Our only chance, in this world, of a complete happiness, lies in the
measure of our success in shutting the eyes of the mind, and deadening
its sense of hearing, and dulling the keenness of its apprehension of
the unknown. Knowing so much less than nothing, for we are entrapped
in smiling and many-coloured appearances, our life may seem to be but
a little space of leisure, in which it will be the necessary business
of each of us to speculate on what is so rapidly becoming the past
and so rapidly becoming the future, that scarcely existing present
which is after all our only possession. Yet, as the present passes
from us, hardly to be enjoyed except as memory or as hope, and only
with an at best partial recognition of the uncertainty or inutility
of both, it is with a kind of terror that we wake up, every now and
then, to the whole knowledge of our ignorance, and to some perception
of where it is leading us. To live through a single day with that
overpowering consciousness of our real position, which, in the moments
in which alone it mercifully comes, is like blinding light or the
thrust of a flaming sword, would drive any man out of his senses. It
is our hesitations, the excuses of our hearts, the compromises of
our intelligence, which save us. We can forget so much, we can bear
suspense with so fortunate an evasion of its real issues; we are so
admirably finite.
And so there is a great, silent conspiracy between us to forget death;
all our lives are spent in busily forgetting death. That is why we
are active about so many things which we know to be unimportant; why
we are so afraid of solitude, and so thankful for the company of our
fellow-creatures. Allowing ourselves, for the most part, to be but
vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find
our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams,
in religion, passion, art; each a forgetfulness, each a symbol of
creation; religion being the creation of a new heaven, passion the
creation of a new earth, and art, in its mingling of heaven and
earth, the creation of heaven out of earth. Each is a kind of sublime
selfishness, the saint, the lover, and the artist having each an
incommunicable ecstasy which he esteems as his ultimate attainment,
however, in his lower moments, he may serve God in action, or do the
will of his mistress, or minister to men by showing them a little
beauty. But it is, before all things, an escape: and the prophets
who have redeemed the world, and the artists who have made the world
beautiful, and the lovers who have quickened the pulses of the world,
have really, whether they knew it or not, been fleeing from the
certainty of one thought: that we have, all of us, only our one day;
and from the dread of that other thought: that the day, however used,
must after all be wasted.
The fear of death is not cowardice; it is, rather, an intellectual
dissatisfaction with an enigma which has been presented to us, and
which can be solved only when its solution is of no further use. All
we have to ask of death is the meaning of life, and we are waiting
all through life to ask that question. That life should be happy or
unhappy, as those words are used, means so very little; and the
heightening or lessening of the general felicity of the world means
so little to any individual. There is something almost vulgar in
happiness which does not become joy, and joy is an ecstasy which can
rarely be maintained in the soul for more than the moment during which
we recognize that it is not sorrow. Only very young people want to be
happy. What we all want is to be quite sure that there is something
which makes it worth while to go on living, in what seems to us our
best way, at our finest intensity; something beyond the mere fact that
we are satisfying a sort of inner logic (which may be quite faulty)
and that we get our best makeshift for happiness on that so hazardous
assumption.
Well, the doctrine of Mysticism, with which all this symbolical
literature has so much to do, of which it is all so much the
expression, presents us, not with a guide for conduct, not with a plan
for our happiness, not with an explanation of any mystery, but with a
theory of life which makes us familiar with mystery, and which seems to
harmonise those instincts which make for religion, passion, and art,
freeing us at once of a great bondage. The final uncertainty remains,
but we seem to knock less helplessly at closed doors, coming so much
closer to the once terrifying eternity of things about us, as we come
to look upon these things as shadows, through which we have our shadowy
passage. "For in the particular acts of human life," Plotinus tells us,
"it is not the interior soul and the true man, but the exterior shadow
of the man alone, which laments and weeps, performing his part on the
earth as in a more ample and extended scene, in which many shadows
of souls and phantom scenes appear." And as we realise the identity
of a poem, a prayer, or a kiss, in that spiritual universe which we
are weaving for ourselves, each out of a thread of the great fabric;
as we realise the infinite insignificance of action, its immense
distance from the current of life; as we realise the delight of feeling
ourselves carried onward by forces which it is our wisdom to obey; it
is at least with a certain relief that we turn to an ancient doctrine,
so much the more likely to be true because it has so much the air of
a dream. On this theory alone does all life become worth living, all
art worth making, all worship worth offering. And because it might
slay as well as save, because the freedom of its sweet captivity might
so easily become deadly to the fool, because that is the hardest path
to walk in where you are told only, walk well; it is perhaps the only
counsel of perfection which can ever really mean much to the artist.