THE WOUNDS OF A FRIEND
Those who have been friendly enough to follow me so far in my little
story will scarcely push their friendship so far that they will refrain
from criticism upon myself and my doings. On one point, viz. the
social morality of my conduct, I am so sure of criticism that I will
anticipate it with self-criticism. Had I the moral right to desert the
city, and to ignore the social obligations of the city, in order to
find a life that was more pleasurable to myself? A city which presents
a depressing variety of social needs can hardly afford to spare any
good citizen, however humble, who is capable of social service, and for
such a citizen to contract himself out of his obligations is very like
skulking. I confess that this consideration occasioned me some
uneasiness, and the questions which it raised have been treated with
such admirable lucidity by a friend of mine, who still resides in
London, that I will let him put the case against me.
The friend of whom I speak belongs to that class which may be roughly
described as Earnest Good People. With very small means, and not much
spare time at his disposal, he is nevertheless constantly engaged in
what is called the work of Social Amelioration. The problems of city
squalor, vice, and ignorance haunt him like a nightmare. When a very
young man he made a voyage of discovery among the submerged tenth; got
acquainted with tramps, night strollers, and wastrels on the Thames
Embankment; slept in doss-houses and Salvation Army shelters; tried his
hand on experimental philanthropy among the slums; and was driven
half-frantic by what he saw. He has the makings of a saint in him; of
a Francis of Assisi, of a Father Damien. He teaches in night-schools,
conducts Penny Banks, and is grateful to any one who will introduce him
to a desperate social enterprise which no one else will attempt. The
first business of life, he is fond of saying, is not to get good, but
to do good. Of pleasure, in the usual sense of the term, he knows
nothing, and would grudge the expenditure of a sixpence upon himself as
long as he knew a cadger or a decayed washerwoman who seemed to have a
better claim to it. London is for him not a home, but a battlefield,
and his spirit is the spirit of the soldier who dare not forsake his
post.
Many years ago, when I was going for my summer holiday, he wrote me a
reproachful poem, from which I quote a part, because it is the best
index to his own character and the most lucid exposition of his own
attitude to life which I can recall:
The roar of the streets at their loudest
Rises and falls like a tune;
Midday in the heart of London,
Midway in the month of June.
And blue at the end of a valley
I see the ocean gleam,
And a voice like falling water
Speaks to me thro' a dream.
It calls, and it bids me follow;
Ah, how the worn nerves thrill
At the vision of those green pastures
And waters running still!
But I dare not move nor follow,
For out of the quivering heat
Another vision arises
And darkens at my feet--
White faces worn with the fever
That crouches evermore
In the court and alley, and seizes
The poor man at his door,
Float up in my dream and call me,
And cry, If Christ were here
He had not left us to perish
In the fever-heat of the year!
God knows how I yearn for the mountains
And the river that runs between!
Ah, well, I can wait--and the pastures
Of heaven are always green.
No one will question the nobility of sentiment in these simple lines,
and they are the genuine expression of the man. In his case, however
slight may be his claim to be called a poet, that hardest test of the
poet is fulfilled:--
The gods exact for song
To become what we sing.
It will be imagined that a man of this order would view my retreat from
London with disfavour. He thought me guilty of a kind of social
perfidy. No doubt the Earnest Good People, for whom I have the
greatest reverence, will agree in the same verdict. A letter received
during the last few days from my friend puts the case with such force,
and yet with such good-feeling, that I will transcribe a part of it.
'I confess,' he writes, 'that the pleasures of life among the mountains
leaves me cold. It is not that I am incapable of the same kind of
pleasure, but, as you know, I have other ideas concerning the uses of
life. I cannot enjoy sunsets while men and women are starving. The
thought of all the misery of life for multitudes would, as Rossetti
puts it, "make a goblin of the sun." You used to be very eloquent
against good men who lived only for their own pleasure; are not you
yourself living in the same way? I have heard you declaim against the
gross selfishness of Goethe's aim in life--"to build the pyramid of his
own intellectual culture"; are not you, in your own way, pursuing the
same ideal? I have heard you say that nothing so belittled Goethe in
your judgment as the fact that he was destitute of patriotism; he dwelt
at ease among his books, while his country perished and felt no pang;
and you live your joyous life among the hills, and have forgotten the
Golgothas on which the poor of London endure their unpitied martyrdom.
