And here comes in the peculiarly paralysing effect of these baser emotions. As Victor Hugo once said, in a fine apophthegm, "Despair yawns." Fear and anxiety bring with them a particular kind of physical fatigue which makes us listless and inert. They lie on the spirit with a leaden dullness, which takes from us all possibility of energy and motion. Who does not know the instinct, when one is crushed and tortured by depression, to escape into solitude and silence, and to let the waves and streams flow over one. That is a universal instinct, and it is not wholly to be disregarded; it shows that to torture oneself into rational activity is of little use, or worse than useless.

When I was myself a sufferer from long nervous depression, and had to face a social gathering, I used out of very shame, and partly I think out of a sense of courtesy due to others, to galvanise myself into a sort of horrid merriment. The dark tide flowed on beneath in its sore and aching channels. It was common enough then for some sympathetic friend to say, "You seemed better to-night—you were quite yourself; that is what you want; if you would only make the effort and go out more into society, you would soon forget your troubles." There is something in it, because the sick mind must be persuaded if possible not to grave its dolorous course too indelibly in the temperament; but no one else could see the acute and intolerable reaction which used to follow such a strain, or how, the excitement over, the suffering resumed its sway over the exhausted self with an insupportable agony. I am sure that in my long affliction I never suffered more than after occasions when I was betrayed by excitement into argument or lively talk, and the worst spasms of melancholy that I ever endured were the direct and immediate results of such efforts.

The counteracting force in fact must be an emotional and instinctive one, not a rational and deliberate one; and this must be our next endeavour, to see in what direction the counterpoise must lie.

In depression then, and when causeless fears assail us, we must try to put the mind in easier postures, to avoid excess and strain, to live more in company, to do something different. Human beings are happiest in monotony and settled ways of life; but these also develop their own poisons, like sameness of diet, however wholesome it may be. It is, I believe, an established fact that most people cannot eat a pigeon a day for fourteen days in succession; a pigeon is not unwholesome, but the digestion cannot stand iteration. There is an old and homely story of a man who went to a great doctor suffering from dyspepsia. The doctor asked him what he ate, and he said that he always lunched off bread and cheese. "Try a mutton chop," said the doctor. He did so with excellent results. A year later he was ill again and went to the same doctor, who put him through the same catechism. "What do you have for luncheon?" said the doctor. "A chop," said the patient, conscious of virtuous obedience. "Try bread and cheese," said the doctor. "Why," said the patient, "that was the very thing you told me to avoid." "Yes," said the doctor, "and I tell you to avoid a chop now. You, are suffering not from diet, but from monotony of diet—and you want a change."

The principle holds good of ordinary life; it is humiliating to confess it, but these depressions and despondencies which beset us are often best met by very ordinary physical remedies. It is not uncommon for people who suffer from them to examine their consciences, rake up forgotten transgressions, and feel themselves to be under the anger of God. I do not mean that such scrutiny of life is wholly undesirable; depression, though it exaggerates our sinfulness, has a wonderful way of laying its finger on what is amiss, but we must not wilfully continue in sadness; and sadness is often a combination of an old instinct with the staleness which comes of civilised life; and a return to nature, as it is called, is often a cure, because civilisation has this disadvantage, that it often takes from us the necessity of doing many of the things which it is normal to man by inheritance to do—fighting, hunting, preparing food, working with the hands. We combat these old instincts artificially by games and exercises. It is humiliating again to think that golf is an artificial substitute for man's need to hunt and plough, but it is undoubtedly true; and thus to break with the monotony of civilisation, and to delude the mind into believing that it is occupied with primal needs is often a great refreshment. Anyone who fishes and shoots knows that the joy of securing a fish or a partridge is entirely out of proportion to any advantages resulting. A lawyer could make money enough in a single week to buy the whole contents of a fishmonger's shop, but this does not give him half the satisfaction which comes from fishing day after day for a whole week, and securing perhaps three salmon. The fact is that the old savage mind, which lies behind the rational and educated mind, is having its fling; it believes itself to be staving off starvation by its ingenuity and skill, and it unbends like a loosened bow.

We may be enjoying our work, and we may even take glad refuge in it to stave off depression, but we are then often adding fuel to the fire, and tiring the very faculty of resistance, which hardly knows that it needs resting.

The smallest change of scene, of company, of work may effect a miraculous improvement when we are feeling low-spirited and listless. It is not idleness as a rule that we want, but the use of other faculties and powers and muscles.

And thus though our anxieties may be a real factor in our success, and may give us the touch of prudence and vigilance we want, it does not do to allow ourselves to drift into vague fears and dull depressions, and we must fight them in a practical way. We must remember the case of Naaman, who was vexed at being told to go and dip himself in a mud-stained stream running violently in rocky places, when he might have washed in Abana and Pharpar, the statelier, purer, fuller streams of his native land. It is just the little homely torrent that we need, and part of our cares come from being too dignified about them. It is pleasanter to think oneself the battle-ground for high and tragical forces of a spiritual kind, than to realise that some little homely bit of common machinery is out of gear. But we must resist the temptation to feel that our fears have a dark and great significance. We must simply treat them as little sicknesses and ailments of the soul.

I therefore believe that fears are like those little fugitive gliding things that seem to dart across the field of the eye when it is weak and ailing, vague clusters and tangles and spidery webs, that float and fly, and can never be fixed and truly seen; and that they are best treated as we learn to treat common ailments, by not concerning ourselves very much about them, by enduring and evading them and distracting the mind, and not by facing them, because they will not be faced; nor can they be dispelled by reason, because they are not in the plane of reason at all, but phantoms gathered by the sick imagination, distorted out of their proper shape, evil nightmares, the horror of which is gone with the dawn. They are the shadows of our childishness, and they show that we have a long journey before us; and they gain their strength from the fact that we gather them together out of the future like the bundle of sticks in the fable, when we shall have the strength to snap them singly as they come.

The real way to fight them is to get together a treasure of interests and hopes and beautiful visions and emotions, and above all to have some definite work which lies apart from our daily work, to which we can turn gladly in empty hours; because fears are born of inaction and idleness, and melt insensibly away in the warmth of labour and duty.

Nothing can really hurt us except our own despair. But the problem which is difficult is how to practise a real fulness of life, and yet to keep a certain detachment, how to realise that what we do is small and petty enough, but that the greatness lies in our energy and briskness of action; we should try to be interested in life as we are interested in a game, not believing too much in the importance of it, but yet intensely concerned at the moment in playing it as well and skilfully as possible. The happiest people of all are those who can shift their interest rapidly from point to point, and throw themselves into the act of the moment, whatever it may be. Of course this is largely at first a matter of temperament, but temperament is not unalterable; and self-discipline working along the lines of habit has a great attractiveness, the moment we feel that life is beginning to shape itself upon real lines.



XVI

FEAR OF LIFE

Let us divide our fears up into definite divisions, and see how it is best to deal with them. Lowest and worst of all is the shapeless and bodiless fear, which is a real disease of brain and nerves. I know no more poignant description of this than in the strange book Lavengro:

"'What ails you, my child,' said a mother to her son, as he lay on a couch under the influence of the dreadful one; 'what ails you? you seem afraid!'

