supply a commentary. The woman of whom Wordsworth speaks was, when he
first saw her, a "phantom of delight," an embodiment of feminine beauty,
and, as such, possessing a characteristic perhaps superfluous from a
moral point of view. I have known and know women, not exactly beautiful,
before whom I would gladly bow as deeply as I would if they were
beautiful as Helen of Troy. But a poet must be allowed to take pleasure
in beauty, and we may grant to it a certain place that it deserves among
higher qualities. For it does so when the possessor is absolutely--not
unaware of the fact, for that is hardly possible, nor, perhaps,
desirable--but absolutely untouched by any vanity or self-consciousness.
The beauty, one may say, gives, at least, an opportunity for displaying
a quality which otherwise would not have so good an occasion of
manifestation. And, moreover, there is a beauty of the rarest and most
exquisite, which, if not the product, is, or at least seems to be, the
spontaneous accompaniment of nobility of mind and character. Some
persons, by a singular felicity, possess beauty as one of their
essential attributes; it seems to be not an accident or an addition,
but a part of their essence, which must mould every detail, which shines
through body as well as soul, and is but the outward and visible sign of
all that is sweet and elevated. Wordsworth's ideal woman is--
Not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food,
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles:
and yet displays equally--
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill.
We cannot, even in our thoughts, separate the artistic homage which we
pay to the external appearance, and that which we pay to the inner
qualities, of which they are apparently the inevitable and predestined
symbol. We have before us the ideal--the type which reconciles all the
conditions of human life, physical and moral--the "perfect woman," who
is also the fitting vehicle of the angel light.
But it is, of course, upon the qualities symbolised and not upon the
outward symbols that we must insist. I will, therefore, say, that the
inward beauty, whether fully represented or not by the outward form,
implies, in the first place, the absence of all those qualities which
tend to lower and vulgarise life. What we call the worldly view, for
example, of love and marriage, is simply unintelligible to such a
nature. Love means, to it, an absolute self-surrender, and the complete
fusion of its own life with the life of the beloved object. It can only
be granted in return for a reciprocal surrender; and becomes the mutual
passion by which fear and distrust are utterly cast out; and the
intensity proves not liability to weak illusions, but the sure insight
of the lofty instincts which cannot fail to recognise corresponding
instincts in others. To the lower mind, such a character appears to be
too highly strung, too impassioned, romantic, and careless of the solid
advantages which secure at least comfort. To those of more or less
congenial sentiment, it will rather appear to imply a spirit which,
because it breathes a higher element than that at which men habitually
live, perceives also more distinctly what are the truest and deepest
sources of all that deserves to be called real happiness. To live in an
atmosphere of the strongest and most unqualified affection, to have the
very substance of life woven out of the unreserved love of a worthy
object, is its ideal; and that ideal represents, I am convinced, the
highest and purest happiness that can be enjoyed in this world.
Suppose, now, that one so endowed is struck by one of those terrible
blows which shiver the very foundations of life; which make the outside
world a mere discordant nightmare, and seem to leave for the only
reality a perpetual and gnawing pain, which lulls for an instant only to
be revived by every contact with facts. Sorrow becomes the element in
which one lives and moves. Consolation, according to the familiar
phrase, is idle; for the vulgar notion of consoling is that which Sir
Walter Scott attributes to one of his characters: it is to try to prove
that the very thing for which we offer consolation has not happened--in
other words, to undertake an enterprise which is obviously hopeless and
illusory. Yet the greatest test of true nobility of character is its
power of turning even the bitterest grief to account. The lofty and
simple nature sorrows; it does not attempt to shut its eyes to the full
extent of the calamity, nor seek to distract itself by a forgetfulness
which might obscure its most sacred visions of the past; nor, on the
other hand, to make a parade of its sensibility, or try to foster or
stimulate enervating emotions. It knows instinctively that grief,
terrible as it is, is yet, in another sense, an invaluable possession.
