merely a refined kind of leisure; that we
+are in search of simplicity, and not merely afraid of work. We must
+not glorify a mild spectatorial pleasure by the name of philosophy,
+or excuse our indolence under the name of contemplation. We must
+abstain deliberately, not tamely hang back; we must desire the
+Kingdom of Heaven for itself, and not for the sake of the things
+that are added if we seek it. If the Scribes and Pharisees have
+their reward for ambition and self-seeking, the craven soul has its
+reward too, and that reward is a sick emptiness of spirit. And then
+if we have erred thus, if we have striven to pretend to ourselves
+that we were careless of the prize, when in reality we only feared
+the battle, what can we do? How can we repair our mistake? There is
+but one way; we can own the pitiful fault, and not attempt to
+glorify it; we can face the experience, take our petty and shameful
+wages and cast ourselves afresh, in our humiliation and weakness,
+upon God, rejoicing that we can at least feel the shame, and
+enduring the chastisement with patient hopefulness; for that very
+suffering is a sign that God has not left us to ourselves, but is
+giving us perforce the purification which we could not take to
+ourselves.
+
+And even thus, life is not all an agony, a battle, an endurance;
+there are sweet hours of refreshment and tranquillity between the
+twilight and the dawn; hours when we can rest a little in the
+shadow, and see the brimming stream of life flowing quietly but
+surely to its appointed end. I watched to-day an old shepherd, on
+a wide field, moving his wattled hurdles, one by one, in the slow,
+golden afternoon; and a whole burden of anxious thoughts fell off
+me for a while, leaving me full of a quiet hope for an end which
+was not yet, but that certainly awaited me; of a day when I too
+might perhaps move as unreflectingly, as calmly, in harmony with
+the everlasting Will, as the old man moved about his familiar task.
+Why that harmony should be so blurred and broken, why we should
+leave undone the things that we desire to do, and do the things
+that we do not desire, that is still a deep and sad mystery; yet
+even in the hour of our utmost wilfulness, we can never wander
+beyond the range of the Will that has made us, and bidden us to be
+what we are. And thus as I sit in this low-lit hour, there steals
+upon the heart the message of hope and healing; the scent of the
+great syringa bush leaning out into the twilight, the sound of the
+fitful breeze laying here and there a caressing hand upon the
+leaves, the soft radiance of the evening star hung in the green
+spaces of the western sky, each and all blending into
+incommunicable dreams.
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of At Large
+by Arthur Christopher Benson
+******This file should be named atlar10.txt or atlar10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, atlar11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, atlar10a.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 At Large
+by Arthur Christopher Benson
+
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