we do not at all understand, which account for the curious subjective
effects which certain people have at close quarters; there is something
hypnotic and mesmeric about the glance of certain eyes; and there is in
all probability a curious blending of mental currents in an assembly of
people, which is not a mere fancy, but a very real physical fact.
Personalities radiate very real and unmistakable influences, and
probably the undercurrent of thought which happens to be in one's mind
when one is with others has an effect, even if one says or does nothing
to indicate one's preoccupation. A certain amount of this comes from an
unconscious inference on the part of the recipients. We often augur,
without any very definite rational process, from the facial
expressions, gestures, movements, tones of others, what their frame of
mind is. But I believe that there is a great deal more than that. We
must all know that when we are with friends to whose moods and emotions
we are attuned, there takes place a singular degree of
thought-transference, quite apart from speech. I had once a great
friend with whom I was accustomed to spend much time tete-a-tete. We
used to travel together and spend long periods, day after day, in close
conjunction, often indeed sharing the same bedroom. It became a matter
at first of amusement and interest, but afterwards an accepted fact,
that we could often realise, even after a long silence, in what
direction the other's thought was travelling. "How did you guess I was
thinking of that?" would be asked. To which the reply was, "I did not
guess--I knew." On the other hand I have an old and familiar friend,
whom I know well and regard with great affection, but whose presence,
and particularly a certain fixity of glance, often, even now, causes me
a curious subjective disturbance which is not wholly pleasant, a sense
of some odd psychical control which is not entirely agreeable.
I have another friend who is the most delightful and easy company in
the world when we are, alone together; but he is a sensitive and
highly-strung creature, much affected by personal influences, and when
I meet him in the company of other people he is often almost
unrecognisable. His mind becomes critical, combative, acrid; he does
not say what he means, he is touched by a vague excitement, and there
passes over him an unnatural sort of brilliance, of a hard and futile
kind, which makes him sacrifice consideration and friendliness to the
instinctive desire to produce an effect and to score a point. I
sometimes actually detest him when he is one of a circle. I feel
inclined to say to him, "If only you could let your real self appear,
and drop this tiresome posturing and fencing, you would be as
delightful as you are to me when I am alone with you; but this hectic
tittering and feverish jocosity is not only not your real self, but it
gives others an impression of a totally unreal and not very agreeable
person." But, alas, this is just the sort of thing one cannot say to a
friend!
As one goes on in life, this terrible and disconcerting shyness of
youth disappears. We begin to realise, with a wholesome loss of vanity
and conceit, how very little people care or even notice how we are
dressed, how we look, what we say. We learn that other people are as
much preoccupied with their thoughts and fancies and reflections as we
are with our own. We realise that if we are anxious to produce an
agreeable impression, we do so far more by being interested and
sympathetic, than by attempting a brilliance which we cannot command.
We perceive that other people are not particularly interested in our
crude views, nor very grateful for the expression of them. We acquire
the power of combination and co-operation, in losing the desire for
splendour and domination. We see that people value ease and security,
more than they admire originality and fantastic contradiction. And so
we come to the blessed time when, instead of reflecting after a social
occasion whether we did ourselves justice, we begin to consider rather
the impression we have formed of other personalities.
I believe that we ought to have recourse to very homely remedies indeed
for combating shyness. It is of no use to try to console and distract
ourselves with lofty thoughts, and to try to keep eternity and the
hopes of man in mind. We so become only more self-conscious and
superior than ever. The fact remains that the shyness of youth causes
agonies both of anticipation and retrospect; if one really wishes to
get rid of it, the only way is to determine to get used somehow to
society, and not to endeavour to avoid it; and as a practical rule to
make up one's mind, if possible, to ask people questions, rather than
to meditate impressive answers. Asking other people questions about
things to which they are likely to know the answers is one of the
shortest cuts to popularity and esteem. It is wonderful to reflect how
much distress personal bashfulness causes people, how much they would
give to be rid of it, and yet how very little trouble they ever take to
acquiring any method of dealing with the difficulty. I see a good deal
of undergraduates, and am often aware that they are friendly and
responsive, but without any power of giving expression to it. I
sometimes see them suffering acutely from shyness before my eyes. But a
young man who can bring himself to ask a perfectly simple question
about some small matter of common interest is comparatively rare; and
yet it is generally the simplest way out of the difficulty.
IX
FEARS OF MIDDLE AGE
Now with all the tremors, reactions, glooms, shadows, and despairs of
youth--it is easy enough to forget them, but they were there--goes a
power of lifting and lighting up in a moment at a chord of music, a
glance, a word, the song of a bird, the scent of a flower, a flying
sunburst, which fills life up like a cup with bubbling and sparkling
liquor.
