Produced by Al Haines.
LURES OF LIFE
BY
JOSEPH LUCAS
AUTHOR OF "OUR VILLA IN ITALY"
T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD.
ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON
First published . . . . January, 1919.
Second Impression . . . . June, 1919.
*CONTENTS*
CHAPTER
I. THE LURE OF LIFE'S AFTERGLOW
II. THE LURE OF HAPPINESS
III. THE LURE OF SELF-DENIAL
IV. THE LURE OF MAGIC WORDS
V. THE LURE OF AN OLD TUSCAN GARDEN
VI. THE LURE OF THE MONTELUPO PLATE
VII. THE LURE OF PLUCK
VIII. THE LURE OF OLD FURNITURE
IX. THE LURE OF PERSONALITY
X. THE LURE OF NICE PEOPLE
XI. THE LURE OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY
XII. JESUS CHRIST THE LURE OF THE AGES
XIII. THE LURE OF THE LIVING WORD
XIV. THE LURE OF THE EUCHARIST
*LURES OF LIFE*
*I*
*THE LURE OF LIFE'S AFTERGLOW*
A friend put me in remembrance that I had a birthday recently. Birthday
emotion with an old man is an extinct crater. When I was young a coming
birthday set my pulse throbbing to mad music weeks beforehand; it filled
me with delightful anticipations. Romance gathered round the happy
event. Our thoughts tripped capriciously along the primrose paths of the
future. I felt myself preordained to greatness. The hoarded treasure
held in bond for me was surely there awaiting delivery, and Time the
magician's wand would wave its largesse into my outstretched eager
hands, and, clothed in honour, I should ride prosperously all the days
of my life.
To the youngster starting on the grand tour of life, the journey is a
splendid venture. The cup held to the lips overflows with rich, ripe,
sparkling liquor; every draught of it is nectar, exhilarating the
spirits, expanding the experience, and discoursing music on every chord
of the harp of a thousand strings. It is superb doing, riding life on a
flowing tide when the warm south wind blows, and the air is redolent
with aromatic spices, when driftwood floats from distant climes, and
shore-birds sail in the central blue signalling that the Land of Heart's
Desire will soon be reached. Truly youth takes life with a zest of its
own.
Yes, the birthday is a happy day to the young. You rejoice that you are
a year older and of added consequence and stature in the world of men,
and a step nearer realizing the daydreams sweetly dreamed in school,
when the magic of life filled you with wonder and awe. Birthday joy
increases immensely until the period of ecstatic joy crowns all, when
you score twenty-one years and write yourself down a man. You are no
longer a flower in the bud worn in anybody's buttonhole, but a
well-developed plant on your own root growing in the open. When you get
twice twenty-one birthday joy cloys on your palate, and you begin to
resent the intrusion of the natal day as an unwelcome guest that you
have seen too often. He reminds you that you are growing old and growing
older. Your friends may crown the day with roses and toast you at the
evening dinner in your best champagne let loose for the occasion, but
the obvious remains, and your response to their unblushing flattery is
not gushing as of yore. You tire of birthday greetings and birthday
festivities; your vivacity flags; your digestion suffers. The thoughts
that adorn the occasion are chiefly reminiscent, for the horizon of the
future is narrowing down and leaves less space for Fancy in which to fly
her kite.
When I had covered my half-century a curious feeling like an electric
shock chased along every fibre of my being on facing the cold, hard fact
for the first time; I had grown old, and done it surreptitiously. Time
glides smoothly, silently, swiftly, and startled as from a deep sleep,
one marvels at the hot haste of the rolling years. You dread nearing
the vortex of the great unknown to which we all inevitably steer, and
finally sink beneath its swirling surface. The outlook is disturbing.
Can't you put down the brake and gentle the pace? Will no opiate drug
Time into forgetfulness? You try the rejuvenating influences of Mrs.
Allen's Hair Restorer, but nothing happens. The bald spot on the crown
of your head increases in baldness and shining splendour. The longer
you watch it, the larger it grows. Time baffles your artful devices,
smiles at your wild alarms, and drives from you the crimson days of
youth, with their vigour and vivacity, leaving in your possession a
feeling of comfortable lethargy which solidifies into pacific
blissfulness. Insensibly a change has passed over you with the mounting
years. How the change wrought you do not know. Where you crossed the
frontier which in the twinkling of an eye ranked you amongst the elders
you cannot say. Who can tell the moment when summer ends and autumn
commences? Who can cut a clean cleavage between afternoon and evening
hours?
However, you settle down to an old man's pleasures. You dislike being
hustled after dinner. You prefer a quiet rubber at Bridge in a cosy
room, with shaded lights, and a silent cigar with cronies of a choice,
familiar brand as playmates. You prefer it to strenuously dancing in a
stuffy, glaring ball-room till morning hours chase the stale and weary
dancers to their homes. It is too fatiguing an amusement to make
pleasure for you, as there is no new romance to be looked for after
fifty. Anticipation at your ripe age is wasted stimulant. Boys dream
of the future, old men live in the present. Youth, once upon a time,
was an asset held in hand, a rich inheritance to be proud of, but now
the treasury of youth is spent to the last coin and only the empty
coffer remains, a memento of the vanished wealth of early days. You are
a middle-aged man aged fifty, and you settle down to it solidly and
squarely and comfortably. You will never be young and flippant again
this side the harbour-bar.
