WHERE NO FEAR WAS

A BOOK ABOUT FEAR

By

ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON

1914

CONTENTS

 I. THE SHADOW II. SHAPES OF FEAR III. THE DARKEST DOUBT IV. VULNERABILITY V. THE USE OF FEAR VI. FEARS OF CHILDHOOD VII. FEARS OF BOYHOOD VIII. FEARS OF YOUTH IX. FEARS OF MIDDLE AGE X. FEARS OF AGE XI. DR. JOHNSON XII. TENNYSON, RUSKIN, CARLYLE XIII. CHARLOTTE BRONTE XIV. JOHN STERLING XV. INSTINCTIVE FEAR XVI. FEAR OF LIFE XVII. SIMPLICITY XVIII. AFFECTION XIX. SIN XX. SERENITY

"Thus they went on till they came to about the middle of the Valley, and then Christiana said, 'Methinks I see something yonder on the roadbefore us, a thing of such a shape such as I have not seen. ' Then saidJoseph, 'Mother, what is it?' 'An ugly thing, Child, an ugly thing, 'said she. 'But, Mother, what is it like?' said he. ''Tis like I cannottell what, ' said she. And now it was but a little way off. Then saidshe, 'It is nigh. '"

"Pilgrim's Progress, " Part II. 

Where No Fear Was

I

THE SHADOW

There surely may come a time for each of us, if we have lived with anyanimation or interest, if we have had any constant or even fitfuldesire to penetrate and grasp the significance of the strange adventureof life, a time, I say, when we may look back a little, notsentimentally or with any hope of making out an impressive case forourselves, and interrogate the memory as to what have been the mostreal, vivid, and intense things that have befallen us by the way. Wemay try to separate the momentous from the trivial, and the importantfrom the unimportant; to discern where and how and when we might haveacted differently; to see and to say what has really mattered, what hasmade a deep mark on our spirit; what has hampered or wounded or maimedus. Because one of the strangest things about life seems to be ourincapacity to decide beforehand, or even at the time, where the realand fruitful joys, and where the dark dangers and distresses lie. Thethings that at certain times filled all one's mind, kindled hope andaim, seemed so infinitely desirable, so necessary to happiness, havefaded, many of them, into the lightest and most worthless of husks andphantoms, like the withered flowers that we find sometimes shut in thepages of our old books, and cannot even remember of what glowing andemotional moment they were the record!

How impossible it is ever to learn anything by being told it! Hownecessary it is to pay the full price for any knowledge worth having!The anxious father, the tearful mother, may warn the little boy beforehe goes to school of the dangers that await him. He does notunderstand, he does not attend, he is looking at the pattern of thecarpet, and wondering for the hundredth time whether the oddly-shapedblue thing which appears and reappears at intervals is a bird or aflower--yes, it is certainly meant for a bird perched on a bough! Hewishes the talk were over, he looks at the little scar on his father'shand, and remembers that he has been told that he cut it in acucumber-frame when he was a boy. And then, long afterwards perhaps, when he has made a mistake and is suffering for it, he sees that it wasTHAT of which they spoke, and wonders that they could not haveexplained it better. 

And this is so all along! We cannot recognise the dark tower, to whichin the story Childe Roland came, by any description. We must go thereourselves; and not till we feel the teeth of the trap biting into us, do we see that it was exactly in such a place that we had been warnedthat it would be laid. 

There is an episode in that strange and beautiful book Phantastes, byGeorge Macdonald, which comes often to my mind. The boy is wandering inthe enchanted forest, and he is told to avoid the house where theDaughter of the Ogre lives. His morose young guide shows him where thepaths divide, and he takes the one indicated to him with a sense ofmisgiving. 

A little while before he had been deceived by the Alder-maiden, and hadgiven her his love in error. This has taken some of the old joy out ofhis heart, but he has made his escape from her, and thinks he haslearned his lesson. 

But he comes at last to the long low house in the clearing; he findswithin it an ancient woman reading out of an old volume; he enters, heexamines the room in which she sits, and yielding to curiosity, heopens the door of the great cupboard in the corner, in spite of amuttered warning. He thinks, on first opening it, that it is just adark cupboard; but he sees with a shock of surprise that he is lookinginto a long dark passage, which leads out, far away from where hestands, into the starlit night. Then a figure, which seems to have beenrunning from a long distance, turns the corner, and comes speeding downtowards him. He has not time to close the door, but stands aside to letit pass; it passes, and slips behind him; and soon he sees that it is ashadow of himself, which has fallen on the floor at his feet. He askswhat has happened, and then the old woman says that he has found hisshadow, a thing which happens to many people; and then for the firsttime she raises her head and looks at him, and he sees that her mouthis full of long white teeth; he knows where he is at last, and stumblesout, with the dark shadow at his heels, which is to haunt him somiserably for many a sad day. 

That is a very fine and true similitude of what befalls many men andwomen. They go astray, they give up some precious thing--theirinnocence perhaps--to a deluding temptation. They are delivered for atime; and then a little while after they find their shadow, which notears or anguish of regret can take away, till the healing of life andwork and purpose annuls it. Neither is it always annulled, even inlength of days. 

But it is a paltry and inglorious mistake to let the shadow have itsdisheartening will of us. It is only a shadow, after all! And if wecapitulate after our first disastrous encounter, it does not mean thatwe shall be for ever vanquished, though it means perhaps a long anddreary waste of shame-stained days. That is what we must try toavoid--any WASTE of time and strength. For if anything is certain, itis that we have all to fight until we conquer, and the sooner we takeup the dropped sword again the better. 

And we have also to learn that no one can help us except ourselves. Other people can sympathise and console, try to soothe our injuredvanity, try to persuade us that the dangers and disasters ahead are notso dreadful as they appear to be, and that the mistakes we have madeare not irreparable. But no one can remove danger or regret from us, orrelieve us of the necessity of facing our own troubles; the most thatthey can do, indeed, is to encourage us to try again. 

But we cannot hope to change the conditions of life; and one of itsconditions is, as I have said, that we cannot foresee dangers. Nomatter how vividly they are described to us, no matter how eagerlythose who love us try to warn us of peril, we cannot escape. For thatis the essence of life--experience; and though we cannot rejoice whenwe are in the grip of it, and when we cannot see what the end will be, we can at least say to ourselves again and again, "this is at allevents reality--this is business!" for it is the moments of enduranceand energy and action which after all justify us in living, and not thepleasant spaces where we saunter among flowers and sunlit woods. Thoseare conceded to us, to tempt us to live, to make us desire to remain inthe world; and we need not be afraid to take them, to use them, toenjoy them; because all things alike help to make us what we are. 

II

SHAPES OF FEAR

Now as I look back a little, I see that some of my worst experienceshave not hurt or injured me at all. I do not claim more than my shareof troubles, but "I have had trouble enough for one, " as Browningsays, --bereavements, disappointments, the illness of those I haveloved, illness of my own, quarrels, misunderstandings, enmities, angers, disapprovals, losses; I have made bad mistakes, I have failedin my duty, I have done many things that I regret, I have beenunreasonable, unkind, selfish. Many of these things have hurt andwounded me, have brought me into sorrow, and even into despair. But Ido not feel that any of them have really injured me, and some of themhave already benefited me. I have learned to be a little more patientand diligent, and I have discovered that there are certain things thatI must at all costs avoid. 

But there is one thing which seems to me to have always and invariablyhampered and maimed me, whenever I have yielded to it, and I have oftenyielded to it; and that is Fear. It can be called by many names, andall of them ugly names--anxiety, timidity, moral cowardice. I can nevertrace the smallest good in having given way to it. It has been from myearliest days the Shadow; and I think it is the shadow in the lives ofmany men and women. I want in this book to track it, if I can, to itslair, to see what it is, where its awful power lies, and what, ifanything, one can do to resist it. It seems the most unreal thing inthe world, when one is on the other side of it; and yet face to facewith it, it has a strength, a poignancy, a paralysing power, whichmakes it seem like a personal and specific ill-will, issuing in a sortof dreadful enchantment or spell, which renders it impossible towithstand. Yet, strange to say, it has not exercised its power in thefew occasions in my life when it would seem to have been reallyjustified. Let me quote an instance or two which will illustrate what Imean. 

I was confronted once with the necessity of a small surgical operation, quite unexpectedly. If I had known beforehand that it was to be done, Ishould have depicted every incident with horror and misery. But themoment arrived, and I found myself marching to my bedroom with asurgeon and a nurse, with a sense almost of amusement at the adventure. 

I was called upon once in Switzerland to assist with two guides in therescue of an unfortunate woman who had fallen from a precipice, and hadto be brought down, dead or alive. We hurried up through thepine-forest with a chair, and found the poor creature alive indeed, butwith horrible injuries--an eye knocked out, an arm and a thigh broken, her ulster torn to ribbons, and with more blood about the place inpools than I should have thought a human body could contain. She wasconscious; she had to be lifted into the chair, and we had to discoverwhere she belonged; she fainted away in the middle of it, and I had togo on and break the news to her relations. If I had been toldbeforehand what would have had to be done, I do not think I could havefaced it; but it was there to do, and I found myself entirely capableof taking part, and even of wondering all the time that it was possibleto act. 

Again, I was once engulfed in a crevasse, hanging from the ice-ledgewith a portentous gulf below, and a glacier-stream roaring in thedarkness. I could get no hold for foot or hand, my companions could notreach me or extract me; and as I sank into unconsciousness, hearing myown expiring breath, I knew that I was doomed; but I can only say, quite honestly and humbly, that I had no fear at all, and only dimlywondered what arrangements would be made at Eton, where I was then amaster, to accommodate the boys of my house and my pupils. It was notdone by an effort, nor did I brace myself to the situation: fear simplydid not come near to me. 

Once again I found myself confronted, not so long ago, with anincredibly painful and distressing interview. That indeed did oppressme with almost intolerable dread beforehand. I was to go to a certainhouse in London, and there was just a chance that the interview mightnot take place after all. As I drove there, I suddenly found myselfwondering whether the interview could REALLY be going to takeplace--how often had I rehearsed it beforehand with anguish--and thenas suddenly became aware that I should in some strange way bedisappointed if it did not take place. I wanted on the whole to gothrough with it, and to see what it would be like. A deep-seatedcuriosity came to my aid. It did take place, and it was very bad--worsethan I could have imagined; but it was not terrible!

These are just four instances which come into my mind. I should be gladto feel that the courage which undoubtedly came had been the creationof my will; but it was not so. In three cases, the events cameunexpectedly; but in the fourth case I had long anticipated the momentwith extreme dread. Yet in that last case the fear suddenly slippedaway, without the smallest effort on my part; and in all four casessome strange gusto of experience, some sense of heightened life andadventure, rose in the mind like a fountain--so that even in thecrevasse I said to myself, not excitedly but serenely, "So this is whatit feels like to await death!"

It was this particular experience which gave me an inkling into thatwhich in so many tragic histories seems incredible--that men often dopass to death, by scaffold and by stake, at the last moment, inserenity and even in joy. I do not doubt for a moment that it is theimmortal principle in man, the sense of deathlessness, which comes tohis aid. It is the instinct which, in spite of all knowledge andexperience, says suddenly, in a moment like that, "Well, what then?"That instinct is a far truer thing than any expectation or imagination. It sees things, in supreme moments, in a true proportion. It assertsthat when the rope jerks, or the flames leap up, or the benumbing blowfalls, there is something there which cannot possibly be injured, andwhich indeed is rather freed from the body of our humiliation. It isbut an incident, after all, in a much longer and more momentous voyage. It means only the closing of one chapter of experience and thebeginning of another. The base element in it is the fear which dreadsthe opening of the door, and the quitting of what is familiar. And Ifeel assured of this, that the one universal and inevitable experience, known to us as death, must in reality be a very simple and even anatural affair, and that when we can look back upon it, it will seem tous amazing that we can ever have regarded it as so momentous andappalling a thing. 

III

THE DARKEST DOUBT

Now we can make no real advance in the things of the spirit until wehave seen what lies on the other side of fear; fear cannot help us togrow, at best it can only teach us to be prudent; it does not of itselfdestroy the desire to offend--only shame can do that; if our wish to bedifferent comes merely from our being afraid to transgress, then, ifthe fear of punishment were to be removed, we should go back with alight heart to our old sins. We may obey irresponsible power, becausewe know that it can hurt us if we disobey; but unless we can perceivethe reason why this and that is forbidden, we cannot concur with law. We learn as children that flame has power to hurt us, but we only dreadthe fire because it can injure us, not because we admire the reasonwhich it has for burning. So long as we do not sin simply because weknow the laws of life which punish sin, we have not learned any hatredof sin; it is only because we hate the punishment more than we love thesin, that we abstain. 

Socrates once said, in one of his wise paradoxes, that it was better tosin knowingly than ignorantly. That is a hard saying, but it means thatat least if we sin knowingly, there is some purpose, some courage inthe soul. We take a risk with our eyes open, and our purpose mayperhaps be changed; whereas if we sin ignorantly, we do so out of amere base instinct, and there is no purpose that may be educated. Anyone who has ever had the task of teaching boys or young men to writewill know how much easier it is to teach those who write volubly andexuberantly, and desire to express themselves, even if they do it withmany faults and lapses of taste; taste and method may be corrected, ifonly the instinct of expression is there. But the young man who has noimpulse to write, who says that he could think of nothing to say, it isimpossible to teach him much, because one cannot communicate the desirefor expression. 

And the same holds good of life. Those who have strong vital impulsescan learn restraint and choice; but the people who have no particularimpulses and preferences, who just live out of mere impetus and habit, who plod along, doing in a dispirited way just what they find to do, and lapsing into indolence and indifference the moment that prescribedwork ceases, those are the spirits that afford the real problem, because they despise activity, and think energy a mere exhibition offussy diffuseness. 

But the generous, eager, wilful nature, who has always some aim insight, who makes mistakes perhaps, gives offence, collideshigh-heartedly with others, makes both friends and enemies, loves andhates, is anxious, jealous, self-absorbed, resentful, intolerant--thereis always hope for such an one, for he is quick to despair, capable ofshame, swift to repent, and even when he is worsted and wounded, risesto fight again. Such a nature, through pain and love, can learn tochasten his base desires, and to choose the nobler and worthier way. 

But what does really differentiate men and women is not their power offearing and suffering, but their power of caring and admiring. The onlyreal and vital force in the world is the force which attracts, thebeauty which is so desirable that one must imitate it if one can, thewisdom which is so calm and serene that one must possess it if one may. 

And thus all depends upon our discerning in the world a lovingintention of some kind, which holds us in view, and draws us to itself. If we merely think of God and nature as an inflexible system of laws, and that our only chance of happiness is to slip in and out of them, asa man might pick his way among red-hot ploughshares, thankful if he canescape burning, then we can make no sort of advance, because we canhave neither faith nor trust. The thing from which one merely flees canhave no real power over our spirit; but if we know God as a fatherlyHeart behind nature, who is leading us on our way, then indeed we canwalk joyfully in happiness, and undismayed in trouble; because troublesthen become only the wearisome incidents of the upward ascent, thefatigue, the failing breath, the strained muscles, the discomfort whichis actually taking us higher, and cannot by any means be avoided. 

But fear is the opposite of all this; it is the dread of the unknown, the ghastly doubt as to whether there is any goal before us or not;when we fear, we are like the butterfly that flutters anxiously awayfrom the boy who pursues it, who means out of mere wantonness to strikeit down tattered and bruised among the grass-stems. 

IV

VULNERABILITY

There have been many attempts in the history of mankind to escape fromthe dominion of fear; the essence of fear, that which prompts it, isthe consciousness of our vulnerability. What we all dread is thedisease or the accident that may disable us, the loss of money orcredit, the death of those whom we love and whose love makes thesunshine of our life, the anger and hostility and displeasure and scornand ill-usage of those about us. These are the definite things whichthe anxious mind forecasts, and upon which it mournfully dwells. 

The object then in the minds of the philosophers or teachers who wouldfain relieve the unhappiness of the world, has been always to suggestways in which this vulnerability may be lessened; and thus their objecthas been to disengage as far as possible the hopes and affections ofmen from things which must always be fleeting. That is the principlewhich lies behind all asceticism, that, if one can be indifferent towealth and comfort and popularity, one has a better chance of serenity. The essence of that teaching is not that pleasant things are notdesirable, but that one is more miserable if one loses them than if onenever cares for them at all. The ascetic trains himself to beindifferent about food and drink and the apparatus of life; he aims atcelibacy partly because love itself is an overmastering passion, andpartly because he cannot bear to engage himself with human affections, the loss of which may give him pain. There is, of course, a deeperstrain in asceticism than this, which is a suspicious mistrust of allphysical joys and a sense of their baseness; but that is in itself anartistic preference of mental and spiritual joys, and a defiance toeverything which may impair or invade them. 

The Stoic imperturbability is an attempt to take a further step; not tofly from life, but to mingle with it, and yet to grow to be notdependent on it. The Stoic ideal was a high one, to cultivate afirmness of mind that was on the one hand not to be dismayed by pain orsuffering, and on the other to use life so temperately and judiciouslyas not to form habits of indulgence which it would be painful todiscontinue. The weakness of Stoicism was that it despised humanrelations; and the strength of primitive Christianity was that, whileit recommended a Stoical simplicity of life, it taught men not to beafraid of love, but to use and lavish love freely, as being the onething which would survive death and not be cut short by it. TheChristian teaching came to this, that the world was meant to be aschool of love, and that love was to be an outward-rippling ring ofaffection extending from the family outwards to the tribe, the nation, the world, and on to God Himself. It laid all its emphasis on the truththat love is the one immortal thing, that all the joys and triumphs ofthe world pass away with the decay of its material framework, but thatlove passes boldly on, with linked hands, into the darkness of theunknown. 

The one loss that Christianity recognised was the loss of love; the onepunishment it dreaded was the withholding of love. 

As Christianity soaked into the world, it became vitiated, and drewinto itself many elements of human weakness. It became a social force, it learned to depend on property, it fulminated a code of criminality, and accepted human standards of prosperity and wealth. It lost itssimplicity and became sophisticated. It is hard to say that men of theworld should not, if they wish, claim to be Christians, but the wholeessence of Christianity is obscured if it is forgotten that its vitalattributes are its indifference to material conveniences, and itsemphatic acceptance of sympathy as the one supreme virtue. 

This is but another way of expressing that our troubles and our terrorsalike are based on selfishness, and that if we are really concernedwith the welfare of others we shall not be much concerned with our own. 

The difficulty in adopting the Christian theory is that God does notapparently intend to cure the world by creating all men unselfish. People are born selfish, and the laws of nature and heredity seem toordain that it shall be so. Indeed a certain selfishness seems to beinseparable from any desire to live. The force of asceticism and ofStoicism is that they both appeal to selfishness as a motive. Theyfrankly say, "Happiness is your aim, personal happiness; but instead ofgrasping at pleasure whenever it offers, you will find it more prudentin the end not to care too much about such things. " It is true thatpopular Christianity makes the same sort of appeal. It says, or seemsto say, "If you grasp at happiness in this world, you may secure agreat deal of it successfully; but it will be worse for you eventually. "

The theory of life as taught and enforced, for instance, in such a workas Dante's great poem is based upon this crudity of thought. Dante, byhis Hell and his Purgatory, expressed plainly that the chief motive ofman to practise morality must be his fear of ultimate punishment. Hiswas an attempt to draw away the curtain which hides this world from thenext, and to horrify men into living purely and kindly. But the mindonly revolts against the dastardly injustice of a God, who allows mento be born into the world so corrupt, with so many incentives to sin, and deliberately hides from them the ghastly sight of the eternaltorments, which might have saved them from recklessness of life. No onewho had trod the dark caverns of Hell or the flinty ridges ofPurgatory, as Dante represented himself doing, who had seen the awfulsights and heard the heart-broken words of the place, could havereturned to the world as a light-hearted sinner! Whatever we maybelieve of God, we must not for an instant allow ourselves to believethat life can be so brief and finite, so small and hampered anopportunity, and that punishment could be so demoniacal and soinfinite. A God who could design such a scheme must be essentially eviland malignant. We may menace wicked men with punishment for wantonmisdeeds, but it must be with just punishment. What could we say of ahuman father who exposed a child to temptation without explaining theconsequences, and then condemned him to lifelong penalties for failingto make the right choice? We must firmly believe that if offences arefinite, punishment must be finite too; that it must be remedial and notmechanical. We must believe that if we deserve punishment, it will bebecause we can hope for restoration. Hell is a monstrous andinsupportable fiction, and the idea of it is simply inconsistent withany belief in the goodness of God. It is easy to quote texts to supportit, but we must not allow any text, any record in the world, howeversacred, to shatter our belief in the Love and Justice of God. And I sayas frankly and directly as I can that until we can get rid of thisintolerable terror, we can make no advance at all. 

The old, fierce Saints, who went into the darkness exulting in thethought of the eternal damnation of the wicked, had not spelt the firstletter of the Christian creed, and I doubt not have discovered theirmistake long ago! Yet there are pious people in the world who willneither think nor speak frankly of the subject, for fear of weakeningthe motives for human virtue. I will at least speak frankly, and thoughI believe with all my heart in a life beyond the grave, in whichsuffering enough may exist for the cure of those who by wilful sin havesunk into sloth and hopelessness and despair, and even into cruelty andbrutality, I do not for an instant believe that the conduct of thevilest human being who ever set foot on the earth can deserve more thana term of punishment, or that such punishment will have anything thatis vindictive about it. 

It may be said that I am here only combating an old-fashioned idea, andthat no one believes in the old theory of eternal punishment, or thatif they believe that the possibility exists, they do not believe thatany human being can incur it. But I feel little doubt that the beliefdoes exist, and that it is more widespread than one cares to believe. To believe it is to yield to the darkest and basest temptation of fear, and keeps all who hold it back from the truth of God. 

