II

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated

dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing,

feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with

hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a

thing to set children screaming;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his

fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for

so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so

incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely

descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who

should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a

being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with

imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often

touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of

right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle

for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with

cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering

solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find, in

him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the

thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an

ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of

shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in

most men is one of conformity; here and there, in picked natures, it

transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with

independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought:—Not in

man alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly well, and

doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant, the oyster,

and the louse, of whom we know so little:—But in man, at least, it sways

with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come second, even

with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are conquered, pains

supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a glance,

although it were a child’s; and all but the most cowardly stand amid the

risks of war; and the more noble, having strongly conceived an act as due

to their ideal, affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, with their

singular origin and perverted practice, they think they are to be

rewarded in some future life: stranger still, if they are persuaded of

the contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit, will strike them

senseless for eternity. I shall be reminded what a tragedy of

misconception and misconduct man at large presents: of organised

injustice, cowardly violence and treacherous crime; and of the damning

imperfections of the best. They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is

indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right. But where the best

consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable that all should

continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching and

inspiriting, that in a field from which success is banished, our race

should not cease to labour.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle, be a

thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer sight, he

startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look, under

what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of

ignorance, burthened with what erroneous morality; by camp-fires in

Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoulders, the wind plucking his

blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his

grave opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man inured to

hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and

a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he for all that

simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave

to drown, for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent

millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the future,

with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues,

honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted perhaps in vain

by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering with the drunken wife

that ruins him; in India (a woman this time) kneeling with broken cries

and streaming tears, as she drowns her child in the sacred river; in the

brothel, the discard of society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with

affronts, a fool, a thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping

the point of honour and the touch of pity, often repaying the world’s

scorn with service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain

cost, rejecting riches:—everywhere some virtue cherished or affected,

everywhere some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the ensign of

man’s ineffectual goodness:—ah! if I could show you this! if I could show

you these men and women, all the world over, in every stage of history,

under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without

hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost

fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to

some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to

escape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory,

but their doom; they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives

long, the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter.

Of all earth’s meteors, here at least is the most strange and consoling:

that this ennobled lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, this

inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare

delights, and add to his frequent pains, and live for an ideal, however

misconceived. Nor can we stop with man. A new doctrine, received with

screams a little while ago by canting moralists, and still not properly

worked into the body of our thoughts, lights us a step farther into the

heart of this rough but noble universe. For nowadays the pride of man

denies in vain his kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer

like a thing apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another

genus: and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus of an

unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does it stop with the

dog? We look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the swarming

ant: a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy of brutes, that

we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; and here also, in

his ordered politics and rigorous justice, we see confessed the law of

duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant?

Rather this desire of well-doing and this doom of frailty run through all

the grades of life: rather is this earth, from the frosty top of Everest

to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues

and one temple of pious tears and perseverance. The whole creation

groaneth and travaileth together. It is the common and the god-like law

of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field

and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the

dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us the love of

an ideal: strive like us—like us are tempted to grow weary of the

struggle—to do well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment,

visitings of support, returns of courage; and are condemned like us to be

crucified between that double law of the members and the will. Are they

like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of some reward, some sugar with the

drug? do they, too, stand aghast at unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings

of those whom, in our partiality, we take to be just, and the prosperity

of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked? It may be, and yet God

knows what they should look for. Even while they look, even while they

repent, the foot of man treads them by thousands in the dust, the yelping

hounds burst upon their trail, the bullet speeds, the knives are heating

in the den of the vivisectionist; or the dew falls, and the generation of

a day is blotted out. For these are creatures, compared with whom our

weakness is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our brief span eternity.

And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of terror and under the

imminent hand of death, God forbid it should be man the erected, the

reasoner, the wise in his own eyes—God forbid it should be man that

wearies in well-doing, that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the

language of complaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the whole

creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable constancy:

Surely not all in vain.

XII

A CHRISTMAS SERMON

BY the time this paper appears, I shall have been talking for twelve

months; {202} and it is thought I should take my leave in a formal and

seasonable manner. Valedictory eloquence is rare, and death-bed sayings

have not often hit the mark of the occasion. Charles Second, wit and

sceptic, a man whose life had been one long lesson in human incredulity,

an easy-going comrade, a manoeuvring king—remembered and embodied all his

wit and scepticism along with more than his usual good humour in the

famous “I am afraid, gentlemen, I am an unconscionable time a-dying.”