The sufferer who has eaten his bread with herbs learns, as the poet puts
it, to know the heavenly powers. For he or she acquires a deeper and
keener sympathy with all who are desolate and afflicted; and the natural
affections become blended, if with a certain melancholy, yet with that
quick and delicate perception of the suffering of others which gives the
only consolation worthy of the name--the sense of something soothing and
softening and inspiring in the midst of the bitterest agony. Grief, so
taken, may be stunning and deadening for the time; it may make life a
heavy burden, from which hope and eager interest have disappeared:
"weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable"; but by slow degrees it undergoes
a transmutation into more steady and profound love of whatsoever may
still be left. The broken and mangled fibres imperceptibly find new
attachments; and the only solution of the terrible dilemma is reached
when time, which heals the actual laceration, enables the sufferer to
feel that the new ties do not imply infidelity to the objects still
beloved, but are a continuous development of the indelible emotions, and
that the later activities are but a carrying on of the old duties, made
more sacred and solemn by the old grief and its associations.
A lofty nature which has profited by passing through the furnace
acquires claims not only upon our love but upon our reverence. It
becomes perhaps within the little circle with which it is familiar the
obvious and immediate resort whenever some blow of sorrow or sickness
has fallen upon one of its fellows. The figure which I attempt truly to
describe is happily not unfamiliar. We have all, I hope, known some one
who is instinctively called to mind whenever there is need of the loving
kindness which seems so obvious and spontaneous that it does not even
occur to the bestower to connect the conduct with self-sacrifice. Such
persons appear to be formed by nature for ministering angels, and move
among us unconscious of their claims to our devotion, and bringing light
into darkness by their simple presence with as little thought that they
deserve our gratitude as that they ought to emerge from obscurity.
Happiness, peaceful and contented at least, if not the old bright and
confident happiness, may come in time; and new spheres be bound together
by the attractive force of a character which, if it is not more
intrinsically lovable, has gained a more pathetic charm from its
experience. The desire to relieve suffering has become a settled
instinct; and, even when there is no special appeal to it, is
incessantly overflowing in those "little, nameless, unremembered acts of
kindness and of love" which, according to Wordsworth again, are the
"best portion of a good man's life". Whether that be quite true I know
not; but in so far as such acts seem to testify most unequivocally to
the constant flow of a current of sympathetic tenderness, always ready
to seize upon every occasion of giving happiness, on a child's birthday
as on the parent's deathbed, they perhaps speak to us most convincingly
of an all-pervading sweetness of character. An assiduous and watchful
desire to show kindness, which makes a perpetual succession of such
little attentions a part of the practical religion of the doer, may
generate a corresponding love even more forcibly than the sacrifices
made in obedience to a more conspicuous appeal for help.
The value of such a life as I have tried imperfectly to indicate is not
to be estimated by the number of good actions performed, or by any
definite list of the particular consequences achieved. It may be hard to
say how many pangs have been soothed, how much happiness has been added
in special cases, by one who goes through life absorbed in such
activities. But above and beyond all the separate instances, such a
person,--the object only to a few, perhaps, of love and reverence, but
to those few the object of those feelings in the most unreserved and
unequivocal form,--is something far more than a source of any number of
particular benefits. To reckon up and estimate the value of such
benefits is a conceivable undertaking; but we cannot attempt to
calculate the value of a spiritual force which has moulded our lives,
which has helped by a simple consciousness of its existence to make us
gentler, nobler, and purer in our thoughts of the world; which has
constantly set before us a loftier ideal than we could frame for
ourselves; which has bestowed upon us an ever-present criterion of the
goodness or badness of our own motives by our perception of the light in
which they appear to a simple and elevated character; which has made
every cowardly and worldly thought shrink away abashed in the presence
of noble instincts; which has given us a sympathy so close and constant
that, as with the light of the sun, we are apt to be unconscious of its
essential importance to us until some accident makes us realise the
effect of its eclipse; and which, therefore, has in some sense become a
part of ourselves, a restraining and elevating and softening impulse, to
which we cling as to the worthiest and most indispensable of our
possessions.
