From a College Window by Arthur Christopher Benson (classic fiction .TXT) 📕

is hard to preach against a thing which is excellent in moderation and only mischievous in excess.

Personally I am afraid that I only look upon games as a pis-aller. I would always rather take a walk than play golf, and read a book than play bridge. Bridge, indeed, I should regard as only one degree better than absolutely vacuous conversation, which is certainly the most fatiguing thing in the world. But the odd thing is that while it is regarded as rather vicious to do nothing, it is regarded as positively virtuous to play a game. Personally I think competition always a more or less disagreeable thing. I dislike it in real life, and I do not see why it should be introduced into one's amusements. If it amuses me to do a thing, I do not very much care whether I do it better than another person. I have no desire to be always comparing my skill with the skill of others.

Then, too, I am afraid that I must confess to lamentably feeble pleasure in mere country sights and sounds. I love to watch the curious and beautiful things that go on in every hedgerow and every field; it is a ceaseless delight to see the tender uncrumpling leaves of the copse in spring, and no a pleasure to see the woodland streaked and stained with the flaming glories of autumn. It is a joy in high midsummer to see the clear dwindled stream run under the thick hazels, among the lush water-plants; it is no less a joy to see the same stream running full and turbid in winter, when the banks are bare, and the trees are leafless, and the pasture is wrinkled with frost. Half the joy, for instance, of shooting, in which I frankly confess I take a childish delight, is the quiet tramping over the clean-cut stubble, the distant view of field and wood, the long, quiet wait at the covert-end, where the spindle-wood hangs out her quaint rosy berries, and the rabbits come scampering up the copse, as the far-off tapping of the beaters draws near in the frosty air. The delights of the country-side grow upon me every month and every year. I love to stroll in the lanes in spring, with white clouds floating in the blue above, and to see the glade carpeted with steel-blue hyacinths. I love to walk on country roads or by woodland paths, on a rain-drenched day of summer, when the sky is full of heavy inky clouds, and the earth smells fresh and sweet; I love to go briskly homeward on a winter evening, when the sunset smoulders low in the west, when the pheasants leap trumpeting to their roosts, and the lights begin to peep in cottage windows.

Such joys as these are within the reach of every one; and to call the country dull because one has not the opportunity of hitting and pursuing a little white ball round and round among the same fields, with elaborately contrived obstacles to test the skill and the temper, seems to me to be grotesque, if it were not also so distressing.

I cannot help feeling that games are things that are appropriate to the restless days of boyhood, when one will take infinite trouble and toil over anything of the nature of a make-believe, so long as it is understood not to be work; but as one gets older and perhaps wiser, a simpler and quieter range of interests ought to take their place. I can humbly answer for it that it need imply no loss of zest; my own power of enjoyment is far deeper and stronger than it was in early years; the pleasures I have described, of sight and sound, mean infinitely more to me than the definite occupations of boyhood ever did. But the danger is that if we are brought up ourselves to depend upon games, and if we bring up all our boys to depend on them, we are not able to do without them as we grow older; and thus we so often have the melancholy spectacle of the elderly man, who is hopelessly bored with existence, and who is the terror of the smoking-room and the dinner-table, because he is only capable of indulging in lengthy reminiscences of his own astonishing athletic performances, and in lamentations over the degeneracy of the human race.

Another remarkable fact about the conventionality that attends games is that certain games are dismissed as childish and contemptible while others are crowned with glory and worship. One knows of eminent clergymen who play golf; and that they should do so seems to constitute so high a title to the respect and regard with which normal persons view them, that one sometimes wonders whether they do not take up the practice with the wisdom of the serpent that is recommended in the Gospels, or because of the Pauline doctrine of adaptability, that by all means they may save some.

But as far as mere air and exercise goes, the childish game of playing at horses is admirably calculated to increase health and vigour and needs no expensive resources. Yet what would be said and thought if a prelate and his suffragan ran nimbly out of a palace gate in a cathedral close, with little bells tinkling, whips cracking, and reins of red ribbon drawn in to repress the curvetting of the gaitered steed? There is nothing in reality more undignified about that than in hitting a little ball about over sandy bunkers. If the Prime Minister and the Lord Chief Justice trundled hoops round and round after breakfast in the gravelled space behind the Horse Guards, who could allege that they would not be the better for the exercise? Yet they would be held for some mysterious reason to have forfeited respect. To the mind of the philosopher all games are either silly or reasonable; and nothing so reveals the stupid conventionality of the ordinary mind as the fact that men consider a series of handbooks on Great Bowlers to be a serious and important addition to literature, while they would hold that a little manual on Blind-man's Buff was a fit subject for derision. St. Paul said that when he became a man he put away childish things. He could hardly afford to say that now, if he hoped to be regarded as a man of sense and weight.

