The key of the blue closet;

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. ONE LIGHTS A CANDLE CALLED PATIENCE ... 1

II. " NEVER WEAR A BROWN HAT IN FRIESLAND " 10

Chapter I One Lights A Candle Called Patience

" WHAT does one end by doing when all the best is taken away from one, when life has grown trivial, stunted, and narrow; when the sun of one's happiness is set? " This is the question put by Lucas Malet's heroine in the Wages of Sin to her uncle, and he answers : " After a time, Polly, not at once — that would be asking too much of poor human nature — but after a time, my dear, one lights a candle called Patience, and guides one's footsteps by that." She asks whether he speaks of his own experience, and he tells her the story of a courtship which had gone forward and ended over thirty years before. "To the best of my ability I lighted that candle the day your mother told me which of the two brothers who loved her she loved best. It burnt very badly at first, Polly, did my candle — guttered, had thieves in the wick ; and meanwhile I stumbled pretty freely. But, by God's grace, it has burnt brighter as time has gone by — burns brightly enough now, as

I humbly trust, to light me down the long hill of old age without any very discreditable tumbles." He drew a little faded miniature from its hiding-place. " There is my romance," he said. " This is like her ; but you are more like. And so you are very dear to me for sake's sake, as well as for your own. Try to light your candle of Patience, my Polly, in faith; remembering that you are not alone. More than half the noblest men and women you meet carry such candles likewise."

The ordinary troubles and worries of life are not in question, but to most of us, sooner or later, there comes a heavy blow. We realise at once that this stroke is other than the rest, that we are not going to get over it easily, that we may never get over it at all. It may be the appearance of some incurable disease. We have been uneasy for a long time, and have said little. One day we muster strength to go to a great specialist and come out trying to smile with white lips. Or it may be, as in Lucas Malet's story, that we fail conclusively in love, fail to attain our heart's desire, knowing all the while with a sure knowledge that there is no reparation, that the heart will ache with longing to the end. Or perhaps in the business of our life we may meet with some overthrow so great, so conclusive, that there is no chance of setting right what has gone wrong. Or perhaps it may suddenly become clear to us that we are prisoners for life. The circumstances in which we are set have been very uncongenial, but we have always

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fancied either that we could open the door when we pleased, or at least that some day the door would be opened for us, and we should enter on happier, more hopeful years. I know men who have been doing their life-work with hardly one ray of encouragement. They have done their best; but things have been against them. They have been working, let us say, in a dying town, from which there has been a constant exodus of the more hopeful and progressive elements. Increase in any form cheers the heart. Decrease, when it is continuous, dulls it in an extraordinary way. Well, they have believed up to a certain point that they could go like the rest, and one day they find out that nobody wants them, that there is no other place for them, that there they must remain to the end, that their lips can never be touched with the potent wine of triumphant joy. Or perhaps some sudden bereavement makes all things different, and covers the land with mist.

What is to be done in these circumstances? Surely the best thing to do is to light a candle called Patience. How can we light that candle, and keep it burning all the way to the end?

In the first place, we must be very quiet. " Patience," says Bunyan, " was very quiet." It will not serve us to indulge in idle rage or yeasty fury. It will not serve us to be fretful, querulous, feeble. Raving and grumbling are alike absolutely forbidden. Better face the fact that we have to suffer solely, to suffer long, perhaps to suffer for all the rest of life. This Is so, and nothing can change it. We shall make it worse if we kick against the pricks. We must first of all be quiet.

Then we must try to keep alive some spark of hope. The first thing I should say to anyone in the dust of a sudden blow is, Hope on. This is not a religious letter, and so I do not propose to speak of the consolations of Christianity. I am content to say that we should resolve to wait and see what time will do for us. Of course in a certain sense time does nothing at all. It is what takes place in time that helps us, that soothes the pain, that heals the wound. Time is full of surprises, and some of them are joyful. A merciful mist hangs over the future. But no future is wholly darkened. All the time the healing forces of nature and of society are at work upon us. If we will not fall into utter despair we shall find, after, it may be, many days and months, that it is not with us as it once was. A man may go on for years slowly counting the hours, longing that they might pass quickly and bring with them their balm.

