I have been asked to speak on the question how to make the best of life,
but may as well confess at once that I know nothing about it. I cannot
think that I have made the best of my own life, nor is it likely that I
shall make much better of what may or may not remain to me. I do not
even know how to make the best of the twenty minutes that your committee
has placed at my disposal, and as for life as a whole, who ever yet made
the best of such a colossal opportunity by conscious effort and
deliberation? In little things no doubt deliberate and conscious effort
will help us, but we are speaking of large issues, and such kingdoms of
heaven as the making the best of these come not by observation.
The question, therefore, on which I have undertaken to address you is, as
you must all know, fatuous, if it be faced seriously. Life is like
playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes
on. One cannot make the best of such impossibilities, and the question
is doubly fatuous until we are told which of our two lives--the conscious
or the unconscious--is held by the asker to be the truer life. Which
does the question contemplate--the life we know, or the life which others
may know, but which we know not?
Death gives a life to some men and women compared with which their so-
called existence here is as nothing. Which is the truer life of
Shakespeare, Handel, that divine woman who wrote the "Odyssey," and of
Jane Austen--the life which palpitated with sensible warm motion within
their own bodies, or that in virtue of which they are still palpitating
in ours? In whose consciousness does their truest life consist--their
own, or ours? Can Shakespeare be said to have begun his true life till a
hundred years or so after he was dead and buried? His physical life was
but as an embryonic stage, a coming up out of darkness, a twilight and
dawn before the sunrise of that life of the world to come which he was to
enjoy hereafter. We all live for a while after we are gone hence, but we
are for the most part stillborn, or at any rate die in infancy, as
regards that life which every age and country has recognised as higher
and truer than the one of which we are now sentient. As the life of the
race is larger, longer, and in all respects more to be considered than
that of the individual, so is the life we live in others larger and more
important than the one we live in ourselves. This appears nowhere
perhaps more plainly than in the case of great teachers, who often in the
lives of their pupils produce an effect that reaches far beyond anything
produced while their single lives were yet unsupplemented by those other
lives into which they infused their own.
Death to such people is the ending of a short life, but it does not touch
the life they are already living in those whom they have taught; and
happily, as none can know when he shall die, so none can make sure that
he too shall not live long beyond the grave; for the life after death is
like money before it--no one can be sure that it may not fall to him or
her even at the eleventh hour. Money and immortality come in such odd
unaccountable ways that no one is cut off from hope. We may not have
made either of them for ourselves, but yet another may give them to us in
virtue of his or her love, which shall illumine us for ever, and
establish us in some heavenly mansion whereof we neither dreamed nor
shall ever dream. Look at the Doge Loredano Loredani, the old man's
smile upon whose face has been reproduced so faithfully in so many lands
that it can never henceforth be forgotten--would he have had one
hundredth part of the life he now lives had he not been linked awhile
with one of those heaven-sent men who know _che cosa e amor_? Look at
Rembrandt's old woman in our National Gallery; had she died before she
was eighty-three years old she would not have been living now. Then,
when she was eighty-three, immortality perched upon her as a bird on a
withered bough.
I seem to hear some one say that this is a mockery, a piece of special
pleading, a giving of stones to those that ask for bread. Life is not
life unless we can feel it, and a life limited to a knowledge of such
fraction of our work as may happen to survive us is no true life in other
people; salve it as we may, death is not life any more than black is
white.
The objection is not so true as it sounds. I do not deny that we had
rather not die, nor do I pretend that much even in the case of the most
favoured few can survive them beyond the grave. It is only because this
is so that our own life is possible; others have made room for us, and we
should make room for others in our turn without undue repining. What I
maintain is that a not inconsiderable number of people do actually attain
to a life beyond the grave which we can all feel forcibly enough, whether
they can do so or not--that this life tends with increasing civilisation
to become more and more potent, and that it is better worth considering,
in spite of its being unfelt by ourselves, than any which we have felt or
can ever feel in our own persons.
Take an extreme case. A group of people are photographed by Edison's new
process--say Titiens, Trebelli, and Jenny Lind, with any two of the
finest men singers the age has known--let them be photographed
incessantly for half an hour while they perform a scene in "Lohengrin";
let all be done stereoscopically. Let them be phonographed at the same
time so that their minutest shades of intonation are preserved, let the
slides be coloured by a competent artist, and then let the scene be
called suddenly into sight and sound, say a hundred years hence. Are
those people dead or alive? Dead to themselves they are, but while they
live so powerfully and so livingly in us, which is the greater paradox--to
say that they are alive or that they are dead? To myself it seems that
their life in others would be more truly life than their death to
themselves is death. Granted that they do not present all the phenomena
of life--who ever does so even when he is held to be alive? We are held
to be alive because we present a sufficient number of living phenomena to
let the others go without saying; those who see us take the part for the
whole here as in everything else, and surely, in the case supposed above,
the phenomena of life predominate so powerfully over those of death, that
the people themselves must be held to be more alive than dead. Our
living personality is, as the word implies, only our mask, and those who
still own such a mask as I have supposed have a living personality.
