XIX
It was at this time, I think, that a great change came over my thoughts,or rather that I realised that a great change had gradually taken place.Till now, I had been dominated and haunted by memories of my latest lifeupon earth; but at intervals there had visited me a sense of older andpurer recollections. I cannot describe exactly how it came about--and,indeed, the memory of what my heavenly progress had hitherto been, asopposed to my earthly experience, was never very clear to me; but Ibecame aware that my life in heaven--I will call it heaven for want of abetter name--was my real continuous life, my home-life, so to speak,while my earthly lives had been, to pursue the metaphor, like termswhich a boy spends at school, in which he is aware that he not onlylearns definite and tangible things, but that his character is hardenedand consolidated by coming into contact with the rougher facts oflife--duty, responsibility, friendships, angers, treacheries,temptations, routine. The boy returns with gladness to the serener andsweeter atmosphere of home; and just in the same way I felt I hadreturned to the larger and purer life of heaven. But, as I say, therecollection of my earlier life in heaven, my occupations andexperience, was never clear to me, but rather as a luminous and hauntingmist. I questioned Amroth about this once, and he said that this was theuniversal experience, and that the earthly lives one lived were likedeep trenches cut across a path, and seemed to interrupt the heavenlysequence; but that as the spirit grew more pure and wise, theconsciousness of the heavenly life became more distinct and secure. Buthe added, what I did not quite understand, that there was little need ofmemory in the life of heaven, and that it was to a great extent theinheritance of the body. Memory, he said, was to a great extent aninterruption to life; the thought of past failures and mistakes, andespecially of unkindnesses and misunderstandings, tended to obscure andcomplicate one's relations with other souls; but that in heaven, whereactivity and energy were untiring and unceasing, one lived far more inthe emotion and work of the moment, and less in retrospect and prospect.What mattered was actual experience and the effect of experience; memoryitself was but an artistic method of dealing with the past, andcorresponded to fanciful and delightful anticipations of the future."The truth is," he said, "that the indulgence of memory is to a greatextent a mere sentimental weakness; to live much in recollection is asign of exhausted and depleted vitality. The further you are removedfrom your last earthly life, the less tempted you will be to recall it.The highest spirits of all here," he said, "have no temptation ever torevert to retrospect, because the pure energies of the moment areall-sustaining and all-sufficing."
The only trace I ever noticed of any memory of my past life in heavenwas that things sometimes seemed surprisingly familiar to me, and that Ihad the sense of a serene permanence, which possessed and encompassedme. Indeed I came to believe that the strange feeling of permanencewhich haunts one upon earth, when one is happy and content, even thoughone knows that everything is changing and shifting around one, and thatall is precarious and uncertain, is in itself a memory of the serene anduntroubled continuance of heaven, and a desire to taste it and realiseit.
Be this as it may, from the time of my finding my settled task andordered place in the heavenly community the memories of my old life uponearth began to fade from my thoughts. I could, indeed, always recallthem by an effort, but there seemed less and less inclination to do sothe more I became absorbed in my heavenly activities.
One thing I noticed in these days; it surprised me very greatly, till Ireflected that my surprise was but the consequence of the strange andmournful blindness with regard to spiritual things in which we liveunder the dark skies of earth. We have there a false idea that somehowor other death takes all the individuality out of a man, obliteratingall the whims, prejudices, the thorny and unreasonable dislikes andfancies, oddities, tempers, roughnesses, and subtlenesses from atemperament. Of course there are a good many of these things whichdisappear together with the body, such as the glooms, suspicions, andcloudy irritabilities, which are caused by fatigue and malaise, and byill-health generally. But a man's whims and fancies and dislikes do notby any means disappear on earth when he is in good health; on thecontrary, they are often apt to be accentuated and emphasised when he isfree from pain and care and anxiety, and riding blithely over the wavesof life. Indeed there are men whom I have known who are never kind orsympathetic till they are in some wearing trouble of their own; whenthey are prosperous and cheerful, they are frankly intolerable, becausetheir mirth turns to derision and insolence.
But one of the reasons why the heavenly life is apt to appear inprospect so wearisome a thing is, because we are brought up to feel thatthe whole character is flattened out and charged with a serene kind ofpriggishness, which takes all the salt out of life. The word "saintly,"so terribly misapplied on earth, grows to mean, to many of us, anirritating sort of kindness, which treats the interests and animatedelements of life with a painful condescension, and a sympathy of whichthe basis is duty rather than love. The true sanctification, which Icame to perceive something of later, is the result of a process ofendless patience and infinite delay, and the attainment of it implies ahumility, seven times refined in the fires of self-contempt, in whichthere remains no smallest touch of superiority or aloofness. How utterlydepressing is the feigned interest of the imperfect human saint inmatters of mundane concern! How it takes at once both the joy out ofholiness and the spirit out of human effort! It is as dreary as theprofessional sympathy of the secluded student for the news of athleticcontests, as the tolerance of the shrewd man of science for the femininelogic of religious sentiment!
