The Thread of Gold Part 6

"Yes," said he, "a great thing, as long as one is not sure one is right, but ready to learn, and not desirous to teach. That is the mistake. We are children at school--we ought not to forget that; but many of us want to sit in the master's chair, and rap the desk, and cane the other children."

And so our talk wandered to other things; then we were silent for a little, while the birds came home to their roosts, and the trees shivered in the breeze of sunset; till at last the golden glow gathered in the west, and the sun went down in state behind the crimson line of sea.

XXII

The Pleasures of Work

I desire to do a very sacred thing to-day: to enunciate a couple of plat.i.tudes and attest them. It is always a solemn moment in life when one can sincerely subscribe to a plat.i.tude. Plat.i.tudes are the things which people of plain minds shout from the steps of the staircase of life as they ascend; and to discover the truth of a plat.i.tude by experience means that you have climbed a step higher.

The first enunciation is, that in this world we most of us do what we like. And the corollary to that is, that we most of us like what we do.

Of course, we must begin by taking for granted that we most of us are obliged to do something. But that granted, it seems to me that it is very rare to find people who do not take a certain pleasure in their work, and even secretly congratulate themselves on doing it with a certain style and efficiency. To find a person who has not some species of pride of this nature is very rare. Other people may not share our opinion of our own work. But even in the case of those whose work is most open to criticism, it is almost invariable to find that they resent criticism, and are very ready to appropriate praise. I had a curiously complete instance of this the other day. In a parish which I often visit, the organ in the church is what is called presided over by the most infamous executant I have ever heard--an elderly man, who seldom plays a single chord correctly, and whose attempts to use the pedals are of the nature of tentative and unsuccessful experiments.

His performance has lately caused a considerable amount of indignation in the parish, for a new organ has been placed in the church, of far louder tone than the old instrument, and my friend the organist is hopelessly adrift upon it. The residents in the place have almost made up their minds to send a round-robin to the Vicar to ask that the _pulsator organorum_, the beater of the organ, as old Cathedral statutes term him, may be deposed. The last time I attended service, one of those strangely appropriate verses came up in the course of the Psalms, which make troubled spirits feel that the Psalter does indeed utter a message to faithful individual hearts. "_I have desired that they, even my enemies,_" ran the verse, "_should not triumph over me; for when my foot slipped, they rejoiced greatly against me._" In the course of the verse the unhappy performer executed a perfect fandango on the pedals. I looked guiltily at the senior churchwarden, and saw his mouth twitch.

In the same afternoon I fell in with the organist, in the course of a stroll, and discoursed to him in a tone of gentle condolence about the difficulties of a new instrument. He looked blankly at me, and then said that he supposed that some people might find a change of instrument bewildering, but that for himself he felt equally at home on any instrument. He went on to relate a series of compliments that well-known musicians had paid him, which I felt must either have been imperfectly recollected, or else must have been of a consolatory or even ironical nature. In five minutes, I discovered that my friend was the victim of an abundant vanity, and that he believed that his vocation in life was organ-playing.

Again, I remember that, when I was a schoolmaster, one of my colleagues was a perfect byword for the disorder and noise that prevailed in his form. I happened once to hold a conversation with him on disciplinary difficulties, thinking that he might have the relief of confiding his troubles to a sympathising friend. What was my amazement when I discovered that his view of the situation was, that every one was confronted with the same difficulties as himself, and that he obviously believed that he was rather more successful than most of us in dealing with them tactfully and strictly.

I believe my principle to be of almost universal application; and that if one could see into the heart of the people who are accounted, and rightly accounted, to be gross and conspicuous failures, we should find that they were not free from a certain pleasant vanity about their own qualifications and efficiency. The few people whom I have met who are apt to despond over their work are generally people who do it remarkably well, and whose ideal of efficiency is so high that they criticise severely in themselves any deviation from their standard.

Moreover, if one goes a little deeper--if, for instance, one cordially re-echoes their own criticisms upon their work--such criticisms are apt to be deeply resented.

