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

we make is to anchor ourselves timidly and persistently to one set of beautiful forms, and if they are destroyed, to feel that the world is made desolate for us. We are apt to think that there is a sort of loyalty about this, and that an ineffectual repining for the beautiful thing that has passed proves the intensity of our regard and love. It is not so; we might as well repine if we have loved a child, to find it growing up to strength and manhood. Because we have loved the rosebud, we need not despise the rose, and when the child loses its tender charm, when the rose drops her loosened petals on the grass, our love is a mere sentiment, an aesthetic appreciation, if we can only regret what is past. It is the fragrant charm, the echoing harmony of the spirit that matters; and if the charm passes out of our ken, if the song dies upon the air, if the sunset hue fades, it is all there none the less, both the beauty and the love we bore it. I do not mean that the conquest is an easy one, because our perceptions are so narrow and so finite that when the sweet sound or the delicate light passes out of our horizon, it is hard to feel that it is not dead. But we ought, I am sure, to remind ourselves more constantly that both the quality of beauty itself and the desirous love that it evokes are the unchangeable things; and that though they shift and fuse, ebb and flow, they are assuredly there. "When they persecute you in one city, flee into another," said the Saviour of men in a dim allegory. It is true of all things; and the secret is to realise that we have no continuing city. Of course there sometimes fall shattering blows upon us, when someone who was half the world to us, on whom we have leant and depended, whose mind and heart have cast a glow of hope and comfort upon every detail of life, steps past the veil into the unseen. Then comes the darkest hour of struggling bewilderment; but even then we make a miserable mistake, if we withdraw into the silence of our own hearts and refuse to be comforted, priding ourselves, it may be, upon the abiding faithfulness of our love. But to yield to that is treachery; and then, most of all, we ought to stretch out our hands to all about us and welcome every gift of love. It is impossible not to suffer, yet we are perhaps but tenderly punished for having loved the image better than the thing it signified. We are punished because our idolising love has rested content with the form that it has borne, and has not gone further and deeper into the love which it typified.

What we have to beware of is a timid and cautious loitering in the little experience we have ourselves selected, in the little garden we have fenced off from the plain and the wood. And thus the old house that I loved in my pleasant youth, the good days that I spent there year by year, are an earnest of the tender care that surrounds me. I will not regard them as past and gone; I will rather regard them as the slow sweet prelude of the great symphony; if I am now tossed upon the melancholy and broken waves of some vehement scherzo of life, the subject is but working itself out, and I will strive to apprehend it even here. There are other movements that await me, as wonderful, as sweet.

"And now that it is all over," said an old, wearied, and dying statesman, after a day of sad farewells, "it is not so bad after all." The terror, the disquietude, is not in the thing suffered, but in our own faithless hearts. But if we look back at the past and see how portion after portion has become dear and beautiful, can we not look forward with a more steadfast tranquillity and believe that the love and beauty are all there waiting for us, though the old light seems to have been withdrawn?


XVII


What a strange, illusory power memory has in dealing with the past, of creating a scene and an emotion that not only never existed, but that could not possibly ever have existed. When I look back to my own commonplace, ordinary, straightforward boyhood, wrapped up in tiny ambitions, vexed with trivial cares, full of trifling events, with a constant sense of small dissatisfaction, I am amazed at the colours with which memory tints the scene. She selects a few golden hours, scenes of peculiar and instantaneous radiance, when the old towers and trees were touched with a fine sunshine, when the sky was unclouded, the heart light, and when one lived for a moment in a sense of some romance of ambition or friendship; and she bids one believe that all one's boyhood was thus bright and goodly, although one knows in one's heart that the texture of it was often mean, pitiful, and selfish; though reason at the same time overwhelms one with reproach and shame for not having made a brighter and braver thing of it, when all the conditions were so favourable.

It is so too with pathos--that pathos which centres so firmly upon the smallest details, and neglects the larger sadnesses. I had so curious an instance of this the other day that I cannot refrain from telling it, because I suppose it can hardly ever have happened to anyone before.

I have an old friend who lives by himself in London, where I sometimes visit him. He is a studious, unmethodical, untidy man. His rooms are dusty and neglected, and he is quite unaware of his surroundings. By his favourite arm-chair stands a table covered with papers, books, cigar-boxes, paper-knives, pencils, in horrible confusion; a condition of things which causes him great discomfort and frequent loss of time. I have often exhorted him to sort the mess; he has always smilingly undertaken to do so, but has never succeeded.

