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From a College Window

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Title: From a College Window

Author: Arthur Christopher Benson


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #4614]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Don Lainson and Charles Aldarondo. HTML version
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW ***




Produced by Don Lainson and Charles Aldarondo. HTML version
by Al Haines.











FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW


By

ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON



Mens cujusque is est quisque



1906




NOTE.

Twelve of the essays included in this volume appeared in the _Cornhill
Magazine_. My best thanks are due to the proprietor and editor of the
_Cornhill Magazine_ for kind permission and encouragement to reprint
these. I have added six further papers, dealing with kindred subjects.

A. C. B.




CONTENTS


      I.  The Point of View
     II.  On Growing Older
    III.  Books
     IV.  Sociabilities
      V.  Conversation
     VI.  Beauty
    VII.  Art
    VII.  Egotism
     IX.  Education
      X.  Authorship
     XI.  The Criticism of Others
    XII.  Priest
   XIII.  Ambition
    XIV.  The Simple Life
     XV.  Games
    XVI.  Spiritualism
   XVII.  Habits
  XVIII.  Religion




I

THE POINT OF VIEW


I have lately come to perceive that the one thing which gives value to
any piece of art, whether it be book, or picture, or music, is that
subtle and evasive thing which is called personality. No amount of
labour, of zest, even of accomplishment, can make up for the absence of
this quality. It must be an almost wholly instinctive thing, I believe.
Of course, the mere presence of personality in a work of art is not
sufficient, because the personality revealed may be lacking in charm;
and charm, again, is an instinctive thing. No artist can set out to
capture charm; he will toil all the night and take nothing; but what
every artist can and must aim at, is to have a perfectly sincere point
of view. He must take his chance as to whether his point of view is an
attractive one; but sincerity is the one indispensable thing. It is
useless to take opinions on trust, to retail them, to adopt them; they
must be formed, created, truly felt. The work of a sincere artist is
almost certain to have some value; the work of an insincere artist is
of its very nature worthless.

I mean to try, in the pages that follow, to be as sincere as I can. It
is not an easy task, though it may seem so; for it means a certain
disentangling of the things that one has perceived and felt for oneself
from the prejudices and preferences that have been inherited, or stuck
like burrs upon the soul by education and circumstance.

It may be asked why I should thus obtrude my point of view in print;
why I should not keep my precious experience to myself; what the value
of it is to other people. Well, the answer to that is that it helps our
sense of balance and proportion to know how other people are looking at
life, what they expect from it, what they find in it, and what they do
not find. I have myself an intense curiosity about other people's point
of view, what they do when they are alone, and what they think about.
Edward FitzGerald said that he wished we had more biographies of
obscure persons. How often have I myself wished to ask simple, silent,
deferential people, such as station-masters, butlers, gardeners, what
they make of it all! Yet one cannot do it, and even if one could, ten
to one they would not or could not tell you. But here is going to be a
sedate confession. I am going to take the world into my confidence, and
say, if I can, what I think and feel about the little bit of experience
which I call my life, which seems to me such a strange and often so
bewildering a thing.

Let me speak, then, plainly of what that life has been, and tell what
my point of view is. I was brought up on ordinary English lines. My
father, in a busy life, held a series of what may be called high
official positions. He was an idealist, who, owing to a vigorous power
of practical organization and a mastery of detail, was essentially a
man of affairs. Yet he contrived to be a student too. Thus, owing to
the fact that he often shifted his headquarters, I have seen a good
deal of general society in several parts of England. Moreover, I was
brought up in a distinctly intellectual atmosphere.

I was at a big public school, and gained a scholarship at the
University. I was a moderate scholar and a competent athlete; but I
will add that I had always a strong literary bent. I took in younger
days little interest in history or polities, and tended rather to live
an inner life in the region of friendship and the artistic emotions. If
I had been possessed of private means, I should, no doubt, have become
a full-fledged dilettante. But that doubtful privilege was denied me,
and for a good many years I lived a busy and fairly successful life as
a master at a big public school. I will not dwell upon this, but I will
say that I gained a great interest in the science of education, and
acquired profound misgivings as to the nature of the intellectual
process known by the name of secondary education. More and more I began
to perceive that it is conducted on diffuse, detailed, unbusiness-like
lines. I tried my best, as far as it was consistent with loyalty to an
established system, to correct the faulty bias. But it was with a
profound relief that I found myself suddenly provided with a literary
task of deep interest, and enabled to quit my scholastic labours. At
the same time, I am deeply grateful for the practical experience I was
enabled to gain, and even more for the many true and pleasant
friendships with colleagues, parents, and boys that I was allowed to
form.

What a waste of mental energy it is to be careful and troubled about
one's path in life! Quite unexpectedly, at this juncture, came my
election to a college Fellowship, giving me the one life that I had
always eagerly desired, and the possibility of which had always seemed
closed to me.

I became then a member of a small and definite society, with a few
prescribed duties, just enough, so to speak, to form a hem to my life
of comparative leisure. I had acquired and kept, all through my life as
a schoolmaster, the habit of continuous literary work; not from a sense
of duty, but simply from instinctive pleasure. I found myself at once
at home in my small and beautiful college, rich with all kinds of
ancient and venerable traditions, in buildings of humble and subtle
grace. The little dark-roofed chapel, where I have a stall of my own;
the galleried hall, with its armorial glass; the low, book-lined
library; the panelled combination-room, with its dim portraits of old
worthies: how sweet a setting for a quiet life! Then, too, I have my
own spacious rooms, with a peaceful outlook into a big close, half
orchard, half garden, with bird-haunted thickets and immemorial trees,
bounded by a slow river.

And then, to teach me how "to borrow life and not grow old," the happy
tide of fresh and vigorous life all about me, brisk, confident,
cheerful young men, friendly, sensible, amenable, at that pleasant time
when the world begins to open its rich pages of experience, undimmed at
present by anxiety or care.

My college is one of the smallest in the University. Last night in Hall
I sate next a distinguished man, who is, moreover, very accessible and
pleasant. He unfolded to me his desires for the University. He would
like to amalgamate all the small colleges into groups, so as to have
about half-a-dozen colleges in all. He said, and evidently thought,
that little colleges are woefully circumscribed and petty places; that
most of the better men go to the two or three leading colleges, while
the little establishments are like small backwaters out of the main
stream. They elect, he said, their own men to Fellowships; they resist
improvements; much money is wasted in management, and the whole thing
is minute and feeble. I am afraid it is true in a way; but, on the
other hand, I think that a large college has its defects too. There is
no real college spirit there; it is very nice for two or three sets.
But the different schools which supply a big college form each its own
set there; and if a man goes there from a leading public school, he
falls into his respective set, lives under the traditions and in the
gossip of his old school, and gets to know hardly any one from other
schools. Then the men who come up from smaller places just form small
inferior sets of their own, and really get very little good out of the
place. Big colleges keep up their prestige because the best men tend to
go to them; but I think they do very little for the ordinary men who
have fewer social advantages to start with.

The only cure, said my friend, for these smaller places is to throw
their Fellowships open, and try to get public-spirited and
liberal-minded Dons. Then, he added, they ought to specialize in some
one branch of University teaching, so that the men who belonged to a
particular department would tend to go there.

Well, to-day was a wet day, so I did what I particularly enjoy--I went
off for a slow stroll, and poked about among some of the smaller
colleges. I declare that the idea of tying them all together seemed to
me to be a horrible piece of vandalism. These sweet and gentle little
places, with a quiet, dignified history and tradition of their own, are
very attractive and beautiful. I went and explored a little college I
am ashamed to say I had never visited before. It shows a poor plastered
front to the street, but the old place is there behind the plaster. I
went into a tiny, dark chapel, with a high pillared pediment of carved
wood behind the altar, a rich ceiling, and some fine columned alcoves
where the dignitaries sit. Out of the gallery opens a venerable
library, with a regretful air of the past about its faded volumes in
their high presses, as though it sadly said, "I am of yesterday." Then
we found ourselves in a spacious panelled Hall, with a great oriel
looking out into a peaceful garden, embowered in great trees, with
smiling lawns. All round the Hall hung portraits of old
worthies--peers, judges, and bishops, with some rubicund wigged
Masters. I like to think of the obscure and yet dignified lives that
have been lived in these quaint and stately chambers. I suppose that
there used to be a great deal of tippling and low gossip in the old
days of the vinous, idle Fellows, who hung on for life, forgetting
their books, and just trying to dissipate boredom. One tends to think
that it was all like that; and yet, doubtless, there were quiet lives
of study and meditation led here by wise and simple men who have long
since mouldered into dust. And all that dull rioting is happily over.
The whole place is full of activity and happiness. There is, if
anything, among the Dons, too much business, too many meetings, too
much teaching, and the life of mere study is neglected. But it pleases
me to think that even now there are men who live quietly among their
books, unambitious, perhaps unproductive, but forgetting the flight of
time, and looking out into a pleasant garden, with its rustling trees,
among the sound of mellow bells. We are, most of us, too much in a fuss
nowadays to live these gentle, innocent, and beautiful lives; and yet
the University is a place where a poor man, if he be virtuous, may lead
a life of dignity and simplicity, and refined happiness. We make the
mistake of thinking that all can be done by precept, when, as a matter
of fact, example is no less potent a force. To make such quiet lives
possible was to a great extent what these stately and beautiful places
were founded for--that there should be in the busy world a corner where
activities should not be so urgent, and where life should pass like an
old dream, tinged with delicate colour and soft sound. I declare I do
not know that it is more virtuous to be a clerk in a bank, toiling day
by day that others should be rich, than to live in thought and
meditation, with a heart open to sweet influences and pure hopes. And
yet it seems to be held nowadays that virtue is bound up with practical
life. If a man is content to abjure wealth and to forego marriage, to
live simply without luxuries, he may spend a very dignified, gentle
life here, and at the same time he may be really useful. It is a thing
which is well worth doing to attempt the reconciliation between the old
and the young. Boys come up here under the impression that their
pastors and teachers are all about fifty; they think of them as
sensible, narrow-minded men, and, like Melchizedek, without beginning
of days or end of life. They suppose that they like marking mistakes in
exercises with blue pencil, and take delight in showing their power by
setting punishments. It does not often occur to them that schoolmasters
may be pathetically anxious to guide boys right, and to guard them from
evil. They think of them as devoid of passions and prejudices, with a
little dreary space to traverse before they sink into the tomb. Even in
homes, how seldom does a perfectly simple human relation exist between
a boy and his father! There is often a great deal of affection on both
sides, but little camaraderie. Little boys are odd, tiresome creatures
in many ways, with savage instincts; and I suppose many fathers feel
that, if they are to maintain their authority, they must be a little
distant and inscrutable. A boy goes for sympathy and companionship to
his mother and sisters, not often to his father. Now a Don may do
something to put this straight, if he has the will. One of the best
friends I ever had was an elderly Don at my own college, who had been a
contemporary of my father's. He liked young men; and I used to consult
him and ask his advice in things in which I could not well consult my
own contemporaries. It is not necessary to be extravagantly youthful,
to slap people on the back, to run with the college boat, though that
is very pleasant if it is done naturally. All that is wanted is to be
accessible and quietly genial. And under such influences a young man
may, without becoming elderly, get to understand the older point of
view.

The difficulty is that one acquires habits and mannerisms; one is
crusty and gruff if interfered with. But, as Pater said, to acquire
habits is failure in life. Of course, one must realize limitations, and
learn in what regions one can be effective. But no one need be
case-hardened, smoke-dried, angular. The worst of a University is that
one sees men lingering on because they must earn a living, and there is
nothing else that they can do; but for a human-hearted, good-humoured,
and sensible man, a college life is a life where it is easy and
pleasant to practise benevolence and kindliness, and where a small
investment of trouble pays a large percentage of happiness. Indeed,
surveying it impartially--as impartially as I can--such a life seems to
hold within it perhaps the greatest possibilities of happiness that
life can hold. To have leisure and a degree of simple stateliness
assured; to live in a wholesome dignity; to have the society of the
young and generous; to have lively and intelligent talk; to have the
choice of society and solitude alike; to have one's working hours
respected, and one's leisure hours solaced--is not this better than to
drift into the so-called tide of professional success, with its dreary
hours of work, its conventional domestic background? No doubt the
domestic background has its interests, its delights; but one must pay a
price for everything, and I am more than willing to pay the price of
celibacy for my independence.

The elderly Don in college rooms, interested in Greek particles,
grumbling over his port wine, is a figure beloved by writers of fiction
as a contrast to all that is brave, and bright, and wholesome in life.
Could there be a more hopeless misconception? I do not know a single
extant example of the species at the University. Personally, I have no
love for Greek particles, and only a very moderate taste for port wine.
But I do love, with all my heart, the grace of antiquity that mellows
our crumbling courts, the old tradition of multifarious humanity that
has century by century entwined itself with the very fabric of the
place. I love the youthful spirit that flashes and brightens in every
corner of the old courts, as the wallflower that rises spring by spring
with its rich orange-tawny hue, its wild scent, on the tops of our
mouldering walls. It is a gracious and beautiful life for all who love
peace and reflection, strength and youth. It is not a life for fiery
and dominant natures, eager to conquer, keen to impress; but it is a
life for any one who believes that the best rewards are not the
brightest, who is willing humbly to lend a cheerful hand, to listen as
well as to speak. It is a life for any one who has found that there is
a world of tender, wistful, delicate emotions, subdued and soft
impressions, in which it is peace to live; for one who has learned,
however dimly, that wise and faithful love, quiet and patient hope, are
the bread by which the spirit is nourished--that religion is not an
intellectual or even an ecclesiastical thing, but a far-off and remote
vision of the soul.

I know well the thoughts and hopes that I should desire to speak; but
they are evasive, subtle things, and too often, like shy birds, will
hardly let you approach them. But I would add that life has not been
for me a dreamy thing, lived in soft fantastic reveries; indeed, it has
been far the reverse. I have practised activity, I have mixed much with
my fellows; I have taught, worked, organized, directed. I have watched
men and boys; I have found infinite food for mirth, for interest, and
even for grief. But I have grown to feel that the ambitions which we
preach and the successes for which we prepare are very often nothing
but a missing of the simple road, a troubled wandering among thorny
by-paths and dark mountains. I have grown to believe that the one thing
worth aiming at is simplicity of heart and life; that one's relations
with others should be direct and not diplomatic; that power leaves a
bitter taste in the mouth; that meanness, and hardness, and coldness
are the unforgivable sins; that conventionality is the mother of
dreariness; that pleasure exists not in virtue of material conditions,
but in the joyful heart; that the world is a very interesting and
beautiful place; that congenial labour is the secret of happiness; and
many other things which seem, as I write them down, to be dull and
trite commonplaces, but are for me the bright jewels which I have found
beside the way.

It is, then, from College Windows that I look forth. But even so,
though on the one hand I look upon the green and sheltered garden, with
its air of secluded recollection and repose, a place of quiet pacing to
and fro, of sober and joyful musing; yet on another side I see the
court, with all its fresh and shifting life, its swift interchange of
study and activity; and on yet another side I can observe the street
where the infinite pageant of humanity goes to and fro, a tide full of
sound and foam, of business and laughter, and of sorrow too, and
sickness, and the funeral pomp of death.

This, then, is my point of view. I can truthfully say that it is not
gloomy, and equally that it is not uproarious. I can boast of no deep
philosophy, for I feel, like Dr. Johnson's simple friend Edwards, that
"I have tried, too, in my time, to be a philosopher, but--I don't know
how--cheerfulness was always breaking in." Neither is it the point of
view of a profound and erudite student, with a deep belief in the
efficacy of useless knowledge. Neither am I a humorist, for I have
loved beauty better than laughter; nor a sentimentalist, for I have
abhorred a weak dalliance with personal emotions. It is hard, then, to
say what I am; but it is my hope that this may emerge. My desire is but
to converse with my readers, to speak as in a comfortable tete-a-tete,
of experience, and hope, and patience. I have no wish to disguise the
hard and ugly things of life; they are there, whether one disguises
them or not; but I think that unless one is a professed psychologist or
statistician, one gets little good by dwelling upon them. I have always
believed that it is better to stimulate than to correct, to fortify
rather than to punish, to help rather than to blame. If there is one
attitude that I fear and hate more than another it is the attitude of
the cynic. I believe with all my soul in romance: that is, in a certain
high-hearted, eager dealing with life. I think that one ought to expect
to find things beautiful and people interesting, not to take delight in
detecting meannesses and failures. And there is yet another class of
temperament for which I have a deep detestation. I mean the assured,
the positive, the Pharisaical temper, that believes itself to be
impregnably in the right and its opponents indubitably in the wrong;
the people who deal in axioms and certainties, who think that
compromise is weak and originality vulgar. I detest authority in every
form; I am a sincere republican. In literature, in art, in life, I
think that the only conclusions worth coming to are one's own
conclusions. If they march with the verdict of the connoisseurs, so
much the better for the connoisseurs; if they do not so march, so much
the better for oneself. Every one cannot admire and love everything;
but let a man look at things fairly and without prejudice, and make his
own selection, holding to it firmly, but not endeavouring to impose his
taste upon others; defending, if needs be, his preferences, but making
no claim to authority.

The time of my life that I consider to have been wasted, from the
intellectual point of view, was the time when I tried, in a spirit of
dumb loyalty, to admire all the things that were said to be admirable.
Better spent was the time when I was finding out that much that had
received the stamp of the world's approval was not to be approved, at
least by me; best of all was the time when I was learning to appraise
the value of things to myself, and learning to love them for their own
sake and mine.

Respect of a deferential and constitutional type is out of place in art
and literature. It is a good enough guide to begin one's pilgrimage
with, if one soon parts company from it. Rather one must learn to give
honour where honour is due, to bow down in true reverence before all
spirits that are noble and adorable, whether they wear crowns and bear
titles of honour, or whether they are simple and unnoted persons, who
wear no gold on their garments.

Sincerity and simplicity! if I could only say how I reverence them, how
I desire to mould my life in accordance with them! And I would learn,
too, swiftly to detect the living spirits, whether they be young or
old, in which these great qualities reign.

For I believe that there is in life a great and guarded city, of which
we may be worthy to be citizens. We may, if we are blest, be always of
the happy number, by some kindly gift of God; but we may also, through
misadventure and pain, through errors and blunders, learn the way
thither. And sometimes we discern the city afar off, with her radiant
spires and towers, her walls of strength, her gates of pearl; and there
may come a day, too, when we have found the way thither, and enter in;
happy if we go no more out, but happy, too, even if we may not rest
there, because we know that, however far we wander, there is always a
hearth for us and welcoming smiles.

I speak in a parable, but those who are finding the way will understand
me, however dimly; and those who have found the way, and seen a little
of the glory of the place, will smile at the page and say: "So he, too,
is of the city."

The city is known by many names, and wears different aspects to
different hearts. But one thing is certain--that no one who has entered
there is ever in any doubt again. He may wander far from the walls, he
may visit it but rarely, but it stands there in peace and glory, the
one true and real thing for him in mortal time and in whatever lies
beyond.




