try and disentangle, as far as I can, the _motif_ that seems to me to
underlie my simple life.
One question above all others has constantly recurred to my mind; and the
answer to it is the sum of my slender philosophy.
The question then is this: is a simple, useful, dignified, happy life
possible to most of us without the stimulus of affairs, of power, of
fame? I answer unhesitatingly that such a life is possible. The tendency
of the age is to measure success by publicity, not to think highly of
any person or any work unless it receives “recognition,” to think it
essential to happiness _monstrari digito_, to be in the swim, to be a
personage.
I admit at once the temptation; to such successful persons comes the
consciousness of influence, the feeling of power, the anxious civilities
of the undistinguished, the radiance of self-respect, the atmosphere
of flattering, subtle deference, the seduction of which not even the
most independent and noble characters can escape. Indeed, many an
influential man of simple character and unpretending virtue, who rates
such conveniences of life at their true value, and does not pursue them
as an end, would be disagreeably conscious of the lack of these _petits
soins_ if he adopted an unpopular cause or for any reason forfeited the
influence which begets them.
A friend of mine came to see me the other day fresh from a visit to a
great house. His host was a man of high cabinet rank, the inheritor of
an ample fortune and a historic name, who has been held by his nearest
friends to cling to political life longer than prudence would warrant.
My friend told me that he had been left alone one evening with his host,
who had, half humorously, half seriously, indulged in a lengthy tirade
against the pressure of social duties and unproductive drudgery that his
high position involved. “If they would only let me alone!” he said; “I
think it very hard that in the evening of my days I cannot order my life
to suit my tastes. I have served the public long enough.... I would
read—how I would read—and when I was bored I would sleep in my chair.”
[Sidenote: SUCCESS]
“And yet,” my friend said, commenting on these unguarded statements, “I
believe he is the only person of his intimate circle who does not know
that he would be hopelessly bored—that the things he decries are the very
breath of life to him. There is absolutely no reason why he should not at
once and forever realise his fancied ideal—and if his wife and children
do not urge him to do so, it is only because they know that he would be
absolutely miserable.” And this is true of many lives.
If the “recognition,” of which I have spoken above, were only accorded
to the really eminent, it would be a somewhat different matter; but
nine-tenths of the persons who receive it are nothing more than phantoms,
who have set themselves to pursue the glory, without the services that
ought to earn it. A great many people have a strong taste for power
without work, for dignity without responsibility; and it is quite
possible to attain consideration if you set yourself resolutely to pursue
it.
The temptation comes in a yet more subtle form to men of a really
high-minded type, whose chief preoccupation is earnest work and the
secluded pursuit of some high ideal. Such people, though they do not
wish to fetter themselves with the empty social duties that assail the
eminent, yet are tempted to wish to have the refusal of them, and to be
secretly dissatisfied if they do not receive this testimonial to the
value of their work. The temptation is not so vulgar as it seems. Every
one who is ambitious wishes to be effective. A man does not write books
or paint pictures or make speeches simply to amuse himself, to fill his
time; and they are few who can genuinely write, as the late Mark Pattison
wrote of a period of his life, that his ideal was at one time “defiled
and polluted by literary ambition.”
Nevertheless, if there is to be any real attempt to win the inner peace
of the spirit, such ambition must be not sternly but serenely resisted.
Not until a man can pass by the rewards of fame _oculis irretortis_—“nor
cast one longing, lingering look behind”—is the victory won.
[Sidenote: PURE AMBITION]
It may be urged, in my case, that the obscurity for which I crave was
never likely to be denied me. True; but at the same time ambition in its
pettiest and most childish forms has been and is a real temptation to
me: the ambition to dominate and dazzle my immediate circle, to stimulate
curiosity about myself, to be considered, if not a successful man, at
least a man who might have succeeded if he had cared to try—all the
temptations which are depicted in so masterly and merciless a way by that
acute psychologist Mr. Henry James in the character of Gilbert Osmond in
the _Portrait of a Lady_—to all of these I plead guilty. Had I not been
gifted with sufficient sensitiveness to see how singularly offensive and
pitiful such pretences are in the case of others, I doubt if I should not
have succumbed—if indeed I have not somewhat succumbed—to them.
