Joyous Gard Part 6

But it seemed to me, as I read it, that the thoughts of man were just as much facts as any other facts, and that when a man had a vision of beauty, or when a hope came to him in a bitter sorrow, it was just as real a thing as the little particle of the brain which stirred and crept nearer to another particle. I do not say that all theories of religion and philosophy are necessarily true, but they are real enough; they have existed, they exist, they cannot die. Of course, in making out a theory, we must not neglect one set of facts and depend wholly on another set of facts; but I believe that the intense and pathetic desire of humanity to know why they are here, why they feel as they do, why they suffer and rejoice, what awaits them, are facts just as significant as the blood that drips from the wound, or the leaf that unfolds in the sun. The comforting and uplifting conclusion which the writer came to was that we were just a set of animated puppets, spun out of the drift of sand and dew by the thing that he called force. But if that is so, why are we not all perfectly complacent and contented, why do we love and grieve and wish to be different? I do still believe that there is a spirit that mingles with our hopes and dreams, something personal, beautiful, fatherly, pure, something which is unwillingly tied to earth and would be free if it could. The sense that we are ourselves wholly separate and distinct, with experience behind us and experience before us, seems to me a fact beside which all other facts pale into insignificance. And next in strength to that seems the fact that we can recognise, and draw near to, and be amazingly desirous of, as well as no less strangely hostile to, other similar selves; that our thought can mingle with theirs, pa.s.s into theirs, as theirs into ours, forging a bond which no accident of matter can dissolve.

Does it really satisfy the lover, when he knows that his love is answered, to realise that it is all the result of some preceding molecular action of the brain? That does not seem to me so much a truculent statement as a foolish statement, s.h.i.+rking, like a glib and silly child, the most significant of data. And I think we shall do well to say to our scientist, as courteously as Sir Lancelot said to the officious knight, who proffered unnecessary service, that we have no need for him at this time.

Now, I am not saying, in all this, that the investigation of science is wrong or futile. It is exactly the reverse; the message of G.o.d is hidden in all the minutest material things that lie about us; and it is a very natural and even n.o.ble work to explore it; but it is wrong if it leads us to draw any conclusions at present beyond what we can reasonably and justly draw. It is the inference that what explains the visible scheme of things can also explain the invisible. That is wrong!

Let me here quote a n.o.ble sentence, which has often given me much-needed help, and served to remind me that thought is after all as real a thing as matter, when I have been tempted to feel otherwise. It was written by a very wise and tender philosopher, William James, who was never betrayed by his own severe standard of truth and reality into despising the common dreams and aspirations of simpler men. He wrote:

"I find it preposterous to suppose that if there be a feeling of unseen reality, shared by numbers of the best men in their best moments, responded to by other men in their deep moments, good to live by, strength-giving--I find it preposterous, I say, to suppose that the goodness of that feeling for living purposes should be held to carry no objective significance, and especially preposterous if it combines harmoniously with an otherwise grounded philosophy of objective truth."

That is a very large and tolerant utterance, both in its suspension of impatient certainties and in its beautiful sympathy with all ardent visions that cannot clearly and convincingly find logical utterance.

What I am trying to say in this little book is not addressed to professional philosophers or men of science, who are concerned with intellectual investigation, but to those who have to live life as it is, as the vast majority of men must always be. What I rather beg of them is not to be alarmed and bewildered by the statements either of scientific or religious dogmatists. No doubt we should like to know everything, to have all our perplexities resolved; but we have reached that point neither in religion nor in philosophy, nor even in science.

We must be content not to know. But because we do not know, we need not therefore refuse to feel; there is no excuse for us to thrust the whole tangle away and out of sight, and just to do as far as possible what we like. We may admire and hope and love, and it is our business to do all three. The thing that seems to me--and I am here only stating a personal view--both possible and desirable, is to live as far as we can by the law of beauty, not to submit to anything by which our soul is shamed and insulted, not to be drawn into strife, not to fall into miserable fault-finding, not to allow ourselves to be fretted and fussed and agitated by the cares of life; but to say clearly to ourselves, "that is a petty, base, mean thought, and I will not entertain it; this is a generous and kind and gracious thought, and I will welcome it and obey it."

