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At Large

by Arthur Christopher Benson · English · Gutenberg #4613 · 489,457 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: At Large

Author: Arthur Christopher Benson


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #4613]
                Most recently updated: December 3, 2009

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4613

Credits: Produced by Don Lainson, Charles Aldarondo, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AT LARGE ***




Produced by Don Lainson and Charles Aldarondo





AT LARGE

By Arthur Christopher Benson


Haec ego mecum


1908


Contents

     I.     THE SCENE
     II.    CONTENTMENT
     III.   FRIENDSHIP
     IV.    HUMOUR
     V.     TRAVEL
     VI.    SPECIALISM
     VII.   OUR LACK OF GREAT MEN
     VIII.  SHYNESS
     IX.    EQUALITY
     X.     THE DRAMATIC SENSE
     XI.    KELMSCOTT AND WILLIAM MORRIS
     XII.   A SPEECH DAY
     XIII.  LITERARY FINISH
     XIV.   A MIDSUMMER DAY'S DREAM
     XV.    SYMBOLS
     XVI.   OPTIMISM
     XVII.  JOY
     XVIII. THE LOVE OF GOD
     EPILOGUE





I. THE SCENE


Yes, of course it is an experiment! But it is made in corpore vili.
It is not irreparable, and there is no reason, more's the pity, why I
should not please myself. I will ask--it is a rhetorical question which
needs no answer--what is a hapless bachelor to do, who is professionally
occupied and tied down in a certain place for just half the year? What
is he to do with the other half? I cannot live on in my college rooms,
and I am not compelled to do so for economy. I have near relations and
many friends, at whose houses I should be made welcome. But I cannot be
like the wandering dove, who found no repose. I have a great love of my
independence and my liberty. I love my own fireside, my own chair, my
own books, my own way. It is little short of torture to have to conform
to the rules of other households, to fall in with other people's
arrangements, to throw my pen down when the gong sounds, to make myself
agreeable to fortuitous visitors, to be led whither I would not. I do
this, a very little, because I do not desire to lose touch with my kind;
but then my work is of a sort which brings me into close touch day after
day with all sorts of people, till I crave for recollection and repose;
the prospect of a round of visits is one that fairly unmans me. No doubt
it implies a certain want of vitality, but one does not increase one's
vitality by making overdrafts upon it; and then too I am a slave to my
pen, and the practice of authorship is inconsistent with paying visits.
Of course the obvious remedy is marriage; but one cannot marry from
prudence, or from a sense of duty, or even to increase the birth-rate,
which I am concerned to see is diminishing. I am, moreover, to be
perfectly frank, a transcendentalist on the subject of marriage. I know
that a happy marriage is the finest and noblest thing in the world, and
I would resign all the conveniences I possess with the utmost readiness
for it. But a great passion cannot be the result of reflection, or of
desire, or even of hope. One cannot argue oneself into it; one must be
carried away. "You have never let yourself go," says a wise and gentle
aunt, when I bemoan my unhappy fate. To which I reply that I have never
done anything else. I have lain down in streamlets, I have leapt into
silent pools, I have made believe I was in the presence of a deep
emotion, like the dear little girl in one of Reynolds's pictures, who
hugs a fat and lolling spaniel over an inch-deep trickle of water, for
fear he should be drowned. I do not say that it is not my fault. It is
my fault, my own fault, my own great fault, as we say in the Compline
confession. The fault has been an over-sensibility. I have desired close
and romantic relations so much that I have dissipated my forces; yet
when I read such a book as the love-letters of Robert Browning and
Elizabeth Barrett, I realise at once both the supreme nature of the
gift, and the hopelessness of attaining it unless it be given; but I try
to complain, as the beloved mother of Carlyle said about her health, as
little as possible.

Well, then, as I say, what is a reluctant bachelor who loves his liberty
to do with himself? I cannot abide the life of towns, though I live in a
town half the year. I like friends, and I do not care for acquaintances.
There is no conceivable reason why, in the pursuit of pleasure, I should
frequent social entertainments that do not amuse me. What have I then
done? I have done what I liked best. I have taken a big roomy house in
the quietest country I could find, I have furnished it comfortably, and
I have hitherto found no difficulty in inducing my friends, one or two
at a time, to come and share my life. I shall have something to say
about solitude presently, but meanwhile I will describe my hermitage.

The old Isle of Ely lies in the very centre of the Fens. It is a range
of low gravel hills, shaped roughly like a human hand. The river runs
at the wrist, and Ely stands just above it, at the base of the palm,
the fingers stretching out to the west. The fens themselves, vast peaty
plains, the bottoms of the old lagoons, made up of the accumulation of
centuries of rotting water-plants, stretch round it on every side; far
away you can see the low heights of Brandon, the Newmarket Downs, the
Gogmagogs behind Cambridge, the low wolds of Huntingdon. To the north
the interminable plain, through which the rivers welter and the great
levels run, stretches up to the Wash. So slight is the fall of the land
towards the sea, that the tide steals past me in the huge Hundred-foot
cut, and makes itself felt as far south as Earith Bridge, where the
Ouse comes leisurely down with its clear pools and reed-beds. At the
extremity of the southernmost of all the fingers of the Isle, a big
hamlet clusters round a great ancient church, whose blunt tower is
visible for miles above its grove of sycamores. More than twelve
centuries ago an old saint, whose name I think was Owen, though it
was Latinised by the monks into Ovinus, because he had the care of the
sheep, kept the flocks of St. Etheldreda, queen and abbess of Ely, on
these wolds. One does not know what were the visions of this rude and
ardent saint, as he paced the low heights day by day, looking over the
monstrous lakes. At night no doubt he heard the cries of the marsh-fowl
and saw the elfin lights stir on the reedy flats. Perhaps some touch of
fever kindled his visions; but he raised a tiny shrine here, and here he
laid his bones; and long after, when the monks grew rich, they raised
a great church here to the memory of the shepherd of the sheep, and
beneath it, I doubt not, he sleeps.

What is it I see from my low hills? It is an enchanted land for me, and
I lose myself in wondering how it is that no one, poet or artist, has
ever wholly found out the charm of these level plains, with their rich
black soil, their straight dykes, their great drift-roads, that run as
far as the eye can reach into the unvisited fen. In summer it is a feast
of the richest green from verge to verge; here a clump of trees stands
up, almost of the hue of indigo, surrounding a lonely shepherd's cote;
a distant church rises, a dark tower over the hamlet elms; far beyond, I
see low wolds, streaked and dappled by copse and wood; far to the south,
I see the towers and spires of Cambridge, as of some spiritual city--the
smoke rises over it on still days, hanging like a cloud; to the east lie
the dark pine-woods of Suffolk, to the north an interminable fen;
but not only is it that one sees a vast extent of sky, with great
cloud-battalions crowding up from the south, but all the colour of the
landscape is crowded into a narrow belt to the eye, which gives it an
intensity of emerald hue that I have seen nowhere else in the world.
There is a sense of deep peace about it all, the herb of the field just
rising in its place over the wide acres; the air is touched with a lazy
fragrance, as of hidden flowers; and there is a sense, too, of silent
and remote lives, of men that glide quietly to and fro in the great
pastures, going quietly about their work in a leisurely calm. In the
winter it is fairer still, if one has a taste for austerity. The trees
are leafless now; and the whole flat is lightly washed with the most
delicate and spare tints, the pasture tinted with the yellowing bent,
the pale stubble, the rich plough-land, all blending into a subdued
colour; and then, as the day declines and the plain is rimmed with a
frosty mist, the smouldering glow of the orange sunset begins to burn
clear on the horizon, the grey laminated clouds becoming ridged with
gold and purple, till the whole fades, like a shoaling sea, into the
purest green, while the cloud-banks grow black and ominous, and far-off
lights twinkle like stars in solitary farms.

Of the house itself, exteriorly, perhaps the less said the better; it
was built by an earl, to whom the estate belonged, as a shooting-box. I
have often thought that it must have been ordered from the Army and
Navy Stores. It is of yellow brick, blue-slated, and there has been a
pathetic feeling after giving it a meanly Gothic air; it is ill-placed,
shut in by trees, approached only by a very dilapidated farm-road; and
the worst of it is that a curious and picturesque house was destroyed to
build it. It stands in what was once a very pretty and charming little
park, with an ancient avenue of pollard trees, lime and elm. You can see
the old terraces of the Hall, the mounds of ruins, the fish-ponds, the
grass-grown pleasance. It is pleasantly timbered, and I have an orchard
of honest fruit-trees of my own. First of all I expect it was a Roman
fort; for the other day my gardener brought me in half of the handle of
a fine old Roman water-jar, red pottery smeared with plaster, with two
pretty laughing faces pinched lightly out under the volutes. A few days
after I felt like Polycrates of Samos, that over-fortunate tyrant, when,
walking myself in my garden, I descried and gathered up the rest of the
same handle, the fractures fitting exactly. There are traces of Roman
occupation hereabouts in mounds and earthworks. Not long ago a man
ploughing in the fen struck an old red vase up with the share, and
searching the place found a number of the same urns within the space
of a few yards, buried in the peat, as fresh as the day they were made.
There was nothing else to be found, and the place was under water till
fifty years ago; so that it must have been a boatload of pottery being
taken in to market that was swamped there, how many centuries ago! But
there have been stranger things than that found; half a mile away, where
the steep gravel hill slopes down to the fen, a man hoeing brought up
a bronze spear-head. He took it to the lord of the manor, who was
interested in curiosities. The squire hurried to the place and had it
all dug out carefully; quite a number of spear-heads were found, and a
beautiful bronze sword, with the holes where the leather straps of the
handle passed in and out. I have held this fine blade in my hands, and
it is absolutely undinted. It may be Roman, but it is probably earlier.
Nothing else was found, except some mouldering fragments of wood that
looked like spear-staves; and this, too, it seems, must have been a
boatload of warriors, perhaps some raiding party, swamped on the edge
of the lagoon with all their unused weapons, which they were presumably
unable to recover, if indeed any survived to make the attempt. Hard by
is the place where the great fight related in Hereward the Wake took
place. The Normans were encamped southwards at Willingham, where a line
of low entrenchments is still known as Belsar's Field, from Belisarius,
the Norman Duke in command. It is a quiet enough place now, and the
yellow-hammers sing sweetly and sharply in the thick thorn hedges. The
Normans made a causeway of faggots and earth across the fen, but came
at last to the old channel of the Ouse, which they could not bridge;
and here they attempted to cross in great flat-bottomed boats, but were
foiled by Hereward and his men, their boats sunk, and hundreds of stout
warriors drowned in the oozy river-bed. There still broods for me a
certain horror over the place, where the river in its confined channel
now runs quietly, by sedge and willow-herb and golden-rod, between its
high flood banks, to join the Cam to the east.

But to return to my house. It was once a monastic grange of Ely, a
farmstead with a few rooms, no doubt, where sick monks and ailing
novices were sent to get change of air and a taste of country life.
There is a bit of an old wall still bordering my garden, and a strip of
pale soil runs across the gooseberry beds, pale with dust of mortar
and chips of brick, where another old wall stood. There was a great
pigeon-house here, pulled down for the shooting-box, and the garden is
still full of old carved stones, lintels, and mullions, and capitals of
pillars, and a grotesque figure of a bearded man, with a tunic confined
round the waist by a cord, which crowns one of my rockeries. But it
is all gone now, and the pert cockneyfied house stands up among the
shrubberies and walnuts, surveying the ruins of what has been.

But I must not abuse my house, because whatever it is outside, it is
absolutely comfortable and convenient within: it is solid, well built,
spacious, sensible, reminding one of the "solid joys and lasting
treasure" that the hymn says "none but Zion's children know." And,
indeed, it is a Zion to be at ease in.

One other great charm it has: from the end of my orchard the ground
falls rapidly in a great pasture. Some six miles away, over the dark
expanse of Grunty Fen, the towers of Ely, exquisitely delicate and
beautiful, crown the ridge; on clear sunny days I can see the sun
shining on the lead roofs, and the great octagon rises with all its
fretted pinnacles. Indeed, so kind is Providence, that the huge brick
mass of the Ely water-tower, like an overgrown Temple of Vesta, blends
itself pleasantly with the cathedral, projecting from the western front
like a great Galilee.

The time to make pious pilgrimage to Ely is when the apple-orchards
are in bloom. Then the grim western tower, with its sombre windows, the
gabled roofs of the canonical houses, rise in picturesque masses over
acres of white blossom. But for me, six miles away, the cathedral is
a never-ending sight of beauty. On moist days it draws nearer, as if
carved out of a fine blue stone; on a grey day it looks more like a
fantastic crag, with pinnacles of rock. Again it will loom a ghostly
white against a thunder-laden sky. Grand and pathetic at once, for it
stands for something that we have parted with. What was the outward and
stately form of a mighty idea, a rich system, is now little more than an
aesthetic symbol. It has lost heart, somehow, and its significance
only exists for ecclesiastically or artistically minded persons; it
represents a force no longer in the front of the battle.

One other fine feature of the countryside there is, of which one never
grows tired. If one crosses over to Sutton, with its huge church, the
tower crowned with a noble octagon, and the village pleasantly perched
along a steep ridge of orchards, one can drop down to the west, past a
beautiful old farmhouse called Berristead, with an ancient chapel, built
into the homestead, among fine elms. The road leads out upon the fen,
and here run two great Levels, as straight as a line for many miles, up
which the tide pulsates day by day; between them lies a wide tract of
pasture called the Wash, which in summer is a vast grazing-ground for
herds, in rainy weather a waste of waters, like a great estuary--north
and south it runs, crossed by a few roads or black-timbered bridges, the
fen-water pouring down to the sea. It is a great place for birds this.
The other day I disturbed a brood of redshanks here, the parent birds
flying round and round, piping mournfully, almost within reach of my
hand. A little further down, not many months ago, there was observed a
great commotion in the stream, as of some big beast swimming slowly; the
level was netted, and they hauled out a great sturgeon, who had somehow
lost his way, and was trying to find a spawning-ground. There is an
ancient custom that all sturgeon, netted in English waters, belong by
right to the sovereign; but no claim was advanced in this case. The line
between Ely and March crosses the level, further north, and the huge
freight-trains go smoking and clanking over the fen all day. I often
walk along the grassy flood-bank for a mile or two, to the tiny decayed
village of Mepal, with a little ancient church, where an old courtier
lies, an Englishman, but with property near Lisbon, who was a
gentleman-in-waiting to James II. in his French exile, retired
invalided, and spent the rest of his days "between Portugal and Byall
Fen"--an odd pair of localities to be so conjoined!

And what of the life that it is possible to live in my sequestered
grange? I suppose there is not a quieter region in the whole of England.
There are but two or three squires and a few clergy in the Isle, but the
villages are large and prosperous; the people eminently friendly,
shrewd and independent, with homely names for the most part, but with a
sprinkling both of Saxon appellations, like Cutlack, which is Guthlac
a little changed, and Norman names, like Camps, inherited perhaps from
some invalided soldier who made his home there after the great fight.
There is but little communication with the outer world; on market-days a
few trains dawdle along the valley from Ely to St. Ives and back again.
They are fine, sturdy, prosperous village communities, that mind their
own business, and take their pleasure in religion and in song, like
their forefathers the fenmen, Girvii, who sang their three-part catches
with rude harmony.

Part of the charm of the place is, I confess, its loneliness. One may go
for weeks together with hardly a caller; there are no social functions,
no festivities, no gatherings. One may once in a month have a chat with
a neighbour, or take a cup of tea at a kindly parsonage. But people
tend to mind their own business, and live their own lives in their own
circle; yet there is an air of tranquil neighbourliness all about. The
inhabitants of the region respect one's taste in choosing so homely and
serene a region for a dwelling-place, and they know that whatever motive
one may have had for coming, it was not dictated by a feverish love of
society. I have never known a district--and I have lived in many parts
of England--where one was so naturally and simply accepted as a part
of the place. One is greeted in all directions with a comfortable
cordiality, and a natural sort of good-breeding; and thus the life comes
at once to have a precise quality, a character of its own. Every one
is independent, and one is expected to be independent too. There is no
suspicion of a stranger; it is merely recognised that he is in search of
a definite sort of life, and he is made frankly and unostentatiously at
home.

And so the days race away there in the middle of the mighty plain. No
plans are ever interrupted, no one questions one's going and coming as
one will, no one troubles his head about one's occupations or pursuits.
Any help or advice that one needs is courteously and readily given,
and no favours asked or expected in return. One little incident gave
me considerable amusement. There is a private footpath of my own which
leads close to my house; owing to the house having stood for some time
unoccupied, people had tended to use it as a short cut. The kindly
farmer obviated this by putting up a little notice-board, to indicate
that the path was private. A day or two afterwards it was removed and
thrown into a ditch. I was perturbed as well as surprised by this,
supposing that it showed that the notice had offended some local
susceptibility; and being very anxious to begin my tenure on neighbourly
terms, I consulted my genial landlord, who laughed, and said that there
was no one who would think of doing such a thing; and to reassure me he
added that one of his men had seen the culprit at work, and that it was
only an old horse, who had rubbed himself against the post till he had
thrown it down.

The days pass, then, in a delightful monotony; one reads, writes, sits
or paces in the garden, scours the country on still sunny afternoons.
There are many grand churches and houses within a reasonable distance,
such as the great churches near Wisbech and Lynn--West Walton, Walpole
St. Peter, Tilney, Terrington St. Clement, and a score of others--great
cruciform structures, in every conceivable style, with fine woodwork and
noble towers, each standing in the centre of a tiny rustic hamlet,
built with no idea of prudent proportion to the needs of the places they
serve, but out of pure joy and pride. There are houses like Beaupre,
a pile of fantastic brick, haunted by innumerable phantoms, with its
stately orchard closes, or the exquisite gables of Snore Hall, of rich
Tudor brickwork, with fine panelling within. There is no lack of
shrines for pilgrimage--then, too, it is not difficult to persuade some
like-minded friend to share one's solitude. And so the quiet hours
tick themselves away in an almost monastic calm, while one's book grows
insensibly day by day, as the bulrush rises on the edge of the dyke.

I do not say that it would be a life to live for the whole of a year,
and year by year. There is no stir, no eagerness, no brisk interchange
of thought about it. But for one who spends six months in a busy and
peopled place, full of duties and discussions and conflicting interests,
it is like a green pasture and waters of comfort. The danger of it, if
prolonged, would be that things would grow languid, listless, fragrant
like the Lotos-eaters' Isle; small things would assume undue importance,
small decisions would seem unduly momentous; one would tend to regard
one's own features as in a mirror and through a magnifying glass. But,
on the other hand, it is good, because it restores another kind of
proportion; it is like dipping oneself in the seclusion of a monastic
cell. Nowadays the image of the world, with all its sheets of detailed
news, all its network of communications, sets too deep a mark upon one's
spirit. We tend to believe that a man is lost unless he is overwhelmed
with occupation, unless, like the conjurer, he is keeping a dozen balls
in the air at once. Such a gymnastic teaches a man alertness, agility,
effectiveness. But it has got to be proved that one was sent into
the world to be effective, and it is not even certain that a man has
fulfilled the higher law of his being if he has made a large fortune
by business. A sagacious, shrewd, acute man of the world is sometimes
a mere nuisance; he has made his prosperous corner at the expense of
others, and he has only contrived to accumulate, behind a little fence
of his own, what was meant to be the property of all. I have known a
good many successful men, and I cannot honestly say that I think that
they are generally the better for their success. They have often learnt
self-confidence, the shadow of which is a good-natured contempt for
ineffective people; the shadow, on the other hand, which falls on the
contemplative man is an undue diffidence, an indolent depression, a
tendency to think that it does not very much matter what any one does.
But, on the other hand, the contemplative man sometimes does grasp one
very important fact--that we are sent into the world, most of us, to
learn something about God and ourselves; whereas if we spend our lives
in directing and commanding and consulting others, we get so swollen a
sense of our own importance, our own adroitness, our own effectiveness,
that we forget that we are tolerated rather than needed, it is better on
the whole to tarry the Lord's leisure, than to try impatiently to force
the hand of God, and to make amends for His apparent slothfulness. What
really makes a nation grow, and improve, and progress, is not social
legislation and organisation. That is only the sign of the rising moral
temperature; and a man who sets an example of soberness, and kindliness,
and contentment is better than a pragmatical district visitor with a
taste for rating meek persons.