What then are we to believe about the punishment of our sins? I lookback upon my own life, and I see numberless occasions--they rise upbefore me, a long perspective of failures--when I have acted cruelly, selfishly, self-indulgently, basely, knowing perfectly well that I wasso behaving. What was wrong with me? Why did I so behave? Because Ipreferred the baser course, and thought at the time that it gave mepleasure. 

Well then, what do I wish about all that? I wish it had not happenedso, I wish I had been kinder, more just, more self-restrained, morestrong. I am ashamed, because I condemn myself, and because I know thatthose whom I love and honour would condemn me, if they knew all. But Ido not, therefore, lose all hope of myself, nor do I think that Godwill not show me how to be different. If it can only be done bysuffering, I dread the suffering, but I am ready to suffer if I canbecome what I should wish to be. But I do not for a moment think thatGod will cast me off or turn His face away from me because I havesinned; and I can pray that He will lead me into light and strength. 

And thus it is not my vulnerability that I dread; I rather welcome itas a sign that I may learn the truth so. And I will not look upon mydesire for pleasant things as a proof that I am evil, but rather as aproof that God is showing me where happiness lies, and teaching me bymy mistakes to discern and value it. He could make me perfect if Hewould, in a single instant. But the fact that He does not, is a signthat He has something better in store for me than a mere mechanicalperfection. 

V

THE USE OF FEAR

The advantages of the fearful temperament, if it is not a mereunmanning and desolating dread, are not to be overlooked. Fear is theshadow of the imaginative, the resourceful, the inventive temperament, but it multiplies resource and invention a hundredfold. Everyone knowsthe superstition which is deeply rooted in humanity, that a time ofexaltation and excitement and unusual success is held to be often theprelude to some disaster, just as the sense of excitement and buoyanthealth, when it is very consciously perceived, is thought to herald theapproach of illness. "I felt so happy, " people say, "that I was surethat some misfortune was going to befall me--it is not lucky to feel sosecure as that!" This represented itself to the Greeks as part of thedivine government of the world; they thought that the heedless andself-confident man was beguiled by success into what they called ubris, the insolence of prosperity; and that then atae, that is, disaster, followed. They believed that the over-prosperous man incurred the envyand jealousy of the gods. We see this in the old legend of Polycratesof Samos, whose schemes all succeeded, and whose ventures all turnedout well. He consulted a soothsayer about his alarming prosperity, whoadvised him to inflict some deliberate loss or sacrifice upon himself;so Polycrates drew from his finger and flung into the sea a signet-ringwhich he possessed, with a jewel of great rarity and beauty in it. Soonafterwards a fish was caught by the royal fisherman, and was served upat the king's table--there, inside the body of the fish, was the ring;and when Polycrates saw that, he felt that the gods had restored himhis gift, and that his destruction was determined upon; which cametrue, for he was caught by pirates at sea, and crucified upon a rockyheadland. 

No nation, and least of all the Greeks, would have arrived at thistheory of life and fate, if they had not felt that it was supported byactual instances. It was of the nature of an inference from the factsof life; and the explanation undoubtedly is that men do get betrayed, by a constant experience of good fortune, into rashness andheedlessness, because they trust to their luck and depend upon theirfortunate star. 

But the man who is of an energetic and active type, if he is haunted byanxiety, if his imagination paints the possibilities of disaster, takesevery means in his power to foresee contingencies, and to dealcautiously and thoroughly with the situation which causes him anxiety. If he is a man of keen sensibilities, the pressure of such care is soinsupportable that he takes prompt and effective measures to remove it;and his fear thus becomes an element in his success, because it urgeshim to action, and at the same time teaches him the need of dueprecaution. As Horace wrote:

 "Sperat infestis, metuit secundis Alteram sortem. "

"He hopes for a change of fortune when things are menacing, he fears areverse when things are prosperous. " And if we look at the facts oflife, we see that it is not by any means the confident and optimisticpeople who succeed best in their designs. It is rather the man of eagerand ambitious temperament, who dreads a repulse and anticipates it, andtakes all possible measures beforehand to avoid it. 

We see the same principle underlying the scientific doctrine ofevolution. People often think loosely that the idea of evolution, inthe case, let us say, of a bird like a heron, with his immobility, hislong legs, his pointed beak, his muscular neck, is that suchcharacteristics have been evolved through long ages by birds that havehad to get their food in swamps and shallow lakes, and were thusgradually equipped for food-getting through long ages of practice. Butof course no particular bird is thus modified by circumstances. Apigeon transferred to a fen would not develop the characteristics ofthe heron; it would simply die for lack of food. It is rather thatcertain minute variations take place, for unknown reasons, in everyspecies; and the bird which happened to be hatched out in a fenlandwith a rather sharper beak or rather longer legs than his fellows, would have his power of obtaining food slightly increased, and wouldthus be more likely to perpetuate in his offspring that particularadvantage of form. This principle working through endless centurieswould tend slowly to develop the stock that was better equipped forlife under such circumstances, and to eliminate those less suited tothe locality; and thus the fittest would tend to survive. But it doesnot indicate any design on the part of the birds themselves, nor anydeliberate attempt to develop those characteristics; it is rather thatsuch characteristics, once started by natural variation, tend toemphasize themselves in the lapse of time. 

No doubt fear has played an enormous part in the progress of the humanrace itself. The savage whose imagination was stronger than that ofother savages, and who could forecast the possibilities of disaster, would wander through the forest with more precaution against wildbeasts, and would make his dwelling more secure against assault; sothat the more timid and imaginative type would tend to survive longestand to multiply their stock. Man in his physical characteristics is avery weak, frail, and helpless animal, exposed to all kinds of dangers;his infancy is protracted and singularly defenceless; his pace is slow, his strength is insignificant; it is his imagination that has put himat the top of creation, and has enabled him both to evade dangers andto use natural forces for his greater security. Though he is theyoungest of all created forms, and by no means the best equipped forlife, he has been able to go ahead in a way denied to all otheranimals; his inventiveness has been largely developed by his terrors;and the result has been that whereas all other animals still preserve, as a condition of life, their ceaseless attitude of suspicion and fear, man has been enabled by organisation to establish communities in whichfear of disaster plays but little part. If one watches a bird feedingon a lawn, it is strange to observe its ceaseless vigilance. It takes ahurried mouthful, and then looks round in an agitated manner to seethat it is in no danger of attack. Yet it is clear that the terror inwhich all wild animals seem to live, and without whichself-preservation would be impossible, does not in the least militateagainst their physical welfare. A man who had to live his life underthe same sort of risks that a bird in a garden has to endure from catsand other foes, would lose his senses from the awful pressure ofterror; he would lie under the constant shadow of assassination. 

But the singular thing in Nature is that she preserves characteristicslong after they have ceased to be needed; and so, though a man in acivilised community has very little to dread, he is still haunted by anirrational sense of insecurity and precariousness. And thus many of ourfears arise from old inheritance, and represent nothing rational orreal at all, but only an old and savage need of vigilance and wariness. 

One can see this exemplified in a curious way in level tracts ofcountry. Everyone who has traversed places like the plain ofWorcestershire must remember the irritating way in which the roads keepascending little eminences, instead of going round at the foot. Nowthese old country roads no doubt represent very ancient tracks indeed, dating from times when much of the land was uncultivated. They getstereotyped, partly because they were tracks, and partly because forconvenience the first enclosures and tillages were made along the roadsfor purposes of communication. But the perpetual tendency to ascendlittle eminences no doubt dates from a time when it was safer to go up, in order to look round and to see ahead, partly in order to be sure ofone's direction, and partly to beware of the manifold dangers of theroad. 

And thus many of the fears by which one is haunted are these oldsurvivals, these inherited anxieties. Who does not know the frame ofmind when perhaps for a day, perhaps for days together, the mind isoppressed and uneasy, scenting danger in the air, forecasting calamity, recounting all the possible directions in which fate or malice may havepower to wound and hurt us? It is a melancholy inheritance, but itcannot be combated by any reason. It is of no use then to imitateRobinson Crusoe, and to make a list of one's blessings on a piece ofpaper; that only increases our fear, because it is just the chance offorfeiting such blessings of which we are in dread! We must simplyremind ourselves that we are surrounded by old phantoms, and that wederive our weakness from ages far back, in which risks were many andsecurity was rare. 

VI

FEARS OF CHILDHOOD

If I look back over my own life, I can discern three distinct stages offear and anxieties, and I expect it is the same with most people. Theterrors of childhood are very mysterious things, and their horrorconsists in the child's inability to put the dread into words. Iremember how one night, when we were living in the Master's Lodge atWellington College, I had gone to bed, and waking soon afterwards hearda voice somewhere outside. I got out of bed, went to the door, andlooked out. Close to my door was an archway which looked into the opengallery that ran round the big front hall, giving access to thebedrooms. At the opposite end of the hall, in the gallery, burnt agaslight: to my horror I observed close to the gas what seemed to me acolossal shrouded statue, made of a black bronze, formless, silent, awful. I crept back to my bed, and there shivered in an ecstasy offear, till at last I fell asleep. There was no statue there in themorning! I told my old nurse, after a day or two of dumb dread, what Ihad seen. She laughed, and told me that a certain Mrs. Holder, anelderly widow who was a dressmaker, had been to see her, about somepiece of work. They had turned out the nursery lights and were goingdownstairs, when some question arose about the stuff of the frock, whatever it was. Mrs. Holder had mounted on a chair to look close atthe stuff by the gaslight; and this was my bogey!

We had a delightful custom in nursery days, devised by my mother, thaton festival occasions, such as birthdays or at Christmas, our presentswere given us in the evening by a fairy called Abracadabra. 

The first time the fairy appeared, we heard, after tea, in the hall, the hoarse notes of a horn. We rushed out in amazement. Down in thehall, talking to an aunt of mine who was staying in the house, stood averitable fairy, in a scarlet dress, carrying a wand and a scarlet bag, and wearing a high pointed scarlet hat, of the shape of anextinguisher. My aunt called us down; and we saw that the fairy had theface of a great ape, dark-brown, spectacled, of a good-natured aspect, with a broad grin, and a curious crop of white hair, hanging downbehind and on each side. Unfortunately my eldest brother, a very cleverand imaginative child, was seized with a panic so insupportable at thesight of the face, that his present had to be given him hurriedly, andhe was led away, blanched and shuddering, to the nursery. After that, the fairy never appeared except when he was at school: but long after, when I was looking in a lumber-room with my brother for some mislaidtoys, I found in a box the mask of Abracadabra and the horn. I put ithurriedly on, and blew a blast on the horn, which seemed to be oftortoise-shell with metal fittings. To my amazement, he turnedperfectly white, covered his face with his hands, and burst out withthe most dreadful moans. I thought at first that he was making believeto be frightened, but I saw in a minute or two that he had quite lostcontrol of himself, and the things were hurriedly put away. At the timeI thought it a silly kind of affectation. But I perceive now that hehad had a real shock the first time he had seen the mask; and though hewas then a big schoolboy, the terror was indelible. Who can say of whatold inheritance of fear that horror of the great ape-like countenancewas the sign? He had no associations of fear with apes, but it musthave been, I think, some dim old primeval terror, dating from someancestral encounter with a forest monster. In no other way can Iexplain it. 

Again, as a child, I was once sitting at dinner with my parents, reading an old bound-up Saturday Magazine, looking at the pictures, andwaiting for dessert. I turned a page, and saw a picture of a Saint, lying on the ground, holding up a cross, and a huge and cloudy fiendwith vast bat-like wings bending over him, preparing to clutch him, butdeterred by the sacred emblem. That was a really terrible shock. Iturned the page hastily, and said nothing, though it deprived me ofspeech and appetite. My father noticed my distress, and asked if I feltunwell, but I said "No. " I got through dessert somehow; but then I hadto say good-night, go out into the dimly-lit hall, slip the volume backinto the bookcase, and get upstairs. I tore up the staircase, feelingthe air full of wings and clutching hands. That was too bad ever to bespoken of; and as I did not remember which volume it was, I was neverable to look at the set of magazines again for fear of encountering it;and strange to say some years afterwards, when I was an Eton boy, Ilooked curiously for the picture, and again experienced the sameoverwhelming horror. 

My youngest brother, too, an imaginative child, could never bepersuaded by any bribes or entreaties to go into a dark room to fetchanything out. Nothing would induce him. I remember that he wascatechised at the tea-table as to what he expected to find, to which hereplied at once, with a horror-stricken look and a long stammer, "B--b--b--bloodstained corpses!"

It seems fantastic and ridiculous enough to older people, but thehorror of the dark and of the unknown which some children have is not athing to be laughed at, nor should it be unsympathetically combated. One must remember that experience has not taught a child scepticism; hethinks that anything in the world may happen; and all the monsters ofnursery tales, goblins, witches, evil fairies, dragons, which a childin daylight will know to be imaginary, begin, as the dusk draws on, tobecome appalling possibilities. They may be somewhere about, lurking incellars and cupboards and lofts and dark entries by day, and at nightthey may slip out to do what harm they can. For children, not far fromthe gates of birth, are still strongly the victims of primeval andinherited fears, not corrected by the habitual current of life. It isnot a reason for depriving children of the joys of the old tales andthe exercise of the faculty of wonder; but the tendency should be verycarefully guarded and watched, because these sudden shocks may makeindelible marks, and leave a little weak spot in the mind which mayprove difficult to heal. 

It is not only these spectral terrors against which children have to beguarded. All severity and sharp indignity of punishment, allintemperate anger, all roughness of treatment, should be kept in strictrestraint. There are noisy, boisterous, healthy children, of course, who do not resent or even dread sharp usage. But it is not always easyto discover the sensitive child, because fear of displeasure willfreeze him into a stupor of apparent dullness and stubbornness. I amalways infuriated by stupid people who regret the disappearance ofsharp, stern, peremptory punishments, and lament the softness of therising generation. If punishment must be inflicted, it should be donegood-naturedly and robustly as a natural tit-for-tat. Anger should bereserved for things like spitefulness and dishonesty and cruelty. Thereis nothing more utterly confusing to the childish mind than to havetrifling faults treated with wrath and indignation. It is true that, inthe world of nature, punishment seems often wholly disproportionate tooffences. Nature will penalise carelessness in a disastrous fashion, and spare the cautious and prudent sinner. But there is no excuse forus, if we have any sense of justice and patience at all, for notsetting a better example. We ought to show children that there is amoral order which we are endeavouring to administer. If parents andschoolmasters, who are both judges and executioners, allow their ownrule to be fortuitous, indulge their own irritable moods, punishseverely a trifling fault, and sentimentalise or condone a serious one, a child is utterly confused. I know several people who have had theirlives blighted, have been made suspicious, cynical, crafty, and timid, by severe usage and bullying and open contempt in childhood. The thingto avoid, for all who are responsible in the smallest degree for thenurture of children, is to call in the influence of fear; one may speakplainly of consequences, but even there one must not exaggerate, asschoolmasters often do, for the best of motives, about moral faults;one may punish deliberate and repeated disobedience, wanton cruelty, persistent and selfish disregard of the rights of others, but one mustwarn many times, and never try to triumph over a fault by theinfliction of a shock of any kind. The shock is the most cruel andcowardly sort of punishment, and if we wilfully use it, then we areperpetuating the sad tyranny of instinctive fear, and using thestrength of a great angel to do the work of a demon, such as I saw longago in the old magazine, and felt its tyranny for many days. 

As a child the one thing I was afraid of was the possibility of myfather's displeasure. We did not see a great deal of him, because hewas a much occupied headmaster; and he was to me a stately and majesticpresence, before whom the whole created world seemed visibly to bow. But he was deeply anxious about our upbringing, and had a very strongsense of his responsibility; and he would sometimes reprove us rathersternly for some extremely trifling thing, the way one ate one's food, or spoke, or behaved. This descended upon me as a cloud of darkness; Iattempted no excuses, I did not explain or defend myself; I simply wascrushed and confounded. I do not think it was the right method. Henever punished us, but we were not at ease with him. I remember theagony with which I heard a younger sister once repeat to him some sillyand profane little jokes which a good-natured and absurd old lady hadtold us in the nursery. I felt sure he would disapprove, as he did. Iknew quite well in my childish mind that it was harmless nonsense, anddid not give us a taste for ungodly mirth. But I could not intervene orexpostulate. I am sure that my father had not the slightest idea howweighty and dominant he was; but many of the things he rebuked wouldhave been better not noticed, or if noticed only made fun of, while Ifeel that he ought to have given us more opportunity of stating ourcase. He simply frightened me into having a different morality when Iwas in his presence to what I had elsewhere. But he did not make melove goodness thereby, and only gave me a sense that certain things, harmless in themselves, must not be done or said in the presence ofpapa. He did not always remember his own rules, and there was thus anelement of injustice in his rebukes, which one merely accepted as partof his awful and unaccountable greatness. 

When I was transferred to a private school, a great big place, verywell managed in every way, I lived for a time in atrocious terror ofeverything and everybody. I was conscious of a great code of ruleswhich I did not know or understand, which I might quite unwittinglybreak, and the consequences of which might be fatal. I was neverpunished or caned, nor was I ever bullied. But I simply effaced myselfas far as possible, and lived in dread of disaster. The thought evennow of certain high blank walls with lofty barred windows, theremembered smells of certain passages and corners, the tall form andflashing eye of our headmaster and the faint fragrance of Havana cigarswhich hung about him, the bare corridors with their dark cupboards, thestone stairs and iron railings--all this gives me a far-off sense ofdread. I can give no reason for my unhappiness there; but I canrecollect waking in the early summer mornings, hearing the screams ofpeacocks from an adjoining garden, and thinking with a dreadful senseof isolation and despair of all the possibilities of disaster that layhid in the day. I am sure it was not a wholesome experience. One neednot fear the world more than is necessary--but my only dream of peacewas the escape to the delights of home, and the thought of the largerworld was only a thing that I shrank from and shuddered at. 

No, it is wrong to say one had no friends, but how few they seemed andhow clearly they stand out! I did not make friends among the boys; theywere pleasant enough acquaintances, some of them, but not to be trustedor confided in; they had to be kept at arm's length, and one's reallife guarded and hoarded away from them; because if one told themanything about one's home or one's ideas, it might be repeated, and thesacred facts shouted in one's ears as taunts and jests. But there was alittle bluff master, a clergyman, with shaggy rippled red-brown hairand a face like a pug-dog. He was kind to me, and had me to lunch oneSunday in a villa out at Barnes--that was a breath of life, to sit in ahomelike room and look at old Punches half the afternoon; and there wasanother young man, a master, rather stout and pale, with whom I sharedsome little jokes, and who treated me as he might treat a youngerbrother; he was pledged, I remember, to give me a cake if I won an EtonScholarship, and royally he redeemed his promise. He died of heartdisease a little while after I left the school. I had promised to writeto him from Eton and never did so, and I had a little pang about thatwhen I heard of his death. And then there was the handsome loud-voicedmaid of my dormitory, Underwood by name, who was always just and kind, and who, even when she rated us, as she did at times, had alwayssomething human beckoning from her handsome eye. I can see her now, with her sleeves tucked up, and her big white muscular arms, washing arefractory little boy who fought shy of soap and water. I had a wildidea of giving her a kiss when I went away, and I think she would haveliked that. She told me I had always been a good boy, and that she wassorry that I was going; but I did not dare to embrace her. 

And then there was dear Louisa, the matron of the little sanatorium onthe Mortlake road. She had been a former housemaid of ours; she was astrong sturdy woman, with a deep voice like a man, and when I arrivedthere ill--I was often ill in those days--she used to hug and kiss meand even cry over me; and the happiest days I spent at school were inthat poky little house, reading in Louisa's little parlour, while sheprepared some special dish as a treat for my supper; or sitting hour byhour at the window of my room upstairs, watching a grocer opposite setout his window. I certainly did love Louisa with all my heart; and itwas almost pleasant to be ill, to be welcomed by her and petted andmade much of. "My own dear boy, " she used to say, and it was music inmy ears. 

I feel on looking back that, if I had children of my own, I shouldstudy very carefully to avoid any sort of terrorism. Psychologists tellus that the nervous shocks of early years are the things that leaveindelible marks throughout life. I believe that mental specialistsoften make a careful study of the dreams of those whose minds areafflicted, because it is held that dreams very often continue toreproduce in later life the mental shocks of childhood. Anger, intemperate punishment, any attempt to produce instant submission anddismay in children, is very apt to hurt the nervous organisation. Ofcourse it is easy enough to be careful about these things in shelteredenvironments, where there is some security and refinement of life. Andthis opens up a vast problem which cannot be touched on here, becauseit is practically certain that many children in poor and unsatisfactoryhomes sustain shocks to their mental organisation in early life whichdamage them irreparably, and which could be avoided if they could bebrought up on more wholesome and tender lines. 

VII

FEARS OF BOYHOOD

There is a tendency, I am sure, in books, to shirk the whole subject offear, as though it were a thing disgraceful, shameful, almostunmentionable. The coward, the timid person, receives very littlesympathy; he is rather like one tainted with a shocking disease, ofwhich the less said the better. He is not viewed with any sympathy orcommiseration, but as something almost lower in the scale of humanity. Take the literature that deals with school life, for instance. I do notthink that there is any province of our literature so inept, soconventional, so entirely lacking in reality, as the books which dealwith the life of schools. The difficulty of writing them is very great, because they can only be reconstructed by an effort of memory. The boyhimself is quite unable to give expression to his thoughts andfeelings; school life is a time of sharp, eager, often rather savageemotions, lived by beings who have no sense of proportion, no knowledgeof life, no idea of what is really going on in the world. The actualincidents which occur are very trivial, and yet to the fresh minds andspirits of boyhood they seem all charged with an intense significance. Then again the talk of schoolboys is wholly immature and shapeless. They cannot express themselves, and moreover there is a very strict andperemptory convention which dictates what may be talked about and whatmay not. No society in the world is under so oppressive a taboo. Theymust not speak of anything emotional or intellectual, at the cost ofbeing thought a fool or a prig. They talk about games, they gossipabout boys and masters, sometimes their conversation is nasty andbestial. But it conceals very real if very fitful emotions; yet it isimpossible to recall or to reconstruct; and when older people attemptto reconstruct it, they remember the emotions which underlay it, andthe eager interests out of which it all sprang; and they make itsomething picturesque, epigrammatic, and vernacular which is whollyuntrue to life. The fact is that the talk of schoolboys is very trivialand almost wholly symbolical; emotion reveals itself in glance andgesture, not in word at all. I suppose that most of us remember ourboyish friendships, ardent and eager personal admirations, extraordinary deifications of quite commonplace boys, emotions none ofwhich were ever put into words at all, hardly even into coherentthought, and were yet a swift and vital current of the soul. 

Now the most unreal part of the reconstructions of school life is theinsistence on the boyish code of honour. Neither as a boy nor as aschoolmaster did I ever have much evidence of this. There were certainhard and fast rules of conduct, like the rule which prevented any boyfrom giving information to a master against another boy. But this wasnot a conscientious thing. It was part of the tradition, and the socialostracism which was the penalty of its infraction was too severe torisk incurring. But the boys who cut a schoolfellow for telling tales, did not do it from any high-minded sense of violated honour. It wassimply a piece of self-defence, and the basis of the convention wasmerely this, that, if the rule were broken, it would produce animpossible sense of insecurity and peril. However much boys might onthe whole approve of, respect, and even like their masters, still theycould not make common cause with them. The school was a perfectlydefinite community, inside of which it was often convenient andpleasant to do things which would be penalised if discovered; and thusthe whole stability of that society depended upon a certain secrecy. The masters were not disliked for finding out the infractions of rules, if only such infractions were patent and obvious. A master who lookedtoo closely into things, who practised any sort of espionage, who triedto extort confession, was disapproved of as a menace, and it wasconvenient to label him a sneak and a spy, and to say that he did notplay the game fair. But all this was a mere tradition. Boys do notreflect much, or look into the reasons of things. It does not occur tothem to credit masters with the motive of wishing to protect themagainst themselves, to minimise temptation, to shelter them fromundesirable influences; that perhaps dawns on the minds of sensible andhigh-minded prefects, but the ordinary boy just regards the master asan opposing power, whom he hoodwinks if he can. 

And then the boyish ideal of courage is a very incomplete one. He doesnot recognise it as courage if a sensitive, conscientious, andright-minded boy risks unpopularity by telling a master of some evilpractice which is spreading in a school. He simply regards it as adesire to meddle, a priggish and pragmatical act, and even as asneaking desire to inflict punishment by proxy. 

Courage, for the schoolboy, is merely physical courage, aplomb, boldness, recklessness, high-handedness. The hero of school life is onelike Odysseus, who is strong, inventive, daring, full of resource. Thepoint is to come out on the top. Odysseus yields to sensual delight, heis cruel, vindictive, and incredibly deceitful. It is evident thatsuccessful beguiling, the power of telling an elaborate, plausible, andimperturbable lie on occasions, is an heroic quality in the Odyssey. Odysseus is not a man who scorns to deceive, or who would rather takethe consequences than utter a falsehood. His strength rather lies inhis power, when at bay, of flashing into some monstrous fiction, dramatising the situation, playing an adopted part, with confidence andassurance. One sees traces of the same thing in the Bible. The story ofJacob deceiving Isaac, and pretending to be Esau in order to secure ablessing is not related with disapprobation. Jacob does not forfeit hisblessing when his deceit is discovered. The whole incident is regardedrather as a master-stroke of cunning and inventiveness. Esau is angrynot because Jacob has employed such trickery, but because he hassucceeded in supplanting him. 

I remember, as a boy at Eton, seeing a scene which left a deepimpression on me. There was a big unpleasant unscrupulous boy of greatphysical strength, who was a noted football player. He was extremelyunpopular in the school, because he was rude, sulky, and overbearing, and still more because he took unfair advantages in games. There was ahotly contested house-match, in which he tried again and again to evaderules, while he was for ever appealing to the umpires againstviolations of rule by the opposite side. His own house was ultimatelyvictorious, but feeling ran very high indeed, because it was thoughtthat the victory was unfairly won. The crowd of boys who had beenwatching the match drifted away in a state of great exasperation, andfinally collected in front of the house of the unpopular player, hissedand hooted him. He took very little notice of the demonstration andwalked in, when there arose a babel of howls. He turned round and cameout again, facing the crowd. I can see him now, all splashed and muddy, with his shirt open at the neck. He was pale, ugly, and sinister; buthe surveyed us all with entire effrontery, drew out a pince-nez, beingvery short-sighted, and then looked calmly round as if surprised. Ihave certainly never seen such an exhibition of courage in my life. Heknew that he had not a single friend present, and he did not know thathe would not be maltreated--there were indications of a rush beingmade. He did not look in the least picturesque; he was ugly, scowling, offensive. But he did not care a rap, and if he had been attacked, hewould have defended himself with a will. It did not occur to me then, nor did it, I think, occur to anyone else, what an amazing bit ofphysical and moral courage it was. No one, then or after, had theslightest feeling of admiration for his pluck. "Did you ever see such abrute as P-- looked?" was the only sort of comment made. 

This just serves to illustrate my point, that boys have no realdiscernment for what is courageous. What they admire is a certain graceand spirit, and the hero is not one who constrains himself to do anunpopular thing from a sense of duty, not even the boy who, beingunpopular like P--, does a satanically brave thing. Boys have noadmiration for the boy who defies them; what they like to see is thedefiance of a common foe. They admire gallant, modest, spirited, picturesque behaviour, not the dull and faithful obedience to the senseof right. 

Of course things have altered for the better. Masters are no longerstern, severe, abrupt, formidable, unreasonable. They know that many aboy, who would be inclined on the whole to tell the truth, can easilybe frightened into telling a lie; but they have not yet contrived toput the sense of honour among boys in the right proportion. Suchstories as that of George Washington--when the children were asked whohad cut down the apple-tree, and he rose and said, "Sir, I cannot tella lie; it was I who did it with my little hatchet"--do not really takethe imagination of boys captive. How constantly did worthy preachers atEton tell the story of how Bishop Selwyn, as a boy, rose and left theroom at a boat-supper because an improper song was sung! That anecdotewas regarded with undisguised amusement, and it was simply thought tobe a piece of priggishness. I cannot imagine that any boy ever heardthe story and went away with a glowing desire to do likewise. Theincident really belongs to the domain of manners rather than to that ofmorals. 

The truth is really that boys at school have a code which resemblesthat of the old chivalry. The hero may be sensual, unscrupulous, cruel, selfish, indifferent to the welfare of others. But if he bears himselfgallantly, if he has a charm of look and manner, if he is a deftperformer in the prescribed athletics, he is the object of profound anddevoted admiration. It is really physical courage, skill, prowess, personal attractiveness which is envied and praised. A dull, heavy, painstaking, conscientious boy with a sturdy sense of duty may berespected, but he is not followed; while the imaginative, sensitive, nervous, highly-strung boy, who may have the finest qualities of allwithin him, is apt to be the most despised. Such a boy is often no goodat games, because public performance disconcerts him; he cannot make aready answer, he has no aplomb, no cheek, no smartness; and he isconsequently thought very little of. 

To what extent this sort of instinctive preference can be altered, I donot know; it certainly cannot be altered by sermons, and still less byedicts. Old Dr. Keate said, when he was addressing the school on thesubject of fighting, "I must say that I like to see a boy return ablow!" It seems, if one considers it, to be a curious ideal to startlife with, considering how little opportunity civilisation now givesfor returning blows! Boys in fact are still educated under a systemwhich seems to anticipate a combative and disturbed sort of life tofollow, in which strength and agility, violence and physical activity, will have a value. Yet, as a matter of fact, such things have verylittle substantial value in an ordinary citizen's life at all, exceptin so far as they play their part in the elaborate cult of athleticexercises, with which we beguile the instinct which craves for manualtoil. All the races, and games, and athletics cultivated so assiduouslyat school seem now to have very little aim in view. It is not importantfor ordinary life to be able to run a hundred yards, or even threemiles, faster than another man; the judgment, the quickness of eye, thestrength and swiftness of muscle needed to make a man a good batsmanwere all well enough in days when a man's life might afterwards dependon his use of sword and battle-axe. But now it only enables him to playgames rather longer than other people, and to a certain extentministers to bodily health, although the statistics of rowing wouldseem clearly to prove that it is a pursuit which is rather more apt todamage the vitality of strong boys than to increase the vitality ofweak ones. 

So, if we look facts fairly in the face, we see that much of thetraining of school life, especially in the direction of athletics, isreally little more than the maintenance of a thoughtless old tradition, and that it is all directed to increase our admiration of prowess andgrace and gallantry, rather than to fortify us in usefulness and manualskill and soundness of body. A boy at school may be a skilful carver orcarpenter; he may have a real gift for engineering or mechanics; he mayeven be a good rider, a first-rate fisherman, an excellent shot. He mayhave good intellectual abilities, a strong memory, a power ofexpression; he may be a sound mathematician, a competent scientist; hemay have all sorts of excellent moral qualities, be reliable, accurate, truthful, punctual, duty-loving; he may in fact be equipped for lifeand citizenship, able to play his part sturdily and manfully, and to dothe world good service; but yet he may never win the smallestrecognition or admiration in his school-days, while all the glory andhonour and credit is still reserved for the graceful, attractive, high-spirited athlete, who may have nothing else in the background. 

That is certainly the ideal of the boy, and the disconcerting thing isthat it is also the ideal, practically if not theoretically, of theparent and the schoolmaster. The school still reserves all its bestgifts, its sunshine and smiles, for the knightly and the skilful; itrewards all the qualities that are their own reward. Why, if it wishesto get the right scale adopted, does it not reward the thing which itprofesses to uphold as its best result, worth of character namely? Itclaims to be a training-ground for character first, but it does littleto encourage secret and unobtrusive virtues. That is, it adds itsprizes to the things which the natural man values, and it neglects tocrown the one thing at which it professes first to aim. In doing thisit only endorses the verdict of the world, and while it praises moraleffort, it rewards success. 

The issue of all this is that the sort of courage which it enforces isessentially a graceful and showy sort of courage, a lively readiness, ahigh-hearted fearlessness--so that timidity and slowness and diffidenceand unreadiness become base and feeble qualities, when they are not thethings of which anyone need be ashamed! Let me say then that moralcourage, the patient and unrecognised facing of difficulties, thedisregard of popular standards, solidity and steadfastness of purpose, the tranquil performance of tiresome and disagreeable duties, homelyperseverance, are not the things which are regarded as supreme in theideal of the school; so that the fear which is the shadow of sensitiveand imaginative natures is turned into the wrong channels, and becomesa mere dread of doing the unpopular and unimpressive thing, or a cravendetermination not to be found out. And the dread of being obscure andunacceptable is what haunts the minds of boys brought up on theseambitious and competitive lines, rather than the fear which is thebeginning of wisdom. 

VIII

FEARS OF YOUTH

The fears of youth are as a rule just the terrors of self-consciousnessand shyness. They are a very irrational thing, something purelyinstinctive and of old inheritance. How irrational they are is bestproved by the fact that shyness is caused mostly by the presence ofstrangers; there are many young people who are bashful, awkward, andtongue-tied in the presence of strangers, whose tremors whollydisappear in the family circle. If these were rational fears, theymight be caused by the consciousness of the inspection and possibledisapproval of those among whom one lives, and whose annoyance andcriticism might have unpleasant practical effects. Yet they are causedoften by the presence of those whose disapproval is not of the smallestconsequence, those, in fact, whom one is not likely to see again. Onemust look then for the cause of this, not in the fact that one'sawkwardness and inefficiency is likely to be blamed by those of one'sown circle, but simply in the terror of the unknown and the unfamiliar. It is probably therefore an old inherited instinct, coming from a timewhen the sight of a stranger might contain in it a menace of somehostile usage. If one questions a shy boy or girl as to what it is theyare afraid of in the presence of strangers, they are quite unable toanswer. They are not afraid of anything that will be said or done; andyet they will have become intensely conscious of their own appearanceand movements and dress, and will be quite unable to commandthemselves. That it is a thing which can be easily cured is obviousfrom the fact which I often observed when I was a schoolmaster, that asa rule the boys who came from houses where there was much entertaining, and a constant coming and going of guests, very rarely suffered fromsuch shyness. They had got used to the fact that strangers could bedepended upon to be kind and friendly, and instead of looking upon anew person as a possible foe, they regarded him as a probable friend. 

I often think that parents do not take enough trouble in this respectto make children used to strangers. What often happens is that parentsare themselves shy and embarrassed in the presence of strangers, andwhen they notice that their children suffer from the same awkwardness, they criticise them afterwards, partly because they are vexed at theirown clumsy performance; and thus the shyness is increased, because thechild, in addition to his sense of shyness before strangers, has in thebackground of his mind the feeling that any mauvaise honte that he maydisplay may he commented upon afterwards. No exhibition of shyness onthe part of a boy or girl should ever be adverted upon by parents. Theyshould take for granted that no one is ever willingly shy, and that itis a misery which all would avoid if they could. It is even better toallow children considerable freedom of speech with strangers, than torepress and silence them. Of course impertinence and unpleasantcomments, such as children will sometimes make on the appearance ormanners of strangers, must be checked, but it should be on the groundsof the unpleasantness of such remarks, and not on the ground offorwardness. On the other hand, all attempts on the part of a child tobe friendly and courteous to strangers should be noted and praised; achild should be encouraged to look upon itself as an integral part of acircle, and not as a silent and lumpish auditor. 

Probably too there are certain physical and psychological laws, whichwe do not at all understand, which account for the curious subjectiveeffects which certain people have at close quarters; there is somethinghypnotic and mesmeric about the glance of certain eyes; and there is inall probability a curious blending of mental currents in an assembly ofpeople, which is not a mere fancy, but a very real physical fact. Personalities radiate very real and unmistakable influences, andprobably the undercurrent of thought which happens to be in one's mindwhen one is with others has an effect, even if one says or does nothingto indicate one's preoccupation. A certain amount of this comes from anunconscious inference on the part of the recipients. We often augur, without any very definite rational process, from the facialexpressions, gestures, movements, tones of others, what their frame ofmind is. But I believe that there is a great deal more than that. Wemust all know that when we are with friends to whose moods and emotionswe are attuned, there takes place a singular degree ofthought-transference, quite apart from speech. I had once a greatfriend with whom I was accustomed to spend much time tete-a-tete. Weused to travel together and spend long periods, day after day, in closeconjunction, often indeed sharing the same bedroom. It became a matterat first of amusement and interest, but afterwards an accepted fact, that we could often realise, even after a long silence, in whatdirection the other's thought was travelling. "How did you guess I wasthinking of that?" would be asked. To which the reply was, "I did notguess--I knew. " On the other hand I have an old and familiar friend, whom I know well and regard with great affection, but whose presence, and particularly a certain fixity of glance, often, even now, causes mea curious subjective disturbance which is not wholly pleasant, a senseof some odd psychical control which is not entirely agreeable. 

I have another friend who is the most delightful and easy company inthe world when we are, alone together; but he is a sensitive andhighly-strung creature, much affected by personal influences, and whenI meet him in the company of other people he is often almostunrecognisable. His mind becomes critical, combative, acrid; he doesnot say what he means, he is touched by a vague excitement, and therepasses over him an unnatural sort of brilliance, of a hard and futilekind, which makes him sacrifice consideration and friendliness to theinstinctive desire to produce an effect and to score a point. Isometimes actually detest him when he is one of a circle. I feelinclined to say to him, "If only you could let your real self appear, and drop this tiresome posturing and fencing, you would be asdelightful as you are to me when I am alone with you; but this hectictittering and feverish jocosity is not only not your real self, but itgives others an impression of a totally unreal and not very agreeableperson. " But, alas, this is just the sort of thing one cannot say to afriend!

As one goes on in life, this terrible and disconcerting shyness ofyouth disappears. We begin to realise, with a wholesome loss of vanityand conceit, how very little people care or even notice how we aredressed, how we look, what we say. We learn that other people are asmuch preoccupied with their thoughts and fancies and reflections as weare with our own. We realise that if we are anxious to produce anagreeable impression, we do so far more by being interested andsympathetic, than by attempting a brilliance which we cannot command. We perceive that other people are not particularly interested in ourcrude views, nor very grateful for the expression of them. We acquirethe power of combination and co-operation, in losing the desire forsplendour and domination. We see that people value ease and security, more than they admire originality and fantastic contradiction. And sowe come to the blessed time when, instead of reflecting after a socialoccasion whether we did ourselves justice, we begin to consider ratherthe impression we have formed of other personalities. 

I believe that we ought to have recourse to very homely remedies indeedfor combating shyness. It is of no use to try to console and distractourselves with lofty thoughts, and to try to keep eternity and thehopes of man in mind. We so become only more self-conscious andsuperior than ever. The fact remains that the shyness of youth causesagonies both of anticipation and retrospect; if one really wishes toget rid of it, the only way is to determine to get used somehow tosociety, and not to endeavour to avoid it; and as a practical rule tomake up one's mind, if possible, to ask people questions, rather thanto meditate impressive answers. Asking other people questions aboutthings to which they are likely to know the answers is one of theshortest cuts to popularity and esteem. It is wonderful to reflect howmuch distress personal bashfulness causes people, how much they wouldgive to be rid of it, and yet how very little trouble they ever take toacquiring any method of dealing with the difficulty. I see a good dealof undergraduates, and am often aware that they are friendly andresponsive, but without any power of giving expression to it. Isometimes see them suffering acutely from shyness before my eyes. But ayoung man who can bring himself to ask a perfectly simple questionabout some small matter of common interest is comparatively rare; andyet it is generally the simplest way out of the difficulty. 

IX

FEARS OF MIDDLE AGE

Now with all the tremors, reactions, glooms, shadows, and despairs ofyouth--it is easy enough to forget them, but they were there--goes apower of lifting and lighting up in a moment at a chord of music, aglance, a word, the song of a bird, the scent of a flower, a flyingsunburst, which fills life up like a cup with bubbling and sparklingliquor. 

 "My soul, be patient! Thou shalt find A little matter mend all this!"

And that is the part of youth which we remember, till on looking backit seems like a time of wandering with like-hearted comrades down somesweet-scented avenue of golden sun and green shade. Our memory plays usbeautifully false--splendide mendax--till one wishes sometimes that oldand wise men, retelling the story of their life, could recall for thecomfort of youth some part of its languors and mischances, its bitterjealousies, its intense and poignant sense of failure. 

And then in a moment the door of life opens. One day I was anirresponsible, pleasure-loving, fantastic youth, and a week later Iwas, or it seemed to me that I was, a professional man with all thecares of a pedagogue upon my back. It filled me at first, I remember, with a gleeful amazement, to find myself in the desk, holding forth, instead of on the form listening. It seemed delicious at first to havethe power of correcting and slashing exercises, and placing boys inorder, instead of being corrected and examined, and competing for aplace. It was a solemn game at the outset. Then came the other side ofthe picture. One's pupils were troublesome, they did badly inexaminations, they failed unaccountably; and one had a glimpse too ofsome of the tragedies of school life. Almost insensibly I became awarethat I had a task to perform, that my mistakes involved boys indisaster, that I had the anxious care of other destinies; and thus, almost before I knew it, came a new cloud on the horizon, the cloud ofanxiety. I could not help seeing that I had mismanaged this boy andmisdirected that; that one could not treat them as ingenuous and livelyplaythings, but that what one said and did set a mark which perhapscould not be effaced. Gradually other doubts and problems madethemselves felt. I had to administer a system of education in which Idid not wholly believe; I saw little by little that the rigid oldsystem of education was a machine which, if it made a highlyaccomplished product out of the best material, wasted an enormousamount of boyish interest and liveliness, and stultified the feeblersort of mind. Then came the care of a boarding-house, close relationswith parents, a more real knowledge of the infinite levity of boynature. I became mixed up with the politics of the place, the chance ofmore ambitious positions floated before me; the need for tact, discretion, judiciousness, moderation, tolerance emphasized itself. Iam here outlining my own experience, but it is only one of many similarexperiences. I became a citizen without knowing it, and my place in theworld, my status, success, all became definite things which I had tosecure. 

The cares, the fears, the anxieties of middle life lie for most men andwomen in this region; if people are healthy and active, they generallyarrive at a considerable degree of equanimity; they do not anticipateevil, and they take the problems of life cheerfully enough as theycome; but yet come they do, and too many men and women are tempted tothrow overboard scornfully and disdainfully the dreams of youth as aluxury which they cannot afford to indulge, and to immerse themselvesin practical cares, month after month, with perhaps the hope of afairly careless and idle holiday at intervals. What I think tends tocounteract this for many people is love and marriage, the wonder andamazement of having children of their own, and all the offices oftenderness that grow up naturally beside their path. But this againbrings a whole host of fears and anxieties as well--arrangements, waysand means, household cares, illnesses, the homely stuff of life, muchof it enjoyed, much of it cheerfully borne, and often very bravely andgallantly endured. It is out of this simple material that life has tobe constructed. But there is a twofold danger in all this. There is adanger of cynicism, the frame of mind in which a man comes to facelittle worries as one might put up an umbrella in a shower--"Thouknow'st 'tis common!" Out of that grows up a rude dreariness, aphilosophy which has nothing dignified about it, but is merely arecognition of the fact that life is a poor affair, and that one cannothope to have things to one's mind. Or there is a dull frame of mindwhich implies a meek resignation, a sense of disappointment about life, borne with a mournful patience, a sense of one's sphere having somehowfallen short of one's deserts. This produces the grumpy paterfamiliaswho drowses over a paper or grumbles over a pipe; such a man isinimitably depicted by Mr. Wells in Marriage. That sort of uglydisillusionment, that publicity of disappointment, that frank disregardof all concerns except one's own, is one of the most hideous featuresof middle-class life, and it is rather characteristically English. Itsometimes conceals a robust good sense and even kindliness; but it is abase thing at best, and seems to be the shadow of commercialprosperity. Yet it at least implies a certain sturdiness of character, and a stubborn belief in one's own merits which is quite impervious tothe lessons of experience. On sensitive and imaginative people theresult of the professional struggle with life, the essence of which isoften social pretentiousness, is different. It ends in a mournful anddistracted kind of fatigue, a tired sort of padding along after life, atimid bewilderment at conditions which one cannot alter, and which yethave no dignity or seemliness. 

