"The world," the wise Stoic seemed to say, "is twofold in its nature. Some things may be changed by man, others are by his utmost effort immutable. God has implanted in you a right reason by which, when it is well trained, you can infallibly distinguish between the two, avoiding thus all unworthy fretfulness and all idle kicking against the pricks. Therefore he has made you for happiness; for the joy of men is an achievement; and their misery in the coveting of the unattainable end. If you would fulfil his benevolent design, seek only what has been placed in your power, frankly resigning all that lies beyond; but be ever difficult in renunciation; test and sound well every issue, lest you leave a permitted good undone, than which nothing is a greater sin. To be loyal, to be contented, to acquiesce in all things save only in ameliorable evil, this is to live according to nature, which is God's administration. If you are assiduous in careful choosing, you will learn at last to make a right use of every event; you will be harassed no more by vain desire or unreasoning aversion, but will become God's coadjutor and be always of his mind. So, when external things have ceased to trouble your spirit, you will no longer be a competitor for vanities; but, enfranchised from all solicitude, you will have discarded envy and conceit and intolerance, which are the ill fruits of that vain rivalry. You will neither cringe before power nor covet great place, for alike from inordinate affection and from the fear of pain or death you will be free. Disenamoured of mundane things, you will live simply and unperturbed, in kindness and cheerfulness and in gratitude to Providence. Life will be to you as a feast or solemnity, and when it comes to a close, you will rise up saying, 'I have been well and nobly entertained, it is fit that I give place to another guest.'"
The strength and mastery thus promised raised my dejected spirits, as the words of a new and sanguine physician may hearten one who had long lain stricken yet now dares to hope for the day of recovery. This was a law which did not denounce the world as illusion or enjoin a cloistral seclusion upon the mind, but rather proposed each and every appearance as a touchstone on which the quality of personality should be unceasingly tried. By the constant application of a high standard to life, it seemed to implant an incorrupt seed of manliness, and to create in its disciples that saner mood which holds in equal aversion a Heliogabalus and a Simeon Stylites. So persuaded, I could join with the fervour of a neophyte in the Stoic's profession: "Good and evil are in choice alone, and there is no cause of sorrowing save in my own errant and wilful desires. When these shall have been overcome, I shall possess my soul in tranquillity, vexing myself in nowise if, in the world's illusive good, all men have the advantage over me. For all outward things I will bear with equal mind, even chains or insults or great pain, ashamed of this only, if reason shall not wholly free me from the servitude of care. Let others boast of material goods; mine is the privilege of not needing these or stooping to their control. I will have but a temperate desire of things open to choice, as they are good and present, and the tempter shall find no hold for his hands by which to draw me astray. I will be content with any sojourn or any company, for there is none, howsoever perilous, which may not prove and strengthen the defences of my soul. For I have built an impregnable citadel whence, if only I am true to myself, I can repel assaults from the four quarters of heaven. Who shall console one lifted above the range of grief, whom neither privation nor insolence can annoy? for he has peace as an inalienable possession, and by no earthly tyranny shall be perturbed. Bearing serenely all natural impediments to action, trespassing beyond no eternal landmark, by no foolishness provoked, he shall become a spectator and interpreter of God's works; he shall ripen to the harvest in the sunshine and wait tranquilly for the sickle, knowing that corn is only sown that it may be reaped, and man only born to die."
The mere repetition of these words, so instinct with the spirit of old Roman fortitude, roused me to a more immediate resolution than any other form of solace. There are times when a splendour of exaggeration is the best foil to truth. The Roman's pride is the best corrective to the earthward bias of the diffident; by its excess of an opposite defect it drives us soonest into the mean of a simple and manly confidence. It is better for us first to repeat, "Dare to look up to God and say: Make use of me for the future as Thou wilt, I am of the same mind, I am equal with Thee.... Lead me whither Thou wilt," than to dwell upon such words as these: "It is altogether necessary that thou have a true contempt for thyself if thou desire to prevail against flesh and blood"—or these: "If I abase myself ... and grind myself to the dust which I am, Thy grace will be favourable to me, and Thy light near unto my head.... By seeking Thee alone and purely loving Thee I have found both myself and Thee, and by that love have more deeply reduced myself to nothing."
This supreme abnegation may leave the saint unharmed, but it is ill fitted for those who droop already with the malady of dejection. The divine wisdom which knows the secrets of all hearts and their necessities infinitely various, shall exact obedience according to no adamantine law: it loves not the jots and tittles of formalism, nor the pretensions of those who would cast all things in one mould. From those made perfect, from the saints whose links with earth are almost severed, whose sight begins to pierce gross matter through, it may accept prostration and endless contrite tears, knowing that to these, upon the very verge of illumination, the forms of slavery have lost their vileness. But to those who are still of earth and can but conceive God's fatherhood according to earthly similitudes, it will not ordain a prone obeisance. Such it will require to stand erect even in contrition, in that posture which is the privilege of sons. We who are unperfected affront God supposing him pleased with the prostration of his children. It is the ignorance of a feudal age that ascribes to him a Byzantine love of adulation; but that age is no more, and he disserves the divine majesty who imputes to it a liking for the esprit d'antichambre.
I did not need to dwell upon my weakness and misery but rather upon the grandeur of humanity, whose kinship and collaboration God himself does not reject. The Stoic phase was a useful stage on the road of convalescence, and the majestic words of Epictetus more helpful to a manlier bearing than the confessions of the saintliest souls. If, as is not to be doubted, there are others who seek an issue from the same dark region where I wandered, I do not fear to point them to the Stoic way, which like a narrow gorge cold with perpetual shadow is yet their shortest path upward to the high slopes lit with sunlight. Let them enter it without fear and endure its shadows a while, for by other ways they will fetch a longer compass and come later to their release.