Indeed, to some morbid natures such pretences are vital—nay, self-respect
would be impossible without them. I know a lady who, like Mrs.
Wittiterly, is really kept alive by the excitement of being an invalid.
If she had not been so ill she would have died years ago. I know a worthy
gentleman who lives in London and spends his time in hurrying from house
to house lamenting how little time he can get to do what he really
enjoys—to read or think. Another has come to my mind who lives in a
charming house in the country, and by dint of inviting a few second-rate
literary and artistic people to his house and entertaining them royally,
believes himself to be at the very centre of literary and artistic life,
and essential to its continuance. These are harmless lives, not unhappy,
not useless; based, it is true, upon a false conception of the relative
importance of their own existence, but then is there one of us—the most
hard-working, influential, useful person in the world—who does not
exaggerate his own importance? Does any one realise how little essential
he is, or how easily his post is filled—indeed, how many people there are
who believe that they could do the same thing better if they only had the
chance.
A life to be happy must be compounded in due degree of activity and
pleasure, using the word in its best sense. There must be sufficient
activity to take off the perilous and acrid humours of the mind which,
left to themselves, poison the sources of life, and enough pleasure to
make the prospect of life palatable.
The first necessity is to get rid, as life goes on, of all conventional
pleasures. By the age of forty a man should know what he enjoys, and
not continue doing things intended to be pleasurable, either because he
deludes himself into thinking that he enjoys them, or because he likes
others to think that he enjoys them. I know now that I do not care for
casual country-house visiting, for dancing, for garden parties, for
cricket matches, and many another form of social distraction, but that
the pleasures that remain and grow are the pleasures derived from books,
from the sights and sounds of nature, from sympathetic conversation,
from music, and from active physical exercise in the open air. It is
my belief that a man is happiest who is so far employed that he has to
scheme to secure a certain share of such pleasures. My own life unhappily
is so ordered that it is the other way—that I have to scheme to secure
sufficient activities to make such pleasure wholesome. But I am stern
with myself. At times when I find the zest of simple home pleasures
deserting me, I have sufficient self-control deliberately to spend a week
in London, which I detest, or to pay a duty-visit where I am so acutely
and sharply bored by a dull society—_castigatio mea matutina est_—that I
return with delicious enthusiasm to my own trivial round.
[Sidenote: OUR OWN IMPORTANCE]
I do not flatter myself that I hold any very important place in the
world’s economy. But I believe that I have humbly contributed somewhat to
the happiness of others, and I find that the reward for thwarted, wasted
ambitions has come in the shape of a daily increasing joy in quiet things
and tender simplicities. I need not reiterate the fact that I draw from
Nature, ever more and more, the most unfailing and the purest joy; and
if I have forfeited some of the deepest and most thrilling emotions of
the human heart, it is but what thousands are compelled to do; and it is
something to find that the heart can be sweet and tranquil without them.
The only worth of these pages must rest in the fact that the life which
I have tried to depict is made up of elements which are within the reach
of all or nearly all human beings. And though I cannot claim to have
invented a religious system, or to have originated any new or startling
theory of existence, yet I have proved by experiment that a life beset
by many disadvantages, and deprived of most of the stimulus that to some
would seem essential, need not drift into being discontented or evil or
cold or hard.
33
_Oct. 22, 1898._
That is, so to speak, the outside of my life, the front that is turned
to the world. May I for a brief moment open the doors that lead to the
secret rooms of the spirit?