"My soul, be patient! Thou shalt find
A little matter mend all this!"
And that is the part of youth which we remember, till on looking back
it seems like a time of wandering with like-hearted comrades down some
sweet-scented avenue of golden sun and green shade. Our memory plays us
beautifully false--splendide mendax--till one wishes sometimes that old
and wise men, retelling the story of their life, could recall for the
comfort of youth some part of its languors and mischances, its bitter
jealousies, its intense and poignant sense of failure.
And then in a moment the door of life opens. One day I was an
irresponsible, pleasure-loving, fantastic youth, and a week later I
was, or it seemed to me that I was, a professional man with all the
cares of a pedagogue upon my back. It filled me at first, I remember,
with a gleeful amazement, to find myself in the desk, holding forth,
instead of on the form listening. It seemed delicious at first to have
the power of correcting and slashing exercises, and placing boys in
order, instead of being corrected and examined, and competing for a
place. It was a solemn game at the outset. Then came the other side of
the picture. One's pupils were troublesome, they did badly in
examinations, they failed unaccountably; and one had a glimpse too of
some of the tragedies of school life. Almost insensibly I became aware
that I had a task to perform, that my mistakes involved boys in
disaster, that I had the anxious care of other destinies; and thus,
almost before I knew it, came a new cloud on the horizon, the cloud of
anxiety. I could not help seeing that I had mismanaged this boy and
misdirected that; that one could not treat them as ingenuous and lively
playthings, but that what one said and did set a mark which perhaps
could not be effaced. Gradually other doubts and problems made
themselves felt. I had to administer a system of education in which I
did not wholly believe; I saw little by little that the rigid old
system of education was a machine which, if it made a highly
accomplished product out of the best material, wasted an enormous
amount of boyish interest and liveliness, and stultified the feebler
sort of mind. Then came the care of a boarding-house, close relations
with parents, a more real knowledge of the infinite levity of boy
nature. I became mixed up with the politics of the place, the chance of
more ambitious positions floated before me; the need for tact,
discretion, judiciousness, moderation, tolerance emphasized itself. I
am here outlining my own experience, but it is only one of many similar
experiences. I became a citizen without knowing it, and my place in the
world, my status, success, all became definite things which I had to
secure.
The cares, the fears, the anxieties of middle life lie for most men and
women in this region; if people are healthy and active, they generally
arrive at a considerable degree of equanimity; they do not anticipate
evil, and they take the problems of life cheerfully enough as they
come; but yet come they do, and too many men and women are tempted to
throw overboard scornfully and disdainfully the dreams of youth as a
luxury which they cannot afford to indulge, and to immerse themselves
in practical cares, month after month, with perhaps the hope of a
fairly careless and idle holiday at intervals. What I think tends to
counteract this for many people is love and marriage, the wonder and
amazement of having children of their own, and all the offices of
tenderness that grow up naturally beside their path. But this again
brings a whole host of fears and anxieties as well--arrangements, ways
and means, household cares, illnesses, the homely stuff of life, much
of it enjoyed, much of it cheerfully borne, and often very bravely and
gallantly endured. It is out of this simple material that life has to
be constructed. But there is a twofold danger in all this. There is a
danger of cynicism, the frame of mind in which a man comes to face
little worries as one might put up an umbrella in a shower--"Thou
know'st 'tis common!" Out of that grows up a rude dreariness, a
philosophy which has nothing dignified about it, but is merely a
recognition of the fact that life is a poor affair, and that one cannot
hope to have things to one's mind. Or there is a dull frame of mind
which implies a meek resignation, a sense of disappointment about life,
borne with a mournful patience, a sense of one's sphere having somehow
fallen short of one's deserts. This produces the grumpy paterfamilias
who drowses over a paper or grumbles over a pipe; such a man is
inimitably depicted by Mr. Wells in Marriage. That sort of ugly
disillusionment, that publicity of disappointment, that frank disregard
of all concerns except one's own, is one of the most hideous features
of middle-class life, and it is rather characteristically English. It
sometimes conceals a robust good sense and even kindliness; but it is a
base thing at best, and seems to be the shadow of commercial
prosperity. Yet it at least implies a certain sturdiness of character,
and a stubborn belief in one's own merits which is quite impervious to
the lessons of experience. On sensitive and imaginative people the
result of the professional struggle with life, the essence of which is
often social pretentiousness, is different. It ends in a mournful and
distracted kind of fatigue, a tired sort of padding along after life, a
timid bewilderment at conditions which one cannot alter, and which yet
have no dignity or seemliness.