It may be asked, then, do I set myself up as an example in this
matter? God forbid! I live thus because I like it, and not from any
philosophical or philanthropical standpoint. But if more men were
to follow their instincts in the matter, instead of being misled
and bewildered by the conventional view that attaches virtue to
perspiration, and national vigour to the multiplication of unnecessary
business, it would be a good thing for the community. What I claim is
that a species of mental and moral equilibrium is best attained by a
careful proportion of activity and quietude. What happens in the case of
the majority of people is that they are so much occupied in the process
of acquisition that they have no time to sort or dispose their stores;
and thus life, which ought to be a thing complete in itself, and ought
to be spent, partly in gathering materials, and partly in drawing
inferences, is apt to be a hurried accumulation lasting to the edge of
the tomb. We are put into the world, I cannot help feeling, to BE rather
than to DO. We excuse our thirst for action by pretending to ourselves
that our own doing may minister to the being of others; but all that it
often effects is to inoculate others with the same restless and feverish
bacteria.

And anyhow, as I said, it is but an experiment. I can terminate it
whenever I have the wish to do so. Even if it is a failure, it will at
all events have been an experiment, and others may learn wisdom by my
mistake; because it must be borne in mind that a failure in a deliberate
experiment in life is often more fruitful than a conventional
success. People as a rule are so cautious; and it is of course highly
disagreeable to run a risk, and to pay the penalty. Life is too short,
one feels, to risk making serious mistakes; but, on the other hand,
the cautious man often has the catastrophe, without even having had
the pleasure of a run for his money. Jowett, the high priest of worldly
wisdom, laid down as a maxim, "Never resign"; but I have found myself
that there is no pleasure comparable to disentangling oneself from
uncongenial surroundings, unless it be the pleasure of making mild
experiments and trying unconventional schemes.




II. CONTENTMENT


I have attempted of late, in more than one book, to depict a certain
kind of tranquil life, a life of reflection rather than of action, of
contemplation rather than of business; and I have tried to do this
from different points of view, though the essence has been the same. I
endeavoured at first to do it anonymously, because I have no desire to
recommend these ideas as being my own theories. The personal background
rather detracts from than adds to the value of the thoughts, because
people can compare my theories with my practice, and show how lamentably
I fail to carry them out. But time after time I have been pulled
reluctantly out of my burrow, by what I still consider a wholly
misguided zeal for publicity, till I have decided that I will lurk no
longer. It was in this frame of mind that I published, under my own
name, a book called Beside Still Waters, a harmless enough volume, I
thought, which was meant to be a deliberate summary or manifesto of
these ideas. It depicted a young man who, after a reasonable experience
of practical life, resolved to retire into the shade, who in that
position indulged profusely in leisurely reverie. The book was carefully
enough written, and I have been a good deal surprised to find that it
has met with considerable disapproval, and even derision, on the part
of many reviewers. It has been called morbid and indolent, and decadent,
and half a hundred more ugly adjectives. Now I do not for an instant
question the right of a single one of these conscientious persons to
form whatever opinion they like about my book, and to express it in any
terms they like; they say, and obviously feel, that the thought of the
book is essentially thin, and that the vein in which it is written is
offensively egotistical. I do not dispute the possibility of their being
perfectly right. An artist who exhibits his paintings, or a writer who
publishes his books, challenges the criticisms of the public; and I am
quite sure that the reviewers who frankly disliked my book, and said
so plainly, thought that they were doing their duty to the public, and
warning them against teaching which they believed to be insidious
and even immoral. I honour them for doing this, and I applaud them,
especially if they did violence to their own feelings of courtesy and
urbanity in doing so. Then there were some good-natured reviewers
who practically said that the book was simply a collection of amiable
platitudes; but that if the public liked to read such stuff, they were
quite at liberty to do so. I admire these reviewers for a different
reason, partly for their tolerant permission to the public to read what
they choose, and still more because I like to think that there are so
many intelligent people in the world who are wearisomely familiar with
ideas which have only slowly and gradually dawned upon myself. I have
no intention of trying to refute or convince my critics, and I beg them
with all my heart to say what they think about my books, because only by
the frank interchange of ideas can we arrive at the truth.

But what I am going to try to do in this chapter is to examine the
theory by virtue of which my book is condemned, and I am going to try
to give the fullest weight to the considerations urged against it. I
am sure there is something in what the critics say, but I believe that
where we differ is in this. The critics who disapprove of my book seem
to me to think that all men are cast in the same mould, and that the
principles which hold good for some necessarily hold good for all. What
I like best about their criticisms is that they are made in a spirit of
moral earnestness and ethical seriousness. I am a serious man myself,
and I rejoice to see others serious. The point of view which they
seem to recommend is the point of view of a certain kind of practical
strenuousness, the gospel of push, if I may so call it. They seem to
hold that people ought to be discontented with what they are, that they
ought to try to better themselves, that they ought to be active,
and what they call normal; that when they have done their work as
energetically as possible, they should amuse themselves energetically
too, take hard exercise, shout and play,


     "Pleased as the Indian boy to run
      And shoot his arrows in the sun,"


and that then they should recreate themselves like Homeric heroes,
eating and drinking, listening comfortably to the minstrel, and take
their fill of love in a full-blooded way.

That is, I think, a very good theory of life for some people, though I
think it is a little barbarous; it is Spartan rather than Athenian.

Some of my critics take a higher kind of ground, and say that I want to
minimise and melt down the old stern beliefs and principles of morality
into a kind of nebulous emotion. They remind me a little of an old
country squire of whom I have heard, of the John Bull type, whose
younger son, a melancholy and sentimental youth, joined the Church of
Rome. His father was determined that this should not separate them, and
asked him to come home and talk it over. He told his eldest son that
he was going to remonstrate with the erring youth in a simple and
affectionate way. The eldest son said that he hoped his father would do
it tactfully and gently, as his brother was highly sensitive, to which
his father replied that he had thought over what he meant to say, and
was going to be very reasonable. The young man arrived, and was ushered
into the study by his eldest brother. "Well," said the squire, "very
glad to see you, Harry; but do you mean to tell me that your mother's
religion is not good enough for a damned ass like you?"

Now far from desiring to minimise faith in God and the Unseen, I think
it is the thing of which the world is more in need than anything else.
What has made the path of faith a steep one to tread is partly that it
has got terribly encumbered with ecclesiastical traditions; it has been
mended, like the Slough of Despond, with cartloads of texts and insecure
definitions. And partly too the old simple undisturbed faith in the
absolute truth and authority of the Bible has given way. It is admitted
that the Bible contains a considerable admixture of the legendary
element; and it requires a strong intellectual and moral grip to build
one's faith upon a collection of writings, some of which, at all events,
are not now regarded as being historically and literally true. "If I
cannot believe it all," says the simple bewildered soul, "how can I
be certain that any of it is indubitably true?" Only the patient
and desirous spirit can decide; but whatever else fades, the perfect
insight, the Divine message of the Son of Man cannot fade; the dimmer
that the historical setting becomes, the brighter shine the parables
and the sayings, so far beyond the power of His followers to have
originated, so utterly satisfying to our deepest needs. What I desire to
say with all my heart is that we pilgrims need not be dismayed because
the golden clue dips into darkness and mist; it emerges as bright as
ever upon the upward slope of the valley. If one disregards all that is
uncertain, all that cannot be held to be securely proved in the sacred
writings, there still remain the essential facts of the Christian
revelation, and more deep and fruitful principles than a man can
keep and make his own in the course of a lifetime, however purely and
faithfully he lives and strives. To myself the doubtful matters are
things absolutely immaterial, like the debris of the mine, while the
precious ore gleams and sparkles in every boulder.

What, in effect, these critics say is that a man must not discuss
religion unless he is an expert in theology. When I try, as I have once
or twice tried, to criticise some current conception of a Christian
dogma, the theological reviewer, with a titter that resembles the titter
of Miss Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby, says that a writer who presumes
to discuss such questions ought to be better acquainted with the modern
developments of theology. To that I demur, because I am not attempting
to discuss theology, but current conceptions of theology. If the
advance in theology has been so enormous, then all I can say is that the
theologians fail to bring home the knowledge of that progress to the man
in the street. To use a simple parable, what one feels about many modern
theological statements is what the eloquent bagman said in praise of the
Yorkshire ham: "Before you know where you are, there--it's wanished!"
This is not so in science; science advances, and the ordinary man knows
more or less what is going on; he understands what is meant by the
development of species, he has an inkling of what radio-activity means,
and so forth; but this is because science is making discoveries, while
theological discoveries are mainly of a liberal and negative kind, a
modification of old axioms, a loosening of old definitions. Theology has
made no discoveries about the nature of God, or the nature of the soul;
the problem of free will and necessity is as dark as ever, except that
scientific discovery tends to show more and more that an immutable law
regulates the smallest details of life. I honour, with all my heart, the
critics who have approached the Bible in the same spirit in which they
approach other literature; but the only definite result has been to make
what was considered a matter of blind faith more a matter of opinion.
But to attempt to scare men away from discussing religious topics, by
saying that it is only a matter for experts, is to act in the spirit
of the Inquisition. It is like saying to a man that he must not discuss
questions of diet and exercise because he is not acquainted with the
Pharmacopoeia, or that no one may argue on matters of current politics
unless he is a trained historian. Religion is, or ought to be, a matter
of vital and daily concern for every one of us; if our moral progress
and our spiritual prospects are affected by what we believe, theologians
ought to be grateful to any one who will discuss religious ideas
from the current point of view, if it only leads them to clear up
misconceptions that may prevail. If I needed to justify myself further,
I would only add that since I began to write on such subjects I have
received a large number of letters from unknown people, who seem to be
grateful to any one who will attempt to speak frankly on these matters,
with the earnest desire, which I can honestly say has never been absent
from my mind, to elucidate and confirm a belief in simple and essential
religious principles.

And now I would go on to say a few words as to the larger object which I
have had in view. My aim has been to show how it is possible for people
living quiet and humdrum lives, without any opportunities of gratifying
ambition or for taking a leading part on the stage of the world, to make
the most of simple conditions, and to live lives of dignity and joy.
My own belief is that what is commonly called success has an insidious
power of poisoning the clear springs of life; because people who grow
to depend upon the stimulus of success sink into dreariness and dulness
when that stimulus is withdrawn. Here my critics have found fault with
me for not being more strenuous, more virile, more energetic. It is
strange to me that my object can have been so singularly misunderstood.
I believe, with all my heart, that happiness depends upon strenuous
energy; but I think that this energy ought to be expended upon work, and
everyday life, and relations with others, and the accessible pleasures
of literature and art. The gospel that I detest is the gospel of
success, the teaching that every one ought to be discontented with his
setting, that a man ought to get to the front, clear a space round him,
eat, drink, make love, cry, strive, and fight. It is all to be at the
expense of feebler people. That is a detestable ideal, because it is
the gospel of tyranny rather than the gospel of equality. It is obvious,
too, that such success depends upon a man being stronger than his
fellows, and is only made possible by shoving and hectoring, and
bullying the weak. The preaching of this violent gospel has done us
already grievous harm; it is this which has tended to depopulate country
districts, to make people averse to discharging all honest subordinate
tasks, to make men and women overvalue excitement and amusement. The
result of it is the lowest kind of democratic sentiment, which says,
"Every one is as good as every one else, and I am a little better," and
the jealous spirit, which says, "If I cannot be prominent, I will do
my best that no one else shall be." Out of it develops the demon of
municipal politics, which makes a man strive for a place, in the hope
being able to order things for which others have to pay. It is this
teaching which makes power seem desirable for the sake of personal
advantages, and with no care for responsibility. This spirit seems to
me an utterly vile and detestable spirit. It tends to disguise its rank
individualism under a pretence of desiring to improve social conditions.
I do not mean for a moment to say that all social reformers are of
this type; the clean-handed social reformer, who desires no personal
advantage, and whose influence is a matter of anxious care, is one
of the noblest of men; but now that schemes of social reform are
fashionable, there are a number of blatant people who them for purposes
of personal advancement.

What I rather desire is to encourage a very different kind of
individualism, the individualism of the man who realises that the hope
of the race depends upon the quality of the life, upon the number of
people who live quiet, active, gentle, kindly, faithful lives, enjoying
their work and turning for recreation to the nobler and simpler sources
of pleasure--the love of nature, poetry, literature, and art. Of course
the difficulty is that we do not, most of us, find our pleasures in
these latter things, but in the excitement and amusement of social life.
I mournfully admit it, and I quite see the uselessness of trying to
bring pleasures within the reach of people when they have no taste for
them; but an increasing number of people do care for such things, and
there are still more who would care for them, if only they could be
introduced to them at an impressionable age.

If it is said that this kind of simplicity is a very tame and spiritless
thing, I would answer that it has the advantage of being within the
reach of all. The reason why the pursuit of social advancement and
success is so hollow, is that the subordinate life is after all the life
that must fall to the majority of people. We cannot organise society
on the lines of the army of a lesser German state, which consisted
of twenty-four officers, covered with military decorations, and
eight privates. The successful men, whatever happens, must be a small
minority; and what I desire is that success, as it is called, should
fall quietly and inevitably on the heads of those who deserve it,
while ordinary people should put it out of their thoughts. It is no use
holding up an ideal which cannot be attained, and which the mere attempt
to attain is fruitful in disaster and discontent.

I do not at all wish to teach a gospel of dulness. I am of the opinion
of the poet who said:


     "Life is not life at all without delight,
         Nor hath it any might."


But I am quite sure that the real pleasures of the world are those which
cannot be bought for money, and which are wholly independent of success.

Every one who has watched children knows the extraordinary amount of
pleasure that they can extract out of the simplest materials. To keep
a shop in the corner of a garden, where the commodities are pebbles and
thistle-heads stored in old tin pots, and which are paid for in daisies,
will be an engrossing occupation to healthy children for a long summer
afternoon. There is no reason why that kind of zest should not be
imported into later life; and, as a matter of fact, people who practise
self-restraint, who are temperate and quiet, do retain a gracious kind
of contentment in all that they do or say, or think, to extreme old age;
it is the jaded weariness of overstrained lives that needs the stimulus
of excitement to carry them along from hour to hour. Who does not
remember the rigid asceticism of Ruskin's childhood? A bunch of keys
to play with, and a little later a box of bricks; the Bible and The
Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe to read; a summary whipping if
he fell down and hurt himself, or if he ever cried. Yet no one
would venture to say that this austerity in any way stunted Ruskin's
development or limited his range of pleasures; it made him perhaps a
little submissive and unadventurous. But who that ever saw him, as the
most famous art-critic of the day, being mercilessly snubbed, when he
indulged in paradoxes, by the old wine-merchant, or being told to hold
his tongue by the grim old mother, and obeying cheerfully and sweetly,
would have preferred him to have been loud, contradictory, and
self-assertive? The mischief of our present system of publicity is that
we cannot enjoy our own ideas, unless we can impress people with them,
or, at all events, impress people with a sense of our enjoyment of them.
There is a noble piece of character-drawing in one of Mr. Henry
James's novels, The Portrait of a Lady, where Gilbert Osmond, a selfish
dilettante, finding that he cannot make a great success or attain a
great position, devotes himself to trying to mystify and provoke
the curiosity of the world by retiring into a refined seclusion, and
professing that it affords him an exquisite kind of enjoyment. The
hideous vulgarity of his attitude is not at first sight apparent; he
deceives the heroine, who is a considerable heiress, into thinking that
here, at last, is a man who is living a quiet and sincere life among the
things of the soul; and having obtained possession of her purse, he sets
up house in a dignified old palace in Rome, where he continues to amuse
himself by inviting distinguished persons to visit him, in order that he
may have the pleasure of excluding the lesser people who would like to
be included.

This is, of course, doing the thing upon an almost sublime scale; but
the fact remains that in an age which values notoriety above everything
except property, a great many people do suffer from the disease of not
enjoying things, unless they are aware that others envy their enjoyment.
To people of an artistic temperament this is a sore temptation, because
the essence of the artistic temperament is its egotism, and egotism,
like the Bread-and-butter fly, requires a special nutriment, the
nutriment of external admiration.

And here, I think, lies one of the pernicious results of an
over-developed system of athletics. The more games that people play, the
better; but I do not think it is wholesome to talk about them for large
spaces of leisure time, any more than it is wholesome to talk about your
work or your meals. The result of all the talk about athletics is that
the newspapers get full of them too. That is only natural. It is the
business of newspapers to find out what interests people, and to
tell them about it; but the bad side of it is that young athletes get
introduced to the pleasures of publicity, and that ambitious young
men think that athletics are a short cut to fame. To have played in a
University eleven is like accepting a peerage; you wear for the rest of
your life an agreeable and honourable social label, and I do not think
that a peerage is deserved, or should be accepted, at the age of twenty.
I do not think it is a good kind of fame which depends on a personal
performance rather than upon a man's usefulness to the human race.

The kind of contentment that I should like to see on the increase is the
contentment of a man who works hard and enjoys work, both in itself and
in the contrast it supplies to his leisure hours; and, further, whose
leisure is full of varied interests, not only definite pursuits, but an
interest in his relations with others, not only of a spectatorial kind,
but with the natural and instinctive desire to contribute to their
happiness, not in a priggish way, but from a sense of cordial
good-fellowship.

This programme may seem, as I have said, to be unambitious and prosaic,
and to have very little that is stirring about it. But my belief is that
it can be the most lively, sensitive, fruitful, and enjoyable programme
in the world, because the enjoyment of it depends upon the very stuff of
life itself, and not upon skimming the cream off and throwing away the
milk.

My critics will say that I am only appearing again from my cellar, with
my hands filled with bottled platitudes; but if they are platitudes, by
which I mean plain and obvious truths, why do we not find more people
practising them? What I mean by a platitude is a truth so obvious that
it is devoid of inspiration, and has become one of the things that every
one does so instinctively, that no reminder of them is necessary. Would
that it were so in the present case! All I can say is that I know very
few people who live their lives on these lines, and that most of the
people I know find inspiration anywhere but in the homely stuff of life.
Of course there are a good many people who take life stolidly enough,
and do not desire inspiration at all; but I do not mean that sort of
life in the least. I mean that it ought to be possible and delightful
for people to live lives full of activity and perception and kindliness
and joy, on very simple lines indeed; to take up their work day by day
with an agreeable sense of putting out their powers, to find in the
pageant of nature an infinite refreshment, and to let art and poetry
lift them up into a world of hopes and dreams and memories; and thus
life may become a meal to be eaten with appetite, with a wholesome
appreciation of its pleasant savours, rather than a meal eaten in
satiety or greediness, with a peevish repining that it is not more
elaborate and delicate.

