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Class _^'R_AjlLi 
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COPVRIGHT DEPOSIK 



Domu0 Dolotitf 









By 

IM. Compton Eeitd 

AUTHOR OF " SIRENICA " AND 
** APOLOGIA DIFFIDENTIS " 



3®» 




^etul^orfe: John Lane 
Company. Honbott: 
John Lane, The Bodley 
Head. .*. .*. mcmxix 




•V 



Copyright, 1919, 
By JOHN LANE COMPANY 



Press of 

J. J. Little &• Ives Company 

New York. U.S.A. 



C)CI.A511909 



Kat dr) <}>aL7]K03v yalrjs ax^^ov, evda ol ai<ra 
*EK\l/vykeLV jjieya irelpap oC^vos i} ixlv iKavu. 

ODYSSEY V. 289. 



Domu0 DolorfjB; 



Bomus; l^olorts; 



THE visible world was gone; sounds 
followed. The voices which but now 
were loud in the ears, grew faint as 
whispers, or as tones of men shouting far 
away; they were importunate in their faint- 
ness; they kept thought strained after a mean- 
ing. There had been hope to glide out of 
consciousness, to float round some bend of 
time, as a straw on a meadow brook, from 
the bright light to the dim and thence on into 
a darkness; but here was slow escape, as it 
might be through briers, from which, again 
and again, the caught garment must be freed. 
This was a persecution of delays; it waked 
a fretful mood, bitt-er and powerless as wrath 
of age. The voices now came back, like 
echoes on a changed wind; their words might 
7 



8 Dpmu0 Dolonis 

almost be distinguished. They veered away 
once more, to hang and linger, as if about a 
corner which they could not turn; they grew 
thin as the hum of insects preventing sleep. 
At last they were wholly round ; they were no 
longer heard. A great contentment rose. 
Yet still there was no peace; a new strain 
pressed the mind, which would be now as- 
sured that they were gone for the last time, 
utterly. The tension became pain ; there was 
a longing to hail and have no answer, but all 
power was lost over lips and tongue; in night- 
mares one had known such impotence, but 
this was more than dream. At the point 
of anguish came relief. A sweet singing 
filled the ears, diffused at first, but then 
divided into a full harmony that died like 
chords under a bow drawn slowly to the tip. 
Silence had now a presage of some divine ap- 
proach. Oblivion flowed up like evening 
gloom. Life moved with it to the edge of 
a great deep; it was drawn over; it floated 
down and down, wound in the arms of Sleep. 

A faint awareness stole into being, like 
the grey of morning; then a sense of move- 



Domu0 Dolori0 



ment; but whether it was a coming up and 
forth, or a declining, there was no power to 
tell. Slowly light increased; this was resur- 
gence then, a soaring "back into the embrace 
of space and time. It was the most suave 
and gentle issue from one state to another 
that may be conceived, a phase so delicate 
that had there been strength to wish, the 
heart would have had it last forever. It 
passed; it was but a transience; that which 
had blended with the formless was taking 
form again. Life was returned, the bare 
life, the just-felt difference from not being, 
the quietest state which is not death ; yet very 
life, the god-sent human treasure. One lay, 
as it might be on a cloud becalmed, steeped in 
light, drunken with a cup that had stilled all 
passion. Of what had befallen down in that 
silence there was no knowledge, only some 
dim memory of being borne out far through 
a twilight, along curves wide as the contours 
of a world. 

To lie thus, just existing, was all felicity. 
Resting upon cloud, the substance seemed It- 
self of cloud, woven so fine that it should dis- 
solve upon a breath, yet guarded and folded 



10 Domu$ Doloti^ 

round by over-brooding peace. The mind 
had no thoughts at first; it was a capacity 
that might hold, but did not; it was a dead 
space quickened by trembling air. Then 
gradually it had content, which began with 
wonder over pain miraculously remitted. 
Thoughts came back like petals floating 
down ; at first they lay apart, but when more 
fell, they touched and clung together. There 
was attraction now, but no power to conclude 
or judge, a convergence that obeyed no plan. 
Reason emerged, but went ghostly, following, 
as in a trance, processes unwilled that yet 
should have been her own. Like drew to 
like; the mind discovered order in some way 
imparted, and a rhythm in things, like verse. 
And soon it seemed not to witness only, but 
to have part in making. Lines joined to 
clearer form and hues dissolved to blend 
more richly; it felt exalted as a god approv- 
ing a creation. The remaking of a lost 
world seemed the smoothest work that was 
ever wrought. For the spirit was released 
from all contrariant influence; it had free- 
dom to enjoy its fulness. Conscience, the 
exacting, the never pleased, forsook her 



Domu0 DolDri0 n 

office for a while; no voice called irksomely 
to resolve or deed. The heart was light and 
careless ; the song-bird on the bough had not 
more gladness. A great peace reigned, in- 
effably unmarred and flawless. No peace 
so unassailed had been since childhood; here, 
carried into living sunlight, hovered the ut- 
ter blissfulness of dreams. Now was at- 
tained once more the self-sufficing day, the 
film-sphere never pierced, floating secure by 
all the thorns. There was no taking thought 
for morrows, no duty but to live. If cares 
had ever been, they had crept into a hiberna- 
tion; life had gone onward out of winter, 
leaving them forgotten. The past was but 
a haze, the future a blue unclear horizon to 
be advanced upon some day or never, the 
gods knew how or when. Or rather it was 
like the sum of days which were outshapen 
for us when as yet there was none of them, 
and the years lay unarisen. 

Now, suddenly, there was an end made of 
this passiveness. The still wine sparkled. 
Life, which had been as a held breath, passed 
into a sigh of pleasure as the self came out 
of abeyance, eager for earth again. And 



12 Domu0 DoIoriiBi 

it was perplexed with earth, as one should be 
who returns from a voyage and finds his 
home in unexplained ways strange to him. 
These hours should have been dark under the 
first consciousness of freedom lost: they 
glowed. There should have been a sinking of 
the heart : the heart was lifted up. The whole 
nature was as a trampled grass when the 
crushing foot is gone ; it had yielded only to 
recoil. The recovery seemed too perfect for 
belief; insensibly, the mind drew back upon 
its guard, suspecting snares of fate. For in 
former days when the cup of joy was prof- 
fered, so often there had been wormwood in 
the lees. But here appeared a gift without 
condition or reserve; it was pure largess. 
Life unfolded as at the beginning, but more 
happily, inasmuch as rebirth is goodlier 
change than birth. For the infant passes out 
of night or day, which you will; if any knowl- 
edge he had, he moves from it into forgetful- 
ness. But the reborn win back their own; 
they remember as they come. And there 
was felt an influence, untraced and beyond 
seizure, yet actual as one's own life; it seemed 
to play over the awakened spirit like sun- 



Domu0 Doloti0 13 

light on a face turned upward. There was 
an ambience, an Irradiation; all the nature 
was warmed with a vernal brightness. It 
was so graciously and softly shed that despite 
the will to discover what It was or whence It 
flowed, you would not seek, lest something 
of the magic should be lost; you let the 
bright hours pass; you looked out on things 
as If from under half-closed lids, sunned to 
the heart, wholly content. Enough at first 
to feel the light, after chill of that oblivion 
to be warmed. But In time It was as If a 
clear surface welled up within and took re- 
flection; there came a moment when this glad 
influence was discerned, when it was known 
as the spirit of human helpfulness ordered 
and constrained to law, such as nowhere or at 
any time In a life too much withdrawn had 
been felt immediate thus to sense, and pene- 
trative of the whole nature. For here it was 
not, as when earlier encountered, all inter- 
volved with contraries, half cancelled by 
touch of commoner things, but discrete and 
separated out, the very genius of the place in 
which it shone. It was more beautiful and 
vivid through the very straitness of the place. 



14 Domu0 Doloti^ 

The boundless is nothing to us, uncontained; 
we first know the immeasurable when it is 
poured into our measures. The place was a 
narrow inlet, but throbbing with sea-life, 
vitally. There came back memories of little 
western harbours that brimmed to the wharfs 
edge at the flood, and of the boats that lifted 
and fell in them to an Atlantic rhythm, danc- 
ing the livelier by reason of that confinement. 
Such little havens had brought the soul of the 
outseas into the land; the life of landsmen, 
touched by it, grew larger. Here was a like 
power of mid-sea-deeps borne far in from 
the very main of light. To a nature used 
to dimness it was great experience; it was 
illumination. One seemed to hear a voice 
that whispered: the days go lovelier hence- 
forth, and the suns more splendid, 

gratior it dies 
Et soles melius nitent. 



II 



AND yet the haven of light was the 
House of Pain. The wonder of that 
knowledge spurred the mind; it must 
up and explore a place which had been no- 
place to its old geography, and inhabited by 
folk of nowhere. The mind, shamed and 
humbled by that ignorance, was very fain to 
obey; as the seaman goes inland from the 
shore of wreck to learn on what country he 
is flung and amid what people, so it went 
forth eagerly to discover. And chiefly it 
would know the people, in whom its hope 
lay of beng restored to its own home again. 
What manner of folk, then, were they who 
imparted and administered this brightness? 
A strange folk, who went bare of all pre- 
tence but one, that they were ordinary men 
and women. In which honourable imposture 
they might almost have deceived, for in truth 
their virtues stood in them so naturally as to 
seem carried unawares. The dweller in 
their wards was not long in doubt of them; 
15 



1 6 Domu0 Dolotf0 

he found them different from himself in the 
inner grain, shedding light where he cast 
shadow. To him they soon betrayed them- 
selves with every movement; but if it pleased 
them to suppose him sightless, who was he 
to deny them pleasure? To him they re- 
mained Utopians to the end, a good hope 
growing up that this spirit of theirs should be 
one day borne beyond houses of pain, that it 
should take to itself all spirits of like clean 
flame, that together they should go forth to 
destroy the germs of human ills in the swamps 
and marshes where they breed before they 
reach the blood of men. These doctors had 
nothing of the i^sculapian pose; they were 
rather of the sailor^s open humour. These 
nurses in like manner seemed to possess in 
their inmost nature some buoyant quality of 
the seas. Watching their instant answer to 
all need, you remembered Ocean's daughters 
in the great legend, who sped so fast to one 
in pain that they would not stay to bind their 
sandals. And through many long weeks a 
similitude that might at first have seemed too 
lofty, was found never to lose its fitness. 
For though often to outward view they were 



Domu0 Doloti0 17 

little like winged beings, though often they 
dragged weary feet noisily upon hard floors, 
the brave intent flew still; it soared and it 
alighted. 

The doctor was the known, so too the sur- 
geon; both were familiar forms in the old 
life. But the nurse was almost the unknown ; 
marked, therefore, for a nearer scrutiny. 
Hard sayings were mingled with the praise 
given to this sisterhood out in the infaming 
and censorious world : they came into memory 
now. Some, it was whispered, were called 
to nothing but adventure; they had no voca- 
tion but to fly their homes. Some were 
puffed up by little breaths of science. Some 
were cruel, some were false; here a hard na- 
ture played catlike with suffering, there a 
vain one served only to be seen of men. 
These rumours, which even to ignorance had 
seemed too like the snake's hiss from the 
grass, might now be put to the proof, since 
one was delivered over bound into the hands 
of this tribe, a captive in its tents; a case, a 
subject, an anatomy. A great chance was 
now come, to know truth; one sought to use 
it to some purpose. And so for weeks one 



1 8 Domus Dolori0 

lay deliberately observing, seeing these 
tribeswomen at all hours under all conditions, 
when they were fresh or weary, pleased or 
vexed, smarting under some failure, glad for 
some success. One learned to read their 
faces as they reflected circumstance, and so 
came by degrees at the natures hidden be- 
neath; one learned what their life was, how 
occupied and how disposed, how tried, how 
rewarded. After a month or so, one had 
approached the beginnings of an actual 
knowledge; one knew at least some things 
not born of rumour, but of reality. 

Perhaps the first truth that stood out from 
among the fictions was, that they were of 
that very world which praised or blamed 
them ; they were its conscious citizens. They 
felt the old earth under them and were glad 
of it; they wished you to be glad as they. 
Not theirs the still unworldliness, the dis- 
passionate serene calm of the vowed reli- 
gious, almost too rare and fine for the cheer 
of sick humanity; they were human through 
and through. That old comparison with 
angels ministrant would have been gall to 
them ; they ministered, but not so ; they were 



Dpmu0 Dolon0 19 

of our fellowship and would have no excom- 
munion. Yet their life also was a devotion; 
something greater than themselves most 
plainly wrought in them. But they never 
renounced their individual natures; putting 
off the self, they kept the person. Thus they 
held their several judgment and the right to 
proclaim it of their own will and motion; not 
to transmit It only, as mere vehicles or chan- 
nels, but to lend it some colour and quality of 
their own giving. Thus It was that theirs 
was no undiscerning gentleness ; ungentle they 
never were, but something they would gradu- 
ate against unworthiness. They were very 
tender with all who could endure ; but against 
self-pity they could point disdain by a glance, 
or by an eyebrow lightly raised. What 
deeper springs moved them, they would not 
suffer to be seen, after the English manner; 
all the profession of their creed was action. 
Reflecting on two great systems of tending 
pain, you felt them in their elements Incom- 
parable, and each In its sort supreme; they 
might not be measured with a single rod. 
Nor could you wish them ever joined; they 
had the fine dissemblance within one kind 



20 Domu0 DolPri0 

which makes noble variance, and a fuller 
harmony throughout the world. 

The second feature of this community 
which shone conspicuous was its free consent 
to discipline, under which it was never 
crushed, but stood like a waving cornfield in 
the breeze, freshened by searching airs. 
Here was a bending, undepressed obedience 
that harmed neither liberty nor joy; it was 
service without part in servitude. These 
open natures had pride of trained efficiency, 
and pleasure of the swing and rhythm which 
it lent to all they did; it was the pride of a 
warship's crew. But they were voided and 
rid of small conceit, the spirit of their law 
was too far passed into them to need dis- 
plays ; they held simply to their high tradition. 
By the side of the great hospitals, their 
house had seemed a little vessel; yet it was 
of the Fleet, and they were jealous of the 
mighty membership. They knew themselves 
a force embodied and in a great allegiance. 
But they never vaunted it; for their sister- 
hood is of the kind aspiring once for all, as 
knighthood vows, and afterward guarding 
silence, lest boasting hinder deed. All who 



Domu0 Dolori0 21 

with a good heart enter upon this career live 
at the full stretch of endeavour; their service 
is always active service; they stand to arms; 
they are commanded and obey. They 
know neither long ease, nor rehearsals of 
imagined war ; their enemy is ever upon them ; 
sickness grants no truce and death no armi- 
stice. Many essay the yoke, but none endure 
under it save those in whom is the worth that 
weigheth inward. The weakling falls out 
of ranks like these; the keeping of them is 
too hard for any but the brave. 

For what strain is hourly upon the nurse, 
they who sojourn long in the wards alone 
may know. The house of pain is full of 
shadows ; it is she who must hunt them down 
and let none lie. For here there is blood 
shed every day, here pain is at home like a 
hard master. Odour of drug and anodyne 
clings to the bare walls ; it hangs even in the 
rounded angles where cobwebs have no hold; 
while every window is wide to the summer 
breezes, somewhere it will be clinging still. 
The morning air is full of it, the noon air full; 
it is borne on the light breath of night. It 
clings about the garments and in the hair; 



22 Domu0 Dolotitf 

it creeps into refectories and chambers. 
Day in, day out, and all nights through 
youth and health must house with death and 
sickness; of that tenancy there is no forget- 
ting. They who serve here must eat and 
sleep in the perception of mortality; they 
wake into a fated sadness. Are they re- 
leased awhile beyond the shadow? At their 
return it awaits them on the threshold; as 
surely as they drive it far from others, so 
surely will it turn to threaten them. When 
they are all fordriven and droop under their 
burden, or when some private sorrow falls on 
them, not even valiance may ensure to them 
the even mind without which they fail. They 
know hours when day is hard as noon of 
pestilence, and darkness like gloom of sacri- 
ficial groves; yet still they must go gallantly 
and sound their point of war. And always 
they must be prepared to look straightly 
upon hideous things, on sores, on mangled 
limbs, on the bared fibres of the body, on 
death with livid face and fallen jaw. With 
stained hands they must touch foulness ; they 
must watch knives cut quick flesh. Some- 
times, when they are overwrought, you fancy 



Domu0 Doloris? 23 

that they see with the dying, eye to eye, shar- 
ing mortal fears; that In malign light they 
have glimpse of the gate where pale diseases 
haunt, and sad age — all the dreadful shapes 
that gather in the dark entry to encounter the 
passing soul. In such hard assay not even 
youth and health may alone suffice them ; the 
faith, the pride of their tradition must shine 
clear, and honour pledged to standing firm, 
else they who save shall themselves need suc- 
cour. Lying oneself in the oppression of the 
besieging shadows, gradually one came to 
know the manifest, and imperfectly, with laic 
mind, to divine the never told. Slowly and 
with pains gathering up such gleanings, one 
understood how little the unstricken know, 
who come at a fixed hour with the visitant 
flower-bearing throng, and looking round on 
white linen and gladdened faces think it 
were no such hard lot to labour here. Yet 
even these, entering or departing, are some- 
times startled from complacent moods, and 
guess at truths concealed. A sharp cry 
reaches them; they pass a door ajar on 
ominous shapes; they hasten their steps 
outward, with a sense of something follow- 



24 Domu0 Dolori0 

ing after them, as If Death touched their 
shoulders. All such do but guess; they 
cannot know. For knowledge there must be 
suffering and long sojourn, and some thirst 
for truth, by which things at least one was 
now in some small measure qualified. 

Weeks passed Into months; moons shone 
and waned; but these people held on their 
way ; they changed only to grow. They were 
a perpetual source of wonder, being of a 
temper so remote from that of the bargaining 
and begrudging world, of which the boast Is 
that for nought It will give nothing. You 
could not but marvel at them all, men and 
women, whose nursling and dependent by 
some high chance you were become. But 
chiefly you must marvel at the younger, who 
grew so fast and straight. In this forcing- 
house of qualities you might mark the visible 
change of Ingenuous eager natures, a gra- 
cious thing to see. There were collected here 
In the exercise or probation of this service not 
spirits of great dower, only clear souls, 
such as yearly come from quiet homes into 
the world, to take, as fate wills. Its light or 
darkness. Here they splendidly took light, 



Domu0 Doloti0 25 

and shot up sunward, until one came to think 
of the whole place as some corner in the City 
of the Sun. Here budded and flowered 
under a fair discipline those who else might 
have hved narrowly, scarce profitable to 
their kind. Here was womanhood bearing 
the yoke In youth, and solving unawares a 
Sphinx's riddle. You could not conceive 
them fretting over a small pain, or bearing 
a mean tale, or seeking an unfair advantage. 
If they were true to themselves, they were 
true also to each other, a thing Imagined 
beyond the compass of their sex; they prac- 
tised loyalty like men. The yoke bore hard 
upon their shoulders; often It galled; they 
saw more sad than joyous things. Yet they 
flourished; their life was the utterance of 
natures glad in growth; they breathed as 
cheerfully In this air of pharmacies, having 
no time for sighs, as if they had been shep- 
herdesses on mountains. They had the 
gaiety attuned to earnest life which the wards 
teach well, heightening the faint mood, draw- 
ing the frivolous down, the humour BIron 
was to learn In place of his bird's wit, jesting 
his twelvemonth in a hospital. In short, 



26 Domu0 Dolori0 

they so plainly advanced in the great human 
art of living well, that they were perceived 
as beings rare and significant, whom to have 
known in their clear energy made all suffer- 
ing and confinement good. 

Many times, with the caution learned in 
the world, the mind would go back over 
traversed ground to be assured that in this 
judgment it was not borne away by a rush of 
grateful sentiment, but that it had decided 
slowly and by things proven: leisure enough 
one had, Heaven knew, to compare and 
balance, laid for weeks supine, and lashed to 
a splint like a weaver's beam. Large room 
was made in the account for natural defects 
and fallings short, which, if never seen, must 
have existed in hearts so human. There 
were conceded jealousies, cross humours, 
petulance, rebellion in the bud, desire 
of things forbidden, all which must needs 
arise in a scene of urged activities, when 
nerves are sometimes tense to the point 
at which they bear no more. One had 
not looked for the ideal in the natural, or 
for the perfected in the unfulfilled. Yet with 
all concession of unseen defects, the favour- 



Domu0 Dolon0 27 

able judgment held. Had serious blemish 
been, it must have left some mark on a col- 
lective action under scrutiny day after day, 
It must have affected the spirit which in- 
formed this common labour; at some point or 
other, it must have been betrayed to a sensi- 
bility sharpened by events for just such subtle 
divinations. But there was no betrayal, 
much less proof of any such finished hypo- 
critic art as could have kept a canker hid- 
den. These labourers were justified by 
their works, and by their faces. For if it 
be examined day by day, a face Is a good 
witness. The physiognomists have their 
wisdom ; the moulding of a brow speaks ; the 
curves of a mouth confess. Here, after a 
month, no faces were left doubtful. Some 
were of a nobler cast than others; they had 
various utterances. But all bore one testi- 
mony. 



Ill 



THIS was the point at which great 
as when the traveller, coming from 
prospect burst on the view. It was 
bare mountains, looks suddenly from a crest 
upon Damascus, with the great plain made 
one garden by Abana, and minarets and 
domes rising white amid orchard verdure. 
If these people were but types, what hopes 
dawned for the world and for our land; the 
foundations of the City of the Sun were laid; 
no folly but the supreme could build on them 
with wood and stubble. For an absolute ex- 
cellence was here, fashioned not from rare 
natures by great fortune, but from the aver- 
age, and without favour. It was the same 
virtue now being made illustrious amid dan- 
gers in the fierce trial of war; it was the po- 
tential of that actual. Your life for it, if 
their hour came, these also should endure the 
proof; you knew it of infallible knowledge 
now; you would go to the stake for the be- 
lief. Yet thousands up and down the land 
28 



Domu0 Dolon0 29 

were of the same courage and capacity ; they 
needed but the learning of a like law to 
prove it; and if rulers had but wit to turn 
these forces into other fields, not for the 
remedial end alone, as here, but for the pre- 
ventive, against ills that on all sides wait such 
powers, what wastes, what deserts should not 
be reclaimed for habitable earth. If rulers 
but imagined, what visions coming time 
should show: the rippling, flowing strength, 
now poured to waste, all channelled and 
conducted; tithings first saved, and hundreds, 
then counties, provinces, empires, king- 
doms; the law of helpfulness made universal, 
the perfect commonwealth achieved. The 
mind rehearsed immensities of happy change. 
Whether it dreamed or prophesied it cared 
not: it was in bliss. One was as if touched 
by some rod of miracle through which a heal- ^ 
ing power had streamed. There was con- 
tact with a great Influence ; the feel of It was 
all vivid within. Yet the first touch had not 
been felt, — so gently it had come, on such 
unsuspected ways. Often before one had 
known the supreme thing near, and a virtue 
had passed from It; but always It had risen 



30 Domu0 Dolori0 

in some apparent majesty of art or nature; 
one had stood before it, as it were, stricken 
into awe. But now the soul was in full defer- 
ence, not even knowing how homage began; 
there had been no moment of which you 
might have said: then and thus was the sur- 
render. This quietness of supremacy took 
faster hold of the imagination than swift as- 
sault of charm. 

And now it was more clearly seen wherein 
lay the differing and peculiar strength of these 
lives: they were more quick with human 
kindliness, they were in the best way civic. 
For to be civic is not to abjure selfhood, but 
to have the sense of all selves in your own, 
or in a poet's words, to make the Whole one 
self. Personality is birthright, no more to 
be given away than sold, and to be guarded 
by all forces which may consist with love. It 
must be kept in its distinction, and visibly 
exist in its own fulness. To renounce, to 
abrenounce, the form and character of the 
individual nature Is to disserve the general 
good; save for a rare few, whose city Is not 
here. It Is vanity of abnegation. The city In 
its need shall ask of you to stake for it your 



Domu0 Dolori0 31 

sum of days ; it shall not wring from you by 
slow constraint the days of your years; when 
it has attained to wisdom, it shall suffer none 
else to wring. For by your swift sacrifice the 
greater life may gain, as by death of 
soldiers, but never by the slow consum- 
ing of your days. Therefore the city 
of the coming time shall praise no sac- 
rificial life that forgets the Whole; it 
shall forbid the acceptance of such sacrifice. 
Duty shall have votaries still, but no longer 
slaves or victims; the lifelong service that 
bows down the life shall no more be 
laden upon the single back; all shall serve, but 
none be another's vampire. In the good 
city whoso starves himself shall be held the 
robber of the commonwealth; he shall clip 
gold coinage. Worse shall be the abettor of 
that starving for his own comfort. In the 
good city sacrifice and the perfected selfhood 
shall draw into alliance against selfishness, 
by which conciliation alone all lives shall 
stand incorporate, and each be member of 
the other. 

Such altruist self-regard the healing service 
seemed first to have established, in this, as 



32 Domu0 Doloris 

in other matters of high moment for our 
kind, a guide and pioneer. It had not 
crushed down selves, but kept them upstand- 
ing with their human joys and hopes; it 
forced upon them but one thing, this way of 
civic living. To all who submitted to its 
law, it taught the good athlete's rule, to 
endure hard days not for their own gain but 
for the common victory. So from its wis- 
dom and their obedience arose this dignity 
of glad natures, which lavished and kept, 
which sacrificed and withheld, which served 
and yet were free. In a community thus 
finely ordered there was no descent to 
commonness; before the clean distinction of 
it vulgarity could not live. One thought, 
those who devised this discipline were a hun- 
dred marches in the van of statesmen. While 
such wrought to combine material and gross 
things, these better politicians had pressed 
into service a spiritual force; they had set 
actually moving the one power that regen- 
erates, the confederated will for good. And 
we of Jeshurun*s sort had scarce known what 
they did, or cared to know. For us, theirs 
was no more than the healing business, as It 



Domu0 Dolori0 33 

might be one of many, a service of gain, a 
retailing craft of shopmen. We did not 
think of them as exemplary to ministers of 
State, or of their hospitals as schools of civic 
life. We thought of our ease and sleekness ; 
we were animally blind. 



