But the true artist, like the true priest, cares only for the beautiful quality of the thought that he pursues. The true priest is the man who loves virtue, disinterestedness, truth, and purity with a kind of passion, and only desires to feed the same love in faithful hearts. He seeks the Kingdom of God first; and if the good things of the world are strewn, as they are apt to be strewn, in the path of the virtuous person, he is never for a moment seduced into believing that they are the object of his search. His desire is that souls should glow and thrill with high, sacred, and tender emotions, which are their own surpassing reward.

So, too, the artist is concerned solely with the beautiful thing—whether it is the beauty of the eager relationships of men and women, or the ever-changing exquisite forms and colours of nature, or the effect of all these things upon the desirous soul of man. And it is here that his danger lies, that he may grow to be preoccupied with the changing and blended texture of his own soul, into which flow so many sweet influences and gracious visions—if, like the Lady of Shalott, he grows to think of the live things that move on the river-side only as objects that may minister to the richness of the web that he weaves. He must keep his eye intent upon the power, whatever it may be, that is behind all these gracious manifestations; they must all be symbols to him of some unrevealed mystery, or he will grow to love the gem for its colour, the flower for its form, the cloud for its whiteness or empurpled gloom, the far-off hill for its azure tints, and so forget to discern the spirit that thus gleams and flashes from its shrouding vapours.

And then, too, in art as in love, the artist must lose himself that he may find himself. If he considers all things in relation to his own sensitive and perceptive temperament, he will become immured in a chilly egotism, a narrow selfishness, from which he will not dare to emerge. He must fling himself whole-heartedly into a passionate worship of what is beautiful, not desiring it only that it may thrill and satisfy him, but longing to draw near to its innermost essence. The artist may know, indeed, that he is following the wrong path when he loves the artistic presentation of a thing better than the thing presented, when he is moved more by a single picture of a perfect scene than by the ten thousand lovely things which he may see in a single country walk. He must, indeed, select emotions and beautiful objects by their quality; he must compare and distinguish; but if he once believes that his concern is with representation rather than with life, he goes downward. He must not be concerned for a single instant with the thought, "How will this that I perceive affect others as I represent it?" but he must rather be so amazed and carried out of himself by the beauty of what he sees, that the representing of it is only a necessary consequence of the vision; as a child may tell an adventure breathlessly and intently to its mother or its nurse, absorbed in the recollection.

And thus the true artist will not weigh and ponder the most effective medium for his expression; the thought must be so overpowering that the choice of a medium will be a matter of pure instinct. The most, indeed, of what he feels and perceives he will recognise to be frankly untranslatable in speech or pigment or musical notes, too high, too sacred, too sublime. His work will be no more selfish than the work of the pilot or the general is selfish. The responsibility, the crisis, the claim of the moment, will outweigh and obliterate all personal, all fruitless considerations. He must have no thought of success; if it comes, he may rejoice that he has been a faithful interpreter, and has shared his joy with others; if it does not come, his joy is not lessened.

Then, too, in ordering his life, he must be humble, sincere, and simple. He must keep his eye and his mind open to all generous admirations. He must let no lust or appetite, no ambition of pride, cloud his vision. He must take delight in the work of other artists, and strive to see the beautiful and perfect rather than the false and feeble. He must rejoice if he can see his own dream more seriously and sweetly depicted than he can himself depict it, for he must care for nothing but the triumph of beauty over ugliness, of light over darkness. And thus the true artist may be most easily told by his lavish appreciation of the work of other artists, rather than by his censure and disapproval.

And, again, he must be able to take delight in the smallest and humblest beauties of life. He must not need to travel far and wide in the search for what is romantic, but he must find it lying richly all about him in the simplest scene. He must not crave for excitement or startling events or triumphs or compliments; he must not desire to know or to be known by famous persons, because his joys must all flow from a purer and clearer fountain-head. He must find no day nor hour dreary, and his only fatigue must be the wholesome fatigue that follows on patient labour, not the jaded fatigue of the strained imagination.

Age, and even infirmity, does not dull the zest of such a nature; it merely substitutes a range of gentler and more tranquil emotions for the heroic and passionate enthusiasms of youth; for the true artist knows that the emotion of which he is in search is something far higher and purer and more vivid than his fiercest imaginations—and yet it has the calm of strength and the dignity of worth; the vehement impulses of youth "do it wrong, being so majestical." And he draws nearer to it when animal heat and the turbulence of youthful spirit has burnt clearer and hotter, throwing off its smoke and lively flame for a keener and purer glow.

And above all things, the artist must most beware of the complacency, the sense of victory, the belief that he has attained, has plumbed the depth, seen into the heart of the mystery. Rather as life draws on he must feel, in awe and hope, that it is infinitely mightier and greater than he thought in the days of potent impulse. His whole soul must be full of a sacred fear as he draws closer to the gate, the opening of which may give him a nearer glimpse of the secret. The humble sense of failure will be a bright and noble thought, because it will show him how much the mystery transcends the most daring hope and dream.



XXXI

I was present in a great church the other day at a service held at the hour of sunset The dying light fell richly through the stained windows, lending a deep and beautiful mystery to the scenes there depicted. The pale faces of pictured saints, with their rich robes, were outlined with a pathetic sweetness against backgrounds of solemn buildings or confused woods. The lighted tapers of the choir threw a faint glow up to the intricate roof, which seemed flooded with a golden mist; the gilt pipes of the organ gleamed softly; the music began to roll and stir, with a grave melodious thunder, like the voice of a dreaming spirit. A procession of white-vested figures moved with a ceremonial dignity to their places, and then the service proceeded through soft gradations of prayer and praise, in words of exquisite and restrained felicity, all haunted with the echoes of the ages. I sate alone, a silent listener, and it seemed to me that every appeal which the beauty of art could make to the spirit was here delicately displayed. Eye and ear, emotion and intellect, were alike thrilled and satisfied. They sang the 119th Psalm, that perfect expression of holy quietude: "Thy testimonies are wonderful; therefore doth my soul seek them." Wonderful, indeed, and gracious, sweet as honey. The heart, in that glad moment, drew near to the tender Father of life, who seemed, as in the old parable, to see the repentant son of his heart wandering sadly a long way off, to go forth to meet him, and to fill the house with light and music, that he might feel it to be home indeed.

That the instinct that has drawn all the treasures of art into its service, and with them welcomes and sustains the wearied soul, is a pure and beautiful one, I make no doubt. But then I thought of all that lies outside: of crowded cities, of the ugly mirth, the sordid cares of men and women; of the dark laws that wound and slay; of pain and shame; of tired labour and cruelty and harshness, of lust and greediness.

I thought of how few there were of mankind to whom the sweet pomp which I sate to see and hear makes any appeal, I thought that for one to whom such beauty was desirable and satisfying, there were thousands who would prefer the brisk interchange of life, the race-course, the athletic spectacle, the restaurant, the tap-room. Was this, indeed, religion at all? I wondered. It did, indeed, use the language of religion, surround itself with the memories of saints, the holy wisdom of the ages. But what was the end of it? Did it inspire those who heard it with the desire to win, to sustain, to ameliorate other souls? Did it inculcate the tender affection, the self-sacrifice, the meek devotion that Christ breathed into life? Did it not rather tend to isolate the soul in a paradise of art, to consecrate the pursuit of individual emotion? It is hard to imagine that a spirit who has plunged into the intoxication of sensuous delight that such a solemnity brings would depart without an increased aversion to all that was loud and rude, wife an intensified reluctance to mingle with the coarser throng. Was it not utterly alien to the spirit of Christ thus to seclude oneself in light and warmth, among sweet strains of music and holy pictures? I do not doubt that these delights have a certain ennobling effect upon the spirit; but are they a medicine for the sorrows of the world? are they not rather the anodyne for sensitive spirits fond of tranquil ease?

I could not restrain the thought that if a man of sensitive nature is penetrated with the spirit of Christ first, if the passion of his soul to seek and save the lost is irresistible, if his faith runs clear and strong, he might win a holy refreshment from these peaceful, sweet solemnities. But the danger is for those who have no such unselfish enthusiasm, and who are tempted, under the guise of religion, to yield themselves with a sense of fastidious complacency to what are, after all, mere sensuous delights. Is it right to countenance such error? If piety frankly said, "These things are no part of religion at all; they are only a pure region of spiritual beauty, a garden of refreshment into which a pilgrim may enter by the way; only a mere halting-place, a home of comfort,"—then I should feel that it would be a consistent attitude. But if it is only a concession to the desire of beauty, if it distracts men from the purpose of Christ, if it is a mere bait for artistic souls, then I cannot believe that it is justified.

While I thus pondered, the anthem rose loud and sweet upon the air; all the pathos, the desire of the world, the craving for delicious rest, stirred and spoke in those moving strains—round a quiet minor air, sung by a deep grave voice of a velvety softness, a hundred mellow pipes wove their sweet harmonies: it told assuredly of a hope and of a truth far off; it drew the soul into a secret haven, where it listened contentedly to the roar of the surge outside. But the error seemed to be that one desired to rest there, like the Lotos-eaters in the enchanted land, and not to fare forth as a soldier of God. It spoke of delight, not of hardness; of acquiescence, not of effort.