"Boy. And so I am; a dreadful fear is upon me.

"Mother. But of what? there is no one can harm you; of what are you apprehensive?

"Boy. Of nothing that I can express; I know not what I am afraid of, but afraid I am.

"Mother. Perhaps you see sights and visions; I knew a lady once who was continually thinking that she saw an armed man threaten her, but it was only an imagination, a phantom of the brain.

"Boy. No armed man threatens me; and 'tis not a thing that would cause me any fear. Did an armed man threaten me, I would get up and fight him; weak as I am, I would wish for nothing better, for then, perhaps, I should lose this fear; mine is a dread of I know not what, and there the horror lies.

"Mother. Your forehead is cool, and your speech collected. Do you know where you are?

"Boy. I know where I am, and I see things just as they are; you are beside me, and upon the table there is a book which was written by a Florentine. All this I see, and that there is no ground for being afraid. I am, moreover, quite cool, and feel no pain—but—but—

"And then there was a burst of 'gemiti, sospiri ed alti guai.' Alas, alas, poor child of clay! as the sparks fly upward, so wast thou born to sorrow—Onward!"

That is a description of amazing power, but of course we are here dealing with a definite brain-malady, in which the emotional centres are directly affected. This in a lesser degree no doubt affects more people than one would wish to think; but it may be considered a physical malady of which fear is the symptom and not the cause.

Let us then frankly recognise the physical element in these irrational terrors; and when one has once done this, a great burden is taken off the mind, because one sees that such fear may be a real illusion, a sort of ghastly mockery, which by directly affecting the delicate machinery through which emotion is translated into act, may produce a symptom of terror which is both causeless and baseless, and which may imply neither a lack of courage nor self-control.

And, therefore, I feel, as against the Ascetic and the Stoic, that I am meant to live and to taste the fulness of life; and that if I begin by choosing the wrong joys, it is that I may learn their unreality. I have learned already to compromise about many things, to be content with getting much less than I desire, to acquiesce in missing many good things altogether. But asceticism for the sake of prudence seems to me a wilful error, as though a man practised starvation through uneasy days, because of the chance that he might some day find himself with not enough to eat. The only self-denial worth practising is the self-denial that one admires, and that seems to one to be fine and beautiful.

For we must emphatically remember that the saint is one who lives life with high enjoyment, and with a vital zest; he chooses holiness because of its irresistible beauty, and because of the appeal it makes to his mind. He does not creep through life ashamed, depressed, anxious, letting ordinary delights slip through his nerveless fingers; and if he denies himself common pleasures, it is because, if indulged, they thwart and mar his purer and more lively joys.

The fear of life, the frame of mind which says, "This attractive and charming thing captivates me, but I will mistrust it and keep it at arm's length, because if I lose it, I shall experience discomfort," seems to me a poor and timid handling of life. I would rather say, "I will use it generously and freely, knowing that it may not endure; but it is a sign to me of God's care for me, that He gives me the desire and the gratification; and even if He means me to learn that it is only a small thing, I can learn that only by using it and trying its sweetness."

This may be held a dangerous doctrine; but I do not mean that life must be a foolish and ingenuous indulgence of every appetite and whim. One must make choices; and there are many appetites which come hand in hand with their own shadow. I am not here speaking of tampering with sin; I think that most people burn their fingers over that in early life. But I am speaking rather of the delights of the body that are in no way sinful, food and drink, games and exercise, love itself; and of the joys of the mind and the artistic sense; free and open relations with men and women of keen interests and eager fancies; the delights of work, professional success, the doing of pleasant tasks as vigorously and as perfectly as one can—all the stir and motion and delight of life.

To shrink back in terror from all this seems to me a sort of cowardice; and it is a cowardice too to go on indulging in things which one does not enjoy for the sake of social tradition. One must not be afraid of breaking with social custom, if one finds that it leads one into dreary and useless formalities, stupid and expensive entertainments, tiresome gatherings, dull and futile assemblies. I think that men and women ought gaily and delightedly to choose the things that minister to their vigour and joy, and to throw themselves willingly into these things, so long as they do not interfere with plainer and simpler duties.

Another way of escape from the importunities of fear is to be very resolute in fighting against our personal claims to honour and esteem. We are sorely wounded through our ambitions, whether they be petty or great; and it is astonishing to find how frail a basis often serves for a sense of dignity. I have known lowly and unimportant people who were yet full of pragmatical self-concern, and whose pride took the form not so much of exalting their own consequence as of thinking meanly of other people. It is easy to restore one's own confidence by dwelling with bitter emphasis on the faults and failings of those about one, by cataloguing the deficiencies of those who have achieved success, by accustoming oneself to think of one's own lack of success as a sign of unworldliness, and by attributing the success of others to a cynical and unscrupulous pursuit of reputation. There is nothing in the world which so differentiates men and women as the tendency to suspect and perceive affronts, and to nurture grievances. It is so fatally easy to think that one has been inconsiderately treated, and to mistake susceptibility for courage. Let us boldly face the fact that we get in this world very much what we earn and deserve, and there is no surer way of being excluded and left out from whatever is going forward than a habit of claiming more respect and deference than is due to one. If we are snubbed and humiliated, it is generally because we have put ourselves forward and taken more than our share. Whereas if we have been content to bear a hand, to take trouble, and to desire useful work rather than credit, our influence grows silently and we become indispensable. A man who does not notice petty grumbling, who laughs away sharp comments, who does not brood over imagined insults, who forgets irritable passages, who makes allowance for impatience and fatigue, is singularly invulnerable. The power of forgetting is infinitely more valuable than the power of forgiving, in many conjunctions of life. In nine cases out of ten, the wounds which our sensibilities receive are the merest pin-pricks, enlarged and fretted by our own hands; we work the little thorn about in the puncture till it festers, instead of drawing it out and casting it away.

Very few of the prizes of life that we covet are worth winning, if we scheme to get them; it is the honour or the task that comes to us unexpectedly that we deserve. I have heard discontented men say that they never get the particular work that they desire and for which they feel themselves to be suited; and meanwhile life flies swiftly, while we are picturing ourselves in all sorts of coveted situations, and slighting the peaceful happiness, the beautiful joys which lie all around us, as we go forward in our greedy reverie.

I have been much surprised, since I began some years ago to receive letters from all sorts of unknown people, to realise how many persons there are in the world who think themselves unappreciated. Such are not generally people who have tried and failed;—an honest failure very often brings a wholesome sense of incompetence;—but they are generally persons who think that they have never had a chance of showing what is in them, speakers who have found their audiences unresponsive, writers who have been discouraged by finding their amateur efforts unsaleable, men who lament the unsuitability of their profession to their abilities, women who find themselves living in what they call a thoroughly unsympathetic circle. The failure here lies in an incapacity to believe in one's own inefficiency, and a sturdy persuasion of the malevolence of others.

