IV

Such a perfect day: the sky cloudless; sunlight like pale gold or

amber; soft mists in the distance; a delicate air, gently stirred,

fresh, with no poisonous nip in it. I knew last night it would be fine,

for the gale had blown itself out, and when I came in at sunset the

chimneys and shoulders of the Hall stood out dark against the orange

glow. The beloved house seemed to welcome me back, and as I came across

the footpath, through the pasture, I saw in the brightly-lighted

kitchen the hands of some one whose face I could not see, in the golden

circle of lamplight, deftly moving, preparing something, for my use

perhaps.

Yet for all that I am ill at ease; and as I walked to-day, far and fast

in the sun-warmed lanes, my thoughts came yapping and growling round me

like a pack of curs--undignified, troublesome, vexatious thoughts; I

chase them away for a moment, and next moment they are snapping at my

heels. Experiences of a tragic quality, however depressing they may be,

have a vaguely sustaining power about them, when they close in, as the

fat bulls of Bashan closed in upon the Psalmist. There is no escape

then, and the matter is in the hands of God; but when many dogs have

come about one, one feels that one must try to deal with the situation

oneself; and that is just what one does not want to do.

What sort of dogs are they? Well, to-day they are things like this--an

angry letter from an old friend to whom something which I said about

him was repeated by a busybody. The thing was true enough, and it was

not wrong for me to say it; but that it should be repeated with a deft

and offensive twist to the man himself is the mischief. I cannot deny

that I said it, and I can only affirm its truth. Was it friendly to say

it? says my correspondent. Well, I don't think it was unfriendly as I

said it. It is the turn given to it that makes it seem injurious; and

yet I cannot deny that what has been repeated is substantially what I

said. Why did I not say it to him? he asks, instead of saying it to an

acquaintance. It might, he goes on, have been conceivably of some use

if I had said it to him, but it can be of no use for me to have said it

to a third person. I have no reply to this; it is perfectly true. But I

do not go in for pointing out my friends' faults to them, unless they

ask me to do so: and the remark in question was just one of those

hasty, unconsidered, sweeping little judgments that one does pass in

conversation about the action of a friend. One cannot--at least I

cannot--so order my conversation that if a casual criticism is repeated

without qualification to the person who is the subject of it, he may

not be pained by it. The repetition of it in all its nakedness makes it

seem deliberate, when it is not deliberate at all. I say in my reply

frankly that I admire, esteem, and love my friend, but that I do not

therefore admire his faults. I add that I do not myself mind my friends

criticising me, so long as they do not do it to my face. But I am aware

that, for all my frankness, I cut a poor figure in the matter. I

foresee a tiresome, useless correspondence, and a certain inevitable

coldness. Then, too, I must write a disagreeable letter to the man who

has repeated my criticism; and he will reply, quite fairly, that I

ought not to have said it if I did not mean it, and if I was not

prepared to stand by it. And he will be annoyed too, because he will

not see that he has done anything that he ought not to have done. I

shall say that I shall have for the future to be careful what I say to

him, and he will reply that he quite approves of my decision, and that

it is a pity I have not always acted on the same principle; and he will

have a detestable species of justice on his side.

Then there are other things as well. There is some troublesome legal

business, arising out of a quarrel between two relations of mine on a

question of some property. Whatever I decide, someone will be vexed. I

do not want to take any part in the matter at all, and the only reason

I do it is because I have been appealed to, and there does not seem to

be anyone else who will do it. This will entail a quantity of

correspondence and some visits to town, because of the passion that

people have for interviews, and because lawyers love delay, since it is

a profitable source of income to them. In this case the parties in the

dispute are women, and one cannot treat their requests with the same

bluntness that one treats the requests of men. "I should feel so much

more happy," one of them says, "if you could just run up and discuss

the matter with me; it is so much more satisfactory than a letter,"

This will be troublesome, it will take up time, it will be expensive,

and, as I say, I shall only succeed in vexing one of the claimants, and

possibly both.

