The Thread of Gold

by Arthur Christopher Benson

For thus comes most truly the joy of repentance; it is joy to feel that one's own lesson is learnt, and that the feeble feet are a little stronger; but if one may also feel that another has taken heed, has been saved the fall that must have come if he had not been warned, one does not grudge one's own pain, that has brought a blessing with it, that is outside of one's own blessing; one hardly even grudges the sin.

XXXVIII

The Secret

I have been away from my books lately, in a land of downs and valleys; I have walked much alone, or with a silent companion—that greatest of all luxuries. And, as is always the case when I get out of the reach of books, I feel that I read a great deal too much, and do not meditate enough. It sounds indolent advice to say that one ought to meditate; but I cannot help feeling that reading is often a still more indolent affair. When I am alone, or at leisure among my books, I take a volume down; and the result is that another man does my thinking for me. It is like putting oneself in a comfortable railway carriage; one runs smoothly along the iron track, one stops at specified stations, one sees a certain range of country, and an abundance of pretty things in flashes—too many, indeed, for the mind to digest; and that is the reason, I think, why a modern journey, even with all the luxuries that surround it, is so tiring a thing. But to meditate is to take one's own path among the hills; one turns off the track to examine anything that attracts the attention; one makes the most of the few things that one sees.

Reading is often a mere saving of trouble, a soporific for a restless brain. This last week, as I say, I have had very few books with me. One of the few has been Milton's Paradise Lost, and I have read it from end to end. I want to say a few words about the book first, and then to diverge, to a larger question. I have read the poem with a certain admiration; it is a large, strong, rugged, violent thing. I have, however, read it without emotion, except that a few of the similes in it, which lie like shells on a beach of sand, have pleased me. Yet it is not true to say that I have read it without emotion, because I have read it with anger and indignation. I have come to the conclusion that the book has done a great deal of harm. It is responsible, I think, for a great many of the harsh, business-like, dismal views of religion that prevail among us. Milton treated God, the Saviour, and the angels, from the point of view of a scholar who had read the Iliad. I declare that I think that the passages where God the Father speaks, discusses the situation of affairs, and arranges matters with the Saviour, are some of the most profane and vicious passages in English literature. I do not want to be profane myself, because it is a disgusting fault; but the passage where the scheme of Redemption is arranged, where God enquires whether any of the angels will undergo death in order to satisfy his sense of injured justice, is a passage of what I can only call stupid brutality, disguised, alas, in the solemn and majestic robe of sonorous language. The angels timidly decline, and the Saviour volunteers, which saves the shameful situation. The character of God, as displayed by Milton, is that of a commercial, complacent, irritable Puritan. There is no largeness or graciousness about it, no wistful love. He keeps his purposes to himself, and when his arrangements break down, as indeed they deserve to do, some one has got to be punished. If the guilty ones cannot, so much the worse; an innocent victim will do, but a victim there must be. It is a wicked, an abominable passage, and I would no more allow an intelligent child to read it than I would allow him to read an obscene book.

Then, again, the passage where the rebel angels cast cannon, make gunpowder, and mow the good angels down in rows, is incredibly puerile and ridiculous. The hateful materialism of the whole thing is patent. I wish that the English Church could have an Index, and put Paradise Lost upon it, and allow no one to read it until he had reached years of discretion, and then only with a certificate, and for purely literary purposes.

It is a terrible instance how strong a thing Art is; the grim old author, master of every form of ugly vituperation, had drifted miserably away from his beautiful youth, when he wrote the sweet poems and sonnets that make the pedestal for his fame; and on that delicate pedestal stands this hideous iron figure, with its angry gestures, its sickening strength.

I could pile up indignant instances of the further harm the book has done. Who but Milton is responsible for the hard and shameful view of the position of women? He represents her as a clinging, soft, compliant creature, whose only ideal is to be to make things comfortable for her husband, and to submit to his embraces. Milton spoilt the lives of all the women he had to do with, by making them into slaves, with the same consciousness of rectitude with which he whipped his nephews, the sound of whose cries made his poor girl-wife so miserable. But I do not want to go further into the question of Milton himself. I want to follow out a wider thought which came to me among the downs to-day.

There seems to me to be in art, to take the metaphor of the temple at Jerusalem, three gradations or regions, which may be typified by the Court, the Holy Place, and the Holy of Holies. Into the Court many have admittance, both writers and readers; it is just shut off from the world, but admittance is easy and common. All who are moved and stirred by ideas and images can enter here. Then there is the Holy Place, dark and glorious, where the candlestick glimmers and the altar gleams. And to this place the priests of art have access. Here are to be found all delicate and strenuous craftsmen, all who understand that there are secrets and mysteries in art. They can please and thrill the mind and ear; they can offer up a fragrant incense; but the full mystery is not revealed to them. Here are to be found many graceful and soulless poets, many writers of moving tales, and discriminating critics, who are satisfied, but cannot satisfy. Those who frequent this place are generally of opinion that they know all that is to be known; they talk much of form and colour, of values and order. They can make the most of their materials; and indeed their skill outruns their emotion.