clearly and lucidly. The only piece of literary advice that I have ever found to be of real and abiding use, is the advice I once heard given by Professor Seeley to a youthful essayist, who had involved a simple subject in mazes of irrelevant intricacy. “Don’t be afraid,” said the Professor, “of letting the bones show.” That is the secret: a piece of literary art must not be merely dry bones; the skeleton must be overlaid with delicate flesh and appropriate muscle; but the structure must be there, and it must be visible.
The perfection of lucid writing, which one sees in books such as Newman’s Apologia or Ruskin’s Praeterita, seems to resemble a crystal stream, which flows limpidly and deliciously over its pebbly bed; the very shape of the channel is revealed; there are transparent glassy water-breaks over the pale gravel; but though the very stream has a beauty of its own, a beauty of liquid curve and delicate murmur, its chief beauty is in the exquisite transfiguring effect which it has over the shingle, the vegetation that glimmers and sways beneath the surface. How dry, how commonplace the pebbles on the edge look! How stiff and ruinous the plants from which the water has receded! But seen through the hyaline medium, what coolness, what romance, what secret and remote mystery, lingers over the tiny pebbles, the little reefs of rock, the ribbons of weed, that poise so delicately in the gliding stream! What a vision of unimagined peace, of cool refreshment, of gentle tranquillity, it all gives!
Thus it is with the transfiguring power of art, of style. The objects by themselves, in the commonplace light, in the dreary air, are trivial and unromantic enough; one can hold them in one’s hand, one seems to have seen them a hundred times before; but, plunged beneath that clear and fresh medium, they have a unity, a softness, a sweetness which seem the result of a magical spell, an incommunicable influence; they bring all heaven before the eyes; they whisper the secrets of a region which is veritably there, which we can discern and enjoy, but the charm of which we can neither analyse nor explain; we can only confess its existence with a grateful heart. One who devotes himself to writing should find, then, his chief joy in the practice of his art, not in the rewards of it; publication has its merits, because it entails upon one the labour of perfecting the book as far as possible; if one wrote without publication in view, one would be tempted to shirk the final labour of the file; one would leave sentences incomplete, paragraphs unfinished; and then, too, imperfect as reviews often are, it is wholesome as well as interesting to see the impression that one’s work makes on others. If one’s work is generally contemned, it is bracing to know that one fails in one’s appeal, that one cannot amuse and interest readers. High literature has often met at first with unmerited neglect and even obloquy; but to incur neglect and obloquy is not in itself a proof that one’s standard is high and one’s taste fastidious. Moreover, if one has done one’s best, and expressed sincerely what one feels and believes, one sometimes has the true and rare pleasure of eliciting a grateful letter from an unknown person, who has derived pleasure, perhaps even encouragement, from a book. These are some of the pleasant rewards of writing, and though one should not write with one’s eye on the rewards, yet they may be accepted with a sober gratitude.
Of course there will come moods of discouragement to all authors, when they will ask themselves, as even Tennyson confesses that he was tempted to do, what, after all, it amounts to? The author must beware of rating his own possibilities too high. In looking back at one’s own life, in trying to trace what are the things that have had a deep and permanent influence on one’s character, how rarely is it possible to point to a particular book, and say, “That book gave me the message I most needed, made me take the right turn, gave me the requisite bias, the momentous impulse”? We tend to want to do things on too large a scale, to affect great masses of people, to influence numerous hearts. An author should be more than content if he finds he has made a difference to a handful of people, or given innocent pleasure to a small company. Only to those whose heart is high, whose patience is inexhaustible, whose vigour is great, whose emotion is passionate, is it given to make a deep mark upon the age; and there is needed too the magical charm of personality, overflowing in “thoughts that breathe and words that burn.” But we can all take a hand in the great game; and if the leading parts are denied us, if we are told off to sit among a row of supers, drinking and whispering on a bench, while the great characters soliloquize, let us be sure that we drain our empty cup with zest, and do our whispering with intentness; not striving to divert attention to ourselves, but contributing with all our might to the naturalness, the effectiveness of the scene.
XI
THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS
I was staying the other day in the house of an old friend, a public man, who is a deeply interesting character, energetic, able, vigorous, with very definite limitations. The only male guest in the house, it so happened, was also an old friend of mine, a serious man. One night, when we were all three in the smoking-room, our host rose, and excused himself, saying that he had some letters to write. When he was gone, I said to my serious friend: “What an interesting fellow our host is! He is almost more interesting because of the qualities that he does not possess, than because of the qualities that he does possess.” My companion, who is remarkable for his power of blunt statement, looked at me gravely, and said: “If you propose to discuss our host, you must find some one else to conduct the argument; he is my friend, whom I esteem and love, and I am not in a position to criticise him.” I laughed, and said: “Well, he is my friend, too, and _I_ esteem and love him; and that is the very reason why I should like to discuss him. Nothing that either you or I could say would make me love him less; but I wish to understand him. I have a very clear impression of him, and I have no doubt you have a very clear impression too; yet we should probably differ about him in many points, and I should like to see what light you could throw upon his character.” My companion said: “No; it is inconsistent with my idea of loyalty to criticise my friends. Besides, you know I am an old-fashioned person, and I disapprove of criticising people altogether. I think it is a violation of the ninth commandment; I do not think we are justified in bearing false witness against our neighbour.”
“But you beg the question,” I said, “by saying ‘FALSE witness.’ I quite agree that to discuss people in a malicious spirit, or in a spirit of mockery, with the intention of exaggerating their faults and making a grotesque picture of their foibles, is wrong. But two just persons, such as you and I are, may surely talk over our friends, in what Mr. Chadband called a spirit of love?” My companion shook his head. “No,” he said, “I think it is altogether wrong. Our business is to see the good points of our friends, and to be blind to their faults.” “Well,” I said, “then let us ‘praise him soft and low, call him worthiest to be loved,’ like the people in ‘The Princess.’ You shall make a panegyric, and I will say ‘Hear, hear!'” “You are making a joke out of it,” said my companion, “and I shall stick to my principles–and you won’t mind my saying,” he went on, “that I think your tendency is to criticise people much too much. You are always discussing people’s faults, and I think it ends in your having a lower estimate of human nature than is either kind or necessary. To-night, at dinner, it made me quite melancholy to hear the way in which you spoke of several of our best friends.” “Not leaving Lancelot brave nor Galahad pure!” I said; “in fact you think that I behaved like the ingenious demon in the Acts, who always seems to me to have had a strong sense of humour. It was the seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, was it not, who tried to exorcise an evil spirit? But he ‘leapt upon them and overcame them, so that they fled out of the house naked and wounded.’ You mean that I use my friends like that, strip off their reputations, belabour them, and leave them without a rag of virtue or honour?” My companion frowned, and said: “Yes; that is more or less what I mean, though I think your illustration is needlessly profane. My idea is that we ought to make the best of people, and try as far as possible to be blind to their faults.” “Unless their fault happens to be criticism?” I said. My companion turned to me very solemnly, and said: “I think we ought not to be afraid, if necessary, of telling our friends about their faults; but that is quite a different thing from amusing oneself by discussing their faults with others.” “Well” I said, “I believe that one is in a much better position to speak to people about their faults, if one knows them; and personally I think I arrive at a juster view both of my friends’ faults and virtues by discussing them with others. I think one takes a much fairer view, by seeing the impression that one’s friends make on other people; and I think that I generally arrive at admiring my friends more by seeing them reflected in the mind of another, than I do when they are merely reflected in my own mind. Besides, if one is possessed of critical faculties, it seems to me absurd to rule out one part of life, and that, perhaps, the most important–one’s fellow-beings, I mean–and to say that one is not to exercise the faculty of criticism there. You would not think it wrong, for instance, to criticise books?” “No,” said my companion, “certainly not. I think that it is not only legitimate, but a duty, to bring one’s critical faculties to bear on books; it is one of the most valuable methods of self-education.” “And yet books are nothing but an expression of an author’s personality,” I said. “Would you go so far as to say that one has no business to criticise one’s friends’ books?” “You are only arguing for the sake of arguing,” said my companion. “With books it is quite different; they are a public expression of a man’s opinions, and consequently they are submitted to the world for criticism.” “I confess,” I said, “that I do not think the distinction is a real one. I feel sure one has a right to criticise a man’s opinions, delivered in conversation; and I think that much of our lives is nothing but a more or less public expression of ourselves. Your position seems to me no more reasonable than if a man was to say: ‘I look upon the whole world, and all that is in it, as the work of God; and I am not in a position to criticise any of the works of God.’ If one may not criticise the character of a friend whom one esteems and loves, surely, a fortiori, we ought not to criticise anything in the world at all. The whole of ethics, the whole of religion, is nothing else than bringing our critical faculties to bear upon actions and qualities; and it seems to me that if our critical faculty means anything at all, we are bound to apply it to all the phenomena we see about us.” My companion said disdainfully that I was indulging in the merest sophistry, and that he thought that we had better go to bed, which we presently did.
I have, since this conversation, been reflecting about the whole subject, and I am not inclined to admit that my companion was right. In the first place, if every one were to follow the principle that one had no business to criticise one’s friends, it would end in being deplorably dull. Imagine the appalling ponderosity of a conversation in which one felt bound to praise every one who was mentioned. Think of the insensate chorus which would arise. “How tall and stately A—- is! How sturdy and compact B—- is! Then there is dear C—-; how wise, judicious, prudent, and sensible! And the excellent D—-, what candour, what impulsiveness! E—-, how worthy, how business-like! Yes, how true that is! How thankful we should be for the examples of A—-, B—-, C—-, D—-, and E—-!” A very little of such conversation would go a long way. How it would refresh and invigorate the mind! What a field for humour and subtlety it would open up!
It may be urged that we ought not to regulate our conduct upon the basis of trying to avoid what is dull; but I am myself of opinion that dulness is responsible for a large amount of human error and misery. Readers of The Pilgrim’s Progress will no doubt remember the young woman whose name was Dull, and her choice of companions– Simple, Sloth, Presumption, Short-mind, Slow-pace, No-heart, Linger-after-lust, and Sleepy-head. These are the natural associates of Madam Dull. The danger of dulness, whether natural or acquired, is the danger of complacently lingering among stupid and conventional ideas, and losing all the bright interchange of the larger world. The dull people are not, as a rule, the simple people–they are generally provided with a narrow and self- sufficient code; they are often entirely self-satisfied, and apt to disapprove of everything that is lively, romantic, and vigorous. Simplicity, as a rule, is either a natural gift, or else can be attained only by people of strong critical powers, who will, firmly and vigorously, test, examine, and weigh motives, and arrive through experience at a direct and natural method of dealing with men and circumstances. True simplicity is not an inherited poverty of spirit; it is rather like the poverty of one who has deliberately discarded what is hampering, vexatious, and unnecessary, and has learnt that the art of life consists in disentangling the spirit from all conventional claims, in living by trained impulse and fine instinct, rather than by tradition and authority. I do not say that the dull people are not probably, in a way, the happier people; I suppose that anything that leads to self-satisfaction is, in a sense, a cause of happiness; but it is not a species of happiness that people ought to pursue.
