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

to toughen our intellectual muscles; we make our pastimes into envious rivalries and furious emulations; and when we have poured out our contempt upon a few quiet-minded dreamers for their lack of spirit, scarified a few lovers of leisure for their absence of ability, ploughed up a few pretty wastes where the field-flowers grew as they would, bred up a few hundred gay golden birds, that we may gloat over the thought of striking them blood-bedabbled out of the sky on a winter afternoon, we think complacently of the Kingdom of God, and all we have done so diligently to hasten its coming.

There is a pleasant story of a man who was asked by an ardent missionary for a subscription to some enterprise or other in the ends of the earth. The man produced a shilling and a sovereign. "Here is a shilling for the work," he said, "and here is a sovereign to get it out there!" That seems to me an allegory of much of our Western work. So little of it direct benefit, so much of it indirect transit! When I was a schoolmaster, it always seemed to me that nine-tenths of what we did was looking over work which we had given the boys to do to fill up their time, and to keep them, as we used to say, out of mischief. The worst of bringing up boys on that system is that they require to be kept out of mischief all their life long; and yet the worst kind of mischief, after all, may be to fill life with useless occupations. There are two ways of going out into your garden. You may walk out straight from the bow-window on to the lawn; or you may go out into the street, take the first turn to the right, then the next to the right, and let yourself in at the back-garden door. But there is no merit in that! It is not a thing to be complacent about; still less does it justify you in saying to the simple person who prefers the direct course that the world is getting lazy and decadent and is always trying to save itself trouble. The point is to have lived, not to have been merely occupied. I remember once, when I was an undergraduate, staying at a place in Scotland for a summer holiday. There were all sorts of pleasant things to be done, and we were there to amuse ourselves. One evening it was suggested that we should go out yachting on the following day. I agreed to go, but being a miserable sailor, added that I should only go if it were fine. We were to start early, and when I was called and found it an ugly, gusty morning I went gratefully back to bed, and spent the rest of the day fishing. There was a dreadful, strenuous old Colonel staying in the house; he had been with the yachting party, and they had had a very disagreeable day. That evening in the smoking-room, when we were recounting our adventures, the old wretch said to me: "Now I should like to give you a piece of advice. You said you would go with us, and shirked because you were afraid of a bit of wind. You must excuse an older man who knows something of the world saying straight out that that sort of thing won't do. Make up your mind and stick to it; that's a golden rule." It was in vain that I said that I had never intended to go if it was windy, and that I should have been ill the whole time. "Ah, that's what I call cry-baby talk," said the old ruffian; "I always say that if a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing thoroughly." I said meekly that I should certainly have been thoroughly sea-sick, but that I did not think it was worth while being sea-sick at all. At which he felt very much nettled, and said that it was effeminate. I was very much humiliated, but not in the least convinced; and I am afraid that I enjoyed the most unchristian exultation when, two or three days after, the Colonel insisted on walking to the deer-forest, instead of riding the pony that was offered him; in consequence of which he not only lost half the day, but got so dreadfully tired that he missed two stags in succession, and came home empty-handed, full of excellent excuses, and more pragmatical than ever.