Then, again, the widow of an old friend, lately dead, asks my advice

about publishing a book which her husband has left unfinished, I do not

think it is a very good book, and certainly not worth publishing on its

merits. But the widow feels it a sacred duty to give it to the world;

she seems, too, to regard it as a sacred duty for me, as a loyal

friend, to edit the book, fill up the gaps, and see it through the

press. Then I shall be held responsible for its publication, and the

reviewers will say that it is not worth the paper it is printed on--an

opinion I cannot honestly contest.

Another trial is that a young man, whom I do not know, but whose father

was a friend of mine in old days, writes to me to use my influence that

he should obtain an appointment. He says that he is just as well

qualified as a number of other applicants, and all that is needed is

that I should write a letter to an eminent man whom I know, which will

give him his chance, I hate to do this; I hate to use private

friendship in order that I may do jobs for my friends. If I do not

write the required letter, the young man will think me forgetful of the

old ties; if he does not obtain the appointment, he will blame me for

not acting energetically enough. If he does obtain it on my

recommendation, it may of course turn out all right; but if he does not

show himself fit for the post, I shall be rightly blamed for

recommending him on insufficient grounds; and in any case my eminent

friend will think me an importunate person.

I am busy just now on a book of my own, but all these things force me

to put my work aside, day after day. Even when I have some leisure

hours which I might devote to my own work, I cannot attain the

requisite serenity for doing it--cannot get these vexatious matters out

of my head; and there are other matters, too, of the same kind which I

need not further particularise.

Of course, it may be said that the knot is best cut by refusing to have

anything to do with any of these things. I suppose that if one was

strong-minded and resolute one would behave like Gallio, who drove the

disputants from his judgment-seat. But I have a tenderness for these

people, and a certain conscience in the matter, so that I do not feel

it would be right to refuse. Yet I do not quite know upon what basis I

feel that there is a duty about it. I do not undertake these tasks as a

Christian. The only precedent that I can find in the Gospel which bears

on the matter would seem to justify my refusing to have anything to do

with it all. When the two men came to Christ about a question of an

inheritance, he would not do what they asked him. He said, "Man, who

made me a judge or a divider between you?" Again, I do not do it as a

gentleman, because there is no question of personal honour involved. I

only do it, I think, because I do hot like refusing to do what I am

asked to do, because I wish to please people--a muddled sort of

kindliness.

But the whole question goes deeper than that. I suppose that tasks such

as these fall in the way of all human beings, whatever their motives

for undertaking them may be. How can one do them, and yet not let them

disturb one's tranquillity? The ordinary moralist says, "Do what you

think to be right, and never mind what people say or think." But

unfortunately I do mind very much. I hate coldnesses and

misunderstandings. They leave me with a sore and sensitive feeling

about my heart, which no amount of ingenious argument can take away. I

suppose that one ought to conclude that these things are somehow or

other good for one, that they train one in patience and wisdom. But

when, as is the case with all these episodes, the original dispute

ought never to have occurred; when the questions at issue are mean,

pitiful, and sordid; when, if the people concerned were only themselves

wise, patient, and kind, the situation would never have occurred, what

then? If my acquaintance, in the first case, had not taken a mean

pleasure in tale-bearing and causing pain, if in the second case my two

relatives had not been grasping and selfish, if in the third case my

friend's widow had not allowed her own sense of affection to supersede

her judgment, if in the fourth case my friend had been content to let

his merits speak for themselves instead of relying upon personal

influences, these little crises would never have occurred; it seems

unfair that the pain and discomfort of these paltry situations should

be transferred to the shoulders of one who has no particular personal

interest in the matter. Besides, I cannot honestly trace in my own case

the beneficial results of the process. These rubs only make me resolve

that in the future I will not have anything to do with such matters at

all. It is true that I shall not keep my resolution; but that does not

mend matters appreciably.

Moreover, instead of giving me a wholesome sense of hopefulness and

confidence, it only makes me feel acutely the dreary and sordid

elements which seem inextricably intermingled with life, which might

otherwise be calm, serene, and beautiful. I do not see that any of the

people concerned are the better for any of the incidents which have

occurred--indeed, I think that they are all the worse for them. It is

not encouraging or inspiring to have the meanness and pettiness of

human nature brought before one, and to feel conscious of one's own

weakness and feebleness as well. Some sorrows and losses purge, brace,

and strengthen. Such trials as these stain, perplex, enfeeble.

