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Where No Fear Was: A Book About Fear

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




But we ought rather to think of God as a Power which for some
reason works through imperfection. The battle of the world is that
of force against inertness: and our fears are the shadow of that
combat.

Fear should then rather show us that we are being confronted with
experience; and that our duty is to disregard it, to march forward
through it, to come out on the other side of it. It is all an
adventure, in fact! The disaster in which we are involved is not
sent to show us that the Eternal Power which created us is vexed at
our failures, or bent on crushing us. It is exactly the opposite;
it is to show us that we are worth testing, worth developing, and
that we are to have the glory of going on; the very fear of death
is the last test of our belief in Love. We are assuredly meant to
believe that the coward is to learn the beauty of courage, that the
laggard is to perceive the worth of energy, that the selfish man is
to be taught sympathy. If we must take a metaphor, let us rather
think of God as the graver of the gem than as the child that beats
her doll for collapsing instead of sitting upright.

It is our dishonouring thought of God as jealous, suspicious, fond
of exhibiting power, revengeful, cruel, that does us harm. We must
rather think of His Heart as full of courage, energy, and hope; as
teeming with joy, lightness, zest, mirth; and then we can begin to
think of failures, fears, delays as things small and unimportant,
not as malicious ambushes, but as rough bits of road, as obstacles
to reveal and to develop our strength and gaiety. There is no joy
in the world so great as the joy of finding ourselves stronger than
we know; and that is what God is bent upon showing us, and not upon
proving to us that we are vile and base, in the spirit of the old
Calvinist who said to his own daughter when she was dying of a
painful disease, that she must remember that all short of Hell was
mercy. It is so; but Hell is rather what we start from, and out of
which we have to find our way, than the waste-paper basket of life,
the last receptacle for our shattered purposes.






XX

SERENITY





To achieve serenity we must have the power of keeping our hearts and
minds fixed upon something which is beyond and above the passing
incidents of life, which so disconcert and overshadow us, and which
are after all but as clouds in the sky, or islets in a great ocean.
Think with what smiling indifference a man would meet indignation
and abuse and menace, if he were aware that an hour hence he would
be triumphantly vindicated and applauded. How calmly would a man
sleep in a condemned cell if he knew that a free pardon were on its
way to him! Of course the more eagerly and enjoyably we live, so
much the more we are affected by little incidents, beyond which we
can hardly look when they bring us so much pleasure or so much
discomfort; and thus it is always the men and women of keen and
highly-strung natures, who taste the quality of every moment, in its
sweetness and its bitterness, who will most feel the influence of
fear. Edward FitzGerald once sadly confessed that, as life went on,
days of perfect delight--a beautiful scene, a melodious music, the
society of those whom he loved best--brought him less and less joy,
because he felt that they were passing swiftly, and could not be
recalled. And of course the imaginative nature which lives
tremulously in delight will be most apt to portend sadness in hours
of happiness, and in sorrow to anticipate the continuance of sorrow.
That is an inevitable effect of temperament; but we must not give
way helplessly to temperament, or allow ourselves to drift wherever
the mind bears us. Just as the skilled sailor can tack up against
the wind, and use ingenuity to compel a contrary breeze to bring him
to the haven of his desire, so we must be wise in trimming our sails
to the force of circumstance; while there is an eager delight in
making adverse conditions help us to realise our hopes.

The timid soul that loves delight is apt to say to itself, "I am
happy now in health and circumstances and friends, but I lean out
into the future, and see that health must fail and friends must
drift away; death must part me from those I love; and beyond all
this, I see the cloudy gate through which I must myself pass, and I
do not know what lies beyond it." That is true enough! It is like
the story of the old prince, as told by Herodotus, who said in his
sorrowful age that the Gods gave man only a taste of life, just
enough to let him feel that life was sweet, and then took the cup
from his lips. But if we look fairly at life, at our own life, at
other lives, we see that pleasure and contentment, even if we
hardly realised that it was contentment at the time, have largely
predominated over pain and unhappiness; a man must be very rueful
and melancholy before he will deliberately say that life has not
been worth living, though I suppose that there have probably been
hours in the lives of all of us when we have thought and said and
even believed that we would rather not have lived at all than
suffer so. Neither must we pass over the fact that every day there
are men and women who, under the pressure of calamity and dismay,
bring their lives to a voluntary end.

