XVII
I was alone in an instant, and in terrible pain—pain not in any part of me, but all around and within me. A cold wind of a piercing bitterness seemed to blow upon me; but with it came a sense of immense energy and strength, so that the pain became suddenly delightful, like the stretching of a stiffened limb. I cannot put the pain into exact words. It was not attended by any horror; it seemed a sense of infinite grief and loss and loneliness, a deep yearning to be delivered and made free. I felt suddenly as though everything I loved had gone from me, irretrievably gone and lost. I looked round me, and I could discern through a mist the bases of some black and sinister rocks, that towered up intolerably above me; in between them were channels full of stones and drifted snow. Anything more stupendous than those black-ribbed crags, those toppling precipices, I had never seen. The wind howled among them, and sometimes there was a noise of rocks cast down. I knew in some obscure way that my path lay there, and my heart absolutely failed me. Instead of going straight to the rocks, I began to creep along the base to see whether I could find some easier track. Suddenly the voice of Amroth said, rather sharply, in my ear, "Don't be silly!" This homely direction, so peremptorily made, had an instantaneous effect. If he had said, "Be not faithless," or anything in the copybook manner, I should have sat down and resigned myself to solemn despair. But now I felt a fool and a coward as well.
So I addressed myself, like a dog who hears the crack of a whip, to the rocks.
It would be tedious to relate how I clambered and stumbled and agonised. There did not seem to me the slightest use in making the attempt, or the smallest hope of reaching the top, or the least expectation of finding anything worth finding. I hated everything I had ever seen or known; recollections of old lives and of the quiet garden I had left came upon me with a sort of mental nausea. This was very different from the amiable and easy-going treatment I had expected. Yet I did struggle on, with a hideous faintness and weariness—but would it never stop? It seemed like years to me, my hands frozen and wetted by snow and dripping water, my feet bruised and wounded by sharp stones, my garments strangely torn and rent, with stains of blood showing through in places. Still the hideous business continued, but progress was never quite impossible. At one place I found the rocks wholly impassable, and choosing the broader of two ledges which ran left and right, I worked out along the cliff, only to find that the ledge ran into the precipices, and I had to retrace my steps, if the shuffling motions I made could be so called. Then I took the harder of the two, which zigzagged backwards and forwards across the rocks. At one place I saw a thing which moved me very strangely. This was a heap of bones, green, slimy, and ill-smelling, with some tattered rags of cloth about them, which lay in a heap beneath a precipice. The thought that a man could fall and be killed in such a place moved me with a fresh misery. What that meant I could not tell. Were we not away from such things as mouldering flesh and broken bones? It seemed not; and I climbed madly away from them. Quite suddenly I came to the top, a bleak platform of rock, where I fell prostrate on my face and groaned.
"Yes, that was an ugly business," said the voice of Amroth beside me, "but you got through it fairly well. How do you feel?"
"I call it a perfect outrage," I said. "What is the meaning of this hateful business?"
"The meaning?" said Amroth; "never mind about the meaning. The point is that you are here!"
"Oh," I said, "I have had a horrible time. All my sense of security is gone from me. Is one indeed liable to this kind of interruption, Amroth?"
"Of course," said Amroth, "there must be some tests; but you will be better very soon. It is all over for the present, I may tell you, and you will soon be able to enjoy it. There is no terror in past suffering—it is the purest joy."
"Yes, I used to say so and think so," I said, closing my eyes. "But this was different—it was horrible! And the time it lasted, and the despair of it! It seems to have soaked into my whole life and poisoned it."
Amroth said nothing for a minute, but watched me closely.
Presently I went on. "And tell me one thing. There was a ghastly thing I saw, some mouldering bones on a ledge. Can people indeed fall and die there?"
"Perhaps it was only a phantom," said Amroth, "put there like the sights in the Pilgrim's Progress, the fire that was fed secretly with oil, and the robin with his mouth full of spiders, as an encouragement for wayfarers!"
"But that," I said, "would be too horrible for anything—to turn the terrors of death into a sort of conjuring trick—a dramatic entertainment, to make one's flesh creep! Why, that was the misery of some of the religion taught us in old days, that it seemed often only dramatic—a scene without cause or motive, just displayed to show us the anger or the mercy of God, so that one had the miserable sense that much of it was a spectacular affair, that He Himself did not really suffer or feel indignation, but thought it well to feign emotions, like a schoolmaster to impress his pupils.—and that people too were not punished for their own sakes, to help them, but just to startle or convince others."
"Yes," said Amroth, "I was only jesting, and I see that my jests were out of place. Of course what you saw was real—there are no pretences here. Men and women do indeed suffer a kind of death—the second death—in these places, and have to begin again; but that is only for a certain sort of self-confident and sin-soaked person, whose will needs to be roughly broken. There are certain perverse sins of the spirit which need a spiritual death, as the sins of the body need a bodily death. Only thus can one be born again."
"Well," I said, "I am amazed—but now what am I to do? I am fit for nothing, and I shall be fit for nothing hereafter."
"If you talk like this," said Amroth, "you will only drive me away. There are certain things that it is better not to confess to one's dearest friend, not even to God. One must just be silent about them, try to forget them, hope they can never happen again. I tell you, you will soon be all right; and if you are not you will have to see a physician. But you had better not do that unless you are obliged."
This made me feel ashamed of myself, and the shame took off my thoughts from what I had endured; but I could do nothing but lie aching and panting on the rocks for a long time, while Amroth sat beside me in silence.
"Are you vexed?" I said after a long pause.
"No, no, not vexed," said Amroth, "but I am not sure whether I have not made a mistake. It was I who urged that you might go forward, and I confess I am disappointed at the result. You are softer than I thought."
"Indeed I am not," I said. "I will go down the rocks and come up again, if that will satisfy you."
"Come, that is a little better," said Amroth, "and I will tell you now that you did well—better indeed at the time than I expected. You did the thing in very good time, as we used to say."
By this time I felt very drowsy, and suddenly dropped off into a sleep—such a deep and dreamless sleep, to descend into which was like flinging oneself into a river-pool by a bubbling weir on a hot and dusty day of summer.
