of course, that they could necessarily improve their own, nor that of
the lady who lives next door, nor that of Mr. Lloyd George, nor of Miss
Marie Lloyd, nor even of Lenin and Trotsky; but human nature as it is
found in all of us and as it prevents heaven on this earth lasting much
longer than five and twenty minutes! I know--or rather I think--that I
could improve it. And I should begin at that unhappy "kink" in all of
us which only realises those blessings which belong to other people, or
those which we ourselves have lost. Nobody really and truly knows what
Youth means until they have reached the age which only asks of men and
women to subside--gracefully, if possible, and silently as an act of
decency. We never love the people who love us, to quite the same
extent anyway, until, either they love us no more, or love somebody
else, or go out and die. We never realise the splendour of splendid
health until the doctor prescribes six months in a nursing home as the
only alternative to demise. We never appreciated butter until
profiteers and the war sent the price up to four-and-sixpence for a
pound. The extra five hundred a year which seems to stand in the way
of our complete happiness--when we receive it, we realise that our
happiness really required a thousand. Fame is a wonderful and
beautiful state, until we become famous and find out how dull it is and
what a real blessing it is to be a person of only the least importance.
Life, I can understand, is never so sweet as it is to those who, as it
were, have just been sentenced to be hanged. Our ideals are always
thrilling until one day we wake up to find them accomplished facts; and
the only real passion of our life is the woman who went off and married
somebody else. I exaggerate, perhaps, but scarcely too much, I
believe. For, as I said before, there is a certain "kink" in human
nature which casts a halo of delight over those things which we have
lost, or, by the biggest stretch of dreaming-fancy can we ever hope to
possess. I suppose it means that we could not possibly live up to the
happiness which we believe would be ours were we to possess the
blessings we yearn for with all our hearts. All the same, I wish that
human nature were as fond of the blessings it throws away unheeded, as
it would be could it only regain possession of them once it fully
realises they are lost. Half our troubles spring from our own
fault--though they were not really our own fault, because we did not
know what we were doing when we did those things which might have saved
us all our tears. That is where the tragedy of it all came in. We
never _realised_ . . . we never _knew_! But Fate pays not the
slightest heed to our ignorance. We just have to live out our mistakes
as best we may. And nobody really pities us; we only pity ourselves.
_The Things which are not Dreamed of in Our Philosophy_
The other day I received a most extraordinary spirit picture
anonymously through the post. I cannot describe this picture--it is
well-nigh indescribable. The effect is wonderful, though the means are
of the simplest. Apparently the artist had upset a bottle of ink over
a large piece of white cardboard, and then, with the aid of a sharp
penknife, cut his way across it in long narrow slashes until the effect
is that of rays of light which, seen from a distance, have the effect
of luminosity in a most extraordinary degree. In the corner there is
the figure of Christ on the Cross, to which this method has given the
most marvellous effect of light and shadow. Indeed, the whole picture
is almost uncanny in its effectiveness and in the simplicity of the
means to this end. You ask me if I believe it to be really and truly a
spirit picture? Well, honestly, I do not know. I realise the beauty
of the picture--everyone must realise this who sees it; but, whether
the artist who designed it and transmitted his idea through a human
hand be a spirit I should not like to declare, for the simple reason
that I understand so little of spiritualism--except that side of
spiritualism which _I do not believe_--that I should be foolish to be
dogmatic when all the time I realise that I am yet in ignorance. But
of the genuineness of the "medium" through whose hand the spirit
picture was transmitted I am certain. He thoroughly believed in the
phenomenon that a spirit from another world was using him to convey
messages to the inhabitants of this. You ask me why I believe in his
conviction--well, my answer would be so mundane that you might perhaps
laugh at my logic. But one at least I can give, and it is this; that,
in my experience of mediums and professional spiritualists, one always,
as it were, hears the rattle of the collection-box behind the
"messages" from another sphere--either that, or the person is so
eccentric that "mediumship" in his case has become merely another form
of mental affliction. Well, the artist who sent me this picture is,
except for this fixed idea that he is a medium between this world and
the next, as normal as you or I, and his belief not only is making him
poorer each day--the "spirit" firmly forbidding him either to sell or
exhibit his pictures--but is gently, yet inevitably, leading him
straight towards the workhouse.
