Chapter VIII: Part 8

I feared at first that I might have to sacrifice the rest of my money as well--money slowly accumulated out of my own labours. And the relief of finding that this will not be necessary is immense. We must sell our house at once, and find a smaller one. At present I am not afraid of the changed circumstances; indeed, if I could only recover my power of writing, we need not leave our home. The temptation is to get a book written somehow, because I could make money by any stuff just now. On the other hand, it will almost be to me a relief to part from the home so haunted with the memory of Alec--though that will be a dreadful pain to Maud and Maggie. As far as living more simply goes, that does not trouble me in the least. I have always been slightly uncomfortable about the ease and luxury in which we lived. I only wish we had lived more simply all along, so that I could have put by a little more. I have told Maud exactly how matters stand, and she acquiesces, though I can see that, just at this time, the thought of handing over to strangers the house where we have lived all our married life, the rooms where Alec and the baby died, is a deep grief to her. To me that is almost a relief. I have dreaded going back there. To-night I told Maggie, and she broke out into long weeping. But even so there is something about the idea of being poor, strange to say, which touches a sense of romance in the child. She does not realise the poky restrictions of the new life.

And still stranger to me is the way in which this solid, tangible trouble seems to have restored my energy and calm. I found myself clear-headed, able to grasp the business questions which arose, gifted with a hard lucidity of mind that I did not know I possessed. It is a relief to get one's teeth into something, to have hard, definite occupation to distract one; indeed, it hardly seems to me in the light of a misfortune at present, so much as a blessed tangible problem to be grappled with and solved. What I should have felt if all had been lost, and if I had had to resign my liberty, and take up some practical occupation, I hardly know. I do not think I should even have dreaded that in my present frame of mind.

September 15, 1889.

I have been thinking all day long of my last walk with Alec, the day before he was taken ill. Maud had gone out with Maggie; and the little sturdy figure came to my room to ask if I was going out. I was finishing a book that I was reading for the evening's work; I had been out in the morning, and I had not intended to go out again, as it was cold and drizzling. I very nearly said that I could not go, and I had a shadow of vexation at being interrupted. But I looked up at him, as he stood by the door, and there was a tiny shadow of loneliness upon his face; and I thank God now that I put my book down at once, and consented cheerfully. He brightened up at this; he fetched my cap and stick, and we went off together. I am glad to think that I had him to myself that day. He was in a more confidential mood than usual. Perhaps--who knows?--there was some shadow of death upon him, some instinct to clasp hands closer before the end. He asked me to tell him some stories of my schooldays, and what I used to do as a boy--but he was full of alertness and life, breaking into my narratives to point out a nest that we had seen in the spring, and that now hung, wind-dried and ruinous, among the boughs. Coming back, he flagged a little, and did what he seldom did, put his arm in my own; how tenderly the touch of the little hand, the restless fingers on my arm thrilled me--the hand that lies cold and folded and shrivelled in the dark ground! He was proud that evening of having had me all to himself, and said to Maggie that we had talked secrets, "such as MEN talk when there are no women to ask questions." But thinking that this had wounded Maggie a little, he went and put his arm round her, and I heard him say something about its being all nonsense, and that we had wished for her all the time. . . .

Ah, how can I endure it, the silence, the absence, the lost smile, the child of my own whom I loved from head to foot, body soul and spirit all alike! I keep coming across signs of his presence everywhere, his books, his garden tools in the summerhouse, the little presents he gave me, on my study chimney-piece, his cap and coat hanging in the cupboard--it is these little trifling things, signs of life and joyful days, that sting the heart and pierce the brain with sorrow. If I could but have one sight of him, one word with him, one smile, to show that he is, that he remembers, that he waits for us, I could endure it; but I look into the dark and no answer comes; I send my wild entreaties pulsating through the worlds of space, crying, "Are you there, my child?" That his life is there, hidden with God, I do not doubt; but is it he himself, or has he fallen back, like the drop of water in the fountain, into the great tide of life? That is no comfort to me; it is he that I want, that union of body and mind, of life and love, that was called my child and is mine no more.

September 20, 1889.

