THE HOUSE OF QUIET
[Illustration: _The House of Quiet_]
THE
HOUSE OF QUIET
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
BY
ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
1907
COPYRIGHTED BY
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
1907
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
PREFACE
I have been reading this morning a very pathetic and characteristic
document. It is a paper that has lurked for years in an old collection of
archives, a preface, sketched by a great writer, who is famous wherever
the English language is spoken or read, for the second edition of a
noble book. The book, on its first appearance, was savagely and cruelly
attacked; and the writer of it, hurt and wounded by a mass of hateful
and malevolent criticisms, piled together by an envious and narrow mind,
tried, with a miserable attempt at jaunty levity, to write an answer to
the vicious assailant. This answer is deeply pathetic, because, behind
the desperate parade of cheerful _insouciance_, one seems to hear the
life-blood falling, drop by drop; the life-blood of a dauntless and
pure spirit, whose words had been so deftly twisted and satanically
misrepresented as to seem the utterances of a sensual and cynical mind.
In deference to wise and faithful advice, the preface was withheld and
suppressed; and one is thankful for that; and the episode is further a
tender lesson for all who have faithfully tried to express the deepest
thoughts of their heart, frankly and sincerely, never to make the least
attempt to answer, or apologise, or explain. If one’s book, or poem,
or picture survives, that is the best of all answers. If it does not
survive, well, one has had one’s say, thought one’s thought, done one’s
best to enlighten, to contribute, to console; and, like millions of other
human utterances, the sound is lost upon the wind, the thought, like a
rainbow radiance, has shone and vanished upon the cloud.
The book which is here presented has had its share both of good and evil
report; and it fell so far short of even its own simple purpose, that
I should be the last to hold that it had been blamed unduly. I have no
sort of intention of answering my critics; but I would wish to make plain
what the book itself perhaps fails to make plain, namely, what my purpose
in writing it was. The book grew rather than was made. It was, from the
first, meant as a message to the weak rather than as a challenge to the
strong. There is a theory of life, wielded like a cudgel by the hands of
the merry and high-hearted, that the whole duty of man is to dash into
the throng, to eat and drink, to love and wed, to laugh and fight. That
is a fine temper; it is the mood of the sailor-comrades of Odysseus—
“That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads.”
Such a mood, if it be not cruel, or tyrannous, or brutal, or overbearing,
is a generous and inspiriting thing. Joined, as I have seen it joined,
with simplicity and unselfishness and utter tenderness, it is the finest
spirit in the world—the spirit of the great and chivalrous knight of old
days. But when this mood shows itself without the kindly and gracious
knightly attributes, it is a vile and ugly thing, insolent, selfish,
animal.
The problem, then, which I tried to present in my book, was this: I
imagined a temperament of a peaceful and gentle order, a temperament
without robustness and _joie de vivre_, but with a sense of duty, a
desire to help, an anxious wish not to shirk responsibility; and then
I tried to depict such a character as being suddenly thrust into the
shadow, set aside, as, by their misfortune or their fault, a very large
number of persons are set aside, debarred from ambition, pushed into a
backwater of life, made, by some failure of vitality, into an invalid
(a word which conceals many of the saddest tragedies of the world)—and I
set myself to reflect how a man, with such limitations, might yet lead a
life that was wholesome and contented and helpful; and then, at the last,
I thought of him as confronted with a prospect of one of the deepest and
sweetest blessings of life, the hope of a noble love; and then again,
the tyrannous weakness that had laid him low, swept that too out of his
grasp, and bade him exchange death for life, darkness for the cheerful
day.
Who does not know of home after home where such things happen? of life
after life, on which calamities fall, so that the best that the sufferer
can do is _to gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost_?
This book, _The House of Quiet_, was written for all whose life, by
some stroke of God, seemed dashed into fragments, and who might feel so
listless, so dismayed, that they could not summon up courage even to try
and save something from the desolate wreck.
To compare small things with great, it was an attempt to depict, in
modern unromantic fashion, such a situation as that of _Robinson
Crusoe_, where a man is thrown suddenly upon his own resources, shut off
from sympathy and hope. In that great fiction one sees the patience, the
courage, the inventiveness of the simple hero grow under the author’s
hand; but the soul of my own poor hero had indeed suffered shipwreck,
though he fell among less stimulating surroundings than the caverns
and freshets, the wildfowl and the savages, of that green isle in the
Caribbean Sea.
In the _Life_ of William Morris, a man whose chosen motto was _si je
puis_, and who, whatever else he was accused of, was never accused of a
want of virile strength, there is an interesting and pathetic letter,
which he wrote at the age of fifty-one, when he was being thrust, against
his better judgment, into a prominent position in the Socialist movement.
“My habits are quiet and studious,” he said, “and, if I am too much
worried with ‘politics,’ _i.e._, intrigue, I shall be no use to the cause
as a writer. All this shows, you will say, a weak man: that is true, but
I must be taken as I am, not as I am not.”
