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ALTHEA.

ALTHEA
A SECOND BOOK OF DIALOGUES
OAW ASP/ACA 7TWONS AAWD DUTYES
BY
VERN ON LEE
^) * º .*~~~
22. e”, 2. ºce-C&&.
‘‘Ye are the salt of the earth : but if the salt have lost his savour, where with
shall it be salted ? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be
trødden under foot of men.”—MATTHEw v. 13.
LONDON
OSGOOD, McILVAINE & CO.
45, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
I894
[All rights reserved J
TO
C. A. T.
CONTENTS.
The Value of the Z72dividual
Orpheus in Rome t
On Friendship
About the Social Question
The Spiritual Life
The Use of the Soul
PAGE
49
. IOS
. I 55
. 223
. 267
crº-3
* D - le - 4.2.
*t 24-oo
INTRODUCTORY.
A volume of dialogues similar to these, which I collected
some eight years ago, was prefaced by an elaborate
account of a personage called Baldwin. Re-reading
those pages Żust now, as a prelimzānary to prefacing
this new set of dialogues, / find to may surprise that the
only information about him which I am called to add
Žs that this shadowy personage, about whose rea/
existence and identity / once seemed so certain, has
ceased to exist. Those readers who guite properly leave
the preface to the last, will here interrupt with the state-
ment that they have met Baldwin in every one of these
dialogues ; that is true, but it does not prevent his
having ceased to exist. For Baldwin has departed this
vague life of reality—reality which is vague because it is
complex and shifting—to reappear in the clear, solid
existence of imaginary beings; of those typical repre-
sentatives of tendencies and ideas who are so consol-
ingly consistent; and who stand (being undisturbed by
X INTRODUCTORY.
vital processes) as gentle and spirited as a saddler's
wooden horse, that horse which forever paws without
moving, for the better display of intellectual harness
and trappings. More plainly but less intelligiö/y : ziz j
these new dialogues Baldwin is employed merely to ex-
press a portion of my own motions, those particularly
zwhich / find it least easy to attribute to the other lay |
figures which I have roughly fashioned, for my greater
pleasure, in the approximate likeness of certain of my|
friends. For although it has been needful occasionally
to push ideas to consequences which / have had to set
other dramatis personae or my docile, unreal Baldwin
to combat, nay, even sometimes to copy from other
showmen’s boxes a spiritual puppet for which / had no
model, yet, taken as a whole, the ideas and tendencies
distributed among may half-dozen speakers are may own
Żdeas and tendencies, various, shifting, but never really
conflicting. So that the whole of a dialogue, the various
parts united or òalanced, will give the 2mpressions,
fluctuating, consecutive, but consistent, which / find in
my mind or my note-book on the subject, say, of human
intercourse, of the social question, or of what I have
ventured to ca/Z by the venerable or desecrated name
of Spiritual life. Thus much to foresta/Z such readers
as might complain that certain important views of a
sučject, to wit, their own, have been misinterpreted or
omitted in these dialogues : if misinterpretation or
INTRODUCTORY. xi
omission there be, it is no trick of discussion, but the
result of a regrettable incapacity to realize characters
and attitudes too far removed from may own.
I have said that Baldwin–the real, living Aa/a/wzn
of the book named after him—has ceased to exist.
Baldwin has died because, like certain insects, he was
organized to live only a few days. He belonged, like
many of our dead Selves, of the youthful predecessors of
our identity, to a genus of ephemera which require are!
universe without rain, wind, or frost, Žn fact, made on
purpose for them ; for the lack of which they suffer
/horribly, and after brief draggling and fluttering,
speed:/y decease ; die, to resuscitate 712ost often, alas (the
reverse in this of butterflies), as some humbler Á2nd of
creature, less devoted to sunshine, ſ/zore agreeable to mud.
By this / would imply that a reader of my earlier
dialogues will find in these new ones a good deal which
directly contradicts them, and, what is more important,
a different attitude towards the world and things : the
difference there must necessarily be between the attitude
of youth and the attitude of maturer life. But I do
not wish to suggest that, if I could, I would alter or
withdraw any portion of may former dialogues. It
would surely be a pity if the earlier thought of any
sincere mind Öecame inaccessible to others, since what
zve all require are companions ºn thinking, guite as
much as teachers of thought, and youth is, perhaps, the

xii INTRODUCTORY.
truest companion for youth. Moreover, it is only
through the comparison of my two books together (and
this is may reason for reverting to my former volum
with such seeming egoism), through the comparison of
what I thought and felt zwith zwhat I think and feel, that
I can achieve zwhat I greatly have at heart, namely : to
point out one road, at least, along whicſ, we modern
men and women may reach serenity of mind after the
zºn.comfortable resting-places of our youthful thought.
For, in the youth of many of als, there 7/lay have been
self-satisfaction in abundance, but certainly spiritual
satisfaction of no other sort; and some of us, professed
unbelievers, have traversed sloughs of despond by no
means inferior to those of the orthodox. On/y, with
the significant difference, that while oºr fathers made
themselves wretched about their unworthiness in the eyes
of God, we latter-day religious ſolé suffered sincere
7/aisery for the opposite reason : the universe and its
arrangements dissatisfied man. My speech is not iron-
ical, nor have I followed some of may friend's back into
wnsatisfactory orthodoxy, into acquiescence with the un-
intelligible and barbarously odious, from irritation
at the painful things, the darkness revealed by
reason. On the contrary, it seems to ſee that increased
thoughtfulness and experience ought to make such
2ntellectual apostasy more difficult, by showing the un-
reasonableness, the exaggerated personality, the childish
INTRODUCTORY. xiii
expectation that all things should be arranged to suit our
likings, z0/hich is always at the back of it. I cannot
sympathºse with such apostasy, but I can sympathize
with much that went to produce it. I have suffered
the spiritua/7/zisery of those zwho have zweighed and found
wanting, and no ſmore than they, no more than 1/2) former
Self can I get ſtoral satisfaction from the contemplation
of the universe, óe the showman thereof an intellectual
exquisite like Emerson or a mystical sensualist like
Włężmzazz. May, I should zwis/, //Mat in reading these
dialogues, readers aſkin to myself might little by little
come to guess, as / came to guess z0/zle ZUriting them,
whence this inevitable spiritual discomfort in our prot-
£mate past, and why it 7/27/sº be difficult for any of us
contemporaries to arrive at once at the secret of spiritual
peace, at the knowledge that we 77tust seek for 1/loral
Sačis/action only 27, ourselves.
One half of this explanation must be sought for in
the fact that we have all of us, however unorthodox,
Öeen nourished on theological motions and ideals;
'nay, that it may take generations, even among the least
/a/apered by the zworld’s older religions, before other
notions and ideals have become organic in young minds.
Besides, it is almost inevitable that we should first look
found at the world and things in the selfsame spirit,
the spirit of immaturity, of which, throughout the cen-
tºries, the theological motions, standards, and ideals
xiv. º INTRODUCTORY.
have been the expression. We begin life, inevitably,
knowing so little of anything besides ourselves, that,
though the expression seems paradorical, we can know
even ourselves only very slightly; for knowledge means
comparison, and what is there to compare with ? Hence,
we ſtatura/y imagine Zhat everything is made for als,
and that everything not made for us (if so be that
anything is) must &e made in our image. This, you may
impatiently eacclaim, is the modus operandi of savages
and children , it is well known and obvious, so why talk
about it 2 Because, so far as / can see, it is not suff:-
cient/y admitted that it is also the modus operandi of
most grown up so-called civilized fo/#, and has been of
all established religions. There is nothing in the world
but me, nothing at least of any importance, that is the
ðeginning ; nothing not for me, is the next step, no-
thing not like me, whence class arrangements, domes-
tic and international morality, and the desire to reduce
all persons to the same conduct and opinions ; whence,
by a natural inversion, if I am for a some one greater
than myself, evidently that some one must be like me
too, so that the motion thał żhe universe is made solely
for the delectation of man becomes tempered with the
corresponding notion that man is made solely for the
%
delectation of God, delectation taking the very strange
forms we all Ānow, the same, if we look them in the
face, as the satisfactions which man, sometimes bene-
INTRODUCTORY. XV
volent, sometimes cruel, and always vain, extracts
from his fellow creatures. And now, when to many
persons there can no longer be a guestion of a Godhead
for whose satisfaction man is put through his many
antics, it very naturally follows. . . . But we are still
so theological that to put the thought into words would
horrify us with the sense of Ölasphemy. We should not
zelish &eing discussed so freely ourse/ves.
Briefly, we suffer terribly, many of us, from what is
in reality mere youthful egoism projected into the region
of spiritual things, where egoism is least expected.
Pain, impurity, the various forms of cruelty and injus-
tice implied in death and life and birth, afflict us in a
particular way, guite apart from the share of suffering
they bring us, or from the share of responsibility we
have in them, they distress us as outrage to our ideals,
that is to say, as false notes, horrible, hideous passages
all out of £une, in the great symphony of cause and
effect which the universe is playing, and playing, as we
candidly take for granted, for our enjoyment. AVozy
this is but a form of that ingenuous selfishness
which embitters vain and covetous persons, when they
discover that the world's attention or properties are
not exclusively for them, which makes girls despair of
love and young men of work, because love is not as inez-
haustible, work as fruitful as in the universe—made
Iike Omar K.Åayya/z's, accórding to their hearts' desire
xvi INTRODUCTORY.
—of which the real one ought to be a faithful copy.
Poor people, inevitably foolish, inevitably wretched, our
adversaries, our friends, ourselves /
Yet in this furthest expansion of our youthful grasp-
Žngness, in this transcendent expectation and disappoint-
ment, there is, or ought to be, the rudiment of some ,
zwisdom, and happiness, since to be 2/n/appy about the
universe, to be pained at abstract evil, to suffer in our
ideals, £mplies the possibility at least of not &eing wholly
engrossed with fleshpots and vanities. May, such
spiritual suffering implies the probability of our having
attained to some life wider than our own, more fertile
of happiness than the cramped and cabined life of the
772ere ego.
For the sweetness of life is quickly exhausted if we
seek only to find and consume it, it is pretty welliner.
haustible if we work, however little, to increase it. For
2mmense as are the claims of our selfishness, our powers
of selfish enjoyment are singularly limited, we zwear
ourselves out in the solitude of ambition, of vanity, of
covetousness, of emotional graspingness, even as of
grosser instincts; and require for our renewal the
fruitful contact of our thoughts and wishes with the
necessities of others. Hence the despair of men /ike
Byron and Baudelaire, the aridity of spiritual egoists,
Ánowing no soul except their own, like Pascal.
If the following pages be of any use, it will be
INTRODUCTORY. xvii
//lain/y inasmuch as they show that personal serenity is
achieved guite unconscious/y in the process of wondering
what may be our duties to others ; not the serenčy of .
Özº the serenity of satisfaction with one's own lot in the
world, of one's own powers and opportunities of being
happy, due to the constant zwish that those powers and
opportunities of happiness be extended to others.
For this reason / have made the discussions which -
|
21% ſold my thoughts revolve no longer round the figure
called Baldwin, identified in my mind with so much
that belonged to an earlier stage of my thought, to so
777tuch affirmation zwhich seemed the reaction against in-
evitable doubt, to so match resignation zwhich savoured
very largely of despair. I have taken as central figure
in these dialogues one of those rare natures so strangely !
balanced that they recognize truth as soon as they see Zł; |
and who, never making many claims for themselves,
never go through the disappointment which underlies
most Weltschmertz; matures which énow spontaneously
what the rest of us learn by experience and reflection ;
fortunate samples of zwhat we may perhaps all become,
but, for that very reason, incapable of serving as guides
in the difficult way of becoming it.
Althea is naturally the pupil of Baldwin, for, being
all she is by the mere grace of God, she is, at first
inarticulate, unreasoning, ignorant of all why and
ſ
|
.
.
|
-7
xviii | INTRODUCTORY.
| 20herefore, and requires to be taught many things which
others know. But, once having learned the names, so
to speak, of her instincts, the premisses of her unconscious
arguments, she becomes, as necessarily, the precursor of
many of Baldwin’s Öest thoughts, the perfecter of most
of them. Her notions and decisions require to be dis-,
puted or explained only by natures more complex, more
struggling, less fortunate than herself; to be tempered
ây characters better acquainted zwith zweakness and
sorrow, capable of bringing the element which is wanted
to make love of truth and of justice efficient, mere love
of the creatures who suffer and strive, of the creatures
who can help and be he/ped.
Of the real Baldwin, the Baldwin of my younger
ideas and aspirations, I have long since taken leave.
May / become worthy to live with my thoughts in the
£resence, always, of the other friends who surround
A/thea.
Maiano, near Florence,
May, I893.
| HE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL
I.
“I WANT you to explain,” said Althea, as the park
gate swung behind them, and they emerged into a
high-lying, half-reaped field, whence the big horses
were being led away in the distance, leaving the
stranded reaping-machines, with their sharp red pro-
file, grotesque against the pale sky—“Why are you
angry with these sort of people P You are quite
horrid about them ; and it bothers me, because I
always fancied you must be so just and liberal-minded
to everybody. Of course,” she added, shading her
eyes as she looked at the Sun-permeated masses of un-
reaped barley, yellow hazes of Stalks spiked with long,
stiff, interlacing beards, and at the shining stubble,
on which the great pale Corn-stooks stood, placid
and majestic, with Something, as she had remarked,
that reminded you of the Venus of Milo. “Of course
I seem to have no right to speak on the subject: I’m
B 2
4. ALTHEA.
so solitary, and rude, and unable to sympathize, and
people bore me so, and seem so much less real than
all these other things, the trees, I mean, and clouds,
and grass, and sheep, and lights and shadows. Of
course I am like that, but I’ve always thought it
must be because I’m selfish and stupid, and have
never been taught anything except to ride, and am
generally all wrong, you know, and so can't find out
the good in creatures. And I hoped you would
perhaps show me how to be different. But now it is
you who are harsh and impatient with these poor
people, who, after all, do care about some real things,
books and pictures, and outdoor things; and don't
think merely of titles, and carriage-horses, and
diamonds, and disgusting Stories about their neigh-
bours. And now I want you to explain why.”
“Why, what have I said against your friends P’’
said Baldwin, laughing. He had been thinking during
the last ten minutes, not at all of that particular set
of half-fashionable, half-artistic people ; but of this
strange and delightful creature by his side; of how
she gave one the impression, with her large, calm,
blond.beauty, and that mixture of unconscious moral
gravity and unconscious poetical vision, of being in
some odd way closely akin to the trees and grass,
and clouds and Sea, the real things of the world, as
she called them.
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 5
“You said they were parasites—funguses, that was
the word,” answered Althea, “ and I want to know
why.”
“I meant,” said Baldwin, “that these delightful
friends of ours, with the beautifully furnished houses,
and the beautifully furnished minds—full of all the
most desirable easy-chairs, and old brocade, and
Japanese toys, and exotic plants—that these charm-
ing, amiable creatures, for whose sake clever men are
clever, and pretty women pretty, are living, all this
while, off the spiritual effort of other folk; receiving
everything and giving nothing in return.”
“But everybody cannot be a genius—a Turner, or
a Ruskin, or a Browning. What right have you to
expect it of them P These creatures make the only
return they can : they appreciate the beautiful things
made by their betters. I don’t see why you should
call them names for that, poor things l’’
“I was not alluding to that,” replied Baldwin, “I
don't ask people to have faculties which they don’t
possess. I only ask them to make use of those they
have got. I was looking at these people from the
moral side rather than the intellectual.”
“They are not wicked; you yourself said there
were some of them quite good. I am sure they are
harmless,” answered Althea, with a slight inflexion
of contempt, as she took off her boating hat and
6 ALTHEA.
held it above her eyes, while looking vaguely into
the vague yellow Sunset.
“I don’t think they are harmless ; and I will show
you presently why. It's just because they are, as you
say, quite good, that they seem to me contemptible.
They are incapable of doing a nasty thing themselves,
nasty things have no attraction for them ; yet they
live surrounded by people who are perpetually doing
and saying nasty things, and they merely shrug their
shoulders and say ‘ there is a great deal that's good
in poor So-and-so after all.’ They are mischievous
because they tolerate in others what they would not
tolerate in themselves. That is the reason why I
despise them, Lady Althea.”
“And the reason why I am hard towards them,
perhaps harder than need be, almost,” went on
Baldwin, as they left the cornfields behind them,
the big beeches and isolated ash trees, and made
their way towards the sea, Althea's little brother hang-
ing on to her arm, and the fox terrier running on in
front; “the reason why I am hard to such creatures,
my dear Lady Althea, is that I occasionally experi-
ence the temptation of becoming such a one myself.
I find it so easy to look at only the good side of people
who amuse me, or have some merit or other. I am
angry with the slackness of certain folk, what they
call large-mindedness, because I feel it would suit my
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 7
laziness So well to be large-minded too. I assure you
I feel at times a shame within myself, an inordinate
respect and envy for people of cut-and-dried ideas,
and a certain narrowness of nature, like my cousin
Dorothy, who would simply turn away in detestation
of So much that I analyze, explain, condone ; to whom
Some creatures I tolerate would be simply repulsive.
I wish that I too were narrow, had not a certain
power of Sympathizing and making allowance, a
certain abominable adaptability to everthing that is
human.”
Althea stopped and turned her head, less like a
woman's, in its large placid beauty and intellectual
candour, than like that of some antique youth’s in
whose marble effigy we fancy we recognize one of the
speakers of the Phaedo or the Euthyde/2us. She was
amused and incredulous, and determined to under-
stand.
“I don't know what you mean, Mr. Baldwin–do
you, Harry P” she added smiling, as she leaned her
arm on the shoulder of her brother, whose mind was
divided between this discussion, which delighted his
schoolboy logic, and the desire to investigate into the
rabbit-holes of the rough ground they were coming
to.
“You can’t think how often I have tried to get my-
self most virtuously into the state of mind you are
8 ALTHEA.
abusing so. You can't think how often I have felt
bound to defend people and things to other people who
seemed harsh, while I was just loathing them from
the bottom of my soul. Only the other day I was
trying to convince your cousin Dorothy that she was
horribly narrow-minded because she wanted to chuck
a certain book into the fire ; and then, when some-
body came and said, ‘Disapprove of that book of
Maupassant's how very narrow-minded !” I almost
threw the book at him and cried, “But I disapprove of
it just as much as Dorothy, I just abominate it.’
Formerly, when I used still to go into the world (you
know I only ride and go to picture-galleries now) I
used to make myself quite miserable because my
friends were not so indignant about people as I was
—I remember making the most awful efforts to find
out Some good qualities in a woman who complained
to me of the social degeneracy of Florence, because
in former days she never by any chance went to bed
before nine A.M., nor got up before five P.M. I sat
opposite and tried to persuade myself she was pro-
bably a very good mother, or a very good daughter,
or a very good something or other, feeling that I was
glaring at her all the time. Oh, Harry, don't you
remember I had taken you there to keep me in
countenance P In fact I really think,” added the girl,
“that the chief reason why I have become such a
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 9
solitary owl is that I suffered too much in hearing
people say the things they say in my set, and in try-
ing to make allowance and not be rabid with them.
And now you tell me this habit of understanding and
making allowance is a moral danger, and that people
who practise it are funguses.”
“Not so quick, my dear Lady Althea,” remon-
strated Baldwin, “as Pascal's Casuists say—Distin-
guo; such power of enduring, of making allowance, of
understanding ; such catholicity seems to me indeed
a great moral, and even, in a way, a great intellectual
danger. Yet it is a good, a necessary thing. Only
we must not allow it to eat us up, as (being more
akin to easy living, pleasant intercourse, variety of
experience, to all our moral laziness and intellectual
Small fry of pleasure) there is always a great likelihood
of its doing. Let us understand all things, by all
- means, but let not the comprehension thereof lead us
to toleration, as most often happens. The old saw,
‘Qui comprend tout, sait tout pardonner,’ is well and
good, in So far as understanding how nasty things
have come about undoubtedly leads us to contemplate
their metaphysical inevitableness. But to understand
ought to imply the perception, not merely of cause,
but also of effect; and the perception of certain
effects should make us pardon as little as we pardon
the tiger who may eat us up, the microbe that may
IO ALTHEA.
|
|
|
\
\
poison us, or merely any inanimate nuisance of which
we make short work. Cause makes us lenient and
Scientific ; effect makes us practical and relentless.
The desideratum is clearly that we should understand
all creatures, with a view to judging them, to separ-
ating Such part of them as is useful, pleasant, as
appeals to us (the mere commonest qualities of
humanity suggested by the fact that, like ourselves,
these creatures have a spine, arms and legs, father
and mother, and probably, therefore, certain common
human faculties also), to separating all this which is
good from such other as is evil, doing mischief, or
| tº * tº e g
constituting an obstacle. You are quite right in
thinking Dorothy narrow-minded for wishing to burn
“Bel Ami’; and you are quite right in being indignant
with the persons who can't see why ‘Bel Ami’ should
seem fit for burning. It seems to me that the very
reason for which we value Maupassant's genius and
straightſorwardness, namely, the use of such qualities
to society, must make us dislike his cynicism and
his foulness. After all, the reason which makes me
like the kernel of a walnut is the very reason which
makes me throw away the shell and the rind ; one is
good and another bad, therefore I must separate them.
A story goes among the people of Rome,” went on
Baldwin, as they walked over the brownish grass,
vivider green or yellow even in the little boggy hollows,
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. I I
and its ridges delicately marked with delicate tufts
of downy thistles, white and dim—“ a story which is
greatly to the point. One day Pope Sixtus was told
of a wonder-working crucifix, which was attracting
crowds to a certain church, and greatly glorifying
certain monks. Pope Sixtus went forthwith to the
church, knelt down, and devoutly said his prayers
before that crucifix. But then he sprang up, drew a
hatchet from under his robe, and chopping the
crucifix through and through, exclaimed, “Inasmuch
as Christ, I worship thee; inasmuch as wood, I hack
thee to bits,’ ‘Come Cristo, t' adoro; come legno,
ti spezzo.’ I don't think one could have a better
motto to go through life with than that one ; and
Some day, if ever I possess any knives and forks of
my own, I intend to have them engraved with the
crucifix and the hatchet, and the device, ‘Come
- Cristo, tº adoro ; come legno, ti spezzo.’”
“And are you going to hack us to bits, also,
Mr. Baldwin P’’ asked the boy, walking along with
his sister's arm on his shoulder, like one of the little
fauns who support a young god in Some antique
group.
“To hack to bits, certainly ; but also to adore.
You must not leave out that half of the business;
it's more important almost than the other.”
“But I don't yet understand,” said the girl, after a
I 2 ALTHEA.
pause, “how it all applies to those poor fungus
creatures. Why should they be expected to worship,
or to hack to pieces, either or both 2 Isn’t it enough
if they behave decently themselves P. They can't do
much good, perhaps; but, at least, they do no
harm.” *
“ Pardon me,” answered Baldwin, “ they could do
good, and they are doing harm. They are doing
harm in abetting, in fostering, by their silence, the
vices which they do not themselves practise, and
which they might, by their disapproval, diminish, in
however infinitesimal a degree. Every time that an
honest woman receives at her house a woman who is
not honest, because she is agreeable or good-looking,
or has got a good social position ; every time that an
honest man shows himself at his club with a man
who doesn’t pay his debts, or plays the Don Juan,
because that man is good company, or has some
official position or some artistic talent ; every time
that a man or a woman lets pass a word that slanders
a neighbour or throws doubt upon decent living ;-
every time that one of these things happens, there is,
for the moment, an honest man or woman the less in
the world ; a little more evil and a little less good
than there was before. And what is more, every
time that one of our harmless friends, as you con-
sider them, lets some more or less harmful creature
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. I3
go scot free, our harmless friend, now harmless no
longer, is guilty of what appears to me a very mean
trick—refusing to pay back to the future whatever
he owes to the good behaviour, the generous choice,
of the past. For every good we are permitted to enjoy,
every evil we are permitted to escape, is largely due
to the choice, easy or bitter, conscious or unconscious,
of the men and women of former days. The men
and women of former days P No, not merely upon
them, but upon the men and women of the present—
upon their own action, and their power of modifying
ours. For every evil committed or tolerated not
only does its own mischief, not only contaminates
with its example ; but diminishes the innocent free-
dom of harmless people, and fills their lives with
sacrifices, worries, Suspicion, and false positions.
Just think of the fearful waste of time, trouble, and
money, that is implied by the necessity of protecting
ourselves against thieves and cheats—may, merely
slovenly people ! Why, half the revenue of every
nation almost, and a large proportion of the produce
of every kind of industry, are wasted in paying
policemen, lawyers, overseers, and such-like. And
have you ever reflected that the restrictions placed
upon nearly all women's lives—restrictions upon their
studying, travelling, nay, in many countries, even
upon their freely walking about in broad daylight—
I 4 ALTHEA.
are due mainly to the fact that a certain number of
male cads are tolerated by society, high and low P
In fact, if we look at immorality of any kind, active
or passive, we shall see that one of its most unmis-
takable features is that it is a cheating—that it is the
doing of a thing which, in larger or lesser degree,
makes individual and social life impossible, by those
who have benefited by that individual or social life;
that it is, in fact, the trying to take, and not give
in return : the reversing of the precept, “Do unto
3 Jy
others—
A curious light came into Lady Althea's
clear brown eyes, as if her whole soul were
gathered there to see and understand, to come in
, contact with the obscure, confused Surrounding
world.
“Do you know,” she said, “you seem to be
showing me something so—how shall I say it 2—so
obvious, something that must have been there always,
and always understood, and yet, which I somehow
see for the first time, and don’t see quite clearly
even yet. I can’t make it out. I don’t seem ever to
have understood why certain things were good and
others evil, nor why one should prefer the good ones.
I don’t seem even now to understand quite ; and still,
of course, I’ve always known one ought to do the
good things unless one’s a mean beast ; and I can't
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. I5
remember wishing to do them in order to please God,
because I’ve never been religious really, and because
I've always thought that God was so very unjust and
unkind Himself in making people sinful and then
minding, that I really didn't care whether He was
pleased with me or not. Do you mean to say that
everything that we call wrong hurts some one, near
or far P "
“My dear Lady Althea, you wished to do the
things which were good because——”
But Baldwin stopped. He could not, while looking
into her face, so calm, yet so eager with an eagerness
quite above mere intellectual curiosity, say such a
platitude as that she was good—indeed, allude in any
measure to herself.
“People,” he corrected himself, “wish to do good
without knowing why, because they are of such a
material that the pressure of mankind's Surroundings
must mould them into such ways of feeling. But, to
return. If we depended solely upon people's own
faculties for their good behaviour, there would be
precious little of it. Whereas dozens of things which
in our days do still depend upon an effort of reason,
will become in time quite instinctive, mechanical, like
our preference for soap and water, which is by no
means inborn in humanity, but which has become
quite automatic in us.”
I6 ALTHEA.
Althea Stooped, and gathered some of the little
Parnassus daisies which whitened the boggy grass
among the furze, and the tufts of yellow ragwort of
that waste land by the northern Sea.
“Yes,” she answered, after a moment's thought,
while her brother disappeared after the dog in the
neighbouring Sandy slopes, “I have no doubt that
there is what you call spiritual progress in the world ;
and, of course, I see that it must be due to some-
thing. It is absurd to talk of mere growth in the
abstract; plants and trees grow, don’t they, because
they absorb more and more nourishment from the
earth and air P Is it not so P. Well, I suppose that
folk's conscience also absorbs something to make it
grow. But don't you see that just as every sort of
Soil doesn’t nourish every sort of plant, and some
Sorts nourish only weeds, or nothing at all, so also
every human being doesn’t influence his neighbour's
Conscience. It is a question of division of labour,
don't you see P Some people are smiths, and others
plough men, and others painters, or poets, or musi-
cians ; and Some *—she added, with a laugh—“are
creatures like us, who do nothing except sit waiting
for rents, while their farmers try to grow turnips
which will go wrong. And some, a very few only—
you for instance—are moralists. Do you see P”
“That is exactly what I deny, Lady Althea. I
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. I7
maintain that we are all of us, more or less, moralists.
The typical man, nay, the real individual, the man
who is not an exception, and almost a monstrosity,
is, in lesser degree only, everything which the spe-
cially gifted man is in greater. We are all painters,
sculptors, poets, musicians, philosophers, statesmen ;
for, if we were not, the special painter, sculptor,
musician, philosopher, etc., etc., would exist in vain,
without a public which he could serve, or which
could obey him. And the proof of this, the proof
that we can receive spiritual gifts only if we already
possess some portion of them ourselves, exists
in the odd effect whenever such a special man
is placed opposite a creature in whom there is no
rudiment of the faculty which the special man pos-
sesses in high degree.”
“You mean,” interrupted the girl, “that if Jones
goes to sleep while Rubinstein is playing, or Tomkins
refuses to see the landscape which Turner is trying
to show him, it is not Rubinstein or Turner, but
Jones or Tompkins, who is a monstrosity.” *
“Exactly so. Now, of all endowments sometimes
specialized in individuals, few are necessarily so
universal as what we call the faculty of the moralist.
It is a faculty, this, which mankind exercises every
hour of the day, even as it exercises its eye, its calcu-
lation of weight and velocity, its perception of
C
I8 ALTHEA.
character—those faculties of the painter, the
mechanician, and the psychologist, without which
every man-jack of us would be constantly running
against a wall or a passer-by, or be crushed by
carriages, or cheated by his servants. And the
moral sense, the faculty of thinking ‘what will be the
result upon others ?? is, I insist, even more neces-
sarily essential than these.”
They walked on for a little in silence, broken only
by the questions of the boy, who wanted to know
from his sister the name of every tiny plant, the
reason for every effect of colour and light and shadow
under that grey and yellow evening sky. The boggy
pasture had grown more and more sere, and more
broken-up everywhere by rabbit-holes, until it was
replaced suddenly by the long grey flinty sea-grass,
humping up with its thick slippery cushions and pale
green horse-hair tufts, the sand-hills by the sea. A
great place like a cattle pen, or some vague place
of execution, an arrangement of posts and rails hung
with brown nets and buoys, strewed the dunes with
dry, papery bits of tail and fin, and shingle of scales,
and delicate bits of bone. From below, and seem-
ingly almost from underground, came the dull boom
of the sea.
“Then,” said Althea, “the reason you condemn
those people—the funguses, you know—is because
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 19
they don't interfere sufficiently with their neighbours,
and because they live and let live ; or, as you say,
live properly themselves and let their friends live
improperly P”
“Precisely—that is what I call accepting all the
influence for good which the world, the past and
present, can give ; and declining to expend any such
influence in return.”
“I see. But then it all hangs together with some
things you said yesterday, and which puzzled me
awfully—about toleration being oftener a vice than
a virtue. You wanted one to interfere with one's
people's religious belief; you spoke almost like the
man at the village kirk. I almost thought you were
doing it to mystify those stupid visitors, and I
thought it rather mean of you to do so. But do you
really seriously think that toleration can ever be
pushed too far P You see, Mr. Baldwin, I’ve been
working all these years to get to tolerate other folks’
notions, and to get them to tolerate mine ; and
when one's naturally without much power of sym-
pathy, and rather easily bored and sickened by one's
fellow-creatures, and when one lives in Scotland of
all countries, it's very difficult to become really
tolerant ; and it's too annoying to be told that, after
all, toleration may be a vice.” Althea laughed as
she spoke, half in earnest, half in jest. She had that
C 2
2O ALTHEA.
faculty of seeing the exaggerated and gently absurd
side of herself, which is characteristic of all the most
really earnest, because the most candid, minds.
“Now, logically speaking, if I can ever pretend to
speak logically,” she continued, “what is the use of
trying to impose one's own views upon others ? I
know that you would think it your duty to interfere
if you saw any chance of my turning Catholic, or
High Church, or Esoteric Buddhist, wouldn't you ?
Well ; what I want to know is what earthly value
can my opinions have if they could be upset by
Monsignor Capel or Madame Blavatsky 2 If my
rationalism, as you call it, runs any such risk, it isn’t
real rationalism ; it isn’t organic, and what I believe
or don't believe is a matter of no importance what-
sever.”
“Not at all,” answered Baldwin. “A belief—and
I consider what the world calls unbelief as the most
positive and absolute belief of any—a belief may not
be sufficiently real, organic, not sufficiently the
necessary original outcome of the individual mind, to
resist logical or emotional attacks from a contrary
belief: and yet it may be quite sufficient, while such
attacks be averted, to produce one line of action, or
action-producing feeling, rather than another. And
this, in my eyes, is extremely important. There is
a method of viewing things, of acting, which is
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 21
Protestant, another which is Catholic, another, if you
choose, which is Blavatskian, a fourth which is
rationalistic ; and among these various methods that
one will tend to most practical good which is con-
nected with a true view of the world rather than
an imaginary one. Indeed, such non-vital, non-
original, belief, due merely to tradition and circum-
stances, is the belief of the vast majority of mankind,
not merely upon religious subjects, but upon all
practical and speculative points, and very particu-
larly upon questions of right and wrong ; nay, it is
the belief of every living creature upon some one
subject whereof he is not a master, but which may
yet be connected with very practical results. And
such belief, unoriginal, inorganic, produces therefore
the vast bulk of the world’s action ; and the more in
conformity with ascertainable reality the belief, the
less mischievous and the more useful will be the
action which is based upon it. It is on such belief,
therefore, and not upon the exceptional original, or
at least organic belief, which pioneers and defends
it, that depends the health of the world. It is, for
this reason, quite legitimate to desire that such
belief, when it happens to be in accordance rather
with truth than with error, and productive in So far
rather of good than of ill, should be defended from
the possibility of being exchanged for another belief,
22 ALTHEA.
not more organic, but less in harmony with fact, and
less productive, therefore, of right action.”
“I see,” said Althea ; “but do you know, Mr.
Baldwin, that you are arguing rather like a
member of the Confraternity of the Index or an
official of the Holy Office P”
“Of course I am,” answered Baldwin, laughing ;
“but I consider that these estimable people are
perfectly right in wishing to defend what they con-
sider a safe, though wavering, belief. Their mistake
consists in not seeing that even this is not worth
buying at the price of the spiritual liberty or free
trade to which every improvement in opinion is due.
They don't perceive that truth is not discovered all
at once, and that no one, therefore, has a right to
say, ‘No further inquiries permitted.’ To return to
what you call inorganic belief. Has it ever occurred
to you that the moral ideas of mankind, what we
call their moral instincts, are all of this sort P. Few
people could tell you the logical reason why murder,
lying, and foul living ought to be stamped out.
How many people have the faintest notion why clean
living, for instance, is a virtue P They have been
told that it is, and they have ended with feeling that
it must be. To say of all this mass of non-original,
non-organic belief that it is not worth preserving
because it might fall a victim to sophistry or passion,
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 23
is to say that an evil which may happen might as
well happen.”
“I understand,” said Althea. “Do you know I
have thought something like that myself, only I
wasn’t sure whether it mightn't be some of that
usual wrong-headedness of mine which every one is
always lamenting P You know the way that some
people have of saying that if a man or woman can
go to the bad, they may as well ? Well, it seems to
me that it makes an enormous difference to the
happiness of others whether they do or do not
actually go to the bad, whether evil potentiality be
turned into evil activity. In fact, it seems to me
that the very reason, and the sole one, for objecting
to evil possibilities in people's nature is that the
possibilities may become actualities. I don't know—
and it may be because I’ve got my head screwed on
the wrong way—but I can’t help feeling that the
only reason why I'd rather not have anything to do
with a woman who might behave like a pig is that in
all probability she would behave like a pig. Do you
See 2 ”
“In fact, that if potentiality remained always
potential (which is a contradiction in terms), there
would be no reason to object to it, Lady Althea.
Don't you see how that affects my argument about
organic and non-organic beliefs P”
24 ALTHEA.
“And do you kuow,” went on the girl, smoothing
out a large black feather, dropped by one of the
legions of cawing rooks which circled over cornfield
and dune, “one of the things that has always irritated
me in religious people and religious books, is the
fearful exaggerated importance they give to character
as distinguished from action. They are perpetually
thinking about their own souls, that is to say, about
their own selves, instead of thinking about other
folks' wants and conveniences. What does it matter
whether one’s soul is nasty or nice, so long as one
behaves properly 2” Althea could not help smiling.
She perceived, even as she spoke, how much she
disliked nasty souls in others, and how very much
she would dislike having one herself. And Baldwin
thought, or rather felt, how singularly positive was
the healthiness, the largeness, and beauty of the soul
lodged in this large, fair, youthful body.
They paused for a moment on the ridge of the
sand-hillocks. Inland, a great performance was
preparing : on the low hills grey clouds were heaping
up, rent by the Sunset fire within ; crimson live
embers of cloud below, silver-white shining fire
above. On the other side, pale and misty, lay the
Forth, its trough filled with wan clouds, veined in
the dim distance with the uprising smoke spirals of
an invisible shore. From all sides, from hidden
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 25
places, came the dull sound of the tide; and from
over the distant hills, the cornfields, and heather
came a cold breeze, which died out in a melancholy
flutter among the pale, green-hued sea-grass at their
feet.
“But see here,” went on Althea, suddenly, “there
are two things which you seem to overlook in preach-
ing the necessity of good people not tolerating bad
ones. In the first place—how shall I put it P Are
not those bad people quite as much the natural pro-
duct of the world as the good ones P You remember
you told me I was quite right in thinking that we are
born with certain tendencies and a certain will, and
that therefore we aren’t free as the religious people
make out. Well, isn't what we call evil just as much
part and parcel of nature, as much created by it, as
good P And in that case, what's the sense of oppos-
ing it P I feel that I, personally, should try and
oppose it, and so would all the people whom I think
nice; but somehow it doesn’t seem very logical on
our part. That's one difficulty. The other is that
it is so difficult, in a way, to realize that individual
people do really represent, personify, evil; do you
know what I mean P Do you remember when
Desdemona asks Emilia whether there are such
women P. Well, of course, we know there are, of
course I know that I’ve met such women (you know
i
26 ALTHEA.
one meets pretty well every sort of evil in good
society), and yet it is very difficult to realize that
they are wicked. One seems to be prevented from
doing so by a weight of common man- or woman-
hood, by the community of the human. Evidence
may sometimes tally with evidence, a complete
chain of cause and effect about the absent person,
the abstract, almost. But let this semi-abstract
creature come and stand before you, be more than a
name merely; and immediately, with the sense that
this one also has arms, legs, features, eyes, a voice,
can move and speak, nay, can understand your speech
and meet your thoughts—with this sense that the
creature is a creature like yourself, born of human
parents, comes an incredulity, an impossibility of
believing, or at all events of realizing in any way the
belief. Do you know what I mean by the Desde-
mona feeling 2*
“I know it perfectly. We have it all, more or
less, I fancy, for better or worse. And I think it
says much in favour of our poor humanity, that the
sense of its being shared by a suspected evil-doer
makes it difficult to believe in the evil deed : that
we expect, in the doer of a monstrous thing, a
monster, a creature with horns and a tail, whose
ferocity or filthiness shall seem in the right place.
But does it not strike you, my dear Lady Althea,
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 27
that this second remark of yours almost answers the
first 2 And does not this show plainly, not merely
that the bulk of mankind is good, but that the bulk
of the individual, even of the individual sinner, may
be good also P. There is, speaking metaphorically,
such a preference for good, such an 'impetus to the
right, in all things—or rather what we call good and
right means merely going with the grain of nature—
that we unconsciously recognize that existence
almost implies a greater amount of what is right and
good, than of what is wrong and bad; even as
physical Survival implies that more organs are
healthy than diseased. Thus, as men of science are
beginning to think, the through and through criminal
is well-nigh the maniac, the result of physical de-
generation of Some sort : so that one might say that
the completely diseased soul scarcely exists at all, is
dead socially, a mass of inert putrescence.”
Althea's eyes had widened out once more with
that singular transfiguring light. “But is not this
theory of yours,” she said with some hesitation, “too
dangerous to be true P Would it not lead, like the
theories of those Christians, or rather of those modern
pessimists whom you dislike so much, to saying, as
your friend Marcel said of his wicked heroine, ‘C’est
un pauvre étre qui Souffre’?”
“Not so, but quite the contrary. My recognition
28 ALTHEA. A
|
of the fact that evil of the worst can co-exist with
human qualities sufficient to stagger us with the
Sense of a common humanity, merely strengthens my
conviction that we must not weigh how much of
normal, and, so to speak, inevitable, good may be
co-existing with abnormal evil; that we must not
ask, ‘What is the value of this soul taken as a
whole P’ but resolutely look the evil in the face, and
examine how far this evil is damaging to mankind,
to what extent this creature is responsible therefore
—that is to say, conscious thereof and consciously
capable of renewing it. In the presence of such evil
as actually disintegrates Society, as absolutely puts
us out of working order, the good qualities which
the criminal shares with the innocent must not count
for anything, any more than do the good qualities of
a bushel of wheat which has had poison sprinkled in
it. Is the wheat, as wheat, less nourishing 2 Cer-
tainly not ; but while the wheat nourishes the poison
kills. Just as disease,” continued Baldwin, “is that
condition of the body which is at variance with the
tendencies of physical nature, so also is vice that
action of the individual which is at loggerheads with
the movements of society. You say that evil, like
good, is a natural product. Undoubtedly. But re-
member that the world excretes evil : it is necessarily
produced, but also necessarily thrown off. It is
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 29
that with which the order of things cannot work;
although, in the work, frequently produced.”
They had come to higher sandbanks, covered with
even longer and more wiry matting of Sea-grass,
below which lay a narrow strip of untrodden pale-
brown sand, and beyond, a wan, misty, great, brown
smooth expanse, with a long line of posts and fences,
hung with nets, stretching this way or that like a
delicate, bony hand into its midst : the sky, the sea,
the opposite coast, and the clouds, all the same
colour, the same texture, equally pale and impal-
pable, scarcely divided by a line of palest brown
where the tint of the Sea seemed to reinforce on the
horizon. The black boats, moored by the sand,
seemed to be floating and rocking in emptiness.
A flock of curlews dotted the more distant sands
with sharp black spots like bits of broken spar;
moving, vainly raising themselves for an instant on
their wings, with subdued yet penetrating little
squeals—“a litany of Sad little words,” said Althea,
“in honour of this sad, Sad, pale sea ; the list, one
might fancy, of the drowned men below.” Then
there came down, white, whirling, with louder quack-
ing noise, a flight of Sea-gulls.
