FELLOWSHIP BOOKS EdTtof GyjMani Stratton DMNE DISCONTENT COPYRIGHT 1913 BY E. P. DLTTON & CO. DIVINE DISCONTENT arnes (Jut/Trie" I. OF CONTENT OUR praise of content is too idle. Among arduous days we set up this ideal of rest, our own desires far too tempestuous to let us be at such a haven, and circumstances too busy with our lives. So it is no foolish notion that contentment sets a limit upon meaner ambitions and gives room in the world for nobler. The man who beholds little of life believes there is no more. A child, still radiant with the trail of glory, adventures only upon the path of inno- cence, snug and content with food and warmth and sleep, securely shut from the hurt (which is knowledge) within his mother's arms. Maybe I take it on trust from the robin that i <% sings sings by my window on the bough of an apple- tree; but, for all his pertness, he is an innocent too and finds contentment without much to-do. His business does not mock at good daylight, he does not go far from home. And unlike that ragged beggar of the streets whose misery makes him sing, the robin sings for gladness, or there is no reason for him to sing at all. Since the Fall we have to regard man's life of experience as a more complicated matter. The time comes when the cloud loses a little its early saturation of glory and takes a greyer light, when the child's heart begins to beat with human passions. Are they right or wrong who hazard that the tragedy of Adam took from mankind a more wondrous life of innocence? Is the divine law so withdrawn from operation within and around us that we must mourn amid experience the loss of the "contrary state" of innocence? The danger would be in judging our case from an academic or ecclesiastical proposition, or from words whose significance is hidden until life 2 itself has ripened in us the wisdom we may read them by. Inspiration, the work of the divine, lies embedded within experience; it comes unbidden in unlikely places to unlikely persons. It may forsake the monk early upon his knees before the high altar, and uplift the soul of the humble woman who coaxes the kitchen fire to light. It may be radiant in a railway carriage, or fill a wakeful night with vision. We have no guarantee that we shall hold or behold it, if by an intellectual shift we seek to enclose it within the boundary of our wit. By no sort of arithmetic may it be added or divided. Thus, content, the true virtue which fine souls exhale all about them, is a flashing inward light, a genial warmth, a sign of wholeness and fitness; but we must be particular as to its quality, and not be led astray by that mere dumbness and numbness of faculty, that animal sleep from which the vision is shut. You cannot make content from the absence of cause for discontent. Eat and drink as you may, you are still hungry, still 3 <% thirsty. thirsty. Strange lands and strange faces and many pleasures will still leave you the burden of yourself; and the task upon your table is not added to, for all your fury of steam and electricity. The strangest of all strange things is yourself to the end. Those are unworthy of our regard who seek content- ment by the avoidance of daily vicissitude, holding the law of self-preservation to be the one law which makes for right living. "Children are noisy creatures and spoil the house," say some; "let us have none of them: for us an orderly place with quiet days and unbroken nights of sleep." These good folk are clean, industrious, virtuous, a pattern to casual passers-by. But their methods are high-handed. They hate a dog, but love a doormat; they love chairs and curtains better than children; for their virtue is not discerned through temptation or proved by adversity. They have virtue as though life were emptied of humour and affection to make room for it. Poised amid the chances of existence, they yet take none, and feel no lack, spending their days dusting and scrub- bing, in an eternal preparation for the life which they have no time to live. Others make for themselves a Spartan law against giving and lending, or perhaps they rule hospitality so rigidly for themselves and against their friends that visiting at their house partakes of a fearful discipline, not often to be undertaken. It is all to no pur- pose: these have not the root of the matter in them : their aim is bad, and their arrows wide of the mark. Where then is true contentment to be found? There is a pretty parable in one of the school books of a certain king who went among his people, after the old fashion of kings, seeking wisdom. Among princes and nobles he could find no man who was contented; so, disguised under a cloak of red and gold, with a long blue feather in his cap, he set forth to discover, if he could, a man who \vas truly contented. After trying a merchant and a farmer, who proved both to 5 febe be envious and discontented men, he went to the cottage of an old shepherd and was invited to step in and rest himself. And after par- taking of some homely food, he and his host sat upon a bench by the cottage door to talk. Here at length was content, in owning noth- ing of the world's goods, in having no assur- ance but in Providence, in an easy mind, plain labour and simple submission to the will of others. In the picture the king's high look is good to see while he sits beside the bent and wrinkled peasant to learn the lesson which does not suffer him to change places, as he would surely need to do if Hans Andersen had told his story. No, he draws the precise moral which he needs, going his way to con- tentment, but contentment fitting to a king. Being a king of romance, he had no chamber- lain who would smooth the rough places in his adventures and do the journey-work of his questing, nor had he lost the comeliness of manhood in the abstraction of kingship. So the heavenly meaning of the parable goes out 6 beyond its earthly story everywhere; and the natural schoolboy will