Beside Still Waters

by Arthur Christopher Benson

The morning sun fell brightly on Hugh's breakfast-table; and a honeycomb that stood there, its little cells stored with translucent sweetness, fragrant with the pure breath of many flowers, sparkled with a golden light. Hugh fell to wondering over it. One's food, as a rule, transformed and dignified by art, and enclosed in vessels of metal and porcelain, had little that was simple or ancient about its associations; how the world indeed was ransacked for one's pleasure! meats, herbs, spices, minerals—it was strange to think what a complexity of materials was gathered for one's delight; but honey seemed to take one back into an old and savage world. Samson had gathered it from the lion's bones, Jonathan had thrust his staff into the comb, and put the bright oozings to his lips; humanity in its most ancient and barbarous form had taken delight in this patiently manufactured confection. But a further thought came to him; the philosopher spoke of a development in nature, a slow moving upward through painfully gathered experience. It was an attractive thought, no doubt, and gave a clue to the bewildering differences of the world. But after all how incredibly slow a progress it was! The whole course of history was minute enough, no doubt, in comparison with what had been; but so far as the records of mankind existed, it was not possible to trace that any great development had taken place. The lines of species that one saw to-day were just as distinct as they had been when the records of man began. They seemed to run, like separate threads out of the tapestry, complete and entire from end to end, not mixing or intermingling. Fish, birds, quadrupeds—some had died out indeed, but no creature mentioned in the earliest records showed the smallest sign of approximating or drawing near to any other creature; no bird had lost its wings or gained its hands; no quadruped had deserted instinct for reason. Bees were a case in point. They were insects of a marvellous wisdom. They had a community, a government, almost laws. They knew their own business, and followed it with intense enthusiasm. Yet in all the centuries during which they had been robbed and despoiled for the pleasure of man, they had learnt no prudence or caution. They had not even learned to rebel. Generation after generation, in fragrant cottage gardens, they made their delicious store, laying it up for their offspring. Year after year that store had been rifled; yet for all their curious wisdom, their subtle calculations, no suspicion ever seemed to have entered their heads of what was going forward. They did not even try to find a secret place in the woods for their nest; they built obediently in the straw-thatched hives, and the same spoliation continued. A few days before Hugh had visited a church in the neighbourhood, and had become aware of a loud humming in the chancel. He found that an immense swarm of bees had been hatched out in the roof, and were dying in hundreds, in their attempt to escape through the closed windows. There were plenty of apertures in the church through which they could have escaped, if they had had any idea of exploration. But they were content to buzz feebly up and down the panes, till strength failed them, and they dropped down on to the sill among the bodies of their brothers. An old man who was digging in the churchyard told Hugh that the same thing had gone on in the church every summer for as long as he could remember.

And yet one did not hesitate to accept the Darwinian theory, on the word of scientific men, though the whole of visible and recorded experience seemed to contradict it. Even stranger than the amazing complexity of the whole scheme, was the incredible patience with which the matter was matured. What was more wonderful yet, man, by his power of observing the tendencies of nature, could make her laws to a certain extent serve his own ends. He could, for instance, by breeding carefully from short-legged sheep, in itself a fortuitous and unaccountable variation from the normal type, produce a species that should be unable to leap fences which their long-legged ancestors could surmount; he could thus save himself the trouble of erecting higher fences. This power in man, this faculty for rapid self-improvement, differentiated him from all the beasts of the field; how had that faculty arisen? it seemed a gap that no amount of development could bridge. If nature had all been perfect, if its rules had been absolutely invariable, if existence were conditioned by regular laws, it would be easy enough to believe in God. And yet as it was, it seemed so imperfect, and in some ways so unsatisfactory; so fortuitous in certain respects, so wanting in prevision, so amazingly deliberate. Such an infinity of care seemed lavished on the delicate structure of the smallest insects and plants, such a prodigal fancy; and yet the laws that governed them seemed so strangely incomplete, like a patient, artistic, whimsical force, working on in spite of insuperable difficulties. It looked sometimes like a conflict of minds, instead of one mind.

And then, too, the wonder which one felt seemed to lead nowhere. It did not even lead one to ascertain sure principles of conduct and life. The utmost prudence, the most careful attempt to follow the guidance of those natural laws, was liable to be rendered fruitless by what was called an accident. One's instinct to retain life, to grasp at happiness, was so strong; and yet, again and again, one was taught that it was all on sufferance, and that one must count on nothing. One was set, it seemed, in a vast labyrinth; one must go forward, whether one would or no, among trackless paths, overhung by innumerable perils. The only thing that seemed sure to Hugh was that the more one allowed the awe, the bewilderment, to penetrate one's heart and mind, the more that one indulged a fearful curiosity as to the end and purpose of it all, the nearer one came, if not to learning the lesson, yet at least towards reaching a state of preparedness that might fit one to receive the further confidence of God. Such tranquillity as one gained by putting aside the problems which encompassed one, must be a hollow and vain tranquillity. One might indeed never learn the secret; it might be the will of God simply to confront one with the desperate problem; but a deep instinct in Hugh's heart told him that this could not be so; and he determined that he, at all events, would go about the world as a patient learner, grasping at any hint that was offered him, whether it came by the waving of grasses on the waste, by the droop of flower-laden boughs over a wall, from the strange horned insect that crawled in the dust of the highway, or from the soft gaze of loving eyes, flashing a message into the depths of his soul.

