ill ciass T^ 55Q3 Book L^ ^ tL ^ C#yriglTt]^"_\2LU COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS BEING THE VACATION THOUGHTS OF A SCHOOLMISTRESS BY MARY TAYLOR BLAUVELT Author of " The Development of Cabinet Government in England " BOSTON SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 1911 ^'^:<^ Copyright, 1911 Sherman, French <&«• Company ©CI.A300328 TO NEENA, CLAIRE AND KATHARINE FRIENDS WHO HAVE "HELPED ME TO GOOD THOUGHTS" ' ' Love is the white heat fusion of the intellect, sensibility and will" ANNA EUGENIA MORGAN Late Professor of Moral Philosophy in Wellesley College ' ' Love is the fulfilment of the law' ' CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I In Cambridge Backs 1 II Friendship ....... 6 III The New School Mistress ... 28 IV The Artist . . . . . . .51 V The Artistic Temperament . . 76 VI On the Criticism of Others . . 98 VII The First Great Commandment . 119 VIII Immortauty 143 IX On the Writing of History . . 168 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS It is by the waters of the Cam, in Cambridge, England, that I write. I am an American teacher, and I came over here this summer in the hope of being able to do some research work in English libraries. Scarcely had I landed when I was taken ill, so that considerable time had to be spent in a nursing home. Now that I am better, but still unable to do serious work, I sit a great deal in the college backs, lose myself in the beauty of my surroundings, and in my own thoughts. And since I have had to give up the work which I had planned, it comforts me to put down on paper some of the things which I have thought about. Physical infirmity seems to me an ill chiefly be- cause it prevents work. But on the other hand it is a great blessing in that it brings out human kindness ; in fact the trouble seems to dwindle into nothing, and leave only the loving-kindness. My English friends have been most devoted in their attentions to me, and every American mail- steamer brings loving messages from dear ones far away. And although my long-cherished plans for work have been frustrated, I am sur- prised to find that I am not unhappy. On the 9, IN CAjNIBRIDGE BACKS contrary I spend my time in pleasant thinking, thinking which seems to me ahnost as profitable as the work would have been. After all, when we do our part we never really fail ; we only succeed in a different way from that in which we intended. In Great St. Mary's church here there are some prayer-stools on which are the words, "Think and Thank." I like the combination of injunctions. For I am more and more convinced that when we truly think, that is when the mind is making ac- tual progress, it is impossible not to be both happy and thankful. And perhaps physical disability is sometimes sent to us in order that we may take time to think and thank, in order that the soul may have a prolonged sabbath. For some of us who make a business of accumulating knowledge might get to be mere crams if seasons were not sent to us in which it is impossible to learn more facts, but in which we may feel and assimilate those which we already know, and thus translate our knowledge into wisdom. The story is told of St. Catherine of Genoa that just before her con- version she prayed, "St. Benedict, pray to God for me that He may make me stay three months sick in bed." Was it that she felt the need of a period of enforced idleness, that she might rest be- side still waters as I am resting this summer? I like to remember that our word school is derived from the word Greek word axoXrj — leisure. But when the Greek spoke of axok:j he did not mean idleness, but rather that absorption of the mind in IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 3 high thinking which makes us feel that these lives of ours, however petty and sordid they may seem at times, are still worth living because they are ca- pable of reaching out to and even touching that which is infinite and eternal. So perhaps we may be better able to do and bear because in times of ill health we have found our axoXyj, our true school. It has been said that "Oxford disheartens a man early." Long ago I spent two years in Oxford, and lovely as I found the beautiful city, I came to understand this saying. Originality is often crushed by an atmosphere of criticism, by the cynicism and lack of enthusiasm characteristic of and cultivated by a certain type of Oxford man. What is true of Oxford is I suppose also in a cer- tain measure true of Cambridge, but this summer I am not finding it so. In the first place there is a difference in the towns. Oxford, it has been well said, is imposant, while Cambridge is intime. Then too it is vacation time, most of the men have gone down, I am myself spending the summer not in working but in dreaming, and day dreams are never disheartening. Since I cannot make his- torical researches, I am surrendering myself to the charm of the place, finding in it a constant demand that I should live up to it, that there should be in my own life something to correspond to the beauty of King's Chapel and of Trinity Back. Is beauty, I wonder, conducive to work.? I 4) IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS remember that Goethe and some other literary men have preferred to write in very bare rooms, lest the beauty about them should prove distract- ing, prevent concentration. I suppose that it is with beauty as it is with love. We may make love nothing but an emotional luxury, and so we may make beauty nothing but an emotional lux- ury. On the other hand as love may be the great- est incentive to earnest action, to high living, so beauty may also be such an incentive. And as it is allowable to have times in which we simply en- joy love, so also it is allowable to have times in which we simply enjoy beauty. "Come ye your- selves apart, and rest awhile," rest from action in order that ye may feel. Only let the feeling be the starting point for new action. Or is it rather that after a time we must begin to act in order that the action may be the starting point for new feeling.? Is feeling the end, or is action the end? I am inclined to think that feeling is the greater, and therefore the real end, only as there can be no great action without feeling, so there can be no true feeling without action. There have been times when I have found not only the English university, but the whole Old World disheartening, because of the Past of which it speaks so loudly. All has been done that can be done ; I am borne down by the weight of the Past. This summer I am not having that experience either. The Past seems here to encourage us by the memory of what men have done, and to call IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS 5 upon us to surpass it. There is something too in a small country which is stimulating to ambition. The scholars, the artists, the statesmen live near enough to each other to know and help each other. Our country is so vast; each thinker lives in com- parative isolation. And then Nature in England generally, but especially here on the edge of the fen country, is kindly, friendly and sympathetic, not big enough to dwarf man. I believe too that the mere being in a foreign country is making it possible for me to think more clearly than I could at home. For I am not a part of it here, and, being in a sense wholly out of the life about me, I am perhaps better able to collect my thoughts on life in general. "He who hath watch'd, not shared the strife, Knows how the day hath gone." But while in one sense I am out of the life here, in another sense I am deeply in it. For I love this beautiful England and feel strongly that she is my mother-country, that I am just a tired child come home to rest. II FRIENDSDHIP This is an age in which women, especially in- tellectual women, are given to forming strong friendships. There are women who find their com- fort, their strength, their inspiration in one friend who is all in all to them ; — others, perhaps of a more expansive nature, have several friends each one of whom is in her way supreme. And yet many women question the wisdom of these friend- ships ; some even who indulge in them are just a little ashamed of them; the world is inclined to look askance at them, to regard them as abnormal feminine weaknesses, and there are those who are heard to say that God never meant it to be so, this dependence upon each other, this almost passionate devotion between persons of the same sex. Per- haps we do not remember that these strong friend- ships originated not with women, but with men, and if we are disposed to condemn them wholesale it is certainly because we do not realize how much we owe to them. For I think we rarely if ever come close to a man who has contributed greatly to the order, the justice, the beauty, the thought of the world without finding that there was a friend who was his inspiration, his very soul. Occasion- 6 FRIENDSHIP 7 ally the wife has been this friend, but previous to the nineteenth century this was rare, it was gen- erally some other man. Sometimes both friends became famous, sometimes only one, but the other was always there. The time would fail us to tell of David and Jonathan, of Achilles and Patroclus, of Damon and Pythias, of Orestes and Pylades, of Socrates and Plato, of Paul and Timothy, who through friendship overcame mountains of diffi- culty, intellectual, moral and physical, and of whom the world is slowly beginning to be worthy, since it holds them in grateful remembrance. Nay, is it not almost blasphemous to ask whether God approves of such a relationship, when we re- member that our Lord Himself sanctified it, for among the twelve who "continued with Him in His temptations," there was one who will be known to all time as "the disciple whom Jesus loved?" Strong friendship is the supreme characteristic of that wonderful period of intellectual and spirit- ual awakening which embraces the Renascence and Reformation. These movements differed in differ- ent countries, but everywhere there was the same passionate sense of the value of friendship and of fellow-work, of what Ruskin calls "co-working and army fellowship." I like to think of Rufus Mutianus, that typical son of the Renascence, whose real name was Conrad Muth, but whose friends called him Rufus because of his red hair, while after the fashion of the time they latinized his last name ; a man who was the very incarnation 8 IN CAMBRroGE BACKS of friendship, a man who, like Jesus and Socrates, wrote nothing, but who gathered about him a band of friends whom he inspired to think and write great things. Then from Italy we find Michael Angelo writing, "I cannot enjoy life without the soul," and by the soul he means his friend Tom- maso Cavalieri. Again in Germany we rejoice in Luther and Melancthon, Luther with his clear head and vigorous, sometimes harsh will, Melancthon with what might be called his almost artistic love of learning, his gentleness and sweetness, combined with a certain indecision and weakness of practical judgment, which sometimes accompanies breadth of view. I like even better to remember Staupitz, that earlier friend of Luther, the father-confessor who was the first to understand the young monk, so oppressed with the burden of evil, and to teach him the meaning of the words, "I believe in the for- giveness of sins." When the pupil became the master, Staupitz rejoiced in the inversion of po- sition which he had foreseen from the beginning. He did not follow Luther out of the Church of Rome, the historic church dear to him because of so many associations, but it is good to remember that a difference of opinion on even so vital a mat- ter could not break the friendship. In the last year of his life, 1524, we find him writing a letter in which he thanks his "beloved Martin" for hav- ing led him away "to the living pastures from the husks for the pigs," and speaks of his love for him as "passing the love of women." As for Luther FRIENDSHIP 9 he always retained for Staupitz the warm affec- tion that it is natural to feel for the first person who has understood and been able to help. Throughout his life he speaks of him as his spirit- ual father, toward its close he thanks God that he had been "helped out of his temptations by Dr. Staupitz, without whom he would have been swal- lowed up in them and perished." Surely here was a love stronger than death, since in that bitter age it was stronger than creeds. I myself have found an especial delight in three- cornered friendships. There is a fullness and com- pleteness about three which two cannot quite have ; moreover when full and free fellowship among three is possible, it has none of the morbidness which is sometimes an element in the dual friend- ship. For there is certainly a mystic perfection in the number three which man did not invent; every material object has three dimensions, every polygon must have at least three sides, the human mind has three elements, intellect, sensibility and will ; at least three are necessary to make a family, father, mother and child; even the Godhead, we are taught, and reasoning from analogy I find it easy to believe, fulfills itself in three Persons. So I have sometimes thought that it takes three to make an absolutely complete and perfect friend- ship, although that is a matter of temperament, and generally, perhaps always, two of the three are a little closer to each other than the third can be to either of them. 10 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS The Renascence period furnishes a beautiful and well-nigh perfect example of a triangular friend- ship in that which united Colet, Erasmus and More. Colet, a man of twenty-six, "fell in love," Mr. Seebohm tells us, with More, a lad of fourteen. More whose wit, wisdom and sweetness no man of culture could resist. The friendship thus begun lasted until death, Colet's death, parted them, strengthened not weakened by the fact that some years later More formed another friendship which partook even more than his affection for Colet of the nature of love. For we all know the story of how Erasmus and More met at a dinner table, and neither knowing who the other was, an argument arose, in which each admired the knowledge and skill of his antagonist to such an extent that Eras- mus cried out, "Aut tu es Morus, aut mullus" to which More replied, "Aut tu es Erasmus, aut di- abolus." The friendship formed that day became famous throughout Christendom, but while poster- ity applauds there were contemporaries who, like some of our contemporaries under similar circum- stances, sneered. Thus Tyndale in an attack upon More, sarcastically speaks of Erasmus as "INIore's darling," but More did not flinch ; he accepted the term. "Erasmus, my darling," he says in the reply written for all the world to read, "shall be my dear darling still." We find him at one time writing to his friend that if there was one thought of ambition in his mind, it was the pleasure that he felt in knowing that his name would always be as- FRIENDSHIP 11 sociated with that of Erasmus, while Erasmus de- clares that More's presence is "more sweet to him than anything in life," and adds "In More mihi videor extincttus, adeo uia (puxij juxta Pythago- ram duobus erat." Nor was Colet crowded out ; as long as he lived he was loved and revered by both friends, his holiness, Mr. Hutton tells us, an in- spiration to Erasmus, while his perfect sanity of judgment was a wise restraint upon More. "For centuries," says More writing after his death, for he was the first of the three to die, "we have not had among us any man more learned or more holy." The two who were left were drawn closer to each other by the memory of him whom they had both loved. Nor was even this three-cornered friendship ex- clusive, there was plenty of room for other affec- tions. More's family relations, his beautiful home life are too well known to need comment here, but there were other friends too. Thus we find him writing to Cuthbert Tunstall: "Although every letter I receive from you, dearest friend, is very pleasant to me, yet that which you wrote last is most welcome, for besides the praise which the rest of your letters deserve for their eloquence, the last yields a peculiar gi'ace, for that it contains your own opinion (I would that it were as true as it is favorable) of my Utopia. I almost persuade my- self that all those things which you spoke of it are true, knowing you to be far from all dissimulation, and myself too humble to need flattery and too 12 IN CA^IBRIDGE BACKS dear to you to be mocked. Wherefore, whether you have seen the truth unfeignedly, I rejoice in your judgment, or whether your affection to me hath bhndcd your judgment, I am no less de- lighted by your love." Again to the same friend, "The amber which j^ou sent me, a precious sepul- chre of flies was in many respects most welcome to me; for the matter thereof may bear comparison in color and brightness with any precious stone, and the form is more excellent because it represents the figure of a heart, as it were the emblem of our love ; from which I take your meaning to be that between us it will never fly away, and yet be al- ways without corruption; because I see the fly which hath wings like Cupid, and is as fickle, so shut up and enclosed in the amber that it cannot fly away, and embalmed and preserved that it can- not perish. I am not so much troubled" (a sure proof of friendship) "that I cannot send you a like gift, for I know you do not expect an inter- change of tokens." It was the period of the Renascence which, as we have seen, was richest in these romantic masculine friendships. We are li%T[ng now in an age which for women is a Renascence ; we are being re-born, finding our own minds, finding our own souls, and in the spiritual and intellectual awaken- ing which has come to us, it is natural that we should repeat the story of the Renascence ; that friendship should play the part with us now that it played with men then. For friendship is the FRIENDSHIP 13 most intellectual and spiritual of all relationships ; it is not in any degree founded upon physical de- sire, nor upon the protective instinct, nor as some marriages are upon the hope of gain, material, social or political, " With gold so much, birth, power, repute so much, Or beauty, youth so much in lack of these!" Friends are friends simply because they like to be together; to share each other's thoughts, to live in a greater or less degree their intellectual, spirit- ual and emotional lives in common, but with think- ing persons the emotional is largely the result of the intellectual and spiritual. Hence I am inclined to think that people who do not have fairly strong intellectual and spiritual natures, those whose lives are practical but not intellectual, moral perhaps but not spiritual, can- not, strictly speaking, have friends. Such persons often do have beautiful family relationships ; the emotional nature is satisfied in the family, in the marriage which may have been founded upon pas- sion, or may even have been entered upon in a very prosaic and businesslike way, but which has become a matter of mutual esteem, of being used to each other, dependent upon each other, the married pair having so long shared all the detail of life that they have become so adapted to each other, that it is difficult to adapt themselves to any one else, even in such small matters as the hours of meals 14. IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS or the way in which coffee should be served. Be- tween parents and children there is the physical tie, the sense of gratitude and duty on both sides, the protective instinct at first of the older for the younger, later perhaps of the younger for the older ; between brothers and sisters the feeling that blood is thicker than water, the similarities founded on common antecedents, common and lim- ited environment; and in all the family relation- ships a strong sense of belonging to each other, coupled in these simple families with the fact that no one else belongs to them, since they have no real friendships. They have neighbors to whom they are neighborly, for human nature, especially simple human nature, is kind, but they can hardly be called friends ; they are people with whom they gratify the natural social instincts, talk over the every-day of life, help in trouble or are helped by, but one neighbor does almost as well as an- other, provided he be kind and sociable, the family is all in all. These natural and physical relationships are probably even in the cultured family stronger than the intellectual and spiritual, for even when the members of such a family are so unfortunate as to be lacking in congeniality there is generally a great deal of affection ; at very bottom even the uncongenial sister is commonly more, though less consciously loved, than the congenial friend. But friendship is fellowship, it is founded upon vital congeniality of spirit, and where this does FRIENDSHIP 15 not exist, there can be no friendship. For this reason the Greeks, whose tendency was perhaps to over-estimate the intellectual and spiritual, thought friendship the holiest of all relationships, far holier than marriage. And I am not sure that a perfect friendship, a friendship free from the flaws of which I shall presently speak, is not holier than a fairly comfortable marriage which does not include friendship. If the highest marriages are higher than the highest friendships, it is be- cause they have in them every element of friend- ship and much more besides. The strongest friendships are ordinarily based not upon character, but upon spiritual affinity ; that is, there is more of loving than of liking in them. For loving is not deeper, stronger liking, it is an altogether different thing. We like a per- son because of his qualities ; if we find that we have been mistaken in these qualities we cease to like him. But we go on loving no matter what dis- coveries we may make ; for although the character may be in some respects objectionable, we feel that we are not mistaken in the spirit that lies beneath the character, and we love not because of the char- acter, but because of the spirit that answers to our spirit. So when friendship is absolutely ideal and equal, there is no shame in the presence of one's friend. I may sorrow deeply over my fault, but I am not ashamed to have my friend know about it, for she, like God, understands fully, and so while she sorrows with me over my sin, her love is 16 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS strengthened, not weakened by it. In literature I know of no more beautiful friendship than that between Meredith's "Diana of the Crossways," and Lady Emma Dunstane, and the best part of it is that when Diana has sinned, she goes to Lady Emma with her story, fully expecting the sympa- thy that she receives ; she is ashamed of her sin, but she is not ashamed that Lady Emma should know it. And in this affair Diana is greater than Lady Emma, for it takes more love and trust to be sure of receiving sympathy in such a case than it takes to give it. " I bow before the noble mind That freely some great wrong forgives, Yet nobler is the one forgiven, Who bears that burden well and lives." I like to remember too that St. John was the only other apostle present when St. Peter denied his Lord, and from that time we find St. Peter and St. John inseparable. When we define taste in the largest and deepest sense, I suppose we love our friends more because their taste is in harmony with ours than because their characters are in such harmony, for taste is really a deeper and truer manifestation of spirit than is character. What a man is depends not so much upon what he does as upon what he likes, though of course doing sometimes begets liking.'^ 1 " I want you to think a little of the deep significance of the word taste, for no statement of mine has been more FRIENDSHIP 17 A distinction, however, must be made between taste and tastes ; it is only the former that is es- sential. It is not necessary that my friend and I should always care for the same people, the same books, the same pictures, the same music ; but underneath the tastes we must feel that the taste is essentially the same, though some of its mani- festations may differ or even be antagonistic. While there can be liking without loving, there probably cannot be loving such as friends have for each other without some liking. For while when we once begin to love, we continue to do so no matter what discoveries we may make, we prob- ably do not begin to love where the faults most obnoxious to us are present, for these we are quick to detect, and they are an effectual bar to love. Sometimes we begin with loving and proceed to lik- ing, sometimes we begin with liking and proceed to loving. In the former case the friendship is formed rapidly, for the friends do not have to earnestly or oftener controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. . . . Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first and last and closest trial question to any living crea- ture is, What do you like? Tell me what you like, and I will tell you what you are. Go out into the street and ask the first man or woman that you meet what their taste is, and if they answer candidly, you know them body and soul. And the object of the true education is to make people not only do the right things, but enjoy the right things, not merely industrious but to love industry, not merely learned but to love knowledge, not merely pure but to love purity; not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice." — Ruskin "Crown of Wild Olive." 18 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS learn to know each other, they know and love per- haps at first sight. In a highly sensitive mood two spirits come into contact, and each recognizes in the other the counterpart of itself. Sometimes this is a delusion, when the moment of exaltation is over they find they they have been mistaken, that they have been in love with love, not with each other, but sometimes it is the beginning of a real and powerful friendship. There is generally great spiritual excitement at first, but as the friends come to know each other practically as they have from the beginning known each other spiritually this calms down, only to re-appear when there is something special, some great joy or siorrow to call it forth. The friendships that begin with liking are slower and more commonplace. People are thrown together, work together, think together, approve of each other's principles and opinions, share each other's joys and sorrows, trials and temptations, until by degrees they recognize that they are necessary to each other, that so far as trust, admiration, tenderness and mutual service constitute love, they love each other. This is the safer and surer friendship; some- times I think that it is the better, but then I re- member that when Socrates had come to this con- clusion, he though that he heard a voice saying in his ear that he had been guilty of impiety, and be- cause he was afraid of the God-Love, he made a solemn recantation. This quiet and comparatively FRIENDSHIP 19 unemotional friendship is certainly the safer ; we run no risk of being mistaken in ourselves or in the other ; nor is there the excitement at the beginning which for some natures takes so much strength ; it is "for help and comfort in all the passages of life and death" ; perhaps for those of us who are only average beings, it may be just as helpful, help us to live our average lives as well as that other friendship, but after all it is not the highest, for as Socrates points out, great things are not bom of it, it is not by it that creative souls are stimulated to create. And perhaps it is well that creative aspirations should sometimes be aroused even in those of us who are not capable of creating much, that the spiritual nature (and what is spiritual is always creative, it is the spirit that giveth life) should be consciously stirred, if only that we may thereby appreciate the creations of others. For whatever is spiritual uplifts us to Him who is Spirit. "Love is of God, and he that loveth" (not loveth God, but loveth any one) "is born of God, and knoweth God." "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," and nothing purifies the heart as love does, for where love is there is no room for vulgarity. Moreover when the mind is in this exalted state, it is too up- lifted to feel petty annoyances, and it is not un- usual for the body to be insensible to pain because of love. Then since friendship is such a high and holy thing, since men have always had extreme friend- 20 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS ships with profit not only to themselves but to the world, why should such friendships between women be looked upon askance? In order to be happy and useful, woman must have her emotional nature satisfied, and must have work to do which will give her a place in the world, make her feel that she is worth while. The married woman finds both her work and the satisfaction of her emotional nature in marriage. The old maid of a by-gone gener- ation was unhappy and disagreeable, when she was unhappy and disagreeable, because there was no person and no definite work which she could call her own. The unmarried woman now tends to find her work in some business or profession ; why should not her emotional nature be satisfied in friendship, as the married woman's is in mar- riage.? I suppose that the answer of the objectors would be that these friendships take too much strength with too little results. To most people emotional situations are a strain, the first ecstasy of a sud- den friendship, like the first ecstasy of love be- tween the sexes, takes strength. Nor is it anything against either relationship that it takes strength at first, — all great things take strength, the thorough enjoyment of great music, great pic- tures, great books, how much more a great love.? The question is not does it take strength, but does it give as much as it takes? Are the joy and pain with which love begins travail throes from which something will be born? or is the so-called FRIENDSHIP ai love merely what Mazzini has described as "I'ego- isme a deux personnes, a jealous and convul- sive passion, half pride, half thirst of enjoyment which narrows the sphere of our activity, and causes us to forget our duties both towai'd our country and toward humanity?" Now however emotional and absorbed lovers may be at first, there is little danger that love will take their strength or narrow them for any length of time. For marriage means new work whether the married wish it or not, and in the multiplicity of duties the conscious emotionalism dies out; only a blessed sense of companionship is left. I know a woman who is a very emotional friend ; she once told me that it was well that she had never mar- ried, for she would have been a more emotional wife than any man could stand. But darning stockings and calculating expenses would prob- ably have cured her of over-emotionalism ; she would have been a less emotional wife than she was a friend. And of course the work that marriage brings with it is a blessing in itself, apart from the quieting of the emotional nature. Society knows that it will almost always gain by marriage, not only in the perpetuation of the race, but also in the greater attention to business on the part of the man, the broadening of social interests on the part of the woman, and in the development of character and deeper sympathies which come to both from the constant sacrifices which they have 22 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS to make for each other and for their children, the problems which they have to solve together, the sufferings, the anxieties and the joys which come to a family, and which cannot come to isolated in- dividuals. JBut society is not so sure that it will gain by friendship, for generally no new duties are abso- lutely forced upon us with it; there is the oppor- tunity, and to certain temperaments there is a strong temptation to make enjoying each other the main thing in life. If this temptation is yielded to the emotionalism continues and becomes morbid, and there is not the development that mar- riage brings. For women the danger is greater than for men, partly because we have not natur- ally so many interests, partly because we are not so strong physically, and possibly in some cases because we are more demonstrative, and demon- strations of emotionalism tend to increase the emotionalism. It may be that it would be better that women should live in this respect more as men do, with less physical expression of affection. Friendship is a spiritual relationship ; why should it need physical expression? Perhaps friendship is almost too blissful to be as developing in some respects as is marriage ; there is too little friction in it, for the circumstances of friendship do not bring out, as the circumstances of marriage do, those little commonplace differ- ences which must exist even between those who in all important matters are well adapted to each FRIENDSHIP 23 other. And in the other family relations those be- tween parents and children, brothers and sisters, there is often a real uncongeniality ; there are in almost every family certain members who, if it were not for the tie of blood could not be friends, and in the adapting themselves to each other, there is a discipline which means breadth and self- control. Mr. Chesterton is right when he main- tains that the family is a good institution quite as much because it is uncongenial as because it is congenial. Friendship is narrower than the fam- ily relation just because it is more congenial. The great safeguard against both the over- emotionalism and the narrowness of friendship is in work. It is only when emotionalism is followed by nothing else that it defeats its own end and uses up strength instead of creating it. For passion is energy, but energy must find an outlet in work, physical or mental, else it feeds upon itself. Since friendship does not necessarily bring new work with it as marriage does let the friends either find some new work to do, or make the old work better because of their friendship. Let the new emotion- alism mean new life, let the new life go into the work, make the friendship in some sense creative. Then the friends will not only be saved from a dangerous emotional strain, but they will accom- plish something that will be useful to themselves and to others, and the friendship will be made more secure, since growth is an essential to per- manent friendship. Furthermore there will be 24. IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS little danger of exclusiveness or jealousy. It makes very little difference what my exact place is with my friend; probably she does not know. It is enough that we love each other, and that we help each other to live our lives and to do our work. I had a teacher who used to say, "Love is the white heat fusion of the intellect, sensibility and will." The difficulty with many friendships is that it is the sensibility, the emotional nature alone, which is at a white heat. Let the intellect and will do their part, and there will be little danger. The salvation of friendship as of every- thing else lies in symmetry; — the height, the breadth and the depth of it should be equal. It is Plato who has best summed up the whole matter. And I think he knew of what he wrote, for had not Socrates been the lover and he himself the beloved.'' and have not Europe and America been the better for more than two thousand years because these two men loved each other.? Listen then to what the wise woman of Mantincia said to Socrates : "Men whose bodies only are creative betake themselves to women and beget children, — this is the character of their love. But creative souls, for there certainly are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies, conceive that which is proper for the soul to receive or retain. And what are these conceptions .?