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

by people who are really in search of sensation, who yet profess to be approaching the question in a scientific spirit of inquiry. I enjoy a good ghost story as much as any one; and I am interested, too, in hearing the philosophical conclusions of earnest-minded people; but to hear the question discussed, as one so often hears it, with a pretentious attempt to treat it scientifically, by people who, like the White Queen in Through the Looking-glass, find it pleasant to train themselves to believe a dozen impossible things before breakfast, afflicts me with a deep mental and moral nausea.

One, at least, of the patient investigators of this accumulated mass of human delusion, took up the quest in the hope that he might receive scientific evidence of the continued existence of identity. He was forced to confess that the evidence went all the other way, and that all the tales which appeared to substantiate the fact, were hopelessly discredited. The only thing, as I have said, that the investigations seem to have substantiated, is evidence which none but a determinedly sceptical mind would disallow, that there does exist, in certain abnormal cases, a possibility of direct communication between two or more living minds.

But, as I pondered thus, the day began to darken over the rough pasture with its ruined wall, and I felt creeping upon me that old inheritance of humanity, that terror in the presence of the unseen, which sets the mind at work, distorting and exaggerating the impressions of eye and ear. How easy, in such a mood, to grow tense and expectant--


"Till sight and hearing ache
For something that may keep
The awful inner sense
Unroused, lest it should mark
The life that haunts the emptiness
And horror of the dark."


Face to face with the impenetrable mystery, with the thought of those whom we have loved, who have slipped without a word or a sign over the dark threshold, what wonder if we beat with unavailing hands against the closed door? It would be strange if we did not, for we too must some day enter in; well, the souls of all those who have died, alike those whom we have loved, and the spirits of those old Romans whose mortal bodies melted into smoke year after year in the little enclosure into which I look, know whatever there is to know. That is a stern and dreadful truth; the secret is impenetrably sealed from us; but, "though the heart ache to contemplate it, it is there."


XVII


HABITS

Walter Pater says, in his most oracular mood, in that fine manifesto of a lofty Epicureanism which is known as the Conclusion to the Renaissance essays, that to form habits is failure in life. The difficulty in uttering oracles is that one is obliged for the sake of being forcible to reduce a statement to its simplest terms; and when one does that, there are generally a whole group of cases which appear to be covered by the statement, which contradict it. It is nearly impossible to make any general statement both simple enough and large enough. In the case of Pater's pronouncement, he had fixed his mental gaze so firmly on a particular phenomenon, that he forgot that his words might prove misleading when applied to the facts of life. What he meant, no doubt, was that one of the commonest of mental dangers is to form intellectual and moral prejudices early in life, and so to stereotype them that we are unable to look round them, or to give anything that we instinctively dislike a fair trial. Most people in fact, in matters of opinion, tend to get infected with a species of Toryism by the time that they reach middle age, until they get into the frame of mind which Montaigne describes, of thinking so highly of their own conjectures as to be prepared to burn other people for not regarding them as certainties. This frame of mind is much to be reprobated, but it is unhappily common. How often does one meet sensible, shrewd, and intelligent men, who say frankly that they are not prepared to listen to any evidence which tells against their beliefs. How rare it is to meet a man who in the course of an argument will say, "Well, I had never thought of that before; it must be taken into account, and it modifies my view." Such an attitude is looked upon by active-minded and energetic men as having something weak and even sentimental about it. How common it is to hear people say that a man ought to have the courage of his opinions; how rare it is to find a man who will say that one ought to have the courage to change one's opinions. Indeed, in public life it is generally considered a kind of treachery to change, because people value what they call loyalty above truth. Pater no doubt meant that the duty and privilege of the philosopher is to keep his inner eye open to new impressions, to be ready to see beauty in new forms, not to love comfortable and settled ways, but to bring the same fresh apprehension that youth brings, to art and to life.

He is merely speaking of a mental process in these words; what he is condemning is the dulling and encrusting of the mind with prejudices and habits, the tendency, as Charles Lamb wittily said, whenever a new book comes out, to read an old one, to get into the fireside-and-slippers frame of mind, to grumble at novelty, to complain that the young men are violating all the sacred canons of faith and art.

