Book: Dreamthorp

A >> Alexander Smith >> Dreamthorp




A similar feeling of puzzlement to that which I have indicated, besets
one not unfrequently in the contemplation of men and women. You are
brought in contact with a person, you attempt to comprehend him, to
enter into him, in a word to _be_ him, and, if you are utterly foiled
in the attempt, you cannot flatter yourself that you have been
successful to the measure of your desire. A person interests, or
piques, or tantalises you, you do your best to make him out; yet strive
as you will, you cannot read the riddle of his personality. From the
invulnerable fortress of his own nature he smiles contemptuously on the
beleaguering armies of your curiosity and analysis. And it is not only
the stranger that thus defeats you; it may be the brother brought up by
the same fireside with you, the best friend whom you have known from
early school and college days, the very child, perhaps, that bears your
name, and with whose moral and mental apparatus you think you are as
familiar as with your own. In the midst of the most amicable
relationships and the best understandings, human beings are, at times,
conscious of a cold feeling of strangeness--the friend is actuated by a
feeling which never could actuate you, some hitherto unknown part of
his character becomes visible, and while at one moment you stood in
such close neighbourhood, that you could feel his arm touch your own,
in the next there is a feeling of removal, of distance, of empty space
betwixt him and you in which the wind is blowing. You and he become
separate entities. He is related to you as Border peel is related to
Border peel on Tweedside, or as ship is related to ship on the sea. It
is not meant that any quarrel or direct misunderstanding should have
taken place, simply that feeling of foreignness is meant to be
indicated which occurs now and then in the intercourse of the most
affectionate; which comes as a harsh reminder to friends and lovers
that with whatsoever flowery bands they may be linked, they are
separated persons, who understand, and can only understand, each other
partially. It is annoying to be put out in our notions of men and
women thus, and to be forced to rearrange them. It is a misfortune to
have to manoeuvre one's heart as a general has to manoeuvre his army.
The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may
survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the servants in
the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human
personality. And the worst of all this is, that love and friendship
may be the outcome of a certain condition of knowledge; increase the
knowledge, and love and friendship beat their wings and go. Every
man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings.
Intimacy is frequently the road to indifference, and marriage a
parricide. From these accidents to the affections, and from the
efforts to repair them, life has in many a patched and tinkered look.

Love and friendship are the discoveries of ourselves in others, and our
delight in the recognition; and in men, as in books, we only know that,
the parallel of which we have in ourselves. We know only that portion
of the world which we have travelled over; and we are never a whit
wiser than our own experiences. Imagination, the falcon, sits on the
wrist of Experience, the falconer; she can never soar beyond the reach
of his whistle, and when tired she must return to her perch. Our
knowledge is limited by ourselves, and so also are our imaginations.
And so it comes about, that a man measures everything by his own
foot-rule; that if he is ignoble, all the ignobleness that is in the
world looks out upon him, and claims kindred with him; if noble, all
the nobleness in the world does the like. Shakspeare is always the
same height with his reader; and when a thousand Christians subscribe
to one Confession of Faith, hardly to two of them does it mean the same
thing. The world is a great warehouse of raiment, to which every one
has access and is allowed free use; and the remarkable thing is, what
coarse stuffs are often chosen, and how scantily some people are
attired.

