Chapter 6

Boswell did not shrink from admitting the reader to a sight of Johnson's hypochondria, his melancholy fears, his dreary miseries, his dread of illness, his terror of death. Johnson's horror of annihilation was insupportable. He so revelled in life, in the contact and company of other human beings, that he once said that the idea of an infinity of torment was preferable to the thought of annihilation. He wrote, in his last illness, to his old friend Dr. Taylor:

"Oh! my friend, the approach of death is very dreadful. I am afraid to think on that which I know I cannot avoid. It is vain to look round and round for that help which cannot be had. Yet we hope and hope, and fancy that he who has lived to-day may live to-morrow. But let us learn to derive our hope only from God.

"In the meantime, let us be kind to one another. I have no friend now living but you and Mr. Hector that was the friend of my youth.--Do not neglect, sir, yours affectionately, SAM. JOHNSON."

Was ever the last fear put into such simple and poignant words as in the above letter? It is like that other saying of Johnson's, when all sorts of good reasons had been given why men should wish to be released from their troubles by death, "After all, it is a sad thing for a man to lie down and die." There is no more that can be said, and not the best reasons in the world for desiring to depart and have done with life can ever do away with that sadness.

Dr. Johnson supplies the clearest proof, if proof were needed, that no robustness of temperament, no genius of common sense, no array of rationality, no degree of courage, can save a man from the assaults of fear, and even of fear which the sufferer knows to be unreal. Some of the most severe and angry things which Johnson ever said were said to Boswell and others who persisted in discussing the question of death. Yet Johnson had no rational doubt of immortality, and believed with an almost childlike simplicity in the Christian faith. He was not afraid of pain, or of the act of dying; it was of the unknown conditions beyond the grave that he was afraid. Probably as a rule very robust people are so much occupied in living that they have little time to think of the future, while men and women who hold to life by a frail tenure are not much concerned at quitting a scene which is phantasmal and full of pain. But in Johnson we have the two extremes brought together. He was the most gregarious of men; he loved company so well that he would follow his friends to the very threshold, in the hope, as he once told Boswell, that they might perhaps return. When he was alone and undistracted, his melancholy came back upon him like a cloud. He tortured himself over the unprofitableness of his life, over his failure to achieve official prominence. He does not seem to have brooded over the favourite subject for Englishmen to lose heart over, namely, his financial position. It is a very significant fact in our English life that if at an inquest upon a suicide it can be established that a man has financial difficulties, a verdict of temporary insanity is instantly conceded. Loss of property rather than loss of affection is the thing which the Englishman thinks is likely to derange a man. But Johnson seems never to have been afraid of poverty, nor to have ever troubled about fame. He was very angry once when it was laughingly suggested to him that if he had gone to the Bar he might have been Lord Chancellor; and I have no doubt, as I have said, that one of his uncomfortable reflections was that he did not seem to himself to be in a position of influence and authority. But, apart from that, it is obvious that Johnson's broodings took the form of lamenting his own sinfulness and moral worthlessness: what the faults which troubled him were, it is hard to say. He does not seem to have been repentant about the mortification he caused others by his witty bludgeoning--indeed he considered himself a polite man! But I believe, from many slight indications, that Johnson was distressed by the consciousness of sensual impulses, though he held them in severe restraint. His habit of ejaculatory prayer was, I think, directed against this tendency. The agitation with which he once said that corruption had entered into his heart by means of a dream seems to me a proof of this. He took a tolerant view of the lapses of others, and of course the standard of the age was lax in this respect. But I have little doubt myself that here Johnson found himself often confronted with a sensuous tendency which he thought degrading, and which he constantly combated.

Apart from this, he was not afraid of illness in itself, except as a prelude of mortality. Indeed I believe that he took a hypochondriac pleasure in observing his symptoms minutely, and in dosing himself in all sorts of ways. His mysterious preoccupations with dried orange-peel had no doubt a medicinal end in view. But when it came to suffering pain and even to enduring operations, he had no tremors. His one constant fear was the fear of death. He kept it at arm's length, he loved any social amusement that banished it, but it is obvious, in several of his talks, when the subject was under discussion, that the cloud descended upon him suddenly and made him miserable. It was all summed up in this, that life was to his taste, that even when oppressed with gloom and depression, he never desired to escape. I have heard a great doctor say that he believed that human beings were very sharply divided in this respect, that there were some people in whom any extremity of prolonged anguish, bodily or mental, never produced the smallest desire to quit life; while there were others whose attachment to life was slight, and that a very little pressure of care or calamity developed a suicidal impulse. This is, I suppose, a question of vitality, not necessarily of activity of mind and body, but a deep instinctive desire to live; the thought of deliberate suicide was wholly unintelligible to Johnson, death was his ultimate fear, and however much he suffered from disease or depression, his intention to live was always inalienable.