I awoke suddenly with a pressure on my arm, and, waking up with a sense of renewed freshness, I saw Amroth looking at me anxiously. "Do not say anything," he said. "Can you manage to hobble a few steps? If you cannot, I will get some help, and we shall be all right—but there may be an unpleasant encounter, and it is best avoided." I scrambled to my feet, and Amroth helped me a little higher up the rocks, looking carefully into the mist as he did so. Close behind us was a steep rock with ledges. Amroth flung himself upon them, with an agile scramble or two. Then he held his hand down, lying on the top; I took it, and, stiffened as I was, I contrived to get up beside him. "That is right," he said in a whisper. "Now lie here quietly, don't speak a word, and just watch."
I lay, with a sense of something evil about. Presently I heard the sound of voices in the mist to the left of us; and in an instant there loomed out of the mist the form of a man, who was immediately followed by three others. They were different from all the other spirits I had yet seen—tall, lean, dark men, very spare and strong. They looked carefully about them, mostly glancing down the cliff, and sometimes conferred together. They were dressed in close-fitting dark clothes, which seemed as if made out of some kind of skin or untanned leather, and their whole air was sinister and terrifying. They passed quite close beneath us, so that I saw the bald head of one of them, who carried a sort of hook in his hands.
When they got to the place where my climb had ended, they stopped and examined the stones carefully: one of them clambered a few feet down the cliff. Then he came back and seemed to make a brief report, after which they appeared undecided what to do; they even looked up at the rock where we lay; but while they did this, another man, very similar, came hurriedly out of the mist, said something to the group, and they all disappeared very quickly into the darkness the same way they had come. Then there was a silence. I should have spoken, but Amroth put a finger on his lips. Presently there came a sound of falling stones, and after that there broke out among the rocks below a horrible crying, as of a man in sore straits and instant fear. Amroth jumped quickly to his feet. "This will not do," he said. "Stay here for me." And then leaping down the rock, he disappeared, shouting words of help—"Hold on—I am coming."
He came back some little time afterwards, and I saw that he was not alone. He had with him an old stumbling man, evidently in the last extremity of terror and pain, with beads of sweat on his brow and blood running down from his hands. He seemed dazed and bewildered. And Amroth too looked ruffled and almost weary, as I had never seen him look. I came down the rock to meet them. But Amroth said, "Wait here for me; it has been a troublesome business, and I must go and bestow this poor creature in a place of safety—I will return." He led the old man away among the rocks, and I waited a long time, wondering very heavily what it was that I had seen.
When Amroth came back to the rock he was fresh and smiling again: he swung himself up, and sat by me, with his hands clasped round his knees. Then he looked at me, and said, "I daresay you are surprised? You did not expect to see such terrors and dangers here? And it is a great mystery."
"You must be kind," I said, "and explain to me what has happened."
"Well," said Amroth, "there is a large gang of men who infest this place, who have got up here by their agility, and can go no further, who make it their business to prevent all they can from coming up. I confess that it is the hardest thing of all to understand why it is allowed; but if you expect all to be plain sailing up here, you are mistaken. One needs to be wary and strong. They do much harm here, and will continue to do it."
"What would have happened if they had found us here?" I said.
"Nothing very much," said Amroth; "a good deal of talk no doubt, and some blows perhaps. But it was well I was with you, because I could have summoned help. They are not as strong as they look either—it is mostly fear that aids them."
"Well, but who are they?" I said.
"They are the most troublesome crew of all," said Amroth, "and come nearest to the old idea of fiends—they are indeed the origin of that notion. To speak plainly, they are men who have lived virtuous lives, and have done cruel things from good motives. There are some kings and statesmen among them, but they are mostly priests and schoolmasters, I imagine—people with high ideals, of course! But they are not replenished so fast as they used to be, I think. Their difficulty is that they can never see that they are wrong. Their notion is that this is a bad place to come to, and that people are better left in ignorance and bliss, obedient and submissive. A good many of them have given up the old rough methods, and hang about the base of the cliff, dissuading souls from climbing: they do the most harm of all, because if one does turn back here, it is long before one may make a new attempt. But enough of this," he added; "it makes me sick to think of them—the old fellow you saw with me had an awful fright—he was nearly done as it was! But I see you are feeling stronger, and I think we had better be going. One does not stay here by choice, though the place has a beauty of its own. And now you will have an easier time for awhile."
We descended from our rock, and Amroth led the way, through a long cleft, with rocks, very rough and black, on either side, and fallen fragments under foot. It was steep at first; but soon the rocks grew lower; and we came out presently on to a great desolate plain, with stones lying thickly about, among a coarse kind of grass. At each step I seemed to grow stronger, and walked more lightly, and in the thin fine air my horrors left me, though I still had a dumb sense of suffering which, strange to say, I found it almost pleasant to resist. And so we walked for a time in friendly silence, Amroth occasionally indicating the way. The hill began to slope downwards very slowly, and the wind to subside. The mist drew off little by little, till at last I saw ahead of us a great bare-looking fortress with high walls and little windows, and a great blank tower over all.
XVIII
We were received at the guarded door of the fortress by a porter, who seemed to be well acquainted with Amroth. Within, it was a big, bare place, with, stone-arched cloisters and corridors, more like a monastery than a castle. Amroth led me briskly along the passages, and took me into a large room very sparely furnished, where an elderly man sat writing at a table with his back to the light. He rose when we entered, and I had a sudden sense that I was coming to school again, as indeed I was. Amroth greeted him with a mixture of freedom and respect, as a well-loved pupil might treat an old schoolmaster. The man himself was tall and upright, and serious-looking, but for a twinkle of humour that lurked in his eye; yet I felt he was one who expected to be obeyed. He took Amroth into the embrasure of a window, and talked with him in low tones. Then he came back to me and asked me a few questions of which I did not then understand the drift—but it seemed a kind of very informal examination. Then he made us a little bow of dismissal, and sat down at once to his writing without giving us another look. Amroth took me out, and led me up many stone stairs, along whitewashed passages, with narrow windows looking out on the plain, to a small cell or room near the top of the castle. It was very austerely furnished, but it had a little door which took us out on the leads, and I then saw what a very large place the fortress was, consisting of several courts with a great central tower.
"Where on earth have we got to now?" I said.
"Nowhere 'on earth,'" said Amroth. "You are at school again, and you will find it very interesting, I hope and expect, but it will be hard work. I will tell you plainly that you are lucky to be here, because if you do well, you will have the best sort of work to do."
"But what am I to do, and where am I to go?" I said. "I feel like a new boy, with all sorts of dreadful rules in the background."