* wisdom and vir- tue in general. And such creators are poets and FRIENDSHIP 25 all artists who are deserving of the name inventor. But the greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families, and which is called temperance and justice. And he who in youth has the seed of these planted in him, and is himself inspired, when he comes to maturity desires to beget and generate. He wanders about s-eeking beauty that he may beget offspring, for in deformity he will beget nothing, and naturally embraces the beauti- ful rather than the deformed body ; above all when he finds a fair and noble and well-nurtured soul, he embraces the two in one person, and to such an one he is full of speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits of a good man ; and he tries to edu- cate him, and at the touch of the beautiful which is ever-present to his memory, even when absent, he brings forth that which he had conceived long before, and in company with him tends that which he brings forth ; and they are married by a far nearer tie, and have a closer friendship than those who beget mortal children, for the children who are their common offspring are fairer and more immortal. Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than the ordinary human ones ? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory.? Or who would not have such children as Lycurgus left behind him to be the saviours not only of 26 IN CAJMBRIDGE BACKS Lacedsemon, but of Hellas, as one may say? There is Solon, too, who is the revered father of Athenian laws, and many others there are in many other places both among Hellenes and barbarians. All of them have given the world many noble works, and have been the parents of virtue of every kind, and many temples have been raised in their honor for the sake of their children, which are never raised in honor of any one for the sake of his mortal children. These are the lesser mys- teries of love into which even you, Socrates, may enter ; to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of these, and to which if you pursue them in a right spirit they will lead, I know not whether you will be able to attain. But I will do my utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you can. For he who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms ; and first, if he would be guided by his in- structor aright to love one form only ; out of that he should create fair thoughts ; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another ; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is one and the same ! And when he perceives this he will begin a love of all beautiful forms, and drawing toward and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom ; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, FRIENDSHIP 27 and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere. He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of won- drous beauty, a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying or waxing and waning. — And the true order of going or be- ing led by another to the things of love is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upward for the sake of that other beauty, — until he arrives at the notion of absolute beaut}', and at last knows what the essence of beauty is, and attains that life above all others which man should live in the contemplation of Beauty Ab- solute. For what if man had eyes to see the true beauty, the divine beauty, I mean pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollution of mortality.'' — Do you not see that in that com- munion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth not images of beauty, but realities, for he has hold not of an image but of a reality, and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God, and immortal, if mortal man may !" Ill THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS Among the Essays of Elia there is one entitled "The Old and The New Schoolmaster," in which the old schoolmaster is described as a "fine old pedagogue of the breed long since extinct of the Lilys and Linacres, who believing that all learn- ing was contained in the languages which they taught, and despising every other accomplishment as superficial and useless, came to their task as to a sport. Passing from infancy to age, they dreamed away all their days as in a grammar school. Revolving in a perpetual cycle of declen- sions, conjugations, syntax and prosodies, review- ing constantly the occupation that had claimed their studious childhood, rehearsing continually the part of the Past, life must have slipped from them at last like one day." With this joyous and joy-giving race, he contrasts "the modem school- master, a most pathetic being who is expected to know a little of everything, because his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of anything. He must be superficially, if I may say so, omnis- cient, and all the things that he knows, these or the desire of them, he is expected to instil not by set lessons which he may charge in the bill, but at 28 THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 29 school-intervals as he walks the streets or saunters through the fields with his pupils. The least part of what is expected of him is to be done in school hours. He must insinuate knowledge at the mollia tempora fandi. He must seize every oc- casion, — the season of the year, the time of the day, a passing cloud, a rainbow, a wagon of hay, a regiment of soldiers going by to inculcate some- thing useful. He can receive no pleasure from a casual glimpse of nature, but must catch at it as an object of instruction. Nothing comes to him not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses. The Universe, that Great Book, as it has been called, is to him indeed to all intents and purposes a book out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilies to distasting school-boys." I fancy that the gentle Elia took a somewhat pessimistic view of the schoolmaster even of his day, and yet doubtless there was much truth in the dark picture which he drew. But the reason why the fine old pedagogues were happy, loved and honored, and their successors of Lamb's day were unhappy, and shall I say unloved and dishonored? is perfectly obvious. The schoolmaster of the "fine old breed of the Lilys and Linacres" was happy because he was teaching one subject, clas- sics, the only subject deemed worth knowing, and which he knew or was reverently striving to know, as well as it could be known in his generation. This subject filled him with happiness, so that he taught not out of a sense of duty (conscientious 30 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS teaching is never the highest teaching), but out of joy and with an eagerness that others should know the joy that filled his soul; should drink of the fountain of Truth, Wisdom and Beauty that had been opened to him. His attitude toward his pupils was "What the Father hath given me, that give I unto you." So he taught them reverence and enthusiasm, and no wonder that the reverence and enthusiasm which the pupil felt for the thing taught was in some measure extended to him who taught, that there was a wonderful friendship be- tween master and pupils. For friendship is fel- lowship, and fellowship in those days in which Montaigne's father "received all who knew Greek as though they were angels of God," was largely founded on enthusiasm for the classics, the one subject which all educated men had in common, the one subject which until very recently all edu- cated men in England still had in common, thus making possible a comradeship among English scholars not found among the scholars of other countries. But Charles Lamb lived in the days of our grandfathers ; his lot fell upon those evil times when the number of subjects and what was known of them had increased, and yet had not increased beyond the point where the schoolmaster could, by making a drudge of himself, know a little of each, hence he was required to do so, to be "super- ficially omniscient." The schoolmaster of the "breed of the Lilys and Linacres" knew nearly all THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 31 that there was to know, but then there was not much, so he had tune to know it leisurely and well, to brood over it, and to love it. The schoolmaster of Lamb's day still tried to know everything, that was still the ideal, but everything by that time meant so many things, that, trying to know all, it was impossible for him to know anything more than superficially ; thus he did not brood over the beauty of Truth or of any portion of it, he did not live with it, he did not love it. Life was just a nervous strain, a wild chase after knowledge which because of its vastness his mind could not comprehend, and his spirit could still less apprehend, and in which he took no inter- est save to pass it on to some one else, who, to use Charles Lamb's quaint expression, "distasted" it even more than he did. Of course the knowledge which he thus imparted to his pupils could not be a bond of fellowship between them, since neither pupil nor teacher really loved it. Lamb's new schoolmaster was not unique, he was just like any one else who has more to do than mind or body can stand, incapable of consciously and emotionally loving anything, whether Truth, Beauty, Work, Man or God. A friend once told me that she had always thought the love between her parents the most beautiful thing that she had ever known, but when after her father's death she spoke of it in that way to her mother the reply was, "Yes, so long as you can remember. But it was not always so. When we were first married 32 IN CAJVIBRIDGE BACKS we were very poor, and had to work very hard, so we were too tired to be conscious even of loving each other, and of course we didn't love our work ; there was too much of it." Yes, there was too much of it. and it was too hurried for them to do it either well or lovingly ; they could not feel the artist's joy in perfect workmanship; their work was only a task to get through with. That was the case of Charles Lamb's modern school- master. It is many years since Elia wrote, and times have changed. His "new schoolmaster" has now become the "old schoolmaster," and though his breed is not entirely extinct, he is passing away to give place to him whom we now call the "new schoolmaster." Of this new schoolmaster I can- not say much from personal experience, but the new schoolmistress I know full well. So I will write of her, and much of what is true of her is doubtless true also of the new schoolmaster. Our new schoolmistress differs from Elia's new school- master, because we have in some sense gone back to the breed of Lily and Linacre, and I trust that as time goes on we may do so still more. For now the field of knowledge is so vast that there is no hope of becoming even "superficially omniscient," so we no longer try to be so. We have become specialists as Lily and Linacre were, the difference between us and them is that we know that all knowledge is not contained in the subjects which we teach, and therefore it is impossible for us to THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 33 do as they did, and "despise every other accom- plishment as superficial and useless." We have even passed the times in which men tried (I don't suppose women ever did try) to know "something about everything and everything about some- thing." We are content now if in times of recrea- tion we can learn a little about several things, while in working times we learn a little more about the one thing that we have chosen to teach, be- cause we love it best. With this limited aim each may work at her own subject, with the same leis- ure, the same unhasting diligence, the same fruit- ful dreaminess with which Lily and Linacre worked at theirs, and each may love her subject as the great teachers of old loved their Homer and Vir- gil, a,nd may have the same joy in imparting it that they had. For notwithstanding Plato to the contrary, I believe that no one can be a good teacher who does not love to teach, who is not so filled with the sub- ject that he must impart it to others, who does not have something of the "I must tell you, or I'll burst" feeling. I suppose that what Plato means when he says that no one can be a good teacher who wishes to teach is that no one can be a good teacher who considers himself other men's superior, and therefore capable of teaching them. But does anything tend more toward humility than en- thusiasm for that which is great .f* "I must tell you, or I'll burst," not that you may admire me for knowing or understanding, but that you may come 34. IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS to know and understand, and therefore enjoy as I enjoy, — something of the feeling which Andrew had when he found his brother Simon, and said to him, "We have found Him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write," the feeling which John the Baptist had when he proclaimed, "the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world," knowing all the time, and rejoicing in the knowledge, that "He must increase, while I must decrease." For finding or understanding even a little portion of the truth rouses a feeling in some measure akin to that which one has in finding or understanding a little of Him who is the Whole Truth. Is it too much then to say that no one should teach a subject who does not love it, who does not love it enough to wish to impart it to others, and to be in some way going on with it herself? All good schools make such a requirement of music and art teachers. It is necessary that the music teacher should not only have a certain training in music, but also that she should love music, that she should have some talent for it, and that in addition to teaching she should be doing some- thing with her own music. Is it too much to ask that the teacher of mathematics should be as much of an artist in her own line as the teacher of music is in hers? that she should not only have the re- quisite training, but that she should love mathe- matics, have some special talent for it, and be either actually going on in the subject, or be THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 35 constantly working out new ways of presenting that which she already knows, and that she should somehow make some vital connection between mathematics and life, Avhich makes her eager to teach mathematics to her pupils? And frequently the truly great teacher with a real mastery of her subject will take the most pleasure in teaching elementary work, because she will see the whole wrapped up in the beginning, so that she will never think that it is a small thing to teach the beginning. It is too often assumed that the elements of a subject can be taught by any young girl who happens to know them ; some- times she is not even required to know them par- ticularly well, and of course she knows nothing be- yond them. Never was there a more fatal mis- take. The ideal teacher of elementary work is the mature woman who is, so far as is possible, mistress of the subject. Not that I should say to the young teacher. Be content with elementary work, since it is as great, perhaps a greater thing than advanced work. For to the young woman it is not so great a thing as advanced work, for the reason that she herself is as yet too limited to make it so. So she may not, while she is young, be happy in it, because if she is a growing person she will not be content to do it in a little way, and she has not as yet the outlook which would enable her to do it in a big way. Therefore I should ad- vise her at first to seek as advanced work as she can get. Through teaching advanced work she 36 IN CA^IBRIDGE BACKS will come to see what a big thing elementary work is, then she will herself be big enough to come back to the elementary work, and to teach it with enthu- siasm. When we have once done what the world considers the greater thing we are the more will- ing to do what the world considers the smaller thing, for we see that there is no big or little, it all lies in the doing of it. In the doing, the small thing can be made great, the great thing can be made small. We have seen that the students of the days of Lily and Linacre did not clearly distinguish be- tween love and reverence for Homer and Virgil, and love and reverence for him through whom they became acquainted with Homer and Virgil. And not only were teacher and taught bound by their common enthusiasm, but that Renascence period, as we all know, was characterized by glowing, passionate friendships between mature scholars, many of whom were teachers. Those were days in which men loved each other as in the days of David and Jonathan and the old Greeks, as per- haps men never had loved each other since the little band of those who had been with Jesus, united by a common love for their ascended Lord, ceased to squabble as to who should be the great- est, and lovingly vied with each other in witness- ing to the power of His resurrection. But Charles Lamb represents his new school- master as not only finding no emotional satisfac- tion in his work, but as denied both the affection THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 37 of his pupils, and the friendship of his contempo- raries. He quotes from a letter for which he says he is "indebted to his cousin Bridget," in which "a sensible man of his profession" writes, "Persons in my situation are more to be pitied than can be well imagined. We are surrounded by young and consequently ardently affectionate hearts, but we can never hope to share an atom of their affec- tions. The relation of master and scholar for- bids this. 'How pleasing this must be to you, how I envy your feelings,' my friends will sometimes say to me, when they see young men whom I have edu- cated return after some years' absence from school, their eyes shining with pleasure while they shake hands with their old master, bringing a present of game to me, or a toy to my wife, and thanking me in the warmest manner for my care of their education. A holiday is begged for the boys ; the house is a scene of happiness. I only am sad at heart. This fine-spirited and warm- hearted youth, who fancies that he repays his master with gratitude for his care of his boyish years, this young man in the eight long years I watched over him with a parent's anxiety never could repay me with one look of genuine feeling. He was proud when I praised, he was submissive when I reproved; but he did never love me, and what he now mistakes for gratitude and kindness for me is but the pleasant sensation which all per- sons feel at revisiting the scene of their boyish hopes and fears, and the seeing on equal terms 38 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS the man they were accustomed to look up to with reverence." And what this poor schoolmaster missed from his pupils was not made up to him by his contem- poraries. "Why," asks Elia, "are we never quite at ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? Be- cause we are conscious that he is not quite at ease in ours. He is awkward and out of place in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stat- ure of his understanding to yours. He cannot meet you on the square. He is so used to teach- ing that he wants to be teaching you. He is for- lorn among his co-evals ; his juniors cannot be his friends." I think that we have analyzed the situation of Lamb's "new schoolmaster" sufficiently to see why this, though probably an exaggerated picture, has some truth in it. For the knowledge which neither of them loved could not create affection between master and pupil, and the master was too hard worked, too much of a drudge to make of himself a cultivated man who could meet culti- vated contemporaries on equal terms. But is the schoolmistress of to-day condemned to a life of such isolation.'' First, does she fail to secure the affection of her pupils.? That depends upon what is meant by affection. Strictly speaking, I think that there can hardly be friendship between teacher and pupil, for friendship to my mind means a mutual entering into each other's lives. THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 39 It cannot therefore be formed between two persons who differ greatly in maturity ; it can no more be formed when these persons are mother and daugh- ter than when they are teacher and pupil. For however much love there may be between them, the younger cannot enter fully into the elder's life. And it is seldom that the elder can enter fully into the younger's life, or at least succeed in convincing her that she can. We have a way of forgetting our own youth ; even when we do not forget it intellectually, we often forget it sympa- thetically. Sometimes what we are now pleased to call the foolishness of young persons, instead of calling forth our sympathy makes us blush with shame and mortification, remembering some familiar passage in our own youth, and instead of attracting us repels us, for we do not like to be made ashamed even of our past selves. And if the likeness to our own youth occasionally keeps us apart, even more does the unlikeness. For the girl of to-day is different from the girl of our day, and unless we are very quick at adjusting our- selves to the difference, that is another reason for not fully understanding her. Yet though we teachers may often misunder- stand, I maintain that we who live constantly sur- rounded by young girls, and who make it our busi- ness to try to understand them, have a better chance of doing so than other women of our age, even though they be mothers. And as there is almost always real affection between mother and 40 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS daughter, though not equal friendship, so there is frequently affection between teacher and pupil that is honest, real and personal. Occasionally this affection ripens into friendship, just as the affection between mother and daughter should al- ways ripen into friendship. For a time comes when the pupil, like the daughter, attains her ma- turity, and perhaps can put more into her former teacher's life than the teacher can put into her life. But we teachers are finite, our time and strength is limited, we have many pupils and we cannot enter into personal relations with any large proportion of them. Perhaps it is not desirable that we should try to do so, for we must save ourselves for the class-room, and it may be better that our pupils should see us only when we can be at our best. Yet there is often a great deal of intellec- tual and spiritual sympathy, such as almost amounts to affection, between pupils and teachers who in personal ways scarcely know each other. There are moments in the class-room when "eye lights eye in good fellowship, and hearts," teach- er's and pupils' hearts, "expand and become one in the sense of this world's life." It is wonderful too how a teacher will sometimes become dependent upon the sympathy of a single pupil, perhaps one hardly known to her outside of the class-room. I have had times when there was a lump in my throat, when I have felt that I could not teach a lesson, because of the absence from the class of THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 41 a pupil with whom I was strongly in sympathy, with whom I was in the habit of laughing or feel- ing deeply; sometimes it has been a pupil with whom in a purely social way I had scarcely ex- changed a sentence. I remember that Sonya Kovalevsky writes to a colleague of hers in the University of Stockholm who had been in the habit of attending her lectures, "Do not come to hear me to-day, if you have a headache. I will try to lecture just as well as though you were there." A woman commenting upon this in one of our American magazines condemned Sonya as "wo- manish" after all, not really absorbed in her sub- ject, dependent upon the inspiration that came to her from a single auditor, perhaps lecturing mainly to gain his admiration. But one of our most prominent American professors of mathe- matics, a man, replying to this, said that Sonya's weakness, if weakness it could be called, was at least not confined to womankind, for every teacher, whether man or woman, knows what it is to be thus dependent upon the sympathy of an audience, frequently too upon the sympathy of a single per- son in that audience. No, we do not crave ad- miration, but we do crave sympathy. We wish to feel that others are moved by that which moves us. This sympathy we generally get when we deserve it. And while the brightening of the eyes and the occasional clasping of the hands, which are the tokens of it, do not always mean even in- cipient friendship, they do mean that teacher and 4® IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS pupil will always be glad to meet, to hear of each other, and that they will always think of each other affectionately. Of course we know that this sympathy is often purely sentimental, a combina- tion of the intellectual and the emotional that has no real influence upon the life. The teacher has interested the pupil, but has not influenced her. But is not this often also true of the sympathy be- tween the preacher and his audience? And did not the Divine Teacher tell us that much of the seed would, must perhaps, fall upon stony ground, where there was not much deepness of earth, and that the seed that fell so would spring up quickly, but would also soon wither away? So we must not be discouraged because of this, but rather be thankful that occasionally we do have evidence that some of the seed does fall upon good ground, and brings forth abundantly. Elia's poor schoolmaster was, as we have seen, even less at home with his contemporaries than he was with his pupils. This seems to have been not only because he was too busy to cultivate in- terests which would bring him in touch with them, but also because he never saw them long enough to get used to them. For alas ! poor man ! his work did not cease when the term ended. "Vaca- tions themselves are none to him, he is only rather worse off" than before; for commonly he has some intrusive upper boy fastened upon him at such times, some cadet of a great family, some neg- lected lump of nobility or gentry that he must THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 43 drag after him to the play, to the panorama, to Mr, Bentley's Orrery, to the Pantopticon, or into the country to a friend's house, or to his favorite watering place. Wherever he goes this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all his movements. He is boy- rid, sick of perpetual boy." That is not the way in which we new school- mistresses spend our vacations. We say a real good-bye to our pupils when school closes, in order that when we come back to them we may be more to them. Our vacations are given to rest, to pleasure, to family life, sometimes to intellectual work of our own. It is wonderful too how quickly the one life drops out to give place to the other. Except for the memories, when we are away from school it is as though we were never there ; when we are in school it is as though we were never away, so quickly do we fit into either life, and each supports and strengthens the other. It is the life away from school that enriches the school life and makes it more beautiful, but just as truly does the school life enrich the other life and make it more beautiful. There are the wonderful trips to Europe which teachers take more frequently than do other people who are not rich, the rest of the ocean steamers, the pleasant chance acquaintances with the varied interests which they impart to us, the sight-seeing, the musing and dreaming, the studying sometimes in foreign lands. And even when we do not go abroad we still utilize our long 44. IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS vacations in storing up summer driftwood for the winter fire. We live simple lives with father and mother, brothers and sisters, such as keep us in touch with the ordinary life of womankind. We think, we read, we receive and write letters, thus keeping up old acquaintances while we make new ones. Then in the winter vacations there are the operas and the theatres, the picture galleries and the blessed Christmas time when, through letters, many generations of friends and pupils gather around us, and all the past chapters of life are re- opened. For we new schoolmistresses do make friends among our contemporaries ; it is safe to say that no other class of women makes so many. The married woman has her husband and her children ; she does not need, and the circumstances of her life do not generally permit her to have many close friends, and the unmarried woman who lives at home has commonly a much more limited num- ber from among whom to choose. Our difficulty is that we have too many, so many new friends constantly coming into our lives, that the days and years are not long enough for us to give time to all the people that are dear to us. As to whether we try to instruct our contemporaries, well, that is for our contemporaries to say. Probably most people do know that we are teach- ers without being told, but what of that? Do not people generally recognize a clergyman, a doctor, a lawyer, a business man, a mother without being THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 45 told? And is it such a disgrace to be a teacher that we should dislike being recognized as such? But while we have friends who are not teachers, our dearest friends are generally among our col- leagues, and that begins another chapter. To complete the isolation of Elia's school- master, his occupation had caused estrangement between himself and his wife, his gentle Anna. "My wife too," he writes, "my once darling Anna is the wife of a schoolmaster. When I married her, knowing that the wife of a schoolmaster ought to be a busy, notable creature, and fearing that my gentle Anna would ill supply the loss of my dear mother just then dead, I expressed my fears that I was bringing her into a way of life unsuited to her ; and she who loved me tenderly promised for my sake to exert herself to perform the duties of her new situation. She promised, and she has kept her word. But I have lost my gentle, helpless Anna! When we sit down to en- joy our hour's repose after the fatigue of the day, I am compelled to listen to what have been her useful (and they are really useful) employments through the day, and what she proposes for her to-morrow's task. Her heart and her features are changed by the duties of her situation. To the boys she never appears other than the master's wife, and she looks upon me as the boys' master, to whom all show of love and affection would be highly improper and unbecoming the dignity of her situation and mine." 46 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS Our new schoolmistress has commonly no wise and strong John to deteriorate because he is a teacher's husband ; she often lives in an institution and has no home, or at least no house. But when Max Miiller tried to imagine the conditions of life under which he could best do his work, he decided upon those offered by the mediaeval monastery, and for the scene of his own life-work he chose the Eng- lish university, as being the nearest approach to the mediaeval monastery that modern times can furnish. In our girls' boarding-schools and col- leges, a woman may live the monastic life more nearly than anywhere else. And while I think a woman should not come to that life too early, for she should have something to bring to it, I am ab- normal enough to like it, for it furnishes in such rich abundance the two things that I care most about, opportunity for quiet work, and for form- ing friendships that are worth while. I like too the smooth way in which everything runs, each person with her own allotted task. If I have no house of my own, I have two rooms which I love perhaps more than I should love a whole house. For there would be no room in a house of my own in