Chapter 17
The result is that I find myself greatly fatigued by my visit. I have spent several hours of every day in his society, and I do not suppose that I have uttered a dozen consecutive words; yet many of his statements would be well worth discussing, if he were capable of discussion.
The burden of his song is the lack of that due recognition which he ought to receive; and this, paradoxical as it may appear, is combined with an intense and childish complacency in his own greatness, his position, his influence, his literary and artistic achievements.
He seems to live a very lonely life, though a full one; every hour of his day is methodically mapped out. He has a large correspondence, he reads the papers diligently, he talks, he writes; but he seems to have no friends and no associates. His criticisms upon art, which are suggestive enough, are regarded with undisguised contempt by professional critics; and I find that they are held to be vitiated by a certain want of balance and proportion, and a whimsical eclecticism of taste.
But the pathos of the situation is not the opinion which is held of him, for he is wholly unconscious of it, and he makes up for any lack of expressed approbation by the earnest and admiring approval of all he does, which he himself liberally supplies. It is rather a gnawing hunger of the soul from which he seems to suffer; he has a simply boundless appetite for the poor thing which he calls recognition--I shudder to think how often I have heard the word on his lips--and his own self-approbation is like a drug which he administers to still some fretting pain.
He has been telling me to-night a long story of machinations against him in the club; the perspicacity with which he detected them, the odious repartees he made, the effective counter-checks he applied. "I was always a combatant," he says, with a leering gaiety. Then the next moment he is girding at the whole crew for their stupidity, their ingratitude, their malignity; and it never seems to cross his mind that he can be, or has been in the smallest degree, to blame. It distressed me profoundly, and my mind and heart seemed to weep silent tears.
If he had shown tact, prudence, diligence, if he could have held his tongue when he first took a different place, he would have had a circle of many friends by now. Instead of this, I find him barely tolerated. He talks--he has plenty of courage, and no idea of being put down--but he is listened to with ill-concealed weariness, and, at best, with polite indifference. Yet every now and then the old spell falls on me, and I realise what a noble mind is overthrown. He ought to be at this time the centre of a set of attached friends, a man spoken of with reverence, believed in, revisited by grateful admirers--a man whom it would be an honour and a delight to a young man to know; and the setting in which he lives is precisely adapted to this role. Instead of which it may safely be said that, if he were to announce his departure from town, it would be received with general and cordial satisfaction by his fellow-clubmen.
Even if he had not his circle, he might live a quiet, tranquil, and laborious life in surroundings which are simple and yet dignified.
But the poison is in his system, and it afflicts me to think in how many systems the same poison is at work nowadays. One sees the frankest form of it in the desire of third-rate people to amass letters after their names; but, putting aside all mere vulgar manifestations of it, how many of us are content to do good, solid, beautiful work unpraised, unsung, unheeded? I will take my own case, and frankly confess that what is called recognition is a pleasure to me. I like to have work, which I have done with energy, enjoyment, and diligence, praised--I hope because it confirms the verdict of my own mind that it has been faithfully done. But I can also sincerely say that, as far as literary work goes, the chief pleasure lies in the doing of it; and I could write with unabated zest even if there were no question of publication in view--at least, I think so, but one does not know oneself.
In any event, the contemplation of poor Hardy's case is a terrible lesson to one not to let the desire for praise get too strong a hold, or, at all events, to be deliberately on one's guard against it.
But the pathos and sadness, after all, remain. "Healing is well," says the poet, "but wherefore wounds to heal?" and I find myself lost in a miserable wonder under what law it is that the Creator can mould so fine a spirit, endow it with such splendid qualities, and then allow some creeping fault to obscure it gradually, as the shadow creeps over the moon, and to plunge it into disastrous and dishonourable eclipse.
But I grow tedious; I am inoculated by Hardy's fault. I hastily close this letter, with all friendly greetings. "Pray accept a blessing!" as little Miss Flite said. I am going down to my sister's to-morrow.--Ever yours,
T. B.
SIBTHORPE VICARAGE, WELLS, Dec. 31, 1904 (and Jan. 1, 1905).
DEAR HERBERT,--It is nearly midnight, and I am sitting alone in my room, by the deathbed of the Old Year, expecting every moment to hear the bells break out proclaiming the birth of the New. It is a clear, still night, and I can see, beyond the lawn and over the shrubs of the Vicarage garden, by the light of a low moon, entangled in cloud, the high elms, the church tower, with a light in the belfry, like a solemn, cheerful eye, and the roofs of the little village, all in a patient, musing slumber. Everything is unutterably fresh, tranquil, and serene. By day it is a commonplace scene enough, with a sense of little work-a-day cares and businesses about it all; but now, at night, it is all dim and rich and romantic, full of a calm mystery, hushed and secret, dreaming contented dreams.
