fear; let me say at once that with the miserable weeks that followed
there was mingled much of physical and nervous suffering, far more,
indeed, than I then knew, or was permitted to know. I had been reading
hard, and throwing myself with unaccustomed energy into a hundred new
ideas and speculations. I had had a few weeks before a sudden attack of
sleeplessness, which should have warned me of overstrain. But now every
nervous misery known to man beset me—intolerable depression, spectral
remorse, nocturnal terrors. My work was neglected. I read the Bible
incessantly, and prayed for the hour together. Sometimes my depression
would leave me for a few hours, like a cat playing with a mouse, and leap
upon me like an evil spirit in the middle of some social gathering or
harmless distraction, striking the word from my lips and the smile from
my face.
For some weeks this lasted, and I think I was nearly mad. Two strange
facts I will record. One day, beside myself with agitation, seeing no way
out—for my prayers seemed to batter, as it were, like waves against a
stony and obdurate cliff, and no hope or comfort ever slid into my soul—I
wrote two letters: one to an eminent Roman Catholic, in whose sermons I
had found some encouragement, and one to the elder friend I have above
spoken of. In two days I received the answers. That from the Romanist
hard, irritated, and bewildered—my only way was to submit myself to true
direction, and he did not see that I had any intention of doing this;
that it was obvious that I was being plagued for some sin which I had not
ventured to open to him. I burnt the letter with a hopeless shudder. The
other from my old friend, appointing a time to meet me, and saying that
he understood, and that my prayers would avail.
I went soon after to see him, in a dark house in a London square. He
heard me with the utmost patience, bade me believe that I was not _alone_
in my experience; that in many a life there was—there must be—some root
of bitterness that must flower before the true seed could be sown, and
adding many other manly and tender things.
[Sidenote: LIBERTY]
He gave me certain directions, and though I will confess that I could not
follow them for long—the soul must find her own path, I think, among the
crags—yet he led me into a calmer, quieter, more tranquil frame of mind;
he taught me that I must not expect to find the way all at once, that
long coldness and habitual self-deceit must be slowly purged away. But
I can never forget the infinite gratitude I owe him for the loving and
strenuous way in which he brought me out into a place of liberty with the
tenderness of a true father in God.
11
Thus rudely awakened to the paramount necessity of embracing a faith,
bowing to a principle, obeying a gentle force which should sustain
and control the soul, I flung myself for a time with ardour into
theological reading, my end not erudition, but to drink at the source
of life. Is it arrogant to say that I passed through a painful period
of disillusionment? all round the pure well I found traces of strife
and bitterness. I cast no doubt on the sincerity and zeal of those who
had preceded me; but not content with drinking, and finding their eyes
enlightened, they had stamped the margin of the pool into the mire, and
the waters rose turbid and strife-stained to the lip. Some, like cattle
on a summer evening, seemed to stand and brood within the pool itself,
careless if they fouled the waters; others had built themselves booths
on the margin, and sold the precious draughts in vessels of their own,
enraged that any should desire the authentic stream. There was, it
seemed, but little room for the wayfarer; and the very standing ground
was encumbered with impotent folk.
[Sidenote: DISCERNING THE FAITH]
Not to strain a metaphor, I found that the commentators obscured rather
than assisted. What I desired was to realise the character, to divine the
inner thoughts of Jesus, to be fired by the impetuous eloquence of Paul,
to be strengthened by the ardent simplicity of John. These critics, men
of incredible diligence and patience, seemed to me to make a fence about
the law, and to wrap the form I wished to see in innumerable vestments
of curious design. Readers of the Protagoras of Plato will remember how
the great sophist spoke from the centre of a mass of rugs and coverlets,
among which, for his delectation, he lay, while the humming of his
voice filled the arches of the cloister with a heavy burden of sound. I
found myself in the same position as the disciples of Protagoras; the
voice that I longed to hear, spoke, but it had to penetrate through the
wrappings and veils which these men, in their zeal for service, had in
mistaken reverence flung about the lively oracle.