which I should sit so much as I now sit in my study. So even if my house were as much to my satisfaction as is my study, it would not so sink into my soul. It is like Aurora Leigh's room, green " As green as any privet hedge a bird Might choose to build in," THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 47 green paper, green rugs, cool and refreshing. And there are the books that I love, my Brown- ing, my Plato, my Shakespeare, my Goethe and all my history books. But of late I have taken more pleasure in my pictures than in my books. For I cannot enjoy books without taking time to do so (there is of course a certain pleasure in having them about me, but that can be gained from a limited number) ; moreover it is always possible to get them out of libraries. So I now confine myself in my purchases to the books that I must use as tools, and to a few pets. But my pictures I can sit and enjoy while I am entertaining guests, or when I am too tired to do anything; and even when I am too busy to really look at them, I take a sub-conscious joy in their presence. My almost life-sized Sistine draws me to her and gives me a share in her radiant uplift, my Botticelli's "In- coronata" sympathizes with me when I am sad, only like some dear friends who overpower me with their sympathy, there are times when her sad comprehension is more than I can bear, and then I turn my eyes from her. Andrea del Sarto's por- trait of himself and his wife reminds me of the great poem that it inspired, and constantly tells me that "A man's reach should exceed his grasp." My "Creation of Man" gives me Adam "fresh from God's hands, as his wife saw him," a body strong, perfect and pure such as God Himself could pronounce very good. If we all had such bodies, it would be easy to sing 48 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS "How good is man's life, the mere living!" And there are other pictures, each one associated with something in my life which I wish to remem- ber. There is a statuette too, a copy of Riets- chel's Goethe and Schiller, to remind me of a per- fect summer that I passed in Weimar. And when I look out of my windows, there is the beautiful green world, and the glorious sunsets. But after all a woman's life does not consist in the things that she possesseth, even when these things are books and art treasures. Life con- sists in work and friends. We who lead this in- stitutional life have the work of course, and then what friends we do make ! I believe the conditions for friendship are better in institutional life than in any other kind of life which the world has^ known. And I have been blessed with colleagues whom to know has been a liberal education in many ways. How we love to gather around a tea-table together! There is a tea-room to which we go sometimes, which one of our number says reminds her of those old English taverns, where there was very little perhaps in the way of room or food, but so much in the way of high fellowship. Do we talk shop? Yes, sometimes, but then our shop is such an interesting one, and how could we tend it well and make it a big shop, unless we found it interesting enough to talk about? Do we talk about the girls? Yes, sometimes, for again if we did not talk about them, that would mean that we did not find them sufficiently interesting to talk THE NEW SCHOOL MISTRESS 49 about. I am sure I hope that they talk about us sometimes, I would rather they would even say un- favorable things about us than not talk about us at all. The problems of our little world are really very much the same as the problems of the big world, so it is as we understand our little problems that we are able to understand the bigger prob- lems of the bigger world. Great men are only ordinary men writ large ; we should study great men in order that we may understand the ordinary men with whom we have to deal ; should we not study ordinary men sometimes in order that we may understand great men ? And if we do live in a little world we will certainly never make it a big one by ignoring it, thinking it beneath us to talk about it. But we talk about a great many other things too. There are aspects of our work which cannot be called shop. And when the musicians talk about music, the artists about art, the teachers of literature about literature, the psychologists about psychology, I do not feel as though I were shut up in an institution, but rather as though I were out in the wide, wide world drawing in the breath of life. I am sure that no one of my colleagues attempts to teach me, yet each one of these rarely gifted women does teach me. And then we dis- cuss other matters which have no connection with our work. The affairs of the universe do not have time to get much awry, for we have straight- ened them out so often over our tea-cups. Like 60 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS the clergy too we have a large fund of anecdotes, for both our acquaintances and our reading have been large and varied. And are we happy? I do not know any women who are happier. Doubt- less the married woman's life is higher and holier for the woman who is best fitted for it, but the teacher's life is higher and holier for the woman who is best fitted for it. After all is it really so much better to bring more people into the world, than to train those who are already in it, as we hope we are doing, to be a little better and a little happier? The objection that is sometimes made to our life is that it unfits us for any other. But does not any life tend to unfit for any other life? What middle-aged man or woman of any calling can make a violent change in manner of living with perfect equanimity? On the whole it seems best to lead the life which we have chosen, or which circumstances have chosen for us, as well as we can ; our main duty is to live that life, not to fit ourselves for another, which we shall probably never be called upon to live. And if our human interests are many and varied, we at least stand as good a chance of being able to accommodate ourselves to any changes that may come to us as do our brothers and sisters in other walks of life. IV THE ARTIST This morning I attended a Congregational church in Cambridge, and was much struck by a petition in the long prayer, wherein the clergy- man prayed for "all musicians and artists, that they may seek to use their influence aright." These words set me to thinking my own thoughts to such an extent that I am afraid I did not hear the rest of the prayer, nor any of the sermon. I do not know that I ever heard such a petition in church before, but it seemed to me right that musi- cians and artists of all kinds should be prayed for, and I wondered why clergymen did not pray for them oftener. We pray for all ministers and teachers, why not for the interpreters of truth, the creators of beauty .f* For beauty stirs in us a chord of wider and deeper vibration than does any purely intellectual quality, a real longing for the Infinite, so our artists should be in a peculiar sense servants of the Most High God, and there- fore especially to be prayed for, Ruskin's words came to me, "From day to day and strength to strength, build up indeed by art, by thought and by just will an Ecclesia of which it shall not be said, 'See what manner of stones are here, but see 51 52 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS what manner of men !' " It is significant to me that in building up that Ecclesia, art is placed be- fore either thought or just will. If art then is to be first agent in that structure, how important that its influence should be good! And yet I doubt whether the artist thinks about his influence, or ought to think about it. I am inclined to believe that just so far as he does think about it, his art will be bad, and his influence, in so far as he has any influence, will be bad also. For the world's great workers may be divided into two classes, — Reformers and Artists, and the dif- ference between them does not depend so much upon the form of work which they have chosen, as upon the spirit in which they approach that work. Thus the teacher may be either a reformer or an artist. She (to my mind the teacher is generally she) who thinks most about her pupils, about their needs, moral, mental and physical and seeks prin- cipally to adapt her teaching to those needs, I should class as a reformer. She who thinks most about the subject matter which she is teaching, and seeks to present it as well as she can, almost regardless of her pupils, I should class as an art- ist. Nor is the one necessarily a better teacher than the other. The former makes her students feel that she is interested first in them, in their merits and shortcomings, interested in the subject largely for their sakes, for the effect that it has upon them. The latter is at first chiefly interested in the subject, but eventually she becomes inter- THE ARTIST 53 ested in the pupils for the subject's sake. Gradu- ally she becomes aware that what is dear to her is dear to some of them, and instantly there is a strong bond of sympathy; or she recognizes that what is dear to her is not dear to some of them, and she tries to create a liking, to arouse an en- thusiasm, not so much for their sakes, as for the sake of that which she loves. Even then she does not turn reformer; she does not adapt the subject to her pupils, but she tries to excel herself in her presentation of it, for she feels that if any one fails to share her enthusiasm, it must be because her presentation was faulty. Perhaps she never takes so strong a personal interest in her students as the reformer teacher does. I have sometimes thought that in her judgment of them she is kind- lier, but not so kind. Not being so much inter- ested in their individual moral and intellectual wel- fare, she is not so severe in her judgments of their shortcomings, but on the other hand she will not go so far out of her way to serve them, for her real devotion is to her subject, not to her pupils; one cannot serve two masters. In a sense she does love her students, but often it is in the sense in which Sir Henry Irving loved his audiences when he addressed himself to them as their loving friend. Yet she probably gives more to them as artist than she could give as reformer. For we must fulfill ourselves, not try to be somebody else, that is suicide. We are born reformers or artists, not made; it is the reformer's duty to see that he 54 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS is a good reformer, the artist's duty to see that he is a good artist. Men are reformers then when their aim is to make the world, — their world, the men, women and children right around them — better, artists when they are intent on producing a perfect piece of work. It is the reformer who tries to influence people; that is, he delivers his message to those about him, and his care is first that it shall be a message that will help them, and second that he may put it in such form that they will hear it. But the artist is alone with his God ; in the secret place of the Most High he has seen a vision, and he strives to reproduce that vision perfectly, as he has seen it, "according to the pattern that was shown unto him in the mount," quite irrespective of men's attitude toward it. " And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame, And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame; But each for the joy of the working, and each in his separate star Shall draw the thing as he sees it for the God of things as they are." I think of these two classes of workers in connec- tion with Raphael's great picture "The Trans- figuration." The artist is in my mind on the mount where Christ is being transfigured; the re- former is below in the valley among those pos- sessed with unclean spirits, and unlike the apostles THE ARTIST 55 who because of their unbelief could not cast them out, he with strong faith is constantly casting them out. Nor is the one greater than the other. To concentrate on perfection is in some sense higher, to deal with the numerous and immediate problems of life is in some sense broader, but both are needed, and each must follow his star. Of the reformer it may be said, "His servant doth continually serve Him," but the mission of the artist is not so much to serve Him directly, as to "see His face." Strong to reproduce the truth which has been revealed to him, to create his little portion of beauty, he comes more and more to understand Him who is the source of all truth, the fountain of all beauty, whom he may or may not call God. If his vision is a true one, and he re- produces it correctly, men perhaps of his own gen- eration, perhaps of a later generation, will gaze upon it and be influenced by it ; but he does not seek to influence, he seeks only to present per- fectly that which he has seen, heard and felt of the Word of Life. " And if some worthy spirit be pleased too, It shall some comfort breed, but not more will. But what if none? It cannot yet undo The love I bear unto this holy skill; Tliis is the thing that I was born to do, This is my scene, this part must I fulfill." For just as soon as the artist fixes his eye upon his audience, that is just as soon as he begins to think about his influence, he deteriorates as an 56 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS artist. For then he must present not the ideally best thing, but the best thing that his audience is able to receive ; that is he must adapt his message to them, must make compromises, must in fact cease to be an artist, since the essence of art is the search after perfection. The reformer is con- stantly making compromises in order that he may influence people, and within certain limits it is right that he should. For he speaks to the men of his own generation ; he must influence them or count for nothing, so it is well that he should real- ize that "half a loaf is better than none." His work may be as enduring as that of the artist, but he is held in remembrance not because of the pre- cepts that he taught, but because of the changed lives of those who heard him. Through him they rose a step higher, and the gain which they made they passed on to all those who should come after. Most of us do not read Luther's teachings to-day, but we are all better because Luther taught. The great lawgiver of Israel, like all statesmen, was a reformer rather than an artist, therefore he made compromises. "For the hardness of your hearts he gave you this precept," and we have outgrown many of his precepts. Jesus Christ was more of an artist than of a reformer. He spoke for all time, presented the truth exactly as He saw it, made no compromises to his generation. There- fore, as is so often the case with artists, in his own lifetime his influence was not widespread, but we have outgrown nothing that He taught; all THE ARTIST 57 through the ages the Comforter has been bringing to remembrance such portions of His teaching as the particular age has most needed. So perhaps it is best to pray not that the artist may seek to use his influence aright, but that he may seek to have a true vision, and be able to present clearly that which he has seen. For the truth of the vision, or at least its con- tinuance and deepening truth, and the ability to reproduce it, does depend upon the earnestness with which the artist seeks it. It is true that art- ists are born, not made, that the vision is a free gift. Therefore the true artist will not think of himself as having accomplished anything, but rather of the greatness of the glory that has been revealed to him; he can reverence his art without egotism, for his attitude is that of the priest ad- ministering the sacrament; he is but the medium through which spiritual power manifests itself, the greatness is not in him but through him. If he does not believe in a Power not himself that makes for righteousness, he certainly does believe in a Power not himself that makes for Truth and Beauty. Socrates with his demon, Joan of Arc with her voices, are only slight exaggerations of what all artists, nay, all who have achieved great things have felt. So the true artist does not so much throw himself into his art, as allow his art to impress itself upon him. "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth," that is the attitude. In that remarkable story "The Romance of Leonardo 58 IN CA^IBRIDGE BACKS da Vinci," Merejkowski represents Raphael as say- ing, "When one thinks, everything goes wrong." I take this to mean that so long as the artist con- sciously thinks, that is so long as he and his thought are separated, he produces nothing that can be called art, for what is more antagonistic to art than unassimilated intellect? It is when the man becomes so one with his thought and so one Avith his will, that he seems to neither think nor will, that the heavenly vision comes to him, and later, under similar circvunstances, comes the power to express it. "Divest mind of e'en thought, and lo! God's unexpressed will dawns o'er it." But in the interval between the vision and its final em- bodiment in art, there must be periods in which intellect and will play their part, and play them very consciously. "It shall be given you in that hour what ye shall speak," what ye shall write, what ye shall sing, what ye shall paint, yes, but only as previous to that hour, intellect and will have done their work. Furthermore, later visions come only as the artist has faithfully presented those which have already been vouchsafed to him. Moreover I think it not too much to say that unless the artist's waking hours are rich and pure, he will in time cease to dream true dreams. For art cannot for any long time be separated from the life of which it is the embodiment ; if it would live it must be penetrated and transfigured by the breath of the artist's soul. Hence the artist must not only work but live, since as art is the inter- THE ARTIST 59 pretation of life he only can be an artist who has life, and who has it more abundantly. All the ex- periences of life, its keenest joys and its bitterest sorrows, give richness, breadth and depth to art. He who refuses to drink the cup of either joy or sorrow has thereby put limitations upon his art ; neither the old-time Puritan nor the mere pleasure- seeker has any place in the highest Heaven of Truth and Beauty. Only sinful experiences should be shunned, for in the long run sin must deaden the fineness of any gift. Only the pure in heart shall see God. I would not, however, be understood to say that the artist has no right to use sinful experience as a subject for art. For after all his mission is not so much to give us Beauty in the ordinary sense of the word as to give us Truth, to give us Life. So the greatest artist does not give us the beauti- ful to the exclusion of the unbeautiful, nor the un- beautiful to the exclusion of the beautiful, nor even the moral to the exclusion of the immoral, but still less the immoral to the exclusion of the moral, for he who sees the whole cannot always be a poet of "sweetness and light," nor can he always dwell among the denizens of the dark. He is interested in life in every form in which it appears ; he, the secondary creator, finds no life really repulsive, even as God, the original creator, finds no life really repulsive. He will therefore bring earth's truly great ones before us, and investigate the source of their strength, 60 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS but he will also present to us the lowest, the meanest and vilest, let them justify themselves from their own point of view, say everything that can conceivably be said in their favor. When the artist is himself pure with the artist's passion for truth, I believe that he may safely give us any vision that may come to him. And when he presents that which is really true, not just on the surface true, I have sufficient faith in life and in the Lord of life, to believe that it must tend not toward immorality and ugliness, but toward mor- ality and beauty. "So beautiful that it must be true" has its converse, "so true that it must be beautiful" and both propositions are true. It is said that Jenny Lind could not take the part of a bad character because she felt so out of sympathy with it. Sir Henry Irving seemed to prefer the villain's part, but will anyone say that his acting was productive of evil? For myself I can say that every time I saw Irving I came away feeling that on the one hand my sympathies had been enlarged, while on the other I had been made to pray more earnestly, "Lead me not into temp- tation." For he seemed to say to each one of us, his auditors, "Thou art the man," to make us feel that every man is contained in every other man, that, given the same circumstances, any one of us might have been the villain whose soul was being laid bare before us. So while we looked into the heart of the sinner, and came to love and to hope for him who after all was so like our- THE ARTIST 61 selves, came to understand what it is to "hate sin, but love the sinner" (as children we were taught that that was what God did, but we didn't understand it then), we looked into our own hearts and said to ourselves, "Let him who thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." Yet I do not believe that Irving tried to teach a moral lesson ; he only tried to present truth, to make us know. But perfect knowledge means perfect love, — it means also perfect morality. I think then we may come to the conclusion that the artist's influence is best when he tries not to make his influence good, but to make his art good, and one of the ways to make his art good is to make his life good. Here he has a great struggle, for owing to the circumstances of his life, strong temptations must generally come to him, and owing to his own nature these tempta- tions must appeal to him with peculiar, almost irresistible force. For to be an artist at all it is necessary to have a stronger emotional and in some sense a stronger intellectual nature than other men have ; it is not necessary to have a stronger will. Given an excessive emotional and intellectual nature with an average or less than average will to control them, and moral ruin is almost inevitable. Yet the danger is greater to those who have the artist's temperament, and there are very many such, without the artist's ability. For the work itself is a safeguard ; some very emotional people feel that the only safe out- 62 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS let for their emotional nature is in art, partly be- cause the emotionalism which finds an outlet in that way may not demand other and more dan- gerous outlets, partly because the work takes time, and while one is working one cannot be ac- tively sinning. Moreover the artist frequently realizes that he cannot sin in such a way as to incapacitate himself for work, so for art's sake, if not for morality's sake, he sanctifies himself. For while it is probably true that it is impossible to be an artist at all except as one has a nature peculiarly susceptible to temptation, it is also true that he who constantly yields to temptation will injure or ruin his art. To be an artist then it is necessary that one be tempted, to continue an artist it is necessary that one resist tempta- tion. But after all is there not the same necessity in order to be and to continue to be a man? Then too the artist's difficulty often comes from the fact that to him the boundary between right and wrong is not so rigid as to other people. Seeking to understand life, he sees so much good beneath the evil, and so much evil beneath the good, that he is likely to lose his bearings. Of course the truest and best balanced artist, like the truest and best balanced man, only learns from this so far as his own life is concerned to avoid the evil in the good, and so far as his judgments of others are concerned to be more hopeful and more charitable, since there is so much good in the evil. But to one who is not perfectly balanced, the THE ARTIST 63 temptation is to ask "What is good?" as Pilate asked "What is truth ?" perhaps at first earnestly, even in agony, but later scornfully. In a certain sense too it is necessary that the artist should have no fixed opinions, in order that his mind may be open to all new impressions. He must divest himself of all prejudices, and if he retains tra- ditions, it must be because he is able to make them something more than traditions. He must not put himself in the position of having to con- tend for definition, for once let a man adopt a definition, and all growth in that direction stops. The rest of his life is spent in contending for definition, just as in the case of the adoption of a complicated religious creed, the strength which might have gone toward developing a rich spirit- ual life, goes toward defending the creed. It is the artist's ambition to die learning. But in this tolerance of definition of right and wrong, there is of course danger of coming to the conclusion, practical if not theoretical, that there is no right or wrong. Even when the changing impressions to which the artist is and must be subjected do not mean moral ruin, they often mean life-long ineffectualness, for it is difficult for him who sees good in everything to be able to determine where the greater good lies. Hence there is much truth in the saying "One must see to know, be blind to act." Moreover the very fact that the artist's work lies in the ideal world tends to unfit him to live 64. IN CAMBRroGE BACKS in the real world. The emotions of art have, it is true, the advantage of harmlessness over the emotions of life, but at the same time they lack the bracing qualities which real joys and real sorrows bring with them. He who has " let his feelings run in soft luxurious flow Shrinks when hard service must be done, and faints at every blow." To the mind which has been drugged with bar- ren feeling, and some artists do thus drug their minds, real life seems unprofitable and common- place, its everyday friction intolerable. That is one reason why the artist is so often irritable over little things, he is "ein Mai in Himmel und das nachste Mai in Keller" ; when he does descend to earth, he actually goes beneath the earth. But there is frequently a bitterness about the artist that lies deeper than petty irritability, the bitterness which artists too often feel toward each other. This, however, is not confined to artists. A friend once said to me of a very sweet young girl "She is so uniformly sweet, because she has nothing of the spirit of the reformer in her." And when I read the history of the movement which we have agreed to call pre-eminently the Reformation, just as Mrs. Poyser said "Women are mostly foolish, the Lord Almighty made them to match the men," so I am inclined to say "Re- formers mostly hate each other, the Lord Al- mighty made them to match the artists." Nor THE ARTIST 65 is the reason far to seek in either case. Earnest men with a message, whether artists or reformers, are so sure that their truth is truth, that their message is the right message, that they cannot bear that anyone should deliver a false message, or that the world should receive it. It is almost St. Paul's feeling when he wrote, "If we or an angel from heaven should preach any other doc- trine to you from that which ye have received, let him be anathema." The great artist or the great reformer may have grace to see that his message and the other are both true, and that instead of being antagonistic, they are complementary ; or that if the other message be nothing, it will come to naught, but that if it be of God, he cannot overthrow it; but few men, whether artists or re- formers, are great in all respects. Where the artist's bitterness is really jealousy (it is often falsely so-called) it does not arise from the fact that he is an artist, but from the fact that he is a man with considerable of the old Adam in him. Indeed it is to be attributed not to the artist in him, but to his failure to be completely an artist : that is, to the fact that he cares not so much about art as about reputation. Art too tends to separate the artist from other men, because though in one sense it broadens his sympathies, in another sense it frequently nar- rows them. For while the artist sympathizes with both the good and the evil, the beautiful and the hideous, it is difficult for him to feel an in- 66 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS terest in the mediocre and the commonplace, which generally expresses itself in the conven- tional. The man whose morality is conventional, or whose religion expresses itself in conventional forms, does not seem sincere to him. That is one reason why the artist, even the artist with a deeply religious nature, frequently does not like church services. He whose whole business it is to pene- trate into the truth of things, to find proper ex- pression for the truth which he sees, feels that conventional morality, conventional religion, the ordinary church services do not ring true. Bad taste itself is something that is not true ; services are in bad taste when they are not true expres- sions of the heart. But does not the artist some- times interpret failure to express, which after all comes with practice, to mean failure to feel and to know.'' Of course we do not feel and know quite clearly, until we are able to express that which we feel and know. We clarify the feeling by expressing it, and yet we may feel truly and deeply without feeling clearly. Even "frothing spume and frequent sputter," sometimes "prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest," though the frothing spume and frequent sputter do not seem the fitting expression for it. Perhaps the artist's impatience with the medio- cre and the commonplace arises from his not being artist enough; for while on the one hand he lives too exclusively in the spiritual, that is in the ideal world, on the other hand he is often too THE ARTIST 67 materialistic, or at least too sensuous ; he becomes too dependent upon the senses, that only is beau- tiful to him which appeals to his senses, sound, form, color, verbal beauty of expression and so forth. But if he could only see beneath the sur- face, he might find that beautiful and interesting whose outward manifestation is very common- place. Mr. Browning has been criticized because he makes Pippa, a simple silk-winding girl, talk like a female Paracelsus, Tresham when he has to tell Mildred that he has killed her lover, stop to remind her how as children they had gathered water-lilies together, Paracelsus utter a profound speech several hundred lines long, and then in- stantly expire. But Browning himself answers this criticism when in his essay on Shelley, he says that it is the poet's business to see "not what man sees, but what God sees." It is true that Pippa, Tresham and Paracelsus would not, had they been in the flesh, have spoken as Browning makes them speak; he puts into their mouths not what they would have said, not perhaps what they would even have consciously thought, but what perhaps unconsciously to themselves, God saw that they were trying to say, were trying to think. " Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped. All I could never be, All men ignored in me. This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped." 68 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS We dumb children of earth do have many strug- gling, incoherent thoughts for which no one gives us credit, for which we do not give ourselves credit, because we cannot express them. It is the artist's business to say for us that which we long to say, and cannot. While in a deep and broad sense the artist generally understands people better than they understand themselves, this understanding does not always help him to adapt himself to them, so he does not get the credit for it. He often holds himself aloof from people, or is silent when he is with them, frequently seems unable to adapt him- self to general conversation, is occasionally lack- ing in tact. Because of this lack of adaptability, he who makes experiencing, reflecting upon and expressing experiences, the business of life is con- stantly being told that he is lacking in experi- ence. And doubtless there is a real truth in this ; he seeks experience a little too eagerly to find it. For when a man is very much absorbed in experi- encing, he cannot be absorbed in experiences. The consciousness that he is experiencing becomes stronger than the experience. He whose main business it is to understand life often in some measure foregoes living. "When one becomes too deeply absorbed in the midst of things," Goethe says, "it is impossible to think about their begin- ning and end." When Goethe was a very young man he asked his friend Behrisch what experience was, and was told that "Experience is properly THE ARTIST 69 what an experienced man experiences in experi- encing his experiences." That is the kind of ex- perience that the artist is likely to get, an experi- ence of experience. For he holds himself aloof from things in order that he may see whence they come and whither they go, without being too much occupied by details. He mingles with the real world chiefly in order that he may people his ideal world. While his intense internal activity does not destroy perception, he frequently perceives only that he may conceive. In conversation therefore he often betrays a lack of that instinct- ive sympathy which is the cement of good society. Too much is going on in his own mind for him to be very sensitive to what is going on in other people's minds. With him thought cannot yield even to sympathy. Goethe tells us that he often thought of his companion as though he were his portrait ; he neither spoke nor listened, but he con- sidered him as a picture, as a whole, especially as regarded himself and his relations to him, so too great interest in the whole man excluded all in- terest in the partial man. But men wish their companions to be interested in the partial selves which they are striving at the time to reveal, not in the whole selves which they either do not know, or if they do know, they wish to conceal. It seems almost a contradiction after this to say that the artist is held aloof from society partly by an over-sensitive nature, and yet this is true. For to be an artist it is necessary to be 70 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS very impressionable, and the impressionable man is almost always the sensitive man. The sensitive man shrinks from companionship that is foreign to his nature ; he must have full fellowship or none. Thus Goethe says of Stilling that where he was not known, he was silent, where he was known and not loved, he was sad. But just in proportion as the artist shrinks from mere acquaintances, so much the more does he desire real companionship, the companionship that means absolute trust, absolute sympathy. It is not good for a man to be alone in the ideal world any more than in the real world ; indeed in the ideal world the loneliness is more intense, for the more that there is to share, the greater the need of sharing it. George Eliot says that it is difficult to create, except as one has the assurance that what is infinitely dear to one's self is infinitely dear to some one else; she attributed her success in authorship to her association with George Henry Lewes. And if in his creative moments the artist needs the stimulus of love, equally in moments of exhaustion, and nothing exhausts as art does, does he need love and sympathy upon which to rest. Then because the artist is and must be a most impressionable person, with vary- ing and contradictory impressions and emotions, he needs some one to quiet his restless spirit, to assure him that there are some things which are fixed and constant. I find this need best ex- pressed in the life of Jenny Lind where it is said THE ARTIST 71 of her, "She needed a strong and steady per- sonal influence at the back of her life, to calm her agitation, to control her uncertainties, to abide constant throughout her reactions, to dissi- pate her suspicions, to fix her emotions, to anchor her conscience. She had all the fervors and the lapses, the starts and the recoils of a dramatic genius ; and firm and high as was her moral ideal, its very force brought it into confused collision with the bewilderment of circumstances, and it was as liable to perplex and distress her as to cheer and impel. This made her passionately feel for something which could from without buttress and reassure her spiritual intentions. Shaken as she herself often was by the strong emotions which swept across her soul, she needed an external mark, a sign, a symbol of the unshaken security of the moral end in which she trusted. Someone ought to be near at hand to assure her that all was well, that her belief in goodness had not played her false." ^ While many artists have been ideally mated, they seem more likely to be successful in friend- ship than in marriage, probably because in friend- ship there is less need for contact with the details of the real world than in marriage. Goethe has put into words what many an artist has felt about his friends. He tells us that he gathered about him in Weimar a circle of wise men who "con- 1 Holland and Rockstro "Jenny Lind, The Artist." 