Here is a soil in which fears spring up like thorns and briars. "Whatever I do or say, I shall be passed over and slighted, I shall always find people determined to exclude and neglect me!" I know myself, only too well, how fertile the brain is in discovering almost any reason for a failure except what is generally the real reason, that the work was badly done. And the more eager one is for personal recognition and patent success, the more sickened one is by any hint of contempt and derision.

But it is quite possible, as I also know from personal experience, to go patiently and humbly to work again, to face the reasons for failure, to learn to enjoy work, to banish from the mind the uneasy hope of personal distinction. We may try to discern the humour of Providence, because I am as certain as I can be of anything that we are humorously treated as well as lovingly regarded. Let me relate two small incidents which did me a great deal of good at a time of self-importance. I was once asked to give a lecture, and it was widely announced. I saw my own name in capital letters upon advertisements displayed in the street. On the evening appointed, I went to the place, and met the chairman of the meeting and some of the officials in a room adjoining the hall where I was to speak. We bowed and smiled, paid mutual compliments, congratulated each other on the importance of the occasion. At last the chairman consulted his watch and said it was time to be beginning. A procession was formed, a door was majestically thrown open by an attendant, and we walked with infinite solemnity on to the platform of an entirely empty hall, with rows of benches all wholly unfurnished with guests. I think it was one of the most ludicrous incidents I ever remember. The courteous confusion of the chairman, the dismay of the committee, the colossal nature of the fiasco filled me, I am glad to say, not with mortification, but with an overpowering desire to laugh.

I may add that there had been a mistake about the announcement of the hour, and ten minutes later a minute audience did arrive, whom I proceeded to address with such spirit as I could muster; but I have always been grateful for the humorous nature of the snub administered to me.

Again on another occasion I had to pay a visit of business to a remote house in the country. A good-natured friend descanted upon the excitement it would be to the household to entertain a living author, and how eagerly my utterances would be listened to. I was received not only without respect but with obvious boredom. In the course of the afternoon I discovered that I was supposed to be a solicitor's clerk, but when a little later it transpired what my real occupations were, I was not displeased to find that no member of the party had ever heard of my existence, or was aware that I had ever published a book, and when I was questioned as to what I had written, no one had ever come across anything that I had printed, until at last I soared into some transient distinction by the discovery that my brother was the author of Dodo.

I cannot help feeling that there is something gently humorous about this good-humoured indication that the whole civilised world is not engaged in the pursuit of literature, and that one's claims to consideration depend upon one's social merits. I do honestly think that Providence was here deliberately poking fun at me, and showing me that a habit of presenting one's opinions broadcast to the world does not necessarily mean that the world is much aware either of oneself or of one's opinions.

The cure then, it seems to me, for personal ambition, is the humorous reflection that the stir and hum of one's own particular teetotum is confined to a very small space and range; and that the witty description of the Greek politician who was said to be well known throughout the whole civilised world and at Lampsacus, or of the philosopher who was announced as the author of many epoch-making volumes and as the second cousin of the Earl of Cork, represents a very real truth,—that reputation is not a thing which is worth bothering one's head about; that if it comes, it is apt to be quite as inconvenient as it is pleasant, while if one grows to depend upon it, it is as liable to part with its sparkle as soda-water in an open glass.

And then if one comes to consider the commoner claim, the claim to be felt and respected and regarded in one's own little circle, it is wholesome and humiliating to observe how generously and easily that regard is conceded to affectionateness and kindness, and how little it is won by any brilliance or sharpness. Of course irritable, quick-tempered, severe, discontented people can win attention easily enough, and acquire the kind of consideration which is generally conceded to anyone who can be unpleasant. How often families and groups are drilled and cautioned by anxious mothers and sisters not to say or do anything which will vex so-and-so! Such irritable people get the rooms and the chairs and the food that they like, and the talk in their presence is eagerly kept upon subjects on which they can hold forth. But how little such regard lasts, and how welcome a relief it is, when one that is thus courted and deferred to is absent! Of course if one is wholly indifferent whether one is regarded, needed, missed, loved, so long as one can obtain the obedience and the conveniences one likes, there is no more to be said. But I often think of that wonderful poem of Christina Rossetti's about the revenant, the spirit that returns to the familiar house, and finds himself unregretted:

"'To-morrow' and 'to-day,' they cried; I was of yesterday!"

One sometimes sees, in the faces of old family servants, in unregarded elderly relatives, bachelor uncles, maiden aunts, who are entertained as a duty, or given a home in charity, a very beautiful and tender look, indescribable in words but unmistakable, when it seems as if self, and personal claims, and pride, and complacency had really passed out of the expression, leaving nothing but a hope of being loved, and a desire to do some humble service.

I saw it the other day in the face of a little old lady, who lived in the house of a well-to-do cousin, with rather a bustling and vigorous family pervading the place. She was a small frail creature, with a tired worn face, but with no look of fretfulness or discontent. She had a little attic as a bedroom, and she was not considered in any way. She effaced herself, ate about as much as a bird would eat, seldom spoke, uttering little ejaculations of surprise and amusement at what was said; if there was a place vacant in the carriage, she drove out. If there was not, she stopped at home. She amused herself by going about in the village, talking to the old women and the children, who half loved and half despised her for being so very unimportant, and for having nothing she could give away. But I do not think the little lady ever had a thought except of gratitude for her blessings, and admiration for the robustness and efficiency of her relations. She claimed nothing from life and expected nothing. It seemed a little frail and vanquished existence, and there was not an atom of what is called proper pride about her; but it was fine, for all that! An infinite sweetness looked out of her eyes; she suffered a good deal, but never complained. She was glad to live, found the world a beautiful and interesting place, and never quarrelled with her slender share of its more potent pleasures. And she will slip silently out of life some day in her attic room; and be strangely mourned and missed. I do not consider that a failure in life, and I am not sure that it is not something much more like a triumph. I know that as I watched her one evening knitting in the corner, following what was said with intense enjoyment, uttering her little bird-like cries, I thought how few of the things that could afflict me had power to wound her, and how little she had to fear. I do not think she wanted to take flight, but yet I am sure she had no dread of death; and when she goes thitherward, leaving the little tired and withered frame behind, it will be just as when the crested lark springs up from the dust of the roadway, and wings his way into the heart of the dewy upland.



