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

a spirit of ostentation, that their church might have a new and impressive front, partly in the spirit indicated by the hymn:


"Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee,
Repaid a thousand-fold will be"?


Was it an investment, so to speak, made for the sake of improving their spiritual prosperity?

It is very difficult to say. The monks in their earlier missionary times were full of enthusiasm and faith, no doubt. But when the Abbeys were at the full height of their prosperity, when they were vast landowners and the Abbot had his place in parliament, when the monastic life was a career for an ambitious man, was the spirit of the place a pure and holy one? That they submitted themselves to a severe routine of worship does not go for very, much, because men very easily accommodate themselves to a traditional and a conventional routine.

And thus one is half inclined to believe that the spirit of the monks in their prosperous days was not very different from the spirit that prompts railway extension, and that builds a railway terminus with an ornamental facade.

And so when one sees prosperity spreading wider and lower, and the neat villa residences begin to cluster round the knot of ancient buildings, we must not conclude too hastily that our new wealth has swamped ancient ideals; probably the ideals of prosperous people do not vary very much, whether they are monks or railway officials. The monks in their decadent days have no abounding reputation for virtue or austerity. One likes to think of them as lost in splendid dreams of God's glory and man's holiness, but there is little to show that such was the case.

I do not want to decry the ideas of the monks in order to magnify our modern middle-class ideals. I do not for a moment pretend to think that our national ideals are very exalted ones nowadays. I wish I could believe it; but there is no sign of any particular interest in religion or cultivation or art or literature or romance. We have a certain patriotism, of a somewhat commercial type; we have a belief in our honesty, not, I fear, wholly well-founded. We claim to be plain people who speak our mind; which very often does not mean more than that we do not take the trouble to be polite; we should all say that we valued liberty, which means little more than that we resent interference, and like to do things in our own way. But I do not think that we are at present a noble-minded or an unselfish nation, though we are rich and successful, and have the good humour that comes of wealth and success.

Peterborough is to me a parable of England; it stands for a certain pride in antiquity, coupled with a good-natured contempt for the religious spirit--for, though these cathedrals of ours are well cared for and well-served, no one can say that they have any very deep influence on national life. And it stands, too, for the thing that we do believe in with all our hearts--trim, comfortable material prosperity; a thing which bewilders a dreamer like myself, because it seems to be the deliberate gift and leading of God to our country, while all the time I long to believe that he is pointing us to a far different hope, and a very much quieter and simpler ideal. How little we make of Christ's blessing on poverty, on simplicity, on tenderness! How ready we are to say that his strong words about the dangers of wealth were only counsels given to individuals! The deepest article of our creed, that a man must make his way, fight for his own hand, elbow himself to the front if he can--how little akin that is to the essential spirit of Christ, by which a man ought to lavish himself for others, and quit the world poorer than he entered it!

I turn again into the great, shadowy, faintly lit church, with all its interlaced arches, its colour, its richness of form; I see the figures of venerable, white-robed clergy in their tabernacled stalls, a--little handful of leisurely worshippers. The organ rises pouring sweet music from its forest of pipes. Hark to what they are singing to the rich blending of artful melodies:--

"He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things; but the rich He hath sent empty away."

What a message to thrill through this palace of art, with the pleasant town without, and all the great trains thundering past! To whom is it all addressed? The spirit of that meek religion seems to sit shivering in its gorgeous raiment, heard and heeded of none. Yet here as everywhere there are quiet hearts that know the secret; there are patient women, kind fathers, loving children, who would think it strange and false if they were told that over their heads hangs the bright aureole of the saints. What can we do, we who struggle faintly on our pilgrimage, haunted and misled by hovering delusions, phantoms of wealth and prosperity and luxury, that hide the narrow path from our bewildered eyes? We can but resolve to be simple and faithful and pure and loving, and to trust ourselves as implicitly as we can to the Father who made us, redeemed us, and loves us better than we love ourselves.


