Moments of Being

  In this sense your grandmother’s death was disastrous; for you must conceive that she was not only the most beautiful of women as her portraits will tell you, but also one of the most distinct. Her life had been so swift, it was to be so short, that experiences which in most have space to expand themselves and bear leisurely fruit, were all compressed in her; she had married, borne children, and mourned her husband by the time she was twenty-four. For eight years she pondered that active season, and as I guess, formulated then in great part the judgement of life which underlay her future. She had been happy as few people are happy, for she had passed like a princess in a pageant from her supremely beautiful youth to marriage and motherhood, without awakenment. If I read truly, indeed the atmosphere of her home flattered such dreams and cast over the figure of her bridegroom all the golden enchantments of Tennysonian sentiment. But it would need a clearer vision than mine to decide how far her husband, though now so obviously her inferior in all ways, was able then to satisfy noble and genuine passions in his wife. Perhaps she made satisfaction for herself, cloaking his deficiencies in her own superabundance. At any rate when he was dead she determined to consecrate those years as the golden ones; when as she phrased it perhaps, she had not known the sorrow and the crime of the world because she had lived with a man, stainless of his kind, exalted in a world of pure love and beauty. The effect of his death then was doubly tremendous, because it was a disillusionment as well as a tragic human loss. She had by nature a keen brain, remorseless of all insincerity and even too much inclined to insist that all feeling has an equivalent in action or is worthless. And now that she had none to worship she worshipped the memory, and looking on the world with clear eyes, was more scornful than was just of its tragedy and stupidity because she had lived in a dream and still cherished a dream. She flung aside her religion, and became, as I have heard, the most positive of disbelievers. She reversed those natural instincts which were so strong in her of happiness and joy in a generous and abundant life, and pressed the bitterest fruit only to her lips. She visited the poor, nursed the dying, and felt herself possessed of the true secret of life at last, which is still obscured from a few, though they too must come to know it, that sorrow is our lot, and at best we can but face it bravely. All these things certainly she would have learnt had her husband lived, but learnt them with wisdom and temperance, delighting, rejoicing in the exercise of her own gifts and in the enjoyment of blessings which, surely, were not singular. But it would be easy to exaggerate the significance of this attitude, for much of its crudeness came, not from native harshness, but from the mutilation which her natural growth had undergone. Slowly, as I believe, she came to exercise her mind, and sadly enough to determine that much of the interest of the world must come in future from the satisfaction of her intellect. She saw many clever people, and read with a desire to establish her own sad faith, the works of disbelievers who spelt God without a capital G. In particular she read some early articles by your grandfather and liked them better than she liked him.

  Fate, who is thought by some to arrange human lives to her liking, chose that your grandfather, with his first wife, should live in the same street with your grandmother and further decreed that Minny was to die there, and that your grandmother thus should be thrown into contact with her learned and formidable friend under the conditions which she of all people felt most poignantly. Would any other arrangement of circumstances have so brought about the miracle? For she found one who had equal reasons with herself to believe in the sorrow of life and every incentive to adopt her own stoic philosophy; he also was of the giant breed, no light lover, no superficial optimist. She might go hand in hand with him through the shadows of the Valley – but, of a sudden, her companion became her guide, pointed on, urged her to follow, to hope, to strive once more. She could not so soon throw off what had come to be a habit of suffering almost, and yet his reason was the stronger, his need was the greater. At length with pain and remorse she, courageous as she was, more truly courageous perhaps than her husband, bade herself face the truth and realize in all its aspects the fact that joy was to be endured as well as sorrow. She rose to the heights, wide-eyed and nobly free from all illusion or sentiment, her second love shining pure as starlight; the rosy mists of the first rapture dispelled for ever. Indeed it is notable that she never spoke of her first love; and in treasuring it changed it perhaps to something far fairer than it could have been, had life allowed it to endure. The second marriage was the true though late fulfilment of all that she could be; and, but that it was rather late, rather crowded, and rather anxious, no match was more truly equal, or more ceaselessly valiant. Large words, perhaps, to use of fifteen years! with all their opportunity for smallness, failure, tolerance of mediocrity. But, although there were certain matters which seem to us now decided by her too much in a spirit of compromise, and exacted by him without strict regard for justice or magnanimity, still it is true whether you judge by their work or by themselves that it was a triumphant life, consistently aiming at high things.

  These circumstances had taken their part in forming your grandmother’s character; and by the time we, her children, knew her, she was the most prompt, practical and vivid of human beings. It was as though she had made up her mind definitely upon certain great matters and was never after troubled to consider herself at all; but every deed and word had the bright, inexorable, swift stamp of something struck clearly by a mass of hoarded experience. Four children were born to her; there were four others already, older, demanding other care;fn8 she taught us, was their companion, and soothed, cheered, inspired, nursed, deceived your grandfather; and any one coming for help found her invincibly upright in her place, with time to give, earnest consideration, and the most practical sympathy. Her relations with people indeed were all through her life remarkable; and after her second marriage this decision, of which I speak, seemed to make her spend herself more freely than ever in the service of others. And as that phrase has a doubtful reputation, and might well lead you to imagine a different woman from the real one, I must explain that her conduct in this matter was singular, and by no means of a piece with the mischievous philanthropy which other women practise so complacently and often with such disastrous results.

  Her view of the world had come to be very comprehensive; she seemed to watch, like some wise Fate, the birth, growth, flower and death of innumerable lives all round her, with a constant sense of the mystery that encircled them, not now so sceptical as of old, and [with] a perfectly definite idea of the help that was possible and of use. Her intellectual gifts had always been those that find their closest expression in action; she had great clearness of insight, sound judgement, humour, and a power of grasping very quickly the real nature of someone’s circumstances, and so arranging that the matter, whatever it was, fell into its true proportions at once. Sometimes with her natural impetuosity, she took it on herself to despatch difficulties with a high hand, like some commanding Empress. But most often I think her service, when it was not purely practical, lay in simply helping people by the light of her judgement and experience, to see what they really meant or felt. But any sensible woman may have these qualities, and yet be none of the things that your grandmother was. All her gifts had something swift, decisive, witty even, in their nature; so that there could be no question of dulness or drudgery in her daily work, however lugubrious it seemed of itself. She was sensitive by temperament and impatient of stupidity; and while she was there the whole of that interminable and incongruous procession which is the life of a large family, went merrily; with exquisite humour in its incidents very often, or something grotesque or impressive in its arrangement, perpetually lit up by her keen attention, her amazing sense of the life that is in the weakest or most threadbare situations. She stamped people with characters at once; and at St Ives, or on Sunday afternoons at Hyde Park Gate, the scene was often fit for the stage; boldly acting on her conception she drew out from old General Beadle, or C. B. Clarke, or Jack Hills, or Si
dney Lee, such sparks of character as they have never shown to anyone since. All lives directly she crossed them seemed to form themselves into a pattern and while she stayed each move was of the utmost importance. But she was no aesthetic spectator, collecting impressions for her own amusement.fn9

  Life rather had taught her that facts, as she interpreted them, were by themselves of supreme importance; it was a matter of anxious moment to her that Lisa Stillman should like her brother-in-law, or that a workman wounded in an accident should find healthy employment. She kept herself marvellously alive to all the changes that went on around her, as though she heard perpetually the ticking of a vast clock and could never forget that some day it would cease for all of us. People of the most diverse kinds came to her when they had reason to rejoice or to weep; she seemed, if anything, a little indiscriminate in her choice of friends; but bores and fools have their moments. And it must be owned that living thus at high pressure she contrived to invest the whole scene with an inimitable bravery as though she saw it properly composed, of fools, clowns and splendid Queens, a vast procession on the march towards death. This intense preoccupation with the event of the moment arose partly no doubt because nature had fitted her to deal victoriously with such matters; but also because she had inborn in her and [had] acquired a deep sense of the futility of all effort, the mystery of life. You may see the two things in her face. ‘Let us make the most of what we have, since we know nothing of the future’ was the motive that urged her to toil so incessantly on behalf of happiness, right doing, love; and the melancholy echoes answered ‘What does it matter? Perhaps there is no future.’ Encompassed as she was by this solemn doubt her most trivial activities had something of grandeur about them; and her presence was large and austere, bringing with it not only joy and life, exquisite fleeting femininities, but the majesty of a nobly composed human being.

