Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path

meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and

straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and

even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you

have a wife to support. Suppose, after you are married, one of those

little slips were to befall you. What happened last November might

surely happen February next. They may have annoyed you at the time,

because they were not what you had meant; but how will they annoy you in

the future, and how will they shake the fabric of your wife's confidence

and peace! A thousand things unpleasing went on in the _chiaroscuro_ of

a life that you shrank from too particularly realising; you did not

care, in those days, to make a fetish of your conscience; you would

recognise your failures with a nod, and so, good day. But the time for

these reserves is over. You have wilfully introduced a witness into your

life, the scene of these defeats, and can no longer close the mind's eye

upon uncomely passages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon

your actions. And your witness is not only the judge, but the victim of

your sins; not only can she condemn you to the sharpest penalties, but

she must herself share feelingly in their endurance. And observe, once

more, with what temerity you have chosen precisely _her_ to be your spy,

whose esteem you value highest, and whom you have already taught to

think you better than you are. You may think you had a conscience and

believed in God; but what is a conscience to a wife? Wise men of yore

erected statues of their deities, and consciously performed their part

in life before those marble eyes. A god watched them at the board, and

stood by their bedside in the morning when they woke; and all about

their ancient cities, where they bought and sold or where they piped and

wrestled, there would stand some symbol of the things that are outside

of man. These were lessons, delivered in the quiet dialect of art, which

told their story faithfully, but gently. It is the same lesson, if you

will--but how harrowingly taught!--when the woman you respect shall weep

from your unkindness or blush with shame at your misconduct. Poor girls

in Italy turn their painted Madonnas to the wall: you cannot set aside

your wife. To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are

married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be

good.

And goodness in marriage is a more intricate problem than mere single

virtue; for in marriage there are two ideals to be realised. A girl, it

is true, has always lived in a glass house among reproving relatives,

whose word was law; she has been bred up to sacrifice her judgments and

take the key submissively from dear papa; and it is wonderful how

swiftly she can change her tune into the husband's. Her morality has

been, too often, an affair of precept and conformity. But in the case of

a bachelor who has enjoyed some measure both of privacy and freedom, his

moral judgments have been passed in some accordance with his nature. His

sins were always sins in his own sight; he could then only sin when he

did some act against his clear conviction; the light that he walked by

was obscure, but it was single. Now, when two people of any grit and

spirit put their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this comparative

certainty a huge welter of competing jurisdictions. It no longer matters

so much how life appears to one; one must consult another: one, who may

be strong, must not offend the other, who is weak. The only weak brother

I am willing to consider is (to make a bull for once) my wife. For her,

and for her only, I must waive my righteous judgments, and go crookedly

about my life. How, then, in such an atmosphere of compromise, to keep

honour bright and abstain from base capitulations? How are you to put

aside love's pleadings? How are you, the apostle of laxity, to turn

suddenly about into the rabbi of precision, and, after these years of

ragged practice, pose for a hero to the lackey who has found you out? In

this temptation to mutual indulgence lies the particular peril to

morality in married life. Daily they drop a little lower from the first

ideal, and for a while continue to accept these changelings with a gross

complacency. At last Love awakes and looks about him; find his hero sunk

into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; finds his heroine

divested of her angel brightness; and, in the flash of that first

disenchantment, flees for ever.

Again, the husband, in these unions, is usually a man, and the wife

commonly enough a woman; and when this is the case, although it makes

the firmer marriage, a thick additional veil of misconception hangs

above the doubtful business. Women, I believe, are somewhat rarer than

men; but then, if I were a woman, myself, I daresay I should hold the

reverse; and at least we all enter more or less wholly into one or other

of these camps. A man who delights women by his feminine perceptions

will often scatter his admirers by a chance explosion of the under side

of man; and the most masculine and direct of women will some day, to

your dire surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of

personation. Alas! for the man knowing her to be at heart more candid

than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through these mazes in the

quest for truth. The proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally

surprising to the other. Between the Latin and the Teuton races there

are similar divergencies, not to be bridged by the most liberal

sympathy. And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of this life,

which pass current among us as the wisdom of the elders, this difficulty

has been turned with the aid of pious lies. Thus, when a young lady has

angelic features, eats nothing to speak of, plays all day long on the

piano, and sings ravishingly in church, it requires a rough infidelity

falsely called cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after

all. Yet so it is: she may be a talebearer, a liar, and a thief; she may

have a taste for brandy, and no heart. My compliments to George Eliot

for her Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of satire she has transmuted to

the ends of art, by the companion figure of Lydgate; and the satire was

much wanted for the education of young men. That doctrine of the

excellence of women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false.

It is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry that you take

into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frailties; whose weak

human heart beats no more tunefully than yours.

But it is the object of a liberal education not only to obscure the

knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences

between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but

principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is

astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the

girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very

small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for

judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more largely

displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. They

are taught to follow different virtues, to hate different vices, to

place their ideal, even for each other, in different achievements. What

should be the result of such a course? When a horse has run away, and

the two flustered people in the gig have each possessed themselves of a

rein, we know the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So, when

I see a raw youth and a green girl fluted and fiddled in a dancing

measure into that most serious contract, and setting out upon life's

journey with ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that

some make shipwreck, but that any come to port. What the boy does almost

proudly, as a manly peccadillo, the girl will shudder at as a debasing

vice; what is to her the mere common sense of tactics, he will spit out

of his mouth as shameful. Through such a sea of contrarieties must this

green couple steer their way; and contrive to love each other; and to

respect, forsooth; and be ready, when the time arrives, to educate the

little men and women who shall succeed to their places and perplexities.

And yet, when all has been said, the man who should hold back from

marriage is in the same case with him who runs away from battle. To

avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to

push forward pluckily and make a fall. It is lawful to pray God that we

be not led into temptation; but not lawful to skulk from those that come

to us. The noblest passage in one of the noblest books of this century,

is where the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in the partial fall and

but imperfect triumph, of the younger hero.[3] Without some such manly

note, it were perhaps better to have no conscience at all. But there is

a vast difference between teaching flight, and showing points of peril

that a man may march the more warily. And the true conclusion of this

paper is to turn our back on apprehensions, and embrace that shining and

courageous virtue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant

fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave,

experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith

is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance

and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success;

but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be

a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in

Christian days, and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a man is

indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of elegance and

virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his infirmities, he is filled

with confidence because a year has come and gone, and he has still

preserved some rags of honour. In the first, he expects an angel for a

wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself--erring,

thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling

radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective qualities. You

may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have

learned the mingled lesson of the world; that dolls are stuffed with

sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that hope and love address

themselves to a perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, become

the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of

infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a

something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass

of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find

one, but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a

model, and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you will constantly

support your own unworthiness, and easily forgive the failings of your

friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain the sense of

blemishes; for the faults of married people continually spur up each of

them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a higher

ground. And ever, between the failures, there will come glimpses of kind

virtues to encourage and console.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] Browning's "The Ring and the Book."

III

ON FALLING IN LOVE

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"

There is only one event in life which really astonishes a man and

startles him out of his prepared opinions. Everything else befalls him

very much as he expected. Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable

variety indeed, but with little that is either startling or intense;

they form together no more than a sort of background, or running

accompaniment to the man's own reflections; and he falls naturally into

a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind, and builds himself up in a

conception of life which expects to-morrow to be after the pattern of

to-day and yesterday. He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his

friends and acquaintances under the influence of love. He may sometimes

look forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible expectation. But

it is a subject which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will

help the philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly

thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of

the person's experience. I remember an anecdote of a well-known French

theorist, who was debating a point eagerly in his _cenacle_. It was

objected against him that he had never experienced love. Whereupon he

arose, left the society, and made it a point not to return to it until

he considered that he had supplied the defect. "Now," he remarked, on

entering, "now I am in a position to continue the discussion." Perhaps

he had not penetrated very deeply into the subject after all; but the

story indicates right thinking, and may serve as an apologue to readers

of this essay.

When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is not without something

of the nature of dismay that the man finds himself in such changed

conditions. He has to deal with commanding emotions instead of the easy

dislikes and preferences in which he has hitherto passed his days; and

he recognises capabilities for pain and pleasure of which he had not yet

suspected the existence. Falling in love is the one illogical adventure,

the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our

trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the

cause. Two persons, neither of them it may be, very amiable or very

beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's

eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of

either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They

fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the

very gist and centre-point of God's creation, and demolishes our

laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with

the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person

become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is

translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and

desirable a fellow-creature. And all the while their acquaintances look

on in stupor, and ask each other, with almost passionate emphasis, what

so-and-so can see in that woman, or such-an-one in that man. I am sure,

gentlemen, I cannot tell you. For my part, I cannot think what the women

mean. It might be very well, if the Apollo Belvedere should suddenly

glow all over into life, and step forward from the pedestal with that

godlike air of his. But of the misbegotten changelings who call

themselves men, and prate intolerably over dinner-tables, I never saw

one who seemed worthy to inspire love--no, nor read of any, except

Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps Goethe in his youth. About women I

entertain a somewhat different opinion; but there, I have the misfortune

to be a man.