This sentence sums up, very courageously and faithfully, the difficulty
in which many people, who believe in ideas, and perceive more clearly
than they are able to act, are placed by honest diffidence and candid
self-knowledge. We would amend life, if we could; but the impossibility
lies, not in seeing what is beautiful and just and right, but in making
other people desire it. It is conceivable, after all, that God knows
best, and has good reasons for delay—though many men, and those not the
least gallant, act as though they knew better still. But it matters very
little whether we betray our own weakness, by what we say or do. What
does matter is that we should have desired something ahead of us, should
have pointed it out to others. We may not attain it; others may not
attain it; but we have shown that we dare not acquiesce in our weakness,
that we will not allow ourselves to be silent about our purer hopes, that
we will not recline in a false security, that we will not try to solve
the problem by overlooking its difficulties; but that we will strive to
hold fast, in a tender serenity, to a belief in the strong and loving
purpose of God, however dark may be the shadow that lies across the path,
however sombre the mountain-barrier that lies between us and the sunlit
plain.
A. C. B.
_April 12, 1907._
PREFATORY NOTE TO ORIGINAL EDITION
_The writer of the following pages was a distant cousin of my own, and
to a certain extent a friend. That is to say, I had stayed several times
with him, and he had more than once visited me at my own home. I knew
that he was obliged, for reasons of health, to live a very quiet and
retired life; but he was not a man who appeared to be an invalid. He
was keenly interested in books, in art, and above all in people, though
he had but few intimate friends. He died in the autumn of 1900, and his
mother, who was his only near relation, died in the following year; it
fell to me to administer his estate, and among his papers I found this
book, prepared in all essential respects for publication, though it is
clear that it would not have seen the light in his lifetime. I submitted
it to a friend of wide literary experience; his opinion was that the book
had considerable interest, and illustrated a definite and peculiar point
of view, besides presenting a certain attraction of style. I accordingly
made arrangements for its publication; adding a few passages from the
diary of the last days, which was composed subsequently to the date at
which the book was arranged._
_I need hardly say that the names are throughout fictitious; and I will
venture to express a hope that identification will not be attempted,
because the book is one which depends for its value, not on the material
circumstances of the writer, but upon the views of life which he formed._
THE HOUSE OF QUIET
INTRODUCTORY
_Christmas, Eve, 1898._
I have been a good deal indoors lately, and I have been amusing myself by
looking through old papers and diaries of my own. It seems to me that,
though the record is a very uneventful one, there is yet a certain unity
throughout—I can hardly call it a conscious, definite aim, or dignify it
by the name of a philosophy. But I have lived latterly with a purpose,
and on a plan that has gradually shaped itself and become more coherent.
It was formerly my ambition to write a book, and it has gone the way of
most ambitions. I suppose I have not the literary temperament; I have
not got the instinct for _form_ on a large scale. In the books which
I have attempted to write, I have generally lost myself among details
and abandoned the task in despair. I have never been capable of the
_fundamental brainwork_; the _fundamental conception_ which Rossetti
said made all the difference between a good piece of art and a bad one.
When I was young, my idea of writing was to pile fine phrases together,
and to think that any topic which occurred to my mind was pertinent to
the matter in hand. Now that I am older, I have learnt that form and
conception are not everything but nearly everything, and that a definite
idea austerely presented is better than a heap of literary ornament.
And now it seems to me that I have after all, without intending it,
written a book,—the one book, that, it is said, every man has in his
power to write. I feel like the King of France who said that he had
“discovered” a gallery in one of his palaces by the simple process of
pulling down partition walls. I have discarded a large amount of writing,
but I have selected certain episodes, made extracts from my diaries,
and added a few passages; and the result is the story of my life, told
perhaps in a desultory way, but with a certain coherence.
Whether or no the book will ever see the light I cannot tell; probably
not. I do not suppose I shall have the courage to publish it myself, and
I do not know any one who is likely to take the trouble of editing it
when I am gone. But there it is—the story of a simple life. Perhaps it
will go the way of waste paper, kindle fires, flit in sodden dreariness
about ashpits, till it is trodden in the mire. Perhaps it may repose
in some dusty bookshelf, and arouse the faint and tender curiosity of
some far-off inheritor of my worldly goods, like the old diaries of
my forefathers which stand on my own bookshelf. But if it came to be
published I think that there are some to whom it would appeal, as the
thin-drawn tremor of the violin stirs the note in vase or glass that have
stood voiceless and inanimate. I have borne griefs, humiliations, dark
overshadowings of the spirit; there are moments when I have peered, as it
were, into the dim-lit windows of hell; but I have had, too, my fragrant
hours, tranquil joys, imperishable ecstasies. And as a pilgrim may tell
his tale of travel to homekeeping folks, so I may allow myself the
license to speak, and tell what of good and evil the world has brought
me, and of my faint strivings after that interior peace, which can be
found, possessed, and enjoyed.