I do not claim to live my own life on these lines. I started, as all
sensitive and pleasure-loving natures do, with an expectation of finding
life a much more exciting, amusing, and delightful thing than I have
found it. I desired to skip from peak to peak, without troubling to
descend into the valleys. But now that I have descended, partly out of
curiosity and partly out of inefficiency, no doubt, into the low-lying
vales, I have found them to be beautiful and interesting places, the
hedgerows full of flower and leaf, the thickets musical with the voices
of birds, the orchards loaded with fruit, the friendly homesteads rich
with tranquil life and abounding in quiet friendly people; and then the
very peaks themselves, past which my way occasionally conducts me, have
a beautiful solemnity of pure outline and strong upliftedness, seen from
below, which I think they tend to lose, seen from the summit; and if
I have spoken of the quieter joys, it is--I can say this with perfect
honesty--because I have been pleased with them, as a bird is pleased
with the sunshine and the berries, and sings, not that the passers-by
may admire his notes, but out of simple joy of heart; and, after all, it
is enough justification, if a pilgrim or two have stopped upon their way
to listen with a smile. That alone persuades me that one does no harm
by speaking, even if there are other passers-by who say what a tiresome
note it is, that they have heard it a hundred times before, and cannot
think why the stupid bird does not vary his song. Personally, I would
rather hear the yellow-hammer utter his sharp monotonous notes, with
the dropping cadence at the end, than that he should try to imitate the
nightingale.

However, as I have said, I am quite willing to believe that the critics
speak, or think they speak, in the interests of the public, and with a
tender concern that the public should not be bored. And I will take my
leave of them by saying, like Miss Flite, that I will ask them to accept
a blessing, and that when I receive a judgment, I shall confer estates
impartially.

But my last word shall be to my readers, and I will beg of them not to
be deceived either by experts or by critics; on the one hand, not to
be frightened away from speculating and reflecting about the possible
meanings of life by the people who say that no one under the degree of
a Bachelor of Divinity has any right to tackle the matter; and, on the
other hand, I would implore them to believe that a quiet life is not
necessarily a dull life, and that the cutting off of alcohol does not
necessarily mean a lowering of physical vitality; but rather that if
they will abstain for a little from dependence upon excitement, they
will find their lives flooded by a new kind of quality, which heightens
perception and increases joy. Of course souls will ache and ail, and
we have to bear the burden of our ancestors' weaknesses as well as
the burden of our own; but just as, in the physical region, diet
and exercise and regularity can effect more cures than the strongest
medicines, so, in the life of the spirit, self-restraint and deliberate
limitation and tranquil patience will often lead into a vigorous and
effective channel the stream that, left to itself, welters and wanders
among shapeless pools and melancholy marshes.




III. FRIENDSHIP


To make oneself beloved, says an old French proverb, this is, after
all, the best way to be useful. That is one of the deep sayings which
children think flat, and which young men, and even young women, despise;
and which a middle-aged man hears with a certain troubled surprise, and
wonders if there is not something in it after all; and which old people
discover to be true, and think with a sad regret of opportunities
missed, and of years devoted, how unprofitably, to other kinds of
usefulness! The truth is that most of us who have any ambitions at all,
do not start in life with a hope of being useful, but rather with an
intention of being ornamental. We think, like joseph in his childish
dreams, that the sun and moon and the eleven stars, to say nothing
of the sheaves, are going to make obeisance to us. We want to be
impressive, rich, beautiful, influential, admired, envied; and then, as
we move forward, the visions fade. We have to be content if, in a quiet
corner, a single sheaf gives us a nod of recognition; and as for the
eleven stars, they seem unaware of our very existence! And then we
make further discoveries; that when we have seemed to ourselves most
impressive, we have only been pretentious; that riches are only a
talisman against poverty, and even make suffering and pain and grief
more unendurable; that beauty fades into stolidity or weariness; that
influence comes mostly to people who do not pursue it, and that the
best kind of influence belongs to those who do not even know that they
possess it; that admiration is but a brilliant husk, which may or may
not contain a wholesome kernel; and as for envy, there is poison in that
cup! And then we become aware that the best crowns have fallen to those
who have not sought them, and that simple-minded and unselfish people
have won the prize which has been denied to brilliance and ambition.

That is the process which is often called disillusionment; and it is a
sad enough business for people who only look at one side of the medal,
and who brood over the fact that they have been disappointed and have
failed. For such as these, there follow the faded years of cynicism and
dreariness. But that disillusionment, that humiliation, are the freshest
and most beautiful things in the world, for people who have real
generosity of spirit, and whose vanity has been of a superficial kind;
because they thus realise that these great gifts are real and true
things, but that they must be deserved and not captured; and then
perhaps such people begin their life-work afresh, in a humble and
hopeful spirit; and if it be too late for them to do what they might
have once done, they do not waste time in futile regret, but are
grateful for ever so little love and tenderness. After all, they have
lived, they have learnt by experience; and it does not yet appear what
we shall be. Somewhere, far hence--who knows?--we shall make a better
start.

Some philosophers have devoted time and thought to tracing backwards all
our emotions to their primal origin; and it is undoubtedly true that in
the intensest and most passionate relationships of life--the love of a
man for a woman, or a mother for a child--there is a large admixture of
something physical, instinctive, and primal. But the fact also remains
that there are unnumbered relationships between all sorts of apparently
incongruous persons, of which the basis is not physical desire, or the
protective instinct, and is not built up upon any hope of gain or profit
whatsoever. All sorts of qualities may lend a hand to strengthen and
increase and confirm these bonds; but what lies at the base of all is
simply a sort of vital congeniality. The friend is the person whom one
is in need of, and by whom one is needed. Life is a sweeter, stronger,
fuller, more gracious thing for the friend's existence, whether he be
near or far: if the friend is close at hand, that is best; but if he is
far away, he is still there, to think of, to wonder about, to hear from,
to write to, to share life and experience with, to serve, to honour,
to admire, to love. But again it is a mistake to think that one makes
a friend because of his or her qualities; it has nothing to do with
qualities at all. If the friend has noble qualities, we admire them
because they are his; if he has obviously bad and even noxious faults,
how readily we condone them or overlook them! It is the person that we
want, not what he does or says, or does not do or say, but what he is:
that is eternally enough.

Of course, it does sometimes happen that we think we have made a friend,
and on closer acquaintance we find things in him that are alien to our
very being; but even so, such a friendship often survives, if we have
given our heart, or if affection has been bestowed upon us--affection
which we cannot doubt. Some of the richest friendships of all are
friendships between people whose whole view of life is sharply
contrasted; and then what blessed energy can be employed in defending
one's friend, in explaining him to other people, in minimising faults,
in emphasising virtues! "While the thunder lasted," says the old Indian
proverb, "two bad men were friends." That means that a common danger
will sometimes draw even malevolent people together. But, for most of
us, the only essential thing to friendship is a kind of mutual trust and
confidence. It does not even shake our faith to know that our friend may
play other people false: we feel by a kind of secret instinct that he
will not play us false; and even if it be proved incontestably that he
has played us false, why, we believe that he will not do so again, and
we have all the pleasure of forgiveness.

Who shall explain the extraordinary instinct that tells us, perhaps
after a single meeting, that this or that particular person in some
mysterious way matters to us? The person in question may have no
attractive gifts of intellect or manner or personal appearance; but
there is some strange bond between us; we seem to have shared experience
together, somehow and somewhere; he is interesting, whether he speaks or
is silent, whether he agrees or disagrees. We feel that in some secret
region he is congenial. Est mihi nescio quid quod me tibi temperat
astrum, says the old Latin poet--"There is something, I know not what,
which yokes our fortunes, yours and mine." Sometimes indeed we are
mistaken, and the momentary nearness fades and grows cold. But it is
not often so. That peculiar motion of the heart, that secret joining of
hands, is based upon something deep and vital, some spiritual kinship,
some subtle likeness.

Of course, we differ vastly in our power of attracting and feeling
attraction. I confess that, for myself, I never enter a new company
without the hope that I may discover a friend, perhaps THE friend,
sitting there with an expectant smile. That hope survives a thousand
disappointments; yet most of us tend to make fewer friends as time goes
on, partly because we have not so much emotional activity to spare,
partly because we become more cautious and discreet; and partly, too,
because we become more aware of the responsibilities which lie in
the background of a friendship, and because we tend to be more shy of
responsibility. Some of us become less romantic and more comfortable;
some of us become more diffident about what we have to give in return;
some of us begin to feel that we cannot take up new ideas--none of
them very good reasons perhaps; but still, for whatever reason, we make
friends less easily. The main reason probably is that we acquire a
point of view, and it is easier to keep to that, and fit people in who
accommodate themselves to it, than to modify the point of view with
reference to the new personalities. People who deal with life generously
and large-heartedly go on multiplying relationships to the end.

Of course, as I have said, there are infinite grades of friendship,
beginning with the friendship which is a mere camaraderie arising out of
habit and proximity; and every one ought to be capable of forming this
last relationship. The modest man, said Stevenson, finds his friendships
ready-made; by which he meant that if one is generous, tolerant, and
ungrudging, then, instead of thinking the circle in which one lives
inadequate, confined, and unsympathetic, one gets the best out of it,
and sees the lovable side of ordinary human beings. Such friendships
as these can evoke perhaps the best and simplest kind of loyalty. It
is said that in countries where oxen are used for ploughing in double
harness, there are touching instances of an ox pining away, and even
dying, if he loses his accustomed yoke-fellow. There are such human
friendships, sometimes formed on a blood relationship, such as
the friendship of a brother and a sister; and sometimes a marriage
transforms itself into this kind of camaraderie, and is a very blessed,
quiet, beautiful thing.

And then there are infinite gradations, such as the friendships of
old and young, pupils and masters, parents and children, nurses
and nurslings, employers and servants, all of them in a way unequal
friendships, but capable of evoking the deepest and purest kinds of
devotion: such famous friendships have been Carlyle's devotion to his
parents, Boswell's to Johnson, Stanley's to Arnold; till at last
one comes to the typical and essential thing known specially as
friendship--the passionate, devoted, equal bond which exists between two
people of the same age and sex; many of which friendships are formed at
school and college, and which often fade away in a sort of cordial glow,
implying no particular communion of life and thought. Marriage is often
the great divorcer of such friendships, and circumstances generally,
which sever and estrange; because, unless there is a constant
interchange of thought and ideas, increasing age tends to emphasise
differences. But there are instances of men, like Newman and FitzGerald,
who kept up a sort of romantic quality of friendship to the end.

I remember the daughter of an old clergyman of my acquaintance
telling me a pathetic and yet typical story of the end of one of these
friendships. Her father and another elderly clergyman had been devoted
friends in boyhood and youth. Circumstances led to a suspension of
intercourse, but at last, after a gap of nearly thirty years, during
which the friends had not met, it was arranged that the old comrade
should come and stay at the vicarage. As the time approached, her
father grew visibly anxious, and coupled his frequent expression of the
exquisite pleasure which the visit was going to bring him with elaborate
arrangements as to which of his family should be responsible for the
entertainment of the old comrade at every hour of the day: the daughters
were to lead him out walking in the morning, his wife was to take him
out drives in the afternoon, and he was to share the smoking-room with a
son, who was at home, in the evenings--the one object being that the
old gentleman should not have to interrupt his own routine, or bear the
burden of entertaining a guest; and he eventually contrived only to meet
him at meals, when the two old friends did not appear to have anything
particular to say to each other. When the visit was over, her father
used to allude to his guest with a half-compassionate air: "Poor Harry,
he has aged terribly--I never saw a man so changed, with such a limited
range of interests; dear fellow, he has quite lost his old humour. Well,
well! it was a great pleasure to see him here. He was very anxious
that we should go to stay with him, but I am afraid that will be rather
difficult to manage; one is so much at a loose end in a strange house,
and then one's correspondence gets into arrears. Poor old Harry! What a
lively creature he was up at Trinity, to be sure!" Thus with a sigh dust
is committed to dust.

"What passions our friendships were!" said Thackeray to FitzGerald,
speaking of University days. There is a shadow of melancholy in the
saying, because it implies that for Thackeray at all events that kind
of glow had faded out of life. Perhaps--who knows?--he had accustomed
himself, with those luminous, observant, humorous eyes, to look too deep
into the heart of man, to study too closely and too laughingly the seamy
side, the strange contrast between man's hopes and his performances, his
dreams and his deeds. Ought one to be ashamed if that kind of generous
enthusiasm, that intensity of admiration, that vividness of sympathy die
out of one's heart? Is it possible to keep alive the warmth, the colour
of youth, suffusing all the objects near it with a lively and rosy glow?
Some few people seem to find it possible, and can add to it a kind of
rich tolerance, a lavish affectionateness, which pierces even deeper,
and sees even more clearly, than the old partial idealisation. Such a
large-hearted affection is found as a rule most often in people
whose lives have brought them into intimate connection with their
fellow-creatures--in priests, doctors, teachers, who see others not
in their guarded and superficial moments, but in hours of sharp and
poignant emotion. In many cases the bounds of sympathy narrow themselves
into the family and the home--because there only are men brought into an
intimate connection with human emotion; because to many people, and to
the Anglo-Saxon race in particular, emotional situations are a strain,
and only professional duty, which is a strongly rooted instinct in
the Anglo-Saxon temperament, keeps the emotional muscles agile and
responsive.

Another thing which tends to extinguish friendships is that many of the
people who desire to form them, and who do form them, wish to have
the pleasures of friendship without the responsibilities. In the
self-abandonment of friendship we become aware of qualities and strains
in the friend which we do not wholly like. One of the most difficult
things to tolerate in a friend are faults which are similar without
being quite the same. A common quality, for instance, in the Anglo-Saxon
race, is a touch of vulgarity, which is indeed the quality that makes
them practically successful. A great many Anglo-Saxon people have a
certain snobbishness, to give it a hard name; it is probably the poison
of the feudal system lurking in our veins. We admire success unduly;
we like to be respected, to have a definite label, to know the right
people.

I remember once seeing a friendship of a rather promising kind forming
between two people, one of whom had a touch of what I may call "county"
vulgarity, by which I mean an undue recognition of "the glories of our
birth and state." It was a deep-seated fault, and emerged in a form
which is not uncommon among people of that type--namely, a tendency
to make friends with people of rank, coupled with a constant desire to
detect snobbishness in other people. There is no surer sign of innate
vulgarity than that; it proceeds, as a rule, from a dim consciousness of
the fault, combined with the natural shame of a high-minded nature
for being subject to it. In this particular case the man in question
sincerely desired to resist the fault, but he could not avoid making
himself slightly more deferential, and consequently slightly more
agreeable, to persons of position. If he had not suffered from the
fault, he would never have given the matter a thought at all.

The other partner in the friendly enterprise had a touch of a different
kind of snobbishness--the middle-class professional snobbishness,
which pays an undue regard to success, and gravitates to effective
and distinguished people. As the friendship matured, each became
unpleasantly conscious of the other's defect, while remaining
unconscious of his own. The result was a perpetual little friction on
the point. If both could have been perfectly sincere, and could have
confessed their weakness frankly, no harm would have been done. But each
was so sincerely anxious to present an unblemished soul to the other's
view, that they could not arrive at an understanding on the point; each
desired to appear more disinterested than he was; and so, after coming
together to a certain extent--both were fine natures--the presence of
grit in the machinery made itself gradually felt, and the friendship
melted away. It was a case of each desiring the unalloyed pleasure of an
admiring friendship, without accepting the responsibility of discovering
that the other was not perfection, and bearing that discovery loyally
and generously. For this is the worst of a friendship that begins in
idealisation rather than in comradeship; and this is the danger of
all people who idealise. When two such come together and feel a mutual
attraction, they display instinctively and unconsciously the best
of themselves; but melancholy discoveries supervene; and then what
generally happens is that the idealising friend is angry with the other
for disappointing his hopes, not with himself for drawing an extravagant
picture.

Such friendships have a sort of emotional sensuality about them; and to
be dismayed by later discoveries is to decline upon Rousseau's vice of
handing in his babies to the Foundling Hospital, instead of trying to
bring them up honestly; what lies at the base of it is the indolent
shirking of the responsibilities for the natural consequences of
friendship. The mistake arises from a kind of selfishness, the
selfishness that thinks more of what it wants and desires to get, than
of taking what there is soberly and gratefully.

It is often said that it is the duty and privilege of a friend to warn
his friend faithfully against his faults. I believe that this is a
wholly mistaken principle. The essence of the situation is rather a
cordial partnership, of which the basis is liberty. What I mean
by liberty is not a freedom from responsibility, but an absence of
obligation. I do not, of course, mean that one is to take all one can
get and give as little as one likes, but rather that one must respect
one's friend enough--and that is implied in the establishment of the
relation--to abstain from directing him, unless he desires and asks for
direction. The telling of faults may be safely left to hostile critics,
and to what Sheridan calls "damned good-natured" acquaintances. But the
friend must take for granted that his friend desires, in a general way,
what is good and true, even though he may pursue it on different
lines. One's duty is to encourage and believe in one's friend, not to
disapprove of and to censure him. One loves him for what he is, not for
what he might be if he would only take one's advice. The point is that
it must be all a free gift, not a mutual improvement society--unless
indeed that is the basis of the compact. After all, a man can only feel
responsible to God. One goes astray, no doubt, like a sheep that is
lost; but it is not the duty of another sheep to butt one back into the
right way, unless indeed one appeals for help. One may have pastors
and directors, but they can never be equal friends. If there is to be
superiority in friendship, the lesser must willingly crown the greater;
the greater must not ask to be crowned. The secure friendship is
that which begins in comradeship, and moves into a more generous
and emotional region. Then there is no need to demand or to question
loyalty, because the tie has been welded by many a simple deed, many a
frank word. The ideal is a perfect frankness and sincerity, which
lays bare the soul as it is, without any false shame or any fear of
misunderstanding. A friendship of this kind can be one of the purest,
brightest, and strongest things in the world. Yet how rare it is! What
far oftener happens is that two people, in a sensitive and emotional
mood, are brought together. They begin by comparing experiences, they
search their memories for beautiful and suggestive things, and each
feels, "This nature is the true complement of my own; what light it
seems to shed on my own problems; how subtle, how appreciative it is!"
Then the process of discovery begins. Instead of the fair distant city,
all spires and towers, which we discerned in the distance in a sort
of glory, we find that there are crooked lanes, muddy crossings, dull
market-places, tiresome houses. Odd misshapen figures, fretful and
wearied, plod through the streets or look out at windows; here is a
ruin, with doleful creatures moping in the shade; we overturn a stone,
and blind uncanny things writhe away from the light. We begin to reflect
that it is after all much like other places, and that our fine
romantic view of it was due to some accident of light and colour, some
transfiguring mood of our own mind; and then we set out in search of
another city which we see crowning a hill on the horizon, and leave the
dull place to its own commonplace life. But to begin with comradeship is
to explore the streets and lanes first; and then day by day, as we go
up and down in the town, we become aware of its picturesqueness and
its charm; we realise that it has an intense and eager life of its own,
which we can share as a dweller, though we cannot touch it as a visitor;
and so the wonder grows, and the patient love of home. And we have
surprises, too: we enter a door in a wall that we have not seen before,
and we are in a shrine full of fragrant incense-smoke; the fallen day
comes richly through stained windows; figures move at the altar, where
some holy rite is being celebrated. The truth is that a friendship
cannot be formed in the spirit of a tourist, who is above all in search
of the romantic and the picturesque. Sometimes, indeed, the wandering
traveller may become the patient and contented inhabitant; but it is
generally the other way, and the best friendships are most often those
that seem at first sight dully made for us by habit and proximity, and
which reveal to us by slow degrees their beauty and their worth.


