Chapter V: Part 5

The only thing to fear in such rides as these, is if some ugly or sordid thought, some muddy difficulty, some tangled dilemma is stuck like a burr on the mind; then indeed such hours are of little use, if they be not positively harmful. The mind (at least my mind) has a way of arranging matters in solitude so as to be as little hopeful, as little kindly as possible; the fretted spirit brews its venom, practises for odious repartees, plans devilish questions, and rehearses the mean drama over and over. At such hours I feel indeed like Sinbad, with the lithe legs and skinny arms of the Old Man of the Sea twined round his neck. But the mood changes—an interesting letter, a sunshiny day, a pleasant visitor—any of these raises the spirit out of the mire, and restores me to myself; and I resume my accustomed tranquillity all the more sedulously for having had a dip in the tonic tide of depression.

25

_June 6, 1892._

I have often thought what a lightening of the load of life it would be if we could arrive at greater simplicity and directness in our social dealings with others. Of course the first difficulty to triumph over is the physical difficulty of simple shyness, which so often paralyses men and women in the presence of a stranger. But how instantly and perfectly a natural person evokes naturalness in others. This naturalness is hardly to be achieved without a certain healthy egotism. It by no means produces naturalness in others to begin operations by questioning people about themselves. But if one person begins to talk easily and frankly about his own interests, others insensibly follow suit by a kind of simple imitativeness. And if the inspirer of this naturalness is not a profound egotist, if he is really interested in other people, if he can waive his own claims to attention, the difficulty is overcome.

[Sidenote: THE CONVEYANCER]

The other day I was bicycling, and on turning out of Spyfield, where I had been doing some business, I observed another bicyclist a little ahead of me. He was a tall thin man, with a loose white hat, and he rode with a certain fantastic childish zest which attracted my attention. If there was a little upward slope in the road, he tacked extravagantly from side to side, and seemed to be encouraging himself by murmured exhortations. He had a word for every one he passed. I rode for about half a mile behind him, and he at last dismounted at the foot of a steep slope that leads up to a place called Gallows Hill. He stopped half-way up the hill to study a map, and as I passed him wheeling my bicycle, he called cheerily to me to ask how far it was to a neighbouring village. I told him to the best of my ability, whereupon he said, “Oh no, I am sure you are wrong; it must be twice that distance!” I was for an instant somewhat nettled, feeling that if he knew the distance, his question had a certain wantonness. So I said, “Well, I have lived here for twenty years and know all the roads very well.” The stranger touched his hat and said, “I am sure I apologise with all my heart; I ought not to have spoken as I did.”

Examining him at my leisure I saw him to be a tall, lean man, with rather exaggerated features. He had a big, thin head, a long, pointed nose, a mobile and smiling mouth, large dark eyes, and full side-whiskers. I took him at once for a professional man of some kind, solicitor, schoolmaster, or even a clergyman, though his attire was not clerical. “Here,” he said, “just take the end of this map and let us consult together.” I did as I was desired, and he pointed out the way he meant to take. “Now,” he said, “there is a train there in an hour, and I want to arrive there _easily_—mind you, not _hot_; that is so uncomfortable.” I told him that if he knew the road, which was a complicated one, he could probably just do it in the time; but I added that I was myself going to pass a station on the line, where he might catch the same train nearer town. He looked at me with a certain slyness. “Are you certain of that?” he cried; “I have all the trains at my fingers’ ends.” I assured him it was so, while he consulted a time-table. “Right!” he said, “you are right, but _all_ the trains do not stop there; it is not a deduction that you can draw from the fact of _one_ stopping at the _other_ station.” We walked up to the top of the hill together, and I proposed that we should ride in company. He accepted with alacrity. “Nothing I should like better!” As we got on to our bicycles his foot slipped. “You will notice,” he said, “that these are new boots—of a good pattern—but somewhat smooth on the sole; in fact they slip.” I replied that it was a good thing to scratch new boots on the sole, so as to roughen them before riding. “A capital idea!” he said delightedly; “I shall do it the moment I return, with a pair of nail-scissors, _closed_, mind you, to prevent my straining either blade.” We then rode off, and after a few yards he said, “Now, this is not my usual pace—rather faster than I can go with comfort.” I begged him to take his own pace, and he then began to talk of the country. “Pent up in my chambers,” he said—“I am a conveyancer, you must know—I long for a green lane and a row of elms. I have lived for years in town, in a most convenient street, I must tell you, but I sicken for the country; and now that I am in easier circumstances—I have lived a _hard_ life, mind you—I am going to make the great change, and live in the country. Now, what is your opinion of the relative merits of town and country as a place of residence?” I told him that the only disadvantage of the country to my mind was the difficulty of servants. “Right again!” he said, as if I had answered a riddle. “But I have overcome that; I have been educating a pair of good maids for years—they are paragons, and they will go anywhere with me; indeed, they prefer the country themselves.”