One of the clearly discernible laws of life is that we can both check and contract habits; and when we begin our day, we can begin it if we will by prayer and aspiration and resolution, as much as we can begin it with bath and toilet. We can say, "I will live resolutely to-day in joy and good-humour and energy and kindliness." Those powers and possibilities are all there; and even if we are overshadowed by disappointment and anxiety and pain, we can say to ourselves that we will behave as if it were not so; because there is undoubtedly a very real and n.o.ble pleasure in putting off shadows and troubles, and not letting them fall in showers on those about us. We need not be stoical or affectedly bright; we often cannot give those who love us greater joy than to tell them of our troubles and let them comfort us. And we can be practical too in our outlook, because much of the grittiest irritation of life is caused by indulging indolence when we ought not, and being hurried when we might be leisurely. It is astonis.h.i.+ng how a little planning will help us in all this, and how soon a habit is set up. We do not, it is true, know the limits of our power of choice. But the illusion, if it be an illusion, that we have a power of choice, is an infinitely more real fact to most of us than the molecular motion of the brain particles.

And then too there is another fact, which is becoming more and more clear, namely, what is called the power of suggestion. That if we can put a thought into our mind, not into our reason, but into our inner mind of instinct and force, whether it be a base thought or a n.o.ble thought, it seems to soak unconsciously into the very stuff of the mind, and keep reproducing itself even when we seem to have forgotten all about it. And this is, I believe, one of the uses of prayer, that we put a thought into the mind, which can abide with us, secretly it may be, all the day; and that thus it is not a mere pious habit or tradition to have a quiet period at the beginning of the day, in which we can nurture some joyful and generous hope, but as real a source of strength to the spirit as the morning meal is to the body. I have myself found that it is well, if one can, to read a fragment of some fine, generous, beautiful, or n.o.ble-minded book at such an hour.

There is in many people who work hard with their brains a curious and unreal mood of sadness which hangs about the waking hour, which I have thought to be a sort of hunger of the mind, craving to be fed; and this is accompanied, at least in me, by a very swift, clear, and hopeful apprehension, so that a beautiful thought comes to me as a draught of water to a thirsty man. So I make haste, as often as may be, just to drop such a thought at those times into the mind; it falls to the depths, as one may see a bright coin go gleaming and s.h.i.+fting down to the depths of a pool; or to use a homelier similitude, like sugar that drops to the bottom of a cup, sweetening the draught.

These are little homely things; but it is through simple use and not through large theory that one can best practise joy.

XX

WORK

I came out of the low-arched door with a sense of relief and pa.s.sed into the suns.h.i.+ne; the meeting had broken up, and we went our ways. We had sate there an hour or two in the old panelled room, a dozen full-blooded friendly men discussing a small matter with wonderful ingenuity and zest; and I had spoken neither least nor most mildly, and had found it all pleasant enough. Then I mounted my bicycle and rode out into the fragrant country alone, with all its nearer green and further blue; there in that little belt of s.p.a.ce, between the thin air above and the dense-dark earth beneath, was the pageant of conscious life enacting itself so visibly and eagerly. In the sunlit sky the winds raced gaily enough, with the void silence of moveless s.p.a.ce above it; below my feet what depths of cold stone, with the secret springs; below that perhaps a core of molten heat and imprisoned fire!

What was it all about? What were we all doing there? What was the significance of the little business that had been engaging our minds and tongues? What part did it play in the mighty universe?

The thorn-tree thick with bloom, pouring out its homely spicy smell--it was doing too, beautifully enough, what we had been doing clumsily. It was living, intent on its own conscious life, the sap hurrying, the scent flowing, the bud waxing. The yellow-hammer poising and darting along the hedge, the sparrow twittering round the rick, the c.o.c.k picking and crowing, were all intent on life, proclaiming that they were alive and busy. Something vivid, alert, impa.s.sioned was going forward everywhere, something being effected, something uttered--and yet the cause how utterly hidden from me and from every living thing!

The memory of old poetry began to flicker in my mind like summer lightning. In the orchard, crammed with bloom, two unseen children were calling to each other; a sunburned, careless, graceful boy, whose rough clothes could not conceal his shapely limbs and easy movements, came driving some cows along the lane. He asked me the time in Dorian speech. The shepherds piping together on the Sicilian headland could not have made a fairer picture; and yet the boy and I could hardly have had a thought in common!

All the poets that ever sang in the pleasant springtime can hardly have felt the joyful onrush of the season more sweetly than I felt it that day; and yet no philosopher or priest could have given me a hint of what the mystery was, why so ceaselessly renewed; but it was clear to me at least that the mind behind it was joyful enough, and wished me to share its joy.

And then an hour later I was doing for no reason but that it was my business the dullest of tasks--no less than revising a whole sheaf of the driest of examination papers. Elaborate questions to elicit knowledge of facts arid and meaningless, which it was worth no human being's while to know, unless he could fill out the bare outlines with some of the stuff of life. Hundreds of boys, I dare say, in crowded schoolrooms all over the country were having those facts drummed into them, with no aim in sight but the answering of the questions which I was manipulating. That was a bewildering business, that we should insist on that sort of drilling becoming a part of life. Was that a relation it was well to establish? As the fine old, shrewd, indolent Dr. Johnson said, he for his part, while he lived, never again desired even to hear of the Punic War! And again he said, "You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets, and wonder, when you have done, why they do not desire your company."

Cannot we somehow learn to simplify life? Must we continue to think that we can inspire children in rows? Is it not possible for us to be a little less important and pompous and elaborate about it all, to aim at more direct relations, to say more what we feel, to do more what nature bids us do?

The heart sickens at the thought of how we keep to the grim highways of life, and leave the pleasant s.p.a.ces of wood and field unvisited!

And all because we want more than we need, and because we cannot be content unless we can be envied and admired.

The cure for all this, it seems to me, is a resolute avoidance of complications and intricacies, a determination to live life more on our own terms, and to open our eyes to the simpler pleasures which lie waiting in our way on every side.

I do not believe in the elaborate organisation of life; and yet I think it is possible to live in the midst of it, and yet not to be involved in it. I do not believe in fierce rebellion, but I do believe in quiet transformation; and here comes in the faith that I have in _Joyous Gard_. I believe that day by day we should clear a s.p.a.ce to live with minds that have felt, and hoped, and enjoyed. That is the first duty of all; and then that we should live in touch with the natural beauty of the earth, and let the sweetness of it enter into our minds and hearts; for then we come out renewed, to find the beauty and the fulness of life in the hearts and minds of those about us.

Life is complicated, not because its issues are not simple enough, but because we are most of us so afraid of a phantom which we create--the criticism of other human beings.

If one reads the old books of chivalry, there seems an endless waste of combat and fighting among men who had the same cause at heart, and who yet for the pettiest occasions of dispute must need try to inflict death on each other, each doing his best to shatter out of the world another human being who loved life as well. Two doughty knights, Sir Lamorak and Sir Meliagraunce, must needs hew pieces off each other's armour, break each other's bones, spill each other's blood, to prove which of two ladies is the fairer; and when it is all over, nothing whatever is proved about the ladies, nothing but which of the two knights is the stronger! And yet we seem to be doing the same thing to this day, except that we now try to wound the heart and mind, to make a fellow-man afraid and suspicious, to take the light out of his day and the energy out of his work. For the last few weeks a handful of earnest clergymen have been endeavouring in a Church paper, with floods of pious Billingsgate, to make me ridiculous about a technical question of archaeological interest, and all because my opinion differs from their own! I thankfully confess that as I get older, I care not at all for such foolish controversy, and the only qualms I have are the qualms I feel at finding human beings so childish and so fretful.

