Joyous Gard

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> Joyous Gard

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One of the clearly discernible laws of life is that we can both check
and contract habits; and when we begin our day, we can begin it if we
will by prayer and aspiration and resolution, as much as we can begin
it with bath and toilet. We can say, "I will live resolutely to-day in
joy and good-humour and energy and kindliness." Those powers and
possibilities are all there; and even if we are overshadowed by
disappointment and anxiety and pain, we can say to ourselves that we
will behave as if it were not so; because there is undoubtedly a very
real and noble pleasure in putting off shadows and troubles, and not
letting them fall in showers on those about us. We need not be stoical
or affectedly bright; we often cannot give those who love us greater
joy than to tell them of our troubles and let them comfort us. And we
can be practical too in our outlook, because much of the grittiest
irritation of life is caused by indulging indolence when we ought not,
and being hurried when we might be leisurely. It is astonishing how a
little planning will help us in all this, and how soon a habit is set
up. We do not, it is true, know the limits of our power of choice. But
the illusion, if it be an illusion, that we have a power of choice, is
an infinitely more real fact to most of us than the molecular motion
of the brain particles.

And then too there is another fact, which is becoming more and more
clear, namely, what is called the power of suggestion. That if we can
put a thought into our mind, not into our reason, but into our inner
mind of instinct and force, whether it be a base thought or a noble
thought, it seems to soak unconsciously into the very stuff of the
mind, and keep reproducing itself even when we seem to have forgotten
all about it. And this is, I believe, one of the uses of prayer, that
we put a thought into the mind, which can abide with us, secretly it
may be, all the day; and that thus it is not a mere pious habit or
tradition to have a quiet period at the beginning of the day, in which
we can nurture some joyful and generous hope, but as real a source of
strength to the spirit as the morning meal is to the body. I have
myself found that it is well, if one can, to read a fragment of some
fine, generous, beautiful, or noble-minded book at such an hour.

There is in many people who work hard with their brains a curious and
unreal mood of sadness which hangs about the waking hour, which I have
thought to be a sort of hunger of the mind, craving to be fed; and
this is accompanied, at least in me, by a very swift, clear, and
hopeful apprehension, so that a beautiful thought comes to me as a
draught of water to a thirsty man. So I make haste, as often as may
be, just to drop such a thought at those times into the mind; it falls
to the depths, as one may see a bright coin go gleaming and shifting
down to the depths of a pool; or to use a homelier similitude, like
sugar that drops to the bottom of a cup, sweetening the draught.

These are little homely things; but it is through simple use and not
through large theory that one can best practise joy.

XX

WORK

I came out of the low-arched door with a sense of relief and passed
into the sunshine; the meeting had broken up, and we went our ways. We
had sate there an hour or two in the old panelled room, a dozen
full-blooded friendly men discussing a small matter with wonderful
ingenuity and zest; and I had spoken neither least nor most mildly,
and had found it all pleasant enough. Then I mounted my bicycle and
rode out into the fragrant country alone, with all its nearer green
and further blue; there in that little belt of space, between the thin
air above and the dense-dark earth beneath, was the pageant of
conscious life enacting itself so visibly and eagerly. In the sunlit
sky the winds raced gaily enough, with the void silence of moveless
space above it; below my feet what depths of cold stone, with the
secret springs; below that perhaps a core of molten heat and
imprisoned fire!

What was it all about? What were we all doing there? What was the
significance of the little business that had been engaging our minds
and tongues? What part did it play in the mighty universe?

The thorn-tree thick with bloom, pouring out its homely spicy
smell--it was doing too, beautifully enough, what we had been doing
clumsily. It was living, intent on its own conscious life, the sap
hurrying, the scent flowing, the bud waxing. The yellow-hammer poising
and darting along the hedge, the sparrow twittering round the rick,
the cock picking and crowing, were all intent on life, proclaiming
that they were alive and busy. Something vivid, alert, impassioned was
going forward everywhere, something being effected, something
uttered--and yet the cause how utterly hidden from me and from every
living thing!