72 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS stituted for him a home." His friendships were in every case founded upon the "religious senti- ments, intellectual sympathies, the affairs of the heart which are imperishable" ; he loved his friends because they "helped him to good thoughts." Where he found the intellectual and spiritual sympathy which he craved, he threw aside all re- serve; his one desire was to turn himself inside out, that his friend might comprehend his spirit's life. Of his first intellectual friendship, that with Jacobi, he says "Such a relationship was new to me, and excited a passionate longing for further communion. At night, after we had parted and retired to our chambers, I often sought him again. With the moonlight streaming over the broad Rhine, we stood at the window and revelled in the full interchange of ideas, which in such splendid moments of confidence swell forth so abundantly." But Goethe's supreme friendship was that with Schiller, and the beauty of this connection, he says, lay in the fact that they found the strongest bond of union in their exertions to reach a common aim, and "had no need for what is ordinarily called friendship." The desire to determine whether he or his friend wrote certain lines, he denounced as Philistine, "As if it were of any importance to determine which of us wrote them ! Friends such as we were, intimate for years, in habits of daily intercourse, live so truly in one another that it is hardly possible to determine whether single thoughts belong to one or to the other." THE ARTIST 73 In my essay on friendship I dwelt upon the danger that an emotional friendship may be the enemy of work. I cannot feel that in the case of the real artist there is much danger that work will suffer because of love ; his love will rather be- come material with which to feed his art ; he will work because he loves, and love because he works. Every poet lover or friend can sing " O danke nicht fiir diese Lieder, Mir ziemt es dankbar dir zu sein. Du gabst sie mir, ich gebe wieder. Was jetzt und einst und ewig dein." The danger is not that the artist's work may suffer because of his love, but that his love may suffer because of his work. The artist more than other men craves love and sympathy, but he fre- quently craves them selfishly ; he demands more than he can possibly give ; he is too much wrapped up in his own life and work to give as much as he gets, nor does he realize that the sympathy which he constantly demands takes strength. Did Jacobi also seek Goethe at midnight, I wonder? was it as much of a joy to him to give sympathy as it was to Goethe to receive it? or was he dis- turbed by being kept up late at night? Did he too pour out his soul to Goethe, and did he get as much sympathy as he gave? or when he tried it did he find Goethe so absorbed in his own thoughts, that he came to the conclusion that his function must be to listen, to give sympathy, not 74 IN CA]\IBRIDGE BACKS to expect it in return? Is the artist's love an un- selfish devotion which desires to make sacrifices for the sake of the beloved? Gifts he probably will lavish if he can, for they minister to the sa- cred fire of his love, and for his work's sake it is necessary that he should not outgrow his love, for it is his love that gives life to his work. But is he not in danger of looking upon his love as simply material for and stimulus to art? " And love me, love me, little one, That I of bliss may sing; Then leave me, that with tears and woe. My mournful song may ring. And die ! My song must know death too, And what its sorrows are. That it may know despair's true ring; Die then ! I am Cobzar ! " The test in the artist's case is not does he work better because he loves, he could hardly help doing that, but could he give up his work because he loves? Yet we must not ask too much of him, for what man could give up his life's work for love's sake? There is a sense in which to almost every man work comes, and perhaps should come before love. He can bear his wife's death with more equanimity than he can the permanent giving up of his work, and even interruptions are almost in- tolerable. A woman's work is ordinarily to care for those whom she loves, to make them comfort- able in direct personal ways ; hence what seem like constant interruptions are not real interruptions, THE ARTIST 75 but a part of her work ; she fulfills her life best by submitting to them, but generally speaking the man who allows himself to be interrupted is to be blamed. We do not find fault with the man be- cause he does not fill the woman's place, nor with the woman because she does not fill the man's place. So perhaps we should not require of the artist that he give us all that he has to give, and then all that he would have to give if he were not an artist. The greatest artists have probably been all-round men, but we cannot all be greatest. Some other things must generally be sacrificed to success in art, but let the artist understand that he sacri- fices them, not because the artist's life is more important than other men's lives, but because it is his life, and every man must follow his own star ; and let him not demand of others sacrifices which he would not be willing to make for them. In art, as in everything else, true greatness lies in balance, in being able to see proportions. THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT In connection with my meditations upon the artist, I have thought often of the study of an artistic temperament which Mr. Barrie has given us in "Sentimental Tommy" and "Tommy and Grizel." Tommy, it will be remembered, was the child of a masterful man and an imaginative wo- man. All through his childhood he was troubled by the fact that there seemed to be so many people within him. When he grew to man's estate he was very shy of the ladies, and yet he wrote a book on woman which proved to be the book of the day. So the ladies united to adore him; it was suggested that his wisdom on the subject of the gentler sex was due to the fact that he had loved a beautiful girl who had died. Tommy him- self accepted the suggestion, called his dead lady- love Mildred, and almost came to believe that she had really existed. After this he made love to all the ladies whom he met just to see how it felt to be making love. Then he returned to Thrums, his boyhood's home, and his old playmate Grizel, the Painted Lady's daughter, was disappointed because she could not respect him. So he made up his mind that she 76 THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 77 should respect him, and in an heroic sentimental mood he rescued a boy from drowning. After this he began to think that Grizcl loved him, therefore he made most Aaolent love to her, and she, who had always wanted to love him, but had not permitted herself to do so until she was sure that he wanted her to, now gave herself wholly to the joy of loving. Then the artist in Tommy rebelled against marriage with the commonplace duties that it would bring with it, and at last he had to tell Grizel so. Later the broken-hearted Grizel hears him make love to Lady Pippinworth, a married woman whom at heart he despises, but whose proud scornfulness he wishes to subdue. The result is that she loses her mind temporarily, and Tommy, overcome by remorse and affection (affection, not love) marries her in her insanity and takes care of her most tenderly for eighteen months until her mind returns to her. Yet with all his striving he could not really change him- self. "They say that we always can when we try hard enough," Mr. Barrie says, "so I suppose that Tommy did not try hard enough." In the end he dies most ignominiously, strangled by his great coat, which caught on a nail in the garden wall that he was endeavoring to scale in order to get to Lady Pippinworth. And Grizel, who knew all, thought it all out calmly for herself, and to her latest breath continued to love Tommy just the same. And when Mr, Barrie speculates as to why Grizel loved Tommy, Grizel who saw through 78 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS him so well, and who demanded so much of men, he remembers the look that was wont to come into her face when she bent over a little child. And he sums up Tommy's whole character when he says, "I see that all that was wrong with him was that he could not always be a boy." That is the keynote to Tommy's failings, and because I be- lieve it to be the keynote of many an artist's fail- ings, I have been led to make a special study of him. From morning to night the child lives in a world of illusions ; his whole life consists in play- ing that people and things are not what they are. The pleasure of the game does not even consist in playing that they are better and grander than they are; it is sufficient that they should be differ- ent from what they are. "Have a different name from your real name," said a child of three, "be- cause it isn't any fun to have the same name that you really have." Because this world of illusions may be entered without money and without price, the children of the hovel are as happy as the chil- dren of the palace. In this realm of the imagination the artist lives to the close of his life. We all of us when we are children dream of Thrums ; but compara- tively few of us even as children can put our dreams into words, and after awhile we cease even to dream. The artist is the child who becomes more and more of a child as the years go on, with more and more power to make the rest of us THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAJVIENT 79 children. Dreaming more vividly every year, he gains more and more power to express his dreams. More and more is he able to carry us back to the days when we dreamed ourselves. To this grown-up child too it is not necessary that things be better and grander than they are in order that they may be interesting. The one essential to him too is that they be different. "This is my birthday," writes Sonya Kovalevsky in her diary, "and I am thirty-one years old." In a footnote her biographer says "It was not her birthday, and that was not her age." The youthful Shelley was in the habit of writing let- ters to people under assumed names. The young Goethe loved to go about the country incognito, and this too before he had attained a reputation which might subject him to inconvenience in traveling. There was no object in it. It was simply that he might be something that he was not ; that he might continue the game, which he had begun as a child. To the perfect actor the play is much more real than the reality. "I am sorry that you felt so badly," said the little girl to the big brother, who by an oratorical effort had moved some of his audience to tears. "I didn't feel badl}^" was the indignant reply, "I only wanted to make other people feel badly." That boy was not a perfect artist. The perfect artist feels badly himself, or thinks that he does. Indeed perhaps the only criterion by which the supreme artist can dis- 80 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS tinguish between the world of his imagination, and the world of sense, is in the fact that the former is more real to him than the latter. Wordsworth had, at times, to convince himself of the existence of the external world by clasping a tree or anything else that happened to be near him. Shelley had a period in which he doubted the existence of the You. But it is not only the existence of the You that is doubtful. The existence of the I is even more dubious. There is not one of the various selves that the child or the artist imagines himself to be, that is not more real than the one self that ap- pears to the world. "There is a deal of Hart- leys," said the five-year-old Hartley Coleridge r "there is Picture Hartley, and Shadow Hartley, and there's Echo Hartley, and there's Catch-me- fast Hartley." And there is a "deal" of persons in every child. The difference is that the deal of Hartleys and of Tommies are persistent. Char- acter-formation is a narrowing as well as a deep- ening process. We all of us probably have at the beginning the material for more than one person. Training, environment, the force of our own will, determine which one of the numerous persons that are born in us shall prevail. That one gradually destroys the others, and strengthens himself. Experience we say is broadening. Perhaps it would be just as correct to say that it is narrow- ing. For to have experienced one thing very deeply, so deeply that it has become part and THE ARTISTIC TEMPERA^IENT 81 parcel of the being, a motive-force in the life, shuts out the possibility of experiencing certain other things. The true Tommy refuses to experience anything in such a way as to exclude the possibility of any other experience. He "lives with the world's life," not so much because he has "renounced his own," as because he has no life of his own to re- nounce. With abounding child-life, he has no grown-up life in order that he may be free to live in turn the grown-up lives of every one of the rest of us. And because he lives not one life but many, he understands the lives of every one of us better than we understand them ourselves. He under- stands the individual life, because he understands life itself. We say that it is through experience that we come to know life. But experience often closes the eyes to the deeper meaning of life. Not that the man of artistic temperament does not feel. On the contrary, he feels much more violently than other men do, just as the child feels more violently than the man. There is no joy equal to the violent joy of the child. Nor is there any despair equal to the despair of the im- aginative child. For the child who is very much a child, self-control in either joy or sorrow, is al- most or quite an impossibility. The man knows that nothing is important enough to lose himself over. But if the child's feeling is more violent than the man's, it is less intense and less lasting. The greater violence and the shorter duration 82 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS of the child's emotion spring from the same cause. He is violent, because for the time being he gives himself wholly to one feeling. There is no other to interfere with, or modify it. But the emotion does not last, because just as soon as another emotion arises, it takes complete possession, even as the former did. In the child's case, the former disappears. In the case of the artist pure and simple, it remains to be enshrined as a work of art. In a sense he continues to feel it always, but it is no longer the original feeling that predomi- nates. It is rather the feeling that he has felt. In the artist's case, as in the child's, this often gets the better of the real feeling even while the real feeling lasts. I have sometimes wondered whether it was altogether because of the inade- quacy of language, that Tennyson "sometimes held it half a sin, to put in words the grief he felt." Did not the sin lie partly in the fact that in clothing grief in beautiful words, admiration for the sorrow became stronger than the sorrow itself.? Yet to be very conscious that one is feel- ing, even to get so far as not to be able to dis- tinguish between the real feeling and the con- sciousness of it, does not exclude real feeling. The child enjoys all his plays, the sad ones as well as the glad ones, indeed the sad ones often more than the glad ones. So the man of genius enjoys all his plays, and the sorrowful ones more than the happy ones. There is such a romance about a forlorn existence. There is such a su- THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAJVfENT 83 periority about the suffering man. Stern Thomas Carlyle, who wrapped himself about with melancholy, as with a garment, speaks of a "kind of imperial sorrow that is almost like felicity. So completely and composedly wretched, one is equal to the very gods." "I have heartily en- joyed," says Goethe, "a genuine experience of the variegated throng and press of the world: Sorrow, Hope, Love, Works, Wants, Adventure, Ennui, Impatience, Folly, Joy, the Expected and the Unknown, the Superficial and the Profound." He had enjoyed all, and of them all he places Sorrow first. Denied Lotte's love, he gave him- self up for a time, to the pleasures of melancholy. He had a dagger which he does not forget to say was very handsome. This he placed by his bed- side every night, and before extinguishing his candle, he made various attempts to pierce the sharp point a couple of inches into his breast. But not being able to do it, he laughed himself out of the notion, and decided to live. Tommy, denied the luxury of unrequited love, must needs write a book on the subject. And he was never so happy as when contemplating his own early death. Joy and Sorrow in the abstract impress the child, and the child-man more than joy and sor- row in the concrete. The thought of Death in the abstract is uplifting and ennobling, something to be dwelt upon. Death in the concrete is some- thing to be banished from the mind. A four- 84 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS year-old girl, who had heard of a mother who had lost her child, said to her own mother, "Does she ever laugh now?" Being told that she did, she said in a shocked voice, "Mother! how can she?" Yet if the dead child had been in her own house, there is no doubt that she would have been inter- ested in her play long before the funeral. The impression which the abstract makes upon the mind is at the same time deeper and less deep than that made by the concrete. It is more awe- inspiring, but less life-determining. The loves of the poets have generally been numerous. Why is it that they who enshrine love for us, are themselves such inconstant lovers? Is it because love-making is for them just the most delightful of all plays? Like all the other plays, it is very real while it lasts. And it is as far re- moved from intentional cruelty as any play could possibly be. If only every one had understood with Corp that Tommy's love-making was "just another o' his plays," no harm would have been done by it. With marriage the play ends. The realities of life, from which the artist shrinks, crowd upon him as never before. It becomes less and less possible to live so exclusively in the spirit. When Levine in "Anna Karenina" looked forward to the bliss of married life, he did not take into consideration the fact that his wife must work. The realization of this was for a time a considerable drawback to his happiness. THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 85 The progress of the lover in Plato's Symposium is from the concrete to the abstract. From love of the beautiful in his beloved, he passes onward to the love of Beauty Absolute. But the prog- ress of the artist-lover is from the abstract to the concrete. He loves his mistress because he thinks he sees in her the concrete form in which the Ab- solute Beauty, whose he is, and whom he serves, embodies itself. As Emerson would say, it is not the beloved one whom he loves, but her radiance. Coming too close to her, the radiance is dispelled. For such a nature an unrequited love is more lasting than love requited. So long as there is hope the game continues. And there is more pleasure in struggle than in possession. "Man loves to conquer," says Goethe, "likes not to feel secure." When all hope is gone, the pleasures of melancholy remain, and for the head of the be- loved there is an immortal halo. The pain of disenchantment can never come to the lover. Beatrice, the mistress of Dante's home, would probably have become prosaic, tiresome, even ir- ritating. Beatrice, the unattained and unat- tainable, was to the poet life below and star above. The child does not originate his games. They are all suggested to him. He merely adopts and elaborates. He plays that he is someone whom he knows, someone of whom he has heard. So with Tommy. He did not originate Mildred. She was suggested to him. He did not even orig- 86 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS inate his own nobility of character. That too was a suggestion. When the child Tommy spent a shilling for a picture for his mother, it was that he might give her pleasure. It was after she praised his nobility that he discovered that "there ain't many as noble as I is." The man Tommy, who had reasoned the boy from drowning, "lay on his face shivering, not from cold, not from shock, but in a horror of himself. It was not water that he tried to shake fiercely from him when he rose; it was the monstrous part of him that had done this deed." It was when Crrizel admired his hero- ism and modesty that he again admired him- self. As it was easy to make him believe himself noble, so too it was easy to make him believe him- self base. He was always ill at ease and self- distrustful with people who did not admire him. Originality, we are accustomed to say, is the mark of genius. But perhaps it would be as true to say that the man of genius is the least original of all men. He is the impressionable man, the man whose soul lies open to all impressions, as the child's soul does, the man who can combine these impressions, and then impress them back upon those who have impressed them upon him. He is but the medium, through whom all men find ut- terance, voiceless men as well as those with voices. Where it is so difficult to distinguish between the internal and the external world, where per- sonal identity even is so uncertain, it is not pos- THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 87 sible that the line between truth and falsehood should be sharply drawn. There is no deliberate deception. It is the artist himself who is de- ceived. "One lies more to one's self than to any one else," Byron wrote in his diary. And that is what makes the case almost hopeless. For the lying to one's self is unconscious. Conscious ly- ing may be corrected. But how correct uncon- scious lying.'' "I don't know what my Heavenly Father is going to do about me," said the four- year-old, who had been reproved for what his par- ents considered too active an imagination. "I tell so many stories, I suppose my Heavenly Father will have to put a stop to it somehow. But I don't see how He is going to begin." Yes, that is the trouble. How put a stop to Tommy's story-telling, without clipping his wings .'^ And is it possible to clip his wings, even if it be de- sirable ? In the world of illusions in which the child lives, he is himself the central figure. For him, and by him, this world has been created. He has indeed created it for his own glory. And that part of the external world which he knows exists almost as much for him, as does his own internal world. For him his father earns money ; for him his mother toils. God, he is told, has made the world so beautiful, in order that he may be happy. Thus every child is an egotist. The discipline of life takes the egotism of child- hood out of many men, but rarely out of the art- 88 IN CAMBRroGE BACKS ist. For while other men succeed largely in pro- portion to their ability to repress themselves, the artist succeeds in proportion to his ability to ex- press himself. "Obliterate yourself," was Pym's advice to Tommy. But the artist who really ob- literated himself would be an absolute failure. For the artist has nothing to give the world but himself, and succeeds just in proportion as he is able to give himself. It is the writer who brings his reader into closest contact with himself who writes for all time. To do this, it is necessary not exactly that he think about himself, but that he completely identify himself with the objects of thought. Scherer says of Byron, "He has treated hardly any subject but one, himself," while Scott maintains of the same author that "he has embraced every topic of human life, and sounded everything on the divine harp, from its slightest to its most powerful and heart-astound- ing tones." Are not both statements true, and true not only of Byron, but of every writer who can be called great .f^ For the great writer is he who understands and writes of every topic of hu- man life, every passion of the human heart, and at the same time imparts his own personality to all that he writes. To the making of an artist, both society and solitude are necessary, society in which to ob- serve the lives of others, solitude in which to dis- cover the motive-power of those lives. To do the latter it is necessary to put one's self in every- THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 89 body else's place and then to commune with one's own heart. The proportion in which society and solitude should mingle vary with the nature of the genius. To Shakespeare, one fancies that society was more necessary than to Goethe. To Goethe, solitude was probably more essential than to Shakespeare. For Shakespeare presents men, Goethe thinks about them, and through them. Shakespeare is the seer, Goethe the thinker. Not that Shakes- peare thinks less than Goethe does, but he thinks less consciously and makes his reader less con- scious of his thinking. With him seeing and thinking are one thing. There are times when, to detect at first reading that Shakespeare is thinking, one has to be almost as quick as Shakes- peare himself. Goethe went much into society, but one im- agines that it was always "as the gods, apart." One is sure that Shakespeare was a "good fellow." There is a certain remoteness about Goethe's writings, which we feel is a reflection of the re- moteness of his character. He is further from the world of men and women than Shakespeare, and yet nearer to it. Every character in Shakes- peare is someone whom the reader has seen, or at least someone whom he is sure that Shakes- peare had seen. Every character in Goethe is the imaginative reader's self, the remote idealized self of whom every dreamer dreams. Tommy in his character, and we fancy in this 90 IN CMIBRIDGE BACKS respect in his writings, belongs to the school of Goethe rather than to that of Shakespeare. It is to be observed that it is only the imaginative reader who identifies every creation of Goethe and of Tommy with the self. Grizel half hoped that Tommy's woman was not the real woman, for if she were, then she, Grizel was even less than an average woman. But Grizel was not imaginative. It is this egotism of the artist that makes so- ciety difficult for him. Even as a child Tommy was not one with the children with whom he played. They were all more or less his puppets. As a man he was awkward and shy in society, until so- ciety became absorbed in him. After all, is it quite just to him to call it egotism.'' Was it not rather that he lived in a different world from that in which other people lived, and was at home with them only when he could draw them into his world and make them actors in it.'' Moreover the world stands in the way of the artist's overcoming his egotism. We refrain from praising the child, lest he be spoiled. But the man, who has had so many hard knocks, we think that he can stand praise. In the great artist's case, we do not stop to consider whether he can stand it or not. We praise because he forces our praise. But when the artist-man is still a child he cannot stand it. Yet the very thing that is spoiling the performer is necessary to the success of the performance. Were it not for an occasional "Well done," few of us would have the THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 91 courage to keep on with our work day after day. While the artist's work may be play it is more ex- hausting than any work. He must therefore be sustained by sympathy. No great work of Art, George Henry Lewes tells us, is produced "with- out the co-operation of the nation." Again, is it egotism? Is it not better to say that in order to paint the joys and sorrows of the world, it is necessary to have the sympathy of the world? How go on with one's work, year after year, un- less there is some evidence of success? In some lines of life we can feel that we succeed, whether we please or not. But while no great artist works to please people, there is a sense in which success in art does consist in pleasing people. When a man is as much the creature of impulse as Tommy was, we say that he is deficient in will. But we do not call the child lacking in will be- cause he rushes headlong into action. On the contrary we say that he is willful, full of will — and in the old days parents were accustomed to say that the will of such a child must be broken. There are no parents to break the will of the Tommies, the Gocthes, the Shelleys and the By- rons. Were there such parents, it is doubtful whether they would succeed. So the child's will, the performing will, remains. The man's will, restraining, renouncing and controlling, does not develop. Self-development, so largely an activity of the performing will, is the natural virtue of childhood. This the Tommies have. Self-con- 92 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS trol, the activity of the restraining will, is the ac- quired virtue of manhood. To this the Tommies do not attain. Again, it is the artist in Tommy that keeps him a child. Other men succeed in proportion as they hold on to themselves, the art- ist in proportion as he lets himself go. Other men succeed in proportion as they please others, the artist in proportion as he pleases himself, as he forces others to be pleased with what pleases him. The creature of impulse knows not the war in the members of which St. Paul writes. Grizel says that she has not a beautiful nature like Tommy's, she is so often rebellious. She is rebellious because she is a moral creature. There are two natures struggling within her. Tommy is not rebellious, because he does not fight. When an impulse seizes him, there is nothing within him to contend against it. That is, he is not a moral creature. I have somewhere read of a man who believed that God had forgotten to give him a soul. It would seem almost as though God had forgotten to give Tommy a moral sense, though there is something within him that thinks about the moral sense. Schiller maintained that the Fall of Man was the happiest event in the history of the race, for without it morality would have been impossible. Goethe, on the other hand, thought that we had paid too high a price for morality. And while it is certain that it is possible to be below morality, it is probable that it is possible to be above it. THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAJVIENT 93 Under "the ultimate angel's law, law, life, joy, impulse are one thing." Even here there are some in whose natures struggle is almost absent. There may be a few who have practically no impulses that it is neces- sary to fight, whose wills not only in