On Something (Dodo Press) (22 page)

Now it is here that the opposite, the wisdoms of old age appears; for the
old, when they are wise, are able to point out to men and to women of
middle age what these least suspect, and can provide them with a good
medicine against the insecurity of the soul. The old in their wisdom can
tell those just beneath them this: that though all things human pass, all
bear their fruit. They can say: "You believe that such and such a woman,
with her courtesy, her travel, her sharp edge of judgment, her large
humanity, and her love of the comedy of the world, being dead can never be
replaced. There are, growing up around you, characters quite insufficient,
and to you, perhaps, contemptible, who will in their fruiting display all
these things." There never was, nor has been, a time (say those who are
acquainted with the great story of Europe) when Christendom has failed.
Out of dead passages there has sprung up suddenly, and quite miraculously,
whatever was thought to be lost. So it has been with our music, so with
the splendour of our armies, so with the fabric of our temples, so with
our deathless rhymes. The old, when they are wise, can do for men younger
than they what history does for the reader; but they can do it far more
poignantly, having expression in their eyes and the living tones of a
voice. It is their business to console the world.

Here and there, scattered rarely among men as men are now, you will
find one man who does not pursue the same ends as his fellows; but in a
peculiar manner leads his life as though his eyes were fixed upon some
distant goal or his appetites subjected to some constant and individual
influence.

Such a man may be doing any one of many things. He may be a poet, and his
occupation may be the writing of good verse, pleased at its sound and
pleased as well by the reflection of the pleasure it will give to others.
Or he may be devoted, and follow a creed, a single truth or a character
which he loves, and whose influence and glory he makes it his business to
propagate. Or he may be but a worker in some material, a carver in wood,
or a manager of commercial affairs, or a governor and administrator of
men, and yet so order his life that his work and his material are his
object: not his gain in the end—not his appreciable and calculable gain
at least—nor his immediate and ephemeral pleasures.

Such men, if you will examine them, will prove intent upon one ultimate
completion of their being which is also (whether they know it or not) a
reward, and those who have carefully considered the matter and give it
expression say that such men are out a-hunting for Immortality.

Now what is that? There was a man, before the Normans came to England, who
sailed from the highest Scandinavian mountains, I think, towards these
shores, and landing, fought against men and was wounded so that he was
certain to die. When they asked him why he had undertaken that adventure,
he answered: "That my name might live between the lips of men."

The young, the adventurous, the admired—how eagerly and how properly do
they not crave for glory. Fame has about it a divine something as it were
an echo of perfect worship and of perfect praise, which, though it is
itself imperfect, may well deceive the young, the adventurous, and the
admired. How great to think that things well done and the enlargement of
others shall call down upon our names, even when all is lost but the mere
names, a continuous and an increasing benediction. Nay, more than this:
how great to think of the noise only of an achievement, and to be sure
that the poem written, the carving concluded, or the battle won, the
achievement of itself, though the name of the achiever be perished or
unknown, shall awake those tremendous echoes.

But wait a moment. What is that thing which so does and so desires? What
end does
it
find in glory?
It
is not the receiver of the
benefit;
it
will not hear that large volume of recognition and of
salute. Twist it how you will no end is here, nor in such a pursuit is the
pursuer satisfied.

It is true that men who love to create for themselves imaginary stuff, and
to feed, their cravings, if they cannot with substance then with dreams,
perpetually pretend a satisfaction in such acquirements which the years as
they proceed tell them with increasing iteration that they do not feel.
The young, the adventurous, the admired, may at first be deceived by such
a glamour, and it is in the providential scheme of human affairs, and it
is for the good of us all that the pleasing cheat should last while the
good things are doing. Thus do substantial verse and noble sculpture and
building whose stuff is lasting and whose beauty is almost imperishable,
rise to the advantage of mankind—but oh! there is no lasting in the
dream.

There comes a day of truth inwardly but ineradicably perceived, when such
things, such aspirations, are clearly known for what they are. Of all the
affections that pass, of all those things which being made by a power
itself perishable, must be unmade again, some may be less, others more
lasting, but not one remains for ever.

Nor is this all. What is it, I say, which did the thing and suffered the
desire? Not the receiver, still less the work achieved, it was the man
that so acted and so desired; and that part of him which was affected thus
we call the Soul. Then, surely (one may reason) the soul has, apt to its
own nature, a completion which is also a reward, and there is something
before it which is not the symbol or the cheat of perfect praise, but
is perfect praise; there is surely something before it which is not the
symbol or the cheat of life, but life completed.

Now stand at night beneath a clear heaven solemn and severe with stars,
comprehend (as the great achievement of our race permits us now to do)
what an emptiness and what a scale are there, and you will easily discover
in that one glance, or you will feel at least the appalling thing which
tempts men to deny their immortality.

There is no man who has closely inquired upon this, and there is none
who has troubled himself and admitted a reasonable anxiety upon it, who
has not well retained the nature of despair. Those who approach their
fellow-beings with assertion and with violence in such a matter, affirming
their discovery, their conviction, or their acquired certitude, do an
ill service to their kind. It is not thus that the last things should be
approached nor the most tremendous problem which man is doomed to envisage
be propounded and solved. Ah! the long business in this world! The way in
which your deepest love goes up in nothingness and breaks away, and the
way in which the strongest and the most continuous element of your dear
self is dissipated and fails you in some moment; if I do not understand
these things in a man nor comprehend how the turn of the years can obscure
or obliterate a man's consciousness of what his end should be, then I act
in brute ignorance, or what is much worse, in lack of charity.

