Escape and Other Essays
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Arthur Christopher Benson >> Escape and Other Essays
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13 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Escape
2. Literature and Life
3. The New Poets
4. Walt Whitman
5. Charm
6. Sunset
7. The House of Pengersick
8. Villages
9. Dreams
10. The Visitant
11. That Other One
12. Schooldays
13. Authorship
14. Herb Moly and Heartsease
15. Behold, This Dreamer Cometh
NOTE
I desire to recourd my obligations to the Editor of the Century
Magazine, and to the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine, for their
permission to include in this volume certain essays which appeared
first in their pages.
A. C. B.
INTRODUCTION
1
I walked to-day down by the river side. The Cam is a stream much
slighted by the lover of wild and romantic scenery; and its chief
merit, in the eyes of our boys, is that it approaches more nearly
to a canal in its straightness and the deliberation of its slow
lapse than many more famous floods--and is therefore more adapted
for the maneuvres of eight-oared boats! But it is a beautiful
place, I am sure; and my ghost will certainly walk there, "if our
loves remain," as Browning says, both for the sake of old memories
and for the love of its own sweet peaceableness. I passed out of
the town, out of the straggling suburbs, away from tall, puffing
chimneys, and under the clanking railway bridge; and then at once
the scene opens, wide pasture-lands on either side, and rows of old
willows, the gnarled trunks holding up their clustered rods. There
on the other side of the stream rises the charming village of Fen
Ditton, perched on a low ridge near the water, with church and
vicarage and irregular street, and the little red-gabled Hall
looking over its barns and stacks. More and more willows, and then,
lying back, an old grange, called Poplar Hall, among high-standing
trees; and then a little weir, where the falling water makes a
pleasant sound, and a black-timbered lock, with another old house
near by, a secluded retreat for the bishops of Ely in medieval
times. The bishop came thither by boat, no doubt, and abode there
for a few quiet weeks, when the sun lay hot over the plain; and a
little farther down is a tiny village called Horningsea, with a
battlemented church among orchards and thatched houses, with its
own disused wharf--a place which gives me the sense of a bygone age
as much as any hamlet I know. Then presently the interminable fen
stretches for miles and miles in every direction; you can see, from
the high green flood-banks of the river, the endless lines of
watercourses and far-off clumps of trees leagues away, and perhaps
the great tower of Ely, blue on the horizon, with the vast spacious
sky over-arching all. If that is not a beautiful place in its
width, its greenness, its unbroken silence, I do not know what
beauty is! Nothing that historians call an event has ever happened
there. It is a place that has just drifted out of the old lagoon
life of the past, the life of reed-beds and low-lying islands, of
marsh-fowl and fishes, into a hardly less peaceful life of
cornfield and pasture. No one goes there except on country
business, no armies ever marshalled or fought there. The sun goes
down in flame on the far horizon; the wild duck fly over and settle
in the pools, the flowers rise to life year by year on the edges of
slow watercourses; the calm mystery of it can be seen and
remembered; but it can hardly be told in words.
2
Now side by side with that I will set another picture of a
different kind.
A week or two ago I was travelling up North. The stations we passed
through were many of them full of troops, the trains were crammed
with soldiers, and very healthy and happy they looked. I was struck
by their friendliness and kindness; they were civil and modest;
they did not behave as if they were in possession of the line, as
actually I suppose they were, but as if they were ordinary
travellers, and anxious not to incommode other people. I saw
soldiers doing kind little offices, helping an old frail woman
carefully out of the train and handing out her baggage, giving
chocolates to children, interesting themselves in their fellow-
travellers. At one place I saw a proud and anxious father, himself
an old soldier, I think, seeing off a jolly young subaltern to the
front, with hardly suppressed tears; the young man was full of
excitement and delight, but did his best to cheer up the spirits of
"Daddy," as he fondly called him. I felt very proud of our
soldiers, their simplicity and kindness and real goodness. I was
glad to belong to the nation which had bred them, and half forgot
the grim business on which they were bent. We stopped at a
junction. And here I caught sight of a strange little group. There
was a young man, an officer, who had evidently been wounded; one of
his legs was encased in a surgical contrivance, and he had a
bandage round his head. He sat on a bench between two stalwart and
cheerful-looking soldiers, who had their arms round him, and were
each holding one of his hands. I could not see the officer clearly
at first, as a third soldier was standing close in front of him and
speaking encouragingly to him, while at the same time he sheltered
him from the crowd. But he moved away, and at the same moment the
young officer lifted his head, displaying a drawn and sunken face,
a brow compressed with pain, and looked wildly and in a terrified
way round him, with large melancholy eyes. Then he began to beat
his foot on the ground, and struggled to extricate himself from his
companions; and then he buried his head in his chest and sank down
in an attitude of angry despair. It was a sight that I cannot
forget.
