Still less can it be denied that the Church retains in a high degree its educational influence. For a long period national education was almost wholly in its hands, and, since all disqualifications and most privileges have been abolished, it still exercises a part in English education which excites the alarm of some and the admiration of others. It has thrown itself heartily into the new political conditions, and the vast number of voluntary schools established under clerical influence, and the immense sums that are annually raised for clerical purposes, show beyond all doubt the amount of support and enthusiasm behind it. In every branch of higher education its clergy are conspicuous, and their influence in training the nation is not confined to the pulpit, the university, or the school. No candid observer of English life will doubt the immense effect of the parochial system in sustaining the moral level both of principle and practice, and the multitude, activity, and value of the philanthropic and moralising agencies which are wholly or largely due to the Anglican Church.

Nor can it be reasonably doubted that the Church has been very efficacious in promoting that spiritual life which, whatever opinion men may form of its origin and meaning, is at least one of the great realities of human nature. The power of a religion is not to be solely or mainly judged by its corporate action; by the institutions it creates; by the part which it plays in the government of the world. It is to be found much more in its action on the individual soul, and especially in those times and circumstances when man is most isolated from society. It is in furnishing the ideals and motives of individual life; in guiding and purifying the emotions; in promoting habits of thought and feeling that rise above the things of earth; in the comfort it can give in age, sorrow, disappointment and bereavement; in the seasons of sickness, weakness, declining faculties, and approaching death, that its power is most felt. No one creed or Church has the monopoly of this power, though each has often tried to identify it with something peculiar to itself. It maybe found in the Catholic and in the Quaker, in the High Anglican who attributes it to his sacramental system, and in the Evangelical in whose eyes that system holds only a very subordinate place. All that need here be said is that no one who studies the devotional literature of the English Church, or who has watched the lives of its more devout members, will doubt that this life can largely exist and flourish within its pale.

The attitude which men who have been born within that Church, but who have come to dissent from large portions of its theology, should bear to this great instrument of good, is certainly not less perplexing than the questions we have been considering in the preceding chapters. The most difficult position is, of course, that of those who are its actual ministers and who have subscribed its formularies. Each man so situated must judge in the light of his own conscience. There is a great difference between the case of men who accept such a position in the Church though they differ fundamentally from its tenets, and the case of men who, having engaged in its service, find their old convictions modified or shaken, perhaps very gradually, by the advance of science or by more matured thought and study. The stringency of the old form of subscription has been much mitigated by an Act of 1865 which substituted a general declaration that the subscriber believed in the doctrine of the Church as a whole, for a declaration that he believed 'all and everything' in the Articles and the Prayer-book. The Church of England does not profess to be an infallible Church; it does profess to be a National Church representing and including great bodies of more or less divergent opinion, and the whole tendency of legal decisions since the Gorham case has been to enlarge the circle of permissible opinion. The possibility of the National Church remaining in touch with the more instructed and intellectual portions of the community depends mainly on the latitude of opinion that is accorded to its clergy, and on their power of welcoming and adopting new knowledge, and it may reasonably be maintained that few greater calamities can befall a nation than the severance of its higher intelligence from religious influences.

It should be remembered, too, that on the latitudinarian side the changes that take place in the teaching of the Church consist much less in the open repudiation of old doctrines than in their silent evanescence. They drop out of the exhortations of the pulpit. The relative importance of different portions of the religious teaching is changed. Dogma sinks into the background. Narratives which are no longer seriously believed become texts for moral disquisitions. The introspective habits and the stress laid on purely ecclesiastical duties which once preponderated disappear. The teaching of the pulpit tends rather to the formation of active, useful and unselfish lives; to a clearer insight into the great masses of remediable suffering and need that still exist in the world; to the duty of carrying into all the walks of secular life a nobler and more unselfish spirit; to a habit of judging men and Churches mainly by their fruits and very little by their beliefs. The disintegration or decadence of old religious beliefs which had long been closely associated with moral teaching always brings with it grave moral dangers, but those dangers are greatly diminished when the change of belief is effected by a gradual transition, without any violent convulsion or disruption severing men from their old religious observances. Such a transition has silently taken place in England among great numbers of educated men, and in some measure under the influence of the clergy. Nor has it, I think, weakened the Church. The standard of duty among such men has not sunk, but has in most departments perceptibly risen: their zeal has not diminished, though it flows rather in philanthropic than in purely ecclesiastical channels. The conviction that the special dogmas which divided other Protestant bodies from the Establishment rested on no substantial basis and have no real importance tells in favour of the larger and the more liberal Church, and the comprehensiveness which allows highly accentuated sacerdotalism and latitudinarianism in the same Church is in the eyes of many of them rather an element of strength than of weakness.

Few men have watched the religious tendencies of the time with a keener eye than Cardinal Newman, and no man hated with a more intense hatred the latitudinarian tendencies which he witnessed. His judgment of their effect on the Establishment is very remarkable. In a letter to his friend Isaac Williams he says: 'Everything I hear makes me fear that latitudinarian opinions are spreading furiously in the Church of England. I grieve deeply at it. The Anglican Church has been a most useful breakwater against Scepticism. The time might come when you, as well as I, might expect that it would be said above, "Why cumbereth it the ground?" but at present it upholds far more truth in England than any other form of religion would, and than the Catholic Roman Church could. But what I fear is that it is tending to a powerful Establishment teaching direct error, and more powerful than it has ever been; thrice powerful because it does teach error.'[60]

It is, however, of course, evident that the latitude of opinion which may be reasonably claimed by the clergy of a Church encumbered with many articles and doctrinal formularies is not unlimited, and each man must for himself draw the line. The fact, too, that the Church is an Established Church imposes some special obligations on its ministers. It is their first duty to celebrate public worship in such a form that all members of the Church of England may be able to join in it. Whatever interpretations may be placed upon the ceremonies of the Church, those ceremonies, at least, should be substantially the same. A stranger who enters a church which he has never before seen should be able to feel that he is certain of finding public worship intelligibly and decently performed, as in past generations it has been celebrated in all sections of the Established Church. It has, in my opinion, been a gross scandal, following a gross neglect of duty, that this primary obligation has been defied, and that services are held in English churches which would have been almost unrecognisable by the churchmen of a former generation, and which are manifest attempts to turn the English public worship into an imitation of the Romish Mass. Men have a perfect right, within the widest limits, to perform what religious services and to preach what religious doctrines they please, but they have not a right to do so in an Established Church.

The censorship of opinions is another thing, and in the conditions of English life it has never been very effectively maintained. The latitude of opinion granted in an Established Church is, and ought to be, very great, but it is, I think, obvious that on some topics a greater degree of reticence of expression should be observed by a clergyman addressing a miscellaneous audience from the pulpit of an Established Church than need be required of him in private life or even in his published books.

The attitude of laymen whose opinions have come to diverge widely from the Church formularies is less perplexing, and except in as far as the recent revival of sacerdotal pretensions has produced a reaction, there has, if I mistake not, of late years been a decided tendency in the best and most cultivated lay opinion of this kind to look with increasing favour on the Established Church. The complete abolition of the religious and political disqualifications which once placed its maintenance in antagonism with the interests of large sections of the people; the abolition of the indelibility of orders which excluded clergymen who changed their views from all other means of livelihood; the greater elasticity of opinion permitted within its pale; and the elimination from the statute-book of nearly all penalties and restrictions resting solely upon ecclesiastical grounds,—have all tended to diminish with such men the objections to the Church. It is a Church which does not injure those who are external to it, or interfere with those who are mere nominal adherents. It is more and more looked upon as a machine of well-organised beneficence, discharging efficiently and without corruption functions of supreme utility, and constituting one of the main sources of spiritual and moral life in the community. None of the modern influences of society can be said to have superseded it. Modern experience has furnished much evidence of the insufficiency of mere intellectual education if it is unaccompanied by the education of character, and it is on this side that modern education is most defective. While it undoubtedly makes men far more keenly sensible than in the past to the vast inequalities of human lots, the habit of constantly holding out material prizes as its immediate objects, and the disappearance of those coercive methods of education which once disciplined the will, make it perhaps less efficient as an instrument of moral amelioration.