Perhaps one ought not to use the word dulness, because it may be misunderstood. The kind of dulness of which I speak is not inconsistent with a high degree, not only of practical, but even of mental, ability. I know several people of very great intellectual power who are models of dulness. Their memories are loaded with what is no doubt very valuable information, and their conclusions are of the weightiest character; but they have no vivid perception, no alertness, they are not open to new ideas, they never say an interesting or a suggestive thing; their presence is a load on the spirits of a lively party, their very facial expression is a rebuke to all light-mindedness and triviality. Sometimes these people are silent, and then to be in their presence is like being in a thick mist; there is no outlook, no enlivening prospect. Sometimes they are talkers; and I am not sure that that is not even worse, because they generally discourse on their own subjects with profound and serious conviction. They have no power of conversation, because they are not interested in any one else’s point of view; they care no more who their companions are, than a pump cares what sort of a vessel is put under it–they only demand that people should listen in silence. I remember not long ago meeting one of the species, in this case an antiquarian. He discoursed continuously, with a hard eye, fixed as a rule upon the table, about the antiquities of the neighbourhood. I was on one side of him, and was far too much crushed to attempt resistance. I ate and drank mechanically; I said “Yes” and “Very interesting” at intervals; and the only ray of hope upon the horizon was that the hands of the clock upon the mantelpiece did undoubtedly move, though they moved with leaden slowness. On the other side of the savant was a lively talker, Matthews by name, who grew very restive under the process. The great man had selected Dorchester as his theme, because he had unhappily discovered that I had recently visited it. My friend Matthews, who had been included in the audience, made desperate attempts to escape; and once, seeing that I was fairly grappled, began a conversation with his next neighbour. But the antiquary was not to be put off. He stopped, and looked at Matthews with a relentless eye. “Matthews,” he said, “MATTHEWS!” raising his voice. Matthews looked round. “I was saying that Dorchester was a very interesting place.” Matthews made no further attempt to escape, and resigned himself to his fate.
Such men as the antiquary are certainly very happy people; they are absorbed in their subject, and consider it to be of immense importance. I suppose that their lives are, in a sense, well spent, and that the world is in a way the gainer by their labours. My friend the antiquary has certainly, according to his own account, proved that certain ancient earthworks near Dorchester are of a date at least five hundred years anterior to the received date. It took him a year or two to find out, and I suppose that the human race has benefited in some way or other by the conclusion; but, on the other hand, the antiquary seems to miss all the best things of life. If life is an educative process, people who have lived and loved, who have smiled and suffered, who have perceived beautiful things, who have felt the rapturous and bewildering mysteries of the world–well, they have learnt something of the mind of God, and, when they close their eyes upon the world, take with them an alert, a hopeful, an inquisitive, an ardent spirit, into whatever may be the next act of the drama; but my friend the antiquary, when he crosses the threshold of the unseen, when he is questioned as to what has been his relation to life, will have seen and perceived, and learnt nothing, except the date of the Dorchester earthworks, and similar monuments of history.
And of all the shifting pageant of life, by far the most interesting and exquisite part is our relations with the other souls who are bound on the same pilgrimage. One desires ardently to know what other people feel about it all–what their points of view are, what their motives are, what are the data on which they form their opinions–so that to cut off the discussion of other personalities, on ethical grounds, is like any other stiff and Puritanical attempt to limit interests, to circumscribe experience, to maim life. The criticism, then, or the discussion, of other people is not so much a CAUSE of interest in life, as a SIGN of it; it is no more to be suppressed by codes or edicts than any other form of temperamental activity. It is no more necessary to justify the habit, than it is necessary to give good reasons for eating or for breathing; the only thing that it is advisable to do, is to lay down certain rules about it, and prescribe certain methods of practising it. The people who do not desire to discuss others, or who disapprove of doing it, may be pronounced to be, as a rule, either stupid, or egotistical, or Pharisaical; and sometimes they are all three. The only principle to bear in mind is the principle of justice. If a man discusses others spitefully or malevolently, with the sole intention of either extracting amusement out of their foibles, or with the still more odious intention of emphasizing his own virtues by discovering the weakness of others, or with the cynical desire–which is perhaps the lowest of all–of proving the whole business of human life to be a vile and sordid spectacle, then he may be frankly disapproved of, and if possible avoided; but if a man takes a generous view of humanity, if he admires what is large and noble, if he gives full credit for kindliness, strength, usefulness, vigour, sympathy, then his humorous perception of faults and deficiencies, of whims and mannerisms, of prejudices and unreasonablenesses, will have nothing that is hard or bitter about it. For the truth is that, if we are sure that a man is generous and just, his little mannerisms, his fads, his ways, are what mostly endear him to us. The man of lavish liberality is all the more lovable if he has an intense dislike to cutting the string of a parcel, and loves to fill his drawers with little hanks of twine, the untying of which stands for many wasted hours. If we know a man to be simple-minded, forbearing, and conscientious, we like him all the better when he tells for the fiftieth time an ancient story, prefacing it by anxious inquiries, which are smilingly rebutted, as to whether any of his hearers have ever heard the anecdote before.
But we must not let this tendency, to take a man in his entirety, to love him as he is, carry us too far; we must be careful that the foibles that endear him to us are in themselves innocent.
There is one particular form of priggishness, in this matter of criticism of others, which is apt to beset literary people, and more especially at a time when it seems to be considered by many writers that the first duty of a critic–they would probably call him an artist for the sake of the associations–is to get rid of all sense of right and wrong. I was reading the other day a sensible and appreciative review of Mr. Lucas’s new biography of Charles Lamb. The reviewer quoted with cordial praise Mr. Lucas’s remark–referring, of course, to the gin-and-water, which casts, I fear, in my own narrow view, something of a sordid shadow over Lamb’s otherwise innocent life–“A man must be very secure in his own righteousness who would pass condemnatory judgment upon Charles Lamb’s only weakness.” I do not myself think this a sound criticism. We ought not to abstain from condemning the weakness, we must abstain from condemning Charles Lamb. His beautiful virtues, his tenderness, his extraordinary sweetness and purity of nature, far outweigh this weakness. But what are we to do? Are we to ignore, to condone, to praise the habit? Are we to think the better of Charles Lamb and love him more because he tippled? Would he not have been more lovable without it?
And the fact that one may be conscious of similar faults and moral weaknesses, ought not to make one more, but less, indulgent to such a fault when we see it in a beautiful nature. The fault in question is no more in itself adorable, than it is in another man who does not possess Lamb’s genius.
We have a perfect right–nay, we do well–to condemn in others faults which we frankly condemn in ourselves. It does not help on the world if we go about everywhere slobbering with forgiveness and affection; it is the most mawkish sentimentality to love people in such a way that we condone grave faults in them; and to condone a fault because a man is great, when we condemn it if he is not great, is only a species of snobbishness. It is right to compassionate sinners, to find excuse for the faults of every one but ourselves; but we ought not to love so foolishly and irrationally, that we cannot even bring ourselves to wish our hero’s faults away.
I confess to feeling the most minute and detailed interest in the smallest matters connected with other people’s lives and idiosyncrasies. I cannot bear biographies of the dignified order, which do not condescend to give what are called personal details, but confine themselves to matters of undoubted importance. When I have finished reading such books I feel as if I had been reading The Statesman’s Year-book, or The Annual Register. I have no mental picture of the hero; he is merely like one of those bronze statues, in frockcoat and trousers, that decorate our London squares.
I was reading, the other day, an ecclesiastical biography. The subject of it, a high dignitary of the Church, had attended the funeral of one of his episcopal colleagues, with whom he had had several technical controversies. On the evening of the day he wrote a very tender and beautiful account of the funeral in his diary, which is quoted at length: “How little,” he wrote, “the sense of difference, and how strong my feeling of his power and solid sense; how little I care that he was wrong about the Discipline Bill, how much that he was so happy with us in the summer; how much that he was, as all the family told me, so ‘devoted’ to my Nellie!”
That is a thoroughly human statement, and preserves a due sense of proportion. In the presence of death it is the kindly human relations that matter more than policies and statesmanship.
And so it may be said, in conclusion, that we cannot taste the fulness of life, unless we can honestly say, Nihil humani a me alienum puto. If we grow absorbed in work, in business, in literature, in art, in policy, to the exclusion of the nearer human elements, we dock and maim our lives. We cannot solve the mystery of this difficult world; but we may be sure of this–that it is not for nothing that we are set in the midst of interests and relationships, of liking and loving, of tenderness and mirth, of sorrow and pain. If we are to get the most and the best out of life, we must not seclude ourselves from these things; and one of the nearest and simplest of duties is the perception of others’ points of view, of sympathy, in no limited sense; and that sympathy we can only gain through looking at humanity in its wholeness. If we allow ourselves to be blinded by false conscience, by tradition, by stupidity, even by affection, from realizing what others are, we suffer, as we always suffer from any wilful blindness; indeed, wilful blindness is the most desperate of all faults, perhaps the only one that can hardly be condoned, because it argues a confidence in one’s own opinion, a self-sufficiency, a self- estimation, which shut out, as by an opaque and sordid screen, the light of heaven from the soul.
XII
PRIESTS
I have been fortunate in the course of my life in knowing, more or less intimately, several eminent priests; and by this I do not mean necessarily eminent ecclesiastics; several famous ecclesiastics with whom circumstances have brought me into contact have not been priestly persons at all; they have been vigorous, wise, energetic, statesmanlike men, such as I suppose the Pontifex Maximus at Rome might have been, with a kind of formal, almost hereditary, priesthood. And, on the other hand, I have known more than one layman of distinctly priestly character, priestly after the order of Melchizedek, who had not, I suppose, received any religious consecration for his ministry, apart from perhaps a kingly initiation.
The essence of the priest is that he should believe himself, however humbly and secretly, to be set in a certain sense between humanity and God. He is conscious, if not of a mission, at least of a vocation, as an interpreter of secrets, a guardian of mysteries; he would believe that there are certain people in the world who are called to be apostles, whose work it is to remind men of God, and to justify the ways of God to men. He feels that he stands, like Aaron, to make atonement; that he is in a certain definite relation to God, a relation which all do not share; and that this gives him, in a special sense, something of the divine and fatherly relation to men. In the hands of a perfectly humble, perfectly disinterested man, this may become a very beautiful and tender thing. Such a man, from long and intimate relations with humanity, will have a very deep knowledge of the human heart. He will be surprised at no weakness or frailty; he will be patient with all perverseness and obduracy; he will be endlessly compassionate, because he will realize the strength and insistence of temptation; he will be endlessly hopeful, because he will have seen, a hundred times over, the flower of virtue and love blooming in an arid and desolate heart. He will have seen close at hand the transforming power of faith, even in natures which have become the shuddering victims of evil habit.
