It is very terrible to think that the labour by which men are to live should be of this order. The ideal of labour is that it should be something in which we can take an interest and even a pride. Immense masses of it in London are the merest slavery, and it is as mechanical as the daily journey of the omnibus horse. There is no possibility of relieving it, and all the ordinary copybook advice of moralists and poets as to the temper in which we should earn our bread is childish nonsense. If a man is a painter, or a physician, or a barrister, or even a tradesman, well and good. The maxims of authors may be of some service to him, and he may be able to exemplify them; but if he is a copying clerk they are an insult, and he can do nothing but arch his back to bear his burden and find some compensation elsewhere. True it is, that beneficent Nature here, as always, is helpful. Habit, after a while, mitigated much of the bitterness of destiny. The hard points of the flint became smoothed and worn away by perpetual tramping over them, so that they no longer wounded with their original sharpness; and the sole of the foot was in time provided with a merciful callosity. Then, too, there was developed an appetite which was voracious for all that was best. Who shall tell the revulsion on reaching home, which I should never have known had I lived a life of idleness! Ellen was fond of hearing me read, and with a little care I was able to select what would bear reading—dramas, for example. She liked the reading for the reading’s sake, and she liked to know that what I thought was communicated to her; that she was not excluded from the sphere in which I lived. Of the office she never heard a word, and I never would tell her anything about it; but there was scarcely a single book in my possession which could be read aloud, that we did not go through together in this way. I don’t prescribe this kind of life to everybody. Some of my best friends, I know, would find it intolerable, but it suited us. Philosophy and religion I did not touch. It was necessary to choose themes with varying human interest, such as the best works of fiction, a play, or a poem; and these perhaps, on the whole, did me more good at that time than speculation. Oh, how many times have I left my office humiliated by some silently endured outbreak on the part of my master, more galling because I could not put it aside as altogether gratuitous; and in less than an hour it was two miles away, and I was myself again. If a man wants to know what the potency of love is, he must be a menial; he must be despised. Those who are prosperous and courted cannot understand its power. Let him come home after he has suffered what is far worse than hatred—the contempt of a superior, who knows that he can afford to be contemptuous, seeing that he can replace his slave at a moment’s notice. Let him be trained by his tyrant to dwell upon the thought that he belongs to the vast crowd of people in London who are unimportant; almost useless; to whom it is a charity to offer employment; who are conscious of possessing no gift which makes them of any value to anybody, and he will then comprehend the divine efficacy of the affection of that woman to whom he is dear. God’s mercy be praised ever more for it! I cannot write poetry, but if I could, no theme would tempt me like that of love to such a person as I was—not love, as I say again, to the hero, but love to the Helot. Over and over again, when I have thought about it, I have felt my poor heart swell with a kind of uncontrollable fervour. I have often, too, said to myself that this love is no delusion. If we were to set it down as nothing more than a merciful cheat on the part of the Creator, however pleasant it might be, it would lose its charm. If I were to think that my wife’s devotion to me is nothing more than the simple expression of a necessity to love somebody, that there is nothing in me which justifies such devotion, I should be miserable. Rather, I take it, is the love of woman to man a revelation of the relationship in which God stands to him—of what ought to be, in fact. In the love of a woman to the man who is of no account God has provided us with a true testimony of what is in His own heart. I often felt this when looking at myself and at Ellen. “What is there in me?” I have said, “is she not the victim of some self-created deception?” and I was wretched till I considered that in her I saw the Divine Nature itself, and that her passion was a stream straight from the Highest. The love of woman is, in other words, a living witness never failing of an actuality in God which otherwise we should never know. This led me on to connect it with Christianity; but I am getting incoherent and must stop.
My employment now was so incessant, for it was still necessary that I should write for my newspaper—although my visits to the House of Commons had perforce ceased—that I had no time for any schemes or dreams such as those which had tormented me when I had more leisure. In one respect this was a blessing. Destiny now had prescribed for me. I was no longer agitated by ignorance of what I ought to do. My present