But we have to be very dull and thankless and slow of heart not to
feel that by being allowed to live, for however short a time, we
have been allowed to take part in a very beautiful and wonderful
thing. The loveliness of earth, its colours, its lights, its
scents, its savours, the pleasures of activity and health, the
sharp joys of love and friendship, these are surely very great and
marvellous experiences, and the Mind which planned them must be
full of high purpose, eager intention, infinite goodwill. And we
may go further than that, and see that even our sorrows and
failures have often brought something great to our view, something
which we feel we have learned and apprehended, something which we
would not have missed, and which we cannot do without. If we will
frankly recognise all this, we cannot feebly crumple up at the
smallest touch of misery, and say suspiciously and vindictively
that we wish we had never opened our eyes upon the world; and even
if we do say that, even if we abandon ourselves to despair, we yet
cannot hope to escape; we did not enter life by our own will, it is
not our own prudence that has kept us there, and even if we end it
voluntarily, as Carlyle said, by noose or henbane, we cannot for an
instant be sure that we are ending it; every inference in the
world, in fact, would tend to indicate that we do not end it. We
cannot destroy matter, we can only disperse and rearrange it; we
cannot generate a single force, we can only summon it from
elsewhere, and concentrate it, as we concentrate electricity, at a
single glowing point. Force seems as indestructible as matter, and
there is no reason to think that life is destructible either. So
that if we are to resign ourselves to any belief at all, it must be
to the belief that "to be, or not to be" is not a thing which is in
our power at all. We may extinguish life, as we put out a light;
but we do not destroy it, we only rearrange it.

And we can thus at least practise and exercise ourselves in the
belief that we cannot bring our experiences to an end, however
petulantly and irritably we desire to do so, because it simply is
not in our power to effect it. We talk about the power of the will,
but no effort of will can obliterate the life that we have lived,
or add a cubit to our stature; we cannot abrogate any law of
nature, or destroy a single atom of matter. What it seems that we
can do with the will is to make a certain choice, to select a
certain line, to combine existing forces, to use them within very
small limits. We can oblige ourselves to take a certain course,
when every other inclination is reluctant to do it; and even so the
power varies in different people. It is useless then to depend
blindly upon the will, because we may suddenly come to the end of
it, as we may come to the end of our physical forces. But what the
will can do is to try certain experiments, and the one province
where its function seems to be clear, is where it can discover that
we have often a reserve of unsuspected strength, and more courage
and power than we had supposed. We can certainly oppose it to
bodily inclinations, whether they be seductions of sense or
temptations of weariness. And in this one respect the will can give
us, if not serenity, at least a greater serenity than we expect. We
can use the will to endure, to wait, to suspend a hasty judgment;
and impulse is the thing which menaces our serenity most of all.
The will indeed seems to be like a little weight which we can throw
into either scale. If we have no doubt how we ought to act, we can
use the will to enforce our judgment, whether it is a question of
acting or of abstaining; if we are in doubt how to act, we can use
our will to enforce a wise delay.

The truth then about the will is that it is a force which we cannot
measure, and that it is as unreasonable to say that it does not
exist as to say that it is unlimited. It is foolish to describe it
as free; it is no more free than a prisoner in a cell is free; but
yet he has a certain power to move about within his cell, and to
choose among possible employments.

Anyone who will deliberately test his will, will find that it is
stronger than he suspects; what often weakens our use of it is that
we are so apt to look beyond the immediate difficulty into a long
perspective of imagined obstacles, and to say within ourselves,
"Yes, I may perhaps achieve this immediate step, but I cannot take
step after step--my courage will fail!" Yet if one does make the
immediate effort, it is common to find the whole range of obstacles
modified by the single act; and thus the first step towards the
attainment of serenity of life is to practise cutting off the vista
of possible contingencies from our view, and to create a habit of
dealing with a case as it occurs.

I am often tempted myself to send my anxious mind far ahead in
vague dismay; at the beginning of a week crammed with various
engagements, numerous tasks, constant labour, little businesses,
many of them with their own attendant anxiety, it is easy to say
that there is no time to do anything that one wants to do, and to
feel that the matters themselves will be handled amiss and bungled.
But if one can only keep the mind off, or distract it by work, or
beguile it by a book, a walk, a talk, how easily the thread spins
off the reel, how quietly one comes to harbour on the Saturday
evening, with everything done and finished!

Again, I am personally much disposed to dread the opposition and
the displeasure of colleagues, and to shrink nervously from
anything which involves dealing with a number of people. I ought to
have found out before now how futile such dread is; other people
forget their vexation and even grow ashamed of it, much as one does
oneself; and looking back I can recall no crisis which turned out
either as intricate or as difficult as one expected.

Let me admit that I have more than once in life made grave mistakes
through this timidity and indolence, or through an imaginativeness
which could see in a great opportunity nothing but a sea of
troubles, which would, I do not doubt, have melted away as one
advanced. But no one has suffered except myself! Institutions do
not depend upon individuals; and I regard such failures now just as
the petulant casting away of a chance of experience, as a lesson
which I would not learn; but there is nothing irreparable about it;
one only comes, more slowly and painfully, to the same goal at
last. I dare not say that I regret it all, for we are all of us,
whether small or great, being taught a mighty truth, whether we
wish it or know it; and all that we can do to hasten it is to put
our will into the right scale. I do not think mistakes and failures
ought to trouble one much; at all events there is no fear mingled
with them. But I do not here claim to have attained any real
serenity--my own heart is too impatient, too fond of pleasure for
that!--yet I can see clearly enough that it is there, if I could
but grasp it; and I know well enough how it is to be attained, by
being content to wait, and by realising at every instant and moment
of life that, in spite of my tremors and indolences, my sharp
impatiences, my petulant disgusts, something very real and great is
being shown me, which I shall at last, however dimly, perceive; and
that even so the goal of the journey is far beyond any horizon that
I can conceive, and built up like the celestial city out of
unutterable brightness and clearness, upon a foundation of peace
and joy.