XXXII

Strange that the sight of a man being guillotined should inspire me with a burning desire to inflict the very thing which I see another suffer! What a violent metaphor for a very minute matter! It is only a review which I have been reading, in which a pompous, and I imagine clerical, critic comes down with all his might on a man whom I gather to be a graceful and mildly speculative writer. The critic asks ponderously. What right has a man who seems to be untrained in philosophy and theology to speculate on philosophical and religious matters? He then goes on to quote a passage in which the writer attacks the current view of the doctrine of the Atonement, and he adds that a man who is unacquainted with the strides which theology has made of late years in the direction of elucidating that doctrine ought not to presume to discuss it at all. No doubt, if the writer in question made any claim to be discussing the latest theological position on the subject of the Atonement, in a technical way, he would be a mere sciolist; but he is only claiming to discuss the Current conception of the Atonement; and, as far as I can judge, he states it fairly enough. The truth is that the current conceptions of old theological doctrines tend to be very much what the original framers of those doctrines intended them to be. All that later theologians can do, when the old doctrine is exploded, is to prove that the doctrine can be modified and held in some philosophical or metaphysical sense, which was certainly not in the least degree contemplated by the theologians who framed it; but they are quite unable to explain to the man in the street what the new form of the doctrine is; and their only chance of doing that is to substitute for an old and perfectly clear doctrine a new and perfectly clear doctrine. The tone adopted by this critic reminds me of the tone adopted by Newman to his disciples. Mark Pattison relates how on one occasion he advanced, in Newman's presence, some liberal opinion, in the days when he was himself numbered among the Tractarians; and that Newman deposited, as was his wont, an icy "Very likely!" upon the statement; after which, Pattison says, you were expected to go into a corner and think over your sins. Not so does thought make progress!

But the larger question is this. What right have philosophers or theologians to arrogate to themselves the sole right of speculation in these matters? If religion is a vital matter, and if all of us who have any thoughts at all about life and its issues are by necessity to a certain extent practical philosophers, why should we meekly surrender the stuff of speculation to technical disputants? Of course, there are certain regions of experiment that must be left to specialists, and a scientist who devoted himself to embryology might justly complain of a man who aired views on the subject without adequate study. But as far as life goes, any thoughtful and intelligent man who has lived and reflected is in a sense a specialist. In life and conduct, in morality and religion, we are all of us making experiments all day long, whether we will or no; and it may be fairly said that a middle-aged man who has lived thoughtfully has given up far more time to his subject than the greatest scientist has devoted to his particular branch. A church-goer, like myself, has been lectured once or twice a week on theology for as long as he can remember. For years I have speculated, with deep curiosity, on problems of religion, on the object and ultimate issues of life and death. Neither philosophers nor theologians have ever discovered a final solution which satisfies all the data. The theologian, indeed, is encumbered by a vast mass of human tradition, which he is compelled to treat more or less as divine revelation. The whole religious position has been metamorphosed by scientific discovery; and what theologian or philosopher has ever come near to solving the incompatibility of the apparent inflexibility of natural law with the no less apparent liberty of moral choice? Theologians and philosophers may, if they choose, attempt to crush the speculations of an experimentalist in life, though I think they would be better employed in welcoming them as an instance of how theological and metaphysical conceptions strike upon the ordinary mind; but they shall not prevent one who, like myself, has observed life closely under aspects which the technical student has had no opportunity of observing it, from making my comment upon what I see. It is possible that such comments may appeal to ordinary people with even more force than technical considerations are likely to appeal. We have all to sin and to suffer, to enjoy and to fear; we find our instinct at variance with our reason and our moral sense alike. We have in our souls conceptions of justice, truth, purity, generosity, and we find the natural law, which we would fain believe is the law of God, constantly thwarting and even insulting these conceptions; and yet these conceptions are as real and vivid to us as the law which takes no account of them. We find theologians basing their faith on documents which every day appear to be less and less historical, and on deductions drawn from these documents by men who believed them to be historical. I have the utmost sympathy with the position in which theologians find themselves; but they have mostly their own prudence to thank for it; they are so cautious about sifting the chaff from the grain, that they will not throw away the chaff for fear of casting away a single grain. They are so averse to unsettling the faith of the weak, that the vitality has ebbed away from the faith of the strong; they have clung so hard to tradition, that they have obscured fact; they would confine the limbs of manhood in the garb of childhood; and thus they have forfeited the confidence of intelligent men, and ranged themselves with the credulous, the comfortable, and the unenterprising. Intolerant persecution is out of date, and the question will be solved by the stranding of the theological hull, owing to the quiet withdrawal of the vital tide.



XXXIII

My way this afternoon lay through a succession of old hamlets, one closely bordering on another, that lie all along the base of the wold. I have no doubt that the reason for their position is simply that it is just along the base of the hills that the springs break out, and a village near a perennial and pure spring generally represents a very old human settlement indeed. Sometimes the wold drew near the road, sometimes lay more remote; its pale fallows, its faintly-tinted pastures, seemed to lie very quietly to-day under the grey laden sky. Here a chalk-pit showed its miniature precipices; here a leafless covert detached its wiry sprays against the light. The villages were pretty enough, with their quaint, irregular white cottages, comfortably thatched, among the little orchards and gardens; and in every village the ancient, beautiful church, each with a character of its own and a special feature of interest or beauty, lay nestled in trees, or held up its grey tower over ricks and barns. We are apt to forget what beautiful things these churches are, because they are so common, so familiar; if there were but a few of them, we should make careful pilgrimages to see them, but now we hardly turn off the road to visit them.

I often wonder what exactly the feeling and the spirit were that produced them, what the demand precisely was that created the supply. I suppose they were almost always the gift of some wealthy person; of course labour and perhaps materials were cheaper, but there must have been a much larger proportion of people employed in the trade of building than is the case nowadays; probably these churches were slowly and leisurely built, in the absence of modern mechanical facilities. It is difficult to conceive how the thing was carried out at all in places with so few resources—how the stone was conveyed thither over the infamous miry roads, how the carving was done, how the builders were lodged and fed. One would like, too, to know exactly what part the churches played in the social life of the place. Some people would have us believe that the country people of that date had a simple enjoyment of beauty and artistic instincts which caused them to take a pleasure, which they do not now feel, in these beautiful little sanctuaries. I do not know what the evidence is for that. I find it very hard to believe that our agricultural labourers have gone backwards in this respect; I should imagine it was rather the other way. My impression is that education has probably increased the power of perception and appreciation rather than diminished it. It is possible that the absence of excitement, of diffuse reading, of communication in those days may have tended to concentrate the affections and interests of agricultural people more on their immediate surroundings, but I rather doubt it; the problem is, considering the much greater roughness and coarseness of village life in the Middle Ages, how there could have existed a poetical and artistic instinct among villagers, which they have now forfeited.

These churches certainly indicate that a very different view of religion prevailed; they testify to a simpler and stronger sense of religion than now exists, but not, I think, to a truer sense of it. They stand, I do not doubt, for a much more superstitious and barbarous view of the relation of God to men; the people who built them had, I imagine, the idea of conciliating God by the gift of a seemly sanctuary, a hope of improving not only their spiritual prospects in the after-life, but of possibly advancing their material prosperity in this, by thus displaying their piety and zeal in God's service. I cannot believe that the churches were designed with the intention of making the rustic inhabitants of the place holier, more virtuous, more refined—except incidentally; they were built more in obedience to ecclesiastical tradition, in a time when rationalism had not begun to cast doubt on what I may call the Old Testament theory of the relation of God to men—the theory of a wrathful power, vindictive, jealous of recognition, withholding blessings from the impious and heaping them upon the submissive. As to those who worshipped there, I imagine that the awe and reverence they felt was based upon the same sort of view, and connected religious observance with the hope of prosperity and wealth, and the neglect of it with the fear of chastisement. If misfortune fell upon the godly, they regarded it as the chastening of God inflicted upon the sons of His love; if it fell upon the ungodly, it was a punishment for sin; religion was a process by which one might avert the punishment of sin, induce the bestowal of favours, and in any case improve one's future prospects of heaven. No doubt this form of religion produced a simpler kind of faith, and a profounder reverence; but I do not think that they were very beautiful qualities when so produced, because they seem to me very alien from the simplicity of the religion of Christ. The difficulty in which popular religion finds itself, nowadays, is that in a Protestant Church like our own, neither priest nor people believe in the old mechanical theories of religion, and yet the people are not yet capable of being moved by purer conceptions of it. A priest can no longer threaten his congregation sincerely with the penalties of hell for neglecting the observances of the Church; on the other hand, the conception of religion as a refining, solemnising attitude of soul, bringing tranquillity and harmony into life, is too subtle an idea to have a very general hold upon unimaginative persons. Thus the beauty of these exquisite and stately little sanctuaries, enriched by long associations and touched with a delicate grace by the gentle hand of time, has something infinitely pathetic about it. The theory that brought them into existence has lost its hold, while the spirit that could animate them and give them a living message has not yet entered them; the refined grace, the sweet solemnity of these simple buildings, has no voice for the plain, sensible villager; it cannot be interpreted to him. If all the inhabitants of a village were humble, simple, spiritually minded people, ascetic in life, with a strong sense of beauty and quality, then a village church might have a tranquil and inspiring influence. But who that knows anything of village life can anticipate even in the remote future such a type of character prevailing? Meanwhile the beautiful churches, with all the grace of antiquity and subtle beauty, must stand as survivals of a very different condition of life and belief; while we who love them can only hope that a more vital consciousness of religion may come back to the shrines from which somehow the significance seems to have ebbed away. They are now too often mere monuments and memorials of the past. Can one hope that they may become the inspiration and the sanctification of the present?



