Chapter 6

Not that charm need be whimsical and freakish, though it is perhaps most beautiful when there is something of the child about it, something naive and unconventional. There are men, of whom I think that Cardinal Newman was pre-eminently one, who seem to have had the appeal of a pathetic sort of beauty and even helplessness. Newman seems to have always been surprised to find himself so interesting to others, and perhaps rather over-shadowed by the responsibility of it. He was romantically affectionate, and the tears came very easily at the call of emotion. Such incidents as that when Newman said good-bye to his bare room at Littlemore, and kissed the door-posts and the bed in a passion of grief, show what his intensity of feeling might be.

It is not as a rule the calm and controlled people who have this attractiveness for others; it is rather those who unite with an enchanting kind of playfulness an instinct to confide in and to depend upon protective affection. Very probably there is some deep- seated sexual impulse involved, however remotely and unconsciously, in this species of charm. It is the appeal of the child that exults in happiness, claims it as a right, uses it with a pretty petulance,--like the feigned enmity of the kitten and the puppy,-- and when it is clouded over, requires tearfully that it shall be restored. That may seem an undignified comparison for a prince of the church. But Newman was artist first, and theologian a long way afterward; he needed comfort and approval and even applause; and he evoked, together with love and admiration, the compassion and protective chivalry of his friends. His writings have little logical or intellectual force; their strength is in their ineffable and fragrant charm, their ordered grace, their infinite pathos.

The Greek word for this subtle kind of beauty is charis, and the Greeks are worth hearing on the subject, because they, of all the nations that ever lived, were penetrated by it, valued it, looked out for it, worshipped it. The word itself has suffered, as all large words are apt to suffer, when they are transferred to another language, because the big, ultimate words of every tongue connote a number of ideas which cannot be exactly rendered by a single word in another language. Let us be mildly philological for a moment, and realise that the word charis in Greek is the substantive of which the verb is chairo, to rejoice. We translate the word charis by the English word "grace," which means, apart from its theological sense, a rich endowment of charm and beauty, a thing which is essentially a gift, and which cannot be captured by taking thought. When we say that a thing is done with a perfect grace, we mean that it seems entirely delightful, appropriate, seemly, and beautiful. It pleases every sense; it is done just as it should be done, easily, courteously, gently, pleasantly, with a confidence which is yet modest, and with a rightness that has nothing rigid or unamiable about it. To see a thing so done, whatever it may be, leaves us with an envious desire that we might do the thing in the same way. It seems easy and effortless, and the one thing worth doing; and this is where the moral appeal of beauty lies, in the contagious sort of example that it sets. But when we clumsily translate the word by "grace," we lose the root idea of the word, which has a certain joyfulness about it. A thing done with charis is done as a pleasure, naturally, eagerly, out of the heart's abundance; and that is the appeal of things so done to the ordinary mind, that they seem to well up out of a beautiful and happy nature, as the clear spring rises from the sandy floor of the pool. The act is done, or the word spoken, out of a tranquil fund of joy, not as a matter of duty, or in reluctant obedience to a principle, but because the thing, whatever it is, is the joyful and beautiful thing to do.

And so the word became the fundamental idea of the Christian life: the grace of God was the power that floods the whole of the earlier teaching of the gospel, before the conflict with the ungracious and suspicious world began--the serene, uncalculating life, lived simply and purely, not from any grim principle of asceticism, but because it was beautiful to live so. It stood for the joy of life, as opposed to its cares and anxieties and ambitions; it was beautiful to share happiness, to give things away, to live in love, to find joy in the fresh mintage of the earth, the flowers, the creatures, the children, before they were clouded and stained by the strife and greed and enmity of the world. The exquisite quality of the first soft touches of the gospel story comes from the fact that it all rose out of a heart of joy, an overflowing certainty of the true values of life, a determination to fight the uglier side of life by opposing to it a simplicity and a sweetness that claimed nothing, and exacted nothing but a right to the purest sort of happiness--the happiness of a loving circle of friends, where the sacrifice of personal desires is the easiest and most natural thing in the world, because such sacrifice is both the best reward and the highest delight of love. It was here that the strength of primitive Christianity lay, that it seemed the possession of a joyful secret that turned all common things, and even sorrow and suffering, to gold. If a man could rejoice in tribulation, he was on his way to be invulnerable.