Of course, a man has to decide for himself. If he does not desire leisure, if he finds it wearisome and mischievous, he had better not cultivate it; if his conscience tells him that he must go on with a particular work, he had better simply obey the command. But it is very easy to educate a false conscience in these matters by mere habit; and if you play tricks with your mind or your conscience habitually, it has an ugly habit of ending by playing tricks upon you, like the Old Man of the Sea. The false conscience is satisfied and the real conscience drugged, if a person with a sense of duty to others fills up his time with unnecessary letters and useless interviews; worse still if he goes about proclaiming with complacent pride that his work gives him no time to read or think. If he has any responsibility in the matter, if it is his business to help or direct others, he ought to be sure that he has something to give them beyond platitudes which he has not tested. In the story of Mary and Martha, which is a very mysterious one, it is quite clear that Martha was rebuked, not for being hospitable, but for being fussy; but it is not at all clear what Mary was praised for--certainly not for being useful. She was not praised for visiting the sick, or for attending committees, but apparently for doing nothing--for sitting still, for listening to talk, and for being interested. Presumably both were sympathetic, and Martha showed it by practical kindness, and attention to the knives and the plates. But what was the one thing needful? What was the good part, which Mary had chosen, and which would not be taken from her? The truth is that there is very little said about active work in the Gospel. It is, indeed, rather made fun of, if one may use such an expression. There is a great deal about simple kindness and neighbourliness, but nothing about making money, or social organisation. In a poor village community the problem was no doubt an easier one; but in our more complicated civilisation it is not so easy to see how to act. Suppose that I am seized with a sudden impulse of benevolence, what am I to do? In the old storybooks one took a portion of one's dinner to a sick person, or went to read aloud to some one. But it is not so easy to find the right people. If I set off here on a round with a slop-basin containing apple fritters, my intrusion would be generally and rightly resented; and as for being read aloud to or visited when I am ill, there is nothing I should personally dislike more than a succession of visitors bent on benevolence. I might put up with it if I felt that it sprung from a genuine affection, but if I felt it was done from a sense of duty, it would be an intolerable addition to my troubles. Many people in grief and trouble only desire not to be interfered with, and to be left alone, and when they want sympathy they know how and where to ask for it. Personally I do not want sympathy at all if I am in trouble, because it only makes me suffer more; the real comfort under such circumstances is when people behave quite naturally, as if there were no troubles in the world; then one has to try to behave decently, and that is one's best chance of forgetting oneself.

The only thing, it seems to me, that one may do, is to love people, if one can. It is the mood from which sympathy and help spring that matters, not the spoken word or the material aid. In the worst troubles one cannot help people at all. The knowledge that others love you does not fill the aching gap made by the death of child or lover or friend. And now too, in these democratic days, when compassion and help are more or less organised, when the sense of the community that children should be taught issues in Education Bills, and the feeling that sick people must be tended is expressed by hospitals--when the world has thus been specialised, tangible benevolence is a much more complex affair. It seems clear that it is not really a benevolent thing to give money to anyone who happens to ask for it; and it is equally clear, it seems to me, that not much is done by lecturing people vaguely about their sins and negligences; one must have a very clear sense of one's own victories over evil, and the tactics one has employed, to do that; and if one is conscious, as I am, of not having made a very successful show of resistance to personal faults and failings, the pastoral attitude is not an easy one to adopt. But if one loves people, the problem is not so difficult--or rather it solves itself. One can compare notes, and discuss qualities, and try to see what one admires and thinks beautiful; and the only way, after all, to make other people good, if that is the end in view, is to be good oneself in such a way that other people want to be good too.

The thing which really differentiates people from each other, and which sets a few fine souls ahead of the crowd, is a certain clearness of vision. Most of us take things for granted from the beginning, accept the opinions and conventions of the world, and muddle along, taking things as they come, our only aim being to collect in our own corner as many of the good things of life as we can gather round us. Indeed, it must be confessed that among the commonest motives for showing kindness are the credit that results, and the sense of power and influence that ensues. But that is no good at all to the giver. For the fact is that behind life, as we see it, there lies a very strange and deep mystery, something stronger and larger than we can any of us at all grasp. There are a thousand roads to the city of God, and no two roads are the same, though they all lead to the same place. If we take up the role of being useful, the danger is that we become planted, like a kind of professional guide-post, giving incomplete directions to others, instead of finding the way for ourselves. The mistake lies in thinking that things are unknowable when they are only unknown. Many mists have melted already before the eyes of the pilgrims, and the tracks grow plainer on the hillside; and thus the clearer vision of which I speak is the thing to be desired by all. We must try to see things as they are, not obscured by prejudice or privilege or sentiment or selfishness; and sin does not cloud the vision so much as stupidity and conceit. I have a dream, then, of what I desire and aspire to, though it is hard to put it into words. I want to learn to distinguish between what is important and unimportant, between what is beautiful and ugly, between what is true and false. The pomps and glories of the