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

I passed it to-day at dusk, and I thought I had never seen so characteristically English a scene. The wheel was silent, and the big boarded walls, dusted with flour, loomed up solemnly in the evening light. The full leat dashed merrily through the sluice, making holiday, like a child released from school. Behind was the stack-yard, for it is a farm as well as a mill; and in the byre I heard the grunting of comfortable pigs, and the soft pulling of the hay from the big racks by the bullocks. The fowls were going to roost, fluttering up every now and then into the big elder-bushes; while high above, in the apple-trees, I saw great turkeys settled precariously for the night. The orchard was silent, except for the murmur of the stream that bounds it. In the mill-house itself lights gleamed in the windows, and I saw a pleasant family-party gathered at their evening meal. The whole scene with its background of sloping meadows and budding woods so tranquil and contented--a scene which William Morris would have loved--for there is a pleasant grace of antiquity about the old house, a sense of homely and solid life, and of all the family associations that have gone to the making of it, generation after generation leaving its mark in the little alterations and additions that have met a need, or even satisfied a pleasant fancy.

The miller is an elderly man now, fond of work, prosperous, good-humoured. His son lives with him, and the house is full of grandchildren. I do not say that it puzzles me to divine what is the miller's view of life, because I think I know it. It is to make money honestly, to bring up his grandchildren virtuously and comfortably, to enjoy his daily work and his evening leisure. He is never idle, never preoccupied. He enjoys getting the mill started, seeing the flour stream into the sacks, he enjoys going to market, he enjoys going prosperously to church on Sundays, he enjoys his paper and his pipe. He has no exalted ideas, and he could not put a single emotion into words, but he is thoroughly honest, upright, manly, kind, sensible. A perfect life in many ways; and yet it is inconceivable to me that a man should live thus, without an aim, without a hope, without an object. He would think my own life even more inconceivable--that a man could deliberately sit down day after day to construct a story about imaginary people; and such respect as he feels for me, is mainly due to the fact that my writings bring me in a larger income than he could ever make from his mill. But of course he is a man who is normally healthy, and such men as he are the props of rural life. He is a good master, he sees that his men do their work, and are well housed. He is not generous exactly, but he is neighbourly. The question is whether such as he is the proper type of humanity. He represents the simple virtues at their high-water mark. He is entirely contented, and his desires are perfectly proportioned to their surroundings. He seems indeed to be exactly what the human creature ought to be. And yet his very virtues, his sense of justice and honesty, his sensible kindliness, are the outcome of civilisation, and bear the stamp, in reality, of the dreams of saints and sages and idealists--the men who felt that things could be better, and who were made miserable by the imperfections of the world. I cannot help wondering, in a whimsical moment, what would have been the miller's thoughts of Christ, if he had been confronted with Him in the flesh. He would have thought of Him rather contemptuously, I think, as a bewildering, unpractical, emotional man. The miller would not have felt the appeal of unselfishness and unworldliness, because his ideal of life is tranquil prosperity. He would have merely wondered why people could not hold their tongues and mind their business: and yet he is a model citizen, and would be deeply annoyed if he were told he were not a sincere Christian. He accepts doctrinal statements as he would accept mathematical formulae, and he takes exactly as much of the Christian doctrine as suits him. Now when I compare myself with the miller, I feel that, as far as human usefulness goes, I am far lower in the scale. I am, when all is said and done, a drone in the hive, eating the honey I did not make. I do not take my share in the necessary labour of the world, I do not regulate a little community of labourers with uprightness and kindness, as he does. But still I suppose that my more sensitive organisation has a meaning in the scale of things. I cannot have been made and developed as I am, outside of the purpose of God. And yet my work in the world is not that of the passionate idealist, that kindles men with the hope of bettering and amending the world. What is it that my work does? It fills a vacant hour for leisurely people, it gives agreeable distraction, it furnishes some pleasant dreams. The most that I can say is that I have a wife whom I desire to make happy, and children whom I desire to bring up innocently, purely, vigorously.

