From a College Window, Arthur Christopher Benson [best novels to read for beginners TXT] 📗

are talkers; and I am not sure that that is not even worse, because they generally discourse on their own subjects with profound and serious conviction. They have no power of conversation, because they are not interested in any one else's point of view; they care no more who their companions are, than a pump cares what sort of a vessel is put under it--they only demand that people should listen in silence. I remember not long ago meeting one of the species, in this case an antiquarian. He discoursed continuously, with a hard eye, fixed as a rule upon the table, about the antiquities of the neighbourhood. I was on one side of him, and was far too much crushed to attempt resistance. I ate and drank mechanically; I said "Yes" and "Very interesting" at intervals; and the only ray of hope upon the horizon was that the hands of the clock upon the mantelpiece did undoubtedly move, though they moved with leaden slowness. On the other side of the savant was a lively talker, Matthews by name, who grew very restive under the process. The great man had selected Dorchester as his theme, because he had unhappily discovered that I had recently visited it. My friend Matthews, who had been included in the audience, made desperate attempts to escape; and once, seeing that I was fairly grappled, began a conversation with his next neighbour. But the antiquary was not to be put off. He stopped, and looked at Matthews with a relentless eye. "Matthews," he said, "MATTHEWS!" raising his voice. Matthews looked round. "I was saying that Dorchester was a very interesting place." Matthews made no further attempt to escape, and resigned himself to his fate.

Such men as the antiquary are certainly very happy people; they are absorbed in their subject, and consider it to be of immense importance. I suppose that their lives are, in a sense, well spent, and that the world is in a way the gainer by their labours. My friend the antiquary has certainly, according to his own account, proved that certain ancient earthworks near Dorchester are of a date at least five hundred years anterior to the received date. It took him a year or two to find out, and I suppose that the human race has benefited in some way or other by the conclusion; but, on the other hand, the antiquary seems to miss all the best things of life. If life is an educative process, people who have lived and loved, who have smiled and suffered, who have perceived beautiful things, who have felt the rapturous and bewildering mysteries of the world--well, they have learnt something of the mind of God, and, when they close their eyes upon the world, take with them an alert, a hopeful, an inquisitive, an ardent spirit, into whatever may be the next act of the drama; but my friend the antiquary, when he crosses the threshold of the unseen, when he is questioned as to what has been his relation to life, will have seen and perceived, and learnt nothing, except the date of the Dorchester earthworks, and similar monuments of history.

And of all the shifting pageant of life, by far the most interesting and exquisite part is our relations with the other souls who are bound on the same pilgrimage. One desires ardently to know what other people feel about it all--what their points of view are, what their motives are, what are the data on which they form their opinions--so that to cut off the discussion of other personalities, on ethical grounds, is like any other stiff and Puritanical attempt to limit interests, to circumscribe experience, to maim life. The criticism, then, or the discussion, of other people is not so much a CAUSE of interest in life, as a SIGN of it; it is no more to be suppressed by codes or edicts than any other form of temperamental activity. It is no more necessary to justify the habit, than it is necessary to give good reasons for eating or for breathing; the only thing that it is advisable to do, is to lay down certain rules about it, and prescribe certain methods of practising it. The people who do not desire to discuss others, or who disapprove of doing it, may be pronounced to be, as a rule, either stupid, or egotistical, or Pharisaical; and sometimes they are all three. The only principle to bear in mind is the principle of justice. If a man discusses others spitefully or malevolently, with the sole intention of either extracting amusement out of their foibles, or with the still more odious intention of emphasizing his own virtues by discovering the weakness of others, or with the cynical desire--which is perhaps the lowest of all--of proving the whole business of human life to be a vile and sordid spectacle, then he may be frankly disapproved of, and if possible avoided; but if a man takes a generous view of humanity, if he admires what is large and noble, if he gives full credit for kindliness, strength, usefulness, vigour, sympathy, then his humorous perception of faults and deficiencies, of whims and mannerisms, of prejudices and unreasonablenesses, will have nothing that is hard or bitter about it. For the truth is that, if we are sure that a man is generous and just, his little mannerisms, his fads, his ways, are what mostly endear him to us. The man of lavish liberality is all the more lovable if he has an intense dislike to cutting the string of a parcel, and loves to fill his drawers with little hanks of twine, the untying of which stands for many wasted hours. If we know a man to be simple-minded, forbearing, and conscientious, we like him all the better when he tells for the fiftieth time an ancient story, prefacing it by anxious inquiries, which are smilingly rebutted, as to whether any of his hearers have ever heard the anecdote before.

