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Title: Apologia Diffidentis

Author: O. M. Dalton

Release date: January 13, 2009 [eBook #27795]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK APOLOGIA
DIFFIDENTIS ***

Transcriber's Note:

This book contains a few words in Greek. English
transliterations of these words can be viewed by
hovering the mouse pointer over them.

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Third Edition

Printed in Great Britain
by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh

"I am naturally bashful; nor hath conversation, age, or travel been
able to effront or enharden me."

S
ir Thomas Browne

I N the matter of avowals the diffident never speak if they can write. That
is why my apology for a furtive existence is here set down in solitude
instead of being told face to face. You have borne so many years with my
unresponsive and incomprehensible ways that shame at last constrains me
to this poor defence; for I must either justify myself in your sight, or go far
away where even your kindness cannot reach me. The first alternative is
hard, but the second too grievous for impaired powers of endurance; I must
therefore find what expression I may, and tell you how my life has been
beshrewed ever since, a boy of twelve, I first incurred the obloquy of being
shy. The word slips easily from the pen though the lips refuse to frame it;
for I think most men would rather plead guilty to a vice than to this
weakness.
A doom of reticence is upon all our shy confraternity, and we seldom make
confidences even to each other. It is only at rarest intervals that the spell is
lifted, by silent sympathy, by a smile, by a tear, by I know not what. At such
times our souls are like those deep pools of the shore, only open to the sky
at lowest tides of still summer days, only to be approached across long
stretches of wet sand and slippery shelves of rock. In their depths are
delicate fronded seaweeds and shells tinted with hues of sundawn; but to
see them you must bend low over the surface, which no lightest breath must
furrow, or the vision is gone.
Few of the busy toilers of the world will leave the firm sands to see so little;
but sometimes one weary of keen life will stray aside, and oftener a child
will come splashing across the beach to peer down with artless curiosity
and delight. Then the jealous ocean returns, and the still clear depths are
confused once more with refluent waters; soon the waves are tossing above
the quiet spot, and the child is gone home to sleep and forget. I cannot have
you with me at these still hours of revelation; I must tell my tale as best I
can with such success as fortune may bestow.
I shall say nothing of the miseries which embittered the life of the diffident
boy. But I cannot pass in silence the deeper trouble of earliest manhood,

when my soul first awoke to the dread that though other clouds might drift
westward and dissolve, one would impend over me for ever. It was at the
university that this vague misgiving crept upon me like a chill mist, until
the hopes and aspirations of youth were one by one extinguished, as to a
sailor putting out to sea the comfortable harbour lights vanish in the wracks
of a tempestuous winter morning. I turned my face away from the gracious
young life amidst which I moved, like a man possessed of a dark secret to
his undoing. My heart, yet eager for the joy of living and yearning for
affection, was daily starved of its need as by a power of deliberate and
feline cruelty; and with every expansive impulse instantly restrained by this
dæmonic force, I was left at last unresponsive as a maltreated child, who
flings his arms round no one, but shrinks back into his own world of
solitary fancies.
I think there is no misery so great as that of youth surrounded by all
opportunities for wholesome fellowship, endowed with natural faculties for
enjoyment, yet repressed and thwarted at every turn by invincible self-
consciousness and mistrust: surely no lost opportunities of manhood leave
such aching voids as these. In the spring-time of life to feel day by day the
slow erosion of the power of joy is of all pains most poignant; out of it
grow anxieties, premature despairs, incongruous with fresh cheeks and a
mind not yet mature. This misery was mine for those four years which to
most men are the happiest of a whole career, but to me at every retrospect
seem so beset with gloomy shadows that could I live my life again, I would
not traverse them once more for all the gold of Ophir.
At first I writhed and strained in my bonds, and sometimes would make
timid advances to the generous young hearts around me. But the tension
always proved too sore; I never maintained the ground I had won, and with
a perilous fatalism more and more readily accepted what I deemed
inevitable failure. There were among them, I doubt it not now, Samaritans
who would have tended my bruised limbs; but then they all seemed to be
gliding over the black ice, too happy to stay and lift up the fallen. And
bruised though I was, I still rose time and again and moved painfully among
them, so that theirs was no culpable or merciless neglect.
Yet the end for me was illimitable dreariness; and like Archie in Weir of
Hermiston, I seemed abroad in a world from which every hope of intimacy

was banished. And as with every month the hopelessness of resistance was
made plainer and plainer, there came upon me the recklessness of the
condemned man who jests or blasphemes to hide his ruth. Overwrought
continually by forebodings of coming pain, unstrung by strange revulsions,
I would pass from burning wrath to cold despair, a most petulant and
undisciplined sufferer. Uniting in one person the physical exuberance of
youth and the melancholy of disillusioned manhood, I was deprived of the
balanced energy proper to either age, and kept up a braggart courage with
the headiest wine of literature. I could not bear the bland homilies of the
preachers, but ranged myself with the apostles of rebellion who blew
imperious trumpet blasts before the walls of ordered life.
Verily the violence of the blasts was sometimes such that the ramparts
should have fallen down; and often in my exaltation I already saw them
totter, as I strode along reciting the dithyrambs of men who like myself
could find scarce a responsive heart-beat in all this throbbing world. Above
all I gloried in the declamations of Queen Mab, which sanctioned by high
poetic authority the waste of my affections and my moody defiance of life's
most salutary law. With these upon my lips I roamed, an absurd pathetic
figure, amid the haunts of the Scholar Gipsy, and the wayward upland
breezes conspired with my truant moods. And while I sat by my lamp late
into the night, I turned the pages of pessimists and cynics, for no principles
are dearer to a man than those which allow him to profess contempt for the
benefits which he cannot enjoy.
Yet by seeking amid such simples a balm for wounded pride, I did not really
deceive myself, but lived as a sophist rather than a philosopher. And all the
while I was digging graves for my better instincts, until my sexton's mood,
confining me within churchyard walls, gave me over almost entirely to the
company of mental bats and owls. The danger of it all was that though I was
yet youthful, and should have been still pliant as a sapling, I was fostering
the growth of those habits which, like rings in the grain, are the signature of
unyielding years. Naturalists say that a bullfinch fed only on hempseed
gradually loses his fair plumage and becomes black as a raven: so my soul,
nourished on thoughts of rebellion, put off its bright and diverse
enthusiasms and was clothed in the dark garment of despair.

When the long-desired hour of release came, and I was free to turn my back
upon the spires of my prison city, I had already plumbed an abyss of misery.
The very thought of life in the conflict of the world was abhorrent; and if I
had been of the Roman Church I should have become a Benedictine and
sought a lettered and cloistered peace. I despaired of finding anywhere upon
earth the profound quietude, the absolute detachment, when a chance
occasion seemed to crown my desire, and blind to all warnings of
disillusion, I suddenly set sail for what I then thought might be a permanent
sojourn in the East.
Within two months' time the whole environment of my life was changed,
and I was established on a lonely plantation set high upon a range of hills
whose slopes were clothed with primeval forests verging to a tropical sea.
My home, a white-walled, red-roofed bungalow with a great columned
verandah like a temple's peristyle, lay in the issue of an upper valley
threaded by a clear stream, whence you may look far down over rolling
plains to an horizon lost in the shimmering heat of noon. Immediately to the
east rose the cone of a great solitary hill, always outlined against the sky
with a majestic isolation that lent it an almost personal existence, and at the
birth of every day bearing the orb of the rising sun upon its wooded
shoulder. Round about, in scattered villages of thatched and mud-walled
huts, dwelled brown men of ancient pagan ways, men who neither knew
progress nor set any price upon time.
There I entered upon a wholly new existence as remote from all the social
trials which beset shyness as if it were passed in some island of the
uttermost sea. I had escaped from a harrying pursuit; I was free; and to the
bliss of this recovered liberty I abandoned myself, without attempting to
justify my flight to conscience or forming any scheme for future years. Like
a deer which has eluded the hounds, I yearned only for rest and long
oblivion of the chase; I wanted to live woodland days until, all the strain
and panic of the past forgotten, I might rise refreshed and see a new way
clear before me.
And this first abandonment was a time of ecstasy. The long tranquil days
were crowned by nights of peace yet more desired. I lay beneath the
verandah and watched the stars in their splendour, not the pin-points of cold
light that pierce our misty western heavens, but bright orbs in innumerable

companies hovering upon the tranced earth. Night after night I saw the
incomparable vision; month after month the moon rose slowly over the high
wall of the jungle, first a great globe imminent upon the trees, next soaring
remote through the upper heavens, waning at last to a sphere of pale
unquickening light. I would lie thus for hours motionless, with lulled mind,
until the breeze forerunning the dawn, or the quavering wail of the jackal,
recalled the startled thought to the prison bonds of self.
With the gentle lapse of months all these impersonal influences took
dominion over me and gave me a quiet happiness never known before. The
nights brought the greater light; but the days too had their glories. I would
climb the rugged sides of the mountain, and emerging into a colder world
sit beneath an overhanging rock and see the hot air quivering over leagues
of plain; while in the nearer distance, far down beneath my feet, the rice-
fields shone like emerald and the palm-fringed pools like shields of silver.
Or I would stretch myself at early afternoon on the close-cropped grass on
the jungle-edge, and watch the opposite sky take on an ever-deeper blue
against the setting sun behind me. Often at such times I would hear a
rushing in the highest branches, and turning very silently, see the outposts
of a troop of monkeys peering down through the gleaming foliage. Then, if
I moved, neither head nor limb, others would come, and yet others, leaping
from branch to branch and plunging down from higher to lower levels like
divers cleaving a deep green sea; until at last some slightest involuntary
movement of mine would put the whole host to flight, and greybeards,
young warriors, camp followers and mothers with their children on their
backs would spring precipitate from tree to tree, screaming and gibbering
like Homer's sapless dead. Then, when the stars rushed out and the darkness
came on apace, it was sweet to wander home along those paths so dear to
primitive men in all countries, narrow paths and sinuous, smoothed by the
footfalls of centuries, winding patiently round every obstacle and never
breaking through after the brutal manner of civilization. The fire-flies
gleamed in the brushwood on either hand, and from every side rose that all-
pervading hum of busy insects through which the tropic forest is never still.
Amid these surroundings, so peaceful and so new, my soul was stilled to
that γαλήνη or ocean-calm which the old Greek philosopher found the
highest good for man. And month by month the mere material side of life
grew of less moment; the body fretted the spirit less, but often seemed a

tissue of gossamer lightness through which it could pass at will, as the
breeze through the gleaming spider-webs upon the bushes at dawn. There
were times when the ideal of the mystic seemed well-nigh accomplished,
when my body might almost have been abandoned by the soul for hours
upon end. The words of Emerson seemed to be fulfilled: "By being
assimilated to the original soul by whom and after whom all things subsist,
the soul of man does then easily flow into all things and all things flow into
it: they mix; and he is present and sympathetic with their structure and law."
As I write now amid the roar of London traffic, I well believe that to men
who have never bathed in eastern moonlight, the description will sound
hyperbolical and false. But when I think of those old days, how serene they
were, how apart, I let the words stand: I am not artist enough to give them a
more plausible simplicity. All conditions that a recluse might crave seemed
now to be fulfilled for my benefit. The virgin forests and great hills were a
perpetual joy, but there was a tranquil pleasure in the plantation which
man's labour had reclaimed from these. That was a meet place indeed for
the meditation of a quiet hour, and no more grateful refuge can be
conceived than such a shady grove at the height of noon. You must not
fancy an expanse of dusty land lined with prim rows of plants in the formal
style of a nursery garden; but, spread over the lower slopes of the valleys,
spacious woods of clean, grey-stemmed trees, with overarching branches
thinned to cast a diaphanous shade over the sea of lustrous dark leaves
below. The shrubs stood waist-high in serried, commingling ranks, their
dark burnished leaves gleaming here and there in the sifted rays that found
their way down through the vaults of foliage; the groves of Daphne had no
more perfect sheen.
I learned to feel for this gracious place a love only second to that of the
wilder jungle; for nature thus tamed to work side by side with man loses
indeed her austerer charm, but not her calm and dignity: these she brings
with her always to be a glory to the humblest associate of her labour. Often
as I pruned a tree, or stripped its stem of suckers, I felt the soothing,
quickening influence of this partnership, and my thoughts turned to others
who had known a like satisfaction and relief; to Obermann forgetting his
melancholy in the toil of the vintage, plucking the ripe clusters and
wheeling them away as if he had never known the malady of thought; or to
Edward Fitzgerald out with the dawn among his roses at Little Grange.

Amid these high dreams and simple occupations, time seemed to glide
away like a brimming stream, and the only events that marked the passing
of the years were wayfarings through the country-side, sojournings in
strange, slumbrous native towns, expeditions of wider range to old white
ports of Malabar still dreaming of the forgotten heroes whose story
Camoens sang. After many such journeys the genius of this oriental land
seemed to travel with us, so familiar did every aspect of this simple Indian
life become. Our equipment was of set purpose the patriarchal gear of
native fashion; narrow carts with great lumbering wheels were covered by
matting arched upon bent saplings, and had within a depth of clean rice-
straw on which at night mattresses were spread. Beneath each yoke went a
pair of milk-white oxen with large mild eyes and pendulous dewlaps, great
beasts of a fine Homeric dignity and worthy of Nausicaa's wain. They
swung along with a leisurely rolling gait; and if their silent feet moved too
slowly, the sleepy brown-skinned driver, crouching on the pole between
them, would shame them into speed by scornful words about their ancestry,
more prompt than blows in their effect on beasts of ancient and sacred
lineage.
We travelled at night or in the freshness of early morning, regardless of the
hours, unfretted by the tyrannous remembrances of appointed times.
Milestones passed slowly, like things drifting, which ask no attention, and
hardly perceived in the moment of their disappearance, serve only to enrich
and replenish the mind's voluptuous repose. It was a joy to lie drowsily
back upon the straw, awaiting sleep and looking out upon the stars through
the open back of the cart, while the fire-flies darted across the feathery
clusters of bamboo, and the cradling sound of wheels and footfalls called
slumber up out of the darkness. And it was equal delight to spring from the
cart at first flush of dawn, and see some far blue hill in the east lined like a
cloud with broadening gold, until the resistless sun rose a full orb above it,
flooding the grey plains and making the leaves of the banyans gleam with
the lustre of old bronze. But though the sun was come, we would often
press on for yet three hours, through belts of squirrel-haunted wood, beside
great sheets of water with wild-duck floating far amidst, and borders starred
with yellow nenuphars, across groves of mango and plantain trees into
landscapes of tiny terraced plots, where the vivid green rice-blades stood

thick in the well-soaked earth, and bowed brown figures diverted to their
roots the thread-like rivulet from the great brown tank above.
Here would be a wayside shrine, a simple stuccoed portico with columns
streaked in red, enclosing the sacred emblems with their offerings of golden
marigold, and bearing upon each corner, carved in dark grey stone, Siva's
recumbent bull. Here millet fields, with hedges of blue aloe or euphorbias
like seven-branched candlesticks, announced a place of habitation; soon the
village itself appeared, a long irregular line of white-walled houses roofed
with thatch or tile, and here and there greater dwellings with carved
balconies and barred verandahs, behind which impassive white-robed
figures sat and seemed to ponder upon life. On the right, perhaps, would be
a shop all open to the road, where, cross-legged upon a kind of daïs, the
merchant sat among his piled wares, unenterprising and unsolicitous,
serenely confident in the balance-sheet of fate. On the left, in a shady
corner, a barber would be bending over a half-shaven skull. Everywhere
children of every shade from yellow to deep umber would be playing
solemnly about the ways, turning upon the passing stranger their grave,
unfathomable eyes.
Beyond the village there would be a rest-house maintained for the use of
wayfaring white men, and here we would repose through the heat of the
day, reclining with a book in rooms shaded with shutters, or with fine mats
drenched from hour to hour with cooling sprays of water. Then with the
sun's decline we would set out once more, meeting a file of blue-robed
women erect as caryatides as they came up from the well, each bearing
upon her back-thrown head a water-jar of earthen or brazen ware, staying
her burden with a shapely brown arm circled with bangles of glass and
silver. In the short hours before the darkness, we would encounter all the
types of men which go to make up Indian country life—the red-slippered
banker jogging on his pony beneath a white umbrella, the vendor of palm-
wine urging a donkey almost lost beneath the swollen skins, barefooted
ryots with silent feet and strident tongues, crowds of boys and children
driving buffaloes and cows, all coming homeward from their labour with
the evening.
And when these had gone by, and we rolled on through the scented air of
the silent open country, we would come perhaps in the gathering darkness

to a great river lapping and murmuring through the blackened rocks above
the ford, and shining like a glorious path in the light of the rising moon.
Silently, high above the banks, there would flit through the still air bands of
flying foxes awakened for their nightly raid upon the plantain groves; and
in the shadows of the further bank there would gleam a sudden light, or the
echoes of a hailing voice would rise and then die away. Steeped in the
poetry of all these things we would cross and emerge upon the opposite
slope to begin the pilgrimage of the night anew. So to live tranquil days and
unfretful, moving in quiet through a still land rich in old tradition—this was
an experience of peace which no dreams of imagination could surpass, a
freshness of joy penetrative as the fragrance of unplucked wayside flowers.
Sometimes we would set out on longer journeys by land and sea, crossing
the wooded ghats and descending to some old port of historic name, Cochin
or Mangalore or Calicut, white places of old memory, sleeping by the blue
waves as if no Vasco de Gama had ever come sailing up out of the West to
disturb their enchanted slumber. The approach to these dreamy shores was
dark and tumultuous, as if nature had set an initiation of contrasting toil
before the enjoyment of that light and peace. It followed the bed of a
mountain stream, which began in a mere pleat of the hills, tumbling often in
white cascades, and enduring no boat upon its waters until half its course
was run. But here it challenged man to essay a fall; for where it burst its
way over rocky slopes were channels jeopardous and hardly navigable,
sequences of foaming rapids, races of wild water swirling round opposing
boulders, and careering indignant of restraint between long walls of beetling
rock. Here when the sun had gone down we would embark with a crew of
lithe brown men in a boat hewn from a single tree, seamless and stoutly
fashioned to be the unharmed plaything of such rocks and boisterous waters
as these. In these rapids the river waked to consciousness of mighty life,
tossing our little craft through a riot of dancing waves, whirling it round the
base of perpendicular rocks set like adamant in the hissing waters, sweeping
it helpless as a petal down some glassy plane stilled, as it were, into a
concentrated wrath of movement. The men sprang from side to side, from
bow to stern, staving the craft with a miraculous deftness from a projecting
boulder, forcing her into a new course, steadying her as she reeled in the
shock and strain of the conflict, while their long poles bent continually like
willow wands against her battered sides. The steersman stood silent, except

when he shouted above all the din some resonant, eruptive word of
command; the men responded by breathless invocations to their gods,
relaxing no tense sinew until the pent waters rushed out into some broad
pool where the eased stream went brimming silently, gathering new strength
in the darkness of its central deeps.
At such places the moon would perhaps be obscured by passing clouds, and
we would land upon an eyot until she shone once more in a clear heaven.
Stretched at length upon the fine white sand waiting for her return, we
could hear the boom of waters in the distance calling us on to a renewal of
the conflict. These periods of great stillness, interposed between tumults
past and impending, had their own refinement of pleasure as far above the
joys of fenced and covenanted ease as the bivouac of the hard campaign
surpasses slumber in the fine linen of a captured city: they brought the
wandering mind into communion with elemental forces, and seemed to hold
it expectant of supernatural events. In that interlunar twilight there reigned a
solemn sense of wonder evoked here eternally, one felt, from the ancient
time, with the rustling of stirred foliage and the voice of those far waters for
its music.
The lulled reason yielded place to reverie, and the whole rapt being
abandoned itself like an Orphic worshipper to the guidance of an unseen
mysteriarch. This acquiescence in the swift succession of calm to fury and
stress, resembled the quiet which may be conceived to follow sudden death;
the heightened sense of vicissitude in things summoned up and sustained a
solemn mood. All the while that we lay charmed and half oppressed in this
atmosphere as of an under-world, the clouds were drawing forward on their
course; and as their last fringe trailed slowly by and the moon was revealed
once more, the spell was broken in an instant by human voices calling us to
re-embark. Again we glided to the verge of tumultuous falls, again we were
flung through foaming narrows and labyrinthine passages of torn rocks,
until, the last promontory turned with arrowy swiftness, we shot through a
postern of the granite barrier and bounded far into still water fringed with
trees of profoundest shadow. We put in to shore, for this stage of our
journey was over; the dawn was near; the carts stood waiting on the road.
But the influence of the wonderful night, clinging about us, would keep us
long silent, as if awed by the passing of ancient Vedic gods.

