But we are not all made like this, and it is only possible f

ESCAPE

AND OTHER ESSAYS

By ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON

I love people that leave some traces of their journey behind them,

and I have strength enough to advise you to do so while you can.

--Thomas Gray.

NEW YORK

1915

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Escape

2. Literature and Life

3. The New Poets

4. Walt Whitman

5. Charm

6. Sunset

7. The House of Pengersick

8. Villages

9. Dreams

10. The Visitant

11. That Other One

12. Schooldays

13. Authorship

14. Herb Moly and Heartsease

15. Behold, This Dreamer Cometh

NOTE

I desire to recourd my obligations to the Editor of the Century

Magazine, and to the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine, for their

permission to include in this volume certain essays which appeared

first in their pages.

A. C. B.

INTRODUCTION

1

I walked to-day down by the river side. The Cam is a stream much

slighted by the lover of wild and romantic scenery; and its chief

merit, in the eyes of our boys, is that it approaches more nearly

to a canal in its straightness and the deliberation of its slow

lapse than many more famous floods--and is therefore more adapted

for the maneuvres of eight-oared boats! But it is a beautiful

place, I am sure; and my ghost will certainly walk there, "if our

loves remain," as Browning says, both for the sake of old memories

and for the love of its own sweet peaceableness. I passed out of

the town, out of the straggling suburbs, away from tall, puffing

chimneys, and under the clanking railway bridge; and then at once

the scene opens, wide pasture-lands on either side, and rows of old

willows, the gnarled trunks holding up their clustered rods. There

on the other side of the stream rises the charming village of Fen

Ditton, perched on a low ridge near the water, with church and

vicarage and irregular street, and the little red-gabled Hall

looking over its barns and stacks. More and more willows, and then,

lying back, an old grange, called Poplar Hall, among high-standing

trees; and then a little weir, where the falling water makes a

pleasant sound, and a black-timbered lock, with another old house

near by, a secluded retreat for the bishops of Ely in medieval

times. The bishop came thither by boat, no doubt, and abode there

for a few quiet weeks, when the sun lay hot over the plain; and a

little farther down is a tiny village called Horningsea, with a

battlemented church among orchards and thatched houses, with its

own disused wharf--a place which gives me the sense of a bygone age

as much as any hamlet I know. Then presently the interminable fen

stretches for miles and miles in every direction; you can see, from

the high green flood-banks of the river, the endless lines of

watercourses and far-off clumps of trees leagues away, and perhaps

the great tower of Ely, blue on the horizon, with the vast spacious

sky over-arching all. If that is not a beautiful place in its

width, its greenness, its unbroken silence, I do not know what

beauty is! Nothing that historians call an event has ever happened

there. It is a place that has just drifted out of the old lagoon

life of the past, the life of reed-beds and low-lying islands, of

marsh-fowl and fishes, into a hardly less peaceful life of

cornfield and pasture. No one goes there except on country

business, no armies ever marshalled or fought there. The sun goes

down in flame on the far horizon; the wild duck fly over and settle

in the pools, the flowers rise to life year by year on the edges of

slow watercourses; the calm mystery of it can be seen and

remembered; but it can hardly be told in words.

2

Now side by side with that I will set another picture of a

different kind.

A week or two ago I was travelling up North. The stations we passed

through were many of them full of troops, the trains were crammed

with soldiers, and very healthy and happy they looked. I was struck

by their friendliness and kindness; they were civil and modest;

they did not behave as if they were in possession of the line, as

actually I suppose they were, but as if they were ordinary

travellers, and anxious not to incommode other people. I saw

soldiers doing kind little offices, helping an old frail woman

carefully out of the train and handing out her baggage, giving

chocolates to children, interesting themselves in their fellow-

travellers. At one place I saw a proud and anxious father, himself

an old soldier, I think, seeing off a jolly young subaltern to the

front, with hardly suppressed tears; the young man was full of

excitement and delight, but did his best to cheer up the spirits of

"Daddy," as he fondly called him. I felt very proud of our

soldiers, their simplicity and kindness and real goodness. I was

glad to belong to the nation which had bred them, and half forgot

the grim business on which they were bent. We stopped at a

junction. And here I caught sight of a strange little group. There

was a young man, an officer, who had evidently been wounded; one of

his legs was encased in a surgical contrivance, and he had a

bandage round his head. He sat on a bench between two stalwart and

cheerful-looking soldiers, who had their arms round him, and were

each holding one of his hands. I could not see the officer clearly

at first, as a third soldier was standing close in front of him and

speaking encouragingly to him, while at the same time he sheltered

him from the crowd. But he moved away, and at the same moment the

young officer lifted his head, displaying a drawn and sunken face,

a brow compressed with pain, and looked wildly and in a terrified

way round him, with large melancholy eyes. Then he began to beat

his foot on the ground, and struggled to extricate himself from his

companions; and then he buried his head in his chest and sank down

in an attitude of angry despair. It was a sight that I cannot

forget.

