condone the extremely unbusinesslike, sloppy, and troublesome methods
employed by this spiritual agency. The lady knew the name and position
of the clergyman perfectly well, and might have written or wired to
him. He could thus have been spared his aimless and mysterious journey,
the expense of spending a night at the hotel; and moreover it was only
the fortuitous meeting with a third person, not closely connected with
the story, which prevented the clergyman from leaving the place, his
mission unfulfilled. One cannot help feeling that, if a spiritual
agency was at work, it was working either in a very clumsy way, or with
a relish for mystery which reminds one of the adventures of Sherlock
Holmes; if one is expected to accept the story as a manifestation of
supernatural power, one can only conceive of it as the work of a very
tricksy spirit, like Ariel in the "Tempest"; it seems like a very
elaborate and melodramatic attempt to bring about a result, that could
have been far more satisfactorily achieved by a little common sense. If
instead of inspiring the lady to earnest prayer--which appears too to
have been very slow in its action--why could not the supernatural power
at work have inspired her with the much simpler idea of looking at the
Clergy List? And yet the story no doubt produces on the ordinary mind
an impressive effect, when as a matter of fact, if it is fairly
considered, it can only be regarded, if true, as the work of an amiable
and rather dilettante power, with a strong relish for the elaborately
marvellous.
The truth is that what the ordinary human being desires, in matters of
this kind, is not scientific knowledge but picturesqueness. As long as
people frankly confess that it is the latter element of which they are
in search, that, like the fat boy in Pickwick, they merely want to make
their flesh creep, no harm is done. The harm is done by people who are
really in search of sensation, who yet profess to be approaching the
question in a scientific spirit of inquiry. I enjoy a good ghost story
as much as any one; and I am interested, too, in hearing the
philosophical conclusions of earnest-minded people; but to hear the
question discussed, as one so often hears it, with a pretentious
attempt to treat it scientifically, by people who, like the White Queen
in Through the Looking-glass, find it pleasant to train themselves to
believe a dozen impossible things before breakfast, afflicts me with a
deep mental and moral nausea.
One, at least, of the patient investigators of this accumulated mass of
human delusion, took up the quest in the hope that he might receive
scientific evidence of the continued existence of identity. He was
forced to confess that the evidence went all the other way, and that
all the tales which appeared to substantiate the fact, were hopelessly
discredited. The only thing, as I have said, that the investigations
seem to have substantiated, is evidence which none but a determinedly
sceptical mind would disallow, that there does exist, in certain
abnormal cases, a possibility of direct communication between two or
more living minds.
But, as I pondered thus, the day began to darken over the rough pasture
with its ruined wall, and I felt creeping upon me that old inheritance
of humanity, that terror in the presence of the unseen, which sets the
mind at work, distorting and exaggerating the impressions of eye and
ear. How easy, in such a mood, to grow tense and expectant--
"Till sight and hearing ache
For something that may keep
The awful inner sense
Unroused, lest it should mark
The life that haunts the emptiness
And horror of the dark."
Face to face with the impenetrable mystery, with the thought of those
whom we have loved, who have slipped without a word or a sign over the
dark threshold, what wonder if we beat with unavailing hands against
the closed door? It would be strange if we did not, for we too must
some day enter in; well, the souls of all those who have died, alike
those whom we have loved, and the spirits of those old Romans whose
mortal bodies melted into smoke year after year in the little enclosure
into which I look, know whatever there is to know. That is a stern and
dreadful truth; the secret is impenetrably sealed from us; but, "though
the heart ache to contemplate it, it is there."