There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, and bid him

stand and deliver. Hard work, high thinking, adventurous excitement, and

a great deal more that forms a part of this or the other person's

spiritual bill of fare, are within the reach of almost any one who can

dare a little and be patient. But it is by no means in the way of every

one to fall in love. You know the difficulty Shakespeare was put into

when Queen Elizabeth asked him to show Falstaff in love. I do not

believe that Henry Fielding was ever in love. Scott, if it were not for

a passage or two in "Rob Roy," would give me very much the same effect.

These are great names and (what is more to the purpose) strong, healthy,

high-strung, and generous natures, of whom the reverse might have been

expected. As for the innumerable army of anaemic and tailorish persons

who occupy the face of this planet with so much propriety, it is

palpably absurd to imagine them in any such situation as a love-affair.

A wet rag goes safely by the fire; and if a man is blind, he cannot

expect to be much impressed by romantic scenery. Apart from all this,

many lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under some

unfavourable star. There is the nice and critical moment of declaration

to be got over. From timidity or lack of opportunity a good half of

possible love cases never get so far, and at least another quarter do

there cease and determine. A very adroit person, to be sure, manages to

prepare the way and out with his declaration in the nick of time. And

then there is a fine solid sort of man, who goes on from snub to snub;

and if he has to declare forty times, will continue imperturbably

declaring, amid the astonished consideration of men and angels, until he

has a favourable answer. I daresay, if one were a woman, one would like

to marry a man who was capable of doing this, but not quite one who had

done so. It is just a little bit abject, and somehow just a little bit

gross; and marriages in which one of the parties has been thus battered

into consent scarcely form agreeable subjects for meditation. Love

should run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is

that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered

consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark

room. From the first moment when they see each other, with a pang of

curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleasure and

embarrassment, they can read the expression of their own trouble in each

other's eyes. There is here no declaration, properly so called; the

feeling is so plainly shared, that as soon as the man knows what it is

in his own heart, he is sure of what it is in the woman's.

This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is

astonishing. It arrests the petrifying influence of years, disproves

cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and awakens dormant sensibilities.

Hitherto the man had found it a good policy to disbelieve the existence

of any enjoyment which was out of his reach; and thus he turned his back

upon the strong sunny parts of nature, and accustomed himself to look

exclusively on what was common and dull. He accepted a prose ideal, let

himself go blind of many sympathies by disuse; and if he were young and

witty, or beautiful, wilfully forwent these advantages. He joined

himself to the following of what, in the old mythology of love, was

prettily called _nonchaloir_; and in an odd mixture of feelings, a fling

of self-respect, a preference for selfish liberty, and a great dash of

that fear with which honest people regard serious interests, kept

himself back from the straightforward course of life among certain

selected activities. And now, all of a sudden, he is unhorsed, like St.

Paul, from his infidel affectation. His heart, which has been ticking

accurate seconds for the last year, gives a bound and begins to beat

high and irregularly in his breast. It seems as if he had never heard or

felt or seen until that moment; and by the report of his memory, he must

have lived his past life between sleep and waking, or with the

pre-occupied attention of a brown study. He is practically incommoded by

the generosity of his feelings, smiles much when he is alone, and

develops a habit of looking rather blankly upon the moon and stars. But

it is not at all within the province of a prose essayist to give a

picture of this hyperbolical frame of mind; and the thing has been done

already, and that to admiration. In "Adelaide," in Tennyson's "Maud,"

and in some of Heine's songs, you get the absolute expression of this

midsummer spirit. Romeo and Juliet were very much in love; although they

tell me some German critics are of a different opinion, probably the

same who would have us think Mercutio a dull fellow. Poor Antony was in

love, and no mistake. That lay figure, Marius, in "Les Miserables," is

also a genuine case in his own way, and worth observation. A good many

of George Sand's people are thoroughly in love; and so are a good many

of George Meredith's. Altogether, there is plenty to read on the

subject. If the root of the matter be in him, and if he has the

requisite chords to set in vibration, a young man may occasionally

enter, with the key of art, into that land of Beulah which is upon the

borders of Heaven, and within sight of the City of Love. There let him

sit awhile to hatch delightful hopes and perilous illusions.

One thing that accompanies the passion in its first blush is certainly

difficult to explain. It comes (I do not quite see how) that from having

a very supreme sense of pleasure in all parts of life--in lying down to

sleep, in waking, in motion, in breathing, in continuing to be--the

lover begins to regard his happiness as beneficial for the rest of the

world and highly meritorious in himself. Our race has never been able

contentedly to suppose that the noise of its wars, conducted by a few

young gentlemen in a corner of an inconsiderable star, does not re-echo

among the courts of Heaven with quite a formidable effect. In much the

same taste, when people find a great to-do in their own breasts, they

imagine it must have some influence in their neighbourhood. The presence

of the two lovers is so enchanting to each other that it seems as if it

must be the best thing possible for everybody else. They are half

inclined to fancy it is because of them and their love that the sky is

blue and the sun shines. And certainly the weather is usually fine while

people are courting.... In point of fact, although the happy man feels

very kindly towards others of his own sex, there is apt to be something

too much of the magnifico in his demeanour. If people grow presuming and

self-important over such matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, they will

scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life without some suspicion

of a strut; and the dizziest elevation is to love and be loved in

return. Consequently, accepted lovers are a trifle condescending in

their address to other men. An overweening sense of the passion and

importance of life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To women

they feel very nobly, very purely, and very generously, as if they were

so many Joan-of-Arcs; but this does not come out in their behaviour; and

they treat them to Grandisonian airs marked with a suspicion of fatuity.

I am not quite certain that women do not like this sort of thing; but

really, after having bemused myself over "Daniel Deronda," I have given

up trying to understand what they like.

If it did nothing else, this sublime and ridiculous superstition, that

the pleasure of the pair is somehow blessed to others, and everybody is

made happier in their happiness, would serve at least to keep love

generous and greathearted. Nor is it quite a baseless superstition after

all. Other lovers are hugely interested. They strike the nicest balance

between pity and approval, when they see people aping the greatness of

their own sentiments. It is an understood thing in the play, that while

the young gentlefolk are courting on the terrace, a rough flirtation is

being carried on, and a light, trivial sort of love is growing up,

between the footman and the singing chambermaid. As people are generally

cast for the leading parts in their own imaginations, the reader can

apply the parallel to real life without much chance of going wrong. In

short, they are quite sure this other love-affair is not so deep-seated

as their own, but they like dearly to see it going forward. And love,

considered as a spectacle, must have attractions for many who are not of

the confraternity. The sentimental old maid is a commonplace of the

novelists; and he must be rather a poor sort of human being, to be sure,

who can look on at this pretty madness without indulgence and sympathy.

For nature commends itself to people with a most insinuating art; the

busiest is now and again arrested by a great sunset; and you may be as

pacific or as coldblooded as you will, but you cannot help some emotion

when you read of well-disputed battles, or meet a pair of lovers in the

lane.

Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at large, this

idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between the sweethearts. To do

good and communicate is the lover's grand intention. It is the happiness

of the other that makes his own most intense gratification. It is not

possible to disentangle the different emotions, the pride, humility,

pity, and passion, which are excited by a look of happy love or an

unexpected caress. To make one's self beautiful, to dress the hair, to

excel in talk, to do anything and all things that puff out the character

and attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others, is not only

to magnify oneself, but to offer the most delicate homage at the same

time. And it is in this latter intention that they are done by lovers;

for the essence of love is kindness: and indeed it may be best defined

as passionate kindness: kindness, so to speak, run mad and become

importunate and violent. Vanity in a merely personal sense exists no

longer. The lover takes a perilous pleasure in privately displaying his

weak points and having them, one after another, accepted and condoned.

He wishes to be assured that he is not loved for this or that good

quality, but for himself, or something as like himself as he can

contrive to set forward. For, although it may have been a very difficult

thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act of _Antony

and Cleopatra_, there is a more difficult piece of art before every one

in this world who cares to set about explaining his own character to

others. Words and acts are easily wrenched from their true significance;

and they are all the language we have to come and go upon. A pitiful job

we make of it, as a rule. For better or worse, people mistake our

meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation. And generally we

rest pretty content with our failures; we are content to be

misapprehended by crackling flirts; but when once a man is moonstruck

with this affection of love, he makes it a point of honour to clear such

dubieties away. He cannot have the Best of her Sex misled upon a point

of this importance; and his pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.

He discovers a great reluctance to return on former periods of his life.

To all that has not been shared with her, rights and duties, bygone

fortunes and dispositions, he can look back only by a difficult and

repugnant effort of the will. That he should have wasted some years in

ignorance of what alone was really important, that he may have

entertained the thought of other women with any show of complacency, is

a burthen almost too heavy for his self-respect. But it is the thought

of another past that rankles in his spirit like a poisoned wound. That

he himself made a fashion of being alive in the bald, beggarly days

before a certain meeting, is deplorable enough in all good conscience.

But that She should have permitted herself the same liberty seems

inconsistent with a Divine providence.