Just before the train went off an officer got into my carriage, and

as we started, said to me, "That's a sad business there--it is a

young officer who was taken prisoner by the Germans--one of our

best men; he escaped, and after enduring awful hardships he got

into our lines, was wounded, and sent home to hospital; but the

shock and the anxiety preyed on his mind, and he has become, they

fear, hopelessly insane--he is being sent to a sanatorium, but I

fear there is very little chance of his recovery; he is wounded in

the head as well as the foot. He is a wealthy man, devoted to

soldiering, and he is just engaged to a charming girl . . ."

3

Now there is a hard and bitter fact of life, very different from

the story of the fenland. I am not going to argue about it or

discuss it, because to trace the threads of it back into life

entangles one at once helplessly in a dreadful series of problems:

namely, how it comes to pass that a calamity, grievous and

intolerable beyond all calamities in its pain and sorrow and waste,

a strife abhorred and dreaded by all who are concerned in it,

fruitful in every shade of misery and wretchedness, should yet have

come about so inevitably and relentlessly. No one claims to have

desired war; all alike plead that it is in self-defence that they

are fighting, and maintain that they have laboured incessantly for

peace. Yet the great mills of fate are turning, and grinding out

death and shame and loss. Everyone sickens for peace, and yet any

proposal of peace is drowned in cries of bitterness and rage. The

wisest spend their time in pointing out the blessings which the

conflict brings. The mother hears that the son she parted with in

strength and courage is mouldering in an unknown grave, and chokes

her tears down. The fruit of years of labour is consumed, lands are

laid desolate, the weak and innocent are wronged; yet the great

war-engine goes thundering and smashing on, leaving hatred and

horror behind it; and all the while men pray to a God of mercy and

loving-kindness and entreat His blessing on the work they are

doing.

Is there then, if we are confronted with such problems as these,

anything to do except to stay prostrate, like Job, in darkness and

despair, just enduring the stroke of sorrow? Is there any excuse

for bringing before the world at such a time as this the delightful

reveries, the easy happiness, the gentle schemes of serener and

less troubled days? The book which follows was the work of a time

which seems divided from the present by a dark stream of

unhappiness. Is it right, is it decent, to unfold an old picture of

peace before the eyes of those who have had to look into chaos and

destruction? Would it not be braver to burn the record of the

former things that have passed away? Or is it well to fix our gaze

firmly upon the peaceful things that have been and will be once

more?

4

Yes, I believe that it is right and wholesome to do this, because

the most treacherous and cowardly thing we can do is to disbelieve

in life. Those old dreams and visions were true enough, and they

will be true again. They represent the real life to which we must

try to return. We must try to build up the conception afresh, not

feebly to confess that we were all astray. We cannot abolish evil by

confessing ourselves worsted by it; we can only overcome it by

holding fast to our belief in labour and order and peace. It is a

temptation which we must resist, to philosophise too much about war.

Very few minds are large enough and clear enough to hold all the

problems in their grasp. I do not believe for an instant that war

has falsified our vision of peace. We must cling to it more than

ever, we must emphasize it, we must dwell in it. I regard war as I

regard an outbreak of pestilence; the best way to resist it is not

to brood over it, but to practise joy and health. The ancient

plagues which devastated Europe have not been overcome by philosophy,

but by the upspringing desire of men to live cleaner and more

wholesome lives. That instinct is not created by any philosophy or

persuasion; it just arises everywhere and finds its way to the

light.

To brood over the war, to spend our time in disentangling its

intricate causes, seems to me a task for future historians. But a

lover of peace, confronted by the hideousness of war, does best to

try, if he can, to make plain what he means by peace and why he

desires it. I do not mean by peace an indolent life, lost in gentle

reveries. I mean hard daily work, and mutual understanding, and

lavish help, and the effort to reassure and console and uplift. And

I mean, too, a real conflict--not a conflict where we set the best

and bravest of each nation to spill each other's blood--but a

conflict against crime and disease and selfishness and greediness

and cruelty. There is much fighting to be done; can we not combine

to fight our common foes, instead of weakening each other against

evil? We destroy in war our finest parental stock, we waste our

labour, we lose our garnered store; we give every harsh passion a

chance to grow; we live in the traditions of the past, and not in

the hopes of the future.

5

And yet there is one thing in the present war which I do in my

heart of hearts feel to be worth fighting for, and that is for the

hope of liberty. It is hard to say what liberty is, because the

essence of it is the subjugation of personal inclinations. The

Germans claim that they alone know the meaning of liberty, and that

they have arrived at it by discipline. But the bitterness of this

war lies in the fact that the Germans are not content to set an

example of attractive virtue, and to leave the world to choose it;

but that if the world will not choose it, they will force it upon

them by violence and the sword. It is this which makes me feel that

the war may be a vast protest of the nations, which have the spirit

of the future in their hearts, against a theory of life that

represents the spirit of the past. And I thus, with some seeming

inconsistency, believe that the war may represent the hope of peace

at bay. If the nations can keep this clearly before them, and not

be tempted either into reprisals, or into rewarding themselves by

the spoils of victory, if victory comes; if it ends in the Germans

being sincerely convinced that they have been misled and poisoned

by a conception of right which is both uncivilised and unchristian,

then I believe that all our sufferings may not be too great a price

to pay for the future well-being of the world. That is the largest

and brightest hope I dare to frame; and there are many hours and

days when it seems all clouded and dim.

