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

no sweeter place to be found on a hot summer day than the old drift-road. The hedges are in full leaf, and the undergrowth, sprinkled with flowers, weaves its tapestry over the barer stems of the quicksets. The thrushes sing clear in the tiny thickets, and the blackbird flirts with a sudden outcry in and out of his leafy harbourage. Here the hedge is all hung with briony or traveller's joy; there is a burst of wild-roses, pale discs of faintest rose-jacinth, each with a full-seeded heart. The elder spreads its wide cakes of bloom, and the rich scent hangs heavy on the air. One seems in a moment to penetrate the very heart of the deep country-side, and even the shepherd or the labourer whom one passes shares the silence of the open field, and the same immemorial quality of quiet simplicity and primitive work. It is then that there flashes upon one a sense of the inexplicable mystery of these inexpressive lives, toiling to live and living to toil, half pathetic, half dignified, wholly mysterious in the lie that they give, by their meek persistence, to restless ambitions and dreams of social amelioration. For, whatever happens, such work must still be done until the end of time; and the more that mind and soul awake, the less willing will men be to acquiesce in such uncheered drudgery. If one could but educate the simpler hearts into a joyful and tranquil consent to conditions which, after all, are simple and wholesome enough; if one could implant the contented love of field and wood, wide airs and flying clouds life, love, ease, labour, sorrow--all that is best in our experience--could be tasted here and thus; while the troubles bred by the covetous brain and the scheming mind would find no place here. It is a better lot, after all, to live and feel than to express life and feeling, however subtly and ingeniously, and I for one would throw down in an instant all my vague dreams and impossible hopes, my artificial cares and fretful ambitions, for a life unconscious of itself and an unimpaired serenity of mood. The dwellers in these quiet places neither brood over what might have been nor exercise themselves over what will be. They live in the moment, and the moment suffices them.

In the winter weather the Mareway, in its dreary and sodden bareness, is to my mind an even more impressive place. The wind comes sharply up over the shoulder of the down. The trees are all bare; the pasture is yellow-pale. The water lies in the ruts and ditches. The silence in the pauses of the wind is intense. You can hear the soft sound of grass pulled by the lips of unnumbered browsing sheep behind the hedgerow, or the cry of farmyard fowls from the byre below, the puffing of the steam-plough on the sloping fallow, the far-off railway whistle across the wide valley. The rooks stream home from distant fields, and discuss the affairs of the race with cheerful clamour in the depth of the wood. The day darkens, and a smouldering sunset, hung with gilded clouds streaked with purple bars, begins to burn behind the bare-stemmed copse.

But what is, after all, the deepest charm that invests the old road is the thought of all the sad and tender associations clothing it in the minds of so many vanished generations. Even an old house has a haunting grace enough, as a place where men have been born and died, have loved and enjoyed and suffered; but a road like this, ceaselessly trodden by the feet of pilgrims, all of them with some pathetic urgency of desire in their hearts, some hope unfulfilled, some shadow of sickness or sin to banish, some sorrow making havoc of home, is touched by that infinite pathos that binds all human hearts together in the face of the mystery of life. What passionate meetings with despair, what eager upliftings of desirous hearts, must have thrilled the minds of the feeble and travel-worn companies that made their slow journeys along the grassy road! And one is glad to think, too, that there must doubtless have been many that returned gladder than they came, with the burden shifted a little, the shadow lessened, or at least with new strength to carry the familiar load. For of this we may be sure, that however harshly we may despise what we call superstition, or however firmly we may wave away what we hold to have been all a beautiful mistake, there is some fruitful power that dwells and lingers in places upon which the hearts of men have so concentred their swift and poignant emotions--for all, at least, to whom the soul is more than the body, and whose thoughts are not bounded and confined by the mere material shapes among which, in the days of our earthly limitations, we move uneasily to and fro.