Some habits of thought also, that have grown rapidly among educated men, have tended powerfully in the same direction. The sharp contrasts between true and false in matters of theology have been considerably attenuated. The point of view has changed. It is believed that in the history of the world gross and material conceptions of religion have been not only natural, but indispensable, and that it is only by a gradual process of intellectual evolution that the masses of men become prepared for higher and purer conceptions. Superstition and illusion play no small part in holding together the great fabric of society. 'Every falsehood,' it has been said, 'is reduced to a certain malleability by an alloy of truth,' and, on the other hand, truths of the utmost moment are, in certain stages of the world's history, only operative when they are clothed with a vesture of superstition. The Divine Spirit filters down to the human heart through a gross and material medium. And what is true of different stages of human history is not less true of different contemporary strata of knowledge and intelligence. In spite of democratic declamation about the equality of man, it is more and more felt that the same kind of teaching is not good for everyone. Truth, when undiluted, is too strong a medicine for many minds. Some things which a highly cultivated intellect would probably discard, and discard without danger, are essential to the moral being of multitudes. There is in all great religious systems something that is transitory and something that is eternal. Theological interpretations of the phenomena of outward nature which surround and influence us, and mythological narratives which have been handed down to us from a remote, uncritical and superstitious past, may be transformed or discredited; but there are elements in religion which have their roots much less in the reason of man than in his sorrows and his affections, and are the expression of wants, moral appetites and aspirations which are an essential, indestructible part of his nature.

No one, I think, can doubt that this way of thinking, whether it be right or wrong, has very widely spread through educated Europe, and it is a habit of thought which commonly strengthens with age. Young men discuss religious questions simply as questions of truth or falsehood. In later life they more frequently accept their creed as a working hypothesis of life; as a consolation in innumerable calamities; as the one supposition under which life is not a melancholy anti-climax; as the indispensable sanction of moral obligation; as the gratification and reflection of needs, instincts and longings which are planted in the deepest recesses of human nature; as one of the chief pillars on which society rests. The proselytising, the aggressive, the critical spirit diminishes. Very often they deliberately turn away their thoughts from questions which appear to them to lead only to endless controversy or to mere negative conclusions, and base their moral life on some strong unselfish interest for the benefit of their kind. In active, useful and unselfish work they find the best refuge from the perplexities of belief and the best field for the cultivation of their moral nature, and work done for the benefit of others seldom fails to react powerfully on their own happiness. Nor is it always those who have most completely abandoned dogmatic systems who are the least sensible to the moral beauty which has grown up around them. The music of the village church, which sounds so harsh and commonplace to the worshipper within, sometimes fills with tears the eyes of the stranger who sits without, listening among the tombs.

It is difficult to say how far the partial truce which has now fallen in England over the great antagonisms of belief is likely to be permanent. No one who knows the world can be insensible to the fact that a large and growing proportion of those who habitually attend our religious services have come to diverge very widely, though in many different degrees, from the beliefs which are expressed or implied in the formularies they use. Custom, fashion, the charm of old associations, the cravings of their own moral or spiritual nature, a desire to support a useful system of moral training, to set a good example to their children, their household, or their neighbours, keep them in their old place when the beliefs which they profess with their lips have in a great measure ebbed away. I do not undertake to blame or to judge them. Individual conscience and character and particular circumstances have, in these matters, a decisive voice. But there are times when the difference between professed belief and real belief is too great for endurance, and when insincerity and half-belief affect seriously the moral character of a nation. 'The deepest, nay, the only theme of the world's history, to which all others are subordinate,' said Goethe, 'is the conflict of faith and unbelief. The epochs in which faith, in whatever form it may be, prevails, are the marked epochs in human history, full of heart-stirring memories and of substantial gains for all after times. The epochs in which unbelief, in whatever form it may be, prevails, even when for the moment they put on the semblance of glory and success, inevitably sink into insignificance in the eyes of posterity, which will not waste its thoughts on things barren and unfruitful.'

Many of my readers have probably felt the force of such considerations and the moral problems which they suggest, and there have been perhaps moments when they have asked themselves the question of the poet—

Tell me, my soul, what is thy creed? Is it a faith or only a need?

They will reflect, however, that a need, if it be universally felt when human nature is in its highest and purest state, furnishes some basis of belief, and also that no man can venture to assign limits to the transformations which religion may undergo without losing its essence or its power. Even in the field of morals these have been very great, though universal custom makes us insensible to the extent to which we have diverged from a literal observance of Evangelical precepts. We should hardly write over the Savings Bank, 'Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow will take thought for itself,' or over the Bank of England, 'Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,' 'How hardly shall a rich man enter into the Kingdom of God,' or over the Foreign Office, or the Law Court, or the prison, 'Resist not evil,' 'He that smiteth thee on thy right cheek turn to him the other also,' 'He that taketh away thy coat let him have thy cloak also.' Can it be said that the whole force and meaning of such words are represented by an industrial society in which the formation of habits of constant providence with the object of averting poverty or increasing comfort is deemed one of the first of duties and a main element and measure of social progress; in which the indiscriminate charity which encourages mendicancy and discourages habits of forethought and thrift is far more seriously condemned than an industrial system based on the keenest, the most deadly, and often the most malevolent competition; in which wealth is universally sought, and universally esteemed a good and not an evil, provided only it is honestly obtained and wisely and generously used; in which, although wanton aggression and a violent and quarrelsome temper are no doubt condemned, it is esteemed the duty of every good citizen to protect his rights whenever they are unjustly infringed; in which war and the preparation for war kindle the most passionate enthusiasm and absorb a vast proportion of the energies of Christendom, and in which no Government could remain a week in power if it did not promptly resent the smallest insult to the national flag?

It is a question of a different kind whether the sacerdotal spirit which has of late years so largely spread in the English Church can extend without producing a violent disruption. To cut the tap roots of priestcraft was one of the main aims and objects of the Reformation, and, for reasons I have already stated, I do not believe that the party which would re-establish it has by any means the strength that has been attributed to it. It is true that the Broad Church party, though it reflects faithfully the views of large numbers of educated laymen, has never exercised an influence in active Church life at all proportionate to the eminence of its leading representatives. It is true also that the Evangelical party has in a very remarkable degree lost its old place in the Anglican pulpit and in religious literature, though its tenets still form the staple of the preaching of the Salvation Army and of most other street preachers who exercise a real and widespread influence over the poor. But the middle and lower sections of English society are, I believe, at bottom, profoundly hostile to priestcraft; and although the dread of Popery has diminished, they are very far from being ready to acquiesce in any attempt to restore the dominion which their fathers discarded.

In one respect, indeed, sacerdotalism in the Anglican Church is a worse thing than in the Roman Church, for it is undisciplined and unregulated. The history of the Church abundantly shows the dangers that have sprung from the Confessional, though the Roman Catholic will maintain that its habitually restraining and moralising influence greatly outweighs these occasional abuses. But in the Roman Church the practice of confession is carried on under the most severe ecclesiastical supervision and discipline. Confession can only be made to a celibate priest of mature age, who is bound to secrecy by the most solemn oath; who, except in cases of grave illness, confesses only in an open church; and who has gone through a long course of careful education specially and skilfully designed to fit him for the duty. None of these conditions are observed in Anglican Confession.

In other respects, indeed, the sacerdotal spirit is never likely to be quite the same as in the Roman Church. A married clergy, who have mixed in all the lay influences of an English university, and who still take part in the pursuits, studies, social intercourse and amusements of laymen, are not likely to form a separate caste or to constitute a very formidable priesthood. It is perhaps a little difficult to treat their pretensions with becoming gravity, and the atmosphere of unlimited discussion which envelops Englishmen through their whole lives has effectually destroyed the danger of coercive and restrictive laws directed against opinion. Moral coercion and the tendency to interfere by law on moral grounds with the habits of men, even when those habits in no degree interfere with others, have increased. It is one of the marked tendencies of Anglo-Saxon democracy, and it is very far from being peculiar to, or even specially prominent in, any one Church. But the desire to repress the expression of opinions by force, which for so many centuries marked with blood and fire the power of mediaeval sacerdotalism, is wholly alien to modern English nature. Amid all the fanaticisms, exaggerations, and superstitions of belief, this kind of coercion, at least, is never likely to be formidable, nor do I believe that in the most extreme section of the sacerdotal clergy there is any desire for it. There has been one significant contrast between the history of Catholicism and Anglicanism in the present century. In the Catholic Church the Ultramontane element has steadily dominated, restricting liberty of opinion, and important tenets which were once undefined by the Church, and on which sincere Catholics had some latitude of opinion, have been brought under the iron yoke. This is no doubt largely due to the growth of scepticism and indifference, which have made the great body of educated laymen hostile or indifferent to the Church, and have thrown its management mainly into the hands of the priesthood and the more bigoted, ignorant and narrow-minded laymen. But in the Anglican Church educated laymen are much less alienated from Church life, and a tribunal which is mainly lay exercises the supreme authority. As a consequence of these conditions, although the sacerdotal element has greatly increased, the latitude of opinion within the Church has steadily grown.

At the same time, it is difficult to believe that serious dangers do not await the Church if the unprotestantising influences that have spread within it continue to extend. It is not likely that the nation will continue to give its support to the Church if that Church in its main tendencies cuts itself off from the Reformation. The conversions to Catholicism in England, though probably much exaggerated, have been very numerous, and it is certainly not surprising that it should be so. If the Church of Rome permitted Protestantism to be constantly taught in her pulpits, and Protestant types of worship and character to be habitually held up to admiration, there can be little doubt that many of her worshippers would be shaken. If the Church of England becomes in general what it already is in some of its churches, it is not likely that English public opinion will permanently acquiesce in its privileged position in the State. If it ceases to be a Protestant Church, it will not long remain an established one, and its disestablishment would probably be followed by a disruption in which opinions would be more sharply defined, and the latitude of belief and the spirit of compromise that now characterise our English religious life might be seriously impaired.

FOOTNOTES:

[58] Alciphron, 6th Dialogue.

[59] Nalsons's Collections, i. 769, February 9, 1640.

[60] Autobiography of Isaac Williams, p. 132. This letter was written in 1863.



CHAPTER XII

THE MANAGEMENT OF CHARACTER

Of all the tasks which are set before man in life, the education and management of his character is the most important, and, in order that it should be successfully pursued, it is necessary that he should make a calm and careful survey of his own tendencies, unblinded either by the self-deception which conceals errors and magnifies excellences, or by the indiscriminate pessimism which refuses to recognise his powers for good. He must avoid the fatalism which would persuade him that he has no power over his nature, and he must also clearly recognise that this power is not unlimited. Man is like a card-player who receives from Nature his cards—his disposition, his circumstances, the strength or weakness of his will, of his mind, and of his body. The game of life is one of blended chance and skill. The best player will be defeated if he has hopelessly bad cards, but in the long run the skill of the player will not fail to tell. The power of man over his character bears much resemblance to his power over his body. Men come into the world with bodies very unequal in their health and strength; with hereditary dispositions to disease; with organs varying greatly in their normal condition. At the same time a temperate or intemperate life, skilful or unskilful regimen, physical exercises well adapted to strengthen the weaker parts, physical apathy, vicious indulgence, misdirected or excessive effort, will all in their different ways alter his bodily condition and increase or diminish his chances of disease and premature death. The power of will over character is, however, stronger, or, at least, wider than its power over the body. There are organs which lie wholly beyond its influence; there are diseases over which it can exercise no possible influence, but there is no part of our moral constitution which we cannot in some degree influence or modify.

It has often seemed to me that diversities of taste throw much light on the basis of character. Why is it that the same dish gives one man keen pleasure and to another is loathsome and repulsive? To this simple question no real answer can be given. It is a fact of our nature that one fruit, or meat, or drink will give pleasure to one palate and none whatever to another. At the same time, while the original and natural difference is undoubted, there are many differences which are wholly or largely due to particular and often transitory causes. Dishes have an attraction or the reverse because they are associated with old recollections or habits. Habit will make a Frenchman like his melon with salt, while an Englishman prefers it with sugar. An old association of ideas will make an Englishman shrink from eating a frog or a snail, though he would probably like each if he ate it without knowing it, and he could easily learn to do so. The kind of cookery which one age or one nation generally likes, another age or another nation finds distasteful. The eye often governs the taste, and a dish which, when seen, excites intense repulsion, would have no such repulsion to a blind man. Every one who has moved much about the world, and especially in uncivilised countries, will get rid of many old antipathies, will lose the fastidiousness of his taste, and will acquire new and genuine tastes. The original innate difference is not wholly destroyed, but it is profoundly and variously modified.

These changes of taste are very analogous to what takes place in our moral dispositions. They are for the most part in themselves simply external to morals, though there is at least one conspicuous exception. Many—it is to be hoped most—men might spend their lives with full access to intoxicating liquors without even the temptation of getting drunk. Apart from all considerations of religion, morals, social, physical, or intellectual consequences, they abstain from doing so simply as a matter of taste. With other men the pleasure of excessive drinking is such that it requires an heroic effort of the will to resist it. There are men who not only are so constituted that it is their greatest pleasure, but who are even born with a craving for drink. In no form is the terrible fact of heredity more clearly or more tragically displayed. Many, too, who had originally no such craving gradually acquire it: sometimes by mere social influence, which makes excessive drinking the habit of their circle; more frequently through depression or sorrow, which gives men a longing for some keen pleasure in which they can forget themselves; or through the jaded habit of mind and body which excessive work produces, or through the dreary, colourless, joyless surroundings of sordid poverty. Drink and the sensual pleasures, if viciously indulged, produce (doubtless through physical causes) an intense craving for their gratification. This, however, is not the case with all our pleasures. Many are keenly enjoyed when present, yet not seriously missed when absent. Sometimes, too, the effect of over-indulgence is to vitiate and deaden the palate, so that what was once pleasing ceases altogether to be an object of desire. This, too, has its analogue in other things. We have a familiar example in the excessive novel-reader, who begins with a kind of mental intoxication, and who ends with such a weariness that he finds it a serious effort to read the books which were once his strongest temptation.

Tastes of the palate also naturally change with age and with the accompanying changes of the body. The schoolboy who bitterly repines because the smallness of his allowance restricts his power of buying tarts and sweetmeats will probably grow into a man who, with many shillings in his pocket, daily passes the confectioner's shop without the smallest desire to enter it.

It is evident that there is a close analogy between these things and that collection of likes and dislikes, moral and intellectual, which forms the primal base of character, and which mainly determines the complexion of our lives. As Marcus Aurelius said: 'Who can change the desires of man?' That which gives the strongest habitual pleasure, whether it be innate or acquired, will in the great majority of cases ultimately dominate. Certain things will always be intensely pleasurable, and certain other things indifferent or repellent, and this magnetism is the true basis of character, and with the majority of men it mainly determines conduct. By the associations of youth and by other causes these natural likings and dislikings may be somewhat modified, but even in youth our power is very limited, and in later life it is much less. No real believer in free-will will hold that man is an absolute slave to his desires. No man who knows the world will deny that with average man the strongest passion or desire will prevail—happy when that desire is not a vice.

Passions weaken, but habits strengthen, with age, and it is the great task of youth to set the current of habit and to form the tastes which are most productive of happiness in life. Here, as in most other things, opposite exaggerations are to be avoided. There is such a thing as looking forward too rigidly and too exclusively to the future—to a future that may never arrive. This is the great fault of the over-educationist, who makes early life a burden and a toil, and also of those who try to impose on youth the tastes and pleasures of the man. Youth has its own pleasures, which will always give it most enjoyment, and a happy youth is in itself an end. It is the time when the power of enjoyment is most keen, and it is often accompanied by such extreme sensitiveness that the sufferings of the child for what seem the most trivial causes probably at least equal in acuteness, though not in durability, the sufferings of a man. Many a parent standing by the coffin of his child has felt with bitterness how much of the measure of enjoyment that short life might have known has been cut off by an injudicious education. And even if adult life is attained, the evils of an unhappy childhood are seldom wholly compensated. The pleasures of retrospect are among the most real we possess, and it is around our childish days that our fondest associations naturally cluster. An early over-strain of our powers often leaves behind it lasting distortion or weakness, and a sad childhood introduces into the character elements of morbidness and bitterness that will not disappear.

The first great rule in judging of pleasures is that so well expressed by Seneca: 'Sic praesentibus utaris voluptatibus ut futuris non noceas'—so to use present pleasures as not to impair future ones. Drunkenness, sensuality, gambling, habitual extravagance and self-indulgence, if they become the pleasures of youth, will almost infallibly lead to the ruin of a life. Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.

