by suspicion of other people's conduct and motives. That is of course
allied to insanity. In sane and sound health we realise that we are
not, as a rule, the objects of the malignity and spitefulness of
others. We are perhaps obstacles to the carrying out of other people's
plans; but men and women as a rule mind their own business, and are not
much concerned to intervene in the designs and activities of others.
Yet a man whose mental equilibrium is unstable is apt to think that if
he is disappointed or thwarted it is the result of a deliberate
conspiracy on the part of other people. If he is a writer, he thinks
that other writers are aware of his merits, but are determined to
prevent them being recognised out of sheer ill-will. A man in robust
health realises that he gets quite as much credit or even more credit
than he deserves, and that his claims to attention are generously
recognised; one has exactly as much influence and weight as one can
get, and other people as a rule are much too much occupied in their own
concerns to have either the time or the inclination to interfere. But
as a man grows older, as his work stiffens and weakens, he falls out of
the race, and he must be content to do so; and he is well advised if he
puts his failure down to his own deficiencies, and not to the malice of
others. The world is really very much on the look out for anything
which amuses, delights, impresses, moves, or helps it; it is quick and
generous in recognition of originality and force; and if a writer, as
he gets older, finds his books neglected and his opinions disdained, he
may be fairly sure that he has said his say, and that men are
preoccupied with new ideas and new personalities. Of course this is a
melancholy and disconcerting business, especially if one has been more
concerned with personal prominence than with the worth and weight of
one's ideas; mortified vanity is a sore trial. I remember once meeting
an old author who, some thirty years before the date at which I met
him, had produced a book which attracted an extraordinary amount of
attention, though it has long since been forgotten. The old man had all
the airs of solemn greatness, and I have seldom seen a more rueful
spectacle than when a young and rising author was introduced to him,
and when it became obvious that the young man had not only never heard
of the old writer, but did not know the name of his book.
The question is what we can do to avoid falling under the dominion of
these uncanny fears and fancies, as we fall from middle age to age. A
dreary, dispirited, unhappy, peevish old man or old woman is a very
miserable spectacle; while, at the same time, generous, courteous,
patient, modest, tender old age is one of the most beautiful things in
the world. We may of course resolve not to carry our dreariness into
all circles, and if we find life a poor and dejected business, we can
determine that we will not enlarge upon the theme. But the worst of
discouragement is that it removes even the desire to play a part, or to
make the most and best of ourselves. Like Mrs. Gummidge in David
Copperfield, if we are reminded that other people have their troubles,
we are apt to reply that we feel them more. One does not desire that
people should unduly indulge themselves in self-dramatisation. There is
something very repugnant in an elderly person who is bent on proving
his importance and dignity, in laying claim to force and influence, in
affecting to play a large part in the world. But there is something
even more afflicting in the people who drop all decent pretence of
dignity, and pour the product of an acrid and disappointed spirit into
all conversations.
Age can establish itself very firmly in the hearts of its circle, if it
is kind, sympathetic, appreciative, ready to receive confidences,
willing to encourage the fitful despondencies of youth. But here again
we are met by the perennial difficulty as to how far we can force
ourselves to do things which we do not really want to do, and how far
again, if we succeed in forcing ourselves into action, we can give any
accent of sincerity and genuineness to our comments and questions.
In this particular matter, that of sympathy, a very little effort does
undoubtedly go a long way, because there are a great many people in the
world eagerly on the look out for any sign of sympathy, and not apt to
scrutinise too closely the character of the sympathy offered. And the
best part of having once forced oneself to exhibit sympathy, at
whatever cost of strain and effort, is that one is at least ashamed to
withdraw it.
I remember a foolish woman who was very anxious to retain the hold upon
the active world which she had once possessed. She very seldom spoke of
any subject but herself, her performances, her activities, the pressure
of the claims which she was forced to try to satisfy. I can recall her
now, with her sanguine complexion, her high voice, her anxious and
restless eye wandering in search of admiration. "The day's post!" she
cried, "that is one of my worst trials--so many duties to fulfil, so
many requests for help, so many irresistible claims come before me in
the pile of letters--that high," indicating about a foot and a half of
linear measurement above the table. "It is the same story every day--a
score of people bringing their little mugs of egotism to be filled at
my pump of sympathy!"
