‘I fancy I can give you the passage correctly. I should like you to hear it. It will throw light upon what I have said about my rose-coloured spectacles.’
He looked up, as he spoke, at the trees overhanging the lane through which we walked.
‘“Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts than the thoughts affect the scenery. We see places through our humours as through differently-coloured glasses.”’
He paused a moment, then repeated the last line slowly and with emphasis: ‘We see places through our humours as through differently-coloured glasses.’
‘“We are ourselves,”’ he continued, ‘“a term in the quotation, a note of the chord, and make discord and harmony almost at will. There is no fear for the result, if we but surrender ourselves sufficiently to the country that surrounds and follows us, so that we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some suitable sort of story as we go. We become thus, in some sense, a centre of beauty; we are provocative of beauty, such as a gentle and sincere character is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in others....”’
Then he told me ‘some suitable sort of story’ about a certain man who built a castle upon dry land, a castle of stone, firm as a rock, and filled it with his heart’s desire. But no sooner had the man taken up his abode therein than the tide of circumstances turned. Misfortune followed misfortune; sorrow followed sorrow; first, the loss of earthly possessions, then the loss of loved ones. All brightness and hope were taken out of the man’s life, and for many years he dwelt in darkness.
At this point my friend turned away, and slowly, thoughtfully, polished his spectacles. One could not help thinking that he was relating in a parable the story of his own past. This suspicion was strengthened, if not actually confirmed, when he readjusted his spectacles and continued:
‘Then this same man built a castle in the air partly out of the creations of his own mind, partly out of the creations of others, a castle of thought, a building without visible support. He found, however, that this castle in the air, built on lines he had been taught to smile at in his youth, was more enduring than his castle of stone. Moat and drawbridge were impassable, the gates impregnable. Changed circumstances could not affect it; misfortune and sorrow could not shake it; even death left it unmoved.’
‘You see,’ he continued, ‘what I am driving at? Listen to this from my little volume: “No man can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end, because the world is in his own heart.” And this: “An inspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune we can never exhaust, and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich.”’
The next moment he drew from his pocket a worn leather case and showed me a portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson. He had it wrapped in two layers of paper, both yellow with age and stained from much handling. But the likeness was well preserved, as clear, perhaps, as on the day it was taken.