How should you not be persuaded, ephemeral intelligence? Does not every
matter which you have held closely enough and long enough escape you and
withdraw? Is not that doom true of things which were knit into us, and
were of necessity, so to speak, prime parts of our being? Is it not true
of the network and the structure which supports whatever we are, and
without which we cannot imagine ourselves to be? We ourselves perish. Of
that there is no doubt at all. One is here talking and alive. His friends
are with him: on the time when they shall meet again he is utterly not
there. The motionless flesh before his mourners is nothing. It is not a
simulacrum, it is not an outline, it is not a recollection of the man, but
rather something wholly gone useless. As for that voice, those meanings in
the eyes, and that gesture of the hand, it has suddenly and entirely
ceased to be.

Then how shall we deny the dreadful conclusion (to which how many elder
civilizations have not turned!) that we must seek in vain for any gift to
the giver for any workers' wage, or, rather, to put it more justly, for
a true end to the life we lead. Yet it is not so. The conclusion is more
weighty by far that all things bear their fruit: that the comprehender and
the master of so much, the very
mind
, suffers to no purpose and in
one moment a tragic, final, and unworthy catastrophe agrees with nothing
other that we know. It is not thus of the good things of the earth that
turn kindly into the earth again. It cannot be thus with that which makes
of all the earth a subject thing for contemplation and for description,
for understanding, and, if it so choose—for sacrifice.

Those of our race who have deliberately looked upon the scroll and found
there nothing to read, who have lifted the curtain and found beyond it
nothing to see, have faced their conclusions with a nobility which should
determine us; for that nobility does prove, or, if it does not prove,
compels us to proclaim, that the soul of man which breeds it has somewhere
a lasting home. The conclusion is imperative.

Let not any one pretend in his faith that his faith is immediately evident
and everywhere acceptable. There is in all who pretend to judgment a sense
of the doubt that lies between the one conviction and the other, and all
acknowledge that the scales swing normally upon the beam for normal men.
But they swing—and one is the heavier.

The poets, who are our interpreters, know well and can set forth the
contrast between such intimations and such despair.

   The long descent of wasted days
   To these at last have led me down:
   Remember that I filled with praise
   The meaningless and doubtful ways
   That lead to an eternal town.

Moreover, since we have spoken of the night it is only reasonable to
consider the alternate dawn. The quality of light, its merry action on the
mind, the daylit sky under whose benediction we repose and in which our
kind has always seen the picture of its final place: are these then
visions and deceits?

It is good for a man's soul to sit down in the silence by himself and to
think of those things which happen by some accident to be in communion
with the whole world. If he has not the faculty of remembering these
things in their order and of calling them up one after another in his
mind, then let him write them down as they come to him upon a piece of
paper. They will comfort him; they will prove a sort of solace against
the expectation of the end. To consider such things is a sacramental
occupation. And yet the more I think of them the less I can quite
understand in what elements their power consists.

A woman smiling at a little child, not knowing that others see her, and
holding out her hands towards it, and in one of her hands flowers; an old
man, lean and active, with an eager face, walking at dusk upon a warm
and windy evening westward towards a clear sunset below dark and flying
clouds; a group of soldiers, seen suddenly in manoeuvres, each man intent
upon his business, all working at the wonderful trade, taking their places
with exactitude and order and yet with elasticity; a deep, strong tide
running back to the sea, going noiselessly and flat and black and smooth,
and heavy with purpose under an old wall; the sea smell of a Channel
seaport town; a ship coming up at one out of the whole sea when one is
in a little boat and is waiting for her, coming up at one with her great
sails merry and every one doing its work, with the life of the wind in
her, and a balance, rhythm, and give in all that she does which marries
her to the sea—whether it be a fore and aft rig and one sees only great
lines of the white, or a square rig and one sees what is commonly and well
called a leaning tower of canvas, or that primal rig, the triangular sail,
that cuts through the airs of the world and clove a way for the first
adventures, whatever its rig, a ship so approaching an awaiting boat from
which we watch her is one of the things I mean.

I would that the taste of my time permitted a lengthy list of such things:
they are pleasant to remember! They do so nourish the mind! A glance
of sudden comprehension mixed with mercy and humour from the face of a
lover or a friend; the noise of wheels when the guns are going by; the
clatter-clank-clank of the pieces and the shouted halt at the head of the
column; the noise of many horses, the metallic but united and harmonious
clamour of all those ironed hoofs, rapidly occupying the highway; chief
and most persistent memory, a great hill when the morning strikes it and
one sees it up before one round the turning of a rock after the long passes
and despairs of the night.

When a man has journeyed and journeyed through those hours in which there
is no colour or shape, all along the little hours that were made for sleep
and when, therefore, the waking soul is bewildered or despairs, the morning
is always a resurrection—but especially when it reveals a height in the
sky.

This last picture I would particularly cherish, so great a consolation is
it, and so permanent a grace does it lend later to the burdened mind of a
man.

For when a man looks back upon his many journeys—so many rivers crossed,
and more than one of them forded in peril; so many swinging mountain
roads, so many difficult steeps and such long wastes of plains—of all the
pictures that impress themselves by the art or kindness of whatever god
presides over the success of journeys, no picture more remains than that
picture of a great hill when the day first strikes it after the long
burden of the night.

Whatever reasons a man may have for occupying the darkness with his travel
and his weariness, those reasons must be out of the ordinary and must go
with some bad strain upon the mind. Perhaps one undertook the march from
an evil necessity under the coercion of other men, or perhaps in terror,
hoping that the darkness might hide one, or perhaps for cool, dreading the
unnatural heat of noon in a desert land; perhaps haste, which is in itself
so wearying a thing, compelled one, or perhaps anxiety. Or perhaps, most
dreadful of all, one hurried through the night afoot because one feared
what otherwise the night would bring, a night empty of sleep and a night
whose dreams were waking dreams and evil.