The Silent Isle

by Arthur Christopher Benson

Then as I wandered in a place of dark leaves, beside the moat under the frowning towers, I saw a kingfisher sit on a bough, his back powdered with sapphires, his red breast, his wise head on one side, watching the stream. In a moment he plunged and disappeared; in an instant he was back again on his perch, flashing, like Excalibur, over the stream, his prey in his bill.

For a long morning I wandered about, dizzied with beauty, gazing, wondering, desiring I knew not what.

Then came the strange thought that this place of dreamful beauty should be in the hands of a few simple ecclesiastical persons; the town is little more than a village; century by century it has lived a little, quiet provincial life. It has produced, so far as I know, no great man. This soft air, this humid climate, sheltered from the wind, full of warm sunlight, fed with dew, seems favourable to a long, comfortable, indolent life. The beauty of the place seems to have had no particular effect upon the people who live there. It has never been a centre of thought or activity. It ought, one would have thought, to have produced a certain kind of poetical temper, even though it were a temper of indolent enjoyment rather than of creative force. But not even a beauty born of murmuring sound—and the air is full of murmurs—seemed to have passed into the faces of the simple townsfolk who make it their home. I could not gather thatthe exquisite loveliness of the place had any particular effect upon the dwellers there, except a mild pleasure in the fact that so many strangers should come to see the place. I do not exactly grudge strangers the sight of it, though I should like better to think of it all as standing in an enchanted valley hard to penetrate. But it is difficult to see exactly for whom it all exists. It seems to be a place that ought to have a dreamful, appreciative, emotional life of its own, a place where a few worthy natures might live in a serene, joyful, impassioned mood; a place where there is nothing that need remind the dweller of ugliness or vulgarity, of progress or statistics; a place for elect souls and fine natures.

One does not want to be fantastic or absurd in such reveries as these; but it is sad to think that scattered about England in mean towns, perhaps in sordid houses, are natures that could live in a place like Wells with a perpetual delight, a constant drinking at the sources of beauty, while most of the actual inhabitants have come there almost by chance, and do not appear to be particularly conscious of their blessings or particularly affected by their surroundings. It seems indeed a curious wastefulness, that the Power who rules the world should have heaped in this tiny place among the hills such a treasure of delicate beauty, with such an indifference as to whether it should he perceived or discerned by congenial spirits.

The type of ecclesiastic whom I would like to see in a place like this would be a man deeply sensitive to art and music, with a strong mystical sense of wonder and desire; visionary perhaps, and what is called unpractical, believing that religion was not so much a matter of conduct as a matter of mood; in whom conduct would follow mood, as a rush bends in the stream. I do not say that this is the most vital form of religion. It is not the spirit of Luther or of John Wesley; it lives more among hopes than certainties; it desires to see God rather than to proclaim His wrath. Such a man, tenderly courteous to all, patient, wise, sad with a hopeful sadness, living in an atmosphere of uplifted prayer, hearing the ripple of the spring or the bird's song among the thickets, his heart rising in ecstasy upon the holy music, upborne by the grave organ-thunders, speaking sometimes out of a full heart of the secrets of God, would lead a life that would be shepherded by his Lord in a green pasture; led by waters of comfort and in paths of righteousness, with a table indeed prepared. Such a life is apt nowadays to be viewed contemptuously by the virile man, by the practical philanthropist; but it is such a spirit as this that produced the Psalms, the Book of Job, the Apocalypse. It is a type of religion that even those who base their faith upon the open Bible are apt to despise and condemn; if so, their Bible is not an open one, but sealed with many seals of ignorance and dulness. Such a life should be full of energy, of faith, of purity. It should speak to those that had ears to hear in secret chambers, even though it did not cry from the house-tops. In this stupid and hypocritical age, that mistakes money for wealth, excitement for pleasure, interference for influence, fame for wisdom, speed for progress, volubility for eloquence, such a life is despised, if not actually condemned.

Yet such lives might break from underground, in a place of greensward and bushes, among the voices of birds and the mellow murmur of bells, even as the fountains themselves spring forth. In these bustling days we are apt to think that streams have no work but to turn mills and make light for cities, to bear merchandise, to sweep foulness to the sea; we forget that they pass through woodland places, feeding the grasses and the trees, quenching the thirst of bird and beast, that they sparkle in the sun, gleam wan in the sunset, reflecting the pale sky. Oh, perverse and forgetful generation, that knows better than God what the aim and goal of our pilgrimage is; that will not hear His murmured language, or see His patient writing on the wall! That in teaching, forget to learn, and in prophesying, have no leisure to look backwards! It is we that have despised life and beauty and God; it is we that make graven images, and worship the fire till we cannot see the sun, who pray daily for peace, and cast the jewel in the mire when it is put in our foolish hands.

And after all, though we shelter our lives and seclude them as we may, we have all of us a heavy burden to bear. These mouldering walls, these soaring towers, the voice of many waters, teach me this, if they teach me nothing else, that peace and beauty are dear to the heart of God; that he sets them where he can; that we can perceive them and love them; and that if our life is a learning of some great and dim lesson, these sweet influences may sustain and comfort us at least as well as the phantoms which so many of us pursue.

LIII

I am sure that it is an inspiring as well as a pleasant thing to go on pilgrimage sometimes to the houses where interesting people and great people have lived and thought and written. It helps one to realise, that "they were mortal, too, like us," but it makes one realise it gratefully and joyfully; it is good to feel, as one comes to do by such visits, that such thoughts, such words, are not unattainable by humanity, that they can be thought in rooms and fields and gardens like our own, and written down in chairs and on tables much the same as others. Tennyson went once to see Goethe's house at Weimar, and was more transported by seeing a room full of his old boots and medicine-bottles than by anything else that he saw; and it is a wise care that keeps dear Sir Walter's old hat and coat and clumsy laced shoes in a glass case at Abbotsford. Of course one must not go in search of old boots and bottles, as many tourists do, without caring much about the hero to whom they belonged. One must have grown familiar first with every detail of the great man's life, have read his letters and his biography, and the letters written about him, and his Diary if possible, and all his books; one must have grown to admire him and desire his presence, and hate the thought of the grave that separates him from oneself; until one has come to feel that the place where he slept and ate and walked and talked and wrote is like the field full of stones at Luz, where the ladder was set up from heaven to earth, and where Jacob, shivering in his chilly slumbers, saw, in a moment of dreamful enlightenment, that the heavenly staircase may be let down in a moment at any place or hour, and that the angels may descend, carrying bright thoughts and secret consolations from its cloudy head.

And thus there can be for any one man but a few places to which he owes such a pilgrimage, because, in the first place, the thing must not be too ancient and remote; it is of little use to see the ruined shell of a great house in a forest, because such a scene does not in the least recall what the eyes of one's hero saw and rested upon. There must be some personal aroma about it; one must be able to see the garden-paths where he walked, the furniture which he used, and to realise the place in some degree as it appeared to him.