_Faith_
A few days after the receipt of the picture I discovered the artist and
went to "beard him in his den." While I was talking with him, he
declared that he had just received a "message" from this spirit to draw
me a picture which, it was inferred, would convey some "recollection"
to me. Sitting at the other side of an ordinary desk, the artist
picked up one piece of chalk after another, making a series of circular
marks over the paper. This went on for nearly an hour-and-a-half.
Occasionally something like a definite design seemed to come out of all
this chaos in chalk, if I may so express it, only to be rubbed out
again immediately, the circular movements still continuing. Then at
last, a few vigorous strokes, and suddenly a definite picture came out,
a picture which was continued until it was finally complete. This
picture represented a tall arch, through which the artist had painted
the most beautiful effect of evening sky--the evening sky when sunset
is fading into blue-green and the first stars are twinkling. And
around this arch was chalked a kind of heavy festoon of drooping
ostrich feathers. The picture when finished was certainly very
beautiful, and I have it in my possession at the present moment. _But
it conveyed absolutely nothing to me_, and certainly brought back no
recollection to my memory of a previous life whatsoever. But the
"medium" so thoroughly believed in his "power to convey" that I felt
quite unhappy about having to confess my unfamiliarity. In fact, I
left the studio--if studio it could be called--convinced by the beauty
of the pictures, but still unconvinced that they were really pictures
painted by a spirit artist. The only belief I did come away with was
the belief that the "medium" thoroughly believed in himself and the
reality behind his belief. And, in a way, I envied him; yes, I envied
him, even though his faith may prove but illusory after all. For I
have reached the age when I realise that I am not at all sure that men
and women do really want _truth_, and that a faith which gives comfort
and happiness is, for the practical purpose of going through life
happily and dying in hope, a far more comforting philosophy. I, alas!
_cannot believe_ what I am not convinced is a scientifically proved
fact; but I am to be pitied far more than envied for my--temperamental
limitation--shall I call it? The man or woman who possesses a blind
faith in something above and beyond this world is the man and woman to
be envied, even though everybody cannot emulate their implicit trust.
_Spiritualism_
All the same, I do not think I shall ever dare to become a
spiritualist. If you can understand my meaning, so much, so very much
depends upon the truth and veracity of its tenets that I cannot go
blindly forward, as so many people seem to be able to do, because I
realise that disillusion would mean something so terrible that a kind
of instinctive faith in another life, without reason, without
scientific demonstration, seems far safer for the peace of mind. To
believe in spiritualism, and then to be deceived, would be so
unsettling, so devastating to the "soul," that, in my own self-defence,
I prefer to be sceptical unreasonably than to be equally unreasonably
believing. So many people, who have loved and lost, rush towards
spiritualism demanding no real evidence whatsoever, bringing to it a
kind of passionate yearning to find therein some kind of illusion that
their loved ones, who are dead, still live on waiting for reunion in
another world. Such a yearning is very human, very understandable,
very forgivable; but these people are the enemies of true spiritualism
as a new branch of scientific speculation. I would not rob them of the
glamour of their faith, since, as I have just written, I have reached
that time of life when I realise that humanity does not necessarily
want truth for the foundation of its happiness, but a whole-hearted
faith, a belief sufficiently sublime to make the common Everyday
significant in the march forward toward the Great Unknown. But I,
alas! am not one of those who can merely believe because without belief
my heart would be broken and my life would be drearier than the
loneliest autumn twilight. I find a greater comfort in uncertain hope
and a more uncertain faith. If I ever really and truly believed in
spiritualism and then found, as so many people have done, alas! that
the prophet of it was himself a fraud, I should be cut, as it were,
from all my spiritual bearings, to flounder hopeless and broken-hearted
mid the desolate wastes of agnosticism. I cannot give myself unless I
am convinced that the sacrifice is for something which _I must believe_
in spite of all doubt; not entirely what I _want to believe_ because
belief is full of happiness and comfort. I am of those who demand
"all, or not at all." I cannot go on struggling to find security by
just holding on to one false straw after another. I prefer to hope and
to trust, and, although it is a dreary philosophy, I could not, if I
would, exchange it for something which is false, however wonderful and
beautiful.