A wise man said to me not long ago that the fault of teaching nowadays
was that knowledge was all coined into counters; and that the desire
of learners seemed to be not to possess themselves of the ore, not to
strengthen and toughen the mind by the pursuit, but to possess themselves
of as many of these tokens as possible, and to hand them on unchanged and
unchangeable to those who came to learn of themselves.
This was my difficulty; the shelves teemed with books, the lecturers
cried aloud in every College court, like the jackdaws that cawed and
clanged about the venerable towers; and for a period I flew with notebook
and pen from lecture to lecture, entering admirable maxims, acute verbal
distinctions, ingenious parallels in my poor pages. At home I turned
through book after book, and imbued myself in the learning of the
schools, dreaming that, though the rind was tough, the precious morsels
lay succulent within.
In this conceit of knowledge I was led to leave my College and to plunge
into practical life; what my work was shall presently be related, but
I will own that it was a relief. I had begun to feel that though I had
learnt the use of the tools, I was no nearer finding the precious metal
of which I was in search.
The further development of my faith after this cannot be told in detail,
but it may be briefly sketched, after a life of some intellectual
activity, not without practical employment, which has now extended over
many years.
[Sidenote: THE FATHER]
I began, I think, very far from Christ. The only vital faith that I had
at first was an intense instinctive belief in the absolute power, the
infinite energies, of the Father; to me he was not only Almighty, as our
weak word phrases it, a Being who could, if he would, exert His power,
but παντοκρατῶρ—all-conquering, all-subduing. I was led, by a process of
mathematical certainty, to see that if the Father was anywhere, He was
everywhere; that if He made us and bade us be, He was responsible for the
smallest and most sordid details of our life and thought, as well as for
the noblest and highest. It cannot indeed be otherwise; every thought
and action springs from some cause, in many cases referable to events
which took place in lives outside of and anterior to our own. In any case
in which a man seems to enjoy the faculty of choice, his choice is in
reality determined by a number of previous causes; given all the data,
his action could be inevitably predicted. Thus I gradually realised that
sin in the moral world, and disease in the physical, are each of them
some manifestation of the Eternal Will. If He gives to me the joy of
life, the energy of action, did He not give it to the subtle fungus, to
the venomous bacteria which, once established in our bodies, are known by
the names of cancer and fever? Why all life should be this uneasy battle
I know not; but if we can predicate consciousness of any kind to these
strange rudiments, the living slime of the pit, is it irreverent to say
that faith may play a part in their work as well? When the health-giving
medicine pours along our veins, what does it mean but that everywhere it
leaves destruction behind it, and that the organisms of disease which
have, with delighted zest, been triumphing in their chosen dwelling and
rioting in the instinctive joy of life, sadly and mutely resign the
energy that animates them, or sink into sleep. It is all a balance, a
strife, a battle. Why such striving and fighting, such uneasy victory
and deep unrest should be the Father’s will for all His creatures, I
know not; but that it _is_ a condition, a law of His own mind, I can
reverently believe. When we sing the _Benedicite_, which I for one do
with all my heart, we must be conscious that it is only a selection,
after all, of phenomena that are impressive, delightful, or useful to
ourselves. Nothing that we call, God forgive us, noxious, finds a place
there. St. Francis, indeed, went further, and praised God for “our sister
the Death of the Body,” but in the larger _Benedicite_ of the universe,
which is heard by the ear of God, the fever and the pestilence, the cobra
and the graveyard worm utter their voices too; and who shall say that the
Father hears them not?
[Sidenote: THE JOY OF THE WORLD]
If one believes that happiness is inch by inch diminishing, that it is
all a losing fight, then it must be granted that we have no refuge but in
a Stoic hardening of the heart; but when we look at life and see the huge
preponderance of joy over pain—such tracts of healthy energy, sweet duty,
quiet movement—indeed when we see, as we often do, the touching spectacle
of hope and joy again and again triumphant over weakness and weariness;
when we see such unselfishness abroad, such ardent desire to lighten the
loads of others and to bear their burdens; then it is faithless indeed
if we allow ourselves to believe that the Father has any end in view but
the ultimate happiness of all the innumerable units, which He endows with
independent energies, and which, one by one, after their short taste of
this beautiful and exquisite world, resign their powers again, often so
gladly, into His hand.