Well, it is all very curious, and not without its delight too! What I earnestly desire is that men and women should not thus waste precious time and pleasant life, but go straight to reality, to hope. There are a hundred paths that can be trodden; only let us be sure that we are treading our own path, not feebly s.h.i.+fting from track to track, not following too much the bidding of others, but knowing what interests us, what draws us, what we love and desire; and above all keeping in mind that it is our business to understand and admire and conciliate each other, whether we do it in a panelled room, with pens and paper on the table, and the committee in full cry; or out on the quiet road, with one whom we trust entirely, where the horizon runs, field by field and holt by holt, to meet the soft verge of encircling sky.

XXI

HOPE

The other day I took up idly some magazine or other, one of those great lemon-coloured, salmon-hued, slaty paper volumes which lie in rows on the tables of my club. I will not stop now to enquire why English taste demands covers which show every mean stain, every soiled finger-print; but these volumes are always a reproach to me, because they show me, alas! how many subjects, how many methods of presenting subjects, are wholly uninteresting and unattractive to my trivial mind. This time, however, my eye fell upon a poem full of light and beauty, and of that subtle grace which seems so incomprehensible, so uncreated--a lyric by Mr. Alfred Noyes. It was like a spell which banished for an instant the weariness born of a long, hot, tedious committee, the oppression which always falls on me at the sight and sound of the cataract of human beings and vehicles, running so fiercely in the paved channels of London. A beautiful poem, but how immeasurably sad, an invocation to the memory and to the spirit of Robert Browning, not speaking of him in an elegiac strain as of a great poet who had lived his life to the full and struck his clear-toned harp, solemnly, sweetly, and whimsically too, year after year; but as of something great and n.o.ble wholly lost and separated from the living world.

This was a little part of it:

Singer of hope for all the world, Is it still morning where thou art, Or are the clouds that hide thee furled Around a dark and silent heart?

The sacred chords thy hand could wake Are fallen on utter silence here, And hearts too little even to break Have made an idol of despair.

Come back to England, where thy May Returns, but not that rapturous light; G.o.d is not in His heaven to-day, And with thy country nought is right.

I think that almost magically beautiful! But is it true? I hope not and I think not. The poet went on to say that Paradox had destroyed the sanct.i.ty of Truth, and that Science had done nothing more than strip the skeleton of the flesh and blood that vested it, and crown the anatomy with glory. One cannot speak more severely, more gloomily, of an age than to say that it is deceived by a.n.a.lysis and paradox, and cares nothing for n.o.bler and finer things. It seems to me to be a sorrowful view of life that, to have very little faith or prospect about it. It is true indeed that the paradox-maker is popular now; but that is because men are interested in interpretations of life; and it is true too that we are a little impatient now of fancy and imagination, and want to get at facts, because we feel that fancy and imagination, which are not built on facts, are very tricksy guides to life. But the view seems to me both depressed and morbid which cannot look beyond, and see that the world is pa.s.sing on in its own great unflinching, steady manner. It is like the view of a child who, confronted with a pain, a disagreeable incident, a tedious day of drudgery, wails that it can never be happy again.

The poem ends with a fine apostrophe to Browning as one "who stormed through death, and laid hold of Eternity." Did he indeed do that? I wish I felt it! He had, of course, an unconquerable optimism, which argued promise from failure and perfection from incompleteness. But I cannot take such hopes on the word of another, however gallant and n.o.ble he may be. I do not want hopes which are only within the reach of the vivid and high-hearted; the crippled, drudging slave cannot rejoice because he sees his warrior-lord gay, heroic, and strong. I must build my creed on my own hopes and possibilities, not on the strength and cheerfulness of another.

And then my eye fell on a sentence opposite, out of an article on our social problems; and this was what I read:

"... the tears of a hunger-bitten philosophy, which is so appalled by the common doom of man--that he must eat his bread by the sweat of his brow--that it can talk, write, and think of nothing else."

I think there is more promise in that, rough and even rude as the statement is, because it opens up a real hope for something that is coming, and is not a mere lamentation over a star that is set.

