On Something (Dodo Press) (21 page)

I could wish, as I consider this, that the camera had played no such
trick, and had not revealed in that haze of awful meaning all that lies
beyond the nature of you, child. But it is a truth which is so revealed;
and we may not, upon a penalty more terrible than death, neglect any
ultimate truth concerning our mortal way.

Your feet, which now do not seem to press upon the lawn across which they
run, have to go more miles than you can dream of, through more places than
you could bear to hear, and they must be directed to a goal which will not
in your very young delight be mentioned before you, or of which, if it is
mentioned, you will not understand by name; and your little hands which
you bear before you with the little gesture of flying things, will grasp
most tightly that which can least remain and will attempt to fashion what
can never be completed, and will caress that which will not respond to
the caress. Your eyes, which are now so principally filled with innocence
that that bright quality drowns all the rest, will look upon so much of
deadly suffering and of misuse in men, that they will very early change
themselves in kind; and all your face, which now vaguely remembers nothing
but the early vision from which childhood proceeds, will grow drawn and
self-guarded, and will suffer some agonies, a few despairs, innumerable
fatigues, until it has become the face of a woman grown. Nor will this
sacred doom about you, which is that of all mankind, cease or grow less
or be mitigated in any way; it will increase as surely and as steadily
as increase the number of the years, until at last you will lay down the
daylight and the knowledge of day-lit things as gladly as now you wake
from sleep to see them.

For you are sacred, and all those elders about you, whose solemn demeanour
now and then startles you into a pretty perplexity which soon calls back
their smiles, have hearts only quite different from your quite careless
heart, because they have known the things to which, in the manner of
victims, they are consecrated.

All that by which we painfully may earn rectitude and a proper balance in
the conduct of our short affairs I must believe that you will practise;
and I must believe, as I look here into your face, seeing your confident
advance (as though you were flying out from your babyhood into young life
without any fear), that the virtues which now surround you in a crowd and
make a sort of court for you and are your angels every way, will go along
with you and will stand by you to the end. Even so, and the more so, you
will find (if you read this some years hence) how truly it is written. By
contrast with your demeanour, with your immortal hopes, and with your
pious efforts the world about you will seem darker and less secure with
every passing harvest, and in proportion as you remember the childhood
which has led me so to write of you, in proportion as you remember
gladness and innocence with its completed joy, in that proportion will
you find at least a breaking burden in the weight of this world.

Now you may say to me, little child (not now, but later on), to what
purpose is all this complaint, and why should you tell me these things?

It is because in the portrait before me the holiness, the blessedness, and
therefore the sacredness are apparent that I am writing as I do. For you
must know that there is a false way out and a seeming relief for the rack
of human affairs, and that this way is taken by many. Since you are sacred
do not take it, but bear the burden. It is the character of whatever is
sacred that it does not take that way; but, like a true victim, remains
to the end, ready to complete the sacrifice.

The way out is to forget that one is sacred, and this men and women do in
many ways. The most of them by way of treason. They betray. They break at
first uneasily, later easily, and at last unconsciously, the word which
each of us has passed before He was born in Paradise. All men and all
women are conscious of that word, for though their lips cannot frame it
here, and though the terms of the pledge are forgotten, the memory of its
obligation fills the mind. But there comes a day, and that soon in the
lives of many, when to break it once is to be much refreshed and to seem
to drop the burden; and in the second and the third time it is done, and
the fourth it is done more easily—until at last there is no more need
for a man or a woman to break that pledged word again and once again; it
is broken for good and for all. This is one most common way in which the
sacred quality is lost: the way of treason. Round about such as choose
this kind of relief grows a habit and an air of treason. They betray all
things at last, and even common friendship is at last no longer theirs.
The end of this false issue is despair.