XVII
HABITS
Walter Pater says, in his most oracular mood, in that fine manifesto of
a lofty Epicureanism which is known as the Conclusion to the
Renaissance essays, that to form habits is failure in life. The
difficulty in uttering oracles is that one is obliged for the sake of
being forcible to reduce a statement to its simplest terms; and when
one does that, there are generally a whole group of cases which appear
to be covered by the statement, which contradict it. It is nearly
impossible to make any general statement both simple enough and large
enough. In the case of Pater's pronouncement, he had fixed his mental
gaze so firmly on a particular phenomenon, that he forgot that his
words might prove misleading when applied to the facts of life. What he
meant, no doubt, was that one of the commonest of mental dangers is to
form intellectual and moral prejudices early in life, and so to
stereotype them that we are unable to look round them, or to give
anything that we instinctively dislike a fair trial. Most people in
fact, in matters of opinion, tend to get infected with a species of
Toryism by the time that they reach middle age, until they get into the
frame of mind which Montaigne describes, of thinking so highly of their
own conjectures as to be prepared to burn other people for not
regarding them as certainties. This frame of mind is much to be
reprobated, but it is unhappily common. How often does one meet
sensible, shrewd, and intelligent men, who say frankly that they are
not prepared to listen to any evidence which tells against their
beliefs. How rare it is to meet a man who in the course of an argument
will say, "Well, I had never thought of that before; it must be taken
into account, and it modifies my view." Such an attitude is looked upon
by active-minded and energetic men as having something weak and even
sentimental about it. How common it is to hear people say that a man
ought to have the courage of his opinions; how rare it is to find a man
who will say that one ought to have the courage to change one's
opinions. Indeed, in public life it is generally considered a kind of
treachery to change, because people value what they call loyalty above
truth. Pater no doubt meant that the duty and privilege of the
philosopher is to keep his inner eye open to new impressions, to be
ready to see beauty in new forms, not to love comfortable and settled
ways, but to bring the same fresh apprehension that youth brings, to
art and to life.
He is merely speaking of a mental process in these words; what he is
condemning is the dulling and encrusting of the mind with prejudices
and habits, the tendency, as Charles Lamb wittily said, whenever a new
book comes out, to read an old one, to get into the
fireside-and-slippers frame of mind, to grumble at novelty, to complain
that the young men are violating all the sacred canons of faith and art.
This is not at all the same thing as knowing one's own limitations;
every one, whether he be artist or writer, critic or practitioner,
ought to take the measure of his forces, and to determine in what
regions he can be effective; indeed it is often necessary for a man of
artistic impulses to confine his energies to one specific department,
although he may be attracted by several. Pater was himself an instance
of this. He knew, for instance, that his dramatic sense was weak, and
he wisely let drama alone; he found that certain vigorous writers
exercised a contagious influence over his own style, and therefore he
gave up reading them. But within his own region he endeavoured to be
catholic and sympathetic; he never tied up the contents of his mind
into packets and labelled them, a task which most men between thirty
and forty find highly congenial.
But I desire here to go into the larger question of forming habits; and
as a general rule it may be said that Pater's dictum is entirely
untrue, and that success in life depends more upon forming habits than
upon anything else, except good health. Indeed, Pater himself is an
excellent instance in point. He achieved his large output of beautiful
literary work, the amazing amount of perfectly finished and exquisitely
expressed writing that he gave to the world, by an extreme and patient
regularity of labour. He did not, as some writers do, have periods of
energetic creation, interrupted by periods of fallow idleness. Perhaps
his work might have been more spontaneous if he could, like Milton's
friend, have been wise enough "of such delights to judge, and interpose
them oft." But the achievement of Pater was to realize and to carry out
his own individual method, and it is upon doing this that successful
productivity depends.
I could name, if I chose, two or three friends of my own, men of high
and subtle intelligence, admirable humour, undiminished zest, who have
failed, and will fail, to realize their possibilities, simply by a lack
of method. Who does not know the men whom Mr. Mallock so wittily
describes, of whom, up to the age of forty, their friends say that they
could do anything if they only chose, and after the age of forty that
they could have done anything if they had chosen? I have one particular
friend in my eye at this moment, the possessor of wealth and leisure,
who is a born writer if any man ever was. He has no particular duties,
except the duties of a small landowner and the father of a family; he
is a wide reader, and a critic of delicate and sympathetic acuteness.