“They complain also,” said Althea, as she sat on
the sand-hill with her little brother's head on her
shoulder; “everything complains in this northern
3O ALTHEA.
country—every bird and beast, from the bleating
sheep to the squealing plover; I suppose of the
short-livedness of the summer, the bitterness of wind
and sea. But these seem to be complaining of their
own concerns, their hunger and weariness, while those
black curlews down there on the wet sand complain
of something quite impersonal, the general misery of
the world.”
“I am so glad you told me those things,” said
Althea, after a few minutes' silence; “but I don't see
how you make your theory that evil is excreted by
the world Square with things you have said before,
about Nature being, as indeed I think every honest
creature must admit, so very far from kind or
just.”
“That Nature excretes evil,” answered Baldwin ;
“ that there is in her a force making rather for
health than for disease, is to be taken in reference
to man's relations to man, not to man's feelings for
Nature. In saying that evil is excreted by Nature,
I do not mean to make out Nature one whit more
amiable ; I do not wish to argue myself into a belief
that Nature is good. I wish merely to find an
additional reason for the goodness of man.”
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 3 I
II.
Next morning was a Sunday, with Sunday in the
feel of all things: a grey morning, earlier in im-
pression, fresher than the hour warranted, owing to
the rain in the night ; and with that particular still-
ness of the fields which is brought home to one by
the sound of a solitary church-bell.
“It seems, does it not,” said Althea, drawing up
the pony on the crest of a hill, to look down on the
greyish green pastures dotted with sheep, and the
corn-fields which the breeze shivered with the
patterns of watered silk—“it seems as if it could not
have been there a couple of hours ago—as if it had
never existed before ; as if there could be nothing in
the world except the fields and sheep and trees, and
us intruding on to it all. The other people—the
minister and the people who will be at church—don't
exist yet, do they ”
She laughed, a funny, half childish laugh, after a
moment's concentration of the vague dark eyes, and
a little quiver of the mouth, as she turned her face
full to Baldwin ; a charming creature, with that
supreme charm, somewhat like that of this fresh,
new morning, of never having felt except for
others, of being absolutely unruffled, unsinged by
passion.
32 ALTHEA.
“That isn't what I wanted to talk about,” she
said, urging on the pony. “I have been thinking
over what you were saying yesterday, Mr. Baldwin.
And do you know, opening a book of Ruskin's before
breakfast just now seemed to make me understand
quite well all about the importance of people's
belief, even if inorganic, and about different beliefs
making you feel and think on quite different lines.
I used to wonder formerly at the extraordinary dul-
ness and injustice of such a great, great, beautiful
mind; but now I understand. I see that, given a
man who refers everything—how shall I express it 2
—well, to ruling principles of life and thought (as
distinguished from a creature who thinks only in a
scrappy way), it was quite impossible that Ruskin's
particular religious notions shouldn’t have made him
see a great many things all wrong. That religious
| education, that habit of always looking for what they
call a spiritual meaning everywhere, made him ex-
plain things by mere allegories; as if allegories
always corresponded with reality. You remember
how he explains the fall of Venice, which must
have been due to very practical causes, some change
in the commerce of the world, or something similar,
by mere allegories or coincidences about the figures
on the doges' tombs P And it's that habit of looking
at everything through religious spectacles which
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 33
makes him say that the art of the fifteenth century
is base, because sculptors carved only as much of a
figure's face as could be seen, which he considers
immoral ; when the question of artistic baseness has \
nothing to do with morality or immorality. But the
worst of it is, don’t you think, when he imagines that
because people built cathedrals so and so, and that
building so and so is what he calls moral, they mº
have been infinitely more disinterested and purer
than people who didn't build cathedrals in that par-
ticular way, and especially much more so than we
are. Of course one knows that there are shoals of
mean, nasty creatures nowadays; but it makes one
indignant, don't you think, to be told that the
pollution of a river with factory refuse (doubtless
because of some new process of dyeing or bleaching
which hasn't yet been properly regulated) is sym-
bolic of the moral condition of a time and country
in which decent living is thought more of than
elsewhere and in other times.”
“What you say is so true,” answered Baldwin,
“that, owing to the false beliefs with which people
have been saturated, the moral safety of mankind
has frequently depended upon its power of being
illogical ; or at least of neglecting the lesser logic in
favour of the greater; of overlooking the mere con-
catenation of abstract ideas Springing from a theory
D
34. ALTHEA.
in favour of that concatenation of practical facts, of
really existing cause and effect, which we call life.
Did you ever read the description of the Sacrifice to
Moloch in Flaubert’s ‘Salambó' P Well; given the
belief that God cursed all mankind for the fault of
one man and one woman, and appeased His wrath
by the sacrifice of His only begotten Son, the logical
conclusion should have been, not Christianity, but
that Moloch worship of Tyre and Carthage, But a
conflict existing, man averts his eyes from this
logical sequence in the abstract region, and considers
the logical sequence in the practical, which tells him
how of the better course comes the better, of the
worse the worse; and the voice of God, who is
logically Moloch, bids him love his brethren and
return good for injury. The really logical religious
mind, on the contrary, the rigid one which will not
sacrifice the abstract to the concrete, denies the fact
to save the theory; and becomes committed to a
strange optimism which is a refusal to admit that
evil is evil, or an attempt to call it good : the satis-
faction of one of your seventeenth century preachers
in the brimstone of hell, or the aspirations of some
mediaeval Hintonian after primaeval promiscuity of
all things. Now, had there not been in this case that
bias of perhaps quite inorganic religious belief, there
would have been no conflict between theory and
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL, 35
practice, no necessity for sacrificing either logic or
instinct.” t
Althea had driven the pony down the steep paved
lane, between the red-roofed cottages of the fishing
village. When they had left the cart at the inn, the
girl helping to unbuckle the harness with her strong
white hands, they strolled down to the little harbour,
until it would be time to climb up to the kirk, where
Baldwin had whimsically asked to be taken. The
harbour was quite deserted because of the Sabbath ;
the herring boats were moored close together,
guarded only by the usual barking dog; their brown
Sails and nets and big gourd-like buoys hung out to
dry. On a patch of meagre grass some large nets
were spread out on poles; the poles, some straight
and Some crooked, and the nets, here bulging out,
there tightly strained, forming between them a sort
of grotesque spider's web galley, as Althea pointed
out, Sails set and prow tilted upwards, as if starting
for Some fantastic, lunatic seas.
“Doesn’t it make you think of what you were say-
ing about people's theories 2 ” she asked ; “and aren't
we all of us going off to sea in a gallant ship made of
nets and poles, with a cobweb hull and a rigging of
thread P’’
“Very much so indeed,” answered Baldwin, laugh-
ing; “and that's what I’ve been arguing all along,
D 2
36 ALTHEA.
my dear Lady Althea. We are very odd creatures,
we ordinary mortals, when we come to think of it, and
not at all so different from the people who hunted the
Snark or went off to sea with the Teapot and the
Quangle Wangle. We look at a threepenny bit,
before accepting it or passing it on to our neighbour,
lest it should prove false; but we never dream of
doing as much by our opinions, and accept those and
pass them on, false or not false as may happen.
There is nothing more astounding than the sort of
childlike profligacy which exists in what I should call
the region of intellectual morality. Why, there isn't
the most trifling detail of housekeeping or dress about
which even the best of us are not infinitely more care-
ful than about the principles upon which all our con-
duct in life is founded. People have scarcely any
notion of making the best either of their brains, or
their means of information, or of their moral impulses.
As to the latter, they are continually being wasted
or turned to actual mischief for sheer want of easily
obtained knowledge. Every day I am more and more
struck by the fact that the most devoted and enthu-
siastic creatures are usually the most unthinking and
prejudiced, merely because they have never been
taught that intellectual responsibility is a necessary
\part of moral responsibility. They judge and act in
the dark, and even when they do no practical mischief,
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL, 37
they serve to fatally discredit the cause they are
advocating.”
Althea nodded. “I have noticed that myself,” she
said, “particularly in relation to your cousin Dorothy.
I think Dorothy quite the noblest woman I have ever
met ; and yet her enthusiasm only makes me feel
inclined to cry, just because I understand why it
might make other people laugh. I remember the
difference there was between discussing moral ques-
tions, whether nice women ought to tolerate immoral
men, and all that, with Dorothy and with my sister-
in-law, Helen, who is a good, clean-minded creature,
but with no more enthusiasm than a pint pot. Well,
my sister-in-law's arguments seemed to have just twice
as much moral value, because she knows the world,
has seen evil and knows how insidious it is, and how
easily mixed up with good ; whereas poor Dorothy
expects what you call horns and a tail.”
They stopped for a moment, and leaned upon the
parapet of the pier, looking at the sky and sea : the
grey sea framed in, separated from them by a line of
black rocks, jagged, wicked, with wicked plague-spots
of yellow lichen and seaweed in their hollows: rocks
crouching, claws and teeth Sharpened, ready to tear
and kill. It seemed strange, as the girl pointed out,
that anything so solid as these black rocks should
grip that ungraspable sea, that delicate dimness with
38 ALTHEA.
only a scarce visible bar of palest brown to separate
it from the dim, grey, melting sky. Strange, also,
how anything so evil as those rocks could embrace,
much less imprison, this delicate loveliness. But this
diaphanous grey sea loveliness may be evil itself.
. . . The tide was slowly coming in ; and, as it did
so, the water broke itself into long strands (like yarn
on the posts of a rope-walk) and gathered itself into
fibrous cables, currents along which its atoms were
hurrying landwards, doubling the semicircular pro-
montory; a wicked steely blue where they chased
round the rocks, gradually growing (or rather reap-
pearing from behind the headland) pale, diaphanous,
dim, a grey made up of all the delicate pinks, and
blues, and browns of creation, in the open space of
the sands. The sky hung loosely over the sea : dark,
watery clouds melted away here and there to mere
smoke wreath ; and its darkness heightened the steel-
blue of the impetuous on-pushing current, and made
wanner the wan, white pallor of the part merely
heaving with the tide. The movement of those rush-
ing dull-blue bars was gradually communicated to
all the rest ; the sea was divided all over into watery
Strands, paler or darker, but grey always, and dim,
till at last its surface seemed to bear in the distance
strange things, floating raft-like ; the waters dividing
into fantastic mirages of wan coasts, pale wintry
*
THE WALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 39
meadows watered by wide-shining streams, dunes,
and lagoons. . . . Then, with the falling of the first
scant raindrops, everything subsided into uniformity
under the loosely hanging dark sky.
They clambered back through the village, to the
hill where the little Gothic church, its steeple well
drawn in between its shoulders, seemed to project as
little as possible on that bleak green shore, squatting,
burrowing for fear of the wind among the grass of
the little graveyard. As you approached you saw
through one wide mullioned window the shadowy
mullions of the window opposite, and the outer light
beyond, as if you were looking into a church filled
with pale sea water, filled with the atmosphere
Surrounding the ghosts of the drowned ; an eery
effect which reminded Althea, as she told Baldwin, of
the story of the village tailor who looked out one
winter night and saw a ship go Suddenly down, sink
. straight till all her masts had disappeared, and her
crew had bubbled up again, a rapid vision ; and also
that further along the coast is Aberdour, outside
whose port, full fifty fathoms deep, “ lies gude Sir
Patrick Spens, with the Scots Lords at his feet.”
“I want you to tell me some more. It seems
Somehow all to hang together with what you said
about those fungus people. But I don’t clearly under-
stand,” said Althea, as they waited in the porch till
4O ALTHEA.
the congregation of Scandinavian-looking fishing folk
had all gone in ; “tell me more about the threepenny
bit which we examine, and the opinions which we
don’t. It never struck me before that what people
call self-culture was anything except a Selfish ques-
tion ; do you mean to say that it matters much to
others ?”
“Certainly,” answered Baldwin, as he looked at
her tall, majestic figure, standing out dark in the arch
of the porch, framed in against the background of
pale green grass, of white sky and Sea. “Certainly
self-culture, in the right sense of the word, is not
the cold and selfish thing you imagined. In our day,
when the world is crying out for renovation, when
instincts for good are everywhere groping in the dark;
when beliefs and aspirations are struggling blindly all
round; nowadays when effort and explanation be-
come more imperiously necessary hour by hour—it
behoves each of us to be, to the best of his power, in
working order, in marching trim. The practical.
solutions of the great Social questions which mean
misery or happiness are perhaps not for this genera-
tion nor the next, nor the next after that. But
whether those solutions will come, and how and when,
depends upon us and Our immediate successors. It
ehoves every individual, therefore, to acquire to the
utmost a general lucidity of mind, a power of reason-
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 4 I
ing correctly, of sifting away prejudice and falsehood,
so that all new theories may be understood and
judged at their value. And besides this general
lucidity of mind, it behoves us all to acquire a well-
Organized system of knowledge, into which all new
facts may be fitted, obtaining at once their real value
and bearing, coming at once into contact, direct or
indirect, with all similar facts, and thus eventually
with our theories and practice of life. But this is
only one half ; we are bound to be in morally work-
ing order as well : to accustom ourselves to Sym-
pathize, to renounce, to aspire ; in order that we may
understand and be just, that we may, when the
moment comes (and it comes with every reform and
improvement), sympathize thoroughly, renounce
easily, and inevitably move upwards. The gospel
remaining still unpreached is that of our duty to-
wards our own mind, and consequently towards the
mind of others, the gospel of lucidity.”
Althea's brown eyes had widened out with that
curious light. But she merely smiled. All this
seemed to her, educated in sceptical indifference to
all things, beautiful, but far-fetched and futile : a
Sort of delightful, unpractical poetry.
“You are like a priest,” she said ; “come in and
hear what your rival, the minister, has to say.”
“If he speaks out his convictions, I respect him
42 ALTHEA.
from the bottom of my heart,” answered Baldwin,
with his hand on the door, “ and that is more than I
can say of most of us rationalists, myself frequently
included.”
The church of drowned men, as Althea called it, was
built without an apse, a dreary, lop-headed edifice,
more like a gallows than a cross ; and its granite
pillars and mullions were grown yellow with weather-
stain and lichen. Against the dead, dull grey wall,
where had once stood the altar, was the pulpit. The
minister, a gaunt, deformed creature, with the shaven,
warped face of a dwarf, spread his bulging black
sleeves on the red cushions, folding himself, so to
speak, on to the big gilt Bible; and looking, thus
vaguely enthroned in the half light, like some Strange
squatting idol. The apseless church seemed to
double the value of the voices which sang the hymns
gravely, earnestly, all the pitches welded into a
Solemn medium, equally unlike the nasal bass chanting
of Catholic priests, and that fretting, as with spots of
white, of the Anglican choristers' treble. The ser-
mon which followed was immense, argumentative,
subtle, yet practical. The point of it was that on the
greatest subject of all, God and the salvation of their
Soul, men and women are silent to one another ; dis-
cussing all other matters, inquiring into all other
interests, but living in isolation of soul about this,
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 43
brother with brother, father with children, husband
with wife.
“Listen ; he says the same thing as you,” whis-
pered Althea to Baldwin, where they sat in an empty
pew by the door.
In the dull moments of the sermon, and they were
many and long, the girl opened a volume of Brown-
ing which she had brought with her for the purpose,
and placed beside the Bible on the pew edge. The
place was the end of the speech of Pompilia.
The asceticism, the earnestness of this service, the
insistence on God, and our brethren, and our soul ;
the absence of all mythology and liturgical juggling,
of symbolical formulae and mesmeric passes, like those
of Catholicism and the sham Protestantism of to-day,
impressed both Althea and Baldwin, and seemed to
bring to fuller comprehension the often read words
which they were reading. And of the two, perhaps,
Baldwin felt the most. In the little bare church, with
the minister's voice, between the grave singing of the
hymns, booming out the necessity of spiritual brother-
hood ; under that wan sea light falling on the grey,
lichen-stained walls and arches, he felt suddenly, by
the side of this strange, sweet, strangely candid, and
virginal grown-up child (the more candid and
virginal for Heaven knows what insight into the
rottenness of rich and idle society), the value of
|
~!
44 ALTHEA.
Pompilia, of Caponsacchi, as he had never felt them
before.
“Do you remember those last lines of Pompilia's
speech, Lady Althea P” he said, as they walked
behind the congregation across the little green, tree-
less graveyard—
“Through such souls alone,
God, stooping, shows sufficient of His light,
For us in the dark to rise by ; and I rise.”
“Yes,” answered Althea dreamily; “I was think-
ing of them also. It would be something rather
worth doing, a real thing, don't you think, to be such
a soul, even for a minute to anybody ?”
They walked a long time in silence, merely looking
about, or absorbed in thought, until they had got the
pony harnessed once more, and the cart on its way.
The storm had cleared off, and the sun was shining
behind a thin film of white, raining down in great
whitish beams upon the high-lying cornfields and
sheep-dotted pastures ; the Sea lying pale, luminous,
impalpable beneath, almost white, but tipped with
shining facets where it was enclosed by the long deep-
blue bar of coast and cloud. Pale, whitish still, but
just suffused with blue in the open, where the blue
Bass Rock seemed not so much to rise from, as to
lie lightly upon, the surface of the water.
“You see, Mr. Baldwin,” began Althea, keeping
THE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 45
her eyes fixed on the reins, as they rolled quickly
along; “all that you say is well and good when
applied to exceptional people . . . . no, let me
explain, I mean not merely particularly clever, but
also particularly good people—the people that God
stooping shows His light through, like Caponsacchi.
These creatures are privileged, and their privilege,
like all others, ought to imply an obligation ; they
are rather stronger than their fellows, and are there-
fore bound to lend them some of their strength. But
the great majority of people are in quite a different
position ; they have just intellect and heart enough
for their own needs, and they have absolutely no
means of coming in contact with anyone save their
nearest surroundings. If I do my duty, for instance,
it affects, at the very most, two or three people ;
indeed, not as many, for my family are out of touch
with me and think me scatter-brained : the very
utmost I can perhaps ever do, is to make Harry see
things a little from my point of view, and lead a cleaner
life than most boys ; but that's merely because the
poor little chap is so fond of me, and because we
happen to care for the same books and pictures.”
Baldwin could not help smiling, as he repeated to
himself, “Through such souls alone " . . . . while
the girl was earnestly trying to impress him with her
utter unimportance.
46 ALTHEA.
ſ
|
“Well, and don't you see, my dear Lady Althea,”
he said when she finished speaking, “that in influ-
encing your brother you are influencing the world
at large P. We are, each of us, separate atoms, if you
will ; but we are atoms continually pressing upon
each other; and the sum total of this pressure, trans-
mitted unconsciously from creature to creature, is the
world's movement. Let us suppose that you impress
Harry with a sense of the possibility and duty of
leading, though a man, a life as pure as is demanded
of a woman. Do you not see, that even if Harry
never attempt to convert to his ways a single one of
his companions, he will influence nevertheless every
one of them susceptible of influence, by showing such
lads as are capable of clean living, that clean living
is possible, is practicable, and is the result of being
neither a curate nor a muff Don't you see that you
will have contributed, to the extent of seve, Al souls
in all probability (for the life of Harry means the life
of Harry's children), to the organization of a condition g
of general moral opinion such that only those who
are born vicious need be vicious, while those who are
born good may remain good P’’
Althea did not answer, but Baldwin could see that
her lip quivered a little ; she wished to believe, but
she feared to do so.
“But look,” she said after a long pause ; “you
TIIE VALUE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 47
cannot deny that even the greatest men can do little,
very little, in this world. Think of men like St.
Francis, or like Robert Owen : why, all their efforts
have been engulfed by the brutality and selfishness
of the world. And then tell me, but quite honestly
you know, do you think it worth while for a quite
unimportant individual to do the most that he or she
can in a world where even the very greatest are com- \
paratively powerless P”
Baldwin nodded. “I see your argument; and,
at the first glance, the fact that, as you say, even the
greatest men in this world can do little or nothing
unless supported by the mass, does seem to diminish
sadly, to cast a slur upon, the value of the individual.
But look again and ask yourself the reason why the
single individual, however great, is so comparatively
weak It is because, in reality, the single individual
is so strong : even the meanest, Smallest, has an
enormous weight and strength ; and without this
weight and strength of each constituent individual,
the crowd would be yielding for ever. It is because |
all men are strong, that no one man can force them;
it is because there is life and power throughout the
mass, that the individual exception is virtually power- l
less. Are we unimportant because we are part of the
mass 2 But the life of the mass is our life, its strength
is ours, its quality is our quality. And in this fact,
48 ALTHEA.
dear Lady Althea, in the fact that we are the mass,
and that such as we are, we, its component atoms, it
also is—in this fact that so much of our goodness and
happiness is due to others, and so much of their
goodness and happiness will depend upon us, lies the
reason why we must form opinions and apply them ;
the reason why we must not live and let live like our
friends the fungus people—live honestly and let
others live dishonestly.”
“Then every individual has a value 2 I hope it's
true,” added Althea pensively. “It do hope it’s true.
You see it takes away that horrid feeling that life is
all a sham, men and women merely so many puppets
jerking idiotically about. It makes them real, some-
how, real like all these things, real like the sea and
sky and the grass and trees.”
The cart, as it whirled along, drove before it a
swarm of twittering little birds, which settled, little
brown bur-like blobs, on the hedgerows and hay-
stacks ; rising again on approach of the wheels, a
perfect whirl of wings and of twitter, to alight again
on the hedgerow or haystack beyond.
ORPHEUS IN ROME
ORPHEUS IN ROME
“IT's curious,” said Baldwin, looking less into the
reality of that Roman theatre than into the vague
places of the past, “that one of the few remaining
shreds of my old musical lore—for I could have
talked about Orpheus by the hour together when
you were a naughty little girl, dear Donna Maria,
and I a big wool-gathering lad, indeed we should
doubtless have had terrific Gluckist and Piccinist
fights in the nursery—it's curious that one of the few
impressions remaining to me from my eighteenth
century days should happen to be that of the original
singer of this very opera—the man for whom Gluck
composed his Orpheus.”
“Ah !” exclaimed Donna Maria quickly; “tell us
this minute. You wretched Baldwin, I thought that
you were going to say that you had forgotten that
you had ever cared for old music at all.”
Baldwin smiled wistfully, that new smile of his
E 2'
52 ALTHEA.
which affected Donna Maria like a sigh. He was,
indeed, thinking how much he had altered, not merely
since those distant eighteenth century days, but since
much more recent times, since, almost, he had seen
Donna Maria last. This dear little woman, with her
charming conventional dresses and charming uncon-
ventional movements, seemed as foreign to him as
that music which had once said so much to his soul,
and would now, he foresaw, say so little. She had
herself become a sort of performance like this opera,
an external, indifferent spectacle, with the rapid de-
lightful variations, from frivolous chatter to learned
theorizing, and from earnest intensity to childish
self-ridicule, of her breezy, gusty, Sunny nature.
“Well, yes, perhaps,” he answered, as the violins
began to tune for the overture. “Perhaps I have a
clearer impression of Signor Gaetano Guadagni—his
name was Guadagni, and he was a Lombard like
you, Donna Maria—than of myself in the days when
I made his acquaintance in old music books and
memoirs. It's odd by what caprice one singles out
some particular forgotten creature of the past; or
rather by what caprice some particular ghost chooses
to manifest himself and haunt. Anyhow, I used to
see and hear Signor Guadagni whenever I turned
over the pages of Orpheus, or when I hummed over
any of its airs in my memory. Do you care to hear
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 53
about my friend the ghost P I only wish I knew by
heart some of Dr. Burney's Gibbonian sentences,
rolling and rumbling like the coach that must have
carried him to the opera. To begin with, my friend
Guadagni appears to have been a most beautiful
person, and a first-rate actor, sufficiently to induce
Garrick himself to give him wrinkles. He had not a
big voice—many of the greatest singers of that time,
when singing was a great art, had not—and he sang
in a way of his own, preferring airs with slight
accompaniments, long pauses, and few notes, like
Gluck's. And these few notes he did not regularly
swell and diminish like other singers—at least like
other singers of his day, modelling passages with the
breath—but, on account of his weak chest, took them
at once with full voice and let them dwindle, fade
die away; notes and phrases, like an AEolian harp or
an echo. Can't you imagine him sighing through
those songs, with their constant little murmuring
drooping closes, a sort of disembodied voice, a ghost
among those ghosts in Hades and the Elysian
Fields 2 But what used to strike me even more in
the accounts of this man is, that as an actor, he
seems to have been so precisely what is required in
an opera, and particularly in an opera without much
action, lyric rather than dramatic, like Orpheus. For
they tell us that his acting was not merely passionate
54 ALTHEA.
and pathetic, but extraordinarily good to look at.
Old Burney says his gestures would have been
‘ excellent studies for a statuary ; ' and one comes
away with the impression of an unbroken succession,
fluctuating and moving with the music, of beautiful
and noble movements, completing in their spontaneity,
and suggestiveness and charm, the sort of permeating
poetry of the music and of the story, which has
become, apart from its own beauty, redolent with
the sentiment of all the poets who have repeated it,
and all the ages that have listened. It is difficult to
define in words what I feel to be the sort of acting
fit to accompany music, something quite different
from the acting of a mere spoken play ; movement
and expression which shall obey the same necessities
of measure and grace and nobility as the melodies
themselves, and seem as spontaneous and inevitable
and self-unconscious as the melodies on the lips of
the singer. Think what Gluck's Orpheus must have
been, performed in this way, all its poetry embodied
by this great artist | Poor old Signor Guadagni,”
went on Baldwin after a pause, and laughing at his
own enthusiasm for a singer he had never heard, “his
end was pathetic. Instead of being run through the
body or poisoned by Some jealous husband, or exiled
by the brother of some over-susceptible electoral
princess, with the laurel wreath of Orpheus still on
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 55
his brow, he had the misfortune of turning into a
comfortable citizen of Padua, of growing quite old,
and in his old age, childish. A certain young Lord
Mount Edgcamb whose family had adored
Guadagni in England, went to call on him when on
the grand tour, and found poor old Orpheus amusing
himself with a child's puppet show—wasn't it comic
and sad P And the saddest thing is that he's dead
and gone, buried in a corner of Padua, and that we
can none of us ever see and hear him.”
“Who knows 2 ” answered Donna Maria, with a
little excited air of mystery. She had been listen-
ing with extraordinary interest, and (had Baldwin
noticed it) with evident efforts to suppress a series of
exclamations ; and, towards the end of the little
panegyric of that long silent singer, she had com-
municated by looks and signs to their friend Carlo a
peremptory order of discretion.
“Who knows 2 ” she allowed herself to repeat.
“There is evidently something uncanny about your
friend Guadagni; and since he has had this caprice
of haunting you, don't you think he may some day
take the whim of reappearing to us all on earth P’’
But Baldwin had already relapsed into that listless-
ness which now seemed to have become his normal
condition.
“I think,” said Carlo, coming forward in the box,
56 ALTHEA.
|
3.
while the violins began tuning for the overture,
“that it would be a great mistake on the part of this
delightful eighteenth century spectre to reappear
before Baldwin. It would be running the risk of a
very cool reception; something like what happened
to Heine's exiled gods, when they came back to find
their temples consecrated to the Virgin and their
groves used up as firewood. Baldwin doesn't care
any longer for old music, any more than he cares—
really and actively—for antique sculpture. In the
interval of thinking about other things, of neglecting
art for what he considers more practical concerns,
Baldwin has become a modern.”
Donna Maria furled her fan with a disputative
eagerness dangerous to its Louis XV. workman-
ship.
“Baldwin has had congestion of the brain and
malaria,” she exclaimed, “if that's what you mean
by becoming modern ; and Baldwin has let all the
dreadful things of the day—pauperism, and scep-
ticism, and the horridness of all classes, eat into his
soul until he can’t think of anything else, and can’t
enjoy any art, or any simple, pleasant thing.”
“Pardon me, Donna Maria,” replied Carlo, smiling
at her warlike temper, “I maintain that the pº
occupation of all these horrid modern things—which |
interest me, truly enough, only for their psycho-
“x
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 57
logical value—has resulted, not in making our friend
indifferent to all art, but in turning him into a com-
pletely modern man, to whom all this classic art—
the art of Phidias as well as the art of Gluck—can
have an intellectual, historical value, but not the real
artistic value of being the expression of his own
Soul, its aspirations, and wants, and weaknesses.”
“But where's the pleasure of expressing all these
wretched things P” began Donna Maria impetuously.
But she stopped; for at that moment the first notes
of the overture, the first crisp notes of that orchestra
of violins, came rustling through the theatre as the
wind which disperses the clouds rustles through the
plumes of the mountain pines. º:
A few minutes later all discussion had been
forgotten. For into the slowly unfurling chorus,
drooping with grief, of the mourners about Eurydice's
grave, there dropped unexpectedly, but with the
slow directness of falling tears, four notes of an un-
expected voice; and Orpheus was walking across the
stage and ascending the steps of the tomb. Those
four notes, carrying the name of Eurydice, belonged
to a low soprano voice. But instead of the disturb-
ing fact of a woman dressed up as a man, they con-
veyed to the hearer, quite simply, naturally and
irrefutably, the existence of a world of poetry and
romance, and the presence of a demi-god. The
58 ALTHEA.
slender creature, leaning against the side of the tomb,
and arranging its garlands with listless fingers and
eyes which looked not, was indeed a woman. One
knew it in a second, but in a second also one had
forgotten. And when, after dismissing the make-
believe ballet shepherds and shepherdesses, all
rouged and bewigged, Orpheus comes forward with
the face and movement of a melancholy young faun,
bewailing Eurydice and begging her back of the
gods, that fifth-rate Italian stage, those cardboard
trees and wooden rocks, had disappeared and a new
stage taken its place—a valley of Thessaly, made out
of the rustle of violins, the quavering echoes of the
Solitary hautboy, and the fresh, cool notes of that
young, Supple voice.
“It is strange,” said Donna Maria, when the cur-
tain had fallen at the end of the first act, “that one
of the things we enjoy the most and applaud the
most, this last air which he—I prefer to think of her
as he—sings with such splendid voice and spirit (she
seems to enjoy all those little runs and twirls, doesn’t
she or to do them because she's happy)—it's strange
that that air shouldn't be by Gluck at all, at least so
they say. Is it true, Baldwin 2’”
“It’s quite true,” answered Baldwin. “That last air
of the first act is by a man called Bertoni, by no
means a first-rate man in his day, and it got into the
ORPHE US IN ROME. 59
score of Orpheus by the caprice of some singer, and
has remained in default of anything better. There
is something pathetic, to me, in the survival of the
song by a third class mediocre (I don’t mean to say
the song is not good), when the songs of Gluck’s
greatest rivals, Piccini, and Jomelli and Sacchini,
have been utterly forgotten.”
“I am glad, also, that Bertoni’s air has stayed in,”
remarked Carlo. “It shows, by the fact of its not
jarring with the rest, that Gluck, after all, was a man
of the eighteenth century just like another. It ought
to bring home to us what Donna Maria won’t admit,
that all this Orpheus music can never please us
except as a resuscitation, that it may interest us, and
even, once we are in the right frame of mind, give us
a certain amount of pleasure, but that it can never
become a reality in our spiritual life like Schumann
and Wagner, and even like Grieg and Boito, because
it isn't the product of our own times and our own
minds. I’m not speaking of the technical part of the
matter ; Gluck's orchestration is, of course, miserably
thin compared with ours, but Gluck's songs, as
technique, are, perhaps, better than our Songs; and
this accompaniment of nothing but violins, with an
occasional hautboy, or harp, or horn, to play a little
tune of its own, or to emphasize Some special passage,
is in its right place with those songs, so Singable, so
6O ALTHEA.
considerate for the voice, just as the one big instru-
ment of shot and shimmering sound, made up of fifty
other instruments, which is our modern or chestra, is
in its right place connected with the passionate
declamation of our composers. Mind, I never once
suggest that Orpheus is not a great and perfect work
of art. What I maintain is that it is the work of a
thoroughly bygone past, of a completely extinct art;
and that, produced in utter unconsciousness of what
the modern soul would be, it no longer answers to
the wants of us moderns.”
“But at that rate,” exclaimed Donna Maria angrily,
“you would cart off all art that we haven’t made
Ourselves—you would renounce Homer, and Dante,
and Raphael, and every ancient statue that was ever
dug up !”
“I do renounce them,” answered Carlo, composedly ;
“and I renounce most emphatically and particularly
all those colonies of white, naked, motionless and
emotionless men and women whom antiquity has
devolved upon us: creatures with whose mentality,
if they have any, we no longer have any connection,
and whose bodily excellence we can appreciate only
as a result of infinite study, and a study, observe,
mainly of themselves, since all our ideas of comely
nudity are taken from those self-same statues. And
in the same way that an antique statue can be appre-
ciated and enjoyed only through a study of antique
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 6I
statues, So, I maintain, an opera of Gluck can be
enjoyed only as the result of a study of Gluck and
Gluck’s contemporaries. For I don't believe that
the people in this theatre, much as they may applaud,
enjoy this music as they would enjoy, some of them,
Verdi's Trovatore and others Wagner's Tristan.
You must remember that all music, if decently per-
formed, is rather enjoyable than not, just as any
well-made statue is more interesting to look at than
not, although a statue by Rodin may be more inter-
esting to us than a statue by Phidias.”
“What do you say to this, Baldwin P’’ asked
Donna Maria, expecting that, as formerly, her old
friend would make short work of all modern heresies.
But Baldwin seemed unwilling to be drawn into
the conversation.
“I think,” he said, “that there is considerable
truth in what Carlo says. Only, as regards the
antique, I must remind him that we enjoy no sort of
art, no sort of beauty whatever, without a certain
apprenticeship. The modern man may eventually
be more interested in a Dame de Comptoir by Manet
than in a Madonna by Raphael ; but he will be inter-
ested in neither, at least as a work of art, without a
certain previous habit: people require to be taught
how a wall covered with posters really does look
from a certain distance quite as much as how a naked
arm bends in a certain action ; in fact, antique
62 ALTHEA.
sculpture has half taught them the one and modern
painting has not yet taught them the other, since
they usually maintain that modern painting tells lies.
Oh, no, previous apprenticeship does not tell against
any art’s real power: we all require a little time to
see the beauties of any new sort of landscape ; we
appear to have required all the centuries of centuries
to appreciate the charm of a grey sky and wet road.
But, as to music, I confess there is a difference, due
to the fact, that music does not imitate the things
about us, and to the fact, also, that there is no time
to keep vivid, to perform and re-perform, all the
various styles of all the various ages: such a per-
formance as this is necessarily exceptional, and it
is a resuscitation. The question remains: Are we
restoring life to a thing that can live, or are we
galvanizing a corpse P I have cared too much for this
old music, and I now care too little for music of any
kind, to be able to answer.”
“Oh, that malaria, that malaria ” exclaimed
Donna Maria, “not the physical malaria merely, but
the Spiritual one, all the horrible preoccupations
which either make modern folk utterly ill, like the
air of an ill-managed hospital, or drive them to live
off intellectual drugs, absinthe and opium and has-
chisch, and heaven knows what filthinesses besides,
like Carlo's little pessimists and décadents.”
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 63
f
“Absinthe or haschisch or opium, if you will,”
answered Carlo, with the enthusiam of a neophyte,
“or even, if you will, curare, that drug which strings
up to agony the nerves of Sensation and paralyzes
the nerves of action. I never said that the art of
modern times is milk, or wine and water, or the
vermouth and quinine you make us drink against
fever after our drives in the Campagna. But, poison
or not poison, this modern art has spoilt us, with its
acrid flavour, its heady strength, its visionary fumes,
for any art like this. We may drink of this clear
stream of Gluck's music, and say, “Oh yes, very good
water, quite delicious, and, doubtless, free from every
kind of deleterious matter,’ but our soul is still
athirst, and we run back to Wagner and Schumann,
and even to Grieg and, Fauré.”
Again Donna Maria's anger was interrupted by
the rising of the curtain ; or, rather, diverted from
Carlo's décadent aesthetics to the extreme badness of
the mise en scène, to the rows of Father Christmases
and ladies in grey waterproofs, who bellowed and
gesticulated as unhappy shades at the gates of hell,
and the chains of thick thighed and tight waisted furies
who capered about in the rose-coloured Bengal light.
“Listen, Baldwin,” she whispered, quickly turning
round and presenting her back to the stage, “but for
heaven’s sake don't look till you're told.”
64 ALTHEA.
Suddenly, close upon the rattle of that chorus,
Surging and sinking like the angry but impotent sea
upon the beach, came the thin weak notes of a harp,
and the notes, clear and fresh, but imploring and
helpless, of that voice of a young god of the woods ;
beaten back and returning to implore, till the chorus
of the wardens of hell, growing slower and fainter,
waxing surprised and compassionate, at last gave
way, and bade the gates of Hades roll back on their
hinges.
“Now, look, Baldwin ” whispered Donna Maria.
The crowd of demons and spectres had fallen
asunder, and down the rocky path leading into
Hades, came Orpheus, triumphant but terrified. The
light of our earth, filtered wan through the rocks,
made a blue and ghostly halo round his head,
bleaching the gasping lips and the tremulous hands,
and turning to silver the Strings of his lyre and the
laurels of his crown ; while, as he descended, with
precipitous steps and long, frightened pauses, the red
vapours of hell caught the embroideries of his cloak,
licked the hem of his tunic, and wavered in strange
splendours of ruby and gold all round him.
“Ah ” exclaimed Carlo, with suppressed en-
thusiasm, “that is a figure, all glittering with mystic
jewel-lights, for one of your great pre-Raphaelite
painters, or for Gustave Moreau.”
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 65
The chorus, now pealing out a welcome, began to
grow faint and fainter, it would seem, before the pre-
sence of the victorious mortal, and Orpheus, with a
bound, descended from the rocks; descended, but
only to stagger and cower, while the light of earth
and the light of hell mingled in strange effulgencies
about him ; overcome by the terrors of below, made
dizzy and faint by the sudden granting of his prayer.
Then, raising the beautiful arm which was shielding
his dazed and deafened young head, he flung it joy-
fully in the air, and grasping with the other his lyre,
rushed forward to the fiery portals, his face changed
from terror to triumph.
“Good heavens, how grand l’ exclaimed Carlo,
forgetting all his theories about the insufficience of
old music, and joining Donna Maria in a fit of wild
clapping.
For a little while they did not speak. Carlo sat
humming the air of the last chorus at the bottom of
the box, rapping out its metre on his chair back as if
it had been composed to-day, instead of a century
and a quarter ago; and Donna Maria was watching
the effect it had produced on Baldwin, until, dis-
appointed with his apparent listlessness, she suddenly
clutched his hand and asked,—
“Well, Baldwin, and do you no longer care for old
music 2''
66 ALTHEA.
Baldwin laughed. “What is the name of this
singer ?” he merely asked.
“Helen Hastreiter,” answered Donna Maria.
“Did you think,” asked Carlo, “it might be the
ghost of Signor Guadagni ’’’
II.
“Yes,” answered Baldwin ; “I have spent the
whole morning at the Vatican ; and what is still more
satisfactory—at least with your classical intentions
—I have fallen in love with a little marble Muse.”
Donna Maria affected him, at that moment, as a
creature infinitely charming but decidedly comic,
a child to whom you could talk only nonsense and
tell only fairy tales. She had driven up to fetch
him, in visiting splendour, with liveries and prancing
horses, and stated that it was quite indispensable she
should pay a dozen calls or leave a score of cards.
Then, with an exclamation, a little crow of delight,
at the spring wind and gleams of Sunshine, she had
announced that it was far more indispensable to
walk on the grass in Villa Borghese ; and, scattering
the cards all over the carriage, had seized Baldwin’s
hand and said : “I want to speak to you very
seriously. I saw you again at Orpheus last night.
And you were at the Vatican this morning P’’
“Aren’t you satisfied with me for having fallen
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 67
in love with my Muse—I forget what she's the
Muse of; at all events, neither of political economy
nor of pessimistic philosophy.”
“I don’t know,” said Donna Maria gravely, as
the carriage rolled into the yet empty park. “I
want to know whether you are serious, Baldwin.
I want you to be in earnest a little, for I have
been thinking of very serious matters.”
“Not the calls you ought to be making, and the
serious results of your delay, Donna Maria P.”
“Which of us is frivolous—you or I ?” asked
Donna Maria angrily. “Listen. I have been
thinking all these days about what you said when
we went to Orpheus, and what Carlo said about you.
It doesn’t matter what Carlo says about himself :
he's only a boy, and he’ll get bored with his pº
|
of moroseness and decadence soon enough ; besides,
he enjoyed Orpheus tremendously, and said so after-
wards quite simply, as if he hadn't been pretending
the contrary the whole time, dear creature. But it’s \
different with you, caro Baldwin. If Orpheus bores
you, if you find that all the beautiful things you
cared for are merely so many cast aside toys of
yours—if all that is true, and remains true, then
things are going very badly with you, poor Baldwin.
If it's true, then you may as well give up worrying
about pauperism, and pessimism, and your responsi-
F 2
68 ALTHEA.
bilities and everybody else's ; you won't do any
good, for your mind will be in just as bad a state as
the rest of the world, and it won’t be you who can
improve matters. Don't interrupt and say that in
order to be of any use one must be stirred up, one
must even have been sickened by things—I know
that perfectly ; it's logical. But in order to help to
remedy matters, one must get over that condition of
nausea; one must be sound in all one's feelings, and
perceive things as they are, without exaggeration or
sickness. You used to tell us so yourself; you can
explain these things much better than I. Only you
seem to have forgotten it; perhaps because you've
worried too much and been ill. And the use of me
is to remind you. I haven’t brains like you, and
can't explain why one ought to love classic things, and
be, in a way, classic in one's life; but I’m somehow
constituted in such a way that classic things please me,
and I prefer being healthy-minded and natural; and
I feel that those ancient people and Goethe were right,
that they were going with the grain of Nature, doing
like the trees, and the sunshine and the wind—do you
understand 2–and I feel young, and am determined
to remain young, even at eighty; and all the rest of
you are growing old, and being pleased with grow-
ing old. That's why I mind about Orpheus and the
Vatican ; I can't analyze it deeper.”