A great many people run down jealousy, on the score that it is an

artificial feeling, as well as practically inconvenient. This is

scarcely fair; for the feeling on which it merely attends, like an

ill-humoured courtier, is itself artificial in exactly the same sense

and to the same degree. I suppose what is meant by that objection is

that jealousy has not always been a character of man; formed no part of

that very modest kit of sentiments with which he is supposed to have

begun the world; but waited to make its appearance in better days and

among richer natures. And this is equally true of love, and friendship,

and love of country, and delight in what they call the beauties of

nature, and most other things worth having. Love, in particular, will

not endure any historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it

is one of the most incontestable facts in the world; but if you begin to

ask what it was in other periods and countries, in Greece, for instance,

the strangest doubts begin to spring up, and everything seems so vague

and changing that a dream is logical in comparison. Jealousy, at any

rate, is one of the consequences of love; you may like it or not, at

pleasure; but there it is.

It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when we reflect on the

past of those we love. A bundle of letters found after years of happy

union creates no sense of insecurity in the present; and yet it will

pain a man sharply. The two people entertain no vulgar doubt of each

other: but this pre-existence of both occurs to the mind as something

indelicate. To be altogether right, they should have had twin birth

together, at the same moment with the feeling that unites them. Then

indeed it would be simple and perfect and without reserve or

afterthought. Then they would understand each other with a fulness

impossible otherwise. There would be no barrier between them of

associations that cannot be imparted. They would be led into none of

those comparisons that send the blood back to the heart. And they would

know that there had been no time lost, and they had been together as

much as was possible. For besides terror for the separation that must

follow some time or other in the future, men feel anger, and something

like remorse, when they think of that other separation which endured

until they met. Some one has written that love makes people believe in

immortality, because there seems not to be room enough in life for so

great a tenderness, and it is inconceivable that the most masterful of

our emotions should have no more than the spare moments of a few years.

Indeed, it seems strange; but if we call to mind analogies, we can

hardly regard it as impossible.

"The blind bow-boy," who smiles upon us from the end of terraces in old

Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his bird-bolts among a fleeting

generation. But for as fast as ever he shoots, the game dissolves and

disappears into eternity from under his falling arrows; this one is gone

ere he is struck; the other has but time to make one gesture and give

one passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment. When the

generation is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty years'

panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the world, we

may ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying loves, and

the sweethearts who despised mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and

they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions worth

remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy stamp from

the disposition of their parents.

IV

TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE

Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly false upon

the face of them for the sake of a half-truth upon another subject which

is accidentally combined with the error, one of the grossest and

broadest conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the

truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it were. But the truth is

one; it has first to be discovered, then justly and exactly uttered.

Even with instruments specially contrived for such a purpose--with a

foot-rule, a level, or a theodolite--it is not easy to be exact; it is

easier, alas! to be inexact. From those who mark the divisions on a

scale to those who measure the boundaries of empires or the distance of

the heavenly stars, it is by careful method and minute, unwearying

attention that men rise even to material exactness or to sure knowledge

even of external and constant things. But it is easier to draw the

outline of a mountain than the changing appearance of a face; and truth

in human relations is of this more intangible and dubious order: hard to

seize, harder to communicate. Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial

sense--not to say that I have been in Malabar when as a matter of fact I

was never out of England, not to say that I have read Cervantes in the

original when, as a matter of fact, I know not one syllable of

Spanish--this, indeed, is easy and to the same degree unimportant in

itself. Lies of this sort, according to circumstances, may or may not be

important; in a certain sense even they may or may not be false. The

habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his wife

and friends; while another man who never told a formal falsehood in his

life may yet be himself one lie--heart and face, from top to bottom.

This is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, _vice versa_,

veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and

your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion--that is the truth which

makes love possible and mankind happy.

_L'art de bien dire_ is but a drawing-room accomplishment unless it be

pressed into the service of the truth. The difficulty of literature is

not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but

to affect him precisely as you wish. This is commonly understood in the

case of books or set orations; even in making your will, or writing an

explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the world. But one thing

you can never make Philistine natures understand; one thing, which yet

lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as a high

flight of metaphysics--namely, that the business of life is mainly

carried on by means of this difficult art of literature, and according

to a man's proficiency in that art shall be the freedom and the fulness

of his intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is supposed, can say what

he means; and in spite of their notorious experience to the contrary,

people so continue to suppose. Now, I simply open the last book I have

been reading--Mr. Leland's captivating "English Gipsies." "It is said,"

I find on p. 7, "that those who can converse with Irish peasants in

their native tongue form far higher opinions of their appreciation of

the beautiful, and of _the elements of humour and pathos in their

hearts_, than do those who know their thoughts only through the medium

of English. I know from my own observations that this is quite the case

with the Indians of North America and it is unquestionably so with the

gipsy." In short, where a man has not a full possession of the language,

the most important, because the most amiable, qualities of his nature

have to lie buried and fallow; for the pleasure of comradeship, and the

intellectual part of love, rest upon these very "elements of humour and

pathos." Here is a man opulent in both, and for lack of a medium he can

put none of it out to interest in the market of affection! But what is

thus made plain to our apprehensions in the case of a foreign language

is partially true even with the tongue we learned in childhood. Indeed,

we all speak different dialects; one shall be copious and exact, another

loose and meagre; but the speech of the ideal talker shall correspond

and fit upon the truth of fact--not clumsily, obscuring lineaments, like

a mantle, but cleanly adhering, like an athlete's skin. And what is the

result? That the one can open himself more clearly to his friends, and

can enjoy more of what makes life truly valuable--intimacy with those he

loves. An orator makes a false step; he employs some trivial, some

absurd, some vulgar phrase; in the turn of a sentence he insults, by a

side wind, those whom he is labouring to charm; in speaking to one

sentiment he unconsciously ruffles another in parenthesis; and you are

not surprised, for you know his task to be delicate and filled with

perils. "O frivolous mind of man, light ignorance!" As if yourself, when

you seek to explain some misunderstanding or excuse some apparent fault,

speaking swiftly and addressing a mind still recently incensed, were not

harnessing for a more perilous adventure; as if yourself required less

tact and eloquence; as if an angry friend or a suspicious lover were not

more easy to offend than a meeting of indifferent politicians! Nay, and

the orator treads in a beaten round; the matters he discusses have been

discussed a thousand times before; language is ready-shaped to his

purpose; he speaks out of a cut-and-dry vocabulary. But you--may it not

be that your defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as

touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must

venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, and become

yourself a literary innovator? For even in love there are unlovely

humours; ambiguous acts, unpardonable words, may yet have sprung from a

kind sentiment. If the injured one could read your heart, you may be

sure that he would understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be

shown--it has to be demonstrated in words. Do you think it is a hard

thing to write poetry? Why, that is to write poetry, and of a high, if

not the highest, order.

I should even more admire "the lifelong and heroic literary labours" of

my fellow-men, patiently clearing up in words their loves and their

contentions, and speaking their autobiography daily to their wives, were

it not for a circumstance which lessens their difficulty and my

admiration by equal parts. For life, though largely, is not entirely

carried on by literature. We are subject to physical passions and

contortions; the voice breaks and changes, and speaks by unconscious and

winning inflections; we have legible countenances, like an open book;

things that cannot be said look eloquently through the eyes; and the

soul, not locked into the body as a dungeon, dwells ever on the

threshold with appealing signals. Groans and tears, looks and gestures,

a flush or a paleness, are often the most clear reporters of the heart,

and speak more directly to the hearts of others. The message flies by

these interpreters in the least space of time, and the misunderstanding

is averted in the moment of its birth. To explain in words takes time

and a just and patient hearing; and in the critical epochs of a close

relation, patience and justice are not qualities on which we can rely.

But the look or the gesture explains things in a breath; they tell their

message without ambiguity; unlike speech, they cannot stumble, by the

way, on a reproach or an allusion that should steel your friend against

the truth; and then they have a higher authority, for they are the

direct expression of the heart, not yet transmitted through the

unfaithful and sophisticating brain. Not long ago I wrote a letter to a

friend which came near involving us in quarrel; but we met, and in

personal talk I repeated the worst of what I had written, and added

worse to that; and with the commentary of the body it seemed not

unfriendly either to hear or say. Indeed, letters are in vain for the

purposes of intimacy; an absence is a dead break in the relation; yet

two who know each other fully and are bent on perpetuity in love, may so

preserve the attitude of their affections that they may meet on the same

terms as they had parted.

Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the face; pitiful that

of the deaf, who cannot follow the changes of the voice. And there are

others also to be pitied; for there are some of an inert, uneloquent

nature, who have been denied all the symbols of communication, who have

neither a lively play of facial expression, nor speaking gestures, nor a

responsive voice, nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory speech: people

truly made of clay, people tied for life into a bag which no one can

undo. They are poorer than the gipsy, for their heart can speak no

language under heaven. Such people we must learn slowly by the tenor of

their acts, or through yea and nay communications; or we take them on

trust on the strength of a general air, and now and again, when we see

the spirit breaking through in a flash, correct or change our estimate.

But these will be uphill intimacies, without charm or freedom, to the

end; and freedom is the chief ingredient in confidence. Some minds,

romantically dull, despise physical endowments. That is a doctrine for a

misanthrope; to those who like their fellow creatures it must always be

meaningless; and, for my part, I can see few things more desirable,

after the possession of such radical qualities as honour and humour and

pathos, than to have a lively and not a stolid countenance; to have

looks to correspond with every feeling; to be elegant and delightful in

person, so that we shall please even in the intervals of active

pleasing, and may never discredit speech with uncouth manners or become

unconsciously our own burlesques. But of all unfortunates there is one

creature (for I will not call him man) conspicuous in misfortune. This

is he who has forfeited his birthright of expression, who has cultivated

artful intonations, who has taught his face tricks, like a pet monkey,

and on every side perverted or cut off his means of communication with

his fellow-men. The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit,

showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us. But

this fellow has filled his windows with opaque glass, elegantly

coloured. His house may be admired for its design, the crowd may pause

before the stained windows, but meanwhile the poor proprietor must lie

languishing within, uncomforted, unchangeably alone.

Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to refrain from

open lies. It is possible to avoid falsehood and yet not tell the

truth. It is not enough to answer formal questions. To reach the truth

by yea and nay communications implies a questioner with a share of

inspiration, such as is often found in mutual love. _Yea_ and _nay_ mean

nothing; the meaning must have been related in the question. Many words

are often necessary to convey a very simple statement; for in this sort

of exercise we never hit the gold; the most that we can hope, is by many

arrows, more or less far off on different sides, to indicate, in the

course of time, for what target we are aiming, and after an hour's talk,

back and forward to convey the purport of a single principle or a single

thought. And yet while the curt, pithy speaker misses the point

entirely, a wordy, prolegomenous babbler will often add three new

offences in the process of excusing one. It is really a most delicate

affair. The world was made before the English language, and seemingly

upon a different design. Suppose we held our converse not in words, but

in music; those who have a bad ear would find themselves cut off from

all near commerce, and no better than foreigners in this big world. But

we do not consider how many have "a bad ear" for words, nor how often

the most eloquent find nothing to reply. I hate questioners and

questions; there are so few that can be spoken to without a lie. "_Do

you forgive me?_" Madam and sweetheart, so far as I have gone in life I

have never yet been able to discover what forgiveness means. "_Is it

still the same between us?_" Why, how can it be? It is eternally

different; and yet you are still the friend of my heart. "_Do you

understand me?_" God knows; I should think it highly improbable.

The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a

room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a

disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished

because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame

which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the

critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his

tongue? And, again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed

through a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment; and part

of the truth, as often happens in answer to a question, may be the

foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception; but the feeling is the law,

and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor

of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement:

the beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate

conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of

his own tempers; and to tell truth, rightly understood; is not to state

the true facts, but to convey a true impression; truth in spirit, not

truth to letter, is the true veracity. To reconcile averted friends a

Jesuitical discretion is often needful, not so much to gain a kind

hearing as to communicate sober truth. Women have an ill name in this

connection; yet they live in as true relations; the lie of a good woman

is the true index of her heart.

"It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most useful passage I

remember to have read in any modern author,[4] "two to speak truth--one

to speak and another to hear." He must be very little experienced, or

have no great zeal for truth, who does not recognise the fact. A grain

of anger or a grain of suspicion produces strange acoustical effects,

and makes the ear greedy to remark offence. Hence we find those who have

once quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever ready to break

the truce. To speak truth there must be moral equality or else no

respect; and hence between parent and child intercourse is apt to

degenerate into a verbal fencing bout, and misapprehensions to become

ingrained. And there is another side to this, for the parent begins with

an imperfect notion of the child's character, formed in early years or

during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres, noting only

the facts which suit with his preconception; and wherever a person

fancies himself unjustly judged, he at once and finally gives up the

effort to speak truth. With our chosen friends, on the other hand, and

still more between lovers (for mutual understanding is love's essence),

the truth is easily indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by the

other. A hint taken, a look understood, conveys the gist of long and

delicate explanations; and where the life is known even _yea_ and _nay_

become luminous. In the closest of all relations--that of a love well

founded and equally shared--speech is half discarded, like a roundabout,

infantile process or a ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two

communicate directly by their presences, and with few looks and fewer

words contrive to share their good and evil and uphold each other's

hearts in joy. For love rests upon a physical basis; it is a familiarity

of nature's making and apart from voluntary choice. Understanding has in

some sort out-run knowledge, for the affection perhaps began with the

acquaintance; and as it was not made like other relations, so it is not,

like them, to be perturbed or clouded. Each knows more than can be

uttered; each lives by faith and believes by a natural compulsion; and

between man and wife the language of the body is largely developed and

grown strangely eloquent. The thought that prompted and was conveyed in

a caress would only lose to be set down in words--ay, although

Shakespeare himself should be the scribe.

Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all others, that we must

strive and do battle for the truth. Let but a doubt arise, and alas! all

the previous intimacy and confidence is but another charge against the

person doubted. "_What a monstrous dishonesty is this if I have been

deceived so long and so completely!_" Let but that thought gain

entrance, and you plead before a deaf tribunal. Appeal to the past; why,

that is your crime! Make all clear, convince the reason; alas!

speciousness is but a proof against you. "_If you can abuse me now, the

more likely that you have abused me from the first._"

For a strong affection such moments are worth supporting, and they will

end well; for your advocate is in your lover's heart and speaks her own

language; it is not you but she herself who can defend and clear you of

the charge. But in slighter intimacies, and for a less stringent union?

Indeed, is it worth while? We are all _incompris_, only more or less

concerned for the mischance; all trying wrongly to do right; all fawning

at each other's feet like dumb, neglected lapdogs. Sometimes we catch an

eye--this is our opportunity in the ages--and we wag our tail with a

poor smile. "_Is that all?_" All? If you only knew! But how can they

know? They do not love us; the more fools we to squander life on the

indifferent.

But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear, is excellent;

for it is only by trying to understand others that we can get our own

hearts understood; and in matters of human feeling the clement judge is

the most successful pleader.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," Wednesday, p. 283.

II

CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH

"You know my mother now and then argues very notably; always very

warmly at least. I happen often to differ from her; and we both think

so well of our own arguments, that we very seldom are so happy as to

convince one another. A pretty common case, I believe, in all

_vehement_ debatings. She says, I am _too witty_; Anglice, _too

pert_; I, that she is _too wise_; that is to say, being likewise put

into English, _not so young as she had been_."--MISS HOWE to MISS

HARLOWE, "Clarissa," vol. ii. Letter xiii.

There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs.

The sentiments of a man while he is full of ardour and hope are to be

received, it is supposed, with some qualification. But when the same

person has ignominiously failed, and begins to eat up his words, he

should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is

conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from

ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And

since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt

very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of

proposition is any less true than the other, or that Icarus is not to be

more praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett, the

Successful Merchant. The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is

still in his counting-house counting out his money; and doubtless this

is a consideration. But we have, on the other hand, some bold and

magnanimous sayings common to high races and natures, which set forth

the advantage of the losing side, and proclaim it better to be a dead

lion than a living dog. It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities

reconcile such sayings with their proverbs. According to the latter,

every lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your

umbrella through a long life would seem a higher and wiser flight of

achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so long as you are a

bit of a coward and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the whole

duty of man.

It is a still more difficult consideration for our average men, that

while all their teachers, from Solomon down to Benjamin Franklin and the

ungodly Binney, have inculcated the same ideal of manners, caution, and

respectability, those characters in history who have most notoriously

flown in the face of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms

of praise, and honoured with public monuments in the streets of our

commercial centres. This is very bewildering to the moral sense. You

have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and reputable livelihood

under the eyes of her parents, to go a-colonelling, in the company of

rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of France; surely a melancholy

example for one's daughters! And then you have Columbus, who may have

pioneered America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent

navigator. His Life is not the kind of thing one would like to put into

the hands of young people; rather, one would do one's utmost to keep it

from their knowledge, as a red flag of adventure and disintegrating

influence in life. The time would fail me if I were to recite all the

big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even

shocking, to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I

imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude

towards the nobler and showier sides of national life. They will read of

the Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they assist at a

performance of the _Lyons Mail_. Persons of substance take in the

_Times_ and sit composedly in pit or boxes according to the degree of

their prosperity in business. As for the generals who go galloping up

and down among bomb-shells in absurd cocked hats--as for the actors who

raddle their faces and demean themselves for hire upon the stage--they

must belong, thank God! to a different order of beings, whom we watch as

we watch the clouds careering in the windy, bottomless inane, or read

about like characters in ancient and rather fabulous annals. Our

offspring would no more think of copying their behaviour, let us hope,

than of doffing their clothes and painting themselves blue in

consequence of certain admissions in the first chapter of their school

history of England.

Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs hold their

own in theory; and it is another instance of the same spirit, that the

opinions of old men about life have been accepted as final. All sorts of

allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost

none, for the disenchantments of age. It is held to be a good taunt, and

somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old gentleman

waggles his head and says: "Ah, so I thought when I was your age." It is

not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: "My venerable

sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours." And yet the one is

as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an

Oliver.

"Opinion in good men," says Milton, "is but knowledge in the making."

All opinions, properly so called, are stages on the road to truth. It

does not follow that a man will travel any further; but if he has really

considered the world and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled as far.

This does not apply to formulae got by rote, which are stages on the road

to nowhere but second childhood and the grave. To have a catchword in

your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it

the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of

these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like an

oath and by way of an argument. They have a currency as intellectual

counters; and many respectable persons pay their way with nothing else.