In such light talk we beguiled the way; too soon we came to where our roads divided; I pointed out to him the turn he was to take. “Well,” he said cheerily, “all pleasant things come to an end. I confess that I have enjoyed your company, and am grateful for your kind communications; perhaps we may have another encounter, and if not, we will be glad to have met, and think sometimes of this pleasant hour!” He put his foot upon the step of his bicycle cautiously, then mounted gleefully, and saying “Good-bye, good-bye!” he waved his hand, and in a moment was out of sight.

The thought of this brave and merry spirit planning schemes of life, making the most of simple pleasures, has always dwelt with me. The gods, as we know from Homer, assumed the forms of men, and were at the pains to relate long and wholly unreliable stories to account for their presence at particular times and places; and I have sometimes wondered whether in the lean conveyancer, with his childlike zest for experience, his brisk enjoyment of the smallest details of daily life, I did not entertain some genial, masquerading angel unawares.

26

_June 8, 1893._

Is it not the experience of every one that at rare intervals, by some happy accident, life presents one with a sudden and delicious thrill of beauty? I have often tried to analyse the constituent elements of these moments, but the essence is subtle and defies detection. They cannot be calculated upon, or produced by any amount of volition or previous preparation. One thing about these tiny ecstasies I have noticed—they do not come as a rule when one is tranquil, healthy, serene—they rather come as a compensation for weariness and discontent; and yet they are the purest gold of life, and a good deal of sand is well worth washing for a pellet or two of the real metal.

To-day I was more than usually impatient; over me all the week had hung the shadow of some trying, difficult business—the sort of business which, whatever you do, will be done to nobody’s satisfaction. After a vain attempt to wrestle with it, I gave it up, and went out on a bicycle; the wind blew gently and steadily this soft June day; all the blue sky was filled with large white clouds, blackening to rain. I made for the one piece of flat ground in our neighbourhood. It is tranquillising, I have often found, to the dweller in a hilly land, to cool and sober the eye occasionally with the pure breadths of a level plain. The grass was thick and heavy-headed in the fields, but of mere wantonness I turned down a lane which I know has no ending,—a mere relief-road for carts to have access to a farm,—and soon came to the end of it in a small grassy circle, with a cottage or two, where a footpath strikes off across the fields.

[Sidenote: HERETOFORE UNVISITED]

Why did I never come here before, I thought. Through a gap in the hedge I saw a large broad pasture, fringed in the far distance with full-foliaged, rotund elms in thick leaf; a row of willows on the horizon marked the track of a stream. In the pasture in front of me was a broad oblong pool of water with water-lilies; down one side ran a row of huge horse-chestnuts, and the end was rich in elders full of flat white cakes of blossom. In the field grazed an old horse; while a pigeon sailed lazily down from the trees and ran to the pool to drink. That was all there was to see. But it brought me with a deep and inexplicable thrill close to the heart of the old, kindly, patient Earth, the mother and the mistress and the servant of all—she who allows us to tear and rend her for our own paltry ends, and then sets, how sweetly and tranquilly, to work, with what a sense of inexhaustible leisure, to paint and mellow and adorn the rude and bleeding gaps. We tear up a copse, and she fills the ugly scars in the spring with a crop of fresh flowers—of flowers, perhaps, which are not seen in the neighbourhood, but whose seeds have lain vital and moist in the ground, but too deep to know the impulse born of the spring sun. Yet now they burst their armoured mail, and send a thin, white, worm-like arm to the top, which, as soon as it passes into the light, drinks from the rays the green flush that it chooses to hide its nakedness. We dig a pool in the crumbling marl. At the time the wound seems irreparable; the ugly, slobbered banks grin at us like death; the ground is full of footprints and slime, broken roots and bedabbled leaves,—and next year it is all a paradise of green and luscious water-plants, with a hundred quiet lives being lived there, of snail and worm and beetle, as though the place had never been disturbed. We build a raw red house with an insupportably geometrical outline, the hue of the vicious fire still in the bricks; pass fifty years, and the bricks are mellow and soft, plastered with orange rosettes or grey filaments of lichen; the ugly window frames are blistered and warped; the roof has taken a soft and yielding outline—all is in peace and harmony with the green world in which it sits.

[Sidenote: THE REPAIRER OF THE BREACH]

I never saw this more beautifully illustrated than once, when a great house in Whitehall was destroyed, and heaped up in a hideous rockery of bricks. All through the winter these raw ruins, partly concealed by a rough hoarding, tainted the view; but as soon as spring returned, from every inch of grit rose a forest of green stalks of willow-herb, each in summer to be crowned with a spire of fantastic crimson flowers, and to pass a little later into those graceful, ghostly husks that shiver in the wind. Centuries must have passed since willow-herb had grown on that spot. Had they laid dormant, these hopeful seeds, or had they been wafted along dusty streets and high in air over sun-scorched spaces? Nature at all events had seen her chance, and done her work patiently and wisely as ever.

But to return to my lane-end. How strange and deep are the impressions of a deep and inviolate peace that some quiet corner like this gives to the restless spirit! It can never be so with the scenes that have grown familiar, where we have carried about with us the burden of private cares—the symptoms of the disease of life. In any house where we have lived, every corner, however peaceful and beautiful in itself, is bound to be gradually soaked, as it were, in the miseries of life, to conceal its beauties under the accretion of sordid associations.