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 69
Baldwin was listening attentively, although he
could not help smiling at the earnestness in that
dear, childish face, with something of a Luini’s
angel in its irregularity. It seemed so natural now
to be back with her, experiencing the fluctuations
of this warm, gentle, gusty nature, which shook you
into quicker life, and warmed you into momentary
happiness, like the capricious wind and Sunshine of
that Roman spring among the leafless acacias, the
Solemn ilexes.
“You are quite right, dear Donna Maria,” he
answered. “I have been ill, in spirit as well as in
body; but I have known that I was ill; I have re-
gretted it, I have longed to be my old Self again ;
you see, I mind the evil of the world too much to
enjoy being a pessimist. And I have associated this
state of illness with the indifference which I feel,
or have felt, for the art I once cared for. Do you
think I was happy the other night, when I thought
that Orpheus was going to be nothing to me 2 But
let me tell you about this morning in the Vatican.
Do you know, I often wondered, on my way back to
Italy, how I should be affected, after two months
of illness among that foreign, silent, Oriental art, by
a return to the familiar things of antiquity. I re-
membered that a doubled-headed Janus, with archaic
rows of curls and narrow Smiling eyes, had given me
70 ALTHEA.
|
|
a little pang of recognition and pleasure when I
had met him unexpectedly on the fountain of a
Moorish palace at Seville. Then I went to Naples.
The museum there struck me with a sense of the
familiarity of antique things, but the familiarity
akin to indifference and contempt. All this art,
with its extraordinary excellence of inherited skill,
seemed inane and in a way vulgar; all those
flourishing, well-built, naked bodies, overwhelmed me
with an impression of dulness and commonness,
almost of low breeding. They seemed to talk in a
loud, emphatic way, and yet to say nothing. I
longed for some far-fetched allegoric creature, a
feeble lived hybrid, between the Middle Ages and
the nineteenth century, by Burne Jones or Burne
Jones’s pupils, a creature with a wistful face and
dubious anatomy. I suspected that I must be
growing into what Carlo calls a modern : one who
cares for art only as a mirror of his own personality.
But it has turned out quite differently. You will
laugh; but I am really quite childishly pleased
that the Vatican this morning, was not the Naples
Museum all over again ; I really enjoyed myself
there tremendously.”
Donna Maria had rudely broken into the middle
of Baldwin’s speech, by jumping up with a “Stop
Stop l’ to the coachman, as she recognized in a
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 7 I
neighbouring path a friend's smart nurse and baby.
She made no apology for her interruption, but,
bending over the back of the carriage, kneeling on
the seat, sent out her deep, warm voice in a big
“O caro, caro !” at the sight of that fat, pouting
creature, of all that lump of soft pink flesh and soft
blond hair. Then she turned again to Baldwin,
and listened very attentively.
“I really enjoyed myself so much this morning,”
he went on. “I liked it all, as I used to when I
was a lad, and believed that ‘beauty is truth, truth
beauty, that is all we know on earth,’ and all we
need to know, and all the rest of it. I liked the
sarcophagi with the big masks gaping upon them,
the porphyry baths and the water sparkling in the
fountains ; I liked the innumerable inferior little
marble people, fauns and athletes and Venuses by
no one in particular ; I liked their being so clean-
limbed and cheerful-minded, and I liked the quantities
of them all about.”
“Now why does one like them ’’’ suddenly burst
out Donna Maria, stopping the carriage and Spring-
ing out where the marble horses splash in the big
central fountain. “Why does one like them, not
merely admire them, you know, and why does one
know that it's right to like them P”
“But some people don’t like them, Donna Maria.
72 ALTHEA.
I didn't like them at Naples, and Carlo says that it's
only habit and conventionality that makes us pre-
tend to like them at all.”
“That's it,” she answered triumphantly, watching
the water, which plashed green among the hoofs of
the sculptured horses, their manes grown golden
with age and lichen—“that's just it. Why do we
know that you must have been morbid when you
disliked the antiques at Naples ; and that Carlo's
moderns must be horrid, dreadful creatures, if the
antique does not please them I have thought of
it very often, and now I know why. The explanation
is the same as why do we know that people are morbid
—unless they are utterly stupid—who do not enjoy,
but in a way much stronger than mere admiration,
the sight of clouds moving about like to-day, and
branches bending, and water spirting like this foun-
tain P Look at those trees in front of us,” she con-
tinued, pointing with her parasol to a group of
slender bays shooting up their clustered boles from
the short anemone-starred turf. “We admire them,
but we do something more, for we admire also any-
thing that is well done, a horrible sonnet of Baude-
laire and a dreadful Spanish Saint by Zurbaran, for
instance.”
“We like their being beautiful ; isn’t that enough 2 ”
suggested Baldwin, as they wandered under the
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 73
tunnel of twisting ivy branches, black and scaly
like rhinoceros trunks, at whose end a little circular
temple gleamed white in the fitful sunlight.
“Not merely that, for morbid things are sometimes
beautiful, and things which give one a certain dis-
gust : the blood, for instance, welling Out of Reg-
nault's decapitated Moor. You don’t understand
what I mean. We like this moving sky, and this
rushing wind, and we like these trees, with a kind
of sympathy for the life, the health, the strength
that is in them. We recognize in the trees, in the
way in which they grip the ground with their roots,
and shoot out their branches, and poise and push
forward their leaves, the sign of life, something that
says “this is the way that Nature prefers,’ something'
like what we feel when we are young and healthy
and strong. And it’s the same with the statues:
they may be good antiques, or bad antiques, but we
recognize in them the kind of symmetry of body,
the kind of balance of mind, the sort of life, in
short, which goes with Nature's intentions, and to
which we approach when we are sound and simple
and good.”
“But Nature's intentions,” objected Baldwin rather
Sadly, “are sometimes that we should be weak and ill
and worthless, that we should not strike strong roots
or shoot out vigorous branches.”
74 ALTHEA.
“Yes, but then Nature gets rid of us as quick as
she can. Of course, she does often produce weak
and miserable things, but she doesn't like them, so I
suppose she produces them because, somehow or other,
she can’t help herself,” answered Donna Maria, with
an easy Pagan tendency to personify. “And that's
the reason why I wanted you to enjoy yourself at
the Vatican to-day. It’s a sign of spiritual health.”
“What a Greek you are, Donna Maria,” laughed
Baldwin, as they sat down on the steps of the amphi-
theatre, watching the red and black seminarists
playing at football on the grass beneath the pines,
and the lizards darting among the dwarf marigolds
and Sprouting vetches among the Stones.
“I don’t know about that,” mused Donna Maria,
drawing patterns with her parasol. “I shouldn't
have liked the Greeks for many things, I daresay.
Perhaps they weren’t what I call Greek in everything,
either. And, after all, every art, at one time or
another, whenever it has cared for beauty very
much, has been Greek in that sense, however little
like Greeks people may have been at that time.
Titian is in so many things, and Giorgione in that
pastoral with the people playing under the trees,
and Gluck's Orpheus is Greek, though Gluck wore a
horsehair wig and took snuff. It's very odd to think
he took snuff.”
ORPIHEUS IN ROME. 75
“You have come just in time,” cried Baldwin to
Carlo, as the young man, who had followed the
carriage from the gate, came up breathless across the
grass. “Donna Maria has been explaining in what
consists the healthiness of the antique, of the classic,
and why we all care for it when we are healthy.
Now you may explain once more why no sincere
modern can care for it at all ; and why no sincere
modern can take any but an historical interest in
Gluck's Orpheus, to hear which, by the way, I learn
that the sincere modern yourself has been already
five times.” -
“Oh, bother historical interest, and classicism, and
modernness l’exclaimed Carlo, throwing himself on
to the steps of the hippodrome, one arm under his
head, and his eyes fixed upon the ever changing sky,
where moist blue patches and loose grey cloud
wreaths chased each other in the west wind. “We
are all classic on a day like this and in a place like
this. Look at the bay trees bending in the wind ;
look at the dear lizards darting about, and the red
and black Etruscan beetles among the acanthus
leaves (one has just run up my sleeve, bless him |);
listen to the south-west wind in the pine branches
and in the ilex trunks. There ! those are the pines,
a rustle; they are the violins and the tenors. And the
hollow ilexes—do you hear 2—quite different; those
76 ALTHEA.
are the violoncellos and double-basses, with every
now and then a big thump of a kettledrum when a
branch is snapped. And there's the scent of the
bay leaves; the sun has half baked them already,
and the melting resin of the pine trunks. How good |
And there's something else, too. Ah, it’s the pale
yellow jonquils in your dress, Donna Maria how
right of you to bring them, since Nature hasn't had
the sense to make them grow here. Did I Say I was
a modern ? How idiotic | It was the red plush of
the theatre seats made me think it. Do you hear P
That's the overture of Orpheus—la, la, la ; ta, ta, ta;
ti, ti, ti—Sweeping across the grass just now. And
there's the first chorus—it's the ilexes do it; don’t
you expect to hear those four notes—those beautiful
middle soprano notes, like a viol—“Euridice”—drop-
ping in P Don't you expect to see Orpheus walk down
the steps of the little temple there, with his head
drooping and his hands hanging loosely, like the
Antinous P’ And Carlo, with his arms still crossed
beneath his head, lying on the steps of the circus,
sang out, in his big bass voice, those famous four
notes, “Euridice l’
Donna Maria and Baldwin began to laugh.
“Why do you laugh 2 ” asked Carlo, interrupting
his performance. “I am quite serious. I am classic,
the trees are classic, the grass also, and the sky: the
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 77
whole world is classic. You surely don’t expect me
to say that I am modern, do you ?”
“It's all very well,” exclaimed Donna Maria,
suddenly digging her umbrella into a soft patch of
green among the stone steps, “but I want to know
why it all hangs together; why the day is classic,
and the place, and why it all has to do with antique
statues and Gluck's music, and the Hastreiter’s
acting P It's all very well for you not to care, Carlo ;
you who will say to-morrow that the classic is all
horrid old rubbish ; a mixture of plaster-of-Paris and
hair powder, as you once put it. But I am always
classic, so I am interested to know all, about it.
What makes things classic, Baldwin P What is being
classic P’’
“The classic,” answered Carlo solemnly, con-
templating one of his feet, balanced in the air as he
lay there ; “the classic is the ideal. As to the ideal,
why, the ideal is that quality which is noticeable in
the classic. And it was all, somehow, invented by
the late Plato—Euridice ”
“Be quiet, Carlo l’’ cried Donna Maria ; “ look
here, I want to understand this, Baldwin—I under-
stand that some things are classic because, as I told
you before, they seem to go with the grain of Nature,
like these trees and this grass and this sky; they
seem to be living the life that is the most liveable ;
78 ALTHEA.
the statues and Gluck's music and a lot of other
things. Does it all come to ‘beauty being truth,
truth beauty 2 ” -
“Oh, dear no P '' exclaimed Baldwin ; “ that's
only metaphysics ; for there are two charming
explanations of beauty, dear Donna Maria, as you
doubtless know, each violently contradictory to each
other, and each equally orthodox—indeed, aesthetic
orthodoxy, like other sorts of orthodoxy, depends
upon the conciliation of these two contradictory
principles. One is that beauty is the ideal, which is
explained to us as meaning the abstract, the some-
thing that does not exist outside the human mind ;
and the other, as Keats informs us, that beauty is
truth, truth beauty, which, if it means anything,
Iſlea Il S that beauty is what does really exist. The
result of which metaphysical view is that half the
world, with Zola at their head, are perpetually
expounding and demonstrating that truth is ugliness
and ugliness truth. The fact is that beauty is a
perfectly separate quality, or combination of qualities,
given independent of truth, which, by the way, is a
very relative quality itself. What the constituent
elements of the impression called beauty may or
may not be is a very long question, and a question
which physiological psychology is much more likely
to solve than mere speculative metaphysics; but be
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 79
they what they may, the impression or set of im-
pressions called beauty is a specific, distinct matter.”
“I understand that,” answered Donna Maria;
“but it isn’t about beauty that I want to know, it's
about the particular kind of beauty which we call
classic, which / call classic at least—the sort of
beauty of the antique and of Orpheus, but I needn't
go over all that again. For there is another kind of
beauty, just as beautiful, but which is not classic,
which has nothing to do with a day like this, which
does not make one feel that it goes with the grain of
Nature. For instance, the beauty of the last act of
Wagner's Tristan. It is beautiful, as beautiful as
Orpheus, but it's a beauty that makes one feel not
well, but vaguely ill.”
“Oh,” cried Carlo ; “if you are going to apply
hygienic Standards to beauty, I shall go and perform
first Orpheus and then Tristan on my piano at
home.”
“Do so,” she replied contemptuously. “You see,
Baldwin, I am hygienic ; I am practical. So why
shouldn't I apply hygienic standards to beauty P It
is the only way of measuring its practical value in
life.”
Baldwin did not answer. He was struck by this
simple remark, so simply given out by Donna Maria,
who sat there among the fitful gleams of sunshine,
8O ALTHEA.
like some, little antique dryad—a thing more than
usually connected with Nature—dressed out in
fashionable visiting gear.
“Is the classic that kind of beauty which is
hygienic P Yes, I stick to my expression, Carlo.
Is it the sort of beauty which makes life easier to
US 2 ”
Carlo had straightened himself and was thinking.
“Yes,” he answered, instead of Baldwin, “the classic is
what you call hygienic beauty. It's things as they
should be, bodies as they should be, arms and legs and
backs and heads as they should be ; it’s emotion as it
should be ; and that's why I return to my old theory.
No sort of classic art can really thoroughly express,
reproduce mankind as it is, because our arms and legs,
and our thoughts and emotions, are not what they should
be ; and that is why all classic art must necessarily be
less intimately human, less potent; in fact, less great
than the modern art which is not classic, which gives
us our bodies and Our Souls not as they should be,
but as they are.”
Baldwin smiled at Carlo's return to his theories.
“Euridice l’’ he sang under his breath.
Carlo understood the criticism. “Well, yes,” he
answered quite simply ; “just to-day I am classically
disposed. It’s the weather, and having heard
Orpheus last night, and expecting to hear it again
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 8I
this evening ; I am happy, and I like things to be as
they should be. But it is an individual mood, an
individual moment. How often do you expect me to
be in it 2
“Very often—most often,” exclaimed Donna Maria
angrily, “ considering how little you see of the
miseries of the world, and how young you are.”
“Less often, perhaps, for that reason,” said
Baldwin ; “when you are less young, and less free
from painful thoughts, you will be less interested,
perhaps, in the representation of the very things, the
very imperfections which harass you ; you will court
the moments of feeling things as they should be,
instead of things as they are.”
“Perhaps l’ exclaimed Carlo, indifferently, rising
from the grass and leaning against a pine trunk.
“At all events, to-day I feel classic ; I want to be
classic, I want to forget modern art, I want to walk
on the grass in Villa Borghese and smell the bay
leaves and pine branches, and Donna Maria’s
jonquils, and I want to talk about Gluck's music, and
to think about that wonderful Orpheus, leaning on
the sarcophagus in the attitude of Praxiteles' Faun,
and wandering about with the bowed head and
languid hands of the Antinous, and making one feel
altogether as if the young grasses and budding
bushes, the wind piping in the pines and playing
G
82 ALTHEA.
double bass in the ilexes, had produced between
them all a divine sylvan creature, whose movement
is naturally music, whose speech is naturally song.”
“Yes,” answered Donna Maria, “but I also want
to know why we should want to talk about Orpheus
in this place and on this day, why the remembrance
of that music, the remembrance of that gesture, of
the wonderful piece of poetry which Gluck and the
Hastreiter have made between them, should affect us
in the same way as all these beautiful natural things
that make us feel happy and strong. We shouldn’t
be thinking of Wagner's Isolde in this way under the
pine trees, any more than we should be thinking of
Sarah Bernhardt’s Fédora; and I want to know why?"
“You want to know, Donna Maria P" said Baldwin,
as they brushed through the laurel and box hedge
which enclosed a little dell, dank with arum and
cyclamen leaves, where the first birds were singing in
the ilexes which surrounded a fountain of deep green
water. “You want to know why I should have been
reconciled to antique Sculpture, converted afresh to
the true gods, immediately after hearing Orpheus 2
Why the little Muse with whom I fell in love to-day
at the Vatican had certainly been playing on her pipe
one of Gluck's melodies P”
“Ah !” sighed Carlo, catching at a laurel twig
above him, “Donna Maria is not a modern Italian
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 83
and a descendant of those terrible practical Romans
for nothing. She wants to know why classic music
is hygienic.”
“Why, yes,” she answered ; “ of course I do. It’s
most important. If art had not a possible effect
upon our spiritual welfare, it would have no more
importance and dignity in our lives than any frivolous
amusement.”
“Oh, the moral value of art | * groaned Carlo.
“Listen,” went on Donna Maria, addressing
Baldwin; “I can understand some things, but not
others. I can understand that beauty is independent
of, though occasionally connected with, whāt we call
right and wrong, I can understand that beauty may
be sometimes hostile to our higher feelings.”
“I deny it !” cried Carlo enthusiastically.
“Then listen. Have you ever looked at a bullock's
heart in a butcher's shop P Well, as a matter of
colour, it's one of the loveliest things in the world.
The blood spirting out of that decapitated creature's
neck on to the marble step, in Regnault's picture, is
also exquisitely beautiful. And the most indecent
woman may be, as we see in every French exhibition,
a beautiful object. But the bullock's heart is nasty;
the decapitation is barbarous, the naked woman is in-
decent; and in so far as we are revolted by objects
whose beauty, nevertheless, attracts us. People are
G 2
84 ALTHEA.
so absurd as not to admit that attraction as well as
that repulsion ; they say that a man who paints
bullocks' hearts, decapitations and naked impro-
prieties has a degraded artistic sense, which would
mean that all these things are ugly. And the fine
result, of course (applied even to crush the dear fauns,
because they aren't sufficiently godlike, forsooth), is
naturally that other folk say that all things, beastly
or not, must be beautiful ; nay, that the beastlier, the
more beautiful. People are too stupid to see that
the truth is simply that in a well organized human
being the repulsion for butchers' shops, decapitations,
and improprieties ought to be greater than the attrac-
tion of any amount of beautiful colour or form ; and
that a person who overlooks the repulsion and feels
only the attraction, although perhaps excellent as
an artist, is rather topsy-turvy as a human being.”
“I don't see what that has to do with the hygienic
quality of Gluck’s music,” objected Carlo.
“It has everything to do with it,” retorted Donna
Maria, resolutely. “As it is with the bullock’s
heart, so it is with lots of beautiful things; take,
for instance, Baudelaire's poems and many of Swin-
burne's : they are beautiful, but they appeal to
things in us which are low, savage, which are
bad for our moral health. I return to Wagner's
Tristan. Yesterday afternoon, at my house, the
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 85
governess and the music-master played me the whole
of that “Death of Isolde,’ arranged for four hands.
It is magnificent. As beautiful, quite, as Gluck’s
‘Elysian Fields, and much more stirring. But while
this is holy, that—I mean Isolde—is unholy. I felt
it very strongly, and wondered why. While I was
wondering, I suddenly recollected a book of
anthropology I have been reading : an awful cata-
logue of primaeval ferocities and madnesses. I
understood them. This most modern of all music
suggests all the wild beast in mankind. It is a long,
horrible, hysterical attack put into music: the furies
of speechless sobbing, writhing, murderous passion.”
“Well ; and why not, if, as you say, it is beau-
tiful ?” asked Carlo.
“Because,” answered Baldwin, as Donna Maria
seemed rather at a loss to explain herself; “because
whenever art plays with the savage within us, rouses
these primaeval passions, it attains perhaps its most
potent emotional effects, but it becomes morally
detrimental. The later growths of the soul—gentle-
ness, enthusiasm, pitying Sorrow—do not afford to
art matter, as it were, so magnificently combustible.
But it is only when touching such more recent, nobler
emotions, or at least in leaving the others untouched,
that art has a morally sane effect. Orpheus, in
Gluck's music, in the Hastreiter's singing and acting
86 ALTHEA.
(so measured and harmonious and delicate), is a
gentle, tender, chivalrous creature ; above all, a civil-
ized human creature. Isolde—and to get the full
equivalent, we ought to imagine Isolde acted by a
Sarah—a woman in whom the revolt of the ferocious
powers of love and despair have quenched all higher
emotions, without which the higher animal, man, is
not sane, because not complete.”
“Thank you, Baldwin, you have helped me to
explain myself. But now comes the inexplicable. I
understand why the Isolde music is, however beau-
tiful, morally debasing. I know that certain combi-
nations of rhythm and harmony lash our nerves in
the same way as the passions which they suggest ; I
understand that music which has the movement, the
catch in the breath, the irregular throb of sobbing,
should remind us of an hysterical fit. It's quite easy
to understand why some music represents what Carlo
calls emotion as it ought not to be , but why should
certain other music represent emotion as it ought
to be 2 I see why a beautiful antique should suggest
spiritual health. It suggests bodily health, calmness,
moderation : a person like that could not well be
morally ill; it is one ideal suggesting another. The
statues are healthy, as these trees are healthy, as this
wind is healthy, morally quite as much as physically
—so far it is easy to understand why we think of
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 87
them altogether. But music like Gluck's imitates
nothing, and therefore ought to suggest nothing. I
understand why it does not strike us as unholy; but
why should it strike us as holy P And yet that
whole performance does : the music of Gluck, and
the gestures and expression of the Hastreiter impress
me like a religious ceremony, but the ceremony of a
religion of innocence and strength and light, not of a
religion of mystery, and sin, and weakness.”
“I want to know why also,” said Carlo, his natural
passion for discussion getting the better of his mere
whimsical, lazy, desire to enjoy and to dream—“not
because of the hygienic quality of Orpheus—oh no, I
positively abhor the juxtaposition of poetry and
carbolic acid—but because I have often puzzled to
understand why certain performances make one
feel good. Do you remember, Baldwin, a certain
Livonian singer—a very different creature from the
Hastreiter—whom you heard years ago at our house
—a common, coarse creature, but who sang like
four-and-twenty angels?”
“Of course, I do, Carlo ; and I remember quite
well, how, in the intervals of her songs, while she was
playing irrelevantly, you kept whispering to me that
it made one understand that the beautiful is the same
as the good.”
“Yes,” went on Carlo. “It made me think of all
88 ALTHEA.
the good people I knew. My enthusiasms and aspira-
tions seemed to rush to me on the wave of her voice ;
she seemed to sing to me all that I value most in
life, not explicitly naming the things, but giving their
essence, the emotions which they bring ; and then,
when I looked at her, talked with her again, what
was she P Prose, prose, threefold prose ! I re-
member feeling quite humiliated afterwards that such
a woman, such a thing, as this could, even for a few
minutes only, be so much to one, so fill one's nature;
I remember feeling a sort of pride and satisfaction
when, the day after hearing her, I found that a word
of a certain friend of mine, a look in his eyes in talk-
ing of his lost mother, had made me feel as happy, as
noble as this singing—quite proud to find that a
merely moral thing could move me as much as that
voice. How is that It all hangs together,” he
added, apologetically, “with Donna Maria's curiosity
about the moral wholesomeness of Orpheus.”
“I think,” answered Baldwin after a pause, as they
walked over the sere grass and rustling dry leaves
beneath the pinkish, sere oaks low down in the park,
“I think I could explain my idea best in a metaphor.
Imagine, then, that there is in our nature a peal of
bells, which are set ringing but rarely, and set ringing
by various ropes. What sets each ringing is any
unusual beauty, any unusual goodness, or nobility or
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 89
tenderness, all, in short, that is desirable and rare :
the ideal in some form. These bells may be set in
motion by a beautiful sight, for instance, and then, to
this sight of a beautiful person, of hills, or sun and
water or flowers, there unites the echoes of the pre-
vious vibrations of those soul bells ; associations rush
upon us of noble Sounds and noble feelings, vague,
Sometimes scarcely to be defined or recognized, but
connected with the present experience in their
essential power of giving noble delight: we hear the
notes of present joy, the echoes, or rather the har-
monies, of the joy which has been. The ideal, the
desired, the desirable of our less selfish instincts, all
unite and redouble the original emotion. Your
Livonian singer opens the doors of a paradise in our
own soul—a paradise into which she may be as un-
able to penetrate as the shadows on the grass, the
clouds in the sky, the trees and the flowers, the lines
and tints of the hills, are unable to perceive the deeds
and words of heroism or tenderness which somehow
evoke them in our thoughts; as the flowers which we
lay on the bier of the beloved, the incense we burn
on an altar, are unable to love or to worship. We
are so made that nobility drags out nobility, and
beauty, beauty. We feel good in the presence of
great bodily perfection. Beauty, it seems to me, is
not merely, as Rossetti has it somewhere, genius;
90 ALTHEA.
beauty is goodness. We are the nobler for the delu-
Sion, nay, rather, the great reality of association,
which we feel.”
“Then,” asked Donna Maria, eagerly ; “music
which does not arouse in us the thought or feeling of
violent or enervating passion—music which is merely
beautiful—becomes in so far not merely passive as
regards our spiritual welfare, but absolutely actively
favourable to it * *
“Undoubtedly, it seems to me,” answered Baldwin ;
“and that is why such music as Gluck's does certainly
suggest emotion as it should be, even as antique Sculp-
ture shows us arms and legs as they should be.”
They had come to those high lying pastures under
the pine trees. The grey sky was in a tumult, the
south-west wind was making big music in the
branches, in the hollow trunks of the ilexes, bending
the slender, clustering bay trees, shaking the pine
tops ; and yet, one knew and felt, gently helping the
anemones to unfold in the grass. To our three
friends, with the previous evenings in their ears still,
and the coming evening in their ears already, it all
made the music of Orpheus; even as that music of
Orpheus had seemed to fill the theatre with the
scent of laurel and mountain pine and jonquil : creak-
ing of branch, moaning of hollow trunk, rustle of
leaves, delicate music of violins and hautboys, fresh
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 9I
full notes of a young voice, new like the young grass
under foot, it all moved and melted in their thoughts,
as the grey cloud-wreaths moved and melted in the
wind and the sunshine.
“Look l’ cried Donna Maria, suddenly darting
forward, “here is something for Orpheus !” and she
began breaking long, berried twigs from off a great
laurel branch, which the wind had snapped and
thrown on the grass. *
“Oh ” added Carlo enthusiastically, “but that's
not all. Look there ! the pine branches.”
Some foresters were lopping the branches in a
little pine wood; the green, spruce branches lay in
heaps under the trees, ready to cart. “May I take
some P’’ cried Carlo to the astonished woodmen.
And he filled his arms with the fresh, supple, resinous
green. *.
“Now,” he said, suddenly taking the bay twigs out
of the lady’s hands, “your jonquils, Donna Maria.
Wouldn't that represent Gluck’s music, doesn't it
symbolize that beautiful Orpheus, with his wayward,
half serious, half childish smiles of a young faun ?”
“Yes,” answered Donna Maria absently, and turn-
ing quickly to Baldwin. “Then it is true that there
is an art which shows us ourselves as we are, and
another which shows us ourselves as we should be 2
It is true, then, that it is better for us to care for the
92 ALTHEA.
art which does not merely express ourselves, but
suggests something better 2 Then I am right that
there is classic art, and that classic art is wholesome
art—that there is a moral value in some sorts of
beauty P” -
“Certainly,” answered Baldwin, smiling at her
eager determination, while, his eyes followed Carlo
Scouring the grass for more fallen bay branches.
“Then,” went on Donna Maria, “I was right in
thinking it so sad that you should care no longer for
Gluck's music—I was right in being delighted that
you should have liked the dear statues in the Vatican
Once more P’’
“Quite right, dear Donna Maria ; and what is
more, it is the music which has made me able once
more to love the statues—it's the poetry of those
divine melodies, of that exquisite expression and
gesture, which has made me feel once more the
poetry of that silent, motionless people of marble.
And I will confess one thing to you : I told you I
had fallen in love with a little antique Muse, seated.
on a stone, quite young and childish, with the flute
just removed from her lips, thinking over the tune
she has just been playing, and wondering why it was
So Sad and so consoling. She had thought of it as a
melody just like any other, neither gay nor melan-
choly ; and instead, it has set her thinking of those
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 93
other fields and meadows below, full of flowers and
sunlight, but where the dead walk divided from the
living whom they love, until love is stronger than
death and they are again united—and the tune which
my little Muse has been playing, playing to herself
through the centuries, and to me all day, is that
hautboy solo in the third act of Orpheus.”
They had come up to the carriage, which was
waiting at a bend of the road, near a little temple
of Apollo, Screened among laurels, and reduced, in
two centuries, from an imitation ruin to a real one.
“Well,” asked Carlo, about to place his armful of
green in the hood. “Well ?”
“Well,” answered Donna Maria, a sudden bright-
ness in her eyes; “we will send it all this evening as
an offering to Orpheus.”
And taking the mass of pine branches and laurel
twigs, she removed the bunch of jonquils from her
breast and laid it gently upon them.
III.
They were in the theatre once more, Donna Maria,
Baldwin and young Carlo.
The silence had been broken by the violin prelude
of the third act, at the movement marked in the score
“Lentoe Dolce,” and which seems, in its even flow,
to carry the soul, upon some reedy, willowy stream,
94 ALTHEA.
into the heart of the land of the happy dead. . The
happy dead, the heroes and heroines whom AEneas
saw in Hades, were but sorrily represented by a
ballet of green and pink gauze, crowning and re-
crowning each other with paper garlands, and
watching the twisting and shaking of a more distin-
guished Elysian skirt. But the music of Gluck
blotted out this vision of doubtful bliss. After those
bars of introduction, of voyage, as it were, to the land
of shades, there arose the reedy voice of a hautboy,
quavering in unearthly heights over the tremulous
violins. All other instruments are instruments;
but the hautboy, with its soft shrillness, its quivering
breath, or at least this particular hautboy, of Gluck's,
is like the ghost of a human voice : a human
voice which has shuffled its mortal coil, leaving
it far below in a denser atmosphere, and soared
into a stratum of sound where it trembles in isola-
tion, panting and palpitating like the waves of
heat in the summer air. The hautboy rose above
the violins, meandering in long intricate cadences,
turning back upon itself in clustered little notes like
minute wing-beats, throwing itself out again in
gradually Swelled notes, folding up in gradual silence,
only to start off afresh in new labyrinths of melody,
or to fly rapidly up and down giddy little scales : a
long instrumental Solo, accompanied by the orchestra,
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 95
which seems simple when we examine it, but which
(the highest effort, perhaps, of Gluck’s genius) carries
with it a sense of infinite remoteness, of the peaceful
but vast glades inaccessible to living feet. So strong
was this impression, that when the chorus came for-
ward, headed by Eurydice, and sang that this was
the sacred land of eternal repose, one was ready to
believe it, and to feel, when the orchestra began to
prelude the coming of Orpheus, and to twitter and
murmur and ripple and rustle with the birds and
waters and leaves of Elysium, that the demi-god had
really penetrated into fairy land. Orpheus came
forward, the laurel crown on his head, the lyre by his
side, a quaint, triumphal creature, radiant with the
new sunshine of Elysium and its immortal air, radiant
with the hope of Eurydice. And when the card-
board clouds had rolled away, and he stepped into
the midst of the happy shades, he was met by a
solemn song of welcome, wide, solemn and sweet.
But among the ethereal music, its serenity suffused
with sadness, Orpheus stood out as a strange and
foreign thing, a living creature among the shades, with
restless limbs and impatient, passionate young face,
waiting with tremor for the restored Eurydice.
Then, when the chorus was hushed, and its last
orchestral echoes had died away, he began to look
round, but with eyes that dared not see (for such was
96 ALTHEA.
the promise given to the gods, that he should not
look upon Eurydice till safe upon our earth), and
slowly to move, to wave to and fro, to a music which
seemed to result from his movements rather than to
control them. Silent, without a word or a note, he
turned to one group of shades, then to another,
averting his eyes, extending his hands, imploring
Eurydice to come forth, imploring that they should
make him sicken no longer with hope and sus-
pense. Then quickly he made his way into the
crowd, turning aside with Outstretched arms, like so
much woodland leafage, the creatures that he met ;
striking deeper into the crowd with trembling hands
and anxious, averted eyes, silently moving to that
twisting, winding music, till it was plain that Eurydice
was not there; and he returned, with imploring face
and wearied gesture, to wait impatiently once more.
Suddenly a light came into his eyes, a curious smile,
childish, eager, on to his lips; he raised one hand as
if to catch some unheard Sound, and then, quickly,
softly, like one following some sudden magnetism,
glided into another group, rapidly shoving aside the
women as he went, till he stopped suddenly behind
one woman, hesitating, drawing in his breath, his
hopes and fears on tip-toe. With that odd smile,
childish, half crazy, he laid his hand on her shoulder,
the light of joy flooding his thin, irregular face, and
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 97
taking her by the hand, led her, his heart visibly
panting with the sighing, panting music, out of the
crowd. The music moved in wide waves, oscillated
in little sharp detached notes; and Orpheus's hand,
raised behind the girl’s head, hesitated and trembled
in suspense. Then, with infinite joyful gentleness, it
descended, slowly, slowly, over her face, feeling for
the well-known features. But at the second touch
the joy in his face died out, Smouldered gradually
into doubt and disappointment. Holding her still
by the hand, he let that other exploring hand droop
in disenchantment, his face convulsed with uncer-
tainty and fear. The music swayed, as if nodding
yes and no ; again, as it moved in delicate, hesitating,
detached notes, the hand of Orpheus descended
across the girl's face, but languidly this time, timidly,
and with a little shudder. The music rose to a closing
cadence, the hand was withdrawn, Orpheus fell a
step back, his face ſaint with disgust; the hand hold-
ing the girl's grasped it yet a second in horror and
indecision, it brought her nearer him for a heart's
beat, then, as the music ended the cadence, it pushed
her away, and threw her hand from him in loathing.
“O happy dwellers in Elysium,” burst out the
passionate recitative of Orpheus; “keep me no
longer in Suspense ; give back Eurydice to me.”
“The Fates accede to thy wishes,” answered the
H
98 ALTHEA.
chorus in a great, massive phrase; and that song of
welcome began once more, but calling upon Eury-
dice, bidding her rejoin her living lover ; and turned,
this time, into the solemn farewell of the land of
Death. Orpheus stood there silent, with bowed
head, clasping his hands, grinding them in suppressed
impatience; and, as the chorus drew to an end,
there came up to him, suddenly from behind, and
rapidly placing her hands on his shoulders, the long-
sought Eurydice. At that well-known touch, her
lover gave a start, but not of joy: his slender figure
shrank in her clasp, his face paled and shuddered,
Overcome by the greatness of happiness, by the sense
of Supernatural things. &
Then, after a second, his white, convulsed face
was flooded with joy, his arms were flung round
Eurydice's neck, and passing his hand lightly over
her face as he went—to feel, if not to see it, at least
—he led her away, silently, Swiftly ; borne off with her,
as it were, on the last notes of that sweet, solemn
song of farewell from the dead.
The last bars of that chorus were echoed by the
violins; the stage was empty, the curtain falling.
But no one spoke. More poignant than any grief
was this great, dearly-bought joy—silencing, over-
powering.
“I wonder,” said Baldwin, after a long while,
ORPHEUS IN ROME. 99
*
“whether they have carried her your pine and laurel
branches, Donna Maria P”
“I know they have,” answered Carlo. “I spoke to
your servant just before the last act : he had given
them, and swore he had been silent.”
“Do you think she will appreciate such an offering,
unconsecrated by a florist ’’ asked Baldwin, scepti-
cally. “Will she understand what it means ?”
“What does it matter whether she does 2" ex-
claimed Carlo, cynically. “Most probably she won’t ;
but we shall never be the wiser; and when one will
never be any the wiser oneself, and one has a
silent footman to screen one from others, why
shouldn’t one have the satisfaction of indulging in a
bit of sentiment 2 Those branches were not intended
to please her, bless you ! They were intended to
please ourselves, to put the finishing touch to our
impression.”
Donna Maria was rather overcome with the sense
of having made an idiot of herself, more especially as
she could see the tip of several huge pads, baskets,
bolsters of complimentary flowers protruding from
the side scenes, ready for presentation. To have
sent an armful of pine branches to an actress, and
she a woman of the world! But at Carlo's explana-
tion she flared up.
“No, no l’ she exclaimed ; “that's disgusting of
H 2
IOO ALTHEA.
you ! I’m willing she should throw it all on her fire,
but I won't presume to be cynical.”
A breath of south-west wind among the pine trees,
a scent of bay leaves and shaken Spruce, of growing
grass and opening flowers, swept across Carlo's
mind.
“And yet,” he said, “we have all seen instances
of artists, not merely singers and actors, but painters
and writers, being apparently totally impervious,
foreign to the sort of impression which their work
produces; living unconscious of the kind of images
and emotions which their art awakens in others ;
in fact, being the particular human creatures among a
thousand whom we should put aside as unworthy of
listening to their own music, of seeing their own pic-
tures and acting, even of reading their own poetry.”
“But how,” persisted Donna Maria, her mobile
face pathetically showing her vision of those branches
crackling in the Singing-woman's grate ; “how can a
creature give us what she has not got herself P Or
do you suppose it possible that she gives but a for-
tuitous combination—ordered by Some automatic
mechanism of her nature—of tones and gestures
which, like the fortuitous combination of lights and
shades and colours in trees and meadows, makes
shape, has character and suggestiveness only when
perceived by our mind, but existing to her as so
ORPHEUS IN ROME. IOI
much dead matter It's absurd absurd Explain
it if you can l’” •
“I see,” answered Carlo, laughing; “you are de-
termined that she should understand the connec-
tion between Orpheus and the Villa Borghese. But
listen. Can we not suppose—and daily experience
obliges us to form some explanatory supposition,
does it not P−that in certain beings, endowed with
special powers of evoking poetry for others, there
exists, as it were, an interruption, a separation,
between this artistic entity and their entity as men
and women; and that what circulates into the whole
life of the beholder and listener, mingling with their
hourly feelings and perceptions and fancies, remains
isolated in these Special creatures, dammed up, like
water in a reservoir, in a special corner of their
nature ?”
“Ah,” put in Baldwin, “you will never persuade
Donna Maria of that ; you will never persuade your
own feelings, however much you may persuade your
reason. We suffer from, or rather we enjoy, a special
delusion, a sort of intellectual mirage, in virtue of
which half the charm in all things which are charming
lies in the suggestion that there must be more
charmingness beyond. The delusion is due, I suppose, !
to the seeming logical connection between a visible
and an invisible, a given and a giver; the joy we
IO2 ALTHEA.
have received makes us look to a joy which we shall
receive. The poetic faculty within us is exactly this
| power of creating for ourselves a something beyond ;
of making for ourselves an unreality out of every
reality. Half the charm of the music of Gluck is
that it suggests to us those meadows in the Villa
Borghese ; half their charm will always be in future
that they suggest to us the music of Gluck. Half
the charm of Orpheus is that Orpheus must be so
much more charming : that could we only know this
youth, redolent to us of pastures and woodland, full
of a life so keen and tender, we should reach (as we
think) a thing to whom woods, meadows, life, and
love must mean much more than to ourselves; one
who could tell so many things, enrich our nature
by so much.”
“And then you are quite pleased at the possi-
bility of all this being nonsense !” cried Donna
Maria ; “ of our finding a creature who has less of all
this than ourselves: knowing less, feeling less. You
find it quite satisfactory; forsooth !”
“Not satisfactory, but in a sense consolatory,”
answered Baldwin. “It shows us, indeed, for the
hundredth time, that in this world all is isolated, dis-
persed, imperfect ; but it shows also the power, the
irresistible impulse we possess of uniting, concentrat-
ing, and perfecting by Our vision, our perception, our
ORPHEUS IN ROME. IO3
feeling. Great as is the art of the artist, the art is
more potent still of him who perceives, who connects
the single work, the single art, with life, intermeshing
it with all life’s nerves and arteries. And therefore I
should not repine too much were Orpheus to throw
pine branches and laurel twigs upon the fire, uncon-
scious of the poetry which he had evoked. Wander
Over thy wooden stage among thy cardboard trees,
my poor Orpheus, move thy beautiful arms and
open out thy passionate eyes, sing thy woodland,
meadowland songs | We know thee when we meet
thee again, thee or thy brethren, as we know when we
come across the laurels and cypresses of Pindus. We
know thee, Orpheus, and recognize thy face. But
behold ! when we look in it, 'tis the face of one who
has neither gesture nor voice ; it is the face of one of
our own dear friends.” And Baldwin lightly pressed
Donna Maria's little childish fingers, lying disconso-
lately on the elbow of her chair.
The last act was drawing to a close. Eurydice had
implored and stormed, Orpheus had kept his word to
the gods, neither looked nor explained, until at length
his courage had failed. He had looked, but only to
see Eurydice sink dead a second time. When the
dreadful reality had become clear, or half clear, he
had gently lifted her from the ground and wrapped
her in his cloak. And now, after calling on her
IO4 ALTHEA.
vainly, in supplication, in agony, and finally almost
in anger, he sank down, as the violins played the last
bars of the famous air “Che farò senza Euridice,” on *
the seat beside her, clasping her dead hands in his
hands, and hiding his head on his dead love's
breast.
“Well,” said Carlo, as they were moving away, and
in order, after that silence, to say something, “what
is, after all our discussions, the moral value of the
beautiful ?”
“To make us believe that there is good in ourselves
and others,” answered Donna Maria.
“And that great artists are not necessarily auto-
mata,” added Baldwin, apologetically.
For, in that last pathetic scene, when Orpheus had
taken off his cloak to spread over Eurydice, there had
been revealed, twisted into the girdle of his tunic, a
long twig of laurel, of the sort which grows not in
theatre dressing-rooms, but in the high-lying pastures
of the Villa Borghese,
ON FRIENDSHIP
ON FRIENDSHIP.
I.
“YOU are unfair—you, who teach the rest of us that
justice is most often charity, dear Signora Elena,”
remonstrated Baldwin. “For it is unfair to judge
the present condition of any one, and particularly of
your humble servant, by his opinion of several years
ago. Now, it must be three, five, even seven years
ago since Carlo wrote down our talks de omnibus rebus
et quibusdam aliis.”
