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

were to describe them to others, would be received with a sort of incredulous consternation, to think that I could have performed them. That is the strange part of the inner conscience, that it seems so wholly independent of tradition or convention.

And it is from this sense of a burden, borne without hope of redemption, that we would all of us give our most prized possessions to be free; it is this which has cast such an awful power into the hands of the unscrupulous people who have claimed to be able to atone for, to loose, to set free the ailing soul. Face to face with the terror of darkness, there is hardly anything of which mankind will not repent; and I have sometimes thought that the darkest and heaviest temptation in the whole world is the temptation to yield to a craven fear, when the sincere conscience does not condemn.


XXI


I listened the other day, at a public function, to an eloquent panegyric, pronounced by a man of great ability and sympathetic cultivation, on the Greek spirit. I fell for the moment entirely under the spell of his lofty rhetoric, his persuasive and illuminating argument. I wish I could reproduce what he said; but it was like a strain of beautiful music, and my mind was so much delighted by his rich eloquence, his subtle transitions, his deft modulations, that I had neither time nor opportunity to commit what he said to memory. One thing he said which struck me very much, that the Greek spirit resembled rather the modern scientific spirit than any other of the latter-day developments of thought. I think that this is true in a sense, that the Greeks were penetrated by an insatiable curiosity, and desired to study the principles and arrive at the truth of things. But I do not, upon reflection, think that it is wholly true, because the modern spirit is greatly in love with classification and with detail, while the Greek spirit rather aimed at beauty, and investigated the causes of things with wonder and delight, in what may be called the romantic, the poetical spirit.

The mistake that the orator seemed to me to make was that he implied, or appeared to imply, that the Greek spirit could be attained by the study of Greek. My own belief is that the essence of the Greek spirit was its originality, its splendid absence of deference, its disregard of what was traditional. The Greeks owed nothing to outside influences. If the dim origins of their art were Egyptian, they strode forward for themselves, and spent no time in investigating the earlier traditions. Again, in literature, they wasted no force in attempting to imbibe culture from outside influences; they merely developed the capacities of their own sonorous and graceful language; they infused it with their own vivid and beautiful personality.

Of course, it may be urged that there probably did not exist in the world at that date treasures of ancient literature and art. The question is what the Greeks would have done if they had found themselves in a later world, stocked, and even overstocked, with old masterpieces and monuments of human intellect and energy and skill. The doubt is whether the creative impulse would have died away, and whether the Greeks would have tended to fling themselves into the passionate study, the eager apprehension, of the beautiful inheritance of the ages. I cannot myself believe it. They would have had, I believe, an intense and ardent appreciation of what had been, but the desire to see and hear some new thing of which St. Paul spoke, the deep-seated desire for self-expression, would have kept them free from any tame surrender to tradition, any danger of basing their cultivation on what had been represented or thought or sung by their human predecessors. I cannot, for instance, conceive of the Greeks as devoting themselves to erudition; I cannot imagine their giving themselves up to the same minute appreciation of ancient forms of expression which we give to the Greek literature itself.

Moreover, unless we concede to the Greek literature the position of the high-water mark of human expression, and believe that the intellect of man had since that day suffered decline and eclipse, we ought not to allow an ancient literature to overshadow our own energies, or to give up the hope of creating a vivid literature, at once classical and romantic, of our own.

And even if we did concede to Greek literature this august supremacy, I cannot believe that our best intellect ought to be practised in the awestruck submissiveness of mind that too often results from our classical education. That is why I admire the American spirit in literature. The Americans seem to have little of the reverent, exclusive attitude which we value so highly. They are preoccupied in their own native inspiration. They will speak, without any sense of absurdity, of Shakespeare and E.A. Poe, of Walter Scott and Hawthorne, as comparable influences. They are like children, entirely absorbed in the interest and delight of intent creation. But though their productions are at present, with certain notable exceptions, lacking in vitality and quality, this spirit is, I believe, the spirit in which new ideas and new literatures are produced. I do not desire to see the Americans more critical of the present or more deferential to the past. I do not desire to see them turn with a hopeless wonder to the study of the great English masterpieces. Indeed, I think that our own tendency in England to reverence, our constant appeal to classical standards, is an obstacle to our intellectual and artistic progress. We are like elderly writers who tend to repeat their own beloved mannerisms, and who contemn and decry the work of younger men, despairing of the future. A nation may reach a point, like an ancient and noble dynasty of princes, where it is overshadowed and overweighted by its own past glories, and where it learns to depend upon prestige rather than upon vigour, to wrap itself in its own dignity. What I would rather see is an elasticity, a recklessness, a prodigal trying of experiments, a discontented underrating of past traditions, than a meek acquiescence in their supremacy. What is our present condition? We have few poets of the first rank, few essayists or reflective writers, few dramatists, few biographers. I do not at all wish to underrate the immense vitality of our imaginative faculties, which shows itself in our vast output of fiction; but even here we have few masters, and our critics know and care little for style; they are entirely preoccupied with plot and incident and situation. What we lack is true originality, tranquil force; we are all occupied in trying to startle and surprise, to make a sensation. How little the Greeks cared for that! It was beauty and charm, delicate colour, fine subtlety of which they were, in search; they held all things holy, yet nothing solemn. Their dignity was not a pompous dignity, but the dignity of high tragedy, of unconquerable courage and ruthless fate; not the dignity of the well-appointed house and the tradition of excellent manners.