[Sidenote: OUR INSIGNIFICANCE]
But the fault, if I may so phrase it, of this faith, is the vastness
of the conception to which it opens the mind. When I contemplate this
earth with its continents and islands, its mountains and plains, all
stored with histories of life and death, the bones of dead monsters, the
shattered hulks of time; the vast briny ocean with all the mysterious
life that stirs beneath the heaving crests; when I realise that even
this world, with all its infinite records of life, is but a speck in
the heavens, and that every one of the suns of space may be surrounded
with the same train of satellites, in which some tumultuous drama
of life may be, nay, must be enacting itself—that even on the fiery
orbs themselves some appalling Titan forms may be putting forth their
prodigious energies, suffering and dying—the mind of man reels before
the thought;—and yet all is in the mind of God. The consciousness of
the microscopic minuteness of my own life and energies, which yet are
all in all to me, becomes crushing and paralysing in the light of such
a thought. It seems impossible to believe, in the presence of such a
spectacle, that the single life can have any definite importance, and
the temptation comes to resign all effort, to swim on the stream, just
planning life to be as easy and as pleasant as possible, before one sinks
into the abyss.
12
From such a paralysis of thought and life two beliefs have saved me.
[Sidenote: THE MASTER]
First, it may be confessed, came the belief in the Spirit of God, the
thought of inner holiness, not born from any contemplation of the world
around, which seems indeed to point to far different ideals. Yet as true
and truer than the bewildering example of nature is the inner voice
which speaks, after the wind and storm, in the silent solitudes of the
soul. That this voice exists and is heard can admit of no tangible
demonstration; each must speak for himself; but experience forbids me
to doubt that there is something which contradicts the seduction of
appetite, something which calls, as it were, a flush to the face of the
soul at the thought of triumphs of sense, a voice that without being
derisive or harsh, yet has a terrible and instantaneous severity; and
wields a mental scourge, the blows of which are no less fearful to
receive because they are accompanied with no physical disaster. To
recognise this voice as the very voice and word of the Father to sentient
souls, is the inevitable result of experience and thought.
Then came the triumphant belief, weak at first, but taking slow shape,
that the attitude of the soul to its Maker can be something more than a
distant reverence, an overpowering awe, a humble worship; the belief, the
certainty that it can be, as it were, a personal link—that we can indeed
hold converse with God, speak with Him, call upon Him, put to use a human
phrase, our hand in His, only desiring to be led according to His will.
Then came the further step; after some study of the systems of other
teachers of humanity, after a desire to find in the great redeemers of
mankind, in Buddha, Socrates, Mahomet, Confucius, Shakespeare, the secret
of self-conquest, of reconciliation, the knowledge slowly dawns upon the
mind that in Jesus of Galilee alone we are in the presence of something
which enlightens man not from within but from without. The other great
teachers of humanity seem to have looked upon the world and into their
own hearts, and deduced from thence, by flashes of indescribable genius,
some order out of the chaos, some wise and temperate scheme, but with
Jesus—though I long resisted the conviction—it is different. He comes,
not as a man speaking by observation and thought, but as a visitant from
some secret place, who knows the truth rather than guesses at it. I need
not say that his reporters, the Gospel writers, had but an imperfect
conception of His majesty. His ineffable greatness—it could not well be
otherwise; the mystery rather is that with such simple views of life,
such elementary conceptions of the scheme of things, they yet gave so
much of the stupendous truth, and revealed Jesus in his words and acts
as the Divine Man, who spoke to man not by spiritual influences but by
the very authentic utterance of God. Such teaching as the parables, such
scenes as the raising of Lazarus, or the midday talk by the wayside
well of Sychar, emerge from all art and history with a dignity that
lays no claim to the majesty that they win; and as the tragedy darkens
and thickens to its close, such scenes as the trial, recorded by St.
