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

people how to be happy without success; because the shadow of success is vulgarity, and vulgarity is the one thing which education ought to extinguish. What I desire is that men should learn to see what is beautiful, to find pleasure in homely work, to fill leisure with innocent enjoyment. If education, as the term is generally used, were widely and universally successful, the whole fabric of a nation would collapse, because no one thus educated would acquiesce in the performance of humble work. It is commonly said that education ought to make men dissatisfied, and teach them to desire to improve their position. It is a pestilent heresy. It ought to teach them to be satisfied with simple conditions, and to improve themselves rather than their position--the end of it ought to be to produce content. Suppose, for an instant--it sounds a fantastic hypothesis--that a man born in the country, in the labouring class, were fond of field-work, a lover of the sights of nature in all her aspects, fond of good literature, why should he seek to change his conditions? But education tends to make boys and girls fond of excitement, fond of town sociabilities and amusements, till only the dull and unambitious are content to remain in the country. And yet the country work will have to be done until the end of time.

It is a dark problem; but it seems to me that we are only saved from disaster, in our well-meant efforts, by the simple fact that we cannot make humanity what we so short-sightedly desire to make it; that the dull, uninspired, unambitious element has an endurance and a permanence which we cannot change if we would, and which it is well for us that we cannot change; and that in spite of our curricula and schedules, mankind marches quietly upon its way to its unknown goal.


June 28, 1889.


An old friend has been staying with us, a very interesting man for many reasons, but principally for the fact that he combines two sets of qualities that are rarely found together. He has strong artistic instincts; he would like, I think, to have been a painter; he has a deep love of nature, woodland places and quiet fields; he loves old and beautiful buildings with a tenderness that makes it a real misery to him to think of their destruction, and even their renovation; and he has, too, the poetic passion for flowers; he is happiest in his garden. But beside all this, he has the Puritan virtues strongly developed; he loves work, and duty, and simplicity of life, with all his heart; he is an almost rigid judge of conduct and character, and sometimes flashes out in a half Pharisaical scorn against meanness, selfishness, and weakness. He is naturally a pure Ruskinian; he would like to destroy railways and machinery and manufactories; he would like working-men to enjoy their work, and dance together on the village green in the evenings; but he is not a faddist at all, and has the healthiest and simplest power of enjoyment. His severity has mellowed with age, while his love of beauty has, I think, increased; he does not care for argument, and is apt to say pathetically that he knows that his fellow-disputant is right, but that he cannot change his opinions, and does not desire to. He is passing, it seems to me, into a very gracious and soft twilight of life; he grows more patient, more tender, more serene. His face, always beautiful, has taken on an added beauty of faithful service and gracious sweetness.

We began one evening to discuss a book that has lately been published, a book of very sad, beautiful, wise, intimate letters, written by a woman of great perception, high intellectual gifts and passionate affections. These letters were published, not long after her death, by her children, to whom many of them were addressed.

