He now saw what had hitherto seemed incredible, that the habit of analysis tends to wear away the feelings. He felt "stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything else. The fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me as completely as those of benevolence." His vanity had been gratified at too early an age, and, like all premature pleasures, they had caused indifference, until he despaired of creating any fresh association of pleasure with any objects of human dire. Meanwhile, dejected and melancholy as he was through the winter, he went on mechanically with his tasks; thought he found in Coleridge the first description of what he was feeling; feared the idiosyncrasies of his education had made him a being unique and apart. "I asked myself if I could or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year." But within about half that time, in reading a pathetic page of how a mere boy felt that he could save his family and take the place of all they had lost, a vivid conception of the scene came over him and he was moved to tears. From that moment, his burden grew lighter. He saw that his heart was not dead and that he still had some stuff left of which character and happiness are made; and although there were several later lapses, some of which lasted many months, he was never again as miserable as he had been.
These experience left him changed in two respects. He had a new theory of life, having much in common with the anti-consciousness theory of Carlyle. He still held happiness the end of life, but thought it must be aimed at indirectly and taken incidentally. The other change was that for the first time he gave its proper place to internal culture of the individual, especially the training of the feelings which became now cardinal. He relished and felt the power of poetry and art; was profoundly moved by music; fell in love with Wordsworth and with nature, and his later depressions were best relieved by the power of rural beauty, which wrought its charm not because of itself but by the states and feelings it aroused. His ode on the intimations of immortality showed that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful joy was not lasting, and had sought and found compensation. He had thus come to a very different standpoint from that of his father, who had up to this time formed his mind and life, and developed on this basis his unique individuality.
Jefferies, when eighteen, began his "Story of My Heart,"[31] which he said was an absolutely true confession of the stages of emotion in a soul from which all traces of tradition and learning were erased, and which stood face to face with nature and the unknown.
His heart long seemed dusty and parched for want of feeling, and he frequented a hill, where the pores of his soul opened to a new air. "Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air and the distant sea…. I desired to have its strength, its mystery and glory. I addressed the sun, desiring the sole equivalent of his light and brilliance, his endurance, and unwearied race. I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite color and sweetness. The rich blue of the unobtainable flower of the sky drew my soul toward it, and there it rested, for pure color is the rest of the heart. By all these I prayed. I felt an emotion of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to it." He prayed by the thyme; by the earth; the flowers which he touched; the dust which he let fall through his fingers; was filled with "a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus I prayed…. I hid my face in the grass; I was wholly prostrated; I lost myself in the wrestle…. I see now that what I labored for was soul life, more soul learning." After gazing upward he would turn his face into the grass, shutting out everything with hands each side, till he felt down into the earth and was absorbed in it, whispering deep down to its center. Every natural impression, trees, insects, air, clouds, he used for prayer, "that my soul might be more than the cosmos of life." His "Lyra" prayer was to live a more exalted and intense soul life; enjoy more bodily pleasure and live long and find power to execute his designs. He often tried, but failed for years to write at least a meager account of these experiences. He felt himself immortal just as he felt beauty. He was in eternity already; the supernatural is only the natural misnamed. As he lay face down on the grass, seizing it with both hands, he longed for death, to be burned on a pyre of pine wood on a high hill, to have his ashes scattered wide and broadcast, to be thrown into the space he longed for while living, but he feared that such a luxury of resolution into the elements would be too costly. Thus his naked mind, close against naked mother Nature, wrested from her the conviction of soul, immortality, deity, under conditions as primitive as those of the cave man, and his most repeated prayer was "Give me the deepest soul life."