John, and the sacred death, bring home to the mind the fact that no mere
humanity could bear itself with such gentle and tranquil dignity, such
intense and yet such unselfish suffering as were manifested in the Son of
Man.
[Sidenote: THE RETURN]
And so, as the traveller goes out and wanders through the cities of
men, among stately palaces, among the glories of art, or climbs among
the aching solitudes of lonely mountains, or feasts his eyes upon green
isles floating in sapphire seas, and returns to find that the old
strait dwelling-place, the simple duties of life, the familiar friends,
homely though they be, are the true anchors of the spirit; so, after a
weary pilgrimage, the soul comes back, with glad relief, with wistful
tenderness, to the old beliefs of childhood, which, in its pride and
stubbornness, it cast aside, and rejected as weak and inadequate and
faded; finds after infinite trouble and weariness that it has but
learnt afresh what it knew; and that though the wanderer has ransacked
the world, digged and drunk strange waters, trafficked for foreign
merchandise, yet the Pearl of Price, the White Stone is hidden after all
in his own garden-ground, and inscribed with his own new name.
13
I need not enter very closely into the period of my life which followed
the university. After a good deal of hesitation and uncertainty I decided
to enter for the Home Civil Service, and obtained a post in a subordinate
office. The work I found not wholly uninteresting, but it needs no
special record here. I acquired the knowledge of how to conduct business,
a certain practical power of foreseeing contingencies, a certain
acquaintance with legal procedure, and some knowledge of human nature in
its official aspect.
Intellectually and morally this period of my life was rather stagnant.
I had been through a good deal of excitement, of mental and moral
malady, of general _bouleversement_. Nature exacted a certain amount
of quiescence, melancholy quiescence for the most part, because I felt
myself singularly without energy to carry out my hopes and schemes, and
at the same time it seemed that time was ebbing away purposelessly, and
that I was not driving, so to speak, any piles in the fluid and oozy
substratum of ideas on which my life seemed built. To revel in metaphors,
I was like a snake which has with a great strain bolted a quadruped, and
needs a long space of uneasy and difficult digestion. But at the time I
did not see this; I only thought I was losing time: I felt with Milton—
“How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year.”
But beset as I was by the sublime impatience of youth, I had not serenity
enough to follow out the thoughts which Milton works out in the rest of
the sonnet.
[Sidenote: LITERARY WORK]
At the same time, so far as literary work went, to which I felt greatly
drawn, I was not so impatient. I wrote a great deal for my private
amusement, and to practise facility of expression, but with little idea
of hurried publication. A story which I sent to a well-known editor was
courteously returned to me, with a letter in which he stated that he had
read my work carefully, and that he felt it a duty to tell me that it
was “sauce without meat.” This kind and wholesome advice made a great
difference to me; I determined that I would attempt to live a little
before I indulged in baseless generalisation, or lectured other people on
the art of life. I soon gained great facility in writing, and developed a
theory, which I have ever since had no reason to doubt, that performance
is simply a matter of the intensity of desire. If one only wants enough
to complete a definite piece of work, be it poem, essay, story, or some
far more definite and prosaic task, I have found that it gets itself
done in spite of the insistent pressure of other businesses and the
deadening monotony of heavy routine, simply because one goes back to it
with delight, schemes to clear time for it, waits for it round corners,
and loses no time in spurring and whipping the mind to work, which is
necessary in the case of less attractive tasks. The moment that there
comes a leisurely gap, the mind closes on the beloved work like a limpet;
when this happens day after day and week after week, the accumulations
become prodigious.
I thus felt gradually more and more, that when the _magnum opus_ did
present itself to be done, I should probably be able to carry it through;
and meanwhile I had sufficient self-respect, although I suffered twinges
of thwarted ambition, not to force my crude theories, my scrambling
prose, or my faltering verse upon the world.