This room we connect with some sad misunderstanding. There we gave way to some petty passion of resentment, of jealousy, of irritation, or vainly tried to pacify some similar outbreak from one we loved. This is the torture of imagination; to feel the beauty of sight and sound, we must be sensitive; and if we are sensitive, we carry about the shadow with us—the capacity for self-torment, the struggle of the ideal with the passing mood.

[Sidenote: SAD ASSOCIATIONS]

I have sometimes climbed to the top of a hill and looked into some unknown and placid valley, with field and wood and rivulet and the homes of men. I have seen the figures of men and oxen move sedately about those quiet fields. Often, too, gliding at evening in a train through a pastoral country when the setting sun bathes all things in genial light and contented shade, I have felt the same thought. “How peaceful, how simple life would be, nay, must be, here.” Only very gradually, as life goes on, does it dawn upon the soul that the trouble lies deeper, and that though surrounded by the most unimagined peace, the same fret, the same beating of restless wings, the same delays attend. That dreamt-of peace can hardly be attained. The most we can do is to enjoy it to the utmost when it is with us; and when it takes its flight, and leaves us dumb, discontented, peevish, to quench the sordid thought in resolute _silence_, to curb the grating mood, to battle mutely with the cowering fear; and so to escape investing the house and the garden that we love with the poisonous and bitter associations that strike the beauty out of the fairest scene.

27

_September 20, 1894._

I had to-day a strange little instance of the patient, immutable habit of nature. Some years ago there was a particular walk of which I was fond; it led through pastures, by shady wood-ends, and came out eventually on a bridge that spanned the line. Here I often went to see a certain express pass; there was something thrilling in the silent cutting, the beckoning, ghostly arm of the high signal, the faint far-off murmur, and then the roar of the great train forging past. It was a breath from the world.

[Sidenote: THE RED SPIDER]

On the parapet of the bridge, grey with close-grained lichen, there lived a numerous colony of little crimson spiders. What they did I never could discern; they wandered aimlessly about hither and thither, in a sort of feeble, blind haste; if they ever encountered each other on their rambles, they stopped, twiddled horns, and fled in a sudden horror; they never seemed to eat or sleep, and even continued their endless peregrinations in the middle of heavy showers, which flicked them quivering to death.

I used to amuse myself with thinking how one had but to alter the scale, so to speak, and what appalling, intolerable monsters these would become. Think of it! huge crimson shapeless masses, with strong wiry legs, and waving mandibles, tramping silently over the grey veldt, and perhaps preying on minute luckless insects, which would flee before them in vain.

One day I walked on ahead, leaving a companion to follow. He did follow, and joined me on the bridge—bringing heavy tidings which had just arrived after I left home.

The place grew to me so inseparably connected with the horror of the news that I instinctively abandoned it; but to-day, finding myself close to the place—nearly ten years had passed without my visiting it—I turned aside, musing on the old sadness, with something in my heart of the soft regret that a sorrow wears when seen through the haze of years.

There was the place, just the same; I bent to see a passing train and (I had forgotten all about them) there were my red spiders still pursuing their aimless perambulations. But who can tell the dynasties, the genealogies that had bridged the interval?

The red spider has no great use in the world, as far as I know. But he has every right to be there, and to enjoy the sun falling so warm on the stone. I wonder what he thinks about it all? For me, he has become the type of the patient, pretty fancies of nature, so persistently pursued, so void of moral, so deliciously fantastic and useless—but after all, what am I to talk of usefulness?

Spider and man, man and spider—and to the pitying, tender mind of God, the brisk spider on his ledge, and the dull, wistful, middle-aged man who loiters looking about him, wondering and waiting, are much the same. He has a careful thought of each, I know:—

To both alike the darkness and the day,
The sunshine and the flowers,
We draw sad comfort, thinking we obey
A deeper will than ours.

28

_August 4, 1895._

[Sidenote: THE DAWN]

Just another picture lingers with me, for no very defined reason. It was an August night; I had gone to rest with the wind sighing and buffeting against my windows, but when I awoke with a start, deep in the night, roused, it seemed, as by footsteps in the air and a sudden hollow calling of airy voices, it was utterly still outside. I drew aside my heavy tapestry curtain, and lo! it was the dawn. A faint upward gush of lemon-coloured light edged the eastern hills. The air as I threw the casement wide was unutterably sweet and cool. In the faint light, over the roof of the great barn, I saw what I had seen a hundred times before, a quiet wood-end, upon which the climbing hedges converge. But now it seemed to lie there in a pure and silent dream, sleeping a light sleep, waiting contentedly for the dawn and smiling softly to itself. Over the fields lay little wreaths of mist, and beyond the wood, hills of faintest blue, the hills of dreamland, where it seems as if no harsh wind could blow or cold rain fall. I felt as though I stood to watch the stainless slumber of one I loved, and was permitted by some happy and holy chance to see for once the unuttered peace that earth enjoys in her lonely and unwatched hours. Too often, alas! one carries into the fairest scenes a turmoil of spirit, a clouded mind that breaks and mars the spell. But here it was not so; I gazed upon the hushed eyes of the earth, and heard her sleeping breath; and, as the height of blessing, I seemed myself to have left for a moment the past behind, to have no overshadowing from the future, but to live only in the inviolate moment, clear-eyed and clean-hearted, to see the earth in her holiest and most secluded sanctuary, unsuspicious and untroubled, bathed in the light and careless slumber of eternal youth, in that delicious oblivion that fences day from weary day.