Such a priest as I describe had occasion once to interview a great doctor about the terrible case of a woman of high social position who had become the slave of drink. The doctor was a man of great force and ability, and of unwearying devotion; but he was what would be called a sceptic and a materialist. The priest asked if the case was hopeless; the great doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Yes,” he said, “pathologically speaking, it is hopeless; there may be periods of recovery, but the course that the case will normally run will be a series of relapses, each more serious and of longer duration than the last.” “Is there no chance of recovery on any line that you could suggest?” said the priest. The two looked at each other, both good men and true. “Well,” said the doctor after a pause, “this is more in your line than mine; the only possible chance lies in the will, and that can only be touched through an emotion. I have seen a religious emotion successful, where everything else failed.” The priest smiled and said, “I suppose that would seem to you a species of delusion? You would not admit that there was any reality behind it?” “Yes,” said the doctor, “a certain reality, no doubt; the emotional processes are at present somewhat obscure from the scientific point of view: it is a forlorn hope.” “Yes,” said the priest, “and it is thus the kind of task for which I and those of my calling feel bound to volunteer.”
Of course one of the difficulties that the priest has to struggle against is his inheritance. If we trace back the vocation of the priest to the earliest times, we find their progenitors connected with some of the darkest and saddest things in human history. They are of the same tribe as wizards and magicians, sorcerers and medicine-men, the celebrators of cruel and unholy rites. The priests of Moloch, of Chemosh, of Baal, are the dark and ancient ancestors of the same vocation. All who have trafficked in the terrors of mankind, who have gained power by trading on superstitious imaginings, who have professed to propitiate wrathful and malignant spirits, to stand between men and their dreadful Maker–all these have contributed their share to the dark and sad burden which the priest has to bear. As soon as man, rising out of pure savagery, began to have any conception of the laws of nature, he found in himself a deep instinct for happiness, a terror of suffering and death; yet, at the same time, he found himself set in a world where afflictions seemed to be rained down upon humanity by some mysterious, unseen, and awful power. Could man believe that God wished him well, who racked him with cruel pain, sent plagues among his cattle, swept away those whom he loved, destroyed his crops with hail and thunderbolts, and at the end of all dragged him reluctant and shuddering into the darkness, out of a world where so much was kind and cheerful, and where, after all, it was sweet to live?
He turned in his despair to any one who could profess to hold out any shield over him, who could claim to read the dreadful mind of God, and to propitiate His mercy. Even then a demand created a supply. Men have always loved power and influence; and so spirits of sterner and more tenacious mould, who could perhaps despise the lesser terrors of mankind, and who desired, above all things, to hold the destinies of others in their hands, to make themselves felt, naturally seized the opportunity of surrounding themselves with the awe and dignity that the supposed possession of deeper knowledge and more recondite powers offered them.
Then as the world broadened and widened, as reason began to extend its sway, the work of the priest became more beneficent, and tended to bless and hallow rather than to blast and curse. But still the temptation remains a terribly strong one for men of a certain type, men who can afford to despise the more material successes of the world, who can merge their personal ambition in ambitions for an order and a caste, still to claim to stand between man and God, to profess to withhold His blessings, to grasp the keys of His mysteries, to save men from the consequences of sin. As long as human terror exists, as long as men fear suffering and darkness and death, they will turn to any one who can profess to give them relief; and relief, too, will come; for the essence of courage is, for many timid hearts, the dependence upon a stronger will. And if a man can say, with a tranquil conviction, to a suffering and terrified comrade, “There is no need to fear,” the fear loses half its terrors and half its sting.
Now, when religion of any kind becomes a part of the definite social life of the world, there must of course be an order of ministers whose business it is to preach it, and to bring it home to the minds of men. Such men will be set apart by a solemn initiation to their office; the more solemn the initiation is, the more faithful they will be. The question rather is what extent of spiritual power such ministers may claim. The essence of religious liberty is that men should feel that there is nothing whatever that stands between themselves and God; that they can approach God with perfect and simple access; that they can speak to Him without concealment of their sins, and receive from Him the comforting sense of the possibility of forgiveness. Of course the sense of sin is a terribly complicated one, because it seems to be made up partly of an inner sense of transgression, a sense of failure, a consciousness that we have acted unworthily, meanly, miserably. Yet the sense of sin follows many acts that are not in themselves necessarily disastrous either to oneself or the community. Then there is a further sense of sin, perhaps developed by long inheritance of instinct, which seems to attend acts not in themselves sinful, but which menace the security of society. For instance, there is nothing sinful in a man’s desiring to save himself, and in fact saving himself, from a sudden danger. If a man leaps out of the way of a runaway cart, or throws himself on the ground to avoid the accidental discharge of a gun, he would never be blamed, nor would he blame himself, for any want of courage. Yet if a man in a battle saves himself from death by flight, he would regard himself, and be regarded by others, as having failed in his duty, and he would be apt to feel a lifelong shame and remorse for having yielded to the impulse. Again, the deliberate killing of another human being in a fit of anger, however just, would be regarded by the offender as a deeply sinful act, and he would not quarrel with the justice of the sentence of death which would be meted out to him; but when we transfer the same act to the region of war, which is consecrated by the usage of society, a man who had slain a hundred enemies would regard the fact with a certain complacency, and would not be even encouraged by a minister of religion to repent of his hundred heinous crimes upon his deathbed.
The sense, then, of sin is in a certain degree an artificial sense, and would seem to consist partly of a deep and divine instinct which arraigns the soul for acts, which may be in themselves trifling, but which seem to possess the sinful quality; and partly of a conventional instinct which considers certain things to be abominable, which are not necessarily in themselves sinful, because it is the custom of the world to consider them so.
And then to the philosopher there falls a darker tinge upon the whole matter, when he considers that the evil impulses, to yield to which is sin, are in themselves deliberately implanted in man by his Creator, or at least not apparently eradicated; and that many of those whose whole life has been darkened, embittered, and wrecked by sin, have incurred their misery by yielding to tendencies which in themselves are, by inheritance, practically irresistible.
What room is there, then, in these latter days, when reason and science together have dispelled the darkness of superstition, have diminished the possibility of miraculous occurrences, have laughed empirical occultism out of the field, for the priest?
There is no room for him if there lingers in the depth of his mind any taint of the temptation to serve his own ends, or to exalt himself or his order, by trading on the fears of irrational and credulous humanity. Against such priestcraft as this the true priest must array himself, together with the scientist, the statesman, the physician. Against all personal and priestly domination all lovers of liberty and God must combine. Theirs is the sin of Simon Magus, the sin of Hophni, the sin of Caiaphas; the sin that desires that men should still be bound, in order that they may themselves win worship and honour. It is the deadliest and vilest tyranny in the world.
But of the true priesthood there is more need than there ever was, as the minds of men awaken to the truth; for in a world where there is so much that is dark, men need to be constantly encouraged, reminded, even rebuked. The true priest must leave the social conscience alone, and entrust it to the hands of statesmen and officials. His concern must be with the individual; he must endeavour to make men realize that tranquillity and security of heart can only be won by victories over self, that law is only a cumbrous and incomplete organization for enforcing upon men a sense of equality; and he must show how far law lags behind morality, and that a man may be legally respectable yet morally abominable. The true priest must not obscure the oracles of God; he must beware of, teaching that faith is an intricate intellectual process. He must pare religion to the bone, and show that the essence of it is a perfectly simple relation with God and neighbour. He must not concern himself with policy or ceremony; he must warn men against mistaking aesthetic impulse for the perception of virtue; he must fight against precedent and tradition and custom; he must realize that one point of union is more important than a hundred points of difference. He must set himself against upholsteries and uniforms, against formalities and rituals. He must abjure wealth and position, in favour of humble kindliness and serviceableness. He must have a sense of poetry and romance and beauty about life; where other men are artists in words, in musical tones, in pigments or sculptured stone, he must be an artist in virtue. He must be the friend and lover of humble, inefficient, inarticulate, unpleasing persons; and he must be able to show that there is a desirable quality of beauty in the most sordid and commonplace action, if faithfully performed.
Against such an ideal are arrayed all the forces of the world. Christ and Christ-like men have held up such an ideal to humanity; and the sorrow of it is that, the moment that such thoughts have won for themselves the incredible and instant power that they do win among mortals, men of impure motive, who have desired the power more than the service, have seized upon the source, have fenced it off, have systematized its distribution, have enriched themselves by withholding and denying it to all but those who can pay a price, if not of wealth, at all events of submission and obedience and recognition.
A man who desires the true priesthood may perhaps find it readiest to his hand in some ecclesiastical organization; yet there he is surrounded by danger; his impulses are repressed; he must sacrifice them for the sake of the caste to which he belongs; he is told to be cautious and prudent; he is praised and rewarded for being conventional. But a man may also take such a consecration for himself, as a king takes a crown from the altar and crowns himself with might; he need not require it at the hands of another. If a man resolves not to live for himself or his own ambitions, but to walk up and down in the earth, praising simplicity and virtue and the love of God wherever he sees it, protesting against tyranny and selfishness, bearing others’ burdens as far as he can, he may exercise the priesthood of God. Such men are to be found in every Church, and even holding the highest places in them; but such a priesthood is found, though perhaps few suspect it, by thousands among women where it is found by tens among men. Perhaps it may be said that if a man adds the tenderness of a woman to the serene strength of a man, he is best fitted for the task; but the truth lies in the fact that the qualities for the exercise of such an influence are to be found far more commonly among women than among men, though accompanied as a rule by less consciousness of it, and little desire to exercise it officially; indeed it is the very absence of egotism among women, the absence of the personal claim, that makes them less effective than they otherwise might be, because they do not hold an object or an aim dear enough. They desire to achieve, rather than to be known to have achieved; and yet in this unperceptive world, human beings are apt to choose for their guides and counsellors people whom they know by reputation, rather than those whom they know familiarly. And thus mere recognition often brings with it a power of wider influence, because people are apt to trust the judgment of others rather than their own. In seeking for an adviser, men are apt to consider who has the greatest reputation for wisdom, rather than whom they themselves have found wisest; and thus the man who seeks for influence often attains it, because he has a wider circle of those who recommend him. It is this absence of independent judgment that gives strength to the self-seeking priest; while the natural priesthood of women is less recognized because it is attended with no advertisement.
The natural priest is one whom one can instinctively and utterly trust, in whom one can deposit secrets as one deposits them in the custody of a bank, without any fear that they will be used for other purposes. In the true priest one finds a tender compassion, a deep and patient love; it is not worth while to wear disguises before him, because his keen, weary, and amused eye sees through the mask. It is not worth while to keep back, as Ananias did, part of the price of the land, to leave sordid temptations untold, because the true priest loves the sinner even more than he hates the sin; it is best to be utterly sincere with him, because he loves sincerity even more than unstained virtue; and one can confess to him one’s desires for good with as little false shame as one can confess one’s hankering after evil. Perhaps in one respect the man is more fitted to be a confessor than a woman, because he has a deeper experience of the ardour and the pleasure of temptation; and yet the deeper tenderness of the woman gives her a sympathy for the tempted, which is not even communicated by a wider experience of sin.
