desire their intention; they wish to arrive at mutual understanding and
confidence, to explore personality, to pierce behind the surface, to
establish a definite relation. Yet in the matter of relations with
others, women are often, I believe, less sentimental, and even less
tender-hearted than men, and they have a far swifter and truer
intuition of character. Though the two sexes can never really
understand each other's point of view, because no imagination can cross
the gulf of fundamental difference, yet I am certain that women
understand men far better than men understand women. The whole range of
motives is strangely different, and men can never grasp the comparative
unimportance with which women regard the question of occupation.
Occupation is for men a definite and isolated part of life, a thing
important and absorbing in itself, quite apart from any motives or
reasons. To do something, to make something, to produce something--that
desire is always there, whatever ebb and flow of emotions there may be;
it is an end in itself with men, and with many women it is not so; for
women mostly regard work as a necessity, but not an interesting
necessity. In a woman's occupation, there is generally someone at the
end of it, for whom and in connection with whom it is done. This is
probably largely the result of training and tradition, and great
changes are now going on in the direction of women finding occupations
for themselves. But take the case of such a profession as teaching; it
is quite possible for a man to be an effective and competent teacher,
without feeling any particular interest in the temperaments of his
pupils, except in so far as they react upon the work to be done. But a
woman can hardly take this impersonal attitude; and this makes women
both more and less effective, because human beings invariably prefer to
be dealt with dispassionately; and this is as a rule more difficult for
women; and thus in a complicated matter affecting conduct, a woman as a
rule forms a sounder judgment on what has actually occurred than a man,
and is perhaps more likely to take a severe view. The attitude of a
Galileo is often a useful one for a teacher, because boys and girls
ought in matters that concern themselves to learn how to govern
themselves.
Thus in situations involving relation with others women are more liable
to feel anxiety and the pressure of personal responsibility; and the
question is to what extent this ought to be indulged, in what degree
men and women ought to assume the direction of other lives, and whether
it is wholesome for the director to allow a desire for personal
dominance to be substituted for more spontaneous motives.
It very often happens that the temperaments which most claim help and
support are actuated by the egotistical desire to find themselves
interesting to others, while those who willingly assume the direction
of other lives are attracted more by the sense of power than by genuine
sympathy.
But it is clear that it is in the region of our affections that the
greatest risks of all have to be run. By loving, we render ourselves
liable to the darkest and heaviest fears. Yet here, I believe, we ought
to have no doubt at all; and the man who says to himself, "I should
like to bestow my affection on this person and on that, but I will keep
it in restraint, because I am afraid of the suffering which it may
entail,"--such a man, I say, is very far from the kingdom of God.
Because love is the one quality which, if it reaches a certain height,
can altogether despise and triumph over fear. When ambition and delight
and energy fail, love can accompany us, with hope and confidence, to
the dark gate; and thus it is the one thing about which we can hardly
be mistaken. If love does not survive death, then life is built upon
nothingness, and we may be glad to get away; but it is more likely that
it is the only thing that does survive.
XIX
SIN
It is every one's duty to take himself seriously--that is the right
mean between taking oneself either solemnly or apologetically. There is
no merit in being apologetic about oneself. One has a right to be
there, wherever one is, a right to an opinion, a right to take some
kind of a hand in whatever is going on; natural tact is the only thing
which can tell us exactly how far those rights extend; but it is
inconvenient to be apologetic, because if one insists on explaining how
one comes to be there, or how one comes to have an opinion, other
people begin to think that one needs explanation and excuse; but it is
even worse to be solemn about oneself, because English people are very
critical in private, though they are tolerant in public, because they
dislike a scene, and have not got the art of administering the delicate
snub which indicates to a man that his self-confidence is exuberant
without humiliating him; when English people inflict a snub, they do it
violently and emphatically, like Dr. Johnson, and it generally means
that they are relieving themselves of accumulated disapproval. An
Englishman is apt to be deferential, and one of the worst temptations
of official life is the temptation to be solemn. There is an old story
about Scott and Wordsworth, when the latter stayed at Abbotsford;
Scott, during the whole visit, was full of little pleasant and
courteous allusions to Wordsworth's poems; and one of the guests
present records how at the end of the visit not a single word had ever
passed Wordsworth's lips which could have indicated that he knew his
host to have ever written a line of poetry or prose.
