'The hidden but the common thought of all.'
The thoughts I am about to set down are not _my_ thoughts, for, as my
friends say, I have given up the practice of thinking, or it may be, as
my enemies say, I never had it. They are the thoughts of an
acquaintance who thinks for me. I call him an acquaintance, though I
pass as much of my time with him as with my nearest and dearest;
perhaps at the club, perhaps at the office, perhaps in metaphysical
discussion, perhaps at billiards—what does it matter? Thousands of men
in town have such acquaintances, in whose company they spend, by
necessity or custom, half the sum of their lives. It is not rational,
doubtless; but then 'Consider, sir,' said the great talking
philosopher, 'should we become purely rational, how our friendships
would be cut off. We form many such with bad men because they have
agreeable qualities, or may be useful to us. We form many such by
mistake, imagining people to be different from what they really are.'
And he goes on complacently to observe that we shall either have the
satisfaction of meeting these gentlemen in a future state, or be
satisfied without meeting them.
For my part, I do not feel that the scheme of future happiness, which
ought by rights to be in preparation for me, will be at all interfered
with by my not meeting again the man I have in my. mind. To have seen
him in the flesh is sufficient for me. In the spirit I cannot imagine
him; the consideration is too subtle; for, unlike the little man who
had (for certain) a little soul,' I don't believe he has a soul at all.
He is middle-aged, rich, lethargic, sententious, dogmatic, and, in
short, the quintessence of the commonplace. I need not say, therefore,
that he is credited by the world with unlimited common-sense. And for
once the world is right. He has nothing-original about him, save so
much of sin as he may have inherited from our first parents; there is
no more at the back of him than at the back of a looking-glass—indeed
less, for he has not a grain of quicksilver; but, like the
looking-glass, he reflects. Having nothing else to do, he hangs, as it
were, on the wall of the world, and mirrors it for me as it
unconsciously passes by him—not, however, as in a glass darkly, but
with singular clearness. His vision is never disturbed by passion or
prejudice; he has no enthusiasm and no illusions. Nor do I believe he
has ever had any. If the noblest study of mankind is man, my friend has
devoted himself to a high calling; the living page of human life has
been his favourite and indeed, for these many years, his only reading.
And for this he has had exceptional opportunities. Always a man of
wealth and leisure, he has never wasted himself in that superficial
observation which is often the only harvest of foreign travel. He
despises it, and in relation to travellers, is wont to quote the famous
parallel of the copper wire, 'which grows the narrower by going
further.' A confirmed stay-at-home, he has mingled much in society of
all sorts, and exercised a keen but quite unsympathetic observation.
His very reserve in company (though, when he catches you alone, he is a
button-holder of great tenacity) encourages free speech in others; they
have no more reticence in his presence than if he were the butler. He
has belonged to no cliques, and thereby escaped the greatest peril
which can beset the student of human nature. A man of genius, indeed,
in these days is almost certain, sooner or later, to become the centre
of a mutual admiration society; but the person I have in my mind is no
genius, nor anything like one, and he thanks Heaven for it. To an
opinion of his own he does not pretend, but his views upon the opinions
of other people he believes to be infallible. I have called him
dogmatic, but that does not at all express the absolute certainty with
which he delivers judgment. 'I know no more,' he says, 'about the
problems of human life than you do' (taking me as an illustration of
the lowest prevailing ignorance), 'but I know what everybody is
thinking about them.' He is didactic, and therefore often dull, and
will eventually, no doubt, become one of the greatest bores in Great
Britain. At present, however, he is worth knowing; and I propose to
myself to be his Boswell, and to introduce him—or, at least, his
views—to other people. I have entitled them the Midway Inn, partly from
my own inveterate habit of story-telling, but chiefly from an image of
his own, by which he once described to me, in his fine egotistic
rolling style, the position he seemed to himself to occupy in the
world.
When I was a boy, he said (which I don't believe he ever was), I had a
long journey to take between home and school. Exactly midway there was
a hill with an Inn upon it, at which we changed horses. It was a point
to which I looked forward with very different feelings when going and
returning. In the one case—for I hated school—it seemed to frown darkly
on me, and from that spot the remainder of the way was dull and gloomy;
in the other case, the sun seemed always glinting on it, and the rest
of the road was as a fair avenue that leads to Paradise. The innkeeper
received us with equal hospitality on both occasions, and it was quite
evident did not care one farthing in which direction we were tending.