It is very difficult to determine, by any exercise of the intellect
or imagination, what fears would remain to us if we were freed from
the dominion of the body. All material fears and anxieties would
come to an end; we should no longer have any poverty to dread, or
any of the limitations or circumscriptions which the lack of the
means of life inflicts upon us; we should have no ambitions left,
because the ambitions which centre on influence--that is, upon the
desire to direct and control the interests of a nation or a group
of individuals--have no meaning apart from the material framework
of civil life. The only kind of influence which would survive would
be the influence of emotion, the direct appeal which one who lives
a higher and more beautiful life can make to all unsatisfied souls,
who would fain find the way to a greater serenity of mood. Even
upon earth we can see a faint foreshadowing of this in the fact
that the only personalities who continue to hold the devotion and
admiration of humanity are the idealists. Men and women do not make
pilgrimages to the graves and houses of eminent jurists and
bankers, political economists or statisticians: these have done
their work, and have had their reward. Even the monuments of
statesmen and conquerors have little power to touch the
imagination, unless some love for humanity, some desire to uplift
and benefit the race, have entered into their schemes and policies.
No, it is rather the soil which covers the bones of dreamers and
visionaries that is sacred yet, prophets and poets, artists and
musicians, those who have seen through life to beauty, and have
lived and suffered that they might inspire and tranquillise human
hearts. The princes of the earth, popes and emperors, lie in
pompous sepulchres, and the thoughts of those who regard them, as
they stand in metal or marble, dwell most on the vanity of earthly
glory. But at the tombs of men like Vergil and Dante, of
Shakespeare and Michelangelo, the human heart still trembles into
tears, and hates the death that parts soul from soul. So that if,
like Dante, we could enter the shadow-land, and hold converse with
the spirits of the dead, we should seek out to consort with, not
those who have subdued and wasted the earth, or have terrified men
into obedience and service, but those whose hearts were touched by
dreams of impossible beauty, and who have taught us to be kind and
compassionate and tender-hearted, to love God and our neighbour,
and to detect, however faintly, the hope of peace and joy which
binds us all together.

And thus if emotion, by which I mean the power of loving, is the
one thing which survives, the fears which may remain will be
concerned with all the thoughts which cloud love, the anger and
suspicion that divide us; so that perhaps the only fears which will
survive at all will be the fears of our own selfishness and
coldness, that inner hardness which has kept us from the love of
God and isolated us from our neighbour. The pride which kept us
from admitting that we were wrong, the jealousy that made us hate
those who won the love we could not win, the baseness which made us
indifferent to the discomfort of others if we could but secure our
own ease, these are the thoughts which may still have the power to
torture us; and the hell that we may have to fear may be the hell
of conscious weakness and the horror of retrospect, when we
recollect how under these dark skies of earth we went on our way
claiming and taking all that we could get, and disregarding love
for fear of being taken advantage of. One of the grievous fears of
life is the fear of seeing ourselves as we really are, in all our
baseness and pettiness; yet that will assuredly be shown us in no
vindictive spirit, but that we may learn to rise and soar.

There is no hope that death will work an immediate moral change in
us; it may set us free from some sensual and material temptations,
but the innermost motives will indeed survive, that instinct which
makes us again and again pursue what we know to be false and
unsatisfying.

The more that we shrink from self-knowledge, the more excuses that
we make for ourselves, the more that we tend to attribute our
failures to our circumstances and to the action of others, the more
reason we have to fear the revelation of death. And the only way to
face that is to keep our minds open to any light, to nurture and
encourage the wish to be different, to pray hour by hour that at
any cost we may be taught the truth; it is useless to search for
happy illusions, to look for short cuts, to hope vaguely that
strength and virtue will burst out like a fountain beside our path.
We have a long and toilsome way to travel, and we can by no device
abbreviate it; but when we suffer and grieve, we are walking more
swiftly to our goal; and the hours we spend in fear, in sending the
mind in weariness along the desolate track, are merely wasted, for
we can alter nothing so. We use life best when we live it eagerly,
exulting in its fulness and its significance, casting ourselves
into strong relations with others, drinking in beauty, making high
music in our hearts. There is an abundance of awe in the
experiences through which we pass, awe at the greatness of the
vision, at the vastness of the design, as it embraces and enfolds
our weakness. But we are inside it all, an integral and
indestructible part of it; and the shadow of fear falls when we
doubt this, when we dread being overlooked or disregarded. No such
thing can happen to us; our inheritance is absolute and certain,
and it is fear that keeps us away from it, and the fear of
fearlessness. For we are contending not with God, but with the fear
which hides Him from our shrinking eyes; and our prayer should be
the undaunted prayer of Moses in the clefts of the mountain, "I
beseech Thee, show me Thy Glory!"

THE END

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