return to it, as I do, with thoughts which the pedagogue has not dreamed of. Perhaps it does not recommend the age which we live in to know that what was the text of the romantic tale is now the economist's text. He demands of those who are content with little that they shall con- sider the claims of their fellows. Indeed the economist will have none of these pageants of grinning poverty miscalled moral emblems. Let us have, says he, a manlier measure, a temper thankful in due proportion to tangible possessions either mental or physical. We cannot dazzle him with our red and gold, bought at the price of bent backs and wrinkled faces. Content has indeed been too often the gift of the rich to the poor; out of it they have constructed spurious forms of authority and favourable conditions for charitable enter- prise. So true is this that one seldom hears the old formula uttered upon the poor with- out feeling the force of a strong interrogation. 7 ^ Who Who created this place wherein the poor man is admonished to remain content? Is any State the better for ill-educated, ill-fed beings? Is any civilization flattered or any religious belief upheld by thankfulness which is the result of repression and tyranny? No, we may adapt the saying of the philosopher and declare the benefits of a poor condition praiseworthy but not enviable. Contentment which is the sign of limited understanding rather than a measure of the goodness of content is a rebuke, a very eloquent rebuke. The rich man is no less foolishly content who suffers his possessions to supplant his manly quality or buy him out of reality. Even the economist himself must beware lest he set too much store upon goods, lest he imagine a vain sort of well-being for those whom he would benefit by his reasonings. The worker has the goodly heritage of skill. He can do things with his hands which no clerk or man- ager or politician can know the inwardness of. It is likely that he will never be greatly interested in a villa or a motor-car, which arc inferior distractions. The simplicity of men's minds is hard to kill, whatever engine we use upon it, and the primitive state of content- ment baffles our endeavours at putting a fence about it The relation of content is to the varying desires of mankind; its fullness and profundity are to be measured by the quality of the vessel and its capacity, whether material or spiritual. One may be content with no more than food, content to the measure of hunger's urgency, pleased then to rest drowsily and to have a benign approbation of the world as it is, full and comfortable, prosperous within the range of appetite. Another may find in a competency of this world's goods the top of his bent, the utmost apex of his am- bition, sleeping and waking always without fear of the wolf which haunts the poor man's door, able to indulge the pride which cries exultingly "I owe not any man." Thus the content which is complete so easily can boast of no divine hunger. Our praise is for men 9 ^ rf of high desire and great endeavour. In their contentment we see the enterprise extin- guished, the loss of a goodly companionship. Retirement, that desperate ideal of the trades- man, is an end of usefulness: the man makes too much haste to die, with ten years yet to live. Those who are of the higher order must needs achieve something; for they have to be fit as well as desirous, theirs being no easy or enviable place. So mighty a discontent, so yearning an imagination, where within our rewards is the gift which will reward it and let it rest content? Cuchulain fought the ocean for two whole days, and then it passed over him; Oisin sought for three hundred years to appease his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of faeryland. And history is hardly less extraordinary a record of enduring idealism. The common sailor had no notion of the faith which kept Columbus upon his search for the new world ; for upon his limited mental horizon no enchanted lands dawned. And when at last the swift current swept 10 beneath the great ship's keel telling of inland waters and pouring rivers, he had no power to share in the fierce elation of the master- mind which had designed a continent before- hand and steered a course to it in faith. But there are adventures enough left to us. If you watch the people in the streets of a city, you will see that each one heads, each one follows, a procession; up one turning and down another, men and women and children go all the day long. They are always chang- ing and dividing, each individual intent upon some errand; but always leading and always led. To the idle spectator there is no clue to the many impulses which make up this pag- eantry of even* day; only afterwards the thought will come to him as he walks, that he also leads and follows, and then he will walk with pride, but with humility also. Some- how so we may gather an idea of the wider relevance of our lives, and be little concerned with content which provides ourselves and takes away from noble strife among men. ii II. OF DIVINE DISCONTENT $5 WHEREAS material discontent goes to the forwarding of common ambitions, having for success an ideal which is the mark of a passive spiritual condition mere content- ment the discontent which is divine may well be the name of that critical attitude of the soul towards mortal circumstance and the changes which life effects in the fibre of man's consciousness. It also encloses the selective- ness of a delicately tempered sensibility within its meaning, and gives the thought a wistful en- tanglement with origins, a plain hint of God actively implanted in the flesh. The strange gift of vision strips away the veils which hide the spiritual life from eyes which have not yet learned to see, and, as if from a great height, discerns the far horizon and the beck- oning which allures and supports through all vicissitudes, and has in it the promise of the 12 eternal. But