This is not at all the same thing as knowing one's own limitations; every one, whether he be artist or writer, critic or practitioner, ought to take the measure of his forces, and to determine in what regions he can be effective; indeed it is often necessary for a man of artistic impulses to confine his energies to one specific department, although he may be attracted by several. Pater was himself an instance of this. He knew, for instance, that his dramatic sense was weak, and he wisely let drama alone; he found that certain vigorous writers exercised a contagious influence over his own style, and therefore he gave up reading them. But within his own region he endeavoured to be catholic and sympathetic; he never tied up the contents of his mind into packets and labelled them, a task which most men between thirty and forty find highly congenial.

But I desire here to go into the larger question of forming habits; and as a general rule it may be said that Pater's dictum is entirely untrue, and that success in life depends more upon forming habits than upon anything else, except good health. Indeed, Pater himself is an excellent instance in point. He achieved his large output of beautiful literary work, the amazing amount of perfectly finished and exquisitely expressed writing that he gave to the world, by an extreme and patient regularity of labour. He did not, as some writers do, have periods of energetic creation, interrupted by periods of fallow idleness. Perhaps his work might have been more spontaneous if he could, like Milton's friend, have been wise enough "of such delights to judge, and interpose them oft." But the achievement of Pater was to realize and to carry out his own individual method, and it is upon doing this that successful productivity depends.

I could name, if I chose, two or three friends of my own, men of high and subtle intelligence, admirable humour, undiminished zest, who have failed, and will fail, to realize their possibilities, simply by a lack of method. Who does not know the men whom Mr. Mallock so wittily describes, of whom, up to the age of forty, their friends say that they could do anything if they only chose, and after the age of forty that they could have done anything if they had chosen? I have one particular friend in my eye at this moment, the possessor of wealth and leisure, who is a born writer if any man ever was. He has no particular duties, except the duties of a small landowner and the father of a family; he is a wide reader, and a critic of delicate and sympathetic acuteness. He is bent on writing; and he has written a single book crammed from end to end with good and beautiful things, the stuff of which would have sufficed, in the hands of a facile writer, for half-a-dozen excellent books. He is, moreover, sincerely anxious to write, but he does nothing. If you ask him--and I conceive it to be my duty at intervals to chide him for not producing more--what he does with his time, he says with a melancholy smile: "Oh, I hardly know: it goes!" I trace his failure to produce, simply to the fact that he has never set apart any particular portion of the day for writing; he allows himself to be interrupted; he entertains many guests whom he has no particular wish to see; he "sets around and looks ornery," like the frog; he talks delightfully; an industrious Boswell could, by asking him questions and taking careful notes of his talk, fill a charming volume in a month out of his shrewd and suggestive conversation; of course it is possible to say that he practises the art of living, to talk of "gems of purest ray serene" and flowers "born to blush unseen" and all the rest of it. But his talk streams to waste among guests who do not as a rule appreciate it; and if there is any duty or responsibility in the world at all, it is a duty for men of great endowments, admirable humour, and poetical suggestiveness, to sow the seed of the mind freely and lavishly. We English are of course the chosen race; but we should be none the worse for a little more intellectual apprehension, a little more amiable charm. If my friend had been a professional man, obliged to earn a living by his pen, he would, I do not doubt, have given to the world a series of great books, which would have done something to spread the influence of the kingdom of heaven.

Of course there is a sense in which it is a mistake to let habits become too tyrannical; one ought not to find oneself hopelessly distracted and irritated if one's daily programme is interfered with at any point; one ought to be able to enjoy leisure, to pay visits, to converse volubly. Like Dr. Johnson, one ought to be ready for a frolic. But, on the other hand, if a man takes himself seriously--and I am here not speaking of people with definite engagements, but of people, like writers and artists, who may choose their own times to do their work--he ought to have a regular though not an invariable programme. If he is possessed of such superabundant energy as Walter Scott possessed, he may rise at five, and write ten immortal octavo pages before he appears at breakfast. But as a rule the vitality of ordinary people is more limited, and they are bound to husband it, if they mean to do anything that is worth the name; an artist then ought to have his sacred hours, secure from interruption; and then, let him fill the rest of the day with any amusement that he finds to be congenial.

Of course the thing is easy enough if one's work is really the thing in which one is most interested. There is very little danger, in the case of a man