the main purpose, but in each detail, are naturally one with the Divine will. They are God's children from the very beginning; they do not have to struggle to become so. There are others, who have the lower impulses to some extent, but in whom the moral imperative is so strong, that no sooner is a thing clearly recognized as wrong, than there is no longer any desire to do it. With such per- sons the effort is not so much to do what is right as to find out what is right. Lastly, there are the children and the Tommies, who act at once upon their impulses, whether lower or higher, be- cause for the time being there is absolutely noth- ing with which these impulses can come into col- lision. Such characters are not without their charm. There is the savage within us that awakes at intervals to cry " Ship me somewhere east of Suez where the best is like the worst. Where there ain't no Ten Commandments, an' a man can raise a thirst." And there is the tired man within us that loves to think that Mr. Richard Harding Davis' delight- 94 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS ful, irresponsible heroes are possible. But we know that in real life blessings do not abound wherever the Van Bibbers go. A broken-hearted and demented Grizel in Tommy's case, a Harriet compassing her own destruction in Shelley's case, a wrecked empire in the case of Alcibiades, these are the things that follow in the train of the real Van Bibbers. But while Tommy belongs to this third class of non-strugglers, we sometimes wonder what it is in him that debars him from the first class. None of his impulses are in themselves evil. Is it not again that he is simply the child, the child who cannot accommodate himself to the world of grown-up people, especially to the world where they marry and are given in marriage.'' One fancies that Tommy's books were calm and serene. They lifted one above the atmosphere of reality into the atmosphere of holiness, where no struggle is. His dislike for struggle was prob- ably one among many reasons why he could not write stories. In the essay-novel he could present that ideal life which is above struggle. In the story he would have to present actual life, in which there is naught but conflict. Hartley Coleridge, himself a Tommy, says that given such a character, the likelihood of ac- tion is inversely as the force of the motive and the time for reflection. " I think you could do the most courageous things," Grizel says to Tommy, " so long as there was no reason why you should THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT 95 do them." The child Grizel had said, " It is so easy to make up one's mind ! " " It's easy to you, that has just one mind," Tommy retorted, " but if you had as many minds as I have ! " The im- pulsive man acts with energy and decision because he allows no time for the imagination to work. But if immediate action is impossible the imagina- tive man will perhaps not act at all. He will see that there is as much to be said upon one side as the other. And the more important action is the less likely will he be to act. The very importance of the decision which he has to make paralyzes him, makes him weigh longer and longer the ob- jections which his fruitful imagination has to offer. The right-minded child is overflowing with lov- ingness. He loves everyone and he expects every- one to love him. All trouble calls forth his sym- pathy. He does not stop to inquire whether the sufferer has merited the suffering or not. It is enough for him that the suffering exists. If he can, he will alleviate it. In moments of anger he may inflict pain upon his playmates, in moments of thoughtlessness upon his elders. But no sooner does he realize the trouble that his waywardness has caused than he is filled with penitence. He is burning with a desire to make amends. That it should be his duty deliberately to cause suffer- ing, this is inconceivable to the child. To be grown up means, among other things, to have acquired the power to do hard things. The 96 IN CAJVIBRroGE BACKS Tommies do not grow up. They make love to the Grizels that they may not know the pain of un- requited love. They make love to the Lady Pip- pinworths to atone for having humiliated them. " How we change ! " says Tommy, musing pen- sively of his boyhood. " How we dinna change ! " growls Aaron. And that is the remarkable thing about the Tommies. It is so difficult to change them. Sin leaves its mark upon the rest of us. We are never quite the same again. Sometimes it hardens us, sometimes it wakes us up. The Tommies are neither hardened nor awakened. Why? Is it because, through it all, they have been but children at play, and have preserved the purity and innocence of childhood? There have been, there are, there always will be artists in whom the man is strong enough to keep the child within him in order. He probably is the greatest artist, as well as the greatest man, who can be at the same time most a man and most a child. But to be an artist at all, it is absolutely necessary that the child be there. The presence of the man does not seem to be so essential. Society has done well in these latter days in insisting that the artist conforai to the same moral law to which other men are subject. Nevertheless the errors of genius have always commanded, and will always command, an undying sympathy. When the failings of the Goethes, the Shelleys, the Byrons and the Tommies are recounted, we echo Corp's cry "Dinna tell me to think ill o' that THE ARTISTIC TEIVIPERAMENT 97 laddie !" Is it because we believe that downright genius, like downright love, atones for everything? Rather it is because we feel that the errors of gen- ius are those of an impulsive, generous nature, and we prefer the generous sinner to the calculating saint. Very early in the story of Tommy's manhood, Mr. Barrie tells us that he is suppressing a good many of the nice things that Tommy did, for fear that we might like himv But we saw through Mr. Barrie all the time, we knew that he was chastising Tommy in order that we might love him the more. And we are sure that the Creator, in dealing with the Tommies, remembers that they are but children. VI ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS When we speak the lan^age to which we have always been accustomed, especially if that lan- guage happens to be English, we often use words which conceal quite as much as they reveal that which we have in mind. This practice of veiling our thoughts has become so habitual with us that when we really wish to express ourselves fully and completely, we often cannot find the words, and when we do succeed in saying exactly what we mean we are sometimes misunderstood, for it is as- sumed that we must always mean something a little different from what we say. But I have a foreign friend who in his picturesque English generally manages to express his meaning most forcibly and exactly. Once when I was with this gentleman, I happened to remark upon the fine appearance of a young man of our acquaintance. He re- plied, "His outside, yes, I must say it pleases me as well as that of any man that I know. His in- side, I have not yet arrived into it." I confess that I have always thought arriving into people's insides the most interesting thing in life ; that I am very fond of thinking over people's excellences and deficiencies and their probable dt ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 99 causes, and that I am even sometimes given to talking them over with my friends. When I was a child this tendency was frowned upon. I was told that I must talk about things, not about people. Yet I noticed that the grown people that I knew, I believe because they were thinking, in- teresting, right-minded human beings, generally talked more about people than they did about things. Since I have been grown I have been told that if I lived a broader life, if I were not shut up in an institution, I would think less about people, more about things. I can only say that if this is really true, I am glad that I am shut up in an institution. For I believe that the man who said "The proper study of mankind is man," had so far at least advanced to be wise, and when our greatest nineteenth century poet told us that little else save the development of a soul is worth study, I believe that he knew what he was talking about. Nor can we imagine Shakespeare, Thackeray or Dickens refusing to discuss the characters of others in the proper way and to the proper persons. There is just one type of man to whom it may in a sense be permitted to find things more inter- esting than people, and that is the really great student of natural science. He is permitted to be more interested in the laws of nature than in man if he must be, because he may thus make dis- coveries that will benefit man. Yet even he, though a benefactor of his fellows, pays a certain penalty for his lack of interest in his beneficiaries. We 100 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS often hear it said that this is an age in which there is a dearth of great men. This is probably un- true; we have the great men, but they are scien- tists, so although they are revolutionizing all our lives, we do not fully recognize them as great. They have not the lively interest in us human be- ings that Shakespeare and Dante had, so we have not the lively interest in them. To all time we shall be interested in all the details of Shakes- peare's life that we can get, but though we all profit by Sir Isaac Newton's discoveries, his biog- raphy would find comparatively few readers, and for the most part we no more love him than we love the law of gravitation. Some people seem to have the impression that it is perfectly legitimate to discuss the characters of others, provided that we do not know them, and therefore perhaps have very little data for dis- cussing them. As a teacher of Bible or of history I may, nay I must analyze the characters of St. Peter, of St. Paul, of Julius Caesar, of Queen Elizabeth, but how can I understand those whom I have not seen, except as I have some understand- ing of those whom I have seen.'' As an intelligent member of society, I am also supposed to have an opinion of public measures and of public men, but how am I to be capable of forming an opinion of them if I do not form opinions of the people about me and their measures.? And should the people that I read about in the newspapers and their deeds be more important to me than the people in ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 101 my own little life and their deeds? To the world they are more important ; to me practically they cannot be, and should not be. For generally speak- ing it is by the small affairs which touch me, by the people with whom I come into personal contact that I am influenced, and it is upon these that I ex- ert an influence. I cannot influence public aff'airs, except in a very smiall degree by forming an opin- ion about them, since public opinion shapes events, and the opinion of each individual is a part of public opinion. And as in the case of the great men of the past and their measures, so in the case of the great men of the present and their meas- ures, I am competent to form an opinion of them only as I have trained my judgment by constantly forming opinions of the people about me, their actions and their motives. Furthermore, how can I understand things, the highest and best things, the things that my critics think that I should talk about, except as I understand people? Natural science, as has been seen, I may perhaps under- stand, while knowing very little of the human heart. But the function of painting, poetry and music is chiefly to express and call forth human emotion: how understand them except as I under- stand human emotion? I suppose that the idea that the criticism of others is wrong is founded upon the impression that others are necessarily hurt by the habit of criticism, perhaps also that we ourselves are hurt by it, since we are thereby made severe in our 102 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS judgments, possibly even severe to the point of cruelty. There are those who admit that certain people for certain reasons are justified in analyz- ing those with whom they come in contact, but they maintain that the rest of us should take those whom we meet in a happy-go-lucky fashion, admiring their virtues and closing our eyes to their faults. Thus a friend writes me "Vivisection may be necessary and have valuable results, but it is not a part of my work," and again "It is easy to see faults, but much more difficult to see excel- lencies. I prefer to exercise what skill I have in detecting the latter." But is analysis of char- acter equivalent to spiritual vivisection, which keeps the victim writhing in agony, and perhaps makes the scientific observer callous and cold? And does the person who sees faults understand- ingly fail to see virtues? I have had some ac- quaintance with a class of people who are most rigidly principled against criticising others. They are generally children of the Puritans ; that is, they come of a race that believes more in self- control than in self-development, and that too often mistakes self-repression for self-control. Now I find that on the whole these people are more censorious, and they certainly are less interesting than are those who discuss others more freely, for they understand life less, and they themselves lack in fullness of life. There are three different positions which we take toward life at different stages of our ex- ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 103 istence. First as little children, we are likely to think that everybody is good, and to love every- body. This position, alas ! we cannot maintain long, life knocks it out of us. So we arrive at our second position, in which we divide people into good and bad, feel that we must love and associate with the good, and avoid the bad, "we will not speak of them, look only and pass," or perhaps not even look. We may possibly labor for their salvation, but with the clear understanding that they are quite different beings from ourselves and our friends. This is more or less the position of all of us in extreme youth, and there are those who never advance much beyond it. Such people natu- rally do not wish to believe that some of those with whom they associate and even love must be classed among bad people, and since there is for them no middle ground the only way to keep on respecting their acquaintances and loving their friends is to deny that they have certain very ob- vious faults. To admit that they have these faults, that there is in their nature even the root of faults that are commonly considered "more hei- nous in the sight of God than are others," and still to keep on associating with them would seem to be a letting down of the moral standards. Thus my neighbor A, commenting upon a great, but not very obvious or technical dishonesty on the part of a woman who professed high principles, ex- claimed, "I cannot see how any respectable person could do such a thing." I replied, "Oh, I under- 104 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS stand, and I even see how she fails to realize that she is doing anything wrong. My friend B could do the same thing, and believe that she was doing right, for while her moral sense is strong in some respects, it is not in that respect." To which A rejoined, "I cannot but feel that you judge your friend too harshly, but if you are right in your estimate of her, I do not see how you can care for her," I may be wrong in my analy- sis of my friend, but I am sure that I am not harsh in my attitude toward her, and whether my judgment of her is right or wrong, I am certainly very fond of her. When faults bear fruit in actual sin, the horror of these uncritical people who have refused to see the faults is unbounded. For they have not watched the gradual development of the sin ; they do not understand how it has sprung from a small seed which may be found in all of us, even in them- selves, only in them perhaps circumstances have not favored its development, or possibly training and will-power have prevented its bearing fruit. If we take a full-grown villain, at a definite period of life, such as Shakespeare's lago, he seems out- side the pale of human sympathy. But in the presence of Tito Melema we can only "consider ourselves, lest we also be tempted." The differ- ence is that lago is taken at the point of full de- velopment, so that we do not recognize that we have anything in common with him, while we see Tito's character unfolding from the beginning ; we ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 105 feel that at almost any point, given similar circum- stances, we might have done the same thing. Our attitude toward lago is like that of a person who will not criticise others, which means that he will not understand others, until suddenly he is brought face to face with some great sin, and then, well then he does not understand, and his unqualified condemnation springs from the same source as did his complacent charity ; complacent, I have said, but the complacency was with himself, the virtuous person who never speaks evil of anyone. Then too while such a man does not censure others in words, he certainly makes the people with whom he associates, especially if they happen to be sufficiently interested in humanity to talk about it, feel that he is censuring them, and censuring them unjustly and misunderstandingly, that he simply says "That is wrong," and leaves it at that. Nor do such people often acquire intimate friends, for close friendship demands intimate knowledge, and one who will not express his opin- ions, or perhaps does not even allow himself to form opinions, cannot be intimately known. He does not know himself, nor is it possible for us to know him. So much for the second position. There is a third position where one sees the evil, but sees also the good beneath the evil, and has the clear faith to believe that evil will be overcome by good.- Some see this by intuition, but generally it is by the constant practice of analysis, of criticism, 106 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS that we come to reflect that there is no fault that has not a virtue at its root, and therefore no fault, unless perhaps it be deliberate cruelty, that can make a person positively unlovable. We come to wonder even whether there is such a thing as deliberate cruelty, whether what has that appearance is not generally unstrung nerves, frequently caused by great mental suffering. I find myself somewhat in sympathy with William Rufus because of that blasphemous sentence of his, "God shall never find a good man in me, I have suffered too much at his hands." I recognize the blasphemy, but the suffering that called forth the blasphemy makes me sympathize with the man. I do not know just what he had suffered, probably whatever it was it was mostly through his own fault, but I can fancy him driven almost insane by the punishment that seemed greater than he could bear, so that scarcely conscious of anything save his own blinding, morally blinding, pain, he took a fiendish delight in making others suffer, or as he thought, in getting even with God. There was at first nothing more shocking to me than that Ibsen's Hedda Gabler should make fun of her aunt's bonnet, the bonnet which the dear old lady had bought in order that her new niece should not be ashamed of her. But when Hedda told the story to Judge Brock, and added "You see it just takes me like that all of a sudden. And then I can't help doing it. Oh, I don't know how I am to explain it," I understood, or thought ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS lOT that I did. The thing that "took her all of a sudden" was the misery of her own life, a life en- tirely out of place, a life which was meant to con- tribute to the sum total of beauty in the world, and could not. Hedda could have resisted the temptation to be cruel, we can all resist temp- tation, but it would have been very difficult for her to have done so, and certainly many of us in her place would have done as she did. For some of us, alas ! can, by looking into our own hearts, or by recalling bitter memories of the past, under- stand that kind of cruelty. Have there not been times when, out of sorts with ourselves and our lot, we have taken a fiendish delight in saying or doing the cruel thing? have even in a certain sense ex- ulted in the suffering that we have caused, and all perhaps because we were suffering such wild mis- ery ourselves. Perhaps they whom we thus grieved are no longer living. How we would love some assurance of pardon now, but while they were with us we gave no sign of craving for it ! For after all has been said that can be said in ex- planation of it, intentional cruelty must still be the worst of all sins, it certainly is the sin for which we suffer most remorse. But while nothing can fully excuse this or any other sin, analysis does explain, does make the sin- ner, every sinner, come within the pale of human sympathy. So we find the analytical person at bottom far kinder than the person who refuses to criticise. For analysis is simply trying to under- 108 IX CA3IBRIDGE BACKS stand. And when we understand we must be charitable ; nay, there is no room for charity in the modern perverted sense of the word, but only for love. I have a friend who, when she sums up the character of another, bestows her highest praise when she says, "She is not easily shocked." And if the not being easily shocked does not mean an absence of standards, but rather a knowledge of human nature, an ability to see not only the deed, but just what led to it, then surely it is de- serA-ing of high praise. God is never shocked, for He knows all. That is why we are not ashamed to confess our sins to God, for we know that He understands all, not only what we do and what we say, but the inmost thoughts of our hearts, all the inherited tendencies, all the temptations that come from environment. So it seems to me that He can hardly be said to forgive us, He just under- stands us, and when we really understand there is little room for forgiveness : sympathy and help take its place. In the presence of our fellowmen we are ashamed, for we feel that there are no words by which we can make them fully under- stand. We can only tell them part, nor can we even be sure as to what we tell them means to them. For few men have even in small measure that power which He had of whom it was said "He needed not that any should testify to Him of man, for He Himself knew what was in man." Yet the thoughtful, analytical person, he who knows others a little, and his own heart perhaps a ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 109 little more, does understand man at least enough to know that no one is absolutely black or ab- solutely white. We remember that hard saying of the old-fashioned theologian "There is enough evil in the best action of the best man to damn him." It may be true, a seed of evil in the best action of the best man, which if allowed to develop, would be sufficient to damn. But if true the con- verse is at least equally true, "There is enough of good in the worst action of the worst man to save him," a seed of good which, if allowed to develop, will be sufficient to save. And he who has suffi- cient penetration and analytical power to see this must be an optimist. A friend of mine speaking of a popular play said, "Its lesson seems to be that while society is all wrong, yet at bottom it is all right after all." Understood aright that is life's lesson. That is quite a different thing from saying that it is all right to be all wrong; it simply means that underneath the all wrong is something that is all right, and that will in the end get the better of the all wrong. The only optimism that is of any account is the optimism of such a man as Browning, who thoroughly under- stands sin, has so to speak penetrated it, and come out on the other side. The optimism of a man who does not know sin, who shuts his eyes to the truth is worthless, for it is nothing but ignorance ; but I believe that when we know sin intimately, the tendency of such a knowledge will be not toward pessimism, but toward optimism. 110 IN CAJVIBRIDOE BACKS Then if the danger of thoughtful criticism is not that we shall be cruel to others, does it not lie in the other direction? Should we not be afraid that we may become too lenient to sin? that we may even come to feel that there is no such thing as sin, since a man may do bad things and not be at heart a bad man, and since evil is after all but good in the making? Or may we not become fatalistic, since we see that sin is so largely the result of heredity and environment, or even of physical disease? I answer that this habit of mind will and should make us more lenient to sin- ners, because we come to recognize that what in the end was a great evil sprang from a small seed, a seed which perhaps exists in each of us. But unless we are very superficial people, it will tend to make us more careful rather than more lax in our own lives, for seeing from what small begin- nings great evils flow, we will be more careful to check the small beginnings in ourselves, and so far as we may in othei's for whom we may be in any degree responsible. Check, or direct, as may seem best, for the impulses which lead to evil are often such as properly directed, would lead to good. As a child I used to think that bad people meant to be bad. Now I see that probably no one in the beginning at least means to be bad, we only do not mean to be good. We do not need to mean to be bad, if we only allow ourselves to drift we will be bad, but in order to be good we must mean to be good. Hence we come to understand as Mr. ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 111 Chesterton says that while we may all ultimately be saved, it is safest to live as though we were all in danger of being damned. We begin too to ap- proach God's position, and hate the sin even in its beginnings, especially in ourselves, but love the sinner; hate the sin because it destroys the sinner whom we love. At bottom we can have no hope except as we do believe in the sinfulness of sin. For if sin is inevitable, the necessary result of heredity, environment and physique, then there is no hope ; we are no more responsible for it than we are for being short or tall, nor can we change one more than the other. But if sin is the result of the action or lack of action of the will, then it is possible to get rid of it And while we may be- lieve that there is good in everything and every- body, that should not blind us to the greater good in the better things and the better people. Says Ogniben in Browning's "Soul's Tragedy" "God has His archangels and consorts with them; though he made too and intimately sees what is good in the worm." And then too just as the seeing what is good in evil should not make us incline toward the evil, so the seeing all sides of a question should not pre- vent us from taking sides. Some of the best minds have been ineffectual because of their very breadth to which there was no corresponding depth. Thus Macaulay says of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, that the historian must be partial to him, because he saw things at the time 112 IN CAJMBRIDGE BACKS as the historian sees them after they are over. But HaHfax's own life as a statesman was in a great measure a failure, and largely because of this very power, which was not balanced by practical common sense. While it may be admitted that this gift of an- alysis, of understanding the characters of others is in itself helpful and tends more toward kindness than toward unkindness, why should I talk over the characters of others? My friend who likens analysis to vivisection, writes that if she had ex- traordinary power to understand character, she should pray that she might have the strength to keep her knowledge to herself, so that no one should obtain any information about the failures of others from her. Well, as I have said before, I believe that the power of analysis helps me, helps me to do my daily work, to teach History and Bible better, for it is only as I understand life a little in the concrete, that I can in some measure understand the abstract laws of life, which our Lord Himself, the apostles and the prophets have taught us. I have spoken too of that youthful position in which we perhaps think that we must labor for the salvation of others without under- standing their sin. To be sure it is better to fix the mind upon what people are to be converted to rather than upon what they are to be converted from, and yet there are times when a sympathetic understanding of the latter is also desirable. "Priests should study passion ; how else help man- ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 113 kind who come for help in passionate extremes?" So those who would help themselves and others to correct faults should study faults. And just as I cannot understand or help others except as I understand myself, so I cannot understand or help myself except as I understand others. Therefore it is important that I should not only retain what power of analysis I have, but that I should let it grow, and both retention and growth are depend- ent upon expression. Moreover if I am to come into any close touch with my friends I must know what they think, and they must know what I think about people and things, for we know each other chiefly as we know each other's opinions of life, and our opinions of life can generally be best gathered from our opinions of lives. Nevertheless there are some rules to be adhered to in the exercise of criticism which may all be summed up in one, to wit, never criticise in such a way as to hurt anyone, except of course when for some real good it is necessary to hurt. Thero may be times when it is best to criticise a person to his face in such a way as to hurt. There may also be times when it is best to criticise a person to someone else in order to prevent his getting an appointment which he is not fitted to fill, but to fail to secure such a post will not really hurt him. And there may be other ways in which it is some- times justifiable to speak of a person's faults or deficiencies in such a way as will hurt. But in general I think that I should never criticise a fel- 114 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS low-being in such a way as will hurt him or hurt me, for unkindly criticism hurts the critic far more than it hurts the person criticised. And I find that in order to obey this rule, I must obey at least two other rules. First, Never analyze anyone's character for the benefit of those who do not know human nature well enough to under- stand. My neighbor A was right in objecting to my exposure of my friend B's weakness. I should not have mentioned it to her, for she was not able to understand, and I knew her well enough to know that she would not be able to un- derstand. It is only when we can think out the faults and deficiencies of a mutual acquaintance together, sympathize because we understand, and because we understand one human being better, understand life better, that such discussion can do good. I have been asked how I would feel if I knew that two of my friends were in the habit of discussing my character. I answer that I hope that my friends are sufficiently interested in me to discuss my character, and I know that if they are really my friends such discussion will do me no harm. Either in talking me over they will decide that certain faults which one or both of them had attributed to me are not there, or if they are there they will find an explanation for them which will partially excuse; or if no explanation can be found, they will love me just the same. And this brings me to the other rule which I find it necessary to follow, namely, not to talk over the ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 115 faults of anyone, if these faults awaken dislike in me, unless indeed it is with a person who can cure me of this dislike by making me understand. For generally speaking talking over that which we dislike strengthens the dislike, thereby hurting us and perhaps also hurting the person under dis- cussion. Moreover we can hardly be fair to that which we really dislike, "He that is spiritual judg- eth all things," and by " he who is spiritual" I think is meant he who really thinks about the things that concern humanity, for no one can think on these topics and not be spiritual. But yet there is a "more excellent way," the way that is set forth in that wonderful analysis of the "love that sufFereth long and is kind," of the "love that thinketh no evil." And it is perfectly true that the person who has the best intellectual under- standing of people is not always the person who has the best practical understanding of them, knows best how to get on with them, because some- times the interest is purely intellectual, there is no heart interest, we judge but not in that more excellent way of which the apostle writes. I find it tolerably easy to understand and sympathize with the excesses of humanity, for these are so often but the perversions of a great nature, but it is more difficult for me to sympa- thize with the deficiencies of human nature, and especially with what would perhaps hardly seem a fault at all, just a lack of aspiration, a too great contentment not with one's outer estate, but with 116 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS one's mental and spiritual condition. Here again the foreign friend of whom I spoke at the begin- ning of this essay said what seemed to me a wise thing. We were discussing some mutual acquaint- ances who were probably useful in a small sphere, good moral people certainly, but people who had very little horizon, who saw very little beyond their everyday life. He made the remark, "What I do not like about them is that they are so happy." I