Joyous Gard

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> Joyous Gard

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But of course we cannot all expect to deal with life on this
high-handed scale. The question is what most of us, who feel ourselves
sadly limited, incomplete, fractious, discontented, fitful, unequal to
the claims upon us, should do. If we have no sense of eager adventure,
but are afraid of life, overshadowed by doubts and anxieties, with no
great spring of pleasure, no passionate emotions, no very definite
ambitions, what are we then to do?

Or perhaps our case is even worse than that; we are meanly desirous of
comfort, of untroubled ease, we have a secret love of low pleasures, a
desire to gain rather than to deserve admiration and respect, a
temptation to fortify ourselves against life by accumulating all sorts
of resources, with no particular wish to share anything, but aiming to
be left alone in a circle which we can bend to our will and make
useful to us; that is the hard case of many men and women; and even if
by glimpses we see that there is a finer and a freer life outside, we
may not be conscious of any real desire to issue from our stuffy
parlour.

In either case our duty and our one hope is clear; that we have got
somehow, at all costs and hazards, to find our way into the light of
day. It is such as these, the anxious and the fearful on the one hand,
the gross and sensual on the other, who need most of all a _Joyous
Gard_ of their own. Because we are coming to the light, as Walt
Whitman so splendidly says:--"The Lord advances and yet advances ...
always the shadow in front, always the reach'd hand bringing up the
laggards."

Our business, if we know that we are laggards, if we only dimly
suspect it, is not to fear the shadow, but to seize the outstretched
hands. We must grasp the smallest clue that leads out of the dark, the
resolute fight with some slovenly and ugly habit, the telling of our
mean troubles to some one whose energy we admire and whose disapproval
we dread; we must try the experiment, make the plunge; all at once we
realise that the foundations are laid, that the wall is beginning to
rise above the rubbish and the debris; we must build a home for the
new-found joy, even if as yet it only sings drowsily and faintly
within our hearts, like the awaking bird in the dewy thicket, when the
fingers of the dawn begin to raise the curtain of the night.

XXV

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY

There is one difficulty which stands at the threshold of dealing with
the sense of beauty so as to give it due importance and preponderance,
and that is that it seems with many people to be so frail a thing, and
to visit the mind only as the last grace of a mood of perfect serenity
and well-being. Many people, and those not the least thoughtful and
intelligent, find by experience that it is almost the first thing to
disappear in moments of stress and pressure. Physical pain, grief,
pre-occupation, business, anxiety, all seem to have the power of
quenching it instantaneously, until one is apt to feel that it is a
thing of infinite delicacy and tenderness, and can only co-exist with
a tranquillity which it is hard in life to secure. The result of this
no doubt is that many active-minded and forcible people are ready to
think little of it, and just regard it as a mood that may accompany a
well-earned holiday, and even so to be sparingly indulged.

It is also undoubtedly true that in many robust and energetic people
the sense of what is beautiful is so far atrophied that it can only be
aroused by scenes and places of almost melodramatic picturesqueness,
by ancient buildings clustered on craggy eminences, great valleys with
the frozen horns of mountains, wind-ravaged and snow-streaked, peering
over forest edges, the thunder and splendour of great sea-breakers
plunging landward under rugged headlands and cliff-fronts. But all
this pursuit of sensational beauty is to mistake its quality; the
moment it is thus pursued it ceases to be the milk and honey of life,
and it becomes a kind of stimulant which excites rather than
tranquillises. I do not mean that one should of set purpose avoid the
sight of wonderful prospects and treasure-houses of art, or act as the
poet Gray did when he was travelling with Horace Walpole in the Alps,
when they drew up the blinds of their carriage to exclude the sight of
such prodigious and unmanning horrors!

