Beside Still Waters, Arthur Christopher Benson [good books for high schoolers .txt] 📗

own theory is in the least inconsistent with good citizenship. I have no admiration for the citizenship the end of which is to make a comfortable corner for oneself at the expense of others; I do not at all believe that every man of ideals is bound to take a part in the administration of the community. We can easily have too many administrators; and that ends in the dismal slough of municipal politics. After all, we must nowadays all be specialists, and a man has as much right to specialise in beauty as he has to specialise in Greek Grammar. In fact a specialist in Greek Grammar has as his ultimate view the clearer and nicer appreciation of the shades of Greek expression, and is merely serving a high ideal of mental refinement. It seems to me purely conventional to accept as valuable the work of a commentator on Sophocles, because it is traditionally respectable, and to say that a commentator on sunsets, as I once heard a poet described, is an effeminate dilettante. It is the motive that matters. Personally, I think that a man who has drifted into writing a commentary on Sophocles, because he happens to find that he can earn a living that way, is no more worthy of admiration than a man who earns his living by billiard-marking. Neither are necessary to the world. But the commentator and the billiard-marker are alike admirable, if they are working out a theory, if they think that thus and thus they can best help on the progress of the world._

"_My own desire is, so to speak, to be a commentator on life, in one particular aspect. I think the world would be all the better if there were a finer appreciation of what is noble and beautiful, a deeper discrimination of motives, a larger speculation as to the methods and objects of our pilgrimage. I think the coarseness of the intellectual and spiritual palate that prevails widely nowadays is not only a misfortune, I think it is of the nature of sin. If people could live more in the generous visions of poets, if they could be taught to see beauty in trees and fields and buildings, I think they would be happier and better. Most people are obliged to spend the solid hours of the day in necessary work. The more sordid that work is, the more advisable it is to cultivate a perception of the quality of things. Every one has hours of recreation in every day; the more such hours are filled with pleasant, simple, hopeful, beautiful thoughts, the better for us all._

"_Of course I may be quite wrong; I may be meant to find out my mistake; but I seem to discern in the teaching of Christ a desire to make men see the true values of life, to appreciate what is beautiful and tender in simple lives and homely relationships. The teaching of Christ seems to me to be uniquely and essentially poetical, and to point to the fact that the up-lifting of the human heart in admiration, hope, and love, is the cure for some, at least, of our manifold ills. That is my own theory of life, and I do not see that it is effeminate, or even unpractical; and it is a mere caricature of it to call it Epicurean. What does complicate life is the feeble acceptance of conventional views, the doing of things, not because one hopes for happiness out of them, not even because one likes them, but because one sees other people doing them. Even in the most sheltered existence, like my own, there are plenty of things which provide a bracing tonic against self-satisfaction. There are the criticism and disapproval of others, contempt, hostility; there are illness, and sorrow, and the fear of death. No one of a sensitive nature can hope to live an untroubled life; but to court unhappiness for the sake of its tonic qualities seems to me no more reasonable than to refuse an anaesthetic on the ground that it is interfering with natural processes._

"_I don't know that I expect to convert you; but at least I am glad to make my position clear. I don't assume that I am in the right. I only know that I am trying to do what appears to me to be right, trying to simplify the issues of life, to unravel the tangle in which so many people seem to me to acquiesce helplessly and timidly._"