In starting in life we are apt to attach a disproportionate value to tastes, pleasures, and ideals that can only be even approximately satisfied in youth, health, and strength. We have, I think, an example of this in the immense place which athletic games and out-of-door sports have taken in modern English life. They are certainly not things to be condemned. They have the direct effect of giving a large amount of intense and innocent pleasure, and they have indirect effects which are still more important. In so far as they raise the level of physical strength and health, and dispel the morbidness of temperament which is so apt to accompany a sedentary life and a diseased or inert frame, they contribute powerfully to lasting happiness. They play a considerable part in the formation of friendships which is one of the best fruits of the period between boyhood and mature manhood. Some of them give lessons of courage, perseverance, energy, self-restraint, and cheerful acquiescence in disappointment and defeat that are of no small value in the formation of character, and when they are not associated with gambling they have often the inestimable advantage of turning young men away from vicious pleasures. At the same time it can hardly be doubted that they hold an exaggerated prominence in the lives of young Englishmen of the present generation. It is not too much to say that among large sections of the students at our Universities, and at a time when intellectual ambition ought to be most strong and when the acquisition of knowledge is most important, proficiency in cricket or boating or football is more prized than any intellectual achievement. I have heard a good judge, who had long been associated with English University life, express his opinion that during the last forty or fifty years the relative intellectual position of the upper and middle classes in England has been materially changed, owing to the disproportioned place which outdoor amusements have assumed in the lives of the former. It is the impression of very competent judges that a genuine love, reverence and enthusiasm for intellectual things is less common among the young men of the present day than it was in the days of their fathers. The predominance of the critical spirit which chills enthusiasm, and still more the cram system which teaches young men to look on the prizes that are to be won by competitive examinations as the supreme end of knowledge, no doubt largely account for this, but much is also due to the extravagant glorification of athletic games.

If we compare the class of pleasures I have described with the taste for reading and kindred intellectual pleasures, the superiority of the latter is very manifest. To most young men, it is true, a game will probably give at least as much pleasure as a book. Nor must we measure the pleasure of reading altogether by the language of the genuine scholar. It is not every one who could say, like Gibbon, that he would not exchange his love of reading for all the wealth of the Indies. Very many would agree with him; but Gibbon was a man with an intense natural love of knowledge, and the weak health of his early life intensified this predominant passion. But while the tastes which require physical strength decline or pass with age, that for reading steadily grows. It is illimitable in the vistas of pleasure it opens; it is one of the most easily satisfied, one of the cheapest, one of the least dependent on age, seasons, and the varying conditions of life. It cheers the invalid through years of weakness and confinement; illuminates the dreary hours of the sleepless night; stores the mind with pleasant thoughts, banishes ennui, fills up the unoccupied interstices and enforced leisures of an active life; makes men for a time at least forget their anxieties and sorrows, and if it is judiciously managed it is one of the most powerful means of training character and disciplining and elevating thought. It is eminently a pleasure which is not only good in itself but enhances many others. By extending the range of our knowledge, by enlarging our powers of sympathy and appreciation, it adds incalculably to the pleasures of society, to the pleasures of travel, to the pleasures of art, to the interest we take in the vast variety of events which form the great world-drama around us.

To acquire this taste in early youth is one of the best fruits of education, and it is especially useful when the taste for reading becomes a taste for knowledge, and when it is accompanied by some specialisation and concentration and by some exercise of the powers of observation. 'Many tastes and one hobby' is no bad ideal to be aimed at. The boy who learns to collect and classify fossils, or flowers, or insects, who has acquired a love for chemical experiments, who has begun to form a taste for some particular kind or department of knowledge, has laid the foundation of much happiness in life.

In the selection of pleasures and the cultivation of tastes much wisdom is shown in choosing in such a way that each should form a complement to the others; that different pleasures should not clash, but rather cover different areas and seasons of life; that each should tend to correct faults or deficiencies of character which the others may possibly produce. The young man who starts in life with keen literary tastes and also with a keen love of out-of-door sports, and who possesses the means of gratifying each, has perhaps provided himself with as many elements of happiness as mere amusements can ever furnish. One set of pleasures, however, often kills the capacity for enjoying others, and some which in themselves are absolutely innocent, by blunting the enjoyment of better things, exercise an injurious influence on character. Habitual novel-reading, for example, often destroys the taste for serious literature, and few things tend so much to impair a sound literary perception and to vulgarise the character as the habit of constantly saturating the mind with inferior literature, even when that literature is in no degree immoral. Sometimes an opposite evil may be produced. Excessive fastidiousness greatly limits our enjoyments, and the inestimable gift of extreme concentration is often dearly bought. The well-known confession of Darwin that his intense addiction to science had destroyed his power of enjoying even the noblest imaginative literature represents a danger to which many men who have achieved much in the higher and severer forms of scientific thought are subject. Such men are usually by their original temperament, and become still more by acquired habit, men of strong, narrow, concentrated natures, whose thoughts, like a deep and rapid stream confined in a restricted channel, flow with resistless energy in one direction. It is by the sacrifice of versatility that they do so much, and the result is amply sufficient to justify it. But it is a real sacrifice, depriving them of many forms both of capacity and of enjoyment.

The same pleasures act differently on different characters, especially on the differences of character that accompany difference of sex. I have myself no doubt that the movement which in modern times has so widely opened to women amusements that were once almost wholly reserved for men has been on the whole a good one. It has produced a higher level of health, stronger nerves, and less morbid characters, and it has given keen and innocent enjoyment to many who from their circumstances and surroundings once found their lives very dreary and insipid. Yet most good observers will agree that amusements which have no kind of evil effect on men often in some degree impair the graces or characters of women, and that it is not quite with impunity that one sex tries to live the life of the other. Some pleasures, too, exercise a much larger influence than others on the general habits of life. It is not too much to say that the invention of the bicycle, bringing with it an immense increase of outdoor life, of active exercise, and of independent habits, has revolutionised the course of many lives. Some amusements which may in themselves be but little valued are wisely cultivated as helping men to move more easily in different spheres of society, or as providing a resource for old age. Talleyrand was not wholly wrong in his reproach to a man who had never learned to play whist: 'What an unhappy old age you are preparing for yourself!'

I have already mentioned the differences that may be found in different countries and ages, in the relative importance attached to external circumstances and to dispositions of mind as means of happiness, and the tendency in the more progressive nations to seek their happiness mainly in improved circumstances. Another great line of distinction is between education that acts specially upon the desires, and that which acts specially upon the will. The great perfection of modern systems of education is chiefly of the former kind. Its object is to make knowledge and virtue attractive, and therefore an object of desire. It does so partly by presenting them in the most alluring forms, partly by connecting them as closely as possible with rewards. The great principle of modern moral education is to multiply innocent and beneficent interests, tastes, and ambitions. It is to make the path of virtue the natural, the easy, the pleasing one; to form a social atmosphere favourable to its development, making duty and interest as far as possible coincident. Vicious pleasures are combated by the multiplication of healthy ones, and by a clearer insight into the consequences of each. An idle or inert character is stimulated by holding up worthy objects of interest and ambition, and it is the aim alike of the teacher and the legislator to make the grooves and channels of life such as tend naturally and easily towards good. But the education of the will—the power of breasting the current of the desires and doing for long periods what is distasteful and painful—is much less cultivated than in some periods of the past.

Many things contribute to this. The rush and hurry of modern existence and the incalculable multitude and variety of fleeting impressions that in the great centres of civilisation pass over the mind are very unfavourable to concentration, and perhaps still more to the direct cultivation of mental states. Amusements, and the appetite for amusements, have greatly extended. Life has become more full. The long leisures, the introspective habits, the vita contemplativa so conspicuous in the old Catholic discipline, grow very rare. Thoughts and interests are more thrown on the external; and the comfort, the luxury, the softness, the humanity of modern life, and especially of modern education, make men less inclined to face the disagreeable and endure the painful.

The starting-point of education is thus silently changing. Perhaps the extent of the change is best shown by the old Catholic ascetic training. Its supreme object was to discipline and strengthen the will: to accustom men habitually to repudiate the pleasurable and accept the painful; to mortify the most natural tastes and affections; to narrow and weaken the empire of the desires; to make men wholly independent of outward circumstances; to preach self-renunciation as itself an end.

