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 THE SOLILOQUY OF A HERMIT



 
 PUBLISHER'S NOTE 
 
 TN issuing this little volume adapted 
 to such readers as are interested in 
 original religious psychology, the pub- 
 lisher wishes to announce his intended 
 pubhcation of an extraordinary realistic 
 novel by the same hand entitled " Mr. 
 Tasker's Gods," which should appeal to 
 a far wider public. Such pubhcation, 
 however, must necessarily depend upon 
 the interest excited by the present httle 
 work.






 
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 THE SOLILOQUY OF 
 A HERMIT 
 
 BY 
 
 THEODORE FRANCIS POWYS 
 
 1916 
 
 G. ARNOLD SHAW 
 
 NEW YORK



 
 COPYRIGHT, 1916 
 BY G. ARNOLD SHAW 
 
 COPYRIGHT IN GREAT BRITAIN 
 AND COLONIES



 
 Dedicated 
 
 to a publisher whose humor is as 
 
 kind as his judgement is honest 
 
 G. ARNOLD SHAW






 
 THE 
 SOLILOQUY OF A HERMIT 
 
 "//e that acknowledgeth the Son, 
 hath the Father also.'' 
 
 AM I a fool ? Is not a fool the best 
 title for a good priest? And I am 
 a good priest. Though not of the Church, 
 I am of the Church. Though not of the 
 faith, I am of the faith. Though not 
 of the fold, I am of the fold; a priest 
 in the cloud of God, beside the Altar 
 of Stone. Near beside me is a flock of 
 real sheep; above me a cloud of misty 
 white embraces the noon-day light of 
 the Altar. I am without a behef; — a 
 behef is too easy a road to God. 
 
 A priest has liis roots in the deep 
 darkness of human desires; his place is 
 beside the Altar, held to the earth bv 
 twisted roots; the priest gives to man 
 whom he cannot love, and loves God



 
 2 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 whom he cannot know. The priest 
 points ever to Christ, and tells the 
 people to love Him; but to love one 
 another he does not tell them. How 
 can he.^^ The Master alone can com- 
 mand the impossible ; Christ, who knows 
 only Himself, He can say "Love one 
 another." The priest can only say 
 "Love Christ." He knows that the 
 people can never love one another, and 
 that if they could love one another, 
 there would be no need for them to 
 love Christ. 
 
 And I, the priest, will tell the story. 
 I know how men move under the shadow 
 of the moods of God, and I know how 
 I move. Some try to hide in the Gar- 
 den, and some try to hide in the beast's 
 belly. I have tried to hide amongst 
 grassy hills; but the moods of God have 
 hunted me out. The proper place for 
 a priest is in a cave, a narrow cave 
 where he lies with his back against a 
 sharp rock. As I could not hide from 
 God, I tried to hide from myself, and



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 3 
 
 watch the moods as they passed by. 
 To beheve in God and not to believe 
 in yourself, is the first duty of a priest. 
 There is no need to fulfil a mood; you 
 get far more of the truth of a mood if 
 you do not fulfil it, and a mood is often 
 good and kindly to you if you let it 
 enter without your doing anything that 
 it moves you to do. A priest is always 
 a priest, on a throne; or if upon the 
 gallows, he is still a priest. A priest is 
 a man who knows the workings of the 
 moods of God. 
 
 The common man, the happy man, 
 the working man, the immortal man, is 
 dominated by one mood, so that he 
 never feels God but in one way, and 
 whatever condition he may be in, tliis 
 one mood holds him up. Tliis kind of 
 man is everywhere; he is the people; he 
 talks about "having a drink," "get- 
 ting on in the world," "writing books," 
 "buying stocks and shares," "driving 
 pigs to market," "sowing red wheat." 
 He may be in a palace, or at the bottom



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 of a coal mine, or in a clover field, or 
 in a villa at Chiswick; he is the people, 
 and his dominating mood is the getting 
 mood. 
 
 On the other side of the road is the 
 priest. He is vulnerable, he is mortal; 
 this life is his only life, he is not im- 
 mortal like the other man; the only im- 
 mortahty that he gets is by beheving 
 that he is immortal; his children are 
 not his children, and his hfe is not his 
 life, it is God's. He is the soil in which 
 God practises His divine moods; His 
 hating moods, His loving moods. His 
 cruel moods. The other man is domi- 
 nated by one mood all his hfe; the 
 manner of his hfe never changes, he 
 moves in one small circle. The priest 
 is never under one mood for long; he is 
 always breaking, or rather being broken, 
 by God. God takes him up and casts 
 him down, and pitches him from one 
 mood into another, taking care that no 
 mood lasts that the priest can live and 
 feed upon. The priest prays; he tames



 
 The Soliloquy of a Ilermii 
 
 the moods of prayer, and he tries to 
 shut up the bad moods, the good moods, 
 all the moods, in the Bible; and then 
 he tries to hide the Bible in the Church. 
 And he prays all through the bad moods, 
 even when they bite him (and moods 
 can bite), and he waits and prays till a 
 gentle mood comes like a dove from 
 heaven; then he rejoices and quietly 
 eats his bread like any other m£ui. 
 
 I am writing about myself. I am the 
 priest that I talk about. When I speak 
 about the priest or anything about the 
 priest, I mean myself. I was never put 
 into the fold, and I never climbed over 
 the wall; I never knew Latin; I have 
 never spoken to a Bishop, or helped a 
 Dean on with his gaiters; I have never 
 tried to convert any young lady in the 
 street. I am speaking of Rehgion in a 
 book; — that is not allowed, but what 
 else can I write about .^ It is the only 
 subject I know anything about. 
 
 At the same time there are things 
 that interest me, and things that I love.



 
 6 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 I love a broken chair that is worn 
 through to the wood; it is a chair that 
 can tell its own talc; I have a terror of 
 anything that is sound and whole. I 
 love a broken roller left in a field; my 
 little boys come with me up a Httle hill 
 and play by it; it is left in a field that 
 belongs to a crippled farmer, a weakly 
 tottering old man, crooked and bent; 
 all his farm tools are broken and tied 
 up with string, and the roller is the 
 most broken, and that is why we love 
 it the best. It is much better, I have 
 found, to love a chair than to love a 
 person; there is often more of God in 
 a chair, and God often rests by the 
 side of the old roller and watches my 
 little boys play and the old farmer at 
 plough. 
 
 The moods pass over me and I must 
 act after their ruling. I hate when 
 they hate, I love when they love. The 
 wonderful moods carry me on, and do 
 with me what they will. When an evil 
 day comes, it is the mood from above



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermil 7 
 
 that is evil; when the earth and sky 
 and my heart are bathed in sunbeams, 
 God is in a shining mood above. The 
 moods carry me away in the night and 
 they leap upon me in the day, and 
 they hold me down in the evening, or 
 perhaps let me wander a httle way 
 under the stars. 
 
 I have voted twice at the elections, 
 once for a conservative and once for a 
 liberal; at each election I voted ac- 
 cording to the mood that I was in, as 
 everyone ought to. Just now I wear 
 a badge of an order of Sociahsm, and 
 when one day I broke my spade in 
 trying to lift up a dead cherry-tree in 
 the garden, I looked at my badge and 
 wondered what it meant by having an 
 arrow, the sun and the world upon it. 
 And then I thought of the people; I 
 know a little about the people, the 
 people that slave and toil and tear at 
 each other with the claws of the beast, 
 and the beast has sharp claws. I 
 know their ways and how they steal



 
 8 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 the moods of God; they will not allow 
 the moods of God to pass freely tlirough 
 them and go. 
 
 Once I said, "I love poor men." 
 And I beheved that they were true, 
 noble, simple, and kind, and of all men, 
 I loved most the men in the fields; I 
 thought that the gentle life they led in 
 the country gave their minds the colour 
 of deep grey w aters. I thought that poor 
 people dwelt so near the mud that they 
 were always clean; I thought that only 
 spoilt children were cruel and ugly, and 
 that all the poetry of the world came 
 from the cottage. 
 
 It is the priest's duty to dig in the 
 clay tlirough which the moods of God 
 pass; he must foretell how the clay 
 pieces will behave when the mystic 
 winds that they cannot see blow them. 
 It is well that he preaches of one that 
 will take away the sins of the world, 
 but if that One would take the good- 
 ness of the world, too, he would find 
 the load almost as hard to bear; for



 
 The Soliloquy of a Ilermil q 
 
 the good man often hides beneath liis 
 goodness an ugly little devil that spits 
 out fire. 
 
 Man is a collection of atoms through 
 which pass the moods of God, — a ter- 
 rible clay picture, tragic, frail, drunken, 
 but always deep rooted in the earth, 
 always with claws holding on to his 
 life while the moods pass over him 
 and change his face and his life every 
 moment. The people of the earth are 
 clay pieces that the moods of God 
 kindle into life. 
 
 To the priest every man is a rough 
 soil that the moods of God pass through, 
 and the priest knows that every man 
 will clutch what he can hold hke a 
 babe, and he knows that where the 
 moods of God are, strange things will 
 happen. He knows that the world is a 
 wild mad world, a world that cannot 
 settle into peace, that cannot quietly 
 tend its garden and plant the herbs of 
 the field. In the moods, in my moods, 
 there are great and terrible happenings.



 
 lo The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 In the most quiet places the moods of 
 God rend and tear the heart. Every 
 mood that passes through me is ter- 
 rible, the most peaceful happy mood 
 carries the heart-ache beneath it. 
 
 In looking at my life, as indeed in 
 looking at anyone's life, I see the de- 
 sire to do something so that the moods 
 may pass and the man still hve. And 
 I think that I can also understand the 
 idea of the monk in a cell, or the her- 
 mit in a wood, for these allow the 
 moods freely to pass tlu-ough them, in 
 order that they may catch God in His 
 own thought. In the common longing 
 to do something, — I will not say to work, 
 I see the desire to escape from God. 
 When I want to go out and work or 
 even to help my neighbour, my reason 
 is that I want to hide myself from the 
 moods. I have never been idle — no 
 priest ever is; my sin has been that I 
 have sought to do something; not that 
 I have worked, — of course there comes 
 to the hand of everyone something of



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit ii 
 
 the common burden, — but when I have 
 sought work, it has been as a means of 
 escape, of escape from tlie moods of 
 God. There is only one way of escape 
 and that is in prayer. I will call it the 
 monk's way; only the monk's way is no 
 use to him from whom God hides deep 
 down at the bottom of His moods. 
 
 All human laws are made to trap 
 and snare God's movements; men are 
 always trying to get at ease with them- 
 selves and away from His terrible ways. 
 The priest learns the hard law of men, 
 and he feels the terrible presence of 
 God; from men he is given poverty 
 and scorn, and from God, death. He 
 forgives men, and he takes God's gift, 
 that is to him God's best gift; he trains 
 himself to become as clay in the hand 
 of the potter, to take the mood and 
 the day and the chance as it opens out 
 to him, to walk the road that is nearest 
 before him and to keep always to the 
 left-hand side of the way, to accept as 
 they choose to come-, the anger, the



 
 12 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 fretfulness, the joy, the hunger; for 
 each is a sign, if it be not the reahty, 
 of the moods of God. I have learned 
 to know that though I cannot touch 
 the power, the power can touch me; 
 that is as far as I dare probe into the 
 mystery. I am not evil nor good; I am 
 just my own clay through which the 
 moods of God pass, and this is exactly 
 the case with my brothers, and with 
 everyone else; no one is good or evil, 
 we are all just our own clay. 
 
 When I look at myself before a glass 
 I am not pleased; I fear I cannot look 
 into the glass and say to myself, "What 
 a fine fellow!" I wish I could. All the 
 same I am wilhng to put up with my- 
 self; I am not yet tired of the sun; I 
 hke still to feel the movement of being, 
 and to know that another spring has 
 come; I love myself enough to love the 
 world. 
 
 I have discovered that all movement 
 is a begetting and creating, and that 
 when I only move my feet I bring to



 
 The Soliloquy of a Her mil i3 
 
 birth new wonders. We cannot over- 
 rate too much mere existence. Simply 
 to be set dancing by the sun is some- 
 thing. I love to preach, but the only 
 person I ever preach to is myself, be- 
 cause I am the only person that I have 
 ever met who knows how to attend to 
 a sermon. I preach to myself, and I 
 am interested to get to the bottom of 
 my sins. I find my sins are deep 
 enough to be interesting. I love to 
 hate, to desire, to envy, to bear malice 
 in my heart. I am glad that I have 
 these feehngs; I do not want to love my 
 neighbour. I prefer to mildly hate him. 
 When the mood of gentle tolerance 
 comes to me I take it and love even 
 God. 
 
 I have not fallen into my worst sin. 
 My greatest temptation has always 
 been to work, to go with other men into 
 the great labour market of the world, 
 and be given my place. The priest is 
 lower than the lowest labourer, and if 
 he can only find men and no God in



 
 i4 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 the earth, woe be to him, he will cer- 
 tainly find himself betrayed. 
 
 Once I thought I was wise, wiser 
 than the wise men of old, "It was not 
 for me," I said, "to come out from 
 the same door wherein I went." It is 
 well to break your head against all the 
 walls that you can, while you are young, 
 so that when you grow old you can slay 
 yourself quietly in your own garden. 
 
 I wonder what to most men is the 
 pleasantest thing they do. I know 
 that I am happiest when I am mend- 
 ing my garden raihngs; they are very 
 old and very much out of repair; every 
 labourer that has come past for the 
 last ten years has had something rude 
 to say about them; and if they see me 
 in the garden they stop and advise me 
 to have iron railings; and once a young 
 sheep dealer told me I ought to build 
 a wall. But, alas, I am no lover of walls 
 that keep out the sunshine, and I have 
 a vast hatred for iron raihngs, and 
 why should I not continue my hap-



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit i5 
 
 piness by mending my wooden ones 
 with string. But people do not like my 
 way. And if the Parish Council had the 
 power, it would no doubt compel me 
 either to sell my cottage or to buy iron 
 rlailings. If no one drank any beer, if all 
 were self-respecting, if all wore badges 
 with a "world and an arrow," if everyone 
 went to Chapel, then would they force 
 me to mend my railings with iron nails 
 and barbed wire. If George V were not 
 king, if the people ruled, if these lovers 
 of iron raihngs and brick walls had the 
 power, there would be no life for me or 
 any lover of string upon the earth. I 
 wonder whether if in America a disciple 
 of the god Pan is allowed to mend his 
 garden raihngs with string, or is he 
 badgered to use nails? - One day it 
 will happen that everyone will be forced 
 to hve exactly as his dullest neighbour 
 wishes him to, and we shall be com- 
 pelled to eat meat every day and to 
 earn the money to pay for it. An iron- 
 hearted world it is indeed, and in some



 
 1 6 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 places even the daisies are made of 
 nail heads, so new that they shine 
 quite hke real daisies. I pray that I 
 may always be allowed to keep my 
 blood cool by watching the cows and 
 by moving brown earth under the sun. 
 Must everyone here on earth be either 
 ordering or obeying, stealing or giving, 
 blessing or cursing. ^^ 
 
 The kind of people that I find most 
 unpleasant to my taste, are the people 
 that look and smile and walk on. These 
 are they that find fault, — the fault- 
 finders, the people that point at your 
 thistles and count your nettles, that 
 wonder why you do not keep fowls, 
 or why you keep a row of five broken 
 buckets by your back door. These 
 are the people who think that to work 
 is to worship, and who talk about nothing 
 else than what they can do, and what 
 you cannot do. I lack their ardour; 
 they say they keep the world growing, 
 but it is more likely that they keep the 
 world sinning.



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 17 
 
 It is now spring, witli a dull mist and 
 rain coming over the hills, and a wind 
 that howls like December in the chim- 
 ney, and in the spring what memories 
 come to us who look backward; to us 
 who prefer not to look forward. The 
 memories of spring, — that every spring 
 revives, and every autumn kills, and 
 every winter buries! I know the joy of 
 looking backward, — and the tears, — 
 in order to find again the sun that once 
 shone; and when found I can take and 
 eat the true joy now that I was not able 
 to take then. I can now pick up the 
 wind flowers that I missed by being too 
 eager for them. Only the same kind of 
 day must come in order that I may be 
 able to remember the past, and I must 
 have the same kind of feehngs that I 
 had on that same day; the same old 
 crippled man must hobble past; the 
 same wind must howl in the chimney; 
 the same white cow must chew the cud 
 by my gate; and then I remember. 
 And often it is something ugly that



 
 1 8 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 brings me to this happiness. I have 
 never had the least objection to ugly 
 things. If my fire warms me, what do 
 I care if the grate is a square black 
 hole in the wall, with three varnished 
 iron sunflowers in a row above it? 
 
