Chapter 8

But there is one thing which we must constantly bear in mind, and which all enthusiastic people must particularly recollect, namely, that our delight and interest in life must be large, tolerant, and sympathetic, and that we must not only admit but welcome an immense variety of interest. We must above all things be just, and we must be ready to be both interested and amused by people whom we do not like. The point is that minds should be fresh and clear, rather than stagnant and lustreless. Enthusiastic people, who feel very strongly and eagerly the beauty of one particular kind of delight, are sadly apt to wish to impose their own preferences upon other minds, and not to believe in the worth of others' preferences. Thus the men who feel very ardently the beauty of the Greek Classics are apt to insist that all boys shall be brought up upon them; and the same thing happens in other matters. We must not make a moral law out of our own tastes and preferences, and we must be content that others should feel the appeal of other sorts of beauty; that was the mistake which dogged the radiant path of Ruskin from first to last, that he could not bear that other people should have their own preferences, but considered that any dissidence from his own standards was of the nature of sin. If we insist on all agreeing with ourselves it is sterile enough; but if we begin to call other people hard names, and suspecting or vituperating their motives for disagreeing with us, we sin both against Love and Light. It was that spirit which called forth from Christ the sternest denunciation which ever fell from his lips. The Pharisees tried to discredit His work by representing Him as in league with the powers of evil; and this sin, which is the imputing of evil motives to actions and beliefs that appear to be good, because our own beliefs are too narrow to include them, is the sin which Christ said could find no forgiveness.

I had a personal instance of this the other day which illustrates so clearly what I mean that I will quote it. I wrote a book called _The Child of the Dawn_, the point of which was to represent, in an allegory, my sincere belief that the after-life of man must be a life of effort, and experience, and growth. A lady wrote me a very discourteous letter to say that she believed the after-life to be one of Rest, and that she held what she believed to be my view to be unchristian and untrue. The notion that ardent, loving, eager spirits should be required to spend eternity in a sort of lazy contentment, forbidden to stir a finger for love and truth and right, is surely an insupportable one! What would be the joy of heaven to a soul full of energy and love, condemned to such luxurious apathy, forced to drowse through the ages in epicurean ease? If heaven has any meaning at all, it must satisfy our best and most active aspirations; and a paradise of utter and eternal indolence would be purgatory or hell to all noble natures. But this poor creature, tired no doubt by life and its anxieties, overcome by dreariness and sorrow, was not only desirous of solitary and profound repose, but determined to impose her own theory upon all the world as well. I blame no one for desiring rest; but to wish, as she made no secret that she wished, to crush and confound one who thought and hoped otherwise, does seem to me a very mean and wretched point of view. That, alas, is what many people mean when they say that they _believe_ a thing, namely that they would be personally annoyed if it turned out to be different from what they hoped.

I am sure that we ought rather to welcome with all our might any evidence of strength and energy and joy, even if they seem to spring from principles entirely opposite to our own. The more we know of men and women, the more we ought to perceive that half the trouble in the world comes from our calling the same principles by different names. We are not called upon to give up our own principles, but we must beware of trying to meddle with the principles of other people.

And therefore we must never be disturbed and still less annoyed by other people finding fault with our tastes and principles, calling them fantastic and sentimental, weak and affected, so long as they do not seek to impose their own beliefs upon us. That they should do so is of course a mistake; but we must recognise that it comes either from the stupidity which is the result of a lack of sympathy, or else from the nobler error of holding an opinion strongly and earnestly. We must never be betrayed into making the same mistake; we may try to persuade, and it is better done by example than by argument, but we must never allow ourselves to scoff and deride, and still less to abuse and vilify. We must rather do our best to understand the other point of view, and to acquiesce in the possibility of its being held, even if we cannot understand it. We must take for granted that every one whose life shows evidence of energy, unselfishness, joyfulness, ardour, peacefulness, is truly inspired by the spirit of good. We must believe that they have a vision of beauty and delight, born of the spirit. We must rejoice if they are making plain to other minds any interpretation of life, any enrichment of motive, any protest against things coarse and low and mean. We may wish--and we may try to persuade them--that their hopes and aims were wider, more bountiful, and more inclusive, but if we seek to exclude those hopes and aims, however inconsistent they may be with our own, that moment the shadow involves our own hopes, because our desire must be that the world may somehow become happier, fuller, more joyful, even if it is not on the lines which we ourselves approve.

