Joyous Gard

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> Joyous Gard

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Accessibility is one of the first of Christian virtues; but it is not
always easy to practise, because a man of force and ability, who is
modest and shy, forgets as life goes on how much more his influence is
felt. He himself does not feel at all different from what he was when
he was young, when he was snubbed and silenced and set down in
argument. Perhaps he feels that the world is a kinder and an easier
place, as he grows into deference and esteem, but it is the surest
sign of a noble and beautiful character if the greater he becomes the
more simple and tender he also becomes.

I was greatly interested the other day in attending a meeting at
which, among other speakers, two well-known men spoke. The first was a
man of great renown and prestige, and he made a very beautiful, lofty,
and tender discourse; but, from some shyness or gravity of nature, he
never smiled nor looked at his audience; and thus, fine though his
speech was, he never got into touch with us at all. The second speech
was far more obvious and commonplace, but the speaker, on beginning,
cast a friendly look round and smiled on the audience; and he did the
same all the time, so that one had at once a friendly sense of contact
and geniality, and I felt that every word was addressed to me
personally. That is what it is to be accessible!

One of the best ways in which we can keep the spirit of poetry--by
which I mean the higher, sweeter, purer influences of thought--alive
in one's heart, is by accessibility--by determining to speak freely of
what one admires and loves, what moves and touches one, what keeps
one's mind upon the inner and finer life. It is not always possible or
indeed convenient for younger people to do this, for reasons which are
not wholly bad reasons. Young people ought not to be too eager to take
the lead in talk, nor ought they to be too openly impatient of the
more sedate and prosaic discourse of their elders; and then, too,
there is a time for all things; one cannot keep the mind always on the
strain; and the best and most beautiful things are apt to come in
glimpses and hints, and are not always arrived at by discussion and
argument.

There is a story of a great artist full of sympathy and kindness, to
whom in a single day three several people came to confide sad troubles
and trials. The artist told the story to his wife in the evening. He
said that he was afraid that the third of the visitors thought him
strangely indifferent and even unkind. "The fact was," he said, "that
my capacity for sympathy was really exhausted. I had suffered so much
from the first two recitals that I could not be sorry any more. I
_said_ I was sorry, and I _was_ sorry far down in my mind, but I could
not _feel_ sorry. I had given all the sympathy I had, and it was no
use going again to the well when there was no more water." This shows
that one cannot command emotion, and that one must not force even
thoughts of beauty upon others. We must bide our time, we must adapt
ourselves, and we must not be instant in season and out of season. Yet
neither must we be wholly at the mercy of moods. In religion, the
theory of liturgical worship is an attempt to realise that we ought to
practise religious emotion with regularity. We do not always feel we
are miserable sinners when we say so, and we sometimes feel that we
are when we do not say it; but it is better to confess what we know to
be true, even if at that moment we do not feel it to be true.

We ought not then always, out of modesty, to abstain from talking
about the things for which we care. A foolish shyness will sometimes
keep two sympathetic people from ever talking freely together of their
real hopes and interests. We are terribly afraid in England of what we
call priggishness. It is on the whole a wholesome tendency, but it is
the result of a lack of flexibility of mind. What we ought to be
afraid of is not seriousness and earnestness, but of solemnity and
pomposity. We ought to be ready to vary our mood swiftly, and even to
see the humorous side of sacred and beautiful things. The
oppressiveness of people who hold a great many things sacred, and
cannot bear that they should be jested about, is very great. There is
nothing that takes all naturalness out of intercourse more quickly
than the habit which some people have of begging that a subject may
not be pursued "because it is one on which I feel very deeply." That
is the essence of priggishness, to feel that our reasons are better,
our motives purer, than the reasons of other people, and that we have
the privilege of setting a standard. Conscious superiority is the note
of the prig; and we have the right to dread it.