We never get quit of ourselves. While I am writing, the spring is
outside, and this season of the year touches my spirit always with a
sense of newness, of strangeness, of resurrection. It shoots boyhood
again into the blood of middle age. That tender greening of the black
bough and the red field,--that coming again of the new-old
flowers,--that re-birth of love in all the family of birds, with
cooings, and caressings, and building of nests in wood and brake,--that
strange glory of sunshine in the air,--that stirring of life in the
green mould, making even churchyards beautiful,--seems like the
creation of a new world. And yet--and yet, even with the lamb in the
sunny field, the lark mile-high in the blue, Spring has her melancholy
side, and bears a sadder burden to the heart than Autumn, preaching of
decay with all his painted woods. For the flowers that make sweet the
moist places in the forest are not the same that bloomed the year
before. Another lark sings above the furrowed field. Nature rolls on
in her eternal course, repeating her tale of spring, summer, autumn,
winter; but life in man and beast is transitory, and other living
creatures take their places. It is quite certain that one or other of
the next twenty springs will come unseen by me, will awake no throb of
transport in my veins. But will it be less bright on that account?
Will the lamb be saddened in the field? Will the lark be less happy in
the air? The sunshine will draw the daisy from the mound under which I
sleep, as carelessly as she draws the cowslip from the meadow by the
riverside. The seasons have no ruth, no compunction. They care not
for our petty lives. The light falls sweetly on graveyards, and on
brown labourers among the hay-swaths. Were the world depopulated
to-morrow, next spring would break pitilessly bright, flowers would
bloom, fruit-tree boughs wear pink and white; and although there would
be no eye to witness, Summer would not adorn herself with one blossom
the less. It is curious to think how important a creature a man is to
himself. We cannot help thinking that all things exist for our
particular selves. The sun, in whose light a system lives, warms me;
makes the trees grow for me; paints the evening sky in gorgeous colours
for me. The mould I till, produced from the beds of extinct oceans and
the grating of rock and mountain during countless centuries, exists
that I may have muffins to breakfast. Animal life, with its strange
instincts and affections, is to be recognised and cherished,--for does
it not draw my burdens for me, and carry me from place to place, and
yield me comfortable broadcloth, and succulent joints to dinner? I
think it matter of complaint that Nature, like a personal friend to
whom I have done kind services, will not wear crape at my funeral. I
think it cruel that the sun should shine, and birds sing, and I lying
in my grave. People talk of the age of the world! So far as I am
concerned, it began with my consciousness, and will end with my decease.

And yet, this self-consciousness, which so continually besets us, is in
itself a misery and a galling chain. We are never happy till by
imagination we are taken out of the pales and limits of self. We
receive happiness at second hand: the spring of it may be in ourselves,
but we do not know it to be happiness, till, like the sun's light from
the moon, it is reflected on us from an object outside. The admixture
of a foreign element sweetens and unfamiliarises it. Sheridan prepared
his good things in solitude, but he tasted for the first time his
jest's prosperity when it came back to him in illumined faces and a
roar of applause. Your oldest story becomes new when you have a new
auditor. A young man is truth-loving and amiable, but it is only when
these fair qualities shine upon him from a girl's face that he is
smitten by transport--only then is he truly happy. In that junction of
hearts, in that ecstasy of mutual admiration and delight, the finest
epithalamium ever writ by poet is hardly worthy of the occasion. The
countryman purchases oranges at a fair for his little ones; and when he
brings them home in the evening, and watches his chubby urchins,
sitting up among the bed-clothes, peel and devour the fruit, he is for
the time-being richer than if he drew the rental of the orange-groves
of Seville. To eat an orange himself is nothing; to see _them_ eat it
is a pleasure worth the price of the fruit a thousand times over.
There is no happiness in the world in which love does not enter; and
love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in
the recognition. Apart from others no man can make his happiness; just
as, apart from a mirror of one kind or another, no man can become
acquainted with his own lineaments.

