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WHERE NO FEAR WAS
A BOOK ABOUT FEAR
By
ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON
1914
CONTENTS
I. THE SHADOW
II. SHAPES OF FEAR
III. THE DARKEST DOUBT
IV. VULNERABILITY
V. THE USE OF FEAR
VI. FEARS OF CHILDHOOD
VII. FEARS OF BOYHOOD
VIII. FEARS OF YOUTH
IX. FEARS OF MIDDLE AGE
X. FEARS OF AGE
XI. DR. JOHNSON
XII. TENNYSON, RUSKIN, CARLYLE
XIII. CHARLOTTE BRONTE
XIV. JOHN STERLING
XV. INSTINCTIVE FEAR
XVI. FEAR OF LIFE
XVII. SIMPLICITY
XVIII. AFFECTION
XIX. SIN
XX. SERENITY
"Thus they went on till they came to about the middle of the Valley,
and then Christiana said, 'Methinks I see something yonder on the road
before us, a thing of such a shape such as I have not seen.' Then said
Joseph, 'Mother, what is it?' 'An ugly thing, Child, an ugly thing,'
said she. 'But, Mother, what is it like?' said he. ''Tis like I cannot
tell what,' said she. And now it was but a little way off. Then said
she, 'It is nigh.'"
"Pilgrim's Progress," Part II.
Where No Fear Was
I
THE SHADOW
There surely may come a time for each of us, if we have lived with any
animation or interest, if we have had any constant or even fitful
desire to penetrate and grasp the significance of the strange adventure
of life, a time, I say, when we may look back a little, not
sentimentally or with any hope of making out an impressive case for
ourselves, and interrogate the memory as to what have been the most
real, vivid, and intense things that have befallen us by the way. We
may try to separate the momentous from the trivial, and the important
from the unimportant; to discern where and how and when we might have
acted differently; to see and to say what has really mattered, what has
made a deep mark on our spirit; what has hampered or wounded or maimed
us. Because one of the strangest things about life seems to be our
incapacity to decide beforehand, or even at the time, where the real
and fruitful joys, and where the dark dangers and distresses lie. The
things that at certain times filled all one's mind, kindled hope and
aim, seemed so infinitely desirable, so necessary to happiness, have
faded, many of them, into the lightest and most worthless of husks and
phantoms, like the withered flowers that we find sometimes shut in the
pages of our old books, and cannot even remember of what glowing and
emotional moment they were the record!
How impossible it is ever to learn anything by being told it! How
necessary it is to pay the full price for any knowledge worth having!
The anxious father, the tearful mother, may warn the little boy before
he goes to school of the dangers that await him. He does not
understand, he does not attend, he is looking at the pattern of the
carpet, and wondering for the hundredth time whether the oddly-shaped
blue thing which appears and reappears at intervals is a bird or a
flower--yes, it is certainly meant for a bird perched on a bough! He
wishes the talk were over, he looks at the little scar on his father's
hand, and remembers that he has been told that he cut it in a
cucumber-frame when he was a boy. And then, long afterwards perhaps,
when he has made a mistake and is suffering for it, he sees that it was
THAT of which they spoke, and wonders that they could not have
explained it better.
And this is so all along! We cannot recognise the dark tower, to which
in the story Childe Roland came, by any description. We must go there
ourselves; and not till we feel the teeth of the trap biting into us,
do we see that it was exactly in such a place that we had been warned
that it would be laid.
There is an episode in that strange and beautiful book Phantastes, by
George Macdonald, which comes often to my mind. The boy is wandering in
the enchanted forest, and he is told to avoid the house where the
Daughter of the Ogre lives. His morose young guide shows him where the
paths divide, and he takes the one indicated to him with a sense of
misgiving.
A little while before he had been deceived by the Alder-maiden, and had
given her his love in error. This has taken some of the old joy out of
his heart, but he has made his escape from her, and thinks he has
learned his lesson.
But he comes at last to the long low house in the clearing; he finds
within it an ancient woman reading out of an old volume; he enters, he
examines the room in which she sits, and yielding to curiosity, he
opens the door of the great cupboard in the corner, in spite of a
muttered warning. He thinks, on first opening it, that it is just a
dark cupboard; but he sees with a shock of surprise that he is looking
into a long dark passage, which leads out, far away from where he
stands, into the starlit night. Then a figure, which seems to have been
running from a long distance, turns the corner, and comes speeding down
towards him. He has not time to close the door, but stands aside to let
it pass; it passes, and slips behind him; and soon he sees that it is a
shadow of himself, which has fallen on the floor at his feet. He asks
what has happened, and then the old woman says that he has found his
shadow, a thing which happens to many people; and then for the first
time she raises her head and looks at him, and he sees that her mouth
is full of long white teeth; he knows where he is at last, and stumbles
out, with the dark shadow at his heels, which is to haunt him so
miserably for many a sad day.
