place of life. And if aught be lacking, it is not the chance of living
in heaven, rather is it watchfulness and meditation, also perhaps a
little ecstasy of soul. Though you have but a little room, do you fancy
that God is not there, too, and that it is impossible to live therein
a life that shall be somewhat lofty? If you complain of being alone,
of the absence of events, of loving no one and being unloved, do you
think that the words are true? Do you imagine that one can possibly
be alone, that love can be a thing one knows, a thing one sees; that
events can be weighed like the gold and silver of ransom? Cannot a
living thought—proud or humble, it matters not; so it come but from
your soul, it is great for you—cannot a lofty desire, or simply a
moment of solemn watchfulness to life, enter a little room? And if you
love not, or are unloved, and can yet see with some depth of insight
that thousands of things are beautiful, that the soul is great and
life almost unspeakably earnest, is that not as beautiful as though
you loved or were loved? And if the sky itself is hidden from you,
‘does not the great starry sky,’ asks the poet, ‘spread over our soul,
in spite of all, under guise of death?’ ... All that happens to us is
divinely great, and we are always in the centre of a great world. But
we must accustom ourselves to live like an angel who has just sprung
to life, like a woman who loves, or a man on the point of death. If
you knew that you were going to die to-night, or merely that you
would have to go away and never return, would you, looking upon men
and things for the last time, see them in the same light that you have
hitherto seen them? Would you not love as you never yet have loved?
Is it the virtue or evil of the appearances around you that would be
magnified? Would it be given you to behold the beauty or the ugliness
of the soul? Would not everything, down to actual evil and suffering,
be transformed into love, overflowing with gentlest tears? Does not,
to quote the sage, each opportunity for pardon rob departure or death
of something of its bitterness? And yet, in the radiance or sorrow or
death, is it towards truth or error that one has taken the last steps
one is allowed to take?
Is it the living or the dying who can see and are in the right? Ah!
thrice happy they who have thought, spoken, and acted so as to
receive the approval of those who are about to die, or to whom a
great sorrow has given clearer insight! The sage, to whom none would
hearken in life, can meet with no sweeter reward. If you have lived in
obscure beauty, you have no cause for disquiet. At the end there must
always sound within the heart of man an hour of supreme justice; and
misfortune opens eyes that were never open before. Who knows whether at
this very moment your shadow be not passing over the soul of a dying
man and be not recognised by him as the shadow of one who already knew
the truth? May it not be at the bedside of the last agony that is woven
the veritable and most precious crown of sage and hero, and of all who
have known how to live earnestly amid the sorrows, lofty, pure, and
discreet, of life according to the soul?
‘Death,’ says Lavater, ‘does not only beautify our inanimate form; nay,
the mere thought of death gives a more beautiful form to life itself.’
And even so does every thought, that is infinite as death, beautify our
life. But we must not deceive ourselves. To every man there come noble
thoughts, that pass across his heart like great white birds. Alas! they
do not count; they are strangers whom we are surprised to see, whom we
dismiss with importunate gesture. Their time is too short to touch our
life. Our soul will not become earnest and deep-searching, as is the
soul of the angels, for that we have, for one fleeting instant, beheld
the universe in the shadow of death or eternity, in the radiance of
joy or the flames of beauty and love. We have all known moments such
as these, moments that have but left worthless ashes behind. These
things must be habitual with us; it is of no avail that they should
come by chance. We must learn to live in a beauty, an earnestness, that
shall have become part of ourselves. In life, there is no creature so
degraded but knows full well which is the noble and beautiful thing
that he should do; but this noble and beautiful thing is not strong
enough within him. It is this invisible and abstract strength that it
must be our endeavour to increase, first of all. And this strength
increases only in those who have acquired the habit of resting, more
frequently than others, upon the summits where life absorbs the soul,
upon the heights whence we see that every act and every thought are
infallibly bound up with something great and immortal. Look upon
men and things with the inner eye, with its form and desire, never
forgetting that the shadow they throw as they pass by, upon hillock or
wall, is but the fleeting image of a mightier shadow, which, like the
wing of an imperishable swan, floats over every soul that draws near
to their soul. Do not believe that thoughts such as these can be mere
ornaments, and without influence upon the lives of those who admit
them. It is far more important that one’s life should be perceived than
that it should be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived,
than it transforms itself of its own accord. These thoughts of which I
speak make up the secret treasure of heroism; and, on the day that life
compels us to disclose this treasure, we are startled to find therein
no forces other than those by which we are impelled towards perfect
beauty. Then it is no longer necessary that a great king should die for
us to remember that ‘the world does not end at the house-doors,’ and
not an evening passes but the smallest thing suffices to ennoble the
soul.
