From a College Window

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> From a College Window

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NOTE.

Twelve of the essays included in this volume appeared in the
_Cornhill Magazine_. My best thanks are due to the proprietor and
editor of the _Cornhill Magazine_ for kind permission and
encouragement to reprint these. I have added six further papers,
dealing with kindred subjects.

A. C. B.

CONTENTS

1. The Point of View
2. On Growing Older
3. Books
4. Sociabilities
5. Conversation
6. Beauty
7. Art
8. Egotism
9. Education
10. Authorship
11. The Criticism of Others
12. Priest
13. Ambition
14. The Simple Life
15. Games
16. Spiritualism
17. Habits
18. Religion

I

THE POINT OF VIEW

I have lately come to perceive that the one thing which gives value
to any piece of art, whether it be book, or picture, or music, is
that subtle and evasive thing which is called personality. No
amount of labour, of zest, even of accomplishment, can make up for
the absence of this quality. It must be an almost wholly
instinctive thing, I believe. Of course, the mere presence of
personality in a work of art is not sufficient, because the
personality revealed may be lacking in charm; and charm, again, is
an instinctive thing. No artist can set out to capture charm; he
will toil all the night and take nothing; but what every artist can
and must aim at, is to have a perfectly sincere point of view. He
must take his chance as to whether his point of view is an
attractive one; but sincerity is the one indispensable thing. It is
useless to take opinions on trust, to retail them, to adopt them;
they must be formed, created, truly felt. The work of a sincere
artist is almost certain to have some value; the work of an
insincere artist is of its very nature worthless.

I mean to try, in the pages that follow, to be as sincere as I can.
It is not an easy task, though it may seem so; for it means a
certain disentangling of the things that one has perceived and felt
for oneself from the prejudices and preferences that have been
inherited, or stuck like burrs upon the soul by education and
circumstance.

It may be asked why I should thus obtrude my point of view in
print; why I should not keep my precious experience to myself; what
the value of it is to other people. Well, the answer to that is
that it helps our sense of balance and proportion to know how other
people are looking at life, what they expect from it, what they
find in it, and what they do not find. I have myself an intense
curiosity about other people's point of view, what they do when
they are alone, and what they think about. Edward FitzGerald said
that he wished we had more biographies of obscure persons. How
often have I myself wished to ask simple, silent, deferential
people, such as station-masters, butlers, gardeners, what they make
of it all! Yet one cannot do it, and even if one could, ten to one
they would not or could not tell you. But here is going to be a
sedate confession. I am going to take the world into my confidence,
and say, if I can, what I think and feel about the little bit of
experience which I call my life, which seems to me such a strange
and often so bewildering a thing.

Let me speak, then, plainly of what that life has been, and tell
what my point of view is. I was brought up on ordinary English
lines. My father, in a busy life, held a series of what may be
called high official positions. He was an idealist, who, owing to a
vigorous power of practical organization and a mastery of detail,
was essentially a man of affairs. Yet he contrived to be a student
too. Thus, owing to the fact that he often shifted his
headquarters, I have seen a good deal of general society in several
parts of England. Moreover, I was brought up in a distinctly
intellectual atmosphere.

I was at a big public school, and gained a scholarship at the
University. I was a moderate scholar and a competent athlete; but I
will add that I had always a strong literary bent. I took in
younger days little interest in history or polities, and tended
rather to live an inner life in the region of friendship and the
artistic emotions. If I had been possessed of private means, I
should, no doubt, have become a full-fledged dilettante. But that
doubtful privilege was denied me, and for a good many years I lived
a busy and fairly successful life as a master at a big public
school. I will not dwell upon this, but I will say that I gained a
great interest in the science of education, and acquired profound
misgivings as to the nature of the intellectual process known by
the name of secondary education. More and more I began to perceive
that it is conducted on diffuse, detailed, unbusiness-like lines. I
tried my best, as far as it was consistent with loyalty to an
established system, to correct the faulty bias. But it was with a
profound relief that I found myself suddenly provided with a
literary task of deep interest, and enabled to quit my scholastic
labours. At the same time, I am deeply grateful for the practical
experience I was enabled to gain, and even more for the many true
and pleasant friendships with colleagues, parents, and boys that I
was allowed to form.

What a waste of mental energy it is to be careful and troubled
about one's path in life! Quite unexpectedly, at this juncture,
came my election to a college Fellowship, giving me the one life
that I had always eagerly desired, and the possibility of which had
always seemed closed to me.