“But I complain of the contrary,” answered his
hostess, smiling with her indulgent, half-amused
mouth, while scrutinizing him with her earnest eyes:
“I complain that you have not changed enough, or
changed rather in the wrong direction. I noticed, in
reading our dear Carlo's notes of your discussions,
that you tended to—I don't know what to call i.
exactly—a sort of optimistic pessimism, or rather an
ascetic epicureanism. And now you seem more
IO8 ALTHEA.
than ever a kind of double-headed Janus—you know
the things in the Roman gardens—with one mouth
declaring that we must strive to realize happiness for
Others, and the other mouth declaring that only in
the unreal can we be happy. We are to improve
reality with all our might; and yet we are to find
peace only in art, in poetry, in human beings treated
as unrealities. Now what use would there be in im-
proving reality, if only the unreal can give any satis-
faction ? If, on the other hand, beauty is not life,
but something outside it and incapable of affecting
it, what right have you, who preach the ameliora-
tion of life, to waste your time in its enjoyment P "
They were seated outside a house on the Bay of
Spezia, in a little grove of ilexes, with here and there
a big tuft of white heather, or a bush of delicately ex-
tended lentiscus. Between the trees, between the boles,
slender and dark, and the clusters of pointed dark
leaves, the sea was heaving in delicate luminous grey-
ness—mysterious, unearthly, as it never appears Save
through branches, pale and austere.
“You are mistaken,” rejoined Baldwin, wondering
at the same time whether there might not be some
truth still hidden to him in the lady's words; “and had
Carlo written down a talk we had together Some two
years back, when we went to hear Gluck's Orpheus
in Rome, you would not accuse me of separating art
ON FRIENDSHIP. IO9
and life, the wholesomeness of the one from that of
the other. And see, by a fortunate coincidence, I
have this very morning taken what I always call in
my mind a moral walk.”
“A moral walk 2 ”
“Yes; don’t laugh. Perhaps we all know the im-
pression, or perhaps indeed you, who seem to carry
God about wherever you go, don’t know what it is to
meet Him on the high road. I sometimes do—rarely;
and I always remember these walks as events in my
life. I had one once in your Apennines, five or six
years ago; and one also along the Tweed near Kelso.
To-day it was in that torrent-bed to the back of your
house : there were three Sweetbriar bushes, covered
with white roses, among the round black stones, and \,
the birds were singing like mad in the acacias. It º
seems there sometimes happens some conjunction of
oneself and things Outside oneself, which causes
certain moments, although they are loafing moments
of mere desultory thought and impression, to be, in
the highest sense, lived by us. The world presents
only its beautiful side ; everything is satisfactory,
everything harmonious ; the little worries of life dis-
appear, and its meaner problems. The goodness of
visible things, the obliteration, perhaps, also of man-
kind out of nature—mankind with its contradictions
and imperfections, its train of suspicions—all render \
I IO ALTHEA.
us able to hope in ourselves, to feel the preponder-
ance of the Better, its almost inevitable triumph, in
such a way that we can recognize our worst faults with
humility indeed, but neither self-abasement nor re-
bellion. Moments these, in which we spiritually live and
spiritually grow, the rest of life being but the applica-
tion of what has been learned mainly in them.”
“Well, and what did you learn this morning in the
torrent-bed by the three briar bushes 2 ” asked she.
“Oh, nothing new to you, dear Signora Elena,”
answered Baldwin, Smiling ; “the mere old story over
again.” g
“Which old story, Baldwin P I fear the very one
which seems to me so false and contradictory—that
life and happiness are separate things, that the reality
and the ideal are never to be reconciled 2 ”
“Not at all; I cannot understand why you should
tax me with that. You know, on the contrary, that
art, for instance, is in my eyes legitimate and noble
only when it makes us sounder for the struggle of life.
And I tell you about my moral walks exactly be-
cause they show how great a moral aid all true beauty
must be to us. But here comes one who really is
that strange mixture of Stoic and epicurean which you
accuse me of being. Does she not look like Philosophy
in person, descended from Some fresco, as she comes
along your Botticelli grove 2 °
ON FRIENDS (IIP. I I I
As Althea advanced, all dressed in white, her
tall and stately figure framed between the black ilex
arches, with the shimmer of grey sea here and there,
she seemed indeed to prove her own assertion, that
this walk was really in a strange land under-
ground, where the ghosts of poets wandered, with
laurel wreaths on their heads.
“Well,” she asked, sitting down on the marble
bench, and taking one of her invalid friend's thin
hands with shy tenderness, “what did they say
among the ilexes overhanging the sea P”
“They were saying,” answered Baldwin, “that
your poor friend is a double-headed Janus, with one
face for pessimism and one for optimism ; and he
was trying to divert the criticism by remarking that
Lady Althea is half an epicurean and half a stoic.”
“Whereupon she answered that it was time for
dear Signora Elena to take her afternoon walk,” and
Althea very deliberately slipped her friend's arm
through one of her own, and having handed Baldwin
Some shawls, took up a cushion in her free hand. .
“The mistake which I seem to see in Baldwin,”
went on Signora Elena, as they slowly ascended a
little valley, where the slender budding poplars
powdered with palest, most exquisite gold the
ghostly greenish grey of the olive trees, “exists I
think also, but in a somewhat different way, in Lady
I 1.2 ALTHEA.
Althea; so you must let me quarrel with it to my
heart’s content. You say, Baldwin, that you by no
means divorce the serious work of life from your
ideal pleasures. It is true so far as art and beautiful
nature are concerned ; you admit them as ennobling
factors in reality. But—if I may judge by the notes
which Carlo took down of your talks, and also by
things I have heard you say—you seem to treat
human beings, and the feelings with which they may
inspire you—the human beings you actually know—
as something much more remote from life and its
duties, as a much more than artistic material for
}}
unreal pleasures—
“But,” interrupted Althea, assuming that look, as
Baldwin called it, of one of the youths in Plato's
Dialogues, “surely no one can insist more earnestly
than Mr. Baldwin upon the duty of sharing our
thoughts with others, even of attempting to influence
them to the utmost. Why, but for him, I might still
think the world a box of jerking puppets.”
“Yes, he admits the importance of other people in
so far as their opinions and their action upon others,
not himself, are concerned. But, in their rela-
tion to himself, he tends to seek in other creatures
merely certain aesthetic pleasures ; pleasures ap-
parently unconsciously unreal to himself: watch-
ing them when they are picturesque, or when,
ON FRIENDSHIP. II3
by putting out the candles or half shutting his
eyes, he can make them seem picturesque ; instead of
trying to understand and be understood by them,
instead, in very simple words, of allowing himself to
love them.”
Baldwin felt, as those keen, kind eyes sought his,
and as he looked into the face, worn with bodily pain
and the troubles of others, but enriched thereby, as
some beautiful marble is enriched in tone by exposure
to rain and wind, that, in this case, he had certainly
yielded to very real affection. Yet he knew that his vº
friend had divined the truth, and he admitted it.
“Yes,” he answered, “but surely that is inevitable
as one grows out of youth, unless heaven have en-
dowed one to love all creatures merely because they
are alive and may therefore suffer. Nay, do not
interrupt me, Signora Elena ; though, after all, how
can you understand Such matters ? God has made
you, like St. Francis, His Simpleton. There are
things incomprehensible to you, though clear as day-
light. Still, I will try to explain myself. As years
pass, the habit of dealing fairly with oneself may | 2
lead, does lead, to dealing unfairly with others ; the re-
cognition of one's own baseness to the disbelief in their
nobility. I am not alluding to a facility of crediting
others with one's own shabby thoughts and deeds;
personally, I think I have rather a difficulty in realizing
I
ſ
|
2^
I I4 ALTHEA.
that others can be half as poor creatures as myself.
I am speaking of something different from that and
more subtle; the recognition of all that is hollow,
delusive, or inexplicable in ourselves; a recognition
which comes to most, at least many, of us after our
first youth, making us gradually suspect our neigh-
bours of being as self-deluded, as unreal as ourselves.
Experience tells us that the motives we assign for
our actions, even to ourselves, are not the real ones,
the explanations of our preferences not the princi-
pal ; that we are for ever treating as primary and all-
important merely quite secondary and accidental
causes and reasons, deluding not merely others, but
ourselves. Add to this the recognition that so much
in ourselves which passes muster as spontaneous is
mere conventional habit; so much which we call
moral, merely physical : the crude cravings or com-
plaints of the body masqueraded as elations and
depressions of the soul. My neighbour thinks he is
making an effort; but I know that I often think I
am making an effort, when in reality I am merely
slipping, slipping, or cheerfully stepping out. Thus
truthfulness begets suspicion; and very often, doubt-
less, injustice to others is born of justice to oneself.
And the more other people seek to explain themselves,
the clearer grows the cynical consciousness of one's
explanations of oneself; and one becomes unable to
ON FRIENDSHIP. II 5
enjoy the commerce of others, because one dislikes
the contact with oneself. Therefore, it is surely better
to consider human kind rather as a field for one's
duty than as a source of one's pleasures.”
They walked along for a moment in silence
between the banks of ferns trickling with clear water,
and under the Sweeping, feathery Olive branches,
between long rows of dry reeds, supporting the twisted
vines just bursting into pinkish bud, and great fig
trees writhing their grey arms, and stretching out
their little gloves of green.
“I can't quite understand you, Baldwin,” said
Signora Elena, after a pause. “Perhaps because I
am less rigid with myself than you are.”
“Thank heaven, you are less suspicious of others,”
interrupted Althea, whom Baldwin’s confession had
puzzled and displeased. “Surely the only thing
experience of oneself should teach is that, until
further proof, it is kinder and more practical to
suppose other folk to be honest. But I forgot, Mr.
Baldwin is in doubt about his own honesty.”
Signora Elena Smiled at the young woman’s down-
rightness; morally, as physically, she seemed never
to have found a load too heavy for her muscles, and
she could not conceive any gulf, any division, between
the intellectual perception of a duty and the moral
readiness to perform it.
I 2
I IG ALTHEA.
“When I was young, and imagined myself more
religious than nowadays,” said the elder lady, “I
used to be distressed by the thought that I was
decidedly less good than other folk, subject to more
temptations, gifted with less generous impulses, inca-
pable of as much justice. Then this fear, gradually
dying out, was succeeded by another one, even less
amiable. I became distressed at the possibility of
being good. It sounds very absurd ; but it really
was very distressing, my dear Althea. For, I said
to myself, if it were out of the common to be like me,
to have this small amount of moral power, what must
not be the average and below it P. Later I ceased to
trouble about my comparative goodness or badness,
and troubled only about my positive. And now I
find that instinctively I assume that others are as
good as myself. I have no doubt some are worse and
some better; but, taken as a mass, I try and give
them as much quarter as myself, though very unwill-
ing to admit its necessity; and as a mass, also, I do
not believe the evil things of them which I admit of
myself. Thus others, the unknown, are always my
hope; they seem destined to do easily what I can do
only with effort, or not at all. And I think that this
kind of humility, if it be humility, is the source of all
my happiness and hopefulness. I seem to feel the
world around me, on an average or in the future,
decidedly better than myself.”
ON FRIENDSHIP. I 17
Passing between the high black houses, with their
vague air of dilapidated castles, the three friends
reached a big olive grove, and sat down on a broken
wall, after picking their way carefully among the
fallen black fruit which strewed the grass. A rout
of village children followed, and began, half boldly,
half shyly, with much tittering and running away, to
heap Signora Elena's lap with anemones, marigolds,
and coarse blue archangels, because, passing through
the village, they had seen her make a wreath for a
tiny boy, pink and blue-eyed, in faded blue clothes,
and faded rose-coloured skull-cap ; and now each of
them wanted a garland like his. *
“Well,” said Baldwin, watching the two ladies
making daisy chains, “but all that you have said,
Signora Elena—what you were saying just now—
does not prove that I am not quite right in enjoying
my fellow-creatures, when there is anything enjoyable
about them, from a distance, and without any contact.
We get the benefit of all the best qualities of the people
who have any good qualities. Before discovering
this fact, I used in my youth to wonder why I did
not want the affection of others; how I could listen
to this person or that talking of their friends, dead and
alive, how I could hang on their words, and yet
never ask for any of the affection they were bestow-
ing on others. It struck me suddenly one day, as I
was listening to a certain friend of ours, whom you
II 8 ALTHEA.
know, that I possessed as much of this creature as I
could use or wish—as much, probably, as was worth
having. The very love for her dead sister, which
charmed me about her, was, in the very best sense of
the word, mine. I could carry it about in my life, make
it vibrate in my feelings, sing like a melody through
my mind. I possessed it all, all her better self, her
poetry, as I possess the winter morning with its blue
mists and crisp sunshine, the June night with its
throbbing stars. I possessed this soul more Com-
pletely than it possessed itself. What should I want
with its affection P. That was better reserved for
those who could not have the soul itself.”
Signora Elena merely smiled and shook her head,
as she looked up from her lapful of flowers. The
children screamed and laughed from behind a bank
where they hid, a little heap of brilliant colours; the
birds twittered among the branches; and, across the
ravine, hidden in the greyness of olives, came the
Sound of an accordion, and a plaintive soldier's Song.
Hard by, where a little stream trickled from a natural
basin among the Stones and brambles, stood a solitary
cypress. Baldwin took one of the daisy chains which
his friend had made, and fastened it round the trunk
of the tree—an offering, he said, to Pales or Pan.
“In fact,” said Signora Elena, “you would, my
dear Baldwin, divide your life into two parts—one for
ON FRIENDSHIP. I IQ
~ duty, one for enjoyment. And as your ideas of enjoy-
ment are purely aesthetic, you would place love—I
mean love as its exists between friends—on the
asthetic side, and limit it strictly to dreams, and to
that kind of half-conscious make-believe which is at
the bottom of all art. In fact, you would allow your-
self the satisfaction, as you express it, of possessing
all which seemed beautiful in the soul of another "
without running the risk of disturbing your ideal con-
templation by contact with reality. Affection, love, |
are to you like your god Pan, Something you don’t
believe in (and would think it wrong to believe in,
perhaps), but which, safe in your disbelief, you enjoy
hanging round with your garlands.” -
“Well,” admitted Baldwin, “that does seem to be
the summing up of all my remarks on the subject, so
I suppose it is what I think.”
“And yet,” answered Signora Elena, very gently,
“I venture to doubt whether it is.”
Althea had been listening silently, with that quiet
eagerness which had struck Baldwin years ago, but
ripened now into a curious expression of power, the
power of absolute ingenuousness, of complete open-
ness of mind. •
“But,” she said, “is not Mr. Baldwin more in the
right than his words make him out 2 Is not love, in |
|
+
}
|
{
the ordinary, the best sense of the word, perhaps
I 20 ALTHEA.
merely the highest of our aesthetic efforts; so high,
and considering the selfishness of mankind, so great,
that we are tempted to give it a moral value P I
don’t understand anything about human beings, you
know,” she went on, plucking at one of the olive
branches, which hung, lightly poised in the air, over
the rough paved path ; “but I seem sometimes to
feel around me a vague, universal human blunder ; to
guess, very confusedly, at the existence of one of those
great frauds practised every now and then upon our-
3 y
selves
“And which set human accounts, how wrong and
for how long !” put in Baldwin.
“I mean,” went on Althea, “the blunder of con-
sidering as religious certain acts pleasant to ourselves ;
certain luxuries of our soul as moral efforts; the
enjoyment of the more refined pleasures of this world
as a meritorious and Sanctifying occupation. God,
according to this view, is in all the beautiful things of
this world, and to contemplate them is therefore to
contemplate Him also: granted ; but He is equally
in all the evil things also, and equally to be contem-
plated in them, if by God we mean merely the
creative force. If, on the other hand, by God we
mean Matthew Arnold’s ‘Force that makes for
righteousness,' beauty is no more a condition or a
quality thereof than is redness or yellowness, or
ON FRIENDSHIP. - I 2 I
warmth or coldness. These beautiful things are good
only in the sense that they are pleasant to us, tending
rather to our comfort than discomfort in the long
run; and in the sense also that they are perhaps less
connected with the evil possibilities of our nature
than other things equally pleasant, but which we are
not in such a hurry to call good.”
“But,” answered Signora Elena, astonished and
pathetically touched, as she always was, at the Odd
impersonal stoicism of this beautiful creature, a
Stoicism at once so young and telling of So much
painful observation, “you seem, like Baldwin, to take
for granted that love is one of these purely aesthetic
activities of the soul, that the love of human creatures
is the same sort of thing as the love of trees, skies,
beautiful pictures, or music. But it is surely different.
You remember St. Catherine of Siena praying that
she might be able to love even the dullest people,
even the most repulsive, because, in the light of that
love, she would see what was hidden without that
light, the sweet reasonable soul of which most of
us contain a particle.”
“It is difficult to talk of love, and know what
one is talking about,” interrupted Baldwin, “and
poverty of words produces confusion of thought. We
apply to Yseult that unlucky sentence made for
Magdalen—“because she loved much '—and pardon
I 22 ALTHEA.
the one because we pardon the other, forgetting that
Yseult loved Tristram and Magdalen loved Christ.”
The sun had not yet sunk, but beneath the olives a
sort of twilight had already set in. The grass, no
longer to be distinguished as such, was turning into a
mere bodiless greenness beneath the hanging grey
boughs; a green atmosphere in which the white
garlic flowers seemed no longer to grow like ordinary
flowers in ordinary grass, but to float, white specks of
foam, as in water; while the olive trees seemed to merge
into a roof of mist above that strange green bright-
ness; a roof broken here or there by a glimpse of
the real, pale yellow sky outside.
“Yes,” answered Althea, slowly, her eyes fixed on
a twig, almost a garland, of olive, printing itself, like
an exquisite silver-point drawing, on one of these
rifts of almost colourless sky, her thoughts far away
from the scene, “I know that religious people mean
by love something totally different from the feeling—
not of Yseult, she has nothing to do here, but even of
Magdalen. I was looking over a little ascetic book
of the fourteenth century, by Passavanti, the other
day. I suppose he merely repeated what all other
ascetics have said ever since the beginning; but, you
know, I have read very few books, so things come
new to me; and I was struck by the old man's
definition of love as the love of God, which love of
ON FRIENDSHIP. I23
God makes us love men. I suppose that would
mean, in our language, that the desire for good
makes us thoughtful for our fellows, and sympa-
thizing with them, whom, without the desire for good,
or, as they call it, love of God, we should never
perhaps have approached. That's what you mean,
Signora Elena, and what your St. Catherine
meant.”
“No,” said Signora Elena ; “but go on all the
same ; I want to hear your ideas.”
“Well, then, is this love 2 Is it the same that
people feel for their nearest and dearest ?—not of
Yseults and Tristrams; but the love of devoted
wives, mothers, and daughters, of fabulous friends—
this mere universal desire to understand, to help for
the love of God or of good ; this which can have no
preferences, since the love of the happiness of others
is a matter in which our enjoyment cannot prefer
this or that? Surely the two things are not the
same P It seems to me,” she went on, her eyes, her
voice wandering, as it were, far off, as if she were
Speaking of things purely abstract, “so far as I
have been able to make out, that love—well, call it
merely strong affection—is simply a passionate pre-
ference for an individual, for that creature's society,
ideas, affection, and interests; a vastly disproportion-
ate importance in life and happiness given to one
I 24 ALTHEA.
individual, or a certain number of individuals, over
all the rest of mankind, however much we may desire
to do right by all that rest. And how does the
feeling stand towards the other one, the supposed
love of God, except as a thing separate, different,
if not as a rival 2 Should the two clash, one tend
to take up more room and crowd out the other, what
must happen 2 The Supreme love of the creature,
or the Supreme love of right, must one of them
give way, even as, in their struggles, any other of
our natural tastes, as the love of ease or the love
of beauty P I don’t wish to run down human
affection ; I am only saying that it seems to me a
totally different thing from what people call the
love of God—surely the one is not a drop from
the sea of the other P Preference, fondness for
what one enjoys, which is the love of human beings,
cannot be a fragment of the love of doing right. I
cannot understand why we should not call the latter
by its true, stern name: briefly, Duty.”
They walked on for a long while in silence. The
Sun had set behind the big hill, with the great forge
chimneys smoking like Baal altars into the grey
clouds. The moon, wan and yellow, had appeared
among the watery clouds; an emanation, it seemed,
of those diaphanous olive groves, pale, vague, half
luminous, whose solitary reign had begun, turning
ON FRIENDSHIP. I25
human beings into shy intruders in their breathless
whispering grey Silence.
It seemed as if, should one speak, it would be
speaking to oneself alone. At least, it seemed so to
Baldwin.
“I don't think,” he said, suddenly, “that my quarrel
with human affection—since I am supposed to have
a quarrel—comes from the sense of the love of man
and the love of God not being the same. I fear I
don’t rise to Lady Althea's height of Serene contem-
plation. I fear that I find love a delusion in a way
which touches me more closely. I am getting to
believe more and more, with every day which comes
and goes, that, despite all friendships and all loves,
we must rest content to live alone with our own soul.
Our thoughts, our aspirations, our only valuable con-
fessions and penances, come to us only and alone;
our veritable intellectual and moral life, like our
veritable physical life, takes place in isolation. Sym-
pathy may help, love may help ; but what we actually
feel and think and do, we feel and think and do alone.
There is a point beyond which no Soul can come
within sight of ours—an inner Sanctuary where we
are alone with ourselves. The destruction of such a
boundary would be the destruction of oneself; you
might as well bleed yourself into your friend's veins :
you and he would die, and your lives would have
I26 ALTHEA.
been none the less separate in those last moments.
There is something solemn and sad in this knowledge;
and, next to the fact of death, there is none so full of
awe, I think, as that of such inevitable isolation; next
to the knowledge that time will be when we must be
separate for ever, comes the knowledge that, in
reality, we can never be fully united. And, like the
other, this fact also being repulsive to our feelings,
is difficult of grasp to our minds. There are some
who never do grasp it; and all of us know how long
a time elapses before we do so. You shake your
head, dear Signora Elena, but can you deny the
truth of my words P. There are in the life of every
great affection moments of intense unrest and pain,
when we feel that we cannot any longer share our
life; that we must, morally speaking, rush out into
Solitude or shut Ourselves up all alone; moments of
cold misery, when we seem at once abandoned by
our friend, and abandoning ; when we feel alone,
terribly alone, the whole earth's breadth between us
and him, the whole earth's surface depopulate—mo-
ments from which we return with spasmodic pain and
relief, humbled, puzzled, feeling as if we had been
betraying and been betrayed. Where have we been 2
and why have we not thought of carrying with us
the beloved one Nay, rather, why has an imperious
instinct taught us to slink away in silence; moments
ON FRIENDSHIP. I27
of humiliation and pain, whence we issue into a spasm
of community of existence, burying ourself in the
other's soul, trying to absorb its warmth, to feel its
pulses, hiding our eyes therein. Moments these of
the dispelling of a great delusion, a delusion which
some insist upon carrying down to their graves,
bruising themselves against the impregnable identity
of another; or roving off, moral libertines, in hopes
of finding elsewhere—what? Final fulfilment of that
dream of absolute union P No ; but once more that
passing semblance thereof, through which, as the
central moment of all great love, we have all of us
lived.”
They had entered the fishing village on the strand,
where the workmen from the great arsenal across
the bay were hurrying home from the steamer, like
black ants, into the twilit streets. Everything had
become utterly unsubstantial in the gloaming : houses
mere pale, pink, or yellowish-grey surfaces, people
faint things, with Outline dying away into the dark,
creatures without solidity, which one might expect to
walk through, moving freely in space. And with this
dimness had come that strange appearance of aim-
lessness, of disconnection with all real concerns, of a
crowd moving in the dusk.
“One feels that one will never know them,” said
Althea, when they had descended from amid the
I 28 ALTHEA.
silent vagueness of trees and stones into this vocifer-
ous vagueness of dimly moving human beings, “and
we should be frightfully startled if we suddenly heard,
from among these spectres, a voice we know
addressing us.”
“It is Baldwin’s idea of human intercourse,” said
Signora Elena, Sadly.
“Of course,” he went on, almost to himself, “the
return to one's own solitude is bitter, and bitterer,
perhaps, for the knowledge of its being inevitable.
Sometimes it is a perfect agony; the throes of the
asphyxiated or drowned man returning unwillingly
to life. Yet, life is better than death. And life, the
life of our innermost soul, although love may sit on
the threshold of that innermost forbidden chamber,
is solitary. Solitary, but not empty ; for in it there
is enshrined, in that sanctuary inaccessible to all but
ourselves, the great and only divinity: the god that
consoles, and sympathizes, and encourages, and
satisfies—the ideal.”
At the end of the black village street the sea was
heaving in Smooth, dull, grey masses, with a heavy
regular sough. The moonlight, as they came into
the open, seemed to seek the inner curl of the waves,
filling it with vividest silver, and lighting up the
white, powdery surf under some posts in the water,
ON FRIENDSHIP. I 29
whose shadow was fantastically profiled, now on the
white dust of the surf, now on the quicksilver of the
wave, now on the scarce washed-over sand. And
further on, behind the dam of big stones, the sea,
beneath the widening moonlight, seemed to swell,
swell and rise, as if to swamp and submerge the
whole world.
II.
“I have been thinking about our talk of yesterday,
my dear Baldwin,” said Signora Elena, as they Sat
on the terrace of the house overlooking the sea,
“ and must tell you that I don’t believe you really,
permanently feel like that ; or, if you do, you must
be broken of it before it becomes a habit. You do
not shrink from duty of any sort ; but you shrink
from those sorts of pain without which, I am more
and more persuaded, no duty can be properly per-
formed. Unconsciously you seem to have got hold
of the ideal of a certain German friend of mine
who said that the aim of life should be to grow old
decently—‘anständig alt zu werden.’”
“But,” put in Althea, seated on the grass and
looking at the sea with half-closed eyes, her boy's
hat drawn over them, wondering at the changing
shapes and colours, “is that such a bad aim 2 One
K
I 3O ALTHEA.
could not do much harm in the world if one kept it
steadily in mind.”
“It is merely,” answered Baldwin, “giving to old
age the place which death has occupied in certain
schemes of existence, considering it a final loss of all
things which we can make easy only by gradual and
constant renunciation. No, I do not at all agree
with your German friend, Signora Elena. The aim
of life, or rather, I should say, the reward of a life
properly lived, should be and is the exemption from
old age. For surely, although there is a natural
diminution in bodily and mental vigour, the greater
part of the bankruptcy of old age should be put to
the account of riotous living or of lazy indifference.
And therefore it seems to me that old age, in so far
as an evil to be expected (an evil often greater to
others than to oneself), must be forestalled not by a
process of denudation or shrinkage, of detachment
from things which already detach themselves from
us, but rather by a resolute enlarging of our
personality and its spiritual possessions, of our share
in the life of the world.”
It seemed to them, as they sat there on the terrace,
that this life of the world was vividly brought before
them by the things they saw and heard, the sea
rushing in and the Sun dispersing the clouds, and the
wind heaping them up again in great bars and
ON FRIENDSHIP. I 3 I
masses. Sun and wind and Sea, freshness and
warmth and life, a permeating, overwhelming com-
plexity of sensations and feelings, manifold, wonder-
ful, indescribable; expanses of Sparkling blue, bars
of violet water beneath the cloud-bars, currents and
pools of turquoise green, wash of pale buff where the
surf dies out, great various blending movements of
the sea in front, the sea which taught the old crafts-
men to make their mosaic vaults and God to make
the peacock. Sea and wind and Sun, ever varying
colours and ever varying sound, the music of the surf
containing all manner of instruments and phrases :
the swish of the wave unfurling and rushing forwards,
the hiss of the water torn into foam on the rocks,
the rattle of the wave falling back on its successor
hurtling along the shingle, the great boom of the
water gathered up and crashing down on tiºn
things these, of which we think as being so simple,
as we think also of our mood in their presence, but
wonderful, complicated in reality, made up of endless
other things ; feelings and impressions also, drenching
us, rolling us, carrying us on their surface, drowning us |
in their depths, as we feel ourselves carried along,
overwhelmed, by the rushing Sea Sound.
“Yes,” said Signora Elena, “but how can that be
if we hold aloof from others, allowing them to be
only subjects for duty and objects of aesthetic con-
I& 2
I 32 ALTHEA.
templation, seeking to avoid all contact such as
brings those ‘uneasy pleasures and fine pains,’ as
Emerson calls them, which Baldwin described to us
last night 2 For our life, were it as it ought, should
be a gradual assimilation of the standards, the ideals,
the potentialities even of others, a growing better,
for having made one's own the wisdom, the virtue,
and largely the repugnances that constitute the
moral wealth of the great world without. Each one
of us, of the better at least, brings into the world
some virtue to which he is more particularly inclined,
or the remarkable aversion for some particular fault;
and, by the action of individual on individual, these
excellences become common property, each man
tending to practise, or at least to desire, some virtue
not inherent in his own nature, and each man also
making his neighbour more squeamish towards the
vices which he himself could never stomach. We
are born simple, poor, thin ; the rest of mankind
makes us (if we are of the right kind) take body,
strength, and shape in the process of maturing ;
indeed, there can be no maturity without such process.
People who never come to live on the life of the
community do not grow, are stunted, barren, and end
in deformity. Of such men and women who, when
once the sap of youth is dried up, grow thin, acid,
and useless, we have all had experience.”
ON FRIENDSHIP. I 33
“Undoubtedly,” answered Baldwin, “the good are
those who grow constantly wiser and better, thriving
on the world’s goodness. But this does not disprove
that, although we assimilate the qualities of others,
our real life must, as I fear, take place in Solitude.
There is, for instance, a sort of turning-point in life,
at least in the life of many, when we make the choice
— or rather the choice is made by our nature—
between Such enriching, refining of our soul, and that
impoverishment due to indifference to the welfare of
others, and to the good that is in them. This
moment, I have noticed, is often contemporaneous
with that falling off of the common beauty, strength
and Spirits of youth, after whose loss so many of us
seem to undergo a strange transformation. For
it would seem that there is in youth a certain libera-
tion of energies, a balance of vitality left over by the
cessation of mere growth, and continuing to be called
forth for awhile in answer to the claims which
growth so recently made ; and this surplus of life
induces in us a very wrong notion of the individual ;
what we like, admire, and confide in is not really he
or she, but the common graciousness of evanescent
youth. Add to this that while such bounty of
universal accident ceases, the claims and the friction
of life increase; and a poor nature, instead of growing
rich by the pressure of demands, demands which
I 34. ALTHEA.
it can no longer satisfy, is speedily reduced to bank-
ruptcy. So that, unless we assimilate, we must in-
evit bly deteriorate.”
Althea had been listening very attentively, with
that curious expression of hers, as if a new light were
being shed upon many holes and corners of her soul.
“But,” she said, “how shall I express it?—have
we a right even to become better, in a certain sense,
to prevent our own deterioration, at the expense of
others ? "
“How can one become better at the expense of
others,” asked Baldwin, “since becoming better
means becoming more useful and less noxious 2 ”
“Why, then, we may surely be becoming more
useful and less noxious to some people at the price
of suffering to others. I cannot see why we
should expect that it should be otherwise—why, in a
world full of physical misery and wrong, we should
expect everything to be delightful in the category of
our highest pleasures and duties: if simple matters
are full of imperfection, how much more so the most
complicated matters in the world ! Signora Elena
has been talking about assimilation ; but does not
assimilation imply eventual exhausting of the thing
assimilated 2 I don't know much about human
beings and their feelings, but it seems to me that two
creatures cannot always find each other equally
ON FRIENDSHIP. I35
enchanting and satisfying. We consume all things;
it is absurd to expect that we should not also con-
sume human creatures and be consumed by them in
our turn. Life is perpetual change : the very move-
e ge |
ment which makes our interests and our loves alters
them and obliterates. Such variations, such ex-
hausting of one thing after another, is our life ; it is
Our constant striving onwards to new experience,
But when it comes to our fellow-creatures, we may
Surely be buying our development at the price of
their pain. And when it can be obtained only at
this price, there seems no reason why any of us
precious creatures should have this full life, this full
experience. The answer of that Prince or Minister
is constantly coming to my mind : “Il faut vivre,
monseigneur !’ ‘Je n'en vois pas la nécessité.’
Faust left Gretchen because he wanted further ex-
perience, in the shape of the Young Witch, Helen of
Troy, and I suppose dozens of others besides. But
why should Faust have had that additional experience
at the expense of poor Gretchen's misery Why
should he have had the Young Witch and Helen 2
Our desires betray us often into the absurdity of
supposing them to constitute rights. We desire, we
require novelty, romance, fulness of experience, high
development. But what of that P We desire justice
also in the world, yet we do not find that ; and it
I36 ALTHEA.
seems to me, so long as it is justice only in the
abstract and to others, we sit down contentedly
enough without it.”
“So then,” said Signora Elena, looking at the girl
tenderly and admiringly, “Baldwin has forsworn
human affections because he has found them a source
of pain to himself; and you, my dear Althea, have
made up your mind to avoid them lest they should
snare you into giving pain to others P”
Althea did not answer, but rose from the grass and
went to look at the sea.
Over the sea the wind had built a bridge, straight,
flat, stretching from headland to headland, of white
cumulus marble, beneath which flowed the currents
of deep lustrous blue, of enamel green ; and behind
which, far away, was cast its own shadow, a deep
violet band on the water. The cumulus marble, as
the sun rose slowly and gained strength, Softened
into something of looser texture, equally luminous
but more granulated and crisper, great bales and
heaps of purest Snow, making one understand, in a
way, the faint ridge of white, distant ice Alps in the
offing. The sea swayed under the big cloud-bridge,
luminous, Sparkling, deep blue, turquoise green, un-
steady bars of violet shadow ; the moving waters
massing themselves into ridges, rising, arching into
Solid Crests, Scooped, hollow, heavily poised ; the
ON FRIENDSHIP. I37
green arch bending, toppling, crashing down into
foam, running along, white breasts and manes now
of the sea-chariot emerged, hurrying along the
smooth, white, glassy highway made by the passing
of the last wave.
Althea remained leaning on the parapet, watch-
ing those sea-coursers, the wave running along,
as it were, on all fours, careful never to rise till it
comes to the stone of the shore, and there, as it leaps
up, suddenly caught by the backward impulse of the
wave that has gone before, and has just leaped vainly
up into foam, driven back a subsiding of hissing surf,
rolling the rattling stones as it goes, lying down,
arched and smooth for the next wave to rush forward
in its turn, filling one's ears with such various sounds,
which merge into one—roar, and rattle, and hiss, and
great re-echoing crash, overwhelming, yet so deep,
that a voice at one's elbow would be rude and loud
in comparison.
“She may understand that—what the sea has to
say, and why it is uneasy in mind,” said Baldwin,
nodding in the direction of Althea, “and I fancy she
would be spoilt for one, that she would lose some of
her odd charm if she could understand human seeth-
ings and moanings as well—understand them from
experience, from within, and not merely as a subject
for indignation or pity. She cannot understand
I 38 ALTHEA.
wanting anything, except a map, as it were, to show
one the paths of duty. But you, Signora Elena, ought
to be kinder and more just towards me; you once
quoted Emerson's expression about friendship’s “un-
easy pleasures and fine pains –well, you must know
them. And you must admit that, to a creature at all
imaginative, but unable to make friends, like Lady
Althea, with the waves, and winds, and clouds, such
idealizing affection must hold out the temptation of
being made the highest, most exquisite ministrant to
the cravings of our poor, idealizing self. What is
any art, after all, but the giving of one side only of
the living creature, of a portion of its suggestiveness,
its promise and its fascination ? The pleasure to be
derived from exploring the unknown, from Supple-
menting it with our imagination, which is the
pleasure of a new friendship, stands to the pleasure
which art or literature can give, as the fascination of
a living creature, moving, shifting, taking on every
second new aspects of beauty, does to the fascination
of a mere painted picture. In the new friend there
is, for a while, the realization of the ideal, the ex-
quisite delight, at least, of feeling that the ideal is
within one’s grasp. But the ideal escapes, the desire
fails. Even granted that any melody is as really
exquisite as when it first flashed across our memory,
it is quite certain that no melody is such that we can
ON FRIENDSHIP. I39
listen to for ever. The idealizing faculty is for
ever insatiate, for ever demanding new food. All
this is natural enough and legitimate, as long as we
deal with art ; but art is fiction, made to be fiction,
and human beings are real, moulded out of reality,
their own and ours ; and is that reality, which means
suffering, to be trifled with ? Lady Althea, from her
intuition of Saving pain for others, and I, from my
experience of pain to myself, have come to much the
same conclusion.”
“The conclusion of helping folk without loving
them,” answered Signora Elena. “But you are both
wrong, and both would be defeating your own end.
I have let you both have your say, and now I am
going to answer you.” She had taken Baldwin's
arm, and walked slowly to where Lady Althea was
still standing, absorbed in the sea, or in her own
thoughts. “You are thinking,” she said, with that
gentle obstinacy, that indulgent resolution, as of a
person who understands how an error could arise,
and is patient in setting it right, “that the life which
you advocate—your life of helpfulness to the un-
known or indifferent, of shrinking from contact lest
you should hurt or be hurt—does not, somehow or
other, harmonize with the life of the air and the water
around you, that it seems out of place in a world
which lives in this way,” and she nodded towards the
I4O ALTHEA.
rolling sea and the rolling clouds overhead. “But
you answered your own objections unconsciously
when you said in your plea for solitude of Soul that
there is no reason why we should have all we crave
for ; why, as you said, Faust should leave Gretchen
for the Young Witch and for Helen. Perhaps the
struggle in the moral world—the struggle for life
there, a very different one from that of claw and beak
—is really much more like what the sun, and the
Sea, and the wind, and the rocks are showing us
now, each struggling, breaking against the other,
their victories and defeats making the beautiful life
of the world ; not the sea saying to the cliffs, ‘I will
lie calm, and let you alone,’ and the cliffs answering,
‘We will become friable, and turn into mud at your
touch, and the wind and Sun agreeing to have
nothing to do, either of them, with the clouds—a sort
of general running away of the various instincts of
our nature, each afraid of damaging and being
damaged, which would make the Soul as fine a Sop as
the world would be, if the elements came to terms,
and agreed on staying quiet. Our spiritual life must
be neither a continual struggle to have, nor a con-
tinual giving up ; but refusing nothing legitimate to
ourselves and to others, weighing the claims of both,
a continual stirring, seeking, refraining and renoun-
cing, the manifold activity of which can never be
ON FRIENDSHIP. I4. I
replaced by any sweeping sacrifice of others, or any
sweeping self-renunciation.” .
“You mean, then,” answered Althea, slowly,
“ that Faust ought to seek for further experience, but
not at the expense of Margaret 2 ”
“It sounds very humdrum, but that is what it
comes to : do not squash your own nature for the
benefit of others, for others will require, very likely,
some of the very things in you which you are
squashing ; but trample upon every individual temp-
tation of yours that makes light of other folk's
happiness. Life, as you said, my dear Althea, is
perpetual change. All we need see to is that this
fact remains well in our mind; that the cry ‘always,’
into which all vivid emotion translates itself, should
no longer deceive us or others; and that, knowing
ourselves to be variable, we should provide that
others should suffer as little as possible by our ten-
dency to vary; that they should expect it, or if they
cannot expect it, should be saved the pain of our
variation by our refusing to vary.”
“In fact,” put in Baldwin, “your philosophy, dear
Signora Elena, is that there are no royal roads to
justice and generosity; but that we must seek them,
like everything else, along paths where, unless we
keep our eyes continually before us, we shall per-
petually stumble.”
I42 ALTHEA.
Althea seemed puzzled.
“But, Signora Elena,” she said, after a moment,
“such consideration for the feelings of other folk
necessarily implies a diminution in our liberty, in that
very liberty without which right behaviour is impos-
sible. Fidelity towards individuals is inevitable as a
moral consequence of dependence upon individual
affection. But does not fidelity of this sort imply
a wilful blindness to that individual's defects, or a
more degrading acceptance thereof P Ought we not
to think of another kind of fidelity—fidelity towards
our own better self, our better moments ; deter-
mination never to lose any higher possibility or
higher habit, or higher accidental advantage that
may come to us? Fidelity, I won’t say to the ideal,
because nobody knows what the ideal is, and it
seems to degenerate into mere words, but towards
the nobler reality.”
Signora Elena shook her head.
“Fidelity towards our best moments, my dear
Althea, is fidelity towards our best friends. It is not
true, as Baldwin said last night, that our highest
innermost life must take place in solitude. That is
the case only when what we have taken for friend-
ship is a mere imaginative fancy, the thing made
of ‘wine and dreams’ of Emerson ; or when what
stirs within us, mistaken for the ideal, is the mere
ON FRIENDSHIP. I43
craving for the submission of other souls to our
soul, or the mere restless desire for novelty. On
the contrary, I should venture to say that in our
innermost soul, in the place where the baser parts
of our nature dare not intrude, the best and the
happiest of us will find always the soul, the judg-
ment, the example, the trustfulness, of another. For,
imperfect as we all are, we require each other's
more perfect parts; and every true friendship, every
noble love, will represent some fragment, smaller or
larger, of a perfection that we require. For all
noble love means such an adjustment, natural and
spontaneous, that our loved ones will possess our
higher qualities in higher degree, or other high quali-
ties which we lack, and which we must borrow to
lessen our baseness.”
Baldwin smiled bitterly. “But,” he objected, “you
have yourself said that we are not equal in endow-
ments, that we have all got good qualities and bad.
Then will not such friendship imply, as Lady Althea
said, a certain departure from our own higher stan-
dards in our acceptance of the baser side of those we
love 2 ”
“We never love the baser sides—those that are
really base to our consciousness. What we love is
the better in them, and what they love, if capable of
real love, is the better in us ; so that while we are
I44. ALTHEA.
purified, we may also be purifying. For nothing is
more valuable than the assistance of those whose
nature, unconscious of certain of our temptations,
shames us out of them, making us feel how paltry,
how accidental is the value we see in some things,
how simple it is to do or to refrain from certain others.
We are for ever showing one another a portion,
realized, incarnate, of that great abstract of better
things which you call the ideal. Indeed, I think such
a partial ideal, vested in human individuals, is better
for our nature than the abstract ideal personified in a
supernatural being ; we are less often called upon to
do the impossible, to strain until we break and
despair; we are less often also let off by the sense of
our incompetence to reach higher things. Humanity
is human, knowing human bounds; and the very
faults which we find in our friends ought to encourage
us to attain to some of their virtues. The more that
is asked of us (when asked by the quiet trust of one
we love), the more we are able to give. In all of us
who have a little moral health, our doing and refrain-
ing is greatly commensurate with the trust placed in
us by others.”
