We travelled in the print of olden wars;
Yet all the land was green;
And love we found, and peace,
Where fire and war had been.
They pass and smile, the children of the sword--
No more the sword they wield;
And O, how deep the corn
Along the battlefield!
*****
To reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat
that runs through all the winning music of the world, to hold back the
hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from life because of death:
this it is to be afraid of Pan. Highly respectable citizens who flee
life’s pleasures and responsibilities and keep, with upright hat,
upon the midway of custom, avoiding the right hand and the left, the
ecstasies and the agonies, how surprised they would be if they could
hear their attitude mythologically expressed, and knew themselves as
tooth-chattering ones, who flee from Nature because they fear the hand
of Nature’s God!
*****
The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a kind
of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in our lot,
we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a
fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power
of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures.
*****
Extreme BUSYNESS, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a
symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a
catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a
sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious
of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring
these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will
see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity;
they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not
take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and
unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand
still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they CANNOT be idle, their
nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of
coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.
*****
If a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should
remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger and the
workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within practical limits, it
is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality.
Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you. He
sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to
interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return.
Either he absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives a
recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he
comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole
nervous system, to discharge some temper before he returns to work. I do
not care how much or how well he works, this fellow is an evil feature
in other people’s lives. They would be happier if he were dead.
*****
‘We are all employed in commerce during the day; but in the evening,
VOYEZ-VOUS, NOUS SOMMES SERIEUX.’ These were the words. They were all
employed over the frivolous mercantile concerns of Belgium during the
day; but in the evening they found some hours for the serious concerns
of life. I may have a wrong idea of wisdom, but I think that was a very
wise remark. People connected with literature and philosophy are
busy all their days in getting rid of second-hand notions and false
standards. It is their profession, in the sweat of their brows,
by dogged thinking, to recover their old fresh view of life, and
distinguish what they really and originally like from what they have
only learned to tolerate perforce. And these Royal Nautical Sportsmen
had the distinction still quite legible in their hearts. They had still
those clean perceptions of what is nice and nasty, what is interesting
and what is dull, which envious old gentlemen refer to as illusions.
The nightmare illusion of middle age, the bear’s hug of custom gradually
squeezing the life out of a man’s soul, had not yet begun for these
happy-starr’d young Belgians. They still knew that the interest
they took in their business was a trifling affair compared to their
spontaneous, long-suffering affection for nautical sports. To know what
you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you
you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. Such a man may be
generous; he may be honest in something more than the commercial sense;
he may love his friends with an elective, personal sympathy, and not
accept them as an adjunct of the station to which he has been called. He
may be a man, in short, acting on his own instincts, keeping in his
own shape that God made him in; and not a mere crank in the social
engine-house, welded on principles that he does not understand, and for
purposes that he does not care for.
*****
I suppose none of us recognise the great part that is played in life by
eating and drinking. The appetite is so imperious that we can stomach
the least interesting viands, and pass off a dinner hour thankfully
enough on bread and water; just as there are men who must read
something, if it were only ‘Bradshaw’s Guide.’ But there is a romance
about the matter, after all. Probably the table has more devotees than
love; and I am sure that food is much more generally entertaining than
scenery. Do you give in, as Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the
less immortal for that? The true materialism is to be ashamed of what
we are. To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human
perfection than to find beauty in the colours of the sunset.
*****
For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops, is one
thing; it is another for the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to
overlook the country. It should be a genial and ameliorating influence
in life; it should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature’s
unconcern: that he can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward,
how the spring green brightens in the wood, or the field grows black
under a moving ploughshare. I have been tempted, in this connection, to
deplore the slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle
of a voice, its dull ears, and its narrow range of sight. If you could
see as people are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can
fancy for a superior race, if you could take clear note of the objects
of vision, not only a few yards, but a few miles from where you
stand:--think how agreeably your sight would be entertained, how
pleasantly your thoughts would be diversified, as you walk the Edinburgh
streets! For you might pause, in some business perplexity, in the midst
of the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd as he sat
down to breathe upon a heathery shoulder of the Pentlands; or perhaps
some urchin, clambering in a country elm, would put aside the leaves and
show you his flushed and rustic visage; or as a fisher racing seaward,
with the tiller under his elbow, and the sail sounding in the wind,
would fling you a salutation from between Anst’er and the May.
*****
So you sit, like Jupiter on Olympus, and look down from afar upon men’s
life. The city is as silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming
thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill.
The sea-surf, the cries of plough-men, the streams and the mill-wheels,
the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through the plain;
from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in defiance;
and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumour of
a train, the world has fallen into a dead silence, and the business of
town and country grown voiceless in your ears. A crying hill-bird, the
bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to
interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear,
the whole scene makes a music at once human and rural, and discourses
pleasant reflections on the destiny of man. The spiry habitable
city, ships, the divided fields, and browsing herds, and the straight
highways, tell visibly of man’s active and comfortable ways; and you
may be never so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is
something in the view that spirits up your blood and puts you in the
vein for cheerful labour.
*****
The night, though we were so little past midsummer, was as dark as
January. Intervals of a groping twilight alternated with spells of utter
blackness; and it was impossible to trace the reason of these changes
in the flying horror of the sky. The wind blew the breath out of a man’s
nostrils; all heaven seemed to thunder overhead like one huge sail;
and when there fell a momentary lull on Aros, we could hear the gusts
dismally sweeping in the distance. Over all the lowlands of the Ross the
wind must have blown as fierce as on the open sea; and God only knows
the uproar that was raging around the head of Ben Kyaw. Sheets of
mingled spray and rain were driven in our faces. All round the isle
of Aros, the surf, with an incessant, hammering thunder, beat upon the
reefs and beaches. Now louder in one place, now lower in another, like
the combinations of orchestral music, the constant mass of sound was
hardly varied for a moment. And loud above all this hurly-burly I could
hear the changeful voices of the Roost and the intermittent roaring of
the Merry Men. At that hour there flashed into my mind the reason of
the name that they were called. For the noise of them seemed almost
mirthful, as it out-topped the other noises of the night; or if not
mirthful, yet instinct with a portentous joviality. Nay, and it seemed
even human. As when savage men have drunk away their reason, and,
discarding speech bawl together in their madness by the hour; so, to my
ears, these deadly breakers shouted by Aros in the night.
*****
I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I
lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter; the night was very
dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the purity
of forests. From a good way below, the river was to be heard contending
with ice and boulders; a few lights, scattered unevenly among the
darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation. For
the making of a story here were fine conditions.
*****
On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, these great
granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the
sea, like cattle on a summer’s day. There they stand, for all the world
like their neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them
instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming on their
sides instead of heather; and the great sea-conger to wreathe about the
base of them instead of the poisonous viper of the land. On calm days
you can go wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes following
you about the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help the man
that hears that caldron boiling.
*****
It had snowed overnight. The fields were all sheeted up; they were
tucked in among the snow, and their shape was modelled through the
pliant counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond mother. The wind
had made ripples and folds upon the surface, like what the sea, in quiet
weather, leaves upon the sand. There was a frosty stifle in the air. An
effusion of coppery light on the summit of Brown Carrick showed where
the sun was trying to look through; but along the horizon clouds of cold
fog had settled down, so that there was no distinction of sky and sea.
Over the white shoulders of the headlands, or in the opening of bays,
there was nothing but a great vacancy and blackness; and the road as it
drew near the edge of the cliff, seemed to skirt the shores of creation
and void space.
*****
When we are looking at a landscape we think ourselves pleased; but it
is only when it comes back upon us by the fire o’ nights that we can
disentangle the main charm from the thick of particulars. It is just
so with what is lately past. It is too much loaded with detail to be
distinct; and the canvas is too large for the eye to encompass. But
this is no more the case when our recollections have been strained long
enough through the hour-glass of time; when they have been the burthen
of so much thought, the charm and comfort of so many a vigil. All that
is worthless has been sieved and sifted out of them. Nothing remains but
the brightest lights and the darkest shadows.
*****
Burns, too proud and honest not to work, continued through all reverses
to sing of poverty with a light, defiant note. Beranger waited till he
was himself beyond the reach of want before writing the OLD VAGABOND or
JACQUES. Samuel Johnson, although he was very sorry to be poor, ‘was a
great arguer for the advantages of poverty’ in his ill days. Thus it is
that brave men carry their crosses, and smile with the fox burrowing in
their vitals.
*****
Now, what I like so much in France is the clear, unflinching recognition
by everybody of his own luck. They all know on which side their bread is
buttered, and take a pleasure in showing it to others, which is surely
the better part of religion. And they scorn to make a poor mouth over
their poverty, which I take to be the better part of manliness.
*****
If people knew what an inspiriting thing it is to hear a man boasting,
so long as he boasts of what he really has, I believe they would do it
more freely and with a better grace.
*****
A girl at school in France began to describe one of our regiments on
parade to her French school-mates, and as she went on she told me the
recollection grew so vivid, she became so proud to be the countrywoman
of such soldiers, and so sorry to be in another country, that her voice
failed her and she burst into tears. I have never forgotten that girl,
and I think she very nearly deserves a statue. To call her a young lady,
with all its many associations, would be to offer her an insult. She
may rest assured of one thing, although she never should marry a heroic
general, never see any great or immediate result of her life, she will
not have lived in vain for her native land.
*****
As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with admiration; a look into that
man’s mind was like a retrospect over the smiling champaign of his past
life, and very different from the Sinai-gorges up which one looks for a
terrified moment into the dark souls of many good, many wise, and many
prudent men. I cannot be very grateful to such men for their excellence,
and wisdom, and prudence. I find myself facing as stoutly as I can
a hard, combative existence, full of doubt, difficulties, defeats,
disappointments, and dangers, quite a hard enough life without their
dark countenances at my elbow, so that what I want is a happy-minded
Smethurst placed here and there at ugly corners of my life’s wayside,
preaching his gospel of quiet and contentment.
*****
There is a certain critic, not indeed of execution but of matter, whom
I dare be known to set before the best: a certain low-browed, hairy
gentleman, at first a percher in the fork of trees, next (as they
relate) a dweller in caves, and whom I think I see squatting in
cave-mouths, of a pleasant afternoon, to munch his berries--his wife,
that accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his name I never heard,
but he is often described as Probably Arboreal, which may serve for
recognition. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all
sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run some minims of his
old, wild, tree-top blood; our civilised nerves still tingle with his
rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have moved our
common ancestors, all must obediently thrill.
*****
This is an age when genealogy has taken a new lease of life, and become
for the first time a human science; so that we no longer study it in
quest of the Guaith Voeths, but to trace out some of the secrets of
descent and destiny; and as we study, we think less of Sir Bernard Burke
and more of Mr. Galton. Not only do our character and talents lie upon
the anvil and receive their temper during generations; but the very
plot of our life’s story unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the
biography of the man is only an episode in the epic of the family.
*****
But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy;
and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow
backward the careers of our HOMUNCULUS and be reminded of our antenatal
lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the
elements that build us.