divine discontent seeks no malign or insufficient comfort from mental false-dealing so acutely spoken of in the words: "They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace." The Bible is rich in the language of divine discontent, aiming its heavy blows at false optimism and at comfortings which are rooted in unfaith and pessimism. With many shifts, at many pains, the mind of man searches the recesses of experience for a span of rest which shall not turn into a battlefield. He ransacks the world for pleasure high enough to take from him the fever of his thought, hoping to throw off the inward im- pulse which pushes him on to more and ever more labour and weariness. Only the labour will reward him; but yet he often goes in fear of it, striving by every other means for ends which elude him. I have heard one la- ment that beside the sea, the scale of a man is too insignificant, desiring some more towering 13 % magnificence, magnificence, some sign of power altogether more god-like. But could we stretch our stature to the height of a house or a hill, our scale would still be inconsiderable, and the sea might still mock at us. Our boundaries would be in no way enlarged, although our necessities would be increased. No, we are better to be higher than the primroses and a little lower than a tree. The giant, like the dwarf, is a vagary, and not to be reckoned upon; quantity in a man is no guarantee of manfulness. We are prone, indeed, to be- lieve the sign and pass over the wonder; to imagine more mystery in picturesque ap- pearance than there is warrant for. That gorgeous herald who steps from the darkness of nowhere into the sunshine of the street is not of ordinary design in our eyes. He has hold of us by many an historical tag; yet when his work is over, he will eat his dinner, and his dinner will be like dinners which we have eaten. Altogether he is more care- less of our raptures than is decent. The poet who wrote those beautiful verses I have newly read to my little daughter sat astride a chair clasping its back when I saw him last; yet she asks "Is he not wonderful to look at?" and "He cannot be living now?" So are we at play with our admiration, and the things which we can handle familiarly have nothing of the bloom of romance until we are tamed from our wild illusions and shown wonder and beauty at our own fireside. We are the patient woolgatherers of Fortune, but are loath to look near home for our wool, prefer- ring strange roads and enchanted forests to search in. The homely stuff is too drab, too ready at hand to satisfy us. And circum- stance, that hinders us also. What we would do is inconvenient to be at Our great pic- ture, our wonderful book do not their beauty and complexity haunt us at night when | the moonlight is charming the counterpane i and we blink with the glory of it and our own ; fertile imagining? The work seems all but done. So many days of simple labour with 15 ^the the brush; so many neat pages of foolscap written over, and then the great rush of praise and astonishment and envy! Indeed, so artfully is the feast spread, so eagerly swal- lowed, our plan has melted by the morning, our twilit house of labour soon broken by steadily familiar noises. As with children, so with men: the illusion of circumstance is hard to break, difficult to bend or shape to the right pattern. So far as it may be proved to be Divine, we may account it the cause of our helplessness, getting whatever comfort there is in being beaten by so large an adversary. Those who have rebelled against temporal or spiritual authority have accepted circum- stance as a man-made product, and for that reason capable of change by force or per- suasion. And assuredly that was a romantic day when a man could dispute with one as solid as himself, and block aggression with his body. At least he did not dress up a difficulty and surround it with a halo of light not its own : he liked to feel dark places with 16 a long sharp spear, and adventure his wit against his enemy's. The lantern of the mys- tic has often enough failed to show anything but the darkness, his furious religious besom has left us still our cobwebs of poverty and disease. He has not kept faith with us, nor used his powers to aid us. The fanatic also whose eye lights always jealously upon evil, whose good is a precipitate of evil, a kind of waste product, has little to give the world. Of his building we may say that it is good to fall; and of his planting, it is good to drive the plough through. The energy of divine discontent needs to take a short way, and to come at the matter quickly. The tenderness of the worldly towards the worldly marks the institution as the proper point of attack; but reform had better heed etiquette less and take personal grounds. The man beaten, his walls are only so much brick and mortar, a sound refuge from the rain when wisdom is no longer mislaid among its multitude of coun- sels. When reforms are discussed, our clarity 17 of judgment is lost in a bewilderment of causes; we whittle down the larger law of humanity and make instead ponderously elaborated ones which take us from the true centre. Politicians and judges are our dark Egyptian plague. For the sake of groups, as- sociations, classes and clubs, we fritter away the nobler inclusiveness of our world of men. We have machinery which serves the dolt, but nothing to preserve genius, when it flow- ers among us, from mortal harassment. The problem of bread still presses upon mankind after six thousand years; yet if I have bread because my neighbour has none, it must re- main an unpalatable morsel and a shame in the sight of God. If, being well-provided, I lapse into idleness, and become a mere browser where others labour and sweat, it needs no golden text to tell me of my costly uselessness ; I know without statistics that the bill must be met at one time or another, now or in a generation, to the full, at