Escape, and Other Essays

by Arthur Christopher Benson

The whole thing indeed is so strange as to be almost frightening, the moment that we dare to think at all: and yet we feel on the whole at our ease in it, and in our place; and the one thing that does terrify us is the prospect of leaving it.

What I mean, then, by art in its largest sense is the faculty we have of observing and comparing and wondering; and the people who make the most of life are the people who give their imagination wings; and then, too, comes in the further feeling, which leads us to try and shape our own life and conduct on the lines of what we admire and think beautiful; the dull word duty means that, that we choose what is not necessarily pleasant because for some mysterious reason we feel happier so; because, however much we may pretend to think otherwise, we are all of us at every moment intent upon happiness, which is a very different thing from pleasure, and sometimes quite contrary to it.

And so we come at last to the art of living, which is really a very delicate balancing and comparing of reasons, an attempt, however blind and feeble, to get at happiness; and the moment that this attempt ceases and becomes merely a dull desire to be as comfortable as we can, that moment the spirit begins to go down hill, and the value of life is over; unless perhaps we learn that we cannot afford to go down hill, and that every backward step will have to be painfully retraced, somewhere or other.

What, then, I would try to persuade anyone who is listening to me is that we must use our wills somehow to try experiments, to observe, to distinguish, to follow what we think fine and beautiful. It may be said that this is only a sort of religion, and indeed it is exactly that at which I am aiming. It is a religion, which is within the reach of many people who cannot be touched by what is technically called religion. Religion is a word that has unhappily become specialised. It stands for beliefs, doctrines, ceremonies, practices. But these may not, and indeed do not, suit many of us. The worst of definite religions is that they are too definite. They try to enforce upon us a belief in things which we find incredible, or perhaps think to be simply unknowable; or they make out certain practices to be important, which we do not think important. We must never do violence to our minds and souls by professing to believe what we do not believe, or to think things certain which we honestly believe to be uncertain; but at the same time we must remember that there is always something of beauty inside every religion, because religion involves a deliberate choice of better motives and better actions, and an attempt to exclude the baser and viler elements of life.

Of course the objection to all this—and it is a serious one—is that people may say, "Of course I see the truth of all that, and the advantage of being actively and vividly interested in life; you might as well preach the advantage of being happy; but my own interest is fitful and occasional; sometimes for days together I have no sense of the interest or quality of anything. I have no time, I have no one to enjoy these things with. How am I to become what I see it would be wise to be?" It is as when the woman of Samaria said, "Thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep!" It is true that civilisation does seem more and more to create men and women with these instincts, and to set them in circumstances where it is hard to gratify them. And then such people are apt to say, "Is it after all worth while to aim at so impossible a standard? Is it not better just to put it all aside, and make oneself as comfortable as one can?" And that is the practical answer which a good many people do make to the question; and when such people get older, they are the most discouraging of all advisers, because they ridicule the whole thing as nonsense, which young men and young women had better get out of their heads as soon as they can; as Jowett wrote of his pupil Swinburne, that he was a clever fellow, and would do well enough as soon as he had got rid of all this poetry and nonsense. I feel no doubt that these ideas, this kind of interest in life, in the wonder and strangeness of it, can be pursued by many who do not pursue it. It is like the white deer, which in the old stories the huntsman was for ever pursuing in the forest; he did not ever catch it, but the pursuit of it brought him many high adventures.

Of course it is far easier if one has a friend who shares the same tastes; but if one has not, there are always books, in which the best minds can be found thinking and talking at their finest and liveliest. But here again a good many people are betrayed by reading books as one may collect stamps, just triumphing in the number and variety of the repertory. I believe very little in setting the foot on books, as sailors take possession of an unknown isle. One must make experiments, just to see what are the kind of books which nurture and sustain one; and then I believe in arriving at a circle of books, which one really knows through and through, and reads at all times and in all moods, till they get soaked and enriched with all sorts of moods and associations. I have a dozen such, which I read and mark and scribble in, write when and where I read them, and who were my companions. Of course the same books do not always last through one's course. You grow out of books as you grow out of clothes; and I sometimes look at old favourites, and find myself lost in wonder as to how I can ever have cared for them like that! They seem now like little antechambers and corridors, through which I have passed to something far more noble and gracious. But all the time we must be trying to weave the books really into life, not let them stand like ornaments on a shelf. It is poetry that enkindles the mind most to dwell in the thoughts of which I have been speaking. But it must not be read straight on; it must rather be tasted, brooded over, repeated, learned by heart. Let me take a personal instance. As a boy I had no opinion of Wordsworth, except that I admired one or two of the great poems like the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" and the "Ode to Duty," which no one who sets out to love poetry at all can afford to ignore. Then, as I grew older, I began to see that quotations from Wordsworth had a sort of grandeur in their very substance, which was unlike any other grandeur. And then I took the whole of the poems away for a vacation, and worked at them; and then I found how again and again Wordsworth touches a thought to life, which is like the little objects you pick up on the seashore, the evidence of another life close at hand, indubitably there, and yet unknown, which is being lived under the waste of waters. When Wordsworth says such things as

And many love me, but by none
Am I enough beloved,

or when he says,

Some silent laws our hearts may make
Which they shall long obey—

then he seems to uncover the very secrets of the world, and to speak as when in the prophet's vision the seven thunders uttered their voices. Only to-day I was working with a pupil; in his essay he had quoted Wordsworth, and we looked up the place. While I was speaking, my eye fell upon "The Poet's Epitaph," and I saw,