The Conquest of Fear | Page 6

of every kind, throw the emphasis
on dangers rather than on securities, so that the young life emerges into
a haunted world. Some are reckless of these dangers, some grow
hardened to them, some enjoy the tussle with them, some turn their
minds away from them, while others, chiefly the imaginative or the
intellectual, shrink from them with the discomfort which, as years go
on, becomes worry, anxiety, foreboding, or any other of the many
forms of care.

V
My own life followed what I assume to be the usual course, though in
saying this I am anxious not to give an exaggerated impression. It was
the usual course, not an unusual one. "There's always something" came
to be a common mental phrase, and the something was, as a rule, not
cheering. Neither, as a rule, was it terrible. It was just _something_--a
sense of the carking hanging over life, and now and then turning to a
real mischance or a heartache.
It strikes me as strange, on looking back, that so little attempt was
made to combat fear by religion. In fact, as far as I know, little attempt
was made to combat fear in any way. One's attention was not called to
it otherwise than as a wholly inevitable state. You were born subject to
fear as you were born subject to death, and that was an end of it.
Brought up in an atmosphere in which religion was our main
preoccupation, I cannot recall ever hearing it appealed to as a
counteragent to this most persistent enemy of man. In dealing with your
daily dreads you simply counted God out. Either He had nothing to do
with them or He brought them upon you. In any case His intervention
on your behalf was not supposed to be in this world, and to look for
rewards from Him here and now was considered a form of impiety.
You were to be willing to serve God for naught; after which

unexpected favours might be accorded you, but you were to hope for
nothing as a right. I do not say that this is what I was taught; it was
what I understood; but to the best of my memory it was the general
understanding round about me. In my fight against fear, in as far as I
made one, God was for many years of no help to me, or of no help of
which I was aware. I shall return to the point later in telling how I came
to "discover God" for myself, but not quite the same God, or not quite
the same concept of God, which my youthful mind had supposed to be
the only one.

VI
At the same time it was to a small detail in my religious training--or to
be more exact in the explanation of the Bible given me as a boy--that I
harked back when it became plain to me that either I must conquer fear
or fear must conquer me. Having fallen into my mind like a seed, it lay
for well on to thirty years with no sign of germination, till that "need,"
of which I shall have more to say presently, called it into life.
Let me state in a few words how the need made itself pressing.
It was, as life goes, a tolerably dark hour. I was on the borderland
between young manhood and early middle age. For some years I had
been losing my sight, on top of which came one of those troubles with
the thyroid gland which medical science still finds obscure. For reasons
which I need not go into I was spending an autumn at Versailles in
France, unoccupied and alone.
If you know Versailles you know that it combines all that civilisation
has to offer of beauty, magnificence, and mournfulness. A day's visit
from Paris will give you an inkling of this, but only an inkling. To get it
all you must live there, to be interpenetrated by its glory of decay. It is
always the autumn of the spirit at Versailles, even in summer, even in
spring; but in the autumn of the year the autumnal emotion of the soul
is poignant beyond expression. Sad gardens stretch into sad parks; sad
parks into storied and haunting forests. Long avenues lead to forgotten

châteaux mellowing into ruin. Ghostly white statues astonish you far in
the depths of woods where the wild things are now the most frequent
visitors. A Temple of Love--pillared, Corinthian, lovely--lost in a glade
to which lovers have probably not come in a hundred years--will
remind you that there were once happy people where now the
friendliest sound is that of the wood-chopper's axe or the horn of some
far-away hunt. All the old tales of passion,