At Large

by Arthur Christopher Benson

I do not at all wish to teach a gospel of dulness. I am of the opinion of the poet who said:

"Life is not life at all without delight,
Nor hath it any might."

But I am quite sure that the real pleasures of the world are those which cannot be bought for money, and which are wholly independent of success.

Every one who has watched children knows the extraordinary amount of pleasure that they can extract out of the simplest materials. To keep a shop in the corner of a garden, where the commodities are pebbles and thistle-heads stored in old tin pots, and which are paid for in daisies, will be an engrossing occupation to healthy children for a long summer afternoon. There is no reason why that kind of zest should not be imported into later life; and, as a matter of fact, people who practise self-restraint, who are temperate and quiet, do retain a gracious kind of contentment in all that they do or say, or think, to extreme old age; it is the jaded weariness of overstrained lives that needs the stimulus of excitement to carry them along from hour to hour. Who does not remember the rigid asceticism of Ruskin's childhood? A bunch of keys to play with, and a little later a box of bricks; the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe to read; a summary whipping if he fell down and hurt himself, or if he ever cried. Yet no one would venture to say that this austerity in any way stunted Ruskin's development or limited his range of pleasures; it made him perhaps a little submissive and unadventurous. But who that ever saw him, as the most famous art-critic of the day, being mercilessly snubbed, when he indulged in paradoxes, by the old wine-merchant, or being told to hold his tongue by the grim old mother, and obeying cheerfully and sweetly, would have preferred him to have been loud, contradictory, and self-assertive? The mischief of our present system of publicity is that we cannot enjoy our own ideas, unless we can impress people with them, or, at all events, impress people with a sense of our enjoyment of them. There is a noble piece of character-drawing in one of Mr. Henry James's novels, The Portrait of a Lady, where Gilbert Osmond, a selfish dilettante, finding that he cannot make a great success or attain a great position, devotes himself to trying to mystify and provoke the curiosity of the world by retiring into a refined seclusion, and professing that it affords him an exquisite kind of enjoyment. The hideous vulgarity of his attitude is not at first sight apparent; he deceives the heroine, who is a considerable heiress, into thinking that here, at last, is a man who is living a quiet and sincere life among the things of the soul; and having obtained possession of her purse, he sets up house in a dignified old palace in Rome, where he continues to amuse himself by inviting distinguished persons to visit him, in order that he may have the pleasure of excluding the lesser people who would like to be included.

This is, of course, doing the thing upon an almost sublime scale; but the fact remains that in an age which values notoriety above everything except property, a great many people do suffer from the disease of not enjoying things, unless they are aware that others envy their enjoyment. To people of an artistic temperament this is a sore temptation, because the essence of the artistic temperament is its egotism, and egotism, like the Bread-and-butter fly, requires a special nutriment, the nutriment of external admiration.

And here, I think, lies one of the pernicious results of an over-developed system of athletics. The more games that people play, the better; but I do not think it is wholesome to talk about them for large spaces of leisure time, any more than it is wholesome to talk about your work or your meals. The result of all the talk about athletics is that the newspapers get full of them too. That is only natural. It is the business of newspapers to find out what interests people, and to tell them about it; but the bad side of it is that young athletes get introduced to the pleasures of publicity, and that ambitious young men think that athletics are a short cut to fame. To have played in a University eleven is like accepting a peerage; you wear for the rest of your life an agreeable and honourable social label, and I do not think that a peerage is deserved, or should be accepted, at the age of twenty. I do not think it is a good kind of fame which depends on a personal performance rather than upon a man's usefulness to the human race.

The kind of contentment that I should like to see on the increase is the contentment of a man who works hard and enjoys work, both in itself and in the contrast it supplies to his leisure hours; and, further, whose leisure is full of varied interests, not only definite pursuits, but an interest in his relations with others, not only of a spectatorial kind, but with the natural and instinctive desire to contribute to their happiness, not in a priggish way, but from a sense of cordial good-fellowship.

This programme may seem, as I have said, to be unambitious and prosaic, and to have very little that is stirring about it. But my belief is that it can be the most lively, sensitive, fruitful, and enjoyable programme in the world, because the enjoyment of it depends upon the very stuff of life itself, and not upon skimming the cream off and throwing away the milk.

My critics will say that I am only appearing again from my cellar, with my hands filled with bottled platitudes; but if they are platitudes, by which I mean plain and obvious truths, why do we not find more people practising them? What I mean by a platitude is a truth so obvious that it is devoid of inspiration, and has become one of the things that every one does so instinctively, that no reminder of them is necessary. Would that it were so in the present case! All I can say is that I know very few people who live their lives on these lines, and that most of the people I know find inspiration anywhere but in the homely stuff of life. Of course there are a good many people who take life stolidly enough, and do not desire inspiration at all; but I do not mean that sort of life in the least. I mean that it ought to be possible and delightful for people to live lives full of activity and perception and kindliness and joy, on very simple lines indeed; to take up their work day by day with an agreeable sense of putting out their powers, to find in the pageant of nature an infinite refreshment, and to let art and poetry lift them up into a world of hopes and dreams and memories; and thus life may become a meal to be eaten with appetite, with a wholesome appreciation of its pleasant savours, rather than a meal eaten in satiety or greediness, with a peevish repining that it is not more elaborate and delicate.

I do not claim to live my own life on these lines. I started, as all sensitive and pleasure-loving natures do, with an expectation of finding life a much more exciting, amusing, and delightful thing than I have found it. I desired to skip from peak to peak, without troubling to descend into the valleys. But now that I have descended, partly out of curiosity and partly out of inefficiency, no doubt, into the low-lying vales, I have found them to be beautiful and interesting places, the hedgerows full of flower and leaf, the thickets musical with the voices of birds, the orchards loaded with fruit, the friendly homesteads rich with tranquil life and abounding in quiet friendly people; and then the very peaks themselves, past which my way occasionally conducts me, have a beautiful solemnity of pure outline and strong upliftedness, seen from below, which I think they tend to lose, seen from the summit; and if I have spoken of the quieter joys, it is—I can say this with perfect honesty—because I have been pleased with them, as a bird is pleased with the sunshine and the berries, and sings, not that the passers-by may admire his notes, but out of simple joy of heart; and, after all, it is enough justification, if a pilgrim or two have stopped upon their way to listen with a smile. That alone persuades me that one does no harm by speaking, even if there are other passers-by who say what a tiresome note it is, that they have heard it a hundred times before, and cannot think why the stupid bird does not vary his song. Personally, I would rather hear the yellow-hammer utter his sharp monotonous notes, with the dropping cadence at the end, than that he should try to imitate the nightingale.