XXXVI

The Mill--The Stream's Pilgrimage

There were days, of course, when Hugh's reflections took an irrepressibly optimistic turn. Such was a bright day in the late summer, when the sun shone with a temperate clearness, and big white clouds, like fragments torn from some aerial pack of cotton-wool, moved blithely in the sky. Hugh rode--he was staying at his mother's house--to a little village perched astride on a great ridge. He diverged from the road to visit the ancient church, built of massive stone and roofed with big stone-tiles; up there, swept by strong winds, splashed by fierce rains, it had grown to look like a crag rather than a building. By the side of it ran a little, steep, narrow lane, which he had never explored; he rode cautiously down the stony track, among thick hazel copses; occasionally, through a gap, he had a view of a great valley, all wild with wood; once or twice he passed a timbered farmhouse, with tall brick chimneys. The country round about was much invaded by new, pert houses, but there were none here; and Hugh supposed that this road, which seemed the only track into the valley, was of so forbidding a steepness that it had not occurred to any one to settle there. The road became more and more precipitous, and at the very bottom, having descended nearly three hundred feet, Hugh found himself in a very beautiful place. He thought he had never seen anything more sweetly, more characteristically English. On one side was a rough field, encircled by forest on all sides; here stood some old wooden sheds and byres; and one or two green rides passed glimmering into the thick copse, with a charming air of mystery, as though they led to some sequestered woodland paradise. To the right was a mill, with a great pond thick with bulrushes and water-lilies, full of water-birds, coots and moorhens, which swam about, uttering plaintive cries. The mill was of wood, the planks warped and weather-stained, the tiled root covered with mosses; the mill-house itself was a quaint brick building, with a pretty garden, full of old-fashioned flowers, sloping down to the pool; a big flight of pigeons circled round and round in the breeze, turning with a sudden clatter of wings; behind the house were small sandstone bluffs, fringed with feathery ashes, and the wood ran up steeply above into the sky. It looked like an old steel-engraving, like a picture by Morland or Constable. The blue smoke went up from the chimneys in that sheltered nook, rising straight into the air, lending a rich colour to the trees behind. Hugh thought it would be a beautiful place to live in, so remote from the world, in that still valley, where the only sound was the wind in the copses, the trickle of the mill-leat, and the slow thunder of the dripping wheel within. Yet he supposed that the simple people who lived there were probably unconscious of its beauty, and only aware that the roads which led to the spot were inconveniently steep. Still, it was hard to think that the charm of the place would not pass insensibly into the hearts, perhaps even into the faces, of the dwellers there.

He stood for a little to see the bright water leaping clear and fresh from the sluice. There was a delicious scent of cool river-plants everywhere. It was hard not to think that the stream, bickering out in the sun from the still pool, had a sense of joy and delight. It was passing, passing; Hugh could trace in thought every mile of the way; down the wooded valley it was bound, running over the brown gravel, by shady wood-ends and pasture-sides; then it would pass out into the plain, and run, a full and brimming stream, between high sandy banks, half hidden by the thick, glossy-leaved alders. Hugh knew the broad water-meadows down below, with the low hills on either side, where big water-plants grew in marshy places, and where the cattle moved slowly about through the still hours. Soon the stream would be running by the great downs--it was a river now, bearing boats upon it--till it passed by the wharves and beneath the bridges of the little town, and out into the great sea-flat, meeting, with how strange a wonder, the upward-creeping briny tide, with its sharp savours and its wholesome smell; till it flowed at last by the docks, where the big steamers lay unlading, blowing their loud sea-horns, past weed-fringed piers and shingly beaches, until it was mingled with the moving deep, where the waves ran higher on the blue sea-line, and the great buoy rolled and dipped above the shoal.

And then, perhaps, it would be drawn up again in twisted wreaths of mist, rising in vapour beneath the breathless sun, to float back, perhaps, in clouds over the earth, and begin its little pilgrimage again.

Was the same true, he wondered, of himself, of everything about him? Was it all a never-ending, an unwearying pilgrimage? Was death itself but the merging of the atom in the element, and then, perhaps, the race began again? On such a day as this, of bright sun and eager air, it seemed sweet to think that it was even so. This soul-stuff, that one called oneself, wafted out of the unknown, strangely entangled with the bodily elements, would it perhaps mingle again with earthly conditions, borne round and round in an endless progression? Yet, if this was so, why did one seem, not part of the world, but a thing so wholly distinct and individual? To-day, indeed, Hugh seemed to be akin to the earth, and felt as though all that breathed or moved and lived had a brotherly, a sisterly greeting for him. As he moved slowly on up the steep road, a child playing by the wayside, encouraged perhaps by a loving brightness that rose from Hugh's heart into his face, nodded and smiled to him shyly. Hugh smiled back, and waved his hand. That childish smile came to him as a confirmation of his blithe mood; there were others, then, bound on the same pilgrimage as himself, who wished him well, and shared his happiness. To pass thus smiling through the world, heedless as far as might be of weariness and sorrow, taking the simple joys that flowed so freely, if only one divested oneself of the hard and dull ambitions that made life into a struggle and a contest--that was, perhaps, the secret! There would be days, no doubt, of gloom and heaviness; days when life would run, like the stream which he could hear murmuring below him, through dark coverts, dripping with rain; days of frost, when nature was leafless and benumbed, and when the rut was barred with icy spikes. But one could live in hope and faith, waiting for the summer days, when life ran swift and bright; under a pale sunset sky, till the streaks of crimson light died into a transparent green; and the stream ran joyfully,