         *        *        *        *        *        *


Thus far had I written, when it came into my mind that I should like to
see the reflection of my beliefs in some other mind, to submit them to
the test of what I may perhaps be forgiven for calling a spirit-level!
And so I read my essay to two wise, kindly, and gracious ladies, who
have themselves often indeed graduated in friendship, and taken the
highest honours. I will say nothing of the tender courtesy with which
they made their head-breaking balms precious; I told them that I had not
finished my essay, and that before I launched upon my last antistrophe,
I wanted inspiration. I cannot here put down the phrases they used, but
I felt that they spoke in symbols, like two initiated persons, for whom
the corn and the wine and the oil of the sacrifice stand for very
secret and beautiful mysteries; but they said in effect that I had
been depicting, and not untruly, the outer courts and corridors of
friendship. What they told me of the inner shrine I shall presently
describe; but when I asked them to say whether they could tell me
instances of the best and highest kind of friendship, existing and
increasing and perfecting itself between two men, or between a man and a
woman, not lovers or wedded, they found a great difficulty in doing so.
We sifted our common experiences of friendships, and we could find but
one or two such, and these had somewhat lost their bloom. It came then
to this: that in the emotional region, many women, but very few men, can
form the highest kind of tie; and we agreed that men tended to find what
they needed in marriage, because they were rather interested in than
dependent upon personal emotion, and because practical life, as the
years went on--the life of causes, and movements, and organisations,
and ideas, and investigations--tended to absorb the energies of men; and
that they found their emotional life in home ties; and that the man who
lived for emotional relations would tend to be thought, if not to be, a
sentimentalist; but that the real secret lay with women, and with men
of perhaps a feminine fibre. And all this was transfused by a kind of
tender pity, without any touch of complacency or superiority, such as a
mother might have for the whispered hopes of a child who is lost in tiny
material dreams. But I gathered that there was a region in which the
heart could be entirely absorbed in a deep and beautiful admiration
for some other soul, and rejoice whole-heartedly in its nobleness and
greatness; so that no question of gaining anything, or even of being
helped to anything, came in, any more than one who has long been pent in
shadow and gloom and illness, and comes out for the first time into
the sun, thinks of any benefits that he may receive from the caressing
sunlight; he merely knows that it is joy and happiness and life to be
there, and to feel the warm light comfort him and make him glad; and all
this I had no difficulty in understanding, for I knew the emotion that
they spoke of, though I called it by a different name. I saw that it
was love indeed, but love infinitely purified, and with all the sense of
possession that mingles with masculine love subtracted from it; and how
such a relation might grow and increase, until there arose a sort of
secret and vital union of spirit, more real indeed than time and space,
so that, even if this were divorced and sundered by absence, or the
clouded mind, or death itself, there could be no shadow of doubt as to
the permanence of the tie; and a glance passed between the two as they
spoke, which made me feel like one who hears an organ rolling, and
voices rising in sweet harmonies inside some building, locked and
barred, which he may not enter. I could not doubt that the music was
there, while I knew that for some dulness or belatedness I was myself
shut out; not, indeed, that I doubted of the truth of what was said, but
I was in the position of the old saint who said that he believed, and
prayed to One to help his unbelief. For I saw that though I projected
the lines of my own experience infinitely, adding loyalty to loyalty,
and admiration to admiration, it was all on a different plane. This
interfusion of personality, this vital union of soul, I could not doubt
it! but it made me feel my own essential isolation still more deeply,
as when the streaming sunlight strikes warmth and glow out of the fire,
revealing crumbling ashes where a moment before had been a heart of
flame.


     "Ah te meae si partem animae rapit
      Maturior vis, quid moror altera?"--


"Ah, if the violence of fate snatch thee from me, thou half of my soul,
how can I, the other half, still linger here?" So wrote the old cynical,
worldly, Latin poet of his friend--that poet whom, for all his deftness
and grace, we are apt to accuse of a certain mundane heartlessness,
though once or twice there flickers up a sharp flame from the
comfortable warmth of the pile. Had he the secret hidden in his heart
all the time? If one could dream of a nearness like that, which doubts
nothing, and questions nothing, but which teaches the soul to move in as
unconscious a unison with another soul as one's two eyes move, so that
the brain cannot distinguish between the impressions of each, would not
that be worth the loss of all that we hold most sweet? We pay a price
for our qualities; the thistle cannot become the vine, or the oak the
rose, by admiration or desire. But we need not doubt of the divine
alchemy that gives good gifts to others, and denies them to ourselves.
And thus I can gratefully own that there are indeed these high mysteries
of friendship, and I can be glad to discern them afar off, as the
dweller on the high moorland, in the wind-swept farm, can see, far away
in the woodland valley, the smoke go up from happy cottage-chimneys,
nestled in leaves, and the spire point a hopeful finger up to heaven.
Life would be a poorer thing if we had all that we desired, and it is
permitted to hope that if we are faithful with our few things, we may be
made rulers over many things!




IV. HUMOUR


There is a pleasant story of a Cambridge undergraduate finding it
necessary to expound the four allegorical figures that crown the parapet
of Trinity Library. They are the Learned Muses, as a matter of fact.
"What are those figures, Jack?" said an ardent sister, labouring under
the false feminine impression that men like explaining things. "Those,"
said Jack, observing them for the first time in his life--"those are
Faith, Hope, and Charity, of course." "Oh! but there are FOUR of them,"
said the irrepressible fair one. "What is the other?" Jack, not to
be dismayed, gave a hasty glance; and, observing what may be called
philosophical instruments in the hands of the statue, said firmly, "that
is Geography." It made a charming quaternion.

I have often felt myself that the time has come to raise another figure
to the hierarchy of Christian Graces. Faith, Hope, and Charity, were
sufficient in a more elementary and barbarous age; but, now that
the world has broadened somewhat, I think an addition to the trio is
demanded. A man may be faithful, hopeful, and charitable, and yet leave
much to be desired. He may be useful, no doubt, with that equipment, but
he may also be both tiresome, and even absurd. The fourth quality that I
should like to see raised to the highest rank among Christian graces is
the Grace of Humour.

I do not think that Humour has ever enjoyed its due repute in the
ethical scale. The possession of it saves a man from priggishness; and
the possession of faith, hope, and charity does not. Indeed, not only
do these three virtues not save a man from priggishness--they sometimes
even plunge him in irreclaimable depths of superiority. I suppose that
when Christianity was first making itself felt in the world, the one
quality needful was a deep-seated and enthusiastic earnestness. There is
nothing that makes life so enjoyable as being in earnest. It is not
the light, laughter-loving, jocose people who have the best time in the
world. They have a chequered career. They skip at times upon the hills
of merriment, but they also descend gloomily at other times into the
valleys of dreariness. But the man who is in earnest is generally
neither merry nor dreary. He has not time to be either. The early
Christians, engaged in leavening the world, had no time for levity or
listlessness. A pioneer cannot be humorous. But now that the world is
leavened and Christian principles are theoretically, if not practically,
taken for granted, a new range of qualities comes in sight. By humour
I do not mean a taste for irresponsible merriment; for though humour is
not a necessarily melancholy thing, in this imperfect world the humorist
sighs as often as he smiles. What I mean by it is a keen perception of
the rich incongruities and absurdities of life, its undue solemnity, its
guileless pretentiousness. To be true humour, it must not be at all a
cynical thing--as soon as it becomes cynical, it loses all its natural
grace; it is an essentially tender-hearted quality, apt to find excuse,
ready to condone, eager to forgive. The possessor of it can never be
ridiculous, or heavy, or superior. Wit, of course, is a very small
province of humour: wit is to humour what lightning is to the electric
fluid--a vivid, bright, crackling symptom of it in certain conditions;
but a man may be deeply and essentially humorous, and never say a witty
thing in his life. To be witty, one has to be fanciful, intellectual,
deft, light-hearted; and the humorist need be none of these things.

In religion, the absence of a due sense of humour has been the cause of
some of our worst disasters. All rational people know that what has done
most to depress and discount religion is ecclesiasticism. The spirit of
ecclesiasticism is the spirit that confuses proportions, that loves what
is unimportant, that hides great principles under minute rules, that
sacrifices simplicity to complexity, that adores dogma, and definition,
and labels of every kind, that substitutes the letter for the spirit.
The greatest misfortune that can befall religion is that it should
become logical, that it should evolve a reasoned system from
insufficient data; but humour abhors logic, and cannot pin its faith on
insecure deductions. The heaviest burden which religion can have to
bear is the burden of tradition, and humour is the determined foe of
everything that is conventional and traditional. The Pharisaical spirit
loves precedent and authority; the humorous spirit loves all that is
swift and shifting and subversive and fresh. One of the reasons why the
orthodox heaven is so depressing a place is that there seems to be no
room in it for laughter; it is all harmony and meekness, sanctified by
nothing but the gravest of smiles. What wonder that humanity is dejected
at the thought of an existence from which all possibility of innocent
absurdity and kindly mirth is subtracted--the only things which have
persistently lightened and beguiled the earthly pilgrimage! That is why
the death of a humorous person has so deep an added tinge of melancholy
about it, because it is apt to seem indecorous to think of what was his
most congenial and charming trait still finding scope for its exercise.
We are never likely to be able to tolerate the thought of Death, while
we continue to think of it as a thing which will rob humanity of some of
its richest and most salient characteristics.

Even the ghastly humour of Milton is a shade better than this. It will
be remembered that he makes the archangel say to Adam that astronomy
has been made by the Creator a complicated subject, in order that the
bewilderment of scientific men may be a matter of entertainment to Him!


               "He His fabric of the Heavens
     Hath left to their disputes, perhaps to move
     His laughter at their quaint opinions wide."


Or, again, we may remember the harsh contortions of dry cachinnation
indulged in by the rebel spirits, when they have succeeded in toppling
over with their artillery the armed hosts of Seraphim. Milton certainly
did not intend to subtract all humour from the celestial regions. The
only pity was that he had not himself emerged beyond the childish stage,
which finds its deepest amusement in the disasters and catastrophes of
stately persons.

It may be asked whether we have any warrant in the Gospel for the
Christian exercise of humour. I have no doubt of it myself. The image of
the children in the market-place who cannot get their peevish companions
to join in games, whether merry or mournful, as illustrating the
attitude of the Pharisees who blamed John the Baptist for asceticism and
Christ for sociability, is a touch of real humour; and the story of the
importunate widow with the unjust judge, who betrayed so naively his
principle of judicial action by saying "Though I fear not God, neither
regard men, yet will I avenge this widow, lest by her continual coming
she weary me," must--I cannot believe otherwise--have been intended to
provoke the hearers' mirth. There is not, of course, any superabundance
of such instances, but Christ's reporters were not likely to be on the
look-out for sayings of this type. Yet I find it impossible to believe
that One who touched all the stops of the human heart, and whose stories
are among the most beautiful and vivid things ever said in the world,
can have exercised His unequalled power over human nature without
allowing His hearers to be charmed by many humorous and incisive
touches, as well as by more poetical and emotional images. No one has
ever swayed the human mind in so unique a fashion, without holding in
his hand all the strings that move and stir the faculties of delighted
apprehension; and of these faculties humour is one of the foremost.
The amazing lightness of Christ's touch upon life, the way in which His
words plumbed the depths of personality, make me feel abundantly sure
that there was no dreary sense of overwhelming seriousness in His
relations with His friends and disciples. Believing as we do that He was
Perfect Man, we surely cannot conceive of one of the sweetest and most
enlivening of all human qualities as being foreign to His character.

Otherwise there is little trace of humour in the New Testament. St.
Paul, one would think, would have had little sympathy with humorists. He
was too fiery, too militant, too much preoccupied with the working out
of his ideas, to have the leisure or the inclination to take stock of
humanity. Indeed I have sometimes thought that if he had had some touch
of the quality, he might have given a different bias to the faith; his
application of the method which he had inherited from the Jewish school
of theology, coupled with his own fervid rhetoric, was the first step,
I have often thought, in disengaging the Christian development from the
simplicity and emotion of the first unclouded message, in transferring
the faith from the region of pure conduct and sweet tolerance into a
province of fierce definition and intellectual interpretation.

I think it was Goethe who said that Greek was the sheath into which
the dagger of the human mind fitted best; and it is true that one finds
among the Greeks the brightest efflorescence of the human mind. Who
shall account for that extraordinary and fragrant flower, the flower of
Greek culture, so perfect in curve and colour, in proportion and scent,
opening so suddenly, in such a strange isolation, so long ago, upon the
human stock? The Greeks had the wonderful combination of childish zest
side by side with mature taste; charis, as they called it--a perfect
charm, an instinctive grace--was the mark of their spirit. And we should
naturally expect to find, in their literature, the same sublimation of
humour that we find in their other qualities. Unfortunately the greater
number of their comedies are lost. Of Menander we have but a few tiny
fragments, as it were, of a delectable vase; but in Aristophanes there
is a delicious levity, an incomparable prodigality of laughter-moving
absurdities, which has possibly never been equalled. Side by side
with that is the tender and charming irony of Plato, who is even more
humorous, if less witty, than Aristophanes. But the Greeks seem to have
been alone in their application of humour to literature. In the older
world literature tended to be rather a serious, pensive, stately thing,
concerned with human destiny and artistic beauty. One searches in vain
for humour in the energetic and ardent Roman mind. Their very comedies
were mostly adaptations from the Greek. I have never myself been able to
discern the humour of Terence or Plautus to any great extent. The humour
of the latter is of a brutal and harsh kind; and it has always been a
marvel to me that Luther said that the two books he would take to be his
companions on a desert island would be Plautus and the Bible. Horace and
Martial have a certain deft appreciation of human weakness, but it is
of the nature of smartness rather than of true humour--the wit of the
satirist rather; and then the curtain falls on the older world. When
humour next makes its appearance, in France and England pre-eminently,
we realise that we are in the presence of a far larger and finer
quality; and now we have, so to speak, whole bins full of liquors,
of various brands and qualities, from the mirthful absurdities of the
English, the pawky gravity of the Scotch, to the dry and sparkling
beverage of the American. To give an historical sketch of the growth and
development of modern Humour would be a task that might well claim
the energies of some literary man; it seems to me surprising that some
German philosopher has not attempted a scientific classification of the
subject. It would perhaps be best done by a man without appreciation of
humour, because only then could one hope to escape being at the mercy
of preferences; it would have to be studied purely as a phenomenon,
a symptom of the mind; and nothing but an overwhelming love of
classification would carry a student past the sense of its unimportance.
But here I would rather attempt not to find a formula or a definition
for humour, but to discover what it is, like argon, by eliminating other
characteristics, until the evasive quality alone remains.

It lies deep in nature. The peevish mouth and the fallen eye of the
plaice, the helpless rotundity of the sunfish, the mournful gape and
rolling glance of the goldfish, the furious and ineffective mien of
the barndoor fowl, the wild grotesqueness of the babyroussa and the
wart-hog, the crafty solemn eye of the parrot,--if such things as these
do not testify to a sense of humour in the Creative Spirit, it is hard
to account for the fact that in man a perception is implanted which
should find such sights pleasurably entertaining from infancy upwards.
I suppose the root of the matter is that, insensibly comparing these
facial attributes with the expression of humanity, one credits the
animals above described with the emotions which they do not necessarily
feel; yet even so it is hard to analyse, because grotesque exaggerations
of human features, which are perfectly normal and natural, seem
calculated to move the amusement of humanity quite instinctively. A
child is apt to be alarmed at first by what is grotesque, and, when once
reassured, to find in it a matter of delight. Perhaps the mistake we
make is to credit the Creative Spirit with human emotions; but, on the
other hand, it is difficult to see how complex emotions, not connected
with any material needs and impulses, can be found existing in
organisms, unless the same emotions exist in the mind of their Creator.
If the thrush bursts into song on the bare bush at evening, if the
child smiles to see the bulging hairy cactus, there must be, I think,
something joyful and smiling at the heart, the inmost cell of nature,
loving beauty and laughter; indeed, beauty and mirth must be the natural
signs of health and content. And then there strike in upon the mind two
thoughts. Is, perhaps, the basis of humour a kind of selfish security?
Does one primarily laugh at all that is odd, grotesque, broken, ill at
ease, fantastic, because such things heighten the sense of one's own
health and security? I do not mean that this is the flower of modern
humour; but is it not, perhaps, the root? Is not the basis of laughter
perhaps the purely childish and selfish impulse to delight, not in
the sufferings of others, but in the sense which all distorted things
minister to one--that one is temporarily, at least, more blest than
they? A child does not laugh for pure happiness--when it is happiest, it
is most grave and solemn; but when the sense of its health and soundness
is brought home to it poignantly, then it laughs aloud, just as
it laughs at the pleasant pain of being tickled, because the tiny
uneasiness throws into relief its sense of secure well-being.

And the further thought--a deep and strange one--is this: We see how all
mortal things have a certain curve or cycle of life--youth, maturity,
age. May not that law of being run deeper still? we think of nature
being ever strong, ever young, ever joyful; but may not the very shadow
of sorrow and suffering in the world be the sign that nature too grows
old and weary? May there have been a dim age, far back beyond history or
fable or scientific record, when she, too, was young and light-hearted?
The sorrows of the world are at present not like the sorrows of age, but
the sorrows of maturity. There is no decrepitude in the world: its heart
is restless, vivid, and hopeful yet; its melancholy is as the melancholy
of youth--a melancholy deeply tinged with beauty; it is full of
boundless visions and eager dreams; though it is thwarted, it believes
in its ultimate triumph; and the growth of humour in the world may be
just the shadow of hard fact falling upon the generous vision, for that
is where humour resides; youth believes glowingly that all things
are possible, but maturity sees that to hope is not to execute, and
acquiesces smilingly in the incongruity between the programme and the
performance.

Humour resides in the perception of limitation, in discerning how often
the conventional principle is belied by the actual practice. The old
world was full of a youthful sense of its own importance; it held that
all things were created for man--that the flower was designed to yield
him colour and fragrance, that the beast of the earth was made to give
him food and sport. This philosophy was summed up in the phrase that man
was the measure of all things; but now we have learnt that man is but
the most elaborate of created organisms, and that just as there was a
time when man did not exist, so there may be a time to come when beings
infinitely more elaborate may look back to man as we look back to
trilobites--those strange creatures, like huge wood-lice, that were
in their day the glory and crown of creation. Perhaps our dreams of
supremacy and finality may be in reality the absurdest things in the
world for their pomposity and pretentiousness. Who can say?

But to retrace our steps awhile. It seems that the essence of humour
is a certain perception of incongruity. Let us take a single instance.
There is a story of a drunken man who was observed to feel his way
several times all round the railings of a London square, with the
intention apparently of finding some way of getting in. At last he sat
down, covered his face with his hands, and burst into tears, saying,
with deep pathos, "I am shut in!" In a sense it was true: if the rest
of the world was his prison, and the garden of the square represented
liberty, he was undoubtedly incarcerated. Or, again, take the story
of the Scotchman returning from a convivial occasion, who had jumped
carefully over the shadows of the lamp-posts, but on coming to the
shadow of the church-tower, ruefully took off his boots and stockings,
and turned his trousers up, saying, "I'll ha'e to wade." The reason
why the stories of drunken persons are often so indescribably humorous,
though, no doubt, highly deplorable in a Christian country, is that the
victim loses all sense of probability and proportion, and laments
unduly over an altogether imaginary difficulty. The appreciation of such
situations is in reality the same as the common and barbarous form of
humour, of which we have already spoken, which consists in being amused
at the disasters which befall others. The stage that is but slightly
removed from the lowest stage is the theory of practical jokes, the
humour of which is the pleasure of observing the actions of a person
in a disagreeable predicament which is not so serious as the victim
supposes. And thus we get to the region illustrated by the two stories
I have told, where the humour lies in the observation of one in a
predicament that appears to be of a tragic character, when the
tragic element is purely imaginary. And so we pass into the region of
intellectual humour, which may be roughly illustrated by such sayings as
that of George Sand that nothing is such a restorative as rhetoric,
or the claim advanced by a patriot that Shakespeare was undoubtedly a
Scotchman, on the ground that his talents would justify the supposition.
The humour of George Sand's epigram depends upon the perception that
rhetoric, which ought to be based upon a profound conviction, an
overwhelming passion, an intense enthusiasm, is often little more than
the abandonment of a personality to a mood of intoxicating ebullience;
while the humour of the Shakespeare story lies in a sense of the way in
which a national predilection will override all reasonable evidence.