[Sidenote: LONDON]
Meanwhile I lived a lonely sort of life, with two or three close
intimates. I never really cared for London, but it is at the same time
idle to deny its fascination. In the first place it is full from day to
day of prodigious, astounding, unexpected beauties—sometimes beauty on
a noble scale, in the grand style, such as when the sunset shakes its
hair among ragged clouds, and the endless leagues of house-roofs and the
fronts of town palaces dwindle into a far-off steely horizon-line under
the huge and wild expanse of sky. Sometimes it is the smaller, but no
less alluring beauty of subtle atmospherical effects; and so conventional
is the human appreciation of beauty that the constant presence, in these
London pictures, of straight framing lines, contributed by house-front
and street-end, is an aid to the imagination. Again, there is the beauty
of contrasts; the vignettes afforded by the sudden blossoming of rustic
flowers and shrubs in unexpected places; the rustle of green leaves at
the end of a monotonous street. And then, apart from natural beauty,
there is the vast, absorbing, incredible pageant of humanity, full of
pathos, of wistfulness, and of sweetness. But of this I can say but
little; for it always moved me, and moves me yet, with a sort of horror.
I think it was always to me a spectacular interest; I never felt _one_
with the human beings whom I watched, or even in the same boat, so to
speak, with them; the contemplation of the fact that I am one of so
many millions has been to me a humiliating rather than an inspiring
thought; it dashes the pleasures of individuality; it arraigns the soul
before a dark and inflexible bar. Passing daily through London, there
is little possibility in the case of an imaginative man for hopeful
expansion of the heart, little ground for anything but an acquiescent
acceptance. Under these conditions it is too rudely brought home to me
to be wholesome, how ineffective, undistinguished, typical, minute,
uninteresting any one human being is after all: and though the sight of
humanity in every form is attractive, bewildering, painfully interesting,
thrilling, and astounding—though one finds unexpected beauty and goodness
everywhere—yet I recognise that city life had a deadening effect on my
consciousness, and hindered rather than helped the development of thought
and life.
[Sidenote: THE ARTIST]
Still, in other ways this period was most valuable—it made me practical
instead of fanciful; alert instead of dreamy; it made me feel what I had
never known before, the necessity for grasping the _exact_ point of a
matter, and not losing oneself among side issues. It helped me out of the
entirely amateurish condition of mind into which I had been drifting—and,
moreover, it taught me one thing which I had never realised, a lesson
for which I am profoundly grateful, namely that literature and art play
a very small part in the lives of the majority of people; that most men
have no sort of an idea that they are serious matters, but look upon
them as more or less graceful amusements; that in such regions they have
no power of criticism, and no judgment; but that these are not nearly
such serious defects as the defect of vision which the artist and the
man of letters suffer from and encourage—the defect, I mean, of treating
artistic ideals as matters of pre-eminent national, even of moral
importance. They must be content to range themselves frankly with other
craftsmen; they may sustain themselves by thinking that they may help, a
very little, to ameliorate conditions, to elevate the tone of morality
and thought, to provide sources of recreation, to strengthen the sense
of beauty; but they must remember that they cannot hope to belong to
the primal and elemental things of life. Not till the primal needs are
satisfied does the work of the poet and artist begin—“After the banquet,
the minstrel.”
The poet and the artist too often live, like the Lady of Shalott,
weaving a magic web of fair and rich colour, but dealing not with life
itself, and not even with life viewed _ipsis oculis_, but in the magic
mirror. The Lady of Shalott is doubly secluded from the world; she does
not mingle with it, she does not even see it; so the writer sometimes
does not even see the life which he describes, but draws his knowledge
secondhand, through books and bookish secluded talk. I do not think that
I under-rate the artistic vocation; but it is only one of many, and,
though different in kind, certainly not superior to the vocations of
those who do the practical work of the world.
From this dangerous heresy I was saved just at the moment when it
was waiting to seize upon me, and at a time when a man’s convictions
are apt to settle themselves for life, by contact with the prosaic,
straightforward and commonplace world.