I will not describe the later stages of these journeys: the coasting voyages in
restful ships that seemed built to sail Mæander; the touchings at old
wharfless ports; the visits to lone temples where Herodotus would have
loved to linger; the rambles on the slopes of Adam's Peak; the meditations
amid the ruins of Anaradhapura and Pollanarrua, ancient homes of kings,
now stripped of every glory but that of these sonorous names—such are the
records of every traveller, and are chronicled to satiety by a hundred hasty
pens. A month of wandering within the fringe of civilization would be
closed by a last week of patriarchal travel, bringing us back to our remote
valley just as the clouds of the coming monsoon were ranging in denser
ranks along the evening sky like the tents of a beleaguering army. Hardly
had we time to settle down for the wet season, see to the stacking of fire-
logs, and be sure that every tile on the roof was firm in its appointed place,
when the embattled host seemed to break up from its last camp, and
advance upon us along the whole line that the eye perceived.
One year I was witness of the first onset, which came in the late afternoon
—an immediate shock of massed clouds without throwing forward of
skirmishers or any prelude of the vanguard. Our home looked down upon a
gentle incline of open grassy land to a broad belt of jungle in the middle
distance; here the undergrowth and small trees had been newly cleared
away, opening out a dim far view across an uncumbered leaf-strewn floor
into the backward gloom of the forest. I sat with my eyes fixed upon the
trees, drawing the rain on with the whole strength of desire to the parched
country lying there faint with the exhaustion of three months of drought.
While I watched, the deep line of cloud, at first distinct from the forest-top
along which it came rolling, insensibly merged with the foliage, until every
contour was lost in a common gloom, only the great bare stems below
standing pale against the gathering darkness. There was an intense stillness
everywhere like the silence of expectation which falls upon an awestruck
crowd; the very insects had ceased their usual song. And now the ear caught
a distant sound, vague and deep, coming up out of the mid darkness, and
growing to a mighty volume as a sudden wind swept out from the sounding
foliage into the open land and searched every cranny of the house as it
passed. Then, as if drawn by the wind, there came into view among the
nearest tree-stems a moving grey line advancing with a long roar until it hid
the whole forest from sight: it was the wave of battle about to break upon

us. It came on like a wall, enormous, irresistible; one instant, and it had
devoured the intervening space; another, and we were lost in the deluge,
and the great rain drops were spilled upon the roof with the noise of
continuous thunder. As the deep sound reverberated through the roof above
me, I went in exulting to a hearth piled with blazing logs, glad in the
prospect of renewing for many weeks old and quiet habitudes of indoor life,
rich with solace of books and tranquil meditation.

I have dwelt upon the outward aspects of my life in exile, because the
sojourn of these years amid the hills and forests taught a natural leechcraft
which was to stand me in good stead in coming years, and may stand in
equal stead other souls desolate as mine. Like the Nile brimming over the
fields, a flood of joy from nature overlaid my parched being, enriching it
with a fertile loam, and shielding it from the irritations of the world. I lay
fallow beneath the still, sunlit waters, unharrowed by teasing points of
doubt, and porous to the influence of an all-encompassing peace. Exile had
opened to me a new heaven and a new earth, whose freshness and calm
charmed thought away from all vain questionings; the fascination of
outward things had for a while cooled the useless ardour of introspection.
But it was inevitable that the bland ease of such a contemplative life should
bring no enduring satisfaction to the mind; it was not an end in itself, but a
mere means to serenity, a breathing-space useful to the recovery of a long-
lost fortitude. The time was now come when the hunted deer, refreshed in
the quiet of his inaccessible glen, was to awake to new thought of the herd,
and of the duties of a common life; when the peace of successful flight was
to appear in its true light as a momentary release, and no longer as the
ultimate goal imagined in the anguish of pursuit.
It was during this last monsoon that doubts began to stir within, interrupting
my studies of the systems of Hindu philosophy and my porings over sacred
books. The vague insistence of these misgivings made me surely aware that
even in this eastern paradise all was not well; but at first I refused to listen,
and plunged deep into the maze of the Vedanta to escape the importunate
voice. Yet anxiety came up around me like a heavy atmosphere; an

indescribable sense of disillusion, clinging as a damp mist, brought its
mildew to the soul, until my new heaven was overcast and my new earth
dispeopled of all pleasures. Then one day the fever struck me down, and of
a sudden my mind became an arena in which memories of earlier life
chased one another unceasingly in the round of a delirious dance. Trivial
events impressed themselves on consciousness with strange precision;
objects long forgotten rose before me outlined in fire—one, a pane of
stained glass in Fairford Church, with a lost soul peering in anguish through
the red bars of hell. Each and every apparition was of the old life; all were
emissaries from the forsaken West summoning me back to my renounced
allegiance. When the fever left me, returning reason slowly brought order
amid the welter of confused ideas, as the ants sorted the grain for distracted
Psyche, and for the first time I considered in the detachment of
reminiscence the nature of my action in leaving England. I sifted the
evidence at length as I lay under the verandah slowly recovering strength;
and when at last judgment was delivered, it took the necessary form of
condemnation.
I saw now that unless a man is prepared to discard every western usage, to
slough off his inherited cast of thought, to renounce his faith, wholly and
finally to abandon his country and his father's house, his flight is but the
blind expedient of cowardice or pride. Here and there may be born one who
can so cut himself off from the parent stem as to endure a fruitful grafting
upon an oriental stock, but I knew that I at least was none such. I was no
more prepared for so uncompromising a renunciation than any other
weakling who seeks prestige by parade of exotic wisdom, and deems
himself a seer if he can but name the Triad, or tell the avatars of Vishnu, I
had not the credulity which may justify the honest renegade, and the
western blood still ran too warmly in my veins. I felt that were I to stay in
the East for fifty years, I should never reach the supreme heights of
metaphysical abstraction whence men really appear as specks and life as a
play; therefore to remain was to avow myself a runaway and to live
henceforth despicable in my own eyes. For over the unfathomable deep of
oriental custom the torrent of our civilization flows unblending, as in the
Druid's legend the twin streams of Dee flow clear through Bala lake, and
never mingle with its waters. Not for our use is that intricate mind which in
logic needs more than two premises to a conclusion, and in art is intolerant

of all void space, entangling its figures in labyrinths of ornament which
Maya herself might have devised to distract the sight from truth.
The Hindu has the true dignity of contemplation, and superbly removes
himself from the sordid greeds of life. But in imagining and reviling an
abstraction called Matter, he abides in the errors of the first Greek sages,
and mines so far beneath the trodden earth that when he looks up into
middle day he sees only the stars above him. Could I have shared the
eremite's belief that his prayers help not merely his own solitary soul but all
souls travailing through all the world, I might yet have remained where I
was, an alien living indifferent to the common rule, like a monk of some
shunned exotic order. But with convictions like mine, to do so would have
brought the drear sense of derogation. All the miseries of the past were as
nothing to that; there was but one manly course—to return and gird my
loins for a new struggle with western life. Within a month from the time
when this course was seen to be a duty, I was standing on the deck of a
homeward-bound steamer, watching the harbour lights recede into the
distance.

Back once more in England, I threw aside the clinging robe of meditation,
and falling upon work ravenously, indulged what genius of energy was still
alive within me. I made haste to adore all that I had so lately burned,
making life objective, revering personal ideals, and in the ordinance of
material things finding the truest satisfaction of all endeavour. I saw in
civilization the world's sole hope; its brisk life and abounding force took
sudden hold of a fancy enervated by dreams. Again I found a new heaven
and a new earth, though earth was now no more than man's dinted anvil,
and heaven his reservoir of useful light. I lived for action and movement; I
mingled eagerly with my fellows, and cursed the folly which had driven me
to waste three years in an intellectual swoon. Now the day was not long
enough for work, Lebanon was not sufficient to burn. I saw the western
man with race-dust on his cheeks, or throned in the power-houses of the
world, moving upon iron platforms and straight ladders in the mid throb and
tumult of encompassing engines. One false step, and he must fall a crushed

and mutilated thing. Yet unconcerned as one strolling at large, he controlled
the great wheels and plunging pistons, and brought them to a standstill with
a touch of his finger. The confidence and strenuous ease of such life
compelled me to marvel and admire, and I who had so lately lain at the feet
of eastern sages, set up this mechanician as my god. If I looked back at all
to the land of dreams, the placid figure beneath the Tree of Enlightenment
took on the aspect of a fool's idol, ignobly self-manacled, pitiful and
irksome in remembrance.
But if once more I dreamed of finality in change I deceived myself,
forgetting that God Himself cannot unmake the past or undo what is done.
A year had hardly gone by in this new apprenticeship to life, when at
moments of weariness or overstrain sharp doubts shot through me and were
gone again, like twinges of sudden pain recalling old disease to one who
has lulled himself with dreams of cure. The feeling of fellowship with men
grew weaker, and as it waned I began to shrink once more from my kind. I
still believed myself happy, but happiness seemed to need constant
affirmation, as though it could make no way in my favour without display
of token or credential to confirm its truth. There were pauses in the clatter
and jangle of life; the revolutions of the great wheels sometimes slowed
into silence; and as these interludes grew more frequent, I caught myself
repeating that I really was content. The faint assurance given, I flung myself
with devouring industry upon my allotted task, trying to stifle the
forebodings which prophesied against my peace.
In one such pause my old self appeared before me again, like the face of an
ancient enemy looking in from the darkness; stealthy footfalls which of late
I had so often seemed to hear were now referred to their true cause as we
saw each other eye to eye. The old Adam had awakened and was come for
his inheritance; and the vision of him there across the pane gazing in upon
his own, seemed to arraign me for disowning a brother and denying his
indefeasible right. I recognized that with this familiar form cold reason had
returned to oust the hopes and emotions which had usurped her office. My
rush for freedom had ended, as such sallies often do, in exhaustion, capture
and despair; upon the thrill and thunder of the charge followed the silence
of the dungeon and the anguish of stiffening wounds. The truth, so simply
written that a child might have spelled it, lay clear before me: I had left
reformation till too late. I was too old to change.

Even a few years before, I might have dashed out, like Marmion, from the
prison-fortress; but now the opportunity was past and the portcullis was
down. My character with all its faults was formed within me; and the very
years which I had passed in the wilderness, instead of averting the danger,
had set the final seal upon my fate, for when a man has reached a certain
point in life he is intractable to the reforming hand. But though at last I
knew myself beaten, and helpless in the hands of an implacable power, I
fluttered like a wounded bird and sought wildly for a loophole of escape. I
could no longer hope to stand alone against destiny; that conceit was gone:
could I find a comrade to help me through the press and lift me when I fell?
But here the invincible pride of shyness barred the way, forbidding alike
any confession of weakness or any appeal to man's compassion. I could not
bring myself to say: I am unable to rule my life, do you undertake it for me.
Was marriage a conceivable path of redemption? I had never envisaged it
before, but now, in my desperation, I dreamed it for a moment a possible
issue. I even fixed upon the person who should thus save me from myself,
and beguiled many lonely hours by picturing her charms and enumerating
her noble qualities.
She lived in a country house where I had been several times a guest, and
she had one of those faces which, in Gray's beautiful expression, speak the
language of all nations. Her features had that sunny charm which thaws
mistrust; she was dowered with all graces and sweet qualities; and you
could no more have doubted the immanent nobility of her nature than you
could have dreamed a stain in the texture of a white petal. And with all her
gentleness there was present I know not what sign and promise of strength,
waking in those who saw her an intuitive trust in loyalty of uttermost proof.
She would have flamed indignant against evil, but only evil could have
moved her from that equal poise of soul which made her entrance into a
room the prelude to higher thoughts and finer feelings. She was naturally
kind without consciousness of a mission, neither seeking to enslave nor
enfranchise, but by a silent outflowing of goodness ennobling whatever
company she was in. Nor was her tongue the prattling servant of her beauty,
but a guide of cheerful converse; for just as she charmed without device or
scheme of fascination, so she possessed the art of speaking well without
seeming to have ever studied it. In the chase after just and felicitous ideas,
she could lead or follow over the most varied fields with the intuition of the

huntress born. With all these excellences, her wit, her sincerity, her ardour
for all things bright and true, she had no conceit of herself but kept her
father's house in gladness and loved the country-side.
To her, in these days of imminent dismay, my thoughts flew out as to a fair
protecting saint; until the inspiration of her visionary presence wrought in
my fancy with such a dramaturgic power, that I seemed to walk daily with
her, and to know all those delicate and sweet propinquities by which liking
passes into affection and affection is glorified into love. So far did these
happy day-dreams carry me, that they brought me to the extreme of
imaginary bliss, and poured out for me the wine of untempered joy which
thrills the hearts of lovers on the verge of their betrothal. The dreams that
followed that magic draught denied me no convincing touch of
circumstance, and projected upon a credible and familiar scene the bright
possibilities to which fate denied a real existence. The scene was always the
same, and the words and movements which entranced me followed each
other with almost religious exactitude of detail which the adult demands of
his day-dreams and the child of the fairy-tale he loves.
It was always a June afternoon when we went out together, into the
meadows near her home; she moving with fluent grace as befitted a
daughter of the woods, her eyes indrawing joy from all nature, her hair
reflecting rich gold of the sunlight, her whole face lit with the pleasure of a
bright hour; I a mere satellite attendant upon its central star. We strolled
through the four home-meadows, crossed a high-banked lane and a dingle
with a brook running down it, and then from an open common flooded with
sunlight passed into a wood of tallest beeches. In that cool, shadowy place
the sun, searching a way through crannies in the upper verdure, chequered
with patches of silver light the even mast-strewn floor. The multitude of
smooth grey stems rose aligned like cathedral columns; and the grateful
dimness of the wood, succeeding the glare of day, wakened a sense of
purposed protection and quietude pervading all things, which soothed the
mind with the illusion that this was a sacred spot appointed for an offering
of souls. Near one of those isles of sunlight we lingered; and as she looked
up to the source of light, the movement brought her face near the slanting
shaft of rays, until there was set round it an aureole of dancing beams. It
seemed to me at this part of my dream that there came to both of us some
gracious influence, for as her eyes met mine they dropped again, and were

fixed for a moment upon the wild flowers she carried. Then my heart began
to beat and my whole being to grow greater: impassioned words, to that
hour unconceived, came rushing to my lips; the fire and glory of a new
manhood were kindling in me to the transformation of my nature—when, in
the very moment of utterance, a sheer barrier of doom descended between
me and my joy; the fire was quenched, and my soul was poured out within
me.
To this fatal point my fancy always brought me and no further, that coming
thus to the threshold of the house of joy and hearing the bars shoot into their
sockets I might thoroughly know my ineffectual self and leave untouched
the forbidden latch. So far I came in my dream times without number; and
always on the verge of joy there came that doom, and the shooting of those
adamantine bolts.
Yet all the while I wove it, I knew that this texture of dreams must soon be
drawn aside, and like the curtain in the tragedy reveal at last the horror
concealed within. Such brooding was but the deception of a reluctant spirit
dallying and delaying with any trifle by the way to put off the arrival at the
hill of evil prospect. At last I learned the lesson of this abrupt ending to the
dream at the point of full disillusion; it forced itself upon me with the power
of an oracular utterance warning me to cease my palterings with fate. My
reason now rebuked me like a stern judge, dissecting all false pleas and
laying bare their weakness. What right had I, now knowing myself
incurable, even to dream of easing my own pain by darkening and
despoiling a second life? The love of solitude was now more to me than
even the love of a wife; it would surely come between us like a strange
woman, and fill a pure heart with bitterness. No smiling hopes of a possible
redemption could annul the immutable decree, and if I disobeyed the
warning, guilt as well as misery would be mine; for he is pitiful indeed who
only weds that his wife may suck the poison from his wounds. If I married I
should stand for ever condemned of an unutterable meanness. So I dispelled
my dreams and looked reality in the face.
It was a dismal prospect that lay before me. Until then the future had held
its possible secrets, its imaginable revelations of change, which, like the
luminous suggestions in dark clouds, allured with a promise of a brief and
penetrable gloom. In my darkest hours I had lulled fear by the thought of a

haply interposing Providence, and drifted on from day to aimless day
nursing the hope of some miraculous release upon the very steps of the
scaffold. But now I was twice fallen; and as a man abandoned by the last
illusion of deliverance calls ruin to him, and in the new leisure of despair
calmly scans the features at which but now he dared not glance, so I saw as
in a hard grey light the true outlines of my destiny. The wreathing mist, the
profound soft shadows, the clouds with their promise of mutability, were
now all gone, leaving the bare framework of a world arid and severe as a
lunar landscape.
I seemed to be sitting in the dust, as in inmost Asia a sick man may crouch
abandoned, while the caravan in which all his earthly hopes are centred
goes inexorably upon its way. The blue sky flushes to deep purple before
him; night falls; all colour is swallowed up in darkness, until the jingling
camel-bells receding up the pass cross the dividing ridge, and for him the
last silence is begun. Such then was the end of youthful ambition: for food a
mouthful of ashes instead of the very marrow of joy; for home not the free
ocean, but a stagnant pool ringed with weeping willows, a log's fit floating-
place. Here to float, marking the weed creep onward until all from bank to
bank was overfilmed, and there remained no clear water of space for
reflection of a single star: to float, and feel the sodden fibres of life
loosening in slow decay—this was to be the last state of the seedling which
had sprung up on the mountain slopes with promise of mighty stem and
overarching branches full of sap like the cedars of the Lord.
My life henceforth was to be ringed round and overhung with so heavy an
air that joy and fancy should never fly in it, but fall dead as the birds above
Avernus according to the ancient story. I seemed to see nothing upon the
path of the future but the stern form of Renunciation drawing between me
and the living world the impassable circle of death in life, the ultima linea
rerum. It was the last decree, the irrevocable sentence, the absolute end: and
I had not yet reached half the Psalmist's span; I had not yet forgotten the
lost summer mornings when the breeze scented with lilac came blowing
through the casement, bearing with it the sound of glad voices welcoming
the day.
Philosophers are prone to gird at the animal in man, accusing it of dragging
the soul down to the mire in which it wallows. They forget that by its brutal