 I like things beautiful to keep at a 
 distance, and even art can very well 
 keep shut up in a book. It is a worry to 
 me to have too precious works near by. 
 I can look at good things too much; 
 it is better to have a certain cheap- 
 ness of ordinary and common things 
 about, that one need never look at. 
 
 No labour has made the dehcate vi- 
 sions that come to me from the past, 
 and require only the same kind of day 
 to awaken; no hard chisel formed the 
 look of affection that I saw once in the 
 eyes of a sick man; no brush can show 
 me the first celandine lying in the dust 
 of the road, thrown down by a tiny 
 child, though a brush may be able to 
 show me one, smihng gaily, almost too 
 gaily, from a bank of canvas. Ah, but



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 19 
 
 to him that painted the picture these 
 are memories; all the money in the 
 world cannot buy them. 
 
 I have found a use for every one of 
 the moods that pass through me. There 
 is one of depression that is common to 
 all men, and I compel this mood to 
 carry me down to the earth and even 
 below the earth, so that it may give me 
 peace. When I speak of God, I mean 
 the mystic fear that I share in common 
 with all men, who do not give their 
 lives utterly up into the claws of 
 Mammon. 
 
 When I began to write this— shall I 
 say tract.^^ — I spoke of myself as a priest 
 without a God; but it is quite impos- 
 sible to be a priest at all without the 
 mystic fear showing itself somewhere, 
 showing itself perhaps in the way I 
 walk down the road, or put on my 
 , overcoat, shall I say.^ The fear of God, 
 calm, persistent, triumphant, must show 
 itself to the priest at last. It is impos- 
 sible to ignore it; it is in life, it has to



 
 20 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 open a way for itself although we may 
 try to bar it out. "I went down into 
 Hell and behold he was there." It is 
 futile to try to go gaily along forever 
 and chat and smoke cigarettes, and 
 talk about the pleasure of the spring, 
 or about a young lady who hves the 
 other side of the valley and is no bet- 
 ter than she should be. The fear of 
 God is sure to break in upon you; the 
 very winds bring it; it comes out of 
 the stones; I dig it up in the garden; 
 I hear it in the sound of a train far off; 
 there is fear in the sound of a train. 
 I see it moving in the flight of a bird; 
 I cannot escape it. No one can save 
 himself from the Fear by work; you 
 must stop somewhere, and the Fear 
 can wait for you outside the door, — 
 he has plenty of time. I have always 
 lived near great empty spaces, great 
 empty fields and huge sohtary downs; 
 often I walk miles without meeting 
 anyone, and the moods that come to 
 me are often as empty and void as the



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 21 
 
 hills around; and the very emptiness 
 is dreadful. No wonder that honest 
 labourers crowd to the taverns; no won- 
 der the priest Hkes to have his church 
 full of human flesh and blood rather 
 than to be alone with the fear of God. 
 
 I love hght. I love to hght the lamp 
 on a winter's evening when the sun sets 
 red in a mist behind our low hills, for 
 in the summer the sun climbs up our 
 liighest hill. I like to hght a fire, and 
 to smell the smoke of burning wood 
 and to feel the first warmth that comes 
 when the sticks burn. I love the sun; 
 and if I were to worship an Idol, I 
 would certainly worship a star; and 
 when I dig in the garden I hke to turn 
 my face to the sun. For the moon I 
 have no love, except for the child with 
 torn long hair that runs over his face 
 when he is full, and was discovered by 
 one of my brothers; no doubt she is 
 always fleeing from the horrible old 
 man with the sticks. There hved just 
 such an old man in our village.



 
 22 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 I take my life as I find it, and live it 
 to myself as everyone does. As I am a 
 priest, I never give anything away; it 
 is a natural law of my nature not to 
 give, but always to receive. I once 
 asked a tramp why he did not beg of 
 me for anything, and I inquired of him 
 whether I looked a mean fellow, or if 
 I looked as if I had not anything to 
 give away. He said he did not know 
 why he had not asked, but that some- 
 how he knew that I was not the kind 
 of gentleman to beg from ; he also added 
 as he went on, "the woman behind me 
 will ask you," and so she did, but got 
 nothing. 
 
 Looking backward, looking forward, 
 looking around me in search of my 
 greatest pleasure next to mending my 
 railings, I can say without lying that 
 I find it in reading a good book. I do 
 not know any good thing that is so 
 good as this. But I must have a book 
 to my mind. I do not object to any 
 kind of story,— to travel, to pig-sticking



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 23 
 
 even; but it must be something with a 
 soul. If it be a story, let it have a touch 
 of human blood about it; what I want 
 is a real mind's battle-ground, with 
 sweat and agony. I like an author 
 who has seen — who has lived, what he 
 is writing about; I hate a book that 
 tells only half the man does and in- 
 vents the other half: I like the whole 
 man in his work, — his body, his hands 
 and his eyes, and even his belly. And 
 I hke best to read of actual moving, 
 working life; of ships as Conrad writes 
 of them, or anything else that has a 
 real touch of moving, itching, speaking 
 life about it. Let me have the whole 
 body of the man as well as his brain 
 in his book. 
 
 A book that I love, and of all books 
 the most intensely human, is Wesley's 
 journal. He is a worshipful priest of 
 his hands, as Malory would have said; 
 he speaks with tlie fervour of God and 
 rides with the fervour of the Devil. 
 There are no cobwebs about his ser-



 
 24 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 mons even; he let the winds of heaven 
 into his hfe, the sly old heathen! He 
 was called, I suppose, as many bad 
 names as any person upon earth or in 
 heaven. But how human he was; how 
 his human hatred and mahce show up 
 the man as a man, and not a pitiful 
 humbug as most of us are; and he 
 could bring down his fist when he 
 wished to. He was a bad husband, I 
 know it; but let any young lady with a 
 white fur muff and neat ankles, who 
 wants to marry a John — more John 
 than Wesley — find out a Httle what 
 manner of man he is, before she trips 
 up to the altar beside him; and if she 
 is wise, she will turn back and find 
 some sober bank-manager instead, whose 
 name may very well be something else 
 than John. John Bunyan would have 
 called Wesley a cock of the right kind, 
 but a wild cock, a cock that strayed, 
 a cock that would ride without a wink 
 sixty miles before breakfast, "with a 
 driving rain in our faces," rather than



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 26 
 
 listen to the gentle upbraidings of a 
 sober partner at home. And this other 
 John who is the true saint — whereas 
 Wesley is the sinner — this other John 
 had ever that strange quaint love of 
 all weak things; he might well have 
 been a Russian peasant; a marvellously 
 loving man he must have been and very 
 tender too to all about him; it would 
 have been a helhsh thing to have cast 
 stones at this man's behef. The thing 
 was life and death to him; he could not 
 defend it like John Wesley, who knew 
 the httle hidden ways of his Lord. 
 
 Everyone treated Bunyan with kind- 
 ness, with tolerance; there must be 
 some good in man. It is true that they 
 put informers Hke black rooks into the 
 trees, but they did not run mad bulls 
 at his meetings, or drag his preachers 
 through ponds. I expect one had to be 
 a brave man to take John Wesley into 
 a corner and tell him quietly in his 
 ear that one did not beheve in a God. 
 Some of the young gentlemen who



 
 26 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 broke in drunk to his meetings were 
 sometimes pretty roughly handled. 
 
 Wesley's humour is always bubbhng 
 over, try as he might to keep it down. 
 And how he loved to make the people 
 fall and rave at his meetings; and he 
 went about afterwards counting them 
 as though they were so many dead 
 sheep. I would have walked miles to 
 have heard him, and, by heaven, I 
 would have tumbled over, too, if I could 
 have done it. It is no small thing to 
 be taken out of this care-worn, weary, 
 everyday hfe, and behold instead a vision 
 of yourself as a damned sinner with the 
 fire of Hell at your feet, and to roar out, 
 feehng that the very devils had hold of 
 you. And after all this, as they almost 
 always did, to receive the pardon; to 
 hear the voice from above; and to 
 sleep in peace with the Grace of God 
 upon your pillows. It was no small 
 thing that Wesley could fill thousands of 
 death-beds with immortal longings and 
 a certainty of salvation; if they were



 
 The Soliloquy of a llermil ^7 
 
 all lies and cheating, they were certainly 
 romantic lies and joyful madness; and 
 if death can be cheated of its sting, 
 why, then let us cheat it, if wc can I 
 Wesley could give hope at the last, 
 even if it were a mad hope; and who 
 of us has not said many times, "What 
 can I do to be saved?" It is one of 
 the most curious feehngs that I know, 
 this one of being on the side of God, on 
 the safe side. Sometimes in my life 
 I have been able to go a little towards 
 this feehng, and to know what it is 
 hke; to go just near enough to the 
 door to want to get in, and to be made 
 quite ill-tempered when my old doubts 
 drove me away. 
 
 Another book that sometimes pleases 
 me, and I like the sober colour of its 
 binding, is the Bible; and what a book 
 of blood and tears! Think of all the 
 human eyes that have read all this 
 very ^ strange matter ; think of all the 
 human hearts that have read terror 
 and hope and death into these pages.



 
 28 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 This human element must make the 
 book at least of interest to everyone. 
 How it has eaten into the heart of man, 
 how it has torn at his vitals and lashed 
 him with his blood. How it utters the 
 moods of God with a great and deep 
 voice, crying, weeping, hating, and end- 
 ing up in utter madness. The divine 
 fear flows in great waves through its 
 pages, drowning many that meet it 
 there, and even a child sees something 
 terrible about this book. It tells of 
 men walking in dreams in the garden 
 of God, singing and praying and telhng 
 Eastern tales under the moods of God; 
 and how well it keeps to the earth 
 and the things of the earth, the poetry 
 of the belly of life. We can see the 
 dark men wandering under the sun of 
 the desert, walking in the cool of the 
 evening, throwing a spear and shooting 
 with an arrow. It shows you a man 
 breaking a hole in his own wall, as a 
 sign from God; — what a mood to be in! 
 Another eating honey out of the bones



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 29 
 
 of a lion; and at the end man comes 
 to Clirist, the human child, the child of 
 the moods of God; and then the Agony 
 in the Garden. 
 
 We all read our own hfe in this book, 
 our beginning and our end. The world 
 is a garden to us all at first, and thorns 
 and nettles come only too quickly ; but we 
 may find a good poet among the nettles, 
 and perhaps a Ruth. Or it may be our 
 destiny under some mood or other to 
 marry a harlot, and when, as no doubt 
 the Prophet did, we make her an honest 
 woman, she will have plenty of time to 
 preach to us of our own failings. 
 
 It was not easy for man to bear the 
 heavy weight of the moods without 
 Christ, and He is welcomed by all the 
 weak ones in the earth, and not w^ithout 
 cause, for the end must be the agony 
 in the garden that only very old sin- 
 ners seem to escape. And how can the 
 play be acted without the last scene? 
 It cannot be complete without the end. 
 If man had been able to sneak into



 
 3o The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 another life the Bible would never have 
 been needed. The moods of Him above 
 are too great and terrible to carry the 
 soul of man with them, when they pass 
 the dark waters. It is well that our 
 end should be perfect and utter, and we 
 know it is well. We poor mortals, — at 
 least the weak ones amongst us, the 
 others don't care, — we poor mortals 
 play with the romance of another life 
 as a babe would with a celluloid toy, 
 and when the fire touches it, in a mo- 
 ment it is gone. 
 
 Everything that we do and think 
 under the moods is put into the Bible; 
 the Bible tells us all we can ever know 
 about ourselves. In our lives the Proph- 
 ets sing wild songs; Ruth Hes down by 
 Boaz; David steals the cakes; Mary 
 washes Christ's feet with her hair; 
 and Samuel hews Agag to pieces before 
 the Lord. All the cruelty, all the ter- 
 ror, all the poetry of the Bible is acted 
 in our lives; that is why it is the reli- 
 gious book that will live; it is true, be-



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 3i 
 
 cause it is true to life and true to man. 
 We may well sorrow over the sorrows 
 of our Lord, for one day the nails will 
 be driven into our own hands. A httle 
 pain that we feel in our bodies may be 
 the beginning of a fatal disease; a 
 thought that anchors in our minds may 
 be the prelude to a fierce madness. 
 We pass our days as gaily as we can, 
 but the Bible is always near, and try 
 how we may to escape, God will win. 
 The book of our tragedy is in our doors, 
 open it and know what we are and how 
 we shall end. 
 
 And our best books follow the same 
 plan, and try to show the same sad 
 story with a gay laugh. Shakespeare 
 plays in the field of our folhes with a 
 light hand, and Hke the Bible he would 
 show us our heart's blood held up by a 
 gay fool in cap and bells; only in 
 Shakespeare, there is a great deal more 
 of the love of the Devil than of the 
 fear of God. Shakespeare took away the 
 clouds of God and put the sunshine of



 
 32 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 his own head and pointed becird in their 
 place. As a matter of fact all books 
 tell the same tale, and advise men to 
 look into all kinds of holes and corners 
 for honey to make their hves sweet. 
 
 If ever I wrote a book I would hke 
 to show that the continued touch of 
 life gives us a joy that we may well try 
 to understand, and in books this touch 
 of hfe is what pleases me most. There 
 is something in the spirit of these mod- 
 ern days that makes me feel that I am 
 wasting time when I am reading, and 
 that "something" must be the iron-eyed, 
 restless, nail-making devil that tries to 
 put petrol into every man's belly, and 
 would turn the world into a scurvy 
 heap of scurrying ants, all running 
 every way inside large white eggs that 
 move themselves, a great many times 
 bigger than the little ants. And even 
 I that hve in the wilderness, sitting 
 in my own hut between the hills that 
 are now covered with yellow gorse 
 flowers, — even I, with brown bread and



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 33 
 
 tea upon the table, and my feet to the 
 fire, — even I, sitting thus in the desert, 
 feel the devil tugging at my coat and 
 shouting in my ear that I ought to be 
 doing something in order to help the 
 nail-makers to iron over the whole 
 world. It is terrible to think that the 
 evil smell of modern oil has got to me, 
 and that the vile working devils would 
 even try to pump petrol into my soul. 
 In heaven's name let those that make 
 work into a god with a Brummagem 
 name, take him out of my way; I do 
 not like that kind of god. 
 
 Do not think, reader, that I mean 
 to revile the kind of work that I see 
 pass my garden. I see an old cart 
 trundling along filled with turnips, going 
 about a mile an hour; I see a rabbit- 
 catcher half hidden in a rabbit hole, 
 quietly wondering where to set his next 
 snare, and turning at last his slow steps 
 to the inn to exchange a rabbit for 
 beer. No, it is the work that bites you 
 that I iiate, — work with a foreman biting



 
 3^^ The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 behind; not the work of a ploughboy 
 who has plenty of time to think of his 
 dinner and to sing a song; but the 
 work that has no song in it at all, the 
 work that is sheer, bare, vile toil. 
 
 And let us all bless rehgion, for it 
 can, like a pleasant timely illness, take 
 men away from their cursed everlasting 
 toil. Where work is the most, rehgion is 
 the least thing in the land. And re- 
 hgion, so the task-masters say, might 
 very well do more harm than the 
 drink, if it takes the line of least resist- 
 ance. In their heart of hearts the task- 
 masters fear the priest; that is why they 
 try so hard and succeed so well in mak- 
 ing a false priest; they do not mind 
 the Lord God, but they do not Hke the 
 Son of Man. I wonder if we shall ever 
 understand that the world is not made 
 for work but for Joy. And I who am 
 trying to understand, why should not I 
 be left in peace to eat and walk amongst 
 the clean rain-swept hills and to try to 
 get under the moods of God.



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermll 35 
 
 Come and take and eat this morning 
 with me, a bowl of porridge with salt, 
 bread crisped by the fire, tea, the vir- 
 gin herb of the sun, and brown sugar, 
 the sweetness of our Mother's breast. 
 Shall we go out and slay a lamb of the 
 flock if we have a mind to a feast? Why 
 should we not cut a throat or stick a 
 pig, and cook it over a great fire? But 
 I prefer parched corn; I prefer to grow 
 some genial honest sea-cabbage in my 
 garden, or to transform some ugly worn 
 bits of copper into shining white eggs. 
 It is well to leave too many dinners 
 alone, and too big feasts; for if we eat 
 a great many very large dinners, the 
 dinners will most Hkely end by eating 
 us. 
 
