Chapter 20
The child lay sick many days, his guardian still coming to him and sitting with him, with gentle talk and tender offices, till the scene in the garden was like an evil dream; but as his guardian spoke no word of displeasure to the child, the child still feared to ask him, and only strove to forget. And then at last he was well enough to go out a little; but a few days after--he avoided the inner garden now out of a sort of horror--he was sitting in the sun, near the house, feebly trying to amuse himself with one of his old games--how poor they seemed after the fruits of the inner paradise, how he hankered desirously after the further place, with its hot, sweet, fragrant scents, its rich juices!--when again his guardian came upon him in a sudden wrath, and struck him many times, dashing him down to the ground; and again he crept home, and lay long ill, and again his guardian was unwearyingly kind; but now a sort of horror of the man grew up in the mind of the child, and he feared that his strange anger might break out at any moment in a storm of blows.
And at last he was well again; and had half forgotten, in the constant kindness, and even merriment, of his guardian, the horror of the two assaults. He was out and about again; he still shunned the paradise of fruits, but wearying of the accustomed pleasaunce, he went further and passed into the wood; how cool and mysterious it was among the great branching trees! the forest led him onwards; now the sun lay softly upon it, and a stream bickered through a glade, and now the path lay through thickets, which hid the further woodland from view; and now passing out into a more open space, he had a thrill of joy and excitement; there was a herd of strange living creatures grazing there, great deer with branching horns; they moved slowly forwards, cropping the grass, and the child was lost in wonder at the sight. Presently one of them stopped feeding, began to sniff the air, and then looking round, espied the child, and began slowly to approach him. The child had no terror of the great dappled stag, and held out his hand to him, when the great beast suddenly bent his head down, and was upon him with one bound, striking him with his horns, lifting him up, smiting him with his pointed hooves. Presently the child, in his terror and faintness, became aware that the beast had left him, and he began to drag himself, all bruised as he was, along the glade; then he suddenly saw his guardian approaching, and cried out to him, holding out his hands for help and comfort--and his guardian strode straight up to him, and, with the same fierce anger in his face, struck at him again and again, and spurned him with his feet. And then, when he left him, the child at last, with accesses of deadly faintness and pain, crept back home, to be again tended by the old nurse, who wept over him; and the child found that his guardian came to visit him, as kind and gentle as ever. And at last one day when he sate beside the child, holding his hand, stroking his hair, and telling him an old tale to comfort him, the child summoned up courage to ask him a question about the garden and the wood; but at the first word his guardian dropped his hand, and left him without a word.
And then the child lay and mused with fierce and rebellious thoughts. He said to himself, "If my guardian had told me where I might not go; if he had said to me, 'in the inner garden are unwholesome fruits, and in the wood are savage beasts; and though I am strong and powerful, yet I have not strength to root up the poisonous plants and make the place a wilderness; and I cannot put a fence about it, or a fence about the wood, that no one should enter; but I warn you that you must not enter, and I entreat you for the love I bear you not to go thither,'" then the child thought that he would not have made question, but would have obeyed him willingly; and again he thought that, if he had indeed ventured in, and had eaten of the evil fruits, and been wounded by the savage stag, yet if his guardian had comforted him, and prayed him lovingly not to enter to his hurt, that then he would have loved his guardian more abundantly and carefully. And he thought too that, if his guardian had ever smitten him in wrath, and had then said to him with tears that it had grieved him bitterly to hurt him, but that thus and thus only could he learn the vileness of the place, then he would have not only forgiven the ill-usage, but would even have loved to endure it patiently. But what the child could not understand was that his guardian should now be tender and gracious, and at another time hard and cruel, explaining nothing to him. And thus the child said in himself, "I am in his power, and he must do his will upon me; but I neither trust nor love him, for I cannot see the reason of what he does; though if he would but tell me the reason, I could obey him and submit to him joyfully." These hard thoughts he nourished and fed upon; and his guardian came no more to him for good or for evil; and the child, much broken by his hard usage and his angry thoughts, crept about neglected and spiritless, with nothing but fear and dismay in his heart.
So the imagination shaped itself in my mind, a parable of the sad, strange life of man.
"Perfect Love!" If it were indeed that? Yet God does many things to His frail children, which if a man did, I could not believe him to be loving; though if He would but give us the assurance that it was all leading us to happiness, we could endure His fiercest stroke, His bitterest decree. But He smites us, and departs; He turns away in a rage, because we have broken a law that we knew not of. And again, when we seem most tranquil and blest, most inclined to trust Him utterly, He smites us down again without a word. I hope, I yearn to see that it all comes from some great and perfect will, a will with qualities of which what we know as mercy, justice, and love are but faint shadows--but that is hidden from me. We cannot escape, we must bear what God lays upon us. We may fling ourselves into bitter and dark rebellion; still He spares us or strikes us, gives us sorrow or delight. My one hope is to cooperate with Him, to accept the chastening joyfully and courageously. Then He takes from me joy, and courage alike, till I know not whom I serve, a Father or a tyrant. Can it indeed help us to doubt whether He be tyrant or no? Again I know not, and again I sicken in fruitless despair, like one caught in a great labyrinth of crags and precipices.