"That will all be explained to you," said Amroth. "And now good-bye for the present. Let me hear a good report of you," he added, with a parental air, "when I come again. What would not we older fellows give to be back here!" he added with a half-mocking smile. "Let me tell you, my boy, you have got the happiest time of your life ahead of you. Well, be a credit to your friends!"
He gave me a nod and was gone. I stood for a little looking out rather desolately into the plain. There came a brisk tap at my door, and a man entered. He greeted me pleasantly, gave me a few directions, and I gathered that he was one of the instructors. "You will find it hard work," he said; "we do not waste time here. But I gather that you have had rather a troublesome ascent, so you can rest a little. When you are required, you will be summoned."
When he left me, I still felt very weary, and lay down on a little couch in the room, falling presently asleep. I was roused by the entry of a young man, who said he had been sent to fetch me: we went down along the passages, while he talked pleasantly in low tones about the arrangements of the place. As we went along the passages, the doors of the cells kept opening, and we were joined by young men and women, who spoke to me or to each other, but all in the same subdued voices, till at last we entered a big, bare, arched room, lit by high windows, with rows of seats, and a great desk or pulpit at the end. I looked round me in great curiosity. There must have been several hundred people present, sitting in rows. There was a murmur of talk over the hall, till a bell suddenly sounded somewhere in the castle, a door opened, a man stepped quickly into the pulpit, and began to speak in a very clear and distinct tone.
The discourse—and all the other discourses to which I listened in the place—was of a psychological kind, dealing entirely with the relations of human beings with each other, and the effect and interplay of emotions. It was extremely scientific, but couched in the simplest phraseology, and made many things clear to me which had formerly been obscure. There is nothing in the world so bewildering as the selective instinct of humanity, the reasons which draw people to each other, the attractive power of similarity and dissimilarity, the effects of class and caste, the abrupt approaches of passion, the influence of the body on the soul and of the soul on the body. It came upon me with a shock of surprise that while these things are the most serious realities in the world, and undoubtedly more important than any other thing, little attempt is made by humanity to unravel or classify them. I cannot here enter into the details of these instructions, which indeed would be unintelligible, but they showed me at first what I had not at all apprehended, namely the proportionate importance and unimportance of all the passions and emotions which regulate our relations with other souls. These discourses were given at regular intervals, and much of our time was spent in discussing together or working out in solitude the details of psychological problems, which we did with the exactness of chemical analysis.
What I soon came to understand was that the whole of psychology is ruled by the most exact and immutable laws, in which there is nothing fortuitous or abnormal, and that the exact course of an emotion can be predicted with perfect certainty if only all the data are known.
One of the most striking parts of these discourses was the fact that they were accompanied by illustrations. I will describe the first of these which I saw. The lecturer stopped for an instant and held up his hand. In the middle of one of the side-walls of the room was a great shallow arched recess. In this recess there suddenly appeared a scene, not as though it were cast by a lantern on the wall, but as if the wall were broken down, and showed a room beyond.
In the room, a comfortably furnished apartment, there sat two people, a husband and wife, middle-aged people, who were engaged in a miserable dispute about some very trivial matter. The wife was shrill and provocative, the husband curt and contemptuous. They were obviously not really concerned about the subject they were discussing—it only formed a ground for disagreeable personalities. Presently the man went out, saying harshly that it was very pleasant to come back from his work, day after day, to these scenes; to which the woman fiercely retorted that it was all his own fault; and when he was gone, she sat for a time mechanically knitting, with the tears trickling down her cheeks, and every now and then glancing at the door. After which, with great secrecy, she helped herself to some spirits which she took from a cupboard.
The scene was one of the most vulgar and debasing that can be described or imagined; and it was curious to watch the expressions on the faces of my companions. They wore the air of trained doctors or nurses, watching some disagreeable symptoms, with a sort of trained and serene compassion, neither shocked nor grieved. Then the situation was discussed and analysed, and various suggestions were made which were dealt with by the lecturer, in a way which showed me that there was much for us to master and to understand.
There were many other such illustrations given. They were, I discovered, by no means imaginary cases, projected into our minds by a kind of mental suggestion, but actual things happening upon earth. We saw many strange scenes of tragedy, we had a glimpse of lunatic asylums and hospitals, of murder even, and of evil passions of anger and lust. We saw scenes of grief and terror; and, stranger still, we saw many things that were being enacted not on the earth, but upon other planets, where the forms and appearances of the creatures concerned were fantastic and strange enough, but where the motive and the emotion were all perfectly clear. At times, too, we saw scenes that were beautiful and touching, high and heroic beyond words. These seemed to come rather by contrast and for encouragement; for the work was distinctly pathological, and dealt with the disasters and complications of emotions, as a rule, rather than with their glories and radiances. But it was all incredibly absorbing and interesting, though what it was to lead up to I did not quite discern. What struck me was the concentration of effort upon human emotion, and still more the fact that other hopes and passions, such as ambition and acquisitiveness, as well as all material and economic problems, were treated as infinitely insignificant, as just the framework of human life, only interesting in so far as the baser and meaner elements of circumstance can just influence, refining or coarsening, the highest traits of character and emotion.
We were given special cases, too, to study and consider, and here I had the first inkling of how far it is possible for disembodied spirits to be in touch with those who are still in the body.
As far as I can see, no direct intellectual contact is possible, except under certain circumstances. There is, of course, a great deal of thought-vibration taking place in the world, to which the best analogy is wireless telegraphy. There exists an all-pervading emotional medium, into which every thought that is tinged with emotion sends a ripple. Thoughts which are concerned with personal emotion send the firmest ripple into this medium, and all other thoughts and passions affect it, not in proportion to the intensity of the thought, but to the nature of the thought. The scale is perfectly determined and quite unalterable; thus a thought, however strong and intense, which is concerned with wealth or with personal ambition sends a very little ripple into the medium, while a thought of affection is very noticeable indeed, and more noticeable in proportion as it is purer and less concerned with any kind of bodily passion. Thus, strange to say, the thought of a father for a child is a stronger thought than that of a lover for his beloved. I do not know the exact scale of force, which is as exact as that of chemical values—and of course such emotions are apt to be complex and intricate; but the purer and simpler the thought is, the greater is its force. Perhaps the prayers that one prays for those whom one loves send the strongest ripple of all. If it happens that two of these ripples of personal emotion are closely similar, a reflex action takes place; and thus is explained the phenomenon which often takes place, the sudden sense of a friend's personality, if that friend, in absence, writes one a letter, or bends his mind intently upon one. It also explains the way in which some national or cosmic emotion suddenly gains simultaneous force, and vibrates in thousands of minds at the same time.