*****
What is mine, then, and what am I? If not a curve in this poor body of
mine (which you love, and for the sake of which you dotingly dream that
you love me), not a gesture that I can frame, not a tone of my voice,
not a look from my eyes, no, not even now when I speak to him I love,
but has belonged to others? Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with
my eyes; other men have heard the pleadings of the same voice that now
sounds in your ears. The hands of the dead are in my bosom; they move
me, they pluck me, they guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and
I but re-inform features and attributes that have long been laid aside
from evil in the quiet of the grave. Is it me you love, friend? or the
race that made me? The girl who does not know and cannot answer for the
least portion of herself? or the stream of which she is a transitory
eddy, the tree of which she is the passing fruit? The race exists; it is
old, it is ever young, it carries its eternal destiny in its bosom; upon
it, like waves upon the sea, individual succeeds individual, mocked with
a semblance of self-control, but they are nothing. We speak of the soul,
but the soul is in the race.
*****
The future is nothing; but the past is myself, my own history, the seed
of my present thoughts, the mould of my present disposition. It is not
in vain that I return to the nothings of my childhood; for every one
of them has left some stamp upon me or put some fetter on my boasted
free-will. In the past is my present fate; and in the past also is my
real life.
*****
For as the race of man, after centuries of civilisation, still keeps
some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not
altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honoured, and Lord
Chancellor of England. We advance in years somewhat in the manner of
an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as
the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our
communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the
march. There is our true base; that is not only the beginning, but the
perennial spring of our faculties; and grandfather William can retire
upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.
*****
The regret we have for our childhood is not wholly justifiable: so much
a man may lay down without fear of public ribaldry; for although we
shake our heads over the change, we are not unconscious of the manifold
advantages of our new state. What we lose in generous impulse we more
than gain in the habit of generously watching others; and the capacity
to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost appetite for playing at
soldiers.
*****
If a man lives to any considerable age, it cannot be denied that he
laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal
more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.
*****
There is something irreverent in the speculation, but perhaps the want
of power has more to do with wise resolutions of age than we are always
willing to admit.
*****
People may lay down their lives with cheerfulness in the sure
expectation of a blessed immortality; but that is a different affair
from giving up youth, with all its admirable pleasures, in the hope of
a better quality of gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than
improbable, old age.
*****
Childhood must pass away, and then youth, as surely as, age approaches.
The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good
grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to
lead an adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time
arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life
and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.
*****
Age asks with timidity to be spared intolerable pain; youth, taking
fortune by the beard, demands joy like a right.
*****
It is not possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and
blank; and even if you could do so, instead of coming ultimately to the
right conclusion, you would be very apt to remain in a state of balance
and blank to perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate stages, a dash of
enthusiasm is not a thing to be ashamed of in the retrospect: if St.
Paul had not been a very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder
Christian. For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist
with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the moment)
that we had better leave these great changes to what we call blind
forces; their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the
little, peering, partial eyesight of men. I seem to see that my
own scheme would not answer; and all the other schemes I ever heard
propounded would depress some elements of goodness just as much as they
encouraged others. Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with
years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in
the common orbit of men’s opinions.
Those who go the devil in youth, with anything like a fair chance, were
probably little worth saving from the first; they must have been feeble
fellows--creatures made of putty and pack-thread, without steel or fire,
anger or true joyfulness, in their composition; we may sympathise with
their parents, but there is not much cause to go into mourning for
themselves; for to be quite honest, the weak brother is the worst of
mankind.
*****
The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as
the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings. Their most
anti-social acts indicate the defects of our society. When the torrent
sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you
need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. ... But it
is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream
in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars
and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn
stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel
on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God’s
sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of
himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of
their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce
be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and
such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been
wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that
youth hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and complete
our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against
some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to
the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person
with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.
*****
Had he but talked--talked freely--let himself gush out in words (the way
youth loves to do, and should) there might have been no tale to write
upon the Weirs of Hermiston.
*****
A young man feels himself one too many in the world; his is a painful
situation; he has no calling; no obvious utility; no ties but to his
parents, and these he is sure to disregard. I do not think that a proper
allowance has been made for this true cause of suffering in youth; but
by the mere fact of a prolonged existence, we outgrow either the fact
or else the feeling. Either we become so callously accustomed to our
own useless figure in the world, or else--and this, thank God, in the
majority of cases--we so collect about us the interest or the love of
our fellows, so multiply our effective part in the affairs of life, that
we need to entertain no longer the question of our right to be.
*****
It had been long his practice to prophesy for his second son a career of
ruin and disgrace. There is an advantage in this artless parental habit.
Doubtless the father is interested in his son; but doubtless also the
prophet grows to be interested in his prophecies. If the one goes wrong
the others come true.
*****
When the old man waggles his head and says, ‘Ah, so I thought when I
was your age,’ he has proved the youth’s case. Doubtless, whether from
growth of experience or decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer;
but he thought so while he was young; and all men have thought so while
they were young, since there was dew in the morning or hawthorn in
May; and here is another young man adding his vote to those of previous
generations and riveting another link to the chain of testimony. It is
as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated,
to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other
wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn grey, or mothers
to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than
their lives.
*****
Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other
both in mind and body; to try the manners of different nations; to
hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and country; to be
converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting
verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre
to applaud HERNANI. There is some meaning in the old theory about wild
oats; and a man who has not had his green-sickness and got done with it
for good is as little to be depended on as an unvaccinated infant.
*****
When we grow elderly, how the room brightens and begins to look as it
ought to look, on the entrance of youth, grace, health and comeliness!
You do not want them for yourself, perhaps not even for your son, but
you look on smiling; and when you recall their images--again it is
with a smile. I defy you to see or think of them and not smile with an
infinite and intimate but quite impersonal pleasure.