They seem to stand for vague bodies of theory in the background. The

imputed virtue of folios full of knockdown arguments is supposed to

reside in them, just as some of the majesty of the British Empire dwells

in the constable's truncheon. They are used in pure superstition, as old

clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an exorcism. And yet they are vastly

serviceable for checking unprofitable discussion and stopping the mouths

of babes and sucklings. And when a young man comes to a certain stage of

intellectual growth, the examination of these counters forms a gymnastic

at once amusing and fortifying to the mind.

Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having passed through

Newhaven and Dieppe. They were very good places to pass through, and I

am none the less at my destination. All my old opinions were only stages

on the way to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way

to something else. I am no more abashed at having been a red-hot

Socialist with a panacea of my own than at having been a sucking infant.

Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be

kicked about a little to convince you of the fact. And in the meanwhile

you must do something, be something, believe something. It is not

possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and blank; and

even if you could do so, instead of coming ultimately to the right

conclusion, you would be very apt to remain in a state of balance and

blank to perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate stages, a dash of

enthusiasm is not a thing to be ashamed of in the retrospect: if St.

Paul had not been a very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder

Christian. For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist

with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the moment)

that we had better leave these great changes to what we call great blind

forces; their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the

little, peering, partial eyesight of men. I seem to see that my own

scheme would not answer; and all the other schemes I ever heard

propounded would depress some elements of goodness just as much as they

encouraged others. Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with

years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in

the common orbit of men's opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit

to gout or grey hair, as a concomitant of growing age or else of failing

animal heat; but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change

for the better--I daresay it is deplorably for the worse. I have no

choice in the business, and can no more resist this tendency of my mind

than I could prevent my body from beginning to totter and decay. If I am

spared (as the phrase runs) I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome

desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the time comes,

shall I plume myself on the immunity. Just in the same way, I do not

greatly pride myself on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of

Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become

cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the growth of

experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to these

and certain other faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one

sense I hope I am journeying towards the truth, in another I am

indubitably posting towards these forms and sources of error.

As we go catching and catching at this or that corner of knowledge, now

getting a foresight of generous possibilities, now chilled with a

glimpse of prudence, we may compare the headlong course of our years to

a swift torrent in which a man is carried away; now he is dashed against

a boulder, now he grapples for a moment to a trailing spray; at the end

he is hurled out and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. We have

no more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our theories;

we are spun round and round and shown this or the other view of life,

until only fools or knaves can hold to their opinions. We take a sight

at a condition in life, and say we have studied it; our most elaborate

view is no more than an impression. If we had breathing space, we should

take the occasion to modify and adjust; but at this breakneck hurry, we

are no sooner boys than we are adult, no sooner in love than married or

jilted, no sooner one age than we begin to be another, and no sooner in

the fulness of our manhood than we begin to decline towards the grave.

It is in vain to seek for consistency or expect clear and stable views

in a medium so perturbed and fleeting. This is no cabinet science, in

which things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a pistol to our

head; we are confronted with a new set of conditions on which we have

not only to pass a judgment, but to take action, before the hour is at

an end. And we cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux

of things, our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not

infrequently we find our own disguise the strangest in the masquerade.

In the course of time we grow to love things we hated and hate things we

loved. Milton is not so dull as he once was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so

amusing. It is decidedly harder to climb trees, and not nearly so hard

to sit still. There is no use pretending; even the thrice royal game of

hide and seek has somehow lost in zest. All our attributes are modified

or changed; and it will be a poor account of us if our views do not

modify and change in a proportion. To hold the same views at forty as we

held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take

rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched, and

none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the

Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his

first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.

And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin at Gravesend with a

chart of the Red Sea. _Si Jeunesse savait, si Vieillesse pouvait_, is a

very pretty sentiment, but not necessarily right. In five cases out of

ten, it is not so much that the young people do not know, as that they

do not choose. There is something irreverent in the speculation, but

perhaps the want of power has more to do with the wise resolutions of

age than we are always willing to admit. It would be an instructive

experiment to make an old man young again and leave him all his

_savoir_. I scarcely think he would put his money in the Savings Bank

after all; I doubt if he would be such an admirable son as we are led to

expect; and as for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he would

out-Herod Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers to the blush.

Prudence is a wooden Juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Franklin walks

with the portly air of a high-priest, and after whom dances many a

successful merchant in the character of Atys. But it is not a deity to

cultivate in youth. If a man lives to any considerable age, it cannot be

denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments

his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.

It is customary to say that age should be considered, because it comes

last. It seems just as much to the point that youth comes first. And the

scale fairly kicks the beam, if you go on to add that age, in a majority

of cases, never comes at all. Disease and accident make short work of

even the most prosperous persons; death costs nothing, and the expense

of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle to the happy heir. To be

suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes is tragical

enough at best; but when a man has been grudging himself his own life in

the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never

to be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on

the confines of farce. The victim is dead--and he has cunningly

overreached himself: a combination of calamities none the less absurd

for being grim. To husband a favourite claret until the batch turns

sour, is not at all an artful stroke of policy; and how much more with a

whole cellar--a whole bodily existence! People may lay down their lives

with cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality; but

that is a different affair from giving up youth with all its admirable

pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of gruel in a more than

problematical, nay, more than improbable, old age. We should not

compliment a hungry man, who should refuse a whole dinner and reserve

all his appetite for the dessert, before he knew whether there was to be

any dessert or not. If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world,

we surely have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and

perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad,

we have heard the mermaids singing, and know that we shall never see dry

land any more. Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there is

a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let

us have a pipe before we go!

Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous preparation for old

age is only trouble thrown away. We fall on guard, and after all it is a

friend who comes to meet us. After the sun is down and the west faded,

the heavens begin to fill with shining stars. So, as we grow old, a sort

of equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for the violent ups and

downs of passion and disgust; the same influence that restrains our

hopes quiets our apprehensions; if the pleasures are less intense, the

troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a word, this period for

which we are asked to hoard up everything as for a time of famine, is,

in its own right, the richest, easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by

managing its own work and following its own happy inspiration, youth is

doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age. A full, busy youth is

your only prelude to a self-contained and independent age; and the muff

inevitably develops into the bore. There are not many Doctor Johnsons,

to set forth upon their first romantic voyage at sixty-four. If we wish

to scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves' kitchen in the East End, to go

down in a diving-dress or up in a balloon, we must be about it while we

are still young. It will not do to delay until we are clogged with

prudence and limping with rheumatism, and people begin to ask us: "What

does Gravity out of bed?" Youth is the time to go flashing from one end

of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of

different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in

town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the

metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait

all day long in the theatre to applaud _Hernani_. There is some meaning

in the old theory about wild oats; and a man who has not had his

green-sickness and got done with it for good, is as little to be

depended on as an unvaccinated infant. "It is extraordinary," says Lord

Beaconsfield, one of the brightest and best preserved of youths up to

the date of his last novel,[5] "it is extraordinary how hourly and how

violently change the feelings of an unexperienced young man." And this

mobility is a special talent entrusted to his care; a sort of

indestructible virginity; a magic armour, with which he can pass unhurt

through great dangers and come unbedaubed out of the miriest passages.

Let him voyage, speculate, see all that he can, do all that he may; his

soul has as many lives as a cat; he will live in all weathers, and never

be a halfpenny the worse. Those who go to the devil in youth, with

anything like a fair chance, were probably little worth saving from the

first; they must have been feeble fellows--creatures made of putty and

pack-thread, without steel or fire, anger or true joyfulness, in their

composition we may sympathise with their parents, but there is not much

cause to go into mourning for themselves; for, to be quite honest, the

weak brother is the worst of mankind.

When the old man waggles his head and says, "Ah, so I thought when I was

your age," he has proved the youth's case. Doubtless, whether from

growth of experience or decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer;

but he thought so while he was young; and all men have thought so while

they were young, since there was dew in the morning or hawthorn in May;

and here is another young man adding his vote to those of previous

generations and rivetting another link to the chain of testimony. It is

as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated,

to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other

wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn grey, or mothers

to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than

their lives.

By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel more than usually

tempted to offer their advice, let me recommend the following little

tale. A child who had been remarkably fond of toys (and in particular of

lead soldiers) found himself growing to the level of acknowledged

boyhood without any abatement of this childish taste. He was thirteen;

already he had been taunted for dallying over-long about the playbox; he

had to blush if he was found among his lead soldiers; the shades of the

prison-house were closing about him with a vengeance. There is nothing

more difficult than to put the thoughts of children into the language of

their elders; but this is the effect of his meditations at this

juncture: "Plainly," he said, "I must give up my playthings in the

meanwhile, since I am not in a position to secure myself against idle

jeers. At the same time, I am sure that playthings are the very pick of

life; all people give them up out of the same pusillanimous respect for

those who are a little older; and if they do not return to them as soon

as they can, it is only because they grow stupid and forget. I shall be

wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of their foolish world;

but so soon as I have made enough money, I shall retire and shut myself

up among my playthings until the day I die." Nay, as he was passing in

the train along the Esterel mountains between Cannes and Frejus, he

remarked a pretty house in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and

decided that this should be his Happy Valley. Astrea Redux; childhood

was to come again! The idea has an air of simple nobility to me, not

unworthy of Cincinnatus. And yet, as the reader has probably

anticipated, it is never likely to be carried into effect. There was a

worm i' the bud, a fatal error in the premises. Childhood must pass

away, and then youth, as surely as age approaches. The true wisdom is to

be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing

circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an

adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives,

into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve

well of yourself and your neighbour.

