I don't know what has happened to your letters. Perhaps you have not
been able to write? I go back to work to-morrow.
UPTON,
May 2, 1904.
MY DEAR HERBERT,--My holidays are over, and I am back at work again. I
have got your delightful letter; it was silly to be anxious. . . .
To-day I was bicycling; I was horribly preoccupied, as, alas, I often
am, with my own plans and thoughts. I was worrying myself about my
work, fretting about the thousand little problems that beset a
schoolmaster, trying to think out a chapter of a book which I am
endeavouring to write, my mind beating and throbbing like a feverish
pulse. I kept telling myself that the copses were beautiful, that the
flowers were enchanting, that the long line of distant hills seen
across the wooded valleys and the purple plain were ravishingly
tranquil and serene; but it was of no use; my mind ran like a
mill-race, a stream of thoughts jostling and hurrying on, in spite of
my efforts to shut the sluice.
Suddenly I turned a corner by a little wood, and found myself looking
over into the garden of a small, picturesque cottage, which has been
smartened up lately, and has become, I suppose, the country retreat of
some well-to-do people. It was a pretty garden; a gentle slope of
grass, borders full of flowers, and an orchard behind, whitening into
bloom, with a little pool in the shady heart of it. On the lawn were
three people, obviously and delightfully idle; an elderly man sate in a
chair, smiling, smoking, reading a paper. The other two, a younger man
and a young woman, were walking side by side, their heads close
together, laughing quietly at some gentle jest. A perambulator stood by
the porch. Both the men looked like prosperous professional people,
clean-shaven, healthy, and contented. I inferred, for no particular
reason, that the young pair were man and wife, lately married, and that
the elder man was the father-in-law. I had this passing glimpse, no
more, of an interior; and then I was riding among the spring woods
again.
Of course it was only an impression, but this happy, sunshiny scene, so
suddenly opened to my gaze, so suddenly closed again, was like a
parable. I felt as if I should have liked to stop, to take off my hat,
and thank my unknown friends for making so simple, pleasant, and sweet
a picture. I dare say they were as preoccupied in professional matters,
as careful and troubled as myself, if I had known more about them. But
in that moment they were finding leisure simply to taste and enjoy the
wholesome savours of life, and were neither looking backward in regret
nor forward in anticipation. I dare say the jokes that amused them were
mild enough, and that I should have found their conversation tedious
and tiresome if I had been made one of the party. But they were
symbolical; they stood for me, and will stand, as a type of what we
ought to aim at more; and that is simply LIVING. It is a lesson which
you yourself are no doubt learning in your fragrant, shady garden. You
have no need to make money, and your only business is to get better.
But for myself, I know that I work and think and hope and fear too
much, and that in my restless pursuit of a hundred aims and ambitions
and dreams and fancies, I am constantly in danger of hardly living at
all, but of simply racing on, like a man intoxicated with affairs,
without leisure for strolling, for sitting, for talking, for watching
the sky and the earth, smelling the scents of flowers, noting the funny
ways of animals, playing with children, eating and drinking. Yet this
is our true heritage, and this is what it means to be a man; and, after
all, one has (for all one knows) but a single life, and that a short
one. It is at such moments as these that I wake as from a dream, and
think how fast my life flows on, and how very little conscious of its
essence I am. My head is full from morning to night of everything
except living. For a busy man this is, of course, to a certain extent
inevitable. But where I am at fault is in not relapsing at intervals
into a wise and patient passivity, and sitting serenely on the shore of
the sea of life, playing with pebbles, seeing the waves fall and the
ships go by, and wondering at the strange things cast up by the waves,
and the sharp briny savours of the air. Why do I not do this? Because,
to continue my confession, it bores me. I must, it seems, be always in
a fuss; be always hauling myself painfully on to some petty ambition or
some shadowy object that I have in view; and the moment I have reached
it, I must fix upon another, and begin the process over again. It is
this lust for doing something tangible, for sitting down quickly and
writing fifty, for having some definite result to show, which is the
ruin of me and many others. After all, when it is done, what worth has
it? I am not a particularly successful man, and I can't delude myself
into thinking that my work has any very supreme value. And meanwhile
all the real experiences of life pass me by. I have never, God forgive
me, had time to be in love! That is a pitiful confession.
Sometimes one comes across a person with none of these uneasy
ambitions, with whom living is a fine art; then one realises what a
much more beautiful creation it is than books and pictures. It is a
kind of sweet and solemn music. Such a man or woman has time to read,
to talk, to write letters, to pay calls, to walk about the farm, to go
and sit with tiresome people, to spend long hours with children, to sit
in the open air, to keep poultry, to talk to servants, to go to church,
to remember what his or her relations are doing, to enjoy garden
parties and balls, to like to see young people enjoying themselves, to
hear confessions, to do other people's business, to be a welcome
presence everywhere, and to leave a fragrant memory, watered with sweet
tears. That is to live. And such lives, one is tempted to think, were
more possible, more numerous, a hundred years ago. But now one expects
too much, and depends too much on exciting pleasures, whether of work
or play. Well, my three persons in a garden must be a lesson to me;
and, whatever may really happen to them, in my mind they shall walk for
ever between the apple-trees and the daffodils, looking lovingly at
each other, while the elder man shall smile as he reads in the
Chronicle of Heaven, which does not grow old.--Ever yours,