*****
To speak truth there must be moral equality or else no respect; and
hence between parent and child intercourse is apt to degenerate into a
verbal fencing-bout, and misapprehensions to become engrained. And there
is another side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect
notion of the child’s character, formed in early years or during the
equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres, noting only the facts
which suit with his pre-conception; and wherever a person fancies
himself unjustly judged, he at once and finally gives up the effort to
speak truth.
*****
So, as we grow old, a sort of equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted
for the violent ups and downs of passion and disgust; the same influence
that restrains our hopes quiets our apprehensions; if the pleasures are
less intense, the troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a word,
this period for which we are asked to hoard up everything as for a time
of famine, is, in its own right, the richest, easiest, and happiest
of life. Nay, by managing its own work and following its own happy
inspiration, youth is doing the best it can to endow the leisure of
age. A full, busy youth is your only prelude to a self-contained and
independent age; and the muff inevitably develops into a bore.
*****
To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth
is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and
delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.
*****
The schoolboy has a keen sense of humour. Heroes he learns to understand
and to admire in books; but he is not forward to recognise the heroic
under the traits of any contemporary.
*****
Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs hold their
own in theory; and it is another instance of the same spirit, that the
opinions of old men about life have been accepted as final. All sorts
of allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost
none, for the disenchantments of age. It is held to be a good taunt, and
somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old gentleman
waggles his head and says: ‘Ah, so I thought when I was your age.’ It
is not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: My venerable
sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours.’ And yet the one
is as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an
Oliver.
*****
What shall we be when we grow really old? Of yore, a man was thought to
lay on restrictions and acquire new deadweight of mournful experience
with every year, till he looked back on his youth as the very summer of
impulse and freedom.
*****
And it may be worth while to add that these clouds rolled away in their
season, and that all clouds roll away at last, and the troubles of youth
in particular are things but of a moment.
*****
Through what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the
consciousness of the man’s art dawns first upon the child, it should be
not only interesting but instructive to inquire. A matter of curiosity
to-day, it will become the ground of science to-morrow. From the mind of
childhood there is more history and more philosophy to be fished up than
from all the printed volumes in a library.
*****
I could not finish THE PIRATE when I was a child, I have never finished
it yet; PEVERIL OF THE PEAK dropped half way through from my schoolboy
hands, and though I have since waded to an end in a kind of wager with
myself, the exercise was quite without enjoyment. There is something
disquieting in the considerations. I still think the visit to Ponto’s
the best part of the BOOK OF SNOBS: does that mean that I was right when
I was a child, or does it mean that I have never grown since then, that
the child is not the man’s father, but the man? and that I came into the
world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned sinsyne to
be more tolerant of boredom?
*****
The child thinks much in images, words are very live to him, phrases
that imply a picture eloquent beyond their value.
*****
Somehow my playmate had vanished, or is out of the story, as the sagas
say, but I was sent into the village on an errand; and, taking a book
of fairy tales, went down alone through a fir-wood, reading as I walked.
How often since then has it befallen me to be happy even so; but that
was the first time: the shock of that pleasure I have never since
forgot, and if my mind serves me to the last, I never shall; for it was
then I knew I loved reading.
*****
The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the matter that
was read to me, and not of any manner in the words. If these pleased me,
it was unconsciously; I listened for news of the great vacant world
upon whose edge I stood; I listened for delightful plots that I might
re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and circumstances that I might
call up before me, with closed eyes, when I was tired of Scotland, and
home, and that weary prison of the sick-chamber in which I lay so long
in durance.
*****
I rose and lifted a corner of the blind. Over the black belt of the
garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here and there a
lighted window. How often before had my nurse lifted me out of bed and
pointed them out to me, while we wondered together if, there also, there
were children that could not sleep, and if these lighted oblongs were
signs of those that waited like us for the morning.
*****
There never was a child but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a
military commander, and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and
suffered shipwreck and prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore,
and gallantly retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected
innocence and beauty.
*****
None more than children are concerned for beauty, and, above all, for
beauty in the old.
*****
So in youth, like Moses from the mountain, we have sights of that
House Beautiful of art which we shall never enter. They are dreams
and unsubstantial; visions of style that repose upon no base of human
meaning; the last heart-throb of that excited amateur who has to die in
all of us before the artist can be born. But they come in such a rainbow
of glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthly in
comparison. We are all artists; almost all in the age of illusion,
cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to the strains of some
deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were happy! But art, of
whatever nature, is a kind of mistress; and though these dreams of
youth fall by their own baselessness, others succeed, grave and more
substantial; the symptoms change, the amiable malady endures; and still
at an equal distance, the House Beautiful shines upon its hill-top.
*****
Children, for instance, are able enough to see, but they have no great
faculty for looking; they do not use their eyes for the pleasure of
using them, but for by-ends of their own; and the things I call to
mind seeing most vividly were not beautiful in themselves, but merely
interesting or enviable to me, as I thought they might be turned to
practical account in play.
*****
The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, in conscious
art, which, though it be derived from play, is itself an abstract,
impersonal thing, and depends largely upon philosophical interests
beyond the scope of childhood. It is when we make castles in the air and
personate the leading character in our own romances, that we return to
the spirit of our first years. Only, there are several reasons why the
spirit is no longer so agreeable to indulge. Nowadays, when we admit
this personal element into our divagations, we are apt to stir up
uncomfortable and sorrowful memories, and remind ourselves sharply of
old wounds..Alas! when we betake ourselves to our intellectual form of
play, sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed, we rouse
many hot feelings for which we can find no outlet. Substitutes are not
acceptable to the mature mind, which desires the thing itself; and
even to rehearse a triumphant dialogue with one’s enemy, although it is
perhaps the most satisfactory piece of play still left within our reach,
is not entirely satisfying, and is even apt to lead to a visit and an
interview which may be the reverse of triumphant after all.