XXXIV

I have just returned from a very curious and interesting visit. I have been to stay with an old school friend of my own, a retired Major; he has a small place of his own in the country, and has lately married a very young and pretty wife. I met him by chance in my club in London, looking more grey and dim than a man who has just married a lovely and charming girl ought to look. He asked me rather pressingly to come and stay with him; and though I do not like country-house visits, for the sake of the old days I went.

Well, it was a very interesting visit; I was warmly welcomed. The young wife, who I must say is the daughter of a penniless country clergyman with a large family, was radiant; the Major was quietly and undemonstratively pleased to see me; the veil of the years fell off, and I found myself back on the old easy terms with him, as when we were schoolboys together thirty years ago. He is a very simple and transparent creature, and I read him as if he were a book. He indulged in almost extravagant panegyrics of his wife and descriptions of his own happiness. But I very soon made a discovery: his charming wife is, not to put too fine a point upon it, a fool. She is perfectly harmless, good-natured, and virtuous. But she is a very silly and a very conventional girl She is full of delight at her promotion; but she is entirely brainless, and not even very affectionate. She as wholly preoccupied about her new possessions, and the place she is going to take in the county; she cares for her husband, because he represents her social success, and because he is a creditable and presentable man. But she has no grain of sympathy, perception, humour, or emotion. I began by thinking it was rather a tragedy; my old friend had married for love; he is anything but a fool himself, except for this one serious error, the falling in love with a girl who can give him none of the things he desires. He is a very serious, simple, intelligent, and tenderhearted fellow, with all sorts of odd ideas of his own, which he produces with an admirable humility. He likes books; he reads poetry—I even suspect him of writing it. He is interested in social problems, and has a dozen kindly enterprises—a club, a carving class, a natural history society, and so forth—for the benefit of the village where he lives. He would have been an ideal country clergyman; he is an excellent man of business, and does a good deal of county work. He is fond of sport, too—in fact, one of those grave, affectionate, solid men who are to be found living quietly in every part of England—a characteristic Englishman, indeed. But the strain of romance in his nature has for once led him wrong, and the mistake seemed irreparable. I was at first inclined to regard him with deep compassion. He is the soul of chivalry, and it struck me as deeply pathetic to see him smiling indulgently, but with a sad and bewildered air, at the terrible snobbishness, to be candid, which his lively wife's conversation revealed. She was for ever talking about "the right people," and the only subject which seemed to arouse her enthusiasm was the fact that she had been received on equal terms by some of the wives of neighbouring squires. The Major tried to give a pleasant turn to the conversation, and when he was alone with me, after praising the practical good sense of his wife, added, "Of course she hasn't quite settled down yet! She has lived rather a poky life, and the change has upset her a little." That was the nearest that the good fellow could get to an apology, and it touched me a good deal. I did my part, and praised my hostess's charm and beauty, and expressed gratitude for the warmth of my welcome.

But now that I have had time to reflect on the situation, I am not at all sure that the Major is not to be congratulated after all. He has got before him a perfectly definite occupation, and one which he will fulfil with all the generosity of his nature. He was a lonely man before his marriage, and, like all lonely men, was becoming somewhat self-absorbed. Now his work is cut out for him. He has got to make the best of a tiresome and unsympathetic wife. I will venture to say that if the Major lives to be eighty, his wife will never suspect that he does not adore and admire her. He will never say a harsh or unkind or critical thing to her. He may induce her, perhaps, by gentle precepts, to moderate her complacency; and perhaps, too, they will have children, and some kind affection may awake in his shallow little partner's heart. The Major will make a perfect father, and he will find in his children, if only they inherit something of his own wise and tender nature, a deep and lasting joy. I think that if he had married an adoring and sympathetic wife, he might almost have grown exacting—perhaps even selfish, because he is the sort of man that requires to have the best part of him evoked. He is unambitious and in a way indolent; and if everything had been done for him—his wishes anticipated, sympathy lavished upon him—he would have had no region in which to exercise that self-restraint which is now a necessity of the case. We are very liable to try and arrange the lives of others for them, and to think we could have done better for them than Providence; and since I have pondered over the situation, I am inclined to be ashamed of myself for feeling the regret which I began by feeling. If there was any weakness in my friend's mind, if I thought that he would grow irritable, harsh, impatient with his silly wife, it would be different. But he will have to stand between her and the world; she will shock and distress all his finer feelings and instincts of propriety. They will go and pay visits, and he will have to hear her saying all sorts of trivial and vulgar things. He will make himself into a kind guardian and interpreter and champion for this foolish young woman. She will try his patience, his endurance, his chivalry to the uttermost; and he will never fail her for an instant—he will never even confess to himself in the loneliness of his own heart that there is anything amiss. The severest criticism he will ever pass upon her will be a half-hearted wish that she should exhibit the best side of herself more consistently. And so I come at last to think that there are many worse things in the world for a strong man than to be the bulwark and fortress of a thoroughly inferior nature. He feels the strain at first, because it is all so different from what he expected and hoped. But he will soon grow used to that. And, after all, his wife is both lovely and healthy; she will always be delightful to look at. Indeed, if he can teach, her to hold her tongue, to listen instead of rattling away, to smile with those pretty eyes of hers as if she understood, to ask the simplest questions about other people's tastes and preferences, instead of describing her own garden and poultry-yard, she might pass for a delightful and even enchanting woman. But I fear that neither he nor she are quite clever enough for that. I do not personally envy my old friend; if I were in his position, the situation would bring out the very worst side of my nature. But because I realise how much better a fellow he is than myself, I believe that he has every prospect of being a decidedly happy man.



XXXV

There are certain writers—men, too, of ability, humour, perspicacity, with wide knowledge, lucidity of expression, firm intellectual grip, genuine admirations, who really live among the things of the mind—whose writings are almost wholly distressing to me, and affect me exactly as the cry of an itinerant vendor in a quiet and picturesque town affects me. It is an honest trade enough; he saves people a great deal of trouble; he sells, no doubt, perfectly wholesome and inexpensive things; but I am glad when he has turned the corner, and when his raucous clamour is heard more faintly—glad when he is out of sight, and still more when he is out of hearing. So with these authors; if I take up one of their books, however brilliant and even true the statements may be, I am sorry that the writer has laid hands upon a thing I admire and value. He seems like a damp-handed auctioneer, bawling in public, and pointing out the beauties of a mute and pathetic statue.

I am thinking now of one writer in particular, a well-known man of letters, a critic, essayist, and biographer; a man of great acuteness and with strong and vehement preferences in literature. When I have been forced by circumstances, as I sometimes have, to read one of his books, I find myself at once in a condition of irritable opposition. He writes sensibly, acutely, epigrammatically; but there is a vile complacency about it all, an underlying assumption that every one who does not agree with him in the smallest particular is necessarily a fool—a sense that he feels that he has gone into the merits of a book, and that there is exactly as much and as little in it as he tells you. He is very often right; that is the misery of it. But this lack of urbanity, this unnecessary insolence, is a very grave fault in a writer—fatal, indeed, to his permanence. He turns a book or a person inside out, dissects it in a deft and masterly way; but one feels at the end as one might feel about an anatomist who has dissected every fibre of an animal's body, classified every organ, traced every muscle and nerve, and bids you at the end take it on his authority that there is no such thing as the vital principle or the informing soul, because he has shown you everything that there is to see. Yet the finest essence of all, the living and breathing spirit, has escaped him.

But what is a still worse fault in the writer of whom I speak is that he is the victim of a certain intellectual snobbishness. By which I mean that when he has once conceived an admiration for a historical personage or a writer he becomes unable to criticise him; he can only justify and praise him, sling mud at his opponents, and, so to speak, clear a space round his hero by knocking over in opprobrious terms any one who may threaten his supremacy. He condones and even praises any fault in his idol; and what would be in his eyes a damning fault in one whom he happened to dislike, becomes a salient virtue in the person whom he praises. He condemns Swift for his coarseness and praises Johnson for his outspokenness. He condemns Robert Browning for his obscurity and praises George Meredith for his rich complexity. He would never see that the victory lies with the appreciator of any personality, because, if you happen to appreciate a figure whom he himself dislikes, you are proclaimed to be guilty of perversity and bad taste. Thus I not only feel sore when he abuses a character whom I love, but I feel ashamed when he decries one whom I hate, for I am tempted to feel that I must have grossly misunderstood him; and even when he rapturously and unctuously belauds some figure that I admire, I feel my admiration to be smirched and tarnished.

The one quality which I think he always misses in a character is a high, pure, delicate sense of beauty, the subtlest fibre of poetry. This my swashbuckler misnames sentimentality—and thus I feel that he always tends to admire the wrong qualities, because he condones even what he calls sentimentality in one whom he chooses to admire.

It is this attitude of disdain and scorn, based upon the intellect rather than upon the soul, that I think is one of the most terrible and satanical things in life. Such a quality may be valuable in scientific research, it may be successful in politics, because there are still among us many elementary people who really like to see a man belaboured; it may be successful in business, it may being a man wealth, position, and a certain kind of influence. But it never inspires confidence or affection; and though such a man may be feared and respected on the stage of life, there is an invariable and general sense of relief when he quits it.

"The fruit of the Spirit," wrote the wise apostle—who knew, too, the bitter pleasures of a vehement controversy, and was no milk-and-water saint—"the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, meekness, long-suffering, kindness." None of these fruits hang upon the vigorous boughs of our friend's tree. He is rather like that detestable and spidery thing the araucaria, which has a wound for every tender hand, and invites no bright-eyed feathered songsters to perch or build among its sinister branches.

