Escape, and Other Essays by Arthur Christopher Benson (ebook reader online TXT) 📕

duty, a larger idea of national service, not loudly advertised but deeply rooted, and far removed from the undisciplined individualism of my boyhood. It has been a secret growth, not an educational programme. The Boer War, I think, revealed its presence, and the war we are now waging has testified to its mature strength. It has come partly by organisation, and still more through the workings of a more generous and self-sacrificing ideal. In any case it is a great and noble harvest; and I rejoice with all my heart that it has thus ripened and borne fruit, in courage and disinterestedness, and high-hearted public spirit.


XIII


AUTHORSHIP

1


The essay which stands next in this volume, "Herb Moly and Heartsease," was the subject of a curious and interesting experiment. It seemed to me, when I first thought of it, to be a suggestive subject, a substantial idea. One ought not to write a commentary on one's own work, but the underlying theme is this: I have been haunted all my life, at intervals, sometimes very insistently, by the sense of a quest; and I have often seemed to myself to be searching for something which I have somehow lost; to be engaged in trying to rediscover some emotion or thought which I had once certainly possessed and as certainly have forgotten or mislaid. At times I felt on the track of it, as if it had passed that way not long before; at times I have felt as if I were close upon it, and as if it were only hidden from me by the thinnest of veils. I have reason to know that other people have the same feeling; and, indeed, it is that which constitutes the singular and moving charm of Newman's poem, "Lead, kindly Light," where all is summed up in those exquisite lines, often so strangely misinterpreted and misunderstood, which end the poem:


"And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile."


I wish that he had not written "those angel faces," because it seems to limit the quest to ecclesiastical lines, as, indeed, I expect Newman did limit it. But we must not be so blind as to be unable to see behind the texture of prepossessions that decorate, as with a tapestry, the chambers of a man's inner thought; and I have no doubt whatever that Newman meant the same thing that I mean, though he used different symbols. Again, we find the same idea in Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," the thought that life is not circumscribed by birth and death, but that one's experience is a much larger and older thing than the experience which mere memory records. It is that which one has lost; and one of the greatest mysteries of art lies in the fact that a picture, or a sudden music, or a page in a book, will sometimes startle one into the consciousness of having heard, seen, known, felt the emotion before, elsewhere, beyond the visible horizon.

Well, I tried to put that idea into words in "Herb Moly and Heartsease"; and because it was a deep and dim idea, and also partly because it fascinated me greatly, I spent far more time and trouble on the little piece than I generally spend.

Then it occurred to me, in a whimsical moment, that I would try an experiment. I would send out the thing as a ballon d'essai, to see if anyone would read it for itself, or would detect me underneath the disguise. Through the kind offices of a friend, I had it published secretly and anonymously. I chose the most beautiful type and paper I could find; it cost me far more than the sale of the whole edition could possibly recoup. I had it sent to papers for review, and I even had some copies sent to literary friends of my own.

The result was a quite enchanting humiliation. One paper reviewed it kindly, in a little paragraph, and said it was useful; another said that the writer used the word "one" much too frequently; while only one of my friends even acknowledged it. It is pleasant to begin at the bottom again, and find that no one will listen, even to a very careful bit of writing by one who has at all events had a good deal of practice, and who did his very best!


2


This set me thinking over my literary adventures, and I think they may be interesting to other authors or would-be authors; and then I wish to go a little further, and try to say, if I can, what I believe the writing of books really to be, why one writes, and what one is aiming at. I have a very clear idea about it all, and it can do no harm to state it.

I was brought up much among books and talk about books. Indeed, I have always believed that my father, though he had great practical gifts of organisation and administration, which came out in his work as a schoolmaster and a bishop, was very much of an artist at heart, and would have liked to be a poet. Indeed, the practice of authorship has run in my family to a quite extraordinary degree. In four generations, I believe that some twenty of my blood-relations have written and published books, from my cousin Adelaide Anne Procter to my uncle Henry Sidgwick. When we were children we produced little magazines of prose and poetry, and read them in the family circle. I wrote poetry as a boy at Eton, and at Cambridge as an undergraduate; and at the end of my time at Cambridge I produced a novel, which I sent to Macmillan's Magazine, of which Lord Morley was then editor, who sent it back to me with a kind letter to say that it was sauce without meat, and that I should not be proud of the book in later life if it were published.

Then as an undergraduate I began an odd little book called Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, a morbid affair, which was published anonymously, and, though severely handled by reviewers, had a certain measure of success. But then I became a busy schoolmaster, and all I did was to write laboured little essays, which appeared in various magazines, and were afterwards collected. Then I took up poetry, and worked very hard at it indeed for some years, producing five volumes, which very few people ever read. It was a great delight, writing poetry, and I have masses of unpublished poems. But I do not grudge the time spent on it, because I think it taught me the use of words. Then came two volumes of stories, mostly told or read to the boys in my house, with a medieval sort of flavour-- The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset.

I also put together a little book on Tennyson, which has, I believe, the merit of containing all the most interesting anecdotes about him, and I also wrote the Rossetti in the Men of Letters Series, a painstaking book, rather rhetorical; though the truth about Rossetti cannot be told, even if it could be known.

All this work was done in the middle of hard professional work, with a boarding-house and many pupils. I will dare to say that I was an active and diligent schoolmaster, and writing was only a recreation. I could only get a few hours a week at it, and it never interfered with my main work.

My father died in 1896, and I wrote his life in two big volumes, a very solid piece of work; but it was after that, I think, that my real writing began. I believe it was in 1899 that I slowly composed The House of Quiet, but I could not satisfy myself about the ending, and it was laid aside.

Then I was offered the task of editing Queen Victoria's letters. I resigned my mastership with a mixture of sorrow and relief. The work was interesting and absorbing, but I did not like our system of education, nor did I believe in it. But I put my beliefs into a little book called The Schoolmaster, which made its way.

I left my work as a teacher in 1903, when I was forty-one. The House of Quiet appeared in that year anonymously, and began to sell. I lived on at Eton with an old friend; went daily up to Windsor Castle, and toiled through volumes of papers. But I found that it was not possible to work more than a few hours a day at the task of selection, because one's judgment got fatigued and blurred.

The sudden cessation of heavy professional work made itself felt in an extreme zest and lightness of spirit. It was a very happy and delightful time. I was living among friends who were all very hard at work, and the very contrast of my freedom with their servitude was enlivening. I was able, too, to think over my schoolmastering experience; and the result was The Upton Letters, an inconsequent but I think lively book, also published anonymously and rather disregarded by reviewers. But the book was talked about and read; and for the next year or two I worked with indefatigable zest at writing. I brought out monographs on Edward FitzGerald and Walter Pater; I wrote The Thread of Gold, which also succeeded; and in the next year I settled at Cambridge, and wrote From a College Window as a serial in the Cornhill, and The Gate of Death, both anonymously; and in the following year Beside Still Waters and The Altar Fire. All this time the Queen's letters were going quietly on in the background.

I have written half-a-dozen books since then. But that is how I began my work; and the one point which is worth noticing is that the four books which have sold most widely, The House of Quiet, The Upton Letters, The Thread of Gold, and the College Window, were all of them issued anonymously, and the authorship was for a considerable time undetected. So that it is fair to conclude that the public is on the look-out for books which interest it, and will find out what it wants; because none of those books owed anything whatever to my parentage or my position or my friends--or indeed to the reviewers either; and it proves the truth of what a publisher said to me the other day, that neither reviews nor advertisements will really do much for a book; but that if readers begin to talk about a book and to recommend it, it is apt to go ahead. And, further, I conclude from the fact that none of my subsequent books have been as popular as these, though I have no cause to complain, that a new voice and new ideas are what prove attractive--and perhaps not so much new ideas as familiar ideas which have not been clearly expressed and put into words. There was a little mystery about the writer then, and there is no mystery now; everyone knows exactly what to expect; and the new generation wants a fresh voice and a different way of putting things.


3


As to the motive force, whatever it may be, that lies behind writing, we may disengage from it all subsidiary motives, such as the desire for money, philanthropy, professional occupation; but the main force is, I think, threefold--the motive of art pure and simple, the desire for communication with one's fellows, and the motive of ambition, which may almost be called the desire for applause.

The ultimate instinct of art