At Large by Arthur Christopher Benson (free ebook reader for android .txt) 📕

Haec ego mecum

1908

Contents


I. THE SCENE
II. CONTENTMENT
III. FRIENDSHIP
IV. HUMOUR
V. TRAVEL
VI. SPECIALISM
VII. OUR LACK OF GREAT MEN
VIII. SHYNESS
IX. EQUALITY
X. THE DRAMATIC SENSE
XI. KELMSCOTT AND WILLIAM MORRIS
XII. A SPEECH DAY
XIII. LITERARY FINISH
XIV. A MIDSUMMER DAY'S DREAM
XV. SYMBOLS
XVI. OPTIMISM
XVII. JOY
XVIII. THE LOVE OF GOD
EPILOGUE




I. THE SCENE

Yes, of course it is an experiment! But it is made in corpore vili. It is not irreparable, and there is no reason, more's the pity, why I should not please myself. I will ask--it is a rhetorical question which needs no answer--what is a hapless bachelor to do, who is professionally occupied and tied down in a certain place for just half the year? What is he to do with the other half? I cannot live on in my college rooms, and I am not compelled to do so for economy. I have near relations and many friends, at whose houses I should be made welcome. But I cannot be like the wandering dove, who found no repose. I have a great love of my independence and my liberty. I love my own fireside, my own chair, my own books, my own way. It is little short of torture to have to conform to the rules of other households, to fall in with other people's arrangements, to throw my pen down when the gong sounds, to make myself agreeable to fortuitous visitors, to be led whither I would not. I do this, a very little, because I do not desire to lose touch with my kind; but then my work is of a sort which brings me into close touch day after day with all sorts of people, till I crave for recollection and repose; the prospect of a round of visits is one that fairly unmans me. No doubt it implies a certain want of vitality, but one does not increase one's vitality by making overdrafts upon it; and then too I am a slave to my pen, and the practice of authorship is inconsistent with paying visits. Of course the obvious remedy is marriage; but one cannot marry from prudence, or from a sense of duty, or even to increase the birth-rate, which I am concerned to see is diminishing. I am, moreover, to be perfectly frank, a transcendentalist on the subject of marriage. I know that a happy marriage is the finest and noblest thing in the world, and I would resign all the conveniences I possess with the utmost readiness for it. But a great passion cannot be the result of reflection, or of desire, or even of hope. One cannot argue oneself into it; one must be carried away. "You have never let yourself go," says a wise and gentle aunt, when I bemoan my unhappy fate. To which I reply that I have never done anything else. I have lain down in streamlets, I have leapt into silent pools, I have made believe I was in the presence of a deep emotion, like the dear little girl in one of Reynolds's pictures, who hugs a fat and lolling spaniel over an inch-deep trickle of water, for fear he should be drowned. I do not say that it is not my fault. It is my fault, my own fault, my own great fault, as we say in the Compline confession. The fault has been an over-sensibility. I have desired close and romantic relations so much that I have dissipated my forces; yet when I read such a book as the love-letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, I realise at once both the supreme nature of the gift, and the hopelessness of attaining it unless it be given; but I try to complain, as the beloved mother of Carlyle said about her health, as little as possible.

Well, then, as I say, what is a reluctant bachelor who loves his liberty to do with himself? I cannot abide the life of towns, though I live in a town half the year. I like friends, and I do not care for acquaintances. There is no conceivable reason why, in the pursuit of pleasure, I should frequent social entertainments that do not amuse me. What have I then done? I have done what I liked best. I have taken a big roomy house in the quietest country I could find, I have furnished it comfortably, and I have hitherto found no difficulty in inducing my friends, one or two at a time, to come and share my life. I shall have something to say about solitude presently, but meanwhile I will describe my hermitage.

The old Isle of Ely lies in the very centre of the Fens. It is a range of low gravel hills, shaped roughly like a human hand. The river runs at the wrist, and Ely stands just above it, at the base of the palm, the fingers stretching out to the west. The fens themselves, vast peaty plains, the bottoms of the old lagoons, made up of the accumulation of centuries of rotting water-plants, stretch round it on every side; far away you can see the low heights of Brandon, the Newmarket Downs, the Gogmagogs behind Cambridge, the low wolds of Huntingdon. To the north the interminable plain, through which the rivers welter and the great levels run, stretches up to the Wash. So slight is the fall of the land towards the sea, that the tide steals past me in the huge Hundred-foot cut, and makes itself felt as far south as Earith Bridge, where the Ouse comes leisurely down with its clear pools and reed-beds. At the extremity of the southernmost of all the fingers of the Isle, a big hamlet clusters round a great ancient church, whose blunt tower is visible for miles above its grove of sycamores. More than twelve centuries ago an old saint, whose name I think was Owen, though it was Latinised by the monks into Ovinus, because he had the care of the sheep, kept the flocks of St. Etheldreda, queen and abbess of Ely, on these wolds. One does not know what were the visions of this rude and ardent saint, as he paced the low heights day by day, looking over the monstrous lakes. At night no doubt he heard the cries of the marsh-fowl and saw the elfin lights stir on the reedy flats. Perhaps some touch of fever kindled his visions; but he raised a tiny shrine here, and here he laid his bones; and long after, when the monks grew rich, they raised a great church here to the memory of the shepherd of the sheep, and beneath it, I doubt not, he sleeps.

What is it I see from my low hills? It is an enchanted land for me, and I lose myself in wondering how it is that no one, poet or artist, has ever wholly found out the charm of these level plains, with their rich black soil, their straight dykes, their great drift-roads, that run as far as the eye can reach into the unvisited fen. In summer it is a feast of the richest green from verge to verge; here a clump of trees stands up, almost of the hue of indigo, surrounding a lonely shepherd's cote; a distant church rises, a dark tower over the hamlet elms; far beyond, I see low wolds, streaked and dappled by copse and wood; far to the south, I see the towers and spires of Cambridge, as of some spiritual city--the smoke rises over it on still days, hanging like a cloud; to the east lie the dark pine-woods of Suffolk, to the north an interminable fen; but not only is it that one sees a vast extent of sky, with great cloud-battalions crowding up from the south, but all the colour of the landscape is crowded into a narrow belt to the eye, which gives it an intensity of emerald hue that I have seen nowhere else in the world. There is a sense of deep peace about it all, the herb of the field just rising in its place over the wide acres; the air is touched with a lazy fragrance, as of hidden flowers; and there is a sense, too, of silent and remote lives, of men that glide quietly to and fro in the great pastures, going quietly about their work in a leisurely calm. In the winter it is fairer still, if one has a taste for austerity. The trees are leafless now; and the whole flat is lightly washed with the most delicate and spare tints, the pasture tinted with the yellowing bent, the pale stubble, the rich plough-land, all blending into a subdued colour; and then, as the day declines and the plain is rimmed with a frosty mist, the smouldering glow of the orange sunset begins to burn clear on the horizon, the grey laminated clouds becoming ridged with gold and purple, till the whole fades, like a shoaling sea, into the purest green, while the cloud-banks grow black and ominous, and far-off lights twinkle like stars in solitary farms.

Of the house itself, exteriorly, perhaps the less said the better; it was built by an earl, to whom the estate belonged, as a shooting-box. I have often thought that it must have been ordered from the Army and Navy Stores. It is of yellow brick, blue-slated, and there has been a pathetic feeling after giving it a meanly Gothic air; it is ill-placed, shut in by trees, approached only by a very dilapidated farm-road; and the worst of it is that a curious and picturesque house was destroyed to build it. It stands in what was once a very pretty and charming little park, with an ancient avenue of pollard trees, lime and elm. You can see the old terraces of the Hall, the mounds of ruins, the fish-ponds, the grass-grown pleasance. It is pleasantly timbered, and I have an orchard of honest fruit-trees of my own. First of all I expect it was a Roman fort; for the other day my gardener brought me in half of the handle of a fine old Roman water-jar, red pottery smeared with plaster, with two pretty laughing faces pinched lightly out under the volutes. A few days after I felt like Polycrates of Samos, that over-fortunate tyrant, when, walking myself in my garden, I descried and gathered up the rest of the same handle, the fractures fitting exactly. There are traces of Roman occupation hereabouts in mounds and earthworks. Not long ago a man ploughing in the fen struck an old red vase up with the share, and searching the place found a number of the same urns within the space of a few yards, buried in the peat, as fresh as the day they were made. There was nothing else to be found, and the place was under water till fifty years ago; so that it must have been a boatload of pottery being taken in to market that was swamped there, how many centuries ago! But there have been stranger things than that found; half a mile away, where the steep gravel hill slopes down to the fen, a man hoeing brought up a bronze spear-head. He took it to the lord of the manor, who was interested in curiosities. The