Disenchantment

the end of his days, by anyone who has ever had it. This is the power of taking delight in a thing, or rather in anything, everything, not as a means to some other end, but just because it is what it is, as the lover dotes on whatever may be the traits of the beloved object. A child in the full health of his mind will put his hand flat on the summer turf, feel it, and give a little shiver of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe. He is not thinking how well it will do for some game or to feed sheep upon. That would be the way of the wooer whose mind runs on his mistress’s money. The child’s is sheer affection, the true ecstatic sense of the thing’s inherent characteristics. No matter what the things may be, no matter what they are good or no good for, there they are, each with a thrilling unique look and feel of its own, like a face; the iron astringently cool under its paint, the painted wood familiarly warmer, the clod crumbling enchantingly down in the hands, with its little dry smell of the sun and of hot nettles; each common thing a personality marked by delicious differences.

This joy of an Adam new to the garden and just looking round is brought by the normal child to the things that he does as well as those that he sees. To be suffered to do some plain work with the real spade used by mankind can give him a mystical exaltation: to come home with his legs, as the French say, reentering his body from the fatigue of helping the gardener to weed beds sends him to sleep in the glow of a beatitude that is an end in itself. Then the paradoxes of conduct begin to twinkle into sight; sugar is good, but there is a time to refrain from taking it though you can; a lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie. Divine unreason, as little scrutable and yet as surely a friend as the star that hangs a lamp out from the Pole to show you the way across gorse-covered commons in Surrey. So he will toe the line of a duty, not with a mere release from dismay, but exultantly, with the fire and lifting of heart of the strong man and the bridegroom, feeling always the same secret and almost sensuous transport, while he suppresses a base impulse, that he felt when he pressed the warm turf with his hand or the crumbling clay trickled warm between his fingers.

The right education, if we could find it, would work up this creative faculty of delight into all its branching possibilities of knowledge, wisdom, and nobility. Of all three it is the beginning, condition, or raw material. At present it almost seems to be the aim of the commonplace teacher to take it firmly away from any pupil so blessed as to possess it. How we all know the kind of public school master whose manner expresses breezy comradeship with the boys in facing jointly the boredom of admittedly beastly but still unavoidable lessons! And the assumption that life out of school is too dull to be faced without the aid of infinitely elaborated games! And the girl schools where it seems to be feared that evil must come in any space of free time in which neither a game nor a dance nor a concert nor a lecture with a lantern intervenes to rescue the girls from the presumed tedium of mere youth and health! Everywhere the assumption that simple things have failed; that anything like hardy mental living and looking about for oneself, to find interests, is destined to end ill; that the only hope is to keep up the full dose of drugs, to be always pulling and pushing, prompting and coaxing and tickling the youthful mind into condescending to be interested. You know the effects: the adolescent whose mind seems to drop when taken out of the school shafts, or at least to look round, utterly at a loss, with a plaintive appeal for a suggestion of something to do, some excitement to come, something to make it worth while to be alive on this dull earth. We saw the effects in our hapless brain work in the war.

But if we were to wait to save England till thousands of men and women brought up in this way see what they have lost and insist on a better fate for their children we might as well write England off as one with Tyre and Sidon already. Her case is too pressing. She cannot wait for big, slowly telling improvements in big institutions, although improvements must come. She has to be saved by a change in the individual temper. We each have to fall back, with a will, on the only way of life in which the sane simplicity of joy in plain things and in common rightness of action can be generated. Health of mind or body comes of doing wholesome things⁠—perhaps for a long time without joy in doing them, as the sick man lies chafing, eating the slops that are all he is fit for, or as the dipsomaniac drinks in weariness and depression the insipid water that is to save him. Then, on some great day, self-control may cease to be merely the sum of many dreary acts of abstention; it may take life again as an inspiriting force, both a warmth and a light, such as makes nations great.

XVI

Fair Warning

I

To give the cure a chance we must have a long quiet time. And we must secure it now.

For the moment, no doubt, war has gone out of fashion; it pines in the shade,