XVII

SIMPLICITY

If we are to avoid the dark onset of fear, we must at all costs simplify life, because the more complicated and intricate our life is, and the more we multiply our defences, the more gates and posterns there are by which the enemy can creep upon us. Property, comforts, habits, conveniences, these are the vantage-grounds from which fears can organise their invasions. The more that we need excitement, distraction, diversion, the more helpless we become without them. All this is very clearly recognised and stated in the Gospel. Our Saviour does not seem to regard the abandonment of wealth as a necessary condition of the Christian life, but He does very distinctly say that rich men are beset with great difficulties owing to their wealth, and He indicates that a man who trusts complacently in his possessions is tempted into a disastrous security. He speaks of laying up treasure in heaven as opposed to the treasures which men store up on earth; and He points out that whenever things are put aside unused, in order that the owner may comfort himself by the thought that they are there if he wants them, decay and corruption begin at once to undermine and destroy them. What exactly the treasure in heaven can be it is hard to define. It cannot be anything quite so sordid as good deeds done for the sake of spiritual investment, because our Saviour was very severe on those who, like the Pharisees, sought to acquire righteousness by scrupulosity. Nothing that is done just for the sake of one's own future benefit seems to be regarded in the Gospel as worth doing. The essence of Christian giving seems to be real giving, and not a sort of usurious loan. There is of course one very puzzling parable, that of the unjust steward, who used his last hours in office, before the news of his dismissal could get abroad, in cheating his master, in order to win the favour of the debtors by arbitrarily diminishing the amount of their debts. It seems strange that our Saviour should have drawn a moral out of so immoral an incident. Perhaps He was using a well-known story, and even making allowances for the admiration with which in the East resourcefulness, even of a fraudulent kind, was undoubtedly regarded. But the principle seems clear enough, that if the Christian chooses to possess wealth, he runs a great risk, and that it is therefore wiser to disembarrass oneself of it. Property is regarded in the Gospel as an undoubtedly dangerous thing; but so far from our Lord preaching a kind of socialism, and bidding men to co-operate anxiously for the sake of equalising wealth, He recommends an individualistic freedom from the burden of wealth altogether. But, as always in the Gospel, our Lord looks behind practice to motive; and it is clear that the motive for the abandonment of wealth is not to be a desire to act with a selfish prudence, in order to lay an obligation upon God to repay one generously in the future for present sacrifices, but rather the attainment of an individual liberty, which leaves the spirit free to deal with the real interests of life. And one must not overlook the definite promise that if a man seeks virtue first, even at the cost of earthly possessions and comforts, he will find that they will be added as well.

Those who would discredit the morality of the Gospel would have one believe that our Saviour in dealing with shrewd, homely, literal folk was careful to promise substantial future rewards for any worldly sacrifices they might make; but not so can I read the Gospel. Our Saviour does undoubtedly say plainly that we shall find it worth our while to escape from the burdens and anxieties of wealth, but the reward promised seems rather to be a lightness and contentment of spirit, and a freedom from heavy and unnecessary bonds.

In our complicated civilisation it is far more difficult to say what simplicity of life is. It is certainly not that expensive and dramatic simplicity which is sometimes contrived by people of wealth as a pleasant contrast to elaborate living. I remember the son of a very wealthy man, who had a great mansion in the country and a large house in London, telling me that his family circle were never so entirely happy as when they were living at close quarters in a small Scotch shooting-lodge, where their life was comparatively rough, and luxuries unattainable. But I gathered that the main delight of such a period was the sense of laying up a stock of health and freshness for the more luxurious life which intervened. The Anglo-Saxon naturally loves a kind of feudal dignity; he likes a great house, a crowd of servants and dependants, the impression of power and influence which it all gives; and the delights of ostentation, of having handsome things which one does not use and indeed hardly ever sees, of knowing that others are eating and drinking at one's expense, which is a thing far removed from hospitality, are dear to the temperament of our race. We may say at once that this is fatal to any simplicity of life; it may be that we cannot expect anyone who is born to such splendours deliberately to forego them; but I am sure of this, that a rich man, now and here, who spontaneously parted with his wealth, and lived sparely in a small house, would make perhaps as powerful an appeal to the imagination of the English world as could well be made. If a man had a message to deliver, there could be no better way of emphasizing it. It must not be a mere flight from the anxiety of worldly life into a more congenial seclusion. It should be done as Francis of Assisi did it, by continuing to live the life of the world without any of its normal conveniences. Patent and visible self-sacrifice, if it be accompanied by a tender love of humanity, will always be the most impressive attitude in the world.

But if one is not capable of going to such lengths, if indeed one has nothing that one can resign, how is it possible to practise simplicity of life? It can be done by limiting one's needs, by avoiding luxuries, by having nothing in one's house that one cannot use, by being detached from pretentiousness, by being indifferent to elaborate comforts. There are people whom I know who do this, and who, even though they live with some degree of wealth, are yet themselves obviously independent of comfort to an extraordinary degree. There is a Puritanical dislike of waste which is a very different thing, because it often coexists with an extreme attachment to the particular standard of comfort that the man himself prefers. I know people who believe that a substantial midday meal and a high tea are more righteous than a simple midday meal and a substantial dinner. But the right attitude is one of unconcern and the absence of uneasy scheming as to the details of life. There is no reason why people should not form habits, because method is the primary condition of work; but the moment that habit becomes tyrannous and elaborate, then the spirit is at once in bondage to anxiety. The real victory over these little cares is not for ever to have them on one's mind; or one becomes like the bread-and-butter fly in Through the Looking-Glass, whose food was weak tea with cream in it. "But supposing it cannot find any?" said Alice. "Then it dies," says the gnat, who is acting the part of interpreter. "But that must happen very often?" said Alice. "It ALWAYS happens!" says the gnat with sombre emphasis.

Simplicity is, in fact, a difficult thing to lay down rules for, because the essence of it is that it is free from rules; and those who talk and think most about it, are often the most uneasy and complicated natures. But it is certain that if one finds oneself growing more and more fastidious and particular, more and more easily disconcerted and put out and hampered by any variation from the exact scheme of life that one prefers, even if that scheme is an apparently simple one, it is certain that simplicity is at an end. The real simplicity is a sense of being at home and at ease in any company and mode of living, and a quiet equanimity of spirit which cannot be content to waste time over the arrangements of life. Sufficient food and exercise and sleep may be postulated; but these are all to be in the background, and the real occupations of life are to be work and interests and talk and ideas and natural relations with others. One knows of houses where some trifling omission of detail, some failure of service in a meal, will plunge the hostess into a dumb and incommunicable despair. The slightest lapse of the conventional order becomes a cloud that intercepts the sun. But the right attitude to life, if we desire to set ourselves free from this self-created torment, is a resolute avoidance of minute preoccupations, a light-hearted journeying, with an amused tolerance for the incidents of the way. A conventional order of life is useful only in so far as it removes from the mind the necessity of detailed planning, and allows it to flow punctually and mechanically in an ordered course. But if we exalt that order into something sacred and solemn, then we become pharisaical and meticulous, and the savour of life is lost.

One remembers the scene in David Copperfield which makes so fine a parable of life; how the merry party who were making the best of an ill-cooked meal, and grilling the chops over the lodging-house fire, were utterly disconcerted and reduced to miserable dignity by the entry of the ceremonious servant with his "Pray, permit me," and how his decorous management of the cheerful affair cast a gloom upon the circle which could not even be dispelled when he had finished his work and left them to themselves.