I have had an almost solitary day, except for meals. I like being here in a way; there is no strain about it. That is the best of blood-relationship; there is no need to entertain or to be entertained. My brother-in-law, Charles, is an excellent fellow, full to the brim of small plans and designs for his parish; my sister is a very simple and unworldly person, entirely devoted to her husband and children. My nephews and nieces, four in number, three girls and a boy, do not, I regret to say, interest me very deeply; they are amiable, healthy children, with a confined horizon, rather stolid; they never seem to quarrel or to have any particular preferences. The boy, who is the youngest, is to come to my house at Upton when he is old enough; but at present I am simply a good-natured uncle to the children, whose arrival and whose gifts make a pleasant little excitement. Our talk is purely local, and I make it my business to be interested. It is all certainly very restful. Sometimes--as a rule, in fact--when I stay in other people's houses, I have a sense of effort; I feel dimly that a certain brightness is expected of me; as I dress in the morning I wonder what we shall talk about, and what on earth I shall do between breakfast and lunch. But here I have a fire in my bedroom all day, and for the first time, I am permitted to smoke there. I read and write all the morning; I walk, generally alone, in the afternoon. I write before dinner. The result is that I am perfectly content. I sleep like a top; and I find myself full of ideas. The comfort of the whole thing is that no one is afraid that I am not amused, and I myself do not have the uneasy sense that I am bound, so to speak, to pay for my entertainment by being brisk, lively, or sympathetic. The immediate consequence is, that I get as near to all three qualities as I ever get. We simply live our own lives quietly, in company. My presence gives a little fillip to the proceedings; and I myself get all the benefit of change of scene, together with simple unexhausting companionship.
Hark! it is midnight! The soft murmur of bells rises on the clear air, toppling over in a sweet cascade of sound, bringing hope and peace to the heart. In the attic above I hear the children moving softly about, and catch the echo of young voices. They are supposed to be asleep, but I gather that they have been under a vow to keep awake in turn, the watcher to rouse the others just before midnight. The bells peal on, coming in faint gusts of sound, now loud, now low.
I suppose if I were more simple-minded I should have been thinking over my faults and failures, desiring to do better, making good resolutions. But I don't do that. I do desire, with all my heart, to do better. I know how faltering, how near the ground my flight is. But these formal, occasional repentances are useless things; resolutions do little but reveal one's weakness more patently. What I try to do is simply to uplift my heart with all its hopes and weaknesses to God, to try to put my hand in His, to pray that I may use the chances He gives me, and interpret the sorrows He may send me. He knows me utterly and entirely, my faults and my strength. I cannot fly from Him though I take the wings of the morning. I only pray that I may not harden my heart; that I may be sought and found; that I may have the courage I need. All that I have of good He has given me; and as for the evil, He knows best why I am tempted, why I fall, though I would not. There is no strength like the abasement of weakness; no power like a childlike confidence. One thing only I shall do before I sleep--give a thought to all I love and hold dear, my kin, my friends, and most of all, my boys: I shall remember each, and, while I commend them to the keeping of God, I shall pray that they may not suffer through any neglect or carelessness of my own. It is not, after all, a question of the quantity of what we do, but of the quality of it. God knows and I know of how poor a stuff our dreams and deeds are woven; but if it is the best we can give, if we desire with all our hearts what is noble and pure and beautiful and true--or even desire to desire it--He will accept the will and purify the deed. And in such a mood as this--and God forgive us for not more often dwelling in such thoughts--I can hope and feel that the most tragic failure, the darkest sorrow, the deepest shame are viewed by God, and will some day be viewed by ourselves, in a light which will make all things new; and that just as we look back on our childish griefs with a smiling wonder, so we shall some day look back on our mature and dreary sufferings with a tender and wistful air, marvelling that we could be so short-sighted, so faithless, so blind.
And yet the thought of what the new year may hold for us cannot be other than solemn. Like men on the eve of a great voyage, we know not what may be in store, what shifting of scene, what loss, what grief, what shadow of death. And then, again, the same grave peace flows in upon the mind, as the bells ring out their sweet refrain, "It is He that hath made us." Can we not rest in that?
What I hope more and more to do is to withdraw myself from material aims and desires; not to aim at success, or dignity of office, or parade of place. I wish to help, to serve, not to command or rule. I long to write a beautiful book, to put into words something of the sense of peace, of beauty and mystery, which visits me from time to time. Every one has, I think, something of the heavenly treasure in their hearts, something that makes them glad, that makes them smile when they are alone; I want to share that with others, not to keep it to myself. I drift, alas, upon an unknown sea; but sometimes I see, across the blue rollers, the cliffs and shores of an unknown land, perfectly and impossibly beautiful. Sometimes the current bears me away from it; sometimes it is veiled in cloud-drift and weeping rain. But there are days when the sun shines bright upon the leaping waves, and the wind fills the sail and bears me thither. It is of that beautiful land that I would speak, its pure outlines, its crag-hollows, its rolling downs. Tendimus ad Latium, we steer to the land of hope.