I will go further, and say that only once in the course of my life have I found a man who did his work really well, without any particular pride and pleasure in it. To do that implies an extraordinary degree of will-power and self-command.

I do not mean to say that, if any professional person found himself suddenly placed in the possession of an independent income, greater than he had ever derived from his professional work, his pleasure in his work would be sufficient to retain him in the exercise of it. We have most of us an unhappy belief in our power of living a pleasurable and virtuous life of leisure; and the desire to live what is called the life of a gentleman, which character has lately been defined as a person who has no professional occupation, is very strong in the hearts of most of us.

But, for all that, we most of us enjoy our work; the mere fact that one gains facility, and improves from day to day, is a source of sincere pleasure, however far short of perfection our attempts may fall; and, generally speaking, our choice of a profession is mainly dictated by a certain feeling of apt.i.tude for and interest in what we propose to undertake.

It is, then, a happy and merciful delusion by which we are bound. We grow, I think, to love our work, and we grow, too, to believe in our method of doing it. We cannot, a great preacher once said, all delude ourselves into believing that we are richer, handsomer, braver, more distinguished than others; but there are few of us who do not cherish a secret belief that, if only the truth were known, we should prove to be more interesting than others.

To leave our work for a moment, and to turn to ordinary social intercourse. I am convinced that the only thing that can account for the large number of bad talkers in the world is the wide-spread belief that prevails among individuals as to their power of contributing interest and amus.e.m.e.nt to a circle. One ought to keep this in mind, and bear faithfully and patiently the stream of tiresome talk that pours, as from a hose, from the lips of diffuse and lengthy conversationalists. I once made a terrible mistake. I complimented, from the mere desire of saying something agreeable, and finding my choice of praiseworthy qualities limited, an elderly, garrulous acquaintance on his geniality, on an evening when I had writhed uneasily under a steady downpour of talk. I have bitterly rued my insincerity. Not only have I received innumerable invitations from the man whom the Americans would call my complimentee, but when I am in his company I see him making heroic attempts to make his conversation practically continuous. How often since that day have I sympathised with St James in his eloquent description of the deadly and poisonous power of the tongue! A bore is not, as is often believed, a merely selfish and uninteresting person. He is often a man who labours conscientiously and faithfully at an accomplishment, the exercise of which has become pleasurable to him. And thus a bore is the hardest of all people to convert, because he is, as a rule, conscious of virtue and beneficence.

On the whole, it is better not to disturb the amiable delusions of our fellow-men, unless we are certain that we can improve them. To break the spring of happiness in a virtuous bore is a serious responsibility.

It is better, perhaps, both in matters of work and in matters of social life, to encourage our friends to believe in themselves. We must not, of course, encourage them in vicious and hurtful enjoyment, and there are, of course, bores whose tediousness is not only not harmless, but a positively noxious and injurious quality. There are bores who have but to lay a finger upon a subject of universal or special interest, to make one feel that under no circ.u.mstances will one ever be able to allow one's thoughts to dwell on the subject again; and such a person should be, as far as possible, isolated from human intercourse, like a sufferer from a contagious malady. But this extremity of noxiousness is rare. And it may be said that, as a rule, one does more to increase happiness by a due amount of recognition and praise, even when one is recognising rather the spirit of a performance than the actual result; and such a course of action has the additional advantage of making one into a person who is eagerly welcomed and sought after in all kinds of society.

XXIII

The Abbey

The fresh wind blew cheerily as we raced, my friend and I, across a long stretch of rich fen-land. The sunlight, falling somewhat dimly through a golden haze, lay very pleasantly on the large pasture-fields.

There are few things more beautiful, I think, than these great level plains; they give one a delightful sense of s.p.a.ce and repose. The distant lines of trees, the far-off church towers, the long d.y.k.es, the hamlets half-hidden in orchards, the "sky-s.p.a.ce and field-silence,"

give one a feeling of quiet rustic life lived on a large and simple scale, which seems the natural life of the world.