In the jaded morning light the glory was faded, and the little wood wore its usual workaday look, the face it bears before the world; but I, I had seen it in its golden dreams; I knew its secret, and it could not deceive me; it had yielded to me unawares its sublimest confidence, and however it might masquerade as a commonplace wood, a covert for game, a commercial item in an estate-book, known by some homely name, I had seen it once undisguised, and knew it as one of the porches of heaven.

29

_April 4, 1896._

It seems a futile task to say anything about the spring; yet poets and romancers make no apologies for treating of love, which is an old and familiar phenomenon enough. And I declare that the wonder of spring, so far from growing familiar, strikes upon the mind with a bewildering strangeness, a rapturous surprise, which is greater every year. Every spring I say to myself that I never realised before what a miraculous, what an astounding thing is the sudden conspiracy of trees and flowers, hatched so insensibly, and carried out so punctually, to leap into life and loveliness together. The velvety softness of the grass, the mist of green that hangs about the copse, the swift weaving of the climbing tapestry that screens the hedgerow-banks, the jewellery of flowers that sparkle out of all sequestered places; they are adorable. But this early day of spring is close and heavy, with a slow rain dropping reluctantly out of the sky, a day when an insidious melancholy lies in wait for human beings, a sense of inadequacy, a meek rebellion against all activity, bodily or mental. I walk slowly and sedately along the sandy roads fast oozing into mire. There is a sense of expectancy in the air; tree and flower are dispirited too, oppressed with heaviness, and yet gratefully conscious, as I am not, of the divine storage of that pure and subtle element that is taking place for their benefit. “Praise God,” said Saint Francis, “for our sister the water, for she is very serviceable to us and humble and clean.” Yes, we give thanks! but, alas! to sit still and be pumped into, as Carlyle said of Coleridge’s conversation, can never be an enlivening process.

Yet would that the soul could gratefully recognise her own rainy days; could droop, like Nature, with patient acquiescence, with wise passivity, till the wells of strength and freshness are stored!

[Sidenote: SUBTLE SUPERIORITIES]

The particular form of melancholy which I find besets me on these sad reflective mornings, is to compare my vague ambitions with my concrete performances. I will not say that in my dreamful youth I cherished the idea of swaying the world. I never expected to play a brave part on the public stage. Political and military life—the two careers which ripple communities to the verge, never came within the range of my possibilities. But I think that I was conscious—as most intelligent young creatures undoubtedly are—of a subtle superiority to other people. An ingenious preacher once said that we cannot easily delude ourselves into the belief that we are richer, taller, more handsome, or even wiser, better, abler, and more capable than other people, but we can and do very easily nourish a secret belief that we are more _interesting_ than others. Such an illusion has a marvellous vitality; it has a delicate power of resisting the rude lessons to the contrary which contact with the world would teach us; and I should hardly like to confess how ill I have learned my lesson. I realise, of course, that I have done little to establish this superiority in the eyes of others; but I find it hard to disabuse myself of the vague belief that if only I had the art of more popular and definite expression, if only the world had a little more leisure to look in sequestered nooks for delicate flowers of thought and temperament, then it might be realized how exquisite a nature is here neglected.

[Sidenote: THE HARD TRUTH]

In saying this I am admitting the reader to the inmost _penetralia_ of thought. I frankly confess that in my robust and equable moments I do recognise the broken edge of my life, and what a very poor thing I have made of it—but, for all that, it is my honest belief that we most of us have in our hearts that inmost shrine of egotism, where the fire burns clear and fragrant before an idealised image of self; and I go further, and say that I believe this to be a wholesome and valuable thing, because it is of the essence of self-respect, and gives us a feeble impulse in the direction of virtue and faith. If a man ever came to realise exactly his place in the world, as others realise it, how feeble, how uninteresting, how ludicrously unnecessary he is, and with what a speedy unconcern others would accommodate themselves to his immediate disappearance, he would sink into an abyss of gloom out of which nothing would lift him. It is one of the divine uses of love, that it glorifies life by restoring and raising one’s self-esteem.

In the dejected reveries of such languorous spring days as these, no such robust egotism as I have above represented comes to my aid. I see myself stealing along, a shy, tarnished thing, a blot among the fresh hopes and tender dreams that smile on every bank. The pitiful fabric of my life is mercilessly unveiled; here I loiter, a lonely, shabby man, bruised by contact with the word, dilatory, dumb, timid, registering tea-table triumphs, local complacencies, provincial superiorities—spending sheltered days in such comfortable dreams as are born of warm fires, ample meals, soft easy-chairs, and congratulating myself on poetical potentialities, without any awkward necessities of translating my dreams into corrective action—or else discharging homely duties with an almost sacerdotal solemnity, and dignifying with the title of religious quietism what is done by hundreds of people instinctively and simply and without pretentiousness. If I raved against my limitations, deemed my cage a prison, beat myself sick against the bars, I might then claim to be a fiery and ardent soul; but I cannot honestly do this; and I must comfort myself with the thought that possibly the ill-health, which necessitates my retirement, compensates for the disabilities it inflicts on me, by removing the stimulus which would make my prison insupportable.