I was sitting the other day at a function next a man of some eminence,
and I was really amazed at the way in which he discoursed of himself
and his habits, his diet, his hours of work, and the blank indifference
with which he received similar confidences. He merely waited till the
speaker had finished, and then resumed his own story.
It is this sort of solemn egotism which makes us overvalue our
anxieties quite out of all proportion to their importance, because they
all appear to us as integral elements of a dignified drama in which we
enact the hero's part. We press far too heavily on the sense of
responsibility; and if we begin by telling boys, as is too often done
in sermons, that whatever they do or say is of far-reaching
consequence, that every lightest word may produce an effect, that any
carelessness of speech or example may have disastrous effects upon the
character of another, we are doing our best to encourage the
self-emphasis which is the very essence of priggishness.
There is a curious conflict going on at the present time in English
life between light-mindedness and solemnity; there is a great appetite
for living, a love of amusement, a tendency to subordinate the
interests of the future to the pleasure of the moment, and to think
that the one serious evil is boredom; that is a healthy manifestation
enough in its way, because it stands for interest and delight in life;
but there is another strain in our nature, that of a rather heavy
pietism, inherited from our Puritan ancestors. It must not be forgotten
that the Puritan got a good deal of interest out of his sense of sin;
as the old combative elements of feudal ages disappeared, the soldierly
blood retained the fighting instinct, and turned it into moral regions.
The sense of adventure is impelled to satiate itself, and the Pilgrim's
Progress is a clear enough proof that the old combativeness was all
there, revelling in danger, and exulting in the thought that the human
being was in the midst of foes. Sin represented itself to the Puritan
as a thing out of which he could get a good deal of fun; not the fun of
yielding to it, but the fun of whipping out his sword and getting in
some shrewd blows. When preachers nowadays lament that we have lost the
sense of sin, what they really mean is that we have lost our
combativeness: we no longer believe that we must treat our foes with
open and brutal violence, and we perceive that such conduct is only
pitting one sin against another. There is no warrant in the Gospel for
the combative idea of the Christian life; all such metaphors and
suggestions come from St. Paul and the Apocalypse. The fact is that the
world was not ready for the utter peaceableness of the Gospel, and it
had to be accommodated to the violence of the world.
Now again the Christian idea is coloured by scientific and medical
knowledge, and sin, instead of an enemy which we must fight, has become
a disease which we must try to cure.
Sins, the ordinary sins of ordinary life, are not as a rule instincts
which are evil in themselves, so much as instincts which are selfishly
pursued to the detriment of others; sin is in its essence the
selfishness which will not cooperate, and which secures advantages
unjustly, without any heed to the disadvantage of others. SYMPATHETIC
IMAGINATION is the real foe of sin, the power of putting oneself in the
place of another; and much of the sentiment which is so prevalent
nowadays is the evidence of the growth of sympathy.
The old theory of sin lands one in a horrible dilemma, because it
implies a treacherous enmity on the part of God, to create man weak and
unstable, and to pit his weakness against tyrannous desires; to allow
his will to do evil to be stronger than his power to do right, is a
satanical device. One must not sacrifice the truth to the desire for
simplicity and effective statement. The truth is intricate and obscure,
and to pretend that it is plain and obvious is mere hypocrisy. The
strength of Calvinism is its horrible resemblance to a natural
inference from the facts of life; but if any sort of Calvinism is true,
then it is a mere insult to the intelligence to say that God is loving
or just. The real basis for all deep-seated fear about life is the fear
that one will not be dealt with either lovingly or justly. But we have
to make a simple choice as to what we will believe, and the only hope
is to believe that immediate harshness and injustice is not ultimately
inconsistent with Love. No one who knows anything of the world and of
life can pretend to think or say that suffering always results from, or
is at all proportioned to, moral faults; and if we are tempted to
regard all our disasters as penal consequences, then we are tempted to
endure them with gloomy and morbid immobility.