Our goal was the remains of an old religious house, now a farm. We were soon at the place; it stood on a very gentle rising ground, once an island above the fen. Two great columns of the Abbey Church served as gate-posts. The house itself lay a little back from the road, a comfortable cl.u.s.ter of big barns and outhouses, with great walnut trees all about, in the middle of an ancient tract of pasture, full of dimpled excavations, in which the turf grew greener and more compact.

The farm-house itself, a large irregular Georgian building covered with rough orange plaster, showed a pleasant tiled roof among the barns, over a garden set with venerable sprawling box-trees. We found a friendly old labourer, full of simple talk, who showed us the orchard, with its mouldering wall of stone, pierced with niches, the line of dry stew-ponds, the refectory, now a great barn, piled high with heaps of grain and straw. We walked through byres tenanted by comfortable pigs routing in the dirt. We hung over a paling to watch the creased and discontented face of an old hog, grunting in shrill antic.i.p.ation of a meal. Our guide took us to the house, where we found a transept of the church, now used as a brew-house, with the line of the staircase still visible, rising up to a door in the wall that led once to the dormitory, down the steps of which, night after night, the shivering and sleepy monks must have stumbled into their chilly church for prayers. The hall of the house was magnificent with great Norman arches, once the aisle of the nave.

The whole scene had the busy, comfortable air of a place full of patriarchal life, the dignity of a thing existing for use and not for show, of quiet prosperity, of garnered provender and well-fed stock.

Though it made no deliberate attempt at beauty, it was full of a seemly and homely charm. The face of the old fellow that led us about, chirping fragments of local tradition, with a mild pride in the fact that strangers cared to come and see the place, wore the contented, weather-beaten look that comes of a life of easy labour spent in the open air. His patched gaiters, the sacking tied round him with a cord to serve as an ap.r.o.n, had the same simple appropriateness. We walked leisurely about, gathering a hundred pretty impressions,--as the old filbert-trees that fringed the orchard, the wall-flowers, which our guide called the blood-warriors, on the ruined coping, a flight of pigeons turning with a sharp clatter in the air. At last he left us to go about his little business; and we, sitting on a broken mounting-block in the sunshine, gazed lazily and contentedly at the scene.

We attempted to picture something of the life of the Benedictines who built the house. It must have been a life of much quiet happiness. We tried to see in imagination the quaint cl.u.s.tered fabrics, the ancient church, the cloister, the barns, the out-buildings. The brethren must have suffered much from cold in winter. The day divided by services, the nights broken by prayers; probably the time was dull enough, but pa.s.sed quickly, like all lives full of monotonous engagements. They were not particularly ascetic, these Benedictines, and insisted much on manual labour in the open air. Probably at first the monks did their farm-work as well; but as they grew richer, they employed labourers, and themselves fell back on simpler and easier garden-work. Perhaps some few were truly devotional spirits, with a fire of prayer and aspiration burning in their hearts; but the majority would be quiet men, full of little gossip about possible promotions, about lands and crops, about wayfarers and ecclesiastics who pa.s.sed that way and were entertained. Very few, except certain officials like the Cellarer, who would have to ride to market, ever left the precincts of the place, but laid their bones in the little graveyard east of the church. We make a mistake in regarding the life and the buildings as having been so picturesque, as they now appear after the long lapse of time. The church was more venerable than the rest; but the refectory, at the time of the dissolution, cannot have been long built; still, the old tiled place, with its rough stone walls, must have always had a quaint and irregular air.

Probably it was as a rule a contented and amiable society. The regular hours, the wholesome fatigue which the rule entailed, must have tended to keep the inmates in health and good-humour. But probably there was much t.i.ttle-tattle; and a disagreeable, jealous, or scheming inmate must have been able to stir up a good deal of strife in a society living at such close quarters. One thinks loosely that it must have resembled the life of a college at the University, but that is an entire misapprehension; for the idea of a college is liberty with just enough discipline to hold it together, while the idea of a monastery was discipline with just enough liberty to make life tolerable.