The memory of old poetry began to flicker in my mind like summer
lightning. In the orchard, crammed with bloom, two unseen children
were calling to each other; a sunburned, careless, graceful boy,
whose rough clothes could not conceal his shapely limbs and easy
movements, came driving some cows along the lane. He asked me the time
in Dorian speech. The shepherds piping together on the Sicilian
headland could not have made a fairer picture; and yet the boy and I
could hardly have had a thought in common!

All the poets that ever sang in the pleasant springtime can hardly
have felt the joyful onrush of the season more sweetly than I felt it
that day; and yet no philosopher or priest could have given me a hint
of what the mystery was, why so ceaselessly renewed; but it was clear
to me at least that the mind behind it was joyful enough, and wished
me to share its joy.

And then an hour later I was doing for no reason but that it was my
business the dullest of tasks--no less than revising a whole sheaf of
the driest of examination papers. Elaborate questions to elicit
knowledge of facts arid and meaningless, which it was worth no human
being's while to know, unless he could fill out the bare outlines with
some of the stuff of life. Hundreds of boys, I dare say, in crowded
schoolrooms all over the country were having those facts drummed into
them, with no aim in sight but the answering of the questions which I
was manipulating. That was a bewildering business, that we should
insist on that sort of drilling becoming a part of life. Was that a
relation it was well to establish? As the fine old, shrewd, indolent
Dr. Johnson said, he for his part, while he lived, never again desired
even to hear of the Punic War! And again he said, "You teach your
daughters the diameters of the planets, and wonder, when you have
done, why they do not desire your company."

Cannot we somehow learn to simplify life? Must we continue to think
that we can inspire children in rows? Is it not possible for us to be
a little less important and pompous and elaborate about it all, to aim
at more direct relations, to say more what we feel, to do more what
nature bids us do?

The heart sickens at the thought of how we keep to the grim highways
of life, and leave the pleasant spaces of wood and field unvisited!
And all because we want more than we need, and because we cannot be
content unless we can be envied and admired.

The cure for all this, it seems to me, is a resolute avoidance of
complications and intricacies, a determination to live life more on
our own terms, and to open our eyes to the simpler pleasures which lie
waiting in our way on every side.

I do not believe in the elaborate organisation of life; and yet I
think it is possible to live in the midst of it, and yet not to be
involved in it. I do not believe in fierce rebellion, but I do believe
in quiet transformation; and here comes in the faith that I have in
_Joyous Gard_. I believe that day by day we should clear a space to
live with minds that have felt, and hoped, and enjoyed. That is the
first duty of all; and then that we should live in touch with the
natural beauty of the earth, and let the sweetness of it enter into
our minds and hearts; for then we come out renewed, to find the beauty
and the fulness of life in the hearts and minds of those about us.
Life is complicated, not because its issues are not simple enough, but
because we are most of us so afraid of a phantom which we create--the
criticism of other human beings.

If one reads the old books of chivalry, there seems an endless waste
of combat and fighting among men who had the same cause at heart, and
who yet for the pettiest occasions of dispute must need try to inflict
death on each other, each doing his best to shatter out of the world
another human being who loved life as well. Two doughty knights, Sir
Lamorak and Sir Meliagraunce, must needs hew pieces off each other's
armour, break each other's bones, spill each other's blood, to prove
which of two ladies is the fairer; and when it is all over, nothing
whatever is proved about the ladies, nothing but which of the two
knights is the stronger! And yet we seem to be doing the same thing to
this day, except that we now try to wound the heart and mind, to make
a fellow-man afraid and suspicious, to take the light out of his day
and the energy out of his work. For the last few weeks a handful of
earnest clergymen have been endeavouring in a Church paper, with
floods of pious Billingsgate, to make me ridiculous about a technical
question of archaeological interest, and all because my opinion differs
from their own! I thankfully confess that as I get older, I care not
at all for such foolish controversy, and the only qualms I have are
the qualms I feel at finding human beings so childish and so fretful.

Well, it is all very curious, and not without its delight too! What I
earnestly desire is that men and women should not thus waste precious
time and pleasant life, but go straight to reality, to hope. There are
a hundred paths that can be trodden; only let us be sure that we are
treading our own path, not feebly shifting from track to track, not
following too much the bidding of others, but knowing what interests
us, what draws us, what we love and desire; and above all keeping in
mind that it is our business to understand and admire and conciliate
each other, whether we do it in a panelled room, with pens and paper
on the table, and the committee in full cry; or out on the quiet road,
with one whom we trust entirely, where the horizon runs, field by
field and holt by holt, to meet the soft verge of encircling sky.