IV 



OF all the offices which illustrate this 
good citizenship, that of the Night 
Sister touches imagination most. 
For all sufferers, there is about her a charm 
of mystery, coming to her from the shadowy 
spaces which are her province and the solemn 
hours in which she reigns. To the exalted 
fancy of the sleepless, as they watch her mov- 
ing to and fro amid their pains, she becomes 
the most tutelary of mortal beings. She 
breathes communicable strength when in 
the dead night life pauses in the veins, and 
men fear. In the hour when hope ebbs far 
she comes among them for a sign of rallying 
and new resistance. The eyes of the fearful 
turn to her ; she seems the column upon which 
their unsure fates are stayed. Night after 
night she looks on mournful things and is still 
strong; she has seen the worst that man 
endures and yet has comfort; therefore men 
trust her. It is she who puts to flight sur- 
rendering thoughts, fans courage to its last 
34 



Domu0 Doloris 35 

flicker, and rejoices with the indomitable soul. 
To those in anguish she is the source of 
blessed remedy; she gives or withholds the 
drug that brings forgetfulness and soothes 
the nerve of pain. She stands between the 
living and the dead; she is the friend of the 
departing; telling them their time, and com- 
ing to speed them on their last journey. 
Though sometimes near to breaking, she 
holds out to the morning, keeping to the end 
for others the illusion of that columnar 
strength. For all this, her reward seems 
nothing but a banishment from earth's de- 
lights : this is Persephone, snatched from the 
upper day to walk the halls of Dis, forfeit- 
ing the sun and the meadows and the large 
air. But to have been the good genius of 
many sufferers is great exchange; the con- 
sciousness of it is her true reward, and the 
music of the thought her nocturne. 

The Sister of one's own experience, the 
Noctiluca of one's night, was not unworthy 
of this obscure great office; she was a brave 
human soul. Dark, and of no commanding 
stature, she seemed passing tall when she 
stood with her hands folded before her and 



36 Domu0 DolPri0 

looked you down like a centurion. The 
broad white cap at first lent to her face an 
aspect of demureness which knowledge soon 
belied; this was no Quakeress, though of a 
quiet manner ; the eyes told that, and the lips 
not fashioned for solemnity. She was con- 
fident in bearing, proudly professional, sure 
of herself and mistress of event. She 
could be imperative as fate, and never 
raise her voice to prove it. It seemed there 
was little in life, from its beginning to its end, 
which could now impress her; she had seen 
so much of mortal things. Of death she 
could speak with an indifference which might 
at first repel; but then she knew this enemy 
well, and had often beaten him, fighting from 
the evening to the morning light. She loved 
children, and now and then would bring them 
in on her arm to greet you with the day, most 
often a boy with hair fit for a child angel, 
but under it a blanched face of which she 
knew, but did not tell, the omens, letting the 
day's sun shine on it, and a few bright mo- 
ments fly. For herself she would appear to 
have no great joy of living, being, one might 
guess, of independent habit, not companion- 



Domu0 Doloti0 37 

able with all; it might be that there lay be- 
fore her no clear and happy prospect, nor was 
the present ever kindly, for she who could 
charm sleep to other pillows could not per- 
suade it to her own. A sense of having 
failed in life seemed to be growing upon her; 
with feint of cynicism she would proclaim 
that she could no longer keep a conscience. 
But while the words were on her lips she 
would be doing with her own hands what she 
might well have left to others, or else a work 
beyond strict duty; and the eye of fancy could 
not see this Sister arraigned at any Judgment 
on the charge of conscience lost. She had 
received an education of some range, studied 
the times, and was humorous in the observa- 
tion of men and things. Her coming on duty 
as the light began to fail was often the day's 
event, and always eagerly expected. She 
came from breakfasting in the summer dusk 
with colleagues who supped ; for every hospi- 
tal has Laestrygonian ways, and those who 
start out to begin their toil meet those who 
have ended and return. It was the patient's 
fortune that she broke upon a grey hour 
like a belated sun with a kind of morning 



38 Domu0 Dolori0 

freshness, and cleared all clouds away. It 
was impossible to make her see her merit, for 
she distrusted praise; and to have succeeded 
might have robbed her of a main pleasure, to 
jest at destiny. You doubted if she loved 
set forms of prayer; but if to work is indeed 
to pray, the labours of her nights were lauds 
and matins. 

Through knowledge of such natures 
dawned vision of a new power on the 
earth, womanhood under discipline, which 
moved the imagination the more because 
short sight had looked for a less thing. It 
was as if you had thought to see uncertain 
windmill's work, fitful as the light breeze that 
turns the sails, but coming near, had found a 
force In majesty of function, undeviating. Im- 
mutable, intense, so that you stopped short, 
first surprised, and then ashamed of having 
marvelled. For to have expected any other 
Issue was seen now to be more than lack of 
vision; it touched upon disgrace. But if the 
finding of strangeness brought no credit. It 
doubled the delight, now that at last, out 
of due time, one saw. Assuredly It was 
matter for rejoicing to see suddenly be- 



Domu0 Dolori0 39 

fore one's eyes, in the wood of larger, 
louder birds, the phoenix on the bough. 
Here, proud in a maturity of strength, was 
that in which the centuries had not believed, 
the woman under accepted law, and glad in 
its severity. Natures deemed weak were dis- 
covered steel-like in endurance, a temperable 
metal; spirits not called to the severer loyal- 
ties were trusty as sworn men. At this con- 
futation of misgivings, there was drawn a 
deep, glad breath; the mind knew that it had 
travelled, it looked over a new world, it 
hailed the broader view. 

Who, before such example, should fear 
the new comradeship of the sexes? The 
past seemed now ridiculous in timidity and 
blindness, dreading advent of Souls unsexed; 
and those children of the present who also 
feared, were as creatures facing backwards, 
beings heraldically regardant, mediaeval, not 
of our age or prospect. For sex is changeless 
in the soul as in the body; it is of an unalter- 
able and proud severalty. And as for fol- 
lies attending change, what great matter that 
when the tether was first cut there had been 
riot of careering in some fields, a light- 



40 Domu0 DolPtis 

heeled extravagance, as of colts unloosed? 
All this was but a harmless phase of chal- 
lenge and natural rebounding. The scene 
of the first foolishness was long left behind; 
already the advance was over the hills and 
many leagues away. War had but hastened 
a pledged gift of peace. In a time of stress 
woman had transmuted to her use virtues till 
now accounted male, subtly according them 
with her own; wholly unmanlike, she had put 
on manfulness. In what hare's breast might 
such a vision rouse alarm? Because Eve 
delved need Adam spin? Rather it must re- 
joice all wisdom, suggesting complementary 
change, when man in his turn should follow 
with like transmutations. Could he but 
take with similar art Into his nature such 
qualities of woman as should give him more 
grace while yet to the life's core male; could 
he but refine his proper metal, leaving It all 
its stubborn strength, but giving it a new 
spring and a new sheen, from this refining 
what undreamed regeneration might not come 
soon upon the world, from this unestranging 
but supreme divergence what noble poise of 
mind. 



BY aid of friends matchless in the fifth 
Work of Mercy, by help of books, by 
expatiations of a mind freed from 
cares, the days that escaped pain flowed with 
a benign and healing sameness; monotony is 
sometimes a good medicine. They might 
not be described as usual days of wards, 
since there was privacy, with bending of 
rigidities, and certain rules relaxed. Yet 
they were at no such great remove. All who 
lay here were as points in one circumference; 
one durance fettered all; we were one com- 
munity, through windows, walls and echoing 
spaces not seldom audible to one another. 
The sun being up, the rested human creature, 
bathed and kempt, renewed the ancient hope 
which dawn awakens, and with it the will to 
live out another day, to insist with Provi- 
dence, which, after youth is past, is not the 
least miracle of incarnation. The labours of 
the night service drew to their close ; sounds 
multiplied through the house; the energy 
41 



42 Domu0 Dolon0 

that ebbed with the waning darkness turned 
now with buoyant flood, as those quickened by 
sleep came back to duty; the whole nature re- 
ceived the influent freshness. There was 
bed-making now, then breakfasting, no light 
matter when the head was lower than the 
body, and you must eat against gravity. 
During the adventure the Day Sister would 
come with letters, and news of the two hemi- 
spheres, her face bland as the morning and 
dissipant of clouds. And now behold the 
wardmaid, hurled upon her task by some fa- 
natic faith in haste, a character after the 
heart of Dickens, and charged with the hu- 
mours of his sanguine town. Each day would 
mar her hope to achieve at a single onset; for 
she was a Figaro in the house ; always, when 
her worst impended, some distant call sound- 
ing, she would run forth declamatory, behind 
her all movable things moved, all invertible 
things inverted. Then you must lie helpless 
amid the disjected elements of your world, all 
that you longed for out of reach, all unde- 
sired things at hand, till in her good time she 
would plunge back, and at last her chaos end. 
On her withdrawal, your nurse succeeds, 



Domu0 Dolotis 43 

using economy of deftest movements; she 
takes a temperature and fills up a chart, 
commenting In a low clear voice; she or- 
ders, she disposes, calm mistress of your 
diurnal fate. Before she vanishes In her 
turn, she brings back all your exiled flowers, 
roses in bowls, irises, carnations, giving each 
group some care; these bright lives also must 
have tending. The colour and Invading 
fragrance hold you in delight awhile ; you let 
sense hover over this perfection of pure, 
serene existence. Sated at last, distracted 
from the charm, you read, you write, you 
pause to enjoy pure vacancy of mind. 

The door opens as if with deference. 
Matron enters, episcopally clad in purple, 
making visitation of her diocese, an erect 
small figure, full of life, commanding a wit 
perilous, perhaps, to such as should be care- 
less with its edge. Aware of her omnipo- 
tence, you are rejoiced that, transparently, 
her will Is good. Sometimes, as she stands 
at the bed's foot, judging events and men, 
you picture her among Ecclesiazusa, giving 
an honourable House her mind. But you 
curb the fancy; matrons are august; they arc 



44 Domus Dolotis 

for awe, not for imaginations. She passes 
on to the large ward down the passage; the 
influence of her vivacity dies; a languor gains 
you with the silence. You lie and watch 
white butterflies flickering outside the open 
window, over ground on which your eyes have 
never rested. You look across to the roof 
of the opposite ward, seeking on the tiles the 
shadow of the chimney which serves you as a 
dial ; you gaze higher yet at your one square 
of sky, your treasured share of the heavens, 
to plunge sight in the lucent blue. Azure 
Is colour of dreams; perception of it draws to 
them, whether they haunt night or day. The 
measure of a poem to Blue Dream stirs In 
the doorway of your mind; it lures with half- 
forgotten cadences and imagery of oblivion, 
dim forms, tranced folds of air, sleep-flowers 
with drooping heads. 

You float too fast to the Fortunate Isles. 
Some jealous spirit of Reality Is suddenly at 
the helm; with a wrench your course Is 
changed. For as one might rip a fabric 
down, a boy's voice rends the air, trying each 
note In the scale of agony; you are widely 
awake once more. That spirit has done 



Domu0 Dolori0 45 

well; blue dreams seduce; it is good not to 
forget that this Is the house of pain. You 
know the story of the broken elbow now be- 
ing flexed again, the old tale of stairs and 
banisters; a slide, a swerve, a fall, a fracture. 
You envisage the small boy fast held by con- 
straining hands; you see him quiver and start 
like a caught bird. You remember how once 
a starling felt under your own hand, en- 
tangled In a garden net, the warmth of the 
slight creature, Its surprising strength as It 
struggled In a frenzy of fear In liberating 
fingers. The boy must feel almost like that, 
as warm, as fragile, as Impotently strong. 
Your heart goes out to him: something you 
know of those discruclating flexures. But 
there is no help save by this pain; you fall 
back on the philosophy of the wards. Pain 
Is for all; we take up the lots that fall to us. 
His turn now, the next time yours ; to-morrow 
you shall bite upon your lip while he eats 
strawberries. All must take the cruelties of 
mercy; all in their turn are foundered and 
sucked down in the dark whirlpool ; yet some- 
how most emerge, they are rendered to the 
light, to smile once more. Nevertheless, de- 



46 Domu0 Dolori0 

spite that stern philosophy, it is hard that for 
heedless youth there should be shaken from 
the urn the lot for this exceeding torment. 
Gradually the cries pierce less; they die into 
low moans; these also cease. You hear the 
Sister, whose task that torturing was, lament 
the need of it outside your door. You know 
her words sincere; there is no cruelty in her 
nature. You know also the strength of her 
hands. 

Noon is now come ; soon a second fast, un- 
wittingly achieved, is broken. Follows fresh 
ritual of laving; then more languor of ease. 
But again Reality disturbs bliss. It is your 
doctor now, loosed, as it were, upon you, with 
a staff-nurse at his heels. You give them 
drowsy welcome; you are in no mood to be 
pulled or shifted, or made a spectacle for 
their science. But to-day you are only ques- 
tioned and reprieved. You look contentedly 
at their retreating shapes; now, at a back 
view, they seem what they are, great people. 
You determine next time to receive them will- 
ingly ; you feel contrition. You know by now 
that, if your case is common, the sick have 
need to spend much time repenting, the per- 



Domu0 Dolori0 47 

versity of Adam's children being deep-fixed 
in them. Too helpless to commit offences, 
they omit in double measure, and stand soon 
in such arrears of virtue that there are sin- 
ners of a positive kind wanting absolution 
less. You sink deeper in the pillows, feel- 
ing after loose threads of dream; all slip 
from your grasp. Life dwindles, a shore 
left behind; here is the open sea. After you 
know not what wanderings, you are recalled 
with a start, as if a voice hailed over the 
waters ; a surgeon speaks without, for whom 
a bad case waits. Instinctively you begin 
listening for the sound of soft-tyred wheels; 
it comes, light as a rustling of grasses; scarce 
perceived, it is already lost. You can see, 
as if no wall rose between, the supine shape 
with face upturned, borne onward where that 
wonder-worker stands prepared in the white 
place, with white attendant forms about him. 
A door swings on its hinge; you hear no 
more. This time the threads are found; you 
are bedrowsed; you are gone from con- 
sciousness as surely as that victim under the 
ether-fumes. Strange forces use you also, 
of which you know little as he of those chirur- 



48 Domu0 Dolon0 

gic doings. You are gone far, floating where 
the papyrus waves by Anapo; you have 
crossed the tragic harbour; you stand under 
the quarry walls where the Athenians pined 
for home. But the yellow rock darkens and 
closes In; It Is once more the familiar wall of 
olive-green on which the images of your 
solace are all projected. You wake more 
fully; you must have slept long; by the 
shadows on the roof It Is half-past three. 
The convoy coming back must have aroused 
you; from words exchanged as It goes by, 
you learn that there has been success. The 
supine form returns on the light wheels ; you 
know that it neither sees, nor hears, nor 
dreams. It is but a frame or shell, with all 
that makes humanity still subtracted; It will 
not enjoy your happy fortune; the soul will 
come back to it In pain. The surgeon strides 
off; the rhythm of his feet betrays the alert 
undreaming nature. Before the last echo 
dies, he has leaped Into his car; he steers 
through traffic to some fresh endeavour. 
You fall to thinking of the trenchant life to 
which all knots are Gordian; here is one 
who knows no faltering, but cuts down on 



Domu0 Dolori0 49 

the mischief, making clean end. If ever he 
rests, his must be the demigod's content for 
mighty labours done, Antaeus lifted off his 
feet, the stalls of Augeas cleansed. Good 
speed to him, you wish, and a hydra's head 
lopped every day. 

A nurse comes, bringing tea. She has 
seen these wonders of dexterity; she tells of 
them as an enthusiast for a game will recount 
heroic feats. You like the zeal; as for the 
subject, such themes are natural here; they 
spoil no appetites. Like the hero, she 
hastens forth; all hasten here; you sigh a 
moment over your helplessness. But her 
zeal has served to remind you of a task; you 
begin making dressings, to propitiate your 
conscience, and a taskmistress who, if that 
is left undone which should have been done, 
will ask full reason why. The pleasure of 
handiwork grows on you, and you lose count 
of time; more than an hour is gone; the cool 
of evening gains on the day's heat. There 
is now more ritual with water; you eat for 
the last time. A friend comes in and talks 
awhile, a man of inches in the stature of mind 
and body; in both he finely overshadows, a 



so Domus! Dolori0 

tree richly laden; at hint or question, as at 
the shaking of a bough, he showers down 
ripeness. At his departure you sort and 
store the fallen fruit; earth seems a good 
orchard yet. Twilight now draws on; the 
petals which the flowers have dropped shine 
whiter upon the darkening floor. Without, 
young nurses, in the free air at last, are 
watering plants; their laughter floats in, a 
therapeutic sound. In the sky there is an 
imminence of stars yet undiscerned. A lamp 
shines from the opposite ward, light upon 
twilight, golden as ripe corn on the blue. 
The nurses hasten In under the wall, their 
heads alone visible In uneven motion, passing 
like white moths along a hedgerow ; the music 
of their laughter Is cut off by a closing door; 
And now your square of sky changes from 
blue to sable, and puts forth a splendid star; 
only when a cloud floats over it, can you suffer 
drawn blinds and any meaner light. But 
with their drawing, comes pleasure of se- 
questering and deep peace; It is the last of 
day. The Night Sister looks In to see that 
all Is well; she smooths your pillows, laughs 



Domu0 Dolorf0 51 

over little happenings reported, and is gone 
to harder work. The world seems one great 
pillow smoothed for weariness; almost per- 
suaded that such indeed it is, you fall asleep. 



VI 



SUCH days brought large amends of 
fate; they had their intrinsic beauty, 
and beyond it the attraction of the un- 
foreseen, which from the first touched them 
like winter sunlight, doubly enjoyed for 
strangeness. For it had been a fixed belief 
that the soul of a wrecked body must als' 
be dejected, and haunt the same drear shore. 
But when the body is laid motionless, yet 
often released from pain, the soul comes as 
near as may be to existence in herself alone. 
She is set free. She goes unlncarnate if 
she will, moved by her own action, perfectly. 
It is not she who is made nursling, but this 
trunk which she inhabits; none may nurse 
the soul. Now she may know exquisite and 
lustral hours; she may be hearth to empyreal 
fires; joy of zeniths may stream for her sole 
delight. In truth, the 111 hap of the body 
may prove the chance of chances for the soul. 
In such deliverance the spirit seemed now 
daily to soar. It rose like the lark towards 
52 



Domu0 Dolori0 53 

the sunburst, bathing In floods of dawn, for- 
getting all old and stale recurrences, and the 
voice of the sad Preacher, with his dirge of 
ever rounding winds and suns that make 
nothing new. All things were new: earth, 
heaven and their divine conjuncture. 

It would sometimes happen that when the 
soul was just alighted and, as It were, still 
quivering with joy of flight, friends would 
come in before you might collect your wits, 
with a demeanour set to pity. Then there 
began a comedy of errors in which apparent 
parts were Interchanged; we wandered In 
Illusion; the moon seemed to shine. For the 
pitiers became the pitied, and objects un- 
awares of a compassion like their own; while 
they grieved for you that you were In such 
evil case, you grieved for them that they were 
in any other. For at that moment your state 
was in your own sight royal, and to be drawn 
from it by a condolence, however beautiful, 
a descent by the climax of absurdity. Their 
artful cheerfulness was the wrong thing to 
find after such soaring; you wished to tell 
them, but found no words; the Inversion of 
the customary was too strange, and un- 



54 Domu0 Doloti0 

interpretable in your languor. You could 
not even seek to end one paradox by 
another, and use on them the Stoic argument 
that this pity proved them sick, being itself a 
disease which the wise mind avoids. You 
might not say compassion was disease, when 
it shone all luminous before you, a flame of 
the soul, a grace. And as for the bare truth, 
it should never convince in such environment. 
How tell them tales of Ariel, with the sur- 
geon's cockpit not ten yards away? The 
massive contradiction of that neighbourhood 
should cast doubt on any truth. Thus it was 
that encountering compassions passed like 
moonbeams, to and fro, across, aslant, astray, 
spreading unreal light. You were glad of 
all these generous hearts, yet wished them 
less rich in pity, for, unobtruded though it 
was, and delicate, it vexed your sensibility; 
you had borne all in this sort that you could 
endure. Yet, without full reason given, to 
ask that it should cease would have seemed 
outrage, or a false pretence to fortitude; the 
dilemma was too high of horn for a lame 
mind. You therefore bore as best you 
might, with show of gratefulness, settling 



Domu0 Doloti0 ss 

down to hear what they would say, as men 
compose themselves before a recitation, when 
the reciter Is well liked, but the subject un- 
desired. 

Always they would recite events, which 
in the strange judgment of the healthy are 
the one food for the sick. But you had 
soared out; you had tasted the eventless; you 
desired not Canterbury Tales, but chorus 
of Aristophanes or Shelley. To do them 
pleasure you feigned hunger; but this was 
not your nourishment. A consciousness 
of arrogance in your passivity now oppressed, 
and the long-drawn feint exhausted; but in 
your indolence there was no help ; they must 
say on, and you give ear, till the energy of 
one or other failed. By implication, they 
were slighting that which you treasured most ; 
your ranged, identic days, each behind each 
in their clean bareness, were desolate ridges 
in their sight. They did not know the dunes 
towards El-Hyza by the sea-village of Tor, 
of which a rare traveller tells that though 
they seem mute and dead, they ring under the 
feet with a sound like after-chime of bells. 
And how should you persuade that the bare 



56 Domu0 Dolotis 

days now traversed gave likewise a deep 
music forth? Were these your friends but 
fresh out of your clouds, and you in your 
turn out of their earth-borne cars, you never 
had believed. Therefore you held your 
peace, and let them tell as they would. Upon 
a day, when there was one alone with you 
who would have understood how dunes ring, 
you made ready to unfold the causes of your 
peace. But at the point of confidence, some 
trivial happening thrust itself between re- 
solve and speech; the rare occasion passed. 
The incongruous is mortal to confessions; it 
kills through any avenue of sense, through 
hearing, sight or touch, dealing impartial 
blows; it may come in a vibration or upon 
an air; a draught may blow away avowal, 
a tinkling be curfew to an inward fire. So 
now, the noise of some indifferent thing 
broken drove back the issuing words. That 
night repentance fell on you, that you had 
let yourself be stayed for din of a crock 
shattered; you lay in a hair shirt, you were 
bound in bandages of hair. 

The present ecstasies of the free soul were 
not as her escapes in former times; they were 



Domu0 Dolori0 si 

perceived other in kind. In the old days, 
she fled out disdainful or oppressed into lone 
space, wandering purposeless on strange 
marches of existence where the imminent 
never befel, where the promise was unful- 
filled, where there was no clear utterance of 
sound or light or colour, but absence, and the 
mere reprieve from life. But now flight 
was short and sunward, urged by a purpose 
which gradually grew clear. That which the 
soul now sought was not ease bought by 
evasion, but new strength in light, which she 
would bring back and impart; she had no 
longer any loathing of return, as once, when 
the Sirens sang, and she burned to shed the 
body, to have deliverance, to cross the bounds 
of the defiled earth no more. Now she was 
eager to return; she had no hatred of the 
body or its yoke, but a new desire to serve 
and save it; for in some way it seemed no 
longer the outcast of creation, but worthy 
to be loved, and of her kindred. The great 
human principle of law was suddenly applied 
in this relation, that rights and duties co- 
extend; she discovered, half troubled, half 
amazed, that bodies have rights and souls 



58 Domu0 Doloti0 

duties. Souls too must serve, and keep the 
law of kind; they also are involved in human 
clay. For no life is there any utter freedom ; 
all that is depends, all that is done is inter- 
acted. The body seemed no longer patib- 
ular and born for scourging, but rather a 
thing of dignity and greatness which It 
was her part to draw upward and unfold. 
Her very existence might be given for that 
duty, her ruin ordained for its neglect, were 
the high charge betrayed. It might be that 
they two were bound not transiently, but aL 
ways, to remain Incorporate and animate to- 
gether through changes unlmagined, refining 
and taking fineness, blending life physical and 
spiritual, until they were wholly implicate 
and made one In a single perfect substance. 
It seemed to her now that only so might any 
goal be reached or any Judgment undergone. 
Without this strange associate of her for- 
tune, transmuted and made purer by her toil, 
were It through a thousand weary changes, 
she should reach no shore of light, she should 
never crown her voyage. 

Thus, In a moment, a conception of life 
triumphed which had been despised In former 



Domu0 Dolon0 59 

years. And there was not only acceptance 
by the mmd; the truth of it seemed to be felt 
in the whole contexture of the being. Pulvis 
et umbra: the two constituents of man re- 
mained, but the lover of the shadow now 
confessed the dust. The influence of the 
house of pain had first turned the heart 
this way; the sacrifice here made for the brute 
flesh, the strong devotion ceaselessly given, 
had made of this carcass a new thing. The 
whole nature rejoiced in a conciliated life; a 
visionary sight now played over it, foresee- 
ing transfusions of the low and high until 
there should be at last integral, essential 
change. One had at these times the happy 
conceit of youth again, which in gaiety of 
heart bids reason station where fancy scarce 
can fly. A lightness and elation came to 
thought, unknown since those Icarian years. 