Such a loss as mine passes over the soul like a plough cleaving a pasture line by line. The true stuff of the spirit is revealed and laid out in all its bareness. That customary outline, that surface growth of herb and blade, is all pared away. I have been accustomed to think myself a religious man--I have never been without the sense of God over and about me. But when an experience like this comes, it shows me what my religion is worth. I do not turn to God in love and hope; I do not know Him, I do not understand Him. I feel that He must have forgotten me, or that He is indifferent to me, or that He is incapable of love, and works blindly and sternly. My reason in vain says that the great and beautiful gift itself of the child's life and the child's love came from Him. I do not question His power or His right to take my child from me. But I endure only because I must, not willingly or loyally or lovingly. It is not that I feel the injustice of His taking the boy away; it is a far deeper sense of injustice than that. The injustice lies in the fact that He made the child so utterly dear and desired; that He set him so firmly in my heart; this on the one hand; and on the other, that He does not, if He must rend the little life away and leave the bleeding gap, send at the same time some love, some strength, some patience to make the pain bearable. I cannot believe that the love I bore my boy was anything but a sweet and holy influence. It gave me the one thing of which I am in hourly need--something outside of myself and my own interests, to love better than I loved even myself. It seems indeed a pure and simple loss, unless the lesson God would have us learn is the stoical lesson of detachment, indifference, cold self-sufficiency. It is like taking the crutches away from a lame man, knocking the props away from a tottering building. An optimistic moralist would say that I loved Alec too selfishly, and even that the love of the child turned away my heart from the jealous Heart of God, who demands a perfect surrender, a perfect love. But how can one love that which one does not know or understand, a Power that walks in darkness and that gives us on the one hand sweet, beautiful, and desirable things, and on the other strikes them from us when we need them most? It is not as if I did not desire to trust and love God utterly. I should think even this sorrow a light price to pay, if it gave me a pure and deep trust in the mercy and goodness of God. But instead of that it fills me with dismay, blank suspicion, fretful resistance. I do not feel that there is anything which God could send me or reveal to me, which would enable me to acquit Him of hardness or injustice. I will not, though He slay me, say that I trust Him and love Him when I do not. He may crush me with repeated blows of His hand, but He has given me the divine power of judging, of testing, of balancing; and I must use it even in His despite. He does not require, I think, a dull and broken submissiveness, the submissiveness of the creature that is ready to admit anything, if only he can be spared another blow. What He requires, so my spirit tells me, is an eager co-operation, a brave approval, a generous belief in His goodness and His justice; and this I cannot give, and it is He that has made me unable to give it. The wound may heal, the dull pain may die away, I may forget, the child may become a golden memory--but I cannot again believe that this is the surrender God desires. What I think He must desire, is that I should love the child, miss him as bitterly as ever, feel my day darkened by his loss, and yet turn to Him gratefully and bravely in perfect love and trust. It may be that I may be drawn closer to those whom I love, but the loss must still remain irreparable, because I might have learned to love my dear ones better through Alec's presence, and not through his absence. It is His will, I do not doubt it; but I cannot see the goodness or the justice of the act, and I will not pretend to myself that I acquiesce.

September 25, 1889.

Yesterday was a warm, delicious, soft day, full of a gentle languor, the air balmy and sweet, the sunshine like the purest gold; we sate out all the morning under the cliff, in the warm dry sand. To the right and left of us lay the blue bay, the waves breaking with short, crisp sparkles on the shore. We saw headland after headland sinking into the haze; a few fishing-boats moved slowly about, and far down on the horizon we watched the smoke of a great ocean-steamer. We talked, Maud and I, for the first time, I think, without reserve, without bitterness, almost without grief, of Alec. What sustains her is the certainty that he is as he was, somewhere, far off, as brave and loving as ever, waiting for us, but waiting with a perfect understanding and knowledge of why we are separated. She dreams of him thus, looking down upon her, and seeming, in her dream, to wonder what there can be to grieve about. I suppose that a mother has a sense of oneness with a child that a father cannot have. It is a deep and marvellous faith, an intuition that transcends all reason, a radiant certainty. I cannot attain to it. But in the warmth and light of her belief, I grew to feel that at least there was some explanation of it all. Not by chance is the dear gift sent us, not by chance do we learn to love it, not by chance is it rent from us. Lying thus, talking softly, in so gracious a world, a world that satisfied every craving of the senses, I came to realise that the Father must wish us well, and that if the shadow fell upon our path, it was not to make us cold and bitter-hearted. Infinite Love! it came near to me in that hour, and clasped me to a sorrowful, tender, beating Heart. I read Maud, at her request, "Evelyn Hope," and the strong and patient love, that dwells so serenely and softly upon the incidents of death, yet without the least touch of morbidity and gloom, treating death itself as a quiet slumber of the soul, taught me for a moment how to be brave.

"You will wake and remember, and understand,"--my voice broke and tears came, unbidden tears which I did not even desire to conceal--and in that moment the spirit of my wife came near to me, and soul looked into the eyes of soul, with a perfect and bewildering joy, the very joy of God.

October 10, 1889.