You need repent none of your youthful vagaries. They may have been over

the score on one side, just as those of age are probably over the score

on the other. But they had a point; they not only befitted your age and

expressed its attitude and passions, but they had a relation to what was

outside of you, and implied criticisms on the existing state of things,

which you need not allow to have been undeserved, because you now see

that they were partial. All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of

stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have

a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put

by babes and sucklings. Their most anti-social acts indicate the defects

of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you

must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream

is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England,

discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads

irritated at the injustices of society see nothing for it but the

abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a

young fool; so are these cock-sparrow revolutionaries. But it is better

to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the

shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and

incongruities of life, and take everything as it comes in a forlorn

stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on

through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's

sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of

himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of

their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce

be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and

such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been

wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that

youth hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our

own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against

some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to

the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person

with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.

In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, there is a strong

probability that age is not much more so. Undying hope is co-ruler of

the human bosom with infallible credulity. A man finds he has been wrong

at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing

conclusion that he is at last entirely right. Mankind, after centuries

of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly constitutional

millennium. Since we have explored the maze so long without result, it

follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much

longer; close by must be the centre, with a champagne luncheon and a

piece of ornamental water. How if there were no centre at all, but just

one alley after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or

issue?

I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation, which I take the

liberty to reproduce. "What I advance is true," said one. "But not the

whole truth," answered the other. "Sir," returned the first (and it

seemed to me there was a smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech), "Sir,

there is no such thing as the whole truth!" Indeed, there is nothing so

evident in life as that there are two sides to a question. History is

one long illustration. The forces of nature are engaged, day by day, in

cudgelling it into our backward intelligences. We never pause for a

moment's consideration, but we admit it as an axiom. An enthusiast sways

humanity exactly by disregarding this great truth, and dinning it into

our ears that this or that question has only one possible solution; and

your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow, dominates things for a while

and shakes the world out of a doze; but when once he is gone, an army of

quiet and uninfluential people set to work to remind us of the other

side and demolish the generous imposture. While Calvin is putting

everybody exactly right in his "Institutes," and hot-headed Knox is

thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is already looking at the other side

in his library in Perigord, and predicting that they will find as much

to quarrel about in the Bible as they had found already in the Church.

Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is

nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both

are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to

differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?

I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a

philosopher must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I

fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before

us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there

are as many as you please; that there is no centre to the maze because,

like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to

differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only "one undisturbed

song of pure concent" to which we are ever likely to lend our musical

voices.

FOOTNOTE:

[5] "Lothair."

III

AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS

"BOSWELL: We grow weary when idle."

"JOHNSON: That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company;

but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all

entertain one another."

Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence

convicting them of _lese_-respectability, to enter on some lucrative

profession, and labour therein with something not far short of

enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have

enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little

of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so

called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great

deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has

as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted

that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap

race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for

those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination,

votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, "goes for"

them. And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it

is not hard to understand his resentment when he perceives cool persons

in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears

and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate

place by the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken

Rome for those tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house,

and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? It

is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops,

and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement.

Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a

superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary

persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to

disparage those who have none.

But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the

greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry,

but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest

difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to

remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously

argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said

against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say. To

state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that

a man has written a book of travels in Montenegro is no reason why he

should never have been to Richmond.

It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in

youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school

honours with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their

medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin

the world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad is

educating himself, or suffering others to educate him. It must have been

a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these

words: "Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of

knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon

books will be but an irksome task." The old gentleman seems to have been

unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome, and not a

few become impossible, by the time a man has to use spectacles and

cannot walk without a stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but

they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to

sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back

turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very

hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for

thought.

If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the

full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would

rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in the

class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time.

I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic

Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor

Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such

scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain

other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was

playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of

education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and

turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects

of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets,

it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in

the streets, for, if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs

into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and

smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird

will sing in the thicket, and there he may fall into a vein of kindly

thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this be not

education, what is? We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such

an one, and the conversation that should thereupon ensue:--

"How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?"

"Truly, sir, I take mine ease."

"Is not this the hour of the class? and shouldst thou not be plying thy

Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge?"

"Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave."

"Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee? Is it mathematics?"

"No, to be sure."

"Is it metaphysics?"

"Nor that."

"Is it some language?"

"Nay, it is no language."

"Is it a trade?"

"Nor a trade neither."

"Why, then, what is't?"

"Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am

desirous to note what is commonly done by persons in my case, and where

are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what manner

of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to

learn, by root-of-heart, a lesson which my master teaches me to call

Peace, or Contentment."

Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and shaking

his cane with a very threatful countenance, broke forth upon this wise:

"Learning, quotha!" said he; "I would have all such rogues scourged by

the Hangman!"

And so he would go on his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of

starch, like a turkey when it spreads its feathers.

Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion. A fact is not called

a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your

scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged

direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all,

only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed

that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a

telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience

as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go

hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter

xx., which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., which is

hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an

intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears,

with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than

many another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill

and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious

science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking,

that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While

others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of

which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn

some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to

speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have

"plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or

another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and

owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the

better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain

under-bred and pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes

the idler, who began life along with them--by your leave, a different

picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he

has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all

things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book

in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to

excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and

the business man-some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's

knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has

another and more important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who

has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their

hobbles, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He

will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool

allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no

out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning

falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but

very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and leads to

the Belvedere of Common-sense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if

no very noble prospect; and while others behold the East and West, the

Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning

hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shadows running speedily

and in many different directions into the great daylight of Eternity.

The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent

wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all

this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and

peaceful landscape; many fire-lit parlours; good people laughing,

drinking, and making love as they did before the Flood or the French

Revolution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn.

Extreme _busyness_, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a

symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a

catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a

sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious

of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring

these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will

see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity;

they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not

take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and

unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand

still. It is no good speaking to such folk; they _cannot_ be idle, their

nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of

coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When

they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and

have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If

they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid

trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was

nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were

paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in

their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of

the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they

had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed

with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own

affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have

dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until

here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all

material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while

they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered

on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but

now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits

bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to

me as being Success in Life.

But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy habits,

but his wife and children, his friends and relations, and down to the

very people he sits with in a railway-carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual

devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by

perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by any means

certain that a man's business is the most important thing he has to do.

To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest,

most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the

Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, among the

world at large, as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the

walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers in the

orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from the benches,

do really play a part and fulfil important offices towards the general

result. You are no doubt very dependent on the care of your lawyer and

stockbroker, of the guards and signalmen who convey you rapidly from

place to place, and the policemen who walk the streets for your

protection; but is there not a thought of gratitude in your heart for

certain other benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your

way, or season your dinner with good company? Colonel Newcome helped to

lose his friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing

shirts; and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes.

And though Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, I think I could

name one or two long-laced Barabbases whom the world could better have

done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation

to Northcote, who had never done him anything he could call a service,

than to his whole circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good

companion emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are people

in the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done

them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish

disposition. A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper covered with

the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half-an-hour pleasantly,

perhaps profitably, over an article of his; do you think the service

would be greater, if he had made the manuscript in his heart's blood,

like a compact with the devil? Do you really fancy you should be more

beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while

for your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties because,

like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice

blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a

jest; but wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the favour is

conferred with pain, and, among generous people, received with

confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being

happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which

remain unknown even to ourselves, or, when they are disclosed, surprise

nobody so much as the benefactor. The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy

ran down the street after a marble, with so jolly an air that he set

every one he passed into a good humour; one of these persons, who had

been delivered from more than usually black thoughts, stopped the little

fellow and gave him some money with this remark: "You see what sometimes

comes of looking pleased." If he had looked pleased before, he had now

to look both pleased and mystified. For my part, I justify this

encouragement of smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to

pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal

largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better

thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of

goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had

been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the

forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they

practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.

Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle

he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger

and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and, within practical

limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of

Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I

beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of

activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous

derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all

fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a

leaden inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a

contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper

before he returns to work. I do not care how much or how well he works,

this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives. They would be

happier if he were dead. They could easier do without his services in

the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits.

He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to be beggared out of

hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.

And what, in God's name, is all this pother about? For what cause do

they embitter their own and other people's lives? That a man should

publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not

finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest

to the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand fall,

there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc

she should be at home minding women's work, she answered there were

plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts! When

nature is "so careless of the single life," why should we coddle

ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance?

Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir

Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged on better or worse,

the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to

his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. There are not many

works extant, if you look the alternative all over, which are worth the

price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. This is a

sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a

tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great cause for personal

vainglory in the phrase; for although tobacco is an admirable sedative,

the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious

in themselves. Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the

services of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a

gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go

and labour themselves into a great fortune and thence into the

bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles

until their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though

Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid;

and fine young men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven

off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these

persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise

of some momentous destiny? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they

play their farces was the bull's-eye and centre-point of all the

universe? And yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away their

priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the

glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them

indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable

that the mind freezes at the thought.

IV

ORDERED SOUTH

By a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are sent when health

deserts us are often singularly beautiful. Often, too, they are places

we have visited in former years, or seen briefly in passing by, and kept

ever afterwards in pious memory; and we please ourselves with the fancy

that we shall repeat many vivid and pleasurable sensations, and take up

again the thread of our enjoyment in the same spirit as we let it fall.