Whatever we are to expect at the hands of children, it should not be any
peddling exactitude about matters of fact. They walk in a vain show,
and among mists and rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and
unconcerned about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly
learned; and there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to
teach them what we mean by abstract truthfulness. When a bad writer is
inexact, even if he can look back on half a century of years, we charge
him with incompetence and not, with dishonesty. And why not extend the
same allowance to imperfect speakers? Let a stockbroker be dead stupid
about poetry, or a poet inexact in the details of business, and we
excuse them heartily from blame. But show us a miserable, unbreeched,
human entity, whose whole profession it is to take a tub for a fortified
town and a shaving-brush for the deadly stiletto, and who
passes three-fourths of his time in a dream and the rest in open
self-deception, and we expect him to be as nice upon a matter of fact
as a scientific expert bearing evidence. Upon my heart, I think it less
than decent: you do not consider how little the child sees, or how swift
he is to weave what he has seen into bewildering fiction; and that
he cares no more for what you call truth, than you for a gingerbread
dragoon. It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland, where
they figure so prettily--pretty like flowers and innocent like dogs.
They will come out of their gardens soon enough, and have to go into
offices and the witness-box. Spare them yet a while, O conscientious
parent! Let them doze among their playthings yet a little! for who knows
what a rough, warfaring existence lies before them in the future?
*****
‘You are a friend of Archie Weir’s?’ said one to Frank Innes; and Innes
replied, with his usual flippancy and more than his usual insight: ‘I
know Weir, but I never met Archie.’ No one had met Archie, a malady most
incident to only sons. He flew his private signal, and none heeded it;
It seemed he was abroad in a world from which the very hope of intimacy
was banished; and he looked round about him on the concourse of his
fellow-students, and forward to the trivial days and acquaintances that
were to come, without hope or interest.
*****
‘My poor, dear boy!’ observed Glenalmond. ‘My poor, dear and, if you
will allow me to say so, very foolish boy! You are only discovering
where you are; to one of your temperament, or of mine, a painful
discovery. The world was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred
millions of me, all different from each other and from us; there’s no
royal road, we just have to sclamber and tumble.’
*****
Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the services of no
single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a gentleman with
a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go and labour
themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court;
scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper
is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the
Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid; and fine young men who
work themselves into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse with
white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been
whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies the promise of some momentous
destiny? and that this Lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces
was the bull’s-eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is
not so. The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for
all they know, may be chimerical, or hurtful; the glory and riches they
expect may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the
world they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the
thought.
*****
As we go catching and catching at this or that corner of knowledge,
now getting a foresight of generous possibilities, now chilled with a
glimpse of prudence, we may compare the headlong course of our years to
a swift torrent in which a man is carried away; now he is dashed against
a boulder, now he grapples for a moment to a trailing spray; at the end,
he is hurled out and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. We have
no more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our theories;
we are spun round and round and shown this or the other view of life,
until only fools or knaves can hold to their opinions.... All our
attributes are modified or changed; and it will be a poor account of us
if our views do not modify and change in a proportion. To hold the same
views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a
score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable
brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should
sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the
Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other
for the whole voyage.
*****
It is good to have been young in youth and, as years go on, to grow
older. Many are already old before they are through their teens; but
to travel deliberately through one’s ages is to get the heart out of a
liberal education. Times change, opinions vary to their opposite, and
still this world appears a brave gymnasium, full of sea-bathing,
and horse exercise, and bracing, manly virtues; and what can be more
encouraging than to find the friend who was welcome at one age, still
welcome at another? Our affections and beliefs are wiser than we; the
best that is in us is better than we can understand; for it is grounded
beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe, from one age on to
another.
*****
But faces have a trick of growing more and more spiritualised and
abstract in the memory, until nothing remains of them but a look, a
haunting expression; just that secret quality in a face that is apt to
slip out somehow under the cunningest painter’s touch, and leave the
portrait dead for the lack of it.
*****
Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the face; pitiful that
of the deaf who cannot follow the changes of the voice. And there are
others also to be pitied; for there are some of an inert, uneloquent
nature, who have been denied all the symbols of communication, who have
neither a lively play of facial expression, nor speaking gestures, nor a
responsive voice, nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory speech: people
truly made of clay, people tied for life into a bag which no one can
undo. They are poorer than the gipsy, for their heart can speak no
language under heaven.
*****
For my part, I can see few things more desirable, after the possession
of such radical qualities as honour and humour and pathos, than to have
a lively and not a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond with
every feeling; to be elegant arid delightful in person, so that we shall
please even in the intervals of active pleasing, and may never discredit
speech with uncouth manners or become unconsciously our own burlesques.
But of all unfortunates there is one creature (for I will not call
him man) conspicuous in misfortune. This is he who has forfeited his
birthright of expression, who has cultivated artful intonations, who has
taught his face tricks, like a pet monkey, and on every side perverted
or cut off his means of communication with his fellow-men. The body is a
house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying
on the passersby to come and love us. But this fellow has filled his
windows with opaque glass, elegantly coloured. His house may be admired
for its design, the crowd may pause before the stained windows, but
meanwhile the poor proprietor must lie languishing within, uncomforted,
unchangeably alone.
*****
The lads go forth pricked with the spirit of adventure and the desire
to rise in Life, and leave their homespun elders grumbling and wondering
over the event. Once, at a village called Lausanne, I met one of these
disappointed parents: a drake who had fathered a wild swan and seen it
take wing and disappear. The wild swan in question was now an apothecary
in Brazil. He had flown by way of Bordeaux, and first landed in America,
bare-headed and bare-footed, and with a single halfpenny in his pocket.
