and whose whole life has been not spoiled, of course, but a little
shadowed by the thought that the elements of happiness have never been
quite as pure as it would have wished, turns back in thought to the
old scenes of love and companionship, and evokes from the dark, as
from the pages of some volume of photographs and records, the pictures
of the past, retouching them, it is true, and adapting them, by deftly
removing all the broken lights and intrusive anxieties, not into what
they actually were, but into what they might have been. Carlyle laid
his finger upon the truth of this power, when he said that the reason
why the pictures of the past were always so golden in tone, so
delicate in outline, was because the quality of fear was taken from
them. It is the fear of what may be and what must be that overshadows
present happiness; and if fear is taken from us we are happy. The
strange thing is that we cannot learn not to be afraid, even though
all the darkest and saddest of our experiences have left us unscathed;
and if we could but find a reason for the mingling of fear with our
lives, we should have gone far towards solving the riddle of the
world.
This indulgence of memory is not necessarily a weakening or an
enervating thing, so long as it does not come to us too early, or
disengage us from needful activities. It is often not accompanied by
any shadow of loss or bitterness. I remember once sitting with my
beloved old nurse, when she was near her ninetieth year, in her little
room, in which was gathered much of the old nursery furniture, the
tiny chairs of the children, the store-cupboard with the farmyard
pictures on the panel, the stuffed pet-birds--all the homely wrack of
life; and we had been recalling many of the old childish incidents
with laughter and smiles. When I rose to go, she sate still for a
minute, and her eyes filled with quiet tears, "Ah, those were happy
days!" she said. But there was no repining about it, no sense that it
was better to forget old joys--rather a quiet pleasure that so much
that was beautiful and tender was laid away in memory, and could
neither be altered nor taken away. And one does not find in old
people, whose memory of the past is clear, while their recollection of
the present grows dim, any sense of pathos, but rather of pride and
eagerness about recalling the minutest details of the vanished days.
To feel the pathos of the past, as Tennyson expressed it in that
wonderful and moving lyric, _Tears, idle tears_, is much more
characteristic of youth. There is rather in serene old age a sense of
pleasant triumph at having safely weathered the storms of fate, and
left the tragedies of life behind. The aged would not as a rule live
life over again, if they could. They are not disappointed in life.
They have had, on the whole, what they hoped and desired. As Goethe
said, in that deep and large maxim, "Of that which a man desires in
his youth, he shall have enough in his age." That is one of the most
singular things in life--at least this is my experience--how the
things which one really desired, not the things which one ought to
have desired, are showered upon one. I have been amazed and even
stupefied sometimes to consider how my own little petty, foolish,
whimsical desires have been faithfully and literally granted me. We
most of us do really translate into fact what we desire, and as a rule
we only fail to get the things which we have not desired enough. It is
true indeed that we often find that what we desired was not worth
getting; and we ought to be more afraid of our desires, not because we
shall not get them, but because we shall almost certainly have them
fulfilled. For myself I can only think with shame how closely my
present conditions do resemble my young desires, in all their petty
range, their trivial particularity. I suppose I have unconsciously
pursued them, chosen them, grasped at them; and the shame of it is
that if I had desired better things, I should assuredly have been
given them. I see, or seem to see, the same thing in the lives of many
that I know. What a man sows he shall reap! That is taken generally to
mean that if he sows pleasure, he shall reap disaster; but it has a
much truer and more terrible meaning than that--namely, that if a man
sows the seed of small, trivial, foolish joys, the grain that he
reaps is small, trivial, and foolish too. God is indeed in many ways
an indulgent Father, like the Father in the parable of the Prodigal
Son; and the best rebuke that He gives, if we have the wisdom to see
it, is that He so often does hand us, with a smile, the very thing we
have desired. And thus it is well to pray that He should put into our
minds good desires, and that we should use our wills to keep ourselves
from dwelling too much upon small and pitiful desires, for the fear is
that they will be abundantly gratified.
And thus when the time comes for recollection, it is a very wonderful
thing to look back over life, and see how eagerly gracious God has
been to us. He knows very well that we cannot learn the paltry value
of the things we desire, if they are withheld from us, but only if
they are granted to us; and thus we have no reason to doubt His
fatherly intention, because He does so much dispose life to please us.