6

We cannot at this time disengage our thoughts from the war; we

cannot, and we ought not. Still less can we take refuge from it in

idle dreams of peace and security; but at a time when every paper

and book that we see is full of the war and its sufferings, there

must be men and women who would do well to turn their hearts and

minds for a little away from it. If we brood over it, if we feed

our minds upon it, especially if we are by necessity non-

combatants, it is all apt to turn to a festering horror which makes

us useless and miserable. Whatever happens, we must try not to be

simply the worse for the war--morbid, hysterical, beggared of faith

and hope, horrified with life. That is the worst of evils; and I

believe that it is wholesome to put as far as we can our cramped

minds in easier postures, and to let our spirits have a wider

range. We know how a dog who is perpetually chained becomes fierce

and furious, and thinks of nothing but imaginary foes, so that the

most peaceful passer-by becomes an enemy. I have felt, since the

war began, a certain poison in the air, a tendency towards

suspicion and contentiousness and vague hostility. We must exorcise

that evil spirit if we can; and I believe it is best laid by

letting our minds go back to the old peace for a little, and

resolving that the new peace which we believe is coming shall be of

a larger and nobler quality; we may thus come to appreciate the

happiness which we enjoyed but had not earned; and lay our plans

for earning a new kind of happiness, the essence of which shall be

a mutual trust, that desires to give and share whatever it enjoys,

instead of hoarding it and guarding it.

A wise and unselfish woman wrote to me the other day in words which

will long live in my mind; she had sent out one whom she dearly

loved to the front, and she was fighting her fears as gallantly as

she could. "Whatever happens, we must not give way to dread," she

wrote. "It does not do to dread anything for our own treasures."

That is the secret! What we must not do, in the time of war, is to

indicate to everyone else what their sacrifices ought to be; we

must just make our own sacrifices; and perhaps the man who loves

and values peace most highly does not sacrifice the least. But even

he may try to realise that life does not contradict itself; but

that the parts of it, whether they be delightful or dreadful, do

work into each other in a marvellous way.

I

ESCAPE

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality--the

story of an escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and

at all times--how to escape. The stories of Joseph, of Odysseus, of

the prodigal son, of the Pilgrim's Progress, of the "Ugly

Duckling," of Sintram, to name only a few out of a great number,

they are all stories of escapes. It is the same with all love-

stories. "The course of true love never can run smooth," says the

old proverb, and love-stories are but tales of a man or a woman's

escape from the desert of lovelessness into the citadel of love.

Even tragedies like those of OEdipus and Hamlet have the same

thought in the background. In the tale of OEdipus, the old blind

king in his tattered robe, who had committed in ignorance such

nameless crimes, leaves his two daughters and the attendants

standing below the old pear-tree and the marble tomb by the sacred

fountain; he says the last faint words of love, till the voice of

the god comes thrilling upon the air:

"OEdipus, why delayest thou?"

Then he walks away at once in silence, leaning on the arm of

Theseus, and when at last the watchers dare to look, they see

Theseus afar off, alone, screening his eyes with his hand, as if

some sight too dreadful for mortal eyes had passed before him; but

OEdipus is gone, and not with lamentation, but in hope and wonder.

Even when Hamlet dies, and the peal of ordnance is shot off, it is

to congratulate him upon his escape from unbearable woe; and that

is the same in life. If our eye falls on the sad stories of men and

women who have died by their own hand, how seldom do they speak in

the scrawled messages they leave behind them as though they were

going to silence and nothingness! It is just the other way. The

unhappy fathers and mothers who, maddened by disaster, kill their

children are hoping to escape with those they love best out of

miseries they cannot bear; they mean to fly together, as Lot fled

with his daughters from the city of the plain. The man who slays

himself is not the man who hates life; he only hates the sorrow and

the shame which make unbearable that life which he loves only too

well. He is trying to migrate to other conditions; he desires to

live, but he cannot live so. It is the imagination of man that

makes him seek death; only the animal endures, but man hurries away

in the hope of finding something better.

It is, however, strange to reflect how weak man's imagination is

when it comes to deal with what is beyond him, how little able he

is to devise anything that he desires to do when he has escaped

from life. The unsubstantial heaven of a Buddhist, with its

unthinkable Nirvana, is merely the depriving life of all its

attributes; the dull sensuality of the Mohammedan paradise, with

its ugly multiplication of gross delights; the tedious outcries of

the saints in light which make the medieval scheme of heaven into

one protracted canticle--these are all deeply unattractive, and

have no power at all over the vigorous spirit. Even the vision of

Socrates, the hope of unrestricted converse with great minds, is a

very unsatisfying thought, because it yields so little material to

work upon.