The greater part of mankind trouble themselves little enough about the
eternal questions: what we are, and what we shall be hereafter. Life to
the strong, energetic, the full-blooded gives innumerable opportunities
of forgetting. It is easy to swim with the stream, to take no thought of
the hills which feed the quiet source of it, or the sea to which it runs;
for such as these it is enough to live. But all whose minds are restless,
whose imagination is constructive, who have to face some dreary and
aching present, and would so gladly take refuge in the future and nestle
in the arms of faith, if they could but find her—for these the obstinate
question must come. Like the wind of heaven it rises. We may shut it
out, trim the lamp, pile the fire, and lose ourselves in pleasant and
complacent activities; but in the intervals of our work, when we drop
the book or lay down the pen, the gust rises shrill and sharp round the
eaves, the gale buffets in the chimney, and we cannot drown the echo in
our hearts.
This is the question:—
Is our life a mere fortuitous and evanescent thing? Is consciousness a
mere symptom of matter under certain conditions? Do we begin and end? Are
the intense emotions and attachments, the joys and sorrows of life, the
agonies of loss, the hungering love with which we surround the faces,
the voices, the forms of those we love, the chords which vibrate in us
at the thought of vanished days, and places we have loved—the old house,
the family groups assembled, the light upon the quiet fields at evening,
the red sunset behind the elms—all those purest, sweetest, most poignant
memories—are these all unsubstantial phenomena like the rainbow or the
dawn, subjective, transitory, moving as the wayfarer moves?
Who can tell us?
Some would cast themselves upon the Gospel—but to me it seems that Jesus
spoke of these things rarely, dimly, in parables—and that though He
takes for granted the continuity of existence, He deliberately withheld
the knowledge of the conditions under which it continues. He spoke, it is
true, in the story of Dives and Lazarus, of a future state, of the bosom
of Abraham where the spirit rested like a tired child upon his father’s
knee—of the great gulf that could not be crossed except by the voices
and gestures of the spirits—but will any one maintain that He was not
using the forms of current allegory, and that He intended this parable
as an eschatological solution? Again He spoke of the final judgment in a
pastoral image.
[Sidenote: IDENTITY]
Enough, some faithful souls may say, upon which to rest the hope of the
preservation of human identity. Alas! I must confess with a sigh, it is
not enough for me. I see the mass of His teaching directed to life, and
the issues of the moment; I seem to see Him turn His back again and again
on the future, and wave His followers away. Is it conceivable that if He
could have said, in words unmistakable and precise, “You have before you,
when the weary body closes its eyes on the world, an existence in which
perception is as strong or stronger, identity as clearly defined, memory
as real, though as swift as when you lived—and this too unaccompanied
by any of the languors or failures or traitorous inheritance of the
poor corporal frame,”—is it conceivable, I say, that if He could have
said this, He would have held His peace, and spoken only through dark
hints, dim allegories, shadowy imaginings. Could a message of peace more
strong, more vital, more tremendous have been given to the world? To have
satisfied the riddles of the sages, the dream of philosophers, the hopes
of the ardent—to have allayed the fears of the timid the heaviness of the
despairing; to have dried the mourner’s tears—all in a moment. And He did
not!
What then _can_ we believe? I can answer but for myself.
I believe with my whole heart and soul in the indestructibility of life
and spirit. Even _matter_ to my mind seems indestructible—and matter is,
I hold, less real than the motions and activities of the spirit.
It has sometimes seemed to me that matter may afford us the missing
analogy: when the body dies, it sinks softly and resistlessly into the
earth, and is carried on the wings of the wind, in the silent speeding
fountains, to rise again in ceaseless interchange of form.
[Sidenote: INDIVIDUALITY]
Could it be so with life and spirit? As the fountain casts the jet
high into the air over the glimmering basin, and the drops separate
themselves for a prismatic instant—when their separate identity seems
unquestioned—and then rejoin the parent wave, could not life and spirit
slip back as it were into some vast reservoir of life, perhaps to linger
there awhile, to lose by peaceful self-surrender, happy intermingling,
by cool and tranquil fusion the dust, the stain, the ghastly taint of
suffering and sin? I know not, but I think it may be so.