As we steer cautiously into the sixties and face the grand climacteric,
life grows pensive. Sober reflections automatically cast their
lengthening shadows over us. We have drunk copiously of the wine of
life, and are now coming to the dregs of the bottle. We get moody.
Meridian sunshine has not fructified the promise of youth as we
appointed it. Lean years have eaten up years of plenty. We have
gathered tares with the wheat which brought disappointment into the
storehouse. Varied experiences have chequered life with cross lights
and shadows. The grand ideals of sanguine youth have dissolved like
dreams at daybreak, and instead of the great achievement ours is the
common lot. Rates and taxes are hardy annuals that flourish undisturbed
amidst the ruins. Are we downhearted because the romance of life has
fizzled out like spent fireworks and left us in darkness? We did not
expect to finish up in obscurity. Are we downhearted? No; after the
struggle and stress of conflict we get our second breath; and the calm
of age overtakes us. The halcyon hours set in to cheer us. I now move
airily along the line of least resistance, and this brings tranquillity
of mind in my advancing years. We are no longer broody. Experience
breaks one in gently to the monotony of daily routine, and the collar
neither frets nor rubs the shoulder, for the velvet lining of
contentment softens the friction and we trudge along serenely going
West.
Everything contributes to make an old man's lot happy if the salt of
life has not lost its savour. We have played the game, and now we watch
others take their innings. It is good fun to watch. I tell you it is
music to the eye watching the gay young world go its own way. The
swagger, the _bravoure_, the buoyancy of its manners, stagger the dull
parental mind. There is rhythm in its movements, there is character in
its gaiety. It tops the record of the far-off days of splendour when
we, their portly ancestors, were down in the arena beating up the dust
of conflict, and considered ourselves the cream of modernity and the
finest goods in the market. The youth of to-day has its hand on the
wheel and the joy-car pads merrily, heedless of speed limits, for time
has no limit and life sings a pleasant song to boys of the new regime.
Life's afterglow is the period when the past is viewed through the
golden haze of memory and we live over again the days of our youth, the
splendid days of hope and promise. Pleasant things and pleasant people
are remembered, and disagreeable events that vexed us are forgotten. We
wipe clean from the slate memories that are unwelcome. From the mellowy
distance we admire the picture in its broad outlines; its uninteresting
details drop out of sight. It is the vivid patches of colour upon the
canvas where the eye lingers lovingly and long. It is the happy past
that enchants the memory to-day.
An old man glances over his shoulder adown the long pathway of receding
years hungrily, and muses to himself, "Oh, to be out in the world again
as I knew it fifty years ago, with the same sunny people about me; to
meet them on the old familiar footing. We had capacious times together;
we understood one another and loved one another with kindred hearts and
flowing speech. I talk with people nowadays, but these new friends of
mine are not responsive. There is a glass screen between us as we talk
together; we sit near one another, but we are far apart. I catch a
far-off glint in their eye which holds me at arm's-length. Our lips are
restrained, our thoughts are bottled up. It seems like sitting together
in a room with blinds drawn, talking in the dark. Yes; new friends at
best are but amiable strangers, for we met one another only when the
flower of life had wilted and the leaf was sere and yellow on the tree.
The full, unrestrained days when the sap was rising, the blossoming days
of youth, were lived apart. I do not know these good people intimately,
and I never can, and they can never know me. We each have a buried past
which is sacred ground where the other never treads."
I met recently a grey-haired man who was a schoolboy friend of mine. A
wide sundering gap of years lies between us since our previous meeting,
but at once we grasped hands and knew each other intimately, although
mid-life with each had been filled with a fulness the other knew nothing
of. As boys we chummed together, and now we renewed our ancient
friendship on olden lines. We had studied the same lessons, slept in
the same dormitory, sculled in the same boat, fought in the same
playground scrimmages, and, having met again after long intervening
years, we had endless youthful reminiscences in common to discuss and
life-histories to relate. There was no need to sit on the safety-valve
to throttle down the conversation. Talk came, a flowing stream bubbling
up from the hot springs of the heart. Our meeting had the perfume of
romance clinging to it, which made golden the precious hours in the
spending. Two grey-haired men chattering with their heads together for
the nonce were merry schoolboys. The present was forgotten; the past
was everything to them while the old enthusiasms flared up brightly and
shot a warm rosy afterglow athwart life's pleasant evening hour.
Loafing is a privilege of one's declining years. It is an agreeable
form of laziness which sits well upon old shoulders. It is that mellow
state of stagnant content which pervades the mind when the natural force
abates. I do not extol it as a virtue, I claim it as a privilege. It
helps to fill gaps in the daily round when business no longer engages
your attention and office hours are a dread ordeal done with for ever.