What is there that is wrong with all this? The cause is easy enough toanalyse. It is the result of a system which develops conventional, short-sighted, complicated households, averse to effort, fond ofpleasure, and with tastes which are expensive without being refined. The only cure would seem to be that men and women should be borndifferent, with simple active generous natures; it is easy to say that!But the worst of the situation is that the sordid banality and uglytragedy of their lot do not dawn on the people concerned. Greedy vanityin the more robust, lack of moral courage and firmness in the moresensitive, with a social organisation that aims at a surface dignityand a cheap showiness, are the ingredients of this devil's cauldron. The worst of it is that it has no fine elements at all. There is anobility about real tragedy which evokes a quality of passionate andsincere emotion. There is something essentially exalted about a fierceresistance, a desperate failure. But this abject, listless dreariness, which can hardly be altered or expressed, this miserable floating downthe muddy current, where there is no sharp repentance or fierybattling, nothing but a mean abandonment to a meaningless andunintelligible destiny, seems to have in it no seed of recovery at all. 

The dark shadow of professional anxiety is that it has no tragicquality; it is like ploughing on day by day through endless mud-flats. One does not feel, in the presence of sharp suffering or bitter loss, that they ought not to exist. They are there, stern, implacable, august; stately enemies, great combatants. There is a significanceabout their very awfulness. One may fall before them, but they passlike a great express train, roaring, flashing, things deliberately andintently designed; but these dull failures which seem not the outgrowthof anyone's fierce longing or wilful passion, but of everyone'slaziness and greediness and stupidity, how is one to face them? It isthe helpless death of the quagmire, not the death of the fight or themountain-top. Is there, we ask ourselves, anything in the mind of Godwhich corresponds to comfort-loving vulgarity, if so strong and yet sostagnant a stream can overflow the world? The bourgeois ideal! Onewould rather have tyranny or savagery than anything so gross and smug. 

And yet we see high-spirited and ardent husbands drawn into this byobstinate and vulgar-minded wives. We see fine-natured and sensitivewomen engulfed in it by selfish and ambitious husbands. The tendency isawfully and horribly strong, and it wins, not by open combat, but bysecret and dull persistence. And one sees too--I have seen it manytimes--children of delicate and eager natures, who would haveflourished and expanded in more generous air, become conventional andcommonplace and petty, concerned about knowing the right people anddoing the right things, and making the same stupid and paltry show, which deceives no one. 

There is nothing for it but independence and simplicity and, perhapsbest of all, a love of beauty. William Morris asserted passionatelyenough that art was the only cure for all this dreariness--the love ofbeautiful sounds and sights and words; and I think that is true, if itbe further extended to a perception of the quality of beauty in theconduct and relations of life. For those are the cheap and reasonablepleasures of life, accessible to all; and if men and women cared forwork first and the decent simplicities of wholesome living, and couldfurther find their pleasure in art, in whatever form, then I believethat many of these fears and anxieties, so maiming and impairing to allthat is fine in life, would vanish quietly out of being. The thingseems both beautiful and possible, because one knows of householdswhere it is so, and where it grows up naturally and easily enough. Iknow households of both kinds--where on the one hand the standard isambitious and mean, where the inmates calculate everything with a viewto success, or rather to producing an impression of success; and thereall talk and intercourse is an unreal thing, not the outflow of naturalinterests and pleasant tastes, but a sham culture and a refinement thatis only pursued because it is the right sort of surface to present tothe world. One submits to it with boredom, one leaves it with relief. They have got the right people together, they have shown that they cancommand their attendance; it is all ceremony and waste. 

And then I know households where one sees in the books, the pictures, the glances, the gestures, the movements of the inmates, a sort ofgrace and delicacy which comes of really caring about things that arebeautiful and fine. Sincere things are simply said, humour bubbles upand breaks in laughter; one feels that light is thrown on a hundredtopics and facts and personalities. The whole of life then becomes agarden teeming with strange and wonderful secrets, and influences thatflash and radiate, passing on into some mysterious and fragrant gloom. Everything there seems charged with significance and charm; there areno pretences--there are preferences, prejudices if you will; but thereis tolerance and sympathy, and a desire to see the point of view ofothers. The effect of such an atmosphere is to set one wondering howone has contrived to miss the sense of so much that is beautiful andinteresting in life, and sends one away longing to perceive more, anddetermined if possible to interpret life more truly and more graciously. 

X

FEARS OF AGE

And then age creeps on; and that brings fears of its own, and fearsthat are all the more intolerable because they are not definite fearsat all, merely a loss of nervous vigour, which attaches itself to themost trivial detail and magnifies it into an insuperable difficulty. Afriend of mine who was growing old once confided to me that foreigntravel, which used to be such a delight to him, was now gettingburdensome. "It is all right when I have once started, " he said, "butfor days before I am the prey of all kinds of apprehensions. " "Whatsort of apprehensions?" I said. He laughed, and replied, "Well, it isalmost too absurd to mention, but I find myself oppressed with anxietyfor weeks beforehand as to whether, when we get to Calais, we shallfind places in the train. " And I remember, too, how a woman friend ofmine once told me that she called at the house of an elderly couple inLondon, people of rank and wealth. Their daughter met her in thedrawing-room and said, "I am glad you are come--you may be able tocheer my mother up. We are going down to-morrow to our place in thecountry; the servants and the luggage went this morning, and my motherand father are to drive down this afternoon--my mother is very lowabout it. " "What is the matter?" said my friend. The daughter replied, "She is afraid that they will not get there in time!" "In time forwhat?" said my friend, thinking that there was some importantengagement. "In time for tea!" said the daughter gravely. 

It is all very well to laugh at such fears, but they are not naturalfears at all, they just indicate a low vitality; they are the symptomsand not the causes of a disease. It is the frame of mind of thesluggard in the Bible who says, "There is a lion in the way. " Youngerpeople are apt to be irritated by what seems a wilful creating ofapprehensions. They ought rather to be patient and reassuring, andcompassionate to the weakness of nerve for which it stands. 

With such fears as these may be classed all the unreal but none theless distressing fears about health which beset people all their lives, in some cases; it is extremely annoying to healthy people to find a manreduced to depression and silence at the possibility of taking cold, orat the fear of having eaten something unwholesome. I remember anelderly gentleman who had lived a vigorous and unselfish life, and wasindeed a man of force and character, whose activity was entirelysuspended in later years by his fear of catching cold or of over-tiringhimself. He was a country clergyman, and used to spend the whole ofSunday between his services, in solitary seclusion, "resting, " andretire to bed the moment the evening service was over; moreover hisdread of taking cold was such that he invariably wore a hat in thewinter months to go from the drawing-room to the dining-room fordinner, even if there were guests in his house. He used to jest aboutit, and say that it no doubt must look curious; but he added that hehad found it a wise precaution, and that we had no idea how disablinghis colds were. Even a very healthy friend of my own standing has toldme that if he ever lies awake at night he is apt to exaggerate thesmallest and most trifling sense of discomfort into the symptom of somedangerous disease. Let me quote the well-known case of Hans Andersen, whose imagination was morbidly strong. He found one morning when heawoke that he had a small pimple under his left eyebrow. He reflectedwith distress upon the circumstance, and soon came to the ruefulconclusion that the pimple would probably increase in size, and deprivehim of the sight of his left eye. A friend calling upon him in thecourse of the morning found him writing, in a mood of solemnresignation, with one hand over the eye in question, "practising, " ashe said, "how to read and write with the only eye that would soon beleft him. "

One's first impulse is to treat these self-inflicted sufferings asridiculous and almost idiotic. But they are quite apt to beset peopleof effectiveness and ability. To call them irrational does not curethem, because they lie deeper than any rational process, and are infact the superficial symptoms of some deep-seated weakness of nerve, while their very absurdity, and the fact that the mind cannot throwthem off, only proves how strong they are. They are in fact signs ofsome profound uneasiness of mind; and the rational brain of suchpeople, casting about for some reason to explain the fear with whichthey are haunted, fixes on some detail which is not worthy of seriousnotice. It is of course a species of local insanity and monomania, butit does not imply any general obscuration of faculties at all. Some ofthe most intellectual people are most at the mercy of such trials, andindeed they are rather characteristic of men and women whose brain isapt to work at high pressure. One recollects in the life of Shelley, how he used to be haunted by these insupportable fears. He was at onetime persuaded that he had contracted leprosy, and he used todisconcert his acquaintances by examining solicitously their wrists andnecks to see if he could detect symptoms of the same disease. 

There is very little doubt that as medical knowledge progresses weshall know more about the cause of such hallucinations. To call themunreal is mere stupidity. Sensible people who suffer from them areoften perfectly well aware of their unreality, and are profoundlyhumiliated by them. They are some disease or weakness of theimaginative faculty; and a friend of mine who suffered from such thingstold me that it was extraordinary to him to perceive the incredibleingenuity with which his brain under such circumstances used to findconfirmation for his fears from all sorts of trivial incidents which atother times passed quite unnoticed. It is generally quite useless tothink of removing the fear by combating the particular fancy; theaffected centre, whatever it is, only turns feverishly to some othersimilar anxiety. Occupation of a quiet kind, exercise, rest, are thebest medicine. 

Sometimes these anxieties take a different form, and betray themselvesby suspicion of other people's conduct and motives. That is of courseallied to insanity. In sane and sound health we realise that we arenot, as a rule, the objects of the malignity and spitefulness ofothers. We are perhaps obstacles to the carrying out of other people'splans; but men and women as a rule mind their own business, and are notmuch concerned to intervene in the designs and activities of others. Yet a man whose mental equilibrium is unstable is apt to think that ifhe is disappointed or thwarted it is the result of a deliberateconspiracy on the part of other people. If he is a writer, he thinksthat other writers are aware of his merits, but are determined toprevent them being recognised out of sheer ill-will. A man in robusthealth realises that he gets quite as much credit or even more creditthan he deserves, and that his claims to attention are generouslyrecognised; one has exactly as much influence and weight as one canget, and other people as a rule are much too much occupied in their ownconcerns to have either the time or the inclination to interfere. Butas a man grows older, as his work stiffens and weakens, he falls out ofthe race, and he must be content to do so; and he is well advised if heputs his failure down to his own deficiencies, and not to the malice ofothers. The world is really very much on the look out for anythingwhich amuses, delights, impresses, moves, or helps it; it is quick andgenerous in recognition of originality and force; and if a writer, ashe gets older, finds his books neglected and his opinions disdained, hemay be fairly sure that he has said his say, and that men arepreoccupied with new ideas and new personalities. Of course this is amelancholy and disconcerting business, especially if one has been moreconcerned with personal prominence than with the worth and weight ofone's ideas; mortified vanity is a sore trial. I remember once meetingan old author who, some thirty years before the date at which I methim, had produced a book which attracted an extraordinary amount ofattention, though it has long since been forgotten. The old man had allthe airs of solemn greatness, and I have seldom seen a more ruefulspectacle than when a young and rising author was introduced to him, and when it became obvious that the young man had not only never heardof the old writer, but did not know the name of his book. 

The question is what we can do to avoid falling under the dominion ofthese uncanny fears and fancies, as we fall from middle age to age. Adreary, dispirited, unhappy, peevish old man or old woman is a verymiserable spectacle; while, at the same time, generous, courteous, patient, modest, tender old age is one of the most beautiful things inthe world. We may of course resolve not to carry our dreariness intoall circles, and if we find life a poor and dejected business, we candetermine that we will not enlarge upon the theme. But the worst ofdiscouragement is that it removes even the desire to play a part, or tomake the most and best of ourselves. Like Mrs. Gummidge in DavidCopperfield, if we are reminded that other people have their troubles, we are apt to reply that we feel them more. One does not desire thatpeople should unduly indulge themselves in self-dramatisation. There issomething very repugnant in an elderly person who is bent on provinghis importance and dignity, in laying claim to force and influence, inaffecting to play a large part in the world. But there is somethingeven more afflicting in the people who drop all decent pretence ofdignity, and pour the product of an acrid and disappointed spirit intoall conversations. 

Age can establish itself very firmly in the hearts of its circle, if itis kind, sympathetic, appreciative, ready to receive confidences, willing to encourage the fitful despondencies of youth. But here againwe are met by the perennial difficulty as to how far we can forceourselves to do things which we do not really want to do, and how faragain, if we succeed in forcing ourselves into action, we can give anyaccent of sincerity and genuineness to our comments and questions. 

In this particular matter, that of sympathy, a very little effort doesundoubtedly go a long way, because there are a great many people in theworld eagerly on the look out for any sign of sympathy, and not apt toscrutinise too closely the character of the sympathy offered. And thebest part of having once forced oneself to exhibit sympathy, atwhatever cost of strain and effort, is that one is at least ashamed towithdraw it. 

I remember a foolish woman who was very anxious to retain the hold uponthe active world which she had once possessed. She very seldom spoke ofany subject but herself, her performances, her activities, the pressureof the claims which she was forced to try to satisfy. I can recall hernow, with her sanguine complexion, her high voice, her anxious andrestless eye wandering in search of admiration. "The day's post!" shecried, "that is one of my worst trials--so many duties to fulfil, somany requests for help, so many irresistible claims come before me inthe pile of letters--that high, " indicating about a foot and a half oflinear measurement above the table. "It is the same story every day--ascore of people bringing their little mugs of egotism to be filled atmy pump of sympathy!"

It was a ridiculous exhibition, because one was practically sure thatthere was nothing of the kind going on. One was inclined to believethat they were mugs of sympathy filled at the pump of egotism! But ifthe thing were really being done, it was certainly worth doing!

One of the causes of the failure of nerve-force in age, which liesbehind so much of these miseries, is that people who have lived at allactive lives cannot bring themselves to realise their loss of vigour, and try to prolong the natural energies of middle age into the twilightof elderliness. Men and women cling to activities, not because theyenjoy them, but to delude themselves into believing that they are stillyoung. That terrible inability to resign positions, the duties of whichone cannot adequately fulfil, which seems so disgraceful andunconscientious a handling of life to the young, is often a patheticclinging to youth. Such veterans do not reflect that the only effect ofsuch tenacity is partly that other people do their work, and partlyalso that the critic observes that if a post can be adequately filledby so old a man it is a proof that such a post ought not to exist. Thetendency ought to be met as far as possible by fixing age-limits to allpositions. Because even if the old and weary do consult their friendsas to the advisability of retirement, it is very hard for the friendscordially to recommend it. A public man once told me that a very agedofficial consulted him as to the propriety of resignation. He said inhis reply something complimentary about the value of the veteran'sservices. Whereupon the old man replied that as he set so high anestimation upon his work, he would endeavour to hold on a little longer!

The conscientious thing to do, as we get older and find ourselvesslower, more timid, more inactive, more anxious, is to consult a candidfriend, and to follow his advice rather than our own inclination; acertain fearfulness, an avoidance of unpleasant duty, a drearyforeboding, is apt to be characteristic of age. But we must meet itphilosophically. We must reflect that we have done our work, and thatan attempt to galvanise ourselves into activity is sure to result indepression. So we must condense our energies, be content to play alittle, to drowse a little, to watch with interest the game of life inwhich we cannot take a hand, until death falls as naturally upon ourwearied eyes as sleep falls upon the eyes of a child tired with a longsummer day of eager pleasure and delight. 

But there is one practical counsel that may here be given to all whofind a tendency to dread and anxiety creeping upon them as lifeadvances. I have known very truly and deeply religious people who havebeen thus beset, and who make their fears the subject of earnestprayer, asking that this particular terror may be spared them, thatthis cup may be withdrawn from their shuddering lips. I do not believethat this is the right way of meeting the situation. One may pray aswhole-heartedly as one will against the tendency to fear; but it is agreat help to realise that the very experiences which seem now sooverwhelming had little or no effect upon one in youthful andhigh-hearted days. It is not really that the quality of events alter;it is merely that one is losing vitality, and parting with theirresponsible hopefulness that did not allow one to brood, simplybecause there were so many other interesting and delightful thingsgoing on. 

One must attack the disease, for it is a disease, at the root; and itis of little use to shrink timidly from the particular evil, becausewhen it is gone, another will take its place. We may pray for courage, but we must practise it; and the best way of meeting particular fearsis to cultivate interests, distractions, amusements, which may serve todispel them. We cannot begin to do that while we are under the dominionof a particular fear, for the strength of fear lies in its dominatingand nauseating quality, so that it gives us a dreary disrelish forlife; but if we really wish to combat it, we must beware of inactivity;it may be comfortable, as life goes on, to cultivate a habit of mildcontemplation, but it is this very habit of mind which predisposes usto anxiety when anxiety comes. Dr. Johnson pointed out howcomparatively rare it was for people who had manual labour to perform, and whose work lay in the open air, to suffer from hypochondriacalterrors. The truth is that we are made for labour, and we have by nomeans got rid of the necessity for it. We have to pay a price for thecomforts of civilisation, and above all for the pleasures ofinactivity. It is astonishing how quickly a definite task which one hasto perform, whether one likes it or not, draws off a cloud of anxietyfrom one's spirit. I am myself liable to attacks of depression, notcauseless depression, but a despondent exaggeration of small troubles. Yet in times of full work, when meetings have to be attended, paperstackled, engagements kept, I seldom find myself suffering from vagueanxieties. It is simply astonishing that one cannot learn more commonsense! I suppose that all people of anxious minds tend to find thewaking hour a trying one. The mind, refreshed by sleep, turnssorrowfully to the task of surveying the difficulties which lie beforeit. And yet a hundred times have I discovered that life, which seemedat dawn nothing but a tangle of intolerable problems, has become atnoon a very bearable and even interesting affair; and one should thuslearn to appreciate the tonic value of occupation, and set oneself todiscern some pursuit, if we have no compulsory duties, which may setthe holy mill revolving, as Dante says; for it is the homely grumble ofthe gear which distracts us from the other sort of grumbling, theself-pitying frame of mind, which is the most fertile seed-plot of fear. 

"How happy I was long ago; how little I guessed my happiness; howlittle I knew all that lay before me; how sadly and strangely afflictedI am!" These are the whispers of the evil demon of fearfulness; andthey can only be checked by the murmur of wholesome and homely voices. 

The old motto says, "Orare est laborare, " "prayer is work"--and it isno less true that "laborare est orare, " "work is prayer. " The truth isthat we cannot do without both; and when we have prayed for courage, and tried to rejoice in our beds, as the saints who are joyful in glorydo, we had better spend no time in begging that money may be sent us tomeet our particular need, or that health may return to us, or that thisand that person may behave more kindly and considerately, but go ourway to some perfectly commonplace bit of work, do it as thoroughly aswe can, and simply turn our back upon the hobgoblin whose grimaces fillus with such uneasiness. He melts away in the blessed daylight over thevolume or the account-book, in the simple talk about arrangements oraffairs, and above all perhaps in trying to disentangle and relieveanother's troubles and anxieties. We cannot get rid of fear by drugs orcharms; we have to turn to the work which is the appointed solace ofman, and which is the reward rather than the penalty of life. 

XI

DR. JOHNSON

There is one great and notable instance in our annals which ought onceand for all to dispose of the idea that there is anything weak orunmanly in finding fear a constant temptation, and that is the case ofDr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson holds his supreme station as the "figure" parexcellence of English life for a number of reasons. His robustness, hiswit, his reverence for established things, his secret piety are allcontributory causes; but the chief of all causes is that the proportionin which these things were mixed is congenial to the British mind. TheEnglishman likes a man who is deeply serious without being in the leasta prig; a man who is tender-hearted without being sentimental; he likesa rather combative nature, and enjoys repartee more than he enjoyshumour. The Englishman values good sense above almost all qualities; bya sensible man he means a man with a clear judgment of right and wrong, a man who is not taken in by pretences nor gulled by rhetoric; a manwho can instinctively see what is important and what is unimportant. But of course the chief external reason, apart from the character ofJohnson himself, for his supremacy of fame, is that his memory isenshrined in an incomparable biography. It shows the strange ineptnessof Englishmen for literary and artistic criticism, their incapacity forjudging a work of art on its own merits, their singular habit ofallowing their disapprobation of a man's private character todepreciate his work, that an acknowledged critic like Macaulay couldwaste time in carefully considering whether Boswell was more fool ormore knave, and triumphantly announce that he produced a good book byaccident. Probably Boswell did not realise how matchless a biographerhe was, though he was not disposed to belittle his own performances. But his unbridled interest in the smallest details, his power ofhero-worship, his amazing style, his perception, his astonishing memoryand the training he gave it, his superb dramatic faculty, which enabledhim to arrange his other characters around the main figure, and tosubordinate them all to his central emphasis--all these qualities areundeniable. Moreover he was himself the most perfect foil and contrastto Johnson that could be imagined, while he possessed in a uniquedegree the power of both stimulating and provoking his hero toanimation and to wrath. Boswell may not have known what an artist hewas, but he is probably one of the best literary artists who has everlived. 

But the supreme quality of his great book is this--that his interest inevery trait of his hero, large and small, is so strong that he had noneof that stiff propriety or chilly reserve which mars almost all Englishbiographies. He did not care a straw whether this characteristic orthat would redound to Johnson's credit. He saw that Johnson was alarge-minded, large-hearted man, with an astonishing power ofconversational expression, and an extremely picturesque figure as well. He perceived that he was big enough to be described in full, and thatthe shadows of his temperament only brought out the finer features intoprominence. 

Since the days of Johnson there are but two Englishmen whose lives weknow in anything like the same detail--Ruskin and Carlyle. We know thelife of Ruskin mainly from his own power of impassioned autobiography, and because he had the same sort of power of exhibiting both his charmand his weakness as Boswell had in dealing with Johnson. But Ruskin wasnot at all a typical Englishman; he had a very feminine side to hischaracter, and though he was saved from sentimentality by his extremetrenchancy, and by his irritable temper, yet his whole temperament isbeautiful, winning, attractive, rather than salient and picturesque. Hehad the qualities of a poet, a quixotic ideal, and an exuberant fancy;but though his spell over those who understand him is an almost magicalone, his point of view is bound to be misunderstood by the ordinary man. 

Carlyle's case is a different one again. There the evidence is mainlydocumentary. We know more about the Carlyle interior than we know ofthe history of any married pair since the world began. There is littledoubt that if Carlyle could have had a Boswell, a biographer who couldhave rendered the effect of his splendid power of conversation, wemight have had a book which could have been put on the same level asthe life of Johnson, because Carlyle again was pre-eminently a"figure, " a man made by nature to hold the enraptured attention of acircle. But it would have been a much more difficult task to representCarlyle's talk than it was to represent Johnson's, because Carlyle wasan inspired soliloquist, and supplied both objection and repartee outof his own mind. I think it probable that Carlyle was a typicalScotchman; he was more impassioned in his seriousness than Johnson, buthe had a grimness which Johnson did not possess, and he had notJohnson's good-natured tolerance for foolish and well-meaning people. Carlyle himself had a good deal of Boswell's own gift, a power ofminute and faithful observation, and a memory which treasured andreproduced characteristic details. If Carlyle had ever had the time orthe taste to admire any human being as Boswell admired Johnson, hemight have produced fully as great a book; but Carlyle had a propheticimpulse, an instinct for inverting tubs and preaching from them, adesire for telling the whole human race what to do and how to do it, which Johnson was too modest to claim. 

There is but one other instance that I know in English literature of aman who had the Boswellian gift to the full, but who never had completescope, and that was Hogg. If Hogg could have spent more of his lifewith Shelley, and had been allowed to complete his book, we might, Ibelieve, have had a monument of the same kind. 

But in the case of Boswell and Johnson, it is Boswell's magnificentscorn of reticence which has done the trick, like the spurt of acid, ofwhich Browning speaks in one of his best similes. The final stroke ofgenius which has established the Life of Johnson so securely in thehearts of English readers, lies in the fact that Boswell has given ussomething to compassionate. As a rule the biographer cannot bear toevoke the smallest pity for his hero. The absence of female relativesin the case of Johnson was probably a part of his good fortune. Nobiographer likes, and seldom dares, to torture the sensibilities of agreat man's widow and daughters. And the strength as well as theweakness of the feminine point of view is that women have a power notso much of not observing, as of actually obliterating the weaknesses ofthose whom they love. It is sentiment which ruins biographies, thesentiment that cannot bear the truth. 

Boswell did not shrink from admitting the reader to a sight ofJohnson's hypochondria, his melancholy fears, his dreary miseries, hisdread of illness, his terror of death. Johnson's horror of annihilationwas insupportable. He so revelled in life, in the contact and companyof other human beings, that he once said that the idea of an infinityof torment was preferable to the thought of annihilation. He wrote, inhis last illness, to his old friend Dr. Taylor:

"Oh! my friend, the approach of death is very dreadful. I am afraid tothink on that which I know I cannot avoid. It is vain to look round andround for that help which cannot be had. Yet we hope and hope, andfancy that he who has lived to-day may live to-morrow. But let us learnto derive our hope only from God. 

"In the meantime, let us be kind to one another. I have no friend nowliving but you and Mr. Hector that was the friend of my youth. --Do notneglect, sir, yours affectionately, SAM. JOHNSON. "

Was ever the last fear put into such simple and poignant words as inthe above letter? It is like that other saying of Johnson's, when allsorts of good reasons had been given why men should wish to be releasedfrom their troubles by death, "After all, it is a sad thing for a manto lie down and die. " There is no more that can be said, and not thebest reasons in the world for desiring to depart and have done withlife can ever do away with that sadness. 

Dr. Johnson supplies the clearest proof, if proof were needed, that norobustness of temperament, no genius of common sense, no array ofrationality, no degree of courage, can save a man from the assaults offear, and even of fear which the sufferer knows to be unreal. Some ofthe most severe and angry things which Johnson ever said were said toBoswell and others who persisted in discussing the question of death. Yet Johnson had no rational doubt of immortality, and believed with analmost childlike simplicity in the Christian faith. He was not afraidof pain, or of the act of dying; it was of the unknown conditionsbeyond the grave that he was afraid. Probably as a rule very robustpeople are so much occupied in living that they have little time tothink of the future, while men and women who hold to life by a frailtenure are not much concerned at quitting a scene which is phantasmaland full of pain. But in Johnson we have the two extremes broughttogether. He was the most gregarious of men; he loved company so wellthat he would follow his friends to the very threshold, in the hope, ashe once told Boswell, that they might perhaps return. When he was aloneand undistracted, his melancholy came back upon him like a cloud. Hetortured himself over the unprofitableness of his life, over hisfailure to achieve official prominence. He does not seem to havebrooded over the favourite subject for Englishmen to lose heart over, namely, his financial position. It is a very significant fact in ourEnglish life that if at an inquest upon a suicide it can be establishedthat a man has financial difficulties, a verdict of temporary insanityis instantly conceded. Loss of property rather than loss of affectionis the thing which the Englishman thinks is likely to derange a man. But Johnson seems never to have been afraid of poverty, nor to haveever troubled about fame. He was very angry once when it was laughinglysuggested to him that if he had gone to the Bar he might have been LordChancellor; and I have no doubt, as I have said, that one of hisuncomfortable reflections was that he did not seem to himself to be ina position of influence and authority. But, apart from that, it isobvious that Johnson's broodings took the form of lamenting his ownsinfulness and moral worthlessness: what the faults which troubled himwere, it is hard to say. He does not seem to have been repentant aboutthe mortification he caused others by his witty bludgeoning--indeed heconsidered himself a polite man! But I believe, from many slightindications, that Johnson was distressed by the consciousness ofsensual impulses, though he held them in severe restraint. His habit ofejaculatory prayer was, I think, directed against this tendency. Theagitation with which he once said that corruption had entered into hisheart by means of a dream seems to me a proof of this. He took atolerant view of the lapses of others, and of course the standard ofthe age was lax in this respect. But I have little doubt myself thathere Johnson found himself often confronted with a sensuous tendencywhich he thought degrading, and which he constantly combated. 

Apart from this, he was not afraid of illness in itself, except as aprelude of mortality. Indeed I believe that he took a hypochondriacpleasure in observing his symptoms minutely, and in dosing himself inall sorts of ways. His mysterious preoccupations with dried orange-peelhad no doubt a medicinal end in view. But when it came to sufferingpain and even to enduring operations, he had no tremors. His oneconstant fear was the fear of death. He kept it at arm's length, heloved any social amusement that banished it, but it is obvious, inseveral of his talks, when the subject was under discussion, that thecloud descended upon him suddenly and made him miserable. It was allsummed up in this, that life was to his taste, that even when oppressedwith gloom and depression, he never desired to escape. I have heard agreat doctor say that he believed that human beings were very sharplydivided in this respect, that there were some people in whom anyextremity of prolonged anguish, bodily or mental, never produced thesmallest desire to quit life; while there were others whose attachmentto life was slight, and that a very little pressure of care or calamitydeveloped a suicidal impulse. This is, I suppose, a question ofvitality, not necessarily of activity of mind and body, but a deepinstinctive desire to live; the thought of deliberate suicide waswholly unintelligible to Johnson, death was his ultimate fear, andhowever much he suffered from disease or depression, his intention tolive was always inalienable. 

His fear then was one which no devoutness of faith, no resolutetenacity of hope, no array of reasons could ever touch. It was simplythe unknown that he feared. Life had not been an easy business forJohnson; he had known all the calamities of life, and he was familiarwith the worst calamity of all, the causeless melancholy which makeslife weary and distasteful without ever removing the certainty that itis in itself desirable. 

We may see from all this that to attempt to seek a cure for fear inreason is foredoomed to failure, because fear lies in a region that isbehind all reason. It exists in the depth of the spirit, as in thefallen gloom of the glimmering sea-deeps, and it can be touched by noactivity of life and joy and sunlight on the surface, where thespeeding sail moves past wind-swept headlands. We must follow it intothose depths if we are to deal with it at all, and it must bevanquished in the region where it is born, and where it skulks unseen. 

XII

TENNYSON, RUSKIN, CARLYLE

There were three great men of the nineteenth century of whom we knowmore than we know of most men, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Tennyson, in whoselives fear was a prominent element. 

Tennyson has suffered no loss of fame, but he has suffered of late acertain loss of influence, which was bound to come, if simply from thetremendous domination which his writings exercised in his lifetime. Hewas undoubtedly one of the first word-artists who ever lived and wrote, but he was a great deal more than that; he was a great mystic, a manwhose mind moved in a shining cloud of inspiration. He had theconstitution and the temperament of a big Lincolnshire yeoman, withthat simple rusticity that is said to have characterised Vergil. Buthis spirit dwelt apart, revolving dim and profound thoughts, broodingover mysteries; if he is lightly said to be Early Victorian, it is notbecause he was typical of his age, but because he contributed so muchto make it what it was. While Browning lived an eager personal life, full of observation, zest, and passion, Tennyson abode in moreimpersonal thoughts. In the dawn of science, when there was a danger oflife becoming over-materialised, contented with the first steps ofswiftly apprehended knowledge, and with solutions which were nosolutions at all, but only the perception of laws, Tennyson was the manof all others who saw that science had a deeply poetical side, andcould enforce rather than destroy the religious spirit; he saw that aknowledge of processes was not the same thing as an explanation ofimpulses, and that while it was a little more clear in the light ofscience what was actually happening in the world, men were no nearerthe perception of why it happened so, or why it happened at all. Tennyson saw clearly the wonders of astronomy and geology, anddiscerned that the laws of nature were nothing more than the habits, soto speak, of a power that was incredibly dim and vast, a power whichheld within itself the secrets of motion and rest, of death and life. Thus he claimed for his disciples not only the average thoughtful men, but the very best and finest minds of his generation who wished to linkthe past and the present together, and not to break with the oldsanctities. 

Tennyson's art suffered from the consciousness of his enormousresponsibility, and where he failed was from his dread of unpopularity, or his fear of alienating the ordinary man. Browning was interested inethical problems; his robust and fortunate temperament allowed him tobridge over with a sort of buoyant healthiness the gaps of hisphilosophy. But Tennyson's ethical failure lay in his desire to improvethe occasion, and to rule out all impulses that had not a social andcivic value. In the later "Idylls" he did his best to represent theprig trailing clouds of glory, and to discourage lawlessness in everyform; but he was more familiar with the darker and grosser sides oflife than he allowed to appear in his verse, which suffers from analmost prudish delicacy, which is more akin to respectability than tomoral courage. 

But all this was the shadow of a very sensitive and melancholytemperament. Comparatively little is known of the first forty years ofhis life; it is after that time that the elaborate legend begins. Tillthe time of his marriage, he must have been a constant anxiety to hisfriends; his gloom, his inertia, his drifting mooning ways, hishypochondria, his incapacity for any settled plan of life, all seemedto portend an ultimate failure. But this troubled inertness was thesoil of his inspiration; his conceptions took slow and stately shape. He never suffered from the haste, which as Dante says "mars all decencyof act. " After that time he enjoyed a great domestic happiness, andpractised considerable sociability. His terrifying demeanour, hisamazing personal dignity and majesty, the certainty that he would saywhatever came into his head, whether it was profound and solemn, ortesty and discourteous, gave him a personal ascendancy that neverdisappointed a pilgrim. 

But he lived all his life in a perpetual melancholy, feeling thesmallest slights acutely, hating at once obscurity and publicity, awareof his renown, yet shrinking from the evidences of it. He could bedistracted by company, soothed by wine and tobacco; but left to itself, his mind fell helplessly down the dark slope into a sadness and adreariness which deprived life of its savour. It was not that his dreadwas a definite one; he was strong and tough physically, and he regardeddeath with a solemn curiosity; but he had a sense of the profitlessnessof vacant hours, unthrilled by beauty and delight, and had also amorbid pride, of the nature of vanity, which caused him to resent thesmallest criticism of his works from the humblest reader. There aremany stories of this, how he declaimed against the lust of gossip, which he called with rough appositeness "ripping up a man like a pig, "and thanked God with all his heart and soul that he knew nothing ofShakespeare's private life; and in the same breath went on to say thathe thought that his own fame was suffering from a sort of congestion, because he had received no letters about his poems for several days. 

In later life he became very pessimistic, and believed that the worldwas sinking fast into dull materialism, petty selfishness, and moralanarchy. He had less opportunity of knowing what was going on in theworld than most people, in his sheltered and secluded life, with hiscourt of friends and worshippers. And indeed it was not a rationalpessimism; it was but the shadow of his fear. And the fact remains thatin spite of a life of great good fortune, and an undimmed supremacy offame, he spent much of his time in fighting shadows, involved in cloudsof darkness and dissatisfaction. That was no doubt the price he paidfor his exquisite perception of beauty and his power of melodiousexpression. But we make a great mistake if we merely think of Tennysonas a rich and ample nature moving serenely through life. He was"black-blooded, " he once said, adding, "like all the Tennysons. "Doubtless he had in his mind his father, a man often deeply in the gripof melancholy. And the absurd legend, invented probably by Rossetti, contains a truth in it and may be quoted here. Rossetti said that heonce went to dine with a friend in London, and was shown into a dimlylit drawing-room with no one to receive him. He went towards thefireplace, and suddenly to his surprise discovered an immensely tallman in evening dress lying prostrate on the hearthrug, his facedownwards, in an attitude of prone despair. While he gazed, thestranger rose to his feet, looked fixedly at him, and said, "I mustintroduce myself; I am Octavius, the most morbid of the Tennysons. "

With Ruskin we have a different case. He was brought up in the mostsecluded fashion, and though he was sharply enough disciplined intodecorous behaviour by his very grim and positive mother, he was guardedlike a precious jewel, and as he grew up he was endlessly petted andindulged. The Ruskins lived a very comfortable life in a big villa withample grounds at Denmark Hill. Whatever the wonderful boy did wasapplauded and even dangerously encouraged, both in the way of drawingand of writing. Though he seems to have been often publicly snubbed byboth his parents, it was more a family custom than anything else, andwas accompanied by undisguised admiration and patent pride. They werehis stupefied critics, when he read aloud his works in the familycircle, and his father obediently produced large sums of money togratify his brilliant son's artistic desire for the possession ofTurner's paintings. Ruskin in his morbid moments, in later life, turnedfiercely and unjustly against his fond and tender father. He accusedhim with an in temperate bitterness of having lavished everything uponhim except the intelligent sympathy of which he stood in need, and hisfather's gentle and mournful apologies have an extraordinary beauty ofpuzzled and patient dignity about them. 

When Ruskin went to Oxford, his mother went to reside there too, tolook after her darling. One might have supposed that this would haveinvolved Ruskin in ridicule, but he was petted and indulged by hisfellow-undergraduates, who found his charm, his swift wit, hischildlike waywardness, his freakish humour irresistible. Then he had aserious illness, and his first taste of misery; he was afraid of death, he hated the constraints of invalid life and the grim interruption tohis boundless energies and plans. Then came his first great book, andhe strode full-fledged into fame. His amazing attractiveness, his talk, which combined incisiveness and fancy and humour and fire andgentleness, made him a marked figure from the first. Moreover, he hadthe command of great wealth, yet no temptation to be idle. The tale ofRuskin's industry for the next fifty years is one that would beincredible if it were not true. His brief and dim experience of marriedlife seems hardly to have affected him. As a critic of art and ethics, as the writer of facile magnificent sentences, full of beauty andrhythm, as the composer of word-structures, apparently logical in formbut deeply prejudiced and inconsequent in thought, he became one of thegreat influences of the day, and wielded not only power but realdomination. The widespread delusion of the English educated classes, that they are interested in art, was of Ruskin's making. Then somethingvery serious happened to him; a baffled passion of extraordinaryintensity, a perception of the realities of life, the consciousnessthat his public indulged and humoured him as his parents had done, andadmired his artistic advice without paying the smallest heed to hisethical principles--all these experiences broke over him, wearied as hewas with excessive strain, like a bitter wave. But his pessimism tookthe noble form of an intense concern with the blindness andimpenetrability of the world at large. He made a theory of politicaleconomy, which, peremptory and prejudiced as it is, is yet built onlarge lines, and has been fruitful in suggestiveness. But he tasteddiscouragement and failure in deep draughts. His parents franklyexpressed their bewildered disappointment, his public looked upon himas a perverse man who was throwing away a beautiful message for thesake of a crabbed whim; and he fell into a fierce depression, alternating between savage energy and listless despondency, whichlasted for several years, till at last the overwrought brain and mindgave way; and for the rest of his life he was liable to recurrentattacks of insanity, which cleared off and left him normal again, or asnormal as he ever had been. Wide and eager as Ruskin's tenderness was, one feels that his heart was never really engaged; he was always faraway, in a solitude full of fear, out of the reach of affection, alwayssolemnly and mournfully alone. Ruskin was never really allied with anyother human soul; he knew most of the great men of the day; he baitedRossetti, he petted Carlyle; he had correspondents like Norton, to whomhe poured out his overburdened heart; but he was always the spoiled andindulged child of his boyhood, infinitely winning, provoking, wilful. He could not be helped, because he could never get away from himself;he could admire almost frenziedly, but he could not worship; he couldnot keep himself from criticism even when he adored, and he had abitter superiority of spirit, a terrible perception of theimperfections and faults of others, a real despair of humanity. 

I do not know exactly what the terrors which Ruskin suffered were--veryfew people will tell the tale of the valley of hobgoblins, or probablycannot! In the Pilgrim's Progress itself, the unreality of the spiritsof fear, their secrecy and leniency, is very firmly and wittily told. They scream in their dens, sitting together, I have thought, like fowlsin a roost. They come padding after the pilgrim, they show themselvesobscurely, swollen by the mist at the corners of the road. They givethe sense of being banded together in a numerous ambush, they candeceive eye and ear, and even nose with noisome stenches; but theycannot show themselves, and they cannot hurt. If they could be seen, they would be nothing but limp ungainly things that would rouse disdainand laughter and even pity, at anything at once so weak and somalevolent. But they are not like the demons of sin that can hamper andwound; they are just little gnomes and elves that can make a noise, andtheir strength is a spiteful and a puny thing. 

Ruskin had no sordid or material fears; he had no fear of poverty, forhe flung his father's hard-earned wealth profusely away; nor did hefear illness; indeed one of the bravest and most gallant things abouthim was the way in which he talked and wrote about his insane fits, described his haunted visions, told, half-ruefully, half-humorously, how he fought and struggled with his nurses, and made fun of thematter. That was a very courageous thing to do, because most people areashamed of insanity, no doubt from the old sad ignorant tradition thatit was the work of demoniacal agencies, and not a mere disease likeother diseases. Half the tragedy of insanity is that it shocks people, and cannot be alluded to or spoken about; but one can take the stingout of almost any calamity if one can make fun of it, and this Ruskindid. 

But he was wounded by his fears, as we most of us are, not only throughhis vanity but through his finest emotions. He felt his impotence andhis failure. He had thought of his gift of language as one might thinkof a magic wand which one can wave, and thus compel duller spirits todo one's bidding. Ruskin began by thinking that there was not muchamiss with the world except a sort of pathetic stupidity; and hethought that if only people could be told, clearly and loudly enough, what was right, they would do it gladly; and then it dawned upon him byslow degrees that the confusion was far deeper than that, that menmostly did not live in motives but in appetites. And so he fell into asort of noble rage with the imperfection of mortal things; and one ofthe clearest signs, as he himself knew, that he was drifting into oneof the mind-storms which swept across him, was that in these moodseverything that people said or wrote had power to arouse hisirritation, to interrupt his work, to break his sleep, and to show himthat he was powerless indeed. What he feared was derision, and thegood-natured indifferent stolidity that is worse than any derision, andthe knowledge that, with all his powers and perceptions, hiscommon-sense, which was great, and his sense of responsibility, he wastreated by the world like a spoilt child, charming even in his wrath, who had full license to be as vehement as he liked, with theunderstanding that no one would act on his advice. 

I often go to Brantwood, which is a sacred place indeed, and see withdeep emotion the little rooms, with all their beautiful treasures, andall the great accumulations of that fierce industry of mind, andremember that in that peaceful background a man of exquisite geniusfought with sinister shadows, and was worsted in the fight, for a time;because the last ten years of that long life were a time of serenewaiting for death, a beguiling by little childish and homelyoccupations the heavy hours: he could uplift his voice no more, oftencould hardly frame an intelligible thought. But meanwhile his greatmessage went on rippling out to the world, touching heart after heartinto light and hope, and doing, insensibly and graciously, by thespirit, the very thing he had failed to do by might and power. 

And then we come to Carlyle, and here we are on somewhat differentground. Carlyle had a colossal quarrel with the age, but he thoughtvery little of the message of beauty and peace. His idea of the worldwas that of a stern combative place, with the one hope a strenuous andgrim righteousness; Carlyle thought of the world as a place wherecheats and liars cozened and beguiled men, for their own advantage, with all sorts of shams and pretences: but he did not really know theworld; he put down to individual action and deliberate policy much thatwas due simply to the prevalence of tradition and system, and to thecomplexity of civilisation. He was so fierce an individualist himselfthat he credited everyone else with purpose and prejudice. He did notrealise the vast preponderance of helpless good-nature and muddledkindliness. The mistake of much of Carlyle's work is that it is toopoignantly dramatic, and bristles with intention and significance; andhe did not allow sufficiently for the crowd of vague supers who throngthe background of the stage. Neither did he ever go about the worldwith his eyes open for general facts. Wherever he was, he was intenselyobservant, but he spent his days either in a fierce absorption of work, blind even to the sorrow and discomfort of his wife, or taking rapidtours to store his mind with the details of historical scenes, or inthe big houses of wealthy people, where he kept much to himself, storedup irresistibly absurd caricatures of the other guests, and lamentedhis own inaction. I have never been able to discover exactly whyCarlyle spent so much time in staying at great houses, deriding andsatirising everything he set eyes upon; it was, I believe, vaguelygratifying to him to have raised himself unaided into the highestsocial stratum; and the old man was after all a tremendous aristocratat heart. Or else he skulked with infinite melancholy in his mother'shouse, being waited upon and humoured, and indulging his deep and truefamily affection. But he was a solitary man for the most part, andmixed with men, involved in a cloud of his own irresistibly fantasticand whimsical talk; for his real gift was half-humorous, half-melancholy improvisation rather than deliberate writing. 