It will be recognised how much of our humour depends upon our keen
perception of the weaknesses and imperfections of other nationalities. A
great statesman once said that if a Scotchman applied for a post and
was unsuccessful, his one object became to secure the post for another
Scotchman; while if an Irishman made an unsuccessful application, his
only aim was to prevent any other Irishman from obtaining the post. That
is a humorous way of contrasting the jealous patriotism of the Scot with
the passionate individualism of the Celt. The curious factor of this
species of humour is that we are entirely unable to recognise the
typicality of the caricatures which other nations draw of ourselves. A
German fails to recognise the English idea of the German as a man who,
after a meal of gigantic proportions and incredible potations, among the
smoke of endless cigars, will discuss the terminology of the absolute,
and burst into tears over a verse of poetry or a strain of music.
Similarly the Englishman cannot divine what is meant by the Englishman
of the French stage, with his long whiskers, his stiff pepper-and-salt
clothes, walking arm-in-arm with a raw-boned wife, short-skirted and
long-toothed, with a bevy of short-skirted and long-toothed daughters
walking behind.

But if it requires a robust humorist to perceive the absurdity of his
own nation, what intensity of humour is required for a man to see the
absurdity of himself! To acquiesce in appearing ridiculous is the height
of philosophy. We are glad enough to amuse other people intentionally,
but how many men does one know who do not resent amusing other people
unintentionally? Yet if one were a true philanthropist, how delighted we
ought to be to afford to others a constant feast of innocent and joyful
contemplation.

But the fact which emerges from all these considerations is the fact
that we do not give humour its place of due dignity in the moral and
emotional scale. The truth is that we in England have fallen into a
certain groove of humour of late, the humour of paradox. The formula
which lies at the base of our present output of humour is the formula,
"Whatever is, is wrong." The method has been over-organised, and the
result is that humour can be manufactured in unlimited quantities. The
type of such humour is the saying of the humorist that he went about
the world with one dread constantly hanging over him--"the dread of not
being misunderstood." I would not for a moment deny the quality of such
humour, but it grows vapid and monotonous. It is painful to observe the
clever young man of the present day, instead of aiming at the expression
of things beautiful and emotional, which he is often well equipped to
produce, with all the charm of freshness and indiscretion, turn aside
to smart writing of a cynical type, because he cannot bear to be thought
immature. He wants to see the effect of his cleverness, and the envious
smile of the slower-witted is dearer to him than the secret kindling of
a sympathetic mind. Real humour is a broader and a deeper thing, and it
can hardly be attained until a man has had some acquaintance with the
larger world; and that very experience, in natures that are emotional
rather than patient, often tends to extinguish humour, because of the
knowledge that life is really rather too sad and serious a business
to afford amusement. The man who becomes a humorist is the man who
contrives to retain a certain childlike zest and freshness of mind side
by side with a large and tender tolerance. This state of mind is not one
to be diligently sought after. The humorist nascitur non fit. One sees
young men of irresponsible levity drawn into the interest of a cause or
a profession, and we say sadly of them that they have lost their sense
of humour. They are probably both happier and more useful for having
lost it. The humorist is seldom an apostle or a leader. But one does
occasionally find a man of real genius who adds to a deep and vital
seriousness a delightful perception of the superficial absurdities of
life; who is like a river, at once strong and silent beneath, with
sunny ripples and bright water-breaks upon the surface. Most men must be
content to flow turbid and sullen, turning the mills of life or bearing
its barges; others may dash and flicker through existence, like a
shallow stream. Perhaps, indeed, it may be said that to be a real
humorist there must be a touch of hardness somewhere, a bony carapace,
because we seldom see one of very strong and ardent emotions who is a
true humorist; and this is, I suppose, the reason why women, as a rule,
are so far less humorous than men. We have to pay a price for our good
qualities; and though I had rather be strong, affectionate, loyal,
noble-minded, than be the best humorist in the world, yet if a gift
of humour be added to these graces, you have a combination that is
absolutely irresistible, because you have a perfect sense of proportion
that never allows emotion to degenerate into gush, or virtue into
rigidity; and thus I say that humour is a kind of divine and crowning
grace in a character, because it means an artistic sense of proportion,
a true and vital tolerance, a power of infinite forgiveness.




V. TRAVEL


There are many motives that impel us to travel, to change our sky, as
Horace calls it--good motives and bad, selfish and unselfish, noble
and ignoble. With some people it is pure restlessness; the tedium of
ordinary life weighs on them, and travel, they think, will distract
them; people travel for the sake of health, or for business reasons, or
to accompany some one else, or because other people travel. And these
motives are neither good nor bad, they are simply sufficient. Some
people travel to enlarge their minds, or to write a book; and the worst
of travelling for such reasons is that it so often implants in the
traveller, when he returns, a desperate desire to enlarge other
people's minds too. Unhappily, it needs an extraordinary gift of vivid
description and a tactful art of selection to make the reflections of
one's travels interesting to other people. It is a great misfortune for
biographers that there are abundance of people who are stirred, partly
by unwonted leisure and partly by awakened interest, to keep a diary
only when they are abroad. These extracts from diaries of foreign
travel, which generally pour their muddy stream into a biography on the
threshold of the hero's manhood, are things to be resolutely skipped.
What one desires in a biography is to see the ordinary texture of a
man's life, an account of his working days, his normal hours; and to
most people the normal current of their lives appears so commonplace and
uninteresting that they keep no record of it; while they often keep
an elaborate record of their impressions of foreign travel, which
are generally superficial and picturesque, and remarkably like the
impressions of all other intelligent people. A friend of mine returned
the other day from an American tour, and told me that he received
a severe rebuke, out of the mouth of a babe, which cured him of
expatiating on his experiences. He lunched with his brother soon after
his return, and was holding forth with a consciousness of brilliant
descriptive emphasis, when his eldest nephew, aged eight, towards the
end of the meal, laid down his spoon and fork, and said piteously to
his mother, "Mummy, I MUST talk; it does make me so tired to hear Uncle
going on like that." A still more effective rebuke was administered by a
clever lady of my acquaintance to a cousin of hers, a young lady who
had just returned from India, and was very full of her experiences.
The cousin had devoted herself during breakfast to giving a lively
description of social life in India, and was preparing to spend the
morning in continuing her lecture, when the elder lady slipped out of
the room, and returned with some sermon-paper, a blotting-book, and a
pen. "Maud," she said, "this is too good to be lost: you must write it
all down, every word!" The projected manuscript did not come to very
much, but the lesson was not thrown away.

Perhaps, for most people, the best results of travel are that they
return with a sense of grateful security to the familiar scene: the
monotonous current of life has been enlivened, the old relationships
have gained a new value, the old gossip is taken up with a comfortable
zest; the old rooms are the best, after all; the homely language is
better than the outlandish tongue; it is a comfort to have done with
squeezing the sponge and cramming the trunk: it is good to be at home.

But to people of more cultivated and intellectual tastes there is an
abundance of good reasons for the pursuit of impressions. It is worth
a little fatigue to see the spring sun lie softly upon the unfamiliar
foliage, to see the delicate tints of the purple-flowered Judas-tree,
the bright colours of Southern houses, the old high-shouldered chateau
blinking among its wooded parterres; it is pleasant to see mysterious
rites conducted at tabernacled altars, under dark arches, and to
smell the "thick, strong, stupefying incense-smoke"; to see well-known
pictures in their native setting, to hear the warm waves of the canal
lapping on palace-stairs, with the exquisite moulded cornice overhead.
It gives one a strange thrill to stand in places rich with dim
associations, to stand by the tombs of heroes and saints, to see the
scenes made familiar by art or history, the homes of famous men. Such
travel is full of weariness and disappointment. The place one had
desired half a lifetime to behold turns out to be much like other
places, devoid of inspiration. A tiresome companion casts dreariness
as from an inky cloud upon the mind. Do I not remember visiting the
Palatine with a friend bursting with archaeological information, who led
us from room to room, and identified all by means of a folding plan, to
find at the conclusion that he had begun at the wrong end, and that even
the central room was not identified correctly, because the number of
rooms was even, and not odd?

But, for all that, there come blessed unutterable moments, when the mood
and the scene and the companion are all attuned in a soft harmony. Such
moments come back to me as I write. I see the mouldering brickwork of
a crumbling tomb all overgrown with grasses and snapdragons, far out in
the Campagna; or feel the plunge of the boat through the reed-beds of
the Anapo, as we slid into the silent pool of blue water in the heart of
the marsh, where the sand danced at the bottom, and the springs bubbled
up, while a great bittern flew booming away from a reedy pool hard by.
Such things are worth paying a heavy price for, because they bring a
sort of aerial distance into the mind, they touch the spirit with a
hope that the desire for beauty and perfection is not, after all, wholly
unrealisable, but that there is a sort of treasure to be found even upon
earth, if one diligently goes in search of it.

Of one thing, however, I am quite certain, and that is that travel
should not be a feverish garnering of impressions, but a delicious and
leisurely plunge into a different atmosphere. It is better to visit few
places, and to become at home in each, than to race from place to place,
guide-book in hand. A beautiful scene does not yield up its secrets to
the eye of the collector. What one wants is not definite impressions but
indefinite influences. It is of little use to enter a church, unless one
tries to worship there, because the essence of the place is worship, and
only through worship can the secret of the shrine be apprehended. It
is of little use to survey a landscape, unless one has an overpowering
desire to spend the remainder of one's days there; because it is the
life of the place, and not the sight of it, in which one desires to have
a part. Above all, one must not let one's memories sleep as in a dusty
lumber-room of the mind. In a quiet firelit hour one must draw near, and
scrutinise them afresh, and ask oneself what remains. As I write, I open
the door of my treasury and look round. What comes up before me? I see
an opalescent sky, and the great soft blue rollers of a sapphire sea. I
am journeying, it seems, in no mortal boat, though it was a commonplace
vessel enough at the time, twenty years ago, and singularly destitute of
bodily provision. What is that over the sea's rim, where the tremulous,
shifting, blue line of billows shimmers and fluctuates? A long, low
promontory, and in the centre, over white clustered houses and masts
of shipping, rises a white dome like the shrine of some celestial city.
That is Cadiz for me. I dare say the picture is all wrong, and I shall
be told that Cadiz has a tower and is full of factory chimneys; but
for me the dome, ghostly white, rises as though moulded out of a single
pearl, upon the shifting edges of the haze. Whatever I have seen in my
life, that at least is immortal.

Or again the scene shifts, and now I stumble to the deck of another
little steamer, very insufficiently habited, in the sharp freshness
of the dawn of a spring morning. The waves are different here--not the
great steely league-long rollers of the Atlantic, but the sharp azure
waves, marching in rhythmic order, of the Mediterranean; what is the
land, with grassy downs and folded valleys falling to grey cliffs, upon
which the brisk waves whiten and leap? That is Sicily; and the thought
of Theocritus, with the shepherd-boy singing light-heartedly upon the
headland a song of sweet days and little eager joys, comes into my heart
like wine, and brings a sharp touch of tears into the eyes. Theocritus!
How little I thought, as I read the ugly brown volume with its yellow
paper, in the dusty schoolroom at Eton ten years before, that it was
going to mean that to me, sweetly as even then, in a moment torn from
the noisy tide of schoolboy life, came the pretty echoes of the song
into a little fanciful and restless mind! But now, as I saw those
deserted limestone crags, that endless sheep-wold, with no sign of a
habitation, rising and falling far into the distance, with the fresh
sea-breeze upon my cheek--there came upon me that tender sorrow for all
the beautiful days that are dead, the days when the shepherds walked
together, exulting in youth and warmth and good-fellowship and song, to
the village festival, and met the wandering minstrel, with his coat of
skin and his kind, ironical smile, who gave them, after their halting
lays, a touch of the old true melody from a master's hand. What do all
those old and sweet dreams mean for me, the sunlight that breaks on the
stream of human souls, flowing all together, alike through dark rocks
where the water chafes and thunders, and spreading out into tranquil
shining reaches, where the herons stand half asleep? What does that
strange drift of kindred spirits, moving from the unknown to the
unknown, mean for me? I only know that it brings into my mind a strange
yearning, and a desire of almost unearthly sweetness for all that is
delicate and beautiful and full of charm, together with a sombre pity
for the falling mist of tears, the hard discipline of the world, the
cries of anguish, as life lapses from the steep into the silent tide of
death.

Or, again, I seem once more to sit in the balcony of a house that looks
out towards Vesuvius. It is late; the sky is clouded, the air is still;
a grateful coolness comes up from acre after acre of gardens climbing
the steep slope; a fluttering breeze, that seems to have lost his way
in the dusk, comes timidly and whimsically past, like Ariel, singing
as soft as a far-off falling sea in the great pine overhead, making a
little sudden flutter in the dry leaves of the thick creeper; like Ariel
comes that dainty spirit of the air, laden with balmy scents and cool
dew. A few lights twinkle in the plain below. Opposite, the sky has an
added blackness, an impenetrability of shade; but what is the strange
red eye of light that hangs between earth and heaven? And, stranger
still, what is that phantasmal gleam of a lip of crags high in the air,
and that mysterious, moving, shifting light, like a pale flame,
above it? The gloomy spot is a rent in the side of Vesuvius where the
smouldering heat has burnt through the crust, and where a day or two
before I saw a viscid stream of molten liquor, with the flames playing
over it, creeping, creeping through the tunnelled ashes; and in the
light above is the lip of Vesuvius itself, with its restless furnace at
work, casting up a billowy swell of white oily smoke, while the glare of
the fiery pit lights up the underside of the rising vapours. A ghastly
manifestation, that, of sleepless and stern forces, ever at work upon
some eternal and bewildering task; and yet so strangely made am I, that
these fierce signal-fires, seen afar, but blend with the scents of the
musky alleys for me into a thrill of unutterable wonder.

There are hundreds of such pictures stored in my mind, each stamped upon
some sensitive particle of the brain, that cannot be obliterated, and
each of which the mind can recall at will. And that, too, is a fact of
surpassing wonder: what is the delicate instrument that registers, with
no seeming volition, these amazing pictures, and preserves them thus
with so fantastic a care, retouching them, fashioning them anew,
detaching from the picture every sordid detail, till each is as a lyric,
inexpressible, exquisite, too fine for words to touch?

Now it is useless to dictate to others the aims and methods of travel:
each must follow his own taste. To myself the acquisition of knowledge
and information is in these matters an entirely negligible thing. To me
the one and supreme object is the gathering of a gallery of pictures;
and yet that is not a definite object either, for the whimsical and
stubborn spirit refuses to be bound by any regulations in the matter.
It will garner up with the most poignant care a single vignette, a
tiny detail. I see, as I write, the vision of a great golden-grey
carp swimming lazily in the clear pool of Arethusa, the carpet of
mesembryanthemum that, for some fancy of its own, chose to involve the
whole of a railway viaduct with its flaunting magenta flowers and its
fleshy leaves. I see the edge of the sea, near Syracuse, rimmed with a
line of the intensest yellow, and I hear the voice of a guide explaining
that it was caused by the breaking up of a stranded orange-boat, so that
the waves for many hundred yards threw up on the beach a wrack of fruit;
yet the same wilful and perverse mind will stand impenetrably dumb and
blind before the noblest and sweetest prospect, and decline to receive
any impression at all. What is perhaps the oddest characteristic of the
tricksy spirit is that it often chooses moments of intense discomfort
and fatigue to master some scene, and take its indelible picture. I
suppose that the reason of this is that the mind makes, at such moments,
a vigorous effort to protest against the tyranny of the vile body, and
to distract itself from instant cares.

But another man may travel for archaeological or even statistical
reasons. He may wish, like Ulysses, to study "manners, councils,
customs, governments." He may be preoccupied with questions of
architectural style or periods of sculpture. I have a friend who takes
up at intervals the study of the pictures of a particular master, and
will take endless trouble and undergo incredible discomfort, in order
to see the vilest daubs, if only he can make his list complete, and say
that he has seen all the reputed works of the master. This instinct
is, I believe, nothing but the survival of the childish instinct for
collecting, and though I can reluctantly admire any man who spares no
trouble to gain an end, the motive is dark and unintelligible to me.

There are some travellers, like Dean Stanley, who drift from the
appreciation of natural scenery into the pursuit of historical
associations. The story of Stanley as a boy, when he had his first sight
of the snowy Alps on the horizon, always delights me. He danced about
saying, "Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do?" But, in later days,
Stanley would not go a mile to see a view, while he would travel all
night to see a few stones of a ruin, jutting out of a farmyard wall, if
only there was some human and historical tradition connected with the
place. I do not myself understand that. I should not wish to see Etna
merely because Empedocles is supposed to have jumped down the crater,
nor the site of Jericho because the walls fell down at the trumpets
of the host. The only interest to me in an historical scene is that
it should be in such a condition as that one can to a certain extent
reconstruct the original drama, and be sure that one's eyes rest upon
very much the same scene as the actors saw. The reason why Syracuse
moved me by its acquired beauty, and not for its historical
associations, was because I felt convinced that Thucydides, who gives so
picturesque a description of the sea-fight, can never have set eyes on
the place, and must have embroidered his account from scanty hearsay.
But, on the other hand, there are few things in the world more
profoundly moving than to see a place where great thoughts have been
conceived and great books written, when one is able to feel that the
scene is hardly changed. The other day, as I passed before the
sacred gate of Rydal Mount, I took my hat off my head with a sense of
indescribable reverence. My companion asked me laughingly why I did so.
"Why?" I said. "From natural piety, of course! I know every detail here
as well as if I had lived here, and I have walked in thought a hundred
times with the poet, to and fro in the laurelled walks of the garden, up
the green shoulder of Nab Scar, and sat in the little parlour, while
the fire leapt on the hearth, and heard him 'booing' his verses, to be
copied by some friendly hand."

I thrill to see the stately rooms of Abbotsford, with all their sham
feudal decorations, the little staircase by which Scott stole away
to his solitary work, the folded clothes, the shapeless hat, the ugly
shoes, laid away in the glass case; the plantations where he walked with
his shrewd bailiff, the place where he stopped so often on the shoulder
of the slope, to look at the Eildon Hills, the rooms where he sat, a
broken and bereaved man, yet with so gallant a spirit, to wrestle with
sorrow and adversity. I wept, I am not ashamed to say, at Abbotsford, at
the sight of the stately Tweed rolling his silvery flood past lawns and
shrubberies, to think of that kindly, brave, and honourable heart, and
his passionate love of all the goodly and cheerful joys of life and
earth.

Or, again, it was a solemn day for me to pass from the humble tenement
where Coleridge lived, at Nether Stowey, before the cloud of sad habit
had darkened his horizon, and turned him away from the wells of poetry
into the deserts of metaphysical speculation, to find, if he could, some
medicine for his tortured spirit. I walked with a holy awe along the
leafy lanes to Alfoxden, where the beautiful house nestles in the
green combe among its oaks, thinking how here, and here, Wordsworth and
Coleridge had walked together in the glad days of youth, and planned,
in obscurity and secluded joy, the fresh and lovely lyrics of their
matin-prime.

I turn, I confess, more eagerly to scenes like these than to scenes of
historical and political tradition, because there hangs for me a glory
about the scene of the conception and genesis of beautiful imaginative
work that is unlike any glory that the earth holds. The natural joy of
the youthful spirit receiving the impact of mighty thoughts, of poignant
impressions, has for me a liberty and a grace which no historical or
political associations could ever possess. I could not glow to see
the room in which a statesman worked out the details of a Bill for the
extension of the franchise, or a modification of the duties upon imports
and exports, though I respect the growing powers of democracy and the
extinction of privilege and monopoly; but these measures are dimmed and
tainted with intrigue and manoeuvre and statecraft. I do not deny their
importance, their worth, their nobleness. But not by committees and
legislation does humanity triumph. In the vanguard go the blessed
adventurous spirits that quicken the moral temperature, and uplift the
banner of simplicity and sincerity. The host marches heavily behind, and
the commissariat rolls grumbling in the rear of all; and though my place
may be with the work-a-day herd, I will send my fancy afar among the
leafy valleys and the far-off hills of hope.