XXI

HOPE

The other day I took up idly some magazine or other, one of those
great lemon-coloured, salmon-hued, slaty paper volumes which lie in
rows on the tables of my club. I will not stop now to enquire why
English taste demands covers which show every mean stain, every soiled
finger-print; but these volumes are always a reproach to me, because
they show me, alas! how many subjects, how many methods of presenting
subjects, are wholly uninteresting and unattractive to my trivial
mind. This time, however, my eye fell upon a poem full of light and
beauty, and of that subtle grace which seems so incomprehensible, so
uncreated--a lyric by Mr. Alfred Noyes. It was like a spell which
banished for an instant the weariness born of a long, hot, tedious
committee, the oppression which always falls on me at the sight and
sound of the cataract of human beings and vehicles, running so
fiercely in the paved channels of London. A beautiful poem, but how
immeasurably sad, an invocation to the memory and to the spirit of
Robert Browning, not speaking of him in an elegiac strain as of a
great poet who had lived his life to the full and struck his
clear-toned harp, solemnly, sweetly, and whimsically too, year after
year; but as of something great and noble wholly lost and separated
from the living world.

This was a little part of it:

Singer of hope for all the world,
Is it still morning where thou art,
Or are the clouds that hide thee furled
Around a dark and silent heart?

The sacred chords thy hand could wake
Are fallen on utter silence here,
And hearts too little even to break
Have made an idol of despair.

* * * * *

Come back to England, where thy May
Returns, but not that rapturous light;
God is not in His heaven to-day,
And with thy country nought is right.

I think that almost magically beautiful! But is it true? I hope not
and I think not. The poet went on to say that Paradox had destroyed
the sanctity of Truth, and that Science had done nothing more than
strip the skeleton of the flesh and blood that vested it, and crown
the anatomy with glory. One cannot speak more severely, more gloomily,
of an age than to say that it is deceived by analysis and paradox, and
cares nothing for nobler and finer things. It seems to me to be a
sorrowful view of life that, to have very little faith or prospect
about it. It is true indeed that the paradox-maker is popular now; but
that is because men are interested in interpretations of life; and it
is true too that we are a little impatient now of fancy and
imagination, and want to get at facts, because we feel that fancy and
imagination, which are not built on facts, are very tricksy guides to
life. But the view seems to me both depressed and morbid which cannot
look beyond, and see that the world is passing on in its own great
unflinching, steady manner. It is like the view of a child who,
confronted with a pain, a disagreeable incident, a tedious day of
drudgery, wails that it can never be happy again.

The poem ends with a fine apostrophe to Browning as one "who stormed
through death, and laid hold of Eternity." Did he indeed do that? I
wish I felt it! He had, of course, an unconquerable optimism, which
argued promise from failure and perfection from incompleteness. But I
cannot take such hopes on the word of another, however gallant and
noble he may be. I do not want hopes which are only within the reach
of the vivid and high-hearted; the crippled, drudging slave cannot
rejoice because he sees his warrior-lord gay, heroic, and strong. I
must build my creed on my own hopes and possibilities, not on the
strength and cheerfulness of another.

And then my eye fell on a sentence opposite, out of an article on our
social problems; and this was what I read:

"... the tears of a hunger-bitten philosophy, which is so
appalled by the common doom of man--that he must eat his
bread by the sweat of his brow--that it can talk, write, and
think of nothing else."

I think there is more promise in that, rough and even rude as the
statement is, because it opens up a real hope for something that is
coming, and is not a mere lamentation over a star that is set.

"A hunger-bitten philosophy"--is it not rather that there is creeping
into the world an uneasy sense that we must, if we are to be happy,
_share_ our happiness? It is not that the philosopher is hungry, it is
that he cannot bear to think of all the other people who are condemned
to hunger; and why it occupies his tongue and his pen, is that it
clouds his serenity to know that others cannot now be serene. All this
unrest, this grasping at the comfort of life on the one hand, and the
patience, the justice, the tolerance, with which such claims are
viewed by many possessors on the other, is because there is a spirit
of sympathy growing up, which has not yet become self-sacrifice, but
is on its way to become so.

