The Silent Isle by Arthur Christopher Benson (books to read this summer txt) 📕

a necessary danger, not by thrusting oneself into perilous situations. To marry without love, for the sake of the discipline, is as if a dizzy man should adventure himself alone upon the Matterhorn; the rashness of proved incapacity is not courage, but a detestable snobbishness. One must make the best of the hard problem of God, not add to its complexity, in order to increase one's patience. Neither men nor angels have any patience with a fool, and it is the deed of a fool to cultivate occasions of folly. One serves best by making the most of one's faculties, not by choosing a life where one's disabilities have full play, in order to correct them. I might as well tell the Pharisee, who bids me let myself go, to take to drink, in order that he may learn moral humility, or to do dishonest things for the discipline of reprobation. I do not think so ill of God as not to believe that he is trying to help me; as the old poet said, "The Gods give to each man whatever is most appropriate to him. Man is dearer to the Gods than to himself." God has sent me many gifts, both good and evil; but he has not sent me a wife, perhaps in pity for a frail creature of his hand, who might have had to bear that tedious fate! But I know what I miss, and see that loveless self-interest is the dark bane of solitude. One may call it a moral leprosy if one loves hard names; but no leper would choose to be a leper if he could avoid it. Whatever happens in this dim world, we should be tender and compassionate of one another. It is a mere stupidity, that stupidity which is of the nature of sin, to compassionate a man for being ill or poor, and not to compassionate him for being cold and lonely. The solitary man must dwell within his own shadow, and make what sport he can; and it is the saddest of all the privileges of reasoning beings, that reason can thus debar a man from wholesome experience. Even in the desolation of ruined Babylon the satyr calls to his fellow and the great owl rears her brood; but the narrow and shivering soul must sit in solitude, till perhaps on a day of joy he may see the background of his dark heart all alive with a tapestry of shining angels, bearing vials in their hands of the water of Life.


XII


I wonder if others experience a very peculiar sensation, which comes upon me at intervals unexpectedly and inexplicably in a certain kind of scene, and on reading a certain type of book--I have known it from my early childhood, as far back as I can recollect anything. It is the sensation of being quite close to some beautiful and mysterious thing which I have lost, and for which in a blind way I am searching. It contains within it a vague yet poignant happiness, a rich and unknown experience. It is the nearest I ever come to a sense of pre-existence; and I have sometimes wondered if it might not be, not perhaps my own pre-existence, but some inherited recollection of happiness in which I myself had no part, but which was part of the mind of one, or of many, from whom I derive my origin. If limbs and features, qualities and desires, are derived from one's ancestors, why should one not also derive a touch of their happy dreams, their sweet remembrances?

The first time it ever came to me was when we were taken, quite as small children, to a little cottage which stood in a clearing of a great pine-wood near Wellington College. I suppose that the cottage was really older than the wood; it was guarded by great sprawling laurels, and below the house was a privet-hedged garden, sheltered all round by the pines, with a stream at the foot. The sun lay very warm on the vegetable beds and orchard trees, and there was a row of hives--not painted cupboards such as one now sees, but big egg-shaped things made of a rope of twisted straw--round which on warm days the humming bees made a low musical note, that rose and fell as the numbers increased or diminished. I suppose my nurse went to buy honey there--we called it The Honey-woman's Cottage. I dimly remember an old, smiling, wrinkled woman opening the door to us, summoning my nurse in to a mysterious talk, and inviting us to go into the garden meanwhile. The whole proceeding was intensely mysterious and beautiful. Through the red pine stems one could see the sandy soil rising and falling in low ridges, strewn with russet needles. Down below, nearer to the stream, a tough green sword-grass grew richly; and beyond lay the deep wood, softly sighing, and containing all sorts of strange scents and haunting presences. In the garden there was a penetrating aromatic smell from the box-hedges and the hot vegetable-beds. We wandered about, and it used to seem to me, I remember, like the scenes in which some of Grimm's fairy-tales were enacted I suppose that the honey-woman was the wife of a woodman and was a simple soul enough; but there was something behind it all; she knew more than she would say. Strange guests drew nigh to the cottage at nightfall, and the very birds of the place had sad tales to tell. But it was not that I connected it with anything definite--it was just the sense of something narrowly eluding me, which was there, but which I could not quite perceive. There were other places, too, that gave me the same sense--one a big dark pool in the woods, with floating water-lilies; it was there, too, that mysterious presence; and it was to be experienced also at the edge of a particular covert, a hanging wood that fell steeply from the road, where the ferns glittered with a metallic light and the flies buzzed angrily in the thicket.