I became then a member of a small and definite society, with a few
prescribed duties, just enough, so to speak, to form a hem to my
life of comparative leisure. I had acquired and kept, all through
my life as a schoolmaster, the habit of continuous literary work;
not from a sense of duty, but simply from instinctive pleasure. I
found myself at once at home in my small and beautiful college,
rich with all kinds of ancient and venerable traditions, in
buildings of humble and subtle grace. The little dark-roofed
chapel, where I have a stall of my own; the galleried hall, with
its armorial glass; the low, book-lined library; the panelled
combination-room, with its dim portraits of old worthies: how sweet
a setting for a quiet life! Then, too, I have my own spacious
rooms, with a peaceful outlook into a big close, half orchard, half
garden, with bird-haunted thickets and immemorial trees, bounded by
a slow river.

And then, to teach me how "to borrow life and not grow old," the
happy tide of fresh and vigorous life all about me, brisk,
confident, cheerful young men, friendly, sensible, amenable, at
that pleasant time when the world begins to open its rich pages of
experience, undimmed at present by anxiety or care.

My college is one of the smallest in the University. Last night in
Hall I sate next a distinguished man, who is, moreover, very
accessible and pleasant. He unfolded to me his desires for the
University. He would like to amalgamate all the small colleges into
groups, so as to have about half-a-dozen colleges in all. He said,
and evidently thought, that little colleges are woefully
circumscribed and petty places; that most of the better men go to
the two or three leading colleges, while the little establishments
are like small backwaters out of the main stream. They elect, he
said, their own men to Fellowships; they resist improvements; much
money is wasted in management, and the whole thing is minute and
feeble. I am afraid it is true in a way; but, on the other hand, I
think that a large college has its defects too. There is no real
college spirit there; it is very nice for two or three sets. But
the different schools which supply a big college form each its own
set there; and if a man goes there from a leading public school, he
falls into his respective set, lives under the traditions and in
the gossip of his old school, and gets to know hardly any one from
other schools. Then the men who come up from smaller places just
form small inferior sets of their own, and really get very little
good out of the place. Big colleges keep up their prestige because
the best men tend to go to them; but I think they do very little
for the ordinary men who have fewer social advantages to start
with.

The only cure, said my friend, for these smaller places is to throw
their Fellowships open, and try to get public-spirited and liberal-
minded Dons. Then, he added, they ought to specialize in some one
branch of University teaching, so that the men who belonged to a
particular department would tend to go there.