 All praise be to Wine, but should not 
 wine be kept for those selected moments 
 when we meet the ones that we love, 
 the children of our hearts.^ I do not 
 like always to see wine on the table; it 
 is often stale, and the decanter not 
 overfull; and there are often dregs that



 
 36 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 the unwary guest has to finish; and 
 worst of all the host wonders if there 
 will be just enough. Throw such dregs 
 to the pigs. When I take wine I hke 
 bottles, or better still a goodly hooped 
 barrel in the cellar and the wine drawn 
 in fantastic jugs. I like there to be 
 around the table three or four com- 
 panions, but no more than the number 
 of the bottles, and no women. And 
 there ought to be a ritual, a crowning 
 of the cups; cups of silver and gold; 
 a feast of wine is quite worth the 
 trouble of reading the writing upon the 
 wall. 
 
 Sometimes, but alas only too seldom, 
 comes to me out of the heavenly pres- 
 ence the mood of loving Tolerance, that 
 most gentle of the moods of God. It 
 is then that I regard the world as a 
 garden and the people as good children; 
 it is the mood in which everyone is for- 
 given; it is the mood that makes me 
 say to myself, "It is good for me to be 
 here," and to say to other people, "It



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 87 
 
 is good for you to be near me." It is 
 a mood that would pick out of every 
 man's life pearls, and see joy in every 
 hardsliip. It is a mood that whispers 
 joy to the sick man and tells him of 
 the wonderful stillness of death. This 
 mood is full of summer blessedness, of 
 cool places amidst great and fair trees; 
 of rich banks of summer flowers; of 
 the noon-tide when the labourer lays 
 him down to rest. Under this blessed 
 mood the winds of heaven are still, 
 and the mind of man is filled with 
 peace, that is truly and really the Peace 
 of God. Alas, this mood stays with me 
 but a short time. 
 
 I want to manage myself as well as 
 I can, but it is not easy to manage my- 
 self when I am tired; when I am tired 
 I can do nothing else but walk up and 
 down. At those times I am a great 
 trouble, a great worry to myself; I *do 
 not obey the rules that I have .set up to 
 guide me; I do not even obey myself. 
 If I say, " Go out for a walk in the rain,"



 
 38 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 I do not go. If I order myself to write 
 letters, I do not write them. It is no 
 good. This kind of "being tired" is a 
 mood of despair, and when despair gets 
 hold of you there is no escape till the 
 ugly thing lets go. 
 
 Perhaps it is possible for some to get 
 good even out of this mood, for God 
 hides His gold in queer places; despair 
 may be a kind of winter in the summer 
 of your day. The sap has sunk hke 
 lead into your heels and you feel as 
 though you could howl like a winter's 
 wolf. This hopeless despair, by bringing 
 you to the earth, raises you again; it 
 changes your blood, and drives you 
 with vicious kicks behind into a new 
 pasture. It makes a way for you out 
 of your own misery, and creates a new 
 mind out of your unrest: that, — with a 
 new beginning. But I can never escape, 
 I can only wait until the mood lets go, 
 and meanwhile the teeth of the mood 
 bite me to the bone, and the black 
 cruelty cuts at the very roots of my



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 3q 
 
 being; and when it has hold of me I 
 can do nothing; I cannot even read 
 "The City of Dreadful Night." When 
 I am hke that I know there is nothing 
 to be done, — nothing. When I am like 
 that I feel as if mind and body are 
 hemmed in by black darkness, and 
 that if I move I shall touch the jagged 
 edges of a rusty knife, held in the claws 
 of an ugly round-headed demon; and 
 so I wait and hope that this mood of 
 God will not last long. 
 
 When we were all of us quite natural 
 beasts of the earth, we were able to 
 take and enjoy the life near to us; but 
 being grown into men, we have got into 
 the bad habit of looking forward, and 
 by looking forward we quite lose the 
 present. I want to take every moment 
 as a fact in itself of special interest, 
 and as a moment that belongs to me. 
 Every moment that I have to spend 
 does belong to me, and the moments 
 may be gold or dross as I choose to make 
 them. Why should I let a moment pass



 
 [xo The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 me without taking it and finding a 
 fairy food for my thought? I Hke to 
 have a plan to fit the kind of day that 
 I expect to come; I Hke to know a 
 Httle how I want to treat the day, be- 
 fore I find out how the day will treat 
 me. So that if I am bitten by one hour, 
 I have got a muzzle ready for the next. 
 And I like to remind myself very often 
 that the day ends in sleep, and that 
 sleep is a passing good thing for a man. 
 To me by no means seldom comes the 
 thought (that is, in truth, only the push 
 of the old animal behind), that the day 
 is wasted, — I have done nothing; and a 
 good thing too if I have done nothing, — 
 the most pleasant and the most useful 
 way that anyone can spend a day is to 
 do nothing. 
 
 May my pride help me, poor foohsh 
 mortal that I am, with my insane de- 
 sire to do things! Has not all this 
 same sad day the breath of life passed 
 into my lungs, — is it then nothing to 
 breathe.'^ And I have eaten and touched



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 4i 
 
 the fruits of the earth. How do I 
 know that some God may not have 
 rested beside me during my idleness, and 
 His breath may have mingled with 
 my breath, and His thought with my 
 thought? How can I tell that even in 
 this sad day of nothing done, a wave of 
 thought, beginning in a tiny ripple, may 
 not have been conceived in me? And, be- 
 sides, what man, what king, what priest 
 can do anything more than live? It 
 has taken long enough to make a man, 
 and now a man sits in disgrace and 
 hates himself because in one day he has 
 done nothing. What after all are the 
 very wonderful doings of man worth? 
 Very hkely by doing nothing we may 
 be going a httle way on the right road, 
 and by doing a great deal we may only 
 be going round the same old way 
 again, the same old way that leads to 
 common ugly rows of houses, munici- 
 pal buildings, and petrol-filled machines. 
 I, too, for a long while, have looked 
 round this corner and that corner for



 
 42 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 God's secret, and at last I have dis- 
 covered that I can do very well if I 
 loiter through my Ufe without knowing 
 any secret at all; and who can say 
 that there is any secret to know? It is 
 quite clear, and quite proven, that men 
 breathe when they are born and not 
 when they die; and there are other 
 matters quite as clear to me. It is my 
 wish to be an intelligent creature that 
 has no desire to get more than just the 
 plain grass and sun that are quite easy 
 to get, and to wrap myself up in winter 
 in a woollen blanket. The excitement 
 of going out to pick up a few sticks is 
 all the hunting that I want; and all 
 the gallantry that I want is sometimes 
 to see in summer a little piece of pink 
 or white on the side of a liill a mile or 
 two away. I am easy to please and I 
 never want to do anytliing that hurts 
 anyone; — why should I? I should not 
 like to see the blood of my neighbour if 
 I dug at him with a knife. And why 
 should I want to hurt anyone when I



 
 The Soliloquy of a Ilermil 43 
 
 can enjoy reading "Tristram Shandy." 
 The uttermost I can do is to try my 
 best to hate. But I do not Hke to hate 
 anyone that is too near; there ought to 
 be a good wide space between a man 
 and his neighbour. 
 
 It is my business to find out what I 
 value in the world, and by no means 
 to pay my regard to what other people 
 value. Christian — Bunyan's pilgrim — 
 all of a sudden, while he was walking in 
 the fields, became aware that he was of 
 value; and it was then that he became 
 for the first tune in his life a really 
 proud man, and a man who could walk 
 his own way whatever Church and 
 State and family chose to say to liim. 
 I only require to beheve in myself, and 
 then everytliing that I do will be well 
 done. No two people look even at the 
 same daisies in the same way, and my 
 way is the best way for me. I have 
 the moments of my fife to spend, I 
 have myself, what more can I want? 
 
 In the old days I used to tie myself



 
 ^4 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 up in a mystic knot, that I never could 
 undo; neither could I ever explain what 
 it meant. Now I leave all mystery to 
 come and go with the moods. If a 
 mood comes and therein is hidden a vi- 
 sion, I welcome it and believe; for there 
 is a mood in which God even believes 
 in Himself, and in that mood He begets 
 the belief of the world. And I am will- 
 ing to beheve, too, when it comes to me. 
 I take and eat of the mystic fruit; only 
 when the fruit is taken away I do not 
 pretend that I have it still. How often 
 has my body been the home of carking 
 care, and vile, dire forebodings, or silly 
 ignorance, or turbid folly .^^ And I have 
 had to hve a long time before I was 
 able to open my eyes and see myself. 
 
 To have the soul and teeth of a hon 
 and the body of a tramp, is the way to 
 tread on this world as it ought to be 
 trodden on. I know that I am an 
 enemy to the people of the world as 
 they are. I do not like the way they 
 look at me. Why is it that when I am



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit /i5 
 
 doing my work, the people of the world 
 look at me as though I were doing 
 something wrong? "There he is again, 
 digging in his garden." 
 
 I suppose that I am the kind of per- 
 son that whatever I do is a criminal 
 offence. I must not even water my 
 flowers, or walk down the road, or tlirow 
 a stone at a rat, or read the paper in a 
 corner under a little bush of May. 
 No one ever likes to be understood; 
 perhaps that is why there is a jeering 
 twinkle in the eyes of those that look 
 at me as I cut my grass. Perhaps the 
 people think that I understand them. 
 If they do tliink so, they are certainly 
 to be excused for the way they look 
 at me, but they are wrong. I do not 
 pretend to understand them, for to 
 understand the people would be to 
 understand God, at least to understand 
 what God ought never to be. 
 
 To give too good heed to God's 
 moods often gets a man shut up inside 
 prison walls. That is why it is well to



 
 46 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 understand one's own mind, so that 
 when we find a mood pulls us along a 
 road to destruction, we can hold back 
 a little before it is too late. I have 
 never found that God plays at his 
 moods. If He does jest at all, it is a 
 very monstrous jest, and the sort of 
 jest that does not appeal to me per- 
 sonally, though I like to read about it 
 in the papers. 
 
 I very much dishke people who are 
 always the same; for no man can be 
 always the same unless he is so much 
 of an animal that the moods pass over 
 him like the clouds. 
 
 I notice in this tract that I am now 
 writing, that sometimes I appear to be 
 an infidel and sometimes a befiever, 
 sometimes a Cliristian and sometimes a 
 heathen, and every brave man is just 
 the same as I am; for no one but a 
 coward hides his head in the sand when 
 the mood that he is afraid to see goes 
 by. If a man is sincere he will change 
 his opinion with every mood, at least



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit ^7 
 
 about the tilings that belong to the 
 spirit. I do not change my ideas in 
 some things, because God is a spirit, 
 and though in the earth we have the 
 Son of God to live with, God himself 
 keeps always in the spirit of His moods. 
 I change my mind most in what I be- 
 lieve; but as a rule I do the same 
 thing. I am always polite to the 
 world, and I try not to tell anyone 
 when God's moods break in upon me; 
 or when a tongue of fire suddenly de- 
 vours all the thought that I love best; 
 this is what I expect to happen. 
 
 But it is a Uttle hard when God's 
 moods shatter my belief in Him, though 
 no mood of God can take away the 
 love of Christ; for that kind of love 
 that Christ first planted is the only 
 flower that can live under all the 
 moods; and so it is possible, nay de- 
 sirable, for the greatest infidel upon 
 earth to love Christ; for in some curi- 
 ous way the Son of Man is in Earth 
 and in Heaven, though this double life



 
 /i8 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 is rather obscure. However, His love 
 has been felt by men even under the 
 Garment of God, and in the darkest 
 terrors of His moods; and also I have 
 felt it while I have been quite quietly 
 picking buttercups with my two Kttle 
 boys in the fields. 
 
 All priests ought to be trained as un- 
 behevers, for unbelief is the only good 
 soil for the believing mood to grow in; 
 so long as unbeHef is not fixed to that 
 foohsh idea that we are all so proud of, 
 the idea, I mean, that we know the 
 Truth. How, I should hke to know, 
 can I know the Truth when God Him- 
 self is always contradicting it? If I say 
 anything is true, then a mood comes 
 and casts the thing called Truth to the 
 winds, and my idea of God goes with 
 it. If I say I believe only in matter, 
 I have to be always proving it to my- 
 self in order to keep out the belief in 
 God. 
 
 That is why so many people are argu- 
 ing whether one behef or another is



 
 The Soliloquy of a Ilermil /jq 
 
 true; because each knows that if he 
 does not keep it up, his side of the 
 question will shp tlirough his fingers. 
 And a man is most unhappy when he 
 has always to be fighting the mood of 
 belief or unbelief, in order to keep the 
 one or the other simply because he 
 happens to think that one or other of 
 the ideas belongs to him; it doesn't. 
 Like all other ideas, it belongs to 
 God. It is just man's conceit. He 
 stands hke a cock upon a dunghill and 
 crows out his belief; or else he holds 
 his watch in his hand and says, "Let 
 God strike me dead, if he is a God, in 
 ten minutes." And perhaps the next 
 day this very man believes in God, for 
 the mood of behef is upon him before 
 he takes out his watch again to prove 
 the contrary, and then he has to do all 
 he can to pretend to himself that he 
 does not beheve. 
 
 It is not for me to say how long the 
 different moods are wont to stay; every- 
 one in this matter must judge for him-



 
 5o The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 self. And it is no use crying out 
 against the mood that hurts you; it is 
 better to go and dig in the garden. 
 
 I can see, and so can any other who 
 can think for himself, how good a thing 
 it is that God hves in us in no fixed 
 mood. If He did, it would render the 
 Advent of Clu'ist an impossibihty. And 
 how cruelly Clirist was treated by the 
 men who had fixed the moods by their 
 law shows that if man could keep God 
 out of his life, he would gladly do it; 
 just as he would hke to keep out death, 
 war, plague, earthquake, love, wisdom, 
 pity, or any other state that hurts his 
 appetite, and prevents him from gath- 
 ering together the things of this world, 
 and from leaving them to his children. 
 
 And it is easy to see how man, with 
 his instinctive cunning, caught at the 
 fixed behef in a distant God as some- 
 thing tangible that would get this near 
 God and His upsetting moods quite out 
 of his hfe. Man thought — fooHsh fel- 
 low — that if he always held on to the



 
 The Soliloquy of a IJermil 5i 
 
 tail of the bull, it would not gore him, 
 but this bull has not got a tail. 
 
 I am ashamed at the way we eat and 
 drink and sleep as if none of these 
 tilings concern us in the least. We take 
 our dinner just as if it were no great 
 matter, when every sitting down to 
 meat should be a feast to the Lord. 
 We cast our bread into the dust to 
 the dogs, when we ought to hand it to 
 them in silver dishes. Everything that 
 we eat should be sacred to our palates. 
 I like to make a wonder out of every 
 little act, because every little act is a 
 wonder. 
 
 The simple life — so called — is not 
 the simple hfe at all; it is the deeper 
 life. The simple life is the life of motor 
 cars, of divorces, of monkey dances, of 
 hunting cats and hares and foxes, of 
 shooting people and playing games like 
 ferrets. All these things are the natu- 
 ral, the simple life of a man. Anyone 
 can get pleasure in these ways; put a 
 man on a horse, and a fox or a cat be-



 
 52 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 fore him running away, and the man 
 will be simple and happy. And the 
 other pleasm"es are just as simple. 
 
 The best joy is not got quite so easily. 
 I want to cultivate the kind of mind 
 that can turn stones into bread, a dull 
 hour into heavenly glory, and a dull 
 life into the life of a king. For what 
 we call dullness, is really the best soil 
 we can dig in, because the gold that it 
 yields is very precious and very lasting. 
 I like to know that I am getting rich, 
 not by stealing from the poor, but by 
 getting something more out of myself; 
 I want to get all I can out of myself, 
 and what I want to get, is the tiling 
 that shall please me. 
 
 The fact that it is hard to get any- 
 thing out of oneself drives people to go 
 and get what they can out of others. I 
 do not blame them. I never blame any- 
 body; I never even blame myself. The 
 light of my lamp gives hght to the 
 moods of God that overshadow me as I 
 write; the air surrounds the moods when



 
 The SoKlofiny of a Tfermif 53 
 
 it surrounds inc; and the moods rest 
 in me when I sleep. I try to deepen, 
 to broaden, to open my Ufe in every 
 way; to stand no more wondering how 
 to be happy, but to see and feel and 
 touch. I Hke to touch the waves of 
 the sea and the mould in my garden; 
 I like to touch the heart of man; I like 
 to touch the grass and moss of the 
 fields. 
 