Yet it is not by telling yourself that God is great and that you move
in His radiance, that you will be able to live in the beauty and
fertile depths where the heroes dwelt. You may perhaps remind yourself,
day and night, that the hands of all the invisible powers are waving
over your head like a tent with countless folds, and yet shall the
least gesture of these hands be imperceptible to you. It behoves you
to be keenly vigilant; and better had you watch in the market-place
than slumber in the temple. Beauty and grandeur are everywhere; for it
needs but an unexpected incident to reveal them to us. This is known to
nearly all men; but know it though they may, it is only when fortune or
death lashes them that they grope around the wall of life in search of
the crevices through which God may be seen. They know full well that
there are eternal crevices even in the humble walls of a hovel, and
that the smallest window cannot take away a line or a star from the
immensity of heavenly space. But it is not enough to possess a truth;
it is essential that the truth should possess us.
And yet are we in a world where the smallest events assume,
spontaneously, a beauty that ever becomes purer and loftier. There is
nothing that coalesces more readily than earth and sky; if your eyes
have rested upon the stars, before enfolding in your arms the woman you
love, your embrace will not be the same as though you had merely looked
at the walls of your room. Be sure that the day you lingered to follow
a ray of light through a crevice in the door of life, you did something
as great as though you had bandaged the wounds of your enemy, for at
that moment did you no longer have any enemies.
Our lives must be spent seeking our God, for God hides; but His
artifices, once they be known, seem so simple and smiling! From that
moment, the merest nothing reveals His presence, and the greatness of
our life depends on so little! Even thus may the verse of a poet, in
the midst of the humble incidents of ordinary days, suddenly reveal to
us something that is stupendous. No solemn word has been pronounced,
and we feel that nothing has been called forth; and yet, why has an
ineffable face beckoned to us from behind an old man’s tears, why does
a vast night, starred with angels, extend over the smile of a child,
and why, around a yes or no, murmured by a soul that sings and busies
itself with other matters, do we suddenly hold our breath for an
instant and say to ourselves, ‘Here is the house of God, and this one
of the approaches to heaven’?
It is because these poets have been more heedful than we to the
‘never-ending shadow.’ ... That is the essence of supreme poetry, that,
and that alone, and its sole aim is to keep open ‘the great road that
leads from the seen to the unseen.’ But that is life’s supreme aim,
too, and it is easier far to attain in life than in the noblest of
poems, for these have had to abandon the two great wings of silence.
Not a single day is trivial. It is essential that this idea should sink
into our life and take root therein. There is no question of being sad.
Small joys, faint smiles, and great tears, all these fill up the same
nook in time and space. You can play in life as innocently ‘as a child
about a death-bed,’ and it is not the tears that are indispensable.
Smiles as well as tears open the gates of the other world. Go or come,
you will find all you need in the darkness, but never forget that you
are close to the gate.
* * * * *
After this lengthy digression, I return to my starting-point, which was
that ‘it is well that men should be reminded that the very humblest of
them has the power to fashion, after a divine model that he chooses
not, a great moral personality, composed in equal parts of himself
and the ideal.’ It is only in the depths of life that this ‘great
moral personality’ can be carved out; and only by means of incessant
‘revelations of the divine’ can we add to the stores of the ideal we
require. To every man is it given to attain in spirit to the heights
of virtuous life, and to know at all times what his conduct should be,
would he act like a hero or a saint. But more than this is needed.
