“Do.”
“He is a Thanks-giving Man. You,
too, must have much to thank God for, Mr. Chillingly;
and in thanksgiving to God does there not blend usefulness
to man, and such sense of pastime in the usefulness
as makes each day a holiday?”
Kenelm looked up into the quiet face of this obscure
pastor’s wife with a startled expression in
his own.
“I see, ma’am,” said he, “that
you have devoted much thought to the study of the
aesthetical philosophy as expounded by German thinkers,
whom it is rather difficult to understand.”
“I, Mr. Chillingly! good gracious! No!
What do you mean by your aesthetical philosophy?”
“According to aesthetics, I believe man arrives
at his highest state of moral excellence when labour
and duty lose all the harshness of effort,—when
they become the impulse and habit of life; when as
the essential attributes of the beautiful, they are,
like beauty, enjoyed as pleasure; and thus, as you
expressed, each day becomes a holiday: a lovely
doctrine, not perhaps so lofty as that of the Stoics,
but more bewitching. Only, very few of us can
practically merge our cares and our worries into so
serene an atmosphere.”
“Some do so without knowing anything of aesthetics
and with no pretence to be Stoics; but, then, they
are Christians.”
“There are some such Christians, no doubt; but
they are rarely to be met with. Take Christendom
altogether, and it appears to comprise the most agitated
population in the world; the population in which there
is the greatest grumbling as to the quantity of labour
to be done, the loudest complaints that duty instead
of a pleasure is a very hard and disagreeable struggle,
and in which holidays are fewest and the moral atmosphere
least serene. Perhaps,” added Kenelm, with
a deeper shade of thought on his brow, “it is
this perpetual consciousness of struggle; this difficulty
in merging toil into ease, or stern duty into placid
enjoyment; this refusal to ascend for one’s self
into the calm of an air aloof from the cloud which
darkens, and the hail-storm which beats upon, the
fellow-men we leave below,—that makes the
troubled life of Christendom dearer to Heaven, and
more conducive to Heaven’s design in rendering
earth the wrestling-ground and not the resting-place
of man, than is that of the Brahmin, ever seeking to
abstract himself from the Christian’s conflicts
of action and desire, and to carry into its extremest
practice the aesthetic theory, of basking undisturbed
in the contemplation of the most absolute beauty human
thought can reflect from its idea of divine good!”
Whatever Mrs. Emlyn might have said in reply was interrupted
by the rush of the children towards her; they were
tired of play, and eager for tea and the magic lantern.
THE room is duly obscured and the white sheet attached
to the wall; the children are seated, hushed, and
awe-stricken. And Kenelm is placed next to Lily.