the price of suffering. Like a tale that has been told if many times we know by heart how hard life is to live. Balanced between our spiritual aspiration and the insecurity of mortal cir- cumstance, we are in two minds as to our con- dition. Entrapped in the disabilities of the flesh, urged on all the while by that same stream of life of which we often seem to be but spectators, allured at one moment, set back at the next, how shall we sufficiently realize ourselves to be agents and forces of the divine^ It is hard to live how often have we heard it said! Do not the pulpits all over the land hold up to us the grim lesson of mortality, bidding us be ''humble, and mindful of death"! Seeing it so, how could we but set- tle with a will into a spiritless tussle with brief life our niggardly and insufficient portion of eternity? Such a savage and heathenish wor- ship of death might well invade and spoil our zest for living interests, did we attend to it or allow ourselves to be jockeyed and hypno- tized into that desperate frame of mind; and, dying daily in a foolish sense, become too 1 9 fy ready ready to believe that happiness might some- how exhale from our faintheartedness and the postponement of our purposes. Men do not easily die, just as they do not easily live; and as nature makes of physical decay the nucleus of other forms of life, so much more does the spiritual principle deny death. A man may die by inches, as we say; his powers fade imperceptibly; but this does not take place without immense resistance. There is remorse to battle with anger, love to light up the darkest day with strange spiritual flicker- ings. No man is utterly vile, or quite blame- worthy. One beginning an evil course has to face the difficulty of the career, and re- cover from the heavy blows which he invites. The good man has many compensations in the conflict with ill ; but the wicked man must find, on the other hand, that his good is ever in rebellion against destruction that life is tenacious and will fight from stronghold to stronghold and inch by inch for possession. .What abstinence will not do, satiety will at- 20 tempt; what satiety does not win over, weari- ness and sickness may. The man is being fought by enemies whom he knows naught of, all the farce of nature's first law being then called into operation. He is the product of the ages, and death shall not steal him easily away, with only his single will to favour the adven- ture. In our divine discontent we must put away the grisly garnishments and decorations which are the emblem of a decadent imagina- tion. Not false peace, but a sword will match the disposition of the mind. Not teaching that is jaundiced, not laws nor associations so long as they do not extend or preserve the sphere of human uselessness, so long as they limit and have within them no passion for service. None of these man-made conditions will bear scrutiny; for the critical spirit im- plies not merely bias but constructiveness also with reference to a more divine pattern. We are not to be so careful to condemn the deed : a solemn abstraction looms behind its paltry actual counterpart. The unmistakable vision 21 of right things defeats all special-pleading which seeks to divert the attention from wrong conceptions of right. The law or the institution may be what it cares to be, so long as our minds are clear and we are not de- ceived. There must always remain those who, while seeming to quench the flame with sand, still lead on towards the sun ; those idol- breakers who cannot bear that mankind shall fill its eyes with unbeautiful form, and so must ever break and ever remodel the likeness of the gods. In that high cause man shares the burden of the creational mind. Set in Time and Change, he yet derives from beyond the measure of Time, and has a fixity which vicis- situde can hardly disturb out of its calm. The pulsation of life, the ebb and flow of tides, night and day, the whole rhythmic tune of the Universe, the quick heart-beat respond- ing and corresponding these are all with ref- erence to the same fixed centre, all evidences of friction and contrariety from which unity, 22 wholeness, harmony are evolved. They are the milk of God * It is as though the Creator, dreaming in the twilight of Heaven, had paused a little to search the chambers of His mind, and as the divine thought flashed, the Universe with its elaborately interwoven pattern of life un- folded itself to be the test and the revelation. The one thought, the atonement, has to be fashioned from the interaction of two thoughts. Out of twilight is the sun ripened, out of doubt comes faith, by sorrow knowl- edge. Through the maze of evolution God may be said to test His mind, to resolve His moment of divine discontent. The states of innocence and experience, the principles of good and evil are both essential to that which they are in reference to, to the fixity they in- evitably discover or evolve. Thus calling man from the dust, as He had wrought form from out the elemental chaotic cloud, God made him in His image and put him from the 23 * Garden Garden of Contentment into an environment of material things and the fact of experience. Framed and held within tremendous primi- tive elements, shut in by day and night, the graciousness and gloom of more spacious moods, man is conditioned by the unerring physical law; but lit also by the light of divine consciousness, the fire which is all life and breath and all unresting intelligence too. Through what obscure forms of evolution mankind has been rehearsed in the divine dream is lost to any reckoning of ours in the sheer scale of Space and Duration. Our lit- tle foot-rule by which we measure, our scien- tific scales for weighing, still leave us the knowledge that the measure runs out on all sides and that the facts are beyond compre- hension. Yet if God's thought glitters as we suppose with this rich enchantment, if the creative