In this agreeable frame of mind I drew near home and stood awhile on the deserted bowling-green with its elder-thickets, its little grassy terraces, its air of regretful wildness, so often worn by a place that has been tamed by civilisation and has not quite reverted to its native savagery. A thrush sang with incredible clearness, repeating a luscious phrase often enough to establish its precision of form, and yet not often enough to satiate—a triumph of instinctive art.

These thrushes are great favourites of mine; I often sit, on a dewy morning, to watch them hunting. They hop lightly along, till they espy a worm lying in blissful luxury out of his hole; two long hops, and they are upon him; he, using all his retractile might, clings to his home, but the thrush sets his feet firm in the broad stride of the Greek warrior, gives a mighty tug—you can see the viscous elastic thread strain—and the worm is stretched writhing on the grass. What are the dim dreams of the poor reptile, I wonder; does he regret his cool burrow, “and youth and strength and this delightful world?”—no, I think it is a stoical resignation. For a moment the thrush takes no notice of him, but surveys the horizon with a caution which the excitement of the chase has for an instant imprudently diverted. Then the meal begins, with horrid leisureliness.

But it is strange to note the perpetual instinctive consciousness of danger which besets birds thus in the open; they must live in a tension of nervous watchfulness which would depress a human being into melancholia. There is no absorbed gobbling; between every mouthful the little head with its beady eyes swings right and left to see that all is clear; and he is for ever changing his position and seldom fronts the same way for two seconds together.

Do we realise what it must be to live, as even these sheltered birds do in a quiet garden, with the fear of attack and death hanging over them from morning to night?

[Sidenote: THE BONDAGE OF A BIRD]

Another fact that these thrushes have taught me is the extreme narrowness of their self-chosen world. They are born and live within the compass of a few yards. We are apt to envy a bird the power of changing his horizon, of soaring above the world, and choosing for his home the one spot he desires. Think what our life would be if, without luggage, without encumbrances, we could rise in the air and, winging our way out to the horizon, choose some sequestered valley, and there, without house, without rates and taxes, abide, with water babbling in its channel and food abundant. Yet it is far otherwise. One of my thrushes has a white feather in his wing; he was hatched out in a big syringa which stands above the bowling-green; and though I have observed the birds all about my few acres carefully enough I have never seen this particular thrush anywhere but on the lawn. He never seems even to cross the wall into the garden; he has a favourite bush to roost in, and another where he sometimes sings: at times he beats along the privet hedge, or in the broad border, but he generally hops about the lawn, and I do not think he has ever ventured beyond it. He works hard for his living too; he is up at dawn, and till early afternoon he is generally engaged in foraging. He will die, I suppose, in the garden, though how his body is disposed of is a mystery to me.

[Sidenote: THE SOUL OF A THRUSH]

He takes the limitations of his life just as he finds them; he never seems to think he would like to be otherwise; but he works diligently for his living, he sings a grateful song, he sleeps well, he does not compare himself with other birds or wish his lot was different—he has no regrets, no hopes, and few cares. Still less has he any philanthropic designs of raising the tone of his brother thrushes, or directing a mission among the quarrelsome sparrows. Sometimes he fights a round or two, and when the spring comes, stirred by delicious longings, he will build a nest, devote the food he would like to devour to his beady-eyed, yellow-lipped young, and die as he has lived. There is a good deal to be said for this brave and honest life, and especially for the bright and wholesome music which he makes within the thickets. I do not know that it can be improved upon.

30

_Aug. 19, 1898._

[Sidenote: GOD’S ACRE]

There is a simple form of expedition of which I am very fond; that is the leisurely visiting of some rustic church in the neighbourhood. They are often very beautifully placed—sometimes they stand high on the ridges and bear a bold testimony to the faith; sometimes they lie nestled in trees, hidden in valleys, as if to show it is possible to be holy and beautiful, though unseen. Sometimes they are the central ornament of a village street; there generally seems some simple and tender reason for their position; but the more populous their neighbourhood, the more they have suffered from the zeal of the restorer. What I love best of all is a church that stands a little apart, sheltered in wood, dreaming by itself, and guarding its tranquil and grateful secret—“_secretum meum mihi_,” it seems to say.

I like to loiter in the churchyard ground to step over the hillocks, to read the artless epitaphs on slanting tombs; it is not a morbid taste, for if there is one feeling more than another that such a visit removes and tranquillises, it is the fear of death. Death here appears in its most peaceful light; it seems so necessary, so common, so quiet and inevitable an end, like a haven after a troubled sea. Here all the sad and unhappy incidents of mortality are forgotten, and death appears only in the light of a tender and dreamful sleep.