We have had the kindest, dearest letters from our neighbours about our last misfortune. But no one seems to anticipate that we shall be obliged to leave the place. They naturally suppose that I shall be able to make as large an income as I want by writing. And so I suppose I could. I talked the whole matter over with Maud, and said I would abide by her decision. I confessed that I had an extreme repugnance to the thought of turning out books for money, books which I knew to be inferior; but I also said that if she could not bear to leave the place, I had little doubt that I could, for the present at all events, make enough money to render it possible for us to continue to live there. I said frankly that it would be a relief to me to leave a house so sadly haunted by memory, and that I should myself prefer to live elsewhere, framing our household on very simple lines--and to let the power of writing come back if it would, not to try and force it. It would be a dreadful prospect to me to live thus, overshadowed by recollection, working dismally for money; but I suppose it would be possible, even bracing. Maud did not hesitate: she spoke quite frankly; on the one hand the very associations, which I dread most, were evidently to her a source of sad delight; and the thought of strangers living in rooms so hallowed by grief was like a profanation. Then there was the fact of all her relations with our friends and neighbours; but she said quite simply that my feeling outweighed it all, and that she would far rather begin life afresh somewhere else, than put me in the position I described. We determined to try and find a small house in the neighbourhood of her own old home in Gloucestershire; and this thought, I am sure, gave her real happiness. We determined at once what we would do; we would let our house for a term of years, take what furniture we needed, and dispose of the rest; we arranged to go off to Gloucestershire, as soon as possible, to look for a house. We both realise that we must learn to retrench at once. We shall have less than half our former income, counting in what we hope to get from the old house. I am not at all afraid of that. I always vaguely disliked living as comfortably as we did--but it will not be agreeable to have to calculate all our expenses--that may perhaps mend itself, if I can but begin my writing again.

All this helps me--I am ashamed to say how much--though sometimes the thought of all the necessary arrangements weighs on me like a leaden weight, on days when I fall back into a sad, idle, hopeless repining. Sometimes it seems as if the old happy life was all broken up and gone for ever; and, so strange a thing is memory and imagination, that even the months overshadowed by the loss of my faculty of work seem to me now impossibly fragrant and beautiful, my sufferings unreal and unsubstantial. Real trouble, real grief, have at least the bracing force of actuality, and sweep aside with a strong hand all artificial self-made miseries and glooms.

December 15, 1889.

I have kept no record of these weeks. They have been full of business, sadness, and yet of hope. We went back home for a time; we made our farewells, and it moved me strangely to see that our departure was viewed almost with consternation. It is Maud's loss that will be felt. I have lived very selfishly and dully myself, but even so I was half-glad to find that even I should be missed. At such a time everything is forgotten and forgiven, and such grudging, peaceful neighbourliness as even I have shown seems appreciated and valued. It was a heartrending business reviving our sorrow, and it plunged me for a time into my old dry bitterness of spirit. But I hardened my heart as best I could, and felt more deeply than ever, how far beyond my powers of endurance it would have been to have taken up the old life, and Alec not there. Again and again it was like a knife plunged into my heart with an almost physical pain. Not so with Maud and Maggie--it was to them a treasure of precious memories, and they could dare to indulge their grief. I can't write of it, I can't think of it. Wherever I turned, I saw him in a hundred guises--as a tiny child, as a small, sturdy boy, as the son we lost.

We have let the house to some very kind and reasonable people, who have made things very easy to us; and to me at least it was a sort of heavy joy to take the last meal in the old home, to drive away, to see the landscape fade from sight. I shall never willingly return. It would seem to me like a wilful rolling among the thorns of life, a gathering-in of spears into one's breast. I seemed like a naked creature that had lost its skin, that shrank and bled at every touch.

February 10, 1890.

I have been house-hunting, and I do not pretend to dislike it. The sight of unknown houses, high garden walls, windows looking into blind courts, staircases leading to lofts, dark cupboards, old lumber, has a very stimulating effect on my imagination. Perhaps, too, I sometimes think, these old places are full of haunting spiritual presences, clinging, half tearfully, half joyfully to the familiar scenes, half sad, perhaps, that they did not make a finer thing of the little confined life; half glad to be free--as a man, strong and well, might look with a sense of security into a room where he had borne an operation. But I have never believed much in haunted rooms. The Father's many mansions can be hardly worth deserting for the little, dark houses of our tiny life.

I disliked some of the houses intensely--so ugly and pretentious, so inconvenient and dull; but even so it is pleasant in fancy to plan the life one would live there, the rooms one would use. One house touched me inexpressibly. It was a house I knew from the outside in a little town where I used to go and spend a few weeks every year with an old aunt of mine. The name of the little town--I saw it in an agent's list--had a sort of enchantment for me, a golden haze of memory. I was allowed a freedom there I was allowed nowhere else, I was petted and made much of, and I used to spend most of my time in sauntering about, just looking, watching, scrutinising things, with the hard and uncritical observation of childhood. When I got to the place, I was surprised to find that I knew well the look of the house I went to see, though I had not ever entered it. Two neat, contented, slightly absurd old maiden ladies had lived there, who used to walk out together, dressed exactly alike in some faded fashion. The laurels and yews still grew thickly in the shrubbery, and shaded the windows of the ugly little parlours. An old, quiet, respectable maid showed me round; she had been in service there for twenty years, and she was tearfully lamenting over the break-up of the home. The old ladies had lived there for sixty years. One of them had died ten years before, the other had lingered on to extreme old age. The house was like a museum, a specimen of a house of the thirties, in which nothing had ever been touched or changed. The strange wall-papers and chintzes, the crewel-work chairs, the mirrors, the light maple furniture, the case of moth-eaten humming-birds, the dull engravings of historical pictures, the old books--the drawing-room table was covered with annuals and keepsakes, Moore's poems, Mrs. Barbauld's works--all had a pathetic ugliness, redeemed by a certain consistency of quality. And then the poky, comfortable arrangements, the bath-chair in the coach-house, the four-post bedsteads, the hand-rail on the stairs, the sandbags for the doors, all spoke of a timid, invalid life, a dim backwater in the tide of things. There had been children there at some time, for there were broken toys, collections of dried plants, curious stones, in an attic. The little drama of the house shaped itself for me, as I walked through the frowsy, faded rooms, with a touching insistence. This bedroom had never been used since Miss Eleanor died--and I could fancy the poor, little, timid, precise life flitting away among the well-known surroundings. This had been Miss Jackson's favourite room--it was so quiet--she had died there, sitting in her chair, a few weeks before. The leisurely, harmless routine of the quiet household rose before me. I could imagine Miss Jackson writing her letters, reading her book, eating her small meals, making the same humble and grateful remarks, entertaining her old friends. Year after year it had gone on, just the same, the clock ticking loud in the hall, the sun creeping round the old rooms, the birds singing in the garden, the faint footsteps in the road. It had begun, that gentle routine, long before I had been born into the world; and it was strange to me to think that, as I passed through the most stirring experiences of my life, nothing ever stirred or moved or altered here. Miss Jackson had felt Miss Eleanor's death very much; she had hardly ever left the house since, and they had had no company. Yes, what a woefully bewildering thing death swooping down into that quiet household, with all its tranquil security, must have been! One wondered what Miss Eleanor had felt, when she knew she had to die, to pass out into the unknown dark out of a world so tender, so familiar, so peaceful; and what had poor Miss Jackson made of it, when she was left alone? She must have found it all very puzzling, very dreary. And yet, in the dim past, perhaps one or both of them, had had dreams of a fuller life, had fancied that something more than tenderness had looked out of the eyes of a man; well, it had come to nothing, whatever it might have been; and the two old ladies had settled down, perhaps with some natural repining, to their unexciting, contented life, the day filled with little duties and pleasures, the nights with innocent sleep. It had not been a selfish life--they had been good to the poor, the maid told me; and in old days they had often had their nephews and nieces to stay with them. But those children had grown up and gone out into the world, and no longer cared to return to the dull little house with its precise ways, and the fidgety love that had once embraced them.

The whole thing seemed a mysterious mixture of purposelessness and contentment. Rumours of wars, social convulsions, patriotic hopes, great ideas, had swept on their course outside, and had never stirred the drowsy current of life behind the garden walls. The sisters had lived, sweetly, perhaps, and softly, like trees in some sequestered woodland, hardly recognising their own gentle lapse of strength and activity.

And now the whole thing was over for good. Curious and indifferent people came, tramped about the house, pronounced it old-fashioned and inconvenient. I could not do that myself; the place was brimful of the pathetic evidences of what had been. Soon, no doubt, the old house would wear a different guise--it would be renovated and restored, the furniture would drift away to second-hand shops, the litter would be thrown out upon the rubbish-heap. New lives, new relationships would spring up; children would be born, boys would play, lovers would embrace, sufferers would lie musing, men and women would die in those refurbished rooms. Everything would drift onwards, and the lives to whom each corner, each stair, each piece of furniture had meant so much, would become a memory first, and then fade into nothingness. Where and what were the two old ladies now? Were they gone out utterly, like an extinguished flame? were they in some new home of tranquil peace? Were they adjusting themselves with a sense of timid impotence--those slender, tired spirits--to new and bewildering conditions?

The old, dull house called to me that day with a hundred faint voices and tremulous echoes. I could make nothing of it; for though it swept the strings of my heart with a ghostly music, it seemed to have no certain message for me, but the message of oblivion and silence.

I was sorry, as I went away, to leave the poor maidservant to her lonely and desolate memories. She had to leave her comfortable kitchen and her easy routine, for new duties and new faces, and I could see that she anticipated the change with sad dismay.

It seemed to me in that hour as though the cruelty and the tenderness of the world were very mysteriously blended--there was no lack of tenderness in the old house with its innumerable small associations, its sheltered calm. And then suddenly the stroke must fall, and fall upon lives whose very security and gentleness seemed to have been so ill a preparation for sterner and darker things. It would have been more loving, one thought, either to have made the whole fabric more austere, more precarious from the first; or else to have bestowed a deep courage and a fertile hope, a firmer endurance, rather than to have confronted lives so frail and delicate with the terrors of the vast unknown.

April 8, 1890.

Our new house is charming, beautiful, homelike. It is an old stone building, formerly a farm; it has a quaint garden and orchard, and the wooded hill runs up steeply behind, with a stream in front. It is on the outskirts of a village, and we are within three miles of Maud's old home, so that she knows all the country round. We have got two of our old servants, and a solid comfortable gardener, a native of the place. The house within is quaint and comfortable. We have a spare bedroom; I have no study, but shall use the little panelled dining-room. We have had much to do in settling in, and I have done a great deal of hard physical work myself, in the way of moving furniture and hanging pictures, inducing much wholesome fatigue. Maggie, who broke down dreadfully on leaving the old home, with the wonderful spring that children have, is full of excitement and even delight in the new house. I rather dread the time when all our occupations shall be over, and when we shall settle down to the routine of life. I begin to wonder how I shall occupy myself. I mean to do a good many odd jobs--we have no trap, and there will be a good deal of fetching and carrying to be done. We shall resume our lessons, Maggie and I; there will be reading, gardening, walking. One ought to be able to live philosophically enough. What would I not give to be able to write now! but the instinct seems wholly and utterly dead and gone. I cannot even conceive that I ever used, solemnly and gravely, to write about imaginary people, their jests and epigrams, their sorrows and cares. Life and Art! I used to suppose that it was all a softly moulded, rhythmic, sonorous affair, strophe and antistrophe; but the griefs and sorrows of art are so much nearer each other, like major and minor keys, than the griefs and sorrows of life. In art, the musician smiles and sighs alternately, but his sighing is a balanced, an ordered mood; the inner heart is content, as the pool is content, whether it mirrors the sunlight or the lonely star; but in life, joy is to grief what music is to aching silence, dumbness, inarticulate pain--though perhaps in that silence one hears a deeper, stranger sound, the buzz of the whirring atom, the soft thunder of worlds plunging through the void, joyless, gigantic, oblivious forces.

Is it good thus to have the veils of life rent asunder? If life, the world's life, activity, work, be the end of existence, then it is not good. It breaks the spring of energy, so that one goes heavily and sorely. But what if that be not the end? What then?

May 16, 1890.

At present the new countryside is a great resource. I walk far among the wolds; I find exquisite villages, where every stone-built house seems to have style and quality; I come down upon green water-meadows, with clear streams flowing by banks set with thorn-bushes and alders. The churches, the manor-houses, of grey rubble smeared with plaster, with stone roof-tiles, are a feast for eye and heart. Long days in the open air bring me a dull equable health of body, a pleasant weariness, a good-humoured indifference. My mind becomes grass-grown, full of weeds, ruinous; but I welcome it as at least a respite from suffering. It is strange to think of myself at what ought, I suppose, to be the busiest and fullest time of my life, living here like a tree in lonely fields. What would be the normal life? A little house in a London street, I suppose, with a lot of white paint and bookshelves. Luncheons, dinners, plays, music, clubs, week-end visits to lively houses, a rush abroad, a few country visits in the winter. Very harmless and pleasant if one enjoyed it, but to me inconceivable and insupportable. Perhaps I should be happier and brisker, perhaps the time would go quicker. Ought one to make up one's mind that this would be the normal life, and that therefore one had better learn to accommodate oneself to it? Does one pay penalties for not submitting oneself to the ordinary laws of human intercourse? Doubtless one does. But then, made as I am, I should have to pay penalties which would seem to be even heavier for the submission. It is there that the puzzle lies; that a man should be created with the strong instinct that I feel for liberty and independence and solitude and the quiet of the country, and then that he should discover that the life he so desires should be the one that develops all the worst side of him--morbidity, fastidiousness, gloom, discontent. This is the shadow of civilisation; that it makes people intellectual, alert, craving for stimulus, and yet sucks their nerves dry of the strength that makes such things enjoyable.