And meanwhile I desire but to work in a corner; to make the few lives that touch my own a little happier and braver; to give of my best, to withhold what is base and poor. There is abundance of evil, of weakness, of ugliness, of dreariness in my own heart; I only pray that I may keep it there, not let it escape, not let it flow into other lives.
The great danger of all natures like my own, which have a touch of what is, I suppose, the artistic temperament, is a certain hardness, a self-centred egotism, a want of lovingness and sympathy. One sees things so clearly, one hankers so after the power of translating and expressing emotion and beauty, that the danger is of losing proportion, of subordinating everything to the personal value of experience. From this danger, which is only too plain to me, I humbly desire to escape; it is all the more dangerous when one has the power, as I am aware I have, of entering swiftly and easily into intimate personal relations with people; one is so apt, in the pleasure of observing, of classifying, of scrutinising varieties of temperament, to use that power only to please and amuse oneself. What one ought to aim at is not the establishment of personal influence, not the perverted sense of power which the consciousness of a hold over other lives gives one, but to share such good things as one possesses, to assist rather than to sway.
Well, it is all in the hands of God; again and again one returns to that, as the bird after its flight in remote fields returns to the familiar tree, the branching fastness. One should learn, I am sure, to live for the day and in the day; not to lose oneself in anxieties and schemes and aims; not to be overshadowed by distant terrors and far-off hopes, but to say, "To-day is given me for my own; let me use it, let me live in it." One's immediate duty is happily, as a rule, clear enough. "Do the next thing," says the old shrewd motto.
The bells cease in the tower, leaving a satisfied stillness. The fire winks and rustles in the grate; a faint wind shivers and rustles down the garden paths, sighing for the dawn. I grow weary.
Herbert, I must say "Good-night." God keep and guard you, my old and true friend. I have rejoiced week by week to hear of your recovered health, your activity, your renewed zest in life. When shall I welcome you back? I feel somehow that in these months of separation we have grown much nearer and closer together. We have been able to speak in our letters in a way that we have seldom been able to speak eye to eye. There is a pure gain. My heart goes out to you and yours; and at this moment I feel as if the dividing seas are nothing, and that we are close together in the great and loving heart of God.--Your ever affectionate,
T. B.
SIBTHORPE VICARAGE, WELLS, Jan. 7, 1905.
DEAR HERBERT,--Four nights ago I dreamed a strange dream. I was in a big, well-furnished, airy room, with people moving about in it; I knew none of them, but we were on friendly terms, and talked and laughed together. Quite suddenly I was struck somewhere in the chest by some rough, large missile, fired, I thought, from a gun, though I heard no explosion; it pierced my ribs, and buried itself, I felt, in some vital part. I stumbled to a couch and fell upon it; some one came to raise me, and I was aware that other persons ran hither and thither seeking, I thought, for medical aid and remedies. I knew within myself that my last hour had come; I was not in pain, but life and strength ebbed from me by swift degrees. I felt an intolerable sense of indignity in my helplessness, and an intense desire to be left alone that I might die in peace; death came fast upon me with clouded brain and fluttering breath. . . .
SIBTHORPE VICARAGE, WELLS, Jan. 7, 1905.
DEAR NELLIE,--I have just opened your letter, and you will know how my whole heart goes out to you. I cannot understand it, I cannot realise it; and I would give anything to be able to say a word that should bring you any comfort or help. God keep and sustain you, as I know He CAN sustain in these dark hours. I cannot write more to-day; but I send you the letter that I was writing, when your own letter came. It helps me even now to think that my dear Herbert told me himself--for that, I see, was the purpose of my dim dream--what was befalling him. And I am as sure as I can be of anything that he is with us, with you, still. Dear friend, if I could only be with you now; but you will know that my thoughts and prayers are with you every moment.--Ever your affectionate,
T. B.
[I add an extract from my Diary.--T. B.]
Diary, Jan. 15.--A week ago, while I was writing the above unfinished lines, I received a letter to say that my friend Herbert was dead--he to whom these letters have been written. It seems that he had been getting, to all appearances, better; that he had had no renewed threatenings of the complaint that had made him an exile. But, rising from his chair in the course of the evening, he had cried out faintly; put his hand to his breast; fallen back in his chair unconscious, and, in a few minutes, had ceased to breathe. They say it was a sudden heart-failure.
It is as though we had been watching by a burrow with all precaution that some little hunted creature should not escape, and that, while we watched and devised, it had slipped off by some other outlet the very existence of which we had not suspected.