The only critic who helps me is the critic whose humility keeps pace with his acuteness, who leads me gently where he has himself trodden patiently and observantly, and does not attempt to disfigure and ravage the regions which he has not been able to desire to explore. The man who will show me unsuspected connections, secret paths of thought, who will teach me how to extend my view, how I may pass quietly from the known to the unknown; who will show me that stars and flowers have voices, and that running water has a quiet spirit of its own; and who in the strange world of human life will unveil for me the hopes and fears, the deep and varied passions, that bind men together and part them, and that seem to me such unreasonable and inexplicable things if they are bounded by the narrow fences of life—emotions that travel so long and intricate a path, that are born with such an amazing suddenness and attain so large a volume, so fierce a velocity—this is the interpreter and guide whom I would welcome, even if he know but a little more than myself; while if my guide is infallible and disdainful, if he denies what he cannot see and derides what he has never felt, then I feel that I have but one enemy the more, in a place where I am beset with foes.



XXXVI

I have had rather a humiliating experience to-day. A young literary man, whom I knew slightly, came down to see me, and stayed the night. He was a small, shapely, trim personage, with a pale, eloquent face, large eyes, mobile lips, and of extraordinary intelligence. I was prepared—I make the confession very frankly—to find a certain shyness and deference about my young friend. He has not made his mark as yet, though I think he is likely to make it; he has written nothing in particular, whereas I am rather a veteran in these matters.

We had a long talk about all kinds of things, mostly books; and it presently dawned upon me that, so far from being either shy or deferential, it was rather the other way. He looked upon himself, and quite rightly, as an advanced and modern young man, brimful of ideas and thoroughly abreast of the thoughts and movement of the day. Presently I made a fresh discovery, that he looked upon me as an old fogey, from whom intelligence and sympathy could hardly be expected. He discussed some modern books with great acuteness, and I became aware that, so far from desiring to learn my opinion, he had not the slightest wish even to hear me express it. He listened very courteously to my criticisms, as a man might listen to the talk of a child. However, when I had once got hold of the clue, I abandoned myself joyfully to what appeared to me to be the humour of the situation. I thought to myself that here was an opportunity of turning inside out the mind of a very young and intelligent man. I might learn, I thought, what the new ideas were, the direction in which the younger generation were tending. Now, it would be invidious to mention the names of the books that we discussed. Many of the volumes that he ranked very high, I had not even read; and he was equally at sea in the old books that seemed to me the most vital and profound. I discovered that the art that he preferred was a kind of brilliant impressionism. He did not care much about the truth of it to life; the desirable quality seemed to him to be a sort of arresting daring of statement. He was not a narrow-minded man at all; he had read a great many books, both old and new, but he valued specious qualities above everything, and books which seemed to me to be like the crackling of thorns under a pot seemed to him to be the glowing heart of the fire. The weakness of my young friend's case lay, I thought, in the fact that he not only undervalued experience, but that he evidently did not believe that experience could have anything to say to him. With the swift insight of youth, he had discounted all that, and growing older appeared to him to be a mere stiffening and hardening of prejudices. Where he seemed to me to fail was in any appreciation of tender, simple, wistful things; as I grow older, I feel the pathetic charm of life, its hints, its sorrow, its silence, its infinite dreams, its darkening horizon, more and more acutely. Of all this he was impatient. His idea was to rejoice in his strength; he loved, I felt, the sparkling facets of the gem, the dazzling broken reflections, rather than its inner heart of light. The question which pressed on me with a painful insistence was this: "Was he wholly in the right? was I wholly in the wrong?" I am inclined, of course, to believe that men do their best artistic work in their youth, while they are passionately just, charmingly indiscreet, relentlessly severe; before they have learnt the art of compromise or the force of limitations. I suppose that I, like all other middle-aged writers, am tempted to think that my own youth is miraculously prolonged; that I have not lost in fire what I have gained in patience and width of view. But he would believe that I have lost the glow, and that what seems to me to be gentle and beautiful experience is but the closing in of weariness and senility. I have often thought myself that an increase of accomplishment goes hand-in-hand with an increased tameness of spirit. And the most pathetic of all writers are, to my mind, those whose mastery of their art grows as the initial impulse declines. But my young friend appeared to me to value only prodigal and fantastic vigour, and to prefer the sword-dance to the minuet.

I began to perceive at last that he was feeling as Hamlet did when the bones of Yorick were unearthed; with a kind of luxurious pity for my mouldering conditions; touched, perhaps, a little by the thought that I was excluded from the bright and brave shows of earth, and sadly conscious of the odour of corruption. I felt as he strolled with me round my garden on the following morning that he was regarding my paltry, unadventurous life with a sincere pity, as the life of one who had stolen from the brisk encounters of wit and revelry to a quiet bedroom and a basin of gruel. And yet the curious thing was that I felt no kind of resentment about it at all. I did not envy him his youth and his pride; indeed, I felt glad to have escaped from it, if I was like what he was at his age. The world seemed full to me of a whole range of fine sensations, gentle secrets, remote horizons, of which he had no perception. Indeed, I think he despised my whole conception of patient and faithful art. His idea rather was that one should not spend much time over work, but that one should break at intervals into a spurting, fizzing flame, and ascend like a rocket over the heads of the crowd, discharging a shower of golden stars.

I may, of course, be only coming down like a burnt-out stick; and this is where the humiliation lies; but I feel rather as if I were soaring to worlds unknown: though perhaps, after all, that is only one of the happy delusions, the gentle compensations, which God showers down so plentifully upon the middle-aged.

I have had two visitors lately who have set me reflecting upon the odd social habits of the men of my nation. They were not unusual experiences—indeed I think they may fairly be called typical.

One of these was a man who invited himself to come and see me; the excuse, a small matter of business; but he added that we had many common friends, that he had read my books, and much wished to make my acquaintance.

He came down to luncheon and to spend the afternoon. He was a tall, handsome, well-dressed man, with a courteous, conventional manner, but every inch a gentleman. He had a perfect social ease; he began by paying me rather trite compliments, saying that he found my books extremely sympathetic, and that I constantly put feelings into words which he had always had and which he had never been able to express. Then we turned to our business and finished it in five minutes. It now remained to fill the remainder of the time. We strolled round the garden; we lunched; we strolled again. We had an early tea, and I walked down to the station with him. I had thought that perhaps he wished to discuss some of the topics on which I had written in my books; but he did not appear to have any such wish. He had lately taken a house himself in the country; and he appeared to wish to tell me about that. I was delighted to hear about it, because I am always interested to hear how other people live; but I began to be surprised when I discovered that this seemed to be the only thing he wished to talk about. He described the house, the garden, the village, the neighbours; he described his mode of life, his parties, the things he said to other people, the visits he paid. I became a mute listener. Occasionally I assented or asked a question; but if I attempted to contribute to the conversation he became restive and bored; so I merely let him have his head, and he talked on. I will confess that I derived a good deal of entertainment from my companion, for he was a shrewd and observant man. I do not think I ever learnt so much about an entire stranger in so short a time. I even knew what he had for breakfast and what he drank with his luncheon. When we said goodbye at the station, he said that he had spent a very pleasant day, and I am sure it was the truth; he pressed me to visit him with much cordiality, and said that it had given him great pleasure to make my acquaintance; we bowed and smiled and waved our hands, and the train moved out of the station.

The surprising thing is that it never seemed to occur to him that he had not made my acquaintance at all. He had seen my house, indeed, but every detail that he observed had suggested to him some superior detail in his own house. He had certainly allowed me to make his acquaintance, but that had not been the professed object of his visit. He could not have talked more obligingly if I had been an interviewer who had desired to write his biography. I do not believe that it had ever crossed his mind that the occasion had been anything but a complete success. His enjoyment was evidently to converse, and he had conversed unintermittently for several hours. The man was an egoist, of course, but he had not talked exclusively about himself. Much of his talk had been devoted to other people, but they were all of them the people whom he saw in his own private mirror. I have no doubt that for the time being I was a figure in his dreams, and that I shall be described with the same minuteness to the unhappy recipients of his confidences who are now awaiting him at dinner,—at which I may mention he always drinks whisky-and-seltzer.

I do not mean that every one is like this; but there are really a larger number of people in the world than I like to think whose delight it is not to perceive but to relate. The odd thing is that my friend should think it necessary to preface his meeting with courteous formulas, which I suppose are really merely liturgical, like the Dominus vobiscum, relating to what a polite Frenchman the other day called votre presence et votre precieux concours.

It is really impossible to convey anything to such people; in fact, it is almost impossible to communicate with them at all. "Never tell people how you are," as a trenchant lady of my acquaintance said to me the other day; "they don't want to know."

I think that the society of people who do want to know, and who ply one with questions as to one's tastes and habits, are almost more trying than the purely narrative people, and induce a subtle sense of moral hypochondria. The perfect mixture, which is not a common one, is that of the person who both desires to know and is willing to illustrate one's experience by his own. Then there is a still more inexplicable class—the people who go greedily to entertainments, come early and go late, who seem to wish neither to learn nor to communicate, but sit staring and tongue-tied. The inveterate talker is the least tiresome of the three undesirable types, because one at least learns something of another's point of view. But the danger of general society to a person like myself, who has a desire to play a certain part in talk, is that sometimes one is tied to an uncompromising person as to a post for execution. I love a decent equality in the matter of talk. I want to hear other people's views and to contrast my own with them. I do not wish to lie, like a merchant vessel near a pirate ship, and to be fired into at intervals until I surrender. Neither do I want to do all the firing myself.

The odd thing is that people, like the saints in the psalm, are so joyful in glory! They seem entirely content with their aims and methods, and not even dimly to suspect that they might be enlarged or improved. Some of them want to talk, and some of them seem not even to wish to be talked to; a very few to listen, and a small and happy percentage desire both to give and to take.