And now he was an apothecary! Such a wonderful thing is an adventurous
life! I thought he might as well have stayed at home; but you never can
tell wherein a man’s life consists, nor in what he sets his pleasure:
one to drink, another to marry, a third to write scurrilous articles and
be repeatedly caned in public, and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an
apothecary in Brazil. As for his old father, he could conceive no reason
for the lad’s behaviour. ‘I had always bread for him,’ he said; ‘he ran
away to annoy me. He loved to annoy me. He had no gratitude.’ But at
heart he was swelling with pride over his travelled offspring, and he
produced a letter out of his pocket, where, as he said, it was rotting,
a mere lump of paper rags, and waved it gloriously in the air. ‘This
comes from America,’ he cried, ‘six thousand leagues away!’ And the
wine-shop audience looked upon it with a certain thrill.
*****
The fame of other lands had reached them; the name of the eternal
city rang in their ears; they were not colonists, but pilgrims; they
travelled towards wine and gold and sunshine, but their hearts were set
on something higher. That divine unrest, that old stinging trouble of
humanity that makes all high achievements and all miserable failures,
the same that spread wings with Icarus, the same that sent Columbus into
the desolate Atlantic, inspired and supported these barbarians on their
perilous march.
*****
There is more adventure in the life of the working man who descends as a
common soldier into the battle of life, than in that of the millionaire
who sits apart in an office, like Von Moltke, and only directs the
manoeuvres by telegraph. Give me to hear about the career of him who
is in the thick of the business; to whom one change of market means an
empty belly, and another a copious and savoury meal. This is not the
philosophical, but the human side of economics; it interests like a
story; and the life of all who are thus situated partakes in a small way
of the charm of Robinson Crusoe; for every step is critical, and human
life is presented to you naked and verging to its lowest terms.
*****
An aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed
estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by
year a revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be
spiritually rich.
*****
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded
in life; and perhaps only in law and the higher mathematics may this
devotion be maintained, suffice to itself without reaction, and find
continual rewards without excitement.
*****
Study and experiment, to some rare natures, is the unbroken pastime of
a life. These are enviable natures; people shut in the house by sickness
often bitterly envy them; but the commoner man cannot continue to exist
upon such altitudes: his feet itch for physical adventure; his blood
boils for physical dangers, pleasures, and triumphs; his fancy, the
looker after new things, cannot continue to look for them in books and
crucibles, but must seek them on the breathing stage of life.
*****
Life goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most
various and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the
ear, to the mind--the seat of wonder, to the touch--so thrillingly
delicate, and to the belly--so imperious when starved. It combines and
employs in its manifestation the method and material, not of one art
only, but of all the arts. Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few
of life’s majestic chords; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry
of light and colour; literature does but drily indicate that wealth
of incident, of moral obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture and
agony, with which it teems. To ‘compete with life,’ whose sun we cannot
look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and slay us--to compete
with the flavour of wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire,
the bitterness of death and separation here is, indeed, a projected
escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress
coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed
with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the
insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense: none can ‘compete with
life’: not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these
facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read
of the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are surprised, and
justly commend the author’s talent, if our pulse be quickened. And mark,
for a last differentia, that this quickening of the pulse is, in almost
every case, purely agreeable; that these phantom reproductions of
experience, even at their most acute, convey decided pleasure; while
experience itself, in the cockpit of life, can torture and slay.
*****
Into how many houses would not the note of the monastery bell, dividing
the day into manageable portions, bring peace of mind and healthful
activity of body! We speak of hardships, but the true hardship is to be
a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in our own dull and foolish
manner.
*****
But struggle as you please, a man has to work in this world. He must be
an honest man or a thief, Loudon.
*****
Industry is, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful and
profitable to the worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you
have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral
profit, all in one.
*****
‘The cost of a thing,’ says he, ‘is the amount OF WHAT I WILL CALL
LIFE which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the
long-run.’ I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more
clearly, that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty.
Between these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not
fail to find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one or
other, that a man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, in
Thoreau’s terms, his whole life for it, or, in mine, bartering for it
the whole of his available liberty, and becoming a slave till death.
There are two questions to be considered--the quality of what we buy,
and the price we have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, a
two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood? and can you
afford the one you want? It is a matter of taste; it is not in the least
degree a question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is no
authority for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is true
that we might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is
also highly improbable; not many do; and the art of growing rich is not
only quite distinct from that of doing good, but the practice of the one
does not at all train a man for practising the other.
*****
We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to that which
is congenial. It is only to transact some higher business that even
Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus. We must all work for the sake
of work; we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any ‘absorbing
pursuit--it does not much matter what, so it be honest’; but the most
profitable work is that which combines into one continued effort the
largest proportion of the powers and desires of a man’s nature; that
into which he will plunge with ardour, and from which he will desist
with reluctance; in which he will know the weariness of fatigue, but not
that of satiety; and which will be ever fresh, pleasing and stimulating
to his taste. Such work holds a man together, braced at all points; it
does not suffer him to doze or wander; it keeps him actively conscious
of himself, yet raised among superior interests; it gives him the profit
of industry with the pleasures of a pastime. This is what his art should
be to the true artist, and that to a degree unknown in other and less
intimate pursuits. For other professions stand apart from the human
business of life; but an art has the seat at the centre of the artist’s
doings and sufferings, deals directly with his experiences, teaches him
the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps, and becomes a part of his
biography.
*****
Farewell fair day and fading light!
The clay-born here, with westward sight,
Marks the huge sun now downward soar.
Farewell. We twain shall meet no more.
Farewell. I watch with bursting sigh
My late contemned occasion die.
I linger useless in my tent:
Farewell, fair day, so foully spent!