Granted again that the case just put is an extreme one; still many a man
and many a woman has so stamped him or herself on his work that, though
we would gladly have the aid of such accessories as we doubtless
presently shall have to the livingness of our great dead, we can see them
very sufficiently through the master pieces they have left us.
As for their own unconsciousness I do not deny it. The life of the
embryo was unconscious before birth, and so is the life--I am speaking
only of the life revealed to us by natural religion--after death. But as
the embryonic and infant life of which we were unconscious was the most
potent factor in our after life of consciousness, so the effect which we
may unconsciously produce in others after death, and it may be even
before it on those who have never seen us, is in all sober seriousness
our truer and more abiding life, and the one which those who would make
the best of their sojourn here will take most into their consideration.
Unconsciousness is no bar to livingness. Our conscious actions are a
drop in the sea as compared with our unconscious ones. Could we know all
the life that is in us by way of circulation, nutrition, breathing, waste
and repair, we should learn what an infinitesimally small part
consciousness plays in our present existence; yet our unconscious life is
as truly life as our conscious life, and though it is unconscious to
itself it emerges into an indirect and vicarious consciousness in our
other and conscious self, which exists but in virtue of our unconscious
self. So we have also a vicarious consciousness in others. The
unconscious life of those that have gone before us has in great part
moulded us into such men and women as we are, and our own unconscious
lives will in like manner have a vicarious consciousness in others,
though we be dead enough to it in ourselves.
If it is again urged that it matters not to us how much we may be alive
in others, if we are to know nothing about it, I reply that the common
instinct of all who are worth considering gives the lie to such cynicism.
I see here present some who have achieved, and others who no doubt will
achieve, success in literature. Will one of them hesitate to admit that
it is a lively pleasure to her to feel that on the other side of the
world some one may be smiling happily over her work, and that she is thus
living in that person though she knows nothing about it? Here it seems
to me that true faith comes in. Faith does not consist, as the Sunday
School pupil said, "in the power of believing that which we know to be
untrue." It consists in holding fast that which the healthiest and most
kindly instincts of the best and most sensible men and women are
intuitively possessed of, without caring to require much evidence further
than the fact that such people are so convinced; and for my own part I
find the best men and women I know unanimous in feeling that life in
others, even though we know nothing about it, is nevertheless a thing to
be desired and gratefully accepted if we can get it either before death
or after. I observe also that a large number of men and women do
actually attain to such life, and in some cases continue so to live, if
not for ever, yet to what is practically much the same thing. Our life
then in this world is, to natural religion as much as to revealed, a
period of probation. The use we make of it is to settle how far we are
to enter into another, and whether that other is to be a heaven of just
affection or a hell of righteous condemnation.
Who, then, are the most likely so to run that they may obtain this
veritable prize of our high calling? Setting aside such lucky numbers
drawn as it were in the lottery of immortality, which I have referred to
casually above, and setting aside also the chances and changes from which
even immortality is not exempt, who on the whole are most likely to live
anew in the affectionate thoughts of those who never so much as saw them
in the flesh, and know not even their names? There is a _nisus_, a
straining in the dull dumb economy of things, in virtue of which some,
whether they will it and know it or no, are more likely to live after
death than others, and who are these? Those who aimed at it as by some
great thing that they would do to make them famous? Those who have lived
most in themselves and for themselves, or those who have been most
ensouled consciously, but perhaps better unconsciously, directly but more
often indirectly, by the most living souls past and present that have
flitted near them? Can we think of a man or woman who grips us firmly,
at the thought of whom we kindle when we are alone in our honest daw's
plumes, with none to admire or shrug his shoulders, can we think of one
such, the secret of whose power does not lie in the charm of his or her
personality--that is to say, in the wideness of his or her sympathy with,
and therefore life in and communion with other people? In the wreckage
that comes ashore from the sea of time there is much tinsel stuff that we
must preserve and study if we would know our own times and people;
granted that many a dead charlatan lives long and enters largely and
necessarily into our own lives; we use them and throw them away when we
have done with them. I do not speak of these, I do not speak of the
Virgils and Alexander Popes, and who can say how many more whose names I
dare not mention for fear of offending. They are as stuffed birds or
beasts in a Museum, serviceable no doubt from a scientific standpoint,
but with no vivid or vivifying hold upon us. They seem to be alive, but
are not. I am speaking of those who do actually live in us, and move us
to higher achievements though they be long dead, whose life thrusts out
our own and overrides it. I speak of those who draw us ever more towards
them from youth to age, and to think of whom is to feel at once that we
are in the hands of those we love, and whom we would most wish to
resemble. What is the secret of the hold that these people have upon us?