insistence upon physical needs it often preserves from madness, and timely
arrests him who goes like a sleep-walker upon the verge of the abyss.
Weariness and hunger are like brakes upon the car; they stop the dire
momentum of grief, and insure that if misery will again drive us furiously,
she must lash winded steeds anew. But what force should stay a
disembodied sorrow, which unbreathed by period or alternation of despair,
should be rapt onward in the whirlwind and the hurricane, gathering
eternally a fresh impetus of woe? Let us rail at the body for its weakness if
we will, but prize it also for its restraint of the distracted mind. In the worst
hour of my dejection it was the body which called the lost reason home. I
became hungry and ate, hardly knowing what I did; I slept exhaustion
away; and after many hours awoke with clearer eyes, grateful to the weak
flesh, and ready in its company to face life once more, a defeated but not a
desperate man. I was glad to be thus reminded that the body could play this
helpful part, and my gratitude for its timely rescue taught me in after days
to endure its tyranny with a better grace. In the interlude between despair
and new effort, I once more turned a dispassionate gaze upon myself, as
upon some abandoned slave of a drug; and maintaining an attitude of half-
amused detachment, sought by a diagnosis of my case to establish the real
causes of my failure to lead a normal life.
At the outset I would make it clear that for me the only shyness that counts,
is that which is so deeply ingrained, as to have outlasted youth. It may,
indeed, be physically related to that transient bashfulness which haunts so
many of us in our younger days only to vanish at maturity, swift as the
belated ghost at cockcrow. But unlike this common accident of growth, it is
no surface-defect, but an inward stain which dyes the very fibres of the
being. It may, indeed, be somewhat bleached and diminished by a timely
and skilful treatment, but is become too much a part of life to be ever
wholly washed away. And the unhappy step-children of nature whose
inheritance it is, seldom find a deliverer good at need; for as the world
draws no distinction between their grave affliction and that other
remediable misery of youth, it will sanction no other treatment than banter
or mockery, which does but infuse yet more deeply the mournful dye. When
this fails, it leaves its victims to the desolation which according to its
judgment they have wilfully chosen; for the most part ignoring their
existence, but often chastising them with scorpion-stings of disdain. Yet the

subjects of this scorn, sufferers as I believe from a hereditary tendency
matured by neglect into disease, deserve a more merciful usage than this,
and their plea for extenuating circumstances should not be too impatiently
rejected. For in them what is to most men a transient ailment has thrown
down permanent roots to draw a nourishment from pain: and he who is
fortunate enough to be whole should think twice before he makes sport of
those in this distress.
To me this malady seems to arise from an antinomy between the physical
and intellectual elements of the personality, from an unhappy marriage of
mind and body, suffering the lower of the two partners to abase the life of
the higher by the long-drawn misery of a hateful but indissoluble union.
When the physical and mental natures in a man are happily attuned, there is
a fair concord in his life and the outward expression of his being is an
unimpeded process, to which, as to the functions of a healthy organism, no
heedful thought is given. If both natures are of the finest temper, they find
utterance in a noble amiability and ease of manner; if both are coarse in the
grain, they blend in a naïve freedom always sure of itself, the freedom of
Sancho spreading himself in the duchess's boudoir. Between these two
extremes there intervene a hundred compromises by which minds and
bodies less equally yoked contrive to muffle the discordant notes of an
inharmonious wedlock.
In most cases use gives to this politic agreement the peace and permanence
of settled habit; the body proves itself so far amenable that it is accepted as
a needful if uninspiring companion, and its plain usefulness ends by dulling
the edged criticisms of the mind. But wherever there is a permanent
incompatibility too profound for compromise, an elemental difference
keeping the personality continually distraught, then shyness, in the sense in
which I understand it, assumes its inalienable dominion. The flame of
rebellion may smoulder unobserved while the sufferer is in his own home,
but among strangers it will blaze fiercely, as the mind protests against the
misinterpretations of its unworthy partner. This burning shame is not the
proof of a foolish conceit, as unsympathetic criticism proclaims it, but the
visible misery of a keen spirit thwarted by physical defect. The man who
manifests it is angered with himself because through a physical hindrance
he has failed to take the place which would otherwise be his. He is proud, it
may be, but not fatuous; for shyness as a rule implies a comparative

quickness and alertness of intellect: its exceeding sensibility is exclusive of
dulness; and it is frequently due to the presence in a reluctant body of a
mind endowed with active powers.
Inasmuch as diffidence appears where the subtler formalities of life are
compulsory, it is clear that it essentially belongs to the class called gentle,
for this class alone enforces that exacting code of etiquette to which our
discomfiture is so largely due. Shyness has seldom place in the patriarchal
life where men live, "sound, without care, every man under his own vine or
his own fig-tree," nor among those who, perforce pursuing a too laborious
existence, have no leisure for superficial refinements. Though here and
there you may find a Joseph Poorgrass, it is rare among the simple; it is not
a popular weakness, and therefore wins no popular sympathy. Such is its
first social limitation: it is almost restricted to the classes which are
outwardly refined.
But it has another limitation of equal importance which may be described as
climatic; for this malady is not found in equal degrees all over the habitable
globe. There are many lands where it hardly exists at all even among the
class which is alone liable to it; and in its serious form it is found only over
a small part of the earth. There are many causes which conduce to this
partial distribution. In one country manners are not minutely schooled,
women being held of secondary account, and men content without subtlety;
in another, life is in itself too primitive to devise the artifices of refinement;
in a third, the fundamental disunion between the mind and the physical
organism is prevented by the kindly hand of nature. For these reasons all the
savage world, all the East, and the whole of southern Europe have little
knowledge of the diffident, and what zoologists would call the area of
distribution of the species is confined within narrow geographical limits.
It is in fact chiefly in the north and west of our own continent that the
haunts of the diffident are to be found, for there alone are all the conditions
necessary to their maintenance fulfilled—a society sufficiently leisured and
wealthy to have elaborated conventional rules of intercourse, the
assemblage of both sexes upon an equal footing, and a climate which
exaggerates the antagonism between the quick mind and the unresponsive
body. Here the cold humid airs have produced a race with great limbs and
great appetites, but compensated these gifts by a certain unreadiness in the

delicate encounter of wits and graces. To these impassive natures all
displays of the personality are distasteful, and the lighter social arts,
seeming both insignificant and histrionic, are learned with difficulty and
practised with repugnance. An awkwardness of address, in the uneducated
almost bovine, becomes in the cultivated a painful reserve and self-
consciousness, reflecting in open physical distress the uneasiness of the
man's whole being.
And among the northern nations which are thus afflicted England has
achieved an undesirable supremacy, having herself smoothed the path of her
eminence by a school system which withdraws her youth from female
influences during the years when the tendency to reserve may be combated
with a certain hope of success. It would ill become one who has never
recovered from the effects of such deprivation to assume on the ground of
his own narrow experience any wide dissemination of similar defects
among his countrymen; his testimony would be received with suspicion,
and he would be condemned as one who to justify himself would drag
others down to his own poor level. Let me therefore place myself on surer
ground by calling as a witness an impartial observer from another country,
one exceptionally trained in the analysis of national temperament and
conduct.
When M. Taine visited England towards the close of the nineteenth century
one of the first things to attract his notice was the bashfulness which he
encountered in unexpected places. He was surprised to meet travelled and
cultured men who were habitually embarrassed in society, and so reserved
that you might live with them six months before you discovered half their
excellent qualities. To unveil their true nature there was needed the steady
breeze of a serious interest or the hurricane of perilous times; the faint airs
of courtliness could not stir the heavy folds that hung before their hearts.
These strong men could not join in delicate raillery, but shrank back afraid;
as if a tortoise, startled by a shower of blossoms, should withdraw into that
thick carapace which can bear the impact of a rock. There was one who
stammered pitifully in a drawing-room, but the next day sought the
suffrages of electors with an unembarrassed and fluent eloquence, so
proving that his failure came not of folly or cowardice, but from lack of
training in a certain school of fence. He needed the open air for the play of
his broadsword; and to his hand, apt to another hilt, the foil appeared a

woman's weapon. Speaking of high aims and national ideals, he moved in a
large place oblivious of himself; but in the social arena he tripped with
timid steps, like a man essaying an unfamiliar dance. On the platform he
had the enthusiasm and confidence of an orator; on the carpet he could not
string three sentences in any courtly language.
In the North the art of mercurial dialogue, which in the South is a natural
gift, is only learned under favourable conditions, and is often condemned by
those who have it not, as a popinjay's accomplishment. Immediate
cordiality to strangers is frowned upon as tending to divorce courtesy from
truth. It is otherwise with the southern peoples. While the Englishman
conceals his benevolence by a frigid aloofness of manner, or blurts out
friendliness like an indiscretion, the Italian is courtly without a second
thought, and the Frenchman seems the comrade of a chance acquaintance
from the moment when he has taken his hand. They are amiable without
effort in the security of a harmonious nature, and if they encounter
diffidence at all, observe it like an anthropologist confronted with a survival
of primitive times in the culture of a civilized age.
Taine did not err when he found the home of shyness among the Teutonic
peoples; he saw that it flourishes in climatic conditions acting hardly upon a
vigorous race, and only allowing it to cultivate ease of manner by effort and
outlay, just as they only allow it to raise under glass the grapes and oranges
which more favoured peoples can grow in the open air. He saw too that this
pain of diffidence becomes more subtle as the progress of culture makes us
more sensitive to vague impressions from our environment, and tunes the
nerves to a higher pitch. A shy nature upon this plane of susceptibility
suffers anguish from an uncontrollable body; and even in peaceful moments
the memory of the discomfitures so inflicted may distort a man's whole
view of the world around him. He is impatient of the wit which demands a
versatility in response beyond his powers, and persuades himself into
contempt of those ephemeral arts to which his nature cannot be constrained.
Irritated at the injustice which places so high in the general scale of values
accomplishments which he cannot practise, shrinking from the suave
devices of gesture and expression which in his own case might quickly pass
into antic or grimace, he withdraws more and more from the places where
such arts win esteem to live in a private world of inner sentiment. As he
leaves this sure retreat but rarely himself, so he forbids ingress to others;

and becoming yearly a greater recluse, he confines himself more and more
within the walls of his forbidden city. The mind which may have been fitted
to expand in the free play of intellectual debate or to explore the high peaks
of idea, loses its power of flight in this cave where it dwells with a company
of sad thoughts, until at last the sacrifice is complete and the perfect eremite
is formed.
But the virile Teutonic spirit does not suffer things to reach this ultimate
pass without stubborn resistance, and this is one reason why shyness is
often so conspicuous, seeming deliberately to court an avoidable confusion.
Over and over again it forces the recalcitrant body back into the arena,
preferring repeated humiliation to a pusillanimous surrender. People often
wonder at the recklessness with which the shy expose themselves to
disaster, forgetting that in this insistence of a soul under discomfiture, there
is evidence of a moral strength which is its own reward. What discipline is
harder than that which conscientious diffidence imposes upon itself? To
stand forth and endure, though every instinct implores retreat, is a true
assertion of the higher self for the satisfaction of imperious duty. Such
deliberate return towards suffering is no cowardice, but a triumph over
weak flesh; and the awkward strife of diffidence may often prove a greater
feat of arms than the supple fence of self-possession.
Like the physical obstacles, the mists, the snows and bleak winds, which
have hardened the fibre of northern men, diffidence as an obstacle to ease
has its place among the causes of strong character; and those who appear at
a first glance weak and ineffectual as Hamlet, will often in the light of
knowledge be found guided by the most inflexible moral determination.
They see, as in a mirage, peace supreme and adorable, but may not tread the
hermit's path that leads to her dwelling. Only a religious vow might justify
the abandonment of the human struggle, and even that appears desertion.
The stern genius of the North grudges immurement, even to great piety,
remembering that Christ himself remained but forty days in the desert and
then returned to deliver the world. If he had remained there all his life, and
never met the Pharisees and high-priests, our forefathers would have
rejected his law. For this reason there can be no more rest for the shy than
for starving Tantalus; for this reason my flight into the East had been
foredoomed to failure.

If shyness is thus affected by climate and geography, its birth and growth
are also conditioned by historical causes. Just as it is the peculiar failing of
northern and western peoples, so it is the creation of comparatively modern
times; it had no place among the classified weaknesses of men until these
peoples began in their turn to make history.
In Greece, where limb and thought were consentient in one grace of motion,
the body was too perfect an expression of the mind to admit any
consciousness of discord; the greater simplicity of a life passed largely in
the open air, left no place for awkwardness in the franker converse of man
with man. Moreover the seclusion of women rendered unnecessary that
complicated code of manners which the freer intercourse of the sexes has
built up in later times as a barrier against brutality or the unseemly
selfishness of passion. In Greece the words of the witty and the wise could
be heard in the market-place; good conversation was not for the few alone;
and the common man might of unquestioned right approach the circle of
Socrates or Plato. The sense of community was everywhere, overthrowing
reserve, and propitious to the universal growth of fellowship.
In the Roman world things were changed; there were more closed doors and
courts impenetrable of access. Insignia of office, gradations of wealth and
rank, sundered those of high estate from classes which now acknowledged
their own inferiority; privacies, exclusions, distinctions innumerable,
altered the face of public life as the easy mos majorum was confined by the
ordinances of encroaching fashion. It was now that women began to be cast
for leading parts upon the great stage of life. Under the Empire, by the rapid
removal of her disabilities the Roman matron achieved a position of
independence which made her, according to her nature, a potent force of
good or evil. It was now that the intricate threads of social prescription were
woven into that ceremonial mantle which was afterwards to sit so uneasily
on the shoulders of barbarian men.
But the time for shyness was not yet come, for Italy is a sunny land where
clear air makes clear minds, blandly or keenly observant of the world, and
never impelled by onset of outer mists and darkness to tend a flickering
light within themselves. There was melancholy, high and stately, such as
Lucretius knew, when he went lonely among the homesteads or along the
shore; but it was too exalted to be one with diffidence, for he who will hold

the sum of things in his thoughts walks on clouds above the heads of men,
free of all misgiving. Perhaps beyond the Alps, in some Rhætian upland
where Roman dignity was interfused with old barbaric roughness, the first
signs of our malady were perceived and the first ancestor of all the shy was
born. But even yet the time was not ripe, nor the place prepared.
Christianity had to come, turning men's eyes inwards and proclaiming the
error of the objective pagan way. A new feeling, the sense of personal
unworthiness before God, spreading through the Roman world, now stirred
mankind to still communing with themselves, and sanctioned the stealing
away from the noisy festivals of life. By enjoining a search into the depths
of the heart, it encouraged the growth of a self-consciousness hitherto
unknown. It was not always a panic of contrition, sweeping the joyous out
of the sunlight into a monastic shade, which brought the troubled into a new
way of peace, but sometimes a quiet joy in renunciation, congruous with a
timid mood, leading by gradual allurement to cloisters of shadowy lanes
and cells which were forest bowers. The new faith gave open sanction to
evasion of the banquet, and thus fortified and increased those who loved not
the ceremonial day. The spirit of solitude, no more a mænad, but a nun,
sheltered earth's children in the folds of her robe, and no man said her nay.
Moreover, Christianity quickened the force of that feminine influence
which Rome had first set flowing through the civilized world, but diverted
the stream from irregular and torrential courses into a smooth channel
gliding amid sacred groves. It clothed woman with ideal grace and virtue,
and perceived in her powers which the virile mind could never wield.
"Inesse quinetiam sanctum aliquid et providum putant, nec aut consilia
earum aspernantur, nec responsa negligunt." So our ancestors held in the
northern woods, and Christianity, purifying and expanding their belief,
fulfilled it with a new perfection.
But this gradual binding of all men's limbs in silken cords of reverence,
making a rude world civil, was now to inaugurate for diffidence its
miserable career. Through the rough deference of the German camp,
through the Provençal code of courtoisie, up to the modern law of fine
manners, the drudge and chattel of the primeval tribe has risen to impose
her law upon the modern world. Earth is better for this finer power, but
social intercourse is less sincere. For woman, having curbed the brute man
by conventional restraints of outward demeanour, has made human

intercourse smooth and seemly, but imposed upon mankind the wearing of
unnatural masks. Before the multitude of locked souls with labels of
smiling faces the sensitive nature feels itself mocked, and is soon
distraught. It cannot suffer convention gladly for an ultimate good, but is
chilled by this everlasting urbanity, which must, it fancies, be compact of
irony and conceal a disingenuous soul.
All this finished science of illusion is like an east wind to the confidences of
the shy, and if they stay within its range they are blighted before their hearts
have time to unfold. They long for a less biting air, for vernal hours in
sheltered dells, where without sheaths and unguarded the hearts of flowers
lie open to their neighbours and to heaven. There was once a simple day
when religion set hearts interflowing, but now it can melt them only within
the precincts; the fire which is carried from the altar is dead at the church
door. The brotherliness of those early days is indeed often found in humble
walks of life, but these we cannot continually tread, because our intellectual
and artistic tastes find there no sufficient nurture. Among the cultured a cold
convention often reigns, behind which only a more persistent nature than
ours can pass. Unless, therefore, we find our way into some circle of gentle
scholars or lovers of the beautiful quite simple in their tastes, a thing
possible but not often granted by a niggard fortune, we are perforce thrown
back upon our own company, and move towards the grave alone. For this
we accuse none; nothing is more at fault than our own constitution. But to
us society is a school of dames, who are not to be blamed if amid the crowd
that clamours for their teaching, they find no time for the backward scholar.
We are the dunces of the school, and are dismissed without learning the
accomplishments set forth upon the prospectus. That is why in our northern
streets so many seeming hats are cowls.
In England the loss of congenial intercourse is perhaps more certain than in
other lands. For through his national reserve the highly-cultured
Englishman has a cold perfection of good breeding to which heartiness is
vulgarity; he emanates intimidation, and in courtesy is rather studious than
spontaneous, seldom genial but in an ancient friendship. If you knew him to
the concealed heart, and were suffered to assay the fine metal beneath this
polished surface, you would win a golden friendship; but only on a desert
island would he permit the operation. To the shy who may encumber his
path his bearing seems marked by an indifference which they magnify into

aversion, and are thereby the worse confounded. In a land where such
convention reigns they go through life like persons afflicted with a partial
deafness; between them and the happier world there is as it were a
crystalline wall which the pleasant low voices of confidence can never
traverse.
I say, then, that the real, the enduring shyness is that inveteration of reserve
to which a few men in a few countries are miserably condemned. Others
know it as a transient inconvenience, as the croup or measles of childhood;
but in us it is obstinate and ineradicable as grave disease. If out of the long
frustration of our efforts to be whole some strain of bitterness passes into
our nature; if sometimes we burn with unjust resentment against the fate
which, suffers such lives as ours to be prolonged, let it be remembered in
extenuation that to those who bear a double burden human charity owes the
larger kindliness. For though like you we bear our share of common
troubles, O happier men and women, the common pleasures and
compensations which are as wings upon your shoulders are heavy packs on
ours. The cheerful contrasts are for you alone; for us the bright threads
interwoven in the dark stuff of life were faded before they reached the
loom.
You who have the friendships and affections without which you would not
care to live a day, think more kindly of those to whom the interludes of toil
are often harder than the toil itself. Of your charity believe our fate ordained
and not the choice of our own perversity; for what man born of woman
would choose a path so sad, were there not within him some guiding and
possessing devil which he could in nowise cast out? Never will in maddest
hours of freedom consented to such doom; we were condemned at birth, our
threads were spoiled upon the fingers of the Norns.