It is essential that the spiritual atmosphere about us should be
transformed to such a degree that it ends by resembling the atmosphere
of Swedenborg’s beautiful countries of the age of gold, wherein the air
permitted not a falsehood to leave the lips. An instant comes then,
when the smallest ill that we fain would commit falls at our feet like
a leaden ball upon a disc of bronze; when everything changes, though we
know it not, into beauty, love, or truth. But this atmosphere enwraps
those only who have been heedful to ventilate their life sufficiently
by at times flinging open the gates of the other world. It is when we
are near to those gates that we see; it is when we are near to those
gates that we love. For to love one’s neighbour does not mean only
to give oneself to him, to serve, help, and sustain others. We may
possibly be neither good, nor noble, nor beautiful, even in the midst
of the greatest sacrifice; and the sister of charity who dies by the
bedside of a typhoid patient may perchance have a mean, rancorous,
miserable soul. To love one’s neighbour in the immovable depths means
to love in others that which is eternal; for one’s neighbour, in the
truest sense of the term, is that which approaches the nearest to God;
in other words, all that is best and purest in man; and it is only by
ever lingering near the gates I spoke of, that you can discover the
divine in the soul. Then will you be able to say with the great Jean
Paul: ‘When I desire to love most tenderly one who is dear to me, and
wish to forgive him everything, I have but to look at him for a few
moments in silence.’ To learn to love, one must first learn to see. ‘I
lived for twenty years by my sister’s side,’ said a friend to me, one
day, ‘and _I saw her_ for the first time at the moment of our mother’s
death.’ Here, too, it had been necessary that death should violently
fling open an eternal gate, so that two souls might behold each other
in a ray of the primeval light. Is there one amongst us who has not
near to him sisters he has never seen?
Happily, even in those whose vision is most limited, there is always
something that acts in silence as though they had seen. It is possible,
perhaps, that to be good is only to be in a little light what all are
in darkness. Therefore, doubtless, is it well that we should endeavour
to raise our life, and should strive towards summits where ill-doing
becomes impossible. And therefore, too, is it well to accustom the eye
to behold events and men in a divine atmosphere. But even that is not
indispensable; and how small must the difference seem to the eyes of
a God! We are in a world where truth reigns at the bottom of things,
and where it is not truth but falsehood that needs to be explained. If
the happiness of your brother sadden you, do not despise yourself; you
will not have to travel far along the road before you will come across
something in yourself that will not be saddened. And even though you do
not travel the road, it matters little: something there was that was
not sad....
Those who think of nothing have the same truth as those who think
of God; the truth is a little further from the threshold, that is
all. ‘Even in the life that is most ordinary,’ says Renan, ‘the part
that is done for God is enormous. The lowest of men would rather be
just than unjust: we all worship, we all pray, numbers of times every
day, without knowing it.’ And we are surprised when chance suddenly
reveals to us the importance of this divine part. There are about us
thousands and thousands of poor creatures who have nothing of beauty
in their lives: they come, they go, in obscurity, and we believe that
all is dead within them; and no one pays any heed. And then one day a
simple word, an unexpected silence, a little tear that springs from
the source of beauty itself, tell us that they have found the means of
raising aloft, in the shadow of their soul, an ideal a thousand times
more beautiful than the most beautiful things their ears have ever
heard, or their eyes ever seen. Oh, noble and pallid ideals of silence
and shadow! It is you, above all, who call forth the smile of the
angels, it is you, above all, who soar direct to God! In what myriads
of hovels, in what dens of misery, in what prisons, perhaps, are you
not being cherished at this moment, cherished with the purest blood and
tears of an unhappy soul that has never smiled; even as the bees, at
the time when all the flowers are dead about them, still offer to her
who is to be their queen a honey a thousand times more precious than
the honey they give to their little sisters of daily life.... Which of
us has not met, more than once, along the paths of life, a forsaken
soul that has yet not lost the courage to cherish, in the darkness, a
thought diviner and purer than all those that so many others had the
power to choose in the light? Here, too, it is simplicity that is God’s
favourite slave; and it is enough, perhaps, that a few sages should
know what has to be done, for the rest of us to act as though we knew
too....
THE INNER BEAUTY
THE INNER BEAUTY
NOTHING in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor
is there anything to which beauty clings so readily. There is nothing
in the world capable of such spontaneous up-lifting, of such speedy
ennoblement; nothing that offers more scrupulous obedience to the pure
and noble commands it receives. There is nothing in the world that
yields deeper submission to the empire of a thought that is loftier
than other thoughts. And on this earth of ours there are but few souls
that can withstand the dominion of the soul that has suffered itself to
become beautiful.
In all truth might it be said that beauty is the unique aliment of our
soul, for in all places does it search for beauty, and it perishes not
of hunger even in the most degraded of lives. For indeed nothing of
beauty can pass by and be altogether unperceived. Perhaps does it never
pass by save only in our unconsciousness, but its action is no less
puissant in gloom of night than by light of day; the joy it procures
may be less tangible, but other difference there is none. Look at the
most ordinary of men, at a time when a little beauty has contrived to
steal into their darkness. They have come together, it matters not
where, and for no special reason; but no sooner are they assembled than
their very first thought would seem to be to close the great doors
of life. Yet has each one of them, when alone, more than once lived
in accord with his soul. He has loved perhaps, of a surety he has
suffered. Inevitably must he, too, have heard the ‘sounds that come
from the distant country of Splendour and Terror’; and many an evening
has he bowed down in silence before laws that are deeper than the sea.