It was a ridiculous exhibition, because one was practically sure that
there was nothing of the kind going on. One was inclined to believe
that they were mugs of sympathy filled at the pump of egotism! But if
the thing were really being done, it was certainly worth doing!
One of the causes of the failure of nerve-force in age, which lies
behind so much of these miseries, is that people who have lived at all
active lives cannot bring themselves to realise their loss of vigour,
and try to prolong the natural energies of middle age into the twilight
of elderliness. Men and women cling to activities, not because they
enjoy them, but to delude themselves into believing that they are still
young. That terrible inability to resign positions, the duties of which
one cannot adequately fulfil, which seems so disgraceful and
unconscientious a handling of life to the young, is often a pathetic
clinging to youth. Such veterans do not reflect that the only effect of
such tenacity is partly that other people do their work, and partly
also that the critic observes that if a post can be adequately filled
by so old a man it is a proof that such a post ought not to exist. The
tendency ought to be met as far as possible by fixing age-limits to all
positions. Because even if the old and weary do consult their friends
as to the advisability of retirement, it is very hard for the friends
cordially to recommend it. A public man once told me that a very aged
official consulted him as to the propriety of resignation. He said in
his reply something complimentary about the value of the veteran's
services. Whereupon the old man replied that as he set so high an
estimation upon his work, he would endeavour to hold on a little longer!
The conscientious thing to do, as we get older and find ourselves
slower, more timid, more inactive, more anxious, is to consult a candid
friend, and to follow his advice rather than our own inclination; a
certain fearfulness, an avoidance of unpleasant duty, a dreary
foreboding, is apt to be characteristic of age. But we must meet it
philosophically. We must reflect that we have done our work, and that
an attempt to galvanise ourselves into activity is sure to result in
depression. So we must condense our energies, be content to play a
little, to drowse a little, to watch with interest the game of life in
which we cannot take a hand, until death falls as naturally upon our
wearied eyes as sleep falls upon the eyes of a child tired with a long
summer day of eager pleasure and delight.
But there is one practical counsel that may here be given to all who
find a tendency to dread and anxiety creeping upon them as life
advances. I have known very truly and deeply religious people who have
been thus beset, and who make their fears the subject of earnest
prayer, asking that this particular terror may be spared them, that
this cup may be withdrawn from their shuddering lips. I do not believe
that this is the right way of meeting the situation. One may pray as
whole-heartedly as one will against the tendency to fear; but it is a
great help to realise that the very experiences which seem now so
overwhelming had little or no effect upon one in youthful and
high-hearted days. It is not really that the quality of events alter;
it is merely that one is losing vitality, and parting with the
irresponsible hopefulness that did not allow one to brood, simply
because there were so many other interesting and delightful things
going on.
One must attack the disease, for it is a disease, at the root; and it
is of little use to shrink timidly from the particular evil, because
when it is gone, another will take its place. We may pray for courage,
but we must practise it; and the best way of meeting particular fears
is to cultivate interests, distractions, amusements, which may serve to
dispel them. We cannot begin to do that while we are under the dominion
of a particular fear, for the strength of fear lies in its dominating
and nauseating quality, so that it gives us a dreary disrelish for
life; but if we really wish to combat it, we must beware of inactivity;
it may be comfortable, as life goes on, to cultivate a habit of mild
contemplation, but it is this very habit of mind which predisposes us
to anxiety when anxiety comes. Dr. Johnson pointed out how
comparatively rare it was for people who had manual labour to perform,
and whose work lay in the open air, to suffer from hypochondriacal
terrors. The truth is that we are made for labour, and we have by no
means got rid of the necessity for it. We have to pay a price for the
comforts of civilisation, and above all for the pleasures of
inactivity. It is astonishing how quickly a definite task which one has
to perform, whether one likes it or not, draws off a cloud of anxiety
from one's spirit. I am myself liable to attacks of depression, not
causeless depression, but a despondent exaggeration of small troubles.