I know so many good people who are anxious to increase happiness, but only on their own conditions; they feel that they estimate exactly what the quantity and quality of joy ought to be, and they treat the joy which they do not themselves feel as an offence against truth. It is from these beliefs, I have often thought, that much of the unhappiness of family circles arises, the elders not realising how the world moves on, how new ideas come to the front, how the old hopes fade or are transmuted. They see their children liking different thoughts, different occupations, new books, new pleasures; and instead of trying to enter into these things, to believe in their innocence and their naturalness, they try to crush and thwart them, with the result that the boys and girls just hide their feelings and desires, and if they are not shamed out of them, which sometimes happens, they hold them secretly and half sullenly, and plan how to escape as soon as they can from the tender and anxious constraint into a real world of their own. And the saddest part of all is that the younger generation learn no experience thus; but when they form a circle of their own and the same expansion happens, they do as their parents did, saying to themselves, "My parents lost my confidence by insisting on what was not really important; but _my_ objections are reasonable and justifiable, and my children must trust me to know what is right."

We must realise then that elasticity and sympathy are the first of duties, and that if we embark upon the crusade of joy, we must do it expecting to find many kinds of joy at work in the world, and some which we cannot understand. We may of course mistrust destructive joy, the joy of selfish pleasure, rough combativeness, foolish wastefulness, ugly riot--all the joys that are evidently dogged by sorrow and pain; but if we see any joy that leads to self-restraint and energy and usefulness and activity, we must recognise it as divine.

We may have then our private fancies, our happy pursuits, our sweet delights; we may practise them, sure that the best proof of their energy is that they obviously and plainly increase and multiply our own happiness. But if we direct others at all, it must be as a signpost, pointing to a parting of roads and making the choice clear, and not as a policeman enforcing the majesty of our self-invented laws.

Everything that helps us, invigorates us, comforts us, sustains us, gives us life, is right for us; of that we need never be in any doubt, provided always that our delight is not won at the expense of others; and we must allow and encourage exactly the same liberty in others to choose their own rest, their own pleasure, their own refreshment. What would one think of a host, whose one object was to make his guests eat and drink and do exactly what he himself enjoyed? And yet that is precisely what many of the most conscientious people are doing all day long, in other regions of the soul and mind.

The one thing which we have to fear, in all this, is of lapsing into indolence and solitary enjoyment, guarding and hoarding our own happiness. We must measure the effectiveness of our enjoyment by one thing and one thing alone--our increase of affection and sympathy, our interest in other minds and lives. If we only end by desiring to be apart from it all, to gnaw the meat we have torn from life in a secret cave of our devising, to gain serenity by indifference, then we must put our desires aside; but if it sends us into the world with hope and energy and interest and above all affection, then we need have no anxiety; we may enter like the pilgrims into comfortable houses of refreshment, where we can look with interest at pictures and spiders and poultry and all the pleasant wonders of the place; we may halt in wayside arbours to taste cordials and confections, and enjoy from the breezy hill-top the pleasant vale of Beulah, with the celestial mountains rising blue and still upon the far horizon.

XIX

SCIENCE

I read the other day a very downright book, with a kind of dry insolence about it, by a man who was concerned with stating what he called the _mechanistic_ theory of the universe. The worlds, it seemed, were like a sandy desert, with a wind that whirled the sands about; and indeed I seemed, as I looked out on the world through the writer's eyes, to see nothing but wind and sand! One of his points was that every thought that passed through the mind was preceded by a change in the particles of the brain; so that philosophy, and religion, and life itself were nothing but a shifting of the sand by the impalpable wind--matter and motion, that was all! Again and again he said, in his dry way, that no theory was of any use that was not supported by facts; and that though there was left a little corner of thought, which was still unexplained, we should soon have some more facts, and the last mystery would be hunted down.

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, pass 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, shirking, 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 God is hidden in all the minutest material things that lie about us; and it is a very natural and even noble 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 noble 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 noble 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 astonishing 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 noble 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 noble-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 shifting 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 passed into the sunshine; 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 space, 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 space 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 cock picking and crowing, were all intent on life, proclaiming that they were alive and busy. Something vivid, alert, impassioned 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 spaces 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.