1
_Dec. 7, 1897._
[Sidenote: MY ROOM]
I sit this evening, towards the end of the year, in a deep arm-chair in
a large, low panelled room that serves me as bedroom and study together:
the windows are hung with faded tapestry curtains; there is a great
open tiled fireplace before me, with logs red-crumbling, bedded in grey
ash, every now and then winking out flame and lighting up the lean iron
dogs that support the fuel; odd Dutch tiles pave and wall the cavernous
hearth—this one a quaint galleon in full sail on a viscous, crested sea;
that, a stout sleek bird standing in complacent tranquillity; at the back
of the hearth, with the swift shadows flickering over it, is a large iron
panel showing a king in a war chariot, with a flying cloak, issuing from
an arched portal, upon a bridge which spans a furious stream, and shaking
out the reins of two stamping steeds; on the high chimney-board is a row
of Delft plates. The room is furnished with no precision or propriety,
the furniture having drifted in fortuitously as it was needed: here is a
tapestried couch; there an oak bookcase crammed with a strange assortment
of books; here a tall press; a picture or two—a bishop embedded in lawn
with a cauliflower wig; a crayon sketch of a scholarly head. There is
no plan of decoration—all fantastic miscellany. At the far end, under
an arch of oak, stands a bed, screened from the room by a dark leather
screen. Outside, all is unutterably still, not with the stillness that
sometimes falls on a sleeping town, where the hush seems invaded by
imperceptible cries, but with the deep tranquillity of the country-side
nestling down into itself. The trees are silent. Listening intently, I
can hear the trickle of the mill-leat, and the murmur of the hazel-hidden
stream; but that slumbrous sound ministers, as it were, the dreamful
quality, like the breathing of the sleeper—enough, and not more than
enough, to give the sense of sleeping life, as opposed to the aching, icy
stillness of death.
2
[Sidenote: EARLY DAYS]
I may speak shortly of my parentage and circumstances. I was the only
son of my father, a man who held a high administrative position under
Government. He owed his advancement not to family connections, for our
family though ancient was obscure. No doubt it may be urged that all
families are equally ancient, but what I mean is that our family had for
many generations preserved a sedulous tradition of gentle blood through
poverty and simple service. My ancestors had been mostly clergymen,
doctors, lawyers—at no time had we risen to the dignity of a landed
position or accumulated wealth: but we had portraits, miniatures,
plate—in no profusion, but enough to be able to feel that for a century
or two we had enjoyed a liberal education, and had had opportunities
for refinement if not leisure, and aptitude for cultivating the arts of
life; it had not been a mere sordid struggle, an inability to escape from
the coarsening pressure of gross anxieties, but something gracious,
self-contained, benevolent, active.
My father changed this; his profession brought him into contact with men
of rank and influence; he was fitted by nature to play a high social
part; he had an irresistible geniality, and something of a courtly air.
He married late, the daughter of an impoverished offshoot of a great
English family, and I was their only child.
The London life is dim to me; I faintly recollect being brought into the
room in a velvet suit to make my bow to some assembled circle of guests.
I remember hearing from the nursery the din and hubbub of a dinner-party
rising, in faint gusts, as the door was opened and shut—even of brilliant
cascades of music sparkling through the house when I awoke after a first
sleep, in what seemed to me some dead hour of the night. But my father
had no wish to make me into a precocious monkey, playing self-conscious
tricks for the amusement of visitors, and I lived for the most part in
the company of my mother—herself almost a child—and my faithful nurse,
a small, simple-minded Yorkshire woman, who had been my mother’s nurse
before.
When I was about six years old my father died suddenly, and the first
great shock of my life was the sight of the handsome waxen face, with the
blurred and flinty look of the dulled eyes, the leaden pallor of the thin
hands crossed on his breast; to this day I can see the blue shadows of
the ruffled shroud about his neck and wrists.
Our movements were simple enough. Only that summer, owing to an accession
of wealth, my father and mother had determined on some country home to
which they might retire in his months of freedom. My mother had never
cared for London; together they had found in the heart of the country a
house that attracted both of them, and a long lease had been taken within
a week or two of my father’s death. Our furniture was at once transferred
thither, and from that hour it has been my home.
3
[Sidenote: THE HOME LAND]
The region in which I live is a land of ridge and vale, as though it had
been ploughed with a gigantic plough. The high-roads lie as a rule along
the backs of the uplands, and the villages stand on the windy heights.
The lines of railway which run along the valley tend to create a new
species of valley village, but the old hamlets, with their grey-stone
high-backed churches, with slender shingled spires, stand aloft, the
pure air racing over them. The ancient manors and granges are as a rule
built in the more sheltered and sequestered valleys, approached from the
high-road by winding wood-lanes of exquisite beauty. The soil is sandy,
and a soft stone is quarried in many places by the road-side, leaving
quaint miniature cliffs and bluffs of weathered yellow, sometimes so
evenly stratified as to look like a rock-temple or a buried ruin with
mouldering buttresses; about these pits grow little knots of hazels and
ash-suckers, and the whole is hung in summer with luxuriant creepers and
climbing plants, out of which the crumbling rock-surfaces emerge. The
roads go down very steeply to the valleys, which are thick-set with copse
and woodland, and at the bottom runs a full-fed stream, with cascades and
pebbly shingles, running dark under scarps of sandstone, or hidden deep
under thick coverts of hazel, the water in the light a pure grey-green.
