|
|
|
Prev
| Next
| Contents
MOOD AND WILL.
Winter came apace. When we look towards winter from the last borders
of autumn, it seems as if we could not encounter it, and as if it
never would go over. So does threatened trouble of any kind seem to
us as we look forward upon its miry ways from the last borders of
the pleasant greensward on which we have hitherto been walking. But
not only do both run their course, but each has its own
alleviations, its own pleasures; and very marvellously does the
healthy mind fit itself to the new circumstances; while to those who
will bravely take up their burden and bear it, asking no more
questions than just, "Is this my burden?" a thousand ministrations
of nature and life will come with gentle comfortings. Across a dark
verdureless field will blow a wind through the heart of the winter
which will wake in the patient mind not a memory merely, but a
prophecy of the spring, with a glimmer of crocus, or snow-drop, or
primrose; and across the waste of tired endeavour will a gentle
hope, coming he knows not whence, breathe springlike upon the heart
of the man around whom life looks desolate and dreary. Well do I
remember a friend of mine telling me once--he was then a labourer in
the field of literature, who had not yet begun to earn his penny a
day, though he worked hard--telling me how once, when a hope that
had kept him active for months was suddenly quenched--a book refused
on which he had spent a passion of labour--the weight of money that
must be paid and could not be had, pressing him down like the
coffin-lid that had lately covered the ONLY friend to whom he could
have applied confidently for aid--telling me, I say, how he stood at
the corner of a London street, with the rain, dripping black from
the brim of his hat, the dreariest of atmospheres about him in the
closing afternoon of the City, when the rich men were going home,
and the poor men who worked for them were longing to follow; and how
across this waste came energy and hope into his bosom, swelling
thenceforth with courage to fight, and yield no ear to suggested
failure. And the story would not be complete--though it is for the
fact of the arrival of unexpected and apparently unfounded HOPE that
I tell it--if I did not add, that, in the morning, his wife gave him
a letter which their common trouble of yesterday had made her
forget, and which had lain with its black border all night in the
darkness unopened, waiting to tell him how the vanished friend had
not forgotten him on her death-bed, but had left him enough to take
him out of all those difficulties, and give him strength and time to
do far better work than the book which had failed of birth.--Some of
my readers may doubt whether I am more than "a wandering voice," but
whatever I am, or may be thought to be, my friend's story is true.
And all this has come out of the winter that I, in the retrospect of
my history, am looking forward to. It came, with its fogs, and
dripping boughs, and sodden paths, and rotting leaves, and rains,
and skies of weary gray; but also with its fierce red suns, shining
aslant upon sheets of manna-like hoarfrost, and delicate ice-films
over prisoned waters, and those white falling chaoses of perfect
forms--called snow-storms--those confusions confounded of infinite
symmetries.
And when the hard frost came, it brought a friend to my door. It was
Mr Stoddart.
He entered my room with something of the countenance Naaman must
have borne, after his flesh had come again like unto the flesh of a
little child. He did not look ashamed, but his pale face looked
humble and distressed. Its somewhat self-satisfied placidity had
vanished, and instead of the diffused geniality which was its usual
expression, it now showed traces of feeling as well as plain signs
of suffering. I gave him as warm a welcome as I could, and having
seated him comfortably by the fire, and found that he would take no
refreshment, began to chat about the day's news, for I had just been
reading the newspaper. But he showed no interest beyond what the
merest politeness required. I would try something else.
"The cold weather, which makes so many invalids creep into bed,
seems to have brought you out into the air, Mr Stoddart," I said.
"It has revived me, certainly."
"Indeed, one must believe that winter and cold are as beneficent,
though not so genial, as summer and its warmth. Winter kills many a
disease and many a noxious influence. And what is it to have the
fresh green leaves of spring instead of the everlasting brown of
some countries which have no winter!"
I talked thus, hoping to rouse him to conversation, and I was
successful.
"I feel just as if I were coming out of a winter. Don't you think
illness is a kind of human winter?"
"Certainly--more or less stormy. With some a winter of snow and hail
and piercing winds; with others of black frosts and creeping fogs,
with now and then a glimmer of the sun."
"The last is more like mine. I feel as if I had been in a wet hole
in the earth."
"And many a man," I went on, "the foliage of whose character had
been turning brown and seared and dry, rattling rather than rustling
in the faint hot wind of even fortunes, has come out of the winter
of a weary illness with the fresh delicate buds of a new life
bursting from the sun-dried bark."
"I wish it would be so with me. I know you mean me. But I don't feel
my green leaves coming."
"Facts are not always indicated by feelings."
"Indeed, I hope not; nor yet feelings indicated by facts."
"I do not quite understand you."
"Well, Mr Walton, I will explain myself. I have come to tell you how
sorry and ashamed I am that I behaved so badly to you every time you
came to see me."
"Oh, nonsense!" I said. "It was your illness, not you."
"At least, my dear sir, the facts of my behaviour did not really
represent my feelings towards you."
"I know that as well as you do. Don't say another word about it. You
had the best excuse for being cross; I should have had none for
being offended."