Such in its broader outlines seemed the infirmity which had grown with my
growth, and now had to be reckoned with, like the bridle of Theages, as a
permanent hindrance to a reasonable happiness. Old hopes lay shattered

about me—well, I had to pick up the fragments and piece together a less
ambitious ideal.
I will not linger over the forces which helped my resolution, the great and
general remedies which come to the relief of men in like evil case. Religion,
philosophy, art, science, literature—all promised their anodynes against
despair; slowly they stirred in me anew those springs of interest in life
which disillusion seemed to have choked for ever. I rose up, and looking
round upon the world saw that it was still good; and there came into my
memory brave words which a golden book puts in the mouths of its
indomitable knights: "I will take the adventure which God shall ordain me."
I now perceived that if evil fortune had unhorsed me it had yet left me
endurance to continue the combat on foot. My second failure was more
final and disastrous than the first discomfiture in earlier life, but now the
plague of pessimism was stayed by a greater recuperative power. Those
long hours of the long eastern day, spent under the verandah with books of
many ages and languages, had not been altogether fruitless; they had helped
to mature a wider and more catholic taste than that of restless youth, the
kind of culture that brings not rebellion but peace.
In my eastern watch-tower I had re-read the great books from a new point
of vantage, and let the eye roam over fields of literature which lie beyond
the undergraduate's bounds; by a still permeation of fine influence, my
crude philosophy was unconsciously mellowed, as the surface of ivory,
according to Roman belief, by the bland air of Tibur. For by the mere being
in an atmosphere of serenity our nature grows porous to gracious influences
streaming in we know not how or when, and taking their abode in our very
grain and structure. And so without consciousness of good desert, I found
myself confident in a new discipline, and looking for the word of command
from wiser leaders than Byron or the youthful Shelley. Queen Mab was now
the saddest rhetoric, and Childe Harold's plaint unseemly lamentation; I had
erased from my calendar of saints the names of apostles of affliction once
held in honour; the Caliph Amurath with his tale of fourteen happy days out
of a long life of royal opportunity; Swift with his birthday lection from
Jeremiah. Rather there trooped into memory with a quiet pomp and
induction of joy, forms of men who, though justified in rebellion by every
human suffrage, remained loyal to the end and proved by endurance a more
imperial humanity. Socrates unperturbed by mortal injustice; Dante a deep

harmonious voice amid jangling destinies; William the Silent serene in
every desperate conjecture—these seemed now the more perfect captains. If
exile had done no more than transfer my allegiance to such as these, I had
not borne the lash in vain.
But at the first setting out upon this later stage I had still mistakes to make,
and the ascent to tranquillity was not to be accomplished without stumbling.
It was the old Roman creed which first drew me away from fretting
memories; in its high restraint, as of a hushed yet mighty wind, it breathed a
power of valiant endurance, and promised before nightfall the respite of a
twilight hour. For stoicism has qualities which seem foreordained for the
bracing of shy souls, as if the men who framed its austere laws had
prescience of our frailty and consciously legislated to its intention. It is the
philosophy of the individual standing by himself, as the shy must always
stand, over against a world which he likes not but may not altogether shun.
And in this proud estrangement it promises release from all the inquisition
of morbid fears, and an imperturbable calm above the need of earthly
friends or comfort or happiness; it plants the feet upon that path of nature
along which a man may go strongly, consoled in solitude by a god-like
sense of self-reliance. This immutable confidence is the essential power of
stoicism, which does not, like the great oriental religions, tame personality
by ruthless maiming, but teaches it to bear the brunt of adversities erect,
like an athlete finely trained. Its very arrogance, its sufficiency, perforce
commend it to those whose instinct urges to self-abasement: its lofty
disregard of adverse circumstance is medical to their timidity.
And so in the hour of my bereavement its voice inspired to resistance like a
bugle sounding the advance; its echoes rang with the assurance that man
was not made to be the worm of Eden, darkly creeping in the dust, but
rather its noblest creature, with the light crowning his head and the winds
tossing his hair. And then its strong simplicity, so masculine and
unemotional, was grateful to one now finally dismated, and so cruelly
handled as to have, it seemed, no use for a heart any more. Better let feeling
die than be betrayed by diffidence into the denial of its true allegiance, or
into expressions of the inner life false and wry as the strange laughter which
the doomed suitors in Ithaca could not control. Though it stifled feeling, the
creed of Cleanthes exalted the intellect, which was all that now remained to
me unimpaired; surely it was the appointed rule for one henceforth to be

severed from the passions and enthusiasms through which humanity errs
and is happy.
"The world," the wise Stoic seemed to say, "is twofold in its nature. Some
things may be changed by man, others are by his utmost effort immutable.
God has implanted in you a right reason by which, when it is well trained,
you can infallibly distinguish between the two, avoiding thus all unworthy
fretfulness and all idle kicking against the pricks. Therefore he has made
you for happiness; for the joy of men is an achievement; and their misery in
the coveting of the unattainable end. If you would fulfil his benevolent
design, seek only what has been placed in your power, frankly resigning all
that lies beyond; but be ever difficult in renunciation; test and sound well
every issue, lest you leave a permitted good undone, than which nothing is a
greater sin. To be loyal, to be contented, to acquiesce in all things save only
in ameliorable evil, this is to live according to nature, which is God's
administration. If you are assiduous in careful choosing, you will learn at
last to make a right use of every event; you will be harassed no more by
vain desire or unreasoning aversion, but will become God's coadjutor and
be always of his mind. So, when external things have ceased to trouble your
spirit, you will no longer be a competitor for vanities; but, enfranchised
from all solicitude, you will have discarded envy and conceit and
intolerance, which are the ill fruits of that vain rivalry. You will neither
cringe before power nor covet great place, for alike from inordinate
affection and from the fear of pain or death you will be free. Disenamoured
of mundane things, you will live simply and unperturbed, in kindness and
cheerfulness and in gratitude to Providence. Life will be to you as a feast or
solemnity, and when it comes to a close, you will rise up saying, 'I have
been well and nobly entertained, it is fit that I give place to another guest.'"
The strength and mastery thus promised raised my dejected spirits, as the
words of a new and sanguine physician may hearten one who had long lain
stricken yet now dares to hope for the day of recovery. This was a law
which did not denounce the world as illusion or enjoin a cloistral seclusion
upon the mind, but rather proposed each and every appearance as a
touchstone on which the quality of personality should be unceasingly tried.
By the constant application of a high standard to life, it seemed to implant
an incorrupt seed of manliness, and to create in its disciples that saner mood
which holds in equal aversion a Heliogabalus and a Simeon Stylites. So

persuaded, I could join with the fervour of a neophyte in the Stoic's
profession: "Good and evil are in choice alone, and there is no cause of
sorrowing save in my own errant and wilful desires. When these shall have
been overcome, I shall possess my soul in tranquillity, vexing myself in
nowise if, in the world's illusive good, all men have the advantage over me.
For all outward things I will bear with equal mind, even chains or insults or
great pain, ashamed of this only, if reason shall not wholly free me from the
servitude of care. Let others boast of material goods; mine is the privilege
of not needing these or stooping to their control. I will have but a temperate
desire of things open to choice, as they are good and present, and the
tempter shall find no hold for his hands by which to draw me astray. I will
be content with any sojourn or any company, for there is none, howsoever
perilous, which may not prove and strengthen the defences of my soul. For I
have built an impregnable citadel whence, if only I am true to myself, I can
repel assaults from the four quarters of heaven. Who shall console one lifted
above the range of grief, whom neither privation nor insolence can annoy?
for he has peace as an inalienable possession, and by no earthly tyranny
shall be perturbed. Bearing serenely all natural impediments to action,
trespassing beyond no eternal landmark, by no foolishness provoked, he
shall become a spectator and interpreter of God's works; he shall ripen to
the harvest in the sunshine and wait tranquilly for the sickle, knowing that
corn is only sown that it may be reaped, and man only born to die."
The mere repetition of these words, so instinct with the spirit of old Roman
fortitude, roused me to a more immediate resolution than any other form of
solace. There are times when a splendour of exaggeration is the best foil to
truth. The Roman's pride is the best corrective to the earthward bias of the
diffident; by its excess of an opposite defect it drives us soonest into the
mean of a simple and manly confidence. It is better for us first to repeat,
"Dare to look up to God and say: Make use of me for the future as Thou
wilt, I am of the same mind, I am equal with Thee.... Lead me whither Thou
wilt," than to dwell upon such words as these: "It is altogether necessary
that thou have a true contempt for thyself if thou desire to prevail against
flesh and blood"—or these: "If I abase myself ... and grind myself to the
dust which I am, Thy grace will be favourable to me, and Thy light near
unto my head.... By seeking Thee alone and purely loving Thee I have

found both myself and Thee, and by that love have more deeply reduced
myself to nothing."
This supreme abnegation may leave the saint unharmed, but it is ill fitted
for those who droop already with the malady of dejection. The divine
wisdom which knows the secrets of all hearts and their necessities infinitely
various, shall exact obedience according to no adamantine law: it loves not
the jots and tittles of formalism, nor the pretensions of those who would
cast all things in one mould. From those made perfect, from the saints
whose links with earth are almost severed, whose sight begins to pierce
gross matter through, it may accept prostration and endless contrite tears,
knowing that to these, upon the very verge of illumination, the forms of
slavery have lost their vileness. But to those who are still of earth and can
but conceive God's fatherhood according to earthly similitudes, it will not
ordain a prone obeisance. Such it will require to stand erect even in
contrition, in that posture which is the privilege of sons. We who are
unperfected affront God supposing him pleased with the prostration of his
children. It is the ignorance of a feudal age that ascribes to him a Byzantine
love of adulation; but that age is no more, and he disserves the divine
majesty who imputes to it a liking for the esprit d'antichambre.
I did not need to dwell upon my weakness and misery but rather upon the
grandeur of humanity, whose kinship and collaboration God himself does
not reject. The Stoic phase was a useful stage on the road of convalescence,
and the majestic words of Epictetus more helpful to a manlier bearing than
the confessions of the saintliest souls. If, as is not to be doubted, there are
others who seek an issue from the same dark region where I wandered, I do
not fear to point them to the Stoic way, which like a narrow gorge cold with
perpetual shadow is yet their shortest path upward to the high slopes lit with
sunlight. Let them enter it without fear and endure its shadows a while, for
by other ways they will fetch a longer compass and come later to their
release.
But when some interval had passed I became aware that this cold ideal was
not the end, and that out of the gall of austerity sweetness should yet come
forth. Wise men have said that all great systems of ethics meet upon a
higher plane, as the branches of forest trees rustle together in the breeze; for
though in the dark earth their roots creep apart, their summits are joined in

the freedom of clear air. As I now struck inland from the iron shores of
shipwreck, my heart warmed to a brighter and softer landscape, and with
Landor I began to wish that I might walk with Epicurus on the right hand
and Epictetus on the left. With a later thinker I reflected that if the Stoic
knew more of the faith and hope of Christianity, the Epicurean came nearer
to its charity. For it is true that Stoicism commands admiration rather than
love. It was indeed too harsh a saying that "the ruggedness of the Stoic is
only a silly affectation of being a god, to wind himself up by pulleys to an
insensibility of suffering": that is the judgment of the bluff partisan, so
shocked by the adversary's opinions that he feels absolved from any effort
to understand them. But even those who in extremity have been roused to
new valour by the precepts as by a Tyrtæan ode, for all the gratitude which
they owe, will not impute to their deliverers an inhuman perfection. The
Stoic does in truth wear a semblance of academic conceit, as though related
to God not as a child to its father, but as a junior to a senior colleague. And
with all its sufficiency, his philosophy seems too Fabian in its counsels; it is
always withdrawing, passing by on the other side, avoiding battle—so that
as a preparation for the uttermost ordeal it will often prove inferior to the
reckless pugnacity of a narrow zealot.
Then, too, it acts like a frost not merely upon personal, but upon national
ambition, and so keeps the wellspring from the root. Its assumption of a
superhuman fortitude accords but ill with scientific truth, for if with one
bound every man may become as God, he will despise that infinitely slow
upward progression which is the only real advance. But, above all, it lives
estranged from tenderness, in which alone at certain hours of torment the
distracted mind finds God's face reflected. It preaches renunciation of all
vain aversions and desires; but it repels sweet impulses that are not vain. By
exalting apathy in regard to personal suffering, it becomes insensible to
others' pain also. In the conviction that appeals for sympathy are avowals of
unworthiness, it will have no part in the love of comrades, and it never
discovered the truth that the strength and the compassion of the Divine are
one perfection.
There is a favourite mediæval legend depicted in one of the windows of the
cathedral at Bourges, which exposes in a characteristic fashion this
weakness of the Stoic's creed. The Evangelist St John, when at Ephesus,
remarked in the forum the philosopher Cratinus giving a lesson of

abnegation to certain rich young men. At the teacher's bidding the youths
had converted all their wealth into precious stones, and these they were now
bidden crush to dust with a heavy hammer in the presence of the assembled
people, that so they might make public profession of their contempt for
riches. But St John was angered at so wasteful a renunciation. "It is
written," he said, "that whoso would be perfect should not destroy his
possessions, but sell them, and give the proceeds to the poor." "If your
master is the true God," replied Cratinus scornfully, "restore these gems
again to their original form, and then they shall be bestowed according to
your desire." St John prayed, and the precious stones lay there once more
perfect in all their brilliance and splendour. The moral of the old tale is clear
—that all virtue without charity is nothing worth; and that of virtue without
charity, the Stoic's cold renunciation is the chief type and ensample.
The insight into this higher truth did not come by inspiration, but was
gradually imparted during long summer days, when I wandered from dawn
to dark among the fields and woods. Hoping at first no more than to tire the
mind with the body and so win a whole repose, I became by degrees
receptive of a new learning from nature, which created new sympathies and
kindled fresh ambitions. Naturally I again read Wordsworth, and now for
the first time since childhood I knew what joys intimacy brings. I was one
of a brotherhood, and wherever I went was sure of a friendly salutation.
Things that grew in silence became my friends; I was with them at all
hours, in light and shadow, in warmth and cold, watching their gracious and
responsive existences, which reject no good gift, but radiantly grow towards
the light while it endures. Insensibly the spirit of this gentle expansive life
was infused within me, until the heart which I had deemed useless and
outworn, began to open like a flower scathed by frost, at the full coming of
spring. The plants and trees were human to me, the brooks spoke with
articulate voice; by that ancient witchery of animism, old as the relationship
of man and nature, I was put to school again: until at last, absorbed in the
vicissitudes of small things and surrendering reason to a host of pathetic
fallacies, I was taught the great secret that life may not be centred in itself,
but in the going out of the heart is wisdom. And as among human friends
there are some to whom a man is bound by deeper and tenderer links than to
the rest, so it is with these other friends which have no language, but only
the wild-wood power of growing about the heart. Among their gracious

company each man will discover his own affinity, and having found it will
look on the rest of nature with brighter eyes. Some learn the great lessons
from mountains, lakes, and sounding cataracts; others from broad rivers
peacefully flowing to the sea. To me there spoke no such romantic voices.
My wanderings led me through a country of simple rural charm, and the
friends that became dearest to me were just our English elms.
Who but the solitary, artists alone excepted, understand the full charm of
elms in an English landscape? To us there is an especial appeal in their
loneliness, as they range apart along the hedgerows, embayed in blue air
and sunlight which do but play upon the fringe of your huddling forest. See
them on a breezy August morning across a tawny corn-field, printing their
dark feathery contours on a blue sky and holding the shadows to their
bosoms; or on a June evening get them between you and the setting sun,
and mark the droop and poise of the upper foliage fretted black upon a
ground of red fire. Here are no cones or hemispheres, or shapeless bulks of
green, but living beings of articulated form, clothed in verdure as with the
fine-wrought drapery that enhances rather than conceals the beauty of the
statue.
Or at a still later hour, over against the harvest moon, see them rise
congruous with the gentle night, casting round them not palls of ominous
gloom, but clear translucent shadows sifted through traceries of leafage
which do but veil the light. And what variety of form and structure sunders
them from other trees, what irregular persuasive grace. Some are tall and
straight, springing like fountains arrested in the moment when they turn to
fall; others bend oblique without one perpendicular line, every branch by
some subtle instinct evading the hard angles of earth-measurement as
unmeet for that which frames the sky; others again spread to all the quarters
of heaven their vast umbrageous arms. No trees are so companionable as
the elms to the red-roofed homestead which nestles at their feet and is glad
for them. Seen from a distance, how delightful is this association, how
delicate the contrast of tile and leaf and timbered barn, each lending some
complement to the other's fairest imperfection. Perhaps there will be a
whole line of distinct trees, and then you will see as it were a cliff-side of
verdure in which, beneath the billowy curves of lit foliage, there open
caverns and cool deeps of shadow fit for a Dryad's rest.

To know the elm-tree you must not come too near, for it too is wild and
does not reveal its nature lightly; you may be cooler in the shadow of the
beech or stand drier beneath the red-stemmed leaves of the sycamore. Yet it
suffers the clinging ivy; it was beloved of poets in old days, and painters
love it still. It has not the walnut's vivid green nor the rare flush that lights
up the pine-stem. Its leaves are rough and of no brilliance; its bark is rugged
also. But in life the familiar guardian of home meadows, it has stood by our
fathers' landmarks from generation to generation, and when fallen and hewn
and stacked it sheds a fragrance which, wherever perceived in after years,
brings back memories of wanderings in deep lanes and of the great dim
barns where we played in childhood. In the dull winter days when only
yews and cypresses wear their leaves, I sometimes wander to a place whose
walls are hung with the works of many a seer and lover of elms; there
seated before a few small frames I give them thanks for having read the
dear trees truly, and glorified a close and barren gallery with all the breezes
and colours of the fields: I am beyond all noise and murkiness, walking in
the peace and spaciousness of unsullied air.
To a mind now happily reverted to the primitive confidence in souls
everywhere indwelling and creating sympathies between all things, the
bonds of kinship between man and nature were drawn ever closer, and it
seemed a wholly natural belief that the changes of the visible universe,
affecting things which lived an almost personal existence, should be instinct
with the deeper meaning of events in the drama of human existence.
Like the every-day life of men with its imperceptible attritions was the
insensible growth and decay of things; as the tumult of his emotions were
the storms and catastrophes that convulse the face of nature. The movement
never ceased; the transforming power was never wearied; the spectator had
but to give rapt attention, to be carried beyond his poor solicitudes to a
participation in elemental processes of change in which the fates of
humanity were mysteriously involved. The thought of this indissoluble
union kept alive the sense of brotherhood within me, of responsibility in
life, of interest in all that happens; and whether it was the daily contraction
of a pond in drought, or a battle of ants by the wayside, or the first tinge of
autumn upon the woods, all was ennobled by symbolic relationships to
man's experience, which in the unceasing flow of their perception were
lustral to a solitary heart, without them choked and stagnant.