The immediate result of it all is that the work which I can do and

desire to do, and which, if anything, I seem to have been sent into the

world to do, is delayed and hindered. No good can come out of the

things which I am going to spend the hours in trying to mend. Neither

will any of the people concerned profit by my example in the matter,

because they will only have their confidence in my judgment and

amiability diminished.

And so I walk, as I say, along the sandy lanes, with the fresh air and

the still sunlight all about me, kept by my own unquiet heart from the

peace that seems to be all about me within the reach of my hand. The

sense of God's compassion for his feeble creatures does not help me;

how can he compassionate the littleness for which he is himself

responsible? It is at such moments that God seems remote, careless,

indifferent, occupied in his own designs; strong in his ineffable

strength, leaving the frail and sensitive creatures whom he has made,

to whom he has given hopes and dreams too large for their feeble nerves

and brains, to stumble onwards over vale and hill without a comforting

smile or a sustaining hand. Would that I could feel otherwise! He gives

us the power of framing an ideal of hopefulness, peace, sweetness, and

strength; and then he mocks at our attempts to reach them. I do not ask

to see every step of the road plainly; I only long to know that we are

going forwards, and not backwards, I must submit, I know; but I cannot

believe that he only demands a tame and sullen submission; rather he

must desire that I should face him bravely and fearlessly, in hope and

confidence, as a loving and beloved son.

V

How often in sermons we are exhorted to effort! How rarely are we told

precisely how to begin! How glibly it is taken for granted that we are

all equally capable of it. Yet energy itself is a quality, a gift of

temperament. The man who, like Sir Richard Grenville, says "Fight on,"

when there is nothing left to fight with or to fight for, except that

indefinable thing honour, or the man who, like Sir Andrew Barton, says:

"I'll but lie down and bleed awhile,

And then I'll rise and fight again;"--

they are people of heroic temper, and cannot be called a common

species. "Do the next thing," says the old motto. But what if the next

thing is one of many, none of them very important, and if at the same

time one has a good book to read, a warm fire to sit by, an amusing

friend to talk to? "He who of such delights can judge, and spare to

interpose them oft, is not unwise," says Milton. Most of us have a

certain amount of necessary work to do in the world, and it can by no

means be regarded as established that we are also bound to do

unnecessary work. Supposing that one's heart is overflowing with mercy,

compassion, and charity, there are probably a hundred channels in which

the stream can flow; but that is only because a good many hearts have

no such abounding springs of love; and thus there is room for the

philanthropist; but if all men were patient, laborious, and

affectionate, the philanthropist's gifts would find comparatively

little scope for their exercise; there might even be a _queue_ of

benevolent people waiting for admission to any house where there was

sickness or bereavement. Moreover, all sufferers do not want to be

cheered; they often prefer to be left alone; and to be the compulsory

recipient of the charity you do not require is an additional burden. A

person who is always hungering and thirsting to exercise a higher

influence upon others is apt to be an unmitigated bore. The thing must

be given if it is required, not poured over people's heads, as

Aristophanes says, with a ladle. To be ready to help is a finer quality

than to insist on helping, because, after all, if life is a discipline,

the aim is that we have to find the way out of our troubles, not that

we should be lugged and hauled through them, "bumped into paths of

peace," as Dickens says. Just as justice requires to be tempered by

mercy, so energy requires to be tempered by inaction. But the

difficulty is for the indolent, the dreamy, the fastidious, the loafer,

the vagabond. Energy is to a large extent a question of climate and

temperament. What of the dwellers in a rich and fertile country, where

a very little work will produce the means of livelihood, and where the

temperature does not require elaborate houses, carefully warmed, or

abundance of conventional clothing? A dweller in Galilee at the time of

the Christian era, a dweller in Athens at the time of Socrates--it was

possible for each of these to live simply and comfortably without any

great expenditure of labour; does morality require that one should work

harder than one need for luxuries that one does not want? Neither our

Lord nor Socrates seems to have thought so. Our Lord himself went about

teaching and doing good; but there is no evidence that he began his

work before he was thirty, and he interposed long spaces of reflection

and solitude. If the Gospel of work were to be paramount, he would have

filled his days with feverish energy; but from the beginning to the end

there is abundance of texts and incidents which show that he thought

excessive industry rather a snare than otherwise. He spoke very sternly

of the bad effect of riches. He told his disciples not to labour for

perishable things, not to indulge anxiety about food and raiment, but

to live like birds and flowers; he rebuked a bustling, hospitable

woman--he praised one who preferred to sit and hear him talk. His whole

attitude was to encourage reflection rather than philanthropy, to

invite people to think and converse about moral principles rather than

to fling themselves into mundane activities. There is far more

justification in the Gospel for a life of kindly and simple leisure

than there is for what may be called a busy and successful career. The

Christian is taught rather to love God and to be interested in his

neighbour than to love respectability and to make a fortune. Indeed, to

make a fortune on Christian lines is a thing which requires a somewhat

sophistical defence.

And thus the old theory of accepting salvation rather than working for

it is based not so much upon the theory that in the presence of

absolute and infinite perfection there is little difference between the

life of the entirely virtuous and the entirely vicious man, as upon the

fact that if one's limitations of circumstance and heredity are the

gift of God, one's salvation must be his gift also. We do not know to

what extent our power of choice and our freedom of action is limited;

it is quite obvious that it is to a certain extent limited by causes

over which we have no control, and it is therefore best to trust God

entirely in the matter, and to acquit him of injustice, if we can,

though it must be a hard matter for the innocent child who is the

victim of his ancestor's propensities to believe that the best has been

done for him that it was possible to do.

And thus the question of effort is not a simple one, though it may be

said roughly that as every one's ideal is at all events somewhat higher

than his practice, it is a plain duty to make one's practice conform a

little closer to one's ideal.

Sometimes one is bewildered by the sight of men who seem to have all

the material for a good and useful and happy life ready to hand, but

who yet attempt the wrong things, or are pushed into attempting them,

by not taking the measure of their powers. Of course, there is a great

nobleness about people who ardently undertake the impossible; but what

can one make of the people, and they are very numerous, who have not

the ardent quality in their souls? Is it possible to become ardent even

if one does not happen to admire the quality? I fear not. But what

ought to be possible for every one is to arrive at a sort of harmony of

life, to have definite things that they want to do, definite regions in

which they desire to advance. The people whom it is hard to fit into

any scheme of benevolent creation are the vague, insignificant,

drifting people, whose only rooted tendency is to do whatever is

suggested to them. One who like myself has been a schoolmaster knows

that the danger of school life is not that the wicked are numerous, but

the weak; the boys who have little imagination, little prudence, and

who cannot summon up an instinctive motive to protect them against

yielding to any temptation that may fall in their way. These are the

people who get so little sympathy and encouragement. Their stronger

companions use them and despise them, treating them as a convenient

audience, as the Greek heroes in the _Iliad_ treated the feeble,

sheep-like soldiers, who ran hither and thither on the field of battle,

well-meaning, ineffective, "strengthless heads." The brisk and virtuous

master bullies them, calls them bolsters and puddings, loafers and

ne'er-do-weels. What wonder if they do not easily discern their place

in the scheme of things! Indeed, if it were not for tender fathers and

mothers who believe in them and encourage them, their lot would be

intolerable. How is such a boy to make an effort? His work wearies and

puzzles him--it does not seem to lead him anywhere; he has no gift for

games; he is neither amusing nor attractive; he gets no credit for

anything, and indeed he deserves none; he ought really to be in a kind

of moral sanatorium, guarded, guided, encouraged by wise and faithful

and compassionate pastors. The worst feature of school life is that if

it fortifies characters with some vigour about them, it implies that

others must inevitably go under and be turned out moral and mental

failures. It is the way of the world, says the philosopher, rough

justice! It may be justice, but it is certainly rough; and I look

forward to the time when we educators of the present generation will be

considered incredibly hard-hearted, unconscientious, immoral, for

acquiescing so contentedly in the ruthless sacrifice of the weak to the

culture of the strong.