But the Gospel again is full of precepts in favour of frankness,
outspokenness, letting light shine out, speaking sincerely; only it
must not be done provokingly, condescendingly, solemnly. It is well
for every one to have a friend or friends with whom he can talk quite
unaffectedly about what he cares for and values; and he ought to be
able to say to such a friend, "I cannot talk about these things now; I
am in a dusty, prosaic, grubby mood, and I want to make mud-pies"; the
point is to be natural, and yet to keep a watch upon nature; not to
force her into cramped postures, and yet not to indulge her in rude,
careless, and vulgar postures. It is a bad sign in friendship, if
intimacy seems to a man to give him the right to be rude, coarse,
boisterous, censorious, if he will. He may sometimes be betrayed into
each and all of these things, and be glad of a safety-valve for his
ill-humours, knowing that he will not be permanently misunderstood by
a sympathetic friend. But there must be a discipline in all these
things, and nature must often give way and be broken in; frankness
must not degenerate into boorishness, and liberty must not be the
power of interfering with the liberty of the friend. One must force
oneself to be courteous, interested, sweet-tempered, when one feels
just the contrary; one must keep in sight the principle, and if
violence must be done, it must not be done to the better nature. Least
of all must one deliberately take up the role of exercising influence.
That is a sad snare to many fine natures. One sees a weak, attractive
character, and it seems so tempting to train it up a stick, to fortify
it, to mould it. If one is a professed teacher, one has to try this
sometimes; but even then, the temptation to drive rather than lead
must be strenuously resisted.

I have always a very dark suspicion of people who talk of spheres of
influence, and who enjoy consciously affecting other lives. If this is
done professionally, as a joyful sort of exercise, it is deadly. The
only excuse for it is that one really cares for people and longs to be
of use; one cannot pump one's own tastes and character into others.
The only hope is that they should develop their own qualities. Other
people ought not to be 'problems' to us; they may be mysteries, but
that is quite another thing. To love people, if one can, is the only
way. To find out what is lovable in them and not to try to discover
what is malleable in them is the secret. A wise and witty lady, who
knows that she is tempted to try to direct other lives, told me that
one of her friends once remonstrated with her by saying that she ought
to leave something for God to do!

I know a very terrible and well-meaning person, who once spoke
severely to me for treating a matter with levity. I lost my temper,
and said, "You may make me ashamed of it, if you can, but you shall
not bully me into treating a matter seriously which I think is wholly
absurd." He said, "You do not enough consider the grave issues which
may be involved." I replied that to be for ever considering graver
issues seemed to me to make life stuffy and unwholesome. My censor
sighed and shook his head.

We cannot coerce any one into anything good. We may salve our own
conscience by trying to do so, we may even level an immediate
difficulty; but a free and generous desire to be different is the only
hope of vital change. The detestable Puritan fibre that exists in many
of us, which is the most utterly unchristian thing I know, tempts us
to feel that no discipline is worth anything unless it is dark and
gloomy; but that is the discipline of the law-court and the prison,
and has never remedied anything since the world began. Wickedness is
nearly always, perhaps always, a moral invalidism, and we shall see
some day that to punish men for crime by being cruel to them is like
condemning a man to the treadmill for having typhoid fever. I can only
say that the more I have known of human beings, and the older I grow,
the more lovable, gentle, sweet-tempered I have found them to be.

The life of Carlyle seems to me to be one of the most terrible and
convincing documents in the world in proof of what I have been saying.
The old man was so bent on battering and bumping people into
righteousness, so in love with spluttering and vituperating and
thundering all over the place, that he missed the truest and sweetest
ministry of love. He broke his wife's heart, and it is idle to pretend
he did not. Mrs. Carlyle was a sharp-edged woman too, and hurt her own
life by her bitter trenchancy. But there was enough true love and
loyalty and chivalry in the pair to furnish out a hundred marriages.
Yet one sees Carlyle stamping and cursing through life, and never
seeing what lay close to his hand. I admire his life not because it
was a triumph, but because it was such a colossal failure, and so
finely atoned for by the noble and great-minded repentance of a man
who recognised at last that it was of no use to begin by trying to be
ruler over ten cities, unless he was first faithful in a few things.