But I would not here quarrel with the taste of any man. If a mortal
chooses to travel in search of comfortable rooms, new cookery and wines,
the livelier gossip of unknown people, in heaven's name let him do so.
If another wishes to study economic conditions, standards of life,
rates of wages, he has my gracious leave for his pilgrimage. If another
desires to amass historical and archaeological facts, measurements
of hypaethral temples, modes of burial, folk-lore, fortification,
God forbid that I should throw cold water on the quest. But the only
traveller whom I recognise as a kindred spirit is the man who goes in
search of impressions and effects, of tone and atmosphere, of rare and
curious beauty, of uplifting association. Nothing that has ever moved
the interest, or the anxiety, or the care, or the wonder, of human
beings can ever wholly lose its charm. I have felt my skin prickle and
creep at the sight of that amazing thing in the Dublin museum, a section
dug bodily out of a claypit, and showing the rough-hewn stones of a
cist, deep in the earth, the gravel over it and around it, the roots
of the withered grass forming a crust many feet above, and, inside the
cist, the rude urn, reversed over a heap of charred ashes; it was not
the curiosity of the sight that moved me, but the thought of the old
dark life revealed, the dim and savage world, that was yet shot through
and pierced, even as now, with sorrow for death, and care for the
beloved ashes of a friend and chieftain. Such a sight sets a viewless
network of emotion, which seems to interlace far back into the ages,
all pulsating and stirring. One sees in a flash that humanity lived,
carelessly and brutally perhaps, as we too live, and were confronted, as
we are confronted, with the horror of the gap, the intolerable
mystery of life lapsing into the dark. Ah, the relentless record, the
impenetrable mystery! I care very little, I fear, for the historical
development of funereal rites, and hardly more for the light that such
things throw on the evolution of society. I leave that gratefully enough
to the philosophers. What I care for is the touch of nature that shows
me my ancient brethren of the dim past--who would have mocked and
ridiculed me, I doubt not, if I had fallen into their hands, and killed
me as carelessly as one throws aside the rind of a squeezed fruit--yet
I am one of them, and perhaps even something of their blood flows in my
veins yet.

As I grow older, I tend to travel less and less, and I do not care if
I never cross the Channel again. Is there a right and a wrong in the
matter, an advisability or an inadvisability, an expediency or an
inexpediency? I do not think so. Travelling is a pleasure, if it is
anything, and a pleasure pursued from a sense of duty is a very fatuous
thing. I have no good reason to give, only an accumulation of small
reasons. Dr. Johnson once said that any number of insufficient reasons
did not make a sufficient one, just as a number of rabbits did not make
a horse. A lively but misleading illustration: he might as well have
said that any number of sovereigns did not make a cheque for a hundred
pounds. I suppose that I do not like the trouble, to start with; and
then I do not like being adrift from my own beloved country. Then
I cannot converse in any foreign language, and half the pleasure of
travelling comes from being able to lay oneself alongside of a new point
of view. Then, too, I realise, as I grow older, how little I have really
seen of my own incomparably beautiful and delightful land, so that, like
the hero of Newman's hymn,


                 "I do not ask to see
     The distant scene; one step enough for me."


And, lastly, I have a reason which will perhaps seem a far-fetched one.
Travel is essentially a distraction, and I do not want to be distracted
any more. One of the mistakes that people make, in these Western
latitudes, is to be possessed by an inordinate desire to drown thought.
The aim of many men whom I know seems to me to be occupied in some
absolutely definite way, so that they may be as far as possible
unaware of their own existence. Anything to avoid reflection! A normal
Englishman does not care very much what the work and value of his
occupation is, as long as he is occupied; and I am not at all sure that
we came into the world to be occupied. Christ, in the Gospel story,
rebuked the busy Martha for her bustling anxieties, her elaborate
attentions to her guests, and praised the leisurely Mary for desiring to
sit and hear Him talk. Socrates spent his life in conversation. I do not
say that contemplation is a duty, but I cannot help thinking that we
are not forbidden to scrutinise life, to wonder what it is all about, to
study its problems, to apprehend its beauty and significance. We admire
a man who goes on making money long after he has made far more than he
needs; we think a life honourably spent in editing Greek books. Socrates
in one of Plato's dialogues quotes the opinion of a philosopher to the
effect that when a man has made enough to live upon, he should begin
to practise virtue. "I think he should begin even earlier," says the
interlocutor; and I am wholly in agreement with him. Travel is one of
the expedients to which busy men resort, in order that they may forget
their existence. I do not venture to think this exactly culpable, but I
feel sure that it is a pity that people do not do less and think more.
If a man asks what good comes from thinking, I can only retort by asking
what good comes from the multiplication of unnecessary activity. I am
quite as much at a loss as any one else to say what is the object of
life, but I do not feel any doubt that we are not sent into the world
to be in a fuss. Like the lobster in The Water-Babies, I cry, "Let me
alone; I want to think!" because I believe that that occupation is at
least as profitable as many others.

And then, too, without travelling more than a few miles from my door,
I can see things fully as enchanting as I can see by ranging Europe. I
went to-day along a well-known road; just where the descent begins to
fall into a quiet valley, there stands a windmill--not one of the ugly
black circular towers that one sometimes sees, but one of the old crazy
boarded sort, standing on a kind of stalk; out of the little
loopholes of the mill the flour had dusted itself prettily over the
weather-boarding. From a mysterious hatch half-way up leaned the miller,
drawing up a sack of grain with a little pulley. There is nothing so
enchanting as to see a man leaning out of a dark doorway high up in
the air. He drew the sack in, he closed the panel. The sails whirled,
flapping and creaking; and I loved to think of him in the dusty gloom,
with the gear grumbling among the rafters, tipping the golden grain into
its funnel, while the rattling hopper below poured out its soft stream
of flour. Beyond the mill, the ground sank to a valley; the roofs
clustered round a great church tower, the belfry windows blinking
solemnly. Hard by the ancient Hall peeped out from its avenue of elms.
That was a picture as sweet as anything I have ever seen abroad,
as perfect a piece of art as could be framed, and more perfect than
anything that could be painted, because it was a piece out of the old
kindly, quiet life of the world. One ought to learn, as the years flow
on, to love such scenes as that, and not to need to have the blood and
the brain stirred by romantic prospects, peaked hills, well-furnished
galleries, magnificent buildings: mutare animum, that is the secret, to
grow more hopeful, more alive to delicate beauties, more tender, less
exacting. Nothing, it is true, can give us peace; but we get nearer it
by loving the familiar scene, the old homestead, the tiny valley,
the wayside copse, than we do by racing over Europe on the track
of Giorgione, or over Asia in pursuit of local colour. After all,
everything has its appointed time. It is good to range in youth, to rub
elbows with humanity, and then, as the days go on, to take stock, to
remember, to wonder, "To be content with little, to serve beauty well."




VI. SPECIALISM


It is a very curious thing to reflect how often an old platitude or
axiom retains its vitality, long after the conditions which gave it
birth have altered, and it no longer represents a truth. It would
not matter if such platitudes only lived on dustily in vapid and
ill-furnished minds, like the vases of milky-green opaque glass
decorated with golden stars, that were the joy of Early Victorian
chimney-pieces, and now hold spills in the second-best spare bedroom.
But like the psalmist's enemies, platitudes live and are mighty. They
remain, and, alas! they have the force of arguments in the minds
of sturdy unreflective men, who describe themselves as plain,
straightforward people, and whose opinions carry weight in a community
whose feelings are swayed by the statements of successful men rather
than by the conclusions of reasonable men.

One of these pernicious platitudes is the statement that every one ought
to know something about everything and everything about something. It
has a speciously epigrammatic air about it, dazzling enough to persuade
the common-sense person that it is an intellectual judgment.

As a matter of fact, under present conditions, it represents an
impossible and even undesirable ideal. A man who tried to know something
about everything would end in knowing very little about anything; and
the most exhaustive programme that could be laid down for the most
erudite of savants nowadays would be that he should know anything about
anything, while the most resolute of specialists must be content with
knowing something about something.

A well-informed friend told me, the other day, the name and date of
a man who, he said, could be described as the last person who knew
practically everything at his date that was worth knowing. I have
forgotten both the name and the date and the friend who told me, but I
believe that the learned man in question was a cardinal in the sixteenth
century. At the present time, the problem of the accumulation of
knowledge and the multiplication of books is a very serious one indeed.
It is, however, morbid to allow it to trouble the mind. Like all
insoluble problems, it will settle itself in a way so obvious that the
people who solve it will wonder that any one could ever have doubted
what the solution would be, just as the problem of the depletion of the
world's stock of coal will no doubt be solved in some perfectly simple
fashion.

The dictum in question is generally quoted as an educational formula in
favour of giving every one what is called a sound general education.
And it is probably one of the contributory causes which account for the
present chaos of curricula. All subjects are held to be so important,
and each subject is thought by its professors to be so peculiarly
adapted for educational stimulus, that a resolute selection of subjects,
which is the only remedy, is not attempted; and accordingly the victim
of educational theories is in the predicament of the man described by
Dr. Johnson who could not make up his mind which leg of his breeches
he would put his foot into first. Meanwhile, said the Doctor, with a
directness of speech which requires to be palliated, the process of
investiture is suspended.

But the practical result of the dilemma is the rise of specialism. The
savant is dead and the specialist rules. It is interesting to try to
trace the effect of this revolution upon our national culture.

Now, I have no desire whatever to take up the cudgels against the
specialists: they are a harmless and necessary race, so long as they are
aware of their limitations. But the tyranny of an oligarchy is the
worst kind of tyranny, because it means the triumph of an average over
individuals, whereas the worst that can be said of a despotism is that
it is the triumph of an individual over an average. The tyranny of the
specialistic oligarchy is making itself felt to-day, and I should like
to fortify the revolutionary spirit of liberty, whose boast it is
to detest tyranny in all its forms, whether it is the tyranny of an
enlightened despot, or the tyranny of a virtuous oligarchy, or the
tyranny of an intelligent democracy.

The first evil which results from the rule of the specialist is the
destruction of the AMATEUR. So real a fact is the tyranny of the
specialist that the very word "amateur," which means a leisurely lover
of fine things, is beginning to be distorted into meaning an inefficient
performer. As an instance of its correct and idiomatic use, I often
think of the delightful landlord whom Stevenson encountered somewhere,
and upon whom he pressed some Burgundy which he had with him. The
generous host courteously refused a second glass, saying, "You see I
am an amateur of these things, and I am capable of leaving you
not sufficient." Now, I shall concern myself here principally with
literature, because, in England at all events, literature plays the
largest part in general culture. It may be said that we owe some of the
best literature we have to amateurs. To contrast a few names, taken at
random, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Dr. Johnson, De Quincey, Tennyson,
and Carlyle were professionals, it is true; but, on the other hand,
Milton, Gray, Boswell, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Shelley, Browning,
and Ruskin were amateurs. It is not a question of how much a man writes
or publishes, it is a question of the spirit in which a man writes.
Walter Scott became a professional in the last years of his life, and
for the noblest of reasons; but he also became a bad writer. A good pair
to contrast are Southey and Coleridge. They began as amateurs. Southey
became a professional writer, and his sun set in the mists of valuable
information. Coleridge, as an amateur, enriched the language with a
few priceless poems, and then got involved in the morass of dialectical
metaphysics. The point is whether a man writes simply because he cannot
help it, or whether he writes to make an income. The latter motive does
not by any means prevent his doing first-rate artistic work--indeed,
there are certain persons who seem to have required the stimulus of
necessity to make them break through an initial indolence of nature.
When Johnson found fault with Gray for having times of the year when
he wrote more easily, from the vernal to the autumnal equinox, he added
that a man could write at any time if he set himself doggedly to
it. True, no doubt! But to write doggedly is not to court favourable
conditions for artistic work. It may be a finer sight for a moralist to
see a man performing an appointed task heavily and faithfully, with grim
tenacity, than it is to see an artist in a frenzy of delight dashing
down an overpowering impression of beauty; but what has always hampered
the British appreciation of literature is that we cannot disentangle the
moral element from it: we are interested in morals, not in art, and we
require a dash of optimistic piety in all writing that we propose to
enjoy.

The real question is whether, if a man sets himself doggedly to work,
the appetite comes with eating, and whether the caged bird begins to
flutter its wings and to send out the song that it learnt in the green
heart of the wood. When Byron said that easy writing made damned hard
reading, he meant that careless conception and hasty workmanship tend
to blur the pattern and the colour of work. The fault of the amateur is
that he can make the coat, but he cannot be bothered to make it fit. But
it is not by any means true that hard writing makes easy reading. The
spirit of the amateur is the spirit of the lover, who trembles at the
thought that the delicate creature he loves may learn to love him in
return, if he can but praise her worthily. The professional spirit is
the spirit in which a man carefully and courteously woos an elderly
spinster for the sake of her comfortable fortune. The amateur has an
irresponsible joy in his work; he is like the golfer who dreams
of mighty drives, and practises "putting" on his back lawn: the
professional writer gives his solid hours to his work in a conscientious
spirit, and is glad in hours of freedom to put the tiresome business
away. Yet neither the amateur nor the professional can hope to capture
the spirit of art by joy or faithfulness. It is a kind of divine
felicity, when all is said and done, the kindly gift of God.

Now into this free wild world of art and literature and music comes
the specialist and pegs out his claim, fencing out the amateur, who is
essentially a rambler, from a hundred eligible situations. In literature
this is particularly the case: the amateur is told by the historian that
he must not intrude upon history; that history is a science, and not
a province of literature; that the time has not come to draw any
conclusions or to summarise any tendencies; that picturesque narrative
is an offence against the spirit of Truth; that no one is as black or as
white as he is painted; and that to trifle with history is to commit a
sin compounded of the sin of Ananias and Simon Magus. The amateur runs
off, his hands over his ears, and henceforth hardly dares even to
read history, to say nothing of writing it. Perhaps I draw too harsh
a picture, but the truth is that I did, as a very young man, with no
training except that provided by a sketchy knowledge of the classics,
once attempt to write an historical biography. I shudder to think of
my method and equipment; I skipped the dull parts, I left all tiresome
documents unread. It was a sad farrago of enthusiasm and levity and
heady writing. But Jove's thunder rolled and the bolt fell. A just
man, whom I have never quite forgiven, to tell the truth, told me with
unnecessary rigour and acrimony that I had made a pitiable exhibition
of myself. But I have thanked God ever since, for I turned to literature
pure and simple.

Then, too, it is the same with art-criticism; here the amateur again,
who, poor fool, is on the look-out for what is beautiful, is told that
he must not meddle with art unless he does it seriously, which
means that he must devote himself mainly to the study of inferior
masterpieces, and schools, and tendencies. In literature it is the same;
he must not devote himself to reading and loving great books, he must
disentangle influences; he must discern the historical importance of
writers, worthless in themselves, who form important links. In theology
and in philosophy it is much the same: he must not read the Bible and
say what he feels about it; he must unravel Rabbinical and Talmudic
tendencies; he must acquaint himself with the heretical leanings of a
certain era, and the shadow cast upon the page by apocryphal tradition.
In philosophy he is still worse off, because he must plumb the depths of
metaphysical jargon and master the criticism of methods.

Now, this is in a degree both right and necessary, because the blind
must not attempt to lead the blind; but it is treating the whole thing
in too strictly scientific a spirit for all that. The misery of it is
that the work of the specialist in all these regions tends to set a
hedge about the law; it tends to accumulate and perpetuate a vast amount
of inferior work. The result of it is, in literature, for instance,
that an immense amount of second-rate and third-rate books go on being
reprinted; and instead of the principle of selection being applied to
great authors, and their inferior writings being allowed to lapse into
oblivion, they go on being re-issued, not because they have any
direct value for the human spirit, but because they have a scientific
importance from the point of view of development. Yet for the ordinary
human being it is far more important that he should read great
masterpieces in a spirit of lively and enthusiastic sympathy than
that he should wade into them through a mass of archaeological and
philological detail. As a boy I used to have to prepare, on occasions,
a play of Shakespeare for a holiday task. I have regarded certain plays
with a kind of horror ever since, because one ended by learning up the
introduction, which concerned itself with the origin of the play, and
the notes which illustrated the meaning of such words as "kerns and
gallowglasses," and left the action and the poetry and the emotion
of the play to take care of themselves. This was due partly to the
blighting influence of examination-papers set by men of sterile,
conscientious brains, but partly to the terrible value set by British
minds upon correct information. The truth really is that if one begins
by caring for a work of art, one also cares to understand the medium
through which it is conveyed; but if one begins by studying the medium
first, one is apt to end by loathing the masterpiece, because of the
dusty apparatus that it seems liable to collect about itself.

The result of the influence of the specialist upon literature is that
the amateur, hustled from any region where the historical and scientific
method can be applied, turns his attention to the field of pure
imagination, where he cannot be interfered with. And this, I believe, is
one of the reasons why belles-lettres in the more precise sense tend to
be deserted in favour of fiction. Sympathetic and imaginative criticism
is so apt to be stamped upon by the erudite, who cry out so lamentably
over errors and minute slips, that the novel seems to be the only safe
vantage-ground in which the amateur may disport himself.

But if the specialist is to the amateur what the hawk is to the dove,
let us go further, and in a spirit of love, like Mr. Chadband, inquire
what is the effect of specialism on the mind of the specialist. I
have had the opportunity of meeting many specialists, and I say
unhesitatingly that the effect largely depends upon the natural
temperament of the individual. As a general rule, the great specialist
is a wise, kindly, humble, delightful man. He perceives that though he
has spent his whole life upon a subject or a fraction of a subject, he
knows hardly anything about it compared to what there is to know. The
track of knowledge glimmers far ahead of him, rising and falling like a
road over solitary downs. He knows that it will not be given to him to
advance very far upon the path, and he half envies those who shall come
after, to whom many things that are dark mysteries to himself will be
clear and plain. But he sees, too, how the dim avenues of knowledge
reach out in every direction, interlacing and combining, and when he
contrasts the tiny powers of the most subtle brain with all the wide
range of law--for the knowledge which is to be, not invented, but
simply discovered, is all assuredly there, secret and complex as it
seems--there is but little room for complacency or pride. Indeed,
I think that a great savant, as a rule, feels that instead of being
separated by his store of knowledge, as by a wide space that he has
crossed, from smaller minds, he is brought closer to the ignorant by the
presence of the vast unknown. Instead of feeling that he has soared like
a rocket away from the ground, he thinks of himself rather as a flower
might think whose head was an inch or two higher than a great company
of similar flowers; he has perhaps a wider view; he sees the bounding
hedgerow, the distant line of hills, whereas the humbler flower sees
little but a forest of stems and blooms, with the light falling dimly
between. And a great savant, too, is far more ready to credit other
people with a wider knowledge than they possess. It is the lesser kind
of savant, the man of one book, of one province, of one period, who is
inclined to think that he is differentiated from the crowd. The great
man is far too much preoccupied with real progress to waste time and
energy in showing up the mistakes of others. It is the lesser kind of
savant, jealous of his own reputation, anxious to show his superiority,
who loves to censure and deride the feebler brother. If one ever sees a
relentless and pitiless review of a book--an exposure, as it is called,
by one specialist of another's work--one may be fairly certain that the
critic is a minute kind of person. Again, the great specialist is never
anxious to obtrude his subject; he is rather anxious to hear what is
going on in other regions of mental activity, regions which he would
like to explore but cannot. It is the lesser light that desires to
dazzle and bewilder his company, to tyrannise, to show off. It is the
most difficult thing to get a great savant to talk about his subject,
though, if he is kind and patient, will answer unintelligent questions,
and help a feeble mind along, it is one of the most delightful things
in the world. I seized the opportunity some little while ago, on finding
myself sitting next to a great physicist, of asking him a series of
fumbling questions on the subject of modern theories of matter; for an
hour I stumbled like a child, supported by a strong hand, in a dim and
unfamiliar world, among the mysterious essences of things. I should like
to try to reproduce it here, but I have no doubt I should reproduce it
all wrong. Still, it was deeply inspiring to look out into chaos, to
hear the rush and motion of atoms, moving in vast vortices, to learn
that inside the hardest and most impenetrable of substances there was
probably a feverish intensity of inner motion. I do not know that I
acquired any precise knowledge, but I drank deep draughts of wonder
and awe. The great man, with his amused and weary smile, was infinitely
gentle, and left me, I will say, far more conscious of the beauty and
the holiness of knowledge. I said something to him about the sense of
power that such knowledge must give. "Ah!" he said, "much of what I have
told you is not proved, it is only suspected. We are very much in the
dark about these things yet. Probably if a physicist of a hundred years
hence could overhear me, he would be amazed to think that a sensible man
could make such puerile statements. Power--no, it is not that! It rather
makes one realise one's feebleness in being so uncertain about things
that are absolutely certain and precise in themselves, if we could
but see the truth. It is much more like the apostle who said, 'Lord, I
believe; help Thou my unbelief.' The thing one wonders at is the courage
of the men who dare to think they KNOW."

