Part 4

But the time for shyness was not yet come, for Italy is a sunny land where clear air makes clear minds, blandly or keenly observant of the world, and never impelled by onset of outer mists and darkness to tend a flickering light within themselves. There was melancholy, high and stately, such as Lucretius knew, when he went lonely among the homesteads or along the shore; but it was too exalted to be one with diffidence, for he who will hold the sum of things in his thoughts walks on clouds above the heads of men, free of all misgiving. Perhaps beyond the Alps, in some Rhaetian upland where Roman dignity was interfused with old barbaric roughness, the first signs of our malady were perceived and the first ancestor of all the shy was born. But even yet the time was not ripe, nor the place prepared. Christianity had to come, turning men's eyes inwards and proclaiming the error of the objective pagan way. A new feeling, the sense of personal unworthiness before God, spreading through the Roman world, now stirred mankind to still communing with themselves, and sanctioned the stealing away from the noisy festivals of life. By enjoining a search into the depths of the heart, it encouraged the growth of a self-consciousness hitherto unknown. It was not always a panic of contrition, sweeping the joyous out of the sunlight into a monastic shade, which brought the troubled into a new way of peace, but sometimes a quiet joy in renunciation, congruous with a timid mood, leading by gradual allurement to cloisters of shadowy lanes and cells which were forest bowers. The new faith gave open sanction to evasion of the banquet, and thus fortified and increased those who loved not the ceremonial day. The spirit of solitude, no more a maenad, but a nun, sheltered earth's children in the folds of her robe, and no man said her nay.

Moreover, Christianity quickened the force of that feminine influence which Rome had first set flowing through the civilized world, but diverted the stream from irregular and torrential courses into a smooth channel gliding amid sacred groves. It clothed woman with ideal grace and virtue, and perceived in her powers which the virile mind could never wield. "Inesse quinetiam sanctum aliquid et providum putant, nec aut consilia earum aspernantur, nec responsa negligunt." So our ancestors held in the northern woods, and Christianity, purifying and expanding their belief, fulfilled it with a new perfection.

But this gradual binding of all men's limbs in silken cords of reverence, making a rude world civil, was now to inaugurate for diffidence its miserable career. Through the rough deference of the German camp, through the Provencal code of _courtoisie_, up to the modern law of fine manners, the drudge and chattel of the primeval tribe has risen to impose her law upon the modern world. Earth is better for this finer power, but social intercourse is less sincere. For woman, having curbed the brute man by conventional restraints of outward demeanour, has made human intercourse smooth and seemly, but imposed upon mankind the wearing of unnatural masks. Before the multitude of locked souls with labels of smiling faces the sensitive nature feels itself mocked, and is soon distraught. It cannot suffer convention gladly for an ultimate good, but is chilled by this everlasting urbanity, which must, it fancies, be compact of irony and conceal a disingenuous soul.

All this finished science of illusion is like an east wind to the confidences of the shy, and if they stay within its range they are blighted before their hearts have time to unfold. They long for a less biting air, for vernal hours in sheltered dells, where without sheaths and unguarded the hearts of flowers lie open to their neighbours and to heaven. There was once a simple day when religion set hearts interflowing, but now it can melt them only within the precincts; the fire which is carried from the altar is dead at the church door. The brotherliness of those early days is indeed often found in humble walks of life, but these we cannot continually tread, because our intellectual and artistic tastes find there no sufficient nurture. Among the cultured a cold convention often reigns, behind which only a more persistent nature than ours can pass. Unless, therefore, we find our way into some circle of gentle scholars or lovers of the beautiful quite simple in their tastes, a thing possible but not often granted by a niggard fortune, we are perforce thrown back upon our own company, and move towards the grave alone. For this we accuse none; nothing is more at fault than our own constitution. But to us society is a school of dames, who are not to be blamed if amid the crowd that clamours for their teaching, they find no time for the backward scholar. We are the dunces of the school, and are dismissed without learning the accomplishments set forth upon the prospectus. That is why in our northern streets so many seeming hats are cowls.

In England the loss of congenial intercourse is perhaps more certain than in other lands. For through his national reserve the highly-cultured Englishman has a cold perfection of good breeding to which heartiness is vulgarity; he emanates intimidation, and in courtesy is rather studious than spontaneous, seldom genial but in an ancient friendship. If you knew him to the concealed heart, and were suffered to assay the fine metal beneath this polished surface, you would win a golden friendship; but only on a desert island would he permit the operation. To the shy who may encumber his path his bearing seems marked by an indifference which they magnify into aversion, and are thereby the worse confounded. In a land where such convention reigns they go through life like persons afflicted with a partial deafness; between them and the happier world there is as it were a crystalline wall which the pleasant low voices of confidence can never traverse.

