THE OSSIFICATION OF THE WILL.
AMIDST the many strongly chiselled bas-reliefs of New England life which Miss M. E. Wilkins has given to the world in her three volumes of tales, there is none more impressive in its way than the picture of a will which, by the redundant vehemence of its premature volition, so completely mortgages, as it were, its own future, that even when the mind which conceived its hasty resolves is convinced of its own error, it seems hardly more able to reverse its decision, than a man who has thrown all his force into a downward stroke is to arrest his arm at the very close of its descent. The story is called " A Conflict Ended," and is contained in the volume termed" A Far-Away Melody, and other Stories." It describes a New Englander of very moderate culture, but of excessive momentum of will. He rashly commits himself to saying on very insufficient grounds, that if a certain minister should be invited by the congregation to which he belonged, he would never go inside the church again so long as be lived, whereupon one of his brother-worshippers remarks, " You'll have to set on the steps then, brother Woodman," a remark in which "brother Wood- man " sees nothing laughable, but replies, " kinder gritting his teeth :"—" I will set on the steps fifty years before I'll go into this house, if that man's settled here." Accordingly, on the Sunday on which the new minister began to preach, this over- emphatic will of his closes on the destiny he had carved out for himself in that event, and be begins to sit on the steps in all weathers, rain, snow, or glaring sun, though he loses thereby the woman to whom he had engaged himself, and leads for years a miserable life as the mere victim of the vast momentum of his capricious will. The woman to whom he had been en- gaged and most passionately attached, as she also was to him, —in the end she does actually become his wife,—thus de- scribes him : " No ; he ain't crazy ; he's got too much will for his common-sense ; that's all, and the will teeters the sense a little too far into the air."' Again : " He always had a way of saying things over and over, as if he were making steps out of 'em, and raising of himself up on 'ens, till there was no moving him at all." When, many years after the habit has been thus chiselled out like so many granite steps, she asks him why, if be no longer holds his former un- favourable view of the minister, he does not go into the meeting-house and behave like other people, Marcus Wood- man replies : "Don't you suppose I would if I could ? I can't, Esther, I can't." He is the victim of his own past will, and has no longer any power to alter the will which has once settled down on this irrational resolve. " Do you s'pose," he asks, " I've took any comfort sitting there on them steps in the winter snows and summer suns ? Do you s'pose I've took any comfort not marrying you Don't you s'pose I'd given all I was worth any time the last ten year to have got up an' walked into the church with the rest of the folks?" And when she replies that she thinks he could if he really wished it, he rejoins : " All I know is, I can't make myself give it up. I can't. I ain't made strong enough to." And that is just the fact. He is not strong enough to alter his own course once taken. It is not in reality excess of will-power at all, rather de- ficiency of power to alter a resolution once fixed and ossified. He has precipitated his life into an orbit from which, eccentric as it is, he has no power to withdraw it. He has made an oddity, a moral gurgoyle of himself, and yet he can no more hark back upon his own course than the gurgoyle, once sculptured in stone, can untwist itself from its grotesque and misshapen curves and angles. This is the nearest approach we have in our human life to the theological conception of predestination to repro- bation. There is such a thing as self-predestination, and when that self-predestination takes a hasty and inconsiderate form in a man whose power of setting himself in motion is a great deal larger than his power of arresting his course when he sees it to be going wrong, we have precisely that irresistible momentum of distorted volition of which Miss Wilkins gives us so singularly powerful a picture. Clearly this is not a case of a strong will, for a strong will is a strong governing power, and the strength here is ungovernable strength, a force of momentum which defies government, just as a great fly-wheel, once set in motion, takes a very much mightier force to stop than it took to start it. The phenomenon with which we have to deal is a form of the inertia of character induced by a premature vehemence of purpose, not a force of the constant vigour and vigilance of the will. It is due to what Clough used to call "the ruinous force of the will," meaning not its power to govern according to reason, but its rigidity when it has once snapped on an irrational resolve.
This power, if it can be called a power and not rather a fatality, to determine the set of a destiny, and even of a char- acter, not by conscience or reason, but by a kind of suddenly crystallising caprice, was comparatively common, if we may trust Mies Wilkins's wonderful pictures of New England life, among the descendants of the old Calvinists, who seem to have copied into their daily practice the arbitrary predestinarianism which they enshrined in their theology. Worshipping a God whose Sic volo, sic jubeo, was supposed to be an adequate ex- planation of the final damnation of millions of human beings no less than of the salvation of the few, they seemed to think they
could not do better than predestine their own lots by a caprice at least as unintelligible, and much more short-sighted ; but that kind of human predestinarianism is by no means con fined to Calvinists. You will see it in the arbitrary asceticism or expiatory passion of Hindoos, who, if they light suddenly upon a fancy for accumulating a stock of meritorious suffering to their own credit, will inflict on themselves as much as St. Simeon Stylites did or more, with no better justification than a whim of pious caprice,—will hold up an arm, for instance, till they die, or will persist in realising practically some other equally painful and equally sudden caprice of the imagination far more difficult of execution than Marcus Woodman's resolve to sit on the steps of his church through snow and sunshine, as long as the minister he had objected to continued to preach there. The power of the will to petrify itself, or rather, its inability to relax itself, after it has once congealed, is a condition of mind by no means peculiar to the descendants of Calvinists ; but it is generally traceable to fatalism of some kind, to some form of the strange creed that the determining wills of the universe do not act out of any re- gard to reason or righteousness applicable to the changing con- ditions of changing life, but simply out of wilfulness, and that even the most short-sighted of mortals cannot do better than imitate this arbitrariness of the supreme Will's decree. There is, we believe, usually some sort of religious fatalism in this irrational snap of the will, some sort of conscious or un- conscious instinct that irrevocability of will embodies a kind of grandeur, instead of suggesting a gigantic incom- petence to reform one's own procedure. Marcus Woodman, it is said, hewed steps out of the rock of existence, on which he seemed to be raising himself to a higher level. Really they were useless steps, which led up nowhere,—at least, only to a naked pinnacle of caprice from which he found it at length all but impossible to descend. Immutability of will is admirable, if it is founded upon an equal immutability of right vision. But to value any immutability of purpose determined by a mere accident, by the mere blind plunging of the hand into a lottery, is the highest form of irrationality. Yet it is a form of irrationality common enough in many an old English province,—for instance, in Yorkshire fifty years ago, as the Brontës testify ; indeed, as Branwell Bronte himself proved when he resolved to stand up to die, and kept to his strange and arbitrary resolve.
But perhaps, after all, there is something to be said for this extreme of local persistency in caprice, as compared at least with the other extreme, which is becoming too common in our own rapidly moving cities, where not only is everything mutable, but there is a sort of pride in never being consistent with yourself, in never adhering to any groove of habit for more than the infinitesimal period during which that special groove is fashionable. The force of the will is truly " ruinous " when it cleaves as tenaciously to arbitrary error as it does to discriminating and deliberate purpose. But it is better to hold your own position, even when your own position is wrong, than never to be able to hold your own, even when your own position is wisely chosen and absolutely right. Ossification of the will is bad, but it is hardly so contemptible as flaccidity of the will, and that is the moral malady which most besets us now.
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