Better still is the grateful coolness of the church itself; here one can trace in the epitaphs the fortunes of a family—one can see the graves of old squires who have walked over their own fields, talked with their neighbours, shot, hunted, eaten, drunk, have loved and been loved, and have yielded their place in the fulness of days to those that have come after them. Very moving, too, are the evidences of the sincere grief, which underlies the pompous phraseology of the marble monument with its urns and cherubs. I love to read the long list of homely virtues attributed by the living to the dead in the depth of sorrow, and to believe them true. Then there are records of untimely deaths,—the young wife, the soldier in his prime, the boy or girl who have died unstained by life, and about whom clings the passionate remembrance of the happy days that are no more. Such records as those do not preach the lesson of vanity and decay, but the lesson of pure and grateful resignation, the faith that the God who made the world so beautiful, and filled it so full of happiness, has surprises in store for His children, in a world undreamed of.

[Sidenote: THE MONUMENT]

One monument in a church not far from Golden End always brings tears to my eyes; there is a chapel in the aisle, the mausoleum of an ancient family, where mouldering banners and pennons hang in the gloom; in the centre of the chapel is an altar-tomb, on which lies the figure of a young boy, thirteen years old, the inscription says. He reclines on one arm, he has a delicately carved linen shirt that leaves the slender neck free, and he is wrapped in a loose gown; he looks upward toward the east, his long hair falling over his shoulders, his thin and shapely hand upon his knee. On each side of the tomb, kneeling on marble cushions on the ledge, are his father and mother, an earl and countess. The mother, in the stately costume of a bygone court, with hair carefully draped, watches the face of the child with a look in which love seems to have cast out grief. The earl in armour, a strongly-built, soldier-like figure, looks across the boy’s knee at his wife’s face, but in his expression—I know not if it be art—there seems to be a look of rebellious sorrow, of thwarted pride. All his wealth and state could not keep his darling with him, and he does not seem to understand. There have they knelt, the little group, for over two centuries, waiting and watching, and one is glad to think that they know now whatever there is to know. Outside the golden afternoon slants across the headstones, and the birds twitter in the ivy, while a full stream winds below through the meadows that once were theirs.

Such a contemplation does not withdraw one from life or tend to give a false view of its energies; it does not forbid one to act, to love, to live; it only gilds with a solemn radiance the cloud that overshadows us all, the darkness of the inevitable end. Face to face with the _lacrimæ rerum_ in so simple and tender a form, the heavy words _Memento Mori_ fall upon the heart not as a sad and harsh interruption of wordly dreams and fancies, but as a deep pedal note upon a sweet organ, giving strength and fulness and balance to the dying away of the last grave and gentle chord.

31

If any one whose eye may fall upon these pages be absolutely equable of temperament, serene, contented, the same one day as another, as Dr. Johnson said of Reynolds, let him not read this chapter—he will think it a mere cry in the dark, better smothered in the bed-clothes, an unmanly piece of morbid pathology, a secret and sordid disease better undivulged, on which all persons of proper pride should hold their peace.

Well, it is not for him that I write; there are books and books, and even chapters and chapters, just as there are people and people. I myself avoid books dealing with health and disease. I used when younger to be unable to resist the temptation of a medical book; but now I am wiser, and if I sometimes yield to the temptation, it is with a backward glancing eye and a cautious step. And I will say that I generally put back the book with a snap, in a moment, as though a snake had stung me. But there will be no pathology here—nothing but a patient effort to look a failing in the face, and to suggest a remedy.

[Sidenote: FEARS]

I speak to the initiated, to those who have gone down into the dark cave, and seen the fire burn low in the shrine, and watched aghast the formless, mouldering things—hideous implements are they, or mere weapons?—that hang upon the walls.

Do you know what it is to dwell, perhaps for days together, under the shadow of a fear? Perhaps a definite fear—a fear of poverty, or a fear of obloquy, or a fear of harshness, or a fear of pain, or a fear of disease—or, worse than all, a boding, misshapen, sullen dread which has no definite cause, and is therefore the harder to resist.

[Sidenote: DREAMS]

These moods, I say it with gratitude for myself and for the encouragement of others, tend to diminish in acuteness and in frequency as I grow older. They are now, as ever, preluded by dreams of a singular kind, dreams of rapid and confused action, dreams of a romantic and exaggerated pictorial character—huge mountain ranges, lofty and venerable buildings, landscapes of incredible beauty, gardens of unimaginable luxuriance, which pass with incredible rapidity before the mind. I will indicate two of these in detail. I was in a vessel like a yacht, armed with a massive steel prow like a ram, which moved in some aerial fashion over a landscape, skimming it seemed to me but a few feet above the ground. A tall man of benignant aspect stood upon the bridge, and directed the operations of the unseen navigator. We ascended a heathery valley, and presently encountered snow-drifts, upon which the vessel seemed to settle down to her full speed; at last we entered a prodigious snowfield, with vast ridged snow-waves extending in every direction for miles; the vessel ran not over but through these waves, sending up huge spouts of snow which fell in cool showers upon my head and hands, while the tinkle of dry ice fragments made a perpetual low music. At last we stopped and I descended on to the plateau. Far ahead, through rolling clouds, I saw the black snow-crowned heights of a mountain, loftier than any seen by human eye, and for leagues round me lay the interminable waste of snow. I was aroused from my absorption by a voice behind me; the vessel started again on her course with a leap like a porpoise, and though I screamed aloud to stop her, I saw her, in a few seconds, many yards ahead, describing great curves as she ran, with the snow spouting over her like a fountain.