But I found to my great content that whatever change had passed over thespirits of my companions, they had at least lost no fibre of theirindividuality. The change that had passed over them was like the changethat passes over a young man, who has lived at the University amongdilettante literary designs and mild sociological theorising, when hefinds himself plunged into the urgent practical activities of the world.Our happiness was the happiness which comes of intense toil, with nofatigue to dog it, and from a consciousness of the vital issues whichwe were pursuing. But my companions had still intellectual faults andpreferences, self-confidence, critical intolerance, boisterousness,wilfulness. Stranger still, I found coldness, anger, jealousy, still atwork. Of course in the latter case reconciliation was easier, both inthe light of common enthusiasm and, still more, because mentalcommunication was so much swifter and easier than it had been on earth.There was no need of those protracted talks, those tiresome explanationswhich clever people, who really love and esteem each other, fall into onearth--the statements which affirm nothing, the explanations whichelucidate nothing, because of the intricacies of human speech and thefact that people use the same words with such different implications andmeanings. All those became unnecessary, because one could pierceinstantaneously into the very essence of the soul, and manifest, withoutthe need of expression, the regard and affection which lay beneath thecross-currents of emotion. But love and affection waxed and waned inheaven as on earth; it was weakened and it was transferred. Few soulsare so serene on earth as to see with perfect equanimity a friend, whomone loves and trusts, becoming absorbed in some new and excitingemotion, which may not perhaps obliterate the original regard, but whichmust withdraw from it for a time the energy which fed the flame of theintermitted relation.
It was very strange to me to realise the fact that friendships andintimacies were formed as on earth, and that they lost their freshness,either from some lack of real congeniality or from some divergence ofdevelopment. Sometimes, I may add, our teachers were consulted by theaggrieved, sometimes they even intervened unasked.
I will freely confess that this all immensely heightened the intereststo me of our common life. One could see two spirits drawn together bysome secret tie of emotion, and one could see some further influencestrike across and suspend it. One case of this I will mention, which istypical of many. There came among us an extremely lively and ratherwhimsical spirit, more like a boy than a man
. I wondered at first why hewas chosen for this work, because he seemed both fitful and evencapricious; but I gradually realised in him an extraordinary fineness ofperception, and a swiftness of intuition almost unrivalled. He had apower of weighing almost by instinct the constituent elements ofcharacter, which seemed to me something like the power of tonality in amusician, the gift of recognising, by pure faculty, what any notes maybe, however confusedly jangled on an instrument. It was wonderful to mehow often his instantaneous judgments proved more sagacious than ourcarefully formed conclusions.
This boy became extraordinarily attractive to an older woman who was oneof our number, who was solitary and abstracted, and of an intenseseriousness of devotion to her work. It was evident both that she felthis charm intensely and that her disposition was wholly alien to thedisposition of the boy himself. In fact, she simply bored him. He tookall that he did lightly, and achieved by an intense momentaryconcentration what she could only achieve by slow reflection. Thisdevotion had in it something that was strangely pathetic, because ittook the form in her of making her wish to conciliate the boy'sadmiration, by treating thoughts and ideas with a lightness and a humourto which she could by no means attain, and which made things worserather than better, because she could read so easily, in the thoughts ofothers, the impression that she was attempting a handling of topicswhich she could not in the least accomplish. But advice was useless.There it was, the old, fierce, constraining attraction of love, as ithad been of old, making havoc of comfortable arrangements, attemptingthe 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 faulthad ever been, no doubt, to estimate slow and accurate methods toohighly, and to believe that all was insecure and untrustworthy that wasnot painfully accumulated. Now she saw that genius could accomplishwithout 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 tohave the right result. He might have learned to extend his sympathy to anature so dumb and plodding; and this coldness of his called down arebuke of what seemed almost undue sternness from one of our teachers.It was not given in my presence, but the boy, bewildered by the severitywhich he did not anticipate, coupled indeed with a hint that he must beprepared, if he could not exhibit a more elastic sympathy, to have hiscourse suspended in favour of some more simple discipline, told me thewhole 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 andall that, but I simply am not myself when she is by; it is like taking arun with a tortoise!"
"Well," I said, "no one expects you to give up all your time to takingtortoises for runs; but I suppose that tortoises have their rights, andmust 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 thatthis place is not rather too solemn for me. What is the good of beingwiser than the aged, if one has more commandments to keep?"
Things, however, settled down in time. Barbara, I think, must have beentaken to task as well, because she gave up her attempts at wit; and theend of it was that a quiet friendship sprang up between the incongruouspair, 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 emotionalrelations. It was a place of hard and urgent work; but I came to realisethat, just as on earth, institutions like schools and colleges, where agreat variety of natures are gathered in close and daily contact, areshot through and through with strange currents of emotion, which somepeople pay no attention to, and others dismiss as mere sentimentality,so it was also bound to be beyond, with this difference, that whereas onearth we are shy and awkward with our friendships, and all sorts ofphysical complications intervene, in the other world they assume theirfrank importance. I saw that much of what is called the serious businessof life is simply and solely necessitated by bodily needs, and is reallyentirely temporary and trivial, while the real life of the soul, whichunderlies it all, stifled and subdued, pent-up uneasily and crampedunkindly like a bright spring of water under the superincumbent earth,finds its way at last to the light. On earth we awkwardly divide thisimpulse; we speak of the relation of the soul to others and of therelation of the soul to God as two separate things. We pass over thewords of Christ in the Gospel, which directly contradict this, and whichmake the one absolutely dependent on, and conditional on, the other. Wespeak of human affection as a thing which may come in between the souland God, while it is in reality the swiftest access thither. We speak asthough ambition were itself made more noble, if it sternly abjures allmultiplication of human tenderness. We speak of a life which sacrificesmaterial success to emotion as a failure and an irresponsible affair.The truth is the precise opposite. All the ambitions which have theirend in personal prestige are wholly barren; the ambitions which aim atsocial amelioration have a certain nobility about them, though theysubstitute a tortuous by-path for a direct highway. And the plain truthis that all social amelioration would grow up as naturally and asfragrantly as a flower, if we could but refine and strengthen and awakenour slumbering emotions, and let them grow out freely to gladden thelittle circle of earth in which we live and move.