His fear then was one which no devoutness of faith, no resolute tenacity of hope, no array of reasons could ever touch. It was simply the unknown that he feared. Life had not been an easy business for Johnson; he had known all the calamities of life, and he was familiar with the worst calamity of all, the causeless melancholy which makes life weary and distasteful without ever removing the certainty that it is in itself desirable.

We may see from all this that to attempt to seek a cure for fear in reason is foredoomed to failure, because fear lies in a region that is behind all reason. It exists in the depth of the spirit, as in the fallen gloom of the glimmering sea-deeps, and it can be touched by no activity of life and joy and sunlight on the surface, where the speeding sail moves past wind-swept headlands. We must follow it into those depths if we are to deal with it at all, and it must be vanquished in the region where it is born, and where it skulks unseen.

XII

TENNYSON, RUSKIN, CARLYLE

There were three great men of the nineteenth century of whom we know more than we know of most men, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Tennyson, in whose lives fear was a prominent element.

Tennyson has suffered no loss of fame, but he has suffered of late a certain loss of influence, which was bound to come, if simply from the tremendous domination which his writings exercised in his lifetime. He was undoubtedly one of the first word-artists who ever lived and wrote, but he was a great deal more than that; he was a great mystic, a man whose mind moved in a shining cloud of inspiration. He had the constitution and the temperament of a big Lincolnshire yeoman, with that simple rusticity that is said to have characterised Vergil. But his spirit dwelt apart, revolving dim and profound thoughts, brooding over mysteries; if he is lightly said to be Early Victorian, it is not because he was typical of his age, but because he contributed so much to make it what it was. While Browning lived an eager personal life, full of observation, zest, and passion, Tennyson abode in more impersonal thoughts. In the dawn of science, when there was a danger of life becoming over-materialised, contented with the first steps of swiftly apprehended knowledge, and with solutions which were no solutions at all, but only the perception of laws, Tennyson was the man of all others who saw that science had a deeply poetical side, and could enforce rather than destroy the religious spirit; he saw that a knowledge of processes was not the same thing as an explanation of impulses, and that while it was a little more clear in the light of science what was actually happening in the world, men were no nearer the perception of why it happened so, or why it happened at all. Tennyson saw clearly the wonders of astronomy and geology, and discerned that the laws of nature were nothing more than the habits, so to speak, of a power that was incredibly dim and vast, a power which held within itself the secrets of motion and rest, of death and life. Thus he claimed for his disciples not only the average thoughtful men, but the very best and finest minds of his generation who wished to link the past and the present together, and not to break with the old sanctities.

Tennyson's art suffered from the consciousness of his enormous responsibility, and where he failed was from his dread of unpopularity, or his fear of alienating the ordinary man. Browning was interested in ethical problems; his robust and fortunate temperament allowed him to bridge over with a sort of buoyant healthiness the gaps of his philosophy. But Tennyson's ethical failure lay in his desire to improve the occasion, and to rule out all impulses that had not a social and civic value. In the later "Idylls" he did his best to represent the prig trailing clouds of glory, and to discourage lawlessness in every form; but he was more familiar with the darker and grosser sides of life than he allowed to appear in his verse, which suffers from an almost prudish delicacy, which is more akin to respectability than to moral courage.

But all this was the shadow of a very sensitive and melancholy temperament. Comparatively little is known of the first forty years of his life; it is after that time that the elaborate legend begins. Till the time of his marriage, he must have been a constant anxiety to his friends; his gloom, his inertia, his drifting mooning ways, his hypochondria, his incapacity for any settled plan of life, all seemed to portend an ultimate failure. But this troubled inertness was the soil of his inspiration; his conceptions took slow and stately shape. He never suffered from the haste, which as Dante says "mars all decency of act." After that time he enjoyed a great domestic happiness, and practised considerable sociability. His terrifying demeanour, his amazing personal dignity and majesty, the certainty that he would say whatever came into his head, whether it was profound and solemn, or testy and discourteous, gave him a personal ascendancy that never disappointed a pilgrim.