In one region I own that I dread and dislike the tyranny of the
specialist, and that is the region of metaphysical and religious
speculation. People who indulge themselves in this form of speculation
are apt to be told by theologians and metaphysicians that they ought
to acquaint themselves with the trend of theological and metaphysical
criticism. It seems to me like telling people that they must not ascend
mountains unless they are accompanied by guides, and have studied the
history of previous ascents. "Yes," the professional says, "that is just
what I mean; it is mere foolhardiness to attempt these arduous places
unless you know exactly what you are about."

To that I reply that no one is bound to go up hills, but that every
one who reflects at all is confronted by religious and philosophical
problems. We all have to live, and we are all more or less experts in
life. When one considers the infinite importance to every human spirit
of these problems, and when one further considers how very little
theologians and philosophers have ever effected in the direction of
enlightening us as to the object of life, the problem of pain and evil,
the preservation of identity after death, the question of necessity and
free-will, surely, to attempt to silence people on these matters because
they have not had a technical training is nothing more than an attempt
wilfully to suppress evidence on these points? The only way in which it
may be possible to arrive at the solution of these things is to know
how they appeal to and affect normal minds. I would rather hear the
experience of a life-long sufferer on the problem of pain, or of a
faithful lover on the mystery of love, or of a poet on the influence of
natural beauty, or of an unselfish and humble saint on the question of
faith in the unseen, than the evidence of the most subtle theologian or
metaphysician in the world. Many of us, if we are specialists in nothing
else, are specialists in life; we have arrived at a point of view; some
particular aspect of things has come home to us with a special force;
and what really enriches the hope and faith of the world is the
experience of candid and sincere persons. The specialist has often
had no time or opportunity to observe life; all he has observed is the
thought of other secluded persons, persons whose view has been both
narrow and conventional, because they have not had the opportunity of
correcting their traditional preconceptions by life itself.

I call, with all the earnestness that I can muster, upon all
intelligent, observant, speculative people, who have felt the problems
of life weigh heavily upon them, not to be dismayed by the disapproval
of technical students, but to come forward and tell us what conclusions
they have formed. The work of the trained specialist is essentially, in
religion and philosophy, a negative work. He can show us how erroneous
beliefs, which coloured the minds of men at certain ages and eras,
grew up. He can show us what can be disregarded, as being only the
conventional belief of the time; he can indicate, for instance, how a
false conception of supernatural interference with natural law grew up
in an age when, for want of trained knowledge, facts seemed fortuitous
occurrences which were really conditioned by natural laws. The poet
and the idealist make and cast abroad the great vital ideas, which the
specialist picks up and analyses. But we must not stop at analysis; we
want positive progress as well. We want people to tell us, candidly and
simply, how their own soul grew, how it cast off conventional beliefs,
how it justified itself in being hopeful or the reverse. There never was
a time when more freedom of thought and expression was conceded to the
individual. A man is no longer socially banned for being heretical,
schismatic, or liberal-minded. I want people to say frankly what real
part spiritual agencies or religious ideas have played in their lives,
whether such agencies and ideas have modified their conduct, or have
been modified by their inclinations and habits. I long to know a
thousand things about my fellow-men--how they bear pain, how they
confront the prospect of death, the hopes by which they live, the fears
that overshadow them, the stuff of their lives, the influence of their
emotions. It has long been thought, and it is still thought by many
narrow precisians, indelicate and egotistical to do this. And the result
is that we can find in books all the things that do not matter, while
the thoughts that are of deep and vital interest are withheld.

Such books as Montaigne's Essays, Rousseau's Confessions, Mrs. Carlyle's
Letters, Mrs. Oliphant's Memoirs, the Autobiography of B. R. Haydon, to
name but a few books that come into my mind, are the sort of books that
I crave for, because they are books in which one sees right into the
heart and soul of another. Men can confess to a book what they cannot
confess to a friend. Why should it be necessary to veil this essence
of humanity in the dreary melodrama, the trite incident of a novel or
a play? Things in life do not happen as they happen in novels or plays.
Oliver Twist, in real life, does not get accidentally adopted by his
grandfather's oldest friend, and commit his sole burglary in the
house of his aunt. We do not want life to be transplanted into trim
garden-plots; we want to see it at home, as it grows in all its native
wildness, on the one hand; and to know the idea, the theory, the
principle that underlie it on the other. How few of us there are who
MAKE our lives into anything! We accept our limitations, we drift with
them, while we indignantly assert the freedom of the will. The best
sermon in the world is to hear of one who has struggled with life, bent
or trained it to his will, plucked or rejected its fruit, but all upon
some principle. It matters little what we do; it matters enormously how
we do it. Considering how much has been said, and sung, and written, and
recorded, and prated, and imagined, it is strange to think how little
is ever told us directly about life; we see it in glimpses and flashes,
through half-open doors, or as one sees it from a train gliding into
a great town, and looks into back windows and yards sheltered from the
street. We philosophise, most of us, about anything but life; and one
of the reasons why published sermons have such vast sales is because,
however clumsily and conventionally, it is with life that they try to
deal.

This kind of specialising is not recognised as a technical form of it at
all, and yet how far nearer and closer and more urgent it is for us than
any other kind. I have a hope that we are at the beginning of an era of
plain-speaking in these matters. Too often, with the literary standard
of decorum which prevails, such self-revelations are brushed aside as
morbid, introspective, egotistical. They are no more so than any other
kind of investigation, for all investigation is conditioned by the
personality of the investigator. All that is needed is that an observer
of life should be perfectly candid and sincere, that he should not
speak in a spirit of vanity or self-glorification, that he should try to
disentangle what are the real motives that make him act or refrain from
acting.

As an instance of what I mean by confession of the frankest order,
dealing in this case not only with literature but also with morality,
let me take the sorrowful words which Ruskin wrote in his Praeterita, as
a wearied and saddened man, when there was no longer any need for him
to pretend anything, or to involve any of his own thoughts or beliefs in
any sort of disguise. He took up Shakespeare at Macugnaga, in 1840, and
he asks why the loveliest of Shakespeare's plays should be "all mixed
and encumbered with languid and common work--to one's best hope
spurious certainly, so far as original, idle and disgraceful--and all
so inextricably and mysteriously that the writer himself is not only
unknowable, but inconceivable; and his wisdom so useless, that at this
time of being and speaking, among active and purposeful Englishmen,
I know not one who shows a trace of ever having felt a passion of
Shakespeare's, or learnt a lesson from him."

That is of course the sad cry of one who is interested in life
primarily, and in art only so far as it can minister to life. It may be
strained and exaggerated, but how far more vital a saying than to
expand in voluble and vapid enthusiasm over the insight and nobleness
of Shakespeare, if one has not really felt one's life modified by that
mysterious mind!

Of course such self-revelation as I speak of will necessarily fall into
the hands of unquiet, dissatisfied, melancholy people. If life is a
common-place and pleasant sort of business, there is nothing particular
to say or to think about it. But for all those--and they are many--who
feel that life misses, by some blind, inevitable movement, being the
gracious and beautiful thing it seems framed to be, how can such as
these hold their peace? And how, except by facing it all, and looking
patiently and bravely at it, can we find a remedy for its sore
sicknesses? That method has been used, and used with success in every
other kind of investigation, and we must investigate life too, even
if it turns out to be all a kind of Mendelism, moved and swayed by
absolutely fixed laws, which take no account of what we sorrowfully
desire.

Let us, then, gather up our threads a little. Let us first confront the
fact that, under present conditions, in the face of the mass of records
and books and accumulated traditions, arts and sciences must make
progress little by little, line by line, in skilled technical hands.
Fine achievement in every region becomes more difficult every day,
because there is so much that is finished and perfected behind us; and
if the conditions of our lives call us to some strictly limited path,
let us advance wisely and humbly, step by step, without pride or vanity.
But let us not forget, in the face of the frigidities of knowledge,
that if they are the mechanism of life, emotion and hope and love and
admiration are the steam. Knowledge is only valuable in so far as it
makes the force of life effective and vigorous. And thus if we have
breasted the strange current of life, or even if we have been ourselves
overpowered and swept away by it, let us try, in whatever region we
have the power, to let that experience have some value for ourselves
and others. If we can say it or write it, so much the better. There
are thousands of people moving through the world who are wearied and
bewildered, and who are looking out for any message of hope and joy that
may give them courage to struggle on; but if we cannot do that, we can
at least live life temperately and cheerfully and sincerely: if we have
bungled, if we have slipped, we can do something to help others not to
go light-heartedly down the miry path; we can raise them up if they
have fallen, we can cleanse the stains, or we can at least give them the
comfort of feeling that they are not sadly and insupportably alone.




VII. OUR LACK OF GREAT MEN


It is often mournfully reiterated that the present age is not an age
of great men, and I have sometimes wondered if it is true. In the
first place I do not feel sure that an age is the best judge of its own
greatness; a great age is generally more interested in doing the things
which afterwards cause it to be considered great, than in wondering
whether it is great. Perhaps the fact that we are on the look-out for
great men, and complaining because we cannot find them, is the best
proof of our second-rateness; I do not imagine that the Elizabethan
writers were much concerned with thinking whether they were great or
not; they were much more occupied in having a splendid time, and in
saying as eagerly as they could all the delightful thoughts which came
crowding to the utterance, than in pondering whether they were worthy
of admiration. In the annals of the Renaissance one gets almost weary of
the records of brilliant persons, like Leo Battista Alberti and Leonardo
da Vinci, who were architects, sculptors, painters, musicians, athletes,
and writers all in one; who could make crowds weep by twanging a lute,
ride the most vicious horses, take standing jumps over the heads of tall
men, and who were, moreover, so impressionable that books were to them
as jewels and flowers, and who "grew faint at the sight of sunsets and
stately persons." Such as these, we may depend upon it, had little time
to give to considering their own effect upon posterity. When the sun
rules the day, there is no question about his supremacy; it is when we
are concerned with scanning the sky for lesser lights to rule the night
that we are wasting time. To go about searching for somebody to inspire
one testifies, no doubt, to a certain lack of fire and initiative. But,
on the other hand, there have been many great men whose greatness their
contemporaries did not recognise. We tend at the present time to honour
achievements when they have begun to grow a little mouldy; we seldom
accord ungrudging admiration to a prophet when he is at his best.
Moreover, in an age like the present, when the general average of
accomplishment is remarkably high, it is more difficult to detect
greatness. It is easier to see big trees when they stand out over a
copse than when they are lost in the depths of the forest.

Now there are two modes and methods of being great; one is by largeness,
the other by intensity. A great man can be cast in a big, magnanimous
mould, without any very special accomplishments or abilities; it may
be very difficult to praise any of his faculties very highly, but he
is there. Such men are the natural leaders of mankind; they effect
what they effect not by any subtlety or ingenuity. They see in a wide,
general way what they want, they gather friends and followers and
helpers round them, and put the right man on at the right piece of work.
They perform what they perform by a kind of voluminous force, which
carries other personalities away; for lesser natures, as a rule, do not
like supreme responsibility; they enjoy what is to ordinary people
the greatest luxury in the world, namely, the being sympathetically
commandeered, and duly valued. Inspiration and leadership are not common
gifts, and there are abundance of capable people who cannot strike out
a novel line of their own, but can do excellent work if they can be
inspired and led. I was once for a short time brought into close contact
with a man of this kind; it was impossible to put down on paper or to
explain to those who did not know him what his claim to greatness was. I
remember being asked by an incredulous outsider where his greatness
lay, and I could not name a single conspicuous quality that my hero
possessed. But he dominated his circle for all that, and many of them
were men of far greater intellectual force than himself. He had his
own way; if he asked one to do a particular thing, one felt proud to
be entrusted with it, and amply rewarded by a word of approval. It
was possible to take a different view from the view which he took of a
matter or a situation, but it was impossible to express one's dissent
in his presence. A few halting, fumbling words of his were more weighty
than many a facile and voluble oration. Personally I often mistrusted
his judgment, but I followed him with an eager delight. With such men
as these, posterity is often at a loss to know why they impressed their
contemporaries, or why they continue to be spoken of with reverence and
enthusiasm. The secret is that it is a kind of moral and magnetic
force, and the lamentable part of it is that such men, if they are not
enlightened and wise, may do more harm than good, because they tend to
stereotype what ought to be changed and renewed.

That is one way of greatness; a sort of big, blunt force that overwhelms
and uplifts, like a great sea-roller, yielding at a hundred small
points, yet crowding onwards in soft volume and ponderous weight.

Two interesting examples of this impressive and indescribable greatness
seem to have been Arthur Hallam and the late Mr. W. E. Henley. In the
case of Arthur Hallam, the eulogies which his friends pronounced upon
him seem couched in terms of an intemperate extravagance. The fact that
the most splendid panegyrics upon him were uttered by men of high
genius is not in itself more conclusive than if such panegyrics had been
conceived by men of lesser quality, because the greater that a man is
the more readily does he perceive and more magniloquently acknowledge
greatness. Apart from In Memoriam, Tennyson's recorded utterances about
Arthur Hallam are expressed in terms of almost hyperbolical laudation.
I once was fortunate enough to have the opportunity of asking Mr.
Gladstone about Arthur Hallam. Mr. Gladstone had been his close friend
at Eton and his constant companion. His eye flashed, his voice gathered
volume, and with a fine gesture of his hand he said that he could only
deliberately affirm that physically, intellectually, and morally, Arthur
Hallam approached more nearly to an ideal of human perfection than
any one whom he had ever seen. And yet the picture of Hallam at Eton
represents a young man of an apparently solid and commonplace type, with
a fresh colour, and almost wholly destitute of distinction or charm;
while his extant fragments of prose and poetry are heavy, verbose, and
elaborate, and without any memorable quality. It appears indeed as if
he had exercised a sort of hypnotic influence upon his contemporaries.
Neither does he seem to have produced a very gracious impression upon
outsiders who happened to meet him. There is a curious anecdote told
by some one who met Arthur Hallam travelling with his father on the
Continent only a short time before his sudden death. The narrator says
that he saw with a certain satisfaction how mercilessly the young
man criticised and exposed his father's statements, remembering how
merciless the father had often been in dealing summarily with the
arguments and statements of his own contemporaries. One asks oneself in
vain what the magnetic charm of his presence and temperament can have
been. It was undoubtedly there, and yet it seems wholly irrecoverable.
The same is true, in a different region, with the late Mr. W. E. Henley.
His literary performances, with the exception of some half-a-dozen
poetical pieces, have no great permanent value. His criticisms were
vehement and complacent, but represent no great delicacy of analysis
nor breadth of view. His treatment of Stevenson, considering the
circumstances of the case, was ungenerous and irritable. Yet those
who were brought into close contact with Henley recognised something
magnanimous, noble, and fiery about him, which evoked a passionate
devotion. I remember shortly before his death reading an appreciation
of his work by a faithful admirer, who described him as "another Dr.
Johnson," and speaking of his critical judgment, said, "Mr. Henley is
pontifical in his wrath; it pleased him, for example, to deny to De
Quincey the title to write English prose." That a criticism so arrogant,
so saugrenu, should be re-echoed with such devoted commendation is a
proof that the writer's independent judgment was simply swept away by
Henley's personality; and in both these cases one is merely brought face
to face with the fact that though men can earn the admiration of the
world by effective performance, the most spontaneous and enduring
gratitude is given to individuality.

The other way of greatness is the way of intensity, that focuses all
its impact at some brilliant point, like a rapier-thrust or a flash of
lightning. Men with this kind of greatness have generally some supreme
and dazzling accomplishment, and the rest of their nature is often
sacrificed to one radiant faculty. Their power, in some one single
direction, is absolutely distinct and unquestioned; and these are the
men who, if they can gather up and express the forces of some vague and
widespread tendency, some blind and instinctive movement of men's minds,
form as it were the cutting edge of a weapon. They do not supply the
force, but they concentrate it; and it is men of this type who are often
credited with the bringing about of some profound and revolutionary
change, because they summarise and define some huge force that is
abroad. Not to travel far for instances, such a man was Rousseau. The
air of his period was full of sentiments and emotions and ideas; he was
not himself a man of force; he was a dreamer and a poet; but he had
the matchless gift of ardent expression, and he was able to say
both trenchantly and attractively exactly what every one was vaguely
meditating.

Now let us take some of the chief departments of human effort, some of
the provinces in which men attain supreme fame, and consider what
kinds of greatness we should expect the present day to evoke. In the
department of warfare, we have had few opportunities of late to discover
high strategical genius. Our navy has been practically unemployed,
and the South African war was just the sort of campaign to reveal the
deficiencies of an elaborate and not very practical peace establishment.
Though it solidified a few reputations and pricked the bubble of some
few others, it certainly did not reveal any subtle adaptability in our
generals. It was Lord North, I think, who, when discussing with his
Cabinet a list of names of officers suggested for the conduct of a
campaign, said, "I do not know what effect these names produce upon you,
gentlemen, but I confess they make me tremble." The South African war
can hardly be said to have revealed that we have many generals who
closely corresponded to Wordsworth's description of the Happy Warrior,
but rather induced the tremulousness which Lord North experienced.
Still, if, in the strategical region, our solitary recent campaign
rather tends to prove a deficiency of men of supreme gifts, it at all
events proved a considerable degree of competence and devotion. I could
not go so far as a recent writer who regretted the termination of the
Boer War because it interrupted the evolution of tactical science, but
it is undoubtedly true that the growing aversion to war, the intense
dislike to the sacrifice of human life, creates an atmosphere
unfavourable to the development of high military genius; because great
military reputations in times past have generally been acquired by men
who had no such scruples, but who treated the material of their armies
as pawns to be freely sacrificed to the attainment of victory.

