Part 2

Set against the witness of all that misguidance of the past that wise and lovely saying of Christ, so unlikely in its first seeming: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.” At first it sounds so improbable--so contrary to all we know of man’s long struggle for existence up to date. And yet, (however much we must still qualify the possession of the meek upon earth) still more must we qualify the possession of the overbearing and the proud, when we realise what true possession should be. A modern writer has described war as “the great illusion,” and has set himself to show that all those advantages at which the State aims when it turns to military operations, become as dust in the balance if compared to the real cost in treasure which war entails even for those who are nominally the victors. And war is only one form or aspect of that great strife for possession which has afflicted every race in its progress from the cradle to the grave--merely a larger and more apparent version of the conflict between folly and wisdom which goes on in every human breast. Possession is the great illusion through which man physically or intellectually strong seeks to secure power, and succeeds only in securing weakness--not only for himself but for others.

For you cannot test strength truthfully without relation to its surroundings. A tower built upon foundations that shift and give way under its weight is not strong, however formidably it has been reared, or however closely its windows are grated and barred. Its very bulk and weight may help to bring about its fall. Similarly any strength of despotism or government which is reared up and depends for its stay upon the weakness of others is a mere apparition of power. Here to-day, it is gone to-morrow when those upon whose subjection it rested have discovered a strength of their own--or, because of their weakness, have failed in its support.

True possession can only be had in relation and in proportion to the self-possession of others; the man who reduces the self-possession of others never adds to his own; and where self-possession is absent, no real or strength-giving possession remains possible.

“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul,” is one of those profound messages of wisdom which have been obscured by the theological gloss laid upon them. Instead of the immediate and practical condemnation of here and now, the hypothetical condemnation to loss in a future life has been substituted, and our spiritual preceptors have not concentrated upon making clear to us how, here and now, possession of the whole world (in any material sense) does actually tend to destroy soul.

The possessive outlook, in its very inception, sets a limit to the springs of spiritual growth or action, and to that “perfect freedom” the basis of which is service. But if “service is perfect freedom,” then “domination is perfect bondage,” as much for those who impose as for those who suffer it. For the man who domineers over his fellows receives in his own soul the reflex or complementary part of that evil effect which he has on others. There is no act done by man to man which is not sacramental in its operation for good or ill; in all his deeds to his neighbours he both gives and receives, either for his own help or hindrance. Whosoever gives a blow receives one; and that blow may be the heavier that is not returned in kind. He who does unkindness to others is unkind to his own soul; he who diminishes the self-possession of others diminishes his own.

Yet possession--in the sense of realising each one for himself the wealth and enjoyment which life has to offer--is so deep an instinct, is so knit up with the adventurous and progressive spirit out of which the higher human consciousness is built--that it is useless to turn on man and say to him: “Possess nothing--rid yourself of all joys, of all the delights of the senses and the understanding--so only shall you attain to the heavenly stature.” That doctrine has been preached in the past; and the squeals of Manichean hermits in the wilderness, and of monastic contortionists, denying to their senses the very ground upon which they stood, has been its echoing chorus all down the ages. Never were souls more horribly possessed than these fliers from possession; never were men more defeated in their warfare with the thing they spurned. Like a tin tied to a dog’s tail the more they ran from it, the more the flesh afflicted them reminding them of its neglected claims. The loveliest and wisest of these mediæval sinners against the life which God had given them was brought by his own gospel of peace to a death-bed repentance which others did not attain to. “Brother ass, I have been too hard upon thee,” said St. Francis, turning with compunction at last to his much-wronged body, the one thing to which, in mistaken piety, he had denied either consideration or love. The single greed which ate up and destroyed the life of that lovely saint was a greed for mortification; and he died very literally of blood-poisoning, brought about by his own suicidal act, because he willed too possessively to share the passion and sufferings of Christ--the death instead of the life.

That blood-poisoning of the mediæval saint’s was a reaction, violent and unkind, against the wrongful version of possession which, in their day as in our own, was destroying the peaceful possibilities of human society.

Yet without a certain quality of possessiveness the human mind cannot grow. Wordsworth pictures for us very beautifully that natural possessive element in its age of innocence.