I have known men who in their misery have looked daily at the calendar, and counted the leaden weeks, saying in their hearts, " When I have lived through such and such a period I shall begin to be better." Sometimes the relief is delayed till the heart fairly sinks ; but if the candle called Patience is kept burning, the day will come, not perhaps of full cure, but of alleviation. On some morning we

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shall find that the pain is less sharp. It has not gone, but it does not burn and sting as it used to do. There will be a revival, however faint, of interest in passing things. There may even be for once, and that is most hopeful, the forgetting of some dreadful anniversary. Yes, it may be true for the worst sufferers that the joys of their life are yet to come. However slow recovery may be, let it once begin, and it will go on. It will begin, I think, when the time passes a little more quickly, when one ceases to say each morning, " How am I to get through this long day? " The sorrow may remain. It may be impossible to forget it, but sometimes it may be put far from us, and of tener it may be contemplated through the softening medium of thoughts that blend sorrow with hope. Many a bitter memory is recalled at last without its bitterness. To believe this is to light a candle called Patience, for there is no true patience which does not involve an element of hope.

Once more, it is necessary to do something. To do nothing is to throw up the arms and yield. The heart turns upon itself in morbid contemplation, eats itself away. It is best to go on with our regular work as soon as possible, as steadfastly as may be, even when it is mere weariness and burden, without interest of any kind. By and by it will be wise to ask, " Ls it possible to change my circumstances ? " If that question has to be answered, as so often it has to be answered, in the negative, then one must ask, " How can I conquer my circumstances ? " It is the clear duty of one in adverse circumstances to escape from them if he can, or at least to recast or renovate them, to mould them so far as they can be moulded. Thus the invalid should accept the verdict of no doctor, but do his utmost to recover health. The man who has met with a terrible reverse in his work or business ought not to give up until he is quite certain that the reverse is irretrievable. I am convinced that multitudes have yielded too soon. In the lives of great men we may read that the tide often turned just when they were on the point of despair. I call to mind Carlyle, Napoleon, Cromwell, and many others. In the same way, the surroundings which are hostile to the life and peace of the spirit may be escaped from, and if the door can be forced open they ought to be escaped from. We are all of us, when the candle called Patience goes out, apt to give over hoping, and to think effort is of no use. It is not true that steady and well-directed labour will achieve anything, but it is true that wise and sustained effort may work wonders.

Still, it has to be admitted that for some things there is no remedy but patience. There are diseases that will only tighten their grasp till life yields. Many of us have to accept pain as our lifelong companion ; many of us have to be content with poverty. Many of us have to live in a moral and spiritual atmosphere which is as a bitter east wind. The sun never shines upon our appointed place, never will shine. What then? We must call forth the

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resources of our spirits. We must respond in the right way to circumstance, that the soul may develop virtue and forbearance. It may develop much more than that, even a far-reaching human sympathy and helpfulness. Two of the most beautiful lives I have ever witnessed, lives which turned houses into homes, were lives of bitter and almost unremitting physical pain. Often when the fight with circumstance is bravely continued, the enemy suddenly yields, and gladness of the heart comes out of discouragement and deprivation. There is a story by the German novelist Raabe called Abu Telfan. Abu Telfan is a negro village, where a German wanderer is kept in slavery for ten years. He worked endlessly in insufferable heat, he suffered incessantly from the whip. At the end of ten years he was bought out of captivity by a German dealer in beasts for menageries, and sent home. In the utter misery of his toil, misery where the whole nature seemed to be thwarted and crushed and dwarfed, his soul gathered strength and colour. It touched the reality of things ; by endurance there came a certain manliness and wisdom. His misery brought him such a sense of the truth of tilings that he was not deceived. He mastered the essential principle of all stoicism, which is that the externals are nothing, and that the inner self is all. There is no plight in which the human spirit can find itself where it may not obtain some mastery of circumstance. This can be achieved by hope and by steady labour. Whenever effort is abandoned there are the sad refuges of drink and drugs and suicide.

So I say that to light a candle called Patience we must first of all be quiet, and then we must cherish some hope, and then we must go on with our work, either for the change of circumstance or for the overcoming of circumstance.

We have great resources. There is a power of endurance in human nature which we know only when it is tested. I have read that nature has given us much more than the capacity for ordinary hearing. I have been told that you may lose half your power of hearing, and be practically unconscious of your loss. There was so much to spare. It is when you have lost a little more than half your power of hearing that you begin to be aware of your deficiency. Whether that be so or not, no man knows what he can bear till he is called upon to bear the worst. We were born to suffer as well as to work, and the better we work the better we shall suffer.