Still I think that if one is on the right track, and if beauty has its
due place and value in life, there will be less and less impulse to go
far afield for it, in search of something to thrill the dull
perception and quicken it into life. I believe that people ought to be
content to live most of their lives in the same place, and to grow to
love familiar scenes. Familiarity with a scene ought not to result in
the obliteration of all consciousness of it: one ought rather to find
in use and affection an increased power of subtle interpretation, a
closer and finer understanding of the qualities which underlie the
very simplest of English landscapes. I live, myself, for most of the
year in a countryside that is often spoken of by its inhabitants as
dull, tame, and featureless; yet I cannot say with what daily renewal
of delight I wander in the pastoral Cambridge landscape, with its long
low lines of wold, its whitewalled, straw-thatched villages embowered
in orchards and elms, its slow willow-bound streams, its level
fenland, with the far-seen cloud-banks looming overhead: or again in
the high-ridged, well-wooded land of Sussex, where I often live, the
pure lines of the distant downs seen over the richly coloured
intervening weald grow daily more dear and intimate, and appeal more
and more closely to the deepest secrets of sweetness and delight. For
as we train ourselves to the perception of beauty, we become more and
more alive to a fine simplicity of effect; we find the lavish
accumulation of rich and magnificent glories bewildering and
distracting.

And this is the same with other arts; we no longer crave to be dazzled
and flooded by passionate and exciting sensation, we care less and
less for studied mosaics of word and thought, and more and more for
clearness and form and economy and austerity. Restless exuberance
becomes unwelcome, complexity and intricacy weary us; we begin to
perceive the beauty of what Fitzgerald called the 'great still books.'
We do not desire a kaleidoscopic pageant of blending and colliding
emotions, but crave for something distinctly seen, entirely grasped,
perfectly developed. Because we are no longer in search of something
stimulating and exciting, something to make us glide and dart among
the surge and spray of life, but what we crave for is rather a calm
and reposeful absorption in a thought which can yield us all its
beauty, and assure us of the existence of a principle in which we can
rest and abide. As life goes on, we ought not to find relief from
tedium only in a swift interchange and multiplication of sensations;
we ought rather to attain a simple and sustained joyfulness which can
find nurture in homely and familiar things.

If again the sense of beauty is so frail a thing that it is at the
mercy of all intruding and jarring elements, it is also one of the
most patient and persistent of quiet forces. Like the darting fly
which we scare from us, it returns again and again to settle on the
spot which it has chosen. There are, it is true, troubled and anxious
hours when the beauty round us seems a cruel and intrusive thing,
mocking us with a peace which we cannot realise, and torturing us with
the reminder of the joy we have lost. There are days when the only way
to forget our misery is to absorb ourselves in some practical energy;
but that is because we have not learned to love beauty in the right
way. If we have only thought of it as a pleasant ingredient in our cup
of joy, as a thing which we can just use as we can use wine, to give
us an added flush of unreasonable content, then it will fail us when
we need it most. When a man is under the shadow of a bereavement, he
can test for himself how he has used love. If he finds that the loving
looks and words and caresses of those that are left to him are a mere
torture to him, then he has used love wrongly, just as a selfish and
agreeable delight; but if he finds strength and comfort in the
yearning sympathy of friend and beloved, reassurance in the strength
of the love that is left him, and confidence in the indestructibility
of affection, then he has used love wisely and purely, loving it for
itself, for its beauty and holiness, and not only for the warmth and
comfort it has brought him.

So, if we have loved beauty well, have seen in it a promise of
ultimate joy, a sign of a deliberate intention, a message from a power
that does not send sorrow and anxiety wantonly, cruelly and
indifferently, an assurance of something that waits to welcome and
bless us, then beauty is not a mere torturing menace, a heartless and
unkind parading of joy which we cannot feel, but a faithful pledge of
something secure and everlasting, which will return to us again and
again in ever fuller measure, even if the flow of it be sometimes
suspended.

We ought then to train and practise our sense of beauty, not selfishly
and luxuriously, but so that when the dark hour comes it may help us
to realise that all is not lost, may alleviate our pain by giving us
the knowledge that the darkness is the interruption, but that the joy
is permanent and deep and certain.

Thus beauty, instead of being for us but as the melody swiftly played
when our hearts are high, a mere momentary ray, a happy accident that
befalls us, may become to us a deep and vital spring of love and hope,
of which we may say that it is there waiting for us, like the home
that awaits the traveller over the weary upland at the foot of the
far-looming hill. It may come to us as a perpetual sign that we are
not forgotten, and that the joy of which it makes mention survives all
interludes of strife and uneasiness. It is easy to slight and overlook
it, but if we do that, we are deluded by the passing storm into
believing that confusion and not peace is the end. As George Meredith
nobly wrote, during the tragic and fatal illness of his wife, "Here I
am in the very pits of tragic life.... Happily for me, I have learnt
to live much in the spirit, and see brightness on the other side of
life, otherwise this running of my poor doe with the inextricable
arrow in her flanks would pull me down too." The spirit, the
brightness of the other side, that is the secret which beauty can
communicate, and the message which she bears upon her radiant wings.

