who might have changed clothes with the nearest scarecrow without a
perceptible difference, and whose life was evidently not ordered by
any excessive self-respect, falling back on the dignity of human
nature in order to be rid of a companion as disreputable as himself,
is what makes the scene so grotesque, and yet in a sense so
impressive, because it shows a lurking standard of conduct which no
pitiableness of degradation could obliterate. I think that is a good
illustration of what I mean by humour, because in the presence of such
a scene it is possible to have three perfectly distinct emotions. One
may be sorry with all one's heart that men should fall to such
conditions, and feel that it is a stigma on our social machinery that
it should be so. Those two melancholy figures were a sad blot upon
the wholesome countryside! Yet one may also discern a hope in the mere
possibility of framing an ideal under such discouraging circumstances,
which will be, I have no sort of doubt, a seed of good in the upward
progress of the poor soul which grasped it; because indeed I have no
doubt that the miserable creature _is_ on an upward path, and that
even if there is no prospect for him in this life of anything but a
dismal stumbling down into disease and want, yet I do not in the least
believe that that is the end of his horizon or his pilgrimage; and
thirdly, one may be genuinely and not in the least evilly amused at
the contrast between the disreputable squalor of the scene and the
lofty claim advanced. The three emotions are not at all inconsistent.
The pessimistic moralist might say that it was all very shocking, the
optimistic moralist might say that it was hopeful, the unreflective
humourist might simply be transported by the absurdity; yet not to be
amused at such a scene would appear to me to be both dull and
priggish. It seems to me to be a false solemnity to be shocked at any
lapses from perfection; a man might as well be shocked at the
existence of a poisonous snake or a ravening tiger. One must "see life
steadily and see it whole," and though we may and must hope that we
shall struggle upwards out of the mess, we may still be amused at the
dolorous figures we cut in the mire.
I was once in the company of a grave, decorous, and well-dressed
person who fell helplessly into a stream off a stepping-stone. I had
no wish that he should fall, and I was perfectly conscious of intense
sympathy with his discomfort; but I found the scene quite
inexpressibly diverting, and I still simmer with laughter at the
recollection of the disappearance of the trim figure, and his furious
emergence, like an oozy water-god, from the pool. It is not in the
least an ill-natured laughter. I did not desire the catastrophe, and I
would have prevented it if I could; but it was dreadfully funny for
all that; and if a similar thing had happened to myself, I should not
resent the enjoyment of the scene by a spectator, so long as I was
helped and sympathised with, and the merriment decently repressed
before me.
I think that what is called practical joking, which aims at
deliberately producing such situations, is a wholly detestable thing.
But it is one thing to sacrifice another person's comfort to one's
laughter, and quite another to be amused at what a fire-insurance
policy calls the act of God.
And I am very sure of this, that the sane, healthy, well-balanced
nature must have a fund of wholesome laughter in him, and that so far
from trying to repress a sense of humour, as an unkind, unworthy,
inhuman thing, there is no capacity of human nature which makes life
so frank and pleasant a business. There are no companions so
delightful as the people for whom one treasures up jests and
reminiscences, because one is sure that they will respond to them and
enjoy them; and indeed I have found that the power of being
irresponsibly amused has come to my aid in the middle of really tragic
and awful circumstances, and has relieved the strain more than
anything else could have done.
I do not say that humour is a thing to be endlessly indulged and
sought after; but to be genuinely amused is a sign of courage and
amiability, and a sign too that a man is not self-conscious and
self-absorbed. It ought not to be a settled pre-occupation. Nothing
is more wearisome than the habitual jester, because that signifies
that a man is careless and unobservant of the moods of others. But it
is a thing which should be generously and freely mingled with life;
and the more sides that a man can see to any situation, the more rich
and full his nature is sure to be.
After all, our power of taking a light-hearted view of life is
proportional to our interest in it, our belief in it, our hopes of it.
Of course, if we conclude from our little piece of remembered
experience, that life is a woeful thing, we shall be apt to do as the
old poets thought the nightingale did, to lean our breast against a
thorn, that we may suffer the pain which we propose to utter in liquid
notes. But that seems to me a false sentiment and an artificial mode
of life, to luxuriate in sorrow; even that is better than being
crushed by it; but we may be sure that if we wilfully allow ourselves
to be one-sided, it is a delaying of our progress. All experience
comes to us that we may not be one-sided; and if we learn to weep with
those that weep, we must remember that it is no less our business to
rejoice with those that rejoice. We are helped beyond measure by
those who can tell us and convince us, as poets can, that there is
something beautiful in sorrow and loss and severed ties; by those who
show us the splendour of courage and patience and endurance; but the
true faith is to believe that the end is joy; and we therefore owe
perhaps the largest debt of all to those who encourage us to enjoy, to
laugh, to smile, to be amused.
And so we must not retire into our fortress simply for lonely visions,
sweet contemplation, gentle imagination; there are rooms in our castle
fit for that, the little book-lined cell, facing the sunset, the high
parlour, where the gay, brisk music comes tripping down from the
minstrels' gallery, the dim chapel for prayer, and the chamber called
_Peace_--where the pilgrim slept till break of day, "and then he awoke
and sang"; but there is also the well-lighted hall, with cheerful
company coming and going; where we must put our secluded, wistful,
sorrowful thought aside, and mingle briskly with the pleasant throng,
not steeling ourselves to mirth and movement, but simply glad and
grateful to be there.
It was while I was writing these pages that a friend told me that he
had recently met a man, a merchant, I think, who did me the honour to
discuss my writings at a party and to pronounce an opinion upon them.
He said that I wrote many things which I did not believe, and then
stood aside, and was amused in a humorous mood to see that other
people believed them. It would be absurd to be, or even to feel,
indignant at such a travesty of my purpose as this, and indeed I think
that one is never very indignant at misrepresentation unless one's
mind accuses itself of its being true or partially true.
It is indeed true that I have said things about which I have since
changed my mind, as indeed I hope I shall continue to change it, and
as swiftly as possible, if I see that the former opinions are not
justified. To be thus criticised is, I think, the perfectly natural
penalty of having tried to be serious without being also solemn; there
are many people, and many of them very worthy people, like our friend
the merchant, who cannot believe one is in earnest if one is not also
heavy-handed. Earnestness is mixed up in their minds with bawling and
sweating; and indeed it is quite true that most people who are willing
to bawl and sweat in public, feel earnestly about the subjects to
which they thus address themselves. But I do not see that earnestness
is in the least incompatible with lightness of touch and even with
humour, though I have sometimes been accused of displaying none.
Socrates was in earnest about his ideas, but the penalty he paid for
treating them lightly was that he was put to death for being so
sceptical. I should not at all like the idea of being put to death for
my ideas; but I am wholly in earnest about them, and have never
consciously said anything in which I did not believe.
But I will go one step further and say that I think that many earnest
men do great harm to the causes they advocate, because they treat
ideas so heavily, and divest them of their charm. One of the reasons
why virtue and goodness are not more attractive is because they get
into the hands of people without lightness or humour, and even without
courtesy; and thus the pursuit of virtue seems not only to the young,
but to many older people, to be a boring occupation, and to be
conducted in an atmosphere heavy with disapproval, with dreariness and
dulness and tiresomeness hemming the neophyte in, like fat bulls of
Bashan. It is because I should like to rescue goodness, which is the
best thing in the world, next to love, from these growing influences,
that I have written as I have done; but there is no lurking cynicism
in my books at all, and the worst thing I can accuse myself of is a
sense of humour, perhaps whimsical and childish, which seems to me to
make a pleasant and refreshing companion, as one passes on pilgrimage
in search of what I believe to be very high and heavenly things
indeed.
XV
VISIONS
I used as a child to pore over the Apocalypse, which I thought by far
the most beautiful and absorbing of all the books of the Bible; it
seemed full of rich and dim pictures, things which I could not
interpret and did not wish to interpret, the shining of clear gem-like
walls, lonely riders, amazing monsters, sealed books, all of which
took perfectly definite shape in the childish imagination. The
consequence is that I can no more criticise it than I could criticise
old tapestries or pictures familiar from infancy. They are there, just
so, and any difference of form is inconceivable.
In one point, however, the strange visions have come to hold for me an
increased grandeur; I used to think of much of it as a sort of
dramatic performance, self-consciously enacted for the benefit of the
spectator; but now I think of it as an awful and spontaneous energy of
spiritual life going on, of which the prophet was enabled to catch a
glimpse. Those 'voices crying day and night' 'the new song that was
sung before the throne,' the cry of "Come and see"--these were but
part of a vast and urgent business, which the prophet was allowed to
overhear. It is not a silent place, that highest heaven, of indolence
and placid peace, but a scene of fierce activity and the clamour of
mighty voices.
And it is the same too of another strange scene--the Transfiguration;
not an impressive spectacle arranged for the apostles, but a peep into
the awful background behind life. Let me use a simple parable: imagine
a man who had a friend whom he greatly admired and loved, and suppose
him to be talking with his friend, who suddenly excuses himself on the
plea of an engagement and goes out; and the other follows him, out of
curiosity, and sees him meet another man and talk intently with him,
not deferentially or humbly, but as a man talks with an equal. And
then drawing nearer he might suddenly see that the man his friend has
gone out to meet, and with whom he is talking so intently, is some
high minister of State, or even the King himself!
That is a simple comparison, to make clear what the apostles might
have felt. They had gone into the mountain expecting to hear their
Master speak quietly to them or betake himself to silent prayer; and
then they find him robed in light and holding converse with the
spirits of the air, telling his plans, so to speak, to two great
prophets of the ancient world.
If this had been but a pageant enacted for their benefit to dazzle and
bewilder them, it would have been a poor and self-conscious affair;
but it becomes a scene of portentous mystery, if one thinks of them as
being permitted to have a glimpse of the high, urgent, and terrifying
things that were going on all the time in the unseen background of the
Saviour's mind. The essence of the greatness of the scene is that it
was _overheard_. And thus I think that wonder and beauty, those two
mighty forces, take on a very different value for us when we can come
to realise that they are small hints given us, tiny glimpses conceded
to us, of some very great and mysterious thing that is pressingly and
speedily proceeding, every day and every hour, in the vast background
of life; and we ought to realise that it is not only human life as we
see it which is the active, busy, forceful thing; that the world with
all its noisy cities, its movements and its bustle, is not a burning
point hung in darkness and silence, but that it is just a little
fretful affair with infinitely larger, louder, fiercer, stronger
powers, working, moving, pressing onwards, thundering in the
background; and that the huge forces, laws, activities, behind the
world, are not perceived by us any more than we perceive the vast
motion of great winds, except in so far as we see the face of the
waters rippled by them, or the trees bowed all one way in their
passage.
It is very easy to be so taken up with the little absorbing
businesses, the froth and ripple of life, that we forget what great
and secret influences they must be that cause them; we must not forget
that we are only like children playing in the nursery of a palace,
while in the Council-room beneath us a debate may be going on which is
to affect the lives and happiness of thousands of households.
And therefore the more that we make up our little beliefs and ideas,
as a man folds up a little packet of food which he is to eat on a
journey, and think in so doing that we have got a satisfactory
explanation of all our aims and problems, the more utterly we are
failing to take in the significance of what is happening. We must
never allow ourselves to make up our minds, and to get our theories
comfortably settled, because then experience is at an end for us, and
we shall see no more than we expect to see. We ought rather to be
amazed and astonished, day by day, at all the wonderful and beautiful
things we encounter, the marvellous hints of loveliness which we see
in faces, woods, hills, gardens, all showing some tremendous force at
work, often thwarted, often spoiled, but still working, with an
infinity of tender patience, to make the world exquisite and fine.