The second was a very different scene. I was in the vine-clad alleys of some Italian garden; against the still blue air a single stone pine defined itself; I walked along a path, and turning a corner an exquisite conventual building of immense size, built of a light brown stone, revealed itself. From all the alleys round emerged troops of monastic figures in soft white gowns, and a mellow chime of exceeding sweetness floated from the building. I saw that I too was robed like the rest; but the gliding figures outstripped me; and arriving last at a great iron portal I found it closed, and the strains of a great organ came drowsily from within.

Then into the dream falls a sudden sense of despair like an ashen cloud; a feeling of incredible agony, intensified by the beauty of the surrounding scene, that agony which feverishly questions as to why so dark a stroke should fall when the mind seems at peace with itself and lost in dreamy wonder at the loveliness all about it. Then the vision closes, and for a time the mind battles with dark waves of anguish, emerging at last, like a diver from a dim sea, into the waking consciousness. The sickly daylight filters through the window curtains and the familiar room swims into sight. The first thought is one of unutterable relief, which is struck instantly out of the mind by the pounce of the troubled mood; and then follows a ghastly hour, when every possibility of horror and woe intangible presses in upon the battling mind. At such moments a definite difficulty, a practical problem would be welcome—but there is none; the misery is too deep for thought, and even, when after long wrestling, the knowledge comes that it is all a subjective condition, and that there is no adequate cause in life or circumstances for this unmanning terror—even then it can only be silently endured, like the racking of some fierce physical pain.

[Sidenote: WOE]

The day that succeeds to such a waking mood is almost the worst part of the experience. Shaken and dizzied by the inrush of woe, the mind straggles wearily through hour after hour; the familiar duties are intolerable; food has no savour; action and thought no interest; and if for an hour the tired head is diverted by some passing event, or if, oppressed with utter exhaustion, it sinks into an unrefreshing slumber, repose but gives the strength to suffer—the accursed mood leaps again, as from an unseen lair, upon the unnerved consciousness, and tears like some strange beast the helpless and palpitating soul.

When first, at Cambridge, I had the woeful experiences above recorded, I was so unused to endurance, so bewildered by suffering, that I think for awhile I was almost beside myself. I recollect going down with some friends, in a brief lull of misery, to watch a football match, when the horror seized me in the middle of a cheerful talk with such vehemence, that I could only rush off with a muttered word, and return to my rooms, in which I immured myself to spend an hour in an agony of prayer. Again I recollect sitting with some of the friends of my own age after hall; we were smoking and talking peacefully enough—for some days my torment had been suspended—when all at once, out of the secret darkness the terror leapt upon me, and after in vain resisting it for a few moments, I hurried away, having just enough self-respect to glance at my watch and mutter something about a forgotten engagement. But worst of all was a walk taken with my closest friend on a murky November day. We started in good spirits, when in a moment the accursed foe was upon me; I hardly spoke except for fitful questions. Our way led us to a level crossing, beside a belt of woodland, where a huge luggage train was jolting and bumping backwards and forewards. We hung upon the gate; and then, and then only, came upon me in a flash an almost irresistible temptation to lay my head beneath the ponderous wheels, and end it all; I could only pray in silence, and hurry from the spot in speechless agitation. What wonder if I heard on the following day that my friend complained that I was altering for the worse—that I had become so sullen and morose that it was no use talking to me.

Gradually, very gradually, the aching frost of the soul broke up and thawed; little trifling encouraging incidents—a small success or two, an article accepted by a magazine, a friendship, an athletic victory, raised me step by step out of the gloom. One benefit, even at the time, it brought me—an acute sensitiveness to beauty both of sight and sound. I used to steal at even-song into the dark nave of King’s Chapel, and the sight of the screen, the flood of subdued light overflowing from the choir, the carven angels with their gilded trumpets, penetrated into the soul with an exquisite sweetness; and still more the music—whether the low prelude with the whispering pedals, the severe monotone breaking into freshets of harmony, the swing and richness of the chants, or the elaborate beauty of some familiar magnificat or anthem—all fell like showers upon the arid sense. The music at King’s had one characteristic that I have never heard elsewhere; the properties of the building are such that the echo lingers without blurring the successive chords—not “loth to die,” I used to think, as Wordsworth says, but sinking as it were from consciousness to dream, and from dream to death.

[Sidenote: THE BROTHERHOOD OF SORROW]

One further gain—the greater—was that my suffering did not, I think, withdraw me wholly into myself and fence me from the world; rather it gave me a sense of the brotherhood of grief. I was one with all the agonies that lie silent in the shadow of life; and though my suffering had no tangible cause, yet I was initiated into the fellowship of those who _bear_. I _understood_;—weak, faithless, and faulty as I was, I was no longer in the complacent isolation of the strong, the successful, the selfish, and even in my darkest hour I had strength to thank God for that.

