A MEDITATION.
So now, I think, I begin to see why I have been sent here--not to give
lessons, but to take them. My education has been neglected, and I am
coaching for a pass in the higher learning of life. I am reading with
Victoria--reading in the deep eyes, without book. It is a course of
social economy by a new method. The method is to look on this image
of the Divine, as intently as may be without being caught in the
act. I must not be caught; half of the gusty anger of the gods with
adoring mortals comes of their dislike of being stared at. And, besides
looking, there must be listening--listening with the heart. The ear
will not do; the true message of this exquisite piece of being is only
for a finer organ. Put a microphone in a cave, and it will register the
beat of the earth’s breathing: with a still more delicate instrument,
perhaps, this girl’s elemental nature, at its stillest, will be heard
to speak. As soon as my heart was stirred, then truly she began to be
audible to me--blessed day!
And to give me delight, as well as profit, she has not the faintest
idea of her function. Often I get the benefit of a whole morning’s
lecture, requiring copious notes, while, for all she knows of it, I
have but watched her as she manœuvred a battalion of fowls.
A grand provision of leisure for the true work of life seems to be
her chief instinctive aim. She has the genius of indifference to
trivial things; she is never busy with aught that does not truly
count. The idleness of hurry is unknown to her; she is always free for
essentials--a true word, a noble action, a great thought.
But this is lover’s talk. I cannot help that; lover’s talk let it be,
so only she cannot overhear.
I am a true lover in this, that the things she says to me are as
nothing to the things she seems to say. I do not want her to say much.
I can say for her all I most want to hear. She idealises the world
for me. She is a sublime suggestion. She only starts the game; I play.
Worship is in the worshipper. She brings out my highest, truest, best.
A something is within me; she is its mystical correspondence in warm
life. She seems to speak things to me, she seems to be things to me.
Are these things true of her? What care I: they are true of me!
So, then, for me, she is a great artist in being. She lives to beauty,
the sole end. She does naught only for the thing done; there is also
the way of doing it. I note her placid disdain of a certain hen, that
has an absurd habit of hatching by quantity, and addles half the
brood. The other half, for want of due maternal care, are a species of
bush-fowl that have lost their way in civilisation, and Victoria spends
days over their bags of bone and feathers, to bring them into harmony
with her great law. I am sure she thinks, though she might never know
how to say it, that every problem of being is, in the profoundest
sense, a problem of manner. _How_ do you love, hate, suffer, and
rejoice; nay, how do you eat and drink? There are higher proprieties,
even in this art, than the management of peas with the fork. Is it
after the manner of the farm-yard, or after the other? I remember her
little touch about the pasturing brutes. The brutes, too, renounce, but
not as a fine art. It is only their ‘needs must when the devil drives.’
That was her meaning. They only do without; man _gives up_, because man
alone is the artist, and art is choice. Living or dying, how slight as
ends in themselves! but how you live, how you die! Is the piece well
acted, or have you but got through your part? Who wants it, merely as
a part got through? Not that greater than Theseus, for certain, before
whom this dream-play is played.
That picture of the old life troubled me so, that grand composition of
the Exchange steps. It would not come right. Here is one whose mere
presence brings everything into its place. Let her but stand beside
the easel, and I get the key at once. Now I see where it was wrong;
now could I go among the rushing, blurred figures of my sitters, and
ask them, for the love of God, and, still more, for the love of man,
to keep still. I could say to them, as at her bidding, ‘Piano! piano!
you are perishing of over strain. You, the higher up, why this frantic
scraping for useless currency? What can it do for you? How much of
peace comes out of it, how much of fineness of life? What are you when
all is done--when you have sat at meat with my Lord, and added the
Hall in the country to the mansion in town? Have you yet found out the
faintest inner meaning of one of the pictures on your wall, of one of
the books on your shelf? You think Walter Map is for monkish Latin,
and that other’s vision of “all the wealth of this world, and the woe,
both” merely for a scholar’s treat. _Malheureux!_ rushing away to your
daily drive for more canvases, more bindings, more horses of swiftness,
more furniture, in a word, and more dinners of the stalled ox. The
greed makes the hurry, and the wasteful idle hurry spoils the life.
Oh, the grim set of your jaws, the thinly veiled hardness of your eye,
even at the sacred hour of rest and relaxation! What are you but a huge
river-pike in black and white! More leisure, friend, less lust of gear.
Cut away the hindrances to living, and begin to live. Take nothing
in but what you can digest to true use, which is beauty of life. What
a scandal, if you were caught and opened in an unguarded hour, and
half your stomach were found lined with vanities as profitless as the
bits of shoe leather and old corks so often found in the maw of your
prototype--vanities of things bolted to the end of bolting, titles of
park and meadow where _you_ can never find a flower, visiting-lists
where you can never find a friend, cards for music where you may never
hear a note that breathes one of the secrets of Heaven. Your bolting
for waste takes so much out of the common stock for use. Your grab for
superfluity baulks so much honest craving for need!’
You work for it! Will no one deliver us from the tyranny of that cry?