Some chalk is mingled with these ridges, so that in rainy weather the
hoof-prints in the roads ooze as with milk. The view from these uplands
is of exquisite beauty, ridge after ridge rolling its soft outlines,
thinly wooded. Far away are glimpses of high heathery tracts black with
pines, or a solitary clump upon some naked down. But the views in the
valleys are even more beautiful. The steep wood rises from the stream,
or the grave lines of some tilted fallow; in summer the water-plants
grow with rich luxuriance by the rivulet, tall willow-herb and velvety
loosestrife, tufted meadowsweet, and luxuriant comfrey. The homesteads
are of singular stateliness, with their great brick chimney-stacks, the
upper storeys weather-tiled and the roof of flat tiles of sandstone; the
whole mellowed by orange and grey lichens till the houses seem to have
sprung from the very soil.
4
[Sidenote: GOLDEN END]
My own home—bearing the tranquil name of Golden End—is an ancient manor;
out of a sandy lane turns an avenue of great Scotch firs, passing the
house and inclining gradually in its direction. The house is a strange
medley; one part of it is an Elizabethan building, mullioned, of grey
stone; one wing is weather-tiled and of simple outline. The front,
added at some period of prosperity, is Georgian, thickly set with large
windows; over all is a little tiled cupola where an alarm bell hangs.
There is a small square garden in front surrounded by low walls; above
the house lies what was once a bowling-green, with a terraced walk
surrounding it. The kitchen garden comes close up to the windows, and is
protected on the one side by a gigantic yew hedge, like a green bastion,
on the other by an ancient stone wall, with a tiled roof; below the house
lie quaint farm-buildings, cartsheds, barns, granaries, and stables;
beyond them are pools, fringed with self-sown ashes, and an orchard,
in the middle of which stands a brick dovecot with sandstone tiles. The
meadows fall from the house to the stream; but the greater part of the
few acres which we hold is simple woodland, where the copse grows thick
and dark, with here and there a stately forest tree. The house seen, as
I love best to see it, from the avenue on a winter evening, rises a dark
irregular pile, crowned with the cupola and the massive chimneys against
a green and liquid sky, in which trembles a single star; the pine-trees
are blacker still; and below lies the dim mysterious woodland, with the
mist rising over the stream, and, beyond that, soft upland after upland,
like a land of dreams, out to the horizon’s verge.
Within all is dark and low; there is a central panelled hall with round
oak arches on either hand leading through little anterooms to a parlour
and dining-room. There are wide, meaningless corridors with steps up and
down that connect the wings with the central building; the staircases
are of the most solid oak. All the rooms are panelled except the attics,
which show the beams crossing in the ancient plasterwork. At the top
of the house is a long room which runs from end to end, with a great
open fireplace. The kitchen is a huge, paved chamber with an oak pillar
in the centre. A certain amount of massive oak furniture, sideboards,
chests, and presses, with initials or dates, belongs to the place; but
my father was a great collector of books, china, and pictures, which,
with the furniture of a large London house, were put hurriedly in, with
little attempt at order; and no one has since troubled to arrange them.
One little feature must be mentioned; at the top of the house a crazy oak
door gives access to a flight of stairs that leads on to a parapet; but
below the stairs is a tiny oratory, with an altar and some seats, where
the household assemble every morning for a few prayers, and together sing
an artless hymn.
5
[Sidenote: MY MOTHER]
My mother, who through the following pages must be understood to be the
presiding deity of the scene—_O quam te memorem?_—how shall I describe
her? Seen through her son’s eyes she has an extraordinary tranquillity
and graciousness of mien. She moves slowly with an absolutely unconscious
dignity. She is naturally very silent, and has a fixed belief that she
is entirely devoid of all intellectual power, which is in one sense
true, for she reads little and has no taste for discussion. At the same
time she is gifted with an extraordinary shrewdness and penetration in
practical matters, and I would trust her judgment without hesitation. She
is intensely affectionate, and has the largest heart I have ever known;
but at the same time is capable of taking almost whimsical prejudices
against people, which, however I have combated them at the time, have
generally proved to be justified by subsequent events. Her sympathy and
her geniality make her delightful company, for she delights in listening
to the talk of clever people and has a strong sense of humour. She likes
being read to, though I do not think she questions the thought of what is
read. She is deeply religious, though I do not suppose she could give a
reason for her faith, and is constantly tolerant of religious differences
which she never attempts to comprehend. In the village she is simply
adored by men, women, and children alike, though she is not particularly
given to what is called “visiting the poor.”
At the same time if there is trouble in any house, no matter of what
kind, she goes there straight by instinct, and has none of the dread of
emotional scenes which make so many of us cowards in the presence of
sorrow and suffering. I do not think she feels any duty about it, but it
is as natural and spontaneous for her to go as it is for most of us to
desire to keep away. A shrewd woman of the village, a labourer’s wife,
whom my mother had seen through a dreadful tragedy a year or two before,
once said in reply to a question of mine, “It isn’t as if her ladyship
said or did more than any one else—every one was kind to us—but she used
to come in and sit with me and look at me, and after a little I used to
feel that it was all right.”