II

ON GROWING OLDER


The sun flares red behind leafless elms and battlemented towers as I
come in from a lonely walk beside the river; above the chimney-tops
hangs a thin veil of drifting smoke, blue in the golden light. The
games in the Common are just coming to an end; a stream of long-coated
spectators sets towards the town, mingled with the parti-coloured,
muddied figures of the players. I have been strolling half the
afternoon along the river bank, watching the boats passing up and down;
hearing the shrill cries of coxes, the measured plash of oars, the
rhythmical rattle of rowlocks, intermingled at intervals with the harsh
grinding of the chain-ferries. Five-and-twenty years ago I was rowing
here myself in one of these boats, and I do not wish to renew the
experience. I cannot conceive why and in what moment of feeble
good-nature or misapplied patriotism I ever consented to lend a hand. I
was not a good oar, and did not become a better one; I had no illusions
about my performance, and any momentary complacency was generally
sternly dispelled by the harsh criticism of the coach on the bank, when
we rested for a moment to receive our meed of praise or blame. But
though I have no sort of wish to repeat the process, to renew the
slavery which I found frankly and consistently intolerable, I find
myself looking on at the cheerful scene with an amusement in which
mingles a shadow of pain, because I feel that I have parted with
something, a certain buoyancy and elasticity of body, and perhaps
spirit, of which I was not conscious at the time, but which I now
realize that I must have possessed. It is with an admiration mingled
with envy that I see these youthful, shapely figures, bare-necked and
bare-kneed, swinging rhythmically past. I watch a brisk crew lift a
boat out of the water by a boat-house; half of them duck underneath to
get hold of the other side, and they march up the grating gravel in a
solemn procession. I see a pair of cheerful young men, released from
tubbing, execute a wild and inconsequent dance upon the water's edge; I
see a solemn conference of deep import between a stroke and a coach. I
see a neat, clean-limbed young man go airily up to a well-earned tea,
without, I hope, a care, or an anxiety in his mind, expecting and
intending to spend an agreeable evening. "Oh, Jones of Trinity, oh,
Smith of Queen's," I think to myself, "tua si bona noris! Make the best
of the good time, my boy, before you go off to the office, or the
fourth-form room, or the country parish! Live virtuously, make honest
friends, read the good old books, lay up a store of kindly
recollections, of firelit rooms in venerable courts, of pleasant talks,
of innocent festivities. Very fresh is the cool morning air, very
fragrant is the newly-lighted bird's-eye, very lively is the clink of
knives and forks, very keen is the savour of the roast beef that floats
up to the dark rafters of the College Hall. But the days are short and
the terms are few; and do not forget to be a sensible as well as a
good-humoured young man!"

Thackeray, in a delightful ballad, invites a pretty page to wait till
he comes to forty years: well, I have waited--indeed, I have somewhat
overshot the mark--and to-day the sight of all this brisk life, going
on just as it used to do, with the same insouciance and the same
merriment, makes me wish to reflect, to gather up the fragments, to see
if it is all loss, all declension, or whether there is something left,
some strength in what remains behind.

I have a theory that one ought to grow older in a tranquil and
appropriate way, that one ought to be perfectly contented with one's
time of life, that amusements and pursuits ought to alter naturally and
easily, and not be regretfully abandoned. One ought not to be dragged
protesting from the scene, catching desperately at every doorway and
balustrade; one should walk off smiling. It is easier said than done.
It is not a pleasant moment when a man first recognizes that he is out
of place in the football field, that he cannot stoop with the old
agility to pick up a skimming stroke to cover-point, that dancing is
rather too heating to be decorous, that he cannot walk all day without
undue somnolence after dinner, or rush off after a heavy meal without
indigestion. These are sad moments which we all of us reach, but which
are better laughed over than fretted over. And a man who, out of sheer
inability to part from boyhood, clings desperately and with apoplectic
puffings to these things is an essentially grotesque figure. To listen
to young men discussing one of these my belated contemporaries, and to
hear one enforcing on another the amusement to be gained from watching
the old buffer's manoeuvres, is a lesson against undue youthfulness.
One can indeed give amusement without loss of dignity, by being open to
being induced to join in such things occasionally in an elderly way,
without any attempt to disguise deficiencies. But that is the most that
ought to be attempted. Perhaps the best way of all is to subside into
the genial and interested looker-on, to be ready to applaud the game
you cannot play, and to admire the dexterity you cannot rival.

What then, if any, are the gains that make up for the lack of youthful
prowess? They are, I can contentedly say, many and great. In the first
place, there is the loss of a quality which is productive of an
extraordinary amount of pain among the young, the quality of
self-consciousness. How often was one's peace of mind ruined by
gaucherie, by shyness, by the painful consciousness of having nothing
to say, and the still more painful consciousness of having said the
wrong thing in the wrong way! Of course, it was all immensely
exaggerated. If one went into chapel, for instance, with a straw hat,
which one had forgotten to remove, over a surplice, one had the feeling
for several days that it was written in letters of fire on every wall.
I was myself an ardent conversationalist in early years, and, with the
charming omniscience of youth, fancied that my opinion was far better
worth having than the opinions of Dons encrusted with pedantry and
prejudice. But if I found myself in the society of these petrified
persons, by the time that I had composed a suitable remark, the slender
opening had already closed, and my contribution was either not uttered
at all, or hopelessly belated in its appearance. Or some deep
generalization drawn from the dark backward of my vast experience would
be produced, and either ruthlessly ignored or contemptuously corrected
by some unsympathetic elder of unyielding voice and formed opinions.
And then there was the crushing sense, at the conclusion of one of
these interviews, of having been put down as a tiresome and heavy young
man. I fully believed in my own liveliness and sprightliness, but it
seemed an impossible task to persuade my elders that these qualities
were there. A good-natured, elderly friend used at times to rally me
upon my shyness, and say that it all came from thinking too much about
myself. It was as useless as if one told a man with a toothache that it
was mere self-absorption that made him suffer. For I have no doubt that
the disease of self-consciousness is incident to intelligent youth.
Marie Bashkirtseff, in the terrible self-revealing journals which she
wrote, describes a visit that she paid to some one who had expressed an
interest in her and a desire to see her. She says that as she passed
the threshold of the room she breathed a prayer, "O God, make me worth
seeing!" How often used one to desire to make an impression, to make
oneself felt and appreciated!

Well, all that uneasy craving has left me. I no longer have any
particular desire for or expectation of being impressive. One likes, of
course, to feel fresh and lively; but whereas in the old days I used to
enter a circle with the intention of endeavouring to be felt, of giving
pleasure and interest, I now go in the humble hope of receiving either.
The result is that, having got rid to a great extent of this pompous
and self-regarding attitude of mind, I not only find myself more at
ease, but I also find other people infinitely more interesting. Instead
of laying one's frigate alongside of another craft with the intention
of conducting a boarding expedition, one pays a genial visit by means
of the long-boat with all the circumstance of courtesy and amiability.
instead of desiring to make conquests, I am glad enough to be
tolerated. I dare, too, to say what I think, not alert for any symptoms
of contradiction, but fully aware that my own point of view is but one
of many, and quite prepared to revise it. In the old days I demanded
agreement; I am now amused by divergence. In the old days I desired to
convince; I am now only too thankful to be convinced of error and
ignorance. I now no longer shrink from saying that I know nothing of a
subject; in old days I used to make a pretence of omniscience, and had
to submit irritably to being tamely unmasked. It seems to me that I
must have been an unpleasant young man enough, but I humbly hope that I
was not so disagreeable as might appear.

Another privilege of advancing years is the decreasing tyranny of
convention. I used to desire to do the right thing, to know the right
people, to play the right games. I did not reflect whether it was worth
the sacrifice of personal interest; it was all-important to be in the
swim. Very gradually I discovered that other people troubled their
heads very little about what one did; that the right people were often
the most tiresome and the most conventional, and that the only games
which were worth playing were the games which one enjoyed. I used to
undergo miseries in staying at uncongenial houses, in accepting
shooting invitations when I could not shoot, in going to dances because
the people whom I knew were going. Of course one has plenty of
disagreeable duties to perform in any case; but I discovered gradually
that to adopt the principle of doing disagreeable things which were
supposed to be amusing and agreeable was to misunderstand the whole
situation. Now, if I am asked to stay at a tiresome house, I refuse; I
decline invitations to garden parties and public dinners and dances,
because I know that they will bore me; and as to games, I never play
them if I can help, because I find that they do not entertain me. Of
course there are occasions when one is wanted to fill a gap, and then
it is the duty of a Christian and a gentleman to conform, and to do it
with a good grace. Again, I am not at the mercy of small prejudices, as
I used to be. As a young man, if I disliked the cut of a person's
whiskers or the fashion of his clothes, if I considered his manner to
be abrupt or unpleasing, if I was not interested in his subjects, I set
him down as an impossible person, and made no further attempt to form
acquaintance.

Now I know that these are superficial things, and that a kind heart and
an interesting personality are not inconsistent with boots of a
grotesque shape and even with mutton-chop whiskers. In fact, I think
that small oddities and differences have grown to have a distinct
value, and form a pleasing variety. If a person's manner is
unattractive, I often find that it is nothing more than a shyness or an
awkwardness which disappears the moment that familiarity is
established. My standard is, in fact, lower, and I am more tolerant. I
am not, I confess, wholly tolerant, but my intolerance is reserved for
qualities and not for externals. I still fly swiftly from long-winded,
pompous, and contemptuous persons; but if their company is unavoidable,
I have at least learnt to hold my tongue. The other day I was at a
country-house where an old and extremely tiresome General laid down the
law on the subject of the Mutiny, where he had fought as a youthful
subaltern. I was pretty sure that he was making the most grotesque
misstatements, but I was not in a position to contradict them. Next the
General was a courteous, weary old gentleman, who sate with his
finger-tips pressed together, smiling and nodding at intervals.
Half-an-hour later we were lighting our candles. The General strode
fiercely up to bed, leaving a company of yawning and dispirited men
behind. The old gentleman came up to me and, as he took a light, said
with an inclination of his head in the direction of the parting figure,
"The poor General is a good deal misinformed. I didn't choose to say
anything, but I know something about the subject, because I was private
secretary to the Secretary for War."

That was the right attitude, I thought, for the gentlemanly
philosopher; and I have learnt from my old friend the lesson not to
choose to say anything if a turbulent and pompous person lays down the
law on subjects with which I happen to be acquainted.

Again, there is another gain that results from advancing years. I think
it is true that there were sharper ecstasies in youth, keener
perceptions, more passionate thrills; but then the mind also dipped
more swiftly and helplessly into discouragement, dreariness, and
despair. I do not think that life is so rapturous, but it certainly is
vastly more interesting. When I was young there were an abundance of
things about which I did not care. I was all for poetry and art; I
found history tedious, science tiresome, politics insupportable. Now I
may thankfully say it is wholly different. The time of youth was the
opening to me of many doors of life. Sometimes a door opened upon a
mysterious and wonderful place, an enchanted forest, a solemn avenue, a
sleeping glade; often, too, it opened into some dusty work-a-day place,
full of busy forms bent over intolerable tasks, whizzing wheels, dark
gleaming machinery, the din of the factory and the workshop. Sometimes,
too, a door would open into a bare and melancholy place, a hillside
strewn with stones, an interminable plain of sand; worst of all, a
place would sometimes be revealed which was full of suffering, anguish,
and hopeless woe, shadowed with fears and sins. From such prospects I
turned with groans unutterable; but the air of the accursed place would
hang about me for days. These surprises, these strange surmises,
crowded in fast upon me. How different the world was from what the
careless forecast of boyhood had pictured it! How strange, how
beautiful, and yet how terrible! As life went on the beauty increased,
and a calmer, quieter beauty made itself revealed; in youth I looked
for strange, impressive, haunted beauties, things that might deeply
stir and move; but year by year a simpler, sweeter, healthier kind of
beauty made itself felt; such beauty as lies on the bare, lightly
washed, faintly tinted hillside of winter, all delicate greens and
browns, so far removed from the rich summer luxuriance, and yet so
austere, so pure. I grew to love different books too. In youth one
demanded a generous glow, a fire of passion, a strongly tinged current
of emotion; but by degrees came the love of sober, subdued reflection,
a cooler world in which, if one could not rest, one might at least
travel equably and gladly, with a far wider range of experience, a
larger, if a fainter, hope. I grew to demand less of the world, less of
Nature, less of people; and, behold, a whole range of subtler and
gentler emotions came into sight, like the blue hills of the distance,
pure and low. The whole movement of the world, past and present, became
intelligible and clear. I saw the humanity that lies behind political
and constitutional questions, the strong, simple forces that move like
a steady stream behind the froth and foam of personality. If in youth I
believed that personality and influence could sway and mould the world,
in later years I have come to see that the strongest and fiercest
characters are only the river-wrack, the broken boughs, the torn
grasses that whirl and spin in the tongue of the creeping flood, and
that there is a dim resistless force behind them that marches on
unheeding and drives them in the forefront of the inundation. Things
that had seemed drearily theoretical, dry, axiomatic, platitudinal,
showed themselves to be great generalizations from a torrent of human
effort and mortal endeavour. And thus all the mass of detail and human
relation that had been rudely set aside by the insolent prejudices of
youth under the generic name of business, came slowly to have an
intense and living significance. I cannot trace the process in detail;
but I became aware of the fulness, the energy, the matchless interest
of the world, and the vitality of a hundred thoughts that had seemed to
me the dreariest abstractions.

Then, too, the greatest gain of all, there comes a sort of patience. In
youth mistakes seemed irreparable, calamities intolerable, ambitions
realizable, disappointments unbearable. An anxiety hung like a dark
impenetrable cloud, a disappointment poisoned the springs of life. But
now I have learned that mistakes can often be set right, that anxieties
fade, that calamities have sometimes a compensating joy, that an
ambition realized is not always pleasurable, that a disappointment is
often of itself a great incentive to try again. One learns to look over
troubles, instead of looking into them; one learns that hope is more
unconquerable than grief. And so there flows into the gap the certainty
that one can make more of misadventures, of unpromising people, of
painful experiences, than one had ever hoped. It may not be, nay, it is
not, so eager, so full-blooded a spirit; but it is a serener, a more
interesting, a happier outlook.

And so, like Robinson Crusoe on his island, striking a balance of my
advantages and disadvantages, I am inclined to think that the good
points predominate. Of course there still remains the intensely human
instinct, which survives all the lectures of moralists, the desire to
eat one's cake and also to have it. One wants to keep the gains of
middle life and not to part with the glow of youth. "The tragedy of
growing old," says a brilliant writer, "is the remaining young;" that
is to say, that the spirit does not age as fast as the body. The
sorrows of life lie in the imagination, in the power to recall the good
days that have been and the old sprightly feelings; and in the power,
too, to forecast the slow overshadowing and decay of age. But Lord
Beaconsfield once said that the worst evil one has to endure is the
anticipation of the calamities that do not happen; and I am sure that
the thing to aim at is to live as far as possible in the day and for
the day. I do not mean in an epicurean fashion, by taking prodigally
all the pleasure that one can get, like a spendthrift of the happiness
that is meant to last a lifetime, but in the spirit of Newman's hymn--

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


Even now I find that I am gaining a certain power, instinctively, I
suppose, in making the most of the day and hour. In old days, if I had
a disagreeable engagement ahead of me, something to which I looked
forward with anxiety or dislike, I used to find that it poisoned my
cup. Now it is beginning to be the other way; and I find myself with a
heightened sense of pleasure in the quiet and peaceful days that have
to intervene before the fateful morning dawns. I used to awake in the
morning on the days that were still my own before the day which I
dreaded, and begin, in that agitated mood which used to accompany the
return of consciousness after sleep, when the mind is alert but
unbalanced, to anticipate the thing I feared, and feel that I could not
face it. Now I tend to awake and say to myself, "Well, at any rate I
have still to-day in my own hands;" and then the very day itself has an
increased value from the feeling that the uncomfortable experience lies
ahead. I suppose that is the secret of the placid enjoyment which the
very old so often display. They seem so near the dark gate, and yet so
entirely indifferent to the thought of it; so absorbed in little
leisurely trifles, happy with a childlike happiness.

And thus I went slowly back to College in that gathering gloom that
seldom fails to bring a certain peace to the mind. The porter sate,
with his feet on the fender, in his comfortable den, reading a paper.
The lights were beginning to appear in the court, and the firelight
flickered briskly upon walls hung with all the pleasant signs of
youthful life, the groups, the family photographs, the suspended oar,
the cap of glory. So when I entered my book-lined rooms, and heard the
kettle sing its comfortable song on the hearth, and reflected that I
had a few letters to write, an interesting book to turn over, a
pleasant Hall dinner to look forward to, and that, after a space of
talk, an undergraduate or two were coming to talk over a leisurely
piece of work, an essay or a paper, I was more than ever inclined to
acquiesce in my disabilities, to purr like an elderly cat, and to feel
that while I had the priceless boon of leisure, set in a framework of
small duties, there was much to be said for life, and that I was a poor
creature if I could not be soberly content.

Of course I know that I have missed the nearer ties of life, the
hearth, the home, the companionship of a wife, the joys and interests
of growing girls and boys. But if a man is fatherly and kind-hearted,
he will find plenty of young men who are responsive to a paternal
interest, and intensely grateful for the good-humoured care of one who
will listen to their troubles, their difficulties, and their dreams. I
have two or three young friends who tell me what they are doing, and
what they hope to do; I have many correspondents who were friends of
mine as boys, who tell me from time to time how it goes with them in
the bigger world, and who like in return to hear something of my own
doings.

And so I sit, while the clock on the mantelpiece ticks out the pleasant
minutes, and the fire winks and crumbles on the hearth, till the old
gyp comes tapping at the door to learn my intentions for the evening;
and then, again, I pass out into the court, the lighted windows of the
Hall gleam with the ancient armorial glass, from staircase after
staircase come troops of alert, gowned figures, while overhead, above
all the pleasant stir and murmur of life, hang in the dark sky the
unchanging stars.




III

BOOKS


The one room in my College which I always enter with a certain sense of
desolation and sadness is the College library. There used to be a story
in my days at Cambridge of a book-collecting Don who was fond of
discoursing in public of the various crosses he had to bear. He was
lamenting one day in Hall the unwieldy size of his library. "I really
don't know what to do with my books," he said, and looked round for
sympathy. "Why not read them?" said a sharp and caustic Fellow
opposite. It may be thought that I am in need of the same advice, but
it is not the case. There are, indeed, many books in our library; but
most of them, as D. G. Rossetti used to say in his childhood of his
father's learned volumes, are "no good for reading." The books of the
College library are delightful, indeed, to look at; rows upon rows of
big irregular volumes, with tarnished tooling and faded gilding on the
sun-scorched backs. What are they? old editions of classics, old
volumes of controversial divinity, folios of the Fathers, topographical
treatises, cumbrous philosophers, pamphlets from which, like dry ashes,
the heat of the fire that warmed them once has fled. Take one down: it
is an agreeable sight enough; there is a gentle scent of antiquity; the
bumpy page crackles faintly; the big irregular print meets the eye with
a pleasant and leisurely mellowness. But what do they tell one? Very
little, alas! that one need know, very much which it would be a
positive mistake to believe. That is the worst of erudition--that the
next scholar sucks the few drops of honey that you have accumulated,
sets right your blunders, and you are superseded. You have handed on
the torch, perhaps, and even trimmed it. Your errors, your patient
explanations, were a necessary step in the progress of knowledge; but
now the procession has turned the corner, and is out of sight.

Yet even here, it pleases me to think, some mute and unsuspected
treasure may lurk unknown. In a room like this, for over a couple of
centuries, stood on one of the shelves an old rudely bound volume of
blank paper, the pages covered with a curious straggling cipher; no one
paid any heed to it, no one tried to spell its secrets. But the day
came when a Fellow who was both inquisitive and leisurely took up the
old volume, and formed a resolve to decipher it. Through many baffling
delays, through many patient windings, he carried his purpose out; and
the result was a celebrated Day-book, which cast much light upon the
social conditions of a past age, as well as revealed one of the most
simple and genial personalities that ever marched blithely through the
pages of a Diary.