There was a certain heath-clad ridge which like a watch-tower set above a
city never failed to bring before the ranging eye some vision pregnant of
those emotions by which the sense of humanity is quickened to a deeper
consciousness of itself. The witchery of space was there always, and
seemed to draw from the soul the clinging mists of her indifference. It was
there that I saw nature in all her moods, and felt that to each my own moods
responded; there that despondency, imagining her monotony of woe, was
confuted by the saving changefulness of created things. I remember one
day, when a summer storm was spending its fury, I stood upon this ridge
and looked across the low lands that stretched away beneath me. They lay
with all their boundaries confused by a pall of purple gloom, then darkly
transparent, and dissolving before the returning sun, whose penetrative
influence was felt rather than actually perceived. As I gazed, high in the veil
of cloud there began faintly to gleam a spot of palest gold, so high that it
seemed to belong to the sky and to have no part in an earthly landscape.
Gradually it expanded, grew more vivid, and assumed form, other forms
and tints emerged beside it, until at last it was revealed as a ripe corn-field
on the high slopes across the valley, and before many moments had passed,
a long line of downs stood out in the pure air with a sculptural clearness, as
if during the storm all had been uprooted and moved a whole league
towards the spot where I stood. While the rainbow spanned the plain, and
the thunder still rolled in the distance, all the opposite heaven cleared
almost to the furthest horizon; but there a remoter range yet lay half-
covered by a billowy mass of clouds, like the hull of a dismasted ship in the
folds of her fallen sails. At last even this trace of the battle was gone; the
sun shone unopposed; the wet lands and clear sky were lit with an intenser
brightness for their transient eclipse.
Then the humanity of all these things was borne in upon my mind, and I
was affected by these vicissitudes shadowing forth the destiny of man, and
reminding him in their beautiful and majestic procession that nature endures
no perpetual gloom. The sudden ruin of a bright day in deluge and darkness
and sonorous thunder, the timid reappearance of faint light, the natural
forms strangely emerging from the perplexed wrack infesting the heaven,
and at last seen as never before through leagues of pellucid air; the thunder's
silence, the final and supreme triumph of light;—these swift yet utter
revolutions of the visible world, by very grace of mutability, were rich with

instant consolations for the soul's misgiving. They served to remind me that
the fears, the spiritual conflicts, the darkness that seems eternal, are mere
incidents of a summer noon and leave behind them a purer and serener day.
Through all this close intercourse with nature my mind was being prepared
for a healthier relation to my fellow-man, and my heart saved from the
petrification of melancholy self-regard. The ever-growing delight in these
inanimate things, the constant discovery of new charms as knowledge
widened with experience, united to prevent stagnation and despair; they
kept heart and mind alert for the perception of new glories; and it is from a
clear sense of their salutary power that I dwell upon them in this record of a
self-tormented life. How should he find life colourless whose eyes are often
fixed upon the sky, who sees grey zones of cloud flush crimson before the
sunrise, and at evening the wide air richly glowing, moted as with the
bloom of plums and the golden pollen of all flowers?
At the end of that summer I returned to the occupations of life, appeased
and almost happy in this inheritance of new sympathies. And before long I
found that these were themselves but precursors of that which was to come,
and that like the paranymphs who escort the bride, they did but apparel the
heart for a deeper and more abiding joy. They were busied about me in
tranquil hours, and speaking not, but seeming to wait in gladness for
another, they made me serenely expectant also. They destroyed all sadness
of retrospect; they led me always forward; with faces transparent with the
light of an inward happiness they seemed to promise a vision at each near
bending of the way. From glad looks and gestures assuring imminent joy, I
too was charmed into a like faith, and went on blithely in the confidence of
a coming illumination. Nor was that hope vain, for at length the mystery
was made plain, and one day they brought me exulting into the presence of
the Ideal Love.
There is a place in every heart which must be filled by adoration, or else the
whole will grow hard and wither like a garden whose central fountain is
grown dry. And though the affection of mortal man or woman may abandon
it, there remains yet this other love which by pure and strenuous invocation
may be drawn to it, and dwell in it, to the ennoblement of life; so great is
the care of providence for mortal need. Love is our need, and it is given, if
we despair not of it, even to such as have rarely felt the glow of earthly
passion. For love is of many kinds; yet the palest and most subtle of its

forms are made real to those who believe, and may become the guiding
influences of their lives. Such are the visions of the ideal love to which
those glad natural sympathies now led me, leaving me alone awhile that I
might worship the orient light. And when I came out from that presence I
rejoiced indeed, for the path was clear for my return, and life was now glad
with promise like an orchard burgeoning with white blossoms. Old
memories crowded back on me of hours beneath the cedars with the
Phædrus and the Vita Nuova, hours made happy with intellectual and
austere delights. But now the joy was other than intellectual, though
significant tenfold, for then in untried youth I had wondered at the beauty of
an imaginary world; now with eyes that had looked on desolation I
perceived that these visions were true. For had they been no more than airy
fancies, they surely had not endured throughout these long ages in our laden
and mortal air.
It was not merely the beauty of a literary setting which had preserved them:
the craftsman's skill might indeed have enhanced their natural splendour,
but it could not have alone inspired them with this perennial life. The gem
with fire in its heart outlives the delicate setting; though it may be
maltreated and buried for centuries by the wayside, it will come to light
when the gold that framed it is long battered or lost, and will be desired by
new generations for its inherent and unalterable beauty.
Not Plato's or Dante's creative power, but truth surviving all incarnations of
genius, has kept this celestial gem aglow: they have but celebrated that
which was never mortal, and guided wandering eyes to heaven's most
beautiful star. This intangible and unincarnate vision exacts more from its
votaries than the love which walks the earth: holding the lover ever in the
strain of apprehension, it inures him to unwearying worship, and itself
moving in regions incorruptible, never loses the glory of its first hour. The
years may pass, but one face, like a hallowed thing, abides continually;
years may fret and corrode other ideals, but to this they add beauties of ever
fresh significance. The auroral glow is always round it, brightening the
world, until it becomes an emblem of illumination and the symbol of eternal
truths. This visionary presence wakes aspiration to new effort and touches
the intellect with passion; beleaguered thought sallies out with new
strength, and the frontiers of darkness recede before it. From this comes the
quickening of the heart without which hope wanes and the mind is barren:

the deep pure joy of contemplation awakens all that is best in the soul,
which goes towards it on tense wings of desire. And as with time it draws
further from the earth, and, following, the soul essays ever higher flights, it
is often poised at a great height as in a trance of motion, whence it looks
back upon the world it has left, and round it upon other worlds. Then, its
love-range being wondrously expanded, it sees beyond that visionary
countenance, which dissolves and forms again like a delicate wreath of
mist; and clear starlight falls upon it from every side, so that all shadow is
destroyed. And when it returns to earth again, and is forced to contemplate
meaner things, it is now aware that the very soil is compacted of dust of
stars, and that he who looks listlessly upon creation is unworthy of the
human name. And so continually flying forth and returning, it weaves
endless bonds between the infinitesimal and the infinite, forgetting how to
despise, which is the heavenly science.
All this ardour is awakened and sustained by love, which began in sense
and is now transformed. Through each succeeding change it is known for
the same divine power which has so attuned the body that it vibrates no
more to desire alone, but is now become resonant beneath a faint and
spiritual breath.
It is an old story that love is sightless, but that is the love which romps
among the roses and is blinded by their thorns. There is another and a better
tradition that love's eyes pierce heaven, and this is a great truth; for infinity
is cold and vaporous until man projects upon it his mortal ideal, his
conception of an earthly love transfigured. When this beloved guide appears
throned above him as in the clouds, he dares to lift his eyes, and there he
reads through its light the divine purports of his existence. Is it a small thing
to stand, though but for a moment, searching infinity undismayed? This is
the celestial ocean to whose shore he is come; and now "drawing towards
and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble
thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom, until on that shore he
grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single
science, which is the science of beauty everywhere ... beauty absolute,
separate, simple, everlasting, which without diminution, without increase,
or any change, is imparted to the ever growing and perishing beauties of all
other things."

To some the great perception comes but late, rising from the ashes of love's
common furnace. But they whose hearts have never been consumed in these
roaring flames may find it earlier; and purged from all taints of jealousy and
covetousness, may pass straightway into the bliss of a higher union. This is
that supreme affiance and espousal of the soul wherein they may be
released into a larger air, undelayed by the earthward longings and gradual
initiations of seemingly happier men. Thus its servants do not decline into
slothful service, but are strenuous always; raised above the acquiescence of
use, they never know the cloying of fruition or suffer the barbarian conquest
of indifference. Their soul is unaffected by material circumstance or
misfortune, and illuminates their lives as often as in the silent hour of
meditation they concentrate their thoughts upon its grace. The cup of
earthly love, even the noblest, is often dipped in Pyriphlegethon, and the
draught it offers scathes the palate until its finest sensibility is for ever
dulled. Those who have quaffed this liquid fire can no longer understand his
mood who leaves the roses and the wine to toil through deserts in search of
limpid water. They think him madly ungrateful for God's good gifts, a fool
abandoning joy proved and present for a shadow far and incomprehensible.
But they who have not denied themselves are no longer fit judges of him
who has renounced. They cannot know that by this renunciation the senses
are thrice refined, and receive as a vital influence the stellar beam which
falls chill and ineffectual upon a grosser frame. They cannot believe that
this love from the infinite distance wields as mighty a force over renunciant
lives as the near flame of passion over their own. But, for all their denial, it
lives and puissantly reigns. It reigns in very truth predominant, this ideal
love to which space exists not and propinquity is nothing; and it will have
none for its subjects but those who by bereavement or aspiration or intense
purity are inly prepared for its dominion.
Happy therefore are the shy if in the midst of their tribulation they are
guided to the gateway of so bright a kingdom. It may well be that we must
first be led thither by some dear-remembered and virgin form once almost
ours through earthly love, but now joined to us only by an imperishable and
mystic union. Our sight may at first need the embodied beauty to give it the
finer powers by which the revelation of the ideal grows familiar to us, but is
at last attainable without mortal intervention by an immediate flight of the
soul. Until that late day of enlightenment we must still be set upon the

celestial path by a touch of human tenderness; a pure yet sensuous yearning
must be ours when we are first girded to the ascent. If there are beings
which attain the fulness of the ideal love without the first inspiration of a
fair earthly form I know nothing in creation to which they may be likened,
nor had I ever part in so rare an enfranchisement. The vision that now
entrances my soul first arose from a living, breathing form radiant with
earthly brightness and instinct with every charm which brings men fawning
to the feet of women. The sensuous frenzy which lovers sing was also mine,
the tremor of the heart, the vibration of the very life; the deep seventh wave
of passion rioted through me also. But from the first amazement of the
shaken being it was not given me to pass through satisfaction into
tranquillity; I was held long in a whirl of trouble; in the anguish of denial I
learned initiation into the mystery which is eternal and supreme.
It is good for some of earth's children that passion should be stayed before it
makes ashes of the fancy; for if it does but touch for a moment only to be
withdrawn for ever, it does not destroy, but by its meteoric passage kindles
the imagination with the glow of an incorruptible flame. It is with them
long enough to brand upon memory the image which, though never
renewed before their bodily eyes, by its very severance from perception
puts on an immortality of virginal grace. Love is understanding, said the
poet of Heaven and Hell, and love ennobled through renunciant years shall
at the last encompass the world. The sensuous glow that first quickened the
heart of youth is transmuted into a purer fire akin to that which moves the
spheres.
To know this truth is their compensation who are swiftly withdrawn from
the warm radiance of earthly love. They are stricken, but before passion
blinds them are rapt into a high solitude, whence, if they truly love, an
infinite prospect is unrolled before them. They know desire; but as their
passion was hopeless in this world, their steps were mercifully set upon a
new path, whereby the bodily semblance of the beloved became the symbol
of spiritual comeliness, alluring the beholder into the peace of a serene and
unworldly mood. A thin and rarefied ideal, you say, a mirage which no
wayfarer can approach: experience rejects these subtleties, and to these
creations of a dream human affection was never given. True, to hearts
established and content in happy unions, to minds preoccupied with the
near cares and pleasures of a home, our distant visions may appear frail

structures wrought in mist by homeless fancy. But for the exiled heart they
are not such, but verities of abiding inspiration. For the ideal love did not
die with Plato, but came again in mediæval Italy, and who shall say that
even our material age has banished it from the earth?
No indeed it is not dead, the ideal love, but indwells, a redeeming power,
wherever there are desolate hearts and minds to be updrawn and united by
its ministry; a power so lustral in its nature, that no abject and despairing
thought creeps into its presence but is purified and exalted by its regard.
This love brings hope and cheerful constancy; with a shining falchion it
affrights into their natal darkness the monstrous forms of despair, and lends
to all work a secret charm of chivalry. It sustains that high anticipatory
mood to which life is but a preparation, and the bees buzzing round the
honey-flowers seem poor things toiling for an inessential gain. Because it is
mystic and transcendental it is the predestined guide of all whom fate holds
removed from earthly love. This is the old device of the world's failures,
you say, to trick themselves out in Plato's mantle or the schoolman's cowl,
and conceal their spite beneath the pretensions of the mystic. But I answer
that the causes which moved the Greek and the Florentine are still at work
among mankind to-day; they have never ceased, however much obscured
by the glare of triumphant luxury or the stress of miserable toil. Often when
disillusion has laid bare a soul, this love which did but slumber awakes to
contest with envy or despair the possession of a wounded heart. I aver that
any exile from the happier earth whose heart is pure, if he invokes this love
with ardent faith, may unbar his door and feel that it has passed his
threshold. Let us never be persuaded that the ideal world is far from this
earth of ours, or that the way to it may not be daily traversed by him who
has submitted to the heavenly guide. Not even the close entanglement of
common cares can avail to keep such an one from his love; but as Bishop
Berkeley is said to have been able to pass in a moment from the
consideration of trifling things to the throne of thrones and the seats of the
Trinity, so this lover shall overpass with easy and habitual flight the barriers
that hold most men life-long prisoners.
For to the Spirit that is chastened and endures there is given a power of
flight and poise, by which, if it abandon itself to the celestial wind, it may
instantly remove from the deeper planes of life, as a bird by the mere
slanting of its wings is carried in proud quiescence into an upper region of

the air. He shall know instant release from the leaguer of disillusion and
vain solicitudes; in the light of one beautiful and compassionate
countenance the unquiet memories of failure shall give up their exceeding
bitterness.
And though the style and instinct of modern life are hostile to such love,
though in prosperity it is ignored and in adversity often overborne by a vain
uproar of lamentation, yet even in a self-indulgent and furious world it still
draws many to the severe exaltation of its service. We cannot approach the
heights where a Plato and a Dante walked with ease, but far beneath upon
the lower slopes we can draw a breath of new life as we fix our weaker eyes
upon the glory which they saw so near. Although the men who have there
ascended are a supreme company, we may yet presume to follow; for let it
never be said that the gods have reserved for surpassing genius the
consolation of which lesser men have so much deeper need. But he who
would reach a serener air must press forward strenuously; for as a mountain
may have one bare and northern slope, and another sunlit and clothed with
verdure, and yet there may be a path on each side to the summit, so it is
with the ascent to this felicity. One lingers amid pleasant groves and
laughing waters; another, undistracted by the beauty of any lower zone, but
fixing his eyes upon the far summit, crosses the chill rocky slopes, never
feeling the warmth of the sun and only seeing his brightness reflected from
the highest peak. Though the ways of the two travellers lie far apart until
the end, their endurance may be crowned with the same reward; but he who
knew no dalliance and plucked no fruit has from the beginning seen the
goal clearly, and lived steadfastly in its distant promise. And do you tell me
that this is not love or joy, you who saunter in the verdant southern valleys
breathing a present happiness with the perfume of a thousand flowers? Your
way may lead you upward after long vicissitudes, but endurance will more
swiftly fail you for the last most arduous ascent. Very love is of the heights,
and he whose thoughts have long been thither exalted will breathe with
least pain the attenuate upper air.
To this pilgrimage the diffident are foreordained; it is their happiest hour
when they take staff and scrip and set out in earnest for the shrine built
among the mountains. The gardens of Armida are not for them, nor the
warm breezes fragrant of fruit and flowers; but the vision of a far peak
flushed at sundawn draws them onward, and strength and peace are

increased upon them throughout the great ascent. He is still too rich for pity
to whom renunciation brings these high and enviable hours.
But the heavens are not opened every day, and the adept of these mysteries
must walk the dull round of common life like other men, not warmed as
they are by the glow of constant friendship, yet cheered by intermittent
flames of remembrance and of hope. The real life of the diffident is
cunningly hidden from those around them, for whom, indeed, it is wont to
have faint interest; but before you who have often sought me out through
fair and foul weather, I may venture to undo the pack of small resources
which brings variety and distraction into lonely days.
Firstly, I still dare to haunt the forecourts of philosophy. Into her inner
courts I may not penetrate, lacking the leisure which her whole service
demands; yet the loiterings which I may still enjoy are to me like voyages
into a foreign country, and give my mind the healthful enjoyment of
change; they are not long enough to bring that whole detachment from daily
life which, in my case, might prove a perilous advantage. All that I need for
common use is a simple rule based on a few fundamental thoughts to give
me a course upon the wayward ocean, and though it be full of error as the
Almagest, yet it shall surpass the thumb-rules of Philistia. It must be a
doctrine which allows imagination her right and durable career, and
therefore not be monist. For materialism is too wildly imaginative at the
start: like a runner who at the outset overstrains his heart and thereafter runs
no more, the follower of this creed, by his postulate of a blind impersonal
Law, exhausts his power of speed and plods henceforth eyes downward
over flattest plains of dulness. That my mind may remain curious and alert
in isolation, I must conceive in the universal scheme a power that does not
alone impel, but also draws me forward. For were it true that the sum of
things blunders from change to change, swept by blind force into uncharted
voids, I should abandon myself in despair to that hopeless course, and drift
indifferent to the direction or the end.
Let me rather believe that if each several idea is compacted by my active
intelligence out of some vast system of relations, then only a supreme
intelligence akin to man's can brace together the whole system or universal
sum of things. For this earth, yes, and all the complex of the spheres, exist
to me imperfectly as idea alone, nor can I conceive them any complete

existence apart from a kindred but omniscient mind. Each advance in
human knowledge should then be an infinitesimal approach towards the
supreme comprehension; and the aspiring race of man is justified in that
inchoation of long hope which is folly to the single life.
I would also believe that new relations between things may be detected not
merely by the staid and ordered process of collating abstractions, which is
science, but by swifter and more genial methods of intuition.

"Hurrah for
positive science,
Long live exact
demonstration!"

cried Walt Whitman, exulting over the filed fetters of mankind; and let us
all echo the cry, nor ever forget the razed Bastilles of superstition. But there
glimmers a wealth of truth in the penumbra beyond our lanterns to which
science will creep too slowly without the aid of imagination. Yet this truth
may be seized by swift sallies into the darkness, and assured to us as it were
by some dim apperception of the soul, when the whole personality is made
tense, and subtly anticipates the cosmic argument. Life is too short to
renounce this daring: the sense of kinship with the All-Consciousness
sanctions if not commands the right adventure.
It was this feeling which led William Blake to exclaim in his impulsive
way, that to generalize is to be an idiot, that direct perception is all, and the
slow process of the inductive reason a devil's machination. This method of
intuition is to the more sober method of science as the romantic to the
classical spirit in literature, permitting to the individual mind a licence of
noble vagrancy. But it must be a law for the ordinary intelligence to
exercise the two apart, else it will fall into sick fancies of excitement, and
by abuse of wild analogies lose the vital art of balance and sane
comparison. Only the greatest minds, endowed as it were with some divine
genius of extrication, may dare to practise the two together. So Leonardo da
Vinci drove inference and intuition abreast without disaster, and gathered
from purple distances of thought their wildest and most splendid flowers.
To him, as has been well said, philosophy was something giving strange

swiftness and double sight, clairvoyant of occult gifts in common or
uncommon things. The doom of Phæton awaits those who now would
follow that marvellous course; but the poetic observation of resemblances
in things remote, which lent so rich a colour to the science of the
Renaissance, may yet be trained in all our minds; and the philosophy which
trusts in the slow suffusion of the worlds with intellectual light will bless
and encourage its reasonable growth.
Such a philosophy brings also a living sympathy with art. For the artist ever
sees a perfection of truth beyond his rendering, yet always calling for
expression; there is something eternally missed by his highest effort, and he
can never know complacency. The philosophy which conceives the gradual
growth of form through consciousness towards a perfection infinitely
removed, yet in its remoteness drawing up our life as the moon sways the
tides—this surely is the artist's wisdom. Idealism is like love, ἄπορα
πόριμος, holding us as it were in touch with the intangible: it will have us
conceive the Absolute without that helpless absorption in thought which
changed Amiel's life from a fountain to a vapour: it would keep us near the
surf and confluence of things. Its function is not to give any mysterious
transcendental knowledge, but to serve culture "by suggesting questions
which help to detect the passion, and strangeness and dramatic contrasts of
life." And not only to bring suggestions, but repose, by granting to eyes
wearied with minute concerns the contrasts of vast times and spaces, the
majestic idea of the Whole; to change the focus and variously dispose the
perspectives of familiar things.
An old watchmaker, whose window overlooked a wide meadow, used ever
and again to lay down his instruments to gaze out upon the expanse of
green, pasturing upon it a wandering vague regard, and absorbing from it an
assuagement of his wearied senses which, he said, served him more
effectually after these bright interludes. The province of Metaphysics
should be to us as to this wise workman his field; not a place to dream our
days away in, but for occasional resort; in which we may forget the
infinitesimal in healing visions of broad space and colour. I counsel every
lonely man to satisfy what has been described as the common metaphysical
instinct, and according to his powers to become a metaphysician. There is
no discipline which so well consists with solitude, none which so instantly
enfranchises the mind from the tyranny of mean self-interest or vain and

