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

hardly guessed that one was happy at all, and did not perceive--how could one?--as life rose serenely and strongly to its zenith, what the pains and shadows of the declining life might be. And yet more strange is it that the memory, by some subtle alchemy, has the power of involving in a delicate golden mist days of childhood and boyhood which one knows as a matter of fact not to have been happy. For instance, my own memory continues to clothe my early schooldays with a kind of sunlit happiness, though I was not only not consciously happy, but distinctly and consciously unhappy. But memory refuses to retain the elements of unhappiness, the constant apprehension, that hung over one like a cloud, of punishment, and even ill-usage. I was not unduly punished at school, and I was certainly never ill-used. But one saw others suffer, and my own sensitive and timid nature perpetually foreboded disaster. Day after day as a little boy I longed for home surroundings and home affections as eagerly as the hart desires the water-brooks. But memory pushes all that aside, and obstinately insists on regarding the whole period in an idyllic and buoyant light.

I walk round the borders, which are all full of the little glossy spikes of snowdrops pushing up, struggling through the crusted earth. The sad hero of Maud walked "in a ghastly glimmer," and found "the shining daffodil dead." I walk in the soft twilight, that is infinitely tender, soothing, and sweet, and find the daffodil taking on his new life; and there rises in my heart an uplifted yearning, not so much for the good days that are dead, but that I may somehow come to possess the peace that underlies the memory of them all--not handle it for a moment and lay it down, but possess it or be possessed by it for ever.

Yet these busy days through which I have been passing are good for me, I believe. I have seen and talked to a number of people; and so far from finding that my solitary life makes me unfit for society, I think that it gives me a good-humoured contentment in the interchange of talk and argument, which I lacked in old days when I was fighting for my position. The things seem to matter so little to me now. I do not care in the least what impression I make, so long as people are kind and friendly. Life is no longer a race, where I wish to get ahead of others; it is a pilgrimage in which we are all alike bound. But it is good for me to be in the middle of it all, not only because of the contrast which it presents to the life I have chosen, but because it is like the strong scour of a current sweeping through the mind and leaving it clean and sweet. The danger of the quiet life is that one gets too comfortable, too indolent. It does me good to have to mix with people, to smile and bow, to try and say the right thing, to argue a point courteously, to weigh an opponent's arguments, to make efforts, to go where I do not desire to go; and I have no longer an axe of my own to grind; I only desire that the right conclusion should be reached.

But the things which people consider amusing and entertaining bewilder me more and more. I went to an evening party on one of the evenings I spent in town. There was a suite of fine rooms, hung with beautiful pictures and full of works of art. A courteous host and hostess received us, said a few amiable words to each, and passed us on into the rooms: we circulated, stood, sate, looked, talked. I suppose it is a question of temperament, but I felt that every single element of social, intellectual, and aesthetic pleasure was absent from the scene. One had no time to look at the beautiful things that leaned and beckoned from the walls. There was no chance of quiet, reasonable talk; one pumped up a few inanities to person after person. I suppose that most of the guests would not have come if they did not at all events think it amused them; but what was the charm? I suppose that to most of the guests it was the stir, the light, the moving figures--for there were many beautiful and stately women and distinguished men present--the sense of company, warmth, success, about it all. To me it was merely distracting--a score of sources of pleasure, and all of them preventing the enjoyment of each. I think I am probably more and not less sensitive to all these fine and rare things than perhaps most people; and I suppose it is this very sensitiveness that makes me averse to them all in mass. It is to me like the jangling of all the strings of some musical instrument. I felt that I could have lingered alone in these fine rooms, wandering from picture to picture with a lively pleasure. There were many people present with whom I should have deeply enjoyed a tete-a-tete. But the whole effect was like over-eating oneself, like having to taste a hundred exquisite dishes in a single meal. I do not protest against such gatherings on principle; if they give the guests a sense of pleasure and well-being, I have not a word to say against it all. But I believe in my heart that there are many people who do not really enjoy it, or enjoy it only in a purely conventional way; and what I should like to do is to assist the people whose enjoyment of it is conventional, to find out simpler and more real sources of happiness; because to make these great houses possible there is a vast amount of patient and unpraised human labour wasted. I do not think labour is wasted in producing beautiful things, so long as they can have an effect; but a superabundance of beauty has no effect--no effect, at least, that could not be produced by things less costly of effort and skill. The very refreshments, which hardly any one touched, stand for an amount of wasted labour which might have given pleasure to the poor toilers who produced them. Think of the ransacking of different climates, of the ships speeding over the sea, the toil of gatherers, porters, cooks, servers, that went to fit out that sparkling buffet. I suppose that it is easy for me, who do not value the result, to be mildly socialistic about these things; the pathos is not in the work, but in the waste of the work, not in the delicate things collected for our use and however fitfully enjoyed, but in the things made and collected by unknown toilers, and then either not used at all or not consciously enjoyed.