Of course, as far as he himself is concerned, such a death is simply a piece of good fortune. If I could know that such would be the manner of my own death, a real weight would be lifted from my mind. To die quickly and suddenly, in all the activity of life, in comparative tranquillity, with none of the hideous apparatus of the sick-room about one, with no dreary waiting for death, that is a great joy. But for his wife and his poor girls! To have had no last word, no conscious look from one whose delicate consideration for others was so marked a part of his nature, this is a terrible and stupefying misery.
I cannot, of course, even dimly realise what has happened; the remoteness of it all, the knowledge that my own outer life is absolutely unchanged, that the days will flow on as usual, makes it trebly difficult to feel what has befallen me. I cannot think of him as dead and silent; yet even before I heard the news, he was buried. I cannot, of course, help feeling that the struggling spirit of my friend tried to fling me, as it were, some last message; or that I suffered with him, and shared his last conscious thought.
Perhaps I shall grow to think of Herbert as dead. But, meanwhile, I am preoccupied with one thought, that such an event ought not to come upon one as such a stunning and trembling shock as it does. It reveals to one the fact of how incomplete one's philosophy of life is. One ought, I feel, deliberately to reckon with death, and to discount it. It is, after all, the only certain future event in our lives.
And yet we struggle with it, put it away from us, live and plan as though it had no existence; or, if it insistently clouds our thoughts, as it does at intervals, we wait resignedly until the darkness lifts, and until we may resume our vivid interests again.
I do not, of course, mean that it should be a steady, melancholy preoccupation. If we have to die, we are also meant to live; but we ought to combine and co-ordinate the thought of it. It ought to take its place among the other great certainties of life, without weakening our hold upon the activity of existence. How is this possible? For the very terror of death lies not in the sad accidents of mortality, the stiffened and corrupting form, the dim eye, the dreadful pageantry--over that we can triumph; but it is the blank cessation of all that we know of life, the silence of the mind that loved us, the irreparable wound.
Some turn hungrily to Spiritualism to escape from this terrible mystery. But, so far as I have looked into Spiritualism, it seems to me only to have proved that, if any communication has ever been made from beyond the gate of death--and even such supposed phenomena are inextricably intertwined with quackeries and deceits--it is an abnormal and not a normal thing. The scientific evidence for the continuance of personal identity is nil; the only hope lies in the earnest desire of the hungering heart.
The spirit cries out that it dare not, it cannot cease to be. It cannot bear the thought of all the energy and activity of life proceeding in its accustomed course, deeds being done, words being uttered, the problems which the mind pondered being solved, the hopes which the heart cherished being realised--"and I not there." It is a ghastly obsession to think of all the things that one has loved best--quiet work, the sunset on familiar fields, well-known rooms, dear books, happy talk, fireside intercourse--and one's own place vacant, one's possessions dispersed among careless hands, eye and ear and voice sealed and dumb. And yet how strange it is that we should feel thus about the future, experience this dumb resentment at the thought that there should be a future in which one may bear no part, while we acquiesce so serenely in claiming no share in the great past of the world that enacted itself before we came into being. It never occurs to us to feel wronged because we had no conscious outlook upon the things that have been; why should we feel so unjustly used because our outlook may be closed upon the things that shall be hereafter? Why should we feel that the future somehow belongs to us, while we have no claim upon the past? It is a strange and bewildering mystery; but the fact that the whole of our nature cries out against extinction is the strongest argument that we shall yet be, for why put so intensely strong an instinct in the heart unless it is meant to be somehow satisfied?
Only one thought, and that a stern one, can help us--and that is the certainty that we are in stronger hands than our own. The sense of free-will, the consciousness of the possibility of effort, blinds us to this; we tend to mistake the ebullience of temperament for the deliberate choice of the will. Yet have we any choice at all? Science says no; while the mind, with no less instinctive certainty, cries out that we have a choice. Yet take some sharp crisis of life--say an overwhelming temptation. If we resist it, what is it but a resultant of many forces? Experience of past failures and past resolves combine with trivial and momentary motives to make us choose to resist. If we fail and yield, the motive is not strong enough. Yet we have the sense that we might have done differently: we blame ourselves, and not the past which made us ourselves.
But with death it is different. Here, if ever, falls the fiat of the Mind that bade us be. And thus the only way in which we can approach it is to put ourselves in dependence upon that Spirit. And the only course we can follow is this: not by endeavouring to anticipate in thought the moment of our end--that, perhaps, only adds to its terrors when it comes--but by resolutely and tenderly, day after day, learning to commend ourselves to the hand of God; to make what efforts we can; to do our best; to decide as simply and sincerely as possible what our path should be, and then to leave the issue humbly and quietly with God.
I do this, a little; it brings with it a wonderful tranquillity and peace. And the strange thing is that one does not do it oftener, when one has so often experienced its healing and strengthening power.