VII 

IN times of weakness old habits of mind 
will often return out of the past fresh as 
If never Intermitted. In youth you 
had followed the psychologists, charmed by 
their magisterial talk; now, making observa- 
tions upon yourself, you missed the precise 
terms of their science. You seemed to re- 
member definitions of great craft, and knit 
so close that nothing might pass their mesh. 
Books of the precisians were therefore pro- 
cured on the subject of the embodied soul. 
They came, and were perused; great was the 
disillusion. There was no help In these 
grave scrutineers of mind, but they them- 
selves asked help; you found each fall- 
ing back on the old words and making them 
auxiliary when trouble overtook his train of 
polysyllables. You were soon thankful not 
to translate experience into any of their 
systems. All was a maze of question-beg- 
ging term and paraphrase which led you from 
the clear Into the gross, from the Eleuslnlan 
60 



Domu0 Dolonis 6i 

into the German darkness. For what, O 
Clarian Apollo! was your soul now become? 
A centre of immediate experience; the inner 
being of that unity of which the body is the 
outward expression; a coherence of spiritual 
becomings and befallings; a pure Will as 
apperception; a supersensual, spaceless, single 
existence. And what your body? Vile 
mass for experiment in verbiage. You wan- 
dered in a labyrinth of terms, falling at last 
with joy upon an aphorist who simply styled 
it the inversion of the soul. And as for the 
relation of the two elemental partners, it was 
resolved into a stiff parallelism; from a mar- 
riage, it was become a course of never meet- 
ing lines. Thus, after copious reading, you 
were left asking still where wisdom should in- 
deed be found. When the Greeks called the 
soul a butterfly, or a flake of elemental fire, 
or a quintessence, or a harmony, their figures 
touched reality as near as these long baggage- 
trains of language. Plotinus, turning an old 
problem outside in, averred that body is en- 
closed in soul. This seemed original, at least, 
and as true as other divinations; it penetrated 
in its terseness; your inmost sense approved. 



62 Domus Dolotis 

You recalled a distinction somewhere drawn 
between the imagination which grasps the 
spirit of a thing, and the understanding which 
dissects the body of a fact; the Greeks ex- 
pressed the first, the new psychologists the 
second. As algebra, their formulae impressed; 
they posed a problem; they helped thought. 
But, like algebra, they might be interpreted 
only by comparison with the assumptions on 
which all were grounded; and whenever the 
need was to describe vital things, verities of 
the breathing self, of the real man bat- 
tling out his war before fate, then this 
algebraic scaffolding collapsed into a heap 
of poles. When the famous among these 
analysts died, and their lives had to be 
written, it was not said that their coherence 
of psychic life was great, but that they had 
great souls. It was confessed thereby that 
without the figurative all-suggesting word, 
no personality described should survive a 
chapter, or find its way into a single natural 
heart. Science can tell our bones; she can- 
not paint our portraits. 

So you returned to the old words, soul and 
body; they must suffice for the domestic 



Domu0 Dolori0 63 

change within, where now began a new com- 
mon life. The aloofness of the former dual- 
ism was gone. The soul was angered that 
she had lived averse from that which she 
should have learned to love, and descending 
to the body, as Selene to the slumbering 
Endymion, knew^ herself not too high for a 
mortal kindness. The body might no longer 
be disdained; it could receive ennoblement; 
already she was aware of something soul-like 
in it, and agreeing with her own substance, 
by which it should be helped to rise. And 
now there came a splendour into life, and 
a knowledge how sense might warm towards 
spirit as to an accostable and glad power. 
Lamentable in their dead loss of joy to earth 
were the old Castilian rules which had kept 
soul from common life, as from a state too 
base for her, and had set her up apart, like 
some Infanta, in whose presence none might 
speak a human thought. Sad also were the 
theories which had too much feared the body 
as a power of evil, and esteemed too low the 
pure and purifying strength of soul; and all 
the separating and repressive days were sad, 
when men believed that through this part- 



64 Domu0 Dolori0 

nership the soul might be abased but the 
Body never lifted higher. With such belief 
there might be no raising of the flesh; there 
had been immeasurable waste of joy and 
goodness. But now the soul should come in 
and out on ordinary days, no longer the con- 
descending and rare visitant at feast-times; 
the reprobate body should be changed, look 
up to her and wear to her fineness. It 
seemed strange not to have reached this 
knowledge long ago ; but it is general to man 
to be smitten and flung Into his best wisdom. 
A few only attain to it without the like rough 
prompting in the stillness of clear minds; 
most need a violence for their turning, and 
not till they have suffered It does an after- 
clearness come. They must be stunned be- 
fore they wake to sight; there must first fall 
on them a didactic and memorable blow. In 
the silence of the house of pain lie many who 
have received that blow. 



VIII 

BUT now, with an assured return of 
strength, the mind remembered, 
touched by shame, that for more than 
twenty months all personal life had ceased 
to be accounted; the nations were yet In 
agony; It was no hour for self-regard. The 
several soul was indeed nothing now for 
thought; Its goings were Impertinent to the 
vast trend of things. The dark tide roared 
on, and little psychic fears and hopes went 
from cognizance like wisps blown. Inappre- 
hensible for smallness; the Individual ceased 
out of consciousness and was annulled. Mur- 
murs of war vexed even this place of refuge; 
they thrust Into the quietness, the moment 
happier sounds were still. War weighed up- 
on the life of the civil wards. None had less 
release from the besieging thought of It than 
those who without part or lot lay helpless. 
For such will ponder long In the hours when 
pain is sole distraction; their minds make 
weak defence and are swiftly overrun. The 
65 



66 Domu0 Dolotis 

cloud which had been the background of all 
vision drew again over the bright sky; no 
spirit might reach up to joy; the shade of 
universal grief descended. There might be 
no contemplation now but of the general 
body and the general soul in their affliction; 
and in a misery at their long anguish, the 
mind dared only look far forward, as one 
who goes upon a striding edge, with abyss 
on either side. Yet it pleased itself with the 
fancy that the peoples also, after this shatter- 
ing, should be recovered into a harmony like 
the small single nature. It wondered how 
after the recovery their new state should af- 
fect the common life ; and above all whether 
it should be a preparation for that everlast- 
ing peace, the passionate world's desire, 
which quick-travelling pens now promised. 
And thus that ancient dream filled yet anoth- 
er mind, driving away, after its wont, all 
lesser visions. You read once more the 
theories of men caught up in the splendour 
of the dream till their sight failed in discern- 
ment of things below. You followed them 
with joy awhile, as they pursued this happiest 
theme of seers. The hopes which they raised 



Domu0 Dolon0 67 

were fair to watch ; like birds started by the 
traveller's step, they flashed glinting wings. 
But all too soon it seemed that the best 
among the seers were as tired men plan- 
ning holidays in far lands that they 
should never tread; anticipation made 
their hearts too young; their spirits ran ahead 
of time. You had just learned that such out- 
racing is forbidden to the complete human 
creature, and that the soul must trudge, or 
ever the body runs. Less lovable were pro- 
jectors of a nearer sight, who by prospectus 
duly drawn would bring Saturnian days 
again ; in these the quality of good boyishness, 
which pleased at the first reading, passed at 
the second into puerility. Seeking exact range, 
they measured distance ill ; they forgot what 
every marksman should know well, that 
things seen clearly over chasms are half the 
world away. But if, one thought, we must 
have prophecy, V^irgil had finer art in it than 
Kant or Grotius; he painted in the shadows, 
he more delicately urged the doubt. The 
world's great age shall come again ; of a sure- 
ty it shall come. Another Tiphys there shall 
be ; Argo shall sail once more ; a new Achilles 



68 Domu0 Dolori0 

shall find another Troy. But likewise there 
shall creep In vestiges of ancient guile : Pau- 
ca tamen suberunt priscae vestigia fraudis. 
There was prophecy In that line also. 

In short, a scrutiny of these plans evoked 
sighs : here was too sanguine work; here were 
the playbills posted and the theatre unbuilt. 
How should an outward mechanism avail, 
when the first need and last was Inward 
change, change absolute, throughgoing, Irre- 
versible, change In the very seed of life, com- 
pared with which the foundation or undoing 
of great realms were but a simple matter. 
Until that change should come, all else was 
deceiving shift and palliative, fit to avert war, 
but not to end It. It seemed a thing almost 
for tears, this change being scarce begun, that 
men should deem themselves prepared for 
everlasting peace. For the plain truth Is that 
In his transience and Imperfection man Is 
incongruous with all that is ever-during; be- 
fore he may begin to consist even In part 
with the eternal upon earth, the slow and nat- 
ural growth of ages must be added to his 
stature. The very best among the peoples 
are unworthy yet of that gift; the noblest of 



Domu0 Dolon0 69 

them are errant, punishable folk, subject to 
many passions, spurred into dark ways by 
pride. Their sons also shall be creatures of 
a humanity risen but a span, with the vast 
slopes of ascent before them; while they 
stand yet so low; how should they claim the 
reward of the ascended? For every nation 
upon earth there is but one way, — to advance 
in goodness, to grow In wisdom; when they 
have so grown, there shall be times when 
peace shall last long years, and their claim 
shall seem less vain than now. But vain It 
still must be. For even In those years (them- 
selves by what a mountain-barrier hid from 
us!) the storms must gather upon the deeps 
again. That man should think, being yet as 
a child, to snatch the reward of the perfect- 
ed, is most pernicious and presuming doc- 
trine. As the children of men now are, 
greedy and unstable, a crowd of jealous clans, 
sects, classes, the sole peace matched with 
them must yet be measured out In lengths 
which to eternity shall seem but points of 
time, and so corruptible that Its decay must 
breed new wars. That such men should ar- 
raign God for suffering wars to be, what is 



70 Domu0 Dolori^ 

it but the cry of blindness ? For God should 
mock himself should he give to any such the 
rewards appointed for the perfect. A brief, 
frail peace assorted to the nature of mortality, 
this alone is meet for man until his ill way 
be amended. This only, it may be, in his 
unpurged heart does he in singleness desire. 
For its very changefulness commends it more 
to his inconstancy than that eternal concord, 
which in the fondness of his exaltations he 
sometimes think to love. Man were not man 
were he constant to an immobility; fugientia 
capiat, he follows after that which leaves 
him on the swiftest wing. As he is, and has 
been, and haply long must be, he has no care 
for things unthreatened or unpriced, like the 
general air, to be had for the fetching of a 
breath, free to all in every place and at every 
hour; his love is for the costly, the contested, 
the strife-engendering, the things for which 
men take jeopardy of their lives. Without 
her present swiftness of evasion, the contrast 
with dire war withdrawn, peace should soon 
cloy this coveting, fastidious creature. There- 
fore it is that he must change at the root, he 
must grow up out of immaturity before aught 



Domu0 Dolori0 71 

that endures for ever may hold his variable 
heart. Even to-day, after what weary ages 
of his striving, the most everlasting quality 
in man is his child-nature. 

All creatures have the peace which is of 
their own state ; our peace is mortal like our- 
selves ; no peace save that which knows decay 
has yet descended upon this earth. Man does 
unjustly, when he blames this his proper 
peace, that it grows old and suffers war to 
come up against his life. The priestess of a 
temple in Hellas once grew old; while she 
slept, fire broke forth, and the temple was 
burned down. Then the citizens, who should 
have blamed themselves for tasking her be- 
yond her weakness, arose in wrath that she 
followed the law of Nature and not theirs; 
they punished bitterly, refining chastisement 
into vengeance; they left her marble statue 
erect in whiteness before black ruins that 
every passer by should know her deed. Men 
deal with Peace, as those citizens with their 
priestess. They ascribe to her in their fool- 
ishness powers belonging to another state. 
And when she is proved to have none such, 
they nourish unjust and bitter memories, un- 



,72^ Domu0 Dolori0 

til once more the incorrigible hope returns, 
and the temple is rebuilt, and another priest- 
ess named to grow old and fail again. So the 
cycle of illusion and forgetfulness runs the 
old course. The peace which lives with men 
and serves them is as themselves imperfect; 
while they live still corruptible, it also must 
decay, and yield to natural laws of death. 
How should we say that because we now 
repent, the temple of man's hope shall never 
burn again ? We are first to give pledge and 
proof that we have repented for all time. 

God, said Augustine, of his just ordinance 
has given to man upon earth not the guerdons 
of the immortals, but those rewards only 
which sort with his finite nature; among them 
he has set a bounded peace according to the 
limitation of the life temporal, and therewith 
such things as may be needful to defend it 
or recover, if it be ravished away. He has 
not given the peace of quiet, the peace of 
Sabbath, the peace without an evening. Let 
man therefore forbear to claim of right the 
whole fulfilment of peace, while he himself 
is unfulfilled. His rash, forestalling hope 
argues him simple as those earliest Christians, 



Domu0 Dolons 73 

looking to see in the flesh that second coming 
for which Christendom yet waits after nigh 
two thousand years. For unregenerate man 
to speak as though by virtue of decrees or 
treaties he might keep peace for ever upon 
earth, a deathless bird Incaged, what is it but 
a breath of vanity? The spirit must be 
changed, or all his mechanisms are nothing, 
his leagues vain; for not on any clause or 
document, but on the inward nature hangs 
fast the whole event. And who is so blind 
as not to know that it is easier to build or 
destroy an empire than lastingly to change 
one vital spring of human action, such as the 
collective pride from which wars flow? These 
things are lodged too deep to be reached by 
statutes. As knowledge feels Its dark way 
backward beyond history, and science ex- 
plores the state of men too primitive to re- 
cord their lives, it grows clear that the 
vanities and greeds which move ourselves 
were Implanted In the mind when the first 
living race grew human. If through six 
thousand chronicled years, succeeding un- 
recorded thousands, these faults have never 
ceased to flourish, what madness to believe 



74 Domu0 Dolori0 

that drafted treaties can end all in a pair or 
score of generations ! As well believe in 
power of spells to transmute the elements 
of things. And if even to disguise these 
greeds and vanities is thus a matter in- 
finitely hard and slow, how long shall it 
be before the desire of whole peoples 
or whole classes shall be transferred from the 
covetable things of competition, wealth, ter- 
ritory, and all else of the material kind, to 
things unseen and spiritual, the fruits of char- 
ity and mutual justice, which alone are con- 
gruous with everlasting peace? What huge 
impenetrable wastes of time are to be over- 
gone ere there come an end to this aboriginal 
unquenched desire? What power shall thus 
miraculously turn within calculable time the 
vain and coveting heart of man, which many 
saints and prophets have striven to make 
anew, but left the same intractable and stub- 
born substance for which Chaldeans framed 
their laws? 

At this point one seemed to hear a Pla- 
tonlcian speaking thus to the forgetful vis- 
ionary tribe. "Sirs," he said, *'I would have 
you recall this saying of my master, that in 



Domu0 Doloti0 75 

every man there are two tendencies or In- 
stincts, one verging towards submissiveness, 
the other towards the spirited use of strength. 
In one breast the first may prevail, the 
second In another, and when either runs 
Into excess, there Is produced the abject or 
the overbearing person, each after his kind a 
likely servant of injustice. If you shall con- 
sider great multitudes, you shall discover all 
possible admixtures between the two ex- 
tremes; In nations, which are communities of 
men united by one blood or Interest, you shall 
find them In mass and wide diffusion, and by 
conjunction more dangerous In excitement, 
since the faggot burns more fiercely than the 
stick. Always these instincts are opposed, 
whether their force be nearly equal, or wheth- 
er the one predominate above the other, lend- 
ing a whole people a name for Intolerance or 
for meekness. Observe now that this Inward 
and Instinctive enmity Is not between virtue 
and vice, but between two neutral qualities. 
And herein lies ineradicable the root of evil. 
The opposition is not transient or unembod- 
ied; It Is ancient and Innate and before moral- 
ity. Submissiveness is good, as tending to 



76 Damu0 Dolotis 

quiet and good order; and high spirit is good, 
as fostering manfulness ; each in its own way 
works to fulfil the nature of the man. Both 
in individuals and in peoples, if you would 
guide progressing nature towards perfection, 
you must so far compose this inward discord 
that all peoples under all governments may 
think alike, and think rightly, as to what 
things are honourable and just in their rela- 
tions. It behoves you then to find some divin- 
er art of statesmanship than any yet dis- 
covered, which, using the two instincts as 
warp and weft, shall by their perfect inter- 
texture weave indestructible the great web 
of the State. For otherwise their unaccorded 
difference will continually draw them apart, 
and at periods they will tend so far asunder 
that each will lose its neutral quality to as- 
sume the colour of a vice, the orderly hearts 
growing slothful and timid to the point of 
cowardice, so as to do no less than tempt 
aggression, the courageous provocative and 
beyond reason fierce. And then, yea, though 
we be all democracies, there will be ever at 
hand the ambitious leader and the broker of 
false fame who will use the pugnacious nature 



Domu0 Dolori0 77 

to embroil good neighbours, ready of his 
mere pride to drive them into ruin. Our 
task, therefore, is perhaps the most arduous 
on earth, to establish a harmony in the soul 
which shall reconcile these two dissimilar or 
contrary parts of nature, so that the com- 
bative may leave aggression, and the peace- 
ful cease from self-abasement, and mankind 
keep uncorrupted peace, not for a decade or 
a generation, but long untroubled ages 
through. For until these contraries transfuse 
and penetrate each other, so that the spirit 
which seeks quietness is duly touched with 
flame, and that which seeks supremacy is ever 
tractable to justice, peace shall not be for 
many ages, much less for all time, but for 
clipped and shorn durations, mere strips and 
lengths, with war the certain end." 



IX 



NOCTILUCA, sated with night, was of 
those who sometimes saw the vision. 
It shone for her, but as the farthest of 
all stars : she also was almost of the Platoni- 
cians. And to her immediate, practical mind 
the cause of its remoteness lay not so much in 
the general backwardness of souls as in the 
particular pugnacity of men. On this point 
she might not be directly countered by any 
seeker after the lesser peace ; you must fetch 
a compass in advance, and spring at her 
out of some ambush. It was your daily wont 
to cull out fancies or tales from your read- 
ing for her amusement when her toil ended, 
to win her countenance for books in a 
place that little loved them; and one day, 
the Iliad lying by, you told her of that famous 
brawl of gods, how Ares and Aphrodite, 
strife-makers of all time, were borne down 
by Athene, who with her stout hand (there 
was emphasis upon that adjective) took up 
a boundary-stone and smote the god of war 
78 



Domu0 Dolori0 79 

upon the neck, that he fell, and flung the 
Love-goddess, like a baggage, after him. 
She liked the megalithic argument, and 
praised the effective hand. It was an alle- 
gory: thus, by the sense and strength of 
woman, wars should at last have end. But 
then you showed out of the same book that 
among all brawlers and accessories to brawls 
this same Athene stood the first, and that for 
incitements and assaults there was none her 
equal either on earth or upon Olympus. It 
seemed, then, that even when the gods walked 
earth as visible examples, pugnacity was no 
peculiar gift of men, and history more re- 
cent than the mythologic had brought small 
proof of change. It might be contended, 
therefore, that with power in the State shared 
equally by the two sexes, everlasting peace 
should have less chance than now. It was re- 
mote because, without changed hearts, tem- 
poral peace bred corruption, and corruption 
in Its turn bred war. Into which matter a 
Roman woman had looked deep in Caesar 
Domitian's day, perceiving in an unregenerate 
world that long peace, like long rain, rotted 
and mildewed, and uttering her thought of it 



8o Domu0 Dolori0 

roundly as any long-bearded prophet. Exi- 
tium pax, she said: peace is destruction. 

As the effect of these morning disputations, 
the Sister grew more tolerant of a book, sus- 
picious still, yet half charmed, as one who sees 
a bright snake in the sun, and does not strike. 
Although, in her fast conviction, the multi- 
tude of books was too great for the world's 
good, she was not for St. Patrick's way, and 
would give some of them the freedom of her 
isle. But reading, she would say, stopped do- 
ing; and since, for her, life essentially was 
action, and to live well was to be doing as 
nearly always as you might, she would pre- 
scribe an antidote for legendi cacoethes, of 
a strength accommodated to the patient. It 
was the day following her acquaintance with 
Athene of the stout hand and the minor 
prophetess Sulpicia, that she first brought 
gauze and cotton wool in piles, that you might 
make a tale of dressings, and reduce your 
bookish leisure : such means she had devised 
to stay excess in Homer, and keep the abuse 
of Balzac down. This piece-work became 
customary, and the most definite among your 
objects in existing. You mostly achieved the 



Domu0 Dolon0 8i 

tale; but sometimes, falling short, must find 
an artifice wherewith to appease her, since to 
put her wholly from her scheme was beyond 
your present force. For you knew now all the 
truth of Chaucer's words: "It is grete sci- 
ence to eschewe the wylle of a woman, when 
by effecte she putteth her entente to a thinge 
.hat her herte directly draweth." And indeed 
her way was good, and for your health. For 
often in those weeks you seemed to read as 
a beast grazes, half the day. In spite of 
meals, ablutions, dressings, visits and the par- 
celling routine of time, there were ever voids 
to fill. And after the first period of weak- 
ness, you could not always loll inert upon your 
bed of water, like a seal in a calm bay. 

By the goodness of friends, a stream of 
books flowed week after week, with the un- 
hastened movement of the moraine, from a 
couch beside the door to the bed-table, thence 
to the mantel, and onward to another table 
on the way out and homeward. Your read- 
ing went through ordered phases, alike, it 
may be, for many a patient of long term, who 
passes from apathy to slow receptiveness, and 
gradually back to the whole ardour of mind; 



82 Domu0 Dolotig 

as the earth turns to all the signs and the full 
round of the Zodiac, so you seemed to look 
out in succession upon all regions of the lit- 
erary heavens. In the first days, when the 
foundations of physical life were shaken, and 
needed a still gravitation for their settling, 
the mind was satisfied with fiction, not of the 
noisy cavalcading sort, which drags, as it 
were, at a horseman's stirrup, but the easy- 
faring tales of common life, with a plenty of 
light, unshattering emotions, and happenings 
which are never quite events. This phase 
was long, the shock having been rude, and the 
settling in proportion slow. It was a welcome 
sign of progress when these narratives no 
longer pleased; and after a transition through 
the romance which is philosophy dis- 
guised, the second phase began. In this, the 
mind turned critically upon all fiction save the 
subtlest, vexed with its fluttering about cir- 
cumstance, its chase after the singular and ex- 
ternal: there seemed a curse upon it as on 
the sea, which cannot be still. It misdirected 
sight; it annoyed by Indication of the unde- 
sired. Often you felt as one led through 
rooms hung with strangers' portraits, con- 



Domu0 DPlori0 83 

demned to genealogic talk, when from an op- 
posite embrasure you might turn your back 
on paint, and see universal earth and sky. 
Fiction served the servants of caprice and was 
therefore twice a slave; it must obey the 
ceaseless call for change, lest its clients damn 
its plots for sameness. The harmed and 
stricken long not for difference, but for unity, 
feeling in their shaken state towards litera- 
ture as towards religion, that it must stand 
not on singularity but on singleness: all that 
estranges or excludes they would thrust away; 
they will not have their house built upon 
sands, but upon the bedrock that no flood 
changes, the one, the continuous, the sure, the 
ground and base of all. Beyond this stage are 
many halting-places and ascents through 
which the recovering mind must patiently 
climb higher. Towards the end, it seeks the 
writers not of this time or that, or of this or 
that society, but of all time and one humanity; 
it looks for the laurelled brows, of which it 
Is sure that they will frown or be serene 
rightly. The authors now preferred are 
those who lead up an argument like a tide, 
historians, orators, epic and dramatic poets, 



84 Domu0 Dolori0 

scientists of the large induction, all sharers 
alike in wide vision and the sense of majesty 
in cause. The classic drama pleases now, 
even the French, at most times felt too bare, 
for it provides a vertebrate ideal structure, 
as a range of mountains gives a country 
frame. Thought, lost in confused valleys and 
broken hills, comes out with delight on an en- 
chainment and asserted bond of things ; it has 
joy of symmetry; it loves the strength and 
consecution. A last phase comes when in 
their turn argument and proposition tire. 
Now all that reasons and discourses fail to 
guide. The soul will have that which utters 
life for it, as flame fire. It turns to lyric 
verse, in which alone it seems to find assur- 
ance that it indestructibly and personally 
lives. 

All books were fellow-prisoners now, and 
in worse case than your own, for to them the 
heart of the house was cold. There was no 
place for them in this economy: they found 
here no part of an ideal commonwealth, but 
a corner of a hostile country. The sympathy 
that was ever round the human inmate was 
not for them; they must bear old feminine 



Domu0 Dolori0 85 

disdains and rancours, stored up for their 
kind; one used to think that they were the 
true patients, and in good sooth they suf- 
fered. When in the morning the ward-maid 
came in storm, their troublous day began. To 
the spirit of that hurricane, they were but 
things in three dimensions, a jetsam for her 
tossing. For her they had neither front nor 
back, top or bottom, neither kinship nor be- 
longing; without contempt or malice she 
wrought on them bitter severance and wide 
dispersion. Now was the grave work set up- 
on its head in a lighter company, now the first 
volume torn from the second, and each laid 
far from the hand that sought it, as though 
strewn on the sunderbunds of Ganges. She 
did not hate; she would not harm them; 
but they were indifferent and dumb things, in 
no wise animate for man. More positive mis- 
liking followed later, when an elder among 
nurses took the ward, one taciturn but of 
some humour, dubbed by you secretly, in her 
austerer moods, Severiana. Hers was a mind 
that looked on books as unclean things, bring- 
ing dust into her province, and harbouring 
before her face the abhorred detritus; when 



86 Domu0 Dolon0 

the duster was in her hand, you might have 
thought she flogged them. Yet even she had 
no consuming hate ; therein lay the point and 
bitterness of their suffering. There was no 
martyrdom won from this handling; they 
were things not seriously regarded. None 
ever reached the basket which is the general 
bier of books; none fell from the mantel to 
the fire. They were too small for persecu- 
tion : she passed out and let them lie. 