Perhaps there is nothing that reflects our anthropomorphic ideas of God more strongly than the fact that no revelation of prophets has ever conceived of the Supreme Deity as other than masculine; and no doubt the Mariolatry of the Church of Rome is the reflection of the growing influence in the world of the feminine element; and yet the conception of God as masculine is in itself a limitation of His infinite perfection. That we should carry our conception of sex into the infinite is perhaps a mere failure of imagination, and if we could divest ourselves of a thought which possibly has no reality in it, we should perhaps grow to feel that the true priesthood of life could be exercised as well by women as by men, or even better. The true principle is that all those who are set free by a natural grace, a divine instinct, from grosser temptations, and whose freedom leads them not to a cold self- sufficiency, to a contempt for what is weaker, but to an ardent desire to save, to renew, to upraise, are the natural priests or priestesses of the world; for the only way in which the priest can stand between man and God is, when smaller and more hampered natures realize that he has a divine freedom and compassion conferred upon him, which sets him above themselves; when they can feel that in religion it is better to agree with the saints than to differ from them; when they can see that there are certain people whose religious intuitions can be trusted, because they are wider and deeper than the narrower intuitions of more elementary natures.
The priest, then, that I would recognize is not the celebrator of lonely and forlorn mysteries, the proprietor of divine blessings, the posturer in solemn ceremonies, but the man or woman of candid gaze, of fearless heart, of deep compassion, of infinite concern. It is these qualities which, if they are there, lend to rite and solemnity a holiness and a significance which they cannot win from antiquity or tradition. Such priests as these are the interpreters of the Divine will, the channels of Divine grace; and the hope of the race lies in the fact that such men and women are sent into the world, and go in and out among us, more than in all the stately organizations, the mysterious secrets, the splendid shrines, devised by the art of man to make fences about the healing spring; shrines where, though sound and colour may lavish their rich hues, their moving tones, yet the raiment of the priest may hide a proud and greedy heart, and the very altar may be cold.
XIII
AMBITION
I am afraid that Milton’s great line about ambition,
“That last infirmity of noble minds,”
is responsible for a good deal of harm, because it induces high- minded persons of inexact ideas to think ambition a noble infirmity, or at least to believe that they need not try to get rid of their personal ambitions until they have conquered all their other evil dispositions. I suppose that what Milton meant was that it was the hardest of all faults to get rid of; and the reason why it is so difficult to eject it, is because it is so subtle and ingenious a spirit, and masquerades under such splendid disguises, arrayed in robes of light. A man who desires to fill a high position in the world is so apt to disguise his craving to himself by thinking, or trying to think, that he desires a great place because of the beneficent influence he can exert, and all the good that he will be able to do, which shall stream from him as light from the sun. Of course to a high-minded man that is naturally one of the honest pleasures of an important post; but he ought to be quite sure that his motive is that the good should be done, and not that he should have the credit of doing it. I have burnt my own fingers not once nor twice at the fire of ambition, and the subject has been often in my mind. But my experiences were so wholly unlike anything that I had anticipated, though I suppose they are in reality normal enough, that I will venture to set them down here. The first curious experience was how, on a nearer survey of the prospect of obtaining an important post, all the incidental advantages and conveniences of the position sank into nothingness. This was a quite unexpected development; I had imagined that a prospect of dignity and importance would have had something vaguely sustaining about it. A brilliant satirist once said that a curate did not as a rule desire to be a bishop that he might exercise a wide and useful influence, but primarily that he might be called “my lord.” I myself was brought, as a child, in contact with one who was somewhat unexpectedly called to a high office. I was much with him in the days when his honours first invested him, and I confess with a certain shame that it did undoubtedly seem to me that the dignity of the office, the sense of power, the obvious respect paid to him by people of position, were things that must pleasantly sweeten a mortal cup. The other day I was in the company of an eminent prelate; there were three curates present: they hovered round the great man like bees round a flower; they gazed with innocent rapture upon his shapely legs, somewhat strangely swathed, as Carlyle said, his bright, grotesque hat; and I could not help feeling that they thought how well such raiment would become themselves. It is of course a childish view; but then how long our childish views survive, though hidden under grave pretences! To see a great personage move with dignity to his appointed place in a great ceremony, attended by all the circumstances of pomp, a congregation gazing, with an organ above thundering out rich and solemn music, how impressive it all appears! How hard to think that the central actor in such a scene does not feel his heart swell with a complacent joy! And yet I suppose that any sensible man under such conditions is far more likely to be oppressed with a sense of weakness and anxious responsibility; how soon such surroundings ought to, nay, do find their true value in a wise man’s mind! The triumph rather is if, in the midst of all this glitter and glory, when a silence is made, the worshipful man speaks simple and strong words out of a pure and noble heart; and then one can feel that the pomp is nothing but the due homage of mankind for real greatness, and that it has followed him rather than been followed by him.
It was a relief to find, as I say, that, on a nearer prospect, all the circumstance of greatness vanished into shadow–indeed more than that–it became one of the distinct disadvantages of the position. I felt that time and money and thought would have to be spent on the useless and fatiguing mise-en-scene, and that it would all entail a quantity of futile worry, of tiresome publicity, of intolerable functions, that meant nothing but weariness of spirit. I think that men of high official position are most to be pitied because of the time that they have to spend, not in their work, but in the ornamental appearances entailed on them by their duties. These things have a certain value, I suppose, in stimulating the imagination of gazers; but surely it is a poor value after all. A secretary of state in his study, working out the hard and tiresome details of a plan that will benefit perhaps a whole nation in humble ways, is a more admirable figure than the same man, in ribbon and star, bowing and smiling at an evening party. And yet the dignified trappings of the post are what ordinary men desire.
The next step in my own progress when confronted, as I say, with the prospect of the possibility that I might feel bound to accept an important position, was the consciousness of the anxious and wearing responsibilities that it involved. I felt that a millstone was to be bound round my neck, and that I must bid farewell to what is after all the best gift of heaven, my liberty; a liberty won by anxious years of hard toil.
And here I have no doubt, though I tried hard not to let it affect me, that my desire not to sacrifice my liberty did make me exaggerate the difficulties that lay before me; difficulties which I should probably have unconsciously minimized if I had desired the position which was in prospect. It was a happy moment when I found myself relieved from the responsibility of undertaking an impossible task. I felt, too, that I was further disqualified by my reluctance to attempt the task; a reluctance which a near prospect of the position had poignantly revealed to me. A great task ought to be taken up with a certain buoyancy and eagerness of spirit, not in heaviness and sadness. A certain tremor of nerves, a stage fright, is natural to all sensitive performers. But this is merely a kind of anteroom through which one must needs pass to a part which one desires to play; but if one does not sincerely desire to play the part, it is clear that to attempt it merely from a sense of duty is an ill omen for success. And so I felt sincerely and humbly that I ought not to feel compelled to attempt it. The conviction came in a flash like a divine intuition, and was followed by a peace of mind which showed me that I was acting rightly. I seemed too to perceive that the best work in the world was not the work of administration and organization, but humble and individual ministries performed in a corner without tangible rewards. For such work I was both equipped and prepared, and I turned back to the fallentis semita vitae, which is the true path for the sincere spirit, aware that I had been truly and tenderly saved from committing a grave mistake.
Perhaps if one could have looked at the whole question in a simpler and larger-minded way, the result might have been different. But here temperament comes in, and the very complexities and intricacies that clouded the matter were of themselves evidence that after all it was the temperament that was at fault. Cecil Rhodes, it is recorded, once asked Lord Acton why Mr. Bent, the explorer, did not pronounce certain ruins to be of Phoenician origin. Lord Acton replied with a smile that it was probably because he was not sure. “Ah!” said Cecil Rhodes, “that is not the way that Empires are made.” A true, interesting, and characteristic comment; but it also contains a lesson that people who are not sure should not attempt to make empires, or undertake tasks that involve the welfare of many.
And so there remains the duty to me, after my piece of experience, to gather up the fragments that remain, to interpret. Dante assigns the lowest place in the lower world to those who refuse a great opportunity, but he is speaking of those who perversely reject a great task, which is plainly in their power, for some false and low motive. But the case is different for those who have a great temptation put before them, and who, desiring to do what is right, have it brought home to them in a convincing way that it is not their opportunity. No one ought to assume great responsibilities if he is not equal to them. One of the saddest things ever said on a human deathbed was what was said by a great ecclesiastic, who had disappointed the hopes that had been formed of him. In his last moments he turned to one who stood near him and murmured, “I have held a great post, and I have not been equal to it.” The misery was that no one could sincerely contradict him. It is not a piece of noble self-sacrifice to have assumed confidently a great responsibility to which one is not equal. It is a mere mistake, and a mistake which is even more reprehensible than the mistake of being over-persuaded into attempting a task for which one is not fitted. One is given reason and common sense and prudence that one may use them, and to act contrary to their dictates because those who do not know you so well as you know yourself advise you cheerfully that it will probably be all right, is an act of criminal folly. Heavy responsibilities are lightly assumed nowadays, because the temptations of power and publicity are very strong, and because too high a value is set upon worldly success. It is a plainer and simpler duty for those who wish to act rightly, and who have formed a deliberate idea of own limitations, to refuse great positions humbly and seriously, if they know that they will be unequal to them.
Of course I knew that I should be reproached with indolence and even cowardice. I knew that I should be supposed to be one of those consistently impracticable people who insist on going off at a tangent when the straight course lies before them. That I should be relegated to the class of persons who have failed in life through some deep-seated defect of will. The worst of a serious decision of the kind is that, whichever step one takes, one is sure to be blamed. I saw all this with painful clearness, but it is better to be arraigned before the tribunal of other men’s consciences than to be condemned before one’s own. It is better to refuse and be disappointed, than to accept and be disappointed. Failure in the course marked out, in the event of acceptance, would have been disastrous, not only to myself but to the institution I was to be set to rule and guide. Far better that the task should be entrusted to one who had no diffidence, no hesitation, but a sincere confidence in his power of dealing with the difficulties of the situation, and an ardent desire to grapple with them.
The only difficulty, if one believes very strongly, as I do, in a great and wise Providence that guides our path, is to interpret why the possibility of a great task is indicated to one if it is not intended that one should perform it. But the essence of a true belief in the call of Providence seems to me to lie not in the rash acceptance of any invitation that happens to come in one’s way, but a stern and austere judgment of one’s own faculties and powers. I have not the smallest doubt that Providence intended that this great task should be refused by me; my only difficulty is to see what to make of it, and why it was even suggested. One lesson is that one must beware of personal vanity, another that one should not indulge in the temptation to desire important posts for any reason except the best: the humble hope to do work that is useful and valuable. If I had sternly repressed these tendencies at an earlier stage of life, this temptation would not have been necessary, nor the humiliation which inevitably succeeds it.
