Call it coldness, call it indifference, call it cowardice—the
matter is not mended. If one is cold, one does
not grow hot by pretending to perspire; if one is
indifferent, one does not become enthusiastic by indulging
in hollow rhetoric. If one is cowardly, one can
only improve by facing a necessary danger, not by
thrusting oneself into perilous situations. To
marry without love, for the sake of the discipline,
is as if a dizzy man should adventure himself alone
upon the Matterhorn; the rashness of proved incapacity
is not courage, but a detestable snobbishness.
One must make the best of the hard problem of God,
not add to its complexity, in order to increase one’s
patience. Neither men nor angels have any patience
with a fool, and it is the deed of a fool to cultivate
occasions of folly. One serves best by making
the most of one’s faculties, not by choosing
a life where one’s disabilities have full play,
in order to correct them. I might as well tell
the Pharisee, who bids me let myself go, to take to
drink, in order that he may learn moral humility,
or to do dishonest things for the discipline of reprobation.
I do not think so ill of God as not to believe that
he is trying to help me; as the old poet said, “The
Gods give to each man whatever is most appropriate
to him. Man is dearer to the Gods than to himself.”
God has sent me many gifts, both good and evil; but
he has not sent me a wife, perhaps in pity for a frail
creature of his hand, who might have had to bear that
tedious fate! But I know what I miss, and see
that loveless self-interest is the dark bane of solitude.
One may call it a moral leprosy if one loves hard
names; but no leper would choose to be a leper if
he could avoid it. Whatever happens in this dim
world, we should be tender and compassionate of one
another. It is a mere stupidity, that stupidity
which is of the nature of sin, to compassionate a
man for being ill or poor, and not to compassionate
him for being cold and lonely. The solitary man
must dwell within his own shadow, and make what sport
he can; and it is the saddest of all the privileges
of reasoning beings, that reason can thus debar a man
from wholesome experience. Even in the desolation
of ruined Babylon the satyr calls to his fellow and
the great owl rears her brood; but the narrow and
shivering soul must sit in solitude, till perhaps on
a day of joy he may see the background of his dark
heart all alive with a tapestry of shining angels,
bearing vials in their hands of the water of Life.
XII
I wonder if others experience a very peculiar sensation, which comes upon me at intervals unexpectedly and inexplicably in a certain kind of scene, and on reading a certain type of book—I have known it from my early childhood, as far back as I can recollect anything. It is the sensation of being quite close to some beautiful and mysterious thing which I have lost, and for which in a blind way I am searching.