A few weeks ago I called to see him; the servant who let me in, whose face was new to me, looked very grave; and when I asked if my friend was in, turned pale and said: "I suppose you do not know what has happened, sir--Mr. A---- died yesterday at Brighton. I think that Mr. B----" (naming the owner of the house, who lets lodgings) "can tell you all about it--will you go upstairs? I will tell him you are here."

I went up: the sun was streaming into the room, with its well-known furniture and pictures, shabby and yet somehow home-like. There was the familiar table, with all its litter. I was stunned with the news, unable to realise it; and the sight of the table, with all the customary details in the old disorder, fairly unmanned me; so it was all over and done with, and my friend was gone without a word or sign.

I heard rapid steps along the passage; Mr. B----, the owner of the house, entered with an apologetic smile. "I am afraid that there has been a mistake, sir," he said. "Mr. A---- is not dead, as the servant informed you; it is the gentleman who lives on the floor above, who has been an invalid for some time, who is dead; the servant is new to the place, and has made a confusion; we only had a wire a few minutes ago. Mr. A---- is perfectly well, and will be in in a few minutes if you will wait"

I waited, in a strange revulsion of spirit; but the most singular thing is that the crowded table, which had been a few minutes before the most pathetic thing in the world, had become by the time that A---- entered smiling, as irritating and annoying as ever; changed from the poor table where his earthly litter had accumulated, which he could touch no more for ever, into the table which he ought to have put straight long ago and should be ashamed of leaving in so vile a condition.


XVIII


I have had a night of strange and terror-haunted dreams. Yesterday I was forced to work at full speed, feverishly and furiously for a great many hours, at a piece of work that admitted of no delay. By the evening I was considerably exhausted, yet the work was not done. I slept for an hour, and then settled down again and worked very late in the night, until it was finished. Such a strain cannot be borne with impunity, and I never do such a thing except under pressure of absolute necessity. I suppose that I contrived to inflame some delicate tissue of the brain, as the result was a series of intensely vivid dreams, with a strange quality of horror about them. It was not so much that the incidents themselves were of a dreadful type, but I was overshadowed by a deep boding, a dull ache of the mind, which charged everything that I saw with a sense of fortuitous dismay. I woke in that painful mood in which the mind is filled with a formless dread; and the sensation has hung about me, more or less, all day.

What a strange phenomenon it is that the sick mind should be able thus to paint its diseased fancies in the dark, and then to be dismayed at its own creations. In one of my dreams, for instance, I seemed to wander in the bare and silent corridors of a great house. I passed a small and sinister door, and was impelled to open it. I found myself in a large oak-panelled room, with small barred windows admitting a sickly light. The floor was paved with stone; and in the centre, built into the pavement, stood a large block of basalt, black and smooth, which was roughly carved into the semblance of a gigantic human head. I stared at this for a long time, and then swiftly withdrew, overcome with horror which I could not translate into words. All that I seemed to know was that some kind of shocking rites were here celebrated: I did not know what they were, and there were no signs of anything; no instruments of death, no trace of slaughter; yet for all that I knew that the place stood for some evil mystery, and the very walls and floor seemed soaked with fear and pain.

That is the inexplicable part of dreams, that one should invent incidents and scenes of every kind, with no sense of invention or creation, with no feeling that one is able to control what one appears to hear or see; and then that in some other part of one's mind, one should be moved and stirred by the appropriate emotions awakened by word or sight. In waking hours one can be stirred, amused, grieved by the exercise of one's imagination, but one is aware that it is imagination, and one does not lose the sense of responsibility, the consciousness of creation.

It is this sensation, that dreams arise from some power or influence exterior to oneself, which them the significance which they used to possess, and indeed still possess, for the unreasoning mind. They seem communications from some other sphere of life, experiences external to oneself, messages from some hidden agency. When they correspond, as by coincidence they are almost bound on occasions to do, with some unforeseen and unexpected event that follows them, it is very difficult for unphilosophical minds not to believe that they are visions sent from some power that can foresee the future. It would be strange if dreams, trafficking