The fact, of course, is that it is just the variety of experience

which makes life interesting,--toil and rest, pain and relief, hope

and satisfaction, danger and security,--and if we once remove the

idea of vicissitude from life, it all becomes an indolent and

uninspiring affair. It is the process of change which is

delightful, the finding out what we can do and what we cannot,

going from ignorance to knowledge, from clumsiness to skill; even

our relations with those whom we love are all bound up with the

discoveries we make about them and the degree in which we can help

them and affect them. What the mind instinctively dislikes is

stationariness; and an existence in which there was nothing to

escape from, nothing more to hope for, to learn, to desire, would

be frankly unendurable.

The reason why we dread death is because it seems to be a

suspension of all our familiar activities. It would be terrible to

have nothing but memory to depend upon. The only use of memory is

that it distracts us a little from present conditions if they are

dull, and it is only too true that the recollection in sorrow of

happy things is torture of the worst kind.

Once when Tennyson was suffering from a dangerous illness, his

friend Jowett wrote to Lady Tennyson to suggest that the poet might

find comfort in thinking of all the good he had done. But that is

not the kind of comfort that a sufferer desires; we may envy a good

man his retrospect of activity, but we cannot really suppose that

to meditate complacently upon what one has been enabled to do is

the final thought that a good man is likely to indulge. He is far

more likely to torment himself over all that he might have done.

It is true, I think, that old and tired people pass into a quiet

serenity; but it is the serenity of the old dog who sleeps in the

sun, wags his tail if he is invited to bestir himself, but does not

leave his place; and if one reaches that condition, it is but a

dumb gratitude at the thought that nothing more is expected of the

worn-out frame and fatigued mind. But no one, I should imagine,

really hopes to step into immortality so tired and worn out that

the highest hope that he can frame is that he will be let alone for

ever. We must not trust the drowsiness of the outworn spirit to

frame the real hopes of humanity. If we believe that the next

experience ahead of us is like that of the mariners,

In the afternoon they came unto a land

In which it seemed always afternoon,

then we acquiesce in a dreamless sort of sleep as the best hope of

man.

No, we must rather trust the desires of the spirit at its

healthiest and most vigorous, and these are all knit up with the

adventure of escape, as I have said. There is something hostile on

our track: the copse that closes in upon the road is thick with

spears; presences that do not wish us well move darkly in the wood

and keep pace with us, and the only explanation we can give is that

we need to be spurred on by fear if we are not drawn forward by

desire or hope. We have to keep moving, and if we will not run to

the goal, we must at least flee, with backward glances at something

which threatens us.

There is an old and strange Eastern allegory of a man wandering in

the desert; he draws near to a grove of trees, when he suddenly

becomes aware that there is a lion on his track, hurrying and

bounding along on the scent of his steps. The man flees for safety

into the grove; he sees there a roughly built water-tank of stone,

excavated in the ground, and built up of masonry much fringed with

plants. He climbs swiftly down to where he sees a ledge close on

the water; as he does this, he sees that in the water lies a great

lizard, with open jaws, watching him with wicked eyes. He stops

short, and he can just support himself among the stones by holding

on to the branches of a plant which grows from a ledge above him.

While he thus holds on, with death behind him and before, he feels

the branches quivering, and sees above, out of reach, two mice, one

black and one white, which are nibbling at the stems he holds and

will soon sever them. He waits despairingly, and while he does so,

he sees that there are drops of honey on the leaves which he holds;

he puts his lips to them, licks them off, and finds them very

sweet.

The mice stand, no doubt, for night and day, and the honey is the

sweetness of life, which it is possible to taste and relish even

when death is before and behind; and it is true that the utter

precariousness of life does not, as a matter of fact, distract us

from the pleasure of it, even though the strands to which we hold

are slowly parting. It is all, then, an adventure and an escape;

but even in the worst insecurity, we may often be surprised to find

that it is somehow sweet.

It is not in the least a question of the apparent and outward

adventurousness of one's life. Foolish people sometimes write and

think as though one could not have had adventures unless one has

hung about at bar-room doors and in billiard-saloons, worked one's

passage before the mast in a sailing-ship, dug for gold among the

mountains, explored savage lands, shot strange animals, fared

hardly among deep-drinking and loud-swearing men. It is possible,

of course, to have adventures of this kind, and, indeed, I had a

near relative whose life was fuller of vicissitudes than any life I

have ever known: he was a sailor, a clerk, a policeman, a soldier,

a clergyman, a farmer, a verger. But the mere unsettledness of it

suited him: he was an easy comrade, brave, reckless, restless; he

did not mind roughness, and the one thing he could not do was to

settle down to anything regular and quiet. He did not dislike life

at all, even when he stood half-naked, as he once told me he did,

on a board slung from the side of a ship, and dipped up pails of

water to swab it, the water freezing as he flung it on the timbers.