He is bent on writing; and he has written a single book crammed from
end to end with good and beautiful things, the stuff of which would
have sufficed, in the hands of a facile writer, for half-a-dozen
excellent books. He is, moreover, sincerely anxious to write, but he
does nothing. If you ask him--and I conceive it to be my duty at
intervals to chide him for not producing more--what he does with his
time, he says with a melancholy smile: "Oh, I hardly know: it goes!" I
trace his failure to produce, simply to the fact that he has never set
apart any particular portion of the day for writing; he allows himself
to be interrupted; he entertains many guests whom he has no particular
wish to see; he "sets around and looks ornery," like the frog; he talks
delightfully; an industrious Boswell could, by asking him questions and
taking careful notes of his talk, fill a charming volume in a month out
of his shrewd and suggestive conversation; of course it is possible to
say that he practises the art of living, to talk of "gems of purest ray
serene" and flowers "born to blush unseen" and all the rest of it. But
his talk streams to waste among guests who do not as a rule appreciate
it; and if there is any duty or responsibility in the world at all, it
is a duty for men of great endowments, admirable humour, and poetical
suggestiveness, to sow the seed of the mind freely and lavishly. We
English are of course the chosen race; but we should be none the worse
for a little more intellectual apprehension, a little more amiable
charm. If my friend had been a professional man, obliged to earn a
living by his pen, he would, I do not doubt, have given to the world a
series of great books, which would have done something to spread the
influence of the kingdom of heaven.
Of course there is a sense in which it is a mistake to let habits
become too tyrannical; one ought not to find oneself hopelessly
distracted and irritated if one's daily programme is interfered with at
any point; one ought to be able to enjoy leisure, to pay visits, to
converse volubly. Like Dr. Johnson, one ought to be ready for a frolic.
But, on the other hand, if a man takes himself seriously--and I am here
not speaking of people with definite engagements, but of people, like
writers and artists, who may choose their own times to do their
work--he ought to have a regular though not an invariable programme. If
he is possessed of such superabundant energy as Walter Scott possessed,
he may rise at five, and write ten immortal octavo pages before he
appears at breakfast. But as a rule the vitality of ordinary people is
more limited, and they are bound to husband it, if they mean to do
anything that is worth the name; an artist then ought to have his
sacred hours, secure from interruption; and then, let him fill the rest
of the day with any amusement that he finds to be congenial.
Of course the thing is easy enough if one's work is really the thing in
which one is most interested. There is very little danger, in the case
of a man who likes and relishes the work he is doing more than he
relishes any form of amusement; but we many of us have the unhappy
feeling that we enjoy our work very much, if we can once sit down to
it; only we do not care about beginning it. We read the paper, we write
a few letters, we look out an address in Who's Who, and we become
absorbed in the biographies of our fellow-men; very soon it is time for
luncheon, and then we think that we shall feel fresher if we take a
little exercise; after tea, the weather is so beautiful that we think
it would be a pity not to enjoy the long sunset lights; we come in; the
piano stands invitingly open, and we must strike a few chords; then the
bell rings for dressing, and the day is gone, because we mistrust the
work that we do late at night, and so we go to bed in good time. Not so
does a big book get written!
We ought rather to find out all about ourselves; when we can work our
best, how long we can work continuously with full vigour; and then
round these fixed points we should group our sociability, our leisure,
our amusement. If we are altruistically inclined, we probably say that
it is a duty to see something of our fellow-creatures, that we ought
not to grow morose and solitary; there is an abundance of excuses that
can be made; but the artist and the writer ought to realize that their
duty to the world is to perceive what is beautiful and to express it as
resolutely, as attractively as they can; if a writer can write a good
book, he can talk in its pages to a numerous audience; and he is right
to save up his best thoughts for his readers, rather than to let them
flow away in diffuse conversation. Of course a writer of fiction is
bound to make the observation of varieties of temperament a duty; it is
his material; if he becomes isolated and self-absorbed, his work
becomes narrow and mannerized; and it is true, too, that, with most
writers, the collision of mind with mind is what produces the brightest
sparks.