_On Reality in People_
My one great grievance against people in the mass is that they are so
very seldom real. I don't mean to say, of course, that you can walk
through them like ghosts, or that, if they "gave you one straight from
the shoulder," you wouldn't get a black eye. But what I mean is, that
they are so very rarely their true selves; they so very rarely say what
they think--or indeed think anything at all! They are so very rarely
content to be merely human beings, and not some kind of walking-waxwork
figure with a gramophone record inside them speaking the opinions which
do not belong to them, but to some mysterious "authority" whom it is
the correct thing to quote. Have you ever watched the eyes of friends
talking together? I don't mean friends who are _real_ friends, friends
with whom every thought is a thought shared--but the kind of familiar
acquaintance who passes for a friend in polite society, and passes out
of one's life as little missed in reality as an arm-chair which has
gone to be repaired. In their eyes there is rarely any "answering
light"--just a cold, glassy kind of surface, which says nothing and is
as unsympathetic and as unfamiliar as a holland blind. You can tell by
their expression that, in spite of all their apparent air of friendly
familiarity, they are merely talking for talking's sake, merely being
friendly for the sake of friendship; that, if they were never to see
each other again, they would do so without one heartbreak. Perhaps I
am unsociable, perhaps I am a bit of a misanthrope; but those kind of
friends, those kind of people, bore me unutterably. I am only really
happy in the society of bosom friends, or in the society of interesting
strangers. The half-and-halves, the people who claim friendship
because circumstances happened to have thrown you together fairly
frequently--and one of us has a beautiful house and the other an
excellent cook--these people press upon my spirit like a
strait-waistcoat. I gabble the conventional small-talk of polite
sociability, and I thank God when they are gone! They are called
"friends," but we have absolutely nothing in common--not even a disease!
So much polite conversation is merely "polite," and can by no stretch
of imagination be rightly called "conversation." It consists for the
most part in exaggerated complimentary remarks--which, it is hoped,
will please you--or in one person waiting impatiently while the other
person relates all he and his family have been doing until he, in his
turn, can seize a momentary pause for breath to begin the whole recent
history of his own affairs in detail. But neither of them is really at
all interested in the story of the other's doings--you can see that in
their eyes, in the kind of fixed smile of simulated interest with which
they listen, the while they furtively take note of the grey hair you
are trying to hide, the shirt button which will leave its moorings if
something isn't done for it before long, the stain on your waistcoat
denoting egg-for-breakfast and an early hurry--all the things, in fact,
which really interest them to an extent and are far more thrilling
anyway than the things you are telling them in so much thraldom on your
own part and with so much gusto.
Some people are artificial through and through; it may be said of them
that they are only really real when they are having a tooth pulled.
But the majority of people only hide themselves behind a kind of crust
of artificiality; beneath that crust they were real live men and women.
And the war--thank God! (that is to say, if one ever can thank God for
the war)--cracked that crust until it fell away, and was trampled under
the feet of real men and women living real lives, honestly with
themselves and _vis-à-vis_ the world. That is one of the reasons why
the war has made social life a so much more vital and interesting
state. Of course, there are some people who still strive to revive the
social life of "masks," but they are the people whose crust of
artificiality was only cracked--or rather chipped--by the horror and
reality of war. War never really reached them, except through their
stomachs and their motor cars, or perhaps in the excuse it gave them
for flirting half-heartedly with some really useful human labour. They
never went "over the top" in spirit, and their point of view still
reeks of the point of view of the farthest back of the base. These
people will be more real when they are _dead_ than while they are
alive--if you can understand my meaning? But thank Heaven! their ranks
are thinned. They belong to the "back of beyond," to the "frumps," the
"washouts," and the "back numbers."