They were silent for a few moments. The sun,
getting hotter and hotter, was melting the big
cumulus balls of that bridge stretched in mid sky
from headland to headland. Its snow was becoming
less crisp (before you might have almost heard its
ON FRIENDSHIP. I45
scrunch) and dazzling, and was dissolving to grey
ragged vapours, dissolving and dissolving, which
the wind drove before it inward to land. Then
the bridge disappeared, and the blue sky was
clear.
“I quite agree,” said Baldwin, “that we grow, as
in the physical, so in the moral order also, by assimi-
lation from without. Our self, as you said, is, to a
large extent, the rearrangement of those other selves
whom we have met and lived with ; the originality
of our personality being shown in the new pattern
made out of these old materials. Can we doubt it P
Is not our mind the collection of things outside us,
sights, sounds, words—the thoughts and feelings of
other folk, transmuted by the necessities of our
special nature ? Let us examine our consciousness,
independent and original creatures that we are, and
answer sincerely, how much it would contain had we
never come in contact with others, in reality or in
books P. Where do I end, and you begin 2 Who can
answer 2 We are not definite, distinct existences,
floating in a moral and intellectual vacuum ; we are
for ever meeting, crossing, encroaching, living next
one another, in one another, part of Ourselves left
behind in others, part of them become ourselves: a
flux of thought, feeling, experience, aspiration, a
complex, interchanging life, which is the life eternal,
not of the individual, but of the race.”
L
|
I 46 ALT IIEA.
“But all this,” added Baldwin, suddenly, “may
surely exist apart from such personal feeling as you ad-
vocate. Cannot we admit at once that people are prose,
good prose or bad, and take them with the same calm-
ness with which we read a book P You see I am still
tormented by the doubt whether we human creatures
are not always in danger of preying upon one an-
other, unless deliberately chained up with the chain
of indifference; whether friendship, when it does not
mean mere dull jogging side by side, must not imply
as Emerson seems to have thought (and Emerson is
the great expert of friendship), not merely the
absorption of one by the other, but the actual
cxhausting one another of all that can please and profit,
even as we exhaust the air of the oxygen which we
require. . . . . It is certain that there comes a
moment when the charm of pursuit, of discovery, of
the unknown, must end. Or rather when the quali-
ties which come under our notice are merely such as
we do not care for, because we had quickly discovered
and enjoyed those for which we could care ; when
we get to know the residuum, which, to us, is
trash. . . . . It is terrible to feel that one has burned
up or out another Soul; there is a sense of awful
humiliation in this recognition when we do recog-
nize. It seems an insult to all one's better feelings.
Infinitely rather the bitterness of secing that oneself
ON FRIENDSHIP. I47
has been exhausted by another, that one has done
all one’s poor little tricks, sung all one's poor little
33 - -
Baldwin was silent, and for a moment Signora
Elena did not answer. Only, to break the silence,
Althea said, very quietly,–
“Yes, but why should people consume one an-
other ? Why live on each other, and nothing else 2
Surely there is something false in that. It seems to
me that friendship, if it could exist, should be the
journey, side by side, of creatures living off the same
interests, the same aspirations, staying together be- |
cause they both were attracted by the same things.
I don't know, of course, but it seems as if creatures
impelled merely towards each other must necessarily,
after meeting, pass one another, pushed onward in
opposite directions, or, at least, towards new obj ects,
by the very wants and wishes which had brought
them together. Surely people might see the reality,
and feel naturally in their affections as much as in
anything else.” 3-
Signora Elena shook her head. “I doubt it,” she
said ; “We cannot prevent ourselves—some at least—
from weaving what Emerson calls the textures of
wine and dreams. But is it not sufficient if, once the
cobweb of imagination broken through, we recognize
the solid reality underneath P If the human being
L 2
I48 ALTHEA.
be cherished in place of the phantom, not in the same
way, but, perhaps in a measure for its sake 2 Could
we even be brought close to reality unless decoyed
by fancy 2 Prose remains; good prose, holy prose,
often infinitely more satisfying than the poetry; but
who is he that searches after prose? We are not like
Saul, who went to seek for his asses and found a
kingdom. No prosaic useful thing would make us
stir; we must be baited by the unattainable. Even
if the idealizing fancy should bring us down upon
prose, bruised, and having bruised it, remember that
it has brought us in contact. But for it we might
have walked on a mile apart. After all, if the prose
of others is noble, and our own prose noble, the two
nobilities will coalesce. But we require both poetry
and prose. If we sought in our friendships for only
poetry we should be libertines, wasters, destroyers.
But poetry is what moves; prose what retains us.
Friendship is, after all, something akin to wedlock;
only, being restrained by none of wedlock's legal and
natural bonds, and not limited to one individual, of a
freer, more sensitive sort ; and yet wedlock begins,
or should begin, in the love of the unreal. No ; let
us not despise that seemingly selfish, seemingly
barren love for the perfect, desire for the unattain-
able; through it we rise to better things, find them
within our reach. Do not let us despise even the
ON FRIENDSHIP. - 149
foolish courtship of friends, if there comes from it
the sincere and honest marriage of true minds. You
are not what I thought to pursue in you, but pur-
suing the unreal nobility I become ennobled, and
when possessing the real prosaic excellence I am
enriched.”
“You speak like Mr. Baldwin,” remarked Althea.
“You seem to admit all his notions of poetry, of un-
reality, of exaltation ; then, how is it that you do not
come to his conclusion—namely, that all this poetry
and unreality and fervour can lead only to bitterness 2"
“Because I think,” answered Signora Elena, “that
there enters into my calculation an element which both
—you, with your stoical sense of duty, and Baldwin,
with his aesthetical pessimism—have somehow left
out of account: the simple, commonplace thing called
love. It is love which, as in all other matters, is the
trustiest opponent of that tendency to prey upon
each other, in whatever sense. Love prevents that
lassitude, that bitterness of which Baldwin has
spoken ; it removes all fear of wearing out or being
worn out. It knows nothing either of novelty or of
Satiety, for it is, essentially, the caring for a creature
has preferred. Love gives us trustfulness, patience,
and, in a way, fairness. All these, of course, we
ought to possess towards every man and in all cases ;
|
t
because it is itself; the act of preferring, because one
|
|
|
I 50 ALTHEA.
and some day, when earth becomes heaven, we doubt-
less shall ; only that day has not yet come. We
have indeed no intellectual right to trust all men,
since they so often, willingly and unwillingly, deceive
us; it is our duty to weigh them, and often to throw
away when found waiting. The world at large is
bound to teach us a vast amount of well-deserved
suspicion; nay, a good deal of that we learn, as
Baldwin was saying yesterday, from the conscious-
ness of the poorness of our own stuff, and the multi-
plicity of our own adulterations. At all events, it is
not by contact with the rank and file of our fellow-
creatures that we can be educated to that readiness
to wait for further evidence, that giving of credit,
which are so necessary for all dutiful action. These
things are taught us, at the expense, alas ! Sometimes
of base endurance of evil—by those whom we love,
whom our soul cannot afford readily to lose ; to keep
whom, and our opinion of whom, we are willing to
wait and trust an infinity. Nay, more important
still, love alone by making us care, not for a mere
quality, a mere pleasure-giving item, but for an indi-
vidual, not for a mere momentary impression, but
for a life—love can teach us to do what philosophy
and justice clamour in vain for : to take the bad with
the good, to consider the bulk of a creature's merits
ON FRIENDSHIP. I5 I
and demerits, not to throw away what is precious,
because of some alloy; not to yield, above all, to the
momentary superiority of the sound piece of / which
happens (the whole case reversible the next minute)
to come into momentary contact with an unsound
}} |
piece of Thou
“In short,” put in Baldwin, “you consider what
you call love as the banker of our good impressions,
and generous and also just appreciations, enabling
us to tide over difficult moments, giving that highest
of moral, as of economic, requisites, credit.”
“You have expressed it perfectly, so perfectly that
I believe, in your heart of hearts, you agree with"
me, Baldwin. Love identifies us in such mysteri-
ous manner with others, that the pain or pleasure
which we merely know is yet more vivid than such
as we in ourselves can actually feel. It substitutes
the desire for pleasure, the shunning of the unbear-
able, for that call of duty which in most things does
not succeed in becoming sufficiently imperative.
Therefore do not despise ourselves for asking and
granting favours, for doing more for those we love
than for those who are indifferent. It is a great step,
the greatest of all, to be taken out of ourselves, however
near by ; and we could not, probably, wish well to
mankind, to our kinsmen or countrymen even, if we
I 52 ALTHEA.
had not first learned to seek the good of the one and
only Jy -
Althea had been listening with knit brows and
parted lips ; she had learned something, but an objec-
tion still remained deep in her austere nature.
“Then,” she remarked, “to give their due to all
men, both in help and in forbearance, and most,
perhaps, in understanding ; to do our duty because
not to do it would make us too miserable—all this to
you is an ideal too high for us poor creatures; a thing
far from attained in any, and perhaps even unattain-
able. And love—this sort of vicarious selfishness—
is to bridge over the gulf between preference for our-
selves and justice to others. But there is one point
which puzzles me. May we not be acquiring such
powers of sympathy, such capacities for justice, at
the price of the very opportunities, the very possibili-
ties, of putting them to profit? Friendship, love—
call it what you will—means preference; and does
not preference imply exclusion, and hence want of
sympathy, want of justice And do we belong so
exclusively to Ourselves—belong to hoard or to waste—
that we should have the right of giving the whole
of us to one other 2 ”
Signora Elena took the hand of her antagonist, so
strangely impersonal in her abstract passion for right,
and yet, with her youth, her face rather of a beautiful
ON FRIENDSHIP. º I 53
boy than of a woman, and her restrained tenderness
of manner, so very lovable.
“I think,” she answered, “that the answer to your
objection is contained in my very recommendation
to do what you still question. If we hoard or waste
our soul, as you say, for the benefit of one other,
cheating the rest of the world of the very fruits of
that habit of loving kindness, we are loving not too
much, but too little. We must be absolutely generous
and liberal in order to be just. In giving the whole
of ourself to one idea, we cheat another of its due
influence; in giving ourselves to one person, we are
depriving of their legitimate portions all those others,
whether at our hearth in humble matters, or among
the unseen crowd, attainable only to our most general
thought, who require us. We must love, and let
ourselves be loved by, many. For the use of us, as
of everything else in this world, my dear Althea, is
to be consumed and assimilated : we are the food and
fuel of one another.”
Althea did not answer. She rose from the grass
where she had been sitting, and walked silently along
the shore. The Sea was shifting its patterns of spark-
ling blue, of peacock, of enamel green and violet; the
waves rushing along, making and unmaking them-
selves, hissing and hurtling and booming against the
stones; the sunshine seeming to swirl all round. She
I 54 ALTHEA.
\
did not say anything more on the subject of their
conversation, but when, much later, they said good-
night, she kissed the hand which Signora Elena
extended, and departed in Silence, which seemed more
meaningfull than words.
About THE SOCIAL QUESTION
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION.
I.
THAT solemn Roman landscape, where the hillock
whose grass your horse tramples may have been a
great city before Rome was, had brought its usual
thoughts of time and instability.
“Then,” said Donna Maria, suddenly, broaching
a subject she had instinctively avoided, “you no
longer believe in Socialism, Cousin Boris P”
The young Russian smiled bitterly. He felt acutely
the contrast of the Boris of to-day, as well-groomed
as the horse he rode, accompanying a rich and pretty
woman on her errands of Sentimental archaeology,
and the Boris of four years ago, who had written to
her, with hands grimy from breaking-up types, that
he had thrown in his lot with the industrious and the
oppressed. ! *
“Socialism,” he answered, “is a very big word, and
one which women of the world are apt . . . .”
“Yes, yes,” she cried, “which women of the world
I 58 ALTHEA.
are apt to employ merely as a term of abuse. You
are quite right ; I used to be so intemperate when I
was young But I have really tried to be fair ; I have
read a lot of books, and I have understood what your
former friends think. Let the State only suppress
money, confiscate capital, regulate the production of
commodities in national factories and their exchange
by means of soup-tickets, and there will be an end of
injustice, misery, and crime. They have the social
mechanism, every piece numbered and labelled,
ready to hand, fit for putting up ! Happy people !
They need scarcely stir, barely think, and certainly
never repeat that silly Christian trick of self-sacrifice ;
next year they may take to any convenient form of
lotos-eating, for, of course, they will have twenty
hours of leisure. I forgot; the State will have
decided what sort of plant the lotos really is, and
which is the best way of cooking it.”
Donna Maria spoke with an air of impetuous relief;
and when she had done, she began stroking her
horse's neck, as if she had just finished a long gallop.
Althea noticed the movement, and understood ;
but she could not understand why her friend always
spoke on this subject as if she were impartial, and
always looked exasperated.
“You are right, my cousin,” answered the Russian,
after a brief silence. “Socialists are happy, happy
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I59
people. I was very happy when I could still believe
that the world’s misery is all due to an easily altered
system. To return to your question : Yes, I no
longer believe in Socialism, I no longer believe that
the mischief comes from speculation or lending at
interest ; nor that the State is the same thing as
society, nor that society may enslave its own
members; still less that by making laws you can
change hearts. All these Socialistic remedies have
come to mean, in my eyes, merely so much juggling,
transferring prosperity from one pocket to the other,
and losing a good deal in the transfer. I no longer
believe in a single one of their remedies, but I wish to
Heaven I did. I wish I could still believe that a
clean sweep can be made of all this inequality and
injustice, which means waste—waste of wealth, of
feeling, of energy, of time ; waste of those who are
rich and of those who are poor. Ah, I wish I could
remain a Socialist still.”
“But are you sure,” asked Althea, as if repeating
to herself some thought which was uppermost in
her mind, “are you sure that there is no other
remedy than that of the Socialist for us to believe in P’’
But Boris took no notice of her words.
“Please do not think,” he continued, passionately,
“that my feelings have changed because my beliefs
have altered. I hate as much as all the Socialists
I6O ALTHEA.
rolled into one the state of things of which we and
they, and all our respective follies, are all equally a
result. I would go round the world, if hatred could
not take care of itself, teaching the people to hate all
our boasted civilization, either reduced to the barest
necessaries, physical and moral, or clogged with
unuseable comforts and pleasures. For I hate your un-
equally distributed wealth, still worse your unequally
distributed leisure—meaning overwork and stupidity
on the one hand, and ennui and Stupidity on the
other. I hate the lack of freely circulating life
and experience, the barrier of useless possessions and
covetous necessities which divide us from one-half of
our fellows. I hate, above all, the hypocritical
twaddle which calls the rich classes the educated,
and confounds their self-indulgence with refinement.”
They rode on for awhile in silence—the young
Russian exhausted by his own violence ; Donna
Maria, taken aback, grieved like a good child Suddenly
scolded ; and Althea stifling indignation at what
seemed to her personal and intemperate. They were
crossing Some low undulations of grass, greening
again after the winter's Sering, and with a faint wintry
grey in its green that made one think of northern
dunes. Around them was that vast emptiness : no
house or tree attempting to intrude, and fences and
ditches not interrupting its long low lines ; a full,
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I61
brown stream, sluggishly tugging at the Swamped
willows, not visibly breaking its surface ; green
emptiness bounded by the blue hills, their tops
powdered with the last spring snow, and on whose
flanks the gathering white cumu'-.s clouds cast
slowly-moving shadows. A dip in the ground, and
the mountains disappear and the clouds with them,
save such as have got broken off and roll vaguely
about, greyish-white balls, in the high blue sky,
making you realize how infinitely high, fathoms and
miles, and thousands of miles, that blue vault really
is. A dip, and then a little ascent, cleared by the
horses so quickly that you scarcely realize it; the
cloud chain reappearing, and under it the chain of blue
Snow-powdered hills; and once at the top, the great
grey-green emptiness reappearing also, rolling away
on all sides.
“You have told us what you hate,” said Donna
Maria at last, a little tremble of emotion in her voice;
“things which, after all, we perhaps hate as much as
you. . . .”
“I trust you do not, dear cousin,” interrupted Boris,
sarcastically, “for I should be sorry to think your
delightful Greek serenity hid as uncomfortable a soul
as mine.”
“As much as you, but not perhaps in the same
way, Boris; for I think that in your Socialist days
M
I62 ALTHEA.
you talked yourself into the Socialist belief—the
belief with which Socialists sow class hatred wherever
they go—that the rich are deliberately and Systemati-
cally oppressing the poor, that they hate them, and
that the poor ought simply to hate them back as
hard as they can. It makes me quite miserable,
because, besides the folly and wickedness implied in
all hatred, it seems to me that you are wasting so
much invaluable moral capital, so much power for
good. The upper classes cannot of course bring to
the work the energy of personal interest, of envy and
hatred ; but are these efficacious feelings not very
two-edged tools — I don't know whether your system
of ethics allows me to employ so feudal an adjective
as base ? Is not the energy of disinterested morality
and benevolence as good, and better P That it exists
in less amount I am forced to admit; any ruffian may
desire such social reorganization as will benefit
himself; whereas the man who can desire what will
not be for his own bettering, and may be to his
detriment, is not by any means so common. And
the number of interested persons—I will not say
even mean and Selfish ones—among the lower class
is undoubtedly greater than that of the disinterested,
exceptional Souls among the upper ; so that the
force of envy and hatred is likely to be greater than
that of sympathy and justice. But should we there-
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I63
fore waste the lesser in quantity, the better in quality?
And will not the world require every scrap of decent
disinterestedness, of cultivated feeling, of sober
thought, to prevent this sea of covetousness and
vindictiveness and ignorance from overwhelming all
noble and beautiful things 2 °
Althea had been listening attentively as they rode
along, her eyes fixed on those distant cloud-hills,
and on a group of stone-pines and a kind of castle
which had appeared in sight, the first incident for
miles among those pale-green grassy billows.
“I think,” she said, “ that the upper classes should
not allow any good there is in them to be wasted.
I don't mean merely for their own sake, though
Heaven knows how many of them lose by not know-
ing their own duties ; I have seen so much of that :
honest and intelligent creatures becoming daily more
enslaved by the various fleshpots—material, asthetic, |
or what they call social, which is in reality the very
reverse of social ; their lives consumed in a routine
of waste of money, food, time, energy, thought,
sometimes of a kind of heroism even ; doing things
which have to be done? not because these things
are useful or even pleasant, but because their doing
has become systematic. And such enslavement to
the fleshpots—sometimes due to sheer ignorance that
the world contains any other interests—to the clothes,
M 2
I64 ALTHEA.
carriages, titles, dinner-tables, and grouse moors, all
things which only the rich can possess and the idle
can attend to—means sacrifice of many nobler things
for the sake of those fleshpots; certainly sacrifice of
much true happiness as well as possible use-
fulness. Maria accuses the Socialists of wasting the
good that might be got out of the upper classes;
but, really, I think it is rather the upper classes who
are guilty of this wastefulness. For in these upper
classes—I hate that ridiculous upper and lower—if
there is a waste of material wealth which other folk
are famishing for, there is nearly as great a waste of
intellectual and moral wealth : mind and culture and
leisure become barren for lack of generous impulse;
generosity and tenderness grown mischievous for
want of thoughtfulness and knowledge.”
“Exactly so l’exclaimed Donna Maria, enthusi-
astically ; “it is this which I want to prevent Of
course I understand ”—and her charming mobile
child’s face grew very grave—“that a better distribu-
tion of wealth would immensely increase the possi-
bility of decent living, of usefulness and happiness
in both classes, the One which possesses too much, as
well as the one which possesses too little. For of
course it is evident how difficult Sobriety, purity, in -
dustry, and honesty must be in certain positions—
not merely the less comfortable ones created by our
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I65
present imperfect repartition of wealth; just as it
is evident that education and the leisure necessary
thereunto can be fully attained by every one when
only economic relations are greatly modified. But it
is equally certain, only people don't choose to see it,
that these economic relations cannot be really im-
proved, that opposing classes of strong unscrupulous
Creatures, and of weak and demoralized ones, cannot
be secured against, until whatever possibilities of
Sobriety, purity, industry, honesty, and gentleness,
now being wasted, be turned to their full account ;
until the leisure, education, and generous impulse
already available be really turned to profit. Since
all real improvement in the world's condition must be
very gradual, extending over much time and rami-
fying in many directions, we must do all in our
power to help this slow movement by removing old
obstacles and forestalling new ones. I don't believe
in the efficacy of a mere change of forms, any more
than in the alteration of mere names ; I believe we
must persistently work at the renovation of the very
material of human progress—the human heart and
mind. That is why I consider it positively criminal,
both on the side of rich folk who won't do it, and of
your Socialists who try to prevent them —positively
criminal that the privileged classes should not be
turned to account in thinking and feeling for those
I66 AlTHEA.
|
!
unprivileged classes who cannot yet think or feel
3 J.
for themselves . .
“But how do you know that the unprivileged
classes cannot yet think or feel for themselves P”
asked Althea, startled by the sweepingness of this
assertion.
“Because they are too busy building our houses,
weaving our clothes, sweeping our floors, cooking
our dinners, and grooming our beasts, my dear Lady
Althea,” answered Boris, passing his hand as he
spoke over his horse's sleek neck, and nodding, to
mark the contrast, towards a group of peasants,
tattered, shaggy, and fever-stricken, who had issued
out of one of the reed wigwams dotted about the
immense grazing ground.
“Of course they are unable,” went on Donna
Maria, regardless of the interruption, but stopping
her horse and fumbling in her coat pocket. “Lend
me five francs, Boris ; I think they ought to have
quinine. For it is all very well : the merely
material, mechanical, legal monopolies we can
gradually strip off, or you can violently strip off us
—such as the monopoly of land and of capital—but
other monopolies, grown in the centuries to be part
and parcel of us, will not be so easy to get rid of,
monopolies of thought and feeling ; and while we
possess them we must see to their being employed,
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. . I67
not for mischief, but for the good of the people. I
fear,” added Donna Maria, as they cantered off from
the huts and their squalid inhabitants, her vivacious
mind suddenly shifting its quarters, “I fear—I fear
those people will just play at the lottery with those
five francs, and they are so demoralized already
Please, please, Althea, remind me next time we have
a ride to get Agostino to make me some little
packets of quinine, like those I have for our people
in Lombardy. It is shameful that you positively
cannot buy unadulterated quinine at village apothe-
caries’. They take advantage of the poor people
who require it so much and pay for it so exorbi-
tantly : that is what comes of the upper classes
thinking only of their comforts and amusements.”
Even the bitter spirit of Boris was subdued by
this characteristic revelation of his cousin’s person-
ality. He remembered how his old friend Baldwin
used to compare her to the Roman sea-wind : the
little gentle breath, warm, kind, scarcely rippling
things, making trees bud, flowers bloom, and birds
sing in the listener’s heart ; but at other moments
turning into a blustering gale, carrying off hats and
cloaks, and pulling up trees by the roots: the sea-
wind which shakes up, warms, chills, caresses, out-
rages by turns, but leaves the world more wholesome
and summer-like than before.
I68 •) ALTHEA.
“I see,” he said, laughing. “The upper classes
are to administer moral tonics and fever-powders to
the lower, having had the advantage of dealing at
large spiritual warehouses, instead of depending on
miserable country retailers.”
“But do we always give them the same unadul-
terated moral drugs which we swallow ourselves P’’
asked Althea. “That is the question. And, so far
as I can See, it is exactly what we do not, my dear
Maria. Before being able to judge correctly for the
uneducated, we ought evidently to form a correct
judgment about them. Now, it so happens that
we are perpetually judging the lower classes by
standards different from those by which we judge
ourselves.”
“Of course,” interrupted Donna Maria, “we can't
ask as much of them as of ourselves; So we must
have two standards.”
Althea looked at her friend for a moment with that
puzzled incredulity with which she always met cases
of self-delusion or insincerity.
| “So one might expect. But, as a matter of fact,
} we ask much more of them than of ourselves. We
insist upon every virtue from the class of people to
whom such virtue is infinitely more difficult, merely
because their bad luck makes it less easy to repair
the want of it ; while we ask very little of ourselves,
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I69
because our many advantages make it easier to com-
pensate for our deficiency in virtue. Because we
happen to have secured to us certain reserves which
we can always fall back upon, a lot of things are
legitimate or permissible which in the poor, merely
because they are poor, are wicked, unpardonable,
and such as to hurry them irremissibly down the
bottomless pit. Among my acquaintances is a cer-
tain little sempstress ; her husband is dying at the
hospital; she lives in a tiny dark, Smelly room, and
she has got three restless, unruly little children,
always up to some mischief. Well, whenever I go to
see her, I let her know—I am bound to let her know
—how wrong, how very wrong, it is of her—wrong
enough, in fact, to deserve that all friends should
throw her over—that she should waste time, dawdle
in the street, or jabber with the neighbours ; be slack,
careless, and think of anything, in short, besides
getting a certain number of handkerchiefs hemmed
by a certain date. Yet the poor creature's circum-
stances are not conducive to energy and concen-
tration ; and her pleasure in life—indeed, her solace
in trouble—consists solely in dawdling and jabbering.
But I am doing my duty in telling her she is a very
reprehensible young woman Similarly, we all fall
ruthlessly upon the working man who marries too
early in life; we inveigh against his lack of self-
I7o ALTHEA;
|
|
|
restraint and his grossness; yet he may in reality be
following the one call of something human and
noble—affection, desire to protect and receive sym-
pathy. Now, if the woman with the dying husband
and the three little children were a lady, if the young
man wanting to marry his sweetheart had an inde-
pendent fortune, we should admit that their conduct
was very human and proper. . . . . Oh, no | I don’t
Say we ought to encourage them in giving way to
such human tendencies, since in their case the result
would be only disastrous to themselves. I merely
remark that our manner of judging those worse
off than ourselves is, although perhaps inevitable,
not very just, or merciful, or intelligent. Of course,
this is all due to the economic fact, which no Social-
| istic sophisms can alter, that capital and the abilities
required for the management thereof are less
plentiful and more in demand than mere labour,
and that labour consequently gets the lesser share of
-*
the wealth it helps to produce ; but it is a mere
accident that capital and labour should stand in this
particular relation at this particular moment in the
world's history, and that we particular individuals
should happen to represent capital which gets the
large share, and those other individuals labour which
gets the smaller one. Of course we give, for instance
food and shelter in return for the work of our
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 17I
servants ; but accident has so placed us that we get
food and shelter, the first cuts off the joint, the fresh
dishes, the better rooms and furniture, without any
such labour. What are we doing for them, while
they are sweeping, and scouring, and cooking for
us . . . P ‘’
“Well,” interrupted Boris, “you for one, Lady
Althea, were sweeping, and sewing, and cooking all
for yourself when I saw you last in London.”
“Most of us,” she went on, “are not doing
much—at least, much that can be of use to the
hewers of wood and drawers of water. A man or
woman of independent means, who desists from
crime and vice, taking life merely as a pastime, is a l/
perfectly blameless creature; if the pastime be of an
intellectual or artistic type, he or she is even an object,
of admiration. Oh, yes, it is quite natural. But the
result of it is not pretty. It isn’t pretty to censure
so freely in others what we admit as proper in our- !/
selves, merely because our circumstances allow us a
|
!
lot of luxuries of conduct in which those others
must not indulge. To them it must seem very much
as if, because we are rich, we need never give ; and
because they are poor, they shall never take. It
would be more seemly, don't you think, iſ, since we
can't justify the accident that has given us all the
advantages, we should at least justify our right to
!
{
172 * ALTHEA.
advise, to reprimand, to say ‘Take patience’ or ‘It
must be borne' to those whom accident has given
only disadvantages P.”
“But that is exactly what I have been preaching
all along !” exclaimed Donna Maria. “We should
show them that if they must bear much, we also
will carry our load; that if they are threatened for
ever with material want, we, on the other hand, are
driven to work, to read, to think, and experiment and
select, by the fear of moral bankruptcy; and it is
one of my quarrels with all you Radicals and
Socialists,” went on Donna Maria, hotly, unconscious
of Althea’s smile of tender admiration and amuse-
ment, “that you prevent the lower classes from
realizing the natural division of labour, the give and
take of those who work with their hands and those
who work with their brains and hearts—or at least
who ought to ; you, on the contrary, teach the people
that progress would move on much quicker if we
were to harness the ox and yoke the horse !”
“I agree in everything you say,” answered Lady
Althea, riding along, Boris thought, like a sort of
equestrian goddess of justice; “only, it happens to
be not the Socialists and Radicals, but our own old
Conservative Society, which is perpetually yoking the
horse and harnessing the ox—or at least disposing
of its human cattle quite irrespective of their con-
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I73
genital peculiarities. A man who would make an ex-
cellent navvy is allowed to be a prince, with a
prince's education and responsibilities; a woman
who would make a perfect princess does charing,
and can scarcely spell : everywhere we see men and
women excluded from the places to which, by the
grace of Heaven, they were born. Has it never
struck you how indifferent we are to Nature's
hierarchies, and how large a proportion of human
beings are, in the truest sense of the word, dé-
classé 2 ”
“Yes, yes,” answered Donna Maria, more anxious
to develop her own favourite theory than to do
justice to her companion’s amendments thereof.
“Of course, all that will be adjusted in the long run,
and the upper classes will represent all that is best
in every condition of life. What I insist upon is,
that the upper classes—that is to Say, the people }
who have more leisure and comfort and refinement—
are, so to speak, paying for their privileges by keep-
ing up the standard of civilization.”
“Oh, my dear cousin l is it possible that you, a
woman of the world, should believe such a thing
as that P” burst out Boris. “Why, have you never
asked yourself what would happen if some day the
people, getting tired of such assertions, were to burst
in upon us, as Vesuvius burst in upon the people of
I74. ALTHEA.
Pompeii! What objects would they discover in
greatest number wherewith to keep up the standard
of civilization ? Cigars, choice wines, dresses in
which it is impossible to do any single useful thing,
expensive food, and soft furniture And engaged
in what elevating occupations would they discover
those keepers-up of standards 2 ”
| “You are not really answering Maria,” broke in
Althea, “because you must know that she doesn’t
mean that sort of thing when she talks of keeping
up the standard of civilization.”
“I suppose Maria doesn't, so I beg her forgiveness,”
answered Boris, doggedly ; “but Maria was listening
as well as I when one of her friends propounded, in
her drawing-room, the theory that it was all right to
have strawberries in January, because it contributed
to raise the standard of refined and exquisite living.”
They rode on a long while in painful silence, the
zigzags of fences alone forming an incident in the
endless green undulations which stretched to the
mountains and clouds. Suddenly, in an unforeseen
hollow, there appeared one of those gaunt buildings,
towered farms, fortified villas, you know not which ;
places whose walls are eaten up with damp and
lichen, mud and refuse invading them on all sides,
and which yet, with their big buttressed windows
and stuccoed chapels, their lamentable attempt at
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I75
luxury, tell of some destination beyond the housing
of horses, chickens, and fever-stricken peasants ; and
make one marvel, every now and again, in one's
wanderings about Rome, When and why 2 What
manner of creature could it be that once upon a time
tried to trespass on the solitude and malaria of the
great, bleak, green plain P
“Let us go towards Rome,” said Donna Maria,
turning her horse's head, after gazing long and
wistfully at the dreary building, which seemed to
bring to a focus, with its grim and dreary senseless-
ness, all the grim and dreary problems which were
overpowering her cheerful helpfulness of nature. “Oh
why is the world like this, and what are we to do P”
“My dear cousin,” said Boris, aſter they had
ridden some time in silence—with only the horizon
altered, the clouds and mountains exchanged for the
low hills of the Tiber valley and the cupola of St.
Peter's under the slowly sinking Sun—“do not think
me brutal if I tell you that when you have been
made thoroughly miserable by such thoughts, you
will have, like me, to give up thinking them ; like
me as I am beginning to become, for I have still but
partially recovered my Self-possession, as I am afraid
I proved by some very violent and rude speeches at
the beginning of our ride. It is difficult to become
stoical even to the sufferings of other people, but one
176 ALTHEA.
|
has to become so. Just before I met you at the
city gates I had come across a stone-breaker working
along the roadside, and evidently very far gone in
consumption ; his wife was in the hospital; of his
five children, two were ill; he was gaining a franc
and a half a day, and could not afford to stop work
on bad days. It isn't a particularly bad case. A
franc and a half a day; why, it is very high pay for
this country ; there are places in the Neapolitan
provinces where a whole day's hard digging and
trenching, including a long walk there and back,
owing to the desolation of those parts, is paid only
forty centimes. . . . Still, we never feel much unless
we see, and the road-mender, with his sixteen pence,
affected me no more than the Neapolitan peasant
with his fourpence. But it is absurd to let oneself
be made wretched by such cases. Progress, suppos-
ing there is such a thing, must be incalculably slow.
Hitherto, in a great many things, there has been
next to none. We don’t make ourselves miserable,
after all, about the millions of creatures who died
like beasts while building the pyramids, nor about
the millions of slaves lashed and starved throughout
antiquity ; of serfs starved and beaten throughout the
Middle Ages; the myriads of wretches trampled and
tortured before history ever was.”
“Yes, but all that is in the past,” exclaimed Donna
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 177
Maria, impetuously; “it is gone, done with. But that
such misery should endure while we live, our pulsa-
tions of pleasure keeping time with other folk’s pul-
sations of pain, this seems outrageous to our feelings;
worst of all, that, misery should survive, and survive
God knows how long. We cannot, must not, bear
that "
“That is what I once thought”—and Boris’s tone
was curiously sad in its coldness—“but that is mere
Selfish sentimentality in ourselves. Why, forsooth,
should misery be more unbearable because it happens
to coincide with our valuable stay on earth P That
evil in the past was quite as terrible, quite as out-
rageous, as any in the present ; and if it is over so
far as individuals are concerned, why, so will this be,
thanks to the saving grace of death. Outrageous to
our feelings | But what right have we to such feel-
ings What right have we to be shocked at the
inevitable 2 Look at the faces we meet in the street
—ask yourself what are the thoughts, emotions, and
habits of their owners, and wonder, if you can, that
there is so much misery and filth in the world ; nay,
wonder, rather, that there is so little. For these
people in the street are our friends, brothers, sisters,
husbands, wives, and children—they are ourselves |
No ; it bores me to be told that the upper classes
are enjoying themselves out of obligingness to the
N
178 ALTHEA.
* lower, and that everything is for the best. But at the
same time I lose all patience when I see people
trying to relieve their uncomfortable feeling' at the
thought of misery, just as they would relieve any
other uncomfortable feeling, merely because it hap-
pens to be uncomfortable and in them—”
“Ah !” cried Donna Maria, in one of those fits of
self-accusation which were one of the lovable varieties
in her lovable and variable nature, “I know some-
thing about that sort of thing ! In my very small
experience I see two cases which look rather like
crimes—miserable children born of fathers in the
last stage of consumption, and who distinctly owe
their existence to the fostering care of myself and my
friends—and we all know nowadays that physical
degeneracy may ramify into every sort of moral im-
becility and perverseness | And yet I cannot help
thinking that, whatever mischief it may occasionally
lead to, there is safety and usefulness in the feeling
| which makes us miserable at others' sufferings ; it is
t
an instinct of moral self-preservation for ourselves
\
and others.”
Althea nodded.
“I think,” she said, “that it is an excellent thing
that we should not be able to enjoy ourselves
\thoroughly in the presence of other people's suffer-
ings; a great amount of the world's suffering is due
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I79
to the vast majority of us being able, on the contrary,
or having been, to enjoy themselves quite equally
whether others suffered or not. It is one thing to
guard against rash action springing from such feel-
ings, and another to guard, as your cousin pretends
one had better guard (only he doesn't really think
so), against the feelings themselves; the harm is in
the rashness, and rashness is harmful in totally
different matters—don't you think? Doing good—
or, rather, doing the right thing (I don’t see why the
# expression should always be applied to doing what is
really doing the wrong thing)—doing the right thing,
then, not in the worldly sense, should not be the
II] ere relieving of a want in ourselves—which, of
course, may be selfishly relieved like any other; it
ought to become the fulfilling of one of the principal -
functions of life, with only that amount of satisfac-
tion to ourselves which attaches, negatively almost,
to the fulfilment of any other function. We ought |.
to want to save other people from pain, as we want
to save ourselves, and therefore try not to bungle
them into worse pain, as we should try not to bungle
ourselves into it. We ought to cultivate our aversion
to other folk's pain (not neglecting our own by any
means); but, at the same time, to train ourselves to
see and feel in the future and the distant, minding as
much what happens there as what happens nearer
N 2
I 8o ALTHIEA.
ourselves and the present, and sacrifice meanwhile
the acutely felt present to a future which we can
foretell although we may not as yet acutely perceive.
We must train ourselves to disliking injustice and
suffering irrespective of where and when, and to dis-
like it worst only where it really exists in largest
amount or acutest degree, closing our ears and eyes
to the fallacious appearance, the mere hallucination
of our egoism, that things are worse because they
happen to be under our eyes : they are not, any
more than objects are bigger because they are near.
Or rather, I should have said, let us use the present,
the near at hand, to learn from it what must be the
future and distant, getting to know the larger by our
knowledge of the smaller, instead of letting the
Smaller make us forgetful of the larger. Our business,
as rational beings, is to try and understand—is it not?
and to try not to act, if possible, without understand-
ing at least this much, that in the particular case any
action may be preferable to none. The case to which
Maria alludes, and in which her good sense was really
overridden by the sentimentality of her friends, was
an instance of what may result from trying to cut
short an individual evil without calculating what
new evils may result from the operation.
“Of course I’ve been repeating a lot of truisms,”
said Althea, setting her horse gradually to a
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I8 I
trot, “but one is apt to forget even truisms in the
course of an argument, and after your cousin's plea
in favour of hard-heartedness I thought it useful to
point out the necessity also of the reverse, more parti-
cularly as I am rather a hard-hearted woman myself.”
They hurried along the grassy slopes till, Suddenly,
they met the main road which runs nôrth from Rome,
and a great brown bend of the Tiber, the poplars
along its banks just barely tipped with delicate
yellowish new leaves, the willows in its swirl covered
with soft catkins. It had rained here, and every-
thing had that warm, blond quality which lends
the Roman landscape a Spring-like air almost in
winter. The grass here by the riverside was lush-
green already, and full of long-stemmed daisies and
star anemones, but frosted over with delicate grey
withered thistles. Some wild olive trees formed
a dark-green tuft upon the slope, and beneath it lay
a big sheep-dog, while a man, with goatskin leggings
like a satyr, Sat milking a sheep ; all round about the
little new-born lambs were bleating and sucking, snow-
white in their newness upon that greenness of new
grass. And below, with the wide bend of river, its
eddies faintly reddened by the afternoon sun, stretched
the green, yellow and brown boggy valley, its faint
undulations marked with hay-ricks and long Snaking
fences.
\ .
|
}
I82 ALTHEA.
“The fact is,” continued Althea, rather to herself
than to her companions, “that we are utterly un-
reasonable. We wish, we sensitive people, to See all
round us a certain amount of comfort. That is to
say, to enjoy in ourselves a degree. Of moral peace-
fulness, for which the moral expenditure of the world
—what we are willing to pay in thought, in absti-
nence and effort—is utterly insufficient. As with
material wealth, so with spiritual, we do nothing but
waste ; yet we expect to have the means of sending
every beggar from our door metamorphosed into a
prosperous citizen. We are trying, with our toy pails,
to empty out a Sea of ignorance and selfishness.”
“I don't understand in the least what you are
alluding to,” answered Donna Maria, briskly.
“And yet we have talked it all over very often
with Baldwin,” replied Althea, sadly; “and you
must have met it often enough in books—you who
have always read such a lot.”
“Baldwin always irritates me with his cocksure-
ness ; however, I'll try and be less irritated next
time,” rejoined Donna Maria.
Boris laughed his bitter, miserable laugh.
“That is it ! Let us read all about it in books;
better still, in reviews, which are less boring. Let
us talk it over with Baldwin, with Tom, Dick, or
Harry—I beg your pardon, with the eminent econo-
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 183
mist A., the celebrated philanthropist B., and the
great idealist philosopher C.—during an interval at
dinner, or while we are waiting for the carriage on
coming out from the ball, or in one of those charm-
ing chats before the lamp is brought in—it, I pre-
sume, being the way of diminishing inequality and
increasing human welfare without any loss to the
great civilization of which we are a part, and Our
houses and carriages and bibelots also a part. Mean-
while, the Huns and Vandals are also thinking how
they may diminish inequality and increase human
welfare. But, being hampered by no houses,
carriages, bibelots, philosophy, philanthropy, or
economics, they will manage the business in a less
cautious manner. And there will not remain much
of our civilization, of our economists, philanthropists,
and philosophers—nay, perhaps not much of Hun
and Vandaldom—to record what the Huns' and
Vandals' method was. And now, good evening;
I see your brougham and the groom waiting for
your horses. I think my best way home is by the
next city gate.”
A few gas-lamps made twilight apparent in the
wretched muddy suburb of jerry-built houses, from
whose windows fluttered unseemly rags. Some carters
were yelling over their horses, and from inside Rome
there came a melancholy jangle of bells.
I84 ALTHEA.
II.
The lingering winter had suddenly changed to
spring, the Roman spring which is already Summer.
The dust lay thick along that road where every
building is a church or convent, and each dates from
the first martyrs; the dust was like a bloom upon
the clematis and elder, where a hedge-row inter-
rupted the high crumbling walls, tufted with seeding
grasses and fringed all over with weeds. And the
milky pale-blue sky of summer already seemed to
draw to it the white of the dust, the white of the
stones, the whitish glint on the new leaves, to make
of it all that strange symphony in mother-of-pearl,
and alabaster and pearl, which, to those who know
it, characterizes the South.
“I have asked you to take this dusty walk,” said
Donna Maria, pushing her veil back and drawing a
deep breath of relief and satisfaction, “because,
since one can do nothing on this hideous, hideous
day except hope it may not be so hideous after
all . . . .”