She manages the household with less expenditure of trouble than I have
ever seen. Our servants never seem to leave us; they are paid what many
people would call absurdly high wages, but I do not think that is the
attraction. My mother does not see very much of them, and finds fault,
when rarely necessary, with a simple directness which I have in vain
tried to emulate; but her displeasure is so impersonal that there seems
to be no sting in it. It is not that they have failed in their duty to
herself, but they have been untrue to the larger duty to which she is
herself obedient.
She never seems to labour under any strong sense of the imperative duty
of philanthropic activity—indeed it is hard to say how her days are
filled—but in her simplicity, her unselfishness, her quiet acceptance
of the conditions of life, her tranquillity and her devoted lovingness
she seems to me the best Christian I have ever seen, and to come nearest
to the ideals of Christ. But, though a large part of her large income
is spent in unostentatious benevolence, she would think it preposterous
if it were suggested to her that Christianity demanded an absolute
sacrifice of worldly possessions. Yet she sets no store on comfort or
the evidences of wealth; she simply accepts them, and has a strong
instinctive feeling of stewardship.
I cannot help thinking that such women are becoming rarer; and yet it is
hard to believe that they can ever have been other than rare.
6
I gratefully acknowledge the constant presence of an element in my
life which for want of a better name I will call the sense of beauty.
I mean by that the unaccountable thrill of emotion by which one is
sometimes surprised, often quite suddenly and unexpectedly; this sense
of wonder, which darts upon the mind with an almost physical sensation,
seems to come in two different ways. With some, the majority I believe,
it originates entirely in personal relations with other human beings
and is known as love; with others it arises over a larger region, and
is inspired by a sudden perception of some incommunicable beauty in a
flower, a scent, a view, a picture, a poem. Those in whom the latter
sense predominates are, I think, less apt to be affected by human
relationships, but pass through the world in a certain solitary and
wistful mood, with perhaps more wide and general sources of happiness but
less liable to be stirred to the depths of their being by a friendship
or a passion. To take typical examples of such a class I conceive that
Wordsworth and William Morris were instances. Wordsworth derived, I
believe, his highest inspiration from the solemn dignities of nature, in
her most stupendous and majestic forms; while to Morris belonged that
power, which amounted in him to positive genius, for seeing beauty in the
most homely and simple things.
[Sidenote: BEAUTY AND MYSTERY]
I was myself haunted from a very early date by the sense of beauty and
mystery, though not for many years could I give it a name; but I have
found in my case that it originated as a rule in some minute effect of
natural things. I have seen some of the wildest and most astounding
natural prospects in Europe; I have climbed high rocky peaks and threaded
mountain solitudes, but some overshadowing of horror and awe has robbed
emotion of its most intimate joy; and I have always found myself more
thrilled by some tranquil vignette—the moon rising through a forest
glade, a red sunset between the boughs of pines, the crisping wave of
some broken eddy, the “green-dense and dim-delicious” depth of a woodland
pool, the weathered gables of an ancient manor, an orchard white with
the snows of spring—than I have ever been by the sight of the most solemn
mountain-head or the furious breakers of some uncontrolled tide.
Two or three of these sacred sights I may venture to describe, taking
them at random out of the treasure-house of memory; two belong to my
schooldays. I was a pupil at a big suburban school; the house which we
inhabited had once been the villa of a well-known statesman, and had
large and dignified grounds, where with certain restrictions, we were
allowed to ramble. They were bounded on one side by a high paling,
inaccessible to small limbs, and a vague speculation as to what was
behind the fence long dwelt with me. One day, however, I found that I
could loose a portion of a broken paling, and looking through I saw a
quiet place, the tail of a neglected shrubbery; the spot seemed quite
unvisited; the laurels grew thickly about, and tall elms gave an austere
gloom to the little glade; the ground was pathless, and thickly overgrown
with periwinkles, but in the centre were three tiny grave-mounds, the
graves, I have since reflected, of dogs, but which I at the time
supposed to be the graves of children. I gazed with a singular sense
of mystery, and strange dream-pictures rose instinctively in my mind,
weaving themselves over the solitary and romantic spot. It is strange how
often in dreams and gentle reveries I have visited the place.
[Sidenote: THE ENCHANTED LAND]
The next is a later vision. Near the public school where I was educated
lay a forest to which we had free admittance. I found that by hard
walking it was just possible to reach a wooded hill which was a
conspicuous feature of the distant landscape, but the time at my disposal
between two school engagements never sufficed to penetrate farther. From
the top of this hill it was possible to get a view of a large tract
of forest ground, an open grassy glade, with large trees of towering
greenness standing sentinel on either side; the bracken grew luxuriantly
in places, and at the end of the glade was a glint of water in the horn
of some forest pool. This place was to me a veritable “magic casement”;
beyond lay the enchanted land into which I could not penetrate, the blue
hills on the horizon seen over the tree-tops. I never dreamt of them as
inhabited by human beings like myself, but as some airy region, with
leagues of dreaming woods and silent forest spaces. At times a deer would
slowly cross the open vale, and stand to sniff the breeze; the very
cooing of the doves in their leafy fastnesses had a richer and drowsier
sound.
