Part 2 (1/2)

_The Great Work_

Sitting, pen in hand, alone in the stillness of the library, with flies droning behind the sunny blinds, I considered in my thoughts what should be the subject of my great Work. Should I complain against the mutability of Fortune, and impugn Fate and the Constellations; or should I reprehend the never-satisfied heart of querulous Man, drawing elegant contrasts between the unsullied snow of mountains, the serene s.h.i.+ning of stars, and our hot, feverish lives and foolish repinings? Or should I confine myself to denouncing contemporary Vices, crying ”Fie!”

on the Age with Hamlet, sternly unmasking its hypocrisies, and riddling through and through its comfortable Optimisms?

Or with Job, should I question the Universe, and puzzle my sad brains about Life--the meaning of Life on this apple-shaped Planet?

_My Mission_

But when in modern books, reviews, and thoughtful magazines I read about the Needs of the Age, its Complex Questions, its Dismays, Doubts, and Spiritual Agonies, I feel an impulse to go out and comfort it, to still its cries, and speak earnest words of Consolation to it.

_The Birds_

But how can one toil at the great task with this hurry and tumult of birds just outside the open window? I hear the Thrush, and the Blackbird, that romantic liar; then the delicate cadence, the wiry descending scale of the Willow-wren, or the Blackcap's stave of mellow music. All these are familiar--but what is that unknown voice, that thrilling note? I hurry out; the voice flees and I follow; and when I return and sit down again to my task, the Yellowhammer trills his sleepy song in the noonday heat; the drone of the Greenfinch lulls me into dreamy meditations. Then suddenly from his tree-trunks and forest recesses comes the Green Woodp.e.c.k.e.r, and mocks at me an impudent voice full of liberty and laughter.

Why should all the birds of the air conspire against me? My concern is with the sad Human Species, with lapsed and erroneous Humanity, not with that inconsiderate, wandering, feather-headed race.

_High Life_

Although that immense Country House was empty and for sale, and I had got an order to view it, I needed all my courage to walk through the lordly gates, and up the avenue, and then to ring the door-bell. And when I was ushered in, and the shutters were removed to let the daylight into those vast apartments, I sneaked through them, cursing the dishonest curiosity which had brought me into a place where I had no business. But I was treated with such deference, and so plainly regarded as a possible purchaser, that I soon began to believe in the opulence imputed to me. From all the novels describing the mysterious and glittering life of the Great which I had read (and I had read many), there came to me the enchanting vision of my own existence in this Palace. I filled the vast s.p.a.ces with the s.h.i.+ne of jewels and stir of voices; I saw a vision of ladies sweeping in their tiaras down the splendid stairs.

But my Soul, in her swell of pride, soon outgrew these paltry limits, O no! Never could I box up and house and localize under that lowly roof the Magnificence and Ostentation of which I was capable.

Then for one thing there was stabling for only forty horses; and of course, as I told them, this would never do.

_Empty Sh.e.l.ls_

They lie like empty seash.e.l.ls on the sh.o.r.es of Time, the old worlds which the spirit of man once built for his habitation, and then abandoned. Those little earth-centred, heaven-encrusted universes of the Greeks and Hebrews seem quaint enough to us, who have formed, thought by thought from within, the immense modern Cosmos in which we live--the great Creation of granite, planned in such immeasurable proportions, and moved by so pitiless a mechanism, that it sometimes appals even its own creators. The rush of the great rotating Sun daunts us; to think to the distance of the fixed stars cracks our brain.

But if the ephemeral Being who has imagined these eternal spheres and s.p.a.ces, must dwell almost as an alien in their icy vastness, yet what a splendour lights up for him and dazzles in those great halls! Anything less limitless would be now a prison; and he even dares to think beyond their boundaries, to surmise that he may one day outgrow this vast Mausoleum, and cast from him the material Creation as an integument too narrow for his insolent Mind.

_Dissatisfaction_