But with all this variety of life he did not learn anything

particular from it all; he was much the same always, good-natured,

talkative, childishly absorbed, not looking backward or forward,

and fondest of telling stories with sailors in an inn. He learned

to be content in most companies and to fare roughly; but he gained

neither wisdom nor humour, and he was not either happy or

independent, though he despised with all his heart the stay-at-

home, stick-in-the-mud life.

But we are not all made like this, and it is only possible for a

few people to live so by the fact that most people prefer to stay

at home and do the work of the world. My cousin was not a worker,

and, indeed, did no work except under compulsion and in order to

live; but such people seem to belong to an older order, and are

more like children playing about, and at leisure to play because

others work to feed and clothe them. The world would be a wretched

and miserable place if all tried to live life on those lines.

It would be impossible to me to live so, though I dare say I should

be a better man if I had had a little more hardship of that kind;

but I have worked hard in my own way, and though I have had few

hairbreadth escapes, yet I have had sharp troubles and slow

anxieties. I have been like the man in the story, between the lion

and the lizard for many months together; and I have had more to

bear, by temperament and fortune, than my roving cousin ever had to

endure; so that because a life seems both sheltered and prosperous,

it need not therefore have been without its adventures and escapes

and its haunting fears.

The more one examines into life and the motives of it, the more

does one perceive that the imagination, concerning itself with

hopes of escape from any conditions which hamper and confine us, is

the dynamic force that is transmuting the world. The child is for

ever planning what it will do when it is older, and dreams of an

irresponsible choice of food and an unrestrained use of money; the

girl schemes to escape from the constraints of home by independence

or marriage; the professional man plans to make a fortune and

retire; the mother dreams ambitious dreams for her children; the

politician craves for power; the writer hopes to gain the ear of

the world--these are only a few casual instances of the desire that

is always at work within us, projecting us into a larger and freer

future out of the limited and restricted present. That is the real

current of the world, and though there are sedate people who are

contented with life as they see it, yet in most minds there is a

fluttering of little tremulous hopes forecasting ease and freedom;

and there are also many tired and dispirited people who are not

content with life as they have it, but acquiesce in its dreariness;

yet all who have any part in the world's development are full of

schemes for themselves and others by which the clogging and

detaining elements are somehow to be improved away. Sensitive

people want to find life more harmonious and beautiful, healthy

people desire a more continuous sort of holiday than they can

attain, religious people long for a secret ecstasy of peace; there

is, in fact, a constant desire at work to realise perfection.

And yet, despite it all, there is a vast preponderance of evidence

which shows us that the attainment of our little dreams is not a

thing to be desired, and that satisfied desire is the least

contented of moods. If we realise our programme, if we succeed,

marry the woman we love, make a fortune, win leisure, gain power, a

whole host of further desires instantly come in sight. I once

congratulated a statesman on a triumphant speech.

"Yes," he said, "I do not deny that it is a pleasure to have had

for once the exact effect that one intended to have; but the shadow

of it is the fear that having once reached that standard, one may

not be able to keep it up."

The awful penalty of success is the haunting dread of subsequent

failure, and even sadder still is the fact that in striving eagerly

to attain an end, we are apt to lose the sense of the purpose which

inspired us. This is more drearily true of the pursuit of money

than of anything else. I could name several friends of my own who

started in business with the perfectly definite and avowed

intention of making a competence in order that they might live as

they desired to live; that they might travel, read, write, enjoy a

secure leisure. But when they had done exactly what they meant to

do, the desires were all atrophied. They could not give up their

work; they felt it would be safer to have a larger margin, they

feared they might be bored, they had made friends, and did not wish

to sever the connection, they must provide a little more for their

families: the whole programme had insensibly altered. Even so they

were still planning to escape from something--from some boredom or

anxiety or dread.

And yet it seems very difficult for any person to realise what is

the philosophical conclusion, namely, that the work of each of us

matters very little to the world, but that it matters very much to

ourselves that we should have some work to do. We seem to be a very

feeble-minded race in this respect, that we require to be

constantly bribed and tempted by illusions. I have known men of

force and vigour both in youth and middle life who had a strong

sense of the value and significance of their work; as age came upon

them, the value of their work gradually disappeared; they were

deferred to, consulted, outwardly reverenced, and perhaps all the

more scrupulously and compassionately in order that they might not

guess the lamentable fact that their work was done and that the

forces and influences were in younger hands. But the men themselves

never lost the sense of their importance. I knew an octogenarian

clergyman who declared once in my presence that it was ridiculous

to say that old men lost their faculty of dealing with affairs.