But
that is down need fear no fall,
He that is low no pride.
And there can be now no more chance of these bitter and self- revealing incidents, which show one, as in a clear mirror, the secret weaknesses of the heart.
But in setting aside the desire for the crowns and thrones of ambition, we must be very careful that we are not merely yielding to temptations of indolence, of fastidiousness, of cowardice, and calling a personal motive unworldliness for the sake of the associations. No man need set himself to seek great positions, but a man who is diffident, and possibly indolent, will do well to pin himself down in a position of responsibility and influence, if it comes naturally in his way. There are a good many men with high natural gifts of an instinctive kind who are yet averse to using them diligently, who, indeed, from the very facility with which they exercise them, hardly know their value. Such men as these–and I have known several–undertake a great responsibility if they refuse to take advantage of obvious opportunities to use their gifts. Men of this kind have often a certain vague, poetical, and dreamy quality of mind; a contemplative gift. They see and exaggerate the difficulties and perils of posts of high responsibility. If they yield to temptations of temperament, they often become ineffective, dilettante, half-hearted natures, playing with life and speculating over it, instead of setting to work on a corner of the tangle. They hang spiritless upon the verge of the battle instead of mingling with the fray. The curse of such temperaments is that they seem destined to be unhappy whichever way they decide. If they accept positions of responsibility, they are fretted and strained by difficulties and obstacles; they live uneasily and anxiously; they lose the buoyancy with which great work should be done; if, on the other hand, they refuse to come forward, they are tortured with regrets for having abstained; they become conscious of ineffectiveness and indecision; they are haunted by the spectres of what might have been.
The only course for such natures is to endeavour to see where their true life lies, and to follow the dictates of reason and conscience as far as possible. They must resolve not to be tempted by the glamour of possible success, but to take the true measure of their powers. They must not yield to the temptation to trust to the flattering judgment that others may form of their capacities, nor light-heartedly to shoulder a burden which they may be able to lift but not to carry. Such natures will sometimes attempt a great task with a certain glow and enthusiasm; but they must ask themselves humbly how they will continue to discharge it when the novelty has worn off, and when the prospect that lies before them is one of patient and unpraised labour. It leads to worse disasters to over- estimate one’s powers than to under-estimate them. A man who over- estimates his capacities is apt to grow impatient, and even tyrannical, in the presence of difficulties.
And after all it may be said that humility is a rarer virtue than confidence; and though it is not so popular, though it does not appeal so much to the imagination, it is a quality that may well be exercised, if it is done without self-consciousness, in these busy days and in these active western climes. The best work of the world is done, as I have said, not by those who organize on a large scale, but by those who work faithfully on individual lines, in corners and byways. Indeed, the success of those who organize and rule is due in part no doubt to the power that they may possess of inspiring silent effort, but is still more largely due to the faithful workers whose labours are unnoted, who carry out great designs in a simple and quiet spirit. There is strong warrant in the teaching of Christ for the work of those who are faithful in a few things. There is no warrant for the action of those who stride into the front, and clamour to be entrusted with the destinies of others. There can be no question that Christ does not admit the value of ambition in any form as a motive for character. The lives that He praises are the lives of quiet, affectionate persons, more concerned with the things of the spirit than with the things of the intellect. The Christian must concern himself, not with grasping at influence, not even with setting his mark upon the world, but with the quality of his decisions, his work, his words, his thoughts. The only thing possible for him is to go forward step by step, trusting more to the guidance of God than to his own designs, to what are called intuitions more than to reasoned conclusions. In that spirit, if he can attain to it, he begins to be able to estimate things at their true value. Instead of being dazzled with the bright glare which the world throws upon the objects of his desire, he sees all things in a pale, clear light of dawn, and true aims begin to glow with an inner radiance. He may tremble and hesitate before a decision, but once taken there is no looking back; he knows that he has been guided, and that God has told him, by silent and eloquent motions of the spirit, what it is that He would have him to do; he has but to interpret and to trust.
But even supposing that one has learnt one’s own lesson in the school of ambition, the question comes in as to how far it should be used as a motive for the young, by those who are entrusted with educational responsibilities. It is one of the most difficult things to decide as to what extent it is permissible to use motives that are lower than the highest, because they may possess a greater effectiveness in the case of immature minds. It is easy enough to say sincerely that one ought always to appeal to the highest possible motive; but when one is conscious that the highest motive is quite out of the horizon of the person concerned, and practically is no motive at all, is it not merely pedantry to insist upon appealing to the highest motive for one’s own satisfaction? It is not perhaps so difficult where the lower reason for a course of action is still a sound reason in itself, as, for instance, if one is trying to help a man out of drunken habits. The highest motive to appeal to is the truth that in yielding to sensual impulses, in such a matter, a man is falling short of his best ideal; but a more practical motive is to point out the loss of health and respectability that results from the practice. Yet when one appeals to a boy’s ambition, and encourages him to be ambitious, one cannot be quite certain whether one is not appealing to a false motive altogether. The excuse for using it is the hope that, when for the sake of ambition he has learnt diligence and perseverance, he may grow to perceive that the competitive instinct, which in its barest form is the desire to obtain desirable things at the expense of others, is not in reality a good motive at all. With immature characters part of the joy of success is that others have been beaten, the pride of having carried off a prize which others are disappointed of obtaining. And if one talks to an ambitious boy, and tries to inculcate the principle that one should do one’s best without caring about results, one is generally conscious that he believes it to be only a tiresome professional platitude, the kind of sentiment in which older people think fit to indulge for the purpose, if possible, of throwing cold water on innocent enjoyment.
Yet, after all, how very few people there are who do learn the further lesson! The successful man generally continues to show to the end of his life a contempt for unsuccessful persons, which is only good-humoured because of the consciousness of his own triumph; how rare, again, it is to find an unsuccessful person who does not attempt, if he can, to belittle the attainments of his successful rival, or who at least, if he overcomes that temptation from a sense of propriety, feels entitled to nourish a secret satisfaction at any indication of failure on the part of the man who has obtained the prize that he himself coveted in vain. Yet if one has ever seen, as I have, the astonishing change of both work and even character which may come over a boy or a young man who is perhaps diffident and indolent, if one can get him to do a successful piece of work, or push an opportunity in his way and help him to seize it, one hesitates before ruling out the use of ambition as an incentive. Perhaps it is uneasy and casuistical morality to shrink from using this incentive, so long as one faithfully puts the higher side of the question before a boy as well. But when one is quite sure that the larger aspect of the case will fall on deaf ears, and that only the lower stimulus will be absorbed, one is apt to hesitate. I am inclined, however, to think that such hesitation is on the whole misplaced, and that in dealing with immature minds one must be content to use immature motives. There is a temptation to try and keep the education of people too much in one’s own hands, and to feel oneself to be too responsible in the matter. I have a friend who errs in this respect, and who is apt to assume too wide a responsibility in dealing with others, who was gently rebuked by a wise-hearted teacher of wide and deep experience, who said on one occasion, when over-anxiety had spoilt the effect of my friend’s attempts, that he ought to be content to leave something for God to do.
But for oneself, one must try to learn the large lesson in the course of time, to learn that the sense of ambition is often, in reality, only a sense of personal vanity and self-confidence disguised; and that the one possible attitude of mind is to go humbly and patiently forward, desiring the best, labouring faithfully and abundantly, neither seeking nor avoiding great opportunities, not failing in courage nor giving way to rash impulses, and realizing the truth of the wise old Greek proverb that the greatest of all disasters for a man is to be opened and found to be empty; the wise application of which to life is not to avoid the occasions of opening, but to make sure that if the opening comes inevitably, we shall be found not to have devoted ourselves to the adorning of the casket, but to have piled with careful hands the treasure high within.
XIV
THE SIMPLE LIFE
There is a good deal of talk just now about “the simple life,” and though I would not go so far as to say that there is a movement in the direction of it, yet the talk that one hears on many sides proves, at all events, that people take a certain interest in the question.
Part of it is a pose no doubt; there is a distinguished, and I would add very charming, lady of my acquaintance, who has the subject constantly on her lips. Her method of practising simplicity is a delightful one, as all her methods are. In addition to the three magnificent residences which she already possesses, she has bought a cottage in a secluded part of the country; she has spent a large sum of money in adding to it; it is furnished with that stately austerity which can only be achieved at great expense. She motors down there, perhaps three times in the year, and spends three days there, on each visit, with two or three friends who are equally in love with simplicity; I was fortunate enough, the other day, to be included in one of these parties; the only signs of simplicity to the complex mind were that there were only five courses at dinner, that we drank champagne out of rather old- fashioned long glasses, and that two goats were tethered in a corner of the lawn. The goats I understood were the seal and symbol of the simple life. No use was made of them, and they were decidedly in the way, but without them life would have been complicated at once.
When we went off again in the motor, my charming hostess waved her hand at the little cottage, as we turned the corner, with a sigh, as of one condemned by a stern fate to abjure the rural felicity which she loved, and then settled down with delighted zest to discuss her programme of social engagements for the next few weeks.
It had certainly been very delightful; we had talked all day long; we had wandered, adoring simplicity, on the village green; we had attended an evening service in the church; we had consumed exquisitely cooked meals about an hour before the usual time, because to breakfast at eight and to dine at seven was all part of the pretty game. I ventured to ask my hostess how she would like to spend six months in her cottage comparatively alone, and she replied with deep conviction, “I should adore it; I would give all I possess to be able to do it.” “Then it is nothing,” I said, “but a sense of duty that tears you away?” To which she made no answer except to shake her head mournfully, and to give me a penetrating smile.
I cannot help wondering whether the people who talk about the simple life have any idea what it means; I do not think that my fair hostess’s desire for it is altogether a pose. One who lives, as she does, in the centre of the fashionable world, must inevitably tire of it from time to time. She meets the same people over and over again, she hears the same stories, the same jokes; she is not exactly an intellectual woman, though she has a taste for books and music; the interest for her, in the world in which she lives, is the changing relations of people, their affinities, their aversions, their loves and hates, their warmth and their coldness. What underlies the shifting scene, the endless entertainments, the country-house visits, the ebb and flow of society, is really the mystery of sex. People with not very much to do but to amuse themselves, with no prescribed duties, with few intellectual interests, become preoccupied in what is the great underlying force in the world, the passion of love; the talk that goes on, dull and tiresome as it appears to an outsider, is all charged with the secret influence; it is not what is said that matters; it is what is implied by manner and glance and inflection of tone. This atmosphere of electrical emotion is, for a good many years of their lives, the native air of these fair and unoccupied women. Men drift into it and out of it, and it provides for them often no more than a beautiful and thrilling episode; they become interested in sport, in agriculture, in politics, in business; but with women it is different; lovers and husbands, emotional friendships with other women–these constitute the business of life for a time; and then perhaps the tranquillizing and purer love of children, the troubles and joys of growing boys and girls, come in to fill the mind with a serener and kindlier, though not less passionate an emotion; and so life passes, and age draws near.