effort takes this shape to explore the nooks and crannies of material existence, we being its tools and instruments if this be a true figure of life's origin, may we not also 24 be seen to pass on the stream of life, and re- flect what deeds we do upon another race in some distant star whose dial mirrors our minds among the mists of Space? We may not guess what wars and darkness our treason and unfaith bring to pass. So immense are we when our hands are lifted to grope along the boundaries of this fleshly territory and out into the firmament beyond; yet so in- significant in the knowledge that the sum and extent of one world's deed renders our wilful- ness and obedience of identical purport, our good and ill no more than a minute whimsical diversity in the pattern of God's mantle. The moralists have never been able to find a clue to the varying needs of men; indeed, while ap- portioning blame which is naught but the bestowal of a name or a written tally, they have not even discriminated between plain effects and causes. The human mind is far too diverse and delicate to be mended by re- buke if it be no more than rebuke. Thus the law set to punish is incapable of constructive 25 % remedy, remedy, because the plain rogue, its victim, is not the real offender against the community. The ruffian who looks what he is may be a re- freshing survival from a more direct and man- ful condition than this dull one of taxpayers and rate-collectors and retired colonels; at least he deceives nobody. What legal or other mode or mind has any right to so ar- rogant and racial an ascendancy? The polite fraud of the intellect, the subtle false-dealing of half-truth and mental corruption these are the spoilers, that go free. Yet the choice of rulers and lawgivers is difficult: to some extent the world must trust to friction, to action and reaction, even if only antagonism between am- bitions and interests, until there is wrought the nobler ideal of service and disinterest, if this may derive from such unlikely parentage. Our task is at best but a rough-hewing, guided to determine difficult points of conduct by the aggregate of human wisdom named Truth. And let us not despise our little art of life, but make of it this much more than an exer- 26 cise in a witty learning of how to stand well with men that it shall respond to impulses which inwardly stir us to compass deeds un- like those already hardened and deadened into habit. Or if truly we ought to repudiate mental sagacity with its whole desire to prove the next event by the last, and to stand bar- gaining for other terms and tools; if this is of the Devil and from darkness, as some de- clare, then let it be rejected utterly. But in cutting ourselves adrift from the entangle- ment, we must ask the question plainly, and know how much or how little we lay upon ourselves, adventuring, as we then are com- pelled to, upon uncharted regions. That one is not entirely foolish who takes a bold stand upon the human position and elects to carve out a delicate gracious figure; who of mortal clay fashions a beautiful proportion- ate living man, and then calls aloud for the high tests of reason and daylight upon the work. Such a vigorous grip of reality is more acceptable than mystic rumblings which 27 % serve serve to betray indecision and unfaith rather than to reveal the power to handle spiritual things. In no sense does a worship of divine ancestry preclude a proper care for tangible human revelation ; it leads the more certainly to an increased interest in man and the study of mankind. Yet in each heresy we picture the destruction of the angelic host, so tremu- lous are we, so ungenerous to our friend who from divergency of invention we call foe, and at whose discomfiture we are willing to con- nive. In such a temper the holy warfare of puritanism was launched against the arts, whose activity has survived the utmost, and whose decision to go the way of art, which is also the way of nature, impels the artist to aim at perfecting one thing and one man at a time, and to let just expression be its own missioner. To him the fitness of his work is of importance first and last. In that is em- bedded all the lesson he has to teach ; for his mind is incurious as to your conversion. And why should he labour with the indeterminable 28 factors of your mind, or spoil the simple sub- tle implication of right vision and interpreta- tion? The poet also do you require the extravagance of Moody and Sankey, like some unpromising propaganda to weigh down and break his delicate emotional spell? It cannot be. Art delights in diversity, it propagates the fine spirit of humanity, and praises life. And in the flesh we cannot but seek to build our House of Life true in point of art, right with the conditions laid upon us. The hard varying grain of circumstance yields the ma- terial with which we are at leave to build heroically if we will; yet must we be eager to require relevance in our undertakings and not account loss so bitterly. The stakes are not well laid for a merely tolerable existence and a dislocated diligence. By no means shall we consent to sell ourselves cheaply, nor shall our wives or children be, by consent or repute, the instrument of our confusion. It is too precarious a livelihood which imperils the soul or stays it at gentility. "I who am 29 ^ young," young," says one, "must first know my own task ere I can promise diligence in it. At the beginning your inducements, your decorations and pensions have little charm for me. Let me make my desire otherwise in service, my reward in happiness." May we claim so great a prize? Life is compared to a lottery; but how much more like a lottery it is as rec- ommended by some! We are admonished to make haste, and be in time; the prizes are guaranteed by government statute; there are few blanks. Everywhere are we bidden to know that ours is a duty of no especial con- sequence, mere pawns, mere