It is not a very happy business to trace the decay of a great and noble idea; but one can catch a glimpse of the perversion of "grace" in the hands of our Puritan ancestors, when it became a combative thing, which instead of winning the enemies of the Lord by its patient sweetness, put an edge on the sword of holiness, and enabled the staunch Christian to hew the Amalekites hip and thigh; so that the word, which had stood for a perfectly peaceful and attractive charm, became the symbol of righteous persecution, and flowered in cries of anguish and spilled blood.

We shall take a long time before we can crawl out of the shadow of that dark inheritance; but there are signs in the world of an awakening brotherliness; and perhaps we may some day come back to the old truth, so long mishandled, that the essence of all religion is a spirit of beauty and of joy, bent on giving rather than receiving; and so at last we may reach the perception that the fruitful strength of morality lies not in its terror, its prohibitions, its coercions, but in its good-will, its tolerance, its dislike of rebuke and censure, its rapturous acceptance of all generous and chivalrous and noble ways of living.

And thus, then, I mean by charm not a mere superficial gracefulness which can be learned, as good manners are learned, through a certain code of behaviour, but a thing which is the flower and outward sign of a beautiful attitude to life; an eagerness to welcome everything which is fine and fresh and unstained; that turns away the glance from things unlovely and violent and greedy not in a disapproving or a self-righteous spirit, because it is respectable to be shocked, but in a sense of shame and disgrace that such cruel and covetous and unclean things should be. If one takes a figure like that of St. Francis of Assisi, who for all the superstition and fanaticism with which the record is intermingled, showed a real reflection and restoration of the old Christian joy of life, we shall see that he had firm hold of the secret. St. Francis's love of nature, of animals, of flowers, of children, his way of breaking into song about the pleasant things of earth, his praise of "our sister the Water, because she is very serviceable to us and humble and clean," show the outrush of an overpowering joy. He had the courage to do what very few men and women ever dare to do, and that is to make a clean sweep of property and its complications; but even so, the old legend distorts some of this into a priggish desire to set a good example, to warn and rebuke and improve the occasion. But St. Francis's asceticism is the only kind of asceticism that has any charm, the self-denial, namely, that springs from a sense of enjoyment, and is practised from a feeling of its beauty, and not as a matter of timid and anxious calculation. It is true that St. Francis was haunted by the medieval nightmare of the essential vileness of the body, and spurred it too hard. But apart from this, one recognises in him a poet, and a man of ineffable charm, who found the company of sinners at least as attractive as the company of saints, for the simple reason that the sinner is often enough well meaning and humble, and is spared at least the ugliness of respectable self- righteousness, which is of all things most destructive of the sense of proportion, and most divorced from natural joy. St. Francis took human nature as he found it, and recognised that failure has a beauty which is denied to success, for the simple reason that conscious failure makes a man both grateful and affectionate, while success too often makes him cold and hard.

And there is thus a wonderful fragrance about all that St. Francis did and said, though he must have been sorely tried by his stupid and pompous followers, who constantly misunderstood and misrepresented him, and dragged into the light what was meant to be the inner secret of his soul. There are few figures in the roll of saints so profoundly beautiful and touching as that of St. Francis, because he had in a pre-eminent degree that childlike freshness and trustfulness which is the secret of all charm.

Charm is of course not the same thing as beauty, but only a subdivision of it. There are many things in nature and in art, from the Matterhorn to "Samson Agonistes," that have no charm, but that appeal to a different range of emotions, the sublime, the majestic, the awe-inspiring, things in the presence of which we are hardly at ease; but charm is essentially a comfortable quality, something that one gathers to one's heart, and if there is a mystery about it, as there is about all beautiful things, it is not a mystery of which one would be afraid to know the secret. Charm is the quality which makes one desire to linger upon one's pilgrimage, that cries to the soul to halt, to rest, to be content. It is intimate, reassuring, and appealing; and the shadow of it is the gentle pathos, which is in itself half a luxury of sadness, in the thought that sweet things must have an end. As Herrick wrote to the daffodils:

Stay, stay Until the hasting day Has run But to the evensong: And, having prayed together, we Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you, We have as short a spring; As quick a growth to meet decay As you, or anything.

