On Nothing and Kindred Subjects (16 page)

"My young friend, I easily perceive that you are put out by this
Burden which you bear upon your shoulders. I am indeed surprised
that one so intelligent should take such a matter so ill. What! Do
you not know that burdens are the common lot of humanity? I myself,
though you may little suspect it, bear a burden far heavier than
yours, though, true, it is invisible, and not strapped on to my
shoulders by gross material thongs of leather, as is yours. The
worthy Squire of our parish bears one too; and with what manliness!
what ease! what abnegation! Believe me, these other Burdens of which
you never hear, and which no man can perceive, are for that very
reason the heaviest and the most trying. Come, play the man! Little
by little you will find that the patient sustenance of this Burden
will make you something greater, stronger, nobler than you were, and
you will notice as you grow older that those who are most favoured
by the Unseen bear the heaviest of such impediments."

With these last words recited in a solemn, and, as it were, an
inspired voice, the Hierarch lifted an immense stone from the
roadway, and placing it on the top of the Burden, so as considerably
to add to its weight, went on his way.

The irritation of the Man was already considerable when his family
called upon him—his mother, that is, his younger sister, his cousin
Jane, and her husband—and after they had eaten some of his food and
drunk some of his beer they all sat out in the garden with him and
talked to him somewhat in this manner:

"We really cannot pity you much, for ever since you were a child
whatever evil has happened to you has been your own doing, and
probably this is no different from the rest…. What can have
possessed you to get putting upon your back an ugly, useless, and
dangerous great Burden! You have no idea how utterly out of fashion
you seem, stumbling about the roads like a clodhopper, and going up
and downstairs as though you were on the treadmill…. For the
Lord's sake, at least have the decency to stay at home and not to
disgrace the family with your miserable appearance!"

Having said so much they rose, and adding to his burden a number of
leaden weights they had brought with them, went on their way and
left him to his own thoughts.

You may well imagine that by this time the irritation of the Man had
gone almost past bearing. He would quarrel with his best friends,
and they, in revenge, would put something more on to the burden,
till he felt he would break down. It haunted his dreams and filled
most of his waking thoughts, and did all those things which burdens
have been discovered to do since the beginning of time, until at
last, though very reluctantly, he determined to be rid of it.

Upon hearing of this resolution his friends and acquaintances raised
a most fearful hubbub; some talked of sending for the police, others
of restraining him by force, and others again of putting him into an
asylum, but he broke away from them all, and, making for the open
road, went out to see if he could not rid himself of this abominable
strain.

Of himself he could not, for the Burden was so cunningly strapped on
that his hands could not reach it, and there was magic about it, and
a spell; but he thought somewhere there must be someone who could
tell him how to cast it away.

In the very first ale-house he came to he discovered what is common
to such places, namely, a batch of politicians, who laughed at him
very loudly for not knowing how to get rid of burdens. "It is done,"
they said, "by the very simple method of paying one of us to get on
top and undo the straps." This the man said he would be very willing
to do, whereat the politicians, having fought somewhat among
themselves for the money, desisted at last in favour of the most
vulgar, who climbed on to the top of the man's burden, and remained
there, viewing the landscape and commenting in general terms upon
the nature of public affairs, and when the man complained a little,
the politician did but cuff him sharply on the side of the head to
teach him better manners.

Yet a little further on he met with a Scientist, who told him in
English Greek a clear and simple method of getting rid of the
burden, and, since the Man did not seem to understand, he lost his
temper, and said, "Come, let me do it," and climbed up by the side
of the Politician. Once there the Scientist confessed that the
problem was not so easy as he had imagined.

"But," said he, "now that I am here, you may as well carry me, for
it will be no great additional weight, and meanwhile I will spend
most of my time in trying to set you free."

And the third man he met was a Philosopher with quiet eyes; a person
whose very gestures were profound. Taking by the hand the Man, now
fevered and despairing, he looked at him with a mixture of
comprehension and charity, and he said:

"My poor fellow, your eyes are very wild and staring and bloodshot.
How little you understand the world!" Then he smiled gently, and
said, "Will you never learn?"

And without another word he climbed up on the top of the burden and
seated himself by the side of the other two.

After this the man went mad.

The last time I saw him he was wandering down the road with his
burden very much increased. He was bearing not only these original
three, but some Kings and Tax-gatherers and Schoolmasters, several
Fortune-tellers, and an Old Admiral. He was blind, and they were
goading him. But as he passed me he smiled and gibbered a little,
and told me it was in the nature of things, and went on downward
stumbling.

This Parable I think, as I re-read it, demands a KEY, lest it
prove a stumbling-block to the muddle-headed and a perplexity to the
foolish. Here then is the KEY:
—

The
MAN
is a
MAN.
His
BURDEN
is that Burden
which men often feel themselves to be bearing as they advance from
youth to manhood. The
RELATIVES
(his mother, his sister, his
cousins, etc.) are a Man's
RELATIVES
and the little weights
they add to the
BURDEN
are the little additional weights a
Man's
RELATIVES
commonly add to his burden. The
PARSON
represents a
PARSON,
and the
POLITICIAN,
the
PHILOSOPHER,
the
SCIENTIST,
the
KINGS,
the
TAX-GATHERERS
and the
OLD ADMIRAL,
stand severally for an
OLD ADMIRAL, TAX-GATHERERS,
POLITICIANS, PHILOSOPHERS, SCIENTISTS
and
KINGS.

The
POLITICIANS
who fight for the
MONEY
represent
POLITICIANS,
and the
MONEY
they struggle
for is the
MONEY
for which Politicians do ceaselessly jostle
and barge one another. The
MOST VULGAR
in whose favour the
others desist, represents the
MOST VULGAR _who, among Politicians,
invariably obtains the largest share of whatever public money is going.

The_ MADNESS
of the Man at the end, stands for the
MADNESS
_which does as a fact often fall upon Men late in life if their
Burdens are sufficiently increased.

I trust that with this Key the Parable will be clear to all._

In that part of the Thames where the river begins to feel its life
before it knows its name the counties play with it upon either side.
It is not yet a boundary. The parishes upon the northern bank are
sometimes as truly Wiltshire as those to the south. The men upon the
farms that look at each other over the water are close neighbours;
they use the same words and the way they build their houses is the
same. Between them runs the beginning of the Thames.

From the surface of the water the whole prospect is sky, bounded by
reeds; but sitting up in one's canoe one sees between the reeds
distant hills to the southward, or, on the north, trees in groups,
and now and then the roofs of a village; more often the lonely group
of a steading with a church close by.

Floating down this stream quite silently, but rather swiftly upon a
summer's day, I saw on the bank to my right a very pleasant man. He
was perhaps a hundred yards or two hundred ahead of me when I first
caught sight of him, and perceived that he was a clergyman of the
Church of England. He was fishing.

He was dressed in black, even his hat was black (though it was of
straw), but his collar was of such a kind as his ancestors had worn,
turned down and surrounded by a soft white tie. His face was clear
and ruddy, his eyes honest, his hair already grey, and he was gazing
intently upon the float; for I will not conceal it that he was
fishing in that ancient manner with a float shaped like a sea-buoy
and stuck through with a quill. So fish the yeomen to this day in
Northern France and in Holland. Upon such immutable customs does an
ancient State repose, which, if they are disturbed, there is danger
of its dissolution.

As I so looked at him and rapidly approached him I took care not to
disturb the water with my paddle, but to let the boat glide far from
his side, until in the pleasure of watching him, I got fast upon the
further reeds. There she held and I, knowing that the effort of
getting her off would seriously stir the water, lay still. Nor did I
speak to him, though he pleased me so much, because a friend of mine
in Lambourne had once told me that of all things in Nature what a
fish most fears is the voice of a man.

He, however, first spoke to me in a sort of easy tone that could
frighten no fish. He said "Hullo!"

I answered him in a very subdued voice, for I have no art where
fishes are concerned, "Hullo!"

Then he asked me, after a good long time, whether his watch was
right, and as he asked me he pulled out his, which was a large,
thick, golden watch, and looked at it with anxiety and dread. He
asked me this, I think, because I must have had the look of a tired
man fresh from the towns, and with the London time upon him, and yet
I had been for weeks in no town larger than Cricklade: moreover, I
had no watch. Since, none the less, it is one's duty to uplift,
sustain, and comfort all one's fellows I told him that his watch was
but half a minute fast, and he put it back with a greater content
than he had taken it out; and, indeed, anyone who blames me for what
I did in so assuring him of the time should remember that I had
other means than a watch for judging it. The sunlight was already
full of old kindness, the midges were active, the shadow of the
reeds on the river was of a particular colour, the haze of a
particular warmth; no one who had passed many days and nights
together sleeping out and living out under this rare summer could
mistake the hour.

In a little while I asked him whether he had caught any fish. He
said he had not actually caught any, but that he would have caught
several but for accidents, which he explained to me in technical
language. Then he asked me in his turn where I was going to that
evening. I said I had no object before me, that I would sleep when I
felt sleepy, and wake when I felt wakeful, and that I would so drift
down Thames till I came to anything unpleasant, when it was my
design to leave my canoe at once, to tie it up to a post, and to go
off to another place, "for," I told him, "I am here to think about
Peace, and to see if She can be found." When I said this his face
became moody, and, as though such portentous thoughts required
action to balance them, he strained his line, lifted his float
smartly from the water (so that I saw the hook flying through the
air with a quarter of a worm upon it), and brought it down far up
the stream. Then he let it go slowly down again as the water carried
it, and instead of watching it with his steady and experienced eyes
he looked up at me and asked me if, as yet, I had come upon any clue
to Peace, that I expected to find Her between Cricklade and Bablock
Hythe. I answered that I did not exactly expect to find Her, that I
had come out to think about Her, and to find out whether She could
be found. I told him that often and often as I wandered over the
earth I had clearly seen Her, as once in Auvergne by Pont-Gibaud,
once in Terneuzen, several times in Hazlemere, Hampstead, Clapham,
and other suburbs, and more often than I could tell in the Weald:
"but seeing Her," said I, "is one thing and holding Her is another.
I hardly propose to follow all Her ways, but I do propose to
consider Her nature until I know so much as to be able to discover
Her at last whenever I have need, for I am convinced by this time
that nothing else is worth the effort of a man … and I think I
shall achieve my object somewhere between here and Bablock Hythe."

He told me without interest that there was nothing attractive in the
pursuit or in its realisation.

I answered with equal promptitude that the whole of attraction was
summed up in it: that to nothing else did we move by nature, and to
nothing else were we drawn but to Peace. I said that a completion
and a fulfilment were vaguely demanded by a man even in very early
youth, that in manhood the desire for them became a passion and in
early middle age so overmastering and natural a necessity that all
who turned aside from it and attempted to forget it were justly
despised by their fellows and were some of them money-makers, some
of them sybarites, but all of them perverted men, whose hard eyes,
weak mouths, and fear of every trial sufficiently proved the curse
that was upon them. I told him as heatedly as one can speak lying
back in a canoe to a man beyond a little river that he, being older
than I, should know that everything in a full man tended towards
some place where expression is permanent and secure; and then I told
him that since I had only seen such a place far off as it were, but
never lived in, I had set forth to see if I might think out the way
to it, "and I hope," I said, "to finish the problem not so far down
as Bablock Hythe, but nearer by, towards New Bridge or even higher,
by Kelmscott,"