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Where No Fear Was: A Book About Fear

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> Where No Fear Was: A Book About Fear



"Thus they went on till they came to about the middle of the
galley, and then Christiana said, 'Methinks I see something yonder
on the read before us, a thing of such a shape such as I have not
seen.' Then said Joseph, 'Mother, what is it?' 'An ugly thing,
Child, an ugly thing,' said she. 'But, Mother, what is it like?'
said he. ''Tis like I cannot tell what,' said she. And now it was
but a little way off. Then said she, 'It is nigh.'"

"Pilgrim's Progress," Part II.






Where No Fear Was

I

THE SHADOW





There surely may come a time for each of us, if we have lived with
any animation or interest, if we have had any constant or even
fitful desire to penetrate and grasp the significance of the
strange adventure of life, a time, I say, when we may look back a
little, not sentimentally or with any hope of making out an
impressive case for ourselves, and interrogate the memory as to
what have been the most real, vivid, and intense things that have
befallen us by the way. We may try to separate the momentous from
the trivial, and the important from the unimportant; to discern
where and how and when we might have acted differently; to see and
to say what has really mattered, what has made a deep mark on our
spirit; what has hampered or wounded or maimed us. Because one of
the strangest things about life seems to be our incapacity to
decide beforehand, or even at the time, where the real and fruitful
joys, and where the dark dangers and distresses lie. The things
that at certain times filled all one's mind, kindled hope and aim,
seemed so infinitely desirable, so necessary to happiness, have
faded, many of them, into the lightest and most worthless of husks
and phantoms, like the withered flowers that we find sometimes shut
in the pages of our old books, and cannot even remember of what
glowing and emotional moment they were the record!

How impossible it is ever to learn anything by being told it! How
necessary it is to pay the full price for any knowledge worth
having! The anxious father, the tearful mother, may warn the little
boy before he goes to school of the dangers that await him. He does
not understand, he does not attend, he is looking at the pattern of
the carpet, and wondering for the hundredth time whether the oddly-
shaped blue thing which appears and reappears at intervals is a
bird or a flower--yes, it is certainly meant for a bird perched on
a bough! He wishes the talk were over, he looks at the little scar
on his father's hand, and remembers that he has been told that he
cut it in a cucumber-frame when he was a boy. And then, long
afterwards perhaps, when he has made a mistake and is suffering for
it, he sees that it was THAT of which they spoke, and wonders that
they could not have explained it better.

And this is so all along! We cannot recognise the dark tower, to
which in the story Childe Roland came, by any description. We must
go there ourselves; and not till we feel the teeth of the trap
biting into us, do we see that it was exactly in such a place that
we had been warned that it would be laid.

There is an episode in that strange and beautiful book Phantastes,
by George Macdonald, which comes often to my mind. The boy is
wandering in the enchanted forest, and he is told to avoid the
house where the Daughter of the Ogre lives. His morose young guide
shows him where the paths divide, and he takes the one indicated to
him with a sense of misgiving.

A little while before he had been deceived by the Alder-maiden, and
had given her his love in error. This has taken some of the old joy
out of his heart, but he has made his escape from her, and thinks
he has learned his lesson.

But he comes at last to the long low house in the clearing; he
finds within it an ancient woman reading out of an old volume; he
enters, he examines the room in which she sits, and yielding to
curiosity, he opens the door of the great cupboard in the corner,
in spite of a muttered warning. He thinks, on first opening it,
that it is just a dark cupboard; but he sees with a shock of
surprise that he is looking into a long dark passage, which leads
out, far away from where he stands, into the starlit night. Then a
figure, which seems to have been running from a long distance,
turns the corner, and comes speeding down towards him. He has not
time to close the door, but stands aside to let it pass; it passes,
and slips behind him; and soon he sees that it is a shadow of
himself, which has fallen on the floor at his feet. He asks what
has happened, and then the old woman says that he has found his
shadow, a thing which happens to many people; and then for the
first time she raises her head and looks at him, and he sees that
her mouth is full of long white teeth; he knows where he is at
last, and stumbles out, with the dark shadow at his heels, which is
to haunt him so miserably for many a sad day.