Is it not that while, conventionally speaking, alive, they most merged
their lives in, and were in fullest communion with those among whom they
lived? They found their lives in losing them. We never love the memory
of any one unless we feel that he or she was himself or herself a lover.
I have seen it urged, again, in querulous accents, that the so-called
immortality even of the most immortal is not for ever. I see a passage
to this effect in a book that is making a stir as I write. I will quote
it. The writer says:--
"So, it seems to me, is the immortality we so glibly predicate of
departed artists. If they survive at all, it is but a shadowy life
they live, moving on through the gradations of slow decay to distant
but inevitable death. They can no longer, as heretofore, speak
directly to the hearts of their fellow-men, evoking their tears or
laughter, and all the pleasures, be they sad or merry, of which
imagination holds the secret. Driven from the marketplace they become
first the companions of the student, then the victims of the
specialist. He who would still hold familiar intercourse with them
must train himself to penetrate the veil which in ever-thickening
folds conceals them from the ordinary gaze; he must catch the tone of
a vanished society, he must move in a circle of alien associations, he
must think in a language not his own." {5}
This is crying for the moon, or rather pretending to cry for it, for the
writer is obviously insincere. I see the _Saturday Review_ says the
passage I have just quoted "reaches almost to poetry," and indeed I find
many blank verses in it, some of them very aggressive. No prose is free
from an occasional blank verse, and a good writer will not go hunting
over his work to rout them out, but nine or ten in little more than as
many lines is indeed reaching too near to poetry for good prose. This,
however, is a trifle, and might pass if the tone of the writer was not so
obviously that of cheap pessimism. I know not which is cheapest,
pessimism or optimism. One forces lights, the other darks; both are
equally untrue to good art, and equally sure of their effect with the
groundlings. The one extenuates, the other sets down in malice. The
first is the more amiable lie, but both are lies, and are known to be so
by those who utter them. Talk about catching the tone of a vanished
society to understand Rembrandt or Giovanni Bellini! It's nonsense--the
folds do not thicken in front of these men; we understand them as well as
those among whom they went about in the flesh, and perhaps better. Homer
and Shakespeare speak to us probably far more effectually than they did
to the men of their own time, and most likely we have them at their best.
I cannot think that Shakespeare talked better than we hear him now in
"Hamlet" or "Henry the Fourth"; like enough he would have been found a
very disappointing person in a drawing-room. People stamp themselves on
their work; if they have not done so they are naught; if they have we
have them; and for the most part they stamp themselves deeper in their
work than on their talk. No doubt Shakespeare and Handel will be one day
clean forgotten, as though they had never been born. The world will in
the end die; mortality therefore itself is not immortal, and when death
dies the life of these men will die with it--but not sooner. It is
enough that they should live within us and move us for many ages as they
have and will. Such immortality, therefore, as some men and women are
born to, achieve, or have thrust upon them, is a practical if not a
technical immortality, and he who would have more let him have nothing.
I see I have drifted into speaking rather of how to make the best of
death than of life, but who can speak of life without his thoughts
turning instantly to that which is beyond it? He or she who has made the
best of the life after death has made the best of the life before it; who
cares one straw for any such chances and changes as will commonly befall
him here if he is upheld by the full and certain hope of everlasting life
in the affections of those that shall come after? If the life after
death is happy in the hearts of others, it matters little how unhappy was
the life before it.
And now I leave my subject, not without misgiving that I shall have
disappointed you. But for the great attention which is being paid to the
work from which I have quoted above, I should not have thought it well to
insist on points with which you are, I doubt not, as fully impressed as I
am: but that book weakens the sanctions of natural religion, and
minimises the comfort which it affords us, while it does more to
undermine than to support the foundations of what is commonly called
belief. Therefore I was glad to embrace this opportunity of protesting.
Otherwise I should not have been so serious on a matter that transcends
all seriousness. Lord Beaconsfield cut it shorter with more effect. When
asked to give a rule of life for the son of a friend he said, "Do not let
him try and find out who wrote the letters of Junius." Pressed for
further counsel he added, "Nor yet who was the man in the iron mask"--and
he would say no more. Don't bore people. And yet I am by no means sure
that a good many people do not think themselves ill-used unless he who
addresses them has thoroughly well bored them--especially if they have
paid any money for hearing him. My great namesake said, "Surely the
pleasure is as great of being cheated as to cheat," and great as the
pleasure both of cheating and boring undoubtedly is, I believe he was
right. So I remember a poem which came out some thirty years ago in
_Punch_, about a young lady who went forth in quest to "Some burden make
or burden bear, but which she did not greatly care, oh Miserie." So,
again, all the holy men and women who in the Middle Ages professed to
have discovered how to make the best of life took care that being bored,
if not cheated, should have a large place in their programme. Still
there are limits, and I close not without fear that I may have exceeded
them.