XXVI

THE PRINCIPLE OF BEAUTY

"I have loved," said Keats, "the _principle_ of beauty in all things."
It is that to which all I have said has been leading, as many roads
unite in one. We must try to use discrimination, not to be so
optimistic that we see beauty if it is not there, not to overwhelm
every fling that every craftsman has at beauty with gush and
panegyric; not to praise beauty in all companies, or to go off like a
ripe broom-pod, at a touch. When Walter Pater was confronted with
something which courtesy demanded that he should seem to admire, he
used to say in that soft voice of his, which lingered over emphatic
syllables, "Very costly, no doubt!"

But we must be generous to all beautiful intention, and quick to see
any faintest beckoning of the divine quality; and indeed I would not
have most people aim at too critical an attitude, for I believe it is
more important to enjoy than to appraise; still we must keep the
principle in sight, and not degenerate into mere collectors of
beautiful impressions. If we simply try to wallow in beauty, we are
using it sensually; while if on the other hand we aim at correctness
of taste, which is but the faculty of sincere concurrence with the
artistic standards of the day, we come to a sterile connoisseurship
which has no living inspiration about it. It is the temperate use of
beauty which we must aim at, and a certain candour of observation,
looking at all things, neither that we may condemn if we can, nor that
we may luxuriously abandon ourselves to sensation, but that we may
draw from contemplation something of the inner light of life.

I have not here said much about the arts--music, sculpture, painting,
architecture--because I do not want to recommend any specialisation in
beauty. I know, indeed, several high-minded people, diligent,
unoriginal, faithful, who have begun by recognising in a philosophical
way the worth and force of beauty, but who, having no direct instinct
for it, have bemused themselves by conventional and conscientious
study, into the belief that they are on the track of beauty in art,
when they have no real appreciation of it at all, no appetite for it,
but are only bent on perfecting temperament, and whose unconscious
motive has been but a fear of not being in sympathy with men whose
ardour they admire, but whose love of beauty they do not really share.
Such people tend to gravitate to early Italian painting, because of
its historical associations, and because it can be categorically
studied. They become what is called 'purists,' which means little more
than a learned submissiveness. In literature they are found to admire
Carlyle, Ruskin, and Browning, not because of their method of treating
thought, but because of the ethical maxims imbedded--as though one
were to love a conserve of plums for the sake of the stones!

One should love great writers and great artists not because of their
great thoughts--there are plenty of inferior writers who traffic in
great thoughts--but because great artists and writers are the people
who can irradiate with a heavenly sort of light common thoughts and
motives, so as to show the beauty which underlies them and the
splendour that breaks from them. It is possible to treat fine thoughts
in a heavy way so as to deprive them of all their rarity and
inspiration. The Gospel contains some of the most beautiful thoughts
in the world, beautiful because they are common thoughts which every
one recognises to be true, yet set in a certain light, just as the
sunset with its level, golden, remote glow has the power of
transfiguring a familiar scene with a glory of mystery and desire. But
one has but to turn over a volume of dull sermons, or the pages of a
dreary commentary, to find the thoughts of the Gospel transformed into
something that seems commonplace and uninspiring. The beauty of
ordinary things depends upon the angle at which you see them and the
light which falls upon them; and the work of the great artist and the
great writer is to show things at the right angle, and to shut off the
confusing muddled cross-lights which conceal the quality of the thing
seen.

The recognition of the principle of beauty lies in the assurance that
many things have beauty, if rightly viewed, and in the determination
to see things in the true light. Thus the soul that desires to see
beauty must begin by believing it to be there, must expect to see it,
must watch for it, must not be discouraged by those who do not see it,
and least of all give heed to those who would forbid one to discern it
except in definite and approved forms. The worst of aesthetic prophets
is that, like the Scribes, they make a fence about the law, and try to
convert the search for principle into the accumulation of detailed
tenets.

Let us then never attempt to limit beauty to definite artistic lines;
that is the mistake of the superstitious formalist who limits divine
influences to certain sanctuaries and fixed ceremonials. The use of
the sanctuary and the ceremonial is only to concentrate at one fiery
point the wide current of impulsive ardour. The true lover of beauty
will await it everywhere, will see it in the town, with its rising
roofs and its bleached and blackened steeples, in the seaport with its
quaint crowded shipping, in the clustered hamlet with its
orchard-closes and high-roofed barns, in the remote country with its
wide fields and its converging lines, in the beating of the sea on
shingle-bank and promontory; and then if he sees it there, he will see
it concentrated and emphasised in pictures of these things, the
beauty of which lies so often in the sense of the loving apprehension
of the mystery of lights and hues; and then he will trace the same
subtle spirit in the forms and gestures and expressions of those among
whom he lives, and will go deeper yet and trace the same spirit in
conduct and behaviour, in the free and gallant handling of life, in
the suppression of mean personal desires, in doing dull and
disagreeable things with a fine end in view, in the noble affection of
the simplest people; until he becomes aware that it is a quality which
runs through everything he sees or hears or feels, and that the
eternal difference is whether one views things dully and stupidly,
regarding the moment hungrily and greedily, as a dog regards a
plateful of food, or whether one looks at it all as a process which
has some fine and distant end in view, and sees that all experience,
whether it be of things tangible and visible, or of things
intellectual and spiritual, is only precious because it carries one
forward, forms, moulds, and changes one with a hope of some high and
pure resurrection out of things base and hurried into things noble and
serene.

The need, the absolute need for all and each of us, is to find
something strong and great to rest and repose upon. Otherwise one
simply falls back on the fact that one exists and on the whole enjoys
existing, while one shuns the pain and darkness of ceasing to exist.
As life goes on, there comes such an impulse to say, "Life is
attractive and might be pleasant, but there is always something
shadowing it, spoiling it, gnawing at it, a worm in the bud, of which
one cannot be rid." And so one sinks into a despairing apathy.

What then is one born for? Just to live and forget, to be hurt and
healed, to be strong and grow weak? That as the spirit falls into
faintness, the body should curdle into worse than dust? To give each a
memory of things sharp and sweet, that no one else remembers, and then
to destroy that?

No, that is not the end! The end is rather to live fully and ardently,
to recognise the indestructibility of the spirit, to strip off from it
all that wounds and disables it, not by drearily toiling against
haunting faults, but by rising as often as we can into serene ardour
and deep hopefulness. That is the principle of beauty, to feel that
there is something transforming and ennobling us, which we can lay
hold of if we wish, and that every time we see the great spirit at
work and clasp it close to our feeble will, we soar a step higher and
see all things with a wider and a clearer vision.

XXVII

LIFE

But in all this, and indeed beyond all this, we must not dare to
forget one thing; that it is life with which we are confronted, and
that our business is to live it, and to live it in our own way; and
here we may thankfully rejoice that there is less and less tendency in
the world for people to dictate modes of life to us; the tyrant and
the despot are not only out of date--they are out of fashion, which is
a far more disabling thing! There is of course a type of person in the
world who loves to call himself robust and even virile--heaven help us
to break down that bestial ideal of manhood!--who is of the stuff that
all bullies have been made since the world began, a compound of
courage, stupidity, and complacency; to whom the word 'living' has no
meaning, unless it implies the disturbing and disquieting of other
people. We are gradually putting him in his right place, and the
kindlier future will have little need of him; because a sense is
gradually shaping itself in the world that life is best lived on
peaceful and orderly lines.

But if the robust _viveur_ is on the wrong tack, so long as he grabs
and uses, and neither gives nor is used, so too the more peaceable and
poetical nature makes a very similar mistake, if his whole heart is
bent upon receiving and enjoying; for he too is filching and conveying
away pleasure out of life, though he may do it more timidly and
unobtrusively. Such a man or woman is apt to make too much out of the
occasions and excitements of life, to over-value the aesthetic kind of
success, which is the delicate impressing of other people, claiming
their admiration and applause, and being ill-content if one is not
noticed and praised. Such an one is apt to overlook the common stuff
and use of life--the toil, the endurance, the discipline of it; to
flutter abroad only on sunshiny days, and to sit sullenly with folded
wing when the sky breaks into rain and chilly winds are blowing. The
man who lives thus, is in danger of over-valuing the raptures and
thrills of life, of being fitful and moody and fretful; what he has to
do is to spread serenity over his days, and above all to be ready to
combine, to minister, to sympathise, to serve. _Joyous Gard_ is a very
perilous place, if we grow too indolent to leave it; the essence of it
is refreshment and not continuance. There are two conditions attached
to the use of it; one is that we should have our own wholesome work in
the world, and the second that we should not grow too wholly absorbed
in labour.

No great moral leaders and inspirers of men have ever laid stress on
excessive labour. They have accepted work as one of the normal
conditions of life, but their whole effort has been to teach men to
look away from work, to find leisure to be happy and good. There is no
essential merit in work, apart from its necessity. Of course men may
find themselves in positions where it seems hard to avoid a fierce
absorption in work. It is said by legislators that the House of
Commons, for instance, is a place where one can neither work nor rest!
And I have heard busy men in high administrative office, deplore
rhetorically the fact that they have no time to read or think. It is
almost as unwholesome never to read or think as it is to be always
reading and thinking, because the light and the inspiration fade out
of life, and leave one a gaunt and wolfish lobbyist, who goes about
seeking whom he may indoctrinate. But I have little doubt that when
the world is organised on simpler lines, we shall look back to this
era, as an era when men's heads were turned by work, and when more
unnecessary things were made and done and said than has ever been the
case since the world began.

The essence of happy living is never to find life dull, never to feel
the ugly weariness which comes of overstrain; to be fresh, cheerful,
leisurely, sociable, unhurried, well-balanced. It seems to me that it
is impossible to be these things unless we have time to consider life
a little, to deliberate, to select, to abstain. We must not help
ourselves either to work or to joy as if we were helping ourselves to
potatoes! If life ought not to be perpetual drudgery, neither can it
be a perpetual feast. What I believe we ought to aim at is to put
interest and zest into the simplest acts, words, and relations of
life, to discern the quality of work and people alike. We must not
turn our whole minds and hearts to literature or art or work, or even
to religion; but we must go deeper, and look close at life itself,
which these interpret and out of which they flow. For indeed life is
nobler and richer than any one interpretation of it. Let us take for a
moment one of the great interpreters of life, Robert Browning, who was
so intensely interested above all things in personality. The charm of
his writing is that he contrives, by some fine instinct, to get behind
and within the people of whom he writes, sees with their eyes, hears
with their ears, though he speaks with his own lips. But one must
observe that the judgment of none of his characters is a final
judgment; the artist, the lover, the cynic, the charlatan, the sage,
the priest--they none of them provide a solution to life; they set out
on their quest, they make their guesses, they reveal their aims, but
they never penetrate the inner secret. It is all inference and hope;
Browning himself seems to believe in life, not because of the reasons
which his characters give for believing in it, but in spite of all
their reasons. Like little boats, the reasons seem to strand, one by
one, some sooner, some later, on the sands beneath the shallow sea;
and then the great serene large faith of the poet comes flooding in,
and bears them on their way.

It is somewhat thus that we must deal with life; it is no good making
up a philosophy which just keeps us gay when all is serene and
prosperous. Unpleasant, tedious, vexing, humiliating, painful,
shattering things befall us all by the way. That is the test of our
belief in life, if nothing daunts us, if nothing really mars our
serenity of mood.

And so what this little book of mine tries to recommend is that we
should bestir ourselves to design, plan, use, practise life; not drift
helplessly on its current, shouting for joy when all is bright,
helplessly bemoaning ourselves when all is dark; and that we should do
this by guarding ourselves from impulse and whim, by feeding our minds
and hearts on all the great words, high examples, patient endurances,
splendid acts, of those whom we recognise to have been the finer sort
of men. One of the greatest blessings of our time is that we can do
that so easily. In the dullest, most monotonous life we can stay
ourselves upon this heavenly manna, if we have the mind. We need not
feel alone or misunderstood or unappreciated, even if we are
surrounded by harsh, foolish, dry, discontented, mournful persons. The
world is fuller now than it ever was of brave and kindly people who
will help us if we ask for help. Of course if we choose to perish
without a struggle, we can do that. And my last word of advice to
people into whose hands this book may fall, who are suffering from a
sense of dim failure, timid bewilderment, with a vague desire in the
background to make something finer and stronger out of life, is to
turn to some one whom they can trust--not intending to depend
constantly and helplessly upon them--and to get set in the right road.

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