Another way is to take refuge from ourselves in pleasures, and this is
easily done, not by the worse, but by the better sort; for there are some,
some few, who would never betray nor break their ancient word, but who,
seeing no meaning in a sacrifice nor in a burden, escape from it through
pleasure as through a drug, and this pleasure they find in all manner of
things, and always that spirit near them which would destroy their sacred
mark, persuades them that they are right, and that in such pursuits the
sacrifice is evaded. So some will steep themselves in rhyme, some in
landscapes, some in pictures, some in the watching of the complexity and
change of things, some in music, some in action, some in mere ease. It
seems as though the men and women who would thus forget their sacredness
are better loved and better warned than those who take the other path, for
they never forget certain gracious things which should be proper to the
mind, nor do they lose their friends. But that they have taken a wrong
path you may easily perceive from this sign: that these pleasures, like
any other drug, do not feed or satisfy, but must be increased with every
dose, and even so soon pall and are continued not because they are
pleasures any longer, but because, dull though they have become, without
them there is active pain.

Take neither the one path nor the other, but retain, I beseech you, when
the time comes, that quality of sacredness of which I speak, for there
is no alternative. Some trouble fell upon our race, and all of us must
take upon ourselves the business and the burden. If you will attempt any
way out at all it will but lead you to some worse thing. We have not all
choices before us, but only one of very few, and each of those few choices
is mortal, and all but one is evil.

You should remember this also, dear little child, that at the beginning—
oh, only at the very beginning of life—even your reason that God gave
may lead you wrong. For with those memories strong upon you of perfect
will, of clear intelligence, and of harmonious beauty all about, you will
believe the world in which you stand to be the world from which you have
come and to which you are also destined. You have but to treat this world
for but a very little while as though it were the thing you think it to
find it is not so.

Do you know that that which smells most strongly in this life of
immortality, and which a poet has called "the ultimate outpost of
eternity," is insecure and perishes? I mean the passionate affection of
early youth. If that does not remain, what then do you think can remain?
I tell you that nothing which you take to be permanent round about you
when you are very young is more than the symbol or clothes of permanence.
Another poet has written, speaking of the chalk hills:—

   Only a little while remain
   The Downs in their solemnity.

Nor is this saying forced. Men and women cannot attach themselves even to
the hills where they first played.

Some men, wise but unillumined, and not conscious of that light which I
here physically see shining all round and through you in the picture which
is before my eyes as I write, have said that to die young and to end the
business early was a great blessing. We do not know. But we do know that
to die long after and to have gone through the business must be blessed,
since blessedness and holiness and sacredness are bound together in one.

But, of these three, be certain that sacredness is your chief business,
blessedness after your first childhood you will never know, and holiness
you may only see as men see distant mountains lifted beyond a plain; it
cannot be your habitation. Sacredness, which is the mark of that purpose
whose heir is blessedness, whose end is holiness, will be upon you until
you die; maintain it, and let it be your chief concern, for though you
neglect it, it will remain and avenge itself.

All this I have seen in your picture as you go across the grass, and it
was an accident of the camera that did it. If any one shall say these
things do not attach to the portrait of a child, let him ask himself
whether they do not attach to the portrait that might be drawn, did human
skill suffice, of the life of a woman or a man which springs from the
demeanour of childhood; or let him ask himself whether, if a face in old
age and that same face in childhood were equally and as by a revelation
set down each in its full truth, and the growth of the one into the other
were interpreted by a profound intelligence, what I have said would not
be true of all that little passage of ours through the daylight.

There are three phases in the life of man, so far as his thoughts upon
his surroundings are concerned.

The first of these is the phase of youth, in which he takes certain
matured things for granted, and whether he realizes his illusion or no,
believes them to be eternal. This phase ends sharply with every man, by
the action of one blow. Some essence is dissolved, some binding cordage
snaps, or some one dies.