This candle called Patience will often go out ; but it may be re-lighted, and at last it will shine very cheerily. Will the old happiness come back? You may as well ask whether the exuberant delight of childhood, and the boundless hope of youth will come back. They will not return. But something may come in their room which is just as good. A man need not mourn overmuch; but he will never be the same again. Many faults of the old days may well disappear, many new virtues take their room. Will the

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wounds ever be quite healed? They may be healed, but the scar will remain; and the sword-like pain when we least expect it will again traverse the heart. I have not touched upon religion; but what if this life is our Exile and Captivity, and Death our Return?

CHAPTER H

" NEVER WEAR A BROWN HAT IN FRIESLAND "

AN Englishman who travelled in North Holland some fifty years ago brought back from his wanderings this valuable precept, " Never wear a brown hat in Friesland."

He had taken for his journey a brown felt hat, a hat that had every possible recommendation but one. It was a hat with no headaches in it. It might be bumped, it might be packed, you might sit on it, you might sleep in it, and it was still the same, kindly, comforting, unobtrusive. It was a hat indeed that a man might be buried in. And yet it was not a hat to be worn with impunity in Friesland, for there the natives had strange tastes in headgear. Women wore on their heads a knitted cap, a gilt metal cap, a lace cap, and a straw bonnet surmounting all. The men were scarcely less wonderful to behold, and they were not only proud of their ways, but intolerant of the ways of others. Wherever this traveller went a jeering mob surrounded him. He was laughed at with a most disconcerting and noisy sincerity. It was with great relief that he escaped with his brown hat from Friesland into England.

There is an obvious moral in the precept, " Never 10

"NEVER WEAR A BROWN HAT"

wear a brown hat in Friesland." It enforces the great value of tact to all who desire to get peaceably, usefully, and happily through the world. Those who are without tact think that all nations can be dealt with in the same way, and all individuals. The tactful man is the man who knows better. John Bull is honestly puzzled to understand the intense hostility with which he is regarded in most countries. He means well, and knows that he means well. The fact is that John Bull has persisted, through all his career, in wearing a brown hat in Friesland. The luxury has cost him many millions — I dare not say how many.

But I propose to deal with tact in the treatment of individuals. We begin by saying that tact means touch. It is, as a lexicographer says, fineness of discernment as to action and conduct, especially a fine sense of how to avoid giving offence, an ability to say and do what is best for the intended end. Two things are necessary for tact — a kind heart and common sense. Perhaps I should say that for the very finest tact we need both qualities in the superlative degree. We need love, and we need the highest form of intellectual discernment. We need deliverance from the prison-house of self. For the truest tact there must be the widening and falling away of the personal horizon, so that the interests of others replace one's own.

" And she by tact of love was well aware That Lancelot knew that she was looking at him." 11

It is love that brings human beings into spiritual alliance, and yet love by itself is not sufficient. Mark Rutherford describes a common tragedy in his unerring way : " His wife was an honest, good little woman, but so much attached to him and so dependent on him that she was his mere echo. She had no opinions which were not his, and whenever he said anything which went beyond the ordinary affairs of the house she listened with curious effort, and generally responded by a weakened repetition of M'Kay's own observations. He perpetually, therefore, had before him an enfeebled reflection of himself, and this irritated him, notwithstanding his love for her; for who could help loving a woman who, without the least hesitation, would have opened her veins at his command, and have given up every drop of blood in her body for him? Over and over again I have heard him offer some criticism on a person or event, and the customary chime of approval would ensue, provoking him to such a degree that he would instantly contradict himself with much bitterness, leaving poor Mrs. M'Kay in much perplexity. Such a shot as this generally reduced her to timid silence." Lord Chesterfield was wont to say that those who really desired to please were almost sure to please, but there is much virtue in the " almost." When we say that a man is " wellmeaning " we usually mean that he is tactless.