XVIII

SYMPATHY

But there is one thing which we must constantly bear in mind, and
which all enthusiastic people must particularly recollect, namely,
that our delight and interest in life must be large, tolerant, and
sympathetic, and that we must not only admit but welcome an immense
variety of interest. We must above all things be just, and we must be
ready to be both interested and amused by people whom we do not like.
The point is that minds should be fresh and clear, rather than
stagnant and lustreless. Enthusiastic people, who feel very strongly
and eagerly the beauty of one particular kind of delight, are sadly
apt to wish to impose their own preferences upon other minds, and not
to believe in the worth of others' preferences. Thus the men who feel
very ardently the beauty of the Greek Classics are apt to insist that
all boys shall be brought up upon them; and the same thing happens in
other matters. We must not make a moral law out of our own tastes and
preferences, and we must be content that others should feel the appeal
of other sorts of beauty; that was the mistake which dogged the
radiant path of Ruskin from first to last, that he could not bear that
other people should have their own preferences, but considered that
any dissidence from his own standards was of the nature of sin. If we
insist on all agreeing with ourselves it is sterile enough; but if we
begin to call other people hard names, and suspecting or vituperating
their motives for disagreeing with us, we sin both against Love and
Light. It was that spirit which called forth from Christ the sternest
denunciation which ever fell from his lips. The Pharisees tried to
discredit His work by representing Him as in league with the powers of
evil; and this sin, which is the imputing of evil motives to actions
and beliefs that appear to be good, because our own beliefs are too
narrow to include them, is the sin which Christ said could find no
forgiveness.

I had a personal instance of this the other day which illustrates so
clearly what I mean that I will quote it. I wrote a book called _The
Child of the Dawn_, the point of which was to represent, in an
allegory, my sincere belief that the after-life of man must be a life
of effort, and experience, and growth. A lady wrote me a very
discourteous letter to say that she believed the after-life to be one
of Rest, and that she held what she believed to be my view to be
unchristian and untrue. The notion that ardent, loving, eager spirits
should be required to spend eternity in a sort of lazy contentment,
forbidden to stir a finger for love and truth and right, is surely an
insupportable one! What would be the joy of heaven to a soul full of
energy and love, condemned to such luxurious apathy, forced to drowse
through the ages in epicurean ease? If heaven has any meaning at all,
it must satisfy our best and most active aspirations; and a paradise
of utter and eternal indolence would be purgatory or hell to all noble
natures. But this poor creature, tired no doubt by life and its
anxieties, overcome by dreariness and sorrow, was not only desirous of
solitary and profound repose, but determined to impose her own theory
upon all the world as well. I blame no one for desiring rest; but to
wish, as she made no secret that she wished, to crush and confound one
who thought and hoped otherwise, does seem to me a very mean and
wretched point of view. That, alas, is what many people mean when they
say that they _believe_ a thing, namely that they would be personally
annoyed if it turned out to be different from what they hoped.

I am sure that we ought rather to welcome with all our might any
evidence of strength and energy and joy, even if they seem to spring
from principles entirely opposite to our own. The more we know of men
and women, the more we ought to perceive that half the trouble in the
world comes from our calling the same principles by different names.
We are not called upon to give up our own principles, but we must
beware of trying to meddle with the principles of other people.

And therefore we must never be disturbed and still less annoyed by
other people finding fault with our tastes and principles, calling
them fantastic and sentimental, weak and affected, so long as they do
not seek to impose their own beliefs upon us. That they should do so
is of course a mistake; but we must recognise that it comes either
from the stupidity which is the result of a lack of sympathy, or else
from the nobler error of holding an opinion strongly and earnestly. We
must never be betrayed into making the same mistake; we may try to
persuade, and it is better done by example than by argument, but we
must never allow ourselves to scoff and deride, and still less to
abuse and vilify. We must rather do our best to understand the other
point of view, and to acquiesce in the possibility of its being held,
even if we cannot understand it. We must take for granted that every
one whose life shows evidence of energy, unselfishness, joyfulness,
ardour, peacefulness, is truly inspired by the spirit of good. We must
believe that they have a vision of beauty and delight, born of the
spirit. We must rejoice if they are making plain to other minds any
interpretation of life, any enrichment of motive, any protest against
things coarse and low and mean. We may wish--and we may try to
persuade them--that their hopes and aims were wider, more bountiful,
and more inclusive, but if we seek to exclude those hopes and aims,
however inconsistent they may be with our own, that moment the shadow
involves our own hopes, because our desire must be that the world may
somehow become happier, fuller, more joyful, even if it is not on the
lines which we ourselves approve.