XVIII

AFFECTION

One of the ways in which our fears have power to wound us most grievously is through our affections, and here we are confronted with a real and crucial difficulty. Are we to hold ourselves in, to check the impulses of affection, to use self-restraint, not multiply intimacies, not extend sympathies? One sees every now and then lives which have entwined themselves with every tendril of passion and love and companionship and service round some one personality, and have then been bereaved, with the result that the whole life has been palsied and struck into desolation by the loss. I am thinking now of two instances which I have known; one was a wife, who was childless, and whose whole nature, every motive and every faculty, became centred upon her husband, a man most worthy of love. He died suddenly, and his wife lost everything at one blow; not only her lover and comrade, but every occupation as well which might have helped to distract her, because her whole life had been entirely devoted to her husband; and even the hours when he was absent from her had been given to doing anything and everything that might save him trouble or vexation. She lived on, though she would willingly have died at any moment, and the whole fabric of her life was shattered. Again, I think of a devoted daughter who had done the same office for an old and not very robust father. I heard her once say that the sorrow of her mother's death had been almost nullified for her by finding that she could do everything for and be everything to her father, whom she almost adored. She had refused an offer of marriage from a man whom she sincerely loved, that she might not leave her father, and she never even told her father of the incident, for fear that he might have felt that he had stood in the way of her happiness. When he died, she too found herself utterly desolate, without ties and without occupation, an elderly woman almost without friends or companions.

Ought one to feel that this kind of jealous absorption in a single individual affection is a mistake? It certainly brought both the wife and daughter an intense happiness, but in both cases the relation was so close and so intimate that it tended gradually to seclude them from all other relations. The husband and the father were both reserved and shy men, and desired no other companionship. One can see so easily how it all came about, and what the inevitable result was bound to be, and yet it would have been difficult at any point to say what could have been done. Of course these great absorbed emotions involve large risks; and it may be doubted whether life can be safely lived on these intensive lines. These are of course extreme instances, but there are many cases in the world, and especially in the case of women whose life is entirely built up on certain emotions like the love and care of children; and when that is so, a nature becomes liable to the sharpest incursions of fear. It is of little use arguing such cases theoretically, because, as the proverb says, as the land lies the water flows,—and love makes very light of all prudential considerations.

The difficulty does not arise with large and generous natures which give love prodigally in many directions, because if one such relation is broken by death, love can still exercise itself upon those that remain. It is the fierce and jealous sort of love that is so hard to deal with, a love that exults in solitariness of devotion, and cannot bear any intrusion of other relations.

Yet if one believes, as I for one believe, that the secret of the world is somehow hidden in love, and can be interpreted through love alone, then one must run the risks of love, and seek for strength to bear the inevitable suffering which love must bring.

But men and women are very differently made in this respect. Among innumerable minor differences, certain broad divisions are clear. Men, in the first place, both by training and temperament, are far less dependent upon affection than women. Career and occupation play a much larger part in their thoughts. If one could test and intercept the secret and unoccupied reveries of men, when the mind moves idly among the objects which most concern it, it would be found, I do not doubt, that men's minds occupy themselves much more about definite and tangible things—their work, their duties, their ambitions, their amusements—and centre little upon the thought of other people; an affection, an emotional relation, is much more of an incident than a settled preoccupation; and then with men there are two marked types, those who give and lavish affection freely, who are interested and attracted by others and wish to attach and secure close friends; and there are others who respond to advances, yet do not go in search of friendship, but only accept it when it comes; and the singular thing is that such natures, which are often cold and self-absorbed, have a power of kindling emotion in others which men of generous and eager feeling sometimes lack. It is strange that it should be so, but there is some psychological law at the back of it; and it is certainly true in my experience that the men who have been most eagerly sought in friendship have not as a rule been the most open-hearted and expansive natures. I suppose that a certain law of pursuit holds good, and that people of self-contained temperament, with a sort of baffling charm, who are critical and hard to please, excite a certain ambition in those who would claim their affection.

Women, I have no doubt, live far more in the thought of others, and desire their intention; they wish to arrive at mutual understanding and confidence, to explore personality, to pierce behind the surface, to establish a definite relation. Yet in the matter of relations with others, women are often, I believe, less sentimental, and even less tender-hearted than men, and they have a far swifter and truer intuition of character. Though the two sexes can never really understand each other's point of view, because no imagination can cross the gulf of fundamental difference, yet I am certain that women understand men far better than men understand women. The whole range of motives is strangely different, and men can never grasp the comparative unimportance with which women regard the question of occupation. Occupation is for men a definite and isolated part of life, a thing important and absorbing in itself, quite apart from any motives or reasons. To do something, to make something, to produce something—that desire is always there, whatever ebb and flow of emotions there may be; it is an end in itself with men, and with many women it is not so; for women mostly regard work as a necessity, but not an interesting necessity. In a woman's occupation, there is generally someone at the end of it, for whom and in connection with whom it is done. This is probably largely the result of training and tradition, and great changes are now going on in the direction of women finding occupations for themselves. But take the case of such a profession as teaching; it is quite possible for a man to be an effective and competent teacher, without feeling any particular interest in the temperaments of his pupils, except in so far as they react upon the work to be done. But a woman can hardly take this impersonal attitude; and this makes women both more and less effective, because human beings invariably prefer to be dealt with dispassionately; and this is as a rule more difficult for women; and thus in a complicated matter affecting conduct, a woman as a rule forms a sounder judgment on what has actually occurred than a man, and is perhaps more likely to take a severe view. The attitude of a Galileo is often a useful one for a teacher, because boys and girls ought in matters that concern themselves to learn how to govern themselves.

Thus in situations involving relation with others women are more liable to feel anxiety and the pressure of personal responsibility; and the question is to what extent this ought to be indulged, in what degree men and women ought to assume the direction of other lives, and whether it is wholesome for the director to allow a desire for personal dominance to be substituted for more spontaneous motives.

It very often happens that the temperaments which most claim help and support are actuated by the egotistical desire to find themselves interesting to others, while those who willingly assume the direction of other lives are attracted more by the sense of power than by genuine sympathy.

But it is clear that it is in the region of our affections that the greatest risks of all have to be run. By loving, we render ourselves liable to the darkest and heaviest fears. Yet here, I believe, we ought to have no doubt at all; and the man who says to himself, "I should like to bestow my affection on this person and on that, but I will keep it in restraint, because I am afraid of the suffering which it may entail,"—such a man, I say, is very far from the kingdom of God. Because love is the one quality which, if it reaches a certain height, can altogether despise and triumph over fear. When ambition and delight and energy fail, love can accompany us, with hope and confidence, to the dark gate; and thus it is the one thing about which we can hardly be mistaken. If love does not survive death, then life is built upon nothingness, and we may be glad to get away; but it is more likely that it is the only thing that does survive.



XIX

SIN

It is every one's duty to take himself seriously—that is the right mean between taking oneself either solemnly or apologetically. There is no merit in being apologetic about oneself. One has a right to be there, wherever one is, a right to an opinion, a right to take some kind of a hand in whatever is going on; natural tact is the only thing which can tell us exactly how far those rights extend; but it is inconvenient to be apologetic, because if one insists on explaining how one comes to be there, or how one comes to have an opinion, other people begin to think that one needs explanation and excuse; but it is even worse to be solemn about oneself, because English people are very critical in private, though they are tolerant in public, because they dislike a scene, and have not got the art of administering the delicate snub which indicates to a man that his self-confidence is exuberant without humiliating him; when English people inflict a snub, they do it violently and emphatically, like Dr. Johnson, and it generally means that they are relieving themselves of accumulated disapproval. An Englishman is apt to be deferential, and one of the worst temptations of official life is the temptation to be solemn. There is an old story about Scott and Wordsworth, when the latter stayed at Abbotsford; Scott, during the whole visit, was full of little pleasant and courteous allusions to Wordsworth's poems; and one of the guests present records how at the end of the visit not a single word had ever passed Wordsworth's lips which could have indicated that he knew his host to have ever written a line of poetry or prose.