 It is only when I meet men that I 
 am ashamed, and it is when I am 
 ashamed that my love bites me, and I 
 feel pain as though I had been bitten 
 by an adder. Sometimes when I walk 
 along the street of our little town and 
 men pass me, and I see them talking 
 to each other, I feel ashamed. There is 
 something very ugly about the immor- 
 tal part of a man, — his greed, his getting 
 on, his self-sacrifice, his giving to the 
 poor. I suppose there can be nothing 
 beautiful in anything that has gone on 
 a long while without changing; it is 
 only the ugly part of us that can live



 
 54 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 tlirough so many generations of flesh 
 and blood. I long for man to repent 
 and to be saved from his immortality, 
 so that I may not feel ashamed when 
 I get into the road to let him pass on 
 the pavement. 
 
 At last, thank goodness, I have not 
 the slightest value for my own opinion 
 or for anything that I may say, or 
 think, or write. I now take it for 
 granted that I am nearly always as far 
 from the Truth as Mr. Gladstone was, 
 and I do not care if I am. I am not 
 here to do right or wrong, or to teach 
 anyone; I am here to live. And at 
 last I have found out where the pleas- 
 ure of hving hides; I know now the 
 moments that I have most enjoyed, 
 and these moments may come again; 
 there is not one that may not come 
 again, even in old age. 
 
 Youth is silly and selfish; it is often 
 miserable and foohsh; its good looks 
 are stuffed with foohsh feelings that are 
 often as old as the world; and its mind



 
 T}ie SoUloquy of a Hermit 55 
 
 is narrow, — it is always thinking a 
 thousand things too many about itself, 
 when one thing would do. Youth has 
 too many irons in the fire to be able 
 really to live. It is best to have before 
 you only two roads, This or That, this 
 life as it is, or nothingness. 
 
 I will try to remember a few of the 
 fairy hours that I have enjoyed most. 
 I remember one evening in late autumn, 
 that I walked with two very dear com- 
 panions into the shining lights of a 
 town, out of the dark country lanes. 
 The first lamp that we passed might 
 have been an immortal star. The first 
 street, the first moving creature, an old 
 woman carrying a bundle of gloves in a 
 black cloth bag, — no sinner entering 
 heaven could have had so much joy. 
 The streets grew broader and the lamps 
 brighter and the passers-by more gay, 
 and the whole town was a fairy palace 
 made for our delight, and we had only 
 to walk about to enjoy it. 
 
 And I remember under a white cliff,



 
 56 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 where the sand was too hot to touch 
 and the sun's kiss kissed deep into my 
 soul. With a dear friend I partook of 
 a httle bread and a tiny hard piece of 
 cheese and a Httle bottle of Kme-juice, 
 and we parted it between us, and 
 broke the bread with a priest's hands, 
 and ate and drank as though we shared 
 only one child's heart between us; and 
 afterwards we each smoked a cigarette 
 that tasted of cool woods. 
 
 And one other walk, that I hope in 
 my last hour to remember; it was in a 
 cold February, and we walked far over 
 the downs, over the white dead grass, 
 dry and crisp in the wind; and we 
 rested a little and ate in a place where 
 a little mound rose above the hill. 
 And we watched, in the valley beneath 
 us, tiny children running to school 
 beside a little blue trickle of water, 
 and large gulls were washing and flap- 
 ping their wings in the water. The 
 children called to them and waved their 
 arms, and the gulls rose and spread



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 67 
 
 like snowflakes over the valley, and the 
 children ran on, holding each other's 
 hands and singing. 
 
 The cup I wish to drink is the cup of 
 the earth's blood. I wish to drink 
 deep of the silence, the deep mists, the 
 growing corn, and the movements of 
 birds. The very life that I feel around 
 me should drug me, and each motion 
 and movement and tongue of fire that 
 I feel ought to pass Hke rich wine into 
 my being. The very stones of the road 
 should yield up to me their thoughts. 
 And no doubt that was what Christ 
 meant, when He spoke about the stones 
 becoming men. To force upon our 
 wonderful bodies the drunkenness of 
 prepared wine, is to sour the imagina- 
 tion and to prevent us from ever getting 
 the dehcious joy of real drunkenness. 
 
 I try to be at peace with all my 
 thoughts and to welcome even my anger 
 when it breaks out upon me. I watch 
 myself as if I were far away, as if I 
 were a cloud passing in the sky, or a



 
 58 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 distant sheep feeding upon the hill-side. 
 I have yet to change a great deal be- 
 fore I can reach the goal of happiness. 
 I still feel that I am in part immortal. 
 I still find a curious pleasure in possess- 
 ing a handful of bright gold coins. I 
 still desire cunningly to defraud. And 
 often, however much I disbelieve in my 
 opinion, I think I am right. And feel- 
 ing as I do the very movements of 
 God, I do not like to be treated as a 
 poor man who cannot afford a day 
 labourer to dig his garden. 
 
 I suppose my class, the priest class, 
 craves for love more than any other 
 kind of human, as it feels itself sinking 
 into extinction. I do not possess enough 
 of the attributes of immortality, — greed, 
 hardness of heart, cunning — all the bit- 
 ing instincts of the animal. I have them 
 enough to pain, but not enough to 
 save. I cannot help thinking that the 
 immortal man out of his abundance 
 might give me a kindly look as he 
 passes me in the road, a kindly look



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit Bg 
 
 out of the body of hatred. This is my 
 last priestly affliction; I desire to be 
 loved, and loved for nothing. This is 
 my last foolish hope; I want to be 
 loved by men. 
 
 Love is the last sadness of the priest, 
 and men turn away from liim because 
 he tries to love them; for have not the 
 people that immortal hatred that is 
 better than love.»^ 
 
 My wish is that I may understand 
 myself. I know quite enough about 
 other people; they show me their ways 
 only too clearly. I want to appear 
 interesting in my own eyes; I want to 
 be something of value to myself. I do 
 not want to love. I want to study my- 
 self, because I am the nearest and most 
 interesting creature that I know. I 
 would like to be believed in, so that I 
 might have some guide to the behef in 
 myself. Left quite alone, my interest 
 in myself is apt to dwindle. 
 
 I hke to be contented with myself in 
 every way, and to mistrust everything



 
 6o The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 that is not mine. I am sm^e that my 
 som* grapes are not so very sour, nor 
 are the sweet grapes of my neighbours 
 so very sweet; and it is indeed possible 
 that all kinds of grapes have very 
 much the same taste; the best fruit 
 can only give out so much sweetness 
 and no more. 
 
 With the terrible moods of God mov- 
 ing about me, as dark clouds, and then 
 the lightning, and sometimes the omi- 
 nous silence and calm, I turn to the 
 stranger upon earth that once learned 
 to bear the burden of God, calhng Him 
 Father, and holding Him, like Hercules 
 did the world, upon His shoulders. I 
 turn to the stranger upon earth. He 
 who was not afraid to call the terrible 
 moods "Father," to take them into 
 His life, to bear with them, to love 
 them. And still more than that. He 
 dared also to become the shepherd of 
 men; to live Himself as a man and to 
 fall before His Father's terrible mood of 
 blind rage working in men. He alone



 
 The Soliloquy of a Ilernill Gi 
 
 dared to become one with the spoiler 
 and the spoiled. I bow my head before 
 this stranger of the Earth; and why 
 should not I too sing a song of behef 
 in Him? 
 
 It is the spring, and the apple- 
 blossom is beautiful because He is there 
 in it. To love Him is the only good 
 thing in this world. It does not matter 
 if He is true; He is beyond all Truth. 
 All things have breath in Him; I feel 
 Him in the earth. When I hammer at 
 the rocks and break away fossils that 
 have been there for millions of years, 
 I am only going a httle way into His 
 love. When I look up in the night and 
 see the light that has left a star thou- 
 sands of years ago, I can only see a 
 httle way into His love. His love is a 
 terrible love, — terrible and deep, hard 
 for a man to bear; I have hved in it, 
 I know it. I hear people say, "Why 
 did He come here to this httle Planet; 
 why did He not leave it out? " I answer, 
 "He leaves nothing out; He cannot give



 
 62 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 any tiling better than His love; it is of 
 more worth than immortality." 
 
 A future life is nothing to me; His 
 love is everything. I study the rocks 
 and the stars; I love old, very old his- 
 tory; it gives me a breath of Him. I 
 love to know that matter is infinite, 
 for His love is in all matter. A stone 
 that has never been touched by man is 
 touched by Him. The world says it is 
 not possible to believe hke this, but I 
 know it is possible. I would never 
 dispute as to whether Clirist lived or 
 not; that does not matter. It does 
 not matter whether we Hve. Life is 
 wonderful, but we only feel ahve when 
 we get near Him, for near Him even 
 Death hveth. He is the fife stream of 
 the worlds; we are all in that stream, 
 only we do not know that we are fed 
 every day by Him. 
 
 I know quite well He is the most 
 unreal, the most unthinkable of ideas; 
 but to feel Him is All; to believe in 
 Him is nothing. We send His love to



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermil 63 
 
 the farthermost star, and He will be 
 formed in that star. When He is near, 
 very near to us, then we feel His ter- 
 rible love and we kill Him. 
 
 Even now the mood of belief is gone 
 and I turn upon myself and cry out 
 against what I am writing; I shake all 
 the thoughts of love about my ears, 
 and turn Christ into a worm agcdn. I 
 look out again into the mist; I sit and 
 watch the dim evening light that sad- 
 dens the hills; I see the days pass, the 
 winter days; and I taste the creatures, 
 the bread and the wine; and I do not 
 feel His body in them, the bread and 
 the wine! I feel the emptiness, the 
 unutterable emptiness of all the thoughts 
 in the world; and I hearken to the re- 
 mote sounds of the sea. I wonder Avhy 
 we can ever leave the simple clearness 
 of our lives, in order to crawl into the 
 underworld of mystery. I see all things 
 common again and myself the concunon- 
 est of all. I see the Eternal moods 
 casting men over and over again into



 
 64 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 the same pit, and I see the Christ, a 
 poor dark Arab, lying beaten by the 
 rods of the Roman soldiers, because 
 the wicked sisters of poetry chose him 
 out of all men to teach Truth, — Truth 
 that is hateful to men. Christ, hke 
 the first swallow, is a promise of sum- 
 mer, but only too well we know that 
 the sunmier ends, and then comes "the 
 winter of our discontent." 
 
 Who can blame the men who choose 
 to hve the simple life of swagger and 
 bluster and shame .^ For all those who 
 step into other ways know what they 
 see, but they do not often dare to tell it 
 to others. I ought to be glad when I 
 see in every eye the cunning of deceit; 
 "the getting eye," I might call it, for 
 in the lowest cunning there is the only 
 abiding happiness for man. That kind 
 of life can alone give him joy, under 
 the rule of the moods of God. The 
 lowest creatures alone have happiness, 
 and the children that do not know; 
 and why should we teach them.^ When



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 65 
 
 I look back at the past, I do not regard 
 the moods of God at all; I do not care 
 whether I have done good or evil; I do 
 not care whether I cursed or whether 
 I blessed; I do not care whether I have 
 been good or wise; or whether I have 
 ever learned Latin; I do not care 
 whether as a priest I have kicked over 
 my own altar. 
 
 Tliis is what I care to remember. I 
 I can feel now the warmth of a perfect 
 day in June; I can see the bugloss on 
 the cliff, growing in little patches of 
 blue below the white chalk. And I 
 remember a night in winter when I saw 
 a white lamb lying quite dead under a 
 clear moon. I see now the rough old 
 black dog, bhnd of one eye, that used 
 to be asleep on the green in the dog- 
 days that are past; and its master, a 
 wild old man with a great stride and 
 long beard who was always hanomering 
 up pig-styes. 
 
 I look back and see the common 
 things, the human things; not God's



 
 66 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 moods, or Clirist, or the wonder that is 
 called man's soul. I believe that I 
 have shed more tears over my little 
 boy's broken engine that I dug up one 
 day in the garden, than over all the 
 kilhng of the Son of Man. I remember 
 how I used to carry a little jug and 
 fetch the milk across the green; and 
 I see now the daisies that came out 
 altogether one spring day; and the 
 mild look of the red and white cow 
 that was always milked first and fed 
 upon the green before the others came 
 out. I look back again to the long win- 
 ters, to the caressing white mists and 
 silvery hoar-frosts; and afterwards the 
 white May that always came out first 
 on our hedge. 
 
 No doubt, I, like everyone else who 
 knows, would gladly rid myself of the 
 deep, fierce, hidden feehngs; of the wild 
 moods of God that tear and baffle 
 us. How I wish that I could bring all 
 the dark moods up into the clear air 
 of a high mountain, and prevent them



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit Cy-j 
 
 from ever entering into man again! I 
 long to bring all the hidden thoughts, 
 the gnashing of secret teeth into the 
 sun. God must come out of His heaven, 
 the devil out of his hell, and Christ 
 out of the soul, into the light of the 
 sun. 
 
 Let the terrible Gods come down from 
 on high. If they have prepared a fu- 
 ture life for us, let us prepare a pres- 
 ent hfe for them. And indeed that is 
 just what Christ the Son of God would 
 have us do. He is wiUing to hve with 
 us in the sun; let us open our door to 
 him. I will take Him, and all the rest 
 of the heavenly hosts can go, and He 
 will not refuse to come. All the deep 
 thought and the dread marv^els of God 
 can go; all the hidden fears and these 
 secret terrors can go. With the Son of 
 Man beside me I can defy the moods; 
 and even the old Devil will cast his 
 darts at me in vain. 
 
 It is impossible for me, who am only 
 mortal, to keep away from the Son of



 
 68 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 Man; He is always ready to come in, 
 and I am not able to shut Him out; 
 only those who have the immortal 
 cravings for life can do that. He will 
 not allow me to put Him away; He 
 comes in because it is His right; He 
 comes in because the heart of man is 
 His home. 
 
 It is well that I have reached this 
 silence, this quiet haven that I longed 
 for as a child, and could not find. 
 As a young man walking home in the 
 dusk of the evening, I longed for it 
 then. And as a man, when I struck 
 about me breaking up old thoughts, 
 burning, tlirusting, tearing, and at last 
 leaving myself naked, I longed for the 
 silence then. I have feared it; I 
 thought that to reach it meant death, 
 the first step towards death, and I 
 struggled. I have tried to piece the 
 old thoughts together that as a man I 
 had broken. I was hke a child, who 
 thinking that she was too old to play 
 with her doll had long ago left it at



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 69 
 
 the bottom of the cupboard; but was 
 forced on a rainy day to find it again, 
 and to tie on its broken arm and find 
 it a new head. I sought for my broken 
 God again; and put it together as it 
 used to be, before as a man I broke it 
 to pieces. 
 
 At last I begin to know myself; I 
 can now love the wonder that is be- 
 coming myself. I hve now as I wish 
 to hve; I take every day as it is. I 
 do not try to break the day to pieces 
 as I used to do. The days pass me hke 
 hurrying girls on hght feet. Years 
 ago I longed to hold them and find out 
 what secrets they had under their cloud 
 and sunshine; and now I know that it 
 is the days that long to find out my 
 secret. They cannot find it out; they 
 are bound to the wheel, they must 
 dance on and on and make the young 
 men follow them. And they are caught 
 sometimes, these girl days; they are 
 torn and broken and their evenings are 
 muddy.



 
 70 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 In my life there is human hfe, that is 
 all, — human life. If anyone wants more 
 than that, he must go beyond me to 
 find it. The moods hide God as with a 
 garment, but He can find me. And He 
 has found me; and He speaks His ter- 
 rible words in the moods of my life. 
 It is no good to try to get out of His 
 way. Everywhere the hand of the 
 Devastator is upon Man, to press him 
 down to the earth. 
 
 Only at times under His yoke I have 
 been allowed to take a httle nectar 
 from the flowers; I have hidden my 
 hand in a waterfall of brown hair; I 
 have caught a hurried kiss from a 
 breathing sunbeam. This is all we can 
 have, — all. It is impossible to get more 
 out of the world than it can give. It 
 is best to ruminate hke a cow. 
 
 The world is always rain-swept and 
 sun-cracked, soaked with salt mists 
 and splashed with mud; and our fives 
 at the best are broken and tlireadbare, 
 wliile death ever cfings to life, slowly



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 71 
 
 devouring it. That is how we are 
 made; and always the moods of God 
 fill us with madness, for that is how 
 He is made. 
 
 I have always longed to show to 
 myself and to make myself see where 
 true joy is to be found; and I want to 
 really beheve . that hfe can be made a 
 beautiful thing. In the old days when 
 I held my head in the sand of mystery, 
 I thought that something wonderful 
 would happen to me; and now I be- 
 heve that the most wonderful thing is 
 that nothing wonderful happens. We 
 are, just as we are, and nothing else; 
 are we not wonderful enough? By 
 just holding up my hand I am often- 
 times filled by a divine vision; by only 
 hearing the wind howl in the chimney, 
 I am filled with all the harmony of 
 music. By eating bread I am fed with 
 the whole goodness and fullness of the 
 earth. And when the silent mood comes, 
 the calmness of immense seas and eter- 
 nal spaces fills me.