But it is difficult to discern in all this what his endless andplangent melancholy was concerned with. He had a very singular physicalframe, immensely tough and wiry, with an imagination which emphasizedand particularised every slight touch of bodily disorder. When he wasat work, he toiled like a demon day after day, entirely and vehementlyabsorbed. When he was not at work he suffered from dreary reaction. Hefought out in early days a severe moral combat, and found his way to abelief in God which was very different from his former Calvinism. Carlyle can by no stretch of the word be called a Christian, but he wasone of the most thoroughgoing Deists that ever lived. The terror thatbeset him in that first great conflict was a ghastly fear of his owninsignificance, and a horrible suspicion that the world was made onfortuitous and indifferent lines. His dread was that of being worsted, in spite of all his eager sensibility and immense desire to do a noblework, of being crushed, silenced, thrown ruthlessly on the dust-heap ofthe world. He learned a fiery sort of Determinism, and a faith in thestubborn power of the will, not to achieve anything, but to achievesomething. 

Yet after this tremendous conflict, described in Sartor Resartus, wherehe found himself at bay with his back to the wall, he never had anyultimate doubt again of his own purpose. Still, it brought him noserenity; and I suppose there is no writer in the world whose lettersand diaries are so full of cries of anguish and hopelessness. He wascrushed under the sense of the world's immensity; his own observationwas so microscopic, his desire to perceive and know so strong, hisappetite for definiteness so profound, that I feel that Carlyle'sterror was like that of a mite in an enormous cheese, longing toexplore it all, lost in the high-flavoured dusk, and conscious of ascale of mystery so vast that it humiliated a brain that wanted to knowthe truth about everything. In these sad hours--and they were numerousand protracted--he felt like a knight worn out by conflict, under alistless enchantment which he could not break. I know few confessionsthat are so filled with gleams of high poetry and beauty as many ofthese solitary lamentations. But I believe that the terrors thatCarlyle had to face were the terrors of a swift, clear-sighted, feverishly active, intuitive brain, prevented by mortal weakness andfrailty from dealing as he desired with the dazzling immensity andintricacy of the world's life and history. 

I feel no real doubt of this, because Carlyle's passion for accurateand minute knowledge, his intense interest in temperament andcharacter, his almost unequalled power of observation--which is reallythe surest sign of genius--come out so clearly all through his life, that his finite limitations must have been of the nature of a tortureto him. One who desired to know the truth about everything sovehemently, was crushed and bewildered by the narrow range and limitedscope of his own insatiable thought. His power of expressing all thathe saw and felt, so delicately, so humorously, and at times sotenderly, must have beguiled his sadness more than he knew. It wasRuskin who said that he could never fit the two sides of the puzzletogether--on the one side the awful dejection and despondency whichCarlyle always claimed to feel in the presence of his work, as adredger in lakes of mud and as a sorter of mountains of rubbish, and onthe other side the endless relish for salient traits, and the delightedapprehension of quality which emerges so clearly in all he wrote. 

But it is clear that Carlyle suffered ceaselessly, though neverunutterably. He was a matchless artist, with an unequalled gift ofputting into vivid words everything he experienced; but his sadness wasa disease of the imagination, a fear, not of anything definite--for henever even saw the anxieties that were nearest to him--but a nightmaredream of chaos and whirling forces all about him, a dread of slippingoff his own very fairly comfortable perch into oceans of confusion anddismay. 

XIII

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

I doubt if the records of intimate biography contain a finerobject-lesson against fear and all its obsessions than the life ofCharlotte Bronte. She was of a temperament which in many ways was moreopen to the assaults of fear than any which could well be devised. Shewas frail and delicate, liable to acute nervous depression, intenselyshy and sensitive, and susceptible as well; that is to say that hershyness did not isolate her from her kind; she wanted to be loved, respected, even admired. When she did love, she loved with fire andpassion and desperate loyalty. 

Her life was from beginning to end full of sharp and tragicexperiences. She was born and brought up in a bleak moorland village, climbing steeply and grimly to the edge of heathery uplands. The bareparsonage, with its little dark rooms, looks out on a churchyard pavedwith graves. Her father was a kindly man, but essentially moody andsolitary. He took all his meals alone, walked alone, sate alone. Hermother died of cancer, when she was but a child. Then she was sent toan ill-managed austere school, and here when she was nine years old hertwo elder sisters died. She took service two or three times as agoverness, and endured agonies of misunderstanding, suspicious of heremployers, afraid of her pupils, longing for home with an intenseyearning. Then she went out to a school at Brussels, where under theteaching of M. Heger, a gifted professor, her mind and heart awoke, andshe formed for him a strange affection, half an intellectual devotion, half an unconscious passion, which deprived her of her peace of mind. Her sad and wistful letters to him, lately published, were disregardedby him, partly because his wife was undoubtedly jealous of therelation, partly because he was disconcerted by the emotion he hadaroused. Her brother, a brilliant, wayward, and in some ways attractiveboy, got into disgrace, and drifted home, where he tried to consolehimself with drink and opium. After three years of this horrible life, he died, and within twelve months her two surviving sisters, Emily andAnne, developed consumption and died. As Robert Browning says, thereindeed was "trouble enough for one!"

Now it must be borne in mind that her temperament was naturallyhypochondriacal. 

Let me quote a passage dealing with the same experience; it isundoubtedly autobiographical, though it comes from Villette, into whichCharlotte Bronte threw the picture of her own solitary experiences inBrussels. She is left alone at the pensionnat in the vacation, strainedby work and anxiety, and tortured by exhaustion, restlessness, andsleeplessness:--

"One day, perceiving this growing illusion, I said, 'I really believemy nerves are getting overstretched: my mind has suffered somewhat toomuch; a malady is growing upon it--what shall I do? How shall I keepwell?'

"Indeed there was no way to keep well under the circumstances. At lasta day and night of peculiarly agonising depression were succeeded byphysical illness; I took perforce to my bed. About this time the Indiansummer closed, and the equinoctial storms began; and for nine dark andwet days, of which the hours rushed on all turbulent, deaf, dishevelled--bewildered with sounding hurricane--I lay in a strangefever of the nerves and blood. Sleep went quite away. I used to rise inthe night, look round for her, beseech her earnestly to return. Arattle of the window, a cry of the blast only replied--Sleep never came!

"I err. She came once, but in anger. Impatient of my importunity shebrought with her an avenging dream. By the clock of St. Jean Baptiste, that dream remained scarce fifteen minutes--a brief space, butsufficing to wring my whole frame with unknown anguish; to confer anameless experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the verytone of a visitation from eternity. Between twelve and one that night acup was forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, drawn from no well, but filled up seething from a bottomless and boundless sea. Suffering, brewed in temporal or calculable measure, and mixed for mortal lips, tastes not as this suffering tasted. Having drank [sic] and woke, Ithought all was over: the end come and passed by. Tremblingfearfully--as consciousness returned--ready to cry out on somefellow-creature to help me, only that I knew no fellow-creature wasnear enough to catch the wild summons--Goton in her far distant atticcould not hear--I rose on my knees in bed. Some fearful hours went overme; indescribably was I torn, racked and oppressed in mind. Amidst thehorrors of that dream I think the worst lay here. Methought thewell-loved dead, who had loved ME well in life, met me elsewherealienated; galled was my inmost spirit with an unutterable sense ofdespair about the future. Motive there was none why I should try torecover or wish to live; and yet quite unendurable was the pitiless andhaughty voice in which Death challenged me to engage his unknownterrors. When I tried to pray I could only utter these words:--

"'From my youth up Thy terrors have I suffered with a troubled mind. '"

The deep interest of this experience is that it was endured by one whowas not only intellectually endowed beyond most women of her time, butwhose sanity, reasonableness, and moral force were conspicuouslystrong. Charlotte Bronte was not one of those impulsive and imaginativewomen who are the prey of every fancy. Throughout the whole of hercareer, she was for ever compelling her frail and sensitivetemperament, with indomitable purpose, to perform whatever she hadundertaken to do. There never was anyone who lived so sternly byprinciple and reason, or who so maintained her self-control in the faceof sorrow, disaster, unhappiness, and bereavement. She never gave wayto feeble or morbid self-accusation, and therefore the fact that shecould thus have suffered is a sign that this unnamed terror can coexistwith a dauntless courage and an essential self-command. 

Here again is the cry of a desolate heart! She had been going throughher sisters' papers not long after their death, and wrote to her greatfriend:

"I am both angry and surprised at myself for not being in betterspirits; for not growing accustomed, or at least resigned, to thesolitude and isolation of my lot. But my late occupation left a result, for some days and indeed still, very painful. The reading over ofpapers, the renewal of remembrances, brought back the pangs ofbereavement and occasioned a depression of spirits well-nighintolerable. For one or two nights I hardly knew how to get on tillmorning; and when morning came I was still haunted by a sense ofsickening distress. I tell you these things because it is absolutelynecessary to me to have SOME relief. You will forgive me and nottrouble yourself, or imagine that I am one whit worse than I say. It isquite a mental ailment, and I believe and hope is better now. I thinkso, because I can speak about it, which I never can when grief is atits worst. I thought to find occupation and interest in writing whenalone at home, but hitherto my efforts have been in vain: thedeficiency of every stimulus is so complete. You will recommend me, Idare say, to go from home; but that does no good, even could I againleave papa with an easy mind. . . . I cannot describe what a time of itI had after my return from London and Scotland. There was a reactionthat sank me to the earth, the deadly silence, solitude, depression, desolation were awful; the craving for companionship, the hopelessnessof relief were what I should dread to feel again. "

Or again, in a somewhat calmer mood, she writes:

"I feel to my deep sorrow, to my humiliation, that it is not in mypower to bear the canker of constant solitude. I had calculated thatwhen shut out from every enjoyment, from every stimulus but what couldbe desired from intellectual exertion, my mind would rouse itselfperforce. It is not so. Even intellect, even imagination will notdispense with the ray of domestic cheerfulness, with the gentle spur offamily discussions. Late in the evening and all through the nights, Ifall into a condition of mind which turns entirely to the past--tomemory, and memory is both sad and relentless. This will never do, andwill produce no good. I tell you this that you may check falseanticipations. You cannot help me, and must not trouble yourself in anyshape to sympathise with me. It is my cup, and I must drink it asothers do theirs. "

It would be difficult to create a picture of more poignant suffering;yet she was at this time a famous writer. She had published Jane Eyreand Shirley, and on her visits to London, to her hospitable publisher, had found herself welcomed, honoured, feted. The great lions of theliterary world had flocked eagerly to meet her. Even these simplefestivities were accompanied by a deadly sense of strain, anxiety, andexhaustion. Mrs. Gaskell describes how a little later she met CharlotteBronte at a quiet country-house, and how Charlotte was reduced fromtolerable health to a bad nervous headache by the announcement thatthey were going to drive over in the afternoon to have tea at aneighbour's house--the prospect of meeting strangers was so alarming toher. 

But in spite of this agonising susceptibility and vulnerability, thereis never the least touch either of sentimentality or self-pity aboutCharlotte Bronte. She stuck to her duty and faced life with an infinityof patient courage. One of her friends said of her that no one she hadever known had sacrificed more to others, or done it with a fullerconsciousness of what she was sacrificing. If duty and affection badeher act, no sense of weakness or of inclination had any power over her. She was afraid of life, but she stood up to it; she was never crushedor broken. Consider the circumstances under which she began to writeJane Eyre. She had written her novel The Professor, and it was returnedto her nine several times, by publisher after publisher. Her father wasthreatened with blindness. She had taken him to Manchester for anoperation, installed him in lodgings, and settled down alone to nursehim. The ill-fated Professor came back to her once more with a politerefusal. That very day she wrote the first lines of Jane Eyre. Later ontoo, with her brother dying of opium and drink, she had begun Shirley, and she finished it after the deaths of her sisters. She was perfectlymerciless to herself, saw no reason why she should be spared any sorrowor suffering or ill-health, but looked upon it all as a stern but notunjust discipline. She had one of the most passionately affectionatenatures both in friendship and home relations--"my hot tenaciousheart, " she once says! But there was no touch of softness orsentimentality about her; she never feebly condoned weaknesses; herobservation of people was minute, her judgment of them severe and evensatirical. Her letters abound in pungent humour and acute perception;and her idea of charity was not that of mild and muddled tolerance. Shehad a vein of frank and rather bitter irony when she was indignant, andshe could return stroke for stroke. 

She knew well that, whatever life was meant to be, it was not intendedto be an easy business; but she did not face it stoically orindifferently; she had a fierce desire for knowledge, culture, ideas;she was ambitious; and above everything she desired to be loved; yetshe did not think of love in the way in which all English romancers hadtreated it for over a century, as a condescending hand held out by asuperior being, for the glory of which a woman submitted to a more orless contented servitude; but as a glowing equality of passion andworship, in which two hearts clasped each other close, with a sacredconcurrence of soul. And thus it was that she and Robert Browning, above all other writers of the century, put the love of man and womanin the true light, as the supreme worth of life; not as a half-sensuousexcitement, with lapses and reactions, but as a great and holy mysteryof devotion and service and mutual help. She too had her little tasteof love. Mr. Nicholls, her father's curate, a man of deep tendernessbehind his quiet homely ways, had proposed to her; she had refused him;but his suffering and bewilderment had touched her deeply, and at lastshe consented, though she went to her wedding in fear and dread; butshe was rewarded, and for a few short months tasted a calm and sweethappiness, the joy of being needed and desired, and at the same timeguarded and tended well. Her pathetic words, when she knew from hislips that she must die, "God will not part us--we have been so happy, "are full of the deepest tragedy. 

I say again that I know of no instance among the most intimate recordsof the human heart, in which life was faced with such splendid courageas it was by Charlotte Bronte. It contained so many things which shedesired--art, beauty, thought, peace, deep and tender relations, andthe supreme crown of love. But she never dreamed of trying to escape orshirk her lot. After her first great success with Jane Eyre, she mighthave lived life on her own lines; her writing meant wealth to one ofher simple tastes; and as her closest friend said, if she had chosen toset up a house of her own, she would have been gratefully thanked forany kindness she might have shown to her household, instead of being, as she was, ruthlessly employed and even tyrannised over. Consider howa young authoress, with that splendid success to her credit, wouldnowadays be made much of and tended, begged to consult her own wishesand make, her own arrangements. But Charlotte Bronte hated notoriety, and took her fame with a shrinking and modest amazement. She never gaveherself airs, or displayed any affectation, or caught at any flattery. She just went back to her tragic home, and carried the burden ofhousekeeping on her frail shoulders. The simplicity, the delicacy, thehumility of it all is above praise. If ever there was a human being whomight have pleaded to be excused from any gallant battling with lifebecause of her bleak, comfortless, unhappy surroundings, and her ownsensitive temperament, it was Charlotte Bronte. But instead of that shefought silently with disaster and unhappiness, neither pitying herselffor her destiny, nor taking the smallest credit for her toughresistance. It does not necessarily prove that all can wage so equal afight with fears and sorrows; but it shows at least that an indomitableresolution can make a noble thing out of a life from which everycircumstance of romance and dignity seems to be purposely withdrawn. 

I do not think that there is in literature a more inspiring andheartening book than Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. The bookwas written with a fine frankness and a daring indiscretion which costMrs. Gaskell very dear. It remains as one of the most matchless andsplendid presentments of duty and passion and genius, waging aperfectly undaunted fight with life and temperament, and carrying offthe spoils not only of undying fame, but the far more supreme crown ofmoral force. Charlotte Bronte never doubted that she had been set inthe forefront of the battle, and that her first concern was with theissues of life and sorrow and death. She died at thirty-eight, at atime when many men and women have hardly got a firm hold of life atall, or have parted with weak illusions. Yet years before she had saidsternly to a friend who was meditating a flight from hard conditions oflife: "The right course is that which necessitates the greatestsacrifice of self-interest. " Many people could have said that, but Iknow no figure who more relentlessly and loyally carried out theprinciple than Charlotte Bronte, or who waged a more vigorous andtenacious battle with every onset of fear. "My conscience tells me, "she once wrote about an anxious decision, "that it would be the act ofa moral poltroon to let the fear of suffering stand in the way ofimprovement. But suffer I shall. No matter!"

XIV

JOHN STERLING

I believe that the most affecting, beautiful, and grave message everwritten from a death-bed is John Sterling's last letter to Carlyle. Itreflects, perhaps, something of Carlyle's own fine manner, but thenSterling had long been Carlyle's friend and confidant. 

Before I give it, let me add a brief account of Sterling. He was someten years Carlyle's junior, the son of the redoubtable Edward Sterling, the leader-writer of the Times, a man who in his day wielded a mightyinfluence. Carlyle describes the father's way of life, how he spent theday in going about London, rolling into clubs, volubly questioning andtalking; then returned home in the evening, and condensed it all into aleader, "and is found, " said Carlyle, "to have hit the essentialpurport of the world's immeasurable babblement that day with anaccuracy above all other men. "

The younger Sterling, Carlyle's friend, was at Cambridge for a time, but never took his degree; he became a journalist, wrote a novel, tales, plays, endless poems--all of thin and vapid quality. His brieflife, for he died at thirty-eight, was a much disquieted one; hetravelled about in search of health, for he was early threatened withconsumption; for a short time he was a curate in the English Church, but drifted away from that. He lived for a time at Falmouth, andafterwards at Ventnor. He must have been a man of extraordinary charm, and with quite unequalled powers of conversation. Even Carlyle seems tohave heard him gladly, and that is no ordinary compliment, consideringCarlyle's own volubility, and the agonies, occasionally suppressed butgenerally trenchantly expressed, with which Carlyle listened to otherwell-known talkers like Coleridge and Macaulay. 

Carlyle certainly had a very deep affection and admiration forSterling; he rains down praises upon him, in that wonderful littlebiography, which is probably the finest piece of work that Carlyle everdid. 

He speaks of Sterling as "brilliant, beautiful, cheerful with anever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, imaginations . . . With frankaffections, inexhaustible hopes, audacities, activities, and generalradiant vivacity of heart and intelligence, which made the presence ofhim an illumination and inspiration wherever he went. "

But all Carlyle's love and admiration for his friend did not induce himto praise Sterling's writings; he looked upon him as a poet, butwithout the gift of expression. He says that all Sterling's work wasspoilt by over-haste, and "a lack of due inertia. " The fact is thatSterling was a sort of improvisatore, and what was beautiful andnatural enough when poured out in talk, and with the stimulus ofcongenial company, grew pale and indistinct when he wrote it down; hehad, in fact, no instinct for art or for design, and he failed wheneverhe tried to mould ideas into form. 

The shadow of illness darkened about him, and he spent long periods inprostrate seclusion, tended by his wife and children, unable to writeor talk or receive his friends. Then a terrible calamity befell him. His mother, to whom he was devotedly attached, died after a longillness, Sterling not being allowed to go to her, or to leave his ownsick-room. He received the news one morning by letter, that all wasover, went in to tell his wife, who was ill; while they were talking, his wife became faint, and died two hours later. So that within a fewhours he lost the two human beings whom he most devotedly loved, and onwhom he most depended for sympathy and help. 

But in all Sterling's sorrows and illnesses, he never seems to havelost his interest in life and thought, in ideas, questions, andproblems. Again and again he came back to the surface, with anirrepressible zest and freshness, and even gaiety, until at last allhope of life was extinguished. He lay dying for many weeks, and it wasthen that he wrote his last letter to Carlyle, which must be given infull:--

HILLSIDE, VENTNOR, 10th August 1844. 

MY DEAR CARLYLE, --For the first time for many months it seems possibleto send you a few words; merely, however, for Remembrance and Farewell. On higher matters there is nothing to say. I tread the common road intothe great darkness, without any thought of fear, and with very much ofhope. Certainty indeed I have none. With regard to you and me I cannotbegin to write; having nothing for it but to keep shut the lid of thosesecrets with all the iron weights that are in my power. Towards me itis still more true than towards England that no man has been and donelike you. Heaven bless you! If I can lend a hand when THERE, that willnot be wanting. It is all very strange, but not one hundredth part sosad as it seems to the standers-by. 

Your Wife knows my mind towards her, and will believe it withoutasseverations. --Yours to the last, JOHN STERLING. 

That letter may speak for itself. In its dignity, its nobleness, itsfearlessness, it is one of the finest human documents I know. But letit be remembered that it is not the letter of a mournful andheart-broken man, turning his back on life in an ecstasy of despair;but the letter of one who had taken a boundless delight in life, hadknown upon equal terms most of the finest intellects of the day, andhad been frankly recognised by them as a chosen spirit. All Sterling'sdesigns for life and work had been slowly and surely thwarted by thepressure of hopeless illness; yet he had never complained or fretted orbrooded, or indulged in any bitter recriminations against his destiny. That seems to me a very heroic attitude; while the letter itself, inits perfect frankness and courage, without a touch of solemnity oraffectation, or any trace of craven shrinking from his doom, makes itin its noble simplicity one of the finest "last words" that I have everread, and finer, I verily believe, than any flight of poeticalimagination. 