“Good heavens, what do you mean P’ interrupted
Althea. “Hideous day P Why hideous day, with
this sun in the sky P’’
“Lady Althea has actually forgotten that this is
May Day, that the town is full of troops and police,
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 185
and that we are awaiting the news of pillage or
massacre,” exclaimed Boris. “Why, the monks in
yonder convent are more up to date, for they
double-locked the gate in my face, and shouted
through the grating, ‘Not to-day, because of the
Revolution.’”
“You see, at home, one would have been besieged
by horrid things—I don’t mean besieged by the
mob,” explained Donna Maria, “but besieged by
people's disgusting remarks about what may happen,
and by the knowledge of their disgusting thoughts ;
every one become cowardly or envious, wanting to
imprison or shoot the other party, or, rather, get Some
one else to do so; all telling lies to others and to
themselves, the Socialists on the one hand, and the
bourgeoisie on the other. And one would be besieged
also, don't you know, by one's own fear and meanness
and willingness that anything should have happened
So long as it was all over.”
“Instead of which, in this part of the world,”
answered Baldwin, Smiling at her simplicity, so oddly
mixed with subtlety, “in this part of the world, with
the great ruins all round become terraces and walls
of gardens and orchards, and the little early Christian
churches built of fragments of pagan temples, you
feel consoled, safe in the arms, as it were, of Time,
who is really the one safe friend of every one. And
I86 ALTHEA.
the dread of change, the thought of change,
diminishes, is dwarfed to nothingness in the presence
of all the change embodied everywhere around us.”
Donna Maria passed her arm through his. “Ah!”
she exclaimed, “you understand it, Baldwin. That
is why Rome is the place where one can feel most
at peace; and I think, perhaps, the place where one
ought to feel least frightened.”
“But why should one be frightened anywhere 2 ”
asked Althea, with great simplicity. “I mean why
should one allow oneself to become so 2 It has
struck me very much, hearing people talk of this
first of May, and of the things of which it is the
forerunner, that they seem not only to be afraid, but
to consider it proper to be afraid. It seems to me,
on the contrary, that we should very carefully dis-
courage any tendency to be frightened about the
world’s future. The future is necessarily the dark ;
and we must not fill the dark with imaginary traps
and phantoms. If coming miseries are inevitable,
then panic is but an additional agony in vain ; and if
we might struggle against them, panic will unfit us
to do so.”
“It seems easy to you,” replied Boris, awakening
from his usual gloomy apathy; “but the proof how
difficult it is, how few there are like you, Lady
Althea, is that a large proportion of the world’s
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I87
wretchedness has always been due to this tendency
to be frightened.”
“I didn't mean it was easy not to be frightened
when there was something to be frightened about,”
Althea hastened to correct. “Nobody can tell till
they have tried whether their nerves would bear the
strain, and whether they would not be cowards at
the moment of danger. I don't suppose I am a
brave woman at all. But surely, if we trièd, we
might be intrepid at least in facing a thought; we
might be trained to possess ourselves at least in
mind, and wait till we are frightened in our nerves.
As regards May Days and so forth, we should not
take to heart the horrors of the future. They can
only be, at the worst, perceived by individuals ; and
is not the individual liable already in the present to
the very worst that can befall him 2 Grief, loss of
fortune and friends, untimely or horrible death P
The individual, therefore, has merely his chance of
every-day calamity increased by a very small addi-
tional probability. As to the race, we now know that,
in the long run, it must benefit by all political and
social change, since change of this sort means what
the race insists upon ; and benefit daily more quickly
and completely, as the world moves quicker and
quicker. Will certain things be lost for our grand-
children P But can we be sure that they would value
I88 ALTHEA.
those things P. We forget that not circumstances
only, but man also will change ; and we judge of a
future for which we are unfitted by the habits and
necessities of the present.”
“Quite true, quite true,” said Baldwin, gravely,
wondering for the hundredth time at the girl’s simple
stoicism.
“Quite true !” cried Donna Maria, “but you for-
get that while all is righting itself in the long run,
there may be an infinite waste of human wealth, of
civilization slowly elaborated and rashly destroyed,
a terrible waste of time and of suffering. The
northern races came to share what had been pro-
duced—of thought, feeling, beauty, wealth—by the
races of the South, that they might, eventually, add
to it all, as they have done. But meanwhile, think
of the ruin, the irreparable waste that took place in
that process of sharing ! I sometimes tax myself
with prejudice and cowardice, with excessive con-
servatism, because I would fain hold tight to certain
ideas, now become almost instincts, of decorum, of
right and wrong, or what we still call by these names.
But, even if I exagerate, am I not right at bottom P
Surely the bulk of what the Past has left behind, in
ourselves and in our thoughts and institutions, is
sound enough ; we necd Only weed away what has
come down, half-dead, to us, and add new things to
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I89
suit new times. I know I don’t do it enough myself,
so you will think this all prejudice. But only ask
yourselves whether it is not true that infinitely the
larger part of us must always be the Past's. What
can the present, which is but a moment, bring into
competition with the centuries and aeons P I am
afraid lest in the great changes of the future, we may
waste a moral and intellectual capital, in instincts,
feelings, aversions and ideals, far surpassing in value
any material wealth which may be wasted. I am
frightened at the thought of what may come in the
way of vandalism towards our soul.”
In front of them stretched the long, white road,
where a string of carts, with the characteristic leather
umbrella, sent up a cloud of dust into the blue sky, as
they went with jingling bells. Every now and then
the weed-draped walls on either side, the palings of
dried reeds, were broken by Some old-fashioned
country house, with a vista of laurel hedge and
statue-peopled avenue through its gates, and more
frequently by the paved square before some rarely
opened little basilica.
“Let us go in ” exclaimed Donna Maria, as they
noticed in passing that one of them was standing
open.
“I like your expression—vandalism to our soul,”
said Baldwin, as they stood in the little empty church,
I90 ALTHEA.
its tesselated pavement uneven from age, its marble
columns opaque with damp, the frescoes peeling from
its choir, and all its melancholy emptiness exhaling
decay at the contact of the warm spring air. “It
means a great, great danger; it ought to mean a great,
great duty. The duty of diminishing so far as
it is possible, the conflict in which such acts of
vandalism take place; the duty, consequently, of
being unprejudiced, just, liberal, of giving instead of
waiting that things be taken, of opening doors that
they may not be broken in ; the duty of keeping
one's temper ; the duty, above all, of trying to learn
our duty.”
“You mean, I suppose,” asked Althea, as they
passed out of the church into the warmth and light
outside, “that we expose civilization to great dangers
by our besetting fear of letting things take their own
course; by our efforts to prevent or regulate all
change ; by our assumption of knowing what is good
for people better than they can know themselves;
what will be right in the future before the future has
come 2 You mean all that system of protecting and
directing which is due to an extraordinary marriage
of presumptuousness and timidity, of irresponsibility
and meddlesomeness P”
“I mean that, but more besides. Of course,
the more dogmatic and rabid we are the more
dogmatic and rabid will become our opponents,
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I9 I
and the more chance there will be of things finding
their level with a maximum of breakage in the pro-
cess; the more chance of such wisdom and decorum
as has been hitherto acquired being lost in the
scuffle over the new right and wrong.”
“Toleration, in short—the virtue to which I
cannot attain l’ commented Donna Maria, very
Sadly.
“Yes, toleration ; toleration to which you will have
to attain, dear Donna Maria, if merely that your
adversaries may approach and see how much wisdom
and charm there is in the very tendencies they
abominate most. But besides tolerating other folk's
opinion we must do another thing if we wish to
diminish the coming struggle and the coming wast-
ing and destroying.”
“And what is that, Baldwin P’’
“I should think,” answered Boris, bitterly, “that as
Baldwin has just asked prejudice and hatred to be
tolerant, he is now going to complete his panacea by
getting unscrupulousness and rapacity to be honest.
By that simple means we shall avoid all collisions,
and consequently all breakages.”
“It is not because we cannot save everything,”
rejoined Althea, rather warmly, “that we should not
save what we can. Because there are people who
can never be made tolerant or honest, shall those
who might become so remain intolerant and dis-
|
I92 ALTHEA.
honest ? It is terrible to think how much of the
world’s evil is due to people being mischievous
simply because they have never been shown their
mischievousness. Think what a natural power—like
that of tides and winds—is being wasted or made
destructive in all the innumerable people who are
hurting their neighbours inadvertently, or under the
impression of doing them good.”
“Precisely so,” answered Baldwin. “Of all the
things which the world wastes—and it makes pretty
free with wealth, health, time, and pain—the worst
waste is that of intelligence and goodness. A very
good woman once remarked in my presence that God
intended us to do our duty and a little more. The
little more is doubtless done by good people ; but is
the duty P"
“I think it is,” said Althea, drily ; “for we take
care to make our duty very easy to perform. For
instance, how many people ask themselves, I wonder,
whether the source of their income is clean 2 Save
that ancient Roman who answered that money always
smells sweet, there are but few who are thus curious
about their investments and trades; they consider that
as long as they do not cheat any one—that is to say,
as long as they keep their business contracts, it does
not matter whether the business be beneficial or
damaging to the rest of the world.”
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I93
“The answer of that ancient Roman,” put in
Baldwin, “reminds me of a case in point. It concerns
a smell, a very bad smell, but the air is good enough
out here to allow bad smells to be talked of. This
one exists, for a number of very simple mechanical
reasons which I will spare you, in the workshop,
kitchen, and bedroom of an excellent carpenter who
sometimes works for me—”
“Tell me his address,” interrupted Donna Maria.
“That smell shall be at an end to-morrow.”
Baldwin shook his head sadly.
“I fear my poor carpenter will end before the
smell. He is consumptive, and has some internal
trouble connected with blood poisoning. His wife
had typhoid after child-birth; the whole family has
had influenza of the worst type and frequent fevers;
finally, a boy has died of diphtheria ; all this in less
than a year. The house my carpenter inhabits be-
longs to a descendant of that ancient Roman. He is
not an usurer, like his ancestor, but a very excellent,
kind young man, with a kind young wife and nicely
brought up children. He cannot afford to get rid of the
smell except by quadrupling the rent, because the
house is letting cheap on account of the smell being
there. Were the smell destroyed, my carpenter would
be dislodged also, and forced to go to a worse house,
perhaps with as bad a smell. So it comes to the
O
I94. ALTHEA.
curious fact that my carpenter implores me, and I
implore you, to allow him to end his days in company
with that smell.”
Donna Maria had restrained herself with diffi-
culty.
“But it is too horrible ! It must not be | Whether
he likes it or no, he shall not live any longer with
that smell. It is a public disgrace | The prince—
for I know whom you mean—must sell the house or
pull it down, and the town must erect proper work-
men's dwellings in its place.”
“And it is you,” exclaimed Boris, “who hate the
thought of Socialism It is you who are so con-
vinced—as convinced even as Baldwin–that every-
thing ought to be left to private enterprise, and that,
as Herbert Spencer teaches, State interference will
end in Egyptian servitude and Chinese stagnation
Does not this case make you understand that the
people who are actually suffering, or actually seeing
others suffer all day long, should be willing to buy
immediate relief at the price of any amount of
Egyptian bondage and Chinese stagnation in the
future P And yet I somctimes think that if Socialism
does come, if gradually we find ourselves fed, housed,
clothed, educated, and finally, of course, brought into
existence by government regulation, it will be less the
fault of the poor, grabbing for immediate food and
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I95
leisure, than that of the rich, impatient to devolve
the responsibility of relieving misery upon some one
else's shoulders.”
“Well, then,” answered Donna Maria, desperately,
“let the individual find the remedy for individual
evil.”
“You mean, let Baldwin’s carpenter fight the smell
unaided or get reconciled to it?”
“No, Boris. Let the prince cease drawing rent
out of that infamous house. I will write to him as
soon as I get home. He will do it; he is a good
young man.”
“But you will merely be doing an awful injustice,
Maria, to the tenants of the prince's other houses,” said
Althea, sadly. “The whole quarter belonging to
him is in a similar condition. He is waiting for the
Tiber works to raise the value of that part of the
town; then he will build better houses for a better
class of people. His father bought the ground with
this in view ; and if the prince were to build better
houses and let them at the present rents he would
simply be a beggar to-morrow.”
“Oh, a beggar ! ” exclaimed Donna Maria. “A
million less in a fortune of millions !”
“I don’t mean that I should be a beggar in his
place,” rejoined Althea ; “two hundred a year is a
respectable fortune in my eyes, but then I don't
O 2
I96 ALTHEA.
keep up the standard of civilization. You have no
right to expect a man to deprive himself, even for a
year, of any of the things which he has been taught
to consider indispensable: and he has been taught
that twenty servants and twenty-four horses are in-
dispensable to a man of his rank. Count up, and
you will see that, what with guests, the number is
quite a low one.”
“Well, then, what?” asked Donna Maria, seating
herself on a low wall under some eucalyptuses, and
gazing despairingly at the heaps of broken antique
masonry and heaps of modern rubbish of the little
wilderness they had come to.
“Why, I should say,” answered Althea, drawing
patterns with her parasol in the dust, “alter people’s
notions about their duty and the little more. This
whole miserable little story of the smell brings home
to me once more what I have been thinking ever
since Mr. Baldwin first taught me that our conduct
was good or bad, according as it made more people
happy or wretched. It seems to me that people
should be trained (and civilization should consist in
such training) to a certain larger unselfishness—not
the unselfishness of giving up a toy donkey to a tire-
Some brother, or sacrificing liberty and usefulness to
a prejudiced father or mother—in the same way that
they are trained to a certain elementary decency and
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I97
politeness. You shake your head, Monsieur Boris.
I don't see why putting the good of the world before
one's own, in the sense of sacrificing the smaller
interest in case of conflict, should necessarily carry
us to any marvellous feats of charity and heroism.
It would lead to the habit of simply asking ourselves
—very much as we ask ourselves at present whether
this or that is customary or fashionable—‘how will
such a thing affect other people 2' It would lead to
the not very ascetic or very heroic renouncing of such
advantages to oneself as are bought by an unfair dis-
advantage, nay, by any real disadvantage to others.
A better understanding of duty, and consequent
doubt of the likelihood of the ‘little more, would,
with time, acquire an habitual restraining power
against getting money from unhealthy houses, bad
professions, or extortionate bargains ; a positive
prejudice analogous to the one which at present
prevents many enlightened persons from allowing
their children to keep a shop or learn a trade. Such
things would get to be considered as unfitting for a
lady or a gentleman. Don't you think,” concluded
Althea, looking up with an earnest, Serene face,
“that to teach children the possible connection
between money and typhoid stenches might be the
most useful form of elementary chemistry P And
that to have a notion of the life of a coal miner or
---
198 ALTHEA.
of the condition of a cottier would be more useful
than to be able to draw a map of Northumberland
or to tell the date of the conquest of Ireland P’’
Boris shook his head. “Is it not wiser to let
people defend themselves against nuisances and
sufferings P. They know their own interests best,
and need not be forestalled by other people's
scruples. I am a believer in spontaneity, and I think
the carpenters of the future are not likely to allow
their landlords to furnish them with typhoid and
diphtheria.”
“But, meanwhile, it is a pity that this particular
present carpenter's typhoid and diphtheria should not
have been forestalled by a scruple, since it could
have been forestalled by nothing else,” answered
Althea, coldly. “I believe in spontaneity also, but I
don’t see why that should make one disbelieve in
man's spontaneous efforts at dealing fairly. For the
rest, half of our existence, energy, and substance
does in the present go towards defending ourselves
and our interests against persons who decline to
forestall us with scruples : police, law, the magistra-
ture, prisons, hangmen, documents, inspectors, fines,
walls, locks and keys, and spring guns, are all here
in default of those scruples. So are armies, navies,
fortresses, munitions, conscriptions, and all the things
by which the blood of nations is drawn so freely.
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. I99
So don't you think that, although inevitable
perhaps at present, the system of letting people pro-
tect themselves against the lack of conscience and
forethought of others does involve a stupendous
degree of wastefulness P And that if the rival system
of forestalling evil to others by an exercise of thought
and will could come a little into vogue, there might
be some economy of wealth, and time, and energy,
and happiness 2"
“I think,” Baldwin summed up, “that Lady
Althea might formulate her notion, in which I wholly
concur, of our duty in protecting others in some
such manner, to protect others from ourselves,
from the injury which may be done them by our
desires, our vanity and sloth ; and to protect them
from the waste of time, strength, and happiness
implied in protecting themselves against us.”
“And meanwhile,” asked Donna Maria, impatiently,
“who is going to protect the carpenter P’’
“I fear, my dear Donna Maria,” answered Baldwin,
sadly, “that, except so far as a few palliatives may
go, you might as well ask who is going to protect the
men who built the pyramids. The suffering we see
around us, although unfortunately not over, belongs,
in a sense, and in a large degree, to the past, and our
efforts can very rarely have a retrospective action ;
and the evil we see nearest our hand is often really
2OO ALTHEA.
utterly beyond our reach ; that is why, in trying to
remedy, we usually upset other things, but do not
succeed in removing it. The more reason, therefore,
that we should spare no effort for the future, since
the present already belongs to the past.”
The gate at which they had long been ringing had
at last been opened, and they had entered a long
avenue of eucalyptus running through a field of
vines and vegetables, and leading to a quaint porched
church, which from the road below reminded one
of certain backgrounds in Signorelli’s frescoes of
monastic life. The place was now a reformatory, in
the hands of some white-garbed monks, who were
working silently about the place. Near the convent
the eucalyptus avenue was massed into a little grove.
One could appreciate the beauty of the straight
boles, smooth like the fairest skin, of delicate, almost
flesh-coloured brown, wherever the grey bark has
recently peeled off, and silvery in the rough parts;
the beauty of that foliage which hangs so close, yet
never clings, those wisps of cinnamon-coloured straw
hanging among it. In that place, by the reddish
mediaeval brickwork of the little belfried church,
fragments of broken antique sculpture lying about in
the bushes, and monks and red-jacketed convict boys
working silently all round, these trees, straight, bare,
with their tangled foliage and half-flayed trunks and
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 2OI
wisps of hanging bark, had an odd, ascetic look,
making one think of some statue of John the Baptist
in the wilderness, straight, rigid, fever-stricken, with
shining emaciated limbs beneath his goatskin.
The austerity of the place, but particularly the
story of the carpenter, were making Donna Maria
very thoughtful.
“Listen,” she said ; “what you have been saying,
caro Baldwin, has brought home to me some thoughts
with which I have been messing and muddling ever
since I read Tolstoi’s ‘Que Faire,’ and since you made
me read Some books of political economy to show me
where he was mistaken. That's the worst of living
in the world and trying to do things: one's thoughts
never get properly thought out. Anyhow, here they
are. I understand that, economically speaking, by
an adjustment inevitable in the present condition of
wealth, I (and by myself I mean of course all people
who don't do anything) have a right to all the time
and strength and skill which other people give me,
sometimes in the form of actual services, but more
usually in that of various properties, in return for
wages directly or indirectly paid by me. That by
such payments I can buy services or provisions is
due inevitably to the fact that I possess capital which
I can lend out at interest. And that I should be
able to lend out capital at interest has been in modern
2O2 ALTHEA.
times, and probably for some time yet will be, a less
evil to mankind at large than that capital should be
possessed by the State, and individual effort hampered
by artificial equality. This is the case—is it not 2–at
least, according to your economic books and Herbert
Spencer. I am benefiting by representing, as it were,
the less of two evils.”
“Precisely so,” interrupted Boris; “but you have
yourself defined the condition as the less of two evils.
It was also the less of two evils that the Spartans
should possess Helots; that the Roman people should
have been crushed by a land-grabbing aristocracy;
that the feudal lord should have vanquished his
Jacques, and Crassus have defeated Spartacus.
Each of these was the lesser evil of two evils, but it
was itself a great evil, the mother of other great evils,
and the mother also of many other dreadful similar
alternatives. That Crassus should have conquered
Spartacus was better in one way; but the fate of
Spartacus and his fellow thralls was ultimately
avenged in one of the many miseries of bankrupt,
discordant Rome. We are apt to overlook this fact,
that the lesser of the two evils is not a good thing.
It would have been infinitely better had Spartacus
not required to have been defeated, or had the
wickedness of his victors (though probably less than
would have been his own wickedness and that of his
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 2O3
companions) not been inevitable like his misery and
rebellion.”
* “That is just what I mean l’ exclaimed Donna
Maria. “Does it not lie with us, or rather does it not
depend upon our views and character, to make the
safer alternative itself less fruitful of harm P You will
Say I am always reverting to the same idea, but the
reverting is just what makes one hope the idea may
be a true one. Look : I feel that although in con-
sideration of certain economic necessities, it is legiti-
mate that I should have all fatiguing and disagreeable
work done for me, and done by people whom I merely
provide with what is requisite to fit them for that
work . . . .”
“That is quite true,” broke in Boris, who only saw
the pessimistic points in any argument. “We spend
upon those who serve us only as we should spend
upon an animal or a machine, the cost of keeping it
in working order. And if rich folk appear to do
more for their domestic servants, it is merely because
a certain Superfluity above mere cost of subsistence
and reproduction, a certain comfort and decency, is
as necessary to fit a human being for approaching
their persons and ministering to their personal wants
as an extra amount of feeding and grooming is
necessary to fit a horse to carry us on his back instead
of dragging a manure cart.”
2O4. ALTHEA.
“You have expressed it perfectly, Boris,” went on
Donna Maria, sadly. “Well, to return, although I
feel I have a right, on account of economic possibili-
ties and necessities, thus to accept so much comfort
and leisure and luxury in return for virtually nothing
at all—for life without comfort and leisure is nothing
—yet I feel that I have no right thus to take and not
give, no right on account of the necessities and possi-
bilities of the human soul. As the possessor of so
much capital at a time when capital exchanges at
such or such another rate with labour, I cannot give
higher prices for the material services which furnish
me with so much leisure and comfort ; if I did, I
should simply be pauperizing the working class.”
“We never ask,” murmured Boris to himself,
“whether all this time we have not been pauperizing
the idle class.”
“But, as the possessor of a brain and nervous
system—let me call it soul—capable of profiting
by this additional leisure and comfort, I have no
right to withhold from those to whom this leisure
and comfort are due, the intellectual and moral fruits
which cannot be produced without them, and which
are almost as valuable and necessary to the class
which cannot obtain them for itself (being busy
obtaining my leisure and comfort) as what that class
furnishes to myself. Hence, as much as I have a
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 2O5
right to insist on a certain amount of material work
being done for me in return for my capital by those
whom my capital brings into and keeps in existence,
so much also have they the right to insist upon a
certain amount of mental and moral work being done
for them by those faculties in us which are brought
into and kept in existence by the higher dose of
leisure and comfort. In all past co-operation between
classes set aside for different lives there has been,
Ostensibly at least, an understanding of such give and
take ; and it is only nowadays that people have lost
all shame and given the human animal only enough
to keep him useful.”
“You speak, my dear cousin, exactly as did the
monks whose rule did not include their working as
these good white creatures are doing. The world
was to keep them in food and lodging and clothing,
and they were to keep the world—allow me the ex-
pression—in spiritual requisites by dint of hard
praying. This was quite fair so long as the world
believed in the efficacy of these prayers; but once it
ceased to do so, it began to wonder whether these
holy people were not receiving food, clothing and
shelter in return for nothing at all.”
“But in this case,” answered Althea, “ some of the
prayers are manifestly efficacious—a very small
minority are giving something in return. As to the
2O6 ALTHEA.
majority, I confess that, so far from giving any
spiritual food to the workers, they seem busily em-
ployed spoiling the bread and spilling the wine
which they themselves are not inclined to consume.
However, I wish everyone thought and acted like
Maria. We look forward—if we did not life would
be too hideous—to a future when no such difference
will exist; when all will work, without separation of
class, for all ; when capital will be sufficiently plenti-
ful and labour sufficiently in request for them to
exchange otherwise than, as Monsieur Boris says, the
oats and the work of a horse. But undoubtedly the
coming of the future, its very possibility, will depend
in some measure upon the leisured class working
meanwhile for the unleisured, upon the recognition
that, in the measure of our several strengths, we have
none of us the right to accept and not give, to profit
by the mere accidental economic circumstances
which give us power over other folk's work.”
“But I do not see,” said Boris, “ by what mechan-
ism the intellectual wealth which the leisured class
is, according to you and to my cousin, bound to
produce, can be transferred, however piecemeal, to a
class too busy and too hungry even to want such
intellectual wealth. All the philosophy and all the
art that the world has ever produced would be mere
stones instead of bread to the tailors of Alton Lock
ABOUT THE SOCIAL, QUESTION. 2O7
and the miners of Germina/. It seems to me that
you are all of you busy evading the terrible fact that,
so long as inevitable causes continue to make capital
scarce and more requisite than labour, capital will
}
continue to obtain the larger share of the wealth
which itself and labour unite in producing. And, as
long as the wealth which is constantly being pro-
duced is divided with extreme inequality between
the capitalist class (which also comprises the class
of expensively trained, highly-paid workers) and the
labouring class, there must be the evils of excessive
wealth on the one hand and of excessive poverty on
the other ; of wastefulness and misery, of idleness
and of overwork.”
“That is quite true,” replied Althea; “but the fact |
of this being the result of inevitable natural processes ---
does not necessarily militate against a possibility of
diminishing the painfulness of this inevitable result.
Let me explain by an analogy: Extreme cold and
extreme heat are also the result of inevitable natural
processes; yet we have found the means of diminish-
ing their painful and mischievous effects ; in fact, if
we had not, the human race would have long ceased
to exist. And if we are able to equalize and render
supportable so many of the inevitable excesses of
nature (indeed, to do so represents three-quarters of
man's work on earth), tempering heat with cold and
2O8 ALTHEA.
cold with heat, and uniting opposite qualities into
such compounds as serve our purposes, ought we
not also to render more supportable the phenomenon
of capital's superiority over labour, by tempering
extreme poverty with the excess of extreme
riches P’’
“But that is what pious people have been preach-
ing and practising ever since the world began, my
dear Lady Althea ; and it is what we now call
pauperization.”
“Pardon me, Boris,” answered Baldwin; “what
Lady Althea is alluding to—I know it because I
have so often had the honour of discussing these
matters with her—what Lady Althea is alluding to
is a totally different thing. It is what has been
considered rather a vice than a virtue till our own
day, and it is called Saving.”
Donna Maria turned suddenly round, where she
had seated herself on a terrace wall overlooking
vineyards and farm-buildings and great lowering
ruins, with only the cupola of St. Peter's on the
horizon to remind them that they were within the
walls of a great city. “Is that why you were so un-
sympathizing about my buying those pearls the day
before yesterday P I felt that you considered me
unprincipled, and I was determined I wouldn't ask
you why, since you wouldn't tell me.”
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 209
Baldwin merely laughed as he looked into the
valley below, screening his eyes with his hand against
the effulgence of the setting sun. But his laugh,
though without bitterness, was very sad.
“My dear Donna Maria,” he answered, “you
really require no further explanations ; you have
been reading a lot of books on political economy,
and you summed up the relations of capital and
labour quite admirably a few minutes ago. I cannot
tell you anything you have not read a dozen times
Over.” *
Althea turned pale as he spoke these words. It
seemed to her very ungenerous on the part of her
former teacher thus to resent, however impersonally,
the indifference with which his teachings were usually
met; and, at the same time, a certain sternness in
her character made her fear that Baldwin's disap-
pointment in his audience would result in his ceasing
to address it. But Donna Maria had the confiding-
ness of one who is full of the power of forgiveness
and also occasionally in need of it from others. y
“Nothing that I have not read, very possibly,”
she answered ; “but evidently something which I
have not benefited by reading. So, won’t you ex-
plain P”
It was, perhaps, not the first time that Baldwin
had repeated his explanations; but as experience
P
2 IO ALTHEA.
taught him day by day how little anything we say
is listened to, he had made up his mind to repeat
the same thing a thousand times over on the bare
chance of being listened to the thousand and first.
“You were asking,” he began, “what most honest
people must ask themselves at least once in their
life : are we worth the difference between the expense
of our keep and production and the keep and pro-
duction of those less fortunate than ourselves 2 May
we be supposed to give them in the present, or
prepare for them in however remote a future, any-
thing equivalent in importance to the services which
we receive from them, and in return for which (as
the Socialists have seen quite correctly) we give them
a portion of our own savings, but barely sufficient to
breed, groom, and train our human beasts of burden P
We are living, as you quite correctly stated, upon
the result of our saving, living to-day upon the pro-
duct of what we might have expended yesterday;
and, in So far as no one could forbid our
Spending that money yesterday had we chosen, we
are at liberty to spend its fruit to-day as we please.
We have a right to subsist on Our capital as those
others do on their labour. But we must understand
what we mean by right. In this case it means
simply that mankind in the aggregate has found it
more convenient—owing to one of those wretched
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 2 II
choices between two evils—to leave to the individual
his free choice in the matter of lending his savings
as it has left to the individual his free choice in the
matter of lending his labour. But social convenience
(which has changed many a time and may change
º • , )
to-morrow) apart, have we a moral right to exist;
better, more comfortably and pleasantly on º
capital than those other folk do on their labour º
Or, instead of asking, “ have we a moral right,’ let me
say what means the same thing and is more intelli-
gible: is the aggregate of mankind, including mankind
in the future, benefited or damaged by our having
the advantage 2 Please take notice that I do not
ask whether mankind is benefited or damaged by the
cause of this phenomenon, Since that seems answered
by the very fact of its persistence; I am asking
simply whether in this choice between two evils, the
evil of individual enslavement which we have rejected,
together with Socialism, and the evil of uneven dis-
tribution of wealth which we have preferred, we have
not, as usual, got hold of a new alternative. This
alternative is simply: is it better that we should spend
all of Our larger share on ourselves, or is it better
that we should replace a portion of it in the common
fund whence wealth increases to be divided afresh P
You have been reading books on political economy;
you are acquainted therefore with the elementary
P 2
2 I 2 ALTHEA.
distinction between unproductive and productive
expenditure; the first means consuming our wealth
in necessaries, comforts, or pleasures; the second,
employing that wealth as the seed for more, and a
larger amount of, wealth. If we consume all the
interest which is brought us by our capital (I don’t
speak of land and rent, because, except in the case
of building ground, land is every day bringing less
and less of what is really rent as distinguished from
interest on capital invested in its improvement)—if
we consume the interest of our capital, the world at
large is none the better for its existence ; if, on the
contrary, we re-invest this interest in useful under-
takings, the world is enriched by the produce of that
investment, exactly as the world would be enriched
by so many grains of wheat which we should sow in
the ground instead of swallowing them in the shape
of a biscuit. But you will say, what difference does
this different employment of our income make to the
classes who live on labour and not on capital How
will they benefit by the new wealth which may be
called into existence P”
“Because the more wealth in existence the larger
the share which every one will have of it,” interrupted
Donna Maria, eagerly ; “and yet no—because it is
again dividedly unequally ; this will mean merely that
we shall again have a larger share in a larger total.”
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. ! 2 I 3
“But the point is,” answered Baldwin, “that the
more wealth the less inequality in division ; not only
larger shares, but more even ones. For if capital—
that is to say, wealth devoted to production—become
more plentiful in proportion to labour—and capital
doubles infinitely more rapidly than labour, for
labour means population—capital will exchange with
labour at a rate less favourable to its owners and
more favourable to the owners of labour; since the
rate of exchange between the two—that is to say, the
shares which each can claim in the wealth which they
have united in producing—depends upon the relation
between the supply and demand of the one and the
Supply and demand of the other. But it is absurd
my repeating all this, which is explained in every
Sixpenny primer.”
“Somehow or other, in the primer it doesn’t seem to
connect with any of one's own concerns, any more than
the laws of physics in handbooks,” answered Donna
Maria, a light of comprehension coming into her
face. “Well, then, do you mean, Baldwin, that it
is not only no merit of ours if a little capital will
exchange for a lot of labour, but that it is even to
some extent much the result of our having everything
that we like 2 ”
Baldwin nodded. “So far from resulting from
any merits of ours, the fact that accumulated wealth
2I4. ALTHEA.
should be so scarce, and the fact that we can there-
fore lend it out at a high interest, is very largely the
result of our folly, of our vices—at best, of our indif-
ference. We—and by we I mean the well-to-do,
educated classes—destroy an immense amount of
wealth in war, or in the preparation for war; war
which, when it is not a matter of foolish national vanity,
is most often a matter of commercial rivalry con-
cerning the wealthy classes, but utterly indifferent to
the poor ones. In most countries we also destroy a
lot of capital by means of protective tariffs, which
put money into the pockets of manufacturers and
landowners which has been abstracted out of the
pockets of the taxpayers. These things we do in our
public capacity, as members of Parliament, journalists,
or politicians of the drawing-room, club, or café.
Then, in our private capacity, we–and I think women
almost more than men—destroy great lumps of
wealth at one blow by rapidly changing fashions and
throwing out of use expensive machinery, elaborately
made designs, slowly acquired skill, and sometimes
valuable raw material, all of which would have been
kept in use but for our caprice. In these ways, by
the exercise of our taste and influence, we diminish
the accumulated wealth by large bold strokes, and by
large bold strokes incline the exchange between
capital and labour distinctly in our own favour. We
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 2I 5
do the same thing on a smaller scale by minute
strokes perpetually repeated, wasting wealth piecemeal
in enjoyments which do not improve us and very
frequently do harm to others, in luxury, ostentation,
and vice. By a curious coincidence of economical
equilibrium, all this eventually profits us by keeping up
the rate of interest; and by an odd reversing of practi.
cal justice, damages those who have had no satisfaction
and shared no responsibility in it all. Were we less
reckless, less vain, less grasping, less luxurious, osten-
tatious, and vicious—in fact, were we less destructive—
the rate of exchange between labour and capital
would be altered, but altered in favour, not of our-
Selves, but of others.”
“And you think that a recommendation of already
sufficiently uncomfortable virtue to the people who
do not feel the need of it 2 ” asked Boris. ---
“I think,” answered Althea, “that as we have been
talking of the best way to relieve the pain which the
fact of unevenly distributed comfort and leisure causes
in some of us, we need not discuss the impressions of
the people who feel no such pain, and who can be
quite comfortable themselves in the sight of the dis-
comfort of others. We have not been discussing how
the totality of the world's economic wrongness is to
be removed—that will be the work of time and un-
conscious change—but how such individuals as are
2I6 ALTHEA.
i|
inclined may help, however slightly, to diminish some
of that wrongness, or at least not to increase it. To
those who suffer from the knowledge of other folk's
sufferings, who are abashed by the consciousness of
their undeserved privileges, there is something bitter,
but invigorating and consoling, in the fact that the
reward of our honesty and wisdom and self-
denial would be that others should be better off, not
we ; that the moral choice would have a moral
reward.”
“The thought is certainly consoling,” said Boris,
after a pause; “but does it not resemble so many other
consoling pieces of generosity, by which people have
been able, ever since the beginning of time, to
temporize with the misfortunes of others We have
always been taking advantage of the misfortunes
of our neighbours, and silencing our conscience by
arranging to give them back a small proportion of
what, under different circumstances, would none of it
have been ours. Yet no one has been able to decide
satisfactorily even about that proportion. The Jesuit
casuists, quoted by Pascal, determined, after much
disputing, that we can be expected to give only of
Our Superfluity ; and of superfluity no one was ever
known to be possessed, so . . . .”
“But Christ,” exclaimed Donna Maria, whose
religious instincts were offended by her cousin's levity,
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 217
“Christ had settled the question long before the
Jesuits; and He said, give all.”
“I think,” said Baldwin, “that were Christ to
return on earth in our day—to come once more to be
crucified, as the legend makes Him tell St. Peter at
that little church on the Appian way—I think he
would have explained that to give all did not mean
to make oneself a beggar in order that another man
should cease to be one. What is wanted is to give,
not that portion which may be useful to us and
through us, but that other portion which would be
more useful to others and through others.”
“And what is that portion P” asked Donna Maria,
eagerly.
“You are asking me the question which was put
to those Jesuits,” answered Baldwin, “and I fear
I cannot answer it so completely and satisfac-
torily. Yet I think we may get at a few principles
applicable to most cases; for the difficulty of the
matter lies in the fact that the only means of making
Such renunciation really equal is to distribute it in a
perfectly individual and uneven way. For one of these
principles would be—the most important of any I
can think of at present—that people should give up
all such expenditure as makes them less fit for social,
intellectual, moral, or physical uses, by fostering their
laziness, sensuality, thoughtlessness, covetousness,
218 ALTHEA.
and vanity. The side of human nature to which
great expenditure on food, clothes, equipages, and so
forth mainly appeal is the side which makes people
less valuable as human beings; so as this kind of
expenditure ought to be diminished merely with a
view to making us less useless or pernicious, it is
evidently the first which should be cut down with a
view to economic redistribution, and an increase of
productivity of capital, and therefore of wages.”
“But you are not against such things as render life
more easy and more delightful, Baldwin 2 °
“I want, on the contrary, that they should be within
the reach of everyone; I want all lives to be full
of comfort and pleasure and variety, to have as much
of it as can really be enjoyed; therefore I am against
a small number of lives being so clogged with luxury
and novelty as to prevent these good things being in-
creased by those who enjoy them, and even enjoyed
as fully as they might be by those who possess them.
To return to our rule. I think that we should curtail
all such expenditure as fosters people's incapacity
or unwillingness to give the world any share of work,
whether work applied directly. or indirectly to their
own Sustenance, or work given to others.”
“It is curious,” observed Althea, twisting one of
the long grey eucalyptus leaves round her finger,
“that a certain degree of over-spending invariably
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 2 I9
means, not merely a waste of what might have been
productive capital, but also a waste of what might
have been productive human energy, intellectual or
bodily.”
“It does more than that,” replied Baldwin ; “for,
as leisure is the most necessary of all comforts, idle-
ness is the most destructive of all luxuries ; since
idleness is not merely the passive not doing, but,
almost inevitably, the doing of the useless or mis-
chievous, of something requiring that other people
should work, either to facilitate or to remedy. It is
difficult to realize, and yet it is true, that the amount
of useful activity which the world gets out of people
is in exactly inverse proportion (except in the case of
beggars) to the amount of time and trouble which
, they cost the world; so that we get, through a series
of constantly increasing taking linked with constantly
dºminishing giving, to the class which requires people
to do even the most personal things for them, those
whose life is all play, and who must have, so to
speak, billiard-markers and caddy-boys to do the
drudgery even of life's game. Nay, the truth is even
more mad-looking than that, once we can lose the
familiarity which makes us overlook its monstrosity.
For these people waste the world's wealth and time
and energy, not merely in harmless indifference, but
often in absolute mischief. It is they who introduce
22O ALTHEA.
new-fangled and expensive vices, and those constantly
varying fashions which waste materials, throw skilled
labourers out of work, and sometimes overwork
tailors and dressmakers into consumption or death
for the instant gratification of a caprice. . . . . Not
to speak of the destruction of their constitution and
their children's, which sometimes leaves only disease
as the net product of their lives and of the lives whose
labour they consume.” t
And Baldwin watched his cigarette-end drop into
the vineyard below with an expression of deep dis-
couragement. The sun, setting in pale gold suffusion
behind St. Peter's, was flushing the brick of a great
broken arch, which projected, like the rib, covered
with sea-weed, of a huge wrecked vessel, out of the
confusion of pale green vines and pale yellow reed
fences of the valley. From the hidden road rose the
tinkling of cart-bells, the drone of the carter's songs;
and, as the first star throbbed into sight in the pale
sky opposite the sunset, the bells of those little early
Christian churches and monasteries, the thousand
bells of the distant city, began to ring the May-tide
Salutation to the Virgin,
“The question is,” said Althea, rather to herself
than to others, leaning against the rosy bole of a tall
eucalyptus and looking into that sunset as if into the
future ; “the question is, how long shall we have the
ABOUT THE SOCIAL QUESTION. 22 I
means of knowing these things and refuse to know
them 2 How long shall we deem it unfair to profit
by the misfortunes of others in small matters and
honourable to do so in large ones P Shall we go on,
honest folk that we are, returning most scrupulously
to its owner the sixpence found in the street, and not
returning to the classes below us the advantages
which they have lost and we have gained in the
windings and ups and downs of the world's
history 2” -
“It seems all rather wonderful and incomprehen-
sible, and yet as if it could not be otherwise,” said
Donna Maria, wrapping herself in her cloak as they
turned to go. “I mean all that you have been ex-
plaining to us. One can't quite realize that—how
shall I explain ?—well, that a great duty should b
so simple and so near at hand.” - - - -
“I fear most people will not find it so simple,”
put in Boris, “ and will refuse to admit that it can be
so near at hand.” l
“Why not P” asked Donna Maria, impetuously.
“Why, it's so convenient, one can begin at once
For instance, in driving home now we'll pass through
the Corso, and leave word at that jeweller's that I
won’t have those pearls, Baldwin. Dear me, I had
forgotten ; this is May Day, and all the shops will
be shut because of the Socialists.”
| HE SPIRITUAL LIFE
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
I.
THEY had entered the church of Fiesole just as the
Candlemas procession was descending the steps of
the chancel and winding through the nave below :
seminarist boys in black skirts and white surplices
in front, canons in various purples—from violet to
brown—behind ; the lights of their tapers yellow in
the dim daylight, against the pale grey Stone. Bald- -
win was under that spell, due to boyhood passed in
the still pontifical Rome, which the ceremonies of the
Catholic Church invariably threw over him. The
gold altar-piece shimmered among the wax lights in
the bare grey apse, Surrounded by those solemn faces
lit up by the tapers; the white and gold stoles
moved slowly backwards and forwards, the great
silver candlesticks fell and rose with the genu-
flexions in the lilac incense Smoke ; the notes of the
organ, the solemn enharmonic chants, the majestic
Latin words circulated, themselves a procession,
Q
226 ALTHEA.
among the arches and the capitals, once a temple of
the pagan. Below, glimmered the lamps that hang
from the roof of the crypt.
“There is nothing in the world to compare with
it,” remarked Baldwin, as he liſted the heavy leather
curtain for Althea to pass out ; “things, to be
as perfect as these Roman rites, must be mani-
pulated by unconscious centuries, welded by them
into one homogeneous work of art : church, priests,
vestments, lights, incense, chants ; and, on the top
of everything, the venerableness of old age. Nothing
in the future will ever replace them.”
The professor, who was returning to the faith of
his childhood, under the stress of a passionate pity
for the animals tortured by Science—the professor
had been kneeling throughout the ceremony ; and
for a moment or two afterwards seemed absorbed in
thought.