I do not wish to be a mere Jeremiah in the region of prophecy, and to deplore, sarcastically and incisively, what I cannot amend. What I rather wish to do is to make a plea for greater simplicity in the matter, and to try and destroy some of the terrible priggishness in the matter of athletics, which appears to me to prevail. After all, athletics are only one form of leisurely amusement; and I maintain that it is of the essence of priggishness to import solemnity into a matter which does not need it, and which would be better without it. Because the tyranny is a real one; the man of many games is not content with simply enjoying them; he has a sense of complacent superiority, and a hardly disguised contempt for the people who do not play them.

I was staying in a house the other day where a distinguished philosopher had driven over to pay an afternoon call. The call concluded, he wished to make a start, so I went down to the stable with him to see about putting his pony in. The stables were deserted. I was forced to confess that I knew nothing about the harnessing of steeds, however humble. We discovered portions of what appeared to be the equipment of a pony, and I held them for him, while he gingerly tried them on, applying them cautiously to various portions of the innocent animal's person. Eventually we had to give it up as a bad job, and seek for professional assistance. I described the scene for the benefit of a lively lady of my acquaintance, who is a devotee of anything connected with horses, and she laughed unmercifully at the description, and expressed the contempt, which she sincerely felt, in no measured terms. But, after all, it is no part of my business to harness horses; it is a convenience that there should be persons who possess the requisite knowledge; for me horses only represent a convenient form of locomotion. I did not mind her being amused--indeed, that was the object of my narrative--but her contempt was just as much misplaced as if I had despised her for not being able to tell the difference between sapphics and alcaics, which it was my business to know.

It is the complacency, the self-satisfaction, that results from the worship of games, which is one of its most serious features. I wish with all my heart that I could suggest a remedy for it; but the only thing that I can do is to pursue my own inclinations, with a fervent conviction that they are at least as innocent as the pursuit of athletic exercises; and I can also, as I have said, wave a little flag of revolt, and rally to my standard the quieter and more simple-minded persons, who love their liberty, and decline to part with it unless they can find a better reason than the merely comfortable desire to do what every one else is doing.


XVI


SPIRITUALISM

I was sitting the other day in a vicarage garden with my friend the vicar. It was a pretty, well-kept place, with old shrubberies and umbrageous trees; to the right, the tower of the church rose among its elms. We sate out of the wind, looking over a rough pasture field, apparently a common, divided from the garden by a little ha-ha of brick. The surface of the field was very irregular, as though there had been excavations made in it for gravel at some time or other; in certain parts of the field there appeared fragments of a stone wall, just showing above the ground.

The vicar pointed to the field. "Do you see that wall?" he said; "I will tell you a very curious story about that. When I came here, forty years ago, I asked the old gardener what the field was, as I never saw any one in it, or any beasts grazing there; and yet it was unfenced, and appeared to be common land--it was full of little thickets and thorn-bushes then. He was not very willing to tell me, I thought, but by dint of questions I discovered that it was a common, and that it was known locally by the curious name of Heaven's Walls. He went on to say that it was considered unlucky to set foot in it; and that, as a matter of fact, no villager would ever dream of going there; he would not say why, but at last it came out that it was supposed to be haunted by a spirit. No one, it seemed, had ever seen anything there, but it was an unlucky place.

"Well, I thought no more of it at the time, though I often went into the field. It was a quiet and pretty place enough; full of thickets, as I have said, where the birds built unmolested--there was generally a goldfinch's nest there.

"It became necessary to lay a drain across it, and a big trench was dug. One day they came and told me that the workmen had found something--would I go and look at it? I went out and found that they had unearthed a large Roman cinerary urn, containing some calcined bones. I told the lord of the manor, who is a squire in the next parish, and he and I after that kept a look-out over