Of course our love of wealth and comfort is to a certain extent responsible for this. We have been thrown off our balance by the vast and rapid development of the resources of the earth, the binding of natural forces to do our bidding; it is the most complicated thing in the world nowadays to live the simple life; and not until we can gain a rich simplicity, not until we can recover an interest in ideas rather than an appetite for comforts, will our force and vitality return to us.

We are all too anxious to do the right thing and to be known to the right people; but unfortunately for us the right people are not the people of vivacity and intellectual zest, but the possessors of industrial wealth or the inheritors of scrupulous traditions and historical names. The sad fact, the melancholy truth, is that we have become vulgar; and until we can purge ourselves of vulgarity, till we can realise the ineffable ugliness of pomposity and pretension and ostentation, we shall effect nothing. Even our puritan forefathers, with their hatred of art, were in love with ideas. They sipped theology with the air of connoisseurs; they drank down Hebrew virtues with a vigorous relish. Then came a rococo and affected age, neat, conceited, and trim; yet in the middle of that stood out a great rugged figure like Johnson, full to the brim of impassioned force. Then again the intellect, the poetry of the nation stirred and woke. In Wordsworth, in Scott, in Keats and Shelley and Byron, in Tennyson and Browning, in Carlyle and Ruskin, came an age of passionate sincerity of protest against the dulness of prosperity. But now we seem to have settled down comfortably to sleep again, and are content to fiddle melodiously on delicate instruments. The trumpet and the horn are silent.

Perhaps we must content ourselves with the vigorous advance of science, the determination to penetrate secrets, to know all that is to be known, not to form conclusions without evidence. But the scientific attitude tends, except in the highest minds, to develop a certain dryness, a scepticism about spiritual and imaginative forces, a dulness of the inner apprehension, a hard quality of judgment. Not in such a mood as this does humanity fare further and higher. Men become cautious, prudent, and decisive thus, instead of generous, hopeful, and high-hearted.

But to despair too soon of an era, to despise and satirise an age, a national temper, is a deep and fatal mistake. The world moves onwards patiently and inevitably, obeying a larger and a mightier law. What is rather the duty of all who love what is noble and beautiful is not to carp and bicker over faulty conditions, but to realise their aims and hopes, to labour abundantly and patiently, to speak and feel sincerely, to encourage rather than to condemn, Serviendum lietandum says the brave motto. To serve, one cannot avoid that; but to serve with blitheness, that is the secret.


XXII


I cannot help wondering what the substance was which my fellow-traveller to-day was consuming under the outward guise of cigarettes. It had a scent that was at once strange and afflicting. It was no more like tobacco than tobacco is like violets. It seemed as though it must have been carefully prepared and procured for some unknown purpose, but it was impossible to connect pleasure with it. It had a corroding mineral scent, and must have been digged, I think, out of the bowels of the surely not harmless earth. And the man himself! He was primly and precisely dressed, but he had an indefinable resemblance to a goat; his hair curled like horns; and he had the thin, restless, sneering lips, the impudent, inexpressive eyes of the goat. I found myself curiously oppressed by him. I hated his slow, deliberate movements; the idea that the air he breathed should mingle with the air of the carriage, and be transferred to my own lungs and blood, was horrible to me. I pitied those who had to serve him, and the relations compelled to own him. Yet I cannot trace the origin of this deep repugnance. There are innumerable natural objects far more hideous and outwardly repellent, but which yet do not possess this nauseating quality. Such shuddering hostility may lie far deeper than the outward appearance, and arise from some innate enmity of soul. It is a wholly unreasonable thing, no doubt, and yet it transcends all reason and surmounts all moral principle. I should not, I hope, refuse to help or succour such a man if he were in need or pain; but