But, in these days of cheap print and nasty paper, with a central
library into which pours the annual cataract of literature, these
little ancient libraries have no use left, save as repositories or
store-rooms. They belong to the days when books were few and expensive;
when few persons could acquire a library of their own; when lecturers
accumulated knowledge that was not the property of the world; when
notes were laboriously copied and handed on; when one of the joys of
learning was the consciousness of possessing secrets not known to other
men. An ancient Dean of Christ Church is said to have given three
reasons for the study of Greek: the first was that it enabled you to
read the words of the Saviour in the original tongue; the second, that
it gave you a proper contempt for those who were ignorant of it; and
the third was that it led to situations of emolument. What a rich aroma
hangs about this judgment! The first reason is probably erroneous, the
second is un-Christian, and the third is a gross motive which would
equally apply to any professional training whatsoever.

Well, the knowledge of Greek, except for the schoolmaster and the
clergyman, has not now the same obvious commercial value. Knowledge is
more diffused, more accessible. It is no longer thought to be a secret,
precious, rather terrible possession; the possessor is no longer
venerated and revered; on the contrary, a learned man is rather
considered likely to be tiresome. Old folios have, indeed, become
merely the stock-in-trade of the illustrators of sensational novels.
Who does not know the absurd old man, with white silky hair, velvet
skull-cap, and venerable appearance, who sits reading a folio at an oak
table, and who turns out to be the villain of the piece, a mine of
secret and unsuccessful wickedness? But no one in real life reads a
folio now, because anything that is worth reprinting, as well as a good
deal that is not, is reprinted in convenient form, if not in England,
at least in Germany.

And the result of it is that these College libraries are almost wholly
unvisited. It seems a pity, but it also seems inevitable. I wish that
some use could be devised for them, for these old books make at all
events a very dignified and pleasant background, and the fragrance of
well-warmed old leather is a delicate thing. But they are not even good
places for working in, now that one has one's own books and one's own
reading-chair. Moreover, if they were kept up to date, which would in
itself be an expensive thing, there would come in the eternal
difficulty of where to put the old books, which no one would have the
heart to destroy.

Perhaps the best thing for a library like this would be not to attempt
to buy books, but to subscribe like a club to a circulating library,
and to let a certain number of new volumes flow through the place and
lie upon the tables for a time. But, on the other hand, here in the
University there seems to be little time for general reading; and
indeed it is a great problem, as life goes on, as duties grow more
defined, and as one becomes more and more conscious of the shortness of
life, what the duty of a cultivated and open-minded man is with regard
to general reading. I am inclined to think that as one grows older one
may read less; it is impossible to keep up with the vast output of
literature, and it is hard enough to find time to follow even the one
or two branches in which one is specially interested. Almost the only
books which, I think, it is a duty to read, are the lives of great
contemporaries; one gets thus to have an idea of what is going on in
the world, and to realize it from different points of view. New
fiction, new poetry, new travels are very hard to peruse diligently.
The effort, I confess, of beginning a new novel, of making acquaintance
with an unfamiliar scene, of getting the individualities of a fresh
group of people into one's head, is becoming every year harder for me;
but there are still one or two authors of fiction for whom I have a
predilection, and whose works I look out for. New poetry demands an
even greater effort; and as to travels, they are written so much in the
journalistic style, and, consist so much of the meals our traveller
obtains at wayside stations, of conversations with obviously reticent
and even unintelligent persons; they have so many photogravures of
places that are exactly like other places, and of complacent people in
grotesque costumes, like supers in a play, that one feels the whole
thing to be hopelessly superficial and unreal. Imagine a journalistic
foreigner visiting the University, lunching at the station
refreshment-room, hurrying to half-a-dozen of the best known colleges,
driving in a tram through the main thoroughfares, looking on at a
football match, interviewing a Town Councillor, and being presented to
the Vice-Chancellor--what would be the profit of such a record as he
could give us? What would he have seen of the quiet daily life, the
interests, the home-current of the place? The only books of travel
worth reading are those where a person has settled deliberately in an
unknown place, really lived the life of the people, and penetrated the
secret of the landscape and the buildings.

I wish very much that there was a really good literary paper, with an
editor of catholic tastes, and half-a-dozen stimulating specialists on
the staff, whose duty would be to read the books that came out, each in
his own line, write reviews of appreciation and not of contemptuous
fault-finding, let feeble books alone, and make it their business to
tell ordinary people what to read, not saving them the trouble of
reading the books that are worth reading, but sparing them the task of
glancing at a good many books that are not worth reading. Literary
papers, as a rule, either review a book with hopeless rapidity, or tend
to lag behind too much. It would be of the essence of such a paper as I
have described, that there should be no delay about telling one what to
look out for, and at the same time that the reviews should be
deliberate and careful.

But I think that as one grows older one may take out a licence, so to
speak, to read less. One may go back to the old restful books, where
one knows the characters well, hear the old remarks, survey the same
scenes. One may meditate more upon one's stores, stroll about more,
just looking at life, seeing the quiet things that are happening, and
beaming through one's spectacles. One ought to have amassed, as life
goes on and the shadows lengthen, a good deal of material for
reflection. And, after all, reading is not in itself a virtue; it is
only one way of passing the time; talking is another way, watching
things another. Bacon says that reading makes a full man; well, I
cannot help thinking that many people are full to the brim when they
reach the age of forty, and that much which they afterwards put into
the overcharged vase merely drips and slobbers uncomfortably down the
side and foot.

The thing to determine then, as one's brain hardens or softens, is what
the object of reading is. It is not, I venture to think, what used to
be called the pursuit of knowledge. Of course, if a man is a
professional teacher or a professional writer, he must read for
professional purposes, just as a coral insect must eat to enable it to
secrete the substances out of which it builds its branching house. But
I am not here speaking of professional studies, but of general reading.
I suppose that there are three motives for reading--the first, purely
pleasurable; the second, intellectual; the third, what may be called
ethical. As to the first, a man who reads at all, reads just as he
eats, sleeps, and takes exercise, because he likes it; and that is
probably the best reason that can be given for the practice. It is an
innocent mode of passing the time, it takes one out of oneself, it is
amusing. Of course, it can be carried to an excess; and a man may
become a mere book-eater, as a man may become an opium-eater. I used at
one time to go and stay with an old friend, a clergyman in a remote
part of England. He was a bachelor and fairly well off. He did not care
about exercise or his garden, and he had no taste for general society.
He subscribed to the London Library and to a lending library in the
little town where he lived, and he bought too, a good many books. He
must have spent, I used to calculate, about ten hours of the
twenty-four in reading. He seemed to me to have read everything, old
and new books alike, and he had an astonishing memory; anything that he
put into his mind remained there exactly as fresh and clear as when he
laid it away, so that he never needed to read a book twice. If he had
lived at a University he would have been a useful man; if one wanted to
know what books to read in any line, one had only to pick his brains.
He could give one a list of authorities on almost every subject. But in
his country parish he was entirely thrown away. He had not the least
desire to make anything of his stores, or to write. He had not the art
of expression, and he was a distinctly tiresome talker. His idea of
conversation was to ask you whether you had read a number of modern
novels. If he found one that you had not read, he sketched the plot in
an intolerably prolix manner, so that it was practically impossible to
fix the mind on what he was saying. He seemed to have no preferences in
literature whatever; his one desire was to read everything that came
out, and his only idea of a holiday was to go up to London and get
lists of books from a bookseller. That is, of course, an extreme case;
and I cannot help feeling that he would have been nearly as usefully
employed if he had confined himself to counting the number of words in
the books he read. But, after all, he was interested and amused, and a
perfectly contented man.

As to the intellectual motive for reading, it hardly needs discussing;
the object is to get clear conceptions, to arrive at a critical sense
of what is good in literature, to have a knowledge of events and
tendencies of thought, to take a just view of history and of great
personalities; not to be at the mercy of theorists, but to be able to
correct a faulty bias by having a large and wide view of the progress
of events and the development of thought. One who reads from this point
of view will generally find some particular line which he tends to
follow, some special region of the mind where he is desirous to know
all that can be known; but he will, at the same time, wish to acquaint
himself in a general way with other departments of thought, so that he
may be interested in subjects in which he is not wholly well-informed,
and be able to listen, even to ask intelligent questions, in matters
with which he has no minute acquaintance. Such a man, if he steers
clear of the contempt for indefinite views which is often the curse of
men with clear and definite minds, makes the best kind of talker,
stimulating and suggestive; his talk seems to open doors into gardens
and corridors of the house of thought; and others, whose knowledge is
fragmentary, would like to be at home, too, in that pleasant palace.
But it is of the essence of such talk that it should be natural and
attractive, not professional or didactic. People who are not used to
Universities tend to believe that academical persons are invariably
formidable. They think of them as possessed of vast stores of precise
knowledge, and actuated by a merciless desire to detect and to ridicule
deficiencies of attainment among unprofessional people. Of course,
there are people of this type to be found at a University, just as in
all other professions it is possible to find uncharitable specialists
who despise persons of hazy and leisurely views. But my own impression
is that it is a rare type among University Dons; I think that it is far
commoner at the University to meet men of great attainments combined
with sincere humility and charity, for the simple reason that the most
erudite specialist at a University becomes aware both of the wide
diversity of knowledge and of his own limitations as well.

Personally, direct bookish talk is my abomination. A knowledge of books
ought to give a man a delicate allusiveness, an aptitude for pointed
quotation. A book ought to be only incidentally, not anatomically,
discussed; and I am pleased to be able to think that there is a good
deal of this allusive talk at the University, and that the only reason
that there is not more is that professional demands are so insistent,
and work so thorough, that academical persons cannot keep up their
general reading as they would like to do.

And then we come to what I have called, for want of a better word, the
ethical motive for reading; it might sound at first as if I meant that
people ought to read improving books, but that is exactly what I do not
mean. I have very strong opinions on this point, and hold that what I
call the ethical motive for reading is the best of all--indeed the only
true one. And yet I find a great difficulty in putting into words what
is a very elusive and delicate thought. But my belief is this. As I
make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful
mystery seems to gather and grow. I see that many people find the world
dreary--and, indeed, there must be spaces of dreariness in it for us
all--some find it interesting; some surprising; some find it entirely
satisfactory. But those who find it satisfactory seem to me, as a rule,
to be tough, coarse, healthy natures, who find success attractive and
food digestible: who do not trouble their heads very much about other
people, but go cheerfully and optimistically on their way, closing
their eyes as far as possible to things painful and sorrowful, and
getting all the pleasure they can out of material enjoyments.

Well, to speak very sincerely and humbly, such a life seems to me the
worst kind of failure. It is the life that men were living in the days
of Noah, and out of such lives comes nothing that is wise or useful or
good. Such men leave the world as they found it, except for the fact
that they have eaten a little way into it, like a mite into a cheese,
and leave a track of decomposition behind them.

I do not know why so much that is hard and painful and sad is
interwoven with our life here; but I see, or seem to see, that it is
meant to be so interwoven. All the best and most beautiful flowers of
character and thought seem to me to spring up in the track of
suffering; and what is the most sorrowful of all mysteries, the mystery
of death, the ceasing to be, the relinquishing of our hopes and dreams,
the breaking of our dearest ties, becomes more solemn and awe-inspiring
the nearer we advance to it.

I do not mean that we are to go and search for unhappiness; but, on the
other hand, the only happiness worth seeking for is a happiness which
takes all these dark things into account, looks them in the face, reads
the secret of their dim eyes and set lips, dwells with them, and learns
to be tranquil in their presence.

In this mood--and it is a mood which no thoughtful man can hope or
ought to wish to escape--reading becomes less and less a searching for
instructive and impressive facts, and more and more a quest after
wisdom and truth and emotion. More and more I feel the impenetrability
of the mystery that surrounds us; the phenomena of nature, the
discoveries of science, instead of raising the veil, seem only to make
the problem more complex, more bizarre, more insoluble; the
investigation of the laws of light, of electricity, of chemical action,
of the causes of disease, the influence of heredity--all these things
may minister to our convenience and our health, but they make the mind
of God, the nature of the First Cause, an infinitely more mysterious
and inconceivable problem.

But there still remains, inside, so to speak, of these astonishing
facts, a whole range of intimate personal phenomena, of emotion, of
relationship, of mental or spiritual conceptions, such as beauty,
affection, righteousness, which seem to be an even nearer concern, even
more vital to our happiness than the vast laws of which it is possible
for men to be so unconscious, that centuries have rolled past without
their being investigated.

And thus in such a mood reading becomes a patient tracing out of human
emotion, human feeling, when confronted with the sorrows, the hopes,
the motives, the sufferings which beckon us and threaten us on every
side. One desires to know what pure and wise and high-hearted natures
have made of the problem; one desires to let the sense of beauty--that
most spiritual of all pleasures--sink deeper into the heart; one
desires to share the thoughts and hopes, the dreams and visions, in the
strength of which the human spirit has risen superior to suffering and
death.

And thus, as I say, the reading that is done in such a mood has little
of precise acquisition or definite attainment about it; it is a desire
rather to feed and console the spirit--to enter the region in which it
seems better to wonder than to know, to aspire rather than to define,
to hope rather than to be satisfied. A spirit which walks expectantly
along this path grows to learn that the secret of such happiness as we
can attain lies in simplicity and courage, in sincerity and
loving-kindness; it grows more and more averse to material ambitions
and mean aims; it more and more desires silence and recollection and
contemplation. In this mood, the words of the wise fall like the
tolling of sweet, grave bells upon the soul, the dreams of poets come
like music heard at evening from the depth of some enchanted forest,
wafted over a wide water; we know not what instrument it is whence the
music wells, by what fingers swept, by what lips blown; but we know
that there is some presence there that is sorrowful or glad, who has
power to translate his dream into the concord of sweet sounds. Such a
mood need not withdraw us from life, from toil, from kindly
relationships, from deep affections; but it will rather send us back to
life with a renewed and joyful zest, with a desire to discern the true
quality of beautiful things, of fair thoughts, of courageous hopes, of
wise designs. It will make us tolerant and forgiving, patient with
stubbornness and prejudice, simple in conduct, sincere in word, gentle
in deed; with pity for weakness, with affection for the lonely and the
desolate, with admiration for all that is noble and serene and strong.

Those who read in such a spirit will tend to resort more and more to
large and wise and beautiful books, to press the sweetness out of old
familiar thoughts, to look more for warmth and loftiness of feeling
than for elaborate and artful expression. They will value more and more
books that speak to the soul, rather than books that appeal to the ear
and to the mind. They will realize that it is through wisdom and force
and nobility that books retain their hold upon the hearts of men, and
not by briskness and colour and epigram. A mind thus stored may have
little grasp of facts, little garniture of paradox and jest; but it
will be full of compassion and hope, of gentleness and joy. . . .

Well, this thought has taken me a long way from the College library,
where the old books look somewhat pathetically from the shelves, like
aged dogs wondering why no one takes them for a walk. Monuments of
pathetic labour, tasks patiently fulfilled through slow hours! But yet
I am sure that a great deal of joy went to the making of them, the joy
of the old scholar who settled down soberly among his papers, and heard
the silvery bell above him tell out the dear hours that, perhaps, he
would have delayed if he could. Yes, the old books are a tender-hearted
and a joyful company; the days slip past, the sunlight moves round the
court, and steals warmly for an hour or two into the deserted room.
Life--delightful life--spins merrily past; the perennial stream of
youth flows on; and perhaps the best that the old books can do for us
is to bid us cast back a wistful and loving thought into the past--a
little gift of love for the old labourers who wrote so diligently in
the forgotten hours, till the weary, failing hand laid down the
familiar pen, and soon lay silent in the dust.




IV

SOCIABILITIES


I have a friend here, an old friend, who, in refreshing contrast with
the majority of the human race, possesses strongly marked
characteristics. He knows exactly the sort of life that suits him, and
exactly what he likes. He is not, as Mr. Enfield said, one of the
fellows who go about doing what is called "good." But he contrives to
give a great deal of happiness without having any programme. He is, in
the first place, a savant with a great reputation; but he makes no
parade of his work, and sits down to it because he likes it, as a
hungry man may sit down to a pleasant meal. He is thus the most
leisurely man that I know, while, at the same time, his output is
amazing. His table is covered deep with books and papers; but he will
work at a corner, if he is fortunate enough to find one; and, if not,
he will make a kind of cutting in the mass, and work in the shade, with
steep banks of stratified papers on either hand. He is always
accessible, always ready to help any one. The undergraduate, that shy
bird in whose sight the net is so often spread in vain, even though it
be baited with the priceless privilege of tea, tobacco, and the talk of
a well-informed man, comes, in troops and companies, to see him. He is
a man too with a deep vein of humour, and, what is far more rare, a
keen vein of appreciation of the humour of others. He laughs as if he
were amused, not like a man discharging a painful duty. It is true that
he will not answer letters; but then his writing-paper is generally
drowned deeper than plummet can sound; his pens are rusty, and his ink
is of the consistency of tar; but he will always answer questions, with
an incredible patience and sympathy, correcting one's mistakes in a
genial and tentative way, as if a matter admitted of many opinions. If
a man, for instance, maintains that the Norman Conquest took place in
1066 B.C., he will say that some historians put it more than two
thousand years later, but that of course it is difficult to arrive at
exact accuracy in these matters. Thus one never feels snubbed or
snuffed out by him.

Well, for the purposes of my argument, I will call my friend Perry,
though it is not his name; and having finished my introduction I will
go on to my main story.

I took in to dinner the other night a beautiful and accomplished lady,
with whom it is always a pleasure to talk. The conversation turned upon
Mr. Perry. She said with a graceful air of judgment that she had but
one fault to find with him, and that was that he hated women. I
hazarded a belief that he was shy, to which she replied with a
dignified assurance that he was not shy; he was lazy.

Prudence and discretion forbade me to appeal against this decision; but
I endeavoured to arrive at the principles that supported such a
verdict. I gathered that Egeria considered that every one owed a
certain duty to society; that people had no business to pick and
choose, to cultivate the society of those who happened to please and
interest them, and to eschew the society of those who bored and wearied
them; that such a course was not fair to the uninteresting people, and
so forth. But the point was that there was a duty involved, and that
some sacrifice was required of virtuous people in the matter.

Egeria herself is certainly blameless in the matter: she diffuses
sweetness and light in many tedious assemblies; she is true to her
principles; but for all that I cannot agree with her on this point.

In the first place I cannot agree that sociability is a duty at all,
and to conceive of it as such seems to me to misunderstand the whole
situation. I think that a man loses a great deal by being unsociable,
and that for his own happiness he had better make an effort to see
something of his fellows. All kinds of grumpinesses and morbidities
arise from solitude; and a shy man ought to take occasional dips into
society from a medicinal point of view, as a man should take a cold
bath; even if he confers no pleasure on others by so doing, the mere
sense, to a timid man, of having steered a moderately straight course
through a social entertainment is in itself enlivening and
invigorating, and gives the pleasing feeling of having escaped from a
great peril. But the accusation of unsociability does not apply to
Perry, whose doors are open day and night, and whose welcome is always
perfectly sincere. Moreover, the frame of mind in which a man goes to a
party, determined to confer pleasure and exercise influence, is a
dangerously self-satisfied one. Society is, after all, a recreation and
a delight, and ought to be sought for with pleasurable motives, not
with a consciousness of rectitude and justice.