Farewell, fair day. If any God
At all consider this poor clod,
He who the fair occasion sent
Prepared and placed the impediment.
Let him diviner vengeance take--
Give me to sleep, give me to wake
Girded and shod, and bid me play
The hero in the coming day!
*****
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be
sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by
any means certain that a man’s business is the most important thing he
has to do. To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the
wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be played
upon the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass,
among the world at large, as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre,
not only the walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent
fiddlers in the orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands
from the benches, do really play a part and fulfil important offices
towards the general result.
*****
The fact is, fame may be a forethought and an afterthought, but it is
too abstract an idea to move people greatly in moments of swift
and momentous decision. It is from something more immediate, some
determination of blood to the head, some trick of the fancy, that the
breach is stormed or the bold word spoken. I am sure a fellow shooting
an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly as much thought about fame as most
commanders going into battle; and yet the action, fall out how it
will, is not one of those the muse delights to celebrate. Indeed, it
is difficult to see why the fellow does a thing so nameless and yet so
formidable to look at, unless on the theory that he likes it.
*****
It is but a lying cant that would represent the merchant and the banker
as people disinterestedly toiling for mankind, and then most useful when
absorbed in their transactions; for the man is more important than his
services.
*****
It was my custom, as the hours dragged on, to repeat the question, ‘When
will the carts come in?’ and repeat it again and again until at last
those sounds arose in the street that I have heard once more this
morning. The road before our house is a great thoroughfare for early
carts. I know not, and I never have known, what they carry, whence they
come, or whither they go. But I know that, long ere dawn, and for hours
together, they stream continuously past, with the same rolling and
jerking of wheels, and the same clink of horses’ feet. It was not for
nothing that they made the burthen of my wishes all night through. They
are really the first throbbings of life, the harbingers of day; and it
pleases you as much to hear them as it must please a shipwrecked seaman
once again to grasp a hand of flesh and blood after years of miserable
solitude. They have the freshness of the daylight life about them. You
can hear the carters cracking their whips and crying hoarsely to their
horses or to one another; and sometimes even a peal of healthy, harsh
horse-laughter comes up to you through the darkness. There is now an end
to mystery and fear. Like the knocking at the door in MACBETH, or the
cry of the watchman in the TOUR DE NESLE, they show that the horrible
caesura is over, and the nightmares have fled away, because the day
is breaking and the ordinary life of men is beginning to bestir itself
among the streets.
*****
She was as dead an old woman as ever I saw; no more than bone and
parchment, curiously put together. Her eyes, with which she interrogated
mine, were vacant of sense. It depends on what you call seeing, whether
you might not call her blind. Perhaps she had known love; perhaps borne
children, suckled them, and given them pet names. But now that was all
gone by, and had left her neither happier nor wiser; and the best she
could do with her mornings was to come up here into the cold church and
juggle for a slice of heaven. It was not without a gulp that I escaped
into the streets and the keen morning air. Morning? why, how tired of
it she would be before night! and if she did not sleep, how then? It
is fortunate that not many of us are brought up publicly to justify
our lives at the bar of threescore years and ten; fortunate that such a
number are knocked opportunely on the head in what they call the flower
of their years, and go away to suffer for their follies in private
somewhere else. Otherwise, between sick children and discontented old
folk, we might be put out of all conceit of life.
*****
When I was going, up got my old stroller, and off with his hat. ‘I am
afraid,’ said he, ‘that monsieur will think me altogether a beggar;
but I have another demand to make upon him.’ I began to hate him on the
spot. ‘We play again to-night,’ he went on. ‘Of course I shall refuse
to accept any more money from monsieur and his friends, who have been
already so liberal. But our programme of to-night is something truly
creditable; and I cling to the idea that monsieur will honour us
with his presence. And then, with a shrug and a smile: ‘Monsieur
understands--the vanity of an artist!’ Save the mark! The vanity of an
artist! That is the kind of thing that reconciles me to life: a ragged,
tippling, incompetent old rogue, with the manners of a gentleman and the
vanity of an artist, to keep up his self-respect!
*****
Time went on, and the boy’s health still slowly declined. The Doctor
blamed the weather, which was cold and boisterous. He called in his
CONFRERE from Burron, took a fancy for him, magnified his capacity, and
was pretty soon under treatment himself--it scarcely appeared for what
complaint. He and Jean-Marie had each medicine to take at different
periods of the day. The Doctor used to lie in wait for the exact moment,
watch in hand. ‘There is nothing like regularity,’ he would say, fill
out the doses, and dilate on the virtues of the draught; and if the boy
seemed none the better, the Doctor was not at all the worse.
*****
‘I lead you,’ he would say, ‘by the green pastures. My system, my
beliefs, my medicines, are resumed in one phrase--to avoid excess.
Blessed nature, healthy, temperate nature, abhors and exterminates
excess. Human law in this matter imitates at a great distance her
provisions; and we must strive to supplement the efforts of the law.
Yes, boy, we must be a law to ourselves and for our neighbours--LEX
ARMATA--armed, emphatic, tyrannous law. If you see a crapulous human
ruin snuffing, dash from him his box! The judge, though in a way an
admission of disease, is less offensive to me than either the doctor or
the priest. Above all, the doctor--the doctor and the purulent trash
and garbage of his pharmacopoeia! Pure air--from the neighbourhood of
a pinetum for the sake of the turpentine--unadulterated wine, and the
reflections of an unsophisticated spirit in the presence of the works
of nature--these, my boy, are the best medical appliances and the best
religious comforts. Devote yourself to these. Hark! there are the bells
of Bourron (the wind is in the North, it will be fair). How clear and
airy is the sound! The nerves are harmonised and quieted; the mind
attuned to silence; and observe how easily and regularly beats the
heart! Your unenlightened doctor would see nothing in these sensations;
and yet you yourself perceive they are a part of health. Did you
remember your cinchona this morning? Good. Cinchona also is a work of
nature; it is, after all, only the bark of a tree which we might gather
for, ourselves if we lived in the locality.’