X 



ONE wet morning, of that greyness 
which seems to colour thought, the 
Noctiluca came in with a face that 
marked storm in subsidence. You were 
at the point of making good lost sleep, and 
near to that sweetest entrance into slumber 
when the door, tried vainly all the night, is 
unbarred, beyond hope, with the full day. 
It was hard for a mind half dreaming and 
adrift towards calm to face about upon un- 
quietness and breakers, yet there was no 
choice ; there were no ways but such as this 
to requite long kindness, and what was it to 
give up a dream, and for a little space lend 
idle ears? You therefore roused yourself 
to make an audience, seeking to conceal your 
drowsiness, lest she should go from you with 
undisburdened soul. It seemed that, in the 
night just past, a young nurse had touched the 
deeps of known human folly. An emergency 
arising, of which mother-wit should have 
made swift end, she had let mischief grow 
87 



88 Domu0 Doloris? 

apace rather than strain a rule and essay plain 
common sense. For the Sister's helpful na- 
ture, ineptitude stood next to sin; four hours 
now had her brooding mind contained the 
grievance ; it was pleasant, it was more grate- 
ful than a night's rest, to see the instant ease 
she had of its release. Nurses were the bond- 
slaves of lectures and instructions; they loved 
the letter that spares thought; and the pleas- 
ant shadow of a regulation. Their wits in 
one night-hour gathered wool in bales. Their 
ideal of life was an eternal supervision, un- 
der which they might live safe in the ab- 
sence of their minds. Here, feeling perhaps 
the theme give out before her vigour, she 
suddenly enlarged its borders and drew her 
whole sex into the charge: such influence on 
quick temperament have grey skies crowning 
a vexation ; such comfort does it often bring 
to lash that which you love well. Women, 
it seemed, went open-eyed into slavery. 
They were the serfs of method; one 
who for love or pity would break all laws 
frangible, would die rather than infringe a 
rule. She was now consciously tirading, but 
the better for this vent of spleen; her imagi- 



Dpmu$ Dolori0 89 

nation, like a torch, flared In the recesses of 
the female nature. But while she searched 
them, dragging many things to light, you did 
not closely follow; though she intended but 
small hurt with all her halings, it had 
seemed unfair to hearken; you went apart 
after another thought For she had ap- 
proached a universal problem, touching the 
life of all communities. How shall discipline 
prevail, but also freshness? How shall a 
disciple originate, unovershadowed? How 
shall responsibility let youth ripen without 
disestablishment of maturer age ? How shall 
the novice practise to bring down emergen- 
cies, when they are the preserved birds of the 
adept? And how shall the probationer over- 
leap the Sister's pale? To draw the best 
from maturity and youth, by some art you 
must yoke together In the common service the 
daring and the cautious mind. There was but 
a precarious harmony now; as things were 
like to be, half a peg's turn should bring great 
discord. And if no wise change should come, 
one rough day youth might thrust age under 
hatches, and steer at large for surpassing 
hazards. It had been said that youth was 



90 Domus! Dolori0 

drunkenness without wine. But sometimes 
age seemed insensibility without drug, and 
like youth's bright inebriation, more danger- 
ous for being a state of nature. 

The long imbedded regain in their deep 
rest and their dependence more than one men- 
tal quality of children. They can make them- 
selves believe what thing they will in broad- 
est day; they are surprised at nothing; all 
sequences are natural to them, all effects upon 
one plane in logic. They dream by day; they 
live in the land of wonder, where the maddest 
is the truest, where things of the sea come 
into the land, and things of the land go into 
the air; they are not surprised, whatever fan- 
tasy be enacted. This faculty now took 
charge of all your mind, as if it were the 
governor of the place, and at suggestion of 
a sea-metaphor, some plash within the water- 
bed perhaps aiding, had sent the Sister afloat 
before your dream-dimmed eyes; she was as 
surely launched in a swift boat as you were 
fast fixed at moorings. Strange nautical di- 
versions now began: she sailed about you, 
tacking, beating up, racing down the wind, 
and at each passage within hailing distance 



Domu$ Dolori0 91 

sent over to you new Sulplciads. All had the 
full clearness of reality; you saw the tiller 
sway, you heard the water hissing at the 
boat's bows. She was in full sail all about 
you, and you must interject such comment as 
might reach her as she flew by. The first time 
she came near she was voluble over the short 
sight of women. They loved immediate and 
small things; they could not embrace wide 
prospect. All hung for them on personality 
and near appearance; they did not test by 
character, but approved or scorned by face; 
whence groundless favourings and aversions 
which should mar all their politics. More- 
over, the impetuous side of their character of- 
fended; for a whim, they dashed themselves 
to grief like birds on lighthouse lanterns. 
When she came up before the wind, you had 
just a chance to shout at her that if these de- 
fects indeed existed, they at least went with a 
great virtue, with a sacred primitive spon- 
taneousness and noble generosity of heart, 
without which this were an uninhabitable 
world: for who should endure life with none 
but calculating women? She raced past; you 
hoped these words had flown aboard. When 



92 Damu0 Dolorisf 

she came round again, she had fallen 
on the susceptibility of women, ever at the 
mercy of impressing powers, good, indif- 
ferent or bad; they were warm wax to all. 
As upon this quarter she must needs beat up 
against the breeze, you had more time; you 
argued that, were it so, there was again a 
compensation. The Golden Age was before 
us and not behind, which age (a seer had 
said it) was ordained by Providence for 
woman; her receptive nature should more 
perfectly reflect its beauty than man's rough 
surface ; her great day therefore was to come. 
She took the prophecy away upon a new tack, 
and at the next approach was all intent upon 
the future, though obstinate yet in gloom. 
Her point was now that with a sex inequable 
and fitful, leaving half its native wit enslaved, 
and with the rest conceiving Amazonian 
queendoms, the cause should halt for as long 
time as it moved. She was now at the height 
of her indictment, but you knew (and this 
was the charm of the whole onset) , that had 
you, which might all gods forbid! approved 
a single count of it, she would have set on 
you in your turn, and, with all that way upon 



Damu0 Doloti0 93 

her, sunk you incontinent at your moorings. 
On the succeeding tack, the future was still 
in her mind, but the vehemence had now 
abated and the speed; fears and forebodings 
stilled her. She dreaded for her sex a rival- 
ry with man in pursuit of life's gross rewards, 
money, comfort, preferment, and all other 
covetable things; in a struggle upon this low 
ground not even the stout hand of Athene 
should bring the placewoman to her ambition, 
for the man's bones were heavier than hers, 
as nurses had good cause to know. And how 
should a woman put her heart into dusty 
things for her whole life, to keep interest for 
them always, as men must learn to do? For 
at least she should need a dewier and 
brighter world within reach for her often re- 
sort, that she might refresh her soul, going 
apart into some place of verdure. Better 
were it for her to remove the rivalry into 
higher fields where the heart might live 
more gracious life, irradiating idea. But 
if she were indeed content to struggle for 
the things of the dust, then she must abandon 
thoughts of dominance, and compromise with 
her strong rival, seeking to change into a 



94 Domu0 Dolori0 

good comradeship his jealousy, or that worse 
thing, the patronage of his kindness. This 
counsel at least seemed to concede a rudi- 
ment of sense to man. You told her the 
question put by Philosophy to the last sage 
of Rome: ''What thing is a manf and of 
his answer: ''J reasonable mortal beast/' 

She was now standing disembarked upon 
your floor, as if she had never sat thwart or 
held tiller. By an imperceptible change, 
earth had replaced sea; no break was felt; 
the sentence begun on the one element was 
continuing In the other. But here was no 
matter for surprise; all was In the order of 
the unamazlng marvellous which makes so 
well for happiness. She spoke now of medi- 
cines; but you gave imperfect heed; your 
interest lingered yet with the former subject. 
There had been sides of it to which she had 
not turned, but which. If really she had 
sailed and argued, must have been present 
to her thought. There was that ultimate 
difference within the species, and its effect on 
power of larger life: you wondered with 
what presumption you should have replied If 
she had mooted that. Perhaps you would 



Domu0 Dolori0 95 

have urged the human habit of confusing the 
superposed with the elemental, and imputing 
to the second the consequences proper to the 
first. Our generations fleet too fast to sec 
how Time and Circumstance bulk out a 
nucleus with their incrusting layers. These 
mighty fashioners deceive us by their inhu- 
man slowness; they work with an aeonic lei- 
sure beyond our wits. We imagine for them 
little spans like ours, in which, if we mark 
no movement, we conceive ourselves among 
primordial things : so does the ephemeral mis- 
judge the powers that make its day. But 
Time and Circumstance may undo that which 
they have put together. They enucleate, and 
prove how much was of their adding; they 
recompound, and cover the thin core anew. 
And if we do not understand that centuries 
are their hours, what is that to them? They 
work on, and our ultimates change under 
our eyes. The Hebrew nature, as it came 
out of the Ghetto, was deemed final once; 
Shylock was ultimate, and Barabas of 
Malta ; all cringing and avaricious qualities, it 
was said, had run in the Jew's blood since 
Abraham came from Ur. But although 



96 Domu0 DoIon« 

there are Jews' quarters yet, and character 
may still, In the new freedom, bear marks 
from old environment, already there is per- 
ceived large benefit from air and room for 
a fuller growth. It has been said that when 
the Gentile drove the Jew into the Ghetto 
he thrust the seedling of the Lebanon into a 
flower-pot, to object, after generations, that 
It was no more a noble tree. But Time and 
Circumstance revoked in part their former 
work, and there have been seen of that race 
many of royally free hands, and of a public 
spirit beyond the Imagination of King John; 
there have gone forth of them to our wars 
men who would have followed Gideon or 
Maccabeus, or died on the pyre when 
Masada fell; and none of us Is yet so placed 
as to decide that these rather than those quali- 
ties are not nearest to the core of Jewry. 
How If womanhood had been in like manner 
dwarfed in the flowerpot, less straltly en- 
closed, but for longer tract of time? Thus 
It had seemed to the most unvlslonary among 
men of vision, who, having well observed his 
kind In the world, withdrew Into his house of 
Eyquem to sort out his knowledge. To him, 



Domu0 Dolori0 97 

after trial of various life, it appeared that 
the two sexes stood near to each other in most 
powers; custom and differing instruction had 
thrust them apart beyond the plan of nature. 
And for this inequality, he said, it was easier 
to accuse the one sex than to excuse the other. 
Such things you might have urged, adven- 
turing in waters beyond your depth. You 
were glad they were left unspoken ; that large 
demand of time should have chilled ingenu- 
ous eagerness. You had been fain, were but 
the power yours, to lead on the argument 
to a thought which the ultimate difference 
should more help than harm: that there ex- 
ists a spiritual motherhood; that woman is 
maternal to the great hopes of human-kind, 
which without her are neither formed nor 
know achievement, nor move effective in the 
world; that at every period of bright birth 
she should come forth ascendant, like Mira, 
the wonderful star, which out of obscure dis- 
tances flames into the second magnitude and 
recedes to ingather light again. But these 
were high mysteries not for any words of the 
unillumined; and the Sister preparing now 
for departure, it seemed well to end all with 



98 Domu0 Dolori0 

praise of noble women, and chiefly those of 
this healing service, who had done gentle 
duty amid many and fierce jaws of danger, 
as if they worked in the peace of English 
shires. What region of devastated earth 
was not full of their labours? Shipwrecks, 
bombardments, crossing of wintry mountains, 
all these things they had known, and had 
feared none. They had been worthy of the 
surgeons at work beside the very gap of war, 
whose hearts had so passed into their hands 
that their lives were very cheap to them, if 
only they might fulfil. For all these unfor- 
saking natures, the common words of praise 
seemed cold. You sought for them a fervid 
phrase out of the East: 

The last of the last of them are princes. 



XI 



OFTEN In the night hours you would 
wonder how it should fare with the 
countries of the world in the changes 
to ensue, and how it should be with your own 
land, that ancient and slow-moving England 
over which glib foreign wit made merriment. 
Why, England should fare well, through her 
very singularity in fault and virtue; she 
should outgo nations that dared not start to 
move without rounded systems. In great re- 
forms, that people will sometimes first ad- 
vance which has built few theories across its 
way. How many such reforms had been ef- 
fected here, how many charters wrested from 
kings, while reasoning peoples yet wore the 
yokes which our folk long ago had broken. It 
might be that to the observer from other 
shores England was strange as Egypt to 
Herodotus, the land of curious custom; yet 
Egypt taught Greece, and from England 
France had learned. Here was a peo- 
ple eccentric from the usual orbit, and 
99 



100 Domu0 Daloris 

further from the norm than any race 
which has attained or defended greatness. 
A people mistrustful of fine logic, claim- 
ing a freedom of empiric life, as if that 
were a privilege sealed to it from the 
ancient time. Original in judgment; de- 
serving neither praise nor blame after the 
manner of other tribes of man. In maturity 
still immature, bringing a boy's mind to men's 
affairs, and therefore haply favoured more 
by Fortune, who loves youth in all its kinds 
and gives it her friendliest stars. Islanded 
in the seas of thought, apart from continents; 
ringed about by mist-engendering waters; 
looking on blurred landscapes through rain- 
iest air; not born or used to clearness. Yet 
for all that, wise with a weather-wisdom 
learned not from theories but from freezings, 
drenchings, and all variableness of afflict- 
ing skies; a wisdom fed straight from the 
soil of life and increased by an art like 
woodcraft, of which the doctrine is the 
touch of things. There are those who have 
maintained that the instinct of the tried old 
breed, coming up strongly, as it were from 
below self-consciousness, is better in a storm 



Domu0 Dolori0 loi 

than the reasoning of new men, starting too 
high, and blown this way and that whenever 
it must pause to check its bearings, for instinct 
is less swayed by momentary forces, less sen- 
sitive to distracting doubts. The people in- 
stinctive in this wise moves with the impulse 
of all its generations, in one mass, like a slid- 
ing sea; it trends for the main issue. Our 
country moving so, not seldom found true 
direction and drove majestically towards its 
goal. 

In the same still hours, with the silence 
letting pass faint sounds, in the day beyond 
earshot, the spirit of the place would come 
with them, and engross consciousness. It 
was felt as a breeze of evening after 
sore heat, over lids that close for it, up- 
on lips that smile to it, in hair that lifts 
at its light touch, as it comes suave with 
coolness of streams and clean rock-masses, 
musical at last with leaf-sounds, and exqui- 
sitely soothing all things with freshness. 
And every time that by dying down of sounds 
it flowed into the voids of stillness, and the 
heart stirred to the moving and the going 



102 Domu0 DDlori0 

of it over the face of things, the whole of 
the attending life paused eagerly, and was 
gladdened through all its deeps again. For 
though, after a while, you grew to expect the 
caress of the breeze, yet the sense of strange- 
ness never died that experience great and 
fortunate as this should have been given to 
a wild creature, a hearkener to the Sirens' 
song. A deep gratitude flowed, that upon 
the undeserving graceless there should have 
descended the immeritable grace. The 
senses, drawn from their several distractions, 
were caught up in a unity of purer feeling; 
all in you that was receptive of higher things 
tasted the sustained and still delight. When 
the nature inclines thus in its wholeness to 
a beauty of the spirit, the place of such experi- 
ence is heaven-like; whether it be ward or 
dungeon, it becomes the place of light. For 
these are imparadising hours; and the captive 
may feel lawfully for his cell the rapture of 
that emperor amid his marble: "If there be 
any heaven upon earth, it is this, it is this, 
it is this." 

Whenever through intrusion of outward 
things the charm broke, and the indrawn 



Domu0 DolDri0 103 

senses went apart, there would return the 
former wonder that waters of such fount 
should be diffused; they were lost In run- 
lets, when they might be gathered as one 
power to enrich earth like Niagara or 
Nile. The rivers of the earth created; the 
rivers of the spirit ran three parts to waste. 
And the force from which this influence 
flowed was for the most part set, not to make 
new things, but to make old things anew. It 
might create; it healed only, and restored. 
In like manner other streams, bright from 
the same sun, were squandered; man failed 
to develop his inheritance. Pondering on 
these things, one seemed to hear again 
a young enthusiast, encountered long ago, 
to whom rulers of lands, and leaders of 
class and section, were all alike preposterous 
men, neglecting the diviner helpful spirit, 
which is In every people, but for lack of 
direction, is diffused, or privily expended, or 
runs unprofitably away. Not one of these 
governors and leaders among men but shame- 
lessly Inverted : not one but began with the 
wrong end. The dominant and first thought 
of each was for estate, the second for body, 



104 Domu0 Doloti0 

the third (after huge interval) for mind; the 
heart, by general consent of that fraternity, 
was left in some outer light unbearable to 
them, or admitted only for the part's benefit, 
and thus at a stroke enslaved. But if one 
spark of imagination burned in them (here he 
himself ruddily and finely kindled), they 
would even in that poor glimmer perceive the 
fell inversion, and that to teach men first to 
get, first to covet, first to divide the things of 
competition, instead of first to help each other 
and make their natures rich with loving-kind- 
ness, was as if you should teach children to 
walk first upon their hands. These governors 
were of a savage and immoral ignorance. 
In the name of surviving sense, let them un- 
scale their eyes; let the great gonfalon of the 
Whole stream out above us, and all men 
stand first for it, putting aside, till they had 
learned to serve under it with consecrated 
powers, every greed sectional or private, 
every dividing livery and banner. As surely 
as those old theorists erred who forbade the 
State to sweeten its sour economy with human 
feeling, so grossly was the theory blind which 
eschewed for it, in the general ordering of 



Domu0 Dolon0 105 

life, the discipline and direct use of hearts. 
None but the ignorant could argue that the 
habit of looking first to the Whole in all 
things might not be enforced by a wise rule ; 
all virtue was in great part habit, and it were 
no more Impossible to train the mass of citi- 
zens in altruist purpose than now to implant 
the military virtue, which at first is possessed 
by few, but in the end, taught day by day, 
is propagated even in timid men. As a 
nation was enrolled for its own defence, so 
might it be embodied for the furtherance of 
common good, and there should begin a uni- 
versal service which should lift forward the 
peoples of mankind more mightily in one 
century than heretofore in sequent ages. 
To-day the great host of young men and 
maidens was let pass from youth into 
maturity to be immersed forthwith in 
their own small affairs, coming of age 
for themselves only, without ever having 
served consciously under the common stand- 
ard to prevent and daunt all foes, physical 
and ghostly, of the larger life. But if govern- 
ments embodied this clean power of ado- 
lescence for a work worthy of it in an army of 



io6 Domu0 Dolorf0 

a New Model, they should do more for the 
world than all your bygone kings and cap- 
tains. They should recognise the kindly vir- 
tues; they should cease to waste magnificent 
streams of light. 

The high shame of policy, he went on, was 
Ignorance of this Hght. It had been well for 
these misgovernors and misleaders if they 
had remembered the tale of the great horse 
Bucephalus, who threw all in turn, till there 
came one with wit enough to head him sun- 
wards. There was no true way to govern 
peoples tut to set them first towards the sun. 
But now the great horse was drawn here and 
there by uncertain hands, and turned in 
wrong directions, his own shadow puzzling 
him, till there grew up in him an ungovern- 
able temper. The trainer had never taught 
where lay the line between the civic and un- 
clvlc; It was as If the teacher of a faith should 
forget his creed. And so the young went 
out into life Ignorant, licensed to break, by 
authority, the first and great commandment. 
By consent of governments, if they did but 
contribute and obey, they were free to think 
first of their own selves, their families and 



Domu0 Dolon0 107 

houses, of their classes and their sects; for 
the Whole they were never taught to think, 
and as like as not, if they essayed it, were 
approved less than before, as less calculable 
by the poll, worse units in statistics. "Just 
Heaven!" he would cry, "to live for impost 
and deduction ; to make citizenship a negative 
affair of obeying laws, of not transgressing, 
when by a genial breath they could fan and 
actuate a slumbering ardour of good life that 
might so royally flame upward ! Yet if they 
would but lift their eyes and look from their 
shut windows, what incomings of health and 
willingness should meet their view, the 
kernel-wealth of nations, not drawn out by 
threats, but flowing to them, such easy and 
vast revenue as no Chancellors of their Ex- 
chequer have ever fingered in their dreams. 
If they dared make conscription of the heart, 
you should even see, in our midst not rare or 
pointed at^ or suspected, but the normal hu- 
man creature, the good self-lover of the 
Greek moralist, who seeks indeed for himself 
an advantage over all his neighbours, but of 
one sort only— a larger share in doing well." 
Thus had the enthusiast declaimed, fulgu- 



io8 Domu0 Dolori0 

rant as a young god with tossed-back hair, 
threatening blind rulers with Tower and 
Traitor's Gate. "For at certain levels," he 
said, cooling from wrath to youthful irony, 
"stupidity is treason, high in proportion to 
the peak on which it sits." That had 
been long years since, when he had seemed 
as one thumping a tub. But now, when 
you would agree with him that rivers of 
light are indeed wasted, you could have 
proposed a better place for his scorned 
leaders: they should be brought into a 
hospital. They should receive the didactic 
and memorable blow, which in the case of 
such brittle and dry natures, should be no 
more, perhaps, than the news that the direc- 
tion of hearts was their business. To hos- 
pital all should come, the great officers of 
State, the loud leaders of our factions, there 
to see civic life unpolitically lived. Then 
might a Chancellor have new inspiration of 
finance, the leader of a class discover and 
meditate the Whole, the legist find that prece- 
dent is hemlock, and, at the thought, feel a 
coldness creeping from foot to heart. As 
one pursued the fancy, one was more than 



Domu0 Dolon0 109 

ever sure that Fortune watched over our 
land. As if against that hour she had 
already set the scene. For opposite our 
Parliament House, in full counterview, a 
straight broad bridge between, even now the 
hospital stood prepared. 

Here were but light, unserious thoughts 
on exalted men and matters; but who should 
ask of a brain acutely tilted the sobriety of 
level heads? And ah! one thought, if after 
all there were substance in the young man's 
dream, if Bucephalus might but scientifically 
be turned sunward, what peace, nobility and 
clean fire should descend into our common 
life; after the habit of facing light, all else 
should be added to us. For if but all who 
now entered upon life absorbed in private 
schemes and the small interests of class and 
section, if but all upon the threshold of 
careers had first been taught, each for his 
short term, to look steadily upon the Whole, 
that the orient glory and effulgence of it 
might pass Into their hearts, then might 
indeed begin, upon the great scale alone 
availing, that renewal of the spirit of 
the mind upon which stands temporal salva- 



no Domu0 Dolon0 

tion; then might all men think with the sin- 
gleness of one as to what things are honour- 
able and just and true ; then might the nations 
go forward in their majesty together towards 
one single good. Great goals now beyond 
hope should come into clear vision, as human- 
ity pressed swifter onward; even that bright- 
ness of everlasting peace, the suffering 
world's desire, should shine over nearer hills. 
Even that light should shine. The conflu- 
ence of uncounted wills should carry us within 
its rays. The great peace should be brought 
down. And upon some night of near-de- 
scended stars, by a sign burning in the 
heavens, all men should know her come, as 
once at the coming of a lesser peace, iEgi- 
planctus and Cithaeron flamed, and Argos 
knew the long wars done. 



XII 

BUT If a right self-hood be the key of 
common life, the House of Pain is a 
fair house wherein to correct such as 
may have forgotten or never learned this 
wisdom. For there you shall see right liv- 
ing in a simple dignity, exemplary un- 
awares, a life beautiful in the limitation that 
gives effect, drawn clearly In a pure line 
finely spared; you shall see It, and be put to 
shame, considering the vain Intricacy of our 
lives. There also you shall begin to know 
yourself; the specimen and the thing for other 
eyes becomes objective to its own, as body 
first, but then, the affiance of the flesh and 
spirit aiding, as the whole human creature. 
In the wards, life Is back upon the rudiments ; 
knowledge Is undergoing; in the simple light 
of pain vision clears. The state of the sick 
and harmed Is a patience always, and some- 
times a passion; It is a rich state, by which 
they may be nobly profited. Their natures 
become as still wells, in which lies quietly all 
that time has dropped in them, waiting to be 
III 



112 Domu0 Dolori0 

known; amid much rusting iron and broken 
shard, the recoverable coin of gold. The 
house of pain is the house of truth. It has 
no hanging; its bare walls take and give back 
immediate light, as the day floods in un- 
tempered. Extenuating shades are gone; 
homunculus and muliercula look from these 
pillows. All here dwell with themselves; 
they know how scant their gear is, their very 
narrow furnishing. For as the body is 
tricked out no more, but at the mercy of 
clear eyes, so it is, in part, with the inward 
nature; that also lies displayed. Pain, a great 
teacher, sets forth the character of woman- 
ling and manling; little he misses that is lov- 
able or for contempt; he knows neither flat- 
tery nor malice, showing them what signature 
they have affixed to all their deeds. Day 
after day the portrayed must see the portrait, 
for the most part saddened or resenting, buf 
sometimes with trouble of joy, as when 
Griseldis discerns her royal face. It is hard 
instruction, and the scholar smarts under it; 
yet if there be in him any stuff of manhood 
he shall gratefully remember, henceforward 
loyal and alumnar to this school. 



Domu0 Dolon0 113 

He who has thus learned in open view 
shall esteem less all private teaching in this 
kind, and prefer this more public way. 
There is a familiar essay on the greatness of 
the sick man in his own bed, and on his high 
solitude as he lies absolute in his home, with 
all things hushed about him, engrossing sym- 
pathies. There he lies, by flattering request 
endeared and magnified to himself, the whole 
subject of his thoughts, a great lord, with all 
privileges but one, that of long tenure, since 
by mere act of recovery he shall lose his state. 
But to the patients of the wards this is no 
lord, but the beggar in the lord's bed. For 
them there are neither bushings nor obei- 
sances, but each is cured in his own character, 
and borne with as he bears. Here are the 
true pieties of kindness; here sufferings are 
not enlarged but set in their proportion, and 
by comparison receive their scale: it is great 
equity. Hither it is that the strong soul would 
fain come with its battered body, that they 
two may see out their fate under just law to- 
gether, and no house be stilled for them, nor 
any stream of happy life turned aside. Here 
also is the place where at the last it would 



114 Domu0 Dolori^ 

come to take departure, since homes are for 
continuous life, but this place, haven-like, is 
for going and coming, with wharfs prepared 
for sailings, whence men put out at any hour 
and trouble none left behind. Hither Death 
comes, a civil and familiar client, making no 
disarray. Souls quietly depart to the sound 
of usual labours, and almost unperceived; it 
is so that they choose it, abhorring loud fare- 
wells. "Let us live, laugh and be merry 
among our friends, but die and yield up the 
ghost among strangers, and such as we have 
not known." 