envious polemics. Men do not grow sour and quarrelsome about the
Absolute: everything that is polemical is inspired, as Michelet once said, by
some temporal and momentary interest. The man who has climbed to the
Idalian spring comes down benevolent. He does not grudge this toiling ant
his grain, that snarling dog his bone, but is content to live serene, in the
certainty that his soul has great provision, and that though all human things
are small, each is worth its while. Into his hand there is given a scale by
which life is known in its fair proportions; a tranquil joy, disturbed neither
by dirges nor Epinician odes, is poured into his heart and exalts him above
distraction. He respects himself as akin to that great Self whose perfection
shall one day be known; he understands the passion for the ideal through
which men die young; he wonders at envy and in the happiness of
enfranchisement would have all men free.
The pages of this Almagest are for the exceptional hour; but daily, as one
bookish from the nursery, I read much in many directions. For if books are
called the best friends of happy men, to the sad they are saviours also. And
when I remember too clearly what I am, I turn perhaps most often to
Lucretius. For of all those who have taken up the pen to assuage the
miseries of men, it is he who sings most bravely of the great endurance.
This austere enthusiast, whose soul was never fused in the fire of
friendship; who went apart, as it were, amid thunders upon the lonely
heights; who, without any lover, yet loved his kind so well that all the years
of his maturity, how short and splendid a period, were poured forth in one
song of human consolation,—this man for all the madness of his creed, was
yet aflame with a wisdom to be called divine. That calm face, lit with one
desire—to drive the furies from the way and soothe the frightened children
of men, is ever among the nobler countenances which fancy summons
about my bed. Over the anxious heart they flow, those slow cadences, so
vibrant yet so magnificently passionless, until the nerves of pain cease to
throb, and fear shrinks as a taint impossible to the patient of such a
physician. It is not his to intimidate or denounce, to evoke visions of lurid
hell, to linger over dire vaticinations, or apportion to each his grade of
torment, but with cool fingers to smooth the hair back from the forehead,
and in grave, tender accents to say: Sleep now, for it was a dream.
Landor, in a fine passage, compared the merciful tolerance of the Roman
poet with the pitiless ire of Dante, contrasting in respect of the quality of

mercy these two poets, one in their austere perfection, but so different in
their vision of death, and judgment, and ultimate reward. The seer of lost
worlds has written his own defence, and was indeed but attacked to point
the sharp antithesis; but Lucretius, though he owes it to a literary feint, is
very finely praised. And to me it seems that his compassionate mood
increased upon him just because he was not emulous of the world's gifts or
earnest for its pleasures, but withdrew from the press, and lived out his few
great years contemplating apart the vicissitudes of orbs and men. He did not
wait in ante-chambers or sit at wedding feasts; but severing all entangling
and intricate threads of observance, followed the voice which called him to
solitary places of illimitable prospect. It was not through disillusion or
injustice, or wounded pride, that he walked aloof; but loneliness was his
birthright, and from the hills and headlands to which solitude allured his
steps he saw the dust of mad encounters rise to heaven, and the rent sails of
foundering galleys. He saw, and could not but be wrung with pity for man
deafened to wise counsel by the noise of vanities, and fiercely conspiring to
precipitate his doom. As he went by shore and upland, there gathered in his
mind those resonant hexameters of warning or consolation, those similes
from the life of husbandry and dumb things, which, set like diamonds in
clay, lend to the most arid arguments their own incomparable splendour, or
that homelier beauty which instantly pierces the defences of the heart. Not
diffident as we, but of a nature so infinitely absent and reserved that in the
legend his wife must concoct a philter to remind him of his love, he is of all
the pagans the best companion for our angrier moods. An archaic and
elemental serenity is upon his language and thought, rebuking our
unprofitable petulance; if emotion gains him he finds utterance in those
tremendous periods "where single words seem to gather out of the deep and
to reverberate like thunder." As the reverberation dies away and the clouds
are pierced by the sun, the world is seen in new lights through an air clear
as upon rain-swept mountains.
As my reading is incessant, so also is my writing. For the happiness of man
is in his fertility, and of barrenness comes the worst despair. To be happy is
to have issue—children, or books written, or things beautifully wrought, or
monuments of goodness to live after you, if only in the memory of some
tiny hamlet of the folded hills. This is the law of life that Diotima knew, by
which flower and tree, animal and man, fulfil the end of their creation; and

man in nothing more surely proves his lordship than by his many-handed
hold upon posterity. For the lower creation is procreant in one way, but man
in many; who may have offspring not of body alone but of mind and heart,
and be so redeemed from the grim dismay of childlessness. The greatest
human happiness is to be fertile in every way, a thing granted rarely in the
world we know; the next, perhaps, is that of the parent who gives all of
himself to his family, not tilling any field beyond the charmed walls
confining his desire. The author sure of his fame, the born artist, the
benefactor of his kind, are also happy, seeing their offspring grow in years
and in the power of making a brighter world.
But he is miserable who, aspiring to follow these, feels his force wane
within him while he remains yet fatherless; or who has sons stillborn, or
weakly, or dishonoured. I question whether sheer degradation into evil
brings more pain to man than such sense of sterility or frustrate parentage.
But it is no small part of human redemption that none need know the
interminable misery. A man may have neither sons nor genius, but in the
dark hour he can go out and give, if it be only a penny or a kind word, and
on that foundation build a temple to receive his thanksgiving. To give of
yourself is good. This is that grand agreement and œcumenical consent to
which those words quod ab omnibus quod ubique in deed and truth may be
applied. For this reason meanness is of the deeps, and avarice groans in the
lowest zone of hell. And if there are faces of blank and permanent despair
upon your path, be sure that these are not masks of whole men, but of those
who wilfully abstained from joy and have received the greater damnation.
My children are mostly writings, poor weakly creatures dying inarticulate
and unchristened, tenderly remembered by myself only, but at least no
nuisance to the world. I loved them at their birth, I hold them in
remembrance, though they were ever of a hectic and uncertain beauty.
The comparison of children with branches of the olive is not the mere
ornament of a Bible verse, but the wisdom of one who knew both tree and
child. For as children are bright creatures of swiftly changing moods, so are
the olive leaves in the blue southern air. I once read of an artist who essayed
to paint a group of olives and a cypress growing before them. Against their
silvery leaves its dark burnished form stood finely mysterious, the
contrasting grey lending it a depth of almost sable colour; all was propitious
for his work. Then suddenly, the air being to all seeming quite still, the

grey-green leaves began to shake and quiver, until each olive tree was like a
silver bonfire, tremulous with a thousand waves of white flame flowing and
following along the branches. It was a revelation and swift effluence of life,
perplexing and full of charm. The brush was laid down, the moment of
inspiration gone, before the capricious leaves ceased their quivering to be
robed once more in grey, casting on the ground that translucent shadow
which tempers the sunlight only, and does not spoil it of its gold. In the end
the canvas was covered, but with a sketch far less true and beautiful than
the painter's first happy vision. Even so of all our children few attain the
perfection of our dreams. While we look, some influence comes upon them
and they are changed, some breeze, born we know not where, stirs them to
their heart of joy while we stand perplexed; innumerable laughter of leaves,
a rushing and a shivering in quick answer to a mere breath, silence as swift
when unperceived it dies away—these are their replies to our silent
invocations. We cannot follow the swift course, but are quickened with a
glad rejuvenescence, the true prize and guerdon of parentage. They may
grow old or die, or bring us sorrow; it is enough that once they so lived and
stirred a pride within us. Let Hedonist and idealist dispute, let one worship
pleasure and another wait on the intangible joy, but in the fathering and
mothering and the bringing up of young children, of the flesh, the mind, or
the spirit, lies the natural happiness of men and women. It is a joy which
outlasts disillusions; it rests surely upon achievement and deserts which lie
ponderable in the archangel's scales. For it is certain that he who creates as
best he knows best serves God, the world and himself, and what system of
Ethics has conceived a more perfect rule?
All young life is instinct with such a beauty and trustfulness, that though he
himself may have no part or lot in its creation, and be dumb or awkward in
its presence, a man will be the brighter for having passed, if but for a
moment, out of the darkness of his own course into the radiance within its
orbit. To the diffident this is an especial grace. For children by some deeper
intuition understand us as their parents cannot do; and when all the world is
cold will often smile upon us with happy upturned faces. It is one of my
consolations that the little players in the parks come running to me rather
than to others with their eternal question after the exact hour of day. For I
reflect that though my face grows wrinkled and drawn with years, there
must yet hover something about its ugly surface which tells of a good will

within. There was a time when I found the children's question importunate,
and drew out my watch ungraciously; but now I feel disappointment if
during their hours of play I can walk my mile without answering one of
these high-pitched inquiries.
To have the confidence of children is indeed a thing of which a poor
wanderer may be proud, a credential confirming his self-respect, and
worthy one day to be presented at the gate of heaven. Once during one of
my worst hours of desolation, when I was tramping across the fields, I
found a little maid of seven picking primroses on the edge of an old
orchard. For some time I stood watching, so charmed with the grace of her
movements and the beauty of the spring sunlight on her golden mane, that I
lost all consciousness of present trouble, and beyond her fairy form began
to see vague visions of lost happiness returning. As I stood thus forgetful
and looking absently before me, I suddenly felt a touch which recalled my
scattered thoughts: she had come to me and put her hand in mine. I think in
all my lonely life I never felt so swift a thankfulness as that which suffused
me then: the memory of it is always with me, and now I never see a happy
child engrossed in its little task of duty or pleasure without thinking to
myself there is one of those who truly have power to remit sins. I will not
repeat the fond things often written about children. Not all of them are like
the infant angels of Bellini or Filippino Lippi or Carpaccio; some indeed are
strident, pert, without charm or candour, not doves but little jays; but for the
loveliness of those who have smiled upon me, whether rich or poor,
whether wild or tended flowers, I shall ever hold the whole company dear.
Whether I read or write, or go painfully upon difficult paths of thought, like
many other men whom the world dismays, I win a larger tranquillity and a
clearer vision from an increased simplicity of life. I know that to use the
word asceticism of one's daily practice is to incur the judgment of all those
whom the world calls good fellows, whose motto is live and let live, or any
other aphorism of convenient and universal remission. To them asceticism
is the deterrent saintliness which renounces all joy, and with a hard thin
voice condemns the leanings of mankind to reasonable indulgence. The ill-
favour drawn down by ecclesiastical exaggeration upon the good Greek
word ἄσκησις, which means nothing more than the practice of fitness, has
prejudiced men against all system of conduct bold enough to include it in
their terminology.

Kant's chapter on the Ascetic Exercise of Ethics is a fine defence of that
training of the heart and mind which has no affinity with the morbid
discipline of hair shirt and scourge. "The ascetic exercise of the
monasteries," he says, "inspired by superstitious fear and the hypocritical
disesteem of a man's own self, sets to work with self-reproaches,
whimpering compunction and a torturing of the body. It is intended not to
result in virtue but to make expiation for sins, and by self-imposed
punishment the sinners expect to do penance, instead of ethically
repenting." And again—"All ethical gymnastics consist therefore singly in
subjugating the instincts and appetites of our physical system ... a
gymnastic exercise rendering the will hardy and robust, which by the
consciousness of regained freedom makes the heart glad."
This is sound doctrine, neither ungodly nor inhuman, the word of a man in
whose veins the warm blood yet flowed. Few pictures of venerable age
please more than that of the old philosopher of Königsberg drawn for us by
de Quincey in one of his miscellaneous Essays. There we see Immanuel
Kant, leading his tranquil sane existence, giving his friends sober
entertainment, talking brightly of mundane things, practising "the hilarity
which goes hand in hand with virtue." For me the very eccentricities of his
daily routine have a fascination, and I read them as a devout Catholic reads
many a quaint passage in the Acta Sanctorum. How wise was his nightly
habit, as he settled himself in bed before falling asleep, to asseverate with a
sigh of thankfulness that no man living was more contented and healthier
than he! Here is the true asceticism, the child's glad abandonment to nature
maintained and grown articulate in philosophic age.
To this beauty of plain life I cannot attain. But my own life is as far
removed as may be from brilliant or luxurious pleasures, and I divide my
time between the country and the town. This I do from obedience to reason
rather than fashion; for while the country has my love, the city is more
remedial to my peculiar pain. There the shy man may have what Lamb
called the perfect and sympathetic solitude, as opposed to the "inhuman and
cavern-haunting solitariness," to which his infirmity inclines. There he and
those who rub shoulders with him on the pavement can "enjoy each other's
want of conversation." No creature with a heart can jostle daily with his
kind, but he wins some consciousness of kindly feeling. The very
annoyances and constraints of propinquity are in their own way

disciplinary, and insistent, uncongenial persons, like glaring red buoys with
clanging bells, serve at least to keep us in the fairway of navigation. And in
a city there are voices of cheerful exhortation always echoing in the higher
air above the roar and the trampling, which in the interludes of coarser
sound, or by our removal into some quiet court or garden, may be heard
repeating their stirring watchwords of endeavour. We are told that no word
spoken ever dies, but goes reverberating through space for ever. It is my
fancy that only evil words escape into the outer void, which eternally
engulfs their profitless message, while words of hope and helpfulness are
not thus lightly sundered from the world that needs them, but hover still
near above us, descending with every lull of the tumult into those ears
which are strained towards them. The laden air of towns carries not the
rumour of the battle only, but by the presence of these fair echoes held
within it, gives back to the soul more health than ever it drew from the
body. With this thought I am often consoled as I go my way through gloom
and clamour and unloveliness, finding a Providence in places which else
seem abandoned in the outer desolation.
Nor is the vast city to be valued only for what it gives, but for its own
wonderful self, an obvious point which need not be expanded into a tedious
circle. The shy will naturally draw more advantage from so rich a field of
contemplation than those who seldom walk alone. In London I often map
out a course of wandering which in its varied stages shall remind me of the
change in progress or decay of particular arts or industries or different
quarters of the town. Reading their meaning in the light of history, I make
bare walls speak to me with a personal voice. Let any one but acquaint
himself with the styles of ecclesiastical or domestic architecture, or of
monuments of the dead, or with the history of the thoroughfares he
frequents, and he will be pleasantly constrained to reflection upon those
who have gone before him. As he stands in the shadow of an ancient church
he will think to himself: "By this very wall Chaucer may have stood." As he
walks amid the reverberating ravines which are city streets he will say:
"Here along green and silent paths the Roman legionary marched when
Hadrian ruled the world." When once the faculty of observation has been
awakened to a permanent alertness, the desire to be widely read in history
of men and their arts will become irresistible; and through the knowledge
gradually amassed it will be thought a sorry chance if any ramble of wider

compass yield no vision which in comeliness or deformity tells its tale of
changing fortune. To appreciate human work, and the conditions under
which it is born, is to exult in abounding sympathy with this man's conquest
over things poor in promise, or to condole with that man's failure to do the
best that in him lay.
As I walk by the strand of Thames, my fancy sees upon one flood the gay
barge gliding upward to green fields, and the black hull bearing down the
prisoner to the Traitors' Gate. If I go up Holborn, I remember that where
this traffic now thunders John Gerard tended his Physic Garden when
Elizabeth was queen. I know where Sarah Siddons lived; and where
William Blake died; and my curious wanderings are now so far extended,
that when I turn to the great book of London I seldom find a tedious page.
The places where people strove and suffered evoke before me the forms of
men and women dead but unforgotten, and if I am alone I am not aware of
loneliness.
London is the central wonder, but wonderful also in spirit and suggestion
are those old places which ring it round: these I often frequent at every
season, and carry their portraits over my heart. Let a man once learn to
know them, and his memory shall never starve; he will never forget the
hour when first they yielded him up their secret. Many moments of intimate
delight do I treasure in remembrance, moments when I was suddenly aware
that all previous impressions were the poor gatherings of purblind eyes; but
I will only tell you of one, which may suffice to show what riches lie ever
open to those who roam in solitude.
It was mid-April and the close of a cloudless day. I had been to the
Observatory hill at Greenwich to see the sun set over London, looking for
such a transfiguration of the grey city as should reveal its line of
warehouses lying along the horizon in a mist of splendour like the walls of
the New Jerusalem. So I had seen it before, marvellous and refined in
unearthly fire: but to-day, in a sadder mood, and hungering more deeply for
the vision, I looked out to the west in vain. For the wind had set in from the
east, and driven back upon the town a zone of iron-grey smoke, ragged
along its upper edge like a great water blown to spray, but merging below
with those gloomy and innumerable buildings. Upon this the sun, which all
day had ridden in a clear air, was slowly falling, losing radiance with every

minute, until as it approached that gloomy spray it was luminous no more,
but a dull red orb whose light, like a flame withdrawn into the consumed
heart of coals, glows for awhile beneath a gathering film of grey. In a few
minutes it descended, as if sadly and of resolution, into the murky sea,
where for a moment its red curves seemed to refine the smoke into
translucency; but at last the dun waves gathered upon it dark and
voluminous, drowning it so deeply that the clearer sky above was instantly
robbed of the wonted after-glow. Some pale reflection there was in the
upper heaven, ensuring a time of twilight, but no glory; and smitten with a
congruous sadness, I went down to the river. But there, pacing to and fro as
if upon a quarter-deck, with the water lapping upon the wall beneath, I lived
one of the happy hours of life, redeemed from disappointment, and carried
far into a magical world.
The flood tide, which had turned for more than an hour, was now racing
down wilful for the sea, though the breeze ruffling its surface seemed to
thwart and stay its eager course. And on the surface, indeed, chafed and
broken into innumerable ripples, the wind triumphed; but as one looked
westwards towards the city, it was clear that the sullen strength of stream
and tide had the mastery. For over the broad curving reach, lit like white
unburnished silver with the reflection of the pallid sky, there glided forward
a line of barges each with every red sail set, and as silent as if they sallied
from a besieged city. One by one they hung out their lights, the lamps
swaying and casting yellow bars over the quivering water, until in perfect
silence all passed down before me. Each in turn attaining the lower bend
where the river sweeps northward, went about and stood for the Middlesex
shore; and then for a moment the wind seemed to overcome the tide, for
before the boat could win new way, lying almost broadside across the
stream, the breeze held her motionless, like a tired bird on a windy day
when it flies out from the shelter of the wood. It was but for a moment, and
then the blunt bows glided forward towards the north bank, and another
barge succeeded in the gathering gloom.
And so it was until all were passed. The departing light drew the colours
from the red sails and the silvery brightness from the river; all forms
became outlined in black upon what uncertain light remained. Two men put
off in a boat from an anchored ship; the mingled sound of their oars and
voices came with subdued tone as if out of an infinite distance. Then the

whole reach lay bare and silent for a while, and only the little waves lapping
upon the stone steps played an accompaniment to my dream.
The hour and the place compelled to reverie, and memory consenting to
their evocative charm, I peopled the still scene with the forms of those who
had swayed or shared the fortunes of this land; imperious Elizabeth and
gentler Mary, the slight heroic figure with one sleeve pinned empty on the
breast, and all those who, going down to their business in deep waters or
returning therefrom, have saluted with melancholy or with joy these towers
and this wooded hill. I thought of the lads playing beneath these trees, and
so inbreathing the spirit of this place that for them there was no career but
to follow the river down to ocean, and ocean himself in his circuit of the
world. I thought of the veterans returned from that quest, old Argonauts of a
later day, now clustering round the Hospital fires and perhaps recalling
amid tales of havens and high seas the very morning when they first
dropped round the bend and passed into the new world beyond. For this
Thames is such an avenue and entry into marvellous life that earth can show
no greater rival, none more rich in dignity or in the multitude of its
merchandise. And if the flood of that merchandise shall cease, and the
stream once more go lonely to the sea or carry coracles, it cannot be again
as if it had never borne great ships, or swung the Admiral's galley on its
tide.
It is good for an Englishman to stand here and listen to the brown waters
lapping on the old walls and caulked timbers; to hear, as an under murmur,
voices of Lechlade and Bablockhythe, for all intervening leagues of wood
and meadow not altogether lost: before this persistence and continuity of
youth to feel high thoughts stir within him and solemnize the nativity of
new resolve. You cannot feel beneath your feet these old stones trodden by
the great generations of your own blood and kindred, and not be moved to
walk uprightly, to be approved by their shades as one not unworthy of such
descent. For whether such worn stones be in the aisle of some great minster,
or here, paving this narrow way for hurrying feet, the inspiration is as
strong and the thankfulness not other. For this is a place of meridian, the
navel of our land and empire; the wind searching its alleys has no usual
voice, but as it were a deep and oceanic sound, according with old ballads
and stories of the sea.

