Beside Still Waters

by Arthur Christopher Benson

Hugh felt that such experience as this, experience, that is, in the vital force of prayer, might be called a subjective experience, and could not be put to a scientific test. But for all that, there was nothing which of late years had so grown upon him as the consciousness of the effectiveness of a certain kind of prayer. This was not a mechanical repetition of verbal forms, but a strong and secret uplifting of the heart to the Father of all. There were moments when one seemed baffled and powerless, when one's own strength seemed utterly unequal to the burden; prayer on such occasions did not necessarily bring a perfect serenity and joy, though there were times when it brought even that; but it brought sufficient strength; it made the difficult, the dreaded thing possible. Hugh had proved this a hundred times over, and the marvel to him was that he did not use it more; but the listless mind sometimes could not brace itself to the effort; and then it seemed to Hugh that he was as one who lay thirsting, with water in reach of his nerveless hand. Still there were few things of which he was so absolutely certain as he was of the abounding strength of prayer; it seemed to reveal a dim form moving behind the veil of things, which in the moment of entreaty seemed to suspend its progress, to stop, to draw near, to smile. Why the gifts from that wise hand were often such difficult things, stones for bread, serpents for fish, Hugh could not divine. But he tended less and less to ask for precise things, but to pray in the spirit of the old Dorian prayer that what was good might be given him, even if he did not perceive it to be good, and that what was evil might be withheld, even if he desired it.

While he thus mused, walking swiftly, the day darkened about him, drawing the colour out of field and tree. The tides of the sky thickened, and set to a deep enamelled green, and a star came out above the tree-tops. Now and then he passed through currents of cool air that streamed out of the low wooded valleys, rich with the fragrance of copse and dingle. An owl fluted sweetly in a little holt, and was answered by another far up the hill. He heard in the breeze, now loud, now low, the far-off motions of the wheels of some cart rumbling blithely homewards. All else was still. At last he came out on the top of the wolds; the road stretched before him, a pale ribbon among dusky fields; and the lights of the distant village pierced through the darker gloom of sheltering trees. Hugh seemed that night to walk with his unknown friend close beside him, answering his hopes, stilling his vague discontents, with a pure and tender faithfulness that left him nothing to desire, but that the sweet nearness might not fail him. At such a moment, dear and wonderful as the world was, he felt that it held nothing so beautiful or so dear as that sweet companionship, and that if he had been bidden, in that instant, strong and content as he was, to enter the stream of death, a firm hand and a smiling face would have lifted him, as the stream grew shallower about him, safe and satisfied, up on the further side.

XXVIII

Democracy—Individualism—Corporateness—Materialism

Among the most interesting of the new friends that Hugh made at Cambridge was a young Don who was understood to hold advanced socialistic views. What was more important from Hugh's point of view was that he was a singularly frank, accessible, and lively person, full of ideas and enthusiasms. Hugh was at one time a good deal in his company, and used to feel that the charm of conversation with him was, not that they discussed things, or argued, or had common interests, but that it was like setting a sluice open between two pools; their two minds, like moving waters, seemed to draw near, to intermingle, to linger in a subtle contact. His friend, Sheldon by name, was a great reader of books; but he read, Hugh thought, in the same way that he himself read, not that he might master subjects, annex and explore mental provinces, and classify the movement of thought, but rather that he might lean out into a misty haunted prospect, where mysterious groves concealed the windings of uncertain paths, and the turrets of guarded strongholds peered over the woodland. Hugh indeed guessed dimly that his friend had a whole range of interests of which he knew nothing, and this was confirmed by a conversation they had when they had walked one day together into the deep country. They took a road that seemed upon the map to lead to a secluded village, and then to lose itself among the fields, and soon came to the hamlet, a cluster of old-fashioned houses that stood very prettily on a low scarped gravel hill that pushed out into the fen. They betook themselves to the churchyard, where they found a little ancient conduit that gushed out at the foot of the hill. This they learned had once been a well much visited by pilgrims for its supposed healing qualities. It ran out of an arched recess into a shallow pool, fringed with sedge, and filled with white-flowered cresses and forget-me-not. Below their feet lay a great stretch of rich water-meadows, the wooded hills opposite looming dimly through the haze. Here they sat for a while, listening to the pleasant trickle of the spring, and the conversation turned on the life of villages, the lack of amusement, the dulness of field-labour, the steady drift of the young men to the towns. Hugh regretted this and said that he wished the country clergy would try to counteract the tendency; he spoke of village clubs and natural-history classes. Sheldon laughed quietly at his remarks, and said, "My dear Neville, it is quite refreshing to hear you talk. It is not for nothing that you bear the name of Neville; you are a mediaeval aristocrat at heart. These opinions of yours are as interesting as fossils in a bed of old blue clay. Such things are to be found, I believe, imbedded in the works of Ruskin and other patrons of the democracy. Why, you are like a man who sits in a comfortable first-class carriage in a great express, complacently thinking that the money he has paid for his ticket is the motive force of the train; you are trying to put out a conflagration with a bottle of eau-de-Cologne. The battle is lost, and the world is transforming itself, while you talk so airily. You and other leisurely people are tolerated, just as a cottager lets the houseleek grow on his tiles; but you are not part of the building, and if there is a suspicion that you are making the roof damp, you will have to be swept away. The democracy that you want to form is making itself, and sooner or later you will have to join in the procession."

Hugh laughed serenely at his companion's vehemence. "Oh," he said, "I am a mild sort of socialist myself; that is, I see that it is coming, I believe in equality, and I don't question the rights of the democracy. But I don't pretend to like it, though I bow to it; the democracy seems to me to threaten nearly all the things that are to me most beautiful—the woodland chase, the old house among its gardens, the village church among its elms, the sedge-fringed pool, the wild moorland—and all the pleasant varieties, too, of the human spirit, its fantastic perversities, its fastidious reveries, its lonely dreams. All these must go, of course; they are luxuries to which no individual has any right; we must be drilled and organised; we must do our share of the work, and take our culture in a municipal gallery, or through cheap editions of the classics. No doubt we shall get the 'joys in widest commonalty spread' of which Wordsworth speaks; and the only thing that I pray is that I may not be there to see it."

"You are a fine specimen of the individualist," said Sheldon, "and I have no desire to convert you—indeed we speak different languages, and I doubt if you could understand me; there is to be no such levelling as you suppose, rather the other way indeed; we shall not be able to do without individualism, only it will be pleasantly organised. The delightful thing to me is to observe that you are willing to let us have a little of your culture at your own price, but we shall not want it; we shall have our own culture, and it will be a much bigger and finer thing than the puling reveries of hedonists; it will be like the sea, not like the scattered moorland pools."

"Do you mean," said Hugh, "when you talk so magniloquently of the culture of the future, that it will be different from the culture of the present and of the past?"

"No, no," said Sheldon, "not different at all, only wider and more free. Do you not see that at present it is an elegant monopoly, belonging to a few select persons, who have been refined and civilised up to a certain point? The difficulty is that we can't reach that point all at once—why, it has taken you thirty or forty centuries to reach it!—and at present we can't get further than the municipal art-gallery, and lectures on the ethical outlook of Browning. But that is not what we are aiming at, and you are not to suppose that yours is a different ideal of beauty and sensibility from ours. What I object to is that you and your friends are so select and so condescending. You seem to have no idea of the movement of humanity, the transformation of the race, the corporate rise of emotion."