Must one's hopes and beliefs be thus tentative and provisional? Must one walk through life, never fathoming the secret? I have myself abundance of material comfort, health, leisure. I know that for one like myself, there are hundreds less fortunate. Yet happiness in this world depends very little upon circumstances; it depends far more upon a certain mixture of selfishness, tranquillity, temperance, bodily vigour, and unimaginativeness. To be happy, one must be good-humouredly indifferent to the sufferings of others, and indisposed to forecast the possibilities of disaster. The sadness which must shadow the path of such as myself, is the sadness which comes of the power to see clearly the imperfections of the world, coupled with the inability to see through it, to discern the purpose of it all. One comforts oneself by the dim hope that the desire will be satisfied and the dream fulfilled; but has one any certainty of that? The temptation is to acquiesce in a sort of gentle cynicism, to take what one can get, to avoid as far as possible all deep attachments, all profound hopes, to steel oneself in indifference. That is what such men as my miller do instinctively; meanwhile one tries to believe that the melancholy that comes to such as Hamlet, the sadness of finding the world unintelligible, and painful, and full of shadows, is a noble melancholy, a superior sort of madness. Yet one is not content to bear, to suffer, to wait; one clutches desperately at light and warmth and joy, and alas, in joy and sorrow alike, one is ever and insupportably alone.


April 9, 1889.


I have been reading Rousseau lately, and find him a very incomprehensible figure. The Confessions, it must be said, is a dingy and sordid book. I cannot quite penetrate the motive which induced him to write them. It cannot have been pure vanity, because he does not spare himself; he might have made himself out a far more romantic and attractive character, if he had suppressed the shadows and heightened the lights. I am inclined to think that it was partly vanity and partly honesty. Vanity was the motive force, and honesty the accompanying mood. I do not suppose there is any document so transparently true in existence, and we ought to be thankful for that. It is customary to say that Rousseau had the soul of a lackey, by which I suppose is meant that he had a gross and vulgar nature, a thievish taste for low pleasures, and an ill-bred absence of consideration for others. He had all these qualities certainly, but he had a great deal more. He was upright and disinterested. He had a noble disregard of material advantages; he had an enthusiasm for virtue, a passionate love of humanity, a deep faith in God. He was not an intellectual man nor a philosopher; and yet what a ridiculous criticism is that which is generally made upon him, that his reasoning is bad, his knowledge scanty, and that people had better read Hobbes! The very reason which made Rousseau so tremendous an influence was that his point of view was poetical rather than philosophical; he was not too far removed from the souls to which he prophesied. What they needed was inspiration, emotion, and sentimental dogma; these he could give, and so he saved Europe from the philosophers and the cynics. Of course it is a deplorable life, tormented by strong animal passion, ill-health, insanity; but one tends to forget the prevalent coarseness of social tone at that date, not because Rousseau made any secret of it, but because none of his contemporaries dared to be so frank. If Rousseau had struck out a dozen episodes from the Confessions the result would have been a highly poetical, reflective, charming book. I can easily conceive that it might have a very bad effect upon an ingenuous mind, because it might be argued from what he says that moral lapses do not very much matter, and that emotional experience is worth the price of some animalism. Still more perniciously it might induce one to believe that a man may have a deep sense of religion side by side with an unbridled sensuality, and that one whose life is morally infamous may yet be able to quicken the moral temperature of great nations.

Some of the critics of Rousseau speak as though a man whose moral code was so loose, and whose practice was so libidinous, ought almost to have held his tongue on matters of high moral import. But this is a very false line of argument. A man may see a truth clearly, even if he cannot practise it; and an affirmation of a passionate belief in virtue is emphasised and accentuated when it comes from the lips of one who might be tempted rather to excuse his faults by preaching the irresistible character of evil.

To any one who reads wisely, and not in a censorious and Pharisaical spirit, this sordid record, which is yet interspersed with things so fragrant and beautiful, may have a sobering and uplifting effect. One sees a man hampered by ill-health, by a temperament childishly greedy of momentary pleasure, by irritability, suspicion, vanity and luxuriousness, again and again expressing a deep belief in unselfish emotion, a passionate desire to help struggling humanity onward, a child-like confidence in the goodness and tenderness of the Father of all. Disgust and admiration struggle strangely together. One cannot sympathise and yet one dare not condemn. One feels a horrible suspicion that there are dark and slimy corners, vile secrets, ugly memories, in the minds of hundreds of seemingly respectable people; the book brings one face to face with the mystery of evil; and yet through the gloom there steals a silvery radiance, a far-off hope, an infinite compassion for all weakness and imperfection. One can hardly love Rousseau, though one does not wonder that there were many found to do so; and instead of judging him, one cries out with horror at the slime of the pit where he lay bound.


April 14, 1889.


A delusion of which we must beware is the delusion that we can have a precise and accurate knowledge of spiritual things. This is a delusion into which the exponents of settled religions are apt to fall. The Roman Catholic, with his belief in the infallible Church, as the interpreter of God's spirit, which is nothing more than a belief