"Why," he said, "it is only quite in the last few years that I feel

I have really mastered my work. It takes me far less time than it

used to do; it is just promptly and methodically executed." The old

man obviously did not know that his impression that his work

consumed less time was only too correct, because it was, as a

matter of fact, almost wholly performed by his colleagues, and

nothing was referred to him except purely formal business.

It seems rather pitiful that we should not be able to face the

truth, and that we cannot be content with discerning the principle

of it all, which is that our work is given to us to do not for its

intrinsic value, but because it is good for us to do it.

The secret government of the world seems, indeed, to be penetrated

by a good-natured irony; it is as if the Power controlling us saw

that, like children, we must be tenderly wooed into doing things

which we should otherwise neglect, by a sense of high importance,

as a kindly father who is doing accounts keeps his children quiet

by letting one hold the blotting-paper and another the ink, so that

they believe that they are helping when they are merely being kept

from hindering.

And this strange sense of escape which drives us into activity and

energy seems given us not that we may realise our aims, which turn

out hollow and vapid enough when they are realised, but that we may

drink deep of experience for the sake of its beneficent effect upon

us. The failure of almost all Utopias and ideal states, designed

and planned by writers and artists, lies in the absence of all

power to suggest how the happy folk who have conquered all the ills

and difficulties of life are to employ themselves reasonably and

eagerly when there is nothing left to improve. William Morris,

indeed, in his News from Nowhere, confessed through the mouth of

one of his characters that there would be hardly enough pleasant

work, like hay-making and bridge-building and carpentering and

paving, left to go round; and the picture of life which he draws,

with its total lack of privacy, the shops where you may ask for

anything that you want without having to pay, the guest-houses,

with their straw-coloured wine in quaint carafes, the rich stews

served in grey earthenware dishes streaked with blue, the dancing,

the caressing, the singular absence of all elderly women, strikes

on the mind with a quite peculiar sense of boredom and vacuity,

because Morris seems to have eliminated so many sources of human

interest, and to have conformed every one to a type, which is

refreshing enough as a contrast, but very tiresome in the mass. It

will not be enough to have got rid of the combative and sordid and

vulgar elements of the world unless a very active spirit of some

kind has taken its place. Morris himself intended that art should

supply the missing force; but art is not a sociable thing; it is

apt to be a lonely affair, and few artists have either leisure or

inclination to admire one another's work.

Still more dreary was the dream of the philosopher J. S. Mill, who

was asked upon one occasion what would be left for men to do when

they had been perfected on the lines which he desired. He replied,

after a long and painful hesitation, that they might find

satisfaction in reading the poems of Wordsworth. But Wordsworth's

poems are useful in the fact that they supply a refreshing contrast

to the normal thought of the world, and nothing but the fact that

many took a different view of life was potent enough to produce

them.

So, for the present at all events, we must be content to feel that

our imagination provides us with a motive rather than with a goal;

and though it is very important that we should strive with all our

might to eliminate the baser elements of life, yet we must be brave

and wise enough to confess how much of our best happiness is born

of the fact that we have these elements to contend with.

Edward FitzGerald once said that a fault of modern writing was that

it tried to compress too many good things into a page, and aimed

too much at omitting the homelier interspaces. We must not try to

make our lives into a perpetual feast; at least we must try to do

so, but it must be by conquest rather than by inglorious flight; we

must face the fact that the stuff of life is both homely and indeed

amiss, and realise, if we can, that our happiness is bound up with

energetically trying to escape from conditions which we cannot

avoid. When we are young and fiery-hearted, we think that a tame

counsel; but, like all great truths, it dawns on us slowly. Not

until we begin to ascend the hill do we grasp how huge, how

complicated, how intricate the plain, with all its fields, woods,

hamlets, and streams is; we are happy men and women if in middle

age we even faintly grasp that the actual truth about life is

vastly larger and finer than any impatient youthful fancies about

it are, though it is good to have indulged our splendid fancies in

youth, if only for the delight of learning how much more

magnificent is the real design.

In the Pilgrim's Progress, at the very outset of the journey,

Evangelist asks Christian why he is standing still. He replies:

"Because I know not whither to go."

Evangelist, with a certain grimness of humour, thereupon hands him

a parchment roll. One supposes that it will be a map or a paper of

directions, but all that it has written in it is, "Fly from the

wrath to come!"

Well, it is no longer that of which we are afraid, a rain of fire

and brimstone, storm and tempest! The Power behind the world has

better gifts than these; but we still have to fly, where we can and

as fast as we can; and when we have traversed the dim leagues, and

have seen things wonderful at every turn, and have passed through

the bitter flood, we shall find--at least this is my hope--no

guarded city of God from which we shall go no more out, but another

road passing into wider fields and dimmer uplands, and to things

more and more wonderful and strange and unknown.