worms as we are! What our virtue, what our pence, in so large a cast? The lottery-mongers are in the saddle for us the chances of the sport, the toilsome wayfaring; for them the power, the safe assurance. We hardly dream, so great is the charm of this noble plan, that in fact we need no official to direct the business at all. Our belief is altogether better: let him who must for his soul's ripening think 30 ill; but for us the glittering humour of a day in the world. We will take no sides against it. Do we not, indeed, press forward the claims of Heaven so soon as it overflows the earth, ill-content to sit recording events in a dull style? The clash and friction are fiercest when our talk is of influence: men hate the re- birth which we insist upon, and afterwards feeling the glow of the healing touch which has cured their contentment, they will soon leave their sick-bed and come into the open and turn the aureate earth with a strong hand and an earnest heart. Happy then is he in our company, being content in the place in which he is, not too careful of divine proc- esses that light and excite, to value greatly the trumpery of material possession whose squareness and weight prove its worth the more substantially unimportant. Divine dis- content is no passive virtue, hardly heeding the things which are praiseworthy, since it has happiness sown in with it. Exultingly we cry "The work is finished," but in secret 3 1 % we we mourn the loss of it. Again we bend to laborious days and suffer the hot tide of mental effort to pass over us. We are tormented, and no task, however easy it looks at the beginning, lets us off one iota; yet filled to the brim with rich surmise, all our faculties aroused, we go among men with the light upon our faces like the prophets of old who, on steep crags which pierced the heavens, communed with God. Gifted with divine discontent, we have ever an urgent call to be on with the story, to reach further, voyage longer, search deeper; and, more, to have capacity for failure and fatigue. In the presence of anger, the contented man avails little, because he has too long been at- tuned to pleasing scenes, and courage has been stolen out of his bones : he cannot be debonair; his spirit has no swiftness or vehemence when there is the need. The life of one is always strange to another, however; none are to the full what we think. I remember wondering as a child whether all the houses were like 32 the one in which I lived, and if the orderly procession of duties, of breakfast and dinner and tea, was the same all along the street and in the mysterious detached houses also whose superior gables and greenhouses seemed to de- part rather arrogantly from the prevailing custom of the neighbourhood. On the whole I was inclined to favour the idea that behind some of those doors far more wonderful things happened than even the happiest of our own: learning easier got, music not ended so soon, love and riches always renewed with daily surprise. And these I still determine as of the nature of heaven. The advantageous thing still shapes the divine, when seen with the clear eyes of a child. Popular philosophy imagines man as though he were of straw, and life fixed either at the point of dismal failure or at glittering success, to be lost straightway or gained over at a stroke. The youth, there- fore, not having been taught to require spirit- ual embodiment, and still perhaps a little held by the conception of remote Belief, is apt to 33 *feU fall early into despair of ever reconciling what he divines and what he sees. Having taken a heroic pattern to heart, he soon accounts it true that the propitious time is not yet. It may be his likeness to the antique hero is a little flimsy and unfinished, and the rough manners of the world not entirely to blame for flinging pellets at it. Perhaps the youth depends too much upon the mastery of the original, and too little upon his own individ- ual artistry: whatever the reason, the hero- worshipper is not identical with the hero in mind or work; for admiration has to flatter by labour, imitation grow into spiritual emu- lation. Where did the man hear so evil a report of the world that he must set himself in a place apart? If from his divine self, it has been only partially posted up in the news. Nevertheless he is favoured, and his cause ad- vanced by all men; his golden nimbus finds reflection in their hearts, and it is as true to- day as ever to say that the uplifting of one soul will draw all men. The world is yet a hard 34 nursery full of complicated toys and noisy dis- tractions. We are by turns the man we de- spised, so learning by no mere disparagement to attain mastery of our own share of the per- fect gifts. For the making of a fine nature is not by the means that we guess. In youth we love the solitary pedestal, the memorial of our preconceived ideas, and shiver for the preservation of our own ascendancy most of all. And perchance we have got to let it all go and to stand the strain of having nothing but the stars and the sea and the deep places, a realm of infinite mysterious fortune. Ex- cellence in our craft requires the utmost beauty of our soul, the real fitness for manful life and effort. Be sure one who is unfit for life is not fit for immortality. The art of liv- ing is an applied art in which our learning will hinder as greatly as it helps. We forsake one precedent only to find that some one has been before us and we are at another unknow- ingly. Thus are we vexed, but march on- wards leaving maybe a deal of baggage 35 3 littered littered along the road to be a biddance to others who travel after. To be right with a high conception of reality, we must go with the stubborn gaiety of the artist; and, like as not, we are hardly recommended by a display of the familiar acceptable virtues. A ship is designed to live upon the waters ; but an archi- tect of ships is not free to reckon without