In these ways time, which gradually 
brought strength, brought also wholesome 
learning, of the higher kind for the philoso- 
pher in you, of the primary sort for that 
which was child; and since in his hours 
of day a patient Is nine hours a child, for- 
gotten alphabets of life are taught him 
in this nursery. For all who thus forget, the 
house of pain has glad remedy. If any, 
spoiled by long disablement, would exact 
service no longer due, and spin out his in- 
dulgence, there are ways to bring truth home 
without utterance of words. If any shall 



Domu0 Dolon0 115 

wince under too slight a pain, you shall mark 
him brace his nerve before there settles upon 
the recording face the look which the sorrier 
sufferers know. The teachers are very per- 
fect in this work; they leave to Pain 
the higher woodcraft, but none more dexter- 
ously than they can prune outshoots of char- 
acter. Rambling tendrils of complacency 
vanish ; suckers of green conceit are gone ere 
you perceive them touched. And after a 
period of this handling, the breeze has freer 
course among the branches, the sap runs bet- 
ter In the stems that remain. There is no 
deep indoctrination of the soul; only cure 
for the little lesions of the temper and curva- 
tures of idle habit. In your days of con- 
valescence you were amused to watch their 
deftness, and yourself thus delicately to be 
stripped of vanities. You pictured them 
In the large wards like pruners going 
up and down the rows; you saw In fancy 
the flash of the knife and the trail of 
the lopped shoots behind them; verily the 
ground about your own roots was littered 
deep. There must be royal satisfaction in 
this work, you thought, a delight in making 



ii6 Domu0 Dolori0 

human stems yield better; it must be the true 
cultivator's joy, watching his trees improve. 
You began to understand how natural it was 
that there should be gaiety here and laughter, 
since with good husbandry blitheness ever 
goes. In the first days, you had misliked all 
sounds of mirth; they had rung false amidst 
so much sadness. But now, when a laugh 
sounded, there sang out of it a wisdom im- 
personal to those who laughed; unknown to 
them, it used their gaiety for its own end. 
There was no place here for resentment; by 
gallant service these had won the right to 
laugh near the high throne of Death, as men 
by bravery have won privilege to stand cov- 
ered in a king's presence : of this only a jeal- 
ous cowardice might complain. You ap- 
plauded the wise man's opinion that, if not 
glee and mirth, at least an orderly settled 
countenance in those around were sufficiently 
convenient to a wise and discreet sickness. 
And so wise and discreet you felt yourself 
soon grown, that you could stretch complais- 
ance further, and admit in place of mere com- 
posure a positive and echoing mirth. For the 
sound of it reminds amid wounds and death 



Domu0 Dolori0 n? 

that either life is a brave business, or death 
the better state. Those who might command 
a kindly laughter did well for us all; they in- 
terpreted the courage we ourselves were fain 
to show. At last you came to hate the day 
in which no laugh was heard; you were glad 
for each mirthful voice; you hoped that even 
in the last hour of consciousness you should 
never wish such music hushed. 

The ancients, ranking human qualities, 
held mournfulness a vice and serenity a 
mother among Virtues: they would have 
wreathed a laurel for the lighteners of 
shadows deep as these. For here are up- 
holders of a life often near to sinking; their 
good cheer is as a float to the spent swim.mer, 
and like Leucothea's wimple. Many, al- 
ready swallowing bitter waters, have clutched 
at it, and again struck out for shore. But 
since out of good evil often comes, there rises 
out of this help unexpected harm to on- 
lookers. For the mass of men are wound 
up to a full feeling by none but instant, 
obvious woe; blur it, or delay an end, 
and they run back to apathy. So here there 
is a mischief from this valiance, and from the 



ii8 Domu0 Dolori0 

answer to it which stout hearts make. For 
when the swimmer who was labouring in the 
troughs now seems to sport upon the crests, 
the watchers upon dry ground conclude him 
safe, and comfortably turn their backs. All 
men in their security and their dear pursuits 
are hurriers past, unwillingly reminded of 
mortal things. If that which may disturb 
their ease looms up too near, they quicken 
speed aside, or seize a colourable pretence 
not to understand too well. As they go, they 
sell themselves indulgence for this retirement, 
and ere home is reached, have cheaply ac- 
commodated conscience. When, therefore, 
they are met with the brave dissimilation that 
pain is a light matter, they are mightily re- 
lieved; since the bearer of it laughs and sings, 
they need not stay for him; life calls, and 
business presses. Thus it befalls that the 
stricken within the wards, when they seem 
too easily to attune pain to life, do us in 
some measure a disservice, impelling us on 
our natural incline, where, without them, we 
slide too fast downwards. It were well if 
they more sternly used us for our good, and 
excused us no more by this generous pretend- 



Domu0 Dolotiu 119 

ing. It is a brave thing that they raise merry 
voices. Yet more often far than they do 
now they should cease awhile from catches 
and light airs, sometimes to interpose that 
music of the high pomp of suffering which 
shall stop short the most careless goer upon 
his way, forcing doubt and solemn wonder 
into his soul. For they make that music very 
nobly, since they must ever practice it; but too 
much for themselves, upon muted strings, 
and beyond our hearing. It were better for 
our health if ever and again they ceased their 
muting, and let the strain float abroad upon 
the common air; or if they will not so, that 
they should wholly shut in their tunes and 
laughter, and keep these things also from 
us, to which we have no right. For no man 
may claim portion in their lightness who has 
not in spirit sought to share their burden; 
nor should any sing the chorus of their songs 
who has not sometimes moaned with them in 
the privity of his own heart. 

You should think, hearing ever of humours 
and diversions, each ward were but a nursery, 
with life one long festival, and the yule-tree 
standing there all months through. But that 



120 Domu0 Dolon0 

which IS more constantly set up is the Great 
Term of Pain, about which all must move, 
some drifting towards it, some away; some 
cast before its base, there to sink down and 
make an end. In many wards there is 
neither tune nor jest, but even lawful gaiety 
is stilled. It is good that we should hear of 
these also, and not deem their events foreign 
to our lives. There are wards like this, on 
which a soldier, for most salutary learning, 
has set a door ajar: The patient in the bed 
opposite has wept all night; part of his back 
is blown away. In the next bed lies the 
bravest man whom this recorder ever met : 
the Sister has just told him that his end is 
near; he lies quietly dictating his last letters 
to the friends whom he shall not see again. 
About the bed in the far corner there is now 
a silence. But yesterday they brought back 
to it one cut to a mere trunk by amputation 
of his second leg. As consciousness came 
back, he had screamed in one long agony; it 
seemed, life returned to him for no end but 
to round off his torment. Then Death, not 
always the less merciful, hastened in aid 
against the profounder cruelty of life. And 



Domu0 Dolori^ 121 

all the while there had stood a bowed form 
in that corner, a father powerless except to 
stand with folded hands and hear that rem- 
nant of a strong manhood scream. And 
every man in the ward must listen too, those 
whose fate it should be themselves to founder 
at the Term, no less than the fortunate who at 
last should make Phaeacian land: every man, 
and not one had lived his prime. When we 
would be persuaded for our dear comfort, 
that science has ended pain, it is good that 
such things be recalled; it is good to remem- 
ber that if these walls give back laughter, 
they echo not less with Acherontian sounds. 
And even the sighs and shadows that rise 
most faintly, or are in part shot with music 
and light, are not to be explained away In 
order that our consciences may sleep. The 
surgeon shall have right to his wit, the nurse 
to her laughter; they know propinquities and 
occasions, where in each hour the shifting 
border runs between sun and shade, and when 
it is safely to be crossed. The patient also 
shall jest in his interlude of ease, or coming 
up from the deeps, as it were for breath, be 
free of his poignant mirth. But let no other 



122 Domu0 Dolori0 

have the right, till he shall have striven to un- 
derstand how closely the light and the solemn 
thing here dwell together. What House of 
Pain had ever better beginning than the most 
ancient of all in London town, which the ex- 
jester of a king founded, retired first into an 
austerer life? For this man had tried the 
two sides, the grave and the gay; by St. 
Bartelmy, therefore, a proper founder! 
You might fancy him in a good hour remem- 
bering old arts, lighting up smiles on pallid 
faces and making his four Sisters hold their 
sides. But you believed him one who should 
never jest till sure by his own proofs that the 
hour was good, one who should not bid suf- 
ferers laugh till he knew their groans, and 
had seen with what countenance men die. 



XIII 

WEEK by week the body mended; 
fast. For there were hours when 
sometimes it seemed to mend too 
you came near resenting quick recovery. 
Soon it must bring departure, and you had 
found contentment in this place. With 
mingled thoughts you passed to the conva- 
lescent's joy of doing as feats the former 
usual things. The first adventure was to sit 
erect after that long recumbency, when the 
head swam, and you clutched the bedsides, 
dizzy as if perched on the edge of Carisenda 
tower with the pavement eight score feet be- 
low. Next came the passage of two yards 
from bed to window, an Argonautic voy- 
age, when for the first time after length 
of weeks, you saw earth face to face. 
It was but a narrow strip, upon three 
sides enclosed, but on the fourth contin- 
uous with the ways of men, and there- 
fore wonderful. For beyond the corner of 
the far ward, jutting, as it might be Cape 

123 



124 Domus Dolotig 

Horn, It touched, they said, on gardens, and 
these on roads; and the roads joined other 
roads that ran out in their turn to all the 
compass-points, to end on thundering shores, 
where the sails bellied and the bows plunged, 
bound for uttermost isles and far-off havens 
of the blue sea. The sight of this earth-strip 
was communion given again, and privation 
ended; in your feebleness, you could have 
wept for joy, if eyes, intent on such delight, 
could ever have suffered tears. For though 
in this dread year there were no flowers but 
sad Virginian blooms, accidents and not ends 
^f growth, this was at once enchanted ground; 
its half-rood was the glorious world, and the 
waters redounding with all heaven's light. 
It was more to you in these days than Caesar's 
empire ; memory and fancy never led so brave 
a rout as that which set forth here by this 
peep-hole of a narrow casement above this 
dusty soil. 

For the July days were clear as ever Julius 
knew them; after those privative months, lost 
May, lost June, their loveliness impassioned. 
"Woe unto him that loseth patience" ; but to 
him who loses passion double woe. The 



Domu0 Dolon0 125 

glory of the divine country rose between these 
promontory wards. There breathed the 
sweetness of all fair lands ever trodden in 
past freedom; all visions and all sounds of 
them streamed In on the senses through this 
strait. These were commemorative days, 
when the unforgettable came back and was 
recounted. The begrimed old London docks 
began, and Thames of a thousand cranes; the 
brimmed and winding reaches took up the 
tale and the tide lipping at banks where the 
grey flats stretch seaward. Out from the 
home shores you sailed, Into the narrow seas 
first, and from these Into the broad; past 
Spain and through the Pillars; on by Trin- 
acria and the silt of Nile, down the fierce 
Erythraean. Again on, to white shores 
fringed with palms and Inland hills with 
forests flowering for you like tall gardens. 
Cities rose for you on ancient hills, temples 
on plains, where rivers wound glittering into 
distance, the trees and bushes of the warm 
lands sprang from your scant earth, — olive, 
cypress, laurel-rose. For you oceans and 
lands poured splendour of light. Yet the 
dream never made the actual sad; for sadness 



126 Domu0 Dolari0 

is by comparison, and here one term was 
gone. The present was obliterate and ex- 
punged; it ceased out of existence; a race of 
visions surged, whitened, broke on it, 
drowned it in surfs of light, till the past lived 
alone above bright water. The sound of 
limb might mock at all such rhapsodies. But 
then they had never lain in thirst before 
crawling to the wells of light. 

After this high prelude, joy passed into a 
softer phase ; you knew entrancement, sitting 
quietly in this still place, adoring earth and 
sky. Hour on hour it was enough to sit, 
letting the gladness ripen. There was no 
wish to be set free or to pass beyond these 
protecting walls; the sense of frailness was 
yet too strong. The mind was stayed wholly 
on the satisfaction of this peace; it was the 
state of states, which the faintest breath 
should alter and lightest change needs must 
lessen; let it abide, then, you prayed, in the 
poise of its miraculous perfection. The 
thought rose, rich in comfort, that if age 
knows any comparable joy, it has a treasure 
laid up beyond thieving; if, in brief pause 
and interlude of mid-life, mere weakness 



Domu0 Dolori0 127 

brought such love of calm, how easy should 
the last acceptance be, when all that remained 
of life were pause before last issue? The 
soul had now glory of great ease, not after- 
wards surpassed; the bliss of that first re- 
union with earth made these hours supreme. 
Even when, on a later day, strong and 
friendly hands bore you to a garden aflame 
with roses, of which the first sight was almost 
pain, such seemed their splendour, the ecstasy 
of freedom was never quite like this. For 
between that garden and the house of pain 
there intervened a stretch of road with traffic, 
and, beside it, ranged houses with windows 
full of wares. It was the invading world, 
and every time you went this way, a sadness 
crept in among your joys. Noise of 
thronged life, like clashing of wet cymbals, 
broke sinister upon your music; it spoke 
of time tasked, overshadowed, marred by 
crowding cares which none should any longer 
fend from you; It reminded of an end, of an 
unmooring, when you must push out from 
this haven, and steer a course, and live re- 
sponsible once more among men. These re- 
luctances of the nursling at the gate were 



128 Domu0 Dolotf0 

soon to pass, as the world drew more strong- 
ly, and vigour, reawakening, spurned them. 
There burned up fire of shame at thought of 
idling out one hour too long in harbour; the 
wholesome belief grew, that to a certain 
point of regained strength there must needs 
correspond a point of time when the sheltered 
life should oppress, and seem to take the 
breath from the soul. 



XIV 

FROM that garden of roses there had 
been distant view of field and hill, 
green field, blue hill, with all most 
delicate colours spread to lure the eyes and 
the heart after them. The remembered 
beauty of the far land wrought long un- 
marked beneath consciousness, to emerge at 
last, the one, the omnipotent idea, to which 
all others yielded. You longed to be away 
in the country's depth, scarce looked on since 
war began. It was desiderium, no fancy 
for new things, but soul's hunger for things 
loved before. And instantly, as thought of 
the old countryside took form, memory 
brought back the hour when the storm had 
swept up the clear sky; and a picture framed 
itself of the tranquil place from which you 
had watched the huge cloud rise. For it was 
now the same time of year as then, the 
heaven had the same blue, the earth must be 
awakening under like dews. You saw again 
the old cottage, uneven work of two centuries, 
129 



130 Domu0 Dolori0 

the mole-loved sward before its porch, the 
paths where rose-leaves always lay. You 
saw the lane running past the garden hedge 
to the farm beyond, and ending waywardly at 
a field-gate where, that year, a mare grazed 
with her foal. You felt again the radiance 
of the mornings; the ears caught, clear as 
then, the good country noises, the clucking of 
fowls, the clink of the roadside forge. The 
old land smiled up out of its rest, with every 
feature plain, like the familiar face which 
the lover sees at will through any darkness, 
and brings back over any waste of seas. Into 
that uttermost tranquillity had crashed with 
the most tremendous of all thunders the 
fiercest of all bolts, forged privily for our 
undoing. Then, at the moment of its fall, 
you could not have said what aspect of this 
affliction should afterwards remain printed 
on memory deepest; it was as though the 
fulminate mind were cast prone, disabled 
from its judgment, paralysed from simplest 
use of thought. Now, looking back over an 
interval, you perceived what quality it was 
which had left behind the most enduring im- 
press : it was a heart-freezing strangeness, an 



Domu0 DolPri0 131 

exotic, cold iniquity, as of Assyrian or HIttlte 
minds. Life shrank at the sight of a world's 
order driven down, as it might be, by chariots 
of iron; of shrines battered and breached by 
ram-strokes in the name of God; of trespass 
by sinister and heathen tyranny on places holy 
with great sanctities; of foundations truly 
and well laid for good knocked suddenly 
away, till there was no surety what should 
stand, till elemental hazard reigned and 
probability had laws no more. Before the 
portent of its own nature imbruted thus, hu- 
manity rose aghast; a drear shadow fell 
across the world. 

Autumn had been yet rar when the voice 
of War called over the land, but symptom of 
leaf and branch foretold change and a season 
wearying gently to the fall of the year. In 
the garden borders, yellow and purple flowers 
began prevailing; the warm rose-splendours 
were rarer along hedge and wall. Already 
here and there an elm showed a golden 
bough; the tall pear-trees had tawny flecks 
among their green branches, and stood more 
beautiful than before against the unclouded 
sky. The scene had no far prospect; it was 



132 Domu0 Dolori0 

closed at a near range by rising verdure upon 
which a zone of blue heaven seemed laid; and 
thus, in appearance vertically confined, it 
charmed like a huge tapestry, woven in such 
colours as never steeped spun thread. The 
harmonies of it rose from the sward and flow- 
erheads of rich dye below; they passed 
through grey of stems and yellow and green 
of boughs to that surmounting azure across 
which birds came and went. Nature, that 
year, was all absorbed in languorous and se- 
cret joys so deeply sunken, that at the hoarse 
cry: *'War!" she made no sign, but dreamed 
on in the ancestral peace of the English shires, 
as her wont had been through the long un- 
troubled years. Man alone started at the cry, 
and left his dreams; he knew the call to an 
immense change, almost the ending of a 
world. In the great city, multitudes went to 
and fro, who could not work to-day as yester- 
day, feeling life turned into another channel, 
and the things of their desire clean lost out 
of mind. Many who in those days passed 
between town and country with fear and ex- 
altation in their hearts were now for the first 
time conscious of a discord between Nature 



Domus aDoIotiS 133 

and themselves. They were troubled when 
they came at evening into quiet lanes and 
embowering woods, remembering what fret- 
fulness of strained life lashed at them but a 
short hour ago. Escaped, they asked some 
breath of sympathy; but the leaves rustled 
to a heathen wind; the cool of evening spread 
round them ; the twilight flowed through the 
ways of silence, like deep water under boughs. 
It wounded them that Nature with whom 
they had lived in such close communion 
should calmly thus prolong the old life from 
which they were sundered by one cleaving 
stroke of destiny. It seemed to their unrea- 
son that her colours should now pale visibly 
with their hopes, that perceptibly she 
should breathe sighs for human fates. Had 
they not entered always into her own moods, 
approving her bright hours, striding afield in 
the stern elation of her storms? For all 
this she returned them nothing. In the day 
of trial she smiled in an unmoved content, as 
if she would make plain to them that her 
fortunes were disjoined from theirs, and that 
if any other thought moved them, it was their 
vanity. They were shocked that she should 



134 Domusi Dolori0 

continue at a feast from which ill news had 
summoned them away. Tempestuous days 
should have agreed with their stirred souls, 
and clouds massing along the hills, like the 
cares on the horizon of their lives. This 
radiance was affront. The greatest conflict 
of all time was begun; already the ranks of 
the brave fell like the swathes of this ripe 
harvest; hamlets of France, a few weeks 
since secure as these, were now abandoned of 
their folk and lay pitifully scathed, or heaped 
in ruin. But here the still days yet flowed 
into stiller nights; no sudden roar startled 
men from sleep, nor sound of populations in 
lamentable flight along the roads; but while 
the moon sailed in the calm sky, faint ordi- 
nary sounds rose out of the quietness, some 
distant bark of dogs, or cock's crow before 
the dawn, scarce troubling the profound rest 
of men and things. They chafed at this 
supremacy of old use and wont; all here that 
had life lagged in arrear of the rushing time, 
belated, dull, insensible. Europe was over 
the verge of the unknown, swept towards tre- 
mendous hours. Yet here, through every 
tree and flower, this most personal and hu- 



Domu0 Dolori0 135 

man land of England made no sign. It was 
too hard to them; it was the treason of the 
old familiar friend. Soon they were to con- 
fess their own injustice, and to perceive them- 
selves helped in their own despite. They 
were to feel, in place of anger, gratefulness 
for this sustained constancy on every side 
about them; they were to acknowledge in it 
an example most profitable for their guid- 
ance; they were to cease complaining that 
Nature was natural, and no more. New 
understanding came to them first at night 
under the starry sky; their resentment was 
still proof against the hard light of day. 
Can there live witnesses who shall forget 
those nights when sleep seemed to have left 
the world, and how they roamed out into 
the moonlight where the hideous contrast 
ceased, and death and life were no longer 
far apart? In such a light the youthful and 
wan dead might lie in seemliness, the moon 
not too nearly searching out their hurt, or 
making them a spectacle, like the sun; not 
dwelling upon the particular and several in 
them, but drawing forth the universal quality 
that each mortal bears, till they should seem 



136 Domus Dolon0 

in this last overthrow not more lost to life 
than death. Nature, revealed thus, was 
faithful, an endurer to the end : the hearts of 
the estranged turned again. So should she 
appear before the last dawn, when somewhere 
in this unteachable world (so low had sunk 
their hope) , men should still be lying dead in 
the white fields, young soldiers slain for faith. 
You remembered also how, not less than 
the placid country, the people had at first 
vexed your soul; the natural folk had de- 
meaned themselves like Nature. They per- 
formed their old tasks and went their old 
gait across the meadows; it seemed, they 
would have used the same deliberate and 
heavy tread though the Furies had flown 
shrieking in their ears. In their talk on the 
inn bench, or at their cottage gates, the war 
was episode, a passing theme, intrusive and 
contingent, subordinate to the greater ques- 
tions of wages, rains and markets. Their 
waggons jolted daily along the old ruts, 
driven in the old unurgent way, while over 
there across the Channel, already no wheels 
were rolling but those which carried the sup- 
plies of armies, or wounded men, or huddled 



Domus Doloris 137 

families of exiles flying before the hot breath 
of war. To all with nerves sensitive to 
swift impression, and apprehending minds, 
the rustic seemed indeed what ancient poets 
had called him, a creature born of trunks 
and oaks of knotted grain; his was the 
inhuman calm. To the disturbed spirit, 
shocked by the upheaval of a continent and 
foreboding vast rebounds, this clinging to 
in ancient habit was not life, but a vegetable 
and fibrous growth of cells. This folk, as 
yet touched nowhere near the quick by thrust- 
ing danger, seemed to accept war with the un- 
caring mind of the secure; as dwellers far 
from the volcanic zone, when earth quakes at 
Antipodes, are saddened distantly and faintly 
troubled. The alerter mind was angered 
that the small concerns of usual days should 
for them go equal and abreast with the march 
of epical events; that in a time when the 
pulses of the nations quickened, these rural 
hearts should beat no faster, these dull eyes 
see nothing new. While Flanders home- 
steads blazed and crumbled, their bricks dis- 
solving into clouds of ruddy dust, here folk 
of like farms went calmly about their reap- 



138 Domu0 Dolon0 

ing and their garnering In their forefather's 
way; the goodwives leisurely prepared the 
evening meal after the fashion of their 
mothers' mothers to the third and fourth long 
generation. The great horses drew home the 
harvest through the lanes, just as In other 
years, by places steeped In quietness or 
charged with placid life, by ponds with chil- 
dren playing about their brims, by Inns with 
waggons drawn before the doors, past orch- 
ards where the red fruit waited the gatherer's 
hour. While they saw these things and re- 
membered those, they could have rent their 
garments; their hearts were already torn. 

But in time the genius of this folk became 
in its turn too strong for them. Their spirit 
had honourably made protest; In the end they 
were drawn near to the onflow of this fulfil- 
ling life with Its Immediate hold on things. 
In the surrender they seemed to themselves 
at the beginning as drugged men; it was as 
if some conquering fume from the reaped 
poppies had stolen over their minds, till the 
vision of cruelty and horror which had left 
them sleepless first swam In haze, then grad- 
ually dissolved away. They yielded with a 



Domu0 Dolotis 139 

conscience half resentful, as at some advan- 
tage taken of them, but too weary to begin 
the struggle again, too deeply charmed to 
renew vain war. But afterwards they under- 
stood that a major force had vanquished 
them, an effluence from a stronger spirit, of 
which they had misjudged the power. This 
oak-like stock stood inflexible for their won- 
der; it rustled for nothing less than great 
winds; tempest must rise to wrench its 
branches. Compared with it, they felt them- 
selves frail reeds, bruised at a touch, sighing 
at a breath. Insensibly they admitted a new 
wisdom, learned from the plain minds once 
ignorantly dispraised. They humbled them- 
selves; ashamed, but comforted, they sat at 
hobnailed feet. Once unrepentantly thus 
abased, they perceived great quality of 
manhood in this deliberate steadfast folk, 
so slow to assemble few ideas, so averse 
from giving belief a form. Men of oth- 
er races might use longer sight and swift- 
er judgment; they might follow a whole 
circumference round while this peasantry 
still gaped upon one point. Yet some- 
how in the end advantage seemed often 



I40 2?omu0 Doloris 

with the unhastening minds, which had 
absorbed essential truth, as it were, through 
roots, as the oaks draw February's rain 
into the sap of May. Contemptuous of 
much ado with logic, they had made them- 
selves in peaceful times plain notions of free 
life; they knew the points of Freedom. 
Large was the comfort to the stranger in 
their midst, finding them in the hour of 
danger embattled in a spiritual stronghold 
older than Norman keeps. It was an earnest 
that, come what perils might, England should 
find a way through the dark wood as a 
tracker finds the trail, while her calculating 
foes should theorise away the issue. They 
were glad for that deep instinct in affairs, 
which is but reason long laid down, and ma- 
tured like an old wine. A draught of it now 
rejoiced their hearts. 