That is a very fine and true similitude of what befalls many men
and women. They go astray, they give up some precious thing--their
innocence perhaps--to a deluding temptation. They are delivered for
a time; and then a little while after they find their shadow, which
no tears or anguish of regret can take away, till the healing of
life and work and purpose annuls it. Neither is it always annulled,
even in length of days.

But it is a paltry and inglorious mistake to let the shadow have
its disheartening will of us. It is only a shadow, after all! And
if we capitulate after our first disastrous encounter, it does not
mean that we shall be for ever vanquished, though it means perhaps
a long and dreary waste of shame-stained days. That is what we
must try to avoid--any WASTE of time and strength. For if anything
is certain, it is that we have all to fight until we conquer, and
the sooner we take up the dropped sword again the better.

And we have also to learn that no one can help us except ourselves.
Other people can sympathise and console, try to soothe our injured
vanity, try to persuade us that the dangers and disasters ahead are
not so dreadful as they appear to be, and that the mistakes we have
made are not irreparable. But no one can remove danger or regret
from us, or relieve us of the necessity of facing our own troubles;
the most that they can do, indeed, is to encourage us to try again.

But we cannot hope to change the conditions of life; and one of its
conditions is, as I have said, that we cannot foresee dangers. No
matter how vividly they are described to us, no matter how eagerly
those who love us try to warn us of peril, we cannot escape. For
that is the essence of life--experience; and though we cannot
rejoice when we are in the grip of it, and when we cannot see what
the end will be, we can at least say to ourselves again and again,
"this is at all events reality--this is business!" for it is the
moments of endurance and energy and action which after all justify
us in living, and not the pleasant spaces where we saunter among
flowers and sunlit woods. Those are conceded to us, to tempt us to
live, to make us desire to remain in the world; and we need not be
afraid to take them, to use them, to enjoy them; because all things
alike help to make us what we are.






II

SHAPES OF FEAR





Now as I look back a little, I see that some of my worst experiences
have not hurt or injured me at all. I do not claim more than my
share of troubles, but "I have had trouble enough for one," as
Browning says,--bereavements, disappointments, the illness of those
I have loved, illness of my own, quarrels, misunderstandings,
enmities, angers, disapprovals, losses; I have made bad mistakes, I
have failed in my duty, I have done many things that I regret, I
have been unreasonable, unkind, selfish. Many of these things have
hurt and wounded me, have brought me into sorrow, and even into
despair. But I do not feel that any of them have really injured me,
and some of them have already benefited me. I have learned to be a
little more patient and diligent, and I have discovered that there
are certain things that I must at all costs avoid.

But there is one thing which seems to me to have always and
invariably hampered and maimed me, whenever I have yielded to it,
and I have often yielded to it; and that is Fear. It can be called
by many names, and all of them ugly names--anxiety, timidity, moral
cowardice. I can never trace the smallest good in having given way
to it. It has been from my earliest days the Shadow; and I think it
is the shadow in the lives of many men and women. I want in this
book to track it, if I can, to its lair, to see what it is, where
its awful power lies, and what, if anything, one can do to resist
it. It seems the most unreal thing in the world, when one is on the
other side of it; and yet face to face with it, it has a strength,
a poignancy, a paralysing power, which makes it seem like a
personal and specific ill-will, issuing in a sort of dreadful
enchantment or spell, which renders it impossible to withstand.
Yet, strange to say, it has not exercised its power in the few
occasions in my life when it would seem to have been really
justified. Let me quote an instance or two which will illustrate
what I mean.

I was confronted once with the necessity of a small surgical
operation, quite unexpectedly. If I had known beforehand that it
was to be done, I should have depicted every incident with horror
and misery. But the moment arrived, and I found myself marching to
my bedroom with a surgeon and a nurse, with a sense almost of
amusement at the adventure.

I was called upon once in Switzerland to assist with two guides in
the rescue of an unfortunate woman who had fallen from a precipice,
and had to be brought down, dead or alive. We hurried up through
the pine-forest with a chair, and found the poor creature alive
indeed, but with horrible injuries--an eye knocked out, an arm and
a thigh broken, her ulster torn to ribbons, and with more blood
about the place in pools than I should have thought a human body
could contain. She was conscious; she had to be lifted into the
chair, and we had to discover where she belonged; she fainted away
in the middle of it, and I had to go on and break the news to her
relations. If I had been told beforehand what would have had to be
done, I do not think I could have faced it; but it was there to do,
and I found myself entirely capable of taking part, and even of
wondering all the time that it was possible to act.