We shall now have an opportunity of finishing many pleasant excursions,

interrupted of yore before our curiosity was fully satisfied. It may be

that we have kept in mind, during all these years, the recollection of

some valley into which we have just looked down for a moment before we

lost sight of it in the disorder of the hills; it may be that we have

lain awake at night, and agreeably tantalised ourselves with the thought

of corners we had never turned, or summits we had all but climbed: we

shall now be able, as we tell ourselves, to complete all these

unfinished pleasures, and pass beyond the barriers that confined our

recollections.

The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led away when hope and

memory are both in one story, that I daresay the sick man is not very

inconsolable when he receives sentence of banishment, and is inclined to

regard his ill-health as not the least fortunate accident of his life.

Nor is he immediately undeceived. The stir and speed of the journey, and

the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he tries to sleep between

two days of noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves

into something of their old quickness and sensibility. And so he can

enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and

plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold,

which the first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the fable,

into withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy the admirable brevity and

simplicity of such little glimpses of country and country ways as flash

upon him through the windows of the train; little glimpses that have a

character all their own; sights seen as a travelling swallow might see

them from the wing, or Iris as she went abroad over the land on some

Olympian errand. Here and there, indeed, a few children huzzah and wave

their hands to the express; but for the most part, it is an interruption

too brief and isolated to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease

from browsing; a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a canal

boat, so precariously that it seems as if a fly or the splash of a

leaping fish would be enough to overthrow the dainty equilibrium, and

yet all these hundreds of tons of coal and wood and iron have been

precipitated roaring past her very ear, and there is not a start, not a

tremor, not a turn of the averted head, to indicate that she has been

even conscious of its passage. Herein, I think, lies the chief

attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, and the train

disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart

becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while

the body is borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts

alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations; they make

haste up the poplar alley that leads towards the town; they are left

behind with the signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, he watches

the long train sweep away into the golden distance.

Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock of wonder and

delight with which he will learn that he has passed the indefinable

line that separates South from North. And this is an uncertain moment;

for sometimes the consciousness is forced upon him early, on the

occasion of some slight association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; and

sometimes not until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern

sunshine peeping through the _persiennes_, and the southern patois

confusedly audible below the windows. Whether it come early or late,

however, this pleasure will not end with the anticipation, as do so many

others of the same family. It will leave him wider awake than it found

him, and give a new significance to all he may see for many days to

come. There is something in the mere name of the South that carries

enthusiasm along with it. At the sound of the word, he pricks up his

ears; he becomes as anxious to seek out beauties and to get by heart the

permanent lines and character of the landscape, as if he had been told

that it was all his own--an estate out of which he had been kept

unjustly, and which he was now to receive in free and full possession.

Even those who have never been there before feel as if they had been;

and everybody goes comparing, and seeking for the familiar, and finding

it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would think they were

coming home after a weary absence, instead of travelling hourly farther

abroad.

It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled down in his chosen

corner, that the invalid begins to understand the change that has

befallen him. Everything about him is as he had remembered, or as he had

anticipated. Here, at his feet, under his eyes, are the olive gardens

and the blue sea. Nothing can change the eternal magnificence of form of

the naked Alps behind Mentone; nothing, not even the crude curves of the

railway, can utterly deform the suavity of contour of one bay after

another along the whole reach of the Riviera. And of all this, he has

only a cold head-knowledge that is divorced from enjoyment. He

recognises with his intelligence that this thing and that thing is

beautiful, while in his heart of hearts he has to confess that it is not

beautiful for him. It is in vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit;

in vain that he chooses out points of view, and stands there, looking

with all his eyes, and waiting for some return of the pleasure that he

remembers in other days, as the sick folk may have awaited the coming of

the angel at the pool of Bethesda. He is like an enthusiast leading

about with him a stolid, indifferent tourist. There is some one by who

is out of sympathy with the scene, and is not moved up to the measure of

the occasion; and that some one is himself. The world is disenchanted

for him. He seems to himself to touch things with muffled hands, and to

see them through a veil. His life becomes a palsied fumbling after notes

that are silent when he has found and struck them. He cannot recognise

that this phlegmatic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes

burthened, is the same that he knew heretofore so quick and delicate and

alive.

He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness and amenity of the

climate, and to fancy that in the rigours of the winter at home, these

dead emotions would revive and flourish. A longing for the brightness

and silence of fallen snow seizes him at such times. He is homesick for

the hale rough weather; for the tracery of the frost upon his

window-panes at morning, the reluctant descent of the first flakes, and

the white roofs relieved against the sombre sky. And yet the stuff of

which these yearnings are made is one of the flimsiest: if but the

thermometer fall a little below its ordinary Mediterranean level, or a

wind come down from the snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies

changes upon the instant, and many a doleful vignette of the grim wintry

streets at home returns to him, and begins to haunt his memory. The

hopeless, huddled attitude of tramps in doorways; the flinching gait of

barefoot children on the icy pavement; the sheen of the rainy streets

towards afternoon; the meagre anatomy of the poor defined by the

clinging of wet garments; the high canorous note of the North-easter on

days when the very houses seem to stiffen with cold: these, and such as

these, crowd back upon him, and mockingly substitute themselves for the

fanciful winter scenes with which he had pleased himself a while before.

He cannot be glad enough that he is where he is. If only the others

could be there also; if only those tramps could lie down for a little in

the sunshine, and those children warm their feet, this once, upon a

kindlier earth; if only there were no cold anywhere, and no nakedness

and no hunger; if only it were as well with all men as it is with him!

For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after all. If it is only

rarely that anything penetrates, vividly into his numbed spirit, yet,

when anything does, it brings with it a joy that is all the more

poignant for its very rarity. There is something pathetic in these

occasional returns of a glad activity of heart. In his lowest hours he

will be stirred and awakened by many such; and they will spring perhaps

from very trivial sources; as a friend once said to me, the "spirit of

delight" comes often on small wings. For the pleasure that we take in

beautiful nature is essentially capricious. It comes sometimes when we

least look for it; and sometimes, when we expect it most certainly, it

leaves us to gape joyously for days together, in the very home-land of

the beautiful. We may have passed a place a thousand times and one; and

on the thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand forth in a

certain splendour of reality from the dull circle of surroundings; so

that we see it "with a child's first pleasure," as Wordsworth saw the

daffodils by the lake-side. And if this falls out capriciously with the

healthy, how much more so with the invalid! Some day he will find his

first violet, and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the cold

earth of the clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be transmuted into

colour so rich and odour so touchingly sweet. Or perhaps he may see a

group of washerwomen relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue

sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an

olive-garden; and something significant or monumental in the grouping,

something in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic

of the dress of these southern women, will come home to him

unexpectedly, and awaken in him that satisfaction with which we tell

ourselves that we are the richer by one more beautiful experience. Or it

may be something even slighter: as when the opulence of the sunshine,

which somehow gets lost and fails to produce its effect on the large

scale, is suddenly revealed to him by the chance isolation--as he

changes the position of his sunshade--of a yard or two of roadway with

its stones and weeds. And then, there is no end to the infinite variety

of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate and

continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey now blue;

now tree stands above tree, like "cloud on cloud," massed into filmy

indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is

shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows. But

every one sees the world in his own way. To some the glad moment may

have arrived on other provocations; and their recollection may be most

vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens on their heads; of

tropical effects, with canes and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief

of cypresses; of the troubled, busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that

seem always as if they were being wielded and swept together by a

whirlwind; of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the

myrtles and the scented underwood; of the empurpled hills standing up,

solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at evening.

There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of one such moment

of intense perception; and it is on the happy agreement of these many

elements, on the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole

delight of the moment must depend. Who can forget how, when he has

chanced upon some attitude of complete restfulness, after long uneasy

rolling to and fro on grass or heather, the whole fashion of the

landscape has been changed for him, as though the sun had just broken

forth, or a great artist had only then completed, by some cunning touch,

the composition of the picture! And not only a change of posture--a

snatch of perfume, the sudden singing of a bird, the freshness of some

pulse of air from an invisible sea, the light shadow of a travelling

cloud, the merest nothing that sends a little shiver along the most

infinitesimal nerve of a man's body--not one of the least of these but

has a hand somehow in the general effect, and brings some refinement of

its own into the character of the pleasure we feel.