It is thus easier for men to lead the simple life than women, because they find it natural to grow absorbed in some definite and tangible occupation; and, after all, the essence of the simple life is that it can be lived in any milieu and under any circumstances. It does not require a cottage orne and a motor, though these are not inconsistent with it, if only they are natural.
I would try to trace what I believe the essence of the simple life to be; it lies very far down in the spirit, among the roots of life. The first requisite is a perfect sincerity of character. This implies many things: it means a joyful temperance of soul, a certain clearness and strength of temperament. The truly simple person must not be vague and indeterminate, swayed by desire or shifting emotion; he must meet others with a candid frankness, he must have no petty ambitions, he must have wide and genial interests, he must be quick to discern what is beautiful and wise; he must have a clear and straightforward point of view; he must act on his own intuitions and beliefs, not simply try to find out what other people are thinking and try to think it too; he must in short be free from conventionality. The essence of the really simple character is that a man should accept his environment and circle; if he is born in the so-called world, he need not seek to fly from it. Such a character as I have described has a marvellous power of evoking what is sincere and simple in other natures; such a one will tend to believe that other people are as straightforward and genuine as himself; and he will not be wholly mistaken, because when they are with him, they will be simple too. The simple person will have a strong, but not a Pharisaical, sense of duty; he will probably credit other people with the same sense of duty, and he will not often feel himself bound to disapprove of others, reserving his indignation for any instances of cruelty, meanness, falseness, and selfishness that he may encounter. He will not be suspicious or envious. Yet he will not necessarily be what is called a religious man, because his religion will be rather vital than technical. To be religious in the technical sense of the word –to care, that is, for religious services and solemnities, for priestly influences, for intricate doctrinal emotions–implies a strong artistic sense, and is often very far removed from any simplicity of conduct. But on the other hand the simple man will have a strong sense of responsibility, a deep confidence in the Will of God and His high purposes.
And thus the simple man will scarcely be a man of leisure, because there is so much that he will desire to do, and which he will feel called upon to do. Whatever he considers to be his work, he will do with a cheerful energy, which will sustain him far beyond the threshold of fatigue. His personal wants will be few; he will not care for spending money for the sake of spending it, but he will be liberal and generous whenever there is need. He will be uneasy in luxury. He will be a lover of the open air and of the country, but his aim will be exercise, and the sense of health and vigour, rather than amusement. He will never be reduced to asking himself how he is going to spend the day, for the present day, and a long perspective of days ahead, will already be full by anticipation. He will take work, amusement, people, as they come, and he will not be apt to make plans or to arrange parties, because he will expect to find in ordinary life the amusement and the interest that he desires. He will be above all things tender-hearted, kind, and fearless. He will not take fancies to people, or easily discard a friend; but he will be courteous, kind to all weakness, compassionate to awkwardness, fond of children, good-natured, loving laughter and peacefulness; he will not be easily disappointed, and he will have no time to be fretful, if things do not turn out exactly as he desires.
I have known such persons in every rank of life. They are the people who can be depended upon to do what they undertake, to understand the difficulties of others, to sympathize, to help. The essence of it all is a great absence of self-consciousness, and such people as I have described would be genuinely surprised, as a rule, if they were told that they were living a different life from the lives of others.
This simplicity of nature is not often found in conjunction with very great artistic or intellectual gifts; but when it is so found, it is one of the most perfect combinations in the world.
The one thing that is entirely fatal to simplicity is the desire to stimulate the curiosity of others in the matter. The most conspicuous instance of this, in literature, is the case of Thoreau, who is by many regarded as the apostle of the simple life. Thoreau was a man of extremely simple tastes, it is true. He ate pulse, whatever that may be, and drank water; he was deeply interested in the contemplation of nature, and he loved to disembarrass himself of all the apparatus of life. It was really that he hated trouble more than anything in the world; he found that by working six weeks in the year, he could earn enough to enable him to live in a hut in a wood for the rest of the twelvemonth; he did his household work himself, and his little stock of money sufficed to buy him food and clothes, and to meet his small expenses. But Thoreau was indolent rather than simple; and what spoilt his simplicity was that he was for ever hoping that he would be observed and admired; he was for ever peeping out of the corner of his eye, to see if inquisitive strangers were hovering about to observe the hermit at his contemplation. If he had really loved simplicity best, he would have lived his life and not troubled himself about what other people thought of him; but instead of that he found his own simplicity a deeply interesting and refreshing subject of contemplation. He was for ever looking at himself in the glass, and describing to others the rugged, sunbrowned, slovenly, solemn person that he saw there.
And then, too, it was easier for Thoreau to make money than it would be for the ordinary artisan. When Thoreau wrote his famous maxim, “To maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime,” he did not add that he was himself a man of remarkable mechanical gifts; he made, when he was disposed, admirable pencils, he was an excellent land-surveyor, and an author as well; moreover, he was a celibate by nature. He would no doubt have found, if he had had a wife and children, and no aptitude for skilled labour, that he would have had to work as hard as any one else.
Thoreau had, too, a quality which is in itself an economical thing. He did not care in the least for society. He said that he would rather “keep bachelor’s hall in hell than go to board in heaven.” He was not a sociable man, and sociability is in itself expensive. He had, it is true, some devoted friends, but it seems that he would have done anything for them except see them. He was a man of many virtues and no vices, but he was most at his ease with faddists. Not that he avoided his fellow-men; he was always ready to see people, to talk, to play with children, but on the other hand society was not essential to him. Yet, just and virtuous as he was, there was something radically unamiable about him: “I love Henry,” one of his friends said of him, “but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.” He was in fact an egotist with strong fancies and preferences; and, though he was an ascetic by preference, he cannot be called a simple-minded man, because the essence of simplicity is not to ride a hobby hard. He thought and talked too much about simplicity; and the fact is that simplicity, like humility, cannot exist side by side with self-consciousness. The moment that a man is conscious that he is simple and humble, he is simple and humble no longer. You cannot become humble by reminding people constantly, like Uriah Heep, of your humility; similarly you cannot become simple, by doing elaborately, and making a parade of doing, the things that the simple man would do without thinking about them.
It is almost true to say that the people who are most in love with simplicity are often the most complicated natures. They become weary of their own complexity, and they fancy that by acting on a certain regimen they can arrive at tranquillity of soul. It is in reality just the other way. One must become simple in soul first, and the simple setting follows as a matter of course. If a man can purge himself of ambition, and social pride, and ostentation, and the desire of praise, his life falls at once into a simple mould, because keeping up appearances is the most expensive thing in the world; to begin with eating pulse and drinking water, is as if a man were to wear his hair like Tennyson, and expect to become a poet thereby. Asceticism is the sign and not the cause of simplicity. The simple life will become easy and common enough when people have simple minds and hearts, when they do the duties that lie ready to their hand, and do not crave for recognition.
Neither can simplicity be brought about by a movement. There is nothing which is more fatal to it than that people should meet to discuss the subject; it can only be done by individuals, and in comparative isolation. A friend of mine dreamed the other day that she was discussing the subject of mission services with a stranger; she defended them in her dream with great warmth and rhetoric: when she had done, her companion said, “Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t believe in people being inspired IN ROWS.” This oracular saying has a profound truth in it–that salvation is not to be found in public meetings; and that to assemble a number of persons, and to address them on the subject of simplicity, is the surest way to miss the charm of that secluded virtue.
The worst of it is that the real, practical, moral simplicity of which I have been speaking is not an attractive thing to a generation fond of movement and excitement; what they desire is a picturesque mise-en-scene, a simplicity which comes as a little pretty interlude to busy life; they do not desire it in its entirety and continuously. They would find it dull, triste, ennuyant.
Thus it must fall into the hands of individuals to practise it, who are sincerely enamoured of quietness and peace. The simple man must have a deep fund of natural joy and zest; he must bring his own seasoning to the plain fare of life; but if he loves the face of nature, and books, and his fellow-men, and above all, work, there is no need for him to go out into the wilderness in pursuit of a transcendental ideal. But those whose spirits flag and droop in solitude; who open their eyes upon the world, and wonder what they will find to do; who love talk and laughter and amusement; who crave for alcoholic mirth, and the song of them that feast, had better make no pretence of pursuing a spirit which haunts the country lane and the village street, the rough pasture beside the brimming stream, the forest glade, with the fragrant breeze blowing cool out of the wood. Simplicity, to be successfully attained, must be the result of a passionate instinct, not of a picturesque curiosity; and it is useless to lament that one has no time to possess one’s soul, if, when one visits the innermost chamber, there is nothing there but cobwebs and ugly dust.
XV
GAMES
It requires almost more courage to write about games nowadays than it does to write about the Decalogue, because the higher criticism is tending to make a belief in the Decalogue a matter of taste, while to the ordinary Englishman a belief in games is a matter of faith and morals.
I will begin by saying frankly that I do not like games; but I say it, not because any particular interest attaches to my own dislikes and likes, but to raise a little flag of revolt against a species of social tyranny. I believe that there are a good many people who do not like games, but who do not dare to say so. Perhaps it may be thought that I am speaking from the point of view of a person who has never been able to play them. A vision rises in the mind of a spectacled owlish man, trotting feebly about a football field, and making desperate attempts to avoid the proximity of the ball; or joining in a game of cricket, and fielding a drive with the air of a man trying to catch an insect on the ground, or sitting in a boat with the oar fixed under his chin, being forced backwards with an air of smiling and virtuous confusion. I hasten to say that this is not a true picture. I arrived at a reasonable degree of proficiency in several games: I was a competent, though not a zealous, oar; I captained a college football team, and I do not hesitate to say that I have derived more pleasure from football than from any other form of exercise. I have climbed some mountains, and am even a member of the Alpine Club; I may add that I am a keen, though not a skilful, sportsman, and am indeed rather a martyr to exercise and open air. I make these confessions simply to show that I do not approach the subject from the point of view of a sedentary person but indeed rather the reverse. No weather appears to me to be too bad to go out in, and I do not suppose there are a dozen days in the year in which I do not contrive to get exercise.
But exercise in the open air is one thing, and games are quite another. It seems to me that when a man has reached an age of discretion, he ought no longer to need the stimulus of competition, the desire to hit or kick balls about, the wish to do such things better than other people. It seems to me that the elaborate organization of athletics is a really rather serious thing, because it makes people unable to get on without some species of excitement. I was staying the other day at a quiet house in the country, where there was nothing particular to do; there was not, strange to say, even a golf course within reach. There came to stay there for a few days an eminent golfer, who fell into a condition of really pitiable dejection. The idea of taking a walk or riding a bicycle was insupportable to him; and I think he never left the house except for a rueful stroll in the garden. When I was a schoolmaster it used to distress me to find how invariably the parents of boys discoursed with earnestness and solemnity about a boy’s games; one was told that a boy was a good field, and really had the makings of an excellent bat; eager inquiries were made as to whether it was possible for the boy to get some professional coaching; in the case of more philosophically inclined parents it generally led on to a statement of the social advantages of being a good cricketer, and often to the expression of a belief that virtue was in some way indissolubly connected with keenness in games. For one parent who said anything about a boy’s intellectual interests, there were ten whose preoccupation in the boy’s athletics was deep and vital.
