Some Private Views | Page 2

and
thereby escaped the greatest peril which can beset the student of human

nature. A man of genius, indeed, in these days is almost certain, sooner
or later, to become the centre of a mutual admiration society; but the
person I have in my mind is no genius, nor anything like one, and he
thanks Heaven for it. To an opinion of his own he does not pretend, but
his views upon the opinions of other people he believes to be infallible.
I have called him dogmatic, but that does not at all express the absolute
certainty with which he delivers judgment. 'I know no more,' he says,
'about the problems of human life than you do' (taking me as an
illustration of the lowest prevailing ignorance), 'but I know what
everybody is thinking about them.' He is didactic, and therefore often
dull, and will eventually, no doubt, become one of the greatest bores in
Great Britain. At present, however, he is worth knowing; and I propose
to myself to be his Boswell, and to introduce him--or, at least, his
views--to other people. I have entitled them the Midway Inn, partly
from my own inveterate habit of story-telling, but chiefly from an
image of his own, by which he once described to me, in his fine
egotistic rolling style, the position he seemed to himself to occupy in
the world.
When I was a boy, he said (which I don't believe he ever was), I had a
long journey to take between home and school. Exactly midway there
was a hill with an Inn upon it, at which we changed horses. It was a
point to which I looked forward with very different feelings when
going and returning. In the one case--for I hated school--it seemed to
frown darkly on me, and from that spot the remainder of the way was
dull and gloomy; in the other case, the sun seemed always glinting on it,
and the rest of the road was as a fair avenue that leads to Paradise. The
innkeeper received us with equal hospitality on both occasions, and it
was quite evident did not care one farthing in which direction we were
tending. He would stand in front of his house, jingling his money--our
money--in his pockets, and watch us depart with the greatest serenity,
whether we went east or west. I thought him at one time the most
genial of Bonifaces (for it was his profession to wear a smile), and at
another a mere mocker of human woe. When I grew up, I perceived
that he was a philosopher.
And now I keep the Midway Inn myself, and watch from the hill-top
the passengers come and go--some loth, some willing, like myself of
old--and listen to their talk in the coffee-room; or sometimes in a

private parlour, where, though they speak low and gravely, their
converse is still unrestrained, because, you see, I am the landlord.
Sometimes they speak of Death and the Hereafter, of which the child
they buried yesterday knows more than the wisest of them, and more
than Shakespeare knew. The being totally ignorant of the subject does
not indeed (as you may perhaps have observed in other matters) deter
some of them from speaking of it with great confidence; but the views
of a minority would quite surprise you, and this minority is
growing--coming to a majority. Every day I see an increase of the
doubters. It is not a question of the Orthodox and the Infidel, you must
understand, at all, though that is assuming great proportions; but there
is every day more uncertainty among them, and, what is much more
noteworthy, more dissatisfaction.
Years ago, when a hardy Cambridge scholar dared to publish his doubts
of an eternal punishment overtaking the wicked, an orthodox professor
of the same college took him (theologically) by the throat. 'You are
destroying,' he cried, 'the hope of the Christian.' But this is not the hope
I speak of, as loosing, and losing, its hold upon men's minds; I mean
the real hope, the hope of heaven.
When I used to go to church--for my inn is too far removed from it to
admit of my attendance there nowadays--matters were very different.
Heaven and Hell were, in the eyes not only of our congregation, but of
those who hung about the doors in the summer sun, or even played
leap-frog over the grave-stones, as distinct alternatives as the east and
west highways on each side of my inn. If you did not go one way, you
must go the other; and not only so, but an immense desire was felt by
very many to go in the right direction. Now I perceive it is not so. A
considerable number of highway passengers, though even they are