The pure faint lines of the wold that he saw from his window on the far horizon, rising so peacefully above the level pasture-land, with the hedgerow elms—what did they stand for? The mind reeled at the thought. They were nothing but a gigantic cemetery. Every inch of that soft chalk had been made up by the life and death, through millions of years, of tiny insects, swimming, dying, mouldering in the depths of some shapeless sea. Surely such a thought had a message for his soul, not less real than the simpler and more direct message of peace that the soft pale outlines, the gentle foldings of the hills, seemed to lend his troubled spirit; in such a moment his faith rose strong; he trod a shining track through the deeps of God.

XXX

Flowers—The Garden

The air that day was full of sunlight like fine gold, and put Hugh in mind of the city that was pure gold like unto clear glass!—he had often puzzled over that as a child; gold always seemed so opaque a thing, a surface without depth; but, after all, it was true of the air about him to-day—clear and transparent indeed, with a perfect clarity and purity, and yet undoubtedly all tinged with lucent liquid gold. He sate long on a bench in the college garden, a little paradise for the eye and mind; it had been skilfully laid out, and Hugh used to think that he had never seen a place so enlarged by art, where so much ground went to the acre! All the outer edge of it was encircled by trees—elms, planes, and limes; the borders, full of flowering shrubs, were laid out in graceful curves, and in the centre was a great oval bed of low-growing bushes, with the velvet turf all about it, sweeping in sunlit vistas to left and right. It gave somehow a sense of space and extent, achieved Hugh could not guess how. To-day all the edges of the borders were full of flowers; and as he wandered among them he was more than ever struck with a thought that had often come to him, the mystery of flowers! The extraordinary variety of leaf and colour, the whimsical shapes, the astonishing invention displayed, and yet an invention of an almost childish kind. There was a clump of pink blooms, such as a child might have amused itself with cutting out of paper; here rose tall spires, with sharp-cut, serrated leaves at the base; but the blue flowers on the stem were curiously lipped and horned, more like strange insects than flowers. And then the stainless freshness and delicacy of the texture, that a touch would soil! These gracious things, uncurling themselves hour by hour, blooming, fading, in obedience to the strange instinct of life, surprised him by a sudden thrill. Here was a bed of irises, with smooth blade-like stalks, snaky roots, the flowers of incredible shapes, yet no two exactly alike, all splashed and dappled with the richest colours; and then the mixture of blended fragrance; the hot, honied smell of the candytuft, with aromatic spicy scents of flowers that he could not name. Here again was the escholtzia, with its pointed horns, its bluish leaf, and the delicate orange petals, yet with a scent, pure but acid, which almost made one shudder. There was some mind behind it all, Hugh felt, but what a mind! how leisurely, how fanciful, how unfathomable! For whose pleasure were all these bright eccentric forms created? Certainly not for the pleasure of man, for Hugh thought of the acres and acres of wheat now rising in serried ranks in the deep country, with the poppies or the marigolds among them, all quietly unfolding their bells of scarlet flame, their round, sunlike faces, where no eye could see them, except the birds that flew over. Could it be for God's own pleasure that these flower shapes were made? they could not even see each other, but rose in all their freshness, as by a subtle conspiracy, yet blind to the world about them, conscious only of the sunlight and the rain, with no imaginative knowledge, it would seem, or sympathy with their brethren. It always filled Hugh with a sort of pity to think of the sightless life of trees and flowers, each rising in its place, in plain, on hill, and yet each enclosed within itself, with no consciousness of its own beauty, and still less conscious of the beauty of its fellows. And what was the life that animated them? Where did it come from? Where did it pass to? Had they any sense of joy, of sorrow? It was hard to believe that they had not. It always distressed Hugh to see flowers gathered or boughs broken; it seemed a hateful tyranny to treat these delicate creatures so for an hour's pleasure. The sight of flowers picked and then thrown carelessly down by the roadside, gave him a sense of helpless indignation. The idyllic picture of children wandering in spring, filling their hands with flower-heads torn from bank and copse, appeared to Hugh as only painful. Man, from first to last, seemed to spread a ruthless destruction around him. Hugh's windows overlooked a stream-bend much frequented by fishermen; and it was a misery to him to see the poor dace, that had lived so cool and merry a life in the dark pools of the stream, poising and darting among the river-weed, hauled up struggling to the air, to be greeted with a shout of triumph, and passed about, dying and tortured, among the hot hands, in the thin, choking air. Was that what God made them for? What compensation awaited them for so horrible and shameful an end?

Hugh felt with a sigh that the mystery was almost unendurable, that God should make, hour by hour, these curious and exquisite things, such as flowers and fishes, and thrust them, not into a world where they could live out a peaceful and innocent life, but into the midst of dangers and miseries. Sometimes, beneath his windows, he could see a shoal of little fish flick from the water in all directions at the rush of a pike, one of them no doubt horribly engulphed in the monster's jaws.

Why was so hard a price to be paid for the delightful privilege of life? Was it indifference or carelessness, as a child might make a toy, and weary of it? It seemed like it, though Hugh could not bear to think that it was so; and yet for thousands of centuries the same thing had been going on all over the world, and no one seemed an inch nearer to the mystery of it all. How such thoughts seemed to shrivel into nothing the voluble religious systems that professed to explain it all! The misery of it was that, here and everywhere, God seemed to be explaining it Himself every day and hour, and yet one missed the connection which could make it all intelligible—the connection, that is, between God, as man in his heart conceived of Him, and God as He wrote Himself large in every field and wood. On what hypothesis of pure benevolence and perfect justice could all these restless lives, so full of pain and suffering, and all alike ending in death and disappearance, be explained?