And then to step into a still wider field, there is no sort of doubt
that the formation of reasonable habits, of method, of punctuality, is
a duty, not from an exalted point of view, but because it makes
enormously for the happiness and convenience of every one about us. In
the old-fashioned story-books a prodigious value, perhaps an
exaggerated value, was set upon time; one was told to redeem the time,
whatever that might mean. The ideal mother of the family, in the little
books which I used to read in my childhood, was a lady who appeared
punctually at breakfast, and had a bunch of keys hanging at her girdle.
Breakfast over, she paid a series of visits, looked into the larder,
weighed out stores, and then settled down to some solid reading or
embroidered a fire-screen; the afternoon would be spent in visits of
benevolence, carrying portions of the midday dinner to her poorer
neighbours; the evening would be given to working at the fire-screen
again, while some one read aloud. Somehow it is not an attractive
picture, though it need not have been so dull as it appears. The point
is whether the solid reading had a useful effect or not. In the books I
have in view, it generally led the materfamilias into having an undue
respect for correct information, and a pharisaical contempt for people
who indulged their fancy. In Harry and Lucy, for instance, Lucy, who is
the only human figure in the book, is perpetually being snubbed by the
terrible hard-headed Harry, with his desperate interest in machinery,
by the repellent father who delights to explain the laws of gravity and
the parabola described by the stone which Harry throws. What was
undervalued in those old, dry, high-principled books was the charm of
vivid apprehension, of fanciful imagination, of simple, neighbourly
kindliness. The aim was too much to improve everybody and everything,
to impart and retain correct information. Nowadays the pendulum has
swung a little too far the other way, and children are too much
encouraged, if anything, to be childish; but there is a certain austere
charm in the old simple high-minded household life for all that.
The point is that habit should be there, like the hem of a
handkerchief, to keep the fabric together; but that it should not be
relentlessly and oppressively paraded; the triumph is to have habits
and to conceal them, just as in Ruskin's celebrated dictum, that the
artist's aim should be to be fit for the best society, and then that he
should renounce it. One ought to be reliable, to perform the work that
one undertakes without ceaseless reminders, to discharge duties easily
and satisfactorily; and then, if to this one can add the grace of
apparent leisureliness, the power of never appearing to be interrupted,
the good-humoured readiness to amuse and to be amused, one is high upon
the ladder of perfection. It is absolutely necessary, if one is to play
a satisfactory part in the world, to be in earnest, to be serious; and
it is no less necessary to abstain from ostentatiously parading that
seriousness. One has to take for granted that others are serious too;
and far more is effected by example than by precept, in this, as in
most matters. But if one cannot do both, it is better to be serious and
to show it, than to make a show of despising seriousness and decrying
it. It is better to have habits and to let others know it, than to lose
one's soul by endeavouring to escape the reproach of priggishness, a
quality which in these easy-going days incurs an excessive degree of
odium.
XVIII
RELIGION
There is a motto which I should like to see written over the door of
every place of worship, both as an invitation and a warning: THOU SHALT
MAKE ME TO UNDERSTAND WISDOM SECRETLY. It is an invitation to those who
enter, to come and participate in a great and holy mystery; and it is a
warning to those who believe that in the formalities of religion alone
is the secret of religion to be found. I will not here speak of
worship, of the value of the symbol, the winged prayer, the uttered
word; I wish rather to speak for a little of religion itself, a thing,
as I believe, greatly misunderstood. How much it is misunderstood may
be seen from the fact that, though the word itself, religion, stands
for one of the most beautiful and simple things in the world, there yet
hangs about it an aroma which is not wholly pleasing. What difficult
service that great and humble name has seen! With what strange and evil
meanings it has been charged! How dinted and battered it is with hard
usage! how dimmed its radiance, how stained its purity! It is the best
word, perhaps the only word, for the thing that I mean; and yet
something dusty and technical hangs about it, which makes it wearisome
instead of delightful, dreary rather than joyful. The same is the case
with many of the words which stand for great things. They have been
weapons in the hands of dry, bigoted, offensive persons, until their
brightness is clouded, their keen edge hacked and broken.
