The Child of the Dawn | Page 9

matters so much. When he did at
last get back to the world, people said, 'What a sad pity to see so fine a
career spoilt!' But out of all the years of all his lives, those years had
been his very best and richest, when he sat half the day feeble in the
sun, and could not even look at the papers which lay beside him, or
when he woke in the grey mornings, with the thought of another
miserable day of idleness and pain before him."
I said, "Then is it a bad thing to be busy in the world, because it takes
off your mind from the things which matter?"
"No," said Amroth, "not a bad thing at all: because two things are going
on. Partly the framework of society and life is being made, so that men
are not ground down into that sordid struggle, when little experience is
possible because of the drudgery which clouds all the mind. Though
even that has its opportunities! And all depends, for the individual,
upon how he is doing his work. If he has other people in mind all the
time, and does his work for them, and not to be praised for it, then all is
well. But if he is thinking of his credit and his position, then he does
not grow at all; that is pomposity--a very youthful thing indeed; but the
worst case of all is if a man sees that the world must be helped and
made, and that one can win credit thus, and so engages in work of that

kind, and deals in all the jargon of it, about using influence and living
for others, when he is really thinking of himself all the time, and trying
to keep the eyes of the world upon him. But it is all growth really,
though sometimes, as on the beach when the tide is coming in, the
waves seem to draw backward from the land, and poise themselves in a
crest of troubled water."
"But is a great position in the world," I said, "whether inherited or
attained, a dangerous thing?"
"Nothing is dangerous, child," he said. "You must put all that out of
your mind. But men in high posts and stations are often not progressing
evenly, only in great jogs and starts. They learn very often, with a
sudden surprise, which is not always painful, and sometimes is very
beautiful and sweet, that all the ceremony and pomp, the great house,
the bows and the smiles, mean nothing at all--absolutely nothing,
except the chance, the opportunity of not being taken in by them. That
is the use of all pleasures and all satisfactions--the frame of mind which
made the old king say, 'Is not this great Babylon, which I have
builded?'--they are nothing but the work of another class in the great
school of life. A great many people are put to school with
self-satisfaction, that they may know the fine joy of humiliation, the
delight of learning that it is not effectiveness and applause that matters,
but love and peacefulness. And the great thing is that we should feel
that we are growing, not in hardness or indifference, nor necessarily
even in courage or patience, but in our power to feel and our power to
suffer. As love multiplies, suffering must multiply too. The very Heart
of God is full of infinite, joyful, hopeful suffering; the whole thing is so
vast, so slow, so quiet, that the end of suffering is yet far off. But when
we suffer, we climb fast; the spirit grows old and wise in faith and love;
and suffering is the one thing we cannot dispense with, because it is the
condition of our fullest and purest life."

V
I said suddenly, "The joy of this place is not the security of it, but the

fact that one has not to think about security. I am not afraid of anything
that may happen, and there is no weariness of thought. One does not
think till one is tired, but till one has finished thinking."
"Yes," said Amroth, "that was the misery of the poor body!"
"And yet I used to think," I said, "in the old days that I was grateful to
the body for many pleasant things it gave me--breathing the air, feeling
the sun, eating and drinking, games and exercise, and the strange thing
one called love."
"Yes," said Amroth, "all those things have to be made pleasant, or to
appear so; otherwise no one could submit to the discipline at all; but of
course the pleasure only got in the way of the thought and of the
happiness; it was not what one saw, tasted, smelt, felt, that one desired,
but the real thing behind