A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

The triumph took wings and soared, lifting Sachs with it, him and his yearnings, and that fine old music, too, which was his. Inextricably mingled, they were knit one into each other, soaring into the sunrise.

Thereafter we were taken to the bleak mountain, where should gather the maidens of storm, who did the will of Wotan. It was high and exposed above the region of the trees, and shrill blew the winds over it, and the heavens streamed above it. Fast and thick rode the army of menacing clouds, for the tempest in which the Valkyries rejoice, riding their untamed steeds down the swift roadway of the winds, was broken out in mad fury. Yelling and screaming, it drove in mad circles of wrath round the place where the nine maidens should foregather that evening, each with the fruit of her day’s quest slung across her saddle, each with a hero who should drink that night of the wine of the gods, which should pour into his veins the fire of eternal life in place of the faint mortal blood that had beaten there before. Yet it was not love the maidens sought. It was danger and death and heroic enterprise that bore them so swiftly on their errands, and lit in them a fire brighter than love has ever kindled. Their wine was the buffet of the tempest, their meat the strong winds of God.

Then there was heard, faint at first, the beating of the immortal hoofs in the rush of flying steeds; from east and west there shone out remote fires in the bedlam of the clouds, increasing, getting nearer and more blinding, till through the darkness of the tempest could be seen the figures of the maidens gathering to their trysting-place, some at the gallop, some flying, and all drunk with adventure and swift deeds. Each that day had prospered, each had a hero at her saddle, swooning now in death, but soon to be restored to the fuller life.

So gathered they, but as yet one was still missing—Brünnhilde, the swiftest and best of them all, the dearest to the heart of Wotan, for, indeed, she was none other than his heart and his inviolable will. And while yet the others wondered at her tarrying, she came. But no hero had she. She but led a woman into the midst of her sisters, for pity had touched her fierce heart with so keen and intimate a pang that she had disobeyed the behest of Wotan, and saved her of the race which he had doomed to destruction.... The sorrow and the pain of the world had entered into her. Henceforth no more there would be for her the starry splendour of Valhalla, throned on the thunder and rosy with the light of eternal dawn. Soon for this her deed should another light shine on tower and palace wall—the light of the flames that consumed it.

Tempest, and love, and sorrow, and the doom of the immortal gods all made audible in the eternal kingdom of the air! How is it that, when once one has heard a miracle like this, one can ever so far forget it as to go back to the meanness of little miry ways? There are so many big things in the world, and though one knows that, and has, according to one’s scale, seen and understood their size, yet we can still be so gross of perception that one can sit down, blear-eyed of vision, to write two-penny-halfpenny reflections about sorrow and mutability! (And be rather pleased with them, too, until Legs and Helen laughed themselves all out of shape.)

How large a place, too, in that which makes for size and the breeziness of living, does Art in some form or other occupy for most of us! Music and painting, literature and drama, are great doors flung wide to admit one to the sunshine of God. Often, even to the spiritually-minded, the avenues of prayer and directer communion seem somehow blocked; to others, the majority, they are never wholly open. But to any who have an appreciation at all of what is beautiful, it must be a dark hour indeed when that approach is altogether shrouded and black, when neither Angelo, nor Velasquez, nor Shelley, nor Wagner, has a candle to give one to light the way. Millions of beautiful minds have their approach here. To millions all idea of a personal God, to be approached directly, seems inconceivable, but it seems to me to be one of the perfectly certain things in this very uncertain world that the passionate worship of beauty, in whatever sort manifested, is no less a direct invocation than prayer and the bent knee. The study and the love for ‘whatsoever things are lovely’ is as royal a road, perhaps, as the other, for the passion for what is beautiful is no less than the passion for the only Beautiful, and by such as feel that, all that is filthy is as unerringly condemned as it is by those who call ‘filthy’ by another name—‘sinful.’ For the perception of anything beautiful has to the perceiver a force of purging, while to the gross sense it is a sealed thing.

‘O world as God has made it, all is beauty;
And knowing this is love, and love is duty,
What further can be sought for or declared?’

And to that I say ‘Amen.’

The ‘kennel,’ as that same magician of words said, is ‘a-yelp’ at this. Artists, of whatever sort, are supposed to be loose of life. Where that extraordinary delusion arose I have no idea, unless it had its origin in some superficial observer of the manners and ways in the Latin quarter of Paris. That things not technically parochial may have occurred there, who would deny? But for my part I think it just as un-Christian to nag, and to vex, and to be unkind as to be anything else under the sun. In fact, to put it broadly, I would as soon be a drunken and kind man as be a sour and total abstainer. Sour and total abstainers will turn on me their eyes of smiling pity and horror, but perhaps it is only a matter of taste.

But to be ‘nice’ to people seems so immensely important. You may lecture on the Lamentations of Jeremiah for hours together, with a battery of historical facts to help you, and yet do no particular good; but if you help a lame dog, canine or human, over a stile, you have been a far better Christian. I dare say that word offends some people, so I will cancel it, and say that you have been of far greater service in a world that has fortuitously come into being, and will as fortuitously go out of being. Whatever may be the truth about things seen and unseen, happiness is quite certainly better than misery, and laughter is better than the most edifying tears.