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

try to enforce upon us a belief in things which we find incredible, or perhaps think to be simply unknowable; or they make out certain practices to be important, which we do not think important. We must never do violence to our minds and souls by professing to believe what we do not believe, or to think things certain which we honestly believe to be uncertain; but at the same time we must remember that there is always something of beauty inside every religion, because religion involves a deliberate choice of better motives and better actions, and an attempt to exclude the baser and viler elements of life.

Of course the objection to all this--and it is a serious one--is that people may say, "Of course I see the truth of all that, and the advantage of being actively and vividly interested in life; you might as well preach the advantage of being happy; but my own interest is fitful and occasional; sometimes for days together I have no sense of the interest or quality of anything. I have no time, I have no one to enjoy these things with. How am I to become what I see it would be wise to be?" It is as when the woman of Samaria said, "Thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep!" It is true that civilisation does seem more and more to create men and women with these instincts, and to set them in circumstances where it is hard to gratify them. And then such people are apt to say, "Is it after all worth while to aim at so impossible a standard? Is it not better just to put it all aside, and make oneself as comfortable as one can?" And that is the practical answer which a good many people do make to the question; and when such people get older, they are the most discouraging of all advisers, because they ridicule the whole thing as nonsense, which young men and young women had better get out of their heads as soon as they can; as Jowett wrote of his pupil Swinburne, that he was a clever fellow, and would do well enough as soon as he had got rid of all this poetry and nonsense. I feel no doubt that these ideas, this kind of interest in life, in the wonder and strangeness of it, can be pursued by many who do not pursue it. It is like the white deer, which in the old stories the huntsman was for ever pursuing in the forest; he did not ever catch it, but the pursuit of it brought him many high adventures.

Of course it is far easier if one has a friend who shares the same tastes; but if one has not, there are always books, in which the best minds can be found thinking and talking at their finest and liveliest. But here again a good many people are betrayed by reading books as one may collect stamps, just triumphing in the number and variety of the repertory. I believe very little in setting the foot on books, as sailors take possession of an unknown isle. One must make experiments, just to see what are the kind of books which nurture and sustain one; and then I believe in arriving at a circle of books, which one really knows through and through, and reads at all times and in all moods, till they get soaked and enriched with all sorts of moods and associations. I have a dozen such, which I read and mark and scribble in, write when and where I read them, and who were my companions. Of course the same books do not always last through one's course. You grow out of books as you grow out of clothes; and I sometimes look at old favourites, and find myself lost in wonder as to how I can ever have cared for them like that! They seem now like little antechambers and corridors, through which I have passed to something far more noble and gracious. But all the time we must be trying to weave the books really into life, not let them stand like ornaments on a shelf. It is poetry that enkindles the mind most to dwell in the thoughts of which I have been speaking. But it must not be read straight on; it must rather be tasted, brooded over, repeated, learned by heart. Let me take a personal instance. As a boy I had no opinion of Wordsworth, except that I admired one or two of the great poems like the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" and the "Ode to Duty," which no one who sets out to love poetry at all can afford to ignore. Then, as I grew older, I began to see that quotations from Wordsworth had a sort of grandeur in their very substance, which was unlike any other grandeur. And then I took the whole of the poems away for a vacation, and worked at them; and then I found how again and again Wordsworth touches a thought to life, which is like the little objects you pick up on the seashore, the evidence of another life close at hand, indubitably there, and yet unknown, which is being lived under the waste of waters. When Wordsworth says such things as


And many love me, but by none
Am I enough beloved,


or when he says,


Some silent laws our hearts may make
Which they shall long obey--


then he seems to uncover the very secrets of the world, and to speak as when in the prophet's vision the seven thunders uttered their voices. Only to-day I was working with a pupil; in his essay he had quoted Wordsworth, and we looked up the place. While I was speaking, my eye fell upon "The Poet's Epitaph," and I saw,


Come hither in thy hour of strength,
Come, weak as is a breaking wave!


Those two lines of unutterable magic; he could not understand why I stopped and faltered, nor could I have explained it to him. But it was as Coleridge says,


Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes in holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise.


It is just a mystery of beauty that has been seen, not to be explained or understood.

Of course there are people, there will be people, who will read what I have just written in an agony of rationality, and say that it is all rubbish. But I am describing an experience of ecstasy which is not very common perhaps; but just as real an experience as eating or drinking. I have had the experience before. I shall have it again; I recognise it at once, and it is quite distinct from other experiences. One cannot sit down to it as regularly as one sits down to a meal, of course. It is not a thing to be proud of, because I have had it as far back as I can remember. Nor am I at all sure what the effect of it is. It does not transfigure life except for the moment; and if I were in a dull frame of mind, it might not visit me at all, though it is very apt to come if I am in a sad or anxious frame of mind.

Then how do I interpret it? Very simply indeed; that there is a region which I will call the region of beauty, to which the view of life that I have called art does sometimes undoubtedly admit one; though as I have also said the view of which I speak is concerned with many perceptions which are not beautiful, and even sometimes quite the opposite.

If I were frankly asked whether it is worth while trying to think or imagine or thrust oneself into this particular kind of rapture, I should say, "Certainly not!" It is very doubtful if it could be genuinely attained unless it has been already experienced; and I do not believe in the wholesomeness of self-suggested emotions.

But I do believe most firmly that it is worth while for anyone who is interested in such effects at all to try experiments, by looking at things critically, hearing things, observing, listening to other people, reading books, trying in fact to practise observation and judgment.

I was visiting some printing works the other day. The great cylinders were revolving, the wheels buzzing, the levers clicking. A boy perched on a platform by the huge machine lightly disengaged a sheet of paper; it was drawn in, and a moment after a thing like a gridiron flew up, made a sort of bow, and deposited a printed sheet in a box, the sides of which kept moving, so as to pat the papers into one solid pad.

I came away with the master-printer, and asked him idly whether the boy knew what book he was printing. He laughed. "No," he said, "and the less he is interested the better--his business is just to feed the machine, and it becomes entirely mechanical." I felt a kind of shame at the thought of a human being becoming so entirely and completely a machine; but the boy looked cheerful, well, and intelligent, and as if he had a very decisive little life of his own quite apart from the whizzing engine, for ever bowing over and putting a new sheet in the box.

But it is just that dull and mechanical handling of life which I believe we ought to avoid. It is harder to avoid it for some people than for others, and it is more difficult to escape from under certain conditions. But all art and all artistic perception is just a sign of the irresponsible and irrepressible joy of life, and an attempt, as I said at first, to perceive and distinguish and compare the quality of things. What I am here maintaining is that art is not necessarily the production of something artistic; that is the same impulse only when it rises in the heart of an inventive, accomplished, deft-fingered, eager-minded craftsman. If a man or a woman has a special gift of words, or a mastery of form and colour, or musical phrases, the passion for beauty is bound to show itself in the making of beautiful things--and such lives are among the happiest that a man can live, though there is always the shadow of realising the beauty that is out of reach, that cannot be captured or expressed. And if it could be captured and expressed, the quest would vanish!

But there are innumerable hearts and minds which have the perception of quality, though not the power of expressing it; and these are the people whom I wish to persuade of the fact that they hold in their hands a thread, which, like the clue in the old story, can conduct a searcher safely through the dark recesses of the great labyrinth. He tied it, the dauntless youth in the tale, to the ancient thorn-tree that grew by the cavern's mouth; and then he stepped boldly in, and let it unwind within his hand.

For many people, indeed for all people who have any part in the future of the world, the clue of life must be found in beauty of some kind or another; not necessarily in the outward beauties of colours, sounds, and words, but in the beauty of conduct, in the kind, sweet-tempered, pure, unselfish life. Those who choose such qualities do so simply because they seem more beautiful than the spiteful, angry, greedy, selfish