It is far more wholesome and encouraging to look upon many disasters
that befall us as opportunities to show a little spirit, to evoke the
courage which does not come by indolent prosperity, to increase our
sympathy, to enlarge our experience, to make things clearer to us, to
develop our mind and heart, to free us from material temptations. Past
suffering is not always an evil, it is often an exciting reminiscence.
It is good to take life adventurously, like Odysseus of old. What would
one feel about Odysseus if, instead of contriving a way out of the
Cyclops' cave, he had set himself to consider of what forgotten sin his
danger was the consequence? Suffering and disaster come to us to
develop our inventiveness and our courage, not to daunt and dismay us;
and we ought therefore to approach experience with a sense of humour,
if possible, and with a lively curiosity. I recollect hearing a man the
other day describing an operation to which he had been subjected. "My
word," he said, his eyes sparkling with delight at the recollection,
"that was awful, when I came into the operating-room, and saw the
surgeons in their togs, and the pails and basins all about, and was
invited to step up to the table!" There is nothing so agreeable as the
remembrance of fears through which we have passed; and we can only
learn to despise them by finding out how unbalanced they were.
I do not mean that fears can ever be pleasant at the time, but we do
them too much honour if we court them and defer to them. However much
we may be tortured by them, there is always something at the back of
our mind which despises our own susceptibility to them; and it is that
deeper instinct which we ought to trust.
But we cannot even begin to trust it, as long as we allow ourselves to
believe pietistically that the Mind of God is set on punishment. That
is the ghastly error which humanity tends to make. It has been dinned
into us, alas, from our early years, and religious phraseology is
constantly polluted by it. Our Saviour lent no countenance to this at
all; He spoke perfectly plainly against the theory of "judgments." Of
course suffering is sometimes a consequence of sin, but it is not a
vindictive punishment; it is that we may learn our mistake. But we must
give up the revengeful idea of God: that is imported into our scale of
values by the grossest anthropomorphism. Only the weak man, who fears
that his safety will be menaced if he does not make an example, deals
in revenge. He is indignant at anything which mortifies his vanity,
which implies any doubt of his power or any disregard of his wishes.
Revenge is born of terror, and to think of God as vindictive is to
think of Him as subject to fear. Serene and unquestioned strength can
have nothing to do with fear. Milton is largely responsible for
perpetuating this belief. He makes the Almighty say to the Son--
"Let us advise, and to this hazard draw
With speed what force is left, and all employ
In our defence, lest unawares we lose
This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill."
Milton's idea of the Almighty was frankly that of a Power who had
undertaken more than he could manage, and who had allowed things to go
too far. But it is a puerile conception of God; and to allow ourselves
to think or speak of God as a Power that has to take precautions, or
that has anything to fear from the exercise of human volition, is to
cloud the whole horizon at once.
But we ought rather to think of God as a Power which for some reason
works through imperfection. The battle of the world is that of force
against inertness: and our fears are the shadow of that combat.
Fear should then rather show us that we are being confronted with
experience; and that our duty is to disregard it, to march forward
through it, to come out on the other side of it. It is all an
adventure, in fact! The disaster in which we are involved is not sent
to show us that the Eternal Power which created us is vexed at our
failures, or bent on crushing us. It is exactly the opposite; it is to
show us that we are worth testing, worth developing, and that we are to
have the glory of going on; the very fear of death is the last test of
our belief in Love. We are assuredly meant to believe that the coward
is to learn the beauty of courage, that the laggard is to perceive the
worth of energy, that the selfish man is to be taught sympathy. If we
must take a metaphor, let us rather think of God as the graver of the
gem than as the child that beats her doll for collapsing instead of
sitting upright.