You are doing good to yourself, no doubt; but is it not a better thing
to be doing good to others? I marvel that you can sleep at peace amid
the wailing of the world. I cannot, and I thank God I cannot.
'What you do not seem to realise is that all our acts must be judged
not only from the personal, but from the collective standpoint.
Suppose all men followed your example, what would happen? Why, cities
would soon become the mere refuse-heaps of the unfit. The drudges
would remain, the captains of industry would be gone. There would be
no leaven of higher intelligence left, no standard of manners, nothing
that could set the rhythm of life. This is too much the case already.
The merchant, the writer, the man of wealth and culture, live as far as
they can from the struggling crowd. You would extend the process, and
make it possible for the clerk as well as the merchant. If your new
gospel of a return to Nature succeeds, we shall soon see the universal
exodus of the best intellectual and physical units of the community.
But you forget that some millions will remain behind, who cannot flee.
Have you no obligations to these?
'Besides this, you do not seem to perceive that the ultimate drift of
the new gospel is toward anarchy. The return to nature is practically
a return to barbarism. You would have all men content so long as they
grew enough potatoes for their daily needs. You would have England
return to the conditions of the Saxon heptarchy. Each man would squat
upon his clearing in the forest, ignobly independent, brutally content.
There would be no longer that struggle for life which develops
capacity, that urging onward of the flood of life which cuts for itself
new channels, that passion for betterment which means progress. You
save yourself from the collisions of life; but it is in such collisions
that the finest fires are struck out of the heart of humanity. Again,
I say, any course of action must be judged by its collective effect
before it can be rightly understood. It is not the individual that
counts, but the race. A good for the individual is not permissible
unless it is a good also for the race. I do not admit that your new
way of life is an entire good for you, for I believe you must in time
suffer from your isolation; but even if I did admit it, I should deny
your right to it, if in its large effects it means an ill for the race.
Would you venture to say that the race would profit by it if your
example were largely imitated? I think you dare not say so much, for
you must be aware that the general desertion of cities would mean the
decay of commerce and of the arts, the arrest of progress, and national
disintegration. And if your own personal example would bear only evil
fruit were it elevated to a law of life, it stands condemned.
'For my own part, I am where you left me. I am in the same
rooms--dull, stuffy, inconvenient--you know all about them. I breathe
quantities of bad air every day, and see a hundred things that distress
me. I go three nights a week to the room in Lucraft's Row; struggle
with the young barbarians of the slums, and am content if I see but a
few signs of order evolving themselves out of chaos. A week ago I was
knocked down by a ruffian, who came next day to apologise on the
three-fold ground that he was drunk, that he did not know it was me he
struck, and that if he had known he never would have done it. My
ruffian was very penitent. He has since signed the pledge and is my
firm friend. I chased him out of a public-house last night, and made
him come home to my lodgings with me, where I gave him coffee, and sang
songs to him. He followed all my movements with the big wistful eyes
of a dog. There were tears in those eyes when he bade me good-night.
He brushed them away with a dirty hand, and said, "I know I can keep
straight now, sir, because you are my pal, and I ain't a-going against
the wishes of my pal!" This morning he left a pineapple at the door
for me--he is a coster, and pineapples are cheap just now. I felt more
pleasure than I can say; I could have sung over my work all day, so
glad was I. My dear fellow, don't think I speak pharisaically--you
know me too well; but I do believe I got more genuine pleasure out of
my experience with this rough fellow than you will ever get out of your
sunsets. Lucraft's Row is a dull place enough, but when a ray of light
does shine into it, it brings with it more than common joy.