I was sitting the other day at a function next a man of some eminence, and I was really amazed at the way in which he discoursed of himself and his habits, his diet, his hours of work, and the blank indifference with which he received similar confidences. He merely waited till the speaker had finished, and then resumed his own story.

It is this sort of solemn egotism which makes us overvalue our anxieties quite out of all proportion to their importance, because they all appear to us as integral elements of a dignified drama in which we enact the hero's part. We press far too heavily on the sense of responsibility; and if we begin by telling boys, as is too often done in sermons, that whatever they do or say is of far-reaching consequence, that every lightest word may produce an effect, that any carelessness of speech or example may have disastrous effects upon the character of another, we are doing our best to encourage the self-emphasis which is the very essence of priggishness.

There is a curious conflict going on at the present time in English life between light-mindedness and solemnity; there is a great appetite for living, a love of amusement, a tendency to subordinate the interests of the future to the pleasure of the moment, and to think that the one serious evil is boredom; that is a healthy manifestation enough in its way, because it stands for interest and delight in life; but there is another strain in our nature, that of a rather heavy pietism, inherited from our Puritan ancestors. It must not be forgotten that the Puritan got a good deal of interest out of his sense of sin; as the old combative elements of feudal ages disappeared, the soldierly blood retained the fighting instinct, and turned it into moral regions. The sense of adventure is impelled to satiate itself, and the Pilgrim's Progress is a clear enough proof that the old combativeness was all there, revelling in danger, and exulting in the thought that the human being was in the midst of foes. Sin represented itself to the Puritan as a thing out of which he could get a good deal of fun; not the fun of yielding to it, but the fun of whipping out his sword and getting in some shrewd blows. When preachers nowadays lament that we have lost the sense of sin, what they really mean is that we have lost our combativeness: we no longer believe that we must treat our foes with open and brutal violence, and we perceive that such conduct is only pitting one sin against another. There is no warrant in the Gospel for the combative idea of the Christian life; all such metaphors and suggestions come from St. Paul and the Apocalypse. The fact is that the world was not ready for the utter peaceableness of the Gospel, and it had to be accommodated to the violence of the world.

Now again the Christian idea is coloured by scientific and medical knowledge, and sin, instead of an enemy which we must fight, has become a disease which we must try to cure.

Sins, the ordinary sins of ordinary life, are not as a rule instincts which are evil in themselves, so much as instincts which are selfishly pursued to the detriment of others; sin is in its essence the selfishness which will not cooperate, and which secures advantages unjustly, without any heed to the disadvantage of others. SYMPATHETIC IMAGINATION is the real foe of sin, the power of putting oneself in the place of another; and much of the sentiment which is so prevalent nowadays is the evidence of the growth of sympathy.

The old theory of sin lands one in a horrible dilemma, because it implies a treacherous enmity on the part of God, to create man weak and unstable, and to pit his weakness against tyrannous desires; to allow his will to do evil to be stronger than his power to do right, is a satanical device. One must not sacrifice the truth to the desire for simplicity and effective statement. The truth is intricate and obscure, and to pretend that it is plain and obvious is mere hypocrisy. The strength of Calvinism is its horrible resemblance to a natural inference from the facts of life; but if any sort of Calvinism is true, then it is a mere insult to the intelligence to say that God is loving or just. The real basis for all deep-seated fear about life is the fear that one will not be dealt with either lovingly or justly. But we have to make a simple choice as to what we will believe, and the only hope is to believe that immediate harshness and injustice is not ultimately inconsistent with Love. No one who knows anything of the world and of life can pretend to think or say that suffering always results from, or is at all proportioned to, moral faults; and if we are tempted to regard all our disasters as penal consequences, then we are tempted to endure them with gloomy and morbid immobility.

It is far more wholesome and encouraging to look upon many disasters that befall us as opportunities to show a little spirit, to evoke the courage which does not come by indolent prosperity, to increase our sympathy, to enlarge our experience, to make things clearer to us, to develop our mind and heart, to free us from material temptations. Past suffering is not always an evil, it is often an exciting reminiscence. It is good to take life adventurously, like Odysseus of old. What would one feel about Odysseus if, instead of contriving a way out of the Cyclops' cave, he had set himself to consider of what forgotten sin his danger was the consequence? Suffering and disaster come to us to develop our inventiveness and our courage, not to daunt and dismay us; and we ought therefore to approach experience with a sense of humour, if possible, and with a lively curiosity. I recollect hearing a man the other day describing an operation to which he had been subjected. "My word," he said, his eyes sparkling with delight at the recollection, "that was awful, when I came into the operating-room, and saw the surgeons in their togs, and the pails and basins all about, and was invited to step up to the table!" There is nothing so agreeable as the remembrance of fears through which we have passed; and we can only learn to despise them by finding out how unbalanced they were.

I do not mean that fears can ever be pleasant at the time, but we do them too much honour if we court them and defer to them. However much we may be tortured by them, there is always something at the back of our mind which despises our own susceptibility to them; and it is that deeper instinct which we ought to trust.

But we cannot even begin to trust it, as long as we allow ourselves to believe pietistically that the Mind of God is set on punishment. That is the ghastly error which humanity tends to make. It has been dinned into us, alas, from our early years, and religious phraseology is constantly polluted by it. Our Saviour lent no countenance to this at all; He spoke perfectly plainly against the theory of "judgments." Of course suffering is sometimes a consequence of sin, but it is not a vindictive punishment; it is that we may learn our mistake. But we must give up the revengeful idea of God: that is imported into our scale of values by the grossest anthropomorphism. Only the weak man, who fears that his safety will be menaced if he does not make an example, deals in revenge. He is indignant at anything which mortifies his vanity, which implies any doubt of his power or any disregard of his wishes. Revenge is born of terror, and to think of God as vindictive is to think of Him as subject to fear. Serene and unquestioned strength can have nothing to do with fear. Milton is largely responsible for perpetuating this belief. He makes the Almighty say to the Son—

"Let us advise, and to this hazard draw With speed what force is left, and all employ In our defence, lest unawares we lose This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill."

Milton's idea of the Almighty was frankly that of a Power who had undertaken more than he could manage, and who had allowed things to go too far. But it is a puerile conception of God; and to allow ourselves to think or speak of God as a Power that has to take precautions, or that has anything to fear from the exercise of human volition, is to cloud the whole horizon at once.

But we ought rather to think of God as a Power which for some reason works through imperfection. The battle of the world is that of force against inertness: and our fears are the shadow of that combat.