Well, it is all over now! the idea of the monastic life, which was to make a bulwark for quiet-minded people against the rougher world, is no longer needed. The work of the monks is done. Yet I gave an affectionate thought across the ages to the old inmates of the place, whose bones have mouldered into the dust of the yard where we sat. It seemed half-pleasant, half-pathetic to think of them as they went about their work, st.u.r.dy, cheerful figures, looking out over the wide fen with all its clear pools and reed-beds, growing old in the familiar scene, pa.s.sing from the dormitory to the infirmary, and from the infirmary to the graveyard, in a sure and certain hope. They too enjoyed the first breaking of spring, the return of balmy winds, the pushing up of the delicate flowers in orchard and close, with something of the same pleasure that I experience to-day. The same wonder that I feel, the same gentle thrill speaking of an unattainable peace, an unruffled serenity that lies so near me in the spring sunshine, flashed, no doubt, into those elder spirits. Perhaps, indeed, their heart went out to the unborn that should come after them, as my heart goes out to the dead to-day.

And even the slow change that has dismantled that busy place, and established it as the quiet farmstead that I see, holds a hope within it. There must indeed have been a sad time when the buildings were slipping into decay, and the church stood ruined and roofless. But how soon the scars are healed! How calmly nature smiles at the eager schemes of men, breaks them short, and then sets herself to harmonise and adorn the ruin, till she makes it fairer than before, writing her patient lesson of beauty on broken choir and tottering wall, flinging her tide of fresh life over the rents, and tenderly drawing back the broken fragments into her bosom. If we could but learn from her not to fret or grieve, to gather up what remains, to wait patiently and wisely for our change!

So I reasoned softly to myself in a train of gentle thought, till the plough-horses came clattering in, and the labourers plodded gratefully home; and the sun went down over the flats in a great glory of orange light.

XXIV

Wordsworth

I believe that I was once taken to Rydal Mount as a small boy, led there meekly, no doubt, in a sort of dream; but I retain not the remotest recollection of the place, except of a small flight of stone steps, which struck me as possessing some attractive quality or other.

And I have since read, I suppose, a good many descriptions of the place; but on visiting it, as I recently did, I discovered that I had not the least idea of what it was like. And I would here shortly speak of the extraordinary kindness which I received from the present tenants, who are indeed of the hallowed dynasty; it may suffice to say that I could only admire the delicate courtesy which enabled people, who must have done the same thing a hundred times before, to show me the house with as much zest and interest, as if I was the first pilgrim that had ever visited the place.

In the first place, the great simplicity of the whole struck me. It is like a little grange or farm. The rooms are small and low, and of a pleasant domesticity; it is a place apt for a patriarchal life, where simple people might live at close quarters with each other. The house is hardly visible from the gate. You turn out of a steep lane, embowered by trees, into a little gravel sweep, approaching the house from the side. But its position is selected with admirable art; the ground falls steeply in front of it, and you look out over a wide valley, at the end of which Windermere lies, a tract of sapphire blue, among wooded hills and dark ranges. Behind, the ground rises still more steeply, to the rocky, gra.s.sy heights of Nab Scar; and the road leads on to a high green valley among the hills, a place of unutterable peace.

In this warm, sheltered nook, hidden in woods, with its southerly aspect, the vegetation grows with an almost tropical luxuriance, so that the general impression of the place is by no means typically English. Laurels and rhododendrons grow in dense shrubberies; the trees are full of leaf; flowers blossom profusely. There is a little orchard beneath the house, and everywhere there is the fragrant and pungent smell of sun-warmed garden-walks and box-hedges. There are little terraces everywhere, banked up with stone walls built into the steep ground, where stonecrops grow richly. One of these leads to a little thatched arbour, where the poet often sat; below it, the ground falls very rapidly, among rocks and copse and fern, so that you look out on to the tree-tops below, and catch a glimpse of the steely waters of the hidden lake of Rydal.

Wordsworth lived there for more than thirty years; and half a century has pa.s.sed since he died. He was a skilful landscape gardener; and I suppose that in his lifetime, when the walks were being constructed and the place laid out, it must have had a certain air of newness, of interference with the old wild peace of the hillside, which it has since parted with. Now it is all as full of a quiet and settled order, as if it had been thus for ever. One little detail deserves a special mention; just below the house, there is an odd, circular, low, gra.s.sy mound, said to be the old meeting-place for the village council, in primitive and patriarchal days,--the Mount, from which the place has its name.