The body, by its joys and sufferings alike, offers a great obstruction to these emotional waves. In the land of spirits, as I have indicated, an intention of congenial wills gives an instantaneous perception; but this seems impossible between an embodied spirit and a disembodied spirit. The only communication which seems possible is that of a vague emotion; and it seems quite impossible for any sort of intellectual idea to be directly communicated by a disembodied spirit to an embodied spirit.
On the other hand, the intellectual processes of an embodied spirit are to a certain extent perceptible by a disembodied spirit; but there is a condition to this, and that is that some emotional sympathy must have existed between the two on earth. If there is no such sympathy, then the body is an absolute bar.
I could look into the mind of Amroth and see his thought take shape, as
I could look into a stream, and see a fish dart from a covert of weed.
But with those still in the body it is different. And I will therefore
proceed to describe a single experience which will illustrate my point.
I was ordered to study the case of a former friend of my own who was still living upon earth. Nothing was told me about him, but, sitting in my cell, I put myself into communication with him upon earth. He had been a contemporary of mine at the university, and we had many interests in common. He was a lawyer; we did not very often meet, but when we did meet it was always with great cordiality and sympathy. I now found him ill and suffering from overwork, in a very melancholy state. When I first visited him, he was sitting alone, in the garden of a little house in the country. I could see that he was ill and sad; he was making pretence to read, but the book was wholly disregarded.
When I attempted to put my mind into communication with his, it was very difficult to see the drift of his thoughts. I was like a man walking in a dense fog, who can just discern at intervals recognisable objects as they come within his view; but there was no general prospect and no distance. His mind seemed a confused current of distressing memories; but there came a time when his thought dwelt for a moment upon myself; he wished that I could be with him, that he might speak of some of his perplexities. In that instant, the whole grew clearer, and little by little I was enabled to trace the drift of his thoughts. I became aware that though he was indeed suffering from overwork, yet that his enforced rest only removed the mental distraction of his work, and left his mind free to revive a whole troop of painful thoughts. He had been a man of strong personal ambitions, and had for twenty years been endeavouring to realise them. Now a sense of the comparative worthlessness of his aims had come upon him. He had despised and slighted other emotions; and his mind had in consequence drifted away like a boat into a bitter and barren sea. He was a lonely man, and he was feeling that he had done ill in not multiplying human emotions and relations. He reflected much upon the way in which he had neglected and despised his home affections, while he had formed no ties of his own. Now, too, his career seemed to him at an end, and he had nothing to look forward to but a maimed and invalided life of solitude and failure. Many of his thoughts I could not discern at all—the mist, so to speak, involved them—while many were obscure to me. When he thought about scenes and people whom I had never known, the thought loomed shapeless and dark; but when he thought, as he often did, about his school and university days, and about his home circle, all of which scenes were familiar to me, I could read his mind with perfect clearness. At the bottom of all lay a sense of deep disappointment and resentment. He doubted the justice of God, and blamed himself but little for his miseries. It was a sad experience at first, because he was falling day by day into more hopeless dejection; while he refused the pathetic overtures of sympathy which the relations in whose house he was—a married sister with her husband and children—offered him. He bore himself with courtesy and consideration, but he was so much worn with fatigue and despondency that he could not take any initiative. But I became aware very gradually that he was learning the true worth and proportion of things—and the months which passed so heavily for him brought him perceptions of the value of which he was hardly aware. Let me say that it was now that the incredible swiftness of time in the spiritual region made itself felt for me. A month of his sufferings passed to me, contemplating them, like an hour.
I found to my surprise that his thoughts of myself were becoming more frequent; and one day when he was turning over some old letters and reading a number of mine, it seemed to me that his spirit almost recognised my presence in the words which came to his lips, "It seems like yesterday!" I then became blessedly aware that I was actually helping him, and that the very intentness of my own thought was quickening his own.
I discussed the whole case very closely and carefully with one of our instructors, who set me right on several points and made the whole state of things clear to me.
I said to him, "One thing bewilders me; it would almost seem that a man's work upon earth constituted an interruption and a distraction from spiritual influences. It cannot surely be that people in the body should avoid employment, and give themselves to secluded meditation? If the soul grows fast in sadness and despondency, it would seem that one should almost have courted sorrow on earth; and yet I cannot believe that to be the case."
"No," he said, "it is not the case; the body has here to be considered. No amount of active exertion clouds the eye of the soul, if only the motive of it is pure and lofty, and if the soul is only set patiently and faithfully upon the true end of life. The body indeed requires due labour and exercise, and the soul can gain health and clearness thereby. But what does cloud the spirit is if it gives itself wholly up to narrow personal aims and ambitions, and uses friendship and love as mere recreations and amusements. Sickness and sorrow are not, as we used to think, fortuitous things; they are given to those who need them, as high and rich opportunities; and they come as truly blessed gifts, when they break a man's thought off from material things, and make him fall back upon the loving affections and relations of life. When one re-enters the world, a woman's life is sometimes granted to a spirit, because a woman by circumstance and temperament is less tempted to decline upon meaner ambitions and interests than a man; but work and activity are no hindrances to spiritual growth, so long as the soul waits upon God, and desires to learn the lessons of life, rather than to enforce its own conclusions upon others."
"Yes," I said, "I see that. What, then, is the great hindrance in the life of men?"
"Authority," he said, "whether given or taken. That is by far the greatest difficulty that a soul has to contend with. The knowledge of the true conditions of life is so minute and yet so imperfect, when one is in the body, that the man or woman who thinks it a duty to disapprove, to correct, to censure, is in the gravest danger. In the first place it is so impossible to disentangle the true conditions of any human life; to know how far those failures which are lightly called sins are inherited instincts of the body, or the manifestation of immaturity of spirit. Complacency, hard righteousness, spiritual security, severe judgments, are the real foes of spiritual growth; and if a man is in a position to enforce his influence and his will upon others, he can fall very low indeed, and suspend his own growth for a very long and sad period. It is not the criticism or the analysis of others which hurts the soul, so long as it remains modest and sincere and conscious of its own weaknesses. It is when we indulge in secure or compassionate comparisons of our own superior worth that we go backwards."