"It was only the outside of me."
"Yes, yes; I acknowledge it heartily."
"But that does not settle the matter between me and myself, Mr
Walton; although, by your goodness, it settles it between me and
you. It is humiliating to think that illness should so completely
'overcrow' me, that I am no more myself--lose my hold, in fact, of
what I call ME--so that I am almost driven to doubt my personal
identity."
"You are fond of theories, Mr Stoddart--perhaps a little too much
so,"
"Perhaps."
"Will you listen to one of mine?"
"With pleasure."
"It seems to me sometimes--I know it is a partial representation--as
if life were a conflict between the inner force of the spirit, which
lies in its faith in the unseen--and the outer force of the world,
which lies in the pressure of everything it has to show us. The
material, operating upon our senses, is always asserting its
existence; and if our inner life is not equally vigorous, we shall
be moved, urged, what is called actuated, from without, whereas all
our activity ought to be from within. But sickness not only
overwhelms the mind, but, vitiating all the channels of the senses,
causes them to represent things as they are not, of which
misrepresentations the presence, persistency, and iteration seduce
the man to act from false suggestions instead of from what he knows
and believes."
"Well, I understand all that. But what use am I to make of your
theory?"
"I am delighted, Mr Stoddart, to hear you put the question. That is
always the point.--The inward holy garrison, that of faith, which
holds by the truth, by sacred facts, and not by appearances, must be
strengthened and nourished and upheld, and so enabled to resist the
onset of the powers without. A friend's remonstrance may appear an
unkindness--a friend's jest an unfeelingness--a friend's visit an
intrusion; nay, to come to higher things, during a mere headache it
will appear as if there was no truth in the world, no reality but
that of pain anywhere, and nothing to be desired but deliverance
from it. But all such impressions caused from without--for,
remember, the body and its innermost experiences are only OUTSIDE OF
THE MAN--have to be met by the inner confidence of the spirit,
resting in God and resisting every impulse to act according to that
which APPEARS TO IT instead of that which IT BELIEVES. Hence, Faith
is thus allegorically represented: but I had better give you
Spenser's description of her--Here is the 'Fairy Queen':--
'She was arrayed all in lily white,
And in her right hand bore a cup of gold,
With wine and water filled up to the height,
In which a serpent did himself enfold,
That horror made to all that did behold;
But she no whit did change her constant mood.'
This serpent stands for the dire perplexity of things about us, at
which yet Faith will not blench, acting according to what she
believes, and not what shows itself to her by impression and
appearance."
"I admit all that you say," returned Mr Stoddart. "But still the
practical conclusion--which I understand to be, that the inward
garrison must be fortified--is considerably incomplete unless we
buttress it with the final HOW. How is it to be fortified? For,
'I have as much of this in art as you,
But yet my nature could not bear it so.'
(You see I read Shakespeare as well as you, Mr Walton.) I daresay,
from a certain inclination to take the opposite side, and a certain
dislike to the dogmatism of the clergy--I speak generally--I may
have appeared to you indifferent, but I assure you that I have
laboured much to withdraw my mind from the influence of money, and
ambition, and pleasure, and to turn it to the contemplation of
spiritual things. Yet on the first attack of a depressing illness I
cease to be a gentleman, I am rude to ladies who do their best and
kindest to serve me, and I talk to the friend who comes to cheer and
comfort me as if he were an idle vagrant who wanted to sell me a
worthless book with the recommendation of the pretence that he wrote
it himself. Now that I am in my right mind, I am ashamed of myself,
ashamed that it should be possible for me to behave so, and
humiliated yet besides that I have no ground of assurance that,
should my illness return to-morrow, I should not behave in the same
manner the day after. I want to be ALWAYS in my right mind. When I
am not, I know I am not, and yet yield to the appearance of being."
"I understand perfectly what you mean, for I fancy I know a little
more of illness than you do. Shall I tell you where I think the
fault of your self-training lies?"
"That is just what I want. The things which it pleased me to
contemplate when I was well, gave me no pleasure when I was ill.
Nothing seemed the same."
"If we were always in a right mood, there would be no room for the
exercise of the will. We should go by our mood and inclination only.
But that is by the by.--Where you have been wrong is--that you have
sought to influence your feelings only by thought and argument with
yourself--and not also by contact with your fellows. Besides the
ladies of whom you have spoken, I think you have hardly a friend in
this neighbourhood but myself. One friend cannot afford you half
experience enough to teach you the relations of life and of human
needs. At best, under such circumstances, you can only have right
theories: practice for realising them in yourself is nowhere. It is
no more possible for a man in the present day to retire from his
fellows into the cave of his religion, and thereby leave the world
of his own faults and follies behind, than it was possible for the
eremites of old to get close to God in virtue of declining the
duties which their very birth of human father and mother laid upon
them. I do not deny that you and the eremite may both come NEARER to
God, in virtue of whatever is true in your desires and your worship;
'but if a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he
love God whom he hath not seen?'--which surely means to imply at
least that to love our neighbour is a great help towards loving God.
How this love is to come about without intercourse, I do not see.