But the home of incommunicable dreams, beyond all others, is to me
a certain mill—Grately Mill—that is not many miles from my present
home. My mother had an old aunt who lived in a pleasant house in the
neighbourhood, and we used to go there when I was a child to spend a few
weeks of the early summer.
A little vague lane led to it: a lane that came from nowhere in
particular, and took you nowhere; meandering humbly among the pastures
wherever it was convenient to them to permit it, like a fainthearted
Christian. Hard by was a tall, high-shouldered, gabled farm of red brick,
with a bell perched on the roof in a white pavilion of its own. Down the
lane on hot summer days we used to walk—my mother and I: my mother whom I
revered as a person of unapproachable age and dim experience, though she
had been in the schoolroom herself but a year or two before my birth; I
trotting by her side with a little fishing-rod in a grey holland case, to
fish for perch in the old pond at the Hall.
The lane grew sandier and damper: a rivulet clucked in the ditch,
half-hidden in ragged-robin with its tattered finery, and bright
varnished ranunculus; the rivulet was a mysterious place enough ever
since the day when we found it full of waving clusters of strange dark
creatures, more eel than fish, which had all appeared with miraculous
unanimity in a single night—lamperns, the village naturalist called
them, and told us that in ancient days they were a delicacy; while I, in
my childish mind, at once knew that it was this which had gone to the
composition of that inexplicable dish, a surfeit of lampreys, as the
history had it, of which some greedy monarch died.
Once, too, a bright-coloured eel had been seen at a certain point, who
had only just eluded the grasp of hot little fingers. How many times I
looked for master eel, expecting to meet him at the same place, and was
careful to carry a delightful tin box in my pocket, in which he might
travel home in my pocket, and live an honoured life in a basin in the
night nursery. Poor eel! I am glad now that he escaped, but then he was
only a great opportunity missed—an irreparable regret.
[Sidenote: GRATELY MILL]
Then the poor lane, which had been getting more like a water-course
every moment, no longer made any pretence, and disappeared into a
shallow sheet of clear water—the mill at last! The scene, as I remember
it, had a magical charm. On the left, by the side of the lane, rose a
crazy footpath of boards and posts with a wooden handrail, and a sluice
or two below. Beyond, the deep mill-pool slept, dark and still, all
fringed with trees. On the right the stream flowed off among the meadows,
disappearing into an arch of greenery; in summer the banks and islets
were all overgrown with tall rich plants, comfrey, figwort, water-dock.
The graceful willow-herb hung its pink horns; the loosestrife rose in
sturdier velvet spires. On the bank stood the shuttered, humming mill,
the water-wheel splashing and thundering, like a prisoned giant, in
a penthouse of its own. It was a fearful joy to look in and see it
rise dripping, huge and black, with the fresh smell of the river water
all about it. All the mill was powdered with the dust of grain; the
air inside was full of floating specks; the hoppers rattled, and the
gear grumbled in the roof, while the flour streamed merrily into the
open sack. The miller, a grave preoccupied man, all dusted over, like
a plum, with a thin bloom of flour, gave us a grave nod of greeting,
which seemed to make us free of the place. I dare say he was a shy mild
man, with but little of the small change of the mind at his disposal;
but he seemed to me then an austere and statesmanlike person, full to
the brim of grave affairs. Beyond the mill, a lane of a more determined
character led through arches of elms to the common. And now, on secular
days, the interests of the chase took precedence of all else; but there
were Sundays in the summer when we walked to attend Grately Church.
It seems to me at this lapse of time to have been almost impossibly
antique. Ancient yews stood by it, and it had a white boarded spire with
a cracked bell. Inside, the single aisleless nave, with ancient oak pews,
was much encumbered in one place by a huge hand-organ, with a forest of
gold pipes, turned by a wizened man, who opened a little door in the
side and inserted his hand at intervals to set the tune. The clergyman,
an aged gentleman, wore what was, I suppose, a dark wig, though at the
time I imagined it to be merely an agreeable variety on ordinary hair;
another pleasant habit he had of slightly smacking his lips, at every
little pause, as he read, which gave an air of indescribable gusto to the
service:—“Moab—tut—is my washpot—tut—; over Edom—tut—will I cast out my
shoe—tut—; upon Philistia—tut—will I triumph.”
[Sidenote: GRATELY CHURCH]
In the vestry of the church reposed a curious relic—a pyx, I believe,
is the correct name. It was a gilded metal chalice with a top, into
which, if my memory serves me, were screwed little soldiers to guard the
sacred body; these were loose, and how I coveted them! In the case were
certain spikes and branches of crystal, the broken remains, I believe, of
a spreading crystal tree which once adorned the top. How far my memory
serves me I know not, but I am sure that the relic which may still
survive, is a most interesting thing; and I can recollect that when a
high dignitary of the Church stayed with us, it was kindly brought over
by the clergyman for his inspection, and his surprise was very great.