Ought we then, it may be asked, to decide that if people are incapable

of sustained effort, no effort is to be expected of them? Are we to

decline upon a genial determinism, and to sweep away all belief in

moral responsibility? No! because even if we are determinists, we have

to take into account the fact that society does for some reason

advance. When we consider the fact that the rightness of humanitarian

principles, of anti-slavery movements, of popular education, of Factory

Acts, of public hospitals is universally admitted; when we compare the

current principles of the nineteenth-century man with the current

principles, say, of the fourteenth-century man, it is plain that there

has been a remarkable rise of the moral temperature, and that our

optimistic view of progress is a rational one.

The ordinary person is to-day quite as strongly convinced of the rights

of other men as he is of their duties; and thus the determinist is

bound to confess that there is an ameliorating and humanising principle

at work, if not in the world at large, at least in the Western races.

It is inconsistent to acquiesce in faulty practice and not to acquiesce

in the growth of ideals, even though one may believe that the advance

is due to some external cause and is not self-developed. If performance

is always more or less straining after the ideal, the determinist is

justified in expecting a higher standard of performance, and his

fatalism may take the direction of removing the obstacles to further

improvement. But in dealing with individuals the moralist does well to

temper his hopes with a wise determinism, and not to be too much cast

down if one to whom he has made clear the disastrous effects of

yielding to temptation cannot at once harmonise his purpose and his

practice. If it were true, as too many preachers take for granted, that

we have all, whatever our difference of physical and mental equipment,

an equal sense of moral responsibility, the result would be to plunge

us into hopeless pessimism. The question is whether the moralist is

justified in pretending, for the sake of the effort that it may

produce, to the victim of some moral weakness, that he really has the

power of conquering his fault. He may say to himself, "Some people have

the power of self-mastery, and it is better to assume that all have,

because it tends to produce a greater effort than if one merely tries

to console a moral weakling for his deficiencies." But this is a

dangerous and casuistical path to tread.

It may be justified perhaps on the medical theory that if you tell a

man he will get well, even if you consider him to be doomed, he is more

likely to get well than if you tell him that you consider him to be

doomed. But it is surely wrong to display no more moral indignation in

the case of a vigorous person who has perversely indulged some

temptation which he might have resisted, than in the case of one who is

hampered by inheritance with a violent predisposition to moral evil.

Even the most ardent moralist ought to be true to what he knows to be

the truth. The method of Christ seems here again to differ from the

method of the Christian teacher. Christ reserved his denunciations for

the complacency of virtuous people. We do not see him rebuking the

sinner; his rebukes are rather heaped upon the righteous. He seems to

have had nothing but compassion for the sins that brought their own

obvious punishment, and to have been indignant only with the sins that

brought material prosperity with them. He treated the outcast as his

friend, the respectable as his enemy. He seems to have held that sin at

least taught people to make allowances, to forgive, to love, and that

this was the nearest way to the Father's heart. Christ was very

critical, and relentlessly exposed those of whom he disapproved, but he

was never critical of weakness.

But, we may say, the moral principles which we have won with such

difficulty will collapse and fail if we do not make a resolute stand

against gross faults and strike at them wherever they show their heads.

It is true that we have not got on very fast, but may it not be that we

have mistaken the right method? Perhaps we should have got on faster still

if we had reserved our indignation for the right things--self-satisfaction,

complacency, injustice, cruelty. What we have done is to fight against

the faults of the weak, against the faults of which no defence is

possible, rather than against the faults of the strong, who can resent

and revenge themselves for our criticism. Christ himself seems not to

have been afraid of the sins of the flesh, but to have shown his

severity rather against the sins of the world. Would it be rash to

follow his example? We can all see the havoc wrought by impurity and

intemperance, and there are plenty of rich respectable people, chaste

and moderate by instinct, who are ready to join in what are called

crusades against them. But as long as sins do not menace health or

prosperity or comfort, we easily and glibly condone them. As long as

Christian teachers pursue wealth and preferment, indulge ambition, seek

the society of the respectable, practise pharisaical virtues, we are

not likely to draw much nearer to the ideals of Christ.