Work for what?--to have and to hold, to leave less and less for the
weaker, till finally, in the lowest hell of it, the huge crowd of the
uncanny have to learn to call their base scramble for your leavings the
battle of life? More leisure for these, from the obsession of the one
degrading thought--how to get the dry crust and the cold potato for
the day’s meal. For, true living begins only when such things are done
with, when the belly is timbered with victual, and the back clothed,
and when the spirit, that is the all-in-all, is left free for its
shaping work. More leisure for love and friendship, and kindly deeds,
and joy--the true business, which, if we were not blinded, would have
their banks and their depôts, and their pushing agents in every street.
The real ‘Theory of Exchanges,’ what is it but the philosophy of the
diffusion of the humane self? Oh, the hard world of the self-helpers,
with their Smiling apostle! oh, the hard world!--the hard world of
all the workers, high and low, leisureless for profitable toil, the
real task hardly so much as begun--too hard even for the very martyrs,
robbed of their right to smile in the death-hour, by the horrid fear
that all eternity will never set the muddle straight! Jesus, what a
sight! the sight of the factories, right through, from the tiniest
monkey-faced minder, up to the gaudy boss-bird in his mahogany cage.
This organised labour? fie! oh fie! Organised? for what? for the sake
of the labour, or for the sake of the labourer--the only product that
really counts--for the sake of the cottons, or for the sake of the
garment-stuff for the souls of men? Is labour man’s end, or his means?
his master, or his ministrant? Surely the first true end of making
cottons well is to make the maker better. And, if one must be spoiled
in the process, for Heaven’s sake let it be the cottons, though, of
that, no need. Every thread of their fineness must come out of some
inner fineness in him. How pathetically absurd to have them smooth,
and white, and close-textured, and firm in the pull, and him coarse,
foul, loose-minded, tearing in the Devil’s hand under any strain of
lust or rage! But why insist on a commonplace when all the wisest feel
that truth, and speak it now? The work exists for the worker; let us
never cease to proclaim it, and have done with the old lie--the worker
for the work. How sad the sight when you pass from one to the other!
The expectation born naturally of the fine thing is always of some
finer animate thing behind. Hence the craving for sight and knowledge
of heroes. But see the slop-made piece of human handiwork that skulks
as maker, behind the screen of drawing-room intrigue, or behind my
lady’s fan--shabby, shambling, beer-bedewed, only so much of him washed
as might soil the satins and brocades he shapes for others’ uses! Go
into the dismal slums that manufacture for Mayfair, and follow the
dainty casket for jewels from one end to the other of the line--from
the rickety workshop, airless, and only not lightless, too, because
the light is wanted for the labour, to the still daintier casket for
men and women, in which it finds its cushioned rest. If this beautiful
correspondence, why that grotesque incongruity? If these who touch it
as owners are as fine as itself, why not, also, they who touch it as
makers, at least with the inner fineness, and a certain amplitude of
material life? But no: a dozen have died to all the true ends of being
to make that pretty toy, have been reared in the belief that all the
fineness they have is to go into that direct, and not, in the first
place, into their own lives.
For nothing sanctifies a wrong, not even a headache in doing it; and
‘honest industry,’ which makes of patience and thrift but the foothold
for its spring upon the back of stupidity or improvidence, is the
sinfullest sin of all. Be not so sanctified of air, O new hot-gospeller
of work! Your sole right over knaves and fools is but the right to help
them to better wisdom out of your heart and hand. Your virtue was not
given to you for investment at forty per cent. The knaves and fools are
diseased--that is all; and you, when you stoop to personal profit out
of their infirmity, are worse diseased than they. A terrible malady,
yours, of hard work to self-regarding ends; infectious to the last
degree; a sort of dry rot of life.
Believe this--individualism, self-help, to any other end than the help
of all, is the great untruth. Believe it, in spite of the Smiling
apostle, who has done more harm with the nostrum of his title than
Abernethy with his invention of blue-pill. Go on being self-helpful,
if you must, for thirty, forty centuries more; only not for ever! Take
a lease of five times nine hundred and ninety-nine years, yet fix some
term! Give us a little hope, and name the happy day when the freehold
of light and life and jouissance shall revert to all.
Try the other thing as a regimen, once in a way, as a new diet for your
soul’s health--as a new quack medicine, then, powerfully recommended
by a sufferer: will that appeal? One poor little pill--it cannot hurt
overmuch. Cut off some of the work that ministers but to your ease
and luxury, and that, with interest piled on interest of infamous
wrong, makes the ever-growing load of sorrow for the mass. Cease to be
competitive and self-helping, at least in precious moments when you
feel your heart sick. Go back to it, if you will, if you can, when you
feel a man again, as convalescents resume their mulligatawny and hot
lobster when the plainer roast and boiled have set them right. Treat
your mind like a stomach, and give it a touch of nature once in a
while. Then, if you have a taste that way, still return for your gorge
at the banquet of work. Only, try to include in it some concern for the
most truly helpless, the stupid and the base, and to find the relish in
the end rather than the means. For the end is not to make riches of
mind, body, or estate for yourself, but to lift up life for one and for
all.
This is how I interpret Victoria. This is what I think she means. Let
me put it to the proof.