Men will always differ about the merits of this system. In my own opinion it is difficult to believe that in the period of Catholic ascendency the moral standard was, on the whole and in its broad lines, higher than our own. The repression of the sensual instincts was the central fact in ascetic morals; but, even tested by this test, it is at least very doubtful whether it did not fail. The withdrawal from secular society of the best men did much to restrict the influences for good, and the habit of aiming at an unnatural ideal was not favourable to common, everyday, domestic virtue. The history of sacerdotal and monastic celibacy abundantly shows how much vice that might easily have been avoided grew out of the adoption of an unnatural standard, and how often it led in those who had attained it to grave distortions of character. Affections and impulses which were denied their healthy and natural vent either became wholly atrophied or took other and morbid forms, and the hard, cruel, self-righteous fanatic, equally ready to endure or to inflict suffering, was a not unnatural result. But whatever may have been its failures and its exaggerations, Catholic asceticism was at least a great school for disciplining and strengthening the will, and the strength and discipline of the will form one of the first elements of virtue and of happiness.

In the grave and noble type of character which prevailed in English and American life during the seventeenth century, the strength of will was conspicuously apparent. Life was harder, simpler, more serious, and less desultory than at present, and strong convictions shaped and fortified the character. 'It was an age,' says a great American writer, 'when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal more. The people possessed by hereditary right the quality of reverence, which, in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller proportion and with a vastly diminished force in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day the English settler on these rude shores, having left king, nobles, and all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and necessity of reverence were strong in him, bestowed it on the white hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried integrity; on solid wisdom and sad-coloured experience; on endowments of that grave and weighty order which give the idea of permanence and come under the general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen, therefore,—Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their compeers,—who were elevated to power by the early choice of the people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a ponderous sobriety rather than activity of intellect. They had fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or peril stood up for the welfare of the State like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide.'[61]

The power of the will, however, even when it exists in great strength, is often curiously capricious. History is full of examples of men who in great trials and emergencies have acted with admirable and persevering heroism, yet who readily succumbed to private vices or passions. The will is not the same as the desires, but the connection between them is very close. A love for a distant end; a dominating ambition or passion, will call forth long perseverance in wholly distasteful work in men whose will in other fields of life is lamentably feeble. Every one who has embarked with real earnestness in some extended literary enterprise which as a whole represents the genuine bent of his talent and character will be struck with his exceptional power of traversing perseveringly long sections of this enterprise for which he has no natural aptitude and in which he takes no pleasure. Military courage is with most men chiefly a matter of temperament and impulse, but there have been conspicuous instances of great soldiers and sailors who have frankly acknowledged that they never lost in battle an intense constitutional shrinking from danger, though by the force of a strong will they never suffered this timidity to govern or to weaken them. With men of very vivid imagination there is a natural tendency to timidity as they realise more than ordinary men danger and suffering. On the other hand it has often been noticed how calmly the callous, semi-torpid temperament that characterises many of the worst criminals enables them to meet death upon the gallows.

In courage itself, too, there are many varieties. The courage of the soldier and the courage of the martyr are not the same, and it by no means follows that either would possess that of the other. Not a few men who are capable of leading a forlorn hope, and who never shrink from the bayonet and the cannon, have shown themselves incapable of bearing the burden of responsibility, enduring long-continued suspense, taking decisions which might expose them to censure or unpopularity. The active courage that encounters and delights in danger is often found in men who show no courage in bearing suffering, misfortune, or disease. In passive courage the woman often excels the man as much as in active courage the man exceeds the woman. Even in active courage familiarity does much; sympathy and enthusiasm play great and often very various parts, and curious anomalies may be found. The Teutonic and the Latin races are probably equally distinguished for their military courage, but there is a clear difference between them in the nature of that courage and in the circumstances or conditions under which it is usually most splendidly displayed. The danger incurred by the gladiator was far greater than that which was encountered by the soldier, but Tacitus[62] mentions that when some of the bravest gladiators were employed in the Roman army they were found wholly inefficient, as they were much less capable than the ordinary soldiers of military courage.

The circumstances of life are the great school for forming and strengthening the will, and in the excessive competition and struggle of modern industrialism this school is not wanting. But in ethical and educational systems the value of its cultivation is often insufficiently felt. Yet nothing which is learned in youth is so really valuable as the power and the habit of self-restraint, of self-sacrifice, of energetic, continuous and concentrated effort. In the best of us evil tendencies are always strong and the path of duty is often distasteful. With the most favourable wind and tide the bark will never arrive at the harbour if it has ceased to obey the rudder. A weak nature which is naturally kindly, affectionate and pure, which floats through life under the impulse of the feelings, with no real power of self-restraint, is indeed not without its charm, and in a well-organised society, with good surroundings and few temptations, it may attain a high degree of beauty; but its besetting failings will steadily grow; without fortitude, perseverance and principle, it has no recuperative energy, and it will often end in a moral catastrophe which natures in other respects much less happily compounded would easily avoid. Nothing can permanently secure our moral being in the absence of a restraining will basing itself upon a strong sense of the difference between right and wrong, upon the firm groundwork of principle and honour.

Experience abundantly shows how powerfully the steady action of such a will can operate upon innate defects, converting the constitutional idler into the indefatigably industrious, checking, limiting and sometimes almost destroying constitutional irritability and vicious passions. The natural power of the will in different men differs greatly, but there is no part of our nature which is more strengthened by exercise or more weakened by disuse. The minor faults of character it can usually correct; but when a character is once formed, and when its tendencies are essentially vicious, radical cure or even considerable amelioration is very rare. Sometimes the strong influence of religion effects it. Sometimes it is effected by an illness, a great misfortune, or the total change of associations that follows emigration. Marriage perhaps more frequently than any other ordinary agency in early life transforms or deeply modifies the character, for it puts an end to powerful temptations and brings with it a profound change of habits and motives, associations and desires. But we have all of us encountered in life depraved natures in which vicious self-indulgence had attained such a strength, and the recuperating and moralising elements were so fatally weak, that we clearly perceive the disease to be incurable, and that it is hardly possible that any change of circumstances could even seriously mitigate it. In what proportion this is the fault or the calamity of the patient no human judgment can accurately tell.

Few things are sadder than to observe how frequently the inheritance of great wealth or even of easy competence proves the utter and speedy ruin of a young man, except when the administration of a large property, or the necessity of carrying on a great business, or some other propitious circumstance provides him with a clearly defined sphere of work. The majority of men will gladly discard distasteful work which their circumstances do not require; and in the absence of steady work, and in the possession of all the means of gratification, temptations assume an overwhelming strength, and the springs of moral life are fatally impaired. It can hardly be doubted that the average longevity in this small class is far less than in that of common men, and that even when natural capacity is considerable it is more rarely displayed. To a man with a real desire for work such circumstances are indeed of inestimable value, giving him the leisure and the opportunities of applying himself without distraction and from early manhood to the kind of work that is most suited to him. Sometimes this takes place, but much more frequently vicious tastes or a simply idle or purposeless life are the result. Sometimes, indeed, a large amount of desultory and unregulated energy remains, but the serious labour of concentration is shunned and no real result is attained. The stream is there, but it turns no mill.

Most men escape this danger through the circumstances of life which make serious and steady work necessary to their livelihood, and in the majority of cases the kind of work is so clearly marked out that they have little choice. When some choice exists, the rule which I have already laid down should not be forgotten. Men should choose their work not only according to their talents and their opportunities, but also, as far as possible, according to their characters. They should select the kinds which are most fitted to bring their best qualities into exercise, or should at least avoid those which have a special tendency to develop or encourage their dominant defects. On the whole it will be found that men's characters are much more deeply influenced by their pursuits than by their opinions.

The choice of work is one of the great agencies for the management of character in youth. The choice of friends is another. In the words of Burke, 'The law of opinion ... is the strongest principle in the composition of the frame of the human mind, and more of the happiness and unhappiness of man reside in that inward principle than in all external circumstances put together.'[63] This is true of the great public opinion of an age or country which envelops us like an atmosphere, and by its silent pressure steadily and almost insensibly shapes or influences the whole texture of our lives. It is still more true of the smaller circle of our intimacies which will do more than almost any other thing to make the path of virtue easy or difficult. How large a proportion of the incentives to a noble ambition, or of the first temptations to evil, may be traced to an early friendship, and it is often in the little circle that gathers round a college table that the measure of life is first taken, and ideals and enthusiasms are formed which give a colour to all succeeding years. To admire strongly and to admire wisely is, indeed, one of the best means of moral improvement.