Well, to-day was a wet day, so I did what I particularly enjoy--I
went off for a slow stroll, and poked about among some of the
smaller colleges. I declare that the idea of tying them all
together seemed to me to be a horrible piece of vandalism. These
sweet and gentle little places, with a quiet, dignified history and
tradition of their own, are very attractive and beautiful. I went
and explored a little college I am ashamed to say I had never
visited before. It shows a poor plastered front to the street, but
the old place is there behind the plaster. I went into a tiny, dark
chapel, with a high pillared pediment of carved wood behind the
altar, a rich ceiling, and some fine columned alcoves where the
dignitaries sit. Out of the gallery opens a venerable library, with
a regretful air of the past about its faded volumes in their high
presses, as though it sadly said, "I am of yesterday." Then we
found ourselves in a spacious panelled Hall, with a great oriel
looking out into a peaceful garden, embowered in great trees, with
smiling lawns. All round the Hall hung portraits of old worthies--
peers, judges, and bishops, with some rubicund wigged Masters. I
like to think of the obscure and yet dignified lives that have been
lived in these quaint and stately chambers. I suppose that there
used to be a great deal of tippling and low gossip in the old days
of the vinous, idle Fellows, who hung on for life, forgetting their
books, and just trying to dissipate boredom. One tends to think
that it was all like that; and yet, doubtless, there were quiet
lives of study and meditation led here by wise and simple men who
have long since mouldered into dust. And all that dull rioting is
happily over. The whole place is full of activity and happiness.
There is, if anything, among the Dons, too much business, too many
meetings, too much teaching, and the life of mere study is
neglected. But it pleases me to think that even now there are men
who live quietly among their books, unambitious, perhaps
unproductive, but forgetting the flight of time, and looking out
into a pleasant garden, with its rustling trees, among the sound of
mellow bells. We are, most of us, too much in a fuss nowadays to
live these gentle, innocent, and beautiful lives; and yet the
University is a place where a poor man, if he be virtuous, may lead
a life of dignity and simplicity, and refined happiness. We make
the mistake of thinking that all can be done by precept, when, as a
matter of fact, example is no less potent a force. To make such
quiet lives possible was to a great extent what these stately and
beautiful places were founded for--that there should be in the busy
world a corner where activities should not be so urgent, and where
life should pass like an old dream, tinged with delicate colour and
soft sound. I declare I do not know that it is more virtuous to be
a clerk in a bank, toiling day by day that others should be rich,
than to live in thought and meditation, with a heart open to sweet
influences and pure hopes. And yet it seems to be held nowadays
that virtue is bound up with practical life. If a man is content to
abjure wealth and to forego marriage, to live simply without
luxuries, he may spend a very dignified, gentle life here, and at
the same time he may be really useful. It is a thing which is well
worth doing to attempt the reconciliation between the old and the
young. Boys come up here under the impression that their pastors
and teachers are all about fifty; they think of them as sensible,
narrow-minded men, and, like Melchizedek, without beginning of days
or end of life. They suppose that they like marking mistakes in
exercises with blue pencil, and take delight in showing their power
by setting punishments. It does not often occur to them that
schoolmasters may be pathetically anxious to guide boys right, and
to guard them from evil. They think of them as devoid of passions
and prejudices, with a little dreary space to traverse before they
sink into the tomb. Even in homes, how seldom does a perfectly
simple human relation exist between a boy and his father! There is
often a great deal of affection on both sides, but little
camaraderie. Little boys are odd, tiresome creatures in many ways,
with savage instincts; and I suppose many fathers feel that, if
they are to maintain their authority, they must be a little distant
and inscrutable. A boy goes for sympathy and companionship to his
mother and sisters, not often to his father. Now a Don may do
something to put this straight, if he has the will. One of the best
friends I ever had was an elderly Don at my own college, who had
been a contemporary of my father's. He liked young men; and I used
to consult him and ask his advice in things in which I could not
well consult my own contemporaries. It is not necessary to be
extravagantly youthful, to slap people on the back, to run with the
college boat, though that is very pleasant if it is done naturally.
All that is wanted is to be accessible and quietly genial. And
under such influences a young man may, without becoming elderly,
get to understand the older point of view.

The difficulty is that one acquires habits and mannerisms; one is
crusty and gruff if interfered with. But, as Pater said, to acquire
habits is failure in life. Of course, one must realize limitations,
and learn in what regions one can be effective. But no one need be
case-hardened, smoke-dried, angular. The worst of a University is
that one sees men lingering on because they must earn a living, and
there is nothing else that they can do; but for a human-hearted,
good-humoured, and sensible man, a college life is a life where it
is easy and pleasant to practise benevolence and kindliness, and
where a small investment of trouble pays a large percentage of
happiness. Indeed, surveying it impartially--as impartially as I
can--such a life seems to hold within it perhaps the greatest
possibilities of happiness that life can hold. To have leisure and
a degree of simple stateliness assured; to live in a wholesome
dignity; to have the society of the young and generous; to have
lively and intelligent talk; to have the choice of society and
solitude alike; to have one's working hours respected, and one's
leisure hours solaced--is not this better than to drift into the
so-called tide of professional success, with its dreary hours of
work, its conventional domestic background? No doubt the domestic
background has its interests, its delights; but one must pay a
price for everything, and I am more than willing to pay the price
of celibacy for my independence.

The elderly Don in college rooms, interested in Greek particles,
grumbling over his port wine, is a figure beloved by writers of
fiction as a contrast to all that is brave, and bright, and
wholesome in life. Could there be a more hopeless misconception? I
do not know a single extant example of the species at the
University. Personally, I have no love for Greek particles, and
only a very moderate taste for port wine. But I do love, with all
my heart, the grace of antiquity that mellows our crumbling courts,
the old tradition of multifarious humanity that has century by
century entwined itself with the very fabric of the place. I love
the youthful spirit that flashes and brightens in every corner of
the old courts, as the wallflower that rises spring by spring with
its rich orange-tawny hue, its wild scent, on the tops of our
mouldering walls. It is a gracious and beautiful life for all who
love peace and reflection, strength and youth. It is not a life for
fiery and dominant natures, eager to conquer, keen to impress; but
it is a life for any one who believes that the best rewards are not
the brightest, who is willing humbly to lend a cheerful hand, to
listen as well as to speak. It is a life for any one who has found
that there is a world of tender, wistful, delicate emotions,
subdued and soft impressions, in which it is peace to live; for one
who has learned, however dimly, that wise and faithful love, quiet
and patient hope, are the bread by which the spirit is nourished--
that religion is not an intellectual or even an ecclesiastical
thing, but a far-off and remote vision of the soul.