Yet in times of full work, when meetings have to be attended, papers
tackled, engagements kept, I seldom find myself suffering from vague
anxieties. It is simply astonishing that one cannot learn more common
sense! I suppose that all people of anxious minds tend to find the
waking hour a trying one. The mind, refreshed by sleep, turns
sorrowfully to the task of surveying the difficulties which lie before
it. And yet a hundred times have I discovered that life, which seemed
at dawn nothing but a tangle of intolerable problems, has become at
noon a very bearable and even interesting affair; and one should thus
learn to appreciate the tonic value of occupation, and set oneself to
discern some pursuit, if we have no compulsory duties, which may set
the holy mill revolving, as Dante says; for it is the homely grumble of
the gear which distracts us from the other sort of grumbling, the
self-pitying frame of mind, which is the most fertile seed-plot of fear.
"How happy I was long ago; how little I guessed my happiness; how
little I knew all that lay before me; how sadly and strangely afflicted
I am!" These are the whispers of the evil demon of fearfulness; and
they can only be checked by the murmur of wholesome and homely voices.
The old motto says, "Orare est laborare," "prayer is work"--and it is
no less true that "laborare est orare," "work is prayer." The truth is
that we cannot do without both; and when we have prayed for courage,
and tried to rejoice in our beds, as the saints who are joyful in glory
do, we had better spend no time in begging that money may be sent us to
meet our particular need, or that health may return to us, or that this
and that person may behave more kindly and considerately, but go our
way to some perfectly commonplace bit of work, do it as thoroughly as
we can, and simply turn our back upon the hobgoblin whose grimaces fill
us with such uneasiness. He melts away in the blessed daylight over the
volume or the account-book, in the simple talk about arrangements or
affairs, and above all perhaps in trying to disentangle and relieve
another's troubles and anxieties. We cannot get rid of fear by drugs or
charms; we have to turn to the work which is the appointed solace of
man, and which is the reward rather than the penalty of life.
XI
DR. JOHNSON
There is one great and notable instance in our annals which ought once
and for all to dispose of the idea that there is anything weak or
unmanly in finding fear a constant temptation, and that is the case of
Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson holds his supreme station as the "figure" par
excellence of English life for a number of reasons. His robustness, his
wit, his reverence for established things, his secret piety are all
contributory causes; but the chief of all causes is that the proportion
in which these things were mixed is congenial to the British mind. The
Englishman likes a man who is deeply serious without being in the least
a prig; a man who is tender-hearted without being sentimental; he likes
a rather combative nature, and enjoys repartee more than he enjoys
humour. The Englishman values good sense above almost all qualities; by
a sensible man he means a man with a clear judgment of right and wrong,
a man who is not taken in by pretences nor gulled by rhetoric; a man
who can instinctively see what is important and what is unimportant.
But of course the chief external reason, apart from the character of
Johnson himself, for his supremacy of fame, is that his memory is
enshrined in an incomparable biography. It shows the strange ineptness
of Englishmen for literary and artistic criticism, their incapacity for
judging a work of art on its own merits, their singular habit of
allowing their disapprobation of a man's private character to
depreciate his work, that an acknowledged critic like Macaulay could
waste time in carefully considering whether Boswell was more fool or
more knave, and triumphantly announce that he produced a good book by
accident. Probably Boswell did not realise how matchless a biographer
he was, though he was not disposed to belittle his own performances.
But his unbridled interest in the smallest details, his power of
hero-worship, his amazing style, his perception, his astonishing memory
and the training he gave it, his superb dramatic faculty, which enabled
him to arrange his other characters around the main figure, and to
subordinate them all to his central emphasis--all these qualities are
undeniable. Moreover he was himself the most perfect foil and contrast
to Johnson that could be imagined, while he possessed in a unique
degree the power of both stimulating and provoking his hero to
animation and to wrath. Boswell may not have known what an artist he
was, but he is probably one of the best literary artists who has ever
lived.
But the supreme quality of his great book is this--that his interest in
every trait of his hero, large and small, is so strong that he had none
of that stiff propriety or chilly reserve which mars almost all English
biographies. He did not care a straw whether this characteristic or
that would redound to Johnson's credit. He saw that Johnson was a
large-minded, large-hearted man, with an astonishing power of
conversational expression, and an extremely picturesque figure as well.
He perceived that he was big enough to be described in full, and that
the shadows of his temperament only brought out the finer features into
prominence.