Well, I suppose that I ought to be glad that my visitor enjoyed himself; but I cannot help feeling that my coachman would have done as well as myself—indeed better, for he is a pleasantly taciturn man, and would not even have given way to rebellious thoughts.

The impression left on my mind by my visitor is just as though a grasshopper had leapt upon my window-sill from the garden-bed, and sate there awhile, with his blank eyes, his long, impassive, horse-like face, twiddling his whisks and sawing out a whizzing note with his dry arm. It would please me to observe his dry manners, his unsympathetic and monotonous cries; but neither visitor nor grasshopper would seem within the reach of any human emotion, except a mild curiosity, and even amusement. Indeed, the only difference is that if I had clapped my hands the grasshopper would have gone off like a skipjack, and after a sky-high leap would have landed struggling among the laurels; while the more I clapped my hands at my visitor, the longer he would have been delighted to stay.

My other visitor, who came a day or two later, was a very different type of man. He was a young, vigorous, healthy creature, who had lately gone as a master to a big public school. He came at my invitation, being the son of an old friend of mine. He, too, spent a day with me, and left on my mind a very different impression, namely, that I should grow to respect and like him the more that I saw of him. There was nothing insincere or lacking in genuineness about him. I felt his solidity, his loyalty, his uprightness very strongly. But he exhibited on first acquaintance—due no doubt to a sturdy British shyness—all the qualities that make us so detested upon the Continent, and that lead the more expansive foreigner, who only sees the superficial aspect of the Englishman, to think of us as a brutal nation. He was an odd mixture of awkwardness and complacency, a desire to be courteous struggling with a desire to show his independence; he had no ease of manner, no bonhomie, but a gruff and ugly kind of jocosity, which I am sure was not really natural to him, but was his protest against the possibility of my considering him to be shy. He seemed anxious to show that he was as good a man as myself, which I was quite ready to take for granted. He jested about the dulness of the country; said that he thought it made people jolly mouldy. He did not see that it was a pity to press that fact upon me; the truth was that he was thinking of himself for the time being, though he was no egoist. And whereas the courtly egoist pays you compliments first and then returns to a more congenial self-contemplation, my burly young friend would, I have not the slightest doubt, grow more companionable and considerate every day that one knew him. But his manner was the manner of the common-room and the cricket field, that odd British humour, that, without meaning to be unkind, thrusts its darts clumsily in the weak points of the armour. It is this, I think, that makes English public school life so good a discipline, if one unlearns its methods as soon as one has done with it, because it makes men tolerant of criticism and even ridicule; its absence of sentiment makes them tough; its absence of courtesy makes them strong.

But I did not like it at the time. He surveyed my belongings with good-humoured contempt. He said he did not care for fiddling about a garden himself, and at my fowl-house he jested of fleas. In my library he said he had no time for poking about with books. I asked him about his life at P—— and he assured me it was not half bad; that the boys were all right if you knew how to take them; and he told me some pleasant stories of some of his inefficient colleagues. He said that a good deal of the work was rot, but that they had a first-rate cricket pitch, and a splendid Pro.

Yet this young man took a high classical degree, and is, I know for a fact, an admirable schoolmaster, sensible, effective, and even wise; he makes his boys work, and work contentedly, and he is not only popular but really trusted by the boys. He would never do a mean thing or an unkind thing; he is absolutely manly, straightforward, and honourable, and I gladly admit that a man's behaviour on a social occasion is a very trivial thing beside these greater qualities. But what is it, then, which causes this curious gruffness and rudeness, this apparent assumption that every one is slightly grotesque, low-minded, and dishonest? For the style of humour which this type develops is the humour that consists in calling attention in public to any deficiencies that you may observe in a man's appearance, manner, and surroundings, and also taking for granted that his motives for action are bad. I do not mean to say that my young friend considers me grotesque or dishonest, but his idea of humour is to make a pretence of thinking so. He would be distressed if he thought that he had given me pain; his intention is to diffuse a genial good-humour into the scene; and if he were bantered in the same way, he would take it as an evidence of friendly feeling.

The truth is that it is really schoolboy humour belatedly prolonged. Vituperation is the schoolboy's idea of friendly banter. The schoolboy does not so much consider the feelings of his victim as his companions' need for amusement. But I am sure that the tendency nowadays is, somehow or other, to prolong the hobbledehoy days. There is so much more organisation of everything at schools that young men remain boys longer than they used to do. Partly, too, in the case of this young man, it arises from his never having had a change of atmosphere. He remained a jolly schoolboy till the end of his University days, and then he went back to the society of schoolboys. He is simply undeveloped; and the mistake he makes is to consider himself a man of the world.

But partly, too, it arises from national characteristics, the preference for bluntness and frankness and outspokenness; the tendency to believe that a display of courtesy and emotion and consideration is essentially insincere. One does not at all want to get rid of frankness and outspokenness. Combined with a certain degree of deference and sympathy, they are the most delightful graces in the world. But though the attitude which I have been describing prides itself upon being above all things unaffected, it is in reality a highly affected mood, because it is all based on a kind of false shame. Such a man as my young friend does not really say what he thinks, and very rarely thinks what he says. He is, as I have said, a high-minded, intelligent, and sensible man; but he thinks it priggish to let his real opinions be known, and thus is priggish without perceiving it. The essence of priggishness is the disapproving attitude, and it is priggish to wish to appear superior; but my young friend, in the back of his mind, does think himself the superior of courteous, sympathetic, and emotional persons.

And thus I did not particularly enjoy his visit, because I could not feel at ease with my visitor. I could not say frankly what I thought, but had to select topics which I thought he would consider unaffected.

I think, in fact, that we pay too high a price for our British reticence: perhaps we keep a few foolish and gushing people in order, stifle effusiveness, and dry up unctuousness; but we do so at the price of silencing a much larger number of simple and direct people, and lose much variety of characteristics and interchange of sincere opinions thereby!



XXXVIII

There are some people in the world, I am sure, who are born solitary, who are not conscious of any closeness of relationship with others. They are not necessarily ungenial people—indeed they sometimes have a great deal of external geniality; but when it is a question of forming a closer relationship, they are alarmed and depressed by the responsibility which attaches to it, and become colder instead of warmer, the deeper and more imperative that the claims upon them become. Such people are not as a rule unhappy, because they are spared the pain which arises from the strain of intimacy, and because loss and bereavement do not rend and devastate their hearts. They miss perhaps the best kind of happiness, but they do not suffer from the penalties that dog the great affections of men.

I had an old friend, who was a boy at school with me, who was of this type. He was essentially solitary in spirit, though he was amiable and sociable enough. There can be no harm in my telling the story of his life, as the actors in it are all long ago dead.

He was at the University with me, though not at the same College; I think that owing to a certain similarity of tastes, and perhaps of temperament, I was his nearest and most intimate friend. He confided in me as far as he confided in any one; but I always felt that there was a certain fence behind which I was never admitted; and probably it was because I never showed any signs of desiring to claim more than he was ready to give in the way of intimacy that he found himself very much at his ease with me.

A year or two after he left the University I heard from him, to my great surprise, that he was engaged to be married. I went up to see him in town, where he was then living, and he took me to see his fiancee. She was one of the most beautiful and charming creatures I have ever seen, and the two were evidently, as the phrase goes, very much in love. I must say that my friend was superficially a most attractive fellow; he had a commanding presence, and great personal beauty, and there was a certain air of mystery about him which must, I think, have added to the charm. They were married, and for a time, to all appearances, enjoyed great happiness. A child was born to them, a daughter. I saw them at intervals, and my impression was that my friend had found the one thing that he wanted, the companionship of a loving, beautiful, and intelligent woman.

It was in the course of the year after the birth of the child that I became aware that something had gone wrong; a shadow seemed to have fallen upon them. I became aware in the course of a few days which I spent with them in a little house by the sea, which they had taken for the summer, that all was not well. My friend seemed to me distrait and heavy-hearted; his wife seemed to be pathetically affectionate and anxious. There was no indifference or harshness apparent in his manner to her; indeed, he seemed to me to be extraordinarily considerate and tender. One day—we had gone off in the morning for a long ramble on the cliffs, leaving his wife in the company of an old school friend of hers who had come to stay with them—he suddenly said to me, with a determined air, that he wished to consult me on a point. I expressed the utmost readiness to be of use, and wondered in an agitated way what the matter could be; but he was silent for so long—we were sitting on a grassy headland high above a broad, calm expanse of summer sea—that I wondered if he had repented of his resolution. At last he spoke. I will not attempt to reproduce his words, but he said to me, with an astonishing calmness, that he found that he was ceasing to care for his wife: he said very quietly that it was not that he cared for anyone else, but that his marriage had been a mistake; that he had engaged himself in a moment of passion, and that this had subsequently evaporated. In the days of his first love he had poured out his heart to his wife, and now he no longer desired to do so; he did not wish any more to share his thoughts with her, and he was aware that she was conscious of this; he said that it was infinitely pathetic and distressing to him to see the efforts that she made to regain his confidence, and that he tried as far as he could to talk to her freely, but that he had no longer any sincere desire to do it, and that the effort was acutely painful; he was, he said, deeply distressed that she should be bound to him, and he indicated that he was fully aware that her own affection for him had undergone no change, and that it was not likely to do so. He asked me what he had better do. Should he continue to struggle with his reluctance to communicate his feelings to her; should he endeavour to make her acquiesce in altered relations; should he tell her frankly what had happened; or should he—he confessed that he would prefer this himself—arrange for a virtual separation? "I feel," he said, "that I have lost the only thing in the world I really care about—my liberty." It sounds, as I thus describe the situation, as though my friend was acting in an entirely selfish and cold-blooded manner; but I confess that it did not strike me in that light at the time. He spoke in a mood of dreary melancholy, as a man might speak who had committed a great mistake, and felt himself unequal to the responsibilities he had assumed. He spoke of his wife with a deep compassionateness, as though intensely alive to the sorrow that he had inconsiderately inflicted upon her. He condemned himself unsparingly, and said frankly that he had known all the time that he was doing wrong in allowing himself to be carried away by his passion. "I hoped," he said, "that it might have been the awakening of a new life in me, and that it would be an initiation for me into the inner life of the world, from which I had always been excluded." He went on to say that he would make any sacrifice he could for her happiness—adding gravely, looking at me with a strange air, that if he thought that she would be the happier if he killed himself, he would not hesitate to do it. "But live as we are living," he said, "I cannot. My life has become a continual and wearing drama, in which I can never be myself, but am condemned to play an unreal part."