But we must not let this tendency, to take a man in his entirety, to love him as he is, carry us too far; we must be careful that the foibles that endear him to us are in themselves innocent.

There is one particular form of priggishness, in this matter of criticism of others, which is apt to beset literary people, and more especially at a time when it seems to be considered by many writers that the first duty of a critic--they would probably call him an artist for the sake of the associations--is to get rid of all sense of right and wrong. I was reading the other day a sensible and appreciative review of Mr. Lucas's new biography of Charles Lamb. The reviewer quoted with cordial praise Mr. Lucas's remark--referring, of course, to the gin-and-water, which casts, I fear, in my own narrow view, something of a sordid shadow over Lamb's otherwise innocent life--"A man must be very secure in his own righteousness who would pass condemnatory judgment upon Charles Lamb's only weakness." I do not myself think this a sound criticism. We ought not to abstain from condemning the weakness, we must abstain from condemning Charles Lamb. His beautiful virtues, his tenderness, his extraordinary sweetness and purity of nature, far outweigh this weakness. But what are we to do? Are we to ignore, to condone, to praise the habit? Are we to think the better of Charles Lamb and love him more because he tippled? Would he not have been more lovable without it?

And the fact that one may be conscious of similar faults and moral weaknesses, ought not to make one more, but less, indulgent to such a fault when we see it in a beautiful nature. The fault in question is no more in itself adorable, than it is in another man who does not possess Lamb's genius.

We have a perfect right--nay, we do well--to condemn in others faults which we frankly condemn in ourselves. It does not help on the world if we go about everywhere slobbering with forgiveness and affection; it is the most mawkish sentimentality to love people in such a way that we condone grave faults in them; and to condone a fault because a man is great, when we condemn it if he is not great, is only a species of snobbishness. It is right to compassionate sinners, to find excuse for the faults of every one but ourselves; but we ought not to love so foolishly and irrationally, that we cannot even bring ourselves to wish our hero's faults away.

I confess to feeling the most minute and detailed interest in the smallest matters connected with other people's lives and idiosyncrasies. I cannot bear biographies of the dignified order, which do not condescend to give what are called personal details, but confine themselves to matters of undoubted importance. When I have finished reading such books I feel as if I had been reading The Statesman's Year-book, or The Annual Register. I have no mental picture of the hero; he is merely like one of those bronze statues, in frockcoat and trousers, that decorate our London squares.

I was reading, the other day, an ecclesiastical biography. The subject of it, a high dignitary of the Church, had attended the funeral of one of his episcopal colleagues, with whom he had had several technical controversies. On the evening of the day he wrote a very tender and beautiful account of the funeral in his diary, which is quoted at length: "How little," he wrote, "the sense of difference, and how strong my feeling of his power and solid sense; how little I care that he was wrong about the Discipline Bill, how much that he was so happy with us in the summer; how much that he was, as all the family told me, so 'devoted' to my Nellie!"

That is a thoroughly human statement, and preserves a due sense of proportion. In the presence of death it is the kindly human relations that matter more than policies and statesmanship.

And so it may be said, in conclusion, that we cannot taste the fulness of life, unless we can honestly say, Nihil humani a me alienum puto. If we grow absorbed in work, in business, in literature, in art, in policy, to the exclusion of the nearer human elements, we dock and maim our lives. We cannot solve the mystery of this difficult world; but we may be sure of this--that it is not for nothing that we are set in the midst of interests and relationships, of liking and loving, of tenderness and mirth, of sorrow and pain. If we are to get the most and the best out of life, we must not seclude ourselves from these things; and one of the nearest and simplest of duties is the perception of others' points of view, of sympathy, in no limited sense; and that sympathy we can only gain through looking at humanity in its wholeness. If we allow ourselves to be blinded by false conscience, by tradition, by stupidity, even by affection, from realizing what others are, we suffer, as we always suffer from any wilful blindness; indeed, wilful blindness is the most desperate of all faults, perhaps the only one that can hardly be condoned, because it argues a confidence in one's own opinion, a self-sufficiency, a self-estimation, which shut out, as by an opaque and sordid screen, the light of heaven from the soul.


XII


PRIESTS

I have been fortunate in the course of my life in knowing, more or less intimately, several eminent priests; and by this I do not mean necessarily eminent ecclesiastics; several famous ecclesiastics with whom circumstances have brought me into contact have not been priestly persons at all; they have been vigorous, wise, energetic, statesmanlike men, such