Again, I was once engulfed in a crevasse, hanging from the ice-
ledge with a portentous gulf below, and a glacier-stream roaring
in the darkness. I could get no hold for foot or hand, my
companions could not reach me or extract me; and as I sank into
unconsciousness, hearing my own expiring breath, I knew that I was
doomed; but I can only say, quite honestly and humbly, that I had
no fear at all, and only dimly wondered what arrangements would be
made at Eton, where I was then a master, to accommodate the boys of
my house and my pupils. It was not done by an effort, nor did I
brace myself to the situation: fear simply did not come near to me.

Once again I found myself confronted, not so long ago, with an
incredibly painful and distressing interview. That indeed did
oppress me with almost intolerable dread beforehand. I was to go to
a certain house in London, and there was just a chance that the
interview might not take place after all. As I drove there, I
suddenly found myself wondering whether the interview could REALLY
be going to take place--how often had I rehearsed it beforehand
with anguish--and then as suddenly became aware that I should in
some strange way be disappointed if it did not take place. I wanted
on the whole to go through with it, and to see what it would be
like. A deep-seated curiosity came to my aid. It did take place,
and it was very bad--worse than I could have imagined; but it was
not terrible!

These are just four instances which come into my mind. I should be
glad to feel that the courage which undoubtedly came had been the
creation of my will; but it was not so. In three cases, the events
came unexpectedly; but in the fourth case I had long anticipated
the moment with extreme dread. Yet in that last case the fear
suddenly slipped away, without the smallest effort on my part; and
in all four cases some strange gusto of experience, some sense of
heightened life and adventure, rose in the mind like a fountain--so
that even in the crevasse I said to myself, not excitedly but
serenely, "So this is what it feels like to await death!"

It was this particular experience which gave me an inkling into
that which in so many tragic histories seems incredible--that men
often do pass to death, by scaffold and by stake, at the last
moment, in serenity and even in joy. I do not doubt for a moment
that it is the immortal principle in man, the sense of
deathlessness, which comes to his aid. It is the instinct which, in
spite of all knowledge and experience, says suddenly, in a moment
like that, "Well, what then?" That instinct is a far truer thing
than any expectation or imagination. It sees things, in supreme
moments, in a true proportion. It asserts that when the rope jerks,
or the flames leap up, or the benumbing blow falls, there is
something there which cannot possibly be injured, and which indeed
is rather freed from the body of our humiliation. It is but an
incident, after all, in a much longer and more momentous voyage. It
means only the closing of one chapter of experience and the
beginning of another. The base element in it is the fear which
dreads the opening of the door, and the quitting of what is
familiar. And I feel assured of this, that the one universal and
inevitable experience, known to us as death, must in reality be a
very simple and even a natural affair, and that when we can look
back upon it, it will seem to us amazing that we can ever have
regarded it as so momentous and appalling a thing.






III

THE DARKEST DOUBT





Now we can make no real advance in the things of the spirit until we
have seen what lies on the other side of fear; fear cannot help us
to grow, at best it can only teach us to be prudent; it does not of
itself destroy the desire to offend--only shame can do that; if our
wish to be different comes merely from our being afraid to
transgress, then, if the fear of punishment were to be removed, we
should go back with a light heart to our old sins. We may obey
irresponsible power, because we know that it can hurt us if we
disobey; but unless we can perceive the reason why this and that is
forbidden, we cannot concur with law. We learn as children that
flame has power to hurt us, but we only dread the fire because it
can injure us, not because we admire the reason which it has for
burning. So long as we do not sin simply because we know the laws of
life which punish sin, we have not learned any hatred of sin; it is
only because we hate the punishment more than we love the sin, that
we abstain.