I

An unconscionable time a-dying—there is the picture (“I am afraid,

gentlemen,”) of your life and of mine. The sands run out, and the hours

are “numbered and imputed,” and the days go by; and when the last of

these finds us, we have been a long time dying, and what else? The very

length is something, if we reach that hour of separation undishonoured;

and to have lived at all is doubtless (in the soldierly expression) to

have served. There is a tale in Ticitus of how the veterans mutinied in

the German wilderness; of how they mobbed Germanicus, clamouing go home;

and of how, seizing their general’s hand, these old, war-worn exiles

passed his finger along their toothless gums. _Sunt lacrymæ rerum_: this

was the most eloquent of the songs of Simeon. And when a man has lived

to a fair age, he bears his marks of service. He may have never been

remarked upon the breach at the head of the army; at least he shall have

lost his teeth on the camp bread.

The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of a noble

character. It never seems to them that they have served enough; they

have a fine impatience of their virtues. It were perhaps more modest to

be singly thankful that we are no worse. It is not only our enemies,

those desperate characters—it is we ourselves who know not what we

do,—thence springs the glimmering hope that perhaps we do better than we

think: that to scramble through this random business with hands

reasonably clean to have played the part of a man or woman with some

reasonable fulness, to have often resisted the diabolic, and at the end

to be still resisting it, is for the poor human soldier to have done

right well. To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a

transcendental way of serving for reward; and what we take to be contempt

of self is only greed of hire.

And again if we require so much of ourselves, shall we not require much

of others? If we do not genially judge our own deficiencies, is it not

to be feared we shall be even stern to the trespasses of others? And he

who (looking back upon his own life) can see no more than that he has

been unconscionably long a-dying, will he not be tempted to think his

neighbour unconscionably long of getting hanged? It is probable that

nearly all who think of conduct at all, think of it too much; it is

certain we all think too much of sin. We are not damned for doing wrong,

but for not doing right; Christ would never hear of negative morality;

_thou shalt_ was ever his word, with which he superseded _thou shalt

not_. To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile

the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a

secret element of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we should not dwell

upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell upon it with inverted

pleasure. If we cannot drive it from our minds—one thing of two: either

our creed is in the wrong and we must more indulgently remodel it; or

else, if our morality be in the right, we are criminal lunatics and

should place our persons in restraint. A mark of such unwholesomely

divided minds is the passion for interference with others: the Fox

without the Tail was of this breed, but had (if his biographer is to be

trusted) a certain antique civility now out of date. A man may have a

flaw, a weakness, that unfits him for the duties of life, that spoils his

temper, that threatens his integrity, or that betrays him into cruelty.

It has to be conquered; but it must never he suffered to engross his

thoughts. The true duties lie all upon the farther side, and must be

attended to with a whole mind so soon as this preliminary clearing of the

decks has been effected. In order that he may be kind and honest, it may

be needful he should become a total abstainer; let him become so then,

and the next day let him forget the circumstance. Trying to be kind and

honest will require all his thoughts; a mortified appetite is never a

wise companion; in so far as he has had to mortify an appetite, he will

still be the worse man; and of such an one a great deal of cheerfulness

will be required in judging life, and a great deal of humility in judging

others.

It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life’s endeavour

springs in some degree from dulness. We require higher tasks, because we

do not recognise the height of those we have. Trying to be kind and

honest seems an affair too simple and too inconsequential for gentlemen

of our heroic mould; we had rather set ourselves to something bold,

arduous, and conclusive; we had rather found a schism or suppress a

heresy, cut off a hand or mortify an appetite. But the task before us,

which is to co-endure with our existence, is rather one of microscopic

fineness, and the heroism required is that of patience. There is no

cutting of the Gordian knots of life; each must be smilingly unravelled.

To be honest, to be kind—to earn a little and to spend a little less, to

make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when

that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but

these without capitulation—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep

friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude

and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a

hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful.

There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself

can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended

to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and

study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well. Here is a

pleasant thought for the year’s end or for the end of life. Only

self-deception will be satisfied, and there need be no despair for the

despairer.