The accomplishment of a man is the light by which we are enabled to
discover the limits of his personality. Every man brings into the
world with him a certain amount of pith and force, and to that pith or
force his amount of accomplishment is exactly proportioned. It is in
this way that every spoken word, every action of a man, becomes
biographical. Everything a man says or does is in consistency with
himself; and it is by looking back on his sayings and doings that we
arrive at the truth concerning him. A man is one; and every outcome of
him has a family resemblance. Goldsmith did _not_ "write like an angel
and talk like poor Poll," as we may in part discern from Boswell's
"Johnson." Strange, indeed, if a man talked continually the sheerest
nonsense, and wrote continually the gracefulest humours; if a man was
lame on the street, and the finest dancer in the ball-room. To
describe a character by antithesis is like painting a portrait in black
and white--all the curious intermixtures and gradations of colour are
lost. The accomplishment of a human being is measured by his strength,
or by his nice tact in using his strength. The distance to which your
gun, whether rifled or smooth-bored, will carry its shot, depends upon
the force of its charge. A runner's speed and endurance depends upon
his depth of chest and elasticity of limb. If a poet's lines lack
harmony, it instructs us that there is a certain lack of harmony in
himself. We see why Haydon failed as an artist when we read his life.
No one can dip into the "Excursion" without discovering that Wordsworth
was devoid of humour, and that he cared more for the narrow Cumberland
vale than he did for the big world. The flavour of opium can be
detected in the "Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel." A man's word or
deed takes us back to himself, as the sunbeam takes us back to the sun.
It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, in
the wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents as
we so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice. If you do your
fair day's work, you are certain to get your fair day's wage--in praise
or pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste. You may have seen at
country fairs a machine by which the rustics test their strength of
arm. A country fellow strikes vigorously a buffer, which recoils, and
the amount of the recoil--dependent, of course, on the force with which
it is struck--is represented by a series of notches or marks. The
world is such a buffer. A man strikes it with all his might; his mark
may be 40,000 pounds, a peerage, and Westminster Abbey, a name in
literature or art; but in every case his mark is nicely determined by
the force or the art with which the buffer is struck. Into the world a
man brings his personality, and his biography is simply a catalogue of
its results.

There are some men who have no individuality, just as there are some
men who have no face. These are to be described by generals, not by
particulars. They are thin, vapid, inconclusive. They are important
solely on account of their numbers. For them the census enumerator
labours; they form majorities; they crowd voting booths; they make the
money; they do the ordinary work of the world. They are valuable when
well officered. They are plastic matter to be shaped by a workman's
hand; and are built with as bricks are built with. In the aggregate,
they form public opinion; but then, in every age, public opinion is the
disseminated thoughts of some half a dozen men, who are in all
probability sleeping quietly in their graves. They retain dead men's
ideas, just as the atmosphere retains the light and heat of the set
sun. They are not light--they are twilight. To know how to deal with
such men--to know how to use them--is the problem which ambitious force
is called upon to solve. Personality, individuality, force of
character, or by whatever name we choose to designate original and
vigourous manhood, is the best thing which nature has in her gift. The
forceful man is a prophecy of the future. The wind blows here, but
long after it is spent the big wave which is its creature, breaks on a
shore a thousand miles away. It is curious how swiftly influences
travel from centre to circumference. A certain empress invents a
gracefully pendulous crinoline, and immediately, from Paris to the
pole, the female world is behooped; and neither objurgation of brother,
lover, or husband, deaths by burning or machinery, nor all the wit of
the satirists, are likely to affect its vitality. Never did an idea go
round civilisation so rapidly. Crinoline has already a heavier
martyrology than many a creed. The world is used easily, if one can
only hit on the proper method; and force of character, originality, of
whatever kind, is always certain to make its mark. It is a diamond,
and the world is its pane of glass. In a world so commonplace as this,
the peculiar man even should be considered a blessing. Humorousness,
eccentricity, the habit of looking at men and things from an odd angle,
are valuable, because they break the dead level of society and take
away its sameness. It is well that a man should be known by something
else than his name; there are few of us who can be known by anything
else, and Brown, Jones, and Robinson are the names of the majority.

In literature and art, this personal outcome is of the highest value;
in fact, it is the only thing truly valuable. The greatness of an
artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other
artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself. The great
man is the man who does a thing for the first time. It was a difficult
thing to discover America; since it has been discovered, it has been
found an easy enough task to sail thither. It is this peculiar
something resident in a poem or a painting which is its final test,--at
all events, possessing it, it has the elements of endurance. Apart
from its other values, it has, in virtue of that, a biographical one;
it becomes a study of character; it is a window through which you can
look into a human interior. There is a cleverness in the world which
seems to have neither father nor mother. It exists, but it is
impossible to tell from whence it comes,--just as it is impossible to
lift the shed apple-blossom of an orchard, and to discover, from its
bloom and odour, to what branch it belonged. Such cleverness
illustrates nothing: it is an anonymous letter. Look at it ever so
long, and you cannot tell its lineage. It lives in the catalogue of
waifs and strays. On the other hand, there are men whose every
expression is characteristic, whose every idea seems to come out of a
mould. In the short sentence, or curt, careless saying of such when
laid bare, you can read their histories so far, as in the smallest
segment of a tree you can trace the markings of its rings. The first
dies, because it is shallow-rooted, and has no vitality beyond its own;
the second lives, because it is related to and fed by something higher
than itself. The famous axiom of Mrs. Glass, that in order to make
hare-soup you "must first catch your hare," has a wide significance.
In art, literature, social life, morals even, you must first catch your
man: that done, everything else follows as a matter of course. A man
may learn much; but for the most important thing of all he can find
neither teachers nor schools.