The Hall lay back from the common, sheltered by great trees. The
house itself, a low white building, was on those summer days cool
and fragrant. The feature of the place was the great fish-ponds—one
lay outside the shrubbery; but another, formerly I believe a monastic
stew-pond, was a long rectangle just outside the windows of the
drawing-room, and only separated from it by a gravel walk: along part of
it ran an ancient red-brick wall. This was our favourite fishing-place;
but above it, brooded over by huge chestnuts, lay a deeper and stiller
pond, half covered with water-lilies—too sacred and awful a place to be
fished in or even visited alone.
Upon the fishing hours I do not love to dwell; I would only say that of
such cruelties as attended it I was entirely innocent. I am sure that I
never thought of a perch as other than a delightful mechanical thing, who
had no grave objection to being hauled up gasping, with his black stripes
gleaming, and prickling his red fins, to be presently despatched, and
carried home stiff and cold in a little basket.
The tea under the tall trees of the lawn; the admiring inspection of our
prey; the stuffed dog in the hall with his foot upon a cricket-ball—all
these are part of the dream-pictures; and the whole is invested for me
with the purpureal gleams of childhood.
[Sidenote: GRATELY THIRTY YEARS AFTER]
The other day I found myself on a bicycle near enough to Grately to make
it possible to go there; into the Hall grounds I did not venture, but I
struck across the common and went down the lane to the mill. I was almost
ashamed of the agitation I felt, but the sight of the common, never
visited for nearly thirty years, induced a singular physical distress. It
was not that everything had grown smaller, even changed the places that
they occupy in my mental picture, but a sort of homesickness seemed to
draw tight bands across my heart. What does it mean, this intense local
attachment, for us flimsy creatures, snapped at a touch, and with so
brief a pilgrimage? A strange thought! The very intensity and depth of
the feeling seems to confer on it a right to permanence.
The lane came abruptly to an end by the side of a commonplace,
straight-banked, country brook. There were no trees, no water-plants;
the road did not dip to the stream, and in front of me lay a yellow
brick bridge, with grim iron lattices. Alas! I had mistaken the turn,
and must retrace my steps. But stay! what was that squat white house by
the waterside? It was indeed the old mill, with its boarded projections
swept away, its barns gone, its garden walled with a neat wall. The old
high-timbered bridge was down; some generous landlord had gone to great
expense, and Grately had a good convenient road, a sensible bridge, and
an up-to-date mill. Probably there was not a single person in the parish
who did not confess to an improvement.
But who will give me back the tall trees and the silent pool? Who will
restore the ancient charm, the delicate mysteries, the gracious dignity
of the place? Is beauty a mere trick of grouping, the irradiation of a
golden mood, a chance congeries of water and high trees and sunlight? If
beauty be industriously hunted from one place by ruthless hands, does she
spread her wings and fly? Is the restless, ceaseless effort of nature to
restore beauty to the dismal messes made by man, simply broken off and
made vain? Or has she leisure to work harder yet in unvisited places,
patiently enduring the grasp of the spoiling hand?
It was with something like a sob that I turned away. But of one thing no
one can rob me, and that is the picture of Grately Mill, glorified indeed
by the patient worship of years, which is locked into some portfolio of
the mind, and can be unspread in a moment before the gazing eye.
[Sidenote: EGERIA]
And for one thing I can be grateful—that the still spirit of sweet and
secret places, that wayward nymph who comes and goes, with the wind in
her hair and the gleam of deep water in her eyes—she to whom we give many
a clumsy name—that she first beckoned to me and spoke words in my ear
beneath the high elms of Grately Mill. Many times have we met and spoken
in secret since, my Egeria and I; many times has she touched my shoulder,
and whispered a magic charm. That presence has been often withdrawn from
me; but I have but to recall the bridge, the water-plants, the humming
mill, the sunlight on the sandy shallows, to feel her hand in mine again.
7
As a boy and a young man I went through the ordinary classical
education—private school, public school, and university. I do not think
I troubled my head at the time about the philosophical theory or motive
of the course; but now, looking back upon it after an interval of twenty
years, while my admiration of the theory of it is enhanced, as a lofty
and dignified scheme of mental education, I find myself haunted by
uneasy doubts as to its practical efficacy. While it seems to me to be
for a capable and well-equipped boy with decided literary taste, a noble
and refining influence, I begin to fear that for the large majority of
youthful English minds it is narrowing, unimproving, and conspicuous for
an absence of intellectual enjoyment.
Is it not the experience of most people that little boys are
conscientious, duty-loving, interested not so much in the matter of
work, but in the zealous performance of it; and that when adolescence
begins, they grow indifferent, wearied, even rebellious, until they drift
at last into a kind of cynicism about the whole thing—a kind of dumb
certainty, that whatever else may be got from work, enjoyment in no form
is the result? And is not the moral of this, that the apprenticeship once
over and the foundation laid, special tastes should as far as possible
be consulted, and subjects simplified, so as to give boys a sense of
_mastery_ in something, and interest at all hazards.
[Sidenote: METHODS OF STUDY]
The champions of our classical system defend it on the ground that the
accurate training in the subtleties of grammar hardens and fortifies the
intelligence, and that the mind is introduced to the masterpieces of
ancient literature, and thus encouraged in the formation of correct taste
and critical appreciation.