LV


I have had a fortnight of perfect weather here--the meteorologists call it by the horrible and ugly name of "anticyclone," which suggests, even more than the word "cyclone" suggests, the strange weather said by the Psalmist to be in store for the unrighteous--"Upon the ungodly he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, storm and tempest." I have often wondered what the fields would look like after a rain of snares! The word "cyclone" by itself suggests a ghastly whorl of high vapours, and the addition of "anti" seems to make it even more hostile. But an anticyclone in the springtime is the opening of a door into paradise. Day after day the fields have lain calm beneath a cool and tranquil sun, with a light breeze shifting from point to point in the compass. Day after day I have swept along the great fen-roads, descending from my little hill-range into the flat. Day by day I have steered slowly across the gigantic plains, with the far-off farms to left and right across acres of dark plough-land, rising in dust from the feet of horses dragging a harrow. Every now and then one crosses a great dyke, a sapphire streak of calm water between green flood-banks, running as straight as a line from horizon to horizon. One sweeps through a pretty village at long intervals, with its comfortable yellow-brick houses, and an old church standing up grey in the sun. It was on a day always to be marked with letters of gold in my calendar that I found the house of Bellasyze in a village in the fen. Imagine a great red-brick wall running along by the high road, with a pair of huge gate-posts in the centre, with big stone wyverns on the top. Inside, a little park of ancient trees, standing up among grass golden with buttercups. A quarter of a mile away in the park, an incredibly picturesque house of red brick, with an ancient turreted gate-house, innumerable brick chimney-stacks, gables, mullioned windows, and oriels, rising from great sprawling box-trees and yews. By a stroke of fortune, the young kindly squire was coming out at the gate as I stood gazing, and asked me if I would care to look round. He led me up to the gate-house, and then into a great hall, with vast doors of oak, flagged with stone. "There is our ugliest story!" he said, pointing to the flags. I do not profess to explain what I saw; but there was in one place a stain looking like dark blood just sopped up; and close by, outlined in a damp dimness, the rough form of a human body with outstretched arms, just as though a warm corpse had been lying on the cold stones. "That was where the young heir was killed by his father," said the squire; "his blood fell down here--he was stabbed in the back--and he stumbled a pace or two and fell; we can't scrub it out or dry it out." "I suppose you are haunted?" I said. He laughed. "Well,-it is a great convenience," he said. "I only live here in the summer; I have a little house which is more convenient in the winter, a little distance away. I can never get a caretaker here for the winter--but, bless you, if I left every door and window open, there is not a soul in the place that would come near it!" He led me through ranges of rooms panelled, recessed, orieled--there were staircases, turret-chambers, galleries in every direction. I think there must have been nearly fifty rooms in the house, perhaps half-a-dozen of them inhabited. At one place he bade me look out of a little window, and I saw below a small court with an ancient chapel on the left, the windows bricked up. It had a sinister and wicked air, somehow. The squire told me that they had unearthed a dozen skeletons in that little yard as they were laying a drain, and had buried them in the neighbouring churchyard. But the back of the house was still more ravishing than the front; surrounded by great brick walls, curving outwards, lay a grassy garden, with huge box-trees at the sides, and in the centre many ancient apple-trees in full bloom. The place was bright with carelessly ordered flowers; and behind, the ground fell a little to some great pools full of sedge, some tumbled grassy hillocks covered with blackthorns, and a little wood red with buds and full of birds, called by the delicious name of "My Lord's Wood." The great flat stretched for miles round.

One of the singular charms of the place was that it had never undergone a restoration; it had only been carefully patched just as it needed it. I never saw a place so soaked with charm from end to end, its very wildness giving it a grace which trimness would have utterly destroyed. I stood for a while beside the pool, with a woodpecker laughing in the holt, to watch the long roofs and huddled chimneys rise above the white-flowered orchard. Perhaps in a stormy, rugged day of November it would be sad and mournful enough in its solitary pastures; but on this spring day, with the sun lying warm on the brickwork, it seemed to have a perfection of charm about it like the design of a mind intent upon devising as beautiful a thing as could be made. The old house seemed to have grown old and mellow like a rock or crag; to have sprung up out of the ground; and nature, working patiently with rain and sun and wind, drooping the stonecrop from the parapet, fringing the parapets with snapdragons and wallflowers, touching the old roofs with orange and grey lichens, had done the rest. No one shall learn from me where the House of Bellasyze lies; but I will revisit it spring by spring, like a hidden treasure of beauty.

The result of these perfect days, full of life and freshness, with all the loveliness and without the languors of spring, is to produce in me a perfectly inconsequent mood of happiness, which is better than any amount of philosophical consolation. The air, the breeze, the flying hour are all full of delight. Everything is touched with a fine savour and quality, whether it be the wide