Having dropped out of the marching line and become a spectator of the
passing show, what more natural than that you manifest a livelier
curiosity in other people's activities than in your own sluggish
movements. I love to spend a sunny morning lingering on the old garden
seat, chatting to a friend, or watching the energetic youngsters at play
amongst the roses. I find it enjoyable to take my pitch on the pierhead
with the gay summer crowd ambling along, passing and repassing my post
of observation, and watch the pretty and well-accoutred girls angling
for admiration, and the budding men in spotless flannels flashing
answering glances to catch the lasses' eyes; an endless conversation
going on without voices whispering a word; they look at each other and
laugh, and the incipient mystery of the thing slips into their blood.
I was once reluctant to relinquish youth. Its passions and pleasure made
my life intensely joyous in a clean, healthy way. I resented the horrid
fact that with encroaching years I was no longer able to wake the old
thrill of existence by any of the old methods. The call came to me, but
nature responded not to its alluring voice. The spent fires could not
be rekindled; and in a tragic moment the truth stood uncovered in its
stark nakedness: "I am growing old!" I had to readjust my bearings in
life to meet the new situation. I found it better to walk in step with
the years and melt into middle life with all the gentle conciliations of
an easy mind than to clutch at the hem of the garment of departing youth
and hold on frantically to a corpse; and so it came to pass youth, with
its frank, jovial, devil-may-care lightheartedness, was surrendered
ground, and I put on a splendid face, taking up a new position in the
rear as an old fogy, a little moss-grown, but still alive, healthy,
happy, and hearty.
*II*
*THE LURE OF HAPPINESS*
The joy of living is to grasp life in its fullness just as it comes to
us clean and sweet from the hand of God; to eat the grapes that grow in
our own vineyard; to feed on the honey captured from our own hives; and
to bask in the sunshine blessing our own garden plot. Some people
cannot do this. They were born sour and fail to ripen. They remind me
of the Church of St. Lorenzo at Florence, built but never finished, and
showing a dejected mien to the passer-by. They hold on to life timidly
with cold and clammy hands, and smile with glum visage and call it all
vanity and vexation of spirit. Happiness frets them like a lump of
undigested pickle lying heavy on their chest; they want to throw it off
and be at ease in their misery. They consider it wickedness to enjoy
things--to wallow in sunshine. They say we ought to content ourselves
with bare commodities needful for existence. The primitive man was
happy. He had no shirt to wash, no taxes to pay, no barns to fill with
plenty. We must be primitive to be happy. Deplete the wealthy of their
wealth; sink society to a common ground-level (allow us boots to wear in
this muddy climate, if you please), and then everyone will be healthy,
happy, and poor. Stepping out of his well-appointed motor-car, the
up-to-date man spurns the primitive craze and blazes forth, "Is thy
servant a dog that he should house in a kennel?" Surely civilization
means creature comfort; everyone wants something larger than bare
necessities to embellish life. The Creator rears us on finer lines than
He raises cattle on the marshes. Year by year He lavishes before our
eyes Nature's prodigal store of ornament. Every yard of hedgerow,
"those liberal homes of unmarketable beauty," contradict the crank who
would confine us to the needful.
The dusty utilitarian sees the world only as a crowded granary, a
chattering marketplace in which to buy and sell and get gain. The Divine
Artist enriches the picture by painting in exquisitely the flowering
hawthorn and fragrant violets, and by tuning the throat of the skylark
to rarest melody; and concurrently He attunes the soul of man, which
thrills appreciation, and delights in these manifestations of Sovereign
goodness. He not merely appeases the hunger of the human body, but feeds
the rarer appetites of the human mind with radiant viands; and the more
godlike in stature man grows, the more fully he appreciates God-given
art and beauty flung like flowers across his pathway.
Everybody is happy in his own order. The history of many a man's life is
the story of a soul's wandering in search of happiness. Some people are
happy in their misery. Even when nursing their spleen they do it
comfortably. They dilate on their grief with real zest of morbid
enthusiasm that it flings a blazing cheerfulness over their cold grey
lives. It sets them purring with sweet content when an auditor listens
to their woeful outpourings. This is the cheapest form of happiness,
and reflects an impoverished mind thrown back upon itself.
Hazlitt, the essayist, gently prods these crazy egoists with a sharp pen
and says, "Pure pleasures are in their judgment cloying and insipid; an
ounce of sour is worth a pound of sweet." Farquhar, the lively
dramatist, mocks their folly when portraying the gushing Lady Constance,
who, on finding the miniature of her absent lover lying on the floor,
picks it up and exclaims: "Now I am fitted out for sorrow. With this
I'll sigh, with this converse, gaze on his image till I grow blind with
weeping. It is the only thing could give me joy, because it will
increase my grief."
Happiness is a gift of temperament. The occupation that makes one man
happy the day long would be capital punishment to another man. I have
known people to possess everything and enjoy nothing; others, who
possess little, dwell in paradise. It is a braver thing to extract
honey from the hive of life than to leave it rotting in the comb. Alas!
these weak-kneed, nervous mortals who are afraid of being too happy:
they tremble as they sit at the banquet. They toy with a lean and
hungry fate and dare not clasp a full-bosomed blessing. They prefer
misery as a diet, with a spice of religion thrown in to flavour it.