But he lived all his life in a perpetual melancholy, feeling the smallest slights acutely, hating at once obscurity and publicity, aware of his renown, yet shrinking from the evidences of it. He could be distracted by company, soothed by wine and tobacco; but left to itself, his mind fell helplessly down the dark slope into a sadness and a dreariness which deprived life of its savour. It was not that his dread was a definite one; he was strong and tough physically, and he regarded death with a solemn curiosity; but he had a sense of the profitlessness of vacant hours, unthrilled by beauty and delight, and had also a morbid pride, of the nature of vanity, which caused him to resent the smallest criticism of his works from the humblest reader. There are many stories of this, how he declaimed against the lust of gossip, which he called with rough appositeness "ripping up a man like a pig," and thanked God with all his heart and soul that he knew nothing of Shakespeare's private life; and in the same breath went on to say that he thought that his own fame was suffering from a sort of congestion, because he had received no letters about his poems for several days.

In later life he became very pessimistic, and believed that the world was sinking fast into dull materialism, petty selfishness, and moral anarchy. He had less opportunity of knowing what was going on in the world than most people, in his sheltered and secluded life, with his court of friends and worshippers. And indeed it was not a rational pessimism; it was but the shadow of his fear. And the fact remains that in spite of a life of great good fortune, and an undimmed supremacy of fame, he spent much of his time in fighting shadows, involved in clouds of darkness and dissatisfaction. That was no doubt the price he paid for his exquisite perception of beauty and his power of melodious expression. But we make a great mistake if we merely think of Tennyson as a rich and ample nature moving serenely through life. He was "black-blooded," he once said, adding, "like all the Tennysons." Doubtless he had in his mind his father, a man often deeply in the grip of melancholy. And the absurd legend, invented probably by Rossetti, contains a truth in it and may be quoted here. Rossetti said that he once went to dine with a friend in London, and was shown into a dimly lit drawing-room with no one to receive him. He went towards the fireplace, and suddenly to his surprise discovered an immensely tall man in evening dress lying prostrate on the hearthrug, his face downwards, in an attitude of prone despair. While he gazed, the stranger rose to his feet, looked fixedly at him, and said, "I must introduce myself; I am Octavius, the most morbid of the Tennysons."

With Ruskin we have a different case. He was brought up in the most secluded fashion, and though he was sharply enough disciplined into decorous behaviour by his very grim and positive mother, he was guarded like a precious jewel, and as he grew up he was endlessly petted and indulged. The Ruskins lived a very comfortable life in a big villa with ample grounds at Denmark Hill. Whatever the wonderful boy did was applauded and even dangerously encouraged, both in the way of drawing and of writing. Though he seems to have been often publicly snubbed by both his parents, it was more a family custom than anything else, and was accompanied by undisguised admiration and patent pride. They were his stupefied critics, when he read aloud his works in the family circle, and his father obediently produced large sums of money to gratify his brilliant son's artistic desire for the possession of Turner's paintings. Ruskin in his morbid moments, in later life, turned fiercely and unjustly against his fond and tender father. He accused him with an in temperate bitterness of having lavished everything upon him except the intelligent sympathy of which he stood in need, and his father's gentle and mournful apologies have an extraordinary beauty of puzzled and patient dignity about them.

When Ruskin went to Oxford, his mother went to reside there too, to look after her darling. One might have supposed that this would have involved Ruskin in ridicule, but he was petted and indulged by his fellow-undergraduates, who found his charm, his swift wit, his childlike waywardness, his freakish humour irresistible. Then he had a serious illness, and his first taste of misery; he was afraid of death, he hated the constraints of invalid life and the grim interruption to his boundless energies and plans. Then came his first great book, and he strode full-fledged into fame. His amazing attractiveness, his talk, which combined incisiveness and fancy and humour and fire and gentleness, made him a marked figure from the first. Moreover, he had the command of great wealth, yet no temptation to be idle. The tale of Ruskin's industry for the next fifty years is one that would be incredible if it were not true. His brief and dim experience of married life seems hardly to have affected him. As a critic of art and ethics, as the writer of facile magnificent sentences, full of beauty and rhythm, as the composer of word-structures, apparently logical in form but deeply prejudiced and inconsequent in thought, he became one of the great influences of the day, and wielded not only power but real domination. The widespread delusion of the English educated classes, that they are interested in art, was of Ruskin's making. Then something very serious happened to him; a baffled passion of extraordinary intensity, a perception of the realities of life, the consciousness that his public indulged and humoured him as his parents had done, and admired his artistic advice without paying the smallest heed to his ethical principles--all these experiences broke over him, wearied as he was with excessive strain, like a bitter wave. But his pessimism took the noble form of an intense concern with the blindness and impenetrability of the world at large. He made a theory of political economy, which, peremptory and prejudiced as it is, is yet built on large lines, and has been fruitful in suggestiveness. But he tasted discouragement and failure in deep draughts. His parents frankly expressed their bewildered disappointment, his public looked upon him as a perverse man who was throwing away a beautiful message for the sake of a crabbed whim; and he fell into a fierce depression, alternating between savage energy and listless despondency, which lasted for several years, till at last the overwrought brain and mind gave way; and for the rest of his life he was liable to recurrent attacks of insanity, which cleared off and left him normal again, or as normal as he ever had been. Wide and eager as Ruskin's tenderness was, one feels that his heart was never really engaged; he was always far away, in a solitude full of fear, out of the reach of affection, always solemnly and mournfully alone. Ruskin was never really allied with any other human soul; he knew most of the great men of the day; he baited Rossetti, he petted Carlyle; he had correspondents like Norton, to whom he poured out his overburdened heart; but he was always the spoiled and indulged child of his boyhood, infinitely winning, provoking, wilful. He could not be helped, because he could never get away from himself; he could admire almost frenziedly, but he could not worship; he could not keep himself from criticism even when he adored, and he had a bitter superiority of spirit, a terrible perception of the imperfections and faults of others, a real despair of humanity.