I know well the thoughts and hopes that I should desire to speak;
but they are evasive, subtle things, and too often, like shy birds,
will hardly let you approach them. But I would add that life has
not been for me a dreamy thing, lived in soft fantastic reveries;
indeed, it has been far the reverse. I have practised activity, I
have mixed much with my fellows; I have taught, worked, organized,
directed. I have watched men and boys; I have found infinite food
for mirth, for interest, and even for grief. But I have grown to
feel that the ambitions which we preach and the successes for which
we prepare are very often nothing but a missing of the simple road,
a troubled wandering among thorny by-paths and dark mountains. I
have grown to believe that the one thing worth aiming at is
simplicity of heart and life; that one's relations with others
should be direct and not diplomatic; that power leaves a bitter
taste in the mouth; that meanness, and hardness, and coldness are
the unforgivable sins; that conventionality is the mother of
dreariness; that pleasure exists not in virtue of material
conditions, but in the joyful heart; that the world is a very
interesting and beautiful place; that congenial labour is the
secret of happiness; and many other things which seem, as I write
them down, to be dull and trite commonplaces, but are for me the
bright jewels which I have found beside the way.

It is, then, from College Windows that I look forth. But even so,
though on the one hand I look upon the green and sheltered garden,
with its air of secluded recollection and repose, a place of quiet
pacing to and fro, of sober and joyful musing; yet on another side
I see the court, with all its fresh and shifting life, its swift
interchange of study and activity; and on yet another side I can
observe the street where the infinite pageant of humanity goes to
and fro, a tide full of sound and foam, of business and laughter,
and of sorrow too, and sickness, and the funeral pomp of death.

This, then, is my point of view. I can truthfully say that it is
not gloomy, and equally that it is not uproarious. I can boast of
no deep philosophy, for I feel, like Dr. Johnson's simple friend
Edwards, that "I have tried, too, in my time, to be a philosopher,
but--I don't know how--cheerfulness was always breaking in."
Neither is it the point of view of a profound and erudite student,
with a deep belief in the efficacy of useless knowledge. Neither am
I a humorist, for I have loved beauty better than laughter; nor a
sentimentalist, for I have abhorred a weak dalliance with personal
emotions. It is hard, then, to say what I am; but it is my hope
that this may emerge. My desire is but to converse with my readers,
to speak as in a comfortable tete-a-tete, of experience, and hope,
and patience. I have no wish to disguise the hard and ugly things
of life; they are there, whether one disguises them or not; but I
think that unless one is a professed psychologist or statistician,
one gets little good by dwelling upon them. I have always believed
that it is better to stimulate than to correct, to fortify rather
than to punish, to help rather than to blame. If there is one
attitude that I fear and hate more than another it is the attitude
of the cynic. I believe with all my soul in romance: that is, in a
certain high-hearted, eager dealing with life. I think that one
ought to expect to find things beautiful and people interesting,
not to take delight in detecting meannesses and failures. And there
is yet another class of temperament for which I have a deep
detestation. I mean the assured, the positive, the Pharisaical
temper, that believes itself to be impregnably in the right and its
opponents indubitably in the wrong; the people who deal in axioms
and certainties, who think that compromise is weak and originality
vulgar. I detest authority in every form; I am a sincere
republican. In literature, in art, in life, I think that the only
conclusions worth coming to are one's own conclusions. If they
march with the verdict of the connoisseurs, so much the better for
the connoisseurs; if they do not so march, so much the better for
oneself. Every one cannot admire and love everything; but let a man
look at things fairly and without prejudice, and make his own
selection, holding to it firmly, but not endeavouring to impose his
taste upon others; defending, if needs be, his preferences, but
making no claim to authority.

The time of my life that I consider to have been wasted, from the
intellectual point of view, was the time when I tried, in a spirit
of dumb loyalty, to admire all the things that were said to be
admirable. Better spent was the time when I was finding out that
much that had received the stamp of the world's approval was not to
be approved, at least by me; best of all was the time when I was
learning to appraise the value of things to myself, and learning to
love them for their own sake and mine.