Socrates once said, in one of his wise paradoxes, that it was
better to sin knowingly than ignorantly. That is a hard saying, but
it means that at least if we sin knowingly, there is some purpose,
some courage in the soul. We take a risk with our eyes open, and
our purpose may perhaps be changed; whereas if we sin ignorantly,
we do so out of a mere base instinct, and there is no purpose that
may be educated. Anyone who has ever had the task of teaching boys
or young men to write will know how much easier it is to teach
those who write volubly and exuberantly, and desire to express
themselves, even if they do it with many faults and lapses of
taste; taste and method may be corrected, if only the instinct of
expression is there. But the young man who has no impulse to write,
who says that he could think of nothing to say, it is impossible to
teach him much, because one cannot communicate the desire for
expression.

And the same holds good of life. Those who have strong vital
impulses can learn restraint and choice; but the people who have no
particular impulses and preferences, who just live out of mere
impetus and habit, who plod along, doing in a dispirited way just
what they find to do, and lapsing into indolence and indifference
the moment that prescribed work ceases, those are the spirits that
afford the real problem, because they despise activity, and think
energy a mere exhibition of fussy diffuseness.

But the generous, eager, wilful nature, who has always some aim in
sight, who makes mistakes perhaps, gives offence, collides high-
heartedly with others, makes both friends and enemies, loves and
hates, is anxious, jealous, self-absorbed, resentful, intolerant--
there is always hope for such an one, for he is quick to despair,
capable of shame, swift to repent, and even when he is worsted and
wounded, rises to fight again. Such a nature, through pain and
love, can learn to chasten his base desires, and to choose the
nobler and worthier way.

But what does really differentiate men and women is not their power
of fearing and suffering, but their power of caring and admiring.
The only real and vital force in the world is the force which
attracts, the beauty which is so desirable that one must imitate it
if one can, the wisdom which is so calm and serene that one must
possess it if one may.

And thus all depends upon our discerning in the world a loving
intention of some kind, which holds us in view, and draws us to
itself. If we merely think of God and nature as an inflexible
system of laws, and that our only chance of happiness is to slip in
and out of them, as a man might pick his way among red-hot
ploughshares, thankful if he can escape burning, then we can make
no sort of advance, because we can have neither faith nor trust.
The thing from which one merely flees can have no real power over
our spirit; but if we know God as a fatherly Heart behind nature,
who is leading us on our way, then indeed we can walk joyfully in
happiness, and undismayed in trouble; because troubles then become
only the wearisome incidents of the upward ascent, the fatigue, the
failing breath, the strained muscles, the discomfort which is
actually taking us higher, and cannot by any means be avoided.

But fear is the opposite of all this; it is the dread of the
unknown, the ghastly doubt as to whether there is any goal before
us or not; when we fear, we are like the butterfly that flutters
anxiously away from the boy who pursues it, who means out of mere
wantonness to strike it down tattered and bruised among the grass-
stems.






IV

VULNERABILITY





There have been many attempts in the history of mankind to escape
from the dominion of fear; the essence of fear, that which prompts
it, is the consciousness of our vulnerability. What we all dread is
the disease or the accident that may disable us, the loss of money
or credit, the death of those whom we love and whose love makes the
sunshine of our life, the anger and hostility and displeasure and
scorn and ill-usage of those about us. These are the definite things
which the anxious mind forecasts, and upon which it mournfully
dwells.

The object then in the minds of the philosophers or teachers who
would fain relieve the unhappiness of the world, has been always to
suggest ways in which this vulnerability may be lessened; and thus
their object has been to disengage as far as possible the hopes and
affections of men from things which must always be fleeting. That
is the principle which lies behind all asceticism, that, if one can
be indifferent to wealth and comfort and popularity, one has a
better chance of serenity. The essence of that teaching is not that
pleasant things are not desirable, but that one is more miserable
if one loses them than if one never cares for them at all. The
ascetic trains himself to be indifferent about food and drink and
the apparatus of life; he aims at celibacy partly because love
itself is an overmastering passion, and partly because he cannot
bear to engage himself with human affections, the loss of which may
give him pain. There is, of course, a deeper strain in asceticism
than this, which is a suspicious mistrust of all physical joys and
a sense of their baseness; but that is in itself an artistic
preference of mental and spiritual joys, and a defiance to
everything which may impair or invade them.