I know so many good people who are anxious to increase happiness, but
only on their own conditions; they feel that they estimate exactly
what the quantity and quality of joy ought to be, and they treat the
joy which they do not themselves feel as an offence against truth. It
is from these beliefs, I have often thought, that much of the
unhappiness of family circles arises, the elders not realising how the
world moves on, how new ideas come to the front, how the old hopes
fade or are transmuted. They see their children liking different
thoughts, different occupations, new books, new pleasures; and instead
of trying to enter into these things, to believe in their innocence
and their naturalness, they try to crush and thwart them, with the
result that the boys and girls just hide their feelings and desires,
and if they are not shamed out of them, which sometimes happens, they
hold them secretly and half sullenly, and plan how to escape as soon
as they can from the tender and anxious constraint into a real world
of their own. And the saddest part of all is that the younger
generation learn no experience thus; but when they form a circle of
their own and the same expansion happens, they do as their parents
did, saying to themselves, "My parents lost my confidence by insisting
on what was not really important; but _my_ objections are reasonable
and justifiable, and my children must trust me to know what is right."

We must realise then that elasticity and sympathy are the first of
duties, and that if we embark upon the crusade of joy, we must do it
expecting to find many kinds of joy at work in the world, and some
which we cannot understand. We may of course mistrust destructive joy,
the joy of selfish pleasure, rough combativeness, foolish
wastefulness, ugly riot--all the joys that are evidently dogged by
sorrow and pain; but if we see any joy that leads to self-restraint
and energy and usefulness and activity, we must recognise it as
divine.

We may have then our private fancies, our happy pursuits, our sweet
delights; we may practise them, sure that the best proof of their
energy is that they obviously and plainly increase and multiply our
own happiness. But if we direct others at all, it must be as a
signpost, pointing to a parting of roads and making the choice clear,
and not as a policeman enforcing the majesty of our self-invented
laws.

Everything that helps us, invigorates us, comforts us, sustains us,
gives us life, is right for us; of that we need never be in any doubt,
provided always that our delight is not won at the expense of others;
and we must allow and encourage exactly the same liberty in others to
choose their own rest, their own pleasure, their own refreshment. What
would one think of a host, whose one object was to make his guests eat
and drink and do exactly what he himself enjoyed? And yet that is
precisely what many of the most conscientious people are doing all day
long, in other regions of the soul and mind.

The one thing which we have to fear, in all this, is of lapsing into
indolence and solitary enjoyment, guarding and hoarding our own
happiness. We must measure the effectiveness of our enjoyment by one
thing and one thing alone--our increase of affection and sympathy,
our interest in other minds and lives. If we only end by desiring to
be apart from it all, to gnaw the meat we have torn from life in a
secret cave of our devising, to gain serenity by indifference, then we
must put our desires aside; but if it sends us into the world with
hope and energy and interest and above all affection, then we need
have no anxiety; we may enter like the pilgrims into comfortable
houses of refreshment, where we can look with interest at pictures and
spiders and poultry and all the pleasant wonders of the place; we may
halt in wayside arbours to taste cordials and confections, and enjoy
from the breezy hill-top the pleasant vale of Beulah, with the
celestial mountains rising blue and still upon the far horizon.

XIX

SCIENCE

I read the other day a very downright book, with a kind of dry
insolence about it, by a man who was concerned with stating what he
called the _mechanistic_ theory of the universe. The worlds, it
seemed, were like a sandy desert, with a wind that whirled the sands
about; and indeed I seemed, as I looked out on the world through the
writer's eyes, to see nothing but wind and sand! One of his points was
that every thought that passed through the mind was preceded by a
change in the particles of the brain; so that philosophy, and
religion, and life itself were nothing but a shifting of the sand by
the impalpable wind--matter and motion, that was all! Again and again
he said, in his dry way, that no theory was of any use that was not
supported by facts; and that though there was left a little corner of
thought, which was still unexplained, we should soon have some more
facts, and the last mystery would be hunted down.