 
 72 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 For a long time I liid my head under 
 the sand, and no wonder I could not 
 understand my own words. I know 
 now that the things of greatest value 
 can be had for the asking. I go into 
 the Palace of the Day, that Christ 
 opened, the Palace of True Joy. How 
 dehcately and with what gladness should 
 everyone take part in the great festival! 
 The centre of hfe is always near; it is 
 only the outer parts that are afar off 
 and hard to understand. 
 
 For a long while I have run after 
 the Chariot, and now I have climbed in. 
 I know now that the smallest handle 
 will do to hold to any part of hfe, and a 
 million bodies hke mine can be formed 
 of one thought. All my little experi- 
 ences can be easily acted in any part 
 of the earth. We have built up for 
 ourselves such grotesque buildings of 
 thought, so high that when we reach 
 the top we have to fall off to the ground. 
 We are always forming such high desti- 
 nies for ourselves, that we have quite



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 78 
 
 lost count of the creature of tlie moods 
 of God, that is ourself. 
 
 Whenever a vision has come to me, 
 it has always taken me and shewn me 
 the dehght of just hving, — the joy of 
 things as they are,— of the earth as it is. 
 I have seen only too clearly that my 
 happiness is taken from me because of 
 my desire to become something unut- 
 terable. How often has my wish been 
 to pretend to be something that I am 
 not, and to leave myself in the shade 
 w^hile I follow my shadow in the sun. 
 I can see in every page of my life that 
 my happiness has been taken away be- 
 cause of my desire to get into another 
 hfe, rather than to live my own. No 
 doubt one day we shall find all the 
 mystic writers leaving their pens and 
 their borrowings into the unutterable 
 mystery of God's being, and instead 
 busy themselves all day long peacefully 
 planting cabbages. 
 
 God himself has been raised up on 
 high, like a stone column that has



 
 74 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 only its mass to be proud of, and man 
 is always content to knock his foolish 
 head against the base. 
 
 I know that we have His moods to 
 create us, and the love of the Son of 
 Man to save us from ourselves, and 
 that is All I know. Everyone is bound 
 to set his net in the sea of his Hfe, and 
 to bring home in his net the fish that 
 he deserves or desires, as the case may 
 be; and he devours them, or what is 
 more Ukely, they devour him. 
 
 I have described myself, and have 
 told of my hopes and aspirations, of 
 my fears and of the way I dig in my 
 garden. But I am afraid I have given 
 quite a wrong idea, because in writing, 
 it is impossible to forget that you are 
 writing. When you are writing there 
 is always the wish to stab the heart of 
 the matter; you want to get to the 
 exciting part of your thought, the part 
 of your thought that excites you. That 
 is why I have tlirown all my stones at 
 one dog and left my hands empty. I



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 76 
 
 would like to think how a friend would 
 write about me, and it must be a friend 
 with a Httle wit, and not a soul that 
 loves. 
 
 The first part of my confessions, tell- 
 ing how I touch the earth and sky, 
 and the thoughts of man, are finished; 
 and I would hke to know what I look 
 like from their point of view. The 
 earth loves me, I think I may say that; 
 the great divine Mother presence tells 
 quite clearly of her love. The hills do 
 not turn away; they have no other pur- 
 suits, other wars, other things to make, 
 so that they must leave me alone. 
 There is something in being able to 
 laugh at a milhon years, and being 
 able to laugh at the proud over- 
 grown giants in Switzerland, — that is 
 what our chalk downs can do. And 
 they can bear me up in their arms for 
 my Uttle while, and not so much as 
 feel that a shadow of life has passed 
 over them. In them the moods of 
 God burn hidden hke spent lightning,



 
 76 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 a dread forsaken fire burning under- 
 ground. 
 
 A few million years gives our hills 
 time to reflect upon the moods, and we 
 men need a little of the spirit of their 
 long-suffering, so that God Himself may 
 sink deep for a while, nay, may even be 
 buried in us. And were men ever to 
 act together as one man, which was 
 once dreamed of, then we should pre- 
 sent to the gods that calm upper sur- 
 face, that unperturbed grassy height, 
 and low meadow land, and upland fal- 
 low, so that the moods themselves 
 could sink deep into our matter. But 
 alas, our surface is weak and each 
 httle man must needs be a bearer of 
 good tidings; each little man must 
 needs set himself under the hammer, so 
 that he on a very dark night emits a 
 spark, and cries out in the night that 
 he is saved, and in the morning that 
 he is damned. 
 
 The hills I love have a noble out- 
 ward presence like a faithful comrade;



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 77 
 
 they stay with me even when it rains, 
 and they stay for more than two 
 nights; I thank them for their silence 
 and their gifts. The flowers have an- 
 other way with them; they are not 
 so friendly. And I fear, it is sad to 
 think of it, that they have learned 
 from their creator how to hate. Ah! 
 the pleasure to a rose when it can get 
 a thorn into a human finger; and 
 think of the joy of a red berry when it 
 poisoned httle Betsey; or the merry 
 jests of a bunch of Mary buds that 
 once attracted a Httle boy into the 
 middle of a swamp, where he was 
 drowned. Flowers can speak almost 
 like women; I have seen a very angry 
 look in the eyes of a white nettle, be- 
 cause it could not sting me; and the 
 rage of a musk thistle when I steal its 
 fragrance without being pricked is quite 
 ladyhke. 
 
 Above the flowers are the beasts, or 
 below them, — there is always a httle 
 doubt which to say. The beast loves



 
 78 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 the man that has tamed him; yes, 
 sometimes. And the gentle creatures, 
 are they gentle? Will not a dove fight 
 in its own way, as fiercely as a Hon, for 
 all its pink eyes? Take up a wild five 
 hare and hold it, and see if your 
 hands are not torn by its claws. The 
 moods are beginning to have claws in 
 the beasts; but wait till we get to man. 
 I wonder what these beings, that are 
 made of the same stuff as myself, make 
 of me. I do not think it would be much 
 good to take the opinion of a country- 
 man in this matter. A ploughman 
 critic would indeed speak his mind after 
 his own manner, and that not unworldly, 
 for the earthy wit of the peasant brings 
 the art of the critic to a very lean 
 level indeed, by judging simply by what 
 a man has. I own a cottage, therefore 
 my value to the clown is exactly the 
 value of my cottage, plus the value of 
 my overcoat and the value of my 
 boots. I notice that the passers-by of 
 the fields always look at my boots. Do



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 79 
 
 they expect to see the cloven hoof, I 
 wonder? 
 
 A gentleman came here once for the 
 shooting; he came from town. I may 
 as well say here, that he belonged to 
 the inomortal type of man; and when 
 he was not shooting he attached him- 
 self to me, and he found me very ready 
 to listen to his bons mots, although 
 they were not quite in the same style 
 as our Saviour's. I will now, for a httle 
 while, try to become this immortal young 
 man, who has now gone somewhere else 
 for the shooting. And I will write a 
 httle story about myself from the watch- 
 tower of this young man. In so doing I 
 hope to get at the other side of myself, 
 that I could not very well touch in the 
 first part of my confessions. 
 
 And now, soul of my soul, child of 
 the moon, I will begin; I am trans- 
 formed. 
 
 Mr. Thomas is the only name that 
 will suit the occupier of the red house 
 in the village of . Mr. Thomas is so



 
 8o The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 utterly different from his own name, it 
 would be a cap with a wrong colour for 
 him. His name should have come from 
 a simple man who once upon a time, 
 in a fit of sadness, begat a son. I can 
 never think of Mr. Thomas by his real 
 name. If I were to call out "Powys, 
 Powys," as I might to my dog, I very 
 much doubt whether I should get any 
 answer. If I were to call him by his 
 real name, this story about him would 
 appear to the public to be quite untrue, 
 for people would say that such a name 
 could not have such a story. That is 
 why I call him Mr. Thomas. 
 
 I would like to say, at the beginning, 
 that this type, the type of Mr. Thomas, 
 is not a type that I approve of. I 
 cannot say that I think that God has 
 expressed His divine purpose very well 
 in this kind of man, — a man that does 
 not even know how to treat a trades- 
 man, and who will thank a porter for 
 doing what he is paid to do. Mr. 
 Thomas has what I will call a very



 
 The Soliloquy of a liermil 8i 
 
 care-worn conscience, a conscience that 
 is quite unable to look after its own 
 interests. 
 
 I am writing about him only "as a 
 person that I have met," for heaven's 
 sake understand that, good people. I 
 do not regard liim as my friend, be- 
 cause no one could be that, unless he 
 were born under the same star. I 
 used to see liim sometimes, that was 
 all, and walk with him a httle, and 
 allow him to hsten to a few httle 
 stories of my own, and perhaps to 
 gently instruct hun in the art of hving 
 a good hfe. I may say here that I 
 have no wish to be damned with him; 
 neither do I wish to be caught up in a 
 cloud with him and carried to heaven. 
 
 Mr. Thomas is married and he digs 
 in his garden. He looks rather hke a 
 landscape artist who has spent ten 
 summers in trying to draw an old foot- 
 bridge, two willow trees, and a cow, 
 and could never finish his picture be- 
 cause the cow would never he down.



 
 82 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 He looks as if he has spent all these 
 years in wondering why the cow would 
 never he down; and last of all, his 
 patience being quite exhausted, he 
 packed up his canvas and after walking 
 slowly home in deep thought, began to 
 dig in liis garden. 
 
 The garden that Mr. Thomas culti- 
 vated was round about his house; and 
 his house was in the middle of a grass 
 field; and anyone going past could see 
 the fines of potatoes when Mr. Thomas 
 planted them. And round the garden 
 were very old railings. I was talking 
 to Mr. Thomas one day, and leaning 
 over the raifings, and they fell in pieces. 
 I said I was very sorry; Mr. Thomas 
 only smiled. And I said, being annoyed, 
 "Why can't you get some good iron rail- 
 ings round your garden .^^" Mr. Thomas 
 looked at me in extreme sorrow. 
 
 I remember first seeing Mr. Thomas 
 under the great white nose of the Giant 
 Cfifi", for his viUage is near the sea. I 
 had been shooting rabbits with a rifle,



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 83 
 
 and I was beginning to climb the nar- 
 row path that leads to the top of the 
 chff, when I noticed a man moving 
 along by the rocks towards the path. 
 While I was on the shore he must have 
 been amongst the rocks, and now he 
 began to climb the cliff behmd me, 
 taking care to keep a good distance 
 away. When I rested, he rested, and 
 he seemed most unwilhng to catch me 
 up. He no doubt smd to himself, 
 "There is no hurry; I will wait here 
 until that person is gone." Well, I 
 waited just over the brow of the cliff, 
 where he could not see me, and when 
 he did appear I inquired of him the way 
 to his village. And hke all nervous 
 people he could not give me a direct 
 answer; he spoke as if he did not know. 
 And then he told me the different at- 
 tributes of the ways that I might take; 
 and last of all he offered to show me 
 the way himseff. 
 
 As we walked I knew Mr. Thomas 
 was what we call in the polite world



 
 84 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 a "crank"; he walked as if at any 
 moment the earth might give way; 
 and as we looked across the bay to- 
 wards the Isle of Shngers, he kept a 
 very proper distance from the cliff 
 edge. 
 
 My first impression of Mr. Thomas 
 was a curious feehng that he was hid- 
 ing something; or that he was the 
 guardian of a treasure of wliich he was 
 not allowed to speak. And he seemed 
 to fear me, and when I pointed out to 
 him the beauty of the green sea-weed 
 far below us he turned hurriedly to- 
 wards the setting sun. I belong myself 
 to one of the hberal professions, and I 
 have cultivated a proper manner to 
 use with my inferiors. Mr. Thomas 
 spoke rather quickly, in a low tone, and 
 I did not often reply; he wanted to say 
 fooHsh things about the weather, and I 
 let him. I could tell how nervous he 
 was by his hurried way of speaking, 
 and by the way he fell over the white 
 stones that coastguards put along the



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 85 
 
 path and wliilewash, so that they may 
 see the way on a dark night; and I 
 walked in the path, there being only- 
 room for one. 
 
 Mr. Thomas talked of his favourite 
 snug corners by tlie sea, as a bird 
 would of his resting places, with the 
 fear all the time in his heart that I 
 might rob him of them. And then he 
 talked about the working people that 
 are called laboiu'ers, because he hap- 
 pened to see one. We passed a tumu- 
 lus covered with brambles, the chief 
 growth in that part of the country. 
 Between the brambles there w as a way, 
 as though someone was in the habit of 
 chmbing up, — no doubt Mr. Thomas 
 himself, — and Mr. Thomas found his 
 way to the top and looked towards the 
 distant hills, and then at me. And he 
 told me about a clump of trees (I never 
 looked, though he pointed at it), that 
 marked a deep pit hke the upper part 
 of a funnel, so he said, that an old bot- 
 anist called Culpepper used to boil liis



 
 86 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 potions in, and he told me that in a 
 certain direction there was a hne of 
 hills that marked the middle of the 
 county; and a tower that was some- 
 body's "folly," — goodness knows where 
 that was. We talked of poetry; Mr. 
 Thomas told me about one of his fav- 
 ourite poems, a poem that could be 
 loved, he said, by a saint and by a sin- 
 ner. He had the book in his pocket 
 and read me one verse as we walked. 
 He said it was virginal, a verse for a 
 child to learn. Here is the verse, he 
 read only one. 
 
 The dew no more will weep 
 The primrose's pale cheek to deck; 
 
 The dew no more will sleep 
 Nuzzled in the hly's neck; 
 Much rather would it tremble here 
 And leave them both to be thy tear. 
 
 And thus we walked over great fields, 
 filled, every one of them, with stones, 
 everlasting stones; not smooth shining 
 pebbles, — sharp zigzag flints. And the



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 87 
 
 chalk of the hills in places broke 
 through the thin covering of grass, 
 like the skin of a beggar showing tlirough 
 her ragged clothing. We went tlirough a 
 gate that a man whom we had seen 
 slouching along in front of us had left 
 half open. Mr. Thomas persisted in 
 spending quite ten minutes to fasten 
 some barbed wire round the top of this 
 gate; and in answer to my question as 
 to why he did it, he said, "These 
 people never shut the gates; the sheep 
 will get in, and when I come this way 
 again, I shall have to drive them out." 
 "The farmer ought to put up a no- 
 tice about the gate," I said. "It was the 
 farmer who left the gate open," Mr. 
 Thomas gently rephed. 
 
 I left Mr. Thomas by liis own door, 
 or rather by his railings, and I walked 
 through the village street to the inn. 
 The inn-keeper was feeding his pigs, 
 and after he had finished feeding them, 
 he shewed me a badger that he kept 
 in a barrel. Mr. Thomas' house was



 
 88 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 visible from the Inn-yard, and I could 
 see that he was hoeing in his garden. 
 I looked around me. The land was not a 
 fat land; the grass, like the tliin clothes 
 of the labourers, only just covered up 
 the poverty beneath. I asked the land- 
 lord about Mr. Thomas, but he had 
 not much to tell me, beyond the fact 
 that "he hved over there," pointing to 
 the house. 
 
 Mr. Thomas did not give me a very 
 cordial welcome when I called in the 
 morning, and he did not want to come 
 out; but I dragged him from whatever 
 he was doing, I don't know what it 
 was, and compelled liim to come out 
 with me. We walked along the cold 
 hills, cold as if the ice that made and 
 modelled them still froze the ground. 
 We went along a path going continu- 
 ally uphill, like the narrow path that 
 leads to heaven. And in a hollow 
 place near a pond we came upon an 
 empty cottage, near a tumble-down 
 barn; we looked through the broken



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 89 
 
 window at the stone floor and open grate 
 of the hving room, — an Enghshman's 
 home in Arcadia. "No one hves here 
 now," he said; "that is why I hke to 
 come this way." 
 
 The next thing that we did was to 
 tramp across a heavy ploughed field, 
 and then along by a hedge filled with 
 nettles and sharp thorns, and in one 
 place I saw the half-eaten carcass of a 
 sheep; and in a pit there were the 
 bones of a horse among the cowshps. 
 Mr. Thomas regarded these phenomena 
 with the same gentle look, as being part 
 of the accepted order of things. After 
 a wliile Mr. Thomas grew less shy of 
 me, and he began to confide to me 
 some of his ideas, — ideas about God 
 and the weather. We will take his 
 ideas about the weather first. He 
 thought the rain-drops beat with per- 
 sistent spite upon him; and that the 
 wind buffeted him as if it loved doing 
 it. He thought the storms always waited 
 until he wanted to go out, and then fell



 
 go The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 merrily upon his head. And yet I 
 think he was in a better mood on a 
 dull day than when the sun shone. He 
 did not hke to turn away from the sun, 
 and was never easy with his back to it. 
 This may have been the instinctive 
 wilhng of some plant in him, for his 
 nature belonged to the plant tribe that 
 grows in wild places. He used to he on 
 the long withered cliff grass in the 
 winter and take in to liis body the little 
 warmth that came from the sun, hke a 
 beaten elder tree that waited for the 
 spring. 
 