"A hunger-bitten philosophy"--is it not rather that there is creeping into the world an uneasy sense that we must, if we are to be happy, _share_ our happiness? It is not that the philosopher is hungry, it is that he cannot bear to think of all the other people who are condemned to hunger; and why it occupies his tongue and his pen, is that it clouds his serenity to know that others cannot now be serene. All this unrest, this grasping at the comfort of life on the one hand, and the patience, the justice, the tolerance, with which such claims are viewed by many possessors on the other, is because there is a spirit of sympathy growing up, which has not yet become self-sacrifice, but is on its way to become so.

Then we must ask ourselves what our duty is. Not, I think, with all our comforts about us, to chant loud odes about its being all right with the world, but to see what we can do to make it all right, to equalise, to share, to give.

The finest thing, of course, would be if those who are set in the midst of comfort could come calmly out of it, and live simpler, kinder, more direct lives; but apart from that, what can we do? Is it our duty, in the face of all that, to surrender every species of enjoyment and delight, to live meanly and anxiously because others have to live so? I am not at all sure that it would not prove our greatness if the thought of all the helpless pain and drudgery of the world, the drift of falling tears, were so intolerable to us that we simply could not endure the thought; but I think that would end in quixotism and pessimism of the worst kind, if one would not eat or drink, because men starve in Russia or India, if one would not sleep because sufferers toss through the night in pain. That seems a morbid and self-sought suffering.

No, I believe that we must share our joy as far as we can, and that it is our duty rather to have joy to share, and to guard the quality of it, make it pure and true. We do best if we can so refine our happiness as to make it a thing which is not dependent upon wealth or ease; and the more natural our life is, the more can we be of use by the example which is not self-conscious but contagious, by showing that joy does not depend upon excitement and stimulus, but upon vivid using of the very stuff of life.

Where we fail, many of us, is in the elaborateness of our pleasures, in the fact that we learn to be connoisseurs rather than viveurs, in losing our taste for the ancient wholesome activities and delights.

I had caught an hour, that very day, to visit the Academy; it was a doubtful pleasure, though if I could have had the great rooms to myself it would have been a delightful thing enough; but to be crushed and elbowed by such numbers of people who seemed intent not on looking at anything, but on trying to see if they could recognise any of their friends! It was a curious collection certainly! So many pictures of old disgraceful men, whose faces seemed like the faces of toads or magpies; dull, blinking, malign, or with the pert brightness of acquisition. There were pictures too of human life so-called, silly, romantic, insincerely posed; some fatuous allegorical things, like ill-staged melodramas; but the strength of English art came out for all that in the lovely landscapes, rich fields, summer streams, far-off woodlands, beating seas; and I felt in looking at it all that the pictures which moved one most were those which gave one a sudden hunger for the joy and beauty of earth, not ill-imagined fantastic places, but scenes that one has looked upon a hundred times with love and contentment, the corn-field, the mill with its br.i.m.m.i.n.g leat, the bathing-place among quiet pastures, the lake set deep in water-plants, the old house in the twilight garden--all the things consecrated throughout long ages by use and life and joy.

And then I strayed into the sculpture gallery; and I cannot describe the thrill which half a dozen of the busts there gave me--faces into which the wonder and the love and the pain of life seemed to have pa.s.sed, and which gave me a sudden sense of that strange desire to claim a share in the past and present and future of the form and face in which one suddenly saw so much to love. One seemed to feel hands held out; hearts crying for understanding and affection, breath on one's cheek, words in one's ears; and thus the whole gallery melted into a great throng of signalling and beckoning presences, the air dense with the voices of spirits calling to me, pressing upon me; offering and claiming love, all bound upon one mysterious pilgrimage, none able to linger or to stay, and yet willing to clasp one close by the roadside, in wonder at the marvellous inscrutable power behind it all, which at the same moment seemed to say, "Rest here, love, be loved, enjoy," and at the same moment cried, "Go forward, experience, endure, lament, come to an end."