I made him the only answer that was possible—namely, that I thought that he had undertaken a certain responsibility and that he was bound in honour to fulfil it. I added that I thought that the whole of his future peace of mind depended upon his rising to the situation, even though it were to be a martyrdom. I said that I thought, believing as I did in the providential guidance of individual lives, that it was the crisis of his fate; that he had the opportunity of playing a noble part.

"Yes," he said dispassionately, "if it was the case of a single action of the kind that is usually called heroic, I think I could do it; what I can't say that I think I am equal to is the making of my life into one long pretence; and what is more, it will not be successful—I cannot hope to deceive her day after day."

"Well," I said, "it is a terrible position; but I think you are bound to make the attempt."

"Thanks," he said; "you don't mind my having asked you? I thought it would perhaps make things clearer, and I think that on the whole I agree with you." He then began to talk of other matters with the utmost calmness. The sequel is a strange one; what he said to his wife I do not know, but for the few days that I spent with them there was a very different feeling in the air; he had contrived to reassure her, and her anxiety seemed for a time, at all events, to be at an end. A few days after I left them, the child fell ill, and died within a week. The shock was too much for the wife, and within a month she followed the child to the grave. My friend was left alone; and it seemed to me like a ghastly fulfilment of his desires. I was with him at the funeral of his wife; is it terrible to relate that there was a certain tranquillity about him that suggested the weariness of one off whom a strain had been lifted? But his own life was to be a short one; about two years after he himself died very suddenly, as he had always desired to die. I saw him often in the interval; he never recurred to the subject, and I never liked to reopen it. Only once did he speak to me of her. "I feel," he said to me on one occasion, quite suddenly, "that the two are waiting for me somewhere, and that they understand; and my hope is that when I am freed from this vile body I shall be different—perhaps worthy of their love; it is all within me somewhere, though I cannot get at it. Don't think of me," he said, turning to me, "as a very brutal person. I have tried my best; but I think that the capacity for real feeling has been denied me."

It is a very puzzling episode; what I feel is that though we always recognise the limitations of people physically and mentally, we do not sufficiently recognise the moral and emotional limitations. We think of the will as a dominant factor in people's lives, as a thing that we can all make use of if we choose; we forget that it is just as strictly limited and conditioned as all our other faculties.



XXXIX

I have an acquaintance at Cambridge, John Meyrick by name, who visits me here at intervals, and is to me an object of curious interest. He is a Fellow and Lecturer of his College. He came up there on a scholarship from a small school. He worked hard; he was a moderate oar; he did not make many friends, but he was greatly respected for a sort of quiet directness and common-sense. He never put himself forward, but when it fell to him to do anything he did it with confidence and discretion. He had an excellent head for business, and was Secretary or Treasurer of most of the College institutions. After taking an excellent degree he was elected to a Fellowship. He took advantage of this to go abroad for a year to Germany, and returned a first-rate German scholar, with a considerable knowledge of German methods of education; and was shortly afterwards given a lectureship. I believe he is one of the best lecturers in the place; he knows his subject, and keeps abreast of it. He is extraordinarily clear, lucid, and decisive in statement, and though he is an advanced scholar, he is an extremely practical one. His men always do well. I made his acquaintance over a piece of business, and found him friendly and pleasant. He is fond of taking long, solitary walks on Sunday, as he seldom has time for exercise in the week; and I asked him to come over and see me; he walked from Cambridge one morning, arriving for luncheon, and I accompanied him part of the way back in the afternoon. Since that time he generally comes over once or twice a term. I do not quite know his object in doing this, because I always feel that he has a sort of polite contempt for my ways of life and habits of thought; but it makes a good goal for a long walk, and, moreover, he likes to know different types of people.

He is now about forty-five. In appearance he is trim and small, and gives the impression of being, so to speak, in first-rate training. He has a firm, pale face, of which the only distinction is that it has a look of quiet strength and self-confidence. He has rather thick dark hair, and a close-cropped beard, sprinkled with grey; strong, ugly hands, and serviceable feet. His dress is precise and deliberate, but in no particular fashion. He wears a rather stiff dark suit, low collars, a black tie, a soft black hat, and strong elastic-sided boots. If one met him in the road, one would think him a Board-School Master.

He is very considerate and polite; for instance, if he is coming over he always lets me know a few days before, so that I may get his post-card forwarded to me if I happen to be away. If the day is wet or if he is prevented from coming, he invariably wires in the morning to let me know that he will not appear.

He has one of the best-filled and most serviceable minds I know; though he is overwhelmed by business of all kinds—he is Secretary to two or three boards—he always seems to have read everything and to have a perfectly clear-cut idea about it. He does this by the most extraordinarily methodical use of his time. He rises early, disposes of his correspondence, never failing to answer a letter as briefly as possible the same day that he receives it; reads the paper; lectures and coaches all the morning; attends meetings in the afternoon; coaches again till dinner; and after dinner reads in his rooms till midnight. He seems to have perfect bodily health and vigour, and he has never been known to neglect or to defer anything that he undertakes. In fact, he is a perfectly useful, competent, admirable man.

His behaviour to every one is exactly the same; he treats everybody, his young men, his colleagues, his academical superiors, with the same dry politeness and respect. He is never shy or flustered; he found one day here, staying with me, a somewhat rare species of visitor, a man of high political distinction, who came down to get a quiet Sunday to talk over an important article which I happened to be entrusted with. Meyrick's behaviour was unexceptionable: he was neither abrupt nor deferential; he was simply his unaffected, self-confident self.

I like seeing Meyrick at intervals, because, though he is not really a typical Don at all, he is exactly the sort of figure which would be selected as typical nowadays. The days of the absent-minded, unkempt, slatternly, spectacled, owlish Don are over, and one has instead a brisk professional man, fond of business and ordered knowledge, who is not in the least a man of the world, but a curious variety of it, a man of a small and definite society who, on the strength of knowing a certain class, and of possessing a certain savoir faire, credits himself with a mundane position and enjoys his own self-respect.

But I should be very melancholy if I had to spend a long time in Meyrick's company. In the first place, his views on literature are directly opposed to mine. He has a kind of scheme in his head, and classifies writers into accurate groups. He seems to have no predilection and no admirations except for what he calls important writers. He has no personal interest in writers whatever. He can assign them their exact places in the development of English, but he never approaches an author with the reverential sense of drawing near to a mysterious and divine secret, but rather with a respect for technical accomplishment. In fact, his pleasure in dealing with an author is the pleasure of mastering him and classifying him. He puts a new book through its paces as a horse-dealer does with a horse; he observes his action, his strong and weak points, and then forms a business-like estimate of his worth.

It is the same with his treatment of people. He has a hard and shrewd judgment of character, and a polite contempt for weakness of every kind. He is a Radical by conviction, with a strong sense of equal rights. Socialism he thinks unpractical, and he is interested in movements rather than in men.

But he seldom or never lets one into his confidence about people. If he respects and values a man he says so frankly, but keeps silence about the people of whom he does not approve. On one of the few occasions in which I had a peep into the interior of his mind, I was surprised to find that he had a strong class-feeling. He had an obvious contempt for what may be called the upper class, and gave me to understand that he thought their sense of superiority a very false one. He thought of them simply as the people, so to speak, in possession, but entirely lacking in moral purpose and ideal. I said something about the agreeable, sympathetic courtesy of well-bred people, and he made it plain that he regarded it as a sort of expensive and useless product. He had, I found, a different kind of contempt for the lower classes, regarding them as thriftless and unenterprising. In fact, the professional middle class seemed to him to have a monopoly of the virtues—common-sense, simplicity, respectability.

Two things for which he has no kind of sympathy are art and music, which appear to him to be a kind of harmless and elegant trifling. I am afraid that what irritates me in his treatment of these subjects is his cool and sensible indifference to them. He never expresses the least opposition to them, but merely treats them as purely negligible things. He is not exactly complacent, because there is no touch of vanity or egotism about him; and then his attitude is impossible to assail, because there is no assumption whatever of superiority about it. He merely knows that he is right, and he has no interest whatever in convincing other people; when they know better, when they get rid of their emotional prejudices, they will feel, he is sure, as he does.

In discussing matters he is not at all a doctrinaire; he deals with any objections that one makes courteously and frankly, and even covers his opponent's retreat with a polite quoting of possible precedents. Without being a well-bred man, he is so entirely unpretentious that he could hold his own in any company. He would sit next a commercial traveller and talk to him pleasantly, just as he would sit next the King, if it fell to his lot to do so, and talk without any embarrassment.