And so it is with a heightened relish for the serener simplicities of life, that I return to my quiet rooms, my old trees, my carelessly ordered garden, as a sailor floats into the calm waters of the well-known haven out of the plunge and surf of the sea. There is no strain here to torment me, no waste to afflict me. I do not have to spend reluctant hours in enjoyments which I do not enjoy; I am not overshadowed by the sense of engagements which I am bound to keep. Moreover, I can return to the beloved work which is unwillingly suspended in the bustle of town. I do not know why it is that I have so deep a sense of the value of time, when what I do matters so little to any one. But at least I have here the sense of doing work that may conceivably minister something to the service of others, while in town I have the sense of spending hours in occupations that cannot in any way benefit others, while they are certainly no satisfaction to myself,


"In hoc portu quiescit
Si quis aquas timet inquietas,"


says the wistful poet; and the tossing on the waves of the world thus gives me the tonic sense of contrast to my peaceful life which it would otherwise lack. It is the sail and vinegar of the banquet, lending a brisk and wholesome savour to what might otherwise tend to become vapid and dull.


XIV


I have just finished a book and despatched it to the press. It is rather a dreary moment that! At first one has a sense of relief at having finished a task and set down a burden, but that elation lasts only for a day or two, and then one begins to miss one's true and faithful companion. This particular book has been in a special sense a companion to me, because it has been a book out of my own mind and heart, not a book undertaken for the sake of diffusing useful information, but a book of which I conceived the idea, planned the structure, and filled up the detail. It has almost assumed a personality. It has hardly been absent from my thoughts for the last six months. It has darted into my mind when I awoke; it has stood looking over my shoulder as I read, pointing with airy finger at the lines, "There is a thought for you; here is an excellent illustration of that point you could not make clear." It has walked with me as close or closer than my shadow, until it has become a real thing, a being, a friend, like myself but yet not quite myself.

And then my book, as I read it through for the last time, is all full of gentle and tender associations. This chapter brings back to me a day of fierce wind and blustering rain, when I walked by sodden roads and whistling hedges in my oldest clothes, till they hung heavily about me and creaked as I moved; the thought of the chapter came to me, I remember, when I decided that I had been far enough for health and even for glory, and when I fled back before the hooligan wind; then followed a long, quiet, firelit evening when I abandoned myself in luxurious case to my writing, till the drowsy clock struck the small hours of the morning. Then another chapter is all scented with the breath of roses, that stole into my windows on a still summer evening; at another point the page is almost streaked and stained for me with the sorrowful tidings which came to me in the middle of a sentence; when I took up my writing again some days after, it seemed as though there was a deep trench between me and my former self. And again another chapter was written in all the glow of a beautiful and joyful experience, in a day of serene gladness which made me feel that it was worth while to have lived, even if the world should hold nothing else that was happy for me.

Thus, then, and thus has my life transferred itself to these pages, till they are all full for me of joy and sorrow, of experience and delight, I suppose that a painter or a musician have the same tenderness about their work, though it seems to me impossible that their life can have so flowed into picture or song as my life has flowed into my book. The painter has had to transcribe what he sees, the musician to capture the delicate intervals that have thrilled his inner ear--but if the painter's thought has been absorbed in the forms that he is depicting, if the musician has lost himself among the airy harmonies, the sweet progressions, these things must have