I thought much of the stately, simple, self-absorbed poet, whom somehow one never thinks of as having been young; the lines of Milton haunted me, as I moved about the rooms, the garden-terraces:--

"_In this mount he appeared; under this tree Stood visible; among these pines his voice I heard; here with him at this fountain talked._"

The place is all permeated with the thought of him, his deep and tranquil worship of natural beauty, his love of the kindly earth.

I do not think that Wordsworth is one whose memory evokes a deep personal attachment. I doubt if any figures of bygone days do that, unless there is a certain wistful pathos about them; unless something of compa.s.sion, some wish to proffer sympathy or consolation, mingles with one's reverence. I have often, for instance, stayed at a house where Sh.e.l.ley spent a few half-rapturous, half-miserable months.

There, meditating about him, striving to reconstruct the picture of his life, one felt that he suffered much and needlessly; one would have wished to shelter, to protect him if it had been possible, or at least to have proffered sympathy to that inconsolable spirit. One's heart goes out to those who suffered long years ago, whose love of the earth, of life, of beauty, was perpetually overshadowed by the pain that comes from realising transitoriness and decay.

But Wordsworth is touched by no such pathos. He was extraordinarily prosperous and equable; he was undeniably self-sufficient. Even the sorrows and bereavements that he had to bear were borne gently and philosophically. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, and did it.

Those st.u.r.dy, useful legs of his bore him many a pleasant mile. He always had exactly as much money as he needed, in order to live his life as he desired. He chose precisely the abode he preferred; his fame grew slowly and solidly. He became a great personage; he was treated with immense deference and respect. He neither claimed nor desired sympathy; he was as strong and self-reliant as the old yeomen of the hills, of whom he indeed was one; his vocation was poetry, just as their vocation was agriculture; and this vocation he pursued in as business-like and intent a spirit as they pursued their farming.

Wordsworth, indeed, was armed at all points by a strong and simple pride, too strong to be vanity, too simple to be egotism. He is one of the few supremely fortunate men in the history of literature, because he had none of the sensitiveness or indecision that are so often the curse of the artistic temperament. He never had the least misgivings about the usefulness of his life; he wrote because he enjoyed it; he ate and drank, he strolled and talked, with the same enjoyment. He had a perfect balance of physical health. His dreams never left him cold; his exaltations never plunged him into depression. He felt the mysteries of the world with a solemn awe, but he had no uneasy questionings, no remorse, no bewilderment, no fruitless melancholy.

He bore himself with the same homely dignity in all companies alike; he was never particularly interested in any one; he never had any fear of being thought ridiculous or pompous. His favourite reading was his own poetry; he wished every one to be interested in his work, because he was conscious of its supreme importance. He probably made the mistake of thinking that it was his sense of poetry and beauty that made him simple and tranquil. As a matter of fact, it was the simplicity and tranquillity of his temperament that gave him the power of enjoyment in so large a measure. There is no growth or expansion about his life; he did not learn his serene and impa.s.sioned att.i.tude through failures and mistakes: it was his all along.

And yet what a fine, pure, n.o.ble, gentle life it was! The very thought of him, faring quietly about among his hills and lakes, murmuring his calm verse, in a sober and temperate joy, looking everywhere for the same grave qualities among quiet homekeeping folk, brings with it a high inspiration. But we tend to think of Wordsworth as a father and a priest, rather than as a brother and a friend. He is a leader and a guide, not a comrade. We must learn that, though he can perhaps turn our heart the right way, towards the right things, we cannot necessarily acquire that pure peace, that solemn serenity, by obeying his precepts, unless we too have something of the same strong calmness of soul. In some moods, far from sustaining and encouraging us, the thought of his equable, impa.s.sioned life may only fill us with unutterable envy. But still to have sat in his homely rooms, to have paced his little terraces, does bring a certain imagined peace into the mind, a n.o.ble shame for all that is sordid or mean, a hatred for the conventional aims, the pitiful ambitions of the world.