If ever afterwards, in a forgetfulness, they 
chafed against rural wisdom, it was no longer 
with the former pride. Some of the fault 
had lain with themselves; they had forgotten, 
what manner of wealth lay in the English 
land and race. Now that they had rewon 
the lost, they could be glad with a whole 



Domu0 Dolori0 141 

heart for the harvest gathered in; once more 
they could follow with content the ploughing 
of new fields, and the ritual of the labourer's 
year. With thankfulness they could watch 
one quiet work succeed another, as if no guns 
had thundered over Flanders since Ramillies 
or Oudenarde. On one side, in this war, 
was strength innate and ever-during, on the 
other, disease of force in paroxysm that 
should itself consume the body through which 
it raged. Therefore, their pain soothed, 
they watched autumn quietly come on with 
the old pomps, lighting up all the land with 
glory of undestroying fires. They saw the 
cottages beat off the rains, and grey homes 
that stood forth clear amid falling leaves, 
impregnable of storms. They seemed to per- 
ceive in the familiar land the stored mellow- 
ness of a thousand years, resting like a bloom 
upon its strength; this was known England 
still, unchanged for Armageddon. These 
also were her true men. As the younger of 
them vanished at the call, going with few 
words, as if about some private business, the 
land of yesterday with its pleasant ease 
seemed also to pass; it went with them, it was 



142 Domu0 Dolori0 

dead, it was gone. Another England rose, 
old England, used to wars, advanced into the 
storming seas like some promontory of her 
own Atlantic shores. 

That England must needs now rise in 
might; there was no choice. A bishop of 
her Church two centuries before had put her 
case in words fit for her long remembrance. 
He said that it was with nations as with indi- 
vidual men; that he who should stand and see 
another stripped or hacked in pieces, and not 
at all concern himself in rescue, commits mur- 
der with his eyes and sheds blood by not 
striking a blow. Our country was now such 
bystander; one course alone lay open: to do 
no murder after that kind. The day on 
which she took that course should remain a 
day for anniversaries as long as her race en- 
dured. The greatest day in a man's life, 
and the best rewarded, is that on which he 
gives the utmost for the most loved: there 
is no day between birth and death in memory 
near to this for sweetness. And the worst 
day and heaviest in retribution is that on 
which he withholds the perfect gift. It is 
the same with peoples, when the hour comes 



Dpmu0 Dolori0 143 

for them to be tried, whether they will do 
the fair deed, or whether they will forbear. 
For souls of men or nations the hour flies 
fast; they must say swiftly what they will 
do; it is past them as the wind passes, nor 
comes with the same gift again. A point of 
time shall fix the repute of a generation; in 
a moment a race may unmake a secular fame. 
It may do mortal hurt to its own body, since 
for the deepest wounds nations are vulnerable 
only to themselves. 

The knowledge that without delaying we 
had made right choice, we, the slow people 
and the unprepared, was sweetness crushed 
into the bitter cup at our lips. Grandeur of 
sacrifice flamed up before us, fire from an 
altar too long cold; it remained with a clear 
glow through the months when the cause of 
Freedom swayed imperilled, and without it 
had gone down after the great causes of 
mankind which men have not upheld. When 
the waters of affliction rose, it burned higher 
with, here and there, as contrary winds 
tossed it, a smoke upon its crest, yet ever 
strong and clear; it shone out over the full 
spate of cruelty and violence now foaming 



144 Domu0 Dolpn0 

through the world. It was the beacon for 
an earth profaned by effrontery of madness; 
the insolence of tyrants under it was lit up 
plain as Xerxes' sin. It was the one thing 
that stayed and kindled when the walls of 
fair life seemed fallen away, the noble fabric 
cast upon a heap, a temple that one heave 
of the earth flings down. Save for the light 
it shed, we had scarce dared make answer 
to the question asked by all succeeding ages : 
what profit in wealth and knowledge, if 
tyranny used both for crime; what gain, if 
throned concupiscence might wrest all to its 
own ends ? How was new science, devilishly 
suborned, better than the old hired simple- 
ness ? A single day sent to annihilation more 
lives than many ancient wars: how in this was 
the world profited? What dark perversity 
controlled man's way, if ever, at his imagined 
highest, lust of destruction grew with power, 
and the rivalry of peoples still found no path 
but riverways of blood? What civilization 
might that be for boasting, wherein Peace, 
daughter of Righteousness was ever and 
again dishonoured; in which, at periods fixed 
by insensate greed and pride, youth went 



Domu0 Doloti0 145 

down in promiscuous death, crowned, for a 
funeral wreath, with the green hope of com- 
ing time? How pitiful the thought that at 
the nod of some poor Picrochole the peoples 
of a continent must go to massacre; let but 
some little country lie convenient to him, and 
his armies should slip leash at hint of flat- 
terers in his ear : "the great Soldan is not to 
be compared with thee." If the human race 
must still give over into red hands the inven- 
tions made for use of wisdom, then verily 
we might pray that a scheme of things so 
marred and blemished should return to the 
elements from which it rose, to be built anew, 
this time divinely. For work of civilising 
arts was all too delible and frail if it brought 
no lasting good to man, but evermore these 
shifts and cancellings, these returns around 
old curves, this negative and cyclic way. In 
our bitterness we murmured now that this 
seen world was miscreation, so deeply flawed 
it stood before us. "Let it go," we said, 
"let It crumble into all its atoms. If the 
loveliest and best must know worst ruin, let 
the whole at once be dust." There were 
hours when sorrow crept up over the heart 



146 Domu0 Dolori0 

like dank air, as the autumn night sets in 
with rain. There were hours of yet dead- 
lier chill, when the warmth seemed waning 
out of all life, as if the central heat of earth 
died untimely, and the one force left to unite 
and bind were such rigour of fierce cold as 
changes the falling stream to ice. For in 
the degradation of continuous war all fair 
activities declined, bright influences darkened. 
The power to take impress of various life 
was starved with life itself. Men, driven 
like pack-beasts on the road, dared look aside 
no more towards things delicate and tranquil; 
their eyes were for immediate ruts and pit- 
falls, all their thoughts for the lash. In the 
long banishment from serenity we grew sav- 
age; we hardened in a harder world. We 
heard less surely the softer echoes, less 
certainly perceived finer distinctions. We 
feared to be made coarser for all time, no 
longer such instruments to interpret as be- 
fore. We were goaded on miry and low 
ways ; it might be, we should never reascend 
the hills. As humanity was driven back to 
the defence of the bare life, rich thought 
should come to beggary, knowledge pine un- 



Damu0 Dolori$ 147 

cared for, as if the benefactor should starve 
upon straw. All powers that multiplied life 
must fail if whole races stood ever at fierce 
grips to make the consummate ruin sure. 
The Black Death had maimed Europe for a 
hundred years. What should this Red 
Death do? 



XV 



THE light of sacrifice, burning at first 
upon near altars, had been withdrawn 
from us as months passed, a remoter, 
whiter flame. It changed only to become a 
star, of which the function Is less to kindle, 
but to guide. It gathered round It other 
great lights, giving new splendour to the 
heavens which in peace had never thus su- 
premely blazed ; there had lacked to them this 
depth of mother-darkness, embosoming the 
white fires. It was so that dire war merited ; 
it became the revealer; In the intensity of 
Its blackness, orbs and constellations were 
recovered, long lost to us in the dimness of 
less absolute night. None living through 
these times might truthfully deny that war 
brought with both hands divers gifts of price, 
of which peace was no such giver. Kant's 
shaming word still held good after the cen- 
tury of our swiftest progress: no power 
known till now had wrought like war to 
evoke certain unfulfilled nobilities which lie 
148 



Domu0 Dolori0 149 

within the promise of human nature. There 
were ways In which war conspicuously served 
both heart and mind : It struck fire from the 
one ; the other It made know foundations. It 
freed right feelings which peace by false pro- 
prieties and strait customs had kept from 
freedom. It went through the labyrinths of 
our life like a conflagration, ruining much 
superstructure, but for the first time letting 
sites appear. Men saw at last what lay 
round about them, and on what rocks their 
cities stood. 

War bonded. Before Its coming, old 
threatening cracks had spread In the fabric 
of the State, new fissures opened. Now, out 
of that dissldence the sacred union sprang. 
Men learned to live after the need of kind, 
forgetting their hard and several ambitions. 
War dealt great blows at meanness. Since 
earth had store to be dispersed, none ever so 
magnificently squandered; he scattered with 
the noble gesture of the sower, a reproach 
to a coffering and self-Indulging age. He 
set the generous impulse of abandonment in 
the hearts of thousands, who learned of him 
first that it is better to be reduced in fortune 



150 Domu0 Dolori0 

than In virtue. He lanced the imposthume 
of much wealth and peace that for fatal end 
was growing Inward. He was kindly also to 
the world's prodigals, knowing them capable 
of the sublime profusion, and sure that none 
could make the great stake with such a grace, 
or more to the royal manner born. He 
called; they answered. They who would not 
live well In a land of traffickers, at his sum- 
mons died well for a land of fighting men. 
War brought vision of essential things. In 
Its prospect the great matters rose up sheer; 
they stood discernible In a wide place; they 
seemed to stand alone. We looked on the 
very frame of things; we rejoiced In the bare 
grandeur; we construed intelligible life. The 
times ceased to consist with subtleness of 
gradation; and the dreams being gone, the 
shadows that affianced them were loved no 
more. One working to allay misery In an 
Invaded land told how the austerity of life 
changed its expression on the tongues of the 
warring peoples. In the minds of men 
driven to bay, the need for long vocabularies 
or words had ended; plain terms ruled alone, 
the necessary signs, — food, drink, love, life, 



Domu0 Dolorig 151 

death. The grand and tragical abbreviation 
of all living enforced clear sense. Few and 
short words sufficed for the resolve of men, 
the immeasurable grief of women. War 
called for Spartan life, for Dorian language. 
None wished, as once, to speak elaborately of 
small things, but with simplicity of great 
ones. In the field, two lines sufficed for a 
hero's praise. Such speech was in whole ac- 
cord with the severity of mass and plane 
which composed the picture of the world. 
For the gentle passages were gone, and the 
tempered oppositions. It was as if a soft 
English landscape went suddenly aside, and 
left Estremadura. Here were cast the white 
light and the black shadow; it was plain 
majesty of things known: majestas cognita 
rerum. 

To sum all, out of the ravening beast came 
sweetness, from carrion honey of the hills. 
The shame was upon man, who would neither 
remove the lion-carcass from his roadsides, 
nor better keep his bees. By his default, 
war still produced the Hyblaean sweetness; he 
was true author of the foul hiving. Peace 
might have cared for the golden combs; he 



152 Damu0 Dolon0 

would not suffer it, giving her a gross ease. 
All the shame was his ; it were bare honesty 
to pay war that due of praise which his own 
folly had made just. For the shame were 
doubled upon his head did he stand forth 
hypocrite, denouncing bloody and corrupt 
war with the carcass-honey upon his fingers. 
Let him rather see to the tenure of clean 
hives, that in future time there might be less 
truth than now in the old sneers that peace 
is for nothing but to rust iron and increase 
tailors, war alone sprightly, waking, audible 
and full of vent. 

For man, awakened to this shame, there 
was but one course: to be otherwise pur- 
veyed. For his life, he must be replenished 
of these virtues; he were as well dead with- 
out them. In the past, the clean hands not 
offering, he had even taken from the foul; 
in the coming time under like conditions he 
would so take again. If there were made 
no worthier provision, war should still come 
and go, and carry off beyond our borders 
that which should be restored on no other 
wheels. Man should live on, as now, shame- 
fully obliged, at each return lowlier degraded. 



Domu0 DPloti0 153 

as better knowing his connivanjce. Peace 
whom he should have prepared and trained 
in the nurture of these high qualities, as her 
life's reason, should still abstain from them, 
liking her sloth and his. If we could learn 
no better providence of these virtues, then 
ever and again upon the summer and the long 
bright days there should come sultriness and 
storm, and the clangour of the iron chariot, 
as once more war brought manhood back to 
men. For Peace should never learn until 
man schooled himself; that which he would 
not bear in his own mind he could not put 
into her heart. There was needed for our 
new history not the mad law of fits and 
starts, the furious blazing up from the inert 
and flickering back to it, but one strong ten- 
sion of our life upon those virtues as supreme 
and cardinal to peace. For till that were 
done, there should be no more enduring pe- 
riods under kind stars than now there are, but 
all should come round again under signs of 
death and the fiery Trigon. 

That such new peace might be, there 
must first be a new pressure upon man's loose 
ease, to awaken and keep roused in his mind 



154 Domu0 Dolori0 

its slumbering spirit. And it seemed that he 
were best constrained, might but the sense 
of the great circumference stir in him, as in 
the hard ancient time when the tribe was the 
confessed source of all goods, when not a 
man but knew his life-blood lent him from 
that fount and owing to it every hour. He 
that so felt, though he beat his clothes out of 
a tree's bark, had yet that which lacked to 
his descendants in their fine linen. For they 
dwelled all dissolute in little septs and kin- 
ships as though they lived at large within a 
sky-line; riches and knowledge they might 
have won, but in loss of that old communion 
they had jeopardised their souls. Bitter 
need there was now for them to feel some 
faster line enclosing, to band them and urge 
inward, a circumference drastic upon the 
sense, that the touch and feel of commonalty 
might once more rule their lives. Then 
might that unfeigned fellowship return, now 
warm in us only amid perils, or about our 
own hearths, or in heat of factions, — return 
to its primaeval use, which were nothing less 
than this, to make our whole race tribal to 
us and our blood its trust. And by what 



Domu0 DolDus 155 

more than savage apathy did we fail thus to 
feel the interdepending and coherence of our 
souls, life being a voyage, and deep waters 
under us, and ourselves shipmates all our 
days? Tabula distinguimur : a plank's thick- 
ness keeps us floating. We are embarked 
together between one cutwater and rudder, 
cabined within one ship's ribs. Yet in the 
calms, or on gently heaving waters, we do not 
rightly feel the committal of our fate, nor is 
the right fellowship engendered in us; there 
must rage a storm before we remember 
that we navigate; the water must be risen 
high in the hold before the shipmate spirit 
kindles, the very rail awash before it has 
burned bright. Then often it is too late; 
Nature, roughly intervening, quenches all. 



XVI 

AT this point thought, meteorically wan- 
dering, was fetched down earthwards. 
Such shipmate's sense was here, all 
around you, manifest in each deed and pur- 
pose; in this place of remedies the catholicon 
or universal cure existed and was dispensed. 
You saw now why the place itself was ever 
as a ship to you, remembering how the first 
entry had been like nothing but your coming 
aboard, most miserable supercargo, among 
beings vital with mutual and contributory 
life, whose anchors were all up for no coast- 
wise trafficking, but voyage down under the 
line and new stars. Here was the sense of 
life interdepending, here the true conclusion 
drawn, that with the right enemy confront- 
ing, peace is not rest but action ; peace is one 
state with war. Not the old war of man 
against man, internecine, but of man against 
the monsters harming his life, greeds, 
hatred, cruelties, envies, violences and all 
their brood, a war knightly and saintly, fore- 
156 



Domu0 Dolori0 157 

shadowed in old championships of legend and 
prowess of your Perseus or Saint George, to 
be achieved at last in the knightliness of 
whole nations. A war in a new sense civil, 
with a new truth passing as a service of lustra- 
tion over the earth, and that not only at great 
interval or period, rounding slow to point, 
but always, and through the continuous reach 
of time. By going a warfare, by that only, 
this spirit were of force to make peace new. 
For that which is out of every fray and above 
all battle shall never pluck man out of wrath, 
but that alone shall begin salvation which is 
down with him in the broil and at his right 
hand the whole press through. In which 
place, pre-eminently, the soldiers of this serv- 
ice stood, amid foul things and shed blood, at 
grips with the old enemies sickness and 
Death; nor less, though they themselves 
might not everywhere perceive It, with the ac- 
complices of these, which more subtly arise 
against the soul. In the sacred impulse to 
beat off and rescue, without count of cost, 
they made their battle likest to the sacrificial 
strife that war is, when he returns out of his 



158 Domu0 Dolori0 

rest with those ravished virtues bright upon 
his helm. 

Certain It was that here homunculus, 
wrecked but magnificently unforsaken, re- 
membered as never till now his navigation. 
He saw that the devotion, at once Ideal and 
practical, manifest here was verily of the kind 
for which creation travailed, of which the 
triumph In all provinces of life should crown 
the world's desire. The old peace of quies- 
cence, of fat ease, of strait devotions, was the 
old war's helpmeet ; the peace of the new time 
should be one with the new war. It was 
therefore that the spirit which now wrought 
under his eyes took on for him momentous- 
ness, significant beyond its seeming. For It 
had become to him the earnest of that uni- 
versal spirit which might reign If men had 
nobleness to pay with their own persons the 
cost of finer life, serving the Whole. No 
matter that the place was small and the 
stream of Its force a runlet; It stood for that 
which should gush out like the fountains of 
Orontes. If but that price were paid, peace 
should be waged against all enemies of human 
health, not against physical alone; it should 



Domu0 Dolori0 159 

give assault first on that chill apathy of man 
for all not of his close company which nar- 
rows and degrades his soul. For the huge- 
grown bulk of peoples spread now scarce 
pervious to the old sense of kind. The loyal- 
ty of tribesmen failed in the vast body; com- 
munities thus swollen fell into lethargy, con- 
scious no longer of their whole selves. The 
quick-felt brotherhood that leaps out to aid, 
that stands the instant proof, lived only in 
smaller groups or factions ; it was internal to 
them and of an excluding spirit, so that the 
virtue which bound close within was a sun- 
dering vice without. To send through the 
immense circumference of peoples the con- 
sciousness of kind once vivid in ancestral 
tribes, this was the world's need and the way 
of regeneration. But by what confederacy 
and in what time should such task be ac- 
complished, commensurate as it was with such 
dropsical and misshapen vastness? This, as 
It was among the greatest problems set, so it 
should be among the most glorious in solu- 
tion. A task that might Indeed seem above 
human scope, though millions were agreed for 
the fulfilment. For how should there come 



i6o Domu0 DPlori0 

lightly a transfusion of the mass with good 
will, when such groups as were now ordered 
in their several distinction were banded for 
the welfare of their own close company, and 
turned almost with a single mind towards 
material things? It was no marvel that the 
sky hung low with clouds of envy and malice, 
rolled up to such head that scarcely were 
there hope of a fresh air to breathe till they 
were burst in storm. Yet all the greater were 
the joy, if, with fair weather come, and 
diluvium sluiced away, the soul of noble help- 
fulness were found laborious yet to search 
out and pierce the Whole, brought safe out of 
that flood by such discipline as that ruling all 
life here. 

By thoughts like these the mind made for 
itself the fancy that the final cause of hos- 
pitals was, after all, the soul. Houses of 
Pain, ostensibly mending bodies, in truth 
amended hearts and minds: they were seats 
of vital learning. The fellowship of spirits 
that guided them and wrought in them was 
ordered for greater end than outwardly ap- 
peared. Here was no mere physical ado, or 
narrow practice, but an expounding of salu- 



Domu0 Doloris! i6i 

tary life, a large and catholic profession. 
Here was confederacy of master and scholar 
for spread of knowledge ; here was not school 
alone, but university, home of banded minds, 
universitas magistorum et scholarium, a 
brotherhood and sisterhood leagued to shed 
light abroad. These were collegiate houses, 
wherein sufferer and server learned and 
taught together. The end of their research 
lay far beyond scope of restored limbs or tis- 
sues; the range of It was nowise confined to 
the little county of surgery and physic. Many 
labourers In these walls might deem they 
served for manling's bones; manling might 
deem he suffered for no greater thing. In 
truth, they were here for a larger end, not 
less real because few always thought of It, 
and some even went forth again Into the 
world, their time ended, without having 
understood what august purpose they had 
served. Hospitals were universities; they 
taught. The conviction of this grew from 
deepening root, until amazement held you 
that behind such thin veil of the ostensible, 
the real In Its clear line and salience should 
still remain unseen. It has been said of other 



1 62 Domu0 Dolori0 

universities that the wonder of their exist- 
ence is lost through our mere thoughtlessness. 
They have shone in our midst so long that 
habit makes them natural sights beside our 
way, in our passage disregarded. The fire 
of intellectual life burning in them is so long 
kindled, and tended in such detachment, that 
amid the world's flaring business it goes un- 
marked. Yet if ever there were an activity 
of men to surprise the bygoer into a pause, 
and make him marvel, it were surely this; for 
what is it but almost miracle, that in a world 
hot after utilities a whole society should live 
unanimous for unmaterial things, and in the 
single greed of knowledge? Miraculous one 
day it should appear, when man shall have 
set him down awhile to rest, and slowly it 
shall grow wonderful to him that while he 
went heavily, a surfeit of material things 
clogging his soul, a few, living in a rare ab- 
stinence, lightly and easily worked on. One 
day all universities should be known for 
places of light. But now we are all 
passers by, less in malevolence, than by fault 
of unimagining minds, speaking of these 
places as indeed good and worthy to be en- 



Domu0 Dcloris 163 

dowed, but established for a life apart from 
us, and a show for strangers. In the former 
years, when those intellectual fires had shone 
for you, it had waked scorn in your younger 
heart that man, having a mind wherewith to 
compare and judge, could thus indifferently 
regard the high beacons, all the while using in 
ignorance their unacknowledged rays. It had 
passed the understanding of fresh youth that 
for immediate ease or profiting he could let 
all that light's beauty and warmth of splen- 
dour go. And now you stood yourself in 
the like case, convicted of the same engross- 
ment, as one who had kept the mule-track 
over the moor, blind to beacon and star. The 
House of Pain was beacon, hearth and foun- 
dation of sound learning, nor quite so undis- 
coverably concealed that with the profane 
crowd you should have gone by profanest. All 
this generation had gone by, well-willing, but 
incurious and unaware what scope and range 
the light had, which they misunderstood. We 
had all pressed by together, rapt in the ap- 
portioning of little honours and precedences, 
or accounts of mine and thine ; so full we were 
of small ambitions, we scarce marked these 



1 64 Dpmu0 Dolon0 

gates, but to hope that In our own matter we 
might never go under their lintels. The 
high significance, the large gift of light, now 
felt so fluvial to you and exundant over your 
ways, had been less In that strange past than 
the candle of your strait affairs; all the ful- 
filled theory of selfless life had been to 
you no more than an unpleasing business 
with anatomies, or a dexterity to cut and 
bind. Though once you had esteemed 
yourself a lover of every hearth that shed 
light, you had clean neglected these. In a 
fastidiousness, or a fear, or a misliking you 
had wilfully turned and looked away. For 
that offence shame now fell on you. The thin 
blood of the patient tingled in your veins. 

So that contentedly you now hailed the 
happy violence of fortune which had flung 
you into the light, ensuring a long stay, and 
time to try for your degree. Here was intro- 
duction into a new world and atmosphere of 
which the memory should last out your days. 
The event might be compared with none but 
that which long ago had opened to you the 
valley-heads of thought, where seemed to 
stand high over life peaks signalling dawn, 



Domu0 Doloti0 165 

at their feet outflow of waters quick from the 
rock, and everywhere all manner of un- 
touched dewiness and freshness under large 
heaven, to entrance the amazed, glad mind. 
Here, not less than there, was slaking of the 
soul, was illumination. If, after progression 
of dull years, your pale maturity could answer 
with a tithe of that old marvelling delight, it 
seemed proof absolute that the cause of the 
new wonder must be also great. And it 
seemed sad fate that a mere hazard determ- 
ined our entry into the place of learning. In 
this university, teaching things of the dawn, 
none might matriculate but by incurring first 
hurt or disease. It was a perversity that to 
graduate and pass out with honours, you 
must come in disabled less or more, with 
health impaired, limbs unsound, or mind un- 
settled, and, to crown all, delivered like a 
bale or carcass, the arbiter of your arrival, 
Chance. 



XVII 

PAIN Is a great teacher in his own 
house, though few of those who lie 
under him will at first have it so, since 
the mind must be weaned to his dismaying 
method. They are for long space in no mood 
to take his usage as fair pedagogics; rather is 
it applied ferocity; they seem less taught than 
set upon. To men dazed and like hurt wild 
creatures. Pain is at the beginning but a wild- 
er beast. They are themselves helpless prey 
for every feral shape that fevers loose on 
them, wolf, tiger, bear, vulture clawing and 
beaking. Or in the hours when they are left 
spent, as it were mere substance of man dis- 
persed, brayed or molten, with one single 
attribute, to suffer through each atom, he is 
dire elemental force impelled through them, 
now fast, now slow, now hot, now cold, con- 
tinuous now, now intermitting, urgent to 
crush, to wrench, to drill, to burn, to freeze ; 
never the same, yet always perceived one na- 
ture, as it were a serial fierceness. Not until 

l66 



Domu0 Dolori0 167 

some strength is regathered to them, and 
selfhood stirs to a resistance, does Pain be- 
come personal as themselves, their own an- 
tagonist. Yet still he remains power of 
cruelty, and worse now, as a hard calculator 
set over them, a president of their small fates, 
passionlessly hurting by some superhuman 
law. For he will seem to pause at his leisure 
that he may lay bare all fibres, or spin out 
immeasurable suspense, till life aches under 
his touch through all its moments. Hours are 
as days, days as years, before there is any 
good divined in him, or any purpose but to 
harm. 

To many, a change of mind towards Pain 
comes only when strength, flooding back from 
ebb, restores in them the old vanity. A day 
dawns when the oppressor seems not to de- 
part, as of custom, at his good pleasure, but 
to draw off, as one discomfited. It is enough 
for the complacent human nature. Now 
manling is himself again, the revulsionary 
creature that would be on the summit at one 
jump from the base. For do but hearken to 
that which goes forward in this atomy, that 
but now lay overborne, its ghost half given 



1 68 Domu0 Dolori0 

up. Before him, before his right arm, so 
please you, and his great soul, Og, King of 
giants, flees over Jabbok. Sancta simplicitas, 
how wonderful a thing is man! "The foe is 
fled, he shall come no more; here hang his 
trophies." O sanctior, O sanctissima! But 
Pain has a short way with all this simpleness. 
The boast yet on his lips, homunculus is down 
again, more abject, under a hand that might 
pinch him up like dust. He lies under the 
great hand, sad enough for his haste to vaunt, 
and in so far touched by grace. And hence- 
forward his education goes more by an in- 
ward way; the body is still tried, but the heart 
and sense are also wrought upon. First he 
perceives himself arch-fool, being but a pinch 
of life, to have provoked so masterful a 
handler; and next it is borne in to him that 
this adversary, who might have ended him but 
did not, was more than brute, or heavy king 
in Bashan. For having vanquished, he took 
no manner of advantage, but went quietly 
away; and after many days came again, and 
with great patience taught how he should 
have been opposed, and how, not forgetting 
due homuncular proportion, manling should 



Domu0 Dolori0 169 

yet learn to strive with him, and in time get 
stouter thews. Now follow bouts which end 
not with abasement but with exalting; till 
manling (if English of the elder fashion, and 
thinking biblically In stress) recalls a wres- 
tling once begun between a frailty and an om- 
nipotence which strove not to destroy but to 
render wise. 