And still, as I go in and out, the death of Alec seems the one absolutely unintelligible and inexplicable thing, a gloom penetrated by no star. It was the one thing that might have made me unselfish, tender-hearted, the anxious care of some other than myself. "Perhaps," says an old friend writing to me with a clumsy attempt at comfort, "perhaps he was taken mercifully away from some evil to come." A good many people say that, and feel it quite honestly. But what an insupportable idea of the ways of Providence, that God had planned a prospect for the child so dreadful that even his swift removal should be tolerable by comparison! What a helpless, hopeless confession of failure! No; either the whole short life, closed by the premature death, must have been designed, planned, executed deliberately; or else God is at the mercy of blank cross-currents, opposing forces, tendencies even stronger than Himself; and then the very idea of God crumbles away, and God becomes the blank and inscrutable force working behind a gentle, good-humoured will, which would be kind and gracious if it could, but is trammelled and bound by something stronger; that was the Greek view, of course--God above man, and Fate above God. The worst of it is that it has a horrible vraisemblance, and seems to lie even nearer to the facts of life than our own tender-hearted and sentimental theories and schemes of religion.

But whether it be God or fate, the burden has to be borne. And my one endeavour must be to bear it myself, consciously and courageously, and to shift it so far as I can from the gentler and tenderer shoulders of those whose life is so strangely linked with mine.

May 25, 1890.

One sees a house, like the house we now live in, from a road as one passes, from the windows of a train. It seems to be set at the end of the world, with the earth's sunset distance behind it--it seems a fortress of quiet, a place of infinite peace; and then one lives in it, and behold, it is a centre of a little active life, with all sorts of cross-currents darting to and fro, over it, past it.

Or again one thinks, as one sees such a house in passing, that there at least one could live in meditation and cloistered calm; that there would be neither cares nor anxieties; that one would be content to sit, just looking out at the quiet fields, pacing to and fro, receiving impressions, musing, selecting, apprehending--and then one lives there, and the stream of life is as turbid, as fretful as ever. The strange thing is that such delusions survive any amount of experience; that one cannot read into other lives the things that trouble one's own.

A little definite scheme opens before us here; old friends of Maud's find us out, simple, kindly, tiresome people. There is an exchange of small civilities, there are duties, activities, relationships. To Maud these things come by the light of nature; to her the simplest interchange of definite thoughts is as natural as to breathe. I hear her calm, sweet, full voice answering, asking. To me these things are utterly wearisome and profitless. I want only to speak of the things for which I care, and to people attuned to the same key of thought; a basis of sympathy and temperamental differences--that is the perfect union of qualities for a friend. But these stolid, kindly parsons, with brisk, active wives, ingenuous daughters, heavy sons--I want either to know them better, or not to know them at all. I want to enter the house, the furnished chambers of people's minds; and I am willing enough to throw my own open to a cordial guest; but I do not want to stand and chatter in some debatable land of social conventionality. I have no store of simple geniality. The other night we went to dine quietly with a parson near here, a worthy fellow, happy and useful. Afterwards, in the drawing-room, I sate beside my host. I saw Maud listening, with rapt interest, to the chronicles of all the village families, robustly and unimaginatively told by the parson's wife; meanwhile I, tortured by intolerable ennui, pumped up questions, tried a hundred subjects with my worthy host. He told me long and prolix stories, he discoursed on rural needs. At last I said that we must be going; he replied with genuine disappointment that the night was still young, and that it was a pity to break up our pleasant confabulation. I saw with a shock of wonder that he had evidently been enjoying himself hugely; that it was a pleasure to him, for some unaccountable reason, not to hear a new person talk, but to say the same things that he had said for years, to a new person. It is not ideas that most people want; they are satisfied with mere gregariousness, the sight and sound of other figures. They like to produce the same stock of ideas, the same conclusions. "As I always say," was a phrase that was for ever on my entertainer's lips. I suppose that probably my own range is just as limited, but I have an Athenian hankering after novelty of thought, the new mintage of the mind. I loathe the old obliterated coinage, with the stamp all rounded and faint. Dulness, sameness, triteness, are they essential parts of life? I suppose it is really that my nervous energy is low, and requires stimulus: if it were strong and full, the current would flow into the trivial things. I derive a certain pleasure from the sight of other people's rooms, the familiar, uncomfortable, shabby furniture, the drift of pictures, the debris of ornament--all that stands for difference and individuality. But one can't get inside most people's minds; they only admit one to the public rooms. A crushing fatigue and depression settles down upon me in such hours, and then the old blank sense of grief and loss comes flowing back--it is old already, because it seems to have stained all the backward pages of life; then follows the weary, restless night; and the breaking of the grey, pitiless dawn.