A few days later he sent Carlyle some stanzas of verse, "written, " saysCarlyle, "as if in star-fire and immortal tears; which are among mysacred possessions, to be kept for myself alone. "

A few weeks before he wrote his last letter to Carlyle, Sterling hadwritten a letter to his son, who was then a boy at school in London. Inthat he says:

"When I fancy how you are walking in the same streets, and moving alongthe same river, that I used to watch so intently, as if in a dream, when younger than you are--I could gladly burst into tears, not ofgrief, but with a feeling that there is no name for. Everything is sowonderful, great and holy, so sad and yet not bitter, so full of Deathand so bordering on Heaven. Can you understand anything of this? If youcan, you will begin to know what a serious matter our Life is; howunworthy and stupid it is to trifle it away without heed; what awretched, insignificant, worthless creature anyone comes to be, whodoes not as soon as possible bend his whole strength, as in stringing astiff bow, to doing whatever task lies first before him. "

That again is a noble letter; but over it I think there lies a littleshadow of regret, a sense that he had himself wasted some of the forceof life in vague trifling; but even that mood had passed away in thenearness of the great impending change, leaving him upborne upon thegreatness of God, in deep wonder and hope, knowing nothing more, in hisweariness and his suffering, but the calmness of the Eternal Will. 

XV

INSTINCTIVE FEAR

The fears then from which men suffer, and even the greatest men notleast, seem to be strangely complicated by the fact that nature doesnot seem to work as fast in the physical world as in the mental world. The mosquitoes of South American swamps are all fitted with a perfecttool-box of implements for piercing the hides of warm-blooded animalsand drawing blood, although warm-blooded animals have long ceased toexist in those localities. But as the mosquito is one of the fewcreatures which can propagate its kind without ever partaking of food, the mosquito has therefore not died out; and though for manygenerations billions upon billions of mosquitoes have never had achance of doing what they seem born to do, they have not discardedtheir apparatus. If mosquitoes could reason and philosophise, theprospect of such a meal might remain as a far-off and inspiring idealof life and conduct, a thing which heroes in the past had achieved, andwhich might be possible again if they remained true to their highestinstincts. So it is with humanity. Many of our fears do not correspondto any real danger; they are part of a panoply which we inherit, andhave to do with the instinct of self-preservation. We are exposed todangers still, dangers of infection for instance, but we have developedno instinctive fear which helps us to recognise the presence ofinfection. We take rational precautions against it when we recogniseit, but the vast prevalence and mortality of consumption a generationor two ago was due to the fact that men did not recognise consumptionas infectious; and many fine lives--Keats and Emily Bronte, to name buttwo--were sacrificed to careless proximity as well as to devotedtendance; but here nature, with all her instinct of self-preservation, did not hang out any danger signal, or provide human beings with anyinstinctive fear to protect them. Our instinctive fears, such as ourfear of darkness and solitude, and our suspicion of strangers, seem todate from a time when such conditions were really dangerous, thoughthey are so no longer. 

At the same time the development of the imaginative faculty has broughtwith it a whole series of new terrors, through our power ofanticipating and picturing possible calamities; while our increasedsensitiveness as well as our more sentimental morality expose us to yetanother range of fears. Consider the dread which many of us feel at theprospect of a painful interview, our avoidance of an unpleasant scene, our terror of arousing anger. The basis of all this is the primevaldread of personal violence. We are afraid of arousing anger, notbecause we expect to be assailed by blows and wounds, but because ourfar-off ancestors expected anger to end in an actual assault. We mayknow that we shall emerge from an unpleasant interview unscathed infortune and in limb, but we anticipate it with a quite irrationalterror, because we are still haunted by fears which date from a timewhen injury was the natural outcome of wrath. It may be our duty, andwe may recognise it to be our duty, to make a protest of an unpleasantkind, or to withstand the action of an irritable person; but though weknow well enough that he has no power to injure us, the flashing eye, the distended nostril, the rising pallor, the uplifted voice have adisagreeable effect on our nerves, although we know well that nophysical disaster will result from it. Mrs. Browning, for instance, though she had high moral courage and tenacity of purpose, could notface an interview with her father, because an exhibition of his angercaused her to faint away on the spot. One does not often experiencethis whiff of violent anger in middle life; but the other day I hadoccasion to speak to a colleague of mine on a Board of which I am amember, at the conclusion of a piece of business in which I hadproposed and carried a certain policy. I did not know that hedisapproved of the policy in question, but I found on speaking to himthat he was in a towering passion at my having opposed the policy whichhe preferred. He grew pale with rage; the hair on his head seemed tobristle, his eyes flashed fire; he slammed down a bundle of papers inhis hand on the table, he stamped with passion; and I confess that itwas profoundly disturbing and disconcerting. I felt for a moment thatsickening sense of misgiving with which as a little boy one confrontedan angry schoolmaster. Though I knew that I had a perfect right to myopinion, though I recognised that my sensations were quite irrational, I felt myself confronted with something demoniacal and insane, and thebasis of it was, I am sure, physical and not moral terror. If I hadbeen bullied or chastised as a child, I should be able to refer thediscomfort I felt to old associations. But I feel no doubt that myemotion was something far more primeval than that, and that the dumband atrophied sense of self-preservation was at work. The fear thenthat I felt was an instinctive thing, and was experienced in the innernature and not in the rational mind; and the perplexity of thesituation arises from the fact that such fear cannot be combated byrational considerations. Though no harm whatever resulted or couldresult from such an interview, yet I am certain that the prospect ofsuch an outbreak would make me in the future far more cautious indealing with this particular man, more anxious to conciliate him, andprobably more disposed to compromise a matter. 

Such an incident makes one unpleasantly aware of the quality of one'snature and temperament. It shows one that though one may have a strongmoral and intellectual sense of what is the right and sensible courseto take, one may be sadly hampered in carrying it out, by this secretand hidden instinct of which one may be rationally ashamed, but whichis characteristic of what seems to be the stronger and more vital partof one's self. 

The whole of civilisation is a combat between these two forces, astruggle between the rational and the instinctive parts of the mind. The instinctive mind bids one follow profit, need, advantage, thepleasure of the moment; the rational part of the mind bids one abstain, resist, balance contingencies, act in accordance with a moral standard. Many such abstentions become a mere matter of habit. If one is hungryand thirsty, and meets a child carrying bread or milk, one has noimpulse to seize the food and eat it. One does not reflect upon thepossible outcome of following the impulse of plunder; it simply doesnot enter one's head so to act. And there is of course a slow processgoing on in the world by which this moral restraint is becominghabitual and instinctive; but notably in the case of fear our instinctis a belated one, and results in many causeless and baseless anxietieswhich our reason in vain assures us are wholly false. 

What then is our practical way of escape from the dominion of theseshadows? Not, I am sure, in any resolute attempt to combat them byrational weapons; the rational argument, the common-sense consolation, only touches the rational part of the mind; we have got to get behindand below that, we have got somehow to fight instinct by instinct, andquell the terror in its proper home. By our finite nature we arecompelled to attend to one thing at a time, and thus if we use rationalargument, we are recognising the presence of the irrational fear; it isof little use then to array our advantages against our disadvantages, our blessings against our sufferings, as Michael Finsbury did with suchsmall effect in The Wrong Box; our only chance is to turn tailaltogether, and try to set some other dominant instinct at work; whilewe remember, we shall continue to suffer; our best chance lies inforgetting, and we can only do that by calling some other dominantemotion into play. 

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

When I was myself a sufferer from long nervous depression, and had toface a social gathering, I used out of very shame, and partly I thinkout of a sense of courtesy due to others, to galvanise myself into asort of horrid merriment. The dark tide flowed on beneath in its soreand aching channels. It was common enough then for some sympatheticfriend to say, "You seemed better to-night--you were quite yourself;that is what you want; if you would only make the effort and go outmore into society, you would soon forget your troubles. " There issomething in it, because the sick mind must be persuaded if possiblenot to grave its dolorous course too indelibly in the temperament; butno one else could see the acute and intolerable reaction which used tofollow such a strain, or how, the excitement over, the sufferingresumed its sway over the exhausted self with an insupportable agony. Iam sure that in my long affliction I never suffered more than afteroccasions when I was betrayed by excitement into argument or livelytalk, and the worst spasms of melancholy that I ever endured were thedirect and immediate results of such efforts. 

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

In depression then, and when causeless fears assail us, we must try toput the mind in easier postures, to avoid excess and strain, to livemore in company, to do something different. Human beings are happiestin monotony and settled ways of life; but these also develop their ownpoisons, like sameness of diet, however wholesome it may be. It is, Ibelieve, an established fact that most people cannot eat a pigeon a dayfor fourteen days in succession; a pigeon is not unwholesome, but thedigestion cannot stand iteration. There is an old and homely story of aman who went to a great doctor suffering from dyspepsia. The doctorasked him what he ate, and he said that he always lunched off bread andcheese. "Try a mutton chop, " said the doctor. He did so with excellentresults. A year later he was ill again and went to the same doctor, whoput him through the same catechism. "What do you have for luncheon?"said the doctor. "A chop, " said the patient, conscious of virtuousobedience. "Try bread and cheese, " said the doctor. "Why, " said thepatient, "that was the very thing you told me to avoid. " "Yes, " saidthe doctor, "and I tell you to avoid a chop now. You, are suffering notfrom diet, but from monotony of diet--and you want a change. "

The principle holds good of ordinary life; it is humiliating to confessit, but these depressions and despondencies which beset us are oftenbest met by very ordinary physical remedies. It is not uncommon forpeople who suffer from them to examine their consciences, rake upforgotten transgressions, and feel themselves to be under the anger ofGod. I do not mean that such scrutiny of life is wholly undesirable;depression, though it exaggerates our sinfulness, has a wonderful wayof laying its finger on what is amiss, but we must not wilfullycontinue in sadness; and sadness is often a combination of an oldinstinct with the staleness which comes of civilised life; and a returnto nature, as it is called, is often a cure, because civilisation hasthis disadvantage, that it often takes from us the necessity of doingmany of the things which it is normal to man by inheritance todo--fighting, hunting, preparing food, working with the hands. Wecombat these old instincts artificially by games and exercises. It ishumiliating again to think that golf is an artificial substitute forman's need to hunt and plough, but it is undoubtedly true; and thus tobreak with the monotony of civilisation, and to delude the mind intobelieving that it is occupied with primal needs is often a greatrefreshment. Anyone who fishes and shoots knows that the joy ofsecuring a fish or a partridge is entirely out of proportion to anyadvantages resulting. A lawyer could make money enough in a single weekto buy the whole contents of a fishmonger's shop, but this does notgive him half the satisfaction which comes from fishing day after dayfor a whole week, and securing perhaps three salmon. The fact is thatthe old savage mind, which lies behind the rational and educated mind, is having its fling; it believes itself to be staving off starvation byits ingenuity and skill, and it unbends like a loosened bow. 

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

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

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

I therefore believe that fears are like those little fugitive glidingthings that seem to dart across the field of the eye when it is weakand ailing, vague clusters and tangles and spidery webs, that float andfly, and can never be fixed and truly seen; and that they are besttreated as we learn to treat common ailments, by not concerningourselves very much about them, by enduring and evading them anddistracting the mind, and not by facing them, because they will not befaced; nor can they be dispelled by reason, because they are not in theplane of reason at all, but phantoms gathered by the sick imagination, distorted out of their proper shape, evil nightmares, the horror ofwhich is gone with the dawn. They are the shadows of our childishness, and they show that we have a long journey before us; and they gaintheir strength from the fact that we gather them together out of thefuture like the bundle of sticks in the fable, when we shall have thestrength to snap them singly as they come. 

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

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

XVI

FEAR OF LIFE

Let us divide our fears up into definite divisions, and see how it isbest to deal with them. Lowest and worst of all is the shapeless andbodiless fear, which is a real disease of brain and nerves. I know nomore poignant description of this than in the strange book Lavengro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, therefore, I feel, as against the Ascetic and the Stoic, that I ammeant to live and to taste the fulness of life; and that if I begin bychoosing the wrong joys, it is that I may learn their unreality. I havelearned already to compromise about many things, to be content withgetting much less than I desire, to acquiesce in missing many goodthings altogether. But asceticism for the sake of prudence seems to mea wilful error, as though a man practised starvation through uneasydays, because of the chance that he might some day find himself withnot enough to eat. The only self-denial worth practising is theself-denial that one admires, and that seems to one to be fine andbeautiful. 

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

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

This may be held a dangerous doctrine; but I do not mean that life mustbe a foolish and ingenuous indulgence of every appetite and whim. Onemust make choices; and there are many appetites which come hand in handwith their own shadow. I am not here speaking of tampering with sin; Ithink that most people burn their fingers over that in early life. ButI am speaking rather of the delights of the body that are in no waysinful, food and drink, games and exercise, love itself; and of thejoys of the mind and the artistic sense; free and open relations withmen and women of keen interests and eager fancies; the delights ofwork, professional success, the doing of pleasant tasks as vigorouslyand as perfectly as one can--all the stir and motion and delight oflife. 

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

Another way of escape from the importunities of fear is to be veryresolute in fighting against our personal claims to honour and esteem. We are sorely wounded through our ambitions, whether they be petty orgreat; and it is astonishing to find how frail a basis often serves fora sense of dignity. I have known lowly and unimportant people who wereyet full of pragmatical self-concern, and whose pride took the form notso much of exalting their own consequence as of thinking meanly ofother people. It is easy to restore one's own confidence by dwellingwith bitter emphasis on the faults and failings of those about one, bycataloguing the deficiencies of those who have achieved success, byaccustoming oneself to think of one's own lack of success as a sign ofunworldliness, and by attributing the success of others to a cynicaland unscrupulous pursuit of reputation. There is nothing in the worldwhich so differentiates men and women as the tendency to suspect andperceive affronts, and to nurture grievances. It is so fatally easy tothink that one has been inconsiderately treated, and to mistakesusceptibility for courage. Let us boldly face the fact that we get inthis world very much what we earn and deserve, and there is no surerway of being excluded and left out from whatever is going forward thana habit of claiming more respect and deference than is due to one. Ifwe are snubbed and humiliated, it is generally because we have putourselves forward and taken more than our share. Whereas if we havebeen content to bear a hand, to take trouble, and to desire useful workrather than credit, our influence grows silently and we becomeindispensable. A man who does not notice petty grumbling, who laughsaway sharp comments, who does not brood over imagined insults, whoforgets irritable passages, who makes allowance for impatience andfatigue, is singularly invulnerable. The power of forgetting isinfinitely more valuable than the power of forgiving, in manyconjunctions of life. In nine cases out of ten, the wounds which oursensibilities receive are the merest pin-pricks, enlarged and frettedby our own hands; we work the little thorn about in the puncture tillit festers, instead of drawing it out and casting it away. 

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

I have been much surprised, since I began some years ago to receiveletters from all sorts of unknown people, to realise how many personsthere are in the world who think themselves unappreciated. Such are notgenerally people who have tried and failed;--an honest failure veryoften brings a wholesome sense of incompetence;--but they are generallypersons who think that they have never had a chance of showing what isin them, speakers who have found their audiences unresponsive, writerswho have been discouraged by finding their amateur efforts unsaleable, men who lament the unsuitability of their profession to theirabilities, women who find themselves living in what they call athoroughly unsympathetic circle. The failure here lies in an incapacityto believe in one's own inefficiency, and a sturdy persuasion of themalevolence of others. 

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

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

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

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

I cannot help feeling that there is something gently humorous aboutthis good-humoured indication that the whole civilised world is notengaged in the pursuit of literature, and that one's claims toconsideration depend upon one's social merits. I do honestly think thatProvidence was here deliberately poking fun at me, and showing me thata habit of presenting one's opinions broadcast to the world does notnecessarily mean that the world is much aware either of oneself or ofone's opinions. 

The cure then, it seems to me, for personal ambition, is the humorousreflection that the stir and hum of one's own particular teetotum isconfined to a very small space and range; and that the wittydescription of the Greek politician who was said to be well knownthroughout the whole civilised world and at Lampsacus, or of thephilosopher who was announced as the author of many epoch-makingvolumes and as the second cousin of the Earl of Cork, represents a veryreal truth, --that reputation is not a thing which is worth botheringone's head about; that if it comes, it is apt to be quite asinconvenient as it is pleasant, while if one grows to depend upon it, it is as liable to part with its sparkle as soda-water in an open glass. 

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

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

One sometimes sees, in the faces of old family servants, in unregardedelderly relatives, bachelor uncles, maiden aunts, who are entertainedas a duty, or given a home in charity, a very beautiful and tenderlook, indescribable in words but unmistakable, when it seems as ifself, and personal claims, and pride, and complacency had really passedout of the expression, leaving nothing but a hope of being loved, and adesire to do some humble service. 

I saw it the other day in the face of a little old lady, who lived inthe house of a well-to-do cousin, with rather a bustling and vigorousfamily pervading the place. She was a small frail creature, with atired worn face, but with no look of fretfulness or discontent. She hada little attic as a bedroom, and she was not considered in any way. Sheeffaced herself, ate about as much as a bird would eat, seldom spoke, uttering little ejaculations of surprise and amusement at what wassaid; if there was a place vacant in the carriage, she drove out. Ifthere was not, she stopped at home. She amused herself by going aboutin the village, talking to the old women and the children, who halfloved and half despised her for being so very unimportant, and forhaving nothing she could give away. But I do not think the little ladyever had a thought except of gratitude for her blessings, andadmiration for the robustness and efficiency of her relations. Sheclaimed nothing from life and expected nothing. It seemed a littlefrail and vanquished existence, and there was not an atom of what iscalled proper pride about her; but it was fine, for all that! Aninfinite sweetness looked out of her eyes; she suffered a good deal, but never complained. She was glad to live, found the world a beautifuland interesting place, and never quarrelled with her slender share ofits more potent pleasures. And she will slip silently out of life someday in her attic room; and be strangely mourned and missed. I do notconsider that a failure in life, and I am not sure that it is notsomething much more like a triumph. I know that as I watched her oneevening knitting in the corner, following what was said with intenseenjoyment, uttering her little bird-like cries, I thought how few ofthe things that could afflict me had power to wound her, and how littleshe had to fear. I do not think she wanted to take flight, but yet I amsure she had no dread of death; and when she goes thitherward, leavingthe little tired and withered frame behind, it will be just as when thecrested lark springs up from the dust of the roadway, and wings his wayinto the heart of the dewy upland. 

XVII

SIMPLICITY

If we are to avoid the dark onset of fear, we must at all costssimplify life, because the more complicated and intricate our life is, and the more we multiply our defences, the more gates and posternsthere are by which the enemy can creep upon us. Property, comforts, habits, conveniences, these are the vantage-grounds from which fearscan organise their invasions. The more that we need excitement, distraction, diversion, the more helpless we become without them. Allthis is very clearly recognised and stated in the Gospel. Our Saviourdoes not seem to regard the abandonment of wealth as a necessarycondition of the Christian life, but He does very distinctly say thatrich men are beset with great difficulties owing to their wealth, andHe indicates that a man who trusts complacently in his possessions istempted into a disastrous security. He speaks of laying up treasure inheaven as opposed to the treasures which men store up on earth; and Hepoints out that whenever things are put aside unused, in order that theowner may comfort himself by the thought that they are there if hewants them, decay and corruption begin at once to undermine and destroythem. What exactly the treasure in heaven can be it is hard to define. It cannot be anything quite so sordid as good deeds done for the sakeof spiritual investment, because our Saviour was very severe on thosewho, like the Pharisees, sought to acquire righteousness byscrupulosity. Nothing that is done just for the sake of one's ownfuture benefit seems to be regarded in the Gospel as worth doing. Theessence of Christian giving seems to be real giving, and not a sort ofusurious loan. There is of course one very puzzling parable, that ofthe unjust steward, who used his last hours in office, before the newsof his dismissal could get abroad, in cheating his master, in order towin the favour of the debtors by arbitrarily diminishing the amount oftheir debts. It seems strange that our Saviour should have drawn amoral out of so immoral an incident. Perhaps He was using a well-knownstory, and even making allowances for the admiration with which in theEast resourcefulness, even of a fraudulent kind, was undoubtedlyregarded. But the principle seems clear enough, that if the Christianchooses to possess wealth, he runs a great risk, and that it istherefore wiser to disembarrass oneself of it. Property is regarded inthe Gospel as an undoubtedly dangerous thing; but so far from our Lordpreaching a kind of socialism, and bidding men to co-operate anxiouslyfor the sake of equalising wealth, He recommends an individualisticfreedom from the burden of wealth altogether. But, as always in theGospel, our Lord looks behind practice to motive; and it is clear thatthe motive for the abandonment of wealth is not to be a desire to actwith a selfish prudence, in order to lay an obligation upon God torepay one generously in the future for present sacrifices, but ratherthe attainment of an individual liberty, which leaves the spirit freeto deal with the real interests of life. And one must not overlook thedefinite promise that if a man seeks virtue first, even at the cost ofearthly possessions and comforts, he will find that they will be addedas well. 

Those who would discredit the morality of the Gospel would have onebelieve that our Saviour in dealing with shrewd, homely, literal folkwas careful to promise substantial future rewards for any worldlysacrifices they might make; but not so can I read the Gospel. OurSaviour does undoubtedly say plainly that we shall find it worth ourwhile to escape from the burdens and anxieties of wealth, but thereward promised seems rather to be a lightness and contentment ofspirit, and a freedom from heavy and unnecessary bonds. 