At this stage Pain Is wont to grant a 
breathing-space to the tired small creature, 
that he may take bearing of his road and 
have glimpse whither it may lead. Now first, 
the forest somehow threaded, light peers In 
under low boughs. Into that light the path 
of chastening may lead the endurer out, over 
rich vales, up slopes towards lit clouds. To 
the cloud-border only the strong go; many 
may reach the wood's edge and look forward. 
In the heart of the wood none knew how far 
he should attain; light restores prospect. 
There comes with it a happy sense of life 
promoted and raised higher, such as a child 
feels, granted privilege of the upgrown. Your 
patient has already joy of great association; 
a spirit has descended, by whose touch life 
is braver. For Pain is now perceived a 



1 70 Dpmu0 Doloris 

spirit, and the encounter spiritual; the hard- 
est fighting fell to the soul. The hour when 
these things grow clear is gracious; life seems 
to move through it from Nature's order into 
the order of Grace. 

In such interlude it had been conveyed to 
you that the limit of your learning was 
reached, and you should go no further; 
whence at first a childish jubilance and recoil 
into fleshly ease. But second thoughts bade 
you soon question the gain. You had dis- 
covered how infinite in this place might be 
the loss from abridgment of experience or 
forfeit of a single lesson; discharge now, 
with the best all unattained, began to have 
more and more colour of misadventure. It 
seemed to follow, from the light usage meted 
out, that you were not of those chosen to ex- 
cel, but set down unworthy of the supreme 
discipline; this spoiled all your ease. The 
deeper you saw into the event, the surer it 
became that you had missed election. Your 
inheritance was taken; in your helplessness 
there had been fed to you a pottage for which, 
consciously, you had never asked. It was a 
bitter time; the body now had enough, but 



Domu0 Dolori0 171 

the spirit hungered. While the sense of dis- 
illusion remained quick, you sought to be per- 
suaded that though you had failed of the 
great prize you had yet some profit of this 
schooling. There was a pleasure in going 
over the few things you had been suffered to 
learn; they were mere gleanings, yet they 
should make grist. 

You had learned first that endurance Is 
less according to strength of body than to 
valiance of spirit. For as physical perfec- 
tion or defect invigorates or impedes the soul 
in its endeavour, so the spirit of the mind af- 
fects the body; a brave soul will keep it silent 
in red flame, a mean one will let it cry out at 
a singeing. And as endurance is according 
to the spirit, so is pain conditional to endur- 
ance. For when the brave spirit puts forth 
all its strength, Pain yields; when there is 
flinching, he will press fiercely. You well ap- 
proved it now that surgeon and nurse are 
slow to say what pain is borne by this patient 
or by that, cautious to the extreme point of 
doubt. They pause, suspending judgment, 
even in presence of an open nature. And 
when a close heart is before them, they will 



172 Domu0 Dolon0 

not even conjecture; for it Is true in suffering, 
as In all affections else, that a closed heart Is 
of an undiscernlble and deep secrecy: 

non chiaro si vede 
Un chiuso cor in suo alto secreto. 

In such case, how should they tell what re- 
inforcement Is held back, to be thrown for- 
ward suddenly Into the midmost, changing 
the whole face of battle? In the astounding 
hour they have seen such changes wrought, 
and by those who, to outward seeming, had 
no longer fuel in them for one flicker of 
the soul. They have been witness to victories 
past all imagining, and to like defeats ; having 
in their day learned prudence, they hold their 
peace. Before they may decide what is 
borne, they will somewhat know that which 
bears, a knowledge which neither a face nor 
a demeanour will infallibly yield even to 
trained eyes. The issue is with that which 
hovers out of sight, beyond the excruciated 
flesh, their thumbed primer. In two bodle: 
of like health and strength, equal wounds will 
not cause equal pain, for the one may har- 
bour a great heart and the other a small, and 



£)omu0 DDlori0 173 

pain frames itself to the hearths measure. 
Antlnous in his gainliness shall do sorrily be- 
side a starveling of a man, a forked radish. 
Here are diversities not scrutable by rule or 
method. For to inference from studied symp- 
toms there must be added a spiritual diag- 
nosis, which in perfection comes only to a few, 
by the way of genius. Healers who command 
that power will compare the sufferings of 
different patients only if they have knowl- 
edge of the course run by each, and if it 
may be, of ancestral lives. Something the 
surgeon and nurse would therefore know of 
the manner in which each has used the in- 
heritance of life, and, above all, how borne 
prosperities; they would divine the nurture 
of the will set up by each within himself. In 
a word, they would know the character im- 
pressed on the inward substance, of which the 
outer is often but a case misfitted, or a mas- 
quer's skilfully composed disguise. 

The best of them, perhaps, would first ad- 
mit that in this riddle of suffering the patient 
is expert and they themselves of a lay igno' 
ranee. Their tricks to avert or conquer pain 
give them no pride; their immissions into the 



174 Domu0 Dolori0 

blood, their fumes drowsing the brain, lend 
far too short a power; they feel themselves 
shadowy and weak helpers, sprinkling scant 
drops from Lethe; the lasting help and 
anodyne is unadministrable by their hands. 
That must rise from a wellspring far within; 
and whether it shall succeed or fail, rests not 
with them or with their wisdom, but with the 
bruised remainder of an incarnation which 
lies and gives no sign. Innumerable times our 
perverse human nature must thwart their 
practice. For on one day, as they consider 
the battered sheath of a man in which the 
good steel seems broken and rusted half 
away, there is drawn from it a sword of the 
spirit fit for St. Michael; and on another day, 
in a great scabbard lightly dinted there is 
found a blade of lath. As you revolved these 
things, this matter of the soul's encasement 
seemed well nigh impenetrable even to aided 
sight; wisdom had no rays to determine the 
spirit in the clay; here there was no science, 
but an haruspication. You wondered if the 
sense of impotence in such things bred melan- 
choly in wise men and women, thrown back 
thus upon layman's insight, which is rather of 



Domu0 Dolori0 175 

humanity than science; or whether they were 
consoled by the humour of their state as 
seers, oracular in repute, but in truth loose 
diviners. You fancied them in their con- 
fabulations amused together like Roman 
augurs, with meaning smiles exchanged, 
shrugging their shoulders often over blank 
lots drawn by the great masters, or over rare 
triumph of a guess, in the nick of time saving 
their credit. For the affair was between 
manling and Pain, neither surgeon, nor doc- 
tor, nor nurse having in last resort any say, 
but these two deciding by themselves, apart. 
For these two it was who drew the cord tense ; 
they knew for what strain it were fit; none 
other knew but they. And all the reward of 
such trial should seem likewise the patient's 
due, the sense of achieved masterdom and 
control which is glorious in the heart of man. 
For the surmounter of many towering waves 
swims all aglow towards new storms; and if 
great stubborn odds turn hardly at the elev- 
enth hour and wane from him, his own 
strength lasting well, he has something as 
near ecstasy as nature in her extreme trial 
may attain. To live out those moments when 



176 Domu0 Dolori0 

the balance trembles upon the turn, is to feel 
manhood sweet, and to have crowned prime 
of days. 

The faith that such victories might indeed 
be won, confirmed belief, that Pain is not 
infinite but has his set end, attainable by the 
humblest among the steadfast. There had 
been an hour when you dreamed that your- 
self by immense effort might just have 
touched it, before a swerving force bore you 
away, never to approach again. But now this 
great Term of Pain stood vague for you 
and remote, as ideals are wont to stand, in a 
luminous mist, unapprehended. Immunity 
might spare your flesh; but here was a poor 
exchange : ease of a few nerves for the lost 
chance of chances. Your heart was sore after 
the thing denied; there was a wound in the 
rejection. For this might well be irretriev- 
able loss, such great occasions not often re- 
turning, or coming in years weaker in re- 
sistance, when there is profit in them for 
effectual life no more. Your pilgrimage of 
pain was untimely abandoned; and at first you 
had exulted. Only when the other pilgrims 



Domu$ Dolon0 177 

went on and left you, did you perceive them 
bound, not for any wayside shrine, but for an 
august place and earth's navel; you had 
missed a Mecca or a Rome. 

It was vain now to expect full knowledge. 
To the Term each must go himself, feeling 
with his proper senses, looking with his own 
eyes; this pilgrimage is not by proxy. 
You were to find that those who re- 
turn have rarely made their vision real to 
others, either because the power failed them, 
or the will. They who would tell most ad- 
ventures of life will be silent over this, wheth- 
er it is that some awe clings about the mem- 
ory, or that an excluding pride of initiates 
holds them, or again, that they have the mod- 
esty of the valiant, and inbred hate of words. 
The explorers of the last, the limitary men, 
are not at pains to recount; for them talk is 
waste sound, there is a seemliness in silence. 
In these dire days the land was full of the 
supreme endurers ; they had suffered woes un- 
dreamed by the famed Ithacan, who dis- 
coursed too much ever to have borne as they. 
You were to learn that those with the rich- 
est hidden treasure were for the most part 



178 Domu0 Dolori0 

good guards of it; but for your own defeat, 
it had been a joy to see them avert the ques- 
tions which, inwardly, you were half shamed 
to put. The young Peirithous did not remem- 
ber, when you asked, what things he under- 
went and beyond hope surmounted, offering 
for young Theseus the life which the Fates 
refused. And you must honour the forget- 
fulness, praising him in your heart that he did 
not bring out sanctities to do you pleasure. 
You came to know at last that from these and 
all their kind you might look for no clear 
light; only a gleam left in their eyes from 
something vanished would flash you now and 
then pale suggestion. But if from this side 
was little hope of knowledge, then from none. 
You were left with the glimpses which had 
shone for you at the furthest point of your 
short advance, visions under the dark boughs, 
and much too far away. Yet if near experi- 
ence might not be, the faith at least was worth 
the getting, that Pain cedes to the stout heart, 
that he stays upon a bourne or verge not 
touched alone, but leisurely frequented by 
the dauntless, who walk there unovercome. 
It was a good faith, and comfortable for 



Domu0 Dolori0 179 

manlings. To have learned of Pain in his 
own house, though it were but as a speller- 
out of rudiments, was great event in a life un- 
accidented heretofore, and, in the words of 
one who learned all his days, not put in the 
way of extraordinary casualties. 



XVIII 



As time passed, there dally increased in 
you desire to praise the high discipline 
of healing and tending; long might it 
live, long flourish. Praise to it and to all 
orders and powers of helpfulness allied with 
It; and such Increase, that where now they 
stood defensive In the gate, they might here- 
after more and more prevent the invader, 
fighting for the Whole beyond the walls. Of 
all that fair alliance It seemed to have natural 
priority and advantage, since It wrought al- 
ways about the very roots of humanity, so 
learning incomparably well out of what 
ground and by what husbandry we flourish. 
Calm science, watching over it, taught It dis- 
passionate care. It neither favoured nor pre- 
judged; nothing weighed with it but deliver- 
ance by the honest use of truth. No lure of 
false emotion turned it aside or diffused its 
central force, but It went discerning things In 
their nature, and following their discovered 
law. Its host had the coherence of an army, 
1 80 



Domu^ Dolori0 iSi 

but was embodied against evils only; it did 
not take the field In a bad cause. It had the 
constancy of a Church, but no doctrine tempt- 
ed It at any time to disdain flesh and blood. 
And there had been given to It opportunity to 
quicken and enlarge service, denied by Na- 
ture to an army and by Institution to a 
Church. It drew Its servants not from a 
part of human-kind, but from the whole; it 
did not shut from Its work the half of the 
human race. It brought the priestess into its 
tem.ple, the Amazon into its war. 

Therefore this discipline was of the future. 
It was anticipatory, it challenged time, not by 
Its forward sight alone, not only by Its high 
collective aim, nor by the capacity of its spirit 
to pass over Into other fields, but also by the 
firm balance of heart and mind which it com- 
pelled. In the past there had been no suffi- 
cient thought of such poise in the common 
life; moreover, the two sexes within them- 
selves had failed of it, each, as it were, list- 
ing to a side, a little through its own pro- 
pensity, but more through an unnatural sever- 
ance of main life-interests. Imparting a false 



1 82 Domu0 Dolori0 

bias. There was no general understanding 
or control : the male was let verge unchecked 
to dry cults of reason, the female to emo- 
tional excess. Whence, as extremes, there 
walked abominable before us the mindlessly 
cordial woman, the heartlessly mental man; 
as means, a host of slant and ill-balanced 
natures, secured in any gait to which they in- 
clined under the bad law of letting be. 
The future should enforce a saner principle 
for the demeanour of the whole kind; as pre- 
liminary to such new order, this discipline 
seemed greatly to forerun. There was set up 
under it a constitution for all who laboured 
in its precincts; the heart was enthroned, but 
the reason named executive minister, without 
whose counsel in matters of community the 
crown might never act. In all hours of its 
service this constitution was obeyed; beyond 
them, the great human charities reclaimed al- 
legiance. There were many to urge that by 
such control personality suffered loss, above 
all in amenity and sweetness. But the loss 
was less real than fancied, and not compar- 
able to the gain on other sides; and posterity 
might not judge amenity in our manner. It 



Domu0 Dolori^ 183 

was objected to the women of this service 
that they stripped themselves too bare of 
tenderness; the critics most ready with this 
charge were for the most part themselves 
women. But the answer came from those 
best qualified to judge, from the sick and 
harmed In the hospitals, who declared they 
found these hearts In the right places still, 
and with enough gentleness for their need, 
x^nd the most just of the objectors, those who 
did not clamour from beyond the gates, but 
came in and shared this life themselves, 
learned also to understand, and often in the 
end honourably recanted. Called to aid dur- 
ing the early stress of war, they confessed that 
at first there were times when they stood dis- 
mayed at a sisterhood inhumanly impassive 
before things which It was agony to see. The 
Minerva-like serenity on these brows af- 
fronted their pride in a sex responsive above 
all to suffering; they were startled and es^ 
tranged. But once participants, they dis- 
covered plain necessities, and chief among 
them this serene calm. They quickly learned 
that upon this not least victory hung; that a 
hospital was indeed a ship of war, where in 



1 84 Domu0 Dolori0 

time of action the battle-quarters of the feel- 
ings are below. They found that here the 
heart was not dead; it was battened down 
when the drum beat to quarters. In a few 
months they vexed themselves no more over 
Minerva's pulse; they battened their own 
hearts down. They now knew the blindness 
theirs, not forthwith to have seen that in this 
profession no emotion must cross a duty. 
The work was like a game of skill, needing 
the quick eye and sure hand. She whom feel- 
ings overcame helped not the sick but the sick- 
ness; she carried two loads in place of one; 
the odds were, she should fall. None knew it 
better than the sick themselves, whether of 
the self-pitying kind, or of the selfless; with 
one voice they prayed for a calm strength 
about them, and to be delivered from your 
aspen tenderness. Emotion manifested was 
pure mischief, harming them all. For the 
first kind were distressed to cause distress, 
and insensibly took hurt In their finer consti- 
tution. The second discovered In a care too 
visibly displayed a menace for their dear 
selves; and since their souls were already 
poured out as water, they would have about 



Domu0 Doloris! 185 

them nothing dissoluble more, but rather a 
solidity upon which they might be stayed. In 
short, the patientry were of one mind that 
softness must never impede skill. Euripides 
utters their thought for them when he says 
that between the tender and the tended there 
must be no feelings which touch the life's 
marrow, but likings of a detachable kind 
alone, such as may be drawn in or loosed 
without immoderate joy or pain. For other- 
wise the strength of the tender will give way 
when the strain is full : 

Over hard the burden, if one soul must 
hear the pain for two. 

It should appeal to all of them alike that the 
words are set in the mouth of a Greek nurse, 
pointing the moral in her own person, one in- 
effectual with her case because, for pity of It, 
she let her own heart bleed. 

This service with Its humanity and Its hold 
on coming time needed no common praise. 
For such high exemplar, the commendation 
must be lofty and sustained; for a valiance 
fighting out on all sides towards the future 
there must be praise of large embrace. This 
was a power of the new age, radiant of a 



1 86 Domu0 Dolorig 

light destined to flow beyond present bounds 
and prepare world-wide healing, for the 
common health was not freedom from chill 
or fever, but the expansion of all faculties in 
a harmony of clean life. If the light was 
now too much prisoned in narrow places, if 
they whose final destiny it was to serve health 
alone must toil to cure preventable ills, the 
blame lay not with them, but with us all, 
with the careless, blind communities, rulers 
and governed, whose duty it was to root out 
causes of disease from our estate, whose 
practice it was to let them be. It was high 
merit that those whose true career we spoiled 
had any pity on us, and wrought their best 
for us in this adversity, waiting the day of 
justice. For such desert there must be noth- 
ing short of panegyric, the praise that the 
whole people hears. And since it should 
be a praise sung clear and echoing, some 
lord of music should begin it, one who 
should have known the house of pain, 
and himself lying in the wards, have 
heard in the time of his own suffering 
the deep note haunting there, unseizable 
of the common ear, but of his haply to 



Domu0 Dolori0 187 

be captured. For if, as they say, the con- 
tent of a great music may gather to one note, 
enlarged about it into a theme or heard sem- 
blance, and growing out again from that first 
growth to infinite expansion, what noble des- 
cant should not he make upon such a 
ground or base, fetched from the borderland 
of life and death, where often, in your fancy, 
sounds from the timeless stray over into the 
solitudes of time? 

The great service was honourably imper- 
feet; it had its known flaws which, of its hon- 
esty, it would amend rather than hide. It 
was too near to our humanity not to draw 
some taint from us. Though the light of the 
morning gleamed for it, ancient shadows yet 
lingered under its roof-eaves or in the angles 
of its courts. Some of its new wine was in old 
skins patched and leaking. Its common life 
might not everywhere attain to the unbroken 
harmony: there were discords, clangours, 
snappings of tense strings. You might 
not doubt that among its representatives 
there were some to compromise its name. 
It might be surmised that sometimes it 
must bear with masters of its arts who 



1 88 Domu0 Dolori0 

did not know the art of living, with 
rough-minded men, with fanatical, with ab- 
surd. Rumour told that there might still here 
and there be found a Diafoirus esteemed for 
jargon, or a dunce fee'd for an urbane air; 
and that many were the reputations magni- 
fied by mere pavonian strut and spread. It 
must needs yet be harmed by damaging parti- 
sans, the hot enthusiast, the chill bigot of 
routine. It might not always escape scandal; 
in its great garden, as in every other place of 
ordered growth, were still found strange 
roots of bitterness, ill company for sweet- 
flowering souls: 

Amongst the roses grew some wicked weeds. 
But were there in very truth all these dis- 
creditors; lurked there indeed among its 
thousands the zealot of the knife grudging 
habeas corpus^ the matron tyrannesse, the 
Sister stiff over precedence, a mind drawn like 
a Bill of Rights ; moved there amid the throng 
of nurses more types of foolishness than 
Plautus might find names for, the passively 
unspiritual of this spirit, the hirelings at 
heart, wage-takers, doers of the least; stirred 
there In this multitude the mischievous In of- 



Domu0 Dolon0 189 

fence, backbiters, tarnishers of hope, mock- 
ers, hate-f omenters ; pattered there along the 
wards the unwinged feet of those not born for 
this nobility, the posturing, the hare-brained, 
the pragmatic, the narrow, the obstinate, the 
deciduous of will — all manner of misem- 
ployed and undevoted virgins ; were there at 
this very hour throughout the wide jurisdic- 
tion this v/hole delinquency presented — were 
it even so, what then? Why, no such dread- 
ful matter, or the sense of proportion is 
dead within us. None knowing from with- 
in the house of pain and the quality of its 
people should feel his loyalty disturbed by all 
the bead-roll of follies and defects. For it 
is plain to him that even in the gross and 
average this people is of the great kind. 
Against one surgeon seemingly turned Cree 
for science, he shall put scores of incisive 
but kind men; against one vainly garrulous 
physician, hundreds who act before they talk 
and do both well; against the tyrannesse is- 
suing from her antre, the lady of the lamp; 
against the percher on a dignity, the great 
family of Sisters who stand upon nothing 
but a true service ; against the deciduous, all 



190 Domu0 Dolori0 

those whose leaf was always green and In 
memory is imaginable only so. 

The larger praise therefore should stand, 
not lessened by these things, but rather quick- 
ened at thought of the great maze of stum- 
bling-blocks and snares through which thishost 
miraculously passed in order. Guilt of an old 
injustice recoiled upon ourselves, who feared 
the people of the house of pain, hurrying past 
averse because they and their work waked in 
us images of dread things : it was the coward- 
liness of an age too soft with comfort to 
endure truth. At sight of them we thought 
too easily of man as grass that the scythe 
mows down in the green. We summoned up 
too well their forerunners of frightful mem- 
ory, those old sawyers, cuppers, drenchers, 
and Megaeras of foetid wards, who still out 
of their graves harmed their profession. We 
could not forget the time when it might be 
soberly maintained that the hospital slew 
more than the disease. Though the chil- 
dren of a new day had clean issued from this 
past, our timorous eyes yet saw its shreds 
upon them. But it was in truth to ourselves 
that the past clung, the past of primitive 



Domu0 Dolori$ 191 

man. They had been seen by us as forms 
of evil omen upon our path; did they bid 
good-day, it was almost memento mori. So 
reasons the savage; ours were primaeval 
superstitions, aboriginal thoughts. Deep in 
our consciousness we believed that they had 
knowledge abstruse from us, powerful to mar 
our days. Confusions old as man's mind, 
made out of them wielders of magic. They 
could noose our very souls in snares; they 
had us at the utter disadvantage, helpless as 
penned herds. The surgeon was medicine- 
man, an unscrupling practiser; the nurse, 
witch-woman, Circe of the many simples, 
changing us to dumb beasts. A wilful igno- 
rance kept up backward, men in an age of 
Stone. These pitiful and small causes work- 
ing together to estrange, insensibly had ef- 
fect. Larger and worse was the contented 
blindness by which we were not aware that 
we misperceived. Argo was launched for us ; 
we saw Charon's boat. 



XIX 

THAT larger praise of the panegyric 
should come when the right encomiast, 
hurt to the right point for under- 
standing, should be brought in under the kind 
star. Your lesser business was to praise what 
yourself had seen. It might be objected that 
you looked from too fixed a point, as one who 
should describe a village from the stocks, with 
Its main life passed behind his back. It were 
more just to say you were as one lying dead- 
still on the watch in a glade full of birds. 
Such naturalist has no need to quest after 
knowledge; if he is well posted, it comes to 
him, and on wings. His very fixity Is his 
gain over the impatient searcher whose foot- 
step scares before he comes to near vision. 
You were posted well enough upon ground 
well chosen, and by force of things made 
patient. You stayed so motionless and so 
long, that the life of the place went un- 
constrained about you, as if you were not 
there; and a chirp or flutter out of sight at 
192 



Domu0 Dolon0 193 

last told experience more than ignorance 
in the beginning learned from full view. 
And having in truth not birds to watch, crea- 
tures apart from us, but beings of like kind 
and reactive to idea, you served by your mere 
presence and the challenge of perceived sym- 
pathy to wake a responsiveness in their life, 
quietly deepening and quickening its expres- 
sion. There arose thus a still confluence of 
minds interacting; imperceptibly you elicited, 
and from remoter fields of evidence as the 
range of sympathy Increased. The patient, 
observing in this manner. Is indeed mis- 
named; he is agent above all, a f etcher forth 
and a provoker. Are his means of action 
slight? They are in proportion subtle, work- 
ing Insensibly and unresisted. The helpless 
in truth exert a power, and aid the helpful; 
evertuating themselves, they draw out vir- 
tues. In this way they come In the end to 
feel an ownership In the qualities which 
they would praise. They themselves have 
aroused, enhanced, diversified; who then 
should certify so well as they? Your pa- 
tlentry was ever adept In these elicltations. 
The tests which it applies must stand: its 



194 Domu0 Dolotitf 

knowledge is real, and won from the quick. 
Often exacting and perverse, it tries each 
side of character; it provokes the souls of 
those who tend it by a child-like malice and 
naughtiness of spirit; if they are approved 
in its final judgment, be sure they have ex- 
celled. For it knows that to succeed against 
its pillow-arts and bed-rail sophistries, they 
must have qualities no less diverse to match 
and thwart them; tenderness and long- 
suffering alone shall little avail. They 
must have something of the diplomat and 
of the soldier, of the judge, the advocate^ 
the artist; they must have learned a skill 
to discriminate and compare, to read nature, 
to sum up and decide, to persuade unper- 
ceived and quietly use dominion. But if 
once they have the upper hand of it, they are 
gone far to have the measure of men, and so 
measure all things. For whoever shall thor- 
oughly know patients and yet calmly rule 
them, shall have no bad key to all humanity; 
from manling sick they shall argue to manling 
sound, forearmed against his guile. The 
patient, at his best heroic, in his middle moods 
glides from that height, sometimes immeasur- 



Domu0 Doloris 195 

ably far down. Peevish in his discomfort he 
seeks for a spoiled self the benefit of each 
doubt, in convalescence a wheedler un- 
abashed, one who in a moment screws up the 
slack string to the right pitch for sympathy, 
and should cozen pity out of a heart of stone. 
She who can rule such with an even mind, 
preserving humour and the way of gladness, 
shall proceed accomplished citizen of any 
larger world you will, so difficult in this mi- 
crocosm is her life of every day. And if a 
poll were taken of all at a given time lying in 
the wards, up the land and down, whether 
success in the hard task out-balanced failure, 
you felt very sure the more part should vote 
Aye. Which for you should end the matter, 
since from decision of this ward-mote there 
might be no appeal. 