That is a very fine and true similitude of what befalls many men and
women. They go astray, they give up some precious thing--their
innocence perhaps--to a deluding temptation. They are delivered for a
time; and then a little while after they find their shadow, which no
tears or anguish of regret can take away, till the healing of life and
work and purpose annuls it. Neither is it always annulled, even in
length of days.
But it is a paltry and inglorious mistake to let the shadow have its
disheartening will of us. It is only a shadow, after all! And if we
capitulate after our first disastrous encounter, it does not mean that
we shall be for ever vanquished, though it means perhaps a long and
dreary waste of shame-stained days. That is what we must try to
avoid--any WASTE of time and strength. For if anything is certain, it
is that we have all to fight until we conquer, and the sooner we take
up the dropped sword again the better.
And we have also to learn that no one can help us except ourselves.
Other people can sympathise and console, try to soothe our injured
vanity, try to persuade us that the dangers and disasters ahead are not
so dreadful as they appear to be, and that the mistakes we have made
are not irreparable. But no one can remove danger or regret from us, or
relieve us of the necessity of facing our own troubles; the most that
they can do, indeed, is to encourage us to try again.
But we cannot hope to change the conditions of life; and one of its
conditions is, as I have said, that we cannot foresee dangers. No
matter how vividly they are described to us, no matter how eagerly
those who love us try to warn us of peril, we cannot escape. For that
is the essence of life--experience; and though we cannot rejoice when
we are in the grip of it, and when we cannot see what the end will be,
we can at least say to ourselves again and again, "this is at all
events reality--this is business!" for it is the moments of endurance
and energy and action which after all justify us in living, and not the
pleasant spaces where we saunter among flowers and sunlit woods. Those
are conceded to us, to tempt us to live, to make us desire to remain in
the world; and we need not be afraid to take them, to use them, to
enjoy them; because all things alike help to make us what we are.
II
SHAPES OF FEAR
Now as I look back a little, I see that some of my worst experiences
have not hurt or injured me at all. I do not claim more than my share
of troubles, but "I have had trouble enough for one," as Browning
says,--bereavements, disappointments, the illness of those I have
loved, illness of my own, quarrels, misunderstandings, enmities,
angers, disapprovals, losses; I have made bad mistakes, I have failed
in my duty, I have done many things that I regret, I have been
unreasonable, unkind, selfish. Many of these things have hurt and
wounded me, have brought me into sorrow, and even into despair. But I
do not feel that any of them have really injured me, and some of them
have already benefited me. I have learned to be a little more patient
and diligent, and I have discovered that there are certain things that
I must at all costs avoid.
But there is one thing which seems to me to have always and invariably
hampered and maimed me, whenever I have yielded to it, and I have often
yielded to it; and that is Fear. It can be called by many names, and
all of them ugly names--anxiety, timidity, moral cowardice. I can never
trace the smallest good in having given way to it. It has been from my
earliest days the Shadow; and I think it is the shadow in the lives of
many men and women. I want in this book to track it, if I can, to its
lair, to see what it is, where its awful power lies, and what, if
anything, one can do to resist it. It seems the most unreal thing in
the world, when one is on the other side of it; and yet face to face
with it, it has a strength, a poignancy, a paralysing power, which
makes it seem like a personal and specific ill-will, issuing in a sort
of dreadful enchantment or spell, which renders it impossible to
withstand. Yet, strange to say, it has not exercised its power in the
few occasions in my life when it would seem to have been really
justified. Let me quote an instance or two which will illustrate what I
mean.
I was confronted once with the necessity of a small surgical operation,
quite unexpectedly. If I had known beforehand that it was to be done, I
should have depicted every incident with horror and misery. But the
moment arrived, and I found myself marching to my bedroom with a
surgeon and a nurse, with a sense almost of amusement at the adventure.
I was called upon once in Switzerland to assist with two guides in the
rescue of an unfortunate woman who had fallen from a precipice, and had
to be brought down, dead or alive. We hurried up through the
pine-forest with a chair, and found the poor creature alive indeed, but
with horrible injuries--an eye knocked out, an arm and a thigh broken,
her ulster torn to ribbons, and with more blood about the place in
pools than I should have thought a human body could contain. She was
conscious; she had to be lifted into the chair, and we had to discover
where she belonged; she fainted away in the middle of it, and I had to
go on and break the news to her relations. If I had been told
beforehand what would have had to be done, I do not think I could have
faced it; but it was there to do, and I found myself entirely capable
of taking part, and even of wondering all the time that it was possible
to act.
Again, I was once engulfed in a crevasse, hanging from the ice-ledge
with a portentous gulf below, and a glacier-stream roaring in the
darkness. I could get no hold for foot or hand, my companions could not
reach me or extract me; and as I sank into unconsciousness, hearing my
own expiring breath, I knew that I was doomed; but I can only say,
quite honestly and humbly, that I had no fear at all, and only dimly
wondered what arrangements would be made at Eton, where I was then a
master, to accommodate the boys of my house and my pupils. It was not
done by an effort, nor did I brace myself to the situation: fear simply
did not come near to me.
Once again I found myself confronted, not so long ago, with an
incredibly painful and distressing interview. That indeed did oppress
me with almost intolerable dread beforehand. I was to go to a certain
house in London, and there was just a chance that the interview might
not take place after all. As I drove there, I suddenly found myself
wondering whether the interview could REALLY be going to take
place--how often had I rehearsed it beforehand with anguish--and then
as suddenly became aware that I should in some strange way be
disappointed if it did not take place. I wanted on the whole to go
through with it, and to see what it would be like. A deep-seated
curiosity came to my aid. It did take place, and it was very bad--worse
than I could have imagined; but it was not terrible!
These are just four instances which come into my mind. I should be glad
to feel that the courage which undoubtedly came had been the creation
of my will; but it was not so. In three cases, the events came
unexpectedly; but in the fourth case I had long anticipated the moment
with extreme dread. Yet in that last case the fear suddenly slipped
away, without the smallest effort on my part; and in all four cases
some strange gusto of experience, some sense of heightened life and
adventure, rose in the mind like a fountain--so that even in the
crevasse I said to myself, not excitedly but serenely, "So this is what
it feels like to await death!"
It was this particular experience which gave me an inkling into that
which in so many tragic histories seems incredible--that men often do
pass to death, by scaffold and by stake, at the last moment, in
serenity and even in joy. I do not doubt for a moment that it is the
immortal principle in man, the sense of deathlessness, which comes to
his aid. It is the instinct which, in spite of all knowledge and
experience, says suddenly, in a moment like that, "Well, what then?"
That instinct is a far truer thing than any expectation or imagination.
It sees things, in supreme moments, in a true proportion. It asserts
that when the rope jerks, or the flames leap up, or the benumbing blow
falls, there is something there which cannot possibly be injured, and
which indeed is rather freed from the body of our humiliation. It is
but an incident, after all, in a much longer and more momentous voyage.
It means only the closing of one chapter of experience and the
beginning of another. The base element in it is the fear which dreads
the opening of the door, and the quitting of what is familiar. And I
feel assured of this, that the one universal and inevitable experience,
known to us as death, must in reality be a very simple and even a
natural affair, and that when we can look back upon it, it will seem to
us amazing that we can ever have regarded it as so momentous and
appalling a thing.
III
THE DARKEST DOUBT
Now we can make no real advance in the things of the spirit until we
have seen what lies on the other side of fear; fear cannot help us to
grow, at best it can only teach us to be prudent; it does not of itself
destroy the desire to offend--only shame can do that; if our wish to be
different comes merely from our being afraid to transgress, then, if
the fear of punishment were to be removed, we should go back with a
light heart to our old sins. We may obey irresponsible power, because
we know that it can hurt us if we disobey; but unless we can perceive
the reason why this and that is forbidden, we cannot concur with law.
We learn as children that flame has power to hurt us, but we only dread
the fire because it can injure us, not because we admire the reason
which it has for burning. So long as we do not sin simply because we
know the laws of life which punish sin, we have not learned any hatred
of sin; it is only because we hate the punishment more than we love the
sin, that we abstain.
Socrates once said, in one of his wise paradoxes, that it was better to
sin knowingly than ignorantly. That is a hard saying, but it means that
at least if we sin knowingly, there is some purpose, some courage in
the soul. We take a risk with our eyes open, and our purpose may
perhaps be changed; whereas if we sin ignorantly, we do so out of a
mere base instinct, and there is no purpose that may be educated.
Anyone who has ever had the task of teaching boys or young men to write
will know how much easier it is to teach those who write volubly and
exuberantly, and desire to express themselves, even if they do it with
many faults and lapses of taste; taste and method may be corrected, if
only the instinct of expression is there. But the young man who has no
impulse to write, who says that he could think of nothing to say, it is
impossible to teach him much, because one cannot communicate the desire
for expression.
And the same holds good of life. Those who have strong vital impulses
can learn restraint and choice; but the people who have no particular
impulses and preferences, who just live out of mere impetus and habit,
who plod along, doing in a dispirited way just what they find to do,
and lapsing into indolence and indifference the moment that prescribed
work ceases, those are the spirits that afford the real problem,
because they despise activity, and think energy a mere exhibition of
fussy diffuseness.
But the generous, eager, wilful nature, who has always some aim in
sight, who makes mistakes perhaps, gives offence, collides
high-heartedly with others, makes both friends and enemies, loves and
hates, is anxious, jealous, self-absorbed, resentful, intolerant--there
is always hope for such an one, for he is quick to despair, capable of
shame, swift to repent, and even when he is worsted and wounded, rises
to fight again. Such a nature, through pain and love, can learn to
chasten his base desires, and to choose the nobler and worthier way.
But what does really differentiate men and women is not their power of
fearing and suffering, but their power of caring and admiring. The only
real and vital force in the world is the force which attracts, the
beauty which is so desirable that one must imitate it if one can, the
wisdom which is so calm and serene that one must possess it if one may.
And thus all depends upon our discerning in the world a loving
intention of some kind, which holds us in view, and draws us to itself.
If we merely think of God and nature as an inflexible system of laws,
and that our only chance of happiness is to slip in and out of them, as
a man might pick his way among red-hot ploughshares, thankful if he can
escape burning, then we can make no sort of advance, because we can
have neither faith nor trust. The thing from which one merely flees can
have no real power over our spirit; but if we know God as a fatherly
Heart behind nature, who is leading us on our way, then indeed we can
walk joyfully in happiness, and undismayed in trouble; because troubles
then become only the wearisome incidents of the upward ascent, the
fatigue, the failing breath, the strained muscles, the discomfort which
is actually taking us higher, and cannot by any means be avoided.
But fear is the opposite of all this; it is the dread of the unknown,
the ghastly doubt as to whether there is any goal before us or not;
when we fear, we are like the butterfly that flutters anxiously away
from the boy who pursues it, who means out of mere wantonness to strike
it down tattered and bruised among the grass-stems.
IV
VULNERABILITY
There have been many attempts in the history of mankind to escape from
the dominion of fear; the essence of fear, that which prompts it, is
the consciousness of our vulnerability. What we all dread is the
disease or the accident that may disable us, the loss of money or
credit, the death of those whom we love and whose love makes the
sunshine of our life, the anger and hostility and displeasure and scorn
and ill-usage of those about us. These are the definite things which
the anxious mind forecasts, and upon which it mournfully dwells.
The object then in the minds of the philosophers or teachers who would
fain relieve the unhappiness of the world, has been always to suggest
ways in which this vulnerability may be lessened; and thus their object
has been to disengage as far as possible the hopes and affections of
men from things which must always be fleeting. That is the principle
which lies behind all asceticism, that, if one can be indifferent to
wealth and comfort and popularity, one has a better chance of serenity.
The essence of that teaching is not that pleasant things are not
desirable, but that one is more miserable if one loses them than if one
never cares for them at all. The ascetic trains himself to be
indifferent about food and drink and the apparatus of life; he aims at
celibacy partly because love itself is an overmastering passion, and
partly because he cannot bear to engage himself with human affections,
the loss of which may give him pain. There is, of course, a deeper
strain in asceticism than this, which is a suspicious mistrust of all
physical joys and a sense of their baseness; but that is in itself an
artistic preference of mental and spiritual joys, and a defiance to
everything which may impair or invade them.
The Stoic imperturbability is an attempt to take a further step; not to
fly from life, but to mingle with it, and yet to grow to be not
dependent on it. The Stoic ideal was a high one, to cultivate a
firmness of mind that was on the one hand not to be dismayed by pain or
suffering, and on the other to use life so temperately and judiciously
as not to form habits of indulgence which it would be painful to
discontinue. The weakness of Stoicism was that it despised human
relations; and the strength of primitive Christianity was that, while
it recommended a Stoical simplicity of life, it taught men not to be
afraid of love, but to use and lavish love freely, as being the one
thing which would survive death and not be cut short by it. The
Christian teaching came to this, that the world was meant to be a
school of love, and that love was to be an outward-rippling ring of
affection extending from the family outwards to the tribe, the nation,
the world, and on to God Himself. It laid all its emphasis on the truth
that love is the one immortal thing, that all the joys and triumphs of
the world pass away with the decay of its material framework, but that
love passes boldly on, with linked hands, into the darkness of the
unknown.
The one loss that Christianity recognised was the loss of love; the one
punishment it dreaded was the withholding of love.
As Christianity soaked into the world, it became vitiated, and drew
into itself many elements of human weakness. It became a social force,
it learned to depend on property, it fulminated a code of criminality,
and accepted human standards of prosperity and wealth. It lost its
simplicity and became sophisticated. It is hard to say that men of the
world should not, if they wish, claim to be Christians, but the whole
essence of Christianity is obscured if it is forgotten that its vital
attributes are its indifference to material conveniences, and its
emphatic acceptance of sympathy as the one supreme virtue.
This is but another way of expressing that our troubles and our terrors
alike are based on selfishness, and that if we are really concerned
with the welfare of others we shall not be much concerned with our own.
The difficulty in adopting the Christian theory is that God does not
apparently intend to cure the world by creating all men unselfish.
People are born selfish, and the laws of nature and heredity seem to
ordain that it shall be so. Indeed a certain selfishness seems to be
inseparable from any desire to live. The force of asceticism and of
Stoicism is that they both appeal to selfishness as a motive. They
frankly say, "Happiness is your aim, personal happiness; but instead of
grasping at pleasure whenever it offers, you will find it more prudent
in the end not to care too much about such things." It is true that
popular Christianity makes the same sort of appeal. It says, or seems
to say, "If you grasp at happiness in this world, you may secure a
great deal of it successfully; but it will be worse for you eventually."