In our complicated civilisation it is far more difficult to say whatsimplicity of life is. It is certainly not that expensive and dramaticsimplicity which is sometimes contrived by people of wealth as apleasant contrast to elaborate living. I remember the son of a verywealthy man, who had a great mansion in the country and a large housein London, telling me that his family circle were never so entirelyhappy as when they were living at close quarters in a small Scotchshooting-lodge, where their life was comparatively rough, and luxuriesunattainable. But I gathered that the main delight of such a period wasthe sense of laying up a stock of health and freshness for the moreluxurious life which intervened. The Anglo-Saxon naturally loves a kindof feudal dignity; he likes a great house, a crowd of servants anddependants, the impression of power and influence which it all gives;and the delights of ostentation, of having handsome things which onedoes not use and indeed hardly ever sees, of knowing that others areeating and drinking at one's expense, which is a thing far removed fromhospitality, are dear to the temperament of our race. We may say atonce that this is fatal to any simplicity of life; it may be that wecannot expect anyone who is born to such splendours deliberately toforego them; but I am sure of this, that a rich man, now and here, whospontaneously parted with his wealth, and lived sparely in a smallhouse, would make perhaps as powerful an appeal to the imagination ofthe English world as could well be made. If a man had a message todeliver, there could be no better way of emphasizing it. It must not bea mere flight from the anxiety of worldly life into a more congenialseclusion. It should be done as Francis of Assisi did it, by continuingto live the life of the world without any of its normal conveniences. Patent and visible self-sacrifice, if it be accompanied by a tenderlove of humanity, will always be the most impressive attitude in theworld. 

But if one is not capable of going to such lengths, if indeed one hasnothing that one can resign, how is it possible to practise simplicityof life? It can be done by limiting one's needs, by avoiding luxuries, by having nothing in one's house that one cannot use, by being detachedfrom pretentiousness, by being indifferent to elaborate comforts. Thereare people whom I know who do this, and who, even though they live withsome degree of wealth, are yet themselves obviously independent ofcomfort to an extraordinary degree. There is a Puritanical dislike ofwaste which is a very different thing, because it often coexists withan extreme attachment to the particular standard of comfort that theman himself prefers. I know people who believe that a substantialmidday meal and a high tea are more righteous than a simple midday mealand a substantial dinner. But the right attitude is one of unconcernand the absence of uneasy scheming as to the details of life. There isno reason why people should not form habits, because method is theprimary condition of work; but the moment that habit becomes tyrannousand elaborate, then the spirit is at once in bondage to anxiety. Thereal victory over these little cares is not for ever to have them onone's mind; or one becomes like the bread-and-butter fly in Through theLooking-Glass, whose food was weak tea with cream in it. "But supposingit cannot find any?" said Alice. "Then it dies, " says the gnat, who isacting the part of interpreter. "But that must happen very often?" saidAlice. "It ALWAYS happens!" says the gnat with sombre emphasis. 

Simplicity is, in fact, a difficult thing to lay down rules for, because the essence of it is that it is free from rules; and those whotalk and think most about it, are often the most uneasy and complicatednatures. But it is certain that if one finds oneself growing more andmore fastidious and particular, more and more easily disconcerted andput out and hampered by any variation from the exact scheme of lifethat one prefers, even if that scheme is an apparently simple one, itis certain that simplicity is at an end. The real simplicity is a senseof being at home and at ease in any company and mode of living, and aquiet equanimity of spirit which cannot be content to waste time overthe arrangements of life. Sufficient food and exercise and sleep may bepostulated; but these are all to be in the background, and the realoccupations of life are to be work and interests and talk and ideas andnatural relations with others. One knows of houses where some triflingomission of detail, some failure of service in a meal, will plunge thehostess into a dumb and incommunicable despair. The slightest lapse ofthe conventional order becomes a cloud that intercepts the sun. But theright attitude to life, if we desire to set ourselves free from thisself-created torment, is a resolute avoidance of minute preoccupations, a light-hearted journeying, with an amused tolerance for the incidentsof the way. A conventional order of life is useful only in so far as itremoves from the mind the necessity of detailed planning, and allows itto flow punctually and mechanically in an ordered course. But if weexalt that order into something sacred and solemn, then we becomepharisaical and meticulous, and the savour of life is lost. 

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

XVIII

AFFECTION

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

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

The difficulty does not arise with large and generous natures whichgive love prodigally in many directions, because if one such relationis broken by death, love can still exercise itself upon those thatremain. It is the fierce and jealous sort of love that is so hard todeal with, a love that exults in solitariness of devotion, and cannotbear any intrusion of other relations. 

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

But men and women are very differently made in this respect. Amonginnumerable minor differences, certain broad divisions are clear. Men, in the first place, both by training and temperament, are far lessdependent upon affection than women. Career and occupation play a muchlarger part in their thoughts. If one could test and intercept thesecret and unoccupied reveries of men, when the mind moves idly amongthe objects which most concern it, it would be found, I do not doubt, that men's minds occupy themselves much more about definite andtangible things--their work, their duties, their ambitions, theiramusements--and centre little upon the thought of other people; anaffection, an emotional relation, is much more of an incident than asettled preoccupation; and then with men there are two marked types, those who give and lavish affection freely, who are interested andattracted by others and wish to attach and secure close friends; andthere are others who respond to advances, yet do not go in search offriendship, but only accept it when it comes; and the singular thing isthat such natures, which are often cold and self-absorbed, have a powerof kindling emotion in others which men of generous and eager feelingsometimes lack. It is strange that it should be so, but there is somepsychological law at the back of it; and it is certainly true in myexperience that the men who have been most eagerly sought in friendshiphave not as a rule been the most open-hearted and expansive natures. Isuppose that a certain law of pursuit holds good, and that people ofself-contained temperament, with a sort of baffling charm, who arecritical and hard to please, excite a certain ambition in those whowould claim their affection. 

Women, I have no doubt, live far more in the thought of others, anddesire their intention; they wish to arrive at mutual understanding andconfidence, to explore personality, to pierce behind the surface, toestablish a definite relation. Yet in the matter of relations withothers, women are often, I believe, less sentimental, and even lesstender-hearted than men, and they have a far swifter and truerintuition of character. Though the two sexes can never reallyunderstand each other's point of view, because no imagination can crossthe gulf of fundamental difference, yet I am certain that womenunderstand men far better than men understand women. The whole range ofmotives is strangely different, and men can never grasp the comparativeunimportance with which women regard the question of occupation. Occupation is for men a definite and isolated part of life, a thingimportant and absorbing in itself, quite apart from any motives orreasons. To do something, to make something, to produce something--thatdesire is always there, whatever ebb and flow of emotions there may be;it is an end in itself with men, and with many women it is not so; forwomen mostly regard work as a necessity, but not an interestingnecessity. In a woman's occupation, there is generally someone at theend of it, for whom and in connection with whom it is done. This isprobably largely the result of training and tradition, and greatchanges are now going on in the direction of women finding occupationsfor themselves. But take the case of such a profession as teaching; itis quite possible for a man to be an effective and competent teacher, without feeling any particular interest in the temperaments of hispupils, except in so far as they react upon the work to be done. But awoman can hardly take this impersonal attitude; and this makes womenboth more and less effective, because human beings invariably prefer tobe dealt with dispassionately; and this is as a rule more difficult forwomen; and thus in a complicated matter affecting conduct, a woman as arule forms a sounder judgment on what has actually occurred than a man, and is perhaps more likely to take a severe view. The attitude of aGalileo is often a useful one for a teacher, because boys and girlsought in matters that concern themselves to learn how to governthemselves. 

Thus in situations involving relation with others women are more liableto feel anxiety and the pressure of personal responsibility; and thequestion is to what extent this ought to be indulged, in what degreemen and women ought to assume the direction of other lives, and whetherit is wholesome for the director to allow a desire for personaldominance to be substituted for more spontaneous motives. 

It very often happens that the temperaments which most claim help andsupport are actuated by the egotistical desire to find themselvesinteresting to others, while those who willingly assume the directionof other lives are attracted more by the sense of power than by genuinesympathy. 

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

XIX

SIN

It is every one's duty to take himself seriously--that is the rightmean between taking oneself either solemnly or apologetically. There isno merit in being apologetic about oneself. One has a right to bethere, wherever one is, a right to an opinion, a right to take somekind of a hand in whatever is going on; natural tact is the only thingwhich can tell us exactly how far those rights extend; but it isinconvenient to be apologetic, because if one insists on explaining howone comes to be there, or how one comes to have an opinion, otherpeople begin to think that one needs explanation and excuse; but it iseven worse to be solemn about oneself, because English people are verycritical in private, though they are tolerant in public, because theydislike a scene, and have not got the art of administering the delicatesnub which indicates to a man that his self-confidence is exuberantwithout humiliating him; when English people inflict a snub, they do itviolently and emphatically, like Dr. Johnson, and it generally meansthat they are relieving themselves of accumulated disapproval. AnEnglishman is apt to be deferential, and one of the worst temptationsof official life is the temptation to be solemn. There is an old storyabout Scott and Wordsworth, when the latter stayed at Abbotsford;Scott, during the whole visit, was full of little pleasant andcourteous allusions to Wordsworth's poems; and one of the guestspresent records how at the end of the visit not a single word had everpassed Wordsworth's lips which could have indicated that he knew hishost to have ever written a line of poetry or prose. 

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

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

There is a curious conflict going on at the present time in Englishlife between light-mindedness and solemnity; there is a great appetitefor living, a love of amusement, a tendency to subordinate theinterests of the future to the pleasure of the moment, and to thinkthat the one serious evil is boredom; that is a healthy manifestationenough in its way, because it stands for interest and delight in life;but there is another strain in our nature, that of a rather heavypietism, inherited from our Puritan ancestors. It must not be forgottenthat the Puritan got a good deal of interest out of his sense of sin;as the old combative elements of feudal ages disappeared, the soldierlyblood retained the fighting instinct, and turned it into moral regions. The sense of adventure is impelled to satiate itself, and the Pilgrim'sProgress is a clear enough proof that the old combativeness was allthere, revelling in danger, and exulting in the thought that the humanbeing was in the midst of foes. Sin represented itself to the Puritanas a thing out of which he could get a good deal of fun; not the fun ofyielding to it, but the fun of whipping out his sword and getting insome shrewd blows. When preachers nowadays lament that we have lost thesense of sin, what they really mean is that we have lost ourcombativeness: we no longer believe that we must treat our foes withopen and brutal violence, and we perceive that such conduct is onlypitting one sin against another. There is no warrant in the Gospel forthe combative idea of the Christian life; all such metaphors andsuggestions come from St. Paul and the Apocalypse. The fact is that theworld was not ready for the utter peaceableness of the Gospel, and ithad to be accommodated to the violence of the world. 

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

Sins, the ordinary sins of ordinary life, are not as a rule instinctswhich are evil in themselves, so much as instincts which are selfishlypursued to the detriment of others; sin is in its essence theselfishness which will not cooperate, and which secures advantagesunjustly, without any heed to the disadvantage of others. SYMPATHETICIMAGINATION is the real foe of sin, the power of putting oneself in theplace of another; and much of the sentiment which is so prevalentnowadays is the evidence of the growth of sympathy. 

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

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

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

But we cannot even begin to trust it, as long as we allow ourselves tobelieve pietistically that the Mind of God is set on punishment. Thatis the ghastly error which humanity tends to make. It has been dinnedinto us, alas, from our early years, and religious phraseology isconstantly polluted by it. Our Saviour lent no countenance to this atall; He spoke perfectly plainly against the theory of "judgments. " Ofcourse suffering is sometimes a consequence of sin, but it is not avindictive punishment; it is that we may learn our mistake. But we mustgive up the revengeful idea of God: that is imported into our scale ofvalues by the grossest anthropomorphism. Only the weak man, who fearsthat his safety will be menaced if he does not make an example, dealsin revenge. He is indignant at anything which mortifies his vanity, which implies any doubt of his power or any disregard of his wishes. Revenge is born of terror, and to think of God as vindictive is tothink of Him as subject to fear. Serene and unquestioned strength canhave nothing to do with fear. Milton is largely responsible forperpetuating this belief. He makes the Almighty say to the Son--

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

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

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

Fear should then rather show us that we are being confronted withexperience; and that our duty is to disregard it, to march forwardthrough it, to come out on the other side of it. It is all anadventure, in fact! The disaster in which we are involved is not sentto show us that the Eternal Power which created us is vexed at ourfailures, or bent on crushing us. It is exactly the opposite; it is toshow us that we are worth testing, worth developing, and that we are tohave the glory of going on; the very fear of death is the last test ofour belief in Love. We are assuredly meant to believe that the cowardis to learn the beauty of courage, that the laggard is to perceive theworth of energy, that the selfish man is to be taught sympathy. If wemust take a metaphor, let us rather think of God as the graver of thegem than as the child that beats her doll for collapsing instead ofsitting upright. 

It is our dishonouring thought of God as jealous, suspicious, fond ofexhibiting power, revengeful, cruel, that does us harm. We must ratherthink of His Heart as full of courage, energy, and hope; as teemingwith joy, lightness, zest, mirth; and then we can begin to think offailures, fears, delays as things small and unimportant, not asmalicious ambushes, but as rough bits of road, as obstacles to revealand to develop our strength and gaiety. There is no joy in the world sogreat as the joy of finding ourselves stronger than we know; and thatis what God is bent upon showing us, and not upon proving to us that weare vile and base, in the spirit of the old Calvinist who said to hisown daughter when she was dying of a painful disease, that she mustremember that all short of Hell was mercy. It is so; but Hell is ratherwhat we start from, and out of which we have to find our way, than thewaste-paper basket of life, the last receptacle for our shatteredpurposes. 

XX

SERENITY

To achieve serenity we must have the power of keeping our hearts andminds fixed upon something which is beyond and above the passingincidents of life, which so disconcert and overshadow us, and which areafter all but as clouds in the sky, or islets in a great ocean. Thinkwith what smiling indifference a man would meet indignation and abuseand menace, if he were aware that an hour hence he would betriumphantly vindicated and applauded. How calmly would a man sleep ina condemned cell if he knew that a free pardon were on its way to him!Of course the more eagerly and enjoyably we live, so much the more weare affected by little incidents, beyond which we can hardly look whenthey bring us so much pleasure or so much discomfort; and thus it isalways the men and women of keen and highly-strung natures, who tastethe quality of every moment, in its sweetness and its bitterness, whowill most feel the influence of fear. Edward FitzGerald once sadlyconfessed that, as life went on, days of perfect delight--a beautifulscene, a melodious music, the society of those whom he lovedbest--brought him less and less joy, because he felt that they werepassing swiftly, and could not be recalled. And of course theimaginative nature which lives tremulously in delight will be most aptto portend sadness in hours of happiness, and in sorrow to anticipatethe continuance of sorrow. That is an inevitable effect of temperament;but we must not give way helplessly to temperament, or allow ourselvesto drift wherever the mind bears us. Just as the skilled sailor cantack up against the wind, and use ingenuity to compel a contrary breezeto bring him to the haven of his desire, so we must be wise in trimmingour sails to the force of circumstance; while there is an eager delightin making adverse conditions help us to realise our hopes. 

The timid soul that loves delight is apt to say to itself, "I am happynow in health and circumstances and friends, but I lean out into thefuture, and see that health must fail and friends must drift away;death must part me from those I love; and beyond all this, I see thecloudy gate through which I must myself pass, and I do not know whatlies beyond it. " That is true enough! It is like the story of the oldprince, as told by Herodotus, who said in his sorrowful age that theGods gave man only a taste of life, just enough to let him feel thatlife was sweet, and then took the cup from his lips. But if we lookfairly at life, at our own life, at other lives, we see that pleasureand contentment, even if we hardly realised that it was contentment atthe time, have largely predominated over pain and unhappiness; a manmust be very rueful and melancholy before he will deliberately say thatlife has not been worth living, though I suppose that there haveprobably been hours in the lives of all of us when we have thought andsaid and even believed that we would rather not have lived at all thansuffer so. Neither must we pass over the fact that every day there aremen and women who, under the pressure of calamity and dismay, bringtheir lives to a voluntary end. 

But we have to be very dull and thankless and slow of heart not to feelthat by being allowed to live, for however short a time, we have beenallowed to take part in a very beautiful and wonderful thing. Theloveliness of earth, its colours, its lights, its scents, its savours, the pleasures of activity and health, the sharp joys of love andfriendship, these are surely very great and marvellous experiences, andthe Mind which planned them must be full of high purpose, eagerintention, infinite goodwill. And we may go further than that, and seethat even our sorrows and failures have often brought something greatto our view, something which we feel we have learned and apprehended, something which we would not have missed, and which we cannot dowithout. If we will frankly recognise all this, we cannot feeblycrumple up at the smallest touch of misery, and say suspiciously andvindictively that we wish we had never opened our eyes upon the world;and even if we do say that, even if we abandon ourselves to despair, weyet cannot hope to escape; we did not enter life by our own will, it isnot our own prudence that has kept us there, and even if we end itvoluntarily, as Carlyle said, by noose or henbane, we cannot for aninstant be sure that we are ending it; every inference in the world, infact, would tend to indicate that we do not end it. We cannot destroymatter, we can only disperse and rearrange it; we cannot generate asingle force, we can only summon it from elsewhere, and concentrate it, as we concentrate electricity, at a single glowing point. Force seemsas indestructible as matter, and there is no reason to think that lifeis destructible either. So that if we are to resign ourselves to anybelief at all, it must be to the belief that "to be, or not to be" isnot a thing which is in our power at all. We may extinguish life, as weput out a light; but we do not destroy it, we only rearrange it. 

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

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

Anyone who will deliberately test his will, will find that it isstronger than he suspects; what often weakens our use of it is that weare so apt to look beyond the immediate difficulty into a longperspective of imagined obstacles, and to say within ourselves, "Yes, Imay perhaps achieve this immediate step, but I cannot take step afterstep--my courage will fail!" Yet if one does make the immediate effort, it is common to find the whole range of obstacles modified by thesingle act; and thus the first step towards the attainment of serenityof life is to practise cutting off the vista of possible contingenciesfrom our view, and to create a habit of dealing with a case as itoccurs. 

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

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

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

It is very difficult to determine, by any exercise of the intellect orimagination, what fears would remain to us if we were freed from thedominion of the body. All material fears and anxieties would come to anend; we should no longer have any poverty to dread, or any of thelimitations or circumscriptions which the lack of the means of lifeinflicts upon us; we should have no ambitions left, because theambitions which centre on influence--that is, upon the desire to directand control the interests of a nation or a group of individuals--haveno meaning apart from the material framework of civil life. The onlykind of influence which would survive would be the influence ofemotion, the direct appeal which one who lives a higher and morebeautiful life can make to all unsatisfied souls, who would fain findthe way to a greater serenity of mood. Even upon earth we can see afaint foreshadowing of this in the fact that the only personalities whocontinue to hold the devotion and admiration of humanity are theidealists. Men and women do not make pilgrimages to the graves andhouses of eminent jurists and bankers, political economists orstatisticians: these have done their work, and have had their reward. Even the monuments of statesmen and conquerors have little power totouch the imagination, unless some love for humanity, some desire touplift and benefit the race, have entered into their schemes andpolicies. No, it is rather the soil which covers the bones of dreamersand visionaries that is sacred yet, prophets and poets, artists andmusicians, those who have seen through life to beauty, and have livedand suffered that they might inspire and tranquillise human hearts. Theprinces of the earth, popes and emperors, lie in pompous sepulchres, and the thoughts of those who regard them, as they stand in metal ormarble, dwell most on the vanity of earthly glory. But at the tombs ofmen like Vergil and Dante, of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, the humanheart still trembles into tears, and hates the death that parts soulfrom soul. So that if, like Dante, we could enter the shadow-land, andhold converse with the spirits of the dead, we should seek out toconsort with, not those who have subdued and wasted the earth, or haveterrified men into obedience and service, but those whose hearts weretouched by dreams of impossible beauty, and who have taught us to bekind and compassionate and tender-hearted, to love God and ourneighbour, and to detect, however faintly, the hope of peace and joywhich binds us all together. 

And thus if emotion, by which I mean the power of loving, is the onething which survives, the fears which may remain will be concerned withall the thoughts which cloud love, the anger and suspicion that divideus; so that perhaps the only fears which will survive at all will bethe fears of our own selfishness and coldness, that inner hardnesswhich has kept us from the love of God and isolated us from ourneighbour. The pride which kept us from admitting that we were wrong, the jealousy that made us hate those who won the love we could not win, the baseness which made us indifferent to the discomfort of others ifwe could but secure our own ease, these are the thoughts which maystill have the power to torture us; and the hell that we may have tofear may be the hell of conscious weakness and the horror ofretrospect, when we recollect how under these dark skies of earth wewent on our way claiming and taking all that we could get, anddisregarding love for fear of being taken advantage of. One of thegrievous fears of life is the fear of seeing ourselves as we reallyare, in all our baseness and pettiness; yet that will assuredly beshown us in no vindictive spirit, but that we may learn to rise andsoar. 

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

The more that we shrink from self-knowledge, the more excuses that wemake for ourselves, the more that we tend to attribute our failures toour circumstances and to the action of others, the more reason we haveto fear the revelation of death. And the only way to face that is tokeep our minds open to any light, to nurture and encourage the wish tobe different, to pray hour by hour that at any cost we may be taughtthe truth; it is useless to search for happy illusions, to look forshort cuts, to hope vaguely that strength and virtue will burst outlike a fountain beside our path. We have a long and toilsome way totravel, and we can by no device abbreviate it; but when we suffer andgrieve, we are walking more swiftly to our goal; and the hours we spendin fear, in sending the mind in weariness along the desolate track, aremerely wasted, for we can alter nothing so. We use life best when welive it eagerly, exulting in its fulness and its significance, castingourselves into strong relations with others, drinking in beauty, makinghigh music in our hearts. There is an abundance of awe in theexperiences through which we pass, awe at the greatness of the vision, at the vastness of the design, as it embraces and enfolds our weakness. But we are inside it all, an integral and indestructible part of it;and the shadow of fear falls when we doubt this, when we dread beingoverlooked or disregarded. No such thing can happen to us; ourinheritance is absolute and certain, and it is fear that keeps us awayfrom it, and the fear of fearlessness. For we are contending not withGod, but with the fear which hides Him from our shrinking eyes; and ourprayer should be the undaunted prayer of Moses in the clefts of themountain, "I beseech Thee, show me Thy Glory!"

THE END