The Silent Isle

by Arthur Christopher Benson

After Shorthouse had once tasted the delights of publication and the pleasures of fame he wrote too much, and fiddled rather tediously upon a single string. Moreover, he attempted humorous effects, not very successfully; because one of the interesting points about, John Inglesant is that there is hardly the slightest touch of humour from beginning to end, except perhaps in the fantastic mixture of tragedy and comedy in the carnival scene, presided over by the man who masquerades as a corpse; and even here the humour is almost entirely of a macabre type.

Of course one would not assign to Shorthouse a very high place in English literature, beautiful as his best work is. But a writer may have an interest which is out of proportion to the value of his writings. The interest of Shorthouse is the interest which attaches to the blooming of a curious and exotic flower in a place where its presence is absolutely unaccountable; he probably will not maintain his hold upon the minds of a later generation, because there is no coherent system of thought in his book. Inglesant is a mere courtly mirror, the prey of his moods and his surroundings, in which beautiful tones of religious feeling are engagingly reflected. But to all who study the development of English prose, Shorthouse will have a definite value, as a spontaneous and lonely outcrop of poetical prose-writing in an alien soil; an isolated worker foreshowing in his secluded and graceful talent the rise of a new school in English literature, the appearance of a plant which may be expected in the future, if not in the immediate future, to break into leaf and bloom, into colour and fragrance.

LII

I found myself the other day in the neighbourhood of Wells. I had hitherto rather deliberately avoided going there, because so many people whose taste and judgment are wholly unreliable have told me that I ought to see it. The instinct to disagree with the majority is a noble one, and has perhaps effected more for humanity than any other instinct; but it must be cautiously indulged in.

In this case I resisted the instinct to abstain from visiting Wells; and I was glad that I did so, because, in spite of the fact that most people consider Wells to be a very beautiful place, it is undoubtedly true that it is most beautiful. Wells and Oxford on a large scale, Burford and Chipping Campden on a small scale, are in my experience the four most beautiful places in England, as far as buildings go. There are other places which are full of beautiful buildings; but there is a harmony about these four places which is a very rare and delightful quality.

Wells, as a matter of fact, is almost impossibly beautiful, and incredibly romantic. It is an almost perfectly mediaeval place, with the enormous advantage that it is also old, a quality which we are apt to forget that mediaeval places, when first built, did not possess. I do not think that Wells, when first built, was probably more than just a beautiful place. But it has now all grown old together, undisturbed, unvisited. It has crumbled and weathered and mellowed into one of the most enchanting places in the world.

God forbid that I should attempt to describe it; and indeed I am not sure that the things that are most admired about it are the most admirable. The west front of the Cathedral, for instance, has been temporarily ruined by the restoration of the little marble shafts, which now merely look like a quantity of india-rubber tubing, let in in pieces. The choir of the Cathedral, again, is an outrage. The low stone stalls, like a row of arbours designed by a child, the mean organ, the comfortable seats, have a shockingly Erastian air; there is not a touch of charm or mystery about it; I cannot imagine going there to pray. The Vicars' Close, which is foolishly extolled, has been made by restoration to look like a street in a small watering-place.

But, on the other hand, the Bishop's Palace, with its moat full of swans, its fantastic oriels and turrets, its bastions and towers, wreathed with ivy and creepers, is a thing which fills the mind with a sort of hopeless longing to possess the secret of its beauty; one desires in a dumb and bewildered way to surrender oneself, with a yearning confidence, to whatever the power may be which can design and produce a thing of such unutterable loveliness.

By the favour of an ecclesiastical friend I was allowed to wander alone in a totally unaccountable paradise of gardens that lies to the east of the Cathedral. It was impossible to conceive whom it belonged to, or what connection it had with the houses round about. It was all intersected with pools and rivulets of clear water. Here was a space of cultivated ground with homely vegetables. Here stood a mysterious ancient building, which proved on examination to contain nothing but a gushing well of water. Here was a lawn with a trim gravel walk bordered with roses; while a few paces away was a deserted thicket of sprawling shrubs, elders, and laurels, with a bit of wild rough meadow in the heart of the copse; and here was a sight that nearly brought me to my knees. Beside an ancient wall, with the towers and gables of the Cathedral looking solemnly over, a great spring broke up out of the ground from some secret channel into a little pool surrounded by rich water plants, and flowed away in a full channel; not one, but three of these astonishing fountains were to be seen in this little space of grass and copse.

These are the Wells themselves, the Aquae Solis, as the Romans called them, fed by some hidden channel from the hills, sent gushing up day and night for the delight and refreshment of men. I wish that the mediaeval builders had built the great church over instead of near these wells, and had let them burst up in a special chapel, so that the church might have been musical with the sound of streams; and so that the waters might have flowed from the door of the house, as Ezekiel saw them flow eastward from the threshold of the holy habitation to Engedi and Eneglaim to gladden the earth.