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

plant which may be expected in the future, if not in the immediate future, to break into leaf and bloom, into colour and fragrance.


LII


I found myself the other day in the neighbourhood of Wells. I had hitherto rather deliberately avoided going there, because so many people whose taste and judgment are wholly unreliable have told me that I ought to see it. The instinct to disagree with the majority is a noble one, and has perhaps effected more for humanity than any other instinct; but it must be cautiously indulged in.

In this case I resisted the instinct to abstain from visiting Wells; and I was glad that I did so, because, in spite of the fact that most people consider Wells to be a very beautiful place, it is undoubtedly true that it is most beautiful. Wells and Oxford on a large scale, Burford and Chipping Campden on a small scale, are in my experience the four most beautiful places in England, as far as buildings go. There are other places which are full of beautiful buildings; but there is a harmony about these four places which is a very rare and delightful quality.

Wells, as a matter of fact, is almost impossibly beautiful, and incredibly romantic. It is an almost perfectly mediaeval place, with the enormous advantage that it is also old, a quality which we are apt to forget that mediaeval places, when first built, did not possess. I do not think that Wells, when first built, was probably more than just a beautiful place. But it has now all grown old together, undisturbed, unvisited. It has crumbled and weathered and mellowed into one of the most enchanting places in the world.

God forbid that I should attempt to describe it; and indeed I am not sure that the things that are most admired about it are the most admirable. The west front of the Cathedral, for instance, has been temporarily ruined by the restoration of the little marble shafts, which now merely look like a quantity of india-rubber tubing, let in in pieces. The choir of the Cathedral, again, is an outrage. The low stone stalls, like a row of arbours designed by a child, the mean organ, the comfortable seats, have a shockingly Erastian air; there is not a touch of charm or mystery about it; I cannot imagine going there to pray. The Vicars' Close, which is foolishly extolled, has been made by restoration to look like a street in a small watering-place.

But, on the other hand, the Bishop's Palace, with its moat full of swans, its fantastic oriels and turrets, its bastions and towers, wreathed with ivy and creepers, is a thing which fills the mind with a sort of hopeless longing to possess the secret of its beauty; one desires in a dumb and bewildered way to surrender oneself, with a yearning confidence, to whatever the power may be which can design and produce a thing of such unutterable loveliness.

By the favour of an ecclesiastical friend I was allowed to wander alone in a totally unaccountable paradise of gardens that lies to the east of the Cathedral. It was impossible to conceive whom it belonged to, or what connection it had with the houses round about. It was all intersected with pools and rivulets of clear water. Here was a space of cultivated ground with homely vegetables. Here stood a mysterious ancient building, which proved on examination to contain nothing but a gushing well of water. Here was a lawn with a trim gravel walk bordered with roses; while a few paces away was a deserted thicket of sprawling shrubs, elders, and laurels, with a bit of wild rough meadow in the heart of the copse; and here was a sight that nearly brought me to my knees. Beside an ancient wall, with the towers and gables of the Cathedral looking solemnly over, a great spring broke up out of the ground from some secret channel into a little pool surrounded by rich water plants, and flowed away in a full channel; not one, but three of these astonishing fountains were to be seen in this little space of grass and copse.

These are the Wells themselves, the Aquae Solis, as the Romans called them, fed by some hidden channel from the hills, sent gushing up day and night for the delight and refreshment of men. I wish that the mediaeval builders had built the great church over instead of near these wells, and had let them burst up in a special chapel, so that the church might have been musical with the sound of streams; and so that the waters might have flowed from the door of the house, as Ezekiel saw them flow eastward from the threshold of the holy habitation to Engedi and Eneglaim to gladden the earth.

Then as I wandered in a place of dark leaves, beside the moat under the frowning towers, I saw a kingfisher sit on a bough, his back powdered with sapphires, his red breast, his wise head on one side, watching the stream. In a moment he plunged and disappeared; in an instant he was back again on his perch, flashing, like Excalibur, over the stream, his prey in his bill.

For a long morning I wandered about, dizzied with beauty, gazing, wondering, desiring I knew not what.

