February 20, 1889.
There is a story of a Cornish farmer who, returning home one dark and misty night, struck across the moorland, every yard of which he knew, in order to avoid a long tramp by road. In one place there were a number of disused mine-shafts; the railing which had once protected them had rotted away, and it had been no one's business to see that it was renewed—some few had been filled up, but many of them were hundreds of feet deep, and entirely unguarded. The farmer first missed the track, and after long wandering found himself at last among the shafts. He sate down, knowing the extreme danger of his situation, and resolved to wait till the morning; but it became so cold that he dared stay no longer, for fear of being frozen alive, and with infinite precautions he tried to make his way out of the dangerous region, following the downward slope of the ground. In spite, however, of all his care, he found suddenly, on putting his foot down, that he was on the edge of a shaft, and that his foot was dangling in vacancy. He threw himself backwards, but too late, and he slid down several feet, grasping at the grass and heather; his foot fortunately struck against a large stone, which though precariously poised, arrested his fall; and he hung there for some hours in mortal anguish, not daring to move, clinging to a tuft of heather, shouting at intervals, in the hope that, when he did not return home, a search-party might be sent out to look for him. At last he heard, to his intense relief, the sound of voices hailing him, and presently the gleam of lanterns shot through the mist. He uttered agonising cries, and the rescuers were soon at his side; when he found that he had been lying in a shaft which had been filled up, and that the firm ground was about a foot below him; and that, in fact, if the stone that supported him had given way, he would have been spared a long period of almost intolerable horror.
It is a good parable of many of our disquieting fears and anxieties; as Lord Beaconsfield said, the greatest tragedies of his life had been things that never happened; Carlyle truly and beautifully said that the reason why the past always appeared to be beautiful, in retrospect, was that the element of fear was absent from it. William Morris said a trenchant thing on the same subject. He attended a Socialist Meeting of a very hostile kind, which he anticipated with much depression. When some one asked him how the meeting had gone off he said, "Well, it was fully as damnable as I had expected—a thing which seldom happens." A good test of the happiness of anyone's life is to what extent he has had trials to bear which are unbearable even to recollect. I am myself of a highly imaginative and anxious temperament, and I have had many hours of depression at the thought of some unpleasant anticipation or disagreeable contingency, and I can honestly say that nothing has ever been so bad, when it actually occurred, as it had represented itself to me beforehand. There are a few incidents in my life, the recollection of which I deliberately shun; but they have always been absolutely unexpected and unanticipated calamities. Yet even these have never been as bad as I should have expected them to be. The strange thing is that experience never comes to one's aid, and that one never gets patience or courage from the thought that the reality will be in all probability less distressing than the anticipation; for the simple reason that the fertile imagination is always careful to add that this time the occasion will be intolerable, and that at all events it is better to be prepared for the worst that may happen. Moreover, one wastes force in anticipating perhaps half-a-dozen painful possibilities, when, after all, they are alternatives, and only one of them can happen. That is what makes my present situation so depressing, that I instinctively clothe it in its worst horrors, and look forward to a long and dreary life, in which my only occupation will be an attempt to pass the weary hours. Faithless? yes, of course it is faithless! but the rational philosophy, which says that it will all probably come right, does not penetrate to the deeper region in which the mind says to itself that there is no hope of amendment.
Can one acquire, by any effort of the mind, this kind of patience? I do not think one can. The most that one can do is to behave as far as possible like one playing a heavy part upon the stage, to say with trembling lips that one has hope, when the sick mind beneath cries out that there is none.
Perhaps one can practise a sort of indifference, and hope that advancing years may still the beating heart and numb the throbbing nerve. But I do not even desire to live life on these terms. The one great article of my creed has been that one ought not to lose zest and spirit, or acquiesce slothfully in comfortable and material conditions, but that life ought to be full of perception and emotion. Here again lies my mistake; that it has not been perception or emotion that I have practised, but the art of expressing what I have perceived and felt. Of course, I wish with all my heart and soul that it were otherwise; but it seems that I have drifted so far into these tepid, sun-warmed shallows, the shallows of egoism and self-centred absorption, that there is no possibility of my finding my way again to the wholesome brine, to the fresh movement of the leaping wave. I am like one of those who lingered so long in the enchanted isle of Circe, listening luxuriously to the melting cadences of her magic song, that I have lost all hope of extricating myself from the spell. The old free days, when the heart beat light, and the breeze blew keen against my brow, have become only a memory of delights, just enabling me to speak deftly and artfully of the strong joys which I have forfeited.