The theory of life as taught and enforced, for instance, in such a work
as Dante's great poem is based upon this crudity of thought. Dante, by
his Hell and his Purgatory, expressed plainly that the chief motive of
man to practise morality must be his fear of ultimate punishment. His
was an attempt to draw away the curtain which hides this world from the
next, and to horrify men into living purely and kindly. But the mind
only revolts against the dastardly injustice of a God, who allows men
to be born into the world so corrupt, with so many incentives to sin,
and deliberately hides from them the ghastly sight of the eternal
torments, which might have saved them from recklessness of life. No one
who had trod the dark caverns of Hell or the flinty ridges of
Purgatory, as Dante represented himself doing, who had seen the awful
sights and heard the heart-broken words of the place, could have
returned to the world as a light-hearted sinner! Whatever we may
believe of God, we must not for an instant allow ourselves to believe
that life can be so brief and finite, so small and hampered an
opportunity, and that punishment could be so demoniacal and so
infinite. A God who could design such a scheme must be essentially evil
and malignant. We may menace wicked men with punishment for wanton
misdeeds, but it must be with just punishment. What could we say of a
human father who exposed a child to temptation without explaining the
consequences, and then condemned him to lifelong penalties for failing
to make the right choice? We must firmly believe that if offences are
finite, punishment must be finite too; that it must be remedial and not
mechanical. We must believe that if we deserve punishment, it will be
because we can hope for restoration. Hell is a monstrous and
insupportable fiction, and the idea of it is simply inconsistent with
any belief in the goodness of God. It is easy to quote texts to support
it, but we must not allow any text, any record in the world, however
sacred, to shatter our belief in the Love and Justice of God. And I say
as frankly and directly as I can that until we can get rid of this
intolerable terror, we can make no advance at all.
The old, fierce Saints, who went into the darkness exulting in the
thought of the eternal damnation of the wicked, had not spelt the first
letter of the Christian creed, and I doubt not have discovered their
mistake long ago! Yet there are pious people in the world who will
neither think nor speak frankly of the subject, for fear of weakening
the motives for human virtue. I will at least speak frankly, and though
I believe with all my heart in a life beyond the grave, in which
suffering enough may exist for the cure of those who by wilful sin have
sunk into sloth and hopelessness and despair, and even into cruelty and
brutality, I do not for an instant believe that the conduct of the
vilest human being who ever set foot on the earth can deserve more than
a term of punishment, or that such punishment will have anything that
is vindictive about it.
It may be said that I am here only combating an old-fashioned idea, and
that no one believes in the old theory of eternal punishment, or that
if they believe that the possibility exists, they do not believe that
any human being can incur it. But I feel little doubt that the belief
does exist, and that it is more widespread than one cares to believe.
To believe it is to yield to the darkest and basest temptation of fear,
and keeps all who hold it back from the truth of God.
What then are we to believe about the punishment of our sins? I look
back upon my own life, and I see numberless occasions--they rise up
before me, a long perspective of failures--when I have acted cruelly,
selfishly, self-indulgently, basely, knowing perfectly well that I was
so behaving. What was wrong with me? Why did I so behave? Because I
preferred the baser course, and thought at the time that it gave me
pleasure.
Well then, what do I wish about all that? I wish it had not happened
so, I wish I had been kinder, more just, more self-restrained, more
strong. I am ashamed, because I condemn myself, and because I know that
those whom I love and honour would condemn me, if they knew all. But I
do not, therefore, lose all hope of myself, nor do I think that God
will not show me how to be different. If it can only be done by
suffering, I dread the suffering, but I am ready to suffer if I can
become what I should wish to be. But I do not for a moment think that
God will cast me off or turn His face away from me because I have
sinned; and I can pray that He will lead me into light and strength.
And thus it is not my vulnerability that I dread; I rather welcome it
as a sign that I may learn the truth so. And I will not look upon my
desire for pleasant things as a proof that I am evil, but rather as a
proof that God is showing me where happiness lies, and teaching me by
my mistakes to discern and value it. He could make me perfect if He
would, in a single instant. But the fact that He does not, is a sign
that He has something better in store for me than a mere mechanical
perfection.
V
THE USE OF FEAR
The advantages of the fearful temperament, if it is not a mere
unmanning and desolating dread, are not to be overlooked. Fear is the
shadow of the imaginative, the resourceful, the inventive temperament,
but it multiplies resource and invention a hundredfold. Everyone knows
the superstition which is deeply rooted in humanity, that a time of
exaltation and excitement and unusual success is held to be often the
prelude to some disaster, just as the sense of excitement and buoyant
health, when it is very consciously perceived, is thought to herald the
approach of illness. "I felt so happy," people say, "that I was sure
that some misfortune was going to befall me--it is not lucky to feel so
secure as that!" This represented itself to the Greeks as part of the
divine government of the world; they thought that the heedless and
self-confident man was beguiled by success into what they called ubris,
the insolence of prosperity; and that then atae, that is, disaster,
followed. They believed that the over-prosperous man incurred the envy
and jealousy of the gods. We see this in the old legend of Polycrates
of Samos, whose schemes all succeeded, and whose ventures all turned
out well. He consulted a soothsayer about his alarming prosperity, who
advised him to inflict some deliberate loss or sacrifice upon himself;
so Polycrates drew from his finger and flung into the sea a signet-ring
which he possessed, with a jewel of great rarity and beauty in it. Soon
afterwards a fish was caught by the royal fisherman, and was served up
at the king's table--there, inside the body of the fish, was the ring;
and when Polycrates saw that, he felt that the gods had restored him
his gift, and that his destruction was determined upon; which came
true, for he was caught by pirates at sea, and crucified upon a rocky
headland.