“Ah !” he suddenly said ; “you rationalists, what
are you made of 2 You throw away the kernel, and
regret the husk. If these rites were not hallowed by
the thousands of Souls who have witnessed them,
what value, what charm would there be in such
pageantry The remains of the pomp of Paganism
and of Byzantine Courts, mere perfect ceremonial
and you regret it, you, who have willingly thrown
away what is really beautiful : the spiritual church,
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 227
the invisible rites, the splendour and the music in the
souls of the saints.”
“Are you fair, my dear professor P’’ answered
Baldwin, as they crossed the Square in front of the
church and struck off into the steep lane which leads
to the top of the hill. “Are you fair to the souls of
us poor, unpicturesque moderns P I always hope
that as you are a Saint, one of the old sort, there may
be given to you that special grace bestowed upon one
of the Fathers of the Desert, who, having been allowed
to see the glory, invisible to earthly eyes, which
Surrounds God's Saints, saw this halo round the
head—no, there were no rationalists in those days—
round the head of an acrobat showing his tricks in
the market-place.”
“There are acrobats who twist their legs and arms;
and acrobats who contort their wishes and beliefs,”
answered the professor. et
“Well, then, let me show Lady Althea and you
Some of my tricks. First of all then, I wish to
point out that the religious ideals which have been
handed down to us from times of comparative ignor-
ance—”
“Not ignorance of God!” interrupted the pro-
fessor.
“Well, from times, at all events, of simpler social
organization and of asceticism quite unsuspected of
Q 2
228 ALTHEA.
exaggeration ; such religious ideals have accustomed
us to look for a moral picturesqueness which we miss
in the ideals of our slow-paced times. For we have
learned that not every well-meant act produces
benefit to others; while every act does produce an
alteration in human affairs with consequences often
impossible to forecast, and still oftener impossible
to undo. We have learned that there are gifts de-
lightful to the giver, which are full of evil to the
receiver; and that there are self-sacrifices which
really sacrifice the ultimate welfare of others to Our
own impatient enthusiasm. We can no longer strip
off our clothes like St. Francis ; and the stripping
ourselves of what we ought not to keep is not a
picturesque, inspiriting, or, in fact, even a very
visible proceeding. People forget that modern
Saintliness must often take the form of refusing to
appear Saintly.”
“Picturesque !” exclaimed the professor, “there
you are again with your love of embroidery, and
candles and incense. Can you not understand that
Saintliness is not picturesque, but—I wonder whether
you will think of candles and incense again—holy;
and that what is holy is ineffably beautiful ? But
first, my dear Baldwin, are you sure your modern
renunciation is not akin to the Emperor of China’s
clothes in Andersen's story P Is it not unpicturesque,
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 229
uninspiriting, invisible, simply because it does not
exist? You have found out—your Mills and
Spencers—that to give away one’s money is pauper-
izing, and to mortify the flesh is bad for the health
and temper. Tell me, then, of what do you allow
righteous philosophers to strip themselves, besides, as
you said, the possibility of appearing Saintly P”
“A great many things,” answered Baldwin, a little
hotly. “Some of which, my dear professor, you
could not strip off because you have never allowed
yourself to possess them : luxuries, lazinesses,
cowardices, big and small ; and others which, allow
me to say, you never will consent to throw away,
foregone conclusions, which you suspect to be wrong
but which you feel to be comforting.”
The professor smiled at Baldwin’s unusual im-
petuosity ; his own warmth of character made him
love indignation in others, even when directed against
himself. *
“You make me out a righteous man, which I am
not, in order to overwhelm me the more with the sin
against the Holy Ghost.”
“Yes,” interrupted Baldwin, “that is just it : the
sin against the Holy Ghost, in Goethe's interpretation
rather than St. Paul’s.”
“But I refuse to consider myself such a sinner. I
don’t want to burn Herbert Spencer, nor to disperse
23O ALTHEA.
the ashes of Riccardo; I am quite willing every
one should have their own ideas; and so long as
a man does no harm, what does it matter what he
thinks P”
Althea had been following the discussion with
that intent, rather puzzled look of hers, earnestly
separating the grain and the chaff.
J
“But surely, she said, “we are bound to have
opinions on all matters which lie within our practical
influence ; and for that reason to see to their being
correct. You seem to leave out of the discussion
the fact of what truth is : that truth is the expression
of how things are. You speak of it as something
abstract, about which we can afford to have very
approximate, varying, and conflicting views ; as a
matter of individual taste. But truth, that is to
say, the how things are, is of the same quality in
whatever branch of thought; and if we base our
action upon a mistake in intellectual or moral
science, we must expect a practical failure or
catastrophe as inevitable as that resulting from a
mistake in the most elementary physical matters.
We should cry out, should we not, if any one built
a bridge without knowing the nature of the arch,
or even cooked a dinner without knowing the action
of quick and slow fire, and water and butter. But
in the more complicated questions which involve
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 23
the possible destruction not of bridges or of dinners,
but of happiness and usefulness, people feel, or at
least act, quite differently. They accept some one
else's conclusion, or rush at one themselves; as if,
instead of playing for life and death in the terrible
game between ourselves and the nature of things,
we were playing for counters ; as if words were
mere words, and opinions incapable of producing any
practical results.”
“Ah !” exclaimed the professor, as they walked
up a steep lane, whose rusty cypress hedge and
white walls, overtopped by olives, framed in the
snow-veined blue of a distant mountain ; “Ah, my
dear young lady, you have been to school with
Baldwin ; and he has made you believe that if only
people would cease to look forward to a Paradise in
Heaven they would quickly make one on earth.
And then you wonder at the silly faith of us poor old
fogies l’’
“I don't think Mr. Baldwin has ever taught me
that there is any chance of the world becoming,
within any appreciable time, anything of the nature
of a Paradise. Once upon a time I thought the world
was a box of puppets going about to amuse nobody
in particular. Mr. Baldwin taught me that it was
different, and that there are things I never dreamed
of, called cause and effect ; therefore that certain
232 ALTHEA.
acts give pain or pleasure, or produce it in the long
run ; that the world would be rid of so much pain if
it could be rid of so many such acts.”
“In fact,” broke in the professor, “that it was
your business to diminish people's pain—merely
their pain—that you needn’t think of serving God so
long as you served man P-Or rather, so long as you
preached the service of man P’’
Althea did not seem to remark the contempt in
the professor’s voice and manner.
“Yes,” she answered simply. “But as to the
service of man, I don't think I should venture to
preach it to others, still less to propose it to my-
Self. I say still less, because one can’t hope as
much from oneself, whom one knows, as from others
whom one doesn’t know. It will be time enough
later, don’t you think, to consider how we can serve
man P All we need think of at present is not to
rob, or imprison, or poison, or starve him in the
pursuit of Our pleasures and vanities, and in the in-
dulgence of our sloth—”
They had reached the highest point of the hill of
Fiesole, a bleak spot, where the olive ceases to grow,
and the cypress and the hellebore seemed to have
ousted all more cheerful vegetation from the crumbly
slate Soil. A Solitary stone cottage has lost its way
to this spot. A wretched, battered little place, dirty
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 233
bed-clothes out of its windows, looking down on to the
bleak rubble slope of the Mugnone Valley, looking
up to the blue bleakness of Montesinario, to the
Apennine circle, where the snow lingers and the
Storm-clouds hang. A wind-vexed, desolate, God-
forsaken place. But in front of it are two tall
wind-warped bay trees, and on the lichened wall is
inscribed, “ Canto dei Poeti ’’-Poets' Corner.
The three friends rested for awhile before this
allegoric hovel; for to each of them the place had a
symbolic significance, of the sort which is rather felt
than reasoned, and which is therefore the more
potent.
“Look at this,” at last remarked the professor, -
with a Smile on his thin Tuscan face, in which, as in
his gentle and fiery soul, his friends were apt to trace
a likeness to St. Francis, “if Baldwin had had the
managing of the world, he would have bade the snow-
wind deflect a little from this house, and the thun-
der-Storms burst a little to its side ; at all events, he
would have provided it with a first-rate drain and an
air-tight roof. Her Ladyship Sister Nature—as St.
Francis would have said, arranged matters at less
expense: she bid these laurels grow. You wish to
put comfort into life ; but God has already put
poetry.”
“Yes,” answered Althea sternly ; “but while we
234 ALTHEA.
look at the laurels, and repeat the pretty name
“Poets' Corner, the people inside are aching from
damp and cold. What would you have answered,
dear professor, if, when you were fighting with that
carter the other day, some poetical person had re-
marked that, after all, there was good in the in-
famous brute, because his torturing the unfortunate
horse called forth such beautiful sympathy in you ?”
“I don’t think our dear professor means that,”
said Baldwin, taking the hand of his friend, who
had felt a sudden horror at the light which Althea
had let into his soul. “And I think, in a measure,
we both agree with him ; not when he follows the
false saints in blessing evil; but when he asserts with
the true ones—the true saints, philosophers, and
poets, all those who deserve some of these bays
about their head—that there is something besides
what the world calls pleasure and pain.”
“And still you, you do reduce everything to plea-
sure and pain, Baldwin ” exclaimed the professor.
“You have taught Lady Althea, who ought to have
walked, with the laurel crown you mention, in the
company of the great stoics; you have taught her
the wretched little Epicurean heresy, that in this
empty universe there are only two realities—pleasure
and pain; and that what we call soul, Good, God,
are merely dreams which arise when our body is
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 235
comfortable, or the reverse; as Omar Khayyam ex-
pressed it long before Herbert Spencer, and in a
better literary form : ‘Hell is but a spark from our
useless torment ; and Heaven but the breath from a
moment of ease.’”
“Yes,” answered Baldwin, “I do reduce everything
to a question of pleasure and pain; and yet I do
agree with the stoics, with Sister Nature when she
planted the two laurel trees; and I disagree with—
well, the philosophy which no one has ever had the
face to formulate, but which forms the basis of most
of our proceedings. I don’t know exactly what
name to give it, so I call it in my mind the philo-
sophy of the donkey-cart. The donkey-cart in
question was being pulled by a microscopic donkey,
and driven by two stout men, outside the gates of
Siena on a broiling August evening ; and it flew, as
Only carts can which have a donkey as big as a rat,
and a driver as big as a tun. The philosophy there-
of is as follows: This furious pace is very amus-
ing, and, in that first coolness of the evening,
extremely exhilarating to the two men, but it is diffi-
Cult, painful, and exhausting to the donkey. In
more abstract terms: our pleasure frequently coincides
with the discomfort, pain, or detriment of others; but
there is nothing repulsive that warns us off pleasure;
on the contrary, when we view it quite simply in
236 ALTHEA.
regard to ourselves and the moment, it has even,
besides its own specific attractions, an agreeable air
of naturalness and fitness; it is, in fact, the combina-
tion of sensations or ideas or feelings which fits our
nerves at that particular minute. The circumstances
yielding this pleasure may also yield discomfort or
detriment, but this discomfort or detriment is either
in the future, or to somebody else. The perception
thereof is indirect, incomplete, far from spontaneous,
and very often it does not exist at all. So we crack
the wind of the donkey incidentally to getting an
agreeable ventilation for ourselves. . . This is,
briefly, the philosophy of the donkey-cart ; all the
vice in the world depends upon it ; and all the saints
and Sages have been railing against it since the
beginning of time, that is to say, since the beginning
of pain.”
“And yet,” burst out the professor, “your own
philosophy knows no other basis. You and the
donkey-cart drivers are at One in recognizing only
pleasure and pain.”
“Not at all. The donkey-cart drivers and I differ
most essentially. They recognize the existence of
pleasure and pain not too much, but infinitely too
little. Only a very small portion of pleasure and
pain exists for them as a reality ; they are very imper-
fectly connected, because they have imperfect reason,
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 237
imagination, perception, with the world that contains
them, the world extending not merely in space, but
in time, not merely the world of pain and pleasure to
the north and south, east or west, but the world of
pain and pleasure in the past and future. Know
pleasure and pain P Why they know only their own,
or a little of that of their nearest and dearest, not so
much as their donkey knows of the pleasure and
pain of yesterday and to-morrow. All around is fog,
vagueness ; as there is fog and vagueness around us
when we feel faint, and our eyes no longer catch
hold of the things not ourselves, and our ears are
isolated in the same way.”
“Say simply that the world is full of the pleasure
of tormenting others,” exclaimed the professor.
Althea looked at the professor with the same sur-
prise as if he had been saying that it was easier to
use one's left hand in drawing, or to ride a horse with
one's face to the tail.
“Surely,” she said, “that is a mistake, and due, in
some measure, to the very insufficiency of realization
which makes people seem to get pleasure out of their
neighbour's pain. Surely we need not even take
into consideration, since they are abnormal and
therefore uncommon, the places where pleasure is
taken in the perception of pain ; the few miserable
creatures who experience such pleasure must be of
238 ALTHEA.
the same sort as those whose disease makes them
experience pleasure in pain of their own. Surely,
except in such cases, the pain and the pleasure are
always separate; one exists because the other is not
perceived, or not enough. I remember a doctor
telling me that born criminals are deficient in the
power of perceiving pain in others, and sometimes
in themselves. Even with barbarous nations, even
with street boys, the pleasure most likely is in the
exercise of certain instincts of observation, in the
watching of action and expression due to pain,
rather than in the perception of the pain it-
Self.”
“Oh, but some people actually like giving pain.
I wish to give pain, and as much pain as possible, to
the brute who was beating that lame horse uphill,”
exclaimed the professor.
“I am sure you do,” answered Baldwin, laughing,
“but at the same time I quite agree with Lady Althea
that in such cases your own pleasure is preventing,
not arising from, the complete perception of the
other's pain; you want to hurt your carter just in
proportion as he seems deficient in sensitiveness; if
you were suddenly to perceive that you were hurt-
ing him as much as he was hurting his horse, or
rather if you were to perceive it as thoroughly, you
would immediately leave off; and your momen-
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 239
tary blindness to any pain save his would probably
'make you inclined to kick yourself in turn.”
“Well, perhaps I should—though no, I should
, not. I should recognize that Christ was right in
refusing to return evil for evil; but I should do it all
the same—I should do it all the same.”
“Perhaps it has been given as yet only to Christ,”
answered Baldwin, touched, though amused, at his
friend’s ferocity, “to completely realize pain and
pleasure, and to feel in his own agony only the
pleasure of the good it should buy for others. Any-
how,” continued Baldwin, “the vivid representation
to ourselves of what is hidden behind the barriers of
another individuality must evidently be painful in
proportion as it is real ; if it is not painful, it is not
vivid, or rather it is not there ; our nerves are in
advance of our mind. To realize, to perceive pain,
means to participate therein in a greater or lesser
degree. The mischief, therefore, I think, lies in our
insufficient realization of pain, in our not really per-
ceiving it save in ourselves. In the majority of cases,
and, despite the evidence of cries and contortions
(which we sometimes perceive only as ugly, as ourances-
tors perceived them apparently only as funny) the pain
remains too much of an abstraction ; the tortures of
the not-myself being perceived very slightly compared
with the most moderate discomfort of the myself.
24O ALTHEA.
We are deaf, blind, and, so to speak, under chloro-
form as regards other creatures. 'Tis a case, the
largest in the world—as large as the world—of
Bastiat's what is seen and what is not seen. We feel
our own pleasure; the other fellow's pain is left to be
felt by himself; just as the after effect, the ſo-morrow
of an act is so rarely vivid in our mind, and the
various complications round the corner are so difficult
to imagine.”
“You asked me, in what I differed from the Omar
Khayyams of to-day and yesterday, including those
who drink without philosophizing over their cups,”
continued Baldwin, after a long silence, as they
descended the steep hillside which faced, at this
moment an empty universe, a valley hidden in
white winter mists, against which the sharp line of
cypresses, nay, the green palm growths of the helle-
bores, stood out as against a dim white Sea. And as
they descended, they were accompanied, along the
steep walls, by the little brooks darting, with con-
stantly varying motion, under their half-broken crust
of ice : wayward live things, glistering forked crea-
tures, always shifting and changing, seeking a new
way, breaking the ice and accumulating its broken
scales, with ever new crackle and babble on the way.
“You do not seem to grasp-somehow you saints
never do—that the philosophy of pleasure and pain
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 24. I
—of the pleasure and pain of the world and the uni-
verse—must teach the only valuable lesson of all
religions and all philosophies : the lesson of a life
transcending the senses and the ego, a life with all
men and in all things. We exist at the beginning
enclosed in our shells. The barbarian, the child, the
brute, the degenerate, knows as little of what is pass-
ing in those around him as does one of the lower
animals, less, one would think, than a horse or a dog.
He exists in a shell of egoism thoroughly impene-
trable, which preserves him isolated in the midst of
the world, solitary with his own lusts and sensations,
and as incapable of refreshing, of renewing himself in
the great universal life, as a man covered with india-
rubber from head to foot is incapable of being wetted
by the stream he is wading in. His senses, indeed,
are holes of communication with the Outer world;
but through them pass only communications isolated
among themselves, leading to little, Connecting him
permanently with nothing ; he is hungry and eats,
thirsty and drinks ; a Sensation, an act and no more.
'Tis something else, infinitely complex, something
comprising intelligence, memory, imagination, the
power of living in the past and future, in the distant
and problematic, which liberates us from this hide of
impervious personality. It is this by which, more
and more, man knows the pleasure and pain of others,
R
242 ALTHEA.
by which his life merges into the life beyond. It is
this which allows us to perceive the pain of to-morrow
as that of to-day ; the pain of another as that of
ourselves ; and forestalls and prevents the one and
the other. It is this which extends our pleasures to
those of the distant and the future. It is this which
prevents the past from becoming the mere gone and
wasted thing. By this, enabling others to live, we
are enabled to live ourselves ; not detaching us from
ourselves, but attracting us to the great not-our-
selves.”
They had come suddenly, at the turning of a
hedge red with hips and the berries of butcher's
broom among the purple brushwood, to a group of
osiers in a hollow on the hill ; a film of orange
magnificence against the olives, a sudden flame
against the mist below.
“And what,” asked the professor, stopping by
those burning bushes, and looking vaguely at a
space of blue Sky Overhead, whence the sun was
beginning to melt the frost, to suck up the mists
which filled the valley to its brim; “and what do
you call this something which enables you to do so
many fine things P”
Baldwin smiled as he answered very gently,–
“I have hitherto called it soul, but if you will
show me in what it falls short of the genuine article,
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 243
and if you will find me a fitter name, I am most
willing to call it something else.”
“I thought as much l’ exclaimed the professor.
“But, my poor Baldwin, don't you see that you are
merely playing hide and seek with the Öeast, and
that what you call having a soul, is merely taking a
care for other people's body, in order that they
may take care of yours ? Your philosophy of
pleasure and pain turns Spiritual life into a Com-
plicated conjurer's trick out of which there comes at
last—what? a comfortable human animal ”
“Well,” answered Baldwin, “is that so very com-
mon and so very much to be despised ?”
“Not to be despised, certainly. Heaven knows
I am convinced that a Sound human animal is re-
quisite before we have any right to ask for a clean
human soul. But the means is not the aim. Do
you remember a beautiful passage in Thoreau,
about his picking up the jaw-bone of a hog, and
being struck at the sight of its white, sound tusks,
at there being, as he says, “an animal health and
vigour distinct from the spiritual,” and at the
creature succeeding by other means than temper-
ance and purity ?”
“But I disagree utterly. I imagine the creature's
temperance and purity would not have been our
temperance and purity ; but if the hog succeeded,
R 2
244 ALTHEA.
it was because he had more of hog's virtue than
his fellows.”
The professor gave a contemptuous growl of
“Hog's virtue !” and then went on with his re-
flections, but addressing them to Althea.
“Do you remember that passage P.”
“I remember nothing, because I have read
nothing,” answered the girl simply.
“Oh, yes, you have ; a good deal more of Some
things—of certain trash—than you should. But you
shall read this 1 Well, do we not, every now and
then, find such another on our road, such a hog's
jaw, “with white teeth and sound 'P And are we
not surprised, and in a degree confused, by the im-
pression that whiteness and soundness make upon
us? There is left in us, from pagan days, I
Suppose, a notion of completeness and the power
arising thence; a charm of the thing rounding itself
off, enough material existing for the pattern, enough
pattern, the right pattern, for the material. We feel
in the presence of this perfection sui generis—for
there are perfections of all sorts, good and bad—a
Sense of awkwardness, of inferiority : we are poor
Creatures, incomplete, incoherent, full of rents and
patches. A desire comes over us to cover our
Spiritual nakedness, which consists so largely of mis-
shapen limbs or impotent muscles, in the presence .
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 245
of this unabashed naked animal. Yet it is different.
The human animal, when we come to look at it
closer, is not the fine thing we took it for ; no, your
pagan athlete is ugly in the eyes of God (and in
our eyes when seeing in God’s light) compared with
a Saint of the desert who has crippled body and brain
in the search for something higher. To be an
animal, on the part of a human being, is to be, in a
measure, a monster; for it is monstrous to possess
the human faculty of reason and to employ it merely
for the satisfaction of what the beast satisfies by
bestial intuition ; and it leaves a hidden horror
about what is seemingly a normal creature. The
Faun, it seems to me, is not a real creature, though
occasionally we talk as if he were. When man
takes to the woods, eats roots and berries, he does
not eat only that much which is necessary. Instead
of the fabled Faun, a pleasing, cleanly creature,
much beloved by poets, we get something like those
goat-legged followers of Pan whose statues defile
our museums, hirsute, stinking. That additional
gift of God, a human mind, when it is not developed
to a human soul, revenges itself for neglect by
marring this apparent animal perfection : the beasts
if they knew it, would turn aside in contempt.”
“I can’t understand what it all has to do with
pleasure and pain,” remarked Althea, folding her
246 ALTHEA.
cloak about her; “besides, I have never felt in the
least abashed or awkward before people who seemed
healthy animals and no more. They very often
have about them a taint of what, even in the animal,
would be diseased, for animals are temperate. Also,
to obtain any physical beauty in a human being, we
require more than the mere fitness of animal faculties
to animal functions; we must have the promise, in
head and face and gesture, of a soul fit for spiritual
life. Of course there is more health, if we under-
stand what health means, in an emaciated saint than
in a bloated sensualist: but the latter is exactly not
like the nice, sound, white hog's jaw, which is a
beautiful thing in its way.”
“No, no, you shall not call it soul l’ exclaimed
the professor, after a silence, suddenly reverting to
his dominant thought. “It may be an excellent
thing, one of which you can’t have too much. It
may be, it is, doubtless, the same gud non of the
existence of soul. But it is not soul. Call it, if you
like, virtue ; it stands to human beings as what you
called hog's virtue stands, I suppose, to hogs—it
keeps them sound. The soul teaches the rule of the
soul. This mixture of intelligence, memory, ima-
gination, of ego and not-ego, teaches us only the rule
of the body and the body's vanities and pomps.
The virtue of the soul is positive, efficient ; ’tis the
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE, 247
virtue of appreciation and love of the greatness of
God. Your virtue is negative, teaching the respect
of mealm and tuum, the old insufficient pagan virtue
of temperance.”
“Temperance,the great Temperanția of the poor
pagans, is not the mere hog's virtue after all,”
interrupted Baldwin ; “its component virtues—
chastity, Serenity and moderation—even if they were
not necessary for the preservation of the body
(supposing an individual to be benefiting in bodily
strength by the temperance of his ancestors) would
yet be necessary for the preservation of the soul —
But I forgot, I must not call it soul.”
“Poor Baldwin l’exclaimed the professor, “your
philosophy is but a vicious circle—pleasure, pleasure,
pleasure. My body to receive pleasure, thanks to
your soul; my soul to see the pleasure of your body.
Some day, perhaps—through no effort of reasoning,
but through some sudden emotion—it will be re-
vealed to you that the holy men of all times have
been right—that all real life of the Soul implies
asceticism.”
The world at that moment seemed to repeat the
professor's last word—asceticism. High against the
sky—the high sky of bright cobalt-high, high up,
separate from all things else, out of the bluish mist
and the bluish olives, rose a jag of hill, vivid with
248 ALTHEA.
glare of pink and white houses, printing itself,
enamel upon enamel, brilliant, Southern like an
oleander blossom in June. But below, hundreds of
feet below, the chill white vapours were moving
slowly; slowly rolling themselves and unrolling,
fold upon fold of damp gauze ; Settling in the
hollows, hanging from the projections; luminous,
colourless, hiding, you would think, an absent dis-
appeared world. And, as the mists and the frosts
went on shifting in those deeps, there emerged out
of them vague and unlikely slopes of green and
troughs of Streams, fretted gradually more and more
by dim rows of leafless trees ; a chill and exquisite
fairyland of grass and woods, too pale for this earth,
yet blooming with a faint bloom of sere branches
and stems, and Sere leaf-encrusted frosty grass. A
country of winding streams and sloping lawns, and
flower-like trees, widening away; fit playground for
Some slim and thin-lipped allegoric nymphs, flitting
about in pale, waving robes, or hurling javelins
against the intruder Amor, as in some picture of the
Triumph of Chastity.
“But who would deny that there is wisdom in
asceticism, nay that there can be no wisdom without
it 2" answered Baldwin. “Temperance, the temper-
ance of the ancients, means more than merely limit-
ing our lower desires, our lusts of the flesh, of vanity,
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 249
and of power. 'Tis not enough to restrain them
within such limits as shall hurt neither ourselves nor
our neighbours, nay ; we shall hurt both ourselves
and our neighbours, defraud, and mutilate, by aim-
ing merely at that. The great goddess Temperazzia
should have been painted, not merely clad in Steel
and grasping a sword, but reading in the book of
the world, looking beyond earth to heaven. We
must direct the bulk of our vital sap upon such parts
of us as transcend the mere necessities of our
physical continuance, or our half-physical Social
comfort ; on that which is over and above, which
needs to grow, and whose complete development is
a sort of ideal of perfection for us all, the something
in which alone there is room and shelter for the
greatest happiness of all. All baser wants—and I
am very far from considering as such only those of
the flesh—are legitimate not merely when kept with-
in the bounds of doing no injury, no injury to the
legitimate baser wants of our neighbours. They are
legitimate only under the condition of actually con-
ducing, directly or indirectly, positively or nega-
tively, to wants whose satisfaction in ourselves never
threatens the satisfaction of others. Asceticism, for
all its disastrous exaggerations and follies, can never
lose its charm for the mind ; for asceticism possesses,
however mixed up with rubbish, the secret of all
25O ALTHEA.
spiritual progress : the rule of not indulging, but
employing, our commoner and more self-seeking
part ; of replacing a negative virtue by a positive
one. For the soul, and after all by soul we mean
the same, all of us, is not a thing for merely ruling
the body and keeping it wholesome, our own body
or the body of others ; it is an aim in itself, a thing
for whose perfection the body must be used. The
Soul, the intelligence, the sympathies, the memory,
sense of beauty and imagination, is what keeps at
bay the pain which walks the world ; but it is also
what alone can extract from the world its full tribute
of pleasure.”
The professor was silent for a moment. “And
yet," he said, “we do not understand one another ;
you cannot yet perceive the real life of the soul, the
aim of the Soul’s life, as distinguished from the soul's
mere discipline. The soul is not merely useful be-
cause it serves man ; it is noöſe, because it can be
united to God.”
Baldwin Shook his head with a melancholy smile,
and was silent.
Those valleys below had widened out, clearer and
clearer, though still bathed in frost, till their streams
and tree-rows wound themselves away into the vague
chill blueness of the plain ; the plain stretching you
knew not whence nor whither, formless and without
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 25 I
landmark, till it defined itself against the pale blue
sky in the glittering snow-crests of Vallombrosa.
And above the pale allegorical valley, marked with
faintly outlined houses and cypress clumps—above
this valley of Britomart, and under that snow
brilliancy of the great mountains—rose gradually
towers and battlements, distinct though disembodied :
farms and villas transfigured into a Van Eyck or
Memling vision of the Celestial Jerusalem.
“I have been trying to understand what you
mean,” said Althea, thoughtfully. “For I think you
must mean something real—something that can be
thought and understood—when you say that the
soul can be united with God. Of course you cannot
mean a God whom man could ever approach, except
in thought. But if that is so, do we not, after all,
mean the same thing when we say that the soul,
through perception of cause and effect and perception
of beauty, through sympathy and memory and fancy,
can participate in the life of all times and all things;
and can find its complete life and joy only in the life
and joy of the universe P” l
This time it was the professor who shook his head.
“Ah,” he said, “ words cannot explain such things.”
252 ALTHEA.
II.
Some weeks later the three met again; and as had
become inevitable since the professor's return to the
beliefs of his childhood, the conversation gravitated
at Once to the question of a spiritual life.
“I have been thinking,” he said, “about your
definition of that beautiful antique virtue, or sum of
antique virtues, Temperance ; and I understand now
the dissatisfaction which made me, I fear, momen-
tarily almost blind to its beauty. 'Tis the virtue of
people who looked at life mainly from the aesthetic
point of view—the virtue of the athlete and the
artist—heeding nothing so much as the debasing of
a type, the degeneration of a muscle. Christianity
views things more nobly. It takes away from man
the sole proprietorship of himself, his thoughts and
actions : his soul belongs to God and to Christ ; he
is responsible for it, must keep it pure because it is
not his to dirty ; must make it agreeable, so far as
lies with him, to its real owner—to the Lord. What
if the flesh tempt P God claims His own. Without
such a conception, there is no real spiritual life; and
where in Antiquity there is spiritual life, ’tis because
the light of Christianity has illumined the higher
Souls—the souls of Plato and Marcus Aurelius and
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 253
Epictetus, before it has risen above the horizon and
become sensible to the lowlier.”
The day and the place were appropriate to such
discourse. It was the Thursday of Holy Week ;
and the Solemnity possessed by such days, even for
those to whom they commemorate but the holiness
of a holy man, the solemnity of the austere spring
arising again out of winter, was intensified in the
silence of the bells awaiting the symbolic signal of
new life. The place was the convent of some teach-
ing and nursing nuns, whom the professor had met
in his rambles among the poor ; he had taken his
friends there as a silent expression of his constant,
innermost thoughts. On passing through two for-
midable doors, they had found themselves, surprised
and charmed, in a large cloistered garden ; little box-
enclosed beds—here and there already a pale, pre-
cocious rose-bud—and stacked up Orange and lemon
trees, all flooded with sunshine; a wide square of
blue sky above, and nothing to intrude save the
vigilant over-topping tower of the neighbouring ob-
servatory. And the infinite charm had grown with
the realization that such a place—garden, tiers of
cloisters, orangery, wide arched stairs and pillared
halls—should be contained, silent, airy and Sunny,
in the midst of those close, black streets, always
damp and cold, with their constant rattle of Omni-
254 ALTHEA.
buses and carts, their jostle of dirty, hurrying
people.
“I don't quite agree with you,” answered Baldwin,
as they sat, with Althea, who was making a drawing
for the professor. “Both these theories take for
granted that man's soul is his own ; for the Christian
must give his soul to God; and other men have
claims upon his justice, charity, and love only because
such is the desire of God, and obedience to that
desire is the expression of his giving his soul to God.
The Temperance we were speaking of the other day,
starts from a different conception, possible perhaps
only in recent days: the conception that, whatever
the laws of the country may say, and whatever may
be taught by its religion, a man has no absolute
proprietorship over anything—neither his chattels,
nor his dependants, nor his time, nor himself.”
“Then what becomes of liberty, without which
man cannot have the merit of good deeds, nor even
accomplish deeds which are in any sense good?”
“If by liberty you mean freedom from the inter-
ference of other men,” answered Baldwin, “liberty in
the sense in which Mill used the word, it is to the in-
crease of such liberty of the individual that we owe
this new conception of duty. The freedom from a
number of socially and religiously imposed notions
and habits; the liberty of imagining relations between
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. . 255
men and things different from those actually existing,
has allowed us to suspect, among other things, that
we are not the proprietors, nor even the irresponsible
life owners of anything; least of all, of ourselves.”
The professor, absorbed in the charm of the place,
was watching the Sisters silently coming and going
in the cloisters below, and the flutter of the white
curtain of the cell opposite, whose window framed in,
together with the white pillow, the big crucifix, and
the white-washed wall, a vision of contemplative
life.
“All that is exaggeration,” he answered; “and
Christianity alone has seen the truth in these matters.
God wishesus to fulfil certain duties to our country,
and our neighbour, and our family; but such public |
duties once fulfilled, our private life is in our power ;
and indeed it is only in so far as the world has no
rights over it, that we can fully give it to Him.”
Althea had closed her sketch-book.
“But how can you make a distinction,” she asked,
“between private and public life, as if the one
belonged solely to the individual while the other
did not? There is no life a man may lead with
one or two others which does not spread and affect
the life of all and every one; nay, not even the life
he leads with his own thoughts. For although,
taken separately in each single instance, the indi-
256 ALTHEA.
vidual's deeds and performances, and thoughts and
judgments, may seemingly affect no more than the
immediate surroundings, yet we shall Surely find that
as each unit is but one of many units, so acts be-
come important because more than one person is
likely to commit them. It is the old rule, of asking
ourselves, what if all, or many, others, or even but
a few besides ourselves, should do alike P And in
reality our doing a thing, so far from excluding the
doing of it by others, almost invites them to do the
same. So that the idea of isolating a case for
examination must be false and lead to mistaken
practice.”
“Oh, my dear young lady,” said the professor
sadly, “what a disciple has Baldwin found in you !”
“I can’t understand why he hasn’t found many
more,” answered Althea. “I had never heard about
such things before I met him ; but when he told
me, it seemed wonderful that I could have lived so
long without finding it out for myself. Because it
is so evident, is it not, that there can be no case of
conduct hanging midway between heaven and earth,
and that by cutting away the complicated web of
connection — however microscopic — between all
actions, we are destroying the very fact upon which
our judgment depends A great many actions
would be innocent if they were disconnected with
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 257
all further actions, and their guiltiness consists in
their being connected with actions beyond, connected
to the extent of helping to produce them. An ex-
ample would be harmless if nobody followed it ; but
the very nature of an example is that it should be
followed. Hence I should have said that no life is
in reality so public as that which a man or woman
lives irrespective of what we call public life. For
do not people affect their neighbours by the way
they spend their time, their money, their brains; by
the children and friends they leave ; the mischief or
good they propagate all day long ; much more than
by a vote given on a subject they can affect only by
a vote, or a counsel which probably remains but a
counsel ?”
“I see,” answered the Professor bitterly, “this is
the discipline of what you imagine to be the soul,
but which is in reality the quality Bastiat and your
other economists call foresight, a mixture of calcula-
tion and imagination, with just a sufficient dose of
sympathy to teach you when your galled jade will
wince ; the whole apparatus allowing you to perceive
the effects which are not seen, as well as those which
are seen, and to have a better time in this world by
interfering only as much as necessary with the good
time of your neighbours. And you call your appa-
ratus the soul | *
258 ALTHEA.
Althea flushed, but she checked her indignation as
she reflected, from her own candid example, that
surely no one could really wilfully misunderstand.
“Yes,” answered Baldwin quietly, “that is a neces-
sary part of the soul's work. But it is not enough.
We must not be satisfied with training ourselves to
picture the future consequences of our actions; taken
alone, it would produce mere selfish calculation.
Still less, almost, must we be satisfied with the kind
of sympathy with our immediate neighbour which
produces already such a crop of vicarious selfishness
under the guise of unselfishness, such a sacrifice not
merely of our own small preferences, but of the larger
interests of the world, for which our harsher virtues
are vainly pleading. What we require to develop is
the faculty of passing from the near to the distant,
from the particular to the general, and of perceiving
that this distant, abstract thing—class, country, man-
kind—is but the agglomeration of concrete creatures,
creatures like ourselves, with possibilities of suffering
and enjoyment like our own ; creatures who will
become visible, tangible, only if we fix our eyes well
upon them, as objects in the distance or in the half-
light seem to draw nearer after a second or two of
attentive looking.” - -
The Professor had begun walking impatiently up
and down the long cloister, the shadow of whose
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 259
columns converged in a solemn purple procession to
the great wooden crucifix at the end.
“Do you know,” he said, “what grieves me most
in your philosophy is that you have admitted into it
a certain portion of the teaching of every noble
religion. No, no ; not that I am pained by the con-
tact: truth is not soiled by adjacent falsehood, and
we must be grateful that any of it should be received.
But the presence of this borrowed beauty—for, of
course, I think it is borrowed—prevents your per-
ceiving the ugliness of your philosophy of—the name
is yours, not mine, dear Baldwin–hog's virtue. Do
you not see how you spoil everything with your
perpetual insistence on pleasure and pain P”
“I can't understand,” answered Althea, medita-
tively, “why you should treat pleasure and pain
as if they were base; why, pleasure is the very
thing which should make us unselfish, since we care
for it in others ; pleasure is what would be increased
by our understanding and appreciating all things
around ; and pain means that there is want of sym-
pathy or knowledge or harmony somewhere.”
“Of course God means us to be happy. That is
His aim ; ours to love Him ; and the expression of
our love and worship is unselfishness and self-
sacrifice.” &
Althea thought for a moment, “But are you
S 2
26O ALTHEA.
sure,” she asked, “that self-sacrifice, unselfishness, is
all-sufficient P Has not our sense of the utility and
rareness of this power of the soul made us hold other
powers lightly P. Have we not set it up as an idol, as
our ancestors erected fire and cloud and all other
great forces, irrespective of its employment and the
results of its action ? And have we not in So far
wasted it, made it destructive of its own best effects,
nay, actually harmful ? It seems to me that un-
selfishness has been allowed to foster its opposite
vice, to strengthen selfishness, active and passive.
The renunciation of pleasure, the acceptance of pain
on the part of the Self-sacrificing, has meant the
receiving of pleasure at another's expense, the
avoiding of pain devolved on another, on the part of
him who accepts the Sacrifice. It has produced a
deadness to the Sense of duty, a dulness of sympathy
almost equal to the very sense of duty, to the very
sympathy which had given it birth; and it has fos-
tered that dull habit of thinking that we have a right
to accept whatever is freely given, without question-
ing the lawfulness of the gift. It has, above all,
narrowed human relations to those of individual with
individual, isolating and sterilizing that meeting of
two creatures which should make but an additional
link, an additional cell, in the great wholeness o
life,” -
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 26I
“I understand perfectly,” answered the Professor.
“The sum total of pleasure and pain remains un-
altered, and the world is none the richer than by the
mere transfer of material wealth from one individual
to another, when such transfer of material wealth is
not accompanied by an increase of that wealth due to
its coming into hands more capable of making it
fructify. You see, my dear young lady, that I once
thought, as you do, that religion could be replaced
by political economy. But, like me, you will one day
discover that, although there is no gain to the world
in the mere shifting of the satisfactions and dissatis-
factions of life from one individual to another, there
is great gain to heaven.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by gain to
F/eaven,” answered Althea, as they stopped at the
door of the convent, and gave a last look into that
sunlit cloister before passing into the black Street out-
side. “I always imagine that by God and Heaven
you mean whatever seems kind, and reasonable, and
beautiful in the world's tendencies, do you not P If
so, does it not seem to you also a gain, a gain to the
power you wish to serve, that we should realize the
distant, the hidden, the seemingly abstract; that we
should live for a wider life, in a wider life, than our
own : that we should make selfishness and unselfish-
ness a question no longer between two or three
262 t ALTHEA.
creatures, but between every creature and the whole
world P The practical difference between us is that
I wish to ask not merely, Shall I take up my neigh-
bour's burden but : May not my taking up that
burden affect others besides my neighbour and
myself? and, if so, will it increase or diminish the
amount of evil in the present and the future ?”
The chant of a litany, the weary voices of women,
the bleating, indifferent voices of children, came from
across the cloister as the door swung behind them.
“Ah,” exclaimed the Professor, as the three friends
threaded their way through the black, damp street,
crowded with dirty, half-starved looking people,
pushing barrows and staring in at shop windows,
“ those know, those poor little sisters in there ! they
know that God looks not at the result of actions, but
at the amount of love which inspires them ; and they
know that the aim of life is not to avoid pain
or attain pleasure, but to be united in spirit with
Him.” *
“Yes, if you conceive the Creator as hostile to the
creation, and imagine that if He has turned His back
on this world, we must follow and turn our back also.
You don't really think that, Professor ; for what you
really love is the image, the reflection, of your own
loving kindness.”
Baldwin's remark was lost on the Professor, and
they walked along in silence, joining the crowd of
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 263
devout or idle persons who were making the day's
round of the sepulchres.
The cathedral, which they entered after two other
churches, was even darker than usual, with a darkness
befitting the day's solemn memories. Out of the
circular choir under the dome rose the chanting of
priests and of boys, a queer Sound, a swell and a
rattle, like the breaking of the sea on the shingle.
Or, rather, it seemed to descend, this harmonious dull
clashing of broken echoes, from the cupola above.
At least, as the three friends stood listening in silence,
it seemed less and less to connect itself with the
circles of black and white acolytes (faces, framed in
blackest hair, under the grey twilight, or the yellow
light of the tapers), and the heaps of dull purple and
crimson and white of the far-off canons, their faces
mere reddish blurs. -
“The world,” answered the Professor, following
the thread of his own thoughts, “is not sufficient for
man's happiness, for he is made to find full happiness
only in God. Those who, instead of being led on to
the Creator, stop short at the creation, are doomed to
disappointment. All religion is founded on this
knowledge. And its truth is confirmed even by the
blasphemous cravings after unattainable pleasure of
those whom Baudelaire calls “de la réalité grands
esprits contemptewrs.” -
“The dissatisfaction of those particular great
264 ALTHEA.
minds,” replied Baldwin, “great minds who systema-
tically cultivate their ego, and decline responsibilities
towards other egos—is due, on the contrary, not to
their recognition of what this world really is, but to
their very gratuitous assumption that it was created
solely for their individual delectation ; or, rather, for
the delectation solely of their individual nerves, palate,
sex, eyes, ears, and vanity. And they scold mankind
and the universe, which, after all, are bulky and old
established institutions, for not fitting into the pocket
of one small, selfish, superfine man.”
“Poor things l’” said Lady Althea, gently, “they
are odious, they and their books; but I Sup-
pose it's equally odious of any of us to hate them,
for it’s awful to think of any one being so wretchedly
crooked and ill.”