I find it hard to say why it is that a man who is so admirable in his conduct of life and in his relations with others inspires me at times with so strange a mixture of anger and terror. I am angry because I feel that he takes no account of many of the best things in the world; I am frightened because he is so extraordinarily strong and complete. If he were to be given absolute and despotic power, he would arrange the government of a State on just and equable lines; the only tyranny that he would originate would be the tyranny of common-sense. The only thing which he would be hard on would be unreasonableness in any form. I am very fond of reasonableness myself; I think it a very fine and beautiful quality, and I think that it wins probably the best victories of the world. But I desire in the world a certain driving force, whereas to me Meyrick only represents an immensely strong regulating force. When I am away from him I think subordination and regulation are very fine things, but when I am with him I feel that my liberty is somehow strangely curtailed. I cannot be fanciful or extravagant in Meyrick's company; his polite laugh would be a disheartening rebuke; he would think my extravagance an agreeable conversational ornament, but he would put me down as a man unfit to be placed upon a syndicate. I do not feel that I am being consciously judged and condemned; I simply feel that I am being unconsciously estimated; which fills me with inexplicable rage.

I wrote this on Sunday evening, having spent an hour or two in his company, I can still see him as I stopped to say farewell to him on the long, straight road leading to Cambridge. "Going to turn back here? Well, I must be getting on—very good of you to give me luncheon—good-bye!" with a little brisk smile—he never shakes hands, I must add, on these occasions. I stood for an instant to watch him walk off at a good pace down the road. His boots rose and fell rhythmically, and he put his stick down at regular intervals. He never turned his head, but no doubt plunged into some definite train of thought. Indeed, I have little doubt that he had arranged beforehand exactly what he would think out when I left him alone.

So the little, trim, compact figure trudged away, like a spirit of law, decency, and order, with the long fields stretching to left and right with their distant clumps of trees. He seemed to me to be the embodiment of sensible civilisation, knowing his own mind perfectly, a drill-sergeant of humanity, with a strong sense of responsibility for, but no sympathy with, all lounging, fanciful, and irresolute persons. How useful, how competent, how good, how honourable he was! What a splendid guide, mentor, and guardian! and yet I felt helplessly that he possessed and desired none of the things that make humanity dear and the world beautiful. I often feel very impatient with the way in which writers, and particularly clerical writers, use the word spiritual; it often means, I feel, that they are only conscious of the entire inadequacy of the motives for conduct that they are themselves able to supply; but the moment that I set eyes upon Meyrick, I know what the word means, that it is the one great quality that, for all his virtue and strength, he misses. I do not know what the quality is exactly, but I do know that he is without it; and in the dry light of Meyrick's mind, I forgive all muddled and irresolute people their sins and foolishnesses, their aggravating incompetence, their practical inefficacy; because I know that they have somehow in a clumsy way got hold of the two great principles that "The end is not yet," and "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." For them the misty goal is not even in sight; the vale is bounded by huge pine-clad precipices, wreathed with snow and crowned with cloud; but to Meyrick it does appear quite definitely what we are, and as for the end, well, the avenue of the world seems to lead up to a neat classical building with pillars and a pediment, that is called the temple of reason and common-sense.

I do not know what Meyrick's religious views are; he attends his College chapel with a cool decorum. But I suspect him of being a quiet agnostic. I do not think he cares a straw whether his individuality endures, and he looks forward to a progress which can be tabulated and statistics about the decrease of crime and disease that can be verified; that, I am sure, is his idea of the Kingdom of Heaven.



XL

I have been staying with a friend in Yorkshire, in an out-of-the-way place, and I have seen a good deal of the parish clergyman there, who is rather a pathetic person, I think. It seems to me that he belongs to a type which is perhaps becoming more common, and the fact makes me somewhat anxious about the future of the Church of England, because it is a type that does not seem to me to correspond to the needs of the day at all. He was, I believe, the son of a solicitor in a small country town; he was educated at a local grammar-school, and went up to a small Cambridge College; here he took a pass-degree, and then went into a Theological College, of a rather advanced High-Church type. Having received a so-called classical education, he had no particular intellectual interests. He was not an athlete; he worked just enough to secure a pass-degree, and spent his time at Cambridge in mild sociability. He takes no interest in politics, books, art, games, or even agriculture. Just when his mind began to expand a little he went off to the Theological College, where he was indoctrinated with high ecclesiastical ideas, and formed a great idea of the supreme importance of his vocation. He had no impulse to examine the foundations of his faith, but he meekly assimilated a large number of doctrinal and traditional propositions, such as the Apostolic succession, the visible corporate Church, the sacrificial theory of the Eucharist, priestly absolution, and so forth. He is a believer in systematic confession, but is careful to say that this was not inculcated upon him, but only indicated, and that his belief in it is based on practical experience. He also imbibed a great love of liturgical and ceremonial usage. He was for a short time a country curate, and married a clergyman's daughter. His College gave him the living which he now holds, which is fairly endowed; and having some small means of his own, he lives comfortably. I will add that he is a thoroughly kindly man, and very conscientious in the discharge of what he conceives to be his duty. He has a great many services on Sunday, somewhat sparsely attended. He reads matins and vespers every day in his church, and gives an address on saints' days. But he seems to have no idea what his parishioners are doing or thinking about, and no particular desire to know. He is assiduous in visiting, in holding classes, in teaching; he has no sense of humour whatever; and the system of religion which he administers is so perfectly obvious and unquestioned a thing to him, that it never occurs to him to wonder if other people are not built on different lines. I have often, attended his church and heard him preach; but the sermons which I have heard are either expositions of high doctrine, or else discourses of what I can only call a very feminine and even finicking kind of morality; he preaches on the duty of church-going, on the profane use of scriptural language, on the sanctification of joy, on the advisability of family prayer, on religious meditation, on the examples of saints, on the privilege of devotional exercises, on the consecration of life, on the communion of saints, on the ministry of angels. But it seems all remote from daily life, and to be a species of religion that can only be successfully cultivated by people of abundant leisure. I do not mean to say that many of these things do not possess a certain refined beauty of their own; but I do feel that farmers and labourers are not, as a rule, in the stage in which such ideas are possible or even desirable. I have seen him conduct a children's service, and then he is in high content, surrounded by clean and well-brushed infants, and smiling girls. He sits in a chair on the chancel steps, in a paternal attitude, and leads them in a little meditation on the childhood of the Mother of Christ. Whenever he describes a scene out of the Bible, and he is fond of doing this, it always sounds as if he were describing a stained-glass window; his favourite qualities are meekness, submissiveness, devotion, holiness; and he is apt to illustrate his teaching by the example of the Apostles, whom we are to believe were men of singular modesty because we hear so very little about them. The modern world has no existence for him whatever; and yet one cannot say that he lives in the Middle Ages, because he knows so little about them; he moves in a paradise of cloistered virgins and mild saints; and the virtue that he chiefly extols is the virtue of faith; the more that reason revolts at a statement, the greater is the triumph of godly faith involved in accepting it unquestioned.

The result is that the little girls love him, the boys laugh at him, the women admire him, the men regard him as not quite a man. The only objects for which he raises money diligently are additions to the furniture of the church; he takes a languid interest in foreign missions, he mistrusts science, and social questions he frankly dislikes. I have heard him say, with an air of deep conviction, when the question of the unemployed is raised, "After all, we must remember that the only possible solution of these sad difficulties is a spiritual one."

The pity of it all is that he is so entirely complacent, so absolutely unaware that there is anything amiss. He does not see that people have to be tenderly and simply wooed to religion, and that they have to be led to take an interest in their own characters and lives. His idea is that the Church is there, a holy and venerable institution, with undeniable claims on the allegiance and loyalty of all. Worship is to him a man's first duty and privilege; and if he finds that one of his parishioners thinks the services tedious, tiresome, or unintelligible, he looks upon him as a child of wrath, perverse and ungodly. The one chance a clergyman has to gain the confidence of the men of his congregation is when he prepares the boys for confirmation; but the vicar sees them, each alone, week after week, and initiates them into the theory of the Visible Church and the advisability of regular confession. I confess sadly that it does not seem to me to resemble Christianity at all; in the place of the shrewd, simple, tender, and wise teaching of Christ about daily life and effort, the duties of kindness, purity, unselfishness, he gives an elaborate picture of rites and ceremonies, of mystical and spiritual agencies, which play little part in the life of a day-labourer's son. If he would learn something about the points of a horse instead of about the points of an angel, if he would study the rotation of the crops instead of the rotation of Easter-tide, he would find himself far more in line with his flock: if he would busy himself with getting the boys and girls good places, he would soon have a niche in the hearts of his parishioners; all that he does is to give a ploughboy, who is going off to a neighbouring farm, a little manual of devotion, with ugly and sentimental chromo-lithographs, and beg him to use it night and morning.

His wife is of the same type, a prim and colourless woman, who believes intensely in her husband, and devotes herself to furthering his work. They have three rather priggish children, whose greatest punishment is not to be allowed to teach in the Sunday-school.

One does not like to laugh at a man whose whole life is spent in doing what he believes to be right; but he seems to have no hold on realities, and to be quite unable to throw himself, by imagination or sympathy, into what his people want or need. He has no belief in secular education, and thinks it makes people discontented and faithless. He is generous with his money, spending lavishly on the Church, but he does not believe in what he calls indiscriminate charity. The incident which has touched him more than any other in the course of his ministry, he will tell you, is when a poor old woman on her death-bed confided to him a few shillings to be spent on providing an altar-frontal. He gives a Sunday-school feast every year, which begins with a versicle and a response. "Thou openest Thine Hand," he says in a rich voice and the children pipe in chorus, "And fillest all things living with plenteousness." The day ends with a little service, which he thoroughly enjoys.