Then we must ask ourselves what our duty is. Not, I think, with all
our comforts about us, to chant loud odes about its being all right
with the world, but to see what we can do to make it all right, to
equalise, to share, to give.

The finest thing, of course, would be if those who are set in the
midst of comfort could come calmly out of it, and live simpler,
kinder, more direct lives; but apart from that, what can we do? Is it
our duty, in the face of all that, to surrender every species of
enjoyment and delight, to live meanly and anxiously because others
have to live so? I am not at all sure that it would not prove our
greatness if the thought of all the helpless pain and drudgery of the
world, the drift of falling tears, were so intolerable to us that we
simply could not endure the thought; but I think that would end in
quixotism and pessimism of the worst kind, if one would not eat or
drink, because men starve in Russia or India, if one would not sleep
because sufferers toss through the night in pain. That seems a morbid
and self-sought suffering.

No, I believe that we must share our joy as far as we can, and that it
is our duty rather to have joy to share, and to guard the quality of
it, make it pure and true. We do best if we can so refine our
happiness as to make it a thing which is not dependent upon wealth or
ease; and the more natural our life is, the more can we be of use by
the example which is not self-conscious but contagious, by showing
that joy does not depend upon excitement and stimulus, but upon vivid
using of the very stuff of life.

Where we fail, many of us, is in the elaborateness of our pleasures,
in the fact that we learn to be connoisseurs rather than viveurs, in
losing our taste for the ancient wholesome activities and delights.

I had caught an hour, that very day, to visit the Academy; it was a
doubtful pleasure, though if I could have had the great rooms to
myself it would have been a delightful thing enough; but to be crushed
and elbowed by such numbers of people who seemed intent not on looking
at anything, but on trying to see if they could recognise any of their
friends! It was a curious collection certainly! So many pictures of
old disgraceful men, whose faces seemed like the faces of toads or
magpies; dull, blinking, malign, or with the pert brightness of
acquisition. There were pictures too of human life so-called, silly,
romantic, insincerely posed; some fatuous allegorical things, like
ill-staged melodramas; but the strength of English art came out for
all that in the lovely landscapes, rich fields, summer streams,
far-off woodlands, beating seas; and I felt in looking at it all that
the pictures which moved one most were those which gave one a sudden
hunger for the joy and beauty of earth, not ill-imagined fantastic
places, but scenes that one has looked upon a hundred times with love
and contentment, the corn-field, the mill with its brimming leat, the
bathing-place among quiet pastures, the lake set deep in water-plants,
the old house in the twilight garden--all the things consecrated
throughout long ages by use and life and joy.

And then I strayed into the sculpture gallery; and I cannot describe
the thrill which half a dozen of the busts there gave me--faces into
which the wonder and the love and the pain of life seemed to have
passed, and which gave me a sudden sense of that strange desire to
claim a share in the past and present and future of the form and face
in which one suddenly saw so much to love. One seemed to feel hands
held out; hearts crying for understanding and affection, breath on
one's cheek, words in one's ears; and thus the whole gallery melted
into a great throng of signalling and beckoning presences, the air
dense with the voices of spirits calling to me, pressing upon me;
offering and claiming love, all bound upon one mysterious pilgrimage,
none able to linger or to stay, and yet willing to clasp one close by
the roadside, in wonder at the marvellous inscrutable power behind it
all, which at the same moment seemed to say, "Rest here, love, be
loved, enjoy," and at the same moment cried, "Go forward, experience,
endure, lament, come to an end."

There again opened before one the awful mystery of the beauty and the
grief of life, the double strain which we must somehow learn to
combine, the craving for continuance, side by side with the knowledge
of interruption and silence. If one is real, the other cannot be real!
And I for one have no doubt of which reality I hold to. Death and
silence may deceive us; life and joy cannot. There may be something
hidden beneath the seeming termination of mortal experience; indeed, I
fully believe that there is; but even if it were not so, nothing could
make love and joy unreal, or destroy the consciousness of what says
within us, "This Is I." Our one hope then is not to be deceived or
beguiled or bewildered by the complexity and intricacy of life; the
path of each of us lies clear and direct through the tangle.

And thus, as I have said, our task is not to be defrauded of our
interior peace. No power that we know can do more than dissolve and
transmute our mortal frame; it can melt into the earth, it can be
carried into the depths of the sea, but it cannot be annihilated; and
this is infinitely more true of our spirits; they may undergo a
thousand transformations and transmutations, but they must be
eternally there.

So let us claim our experience bravely and accept it firmly, never
daunted by it, never utterly despairing, leaping back into life and
happiness as swiftly as we can, never doubting that it is assured to
us. The time that we waste is that which is spent in anxious, trivial,
conventional things. We have to bear them in our burdens, many of us,
but do not let us be for ever examining them, weighing them in our
hands, wishing them away, whining over them; we must not let them
beguile us of the better part. If the despairing part of us cries out
that it is frightened, wearied, anxious, we must not heed it; we must
again and again assure ourselves that the peace is there, and that we
miss it by our own fault. Above all let us not make pitiable excuses
for ourselves. We must be like the woman in the parable who, when she
lost the coin, did not sit down to bewail her ill-luck, but swept the
house diligently until she found it. There is no such thing as loss in
the world; what we lose is merely withheld until we have earned the
right to find it again. We must not cultivate repentance, we must not
yield to remorse. The only thing worth having is a wholesome sorrow
for not having done better; but it is ignoble to remember, if our
remembrance has anything hopeless about it; and we do best utterly to
forget our failures and lapses, because of this we may be wholly sure,
that joys are restored to us, that strength returns, and that peace
beyond measure is waiting for us; and not only waiting for us, but as
near us as a closed door in the room in which we sit. We can rise up,
we can turn thither, we can enter if we will and when we will.

XXII

EXPERIENCE

It is very strange to contemplate the steady plunge of good advice,
like a cataract of ice-cold water, into the brimming and dancing pool
of youth and life, the maxims of moralists and sages, the epigrams of
cynics, the sermons of priests, the good-humoured warnings of sensible
men, all crying out that nothing is really worth the winning, that
fame brings weariness and anxiety, that love is a fitful fever, that
wealth is a heavy burden, that ambition is a hectic dream; to all of
which ejaculations youth does not listen and cannot listen, but just
goes on its eager way, trying its own experiments, believing in the
delight of triumph and success, determined, at all events, to test all
for itself. All this confession of disillusionment and disappointment
is true, but only partially true. The struggle, the effort, the
perseverance, does bring fine things with it--things finer by far than
the shining crown and the loud trumpets that attend it.

The explanation of it seems to be that men require to be tempted to
effort, by the dream of fame and wealth and leisure and imagined
satisfaction. It is the experience that we need, though we do not know
it; and experience, by itself, seems such a tedious, dowdy, tattered
thing, like a flag burnt by sun, bedraggled by rain, torn by the
onset, that it cannot by itself prove attractive. Men are heavily
preoccupied with ends and aims, and the recognised values of the
objects of desire and hope are often false and distorted values. So
singularly constituted are we, that the hope of idleness is alluring,
and some people are early deceived into habits of idleness, because
they cannot know what it is that lies on the further side of work. Of
course the bodily life has to be supplied, but when a man has all that
he needs--let us say food and drink, a quiet shelter, a garden and a
row of trees, a grassy meadow with a flowing stream, a congenial task,
a household of his own--it seems not enough! Let us suppose all that
granted to a man: he must consider next what kind of life he has
gained; he has the cup in his hands; with what liquor is it to be
filled? That is the point at which the imagination of man seems to
fail; he cannot set himself to vigorous, wholesome life for its own
sake. He has to be ever looking past it and beyond it for something to
yield him an added joy.

Now, what we all have to do, if we can, is to regard life steadily and
generously, to see that life, experience, emotion, are the real gifts;
not things to be hurried through, thrust aside, disregarded, as a man
makes a hasty meal before some occasion that excites him. One must not
use life like the passover feast, to be eaten with loins girded and
staff in hand. It is there to be lived, and what we have to do is to
make the quality of it as fine as we can.

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