But if I could affirm the other—that the spirit passes onwards through
realms undreamed of, in gentle unstained communion, not only with those
whom one has loved, but with all whom one ever would have loved, lost in
sweet wonder at the infinite tenderness and graciousness of God—would it
not in one single instant give me the peace I cannot find, and make life
into a radiant antechamber leading to a vision of rapturous delight?
34
_Sep. 18, 1900._
How can I write what has befallen me? the double disaster that has cut
like a knife into my life. Was one, I asked myself, the result of the
other, sent to me to show that I ought to have been content with what I
had, that I ought not to have stretched out my hand to the fruit that
hung too high above me. I am too feeble in mind and body to do more
than briefly record the incidents that have struck me down. I feel like
a shipwrecked sailor who, flung on an unhospitable shore, had with
infinite labour and desperate toil dragged a few necessaries out of the
floating fragments of the wreck, and piled them carefully and patiently
on a ledge out of the reach of the tide, only to find after a night of
sudden storm the little store scattered and himself swimming faintly in
a raging sea—that sea which the evening before had sunk into so sweet,
so caressing a repose, and now like a grey monster aroused to sudden
fury, howls and beats for leagues against the stony promontories and the
barren beaches.
[Sidenote: NEW FRIENDS]
I had been in very tranquil spirits and strong health all the summer;
my maladies had ceased to trouble me, and for weeks they were out of my
thoughts. I had found a quiet zest in the little duties that make up my
simple life. I had made, too, a new friend. A pleasant cottage about
half a mile from Golden End had been taken by the widow of a clergyman
with small but sufficient means, who settled there with her daughter,
the latter being about twenty-four. I went somewhat reluctantly with
my mother to call upon them and offer neighbourly assistance. I found
myself at once in the presence of two refined, cultivated, congenial
people. Mrs. Waring, I saw, was not only a well-read woman, interested in
books and art, but she had seen something of society, and had a shrewd
and humorous view of men and things. Miss Waring was like her mother;
but I soon found that to her mother’s kindly and brisk intellect she
added a peculiar and noble insight—that critical power, if I may call
it so, which sees what is beautiful and true in life, and strips it of
adventitious and superficial disguises in the same way that one with a
high appreciation of literature moves instinctively to what is gracious
and lofty, and is never misled by talent or unobservant of genius. The
society of these two became to me in a few weeks a real and precious
possession. I began to see how limited and self-centred my life had begun
to be. They did not, so to speak, provide me with new sensations and new
material so much as put the whole of life in a new light. I found in the
mother a wise and practical counsellor, with a singular grasp of detail,
with whom I could discuss any new book I had read or any article that had
struck me; but with Miss Waring it was different. I can only say that her
wise and simple heart cast a new light upon the most familiar thoughts.
I found myself understood, helped, lifted, in a way that both humiliated
and inspired me. Moreover, I was privileged to be admitted into near
relations with one who seemed to show, without the least consciousness of
it, the best and highest possibilities that lie in human nature. I cannot
guess or define the secret. I only know that it dawned upon me gradually
that here was a human spirit fed like a spring from the purest rains
that fall on some purple mountain-head.
[Sidenote: THE MOMENT]
By what soft and unsuspected degrees my feeling of congenial friendship
grew into a deeper devotion I cannot now trace. It must now in my
miserable loneliness be enough to say that so it was. Only a few days
ago—and yet the day seems already to belong to a remote past, and to be
separated from these last dark hours by a great gulf, misty, not to be
passed,—I realised that a new power had come into my life—the heavenly
power that makes all things new. I had gone down to the cottage in a
hot, breathless sunlight afternoon. I had long passed the formality
of ringing to announce my entrance. There was no one in the little
drawing-room, which was cool and dark, with shuttered windows. I went
out upon the lawn. Miss Waring was sitting in a chair under a beech tree
reading, and at the sight of me she rose, laid down her book, and came
smiling across the grass. There is a subtle, viewless message of the
spirit which flashes between kindred souls, in front of and beyond the
power of look or speech, and at the same moment that I understood I felt
she understood too. I could not then at once put into words my hopes;
but it hardly seemed necessary. We sat together, we spoke a little, but
were mostly silent in some secret interchange of spirit. That afternoon
my heart climbed, as it were, a great height, and saw from a Pisgah top
the familiar land at its feet, all lit with a holy radiance, and then
turning, saw, in golden gleams and purple haze, the margins of an unknown
sea stretching out beyond the sunset to the very limits of the world.