By religion I mean the power, whatever it be, which makes a man choose
what is hard rather than what is easy, what is lofty and noble rather
than what is mean and selfish; that puts courage into timorous hearts,
and gladness into clouded spirits; that consoles men in grief,
misfortune, and disappointment; that makes them joyfully accept a heavy
burden; that, in a word, uplifts men out of the dominion of material
things, and sets their feet in a purer and simpler region.
Yet this great thing, which lies so near us that we can take it into
our grasp by merely reaching out a hand; which is as close to us as the
air and the sunlight, has been by the sad, misguided efforts, very
often of the best and noblest-minded men, who knew how precious a thing
it was, so guarded, so wrapped up, made so remote from, so alien to,
life and thought, that many people who live by its light, and draw it
in as simply as the air they breathe, never even know that they have
come within hail of it. "Is he a good man?" said a simple Methodist
once, in reply to a question about a friend. "Yes, he is good, but not
religious-good." By which he meant that he lived kindly, purely, and
unselfishly as a Christian should, but did not attend any particular
place of worship, and therefore could not be held to have any religious
motive for his actions, but was guided by a mere worthless instinct, a
preference for unworldly living.
Now, if ever there was a Divine attempt made in the world to shake
religion free of its wrappings, it was the preaching of Christ. So far
as we can gather from records of obscure and mysterious origin,
transcriptions, it would seem, of something oral and traditional,
Christ aimed at bringing religion within the reach of the humblest and
simplest souls. Whatever doubt men may feel as to the literal accuracy
of these records in matters of fact, however much it may be held that
the relation of incidents was coloured by the popular belief of the
time in the possibility of miraculous manifestations, yet the words and
sayings of Christ emerge from the narrative, though in places it seems
as though they had been imperfectly apprehended, as containing and
expressing thoughts quite outside the range of the minds that recorded
them; and thus possess an authenticity, which is confirmed and proved
by the immature mental grasp of those who compiled the records, in a
way in which it would not have been proved, if the compilers had been
obviously men of mental acuteness and far-reaching philosophical grasp.
To express the religion of Christ in precise words would be a mighty
task; but it may be said that it was not merely a system, nor primarily
a creed; it was a message to individual hearts, bewildered by the
complexity of the world and the intricacy of religious observances.
Christ bade men believe that their Creator was also a Father; that the
only way to escape from the overwhelming difficulties presented by the
world was the way of simplicity, sincerity, and love; that a man should
keep out of his life all that insults and hurts the soul, and that he
should hold the interests of others as dear as he holds his own. It was
a protest against all ambition, and cruelty, and luxury, and
self-conceit. It showed that a man should accept his temperament and
his place in life, as gifts from the hands of his Father; and that he
should then be peaceful, pure, humble, and loving. Christ brought into
the world an entirely new standard; He showed that many respected and
reverenced persons were very far indeed from the Father; while many
obscure, sinful, miserable outcasts found the secret which the
respectable and contemptuous missed. Never was there a message which
cast so much hope abroad in rich handfuls to the world. The astonishing
part of the revelation was that it was so absolutely simple; neither
wealth, nor intellect, nor position, nor even moral perfection, were
needed. The simplest child, the most abandoned sinner, could take the
great gift as easily as the most honoured statesman, the wisest
sage--indeed more easily; for it was the very complexity of affairs, of
motives, of wealth, that entangled the soul and prevented it from
realizing its freedom.
Christ lived His human life on these principles; and sank from danger
to danger, from disaster to disaster, and having touched the whole
gamut of human suffering, and disappointment, and shame, died a death
in which no element of disgust, and terror, and pain was wanting.