I have been spending some days in town, on business; I have been
sitting on two committees, I have given a lecture, I have attended a
public dinner; and now I have come back gratefully to my hermitage. I
got home in the evening; it is winter, but unusually warm; and the
birds were fluting in the bushes, as I walked round the garden in the
twilight, as though they had an inkling of the Spring; to hear them
gave me a sort of delicious pain, I hardly know why. They seemed to
speak to me of old happy hours that have long folded their wings, of
bright pleasant days, lightly regarded, easily spent, shut into the
volumes of the past. "I see," as the Psalmist said, "that all things
come to an end." There is something artificial about the soft sadness
that one feels, and yet it is perfectly natural and instinctive; it is
not as if I were melancholy or unhappy; my life is full of active
enjoyment, and I am in that mood of delightful tranquillity which comes
of having finished a tiresome series of engagements which I had
anticipated without pleasure. It is not the sense only of vanished
days; nor is it the sense of not having realised their joyfulness at
the time; it is a deeper regret than that; it is the shadow of the
uncertainty as to what will ultimately become of our individuality. If
one was assured of immortality, of permanence, of growth, of progress,
these regrets would fall off from one as gently as withered leaves
float from a tree; or rather, one would never think of them; but now
one has the sense of a certain number of beautiful days dealt out to
one by God, and the knowledge that they are spent one by one. Another
strange thing about the retrospective sadness of the vanished past is
that it is not the memorable days of life, as a rule, whose passing one
regrets. One would not, I think, wish to have one's days of triumph, of
success, or even the days when one was conscious of an extreme personal
happiness, back again. Partly it is that one seems to have appreciated
their quality and crushed out their sweetness--partly, too, there
mingles with days of extreme and conscious bliss a certain fever of the
spirit, a certain strain of excitement, that is not wholly pleasurable.
No, the days that one rather desires to have again are the days of
tranquil and easy contentment, when the old home-circle was complete,
and when one hardly guessed that one was happy at all, and did not
perceive--how could one?--as life rose serenely and strongly to its
zenith, what the pains and shadows of the declining life might be. And
yet more strange is it that the memory, by some subtle alchemy, has the
power of involving in a delicate golden mist days of childhood and
boyhood which one knows as a matter of fact not to have been happy. For
instance, my own memory continues to clothe my early schooldays with a
kind of sunlit happiness, though I was not only not consciously happy,
but distinctly and consciously unhappy. But memory refuses to retain
the elements of unhappiness, the constant apprehension, that hung over
one like a cloud, of punishment, and even ill-usage. I was not unduly
punished at school, and I was certainly never ill-used. But one saw
others suffer, and my own sensitive and timid nature perpetually
foreboded disaster. Day after day as a little boy I longed for home
surroundings and home affections as eagerly as the hart desires the
water-brooks. But memory pushes all that aside, and obstinately insists
on regarding the whole period in an idyllic and buoyant light.
I walk round the borders, which are all full of the little glossy
spikes of snowdrops pushing up, struggling through the crusted earth.
The sad hero of _Maud_ walked "in a ghastly glimmer," and found "the
shining daffodil dead." I walk in the soft twilight, that is infinitely
tender, soothing, and sweet, and find the daffodil taking on his new
life; and there rises in my heart an uplifted yearning, not so much for
the good days that are dead, but that I may somehow come to possess the
peace that underlies the memory of them all--not handle it for a moment
and lay it down, but possess it or be possessed by it for ever.
Yet these busy days through which I have been passing are good for me,
I believe. I have seen and talked to a number of people; and so far
from finding that my solitary life makes me unfit for society, I think
that it gives me a good-humoured contentment in the interchange of talk
and argument, which I lacked in old days when I was fighting for my
position. The things seem to matter so little to me now. I do not care
in the least what impression I make, so long as people are kind and
friendly. Life is no longer a race, where I wish to get ahead of
others; it is a pilgrimage in which we are all alike bound. But it is
good for me to be in the middle of it all, not only because of the
contrast which it presents to the life I have chosen, but because it is
like the strong scour of a current sweeping through the mind and
leaving it clean and sweet. The danger of the quiet life is that one
gets too comfortable, too indolent. It does me good to have to mix with
people, to smile and bow, to try and say the right thing, to argue a
point courteously, to weigh an opponent's arguments, to make efforts,
to go where I do not desire to go; and I have no longer an axe of my
own to grind; I only desire that the right conclusion should be
reached.