35
_Sep. 19, 1900._
That night, in a kind of rapturous peace, I faced the new hope. Even
then, in that august hour, I reflected whether I could, with my broken
life and faded dreams, link a spirit so fair to mine. I can truthfully
say that I was full to the brim of the intensest gratitude, the tenderest
service; but I thought was it just, was it right, with little or nothing
to offer, to seek to make so large a claim upon so beautiful a soul? I
did not doubt that I could win it, and that love would be lavished in
fullest measure to me. But I strove with all my might to see whether such
a hope was not on my part a piece of supreme and shameful selfishness. I
probed the very depths of my being, and decided that I might dare; that
God had given me this precious, this adorable gift, and that I might
consecrate my life and heart to love and be worthy of it if I could.
So I sank to sleep, and woke to the shock of a rapture such as I did
not believe this world could hold. It was a still warm day of late
summer, but a diviner radiance lay over garden, field, and wood for me.
I determined I would not speak to my mother till after I had received my
answer.
After breakfast I went out to the garden—the flowers seemed to smile and
nod their heads at me, leaning with a kind of tender brilliance to greet
me; in a thick bush I heard the flute-notes of my favourite thrush—the
brisk chirruping of the sparrows came from the ivied gable.
What was it?... what was the strange, rending, numbing shock that ran so
suddenly through me, making me in a moment doubtful, as it seemed, even
of my own identity—again it came—again. I raised my eyes, it seemed as
if I had never seen the garden, the house, the trees before. Then came a
pang of such grim horror that I felt as though stabbed with a sword. I
seemed, if that is possible, almost to smell and taste pain. I staggered
a few steps back to the garden entrance—I remember crying out faintly,
and my voice seemed strange to me—there was a face at the door—and then a
blackness closed round me and I knew no more.
36
_Sep. 20, 1900._
I woke at last, swimming upwards, like a diver out of a deep sea, from
some dark abyss of weakness. I opened my eyes—I saw that I was in a
downstairs room, where it seemed that a bed must have been improvised;
but at first I was too weak even to inquire with myself what had
happened. My mother sate by me, with a look on her face that I had never
seen; but I could not care. I seemed to have passed a ford, and to see
life from the other side; to have shut a door upon it, and to be looking
at it from the dark window. I neither cared nor hoped nor felt. I only
wished to lie undisturbed—not to be spoken to or noticed, only to lie.
I revived a little, and the faint flow of life brought back with it, as
upon a creeping tide, a regret that I had opened my eyes upon the world
again—that was my first thought. I had been so near the dark passage—the
one terrible thing that lies in front of all living things—why had I not
been permitted to cross it once and for all; why was I recalled to hope,
to suffering, to fear? Then, as I grew stronger, came a fuller regret for
the good, peaceful days. I had asked, I thought, so little of life, and
that little had been denied. Then as I grew stronger still, there came
the thought of the great treasure that had been within my grasp, and my
spirit faintly cried out against the fierce injustice of the doom. But I
soon fell into a kind of dimness of thought, from which even now I can
hardly extricate myself—a numbness of heart, an indifference to all but
the fact that from moment to moment I am free from pain.
37
_Sep. 21, 1900._
I am climbing, climbing, hour by hour, slowly and cautiously, out of the
darkness, as a man climbs up some dizzy crag, never turning his head—yet
not back to life! I shall not achieve that.