And we need not take it for granted that He will lead us by harsh and
provocative discipline, though when He grants our desire, He sometimes
sends leanness withal into our soul. Yet one of the things that
strikes one most forcibly, as one grows older and learns something of
the secrets of other lives, is how lightly and serenely men and women
do often bear what might seem to be intolerable calamities. How
universal an experience it is to find that when the expected calamity
does come, it is an easier affair than we thought it, so that we say
under the blow, "Is that really all?" In that wonderful book, the
Diary of Sir Walter Scott, when his bankruptcy fell upon him, and all
the schemes and designs that he had been carrying out, with the joyful
zest of a child--his toy-castle, his feudal circle, his wide
estate--were suddenly suspended, he wrote with an almost amused
surprise that he found how little he really cared, and that the people
who spoke tenderly and sympathetically to him, as though he must be
reeling under the catastrophe, would themselves be amazed to find that
he found himself as cheerful and undaunted as ever. Life is apt, for
all vivid people, to be a species of high-hearted game: it is such fun
to play it as eagerly as one can, and to persuade oneself that one
really cares about the applause, the money, the fine house, the
comforts, the deference, the convenience of it all. And yet, if there
is anything noble in a man or woman, when the game is suddenly
interrupted and the toys swept aside, they find that there is
something exciting and stimulating in having to do without, in
adapting themselves with zest to the new conditions. It was a good
game enough, but the new game is better! The failure is to take it all
heavily and seriously, to be solemn about it; for then failure is
disconcerting indeed. But if one is interested in experience, but yet
has the vitality to see how detached one really is from material
things, how little they really affect us, then the change is almost
grateful. It is the spirit of the game, the activity, the energy, that
delights us, not the particular toy. And so the looking back on life
ought never to be a mournful thing; it ought to be light-hearted,
high-spirited, amusing. The spirit survives, and there is yet much
experience ahead of us. We waste our sense of pathos very strangely
over inanimate things. We get to feel about the things that surround
us, our houses, our very chairs and tables, as if they were somehow
things that were actually attached to us. We feel, when the old house
that has belonged to our family passes into other hands, as though
the rooms resented the intruders; as though our sofas and cabinets
could not be at ease in other hands, as if they would almost prefer
shabby and dusty inaction in our own lumber-room, to cheerful use in
some other circle. This is a delusion of which we must make haste to
get rid. It is the weakest sort of sentiment, and yet it is treasured
by many natures as if it were something refined and noble. To yield to
it, is to fetter our life with self-imposed and fantastic chains.
There is no sort of reason why we should not love to live among
familiar things; but to break our hearts over the loss of them is a
real debasing of ourselves. We must learn to use the things of life
very lightly and detachedly; and to entrench ourselves in trivial
associations is simply to court dreariness and to fall into a stupor
of the spirit.
And thus even our old memories must be treated with the same lightness
and unaffectedness. We must do all we can to forget grief and
disaster. We must not consecrate a shrine to sorrow and make the
votive altar, as Dido did, into a _causa doloris_, an excuse for
lamentation. We must not think it an honourable and chivalrous and
noble thing to spend our time in broken-hearted solemnity in the
vaults of perished joys. Or if we do it, we must frankly confess it to
be a weakness and a languor of spirit, not believe it to be a thing
which others ought to admire and respect. It was one of the base
sentimentalities of the last century, a real sign of the decadence of
life, that people felt it to be a fine thing to cherish grief, and to
live resolutely with sighs and tears. The helpless widow of
nineteenth-century fiction, shrouded in crape, and bursting into tears
at the smallest sign of gaiety, was a wholly unlovely, affected,
dramatic affair. And one of the surest signs of our present vitality
is that this attitude has become not only unusual, but frankly absurd
and unfashionable. There is an intense and gallant pathos about a
nature broken by sorrow, making desperate attempts to be cheerful and
active, and not to cast a shadow of grief upon others. There is no
pathos at all in the sight of a person bent on emphasising his or her
grief, on using it to make others uncomfortable, on extracting a
recognition of its loyalty and fidelity and emotional fervour.
Of course there are some memories and experiences that must grave a
deep and terrible mark upon the heart, the shock of which has been so
severe, that the current of life must necessarily be altered by them.
But even then it is better as far as possible to forget them and to
put them away from us--at all events, not to indulge them or dwell in
them. To yield is simply to delay the pilgrimage, to fall exhausted in
some unhappy arbour by the road. The road has to be travelled, every
inch of it, and it is better to struggle on in feebleness than to
collapse in despair.
Mrs. Charles Kingsley, in her widowhood, once said to a friend,
"Whenever I find myself thinking too much about Charles, I simply
force myself to read the most exciting novel I can. He is there, he is
waiting for me; and hearts were made to love with, not to break."
And as the years go on, even the most terrible memories grow to have
the grace and beauty which nature lavishes on all the relics of
extinct forces and spent agonies. They become like the old grey broken
castle, with the grasses on its ledges, and the crows nesting in its
parapets, rising blind and dumb on its green mound, with the hamlet
at its feet; or like the craggy islet, severed by the raging sea from
the towering headland, where the samphire sprouts in the rift, and the
sea-birds roost, at whose foot the surges lap, and over whose head the
landward wind blows swiftly all the day.
XIII
RETROSPECT
But one must not forget that after all memory has another side, too
often a rueful side, and that it often seems to turn sour and
poisonous in the sharp decline of fading life; and this ought not to
be. I would like to describe a little experience of my own which came
to me as a surprise, but showed me clearly enough what memory can be
and what it rightly is, if it is to feed the spirit at all.
Not very long ago I visited Lincoln, where my father was Canon and
Chancellor from 1872 to 1877. I had only been there once since then,
and that was twenty-four years ago. When we lived there I was a small
Eton boy, so that it was always holiday time there, and a place which
recalls nothing but school holidays has perhaps an unfair advantage.
Moreover it was a period quite unaccompanied, in our family life, by
any sort of trouble, illness, or calamity. The Chancery of Lincoln is
connected in my mind with no tragic or even sorrowful event whatever,
and suggests no painful reminiscence. How many people, I wonder, can
say that of any home that has sheltered them for so long?
Of course Lincoln itself, quite apart from any memories or
associations, is a place to kindle much emotion. It was a fine sunny
day there, and the colour of the whole place was amazing--the rich
warm hue of the stone of which the Minster is built, which takes on a
fine ochre-brown tinge where it is weathered, gives it a look of
homely comfort, apart from the matchless dignity of clustered transept
and soaring towers. Then the glowing and mellow brick of Lincoln, its
scarlet roof tiles--what could be more satisfying for instance than
the dash of vivid red in the tiling of the old Palace as you see it on
the slope among its gardens from the opposite upland?--its
smoke-blackened façades, the abundance, all over the hill, of old
embowered gardens, full of trees and thickets and greenery, its grassy
spaces, its creeper-clad houses; the whole effect is one of
extraordinary richness of hue, of age vividly exuberant, splendidly
adorned.
I wandered transported about Cathedral and close, and became aware
then of how strangely unadventurous in the matter of exploration one
had always been as a boy. It was true that we children had scampered
with my father's master-key from end to end of the Cathedral--wet
mornings used constantly to be spent there--so that I know every
staircase, gallery, clerestory, parapet, triforium, and roof-vault of
the building--but I found in the close itself many houses, alleys,
little streets, which I had actually never seen, or even suspected
their existence.
It was all full of little ghosts, and a tiny vignette shaped itself in
memory at every corner, of some passing figure--a good-natured Canon,
a youthful friend, Levite or Nethinim, or some deadly enemy, the son
perhaps of some old-established denizen of the close, with whom for
some unknown reason the Chancery schoolroom proclaimed an inflexible
feud.
But when I came to see the old house itself--so little changed, so
distinctly recollected--then I was indeed amazed at the torrent of
little happy fragrant memories which seemed to pour from every doorway
and window--the games, the meals, the plays, the literary projects,
the readings, the telling of stories, the endless, pointless,
enchanting wanderings with some breathless object in view, forgotten
or transformed before it was ever attained or executed, of which
children alone hold the secret.
Best of all do I recollect long summer afternoons spent in the great
secluded high-walled garden at the back, with its orchard, its mound
covered with thickets, and the old tower of the city wall, which made
a noble fortress in games of prowess or adventure. I can see the
figure of my father in his cassock, holding a little book, walking up
and down among the gooseberry-beds half the morning, as he developed
one of his unwritten sermons for the Minster on the following day.
I do not remember that very affectionate relations existed between us
children; it was a society, based on good-humoured tolerance and a
certain democratic respect for liberty, that nursery group; it had its
cliques, its sections, its political emphasis, its diplomacies; but it
was cordial rather than emotional, and bound together by common
interests rather than by mutual devotion.
This, for instance, was one of the ludicrous incidents which came back
to me. There was an odd little mediæval room on the ground-floor,
given up as a sort of study, in the school sense, to my elder brother
and myself. My younger brother, aged almost eight, to show his power,
I suppose, or to protest against some probably quite real grievance or
tangible indignity, came there secretly one morning in our absence,
took a shovelful of red-hot coals from the fire, laid them on the
hearth-rug, and departed. The conflagration was discovered in time,
the author of the crime detected, and even the most tolerant of
supporters of nursery anarchy could find nothing to criticise or
condemn in the punishment justly meted out to the offender.
But here was the extraordinary part of it all. I am myself somewhat
afraid of emotional retrospect, which seems to me as a rule to have a
peculiarly pungent and unbearable smart about it. I do not as a rule
like revisiting places which I have loved and where I have been happy;
it is simply incurring quite unnecessary pain, and quite fruitless
pain, deliberately to unearth buried memories of happiness.
Now at Lincoln the other day I found, to my wonder and relief, that
there was not the least touch of regret, no sense of sorrow or loss in
the air. I did not want it all back again, nor would I have lived
through it again, even if I could have done so. The thought of
returning to it seemed puerile; it was charming, delightful, all full
of golden prospects and sunny mornings, but an experience which had
yielded up its sweetness as a summer cloud yields its cooling rain,
and passes over. Yet it was all a perfectly true, real, and actual
part of my life, something of which I could never lose hold and for
which I could always be frankly grateful. Life has been by no means a
scene of untroubled happiness since then; but there came to me that
day, walking along the fragrant garden-paths, very clearly and
distinctly, the knowledge that one would not wish one's life to have
been untroubled! Halcyon calm, heedless innocence, childish joy, was
not after all the point--pretty things enough, but only as a change
and a relief, or perhaps rather as a prelude to more serious business!
I was, as a boy, afraid of life, hated its noise and scent, suspected
it of cruelty and coarseness, wanted to keep it at arm's length. I
feel very differently about life now; it's a boisterous business
enough, but does not molest one unduly; and a very little courage goes
a long way in dealing with it!
True, on looking back, the evolution was dim and obscure; there seemed
many blind alleys and passages, many unnecessary winds and turns in
the road; but for all that the trend was clear enough, at all events,
to show that there was some great and not unkindly conspiracy about me
and my concerns, involving every one else's concerns as well, some
good-humoured mystery, with a dash of shadow and sorrow across it
perhaps, which would be soon cleared up; some secret withheld as from
a child, the very withholder of which seems to struggle with
good-tempered laughter, partly at one's dulness in not being able to
guess, partly at the pleasure in store.
I think it is our impatience, our claim to have everything
questionable made instantly and perfectly plain to us, which does the
mischief--that, and the imagination which never can forecast any
relief or surcease of pain, and pays no heed whatever to the
astounding brevity, the unutterable rapidity of human life.
So, as I walked in the old garden, I simply rejoiced that I had a
share in the place which could not be gainsaid; and that, even if the
high towers themselves, with their melodious bells, should crumble
into dust, I still had my dear memory of it all: the old life, the old
voices, looks, embraces, came back in little glimpses; yet it was far
away, long past, and I did not wish it back; the present seemed a
perfectly natural and beautiful sequence, and that past life an old
sweet chapter of some happy book, which needs no rewriting.