For tact, we need the power of cool reflection, the memory of individual traits, precision of judgment, and practical skill. The tactful man is the man who

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does not desire to show his own cleverness, who does not delight in his own finesse. There should be no trace of vanity in him, and he ought to be sympathetic where sympathy is even tolerated. Have you ever seen the searching looks of a great physician? He fixes his eyes of calm sympathy and regard on his patient ; he listens with that look of helpful attention which is peculiar to the faces of those who have known what suffering is. He will let his eyelids fall and lift them again as he probes once more for the secret which he must read for himself. Before the interview is over, he has found it. There is no tact like the tact needed in dealing with great sufferers. Those who are most skilful in that divine art become by long practice able to read clearly the wants and the weaknesses, and know how to lay their fingers healingly on the sore places. Often, however, in this world we have to study dangerous creatures, and master their natural history. The late Lord Ampthill was considered by good judges one of our very best diplomatists. He was the greatest possible contrast to his relative, Lord John Russell, one of the least tactful of human beings. It is told of Lord Ampthill that during his misssion to Rome he possessed a great boa constrictor, the habits of which he delighted to> study. The creature once escaped when he supposed it to be asleep, wound itself round him, and began gradually to tighten its coils. Lord Ampthill saved himself by remembering that there was a bone in its throat which he could find and break. He very coolly

(discovered it, and got rid of Ms dangerous pet. In the same way he studied natures more or less unintelligible to him, not to compliment himself on his own acuteness, but to fit himself for his duties. He was perfectly simple; he avoided the snare of being too wily, too strategic, but he could see and hear and think, and he watched others with patient, speculative eyes that asked their question again and again, rejecting imperfect answers, till the true answer came. This, it seems to me, was a magnificent example of tact, and it had its triumph, though Ampthill was never widely known. Vanity, which is one of the great solvents of reticence, was not his. He had the desire for knowledge without the desire to communicate it. He used it as the opportunity presented itself, not to magnify himself, but to guide him in wise action.

This was the tact of a diplomatist, but in every sphere of life, in the home, and in the office, and in society tact is priceless. In some ways perhaps there is an improvement in our manners. You do not meet many of the disagreeable people described in the essays of our ancestors. Your acquaintances do not

begin sentences with, " What a fool you were to "

They do not say, " This will blow over, as other follies of yours have blown over." They do not single you out of a company where you are sitting dull and dispirited, and ask why you look so wretched. It seldom happens that even the silliest people tell at table a succession of stories about Mr. Somebody,

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when Mr. Somebody's daughter is opposite. One lady does not say to another in company, " Pardon me, your false hair is coming down." Nor do we brutally remind the old of their frailty. " You must be very tired ; you have been ageing very much of late." Neither are brusqueness and repartee much in fashion. I was told by an old friend of Douglas Jerrold that a sensitive man, on being introduced to him, said, " Now, Mr. Jerrold, you must not make a butt of me." " Then why do you bring your hog's head here ? " was the immediate reply. Nowadays if any one made such an answer he would be promptly and deservedly kicked. We have found out the sham of the rough diamond and the rough husk business, and it is highly discredited. As has been said, by the time one has broken one's teeth on a rough husk the tenderness of the kernel has become illusory or valueless. Archbishop Temple was, it may be hoped, the last of the brusque. Nevertheless, tact means much more than the abstinence from brutality. People still say things that they would rather not have said. " I like your book," said a lady to a popular novelist, " and Mr. - - likes it." " I am glad he likes it," was the reply. And still there are people who delight in explanations. There are some things, I am convinced, which are better left unexplained. I do not wish that everything should be made clear to me. I hope many sleeping dogs will be allowed to lie.

The true tact means insight and kindness. Those who have to direct others, employers and teachers, for example, know very well that to get the best from those under them they must carefully study individual characteristics. There are many who never do their best work unless a strong hand is upon them. They have to be taught obedience to rule. When they learn that they are happy and go well. Others, again, answer best to appeals to their reason. If they understand why they should take a certain way, they will take it, but they are never happy in the dark. Others again — and these are the finest natures — will do anything and everything for love.

