The Silent Isle, Arthur Christopher Benson [best book reader txt] 📗

sense; it is applied to a sort of unreasoning stupidity, which accepts suffering and pain without adding to it by imaginative comparison; such patience knows nothing of the pain of which Dante speaks, the pain of contrasting present unhappiness with past delight; and similarly, it does not suffer the pangs of anticipation, the terrors of which Lord Beaconsfield spoke, when he said that the worst calamities in his life were the calamities which never happened. Nine-tenths of the misery of suffering lies in the power of forecasting its continuance and its increase, and the lesser patience of which I have spoken is the patience which, by no effort of reason, but by pure instinct, hears the burden of the moment in the spirit of the proverb that "sufficient for the day is the evil thereof."

But there is a nobler and a purer quality of patience which is perhaps one of the highest and most hopeful attributes of humanity, because it is nurtured in so strong a soil, and watered with the dew of tears; this is a certain tranquil, courageous, and unembittered sweetness in the presence of an irreparable calamity, which is in its very essence divine, and preaches more forcibly the far-reaching permanence of the spiritual clement in mankind than a thousand rhapsodies and panegyrics extolling human ingenuity and human greatness. Mankind has a deeply rooted and childlike instinct that apology and repentance ought to be met with the suspension of pains and penalties, and the hardest lesson in the world to learn is that guilt may be forgiven, but that the consequences of guilt may yet have to be endured. When we have really learnt that, we are indeed perfected. St. Peter in one of his epistles says that it is less creditable to be patient when one is buffeted for one's faults than when one suffers for one's virtues. I fear that I cannot agree with this. One may be convinced of the justice of a sentence, but the more one is convinced of it, the more does one regret the course of conduct that made the sentence necessary. The sinner who suffers for his sin bears not only the pain of the punishment but also the sense of shame and self-condemnation. The good man who suffers for his goodness does indeed have to bear the burden of an awful mystery, a doubt whether God is indeed on the side of the righteous; but he is not crushed beneath the additional burden of self-contempt, he has not the humiliating sense of folly and weakness which the transgressor has to bear; and thus it so often happens that the well-meaning transgressor is slow to learn the lesson of patience, because he takes refuge in a vague sort of metaphysics, and attributes to heredity and environment what is really the outcome of his own wilfulness and perversity.

But the true patience, whatever the cause of its sufferings, brings with it a blessed sense of the faithful sternness, the fruitful lovingness of God, who will not let even the feeblest of sinners be satisfied with less than he can attain, in whose hands the punishment, like fire, runs swiftly and agonisingly to and fro, consuming the baser elements of passion and desire.


XI


I am quite sure that I like solitude. There is no pleasure in the world like waking up in the morning and feeling that absolutely the whole day is at one's disposal; that one can work when one likes, go out when it is fine, have one's meals when one prefers, even when one is hungry. There is no one near enough to drop in, in this blissful corner of the world, and a caller is a rare bird. I have too much to do ever to be bored, and indeed the day is seldom long enough for all I have designed. Best of all, my work, though abundant, is seldom pressing. I have hardly ever anything to do that must be done that moment. With some people that would end in putting off everything till the last moment, but that is not the case with me. The greatest luxury I know is to have accumulated stores of work on which one can draw; and my tendency is, if ever a piece of work is entrusted to me, to do it at once. I have few gregarious instincts, I suppose. I like eating alone, reading alone, and walking alone. There is also a good deal to be said for learning to enjoy solitude, for it is the one luxury that a man without any close home ties can command. An independent bachelor is sure, whether he likes it or not, to have, as life goes on, more and more enforced solitude--that is, if he detests living in a town. I have not even nephews and nieces whom it would be natural to see something of; and thus it is a wise economy to practise for solitude.

From the point of view of work, too, it is undeniably delightful. I need never suspend a train of thought; I can write till I have finished a subject. There is never the abominable necessity of stopping in the middle of a sentence, with the prospect of having laboriously to recapture the mood; and it is the same with reading. If I am interested in a book, I can read on till I am satiated. Never before in my life have I had the chance of reading, as Theocrite praised God, "morning, evening, noon, and night." But now, if I get really absorbed in a volume, I can let the whole story, tragedy or comedy, open before me, take its course, and draw to a close. The result is that I find I can apprehend a book in a way that I have never apprehended one before, in its entirety; one can enter wholly and completely into the mind of an author, into the progress of a biography; so that to read a book now is like sitting out a play.