II

LITERATURE AND LIFE

There is a tendency, not by any means among the greater writers,

but among what may be called the epigoni,--the satellites of

literature, the men who would be great if they knew how,--to speak

of the business of writing as if it were a sacred mystery,

pontifically celebrated, something remote and secret, which must be

guarded from the vulgar and the profane, and which requires an

initiation to comprehend. I always feel rather suspicious of this

attitude; it seems to me something of a pose, adopted in order to

make other people envious and respectful. It is the same sort of

precaution as the "properties" of the wizard, his gown and wand,

the stuffed crocodile and the skeleton in the corner; for if there

is a great fuss made about locking and double-locking a box, it

creates a presumption of doubt as to whether there is anything

particular in it. In my nursery days one of my brothers was fond of

locking up his private treasures in a box, producing it in public,

unfastening it, glancing into it with a smile, and then softly

closing it and turning the key in a way calculated to provoke the

most intense curiosity as to the contents; but upon investigation

it proved to contain nothing but the wool of sheep, dried beans,

and cases of exploded cartridges.

So, too, I have known both writers and artists who made a mystery

out of their craft, professed a holy rapture, as if the business of

imagination and the art of setting things down were processes that

could not be explained to ordinary people, but were the property of

a brotherhood. And thus grow up cliques and coteries, of people

who, by mutual admiration, try to console one another for the

absence of the applause which the world will not concede them, and

to atone for the coldness of the public by a warmth of intimate

proximity.

This does not in the least apply to groups of people who are

genuinely and keenly interested in art of any kind, and form a

congenial circle in which they discuss, frankly and

enthusiastically, methods of work, the books, ideas, pictures, and

music which interest them. That is quite a different thing, a real

fortress of enthusiasm in the midst of Meshech and Kedar. What

makes it base and morbid is the desire to exclude for the sake of

exclusion; to indulge in solitary raptures, hoping to be overheard;

to keep the tail of the eye upon the public; to attempt to mystify;

and to trade upon the inquisitive instinct of human beings, the

natural desire, that is, to know what is going on within any group

that seems to have exciting business of its own.

The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, were a group and not a coterie.

They were engaged in working and enjoying, in looking out for

artistic promise, in welcoming and praising any performance of a

kind that Rossetti recognised as "stunning." They were sure of

their ground. The brotherhood, with its magazine, The Germ, and its

mystic initials, was all a gigantic game; and they held together

because they were revolutionary in this, that they wished to slay,

as one stabs a tyrant, the vulgarised and sentimental art of the

day. They did not effect anything like a revolution, of course. It

was but a ripple on the flowing stream, and they diverged soon

enough, most of them, into definite tracks of their own. The

strength of the movement lay in the fact that they hungered and

thirsted after art, clamouring for beauty, so Mr. Chesterton says,

as an ordinary man clamours for beer. But their aim was not to

mystify or to enlarge their own consequence, but to convert the

unbeliever, and to produce fine things.

There is something in the Anglo-Saxon temperament which is on the

whole unfavourable to movements and groups; the great figures of

the Victorian time in art and literature have been solitary men,

anarchical as regards tradition, strongly individualistic, working

on their own lines without much regard for schools or conventions.

The Anglo-Saxon is deferential, but not imitative; he has a fancy

for doing things in his own way. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron--

were there ever four contemporary poets so little affected by one

another's work? Think of the phrase in which Scott summed up his

artistic creed, saying that he had succeeded, in so far as he had

succeeded, by a "hurried frankness of composition," which was meant

to please young and eager people. It is true that Wordsworth had a

solemn majesty about his work, practised a sort of priestly

function, never averse to entertaining ardent visitors by

conducting them about his grounds, and showing them where certain

poems had been engendered. But Wordsworth, as Fitz-Gerald truly

said, was proud, not vain--proud like the high-hung cloud or the

solitary peak. He felt his responsibility, and desired to be felt

rather than to be applauded.

If one takes the later giants, Tennyson had a sense of magnificence,

a childlike self-absorption. He said once in the same breath that

the desire of the public to know the details of the artist's life

was the most degrading and debasing curiosity,--it was ripping

people up like pigs,--and added with a sigh that he thought that

there was a congestion in the world about his own fame; he had

received no complimentary letters for several days.

Browning, on the other hand, kept his raptures and his processes

severely to himself. He never seems to have given the smallest hint

as to how he conceived a poem or worked it out. He was as reticent

about his occupation as a well-bred stockbroker, and did his best

in society to give the impression of a perfectly decorous and

conventional gentleman, telling strings of not very interesting

anecdotes, and making a great point of being ordinary. Indeed, I

believe that Browning was haunted by the eighteenth-century idea

that there was something not quite respectable about professional

literature, and that, like Gray, he wished to be considered a

private gentleman who wrote for his amusement. When in later years

he took a holiday, he went not for secret contemplation, but to

recover from social fatigue. Browning is really one of the most

mysterious figures in literature in this respect, because his inner

life of poetry was so entirely apart from his outer life of dinner-

parties and afternoon calls. Inside the sacred enclosure, the winds

of heaven blow, the thunder rolls; he proclaims the supreme worth

of human passion, he dives into the disgraceful secrets of the

soul: and then he comes out of his study a courteous and very

proper gentleman, looking like a retired diplomatist, and talking

like an intelligent commercial traveller--a man whose one wish

appeared to be as good-humouredly like everyone else as he

conveniently could.