It is no wonder that, with all this parental earnestness, boys tended to consider success in games the one paramount object of their lives; it was all knit up with social ambitions, and it was viewed, I do not hesitate to say, as of infinitely more importance than anything else. I do not mean to say that many of the boys did not consider it important to be good, and did not desire to be conscientious about their work. But as a practical matter games were what they thought about and talked about, and what aroused genuine enthusiasm. They were disposed to despise boys who could not play games, however virtuous, kindly, and sensible they might be; an entire lack of conscientiousness, and even grave moral obliquity, were apt to be condoned in the case of a successful athlete. We masters, I must frankly confess, did not make any serious attempt to fight the tendency. We spent our spare time in walking about the cricket and football fields, in looking on, in discussing the fine nuances in the style of individual players. It was very natural to take an interest in the thing which was to the boys a matter of profound concern; but what I should be inclined to censure was that it was really a matter of profound concern with ourselves; and we did not take a kindly and paternal interest in the matter, so much as the interest of enthusiasts and partisans.
It is very difficult to see how to alter this. Probably, like other deep-seated national tendencies, it will have to cure itself. It would be impossible to insist that the educators of youth should suppress the interest which they instinctively and genuinely feel in games, and profess an interest in intellectual matters which they do not really feel. No good would come out of practising hypocrisy in the matter, from however high a motive. While schoolmasters rush off to golf whenever they get a chance, and fill their holidays to the brim with games of various kinds, it would be simply hypocritical to attempt to conceal the truth; and the difficulty is increased by the fact that, while parents and boys alike feel as they do about the essential importance of games, head-masters are more or less bound to select men for masterships who are proficient in them; because whatever else has to be attended to at school, games have to be attended to; and, moreover, a man whom the boys respect as an athlete is likely to be more effective both as a disciplinarian and a teacher. If a man is a first-rate slow bowler, the boys will consider his views on Thucydides and Euclid more worthy of consideration than the views of a man who has only a high university degree.
The other day I was told of the case of a head-master of a small proprietary private school, who was treated with open insolence and contempt by one of his assistants, who neglected his work, smoked in his class-room, and even absented himself on occasions without leave. It may be asked why the head-master did not dismiss his recalcitrant assistant. It was because he had secured a man who was a ‘Varsity cricket-blue, and whose presence on the staff gave the parents confidence, and provided an excellent advertisement. The assistant, on the other hand, knew that he could get a similar post for the asking, and on the whole preferred a school where he might consult his own convenience. This is, of course, an extreme case; but would to God, as Dr. Johnson said, that it were an impossible one! I do not wish to tilt against athletics, nor do I at all undervalue the benefits of open air and exercise for growing boys. But surely there is a lamentable want of proportion about the whole view! The truth is that we English are in many respects barbarians still, and as we happen at the present time to be wealthy barbarians, we devote our time and our energies to the things for which we really care. I do not at all want to see games diminished, or played with less keenness. I only desire to see them duly subordinated. I do not think it ought to be considered slightly eccentric for a boy to care very much about his work, or to take an interest in books. I should like it to be recognized at schools that the one quality that was admirable was keenness, and that it was admirable in whatever department it was displayed; but nowadays keenness about games is considered admirable and heroic, while keenness about work or books is considered slightly grovelling and priggish.
The same spirit has affected what is called sport. People no longer look upon it as an agreeable interlude, but as a business in itself; they will not accept invitations to shoot, unless the sport is likely to be good; a moderate performer with the gun is treated as if it was a crime for him to want to shoot at all; then the motoring craze has come in upon the top of the golfing craze; and all the spare time of people of leisure tends to be filled up with bridge. The difficulty in dealing with the situation is that the thing itself is not only not wrong, but really beneficial; it is better to be occupied than to be idle, and it is hard to preach against a thing which is excellent in moderation and only mischievous in excess.
Personally I am afraid that I only look upon games as a pis-aller. I would always rather take a walk than play golf, and read a book than play bridge. Bridge, indeed, I should regard as only one degree better than absolutely vacuous conversation, which is certainly the most fatiguing thing in the world. But the odd thing is that while it is regarded as rather vicious to do nothing, it is regarded as positively virtuous to play a game. Personally I think competition always a more or less disagreeable thing. I dislike it in real life, and I do not see why it should be introduced into one’s amusements. If it amuses me to do a thing, I do not very much care whether I do it better than another person. I have no desire to be always comparing my skill with the skill of others.
Then, too, I am afraid that I must confess to lamentably feeble pleasure in mere country sights and sounds. I love to watch the curious and beautiful things that go on in every hedgerow and every field; it is a ceaseless delight to see the tender uncrumpling leaves of the copse in spring, and no a pleasure to see the woodland streaked and stained with the flaming glories of autumn. It is a joy in high midsummer to see the clear dwindled stream run under the thick hazels, among the lush water-plants; it is no less a joy to see the same stream running full and turbid in winter, when the banks are bare, and the trees are leafless, and the pasture is wrinkled with frost. Half the joy, for instance, of shooting, in which I frankly confess I take a childish delight, is the quiet tramping over the clean-cut stubble, the distant view of field and wood, the long, quiet wait at the covert-end, where the spindle-wood hangs out her quaint rosy berries, and the rabbits come scampering up the copse, as the far-off tapping of the beaters draws near in the frosty air. The delights of the country-side grow upon me every month and every year. I love to stroll in the lanes in spring, with white clouds floating in the blue above, and to see the glade carpeted with steel-blue hyacinths. I love to walk on country roads or by woodland paths, on a rain-drenched day of summer, when the sky is full of heavy inky clouds, and the earth smells fresh and sweet; I love to go briskly homeward on a winter evening, when the sunset smoulders low in the west, when the pheasants leap trumpeting to their roosts, and the lights begin to peep in cottage windows.
Such joys as these are within the reach of every one; and to call the country dull because one has not the opportunity of hitting and pursuing a little white ball round and round among the same fields, with elaborately contrived obstacles to test the skill and the temper, seems to me to be grotesque, if it were not also so distressing.
I cannot help feeling that games are things that are appropriate to the restless days of boyhood, when one will take infinite trouble and toil over anything of the nature of a make-believe, so long as it is understood not to be work; but as one gets older and perhaps wiser, a simpler and quieter range of interests ought to take their place. I can humbly answer for it that it need imply no loss of zest; my own power of enjoyment is far deeper and stronger than it was in early years; the pleasures I have described, of sight and sound, mean infinitely more to me than the definite occupations of boyhood ever did. But the danger is that if we are brought up ourselves to depend upon games, and if we bring up all our boys to depend on them, we are not able to do without them as we grow older; and thus we so often have the melancholy spectacle of the elderly man, who is hopelessly bored with existence, and who is the terror of the smoking-room and the dinner-table, because he is only capable of indulging in lengthy reminiscences of his own astonishing athletic performances, and in lamentations over the degeneracy of the human race.
Another remarkable fact about the conventionality that attends games is that certain games are dismissed as childish and contemptible while others are crowned with glory and worship. One knows of eminent clergymen who play golf; and that they should do so seems to constitute so high a title to the respect and regard with which normal persons view them, that one sometimes wonders whether they do not take up the practice with the wisdom of the serpent that is recommended in the Gospels, or because of the Pauline doctrine of adaptability, that by all means they may save some.
But as far as mere air and exercise goes, the childish game of playing at horses is admirably calculated to increase health and vigour and needs no expensive resources. Yet what would be said and thought if a prelate and his suffragan ran nimbly out of a palace gate in a cathedral close, with little bells tinkling, whips cracking, and reins of red ribbon drawn in to repress the curvetting of the gaitered steed? There is nothing in reality more undignified about that than in hitting a little ball about over sandy bunkers. If the Prime Minister and the Lord Chief Justice trundled hoops round and round after breakfast in the gravelled space behind the Horse Guards, who could allege that they would not be the better for the exercise? Yet they would be held for some mysterious reason to have forfeited respect. To the mind of the philosopher all games are either silly or reasonable; and nothing so reveals the stupid conventionality of the ordinary mind as the fact that men consider a series of handbooks on Great Bowlers to be a serious and important addition to literature, while they would hold that a little manual on Blind-man’s Buff was a fit subject for derision. St. Paul said that when he became a man he put away childish things. He could hardly afford to say that now, if he hoped to be regarded as a man of sense and weight.
I do not wish to be a mere Jeremiah in the region of prophecy, and to deplore, sarcastically and incisively, what I cannot amend. What I rather wish to do is to make a plea for greater simplicity in the matter, and to try and destroy some of the terrible priggishness in the matter of athletics, which appears to me to prevail. After all, athletics are only one form of leisurely amusement; and I maintain that it is of the essence of priggishness to import solemnity into a matter which does not need it, and which would be better without it. Because the tyranny is a real one; the man of many games is not content with simply enjoying them; he has a sense of complacent superiority, and a hardly disguised contempt for the people who do not play them.
I was staying in a house the other day where a distinguished philosopher had driven over to pay an afternoon call. The call concluded, he wished to make a start, so I went down to the stable with him to see about putting his pony in. The stables were deserted. I was forced to confess that I knew nothing about the harnessing of steeds, however humble. We discovered portions of what appeared to be the equipment of a pony, and I held them for him, while he gingerly tried them on, applying them cautiously to various portions of the innocent animal’s person. Eventually we had to give it up as a bad job, and seek for professional assistance. I described the scene for the benefit of a lively lady of my acquaintance, who is a devotee of anything connected with horses, and she laughed unmercifully at the description, and expressed the contempt, which she sincerely felt, in no measured terms. But, after all, it is no part of my business to harness horses; it is a convenience that there should be persons who possess the requisite knowledge; for me horses only represent a convenient form of locomotion. I did not mind her being amused–indeed, that was the object of my narrative–but her contempt was just as much misplaced as if I had despised her for not being able to tell the difference between sapphics and alcaics, which it was my business to know.
It is the complacency, the self-satisfaction, that results from the worship of games, which is one of its most serious features. I wish with all my heart that I could suggest a remedy for it; but the only thing that I can do is to pursue my own inclinations, with a fervent conviction that they are at least as innocent as the pursuit of athletic exercises; and I can also, as I have said, wave a little flag of revolt, and rally to my standard the quieter and more simple-minded persons, who love their liberty, and decline to part with it unless they can find a better reason than the merely comfortable desire to do what every one else is doing.