 I hked to torment him and drive 
 him out of his last stronghold, and then 
 see what he would say; and how he 
 would try to escape me. Mr. Thomas 
 belonged to the type of man that can 
 be cut down in a moment with words. 
 He could be put out of action with one 
 or two simple remarks that touched his 
 pride; and then he would simply go 
 into his shell hke a hermit crab; he 
 would detach himself from all that he



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit qi 
 
 had and keep only his skin. And llien 
 if the attack were pushed, which was 
 always worth doing, that last hope in 
 his own life would be taken away, and 
 he would feel himself completely gone 
 into nothingness. Tliis condition of his 
 completed the jest, and he would walk 
 home across the stony fields, a little 
 tired. 
 
 But after a day or two he would pos- 
 sess himself again, fully clothed and in 
 his right mind, believing in himself, and 
 even going so far as to think that he 
 had in his soul a few httle things of 
 which he might be proud, and also 
 that he had a few more cigarettes to 
 smoke. And the next time I saw him 
 I would give him a hint about the good 
 that he might find in himself if he ate 
 a httle of the apple that grows in the 
 middle of the garden. And I explained, 
 as well as I could, that everything is 
 made by God for the amusement of 
 man; and that the good and evil in 
 life should be kept very separate, other-



 
 92 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 wise we should never enjoy being evil, 
 or ever be bored by being good. 
 
 I tried in this way to teach Mr. 
 Thomas a httle about the ethics of the 
 Christian churches, especially the Angli- 
 can Church of Great Britain. I told 
 him that popular opinion, the opinion 
 of the butchers and their customers, 
 would be for ever unto the end against 
 "that horrid German," and "that 
 wicked Jew," who both tried to untie 
 the priestly knot that hangs up the 
 world, and not only hangs it up, but 
 holds it up. 
 
 I tried to explain to Mr. Thomas 
 that the mass of humanity loves to be 
 good and to sin, by turns, — to sin and 
 repent and to sin again, just as the sun 
 repents and covers the earth with its 
 glory after the dark rains of the night. 
 It is necessary, I said, for the priest 
 to invent every morning new sins for 
 the people; golden calves and pretty 
 dancers. And the priest must show 
 the people how to enjoy them. And



 
 The Soliloquy of a llermll qS 
 
 sometimes for a change lie can throw 
 into the cup of their gladness one or 
 two httle pills of virtue, for the sake of 
 their bowels. 
 
 "And now, my good Mr. Thomas," 
 I said, "for heaven's sake do not throw 
 me into that ice water of beyond 
 thought that your mad German loved 
 so well." Mr. Thomas used to wait for 
 a shining light to come; he used to 
 w£ut like a hen brooding over her eggs; 
 he used to brood in odd corners and 
 try to hatch a httle god out of his eggs, 
 — a httle god that would save his type, 
 the outcast monk type, from the well- 
 deserved stones and jeers of the people. 
 I need not say that all his eggs were 
 addled, for he never got anything out 
 of them, sit as long as he might. 
 
 He would not believe, although I 
 told liim over and over again, that it is 
 the weight of the mass of humanity that 
 bears the world along; and that nothing 
 can change its course, not even the 
 hghtning of the gods, nor the thoughts



 
 g/i The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 of little monk priests. Mr. Thomas 
 never even hatched a little devil out of 
 the eggs that he brooded over, and he 
 knew it. He knew that he had found 
 nothing; he knew that he had searched 
 the orchard and had not even found 
 the crab; he knew that all liis life he 
 had lived in a mystic alley that leads 
 no whither. 
 
 I tried to show him what life is, as 
 we know it, as we the happy ones have 
 made it; and I told him that the one 
 thing to avoid, the one thing that 
 really gives pain, is what is called "the 
 serious state of mind," — the brooding, 
 the dark brooding of the dead stars. 
 "The good God looks down from on 
 high." "The priests say so, and that 
 is all we want to know about Him." 
 And when I said this Mr. Thomas 
 gently stroked his beard, and smiled, 
 and inquired whether I had a cigarette 
 in my case, as he had left his at home. 
 
 Standing on the cliff top one day and 
 looking towards the town over the sea,



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit ()5 
 
 I asked Mr. Thomas ^vlly he did not 
 live down there, instead of the dreary 
 spot that he had chosen. He waited 
 for a httle while and then said, "I Hke 
 the language of these hills better; they 
 are higher up" (wliich indeed was 
 true), "and amongst those church spires 
 I fear that the people do not always 
 speak the truth." "But," I said," their 
 lies are public lies; they live by public 
 opinion; they all have one object in 
 hfe, and what that is, the smallest serv- 
 ant girl knows best." 
 
 Human life is only innocent when it 
 lives in the fairyland of fancy; if it 
 goes running after the gods, it becomes 
 mad; if it goes running back to the 
 beasts, it becomes like a nation at war; 
 the best thing it can do is to stay 
 where it is. Humanity reached its 
 goal when it became man; and it is in 
 the same world now, because this is 
 the only world it can have; it must 
 go on just as it has gone on, and 
 that forever. " That German" thought of



 
 gG The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 something more wonderful than Man, 
 and he ran to the gods — mad. "That 
 Jew," thought of something wonderful; 
 He thought of adopting a Father; 
 and He thought of mankind loving 
 one another; and He went to the 
 Cross. 
 
 Man develops on certain lines, and 
 then explodes and goes on again on the 
 same hues. If he tries to climb up to 
 the gods, he goes mad, and a vulture 
 devours him. He is only right if he 
 remains just what he is, simply a man. 
 He has scholarships, science, and a mil- 
 lion industries. He has municipal gar- 
 dens, and school play-grounds. His 
 priests are now grown quite big enough 
 to drive away the little gods that come 
 in the night; and he can always enjoy 
 excitement in the body politic by pinch- 
 ing the ears of the women. He can 
 believe in a future life; he can beheve 
 in a future death; he can believe that 
 Christ is God, and that God is Christ, 
 and that Christ is man, but he can



 
 The Soliloquy of a Tlermil 97 
 
 never fill the cup fuller than his man- 
 hood will hold. 
 
 See how genius at a certain point 
 always breaks down. "That German" 
 went a httle too far, and when he came 
 to the two kings and the last Pope, he 
 went mad. And the other one, "the 
 Jew,"— he went on preaching very well 
 to the people, until by a sad mischance, 
 the people began to understand what 
 he • said, and when the people under- 
 stood, instead of going mad themselves, 
 they killed Him. 
 
 That is the way of the world, and it 
 happens like that because man's mind 
 can only go to a certain point, and 
 then it breaks. Every mind breaks 
 when it does more than a man can do, 
 and it breaks in unexpected ways. The 
 duty of a philosopher (and the modern 
 philosopher knows liis duty) is to keep 
 the sheep; that is to say, to drive the 
 wolves of thought aw ay from the people, 
 and hang the wolves up — in hard and 
 long words, in the pliilosophers' complex



 
 gS The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 minds that are fitted out with httle hooks 
 to hang each wolf up by. 
 
 The priests who also know their duty 
 have to keep the gods away from the 
 flock, for fear the flock might give 
 away some of its wool, or perhaps even 
 a ewe lamb, here and there, without a 
 priest's blessing. 
 
 If either of these guardians neglects 
 his duty, the people quite rightly de- 
 vour him. "It looks like that, — that 
 is how the world looks," answered Mr. 
 Thomas. And yet why should we not 
 believe a little and love a httle, even if 
 we do go mad? 
 
 I think sometimes when I come home 
 tired to my gate, that I must not come 
 in. I think that I must go on walking 
 past my gate, through the one or two 
 viUages where I am known, and then 
 on and on and on. 
 
 When Jesus adopted God as His 
 Father, He made God begin again as 
 a Babe. When He took everything 
 away from Himself, He took everything



 
 The SolUoqiiy of a Hermit 09 
 
 away from His Father; we that are 
 fathers know that a son can do that. 
 No one need try to take God and put 
 Him upon a great white tlirone, when 
 His Son has taken Him down. When 
 the Son gave up all power, the Father 
 had to give up all power too; when the 
 Son gave up life, it was the Father's 
 life that He gave up, as well as His 
 own. 
 
 There is no need for us to become 
 anything more than what we are, in 
 order to beheve in the Son of Man. 
 We can enter all that He has entered; 
 we can give up all that He has given 
 up, without being a superman or a 
 brute beast. It is not in extremes that 
 the road to Heaven hes; the way to 
 life is the same now as it has ever 
 been; it is in the meaning of things. 
 Surely the Son of God has shown him- 
 self in a form that we, even we, can 
 understand. 
 
 The people marked Him as an enemy, 
 and His presence in us will one day



 
 100 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 make the impossible come to pass; that 
 day will come. We feel that we are 
 at an end; we feel that we are come to 
 our goal; but at the same time we 
 know that there is "that other" be- 
 longing to us, "that other one" who 
 is with us and knows no end. 
 
 Every day I look at the fields as 
 though I am soon to bid them an eter- 
 nal farewell. Perhaps my life has passed 
 through many bodies and I am the last. 
 A star of life with its own colour, its 
 own raiment and its own joys has 
 entered into me to die. But the star 
 has still its desires and its longings; I 
 do not want its light to go out like a 
 snuffed candle. I would hke it to live 
 again in some other body; I would like 
 it to feel the earth through many, many 
 other lives. I do not wish to be the 
 grave for the death of a star. I want 
 it to carry my hfe on, and on, and on. 
 And yet it is only when a star is dying 
 in you that you can feel its life; and 
 it is only when a star is dying in you



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit loi 
 
 that you can feel the sorrows of the 
 Son of Man. 
 
 And this is the way that Mr. Thomas 
 used to talk. I waved my stick as I 
 passed his gate on my way back to 
 town. He held a spade in his hand, 
 and was digging a hole in the ground 
 for a new post to hold up his raihngs. 
 I waved my stick, and he, taking very 
 httle notice, went on with his work. 
 
 When anyone reads a confession like 
 this they should express no phihstine 
 reflection such as, "This good man 
 might have done better with his life"; 
 or, "If we all start writing confessions, 
 what a world it would be!" I suppose 
 I have the priest's instinctive dehght 
 — or love, shall we say — of hearing a 
 tale that comes from a man's fear rather 
 than from his wits; and in speaking or 
 writing a confession, one is always com- 
 ing near to sometliing ugly in the dark 
 of oneself. I touch the hoof, or the fur, 
 or the horns, or the tusks, as I write.



 
 102 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 It is this ugly thing that has a way 
 of peeping out at us when we talk 
 Eibout ourselves; and the sight of half 
 its head, not a very pretty half, makes 
 most people begin to talk about some- 
 tliing else. If you, my dear child or 
 brother, begin to tell a few secrets of 
 your own being, you will know what I 
 mean. You will find, dear friend, when 
 you take your pen to begin, and poke 
 about with your finger and thumb into 
 your own heart, that you touch some- 
 thing not at all nice, not exactly what 
 you thought. 
 
 It is the custom, I know, not to con- 
 fess; to let that inside of you remain 
 hidden under a well-ordered fife; and 
 besides it does not do to risk being 
 laughed at by the people. I know that 
 in every confession there is always 
 worse left beliind than what is said; for 
 we none of us dare to utter the whole 
 of our wickedness. I cannot help think- 
 ing that many of the pangs of human 
 life were quieted and stilled by the use



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit io3 
 
 of the confessional. Anyliow, lo look 
 at oneself with rather more than a 
 critical eye is a good thing; if only to 
 show the gods that they could do a 
 little better with our substance another 
 day. 
 
 One can see, while writing odd things 
 about oneself, that inside the mob 
 still rules, just as it does outside in the 
 world. And the mob may be rioting 
 quite merrily under a pohceman's jacket, 
 or corrupting innocence under lawn 
 sleeves in a cathedral. I think that the 
 mob, — I know them, even hidden in a 
 snug English village, — I think that the 
 mob will always rule; for it is by the 
 law of hate and not by the law of love 
 that the world lives and has its being. 
 
 In the world there will never be 
 security, but there will always be excite- 
 ment; and there is no reason why we 
 should not sometimes get excited about 
 ourselves, and by so doing reveal our- 
 selves as something more than creatures 
 to be fed.



 
 io4 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 I think every father would do very 
 well to write a book of his own short- 
 comings for his children to read. And 
 perhaps so many fathers, who nowa- 
 days appear so very foolish to their 
 families, might by writing their con- 
 fessions, show their children that they 
 did not sign cheques and say family 
 prayers by clockwork, being wound up 
 every evening by the cook in the best 
 parlour. The fear of looking a fool has 
 cost the world more good lives than it 
 wots of. 
 
 We go about the world being friendly, 
 but the mob always tells us where to go, 
 and how to confine our friendhness to 
 the railway carriage, and our morals to 
 our homes. The mob soon breaks our 
 windows, if we do not behave after its 
 manner. All our little moral sensations 
 are upon the surface of our hves; it 
 is the great immoralist that lies beneath. 
 And you have not got to go very far 
 into the lives of the people before you 
 come upon him.



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit io5 
 
 In writing my confessions 1 began to 
 take notice of my pride. I found my- 
 self so proud that I preferred to leave 
 the camel drivers and suffer cold, rather 
 than endure their loud laughter. And 
 I see quite well that there is no getting 
 to the bottom of the pride of a man. 
 We cannot take cover from our pride. 
 I think it quite hkely that the least 
 pride is found in the busiest man, and 
 the most, in an idle slave. We cannot 
 get away from our pride, do what we 
 will. And my pride is quite a plain 
 tiling to see even in these pages. I 
 show it on purpose; I am proud; I 
 like to be proud; 1 intend to be proud. 
 I know the pride of a saint when he 
 shuts himself up away from the world; 
 I know the pride of a sinner when he 
 boasts to the mob of what he can do. 
 The very fact that I love those Hnes of 
 Banyan, 
 
 "He that is down need fear no fall, 
 He that is low no pride."



 
 io6 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 shows how proud I am. Ah! shepherd 
 boy in the valley, I know thy ways, 
 and it is quite possible that the Lord 
 Mayor of London has a heart less 
 proud than thine. 
 
 We that love to be at the bottom, 
 we saints in the wilderness, we humble 
 people in the fields, we peaceful people 
 in leafy lanes. It is with reason that 
 the city man, the wicked sinner, should 
 treat us somewhat roughly, for he fears 
 us, — he fears that if he did not speak 
 very loud, we might make him take off 
 his shoes when he comes into our garden, 
 and stand in the mud with bare feet. 
 Perhaps if we of the saintly tribe, we 
 exempt ones, — if we were compelled to 
 be iron kings, or wheat kings, or petrol 
 kings, — it is possible that we saints 
 might relinquish some of our abomi- 
 nable pride. The very size of our palaces 
 would then diminish some of our big- 
 ness. I can make myself out to be a 
 saint, I can pull myself to pieces as a 
 sinner, I can show myself as a fool in



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 107 
 
 a world of folly. We are all little men 
 that eat off the earth's crust; I am 
 one of the mob, that is all that can be 
 said. 
 
 I am told by one wiser than I that 
 I must tlirow more hght upon this sub- 
 ject of immortality that I have alluded 
 to here and there. I am quite willing 
 to make my meaning more clear; I 
 do not want to be misunderstood, and 
 this is what I think. I beheve that the 
 more dead anything is the more it 
 lasts; and the more ignoble a thing is 
 the longer it lasts. The most base 
 thing in me longs the most to hve for- 
 ever. I may as well say that it is from 
 my own feelings that I get my thoughts 
 upon immortality. And I know my- 
 self a httle. I also know that I get the 
 thought from Him. 
 
 The most wonderful idea that has 
 ever come to man came to Jesus. It 
 came to Him silent, subtile, and Uke 
 the hghtning. The idea that came to 
 Him was this: He wished to create for



 
 io8 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 a moment a state of vision with no 
 earthly everlasting deadness about it; 
 to create a new heaven and a new earth. 
 The longer anything lasts, the worse it 
 always becomes, but the divine idea 
 came to Jesus without beginning and 
 without end; and in a moment it be- 
 came Himself. 
 
