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Page 7
"It is very bewildering," I said, "but I see a little more than I did.
It is all a matter of feeling, then? But it seems hard on people that
they should be so dull and stupid about it all,--that the truth should
lie so close to their hand and yet be so carefully concealed."
"Oh, they grow out of dulness!" he said, with a movement of his hand;
"that is what experience does for us--it is always going on; we get
widened and deepened. Why," he added, "I have seen a great man, as they
called him, clever and alert, who held a high position in the State. He
was laid aside by a long and painful illness, so that all his work was
put away. He was brave about it, too, I remember; but he used to think
to himself how sad and wasteful it was, that when he was most energetic
and capable he should be put on the shelf--all the fine work he might
have done interrupted; all the great speeches he would have made
unuttered. But as a matter of fact, he was then for the first time
growing fast, because he had to look into the minds and hearts of all
sorrowful and disappointed people, and to learn that what we do matters
so little, and that what we are matters so much. When he did at last
get back to the world, people said, 'What a sad pity to see so fine a
career spoilt!' But out of all the years of all his lives, those years
had been his very best and richest, when he sat half the day feeble in
the sun, and could not even look at the papers which lay beside him, or
when he woke in the grey mornings, with the thought of another miserable
day of idleness and pain before him."
I said, "Then is it a bad thing to be busy in the world, because it
takes off your mind from the things which matter?"
"No," said Amroth, "not a bad thing at all: because two things are going
on. Partly the framework of society and life is being made, so that men
are not ground down into that sordid struggle, when little experience is
possible because of the drudgery which clouds all the mind. Though even
that has its opportunities! And all depends, for the individual, upon
how he is doing his work. If he has other people in mind all the time,
and does his work for them, and not to be praised for it, then all is
well. But if he is thinking of his credit and his position, then he does
not grow at all; that is pomposity--a very youthful thing indeed; but
the worst case of all is if a man sees that the world must be helped and
made, and that one can win credit thus, and so engages in work of that
kind, and deals in all the jargon of it, about using influence and
living for others, when he is really thinking of himself all the time,
and trying to keep the eyes of the world upon him. But it is all growth
really, though sometimes, as on the beach when the tide is coming in,
the waves seem to draw backward from the land, and poise themselves in a
crest of troubled water."
"But is a great position in the world," I said, "whether inherited or
attained, a dangerous thing?"
"Nothing is _dangerous_, child," he said. "You must put all that out of
your mind. But men in high posts and stations are often not progressing
evenly, only in great jogs and starts. They learn very often, with a
sudden surprise, which is not always painful, and sometimes is very
beautiful and sweet, that all the ceremony and pomp, the great house,
the bows and the smiles, mean nothing at all--absolutely nothing, except
the chance, the opportunity of not being taken in by them. That is the
use of all pleasures and all satisfactions--the frame of mind which made
the old king say, 'Is not this great Babylon, which I have
builded?'--they are nothing but the work of another class in the great
school of life. A great many people are put to school with
self-satisfaction, that they may know the fine joy of humiliation, the
delight of learning that it is not effectiveness and applause that
matters, but love and peacefulness. And the great thing is that we
should feel that we are growing, not in hardness or indifference, nor
necessarily even in courage or patience, but in our power to feel and
our power to suffer. As love multiplies, suffering must multiply too.
The very Heart of God is full of infinite, joyful, hopeful suffering;
the whole thing is so vast, so slow, so quiet, that the end of suffering
is yet far off. But when we suffer, we climb fast; the spirit grows old
and wise in faith and love; and suffering is the one thing we cannot
dispense with, because it is the condition of our fullest and purest
life."
V
I said suddenly, "The joy of this place is not the security of it, but
the fact that one has not to think about security. I am not afraid of
anything that may happen, and there is no weariness of thought. One does
not think till one is tired, but till one has finished thinking."
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