*****
The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend days
upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes haste to blot. Not
so the Beginner. Human nature has certain rights; instinct--the instinct
of self-preservation--forbids that any man (cheered and supported by
the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the miseries
of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in weeks.
There must be something for hope to feed upon. The beginner must have a
slant of wind, a lucky vein must be running, he must be in one of those
hours when the words come and the phrases balance themselves--EVEN TO
BEGIN. And having begun, what a dread looking forward is that until the
book shall be accomplished! For so long a time the slant is to continue
unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long a time you must keep at
command the same quality of style: for so long a time your puppets are
to be always vital, always consistent, always vigorous!
*****
What is this fortunate circumstance, my friend? inquired Anastasie, not
heeding his protest, which was of daily recurrence.
‘That we have no children, my beautiful,’ replied the Doctor. ‘I think
of it more and more as the years go on, and with more and more gratitude
towards the Power that dispenses such afflictions. Your health, my
darling, my studious quiet, our little kitchen delicacies, how they
would all have suffered, how they would all have been sacrificed! And
for what? Children are the last word of human imperfection. Health flees
before their face. They cry, my dear; they put vexatious questions;
they demand to be fed, to be washed, to be educated, to have their noses
blowed; and then, when the time comes, they break our hearts, as I
break this piece of sugar. A pair of professed egoists, like you and me,
should avoid offspring, like an infidelity.’
‘Indeed!’ said she; and she laughed. ‘Now, that is like you--to take
credit for the thing you could not help.’
*****
I have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound
for ever on man’s shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast
it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful
pressure.
*****
Forth from the casement, on the plain
Where honour has the world to gain,
Pour forth and bravely do your part,
O knights of the unshielded heart!
‘Forth and for ever forward!--out
From prudent turret and redoubt,
And in the mellay charge amain,
To fall, but yet to rise again!
Captive? Ah, still, to honour bright,
A captive soldier of the right!
Or free and fighting, good with ill?
Unconquering but unconquered still!
O to be up and doing, O
Unfearing and unshamed to go
In all the uproar and the press
About my human business!
My undissuaded heart I hear
Whisper courage in my ear.
With voiceless calls, the ancient earth
Summons me to a daily birth.
*****
Yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are born. They
can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are their own paymasters on
parole; and must pay themselves fair wages and no more. For I suppose
that in the course of ages, and through reform and civil war and
invasion, mankind was pursuing some other and more general design than
to set one or two Englishmen of the nineteenth century beyond the reach
of needs and duties. Society was scarce put together, and defended
with so much eloquence and blood, for the convenience of two or three
millionaires and a few hundred other persons of wealth and position.
It is plain that if mankind thus acted and suffered during all these
generations, they hoped some benefit, some ease, some wellbeing, for
themselves and their descendants; that if they supported law and order,
it was to secure fair-play for all; that if they denied themselves in
the present, they must have had some designs on the future. Now a
great hereditary fortune is a miracle of man’s wisdom and mankind’s
forbearance; it has not only been amassed and handed down, it has been
suffered to be amassed and handed down; and surely in such consideration
as this, its possessor should find only a new spur to activity and
honour, that with all this power of service he should not prove
unserviceable, and that this mass of treasure should return in benefits
upon the race. If he had twenty, or thirty, or a hundred thousand at his
banker’s, or if all Yorkshire or all California were his to manage or to
sell, he would still be morally penniless, and have the world to begin
like Whittington, until he had found some way of serving mankind. His
wage is physically in his own hand; but, in honour, that wage must still
be earned. He is only steward on parole of what is called his fortune.
He must honourably perform his stewardship. He must estimate his own
services and allow himself a salary in proportion, for that will be
one among his functions. And while he will then be free to spend that
salary, great or little, on his own private pleasures, the rest of his
fortune he but holds and disposes under trust for mankind; it is
not his, because he has not earned it; it cannot be his, because
his services have already been paid; but year by year it is his to
distribute, whether to help individuals whose birthright and outfit has
been swallowed up in his, or to further public works and institutions.
*****
‘Tis a fine thing to smart for one’s duty; even in the pangs of it there
is contentment.
*****
We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about a little poverty;
but such considerations should not move us in the choice of that which
is to be the business and justification of so great a portion of our
lives and like the missionary, the patriot, or the philosopher, we
should all choose that poor and brave career in which we can do the most
and best for mankind.
*****
The salary in any business under heaven is not the only, nor indeed the
first, question. That you should continue to exist is a matter for your
own consideration; but that your business should be first honest, and
second useful, are points in which honour and morality are concerned.
*****
There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one thing that can
be perfectly attained: Death. And from a variety of circumstances we
have no one to tell us whether it be worth attaining.
A strange picture we make on our way to our chimaeras, ceaselessly
marching, grudging ourselves the time for rest; indefatigable,
adventurous pioneers. It is true that we shall never reach the goal; it
is even more than probable that there is no such place; and if we lived
for centuries and were endowed with the powers of a god, we should find
ourselves not much nearer what we wanted at the end. O toiling hands of
mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon,
it seems to you,’ you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and
but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires
of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel
hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to
labour.
*****
A man who must separate himself from his neighbours’ habits in order to
be happy, is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium
for the same purpose. What we want to see is one who can breast into the
world, do a man’s work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment
of existence.
There is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in
a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the
bracing contact of the world.
*****
You cannot run away from a weakness; you must some time fight it out or
perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?
*****