_Life_
Life is rather like a rocket; it shoots into the sky, flares, fades,
and falls to the ground in dust so unnoticeable that you can hardly
find its remnants, search how you may. Of course, I know that our
lives don't really shoot upwards towards the stars to illumine the
heavens by their own resplendent beams, but we usually think they're
going to, sometimes we think they do, and then, when our dreams settle
down to reality, we discover that our fate has been scarcely different
from the crowd, and that our life stands out about as unique as one
house is in a row of houses all built on the same pattern. But I
sometimes think that our dreams are our real life, and that what we do
is a matter of indifference to what we think and suffer and feel. Some
days, when you sit in a railway carriage on the underground railways
and gaze at the rows of stodgy, expressionless, flat kind of faces
which the majority of the travellers possess, you say to yourself,
"These people can have had no history; these people cannot have really
lived; they cannot have suffered and struggled and hoped and dreamed
and renounced, renounced so often with the heart frozen beyond tears."
And yet you know they must have done--perhaps they are living a whole
lifetime of mental agony even as you watch them, who can tell?--because
you have been "through the mill" too, you too have walked to Amaous,
sat desolate in the Garden of Gethsemane, seen all your fondest dreams
crucified on the Cross of Reality, and risen again, lonelier, sadder,
wiser maybe, but with a wisdom which is more desolate than the
wilderness. You have been through Hell, and no one has guessed, no one
has seen, no one has ever, ever known. And these people, so stodgy, so
expressionless, so dreary and conventional, must have been through it
too. For it seems to me that we must all go through it some time or
other, and the bigger, the braver your heart the greater the Hell; the
more sensitive, the more susceptible you are to the love which links
one human being with another, the greater your pain, the more desolate
your renunciation. And, as I said before, nobody guesses, nobody
believes, nobody ever, ever knows.
So very, very few people can see beyond the outward and visible signs
of pain. They see the smile, the fretfulness--and yet they think the
smile means happiness and the fretfulness an ugly, tiresome thing.
They do not perceive that often the smile is as a cry to Heaven, and
that fretfulness is but the sign of a soul breaking itself against the
jagged rocks of hopelessness and doubt. I often listen to the people
speaking of blindness and the blind. They only see that the eyes are
gone, that the glory which is spring is for ever dead; they perceive
the hesitating walk, the outstretched groping hand which, to my mind,
is more pitiful than the story of the Cross, and inwardly they murmur,
"How awful!" and sometimes they turn away. But they have never seen
the real tragedy which lies behind the visible handicap. Only their
imagination is stirred by the outward and visible side of the tragedy;
never--or rather, very rarely--is it haunted by the realisation of the
despair which is struggling to find peace, some solution of the meaning
of it all, struggling to bring back some reasoned hope and gladness,
some tiny ray of light in the mental and physical darkness, without
which we none of us can believe, we none of us can live. Perhaps they
are wise to see so little of the real sorrow which dogs so many lives,
but they, nevertheless, are blind in their turn. They are wise,
because there is a whole wise philosophy of a sort in being deaf to the
song within the song, blind to the tears which no one sees, to the
trembling lip which is the aftermath of--oh, so many smiles. The
philosopher perceives just enough of the heart-beat of the world to
keep the human touch, but not enough to kill the outbursts of
unreasoned joy which make the picture of life so exhilarating and
jolly. And yet . . . and yet . . . oh yes, happiness _does_ lie in
remembering little, perceiving less, and in pinning your love and faith
in God--in human love, in human gratitude, in human unselfishness
scarcely at all. Happiness, I say, lies thus--but alas! not everybody
can or ever will be happy. They feel too greatly--and if in intense
feeling there is divine beauty, there is also incalculable pain. When
the "ingrate" is turned out of Heaven they do not send him to Hell,
they send him to Earth and give him imagination and a heart.
_Dreams and Reality_
So many people imagine that their love is returned, that their
innermost thoughts are appreciated and understood, when lips meet lips
in that kiss which brings oblivion--that kiss which even the lowliest
man and woman receive once in their lives as a benediction from Heaven.
So many people imagine that they have found the Ideal Friend when they
meet someone with an equal admiration for the poems of Robert Browning;
or the Russian Ballet, or one who places the music of Debussy above the
music of Wagner. But, I fear, they are often disappointed. For the
longer I live, the more convinced I become that Love and Friendship are
but "day dreams" of the "soul,"--that all we can ever possess in Life
is the second-best of both. Nobody in Love, or in the first throes of
a new friendship, will believe me, of course. Why should they? There
are moments in both love and friendship when the "dream" does seem to
become a blissful reality. But they pass--they pass . . . leaving us
once more lonely in the wilderness of the Everyday, wondering if, after
all, those splendid moments which are over were ever anything more than
merely the figments of our own imagination and had nothing whatever to
do with the love we believed was ours, the friendship which seemed to
come towards us with open arms--that the Dream and the Hope, and the
fulfilment of both, merely lived and died in our own hearts alone--in
our own hearts and nowhere . . . alas! nowhere else. I often think it
must be so. Our love is always the same; only the loved-one changes.