All this is very delightful; and no less delightful, too, is it, if the mood takes me, to wander off for a whole day in the country; to moon onwards entirely oblivious of time; to stop on a hill-top and survey a scene, to turn into a village church and sit long in the cool gloom; to seek out the heart of a copse, all carpeted with spring flowers, and to lie on a green bank, with the whisper of the leaves in one's ear; or to sit beside a stream, near a crystal pool, half-hidden in sedges, and to see hour by hour what goes on in the dim waterworld. I do not mean to say that it would not be pleasanter to share one's rambles with a congenial companion; but it is not easy to find one; either there are differences of opinion, or the subtle barriers of age to overleap, or one is conscious that there are regions of one's mind in which a friend will inevitably and fretfully miss his way--there are not many friends, for anyone, to whom his mind can lie perfectly and unaffectedly open; and thus, though I do not hesitate to say that I would prefer the society of the perfect friend to my loneliness, yet I prefer my loneliness to the incursions of the imperfect friend.

Then at the close of day there is a prospect of a long, quiet evening; one can go to bed when one wishes, with the thought of another unclouded and untroubled day before one. Liberty is, after all, the richest gift that life can give.

And now, having made this panegyric on solitude, I will be just and fair-minded, and I will say exactly what I have found the disadvantages to be.

In the first place, though I do not grow morbid, I find a loss of proportion creeping over me. I attach an undue importance to small things. A troublesome letter, which in a busy life one would answer and forget, rattles in the mind like a pea in a bladder. A little incident--say, for instance, that one has to find fault with a servant--assumes altogether unreal importance. In a busy life one would make up one's mind as well as one could, and act. But here it is not easy to make up one's mind. One weighs all contingencies too minutely; one is too considerate, if that is possible; and if one makes up one's mind, perhaps, to find fault, the presence in the house of a dissatisfied person is an undue weight on the mind. Or one reads an unfavourable review, and is too much occupied with its possible results on one's literary prospects. It is not depression that these things induce, but one expends too much energy and thought upon them.

But this on the whole matters little. There is time to be slow in decision; there is time to forecast possibilities. Indeed, it is an advantage for the solitary man to cultivate an over-elaborate way of considering a subject, a slow picking-up and matching of patterns, a maddening deliberation, simply by way of recreation. For a danger of solitude, if one likes one's work, is that one works too much and too hard. Then one writes too much, forgets to fill the cistern; one uses up the old phrases, the old ideas. All which is a sore temptation to a forgetful writer like myself, who re-invents and re-discovers the old sentences with a shock of pleasing novelty and originality, only to find it all written in an earlier book.

But these are all superficial material difficulties such as have to be faced in every life. The real and dark danger of solitude is the self-absorption that is bound to follow. With one like myself, to whom the meeting of a new person is a kind of momentous terror, who feels forced instinctively to use all possible arts to render a clumsy presence and a heavy manner bearable, whose only hope is to be respectfully tolerated, to whom society is not an easy recreation but an arduous game, who would always sooner write a dozen letters than have an interview, with such an one the solitary life tends to make one ghost-like and evasive before one's time. Yet it is not for nothing, I reflect, that Providence has never pushed a pawn to me in the shape of an official wife, and has markedly withheld me from nephews and nieces. It is not for nothing that relationships with others appear to me in the light of a duty, at least in the initial stages, rather than a pleasure.

And yet I reflect that I should doubtless be a better man, even with a shrewish wife and a handful of heavy, unattractive children. I should have to scheme for them, to make things easier for them, to work for them, to recommend them, to cherish them, to love them. These dear transforming burdens are denied me. And yet would the sternest and severest mentor in the world bid me marry without love, for the sake of its effect on my character? "No," he would say, "not that! but let yourself go, be rash, fall in love, marry in haste! It is your only salvation." But that is like telling a dwarf that it is his only salvation to be six feet high--it cannot be done by taking thought. No one can see more acutely and clearly, in more terrible and melancholy detail, than myself what one misses. Call it coldness, call it indifference, call it cowardice--the matter is not mended. If one is cold, one does not grow hot by pretending to perspire; if one is indifferent, one does not become enthusiastic by indulging in hollow rhetoric. If one is cowardly, one can only improve by facing