Among the mind's powers is one that comes of itself to many children and artists. It need not be lost, to the end of his days, by anyone who has ever had it. This is the power of taking delight in a thing, or rather in anything, everything, not as a means to some other end, but just because it is what it is, as the lover dotes on whatever may be the traits of the beloved object. A child in the full health of his mind will put his hand flat on the summer turf, feel it, and give a little shiver of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe. He is not thinking how well it will do for some game or to feed sheep upon. That would be the way of the wooer whose mind runs on his mistress's money. The child's is sheer affection, the true ecstatic sense of the thing's inherent characteristics. No matter what the things may be, no matter what they are good or no good for, there they are, each with a thrilling unique look and feel of its own, like a face; the iron astringently cool under its paint, the painted wood familiarly warmer, the clod crumbling enchantingly down in the hands, with its little dry smell of the sun and of hot nettles; each common thing a personality marked by delicious differences.
This joy of an Adam new to the garden and just looking round is brought by the normal child to the things that he does as well as those that he sees. To be suffered to do some plain work with the real spade used by mankind can give him a mystical exaltation: to come home with his legs, as the French say, re-entering his body from the fatigue of helping the gardener to weed beds sends him to sleep in the glow of a beatitude that is an end in itself. Then the paradoxes of conduct begin to twinkle into sight; sugar is good, but there is a time to refrain from taking it though you can; a lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie. Divine unreason, as little scrutable and yet as surely a friend as the star that hangs a lamp out from the Pole to show you the way across gorse-covered commons in Surrey. So he will toe the line of a duty, not with a mere release from dismay, but exultantly, with the fire and lifting of heart of the strong man and the bridegroom, feeling always the same secret and almost sensuous transport, while he suppresses a base impulse, that he felt when he pressed the warm turf with his hand or the crumbling clay trickled warm between his fingers.
The right education, if we could find it, would work up this creative faculty of delight into all its branching possibilities of knowledge, wisdom, and nobility. Of all three it is the beginning, condition, or raw material. At present it almost seems to be the aim of the commonplace teacher to take it firmly away from any pupil so blessed as to possess it. How we all know the kind of public school master whose manner expresses breezy comradeship with the boys in facing jointly the boredom of admittedly beastly but still unavoidable lessons! And the assumption that life out of school is too dull to be faced without the aid of infinitely elaborated games! And the girl schools where it seems to be feared that evil must come in any space of free time in which neither a game nor a dance nor a concert nor a lecture with a lantern intervenes to rescue the girls from the presumed tedium of mere youth and health! Everywhere the assumption that simple things have failed; that anything like hardy mental living and looking about for oneself, to find interests, is destined to end ill; that the only hope is to keep up the full dose of drugs, to be always pulling and pushing, prompting and coaxing and tickling the youthful mind into condescending to be interested. You know the effects: the adolescent whose mind seems to drop when taken out of the school shafts, or at least to look round, utterly at a loss, with a plaintive appeal for a suggestion of something to do, some excitement to come, something to make it worth while to be alive on this dull earth. We saw the effects in our hapless brain work in the war.
But if we were to wait to save England till thousands of men and women brought up in this way see what they have lost and insist on a better fate for their children we might as well write England off as one with Tyre and Sidon already. Her case is too pressing. She cannot wait for big, slowly telling improvements in big institutions, although improvements must come. She has to be saved by a change in the individual temper. We each have to fall back, with a will, on the only way of life in which the sane simplicity of joy in plain things and in common rightness of action can be generated. Health of mind or body comes of doing wholesome things—perhaps for a long time without joy in doing them, as the sick man lies chafing, eating the slops that are all he is fit for, or as the dipsomaniac drinks in weariness and depression the insipid water that is to save him. Then, on some great day, self-control may cease to be merely the sum of many dreary acts of abstention; it may take life again as an inspiriting force, both a warmth and a light, such as makes nations great.
CHAPTER XVI
FAIR WARNING
I
To give the cure a chance we must have a long quiet time. And we must secure it now.
For the moment, no doubt, war has gone out of fashion; it pines in the shade, like the old horsehair covers for sofas, or antimacassars of lace. Hardly a day can pass, even now, but someone finds out, with a start and a look of displeasure, that war has been given its chance and has not done quite so well as it ought to have done. One man will write to the Press, in dismay, that the meals in the Simplon express are not what they were in 1910. Another, outward bound by Calais to Cannes, has found that the hot-water plant in his sleeping-compartment struck work—and that in a specially cold sector down by the Alps. Thus does war in the end, knock at the doors of us all: like the roll of the earth upon its axis, it brings us, if not death or destitution or some ashy taste in the mouth, at any rate a sense of a fallen temperature in our bunks. However non-porous our minds, there does slowly filter into us the thought that when a million of a country's men of working age have just been killed there may be a plaguey dearth of the man-power needed to keep in pleasant order the lavatories of its trains de luxe. Sad to think how many tender minds, formed in those Elysian years—Elysian for anyone who was not poor—before the war, will have to suffer, probably for many years, these little shocks of realization.
Surely there never was any time in the life of the world when it was so good, in the way of obvious material comfort, to be alive and fairly well-to-do as it was before the war. Think of the speed and comfort and relative cheapness of the Orient Express; of the way you could wander, unruined, through long æsthetic holidays in Italy and semi-æsthetic, semi-athletic holidays in the Alps; of the week-end accessibility of London from Northern England; of the accessibility of public schools for the sons of the average parson or doctor; of the penny post, crown of our civilization—torn from us while the abhorred half-penny post for circulars was yet left; of the Income Tax just large enough to give us a pleasant sense of grievance patriotically borne, but not to prostrate us, winter and summer, with two "elbow jolts" or "Mary Ann punches" like those of the perfected modern prize-fighter.