No nation, and least of all the Greeks, would have arrived at this
theory of life and fate, if they had not felt that it was supported by
actual instances. It was of the nature of an inference from the facts
of life; and the explanation undoubtedly is that men do get betrayed,
by a constant experience of good fortune, into rashness and
heedlessness, because they trust to their luck and depend upon their
fortunate star.
But the man who is of an energetic and active type, if he is haunted by
anxiety, if his imagination paints the possibilities of disaster, takes
every means in his power to foresee contingencies, and to deal
cautiously and thoroughly with the situation which causes him anxiety.
If he is a man of keen sensibilities, the pressure of such care is so
insupportable that he takes prompt and effective measures to remove it;
and his fear thus becomes an element in his success, because it urges
him to action, and at the same time teaches him the need of due
precaution. As Horace wrote:
"Sperat infestis, metuit secundis
Alteram sortem."
"He hopes for a change of fortune when things are menacing, he fears a
reverse when things are prosperous." And if we look at the facts of
life, we see that it is not by any means the confident and optimistic
people who succeed best in their designs. It is rather the man of eager
and ambitious temperament, who dreads a repulse and anticipates it, and
takes all possible measures beforehand to avoid it.
We see the same principle underlying the scientific doctrine of
evolution. People often think loosely that the idea of evolution, in
the case, let us say, of a bird like a heron, with his immobility, his
long legs, his pointed beak, his muscular neck, is that such
characteristics have been evolved through long ages by birds that have
had to get their food in swamps and shallow lakes, and were thus
gradually equipped for food-getting through long ages of practice. But
of course no particular bird is thus modified by circumstances. A
pigeon transferred to a fen would not develop the characteristics of
the heron; it would simply die for lack of food. It is rather that
certain minute variations take place, for unknown reasons, in every
species; and the bird which happened to be hatched out in a fenland
with a rather sharper beak or rather longer legs than his fellows,
would have his power of obtaining food slightly increased, and would
thus be more likely to perpetuate in his offspring that particular
advantage of form. This principle working through endless centuries
would tend slowly to develop the stock that was better equipped for
life under such circumstances, and to eliminate those less suited to
the locality; and thus the fittest would tend to survive. But it does
not indicate any design on the part of the birds themselves, nor any
deliberate attempt to develop those characteristics; it is rather that
such characteristics, once started by natural variation, tend to
emphasize themselves in the lapse of time.
No doubt fear has played an enormous part in the progress of the human
race itself. The savage whose imagination was stronger than that of
other savages, and who could forecast the possibilities of disaster,
would wander through the forest with more precaution against wild
beasts, and would make his dwelling more secure against assault; so
that the more timid and imaginative type would tend to survive longest
and to multiply their stock. Man in his physical characteristics is a
very weak, frail, and helpless animal, exposed to all kinds of dangers;
his infancy is protracted and singularly defenceless; his pace is slow,
his strength is insignificant; it is his imagination that has put him
at the top of creation, and has enabled him both to evade dangers and
to use natural forces for his greater security. Though he is the
youngest of all created forms, and by no means the best equipped for
life, he has been able to go ahead in a way denied to all other
animals; his inventiveness has been largely developed by his terrors;
and the result has been that whereas all other animals still preserve,
as a condition of life, their ceaseless attitude of suspicion and fear,
man has been enabled by organisation to establish communities in which
fear of disaster plays but little part. If one watches a bird feeding
on a lawn, it is strange to observe its ceaseless vigilance. It takes a
hurried mouthful, and then looks round in an agitated manner to see
that it is in no danger of attack. Yet it is clear that the terror in
which all wild animals seem to live, and without which
self-preservation would be impossible, does not in the least militate
against their physical welfare. A man who had to live his life under
the same sort of risks that a bird in a garden has to endure from cats
and other foes, would lose his senses from the awful pressure of
terror; he would lie under the constant shadow of assassination.
But the singular thing in Nature is that she preserves characteristics
long after they have ceased to be needed; and so, though a man in a
civilised community has very little to dread, he is still haunted by an
irrational sense of insecurity and precariousness. And thus many of our
fears arise from old inheritance, and represent nothing rational or
real at all, but only an old and savage need of vigilance and wariness.
One can see this exemplified in a curious way in level tracts of
country. Everyone who has traversed places like the plain of
Worcestershire must remember the irritating way in which the roads keep
ascending little eminences, instead of going round at the foot. Now
these old country roads no doubt represent very ancient tracks indeed,
dating from times when much of the land was uncultivated. They get
stereotyped, partly because they were tracks, and partly because for
convenience the first enclosures and tillages were made along the roads
for purposes of communication. But the perpetual tendency to ascend
little eminences no doubt dates from a time when it was safer to go up,
in order to look round and to see ahead, partly in order to be sure of
one's direction, and partly to beware of the manifold dangers of the
road.