And there have been places since where the same sense has come strongly upon me. One was a glade in Windsor Forest, just to be reached by a rapid walk from Eton on a half-holiday afternoon; it was a wide grassy place, with a few old oaks in it, gnarled and withered; and over the tree-tops was a glimpse of distant blue swelling hills. Even now the same sensation comes back to me, more rarely but not less keenly, at smoke going up from the chimney of an unseen house surrounded by woods, and certain effects of sunset upon lonely woodsides and far-off bright waters. It comes with a sudden yearning, and a sense, too, of some personal presence close at hand, a presence that feels and loves and would manifest itself if it could--one with whom I have shared happiness and peace, one in whose eyes I have looked and in whose arms I have been folded. But the thing is so utterly removed from any sense of desire or passion that I can hardly describe it. It gives a sense of long summer days spent in innocent experience, with no need of word or sign. There is no sense of stirring adventure, of exultation, or pride about it--it is just an infinite untroubled calm, of beautiful things perceived in a serenity untroubled by memory or hope, by sorrow or fear. Its quality lies in its eternity; there is no beginning or end about it, no opening or closing door. There seems nothing to explain or reconcile in it; the heart is content to wonder, and has no desire to understand. There is in it none of the shadow of happy days, past and gone, embalmed in memory; no breath of the world comes near it, no thought of care or anxiety, no ugly shadows of death or silence. It seems when it comes like the only true thing in the world, the only perfectly pure thing, like light or sweet sound. And yet it has always the sense that it is not yet quite found, that it is there waiting for a moment to declare itself, within reach of the hand and yet unattained. It is so real that it makes me doubt the reality of everything else in the world, and it removes for an instant all sense of the jarring and inharmonious elements of life, the pitiful desires, the angers and coldnesses of fellow-mortals, the selfish claims of one's own timid heart and mind.

It came to me for a moment to-day in my little orchard deep in high-seeded grass: a breeze came and went, stirring the leaves of the trees and bowing the tall grasses with its flying footsteps; a bird broke out in a bush into a jocund trill of song, as if triumphing in the joyful sight of something that was hidden from my eyes. If I could but have caught and held the secret, how easily it would have solved my own perplexities, how faithfully would I have whispered it in men's ears; but while I wondered, it was gone like the viewless passage of an angel, and left me with my longing unfulfilled, my yearning unsatisfied.


XIII


I have been spending some days in town, on business; I have been sitting on two committees, I have given a lecture, I have attended a public dinner; and now I have come back gratefully to my hermitage. I got home in the evening; it is winter, but unusually warm; and the birds were fluting in the bushes, as I walked round the garden in the twilight, as though they had an inkling of the Spring; to hear them gave me a sort of delicious pain, I hardly know why. They seemed to speak to me of old happy hours that have long folded their wings, of bright pleasant days, lightly regarded, easily spent, shut into the volumes of the past. "I see," as the Psalmist said, "that all things come to an end." There is something artificial about the soft sadness that one feels, and yet it is perfectly natural and instinctive; it is not as if I were melancholy or unhappy; my life is full of active enjoyment, and I am in that mood of delightful tranquillity which comes of having finished a tiresome series of engagements which I had anticipated without pleasure. It is not the sense only of vanished days; nor is it the sense of not having realised their joyfulness at the time; it is a deeper regret than that; it is the shadow of the uncertainty as to what will ultimately become of our individuality. If one was assured of immortality, of permanence, of growth, of progress, these regrets would fall off from one as gently as withered leaves float from a tree; or rather, one would never think of them; but now one has the sense of a certain number of beautiful days dealt out to one by God, and the knowledge that they are spent one by one. Another strange thing about the retrospective sadness of the vanished past is that it is not the memorable days of life, as a rule, whose passing one regrets. One would not, I think, wish to have one's days of triumph, of success, or even the days when one was conscious of an extreme personal happiness, back again. Partly it is that one seems to have appreciated their quality and crushed out their sweetness--partly, too, there mingles with days of extreme and conscious bliss a certain fever of the spirit, a certain strain of excitement, that is not wholly pleasurable. No, the days that one rather desires to have again are the days of tranquil and easy contentment, when the old home-circle was complete, and when one