reminded him that he had lately expressed ad- miration for certain other acquaintances, for the very reason that they were happy. He replied, "It is one thing to diffuse an atmosphere of happi- ness, another thing to be so damned happy your- self." As I thought it over it seemed to me that he had defined the case accurately, had used ex- actly the right adjective. Those who are happy in the sense of being without aspiration are liter- ally damned, that is condemned not to grow. For it is only those who hunger and thirst who shall be filled. It is only the "crop-fed bird and the maw- crammed beast" whom care does not irk, and whom doubt does not fret. "A man's reach must exceed his grasp." But if I condemn these people, it is perhaps be- cause I do not criticise or analyze, I only condemn ; for it is easy to analyze an excess, difficult to analyze a deficiency ; something is not there that should be, that is all. Yet perhaps as certain faults are only surface-deep, so certain seeming deficiencies may be only surface-deep. Do not ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS 117 people sometimes seem lacking in aspiration be- cause too timid to give expression to their as- pirations? Perhaps too the fault is in myself, perhaps my attitude toward them is over-bearing and censorious, so they feel that they must hide their real selves from me. I have not the power to draw them out. And even granted that they are as deficient as I suppose them to be, as I am tolerant of spiritual people who are not always moral, cannot I be tolerant of moral people who are not always spiritual? At any rate we can love all our neighbors in the way in which Christ commanded us to love them, "as ourselves." Not as we love our friends, that would be impossible, but as we love ourselves. Love for our friends in- cludes an emotional element which cannot be forced, it goes like the wind where it listeth. But love for ourselves consists in seeking our own best interests, and in that way, we can love everyone. Arnold of Rugby tells us that he had a sister who early formed a resolution never to talk about herself, and to this resolution she adhered during the whole of her life. I cannot say that such a determination, taken literally, appears to me to be praiseworthy. People who never talk about themselves are likely to be uninteresting, for if we are attracted by them what we want to know is their real selves. It is true of those who never talk about themselves to an even greater degree than it is true of those who never talk about others that they do not make close friends, although when 118 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS there is great beauty of character, they may com- mand a certain reverent affection. Mr. Howells tells us that Longfellow had too little egotism to form intimate friendships. Just as there are peo- ple who resolve not to talk about themselves, so there are people who resolve not to talk about others. Both resolutions are mistaken. The ideal is not to refrain from talking about either ourselves or others, but to know to whom to talk and how to talk. Of course there is a temptation to talk to the wrong person and in the wrong way, and perhaps this temptation or at least the latter half of it, comes with peculiar force to those of us who follow the profession of teaching. It is part of our business to criticise, and it is easy to fall into the habit of criticising unwisely and unkindly. So we need to pray with Charles Wes- ley " Preserve me from my calling's snare." And in all our criticism we must with Oliver Crom- well "have the grace to believe that we may be mistaken." VII THE FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT I FIND that the great joy in an illness such as I am having this summer is that it furnishes a time in which, being released from the practical duties of life, I can give myself wholly to loving. Whether awake or asleep, or in that delightful state between waking and sleeping, those whom I love are always present with me. In my waking hours I do not so much think happy thoughts about my dear ones as lose myself in that blissful revery which is to thought what thought is to action, in which their spirits seem to commune with my spirit, so that although I lie awake at night I do not suffer from it, because I am so happy. When I sleep I am not conscious of dreaming, yet when I awake it is with the feeling that I have been even happier in sleep than I am in my waking hours, because still nearer to loved ones. When I first open my eyes I have almost the physical sen- sation of holding the hand of one or another friend, generally someone whom I know to be thousands of miles away. This added happiness I carry with me through the day, for they who have been with me sleeping do not leave me wak- ing. And I wonder whether it was after an ex- 119 120 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS perience such as this that the Psahnist wrote, "I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on Thee in the night-watches," and again "When I awake, I am still with Thee." Thus my thoughts pass from the human and finite to the Divine and In- finite, and I wonder to what extent the heavenly love can be like the earthly, how far we can really set our hearts, our beating, throbbing hearts, our whole passion of loving upon that which is in Heaven. I once heard a young wife say, "How can I be expected to love God more than I love my husband and children?" I replied, "Oh, it is a different kind of love that you give to God from that which you give to your husband and children. Ask your- self whether you would prefer that God should not exist than that you should lose your husband and children? That is the real test." I knew of a boy who wished to connect himself with a church. A good man who was interested in him talked to him about the obligation that one who was about to take such a step was under to love God. A woman whom I thought wise, overheard the con- versation and objected to it. "See here," she said to the man, when she could get him alone, "that boy has not yet learned to love anyone. He does not know what love is. Never in his life has he really loved a human being, and if a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? To tell him that it is his duty to love God will, if it has any effect at FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 121 all upon him, simply make him sentimental and in- sincere. Most of the talk about loving God is cant, it is only richly gifted people who can really love God in any personal way. But the boy does, so far as he understands life and himself, mean to do right. To come into the communion of the church, to be associated with others who mean to do right, will strengthen that purpose. So it is well that he should be a member of the church." We have heard too the story of the great liter- ary man and idealist who fell in love with a beau- tiful girl who returned his love, but would not marry him unless he could say that he loved God more than he loved her. He thought that he could not say that, so there was no marriage, and shortly afterward the girl died, her death perhaps hastened by the strain to which she had been sub- jected. I have always thought that Mr. Ruskin's unwillingness to say that he loved God more than he loved his earthly love was a proof that he did thus love Him. For if he did not love the right- eousness which God represents, and which God re- quires more than he loved the girl, why should he have hesitated to tell a falsehood and say that he loved God more than he loved her? So far as we can see no person would have been hurt by this, only the ideal of truth which is part of God. But he preferred to lose her whom his soul loved rather than sin against that ideal. It has always seemed to me that the sacrifice was needless, for the fact that love for her could not make him do what he 122 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS believed to be sinning against God proved that he did love God more than he loved her, only in a different way. "What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." Perhaps this is the nearest that most of us who "have not seen God at any time" can get to loving Him, and therefore it is all that can be required. So I reasoned with myself until very lately. Then I began to consider the commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength." To love God with all the soul means to love Him with all the aspiration after Truth, after Beauty, after Righteousness of which our nature is capable; to love Him with all the strength is the same thing as to love Him with all the will, that is, not to be content with a raptur- ous contemplation of the beauty of holiness, but to make every effort to realize in ourselves the right- eousness of holiness, to give expression to our im- pression by becoming what we adore, thus making the ideal the real. To love Him with all the mind, that surely means that it is our duty not only to do what is right, but to find out what is right, to seek after righteousness with the same passion with which the scientist seeks after truth, and the artist seeks after beauty, and thus to attain not only FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 123 self-control, but also self-development. But what of loving Him with all the heart ? Is it not to feel as Mary did when she brought the box of oint- ment, very precious, and anointed the God-Man's feet? And the story seems to indicate that that lavish offering of real heart-affection pleased the Master more than anything else that was done for Him during his whole earthly pilgrimage. Hence I conclude that there are two kinds of love that can be given to God, first that which Ruskin did give to Him, harmony with His ideals in so far as he understood them, and obedience to His will. But on the other hand Ruskin was right when he said that he did not love God as he should ; the emotional love which he gave to the creature he could not give to the Creator, and God wants that too. Perhaps just as the earthly parent craves the child's love more than his mere obedi- ence, so from the very heart of God the request comes to each one of us "My child, give me thy heart." For God loves us; cold obedience can only wound the heart that loves ; what it seeks is fellowship, and fellowship comes only from a union of hearts. And yet is it just to command us to love the Lord our God with all our heart? can such love be regarded as a duty? It is our duty to do only that which we can do, that which by an effort of the will we can make ourselves do. It is easy to see that it is our duty to love the Lord our God with all our strength, to will what He wills, to seek 124 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS to accomplish what He is seeking to accomplish, and the will can force the mind to do its part, and perhaps even can force the soul. But can the will force the heart? In our human relations it cannot; love is like the wind, which blows where it listeth; we are not able to love because it is de- sirable to do so, or because the person is worthy. Personal love for a friend is a gift, and personal love for God, the power to talk face to face with God as a man talketh with his friend, is also a gift. Such love is given only to one who already has a rich emotional nature, but the rich emo- tional nature is itself a gift. Such love is the distinguishing characteristic of those whom their fellow-Christians have recognized as saints, but the saint's temperament is at bottom very simi- lar to that of the artist, only expressing itself in a different way. That which the artist puts into art, the saint puts into love. Love then is given to the saint as art is given to the artist. Nor should it surprise us that many of the saints of old have been great sinners before they became great saints, for the emotional nature that is capable of the greatest heights is also capable of the lowest depths. And if God and the devil be represented as fighting over a soul, the fight will be hardest for the soul that is of greatest worth. Still while emotional love whether for God or man is a gift, we all feel that there is something lacking in a nature that does not possess it ; there- fore, it seems natural that God should require FIRST GREAT COMMANDIVIENT 125 it of us, since He requires perfection of us, and somehow, though we cannot reason it out, it seems right that He should. Perhaps the justice lies in the fact that while this heart love is a gift, it is a gift that will always be given to us if we do our part. And our part is not to try to induce emotion, manufactured emotion is always an en- emy to real love, but to love in the ways in which we can, with the strength, with the mind, and with the soul, and if the other love which I begin to see is higher and better is not given to us in this life, it will be given to us in that which is to come. "If ye love me," Jesus said, "keep my command- ments." Would He not also have said, "If ye keep my commandments, ye will love me".'' Probably most of us get a little foretaste even in this life of what this highest love is. Some- times with the consciousness of sin there is vouch- safed to us a vision of Him whom we have pierced, and then "we needs must love the highest when we see it." Perhaps this love is given to us in times of sorrow, sorrow which presses us down so that we feel the everlasting arms which are un- derneath. For as suffering is the true cement of love between man and man, so it is also the true cement of love between man and God. God draws near to us, and shares the suffering with us. Or it may be given in times of joy, for if He enters into our sorrow. He enters equally into our joy. If it be true that for men to love each other they must have shed tears together, I think that the 126 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS tears must be not only tears of sorrow, but also tears of joy. Sometimes it comes to us when a new friendship comes into our lives, for human love is often the shortest way to the Divine. Most of us have at least a fleeting vision of it as we celebrate the Feast of Love, that service which all Christians recognize as the highest symbol of our union and communion with the Divine. To our fathers the Eucharist was more than a sym- bol, it was the actual realization of the fact that their fellowship was in Heaven. In it Jesus Him- self drew near to them, His strength descended upon them, their hearts warmed within them as they cried, "Abide with us. Lord, at least we can- not let Thee go except Thou bless us." And often their prayer was granted. He did not go, He stayed to bless. If we could approach it in the same spirit, would we, too, receive what they received ? Whether we attain unto this love of God or not, I cannot imagine that there is any human being who does not at times feel the need of it. For the mind cries out for the Absolute, the heart cries out for the Infinite, the soul cries out for the Divine, the whole being cries out for God. The practical man needs Him to put a touch of idealism into his life, the thinker needs Him to put certainty into his. There are times when we all yearn to give ourselves completely to someone whom we can adore, with whom we can be our best selves, who can understand those vague yearn- FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 127 ings which we do not ourselves understand, those incommunicable and intransmissible feelings which scarcely reach the surface of our consciousness. God knows about them, but we do not, we only vaguely feel them. Is not this very longing God's pleading with us to accept His gift, the gift of love for Him to correspond to His love for us? Is it not His voice sa3^ing to us, "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Rest from what.'' Rest from the vain struggle to be ourselves, for in Him we find ourselves, in Him we are complete. But we quench the Spirit, we shake off our rev- erie, and so perhaps to the end of life these occa- sional moments of Divine homesickness are all that we know of the real love of God. For friendship with God takes time, just as human friendship takes time. I must take time to get acquainted with my friend, so I must take time to get acquainted with God. When I was a child I was taught the best way to get acquainted with Him was through the revelation which He has made of Himself in Jesus. Lately I have come to realize this a little for myself, and the realiza- tion of old things makes them seem new. I have a colleague who says that I know her pretty well, but I do not know much about her. If I know her it is because we have spent considerable time together ; she has not told me mucli about her life before we met, there are many things even in her present life which I do not know, but we live to- 1^ IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS gether, I see how she lives, and somethnes she talks to me about the things for which she cares. And I listen and ponder over what she says, not so much because of interest in the thing itself, although that is always interesting, but in order that I may know and understand her. So I know her without knowing much about her. I have always been familiar with the New Testament ; as a child I studied it carefully in order that I might know about Jesus. But of late I have studied it not so much that I might know about Jesus, but that I might know Jesus Himself. Indeed, when I stop to think about it, it is wonderful how little the New Testament tells us about Him ; I conclude, therefore, that it is not necessary to know much about Him. After all, I know very little about anyone, there is no one of whom I could write a satisfactory biography, and yet there are many people whom I know. Perhaps even the apostles did not know much about Jesus, but they knew Him, and they strove to make us know Him as they knew Him. For it comes to me now that He is the important Fact ; not even His teaching is of supreme importance except as it helps us to know Him. For it is not His teach- ing but He Himself who of God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. He Himself, not His teaching, is the Way by which we come to God. So while others have been willing that we should forget them so long as we remembered their teaching, FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 129 He wishes us to remember Him. "This do in re- membrance of Me." For He was the only teacher who did not have to be ashamed of His life in comparison with what He taught. So we must take time to know Him, and knowing Him we know the Father also. For the new thhig that He brought into the world was that feeling of vital union with the Father, so that to be one with Him is also to be one with the Father, for to know Jesus Christ is to know the only true God. When we really love God with the heart, that is, when He becomes a Person to us, there arises within us a great longing to pray, to enter into direct communication with Him as we are in di- rect communication with our earthly friends. For to pray is to talk with God, to lift up our hearts to Him in order that His heart may come down to us. As children we were taught to ask God for all that we wished. But most of us have a period in which we give up the habit, if indeed it is only a habit. We may give it up because we are indifferent, or because life becomes too material. Or perhaps we take the position of a little girl whom I knew, who having prayed for fine weather in order that she might go on an ex- cursion, when the day dawned rainy, remarked, "I am going to throw God away, and get another God." Or it may be that there is a time of in- formal prayer which is not at all lacking in spir- ituality, in which loving God with the soul. 130 IN CAJVIBRIDGE BACKS though not with the heart, is very strong. In- deed, I have had seasons in which formless prayer, no kneeling, no words, just an inarticulate as- piration for what is Above and Beyond, has seemed much more spiritual than any petition in the kneeling posture. For it was so unnecessary to ask God for anything since He knew all about it anyhow. I have sometimes thought that we were taught to ask for things simply because we are so crude, that except as we ask for definite things, we should have no communication with Him at all, but when we really establish com- munion with Him, we cease to ask for things, that crude praying has performed its mission. What should we think of the child who each day kept asking its parents for the same thing? Would it not be the height of impertinence? The child asks once, because if he did not, the parents would perhaps not know what it was that he wanted. But if the parent says, "I will see about it," the well-trained child does not ask again, he awaits the parent's pleasure. Now God prac- tically says, "I will see about it" ; if we carry out the analogy of the child, the request should not be repeated. But why should it be made even once? Does not our Father know all that we have need of before we ask Him? True, our Lord continued all night in prayer to God. But was He asking for things? Was He not rather just casting Himself upon His Father's love, feeling that the Father was there? Has. FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 131 not He Himself told us that "In that day ye shall ask me nothing?" All this seems to me good reasoning, yet perhaps because the heart is not a reasoner, when we really begin to love God with the heart, we frequently go back to the mode of prayer of child- hood, we ask Him for what we want. It is true that we do not ask so much for things material and tangible as we did when we were younger, but then when we come to love God with the heart, we do not want material and tangible things as we did before. In the form of prayer which our Lord taught us, there is one petition for mate- rial blessing, five for spiritual blessings. Some- times when we do want tangible things we fear and rightly fear to ask for them, lest the very asking should make us want them too much. Thus I have a friend to whose lot it fell to take care of a very sick sister. The sick woman's husband asked her to join him in prayer for her recovery. She replied, "I cannot do that, because I need all my strength to take care of her. When I pray for a thing I come to want it so much that it takes all my strength. And in the present case prayer is quite unnecessary, God loves her and He loves us. He knows all about it, and He will do what is best for us all." I thought that my friend was right for herself, but she was right because for one of her temperament, prayer for her sis- ter's recovery would not have been real prayer. For the desire of the troubled heart to influence 1S2 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS the will of God to its own advantage, perhaps even to break the chain of cause and effect, is not prayer. We do not enter into real communion with God through it, any more than the mother of the condemned criminal, begging for pardon, en- ters thereby into communion with the governor. Prayer is union and communion of hearts and wills. So when we really pray for a sick friend, we do not so much ask for his recovery, whatever the words may be, as we take our Father into our anxiety and sorrow and obtain His sympathy. Jesus prayed, "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me," in order that He might obtain strength to drink the cup. We should pray as He did, pray as Roberston of Brighton has so well put it, "until prayer makes us forget our own wish, and leave or merge it in God's will" ; nothing else is prayer. But there are certain things which it can never hurt anyone to pray for and to pray for repeatedly. We can all pray to be kept from sin, to be given power to conquer faults, strength to bear burdens, to grow in grace, and we should pray often for these things for the very reason that prayer for them will fix the attention upon them, will make us want them more. Yet I fancy that even when we love God with the heart, while the desire for prayer will always be there, just as the desire for communion with a dear earthly friend will always be there, it will not always be easy to obtain our desire, at least not until love is made perfect in us, and we are FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 133 made perfect in love. Prayer often begins with a struggle. Jacob had to wrestle all night with the angel before he obtained the blessing. Jesus Him- self was in an agony in Gethsemane before the prayer that meant real communion was vouchsafed to Him. For as we can have no real good thing except as we consciously long for it and struggle for it, so we cannot have the best thing, Divine communion, without a sti'uggle ; indeed, the strug- gle is part of the blessing. "As the hart pant- eth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, oh God." We must pant before we can have the living water, thirst before we can have the living God. But what is the effect of this emotional love upon character.'' I think that it must be in a greater degree the same as the effect of an emo- tional, idealizing friendship upon character; that is, it is inspiring, creative. For it is emotional love, and only emotional love that is creative. The friend whom I love unemotionally and almost un- consciously, that is whom I like rather than love, may hold me to my duty, but it is only the friend whom I love emotionally and consciously who in- spires me to do my best, nay, who inspires me to do that which I cannot do. Under the influence of conscious love I seem to understand that which I cannot understand, for to the lover as to the artist revelations come which seem not the result of work but of inspiration ; so that I do what I cannot do, for it is not I that do it, but my friend 134. IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS that liveth in me. For every feeling of love, the Talmud tells us, gives birth involuntarily to an invisible genius or spirit which yearns to complete its existence. So when we come into emotional contact with the living God, we experience His creative power, we feel that He is making some- thing different of us, and yet not something dif- ferent. He is simply making us ourselves. For as in all love we go out of ourselves to find ourselves, so in love for God we go out of ourselves to find ourselves in God. Thus we "come to ourselves," we begin to "apprehend that for which we have been apprehended of Christ Jesus," we begin to be perfect, that is made through and through after our own design, each one the perfect ex- pression of God's thought of him, the fulfilment of the idea which God had in mind in creating him. And becoming ourselves, we lose all pre- tense, — we become perfectly simple, perfectly sin- cere, for we see that the ideal of life is not to pre- tend to be what we are not, but to be ourselves, — our best selves. Moreover we are conscious that we are in the Presence of the Infinite, and in that presence all shams vanish. We talk sometimes about the imitation of Christ, but love is not imitative, love is creative. I do not imitate my friend, but through contact with her I become more myself, know my own powers better and exercise them more. We can imitate without love that which we have decided that it is desirable to imitate ; sometimes a period FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 135 of conscious imitation may wisely precede the cre- ative period, but that is before we really love, when we only feel that we ought to love. We probably can imitate better when we do not love than when we do love, for imitation is cold, crea- tion is warm, it is our life-blood that we put into it. Indeed, when we become truly creative, we lose all power of imitation, for we cannot be real and artificial, dead and alive, at the same time. Just as the eifect of a masterpiece upon an orig- inal spirit is not to make him try and imitate it, but try and do something else which arises in his own mind, so the effect of an appreciation of the revelation of God in Christ upon us is not to make us do what Christ did, but to have the same mind in us which was also in Christ Jesus. And in this emotional creative love all thought of duty disap- pears ; the artist creates, expresses himself, not from a sense of duty, but out of the pure joy of creation, because he cannot help himself; so the lover, whether of God or man, creates, finds the best expression for himself, not out of a sense of duty, but because he too cannot help himself, out of the pure joy of creation. Yet while creation is more joyful than is imita- tion, it takes more strength, but love supplies the needed strength. For just as love of the creature leads to energy and concentration, so love of God leads to energj;^ and concentration. And just as earthly love gives physical strength because it gives happiness, and no doctor possesses the cura- 136 IN CAMBRII>GE BACKS tive power that is latent in a spark of happiness, so the love of God, being the supreme source of happiness, must also be the supreme source of physical strength, for, as Amiel puts it, "the high- est happiness is nothing but the conquest of God through love." "The joy of the Lord is your strength." "They that wait upon Jehovah shall renew their strength ; they shall mount upon wings as eagles ; they shall run, and not be weary ; they shall walk and not faint." But while self-development certainly comes from this emotional heart-love, I am not so sure that self-control comes from it in equal measure. That I am inclined to think is more the result of loving God with the will. "The great idea of duty," Goethe tells us, "alone can keep us up- right," and his testimony is the more valuable, since it comes from one who in his inmost being hated and resented the idea of duty. Yet even here the heart does play its part, to some ex- tent it helps us to self-control, but to an even greater extent it helps us by making self- control in great measure unnecessary. That is we abstain from that which we ought not to do, chiefly because mind and heart are so filled with that which we ought to do. "If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free in- deed," free I take it even from temptation to sin, because the heart will be so filled with the desire for righteousnes. When love is perfect, the ex- hortation "Love God and do as you please" is a FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 137 proper one, for then we shall please only what God pleases. When Dante found himself through lov- ing Beatrice, he tells us that " already my desire and will were turned, even as a wheel revolving evenly By the love that moves the sun and other stars." And I cannot see how real, intense love, whether for God or man can fail to kill all desire for the grosser forms of sin. Love is the great purifier ; one of the first things which creative love creates is the clean heart. There is one sin which I find that strong human friendship certainly does help me to refrain from ; if there has been in me any tendency toward bit- terness, I put it aside when real love comes to me ; I cannot love my friend with all my heart and be bitter toward anyone. In "Sandra Belloni" Mere- dith represents Merthyr Powys as saying that love for Italy has made it impossible for him to hate even Austria, Italy's enemy. When Beatrice sa- luted Dante a "flame of charity possessed him, which made him pardon whosoever had offended him." So love toward God and bitterness toward man cannot exist side by side. "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples if ye have love one toward another." "My spirit is too glad and great," says Luther, "for me to be at heart an enemy toward anyone." "Praised be my Lord," says St. Francis, "for those who pardon one an- other for His love's sake." 138 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS Then if I have faults that especially hurt my friend, if I realize that they hurt her, love makes me put forth especial efforts to conquer them. For after all most of us do not sorrow for sin be- cause it is sin, but because it has hurt someone, especially someone whom we love ; few of us would grieve over a wrong action that so far as we could see had hurt no one ; indeed, it might be difficult for us to realize that it was sin. But when we come to realize the personal God, and to have a heart-love for Him, we shall feel that all sin must be guarded against, for every sin especially hurts God since all sin stands in the way of that for which He lives, the coming of His kingdom. So after each sin, we shall know the bitterness of the Psalmist's cry, "Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned," and after each sin we will pray his prayer, "Renew a right spirit within me," Still after all is said I believe that heart-love is inspiring rather than controlling. We are in- spired to do that which is right, we are not in- spired to abstain from that which is wrong. Here the will must play its part ; even when the heart moves the will, the action of the latter is conscious and sometimes painful. But while, so long as we are here, self-control is as important as is self-development, and frequently the neces- sary condition of self-development, I am inclined to think that it is the lower of the two virtues. For while the obligation to self-control is prob- ably temporary, the obligation to self-develop- FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 139 ment is eternal; under the "ultimate angels' law" we shall indulge every instinct of the soul "There where life, law, joy, impulse are one thing." It is only "when the fight begins within himself that a man's worth somewhat" ; we are "never to leave fighting till the life to come," but in the life to come we probably shall leave it. And it is in these exalted moments of conscious emotional love for God that we anticipate "the ultimate angels' law." Thus far I have tried to describe heart-love at its best, but there is another side to the picture. This is the love which, as we