He would stand in front of his house, jingling his money—_our_ money—in
his pockets, and watch us depart with the greatest serenity, whether we
went east or west. I thought him at one time the most genial of
Bonifaces (for it was his profession to wear a smile), and at another a
mere mocker of human woe. When I grew up, I perceived that he was a
philosopher.
And now I keep the Midway Inn myself, and watch from the hill-top the
passengers come and go—some loth, some willing, like myself of old—and
listen to their talk in the coffee-room; or sometimes in a private
parlour, where, though they speak low and gravely, their converse is
still unrestrained, because, you see, I am the landlord.
Sometimes they speak of Death and the Hereafter, of which the child
they buried yesterday knows more than the wisest of them, and more than
Shakespeare knew. The being totally ignorant of the subject does not
indeed (as you may perhaps have observed in other matters) deter some
of them from speaking of it with great confidence; but the views of a
minority would quite surprise you, and this minority is growing—coming
to a majority. Every day I see an increase of the doubters. It is not a
question of the Orthodox and the Infidel, you must understand, at all,
though _that_ is assuming great proportions; but there is every day
more uncertainty among them, and, what is much more noteworthy, more
dissatisfaction.
Years ago, when a hardy Cambridge scholar dared to publish his doubts
of an eternal punishment overtaking the wicked, an orthodox professor
of the same college took him (theologically) by the throat. 'You are
destroying,' he cried, 'the hope of the Christian.' But this is not the
hope I speak of, as loosing, and losing, its hold upon men's minds; I
mean the real hope, the hope of heaven.
When I used to go to church—for my inn is too far removed from it to
admit of my attendance there nowadays—matters were very different.
Heaven and Hell were, in the eyes not only of our congregation, but of
those who hung about the doors in the summer sun, or even played
leap-frog over the grave-stones, as distinct alternatives as the east
and west highways on each side of my inn. If you did not go one way,
you must go the other; and not only so, but an immense desire was felt
by very many to go in the right direction. Now I perceive it is not so.
A considerable number of highway passengers, though even they are less
numerous than of old, are still studious—that is in their
aspirations—to avoid taking (shall I say delicately) the lower road;
but only a few, comparatively, are solicitous to reach the goal of the
upper.
Let me once more observe that I am speaking of the ordinary
passengers—those who travel by the mail. Of the persons who are
convinced that there never was an Architect of the Universe, and that
Man sprang from the Mollusc, I know little or nothing: they mostly
travel two and two, in gigs, and have quarrelled so dreadfully on the
way, that, at the Inn, they don't speak to one another. The commonalty,
I repeat, are losing their hopes of heaven, just as the grown-up
schoolboy finds his paradise no more in home. I can remember when
divines were never tired of painting the lily, of indulging in the most
glowing descriptions of the Elysian Fields. A popular artist once drew
a picture of them: 'The Plains of Heaven' it was called, and the
painter's name was Martin. If he was to do so now, the public (who are
vulgar) would exclaim 'Betty Martin.' Not that they disbelieve in it,
but that the attractions of the place are dying out, like those of Bath
and Cheltenham.
Of course some blame attaches to the divines themselves that things
have come to such a pass. 'I protest,' says a great philosopher, 'that
I never enter a church, but the man in the pulpit talks so unlike a
man, as though he had never known what human joys or sorrows are—so
carefully avoids every subject of interest save _one_, and paints that
in colours at once so misty and so meretricious—that I say to myself, I
will never sit under him again.' This may, of course, be only an
ingenious excuse of his for not going to church; but there is really
something in it. The angels, with their harps, on clouds, are now
presented to the eyes, even of faith, in vain; they are still
appreciated on canvas by an old master, but to become one of them is no
longer the common aspiration. There is a suspicion, partly owing,
doubtless, to the modern talk about the dignity and even the divinity
of Labour, that they ought to be doing something else than (as the
American poet puts it with characteristic ii reverence) 'loafing about
the throne;' that we ourselves, with no ear perhaps for music, and with
little voice (alas!) for praise, should take no pleasure in such
avocations. It is not the sceptics—though their influence is getting to
be considerable—who have wrought this change, but the conditions of
modern life. Notwithstanding the cheerful 'returns' as to pauperism,
and the glowing speeches of our Chancellors of the Exchequer, these
conditions are far harder, among the thinking classes, than they were.