In other moods he felt the world outré-human, and his mind could by no twist be fitted to the cosmos. Ugly, designless creatures caused him to cease to look for deity in nature, where all happens by chance. He at length concluded there is something higher than soul and above deity, and better than God, for which he searched and labored. He found favorite thinking places, to which he made pilgrimages, where he "felt out into the depths of the ether." His frame could not bear the labor his heart demanded. Work of body was his meat and drink. "Never have I had enough of it. I wearied long before I was satisfied, and weariness did not bring a cessation of desire, the thirst was still there. I rode; I used the ax; I split tree-trunks with wedges; my arms tired, but my spirit remained fresh and chafed against the physical weariness." Had he been indefinitely stronger, he would have longed for more strength. He was often out of doors all day and often half the night; wanted more sunshine; wished the day was sixty hours long; took pleasure in braving the cold so that it should be not life's destroyer but its renewer. Yet he abhorred asceticism. He wrestled with the problem of the origin of his soul and destiny, but could find no solution; revolted at the assertion that all is designed for the best; "a man of intellect and humanity could cause everything to happen in an infinitely superior manner." He discovered that no one ever died of old age, but only of disease; that we do not even know what old age would be like; found that his soul is infinite, but lies in abeyance; that we are murdered by our ancestors and must roll back the tide of death; that a hundredth part of man's labor would suffice for his support; that idleness is no evil; that in the future nine-tenths of the time will be leisure, and to that end he will work with all his heart. "I was not more than eighteen when an inner and esoteric meaning began to come to me from all the visible universe, and indefinable aspirations filled me."
Interesting as is this document, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that the seventeen years which intervened between the beginning of these experiences and their final record, coupled with the perhaps unconscious tendency toward literary effect, detract more or less from their value as documents of adolescent nature.
Mr. H. Fielding Hall, author of "The Soul of a People," has since written a book[32] in which, beginning with many definitions of Christianity, weighing the opinion of those who think all our advance is made because of, against those who think it in spite of Christianity, he proceeds to give the story of a boy, probably himself, who till twelve was almost entirely reared by women and with children younger than himself.
He was sickly, and believed not in the Old but in the New Testament; in the Sermon on the Mount, which he supposed all accepted and lived by; that war and wealth were bad and learning apt to be a snare; that the ideal life was that of a poor curate, working hard and unhappy. At twelve, he went to a boarding-school, passed from a woman's world into a man's, out of the New Testament into the Old, out of dreams into reality. War was a glorious opportunity, and all followed the British victories, which were announced publicly. Big boys were going to Sandhurst or Woolwich; there were parties; and the school code never turned the other cheek. Wars were God's storms, stirring stagnant natures to new life; wealth was worshiped; certain lies were an honor; knowledge was an extremely desirable thing—all this was at first new and delightful, but extremely wicked. Sunday was the only other Old Testament rule, but was then forgotten. Slowly a repugnance of religion in all its forms arose. He felt his teachers hypocrites; he raised no alarm, "for he was hardly conscious that his anchor had dragged or that he had lost hold" of it forever. At eighteen, he read Darwin and found that if he were right, Genesis was wrong; man had risen, not fallen; if a part was wrong, the whole was. If God made the world, the devil seemed to rule it; prayer can not influence him; the seven days of creation were periods, Heaven knows how long. Why did all profess and no one believe religion? Why is God so stern and yet so partial, and how about the Trinity? Then explanations were given. Heaven grew repulsive, as a place for the poor, the maimed, the stupid, the childish, and those unfit for earth generally.
Faiths came from the East. "The North has originated only Thor, Odin, Balder, Valkyres." The gloom and cold drive man into himself; do not open him. In the East one can live in quiet solitude, with no effort, close to nature. The representatives of all faiths wear ostentatiously their badges, pray in public, and no one sneers at all religions. Oriental faiths have no organization; there is no head of Hinduism, Buddhism, or hardly of Mohammedanism. There are no missions, but religion grows rankly from a rich soil, so the boy wrote three demands: a reasonable theory of the universe, a workable and working code of conduct, and a promise of something desirable hereafter. So he read books and tried to make a system.
On a hill, in a thunder-storm in the East, he realized how Thor was born. Man fears thunder; it seems the voice of a greater man. Deny eyes, legs, and body of the Deity, and nothing is left. God as an abstract spirit is unthinkable, but Buddhism offers us no God, only law. Necessity, blind force, law, or a free personal will—that is the alternative. Freedom limits omnipotence; the two can never mix. "The German Emperor's God, clanking round the heavenly mansions wearing a German Pickelhaube and swearing German oaths," is not satisfactory. Man's God is what he admires most in himself; he can be propitiated, hence atonement; you can not break a law, but you can study it. Inquiry, not submission, is the attitude. Perhaps both destiny and freedom are true, but truth is for the sake of light.