Then came the strange thought that this place of dreamful beauty should be in the hands of a few simple ecclesiastical persons; the town is little more than a village; century by century it has lived a little, quiet provincial life. It has produced, so far as I know, no great man. This soft air, this humid climate, sheltered from the wind, full of warm sunlight, fed with dew, seems favourable to a long, comfortable, indolent life. The beauty of the place seems to have had no particular effect upon the people who live there. It has never been a centre of thought or activity. It ought, one would have thought, to have produced a certain kind of poetical temper, even though it were a temper of indolent enjoyment rather than of creative force. But not even a beauty born of murmuring sound--and the air is full of murmurs--seemed to have passed into the faces of the simple townsfolk who make it their home. I could not gather thatthe exquisite loveliness of the place had any particular effect upon the dwellers there, except a mild pleasure in the fact that so many strangers should come to see the place. I do not exactly grudge strangers the sight of it, though I should like better to think of it all as standing in an enchanted valley hard to penetrate. But it is difficult to see exactly for whom it all exists. It seems to be a place that ought to have a dreamful, appreciative, emotional life of its own, a place where a few worthy natures might live in a serene, joyful, impassioned mood; a place where there is nothing that need remind the dweller of ugliness or vulgarity, of progress or statistics; a place for elect souls and fine natures.

One does not want to be fantastic or absurd in such reveries as these; but it is sad to think that scattered about England in mean towns, perhaps in sordid houses, are natures that could live in a place like Wells with a perpetual delight, a constant drinking at the sources of beauty, while most of the actual inhabitants have come there almost by chance, and do not appear to be particularly conscious of their blessings or particularly affected by their surroundings. It seems indeed a curious wastefulness, that the Power who rules the world should have heaped in this tiny place among the hills such a treasure of delicate beauty, with such an indifference as to whether it should he perceived or discerned by congenial spirits.

The type of ecclesiastic whom I would like to see in a place like this would be a man deeply sensitive to art and music, with a strong mystical sense of wonder and desire; visionary perhaps, and what is called unpractical, believing that religion was not so much a matter of conduct as a matter of mood; in whom conduct would follow mood, as a rush bends in the stream. I do not say that this is the most vital form of religion. It is not the spirit of Luther or of John Wesley; it lives more among hopes than certainties; it desires to see God rather than to proclaim His wrath. Such a man, tenderly courteous to all, patient, wise, sad with a hopeful sadness, living in an atmosphere of uplifted prayer, hearing the ripple of the spring or the bird's song among the thickets, his heart rising in ecstasy upon the holy music, upborne by the grave organ-thunders, speaking sometimes out of a full heart of the secrets of God, would lead a life that would be shepherded by his Lord in a green pasture; led by waters of comfort and in paths of righteousness, with a table indeed prepared. Such a life is apt nowadays to be viewed contemptuously by the virile man, by the practical philanthropist; but it is such a spirit as this that produced the Psalms, the Book of Job, the Apocalypse. It is a type of religion that even those who base their faith upon the open Bible are apt to despise and condemn; if so, their Bible is not an open one, but sealed with many seals of ignorance and dulness. Such a life should be full of energy, of faith, of purity. It should speak to those that had ears to hear in secret chambers, even though it did not cry from the house-tops. In this stupid and hypocritical age, that mistakes money for wealth, excitement for pleasure, interference for influence, fame for wisdom, speed for progress, volubility for eloquence, such a life is despised, if not actually condemned.

Yet such lives might break from underground, in a place of greensward and bushes, among the voices of birds and the mellow murmur of bells, even as the fountains themselves spring forth. In these bustling days we are apt to think that streams have no work but to turn mills and make light for cities, to bear merchandise, to sweep foulness to the sea; we forget that they pass through woodland places, feeding the grasses and the trees, quenching the thirst of bird and beast, that they sparkle in the sun, gleam wan in the sunset, reflecting the pale sky. Oh, perverse and forgetful generation, that knows better than God what the aim and goal of our pilgrimage is; that will not hear His murmured language, or see His patient writing on the wall! That in teaching, forget to learn, and in prophesying, have no leisure to look backwards! It is we that have despised life and beauty and God; it is we that make graven images, and worship the fire till we cannot see the sun, who pray daily for peace, and cast the jewel in the mire when it is put in our foolish hands.

And after all, though we shelter our lives and seclude them as we may, we have all of us a heavy burden to bear. These mouldering walls, these soaring towers, the voice of many waters, teach me this, if they teach me nothing else, that peace and beauty are dear to the heart of God; that he sets them where he can; that we can perceive them and love them; and that if our life is a learning of some great and dim lesson, these sweet influences may sustain and comfort us at least as well as the phantoms which so many of us pursue.


LIII


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