It is our dishonouring thought of God as jealous, suspicious, fond of
exhibiting power, revengeful, cruel, that does us harm. We must rather
think of His Heart as full of courage, energy, and hope; as teeming
with joy, lightness, zest, mirth; and then we can begin to think of
failures, fears, delays as things small and unimportant, not as
malicious ambushes, but as rough bits of road, as obstacles to reveal
and to develop our strength and gaiety. There is no joy in the world so
great as the joy of finding ourselves stronger than we know; and that
is what God is bent upon showing us, and not upon proving to us that we
are vile and base, in the spirit of the old Calvinist who said to his
own daughter when she was dying of a painful disease, that she must
remember that all short of Hell was mercy. It is so; but Hell is rather
what we start from, and out of which we have to find our way, than the
waste-paper basket of life, the last receptacle for our shattered
purposes.
XX
SERENITY
To achieve serenity we must have the power of keeping our hearts and
minds fixed upon something which is beyond and above the passing
incidents of life, which so disconcert and overshadow us, and which are
after all but as clouds in the sky, or islets in a great ocean. Think
with what smiling indifference a man would meet indignation and abuse
and menace, if he were aware that an hour hence he would be
triumphantly vindicated and applauded. How calmly would a man sleep in
a condemned cell if he knew that a free pardon were on its way to him!
Of course the more eagerly and enjoyably we live, so much the more we
are affected by little incidents, beyond which we can hardly look when
they bring us so much pleasure or so much discomfort; and thus it is
always the men and women of keen and highly-strung natures, who taste
the quality of every moment, in its sweetness and its bitterness, who
will most feel the influence of fear. Edward FitzGerald once sadly
confessed that, as life went on, days of perfect delight--a beautiful
scene, a melodious music, the society of those whom he loved
best--brought him less and less joy, because he felt that they were
passing swiftly, and could not be recalled. And of course the
imaginative nature which lives tremulously in delight will be most apt
to portend sadness in hours of happiness, and in sorrow to anticipate
the continuance of sorrow. That is an inevitable effect of temperament;
but we must not give way helplessly to temperament, or allow ourselves
to drift wherever the mind bears us. Just as the skilled sailor can
tack up against the wind, and use ingenuity to compel a contrary breeze
to bring him to the haven of his desire, so we must be wise in trimming
our sails to the force of circumstance; while there is an eager delight
in making adverse conditions help us to realise our hopes.
The timid soul that loves delight is apt to say to itself, "I am happy
now in health and circumstances and friends, but I lean out into the
future, and see that health must fail and friends must drift away;
death must part me from those I love; and beyond all this, I see the
cloudy gate through which I must myself pass, and I do not know what
lies beyond it." That is true enough! It is like the story of the old
prince, as told by Herodotus, who said in his sorrowful age that the
Gods gave man only a taste of life, just enough to let him feel that
life was sweet, and then took the cup from his lips. But if we look
fairly at life, at our own life, at other lives, we see that pleasure
and contentment, even if we hardly realised that it was contentment at
the time, have largely predominated over pain and unhappiness; a man
must be very rueful and melancholy before he will deliberately say that
life has not been worth living, though I suppose that there have
probably been hours in the lives of all of us when we have thought and
said and even believed that we would rather not have lived at all than
suffer so. Neither must we pass over the fact that every day there are
men and women who, under the pressure of calamity and dismay, bring
their lives to a voluntary end.