They fancy self-inflicted misery is a virtue to be cultivated, and a
grace to be counted for righteousness. We shrewdly detect in such
conduct a pose. It lacks the grace of sincerity. Such people, overfed
on misery, fatten on it incontinently. It is the diet of a low,
melancholy temperament.
There is no standard-pattern happiness planned to suit the temperament
of everybody like the map of a city which all travellers follow to find
their bearings. Happiness is a city that each person maps out for
himself; its highways and byways are of his own engineering and grow to
match his own requirements. Happiness is not a sloppy garment like a
ready-made coat that you buy in a store. Happiness must be made to fit.
In fact, every man makes his own happiness.
We all distil pleasure out of life in our peculiar way. Only our ways
differ as the poles asunder. One man cannot understand where the other
man's relish for life comes in. What is nauseous as bitter herbs in one
mouth tastes delicate as the wines of Orvieto on another palate. A
famous American millionaire found greater satisfaction in the simple
pleasure of attending funerals than in all the superb luxuries which his
millions brought him. We do not envy his simple pleasure. It was an
innocent method of enjoyment peculiarly his own.
I knew a man who made an income of over L10,000 a year by hard work, and
his pleasure was immense in doing it. One half of his relaxation in
life was making more income, and the other half his amusement consisted
in lecturing people on the evil of extravagance if they spent "tuppence"
on a bus fare instead of walking three-pennyworth of leather off the
soles of their boots. He never spent "tuppence" himself if he could
save it. He drove life at high pressure, and enjoyed the sensations of
a quick run. People called him a money-making machine devoid of fine
feeling. People made a mistake. His nature was highly strung. He was
keenly sensitive to pleasure--the pleasure of money-making. It was the
poetry, the luxury, the fine art of life all rolled into one, and it
quickened the gay emotions within him that seeing a good play, hearing
an eloquent sermon or driving a spanking four-in-hand to Ascot on a fine
June morning, excites in other people. There are various buttons to
press, but they all send the same thrill of earthly pleasure tingling
through the human frame. Different hands strike the same chords on the
harp of life, and they tremble into song.
Some heroically minded people assert there are only two things in life:
duty and happiness. It is not everybody who wants to do his duty--that
is a special gift of Providence few enjoy. But everyone wants to be
happy, and happiness is the greatest thing of all: other people's
happiness as well as our own. We are not all sagacious to discern the
angel of duty when she comes mixed in a promiscuous assembly of spirits
less honourable than she. They all dress becomingly and smile
bewitchingly that you cannot mark her down; her radiance shines no
brighter than other luminous spirits that accompany her. We should try
the spirits whether they be good or evil ones. However, they move
first, and try us with their beauty, their flattery, and their gilded
promises. According to the gospel of St. Robert Louis Stevenson, there
is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
A third thing some people suggest makes life worth living is experience.
Experience, they maintain, is a more valuable treasure than happiness;
experience is a pearl of great price, and we must sell all we have to
possess it. The world is spacious; range it widely, breathe its bracing
airs, sail its deep seas in search of experience. Pursue it, and if in
the pursuit you are blown about by the fickle winds of fate, the
buffeting may be disagreeable, but it is most exhilarating and healthy
to the earnest seeker after experience. Provided you are blown, and
blown violently, the direction of the gale matters not; the north-easter
and the zephyr both teach. Experience builds up character and increases
knowledge, though during building operations your wisdom may remain a
stationary virtue. If you come out of the conflict with only experience
to your credit at the other end of the struggle be thankful. Life is
very good. Its chief spoils may be anguish and sorrow, yet experience
makes it full and rich.
The logic of this cold philosophy needs consideration before adopting it
as gospel. If a dinted shield and a broken sword are the only spoils you
bring home from the wars and hang up in the family parlour as trophies
of victory, it is not an adequate recompense for the rich and vital
experience gained in the fight. Experience was what Don Quixote in the
slippered comfort of his home hungered after. It was what he found on
his travels, and after passing through much tribulation it was the one
prize he brought home with him at the journey's end. Experience many an
ambitious man has found to be as an empty goblet to his thirsty lips.
When the Creator was busy in the minting-house He did not cast his
creatures all in the same mould, or coin them of the same metal. Some
people are of fine temperament, cram full of emotion; they are all
feeling, and express their feeling vigorously. Other people are of
baser metal. They are stolid, and pass through life neither contented
nor discontented with their lot; they are neither happy nor miserable.
They are well-regulated clocks running slowly down to the last tick, and
then ceasing to tick at all. Monotony is the bane of their existence,
blighting it with double dulness. They feel little and say nothing
about it. One never knows what hidden compensations life provides for
its multitudinous offspring. These torpid people must have a secret
well of satisfaction from which they dip refreshing draughts in thirsty
moments.