I do not know exactly what the terrors which Ruskin suffered were--very few people will tell the tale of the valley of hobgoblins, or probably cannot! In the Pilgrim's Progress itself, the unreality of the spirits of fear, their secrecy and leniency, is very firmly and wittily told. They scream in their dens, sitting together, I have thought, like fowls in a roost. They come padding after the pilgrim, they show themselves obscurely, swollen by the mist at the corners of the road. They give the sense of being banded together in a numerous ambush, they can deceive eye and ear, and even nose with noisome stenches; but they cannot show themselves, and they cannot hurt. If they could be seen, they would be nothing but limp ungainly things that would rouse disdain and laughter and even pity, at anything at once so weak and so malevolent. But they are not like the demons of sin that can hamper and wound; they are just little gnomes and elves that can make a noise, and their strength is a spiteful and a puny thing.

Ruskin had no sordid or material fears; he had no fear of poverty, for he flung his father's hard-earned wealth profusely away; nor did he fear illness; indeed one of the bravest and most gallant things about him was the way in which he talked and wrote about his insane fits, described his haunted visions, told, half-ruefully, half-humorously, how he fought and struggled with his nurses, and made fun of the matter. That was a very courageous thing to do, because most people are ashamed of insanity, no doubt from the old sad ignorant tradition that it was the work of demoniacal agencies, and not a mere disease like other diseases. Half the tragedy of insanity is that it shocks people, and cannot be alluded to or spoken about; but one can take the sting out of almost any calamity if one can make fun of it, and this Ruskin did.

But he was wounded by his fears, as we most of us are, not only through his vanity but through his finest emotions. He felt his impotence and his failure. He had thought of his gift of language as one might think of a magic wand which one can wave, and thus compel duller spirits to do one's bidding. Ruskin began by thinking that there was not much amiss with the world except a sort of pathetic stupidity; and he thought that if only people could be told, clearly and loudly enough, what was right, they would do it gladly; and then it dawned upon him by slow degrees that the confusion was far deeper than that, that men mostly did not live in motives but in appetites. And so he fell into a sort of noble rage with the imperfection of mortal things; and one of the clearest signs, as he himself knew, that he was drifting into one of the mind-storms which swept across him, was that in these moods everything that people said or wrote had power to arouse his irritation, to interrupt his work, to break his sleep, and to show him that he was powerless indeed. What he feared was derision, and the good-natured indifferent stolidity that is worse than any derision, and the knowledge that, with all his powers and perceptions, his common-sense, which was great, and his sense of responsibility, he was treated by the world like a spoilt child, charming even in his wrath, who had full license to be as vehement as he liked, with the understanding that no one would act on his advice.

I often go to Brantwood, which is a sacred place indeed, and see with deep emotion the little rooms, with all their beautiful treasures, and all the great accumulations of that fierce industry of mind, and remember that in that peaceful background a man of exquisite genius fought with sinister shadows, and was worsted in the fight, for a time; because the last ten years of that long life were a time of serene waiting for death, a beguiling by little childish and homely occupations the heavy hours: he could uplift his voice no more, often could hardly frame an intelligible thought. But meanwhile his great message went on rippling out to the world, touching heart after heart into light and hope, and doing, insensibly and graciously, by the spirit, the very thing he had failed to do by might and power.