There are ugly, coarse, disgusting things at work too--we cannot help
seeing that; but even many of them seem to be destroying, in
corruption and evil odour, something that ought not to be there, and
striving to be clean and pure again.
I often wonder whose was the mind that conceived the visions of the
Apocalypse; if we can trust tradition, it was a confined and exiled
Christian in a lonely island, whose spirit reached out beyond the
little crags and the beating seas of his prison, and in the seeming
silent heaven detected the gathering of monsters, the war of
relentless forces--and beyond it all the radiant energies of saints,
glad to be together and unanimous, in a place where light and beauty
at last could reign triumphant.
I know no literature more ineffably dreary than the parcelling out of
these wild and glorious visions, the attaching of them to this and
that petty human fulfilment. That is not the secret of the Apocalypse!
It is rather as a painter may draw a picture of two lovers sitting
together at evening in a latticed chamber, holding each other's hands,
gazing in each other's eyes. He is not thinking of particular persons
in an actual house; it is rather a hint of love making itself
manifest, recognising itself to be met with an answering rapture. And
what I think that the prophet meant was rather to show that we must
not be deceived by cares and anxieties and daily business; but that
behind the little simmering of the world was a tumult of vast forces,
voices crying and answering, thunder, fire, infinite music. It is all
a command to recognise unseen greatness, to take every least
experience we can, and crush from it all its savour; not to be afraid
of the great emotions of the world, love and sorrow and loss; but only
to be afraid of what is petty and sordid and mean. And then perhaps,
as in that other vision, we may ascend once into a mountain, and there
in weariness and drowsiness, dumbly bewildered by the night and the
cold and the discomforts of the unkindly air, life may be for a moment
transfigured into a radiant figure, still familiar though so
glorified; and we may see it for once touch hands and exchange words
with old and wise spirits; and all this not only to excite us and
bewilder us, but so that by the drawing of the veil aside, we may see
for a moment that there is some high and splendid secret, some
celestial business proceeding with solemn patience and strange
momentousness, a rite which if we cannot share, we may at least know
is there, and waiting for us, the moment that we are strong enough to
take our part!
XVI
THOUGHT
A friend of mine had once a strange dream; he seemed to himself to be
walking in a day of high summer on a grassy moorland leading up to
some fantastically piled granite crags. He made his way slowly
thither; it was terribly hot there among the sun-warmed rocks, and he
found a little natural cave, among the great boulders, fringed with
fern. There he sate for a long time while the sun passed over, and a
little breeze came wandering up the moor. Opposite him as he sate was
the face of a great pile of rocks, and while his eye dwelt upon it it
suddenly began to wink and glisten with little moving points, dots so
minute that he could hardly distinguish them. Suddenly, as if at a
signal, the little points dropped from the rock, and the whole surface
seemed alive with gossamer threads, as if a silken, silvery curtain
had been let down; presently the little dots reached the grass and
began to crawl over it; and then he saw that each of them was attached
to one of the fine threads; and he thought that they were a colony of
minute spiders, living on the face of the rocks. He got up to see this
wonder close at hand, but the moment he moved, the whole curtain was
drawn up with incredible swiftness, as if the threads were highly
elastic; and when he reached the rock, it was as hard and solid as
before, nor could he discover any sign of the little creatures. "Ah,"
he said to himself in the dream, "that is the meaning of the _living_
rock!" and he became aware, he thought, that all rocks and stones on
the surface of the earth must be thus endowed with life, and that the
rocks were, so to speak, but the shell that contained these
innumerable little creatures, incredibly minute, living, silken
threads, with a small head, like boring worms, inhabiting burrows
which went far into the heart of the granite, and each with a strong
retractile power.
I told this dream to a geologist the other day, who laughed, "An
ingenious idea," he said, "and there may even be something in it! It
is not by any means certain that stones do not have a certain obscure
life of their own; I have sometimes thought that their marvellous
cohesion may be a sign of life, and that if life were withdrawn, a
mountain might in a moment become a heap of sliding sand."