So I looked back in joy and tenderness--and even with a sort of
compassion; the child whom I saw sauntering along the grass paths of
the garden, shaking the globed rain out of the poppy's head, gathering
the waxen apples from the orchard grass, he was myself in very
truth--there was no doubting that; I hardly felt different. But I had
gained something which he had not got, some opening of eye and heart;
and he had yet to bear, to experience, to pass through, the days which
I had done with, and which, in spite of their much sweetness, had yet
a bitterness, as of a healing drug, underneath them, and which I did
not wish to taste again. No, I desired no renewal of old things, only
the power of interpreting the things that were new, and through which
even now one was passing swiftly and carelessly, as the boy ran among
the fruit-trees of the garden; but it was not the golden fragrant husk
of happiness that one wanted, but the seed hidden within
it--experience was made sweet just that one might be tempted to live!
Yet the end of it all was not the pleasure or the joy that came and
passed, the gaiety, even the innocence of childhood, but something
stern and strong, which hardly showed at all at first, but at last
seemed like the slow work of the graver of gems brushing away the
glittering crystalline dust from the intaglio.
XIV
HUMOUR
The Castle of _Joyous Gard_ was always full of laughter; not the wild
giggling, I think, of reckless people, which the writer of Proverbs
said was like the crackling of thorns under a pot; that is a wearisome
and even an ugly thing, because it does not mean that people are
honestly amused, but have some basely exciting thing in their minds.
Laughter must be light-hearted, not light-minded. Still less was it
the dismal tittering of ill-natured people over mean gossip, which is
another of the ugly sounds of life. No, I think it was rather the
laughter of cheerful people, glad to be amused, who hardly knew that
they were laughing; that is a wholesome exercise enough. It was the
laughter of men and women, with heavy enough business behind them and
before them, but yet able in leisurely hours to find life full of
merriment--the voice of joy and health! And I am sure too that it was
not the guarded condescending laughter of saints who do not want to be
out of sympathy with their neighbours, and laugh as precisely and
punctually as they might respond to a liturgy, if they discover that
they are meant to be amused!
Humour is one of the characteristics of _Joyous Gard_, not humour
resolutely cultivated, but the humour which comes from a sane and
healthy sense of proportion; and is a sign of light-heartedness rather
than a thing aimed at; a thing which flows naturally into the easy
spaces of life, because it finds the oddities of life, the
peculiarities of people, the incongruities of thought and speech, both
charming and delightful.
It is a great misfortune that so many people think it a mark of
saintliness to be easily shocked, whereas the greatest saints of all
are the people who are never shocked; they may be distressed, they may
wish things different; but to be shocked is often nothing but a mark
of vanity, a self-conscious desire that others should know how high
one's standard, how sensitive one's conscience is. I do not of course
mean that one is bound to join in laughter, however coarse a jest may
be; but the best-bred and finest-tempered people steer past such
moments with a delicate tact; contrive to show that an ugly jest is
not so much a thing to be disapproved of and rebuked, as a sign that
the jester is not recognising the rights of his company, and
outstepping the laws of civility and decency.
It is a very difficult thing to say what humour is, and probably it is
a thing that is not worth trying to define. It resides in the
incongruity of speech and behaviour with the surrounding
circumstances.
I remember once seeing two tramps disputing by the roadside, with the
gravity which is given to human beings by being slightly overcome with
drink. I suppose that one ought not to be amused by the effects of
drunkenness, but after all one does not wish people to be drunk that
one may be amused. The two tramps in question were ragged and
infinitely disreputable. Just as I came up, the more tattered of the
two flung his hat on the ground, with a lofty gesture like that of a
king abdicating, and said, "I'll go no further with you!" The other
said, "Why do you say that? Why will you go no further with me?" The
first replied, "No, I'll go no further with you!" The other said, "I
must know why you will go no further with me--you must tell me that!"
The first replied, with great dignity, "Well, I will tell you that! It
lowers my self-respect to be seen with a man like you!"