And thus many of the fears by which one is haunted are these old
survivals, these inherited anxieties. Who does not know the frame of
mind when perhaps for a day, perhaps for days together, the mind is
oppressed and uneasy, scenting danger in the air, forecasting calamity,
recounting all the possible directions in which fate or malice may have
power to wound and hurt us? It is a melancholy inheritance, but it
cannot be combated by any reason. It is of no use then to imitate
Robinson Crusoe, and to make a list of one's blessings on a piece of
paper; that only increases our fear, because it is just the chance of
forfeiting such blessings of which we are in dread! We must simply
remind ourselves that we are surrounded by old phantoms, and that we
derive our weakness from ages far back, in which risks were many and
security was rare.
VI
FEARS OF CHILDHOOD
If I look back over my own life, I can discern three distinct stages of
fear and anxieties, and I expect it is the same with most people. The
terrors of childhood are very mysterious things, and their horror
consists in the child's inability to put the dread into words. I
remember how one night, when we were living in the Master's Lodge at
Wellington College, I had gone to bed, and waking soon afterwards heard
a voice somewhere outside. I got out of bed, went to the door, and
looked out. Close to my door was an archway which looked into the open
gallery that ran round the big front hall, giving access to the
bedrooms. At the opposite end of the hall, in the gallery, burnt a
gaslight: to my horror I observed close to the gas what seemed to me a
colossal shrouded statue, made of a black bronze, formless, silent,
awful. I crept back to my bed, and there shivered in an ecstasy of
fear, till at last I fell asleep. There was no statue there in the
morning! I told my old nurse, after a day or two of dumb dread, what I
had seen. She laughed, and told me that a certain Mrs. Holder, an
elderly widow who was a dressmaker, had been to see her, about some
piece of work. They had turned out the nursery lights and were going
downstairs, when some question arose about the stuff of the frock,
whatever it was. Mrs. Holder had mounted on a chair to look close at
the stuff by the gaslight; and this was my bogey!
We had a delightful custom in nursery days, devised by my mother, that
on festival occasions, such as birthdays or at Christmas, our presents
were given us in the evening by a fairy called Abracadabra.
The first time the fairy appeared, we heard, after tea, in the hall,
the hoarse notes of a horn. We rushed out in amazement. Down in the
hall, talking to an aunt of mine who was staying in the house, stood a
veritable fairy, in a scarlet dress, carrying a wand and a scarlet bag,
and wearing a high pointed scarlet hat, of the shape of an
extinguisher. My aunt called us down; and we saw that the fairy had the
face of a great ape, dark-brown, spectacled, of a good-natured aspect,
with a broad grin, and a curious crop of white hair, hanging down
behind and on each side. Unfortunately my eldest brother, a very clever
and imaginative child, was seized with a panic so insupportable at the
sight of the face, that his present had to be given him hurriedly, and
he was led away, blanched and shuddering, to the nursery. After that,
the fairy never appeared except when he was at school: but long after,
when I was looking in a lumber-room with my brother for some mislaid
toys, I found in a box the mask of Abracadabra and the horn. I put it
hurriedly on, and blew a blast on the horn, which seemed to be of
tortoise-shell with metal fittings. To my amazement, he turned
perfectly white, covered his face with his hands, and burst out with
the most dreadful moans. I thought at first that he was making believe
to be frightened, but I saw in a minute or two that he had quite lost
control of himself, and the things were hurriedly put away. At the time
I thought it a silly kind of affectation. But I perceive now that he
had had a real shock the first time he had seen the mask; and though he
was then a big schoolboy, the terror was indelible. Who can say of what
old inheritance of fear that horror of the great ape-like countenance
was the sign? He had no associations of fear with apes, but it must
have been, I think, some dim old primeval terror, dating from some
ancestral encounter with a forest monster. In no other way can I
explain it.
Again, as a child, I was once sitting at dinner with my parents,
reading an old bound-up Saturday Magazine, looking at the pictures, and
waiting for dessert. I turned a page, and saw a picture of a Saint,
lying on the ground, holding up a cross, and a huge and cloudy fiend
with vast bat-like wings bending over him, preparing to clutch him, but
deterred by the sacred emblem. That was a really terrible shock. I
turned the page hastily, and said nothing, though it deprived me of
speech and appetite. My father noticed my distress, and asked if I felt
unwell, but I said "No." I got through dessert somehow; but then I had
to say good-night, go out into the dimly-lit hall, slip the volume back
into the bookcase, and get upstairs. I tore up the staircase, feeling
the air full of wings and clutching hands. That was too bad ever to be
spoken of; and as I did not remember which volume it was, I was never
able to look at the set of magazines again for fear of encountering it;
and strange to say some years afterwards, when I was an Eton boy, I
looked curiously for the picture, and again experienced the same
overwhelming horror.