Each man is the most important thing in the world to himself; but why
is he to himself so important? Simply because he is a personality with
capacities of pleasure, of pain, who can be hurt, who can be pleased,
who can be disappointed, who labours and expects his hire, in whose
consciousness, in fact, for the time being, the whole universe lives.
He is, and everything else is relative. Confined to his own
personality, making it his tower of outlook, from which only he can
survey the outer world, he naturally enough forms a rather high
estimate of its value, of its dignity, of its intrinsic worth. This
high estimate is useful in so far as it makes his condition pleasant,
and it--or rather our proneness to form it--we are accustomed to call
vanity. Vanity--which really helps to keep the race alive--has been
treated harshly by the moralists and satirists. It does not quite
deserve the hard names it has been called. It interpenetrates
everything a man says or does, but it inter-penetrates for a useful
purpose. If it is always an alloy in the pure gold of virtue, it at
least does the service of an alloy--making the precious metal workable.
Nature gave man his powers, appetites, aspirations, and along with
these a pan of incense, which fumes from the birth of consciousness to
its decease, making the best part of life rapture, and the worst part
endurable. But for vanity the race would have died out long ago.
There are some men whose lives seem to us as undesirable as the lives
of toads or serpents; yet these men breathe in tolerable content and
satisfaction. If a man could hear all that his fellows say of
him--that he is stupid, that he is henpecked, that he will be in the
_Gazette_ in a week, that his brain is softening, that he has said all
his best things--and if he could believe that these pleasant things are
true, he would be in his grave before the month was out. Happily no
man does hear these things; and if he did, they would only provoke
inextinguishable wrath or inextinguishable laughter. A man receives
the shocks of life on the buffer of his vanity. Vanity acts as his
second and bottleholder in the world's prize-ring, and it fights him
well, bringing him smilingly up to time after the fiercest knock-down
blows. Vanity is to a man what the oily secretion is to a bird, with
which it sleeks and adjusts the plumage ruffled by whatever causes.
Vanity is not only instrumental in keeping a man alive and in heart,
but, in its lighter manifestations, it is the great sweetener of social
existence. It is the creator of dress and fashion; it is the inventor
of forms and ceremonies, to it we are indebted for all our traditions
of civility. For vanity in its idler moments is benevolent, is as
willing to give pleasure as to take it, and accepts as sufficient
reward for its services a kind word or an approving smile. It delights
to bask in the sunshine of approbation. Out of man vanity makes
_gentle_man. The proud man is cold, the selfish man hard and
griping--the vain man desires to shine, to please, to make himself
agreeable; and this amiable feeling works to the outside of suavity and
charm of manner. The French are the vainest people in Europe, and the
most polite.