Just before the train went off an officer got into my carriage, and
as we started, said to me, "That's a sad business there--it is a
young officer who was taken prisoner by the Germans--one of our
best men; he escaped, and after enduring awful hardships he got
into our lines, was wounded, and sent home to hospital; but the
shock and the anxiety preyed on his mind, and he has become, they
fear, hopelessly insane--he is being sent to a sanatorium, but I
fear there is very little chance of his recovery; he is wounded in
the head as well as the foot. He is a wealthy man, devoted to
soldiering, and he is just engaged to a charming girl . . ."
3
Now there is a hard and bitter fact of life, very different from
the story of the fenland. I am not going to argue about it or
discuss it, because to trace the threads of it back into life
entangles one at once helplessly in a dreadful series of problems:
namely, how it comes to pass that a calamity, grievous and
intolerable beyond all calamities in its pain and sorrow and waste,
a strife abhorred and dreaded by all who are concerned in it,
fruitful in every shade of misery and wretchedness, should yet have
come about so inevitably and relentlessly. No one claims to have
desired war; all alike plead that it is in self-defence that they
are fighting, and maintain that they have laboured incessantly for
peace. Yet the great mills of fate are turning, and grinding out
death and shame and loss. Everyone sickens for peace, and yet any
proposal of peace is drowned in cries of bitterness and rage. The
wisest spend their time in pointing out the blessings which the
conflict brings. The mother hears that the son she parted with in
strength and courage is mouldering in an unknown grave, and chokes
her tears down. The fruit of years of labour is consumed, lands are
laid desolate, the weak and innocent are wronged; yet the great
war-engine goes thundering and smashing on, leaving hatred and
horror behind it; and all the while men pray to a God of mercy and
loving-kindness and entreat His blessing on the work they are
doing.
Is there then, if we are confronted with such problems as these,
anything to do except to stay prostrate, like Job, in darkness and
despair, just enduring the stroke of sorrow? Is there any excuse
for bringing before the world at such a time as this the delightful
reveries, the easy happiness, the gentle schemes of serener and
less troubled days? The book which follows was the work of a time
which seems divided from the present by a dark stream of
unhappiness. Is it right, is it decent, to unfold an old picture of
peace before the eyes of those who have had to look into chaos and
destruction? Would it not be braver to burn the record of the
former things that have passed away? Or is it well to fix our gaze
firmly upon the peaceful things that have been and will be once
more?
4
Yes, I believe that it is right and wholesome to do this, because
the most treacherous and cowardly thing we can do is to disbelieve
in life. Those old dreams and visions were true enough, and they
will be true again. They represent the real life to which we must
try to return. We must try to build up the conception afresh, not
feebly to confess that we were all astray. We cannot abolish evil by
confessing ourselves worsted by it; we can only overcome it by
holding fast to our belief in labour and order and peace. It is a
temptation which we must resist, to philosophise too much about war.
Very few minds are large enough and clear enough to hold all the
problems in their grasp. I do not believe for an instant that war
has falsified our vision of peace. We must cling to it more than
ever, we must emphasize it, we must dwell in it. I regard war as I
regard an outbreak of pestilence; the best way to resist it is not
to brood over it, but to practise joy and health. The ancient
plagues which devastated Europe have not been overcome by philosophy,
but by the upspringing desire of men to live cleaner and more
wholesome lives. That instinct is not created by any philosophy or
persuasion; it just arises everywhere and finds its way to the
light.
To brood over the war, to spend our time in disentangling its
intricate causes, seems to me a task for future historians. But a
lover of peace, confronted by the hideousness of war, does best to
try, if he can, to make plain what he means by peace and why he
desires it. I do not mean by peace an indolent life, lost in gentle
reveries. I mean hard daily work, and mutual understanding, and
lavish help, and the effort to reassure and console and uplift. And
I mean, too, a real conflict--not a conflict where we set the best
and bravest of each nation to spill each other's blood--but a
conflict against crime and disease and selfishness and greediness
and cruelty. There is much fighting to be done; can we not combine
to fight our common foes, instead of weakening each other against
evil? We destroy in war our finest parental stock, we waste our
labour, we lose our garnered store; we give every harsh passion a
chance to grow; we live in the traditions of the past, and not in
the hopes of the future.
5
And yet there is one thing in the present war which I do in my
heart of hearts feel to be worth fighting for, and that is for the
hope of liberty. It is hard to say what liberty is, because the
essence of it is the subjugation of personal inclinations. The
Germans claim that they alone know the meaning of liberty, and that
they have arrived at it by discipline. But the bitterness of this
war lies in the fact that the Germans are not content to set an
example of attractive virtue, and to leave the world to choose it;
but that if the world will not choose it, they will force it upon
them by violence and the sword. It is this which makes me feel that
the war may be a vast protest of the nations, which have the spirit
of the future in their hearts, against a theory of life that
represents the spirit of the past. And I thus, with some seeming
inconsistency, believe that the war may represent the hope of peace
at bay. If the nations can keep this clearly before them, and not
be tempted either into reprisals, or into rewarding themselves by
the spoils of victory, if victory comes; if it ends in the Germans
being sincerely convinced that they have been misled and poisoned
by a conception of right which is both uncivilised and unchristian,
then I believe that all our sufferings may not be too great a price
to pay for the future well-being of the world. That is the largest
and brightest hope I dare to frame; and there are many hours and
days when it seems all clouded and dim.
6
We cannot at this time disengage our thoughts from the war; we
cannot, and we ought not. Still less can we take refuge from it in
idle dreams of peace and security; but at a time when every paper
and book that we see is full of the war and its sufferings, there
must be men and women who would do well to turn their hearts and
minds for a little away from it. If we brood over it, if we feed
our minds upon it, especially if we are by necessity non-
combatants, it is all apt to turn to a festering horror which makes
us useless and miserable. Whatever happens, we must try not to be
simply the worse for the war--morbid, hysterical, beggared of faith
and hope, horrified with life. That is the worst of evils; and I
believe that it is wholesome to put as far as we can our cramped
minds in easier postures, and to let our spirits have a wider
range. We know how a dog who is perpetually chained becomes fierce
and furious, and thinks of nothing but imaginary foes, so that the
most peaceful passer-by becomes an enemy. I have felt, since the
war began, a certain poison in the air, a tendency towards
suspicion and contentiousness and vague hostility. We must exorcise
that evil spirit if we can; and I believe it is best laid by
letting our minds go back to the old peace for a little, and
resolving that the new peace which we believe is coming shall be of
a larger and nobler quality; we may thus come to appreciate the
happiness which we enjoyed but had not earned; and lay our plans
for earning a new kind of happiness, the essence of which shall be
a mutual trust, that desires to give and share whatever it enjoys,
instead of hoarding it and guarding it.
A wise and unselfish woman wrote to me the other day in words which
will long live in my mind; she had sent out one whom she dearly
loved to the front, and she was fighting her fears as gallantly as
she could. "Whatever happens, we must not give way to dread," she
wrote. "It does not do to dread anything for our own treasures."
That is the secret! What we must not do, in the time of war, is to
indicate to everyone else what their sacrifices ought to be; we
must just make our own sacrifices; and perhaps the man who loves
and values peace most highly does not sacrifice the least. But even
he may try to realise that life does not contradict itself; but
that the parts of it, whether they be delightful or dreadful, do
work into each other in a marvellous way.
I
ESCAPE
All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality--the
story of an escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and
at all times--how to escape. The stories of Joseph, of Odysseus, of
the prodigal son, of the Pilgrim's Progress, of the "Ugly
Duckling," of Sintram, to name only a few out of a great number,
they are all stories of escapes. It is the same with all love-
stories. "The course of true love never can run smooth," says the
old proverb, and love-stories are but tales of a man or a woman's
escape from the desert of lovelessness into the citadel of love.