The Professor, whose writings were full of anathema
against this school of Baudelarian pessimists, felt
suddenly as if Lady Althea had prevented his tread-
ing on some poor bruised worm or toad. “Poor
y)
!
things poor things l’ he repeated. ^
“The people, on the contrary, who recognize the
reality of things,” went on Baldwin, his voice turned
into a whisper by the great echoing chants, “ask less
and give more; and giving, receive more in return.
They see the past and the future, and the immensity
of the present, very dimly and fragmentarily, but
THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. 265
sufficiently to measure their own infinitesimal share.
And, instead of importuning the universe to pay
more attention to them, they try, consciously or un-
consciously, to give more attention to the universe;
to enlarge their position by going outside themselves.
They increase their points of contact with the rest of
Nature, and live in a greater number of its processes;
becoming, through sympathy and dutiful activity, not
merely men, but limbs of the bigger man, Humanity;
and, through aesthetic perception and philosophic
thought, clients, frequenters, familiars of the nearer
and further circles of the great life beyond mankind.”
Turning away towards the door, they were stopped
short by an impressive sight. The great velarium of
the pulpit, intended as a sounding-board for the
preacher's voice, was spread over the nave like a vast
bird ; poised in the gloom, floating on steady wings,
mysteriously darkening the church with its presence, a
sailing, brooding incubus, beneath whose shadow the
crowd was hurrying along, quiet and vague; the
darkness of the hours on the cross grown into a
terrible, mystic, semi-living creature.
Baldwin put his arm through that of the Professor.
“For all our differences,” he said, “we are seekers.
after the same thing : a higher happiness possible
only in a wider existence, a union with something
transcending our ego, its wants and experiences, a
266 ALTHEA.
union with all that is, and has been, and shall be.
For you, as for us, the real life is as little that of this
church with its egoism of the soul, as of the tavern
outside with its egoism of the body.”
“ Perhaps you are right,” answered the Professor;
“perhaps—who knows God speaks in parables to all
of us, and we, instead of seeking for their meaning, are
disputing about their unreal figures. I am not grieved,
my dear friends, at your having lost this,” and he
turned back and pointed to that brooding horror across
the church ; “but I wish that you had still, like me,
something analogous to the cloisters and cells of those
dearsisters—asunny, silent place, swept and garnished,
wherein your soul could retire at times to live its life.”
“But why retire, why shut out the world 2 ” asked
Althea, after a pause. “Surely the Soul ought not
to be limited to one habitation ; it ought to be
wherever we are, in our relations with all things; it
would make all places peaceful and sweet. Why
should there be a spiritual life set apart 2 Life
should be honest, and intelligent, and appreciative,
and loving ; is that not being spiritual P” /
One of the side doors of the cathedral was open,
- letting in a flood of day. And in it, their bodies
merged into wide beams of luminous spray, their
blond heads outlined with little loose locks, golden
in the pale golden halo, stood a group of young girls.
f
| HE USE OF THE SOUL.
THE USE OF THE SOUL.
“BUT about this thing which Baldwin calls the spiritual
life ; are you not giving it too great importance, dear
Lady Althea 2" asked Philip, with that characteristic
effort, almost grown into a habit, of facing the possible
realities of things, making him argue against the
belief which promised him most satisfaction. “Such
a life, you say, is the only one which can
satisfy certain natures. Granted ; but are you not
mistaking the claims of a small number of individuals
for the interests of the majority, from whom they differ
profoundly 2 Is it not conceivable that the people
who can lead such a Spiritual life may be mere acci-
dents in the evolution of mankind, sports occasionally
occurring, but leading to nothing, disregarded, despised
by the great Selfish, nay, brutish, but irresistible life
of the world, which alone multiplies, and struggles, and
advances, because it is the real life, and does not even
give a look to our Superfine aims and fastidious efforts?”
27O ALTHEA.
There was an odd contrast, or rather an odd coinci-
dence, between his words and that college garden, in
its July solitude, where the tall lime trees, almost join-
ing overhead, made the moist blue sky between their
shaking leaves seem more distant, higher ; while, with
the shiver and rustle passing from one layer of thin Sun-
steeped leaves to the other, the shadows shuddered and
curdled like streams on the grass. Might those lawns,
with their daintiness of thin pale larkspur borders,
and the delicately crumbling walls, their grey and buff
patterned over with violet clematis, symbolize perhaps
this life that we hanker for, walled in from the brutalities
of the world, rendered dignified, peaceful, and useless 2
Althea seemed struck by Philip's words: however
much opposed to her character and views, any scrap
of truth contained in other folks' objections always
impressed her.
“The immense bulk of life is like that nowadays,
and will, I suppose, remain SO yet a long, long while,”
she answered ; “but the spiritual life—we may as well
call it by that name as any other—is important, don’t
you think, because it is a sample of what the life of a
bettered world—and the world must better—will have
more and more largely to consist of * *
“Is that not again one of Our delusions—delu-
sions due to our not being Sufficiently in Sympathy to
recognize the great forces and aims of the world's pro-
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 27 I
gress P” insisted Philip. “Even supposing it to be
true, will this sample, as you call it, of a bettered
world, conduce very much to the world's bettering P
For myself, I fear that the world could dispense
much sooner with us people trying to live according
to the spirit—for I suppose we are trying to do so—than
with the good sound rank and file who do their work,
neither better nor worse, than they are obliged by
circumstances, let alone the others who, without
ideals or aspirations, are merely humbly kind and
open-minded—more kind and open-minded very often
than we aspiring creatures.”
“I don’t feel sure about what you call the rank and
file,” replied Althea, meditatively; “if you are right
that the rank and the file do their work only as well
or as ill as they are forced to do it—for although they
certainly carry on the world’s movement all the more
efficiently for not troubling about it—their not caring
how it goes must produce a great deal of waste and
friction, without which the world might move better.”
“I don't quite follow,” put in Baldwin.
“Why, simply—isn’t selfishness a very double-
edged tool 2 Is it not probable that people who pursue
only their own convenience will frequently disregard
that of their immediate neighbours, let alone their
neighbours in the future ? But, of course, it's quite a
different matter with the other people whom Philip
272 ALTHEA.
alluded to— the people who are humbly good and
open-minded. Only, is he right in saying they have
no ideals, merely because they have no power of
reasoning about them P”
“Oh, if you are going to include them among those
who live the life of the spirit,” interrupted Philip,
“then I have been misunderstanding all the time what
this spiritual life of yours means. I had understood
you and Baldwin to define it as full of a constant and
very lucidly conscious effort at union with the larger
life of all things, union through sympathy and under-
standing, a striving to enlarge the ego till its happiness
became, to a greater or lesser degree, identified with
the happiness of all other egos.”
“Yes, certainly. They are rather big words, but I
suppose they are the nearest expression for what one
would like to realize; and, of course, they imply, as
you say, a far greater intellectual lucidity than most
of us are even taught to seek for—I remember how
surprised I was when Mr. Baldwin first talked to me
of what he called the gospel of lucidity—except in
practical matters involving money or comfort. But it
seems we are still such very poor creatures, and our
faculties develop most often so much at one another's
expense, that the power of rising to large and clear
views of the world is bought very often, don’t you
think, at the price of unfitness for humbler matters,
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 273
and more especially of lack of thoughtfulness and
loving-kindness for the mere human creatures around.
So I can well understand that mere humble kindliness
and justice are more valuable to the world than any
amount of such very imperfect spiritual life as we
can hope for nowadays. “Indeed,” added Althea,
seating herself beneath a great canopy of light-
permeated horse-chestnut leaves, matted, woven to-
gether into intricate design with the sharp black
twigs and branches—“indeed, don’t you think
that if we want to see the pattern for the thinker's,
the poet's—I take the most important types I
can think of—attitude towards the immense realities
of the world, we must look at the way in which the
poor in spirit live in the lives of their nearest and
dearest ; we must watch the sympathy, the imagi-
nation which enables quite stupid people to extend
their joy of the spirit, to limit their material de-
mands; to do on a very small scale what the spiritual
life strives for on a larger one, to accomplish what
always seems to me the one possible miracle, of
always obtaining more without diminishing other
folk's share, of always giving more without impover-
ishing themselves.”
Philip listened with the eagerness, nay, almost
emotion, which, rigidly suppressed through the sense
of its power, revealed itself every now and then in a
T
274 ALTHEA,
little clutch of the lips and eyelids. This studious youth
with the blazing eyes and flaming Orange hair, who
might have been an idealist like Shelley if born in
crasser days, was a curious example of the reaction
against the cant of idealistic optimism which pushes
our youngest contemporaries into disbelief in all
rformulated ideals.
“I did not mean merely that, when I questioned
the utility of the spiritual life,” he said after a moment;
“I was wondering whether what makes the world
progress were not its mere brutal forces, its mere
bestial determination to survive, and their uncon-
scious action and reaction. Surely what matters is
the great unconscious movement of human arrange-
ments, the material, almost mechanical, changes of
position, like the sliding of glaciers and advancing
and receding of seas. This is the only real progress,
this perpetual heaving in various directions of nations,
classes, powers, this mechanical unfolding of new
possibilities, including its mechanical, necessary un-
folding of ideas and habits; this unintentionally and
inevitably brings with it all new repartitions of
happiness and misery (or of their opportunities), nay,
all those novelties in the spiritual life itself, all those
conscious efforts at improvement which—to me at
least—seem so ludicrously paltry in comparison.”
Baldwin listened attentively. Philip seemed to
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 275
suffer from the sense of this overwhelming materiality
which made him enthusiastic.
“Yes,” answered Baldwin, “I perfectly agree in all
you say. This spiritual life, this conscious desire for
better things, is a result of progress much more than
a cause ; and when it becomes a cause, as it tends
daily more and more to become, it is by reacting
on the unconscious, material changes which are giving
it daily more power. But I agree completely also
with Lady Althea, when she says that this life, con-
sciously transcending the vanities and fleshpots of
the ego (for after all, our fine words mean little else),
is the only life we can well conceive as the result of
the world's progress—progress, shall we say, three-
quarters unconscious and one quarter conscious.
For if the majority of mankind ever attain to an even
distribution, if not of comfort and leisure, at least of
the requisites thereunto, the majority of mankind
will, I think, necessarily partake in the wider activities
of the intellect, the sympathies, and the imagination,
and give less weight to the other activities, simply
because these will be otherwise provided for. Many
of our baser pleasures—of the pleasures which diminish
by being shared, and which are attained by the small
individual filibustering, which we all condemn and
condone—many of our baser pleasures, those of
covetousness, ambition, and vanity, are probably the
T 2
276 ALTHEA.
result of the mere struggle for existence, and will lose
their zest, will lose their meaning, once that struggle
for existence has abated its fierceness.”
“But you are reckoning on a change in human
nature,” interrupted Philip, “and, what is more,
taking for granted a necessary evolution in the direc-
tion of happiness.”
“Of course, I am reckoning on a change in human
nature. Why, human nature has done nothing but
change since its first appearance on the scene; indeed,
save for constant change, there would have been no
human nature, no, nor beast's or plant's nature to talk
about. As to a necessary evolution in the direction
of happiness, that is, so far, a matter of historic
experience, nor is there any reason to expect that
there will come a facing round ; and, unless such a
facing round happens—unless the forces of change
should set in the direction of greater human wretched-
ness of nature and misery of circumstances, leading
eventually to the solution of mankind’s problem by
mankind's disappearance off the earth—the time must
come when the tendency to kill, rob, cheat, crush, or
humiliate one's fellow-creatures will be useless, hence
unpleasurable, hence eventually extinct. For there
is no more chance of nature going to the expense of
attaching enjoyment to pushing other folk out of
heir place, when doing so will no longer help the
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 277
maintenance of our species, than of nature going to
the expense of a tail when the human ape ceases to
benefit by dangling itself from branches. We may
all notice how the forces of change, the force of cir-
cumstances, work, by noticing how little pleasure the
majority of us civilized creatures gets from mere
human slaughter, which certainly, in its proper day,
afforded our ancestors the very keenest satisfaction.
So that, for a simple, almost mechanical reason, when
circumstances have become tolerable to most men,
most men will become tolerable to each other. They
will fulfil the first requisite of spiritual living, that of
being comparatively untroubled by the vanities and
fleshpots, of being freed from the exorbitant pre-
occupation of self.”
“All that may be true,” persisted Philip, “the
future may be destined to realize all the things you
say, diminution of evitable miseries, security from
want, leisure, adaptation of the individual to his sur-
roundings, and that easy and natural circulation of all
things which will prevent moral congestion, anaemia,
and fever; without, therefore, containing one tittle
more of what you call spirituality. People may be
happy without bothering about other people's happi-
ness, and become easier to live with without being
any the more spiritual. Is it not conceivable that
this spirituality may have been a temporary necessity,
278 ALTHEA.
a safety valve, in those earlier, those miserable stages
of the world's life—for after all, I too believe that the
world is evolving from worse to better—which will
become gradually unnecessary with the consumma-
tion of a better order of things, very much as convents
have become unnecessary since the world outside them
has grown less brutal 2 Briefly, may not our prefer-
ence for moral and intellectual development, our
mistrust in materiality and egoism, be a mere
prejudice arisen in the days when greater moral and
intellectual activity was necessary P May it not be the
expression of a past state of things, and in so far a
superstition, a delusion ? We have had, after all, to
discard many others, which seemed, at first sight,
beautiful and venerable. We have learned to know
what stuff Franciscan visions were made of, we have
guessed at the conditions of ascetic's ecstasies, we
have taken the measure of Johannes Agricola, and
found that his contemplation of God was no better
than a greedy man's contemplation of hoarded rations
in a beleaguered city. We are able to see more
clearly ; and many mists obscuring our sight, rheums
and sand-grains of our own sickly eyes, have been
cleared away, which we once took for dreadful or
foolish realities outside us. May not this spiritual
life which we hanker after be merely another of
these ?”
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 279
“Undoubtedly,” answered Baldwin, “spirituality,
like everything else, is being tested and sifted. A
great amount of spurious matter, hitherto mingled in
the spiritual life, and accepted as part of it, is being
detected, separated, and consigned to its real place, as
just such stuff as spiritual living should cleanse away;
and, for this very reason, we can attain, if not to a
larger share, at least to a clearer conception of what
true Spirituality has been and must be. We can
repeat more confidently than at any previous time,
that the old people were right, and that the kingdom
of heaven (even though we expect it on earth) will be
of the spirit.”
Philip frowned a little. It seemed to him, though
almost incredible, that Baldwin himself had joined in
that conspiracy of words against realities.
“In plainer words,” went on Baldwin, guessing at
the young man's thought, “a maximum of happiness
for mankind at large is inconceivable apart from a
greater development of spirituality, of intelligence,
imagination, sympathy; of conscious, lucid interpene-
tration of interests; because such happiness is incom-
patible with a state of warfare, or at best of armed
neutrality, of a ‘balance of power' between the
various jealousies and rapacities, such as must continue
to the end of all things if the satisfactions of the ego
and the moment remains the goal of all our effort. The
28O ALTHEA.
immense importance—importance seemingly so dis-
proportionate—which all thinkers and all thinking -
races have given to what we call the spirit, is due to
the recognition, however incomplete and confused,
that only through the spirit, or rather in the Spirit,
can human happiness indefinitely expand. Chris-
tianity and stoicism, mysticism and philosophy,
whatever their schemes and whatever their methods,
have recognized the same great practical, common-
sense fact, that only when happiness of the One is
compatible with the happiness of the other, when
happiness is increased by sharing instead of
diminished by robbing, can the world become
large enough, and man sufficiently free ; and that
what makes the world large and man free is the
great power which renovates as it uses, which multi-
plies as it unites, which, because it unifies, expands.”
There was a brief silence, like the silence which
follows on entering an empty church. Each felt a
little shy of the other, as of intrusion upon innermost
thoughts. The first to speak was Althea, since her
attitude towards all things was so habitually reverent
in its impersonality, that every subject seemed to her
almost equally easy to discuss. -
“I think,” she said, “ that we are misled by having
got to associate with the notion of spiritual life, vague
longings for something distant and unattainable,
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 28 I
where such life would seem easier to lead—a St.
Brandan's Isle or heavenly Jerusalem, separate from
this world. We are haunted by longings for the wide
green valleys watered by streams knowing neither
sea-shore nor well-head, solitary between distant blue
hills, where our soul may wander alone, untroubled,
unseen, like the contemplative Saints, with clasped
hands and wistful eyes, of the old Umbrian frescoes."
But our wishes and visions are surely but delusion.
The spiritual life is no remote region of existence, it
is a mode of living.” *
“Doubtless,” answered Philip, leaning on the terrace
rail, and looking towards the great cedars spread
black on the lawns, the pale grey, delicately etched
belfry, with its gilt vanes and great windows like
organs, pale against the pale grey morning sky,
“Doubtless, but ’tis the mode of existence which, so -
to speak, transcends existence; which holds aloof in
its serene intellectual appreciation of cause and effect,
or aesthetic appreciation of harmony and association. |
It deals with realities, but turning them into visions.”
Althea looked up in surprise. “I can’t understand
what makes you think that ; and yet I see that thought
for ever at the bottom of all you say on this subject.
Surely a spiritual life—one that should really be so—
could never be led in spiritual solitude; nay, is its
absolute negation : a spiritual life must be led in the
282 ALTHEA.
very thick of reality ; must be, in fact, the life least
visionary, and most concerned with practical results.”
“You mean speculative results, dear Lady Althea,”
interrupted the young man with a sceptical smile.
“Speculative and practical, they are the same.
That sounds like paradox, but I am not a paradoxical
woman, am I ? Surely if we look closely enough, we
shall recognize that the more practical we wish to be,
the more speculative, and, in a sense, abstract, we must
become. For it is only through speculation that we
can conceive the practical interests of the distant and
future, and it is not really practical to overlook them.
The Savage who eats all his grain, and has no corn the
next year, is Surely the most unpractical of men, and
he is unpractical from lack of speculative power, the
power of applying an abstract rule of conduct. But
Mr. Baldwin can put these things into words much
better than I can. I seem to feel vaguely that things
are so, while he sees clearly why they must be.”
“I think,” said Baldwin, bowing in answer to
Althea's command to speak,+“I think Lady Althea
sees quite clearly why things must be so , but, as usual
she rather takes for granted that everyone is consti-
tuted like herself, and that everyone recognizes as
clearly and constantly as herself, certain spiritual
necessities which are inborn in her, but have usually
to be slowly induced in other folk. She takes for
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 283
granted that we all instinctively recognize that nothing
human can be foreign or indifferent to us; and that
sympathy helped by imagination and reason, Sym-
pathy with everything living, must positively honey-
comb our existence with interests. Such a condition
she assumes to exist, and such a condition is the basis
of what she calls, and I think very justly, the spiritual
life.”
“You mean that such are all the things you have
taught me to assume, or rather to think about at all,”
exclaimed Althea, indignantly.
But Baldwin went on : “Let me expound Lady
Althea’s notion of spiritual life, the notion for which
I may have casually furnished her with formulae, but
of which she has most certainly furnished me with the
example. She imagines, as I have said, that sym-
pathy, imagination, and reason would honeycomb our
existence with the interests of others, permeate one
life with the other, that of the ego with that of the
non-ego. Without any external tie or regulation,
every individual would find himself, by the mere
tyranny of fellow-feeling and forethought, a portion
of an organization, not organized blunderingly by man,
but made organic by the nature of things. Remark
that this life of mutual interdependence would be at
the same time one of extreme personal liberty and
responsibility. Living very largely for others, and in
284 ALTHEA.
others (as the complement to living through others),
the Spiritual person would have to live in a superlative
degree, according to his individual judgment and
convenience, for we may be satisfied with cut and
dried, obsolete, perfunctory duties, when our object is
to finish up with others so as freely to think of our-
selves; but we shall have to do our very best to apply
all our ingenuity, when the comfort or discomfort of
other people becomes, through greater intelligence
and sympathy, inextricably mixed up with our own ;
we cannot say, ‘I have done my best,’ to our own
misery, or send away our Own distress with an apology.
So a true spiritual life, while enormously narrowing
the field of what we consider indifferent action, will
undoubtedly make not a little havoc in established
notions of duty and self-sacrifice. For by the spirit
only, by thought and feeling, can the life of one
individual be welded with that of others; and only
such real union as this can be fruitful of good;
physical and economic ties, under whatsoever name,
sanctioned by religion or enforced by law, are vital
only inasmuch as they imply this interpenetration of
soul; without it, and whenever, instead of producing,
they go against its production, they mean, all our
finest-looking institutions, merely additional callous-
ness, self-seeking, self-defence, and destruction.”
Philip modded. “I understand,” he said, after a
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 285
moment, “but—forgive my hopeless scepticism—are
you not merely calling soul the instinct by which
each ego tends to seek his own development and his
own good rather in accordance with the good of others
than against it, merely because both he and his neigh-
bours are part of an organic whole, and consequently
working, however unconsciously, in the same direc-
tion 2 That is, I cannot yet say, my own belief,
because I have no defined belief; but the belief
towards which, perhaps almost in proportion to the
vague discomfort which it gives me, I feel the bulk of
my ideas gradually gravitating. But you and Lady
Althea, are you not going perilously near a kind of
mysticism ; and will your mysticism not end, like all
other mysticism that has ever been, in bringing you
back to the very spot you are trying to avoid P Will
not your spirituality end, even like the professed
egoism of other thinkers, in clearing away many
duties towards others in order to instal in their place
what we choose to call duties to ourselves P’’
Baldwin laughed, “My dear boy,” he said, “you
have contemplated the ideas of men like Nietsche and
Ibsen, or rather of their followers, so fixedly, that you
see them, like a sort of mirage, in the middle of the
views to which they are absolutely opposed, as one
sees sometimes the Sash bars of a window right across
the wall opposite them.”
286 ALTHEA.
Althea paid no attention to this remark. She knew
little about currents of thought, and was merely sur-
prised that Philip should have made a confusion where
everything, to her simple, uncompromising vision,
seemed so very obvious.
“There ought to be, don't you think, a continual
revision and correction of our notions of duty P’’ she
remarked ; “they are apt to get Superannuated, and, if
not that, at least rusty and useless, for want of look-
ing after ; a razor isn't much use when it has been
allowed to rust into something like a piece of rotten
wood, and some of our notions of right and wrong
have been allowed to get quite as much out of order.
But so far from getting rid of duties, it seems to me
that any sort of spiritual life would greatly increase
them, at least, immensely enlarge them. At present,
people seem to recognize little more than duties to-
wards their immediate neighbours, towards what is
near at hand and close in the future, duties concerning
mere individual contracts and actions. But all these
will surely some day be united and co-ordinated. We
shall recognize duties in our thoughts, in our attitudes,
in what seems the freest part of our life, because we shall
recognize that it is through our thoughts, our beliefs,
our pleasures, through the way that we sift our beliefs,
affirm our opinions, select our enjoyments, spend our
money and health, we shall affect the amount of
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 287
thought, money, health, which others will have for their
own advantage, and for that of the others whom they
will influence in turn, an endless chain. Weshall recog-
nize duties towards our soul and body, our happiness ;
because our soul, and body, and happiness do not
belong merely to ourselves. I daresay it all seems
awfully big words, and making a great fuss, but after
all, we are talking about rather big things.”
“It seems to me,” said Philip, “that your doctrine
of spiritual life contains the same amount of truth, the
same sort of truth, truth rather to the desires of the
soul than to its possibilities, as every previous spiritual
doctrine, and that it is vitiated by exactly the same
mistake, the mistake of making light of the great,
supreme, dominant fact of self. Stoicism understood
that a large part of our claims is harmful to others
and to our higher self, that we must often resist our
love of ease, of pleasure, of glory; in short, that we
must constantly refuse to be hampered or enslaved by
portions of ourselves; and Christianity understood
that we are cruelly thoughtless of others, cruelly un-
just towards them, refusing them what we claim for
Ourselves, expecting them to endure what we could
not support, that we require perpetually to crush our-
selves, in order not to crush others. The mistake of
stoicism lay in thinking that because we ought to
become indifferent to certain enjoyments, according
}
288 ALTHEA.
to the consequences which such enjoyments might
bring, we ought to become indifferent in great measure
to everything, and, for fear of being hampered by our
possessions, to empty out life of all that gives it value.
The mistake, on the other hand, of Christianity con-
sisted in thinking that because the individual must
sometimes think of others, he must never think of
himself, that the happiness of others is more valuable
merely because it is not our own. Hence, an absurd
and impracticable indifferentism as a result of stoicism;
and, as a result of Christianity, an absurd, nay, perni-
cious self-mutilation for the greater expansion of other
folk's selfishness; in both cases, the paradox that we
should live virtuously for the sake of virtue, whose
practical results, considered as happiness, ought not
to be valued. All this with the consequence of ren-
dering fair and noble living on the whole more
difficult, by severing it from the life which must
always be natural to the healthy majority of mankind.
Nowadays, we have learned or ought to have learned,
from additional science and experience, that we are
so constituted that indifference to the conditions of
life is merely a partial death ; that we cannot feel the
pleasures and pains of others as keenly as our own.
Now, it seems to me that you, with your spiritual life,
are returning a little to the old, wrong notions, and
that, in So far, your doctrine will be faulty, and your
THE SUSE OF THE SOUL. 289
action either mischievous or unpractical. Perhaps I
have misunderstood, but in that case you must be
more explicit, although I confess that I am morbidly
afraid of any attempt to steer against the current of
what we call nature ; the more so, perhaps, that this
current seems sometimes to lead to such ugly mud
and ugly whirlpools.”
“That is perfectly true ; I mean all you say about
stoicism and Christianity,” answered Baldwin, “but
it does not apply, I think, to the sort of spirituality
which we modern people can aspire towards. Science
and experience have indeed taught us, as you say,
the immense Supreme importance of the fact of self.
But are they not teaching us also the faculties pos-
sessed by this self for expanding, and indicating thus
the path to a dim future where our claims may be
reconciled with those of others ? We are learning
humbly, piecemeal, the truth at which those old
framers of spiritual Creeds made such magnificent,
though defective, guesses. We are learning that the
wider the range of our sympathies, the larger the
activity of our thoughts ; the intenser, fuller also will
be our life, the freer, deeper our pleasures ; the more
restricted and less destructive our pains. Is there not
in these facts the basis for a new spirituality, which
shall consist in making ourselves not more indifferent
but more sensitive P Which shall not obliterate the
U
|
29O Aſ THEA.
central ego, but widen it, stretch it over other things P
After all, the progress of our race has all been in this
direction; every extension of duty, from the family to
the tribe, from the township to the nation, from the
nation to mankind, has been such a widening of what
you call the dominant fact of self and the gradual
recognition of those pleasures as nobler which are
compatible with the pleasures of others, which are
increased by being divided. This recognition means
also an extension of the self to the not self. We have
learned facts concerning the self which show us what
we must never expect from it ; but we must not over-
look the other facts, becoming daily clearer to our
experience, which show what we can. We cannot
doubt,” added Baldwin, after a moment's silence,
“that the more we develop, the more our happiness,
nay, our very existence, will depend upon intricacy,
upon Superimposition of impressions, thoughts, and
emotions. The artistic emotions, for instance, are in-
calculably complex compared with the sensual ; and
an average civilized being lives incredibly more in the
past, the future, in things with which he has no
material contact, than does a Savage. Will not our
life become gradually more complex in the matter of
sympathy, more interwoven with the thoughts and
feelings of other lives P Mind, I believe quite as firmly
as Philip that we shall always feel Our Own pain and
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 29I
pleasure more vividly than the pain and pleasure of
equal intensity and duration of our neighbours; nor
is there any moral advantage in Our ceasing to do so,
since pain is equally undesirable wherever it is, and
pleasure equally desirable, unless either imply a dif-
ferent distribution of other pains or pleasures. But I
think we may gradually get to compare pleasure and
pain according to its duration and intensity, indepen-
dent of whose pleasure or pain it may be ; and prefer
the greater pleasure which we perceive intellectually
and sympathetically in others to the lesser pleasure
which we perceive as direct experience in ourselves;
this is already the case wherever there exists great
affection or devotion, and I cannot see why it shoul
not eventually become far more universal.”
Althea nodded. “I don’t know much about affec-
tion and devotion,” she answered, “and I therefore
cannot judge whether other folk's pleasure can ever
be weighed against our own. But pleasure is SO
much less attractive than pain is repulsive ; even a
small pain intellectually perceived is so capable of
spoiling a large pleasure actually realized, that we
could easily train ourselves to lose all sense of plea-
sure to ourselves in the presence of pain to Some one
else. We may surely get to feel about others as
we do about our future self, incapable of buying
satisfaction at the price of discomfort. It seems
U 2
292 ALTHEA.
an almost inevitable result of extension of intelligence,
don't you think P We are still very dull creatures;
but we shall gradually become more lucid—sufficiently
lucid to perceive our neighbours’ condition and interest
as well as Our Own. A man can getkeen pleasure from
pursuing a fox or stalking a deer, only because he is
too dull to perceive the creature's distress in the same
real way that he perceives his own satisfaction.”
They had come, in their aimless wanderings, up
and down and round and round among the colleges
and their gardens, to the side of a chapel, whose great
wide windows were like luminous green caves among
the masonry—green like the hanging leaves of the
elms all round.
“Don’t you think,” went on Althea, leaning
against one of the Smooth grey trunks and looking
into that strange building which seemed filled, so to
speak, with the very essence of the outdoor—“don’t
you think that, in the same way that a musical note is
agreeable to us only when the harmonics are in cer-
tain consonant relations with its own vibrations which
call them forth, So also our own perceptions will
become, when our moral ear grows more sensitive,
agreeable or disagreeable, not merely on their own
account, but on that of the other perceptions—other
folk's perceptions—which we shall dimly guess at
like harmonics P Shall we not writhe if, while our
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 293
own note vibrates to pleasure, we perceive the vibra-
tions of other men's pain P Nay, shall we not, per-
haps, grow to find Our Own Single note poor and thin,
and require to have our own pleasure reinforced,
made fuller, rounder, by an actual harmony of
different sorts of pleasure in other individuals 2 ”
“Listen l’’ said Philip.
For out of the chapel, through the wide cave-like
expanses of transparent green clasped by the black
trefoil of the stonework, came great organ chords and
the white notes of children's voices, while the
thrushes whistled and the jackdaws chucked on the
grass outside.
“That seems, in a way, related to what you were
saying,” went on Philip, looking with the incredulity
which wishes to believe into Althea's serene blond
face ; “ and—how shall I express it 2—are not your
ideas also, like this music, Something delusive, mak-
ing us believe in the old discarded faiths by the mere
coincidence of Our Soul loving rare and harmonious
impressions Pº”
“I think there is something more than mere coinci-
dence,” answered Baldwin. “If such sounds make us
believe more easily in something divine, ’tis because
they have met, and associated with, something divine
in our nature.”
“Let us go in and listen,” merely said Althea.
294 . ALTHEA.
II.
They sat silently in the ante-chapel listening to the
blond voices of the choristers, which carried out, in
their slight, intermittent snatches of song, the im-
pression made by the pale, delicate stonework, reed-
like shafts and mouldings, and the lattice-work of pale
glass, beryl and moonstone tinted, sparsely fretted
with russet and green; an impression, a charm of un-
likely slimness and luminous pallor, as of Summer
dawn over serene waters.
“Are you not allowing yourselves to be deceived
by the accident of an exceptional character, of an
exceptional life,” whispered Philip, as the chapel
gradually emptied—“ deceived, as one might be by
this place and this music, into believing that the
whole world might be made, with a little good will,
pure, and dignified, and harmonious 2 ”
“I don't quite follow what you mean,” answered
Althea, looking rather puzzled: her intelligence
had always stopped short before one fact, that of her
own difference from the rest of the world.
“I mean,” explained Philip, reddening slightly, for
it struck him as a little sacrilegious to bring his
turbid thoughts into this serene presence—“I mean
that, admitting what you call spirituality to be as
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 295
excellentin itself as it seems to you, I yet feel doubtful
whether we should attach much weight to it. Baldwin
said that it is an effect of progress which will react
to accelerate its cause. But is it an effect of which
enough can be produced—enough for such reaction ? Is
it not a mere occasional accident, a sort of moral flower-
ing upon which we dare not count? The movement,
the progress, of the world, is a brutal thing, a hustling
and jostling; and its direct moral outcome is no such
delicate epicureanism of the soul. The struggle for
life produces, as its inevitable outcome, something
absolutely different: that sort of disciplinary virtue
with which savages have kept down selfishness
sufficiently for the painful survival of mankind, and
with which even we latter-day barbarians still barely
keep down selfishness enough for mankind's sluggish
progress. This rude kind of morality—undiscriminat-
ing, harsh, pig-headed, often unjust and mischievous
towards individuals and details, constantly sacrificing
desirable things to Something only a degree more
desirable, perpetually doing evil because good
comes of it—this brutal rule of right and wrong is
profoundly different from your rule of gradual and
delicate identification of our happiness with that of
others; from the very subtle, sensitive, and elastic
thing which you call spirituality; but it is the only
moral life which our low material and intellectual
296 ALTHEA.
life has hitherto produced, and does at present pro-
duce in any appreciable amount. For what Spiritu-
ality can you have in a majority either actively
suffering from lack of food, comfort, and leisure ; or
(as is the case in our middle and so-called upper
class) fighting to retain and increase an unequal
share of such necessary things, and forced, by the
dread of material misery and social helplessness, into
regarding material Superfluity and social conspicu-
Dusness as the only good things in this world P
Why, the lives of us, so-called civilized creatures, are
arranged in intricate systems of barbarism, whence
it is still as difficult to escape as from the blemishes
hereditary in our blood, which weaken our energies
and pervert our instincts.”
Althea did not answer, but sat looking down
on the funeral brasses in the floor, which, in the
chapel twilight, took the appearance, shapeless or
worn out of all shape as they were, of dreadful dead
floating fishes. Outside the jackdaws chucked and
the rooks cawed noisily.
“Good heavens !” she said, after a moment, “is it
possible that the search after a better sort of life
might be merely an additional impossible burden
our thoughtlessness would impose upon this poor,
wretched mankind, already Straining every muscle in
excessive efforts P”
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 297
“I think not,” Baldwin hastened to answer; “I do
not think you ever contemplated the possibility of
such things except for a very small minority—the
small minority of exceptional natures, to whom any
spiritual doctrine, Christianity or stoicism for instance,
could be otherwise than dead-letter. Philip is right
in supposing that there can be but little spirituality
in the present, even as there must have been but
little, and at times none, in the past ; but on what
there may be in the present, little though it be, de-
pends what there should be—and there should be
much more—in the future. The number is com:
paratively very small of those who can live to any
extent in the future and the distant, seeking affinities
between themselves and other men, between them-
selves and the order of all things ; seeking to bring)
themselves in harmony with the widest conception of
life, and estimating freedom of thought and harmless-
ness of life as much as others do material and social
advantages. But though comparatively small, their
number is actually large—we have all met and
known some of them—and their number may daily
become larger. Little by little, most likely, they
may become able to lead for a whole day at a time
the life now confined, perhaps, to a few minutes; they
may get to feel and act and think in most things,
instead of only a few, according to their soul's desire.
298 ALTHEA.
And certainly, however slowly, the level to which,
by grace of birth and strenuous effort, they shall have
risen, may become the level of the many or the most ;
as in the past, so in the future, ways of thought and
feeling once rare will become gradually common.”
“You are speaking then,” asked Philip, a vague
hope coming into his eyes, “ of what Christ called
the Salt of the Earth P "
“The Salt of the Earth, which now, even more
than then, is in danger of losing some of its savour.
Sometimes the danger comes from cowardice or
languor, from lack of intellectual keenness or intel-
lectual training, from absolute ignorance of any life
save the one which circumstances have chosen for
one. Sometimes it is the fear of hurting the feelings,
damaging the material prospects, of mother or child,
wife or father ; sometimes the desire to abide by the
letter of some law, which prevents these people being
as large-minded and large-hearted, as disinterested,
truthful, and intrepid as their own nature warrants.
There are many such. Nay, we are all of us, more or
less, in one thing or another, among them : wretched
creatures trying, if not in this way, then in that, to
serve both God and Mammon, wasting our better
possibilities in lazy or ignorant conformity to the
world's vain and stupid ways, in timid acceptance of
the world’s obsolete and mischievous notions.”
THE USE OF THE SOUL, 299
“Are you not rather exaggerating the usefulness
of the salt, and the loss of its savour? Is it, after all,
So bad a thing as you say, to remain among the
worldly P" asked Philip, his vague disgusted belief
in the brutality of all human affairs uniting with his
student’s ignorance of the ways of the servants of
Mammon.
“I don’t think Mr. Baldwin exaggerates the mis-
chief of worldliness,” answered Althea, as the chapel
door closed behind them and they issued into the
twilit gardens. “I suppose worldliness—the pre-
occupation with distinctions and advantages which
diminish freedom and efficiency instead of increasing
it, the judicious exercise of vanity, covetousness, and
cowardice—I suppose that worldliness is one of those
automatic arrangements for self-defence which would
never have been evolved if there had been no need
for them. But I think that now, at least, it costs
mankind as much as it is worth. Worldliness is one
of the very few things, oddly enough, about which I
know a good deal, more, perhaps, than either of
you ; and I am even more impressed than Mr.
Baldwin with the waste—complete or partial destruc-
tion—of excellent things which it implies : waste of
intelligence, Self-command, and even a degree of
heroism. Indeed, I sometimes catch myself thinking
of what we call worldly people as if they were
3OO ALTIHEA.
the morally unfit. I don't mean that these people
may not have most of the virtues, all the virtues I
lack, and be, actively and potentially, excellent,
heroic. Only they are excellent and heroic, despite
their worldliness, in the moments and portions of
themselves where worldliness does not govern them ;
but, where it does, excellence and heroism are simply
wasted, and become a stumbling-block to the rest of
the world, instead of being an advantage. Now I
think that one chief utility of what we have called
spiritual-mindedness is to reclaim from this destruc-
|tive administration of worldliness so much moral and
intellectual soil which may be as good and better
'than that which happens to be deliberately cultivated
for the production of the useful instead of the useless
or harmful. That is the use of the Salt of the Earth,
to prevent the corruption of so much that is good.”
“Then, if I understand you,” continued Philip, as
they went towards home through the rustling avenue
of lime trees, “the exceptional creatures who, through
grace of character and circumstance, are already able
to live as much in their sympathies and thoughts as
in their vanities and wants, these spiritual people, are,
so to speak, rehearsing what may become the great
reality for all the world, the life which makes other
lives easier and sweeter, instead of more difficult and
bitter P ''
THE USE OF THE SOUL. 3OI
“Has not every thinker and moral teacher, and
every true-minded disciple, done that since the
world's beginning P” answered Baldwin. Y
But Philip took no notice. “And then,” he asked,
with a bitter smile, “when the majority have risen to
the minority's level, what will the minority do 2°
“It will do the things we cannot even think of.”
answered Althea, quietly—“ rise to the higher places
which we, under the ledge of the hill, cannot even
guess at.”
They had left the gardens and were passing through
the empty college yard, where the close-shaven grass
under the sundial looked like the study of some
open-air St. Jerome.
“Will it P” and Philip shook his head. “That,
my dear Lady Althea, is exactly where I cannot
agree with you. It seems to me that you and
Baldwin are committing over again the old, old mis-
take of those who have sighed for a religion, who
have tried to organize what can never be organized,
a spiritual vanguard ; the mistake of the good
builders of these colleges and chapels, who wished to
make it easier for sincere men to think and pray, and
merely made it inevitable that insincere men should
repeat formulas and go through ceremonies. No ;
were your dreams to be realized of a spiritual life, the
minority would have a very different task: the task
3O2 ALTHEA.
of undermining and breaking up, as it has always
done, the spiritual community which had become,
as every spiritual community must, mere dead-letter
and hypocrisy.”
“I think not, Philip,” rejoined Baldwin ; “because
I am sure that Lady Althea has always taken for
granted, in all our conversation, that the life of the
spirit can exist only in the spirit, that is to say, in the
judgment and feeling of the individual ; and that the
spiritual communities of the future, nay, the only
spiritual communities which have ever existed, are
the living, fluctuating communities of thought and
sympathy, of free individual belief and aspiration.”
They stood for a moment in the gateway beneath
the statue of the college founder, etched out by time
in the soft, smoky black of the masonry. Outside
the twilight had suddenly been rent by an incandes-
cence of after glow, upon whose gold ground were
stamped in black the chapel gurgoyles, the gables,
the tower with its four wind vanes, and the round
tops of the elms, picked out with the glow behind.
“I accept your communities of individual souls,”
said Philip, turning to Althea, “but independent
though they be, you conceive them, of course, as all
gravitating together in a common belief in this which
you call spirituality; you take for granted that they
must prepare the way for a sort of Kingdom of
TIIE USE OF THE SOUL. 3O3
Heaven ; must, as you said, be rehearsing what will
become the universal reality. But what if this con-
ception of the world's future be merely the result of
a peculiarity of the world's past P What if this
spirituality be, as I suggested, a mere inheritance from
small centres—Greece, the Middle Ages, Palestine—of
aristocratic thought, and therefore unfitted for the
great democracies, more complete, more powerful,
but, perhaps, also less sensitive and less noble 2 May
we not be doing a presumptuous, a dangerous thing,
in thus digging channels for a great Stream whose
force we cannot calculate, in rehearsing for an un-
known future, the adaptation of thought to practice
and of practice to thought 2'
Althea turned round, and her face was very serene
“Surely,” she said, “there is nothing presump-
tuous or dangerous in each man and each woman
trying to become disinterested and thoughtful, trying
to enjoy the things to be shared, truth and beauty,
as much as is possible. The future, whatever it be,
will know how to profit by whatever is good in the
heritage of the past and the present; our business is
merely to see that this heritage increase, rather
than diminish, while passing through our hands. As
regards adaptation of thought to practice, don’t
you think we need trouble only very little about
that, except in So far as Our Own individual practice
3O4 ALTHEA.
is concerned 2 Such adaptation must depend in
every time, as in every person, upon quantities of
circumstances which we cannot foretell. Let us see
to our thought being as good as it can be, thorough,
sincere. We shall take as much of it into our life as
we can ; or, rather, it will take as much of our life as
is worthy.”
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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