And if the external conditions are thus varied and subtle, even more so

are those within our own bodies. No man can find out the world, says

Solomon, from beginning to end, because the world is in his heart; and

so it is impossible for any of us to understand, from beginning to end,

that agreement of harmonious circumstances that creates in us the

highest pleasure of admiration, precisely because some of these

circumstances are hidden from us for ever in the constitution of our own

bodies. After we have reckoned up all that we can see or hear or feel,

there still remains to be taken into account some sensibility more

delicate than usual in the nerves affected, or some exquisite refinement

in the architecture of the brain, which is indeed to the sense of the

beautiful as the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing or sight. We

admire splendid views and great pictures; and yet, what is truly

admirable is rather the mind within us, that gathers together these

scattered details for its delight, and makes out of certain colours

certain distributions of graduated light and darkness, that intelligible

whole which alone we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, relating in one

of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's house to

another's in search of works of art, begins suddenly to triumph over

these noble and wealthy owners, because he was more capable of enjoying

their costly possessions than they were; because they had paid the money

and he had received the pleasure. And the occasion is a fair one for

self-complacency. While the one man was working to be able to buy the

picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the picture. An

inherited aptitude will have been diligently improved in either case;

only the one man has made for himself a fortune, and the other has made

for himself a living spirit. It is a fair occasion for self-complacency,

I repeat, when the event shows a man to have chosen the better part, and

laid out his life more wisely, in the long run, than those who have

credit for most wisdom. And yet even this is not a good unmixed; and,

like all other possessions, although in a less degree, the possession of

a brain that has been thus improved and cultivated, and made into the

prime organ of a man's enjoyment, brings with it certain inevitable

cares and disappointments. The happiness of such an one comes to depend

greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten and harmonise

the coarser elements of beauty. And thus a degree of nervous

prostration, that to other men would be hardly disagreeable, is enough

to overthrow for him the whole fabric of his life, to take, except at

rare moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him wherever he

goes with failure, and the sense of want, and disenchantment of the

world and life.

It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the life of the invalid

resembles a premature old age. Those excursions that he had promised

himself to finish prove too long or too arduous for his feeble body; and

the barrier-hills are as impassable as ever. Many a white town that sits

far out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the

mountain-side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is

yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds.

The sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully; and after some

feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days, he

falls contentedly in with the restrictions of his weakness. His narrow

round becomes pleasant and familiar to him as the cell to a contented

prisoner. Just as he has fallen already out of the mid race of active

life, he now falls out of the little eddy that circulates in the shallow

waters of the sanatorium. He sees the country people come and go about

their everyday affairs, the foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure

parties; the stir of man's activity is all about him, as he suns himself

inertly in some sheltered corner; and he looks on with a patriarchal

impersonality of interest, such as a man may feel when he pictures to

himself the fortunes of his remote descendants, or the robust old age of

the oak he has planted over-night.

In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of other men,

there is no inharmonious prelude to the last quietude and desertion of

the grave; in this dulness of the senses there is a gentle preparation

for the final insensibility of death. And to him the idea of mortality

comes in a shape less violent and harsh than is its wont, less as an

abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of infinitesimal gradation, and the

last step on a long decline of way. As we turn to and fro in bed, and

every moment the movements grow feebler and smaller and the attitude

more restful and easy, until sleep overtakes us at a stride and we move

no more, so desire after desire leaves him; day by day his strength

decreases, and the circle of his activity grows ever narrower; and he

feels, if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the passion of life,

thus gradually inducted into the slumber of death, that when at last the

end comes, it will come quietly and fitly. If anything is to reconcile

poor spirits to the coming of the last enemy, surely it should be such a

mild approach as this; not to hale us forth with violence, but to

persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in. It is not so

much, indeed, death that approaches as life that withdraws and withers

up from round about him. He has outlived his own usefulness, and almost

his own enjoyment; and if there is to be no recovery; if never again

will he be young and strong and passionate, if the actual present shall

be to him always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of the

far-away past; if, in fact, this be veritably nightfall, he will not

wish greatly for the continuance of a twilight that only strains and

disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly await the perfect darkness. He

will pray for Medea: when she comes, let her either rejuvenate or slay.

And yet the ties that still attach him to the world are many and kindly.

The sight of children has a significance for him such as it may have for

the aged also, but not for others. If he has been used to feel humanely,

and to look upon life somewhat more widely than from the narrow loophole

of personal pleasure and advancement, it is strange how small a portion

of his thoughts will be changed or embittered by this proximity of

death. He knows that already, in English counties, the sower follows the

ploughman up the face of the field, and the rooks follow the sower; and

he knows also that he may not live to go home again and see the corn

spring and ripen, and be cut down at last, and brought home with

gladness. And yet the future of this harvest, the continuance of drought

or the coming of rain unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as ever. For

he has long been used to wait with interest the issue of events in which

his own concern was nothing; and to be joyful in a plenty, and sorrowful

for a famine, that did not increase or diminish, by one half loaf, the

equable sufficiency of his own supply. Thus there remain unaltered all

the disinterested hopes for mankind and a better future which have been

the solace and inspiration of his life. These he has set beyond the

reach of any fate that only menaces himself; and it makes small

difference whether he die five thousand years, or five thousand and

fifty years, before the good epoch for which he faithfully labours. He

has not deceived himself; he has known from the beginning that he

followed the pillar of fire and cloud, only to perish himself in the

wilderness, and that it was reserved for others to enter joyfully into

possession of the land. And so, as everything grows greyer and quieter

about him, and slopes towards extinction, these unfaded visions

accompany his sad decline and follow him, with friendly voices and

hopeful words, into the very vestibule of death. The desire of love or

of fame scarcely moved him, in his days of health, more strongly than

these generous aspirations move him now; and so life is carried forward

beyond life, and a vista kept open for the eyes of hope, even when his

hands grope already on the face of the impassable.

Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of his friends; or

shall we not say rather, that by their thought for him, by their

unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains woven into the very stuff

of life, beyond the power of bodily dissolution to undo? In a thousand

ways will he survive and be perpetuated. Much of Etienne de la Boetie

survived during all the years in which Montaigne continued to converse

with him on the pages of the ever-delightful essays. Much of what was

truly Goethe was dead already when he revisited places that knew him no

more, and found no better consolation than the promise of his own

verses, that soon he too would be at rest. Indeed, when we think of what

it is that we most seek and cherish, and find most pride and pleasure in

calling ours, it will sometimes seem to us as if our friends, at our

decease, would suffer loss more truly than ourselves. As a monarch who

should care more for the outlying colonies he knows on the map or

through the report of his vicegerents, than for the trunk of his empire

under his eyes at home, are we not more concerned about the shadowy life

that we have in the hearts of others, and that portion in their

thoughts and fancies which, in a certain far-away sense, belongs to us,

than about the real knot of our identity--that central metropolis of

self, of which alone we are immediately aware--or the diligent service

of arteries and veins and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we

know (as we know a proposition in Euclid) to be the source and substance

of the whole? At the death of every one whom we love, some fair and

honourable portion of our existence falls away, and we are dislodged

from one of these dear provinces; and they are not, perhaps, the most

fortunate who survive a long series of such impoverishments, till their

life and influence narrow gradually into the meagre limit of their own

spirits, and death, when he comes at last, can destroy them at one blow.

NOTE.--To this essay I must in honesty append a word or two of

qualification; for this is one of the points on which a slightly

greater age teaches us a slightly different wisdom:

A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from particular

obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, himself pursuing

butterflies, but courteously lending his applause to the advance of

the human species and the coming of the kingdom of justice and love.

As he grows older, he begins to think more narrowly of man's action

in the general, and perhaps more arrogantly of his own in the

particular. He has not that same unspeakable trust in what he would

have done had he been spared, seeing finally that that would have

been little; but he has a far higher notion of the blank that he will

make by dying. A young man feels himself one too many in the world;

his is a painful situation: he has no calling; no obvious utility; no

ties but to his parents, and these he is sure to disregard. I do not

think that a proper allowance has been made for this true cause of

suffering in youth; but by the mere fact of a prolonged existence, we

outgrow either the fact or else the feeling. Either we become so

callously accustomed to our own useless figure in the world, or

else--and this, thank God, in the majority of cases--we so collect

about us the interest or the love of our fellows, so multiply our

effective part in the affairs of life, that we need to entertain no

longer the question of our right to be.

And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself dying will

get cold comfort from the very youthful view expressed in this essay.

He, as a living man, has some to help, some to love, some to correct;

it may be, some to punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but

upon the man himself. It is he, not another, who is one woman's son

and a second woman's husband and a third woman's father. That life

which began so small, has now grown, with a myriad filaments, into

the lives of others. It is not indispensable; another will take the

place and shoulder the discharged responsibility; but the better the

man and the nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted to

regret the extinction of his powers and the deletion of his

personality. To have lived a generation is not only to have grown at

home in that perplexing medium, but to have assumed innumerable

duties. To die at such an age, has, for all but the entirely base,

something of the air of a betrayal. A man does not only reflect upon

what he might have done in a future that is never to be his; but

beholding himself so early a deserter from the fight, he eats his

heart for the good he might have done already. To have been so

useless and now to lose all hope of being useful any more--there it

is that death and memory assail him. And even if mankind shall go on,

founding heroic cities, practising heroic virtues, rising steadily

from strength to strength; even if his work shall be fulfilled, his

friends consoled, his wife remarried by a better than he; how shall

this alter, in one jot, his estimation of a career which was his only

business in this world, which was so fitfully pursued, and which is

now so ineffectively to end?

V

AES TRIPLEX

The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and

so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands

alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes

all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps

suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular

siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when

the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives,

and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung

together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at

night. Again, in taking away our friends, death does not take them away

utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable

residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence a whole chapter of

sights and customs striking to the mind, from the pyramids of Egypt to

the gibbets and dule trees of mediaeval Europe. The poorest persons have

a bit of pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over

the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of respect for

what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with

much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades

before the door. All this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied

by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in

error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid

down with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle

and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, have not left

them time enough to go dangerously wrong in practice.