I am not speaking from imagination. I am trying to utter convictions
springing from my personal experience, and which I feel--most
painfully--that I cannot adequately express. I could not say more, even
if by saying more I could express myself adequately, without a sense of
a kind of profanity for uttering what should be kept for a few. But
though I speak for myself, I hope and I entirely believe that I am
therefore speaking for many others also. There are few who have the eyes
to see who have not recognised some such light shining upon their
lives, and as one main source of what they have done or said if least
unworthy. I fancy that the thought which naturally occurs to us when we
reflect upon such an influence will be: was I, could I, be worthy of it?
what am I that such goodness should have come to me? or, what, if
anything, have I done to transmit to others the blessings conferred upon
me? Such questions have various aspects, and I do not quite see how they
could be reduced to a form admitting of a bare logical answer. It now
seems to me almost unbecoming to dwell upon the comparison which I
contemplated at starting. I imagined a man who has made some such
impression upon the world as is recognised by public reputation, to
compare his own achievement with such achievements as these, which are
absolutely private, and neither seek nor desire any public reward. In
truth, the two things are, perhaps, strictly incommensurable. They must
be measured by different standards, and are of importance in different
spheres. And yet I must try to say this much. The achievements to which
I have referred as in their nature public and recognisable, should
certainly be considered with gratitude. Yet, when we attempt to estimate
their worth we are sensible of terrible drawbacks. I have passed, let us
say, a measure admirably useful, or written a book which has made a
mark. Certainly I have done a good action. But what if I had not done
it? Were there not hundreds of people who would have been only too glad
to take my place? I have been successful because I happen to have been
in the front rank, which was impelled by thousands of eager supporters.
I have said just a little better than my rivals what they were all
striving to say; and my highest reward will be that my name will be
attached in my own generation, and possibly even in the next, to some
particular opinion which yet would have come to the birth without me. I
have made a certain commotion on the surface for a moment or two, but
the ripple will die away in a few years; and, important as I may seem to
myself, I have only to look back for a generation to recognise the plain
fact that there have not been at any period more than one or two
conspicuous workers the products of whose activity can be distinctly
recognised at the present day. Even in regard to them, it is often
doubtful whether they did more harm or good; whether they did not direct
human energy along the wrong paths, and do as much in giving currency to
fallacies as in extending permanent truths.
Now, after making such deductions, which to me, at least, seem to be
essentially necessary, we can, I think, do justice to the truth which
is contained in Browning's poem. You are not, he seems to say, to
measure the worth of life by the amount of work done in it, by the
tangible and obvious results which can be tested by the world's coarse
finger and thumb. Rather, he suggests, the value depends upon the
excellence of the soul which is fashioned into "heaven's consummate cup"
by the stress of the potter's wheel; by the joys and sorrows, the trials
and triumphs, which have affected it in its passage through life. I
should prefer to say that the kind of dilemma so suggested is not really
to the purpose. The rabbi may seem to speak, as I said, with a little
too much complacency, if he be interpreted as sharing the feeling which
is often, however unjustly, attributed to Goethe--that his supreme end
was the cultivation of his own nature, and that he regarded himself as a
work of art, to be elaborated for its own sake, and enriched by
experience even at the cost of others. But in a better interpretation
this does not apply: for the very process by which the noble nature is
developed and cultivated, implies the closest and most active sympathy
with suffering, and an invariable reference to the highest aims of life.