God alone is a permanent Ideal because He lives within us--we never
meet Him as a separate entity. Thus we can never become disillusioned.
_Love of God_
Yet, it seems to me sometimes that even our ideal of God changes with
the fleeting years. When we were young, and because He was thus
presented to us by our spiritual pastors and masters, we figured Him as
some tragically revengeful elderly gentleman, who appeared to show His
love for us by always being exceedingly vindictive. Then when Fate, as
it were, thrust us from the confines of our homes into the storm of
life alone, we came to think of the God-Ideal in blind anger. We cried
that He was dead, or deaf; that He was not a God of Love at all, but
cruel . . . more cruel than Mankind. Sometimes we denied that He had
ever existed at all; that all the Church told us about Him was so much
"fudge," and that Heaven and Hell, the punishment of Sin, the reward of
Virtue, were all part of the Great Human Hoax by which Man is cheated
and ensnared. "We will be hoaxed no more!" we cried, little realising
that this is invariably the Second Stage along the road by which
thinking men approaches God.
The Third Stage, when it came, found us older, wiser, far less inclined
to cry "Damn" in the face of the Angels. We began to realise that
through pain we had become purified; through hardship we had become
kind; through suffering, and in the silence of our own thoughts we had
become wise; through our inner-loneliness--that inner-loneliness which
is part of the "cross" which each man carries with him through Life, we
had found the _blind necessity_ of God.
And in this fashion he returns to us. He is not the same God as of old
(we listen to the pictures of this Old God as He is so often described
from the pulpit, in contemptuous amazement, tinged by disdain), but a
far greater God than He--greater, for the reason that we have become
greater too. We no longer seek to find Him in our hours of
happiness--the only hours when, long ago, we sought to feel His
presence. We _know_ that we shall only find Him in our hours of
loneliness, in our hours of desolation, in our hours of black despair.
Now at last we realise that God is not some Deity apart, but some
spirit within _us_, within every man and woman whose "vision" is turned
towards the stars. He is the "Dream" which is clearer to us than
reality, none the less clear because it is the "Dream" which never in
life comes true. He belongs to us and to the whole world. He is
everywhere, yet nowhere. He is the "soul" in Man, the silent message
in beauty, the miracle in all Nature. He is not a Divinity, living in
some far off bourne we call the sky. He is just that "spirit" in all
men's hearts which is the spirit of their self-sacrifice, of their
charity, of their loving kindness, of their honesty, their uprightness
and their truth. It is the "spirit" which, if men be Immortal, will
surely live on and on for ever. Nothing else is worthy immortality.
_The Will to Faith_
I wish that the great Shakespeare had not written that "immortal" line:
"_The wish is father to the Thought._"
It haunts you throughout your life. Like a flaming sign of
interrogation it burns upon the Altar of Faith Unquestioning, before
which, in your perplexity, Fate forces you--at least once in your
life--to bow the head. It makes us wonder if we should believe all the
evidences of Immortality we do--were Immortality really a state of
Punishment and not of Happiness unspeakable. It is so hard, so very
hard, to disentangle our own desires from our own beliefs; so easy to
confuse what we _ought to believe_ with what, beyond all else, _we want
to believe_. It sometimes makes one chary of believing anything--in
questions Human as well as Eternal. The "Personal Bias"--ever in our
heart of hearts can we at all times decide where it ends and
impartiality begins? Even our so-called impartiality is tinged by
it--or what we fondly believe to be our impartial Faith. Doubt strikes
at the root of Justice and of Love--not the doubt that is the
half-brother to Disbelief, but the doubt which wonders always and
always if we believe most easily what we _want to believe_, and if our
firmest conviction against such Belief is not, more than anything else,
yet one more manifestation of what we desire so earnestly _to doubt_.