And yet when these men are assembled it is with the basest of things
that they love to debauch themselves. They have a strange indescribable
fear of beauty, and as their number increases so does this fear become
greater, resembling indeed their dread of silence or of a verity that
is too pure. And so true is this that, were one of them to have done
something heroic in the course of the day, he would ascribe wretched
motives to his conduct, thereby endeavouring to find excuses for it,
and these motives would lie readily to his hand in that lower region
where he and his fellows were assembled. And yet listen: a proud and
lofty word has been spoken, a word that has in a measure undammed the
springs of life. For one instant has a soul dared to reveal itself,
even such as it is in love and sorrow, such as it is in face of death
and in the solitude that dwells around the stars of night. Disquiet
prevails, on some faces there is astonishment, others smile. But have
you never felt at moments such as those how unanimous is the fervour
wherewith every soul admires, and how unspeakably even the very
feeblest, from the remotest depths of its dungeon, approves the word it
has recognised as akin to itself? For they have all suddenly sprung to
life again in the primitive and normal atmosphere that is their own;
and could you but hearken with angels’ ears, I doubt not but you would
hear mightiest applause in that kingdom of amazing radiance wherein
the souls do dwell. Do you not think that even the most timid of them
would take courage unto themselves were but similar words to be spoken
every evening? Do you not think that men would live purer lives? And
yet though the word come not again, still will something momentous have
happened, that must leave still more momentous trace behind. Every
evening will its sisters recognise the soul that pronounced the word,
and henceforth, be the conversation never so trivial, its mere presence
will, I know not how, add thereto something of majesty. Whatever else
betide, there has been a change that we cannot determine. No longer
will such absolute power be vested in the baser side of things, and
henceforth, even the most terror stricken of souls will know that there
is somewhere a place of refuge....
Certain it is that the natural and primitive relationship of soul to
soul is a relationship of beauty. For beauty is the only language of
our soul; none other is known to it. It has no other life, it can
produce nothing else, in nothing else can it take interest. And
therefore it is that the most oppressed, nay, the most degraded of
souls—if it may truly be said that a soul can be degraded—immediately
hail with acclamation every thought, every word or deed, that is
great and beautiful. Beauty is the only element wherewith the soul
is organically connected, and it has no other standard of judgment.
This is brought home to us at every moment of our life, and is no less
evident to the man by whom beauty may more than once have been denied
than to him who is ever seeking it in his heart. Should a day come when
you stand in profoundest need of another’s sympathy, would you go to
him who was wont to greet the passage of beauty with a sneering smile?
Would you go to him whose shake of the head had sullied a generous
action or a mere impulse that was pure? Even though perhaps you had
been of those who commended him, you would none the less, when it was
truth that knocked at your door, turn to the man who had known how to
prostrate himself and love. In its very depths had your soul passed its
judgment, and it is this silent and unerring judgment that will rise to
the surface, after thirty years perhaps, and send you towards a sister
who shall be more truly you than you are yourself, for that she has
been nearer to beauty....
There needs but so little to encourage beauty in our soul; so little
to awaken the slumbering angels; or perhaps is there no need of
awakening—it is enough that we lull them not to sleep. It requires
more effort to fall, perhaps, than to rise. Can we, without putting
constraint upon ourselves, confine our thoughts to everyday things at
times when the sea stretches before us, and we are face to face with
the night? And what soul is there but knows that it is ever confronting
the sea, ever in presence of an eternal night? Did we but dread beauty
less it would come about that nought else in life would be visible; for
in reality it is beauty that underlies everything, it is beauty alone
that exists. There is no soul but is conscious of this, none that is
not in readiness; but where are those that hide not their beauty? And
yet must one of them ‘begin.’ Why not dare to be the one to ‘begin’?
The others are all watching eagerly around us like little children in
front of a marvellous palace. They press upon the threshold, whispering
to each other and peering through every crevice, but there is not one
who dares put his shoulder to the door. They are all waiting for some
grown-up person to come and fling it open. But hardly ever does such a
one pass by.