But the things which people consider amusing and entertaining bewilder
me more and more. I went to an evening party on one of the evenings I
spent in town. There was a suite of fine rooms, hung with beautiful
pictures and full of works of art. A courteous host and hostess
received us, said a few amiable words to each, and passed us on into
the rooms: we circulated, stood, sate, looked, talked. I suppose it is
a question of temperament, but I felt that every single element of
social, intellectual, and aesthetic pleasure was absent from the scene.
One had no time to look at the beautiful things that leaned and
beckoned from the walls. There was no chance of quiet, reasonable talk;
one pumped up a few inanities to person after person. I suppose that
most of the guests would not have come if they did not at all events
think it amused them; but what was the charm? I suppose that to most of
the guests it was the stir, the light, the moving figures--for there
were many beautiful and stately women and distinguished men
present--the sense of company, warmth, success, about it all. To me it
was merely distracting--a score of sources of pleasure, and all of them
preventing the enjoyment of each. I think I am probably more and not
less sensitive to all these fine and rare things than perhaps most
people; and I suppose it is this very sensitiveness that makes me
averse to them all _in mass_. It is to me like the jangling of all the
strings of some musical instrument. I felt that I could have lingered
alone in these fine rooms, wandering from picture to picture with a
lively pleasure. There were many people present with whom I should have
deeply enjoyed a _tête-à-tête_. But the whole effect was like
over-eating oneself, like having to taste a hundred exquisite dishes in
a single meal. I do not protest against such gatherings on principle;
if they give the guests a sense of pleasure and well-being, I have not
a word to say against it all. But I believe in my heart that there are
many people who do not really enjoy it, or enjoy it only in a purely
conventional way; and what I should like to do is to assist the people
whose enjoyment of it is conventional, to find out simpler and more
real sources of happiness; because to make these great houses possible
there is a vast amount of patient and unpraised human labour wasted. I
do not think labour is wasted in producing beautiful things, so long as
they can have an effect; but a superabundance of beauty has no
effect--no effect, at least, that could not be produced by things less
costly of effort and skill. The very refreshments, which hardly any one
touched, stand for an amount of wasted labour which might have given
pleasure to the poor toilers who produced them. Think of the ransacking
of different climates, of the ships speeding over the sea, the toil of
gatherers, porters, cooks, servers, that went to fit out that sparkling
buffet. I suppose that it is easy for me, who do not value the result,
to be mildly socialistic about these things; the pathos is not in the
work, but in the waste of the work, not in the delicate things
collected for our use and however fitfully enjoyed, but in the things
made and collected by unknown toilers, and then either not used at all
or not consciously enjoyed.
And so it is with a heightened relish for the serener simplicities of
life, that I return to my quiet rooms, my old trees, my carelessly
ordered garden, as a sailor floats into the calm waters of the
well-known haven out of the plunge and surf of the sea. There is no
strain here to torment me, no waste to afflict me. I do not have to
spend reluctant hours in enjoyments which I do not enjoy; I am not
overshadowed by the sense of engagements which I am bound to keep.
Moreover, I can return to the beloved work which is unwillingly
suspended in the bustle of town. I do not know why it is that I have so
deep a sense of the value of time, when what I do matters so little to
any one. But at least I have here the sense of doing work that may
conceivably minister something to the service of others, while in town
I have the sense of spending hours in occupations that cannot in any
way benefit others, while they are certainly no satisfaction to myself,
"In hoc portu quiescit
Si quis aquas timet inquietas,"
says the wistful poet; and the tossing on the waves of the world thus
gives me the tonic sense of contrast to my peaceful life which it would
otherwise lack. It is the sail and vinegar of the banquet, lending a
brisk and wholesome savour to what might otherwise tend to become vapid
and dull.