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses, A six year darling of a pigmy size! See, where ’mid work of his own hand he lies, Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses, With light upon him from his father’s eyes! See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, Some fragment from his dream of human life, Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art; A wedding or a festival, A mourning or a funeral; And this hath now his heart, And unto this he frames his song.

With these mental possessions he is opening his mind to the coming conquests of life: as much to be conquered by its beauty as to conquer it. But what he gains from his appreciation of earth’s loveliness brings loss to none; in this extension of his mental horizon there is no shutting of others from a like view; this aspect of the dominion upon which he is now entering is communal, something illimitable, which all may share. Of possession acquired upon those terms we need never be afraid. And it is a very real possession, far more real, as I shall hope presently to show, than any mere power to thwart, hinder, or control the freedom of others, which is the form of possession at which too often man aims.

Let us start, in order to realise this, with certain other experiments of childhood. Which child more truly “possesses” the life of linnet or hedge-sparrow, making it in some measure his own: the child who stays quiet and disciplines himself to watch the bird at the building of its nest, the hatching of its eggs and the feeding of its young; or the child who puts an end to all that beauty and complexity of motion by bringing down his bird with a stone? If he comes to tell others of his experience, what alternatively is there for him to tell? In the one case only his own act of destruction, a thing done and brought to a dead end; in the other he has a dozen new things to tell of--discoveries made in a process of life which he has watched with delight and knows still to be going on. From which of these two experiments does he draw the larger consciousness? Which of the two most peoples his world for him? Step by step as he advances he will find how much, by interfering with the lives of others, he can destroy, but how little he can build up; he can take hold of the daddy-legs leg by leg and find that they all come off, and wonder perhaps at the zest with which that eager little martyr fulfils the words of Scripture, “If thy foot offend thee cut it off and cast it from thee.” But constant repetition of the experiment, though it may give him an evil sense of power, will give him no variety, no real advance in knowledge concerning the life, or the use and beauty of flies’ legs. He will not treasure--to benefit by them--the legs that he has pulled off, nor will his brain have stored anything but an added sense of and liking for his own power to destroy. And so will it be with everything on which he experiments destructively. His knowledge and understanding of their nature will remain at a minimum. Progressing on these lines, he will for ever be making things cease to be themselves without making them really his own. But if he reverse that process of experiment by encouraging things to be themselves, how varied and multitudinous will grow his consciousness of life, his appreciation of its finer shades, its delicacy, its grace, its adaptability, its vigour and its freedom. If his interest is in birds, how much more he will know of them, and find in them how much more of alertness and beauty, if he hang food for them outside his window, rather than cages for them within; if he will recognise that the beauty of a bird lies too largely in its wings, for caging to be anything but a contradiction of its true existence. If his interest is in animals, how far more he will learn of their resources and character, if he aims not at cowing them and causing them to flee from him in fear, but at encouraging them in all genuine and characteristic development. That does not mean teaching them to “perform” in painful and artificial ways--exploits which are always built up on processes of cruelty, and do not in the least reveal animal nature as it really is but only impose upon it a mask of concealment--anthropomorphic, full of conceit and self-flattery--the same fond thing which he did when he began making God also in his own image to worship it.

There, indeed, in man’s shaping of God to be like himself, revengeful, deceitful, pompous, inconsiderate, unmerciful, one-sided and masculine; in making Him, too, a performer of tricks, so that in those attributes he might see himself reflected and stand enlarged in his own eyes--surely there more than in any other department of life has man by his foolish possessiveness brought to the human race poverty instead of wealth, a curse instead of a blessing.

That is but one example of how this narrow possessiveness with which man set out to conquer heaven and earth wears thin and poor under the test of time, and leaves him in the end no standing monuments but just a heap of rubble on which to gaze--only that, or perhaps less--perhaps only desert sand.

That failure of material ambitions stands immortalised for us in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive--stamped on these lifeless things-- The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear:-- ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away!”

That is a moral which we shall do well to remember. All great possessions materially founded come at last to that, and the heart that clings to them must go down after them to the grave.