the storm in his calculation of resistance and buoyancy. So we may not hazard a graceful theory of fair weather which the first blast would overturn: our spirit must penetrate the fact and light it with still unvexed faith. Every road does not wind the same way to the forest and the hill, but where lonely paths intersect among the prickly gorse, and the high roads cross upon the plain, we meet our fellow-travellers and have hail and farewell. And presently that old burden, shouldered unwillingly at the inn, weighs not so heavily, because we have grown to the knowledge that the errand upon which we are sent far exceeds our first dream of industry as bridging the 36 space between need and reward; that in fact our toil goes less to gain which we shall be able to spend in fine linen or ornament, and more to the making of a man whose bravery supersedes every such outward vanity. Being fit, we shall use all these, perhaps; but no longer to the end that our shortcomings are hidden and glossed over, no more as make- weight for gaiety which is not true to the tem- per of our minds. The assemblage of quali- ties most admirable to us go to the making of the man who is our pattern and ideal. Him we hold in regard and remember even when the mirror is put away and we forget what manner of men we are in the flesh, perceiv- ing, though dimly enough, the divine corre- sponding likeness of our earthly being. The world also is created newly each time that we see beyond its pain and complexity, and becomes radiant with the aura of exceeding life, a land flowing with milk and honey, a plenty of spiritual grace poured out. Each morning is the gift of a new day which it were 37 flfc shame shame to break with anger; and if with sim- ple hearts like the hearts of children, we peo- ple the night part with beings more timid than our daytime selves, part with creatures of dark moth-like habit whose call and touch upon our sense is fearful and strange and beautiful beyond forsaking, that holds us also, a little awed by its magnificent serenity, moved by the thought that we must lie prone in the keeping of Him who sleeps not. Age does not see with the same eyes as the youth still in the trail of cloud and glory; it is ac- customed, has patience. But if age has not let slip the light and dulled its heat to a brit- tle grey ash, itself but a burnt-out trace of a fire that once warmed and cheered, it is to be likened to no consuming restless youth; for it is as tried gold which will buy us wisdom's pearl. Certain old country-folk there are whom I have seen whose faces are sweet be- yond words, certain old fishermen too whose eyes are full of that same wonder which chil- dren wake with, having taken from beyond 38 the sea's far rim the colour of the same dream. But oftenest, thinking of age, do I visit a small house which is a good half-day's journey from here, and blame whatsoever business it may be which takes me within reach of it and yet forbids the little more which would find me safely there.' Sometimes the church-bells re- proach me a little when mother and daughter go out and leave me alone among the carved and painted trophies from many lands which fill the rooms. These I look at rather sadly, wondering at the stillness which is in this house, and will one day be in mine, after the children are grown and gone away. Perhaps they go to seek peace itself, and it is here in their absence. Who knows what treasure it was that they went in search of, when they cannot tell the secret themselves? The pass- ing stranger will not heed this house: it is hidden enough from curious eyes by being like its fellows; yet within it are these relics, this drift of restless lives. And here is the mother and the daughter who ministers joy- 39 % fully fully to her at all times, and here also, per- vading the stillness, soothing and hushing all regret and pain, softening every sorrow and anxiety, is the peace which passeth under- standing. % It may be that we turn to age for some- thing of the contemplative part to still us and stay us, for fixity of purpose, moral resolution. However that may be, it is sure that to youth we turn also to pick up the golden threads we have lost on the way. Who is there who does not sometimes fold back the veil and disclose the enchanted daybreak of love, or the first promise of achievement? Who has not be- held the massy gloom of ill-fortune melt be- fore a luminous moment when the effort of youth linked itself to more mature thought and quickened the pulse with livelier energy and more impetuous desire? So at least may we reach and stoop, and always gather for the present new uses for things past and states to come. *fc A merchant who had been successful and 40 was spending the remaining years of his life in leisure desired his sons to seek his advice in all perplexing matters; for, said he: "I have passed through them, and shall be able to advise you so well that you need fall into no errors such as I have fallen and without me you must fall into. Be attentive to my counsel, and more speedily than I you shall gain success and be in honour and repute. The vexations, delays, and losses which have hindered and perplexed me need be of no hurt to you, since you may so readily escape them." Against such friendly fathering, however, many enemies are ranged. The battle is to the strong, at whose side and in whose service youth is enrolled. The battle for the strong and the strong for it, and men not to be reckoned upon so readily, nor led so tamely. If youth could indeed be so guided, a textbook would suffice to stay us, and pro- vide every one a competency. And thus shuffled out of harm's way, the complacency of the world would cry aloud for a strong 41 man of blood, or hatred, or discontent mighty enough to break the drowsy spell. Youth with wiser carelessness throws down its life and the world as a stake; action exhilarates it, each new difficulty meeting with