February 14, 1891.
Then the Christian teacher says: "God has given you a will, an independent will to act and choose; put it in unison with His will." Alas, I know not how much of my seeming liberty is His or mine. He seems to make me able to exert my will in some directions, able to make it effective; and yet in other matters, even though I see that a course is holy and beautiful, I have no power to follow it at all. I see men some more, some less hampered than myself. Some seem to have no desire for good, no dim perception of it. The outcast child, brought up cruelly and foully, with vile inheritances, he is not free, as I use the word; sometimes, by some inner purity and strength, he struggles upwards; most often he is engulfed; yet it is all a free gift, to me much, to another little, to some nothing at all. With all my heart do I wish my will to be in harmony with His. I yield it up utterly to Him. I have no strength or force, and He withholds them from me. I do not blame, I only ask to understand; He has given me understanding, and has put in my heart a high dream of justice and love; why will He not show me that He satisfies the dream? I say with the old Psalmist, "Lo, I come," but He comes not forth to meet me; He does not even seem to discern me when I am yet a long way off, as the father in the parable discerned his erring son.
Then the Christian teacher says to me that all is revealed in Christ; that He reconciles, not an angry God to a wilful world, but a grieved and outraged world to a God who cannot show them He is love.
Yet Christ said that God was all-merciful and all-loving, and that He ordered the very falling of a single hair of our heads. But if God ordered that, then He did not leave unordered the qualities of our hearts and wills, and our very sins are of His devising.
No, it is all dark and desperate; I do not know, I cannot know; I shall stumble to my end in ignorance; sometimes glad when a gleam of sunshine falls on my wearied limbs, sometimes wrapping my garments around me in cold and drenching rain. I am in the hand of God; I know that; and I hope that I may dare to trust Him; but my confidence is shaken as He passes over me, as the reed in the river shakes in the wind.
February 18, 1891.
A still February day, with a warm, steady sun, which stole in and caressed me, enveloping me in light and warmth, as I sate reading this morning. If I could be ashamed of anything, I should be ashamed of the fact that my body has all day long surprised me by a sort of indolent contentment, repeating over and over that it is glad to be alive. The mind and soul crave for death and silence. Yet all the while my faithful and useful friend, the body, seems to croon a low song of delight. That is the worst of it, that I seem built for many years of life. Shall I learn to forget?
I walked long and far among the fields, in the fresh, sun-warmed air. Ah! the sweet world! Everything was at its barest and austerest--the grass thin in the pastures, the copses leafless. But such a sense of hidden life everywhere! I stood long beside the gate to watch the new-born lambs, whose cries thrilled plaintively on the air, like the notes of a violin. Little black-faced grey creatures, on their high, stilt-like legs--a week or two old, and yet able to walk, to gambol, to rejoice, in their way, to reflect. The bleating mothers moved about, divided between a deep desire to eat, and the anxious care of their younglings. One of them stood over her sleeping lamb, stamping her feet, to dismay me, no doubt, while the little creature lay like a folded door-mat on the pasture. Another brutally repelled the advances of a strange lamb, butting it over whenever it drew near; another chewed the cud, while its lamb sucked, its eyes half closed in contented joy, just turning from time to time to sniff at the little creature pressed close to its side. I felt as if I had never seen the sight before, this wonderful and amazing drama of life, beginning again year after year, the same, yet not the same.
The old shepherd came out with his crook, said a few words to me, and moved off, the ewes following him, the lambs skipping behind. "He shall feed me in a green pasture, and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort." How perfectly beautiful and tender the image, a thing seen how many hundred years ago on the hills of Bethlehem, and touching the old heart just as it touches me to-day!
And yet, alas, to me to-day the image seems to miss the one thing needful; how all the images of guide and guardian and shepherd fail when applied to God! For here the shepherd is but a little wiser, a little stronger than his flock. He sees their difficulties, he feels them himself. But with God, He is at once the Guide, and the Creator of the very dangers past which He would lead us. If we felt that God Himself were dismayed and sad in the presence of evils that He could not touch or remedy, we should turn to Him to help us as He best could. But while we feel that the very perplexities and sufferings come from His hand, how can we sincerely ask Him to guard us from things which He originates, or at least permits? Why should they be there at all, if His concern is to help us past them; or how can we think that He will lead us past them, when they are part of His wise and awful design?