But it seemed to me, as I read it, that the thoughts of man were just
as much facts as any other facts, and that when a man had a vision of
beauty, or when a hope came to him in a bitter sorrow, it was just as
real a thing as the little particle of the brain which stirred and
crept nearer to another particle. I do not say that all theories of
religion and philosophy are necessarily true, but they are real
enough; they have existed, they exist, they cannot die. Of course, in
making out a theory, we must not neglect one set of facts and depend
wholly on another set of facts; but I believe that the intense and
pathetic desire of humanity to know why they are here, why they feel
as they do, why they suffer and rejoice, what awaits them, are facts
just as significant as the blood that drips from the wound, or the
leaf that unfolds in the sun. The comforting and uplifting conclusion
which the writer came to was that we were just a set of animated
puppets, spun out of the drift of sand and dew by the thing that he
called force. But if that is so, why are we not all perfectly
complacent and contented, why do we love and grieve and wish to be
different? I do still believe that there is a spirit that mingles with
our hopes and dreams, something personal, beautiful, fatherly, pure,
something which is unwillingly tied to earth and would be free if it
could. The sense that we are ourselves wholly separate and distinct,
with experience behind us and experience before us, seems to me a fact
beside which all other facts pale into insignificance. And next in
strength to that seems the fact that we can recognise, and draw near
to, and be amazingly desirous of, as well as no less strangely hostile
to, other similar selves; that our thought can mingle with theirs,
pass into theirs, as theirs into ours, forging a bond which no
accident of matter can dissolve.

Does it really satisfy the lover, when he knows that his love is
answered, to realise that it is all the result of some preceding
molecular action of the brain? That does not seem to me so much a
truculent statement as a foolish statement, shirking, like a glib and
silly child, the most significant of data. And I think we shall do
well to say to our scientist, as courteously as Sir Lancelot said to
the officious knight, who proffered unnecessary service, that we have
no need for him at this time.

Now, I am not saying, in all this, that the investigation of science
is wrong or futile. It is exactly the reverse; the message of God is
hidden in all the minutest material things that lie about us; and it
is a very natural and even noble work to explore it; but it is wrong
if it leads us to draw any conclusions at present beyond what we can
reasonably and justly draw. It is the inference that what explains the
visible scheme of things can also explain the invisible. That is
wrong!

Let me here quote a noble sentence, which has often given me
much-needed help, and served to remind me that thought is after all as
real a thing as matter, when I have been tempted to feel otherwise. It
was written by a very wise and tender philosopher, William James, who
was never betrayed by his own severe standard of truth and reality
into despising the common dreams and aspirations of simpler men. He
wrote:

"I find it preposterous to suppose that if there be a
feeling of unseen reality, shared by numbers of the best
men in their best moments, responded to by other men in
their deep moments, good to live by, strength-giving--I find
it preposterous, I say, to suppose that the goodness of that
feeling for living purposes should be held to carry no
objective significance, and especially preposterous if it
combines harmoniously with an otherwise grounded philosophy
of objective truth."

That is a very large and tolerant utterance, both in its suspension of
impatient certainties and in its beautiful sympathy with all ardent
visions that cannot clearly and convincingly find logical utterance.

What I am trying to say in this little book is not addressed to
professional philosophers or men of science, who are concerned with
intellectual investigation, but to those who have to live life as it
is, as the vast majority of men must always be. What I rather beg of
them is not to be alarmed and bewildered by the statements either of
scientific or religious dogmatists. No doubt we should like to know
everything, to have all our perplexities resolved; but we have reached
that point neither in religion nor in philosophy, nor even in science.
We must be content not to know. But because we do not know, we need
not therefore refuse to feel; there is no excuse for us to thrust the
whole tangle away and out of sight, and just to do as far as possible
what we like. We may admire and hope and love, and it is our business
to do all three. The thing that seems to me--and I am here only
stating a personal view--both possible and desirable, is to live as
far as we can by the law of beauty, not to submit to anything by which
our soul is shamed and insulted, not to be drawn into strife, not to
fall into miserable fault-finding, not to allow ourselves to be
fretted and fussed and agitated by the cares of life; but to say
clearly to ourselves, "that is a petty, base, mean thought, and I will
not entertain it; this is a generous and kind and gracious thought,
and I will welcome it and obey it."

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