'My objection to your new mode of life is that it is entirely
self-centred. There is no projection of yourself into other lives.
You are contributing nothing to the common stock of moral effort. You
are simply marooned. It alters nothing that you have marooned yourself
under conditions that please and content you. I think that if I were
marooned upon the fairest island of the Southern Seas, where I had but
to bask in the sunshine and stretch out my hand to find delightful
food, there would be still something in my lot which I should find
intolerable. I should spend my days upon the island's loftiest crag,
watching for a sail. The thought of a thousand ships not far away,
rushing round the globe, with throb of piston, crack of cordage, strain
of timber, buffeting of waves, and shouting crews, would drive me
distracted. What to me were blue skies and soft winds when I might be
sharer in this elemental strife? How should I covet, in all this
adorable and detested beauty of my solitary isle, the grey skies that
looked on human effort, the violent wind, the roaring waves, the
muscles cracking at the capstan, the strong exhilaration of peril,
effort, conflict, and the glory of hourly contiguity with death! It
was so Ulysses felt:
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use.
It was so he resolved
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
* * * * *
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
You will not question that the sentiment is manly. Is there not then
something that is unmanly in the opposite sentiment? Or, to be plain,
my friend, is it not lack of courage which has driven you from us, lack
of heroic temper, lack of that divine and primitive instinct which
takes a "frolic welcome" in the "thunder and the sunshine," in the
conflict and the stress of life?
'I believe that we are bound to be the losers by any wilful separation
from our kind. This was the case with the mediaeval monks and
ascetics; they lost far more than they gained from their separation
from the common life of the people. It is the same still with very
rich folk who are able to evade the harsh conscription of life; in
evading the conscription of life they invariably deteriorate in
physical and mental fibre. I can conceive nothing more ruinous to a
young man than that he should have just enough money to make the toil
for bread unnecessary. More lives have been spoiled by competence than
by poverty; indeed, I doubt whether poverty has any effect at all upon
a strong character, except as a stimulus to exertion. Life being what
it is, we should take it as we find it: we gain nothing by going out of
our way to find an easier path. The beaten road is safest. The man
who boldly says, "Let me know the fulness of life; let me taste all
that it has to present of vicissitude, joy, sorrow, labour, struggle;
let me know all that common people endure, and endure with them; let me
be no exception to the common rule, enjoy no special privilege, ask for
no immunity from things harsh and disagreeable"--the man who thinks and
acts thus is the man who gets the best and most out of life. But you,
my friend, have simply copied the old monks in the arrangement of your
life. There is nothing novel in your action, though just now your
egoism is gratified by the sense of novelty and originality. You have
simply gone out of the world to escape the evil of the world. You have
bought yourself out of the conscription of life. You have yet to
answer me one question: are you the better for it? That question
cannot be answered in a day. Ten years hence you will be able to tell
me something about it, and I shall be much surprised if you do not then
report more of loss than gain. No man ever yet held aloof from his
kind without paying the price in narrower sympathies, a narrower brain,
and a narrower heart. The eternal spirit of Progress which works
throughout the universe never fails to punish the deserter, and the
most common punishment is atrophy. Not to submit to the process of
evolution is to fall down the long slope of degeneracy.
'You do not need to be told that the entire history of nations confirms
this rule. The greatest nations are those which have found life most
difficult, and they have thriven on their difficulties. The soft
climate, which reduces toil to a minimum, invariably means the
enervated race. Under the harsh skies of Britain a great race has been
trained to great exploits; but what part have the islands of the South
Pacific ever played in human history? Give man a difficulty to
overcome, and he at once puts forth his strength; difficulty is his
spiritual gymnasium. Impose on him no need of exertion, and he will
rot out, just as the races of the South Pacific are rotting out. I
would measure the future of a man, or of a nation, by this simple test;
do they habitually choose the easier or the harder path for themselves?
The nation that chooses the hard path, that is not afraid of the burden
of empire, that glories in the strife for primacy and is not afraid to
pay the price of primacy in incredible exertion, in blood and
sacrifice, is the nation that shall possess the earth. And is it not
so with men? Here, again, I press home the need for considering one's
actions in their collective aspect. Your course of life is easily
imitable: would you have it imitated? There are thousands of men in
London who could readily retire into a peaceful life to-morrow, on
terms more favourable than yours. Every man possessed of a hundred
pounds a year could do it. Yet there are plenty of old men, with ample
fortunes, who never dream of doing it. They stick to their posts and
they die at them. And it is by such men that the great machinery of
social life, of commerce, of national progress is kept going.
'You would say, perhaps, that they are simply sacrificing the finer
pleasures of life to the fanaticism of work; ah, but they are also
sacrificing them for the good of the community. If the great surgeon
or physician bolted from his duties the moment he had acquired money
enough to buy a cottage, you would say he had no right to rob mankind
of his skill and service to please himself. Have you that right? And
if the whole nation acted in this spirit, how long would the nation
hold its place of power and influence? In less than a century we
should be as the Hottentots. We should be driven out before the
advance of more energetic races, just as the Hottentots; who once
possessed Southern Europe and Egypt, have been forced back into the
African wilderness, where they live a life that is content with the
gratification of the most primitive, the most bestial, wants. It is no
excuse to say that the action of one man can have but little influence
upon the trend of life in a whole nation. The merest unit in the sum,
the cipher even, has power to change the total. The strength of wisdom
in the majority of a nation may be more than sufficient to-day to
counteract the folly of the unit; but there is always the chance that
the folly of the individual may in time prevail against the experience
of the wise, and pervert the nation. At all events, we ought to
consider such possibilities before we hold ourselves free to do as we
please in contempt of general custom.
'Do not be angry with me when I say that to me your flight from London
appears only an illustration of that cowardice about life which is so
common to-day. Men are very much afraid of life to-day; afraid of its
responsibilities and duties; afraid of marriage and the burden of
children; and not alone for the old are there fears in the way, but
even the young men faint and grow weary.
'I can understand Stevenson flying to the South Seas; it was part of
his prolonged duel with death. But his heart was in the Highlands, and
could he have chosen, his feet would have trodden to old age the grey
streets of Edinburgh. Your flight is altogether different. You have
no real excuse in ill-health. You have simply fallen sick with a
distaste for cities. You have had a bad dream, and you are frightened.
I love you still; I count you friend still; but I cannot call you brave.
'O my friend, if I have said anything that sounds unfriendly, do not
believe it of me; do not doubt that I love you. I think I should not
have written thus but that in your last letter you expressed pity for
me, and that stung me, I confess. And so I retort, you see, by pitying
you, which is not admirable in me. Therefore let me say, if you care
still to please me, do not, in any further letters you may write, ever
express the least pity for me. Quite honestly I say I do not need
pity, for I am perfectly happy. In giving all the time and money I can
spare to the poor in Lucraft's Row, I have really renounced nothing;
or, if I have, I am so unconscious of sacrifice that I can only say
with Browning:
Renounce joy for thy fellow's sake?
That's joy beyond joy!
There are half a dozen ragged boys who love me: there are twenty more
who will do so in time; and there is my drunken friend with the dog's
eyes, who looks to me to save him from the pit; what more can I ask?
Fog and mire, grime and drudgery, these never trouble me, because I see
Lucraft's Row, lit with a star, waiting for me at the end of every day.
And the star is growing bigger and brighter, for it shines over a tiny
obscure Bethlehem where the Soul is getting itself born in a few humble
hearts. To be permitted to see this miracle, to assist in this
incarnation of the Soul of the People, is its own exceeding great
reward; and I may be envied, but never pitied.'
So ran the letter of my friend, and as I transcribe it I feel anew that
it is an indictment not to be easily set aside. I must think over what
I can reply to it. It seems as though if he be right in his mode of
life I must be wrong in mine; and yet may we not both be right? Are we
not seeing life from different angles?
Yes, I must have time for thought before I can reply to such a letter.