At Large Part 9

As I write at my ease I see the velvety gra.s.s 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 b.u.t.tercups 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 a.s.surance 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 G.o.d through human a.n.a.logies 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d; 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 n.o.blest 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 d.i.c.kens. 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sure them that they are indeed dear to G.o.d; 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 h.e.l.l is mercy." Of course if one can take so richly decisive a view of the Creator's purpose for His creatures, and look upon h.e.l.l as the normal destination from which a few, by the overpowering condescension of G.o.d, 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 ma.s.s 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 s.e.xes. 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, t.i.ttering and ogling, the young men were noisy, selfish, ill-mannered, enjoying nothing so much as the discomfiture of any pa.s.ser-by. They pushed each other into ditches, they tripped up a friend who pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing a mill in broad water-meadows, overhung by great elms; the gra.s.s was golden with b.u.t.tercups, 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 n.o.bler, wiser, more unselfish; and of that I have no doubt whatever. The sense of equality, of the rights of the weak, compa.s.sion, 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 ident.i.ty, 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 ident.i.ty 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 G.o.d, and cherish this n.o.ble 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 a.s.sistance. 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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 att.i.tude is better than the high-bred att.i.tude; it is better than the stoical att.i.tude; it is even better than the pious att.i.tude, because it depends upon living life to the uttermost, rather than upon detaching oneself from what one considers rather a poor business. The att.i.tude 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 ill.u.s.trate it.

A few days ago, I had a busy tiresome morning hammering into shape a stupid prosaic pa.s.sage, 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 a.s.sume. 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 pa.s.sage of music, a conspiracy of sweet sounds and rich tones; or as if I had pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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 ident.i.ty, 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 s.p.a.ces 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 G.o.d

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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sociations, 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 G.o.d Whom he is to love thus tenderly is the G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.s, 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!