The Altar Fire by Arthur Christopher Benson (golden son ebook txt) 📕

give themselves most freely away too often end by having very little to give; instead of having a store of ripe and wise reflection, they have generally little more than an official smile, a kindly tolerance, a voluble stream of commonplaces.

And then, too, it is hard to see, to speak candidly, what God is doing in the matter. One sees useful careers cut ruthlessly short, generous qualities nullified by bad health or minute faults, promise unfulfilled, men and women bound in narrow, petty, uncongenial spheres, the whole matter in a sad disorder. One sees one man's influence spoilt by over-confidence, by too strong a sense of his own significance, and another man made ineffective by diffidence and self-distrust. The best things of life, the most gracious opportunities, such as love and marriage, cannot be entered upon from a sense of duty, but only from an overpowering and instinctive impulse.

Is it not possible to arrive at some tranquil harmony of life, some self-evolution, which should at the same time be ardent and generous? In my own sad unrest of spirit, I seem to be alike incapable of working for the sake of others and working to please myself. Perhaps that is but the symptom of a moral disease, a malady of the soul. Yet if that is so, and if one once feels that disease and, suffering is not a part of the great and gracious purpose of God--if it is but a failure in His design--the struggle is hopeless. One sees all around one men and women troubled by no misgivings, with no certain aim, just doing whatever the tide of life impels them to do. My neighbour here is a man who for years has gone up to town every day to his office. He is perfectly contented, absolutely happy. He has made more money than he will ever need or spend, and he will leave his children a considerable fortune. He is kind, respectable, upright; he is considered a thoroughly enviable man, and indeed, if prosperity and contentment are the sign and seal of God's approbation, such a man is the highest work of God, and has every reason to be an optimist. He would think my questionings morbid and my desires moonshine. He is not necessarily right any more than I; but his theory of life works out a good deal better for him than mine for me.

Well, we drift, we drift! Sometimes the sun shines bright on the wave, and the wheeling birds dip and hover, and our heart is full of song. But sometimes we plunge on rising billows, with the wind wailing, and the rain pricking the surface with needle-points; we are weary and uncomforted; and we do not know why we suffer, or why we are glad. Sometimes I have a far-off hope that I shall know, that I shall understand and be satisfied; but sometimes, alas, I fear that my soul will flare out upon the darkness, and know no more either of weal or woe.


March 20, 1889.


I am reading a great deal now; but I find that I turn naturally to books of a sad intimite--books in which are revealed the sorrowful cares and troubles of sensitive people. Partly, I suppose, it is to get the sense of comfort which comes from feeling that others have suffered too; but partly to find, if I can, some medicine for my soul, in learning how others struggled out of the mire. Thus I have been reading Froude's Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle's Letters over again, and they have moved me strangely and deeply. Perhaps it is mostly that I have felt, in these dark months, drawn to the society of two brave people--she was brave in her silences, he in the way in which he stuck doggedly to his work--who each suffered so horribly, so imaginatively, so inexplicably, and, alas, it would seem, so unnecessarily! Of course Carlyle indulged his moods, while Mrs. Carlyle fought against hers; moreover, he had the instinct for translating thoughts, instantaneously and volubly, into vehement picturesque speech. How he could bite in a picture, an ugly, ill-tempered one enough very often, as when he called Coleridge a "weltering" man! Many of his sketches are mere Gillray caricatures of people, seen through bile unutterable, exasperated by nervous irritability. And Mrs. Carlyle had a mordant wit enough. But still both of them had au fond a deep need of love, and a power of lavishing love. It comes out in the old man's whimsical notes and prefaces; and indeed it is true to say that if a person once actually penetrated into Carlyle's inner circle, he found himself loved hungrily and devotedly, and never forgotten or cast out. And as to Mrs. Carlyle, I suppose it was impossible to be near her and not to love her! This comes out in glimpses in her sad pathological letters. There is a scene she describes, how she returned home after some long and serious bout of illness, when her cook and housemaid rushed into the street, kissed her, and wept on her neck; while two of her men friends, Mr. Cooke and Lord Houghton, who called in the course of the evening, to her surprise and obvious pleasure, did the very same. The result on myself, after reading the books, is to feel myself one of the circle, to want to do something for them, to wring the necks of the cocks who disturbed Carlyle's sleep; and sometimes, alas, to rap the old man's fingers for his blind inconsiderateness and selfishness. I came the other day upon a passage in a former book of my own, where I said something sneering and derisive about the pair, and I felt deep shame and contrition for having written it--and, more than that, I felt a sort of disgust for the fact that I have spent so much time in writing fiction. Books like the Life of Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle's Letters take the wind out of one's imaginative faculties altogether, because one is confronted with the real stuff of life in them. Life, that hard, stubborn, inconclusive, inconsistent, terrible thing! It is, of course, that very hardness and inconclusiveness that makes one turn to fiction. In fiction, one can round off the corners, repair mistakes, comfort, idealise, smooth things down, make error and weakness bear good fruit, choose, develop as one pleases. Not so with life, where things go from bad to worse, misunderstandings grow and multiply, suffering does not purge, sorrow does not uplift. That is the worst of fiction, that it deludes one into thinking that one can deal gently with life, finish off the picture, arrange things on one's own little principles; and then, as in my own case, life brings one up against some monstrous, grievous, intolerable fact, that one can neither look round or over, and the scales fall from one's eyes. With what courage, tranquillity or joy is one to meet a thoroughly disagreeable situation? The more one leans on the hope that it may amend, the weaker one grows; the thing to realise is that it is bad, that it is inevitable, that it has arrived, and to let the terror and misery do their worst, soak into the soul and not run off it. Only then can one hope to be different; only so can one climb the weary ladder of patience and faith.