The child of emotion is more vivacious; he has colour, romance,
movement. He is of a rarer vintage; there is sparkle in the wine of
life. Occasionally the wine turns sour and drops flavour. Disagreeable
people do exist for some veiled purpose of Providence, as the species
never becomes extinct in the land. In infancy they were rocked in the
cradle of discontent, and they have seldom slept out of it since. They
have grown up in a nursery of their own. They are highly strung, and
have a genius for living in the moment--irritably. Their wit is
brilliant, it scintillates like running water in the sunshine, but it
cuts like a razor. Everybody within reach of their tongue, even innocent
people, feel the whip of their capricious temper. I suppose some grim
pleasure feeds their fiery nature when they subdue friend and enemy
under them. It is an unenviable pleasure which they enjoy; nobody
shares with them, and when their ill-humour dies down it must leave a
nasty taste in their mouth.
If you want to be happy, do not expect too much from life. Do not ask
more from friendship than you give, for eventually the balance is sure
to adjust itself. Do not ask more than your share of good things; if
you do exceed the limit, disappointment will dog your footsteps all the
day. You cannot expect to be always happy. Trouble and sorrow come to
all of us, with a difference. Some people extract comfort out of
trouble, and it assuages their grief; others add worry to their woe, and
it aggravates their vexation of spirit.
Motor-cars carry a little dynamo on board and generate their own
electric current as they travel, and after dark, with the great
headlights glowing, they travel pleasantly and safe. A contented mind
is a dynamo we can carry with us, and it generates its own happiness as
we travel. It illumines the journey of life and makes it pleasant to
ourselves and agreeable to friends travelling in our company.
Do not grizzle over chances missed in life and "might have beens" which
sprinkle your past like gravestones dotting a churchyard, inscribed
"sacred to the memory of cherished griefs still hugged and spasmodically
wept over." Convert the mossy tombstones into wayside shrines which
loving hands garland with fresh flowers, while grateful hearts fondly
linger there, recalling pleasant things and sweet companionship which
gladdened your pilgrim way. Do not erect mural tablets to dead
ambitions in the little sanctuary of your memory; build altars there
instead whereon you can offer acceptable oblations of praise for evils
escaped and for the crown of loving-kindness with which the Everlasting
Arms encircle you.
If we only had the gift of humour on us it would make "life more amusing
than we thought." Our eyes would open to a new world wherein kinder
people dwell and where brighter sunshine warms the heart's red blood and
chases down the gloom we anticipate to-morrow that may never come.
*III*
*THE LURE OF SELF-DENIAL*
Self-denial is not the highest form of virtue, nor is it a permanent
condition of life for man to live in; yet it is a lure that draws men to
martyrdoms as the flame collects moths to the burning. Man was not
predestinated to a life of self-abnegation. Self-denial is a compromise
between misery and happiness. Human nature does not thrive on
compromise; it does not develop in austerities. Self-denial has its
value in the scheme of moral education. Training is good for man if he
does not carry it too far. You can overtrain. The scholar trains; he
discreetly withdraws from gay life and inflicts on himself long hours of
lonely study that he may rank in the list of University honours. The
jockey trains, and punishes himself in so doing that he may ride to win.
It is the same the world over: pain is joy in the making. Where
self-denial is the driving power in religious life it leads, not to
happiness, but to asceticism: to the lonely cell of the misanthropic
monk, the pedestal of St. Simon Stylates, or the self-torture of the
Indian fakir. Deluded people these, who build up life on self-denial as
the pinnacle virtue to which man can soar while on earth. None of these
people set self-denial in its proper place in the human economy--viz., a
means to an end. It is the end-all in their vision of life, and so
their life is dismal in the living and disappointing in its purpose.
Self-denial is necessary and serves a healthy purpose. It is necessary
to man's spiritual welfare as medicine or the surgeon's knife may be
necessary to his physical health.
Man is of twofold nature: the animal and the spiritual, the good and the
bad, the superior and the inferior--label it as you please. Self-denial
is putting the inferior quality under the superior one; self-denial is
following the higher inspiration at the expense of the lower instincts.
"Self-denial": the very word implies, repressing desires, renouncing
pleasures, suffering pain. It means living from choice on the shady,
dank side of the street rather than basking in the open sunny piazza
when only a few steps place you there, where the children play and the
old men foregather deep in the hallowed sunshine. Self-denial is not
the crowning virtue--it is just the market price we pay that we may
garner a harvest of happiness in the recompensing days of autumn.
The Divine purpose in man is growth, not repression of growth; it is to
expand, to unfold, to develop character. To pass from bud to flower in
moral and spiritual excellence, not to stunt manhood till its fairest
features are arrested in growth, and moral atrophy sets up a canker in
the bud, and ugliness usurps the seat of beauty in a man's character.
Ugliness everywhere may be left to the devil as his monopoly.
Self-denial is the grubby chrysalis; happiness is the golden butterfly
on the wing.
Not self-denial, but enjoyment, is the highest good and the truest test
of character. Enjoyment; rejoicing in that which ought to delight us in
this our earthly life--this is a finer attainment than self-denial.
Enjoyment means a full life, living upon our whole nature, and
well-balanced withal in the living. It seems an attractive and sinless
programme to subscribe to, yet it is difficult to draw a boundary-line
between enjoyment and excess. This is where the crux comes in. This is
verily the fire that tries every man's work of what sort it is. It is
cruel punishment to crush your passions and pleasures out of
existence--that is self-denial. It is splendid discipline to give them
play and at the same time hold them in control--that is enjoyment.
