If we write that Mary's first month at Herons' Holt was uneventful, we use the term as a figure of speech that must be taken in its accepted sense; not read literally. For it is impossible that life, in whatever conditions, can be eventless. The dullest life is often with events the most crowded. In dulness we are thrown back upon our inner selves, and that inner self is of a construction so sensitive that each lightest thought is an event that leaves an impression.
In action, in gaiety, in intercourse we put out an unnatural self to brunt the beat of events. We are upon our guard. There are eyes watching us, and from their gaze we by instinct fend our inner self just as by instinct we fend our nakedness.
Overmuch crowded with such events, the inner self is prone to shrivel, to fade beneath lack of nutriment; and it may happen that in time the unnatural self will take its place, will become our very self.
That is gravely to our disadvantage. Overmuch in action, the man of affairs may win the admiration of a surface-seeing world; may capture the benefits of strong purpose, of wealth, and of position. But he is in danger of utterly losing the fruits that only by the inner, the original, and true self can be garnered.
Life presents for our pursuit two sets of treasures. The one may be had by the labours of the hands; the other by exercise of the intellect—the true self. And at once this may be said: that the treasures heaped by the hands soil the hands, and the stain sinks deep. The stain enters the blood and, thence oozing, pigments every part of the being—the face, the voice, the mind, the thoughts. For we cannot labour overlong in the fields without besweating the brow; and certainly we cannot ceaselessly toil after the material treasures of life without gathering the traces of that labour upon our souls. It stains, and the stain is ugly.
Coming to treasures stored by exercise of the intellect, the true self, these also put their mark upon the possessor; but the action is different and the results are different. Here the pigment that colours the life does not come from without but distils from within. Man does not stoop to rend these treasures from the earth; he rises to them. They do not bow; they uplift. They are not wrenched in trampling struggle from the sties where men battle for the troughs; they are absorbed from the truths of life that are as breezes upon the little hills. They are in the face of Nature and in Nature's heart; they are in the written thoughts of men whose thoughts rushed upward like flames, not dropped like plummet-stones—soared after truth and struck it to our understanding, not made soundings for earthy possessions showing how these might be gained.
Yet it is not to be urged that the quest of material treasures is to be despised, or that life properly lived is life solely dreaming among truths. The writer who made the story of the Israelites sickening of manna, wrapped in legend the precept that man to live must work for life. We are not living if we are not working. We cannot have strength but we win meat to make strength.
No; my protest is against the heaping of material treasure to the neglect of treasure stored by the true self. Material treasure is not ours. We but have the enjoyment of it while we can defend it from the forces that constantly threaten it. Misfortune, sorrow, sickness—these are ever in leash against us; may at any moment be slipped. Misfortune may whirl our material treasures from us; sorrow or sickness may canker them, turn them to ashes in the mouth. They are not ours; we hold them upon sufferance. But the treasures of the intellect, the gift of being upon nodding terms with truth, these are treasures that are our impregnable own. Nothing can filch them, nothing canker them: they are our own—imperishable, inexhaustible; never wanting when called upon; balm to heal the blows of adversity, specific against all things malign. Cultivate the perception of beauty, the knowledge of truth; learn to distinguish between the realities of life and the dross of life; and you have a great shield of fortitude of which certainly man cannot rob you, and against which sickness, sorrow, or misfortune may strike tremendous blows without so much as bruising the real you.
And it is in the life that is called uneventful that there is the most opportunity for storing these treasures of the intellect. Perhaps there is also the greater necessity. In the dull round of things we are thrown in upon ourselves, and by every lightest thought and deed either are strengthening that inner self or are sapping it. Either we are reading the thoughts of men whose thoughts heap a priceless store within us, or we are reading that which—though we are unaware—vitiates and puts further and further beyond our grasp the truths of life; either we are watching our lives and schooling them to feed upon thoughts and deeds that will uplift them, or we are neglecting them, and allowing them to browse where they will upon the rank weeds of petty spites, petty jealousies, petty gossipings and petty deeds. In action we may have no time to waste over this poisonous herbage; but in dulness most certainly we do have the when the larger events of life call us into the lists.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg