The Altar Fire

by Arthur Christopher Benson

April 8, 1890.

Our new house is charming, beautiful, homelike. It is an old stone building, formerly a farm; it has a quaint garden and orchard, and the wooded hill runs up steeply behind, with a stream in front. It is on the outskirts of a village, and we are within three miles of Maud's old home, so that she knows all the country round. We have got two of our old servants, and a solid comfortable gardener, a native of the place. The house within is quaint and comfortable. We have a spare bedroom; I have no study, but shall use the little panelled dining-room. We have had much to do in settling in, and I have done a great deal of hard physical work myself, in the way of moving furniture and hanging pictures, inducing much wholesome fatigue. Maggie, who broke down dreadfully on leaving the old home, with the wonderful spring that children have, is full of excitement and even delight in the new house. I rather dread the time when all our occupations shall be over, and when we shall settle down to the routine of life. I begin to wonder how I shall occupy myself. I mean to do a good many odd jobs—we have no trap, and there will be a good deal of fetching and carrying to be done. We shall resume our lessons, Maggie and I; there will be reading, gardening, walking. One ought to be able to live philosophically enough. What would I not give to be able to write now! but the instinct seems wholly and utterly dead and gone. I cannot even conceive that I ever used, solemnly and gravely, to write about imaginary people, their jests and epigrams, their sorrows and cares. Life and Art! I used to suppose that it was all a softly moulded, rhythmic, sonorous affair, strophe and antistrophe; but the griefs and sorrows of art are so much nearer each other, like major and minor keys, than the griefs and sorrows of life. In art, the musician smiles and sighs alternately, but his sighing is a balanced, an ordered mood; the inner heart is content, as the pool is content, whether it mirrors the sunlight or the lonely star; but in life, joy is to grief what music is to aching silence, dumbness, inarticulate pain—though perhaps in that silence one hears a deeper, stranger sound, the buzz of the whirring atom, the soft thunder of worlds plunging through the void, joyless, gigantic, oblivious forces.

Is it good thus to have the veils of life rent asunder? If life, the world's life, activity, work, be the end of existence, then it is not good. It breaks the spring of energy, so that one goes heavily and sorely. But what if that be not the end? What then?

May 16, 1890.

At present the new countryside is a great resource. I walk far among the wolds; I find exquisite villages, where every stone-built house seems to have style and quality; I come down upon green water-meadows, with clear streams flowing by banks set with thorn-bushes and alders. The churches, the manor-houses, of grey rubble smeared with plaster, with stone roof-tiles, are a feast for eye and heart. Long days in the open air bring me a dull equable health of body, a pleasant weariness, a good-humoured indifference. My mind becomes grass-grown, full of weeds, ruinous; but I welcome it as at least a respite from suffering. It is strange to think of myself at what ought, I suppose, to be the busiest and fullest time of my life, living here like a tree in lonely fields. What would be the normal life? A little house in a London street, I suppose, with a lot of white paint and bookshelves. Luncheons, dinners, plays, music, clubs, week-end visits to lively houses, a rush abroad, a few country visits in the winter. Very harmless and pleasant if one enjoyed it, but to me inconceivable and insupportable. Perhaps I should be happier and brisker, perhaps the time would go quicker. Ought one to make up one's mind that this would be the normal life, and that therefore one had better learn to accommodate oneself to it? Does one pay penalties for not submitting oneself to the ordinary laws of human intercourse? Doubtless one does. But then, made as I am, I should have to pay penalties which would seem to be even heavier for the submission. It is there that the puzzle lies; that a man should be created with the strong instinct that I feel for liberty and independence and solitude and the quiet of the country, and then that he should discover that the life he so desires should be the one that develops all the worst side of him—morbidity, fastidiousness, gloom, discontent. This is the shadow of civilisation; that it makes people intellectual, alert, craving for stimulus, and yet sucks their nerves dry of the strength that makes such things enjoyable.

And still, as I go in and out, the death of Alec seems the one absolutely unintelligible and inexplicable thing, a gloom penetrated by no star. It was the one thing that might have made me unselfish, tender-hearted, the anxious care of some other than myself. "Perhaps," says an old friend writing to me with a clumsy attempt at comfort, "perhaps he was taken mercifully away from some evil to come." A good many people say that, and feel it quite honestly. But what an insupportable idea of the ways of Providence, that God had planned a prospect for the child so dreadful that even his swift removal should be tolerable by comparison! What a helpless, hopeless confession of failure! No; either the whole short life, closed by the premature death, must have been designed, planned, executed deliberately; or else God is at the mercy of blank cross-currents, opposing forces, tendencies even stronger than Himself; and then the very idea of God crumbles away, and God becomes the blank and inscrutable force working behind a gentle, good-humoured will, which would be kind and gracious if it could, but is trammelled and bound by something stronger; that was the Greek view, of course—God above man, and Fate above God. The worst of it is that it has a horrible vraisemblance, and seems to lie even nearer to the facts of life than our own tender-hearted and sentimental theories and schemes of religion.

But whether it be God or fate, the burden has to be borne. And my one endeavour must be to bear it myself, consciously and courageously, and to shift it so far as I can from the gentler and tenderer shoulders of those whose life is so strangely linked with mine.

May 25, 1890.

One sees a house, like the house we now live in, from a road as one passes, from the windows of a train. It seems to be set at the end of the world, with the earth's sunset distance behind it—it seems a fortress of quiet, a place of infinite peace; and then one lives in it, and behold, it is a centre of a little active life, with all sorts of cross-currents darting to and fro, over it, past it.

Or again one thinks, as one sees such a house in passing, that there at least one could live in meditation and cloistered calm; that there would be neither cares nor anxieties; that one would be content to sit, just looking out at the quiet fields, pacing to and fro, receiving impressions, musing, selecting, apprehending—and then one lives there, and the stream of life is as turbid, as fretful as ever. The strange thing is that such delusions survive any amount of experience; that one cannot read into other lives the things that trouble one's own.