An excellent theory, and I admit at once its value for minds of high and
firm intellectual calibre. But how does it actually work out for the
majority? In the first place, look at what the study of grammar amounts
to—it comes, as a matter of fact, when one remembers the grammar papers
which were set in examinations, to be little more than a knowledge of
arbitrary, odd and eccentric forms such as a boy seldom if ever meets in
the course of his reading. Imagine teaching English on the same theory,
and making boys learn that metals have no plural, or that certain fish
use the same form in the singular and in the plural—things of which one
acquires the knowledge insensibly, and which are absolutely immaterial.
Moreover, the quantity of grammatical forms in Latin and Greek are
infinitely increased by the immensely larger number of inflexions. Is
it useful that boys should have to commit to memory the dual forms in
Greek verbs—forms of a repulsive character in themselves, and seldom
encountered in books? The result of this method is that the weaker mind
is warped and strained. Some few memories of a peculiarly retentive type
may acquire these useless facts in a mechanical manner; but it is hardly
more valuable than if they were required to commit to memory long lists
of nonsense words. Yet in most cases they are doomed to be speedily and
completely forgotten—indeed, nothing can ever be really learnt unless a
logical connection can be established between the items.
[Sidenote: MASTERY AND SPIRIT]
Then after the dark apprenticeship of grammar comes the next stage—the
appreciation of literature; but I diffidently believe here that not ten
per cent of the boys who are introduced to the classics have ever the
slightest idea that they are in the presence of literature at all. They
never approach the point which is essential to a love of literature—the
instinctive perception of the intrinsic beauty of majestic and noble
words, and still less the splendid associations which grow to be
inseparably connected with words, in a language which one really knows
and admires.
[Sidenote: METHOD AND SPIRIT]
My own belief is that both the method of instruction and the spirit of
that instruction are at fault. Like the Presbyterian Liturgy, the system
depends far too much on the individuality of the teacher, and throws too
great a strain upon his mood. A vigorous, brilliant, lively, humorous,
rhetorical man can break through the shackles of construing and parsing,
and give the boys the feeling of having been in contact with a larger
mind; but in the hands of a dull and uninspiring teacher the system is
simply famishing from its portentous aridity. The result, at all events,
is that the majority of the boys at our schools never get the idea that
they are in the presence of literature at all. They are kept kicking
their heels in the dark and cold antechamber of parsing and grammar, and
never get a glimpse of the bright gardens within.
What is, after all, the aim of education? I suppose it is twofold:
firstly, to make of the mind a bright, keen, and effective instrument,
capable of seeing a point, of grappling with a difficulty, of presenting
facts or thoughts with clearness and precision. A young man properly
educated should be able to detect a fallacy, to correct by acquired
clearsightedness a false logical position. He should not be at the
mercy of any new theory which may be presented to him in a specious and
attractive shape. That is, I suppose, the negative side. Then secondly,
he should have a cultivated taste for intellectual things, a power
of enjoyment; he should not bow meekly to authority in the matter of
literature, and force himself into the admiration of what is prescribed,
but he should be possessed of a dignified and wholesome originality; he
should have his own taste clearly defined. If his bent is historical, he
should be eagerly interested in any masterly presentation of historical
theory, whether new or old; if philosophical, he should keep abreast of
modern speculation; if purely literary, he should be able to return hour
after hour to masterpieces that breathe and burn.
[Sidenote: EDUCATIONAL RESULTS]
But what is the result of our English education? In one respect
admirable; it turns out boys who are courteous, generous, brave, active,
and public-spirited; but is it impossible that these qualities should
exist with a certain intellectual standard? I remember now, though I did
not apply any theory at the time to the phenomenon, that when at school
I used dimly to wonder at seeing boys who were all these things—fond of
talk, fond of games, devoted to all open-air exercises, conscientious
and wholesome-minded, who were at the same time utterly listless in
intellectual things—who could not read a book of any kind except the
simplest novel, and then only to fill a vacant hour, who could not give a
moment’s attention to the presentment of an interesting episode, who were
moreover utterly contemptuous of all such things, inclined to think them
intolerably tedious and essentially priggish—and yet these were the boys
of whom most was made, who were most popular not only with boys but with
masters as well, and who, in our little microcosmography were essentially
the successful people, to be imitated, followed, and worshipped.
Now if it were certain that the qualities which are developed by an
English education would be sacrificed if a higher intellectual standard
were aimed at, I should not hesitate to sacrifice the intellectual
side. But I do not believe it is necessary; and what is stranger still,
I do not believe that most of our educators have any idea that the
intellectual side of education is being sacrificed.
I remember once hearing a veteran and successful educator say that he
considered a well-educated man was a man whose mind was not at the mercy
of the last new book on any ordinary subject. If that is an infallible
test, then our public schools may be said to have succeeded beyond all
reasonable expectation. The ordinary public-school type of man is not in
the least at the mercy of the last new book, because he is careful never
to submit himself to the chance of pernicious bias—he does not get so far
as to read it.
[Sidenote: EDUCATIONAL AIMS]