have seen, is the es- pecial mark of saintliness, and it is in the lives of the mediaeval saints that it is exhibited not only in its strength, but also in its weakness. For it cannot be denied that even making allowance for the difference in the centuries, and admitting that the mission of certain people may be to emphasize certain virtues even at the expense of being one- sided, the lives of the saints are frequently dis- appointing. We often find in them an imagi- native absorption in the love of God which seems to cut them off from all human usefulness : souls sit and sing themselves away to everlasting bliss, as though religion were nothing but an emotional debauch, and as though the only service of God were adulation. The trouble is not far to seek ; for the tempera- 140 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS ment of the saint is the same as that of the artist. Before he becomes a saint, that is before his ex- cessive emotional nature fastens itself upon God, he is subject to the same grosser temptations as those to which the artist is subject. After he be- comes a saint, his temptations are the more re- fined and subtle temptations which beset the artist, especially the temptation to live apart from real- ity. As the artist is sometimes absorbed in art to the exclusion of everything else, so the saint is sometimes absorbed in love to the exclusion of everything else. But just as the art of the artist who separates himself from the world is generally very limited, so the love of the saint who separates himself from the world is generally very imperfect, for it is of the heart alone, intellect and will do not play their part. Just as there is danger in human friendship in which heart and soul are not balanced by mind and will, so there is danger in such a friendship with God. Love, whether it be love for God or man, demands the whole being, else it is not love. Love which is of the heart alone is not even good heart love. If I love my friend I must be with her, must be alone with her at times, so if I love God I must be with Him, must be alone with Him at times. Sometimes at the beginning of a great earthly love the disposition is to give up a considerable period of time not to working but to loving, and if this be a preparation, a gathering of strength and inspiration for future work, it is well. Some- FIRST GREAT COMMANDMENT 141 times too when wearied by work it is good to stop awhile, and to give ourselves up to love. And what is good in human friendship is good also in Divine friendship. St. Paul spent three years in Arabia. Many Christians find it well to go occasionally into retreat, all true lovers of God will want to be alone with Him at times. Yet St. Francis and some others of the better balanced saints have recognized the desire to live perma- nently with God, apart from the world, as one of the sorest temptations that could come to them. For just as there may be a tendency toward a sentimental human friendship, so there may be a tendency toward a sentimental friendship with God. A friendship that is mere reveling in emo- tion, that separates me from work, that practi- cally separates me from my fellows, even although it may arouse a sentimental tenderness for them, that mjakes me always desire to be alone with my friend, whose perfect congeniality makes uncon- genial and irritating people even more uncongenial and irritating, is weakening and immoral. So an emotional love for God that does not help us to do our work and love our neighbor is weakening and immoral. For a friend is one who helps me to do and to be my best, friendship is union in great interests, its chief glory is fellow-work. So friendship with God will make us not idle dreamers, but co-workers with Him. We work with Him, not for Him. I would like to do things for my friends, but there 142 IN CAJVIBRIDGE BACKS is very seldom anything that I can do, so my love for them expresses itself in doing my daily work more enthusiastically. Should not love for God find similar expression? Work can never really separate me from a friend, never interrupt com- munion with her, for though her body may be thousands of miles away, her spirit is closest to me when I am working most earnestly and most joyously. So do we not after all find our best communion with God in work? If St. Francis had tried very long living with God apart from the world, he would have found that he was not even with God. Labor are est or are. In the King James' Version of the New Testa- ment Jesus is represented as saying "Be ye there- fore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect"; in the Revision the command is turned into a promise, "Ye shall therefore be perfect." Is the command to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength also a promise? VIII IMMORTALITY In the course of my illness this summer I have been more than once under the influence of ether. The first time it made a great impression upon me. Two classmates, both very dear friends, were with me for some hours before ; they accom^ panied me to the door of the operating room ; then the one bade me an affectionate farewell, while the other, a woman physician, went in with me and held my hand while the ether was being administered. When I came to myself, I was in my own room, my doctor friend was with me tend- erly caring for me, while on my table were letters and flowers from other friends. I had a feeling that I had somehow undergone a great change, that I had in fact been dead and comie to life again, and that the new life was better and sweeter than the old had been. Since then I have liked to dwell upon that experience, upon the love that was the last thing of which I was conscious before I went to sleep, and the love that was the first thing of which I was conscious when I awoke. And I have wondered if when death really comes to me it will not be like that, just a passing from love to love. If it is not that, I feel that I cannot 143 144 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS bear to die, and neither can I bear to live, for if "all fairest things are doomed to swiftest death," I cannot choose but "weep to have that which I fear to lose." I have a friend with whom I have sometimes dis- cussed the subject of personal immortality, and she tells me that there is a sense in which she could be content, if it were necessary, to give up the hope of existence beyond the grave, that since she is absolutely sure of the goodness of a God who loves us, she knows that He will do what is best for us, and if He denies us the immortality which we crave, she can believe that that too is love ; for some reason known only to Him it is not good that we should have it, and so she can say with Mr. A. C. Benson "Even if death is an end, an extinction, the thought does not afflict me — I am in the Father's hands. The Father's arm is strong, and His heart is very large." I confess that if it came to a choice, I would prefer giving up a personal God to giving up personal immortality. For whether there is a loving All-Father or not, I could never doubt Matthew Arnold's "Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness," I am sure of that because of what I feel within myself, and because of what I see around me. For I find that all the experiences of life are means of growth, sometimes I think almost irrespective of the way in which I take them. Some things I have borne well, others I have borne badly, yet when they have passed I find that through all I IMMORTALITY 145 have grown. Doubtless I should have grown more had I borne everything well, yet even as it is I have grown. This Power plus immortality Avould mean more to me than a God who, I was told, loved me, without immortality. Indeed I find such a God unthinkable. For if God loves us, and yet the soul is not immortal there are so many people to whom He gives so little sign of loving, who could not possibly believe that He loves them for anything that they can see here. I have had more reasons than most people have had for be- lieving that God is love. Some of the things that I have wanted to have have been given to me to have, some of the things that I have wanted to do have been granted to me to do ; when I have been denied that which I wanted to have, or that which I wanted to do, I have sometimes been able to see a reason for it, so that in time it has been possible for me to say understandingly "It is better so." But what of the lives full of promise that have been cut off early.? I do not speak of those who die in infancy, for while from one point of view their lives seem sheer waste, it might be argued that they are born and die for their par- ents' sake. But what of the youths full of talent and enthusiasm, perhaps even of genius, who have passed away when just ready to begin their life work? The only reason that we can possibly see which would justify a loving God in allowing such lives to become extinct, is that there was some great evil ahead of them, which He saw but we 146 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS could not see ; some evil so great that eternal death was better than such suffering. But the answer to this is that if He is God and All-Power- ful, He could have averted the evil; we are shut up then to the conclusion that if He allows such lives to pass into nothingness, He is lacking either in love or in power: — that is, He is not God. Then there are lives that are cut off in the midst of a great experience, before they have had time to learn the lesson that the experience should teach ; the lesson, for instance, that sin should teach. For I believe that even our sins are in God's hands, part of His ordering for us. For to the growing nature, growth often comes out of yielding to temptation, a different kind but perhaps as great a growth as comes from resist- ing it. So while it does not diminish our sin and responsibility, in the larger scheme of things I believe that God means us to yield, that He some- times has a lesson for us that yielding to tempta- tion will teach, and that resisting would not have taught. The author of the fifty-first Psalm had learned some things that only sin could teach, and when he had learned his lesson he was able to teach it to all the generations of men that should come after. But there are souls, beautiful growing souls like the Psalmist's, that are cut off just at the moment of yielding. There is no chance for them to learn sin's lesson here ; is there no other place where they can learn it? In this world too punishment is not in propor- IMMORTALITY 147 tion to sin ; we frequently pay heavier penalties for bad judgment than we do for bad morals ; the sins which spring fromi the excesses of human na- ture are more severely punished than those which spring from its deficiencies, yet we all feel that the former indicate a larger and more generous na- ture than do the latter. Is there no place where the balance will be set right? Again the lives that seem most pitiful to me are the naturally aspiring but empty lives, the lives for instance, of many unmarried and some mar- ried women of a generation ago ; women who were denied both satisfying love and inspiring work, because they were born too soon, and both en- vironment and lack of training prevented them from shaping full lives for themselves. Such lives are to me infinitely more pitiful than are those to whom great sorrow and suffering has come, for suffering is in itself part of the richness of life. But who shall estimate the dreariness of the life to which both joy and sorrow have been denied? the pain not of having lost, but of never having had? In thinking of such souls I have found comfort in an experience of my own. There were two years of my life which seemed an utter blank to me, no joy, no growth, but when they were over and I was far enough re- moved from them to look back upon them, I felt that they had been the two most fruitful years that I had known, and I thanked God for them. And I have wondered whether those to whom not 148 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS only two years but the whole life has seemed empty, may not when life is over and they are able to look back upon it, have a similar experi- ence, whether the Psalmist could have had such an experience in mind when he wrote "I shall be satisfied when I awake in Thy likeness," satisfied with the apparent emptiness, because he could see a reason for it? But if such an one never wakes up, how shall he be satisfied? Is there no place where such a woman, — it is generally a woman — can "open her mouth wide and He will fill it?" fill it if need be with even some of the pain that she has missed here? And what of the submerged tenth or more than a tenth, born in the slums, some of them perhaps with aspirations of which they themselves are ig- norant? forced to think of nothing save "What shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and where- withal shall we be clothed?" and then, alas! not always obtaining food and drink and clothing! Then there are whole races to whom apparently no chance has been given. When I was a little girl I heard a story which some African tribes, — I know not which ones, — tell among themselves in order to account for the differences in races. I will tell it as I remember it. "When God first created man," so these poor savages say, "he created a white man, and it was very early in the morning. So God said 'It is early, and I have plenty of time; sit down and I will teach you some things.* And God taught the white man how to IMMORTALITY 149 make houses, ships, cloth and many other things until the white man knew nearly as much as God knew. Then he made another man, — a man be- longing to our highest tribe, and God said to him, 'Well, it is still fairly early, sit down, and I will teach you some things.' So God taught him some things, not so many as he taught the white man, but still a good many. And so each man that was created was taught fewer things, until at last God created a man belonging to our lowest tribe, and to him He said, 'Well, it is very late, I have no time to talk to you. Go and catch fish, perhaps sometime I will come back.' God has not come back yet, so that man still knows nothing, except how to catch fish." Perhaps God will come back to that lowest tribe sometime ; if He does it will be well for the generation to which He comes, but what of the generations of men who have died knowing nothing save how to catch fish? What too of our ancestors who died in savagery, know- ing nothing of the higher joys of life, and scarcely anything of the lower.'' We are told sometimes that the object of creation, of life, is not the perfection of the individual, but the per- fection of the race. But can we believe that God loves one generation so much more than another that He would sacrifice thousands of generations to the perfection of one ultimate generation? Nay, rather if God is love, must we not all, all generations, all races, all individuals "come in the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son 150 IN CA]\IBRIDGE BACKS of God unto the perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ?" Then these aspirations which we all have, and which cannot be fulfilled here, do not these too point toward immortality ? Take the accomplish- ment of him who has accomplished the most, is it not only a small fraction of that to which he as- pires? Thus our failures here are "but a tri- umph's evidence for the fulness of the days." And life must last not a short time after death, but forever, since the blessed truth is that our as- pirations will never be satisfied. For the happi- ness of life consists not in having, but in wanting, and the spiritual man is so constituted that his aspirations will always be ahead of his attainment, his "reach will always exceed his grasp." "We do not see it where it is, At the beginning of the race; As we proceed it shifts its place, And where we looked for crowns to fall, We find the tug's to come, — that's all." But if our failures, failures which, thank God, are to continue to all eternity, are an argument in favor of immortality, no less are our successes. For not only prophets, poets, artists and musi- cians, but even those to whom they spake have shared God's thoughts with Him, have lived in rapturous communion with God, walking and talk- ing with Him as a man talketh with his friend. Could we love or even respect a God who dropped IMMORTALITY 151 his friends, the sharer of his thoughts into utter nothingness? or even absorbed their individuality in Himself? We are not God, nor part of God; we are friends of God, and such we must ever be. This new spirit of mechanical invention too, the marvelous power which man is acquiring over na- ture, which has not only increased our physical comfort in so many ways, but has also vastly mul- tiplied our intellectual interests, is not this too an evidence of immortality? For if we are Christians believing in the continuous inspiration of the Holy Spirit as the source of civilization, we shall rec- ognize that the God who has spoken to us so often in the past through poets, musicians and painters, is now perhaps speaking to us most clearly through the scientist, and that the spirit great enough to transmit or even to understand the wonderful message must be immortal. So too the being in a foreign country, or even reading or speaking a foreign language brings me this sense of immortality. For the broadening of experi- ence, the living so to speak in a new world and adapting myself to it, gives me the feeling that the mind which is capable of such enlargement, must have endless enlargement awaiting it, must live forever. But perhaps nothing gives me this assurance of an endless life so strongly as the making of a new friend. An experience so broadening, so deepen- ing, so uplifting as love must surely last forever. I have known people who because they had no 152 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS strong sense of immortality were afraid to make close friends, lest they should lose them. I do not wonder; when I was a little girl, I wanted a bird, but was afraid to have it lest it should die. If I do not believe that my friend and I are immortal, I cannot enjoy her even while I have her She is meadows, sun and breeze to me, but of what avail would be meadows, sun and breeze, if I did not be- lieve in God, if I did not believe in immortality? The very passion with which I enter upon a friendship, the newness of life which comes to me with it, is to me an argument in favor of immor- tality, but most of all the aspiration that comes with it. When I love I want to do something for the object of miy love, but I think that even more than that I want to make my own life higher and better, more worthy of my love. The dog too loves his master, and wishes to please him, but be- yond that his love kindles no aspiration in him. In man alone is love what Mazzini says that it should be, "the union of souls that aspire, the flight of the soul toward God." When we really love, love in the full sense of the word, we "lift up our hearts" and when we lift up our hearts, con- sciously or unconsciously we "lift them up to Him." And then there is the unrequited love; is not part of the reason that love is xmrequited to be found in the fact that earthly love is partly physi- cal, that it must find physical expression.? I can- not believe that I can ever feel a spiritual affinity IMMORTALITY 153 toward a person without that affinity really ex- isting; some day she whom I love will come to see it, will acknowledge it in eternity if not in time. Here she is slow to perceive it, perhaps because I cannot find the right expression for the spiritual that is in me, or perhaps she knows that it exists, but because of physical limitations she cannot re- spond; perhaps while I suit her spiritually, I do not suit her physically, tire her when I should rest her. There there will be no bodies, or at least no bodies that can be wearied. Or she may already have so many friends that there is no time or strength for another; there time and strength will not be limited. So in the next life I shall have the love that I have missed in this, "for God above Is great to grant as mighty to make And creates the love to reward the love, I claim you still for my own love's sake." When I speak of immortality it is personal im- mortality that I mean ; for no other immortality should I care. If I am to survive, it must be I, — I \\dth the memory of my past, with all the ties that were formed here on earth, for if I have no memory of my existence here, I might just as well become extinct, and another spirit be created. I know that there are thinkers like Mr. Maeterlinck who believe that spirit is indestructible in the same sense in which they believe that matter is in- destructible; that is, that at death it is absorbed 154 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS into the sum total of spirit. I find Mr. Maeter- linck's position more logical than Mr. Benson's. For Mr. Benson finds no difficulty in believing in a personal God, who is All-Love and All-Power, yet thinks it possible that this powerful, loving God may for some reason deny us personal im- mortality. I maintain that if God, a Person, loves me as a Person, my personality must survive ; that anything else is unthinkable. But Mr. Maeter- linck denies personality to God in so many words, and when we read his essays and see to what an extent he believes the spiritual life to be based upon the physical, and when we read his dramas and see how his people are the playthings of Fate, we feel that he all but denies personality to man. A wise teacher of mine taught me to define a per- son as one who has the power to choose. In that sense Mr. Maeterlinck's "Pelleas and Melisande" certainly are not persons ; their actions and des- tiny are governed entirely by blind Fate. Now if we deny personality to both man and God, it follows as a matter of course that there can be no personal immortality; we who are not persons here cannot be persons anywhere else ; the only im- mortality possible for us is to be absorbed in the impersonal God. Accept Mr. Maeterlinck's prem- ises, and his conclusions follow naturally. And I do not know how his premises can be ab- solutely proved false; the line of argument which attracts me most is that suggested by Mr. Ches- terton. He points out that there is no way by IMMORTALITY 155 which we can answer the mad man logically, for his explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory, or at least it is unanswerable. "If a man says for instance that certain men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by say- ing that the men deny that they are conspirators, which is exactly what conspirators would do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no ar- gument to tell him that the world denies his di- vinity, for the world denied Christ's. But speak- ing quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is the combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's explanation explains, but it does not ex- plain in a large way. The best way to answer the lunatic who believed that his neighbors were conspiring against him would be to say, suppose we grant the details ; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you, it was only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked him his name, it was only because he knew it already. But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you ! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it !" Or to the madman who called himself Christ, "So you are the creator of the world ! but what a small world it must be ! What a little heaven you must inhabit with an- gels no bigger than butterflies !" 156 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS And as a matter of fact that is the way that wise doctors and nurses do talk to the insane. They do not say, "Your position is absolutely without foundation," but "see where it lands you." Now see where Mr. Maeterlinck's position lands him. Not only does it shut out personal immor- tality, but see where it lands him in this life. Fate determined the destiny of "Pclleas and Meli- sande" and will determine the destiny of Meli- sande's daughter. That is, having no power to choose, they have not really sinned, the most dis- mal of all doctrines. To my mind the immorality of the drama does not lie in the fact that the love therein depicted was unlawful, that at least is the smallest part of it, but in the fact that it was such a vile thing even had it been lawful ; a purely physical and sensuous thing without a spark of aspiration in it. I find the sensuosity in this case even worse than sensuality, for in the latter there is often a certain kind of strength; here there is nothing but weakness. Mr. Maeterlinck tries to make us see that the lower animals are almost up to man's level. He succeeds in making us see, that admit his premises, man is almost down to the level of the beasts. I had a college acquaintance who startled me the first time that she called upon me, by telling me that she was looking forward with the greatest of pleasure to the time when she should get rid of her body, for most of her troubles and most of her faults came to her through her body. The re- IMMORTALITY 157 mark made an impression upon me, partly because it was such an unusual statement for a young girl to make (there was something about her which made it impossible to doubt her sincerity) and partly because it was not long before her wish was granted ; she did get rid of her body. But I can- not say that I sympathize with her now any more than I did then ; it seems to me that the spirit owes so much to the body that I can hardly imagine it as continuing to exist without the body. All knowledge and all feeling come to us at first through the body, and all expression of knowledge and feeling is through the body. Most of our temptations come to us, directly or indirectly, through the body, which is equivalent to saying that our moral characters come to us through the body, since "as there is nothing good save the good will," without temptation moral character would be impossible. And the care which the body re- quires, the struggle for material things which it necessitates, although it may seem an impediment, is the means by which the spirit is disciplined. The people who live in fertile countries where physical wants are easily supplied generally de- velop less morally than do those who live in a country where the means of subsistence are more difficult to obtain. Even the weak body may be an advantage, for the regular life which the weak have to live in order to live at all may make them so systematic that they accomplish more than the average strong person does, while the discipline 158 IN CAlNIBRtDGE BACKS of suffering frequently gives a sweetness of spirit and a quickness of sympathy rarely found among the physically strong. Moreover physical limita- tions often define our way by cutting off m,any tempting possibilities ; thus the whole life is con- centrated on that which it can do best, and in the long run counts for more than it would, had its energies been dissipated in a variety of direc- tions. I have a very ardent love of study, of the acquisition of knowledge, and I sometimes think that I might have been a mere cram, had not weakness of the flesh forced me to take seasons to reflect. The teacher whom I have quoted be- fore used to say, "The Sabbath was given to us to protect us against narrowness." I suppose she meant that if we did not have our Sabbath rest, each would become so absorbed in his own little piece of work that he would be unable to see it in its relation to the whole. I have sometimes thought that my weak body was given to me for a similar reason, to protect me from the narrow- ness which a mere accumulation of facts en- genders. So with the poet I can say "nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps soul," and with the Apostle I can say that I "desire not to be unclothed, but clothed upon." But perhaps a time will come when the body has given to the spirit all that it has to give, a time when it can no longer help but impede, and then like all institutions that have been useful, but have survived their usefulness, the monastery and the IMMORTALITY 159 feudal system for instance, it must give way, the mind can get on without it. Even here we very soon discover that while the bodily organs are witnesses from whose testimony we must form our conception of Truth, they are deceptive witnesses ; it is only through thought and reason that we at- tain to accurate knowledge of what they witness. That is we can, as Plato puts it, attain to real truth only when we approach it "with the eye of the mind alone, not allowing when in the act of thought the intrusion or introduction of sight or any other sense in the company of reason, but with the very light of the mind in her clearness penetrating into the very heart of truth." A time may come when it is no longer necessary for the body to furnish to the mind the imperfect data upon which it reasons, when the spirit has learned all that it can learn from the body, when the body in turn has expressed all that the spirit has learned from it that it can express ; then even a strong and perfect body would impede, and the body when it has performed its mission does not stay strong and perfect ; it begins to decay. It is true that the mind seems at times to decay with it, that even the moral nature sometimes seems to give way, and this often makes us feel that since the spirit weakens as the body weakens, it must die when the body dies. But perhaps the soul just goes to sleep to wake up again refreshed. Nor does mental and moral decay always accom- pany physical decay. Have we not all known 160 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS people who while the outward man perished the inward man was renewed day by day? Jesus Christ had not the slightest doubt of im- mortality. He found it proved even in the writ- ings of Moses. With fullest confidence he could say "I go to prepare a place for you." When I was a child I was taken to an artist's studio to see some pictures which he had had on exhibition in Paris. He told us that while there he had over- heard a Frenchman criticise the brilliancy with which he had depicted the autumn foliage of a New England forest ; such coloring, the critic said, did not exist in nature. To which another Frenchman replied, "Do you see that sky? The man who could paint a sky like that would not make a mis- take about other things." Jesus Christ was so right about all the things of which I can judge, I feel that I can trust Him not to make a mistake about the things of which I cannot judge. For the more I think about the teachings of Jesus and compare them with those of other teachers, the more am I struck with the truth of the saying "Never man so spake." Those who bore this testimony had perhaps not heard many great teachers, could not compare him, as the fashion now is, with Buddha, Confucius or Socrates, but if they had been able to do so, I think that their verdict would have been the same. How wonder- ful it is that in that age He never said anything that could offend the morality, or even the taste of the twentieth century! It is true that here IMMORTALITY 161 and there there are pages of Plato that compare well with the teachings of Christ, the parable at the end of the Gorgias, the cave-figure in the Re- public, parts of the Symposium, the Phaedo and the Phaedrus, but turn over a few pages, we will almost invariably find something which, tried by modern standards of either morals or taste, must be condemned. And the impression which Socrates himself made upon his contemporaries, how differ- ent from that made by Jesus ! Simon Peter cast his fisher's coat about him, fell at Jesus' feet and said, "Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man." Alcibiades loved and admired Socrates, and yet not only was he not recalled from vice by him, but he even expected him to share in his vices, and when he was not successful he gave him credit for being a paragon of virtue, but never thought of imitating him. Would Alcibiades have dreamed of tempting Jesus? So much for the matter of Jesus' teaching. What about the manner? He taught "as one having authority, not as the scribes." He never had any doubts as to what He taught. He is sim- ple, authoritative, brief. Socrates is fantastic, tentative, his gold is imbedded in page after page of fanciful and bewildering parable. One does not quite know what he meant, probably because he himself did not quite know. How many more of his sayings we have than we have of Christ's, and yet on how much fewer of the problems of life does he really throw light ! He is always feeling 162 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS his way, not sure himself of what he says. Jesus speaks with absolute certainty, there is no room for any other opinion. "If it were not so, I would have told you." Socrates thinks, Jesus knows, Socrates reasons, Jesus sees. I do not say that there never was a time when Jesus had to think things out, the statement that He increased in wisdom as He increased in stature, may imply that there was, but from the time that His say- ings are recorded. He spake only that which He knew. It is just because Christ's thought is so fuU-grown, His knowledge so absolute, that it seems so simple. The process of searching for truth is often a complicated one, but Truth when found is always simple. Indeed I have sometimes thought that perhaps the reason that a certain type of intellectual peo- ple prefer Socrates to Jesus is that they do not like that absolute certainty, they have a weakness for intellectual processes. I remember that when I first taught sociology and the subject was com- paratively new to me, I was constantly making statements which on further thought, I would modify or even contradict. I remarked to one of my pupils that I hoped