This was but one of the many cases which I had to investigate. I do not say that this is the work of all spirits in the other world—it is not so; there are many kinds of work and occupation. This was the one now allotted to me; but I did become aware of the intense and loving interest which is bent upon the souls of the living by those who are departed. There is not a soul alive who is not being thus watched and tended, and helped, as far as help is possible; for no one is ever forced or compelled or frightened into truth, only drawn and wooed by love and care.
I must say a word, too, of the great and noble friendships which I formed at this period of my existence. We were not free to make many of these at a time. Love seems to be the one thing that demands an entire concentration, and though in the world of spirits I became aware that one could be conscious of many of the thoughts of those about me simultaneously, yet the emotion of love, in the earlier stages, is single and exclusive.
I will speak of two only. There were a young man and a young woman who were much associated with me at that time, whom I will call Philip and Anna. Philip was one of the most beautiful of all the spirits I ever came near. His last life upon earth had been a long one, and he had been a teacher. I used to tell him that I wished I had been under him as a pupil, to which he replied, laughing, that I should have found him very uninteresting. He said to me once that the way in which he had always distinguished the two kinds of teachers on earth had been by whether they were always anxious to teach new books and new subjects, or went on contentedly with the old. "The pleasure," he said, "was in the teaching, in making the thought clear, in tempting the boys to find out what they knew all the time; and the oftener I taught a subject the better I liked it; it was like a big cog-wheel, with a number of little cog-wheels turning with it. But the men who were always wanting to change their subjects were the men who thought of their own intellectual interest first, and very little of the small interests revolving upon it." The charm of Philip was the charm of extreme ingenuousness combined with daring insight. He never seemed to be shocked or distressed by anything. He said one day, "It was not the sensual or the timid or the ill-tempered boys who used to make me anxious. Those were definite faults and brought definite punishment; it was the hard-hearted, virtuous, ambitious, sensible boys, who were good-humoured and respectable and selfish, who bothered me; one wanted to shake them as a terrier shakes a rat—but there was nothing to get hold of. They were a credit to themselves and to their parents and to the school; and yet they went downhill with every success."
Anna was a woman of singularly unselfish and courageous temperament. She had been, in the course of her last life upon earth, a hospital nurse; and she used to speak gratefully of the long periods when she was nursing some anxious case, when she had interchanged day and night, sleeping when the world was awake, and sitting with a book or needlework by the sick-bed, through the long darkness. "People used to say to me that it must be so depressing; but those were my happiest hours, as the dark brightened into dawn, when many of the strange mysteries of life and pain and death gave up their secrets to me. But of course," she added with a smile, "it was all very dim to me. I felt the truth rather than saw it; and it is a great joy to me to perceive now what was happening, and how the sad, bewildered hours of pain and misery leave their blessed marks upon the soul, like the tools of the graver on the gem. If only we could learn to plan a little less and to believe a little more, how much simpler it would all be!"
These two became very dear to me, and I learnt much heavenly wisdom from them in long, quiet conferences, where we spoke frankly of all we had felt and known.
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 life upon earth; but at intervals there had visited me a sense of older and purer recollections. I cannot describe exactly how it came about—and, indeed, the memory of what my heavenly progress had hitherto been, as opposed to my earthly experience, was never very clear to me; but I became aware that my life in heaven—I will call it heaven for want of a better name—was my real continuous life, my home-life, so to speak, while my earthly lives had been, to pursue the metaphor, like terms which a boy spends at school, in which he is aware that he not only learns definite and tangible things, but that his character is hardened and consolidated by coming into contact with the rougher facts of life—duty, responsibility, friendships, angers, treacheries, temptations, routine. The boy returns with gladness to the serener and sweeter atmosphere of home; and just in the same way I felt I had returned to the larger and purer life of heaven. But, as I say, the recollection of my earlier life in heaven, my occupations and experience, was never clear to me, but rather as a luminous and haunting mist. I questioned Amroth about this once, and he said that this was the universal experience, and that the earthly lives one lived were like deep trenches cut across a path, and seemed to interrupt the heavenly sequence; but that as the spirit grew more pure and wise, the consciousness of the heavenly life became more distinct and secure. But he added, what I did not quite understand, that there was little need of memory in the life of heaven, and that it was to a great extent the inheritance of the body. Memory, he said, was to a great extent an interruption to life; the thought of past failures and mistakes, and especially of unkindnesses and misunderstandings, tended to obscure and complicate one's relations with other souls; but that in heaven, where activity and energy were untiring and unceasing, one lived far more in the emotion and work of the moment, and less in retrospect and prospect. What mattered was actual experience and the effect of experience; memory itself was but an artistic method of dealing with the past, and corresponded to fanciful and delightful anticipations of the future. "The truth is," he said, "that the indulgence of memory is to a great extent a mere sentimental weakness; to live much in recollection is a sign of exhausted and depleted vitality. The further you are removed from 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 to revert to retrospect, because the pure energies of the moment are all-sustaining and all-sufficing."
The only trace I ever noticed of any memory of my past life in heaven was that things sometimes seemed surprisingly familiar to me, and that I had the sense of a serene permanence, which possessed and encompassed me. Indeed I came to believe that the strange feeling of permanence which haunts one upon earth, when one is happy and content, even though one knows that everything is changing and shifting around one, and that all is precarious and uncertain, is in itself a memory of the serene and untroubled continuance of heaven, and a desire to taste it and realise it.
Be this as it may, from the time of my finding my settled task and ordered place in the heavenly community the memories of my old life upon earth began to fade from my thoughts. I could, indeed, always recall them by an effort, but there seemed less and less inclination to do so the more I became absorbed in my heavenly activities.
One thing I noticed in these days; it surprised me very greatly, till I reflected that my surprise was but the consequence of the strange and mournful blindness with regard to spiritual things in which we live under the dark skies of earth. We have there a false idea that somehow or other death takes all the individuality out of a man, obliterating all the whims, prejudices, the thorny and unreasonable dislikes and fancies, oddities, tempers, roughnesses, and subtlenesses from a temperament. Of course there are a good many of these things which disappear together with the body, such as the glooms, suspicions, and cloudy irritabilities, which are caused by fatigue and malaise, and by ill-health generally. But a man's whims and fancies and dislikes do not by any means disappear on earth when he is in good health; on the contrary, they are often apt to be accentuated and emphasised when he is free from pain and care and anxiety, and riding blithely over the waves of life. Indeed there are men whom I have known who are never kind or sympathetic till they are in some wearing trouble of their own; when they are prosperous and cheerful, they are frankly intolerable, because their mirth turns to derision and insolence.
