My love for Ellen was great, but I discovered that even such love as this could not be left to itself. It wanted perpetual cherishing. The lamp, if it was to burn brightly, required daily trimming, for people became estranged and indifferent, not so much by open quarrel or serious difference, as by the intervention of trifles which need but the smallest, although continuous effort for their removal. The true wisdom is to waste no time over them, but to eject them at once. Love, too, requires that the two persons who love one another shall constantly present to one another what is best in them, and to accomplish this, deliberate purpose, and even struggle, are necessary. If through relapse into idleness we do not attempt to bring soul and heart into active communion day by day, what wonder if this once exalted relationship become vulgar and mean?
I was much overworked. It was not the work itself which was such a trial, but the time it consumed. At best, I had but a clear space of an hour, or an hour and a half at home, and to slave merely for this seemed such a mockery! Day after day sped swiftly by, made up of nothing but this infernal drudgery, and I said to myself—Is this life? But I made up my mind that never would I give myself tongue. I clapped a muzzle on my mouth. Had I followed my own natural bent, I should have become expressive about what I had to endure, but I found that expression reacts on him who expresses and intensifies what is expressed. If we break out into rhetoric over a toothache, the pangs are not the easier, but the worse to be borne.
I naturally contracted a habit of looking forward from the present moment to one beyond. The whole week seemed to exist for the Sunday. On Monday morning I began counting the hours till Sunday should arrive. The consequence was, that when it came, it was not enjoyed properly, and I wasted it in noting the swiftness of its flight. Oh, how absurd is man! If we were to reckon up all the moments which we really enjoy for their own sake, how few should we find them to be! The greatest part, far the greatest part, of our lives is spent in dreaming over the morrow, and when it comes, it, too, is consumed in the anticipation of a brighter morrow, and so the cheat is prolonged, even to the grave. This tendency, unconquerable though it may appear to be, can to a great extent at any rate, be overcome by strenuous discipline. I tried to blind myself to the future, and many and many a time, as I walked along that dreary New Road or Old St. Pancras Road, have I striven to compel myself not to look at the image of Hampstead Heath or Regent’s Park, as yet six days in front of me, but to get what I could out of what was then with me.
The instinct which leads us perpetually to compare what we are with what we might be is no doubt of enormous value, and is the spring which prompts all action, but, like every instinct, it is the source of greatest danger. I remember the day and the very spot on which it flashed into me, like a sudden burst of the sun’s rays, that I had no right to this or that—to so much happiness, or even so much virtue. What title-deeds could I show for such a right? Straightway it seemed as if the centre of a whole system of dissatisfaction were removed, and as if the system collapsed. God, creating from His infinite resources a whole infinitude of beings, had created me with a definite position on the scale, and that position only could I claim. Cease the trick of contrast. If I can by any means get myself to consider myself alone without reference to others, discontent will vanish. I walk this Old St. Pancras Road on foot—another rides. Keep out of view him who rides and all persons riding, and I shall not complain that I tramp in the wet. So also when I think how small and weak I am.
How foolish it is to try and cure by argument what time will cure so completely and so gently if left to itself. As I get older, the anxiety to prove myself right if I quarrel dies out. I hold my tongue and time vindicates me, if it is possible to vindicate me, or convicts me if I am wrong. Many and many a debate too which I have had with myself alone has been settled in the same way. The question has been put aside and has lost its importance. The ancient Church thought, and seriously enough, no doubt, that all the vital interests of humanity were bound up with the controversies upon the Divine nature; but the centuries have rolled on, and who cares for those controversies now. The problems of death and immortality once upon a time haunted me so that I could hardly sleep for thinking about them. I cannot tell how, but so it is, that at the present moment, when I am years nearer the end, they trouble me but very little. If I could but bury and let rot things which torment me and come to no settlement—if I could always do this—what a blessing it would be.
IX
Holidays
I have said that Ellen had a child by her first husband. Marie, for