XVI
SPIRITUALISM
I was sitting the other day in a vicarage garden with my friend the vicar. It was a pretty, well-kept place, with old shrubberies and umbrageous trees; to the right, the tower of the church rose among its elms. We sate out of the wind, looking over a rough pasture field, apparently a common, divided from the garden by a little ha- ha of brick. The surface of the field was very irregular, as though there had been excavations made in it for gravel at some time or other; in certain parts of the field there appeared fragments of a stone wall, just showing above the ground.
The vicar pointed to the field. “Do you see that wall?” he said; “I will tell you a very curious story about that. When I came here, forty years ago, I asked the old gardener what the field was, as I never saw any one in it, or any beasts grazing there; and yet it was unfenced, and appeared to be common land–it was full of little thickets and thorn-bushes then. He was not very willing to tell me, I thought, but by dint of questions I discovered that it was a common, and that it was known locally by the curious name of Heaven’s Walls. He went on to say that it was considered unlucky to set foot in it; and that, as a matter of fact, no villager would ever dream of going there; he would not say why, but at last it came out that it was supposed to be haunted by a spirit. No one, it seemed, had ever seen anything there, but it was an unlucky place.
“Well, I thought no more of it at the time, though I often went into the field. It was a quiet and pretty place enough; full of thickets, as I have said, where the birds built unmolested–there was generally a goldfinch’s nest there.
“It became necessary to lay a drain across it, and a big trench was dug. One day they came and told me that the workmen had found something–would I go and look at it? I went out and found that they had unearthed a large Roman cinerary urn, containing some calcined bones. I told the lord of the manor, who is a squire in the next parish, and he and I after that kept a look-out over the workmen. We found another urn, and another, both full of bones. Then we found a big glass vessel, also containing bones. The squire got interested in the thing, and eventually had the whole place dug out. We found a large enclosure, once surrounded by a stone wall, of which you see the remains; in two of the corners there was an enormous deposit of wood ashes, in deep pits, which looked as if great fires had burnt there; and the walls in those two corners were all calcined and smoke-stained. We found fifty or sixty urns, all full of bones; and in another corner there was a deep shaft, like a well, dug in the chalk, with handholds down the sides, also full of calcined bones. We found a few coins, and in one place a conglomeration of rust that looked as if it might have been a heap of tools or weapons. We set the antiquaries to work, and they pronounced it to be what is called a Roman Ustrinum–that is to say, a public crematorium, where people who could not afford a separate funeral might bring a corpse to be burnt. If they had no place to deposit the urn, in which the bones were enclosed, they were allowed, it seems, to bury the urn there, until such time as they cared to remove it. There was a big Roman settlement here, you know. There was a fort on the hill there, and the sites of several large Roman villas have been discovered in the neighbourhood. This place must have stood rather lonely, away from the town, probably in the wood which then covered the whole of this county; but it is curious, is it not?” said the vicar, “that the tradition should have been handed down through all these centuries of its being an ill-omened place, long after any tradition of what the uses of the spot were!”
It was curious indeed! The vicar was presently called away, and I sate musing over the strange old story. I could fancy the place as it must have been, standing with its high blank walls in a clearing of the forest, with perhaps a great column of evil-smelling smoke drifting in oily waves over the corner of the wall, telling of the sad rites that were going on within. I could fancy heavy-eyed mourners dragging a bier up to the gates, with a silent form lying upon it, waiting in pale dismay until the great doors were flung open by the sombre rough attendants of the place; until they could see the ugly enclosure, with the wood piled high in the pit for the last sad service. Then would follow the burning and the drenching of the ashes, the gathering of the bones–all that was left of one so dear, father or mother, boy or maiden–the enclosing of them in the urn, and the final burial. What agonies of simple grief the place must have witnessed! Then, I suppose, the place was deserted by the Romans, the walls crumbled down into ruin, grass and bushes grew over the place. Then perhaps the forest was gradually felled and stubbed up, as the area of cultivation widened; but still the sad tradition of the spot left it desolate, until all recollection of its purpose was gone. No doubt, in Saxon days, it was thought to be haunted by the old wailing, restless spirits of those who had suffered the last rites there; so that still the place was condemned to a sinister solitude.
I went on to reflect over the strange and obstinate tradition that lingers still with such vitality among the human race, that certain places are haunted by the spirits of the dead. It is hard to believe that such tradition, so widespread, so universal, should have no kind of justification in fact. And yet there appears to be no justification for the idea, unless the spiritual conditions of the world have altered, unless there were real phenomena, which have for some cause ceased to manifest themselves, which originated the tradition. But there is certainly no scientific evidence of the fact. The Psychical Society, which has faced some ridicule for its serious attempt to find out the truth about these matters, have announced that investigations of so-called haunted houses have produced no evidence whatever. They seem to be a wholly unreliable type of stories, which always break down under careful inquiry. I am inclined myself to believe that such stories arose in a perfectly natural way. It is perfectly natural to simple people to believe that the spirit which animated a mortal body would, on leaving it, tend to linger about the scene of suffering and death. Indeed, it is impossible not to feel that, if the spirit has any conscious identity, it would be sure to desire to remain in the neighbourhood of those whom it loved so well. But the unsatisfactory element in these stories is that it generally appears to be the victim of some heinous deed, and not the perpetrator, who is condemned to make its sad presence known, by wailing and by sorrowful gestures, on the scene of its passion. But once given the belief that a spirit might tend to remain for a time in the place where its earthly life was lived, the terrors of man, his swift imagination, his power of self-delusion, would do the rest.
The only class of stories, say the investigators, which appear to be proved beyond the possibility of reasonable doubt, is the class of stories dealing with apparitions at the time of death; and this they explain by supposing a species of telepathy, which is indeed an obscure force, but obviously an existing one, though its conditions and limitations are not clearly understood. Telepathy is the power of communication between mind and mind without the medium of speech, and indeed in certain cases exercised at an immense distance. The theory is that the thought of the dying person is so potently exercised on some particular living person, as to cause the recipient to project a figure of the other upon the air. That power of visualization is not a very uncommon one; indeed, we all possess it more or less; we can all remember what we believe we have seen in our dreams, and we remember the figures of our dreams as optical images, though they have been purely mental conceptions, translated into the terms of actual sight. The impression of a dream-figure, indeed, appears to us to be as much the impression of an image received upon the retina of the eye, as our impressions of images actually so received. The whole thing is strange, of course, but not stranger than wireless telegraphy. It may be that the conditions of telepathy may some day be scientifically defined; and in that case it will probably make a clear and coherent connection between a number of phenomena which we do not connect together, just as the discovery of electricity connected together phenomena which all had observed, like the adhering of substances to charged amber, as well as the lightning-flash which breaks from the thunder-cloud. No one in former days traced any connection between these two phenomena, but we now know that they are only two manifestations of the same force. In the same way we may find that phenomena of which we are all conscious, but of which we do not know the reason, may prove to be manifestations of some central telepathic force–such phenomena, I mean, as the bravery of armies in action, or the excitement which may seize upon a large gathering of men.
We ought, I think, to admire and praise the patient work of the Psychical Society,–though is common enough to hear quite sensible people deride it,–because it is an attempt to treat a subject scientifically. What we have every right to deride is the dabbling in spiritualistic things by credulous and feeble-minded persons. These practices open to our view one of the most lamentable and deplorable provinces of the human mind, its power of convincing itself of anything which it desires to believe, its debility, its childishness. If the professions of so-called mediums were true, why cannot they exhibit their powers in some open and incontestable way, not surrounding themselves with all the conditions of darkness and excitability, in which the human power of self-delusion finds its richest field?
A friend of mine told me the other day what he evidently felt to be an extremely impressive story about a dignitary of the Church. This clergyman was overcome one day by an intense mental conviction that he was wanted at Bristol. He accordingly went there by train, wandered about aimlessly, and finally put up at a hotel for the night. In the morning he found a friend in the coffee-room, to whom he confided the cause of his presence in Bristol, and announced his intention of going away by the next train. The friend then told him that an Australian was dying in the hotel, and that his wife was very anxious to find a clergyman. The dignitary went to see the lady, with the intention of offering her his services, when he discovered that he had met her when travelling in Australia, and that her husband had been deeply impressed by a sermon which he had then delivered, and had been entreating for some days that he might be summoned to administer the last consolations of religion. The clergyman went in to see the patient, administered the last rites, comforted and encouraged him, and was with him when he died. He afterwards told the widow the story of his mysterious summons to Bristol, and she replied that she had been praying night and day that he might come and that he had no doubt come in answer to her prayers.
But the unsatisfactory part of the story is that one is asked to condone the extremely unbusinesslike, sloppy, and troublesome methods employed by this spiritual agency. The lady knew the name and position of the clergyman perfectly well, and might have written or wired to him. He could thus have been spared his aimless and mysterious journey, the expense of spending a night at the hotel; and moreover it was only the fortuitous meeting with a third person, not closely connected with the story, which prevented the clergyman from leaving the place, his mission unfulfilled. One cannot help feeling that, if a spiritual agency was at work, it was working either in a very clumsy way, or with a relish for mystery which reminds one of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes; if one is expected to accept the story as a manifestation of supernatural power, one can only conceive of it as the work of a very tricksy spirit, like Ariel in the “Tempest”; it seems like a very elaborate and melodramatic attempt to bring about a result, that could have been far more satisfactorily achieved by a little common sense. If instead of inspiring the lady to earnest prayer–which appears too to have been very slow in its action–why could not the supernatural power at work have inspired her with the much simpler idea of looking at the Clergy List? And yet the story no doubt produces on the ordinary mind an impressive effect, when as a matter of fact, if it is fairly considered, it can only be regarded, if true, as the work of an amiable and rather dilettante power, with a strong relish for the elaborately marvellous.
The truth is that what the ordinary human being desires, in matters of this kind, is not scientific knowledge but picturesqueness. As long as people frankly confess that it is the latter element of which they are in search, that, like the fat boy in Pickwick, they merely want to make their flesh creep, no harm is done. The harm is done by people who are really in search of sensation, who yet profess to be approaching the question in a scientific spirit of inquiry. I enjoy a good ghost story as much as any one; and I am interested, too, in hearing the philosophical conclusions of earnest-minded people; but to hear the question discussed, as one so often hears it, with a pretentious attempt to treat it scientifically, by people who, like the White Queen in Through the Looking-glass, find it pleasant to train themselves to believe a dozen impossible things before breakfast, afflicts me with a deep mental and moral nausea.
One, at least, of the patient investigators of this accumulated mass of human delusion, took up the quest in the hope that he might receive scientific evidence of the continued existence of identity. He was forced to confess that the evidence went all the other way, and that all the tales which appeared to substantiate the fact, were hopelessly discredited. The only thing, as I have said, that the investigations seem to have substantiated, is evidence which none but a determinedly sceptical mind would disallow, that there does exist, in certain abnormal cases, a possibility of direct communication between two or more living minds.
But, as I pondered thus, the day began to darken over the rough