I say no matter how clearly the reason of a man tells him that all about
him is changeable, and that perfect and matured things and characters upon
whose perfection and maturity he reposes for his peace must disappear, his
attitude in youth towards those things is one of a complete security as
towards things eternal. For the young man, convinced as he is that his
youth and he himself are there for ever, sees in one lasting framework his
father's garden, his mother's face, the landscape from his windows, his
friendships, and even his life; the very details of food, of clothing,
and of lesser custom, all these are fixed for him. Fixed also are the
mature and perfect things. This aged friend, in whose excellent humour
and universal science he takes so continual a delight, is there for ever.
That considered judgment of mankind upon such and such a troubling matter,
of sex, of property, or of political right, is anchored or rooted in
eternity. There comes a day when by some one experience he is startled out
of that morning dream. It is not the first death, perhaps, that strikes
him, nor the first loss—no, not even, perhaps, the first discovery that
human affection also passes (though that should be for every man the
deepest lesson of all). What wakes him to the reality which is for some
dreadful, for others august, and for the faithful divine, is always an
accident. One death, one change, one loss, among so many, unseals his
judgment, and he sees thenceforward, nay, often from one particular moment
upon which he can put his finger, the doom which lies upon all things
whatsoever that live by a material change.

The second phase which he next enters is for a thoughtful man in a
sceptical and corrupted age the crucial phase, whereby will be determined,
not indeed the fate of his soul, but the justice, and therefore the
advantage to others, of his philosophy.

He has done with all illusions of permanence and repose. Henceforward he
sees for himself a definite end, and the road which used to lead over
the hills and to be lost beyond in the haze of summer plains now leads
directly to a visible place; that place is a cavern in the mountain side,
dark and without issue. He must die. Henceforward he expects the passing
of all to which he is attached, and he is braced against loss by something
lent to him which is to despair as an angel is to a demon; something in
the same category of emotion, but just and fortifying, instead of void
and vain and tempting and without an end. A man sees in this second phase
of his experience that he must lose. Oh, he does not lose in a gamble!
It is not a question of winning a stake or forfeiting it, as the vulgar
falsehood of commercial analogy would try to make our time believe. He
knows henceforward that there is no success, no final attainment of
desire, because there is no fixity in any material thing. As he sits at
table with the wisest and keenest of his time, especially with the old,
hearing true stories of the great men who came before him, looking at
well-painted pictures, admiring the proper printing of collected books,
and praising the just balance of some classical verse or music which
time has judged and made worthy, he so admires and enjoys with a full
consciousness that these things are flowing past him. He cannot rely; he
attempts no foothold. The equilibrium of his soul is only to be discovered
in marching and continually marching. He now knows that he must go onward,
he may not stand, for if he did he would fall. He must go forward and see
the river of things run by. He must go forward—but to what goal?

There is a third phase, in which (as the experience of twenty Christian
centuries determines) that goal also is discovered, and for some who so
discover it the experience of loss begins to possess a meaning.

What this third phase is I confess I do not know, and as I have not felt
it I cannot describe it, but when that third phase is used as I have
suggested a character of wisdom enters into those so using it; a character
of wisdom which is the nearest thing our dull time can show to inspiration
and to prophecy.

It is to be noted also that in this third phase of man's experience of
doom those who are not wise are most unwise indeed; and that where the age
of experience has not produced this sort of clear maturity in the spirit,
then it produces either despair or folly, or an exaggerated shirking of
reality, which, being a falsehood, is wickeder than despair, and far more
inhuman than mere foolishness. Thus those who in the third phase of which
I speak have not attained the wisdom which I here recognize will often
sink into a passion of avarice, accumulating wealth which they cannot
conceivably enjoy; a stupidity so manifest that every age of satire has
found it the most facile of commonplaces. Or, again, those who fail to
find wisdom in that last phase will constantly pretend an unreal world,
making plans for a future that cannot be there. So did a man eleven
years ago in the neighbourhood of Regent Street, for this man, being
eighty-seven years of age, wealthy, and wholly devoid of friends, or near
kindred, took a flat, but he insisted that the lease should be one of not
less than sixty years. In a hundred ways this last phase if it is degraded
is most degraded; and, though it is not worst, it is most sterile when it
falls to a mere regret for the past.