deeper breathing and yet more powerfully strung effort. To youth the time has not come when with duller sense the man feels for ways of escape, having failed and lost heart. No gift, moreover, can have in it either the discipline or the charm of what is the due and the shin- ing prize of a noble and courageous soldier. Content is only won through discontent; ease of mind and leisure for the body are not to be handed like a packet across the table. Each new generation, also, has its peculiar fund of inspiration, and in that regard history can teach no lesson which is not already in full view within the span of one thoughtful mind. We shape to a man, but what we do reacts upon the world; we are poor, but powerful also, and must either sink in the one sort or rise in the other. A too complicated care for 42 opinion in one eager to test himself against society may invite much of the barbarity and savagery of primitive cruelty; but it remains true also that the wheels and cogs need not engage us. If the world can provide us with our best, be sure it has the power to oppose our best and frustrate it or whittle it away harmlessly if it so wish. Yet to the young man who comes with too many poetic observations I say: "I care not what skyey mansions your ideals decorate if they are of no use to daily life in the workshop, in the lane, in the count- ing-house. Were it truly an ideal which you would show us, go and with skilful hand carve it ethereally in material substance. Master the verse, the chisel, the pen; give to your spiritual part the fine integrity of the ma- terial; build the bridge which will let man- kind share with you the vision you boast of." One of the would-be founders of a new ascetic heroic system spoke of it to a certain great fellow whose support he was soliciting, whereupon he was asked the question: "But 43 why, if you prohibit the smoking of tobacco, are your own fingers stained with nicotine?" Need I say that his reply: "Oh, we have not begun yet" completely shattered the fragile illusion, and rendered his errand as fruitless as afterwards the whole cult proved to be? No, we require a greater valour to invite our interest and call us out of our present habit; the sparkling heady wine must not turn into ditchwater so soon as we prepare to drink of it. The "common day" starts early with tremendous meanings around us, so widely spread as it is over the earth. We find our- selves lifted in our own conceit by the subtle comparison. With hardly an effort the whole horizon is ours, and conquest easy enough to be idly recommended elsewhere. And some will argue it the more prosaic than ever it was, as though predestined to defeat every noble aspiration; we and the world both vil- lainous of necessity, by some fate beyond our mending bequeathed to sin and ruin. But I set myself against the report, and if upon 44 that reckoning any sort of belief is founded, put it from my mind without a qualm; for the claims which it will make can be no sounder than the dismal heresy upon which it is built. As with evil, so with good, men hypnotize themselves. They hide from their sight all save those things which are to their standard of good and thus turn a counterfeit complacency uppermost, to the end that they be not shocked or put-about by appearances not within their philosophy. Some one has written: "The Author of Creation is the only author who is supposed to be flattered by disparagement of his works." Set a light to naphtha, and it will burn and maybe fire a house or a ship ; let loose the waters and they will spoil; infect with disease, and it will act after the manner of its sort and no other. The price of knowledge is heavy, but the law remains and must remain if the day is to succeed the night and reason stay within man- kind. Watch the shadow cast upon the wall by a projecting moulding, by a picture-frame 45 ^' or cr a lintel-post: it is true to the angle of the light, to every curve and variation of form. A flicker of firelight from another direction will fight to make its light and its shadow, tempering the stronger shadow exactly ac- cording to its force and colour. For a mo- ment there is the hint of a new figure, and as the flame dies, the mastering light mends its work. It is all logical and accountable, con- summately precise and tireless, and is a source of exceeding joy to those who nurse no desire for law less absolute and inscrutable, but rather, able in little matters to trace its oper- ation, find in it always more and more rapture and excitement. To what we know, we add what we can divine of the unknown in order to find worthy beliefs, or else, existing in despite of the bodying element, we praise the soul and despise the body, and by so much for- bid the dream to cross the gulf. The dream and the deed, as over a gulf, beckon and correspond; spirit and body utterly friendly and interchangeable, and perception and sen- sation with no news that wars against our praise of the God who made our beautiful orderly bodies and who set us in this en- chanted land. That one attends no less to vision who is scrupulous of the material in which he works, knowing that mastery lies first in obedience, and service rests with under- standing. For him no vain bias against solid material and hard fact does not his soul re- appear shiningly in these when he has made them his servants ! The presence of the spirit- ual is not, on the other hand, shown forth by the failure of tangible expression; piety affect- ing to address the world in terms already within knowledge, with no command of the language to forward it, is not merely materi- ally incompetent, but spiritually incompetent. Writing of this I have especially in mind cer- tain psychic pictures which are supposed to suggest important wanderings of the human consciousness ; but there are many people who bear ill-done testimony to beliefs which jut out far beyond their grasp of form into un- 47