What, again, is one to make of Dickens, with his love of private

theatricals, his florid waistcoats and watch-chains, his

sentimental radicalism, his kindly, convivial, gregarious life? He,

again, did his work in a rapture of solitary creation, and seemed

to have no taste for discussing his ideas or methods. Then, too,

Dickens's later desertion of his work in favour of public readings

and money-making is curious to note. He was like Shakespeare in

this, that the passion of his later life seemed to be to realise an

ideal of bourgeois prosperity. Dickens seems to have regarded his

art partly as a means of social reform, and partly as a method of

making money. The latter aim is to a great extent accounted for by

the miserable and humiliating circumstances of his early life,

which bit very deep into him. Yet his art was hardly an end in

itself, but something through which he made his way to other aims.

Carlyle, again, was a writer who put ideas first, despised his

craft except as a means of prophesying, hated literary men and

coteries, preferred aristocratic society, while at the same time he

loved to say how unutterably tiresome he found it. Who will ever

understand why Carlyle trudged many miles to attend parties and

receptions at Bath House, where the Ashburtons lived, or what

stimulus he discerned in it? I have a belief that Carlyle felt a

quite unconscious pride in the fact that he, the son of a small

Scotch farmer, had his assured and respected place among a semi-

feudal circle, just as I have very little doubt that his migration

to Craigenputtock was ultimately suggested to him by the pleasure

and dignity of being an undoubted laird, and living among his own,

or at least his wife's, lands. In saying this, I do not wish to

belittle Carlyle, or to accuse him of what may be called

snobbishness. He had no wish to worm himself by slavish deference

into the society of the great, but he liked to be able to walk in

and say his say there, fearing no man; it was like a huge mirror

that reflected his own independence. Yet no one ever said harder or

fiercer things of his own fellow-craftsmen. His description of

Charles Lamb as "a pitiful rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering

tom-fool" is not an amiable one! Or take his account of Wordsworth-

-how instead of a hand-shake, the poet intrusted him with "a

handful of numb unresponsive fingers," and how his speech "for

prolixity, thinness, endless dilution" excelled all the other

speech that Carlyle had ever heard from mortals. He admitted that

Wordsworth was "a genuine man, but intrinsically and extrinsically

a small one, let them sing or say what they will." In fact, Carlyle

despised his trade: one of the most vivid and voluble of writers,

he derided the desire of self-expression; one of the most

continuous and brilliant of talkers, he praised and upheld the

virtue of silence. He spoke and wrote of himself as a would-be man

of action condemned to twaddle; and Ruskin expressed very

trenchantly what will always be the puzzle of Carlyle's life--that,

as Ruskin said, he groaned and gasped and lamented over the

intolerable burden of his work, and that yet, when you came to read

it, you found it all alive, full of salient and vivid details, not

so much patiently collected, as obviously and patently enjoyed.

Again there is the mystery of his lectures. They seem to have been

fiery, eloquent, impressive harangues; and yet Carlyle describes

himself stumbling to the platform, sleepless, agitated, and

drugged, inclined to say that the best thing his audience could do

for him would be to cover him up with an inverted tub; while as he

left the platform among signs of visible emotion and torrents of

applause, he thought, he said, that the idea of being paid for such

stuff made him feel like a man who had been robbing hen-roosts.

There is an interesting story of how Tennyson once stayed with

Bradley, when Bradley was headmaster of Marlborough, and said

grimly one evening that he envied Bradley, with all his heart, his

life of hard, fruitful, necessary work, and owned that he sometimes

felt about his own poetry, what, after all, did all this elaborate

versifying amount to, and who was in any way the better or happier

for it?

The truth is that the man of letters forgets that this is exactly

the same thought as that which haunts the busy man after, let us

say, a day of looking over examination-papers or attending

committees. The busy man, if he reflects at all, is only too apt to

say to himself, "Here have I been slaving away like a stone-

breaker, reading endless scripts, discussing an infinity of petty

details, and what on earth is the use of it all?" Yet Sir Alfred

Lyall once said that if a man had once taken a hand in big public

affairs, he thought of literature much as a man who had crossed the

Atlantic in a sailing-yacht might think of sculling a boat upon the

Thames. One of the things that moved Dr. Johnson to a tempest of

wrath was when on the death of Lord Lichfield, the Lord Chancellor,

Boswell said to him that if he had taken to the law as a

profession, he might have been Lord Chancellor, and with the same

title. Johnson was extremely angry, and said that it was unfriendly

to remind a man of such things when it was too late.

One may conclude from such incidents and confessions that even some

of the most eminent men of letters have been haunted by the sense

that in following literature they have not chosen the best part,

and that success in public life is a more useful thing as well as

more glorious.