One of the best examples of the lower form of tact was that of Sidney Godolphin, who plays so large a part in Macaulay's History. I know that historians do not judge his character very favourably, though there is some difference of opinion. But he held his position as few have held it through the stormiest times, and he received from Charles n. a very fine compliment. That monarch praised him as a man who was " never in the way and never out of the way." I venture to think that Sir Leslie Stephen undervalues this commendation. Those who are never in the way and never out of the way are not easily found, and they are not easily parted with. Sidney Godolphin was born in. 1645. He entered Parliament in 1668, and he left office finally in 1710, dying in 1712. When his relations to James, to Mary of Modena, to William, to Marlborough and his Duchess, and to Queen Anne, are considered, we may be sure that Godolphin, whatever his weaknesses, was a

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man of the most exquisite tact. He must have been something more than a diplomatist. He must have made himself agreeable and necessary to men and women of the most varied types. But the true tact, I repeat, is the tact of love, the tact of those men and women who are always doing some good, relieving the burdened, and holding up the stumblers. The lives of their fellows are surer in their brightness and braver in their shadows because such hearts have touched them.

Chapter III The Key Op The Blue Closet

IN the Mill on the Floss, Mrs. Pullet gloomily reflects as to the incapacity of her husband to unravel the mystery of her keys in case of her decease.

" * I don't know what you mean to do, sister Glegg, but I mean to give him (Tom) a tablecloth of all my three biggest sizes but one, besides sheets. I don't say what more I shall do ; but that I shall do, and if I should die to-morrow, Mr. Pullet, you'll bear it in mind — though you'll be blundering with the keys, and never remember as that on the third shelf of the left-hand wardrobe, behind the nightcaps with the broad ties — not the narrow frilled uns — is the key o' the drawer in the Blue Room, where the key o' the Blue Closet is. You '11 make a mistake, and I shall never be worthy to know it. You 've a memory for my pills and draughts wonderful, I '11 always say that of you; but you're lost among the keys.' This gloomy prospect of the confusion that would ensue on her decease was very affecting to Mrs. Pullet."

Why do we miss so much those who have gone beyond our reach in this world? Is it not because they have taken with them a key? It may be the key to vast and glorious and richly stored halls and chambers full of music and beauty and inspiration. Or it may be the key to a little bare room — no more than a closet — but the warmth of love was in it, and it was good to be there. The doors remain, and we are always coming up against them, always wishing to pass through them. But these doors are fast. When Coleridge died, Charles Lamb could not get the thought of him out of his mind. He never fairly recovered. His mind ran on the theme till he joined his friend, with a constant turning and reference. " He interrupted himself and his friends, almost every incident, with some play of affected wonder or astonishment or humorous melancholy on the words Coleridge is dead. Nothing could divert him from that, for the thought of it never left him." He said himself : " His great and dear spirit haunts me he was my fifty years' old friend without a dissension. Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again. I seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he lived. I love the faithful Gilmans more than while they exercised their virtues towards him living. What was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel." When Byron died Alfred Tennyson, who was a boy of fourteen, carved on a rock the words, " Byron is dead." It was, he said afterwards, " a day when the whole world seemed to be darkened for me." When Dryden died, as Macaulay says, his secret was buried in his grave. Many felt the same thing about Tennyson, especially when they read the last lines beginning —

"When the dumb Hour, clothed in black, Brings the Dreams about my bed."

They are as simple as simple can be, and yet no one before Tennyson could ever have written them. Nor is it likely that any one capable of the same achievement will ever be born again. There were many, both of those who loved Mr. Gladstone and those who did not, who felt with a thrill of conviction when they heard of his passing, that for good or for evil, such an assemblage of qualities would never be incarnated in a human form again.

These are instances which every one can readily add to from his own experiences. What we are more apt to forget unless bereavement touches us very closely, is that the small in this world are as unique as the great. Nothing is more untrue than the saying that most people are as much alike as coins of the realm, and might almost have been struck out like coins from the same die. It seems so when we pass a judgment on those of whom we know little or nothing. Those whom we really know, with whom we have entered into intimacies of relation, assure us of their uniqueness. The mould was broken after the first impression had been cast. Perhaps it is the uniqueness of single qualities, more than the uniqueness of their combination, that attracts human beings one to the other. When the end comes there is in a little circle of humble people the same feeling as is stirred in a wider world when a great man falls like a tower. A door is closed, the key is gone with the vanished hand. This may mean comparatively little. There was one with whom at intervals of years we held such talk as we never had with any other. There was one theme on which we could speak, and no two besides. But though it was pleasant to enter this blue closet and feel that we could enter it when we pleased, the experience did not count for very much in the complexity of life, and we have forgotten it now. It may mean ever so much, and yet life may be possible and even sweet in spite of the loss. Other keys may be found opening to other chambers.