Fear should then rather show us that we are being confronted with experience; and that our duty is to disregard it, to march forward through it, to come out on the other side of it. It is all an adventure, in fact! The disaster in which we are involved is not sent to show us that the Eternal Power which created us is vexed at our failures, or bent on crushing us. It is exactly the opposite; it is to show us that we are worth testing, worth developing, and that we are to have the glory of going on; the very fear of death is the last test of our belief in Love. We are assuredly meant to believe that the coward is to learn the beauty of courage, that the laggard is to perceive the worth of energy, that the selfish man is to be taught sympathy. If we must take a metaphor, let us rather think of God as the graver of the gem than as the child that beats her doll for collapsing instead of sitting upright.

It is our dishonouring thought of God as jealous, suspicious, fond of exhibiting power, revengeful, cruel, that does us harm. We must rather think of His Heart as full of courage, energy, and hope; as teeming with joy, lightness, zest, mirth; and then we can begin to think of failures, fears, delays as things small and unimportant, not as malicious ambushes, but as rough bits of road, as obstacles to reveal and to develop our strength and gaiety. There is no joy in the world so great as the joy of finding ourselves stronger than we know; and that is what God is bent upon showing us, and not upon proving to us that we are vile and base, in the spirit of the old Calvinist who said to his own daughter when she was dying of a painful disease, that she must remember that all short of Hell was mercy. It is so; but Hell is rather what we start from, and out of which we have to find our way, than the waste-paper basket of life, the last receptacle for our shattered purposes.



XX

SERENITY

To achieve serenity we must have the power of keeping our hearts and minds fixed upon something which is beyond and above the passing incidents of life, which so disconcert and overshadow us, and which are after all but as clouds in the sky, or islets in a great ocean. Think with what smiling indifference a man would meet indignation and abuse and menace, if he were aware that an hour hence he would be triumphantly vindicated and applauded. How calmly would a man sleep in a condemned cell if he knew that a free pardon were on its way to him! Of course the more eagerly and enjoyably we live, so much the more we are affected by little incidents, beyond which we can hardly look when they bring us so much pleasure or so much discomfort; and thus it is always the men and women of keen and highly-strung natures, who taste the quality of every moment, in its sweetness and its bitterness, who will most feel the influence of fear. Edward FitzGerald once sadly confessed that, as life went on, days of perfect delight—a beautiful scene, a melodious music, the society of those whom he loved best—brought him less and less joy, because he felt that they were passing swiftly, and could not be recalled. And of course the imaginative nature which lives tremulously in delight will be most apt to portend sadness in hours of happiness, and in sorrow to anticipate the continuance of sorrow. That is an inevitable effect of temperament; but we must not give way helplessly to temperament, or allow ourselves to drift wherever the mind bears us. Just as the skilled sailor can tack up against the wind, and use ingenuity to compel a contrary breeze to bring him to the haven of his desire, so we must be wise in trimming our sails to the force of circumstance; while there is an eager delight in making adverse conditions help us to realise our hopes.

The timid soul that loves delight is apt to say to itself, "I am happy now in health and circumstances and friends, but I lean out into the future, and see that health must fail and friends must drift away; death must part me from those I love; and beyond all this, I see the cloudy gate through which I must myself pass, and I do not know what lies beyond it." That is true enough! It is like the story of the old prince, as told by Herodotus, who said in his sorrowful age that the Gods gave man only a taste of life, just enough to let him feel that life was sweet, and then took the cup from his lips. But if we look fairly at life, at our own life, at other lives, we see that pleasure and contentment, even if we hardly realised that it was contentment at the time, have largely predominated over pain and unhappiness; a man must be very rueful and melancholy before he will deliberately say that life has not been worth living, though I suppose that there have probably been hours in the lives of all of us when we have thought and said and even believed that we would rather not have lived at all than suffer so. Neither must we pass over the fact that every day there are men and women who, under the pressure of calamity and dismay, bring their lives to a voluntary end.

But we have to be very dull and thankless and slow of heart not to feel that by being allowed to live, for however short a time, we have been allowed to take part in a very beautiful and wonderful thing. The loveliness of earth, its colours, its lights, its scents, its savours, the pleasures of activity and health, the sharp joys of love and friendship, these are surely very great and marvellous experiences, and the Mind which planned them must be full of high purpose, eager intention, infinite goodwill. And we may go further than that, and see that even our sorrows and failures have often brought something great to our view, something which we feel we have learned and apprehended, something which we would not have missed, and which we cannot do without. If we will frankly recognise all this, we cannot feebly crumple up at the smallest touch of misery, and say suspiciously and vindictively that we wish we had never opened our eyes upon the world; and even if we do say that, even if we abandon ourselves to despair, we yet cannot hope to escape; we did not enter life by our own will, it is not our own prudence that has kept us there, and even if we end it voluntarily, as Carlyle said, by noose or henbane, we cannot for an instant be sure that we are ending it; every inference in the world, in fact, would tend to indicate that we do not end it. We cannot destroy matter, we can only disperse and rearrange it; we cannot generate a single force, we can only summon it from elsewhere, and concentrate it, as we concentrate electricity, at a single glowing point. Force seems as indestructible as matter, and there is no reason to think that life is destructible either. So that if we are to resign ourselves to any belief at all, it must be to the belief that "to be, or not to be" is not a thing which is in our power at all. We may extinguish life, as we put out a light; but we do not destroy it, we only rearrange it.

And we can thus at least practise and exercise ourselves in the belief that we cannot bring our experiences to an end, however petulantly and irritably we desire to do so, because it simply is not in our power to effect it. We talk about the power of the will, but no effort of will can obliterate the life that we have lived, or add a cubit to our stature; we cannot abrogate any law of nature, or destroy a single atom of matter. What it seems that we can do with the will is to make a certain choice, to select a certain line, to combine existing forces, to use them within very small limits. We can oblige ourselves to take a certain course, when every other inclination is reluctant to do it; and even so the power varies in different people. It is useless then to depend blindly upon the will, because we may suddenly come to the end of it, as we may come to the end of our physical forces. But what the will can do is to try certain experiments, and the one province where its function seems to be clear, is where it can discover that we have often a reserve of unsuspected strength, and more courage and power than we had supposed. We can certainly oppose it to bodily inclinations, whether they be seductions of sense or temptations of weariness. And in this one respect the will can give us, if not serenity, at least a greater serenity than we expect. We can use the will to endure, to wait, to suspend a hasty judgment; and impulse is the thing which menaces our serenity most of all. The will indeed seems to be like a little weight which we can throw into either scale. If we have no doubt how we ought to act, we can use the will to enforce our judgment, whether it is a question of acting or of abstaining; if we are in doubt how to act, we can use our will to enforce a wise delay.

The truth then about the will is that it is a force which we cannot measure, and that it is as unreasonable to say that it does not exist as to say that it is unlimited. It is foolish to describe it as free; it is no more free than a prisoner in a cell is free; but yet he has a certain power to move about within his cell, and to choose among possible employments.