In such a mood as that there is no sense of terror or despair at the quick-coming onset of death; no more dread of what may be than there is when the hamlet, with its little roofs and tall trees, is folded in the arms of the night, as the sunset dies behind the hill. Beauty may be a terrible thing, as in the sheeted cataract, with all its boiling eddies, or in the falling of the lightning from the womb of the cloud. There is desolation behind that, gigantic movement, ruthless force; but charm comes like a signal of security and good-will, and even its inevitable end is lit with something of mercy and quietness. The danger of charm is that it is the mother of sentiment; and the danger of sentiment is not that it is untrue, but that it takes from us the sense of proportion; we begin to be unable to do without our little scenes and sunsets; and the eye gets so used to dwelling upon the flower-strewn pleasaunce, with its screening trees, that it cannot bear to face the far horizon, with its menace of darkness and storm.

Yet we are very grateful to those who can teach us to turn our eyes to the charm which surrounds us, and a life which is lived without such perception is apt to be a rough and hurrying thing, even though it may also be both high and austere. Like most of life, the true success lies in not choosing one force and neglecting another, but in an expectant kind of compromise. The great affairs and facts of life flash upon us, whether we will or no; and even the man whose mind is bent upon the greatest hopes and aims may find strength and consolation in the lesser and simpler delights. Mighty spirits like, let us say, Carlyle and Ruskin, were not hampered or distracted from their further quest by the microscopic eye, the infinite zest for detail, which characterised both. No one ever spoke so finely as Carlyle of the salient features of moorland and hill, and the silence so deep that it was possible to hear the far- off sheep cropping the grass; no one ever noted so instantaneously the vivid gesture or the picturesque turn of speech, or dwelt more intently upon the pathetic sculpture of experience seen in the old humble workaday faces of country-folk. No one ever delighted more ecstatically than Ruskin in the colour of the amber cataract, with its soft, translucent rims, its flying spray, or in the dim splendours of some half-faded fresco, or in the intricate facade of the crumbling, crag-like church front. But they did not stay there; indeed, Carlyle, in his passionate career among verities and forces, hardly took enough account of the beauty so patiently entwined with mortal things; while Ruskin's sharpest agonies were endured when he found, to his dismay, that men and women could not be induced by any appeal or invective to heed the message of beauty.

It is true that, however we linger, however passionately we love the small, sweet, encircling joys and delights of life, the tragic experience comes to us, whether we will or no. None escapes. And thus our care must be not to turn our eyes away from what in sterner moments we are apt to think mere shows and vanities, but to use them serenely and temperately. St. Augustine, in a magnificent apologue upon the glories and subtleties of light, can only end by the prayer that his heart may not thereby be seduced from heavenly things; but that is the false kind of asceticism, and it is nothing more than a fear of life, if our only concern with it is to shun and abhor the joy it would fain give us. But we may be sure that life has a meaning for us in its charm and loveliness; not the whole meaning, but still an immense significance. To make life into a continuous flight, a sad expectancy, a perpetual awe, is wilfully to select one range of experiences and to neglect its kindness and its good-will. We may grow weak in our sentiment if we make a tragedy out of life, if we cannot bear to have our comfortable arrangements disordered, our little circle of pleasures broken through. The triumph is to be ready for the change, and to know that if the perfect summer day comes to an end, the power that shaped it so, and made the heart swift to love it, has yet larger surprises and glories in store. If we do that, then the charm of life takes its place in our spirits as the evidence of something joyful, wistful, pleasant, bound up with the essence of things; if it disappears, like the gold or azure thread of the tapestry, it is only to emerge in the pattern farther on; and the victory is not to attach ourselves to the particular touches of beauty and fineness which we see in the familiar scene and the well-loved circle, but to recognise beauty as a spirit, a quality which is for ever making itself felt, for ever beckoning and whispering to us, and which will not fail us even if for a time the urgent wind drives us far into the night and the storm, among the crash of the breakers, and the scream of loud winds over the sea.

VI

SUNSET

The liquid kindling of the twilight, the western glow of clear- burning fires, bringing no weariness of heat but the exquisite coolness of darkling airs, is of all the ceremonial of the day the most solemn and sacred moment. The dawn has its own splendours, but it brightens out of secret mists and folded clouds into the common light of day, when the burden must be resumed and the common business of the world renewed again. But the sunset wanes from glory and majesty into the stillness of the star-hung night, when tired eyes may close in sleep, and rehearse the mystery of death; and so the dying down of light, with the suspension of daily activities, is of the nature of a benediction. Dawn brings the consecration of beauty to a new episode of life, bidding the soul to remember throughout the toil and eagerness of the day that the beginning was made in the innocent onrush of dewy light; but when the evening comes, the deeds and words of the daylight are irrevocable facts, and the mood is not one of forward-looking hope and adventure, but of unalterable memory, and of things dealt with so and not otherwise, which nothing can henceforward change or modify. If in the morning we feel that we have power over life, in the evening we know that, whether we have done ill or well, life's power over ourselves has been asserted, and that thus and thus the record must stand.

And so the mood of evening is the larger and the wiser mood, because we must think less of ourselves and more of God. In the dawn it seems to us that we have our part to play, and that nothing, not even God, can prevent us from exercising our will upon the life about us; but in the evening we begin to wonder how much, after all, we have the strength to effect; we see that even our desires and impulses have their roots far back in a past which no restlessness of design or energy can touch; till we end by thankfulness that we have been allowed to feel and to experience the current of life at all. I sat the other day by the bedside of an old and gracious lady, the widow of a great artist, whose works with all their shapely form and dusky flashes of rich colour hung on the walls of her room. She had lived for many years in the forefront of a great fellowship of art and endeavour; she had seen and known intimately all the greatest figures in the art and literature of the last generation; and she was awaiting with perfect serenity and dignity the close. She said to me with a deep emotion, "Ah, the only thing that I desire is that I may continue to FEEL--that brings suffering in abundance with it, but while we suffer we are at least alive. Once or twice in my life I have felt the numbness of anguish, when a blow had fallen, and I could not even suffer. That is the only thing which I dread--not death, nor silence, but only the obliteration of feeling and love." That was a wonderful saying, full of life and energy. She did not wish to recall the old days, nor hanker after them with an unsatisfied pain; and I saw that an immortal spirit dwelt in that frail body, like a bird in an outworn cage.

However much one may enjoy the onrush and vividness of life--I for one find that, though vitality runs now in more definite and habitual channels, though one has done with making vague impulsive experiments, though one wastes less time in undertaking doubtful enterprises, yet there is a great gain in the concentration of energy, and in the certain knowledge of what one's definite work really is.

Far from finding the spring and motion of life diminished, I feel that the current of it runs with a sharper and clearer intensity, because I have learned my limitations, and expend no energy in useless enterprises. I have learned what the achievements are which come joyfully bearing their sheaves with them, and what are the trivial and fruitless aims. When I was younger I desired to be known and recognised and deferred to. I wanted to push my way discreetly into many companies, to produce an impression, to create a sense of admiration. Now as the sunset draws nearer, and the enriched light, withdrawn from the farther horizon, begins to pulsate more intensely in the quarter whence it must soon altogether fade, I begin to see that vague and widely ranging effects have a thinness and shallowness about them. It is a poor thing just to see oneself transiently reflected in a hundred little mirrors. There is no touch of reality about that. Little greetings, casual flashes of courteous talk, petty compliments--these are things that fade as soon as they are born. The only thing worth doing is a little bit of faithful and solid work, something given away which costs one real pain, a few ideas and thoughts worked patiently out, a few hearts really enlivened and inspirited. And then, too, comes the consciousness that much of one's cherished labour is of no use at all except to oneself; that work is not a magnificent gift presented to others, but a wholesome privilege conceded to oneself, that the love which brought with it but a momentary flash of self-regarding pleasure is not love at all, and that only love which means suffering--not delicate regrets and luxurious reveries, but hard and hopeless pain--is worth the name of love at all. Those are some of the lights of sunset, the enfolding gleams that are on their way to death, and which yet testify that the light which wanes and lapses here, drawn reluctantly away from dark valley and sombre woodland, is yet striding ahead over dewy uplands and breaking seas, past the upheaving shoulder of the world.