I say, then, that the real, the enduring shyness is that inveteration of reserve to which a few men in a few countries are miserably condemned. Others know it as a transient inconvenience, as the croup or measles of childhood; but in us it is obstinate and ineradicable as grave disease. If out of the long frustration of our efforts to be whole some strain of bitterness passes into our nature; if sometimes we burn with unjust resentment against the fate which, suffers such lives as ours to be prolonged, let it be remembered in extenuation that to those who bear a double burden human charity owes the larger kindliness. For though like you we bear our share of common troubles, O happier men and women, the common pleasures and compensations which are as wings upon your shoulders are heavy packs on ours. The cheerful contrasts are for you alone; for us the bright threads interwoven in the dark stuff of life were faded before they reached the loom.

You who have the friendships and affections without which you would not care to live a day, think more kindly of those to whom the interludes of toil are often harder than the toil itself. Of your charity believe our fate ordained and not the choice of our own perversity; for what man born of woman would choose a path so sad, were there not within him some guiding and possessing devil which he could in nowise cast out? Never will in maddest hours of freedom consented to such doom; we were condemned at birth, our threads were spoiled upon the fingers of the Norns.

* * * * *

Such in its broader outlines seemed the infirmity which had grown with my growth, and now had to be reckoned with, like the bridle of Theages, as a permanent hindrance to a reasonable happiness. Old hopes lay shattered about me--well, I had to pick up the fragments and piece together a less ambitious ideal.

I will not linger over the forces which helped my resolution, the great and general remedies which come to the relief of men in like evil case. Religion, philosophy, art, science, literature--all promised their anodynes against despair; slowly they stirred in me anew those springs of interest in life which disillusion seemed to have choked for ever. I rose up, and looking round upon the world saw that it was still good; and there came into my memory brave words which a golden book puts in the mouths of its indomitable knights: "I will take the adventure which God shall ordain me." I now perceived that if evil fortune had unhorsed me it had yet left me endurance to continue the combat on foot. My second failure was more final and disastrous than the first discomfiture in earlier life, but now the plague of pessimism was stayed by a greater recuperative power. Those long hours of the long eastern day, spent under the verandah with books of many ages and languages, had not been altogether fruitless; they had helped to mature a wider and more catholic taste than that of restless youth, the kind of culture that brings not rebellion but peace.

In my eastern watch-tower I had re-read the great books from a new point of vantage, and let the eye roam over fields of literature which lie beyond the undergraduate's bounds; by a still permeation of fine influence, my crude philosophy was unconsciously mellowed, as the surface of ivory, according to Roman belief, by the bland air of Tibur. For by the mere being in an atmosphere of serenity our nature grows porous to gracious influences streaming in we know not how or when, and taking their abode in our very grain and structure. And so without consciousness of good desert, I found myself confident in a new discipline, and looking for the word of command from wiser leaders than Byron or the youthful Shelley. Queen Mab was now the saddest rhetoric, and Childe Harold's plaint unseemly lamentation; I had erased from my calendar of saints the names of apostles of affliction once held in honour; the Caliph Amurath with his tale of fourteen happy days out of a long life of royal opportunity; Swift with his birthday lection from Jeremiah. Rather there trooped into memory with a quiet pomp and induction of joy, forms of men who, though justified in rebellion by every human suffrage, remained loyal to the end and proved by endurance a more imperial humanity. Socrates unperturbed by mortal injustice; Dante a deep harmonious voice amid jangling destinies; William the Silent serene in every desperate conjecture--these seemed now the more perfect captains. If exile had done no more than transfer my allegiance to such as these, I had not borne the lash in vain.

But at the first setting out upon this later stage I had still mistakes to make, and the ascent to tranquillity was not to be accomplished without stumbling. It was the old Roman creed which first drew me away from fretting memories; in its high restraint, as of a hushed yet mighty wind, it breathed a power of valiant endurance, and promised before nightfall the respite of a twilight hour. For stoicism has qualities which seem foreordained for the bracing of shy souls, as if the men who framed its austere laws had prescience of our frailty and consciously legislated to its intention. It is the philosophy of the individual standing by himself, as the shy must always stand, over against a world which he likes not but may not altogether shun. And in this proud estrangement it promises release from all the inquisition of morbid fears, and an imperturbable calm above the need of earthly friends or comfort or happiness; it plants the feet upon that path of nature along which a man may go strongly, consoled in solitude by a god-like sense of self-reliance. This immutable confidence is the essential power of stoicism, which does not, like the great oriental religions, tame personality by ruthless maiming, but teaches it to bear the brunt of adversities erect, like an athlete finely trained. Its very arrogance, its sufficiency, perforce commend it to those whose instinct urges to self-abasement: its lofty disregard of adverse circumstance is medical to their timidity.

And so in the hour of my bereavement its voice inspired to resistance like a bugle sounding the advance; its echoes rang with the assurance that man was not made to be the worm of Eden, darkly creeping in the dust, but rather its noblest creature, with the light crowning his head and the winds tossing his hair. And then its strong simplicity, so masculine and unemotional, was grateful to one now finally dismated, and so cruelly handled as to have, it seemed, no use for a heart any more. Better let feeling die than be betrayed by diffidence into the denial of its true allegiance, or into expressions of the inner life false and wry as the strange laughter which the doomed suitors in Ithaca could not control. Though it stifled feeling, the creed of Cleanthes exalted the intellect, which was all that now remained to me unimpaired; surely it was the appointed rule for one henceforth to be severed from the passions and enthusiasms through which humanity errs and is happy.

"The world," the wise Stoic seemed to say, "is twofold in its nature. Some things may be changed by man, others are by his utmost effort immutable. God has implanted in you a right reason by which, when it is well trained, you can infallibly distinguish between the two, avoiding thus all unworthy fretfulness and all idle kicking against the pricks. Therefore he has made you for happiness; for the joy of men is an achievement; and their misery in the coveting of the unattainable end. If you would fulfil his benevolent design, seek only what has been placed in your power, frankly resigning all that lies beyond; but be ever difficult in renunciation; test and sound well every issue, lest you leave a permitted good undone, than which nothing is a greater sin. To be loyal, to be contented, to acquiesce in all things save only in ameliorable evil, this is to live according to nature, which is God's administration. If you are assiduous in careful choosing, you will learn at last to make a right use of every event; you will be harassed no more by vain desire or unreasoning aversion, but will become God's coadjutor and be always of his mind. So, when external things have ceased to trouble your spirit, you will no longer be a competitor for vanities; but, enfranchised from all solicitude, you will have discarded envy and conceit and intolerance, which are the ill fruits of that vain rivalry. You will neither cringe before power nor covet great place, for alike from inordinate affection and from the fear of pain or death you will be free. Disenamoured of mundane things, you will live simply and unperturbed, in kindness and cheerfulness and in gratitude to Providence. Life will be to you as a feast or solemnity, and when it comes to a close, you will rise up saying, 'I have been well and nobly entertained, it is fit that I give place to another guest.'"

The strength and mastery thus promised raised my dejected spirits, as the words of a new and sanguine physician may hearten one who had long lain stricken yet now dares to hope for the day of recovery. This was a law which did not denounce the world as illusion or enjoin a cloistral seclusion upon the mind, but rather proposed each and every appearance as a touchstone on which the quality of personality should be unceasingly tried. By the constant application of a high standard to life, it seemed to implant an incorrupt seed of manliness, and to create in its disciples that saner mood which holds in equal aversion a Heliogabalus and a Simeon Stylites. So persuaded, I could join with the fervour of a neophyte in the Stoic's profession: "Good and evil are in choice alone, and there is no cause of sorrowing save in my own errant and wilful desires. When these shall have been overcome, I shall possess my soul in tranquillity, vexing myself in nowise if, in the world's illusive good, all men have the advantage over me. For all outward things I will bear with equal mind, even chains or insults or great pain, ashamed of this only, if reason shall not wholly free me from the servitude of care. Let others boast of material goods; mine is the privilege of not needing these or stooping to their control. I will have but a temperate desire of things open to choice, as they are good and present, and the tempter shall find no hold for his hands by which to draw me astray. I will be content with any sojourn or any company, for there is none, howsoever perilous, which may not prove and strengthen the defences of my soul. For I have built an impregnable citadel whence, if only I am true to myself, I can repel assaults from the four quarters of heaven. Who shall console one lifted above the range of grief, whom neither privation nor insolence can annoy? for he has peace as an inalienable possession, and by no earthly tyranny shall be perturbed. Bearing serenely all natural impediments to action, trespassing beyond no eternal landmark, by no foolishness provoked, he shall become a spectator and interpreter of God's works; he shall ripen to the harvest in the sunshine and wait tranquilly for the sickle, knowing that corn is only sown that it may be reaped, and man only born to die."