It is the same when we base our delight of human relationship in an insistence upon possession: it serves only to accentuate the place of death in the world and to give it size. The man, or woman, whose idea of love lies in the claim to possess and to control others, dies many deaths before he reaches his final end, and walks daily with his foot in the grave. These tragedies of possession, so impoverishing to the spirit, are all round us; the world is humanly more full of them than of anything else: Husbands who adore their wives, but cannot let them call their souls their own; parents, possessive of their children, imposing upon them their will up to the legal limit and beyond; homes devouring the independence of womanhood, cramping, constraining, robbing of initiative and force, and doing all these things under cover of the claims of love, of natural affection, of piety! What is all this really but possession masquerading under another name? I remember once reading a remarkable story by Mr. John Gray, called _Niggard Truth_, of a woman who took masterful possession of a weak husband and “ran” him as an expression, not of his own personality, but of hers. And when at last she had very literally run him to earth, she buried him in a garment of red flannel so that, as she expressed it, she might “see him better” in the grave. And there, at the end of a strenuous life, she sat amid her domestic possessions, her glass shades, her family plate, and her mahogany, with her mental eye fixed upon a corpse, and her heart filled with a _Magnificat_ of self-applause. She was the “Ozymandias” of the domestic hearth; and there are thousands of them in this country to-day. “Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair!”

I have taken for example the domestic relations, because there we get in small, but simple and concise, that demoralising claim to possession which goes forth with missionary zeal to devastate the world; and because here, in the home, the true social service that is owing is, in theory at least, recognised and admitted.

The duty--surely the obvious duty--of parents to their children is to assist them, to the full extent of their means, toward self-development. We have no right to bring children into the world to warp and stunt their growth, to make them merely reflections of ourselves, or to keep them back from independence when they come to man’s or woman’s estate. What the parent needs, perhaps, most to learn is to relax constantly and in ever-increasing degree that hold which was necessary during the early years of childhood, but which, even then, we take too much for granted and employ far too habitually. Parents often claim too great a possession of their own children; they make cages for their characters, and mould them away from their natural bent to what suits their own family pride, their own taste, or their own sense of importance, sometimes conscientiously believing this to be the parental prerogative. But if parents are to use safely their power to impose moral training they must build up first in their children a sense of self-reliance, of initiative, of freedom, and then trust to it. They have no right to rely for their reward on caged characters, or, by any dictation or control, to exact recompense for the services which (with whatever devotion) they have rendered. The same holds good through all human relations, parental, marital, social, racial: it is ignoble to claim loyalty or devotion from those whom you have not first made free. Gratitude--even filial gratitude--has no moral value save if it comes from a free agent. If it comes from one trained to be not free it partakes of servility. And it is better for parents to forgo gratitude than to exact its imitation or substitute, by the imposition of any restrictive conditions or claims after the years of tutelage are over. It may well be that gratitude has far too small a place in the human heart; but I am quite sure that the claim for gratitude has too large a one, and that this in excess brings the very reverse of a remedy when the other is lacking. And what is true in relation to parents and their children is true also in every other human relationship where the claim to possess intrudes to the hindrance of self-realization and self-development. The possessor, in claiming restrictive possession of others, loses possession of himself.

That is what made slavery as an institution so doubly impoverishing to the human race. It impoverished the mind of the slave, but it impoverished quite as much the mind of the slave-owner.

Wherever man has tried to possess others he has lost possession of himself. That is the price inevitably paid by any class or section of the community which seeks to dominate the lives and restrict the liberty of its fellows. Tyranny does not strengthen but weakens the moral nature of those who exercise it, and he who owns slaves cannot himself be free. Domination is as destructive to human worth and more destructive to moral integrity than subjection. If “possession is nine points of the law” on the material plane, the tenth point--spiritual in its working--is anarchy to the soul.

From time immemorial man has claimed it as his natural right to possess woman. And it is in consequence in relation to woman, and in matters of sex, that he has most obviously lost self-possession. And just as he has claimed that to possess woman is the natural prerogative of the male, so you will hear him maintain that lack of self-possession in regard to woman is natural also--and a certain degree of licence the male prerogative. The two things go together--claim to possess others and you lose possession of yourself: Give to all with whom you come in contact their full right of self-possession and self-development, and you, from that social discipline and service, will in your own body and mind become self-possessed. For that is true possession which, while it brings you a sense of enlargement and joy, takes nothing from the freedom and the joy of others.

