To abstain from all attempts at peering into that obscurity is more perhaps than can be asked of mortals. The less of such peerings we indulge in, however, surely the better, because the saner, because, also, the more trustful. Of all the cataracts of words, poured in verbal Niagaras over this momentous topic, have there been many, I wonder, wiser or truer than these of old Hooker? I write them down as they have lodged in my memory; probably therefore quite incorrectly.
“Rash were it for the feeble mind of man to wade far into the doings of the Almighty. For though ’tis Joy to know Him, and Pride to make mention of His name, yet our deepest Wisdom is to know that we know Him not, and our truest Homage is our Silence.”
August 25, 1900
FROM gropings along unlit ways, and towards an undiscoverable goal, what a pleasant experience it is to turn suddenly back to the well-trodden paths of a near and a tried companionship! It is almost an exact parallel to the sensations of the child who, having rushed out of its home into the wild winter night, full of hollow reverberations, and perturbing gleams, suddenly retreats, and finds itself once more beside the hearth, with an absolutely new sense of its security, and wide-armed delightfulness.
Upon few topics has more ink been expended than upon this one of friendship. As regards one point all the pens have I think been agreed, and that is that diversity constitutes its soundest basis. If a truism, this is at least one of those truisms that every day’s experience throws into new relief. Friendship demands absolutely no conformity, but lives, thrives, and has its being upon the most absolutely radical differences. Friend and friend may differ by nearly everything that can differentiate one human being from another. By the tenour of their thoughts; by the circumstances of their lives; by the very texture of their brains, their souls, their hearts, their entire natures. Friendship makes light of such little discrepancies as these. Its roots push down to a stratum where even the largest of them become mere accidents, and at that serene depth they meet and lock securely under them all.
To say that such a tie is the great ameliorator of life, the soother of its sorrows, the encourager of its brighter moments, is to say ridiculously little. To say that it is one that we could hardly endure to think of existing without, is to say almost less. The very notion of such a deprivation produces a sort of vertigo; a species of mental confusion, akin to the thought of losing identity itself. Worse, indeed, for it is not merely the everyday, the vulgar self, that such a loss—supposing it to be complete—would deprive one of. It is that other, better, and more shining self, which only really exists inside the enchanted walls of a loving, sympathetic friendship. Within those fostering walls it grows, expands, and flourishes, but outside of them it sickens, pines away, and dies.
It is a very singular tie, when one reflects a little upon it; so close often that no nearness of blood, no identity of name, could, so far as one can see, make it any closer. It seems to be antecedent, not alone to itself, but to the whole social warp and woof, of which it is an outcome. Just as the trees in one wood seem, to anyone who wanders often in it, to have acquired a sort of identity, so two who have walked for some time very closely together, though they may differ as widely as an ash does from a pine, as an oak does from a hornbeam, acquire a sort of similarity, due to the same sunshine having warmed, the same storms having shaken and darkened both. It is well to speak a good word now and then of a personage whom one habitually abuses, so let it be recorded in favour of that odd compound of good and ill which we call our existence that, if it has thwarted our desires, dwarfed our ambitions, nipped in our joys, chilled back our aspirations, cut down our hopes, and not infrequently wrung our hearts, at least——it has given us our friends!
September 4, 1900
SURELY people live fast in these days, even the very slowest of them! I find myself turning back of a morning to the thoughts of the Transvaal, and of the struggle still going on there, with the oddest sense of renewal; as of one trying to rekindle dead fires, or to reawaken some set of well-nigh obliterated emotions. When did it begin, this war, which seems to have been going on throughout the greater part of one’s lifetime? which the newspapers have again and again announced to be just over, but with which they nevertheless manage to fill several columns every morning? It is perhaps a mere personal impression, due to closer anxieties, but to myself the fears and perturbations of last spring seem often almost incredibly remote. There are moments when they appear to be as out of date for any practical purpose as the alarms that convulsed our grandfathers and grandmothers two generations ago. E pur si muove! It is still going on, this war of ours, and seems likely moreover, to do so for a considerable time longer. Botha, De Wet, Delarey, with half a dozen more guerrilla leaders, are swarming about, active as ants, and at least as dangerous as hornets. We have got Pretoria, but we have emphatically not got our new colonies, though both, I see, are now officially annexed. That we shall get them some day or other, and that the last of England’s big daughters will—in the course, say of the coming century—become as friendly and tolerant of her as are the other two, a good many people seem to expect. Possibly. The very moderate view she takes of the motherly function will certainly be a help in that direction. In these days grown-up daughters are not expected fortunately to be deferential—especially, perhaps, to their mothers.
The closing scenes of a war have a tendency to awaken in some speculative minds thoughts of war as a whole; of the entire attitude of man as a combative being. So long as the particular struggle we have been watching remains at the acute stage, so long especially as the faintest doubt exists as to its final result, such a merely academic attitude is impossible. Pride; dignity; honour; fear of what may be; anger, perhaps, at what has been; all these rush in a tide through even the most tepid veins, and everything else is for the time being as though it were not. When however the struggle is nearing its end; when the trumpets are beginning to sound the recall, and the fighting, even if it still goes on, appears on both sides to be growing somewhat perfunctory; then thoughts of what it all means, thoughts of War in the abstract, make themselves felt, and in place of hanging breathlessly over the newspapers, one wonders, as one saunters to and fro the garden, whether this same instinct of combativeness really is an integral part of man’s nature? Whether, in other words, it is an absolutely incurable disease, congenital to the species, or merely a sort of youthful malady, destined, like other youthful maladies, to pass away, as a very slowly evolving race attains nearer and nearer to its full maturity?