And thus one plunges again into the darkness. Can it indeed be that God, if He be all-embracing, all-loving, all-powerful, can create or allow to arise within Himself something that is not, Himself, alien to Him, hostile to Him? How can we believe in Him and trust Him, if this indeed be so?
And yet, looking upon that little flock to-day, I did indeed feel the presence of a kind and fatherly heart, of something that grieved for my pain, and that laid a hand upon my shoulder, saying, "Son, endure for a little; be not so disquieted!"
March 8, 1891.
Something--far-off, faint, joyful--cried out suddenly in the depths of my spirit to-day. I felt--I can but express it by images, for it was too intangible for direct utterance--as a woman feels when her child's life quickens within her; as a traveller's heart leaps up when, lost among interminable hills, he is hailed by a friendly voice; as the river-water, thrust up into creeks and estuaries by the incoming tide, is suddenly freed by the ebb from that stealthy pressure, and flows gladly downwards; as the dark garden-ground may feel when the frozen soil melts under warm winds of spring, and the flower-roots begin to swell and shoot.
Some such thrill it was that moved in the silence of the soul, showing that the darkness was alive.
It came upon me as I walked among soft airs to-day. It was no bodily lightness that moved me, for I was unstrung, listless, indolent; but it was a sense that it was good to live, lonely and crushed as I was; that there was something waiting for me which deserved to be approached with a patient expectation--that life was enriched, rather than made desolate by my grief and losses; that I had treasure laid up in heaven. It came upon me as a fancy, but it was something better than that, that one or other of my dear ones had perhaps awaked in the other world, and had sent out a thought in search of me. I had often thought that if, when we are born into this world of ours, our first years are so dumb and unperceptive, it might be even so in the world beyond; that we are there allowed to rest a little, to sleep; and that has seemed to me to be perhaps the explanation why, in those first sad days of grief, when the mourner aches to have some communication with the vanished soul, and when the soul that has passed the bounds of life would be desiring too, one would think, to send some message back, why, I say, there is no voice nor hint nor sign. Perhaps the reason why our grief loses its sting after a season is that the soul we have loved does contrive to send some healing influence into the desolate heart.
I know not; but as I stood upon the hill-top to-day at evening, the setting sun gilding the cloud-edges, and touching the horizon with a delicate misty azure, my spirit did indeed awake with a smile, with a murmured word of hope.
If I, who have lost everything that can enrich and gladden life, can yet feel that inalienable residue of hope, which just turns the balance on the side of desiring still to live, it must be that life has something yet in store for me--I do not hope for love, I do not desire the old gift of expression again; but there is something to learn, to apprehend, to understand. I have learnt, I think, not to grasp at anything, not to clasp anything close to my heart; the dream of possession has fled from me; it will be enough if, as I learn the lesson, I can ease a few burdens and help frail feet along the road. Duty, pleasure, work--strange names which we give to life, perversely separating the strands of the woven thread, they hold no meaning for me now--I do not expect to be free from suffering or from grief; but I will no more distinguish them from other experiences saying, this is joyful, and I will take all I can, or this is sad, and I will fly from it. I will take life whole, not divide it into pieces and choose. My grief shall be like a silent chapel, lit with holy light, into which I shall often enter, and bend, not to frame mechanical prayers, but to submit myself to the still influence of the shrine. It is all my own now, a place into which no other curious eye can penetrate, a guarded sanctuary. My sorrow seems to have plucked me with a strong hand out of the swirling drift of cares, anxieties, ambitions, hopes; and I see now that I could not have rescued myself; that I should have gone on battling with the current, catching at the river wrack, in the hopes of saving something from the stream. Now I am face to face with God; He saves me from myself, He strips my ragged vesture from me and I stand naked as He made me, unashamed, nestling close to His heart.
April 3, 1891.
A truth which has come home to me of late with a growing intensity is that we are sent into the world for the sake of experience, not necessarily for the sake of immediate happiness. I feel that the mistake we most of us make is in reaching out after a sense of satisfaction; and even if we learn to do without that, we find it very difficult to do without the sense of conscious growth. I say again that what we need and profit by is experience, and sometimes that comes by suffering, helpless, dreary, apparently meaningless suffering. Yet when pain subsides, do we ever, does any one ever wish the suffering had not befallen us? I think not. We feel better, stronger, more pure, more serene for it. Sometimes we get experience by living what seems to be an uncongenial life. One cannot solve the problem of happiness by simply trying to turn out of one's life whatever is uncongenial. Life cannot be made into an Earthly Paradise, and it injures one's soul even to try. What we can turn out of our lives are the unfruitful, wasteful, conventional things; and one can follow what seems the true life, though one may mistake even that sometimes. One of the commonest mistakes nowadays is that so many people are haunted with a vague sense that they ought to DO GOOD, as they say. The best that most people can do is to perform their work and their obvious duties well and conscientiously.