Of that kind of possession you may be prodigal, but of that which takes anything from others, or demands any condition of service from others, have a care! And look well what the conditions may be. Ask yourself constantly what is this or that demand for service or labour doing to other souls? What conditions does it lay upon them? You may boast that you have simplified your life--rid yourself, for instance, of domestic service by getting rid of cook and housemaid. You have not. The bread, the meat, even the ground flour that comes into your house is all provided by a domestic service which takes place outside your door and which you do not see. And you are as morally concerned for the conditions of that labour as if you yourself supervised it. You need it and use it as much; it is only done for you at a further remove--out of sight and out of mind--so that it is much easier (but not more justifiable), to be callous as to the conditions of those who render it. And if upon those material lines of comfort and luxury you extend your demands, you are also extending your claim over the lives of others--and your responsibility for those lives, if they go lacking where you go fed.

Surely, for the whole of that part of your life you are under a strict obligation to render service in return--equal to that which you claim. And if you, by your service, cannot insure to others an equality of possession in things material (and make as good and wholesome a use of them as they could make), those material possessions should be a weight upon your conscience, till you have got matters more fairly adjusted. Take it as your standard of life to consume no more than you, by your own labour, in your own lifetime, could produce. What right has any man to more than that, except through the bounty and kindness of his fellows? But if he insists on more, and takes more, does he really possess it? Only in an ever diminishing degree in proportion to his excess, because as he exceeds he is ever diminishing his true faculty for reception.

Here is a simple illustration of that truth, a gross example which I read in a newspaper the other day: In America a prize is annually given to the man who can eat the largest number of pies at a sitting--each of the pies, a compound of jam and pastry, weighing on an average half a pound. The prize-winner became the external possessor of twenty-seven. But internally he could hardly be said to possess them at all--they possessed him, and made him, one would imagine, a thoroughly ineffective citizen for at least the two or three following days. That man would have been far more really the possessor of three or four pies (seeing that he could have properly digested them) than it was possible for him to be of the twenty-seven. In this excess he merely injured himself without any gain, except the monetary bribe which induced him to make a beast of himself. And how many men are there not, who (receiving the monetary bribe of our present unequal and inequitable system of reward for industry or for idleness) proceed to make beasts of themselves--more elaborately, but just as truly and completely as this pie-eater; and by making beasts of themselves are by so much the less men of soul and understanding--not more, but less the possessors of their human birthright.

If we store up treasure materially (treasure of a kind which, if one has more of it, another must needs have less)--if we gather about us, in excess, creature comforts for the over-indulgence of our bodily appetites, we are gathering that which is liable to moth and rust and theft--liable to be a cause of envy and covetousness in others; and when we have gathered to ourselves this excess of perishable delight and have applied it, the result, more likely than not, is a cloying of those very appetites to which we seek to minister--and, eventually, deterioration and enfeeblement of the body itself.

And as with individuals so with nations; there is no greatness of possession in holding that which involves the deprivation of others, the diminution of their freedom, their happiness, their power of self-development. That is not true kingdom. It is the manufacture of slaves. But if we lay up treasure in the kingdom of the mind, in the development of our sense of beauty, our faculty for joy, we have something here on earth which neither moth nor rust can corrupt, nor thieves steal. Our possessions then are things that can arouse no base covetousness, we need not hold them under lock and key, or make laws for their protection, for none can deprive us of them. And while you so hold them on such free and noble conditions, you do not fail to dispense something of their beauty and worth to those with whom you associate.

These possessions, with which you have enriched your lives, make no man poorer, rob no fellow creature of his right, conflict not with the law of charity to all.

Seeking possession upon those lines, you shall find that noble things do tend to make possible a form of possession in which all alike may share; that architecture, music, literature and painting do offer themselves to the service of a far nobler and more communal interpretation of wealth than that which would keep it for separate and individual enjoyment. A thousand may look upon the beauty of one picture, and detract nothing, in the enjoyment of each, from the enjoyment of all; nor has virtue or value gone out of it because so many have looked on it; and so it is (or so it may be) with all beauty whether we find it in nature or in art.

If I were asked to name the man who in the last hundred years had the greatest possessions, I think I would name Wordsworth. Read his poetry with this thought in your mind, of how day by day he gathered possessions of an imperishable kind, which needed no guardianship beyond the purity of his mind, and excited in others no envy. Nay, how much of those wonderful possessions was he not able to give to others? Some of his loveliest lines of poetry are a record of possession rightly attained. I give here only one of his poems--one of his simplest in inspiration--to show what I mean: