Joyous Gard

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> Joyous Gard

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And so we must not retire into our fortress simply for lonely visions,
sweet contemplation, gentle imagination; there are rooms in our castle
fit for that, the little book-lined cell, facing the sunset, the high
parlour, where the gay, brisk music comes tripping down from the
minstrels' gallery, the dim chapel for prayer, and the chamber called
_Peace_--where the pilgrim slept till break of day, "and then he awoke
and sang"; but there is also the well-lighted hall, with cheerful
company coming and going; where we must put our secluded, wistful,
sorrowful thought aside, and mingle briskly with the pleasant throng,
not steeling ourselves to mirth and movement, but simply glad and
grateful to be there.

It was while I was writing these pages that a friend told me that he
had recently met a man, a merchant, I think, who did me the honour to
discuss my writings at a party and to pronounce an opinion upon them.
He said that I wrote many things which I did not believe, and then
stood aside, and was amused in a humorous mood to see that other
people believed them. It would be absurd to be, or even to feel,
indignant at such a travesty of my purpose as this, and indeed I think
that one is never very indignant at misrepresentation unless one's
mind accuses itself of its being true or partially true.

It is indeed true that I have said things about which I have since
changed my mind, as indeed I hope I shall continue to change it, and
as swiftly as possible, if I see that the former opinions are not
justified. To be thus criticised is, I think, the perfectly natural
penalty of having tried to be serious without being also solemn; there
are many people, and many of them very worthy people, like our friend
the merchant, who cannot believe one is in earnest if one is not also
heavy-handed. Earnestness is mixed up in their minds with bawling and
sweating; and indeed it is quite true that most people who are willing
to bawl and sweat in public, feel earnestly about the subjects to
which they thus address themselves. But I do not see that earnestness
is in the least incompatible with lightness of touch and even with
humour, though I have sometimes been accused of displaying none.
Socrates was in earnest about his ideas, but the penalty he paid for
treating them lightly was that he was put to death for being so
sceptical. I should not at all like the idea of being put to death for
my ideas; but I am wholly in earnest about them, and have never
consciously said anything in which I did not believe.

But I will go one step further and say that I think that many earnest
men do great harm to the causes they advocate, because they treat
ideas so heavily, and divest them of their charm. One of the reasons
why virtue and goodness are not more attractive is because they get
into the hands of people without lightness or humour, and even without
courtesy; and thus the pursuit of virtue seems not only to the young,
but to many older people, to be a boring occupation, and to be
conducted in an atmosphere heavy with disapproval, with dreariness and
dulness and tiresomeness hemming the neophyte in, like fat bulls of
Bashan. It is because I should like to rescue goodness, which is the
best thing in the world, next to love, from these growing influences,
that I have written as I have done; but there is no lurking cynicism
in my books at all, and the worst thing I can accuse myself of is a
sense of humour, perhaps whimsical and childish, which seems to me to
make a pleasant and refreshing companion, as one passes on pilgrimage
in search of what I believe to be very high and heavenly things
indeed.

XV

VISIONS

I used as a child to pore over the Apocalypse, which I thought by far
the most beautiful and absorbing of all the books of the Bible; it
seemed full of rich and dim pictures, things which I could not
interpret and did not wish to interpret, the shining of clear gem-like
walls, lonely riders, amazing monsters, sealed books, all of which
took perfectly definite shape in the childish imagination. The
consequence is that I can no more criticise it than I could criticise
old tapestries or pictures familiar from infancy. They are there, just
so, and any difference of form is inconceivable.

In one point, however, the strange visions have come to hold for me an
increased grandeur; I used to think of much of it as a sort of
dramatic performance, self-consciously enacted for the benefit of the
spectator; but now I think of it as an awful and spontaneous energy of
spiritual life going on, of which the prophet was enabled to catch a
glimpse. Those 'voices crying day and night' 'the new song that was
sung before the throne,' the cry of "Come and see"--these were but
part of a vast and urgent business, which the prophet was allowed to
overhear. It is not a silent place, that highest heaven, of indolence
and placid peace, but a scene of fierce activity and the clamour of
mighty voices.

And it is the same too of another strange scene--the Transfiguration;
not an impressive spectacle arranged for the apostles, but a peep into
the awful background behind life. Let me use a simple parable: imagine
a man who had a friend whom he greatly admired and loved, and suppose
him to be talking with his friend, who suddenly excuses himself on the
plea of an engagement and goes out; and the other follows him, out of
curiosity, and sees him meet another man and talk intently with him,
not deferentially or humbly, but as a man talks with an equal. And
then drawing nearer he might suddenly see that the man his friend has
gone out to meet, and with whom he is talking so intently, is some
high minister of State, or even the King himself!

That is a simple comparison, to make clear what the apostles might
have felt. They had gone into the mountain expecting to hear their
Master speak quietly to them or betake himself to silent prayer; and
then they find him robed in light and holding converse with the
spirits of the air, telling his plans, so to speak, to two great
prophets of the ancient world.

If this had been but a pageant enacted for their benefit to dazzle and
bewilder them, it would have been a poor and self-conscious affair;
but it becomes a scene of portentous mystery, if one thinks of them as
being permitted to have a glimpse of the high, urgent, and terrifying
things that were going on all the time in the unseen background of the
Saviour's mind. The essence of the greatness of the scene is that it
was _overheard_. And thus I think that wonder and beauty, those two
mighty forces, take on a very different value for us when we can come
to realise that they are small hints given us, tiny glimpses conceded
to us, of some very great and mysterious thing that is pressingly and
speedily proceeding, every day and every hour, in the vast background
of life; and we ought to realise that it is not only human life as we
see it which is the active, busy, forceful thing; that the world with
all its noisy cities, its movements and its bustle, is not a burning
point hung in darkness and silence, but that it is just a little
fretful affair with infinitely larger, louder, fiercer, stronger
powers, working, moving, pressing onwards, thundering in the
background; and that the huge forces, laws, activities, behind the
world, are not perceived by us any more than we perceive the vast
motion of great winds, except in so far as we see the face of the
waters rippled by them, or the trees bowed all one way in their
passage.

It is very easy to be so taken up with the little absorbing
businesses, the froth and ripple of life, that we forget what great
and secret influences they must be that cause them; we must not forget
that we are only like children playing in the nursery of a palace,
while in the Council-room beneath us a debate may be going on which is
to affect the lives and happiness of thousands of households.

And therefore the more that we make up our little beliefs and ideas,
as a man folds up a little packet of food which he is to eat on a
journey, and think in so doing that we have got a satisfactory
explanation of all our aims and problems, the more utterly we are
failing to take in the significance of what is happening. We must
never allow ourselves to make up our minds, and to get our theories
comfortably settled, because then experience is at an end for us, and
we shall see no more than we expect to see. We ought rather to be
amazed and astonished, day by day, at all the wonderful and beautiful
things we encounter, the marvellous hints of loveliness which we see
in faces, woods, hills, gardens, all showing some tremendous force at
work, often thwarted, often spoiled, but still working, with an
infinity of tender patience, to make the world exquisite and fine.
There are ugly, coarse, disgusting things at work too--we cannot help
seeing that; but even many of them seem to be destroying, in
corruption and evil odour, something that ought not to be there, and
striving to be clean and pure again.

I often wonder whose was the mind that conceived the visions of the
Apocalypse; if we can trust tradition, it was a confined and exiled
Christian in a lonely island, whose spirit reached out beyond the
little crags and the beating seas of his prison, and in the seeming
silent heaven detected the gathering of monsters, the war of
relentless forces--and beyond it all the radiant energies of saints,
glad to be together and unanimous, in a place where light and beauty
at last could reign triumphant.