But when some interval had passed I became aware that this cold ideal was not the end, and that out of the gall of austerity sweetness should yet come forth. Wise men have said that all great systems of ethics meet upon a higher plane, as the branches of forest trees rustle together in the breeze; for though in the dark earth their roots creep apart, their summits are joined in the freedom of clear air. As I now struck inland from the iron shores of shipwreck, my heart warmed to a brighter and softer landscape, and with Landor I began to wish that I might walk with Epicurus on the right hand and Epictetus on the left. With a later thinker I reflected that if the Stoic knew more of the faith and hope of Christianity, the Epicurean came nearer to its charity. For it is true that Stoicism commands admiration rather than love. It was indeed too harsh a saying that "the ruggedness of the Stoic is only a silly affectation of being a god, to wind himself up by pulleys to an insensibility of suffering": that is the judgment of the bluff partisan, so shocked by the adversary's opinions that he feels absolved from any effort to understand them. But even those who in extremity have been roused to new valour by the precepts as by a Tyrtæan ode, for all the gratitude which they owe, will not impute to their deliverers an inhuman perfection. The Stoic does in truth wear a semblance of academic conceit, as though related to God not as a child to its father, but as a junior to a senior colleague. And with all its sufficiency, his philosophy seems too Fabian in its counsels; it is always withdrawing, passing by on the other side, avoiding battle—so that as a preparation for the uttermost ordeal it will often prove inferior to the reckless pugnacity of a narrow zealot.
Then, too, it acts like a frost not merely upon personal, but upon national ambition, and so keeps the wellspring from the root. Its assumption of a superhuman fortitude accords but ill with scientific truth, for if with one bound every man may become as God, he will despise that infinitely slow upward progression which is the only real advance. But, above all, it lives estranged from tenderness, in which alone at certain hours of torment the distracted mind finds God's face reflected. It preaches renunciation of all vain aversions and desires; but it repels sweet impulses that are not vain. By exalting apathy in regard to personal suffering, it becomes insensible to others' pain also. In the conviction that appeals for sympathy are avowals of unworthiness, it will have no part in the love of comrades, and it never discovered the truth that the strength and the compassion of the Divine are one perfection.
There is a favourite mediæval legend depicted in one of the windows of the cathedral at Bourges, which exposes in a characteristic fashion this weakness of the Stoic's creed. The Evangelist St John, when at Ephesus, remarked in the forum the philosopher Cratinus giving a lesson of abnegation to certain rich young men. At the teacher's bidding the youths had converted all their wealth into precious stones, and these they were now bidden crush to dust with a heavy hammer in the presence of the assembled people, that so they might make public profession of their contempt for riches. But St John was angered at so wasteful a renunciation. "It is written," he said, "that whoso would be perfect should not destroy his possessions, but sell them, and give the proceeds to the poor." "If your master is the true God," replied Cratinus scornfully, "restore these gems again to their original form, and then they shall be bestowed according to your desire." St John prayed, and the precious stones lay there once more perfect in all their brilliance and splendour. The moral of the old tale is clear—that all virtue without charity is nothing worth; and that of virtue without charity, the Stoic's cold renunciation is the chief type and ensample.
The insight into this higher truth did not come by inspiration, but was gradually imparted during long summer days, when I wandered from dawn to dark among the fields and woods. Hoping at first no more than to tire the mind with the body and so win a whole repose, I became by degrees receptive of a new learning from nature, which created new sympathies and kindled fresh ambitions. Naturally I again read Wordsworth, and now for the first time since childhood I knew what joys intimacy brings. I was one of a brotherhood, and wherever I went was sure of a friendly salutation. Things that grew in silence became my friends; I was with them at all hours, in light and shadow, in warmth and cold, watching their gracious and responsive existences, which reject no good gift, but radiantly grow towards the light while it endures. Insensibly the spirit of this gentle expansive life was infused within me, until the heart which I had deemed useless and outworn, began to open like a flower scathed by frost, at the full coming of spring. The plants and trees were human to me, the brooks spoke with articulate voice; by that ancient witchery of animism, old as the relationship of man and nature, I was put to school again: until at last, absorbed in the vicissitudes of small things and surrendering reason to a host of pathetic fallacies, I was taught the great secret that life may not be centred in itself, but in the going out of the heart is wisdom. And as among human friends there are some to whom a man is bound by deeper and tenderer links than to the rest, so it is with these other friends which have no language, but only the wild-wood power of growing about the heart. Among their gracious company each man will discover his own affinity, and having found it will look on the rest of nature with brighter eyes. Some learn the great lessons from mountains, lakes, and sounding cataracts; others from broad rivers peacefully flowing to the sea. To me there spoke no such romantic voices. My wanderings led me through a country of simple rural charm, and the friends that became dearest to me were just our English elms.
Who but the solitary, artists alone excepted, understand the full charm of elms in an English landscape? To us there is an especial appeal in their loneliness, as they range apart along the hedgerows, embayed in blue air and sunlight which do but play upon the fringe of your huddling forest. See them on a breezy August morning across a tawny corn-field, printing their dark feathery contours on a blue sky and holding the shadows to their bosoms; or on a June evening get them between you and the setting sun, and mark the droop and poise of the upper foliage fretted black upon a ground of red fire. Here are no cones or hemispheres, or shapeless bulks of green, but living beings of articulated form, clothed in verdure as with the fine-wrought drapery that enhances rather than conceals the beauty of the statue.