March 28, 1889.


Low-hung ragged grey skies, heaven smeared with watery vapours fleeting, broken and mournful, from the west--these above me, as I stand by the old lichened gate of the high wind-swept field at the top of the wold. In front a stretch of rough common, the dark-brown heather, the young gorse, bluish-green, the rusty red of soaked bracken, the pale ochre-coloured grass, all blent into a rich tint that pleases the eye with its wild freshness. To the left, the wide flat level of the plain, with low hills rising on its verge; to the right, a pale pool of water at the bottom of a secret valley, reflecting the leafless bushes that fringe it, catches the sunset gleam that rises in the west; and then range after range of wolds, with pale-green pastures, dark copses, fawn-coloured ploughland, here and there an emerald patch of young wheat. The air is fresh, soft and fragrant, laden with rain; the earth smells sweet; and the wild woodland scent comes blowing to me out of the heart of the spinney. In front of me glimmer the rough wheel-tracks of a grassy road that leads out on to the heath, and two obscure figures move slowly nearer among the tufted gorse. They seem to me, those two figures, charged with a grave significance, as though they came to bear me tidings, messengers bidden to seek and find me, like the men who visited Abraham at the close of the day.

As I linger, the day grows darker, the colour fading from leaf and blade; bright points of light flash out among the dark ridges from secluded farms, where the evening lamp is lit.

Sometimes on days like this, when the moisture hangs upon the hedges, when the streams talk hoarsely to themselves in grassy channels, when the road is full of pools, one is weary, unstrung and dissatisfied, faint of purpose, tired of labour, desiring neither activity nor rest; the soul sits brooding, like the black crows that I see in the leafless wood beneath me, perched silent and draggled on the tree-tops, just waiting for the sun and the dry keen airs to return; but to-day it is not so; I am full of a quiet hope, an acquiescent tranquillity. My heart talks gently to itself, as to an unseen friend, telling its designs, its wishes, its activities. I think of those I hold dear, all the world over; I am glad that they are alive, and believe that they think of me. All the air seems full of messages, thoughts and confidences and welcomes passing to and fro, binding souls to each other, and all to God. There seems to be nothing that one needs to do to-day except to live one's daily life; to be kind and joyful. To-day the road of pilgrimage lies very straight and clear between its fences, in an open ground, with neither valley nor hill, no by-path, no turning. One can even see the gables and chimneys of some grave house of welcome, "a roof for when the dark hours begin," full of pious company and smiling maidens. And not, it seems, a false security; one is not elated, confident, strong; one knows one's weakness; but I think that the Lord of the land has lately passed by with a smile, and given command that the pilgrims shall have a space of quiet. These birds, these branching trees, have not yet lost the joy of His passing. There, along the grassy tracks, His patient footsteps went, how short a time ago! One does not hope that all the journey will be easy and untroubled; there will be fresh burdens to be borne, dim valleys full of sighs to creep through, dark waters to wade across; these feet will stumble and bleed; these knees will be weary before the end; but to-day there is no doubt about the pilgrimage, no question of the far-off goal. The world is sad, perhaps, but sweet; sad as the homeless clouds that drift endlessly across the sky from marge to marge; sweet as the note of the hidden bird, that rises from moment to moment from the copse beside me, again and yet again, telling of a little heart that is content to wait, and not ill-pleased to be alone with its own soft thoughts.


April 4, 1889.


Down in the valley which runs below the house is a mill.