Then there is the region of statesmanship; and here it is abundantly
clear that the social conditions of the day, the democratic current
which runs with increasing spirit in political channels, is unfavourable
to the development of individual genius. The prize falls to the
sagacious opportunist; the statesman is less and less of a navigator,
and more and more of a pilot, in times when popular feeling is
conciliated and interpreted rather than inspired and guided. To be
far-seeing and daring is a disadvantage; the most approved leader is the
man who can harmonise discordant sections, and steer round obvious
and pressing difficulties. Geniality and bonhomie are more valuable
qualities than prescience or nobility of aim. The more representative
that government becomes, the more does originality give place to
malleability. The more fluid that the conceptions of a statesman are,
the greater that his adaptability is, the more acceptable he becomes.
Since Lord Beaconsfield, with all his trenchant mystery, and Mr.
Gladstone, with his voluble candour, there have been no figures of
unquestioned supremacy on the political stage. Even so, the effect in
both cases was to a great extent the effect of personality. The further
that these two men retire into the past, the more that they are
judged by the written record, the more does the tawdriness of Lord
Beaconsfield's mind, his absence of sincere convictions appear, as well
as the pedestrianism of Mr. Gladstone's mind, and his lack of critical
perception. I have heard Mr. Gladstone speak, and on one occasion I had
the task of reporting for a daily paper a private oration on a literary
subject. I was thrilled to the very marrow of my being by the address.
The parchment pallor of the orator, his glowing and blazing eyes, his
leonine air, the voice that seemed to have a sort of physical effect
on the nerves, his great sweeping gestures, all held the audience
spellbound. I felt at the time that I had never before realised the
supreme and vital importance of the subject on which he spoke. But when
I tried to reconstruct from the ashes of my industrious notes the
mental conflagration which I had witnessed, I was at a complete loss
to understand what had happened. The records were not only dull, they
seemed essentially trivial, and almost overwhelmingly unimportant. But
the magic had been there. Apart from the substance, the performance had
been literally enchanting. I do not honestly believe that Mr. Gladstone
was a man of great intellectual force, or even of very deep emotions.
He was a man of extraordinarily vigorous and robust brain, and he was a
supreme oratorical artist.

There is intellect, charm, humour in abundance in the parliamentary
forces; there was probably never a time when there were so many able and
ambitious men to be found in the rank and file of parliamentarians.
But that is not enough. There is no supremely impressive and commanding
figure on the stage; greatness seems to be distributed rather than
concentrated; but probably neither this, nor political conditions, would
prevent the generous recognition of supreme genius, if it were there to
recognise.

In art and literature, I am inclined to believe that we shall look back
to the Victorian era as a time of great activity and high performance.
The two tendencies here which militate against the appearance of the
greatest figures are, in the first place, the great accumulations of art
and literature, and in the second place the democratic desire to share
those treasures. The accumulation of pictures, music, and books makes
it undoubtedly very hard for a new artist, in whatever region, to gain
prestige. There is so much that is undoubtedly great and good for a
student of art and literature to make acquaintance with, that we are apt
to be content with the old vintages. The result is that there are a
good many artists who in a time of less productivity would have made
themselves an enduring reputation, and who now must be content to be
recognised only by a few. The difficulty can, I think, only be met by
some principle of selection being more rigidly applied. We shall have
to be content to skim the cream of the old as well as of the new, and
to allow the second-rate work of first-rate performers to sink into
oblivion. But at the same time there might be a great future before
any artist who could discover a new medium of utterance. It seems at
present, to take literature, as if every form of human expression had
been exploited. We have the lyric, the epic, the satire, the narrative,
the letter, the diary, conversation, all embalmed in art. But there is
probably some other medium possible which will become perfectly
obvious the moment it is seized upon and used. To take an instance from
pictorial art. At present, colour is only used in a genre manner, to
clothe some dramatic motive. But there seems no prima facie reason why
colour should not be used symphonically like music. In music we obtain
pleasure from an orderly sequence of vibrations, and there seems no real
reason why the eye should not be charmed with colour-sequences just as
the ear is charmed with sound-sequences. So in literature it would
seem as though we might get closer still to the expression of mere
personality, by the medium of some sublimated form of reverie, the
thought blended and tinged in the subtlest gradations, without the
clumsy necessity of sacrificing the sequence of thought to the barbarous
devices of metre and rhyme, or to the still more childish devices of
incident and drama. Flaubert, it will be remembered, looked forward to a
time when a writer would not require a subject at all, but would express
emotion and thought directly rather than pictorially. To utter the
unuttered thought--that is really the problem of literature in the
future; and if a writer could be found to free himself from all
stereotyped forms of expression, and to give utterance to the strange
texture of thought and fancy, which differentiates each single
personality so distinctly, so integrally, from other personalities, and
which we cannot communicate to our dearest and nearest, he might enter
upon a new province of art.

But the second tendency which at the present moment dominates writers
is, as I have said, the rising democratic interest in the things of the
mind. This is at present a very inchoate and uncultivated interest:
but in days of cheap publication and large audiences it dominates
many writers disastrously. The temptation is a grievous one--to take
advantage of a market--not to produce what is absolutely the best, but
what is popular and effective. It is not a wholly ignoble temptation. It
is not only the temptation of wealth, though in an age of comfort, which
values social respectability so highly, wealth is a great temptation.
But the temptation is rather to gauge success by the power of appeal. If
a man has ideas at all, he is naturally anxious to make them felt; and
if he can do it best by spreading his ideas rather thinly, by making
them attractive to enthusiastic people of inferior intellectual grip,
he feels he is doing a noble work. The truth is that in literature the
democracy desires not ideas but morality. All the best-known writers
of the Victorian age have been optimistic moralists, Browning, Ruskin,
Carlyle, Tennyson. They have been admired because they concealed their
essential conventionality under a slight perfume of unorthodoxy. They
all in reality pandered to the complacency of the age, in a way in which
Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats did not pander. The democracy
loves to be assured that it is generous, high-minded, and sensible.
It is in reality timid, narrow-minded, and Pharisaical. It hates
independence and originality, and loves to believe that it adores both.
It loves Mr. Kipling because he assures them that vulgarity is not a
sin; it loves Mr. Bernard Shaw because he persuades them that they are
cleverer than they imagined. The fact is that great men, in literature
at all events, must be content, at the present time, to be unrecognised
and unacclaimed. They must be content to be of the happy company of whom
Mr. Swinburne writes:--


  "In the garden of death, where the singers, whose names are deathless,
            One with another make music unheard of men."


Then there is the region of Science, and here I am not qualified
to speak, because I know no science, and have not even taught it, as Mr.
Arthur Sidgwick said. I do not really know what constitutes greatness
in science. I suppose that the great man of science is the man who to a
power of endlessly patient investigation joins a splendid imaginative,
or perhaps deductive power, like Newton or Darwin. But we who stand at
the threshold of the scientific era are perhaps too near the light, and
too much dazzled by the results of scientific discovery to say who is
great and who is not great. I have met several distinguished men of
science, and I have thought some of them to be men of obviously
high intellectual gifts, and some of them men of inert and secretive
temperaments. But that is only natural, for to be great in other
departments generally implies a certain knowledge of the world, or at
all events of the thought of the world; whereas the great man of
science may be moving in regions of thought that may be absolutely
incommunicable to the ordinary person. But I do not suppose that
scientific greatness is a thing which can be measured by the importance
of the practical results of a discovery. I mean that a man may hit upon
some process, or some treatment of disease, which may be of incalculable
benefit to humanity, and yet not be really a great man of science, only
a fortunate discoverer, and incidentally a great benefactor to humanity.
The unknown discoverers of things like the screw or the wheel, persons
lost in the mists of antiquity, could not, I suppose, be ranked as great
men of science. The great man of science is the man who can draw
some stupendous inference, which revolutionises thought and sets men
hopefully at work on some problem which does not so much add to the
convenience of humanity as define the laws of nature. We are still
surrounded by innumerable and awful mysteries of life and being; the
evidence which will lead to their solution is probably in our hands and
plain enough, if any one could but see the bearing of facts which are
known to the simplest child. There is little doubt, I suppose, that
the greatest reputations of recent years have been made in science; and
perhaps when our present age has globed itself into a cycle, we shall be
amazed at the complaint that the present era is lacking in great men. We
are busy in looking for greatness in so many directions, and we are apt
to suppose, from long use, that greatness is so inseparably connected
with some form of human expression, whether it be the utterance of
thought, or the marshalling of armies, that we may be overlooking a more
stable form of greatness, which will be patent to those that come
after. My own belief is that the condition of science at the present day
answers best to the conditions which we have learnt to recognise in
the past as the fruitful soil of greatness. I mean that when we put our
finger, in the past, on some period which seems to have been producing
great work in a great way, we generally find it in some knot or school
of people, intensely absorbed in what they were doing, and doing it with
a whole-hearted enjoyment, loving the work more than the rewards of
it, and indifferent to the pursuit of fame. Such it seems to me is the
condition of science at the present time, and it is in science, I am
inclined to think, that our heroes are probably to be found.

I do not, then, feel at all sure that we are lacking in great men,
though it must be admitted that we are lacking in men whose supremacy is
recognised. I suppose we mean by a great man one who in some region of
human performance is confessedly pre-eminent; and he must further have
a theory of his own, and a power of pursuing that theory in the face
of depreciation and even hostility. I do not think that great men have
often been indifferent to criticism. Often, indeed, by virtue of a
greater sensitiveness and a keener perception, they have been profoundly
affected by unpopularity and the sense of being misunderstood. Carlyle,
Tennyson, Ruskin, for instance, were men of almost morbid sensibility,
and lived in sadness; and, on the other hand, there are few great men
who have not been affected for the worse by premature success. The best
soil for greatness to grow up in would seem to be an early isolation,
sustained against the disregard of the world by the affection and
admiration of a few kindred minds. Then when the great man has learned
his method and his message, and learned too not to over-value the
popular verdict, success may mature and mellow his powers. Yet of how
many great men can this be said? As a rule, indeed, a great man's best
work has been done in solitude and disfavour, and he has attained his
sunshine when he can no longer do his best work.

The question is whether the modern conditions of life are unfavourable
to greatness; and I think that it must be confessed that they are. In
the first place, we all know so much too about each other, and there
is so eager a personal curiosity abroad, a curiosity about the
smallest details of the life of any one who seems to have any power of
performance, that it encourages men to over-confidence, egotism,
and mannerism. Again, the world is so much in love with novelty and
sensation of all kinds, that facile successes are easily made and as
easily obliterated. What so many people admire is not greatness, but the
realisation of greatness and its tangible rewards. The result of this is
that men who show any faculty for impressing the world are exploited and
caressed, are played with as a toy, and as a toy neglected. And then,
too, the age is deeply permeated by social ambitions. Men love to be
labelled, ticketed, decorated, differentiated from the crowd. Newspapers
pander to this taste; and then the ease and rapidity of movement tempt
men to a restless variety of experience, of travel, of society, of
change, which is alien to the settled and sober temper in which great
designs are matured. There is a story, not uncharacteristic, of modern
social life, of a hostess who loved to assemble about her, in the style
of Mrs. Leo Hunter, notabilities small and great, who was reduced to
presenting a young man who made his appearance at one of her gatherings
as "Mr. ----, whose uncle, you will remember, was so terribly mangled
in the railway accident at S----." It is this feverish desire to be
distinguished at any price which has its counterpart in the feverish
desire to find objects of admiration. Not so can solid greatness be
achieved.

The plain truth is that no one can become great by taking thought, and
still less by desiring greatness. It is not an attainable thing; fame
only is attainable. A man must be great in his own quiet way, and the
greater he is, the less likely is he to concern himself with fame. It is
useless to try and copy some one else's greatness; that is like trying
to look like some one else's portrait, even if it be a portrait by
Velasquez. Not that modesty is inseparable from greatness; there are
abundance of great men who have been childishly and grotesquely vain;
but in such cases it has been a greatness of performance, a marvellous
faculty, not a greatness of soul. Hazlitt says somewhere that modesty is
the lowest of the virtues, and a real confession of the deficiency
which it indicates. He adds that a man who underrates himself is justly
undervalued by others. This is a cynical and a vulgar maxim. It is true
that a great man must have a due sense of the dignity and importance
of his work; but if he is truly great, he will have also a sense of
relation and proportion, and not forget the minuteness of any individual
atom. If he has a real greatness of soul, he will not be apt to compare
himself with others, and he will be inclined to an even over-generous
estimate of the value of the work of others. In no respect was the
greatness of D. G. Rossetti more exemplified than in his almost
extravagant appreciation of the work of his friends; and it was to this
royalty of temperament that he largely owed his personal supremacy.

I would believe then that the lack of conspicuous greatness is due
at this time to the overabundant vitality and eagerness of the world,
rather than to any languor or listlessness of spirit. The rise of the
decadent school in art and literature is not the least sign of any
indolent or corrupt deterioration. It rather shows a desperate appetite
for testing sensation, a fierce hunger for emotional experience, a
feverish ambition to impress a point-of-view. It is all part of a revolt
against settled ways and conventional theories. I do not mean that
we can expect to find greatness in this direction, for greatness is
essentially well-balanced, calm, deliberate, and decadence is a sign of
a neurotic and over-vitalised activity.

Our best hope is that this excessive restlessness of spirit will produce
a revolt against itself. The essence of greatness is unconventionality,
and restlessness is now becoming conventional. In education, in art,
in literature, in politics, in social life, we lose ourselves in
denunciations of the dreamer and the loafer. We cannot bear to see a
slowly-moving, deliberate, self-contained spirit, advancing quietly on
its discerned path. Instead of being content to perform faithfully and
conscientiously our allotted task, which is the way in which we can best
help the world, we demand that every one should want to do good, to
be responsible for some one else, to exhort, urge, beckon, restrain,
manage. That is all utterly false and hectic. Our aim should be patience
rather than effectiveness, sincerity rather than adaptability, to learn
rather than to teach, to ponder rather than to persuade, to know the
truth rather than to create illusion, however comforting, however
delightful such illusion may be.




VIII. SHYNESS


I have no doubt that shyness is one of the old, primitive, aboriginal
qualities that lurk in human nature--one of the crude elements that
ought to have been uprooted by civilisation, and security, and progress,
and enlightened ideals, but which have not been uprooted, and are only
being slowly eliminated. It is seen, as all aboriginal qualities are
seen, at its barest among children, who often reflect the youth of the
world, and are like little wild animals or infant savages, in spite of
all the frenzied idealisation that childhood receives from well-dressed
and amiable people.

Shyness is thus like those little bits of woods and copses which one
finds in a country-side that has long been subdued and replenished,
turned into arable land and pasture, with all the wildness and the
irregularity ploughed and combed out of it; but still one comes upon
some piece of dingle, where there is perhaps an awkward tilt in the
ground, or some ancient excavation, or where a stream-head has cut out a
steep channel, and there one finds a scrap of the old forest, a rood or
two that has never been anything but woodland. So with shyness; many
of our old, savage qualities have been smoothed out, or glazed over,
by education and inheritance, and only emerge in moments of passion and
emotion. But shyness is no doubt the old suspicion of the stranger, the
belief that his motives are likely to be predatory and sinister; it is
the tendency to bob the head down into the brushwood, or to sneak behind
the tree-bole on his approach. One sees a little child, washed
and brushed and delicately apparelled, with silken locks and clear
complexion, brought into a drawing-room to be admired; one sees the
terror come upon her; she knows by experience that she has nothing to
expect but attention, and admiration, and petting; but you will see her
suddenly cover her face with a tiny hand, relapse into dismal silence,
even burst into tears and refuse to be comforted, till she is safely
entrenched upon some familiar knee.

I have a breezy, boisterous, cheerful friend, of transparent simplicity
and goodness, who has never known the least touch of shyness from his
cradle, who always says, if the subject is introduced, that shyness
is all mere self-consciousness, and that it comes from thinking about
oneself. That is true, in a limited degree; but the diagnosis is no
remedy for the disease, because shyness is as much a disease as a cold
in the head, and no amount of effort can prevent the attacks of the
complaint; the only remedy is either to avoid the occasions of the
attacks,--and that is impossible, unless one is to abjure the society
of other people for good and all;--or else to practise resolutely the
hardening process of frequenting society, until one gets a sort of
courage out of familiarity. Yet even so, who that has ever really
suffered from shyness does not feel his heart sink as he drives up in
a brougham to the door of some strange house, and sees a grave butler
advancing out of an unknown corridor, with figures flitting to and fro
in the background; what shy person is there who at such a moment would
not give a considerable sum to be able to go back to the station and
take the first train home? Or who again, as he gives his name to a
servant in some brightly-lighted hall, and advances, with a hurried
glance at his toilet, into a roomful of well-dressed people, buzzing
with what Rossetti calls a "din of doubtful talk," would not prefer to
sink into the earth like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and be reckoned no
more among the living?

It is recorded in Tennyson's Life that he used to recommend to a younger
brother the thought of the stellar spaces, swarming with constellations
and traversed by planets at ineffable distances, as a cure for shyness;
and a lady of my acquaintance used to endeavour as a girl to stay her
failing heart on the thought of Eternity at such moments. It is all
in vain; at the urgent moment one cares very little about the stellar
motions, or the dim vistas of futurity, and very much indeed about the
cut of one's coat, and the appearance of one's collar, and the glances
of one's enemies; the doctrines of the Church, and the prospects of
ultimate salvation, are things very light in the scales in comparison
with the pressing necessities of the crisis, and the desperate need to
appear wholly unconcerned!

The wild and fierce shyness of childhood is superseded in most sensitive
people, as life goes on, by a very different feeling--the shyness
of adolescence, of which the essence, as has been well said, is "a
shamefaced pride." The shyness of early youth is a thing which springs
from an intense desire to delight, and impress, and interest other
people, from wanting to play a far larger and brighter part in the lives
of every one else than any one in the world plays in any one else's
life. Who does not recognise, with a feeling that is half contempt and
half compassion, the sight of the eager pretentiousness of youth, the
intense shame of confessing ignorance on any point, the deep desire
to appear to have a stake in the world, and a well-defined, respected
position? I met the other day a young man, of no particular force or
distinction, who was standing in a corner at a big social gathering,
bursting with terror and importance combined. He was inspired, I would
fain believe, by discerning a vague benevolence in my air and demeanour,
to fix his attention on me. He had been staying at a house where there
had been some important guests, and by some incredibly rapid
transition of eloquence he was saying to me in a minute or two, "The
Commander-in-Chief said to me the other day," and "The Archbishop
pointed out to me a few days ago," giving, as personal confidences,
scraps of conversation which he had no doubt overheard as an unwelcome
adjunct to a crowded smoking-room, with the busy and genial elders
wondering when the boys would have the grace to go to bed. My heart bled
for him as I saw the reflection of my own pushing and pretentious youth,
and I only desired that the curse should not fall upon him which has
so often fallen upon myself, to recall ineffaceably, with a blush that
still mantles my cheek in the silence and seclusion of my bedroom, in
a wakeful hour, the thought of some such piece of transparent and
ridiculous self-importance, shamefully uttered by myself, in a transport
of ambitious vanity, long years ago. How out of proportion to the
offence is the avenging phantom of memory which dogs one through the
years for such stupidities! I remember that as a youthful undergraduate
I went to stay in the house of an old family friend in the neighbourhood
of Cambridge. The only other male guest was a grim and crusty don, sharp
and trenchant in speech, and with a determination to keep young men in
their place. At Cambridge he would have taken no notice whatever of
me; but there, on alien ground, with some lurking impulse of far-off
civility, he said to me when the ladies retired, "I am going to have a
cigar; you know your way to the smoking-room?" I did not myself smoke
in those days, so foolish was I and innocent; but recalling, I suppose,
some similar remark made by an elderly and genial non-smoker under the
same circumstances, I said pompously--I can hardly bring myself even now
to write the words--"I don't smoke, but I will come and sit with you
for the pleasure of a talk." He gave a derisive snort, looked at me and
said, "What! not allowed to smoke yet? Pray don't trouble to come on
my account." It was not a genial speech, and it made me feel, as it was
intended to do, insupportably silly. I did not make matters better,
I recollect, on the following day, when on returning to Cambridge
I offered to carry his bag up from the station, for he insisted on
walking. He refused testily, and no doubt thought me, as in fact I was,
a very spiritless young man.

I remember, too, another incident of the same kind, happening about the
same time. I was invited by a fellow-undergraduate to come to tea in his
rooms, and to meet his people. After tea, in the lightness of his he

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