Respect of a deferential and constitutional type is out of place in
art and literature. It is a good enough guide to begin one's
pilgrimage with, if one soon parts company from it. Rather one must
learn to give honour where honour is due, to bow down in true
reverence before all spirits that are noble and adorable, whether
they wear crowns and bear titles of honour, or whether they are
simple and unnoted persons, who wear no gold on their garments.

Sincerity and simplicity! if I could only say how I reverence them,
how I desire to mould my life in accordance with them! And I would
learn, too, swiftly to detect the living spirits, whether they be
young or old, in which these great qualities reign.

For I believe that there is in life a great and guarded city, of
which we may be worthy to be citizens. We may, if we are blest, be
always of the happy number, by some kindly gift of God; but we may
also, through misadventure and pain, through errors and blunders,
learn the way thither. And sometimes we discern the city afar off,
with her radiant spires and towers, her walls of strength, her
gates of pearl; and there may come a day, too, when we have found
the way thither, and enter in; happy if we go no more out, but
happy, too, even if we may not rest there, because we know that,
however far we wander, there is always a hearth for us and
welcoming smiles.

I speak in a parable, but those who are finding the way will
understand me, however dimly; and those who have found the way, and
seen a little of the glory of the place, will smile at the page and
say: "So he, too, is of the city."

The city is known by many names, and wears different aspects to
different hearts. But one thing is certain--that no one who has
entered there is ever in any doubt again. He may wander far from
the walls, he may visit it but rarely, but it stands there in peace
and glory, the one true and real thing for him in mortal time and
in whatever lies beyond.

II

ON GROWING OLDER

The sun flares red behind leafless elms and battlemented towers as
I come in from a lonely walk beside the river; above the chimney-
tops hangs a thin veil of drifting smoke, blue in the golden light.
The games in the Common are just coming to an end; a stream of
long-coated spectators sets towards the town, mingled with the
parti-coloured, muddied figures of the players. I have been
strolling half the afternoon along the river bank, watching the
boats passing up and down; hearing the shrill cries of coxes, the
measured plash of oars, the rhythmical rattle of rowlocks,
intermingled at intervals with the harsh grinding of the chain-
ferries. Five-and-twenty years ago I was rowing here myself in one
of these boats, and I do not wish to renew the experience. I cannot
conceive why and in what moment of feeble good-nature or misapplied
patriotism I ever consented to lend a hand. I was not a good oar,
and did not become a better one; I had no illusions about my
performance, and any momentary complacency was generally sternly
dispelled by the harsh criticism of the coach on the bank, when we
rested for a moment to receive our meed of praise or blame. But
though I have no sort of wish to repeat the process, to renew the
slavery which I found frankly and consistently intolerable, I find
myself looking on at the cheerful scene with an amusement in which
mingles a shadow of pain, because I feel that I have parted with
something, a certain buoyancy and elasticity of body, and perhaps
spirit, of which I was not conscious at the time, but which I now
realize that I must have possessed. It is with an admiration
mingled with envy that I see these youthful, shapely figures, bare-
necked and bare-kneed, swinging rhythmically past. I watch a brisk
crew lift a boat out of the water by a boat-house; half of them
duck underneath to get hold of the other side, and they march up
the grating gravel in a solemn procession. I see a pair of cheerful
young men, released from tubbing, execute a wild and inconsequent
dance upon the water's edge; I see a solemn conference of deep
import between a stroke and a coach. I see a neat, clean-limbed
young man go airily up to a well-earned tea, without, I hope, a
care, or an anxiety in his mind, expecting and intending to spend
an agreeable evening. "Oh, Jones of Trinity, oh, Smith of Queen's,"
I think to myself, "tua si bona noris! Make the best of the good
time, my boy, before you go off to the office, or the fourth-form
room, or the country parish! Live virtuously, make honest friends,
read the good old books, lay up a store of kindly recollections, of
firelit rooms in venerable courts, of pleasant talks, of innocent
festivities. Very fresh is the cool morning air, very fragrant is
the newly-lighted bird's-eye, very lively is the clink of knives
and forks, very keen is the savour of the roast beef that floats up
to the dark rafters of the College Hall. But the days are short and
the terms are few; and do not forget to be a sensible as well as a
good-humoured young man!"

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