My own belief is that every one has a perfect right to choose his own
circle, and to make it large or small as he desires. It is a monstrous
thing to hold that, if an agreeable or desirable person comes to a
place, one has but to leave a piece of pasteboard at his door to entail
upon him the duty of coming round till he finds one at home, and of
disporting himself gingerly, like a dancing bear among the teacups. A
card ought to be a species of charity, left on solitary strangers, to
give them the chance of coming, if they like, to see the leaver of it,
or as a preliminary to a real invitation. It ought to be a ticket of
admission, which a man may use or not as he likes, not a legal summons.
That any one should return a call should be a compliment and an honour,
not regarded as the mere discharging of a compulsory duty.

I have heard fair ladies complain of the boredom they endured at
tea-parties; they speak of themselves as the martyrs and victims of a
sense of duty. If such people talked of the duty of visiting the sick
and afflicted as a thing which their conception of Christian love
entailed upon them, which they performed, reluctantly and unwillingly,
from a sense of obligation, I should respect them deeply and
profoundly. But I have not often found that the people who complain
most of their social duties, and who discharge them most sedulously,
complain because such duties interrupt a course of Christian
beneficence. It is, indeed, rather the other way; it is generally true
that those who see a good deal of society (from a sense of duty) and
find it dull, are the people who have no particular interests or
pursuits of their own.

There is less excuse in a University town than in any other for
adopting this pompous and formal view of the duties of society, because
there are very few unoccupied people in such a place. My own
occupations, such as they are, fill the hours from breakfast to
luncheon and from tea to dinner; men of sedentary lives, who do a good
deal of brainwork, find an hour or two of exercise and fresh air a
necessity in the afternoon. Indeed, a man who cares about his work, and
who regards it as a primary duty, finds no occupation more dispiriting,
more apt to unfit him for serious work, than pacing from house to house
in the early afternoon, delivering a pack of visiting-cards, varied by
a perfunctory conversation, seated at the edge of an easy-chair, on
subjects of inconceivable triviality. Of course there are men so
constituted that they find this pastime a relief and a pleasure; but
their felicity of temperament ought not to be made into a rule for
serious-minded men. The only social institution which might really
prove beneficial in a University is an informal evening salon. If
people might drop in uninvited, in evening dress or not, as was
convenient, from nine to ten in the evening, at a pleasant house, it
would be a rational practice; but few such experiments seem ever to be
tried.

Moreover, the one thing that is fatal to all spontaneous social
enjoyment is that the guests should, like the maimed and blind in the
parable, be compelled to come in. The frame of mind of an eminent
Cabinet Minister whom I once accompanied to an evening party rises
before my mind. He was in deep depression at having to go; and when I
ventured to ask his motive in going, he said, with an air of
unutterable self-sacrifice, "I suppose that we ought sometimes to be
ready to submit to the tortures we inflict on others." Imagine a circle
of guests assembled in such a frame of mind, and it would seem that one
had all the materials for a thoroughly pleasant party.

I was lately taken by a friend, with whom I was staying in the country,
to a garden party. I confess that I think it would be hard to conceive
circumstances less favourable to personal enjoyment. The day was hot,
and I was uncomfortably dressed. I found myself first in a hot room,
where the host and hostess were engaged in what is called receiving. A
stream of pale, perspiring people moved slowly through, some of them
frankly miserable, some with an air of false geniality, which deceived
no one, written upon their faces. "So pleasant to see so many friends!"
"What a delightful day you have got for your party!" Such ineptitudes
were the current coin of the market. I passed on into another room
where refreshment, of a nature that I did not want, was sadly accepted.
And I then passed out into the open air; the garden was disagreeably
crowded; there was "a din of doubtful talk," as Rossetti says. The sun
beat down dizzily on my streaming brow. I joined group after group,
where the conversation was all of the same easy and stimulating
character, until I felt sick and faint (though of robust constitution)
with the "mazes of heat and sound" in which my life seemed "turning,
turning," like the life of the heroine of "Requiescat." I declare that
such a performance is the sort of thing that I should expect to find in
hell, even down to the burning marl, as Milton says. I got away dizzy,
unstrung, unfit for life, with that terrible sense of fatigue
unaccompanied by wholesome tiredness, that comes of standing in hot
buzzing places. I had heard not a single word that amused or interested
me; and yet there were plenty of people present with whom I should have
enjoyed a leisurely talk, to whom I felt inclined to say, in the words
of Prince Henry to Poins, "Prithee, Ned, come out of this fat room, and
lend me thy hand to laugh a little!" But as I went away, I pondered
sadly upon the almost inconceivable nature of the motive which could
lead people to behave as I had seen them behaving, and resolutely to
label it pleasure. I suppose that, as a matter of fact, many persons
find stir, and movement, and the presence of a crowd an agreeable
stimulus. I imagine that people are divided into those who, if they see
a crowd of human beings in a field, have a desire to join them, and
those who, at the same sight, long to fly swiftly to the uttermost ends
of the earth. I am of the latter temperament; and I cannot believe that
there is any duty which should lead me to resist the impulse as a
temptation to evil. But the truth is that sociable people, like
liturgical people, require, for the full satisfaction of their
instincts, that a certain number of other persons should be present at
the ceremonies which they affect, and that all should be occupied in
the same way. It is of little moment to the originators of the ceremony
whether those present are there willingly or unwillingly; and thus the
only resource of their victims is to go out on strike; so far from
thinking it a duty to be present at social or religious functions, in
order that my sociable or liturgical friends should have a suitable
background for their pleasures, I think it a solemn duty to resist to
the uttermost this false and vexatious theory of society and religion!

I suppose, too, that inveterate talkers and discoursers require an
audience who should listen meekly and admiringly, and not interrupt. I
have friends who are afflicted with this taste to such an extent, who
are so determined to hold the talk in their own hands, that I declare
they might as well have a company of stuffed seals to sit down to
dinner with, as a circle of living and breathing men. But I do not
think it right, or at all events necessary, in the interests of human
kindliness, that I should victimize myself so for a man's pleasure.
Neither do I think it necessary that I should attend a ceremony where I
neither get nor give anything of the nature of pleasure, simply in
order to conform to a social rule, invented and propagated by those who
happen to enjoy such gatherings.

I remember being much struck by an artless reminiscence of an
undergraduate, quoted in the Memoirs of a certain distinguished
academical personage, who was fond of inviting young men to share his
hospitality for experimental reasons. I cannot recollect the exact
words, but the undergraduate wrote of his celebrated entertainer
somewhat to the following effect: "He asked me to sit down, so I sate
down; he asked me to eat an apple, so I ate it. He asked me to take a
glass of wine, so I poured one out, and drank it. I am told that he
tries to get you to talk so that he may see the kind of fellow you are;
but I didn't want him to know the kind of fellow I was, so I didn't
talk; and presently I went away." I think that this species of
retaliation is perfectly fair in the case of experimental
entertainments. Social gatherings must be conducted on a basis of
perfect equality, and the idea of duty in connection with them is a
bugbear invented in the interests of those who are greedy of society,
and not in a position to contribute any pleasure to a social gathering.

It might be inferred from the above considerations that I am an
inveterately unsociable person; but such is not the case. I am
extremely gregarious at the right time and place. I love to spend a
large part of the day alone; I think that a perfect day consists in a
solitary breakfast and a solitary morning; a single companion for
luncheon and exercise; again some solitary hours; but then I love to
dine in company and, if possible, to spend the rest of the evening with
two or three congenial persons. But more and more, as life goes on, do
I find the mixed company tiresome, and the tete-a-tete delightful. The
only amusement of society is the getting to know what other people
really think and feel: what amuses them, what pleases them, what shocks
them; what they like and what they loathe; what they tolerate and what
they condemn. A dinner-party is agreeable, principally because one is
absolutely tied down to make the best of two people. Very few English
people have the art of conversing unaffectedly and sincerely before a
circle; when one does come across it, it is a rare and beautiful art,
like singing, or oratory. But the presence of such an improvisatore is
the only thing that makes a circle tolerable. On the other hand, a
great many English people have the art of tete-a-tete talking; and I
can honestly say that I have very seldom been brought into close
relations with an individual without finding an unsuspected depth and
width of interest in the companionship.

But in any case the whole thing is a mere question of pleasure; and I
return to my thesis, which is that the only possible theory is for
every one to find and create the kind of society that he or she may
like. Depend upon it, congenial society is the only kind of society to,
and in which, any one will give his best. If people like the society of
the restaurant, the club, the drawing-room, the dining-room, the open
air, the cricket-field, the moor, the golf-course, in the name of
pleasure and common sense let them have it; but to condemn people, by
brandishing the fiery sword of duty over their heads, to attend
uncongenial gatherings seems to me to be both absurd and unjust.

The case of my friend Perry is, I must admit, complicated by the fact
that he does add greatly to the happiness of any circle of which he is
a member; he is an admirable listener and a sympathetic talker. But if
Egeria desires to make a Numa of him, and to inspire him with her own
gentle wisdom, let her convince him quietly that he does owe a duty to
society, and not censure him before his friends. If Egeria, in her own
inimitable way, would say to him that the lives of academical ladies
were apt to be dull, and that it was a matter of graceful chivalry for
him to brighten the horizon, why, Perry could not resist her. But
chivalry is a thing which must be courteously and generously conceded,
and must never be pettishly claimed; and indeed I do not want Perry
interfered with in this matter: he fills a very peculiar niche, he is a
lodestar to enthusiastic undergraduates; he is the joy of sober
common-rooms. I wish with all my heart that the convenances of life
permitted Egeria herself to stray into those book-lined rooms, dim with
tobacco-smoke, to warble and sing to the accompaniment of Perry's
cracked piano, to take her place among the casual company. But as
Egeria cannot go to Perry, and as Perry will not go to Egeria, they
must respect each other from a distance, and do their best alone.

And, after all, simple, sincere, and kindly persons are apt to find, as
Stevenson wisely said, their circle ready-made. The only people who
cannot get the friends and companions they want are those who
petulantly claim attention; and the worst error of all consists in
mistaking the gentle pleasures of life, such as society and
intercourse, for the duties of life, and of codifying and formalizing
them. For myself, I wish with all my heart that I had Perry's power; I
wish that those throngs of young men would feel impelled to come in and
talk to me, easily and simply. I have, it is true, several faithful
friends, but very few of them will come except in response to a
definite invitation; and really, if they do not want to come, I do not
at all wish to force them to do so. It might amuse me; but if it amused
them, they would come: as they do not come, I am quite ready to
conclude that it does not amuse them. I am as conscious as every one
else of the exquisitely stimulating and entertaining character of my
own talk; it constantly pains me that so few people take advantage of
their opportunities of visiting the healing fount. But the fact is
incontestable that my talents are not appreciated at their right value;
and I must be content with such slender encouragement as I receive. In
vain do I purchase choice brands of cigars and cigarettes, and load my
side-table with the best Scotch whisky. Not eyen with that solace will
the vagrant undergraduate consent to be douched under the stream of my
suggestive conversation.

A humorous friend of mine, Tipton by name, an official of a
neighbouring college, told me that he held receptions of undergraduates
on Sunday evenings. I believe that he is in reality a model host, full
of resource and sprightliness, and that admission to his entertainments
is eagerly coveted. But it pleases him to depreciate his own success.
"Oh, yes," he said, in answer to my questions as to the art he
practised, "a few of them come; one or two because they like me; some
because they, think there is going to be a row about attendance at
chapel, and hope to mend matters; one or two because they like to stand
well with the dons, when there is a chance of a fellowship; but the
lowest motive of all," he went on, "was the motive which I heard from
the lips of one on a summer evening, when my windows were all open, and
I was just prepared to receive boarders; an ingenuous friend of mine
beneath said to another unoccupied youth, 'What do you think about
doing a Tipper tonight?' To which the other replied, 'Well, yes, one
ought to do one a term; let's go in at once and get it over.'"




V

CONVERSATION


I cannot help wishing sometimes that English people had more theories
about conversation. Really good talk is one of the greatest pleasures
there is, and yet how rarely one comes across it! There are a good many
people among my acquaintance who on occasions are capable of talking
well. But what they seem to lack is initiative, and deliberate purpose.
If people would only look upon conversation in a more serious light,
much would be gained. I do not of course mean, Heaven forbid! that
people should try to converse seriously; that results in the worst kind
of dreariness, in feeling, as Stevenson said, that one has the brain of
a sheep and the eyes of a boiled codfish. But I mean that the more
seriously one takes an amusement, the more amusing it becomes. What I
wish is that people would apply the same sort of seriousness to talk
that they apply to golf and bridge; that they should desire to improve
their game, brood over their mistakes, try to do better. Why is it that
so many people would think it priggish and effeminate to try to improve
their talk, and yet think it manly and rational to try to shoot better?
Of course it must be done with a natural zest and enjoyment, or it is
useless. What a ghastly picture one gets of the old-fashioned talkers
and wits, committing a number of subjects to memory, turning over a
commonplace book for apposite anecdotes and jests, adding dates to
those selected that they may not tell the same story again too soon,
learning up a list of epigrams, stuck in a shaving-glass, when they are
dressing for dinner, and then sallying forth primed to bursting with
conversation! It is all very well to know beforehand the kind of line
you would wish to take, but spontaneity is a necessary ingredient of
talk, and to make up one's mind to get certain stories in, is to
deprive talk of its fortuitous charm. When two celebrated talkers of
the kind that I have described used to meet, the talk was nothing but a
smart interchange of anecdotes. There is a story of Macaulay and some
other great conversationalist getting into the swing at breakfast when
staying, I think, with Lord Lansdowne. They drew their chairs to the
fire, the rest of the company formed a circle round them, and listened
meekly to the dialogue until luncheon. What an appalling picture! One
sympathizes with Carlyle on the occasion when he was asked to dinner to
meet a great talker, who poured forth a continuous flow of jest and
anecdote until the meal was far advanced. Then came a lull; Carlyle
laid down his knife and fork, and looking round with the famous
"crucified" expression on his face, said in a voice of agonized
entreaty, "For God's sake take me away, and put me in a room by myself,
and give me a pipe of tobacco!" He felt, as I have felt on such
occasions, an imperative need of silence and recollection and repose.
Indeed, as he said on another occasion, of one of Coleridge's
harangues, "to sit still and be pumped into is never an exhilarating
process."

That species of talker is, however, practically extinct; though indeed
I have met men whose idea of talk was a string of anecdotes, and who
employed the reluctant intervals of silence imposed upon them by the
desperate attempt of fellow-guests to join in the fun, in arranging the
points of their next anecdote.

What seems to me so odd about a talker of that kind is the lack of any
sense of justice about his talk. He presumably enjoys the exercise of
speech, and it seems to me strange that it should not occur to him that
others may like it too, and that he should not concede a certain
opportunity to others to have their say, if only in the interests of
fair play. It is as though a gourmet's satisfaction in a good dinner
were not complete unless he could prevent every one else from partaking
of the food before them.

What is really most needed in social gatherings is a kind of moderator
of the talk, an informal president. Many people, as I have said, are
quite capable of talking interestingly, if they get a lead. The perfect
moderator should have a large stock of subjects of general interest. He
should, so to speak, kick-off. And then he should either feel, or at
least artfully simulate, an interest in other people's point of view.
He should ask questions, reply to arguments, encourage, elicit
expressions of opinion. He should not desire to steer his own course,
but follow the line that the talk happens to take. If he aims at the
reputation of being a good talker, he will win a far higher fame by
pursuing this course; for it is a lamentable fact that, after a lively
talk, one is apt to remember far better what one has oneself
contributed to the discussion than what other people have said; and if
you can send guests away from a gathering feeling that they have talked
well, they will be disposed in that genial mood to concede
conversational merit to the other participators. A naive and
simple-minded friend of my own once cast an extraordinary light on the
subject, by saying to me, the day after an agreeable symposium at my
own house, "We had a very pleasant evening with you yesterday. I was in
great form"!

The only two kinds of talker that I find tiresome are the talker of
paradoxes and the egotist. A few paradoxes are all very well; they are
stimulating and gently provocative. But one gets tired of a string of
them; they become little more than a sort of fence erected round a
man's mind; one despairs of ever knowing what a paradoxical talker
really thinks. Half the charm of good talk consists in the glimpses and
peeps one gets into the stuff of a man's thoughts; and it is wearisome
to feel that a talker is for ever tossing subjects on his horns,
perpetually trying to say the unexpected, the startling thing. In the
best talk of all, a glade suddenly opens up, like the glades in the
Alpine forests through which they bring the timber down to the valley;
one sees a long green vista, all bathed in shimmering sunshine, with
the dark head of a mountain at the top. So in the best talk one has a
sudden sight of something high, sweet, serious, austere.

The other kind of talk that I find very disagreeable is the talk of a
full-fledged egotist, who converses without reference to his hearers,
and brings out what is in his mind. One gets interesting things in this
way from time to time; but the essence, as I have said, of good talk is
that one should have provoking and stimulating peeps into other minds,
not that one should be compelled to gaze and stare into them. I have a
friend, or rather an acquaintance, whose talk is just as if he opened a
trap-door into his mind: you look into a dark place where something
flows, stream or sewer; sometimes it runs clear and brisk, but at other
times it seems to be charged with dirt and debris; and yet there is no
escape; you have to stand and look, to breathe the very odours of the
mind, until he chooses to close the door.

The mistake that many earnest and persevering talkers make is to
suppose that to be engrossed is the same thing as being engrossing. It
is true of conversation as of many other things, that the half is
better than the whole. People who are fond of talking ought to beware
of being lengthy. How one knows the despair of conversing with a man
who is determined to make a clear and complete statement of everything,
and not to let his hearer off anything! Arguments, questions, views,
rise in the mind in the course of the harangue, and are swept away by
the moving stream. Such talkers suffer from a complacent feeling that
their information is correct and complete, and that their deductions
are necessarily sound. But it is quite possible to form and hold a
strong opinion, and yet to realize that it is after all only one point
of view, and that there is probably much to be said on the other side.
The unhappiest feature of drifting into a habit of positive and
continuous talk is that one has few friends faithful enough to
criticise such a habit and tell one the unvarnished truth; if the habit
is once confirmed, it becomes almost impossible to break it off. I know
of a family conclave that was once summoned, in order, if possible, to
communicate the fact to one of the circle that he was in danger of
becoming a bore; the head of the family was finally deputed to convey
the fact as delicately as possible to the erring brother. He did so,
with much tender circumlocution. The offender was deeply mortified, but
endeavoured to thank his elderly relative for discharging so painful a
task. He promised amendment. He sate glum and tongue-tied for several
weeks in the midst of cheerful gatherings. Very gradually the old habit
prevailed. Within six months he was as tedious as ever; but what is the
saddest part of the whole business is that he has never quite forgiven
the teller of the unwelcome news, while at the same time he labours
under the impression that he has cured himself of the habit.

It is, of course, useless to attempt to make oneself into a brilliant
talker, because the qualities needed--humour, quickness, the power of
seeing unexpected connections, picturesque phrasing, natural charm,
sympathy, readiness, and so forth--are things hardly attainable by
effort. But much can be done by perseverance; and it is possible to
form a deliberate habit of conversation by determining that however
much one may be indisposed to talk, however unpromising one's
companions may seem, one will at all events keep up an end. I have
known really shy and unready persons who from a sheer sense of duty
have made themselves into very tolerable talkers. A friend of my
acquaintance confesses that a device she has occasionally employed is
to think of subjects in alphabetical order. I could not practise this
device myself, because when I had lighted upon, we will say, algebra,
archery, and astigmatism, as possible subjects for talk, I should find
it impossible to invent any gambit by which they could be successfully
introduced.