Anyone who will deliberately test his will, will find that it is stronger than he suspects; what often weakens our use of it is that we are so apt to look beyond the immediate difficulty into a long perspective of imagined obstacles, and to say within ourselves, "Yes, I may perhaps achieve this immediate step, but I cannot take step after step—my courage will fail!" Yet if one does make the immediate effort, it is common to find the whole range of obstacles modified by the single act; and thus the first step towards the attainment of serenity of life is to practise cutting off the vista of possible contingencies from our view, and to create a habit of dealing with a case as it occurs.

I am often tempted myself to send my anxious mind far ahead in vague dismay; at the beginning of a week crammed with various engagements, numerous tasks, constant labour, little businesses, many of them with their own attendant anxiety, it is easy to say that there is no time to do anything that one wants to do, and to feel that the matters themselves will be handled amiss and bungled. But if one can only keep the mind off, or distract it by work, or beguile it by a book, a walk, a talk, how easily the thread spins off the reel, how quietly one comes to harbour on the Saturday evening, with everything done and finished!

Again, I am personally much disposed to dread the opposition and the displeasure of colleagues, and to shrink nervously from anything which involves dealing with a number of people. I ought to have found out before now how futile such dread is; other people forget their vexation and even grow ashamed of it, much as one does oneself; and looking back I can recall no crisis which turned out either as intricate or as difficult as one expected.

Let me admit that I have more than once in life made grave mistakes through this timidity and indolence, or through an imaginativeness which could see in a great opportunity nothing but a sea of troubles, which would, I do not doubt, have melted away as one advanced. But no one has suffered except myself! Institutions do not depend upon individuals; and I regard such failures now just as the petulant casting away of a chance of experience, as a lesson which I would not learn; but there is nothing irreparable about it; one only comes, more slowly and painfully, to the same goal at last. I dare not say that I regret it all, for we are all of us, whether small or great, being taught a mighty truth, whether we wish it or know it; and all that we can do to hasten it is to put our will into the right scale. I do not think mistakes and failures ought to trouble one much; at all events there is no fear mingled with them. But I do not here claim to have attained any real serenity—my own heart is too impatient, too fond of pleasure for that!—yet I can see clearly enough that it is there, if I could but grasp it; and I know well enough how it is to be attained, by being content to wait, and by realising at every instant and moment of life that, in spite of my tremors and indolences, my sharp impatiences, my petulant disgusts, something very real and great is being shown me, which I shall at last, however dimly, perceive; and that even so the goal of the journey is far beyond any horizon that I can conceive, and built up like the celestial city out of unutterable brightness and clearness, upon a foundation of peace and joy.

It is very difficult to determine, by any exercise of the intellect or imagination, what fears would remain to us if we were freed from the dominion of the body. All material fears and anxieties would come to an end; we should no longer have any poverty to dread, or any of the limitations or circumscriptions which the lack of the means of life inflicts upon us; we should have no ambitions left, because the ambitions which centre on influence—that is, upon the desire to direct and control the interests of a nation or a group of individuals—have no meaning apart from the material framework of civil life. The only kind of influence which would survive would be the influence of emotion, the direct appeal which one who lives a higher and more beautiful life can make to all unsatisfied souls, who would fain find the way to a greater serenity of mood. Even upon earth we can see a faint foreshadowing of this in the fact that the only personalities who continue to hold the devotion and admiration of humanity are the idealists. Men and women do not make pilgrimages to the graves and houses of eminent jurists and bankers, political economists or statisticians: these have done their work, and have had their reward. Even the monuments of statesmen and conquerors have little power to touch the imagination, unless some love for humanity, some desire to uplift and benefit the race, have entered into their schemes and policies. No, it is rather the soil which covers the bones of dreamers and visionaries that is sacred yet, prophets and poets, artists and musicians, those who have seen through life to beauty, and have lived and suffered that they might inspire and tranquillise human hearts. The princes of the earth, popes and emperors, lie in pompous sepulchres, and the thoughts of those who regard them, as they stand in metal or marble, dwell most on the vanity of earthly glory. But at the tombs of men like Vergil and Dante, of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, the human heart still trembles into tears, and hates the death that parts soul from soul. So that if, like Dante, we could enter the shadow-land, and hold converse with the spirits of the dead, we should seek out to consort with, not those who have subdued and wasted the earth, or have terrified men into obedience and service, but those whose hearts were touched by dreams of impossible beauty, and who have taught us to be kind and compassionate and tender-hearted, to love God and our neighbour, and to detect, however faintly, the hope of peace and joy which binds us all together.

And thus if emotion, by which I mean the power of loving, is the one thing which survives, the fears which may remain will be concerned with all the thoughts which cloud love, the anger and suspicion that divide us; so that perhaps the only fears which will survive at all will be the fears of our own selfishness and coldness, that inner hardness which has kept us from the love of God and isolated us from our neighbour. The pride which kept us from admitting that we were wrong, the jealousy that made us hate those who won the love we could not win, the baseness which made us indifferent to the discomfort of others if we could but secure our own ease, these are the thoughts which may still have the power to torture us; and the hell that we may have to fear may be the hell of conscious weakness and the horror of retrospect, when we recollect how under these dark skies of earth we went on our way claiming and taking all that we could get, and disregarding love for fear of being taken advantage of. One of the grievous fears of life is the fear of seeing ourselves as we really are, in all our baseness and pettiness; yet that will assuredly be shown us in no vindictive spirit, but that we may learn to rise and soar.

There is no hope that death will work an immediate moral change in us; it may set us free from some sensual and material temptations, but the innermost motives will indeed survive, that instinct which makes us again and again pursue what we know to be false and unsatisfying.

The more that we shrink from self-knowledge, the more excuses that we make for ourselves, the more that we tend to attribute our failures to our circumstances and to the action of others, the more reason we have to fear the revelation of death. And the only way to face that is to keep our minds open to any light, to nurture and encourage the wish to be different, to pray hour by hour that at any cost we may be taught the truth; it is useless to search for happy illusions, to look for short cuts, to hope vaguely that strength and virtue will burst out like a fountain beside our path. We have a long and toilsome way to travel, and we can by no device abbreviate it; but when we suffer and grieve, we are walking more swiftly to our goal; and the hours we spend in fear, in sending the mind in weariness along the desolate track, are merely wasted, for we can alter nothing so. We use life best when we live it eagerly, exulting in its fulness and its significance, casting ourselves into strong relations with others, drinking in beauty, making high music in our hearts. There is an abundance of awe in the experiences through which we pass, awe at the greatness of the vision, at the vastness of the design, as it embraces and enfolds our weakness. But we are inside it all, an integral and indestructible part of it; and the shadow of fear falls when we doubt this, when we dread being overlooked or disregarded. No such thing can happen to us; our inheritance is absolute and certain, and it is fear that keeps us away from it, and the fear of fearlessness. For we are contending not with God, but with the fear which hides Him from our shrinking eyes; and our prayer should be the undaunted prayer of Moses in the clefts of the mountain, "I beseech Thee, show me Thy Glory!"



THE END