The question 'Is Life worth Living?' is one that concerns philosophers
and metaphysicians, and not the persons I have in my mind at all; but
the question, 'Do I wish to be out of it?' is one that is getting
answered very widely—and in the affirmative. This was certainly not the
case in the days of our grand-sires. Which of them ever read those
lines—
'For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?'—
without a sympathetic complacency? This may not have been the best of
all possible worlds to them, but none of them wished to exchange it,
save at the proper time, and for the proper place. Thanks to overwork,
and still more to over-worry, it is not so now. There are many
prosperous persons in rude health, of course, who will ask (with a
virtuous resolution that is sometimes to be deplored), 'Do you suppose
then that I wish to cut my throat?' I certainly do not. Do not let us
talk of cutting throats; though, mind you, the average of suicides, so
admirably preserved by the Registrar-General and other painstaking
persons, is not entirely to be depended upon. You should hear the
doctors at my Inn (in the intervals of their abuse of their
professional brethren) discourse upon this topic—on that overdose of
chloral which poor B. took, and on that injudicious self-application of
chloroform which carried off poor C. With the law in such a barbarous
state in relation to self-destruction, and taking into account the
feelings of relatives, there was, of course, only one way of wording
the certificate, but—and then they shake their heads as only doctors
can, and help themselves to port, though they know it is poison to
them.
It is an old joke that annuitants live for ever, but no annuity ever
had the effect of prolonging life which the present assurance companies
have. How many a time, I wonder, in these later years, has a hand been
stayed, with a pistol or 'a cup of cold poison' in it, by the thought,
'If I do this, my family will lose the money I am insured for, besides
the premiums.' This feeling is altogether different from that which
causes Jeannette and Jeannot in their Paris attic to light their
charcoal fire, stop up the chinks with their love-letters, and die
(very disreputably) 'clasped in one another's arms, and silent in a
last embrace.' There is not one halfpenny's worth of sentiment about it
in the Englishman's case, nor are any such thoughts bred in his brain
while youth is in him. It is in our midway days, with old age touching
us here and there, as autumn 'lays its fiery finger on the leaves' and
withers them, that we first think of it. When the weight of anxiety and
care is growing on us, while the shoulders are becoming bowed (not in
resignation, but in weakness) which have to bear it; when our pains are
more and more constant, our pleasures few and fading, and when whatever
happens, we know, must needs be for the worse—then it is that the
praise of the silver hair and length of days becomes a mockery indeed.
Was it the prescience of such a state of thought, I wonder (for it
certainly did not exist in their time), that caused good men of old to
extol old age; as though anything could reconcile the mind of man to
the time when the very sun is darkened to him, and 'the clouds return
after the rain?' There is a noble passage in 'Hyperion' which has
always seemed to me to repeat that sentiment in Ecclesiastes; it speaks
of an expression in a man's face:
'As though the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its storied thunder labouring up.'
This is why poor Paterfamilias, sitting in the family pew, is not so
enamoured of that idea of accomplishing those threescore years and ten
which the young parson, fresh from Cambridge, is describing as such a
lucky number in life's lottery. The attempt to paint it so is
well-meaning, no doubt, 'the vacant chaff well meant for grain;' and it
is touching to see how men generally (knowing that they themselves have
to go through with it) are wont to portray it in cheerful colours.
A modern philosopher even goes so far as to say that our memories in
old age are always grateful to us. Our pleasures are remembered, but
our pains are forgotten; 'if we try to recall a physical pain,' she
writes (for it is a female), 'we find it to be impossible,' From which
I gather only this for certain, that that woman never had the gout.
The folks who come my way, indeed, seem to remember their physical
ailments very distinctly, to judge by the way they talk of them; and
are exceedingly apprehensive of their recurrence. Nay, it is curious to
see how some old men will resent the compliments of their juniors on
their state of health or appearance. 'Stuff and nonsense!' cried old
Sam Rogers, grimly; 'I tell you there is no such thing as a fine old
man.' In a humbler walk of life I remember to have heard a similar but
more touching reply. It was upon the great centenarian question raised
by Mr. Thorns. An old woman in a workhouse, said to be a hundred years
of age, was sent for by the Board of Guardians, to decide the point by
her personal testimony. One can imagine the half-dozen portly
prosperous figures, and the contrast their appearance offered to that
of the bent and withered crone. 'Now, Betty,' said the chairman with
unctuous patronage, 'you look hale and hearty enough, yet they tell me
that you are a hundred years old; is this really true?' 'God Almighty
knows, sir,' was her reply, 'but I feel a thousand.'