Since the days of Johnson there are but two Englishmen whose lives we
know in anything like the same detail--Ruskin and Carlyle. We know the
life of Ruskin mainly from his own power of impassioned autobiography,
and because he had the same sort of power of exhibiting both his charm
and his weakness as Boswell had in dealing with Johnson. But Ruskin was
not at all a typical Englishman; he had a very feminine side to his
character, and though he was saved from sentimentality by his extreme
trenchancy, and by his irritable temper, yet his whole temperament is
beautiful, winning, attractive, rather than salient and picturesque. He
had the qualities of a poet, a quixotic ideal, and an exuberant fancy;
but though his spell over those who understand him is an almost magical
one, his point of view is bound to be misunderstood by the ordinary man.
Carlyle's case is a different one again. There the evidence is mainly
documentary. We know more about the Carlyle interior than we know of
the history of any married pair since the world began. There is little
doubt that if Carlyle could have had a Boswell, a biographer who could
have rendered the effect of his splendid power of conversation, we
might have had a book which could have been put on the same level as
the life of Johnson, because Carlyle again was pre-eminently a
"figure," a man made by nature to hold the enraptured attention of a
circle. But it would have been a much more difficult task to represent
Carlyle's talk than it was to represent Johnson's, because Carlyle was
an inspired soliloquist, and supplied both objection and repartee out
of his own mind. I think it probable that Carlyle was a typical
Scotchman; he was more impassioned in his seriousness than Johnson, but
he had a grimness which Johnson did not possess, and he had not
Johnson's good-natured tolerance for foolish and well-meaning people.
Carlyle himself had a good deal of Boswell's own gift, a power of
minute and faithful observation, and a memory which treasured and
reproduced characteristic details. If Carlyle had ever had the time or
the taste to admire any human being as Boswell admired Johnson, he
might have produced fully as great a book; but Carlyle had a prophetic
impulse, an instinct for inverting tubs and preaching from them, a
desire for telling the whole human race what to do and how to do it,
which Johnson was too modest to claim.
There is but one other instance that I know in English literature of a
man who had the Boswellian gift to the full, but who never had complete
scope, and that was Hogg. If Hogg could have spent more of his life
with Shelley, and had been allowed to complete his book, we might, I
believe, have had a monument of the same kind.
But in the case of Boswell and Johnson, it is Boswell's magnificent
scorn of reticence which has done the trick, like the spurt of acid, of
which Browning speaks in one of his best similes. The final stroke of
genius which has established the Life of Johnson so securely in the
hearts of English readers, lies in the fact that Boswell has given us
something to compassionate. As a rule the biographer cannot bear to
evoke the smallest pity for his hero. The absence of female relatives
in the case of Johnson was probably a part of his good fortune. No
biographer likes, and seldom dares, to torture the sensibilities of a
great man's widow and daughters. And the strength as well as the
weakness of the feminine point of view is that women have a power not
so much of not observing, as of actually obliterating the weaknesses of
those whom they love. It is sentiment which ruins biographies, the
sentiment that cannot bear the truth.
Boswell did not shrink from admitting the reader to a sight of
Johnson's hypochondria, his melancholy fears, his dreary miseries, his
dread of illness, his terror of death. Johnson's horror of annihilation
was insupportable. He so revelled in life, in the contact and company
of other human beings, that he once said that the idea of an infinity
of torment was preferable to the thought of annihilation. He wrote, in
his last illness, to his old friend Dr. Taylor:
"Oh! my friend, the approach of death is very dreadful. I am afraid to
think on that which I know I cannot avoid. It is vain to look round and
round for that help which cannot be had. Yet we hope and hope, and
fancy that he who has lived to-day may live to-morrow. But let us learn
to derive our hope only from God.
"In the meantime, let us be kind to one another. I have no friend now
living but you and Mr. Hector that was the friend of my youth.--Do not
neglect, sir, yours affectionately, SAM. JOHNSON."
Was ever the last fear put into such simple and poignant words as in
the above letter? It is like that other saying of Johnson's, when all
sorts of good reasons had been given why men should wish to be released
from their troubles by death, "After all, it is a sad thing for a man
to lie down and die." There is no more that can be said, and not the
best reasons in the world for desiring to depart and have done with
life can ever do away with that sadness.
Dr. Johnson supplies the clearest proof, if proof were needed, that no
robustness of temperament, no genius of common sense, no array of
rationality, no degree of courage, can save a man from the assaults of
fear, and even of fear which the sufferer knows to be unreal. Some of
the most severe and angry things which Johnson ever said were said to
Boswell and others who persisted in discussing the question of death.