It resulted that the qualities to be praised 
were various as the planes and angles of 
human character turned ever and again 
towards the nurse by sick and restless minds. 
To recite all were a false step in the prais- 
er, who should thus dispose his audience 
ill, and wake prejudice. But since the many 
virtues were included in the few greater, you 



196 Domu0 Dolori0 

would choose one of this large kind, that 
it might stand out simply, and neither weary 
nor offend. You would choose candour; and 
the more readily, that it was a virtue which 
patients themselves help to make by a certain 
abhorrent action which they exert, ingeminat- 
ing by their slyness the love of all that is most 
contrary, and an abiding preference for truth. 
But this singleness of mind had its own great- 
er cause and more constructive, in their daily 
enforced envisaging of those high realities 
in the light of which souls grow. The neces- 
sity, under which they were, to look straight 
and to accord their speech with sight lent 
them an openness and proud simplicity which 
seemed to draw into itself, like wide water, 
all colour and light of day. You thought of 
meres under the chalk-downs, hued like no 
others because the underlying rock is white. 
Such was their nature. And there arose the 
wonder whether this virtue might not spread 
with the growth of its cause in a world en- 
lightened, and passing out into new spheres, 
end the mental discommunion of two sexes, 
till now incompatibly disposed to knowledge ; 
whether by some new dignity of an existence 



Domu0 DDlori0 197 

better shared, it might not antlquate the 
old minuet of minds that set to each other 
in prescribed figures as partners in a formal 
dance, but to the last step were strangers; 
whether there might not spring In a new soil 
a new tree of knowledge with a fruit firm to 
the core, not fair only of rind like the apple 
of Lot's Sea, of which travellers have said 
that though outwardly it may promise quench- 
ing of thirst, within it has only silk and air, 
or that it is good for two things only, to stuff 
cushions and kindle fires. 

The quantitative problem solved, the quali- 
tative remained, a worse perplexity. For 
since here was a service well nigh perfect 
after its kind, the praise of it must be almost 
pure, a thing which the world suspects. The 
mind of man finds absolute praise too sweet a 
manna; there must be a touch of bitterness, 
or light aspersion into credit. So far you 
could go as to admit those lesser froward- 
nesses by which Nature preserves from the 
unbearable perfection. It might conciliate 
the suspicious to be assured that In a pro- 
fession where success turns on human qual- 
ities, the paragon is the general failure and 



198 Domus Dolon0 

the first to miss this praise. You could al- 
low that these whom you commended as free 
from grave offence might not be above 
healthy outbreaks of the provoked spirit; 
you might guess that in their private hours 
they could sometimes forswear patience, 
fume, rebel, and shake fists at heaven; and 
you should be glad it were so, for who never 
breaks out wins seldom through. But for 
all this you should not abate a jot of praise, 
since all of it should make more laudable yet 
the long tenor of duty day after day sus- 
tained. Let the admission that such storms 
might rage soften suspicious minds; and 
there should be few so hard as not to follow 
in regard to nurses Dryden's sentiment 
towards all women, that he had rather see 
some of them extraordinarily praised than 
any of them suffer detraction. But whatever 
suspicion might decide, your full praise should 
be affirmed, and find enough credence by 
the good help of Chance, for there were 
still left in the world a few believers of the 
fine credulity, to whom a praise at once abso- 
lute and true is not beyond conception. And 
Chance, which had introduced you to this 



Domu0 Dolori0 199 

people of the House of Pain, should discover 
you a sufficient score or two of such hearers, 
to whom you might pass on the introduction. 
You vowed on your discharge to seek after 
those purged ears. But meanwhile you were 
determined to praise face to face, most thank- 
less task of all. Like all the truly laudable, 
these might take praise once, to please you, 
but would not bear it twice, though you were 
fain to give it twenty times, even then their 
hopeless debtor. They were elusive, and 
like wild creatures; to approach them you 
must fetch many a compass, crawling, turn- 
ing, going oblique, screened always from 
open view, and with success perhaps one day 
in ten. It called for a very stalker's skill to 
catch them off their guard; but there was a 
charm in the hard pursuit, and the practice of 
this epaenetic became sport. This turning 
away of theirs was no pretence, as at first, in 
some unworthy moment of suspicion, you 
might have deemed; it was a genuine aversion 
of the whole nature. They who live tensely, 
caught up in a zeal, have no care of praise. 
Perhaps it is to them a tinsel, incongruous 
upon a labouring soul. Perhaps, as having 



200 Domu0 Dolori0 

walked beside the vast of trouble and meas- 
ured their smallness by it, they are impatient 
of any tongue which confounds the authentic 
scale of things. Or perhaps they are of the 
blessed, who have come, they know not how, 
into the great harmony, and are distressed by 
flattering voices; who are not to be praised 
by articulate sound, but some hinting breath 
must come to them out of Nature, and a wind 
in the reeds whisper to them that they do 
well. 

It was for these reasons that success came 
so hardly, and only when they were taken 
unaware, as would befall them at rare times. 
So one day, you took at a disadvantage, one 
of the less astute, who stood at first troubled 
and at loss for words, repeating that she and 
her companions were of the ordinary, and in 
no wise singular in virtues. And soon, re- 
covering from the surprise, retorted on you a 
charge of blindness, as being one who could 
not see faults plain to all other eyes. But 
you were so elate over your good hunting 
that you let her think to have the better, con- 
tent to have perceived defect after another 
manner, as the irregularity which makes 



Domu0 Dolori0 201 

the charm. It was still almost a small hour 
of the morning, and the chance had come 
through your question as to certain roarings 
from a great chest which during the past 
night had spoiled the general sleep. It 
seemed that a giant, coming back with rever- 
berance to consciousness, had struggled like 
Enceladus, and that she and another, to keep 
him down, must needs sit on his blankets, 
heaved up like Sicilian fields. A power to 
cope at once with the emergent or eruptive 
was the first of qualifications for this service; 
yet it had seemed to you that perhaps there 
might be some slight touch of the unusual in 
such depression of a giant by mere girls, and 
for this cause you had insinuated your praise. 
But here it was, received less as homage than 
as a dust in the eyes, to be rubbed out swiftly. 
*'We are ordinary girls!" was what she said; 
and you must conclude that at a moment's 
call to leave some task of the light hand, thus 
to bear down the seismic, and having done it 
to resume, was nowise removed from the 
common round. It impressed, that they 
should understand it so. But in a sense which 
they neither meant nor saw, they might in 



202 Domu$ Dolon0 

truth be right: wa»- might well have proved 
it. The quelling of emergencies compared 
with which this sedentary feat should be as 
nothing was usual to our women serving on 
the edge of battle, yet all would make similar 
reply about themselves, that they did the 
work under their hands, and so were 
ordinary people. Opportunity might vary, 
but the spirit was one; the small feat was 
earnest of the greater. If ordinary had that 
sense, the thought formally inspired; it had 
splendour. The country of such women 
should never be overthrown; and if volcani- 
cally upheaved, this strength commanded by 
clear souls should mightily help to press 
eruption down. 



XX 



AND now this most unpralsable com- 
pany was to pass out of your exist- 
ence, if never out of memory. Very 
various they were In temperament and in 
powers, and only In the great cardinal quali- 
ties alike. When should you forget a Matron 
In mind and body least ponderous of that 
honourable order, yet bearing a load of re- 
sponsibility as if it were a bird perched on 
her shoulder? This was a ruler who pal- 
pably ruled, and without timidity. You 
deemed her one who, doing justice, should 
not fear hatred, hearing the murmur of 
wrong heads as music. Within her sphere 
she held dictatorship, in Pain's houses, where 
there is stress always, decision must out- 
run debate. Keen as a sword, her mind was 
as bright; as a blade reflects the ray, at the 
right incidence she would laugh out like a 
girl. She could feel with the strange levity 
which, between pains, hovers in the wards, 
the pathetic foolishness of the afflicted, when, 
203 



204 Dpmu0 Dolori0 

under reprieve, they hunger after nonsense; 
when the bow, strung dangerously tight, 
springs back to the counter-curve. She suf- 
fered It, she laughed with It, knowing It bet- 
ter called alleviation. What else might she 
do, being herself abettor, chief hedger of the 
fence that sheltered us from the world's 
troubles, silencing anxious consciences with 
command of Idle days? She took on herself 
the burden of our small quotidian cares, of 
our food, our covering, all our reduced life's 
business. It was as If she prescribed for us 
this thrice-blessed silliness, and watched us 
drink like wine that which In truth was medi- 
cine. She was wise In many ways, and most 
when she seemed it least. Thus at first you 
would think she wasted time, talking at your 
bed's foot on all matters and sundry, as If this 
were her day's chief affair. But afterwards 
you discovered a design In it, both profes- 
sional and human. It was on your bad days 
that she flowed with talk. She knew that to 
float a heaviness you need a flood. 

And when should you forget Noctiluca, 
rallier of souls in darkness and In eclipse; 
or rather, surpassing driver on the rough 



Domu0 Dolori0 205 

paths, for in all of us there was more of mule 
than star. How many nights, with her 
light lash, had she not stung despondency 
away? She could dispel our lethargies and 
shame our fears; her veterinary art was such 
that there was not one of us, at all able to go, 
that she would not keep upon the track. 
Never did soul more vivid frequent shadows, 
or one whom the spirits of darkness, if such 
there be, would more gladly have undone. 
How often did you feel it shame that so 
brave a succourer should live, as it were, be- 
tween the corner and the hole, unknown and 
unapplauded. Yet perhaps she repined less 
for herself; for she was combative and sharp 
with ironies; and in this place she served a 
cause which she could neither combat nor 
mock. This noble and obscure service might 
all the time spare her bitterness; in work 
more conspicuous but less great, you could 
conceive her rebel, and spending in some bar- 
ren conflict the life now given to grace. 
Here, though she might mock the regulation, 
her heart would not suffer defiance of the 
law; though cold to constituted powers, she 
could love the cause for which they stood. 



2o6 Domu0 Dolori0 

Thus loyal to her end, she was safely con- 
trary in herself, and could indulge her con- 
ceit of a conscience dead. A nature finely 
luminous and planetary in the remembered 
darkness of those nights, which, just because 
she moved in them, were splendid to have 
known. 

Nor should the company of this ship go 
unrecalled, the non-commissioned nurses 
drawn together from the four quarters of 
the country as if to show the strains yet bred 
between our seas. There was Severiana of 
the Midlands, in aspect often austere, but 
less stern than she seemed, one on whose 
face a curt smile might mean refusal, a 
frown, as like as not, indulgence; a pre- 
cise mind, guiding infallible hands. There 
was she of the South, long home-tied and 
kept from this career, for which not the less, 
by some predestination, her unwitting par- 
ents had given her birth. For she came to it 
foreordained, and for long success, bringing 
a maternal soul. Of the younger genera- 
tion, two were of the Principahty, the first 
not capable of any gloom, but like the 
girl of the Greek idyll, with the spring in her 



Domu0 DPlori0 207 

eyes, very Oceanid, a swimmer in Cambrian 
tides. The other was of more mystery, the 
truer Celt, with a voice musical as hill-brooks, 
where they sound low over the deep pools, 
rounding the rocks; a nature needing to be 
fathomed, with something always further to 
be divined; often merry, more often with- 
drawn into herself, and inspiring content with 
silence. There was their comrade from the 
East Riding, abrim with the kindly Saxon 
virtues, genially beaming over all things 
through large orbed spectacles, the windows 
of a friendly spirit: the sight of her upon 
dark days cheered hke a doctor's good re- 
port. There was a girl from the North West 
so full of natural sympathies that learning 
might find in her scant room. But the years 
were before her; this all-puissant discipline 
here beginning for her might work transform- 
ing change; and as it could simplify the sly, 
might now by contrary elaborate the simple. 
There were among the rest two yet to 
be remembered, each foil to the other. 
One had a Spanish strain in the blood, and a 
great gift of deliberate movement, even in 
the muscles that controlled her smile; the 



2o8 Domu0 Dolori0 

other was instant In mirth, and might have 
closed a whole peal of laughter before that 
Iberian smile was well begun. Among all 
these none had the accomplishment of some 
in the great houses, who will respond to any 
patient's interest, discuss Beethoven or du 
Bellay, and delimit the boundaries of the arts. 
It had been privilege to have encountered one 
of that company; but you were well content 
with minds less versatile and singly devoted to 
helpful life. Not all unworthy to be named 
with them was that catastrophic ward-maid, a 
popular philosophy incarnate, London's own 
cheerful child. Sometimes for old sake's 
sake, but in memory's blessed silence, she 
should repeat for you her demonstration that 
all things change and are replaced; that In 
the end worst chaos passes, and the old order, 
coming back, looks new. 

So this lesser House of Pain wrought on, 
lost upon London's edge, to all the centripet- 
ally inclined and circlers round mid points a 
place out of existence, as deep in obscurity of 
unsignifying space, as If set In the desert 
which Is named Abode of Emptiness. So It 
should have been to you a few years since; 



Domu0 Dolon0 209 

but pain opens many eyes. Even now the 
mind had not returned from Its astonishment 
that In relative Influence on a life a hospital 
of no wide fame might stand In a comparison 
with a university; the two had seemed so 
wholly incommensurable In all things, that 
none but an eccentric fancy should have set 
them in one line of thought. But comparison 
there was. In scale, In manifestation, in vari- 
ousness of all endowment polewlse apart, 
they were yet vehicles in their different ways 
of the one ultimate power for those who have 
to live, — the vital ; with any equality in that, 
whatever their disparities, they must in jus- 
tice be compared together. Once in a cathe- 
dral lit with a magnificence of mediaeval glass 
there had risen before you far-celebrated 
windows, vast, and storied up and down 
their traceries with narrative and symbol in 
colours of all dye, so intricate that sight 
must climb and cross, descend and climb again 
to follow the tale, drawn on and never 
tired by the charm of interpretable things 
nobly framed and presented. Conceiving 
that after such vision there could not be 
within the same walls any other inlet of light 



2IO Domu0 DoIori$ 

worthy a glance (and no guide taught you 
better), you thought straightway to go out 
with the one great memory to dream of. But 
on the way some influence led you apart into 
an aisle; it was a definite urging, as if fingers 
plucked your sleeve. There, at the far end, 
suddenly seen, was a window low and 
plain, with carrels of a single colour; it had 
no multitude of forms, nor any diversity 
but such as that one hue might receive from 
uneven thicknesses in the glass, or irregulari- 
ties of plane. But this was azure of fathom- 
less air, blue of zenith sent immediate down. 
It was the clear soul of colour; it held you 
motionless; and the thought flashed up that 
here was the equal of that magnificence. 
There were two greatnesses, not one; and to 
have gone forth ignorant of the second 
should have more than halved your joy. The 
university and hospital stood in a like way 
beside each other. The first with all contrast 
and richness of lights had seemed enough 
for one existence; it might be that of your 
own motion you had not been at pains to seek 
further. As, but for a hint of Chance, you 
might never have seen that soul of colour, 



Domu0 Dolori0 211 

so, but for the didactic blow, you might have 
missed the spirit of the House of Pain. 

Such were these people, whom to know 
was very great acquaintance. It seemed so 
great that you could not but tell of them, of 
the place where they worked, of the order to 
which they belonged, fountain and source of 
so much that they were. It was perhaps a 
trespass and presumption. Even were it 
time of peace, your claim to speak of hospi- 
tals must have been small while knowledge 
thrice as wide was silent; it was far smaller 
now, when the Term of Pain was advanced 
ever further into darkness and the host of 
those enduring to the last daily increased. 
You had but crossed the edge of the heavy 
shadow; all these went into its heart. You 
had but touched the thunder-cloud; they 
passed into it and were folded round. They 
suffered wherever their hard chance made 
shift for them; you had known a place of 
election in its happiest hour, when all flowed 
smoothly; nothing had gone backward, noth- 
ing awry. Your one advantage over them 
lay in being of an age more contemplative 
and patient of a long stillness. You had not, 



212 Domu0 Doloris 

like these, been brutally scythed down in 
youth by war, to fret over a life's path divert- 
ed or an ambition swept away; with a resid- 
ual span too short to care for, you could give 
your mind placidly to surrounding things. 
You did not, staring at your blank walls, feel 
surging in on you from four surfaces the 
enormous weariness of the ages, as a poet 
felt who, years ago, lay thus in a Scottish 
ward, sore for his prime sucked from him by 
vampire hours, and defiantly singing his loss. 
Legions of many armies now knew all that he 
knew, and far more, the misery of youth 
maimed, the uttermost secrets of Pain's 
house. These had facts enough for the real- 
ist's worst hunger. You could never pass 
such test in the extreme knowledge, or de- 
scribe all to the last phial or lancet. But it 
was not your pretension to sate realists. You 
wanted to tell something thankfully about an 
inconspicuous greatness, and the effect of it 
upon your mind; how extraordinarily the 
spirit of it had come up out of quietness with 
an omnipotence of seizure and invasion, and 
a light broad as dawning day; how the faith 
held you fast that this power could only be 



Domu0 Doloris 213 

possessed by that which had great afEnlty 
and inheritance in future time. For you, this 
spirit, though it wrought in a corner of ex- 
istence, was kin to that which must one day 
save the world, unless the fabric of our state- 
craft were doomed to fall in ruin, or sub- 
side meanly into its dust. With all its 
energy and life, it kept the balance between 
heart and mind which gives to emotion law 
and to reason soul. It lived for science, but 
a science touched with internal fire; it lived 
for feeling, but a feeling masterfully reined. 
By virtue of that balance it was of the force 
ordained to move the human mass and make 
the world new; which force was never mind 
alone, but a mutuality of powers composed. 
This spirit distributed through other spheres, 
and changed to meet new needs, should, like 
that Roman service of lustration, transform 
the face of things. Could you but shadow 
forth the effect upon your mind, you should 
rest contented, for the aim was not to paint 
an interior Dutch-fashion, complete with eve- 
ry pot and pan, but to suggest an immanence 
of light. Not the detail, but the light of 
the House of Pain was principal and sover- 



214 Domu0 Dolori0 

eign to its understanding; and the problem 
for your despair was in any way and however 
faintly to convey that which here had quick- 
ened the being, and searched it far down into 
its depths. In any way to make imaginable 
this luminous quality and grace should suffice 
you; for this influence that sustained lives 
was fine as the air and beyond your art to 
render. But there was no escape from the 
attempt; an inward force drove to fulfilment. 
It must be made, and that before the old 
cajoling world urged desistance. For most 
surely the cajoler should tell you soon that 
you had dreamed; that as you lay scanning 
your blank walls, "like some old battered 
sphinx chin-deep in sand,*' you had made no 
wonderful discovery of truth, but seen mirage 
over waste, forms without substance appear- 
ing and vanishing away. It would say that 
sands and a warm sun together work strange- 
ly upon the eyes ; and being of a great art in 
persuasion, it might prevail. It would ad- 
vise restriction to material things that please 
the outward eye; it might end by imposing 
its prudent point of view. Here, near the 
event, the rasher course seemed the way of 



Domu0 Dolon0 215 

honour. It were better to fail, reaching after 
things unseizable, than to succeed with ex- 
actly depicted gear. While therefore this 
faith was fresh, you must strive to convey 
the light. 



XXI 

IT was the day of going free, Imperfect 
splendour, in the West threatening 
and uncertain. In the South of a limpid 
storms. The car, reaching the straight road, 
leapt forward, and forthwith consciousness 
was drawn Into an ecstasy, lost to all things 
save joy in speed and the voice of the large 
air. The small machine might have been the 
sun's chariot; sight and mind were dazzled 
and confused together. From the right hand 
and the left Images rained In and were flung 
off; perception, incredibly belated, caught 
none ; before it could define or fix, new waves 
were on it, and upon these fresh waves In- 
numerable from the green main beyond, each 
rising behind other, away to the far line of 
the sky, the one thing stable and fast. All 
senses were alight, life seemed audible with- 
in, a murmuring, humming flame. After 
months splint-bound or crutched, so to move 
like an arrow in the blue, — who should say 
what it was? In vain those with you laughed, 
216 



Domu0 DolPri0 217 

refusing to this moderated course the name 
of speed; you heard and did not hear, giving 
heed only to the music of the divine air roar- 
ing past. They know not speed who know 
not slowness ; the full secret of this truth was 
yours. And still the green country rushed 
up on either hand, parted, and went behind, 
a wake without sound. Only with a long 
climb to a ridge did the first elation fail; as 
the pace slowed, the hedges ceased to leap 
past dolphin-like, the trees seemed pausing 
to be known. Now at last things were seen 
in their old habit, familiar lives, the wayside 
grasses, the hot-head thistles by the ditch, 
briony twining. Now from the top the Eng- 
lish land spread far on each side of the 
ridge; on the right, fields gleamed, roads 
wound, hills dwindled to a sky-line confused 
in haze, a county's length away; on the left 
were near hills undulant and pine-crested, 
with hamlets here and there across the hol- 
low, nested far down. There seemed noth- 
ing left for life but to draw deep breaths and 
sink sight in space and verdure. 

But in the moods of the shattered, from 
zenith to nadir is but one step ; and in a brief 



21 8 Domu0 Doloti0 

round, experience knows all fates. Just when 
life needed the uncompared delight, pureness 
of joy was spoiled by contrasts and likenings 
officiously revived by memory, or sent down 
by envious gods. Suddenly the skies dropped 
coldness, earth breathed answering chill; sun- 
light faded. The moralising mind, which 
you had thought for this one day quiescent, 
broke in on the pure joy of sense, never in all 
your days less welcome. It contrived by sym- 
bolising arts to make this scene of richness 
drearily speak of loss. An importunate re- 
membrancer, it might have left, you thought, 
this one day free, this one hour. But here 
were the reveries of the wards come after 
you. A voice seemed already to have made 
plain that all this fair land outspread was but 
a figure of the incorrigible old world, ignobly 
relaxed, inertly opposing all the high con- 
straint which was the lesson of the House of 
Pain. Were they likely ever to be forsaken, 
this old world's vagueness and diffusion, by 
which it was ever neutral to its own good? 
This soft-edged landscape, these aimlessly 
outreaching hills, all this luxuriant unzoned 
existence told the same tale. Such was your 



Dpmu0 Dolon0 219 

weakness that you could not defend joy; the 
voice triumphed. Behind this beauty was 
indeed a world straggling to all its aims, in- 
curious, uncohering; a soulless, ineffectual 
bulk of things. These uncertain lights and 
shadows, changing over the fields, seemed its 
disguises, those confused echoes risen from 
the farmsteads were its voice. Should any 
spirit of clear flame ever pass Into that of 
which the very life was thus eternally to 
spread in a rambling hugeness, indifferently 
null? There you sat, abstracted out of the 
past delight, your weak body in relapse, your 
spirits answering to its frailness. But at last 
the humour of things brought help : here was 
but one more irony; the recovered world, 
after Its manner, had broken its own spell. 
You smiled to yourself, thinking how Noctl- 
luca would have understood. You heard her 
saying: "What else should common sense ex- 
pect ?^^ 

A raindrop falling warned to depart. The 
engine renewed Is sound; there was a glide 
forward, then speed again. In the recovered 
joy of It, light once more began to overcome 
shadow. It might be gain that the sum of 



220 Domu0 Dolori0 

things was yet mere mass. The hindrance 
to creation lay not in the formless but in the 
ill-shapen, not in the flatly unaccomplished 
but in the doubtfully half-done; when the 
mountains were brought forth there were 
few preparatory hills. Therefore the spirit 
destined to mould should be glad for a mass 
thus confusedly spread abroad; upon this it 
should accomplish greater work. It was com- 
fortable to believe that a descent of the spirit 
was even now at hand. Millions of men and 
women in the greatest house Pain ever 
reared were near the hour of their dis- 
charge. These also should come forth 
on a high place to survey a world spread 
wide below, and perceive it no longer habit- 
able to any who had come up out of chasten- 
ing such as theirs. And these should not, like 
a sole watcher, gaze powerless over the im- 
mense diffusion. They should have power 
to accomplish if they would — they, millions 
of wills. They should not know the humbling 
of the single soul before its own doubt, or the 
despair of helplessness. They should see 
their scope clear; they should rise and go 
down multitudinous, and from strength to 



Domu0 Dolori0 221 

strength make their heritage new. Here was 
a consoling dream, nor vain, but such as might 
be justified by a theory of human fate. It 
proposed no certainty, but good chance; no 
finality, yet an end. Fate sanctioned no pre- 
sumption of the best; a sober belief in better 
things it might not disallow. Man had not 
the extreme sight; he were best not seek, by 
his own lights, to define the uttermost. Be- 
fore the man there was a mist, before the 
beast a wall, only before the god clearness. 
So the god had vision; the beast content, the 
man change. His destiny was not proven the 
meanest; nor was it sure that, could he 
choose, he would prefer the others: pride 
should deny him the beast's part, knowledge 
of himself the god's. Wisdom therefore 
bade him keep his lot of change, as that fitly 
sorting with his powers and his endeavouring 
soul. In the good age he should look for the 
worse; in the bad seek auspice of the better. 
There was no pledge from heaven that great 
days should endure forever; but to trust 
that they should last long was human duty. 
None might have greater trust than he who 
comes newly from the House of Pain, fresh 



222 Domuis Dolori0 

from a discipline which works, as perhaps no 
other, for the need of a better age. For the 
future will demand of each good citizen such 
use of personality as this discipline already 
asks of those in its control. It will bid all 
strive for the whole, not with the sole mind 
or heart, but with each in its several fulness; 
it will call on them to remember a far goal, 
yet to walk the while by the science of life, 
going forward step by step ; it will exact that 
spirit of sacrifice which builds up and does 
not destroy true selfhood. These things he 
has seen the service of the hospital teach; he 
doubts if in their balance and right relation 
they are so bravely taught in any other place. 
To him it seems that the future is already 
served in the House of Pain. For there the 
spirit of best promise for times hereafter is 
manifest and actual now. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: June 2009 

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