Even the services themselves are a dreary business, because he insists on the whole thing being choral; and little boys in short cassocks, with stocking-legs underneath, howl the responses and monotone the prayers to the accompaniment of a loud raw organ. He reads the lessons in what he calls a devotional way, which consists in reciting all episodes alike, the song of Deborah or the victories of Gideon, as if they were melancholy and pathetic reflections. He is fond of Gregorians and plain-song. The choirmen consist of a scrofulous invalid, his own gardener and coachman, and a bankrupt carpenter, given to drink and profuse repentance. But he is careful to say that he did not suggest the introduction of a choral service—"it was forced upon him by the wish of certain earnest and devoted helpers."

The fact is that the man is, as the children say, a real goose. There is nothing manly, vigorous, or sensible about him; he sometimes deplores the indifference of his parishioners to what he calls true Churchmanship, but he never thinks of comparing his ideal with the Gospel or with the actual conditions of the world. He seems to be hopelessly befogged; he is as certain as only a virtuous or stupid man can be that the religious system which he inculcates is the exact and deliberate development of the Spirit of Christ; and to hear him talk, you would suppose that the only joy in heaven resulted from a rumour that another church was added to the list of sanctuaries which had daily matins. The hopeless difficulty is that he considers his system so pure and lovely that to modify it in any way would seem to be a grievous compromise with worldliness, a violation of his high calling; he looks forward confidently to the time when the people of England will be a devotional and submissive flock, crowding daily to their village sanctuaries, and going back home with the glow and glory of the heavenly mysteries radiating from them in grave smiles and pious ejaculations.

It all seems to me a profoundly melancholy business. One does not wish to prevent people from worshipping God in the vicar's way, if they feel that thus they draw near to the divine presence; but it can only be a very small minority who will ever find satisfaction in this particular type of religion; and I must add that, for myself, I would not unwillingly see that minority reduced. It is a narrow, stuffy, and secluded region at best, remote from the open air, little alive to simplicity, manliness, humour, courage, and cheerfulness. What I resent about it is the solemn certainty with which this system is announced to be the eternal purpose and design of God for man. I am not in a position to say that it is not God's purpose, but nothing that I see in the world convinces me of it; and in any case I can only feel that if this type of religion continues to spread, which I believe it will do, if the better, more unaffected, more intellectual, more manly men begin to be alienated from the clerical profession, it will end in a complete indifference on the part of the nation to religion at all. The fault lies largely, I believe, with the seminaries. They have set up so exotic a standard, screwed up the ecclesiastical tone so high, that few but timid, unintellectual, cautious, and sentimental people will embrace a vocation where so many pledges have to be given. The type of old-fashioned village clergyman, who was at all events a man among men, kindly, generous, hospitable, tolerant, and sensible, seems doomed to extinction, and I cannot help thinking that it is a grievous pity. The new type of clergyman would think, on the other hand, that their disappearance is an unmixed blessing. They would say that they were sloppy, self-indulgent, secular persons, and that the improvement in tone and standard among the clergy was a pure gain; it all depends upon whether you put the social or the priestly functions of the clergyman highest. I am inclined to rate their social value very high, but then I prefer the parson to the priest. I dislike the idea of a priestly caste, an ecclesiastical tradition, a body of people who have the administering of mysterious spiritual secrets. I want to bring religion home to ordinary people, not to segregate it. I would rather have in every parish a wise and kindly man with the same interests as his neighbours, but with a good simple standard of virtuous and brotherly living, than a man endowed with spiritual powers and influences, upholding a standard of life that is subtle, delicate, and refined indeed, but which is neither simple nor practical, and to which the ordinary human being cannot conform, because it lies quite outside of his range of thought. To my mind, the essence of the Gospel is liberty and simplicity; but the Gospel of ecclesiasticism is neither simple nor free.



XLI

It was a pleasant, fresh autumn day, and the philosopher was in a good temper. He was my walking companion for that afternoon. He is always in a good temper, for the matter of that, but his temper has different kinds of goodness. He is always courteous and amiable; but sometimes he has a gentle irony about him and evades all attempts to be serious—to-day, however, he was both benevolent and expansive; and I plunged into his vast mind like a diver leaping headlong from a splash-board.

Let me describe my philosopher first. He is not what is called a social philosopher, a pretentious hedonist, who talks continuously and floridly about himself. I know one such, of whom an enthusiastic maiden said, in a confidential moment, that he seemed to her exactly like Goethe without any of his horrid immorality. Neither is he a technical philosopher, a dreary, hurrying man, travel-stained by faring through the ultimate, spectacled, cadaverous, uncertain of movement, inarticulate of speech. No, my philosopher is a trim, well-brushed man of the world, rather scrupulous about social conventions, as vigorous as Mr. Greatheart, and with a tenderness for the feebler sort of pilgrims. To-day he was blithe and yet serious; he allowed me to ask him questions, and he explained to me technical terms. I felt like a child dandled in the arms of a sage, allowed to blow upon his watch till it opened, and to pull his beard. "No," he said, "I don't advise you, at your age, to try and study philosophy. It requires rather a peculiar kind of mind. You will have to divest words of poetical associations and half-meanings, and arrive at a kind of mathematical appreciation of their value. You had much better talk to me, if you care to, and I will tell you all I can. Besides," he added, "much modern philosophy is a criticism of methods; it has become so special a business that we have most of us drifted quite beyond the horizon, like the higher mathematicians, into questions that have no direct meaning for the ordinary mind. We want a philosopher with a power of literary expression, who can make some attempt to translate our results into ordinary language." "Why could you not do it?" I said, "Ah," said he, "that is not my line! It needs a certain missionary spirit. The thing amuses and interests me; but I don't feel sure that it can be made intelligible—and moreover, I do not think it would be wholly profitable either. We have not determined enough; besides, ordinary people had better act by intuition rather than by reason. There are, too, many data missing, and perhaps the men of science will some day be in a position to give us some, but they have not got far enough yet."

And then we plunged into the subject; but I will not attempt to reproduce what was said, because I cannot remember it, and I should no doubt grossly misrepresent my master. But he led me a fine dance.

It was like a walk I took the other day when I was staying in a mountain country. A companion of mine, tired like myself of inaction, went off with me, and we climbed a high mountain. For some hours we walked in the clouds, in a close-shifting circle of mist, seeing nothing but the little cairns that marked the way, and the bleak grasses at our feet. Now and then we crossed a cold stream that came bubbling into our dim circle, and raved hoarsely away in fretted cataracts. Once we passed a black and silent tarn, with leaden waves lapping among the stones. Once or twice, as we descended, the skirts of the cloud drew up suddenly, and revealed black crags and rocky bastions, and down below a great valley, with sheep grazing, pastures within stone enclosures, little farms, and mountain bases red with fern.

That was like my mental excursion to-day. It was very cold and misty on the heights of my friend's mind. I recognised sometimes familiar things, but all strangely enlarged and transfigured. Once or twice, too, the whole veil flew up, and disclosed a familiar scene, which I felt had some dim connection with the chill and vaporous height, but I could not discern what it was; and when we came down again, the heights were still impenetrably shrouded.

Once indeed my friend emitted a flash of scorn, which was when I mentioned the religious commonplace that the desire of men's hearts to be assured of the continuity of identity was a proof that such a craving must find its fulfilment. "A pleasant dream!" he said. "One might as well affirm that the universal desire for wealth and health was a proof that all would be ultimately healthy and wealthy."

But though I understood little, and remembered less, I felt somehow that it did me good to be brought face to face with these austere problems. It had a bracing effect to have my comfortable intuitions plucked from me, and to be bidden to walk alone. It was vaguely inspiring to look into the misty world that lies behind history and religion and science, the world where one can perhaps be sure of nothing except of one's own consciousness, and not too sure of that. Bracing I say, because of its bareness and precariousness, its sense of ultimate insecurity. I came back to earth not discouraged or dismayed, but more conscious than ever of the urgency of practical problems and the actuality of life. And so, as I say, out of my breathless ramble among ultimate causes and conceptions, I came back to the world with a great sense of zest and relief, as the diver of whom I spoke sees the water grow paler and greener before his swimming eyes, and next moment feels the sunlight about him and sees the willows and the river-bank. I came back filled with a sense of far-off possibilities, and yet more sure than ever that we must neither idle nor despair, but walk swiftly and patiently and help each other along. Not only did I feel my duty to my fellows to be more clear and sure; but my own need of help, my own insignificance, to be more pleasantly insistent. Out of the world where I was only sure of my own consciousness I came down into the world where I am no less practically sure of the presence of millions of similar souls, very blind and weak, perhaps, but very real and dear. On those cloudy hills I had gone astray as a sheep that is lost; and then suddenly there was the sense of the shepherd walking near me—the shepherd himself!—for the philosopher was only a lesser kind of angel bearing a vial in his hands; the blessed sense of being searched for and guided and tenderly chidden and included in the welcome fold. I hope that my philosopher may yet walk on the hills with me, if only for the sake of the love I bear the green valleys; and when I see the great stream passing silently from translucent pool to pool, overhung by rowans and sun-warmed rocks, I shall be glad to think that I have walked on the heights where it was gathered and drawn, and that I have heard it talk hoarsely to itself, cold and uncomforted, among the bleak and dripping stones.