Maggie drew a long breath and pushed her heavy hair back, as if to see a sudden vision more clearly.Here, then, was a secret of life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets - here was a sublime height to be reached without the help of outward things - here was insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely within her own soul, where a supreme teacher was waiting to be heard.It flashed through her like the suddenly apprehended solution of a problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing her heart on her own pleasure, as if that were the central necessity of the universe; and for the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her own desires, of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at her own life as an insignificant part of a divinely guided whole.
She read on and on in the old book, devouring eagerly the dialogues with the invisible Teacher, the pattern of sorrow, the source of all strength;returning to it after she had been called away, and reading till the sun went down behind the willows.With all the hurry of an imagination that could never rest in the present, she sat in the deepening twilight forming plans of self-humiliation and entire devotedness, and in the ardour of first discovery, renunciation seemed to her the entrance into that satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain.She had not perceived - how could she until she had lived longer? - the inmost truth of the old monk's outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.
Maggie was still panting for happiness, and was in ecstasy because she had found the key to it.She knew nothing of doctrines and systems - of mysticism or quietism: but this voice out of the far-off middle ages, was the direct communication of a human soul's belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an unquestioned message.
I suppose that is the reason why the small old-fashioned book, for which you need only pay sixpence at a book-stall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness; while expensive sermons and treatises newly issued leave all things as they were before.It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart's prompting, it is the chronicle of a solitary, hidden anguish, struggle, trust and triumph - not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones.And so it remains to all time, a lasting record of human needs and human consolations, the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and suffered and renounced - in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours - but under the same silent far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness.
In writing the history of unfashionable families, one is apt to fall into a tone of emphasis which is very far from being the tone of good society, where principles and beliefs are not only of an extremely moderate kind, but are always presupposed, no subjects being eligible but such as can be touched with a light and graceful irony.But then, good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner-engagements six weeks deep, its opera and its faëry ballrooms; rides of its ennui on thoroughbred horses, lounges at the club, has to keep clear of crinoline vortices, gets is science done by Faraday, and its religion by the superior clergy who are to be met in the best houses: how should it have time or need for belief and emphasis? But good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic acid - or else, spread over sheepwalks, and scattered in lonely houses and huts on the clayey or chalky cornlands, where the rainy days look dreary.This wide national life is based entirely on emphasis - the emphasis of want, which urges it into all the activities necessary for the maintenance of good society and light irony: it spends its heavy years often in a chill, uncarpeted fashion amidst family discord unsoftened by long corridors.Under such circumstances there are many among its myriads of souls who have absolutely needed an emphatic belief, life in this unpleasurable shape demanding some solution even to unspeculative minds; just as you inquire into the stuffing of your couch when anything galls you there, whereas eider-down and perfect French springs excite no question.Some have an emphatic belief in alcohol, and seek their ekstasis or outside standing-ground in gin, but the rest require something that good society calls enthusiasm, something that will present motives in an entire absence of high prizes, something that will give patience and feed human love when the limbs ache with weariness and human looks are hard upon us - something, clearly, that lies outside personal desires, that includes resignation for ourselves and active love for what is not ourselves.