The only recipe which I would offer to a student of the art is not to
be afraid of apparent egotism, but to talk frankly of any subject in
which he may be interested, from a personal point of view. An
impersonal talker is apt to be a dull dog. There is nothing like a
frank expression of personal views to elicit an equally frank
expression of divergence or agreement. Neither is it well to despise
the day of small things; the weather, railway travelling, symptoms of
illness, visits to a dentist, sea-sickness, as representing the
universal experiences and interests of humanity, will often serve as
points d'appui.

Of course there come to all people horrible tongue-tied moments when
they can think of nothing to say, and, feel like a walrus on an
ice-floe, heavy, melancholy, ineffective. Such a catastrophe is almost
invariably precipitated in my own case by being told that some one is
particularly anxious to be introduced to me. A philosopher of my
acquaintance, who was an admirable talker, told me that on a certain
occasion, an evening party, his hostess led up a young girl to him,
like Iphigenia decked for the sacrifice, and said that Miss ---- was
desirous of meeting him. The world became instantly a blank to him. The
enthusiastic damsel stared at him with large admiring eyes. After a
period of agonized silence, a remark occurred to him which he felt
might have been appropriate if it had been made earlier in the
encounter. He rejected it as useless, and after another interval a
thought came to him which he saw might have served, if the suspense had
not been already so prolonged; this was also put aside; and after a
series of belated remarks had occurred to him, each of which seemed to
be hopelessly unworthy of the expectation he had excited, the hostess,
seeing that things had gone wrong, came, like Artemis, and led
Iphigenia away, without the philosopher having had the opportunity of
indulging in a single reflection. The experience, he said, was of so
appalling a character, that he set to, and invented a remark which he
said was applicable to persons of all ages and of either sex, under any
circumstances whatever; but, as he would never reveal this precious
possession to the most ardent inquirers, the secret, whatever it was,
has perished with him.

One of my friends has a perfectly unique gift of conversation. He is a
prominent man of affairs, a perfect mine of political secrets. He is a
ready talker, and has the art, both in a tete-a-tete as well as in a
mixed company, of mentioning things which are extremely interesting,
and appear to be hopelessly indiscreet. He generally accompanies his
relation of these incidents with a request that the subject may not be
mentioned outside. The result is that every one who is brought into
contact with him feels that he is selected by the great man because of
some happy gift of temperament, trustworthiness, or discretion, or even
on grounds of personal importance, to be the recipient of this signal
mark of confidence. On one occasion I endeavoured, after one of these
conversations, not for the sake of betraying him, but in the interests
of a diary which I keep, to formulate in precise and permanent terms
some of this interesting intelligence. To my intense surprise and
disappointment, I found myself entirely unable to recollect, much less
to express, any of his statements. They had melted in the mind, like
some delicate confection, and left behind them nothing but a faint
aroma of interest and pleasure.

This would be a dangerous example to imitate, because it requires a
very subtle species of art to select incidents and episodes which
should both gratify the hearers, and which at the same time it should
be impossible to hand on. Most people who attempted such a task would
sink into being miserable blabbers of tacenda, mere sieves through
which matters of secret importance would granulate into the hands of
ardent journalists. But at once to stimulate and gratify curiosity, and
to give a quiet circle the sense of being admitted to the inmost
penetralia of affairs, is a triumph of conversational art.

Dr. Johnson used to say that he loved to stretch his legs and have his
talk out; and the fact remains that the best conversation one gets is
the conversation that one does not scheme for, and even on occasions
from which one has expected but little. The talks that remain in my
mind as of pre-eminent interest are long leisurely tete-a-tete talks,
oftenest perhaps of all in the course of a walk, when exercise sends
the blood coursing through the brain, when a pleasant countryside tunes
the spirit to a serene harmony of mood, and when the mind, stimulated
into a joyful readiness by association with some quiet, just, and
perceptive companion, visits its dusty warehouse, and turns over its
fantastic stores. Then is the time to penetrate into the inmost
labyrinths of a subject, to indulge in pleasing discursiveness, as the
fancy leads one, and yet to return again and again with renewed relish
to the central theme. Such talks as these, with no overshadowing
anxiety upon the mind, held on breezy uplands or in pleasant country
lanes, make the moments, indeed, to which the mind, in the sad mood
which remembers the days that are gone, turns with that sorrowful
desolation of which Dante speaks, as to a treasure lightly spent and
ungratefully regarded. How such hours rise up before the mind! Even now
as I write I think of such a scene, when I walked with a friend, long
dead, on the broad yellow sands beside a western sea. I can recall the
sharp hiss of the shoreward wind, the wholesome savours of the brine,
the soft clap of small waves, the sand-dunes behind the shore, pricked
with green tufts of grass, the ships moving slowly on the sea's rim,
and the shadowy headland to which we hardly seemed to draw more near,
while we spoke of all that was in our hearts, and all that we meant to
do and be. That day was a great gift from God; and yet, as I received
it, I did not know how fair a jewel of memory it would be. I like to
think that there are many such jewels of recollection clasped close in
the heart's casket, even in the minds of men and women that I meet,
that seem so commonplace to me, so interesting to themselves!

It is strange, in reflecting about the memorable talks I have held with
different people, to find that I remember best the talks that I have
had with men, rather than with women. There is a kind of simple
openness, an equal comradeship in talks with men, which I find it
difficult to attain in the case of women. I suppose that some
unsuspected mystery of sex creeps in, and that with women there is a
whole range of experiences and emotions that one does not share, so
that there is an invisible and intangible barrier erected between the
two minds. I feel, too, in talking with women, that I am met with
almost too much sympathy and tact, so that one falls into an
egotistical mood. It is difficult, too, I find, to be as frank in
talking with women as with men; because I think that women tend more
than men to hold a preconceived idea of one's character and tastes; and
it is difficult to talk simply and naturally to any one who has formed
a mental picture of one, especially if one is aware that it is not
correct. But men are slower to form impressions, and thus talk is more
experimental; moreover, in talking with men, one encounters more
opposition, and opposition puts one more on one's mettle.

Thus a tete-a-tete with a man of similar tastes, who is just and yet
sympathetic, critical yet appreciative, whose point of view just
differs enough to make it possible for him to throw sidelights on a
subject, and to illumine aspects of it that were unperceived and
neglected--this is a high intellectual pleasure, a potion to be
delicately sipped at leisure.

But after all it is impossible to say what makes a conversationalist.
There are people who seem to possess every qualification for conversing
except the power to converse. The two absolutely essential things are,
in the first place, a certain charm of mind and even manner, which is a
purely instinctive gift; and, in the second place, real sympathy with,
real interest in the deuteragonist.

People can be useful talkers, even interesting talkers, without these
gifts. One may like to hear what a man of vigorous mind may have to say
on a subject that he knows well, even if he is unsympathetic. But then
one listens in a receptive frame of mind, as though one were prepared
to attend a lecture. There are plenty of useful talkers at a
University, men whom it is a pleasure to meet occasionally, men with
whom one tries, so to speak, a variety of conversational flies, and who
will give one fine sport when they are fairly hooked. But though a
University is a place where one ought to expect to find abundance of
the best talk, the want of leisure among the present generation of Dons
is a serious bar to interesting talk. By the evening the majority of
Dons are apt to be tired. They have been hard at work most of the day,
and they look upon the sociable evening hours as a time to be given up
to what the Scotch call "daffing"; that is to say, a sort of nimble
interchange of humorous or interesting gossip; a man who pursues a
subject intently is apt to be thought a bore. I think that the
middle-aged Don is apt to be less interesting than either the elderly
or the youthful Don. The middle-aged Don is, like all successful
professional men, full to the brim of affairs. He has little time for
general reading. He lectures, he attends meetings, his table is covered
with papers, and his leisure hours are full of interviews. But the
younger Don is generally less occupied and more enthusiastic; and best
of all is the elderly Don, who is beginning to take things more easily,
has a knowledge of men, a philosophy and a good-humoured tolerance
which makes him more accessible. He is not in a hurry, he is not
preoccupied. He studies the daily papers with deliberation, and he has
just enough duties to make him feel wholesomely busy. His ambitions are
things of the past, and he is gratified by attention and deference.

I suppose the same is the case, in a certain degree, all the world
over. But the truth about conversation is that, to make anything of it,
people must realize it as a definite mental occupation, and not merely
a dribbling into words of casual thoughts. To do it well implies a
certain deliberate intention, a certain unselfishness, a certain zest.
The difficulty is that it demands a catholicity of interests, a full
mind. Yet it does not do to have a subject on the brain, and to
introduce it into all companies. The pity is that conversation is not
more recognized as a definite accomplishment. People who care about the
success of social gatherings are apt to invite an instrumentalist or a
singer, or a man with what may be called parlour tricks; but few people
are equally careful to plant out two or three conversationalists among
their parties, or to take care that their conversationalists are
provided with a sympathetic background.

For the fact remains that conversation is a real art, and depends like
all other arts upon congenial circumstances and suitable surroundings.
People are too apt to believe that, because they have interests in
their minds and can put those interests into words, they are equipped
for the pretty and delicate game of talk. But a rare admixture of
qualities is needed, and a subtle conversational effect, a sudden
fancy, that throws a charming or a bizarre light on a subject, a power
of pleasing metaphorical expression, the communication of an
imaginative interest to a familiar topic--all these things are of the
nature of instinctive art. I have heard well-informed and sensible
people talk of a subject in a way that made me feel that I desired
never to hear it mentioned again; but I have heard, on the other hand,
people talk of matters which I had believed to be worn threadbare by
use, and yet communicate a rich colour, a fragrant sentiment to them,
which made me feel that I had never thought adequately on the topic
before. One should be careful, I think, to express to such persons
one's appreciation and admiration of their gifts, for the art is so
rare that we ought to welcome it when we find it; and, like all arts,
it depends to a great extent for its sustenance on the avowed gratitude
of those who enjoy it. It is on these subtle half-toned glimpses of
personality and difference that most of our happy impressions of life
depend; and no one can afford wilfully to neglect sources of innocent
joy, or to lose opportunities of pleasure through a stupid or brutal
contempt for the slender resources out of which these gentle effects
are produced.




VI

BEAUTY


I was visited, as I sate in my room to-day, by one of those sudden
impressions of rare beauty that come and go like flashes, and which
leave one desiring a similar experience. The materials of the
impression were simple and familiar enough. My room looks out into a
little court; there is a plot of grass, and to the right of it an old
stone-built wall, close against which stands a row of aged lime-trees.
Straight opposite, at right angles to the wall, is the east side of the
Hall, with its big plain traceried window enlivened with a few heraldic
shields of stained glass. While I was looking out to-day there came a
flying burst of sun, and the little corner became a sudden feast of
delicate colour; the fresh green of the grass, the foliage of the
lime-trees, their brown wrinkled stems, the pale moss on the walls, the
bright points of colour in the emblazonries of the window, made a
sudden delicate harmony of tints. I had seen the place a hundred times
before without ever guessing what a perfect picture it made.

What a strange power the perception of beauty is! It seems to ebb and
flow like some secret tide, independent alike of health or disease, of
joy or sorrow. There are times in our lives when we seem to go singing
on our way, and when the beauty of the world sits itself like a quiet
harmony to the song we uplift. Then again come seasons when all is well
with us, when we are prosperous and contented, interested in life and
all its concerns, when no perception of beauty comes near us; when we
are tranquil and content, and take no heed of the delicate visions of
the day; when music has no inner voice, and poetry seems a mere
cheerful jingling of ordered phrases. Then again we have a time of
gloom and dreariness; work has no interest, pleasure no savour; we go
about our business and our delight alike in a leaden mood of dulness;
and yet again, when we are surrounded with care and trouble, perhaps in
pain or weakness of body, there flashes into the darkened life an
exquisite perception of things beautiful and rare; the vision of a
spring copse with all its tapestry of flowers, bright points of radiant
colour, fills us with a strange yearning, a delightful pain; in such a
mood a few chords of music, the haunting melody of some familiar line
of verse, the song of a bird at dawn, the light of sunset on lonely
fields, thrill us with an inexpressible rapture. Perhaps some of those
who read these words will say that it is all an unreal, a fantastic
experience of which I speak. Of course there are many tranquil,
wholesome, equable natures to whom such an experience is unknown; but
it is to me one of the truest and commonest things of my life to be
visited by this strange perception and appreciation of beauty, which
gives the days in which I am conscious of it a memorable quality, that
seems to make them the momentous days of my life; and yet again the
mood is so utterly withdrawn at intervals, that the despondent spirit
feels that it can never return; and then a new day dawns, and the sense
comes back again to bless me.

If the emotion which I describe followed the variations of bodily
health; if it came when all was prosperous and joyful, and was
withdrawn when the light was low; if it deserted me in seasons of
robust vigour, and came when the bodily vitality was depressed, I could
refer it to some physical basis. But it contradicts all material laws,
and seems to come and go with a whimsical determination of its own.
When it is with me, nothing can banish it; it pulls insistently at my
elbow; it diverts my attention in the midst of the gravest business;
and, on the other hand, no extremity of sorrow or gloom can suspend it.
I have stood beside the grave of one I loved, with the shadow of urgent
business, of hard detailed arrangements of a practical kind, hanging
over me, with the light gone out of life, and the prospect unutterably
dreary; and yet the strange spirit has been with me, so that a strain
of music should have power to affect me to tears, and the delicate
petals of the very funeral wreaths should draw me into a rapturous
contemplation of their fresh curves, their lovely intricacy, their
penetrating fragrance. In such a moment one could find it in one's
heart to believe that some ethereal soulless creature, like Ariel of
the "Tempest," was floating at one's side, directing one's attention,
like a petulant child, to the things that touched its light-hearted
fancy, and constraining one into an unsought enjoyment.

Neither does it seem to be an intellectual process; because it comes in
the same self-willed way, alike when one's mind is deeply engrossed in
congenial work, as well as when one is busy and distracted; one raises
one's head for an instant, and the sunlight on a flowing water or on an
ancient wall, the sound of the wind among trees, the calling of birds,
take one captive with the mysterious spell; or on another day when I am
working, under apparently the same conditions, the sun may fall golden
on the old garden, the dove may murmur in the high elm, the daffodils
may hang their sweet heads among the meadow-grass, and yet the scene,
may be dark to me and silent, with no charm and no significance.

It all seems to enact itself in a separate region of the spirit,
neither in the physical nor in the mental region. It may come for a few
moments in a day, and then it may depart in an instant. I was taking a
week ago what, for the sake of the associations, I call my holiday. I
walked with a cheerful companion among spring woods, lying nestled in
the folds and dingles of the Sussex hills; the sky was full of flying
gleams; the distant ridges, clothed in wood, lay blue and remote in the
warm air; but I cared for none of these things. Then, when we stood for
a moment in a place where I have stood a hundred times before, where a
full stream spills itself over a pair of broken lock-gates into a
deserted lock, where the stonecrop grows among the masonry, and the
alders root themselves among the mouldering brickwork, the mood came
upon me, and I felt like a thirsty soul that has found a bubbling
spring coming out cool from its hidden caverns on the hot hillside. The
sight, the sound, fed and satisfied my spirit; and yet I had not known
that I had needed anything.

That it is, I will not say, a wholly capricious thing, but a thing that
depends upon a certain harmony of mood, is best proved by the fact that
the same poem or piece of music which can at one time evoke the
sensation most intensely, will at another time fail to convey the
slightest hint of charm, so that one can even wonder in a dreary way
what it could be that one had ever admired and loved. But it is this
very evanescent quality which gives me a certain sense of security. If
one reads the lives of people with strong aesthetic perceptions, such
as Rossetti, Pater, J. A. Symonds, one feels that these natures ran a
certain risk of being absorbed in delicate perception. One feels that a
sensation of beauty was to them so rapturous a thing that they ran the
risk of making the pursuit of such sensations the one object and
business of their existence; of sweeping the waters of life with busy
nets, in the hope of entangling some creature "of bright hue and sharp
fin"; of considering the days and hours that were unvisited by such
perceptions barren and dreary. This is, I cannot help feeling, a
dangerous business; it is to make of the soul nothing but a delicate
instrument for registering aesthetic perceptions; and the result is a
loss of balance and proportion, an excess of sentiment. The peril is
that, as life goes on, and as the perceptive faculty gets blunted and
jaded, a mood of pessimism creeps over the mind.

From this I am personally saved by the fact that the sense of beauty
is, as I have said, so whimsical in its movements. I should never think
of setting out deliberately to capture these sensations, because it
would be so futile a task. No kind of occupation, however prosaic,
however absorbing, seems to be either favourable to this perception, or
the reverse. It is not even like bodily health, which has its
variations, but is on the whole likely to result from a certain defined
regime of diet, exercise, and habits; and what would still more
preserve me from making a deliberate attempt to capture it would be
that it comes perhaps most poignantly and insistently of all when I am
uneasy, overstrained, and melancholy. No! the only thing to do is to
live one's life without reference to it, to be thankful when it comes,
and to be contented when it is withdrawn.

I sometimes think that a great deal of stuff is both written and talked
about the beauties of nature. By this I do not mean for a moment that
nature is less beautiful than is supposed, but that many of the
rapturous expressions one hears and sees used about the enjoyment of
nature are very insincere; though it is equally true on the other hand
that a great deal of genuine admiration of natural beauty is not
expressed, perhaps hardly consciously felt. To have a true and deep
appreciation of nature demands a certain poetical force, which is rare;
and a great many people who have a considerable power of expression,
but little originality, feel bound to expend a portion of this upon
expressing an admiration for nature which they do not so much actually
feel as think themselves bound to feel, because they believe that
people in general expect it of them.

But on the other hand there is, I am sure, in the hearts of many quiet
people a real love for and delight in the beauty of the kindly earth,
the silent and exquisite changes, the influx and efflux of life, which
we call the seasons, the rich transfiguring influences of sunrise and
sunset, the slow or swift lapse of clear streams, the march and plunge
of sea-billows, the bewildering beauty and aromatic scents of those
delicate toys of God which we call flowers, the large air and the sun,
the star-strewn spaces of the night.

Those who are fortunate enough to spend their lives in the quiet
country-side have much of this tranquil and unuttered love of nature;
and others again, who are condemned by circumstances to spend their
days in toilsome towns, and yet have the instinct, derived perhaps from
long generations of country forefathers, feel this beauty, in the short
weeks when they are enabled to approach it, more poignantly still.

FitzGerald tells a story of how he went to see Thomas Carlyle in
London, and sate with him in a room at the top of his house, with a
wide prospect of house-backs and chimney-pots; and how the sage reviled
and vituperated the horrors of city life, and yet left on FitzGerald's
mind the impression that perhaps after all he did not really wish to
leave it.

The fact remains, however, that a love of nature is part of the panoply
of cultivation which at the present time people above a certain social
standing feel bound to assume. Very few ordinary persons would care to
avow that they took no interest in national politics, in games and
sport, in literature, in appreciation of nature, or in religion. As a
matter of fact the vital interest that is taken in these subjects,
except perhaps in games and sport, is far below the interest that is
expressed in them. A person who said frankly that he thought that any
of these subjects were uninteresting, tiresome or absurd, would be
thought stupid or affected, even brutal. Probably most of the people
who express a deep concern for these things believe that they are
giving utterance to a sincere feeling; but not to expatiate on the
emotions which they mistake for the real emotion in the other
departments, there are probably a good many people who mistake for a
love of nature the pleasure of fresh air, physical movement, and change
of scene. Many worthy golfers, for instance, who do not know that they
are speaking insincerely, attribute, in conversation, the pleasure they
feel in pursuing their game to the agreeable surroundings in which it
is pursued; but my secret belief is that they pay more attention to the
lie of the little white ball, and the character of bunkers, than to the
pageantry of sea and sky.

As with all other refined pleasures, there is no doubt that the
pleasure derived from the observation of nature can be, if not
acquired, immensely increased by practice. I am not now speaking of the
pursuit of natural history but the pursuit of natural emotion. The
thing to aim at, as is the case with all artistic pleasures, is the
perception of quality, of small effects. Many of the people Who believe
themselves to have an appreciation of natural scenery cannot appreciate
it except on a sensational scale. They can derive a certain pleasure
from wide prospects of startling beauty, rugged mountains, steep
gorges, great falls of water--all the things that are supposed to be
picturesque. But though this is all very well as far as it goes, it is
a very elementary kind of thing. The perception of which I speak is a
perception which can be fed in the most familiar scene, in the shortest
stroll, even in a momentary glance from a window. The things to look
out for are little accidents of light and colour, little effects of
chance grouping, the transfiguration of some well-known and even
commonplace object, such as is produced by the sudden burst into
greenness of the trees that peep over some suburban garden wall, or by
the sunlight falling, by a happy fortune, on pool or flower. Much of
course depends upon the inner mood; there are days when it seems
impossible to be thrilled by anything, when a perverse dreariness holds
the mind; and then all of a sudden the gentle and wistful mood flows
back, and the world is full of beauty to the brim.

Here, if anywhere, in this town of ancient colleges, is abundant
material of beauty for eye and mind. It is not, it is true, the simple
beauty of nature; but nature has been invoked to sanctify and mellow
art. These stately stone-fronted buildings have weathered like crags
and precipices. They rise out of dark ancient embowered gardens. They
are like bright birds of the forest dwelling contentedly in gilded
cages. These great palaces of learning, beautiful when seen in the
setting of sunny gardens, and with even a sterner dignity when planted,
like a fortress of quiet, close to the very dust and din of the street,
hold many treasures of stately loveliness and fair association; this
city of palaces, thick-set with spires and towers, as rich and dim as
Camelot, is invested with a romance that few cities can equal; and then
the waterside pleasaunces with their trim alleys, their air of ancient
security and wealthy seclusion, have an incomparable charm; day by day,
as one hurries or saunters through the streets, the charm strikes
across the mind with an incredible force, a newness of impression which
is the test of the highest beauty. Yet these again are beauties of a
sensational order which beat insistently upon the dullest mind. The
true connoisseur of natural beauty acquiesces in, nay prefers, an
economy, an austerity of effect. The curve of a wood seen a hundred
times before, the gentle line of a fallow, a little pool among the
pastures, fringed with rushes, the long blue line of the distant downs,
the cloud-perspective, the still sunset glow--these will give him ever
new delights, and delights that grow with observation and intuition.

I have spoken hitherto of nature as she appears; to the unruffled, the
perceptive mind; but let us further consider what relation nature can
bear to the burdened heart and the overshadowed mood. Is there indeed a
vis medicatrix in nature which can heal our grief and console our
anxieties? "The country for a wounded heart" says the old proverb. Is
that indeed true? I am here inclined to part company with wise men and
poets who have spoken and sung of the consoling power of nature. I
think it is not so. It is true that anything which we love very deeply
has a certain power of distracting the mind. But I think there is no
greater agony than to be confronted with tranquil passionate beauty,
when the heart and spirit are out of tune with it. In the days of one's
joy, nature laughs with us; in the days of vague and fantastic
melancholy, there is an air of wistfulness, of mystery, that ministers
to our luxurious sadness. But when one bears about the heavy burden of
a harassing anxiety of sorrow, then the smile on the face of nature has
something poisonous, almost maddening about it. It breeds an emotion
that is like the rage of Othello when he looks upon the face of
Desdemona, and believes her false. Nature has no sympathy, no pity. She
has her work to do, and the swift and bright process goes on; she casts
her failures aside with merciless glee; she seems to say to men
oppressed by sorrow and sickness, "This is no world for you; rejoice
and make merry, or I have no need of you." In a far-off way, indeed,
the gentle beauty of nature may help a sad heart, by seeming to assure
one that the mind of God is set upon what is fair and sweet; but
neither God nor nature seems to have any direct message to the stricken
heart.


    "Not till the fire is dying in the grate
     Look we for any kinship with the stars,"

says a subtle poet; and such comfort as nature can give is not the
direct comfort of sympathy and tenderness, but only the comfort that
can be resolutely distilled from the contemplation of nature by man's
indomitable spirit. For nature tends to replace rather than to heal;
and the sadness of life consists for most of us in the
irreplaceableness of the things we love and lose. The lesson is a hard
one, that "Nature tolerates, she does not need." Let us only be sure
that it is a true one, for nothing but the truth can give us ultimate
repose. To the youthful spirit it is different, for all that the young
and ardent need is that, if the old fails them, some new delight should
be substituted. They but desire that the truth should be hidden from
their gaze; as in the childish stories, when the hero and heroine have
been safely piloted through danger and brought into prosperity, the
door is closed with a snap. "They lived happily ever afterwards." But
the older spirit knows that the "ever" must be deleted, makes question
of the "afterwards," and looks through to the old age of bereavement
and sorrow, when the two must again be parted.

But I would have every one who cares to establish a wise economy of
life and joy, cultivate, by all means in his power, a sympathy with and
a delight in nature. We tend, in this age of ours, when communication
is so easy and rapid, when the daily paper brings the whole course of
the world into our secluded libraries, to be too busy, too much
preoccupied; to value excitement, above tranquillity, and interest
above peace. It is good for us all to be much alone, not to fly from
society, but resolutely to determine that we will not be dependent upon
it for our comfort. I would have all busy people make times in their
lives when, at the cost of some amusement, and paying the price perhaps
of a little melancholy, they should try to be alone with nature and
their own hearts. They should try to realize the quiet unwearying life
that manifests itself in field and wood. They should wander alone in
solitary places, where the hazel-hidden stream makes music, and the
bird sings out of the heart of the forest; in meadows where the flowers
grow brightly, or through the copse, purple with bluebells or starred
with anemones; or they may climb the crisp turf of the down, and see
the wonderful world lie spread out beneath their feet, with some
clustering town "smouldering and glittering" in the distance; or lie
upon the cliff-top, with the fields of waving wheat behind, and the sea
spread out like a wrinkled marble floor in front; or walk on the sand
beside the falling waves. Perhaps a soi-disant sensible man may see
these words and think that I am a sad sentimentalist. I cannot help it;
it is what I believe; nay, I will go further, and say that a man who
does not wish to do these things is shutting one of the doors of his
spirit, a door through which many sweet and true things come in.
"Consider the lilies of the field" said long ago One whom we profess to
follow as our Guide and Master. And a quiet receptiveness, an openness
of eye, a simple readiness to take in these gentle impressions is, I
believe with all my heart, of the essence of true wisdom. We have all
of us our work to do in the world; but we have our lesson to learn as
well. The man with the muck-rake in the old parable, who raked together
the straws and the dust of the street, was faithful enough if he was
set to do that lowly work; but had he only cared to look up, had he
only had a moment's leisure, he would have seen that the celestial
crown hung close above his head, and within reach of his forgetful hand.

There is a well-known passage in a brilliant modern satire, where a
trenchant satirist declares that he has tracked all human emotions to
their lair, and has discovered that they all consist of some dilution
of primal and degrading instincts. But the pure and passionless love of
natural beauty can have nothing that is acquisitive or reproductive
about it. There is no physical instinct to which it can be referred; it
arouses no sense of proprietorship; it cannot be connected with any
impulse for self-preservation. If it were merely aroused by tranquil,
comfortable amenities of scene, it might be referable to the general
sense of well-being, and of contented life under pleasant conditions.
But it is aroused just as strongly by prospects that are inimical to
life and comfort, lashing storms, inaccessible peaks, desolate moors,
wild sunsets, foaming seas. It is a sense of wonder, of mystery; it
arouses a strange and yearning desire for we know not what; very often
a rich melancholy attends it, which is yet not painful or sorrowful,
but heightens and intensifies the significance, the value of life. I do
not know how to interpret it, but it seems to me to be a call from
without, a beckoning of some large and loving power to the soul. The
primal instincts of which I have spoken all tend to concentrate the
mind upon itself, to strengthen it for a selfish part; but the beauty
of nature seems to be a call to the spirit to come forth, like the
voice which summoned Lazarus from the rock-hewn sepulchre. It bids us
to believe that our small identities, our limited desires, do not say
the last word for us, but that there is something larger and stronger
outside, in which we may claim a share. As I write these words I look
out upon a strange transfiguration of a familiar scene. The sky is full
of black and inky clouds, but from the low setting sun there pours an
intense pale radiance, which lights up house-roofs, trees, and fields,
with a white light; a flight of pigeons, wheeling high in the air,
become brilliant specks of moving light upon a background of dark
rolling vapour. What is the meaning of the intense and rapturous thrill
that this sends through me? It is no selfish delight, no personal
profit that it gives me. It promises me nothing, it sends me nothing
but a deep and mysterious satisfaction, which seems to make light of my
sullen and petty moods.

I was reading the other day, in a strange book, of the influence of
magic upon the spirit, the vague dreams of the deeper mind that could
be awakened by the contemplation of symbols. It seemed to me to be
unreal and fantastic, a manufacturing of secrets, a playing of
whimsical tricks with the mind; and yet I ought not to say that,
because it was evidently written in good faith. But I have since
reflected that it is true in a sense of all those who are sensitive to
the influences of the spirit. Nature has a magic for many of us--that
is to say, a secret power that strikes across our lives at intervals,
with a message from an unknown region. And this message is aroused too
by symbols; a tree, a flash of light on lonely clouds, a flower, a
stream--simple things that we have seen a thousand times--have
sometimes the power to cast a spell over our spirit, and to bring
something that is great and incommunicable near us. This must be called
magic, for it is not a thing which can be explained by ordinary laws,
or defined in precise terms; but the spell is there, real, insistent,
undeniable; it seems to make a bridge for the spirit to pass into a
far-off, dimly apprehended region; it gives us a sense of great issues
and remote visions; it leaves us with a longing which has no mortal
fulfilment.

These are of course merely idiosyncrasies of perception; but it is a
far more difficult task to attempt to indicate what the perception of
beauty is, and whence the mind derives the unhesitating canons with
which it judges and appraises beauty. The reason, I believe, why the
sense is weaker than it need be in many people, is that, instead of
trusting their own instinct in the matter, they from their earliest
years endeavour to correct their perception of what is beautiful by the
opinions of other people, and to superimpose on their own taste the
taste of others. I myself hold strongly that nothing is worth admiring
which is not admired sincerely. Of course, one must not form one's
opinions too early, or hold them arrogantly or self-sufficiently. If
one finds a large number of people admiring or professing to admire a
certain class of objects, a certain species of scene, one ought to make
a resolute effort to see what it is that appeals to them. But there
ought to come a time, when one has imbibed sufficient experience, when
one should begin to decide and to distinguish, and to form one's own
taste. And then I believe it is better to be individual than catholic,
and better to attempt to feed one's own genuine sense of preference,
than to continue attempting to correct it by the standard of other
people.

It remains that the whole instinct for admiring beauty is one of the
most mysterious experiences of the mind. There are certain things, like
the curves and colours of flowers, the movements of young animals, that
seem to have a perennial attraction for the human spirit. But the
enjoyment of natural scenery, at all events of wild and rugged
prospects, seems hardly to have existed among ancient writers, and to
have originated as late as the eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson spoke of
mountains with disgust, and Gray seems to have been probably the first
man who deliberately cultivated a delight in the sight of those
"monstrous creatures of God," as he calls mountains. Till his time, the
emotions that "nodding rocks" and "cascades" gave our forefathers seem
mostly to have been emotions of terror; but Gray seems to have had a
perception of the true quality of landscape beauty, as indeed that
wonderful, chilly, unsatisfied, critical nature seems to have had of
almost everything. His letters are full of beautiful vignettes, and it
pleases me to think that he visited Rydal and thought it beautiful,
about the time that Wordsworth first drew breath.

But the perception of beauty in art, in architecture, in music, is a
far more complicated thing, for there seem to be no fixed canons here;
what one needs in art, for instance, is not that things should be
perfectly seen and accurately presented; a picture of hard fidelity is
often entirely displeasing; but one craves for a certain sense of
personality, of emotion, of inner truth; something that seizes
tyrannously upon the soul, and makes one desire more of the intangible
and indescribable essence.

I always feel that the instinct for beauty is perhaps the surest
indication of some essence of immortality in the soul; and indeed there
are moments when it gives one the sense of pre-existence, the feeling
that one has loved these fair things in a region that is further back
even than the beginnings of consciousness. Blake, indeed, in one of his
wild half-inspired utterances, went even further, and announced that a
man's hopes of immortality depended not upon virtuous conduct but upon
intellectual perception. And it is hard to resist the belief, when one
is brought into the presence of perfect beauty, in whatever form it may
come, that the deep craving it arouses is meant to receive a
satisfaction more deep and real than the act of mere contemplation can
give. I have felt in such moments as if I were on the verge of grasping
some momentous secret, as if only the thinnest of veils hung between me
and some knowledge that would set my whole life and being on a
different plane. But the moment passes, and the secret delays. Yet we
are right to regard such emotions as direct messages from God; because
they bring with them no desire of possession, which is the sign of
mortality, but rather the divine desire to be possessed by them; that
the reality, whatever it be, of which beauty is the symbol, may enter
in and enthral the soul. It remains a mystery, like all the best things
to which we draw near. And the joy of all mysteries is the certainty
which comes from their contemplation, that there are many doors yet for
the soul to open on her upward and inward way; that we are at the
threshold and not near the goal; and then, like the glow of sunset,
rises the hope that the grave, far from being the gate of death, may be
indeed the gate of life.




VII

ART


I often wish that we had a more beautiful word than "art" for so
beautiful a thing; it is in itself a snappish explosive word, like the
cry of an angry animal; and it has, too, to bear the sad burden of its
own misuse by affected people. Moreover, it stands for so many things,
that one is never quite sure what the people who use it intend it to
mean; some people use it in an abstract, some in a concrete sense; and
it is unfortunate, too, in bearing, in certain usages, a nuance of
unreality and scheming.

What I mean by art, in its deepest and truest sense, is a certain
perceptiveness, a power of seeing what is characteristic, coupled as a
rule, in the artistic temperament, with a certain power of expression,
an imaginative gift which can raise a large fabric out of slender
resources, building a palace, like the Genie in the story of Aladdin,
in a single night.

The artistic temperament is commoner, I think, than is supposed. Most
people find it difficult to believe in the existence of it, unless it
is accompanied by certain fragile signs of its existence, such as
water-colour drawing, or a tendency to strum on a piano. But, as a
matter of fact, the possession of an artistic temperament, without the
power of expression, is one of the commonest causes of unhappiness in
the world. Who does not know those ill-regulated, fastidious people,
who have a strong sense of their own significance and position, a sense
which is not justified by any particular performance, who are
contemptuous of others, critical, hard to satisfy, who have a general
sense of disappointment and dreariness, a craving for recognition, and
a feeling that they are not appreciated at their true worth? To such
people, sensitive, ineffective, proud, every circumstance of life gives
food for discontent. They have vague perceptions which they cannot
translate into words or symbols. They find their work humdrum and
unexciting, their relations with others tiresome; they think that under
different circumstances and in other surroundings they might have
played a braver part; they never realize that the root of their
unhappiness lies in themselves; and, perhaps, it is merciful that they
do not, for the fact that they can accumulate blame upon the conditions
imposed on them by fate is the only thing that saves them from
irreclaimable depression.

Sometimes, again, the temperament exists with a certain power of
expression, but without sufficient perseverance or hard technical merit
to produce artistic successes; and thus we get the amateur. Sometimes
it is the other way, and the technical power of production is developed
beyond the inner perceptiveness; and this produces a species of dull
soulless art, and the role of the professional artist. Very rarely one
sees the outward and the inward combined, but then we get the humble,
hopeful artist who lives for and in his work; he is humble because he
cannot reach the perfection for which he strives; he is hopeful because
he gets nearer to it day by day. But, speaking generally, the
temperament is not one that brings steady happiness; it brings with it
moments of rapture, when some bright dream is being realized; but it
brings with it also moments of deep depression, when dreams are silent,
and the weary brain fears that the light is quenched. There are,
indeed, instances of the equable disposition being found in connection
with the artistic temper; such were Reynolds, Handel, Wordsworth. But
the annals of art are crowded with the figures of those who have had to
bear the doom of art, and have been denied the tranquil spirit.

But besides all these, there are artistic temperaments which do not
express themselves in any of the recognized mediums of art, but which
apply their powers direct to life itself. I do not mean successful,
professional people, who win their triumphs by a happy sanity and
directness of view, to whom labour is congenial and success enjoyable;
but I mean those who have a fine perception of quality in innumerable
forms; who are interested in the salient points of others, who delight
to enter into appropriate relations with those they meet, to whom life
itself, its joys and sorrows, its gifts and its losses, has a certain
romantic, beautiful, mysterious savour. Such people have a strong sense
of the significance of their relations with others, they enjoy dealing
with characters, with problems, with situations. Having both interest
and sympathy, they get the best out of other people; they pierce
through the conventional fence that so many of us erect as a protection
against intrusion. Such people bring the same perception to bear on
technical art. They enjoy books, art, music, without any envious desire
to produce; they can enjoy the noble pleasure of admiring and praising.
Again and again, in reading the lives of artists, one comes across
traces of these wise and generous spirits, who have loved the society
of artists, have understood them, and whose admiration has never been
clouded by the least shadow of that jealousy which is the curse of most
artistic natures. People without artistic sensibilities find the
society of artists trying; because they see only their irritability,
their vanity, their egotism, and cannot sympathize with the visions by
which they are haunted. But those who can understand without jealousy,
pass by the exacting vagaries of the artist with a gentle and tender
compassion, and evoke what is sincere and generous and lovable, without
any conscious effort.

It is not, I think, often enough realized that the basis of the
successful artistic temperament is a certain hardness combined with
great superficial sensitiveness. Those who see the artistic nature
swiftly and emotionally affected by a beautiful or a pathetic thing,
who see that a thought, a line of poetry, a bar of music, a sketch,
will evoke a thrill of feeling to which they cannot themselves aspire,
are apt to think that such a spirit is necessarily fair and tender, and
that it possesses unfathomable reserves of noble feeling. This is often
a great mistake; far below the rapid current of changing and glittering
emotion there often lies, in the artistic nature, a reserve, not of
tenderness or depth, but of cold and critical calm. There are very few
people who are highly developed in one faculty who do not pay for it in
some other part of their natures. Below the emotion itself there sits
enthroned a hard intellectual force, a power of appraising quality, a
Rhadamanthine judgment. It is this hardness which has so often made
artists such excellent men of business, so alert to strike favourable
bargains. In those artists whose medium is words this hardness is not
so often detected as it is in the case of other artists, for they have
the power of rhetoric, the power of luxuriously heightening
impressions, indeed of imaginatively simulating a force which is in
reality of a superficial nature. One of the greatest powers of great
artists is that of hinting at an emotion which they have very possibly
never intimately gauged.