My friend said that the dream made such an impression upon him that
for a time he found it hard to believe that stones and rocks had not
this strange and secret life lurking in their recesses; and indeed it
has since stood to me as a symbol of life, haunting and penetrating
all the very hardest and driest things. It seems to me that just as
there are almost certainly more colours than our eyes can perceive,
and sounds either too acute or too deliberate for our ears to hear, so
the domain of life may be much further extended in the earth, the air,
the waters, than we can tangibly detect.
It seems too to show me that it is our business to try ceaselessly to
discover the secret life of thought in the world; not to conclude that
there is no vitality in thought unless we can ourselves at once
perceive it. This is particularly the case with books. Sometimes, in
our College Library, I take down an old folio from the shelves, and
as I turn the crackling, stained, irregular pages--it may be a volume
of controversial divinity or outworn philosophy--it seems impossible
to imagine that it can ever have been woven out of the live brain of
man, or that any one can ever have been found to follow those old,
vehement, insecure arguments, starting from unproved data, and leading
to erroneous and fanciful conclusions. The whole thing seems so faded,
so dreary, so remote from reality, that one cannot even dimly imagine
the frame of mind which originated it, and still less the mood which
fed upon such things.
Yet I very much doubt if the aims, ideas, hopes of man, have altered
very much since the time of the earliest records. When one comes to
realise that geologists reckon a period of thirty million years at
least, while the Triassic rocks, that is the lowest stratum that shows
signs of life, were being laid down; and that all recorded history is
but an infinitesimal drop in the ocean of unrecorded time, one sees at
least that the force behind the world, by whatever name we call it, is
a force that cannot by any means be hurried, but that it works with a
leisureliness which we with our brief and hasty span of life cannot
really in any sense conceive. Still it seems to have a plan! Those
strange horned, humped, armoured beasts of prehistoric rocks are all
bewilderingly like ourselves so far as physical construction goes;
they had heart, brain, eyes, lungs, legs, a similarly planned
skeleton; it seems as if the creative spirit was working by a
well-conceived pattern, was trying to make a very definite kind of
thing; there is not by any means an infinite variety, when one
considers the sort of creatures that even a man could devise and
invent, if he tried.
There is the same sort of continuity and unity in thought The
preoccupations of man are the same in all ages--to provide for his
material needs, and to speculate what can possibly happen to his
spirit, when the body, broken by accident or disease or decay, can no
longer contain his soul. The best thought of man has always been
centred on trying to devise some sort of future hope which could
encourage him to live eagerly, to endure patiently, to act rightly. As
science opens her vast volume before us, we naturally become more and
more impatient of the hasty guesses of man, in religion and
philosophy, to define what we cannot yet know; but we ought to be very
tender of the old passionate beliefs, the intense desire to credit
noble and lofty spirits, such as Buddha and Mahomet, with some source
of divinely given knowledge. Yet of course there is an inevitable
sadness when we find the old certainties dissolving in mist; and we
must be very careful to substitute for them, if they slip from our
grasp, some sort of principle which will give us freshness and
courage. To me, I confess, the tiny certainties of science are far
more inspiring than the most ardent reveries of imaginative men. The
knowledge that there is in the world an inflexible order, and that we
shall see what we shall see, and not what we would like to believe, is
infinitely refreshing and sustaining. I feel that I am journeying
onwards into what is unknown to me, but into something which is
inevitably there, and not to be altered by my own hopes and fancies.
It is like taking a voyage, the pleasure of which is that the sights
in store are unexpected and novel; for a voyage would be a very poor
thing if we knew exactly what lay ahead, and poorer still if we could
determine beforehand what we meant to see, and could only behold the
pictures of our own imaginations. That is the charm and the use of
experience, that it is not at all what we expect or hope. It is in
some ways sadder and darker; but it is in most ways far more rich and
wonderful and radiant than we had dreamed.