I know no literature more ineffably dreary than the parcelling out of
these wild and glorious visions, the attaching of them to this and
that petty human fulfilment. That is not the secret of the Apocalypse!
It is rather as a painter may draw a picture of two lovers sitting
together at evening in a latticed chamber, holding each other's hands,
gazing in each other's eyes. He is not thinking of particular persons
in an actual house; it is rather a hint of love making itself
manifest, recognising itself to be met with an answering rapture. And
what I think that the prophet meant was rather to show that we must
not be deceived by cares and anxieties and daily business; but that
behind the little simmering of the world was a tumult of vast forces,
voices crying and answering, thunder, fire, infinite music. It is all
a command to recognise unseen greatness, to take every least
experience we can, and crush from it all its savour; not to be afraid
of the great emotions of the world, love and sorrow and loss; but only
to be afraid of what is petty and sordid and mean. And then perhaps,
as in that other vision, we may ascend once into a mountain, and there
in weariness and drowsiness, dumbly bewildered by the night and the
cold and the discomforts of the unkindly air, life may be for a moment
transfigured into a radiant figure, still familiar though so
glorified; and we may see it for once touch hands and exchange words
with old and wise spirits; and all this not only to excite us and
bewilder us, but so that by the drawing of the veil aside, we may see
for a moment that there is some high and splendid secret, some
celestial business proceeding with solemn patience and strange
momentousness, a rite which if we cannot share, we may at least know
is there, and waiting for us, the moment that we are strong enough to
take our part!

XVI

THOUGHT

A friend of mine had once a strange dream; he seemed to himself to be
walking in a day of high summer on a grassy moorland leading up to
some fantastically piled granite crags. He made his way slowly
thither; it was terribly hot there among the sun-warmed rocks, and he
found a little natural cave, among the great boulders, fringed with
fern. There he sate for a long time while the sun passed over, and a
little breeze came wandering up the moor. Opposite him as he sate was
the face of a great pile of rocks, and while his eye dwelt upon it it
suddenly began to wink and glisten with little moving points, dots so
minute that he could hardly distinguish them. Suddenly, as if at a
signal, the little points dropped from the rock, and the whole surface
seemed alive with gossamer threads, as if a silken, silvery curtain
had been let down; presently the little dots reached the grass and
began to crawl over it; and then he saw that each of them was attached
to one of the fine threads; and he thought that they were a colony of
minute spiders, living on the face of the rocks. He got up to see this
wonder close at hand, but the moment he moved, the whole curtain was
drawn up with incredible swiftness, as if the threads were highly
elastic; and when he reached the rock, it was as hard and solid as
before, nor could he discover any sign of the little creatures. "Ah,"
he said to himself in the dream, "that is the meaning of the _living_
rock!" and he became aware, he thought, that all rocks and stones on
the surface of the earth must be thus endowed with life, and that the
rocks were, so to speak, but the shell that contained these
innumerable little creatures, incredibly minute, living, silken
threads, with a small head, like boring worms, inhabiting burrows
which went far into the heart of the granite, and each with a strong
retractile power.

I told this dream to a geologist the other day, who laughed, "An
ingenious idea," he said, "and there may even be something in it! It
is not by any means certain that stones do not have a certain obscure
life of their own; I have sometimes thought that their marvellous
cohesion may be a sign of life, and that if life were withdrawn, a
mountain might in a moment become a heap of sliding sand."

My friend said that the dream made such an impression upon him that
for a time he found it hard to believe that stones and rocks had not
this strange and secret life lurking in their recesses; and indeed it
has since stood to me as a symbol of life, haunting and penetrating
all the very hardest and driest things. It seems to me that just as
there are almost certainly more colours than our eyes can perceive,
and sounds either too acute or too deliberate for our ears to hear, so
the domain of life may be much further extended in the earth, the air,
the waters, than we can tangibly detect.

It seems too to show me that it is our business to try ceaselessly to
discover the secret life of thought in the world; not to conclude that
there is no vitality in thought unless we can ourselves at once
perceive it. This is particularly the case with books. Sometimes, in
our College Library, I take down an old folio from the shelves, and
as I turn the crackling, stained, irregular pages--it may be a volume
of controversial divinity or outworn philosophy--it seems impossible
to imagine that it can ever have been woven out of the live brain of
man, or that any one can ever have been found to follow those old,
vehement, insecure arguments, starting from unproved data, and leading
to erroneous and fanciful conclusions. The whole thing seems so faded,
so dreary, so remote from reality, that one cannot even dimly imagine
the frame of mind which originated it, and still less the mood which
fed upon such things.

Yet I very much doubt if the aims, ideas, hopes of man, have altered
very much since the time of the earliest records. When one comes to
realise that geologists reckon a period of thirty million years at
least, while the Triassic rocks, that is the lowest stratum that shows
signs of life, were being laid down; and that all recorded history is
but an infinitesimal drop in the ocean of unrecorded time, one sees at
least that the force behind the world, by whatever name we call it, is
a force that cannot by any means be hurried, but that it works with a
leisureliness which we with our brief and hasty span of life cannot
really in any sense conceive. Still it seems to have a plan! Those
strange horned, humped, armoured beasts of prehistoric rocks are all
bewilderingly like ourselves so far as physical construction goes;
they had heart, brain, eyes, lungs, legs, a similarly planned
skeleton; it seems as if the creative spirit was working by a
well-conceived pattern, was trying to make a very definite kind of
thing; there is not by any means an infinite variety, when one
considers the sort of creatures that even a man could devise and
invent, if he tried.

There is the same sort of continuity and unity in thought The
preoccupations of man are the same in all ages--to provide for his
material needs, and to speculate what can possibly happen to his
spirit, when the body, broken by accident or disease or decay, can no
longer contain his soul. The best thought of man has always been
centred on trying to devise some sort of future hope which could
encourage him to live eagerly, to endure patiently, to act rightly. As
science opens her vast volume before us, we naturally become more and
more impatient of the hasty guesses of man, in religion and
philosophy, to define what we cannot yet know; but we ought to be very
tender of the old passionate beliefs, the intense desire to credit
noble and lofty spirits, such as Buddha and Mahomet, with some source
of divinely given knowledge. Yet of course there is an inevitable
sadness when we find the old certainties dissolving in mist; and we
must be very careful to substitute for them, if they slip from our
grasp, some sort of principle which will give us freshness and
courage. To me, I confess, the tiny certainties of science are far
more inspiring than the most ardent reveries of imaginative men. The
knowledge that there is in the world an inflexible order, and that we
shall see what we shall see, and not what we would like to believe, is
infinitely refreshing and sustaining. I feel that I am journeying
onwards into what is unknown to me, but into something which is
inevitably there, and not to be altered by my own hopes and fancies.
It is like taking a voyage, the pleasure of which is that the sights
in store are unexpected and novel; for a voyage would be a very poor
thing if we knew exactly what lay ahead, and poorer still if we could
determine beforehand what we meant to see, and could only behold the
pictures of our own imaginations. That is the charm and the use of
experience, that it is not at all what we expect or hope. It is in
some ways sadder and darker; but it is in most ways far more rich and
wonderful and radiant than we had dreamed.

What I grow impatient of are the censures of rigid people, who desire
to limit the hopes and possibilities of others by the little foot-rule
which they have made for themselves. That is a very petty and even a
very wicked thing to do, that old persecuting instinct which says, "I
will make it as unpleasant for you as I can, if you will not consent
at all events to pretend to believe what I think it right to believe."
A man of science does not want to persecute a child who says
petulantly that he will not believe the law of gravity. He merely
smiles and goes on his way. The law of gravity can look after itself!
Persecution is as often as not an attempt to reassure oneself about
one's own beliefs; it is not a sign of an untroubled faith.

We must not allow ourselves to be shaken by any attempt to dictate to
us what we should believe. We need not always protest against it,
unless we feel it a duty to do so; we may simply regard another's
certainties as things which are not and cannot be proved. Argument on
such subjects is merely a waste of time; but at the same time we ought
to recognise the vitality which lies behind such tenacious beliefs,
and be glad that it is there, even if we think it to be mistaken.

And this brings me back to my first point, which is that it is good
for us to try to realise the hidden life of the world, and to rejoice
in it even though it has no truth for us. We must never disbelieve in
life, even though in sickness and sorrow and age it may seem to ebb
from us; and we must try at all costs to recognise it, to sympathise
with it, to put ourselves in touch with it, even though it takes forms
unintelligible and even repugnant to ourselves.

Let me try to translate this into very practical matters. We many of
us find ourselves in a fixed relation to a certain circle of people.
We cannot break with them or abandon them. Perhaps our livelihood
depends upon them, or theirs upon us. Yet we may find them harsh,
unsympathetic, unkind, objectionable. What are we to do? Many people
let the whole tangle go, and just creep along, doing what they do not
like, feeling unappreciated and misunderstood, just hoping to avoid
active collisions and unpleasant scenes. That is a very spiritless
business! What we ought to do is to find points of contact, even at
the cost of some repression of our own views and aims. And we ought
too to nourish a fine life of our own, to look into the lives of other
people, which can be done perhaps best in large books, fine
biographies, great works of imagination and fiction. We must not
drowse and brood in our own sombre corner, when life is flowing free
and full outside, as in some flashing river. However little chance we
may seem to have of _doing_ anything, we can at least determine to
_be_ something; not to let our life be filled, like some base vessel,
with the offscourings and rinsings of other spirits, but to remember
that the water of life is given freely to all who come. That is the
worst of our dull view of the great Gospel of Christ. We think--I do
not say this profanely but seriously--of that water of life as a
series of propositions like the Athanasian Creed!

Christ meant something very different by the water of life. He meant
that the soul that was athirst could receive a draught of a spring of
cool refreshment and living joy. He did not mean a set of doctrines;
doctrines are to life what parchments and title-deeds are to an estate
with woods and waters, fields and gardens, houses and cottages, and
live people moving to and fro. It is of no use to possess the
title-deed if one does not visit one's estate. Doctrines are an
attempt to state, in bare and precise language, ideas and thoughts
dear and fresh to the heart. It is in qualities, hopes, and affections
that we live; and if our eyes are opened, we can see, as my friend
dreamed he saw, the surface of the hard rock full of moving points,
and shimmering with threads of swift life, when the sun has fallen
from the height, and the wind comes cool across the moor from the open
gates of the evening.

XVII

ACCESSIBILITY

I was greatly interested the other day by seeing a photograph, in his
old age, of Henry Phillpotts, the redoubtable Bishop of Exeter, who
lost more money in lawsuits with clergymen than any Bishop, I suppose,
who ever lived. He sate, the old man, in his clumsily fitting gaiters,
bowed or crouched in an arm-chair, reading a letter. His face was
turned to the spectator; with his stiff, upstanding hair, his
out-thrust lip, his corrugated brow, and the deep pouched lines
beneath his eyes, he looked like a terrible old lion, who could no
longer spring, but who had not forgotten how to roar. His face was
full of displeasure and anger. I remembered that a clergyman once told
me how he had been sitting next the Bishop at a dinner of parsons, and
a young curate, sitting on the other side of the Bishop, affronted
him by believing him to be deaf, and by speaking very loudly and
distinctly to him. The Bishop at last turned to him, with a furious
visage, and said, "I would have you to understand, sir, that I am not
deaf!" This disconcerted the young man so much that he could neither
speak nor eat. The old Bishop turned to my friend, and said, in a
heavy tone, "I'm not fit for society!" Indeed he was not, if he could
unchain so fierce a beast on such slight provocation.

And there are many other stories of the bitter things he said, and how
his displeasure could brood like a cloud over a whole company. He was
a gallant old figure, it is true, very energetic, very able,
determined to do what he thought right, and infinitely courageous. I
mused over the portrait, thought how lifelike and picturesque it was,
and how utterly unlike one's idea of an aged Christian or a chief
shepherd. In his beautiful villa by the sea, with its hanging woods
and gardens, ruling with diligence, he seemed to me more like a
stoical Roman Emperor, or a tempestuous Sadducee, the spirit of the
world incarnate. One wondered what it could have been that had drawn
him to Christ, or what part he would have taken if he had been on the
Sanhedrin that judged Him!

It seems to me that one of the first characteristics which one ought
to do one's best to cast out of one's life is that of formidableness.
Yet to tell a man that he is formidable is not an accusation that is
often resented. He may indulgently deprecate it, but it seems to most
people a sort of testimonial to their force and weight and influence,
a penalty that they have to pay for being effective, a matter of
prestige and honour. Of course, an old, famous, dignified man who has
played a great part on the stage of life must necessarily be
approached by the young with a certain awe. But there is no charm in
the world more beautiful than the charm which can permeate dignity,
give confidence, awake affection, dissipate dread. But if a man of
that sort indulges his moods, says what he thinks bluntly and
fiercely, has no mercy on feebleness or ignorance, he can be a very
dreadful personage indeed!

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