As each man is to himself the most important thing in the world, each
man is an egotist in his thinkings, in his desires, in his fears. It
does not, however, follow that each man must be an egotist--as the word
is popularly understood--in his speech. But even although this were
the case, the world would be divided into egotists, likable and
unlikable. There are two kinds of egotism, a trifling vainglorious
kind, a mere burning of personal incense, in which the man is at once
altar, priest, censer, and divinity; a kind which deals with the
accidents and wrappages of the speaker, his equipage, his riches, his
family, his servants, his furniture and array. The other kind has no
taint of self-aggrandisement, but is rooted in the faculties of love
and humour, and this latter kind is never offensive, because it
includes others, and knows no scorn or exclusiveness. The one is the
offspring of a narrow and unimaginative personality; the other of a
large and genial one. There are persons who are the terrors of
society. Perfectly innocent of evil intention, they are yet, with a
certain brutal unconsciousness, continually trampling on other people's
corns. They touch you every now and again like a red-hot iron. You
wince, acquit them of any desire to wound, but find forgiveness a hard
task. These persons remember everything about themselves, and forget
everything about you. They have the instinct of a flesh-fly for a raw.
Should your great-grandfather have had the misfortune to be hanged,
such a person is certain, on some public occasion, to make allusion to
your pedigree. He will probably insist on your furnishing him with a
sketch of your family tree. If your daughter has made a runaway
marriage--on which subject yourself and friends maintain a judicious
silence--he is certain to stumble upon it, and make the old sore smart
again. In all this there is no malice, no desire to wound; it arises
simply from want of imagination, from profound immersion in self. An
imaginative man recognises at once a portion of himself in his fellow,
and speaks to that. To hurt you is to hurt himself. Much of the
rudeness we encounter in life cannot be properly set down to cruelty or
badness of heart. The unimaginative man is callous, and although he
hurts easily, he cannot be easily hurt in return. The imaginative man
is sensitive, and merciful to others, out of the merest mercy to
himself.

In literature, as in social life, the attractiveness of egotism depends
entirely upon the egotist. If he be a conceited man, full of
self-admirations and vainglories, his egotism will disgust and repel.
When he sings his own praises, his reader feels that reflections are
being thrown on himself, and in a natural revenge he calls the writer a
coxcomb. If, on the other hand, he be loving, genial, humourous, with
a sympathy for others, his garrulousness and his personal allusions are
forgiven, because while revealing himself, he is revealing his reader
as well. A man may write about himself during his whole life without
once tiring or offending; but to accomplish this, he must be
interesting in himself--be a man of curious and vagrant moods, gifted
with the cunningest tact and humour; and the experience which he
relates must at a thousand points touch the experiences of his readers,
so that they, as it were, become partners in his game. When X. tells
me, with an evident swell of pride, that he dines constantly with
half-a-dozen men-servants in attendance, or that he never drives abroad
save in a coach-and-six, I am not conscious of any special gratitude to
X. for the information. Possibly, if my establishments boast only of
Cinderella, and if a cab is the only vehicle in which I can afford to
ride, and all the more if I can indulge in _that_ only on occasions of
solemnity, I fly into a rage, pitch the book to the other end of the
room, and may never afterwards be brought to admit that X. is possessor
of a solitary ounce of brains. If, on the other hand, Z. informs me
that every February he goes out to the leafless woods to hunt early
snowdrops, and brings home bunches of them in his hat; or that he
prefers in woman a brown eye to a blue, and explains by early love
passages his reasons for the preference, I do not get angry; on the
contrary, I feel quite pleased; perhaps, if the matter is related with
unusual grace and tenderness, it is read with a certain moisture and
dimness of eye. And the reason is obvious. The egotistical X. is
barren, and suggests nothing beyond himself, save that he is a good
deal better off than I am--a reflection much pleasanter to him than it
is to me; whereas the equally egotistical Z., with a single sentence
about his snowdrops, or his liking for brown eyes rather than for blue,
sends my thoughts wandering away back among my dead spring-times, or
wafts me the odours of the roses of those summers when the colour of an
eye was of more importance than it now is. X.'s men-servants and
coach-and-six do not fit into the life of his reader, because in all
probability his reader knows as much about these things as he knows
about Pharaoh; Z.'s snowdrops and preferences of colour do, because
every one knows what the spring thirst is, and every one in his time
has been enslaved by eyes whose colour he could not tell for his life,
but which he knew were the tenderest that ever looked love, the
brightest that ever flashed sunlight. Montaigne and Charles Lamb are
egotists of the Z. class, and the world never wearies reading them: nor
are egotists of the X. school absolutely without entertainment.
Several of these the world reads assiduously too, although for another
reason. The avid vanity of Mr. Pepys would be gratified if made aware
of the success of his diary; but curiously to inquire into the reason
of that success, _why_ his diary has been found so amusing, would not
conduce to his comfort.

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