June 3, 1890.

I do not want, even in my thoughts, to put the contemplative life above the practical life. Highest of all I would put a combination of the two--a man of high and clear ideals, in a position where he was able to give them shape--a great constructive statesman, a great educator, a great man of business, who was also keenly alive to social problems, a great philanthropist. Next to these I would put great thinkers, moralists, poets--all who inspire. Then I would put the absolutely effective instruments of great designs--legislators, lawyers, teachers, priests, doctors, writers--men without originality, but with a firm conception of civic and human duty. And then I would put all those who, in a small sphere, exercise a direct, quiet, simple influence--and then come the large mass of mankind; people who work faithfully, from instinct and necessity, but without any particular design or desire, except to live honestly, honourably, and respectably, with no urgent sense of the duty of serving others, taking life as it comes, practical individualists, in fact. No higher than these, but certainly no lower, I should put quiet, contemplative, reflective people, who are theoretical individualists. They are not very effective people generally, and they have a certain poetical quality; they cannot originate, but they can appreciate. I look upon all these individualists, whether practical or theoretical, as the average mass of humanity, the common soldiers, so to speak, as distinguished from the officers. Life is for them a discipline, and their raison d'etre is that of the learner, as opposed to that of the teacher. To all of them, experience is the main point; they are all in the school of God; they are being prepared for something. The object is that they should apprehend something, and the channel through which it comes matters little. They do the necessary work of the world; they support themselves, and they support those who from infirmity, weakness, age, or youth cannot support themselves. There is room, I think, in the world for both kinds of individualist, though the contemplative individualists are in the minority; and perhaps it must be so, because a certain lassitude is characteristic of them. If they were in the majority in any nation, one would have a simple, patient, unambitious race, who would tend to become the subjects of other more vigorous nations: our Indian empire is a case in point. Probably China is a similar nation, preserved from conquest by its inaccessibility and its numerical force. Japan is an instance of the strange process of a contemplative nation becoming a practical one. The curious thing is that Christianity, which is essentially a contemplative, unmilitant, unpatriotic, unambitious force, decidedly oriental in type, should have become, by a mysterious transmutation, the religion of active, inventive, conquering nations. I have no doubt that the essence of Christianity lies in a contemplative simplicity, and that it is in strong opposition to what is commonly called civilisation. It aims at improving society through the uplifting of the individual, not at uplifting the individual through social agencies. We have improved upon that in our latter-day wisdom, for the Christian ought to be inherently unpatriotic, or rather his patriotism ought to be of an all-embracing rather than of an antagonistic kind. I do not want to make lofty excuses for myself; my own unworldliness is not an abnegation at all, but a deliberate preference for obscurity. Still I should maintain that the vital and spiritual strength of a nation is measured, not by the activity of its organisations, but by the number of quiet, simple, virtuous, and high-minded persons that it contains. And thus, in my own case, though the choice is made for me by temperament and circumstances, I have no pricking of conscience on the subject of my scanty activities. It is not mere activity that makes the difference. The danger of mere activity is that it tends to make men complacent, to lead them to think that they are following the paths of virtue, when they are only enmeshed in conventionality. The dangers of the quiet life are indolence, morbidity, sloth, depression, unmanliness; but I think that it develops humility, and allows the daily and hourly message of God to sink into the soul. After all, the one supreme peril is that of self-satisfaction and finality. If a man is content with what he is, there is nothing to make him long for what is higher. Any one who looks around him with a candid gaze, becomes aware that our life is and must be a provisional one, that it has somehow fallen short of its possibilities. To better it is the best of all courses; but next to that it is more desirable that men should hope for and desire a greater harmony of things, than that they should acquiesce in what is so strangely and sadly amiss.

June 18, 1890.