Even tragedies like those of OEdipus and Hamlet have the same
thought in the background. In the tale of OEdipus, the old blind
king in his tattered robe, who had committed in ignorance such
nameless crimes, leaves his two daughters and the attendants
standing below the old pear-tree and the marble tomb by the sacred
fountain; he says the last faint words of love, till the voice of
the god comes thrilling upon the air:
"OEdipus, why delayest thou?"
Then he walks away at once in silence, leaning on the arm of
Theseus, and when at last the watchers dare to look, they see
Theseus afar off, alone, screening his eyes with his hand, as if
some sight too dreadful for mortal eyes had passed before him; but
OEdipus is gone, and not with lamentation, but in hope and wonder.
Even when Hamlet dies, and the peal of ordnance is shot off, it is
to congratulate him upon his escape from unbearable woe; and that
is the same in life. If our eye falls on the sad stories of men and
women who have died by their own hand, how seldom do they speak in
the scrawled messages they leave behind them as though they were
going to silence and nothingness! It is just the other way. The
unhappy fathers and mothers who, maddened by disaster, kill their
children are hoping to escape with those they love best out of
miseries they cannot bear; they mean to fly together, as Lot fled
with his daughters from the city of the plain. The man who slays
himself is not the man who hates life; he only hates the sorrow and
the shame which make unbearable that life which he loves only too
well. He is trying to migrate to other conditions; he desires to
live, but he cannot live so. It is the imagination of man that
makes him seek death; only the animal endures, but man hurries away
in the hope of finding something better.
It is, however, strange to reflect how weak man's imagination is
when it comes to deal with what is beyond him, how little able he
is to devise anything that he desires to do when he has escaped
from life. The unsubstantial heaven of a Buddhist, with its
unthinkable Nirvana, is merely the depriving life of all its
attributes; the dull sensuality of the Mohammedan paradise, with
its ugly multiplication of gross delights; the tedious outcries of
the saints in light which make the medieval scheme of heaven into
one protracted canticle--these are all deeply unattractive, and
have no power at all over the vigorous spirit. Even the vision of
Socrates, the hope of unrestricted converse with great minds, is a
very unsatisfying thought, because it yields so little material to
work upon.
The fact, of course, is that it is just the variety of experience
which makes life interesting,--toil and rest, pain and relief, hope
and satisfaction, danger and security,--and if we once remove the
idea of vicissitude from life, it all becomes an indolent and
uninspiring affair. It is the process of change which is
delightful, the finding out what we can do and what we cannot,
going from ignorance to knowledge, from clumsiness to skill; even
our relations with those whom we love are all bound up with the
discoveries we make about them and the degree in which we can help
them and affect them. What the mind instinctively dislikes is
stationariness; and an existence in which there was nothing to
escape from, nothing more to hope for, to learn, to desire, would
be frankly unendurable.
The reason why we dread death is because it seems to be a
suspension of all our familiar activities. It would be terrible to
have nothing but memory to depend upon. The only use of memory is
that it distracts us a little from present conditions if they are
dull, and it is only too true that the recollection in sorrow of
happy things is torture of the worst kind.
Once when Tennyson was suffering from a dangerous illness, his
friend Jowett wrote to Lady Tennyson to suggest that the poet might
find comfort in thinking of all the good he had done. But that is
not the kind of comfort that a sufferer desires; we may envy a good
man his retrospect of activity, but we cannot really suppose that
to meditate complacently upon what one has been enabled to do is
the final thought that a good man is likely to indulge. He is far
more likely to torment himself over all that he might have done.
It is true, I think, that old and tired people pass into a quiet
serenity; but it is the serenity of the old dog who sleeps in the
sun, wags his tail if he is invited to bestir himself, but does not
leave his place; and if one reaches that condition, it is but a
dumb gratitude at the thought that nothing more is expected of the
worn-out frame and fatigued mind. But no one, I should imagine,
really hopes to step into immortality so tired and worn out that
the highest hope that he can frame is that he will be let alone for
ever. We must not trust the drowsiness of the outworn spirit to
frame the real hopes of humanity. If we believe that the next
experience ahead of us is like that of the mariners,
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon,
then we acquiesce in a dreamless sort of sleep as the best hope of
man.