But one of the reasons why the heavenly life is apt to appear in prospect so wearisome a thing is, because we are brought up to feel that the whole character is flattened out and charged with a serene kind of priggishness, which takes all the salt out of life. The word "saintly," so terribly misapplied on earth, grows to mean, to many of us, an irritating sort of kindness, which treats the interests and animated elements of life with a painful condescension, and a sympathy of which the basis is duty rather than love. The true sanctification, which I came to perceive something of later, is the result of a process of endless patience and infinite delay, and the attainment of it implies a humility, seven times refined in the fires of self-contempt, in which there remains no smallest touch of superiority or aloofness. How utterly depressing is the feigned interest of the imperfect human saint in matters of mundane concern! How it takes at once both the joy out of holiness and the spirit out of human effort! It is as dreary as the professional sympathy of the secluded student for the news of athletic contests, as the tolerance of the shrewd man of science for the feminine logic of religious sentiment!
But I found to my great content that whatever change had passed over the spirits of my companions, they had at least lost no fibre of their individuality. The change that had passed over them was like the change that passes over a young man, who has lived at the University among dilettante literary designs and mild sociological theorising, when he finds himself plunged into the urgent practical activities of the world. Our happiness was the happiness which comes of intense toil, with no fatigue to dog it, and from a consciousness of the vital issues which we were pursuing. But my companions had still intellectual faults and preferences, self-confidence, critical intolerance, boisterousness, wilfulness. Stranger still, I found coldness, anger, jealousy, still at work. Of course in the latter case reconciliation was easier, both in the light of common enthusiasm and, still more, because mental communication was so much swifter and easier than it had been on earth. There was no need of those protracted talks, those tiresome explanations which clever people, who really love and esteem each other, fall into on earth—the statements which affirm nothing, the explanations which elucidate nothing, because of the intricacies of human speech and the fact that people use the same words with such different implications and meanings. All those became unnecessary, because one could pierce instantaneously into the very essence of the soul, and manifest, without the need of expression, the regard and affection which lay beneath the cross-currents of emotion. But love and affection waxed and waned in heaven as on earth; it was weakened and it was transferred. Few souls are so serene on earth as to see with perfect equanimity a friend, whom one loves and trusts, becoming absorbed in some new and exciting emotion, which may not perhaps obliterate the original regard, but which must withdraw from it for a time the energy which fed the flame of the intermitted relation.
It was very strange to me to realise the fact that friendships and intimacies were formed as on earth, and that they lost their freshness, either from some lack of real congeniality or from some divergence of development. Sometimes, I may add, our teachers were consulted by the aggrieved, sometimes they even intervened unasked.
I will freely confess that this all immensely heightened the interests to me of our common life. One could see two spirits drawn together by some secret tie of emotion, and one could see some further influence strike across and suspend it. One case of this I will mention, which is typical of many. There came among us an extremely lively and rather whimsical spirit, more like a boy than a man. I wondered at first why he was chosen for this work, because he seemed both fitful and even capricious; but I gradually realised in him an extraordinary fineness of perception, and a swiftness of intuition almost unrivalled. He had a power of weighing almost by instinct the constituent elements of character, which seemed to me something like the power of tonality in a musician, the gift of recognising, by pure faculty, what any notes may be, however confusedly jangled on an instrument. It was wonderful to me how often his instantaneous judgments proved more sagacious than our carefully formed conclusions.
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.
XX
It was at this time that I had a memorable interview with the Master of the College. He appeared very little among us, though, he occasionally gave us a short instruction, in which he summed up the teaching on a certain point. He was a man of extraordinary impressiveness, mainly, I think, because he gave the sense of being occupied in much larger and wider interests. I often pondered over the question why the short, clear, rather dry discourses which fell from his lips appeared to be so far more weighty and momentous than anything else that was ever said to us. He used no arts of exhortation, showed no emotion, seemed hardly conscious of our presence; and if one caught his eye as he spoke, one became aware of a curious tremor of awe. He never made any appeal to our hearts or feelings; but it always seemed as if he had condescended for a moment to put aside far bigger and loftier designs in order to drop a fruit of ripened wisdom in our way. He came among us, indeed, like a statesman rather than like a teacher. The brief interviews we had with him were regarded with a sort of terror, but produced, in me at least, an almost fanatical respect and admiration. And yet I had no reason to suppose that he was not, like all of us, subject to the law of life and pilgrimage, though one could not conceive of him as having to enter the arena of life again as a helpless child!
On this occasion I was summoned suddenly to his presence. I found him, as usual, bent over his work, which he did not intermit, but merely motioned me to be seated. Presently he put away his papers from him, and turned round upon me. One of the disconcerting things about him was the fact that his thought had a peculiarly compelling tendency, and that while he read one's mind in a flash, his own thoughts remained very nearly impenetrable. On this occasion he commended me for my work and my relations with my fellow-students, adding that I had made rapid progress. He then said, "I have two questions to ask you. Have you any special relations, either with any one whom you have left behind you on earth, or with any one with whom you have made acquaintance since you quitted it, which you desire to pursue?"
I told him, which was the truth, that since my stay in the College I had become so much absorbed in the studies of the place that I seemed to have became strangely oblivious of my external friends, but that it was more a suspension than a destruction of would-be relations.
"Yes," he said, "I perceive that that is your temperament. It has its effectiveness, no doubt, but it also has its dangers; and, whatever happens, one ought never to be able to accuse oneself justly of any disloyalty."
He seemed to wait for me to speak, whereupon I mentioned a very dear friend of my days of earth; but I added that most of those whom I had loved best had predeceased me, and that I had looked forward to a renewal of our intercourse. I also mentioned the names of Charmides and Cynthia, the latter of whom was in memory strangely near to my heart.
He seemed satisfied with this. Then he said, "It is true that we have to multiply relationships with others, both in the world and out of it; but we must also practise economy. We must not abandon ourselves to passing fancies, or be subservient to charm, while if we have made an emotional mistake, and have been disappointed with one whom we have taken the trouble to win, we must guard such conquests with a close and peculiar tenderness. But enough of that, for I have to ask you if there is any special work for which you feel yourself disposed. There is a great choice of employment here. You may choose, if you will, just to live the spiritual life and discharge whatever duties of citizenship you may be called upon to perform. That is what most spirits do. I need not perhaps tell you"—here he smiled—"that freedom from the body does not confer upon any one, as our poor brothers and sisters upon earth seem to think, a heavenly vocation. Neither of course is the earthly fallacy about a mere absorption in worship a true one—only to a very few is that conceded. Still less is this a life of leisure. To be leisurely here is permitted only to the wearied, and to those childish creatures with whom you have spent some time in their barren security. I do not think you are suited for the work of recording the great scheme of life, nor do I think you are made for a teacher. You are not sufficiently impartial! For mere labour you are not suited; and yet I hardly think you would be fit to adopt the most honourable task which your friend Amroth so finely fulfils—a guide and messenger. What do you think?"
I said at once that I did not wish to have to make a decision, but that I preferred to leave it to him. I added that though I was conscious of my deficiencies, I did not feel conscious of any particular capacities, except that I found character a very fascinating study, especially in connection with the circumstances of life upon earth.
"Very well," he said, "I think that you may perhaps be best suited to the work of deciding what sort of life will best befit the souls who are prepared to take up their life upon earth again. That is a task of deep and infinite concern; it may surprise you," he added, "to learn that this is left to the decision of other souls. But it is, of course, the goal at which all earthly social systems are aiming, the right apportionment of circumstances to temperament, and you must not be surprised to find that here we have gone much further in that direction, though even here the system is not perfected; and you cannot begin to apprehend that fact too soon. It is unfortunate that on earth it is commonly believed, owing to the deadening influence of material causes, that beyond the grave everything is done with a Divine unanimity. But of course, if that were so, further growth and development would be impossible, and in view of infinite perfectibility there is yet very much that is faulty and incomplete. But I am not sure what lies before you; there is something in your temperament which a little baffles me, and our plans may have to be changed. Your very absorption in your work, your quick power of forgetting and throwing off impressions has its dangers. But I will bear in mind what you have said, and you may for the present resume your studies, and I will once more commend you; you have done well hitherto, and I will say frankly that I regard you as capable of useful and honourable work." He bowed in token of dismissal, and I went back to my work with unbounded gratitude and enthusiasm.
XXI
Some time after this I was surprised one morning at the sudden entrance of Amroth into my cell. He came in with a very bright and holiday aspect, and, assuming a paternal air, said that he had heard a very creditable account of my work and conduct, and that he had obtained leave for me to have an exeat. I suppose that I showed signs of impatience at the interruption, for he broke into a laugh, and said, "Well, I am going to insist. I believe you are working too hard, and we must not overstrain our faculties. It was bad enough, in the old days, but then it was generally the poor body which suffered first. But indeed it is quite possible to overwork here, and you have the dim air of the pale student. Come," he said, "whatever happens, do not become priggish. Not to want a holiday is a sign of spiritual pride. Besides, I have some curious things to show you."
I got up and said that I was ready, and Amroth led the way like a boy out for a holiday. He was brimming over with talk, and told me some stories about my friends in the land of delight, interspersing them with imitation of their manner and gesture, which made me giggle—Amroth was an admirable mimic. "I had hopes of Charmides," he said; "your stay there aroused his curiosity. But he has gone back to his absurd tones and half-tones, and is nearly insupportable. Cynthia is much more sensible, but Lucius is a nuisance, and Charmides, by the way, has become absurdly jealous of him. They really are very silly; but I have a pleasant plot, which I will unfold to you."
As we went down the interminable stairs, I said to Amroth, "There is a question I want to ask you. Why do we have to go and come, up and down, backwards and forwards, in this absurd way, as if we were still in the body? Why not just slip off the leads, and fly down over the crags like a pair of pigeons? It all seems to me so terribly material."
Amroth looked at me with a smile. "I don't advise you to try," he said. "Why, little brother, of course we are just as limited here in these ways. The material laws of earth are only a type of the laws here. They all have a meaning which remains true."
"But," I said, "we can visit the earth with incredible rapidity?"
"How can I explain?" said Amroth. "Of course we can do that, because the material universe is so extremely small in comparison. All the stars in the world are here but as a heap of sand, like the motes which dance in a sunbeam. There is no question of size, of course! But there is such a thing as spiritual nearness and spiritual distance for all that. The souls who do not return to earth are very far off, as you will sometime see. But we messengers have our short cuts, and I shall take advantage of them to-day."
We went out of the great door of the fortress, and I felt a sense of relief. It was good to put it all behind one. For a long time I talked to Amroth about all my doings. "Come," he said at last, "this will never do! You are becoming something of a bore! Do you know that your talk is very provincial? You seem to have forgotten about every one and everything except your Philips and Annas—very worthy creatures, no doubt—and the Master, who is a very able man, but not the little demigod you believe. You are hypnotised! It is indeed time for you to have a holiday. Why, I believe you have half forgotten about me, and yet you made a great fuss when I quitted you."
I smiled, frowned, blushed. It was indeed true. Now that he was with me I loved him as well, indeed better than ever; but I had not been thinking very much about him.
We went over the moorlands in the keen air, Amroth striding cleanly and lightly over the heather. Then we began to descend into the valley, through a fine forest country, somewhat like the chestnut-woods of the Apennines. The view was of incomparable beauty and width. I could see a great city far out in the plain, with a river entering it and leaving it, like a ribbon of silver. There were rolling ridges beyond. On the left rose huge, shadowy, snow-clad hills, rising to one tremendous dome of snow.
"Where are you going to take me?" I said to Amroth.
"Never mind," said he; "it's my day and my plan for once. You shall see what you shall see, and it will amuse me to hear your ingenuous conjectures."
We were soon on the outskirts of the city we had seen, which seemed a different kind of place from any I had yet visited. It was built, I perceived, upon an exactly conceived plan, of a stately, classical kind of architecture, with great gateways and colonnades. There were people about, rather silent and serious-looking, soberly clad, who saluted us as we passed, but made no attempt to talk to us. "This is rather a tiresome place, I always think," said Amroth; "but you ought to see it."
We went along the great street and reached a square. I was surprised at the elderly air of all we met. We found ourselves opposite a great building with a dome, like a church. People were going in under the portico, and we went in with them. They treated us as strangers, and made courteous way for us to pass.
Inside, the footfalls fell dumbly upon a great carpeted floor. It was very like a great church, except that there was no altar or sign of worship. At the far end, under an alcove, was a statue of white marble gleaming white, with head and hand uplifted. The whole place had a solemn and noble air. Out of the central nave there opened a series of great vaulted chapels; and I could now see that in each chapel there was a dark figure, in a sort of pulpit, addressing a standing audience. There were names on scrolls over the doors of the light iron-work screens which separated the chapels from the nave, but they were in a language I did not understand.
Amroth stopped at the third of the chapels, and said, "Here, this will do." We came in, and as before there was a courteous notice taken of us. A man in black came forward, and led us to a high seat, like a pew, near the preacher, from which we could survey the crowd. I was struck with their look of weariness combined with intentness.
The lecturer, a young man, had made a pause, but upon our taking our places, he resumed his speech. It was a discourse, as far as I could make out, on the development of poetry; he was speaking of lyrical poetry. I will not here reproduce it. I will only say that anything more acute, delicate, and discriminating, and, I must add, more entirely valueless and pedantic, I do not think I ever heard. It must have required immense and complicated knowledge. He was tracing the development of a certain kind of dramatic lyric, and what surprised me was that he supplied the subtle intellectual connection, the missing links, so to speak, of which there is no earthly record. Let me give a single instance. He was accounting for a rather sudden change of thought in a well-known poet, and he showed that it had been brought about by his making the acquaintance of a certain friend who had introduced him to a new range of subjects, and by his study of certain books. These facts are unrecorded in his published biography, but the analysis of the lecturer, done in a few pointed sentences, not only carried conviction to the mind, but just, so to speak, laid the truth bare. And yet it was all to me incredibly sterile and arid. Not the slightest interest was taken in the emotional or psychological side; it was all purely and exactly scientific. We waited until the end of the address, which was greeted with decorous applause, and the hall was emptied in a moment.
We visited other chapels where the same sort of thing was going on in other subjects. It all produced in me a sort of stupefaction, both at the amazing knowledge involved, and in the essential futility of it all.
Before we left the building we went up to the statue, which represented a female figure, looking upwards, with a pure and delicate beauty of form and gesture that was inexpressibly and coldly lovely.
We went out in silence, which seemed to be the rule of the place.
When we came away from the building we were accosted by a very grave and courteous person, who said that he perceived that we were strangers, and asked if he could be of any service to us, and whether we proposed to make a stay of any duration. Amroth thanked him, and said smilingly that we were only passing through. The gentleman said that it was a pity, because there was much of interest to hear. "In this place," he said with a deprecating gesture, "we grudge every hour that is not devoted to thought." He went on to inquire if we were following any particular line of study, and as our answers were unsatisfactory, he said that we could not do better than begin by attending the school of literature. "I observed," he said, "that you were listening to our Professor, Sylvanus, with attention. He is devoting himself to the development of poetical form. It is a rich subject. It has generally been believed that poets work by a sort of native inspiration, and that the poetic gift is a sort of heightening of temperament. But Sylvanus has proved—I think I may go so far as to say this—that this is all pure fancy, and what is worse, unsound fancy. It is all merely a matter of heredity, and the apparent accidents on which poetical expression depends can be analysed exactly and precisely into the most commonplace and simple elements. It is only a question of proportion. Now we who value clearness of mind above everything, find this a very refreshing thought. The real crown and sum of human achievement, in the intellectual domain, is to see things clearly and exactly, and upon that clearness all progress depends. We have disposed by this time of most illusions; and the same scientific method is being strenuously applied to all other processes of human endeavour. It is even hinted that Sylvanus has practically proved that the imaginative element in literature is purely a taint of barbarism, though he has not yet announced the fact. But many of his class are looking forward to his final lecture on the subject as to a profoundly sensational event, which is likely to set a deep mark upon all our conceptions of literary endeavour. So that," he said with a tolerant smile, gently rubbing his hands together, "our life here is not by any means destitute of the elements of excitement, though we most of us, of course, aim at the acquisition of a serene and philosophic temper. But I must not delay you," he added; "there is much to see and to hear, and you will be welcomed everywhere: and indeed I am myself somewhat closely engaged, though in a subject which is not fraught with such polite emollience. I attend the school of metaphysics, from which we have at last, I hope, eliminated the last traces of that debasing element of psychology, which has so long vitiated the exact study of the subject."
He took himself off with a bow, and I gazed blankly at Amroth. "The conversation of that very polite person," I said, "is like a bad dream! What is this extraordinarily depressing place? Shall I have to undergo a course here?"
"No, my dear boy," said Amroth. "This is rather out of your depth. But I am somewhat disappointed at your view of the situation. Surely these are all very important matters? Your disposition is, I am afraid, incurably frivolous! How could people be more worthily employed than in getting rid of the last traces of intellectual error, and in referring everything to its actual origin? Did not your heart burn within you at his luminous exposition? I had always thought you a boy of intellectual promise."
"Amroth," I said, "I will not be made fun of. This is the most dreadful place I have ever seen or conceived of! It frightens me. The dryness of pure science is terrifying enough, but after all that has a kind of strange beauty, because it deals either with transcendental ideas of mathematical relation, or with the deducing of principle from accumulated facts. But here the object appears to be to eliminate the human element from humanity. I insist upon knowing where you have brought me, and what is going on here."
"Well, then," said Amroth, "I will conceal it from you no longer. This is the paradise of thought, where meagre and spurious philosophers, and all who have submerged life in intellect, have their reward. It is, as you say, a very dreary place for children of nature like you and me. But I do not suppose that there is a happier or a busier place in all our dominions. The worst of it is that it is so terribly hard to get out of. It is a blind alley and leads nowhere. Every step has to be retraced. These people have to get a very severe dose of homely life to do them any good; and the worst of it is that they are so entirely virtuous. They have never had the time or the inclination to be anything else. And they are among the most troublesome and undisciplined of all our people. But I see you have had enough; and unless you wish to wait for Professor Sylvanus's sensational pronouncement, we will go elsewhere, and have some other sort of fun. But you must not be so much upset by these things."
"It would kill me," I said, "to hear any more of these lectures, and if I had to listen to much of our polite friend's conversation, I should go out of my mind. I would rather fall into the hands of the cragmen! I would rather have a stand-up fight than be slowly stifled with interesting information. But where do these unhappy people come from?"
"A few come from universities," said Amroth, "but they are not as a rule really learned men. They are more the sort of people who subscribe to libraries, and belong to local literary societies, and go into a good many subjects on their own account. But really learned men are almost always more aware of their ignorance than of their knowledge, and recognise the vitality of life, even if they do not always exhibit it. But come, we are losing time, and we must go further afield."