It becomes perfect, that is, by constantly rendering invaluable services
to others; and there is, therefore, no meaning in drawing a distinction
between the services and the influence upon the soul itself. They are
parts of the same indivisible process. What is true and noble, as I
think, in the rabbi's doctrine, is that which I have already tried to
indicate: namely, that the worth of such a life is not exhausted by a
catalogue of the good deeds done, but that, beyond and above all them,
remains the inestimable value within its own circle of the very
existence of a natural symbol of the good and holy--by the "holy" I
understand that which is not only moral, but beautiful by reason of its
morality--and the incalculable benefits to it of the pure fountain of
all good influences which descend upon all within its reach. The
stimulus which is given to the beholders of such a life--by the clear
perception that morality does not mean a string of judicious
commonplaces, but can be embodied as the spring of a harmonious life,
and reveal itself as a concrete flesh-and-blood human being--is
something which transcends in value all the particular results which we
can tabulate and reckon up. We must think of it, not as the cause of so
many external benefits, but as the manifestation of a spiritual force
which modifies and raises the characters of all its surroundings. If the
sphere within which it distinctly operates is far narrower than that of
political or literary achievement, it is also incomparably purer, and
works without a single drawback. Every religion has its saints, and
honours them in various ways, not always altogether edifying. But that
man is unfortunate who has not a saint of his own--some one in whose
presence, or in the very thought of whom, he does not recognise a
superior, before whom it becomes him to bow with reverence and
gratitude, and who has purified the atmosphere and strengthened the
affections in a little circle from which the influence may be
transmitted to others. The saint will be forgotten all too soon--long
before less valuable, but accidentally more conspicuous, services have
passed out of mind--but the moral elevation, even of a small circle, is
a benefit which may be propagated indefinitely.
If we cannot hope to preserve the name, we can try to carry on the good
work; to maintain the ties which have been formed and propagate the
goodwill through widening circles. That, I think, is what every one
feels under the stress of the most terrible trials of life. We are
shocked by the sense of the inevitable oblivion that will hide all that
we loved so well. There is, according to my experience, only one thought
which is inspiring, and--if not in the vulgar sense consoling, for it
admits the existence of an unspeakable calamity--points, at least, to
the direction in which we may gradually achieve something like peace and
hopefulness without the slightest disloyalty to the objects of our
love. It is the thought which I can only express by saying that we may
learn to feel as if those who had left us had yet become part of
ourselves; that we have become so permeated by their influence, that we
can still think of their approval and sympathy as a stimulating and
elevating power, and be conscious that we are more or less carrying on
their work, in their spirit. We find, as Lowell says in his noble ode--
We find in our dull road their shining track;
In every nobler mood
We feel the orient of their spirit glow,
Part of our life's unalterable good,
Of all our saintlier aspiration;
They come transfigured back,
Secure from change in their high-hearted ways,
Beautiful evermore, and with the rays
Of morn on their white shields of expectation.
Alas, he adds, even the best deeds will be hidden before long by "the
thoughtless drift of the deciduous years". Yes; they will be forgotten
before long, as we too shall be forgotten--the incalculable majority
within a generation or two. The thought may be painful, but the
reasonable conclusion is, I think, not that we should fret over the
inevitable; rather that we should purify our minds from this as from
other illusions, and feel ashamed of the selfish desire that our own
names should be preserved when we know that so many who were far better
and nobler than ourselves will inevitably be forgotten, and were better
and nobler without the stimulus of any such paltry desire. Gratitude to
the obscure is, in this sense, I take it, a duty, which we cannot
practise without a proportional moral benefit. It enables us to rise
above the constant temptation to seek for notoriety at any price, and to
make our ultimate aim the achievement of good work, not the chorus of
popular applause which may be aroused. Thoroughly to conquer that
temptation is, I take it, one of the objects which every man should set
before himself. And nothing, I think, helps one more than a vivid and
enduring consciousness of the enormous debt which we owe to men and
women who lived in obscurity, who never had a thought of emerging out of
obscurity, and whose ennobling influence has yet become a part of every
higher principle of action in ourselves. I may or I may not have formed
too low an estimate of the services of the few heroes who stand
conspicuously above the ordinary level; but I am certain that nothing
that I can say would exaggerate the importance of many who have no
claims to such a position. To cherish and preserve that influence by
every faculty we possess seems to me to be our plainest duty; and we may
comfort ourselves, if comfort be needed, by the reflection that, though
the memory may be transitory, the good done by a noble life and
character may last far beyond any horizon which can be realised by our
imaginations.
THE END.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] See the "Wealth of Nature," in _Essays by a Barrister_ [Sir
James Fitzjames Stephen].
ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS.
End of Project Gutenberg's Social Rights And Duties, by Leslie Stephen