Success in this great endeavour brings the victor into marching-line
with the angels, and yields a finer exaltation and a larger recompense
than trampling on the lilies.
It is more difficult to hold steadily a full cup than to carry an empty
flagon. It is a doleful religion that uproots every flower in the
garden as a noxious weed until only the naked brown earth remains to
gaze upon in the blessed sunshine. It is a scurvy trick of virtue to
spill the heady liquor on the ground and then with a flourish place the
empty chalice an offering on the altar. Abstinence is the morality of
the weak, temperance is the morality of the strong.
A deep enjoying nature is one of God's best gifts to man. The happy man
is generally the best of his breed. The good are usually happy, and the
happy are usually good. There are no short cuts to being happy, you
must be really good to win through. If our daily occupation is
congenial to our taste and disposition, our mind dwells at ease and our
nature mellows in the sunshine of agreeable surroundings. Our sense of
contentment radiates good humour and makes us kindly and benevolent to
others. We are not chafed and fretted by duties irksome to us, because
uncongenial. We are fulfilling destiny, and fulfilling it with
completeness of purpose. Those around us feel the warm, penetrating
sunshine of our hearts, and they grow warm under the mystic touch of the
sun. It is for this reason that happiness becomes a holy quest with us,
for out of it spring the virtues which robe life in beauty and gladness.
One of the most precious of human faculties is the power to enjoy.
Self-denial is either a tyranny or a virtue, and should be praised with
circumspection. Many feverishly religious people debase its moral
currency. They hinder their own happiness and thwart the happiness of
others as far as in them lies, and fancy in so doing they keep the whole
ten commandments of God.
Self-denial for the sake of self-denial is a pagan rite: cold, pitiless,
sterile. Renunciation and suffering prove nothing. Men have renounced
and suffered for the greed of gold, for the lust of ambition, for the
honour of a blood-stained idol, and lost moral stamina in so doing. The
experience of ages brands deep the flaming truth upon us that sacrifice
must be valued according to the object for which the sacrifice is made.
Sacrifice for its own sake weaves no crown of glory for the martyr's
brow. It is a form of amiable suicide. If you starve yourself for the
sake of showing mastery over self, what thank have ye? The heathen do
even the same--and do it better. It is an act of self-torture, and
ministers to your pride of purpose. But to give up a meal when hungry
that one you love may have it puts a better complexion on the deed. To
bear pain for the grim joy of bearing it brings no reward. Do not even
the Stoics the same? But to bear pain rather than surrender truth or to
cover a suffering friend is a loving and heroic act, meriting a V.C.
when spiritual honours are distributed.
The old painters pictured in glowing witchery of colour the ordeal by
suffering as the master-key that opened the gates of paradise to
macerated mortals. The old writers drove home the same insidious error
with all the pious fervour of their fluent pen, and thus men became
fascinated with the doctrine of self-immolation as the highest good. In
mediaeval times the _via dolorosa_ was the well-trodden public way
travelled by sainted pilgrims seeking a better country.
Meritorious misery won through, for it was aureoled with the Church's
benediction and rendered attractive by her promise of eternal rewards.
Surely this daily human life of ours was not ordained to be a pageant of
austerity reaching from the cradle to the grave. The Creator, having
given this beautiful world as a temporary home for His children to dwell
in, expects agreeable people to occupy its furnished splendours for a
space of three score years and ten, more or less. If not, then the
Creator's gift is wasted bounty flung to dull and unappreciative
mortals.
Brighter and healthier views of life emerge out of the crude
misconceptions which enveloped the past in religious gloom, although
there yet remain amongst us people who revel in the luxury of
self-denial as in a feast of fat things, while the genial side of their
nature remains dormant, starved, stunted. I have seen such-like in the
flesh, spoken with them and touched their cold hands. They are
unattractive people to know, and not companionable to travel with. They
are faultless, methodical, patient, but they have no endearing
friendships, no entwining intimacies by which you can fasten on them and
love them. They are isolated and self-contained, lacking the charm of
some little human weakness which makes us all akin. They may have a
warm heart, but chilled blood circulates round it. Their eyes glitter
like glaciers at the call of duty. They hurry from committee meeting to
committee meeting, and forget to lunch between engagements. They shine
in the performance of self-imposed errands of mercy, and live by rule
relentlessly at any cost to pocket, health, or reputation. They
minister to the sick and poor assiduously, and mother a class of poor
factory girls in the evening, but their home is shivery to enter as a
cold storage. A cold storage is a curious place to visit, but an
impossible place to dwell in, except for frozen goods.
It is possible to make the best of both worlds without an uncomfortable
sense of sin nagging you like toothache; it is possible to work for
others and yet tend your own vineyard with whole-hearted joy garnered
from the wonder and beauty and sunshine of this our earthly home. The
man is not a miscreant who laughs heartily and often: the person is not
a saint who starves his body to save his soul.
The harassing question is, How can we make the best of life as it comes
to us a day at a time, and yet sail on an even keel? It is the problem
that prophets, savants, and theologians have hammered at through the
ages, but have not yet forged in fine gold the key that unlocks the
mystery; thus there is an opening for us to cut in before the final word
is uttered and the discussion battens down under a unanimous show of
hands, which crowning mercy will be the last far-off result of time.
The question agitating the moment is, What shall we do with the fair
flower of our earthly life? Shall we enjoy it as we would the beauty
and fragrance of a rose, thanking the good God for a gift so sweet and
precious, or shall we with peevish fingers pick the rose to pieces petal
by petal and crush it under foot, fearing its beauty may seduce our
virtue and its perfume poison our soul?
Let us preserve the rose inviolate. Its role is to be joy-giver on the
earth. I would sooner sit with Jesus Christ at the marriage feast in
Cana of Galilee and drink with Him wine of the best vintage that ever
flowed on festive board than sup with John Baptist in the wilderness on
his menu of locusts and wild honey. The exquisite scene my imagination
quaintly pictures is Jesus Christ and John the Baptist sitting together
at the banquet, and each enjoying the meal with equal zest.
The Renaissance which fascinated half Europe in the fifteenth century,
like a carillon of joy-bells ringing through the land, stirring the dull
pulses of the people and reviving generous and graceful ideals of life,
was just open rebellion against the crabbed austerities of the Church,
practised in the name of religion falsely so called. The people threw
off the galling yoke of forced asceticism and found liberty of spirit
and peace of mind in literature and art, and in the spontaneous and
natural flow of healthy human life. Unfortunately, there was a fly in
the amber; the people borrowed most of their new pleasures from pagan
Greece, and the old Greek gods came tripping back from fairyland hand in
glove with Greek culture, which was embarrassing.
The advent of the light-hearted Cavaliers in England, flinging colour
and warmth and gaiety over the land, was a sharp recoil from the drab
severity of Puritan rule. The Puritans were men of strong personality:
half soldiers and half preachers. They were honest without charm;
strong-minded without pose; mighty in conscience, but mean in heart
qualities. They were clean livers, but as they aged their visage grew
hard and sour as unripe fruit, and their geniality of temper withered
like a winter apple. They forgot to smile; the solemnities of life
crushed them. They were grave and sagacious citizens lacking vivacity
and humour, with plenty of flavour, but no sweetness. They dreamed of
invisible kingdoms and fought for eternal verities. They command our
admiration, but do not win our love. Their God was of the best theology
mechanically constructed at Geneva by John Calvin, built up in parts
composed of Righteousness, Justice, Holiness. Beauty was barred as a
Divine attribute. The dismal meeting-house where they worshipped was the
whitewashed prison in which the captured Deity dwelt. The burning light
of this dread Presence enraptured the elect souls and intimidated the
uncovenanted and graceless sinners, while the vast multitude of the
nation held aloof, dreading contact with a religion so fierce and yet so
gloomy, and they waited patiently through the shivering night of
Roundhead rule, like watchmen on the city walls, for the coming of the
king to set English homes once again humming with joy.
These two strong currents of life--Self-denial and Enjoyment--are
flowing side by side in our midst to-day, dividing men in thought and
purpose, driving men into open collision, only to relax their
strangle-hold on one another to get firmer grip and fight again another
day. These two different ideals of life represent two antagonistic
sides of a man's nature that clash with each other, and the man has a
stand-up fight with himself, which is an experience fiery temperaments
often plunge into. Each side carries a half-truth and half an error.
Blend the two half-truths into an intimate and harmonious whole and sink
the errors into the bottomless pit from whence they came, and you
discover human nature touching its highest and ripest form, approaching
the Christlike in character, which combines the two elements in true and
everlasting union.
Jesus of Nazareth, whose knightly character embodied all that the sweet
romancists of the Middle Ages dreamed of and pictured in the faultless
knight-errant of their day which won their hearts' devotion and consent
(_preux chevalier sans peur et sans reproche_), and all that our own age
typifies and holds dear in modern character of good repute when in a
single phrase it proclaims the man a perfect gentleman--Jesus Christ
means all that and more to us. Christ is not a withered flower on a
broken stem torn from the Tree of Life; He is not a damaged idol of an
effete civilization which modern progress sweeps aside in its forward
march; He is not the Lord of an ancient faith whom the fires of
scientific criticism have burnt up and left only His ashes in a cinerary
urn reposing on the altar of our heart. He is the world's one
fulfilment of the faultless and the ideal in human nature, blending all
that is beautiful and enjoyable with all that is holy and vigorous.
*IV*
*THE LURE OF MAGIC WORDS*
Beautiful language is the flower of poetry. The magic of diction, of
enchanted words transformed into radiant, marvellous sentient things
pulsing with life and passion, capture our attention, and deep within us
something vibrates in answer to their mastering call.
A writer with perfect felicity of expression voices thoughts and
emotions of our own heart that we cannot give utterance to, yet of which
we are dimly conscious. These ghostly creatures of our mind, half a
memory and half a thing, peep and mutter within us; we try to hold them,
but they are illusive as shadows on the wall. From the well-written
words there leaps out something that has life and form and comeliness in
it, and instantly we recognize an intimate returning from a far country
laden with spoil. Words liberate the imprisoned thought that fretted
within us and set it free: gloriously free for you and me and all the
world to make familiar with.