I lingered leaning upon the rail until the tide had fallen from the wall,
tracing along the narrow pebbled foreshore a clear marginal line of irregular
contour, now sinuous, now straight, but palely luminous like a silver tone
on some enamel of old Italy, a line drawn by a master draughtsman, in its
inevitable and sure perfection wholly satisfying the eye. With the dark bank
it vanished towards the great city, now marked in the upper sky by a
hovering brightness of light escaped beyond the smoky rampart to tell the
effort of innumerable lamps beneath, all pouring their blurred and vain
effulgence to the disdainful stars.
Moreover, the city will give the shy man all the consolations of art,
philosophy and literature of which his education or experience may have
made him worthy. He can see great pictures or read great books at little
cost, and find in them the truest of friends in need. It is so obvious that a
solitary of any culture will find relief with such companions, that here I take
for granted his resort to their aid, and will only mention two resources from
which the real recluse often draws less advantage than he might, I mean
orchestral music and the drama. Any man of feeling who hears a great
symphony ceases to be self-centred with the first movement; he goes out of
himself, and rides upon waves of sound, exalted by this majesty of
collective effort. No other music thrills his whole being like this, which
sweeps him with all around into the very course of changing fates. In the
confluence of dim hopes and passions which rise above the harmonies like
smoke-wreaths riding the red flame, the soul glows interfluous with other
souls and is elated with the inspiration of their presence. He bears arms
exulting who never had comrades till now; his will is absorbed in
confederate joy and human force unanimous. In this abandonment of the
whole being, the diffident know their fellows near, and in the ecstasy of
shared emotion learn the full measure of their humanity. Philosophers in all
ages have known and taught the power of music in compelling ten thousand
to the love of one, and so ennobling an infinite multitude in the glow of a
common emotion. Sound was the first instinctive language, one for man and
winds and waters; and music, which is the development of this primeval
converse, leaving to grammars the expression of cold and abstract thought,
has gathered about her in her mountain caverns the echoes of all sighs sad
or passionate, of all inarticulate cries born of aspiration or desire, and there

blended them into eternal harmonies which at her word flow forth and join
the hearts of men.
Indeed, that swift responsiveness of feeling which music thus awakes is a
gift beyond gems of Golconda; not youth's swift effusion cheaply given and
soon forgotten, but the vibration of a heart stirred in sympathy with some
profound note of life, as the dyed pane stirs and quivers when the organ
gives forth its deepest tones. Sentiment is a draught of old wine passing into
the veins and enriching the blood, until in the generous glow all the
privations and the stints of loneliness are forgotten. Pure emotion is like
righteous anger, which may be lawfully indulged if the sun go not down
upon it; and as he who shrinks from all fire of wrath lives but a vaporous
life, so he who will never be moved is proud of a poor crustacean strength,
like the limpet, winning darkness in exchange for dull stability. As for me,
in the propitious hour when the heart longs for expansion, I give it
honourable licence, and quicken its unfolding by spells of magical words.
At such times I invoke the aid of passionate souls, not shrinking even from
the vain, provided that they loved greatly and give great expression to their
humanity. Such is that wild lover of George Sand whose Souvenir, for all its
rhetoric, charms like an incantation. The ancients quenched the ashes of the
pyre with red wine, as if the blood of the god-given vine could hearten the
spirit that yet hovered near. Over my ashes let no wine be poured, but read
me such verses high and valiant, that if my soul yet lingers undelivered
from the earth's attraction it may be regenerated and set free into a braver
life.
And let the lonely man be an assiduous frequenter of the playhouse, for the
drama will also open the world's heart to him, and that by a plainer and less
elusive speech. Seated in the theatre among his kind, he knows a deeper
pleasure than other men; for while to these the changing scene brings
remembrance or anticipation of familiar things, to him it reveals whole
vistas of life which, except in dreams, his feet may never tread. When the
curtain is rung down, and he goes out into the street, for a while at least his
existence is transformed. All those front doors aligned in their innumerable
sequence, which in daylight or darkness he passes when he wanders alone,
are now no longer barred against him; they open at the touch of his fancy,
and he sees within the light of homeliness, where father, mother, and child
weave round warm firesides their close conspiracies of affection. At last he

knows what is passing behind those bars; like an old family friend he takes
his place by the fire and receives as of right the confidences which in his
real lonely life never find their way to his ears. He helps the lovers to build
their cloudy castles, he reasons away the parents' care, he goes up-stairs
with a shaded candle to look in upon the children sleeping. Good women
unlock the jewel-caskets which are their souls; happy maidens are sisterly
with him; strong men grapple him to their hearts and call him friend. He
that was vagabond has now innumerable homes, and of the faces that fleet
by him out of doors there are always some which seem to give him
greeting.
These secret and unavowed alliances transfigure the unlovely streets, and
light in the cavernous blank houses many a glowing and familiar hearth. As
he goes on, careless of distance or direction, he is now inwardly busy with
fresh and delightful dreams. He plights his troth and earth is Eden; he
imagines brilliant hours for the dream-children who go by his side, holding
each of his hands. And if the visions change, and sorrow or sin pass in over
a familiar threshold, what generous abnegation, what pity, what righteous
wrath does he not know, until the plastic power of fancy moulds out of this
poor recluse a man like other men. Amid these visionary sympathies time
goes quickly by, and returning to his voiceless dwelling he has stored up
such wealth of dreams that he can even endure the supreme test when the
lonely man finds himself sitting in the wan light with no one near him to
whom he is dear. Of the strength and peacefulness which bring him safely
through that hour of desolation he owes much to the players, who have shot
the drab texture of life with an infinity of bright and tender hues, so that he
can bear to turn it in his hands and look upon it with a wistful pleasure. I
say, then, let the shy man frequent the playhouse, and there facet and
burnish his dulled mind until it reflects, if it may not touch, the many-sided
world.
For the discipline of sympathy, for the quickened sense of comradeship in
work, for the very presence of that unloveliness which compels sympathy, I
dwell more months in the town than in the country-side. But remembering
what Nature did to save me, and owing her an endless debt of filial duty, I
return to her in the summer days, and to make up for the long months of
separation cling nearer to her than most of her truant sons. For communion
with Nature, the ideal joy of country life, is not attained by the sportsman or

the mere player of games, who think of their bodies chiefly, and use as a
means to rude physical vigour the end ordained for the fine contentience of
body, mind, and spirit. Again I will pass by the obvious and familiar
resources of outdoor life, and speak only of such as men are unaccountably
prone to neglect.
There is a way of learning nature which in this wet land is mostly followed
by tramps and vagrants; the way of sleeping beneath the stars. So far is this
joy from the thoughts of most men, that even George Borrow felt a strange
uneasiness when for the first time the darkness descended upon him in the
open country. I think we carry with us all our lives that fear of night with
which nursery tales inspired our childhood; it reinforces the later more
reasoned fear of boisterous weather, or of the men who walk in darkness
because their works are evil. We shrink from night as a chill privation of
daylight, as a gloom which we must traverse, but not inhabit; the distrust
becomes with years instinctive and universal, and the nearest approach to
friendly relation with night attained by most of us is a timid liking for the
twilight hours. Yet as the sun rises alike upon the just and upon the unjust
even so does he descend, and we put a slight upon Providence if we
abandon to rogues and rakes that wonderful kingdom of the darkness of
which by natural prerogative we are enfranchised. By never using our
proper freedom, we give them prescriptive licence of usurpation, so that the
hours in which the heavens are nearest to us are become the peculiar
inheritance of thieves.
I confess that on the night when first I set out to do without a bedroom I too
felt all the force of the traditional mistrust. I heard human whispers in the
wind, and saw the shadows of walls and trees as forms of men lurking to
spring out against me. The movements of roosting birds startled me as I
passed; the sudden silences startled me more. And when I had spread my
gear on the ground and settled down to rest, the sense of exposure on every
side made sleep impossible; time after time I seemed to hear footsteps
stealthily approaching; and there was a strangeness pervading everything
which to my nervous fancy was simply provocative of apparitions. This
lasted many nights; and whether I established myself on the edge of a
copse, or in the open grass, or in a hammock beneath two trees, I continued
a prey to the same uneasy wakefulness. But then, as if satisfied of good
faith by such perseverance, the night began to wear a friendly aspect, the

shadows gave up their ghosts, and the breezes became the expected
messengers of slumber.
When the lonely sleeper-out has grown familiar with the moonlight and the
darkness, he is admitted into the number of earth's favoured sons; for lying
like a child upon her bosom, he hears her heart beating in the silence, and
wakes to see her smiling in her beauty like a queen apparelled. To no man
slumber comes more gently than to him; and his uprising is as that of a
child exulting in the cloudless day. Health and innocence return to him, and
his one sorrow is that he has lived into maturity without continually
partaking of these sane and natural delights. Remorse is his that for all these
years he has feared the dews and shrunk from the bland night airs; and
remembering the needless imprisonment of a hundred chambers, he mourns
over the irrecoverable hours which would have rooted his life more deeply
in tranquillity and strength. But the June sun is up, and the birds are
singing: he strides with light step over the grass, watching the rabbits play
in the glades, and in unison with a host of fellow-creatures singing a
welcome to the dawn. When it is time for him to think of home and he
comes once more beneath a doorway, he has a mind refreshed by the
quietude of dim space, and a heart replenished with innocence and good-
will. He who so sleeps hates no man, and will go upon the dullest way free
from petulance or despair. The scent of the rich earth is in his nostrils, and
the clearness of morning air has passed into his eyes.
I have made my lair in many places since I first kept house with Nature. I
have couched in heather by the pines of hills far above the Sussex Weald; I
have lain in dry furrows or on the margin of a copse, or in the parks of the
children of fortune, for whose welfare, in gratitude for their unconscious
hospitality, I shall ever pray. But of all wild resting-places I have known,
the openest are the most delightful. To see the whole sweep of the stars; to
lie on the shorn ground free of all that overshadows or encompasses or
confines; to breathe in the great gulf of air; to stretch unhindered limbs—
this is an initiation into a new life, a pleasant memory in the long glooms of
winter. Let nothing come between you and the stars, that they may look
well upon your face, and haply repenting of some ancient unkindliness,
draw you at this rebirth a new horoscope of blessing and fair fortune. And if
slumber tarries when you lie in an open spot, you may consciously ride the
great globe through space, and like the shepherd watching by his flock in

the clear night while star rises after star, grow aware of the great earth
rolling to the east beneath you.
In these still hours of night or early dawn there steals upon the charmed
mind an Orphic sense of worship and inexplicable joy. For here on bare
uplands and wooded hills, where the starlight rains down through the
silence, or the day, welling up over the rim of the downs, glides fresh from
the lips of ocean, a calm river of light, here is the place of Dionysus, of him
born from fire and dew, Zagreus the soul of clean souls and wild lives, his
heart a-quiver with vague sadness drawn from all the worlds, Eleutherios,
loosener of heart and lip, the regenerator, the absolver, the eternally
misunderstood, whose true followers are priests of impassioned pure life,
whose wine is not juice of grapes but the clear air ambient upon the hills.
Here when sleep is shamed away by expectant awe, the whole being grows
one with all-environing life; personality glides into the stream of cosmic
existence, lost and found a thousand times in the trance and ecstasy of dim
divine feelings beyond the power of words inexpressible. It is miracle; it is
religion; it is a feast of purification above pomps or mysteries, a cleansing
ritual without victims and undefiled. In such hours, and in such hours alone,
man and things are joined in a supreme utterance of life high and humble,
transient and immortal, by which the fellowship of all existences within the
universe is made real and significant to the initiate mind. For in the day
fences are about us, roofs and towers impend above our heads, we are
cribbed in streets and markets, the din of rhetoric or sordid bargaining fills
our ears. Or if we withdraw into some still chamber, yet the walls built by
hired hands offend, and the doorposts of sapless timber; no high influence
can penetrate to us save through the close court of memory, and compared
with the breezy starlit meadows, how poor an avenue to the soul is that!
And the exuberant sun of noon distracts, and the multitude of his beams is
troublous, for what does sight avail if the things of the heart's desire are lost
in immeasurable perplexities of light? For in the high day the quivering
bright air is more opaque than the dim spaces of night, so tranquil and
severe, or the glowing kingdoms of the morning. At the springing of the day
the eyes open upon awakening flowers, giving filial heed to the marvellous
earth which waits in patience for a human greeting. I like the passage in
which Chaucer tells how in May-time his couch was spread in an arbour
upon the margin of the grass, that he might wake to see the daisies unfold

their petals. Sleeping thus, he also must have known those intervals of
slumber when a sense of some impending wonder grows too strong for
sleep, and all nature seems calling to high vision. Often I have been thus
awakened, not by noise or movement, but as it were by some strange
prescience of beauty constraining me to rise and look. Once I was drawn
some distance round the corner of a copse, and there, low in the sable-blue
of the sky, in a rivalry of intense but dazzling light, the crescent moon hung
splendid over against a great constellation which glittered like a carcanet of
diamonds. They seemed to speak together as if in some scene or passage of
celestial drama, nor did I know which was the diviner speech, the moon's
unwavering effulgence or that leaping coruscation of the stars. Nothing
stirred on the right hand or the left, but earth and air were hushed, as if
before that colloquy all sound and motion were miraculously holden. Tall
trees brown with densest shadows were massed upon one side, obscuring
half the heaven, and lending by their contrasted gloom that sense of
wizardry in natural things which enchants the clear summer nights when the
air is still.
This is but one among many visions of which the remembrance makes life
worshipful; and it is pity that at the hour of their coming well-nigh all
whom they should delight lie chambered within brick walls, lost in sleep or
in the mazes of unprofitable thoughts. For these things in their rare
appearances are more precious than an hour's slumber, were it dreamless as
a child's, or all the watches of luxurious unrest. If another summer is given
me I hope to take the road when July has come with balmy nights, and
wander days at a stretch with all I need upon my shoulders. Then I shall
know the real joy of vagrancy, caring little where night finds me, and
quickening my steps for nothing and for no man. I shall linger in every
glade or on every hill-top which calls to me to stay; I shall tell all the
hedgerow flowers, and lean over the gates to watch the foals playing. The
brooks shall be my washing-basins, and I shall quench hunger and thirst in
the tiled kitchens of lonely farmsteads. If I hear the shriek of a train I shall
smile when I think of its cooped and harried passengers, and plunge devious
into some pathless wood, in whose depths the only sounds are the tap of the
woodpecker's bill or the measured axe-strokes of the woodman. I shall fling
myself down to rest under what tree I will, and pulling from my pocket the
book of my choice, I shall summon a wise and cheerful companion to my

side as easily as ever oriental magician called a jinn to do him service. I
shall once more be commensal with wild creatures, and wonder that
solitude was ever a pain; I shall be healthily disdainful of the valetudinarian
who lives to spoil either his body or his soul.
These are the wanderings which henceforward will chiefly suffice to my
need. For since I roamed my fill in other continents the gadfly may no
longer sting me out of my tranquil haunts. In their youth lonely people
suffer more than others from that restlessness which fills the mind with
sudden distaste for the present scene, and a fierce longing to be somewhere
far away. Others are preserved from it by the love of home; but we, in our
poverty of attachment, listen more readily to the depreciating voice.
I remember how deep had always been my longing to look out upon the sea
from some Greek island, and how one day, when this desire was granted,
and I walked along hills set high above the blue Ægean, I was seized with
an instant yearning to be instead upon Ranmore Common in Surrey. Yet at
that moment a life's ambition was being fulfilled; I stood in a scene of
incomparable beauty, gazing down on those deep azure waters whose voice
is always to me as a lament for wandering Odysseus; the lower slopes were
rich with olive trees, powdering with silver the tilled lands round a beautiful
monastery lying there in its enchanted rest. Dark cypresses rose amid white
walls of villages, by the contrast of their gloom making all bright colours
glorious; away to the left, where the shore verged westward tracing
inimitable curves between field and sea, lay slumbering a little white town
with minarets and walled gardens and tiny haven—a very place for
Argonauts; and yet my thoughts turned to the chalk downs of England and
honeysuckle crowning the unfruitful hollies. Sed quia semper abest quod
aves praesentia temnis;—Such desire has distracted Roman minds; the
perversity is very old; and perhaps only children find no disillusion in the
accomplishment of a dream.
For our feet have one country and our dreams another, and there is no
constancy in us. It is not alone in the bartering of one earthly scene for its
fellow that we suffer the sick thirst of change; but into the rarest hour of
achieved ideal to which hope promised her supreme satisfaction, the same
wayward longing will often find a way; as in a sacred place amid the purest
and most exquisite meditations of the soul, there will suddenly flit

inexplicable shadows of irreverence, with echoes of incongruous voices
from the abandoned world.
But now as the years pass and the penury of human love has made the home
woods and fields more dear, I feel that this unrest is drawing to its end. For
as the seasons pass over the uplands and the meadows, clothing them with
new splendours between the seed-time and the harvest, no vision rises upon
the memory dearer and more beneficent than theirs. As the lover's fancy
dwells upon the image of his beloved in this or that environment, and thus
or thus arrayed, so I see the woods and fields in the various glories of the
year and know not in which garb I love them best. They have heard my
laments, my confidences, all my broken resolves: they are bound to me by
so pure and intimate an affection that all those grander wonders of the
world should never draw me again from this allegiance. Not for the vision
of Himalaya piercing the heaven, or the sunsets of Sienna, or the moonlight
on the Taj Mahal, or for any other beauty or any wonder shall I weary of the
cornfields framed in elms or the great horses turning in the furrow against
the evening sky.
For with the growth of years our desires wander less, and are mercifully
contracted to the scope of our wearying powers. We haunt the same old
places and want the same old things, dwelling amongst them with an
increasing constancy of devotion. For we find that year by year the old
places and things are not really the same; something has touched them in
our absence; strange still agencies have intervened, long silences of
dissolution and the ineluctable fate of change. And so that perfect sameness
which we find unattainable takes on the quality of ideal and demands the
grown man's devotion, as the change that is forbidden casts its resistless
spell over the guarded and tethered child. The eyes of youth are on the far
end of the vista, those of age upon the near; the old horse that has drawn the
coulter through the clay is glad for the four hedges of the paddock which irk
the growing colt's desire. When Richard Jefferies was asked why he walked
the same lane day after day, at first he was at a loss for a reply; but
gradually the reason became clear to him. It was because he had become
aware of the iron law: Nothing twice: he wanted the same old and loved
things not twice but endlessly; he was yearly more eager to be with them,
and paint indelibly upon his memory their delicate quiet beauty, their soft
and perishable charm.