The mere repetition of these words, so instinct with the spirit of old Roman fortitude, roused me to a more immediate resolution than any other form of solace. There are times when a splendour of exaggeration is the best foil to truth. The Roman's pride is the best corrective to the earthward bias of the diffident; by its excess of an opposite defect it drives us soonest into the mean of a simple and manly confidence. It is better for us first to repeat, "Dare to look up to God and say: Make use of me for the future as Thou wilt, I am of the same mind, I am equal with Thee.... Lead me whither Thou wilt," than to dwell upon such words as these: "It is altogether necessary that thou have a true contempt for thyself if thou desire to prevail against flesh and blood"--or these: "If I abase myself ... and grind myself to the dust which I am, Thy grace will be favourable to me, and Thy light near unto my head.... By seeking Thee alone and purely loving Thee I have found both myself and Thee, and by that love have more deeply reduced myself to nothing."

This supreme abnegation may leave the saint unharmed, but it is ill fitted for those who droop already with the malady of dejection. The divine wisdom which knows the secrets of all hearts and their necessities infinitely various, shall exact obedience according to no adamantine law: it loves not the jots and tittles of formalism, nor the pretensions of those who would cast all things in one mould. From those made perfect, from the saints whose links with earth are almost severed, whose sight begins to pierce gross matter through, it may accept prostration and endless contrite tears, knowing that to these, upon the very verge of illumination, the forms of slavery have lost their vileness. But to those who are still of earth and can but conceive God's fatherhood according to earthly similitudes, it will not ordain a prone obeisance. Such it will require to stand erect even in contrition, in that posture which is the privilege of sons. We who are unperfected affront God supposing him pleased with the prostration of his children. It is the ignorance of a feudal age that ascribes to him a Byzantine love of adulation; but that age is no more, and he disserves the divine majesty who imputes to it a liking for the _esprit d'antichambre_.

I did not need to dwell upon my weakness and misery but rather upon the grandeur of humanity, whose kinship and collaboration God himself does not reject. The Stoic phase was a useful stage on the road of convalescence, and the majestic words of Epictetus more helpful to a manlier bearing than the confessions of the saintliest souls. If, as is not to be doubted, there are others who seek an issue from the same dark region where I wandered, I do not fear to point them to the Stoic way, which like a narrow gorge cold with perpetual shadow is yet their shortest path upward to the high slopes lit with sunlight. Let them enter it without fear and endure its shadows a while, for by other ways they will fetch a longer compass and come later to their release.

But when some interval had passed I became aware that this cold ideal was not the end, and that out of the gall of austerity sweetness should yet come forth. Wise men have said that all great systems of ethics meet upon a higher plane, as the branches of forest trees rustle together in the breeze; for though in the dark earth their roots creep apart, their summits are joined in the freedom of clear air. As I now struck inland from the iron shores of shipwreck, my heart warmed to a brighter and softer landscape, and with Landor I began to wish that I might walk with Epicurus on the right hand and Epictetus on the left. With a later thinker I reflected that if the Stoic knew more of the faith and hope of Christianity, the Epicurean came nearer to its charity. For it is true that Stoicism commands admiration rather than love. It was indeed too harsh a saying that "the ruggedness of the Stoic is only a silly affectation of being a god, to wind himself up by pulleys to an insensibility of suffering": that is the judgment of the bluff partisan, so shocked by the adversary's opinions that he feels absolved from any effort to understand them. But even those who in extremity have been roused to new valour by the precepts as by a Tyrtaean ode, for all the gratitude which they owe, will not impute to their deliverers an inhuman perfection. The Stoic does in truth wear a semblance of academic conceit, as though related to God not as a child to its father, but as a junior to a senior colleague. And with all its sufficiency, his philosophy seems too Fabian in its counsels; it is always withdrawing, passing by on the other side, avoiding battle--so that as a preparation for the uttermost ordeal it will often prove inferior to the reckless pugnacity of a narrow zealot.