A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

The finger of the gloomy moralist is pointed at me. I knew it was going to be pointed—and in a sepulchral voice he says: ‘What about death?’

The fact is that I don’t know (nor does he), and it is not my affair. While I am alive I prefer to drink deep of the joy of life than to speculate about what may come next. I can conjure up my death-bed as often as I choose, and make it a scene of moving pathos and dim vexed doubts. There is nothing so easy. I can without the slightest effort advance really profound problems as to ‘what it all means,’ since there is nothing so easy as asking unanswerable questions. What of the death of the wasp which I killed gleefully last August with a tennis-racquet? I haven’t the slightest idea. All I know is that if next August another ventures to buzz round my head when I am having tea on the lawn after a perspiring set, I shall, if possible, kill it again.

If only the gloomy moralist could give me a reasonable theory to show why I could not exterminate wasps, I would accept it. But he can’t. He only says it puzzles him. It puzzles me, too, but in the interval I kill the wasp.

The fact is (degrading though it may sound) that I do not really believe that we are any of us capable of understanding the mind of the Infinite God. Philosophers try to explain little bits of it, and in their explanation of the little bit of it bang their heads together like children playing hide-and-seek in the dark. Hinc illæ lacrimæ. The poor children have terrible headaches. I am extremely sorry, but it is, after all, their fault. Instead of playing hide-and-seek in the dark, they should go out and play in the light; then no heads would be hit together.

It is quite maddening to think of the energy expended over this hide-and-seek, when all the time the garden of the world’s beauty is ready waiting outside the door. If you have the instincts of a beast, perhaps it is better to grope in the dark; but if you have the rudiments of any other condition, go and play. All the beauty that the world holds is at your command. All that really matters in this world is to be enjoyed very cheaply. Most things worth reading can be bought for a shilling or two, and if that is not ‘handy,’ look at a tree instead, and absorb the life that shines in each growing twig of it. Or if you are musically minded, hear, as I have just heard, the glories of the maidens of the storm.

Of course, no one thing is the least more wonderful than any other. All that happens, if we look at it at all closely, is a marvellous conjuring-trick. Why don’t ducks come out of hen’s eggs? Is it not marvellous that chickens invariably issue? If you go a step farther back, and learn something about the continuance of type, it becomes even more wonderful. ‘How’ can be told us, but never ‘why.’ And so I am confident in the unanswerableness of my riddle. Why do sounds like those of the violin and the brass in the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ convey the essence of storm and tempest?

Another conjuring-trick of the most delightful kind occurred next morning. At twelve o’clock last night the streets of London had, without asking (thereby reversing the sad tale of Oliver Twist), been given a second helping of brown porridge. It was ankle-deep on the roadway of Sloane Street, thick brown porridge of mud; then during the night the temperature went down, and it froze. The result is that for the copious soup we are given a clean, dry roadway. There is no mud of any kind, not even frozen mud. The street is clear and dry, as if Oliver Twist had licked it. But where has gone that two inches of obfusc lather? Has the wood-pavement drunk it in? Has it gone into the air? Has some celestial housemaid, like the Awful Thing, been set to sweep the streets, even as she has swept the sky, and given us the invigoration of frost in exchange for the wet blanket of chilly cloud? Coming back from Richter last night, the streets were swimming; eight hours later (or it may be nine) one might walk barefoot across the road, or spread one’s dinner there, and get no taint. How it will be sparkling on the grasses and brave evergreens at home, turned to diamond spray by the red sun of frosty mornings!

‘O world as God has made it!’... How often involuntarily, as if coming from without, that line rings in my head! And how very little we, with all our jealousies, and depressions, and bickerings, and follies, are able to spoil or dim the beauty that is cast so broadly there. Puny as are our efforts for good, it really seems to me that our attempts at being evil are even more impotent and microscopic. We are often as tiresome and unpleasant as we know how to be, yet all the time we are swimming against that huge quiet tide of the beauty of the world as God made it, the knowledge of which is love, and beyond which there is no further declaration possible. Sometimes, if we are very active indeed, and exert ourselves very much, we can stand still or even move a little way in opposition to the great tide, but soon our efforts must relax, and we are swept down again with the current that eternally flows from the heart of the Infinite, and returns there again in those pulsations that are the life and the light of the world.

It is impossible, indeed, unless we say that evil is the vital principle of the world, to think otherwise. War there is between the two huge forces, but it is just Satanism, and nothing else whatever, that makes people say that the world is going from bad to worse. If you are so unfortunate as to be a Satanist, there is nothing more to be said, and I hope the devil will give you your due; but if otherwise, there can be no other conclusion than that good, all that is lovely and fine, is steadily gaining ground. For it does not seem reasonable to suppose that God contemplates some swift heady manœuvre which shall suddenly take evil in the rear, and in a moment rout the antagonism. At any rate, as far as we can possibly judge, it is by quiet processes that He deals with the sum of the world, even as He deals with the units that make it. For just as nobody has any right to expect that the evil in his nature will be suddenly expunged, even though the moment should be one of blinding revelation, so we should acquiesce in the slow progress of the sum-total. For there are only three possible alternatives—the first (namely, that the progress is from bad to worse), which is Satanism; the second, that there is now in the world (and will be) exactly the same amount of evil and good as there has always been, in which case you are confronted with the absurd proposition of two absolutely equal forces having made this scheme of things, which will war to all eternity; and the third, that good is stronger than evil, and is quietly gaining ground.

The objection to the first alternative is that it is Satanism—a very fatal objection. The objection to the second is that it is so stupendously dull. There cannot possibly be any point in anything if the two forces are equal. There can be no struggle in the mind as to whether one ought or ought not to do certain things, if whatever you do or don’t does not make any difference. There remains the third alternative. The objection to that is ... well, I can’t see there is any.