But we have to be very dull and thankless and slow of heart not to feel
that by being allowed to live, for however short a time, we have been
allowed to take part in a very beautiful and wonderful thing. The
loveliness of earth, its colours, its lights, its scents, its savours,
the pleasures of activity and health, the sharp joys of love and
friendship, these are surely very great and marvellous experiences, and
the Mind which planned them must be full of high purpose, eager
intention, infinite goodwill. And we may go further than that, and see
that even our sorrows and failures have often brought something great
to our view, something which we feel we have learned and apprehended,
something which we would not have missed, and which we cannot do
without. If we will frankly recognise all this, we cannot feebly
crumple up at the smallest touch of misery, and say suspiciously and
vindictively that we wish we had never opened our eyes upon the world;
and even if we do say that, even if we abandon ourselves to despair, we
yet cannot hope to escape; we did not enter life by our own will, it is
not our own prudence that has kept us there, and even if we end it
voluntarily, as Carlyle said, by noose or henbane, we cannot for an
instant be sure that we are ending it; every inference in the world, in
fact, would tend to indicate that we do not end it. We cannot destroy
matter, we can only disperse and rearrange it; we cannot generate a
single force, we can only summon it from elsewhere, and concentrate it,
as we concentrate electricity, at a single glowing point. Force seems
as indestructible as matter, and there is no reason to think that life
is destructible either. So that if we are to resign ourselves to any
belief at all, it must be to the belief that "to be, or not to be" is
not a thing which is in our power at all. We may extinguish life, as we
put out a light; but we do not destroy it, we only rearrange it.
And we can thus at least practise and exercise ourselves in the belief
that we cannot bring our experiences to an end, however petulantly and
irritably we desire to do so, because it simply is not in our power to
effect it. We talk about the power of the will, but no effort of will
can obliterate the life that we have lived, or add a cubit to our
stature; we cannot abrogate any law of nature, or destroy a single atom
of matter. What it seems that we can do with the will is to make a
certain choice, to select a certain line, to combine existing forces,
to use them within very small limits. We can oblige ourselves to take a
certain course, when every other inclination is reluctant to do it; and
even so the power varies in different people. It is useless then to
depend blindly upon the will, because we may suddenly come to the end
of it, as we may come to the end of our physical forces. But what the
will can do is to try certain experiments, and the one province where
its function seems to be clear, is where it can discover that we have
often a reserve of unsuspected strength, and more courage and power
than we had supposed. We can certainly oppose it to bodily
inclinations, whether they be seductions of sense or temptations of
weariness. And in this one respect the will can give us, if not
serenity, at least a greater serenity than we expect. We can use the
will to endure, to wait, to suspend a hasty judgment; and impulse is
the thing which menaces our serenity most of all. The will indeed seems
to be like a little weight which we can throw into either scale. If we
have no doubt how we ought to act, we can use the will to enforce our
judgment, whether it is a question of acting or of abstaining; if we
are in doubt how to act, we can use our will to enforce a wise delay.
The truth then about the will is that it is a force which we cannot
measure, and that it is as unreasonable to say that it does not exist
as to say that it is unlimited. It is foolish to describe it as free;
it is no more free than a prisoner in a cell is free; but yet he has a
certain power to move about within his cell, and to choose among
possible employments.
Anyone who will deliberately test his will, will find that it is
stronger than he suspects; what often weakens our use of it is that we
are so apt to look beyond the immediate difficulty into a long
perspective of imagined obstacles, and to say within ourselves, "Yes, I
may perhaps achieve this immediate step, but I cannot take step after
step--my courage will fail!" Yet if one does make the immediate effort,
it is common to find the whole range of obstacles modified by the
single act; and thus the first step towards the attainment of serenity
of life is to practise cutting off the vista of possible contingencies
from our view, and to create a habit of dealing with a case as it
occurs.
I am often tempted myself to send my anxious mind far ahead in vague
dismay; at the beginning of a week crammed with various engagements,
numerous tasks, constant labour, little businesses, many of them with
their own attendant anxiety, it is easy to say that there is no time to
do anything that one wants to do, and to feel that the matters
themselves will be handled amiss and bungled. But if one can only keep
the mind off, or distract it by work, or beguile it by a book, a walk,
a talk, how easily the thread spins off the reel, how quietly one comes
to harbour on the Saturday evening, with everything done and finished!
Again, I am personally much disposed to dread the opposition and the
displeasure of colleagues, and to shrink nervously from anything which
involves dealing with a number of people. I ought to have found out
before now how futile such dread is; other people forget their vexation
and even grow ashamed of it, much as one does oneself; and looking back
I can recall no crisis which turned out either as intricate or as
difficult as one expected.