If we realise that experience is what we need, and not necessarily happiness or contentment, the whole value of life is altered. We see then that we can get as much or even more out of the futile hour when we are held back from our chosen delightful work, even out of the dreary or terrified hour, when the sense of some irrevocable neglect, some base surrender that has marred our life, sinks burning into the soul, as a hot ember sinks smoking into a carpet. Those are the hours of life when we move and climb; not the hours when we work, and eat, and laugh, and chat, and dine out with a sense of well-merited content.
The value of life is not to be measured by length of days or success or tranquillity, but by the quality of our experience, and the degree in which we have profited by it. In the light of such a truth as this, art seems to fade away as just a pleasant amusement contrived by leisurely men for leisurely men.
Then, further, one grows to feel that such easy happiness as comes to us may be little more than the sweetening of the bitter medicine, just enough to give us courage and heart to live on; that applies, of course, only to the commoner sorts of happiness, when one is busy and merry and self-satisfied. Some sorts of happiness, such as the best kind of affection, are parts of the larger experience.
Then, if we take hold of such experience in the right way, welcoming it as far as possible, not resisting it or trying to beguile it or forget it, we can get to the end of our probation quicker; if, that is, we let the truth burn into us, instead of timidly shrinking away from it.
This seems to me the essence of true religion; the people who cling very close to particular creeds and particular beliefs seem to me to lose robustness; it is like trying to go to heaven in a bath-chair! It retards rather than hastens the apprehension of the truth. Here lies, to my mind, the unreality of mystical books of devotion and piety, where one is instructed to practise a servile sort of abasement, and to beg forgiveness for all one's noblest efforts and aspirations. Neither can I believe that the mystical absorption, inculcated by such books, in the human personality, the human sufferings of Christ, is wholesome, or natural, or even Christian. I cannot imagine that Christ Himself ever recommended such a frame of mind for an instant. What we want is a much simpler sort of Christianity. If a man had gone to Christ and expressed a desire to follow Him, Christ, I believe, would have wanted to know whether he loved others, whether he hated sin, whether he trusted God. He would not have asked him to recite the articles of his belief, and still less have suggested a mystical and emotional sort of passion for His own Person. As least I cannot believe it, and I see nothing in the Gospels which would lead me to believe it.
In any case this belief in our experience being sent us for our far-off ultimate benefit has helped me greatly of late, and will, I am sure, help me still more. I do not practise it as I should, but I believe with all my heart that the truth lies there.
After all, the truth IS there; it matters little that we should know it; it is just so and not otherwise, and what we believe or do not believe about it, will not alter it; and that is a comfort too.
April 24, 1891.
After I had gone upstairs to bed last night, I found I had left a book downstairs which I was reading, and I went down again to recover it. I could not find any matches, and had some difficulty in getting hold of the book; it is humiliating to think how much one depends on sight.
A whimsical idea struck me. Imagine a creature, highly intellectual, but without the power of sight, brought up in darkness, receiving impressions solely by hearing and touch. Suppose him introduced into a room such as mine, and endeavouring to form an impression of the kind of creature who inhabited it. Chairs, tables, even a musical instrument he could interpret; but what would he make of a writing-table and its apparatus? How would he guess at the use of a picture? Strangest of all, what would he think of books? He would find in my room hundreds of curious oblong objects, opening with a sort of hinge, and containing a series of laminae of paper, which he would discern by his delicacy of touch to be oddly and obscurely dinted. Yet he would probably never be able to frame a guess that such objects could be used for the communication of intellectual ideas. What would he suppose them to be?
The thought expanded before me. What if we ourselves, in this world of ours, which seems to us so complete, may really be creatures lacking some further sense, which would make all our difficulties plain? We knock up against all sorts of unintelligible and inexplicable things, injustice, disease, pain, evil, of which we cannot divine the meaning or the use. Yet they are undoubtedly there! Perhaps it is only that we cannot discern the simplicity and the completeness of the heavenly house of which they are the furniture. Fanciful, of course; but I am inclined to think not wholly fanciful.
May 10, 1891.
The question is this: Is there a kind of peace, of tranquillity, attainable in this world, which is proof against all calamities, sufferings, sorrows, losses, doubts? Is it attainable for one like myself, who is sensitive, apprehensive, highly strung, at once confident and timid, alive to impressions, liable to swift changes of mood? Or is it a mere matter of mental, moral, and physical health, depending on some balance of qualities, which may or may not belong to a man, a balance which hundreds cannot attain to?
By this peace, I do not mean a chilly indifference, or a stoical fortitude. I do not mean the religious peace, such as I see in some people, which consists in holding as a certainty a scheme of things which I believe to be either untrue or uncertain--and about which, at all events, no certainty is logically and rationally possible.