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

his amusement. Field sports are intelligible enough; the pursuit of art requires some explanation, and incurs a suspicion of effeminacy or eccentricity. Only when authorship becomes a source of profit is it thoroughly respectable.

I had a friend who died not very long ago. He had in his younger days done a little administrative work; but he was wealthy, and at a comparatively early age he abandoned himself to leisure. He travelled, he read, he went much into society, he enjoyed the company of his friends. When he died he was spoken of as an amateur, and praised as a cricketer of some merit. Even his closest friends seemed to find it necessary to explain and make excuses; he was shy, he stammered, he was not suited to parliamentary life; but I can think of few people who did so much for his friends or who so radiated the simplest sort of happiness. To be welcomed by him, to be with him, put a little glow on life, because you felt instinctively that he was actively enjoying every hour of your company. I thought, I remember, at his death, how hopeless it was to assess a man's virtue and usefulness in the terms of his career. If he had entered Parliament, registered a silent vote, spent his time in social functions, letter-writing, lobby-gossip, he would have been acclaimed as a man of weight and influence; but as it was, though he had stood by friends in trouble, had helped lame dogs over stiles, had been the centre of good-will and mutual understanding to a dozen groups and circles, it seemed impossible to recognise that he had done anything in his generation. It is not to be claimed that his was a life of persistent benevolence or devoted energy; but I thought of a dozen men who had lived selfishly and comfortably, making money and amassing fortunes, without a touch of real kindness or fine tenderness about them, who would yet be held to have done well and to have deserved respect, when compared with this peace-maker!

And then I perceived how intolerably false many of our cherished ideals are; that apart from lives of pure selfishness and annexation, many a professed philanthropist or active statesman is merely following a sterile sort of ambition; that it is rare on the whole for so-called public men to live for the sake of the public; while the simple, kindly, uncalculating, friendly attitude to life is a real source of grace and beauty, and leaves behind it a fragrant memory enshrined in a hundred hearts.

So, too, when it comes to what we call literature. No one supposes that we can do without it, and in its essence it is but an extension of happy, fine, vivid talk. It is but the delighted perception of life, the ecstasy of taking a hand in the great mystery, the joy of love and companionship, the worship of beauty and desire and energy and memory taking shape in the most effective form that man can devise. There is no real merit in the accumulation of property; only the people who do the necessary work of the world, and the people who increase the joy of the world are worth a moment's thought, and yet both alike are little regarded.

Of course where the weakness of the artistic life really lies is that it is often not taken up out of mere communicativeness and happy excitement, as a child tells a breathless tale, but as a device for attracting the notice and earning the applause of the world; and then it is on a par with all other self-regarding activities. But if it is taken up with a desire to give rather than to receive, as an irrepressible sharing of delight, it becomes not a solemn and dignified affair, but just one of the most beautiful and uncalculating impulses in the world.

Then there falls another shadow across the path; the unhappiest natures I know are the natures of keen emotion and swift perception who yet have not the gift of expressing what they feel in any artistic medium. It is these, alas! who cumber the streets and porticoes of literature. They are attracted away from homely toil by the perilous sweetness of art, and when they attempt to express their raptures, they have no faculty or knack of hand. And these men and women fall with zealous dreariness or acrid contemptuousness, and radiate discomfort and uneasiness about them.

"A book," said Dr. Johnson, "should show one either how to enjoy life or how to endure it"--was ever the function of literature expressed more pungently or justly? Any man who enjoys or endures has a right to speak, if he can. If he can help others to enjoy or to endure, then he need never be in any doubt as to his part in life; while if he cannot ecstatically enjoy, he can at least good- humouredly endure.


III


THE NEW POETS

There's a dark window in a gable which looks out over my narrow slip of garden, where the almond-trees grow, and to-day the dark window, with its black casement lines, had become suddenly a Japanese panel. The almond was in bloom, with its delicious, pink, geometrical flowers, not a flower which wins one's love, somehow; it is not homely or sweet enough for that. But it is unapproachably pure and beautiful, with a touch of fanaticism about it--the fanaticism which comes of stainless strength, as though one woke in the dawn and found an angel in one's room: he would not quite understand one's troubles!

But when I looked lower down, there was a sweeter message still, for the mezereon was awake, with its tiny porcelain crimson flowers and its minute leaves of bright green, budding as I think Aaron's rod must have budded, the very crust of the sprig bursting into little flames of green and red.

I thought at the sight of all this that some good fortune was about to befall me; and so it did. When I came back there came a friend to see me whom I seldom see and much enjoy seeing. He is young, but he plays a fine part in the world, and he carries about with him two very fine qualities; one is a great and generous curiosity about what our writers are doing. He is the first man from whom I hear of new and beautiful work; and he praises it royally, he murmurs phrases, he even declaims it in his high, thin voice, which wavers like a dry flame. And what makes all this so refreshing is that his other great quality is an intensely critical spirit, which stares closely and intently at work, as through a crystalline lens.

After we had talked a little, I said to him: "Come, praise me some new writers, you herald of the dawn! You always do that when you come to see me, and you must do it now." He smiled secretly, and drew out a slim volume from his pocket and read me some verses; I will not be drawn into saying the name of the poet.

"How do you find that?" he said.

"Oh," I said, "it is very good; but is it the finest gold?"

"Yes," he said, "it is that." And he then read me some more.

"Now," I said, "I will be frank with you. That seems to me very musical and accomplished; but it has what is to me the one unpardonable fault in poetry: it is literary. He has heard and read, that poet, so much sweet and solemn verse, that his mind murmurs like a harp hung among the trees that are therein; the winds blow into music. But I don't want that; I want a fount of song, a spring of living water." He looked a little vexed at that, and read me a few more pages. And then he went on to praise the work of two or three other writers, and added that he believed there was going to be a great outburst of poetry after a long frost.

"Well," I said, "I am sure I hope so. And if there is one thing in the world that I desire, it is that I may be able to recognise and love the new voices."

And then I told him a story of which I often think. When I was a young man, very much pre-occupied with Tennyson and Omar Khayyam and Swinburne, I went to stay with an elderly business man, a friend of my family. He was a great stout, rubicund man, very good- natured, and he had a voice like the cry of an expiring mouse, shrill and thin. We were sitting after dinner in his big dining- room, several of us, looking out into a wide, dusty garden, when the talk turned on books, and I suppose I praised Swinburne, for he asked me to say some, and I quoted the poem which says


And even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.


He heard me attentively enough, and said it was pretty good; but then he said that it was nothing to Byron, and in his squeaky voice he quoted a quantity of Byron, whose poetry, I am sorry to say, I regarded as I might regard withered flowers or worse. His eyes brimmed with tears, and they fell on to his shirt-front; and then he said decisively that there had been no poetry since Byron--none at all. Tennyson was mere word music, Browning was unintelligible, and so forth. And I remember how, with the insolence of youth, I thought how dreadful it was that the old man should have lost all sympathy and judgment; because poetry then seemed to me a really important matter, full of tones and values. I did not understand then, as I understand now, that it is all a question of signals and symbols, and that poetry is but, as the psalm says, what happens when one day telleth another and one night certifieth another. I know now that there can be no deceit about poetry, and that no poet can make you feel more than he feels himself, though he cannot always make another feel as much; and that the worth of his art exists only just in so far as he can say what he feels; and then I thought of my old friend's mind as I might think of a scarecrow among lonely fields, a thing absurd, ragged, and left alone, while real men went about their business. I did not say it, but I thought it in my folly. So I told my young friend that story; and I said:

"I know that it does not really matter what one loves and is moved by as long as one loves something and is moved by its beauty. But, still, I do not want that to happen to me; I do not want to be like a pebble on the beach, when the water draws past it to the land. I want to feel and understand the new signals. In the nursery," I said, "we used to anger our governess when she read us a piece of poetry, by saying to her, 'Who made it up?' 'You should say, "Who wrote it?"' she would say. But I feel now inclined to ask, 'Who made it up?' and I feel, too, like the sign-painter on his rounds, who saw a new sign hung up at an inn, and said in disgust, 'That looks as if some one had been doing it himself.' Your poet seems to me only a very gifted and accomplished amateur."

"Well," he said rather petulantly, "it may be so,