I have sometimes thought that this is in all probability the reason why
women, with all their power of swift impression, of subtle intuition,
have so seldom achieved the highest stations in art. It is, I think,
because they seldom or never have that calm, strong egotism at the base
of their natures, which men so constantly have, and which indeed seems
almost a condition of attaining the highest success in art. The male
artist can believe whole-heartedly and with entire absorption in the
value of what he is doing, can realize it as the one end of his being,
the object for which his life was given him. He can believe that all
experience, all relations with others, all emotions, are and must be
subservient to this one aim; they can deepen for him the channels in
which his art flows; they can reveal and illustrate to him the
significance of the world of which he is the interpreter. Such an
aspiration can be a very high and holy thing; it can lead a man to live
purely and laboriously, to make sacrifices, to endure hardness. But the
altar on which the sacrifice is made, stands, when all is said and
done, before the idol of self. With women, though, it is different. The
deepest quality in their hearts is, one may gratefully say, an intense
devotion to others, an unselfishness which is unconscious of itself;
and thus their aim is to help, to encourage, to sympathize; and their
artistic gifts are subordinated to a deeper purpose, the desire of
giving and serving. One with such a passion in the heart is incapable
of believing art to be the deepest thing in the world; it is to such an
one more like the lily which floats upwards, to bloom on the surface of
some dim pool, a thing exquisitely fair and symbolical of mysteries;
but all growing out of the depths of life, and not a thing which is
deeper and truer than life.

It is useless to try to dive deeper than the secrets of personality and
temperament. One must merely be grateful for the beauty which springs
from them. We must reflect that the hard, vigorous, hammered quality,
which is characteristic of the best art, can only be produced, in a
mood of blind and unquestioning faith, by a temperament which believes
that such production is its highest end. But one who stands a little
apart from the artistic world, and yet ardently loves it, can see that,
beautiful as is the dream of the artist, true and pure as his
aspiration is, there is yet a deeper mystery of life still, of which
art is nothing but a symbol and an evidence. Perhaps that very belief
may of itself weaken a man's possibilities in art. But, for myself, I
know that I regard the absorption in art as a terrible and strong
temptation for one whose chief pleasure lies in the delight of
expression, and who seems, in the zest of shaping a melodious sentence
to express as perfectly and lucidly as possible the shape of the
thought within, to touch the highest joy of which the spirit is
capable. A thought, a scene of beauty comes home with an irresistible
sense of power and meaning to the mind or eye; for God to have devised
the pale liquid green of the enamelled evening sky, to have set the
dark forms of trees against it, and to have hung a star in the
thickening gloom--to have done this, and to see that it is good, seems,
in certain moods, to be the dearest work of the Divine mind; and the
desire to express it, to speak simply of the sight, and of the joy that
it arouses, comes upon the mind with a sweet agony; an irresistible
spell; life would seem to have been well spent if one had only caught a
few such imperishable ecstasies, and written them down in a record that
might convey the same joy to others. But behind this rises the deeper
conviction that this is not the end; that there are deeper and sweeter
secrets in the heavenly treasure-house; and then comes in the shadow of
a fear that, in yielding thus delightedly to these imperative joys, one
is blinding the inner eye to the perception of the remoter and more
divine truth. And then at last comes the conviction, in which it is
possible alike to rest and to labour, that it is right to devote one's
time and energy to presenting these rich emotions as perfectly as they
can be presented, so long as one keeps open the further avenues of the
soul, and believes that art is but one of the antechambers through
which one must take one's faithful way, before the doors of the
Presence itself can be flung wide.

But whether one be of the happy number or not who have the haunting
instinct for some special form of expression, one may learn at all
events to deal with life in an artistic spirit. I do not at all mean by
that that one should learn to overvalue the artistic side of life, to
hold personal emotion to be a finer thing than unselfish usefulness. I
mean rather that one should aim at the perception of quality, the
quality of actions, the quality of thoughts, the quality of character;
that one should not be misled by public opinion, that one should not
consider the value of a man's thoughts to be affected by his social
position; but that one should look out for and appreciate sense,
vigour, faithfulness, kindness, rectitude, and originality, in however
humble a sphere these qualities may be displayed. That one should fight
hard against conventionality, that one should welcome beauty, both the
beauty of natural things, as well as the beauty displayed in sincere
and simple lives in every rank of life. I have heard conventional
professional people, who thought they were giving utterance to manly
and independent sentiments, speak slightingly of dukes and duchesses,
as if the possession of high rank necessarily forfeited all claims to
simplicity and true-heartedness. Such an attitude is as inartistic and
offensive as for a duchess to think that fine courtesy and
consideration could not be found among washerwomen. The truth is that
beauty of character is just as common and just as uncommon among people
of high rank as it is among bagmen; and the only just attitude to adopt
is to approach all persons simply and directly on the grounds of our
common humanity. One who does this will find simplicity, tenderness,
and rectitude among persons of high rank; he will also find
conventionality, meanness, and complacency among them; when he is
brought into contact with bagmen, he will find bagmen of sincerity,
directness, and delicacy, while he will also find pompous, complacent,
and conventional bagmen.

Of course the special circumstances of any life tend to develop certain
innate faults of character into prominence; but it may safely be said
that circumstances never develop a fault that is not naturally there;
and, not to travel far for instances, I will only say that one of the
most unaffected and humble-minded persons I have ever met was a duke,
while one of the proudest and most affected Pharisees I ever
encountered was a servant. It all depends upon a consciousness of
values, a sense of proportion; the only way in which wealth and
poverty, rank and insignificance, can affect a life, is in a certain
degree of personal comfort; and it is one of the most elementary
lessons that one can learn, that it is not either wealth or poverty
that can confer even comfort, but the sound constitution and the
contented mind.

What I would here plead is that the artistic sense, of which I have
spoken, should be deliberately and consciously cultivated. It is not an
easy thing to get rid of conventionality, if one has been brought up on
conventional lines; but I know by personal experience that the mere
desire for simplicity and sincerity can effect something.

All persons engaged in education, whether formally or informally,
whether as professed teachers or parents, ought to regard it as a
sacred duty to cultivate this sense among the objects of their care.
They ought to demand that all people, whether high or low, should be
met with the same simple courtesy and consideration; they ought to
train children both to speak their mind, and also to pay respect to the
opinion of others; they ought not to insist upon obedience, without
giving the reasons why it is desirable and necessary; they ought
resolutely to avoid malicious gossip, but not the interested discussion
of other personalities; they ought to follow, and to give, direct and
simple motives for action, and to learn, if they do not know it, that
it is from this simple and quiet independence of mind that the best
blessings, the best happinesses come; above all, they ought to practise
a real and perceptive sympathy, to allow for differences of character
and taste, not to try so much to form children on the model of their
own characters, as to encourage them to develop on their own lines. To
do this completely needs wisdom, tact, and justice; but nothing can
excuse us from attempting it.

The reason why life is so often made into a dull and dreary business
for ourselves and others, is that we accept some conventional standard
of duty and rectitude, and heavily enforce it; we neglect the interest,
the zest, the beauty of life. In my own career as an educator, I can
truthfully say that when I arrived at some of the perceptions
enunciated above, it made an immense difference to me. I saw that it
was a mistake to coerce, to correct, to enforce; of course such things
have to be done occasionally with wilful and perverse natures; but I
realized, after I had gained some practice in dealing with boys, that
generous and simple praise, outspoken encouragement, admiration,
directness, could win victories that no amount of strictness or
repression could win. I began to see that enthusiasm and interest were
the contagious things, and that it was possible to sympathize genuinely
with tastes which one did not share. Of course there were plenty of
failures on my own part, failures of irritability, stupidity, and
indolence; but I soon realized that these were failures; and, after
all, in education it matters more which way one's face is set than how
fast one proceeds!

I seem, perhaps, to have strayed into the educational point of view;
but it is only an instance of how the artistic method may be applied in
a region which is believed by many to be remote from the region of art.
The principle, after all, is a very clear one; it is that life can be
made with a little effort into a beautiful thing; that the real
ugliness of life consists not in its conditions, not in good or bad
fortune, not in joy or sorrow, not in health or illness, but upon the
perceptive attitude of mind which we can apply to all experiences.
Everything that comes from the hand of God has the quality of which I
am speaking; our business is to try to disentangle it from the
prejudices, the false judgments, the severities, the heavinesses, with
which human nature tends to overlay it. Imagine a man oppressed by all
the ills which humanity can suffer, by shame and disease and failure.
Can it be denied, in the presence of the life of Christ, that it is yet
possible to make out of such a situation a noble and a beautiful thing?
And that is the supreme value of the example of Christ to the world,
that He displayed, if I may so speak, the instinct which I have
described in its absolute perfection. He met all humanity face to face,
with perfect directness, perfect sympathy, perfect perception. He never
ceased to protest, with shame and indignation, against the
unhappinesses which men bring upon themselves, by the yielding to lower
desires, by prejudice, by complacency; but He made allowance for
weakness, and despaired of none; and in the presence of those darker
and sadder afflictions of body and spirit, which it seems that God
permits, if He does not authorize, He bore Himself with dignity,
patience, and confidence; He proved that nothing was unbearable, but
that the human spirit can face the worst calamities with an indomitable
simplicity, which adorns it with an imperishable beauty, and proves it
to be indeed divine.




VIII

EGOTISM


I had an experience the other day, very disagreeable but most
wholesome, which held up for a moment a mirror to my life and
character. I suppose that, at least once in his life, every one has
known what it is, in some corridor or stairway, to see a figure
advancing towards him, and then to discover with a shock of surprise
that he has been advancing to a mirror, and that the stranger is
himself. This happened to me some short while ago, and I was by no
means favourably impressed by what I saw!

Well, the other day I was conducting an argument with an irascible man.
His temper suddenly boiled over, and he said several personal things to
me, of which I did not at once recognize the truth; but I have since
considered the criticisms, and have decided that they are mainly true,
heightened perhaps by a little tinge of temper.

I am sorry my friend said the things, because it is difficult to meet,
on cordial terms, a man whom one knows to hold an unfavourable opinion
of oneself. But in one way I am glad he said them, because I do not
think I could in any other manner have discerned the truth. If a friend
had said them without anger, he would no doubt have so gilded the pill
that it would have seemed rather a precious ornament than a bitter
remedy.

I will not here say in detail what my friend accused me of, but it
amounted to a charge of egotism; and as egotism is a common fault, and
particularly common with lonely and unmarried men, I will make no
excuse for propounding a few considerations on the point, and how it
may perhaps be cured, or, if not cured, at least modified.

I suppose that the egotist is the man who regards the world as a
setting for himself, as opposed to the man who realizes that he is a
small unit in a gigantic system. The characteristic of the egotist is
to consider himself of too great importance, while the danger of the
non-egotist is not sufficiently to realize his significance. Egotism is
the natural temptation of all those whose individuality is strong; the
man of intense desires, of acute perceptions, of vigorous preferences,
of eager temperament, is in danger of trying to construct his life too
sedulously on his own lines; and yet these are the very people who help
other people most, and in whom the hope of the race lies. Meek, humble,
timid persons, who accept things as they are, who tread in beaten
paths, who are easily persuaded, who are cautious, prudent, and
submissive, leave things very much as they find them. I need make no
attempt at indicating the line that such people ought to follow,
because it is, unhappily, certain that they will follow the line of
least resistance, and that they have no more power of initiative than
the bricks of a wall or the waters of a stream. The following
considerations will be addressed to people of a certain vividness of
nature, who have strong impulses, fervent convictions, vigorous
desires. I shall try to suggest a species of discipline that can be
practised by such persons, a line that they can follow, in order that
they may aim at, and perhaps attain, a due subordination and
co-ordination of themselves and their temperaments.

To treat of intellectual egotism first, the danger that besets such
people as I have described is a want of sympathy with other points of
view, and the first thing that such natures must aim at, is the getting
rid of what I will call the sectarian spirit. We ought to realize that
absolute truth is not the property of any creed or school or nation;
the whole lesson of history is the lesson of the danger of affirmation.
The great difference between the modern and the ancient world is the
growth of the scientific spirit, and the meaning and value of evidence.
There are many kinds of certainties. There is the absolute scientific
certainty of such propositions as that two and two make four, and
cannot possibly make five. This is of course only the principle that
two and two CANNOT be said to MAKE four, but that they ARE four, and
that 2 + 2 and 4 are only different ways of describing the same
phenomenon. Then there come the lesser certainties, that is to say, the
certainties that justify practical action. A man who is aware that he
has twenty thousand pounds in the hands of trustees, whose duty it is
to pay him the interest, is justified in spending a certain income; but
he cannot be said to know at any moment that the capital is there,
because the trustees may have absconded with the money, and the man may
not have been informed of the fact. The danger of the egotist is that
he is apt to regard as scientific certainties what are only relative
certainties; and the first step towards the tolerant attitude is to get
rid of these prejudices as far as possible, and to perceive that the
first duty of the philosopher is not to deal in assumptions, but to
realize that other people's regions of what may be called practical
certainties--that is to say, the assurances which justify practical
action--may be both smaller or even larger than his own. The first duty
then of the man of vivid nature is to fight resolutely against the sin
of impatience. He must realize that some people may regard as a
certainty what is to him a questionable opinion, and that his business
is not the destruction of the certainties of others, but the defining
the limits of his own. The sympathy that can be practised
intellectually is the resolute attempt to enter into the position of
others. The temptation to argue with people of convinced views should
be resolutely resisted; argument only strengthens and fortifies the
convictions of opponents, and I can honestly say that I have never yet
met a man of strong intellectual fibre who was ever converted by
argument. Yet I am sure that it is a duty for all of us to aim at a
just appreciation of various points of view, and that we ought to try
to understand others rather than to persuade them.

So far I have been speaking of the intellectual region, and I would sum
it up by saying that I think that the duty of every thoughtful person,
who desires to avoid egotism in the intellectual region, is to
cultivate what may be called the scientific, or even the sceptical
spirit, to weigh evidence, and not to form conclusions without
evidence. Thus one avoids the dangers of egotism best, because egotism
is the frame of mind of the man who says credo quia credo. Whereas the
aim of the philosopher should be to take nothing for granted, and to be
ready to give up personal preferences in the light of truth. In dealing
with others in the intellectual region, the object should be not to
convince, but to get people to state their own views, and to realize
that unless a man converts himself, no one else can; the method
therefore should be not to attack conclusions, but to ask patiently for
the evidence upon which those conclusions are based.

But there is a danger in lingering too long in the intellectual
regions; the other regions of the human spirit may be called the
aesthetic and the mystical regions. To take the aesthetic region next,
the duty of the philosopher is to realize at the outset that the
perception of beauty is essentially an individual thing, and that the
canons of what are called good taste are of all things the most
shifting. In this region the danger of dogmatism is very great, because
the more that a man indulges the rapturous perception of the beauty
that appeals to himself, the more likely he is to believe that there is
no beauty outside of his own perceptions. The duty of a man who wishes
to avoid egotism in this region is to try and recognize faithful
conception and firm execution everywhere; to realize that half, and
more than half, of the beauty of everything is the beauty of age,
remoteness, and association. There is no temptation so strong for the
aesthetic nature, as to deride and contemn the beauty of the art that
we have just outgrown. To take a simple case. The Early Victorian
upholsterers derided the stiffness and austerity of Queen Anne
furniture, and the public genuinely admired the florid and rococo forms
of Early Victorian art. A generation passed, and Early Victorian art
was relentlessly derided, while the Queen Anne was reinstalled. Now
there are signs of a growing tolerance among connoisseurs of the Early
Victorian taste again. The truth is that there is no absolute beauty in
either; that the thing to aim at is progress and development in art,
and that probably the most dangerous and decadent sign of all is the
reverting to the beauty of a previous age rather than striking out a
new line of our own. The aim then of the man who would avoid aesthetic
egotism should be, not to lay down canons of what is or what is not
good art, but to try to recognize, as I have said, faithful conception
and firm execution wherever he can discern it; and, for himself, to
express as vividly as he can his own keenest and acutest perceptions of
beauty. The only beauty that is worth anything, is the beauty perceived
in sincerity, and here again the secret lies in resolutely abstaining
from laying down laws, from judging, from condemning. The victory
always remains with those who admire, rather than with those who
deride, and the power of appreciating is worth any amount of the power
of despising.

And now we pass to the third and most intangible region of the spirit,
the region that I will call the mystical region. This is in a sense
akin to the aesthetic region, because it partly consists in the
appreciation of beauty in ethical things. Here the danger of the vivid
personality is to let his preferences be his guide, and to contemn
certain types of character, certain qualities, certain modes of
thought, certain points of view. Here again one's duty is plain. It is
the resolute avoidance of the critical attitude, the attempt to
disentangle the golden thread, the nobility, the purity, the strength,
the intensity, that may underlie characters and views that do not
superficially appeal to oneself. The philosopher need not seek the
society of uncongenial persons: such a practice is a useless
expenditure of time and energy; but no one can avoid a certain contact
with dissimilar natures, and the aim of the philosopher must be to try
and do sympathetic justice to them, to seek earnestly for points of
contact, rather than to attempt to emphasize differences. For instance,
if the philosopher is thrown into the society of a man who can talk
nothing but motor jargon or golfing shop--I select the instances of the
conversation that is personally to me the dreariest--he need not
attempt to talk of golf or motors, and he is equally bound not to
discourse of his own chosen intellectual interests; but he ought to
endeavour to find a common region, in which he can meet the golfer or
the motorist without mutual dreariness.

Perhaps it may be thought that I have drifted out of the mystical
region, but it is not so, for the relations of human beings with each
other appear to me to belong to this region. The strange affinities and
hostilities of temperament, the inexplicable and undeniable thing
called charm, the attraction and repulsion of character--all this is in
the mystical region of the spirit, the region of intuition and
instinct, which is a far stronger, more vital, and more general region
than the intellectual or the artistic. And further, there comes the
deepest intuition of all, the relation of the human spirit to its
Maker, its originating cause. Whether this relation can be a direct one
is a matter for each person to decide from his own experience; but
perhaps the only two things of which a human being can be said to be
absolutely conscious are his own identity, and the existence of a
controlling Power outside of him. And here lies the deepest danger of
all, that a man should attempt to limit or define his conception of the
Power that originated him, by his own preferences. The deepest mystery
of all lies in the conviction, which seems to be inextricably rooted in
the human spirit, namely, the instinct to distinguish between the
impulses which we believe emanate from God, and the impulses which we
believe emanate from ourselves. It is incontestable that the greater
part of the human race have the instinct that in following beneficent,
unselfish, noble impulses they are following the will of their Maker;
but that in yielding to cruel, sensual, low impulses they are acting
contrary to the will of the Creator. And this intuition is one which
many of us do not doubt, though it is a principle, which cannot be
scientifically proved. Indeed, it is incontestable that, though we
believe the will of God to be on the side of what is good, yet He puts
many obstacles, or permits them to be put, in the way of the man who
desires to act rightly.

The only way, I believe, in this last region, in which we can hope to
improve, to win victories, is the way of a quiet and sincere
submission. It is easy to submit to the Will of God when it sends us
joy and peace, when it makes us courageous, high-hearted, and just. The
difficulty is to acquiesce when He sends us adversity, ill-health,
suffering; when He permits us to sin, or if that is a faithless phrase,
does not grant us strength to resist. But we must try to be patient, we
must try to interpret the value of suffering, the meaning of failure,
the significance of shame. Perhaps it may be urged that this too is a
temptation of egotism in another guise, and that we grow thus to
conceive of ourselves as filling too large a space in the mind of God.
But unless we do this, we can only conceive of ourselves as the victims
of God's inattention or neglect, which is a wholly despairing thought.