 We cannot conceive the hghtning 
 rapidity in which the vision of true 
 life enters in and passes out of our 
 minds. Our minds do not hke this 
 kind of thing; they are not used to it; 
 only by a strange chance Jesus held the 
 new idea for a moment, and that mo- 
 ment gave Him time to understand, 
 because He was the one that was ready 
 to understand. 
 
 Just such a wonderful moment may 
 have come by a happy or an unhappy 
 chance to a beast, and that was the 
 moment that made the beast into a 
 man. What Jesus saw and hved, we 
 may see and live; only we prefer the 
 immortahty of our earth that we have



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit log 
 
 always had, lo the new lieaveii of 
 Jesus. We would rather hve in part 
 dead for a great many hves, than 
 sheu'e with Jesus His kingdom for a 
 moment. His vision, His idea, was the 
 frailest beginning, the most delicate and 
 the most quickly killed, of any idea that 
 has ever come to man. 
 
 Our immortal baseness is trained and 
 schooled; is organized to cast out at 
 once this kind of vision. We know 
 only too well that our old happiness, 
 our old God-head, our old immortality 
 is imperiled by it. We know the danger 
 of a vision that filled one man so sud- 
 denly with burning light, burning Him 
 up in a moment, and leaving Him only 
 a wild mad thing, crying out desperate 
 and loving words. We know the danger 
 of a vision that burnt the immortal 
 man in Him right out in a moment, 
 and left a new man with a strange, a 
 wild and unearthly courage, a man 
 from whom the mob took toll and 
 laughter, and then after a httle while,



 
 no The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 fearing for themselves, hanged Him upon 
 the cross. 
 
 The whole atmosphere of om* hves 
 bm"sts out in rage against tliis other 
 sense, this new vision, that ends in a 
 moment our immortality. We cannot 
 graft our everlasting hfe into the vision 
 that He beheld; our immortahty goes 
 on and on, and if we want to enter the 
 Vision of Jesus, we must stop our char- 
 iot. This vision, this new heaven, is 
 life in a moment; but our way of life 
 is everlasting years. 
 
 The result of the vision is quite clear 
 in the kind of man that Jesus was. 
 Though the vision died down in Him at 
 times, all the signs of our immortal 
 greed for hfe, in His life, are dead. He 
 begins to eat of the earth as a sacra- 
 ment, and, wonder of wonders. He can 
 love and bless men instead of turning 
 fiercely upon the will to devour, — He 
 must have seen that in the mob, — 
 instead of cursing the base hves of men, 
 and their hungry laughter, instead of



 
 The Soliloquy of a Tlermil iii 
 
 casting all the thoughts of man away, 
 He blesses them. He opened the way 
 to a new life, and He longed that the 
 vision that will free man from his im- 
 mortality may come to all, and be 
 received by all. 
 
 No wonder man fled from this kind 
 of freedom; for we prefer to retain the 
 immortality that is our right. I can 
 hear many people declaim, being quite 
 amazed at my utter disregard for estab- 
 lished behefs. I can hear them shout, 
 "We do not want to end, thou thrice 
 foolish Mr. Thomas, we do not want to 
 end; we will all most willingly, without 
 any asking of questions, take the im- 
 mortahty that you in your folly so 
 roundly cry out upon. Give us that 
 immortality; it is just what we all pray 
 for. Remove from us, take out of our 
 sight forever, this vision that takes 
 away our precious lives; do not leave us 
 alone with Jesus; perhaps some good 
 kind pastor will come between. Do not 
 take anything more away from us; we



 
 112 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 want more than our lives, we want to 
 go on living." I can hear people of 
 the world shout out at me like this; 
 and I say to them, "Goodly people, 
 kindly livers, who sometimes offer life- 
 belts to women when the ship is sink- 
 ing, I hear all your loud shouting, I 
 answer quite calmly, 'You will go on 
 living, dear children; did not your 
 fathers hate, just as you hate; did not 
 they get things, just as you get things; 
 did not they eat their dinners and leave 
 the beggars outside, just as you and I 
 eat our dinners?'" 
 
 I can promise that our pretending at 
 httle games of Virtue never in the 
 least hampers our real lives; our real 
 lives go on through many years just 
 in the same way. Your thoughts, 
 exactly your thoughts and not an- 
 other's, will be always here; the im- 
 mortal part of you, your man-self, must 
 go on, because it does not desire to be 
 anything else than itself. It is never 
 worn out; it has the best of systems —



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit ii3 
 
 separate bodies to live in; when you 
 are old, or perhaps before that time, 
 you will die; but that will mean 
 nothing to you, and your immortahty 
 will just dance away as merrily as 
 ever. 
 
 All this is very easy to explain; but 
 the way of Jesus is not so easy. He 
 made a way that opposed every tiling 
 that we have seen or heard of, and most 
 of all, it undermined our inamortahty. 
 His way ends our old lives in a moment; 
 because if you take away our anger, our 
 greed, our hatred, our getting on, our 
 eating the black man, our biting the 
 white woman, our sermon-preaching, 
 our amusements with young ladies, our 
 walking to church, our tlu-oat-cutting, 
 our afternoon tea-parties, and all the 
 tools we have made for killing other 
 people, and the medicine for kiUing 
 ourselves, — if you take away all our 
 good deeds, — we know what they are, 
 — if YOU take all these arts and fancies 
 away from a man, if you take them



 
 ii4 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 away you will leave no man at all, you 
 will leave nothing. 
 
 "Ah! but my soul, Mr. Thomas, you 
 have quite forgotten my soul; surely 
 when the labours and little amusements 
 of my life are taken away, my soul 
 will Hve. When, as a good man tired 
 with all my self-sacrifice, tired with 
 all my good deeds, tired with all my 
 kind treatment of httle children, I 
 leave my poor worn-out body, is not 
 that the proper moment for my soul 
 to save me? " Our souls, my good people, 
 are the least certain of all our posses- 
 sions; our souls are not possessions at 
 all. I will tell you what my soul is. 
 My soul is a waiting, hesitating, long- 
 ing silence; it is the most dehcate, the 
 most ethereal, the most ready to die 
 away of all the silent noiseless feet 
 that we feel moving in our lives. And 
 it waits, and often its flame goes out 
 while it waits. It is not chained to 
 the moods; it is the waiting silence in 
 us that is free.



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit ii5 
 
 The life of the world is as it is made 
 to be; it can never be anything else; 
 it can never really change. The little 
 children of the world are happy some- 
 times, when they get what they want. 
 But there is not so very much happi- 
 ness to be given away between the 
 stars, and there is a very vast deal of 
 misery. 
 
 This is our immortality, because all 
 the feelings are really exactly the same 
 to everyone, though some of course 
 feel more and some less. 
 
 When a Prime Minister succeeds in 
 negotiating a secret Treaty of AUiance 
 somewhere or other, for the good of the 
 war-outfit trade of his country, and 
 the other names and seals are duly set 
 to it, the exalted feehngs of this good 
 Prime Minister are exactly the same 
 as those of our chimney sweep — dead 
 now, honest man — when he has brought 
 down from our parlour chimney with 
 one good jerk a large quantity of soot. 
 And when an old lean woman, the lean-



 
 ii6 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 est in the village, slinks home with a 
 few stolen sticks from the squire's 
 wood, her feeling of exultation is just 
 
 the same as Mr. 's feehng when he 
 
 has made a corner in wheat, in Wall 
 Street, a place I seem to have heard of. 
 A Gentleman Farmer riding home from 
 market in liis motor, after having sold 
 a cow at a good war price, that has 
 gored one of his milk hands the day 
 before, feels just hke a naughty girl 
 who has successfully robbed a foohsh 
 young man of his gold watch, in a flat 
 in Houndsditch. 
 
 We share all our good actions with 
 other people, just as we share the air 
 that we breathe. All our actions are 
 made of exactly the same stuff, like 
 the stars, — the eternal stuff out of 
 which everything is made, everything 
 except the hghtning that destroys them. 
 To that lightning Jesus opened His 
 bosom; it struck dead all His im- 
 mortahty; in one flash it sent a new 
 wonder through the old immortal stuff



 
 The Soliloquy of a Ilermil 117 
 
 of which He was made. AIi! there was 
 irony in tliat shaft of hght from that 
 other place, for it left only one feeling 
 the same in Jesus; one fcehng it could 
 not kill; one feeling that He had in 
 common with all men even unto the 
 end, — I mean the feehng of sorrow. 
 
 So great is the charm of really dying 
 that the ordinary death of a man is a 
 little thing in comparison. The feelings 
 are gay or sad, wicked or good in every 
 man; they are over all the earth. Of 
 course, the bodies that hold them 
 change because the bodies wear out; 
 but the feelings are always hungry, 
 always the same, always yourself. When 
 the squire's new motor makes you skip 
 into a muddy ditch, the squire feels 
 just like you feel when you make Mr. 
 Thomas walk by your side in the gutter; 
 and the feelings of men do not die. 
 
 The feelings or the moods of God, as 
 I used to call them — it is natural to 
 me to change my words a httle — must 
 have some kind of bottle to hold them;



 
 ii8 The Soliloquy of a Hermil 
 
 " 
 
 they have you, with your beating heart, 
 your brain, your nerves, and your bones, 
 that are, I fear, getting a httle too stiff 
 to enjoy dancing. They have you, and 
 they make you dance, as they do every- 
 one else. They even made Him dance a 
 httle round a barren fig-tree, but not in 
 a way that pleased the people. 
 
 At first the people thought Him a 
 quack doctor that did not want to be 
 paid for His work, that went about 
 heahng for fun; and then they thought 
 Him a crank; and then a mischief- 
 maker; and last of all an ahen in the 
 world. 
 
 Is it not strange that only a man who 
 has felt the hghtning and who has felt 
 the immortal moods fall from him, — all 
 save the mood of sorrow, — is it not 
 strange that this is the sort of man 
 that loves the world, that really under- 
 stands the world, and accepts the world .^ 
 And He can even love the people who 
 think they are good; and what must be 
 more easy, He can also love the bold



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit iiQ 
 
 sinner; and He alone can kiss without 
 fear the shamed form of tired outraged 
 bitterness. He can love all of it, — He 
 the one that bled so soon. The most 
 terrible pang of all, pity — the flower of 
 sorrow — that we who have the ever- 
 lasting feehngs dare not endure. He 
 endured it. And pity for the jackal. 
 It is easier, far easier, to pity a white 
 sick child than a red monster of greed. 
 He could pity us because we all feel 
 so safe in the world. 
 
 How we all enjoy the sense of secur- 
 ity that it gives to know that everyone 
 has the same feehngs as oneself. We 
 know aU the kindly, loving feelings of 
 our friends; they are the same feelings 
 as ours, because they are ours; and we 
 are all quite safe with one another. 
 Sometimes, perhaps, in an iU hour, a 
 mass of men who have had bad dreams 
 in the night about bears and hons 
 want to march to the sea-side; and 
 another mass of men, feehng their in- 
 terests he in another direction, oppose



 
 120 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 them; and tliey all feel just alike. The 
 others may have dreamt of great eagles. 
 All these proceed quite calmly to cast- 
 ing each his millions through the fire of 
 Hell itself. 
 
 These moving coloured pictures of 
 Human Madness make a ghastly show 
 when they happen to come to pass; 
 only we all learn from watching them 
 what our feehngs are and what they 
 can do. They can tear our bodies to 
 pieces en masse; and instead of going 
 out with swords and spears to judge 
 the moods of God, we only talk to 
 each other about the wickedness of 
 other countries. 
 
 Yes, there is something in the desire 
 of Jesus to escape and to die. And to 
 this desire, and to this longing, do the 
 priest natures of the world come; here 
 and there out of all manner of holes in 
 the rocks, out of all manner of minds, 
 they move towards the annihilation of 
 themselves. 
 
 From whence comes the hghtning



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 121 
 
 that slings to death the feehngs that 
 live forever? So asks the young man 
 void of understanding with the leer of 
 an angler over the dark waters. Ah! 
 that is easier asked than answered. 
 Bui il may be, — I am not sure, — but 
 it may be that even the moods of God 
 end somewhere I Shall not the immortal 
 feehngs have an end somewhere in 
 some men? Or is it the beginning of a 
 new heaven and a new earth that pass- 
 eth man's understanding? I do not 
 know; in this place even the priest 
 must do what other little foohsh cliil- 
 dren do; he must go out into the garden 
 by the big door. 
 
 What I do know is, that there is 
 something more God-like about the 
 hghtning that kills in a moment, than 
 about all the feehngs that hve forever. 
 Sometimes I think that it is the glorious 
 presence of utter absolute extinction, of 
 death — that is, real death — that gives 
 the magic to the hghtning. 
 
 I wonder, do the moods of God tire



 
 122 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 of their manifold disguises in man? 
 Do they begin to find the eternal mo- 
 tion in clay bodies hard to bear? Does 
 He desire to die? And did He choose 
 the man who called Him Father for 
 His last home? Did the everlasting 
 moods that are God will a grave as 
 well as a birthplace in man? Did He 
 at last desire His own end, and did He 
 begin to die in Jesus? Perhaps, who can 
 say? 
 
 The moods may themselves want to 
 turn aside and to sleep, — never to 
 rise again, never again to torment them- 
 selves and the clay that they live in. 
 I do not know; the exultation that the 
 lightning vision brings into being can- 
 not be explained in words; it may be 
 an end or it may be a beginning. To 
 Jesus it certainly gave sometimes one 
 and sometimes another of these thoughts. 
 I think He longed for it to be a token, 
 a promise of something more wonder- 
 ful even, than the end of God. He 
 longed for it to be a promise of new



 
 The Soliloquy of a Ilermii 128 
 
 life. It may have been such a promise, 
 or it may have been a promise of death. 
 One thing seems to be quite sure, and 
 that is that the vision has more in it 
 than the simple death or life of one 
 creature. Everyone feels that the body 
 and the life of Jesus were a battle ground 
 more terrible than that; and that the 
 happenings in Him surpassed anything 
 that has ever before happened in man. 
 If the everlasting moods did indeed 
 find in Him a willing sacrifice, an altar 
 where they could be quite burnt out, 
 no wonder that His Ways were very 
 httle understood by the people. 
 
 Why Jesus is a figure of such in- 
 tensely human interest to mankind is 
 because He stands always at the part- 
 ing of the ways. In Him end, it may 
 be, the everlasting moods; in Him, it 
 may be, God himself ends; or the sud- 
 den hghtning of a supreme joy begins. 
 And His kind of life was ever the op- 
 posite of man's doings and sayings. 
 He Hved in order to destroy man's im-



 
 12-4 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 mortal ways, and He stabbed every- 
 where, wherever He saw human greed 
 everlasting. 
 
 If anyone deserved a blessing upon 
 earth, it was in His eyes the sinner. 
 He saw that sin ends quicker and 
 changes quicker than righteousness; and 
 the righteousness of the leaders of the 
 people was to Him the most lasting 
 and the most intolerable ugliness that 
 He saw anywhere. 
 
 Everyone knows how His words have 
 been twisted and turned exactly and 
 completely inside out. Of course they 
 have; men do not give up their greed 
 for nothing; and they soon began to 
 think that His Heaven was a shadow 
 in the water, a large shadow of that 
 hunk of meat that they with their dog- 
 hke teeth held in their half-opened 
 mouths. And some amongst men, the 
 good saints and hermits, the good Bish- 
 ops of the flock, let their hunk of 
 meat drop for the shadow, like the dog 
 in the fable; and then there was no



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit io5 
 
 help for it. They had to beheve in 
 Heaven, and so they waved the fairy 
 wand of immortahty over the place 
 where their iiunk of meat sank; and 
 they present to us — these very good ones— 
 rather an odd, and not, I fear, very 
 noble picture; for while they pretend 
 to beheve in the shadow of another life, 
 all the time they are digging their 
 snouts in the mud (they have now 
 changed to swine), and searching for 
 theu" lost meat as the monev-lenders 
 in that old French book searched for rusty 
 nails. They are not altogether beauti- 
 ful objects for our contemplation here 
 upon earth. We prefer the more hon- 
 est sinners. Avoid the good ones, httle 
 girls and boys of the earth, and go and 
 dance with those that take and eat 
 honestly the hon's share. We know 
 that Lion; there is something honest 
 and open about him; the immortal 
 laughters surround him as he gambols 
 and frolics in new-mown hay. High 
 up to his god-like mouth he hfts the



 
 126 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 holy bottle of human life. He drinks. 
 His life is not here nor there; he hves 
 truly and entirely himself in every 
 moment. 
 