And how without this love we are to bear up from within against the
thousand irritations to which, especially in sickness, our
unavoidable relations with humanity will expose us, I cannot tell
either."
"But," returned Mr Stoddart, "I had had a true regard for you, and
some friendly communication with you. If human intercourse were what
is required in my case, how should I fail just with respect to the
only man with whom I had held such intercourse?"
"Because the relations in which you stood with me were those of the
individual, not of the race. You like me, because I am fortunate
enough to please you--to be a gentleman, I hope--to be a man of some
education, and capable of understanding, or at least docile enough
to try to understand, what you tell me of your plans and pursuits.
But you do not feel any relation to me on the ground of my
humanity--that God made me, and therefore I am your brother. It is
not because we grow out of the same stem, but merely because my leaf
is a little like your own that you draw to me. Our Lord took on Him
the nature of man: you will only regard your individual attractions.
Disturb your liking and your love vanishes."
"You are severe."
"I don't mean really vanishes, but disappears for the time. Yet you
will confess you have to wait till, somehow, you know not how, it
comes back again--of itself, as it were."
"Yes, I confess. To my sorrow, I find it so."
"Let me tell you the truth, Mr Stoddart. You seem to me to have been
hitherto only a dilettante or amateur in spiritual matters. Do not
imagine I mean a hypocrite. Very far from it. The word amateur
itself suggests a real interest, though it may be of a superficial
nature. But in religion one must be all there. You seem to me to
have taken much interest in unusual forms of theory, and in mystical
speculations, to which in themselves I make no objection. But to be
content with those, instead of knowing God himself, or to substitute
a general amateur friendship towards the race for the love of your
neighbour, is a mockery which will always manifest itself to an
honest mind like yours in such failure and disappointment in your
own character as you are now lamenting, if not indeed in some mode
far more alarming, because gross and terrible."
"Am I to understand you, then, that intercourse with one's
neighbours ought to take the place of meditation?"
"By no means: but ought to go side by side with it, if you would
have at once a healthy mind to judge and the means of either
verifying your speculations or discovering their falsehood."
"But where am I to find such friends besides yourself with whom to
hold spiritual communion?"
"It is the communion of spiritual deeds, deeds of justice, of mercy,
of humility--the kind word, the cup of cold water, the visitation in
sickness, the lending of money--not spiritual conference or talk,
that I mean: the latter will come of itself where it is natural. You
would soon find that it is not only to those whose spiritual windows
are of the same shape as your own that you are neighbour: there is
one poor man in my congregation who knows more--practically, I mean,
too--of spirituality of mind than any of us. Perhaps you could not
teach him much, but he could teach you. At all events, our
neighbours are just those round about us. And the most ignorant man
in a little place like Marshmallows, one like you with leisure ought
to know and understand, and have some good influence upon: he is
your brother whom you are bound to care for and elevate--I do not
mean socially, but really, in himself--if it be possible. You ought
at least to get into some simple human relation with him, as you
would with the youngest and most ignorant of your brothers and
sisters born of the same father and mother; approaching him, not
with pompous lecturing or fault-finding, still less with that
abomination called condescension, but with the humble service of the
elder to the younger, in whatever he may be helped by you without
injury to him. Never was there a more injurious mistake than that it
is the business of the clergy only to have the care of souls."
"But that would be endless. It would leave me no time for myself."
"Would that be no time for yourself spent in leading a noble,
Christian life; in verifying the words of our Lord by doing them; in
building your house on the rock of action instead of the sands of
theory; in widening your own being by entering into the nature,
thoughts, feelings, even fancies of those around you? In such
intercourse you would find health radiating into your own bosom;
healing sympathies springing up in the most barren acquaintance;
channels opened for the in-rush of truth into your own mind; and
opportunities afforded for the exercise of that self-discipline, the
lack of which led to the failures which you now bemoan. Soon then
would you have cause to wonder how much some of your speculations
had fallen into the background, simply because the truth, showing
itself grandly true, had so filled and occupied your mind that it
left no room for anxiety about such questions as, while secured in
the interest all reality gives, were yet dwarfed by the side of it.
Nothing, I repeat, so much as humble ministration to your
neighbours, will help you to that perfect love of God which casteth
out fear; nothing but the love of God--that God revealed in
Christ--will make you able to love your neighbour aright; and the
Spirit of God, which alone gives might for any good, will by these
loves, which are life, strengthen you at last to believe in the
light even in the midst of darkness; to hold the resolution formed
in health when sickness has altered the appearance of everything
around you; and to feel tenderly towards your fellow, even when you
yourself are plunged in dejection or racked with pain.--But," I
said, "I fear I have transgressed the bounds of all propriety by
enlarging upon this matter as I have done. I can only say I have
spoken in proportion to my feeling of its weight and truth."
"I thank you, heartily," returned Mr Stoddart, rising. "And I
promise you at least to think over what you have been saying--I hope
to be in my old place in the organ-loft next Sunday."
So he was. And Miss Oldcastle was in the pew with her mother. Nor
did she go any more to Addicehead to church.
Prev
| Next
| Contents
|
|
|