Where No Fear Was | Page 3

encourage us to try again.
But we cannot hope to change the conditions of life; and one of its
conditions is, as I have said, that we cannot foresee dangers. No matter
how vividly they are described to us, no matter how eagerly those who
love us try to warn us of peril, we cannot escape. For that is the essence
of life--experience; and though we cannot rejoice when we are in the

grip of it, and when we cannot see what the end will be, we can at least
say to ourselves again and again, "this is at all events reality--this is
business!" for it is the moments of endurance and energy and action
which after all justify us in living, and not the pleasant spaces where we
saunter among flowers and sunlit woods. Those are conceded to us, to
tempt us to live, to make us desire to remain in the world; and we need
not be afraid to take them, to use them, to enjoy them; because all
things alike help to make us what we are.

II
SHAPES OF FEAR

Now as I look back a little, I see that some of my worst experiences
have not hurt or injured me at all. I do not claim more than my share of
troubles, but "I have had trouble enough for one," as Browning
says,--bereavements, disappointments, the illness of those I have loved,
illness of my own, quarrels, misunderstandings, enmities, angers,
disapprovals, losses; I have made bad mistakes, I have failed in my
duty, I have done many things that I regret, I have been unreasonable,
unkind, selfish. Many of these things have hurt and wounded me, have
brought me into sorrow, and even into despair. But I do not feel that
any of them have really injured me, and some of them have already
benefited me. I have learned to be a little more patient and diligent, and
I have discovered that there are certain things that I must at all costs
avoid.
But there is one thing which seems to me to have always and invariably
hampered and maimed me, whenever I have yielded to it, and I have
often yielded to it; and that is Fear. It can be called by many names,
and all of them ugly names--anxiety, timidity, moral cowardice. I can
never trace the smallest good in having given way to it. It has been
from my earliest days the Shadow; and I think it is the shadow in the
lives of many men and women. I want in this book to track it, if I can,
to its lair, to see what it is, where its awful power lies, and what, if
anything, one can do to resist it. It seems the most unreal thing in the
world, when one is on the other side of it; and yet face to face with it, it
has a strength, a poignancy, a paralysing power, which makes it seem

like a personal and specific ill-will, issuing in a sort of dreadful
enchantment or spell, which renders it impossible to withstand. Yet,
strange to say, it has not exercised its power in the few occasions in my
life when it would seem to have been really justified. Let me quote an
instance or two which will illustrate what I mean.
I was confronted once with the necessity of a small surgical operation,
quite unexpectedly. If I had known beforehand that it was to be done, I
should have depicted every incident with horror and misery. But the
moment arrived, and I found myself marching to my bedroom with a
surgeon and a nurse, with a sense almost of amusement at the
adventure.
I was called upon once in Switzerland to assist with two guides in the
rescue of an unfortunate woman who had fallen from a precipice, and
had to be brought down, dead or alive. We hurried up through the
pine-forest with a chair, and found the poor creature alive indeed, but
with horrible injuries--an eye knocked out, an arm and a thigh broken,
her ulster torn to ribbons, and with more blood about the place in pools
than I should have thought a human body could contain. She was
conscious; she had to be lifted into the chair, and we had to discover
where she belonged; she fainted away in the middle of it, and I had to
go on and break the news to her relations. If I had been told beforehand
what would have had to be done, I do not think I could have faced it;
but it was there to do, and I found myself entirely capable of taking part,
and even of wondering all the time that it was possible to act.
Again, I was once