Yet Johnson had no rational doubt of immortality, and believed with an
almost childlike simplicity in the Christian faith. He was not afraid
of pain, or of the act of dying; it was of the unknown conditions
beyond the grave that he was afraid. Probably as a rule very robust
people are so much occupied in living that they have little time to
think of the future, while men and women who hold to life by a frail
tenure are not much concerned at quitting a scene which is phantasmal
and full of pain. But in Johnson we have the two extremes brought
together. He was the most gregarious of men; he loved company so well
that he would follow his friends to the very threshold, in the hope, as
he once told Boswell, that they might perhaps return. When he was alone
and undistracted, his melancholy came back upon him like a cloud. He
tortured himself over the unprofitableness of his life, over his
failure to achieve official prominence. He does not seem to have
brooded over the favourite subject for Englishmen to lose heart over,
namely, his financial position. It is a very significant fact in our
English life that if at an inquest upon a suicide it can be established
that a man has financial difficulties, a verdict of temporary insanity
is instantly conceded. Loss of property rather than loss of affection
is the thing which the Englishman thinks is likely to derange a man.
But Johnson seems never to have been afraid of poverty, nor to have
ever troubled about fame. He was very angry once when it was laughingly
suggested to him that if he had gone to the Bar he might have been Lord
Chancellor; and I have no doubt, as I have said, that one of his
uncomfortable reflections was that he did not seem to himself to be in
a position of influence and authority. But, apart from that, it is
obvious that Johnson's broodings took the form of lamenting his own
sinfulness and moral worthlessness: what the faults which troubled him
were, it is hard to say. He does not seem to have been repentant about
the mortification he caused others by his witty bludgeoning--indeed he
considered himself a polite man! But I believe, from many slight
indications, that Johnson was distressed by the consciousness of
sensual impulses, though he held them in severe restraint. His habit of
ejaculatory prayer was, I think, directed against this tendency. The
agitation with which he once said that corruption had entered into his
heart by means of a dream seems to me a proof of this. He took a
tolerant view of the lapses of others, and of course the standard of
the age was lax in this respect. But I have little doubt myself that
here Johnson found himself often confronted with a sensuous tendency
which he thought degrading, and which he constantly combated.
Apart from this, he was not afraid of illness in itself, except as a
prelude of mortality. Indeed I believe that he took a hypochondriac
pleasure in observing his symptoms minutely, and in dosing himself in
all sorts of ways. His mysterious preoccupations with dried orange-peel
had no doubt a medicinal end in view. But when it came to suffering
pain and even to enduring operations, he had no tremors. His one
constant fear was the fear of death. He kept it at arm's length, he
loved any social amusement that banished it, but it is obvious, in
several of his talks, when the subject was under discussion, that the
cloud descended upon him suddenly and made him miserable. It was all
summed up in this, that life was to his taste, that even when oppressed
with gloom and depression, he never desired to escape. I have heard a
great doctor say that he believed that human beings were very sharply
divided in this respect, that there were some people in whom any
extremity of prolonged anguish, bodily or mental, never produced the
smallest desire to quit life; while there were others whose attachment
to life was slight, and that a very little pressure of care or calamity
developed a suicidal impulse. This is, I suppose, a question of
vitality, not necessarily of activity of mind and body, but a deep
instinctive desire to live; the thought of deliberate suicide was
wholly unintelligible to Johnson, death was his ultimate fear, and
however much he suffered from disease or depression, his intention to
live was always inalienable.
His fear then was one which no devoutness of faith, no resolute
tenacity of hope, no array of reasons could ever touch. It was simply
the unknown that he feared. Life had not been an easy business for
Johnson; he had known all the calamities of life, and he was familiar
with the worst calamity of all, the causeless melancholy which makes
life weary and distasteful without ever removing the certainty that it
is in itself desirable.
We may see from all this that to attempt to seek a cure for fear in
reason is foredoomed to failure, because fear lies in a region that is
behind all reason. It exists in the depth of the spirit, as in the
fallen gloom of the glimmering sea-deeps, and it can be touched by no
activity of life and joy and sunlight on the surface, where the
speeding sail moves past wind-swept headlands. We must follow it into
those depths if we are to deal with it at all, and it must be
vanquished in the region where it is born, and where it skulks unseen.
XII