No, we must rather trust the desires of the spirit at its
healthiest and most vigorous, and these are all knit up with the
adventure of escape, as I have said. There is something hostile on
our track: the copse that closes in upon the road is thick with
spears; presences that do not wish us well move darkly in the wood
and keep pace with us, and the only explanation we can give is that
we need to be spurred on by fear if we are not drawn forward by
desire or hope. We have to keep moving, and if we will not run to
the goal, we must at least flee, with backward glances at something
which threatens us.
There is an old and strange Eastern allegory of a man wandering in
the desert; he draws near to a grove of trees, when he suddenly
becomes aware that there is a lion on his track, hurrying and
bounding along on the scent of his steps. The man flees for safety
into the grove; he sees there a roughly built water-tank of stone,
excavated in the ground, and built up of masonry much fringed with
plants. He climbs swiftly down to where he sees a ledge close on
the water; as he does this, he sees that in the water lies a great
lizard, with open jaws, watching him with wicked eyes. He stops
short, and he can just support himself among the stones by holding
on to the branches of a plant which grows from a ledge above him.
While he thus holds on, with death behind him and before, he feels
the branches quivering, and sees above, out of reach, two mice, one
black and one white, which are nibbling at the stems he holds and
will soon sever them. He waits despairingly, and while he does so,
he sees that there are drops of honey on the leaves which he holds;
he puts his lips to them, licks them off, and finds them very
sweet.
The mice stand, no doubt, for night and day, and the honey is the
sweetness of life, which it is possible to taste and relish even
when death is before and behind; and it is true that the utter
precariousness of life does not, as a matter of fact, distract us
from the pleasure of it, even though the strands to which we hold
are slowly parting. It is all, then, an adventure and an escape;
but even in the worst insecurity, we may often be surprised to find
that it is somehow sweet.
It is not in the least a question of the apparent and outward
adventurousness of one's life. Foolish people sometimes write and
think as though one could not have had adventures unless one has
hung about at bar-room doors and in billiard-saloons, worked one's
passage before the mast in a sailing-ship, dug for gold among the
mountains, explored savage lands, shot strange animals, fared
hardly among deep-drinking and loud-swearing men. It is possible,
of course, to have adventures of this kind, and, indeed, I had a
near relative whose life was fuller of vicissitudes than any life I
have ever known: he was a sailor, a clerk, a policeman, a soldier,
a clergyman, a farmer, a verger. But the mere unsettledness of it
suited him: he was an easy comrade, brave, reckless, restless; he
did not mind roughness, and the one thing he could not do was to
settle down to anything regular and quiet. He did not dislike life
at all, even when he stood half-naked, as he once told me he did,
on a board slung from the side of a ship, and dipped up pails of
water to swab it, the water freezing as he flung it on the timbers.
But with all this variety of life he did not learn anything
particular from it all; he was much the same always, good-natured,
talkative, childishly absorbed, not looking backward or forward,
and fondest of telling stories with sailors in an inn. He learned
to be content in most companies and to fare roughly; but he gained
neither wisdom nor humour, and he was not either happy or
independent, though he despised with all his heart the stay-at-
home, stick-in-the-mud life.
But we are not all made like this, and it is only possible for a
few people to live so by the fact that most people prefer to stay
at home and do the work of the world. My cousin was not a worker,
and, indeed, did no work except under compulsion and in order to
live; but such people seem to belong to an older order, and are
more like children playing about, and at leisure to play because
others work to feed and clothe them. The world would be a wretched
and miserable place if all tried to live life on those lines.
It would be impossible to me to live so, though I dare say I should
be a better man if I had had a little more hardship of that kind;
but I have worked hard in my own way, and though I have had few
hairbreadth escapes, yet I have had sharp troubles and slow
anxieties. I have been like the man in the story, between the lion
and the lizard for many months together; and I have had more to
bear, by temperament and fortune, than my roving cousin ever had to
endure; so that because a life seems both sheltered and prosperous,
it need not therefore have been without its adventures and escapes
and its haunting fears.
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