I have made a new friend, whose contact and example help me so strangely and mysteriously, that it seems to me almost as though I had been led hither that I might know him. He is an old and lonely man, a great invalid, who lives at a little manor-house a mile or two away. Maud knew him by name, but had never seen him. He wrote me a courtly kind of note, apologising for being unable to call, and expressing a hope that we might be able to go and see him. The house stands on the edge of the village, looking out on the churchyard, a many-gabled building of grey stone, a long flagged terrace in front of it, terminated by posts with big stone balls; a garden behind, and a wood behind that--the whole scene unutterably peaceful and beautiful. We entered by a little hall, and a kindly, plain, middle-aged woman, with a Quaker-like precision of mien and dress, came out to greet us, with a fresh kindliness that had nothing conventional about it. She said that her uncle was not very well, but she thought he would be able to see us. She left us for a moment. There was a cleanness and a fragrance about the old house that was very characteristic. It was most simply, even barely furnished, but with a settled, ancient look about it, that gave one a sense of long association. She presently returned, and said, smiling, that her uncle would like to see us, but separately, as he was very far from strong. She took Maud away, and returning, walked with me round the garden, which had the same dainty and simple perfection about it. I could see that my hostess had the poetical passion for flowers; she knew the names of all, and spoke of them almost as one might of children. This was very wilful and impatient, and had to be kept in good order; that one required coaxing and tender usage. We went on to the wood, in all its summer foliage, and she showed us a little arbour where her uncle loved to sit, and where the birds would come at his whistle. "They are looking at us out of the trees everywhere," she said, "but they are shy of strangers"--and indeed we heard soft chirping and rustling everywhere. An old dog and a cat accompanied us. She drew my attention to the latter. "Look at Pippa," she said, "she is determined to walk with us, and equally determined not to seem to need our company, as if she had come out of her own accord, and was surprised to find us in her garden." Pippa, hearing her name mentioned, stalked off with an air of mystery and dignity into the bushes, and we could see her looking out at us; but when we continued our stroll, she flew out past us, and walked on stiffly ahead. "She gets a great deal of fun out of her little dramas," said Miss ----. "Now poor old Rufus has no sense of drama or mystery--he is frankly glad of our company in a very low and common way--there is nothing aristocratic about him." Old Rufus looked up and wagged his tail humbly. Presently she went on to talk about her uncle, and contrived to tell me a great deal in a very few words. I learnt that he was the last male representative of an old family, who had long held the small estate here; that after a distinguished Oxford career, he had met with a serious accident that had made him a permanent invalid. That he had settled down here, not expecting to live more than a few years, and that he was now over seventy; it had been the quietest of lives, she said, and a very happy one, too, in spite of his disabilities. He read a great deal, and interested himself in local affairs, but sometimes for weeks together could do nothing. I gathered that she was his only surviving relation, and had lived with him from her childhood. "You will think," she added, laughing, "that he is the kind of person who is shown by his friends as a wonderful old man, and who turns out to be a person like the patriarch Casby, in Little Dorrit, whose sanctity, like Samson's, depended entirely upon the length of his hair. But he is not in the least like that, and I will leave you to find out for yourself whether he is wonderful or not."

There was a touch of masculine irony and humour about this that took my fancy; and we went to the house, Miss ---- saying that two new persons in one afternoon would be rather a strain for her uncle, much as he would enjoy it, and that his enjoyment must be severely limited. "His illness," she said, "is an obscure one; it is a want of adequate nervous force: the doctors give it names, but don't seem to be able to cure or relieve it; he is strong, physically and mentally, but the least over-exertion or over-strain knocks him up; it is as if virtue went out of him; though a partial niece may say that he has a plentiful stock of the material."

We went in, and proceeded to a small library, full of books, with a big writing-table in the window. The room was somewhat dark, and the feet fell softly on a thick carpet. There was no sort of luxury about the room; a single portrait hung over the mantelpiece, and there was no trace of ornament anywhere, except a big bowl of roses on a table.

Here, with a low table beside him covered with books, and a little reading-desk pushed aside, I found Mr. ---- sitting. He was leaning forwards in his chair, and Maud was sitting opposite him. They appeared to be silent, but with the natural silence that comes of reflection, not the silence of embarrassment. Maud, I could see, was strangely moved. He rose up to greet me, a tall, thin figure, dressed in a rough grey suit. There was little sign of physical ill-health about him. He had a shock of thick, strong hair, perfectly white. His face was that of a man who lived much in the open air, clear and ascetic of complexion. He was not at all what would be called handsome; he had rather heavy features, big, white eyebrows, and a white moustache. His manner was sedate and extremely unaffected, not hearty, but kindly, and he gave me a quick glance, out of his blue eyes, which seemed to take swift stock of me. "It is very kind of you to come and see me," he said in a measured tone. "Of course I ought to have paid my respects first, but I ventured to take the privilege of age; and moreover I am the obedient property of a very vigilant guardian, whose orders I implicitly obey--'Do this, and he doeth it.'" He smiled at his niece as he said it, and she said, "Yes, you would hardly believe how peremptory I can be; and I am going to show it by taking Mrs. ---- away, to show her the garden; and in twenty minutes I must take Mr. ---- away too, if he will be so kind as help me to sustain my authority."