The Stoic imperturbability is an attempt to take a further step;
not to fly from life, but to mingle with it, and yet to grow to be
not dependent on it. The Stoic ideal was a high one, to cultivate a
firmness of mind that was on the one hand not to be dismayed by
pain or suffering, and on the other to use life so temperately and
judiciously as not to form habits of indulgence which it would be
painful to discontinue. The weakness of Stoicism was that it
despised human relations; and the strength of primitive
Christianity was that, while it recommended a Stoical simplicity of
life, it taught men not to be afraid of love, but to use and lavish
love freely, as being the one thing which would survive death and
not be cut short by it. The Christian teaching came to this, that
the world was meant to be a school of love, and that love was to be
an outward-rippling ring of affection extending from the family
outwards to the tribe, the nation, the world, and on to God
Himself. It laid all its emphasis on the truth that love is the one
immortal thing, that all the joys and triumphs of the world pass
away with the decay of its material framework, but that love passes
boldly on, with linked hands, into the darkness of the unknown.

The one loss that Christianity recognised was the loss of love; the
one punishment it dreaded was the withholding of love.

As Christianity soaked into the world, it became vitiated, and drew
into itself many elements of human weakness. It became a social
force, it learned to depend on property, it fulminated a code of
criminality, and accepted human standards of prosperity and wealth.
It lost its simplicity and became sophisticated. It is hard to say
that men of the world should not, if they wish, claim to be
Christians, but the whole essence of Christianity is obscured if it
is forgotten that its vital attributes are its indifference to
material conveniences, and its emphatic acceptance of sympathy as
the one supreme virtue.

This is but another way of expressing that our troubles and our
terrors alike are based on selfishness, and that if we are really
concerned with the welfare of others we shall not be much concerned
with our own.

The difficulty in adopting the Christian theory is that God does
not apparently intend to cure the world by creating all men
unselfish. People are born selfish, and the laws of nature and
heredity seem to ordain that it shall be so. Indeed a certain
selfishness seems to be inseparable from any desire to live. The
force of asceticism and of Stoicism is that they both appeal to
selfishness as a motive. They frankly say, "Happiness is your aim,
personal happiness; but instead of grasping at pleasure whenever it
offers, you will find it more prudent in the end not to care too
much about such things." It is true that popular Christianity makes
the same sort of appeal. It says, or seems to say, "If you grasp at
happiness in this world, you may secure a great deal of it
successfully; but it will be worse for you eventually."

The theory of life as taught and enforced, for instance, in such a
work as Dante's great poem is based upon this crudity of thought.
Dante, by his Hell and his Purgatory, expressed plainly that the
chief motive of man to practise morality must be his fear of
ultimate punishment. His was an attempt to draw away the curtain
which hides this world from the next, and to horrify men into
living purely and kindly. But the mind only revolts against the
dastardly injustice of a God, who allows men to be born into the
world so corrupt, with so many incentives to sin, and deliberately
hides from them the ghastly sight of the eternal torments, which
might have saved them from recklessness of life. No one who had
trod the dark caverns of Hell or the flinty ridges of Purgatory, as
Dante represented himself doing, who had seen the awful sights and
heard the heart-broken words of the place, could have returned to
the world as a light-hearted sinner! Whatever we may believe of
God, we must not for an instant allow ourselves to believe that
life can be so brief and finite, so small and hampered an
opportunity, and that punishment could be so demoniacal and so
infinite. A God who could design such a scheme must be essentially
evil and malignant. We may menace wicked men with punishment for
wanton misdeeds, but it must be with just punishment. What could we
say of a human father who exposed a child to temptation without
explaining the consequences, and then condemned him to lifelong
penalties for failing to make the right choice? We must firmly
believe that if offences are finite, punishment must be finite too;
that it must be remedial and not mechanical. We must believe that
if we deserve punishment, it will be because we can hope for
restoration. Hell is a monstrous and insupportable fiction, and the
idea of it is simply inconsistent with any belief in the goodness
of God. It is easy to quote texts to support it, but we must not
allow any text, any record in the world, however sacred, to shatter
our belief in the Love and Justice of God. And I say as frankly and
directly as I can that until we can get rid of this intolerable
terror, we can make no advance at all.

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