  Written words of a person who is dead or still alive tend most unfortunately to drape themselves in smooth folds annulling all evidence of life. You will not find in what I say, or again in those sincere but conventional phrases in the life of your grandfather, or in the noble lamentations with which he fills the pages of his autobiography,fn10 any semblance of a woman whom you can love. It has often occurred to me to regret that no one ever wrote down her sayings and vivid ways of speech since she had the gift of turning words in a manner peculiar to her, rubbing her hands swiftly, or raising them in gesticulation as she spoke.fn11 I can see her, standing by the open door of a railway carriage which was taking Stella and some others to Cambridge, and striking out in a phrase or two pictures of all the people who came past her along the platform, and so she kept them laughing till the train went.

  What would one not give to recapture a single phrase even! or the tone of the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful figure, so upright and so distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain angle, a little upwards, so that the eye looked straight out at you. “Come children,” she would say directly she had waved her last fantastic farewell, and one would grasp her umbrella, and another her arm, and one no doubt would stand gaping, and she would call sharply, “Quick, quick”. And so she would pass with her swift step, through the crowds, and into some dingy train or omnibus, where perhaps she would ask the conductor why the company did not give him straw to stand on – “Your feet must be cold” – and hear his story and make her comment, until we were home just in time for lunch. “Don’t keep father waiting.” And at lunch in answer to some languid question, “So those young people are gone? We . . .11,1 don’t envy ’em”, she would have her little story to tell, or perhaps her cryptic phrase which we could not interpret, but knew from the shrugs and “Perhaps” that it bore on one of those romances which they both loved to discuss. The relationship between your grandfather and mother was, as the saying is, perfect, nor would I for a moment dispute that, believing as I do that each of these much tried and by no means easy-going people found in the other the highest and most perfect harmony which their natures could respond to. Beautiful often, even to our eyes, were their gestures, their glances of pure and unutterable delight in each other. But, if I can convey my meaning by the metaphor, the high consonance, the flute voices of two birds in tune, was only reached by rich, rapid scales of discord, and incongruity. After all she was fifteen years the younger, and his age was made emphatic by the keen intellect, always voyaging, as she must have thought, alone in ice-bound seas. Her pride in it was like the pride of one in some lofty mountain peak, visited only by the light of the stars, and the rain of snow; it was enthusiastic, but very humble.

  She delighted to transact all those trifling businesses which, as women feel instinctively, are somehow derogatory to the dignity which they like to discover in clever men; and she took it as proud testimony that he came to her ignorant of all depressions and elations but those that high philosophy bred in him. But she never belittled her own works, thinking them, if properly discharged, of equal, though other, importance with her husband’s. Thus in those moments, breathing spaces in the incessant conflict, when each rested secure for a second in the other’s embrace, she knew with just but always delighted pride, that he worshipped in her something as unchallengeably high as the lofty remote peak which she honoured in him. And each sprang rejoicing to do homage to qualities unlike their own – how sweet, released from the agony and loneliness of thought to recognize instantly the real presence of unquestionable human loveliness! as a seafarer wrapt for many days in mist on the fruitless waters lands at dawn upon a sunlit shore, where all nature enfolds him and breathes in his ear rest and assurance. She too whose days were spent in labours often trifling, and often vain, exulted as one clasped suddenly in strong arms and set above it all, silent, still and immortal. She was always the first to reinforce his own impulse towards the most remote and unprofitable tasks; it was on her assurance I think that he began his last long book, The Utilitarians fn12 which would yield no wealth and very little fame, for she undertook that all other matters would prosper meanwhile.

  But these are the pinnacles of life, and as time drew on, the struggle grew sharper, and the buoyancy of youth diminished. His health was worn, and the kind of praise which would have encouraged him, delayed unduly, as he complained. And by this time she had expanded so far, into such remote recesses, alleys in St Ives, London slums, and many other more prosperous but no less exacting quarters, that retrenchment was beyond her power. Every day brought her, it seemed, a fresh sprung harvest that must be despatched and would flourish infallibly tomorrow. Each evening she sat at her table, after some laborious afternoon, her hand moving ceaselessly, at the last a little erratically, as she wrote answers, advice, jests, warning, sympathy, her wise brow and deep eyes presiding, so beautiful still, but now so worn, so profoundly experienced that you could hardly call them sad. When she was dead I found a desk shut when we left St Ives with all the letters received that morning freshly laid in it, to be answered perhaps when she got to London. There was a letter from a woman whose daughter had been betrayed and asked for help; a letter from George, from Aunt Mary,fn13 from a nurse who was out of work, some bills, some begging letters, and many sheets from a girl who had quarrelled with her parents and must reveal her soul, earnestly, diffusely. “Ah, thank Heaven, there is no post tonight!” she would exclaim, half smiling and half sighing, on Saturday; and even your grandfather would look up from his book, press her hand, and vainly protest, “there must be an end of this, Julia!”

  In addition to all her other labours she took it on herself to teach us our lessons, and thus established a very close and rather trying relationship, for she was of a quick temper, and least of all inclined to spare her children. “Your father is a great man.” But in no other way could we have learnt, in the short time we had, so much of her true nature, obscured by none of those graceful figments which interpose themselves generally in the gulf which lies between a middle-aged woman and her children. It might have been better, as it certainly would
have tired her less, had she allowed that some of those duties could be discharged for her. But she was impetuous, and also a little imperious; so conscious of her own burning will that she could scarcely believe that there was not something quicker and more effective in her action than in another’s. Thus when your grandfather was ill she would never suffer a nurse to be with him, nor could she believe that a governess would teach us as well as she did. And apart from economy, which always weighed with her, she had come to attach a desperate importance to the saving of time, as though she saw heap themselves all round her, duties and desires, and time to embrace them slipped from her and left her with grasping fingers. She had constantly in mind that comprehensive view of the final proportions of things which I have noticed; for her words were never trivial; but as her strength lessened her respites were fewer; she sank, like an exhausted swimmer, deeper and deeper in the water, and could only at moments descry some restful shore on the horizon to be gained in old age when all this toil was over. But when we exclaim at the extravagant waste of such a life we are inclined no doubt to lose that view of the surrounding parts, the husband and child and home which if you see them as a whole surrounding her, completing her, robs the single life of its arrow-like speed, and its tragic departure. What is noticeable about her, as I am come to think, is not the waste and the futile gallantry, but the niceness, born of sure judgement, with which her effort matched her aim. There was scarcely any superfluity; and it is for this reason that, past as those years are, her mark on them is ineffaceable, as though branded by the naked steel, the sharp, the pure. Living voices in many parts of the world still speak of her as of someone who is actually a fact in life. Whether she came merry, wrathful or in impulsive sympathy, it does not matter; they speak of her as of a thing that happened, recalling, as though all round her grew significant, how she stood and turned and how the bird sang loudly, or a great cloud passed across the sky. Where has she gone? What she said has never ceased. She died when she was forty-eight, and your mother was a child of fifteen.fn14 If what I have said of her has any meaning you will believe that her death was the greatest disaster that could happen; it was as though on some brilliant day of spring the racing clouds of a sudden stood still, grew dark, and massed themselves; the wind flagged, and all creatures on the earth moaned or wandered seeking aimlessly. But what figures or variety of figures will do justice to the shapes which since then she has taken in countless lives? The dead, so people say, are forgotten, or they should rather say, that life has for the most part little significance to any of us. But now and again on more occasions than I can number, in bed at night, or in the street, or as I come into the room, there she is; beautiful, emphatic, with her familiar phrase and her laugh; closer than any of the living are, lighting our random lives as with a burning torch, infinitely noble and delightful to her children.