Very much, however, of the management of character can only be accomplished by the individual himself acting in complete isolation upon his own nature and in the chamber of his own mind. The discipline of thought; the establishment of an ascendency of the will over our courses of thinking; the power of casting away morbid trains of reflection and turning resolutely to other subjects or aspects of life; the power of concentrating the mind vigorously on a serious subject and pursuing continuous trains of thought,—form perhaps the best fruits of judicious self-education. Its importance, indeed, is manifold. In the higher walks of intellect this power of mental concentration is of supreme value. Newton is said to have ascribed mainly to an unusual amount of it his achievements in philosophy, and it is probable that the same might be said by most other great thinkers. In the pursuit of happiness hardly anything in external circumstances is so really valuable as the power of casting off worry, turning in times of sorrow to healthy work, taking habitually the brighter view of things. It is in such exercises of will that we chiefly realise the truth of the lines of Tennyson:

Oh, well for him whose will is strong, He suffers, but he will not suffer long.

In moral culture it is not less important to acquire the power of discarding the demoralising thoughts and imaginations that haunt so many, and meeting temptation by calling up purer, higher and restraining thoughts. The faculty we possess of alternating and intensifying our own motives by bringing certain thoughts, or images, or subjects into the foreground and throwing others into the background, is one of our chief means of moral progress. The cultivation of this power is a far wiser thing than the cultivation of that introspective habit of mind which is perpetually occupied with self-analysis or self-examination, and which is constantly and remorsefully dwelling upon past faults or upon the morbid elements in our nature. In the morals which are called minor, though they affect deeply the happiness of mankind, the importance of the government of thought is not less apparent. The secret of good or bad temper is our habitual tendency to dwell upon or to fly from the irritating and the inevitable. Content or discontent, amiability or the reverse, depend mainly upon the disposition of our minds to turn specially to the good or to the evil sides of our own lot, to the merits or to the defects of those about us. A power of turning our thoughts from a given subject, though not the sole element in self-control, is at least one of its most important ingredients.

This power of the will over the thoughts is one in which men differ enormously. Thus—to take the most familiar instance—the capacity for worry, with all the exaggerations and distortions of sentiment it implies, is very evidently a constitutional thing, and where it exists to a high degree neither reason nor will can effectually cure it. Such a man may have the clearest possible intellectual perception of its uselessness and its folly. Yet it will often banish sleep from his pillow, follow him with an habitual depression in all the walks of life, and make his measure of happiness much less than that of others who with far less propitious circumstances are endued by nature with the gift of lightly throwing off the past and looking forward with a sanguine and cheerful spirit to the future. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the different degrees of suffering the same trouble will produce in different men, and it is probable that the happiness of a life depends much less on the amount of pleasurable or painful things that are encountered, than upon the turn of thought which dwells chiefly on one or on the other. It is very evident that buoyancy of temperament is not a thing that increases with civilisation or education. It is mainly physical. It is greatly influenced by climate and by health, and where no very clear explanation of this kind can be given it is a thing in which different nations differ greatly. Few good observers will deny that persistent and concentrated will is more common in Great Britain than in Ireland, but that the gift of a buoyant temperament is more common among Irishmen than among Englishmen. Yet it co-exists in the national character with a strong vein of very genuine melancholy, and it is often accompanied by keen sensitiveness to suffering. This combination is a very common one. Every one who has often stood by a deathbed knows how frequently it will be found that the mourner who is utterly prostrated by grief, and whose tears flow in torrents, casts off her grief much more completely and much sooner than one whose tears refuse to flow and who never for a moment loses her self-command.

But though natural temperament enables one man to do without effort what another man with the utmost effort fails to accomplish, there are some available remedies that can palliate the disease. Society, travel and other amusements can do something, and such words as 'diversion' and 'distraction' embalm the truth that the chief virtue of many pleasures is to divert or distract our minds from painful thoughts. Pascal considered this a sign of the misery and the baseness of our nature, and he describes as a deplorable spectacle a man who rose from his bed weighed down with anxiety and grave sorrow, and who could for a time forget it all in the passionate excitement of the chase. But, in truth, the possession of such a power—weak and transient though it be—is one of the great alleviations of the lot of man. Religion, with its powerful motives and its wide range of consolatory and soothing thoughts and images, has much power in this sphere when it does not take a morbid form and intensify instead of alleviating sorrow; and the steady exercise of the will gives us some real and increasing, though imperfect, control over the current of our feelings as well as of our ideas.

Often the power of dreaming comes to our aid. When we cannot turn from some painfully pressing thought to serious thinking of another kind, we can give the reins to our imaginations and soon lose ourselves in ideal scenes. There are men who live so habitually in a world of imagination that it becomes to them a second life, and their strongest temptations and their keenest pleasures belong to it. To them 'common life seems tapestried with dreams.' Not unfrequently they derive a pleasure from imagined or remembered enjoyments which the realities themselves would fail to give. They select in imagination certain aspects or portions, throw others into the shade, intensify or attenuate impressions, transform and beautify the reality of things. The power of filling their existence with happy day-dreams is their most precious luxury. They feel the full force of the pathetic lines of an Irish poet:[64]

Sweet thoughts, bright dreams my comfort be, I have no joy beside; Oh, throng around and be to me Power, country, fame and bride.

To train this side of our nature is no small part of the management of character. There is a great sphere of happiness and misery which is almost or altogether unconnected with surrounding circumstances, and depends upon the thoughts, images, hopes and fears on which our minds are chiefly concentrated. The exercise of this form of imagination has often a great influence, both intellectually and morally. In childhood, as every teacher knows, it is often a distracting influence, and with men also it is sometimes an obstacle to concentrated reasoning and observation, turning the mind away from sober and difficult thought; but there is a kind of dreaming which is eminently conducive to productive thought. It enables a man to place himself so completely in other conditions of thought and life that the ideas connected with those conditions rise spontaneously in the mind. A true and vivid realisation of characters and circumstances unlike his own is acquired. The mere fact of placing himself in other circumstances and investing himself with imaginary powers and functions sometimes suggests possible remedies for great human ills, and gives clearer views of the proportions, difficulties and conditions of governments and societies. Much discovery in science has been due to this power of the imagination to realise conditions that are unseen, and the habit or faculty of living other lives than our own is scarcely less valuable to the historian, and even to the statesman, than to the poet or the novelist or the dramatist. It gives the magic touch which changes mere lifeless knowledge into realisation.

Its effect upon character also is great and various. No one can fail to recognise the depraving influence of a corrupt imagination; and the corruption may spring, not only from suggestions from without, but from those which rise spontaneously in our minds. Nor is even the imagination which is wholly pure absolutely without its dangers. It is a well-known law of our nature that an excessive indulgence in emotion that does not end in action tends rather to deaden than to stimulate the moral nerve. It has been often noticed that the exaggerated sentimentality which sheds passionate tears over the fictitious sorrows of a novel or a play is no certain sign of a benevolent and unselfish nature, and is quite compatible with much indifference to real sorrows and much indisposition to make efforts for their alleviation. It is, however, no less true, as Dugald Stewart says, that the apparent coldness and selfishness of men are often simply due to a want of that kind of imagination which enables us to realise sufferings with which we have never been brought into direct contact, and that once this power of realisation is acquired, the coldness is speedily dispelled. Nor can it be doubted that in the management of thought, the dream power often plays a most important part in alleviating human suffering; illuminating cheerless and gloomy lives, and breaking the chain of evil or distressing thoughts.

The immense place which the literature of fiction holds in the world shows how widely some measure of it is diffused, and how large an amount of time and talent is devoted to its cultivation. It is probable, however, that it is really stronger in the earlier and uncultivated than in the later stages of humanity, as it is more vivid in childhood and in youth than in mature life. 'A child,' as an American writer[65] has well said, 'can afford to sleep without dreaming; he has plenty of dreams without sleep.' The childhood of the world is also eminently an age of dreams. There are stages of civilisation in which the dream world blends so closely with the world of realities, in which the imagination so habitually and so spontaneously transfigures or distorts, that men become almost incapable of distinguishing between the real and the fictitious. This is the true age of myths and legends; and there are strata in contemporary society in which something of the same conditions is reproduced. 'To those who do not read or write much,' says an acute observer, 'even in our days, dreams are much more real than to those who are continually exercising the imagination.... Since I have been occupied with literature my dreams have lost all vividness and are less real than the shadows of the trees; they do not deceive me even in my sleep. At every hour of the day I am accustomed to call up figures at will before my eyes, which stand out well defined and coloured to the very hue of their faces.... The less literary a people the more they believe in dreams; the disappearance of superstition is not due to the cultivation of reason or the spread of knowledge, but purely to the mechanical effect of reading, which so perpetually puts figures and aerial shapes before the mental gaze that in time those that occur naturally are thought no more of than those conjured into existence by a book. It is in far-away country places, where people read very little, that they see phantoms and consult the oracles of fate. Their dreams are real.'[66]