32

_Oct. 21, 1898._

I have been reading some of my old diaries to-day; and I am tempted to try and disentangle, as far as I can, the _motif_ that seems to me to underlie my simple life.

One question above all others has constantly recurred to my mind; and the answer to it is the sum of my slender philosophy.

The question then is this: is a simple, useful, dignified, happy life possible to most of us without the stimulus of affairs, of power, of fame? I answer unhesitatingly that such a life is possible. The tendency of the age is to measure success by publicity, not to think highly of any person or any work unless it receives “recognition,” to think it essential to happiness _monstrari digito_, to be in the swim, to be a personage.

I admit at once the temptation; to such successful persons comes the consciousness of influence, the feeling of power, the anxious civilities of the undistinguished, the radiance of self-respect, the atmosphere of flattering, subtle deference, the seduction of which not even the most independent and noble characters can escape. Indeed, many an influential man of simple character and unpretending virtue, who rates such conveniences of life at their true value, and does not pursue them as an end, would be disagreeably conscious of the lack of these _petits soins_ if he adopted an unpopular cause or for any reason forfeited the influence which begets them.

A friend of mine came to see me the other day fresh from a visit to a great house. His host was a man of high cabinet rank, the inheritor of an ample fortune and a historic name, who has been held by his nearest friends to cling to political life longer than prudence would warrant. My friend told me that he had been left alone one evening with his host, who had, half humorously, half seriously, indulged in a lengthy tirade against the pressure of social duties and unproductive drudgery that his high position involved. “If they would only let me alone!” he said; “I think it very hard that in the evening of my days I cannot order my life to suit my tastes. I have served the public long enough.... I would read—how I would read—and when I was bored I would sleep in my chair.”

[Sidenote: SUCCESS]

“And yet,” my friend said, commenting on these unguarded statements, “I believe he is the only person of his intimate circle who does not know that he would be hopelessly bored—that the things he decries are the very breath of life to him. There is absolutely no reason why he should not at once and forever realise his fancied ideal—and if his wife and children do not urge him to do so, it is only because they know that he would be absolutely miserable.” And this is true of many lives.

If the “recognition,” of which I have spoken above, were only accorded to the really eminent, it would be a somewhat different matter; but nine-tenths of the persons who receive it are nothing more than phantoms, who have set themselves to pursue the glory, without the services that ought to earn it. A great many people have a strong taste for power without work, for dignity without responsibility; and it is quite possible to attain consideration if you set yourself resolutely to pursue it.

The temptation comes in a yet more subtle form to men of a really high-minded type, whose chief preoccupation is earnest work and the secluded pursuit of some high ideal. Such people, though they do not wish to fetter themselves with the empty social duties that assail the eminent, yet are tempted to wish to have the refusal of them, and to be secretly dissatisfied if they do not receive this testimonial to the value of their work. The temptation is not so vulgar as it seems. Every one who is ambitious wishes to be effective. A man does not write books or paint pictures or make speeches simply to amuse himself, to fill his time; and they are few who can genuinely write, as the late Mark Pattison wrote of a period of his life, that his ideal was at one time “defiled and polluted by literary ambition.”

Nevertheless, if there is to be any real attempt to win the inner peace of the spirit, such ambition must be not sternly but serenely resisted. Not until a man can pass by the rewards of fame _oculis irretortis_—“nor cast one longing, lingering look behind”—is the victory won.

[Sidenote: PURE AMBITION]

It may be urged, in my case, that the obscurity for which I crave was never likely to be denied me. True; but at the same time ambition in its pettiest and most childish forms has been and is a real temptation to me: the ambition to dominate and dazzle my immediate circle, to stimulate curiosity about myself, to be considered, if not a successful man, at least a man who might have succeeded if he had cared to try—all the temptations which are depicted in so masterly and merciless a way by that acute psychologist Mr. Henry James in the character of Gilbert Osmond in the _Portrait of a Lady_—to all of these I plead guilty. Had I not been gifted with sufficient sensitiveness to see how singularly offensive and pitiful such pretences are in the case of others, I doubt if I should not have succumbed—if indeed I have not somewhat succumbed—to them.

Indeed, to some morbid natures such pretences are vital—nay, self-respect would be impossible without them. I know a lady who, like Mrs. Wittiterly, is really kept alive by the excitement of being an invalid. If she had not been so ill she would have died years ago. I know a worthy gentleman who lives in London and spends his time in hurrying from house to house lamenting how little time he can get to do what he really enjoys—to read or think. Another has come to my mind who lives in a charming house in the country, and by dint of inviting a few second-rate literary and artistic people to his house and entertaining them royally, believes himself to be at the very centre of literary and artistic life, and essential to its continuance. These are harmless lives, not unhappy, not useless; based, it is true, upon a false conception of the relative importance of their own existence, but then is there one of us—the most hard-working, influential, useful person in the world—who does not exaggerate his own importance? Does any one realise how little essential he is, or how easily his post is filled—indeed, how many people there are who believe that they could do the same thing better if they only had the chance.