In one sense we must be egotistic, if self-knowledge is egotism. We
must try to take the measure of our faculties, and we must try to use
them. But while we must wisely humiliate ourselves before the majesty
of God, the vast and profound scheme of the Universe, we must at the
same time believe that we have our place and our work; that God indeed
purposely set us where we find ourselves; and among the complicated
difficulties of sense, of temptation, of unhappiness, of failure, we
must try to fix our eyes humbly and faithfully upon the best, and seek
to be worthy of it. We must try not to be self-sufficient, but to be
humble and yet diligent.

I do not think that we practise this simple resignation often enough;
it is astonishing how the act of placing our own will as far as
possible in unison with the Will of God restores our tranquillity.

It was only a short time ago that I was walking alone among fields and
villages. It was one of those languid days of early spring, when the
frame and the mind alike seem unstrung and listless. The orchards were
white with flower, and the hedges were breaking into fresh green. I had
just returned to my work after a brief and delightful holiday, and was
overshadowed with the vague depression that the resumption of work
tends to bring to anxious minds. I entered a little ancient church that
stood open; it was full of sunlight, and had been tenderly decked with
an abundance of spring flowers. If I had been glad at heart it would
have seemed a sweet place, full of peace and beautiful mysteries. But
it had no voice, no message for me. I was overshadowed too by a sad
anxiety about one whom I loved, who was acting perversely and
unworthily. There came into my mind a sudden gracious thought to commit
myself to the heart of God, not to disguise my weakness and anxiety,
not to ask that the load should be lightened, but that I might endure
His will to the uttermost.

In a moment came the strength I sought; no lightening of the load, but
a deeper serenity, a desire to bear it faithfully. The very fragrance
of the flowers seemed to mingle like a sweet incense with my vow. The
old walls whispered of patience and hope. I do not know where the peace
that then settled upon me came from, but not, it seemed, out of the
slender resources of my own vexed spirit.

But after all, the wonder is, in this mysterious world, not that there
is so much egotism abroad, but that there is so little! Considering the
narrow space, the little cage of bones and skin, in which our spirit is
confined, like a fluttering bird, it often astonished me to find how
much of how many people's thoughts is not given to themselves, but to
their work, their friends, their families.

The simplest and most practical cure for egotism, after all, is
resolutely to suppress public manifestations of it; and it is best to
overcome it as a matter of good manners, rather than as a matter of
religious principle. One does not want people to be impersonal; all one
desires to feel is that their interest and sympathy is not, so to
speak, tethered by the leg, and only able to hobble in a small and
trodden circle. One does not want people to suppress their personality,
but to be ready to compare it with the personalities of others, rather
than to refer other personalities to the standard of their own; to be
generous and expansive, if possible, and if that is not possible, or
not easy, to be prepared, at least, to take such deliberate steps as
all can take, in the right direction. We can all force ourselves to
express interest in the tastes and idiosyncrasies of others, we can ask
questions, we can cultivate relations. The one way in which we can all
of us improve, is to commit ourselves to a course of action from which
we shall be ashamed to draw back. Many people who would otherwise drift
into self-regarding ways do this when they marry. They may marry for
egotistical reasons; but once inside the fence, affection and duty and
the amazing experience of having children of their own give them the
stimulus they need. But even the most helpless celibate has only to
embark upon relations with others, to find them multiply and increase.
After all, egotism has little to do with the forming or holding of
strong opinions, or even with the intentness with which we pursue our
aims. The dog is the intentest of all animals, and throws himself most
eagerly into his pursuits, but he is also the least egotistical and the
most sympathetic of creatures. Egotism resides more in a kind of proud
isolation, in a species of contempt for the opinions and aims of
others. It is not, as a rule, the most successful men who are the most
egotistical. The most uncompromisingly egotist I know is a would-be
literary man, who has the most pathetic belief in the interest and
significance of his own very halting performances, a belief which no
amount of rejection or indifference can shake, and who has hardly a
good word for the books of other writers. I have sometimes thought that
it is in his case a species of mental disease, because he is an acute
critic of all work except his own. Doctors will indeed tell one that
transcendent egotism is very nearly allied to insanity; but in ordinary
cases a little common sense and a little courtesy will soon suppress
the manifestations of the tendency, if a man can only realize that the
forming of decided opinions is the cheapest luxury in the world, while
a licence to express them uncompromisingly is one of the most
expensive. Perhaps the hardest kind of egotism to cure, is the egotism
that is combined with a deferential courtesy, and the power of
displaying a superficial sympathy, because an egotist of this type so
seldom encounters any checks which would convince him of his fault.
Such people, if they have natural ability, often achieve great success,
because they pursue their own ambitions with relentless perseverance,
and have the tact to do it without appearing to interfere with the
designs of others. They bide their time; they are all consideration and
delicacy; they are never importunate or tiresome; if they fail, they
accept the failure as though it were a piece of undeserved good
fortune; they never have a grievance; they simply wipe up the spilt
milk, and say no more about it; baffled at one point, they go quietly
round the corner, and continue their quest. They never for a moment
really consider any one's interests except their own; even their
generous impulses are deliberately calculated for the sake of the
artistic effect. Such people make it hard to believe in disinterested
virtue; yet they join with the meek in inheriting the earth, and their
prosperity seems the sign of Divine approval.

But apart from the definite steps that the ordinary, moderately
interesting, moderately successful man may take, in the direction of a
cure for egotism, the best cure, after all, for all faults, is a humble
desire to be different. That is the most transforming power in the
world; we may fail a thousand times, but as long as we are ashamed of
our failure, as long as we do not helplessly acquiesce, as long as we
do not try to comfort ourselves for it by a careful parade of our other
virtues, we are in the pilgrim's road. It is a childish fault, after
all. I watched to-day a party of children at play. One detestable
little boy, the clumsiest and most incapable of the party, spent the
whole time in climbing up a step and jumping from it, while he
entreated all the others to see how far he could project himself. There
was not a child there who could not have jumped twice as far, but they
were angelically patient and sympathetic with the odious little wretch.
It seemed to me a sad, small parable of what we so many of us are
engaged all our lives long in doing. The child had no eyes for and no
thoughts of the rest; he simply reiterated his ridiculous performance,
and claimed admiration. There came into my mind that exquisite and
beautiful ode, the work too, strange to say, of a transcendent egotist,
Coventry Patmore, and the prayer he made:

   "Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
    Nor vexing Thee in death,
    And Thou rememberest of what toys
    We made our joys,
    How weakly understood
    Thy great commanded good,
    Then, fatherly not less
    Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
    Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
    'I will be sorry for their childishness.'"


This is where we may leave our problem; leave it, that is to say, if we
have faithfully struggled with it, if we have tried to amend ourselves
and to encourage others; if we have done all this, and reached a point
beyond which progress seems impossible. But we must not fling our
problems and perplexities, as we are apt to do, upon the knees of God,
the very instant they begin to bewilder us, as children bring a tangled
skein, or a toy bent crooked, to a nurse. We must not, I say; and yet,
after all, I am not sure that it is not the best and simplest way of
all!




IX

EDUCATION


I said that I was a public-school master for nearly twenty years; and
now that it is over I sometimes sit and wonder, rather sadly, I am
afraid, what we were all about.

We were a strictly classical school; that is to say, all the boys in
the school were practically specialists in classics, whether they had
any aptitude for them or not. We shoved and rammed in a good many other
subjects into the tightly packed budget we called the curriculum. But
it was not a sincere attempt to widen our education, or to give boys a
real chance to work at the things they cared for; it was only a
compromise with the supposed claims of the public, in order that we
might try to believe that we taught things we did not really teach. We
had an enormous and elaborate machine; the boys worked hard, and the
masters were horribly overworked. The whole thing whizzed, banged,
grumbled, and hummed like a factory; but very little education was the
result. It used to go to my heart to see a sparkling stream of bright,
keen, lively little boys arrive, half after half, ready to work, full
of interest, ready to listen breathlessly to anything that struck their
fancy, ready to ask questions--such excellent material, I used to
think. At the other end used to depart a slow river of cheerful and
conventional boys, well-dressed, well-mannered, thoroughly nice,
reasonable, sensible, and good-humoured creatures, but knowing next to
nothing, without intellectual interests, and, indeed, honestly
despising them. I do not want to exaggerate; and I will frankly confess
that there were always a few well-educated boys among them; but these
were boys of real ability, with an aptitude for classics. And as
providing a classical education, the system was effective, though
cumbrous; hampered and congested by the other subjects, which were well
enough taught, but which had no adequate time given to them, and
intruded upon the classics without having opportunity to develop
themselves. It is a melancholy picture, but the result certainly was
that intellectual cynicism was the note of the place.

The pity of it is that the machinery was all there; cheerful industry
among masters and boys alike; but the whole thing frozen and chilled,
partly by the congestion of subjects, partly by antiquated methods.

Moreover, to provide a classical education for the best boys,
everything else was sacrificed. The boys were taught classics, not on
the literary method, but on the academic method, as if they were all to
enter for triposes and scholarships, and to end by becoming professors.
Instead of simply reading away at interesting and beautiful books, and
trying, to cover some ground, a great quantity of pedantic grammar was
taught; time was wasted in trying to make the boys compose in both
Latin and Greek, when they had no vocabulary, and no knowledge of the
languages. It was like setting children of six and seven to write
English in the style of Milton and Carlyle.

The solution is a very obvious one; it is, at all costs to simplify,
and to relieve pressure. The staple of education should be French, easy
mathematics, history, geography, and popular science. I would not even
begin Latin or Greek at first. Then, when the first stages were over, I
would have every boy with any special gift put to a single subject, in
which he should try to make real progress, but so that there would be
time to keep up the simpler subjects as well. The result would be that
when a boy had finished his course, he would have some one subject
which he could reasonably be expected to have mastered up to a certain
point. He would have learnt classics, or mathematics, or history, or
modern languages, or science, thoroughly; while all might hope to have
a competent knowledge of French, English, history, easy mathematics,
and easy science. Boys who had obviously no special aptitude would be
kept on at the simple subjects. And if the result was only that a
school sent out boys who could read French easily, and write simple
French grammatically, who knew something of modern history and
geography, could work out sums in arithmetic, and had some conception
of elementary science--well, they would, I believe, be very fairly
educated boys.

The reason why intellectual cynicism sets in, is because the boys, as
they go on, feel that they have mastered nothing. They have been set to
compose in Greek and Latin and French; the result is that they have no
power of composing in any of these languages, when they might have
learnt to compose in one. Meanwhile, they have not had time to read any
English to speak of, or to be practised in writing it. They know
nothing of their own history or of modern geography; and the blame is
not with them if they find all knowledge arid and unattractive.

I would try all sorts of experiments. I would make boys do easy
precis-writing; to give a set of boys a simple printed correspondence
and tell them to analyse it, would be to give them a task in which the
dullest would find some amusement. I should read a story aloud, or a
short episode of history, and require them to re-tell it in their own
words. Or I would relate a simple incident, and make them write it in
French; make them write letters in French. And it would be easy thus to
make one subject play into another, because they could be made to give
an account in French of something that they had done in science or
history.

At present each of the roads--Latin, Greek, French, mathematics,
science--leads off in a separate direction, and seems to lead nowhere
in particular.

The defenders of the classical system say that it fortifies the mind
and makes it a strong and vigorous instrument. Where is the proof of
it? It is true that it fortifies and invigorates minds which have, to
start with, plenty of grip and interest; but pure classics are, as the
results abundantly prove, too hard a subject for ordinary minds, and
they are taught in too abstruse and elaborate a way. If it were
determined by the united good sense of educational authorities that
Latin and Greek must be retained at all costs, then the only thing to
do would be to sacrifice all other subjects, and to alter all the
methods of teaching the classics. I do not think it would be a good
solution; but it would be better than the present system of
intellectual starvation.

The truth is that the present results are so poor that any experiments
are justified. The one quality which you can depend upon in boys is
interest, and interest is ruthlessly sacrificed. When I used to press
this fact upon my sterner colleagues, they would say that I only wanted
to make things amusing, and that the result would be that we should
only turn out amateurs. But amateurs are at least better than
barbarians; and my complaint is that the majority of the boys are not
turned out even professionally equipped in the elaborate subjects they
are supposed to have been taught.

The same melancholy thing goes on in the older Universities. The
classics are retained as a subject in which all must qualify; and the
education provided for the ordinary passman is of a contemptible,
smattering kind; it is really no education at all. It gives no grip, or
vigour, or stimulus. Here again no one takes any interest in the
average man. If the more liberal residents try to get rid of the
intolerable tyranny of compulsory classics, a band of earnest,
conventional people streams up from the country and outvotes them,
saying solemnly, and obviously believing, that education is in danger.
The truth is that the intellectual education of the average Englishman
is sacrificed to an antiquated humanist system, administered by
unimaginative and pedantic people.

The saddest part of it all is that we have, most of us, so little idea
of what we want to effect by education. My own theory is a simple one.
I think that we ought first of all to equip boys, as, far as we can, to
play a useful part in the world. Such a theory is decried by
educational theorists as being utilitarian; but if education is not to
be useful, we had better close our schools at once. The idealist says,
"Never mind the use; get the best educational instrument for the
training of the mind, and, when you have finished your work, the mind
will be bright and strong, and capable of discharging any labour." That
is a beautiful theory; but it is not borne out by results; and one of
the reasons of the profound disbelief which is rapidly spreading in the
country with regard to our public schools, is that we send out so many
boys, not only without intellectual life, but not even capable of
humble usefulness. These theorists continue to talk of classics as a
splendid gymnastic, but in their hands it becomes a rack; instead of
leaving the limbs supple and well knit, they are strained, disjointed,
and feeble. Even the flower of our classical system are too often left
without any original power of expression; critical, fastidious minds,
admiring erudition, preferring the elucidation of second-rate authors
to the study of the best. A man who reads Virgil for pleasure is a
better result of a system of education than one who re-edits Tibullus.
Instead of having original thoughts, and a style of their own to
express them in, these high classicists are left with a profound
knowledge of the style and usage of ancient authors, a thing not to be
undervalued as a step in a progress, but still essentially an anteroom
of the mind.

The further task that lies before us educators, when we have trained a
mind to be useful, consists in the awakening, in whatever regions may
be possible, of the soul. By this I do not mean the ethical soul, but
the spirit of fine perception of beauty, of generous admiration for
what is noble and true and high. And here I am sure that we fail, and
fail miserably. For one thing, these great classicists make the mistake
of thinking that only through literature, and, what is more, the
austere literature of Greece and Rome, can this sense be developed. I
myself have a deep admiration for Greek literature. I think it one of
the brightest flowers of the human spirit, and I think it well that any
boy with a real literary sense should be brought into contact with it.
I do not think highly of Latin literature. There are very few writers
of the first rank. Virgil is, of course, one; and Horace is a splendid
craftsman, but not a high master of literature. There is hardly any
prose in Latin fit for boys to read. Cicero is diffuse, and often
affords little more than small-talk on abstract topics; Tacitus a
brilliant but affected prosateur, Caesar a dull and uninspiring author.
But to many boys the path to literary appreciation cannot lie through
Latin, or even Greek, because the old language hangs like a veil
between them and the thought within. To some boys the enkindling of the
intellectual soul comes through English literature, to some through
history, to some through a knowledge of other lands, which can be
approached by geography. To some through art and music; and of these
two things we trifle with the latter and hardly touch upon the former.
I cannot see that a knowledge of the lives, the motives, the
performances of artists is in itself a less valuable instrument of
education than a knowledge of the lives, motives, and performances of
writers, even though they be Greek.

What our teachers fail in--and the most enthusiastic often fail most
hopelessly--is sympathy and imagination. They cannot conceive that what
moves, touches, and inspires themselves may have no meaning for boys
with a different type of mind.

The result of our education can be well reviewed by one who, like
myself, after wrestling, often very sorrowfully, with the problems of
school education, comes up to a university and gets to know something
of these boys at a later stage. Many of them are fine, vigorous
fellows; but they often tend to look upon their work as a disagreeable
necessity, which they do conscientiously, expecting nothing in
particular from it. They play games ardently, and fill their hours of
leisure with talk about them. Yet one discerns in mind after mind the
germs of intellectual things, undeveloped and bewildered. Many of them
have an interest in something, but they are often ashamed to talk about
it. They have a deep horror of being supposed to be superior; they
listen politely to talk about books and pictures, conscious of
ignorance, not ill-disposed to listen; but it is all an unreal world to
them.

I am all for hard and strenuous work. I do not at all wish to make work
slipshod and dilettante. I would raise the standards of simple
education, and force boys to show that they are working honestly. I
want energy and zeal above everything. But my honest belief is that you
cannot get strenuous and zealous work unless you also have interest and
belief in work. At present, education as conducted in our public-school
and university system appears to me to be neither utilitarian nor
intellectual. It aims at being intellectual first and utilitarian
afterwards, and it misses both.

Whether anything can be done on a big scale to help us out of the poor
tangle in which we are involved, I do not know. I fear not. I do not
think that the time is ripe. I do not believe that great movements can
be brought about by prophets, however enlightened their views, however
vigorous their personalities, unless there is a corresponding energy
below. An individual may initiate and control a great force of public
opinion; I do not think he can originate it. There is certainly a vague
and widespread discontent with our present results; but it is all a
negative opinion, a dissatisfaction with what is being done. The
movement must have a certain positive character before it can take
shape. There must arise a desire and a respect for intellectual things,
a certain mental tone, which is wanting. At present, public opinion
only indicates that the rising generation is not well trained, and that
boys, after going through an elaborate education, seem to be very
little equipped for practical life. There is no complaint that boys are
made unpractical; the feeling rather is that they are turned out
healthy, well-drilled creatures, fond of games, manly, obedient, but
with a considerable aversion to settling down to work, and with a firm
resolve to extract what amusement they can out of life. All that is, I
feel, perfectly true; but there is little demand on the part of parents
that boys should have intellectual interests or enthusiasms for the
things of the mind. What teachers ought to aim at is to communicate
something of this enthusiasm, by devising a form of education which
should appeal to the simpler forms of intellectual curiosity, instead
of starving boys upon an ideal of inaccessible dignity. I do not for a
moment deny that those who defend the old classical tradition have a
high intellectual ideal. But it is an unpractical ideal, and takes no
account of the plain facts of experience.

The result is that we teachers have forfeited confidence; and we must
somehow or other regain it. We are tolerated, as all ancient and
respectable things are tolerated. We have become a part of the social
order, and we have still the prestige of wealth and dignity. But what
wealthy people ever dream nowadays of building and endowing colleges on
purely literary lines? All the buildings which have arisen of late in
my University are either buildings for scientific purposes or clerical
foundations for ecclesiastical ends. The vitality of our literary
education is slowly fading out of it. This lack of vitality is not so
evident until you go a little way beneath the surface. Classical
proficiency is still liberally rewarded by scholarships and
fellowships; and while the classical tradition remains in our schools,
there are a good many men, who intend to be teachers, who enter for
classical examinations. But where we fail grievously is in our
provision for average men; they are provided with feeble examinations
in desultory and diffuse subjects, in which a high standard is not
required. It is difficult to imagine a condition of greater vacuity
than that in which a man leaves the University after taking a pass
degree. No one has endeavoured to do anything for him, or to cultivate
his intelligence in any line. And yet these are our parents in the next
generation. And the only way in which we stifle mental revolt is by
leaving our victims in such a condition of mental abjectness and
intellectual humility, that it does not even occur to them to complain
of how unjustly they hav

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