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Page 36
This boy became extraordinarily attractive to an older woman who was one
of our number, who was solitary and abstracted, and of an intense
seriousness of devotion to her work. It was evident both that she felt
his charm intensely and that her disposition was wholly alien to the
disposition of the boy himself. In fact, she simply bored him. He took
all that he did lightly, and achieved by an intense momentary
concentration what she could only achieve by slow reflection. This
devotion had in it something that was strangely pathetic, because it
took the form in her of making her wish to conciliate the boy's
admiration, by treating thoughts and ideas with a lightness and a humour
to which she could by no means attain, and which made things worse
rather than better, because she could read so easily, in the thoughts of
others, the impression that she was attempting a handling of topics
which she could not in the least accomplish. But advice was useless.
There it was, the old, fierce, constraining attraction of love, as it
had been of old, making havoc of comfortable arrangements, attempting
the impossible; and yet one knew that she would gain by the process,
that she was opening a door in her heart that had hitherto been closed,
and learning a largeness of view and sympathy in the process. Her fault
had ever been, no doubt, to estimate slow and accurate methods too
highly, and to believe that all was insecure and untrustworthy that was
not painfully accumulated. Now she saw that genius could accomplish
without effort or trouble what no amount of homely energy could effect,
and a new horizon was unveiled to her. But on the boy it did not seem to
have the right result. He might have learned to extend his sympathy to a
nature so dumb and plodding; and this coldness of his called down a
rebuke of what seemed almost undue sternness from one of our teachers.
It was not given in my presence, but the boy, bewildered by the severity
which he did not anticipate, coupled indeed with a hint that he must be
prepared, if he could not exhibit a more elastic sympathy, to have his
course suspended in favour of some more simple discipline, told me the
whole matter. "What am I to do?" he said. "I cannot care for Barbara;
her whole nature upsets me and revolts me. I know she is very good and
all that, but I simply am not myself when she is by; it is like taking a
run with a tortoise!"
"Well," I said, "no one expects you to give up all your time to taking
tortoises for runs; but I suppose that tortoises have their rights, and
must not be jerked along on their backs, like a sledge."
"Oh," said he, "you are all against me, I know; and I am not sure that
this place is not rather too solemn for me. What is the good of being
wiser than the aged, if one has more commandments to keep?"
Things, however, settled down in time. Barbara, I think, must have been
taken to task as well, because she gave up her attempts at wit; and the
end of it was that a quiet friendship sprang up between the incongruous
pair, like that between a wayward young brother and a plain, kindly,
and elderly sister, of a very fine and chivalrous kind.
It must not be thought that we spent our time wholly in these emotional
relations. It was a place of hard and urgent work; but I came to realise
that, just as on earth, institutions like schools and colleges, where a
great variety of natures are gathered in close and daily contact, are
shot through and through with strange currents of emotion, which some
people pay no attention to, and others dismiss as mere sentimentality,
so it was also bound to be beyond, with this difference, that whereas on
earth we are shy and awkward with our friendships, and all sorts of
physical complications intervene, in the other world they assume their
frank importance. I saw that much of what is called the serious business
of life is simply and solely necessitated by bodily needs, and is really
entirely temporary and trivial, while the real life of the soul, which
underlies it all, stifled and subdued, pent-up uneasily and cramped
unkindly like a bright spring of water under the superincumbent earth,
finds its way at last to the light. On earth we awkwardly divide this
impulse; we speak of the relation of the soul to others and of the
relation of the soul to God as two separate things. We pass over the
words of Christ in the Gospel, which directly contradict this, and which
make the one absolutely dependent on, and conditional on, the other. We
speak of human affection as a thing which may come in between the soul
and God, while it is in reality the swiftest access thither. We speak as
though ambition were itself made more noble, if it sternly abjures all
multiplication of human tenderness. We speak of a life which sacrifices
material success to emotion as a failure and an irresponsible affair.
The truth is the precise opposite. All the ambitions which have their
end in personal prestige are wholly barren; the ambitions which aim at
social amelioration have a certain nobility about them, though they
substitute a tortuous by-path for a direct highway. And the plain truth
is that all social amelioration would grow up as naturally and as
fragrantly as a flower, if we could but refine and strengthen and awaken
our slumbering emotions, and let them grow out freely to gladden the
little circle of earth in which we live and move.
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