 There is no cry in his heart, "What 
 can I do to be saved .►^" He is content; 
 the earth is good enough for him. He 
 spends his treasure; he does not hide it, 
 as a certain country did their treasure 
 in a fortress, until the next war; he 
 spends it all, and when the next war 
 comes, he dies; that is the end of the 
 hon. 
 
 Between the lion of life and Jesus, 
 that sad Stranger, there are innumer- 
 able moving pictures of httle men and 
 women. Children of the earth, I would 
 have you go to the sad Stranger when 
 the moods of the Father get their claws 
 full of your blood. In one way this 
 Stranger is like the hon; He is not 
 afraid of the Father. Go to Him; He 
 will give to you what no other man has 
 ever dared to give; He will give you 
 Himself.



 
 The SolUoqay of a Hermit 127 
 
 Remember before you take Him what 
 He has done. Remember His crime; 
 remember His sin; remember that He 
 has in a moment put an end to the 
 world. No wonder that when the ani- 
 mal instinct of the herd became awake, 
 when they began to understand what 
 He was doing, that they killed Him and 
 freed Barabbas. "To the cross with 
 Him!" they cried out, "He threatens 
 our very Jehovah," which was only too 
 true. And He did more than threaten; 
 He slew. He broke in upon God with a 
 fierce fire, a fire more fierce than God's 
 when He breaks in upon men. He 
 knows, this Son of Man, that a moment 
 of destruction is better than many years 
 of creating; for the soul of a great 
 work of art feels more of its Hfe when 
 the shells are bursting upon it than 
 when the sober eyes of good sightseers 
 peer and blink about it and the beads 
 of the prayers rattle in its long nave. 
 
 Then the destroyer meets the creator 
 in the great awakening; these two heroic



 
 128 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 ones hold hands at last; their souls meet 
 and end. Nothing, not even the moods 
 of God, can find its true soul until it 
 is destroyed; and even the lion of 
 laughter that drinks for ever the cup of 
 earth's richest wine becomes a Httle 
 fat clown with pink cheeks, like a 
 dancer in a show, when the two terrible 
 ones meet, the creator and the destroyer. 
 
 When we see the work that Jesus has 
 done, when we see the great white 
 throne rent and torn and lying like any 
 other broken chair at our feet, when 
 we see the temple whereon the creative 
 mind a little overstepped its mark in 
 decoration nothing but scarred walls, 
 when we see all this as we do see it, 
 we know that a soul has felt its life 
 burn, and its death cool it forever. 
 
 This is what we come to in His life. 
 He seemingly had no fear of the great, 
 the powerful, the almighty; the im- 
 mense terrible coils of the immortal 
 snake had no terrors for Him. The 
 moods fierce and utterly bhnd stayed



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 129 
 
 their fatalistic dancing in Him; He 
 died to break tlie power of God. And 
 now the moods creep silently in the 
 earth; they cannot sting as they used 
 to; they can hve immortal as they 
 used to live in man; but here hes the 
 difference, — they have been conquered. 
 
 Many an artist no doubt looks with 
 sorrow at the fall of the great wild 
 monster moods, the Old Testament of 
 man's history, the blind fierce hidden 
 history of his beginning; the old Crea- 
 tor creating out of the bottom of the 
 sea and upwards, tlirough all times, 
 tlirough all minds. How wildly He 
 created, and with what wasteful profu- 
 sion, we all know. We all know the 
 bhndness of Him that used to sit on 
 High, and now it may be that He of 
 His own free will has entered into the 
 son of man in order to end His long 
 reign; perhaps He has become tired of 
 Himself, and His tiredness at some time 
 or another we all feel. 
 
 And what do any of us know about



 
 i3o The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 ending and beginning? I see that it 
 may have happened like that; I see a 
 difference in the world since He hved ; I 
 even think I see the moods themselves 
 begin to take a new turn, consoling, 
 hberating, and even becoming free men. 
 I see in the new order, the Babe of 
 Joy, that takes the place of the terrible 
 Majesty of the past; I see the awful 
 Majesty of the Creator come into our 
 own Grange mead, and he down amidst 
 a joyous crowd of buttercups and red 
 clover, dimly conscious of a new be- 
 ginning, and of the laughter of the 
 maidens in the village nearby. There is, 
 I may tell you, a higher art in the Babe 
 of Joy than in all the deep wild cruelty 
 of the old order; and after all is said, 
 there was too much of a bully's rod 
 and not enough of a child's laughter in 
 those old days. And surely no one is 
 better pleased than God Himself to 
 come up and find that His terrible 
 moods have not destroyed all the Babe- 
 like laughter upon earth.



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit i3i 
 
 We can bless life when we see that 
 the moods have lost their grip upon the 
 mind; we can bless life when we see 
 man's immortality end and true joy 
 begin; we can bless hfe when we see 
 daisies and buttercups grow between 
 the walls of our best works of art, that 
 the shells have let a httle hght into. 
 Do you remember He talked about de- 
 stroying the temple and building it in 
 three days, — the Golden temple of Solo- 
 mon, filled with the labour of a million 
 artists. He came hke a shell into that 
 old great habitation of fierce Godhead, — 
 that old temple built up in the mind 
 of man, filled with the work of count- 
 less builders; and everywhere, where 
 His heart's blood fell, the temple was 
 destroyed. What cared He for the 
 decorations round the base of the col- 
 imins? What cared He for here a pome- 
 granate and there a pomegranate at 
 the hem of the garment? What cared 
 He for the golden rods and brackets.^ 
 
 A sigh of great content comes up



 
 i32 The Soliloquy of a Hermil 
 
 from our Grange mead, where God lies 
 amongst buttercups and listens to the 
 naughty laughter of little village boys; 
 I cannot see the least willingness on 
 His part to leave the scent of the May 
 clover, in order to go and look at old 
 Churches; but I do notice that He turns 
 a little on one side to watch a young 
 man and maid take the path that leads 
 to the tavern; and He looks at them 
 as though they really were His children. 
 They loiter a httle by the gate, and He 
 lies back again with His white hands 
 gently resting upon the warm red clover. 
 
 In the Old Testament, the old Order, 
 the moods were hemmed in and not 
 allowed to hve a natural hfe in the free 
 air; they were hemmed in until they 
 gathered strength to burst; they were 
 like a terrible lake of black waters 
 that filled and filled from beneath, 
 until it at last burst all doors; the old 
 story of the flood may have had a mean- 
 ing of this kind. 
 
 The hatred and malice, the ungovern-



 
 The Soliloquy of a Ilermil i33 
 
 able rage of man,— the rage of getting 
 more than his neighbour, — tliat no painted 
 lying civihzation can assuage; the rage 
 of a suppressed country, being denied a 
 proper proportion of the earth's sur- 
 face; the rage of another country that 
 the first should want any more; the 
 immortal greed shut up under the sup- 
 posed tameness of man; all the black 
 terrible moods have a way of bursting 
 their chains at times; of getting loose 
 with a sound and a horrible cry of 
 bloody rage. The old prophets de- 
 hghted in it; they wallowed up to their 
 necks in the black waters and enjoyed 
 it. The people did not listen; do the 
 people ever listen until it is too late.^ 
 And then their mangled bodies strew 
 the earth, in the day when the black 
 waters rush out with a horrible sound, 
 and over all the Earth there is black 
 smoke and death and an evil stench. 
 
 Jesus saw the danger of all ill con- 
 tent being saved up and prepared in 
 man's mind, and He advised men to



 
 1 34 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 act naturally like the flowers; and to 
 hate and to love like children, forget- 
 ting everyone his quarrel when the 
 night comes. He turned the sword 
 with wise justice into the heart of Him 
 that created it. 
 
 But alas, the moods are a many- 
 headed monster, and to-day the black 
 waters have burst out again amongst 
 men. He could only give to men the 
 charm that can slay them. I want to 
 be able to bless all life truly and whole- 
 heartedly as He blessed it; I want to 
 be able to bless the sinner as well as 
 the victim of sin; I want, as every good 
 priest should want, to be glad when I 
 see any sign of Joy anywhere in the 
 earth. 
 
 I want to bless all the moods of God, 
 for these too, immortal as they are, will 
 one day desire to end. 
 
 I do not say wicked things when I 
 speak of God coming down from His 
 great white Throne of Majesty and 
 Power, and resting in our mead beside



 
 The Soliloquy of a Ilermil i35 
 
 the dairy cows, who look at Iliin with 
 their quiet soft eyes; I mean no harm. 
 To those who prefer to keep Him as 
 He once was in order to preserve a 
 more artistic effect, I have nothing to 
 say; no doubt they know best; but I 
 prefer to think of Him as watching 
 with a true Father's love the Babe of 
 Joy that will one day grow up out of 
 His old creation, — The Babe of Joy that 
 has taught Him akeady that a child's 
 laughter is of more value than ever- 
 lasting life. 
 
 This is a day of new Values; the old 
 days of greed, of getting and keeping, 
 will end; the old days of holding one's 
 self, of hugging one's self, of Hving one's 
 self, will end. What a time it was 
 when man's whole hope of happiness 
 was to hve forever; to always go on 
 helping the same body out of the same 
 dish forever and ever; and to that 
 happiness the immortal moods have 
 trained the clay pots. They have put 
 into us tlieir unmortal feehngs so strong,



 
 i36 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 that even now as I write, I want to go 
 on living for another day, till to-morrow. 
 And this is what we all say — "till 
 to-morrow." I cannot welcome extinc- 
 tion, because for millions of years the 
 immortal feehngs have been desiring 
 more and more hours, more and more 
 to-morrows. 
 
 When I tliink of Jesus, the burden 
 falls. I do not think of extinction. 
 I think of the moment; I think of how 
 He, in one life, ended the stagnation of 
 immortality. I long to live a moment 
 in Him unfettered and free. Have I 
 explained myself enough now.^ Or have 
 I left only a mist about the eyes and a 
 madness in the heart .^^ I can assure 
 you now, if you have not guessed it 
 before, little and great brethren, that 
 instead of meaning no harm, I mean a 
 great deal of harm. Have we not had 
 nearly enough of the everlasting feuds, 
 of the everlasting jealousy of the moods 
 of God; would it not be better to use 
 our own minds and to reason away from



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 187 
 
 these thiiigsP W Inch is better, I wonder, 
 to lie for a moment where all our 
 finest buttercups grow, or to go on 
 with our greed and getting and hating 
 forever? If we took His road, and gave 
 up our eternal occupations, our ever- 
 lasting work, our immortal getting; and 
 in a moment spent that which we did 
 not gather, in a moment of Joy — a 
 moment that cannot be lost because it 
 is true Joy — would it not be better to 
 spend ourselves for it, for such a mo- 
 ment? But, dear brothers, the pleasure of 
 our lives is in hating. We know^ a little 
 about the merry goblins in the bottom 
 of our hearts; we don't want to cast 
 them out in a hurry. The moods are 
 with us; we play on their side when we 
 amuse ourselves with our httle frolics. 
 It is most easy to call everything 
 degeneration that is not found in the 
 heart of a cruel man. It is most easy 
 to call everything madness that is out- 
 side the pompous throned power of 
 man's immortal behef. It is really



 
 1 38 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 quite easy to call everything mystic 
 stupidity, because it just happens to 
 be not exactly our way of treating danc- 
 ing girls in the night. I do not dispute 
 with tliis; I do not want to slay any 
 child's joy; neither did He. He came 
 to free the world and to give Joy; not 
 afterwards, — He knew no afterwards, — 
 but now. I know my hatred of others ; I 
 know my greed for myself; and I 
 know, my masters, that we all have the 
 same feehngs; I want to break up these 
 feehngs and take hold of the new Joy. 
 
 When we feel the gladness of our 
 greed, when we feel we have managed 
 well a good business matter after the 
 manner of the world, when we feel 
 we have done something very well 
 indeed, perhaps robbed a few milHon 
 homes of their halfpence, how the 
 greed gobhns, old as God Himself, 
 cringe and lick and fawn upon us; for 
 have we not been carrying on their game 
 a httle farther.^ "And a very good game 
 too," you will say. Well, is itP



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 189 
 
 I seem to hear at tliis moment the 
 clamour of something not altogether 
 good; I see torn bodies, broken, buried 
 in blood, that were a year ago very 
 thoughtless young men; and I see the 
 evil eye of our greed blinking and cruel; 
 you have not got to go far from where 
 I write to see its work. Your Uttle 
 happy ways, your little business ways, 
 your little rather long immortal ways, 
 are a cause of all this, my brothers. 
 Without the feehngs that you guard so 
 jealously from madness, (why are you 
 all so afraid of madness?) this could 
 not have happened. Without the feel- 
 ings you enjoy, the shocking face of a 
 woman I once saw in an alley of a great 
 town could never have had written 
 upon it agony unquenchable, agony 
 eternal. The moods of God have caused 
 all this; they are causing it still. 
 
 And our feelings that go on forever, — 
 that we enjoy so much, — are they worth 
 all this terror and horror and blood; 
 do they not after all lick up with their



 
 i/io The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 evil tongues all the waters of real joy 
 out of our lives; do they not take in 
 the cruel grip of their eternal desires 
 all our best children? 
 
 Look at the boldness of Jesus; He 
 too was terrible, like a burning of the 
 firmament amongst the worlds; think 
 of His courage, this lion in the desert; 
 the disputes He had with the lawyers 
 were nothing; what He really did was 
 to stand in the way of the eternal 
 moods. He bade them get out of His 
 way; He would have a New Heaven 
 and a new Earth; He would have the 
 feelings of a flower; child-like laughter, 
 like one of these little ones, to whom 
 every moment is an eternity and whose 
 every hour is a life everlasting. 
 
 He stood alone to stem the torrent of 
 greed, the greed of hving forever. "He 
 that saveth his soul shall lose it." And 
 instead of the greed of living. He built up 
 out of the fire of His heart the joy of fife. 
 
 Consider the day of joy that He 
 created for us; how freely and light-



 
 The Soliloquy of a Ilermii i^i 
 
 heartedly we can now cull the flowers 
 after He has shewn us the way. The 
 deep hidden waters of the inner dark- 
 ness that hved underground like a 
 great earth monster, he brought out 
 into the sun. And how hke snails the 
 eternal feelings creep and creep in our 
 lives; how they force us to hide, and to 
 plan and to corrupt; how they force 
 us to pass the day in gloom, because 
 we are thinking of the morrow, because 
 of the year that is to come. "Take 
 no thought for the morrow." I cannot 
 help seeing almost a vision, as I write 
 of the wonder that He did. And when 
 I think of the fears; the heavy longings 
 for good things; our eternal looking 
 forward; our cringing to time; our 
 continual longing for future gain; when 
 I think how oppressed we all are, how 
 filled to the brim with the feehngs that 
 want to go on forever; I do not know 
 how I can thank Him enough, that 
 opened a w ay for our freedom. 
 
 I cannot think how anyone can re-



 
 1^2 The Soliloquy of a Hermit 
 
 gard immortality as anything else but 
 an endless and sad ordeal of the same 
 feehngs; they go on and on, and always 
 serve us the same. They bring simple 
 peasants and quiet homely gentlemen 
 in hne as fodder for the cannon; they 
 let off the poisonous gas; they drop 
 the bombs in the night; our httle best 
 feelings, yours and mine, are doing it. 
 Our feehngs do all this now; and in 
 the past they pinned Him to the Cross. 
 But not before He had sown His hfe's 
 blood in the earth; not before His 
 death-cry for Freedom had gone out 
 and been heard. 
 
 No doubt the great Artists, the happy 
 portrayers of man's deeds and ways, 
 will scream out with a great rage at 
 the thought of their old occupation 
 being gone. What will happen to bloody 
 rage and bhnd lust that gave them all 
 such good copy for their long nails i^ For 
 was it not ever the moods and the feel- 
 ings of man's deep black nature that 
 gave the good workers in their creative



 
 The Soliloquy of a Hermit i43 
 
 art the chance to get human kind on 
 the point of their pen? 
 
 Well, they will have to change, that 
 is all. Jesus did not consider their 
 love of God and His ways when He 
 stood alone in all the earth to face and 
 destroy the moods. The artists that 
 have for so long hved like vultures upon 
 the broken flesh and rotten carcass of 
 human despair must now learn a new 
 trade; they must try to rest awhile in 
 our Grange-mead beside the dairy cows, 
 and write poems, until a little of the 
 New Heaven and the New Earth enter 
 into them. 
 
 And meanwhile let them bless the 
 maiden and the young man that again 
 loiter through the mead, for it is now 
 evening, on their way home from the 
 tavern; and let them bless the naughty 
 cliild that lingered for one more soli- 
 tary dance alone on the Green after 
 all the others had gone. 
 
 THE END



 
 G. ARNOLD SHAW'S NEW PUBLICATIONS 
 
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