that in another year when I was more mistress of my material, I would not do this so much. She replied, "Then I am^ glad that I am in your class this year ; I like to feel the teacher think." That girl was more interested in my mind, and in its action upon her mind, than in the subject matter; perhaps legitimately so, since IMMORTALITY 163 the object of education is more mental development than knowledge. So the scholar sometimes pre- fers Socrates to Christ, because he is in the period of his life in which intellectual processes mean more to him than do matters of life and death. But when the time comes that he needs Christ to do "more for him than a mere man can," He may "stand confessed as the God of Salvation." For when it comes to matters of vital importance, we want the man who knows, not the man who is thinking them out. So when we ask what lies be- yond life and death, we are glad that Jesus knew rather than thought. The question has often been discussed as to how far the Platonic Socrates corresponds to the real Socrates. One thing at least is true: Plato was Socrates' intellectual and spiritual equal, and therefore capable of creating him. Nor is it likely that he would have hesitated to put his own opin- ion into the mouth of his master ; he would have reasoned that all that he thought was really due to Socrates, for without Socrates he would never have thought at all. And ancient plagiarism — if plagiarism it can be called — was more noble than modern plagiarism — it consisted in attrib- uting one's own thoughts to someone else, whereas modem plagiarism desires that someone's else thoughts be attributed to one's self. That is, the plagiarist of antiquity was anxious that the thought should spread ; if it would spread better by giving someone else the credit for it, by all 164 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS means let him have it ; the modern plagiarist wishes not the thought, but his own fame to spread. But the disciples of Jesus, poor unlettered fishermen, were not capable of inventing Jesus, Plato himself would not have been capable of it. Take the story of his birth alone. Other religions tell us of sons of God born of mortal women, but how vulgar are these stories of actual sexual intercourse between mortals and immortals ! Contrast them with St. Luke's vision, "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall over- shadow thee; therefore that holy thing which is bom of thee shall be called the Son of God." A fisherman or an obscure physician invent that, in that age of bad morals and bad taste.'' And yet when all is said, the heart will cry out, If we could only be sure, it would be so much easier to bear the loss of our loved ones, so much easier to live ourselves ! Perhaps if we could be sure we should not live at all. For living means for a hmnan being making choices ; if there were ab- solutely certainty, not only would there be no room for faith, there would also be no room for moral choice; we should be so overshadowed by God, that it would not be possible for us to exer- cise our own wills. Perhaps we have been at times in the presence of a great person, and have felt stifled, no room to think, no room to will, no room to act, no room to live. What if we were in the unveiled presence of God? Yes, it is well that He should withdraw Himself, that He should be the IMMORTALITY 165 "invisible God" in order that He may leave "room for the newly made to live," which means room for them "to fall into divers temptations," since this is necessary if we would be "perfect and entire, lacking nothing." Yes, it may have its use even that we are sometimes forced to cry out with Jesus, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" A passage in Mrs. Ward's "Lady Rose's Daughter" strikes me very forcibly. Julie has been telling Jacob of her past life. Mrs. Ward says "Jacob listened very humbly. How could he ever be her equal in experience?" He was too sure of the presence of God — too protected by that assurance. Such characters are beautiful, but do we not sometimes feel that they are a little lacking in development? Is it too much to say that before we can attain to full-grown perfection we need to experience even that sense of desertion which was necessary to His perfection? God does not desert us any more than He deserted Christ, but perhaps it is necessary for us, for some of us at least, that we should feel that horror of great darkness, that emptiness and loneliness which He felt. "They have Moses and the prophets ; if they will not hear them, neither will they be converted (nor convinced) though one rose from the dead." If historical evidence can be accepted. One has risen from the dead. And miore than the accounts of His resurrection, the transformation of the lives of His followers is proof that He did rise. "The 166 IN a\-AIBRIDGE BACKS power of His resurrection,'" we feel it in St. Peter's sermon on the Day of Pentecost, in the thanks- giving of the Apostles that they were "counted worthy to suffer shame for His name" : in St. Paul's triumphant cry "Nay, in aU things we are more than conquerors through him that hath loved us." ''"Why stand we in jeopardy every hour.-*' Why indeed, except that having known the *'power of His resurrection," they were able and wining to share in the fellowship of His suffering? And yet we cannot beHeve I With Thomas we say, "Except I shall see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I wiU not believe." The truth is that no amount of historical evi- dence would at all times, and in aJI moods fully satisfy us. For no one will quite believe any- one's else experience in the matter; there would have to be a personal appearance of our dead to each one of us. And thus the object of death, whatever it is, would be defeated : in the constant intercourse of the living and the dead there would be no boundary between life and death. "It is expedient for you," said Jesus, "that I go away." So it is expedient for us that our loved ones go away, perhaps partly in order "that the trial of our faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, might be foimd unto praise and honor and glory." And yet He went away from us in order that He might really be nearer to us. IMMORTALITY 167 serve us better than He could in the flesh. Per- haps our beloved dead have gone from us for the same reason. He is everywhere and always with us, even unto the end of the world ; they are where He is, are not they too everywhere and always with us? He has gone from us in order that He may help us, and He has given us the blessed as- surance that as we live our lives bravely, we help Him. Do our dead help us, and can they be helped by us in a similar way? IX THE WRITING OF HISTORY When I crossed the ocean this summer, it was in the hope that I might find in English libraries material for an historical work which I have been contemplating for many years. I have dreamed of doing a truly beautiful piece of work, small perhaps but as nearly perfect of its kind as pos- sible, true, psychological and artistic. My illness has made it impossible to make any attempt to carry out my plan at least for some time, and in- deed to hope that I shall ever be able to do so seems like hoping against hope. Let me comfort myself as I sit in Trinity College Back with try- ing to put into words my ideal of the history which I would write if I could. Before I can do this I must ask and answer the question, What is the function of history, the end which the historian is seeking to accomplish.'^ Carlyle once said, "A nation's true Bible is its own history." And it is certainly noteworthy that the Hebrew Bible contains not only revela- tions of spiritual truth for all mankind, but that so much of it is occupied with the history of a particular race. No Jewish youth had a proper religious training who did not know the record of 168 THE WRITING OF HISTORY 169 God's dealings with his race in the Past, who was not able intelligently to "praise famous men, and his fathers that begat him," who could not "look back to the rock whence he was hewn, and the hole of the pit whence he was digged." Was not this because right living in the Present must in part at least be inspired and directed by the Past? And is not this as true in London and Washington now as it was in Jerusalem then? For if we are Christians we believe that God directs English and American history now just as much as he di- rected Jewish history then, that He who has be- come the world's Redeemer is still a national Re- deemer, and therefore each nation should know the way in which it has been led in the past, in order that it may not only know itself better, but may also come to a fuller knowledge of Him. And whether we are Christians or not we can- not help feeling that the great spirits of the Past must inspire and direct us in the tasks of the Present, that if we would be worthy successors of those who have gone before, we must profit by their failures and successes, must begin to build where they left off. Our fathers have labored, and we have entered into their labors ; we are the baby on the giant's shoulders ; if we would be taller than the giant we must admire and love him in order that he may inspire us to grow. We must also know just how tall he was in order that we may know where to begin to grow. My old Ox- ford Professor, Dr. York Powell, in talking to 170 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS English boys once said, "I am one of those who think that if we are going to keep this country great, we should have some times to think about her great men. Chinese Gordon used to say that the right book for young officers to read was Plutarch's Lives, and I am sure that the right books for young Englishmen and Englishwomen to read are books which tell them about the great Englishmen and Englishwomen of the Past, to look back and see how such men as Alfred managed by courage, by perseverance, by never knowing when they were beaten, and by sticking to what they knew to be right to pull the country through." I well remember the first service which I ever attended in Westminister Abbey. I had made a mistake about the hour, was late and had to stand. I stood right by the place where someone has said that more illustrious dust lies buried than anywhere else in England, under the out-stretched arm of Chatham, above the spot where he and his great son are at rest. I do not remember the subject of the sermon, but in the course of it the preacher said something like this, "We are here surrounded by England's illustrious dead, and they are crying out to us to know why we have not done more than we have, why we have not advanced further beyond what they did." To an American, visiting the Abbey for the first time, feeling so strongly the truth of the words "The Abbey makes us We,'^ this was most impressive. THE WRITING OF HISTORY 171 And truly what is patriotism but such a loyalty to the Past as begets a promise of the Future? What is our country's good name for which we would fight, but the memory of the lives of her great men, the lives which "remind us that we can make our lives sublime"? It has been well said that one would no more despair of one who loved the history of his country than of one who loved his parents. But while it is perfectly clear that the history of our past should inspire us, it may not be quite so clear that it should direct us. We are not called upon to do just as our fathers did, and to attempt to do so would be mere childishness, for exactly the same thing never happens twice in history, and if it did it would be under different circumstances, and among a different people. But it is also true that exactly the same thing never happens twice in the life of an individual, never- theless it would be absurd to say that the indi- vidual does not profit by experience, and so it is absurd to say that the nation does not profit by experience. We differ from the savage as the man differs from the child, because we have a Past upon which we build, and by which we not only may, but must be guided. For we work to advantage only as we throw our- selves into the stream of previous human effort ; we make progress as we advance with that stream, are checked as we oppose it ; we are able to trans- form and develop our civilization only as we under- 172 IN CAIMBRIDGE BACKS stand it. Efforts at reform which involve a vio- lent break with the Past are generally in vain. For the Past has made us, therefore so long as we live we cannot bury it ; we may think that we have done so, but sooner or later it comes to life again and mocks us. Even in those rare cases in which we are partially successful in our efforts to do away with it, as the French revolutionists seem to have been, it is at too great a cost. And in these days success in the present and the future depends upon a proper understanding of the past, not only on the part of the statesman, but on the part of each individual. For it is pub- lic opinion that rules to-day, and public opinion is the opinion of the average man. The states- man generally has very little to do with forming this public opinion ; he is more often formed by it, and having been formed by it, he is able by means of his executive ability to embody it in action. He is, the wise and witty Mr. Bagehot tells us "a man of common opinions, and uncommon abili- ties" ; the man who does what the average man wants in such a way as to make him think, "I could not have done it any better if I had done it my- self!" How important then that the common opinion of the average man should be wise and safe! Then if we know the truth, the truth will set us free, free from prejudice, not only in national but in international affairs. For nations are wise or foolish in their dealings with each other largely THE WRITING OF HISTORY 173 as their understanding of history is true or false. This is a point which Dr. Powell used to insist upon. "Bulgarians would not be blowing up Greeks with dynamite," he said in 1903, "or Greeks joining Tiirks to cut the throats of Bul- garians, and keep Servians out of Macedonia to- day, but for history, written history. My old friend Morse Stevens used to say that Portugal was raised from the dead by Hercolano, a mere historian. It is history, written history that has raised the Baltic nations, that has made Rou- mania and Hungary important European factors, that has set Bohemia on her feet again, and is making a nation of Albania, that is keeping Polish patriotism alive, that has given the national spirit that Russia, the pretended champion of Christen- dom, in spite of the most solemn engagements, is doing her vilest to crush. It is history that is largely responsible for the unity of Germany, and for the very making of the Italian nation." I confess that my own desire to know and to write history has sprung chiefly from an intense interest in human life. I want to understand people, to understand the people of my own age, and the people of past ages. I never feel that any time has been wasted which helps me to un- derstand people better, for I have accomplished something in that my sympathies have been en- larged, in that I have come more and more to see life as something tremendous and full of in- terest, and men even in their follies and weak- 174 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS nesses as worth while. Nor is this without prac- tical value. For we must strive to promote not only right living between nations, but right living with each other, hence the value of the psycho- logical side of history, that we should know the different types of men, understand the motives of their actions, and thus be fair in our judg- ments. Our relations to the people about us may make us unjust to them at times, we are too near them to really see them, or understand them. In studying the characters of the past we do not labor under this disadvantage, and an unpreju- diced judgment of the mien of the past may help us to get rid of our prejudices in judging the men of the present. The great historian of the seventeenth century who probably devoted more time to trying to understand Oliver Cromwell than anyone else has ever devoted to trying to understand any man, tells us that he finds in him an epitome of the character and history of the whole English people; that just as England has given material both to those who wish to consider her a hypo- critical, land-grabbing bully, and to those who wish to consider her the gi-eatest agent of civili- zation that the world has ever known, so Cromwell has given material alike to those who wish to consider him the greatest of hypocrites, and to those who wish to consider him the greatest of saints. I myself understand Cromwell's life as Dr. Gardiner, both by his books and by the lee- THE WRITING OF HISTORY 175 tures which I heard him give at Oxford, has helped me to understand him, as one of the greatest tragedies that the world has evep known, and I look for a tragedian to arise who will see that there is as much material for tragedy in Cromwell as in Hamlet. For if tragedy be as the Greeks defined it, a conflict of ideals in a noble soul resulting in the apparent defeat of one or all of them, then the life of the man in whose soul the ideals of Puritanism and Parliamen- tarism were constantly at war, so that he was forced sometimes to sin against his conscience in sacrificing one, sometimes in sacrificing the other, was as great a tragedy as that of any man who ever walked this earth. And I confess that my interest in him does not arise so much from the fact that I see in him England writ little, although I do see this in him, as from the fact that I see in him every one of us writ large. His struggles are our struggles, his victories and de- feats are our victories and defeats, only they are on a large scale in order that we may see and un- derstand therm. Of course the main object of history can hardly be to see the workings of the human heart, for that is far better done in the so-called fictitious creations of the great masters of literature. As a child when a story was read to me, I was wont to inquire, "Is it true.'"' and great was my disappointment when I was answered in the negative. As I have grown older, I have learned 176 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS that there is a sense in which we can be surer of the truth of a great novel than we can be of the truth of a great history. For the character drawn by the truly great novelist is always true; he has lived not once but many times, only he did not have the name which the novelist gives him. But while I am sure that my idea of Crom- well is true to life, that there have been and are men who in Cromwell's position, would have been actuated by the motives which I attribute to Cromwell, I cannot be perfectly sure that the inner workings of the mind of the particular man, Oliver Cromwell, were as I would depict them. Generally the historian explains his characters by himself, what would have been his motives, what his train of thought, what his inward strug- gles, had he been in such a position. Every man has something in him of every other man ; the historian tries to find the something in him which corresponds to the man of whom he is writing, the part of him which is the man of whom he writes, and there is always danger that he will find the wrong part. Indeed the part which he seeks may have been all but trained out of him or his an- cestors, so that now it is almost if not quite im- possible to find it. Therefore he cannot under- stand some of the characters of his history as he cannot understand some of his contemporaries, because their reasons were so entirely different from the reasons which would influence him. Yet the fact that we make mistakes as to the char- THE WRITING OF HISTORY 177 acters of those about us is no reason for ceasing to try to understand them, and I do believe that by industrious study, and by loving musing upon those who have gone before, we can know them at least as clearly as we can know most of the men that we see, and after all the child's desire that the story that he reads should be true as he un- derstands truth has something in it. Cromwell is more of an influence in my life than is Hamlet. I once asked a class in English history whether in the civil wars of the seventeenth century they were on the side of king or Parliament ; they were almost evenly divided, but each could see and even sympathize with the arguments on the other side. If that had not been true, I should have been in despair of my teaching, for knowledge involves sympathy, and sympathy involves justice. Does seeing the good on both sides tend to make us lukewarm in actual life.? Then the teaching must go a step further. Each side helps. The liberals help when they propose reform measures, but the conservatives also help when they force them to consider them carefully before passing them, and thus do not allow too violent a break with the Past ; it is our part to help as our side is helping. In that wonderful collection of Roumanian folk songs which Carmen Sylva has given us in "The Bard of the Dimbo-Vitza," there is a song bemoaning the fate of the soldier who died too soon to know which way the fight had 178 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS gone, but history seems to teach that every soldier, whichever side he may be on, may die confident that what is good in his side will con- quer. For in the long run neither side prevails. It is the good in both that is victorious. Straf- ford died as honorably and nobly as did Hamp- den, the one for order and the other for freedom. England now recognizes the value of both. Finally I am one of those who think that it is not unworthy to write history in order to furnish pleasure. We enjoy the Old World largely be- cause of its associations, and whatever deepens our enjoyment adds to our growth. To sum up then. History is written that we may find in it inspiration and direction, and that a fuller knowledge of human life may make us happier, more just and more generous. How then should it be written.? Evidently the first essential is that it should be true. Truth, it has been well said, is the historian's food. For him there is but one goal, one test, one point of honor, "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." No amount of art can compensate for lack of truth, for while truth without art may fail to do good because it reaches so few people, art without truth does harm. And to be true both in letter and in spirit, it is necessary to go to the fountain-head: the past must be studied in books, in manuscripts, in monuments, in buildings, in pictures, in coins, in every way in which it makes itself known. The historian must deem no THE WRITING OF HISTORY 179 time and no trouble too great to put on the ascertaining of even seemingly small facts, but he must discriminate carefully between small facts which are important because of their bearing upon a great whole, and small facts which have no such bearing. And he must have an open enough mind to give up his own pet theories when a fuller knowledge of the facts contradicts them. If he is conscious of a bias in a certain direction it may be well that he read the opposite side first and exhaustively. And when he is sure that his facts are true, he must not be afraid of them. There have been historians who have thought it necessary to bolster up the truth with lies ; to do this is to show a lack of faith in truth. The question comes up as to whether the his- torian should write with an ethical purpose, with the deliberate intention of influencing mankind. Tacitus answers in the affirmative. "This," he says, "I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommunicated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil deeds," and in practice he is true to his theory. But while I believe that history if truly written, will perform that function, generally speaking I think it better that the historian, like the artist, should not try to teach, and should think as little of his influence as possible. His- tory may furnish material for Ethics, but it is not a branch of Ethics. Let the historian con- cern himself only with relating what is true, the 180 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS reader may be trusted to find out the moral for himself. I remember how as a child I hated those collections of Bible stories, in which the author insisted upon drawing the moral; they seemed an insult to my intelligence. Moreover the his- torian who is trying to teach an ethical lesson, who has a case to make out either for or against a man or a course of action, is likely to stray from the truth of history. So too the historian who has a philosophical theory to support is likely to graduate from science into philosophy too easily. I am inclined to think that just as George Eliot said that she loved every character that she had created except Rosamond Vincy, so the historian instead of judging should love all, or almost all, of his characters. But in order that history should inspire and direct us, make us just and make us generous, it is necessary not only that it should be true, but also that its truth should be read, and read by the many. Hence it must be interesting. The his- torian must be an artist as well as a scholar. If the mere researcher has his value, it is chiefly because he furnishes material which can be used by the artist. When Charles James Fox was asked how he prepared his great orations, he re- plied, "I listen to the speeches of a very dull but well informed man, and next day I speak them over again for him." It is sometimes claimed that certain historians are not read because of the amount of learning which they have put into THE WRITING OF HISTORY 181 their books. I am inclined to think that if a historian is not read, it is generally not because of the amount of his learning, but because of the lack of his art. He has put too much work into his book not to put more; where scholarship abounds, art should much more abound. It is reported that Carlyle once said to Meredith, "Man, ye suld write heestory ! ye have an heestorian in ye !" And every historian, even to be true, should have something of the novelist and poet in him ; his imagination should be as strong and true as theirs, for what is imagination but the power to see life, the power to put one's self in another's place.'' I sometimes think that no better history has been written than Palgrave's "Visions of England," for his visions are true, and he has been able to make us see and feel them. I know that it is often claimed that it is dangerous to attempt to write history artistically, for the artistic historian cannot resist the temp- tation to sacrifice truth to art. Macaulay is held up as a dreadful warning; his ambition to write a history that should take the place of the latest novel on every young lady's dressing table is quoted with reprehension, but after all the am- bition was not in itself an unworthy one. And it is also to be noticed that where Macaulay fails, it is not as a scholar or at least not as a re- searcher ; no one was ever more painstaking than he in the search for facts both important and un- important ; he fails as a man and he fails as an 182 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS artist. He falls as a man because he could not free himself from his prejudices, or rather because as Mr. Chesterton would say, "his prejudices became postjudices." Before he knew much about the Duke of Marlborough he formed a cer- tain estimate of him ; when he knew more about the Duke of Marlborough than anyone else did, including some facts that were inconsistent with his estimate, he did not change the estimate. He fails as an artist because he has so little sense of proportion ; to him one fact is as important as an- other, if only he can make a good story out of it. So while almost every story that he tells, con- sidered by itself, has artistic merit, his great work as a whole is lacking artistically. It is just this lack of art, this lack of proportion, that makes it in some sense untrue; in giving us more truths, he has given us less truth. For so far from Art militating against Truth, it is art and only art that is true. Facts are not truth, they are material for truth, it is the artist and the artist only who can so put them together as to give us truth. Yet there is a danger in saying, "I will write a history for the sake of interesting people," just as there is a danger in saying, "I will paint a picture or sing a song for the sake of moving people." For no true artist seeks to interest or move others ; his only care is to present truly that which interests or moves him. The painter or singer who, having mastered his technique, is THE WRITING OF HISTORY 183 so moved by the beauty of the subject that he would paint, or of the song that he would sing that he must paint or sing, does not try to move others, but he does move them. So the historian who, having collected his facts, is so interested in them that he must find worthy expression for them, does not try to interest others, but he does interest them. To be an historian one should care immensely for history, just as to be an artist one should care immensely for art. For just as technique does not make an artist, so accuracy does not make an historian ; there can be no real art which is not an expression of the artist's soul, so there can be no real history which is not an expression of the historian's soul. Therefore it is essential that the historian should have a soul, and a soul that is worth expressing. If much of the history that we read is dull, it is generally because it was written by men too dull to take the ordinary interest in life. No man can be a great historian who is only a historian, for the real historian must be a student of life as well as of books. If a man understand not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he under- stand his great-grandfather whom he hath not seen.'' In proportion as a man is a specialist of any kind, he must take care not to allow his in- terests to become contracted. Mere scholar- ship is the mortal enemy of real scholarship, for what kills the man kills the scholar. It is the sympathetic rather than the critical mind that is 184 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS profound and clear-sighted. Stubbs used to say that he came to understand institutional history as he served on committees, and Green said that it was his pastoral work in East London that helped him more than anything else to realize and depict the life of the English people. The three most popular English historians are Gibbon, Macaulay and Green, and in my opinion they are most popular because they are the three who have been most successful in putting themselves into their work. We know them as we read their books, not only their excellences, but also their deficiencies. In "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" we see its author, pompous, industrious, accurate, brilliant, with a quick eye for the outside of things, but with neither the mind nor the heart to see beneath the surface, to comprehend the panting of the thirsty soul for that which satisfies, the longing of the tortured spirit for that which rests. Therefore he failed to understand the real essence of the period of which he wrote. Therefore he even mistook his subject and called his work "The De- cline and Fall of the Roman Empire," when he was really writing the story of the rise of the new nations. In Macaulay's great history too we see Ma- caulay's self in all his weakness and all his strength. We become acquainted not only with the good and brilliant Whig, the man who never changed his mind, whose friends wished that they THE WRITING OF HISTORY 185 could be as sure of anything as Tom Macaulay was of everything, but also with the good and bril- liant comrade, the diner-out who always furnished intellectual entertainment, clever but never so subtle as to make it difficult for average intel- lects to follow him, and seem' to share in his cleverness ; a generous nature, but after all some- what commonplace and on the surface. And why? Was it not because although Macaulay was affectionate, he was not passionate? his love for his family was beautiful, but outside the family he would seem to have had no strong affections ; there is no evidence that he ever fell in love or even had a very warm friendship ; in- deed he tells us that he preferred the friendship of dead authors to that of living men. And the deepest things of life are not to be learned by mere loving; to know them we must not only love, we must fall in love, and this Macaulay never did. Then take Green, if not the most popular, at least the dearest of English historians. Where Gibbon and Macaulay are weak. Green is strong. No man ever gave us the color, the atmosphere of a period, the spiritual life of a people as he has given it. But try to use his Short History as a text-book for a class unfamiliar with the subject; then you will begin to realize that the outer has been sacrificed to the inner, the class get the atmosphere, but do not get the events. Is not this what might be expected of the man who 186 IN CAMBRIDGE BACKS tells us that because of the peculiar inwardness of his nature, he could scarcely remember any- thing that happened in his own life before he was fifteen years old? Gifts differ, and each must work according to the nature of the gift that is in him, but when the truly great historian comes he will have all the gifts : he will be scientist, philosopher and artist in one, and his gifts will be so co-ordinated that every chapter that he writes will be part of the Truth of God, a revelation of the thought of the Creator realized in His creatures. That is the historian's aim, and surely each may take pride, if not in his own work, at least in that in which he believes, and toward which he would like to minister. OCT 30 y^W One copy del. to Cat. Div. OCT ^.;) i^ii