My youngest brother, too, an imaginative child, could never be
persuaded by any bribes or entreaties to go into a dark room to fetch
anything out. Nothing would induce him. I remember that he was
catechised at the tea-table as to what he expected to find, to which he
replied at once, with a horror-stricken look and a long stammer,
"B--b--b--bloodstained corpses!"
It seems fantastic and ridiculous enough to older people, but the
horror of the dark and of the unknown which some children have is not a
thing to be laughed at, nor should it be unsympathetically combated.
One must remember that experience has not taught a child scepticism; he
thinks that anything in the world may happen; and all the monsters of
nursery tales, goblins, witches, evil fairies, dragons, which a child
in daylight will know to be imaginary, begin, as the dusk draws on, to
become appalling possibilities. They may be somewhere about, lurking in
cellars and cupboards and lofts and dark entries by day, and at night
they may slip out to do what harm they can. For children, not far from
the gates of birth, are still strongly the victims of primeval and
inherited fears, not corrected by the habitual current of life. It is
not a reason for depriving children of the joys of the old tales and
the exercise of the faculty of wonder; but the tendency should be very
carefully guarded and watched, because these sudden shocks may make
indelible marks, and leave a little weak spot in the mind which may
prove difficult to heal.
It is not only these spectral terrors against which children have to be
guarded. All severity and sharp indignity of punishment, all
intemperate anger, all roughness of treatment, should be kept in strict
restraint. There are noisy, boisterous, healthy children, of course,
who do not resent or even dread sharp usage. But it is not always easy
to discover the sensitive child, because fear of displeasure will
freeze him into a stupor of apparent dullness and stubbornness. I am
always infuriated by stupid people who regret the disappearance of
sharp, stern, peremptory punishments, and lament the softness of the
rising generation. If punishment must be inflicted, it should be done
good-naturedly and robustly as a natural tit-for-tat. Anger should be
reserved for things like spitefulness and dishonesty and cruelty. There
is nothing more utterly confusing to the childish mind than to have
trifling faults treated with wrath and indignation. It is true that, in
the world of nature, punishment seems often wholly disproportionate to
offences. Nature will penalise carelessness in a disastrous fashion,
and spare the cautious and prudent sinner. But there is no excuse for
us, if we have any sense of justice and patience at all, for not
setting a better example. We ought to show children that there is a
moral order which we are endeavouring to administer. If parents and
schoolmasters, who are both judges and executioners, allow their own
rule to be fortuitous, indulge their own irritable moods, punish
severely a trifling fault, and sentimentalise or condone a serious one,
a child is utterly confused. I know several people who have had their
lives blighted, have been made suspicious, cynical, crafty, and timid,
by severe usage and bullying and open contempt in childhood. The thing
to avoid, for all who are responsible in the smallest degree for the
nurture of children, is to call in the influence of fear; one may speak
plainly of consequences, but even there one must not exaggerate, as
schoolmasters often do, for the best of motives, about moral faults;
one may punish deliberate and repeated disobedience, wanton cruelty,
persistent and selfish disregard of the rights of others, but one must
warn many times, and never try to triumph over a fault by the
infliction of a shock of any kind. The shock is the most cruel and
cowardly sort of punishment, and if we wilfully use it, then we are
perpetuating the sad tyranny of instinctive fear, and using the
strength of a great angel to do the work of a demon, such as I saw long
ago in the old magazine, and felt its tyranny for many days.
As a child the one thing I was afraid of was the possibility of my
father's displeasure. We did not see a great deal of him, because he
was a much occupied headmaster; and he was to me a stately and majestic
presence, before whom the whole created world seemed visibly to bow.
But he was deeply anxious about our upbringing, and had a very strong
sense of his responsibility; and he would sometimes reprove us rather
sternly for some extremely trifling thing, the way one ate one's food,
or spoke, or behaved. This descended upon me as a cloud of darkness; I
attempted no excuses, I did not explain or defend myself; I simply was
crushed and confounded. I do not think it was the right method. He
never punished us, but we were not at ease with him. I remember the
agony with which I heard a younger sister once repeat to him some silly
and profane little jokes which a good-natured and absurd old lady had
told us in the nursery. I felt sure he would disapprove, as he did. I
knew quite well in my childish mind that it was harmless nonsense, and
did not give us a taste for ungodly mirth. But I could not intervene or
expostulate. I am sure that my father had not the slightest idea how
weighty and dominant he was; but many of the things he rebuked would
have been better not noticed, or if noticed only made fun of, while I
feel that he ought to have given us more opportunity of stating our
case. He simply frightened me into having a different morality when I
was in his presence to what I had elsewhere. But he did not make me
love goodness thereby, and only gave me a sense that certain things,
harmless in themselves, must not be done or said in the presence of
papa. He did not always remember his own rules, and there was thus an
element of injustice in his rebukes, which one merely accepted as part
of his awful and unaccountable greatness.