He had read the book, I found, with deep emotion; but he said very decidedly that it ought not to have been published, at all events so soon after the writer's death. I am inclined to defer greatly to his judgment, and still more to his taste, and I have therefore read the book again to see if I am inclined to alter my mind. I find that my feeling is the exact opposite of his in every way. I feel humbly and deeply grateful to the children who have given the letters to the world. Of course if there had been any idea in the mind of the writer that they would be published, she would probably have been far more reticent; but, as it was, she spoke with a perfect openness and simplicity of all that was in her mind. It is curious to reflect that I met the writer more than once, and thought her a cold, hard, unsympathetic woman. She had to endure many sorrows and bereavements, losing, by untimely death, those whom she most loved; but the revelation of her pain and bewilderment, and the sublime and loving resignation with which she bore it, has been to me a deep, holy, and reviving experience. Here was one who felt grief acutely, rebelliously, and passionately, yet whom sorrow did not sear or harden, suffering did not make self-absorbed or morbid, or pain make callous. Her love flowed out more richly and tenderly than ever to those who were left, even though the loss of those whom she loved remained an unfading grief, an open wound. She did not even shun the scenes and houses that reminded her of her bereavements; she did not withdraw from life, she made no parade of her sorrows. The whole thing is so wholesome, so patient, so devoted, that it has shown me, I venture to say, a higher possibility in human nature of bearing intolerable calamities with sweetness and courage, than I had dared to believe. It seems to me that nothing more wise or brave could have been done by the survivors than to make these letters accessible to others. We English people make such a secret of our feelings, are so stubbornly reticent about the wrong things, have so false and stupid a sense of decorum, that I am infinitely grateful for this glimpse of a pure, patient, and devoted heart. It seems to me that the one thing worth knowing in this world is what other people think and feel about the great experiences of life. The writers who have helped the world most are those who have gone deepest into the heart; but the dullest part of our conventionality is that when a man disguises the secrets of his soul in a play, a novel, a lyric, he is supposed to have helped us and ministered to our deepest needs; but if he speaks directly, in his own voice and person, of these things, he is at once accused of egotism and indecorum. It is not that we dislike sentiment and feeling; we value it as much as any nation; but we think that it must be spoken of symbolically and indirectly. We do not consider a man egotistical, if he will only give himself a feigned name, and write of his experiences in the third person. But if he uses the personal pronoun, he is thought to be shameless. There are even people who consider it more decent to say "one feels and one thinks," than to say "I feel and I think." The thing that I most desire, in intercourse with other men and women, is that they should talk frankly of themselves, their hopes and fears, their beliefs and uncertainties. Yet how many people can do that? Part of our English shyness is shown by the fact that people are often curiously cautious about what they say, but entirely indiscreet in what they write. The only books which possess a real and abiding vitality are those in which personality is freely and frankly revealed. Of course there are one or two authors like Shakespeare who seem to have had a power of penetrating and getting inside any personality, but, apart from them, the books that go on being read and re-read are the books in which one seems to clasp hands with a human soul.

I said many of these things to my friend, and he replied that he thought I was probably right, but that he could not change his opinion. He would not have had these letters published until all the survivors were dead. He did not think that the people who liked the book were actuated by good motives, but had merely a desire to penetrate behind the due and decent privacies of life; and he would have stopped the publication of such letters if he could, because even if people liked them, it was not good for them to read them. He said that he himself felt on reading the book as if he had been listening at keyholes, or peeping in at windows, and seeing the natural endearments of husband and wife, mother and children.

I said that what seemed to me to make a difference was whether the people thus espied were conscious of the espionage or not; and that it was no more improper to have such things revealed IN A BOOK, than to have them described in a novel or shown upon the stage. Moreover, it seemed to me, I said, as though to reveal such things in a book was the perfect compromise. I feel strongly that each home, each circle has a right to its own privacy; but I am not ashamed of my natural feelings and affections, and, by allowing them to appear in a book, I feel that I am just speaking of them simply to those who will understand. I desire communion with all sympathetic and like-minded persons; but one's actual circle of friends is limited by time and space and physical conditions. People talk of books as if every one in the world was compelled to read them. My own idea of a book is that it provides a medium by which one may commune confidentially with people whom one may never see, but whom one is glad to know to be alive. One can make friends through one's books with people with whom one agrees in spirit, but whose bodily presence, modes of life, reticences, habits, would erect a barrier to social intercourse. It is so much easier to love and understand people through their books than through their conversation. In books they put down their best, truest, most deliberate thoughts; in talk, they are at the mercy of a thousand accidents and sensations. There were people who objected to the publication of the Browning love-letters. To me they were the sacred and beautiful record of an intensely holy and passionate relation between two great souls; and I can afford to disregard and to contemn the people who thought the book strained, unconventional and shameless, for the sake of those whose faith in love and beauty was richly and generously nurtured by it.

It seems to me that the whole progress of life and thought, of love and charity, depends upon our coming to understand each other. The hostile seclusion which some desire is really a savage and almost animal inheritance; and the best part of civilisation has sprung from the generous self-revelation of kindly and honourable souls.

I am not even deterred, in a case of this kind, by wondering whether the person concerned would have liked or disliked the publication of these letters. I feel no sort of doubt that, as far as I am concerned, she would be only too willing that I should thus have read and loved them, and I cannot believe that the disapprobation of a few austere people, or the curiosity of a