There are words--spectacular words that print indelibly pleasant
pictures on the mind, reveal in a sabre-flash thoughts that burn and
things that were hidden. There are words--vivid, striking, portentous
words that unfold noble vistas of truth in which happy, emancipated
people walk freely in sunlight and song. There are melodious, aromatic
words that ring tunefully through corridors of the mind like a carillon
of merry bells charming the heart with far-reaching joy. There are
strong, fiery, tempestuous words that crash and rattle and reverberate
like rolling thunder through your being, and kindle the spirit of man
into blazing passion and heroic fervour. There are dull, prosy,
somnolent words that baffle like a London fog, envelop the writer's
meaning in dense obscurity, and lure the reader's mentality into
quagmires of perplexity and doubt.
There are ambrosial, honeyed, ornate words that regale us with fair
visions of life, and steep the mind in dreams of romance and intoxicate
with amorous delight. There are treacherous, lying words that distil
murder in the air as they wing their evil flight. They strike deadly as
a keen stiletto, or spit poison like a venomous adder in the grass.
There are discordant words that harrow up the feelings, and there are
smooth, velvety, caressing words whose sweet sorcery holds us in their
thrall, and that flow on and on harmoniously like the rippling of many
waters that never fall out of tune.
Words cannot be measured with the measuring-reed of a man; they are
spiritual forces; "they are angels of blessing or cursing. Unuttered we
control them, uttered they control us." A man may have much wisdom
packed into his capacious mind, but to unfold it attractively so that it
glitters in the public eye and arrests attention is where the master art
of handling words comes in.
One secret of successful writing is to express your thoughts in as few
words as possible. Be frugal in your expenditure of words as a miser
over the outlay of his hoarded gold. Write clearly, tersely, compactly,
for words, like coins of the realm, are most esteemed when they contain
large value in little space. The more briefly a thing is said, the more
brilliantly it is put. The rarest of all qualities in a writer
is--measure, saying exactly as much as you mean to say and not a word
more or less. If a picture is complete, everything added is something
taken away.
The "command of language" is often a snare of the devil into which men
fall and do themselves grievous hurt. A redundancy of flowery words and
empty fluency of speech confuse the thought and confound the meaning;
skip half the telling and you know more of the tale. Oh the dreariness
of some solid reading I have done in my time!--very learned and logical
dissertations, but dulness crowned it all; even the dry bones of
scientific matter clogged with technicalities can be made to live by a
touch of style. Cartloads of words rumbling along the rutty road of
argument slowly to their destination are not half so forceful as an apt
image which flies straight to the point on wings of inspiration, and
gets there first.
No subject is uninteresting if discoursed with an engaging pen, for
words throw colour-magic on things that are common-place and give charm
to them. I have watched Italian sunlight playing on the crumbling
plaster walls of a peasant's cottage on the Tuscan hills, drenching them
in opal and rose-carmine splendours, changing them into the image of a
fairy palace. Words cast sunlight on commonplace, familiar things,
flushing them with a radiance all their own, and so awaking our mind to
see new beauties, or old beauties made manifest in a new light which had
been staled by the lethargy of custom. Miss Mitford's village was an
ordinary Berkshire village mute in the annals of English history, but it
was surprised into fame by the romantic pen of its lady historian. A
splendid accident of literary achievement adorned it with immortality,
for it unfolds vividly before our wondering eyes the beauty of petty
things and plain people in village life. The world owes to her genial
pen a debt of gratitude; for it has won our sympathies, and in reading
her book we can read our own village with interest instead of boredom,
and see for ourselves the beauty and pathos and comedy of common people
and homely things around us.
Art is the gift of God to man. It is impossible to buy or barter for
the possession of it. You may cultivate, improve, perfect the
indwelling talent, but the Divine seed is sown mysteriously in the life
of the child when brought to birth. In whom the secret power lies
dormant none know until the appointed hour reveals its budding graces.
Inscrutable is the Divine favour; none can tell whence it cometh or
whither it goeth. It is not inherited like gold or lands; it is not an
entailed honour which accompanies the family title. Genius seldom, like
an heirloom, passes from sire to son in direct succession.
A man may possess the advantages that education, training, culture give,
yet all these excellent acquirements combined cannot manufacture an
artist. It needs the live coal taken from off the altar to kindle the
sacred flame which illumines the artist's soul.
The painter's art is subject to this very mysterious law. Philip
Gilbert Hamerton describes the working of the artistic spirit in man.
He says: "Painting is a pursuit in which thought, scholarship,
information, go for little; whereas a strange, unaccountable talent
working in obscure ways achieves the only results worth having. Here is
a field in which neither birth nor condition is of any use, and wealth
itself of exceeding little; here faculty alone avails, and a kind of
faculty so subtle and peculiar, so difficult to estimate before years
have been spent in developing it, or wasted in the vain attempt to
develop where it does not exist."