What is there that is wrong with all this? The cause is easy enough to
analyse. It is the result of a system which develops conventional,
short-sighted, complicated households, averse to effort, fond of
pleasure, and with tastes which are expensive without being refined.
The only cure would seem to be that men and women should be born
different, with simple active generous natures; it is easy to say that!
But the worst of the situation is that the sordid banality and ugly
tragedy of their lot do not dawn on the people concerned. Greedy vanity
in the more robust, lack of moral courage and firmness in the more
sensitive, with a social organisation that aims at a surface dignity
and a cheap showiness, are the ingredients of this devil's cauldron.
The worst of it is that it has no fine elements at all. There is a
nobility about real tragedy which evokes a quality of passionate and
sincere emotion. There is something essentially exalted about a fierce
resistance, a desperate failure. But this abject, listless dreariness,
which can hardly be altered or expressed, this miserable floating down
the muddy current, where there is no sharp repentance or fiery
battling, nothing but a mean abandonment to a meaningless and
unintelligible destiny, seems to have in it no seed of recovery at all.
The dark shadow of professional anxiety is that it has no tragic
quality; it is like ploughing on day by day through endless mud-flats.
One does not feel, in the presence of sharp suffering or bitter loss,
that they ought not to exist. They are there, stern, implacable,
august; stately enemies, great combatants. There is a significance
about their very awfulness. One may fall before them, but they pass
like a great express train, roaring, flashing, things deliberately and
intently designed; but these dull failures which seem not the outgrowth
of anyone's fierce longing or wilful passion, but of everyone's
laziness and greediness and stupidity, how is one to face them? It is
the helpless death of the quagmire, not the death of the fight or the
mountain-top. Is there, we ask ourselves, anything in the mind of God
which corresponds to comfort-loving vulgarity, if so strong and yet so
stagnant a stream can overflow the world? The bourgeois ideal! One
would rather have tyranny or savagery than anything so gross and smug.
And yet we see high-spirited and ardent husbands drawn into this by
obstinate and vulgar-minded wives. We see fine-natured and sensitive
women engulfed in it by selfish and ambitious husbands. The tendency is
awfully and horribly strong, and it wins, not by open combat, but by
secret and dull persistence. And one sees too--I have seen it many
times--children of delicate and eager natures, who would have
flourished and expanded in more generous air, become conventional and
commonplace and petty, concerned about knowing the right people and
doing the right things, and making the same stupid and paltry show,
which deceives no one.
There is nothing for it but independence and simplicity and, perhaps
best of all, a love of beauty. William Morris asserted passionately
enough that art was the only cure for all this dreariness--the love of
beautiful sounds and sights and words; and I think that is true, if it
be further extended to a perception of the quality of beauty in the
conduct and relations of life. For those are the cheap and reasonable
pleasures of life, accessible to all; and if men and women cared for
work first and the decent simplicities of wholesome living, and could
further find their pleasure in art, in whatever form, then I believe
that many of these fears and anxieties, so maiming and impairing to all
that is fine in life, would vanish quietly out of being. The thing
seems both beautiful and possible, because one knows of households
where it is so, and where it grows up naturally and easily enough. I
know households of both kinds--where on the one hand the standard is
ambitious and mean, where the inmates calculate everything with a view
to success, or rather to producing an impression of success; and there
all talk and intercourse is an unreal thing, not the outflow of natural
interests and pleasant tastes, but a sham culture and a refinement that
is only pursued because it is the right sort of surface to present to
the world. One submits to it with boredom, one leaves it with relief.
They have got the right people together, they have shown that they can
command their attendance; it is all ceremony and waste.
And then I know households where one sees in the books, the pictures,
the glances, the gestures, the movements of the inmates, a sort of
grace and delicacy which comes of really caring about things that are
beautiful and fine. Sincere things are simply said, humour bubbles up
and breaks in laughter; one feels that light is thrown on a hundred
topics and facts and personalities. The whole of life then becomes a
garden teeming with strange and wonderful secrets, and influences that
flash and radiate, passing on into some mysterious and fragrant gloom.
Everything there seems charged with significance and charm; there are
no pretences--there are preferences, prejudices if you will; but there
is tolerance and sympathy, and a desire to see the point of view of
others. The effect of such an atmosphere is to set one wondering how
one has contrived to miss the sense of so much that is beautiful and
interesting in life, and sends one away longing to perceive more, and
determined if possible to interpret life more truly and more graciously.
X
FEARS OF AGE
And then age creeps on; and that brings fears of its own, and fears
that are all the more intolerable because they are not definite fears
at all, merely a loss of nervous vigour, which attaches itself to the
most trivial detail and magnifies it into an insuperable difficulty. A
friend of mine who was growing old once confided to me that foreign
travel, which used to be such a delight to him, was now getting
burdensome. "It is all right when I have once started," he said, "but
for days before I am the prey of all kinds of apprehensions." "What
sort of apprehensions?" I said. He laughed, and replied, "Well, it is
almost too absurd to mention, but I find myself oppressed with anxiety
for weeks beforehand as to whether, when we get to Calais, we shall
find places in the train." And I remember, too, how a woman friend of
mine once told me that she called at the house of an elderly couple in
London, people of rank and wealth. Their daughter met her in the
drawing-room and said, "I am glad you are come--you may be able to
cheer my mother up. We are going down to-morrow to our place in the
country; the servants and the luggage went this morning, and my mother
and father are to drive down this afternoon--my mother is very low
about it." "What is the matter?" said my friend. The daughter replied,
"She is afraid that they will not get there in time!" "In time for
what?" said my friend, thinking that there was some important
engagement. "In time for tea!" said the daughter gravely.
It is all very well to laugh at such fears, but they are not natural
fears at all, they just indicate a low vitality; they are the symptoms
and not the causes of a disease. It is the frame of mind of the
sluggard in the Bible who says, "There is a lion in the way." Younger
people are apt to be irritated by what seems a wilful creating of
apprehensions. They ought rather to be patient and reassuring, and
compassionate to the weakness of nerve for which it stands.
With such fears as these may be classed all the unreal but none the
less distressing fears about health which beset people all their lives,
in some cases; it is extremely annoying to healthy people to find a man
reduced to depression and silence at the possibility of taking cold, or
at the fear of having eaten something unwholesome. I remember an
elderly gentleman who had lived a vigorous and unselfish life, and was
indeed a man of force and character, whose activity was entirely
suspended in later years by his fear of catching cold or of over-tiring
himself. He was a country clergyman, and used to spend the whole of
Sunday between his services, in solitary seclusion, "resting," and
retire to bed the moment the evening service was over; moreover his
dread of taking cold was such that he invariably wore a hat in the
winter months to go from the drawing-room to the dining-room for
dinner, even if there were guests in his house. He used to jest about
it, and say that it no doubt must look curious; but he added that he
had found it a wise precaution, and that we had no idea how disabling
his colds were. Even a very healthy friend of my own standing has told
me that if he ever lies awake at night he is apt to exaggerate the
smallest and most trifling sense of discomfort into the symptom of some
dangerous disease. Let me quote the well-known case of Hans Andersen,
whose imagination was morbidly strong. He found one morning when he
awoke that he had a small pimple under his left eyebrow. He reflected
with distress upon the circumstance, and soon came to the rueful
conclusion that the pimple would probably increase in size, and deprive
him of the sight of his left eye. A friend calling upon him in the
course of the morning found him writing, in a mood of solemn
resignation, with one hand over the eye in question, "practising," as
he said, "how to read and write with the only eye that would soon be
left him."
One's first impulse is to treat these self-inflicted sufferings as
ridiculous and almost idiotic. But they are quite apt to beset people
of effectiveness and ability. To call them irrational does not cure
them, because they lie deeper than any rational process, and are in
fact the superficial symptoms of some deep-seated weakness of nerve,
while their very absurdity, and the fact that the mind cannot throw
them off, only proves how strong they are. They are in fact signs of
some profound uneasiness of mind; and the rational brain of such
people, casting about for some reason to explain the fear with which
they are haunted, fixes on some detail which is not worthy of serious
notice. It is of course a species of local insanity and monomania, but
it does not imply any general obscuration of faculties at all. Some of
the most intellectual people are most at the mercy of such trials, and
indeed they are rather characteristic of men and women whose brain is
apt to work at high pressure. One recollects in the life of Shelley,
how he used to be haunted by these insupportable fears. He was at one
time persuaded that he had contracted leprosy, and he used to
disconcert his acquaintances by examining solicitously their wrists and
necks to see if he could detect symptoms of the same disease.
There is very little doubt that as medical knowledge progresses we
shall know more about the cause of such hallucinations. To call them
unreal is mere stupidity. Sensible people who suffer from them are
often perfectly well aware of their unreality, and are profoundly
humiliated by them. They are some disease or weakness of the
imaginative faculty; and a friend of mine who suffered from such things
told me that it was extraordinary to him to perceive the incredible
ingenuity with which his brain under such circumstances used to find
confirmation for his fears from all sorts of trivial incidents which at
other times passed quite unnoticed. It is generally quite useless to
think of removing the fear by combating the particular fancy; the
affected centre, whatever it is, only turns feverishly to some other
similar anxiety. Occupation of a quiet kind, exercise, rest, are the
best medicine.