That is how I also feel, as with the return of summer I wander out into the
old meadows and climb the familiar hills; I find myself hoping that nothing
is changed, and am stirred with sweet anxieties of reminiscence. And surely
within the enchanted boundaries of the counties where I ramble, there is
variety which not the hundred eyes of Argus could exhaust. These fields
and woodlands in high summer feast all the senses with a surfeit of delights.
How good it is to exercise in all its range the fine mechanism of the body,
suffering each part of it to indulge its own hunger after beauty; to feel the
texture of petals, and draw the long grasses through the fingers; to breathe
an air laden with the scent of blossoms, passing from uplands fragrant with
bean-flowers into untilled regions odorous with pines; to hear the birds'
chorus at sunrise and the distant sound of reaping; to see innumerable
marvels; the belts of clover mantling wine-dark in the wind; the poppies in
the standing corn, the carmine yew-stems on the downs; above you the soft
grey clouds delicately floating; below you, as the day declines, some distant
lonely water emerging in its glory to be the mirror and refuge of all
heaven's light; to remember the gorse and broom and look forward to the
royal purple of the heather—all this is a consummation of pure life, a high,
sensuous pleasure penetrating to the inmost soul, and of such exceeding
price that to disdain its offerings or to pass incurious before them, is to live
in the blindness of the tribe of Genseric.
In such wanderings the mind is filled with slow and seasonable thoughts,
lasting as the trees and buildings of the country-side. Old deliberate
contemplations, perceptions after long regard ingathered from abundant
nature, theories leisurely compacted in sunshine or storm, to stand in the
fields of memory, crowned with beauty by the indulgent years. So in the
visible meadows stand the ancient barns, with roofs of umber tiles parcel-
gilded with old gold of lichen, and crowning their seasoned timbers "as
naturally as leaves"; restful structures of a quiet age, capacious of dim
space, unvexed by the glare of a hundred summers.
And if you ask what profit is here for one who must do battle in the loud
world, study for a while the artifice and industrious policy of plants by
which they attract to themselves the visitants they need or with most
masterful defence repel the importunate advance, and you will return to the
societies of men, even to their parliaments, enriched with arts of prudence
beyond the practice of Machiavel. Examine the dog-rose upon the hedge,

how by putting forth thorns it raises itself to the light and ranges irresistible
along the leafy parapets; see how the flowers adapt their form and colour to
the convenience of the bee or the predilections of the bird; consider the
furze armed with spines against browsing muzzles, and be near when it
casts its seed wide upon the earth; and then say if among states or
governments there is a wiser economy or an intelligence more provident of
its end. I myself have the conceit that if time, revoking my sentence of
superannuation, should restore my lost years and add youth to the wisdom
learned along the hedges, even I, a very profitless weed, should not again so
uncivilly decay, but flower to another June and see my seed multiply around
me.
Perhaps, if that might be, I should strive to learn thoroughly, and bring
science to bear upon experience. But, as I am, classifications and
dissections are repellent to my fancy. I cannot get to the hearts of flowers by
any Linnæan approach, but go rather by the old animistic way, still
honoured by Milton through his Genius of the Woods:

"When evening
gray doth rise I
fetch my round,
Over the mount
and all this
hallowed ground,
And early, ere the
breath of odorous
morn
Awakes the
slumbering
leaves."

So I greet the blossoms of hill and upland and water-meadow, knowing
them all by their country names, and sometimes fancying that they know
me back: all that is lacking is the tutelary power to guard their growth and
prolong their bright and fragrant lives. What fine old names they have, great
with the blended dignities of literary and rural lore; archangel, tormentil,
rosa solis or sun-dew, horehound, Saracen's wound-wort, melilot or king's
clover, pellitory of Spain! I cannot coldly divide so fine a company into
bare genera and species, but imagine for them high genealogies and
alliances by an imaginative method of my own: to me the lily and the onion
shall never be connections.
If I must read books on flowers, I take down such a one as Nicholas
Culpeper's Complete Herbal, written from "my house in Spitalfields next
the Red Lion, September 5th, 1653." For here is a man who attempers
science with the quaintest fancies after the manner of his generation, and
delightfully misinterprets the real affinity of the flowers and the heavens.
"He that would know the operation of the herbs must look up to the stars
astrologically," says this master; and so to him briony is "a furious martial
plant," and brank ursine "an excellent plant under the dominion of the
moon." Of rosemary he says, "the sun claims privilege in it, and it is under
the celestial ram," and of viper's bugloss, "it is a most gallant herb of the
sun." The bay-tree rouses him to real eloquence, though not for Apollo's
sake. "It is a tree of the sun and under the celestial sign of Leo, and resists

witchcraft very potently, as also all the evils that old Saturn can do to the
body of man; for neither witch nor devil, thunder nor lightning will hurt a
man in the place where a bay-tree is."
Reading in this old book of the ordinance and virtues of the familiar herbs, I
escape from the severities of botanical science into a maze of queer fancies,
well suited to those retrospective hours when we love best what we least
believe. And by the pleasant suggestion of astrology I am led on to
contemplate the starry heavens, which I do in the ancient pastoral way,
peopling them with mythical forms and connecting them with the
seasonable changes of rustic toil. I forget for the moment all the discoveries
of Copernicus and Kepler, and see eye to eye with Cleostratus of Tenedos
who nightly watched the stars from the sacred slopes of Ida.
Much as the companionships of nature have meant for me, I would not have
any man content himself with these alone. It is not right to live the slave of
Pales, or become the rhapsode of docks and nettles. To be all for the lower
life, were it the fairest, is derogation; and Har and Heva before they may
enter into their kingdom of the flowers must first be fallen spirits. But
continually in the interludes of human endeavour to rebathe the mind at
these clear wells does indeed exceedingly purify and strengthen against the
returning and imminent encounter. Those long retreats at Walden may not
often be repeated, for man is either risen too high or too far fallen to live
well in the sole company of animals and flowers. What sociologists call the
consciousness of kind is as vital to man as the consciousness of self; and to
pine for adoption into an alien kind is vain on this side transmigration.
Not seldom my wanderings in town and country lead me to quiet
churchyards, or to those vast cemeteries where the living have established
the dead in avenues and streets of tombs after their drear suburban fashion.
Solitude has ever persuaded to the contemplation of death, and in these
silent places I feel no shock of sadness but am rather possessed by a
familiar spirit of peace. As I wander from path to path, my fancy is not
lamed by mournful thoughts, but finds suggestion amid the poor laconic
histories by which these headstones appeal to him that passes by.
It is with most men a natural desire to take their last rest in some green
God's acre, far from the smoke and turmoil of towns, lying in a fair space

amid a small company, where there is a wide prospect of tilled lands, and
the reapers cut the swathes against the very churchyard wall. And this is my
most usual aspiration; yet there are times when I would not shrink in
thought from the Valley of Ezekiel, and would be content to be written a
mere number in some city of the dead, where at last after all the loneliness
of life I should no longer be kept apart, but be gathered to my fellows where
they lie in their thousands, and be received a member of their society. And
though I well know that it matters not a cummin-seed whether my bones are
washed to and fro on the bed of the sea or my ashes cast to the winds of
heaven, yet I humour this fancy, and find a quiet pleasure in the thought that
death at least may end this isolation.
And what if the propinquity of these poor remains be gage and promise of a
sympathy of souls unveiled and unhidden by false semblances of the body?
Then should death indeed be the crown of a long desire and give me at the
last the fellowship into which life denied initiation. Surely, as Coleridge
dreamed, there is a sex in souls, which, disengaged from the coarse
companionship of the flesh, shall see into each other's crystal deeps.
Thence, in new life, when the last recondite secret is withholden no longer,
there shall come forth those qualities and powers that ennobled man and
woman in mortality; they shall come forth in all their several strength and
beauty, divinely animate, and reflecting upon each other bright rays and soft
colours invisible upon these misty oceans of our navigation.
It is not terrible to think, at times, on death, for that danse macabre which
troubled the fancy of our forefathers is now danced out, and the silent figure
that knocks at every door comes not as a grinning skeleton but as one of
more gentle countenance than any art can express. The natural change,
which to William Blake was but the passing out of one room into another, is
well personified in the merciful figure with the kind eyes, coming at the
sounded hour to lead away into quietness. My solitude has taught me to
know well those noble efforts which art has made to lift from our bowed
backs the burden of the fear of death: I like to look upon that youthful
Thanatos carved upon a column from the temple of the Ephesian Diana, and
every year the red leaves of autumn persuade my steps to that village rich in
elms where lived one who also saw death so, and laboured to draw the
frightened eyes of men from the hour-glass and the skull to the gracious
vision of the deliverer and friend. There hands which were dear to him have

raised a place of leave-taking upon a green slope, a house of farewell set
upon the shore to receive the last pledges from the living to the absolved
and unburdened dead.
When first I saw Compton it was a cloudless noon in August, the day of
days in which to come alone into this silent place. Out of the fiery heat
beaten from wall and path like a blinding spray of light, it is a passage into
a dimness of cool space, an air glaucous as the shade of olives. There from
the circuit of a dome look down kind faces of immortal youth, in form and
habit too tranquil for our life, but made homely to us by the mercy in their
eyes, and some quality of the white soft hands which draws all weariness
and all pain towards them. To me it was as though some furious struggle in
the waves were over, and swooning out of life I had awakened upon a floor
of translucent ocean, where, in a gracious and tempered light, beings of a
compassion too intense for earth, each with a gesture that was not yet a
touch, were charming all the bruises of the lost battle away. Surely this is
true vision of things to come, and to such mercy we shall awaken. It cannot
be that when the eyes reopen they shall see the forms of dark apparitors, or
that the ears shall hear Æacus and Rhadamanthys speaking in dim halls
their cold, irrevocable dooms. No, but there shall be a pause and respite
upon the way from one to another life, and none may be conceived more
grateful than this rest, as it were a sojourn beneath waters of Eunoë, where a
flood of dear memories foreboding good shall absolve us from the mortal
sin of fear.

Turning back over these pages, I am conscious that I have failed to give real
experiences their proper life. Describing solitude I have been dull; I have
fixed the rushing flames of emotion in poor flamboyant lines. I have written
far more than any reader but yourself will have cared to follow; but now at
any rate the confession is over, and in the future I shall work, and use my
sight for a worthier end than introspection. It has been said that the tale of
any life is interesting if sincerely told; and it may be that the most ordinary
lives have the advantage, because it is the common experience which
touches most hearts. For the greater part mine has been a common life,

unglorified by hazards in the field, or bright fulfilment of ambition; it had
been better for its peace if it might wholly have kept the comfortable, usual
way.
I sometimes wonder whether the printing of these pages will reveal to me
any kinsmen in affliction, for such there must be going westward alone, and
I wish that for a moment we might foregather as we pass, to compare the
marvels of our isolation. Then perhaps I might be urged to higher effort,
hearing stories more pitiful than mine, tales of silent courage under ban of
excommunion to shame me from the very thought of despair. Poets have
metaphorically given colours to souls; mine, I feel, is only grey, the
common hue of shadows; but it was steeped in gloom by a veritable pain
and evils really undergone. And as I reflect upon what I have written, and
try to imagine it read by some brisk person utterly content with life, I can
well understand that the whole thing would appear to him incredible, too
preposterously strange for belief, a rigmarole of sick fancies beyond the
power of hellebore. So be it: I expect small comprehension and no mercy,
for indeed I have written caring little for such consequence, yielding to that
human thirst for utterance which only confession can slake; as one eases
pain by a moan though there are none to hear it. It is not altogether a
grateful task. For hardly, and then only in a fortunate hour, to one whose
years and feelings have been interwoven with his own, will even a healthy
man tell the tale of his hidden emotion; and mine is the deeper reticence of
a habit which has ever held closely to the recipe of fernseed. To entrust a
confidence to one of unproven sympathy, is to risk a profitless
embarrassment. It has been most truly said that both parties to such
impulsive avowals, whenever they afterwards meet, must feel a constraint
as of confederacy in misdemeanour.
I have hope that though I came late to the steady labour of the vineyard, I
may yet earn my wage and begin the new day with the rest. Like Joseph
Poorgrass I can now almost regard my diffidence as an interesting study,
and agree with the rustic man of calamities that destiny might have made
things even worse. Certainly the pain grows less fierce; I can go more
readily among my fellows for all but social ends. For those who live much
apart learn at last to see men not as individuals but in groups: to them it is
the type which counts, the forma specifica per formam individualem
translucens, of which the scholastic jargon speaks. Those with whom I

come in casual contact appear to me now in a vague, diffused light like the
atmosphere of some other world. Dwelling upon none with the eyes of
intimacy, and passing swiftly from this to that, I find each but the harmless
variant of a species; if I lingered or came too near, doubtless old
apprehensions would oppress me still. It is a disadvantage of this outlook
that the fascination of detail is lost, and that I have less sense for the
personal in life. But if I grow old I shall regain the interest in particular
things and persons with which age is consoled amid many miseries; for
while youth grows earnest over some riddle of high art or the occultation of
Aldebaran, age is happily absorbed in the arrangement of a room or
discussing the destinies of a single household.
Meanwhile, though uncongenial to my kind as entering little into their
pleasures, I like to be near them in their grief or happiness, standing
unnoticed in the wind of their fortune's wheel. At least I am not soured or
malevolent, and when there is dancing toward, I am in the crowd upon the
margin of the green. I have abandoned social obligations because I am
unfitted to perform them well, and society high and low exists by their
cheerful fulfilment. But I no longer rail at social law or decline to see
anything but evil in conventions devised by the wisdom and refinement of
centuries. If I refuse invitations and leave calls unpaid, it is because I am
socially bankrupt: were I solvent I should redeem all debts.
I decline therefore to denounce Chesterfield and deify Thoreau: there was
exaggeration in both men, and though my sympathies are rather with the
recluse of Walden pond, it is quite probable that Chesterfield was the more
useful of the two. I am a bad player, I have not the high spirits or the
conversational skill which each should contribute to the social game. And in
almost any sport the incompetent confer a benefit by standing out: at least,
that is the opinion which I hear the average player express. If I lived in the
backwoods where any guest is welcome, it might be my duty to act
differently. But my ways are cast in places where there is no need for social
press-gangs, and the highways and hedges are left unsearched. If therefore
by abstention I gain a qualified peace for myself, and confer positive benefit
on others, I may go my way without serious reproach.
And I did wisely not to marry, for I should have clung too closely to my
study for the happiness of any woman. I once saw an advertisement in the

newspaper inserted by a discontented young wife whose husband was a
recluse and would not take her out of evenings. She wanted to communicate
with congenial people, and, like a desperate sailor marooned, was driven to
wave her signal in the sight of the casual eye. This frank confession of
abandonment made a profound impression upon me. I thought to myself,
"Master recluse, you are a pilferer and have filched a life. I am yet more
solitary in my estate, and if I followed your example, should be guilty of a
greater wrong." There are, indeed, hours when I feel embittered at the
thought that for one innocent defect a whole life should be amerced of joy;
the finality of loss appals: all is so irrevocable; le vase est imbibé, l'étoffe a
pris son pli. Avoided not without cause by those who were my natural
associates, I grow impenetrable of access, and even in my own family
unfamiliar. The resentment that welled up in the man who told the story of
Henry Ryecroft obtains the mastery, and I feel one in spirit with that lonely
analyst of disillusions. Sometimes a worse darkness gathers round, till I
long for one of those intense and all-absorbing creeds which somehow seem
to tend the brightest hearth-fires which earth knows: for philosophy, though
it invented the void, never built a little Gidding.
It is then that I feel like the suppliant of the old Babylonian prayer, "one
whose kin are afar off, whose city is distant," and all that appears before my
sight is one scroll of wrongs which this evil heritage has inflicted upon me.
It has made my best years rich in misery; it has cut me off from marriage; it
has compelled me, one hating vain complaint, to live querulously in the
optative mood. Neither poverty nor sickness could chastise more heavily;
for poverty is strong in numbers and sickness rich in sympathy, but
diffidence reaps laughter and is alone. When such thoughts win dominion
over the mind I could envy what sufferer you will his most awful
punishment. For in his agony be sure there is movement and action; his
limbs are torn, yet he is dragged onward: by his very writhing in the bonds
he confesses his life. But I lie in some dead waste where nothing moves and
all is mist without horizon, lost in an abhorred blankness of dismay to
which no positive suffering may be likened. Thither comes no fierce
provocation to quicken into Promethean scorn; life lies whelmed in
blackness unlit by flashes of defiance or the cold splendour of disdain.
Empedocles once described his dream of retribution for the last unutterable
offence. For thrice ten thousand years the sinner roams estranged from

bliss, taking all mortal shapes, wearing with tired feet all the sad ways of
life. Æther sweeps him out to Ocean, Ocean casts him naked on the shores
of Earth, Earth hurls him upward to the flames of Helios, and he, relentless,
spurns the victim back to Æther, that the dread cycle may begin anew. But
to be for ever driven in this majestic whirl of change, to receive the
chastisement of all elements and survive unbroken for a new revolution of
the wheel, this is but an assurance of the very pride of life, it is the charter
of an invincible manhood. The doom which in truth befits the unutterable
sin is rather the blank pain without accident or period, without point or
salience to draw from stunned nature her last energies of resentment. It is
well for me that this misery is short-lived, and that either by thinking on
that ideal love I know the miracle of the twenty-ninth sonnet, or, struggling
with instant effort out of the toils, try to see myself as I appear to others,
one who should scorn to sit in thirst when there are wells yet for the
seeking.
It is a strange life to lead in this pleasureful world; and if when it is over I
were condemned to live again, coming like Er the Armenian to that meadow
where the lots are thrown down for each to choose his own, I am already
decided what character I should elect to play. I should neither cast myself
for a protagonist's part nor again for that of a dumb actor in those
backgrounds I know too well; but just for a plain manly character, strong to
face all fortunes and rich in troops of friends. There should be no more
evasion or dreary wrestling of mind with body; but life should move to a
restrained harmony, and no elusive wind should carry half the music away.
As for what remains of this present dispensation, I shall know how to
endure, trusting that the years may fade finely, like the figures in an old
tapestry, and that the end may come to me as to the old gentleman in Hans
Christian Andersen's story of the Old House. And I have this advantage over
other men, that while they have the whole cornucopia to lose, I can but be
deprived of the dregs in its pointed end. For in what can there be further
punishment? On others, men of happy pasts, dismay may fall as the ways
are darkened before them. But surely I shall be of good cheer as I come into
the land of the fierce old robber Age; for, stripped long since by a more
subtle and insatiate despoiler, I shall possess nothing of worth to draw his
covetousness upon me. So many joys did my very youth renounce; so many
pleasures the Harpies swept from my place at the spread board of life; such

gags and fetters held me while others danced and sang, that I was the sad
familiar of evil fortune before my companions were acquainted with her
name. That leaden weight which brings others low, by a nice adjustment of
the scales shall raise me for the first time to their equality. And then, as one
experienced in bereavements, of themselves they may seek my company;
and I, so long the useless and estranged, may become at the close their
helpful counsellor.
If only that might be; if only upon the verge of night I might redeem by
usefulness my lost unserviceable day. Then this grey life, so long sole and
intrinsical to itself, should glow at last with some reflection of the sunset;
once more I should know young ardours imagined lost and devotions
miraculously born again.
You will still encounter me now and then, moving absently through the
crowd, or wandering in some green place, as in the garden of the
Luxembourg Vauvenargues used to meet the wounded of the great battle,
keeping apart in the narrower walks, and leaving the broad central ways for
lighter feet than theirs. He often longed to have speech with them; but
always they turned away, with the proud self-sufficiency of the
disillusioned. Perhaps if he had succeeded he would have found that to
some of them life had its consolations not unlike mine, and that they could
still regard it as something more than a friendly process of detachment. But
it is not our habit to expand; we are ever held back by the occult pride
which the same soldier-philosopher has assigned to one of his imaginary
characters, "cette fierté tendre d'une âme timide, qui ne veut avouer ni sa
défaite, ni ses espérances, ni la vanité de ses vœux."

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