The last point I would notice in the management of character is the importance of what may be called moral safety-valves. One of the most fatal mistakes in education is the attempt which is so often made by the educator to impose his own habits and tastes on natures that are essentially different. It is common for men of lymphatic temperaments, of studious, saintly, and retiring tastes, to endeavor to force a high-spirited young man starting in life into their own mould—to prescribe for him the cast of tastes and pursuits they find most suited for themselves, forgetting that such an ideal can never satisfy a wholly different nature, and that in aiming at it a kind of excellence which might easily have been attained is missed. This is one of the evils that very frequently arise when the education of boys after an early age is left in the hands of women. It is the true explanation of the fact, which has so often been noticed, that children of clergymen, or at least children educated on a rigidly austere, puritanical system, so often go conspicuously to the bad. Such an education, imposed on a nature that is unfit for it, generally begins by producing hypocrisy, and not unfrequently ends by a violent reaction into vice. There is no greater mistake in education than to associate virtue in early youth with gloomy colours and constant restrictions, and few people do more mischief in the world than those who are perpetually inventing crimes. In circles where smoking, or field sports, or going to the play, or reading novels, or indulging in any boisterous games or in the most harmless Sunday amusements, are treated as if they were grave moral offences, young men constantly grow up who end by looking on grave moral offences as not worse than these things. They lose all sense of proportion and perspective in morals, and those who are always straining at gnats are often peculiarly apt to swallow camels. It is quite right that men who have formed for themselves an ideal of life of the kind that I have described should steadily pursue it, but it is another thing to impose it upon others, and to prescribe it as of general application. By teaching as absolutely wrong things that are in reality only culpable in their abuse or their excess, they destroy the habit of moderate and restrained enjoyment, and a period of absolute prohibition is often followed by a period of unrestrained license.

The truth is there are elements in human nature which many moralists might wish to be absent, as they are very easily turned in the direction of vice, but which at the same time are inherent in our being, and, if rightly understood, are essential elements of human progress. The love of excitement and adventure; the fierce combative instinct that delights in danger, in struggle, and even in destruction; the restless ambition that seeks with an insatiable longing to better its position and to climb heights that are yet unscaled; the craving for some enjoyment which not merely gives pleasure but carries with it a thrill of passion,—all this lies deep in human nature and plays a great part in that struggle for existence, in that harsh and painful process of evolution by which civilisation is formed, faculty stimulated to its full development, and human progress secured. In the education of the individual, as in the education of the race, the true policy in dealing with these things is to find for them a healthy, useful, or at least harmless sphere of action. In the chemistry of character they may ally themselves with the most heroic as well as with the worst parts of our nature, and the same passion for excitement which in one man will take the form of ruinous vice, in another may lead to brilliant enterprise, while in a third it may be turned with no great difficulty into channels which are very innocent.

Take, for example, the case to which I have already referred, of a perfectly commonplace boy who, on coming of age, finds himself with a competence that saves him from the necessity of work; and who has no ambition, literary or artistic taste, love of work, interest in politics, religious or philanthropic earnestness, or special talent. What will become of him? In probably the majority of cases ruin, disease, and an early death lie before him. He seeks only for amusement and excitement, and three fatal temptations await him—drink, gambling, and women. If he falls under the dominion of these, or even of one of them, he almost infallibly wrecks either his fortune or his constitution, or both. It is perfectly useless to set before him high motives or ideals, or to incite him to lines of life for which he has no aptitude and which can give him no pleasure. What, then, can save him? Most frequently a happy marriage; but even if he is fortunate enough to attain this, it will probably only be after several years, and in those years a fatal bias is likely to be given to his life which can never be recovered. Yet experience shows that in cases of this kind a keen love of sport can often do much. With his gun and with his hunter he finds an interest, an excitement, an employment which may not be particularly noble, but which is at least sufficiently absorbing, and is not injurious either to his morals, his health, or his fortune. It is no small gain if, in the competition of pleasures, country pleasures take the place of those town pleasures which, in such cases as I have described, usually mean pleasures of vice.

Nor is it by any means only in such cases that field sports prove a great moral safety-valve, scattering morbid tastes and giving harmless and healthy vent to turns of character or feeling which might very easily be converted into vice. Among the influences that form the character of the upper classes of Englishmen they have a great part, and in spite of the exaggerations and extravagances that often accompany them, few good observers will doubt that they have an influence for good. However much of the Philistine element there may be in the upper classes in England, however manifest may be their limitations and their defects, there can be little doubt that on the whole the conditions of English life have in this sphere proved successful. There are few better working types within the reach of commonplace men than that of an English gentleman with his conventional tastes, standard of honour, religion, sympathies, ideals, opinions and instincts. He is not likely to be either a saint or a philosopher, but he is tolerably sure to be both an honourable and a useful man, with a fair measure of good sense and moderation, and with some disposition towards public duties. A crowd of out-of-door amusements and interests do much to dispel his peccant humours and to save him from the stagnation and the sensuality that have beset many foreign aristocracies. County business stimulates his activity, mitigates his class prejudices, and forms his judgment: and his standard of honour will keep him substantially right amid much fluctuation of opinions.

The reader, from his own experience of individual characters, will supply other illustrations of the lines of thought I am enforcing. Some temptations that beset us must be steadily faced and subdued. Others are best met by flight—by avoiding the thoughts or scenes that call them into activity; while other elements of character which we might wish to be away are often better treated in the way of marriage—that is by a judicious regulation and harmless application—than in the way of asceticism or attempted suppression. It is possible for men—if not in educating themselves, at least in educating others—to pitch their standard and their ideal too high. What they have to do is to recognise their own qualities and the qualities of those whom they influence as they are, and endeavour to use these usually very imperfect materials to the best advantage for the formation of useful, honourable and happy lives. According to the doctrine of this book, man comes into the world with a free will. But his free will, though a real thing, acts in a narrower circle and with more numerous limitations than he usually imagines. He can, however, do much so to dispose, regulate and modify the circumstances of his life as to diminish both his sufferings and his temptations, and to secure for himself the external conditions of a happy and upright life, and he can do something by judicious and persevering self-culture to improve those conditions of character on which, more than on any external circumstances, both happiness and virtue depend.

FOOTNOTES:

[61] Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, ch. xxii.

[62] Hist. ii. 35.

[63] Speech on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings.

[64] Davis.

[65] Cable.

[66] Jefferies, Field and Hedgerow, p. 242.



CHAPTER XIII

MONEY

I do not think that I can better introduce the few pages which I propose to write on the relations of money to happiness and to character than by a pregnant passage from one of the essays[67] of Sir Henry Taylor. 'So manifold are the bearings of money upon the lives and characters of mankind, that an insight which should search out the life of a man in his pecuniary relations would penetrate into almost every cranny of his nature. He who knows like St. Paul both how to spare and how to abound has a great knowledge; for if we take account of all the virtues with which money is mixed up—honesty, justice, generosity, charity, frugality, forethought, self-sacrifice, and of their correlative vices, it is a knowledge which goes near to cover the length and breadth of humanity, and a right measure in getting, saving, spending, giving, taking, lending, borrowing and bequeathing would almost argue a perfect man.'

There are few subjects on which the contrast between the professed and the real beliefs of men is greater than in the estimate of money. More than any other single thing it is the object and usually the lifelong object of human effort, and any accession of wealth is hailed by the immense majority of mankind as an unquestionable blessing. Yet if we were to take literally much of the teaching we have all heard we should conclude that money, beyond what is required for the necessaries of life, is far more a danger than a good; that it is the pre-eminent source of evil and temptation; that one of the first duties of man is to emancipate himself from the love of it, which can only mean from any strong desire for its increase.

In this, as in so many other things, the question is largely one of degree. No one who knows what is meant by the abject poverty to which a great proportion of the human race is condemned will doubt that at least such an amount of money as raises them from this condition is one of the greatest of human blessings. Extreme poverty means a lifelong struggle for the bare means of living; it means a life spent in wretched hovels, with insufficient food, clothes and firing, in enforced and absolute ignorance; an existence almost purely animal, with nearly all the higher faculties of man undeveloped. There is a far greater real difference in the material elements of happiness between the condition of such men and that of a moderately prosperous artizan in a civilised country than there is between the latter and the millionaire.