EPILOGUE


A blunt and candid critic, commenting on Keats' famous axiom, "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," said: "Then what is the use of having two words for the same thing?" And it is true that words cease to have any real meaning when they are so loosely applied. The same mistake is often made about happiness. It is supposed to be, not a quality, but a condition, or rather an equipoise of qualities and conditions. It is spoken of and thought of as if it were a sort of blend of virtue and health and amusement and sunshiny weather, and no doubt it is often found in combination with these things. But it is a separate quality, for all that, and not merely a result of faculties and circumstances. It is strangely and wilfully independent of its surroundings, and it is not inconsistent with the gravest discomfort of body and even affliction of mind. A ruinous combination of distressing circumstances does not by any means inevitably produce unhappiness. The martyr who sings at the stake among the flames is presumably happy. It may be said that he balances one consideration against another, and decides that his condition is, on the whole, enviable and delightful; but I do not believe that it is a mental process at all, and if the martyr is happy, he is so inevitably and instinctively. Some would urge that happiness is only an effect, like colour. There is no colour in the dark, but as soon as light is admitted, a thing that we call green, such as a leaf or a wall-paper, has the power of selecting and reflecting the green rays, and rejecting all rays that are not green. But the leaf or the paper is not in itself green; it has only a power of seizing upon and displaying greenness. So some would urge that temperaments are not inherently happy, but have the power or the instinct for extracting the happy elements out of life, and rejecting or nullifying the unhappy elements. But this I believe to be a mistake; the happy temperament is not necessarily made unhappy by being plunged in misfortune, while the unhappy temperament has the power of secreting unhappiness out of the most agreeable combination of circumstances. Every one must surely recollect occasions in their own lives when, by all the rules of the game, they ought to have been unhappy, while as a matter of fact they were entirely tranquil and contented. I have been happy in a dentist's chair, and by far the happiest holiday I ever spent in my life was under surroundings of discomfort and squalor such as I never before or since experienced. Those surroundings were certainly not in themselves productive of happiness; but neither did they detract from it. The pathos of the situation is that we all desire happiness--it is merely priggish to pretend that it is otherwise--and that we do not know in the least how to attain it. Some few people go straight for it and reach it; some people find it by turning their back upon what they most desire, and walking in the opposite direction. I had a friend once who made up his mind that to be happy he must make a fortune. He went through absurd privations and endured intolerable labours; he did make a fortune, and retired upon it at an early age, and immediately became a thoroughly unhappy man, having lost all power of enjoying or employing his leisure, and finding himself hopelessly and irremediably bored. Of course, boredom is the surest source of unhappiness, but boredom is not the result of the things we do or avoid doing, but some inner weariness of spirit, which imports itself into occupation and leisure alike, if it is there. There is no nostrum, no receipt for taking it away. A kindly adviser will say to a bored man, "All this discontent comes from thinking too much about yourself; if only you would throw yourself a little into the lives and problems of others, it would all disappear!" Of course it would! But it is just what the bored man cannot do; and the advice is just as practical as to say encouragingly to a man suffering from toothache, "If the pain would only go away, you would soon be well." Ruskin was once consulted by an anxious person, who complained that he was unhappy, and said that he attributed it to the fact that he was so useless. Ruskin replied with trenchant good sense: "It is your duty to try to be innocently happy first, and useful afterwards if you can."

What, then, can we do in the matter? How are we to secure happiness? The answer is that we cannot; that we must take it as it comes, like the sunshine and the spring. Few of us are in a position to alter at a moment's notice the course of our lives. It is more or less laid down for us what paths we have to tread, and in whose company. We can to a certain extent, taught by grim experience of the habits, thoughts, tempers, passions, anticipations, retrospects, that disturb our tranquillity, avoid occasions of stumbling. We can undertake small responsibilities, which we shall be ashamed to neglect; we can, so to speak, diet our minds and hearts, avoiding unwholesome food and debilitating excesses. To a certain extent, I say, for the old fault has a horrid pertinacity, and even when felled in fair fight, has a vile trick of recovering its energies and leaping on us from some ambush by the way, as we saunter, blithely conscious of our victory. It may be a discouraging and an oppressive thought, but the only hope lies in good sense and patience. There are no short cuts; we have to tread every inch of the road.

But we may at least do one thing. We may speak frankly of our experiences, without either pose or concealment. It does us no harm to confess our failures, and it puts courage into other pilgrims, who know at least that they are not alone in their encounters with the hobgoblins. And no less frankly, too, may we speak of the fine things that we have seen and heard by the way, the blue hills and winding waters of which we have caught a glimpse from the brow of the windswept hill, the talk and aspect of other wayfarers whom we have met, the noble buildings of the ancient city, the stately avenue which the dull road intersects unaware, the embowered hamlet, the leafy forest dingle, the bleat of sheep on the dewy upland, the birds' song at evening--all that strikes sharp and clear and desirable upon our fresh or tired sense.

For one thing is certain, that the end is not yet; and that there is something done for the soul both by the morning brightness and the evening heaviness which can be