Money, again, at least to such an amount as enables men to be in some considerable degree masters of their own course in life, is also on the whole a great good. In this second degree it has less influence on happiness than health, and probably than character and domestic relations, but its influence is at least very great. Money is a good thing because it can be transformed into many other things. It gives the power of education which in itself does much to regulate the character and opens out countless tastes and spheres of enjoyment. It saves its possessor from the fear of a destitute old age and of the destitution of those he may leave behind, which is the harrowing care of multitudes who cannot be reckoned among the very poor. It enables him to intermit labour in times of sickness and sorrow and old age, and in those extremes of heat and cold during which active labour is little less than physical pain. It gives him and it gives those he loves increased chances of life and increased hope of recovery in sickness. Few of the pains of penury are more acute than those of a poor man who sees his wife or children withering away through disease, and who knows or believes that better food or medical attendance, or a surgical operation, or a change of climate, might have saved them. Money, too, even when it does not dispense with work, at least gives a choice of work and longer intervals of leisure. For the very poor this choice hardly exists, or exists only within very narrow limits, and from want of culture or want of leisure some of their most marked natural aptitudes are never called into exercise. With the comparatively rich this is not the case. Money enables them to select the course of life which is congenial to their tastes and most suited to their natural talents, or, if their strongest taste cannot become their work, money at least gives them some leisure to cultivate it. The command of leisure, when it is fruitful leisure spent in congenial work, is to many, perhaps, the greatest boon it can bestow. 'Riches,' said Charles Lamb, 'are chiefly good because they give us Time.' 'All one's time to oneself! for which alone I rankle with envy at the rich. Books are good and pictures are good, and money to buy them is therefore good—but to buy time—in other words, life!'

To some men money is chiefly valuable because it makes it possible for them not to think of money. Except in the daily regulation of ordinary life, it enables them to put aside cares which are to them both harassing and distasteful, and to concentrate their thoughts and energies on other objects. An assured competence also, however moderate, gives men the priceless blessing of independence. There are walks of life, there are fields of ambition, there are classes of employments in which between inadequate remuneration and the pressure of want on the one side, and the facilities and temptations to illicit gain on the other, it is extremely difficult for a poor man to walk straight. Illicit gain does not merely mean gain that brings a man within the range of the criminal law. Many of its forms escape legal and perhaps social censure, and may be even sanctioned by custom. A competence, whether small or large, is no sure preservative against that appetite for gain which becomes one of the most powerful and insatiable of passions. But it at least diminishes temptation. It takes away the pressure of want under which so many natures that were once substantially honest have broken down.

In the expenditure of money there is usually a great deal of the conventional, the factitious, the purely ostentatious, but we are here dealing with the most serious realities of life. There are few or no elements of happiness and character more important than those I have indicated, and a small competence conduces powerfully to them. Let no man therefore despise it, for if wisely used it is one of the most real blessings of life. It is of course only within the reach of a small minority, but the number might easily be much larger than it is. Often when it is inherited in early youth it is scattered in one or two years of gambling and dissipation, followed by a lifetime of regret. In other cases it crumbles away in a generation, for it is made an excuse for a life of idleness, and when children multiply or misfortunes arrive, what was once a competence becomes nothing more than bare necessity. In a still larger number of cases many of its advantages are lost because men at once adopt a scale of living fully equal to their income. A man who with one house would be a wealthy man, finds life with two houses a constant struggle. A set of habits is acquired, a scale or standard of luxury is adopted, which at once sweeps away the margin of superfluity. Riches or poverty depend not merely on the amount of our possessions, but quite as much on the regulation of our desires, and the full advantages of competence are only felt when men begin by settling their scheme of life on a scale materially within their income. When the great lines of expenditure are thus wisely and frugally established, they can command a wide latitude and much ease in dealing with the smaller ones.

It is of course true that the power of a man thus to regulate his expenditure is by no means absolute. The position in society in which a man is born brings with it certain conventionalities and obligations that cannot be discarded. A great nobleman who has inherited a vast estate and a conspicuous social position will, through no fault of his own, find himself involved in constant difficulties and struggles on an income a tenth part of which would suffice to give a simple private gentleman every reasonable enjoyment in life. A poor clergyman who is obliged to keep up the position of a gentleman is in reality a much poorer man than a prosperous artizan, even though his actual income may be somewhat larger. But within the bounds which the conventionalities of society imperatively prescribe many scales of expenditure are possible, and the wise regulation of these is one of the chief forms of practical wisdom.

It may be observed, however, that not only men but nations differ widely in this respect, and the difference is not merely that between prudence and folly, between forethought and passion, but is also in a large degree a difference of tastes and ideals. In general it will be found that in Continental nations a man of independent fortune will place his expenditure more below his means than in England, and a man who has pursued some lucrative employment will sooner be satisfied with the competence he has acquired and will gladly exchange his work for a life of leisure. The English character prefers a higher rate of expenditure and work continued to the end.

It is probable that, so far as happiness depends on money, the happiest lot—though it is certainly not that which is most envied—is that of a man who possesses a realised fortune sufficient to save him from serious money cares about the present and the future, but who at the same time can only keep up the position in society he has chosen for himself, and provide as he desires for his children, by adding to it a professional income. Work is necessary both to happiness and to character, and experience shows that it most frequently attains its full concentration and continuity when it is professional, or, in other words, money-making. Men work in traces as they will seldom work at liberty. The compulsory character, the steady habits, the constant emulation of professional life mould and strengthen the will, and probably the happiest lot is when this kind of work exists, but without the anxiety of those who depend solely on it.

It is also a good thing when wealth tends to increase with age. 'Old age,' it has been said, 'is a very expensive thing.' If the taste for pleasure diminishes, the necessity for comfort increases. Men become more dependent and more fastidious, and hardships that are indifferent to youth become acutely painful. Beside this, money cares are apt to weigh with an especial heaviness upon the old. Avarice, as has been often observed, is eminently an old-age vice, and in natures that are in no degree avaricious it will be found that real money anxieties are more felt and have a greater haunting power in age than in youth. There is then the sense of impotence which makes men feel that their earning power has gone. On the other hand youth, and especially early married life spent under the pressure of narrow circumstances, will often be looked back upon as both the happiest and the most fruitful period of life. It is the best discipline of character. It is under such circumstances that men acquire habits of hard and steady work, frugality, order, forethought, punctuality, and simplicity of tastes. They acquire sympathies and realisations they would never have known in more prosperous circumstances. They learn to take keen pleasure in little things, and to value rightly both money and time. If wealth and luxury afterwards come in overflowing measure, these lessons will not be wholly lost.

The value of money as an element of happiness diminishes rapidly in proportion to its amount. In the case of the humbler fortunes, each accession brings with it a large increase of pleasure and comfort, and probably a very considerable addition to real happiness. In the case of rich men this is not the case, and of colossal fortunes only a very small fraction can be truly said to minister to the personal enjoyment of the owner. The disproportion in the world between pleasure and cost is indeed almost ludicrous. The two or three shillings that gave us our first Shakespeare would go but a small way towards providing one of the perhaps untasted dishes on the dessert table. The choicest masterpieces of the human mind—the works of human genius that through the long course of centuries have done most to ennoble, console, brighten, and direct the lives of men, might all be purchased—I do not say by the cost of a lady's necklace, but by that of one or two of the little stones of which it is composed. Compare the relish with which the tired pedestrian eats his bread and cheese with the appetites with which men sit down to some stately banquet; compare the level of spirits at the village dance with that of the great city ball whose lavish splendour fills the society papers with admiration; compare the charm of conversation in the college common room with the weary faces that may be often seen around the millionaire's dinner table,—and we may gain a good lesson of the vanity of riches. The transition from want to comfort brings with it keen enjoyment and much lasting happiness. The transition from mere comfort to luxury brings incomparably less and costs incomparably more. Let a man of enormous wealth analyse his life from day to day and try to estimate what are the things or hours that have afforded him real and vivid pleasure. In many cases he will probably say that he has found it in his work—in others in the hour spent with his cigar, his newspaper, or his book, or in his game of cricket, or in the excitement of the hunting-field, or in his conversation with an old friend, or in hearing his daughters sing, or in welcoming his son on his return from school. Let him look round the splendid adornments of his home and ask how many of these things have ever given him a pleasure at all proportionate to their cost. Probably in many cases, if he deals honestly with himself, he would confess that his armchair and his bookshelves are almost the only exceptions.