Escape, and Other Essays - Arthur Christopher Benson (free novel reading sites .txt) 📗

green summit; or the spring came back after the winter silence with all its languor of unfolding life, while bush and covert wove their screens of dense-tapestried foliage, to conceal what mysteries of love and delight! and the faces or gestures of those about one took on a new significance, a richer beauty, a larger interest, because one began to guess how experience moulded them, by what aims and hopes they were graven and refined, by what failures they were obliterated and coarsened. But the difference was this, that one was not now for ever trying to make these charms one's own, to establish private understandings or mutual relations. It was enough now to observe them as one could, to interpret them, to enjoy them, and to pass by. The acquisitive sense was gone, and one neither claimed nor grasped; one admired and wondered and went forwards. And this again seemed a wholesome balance of thought, for, as the desire to take diminished, the power, of interpreting and enjoying grew.

But very gradually a slow shadow began to fall, like the shadow of a great hill that reaches far out over the plain. I passed one day an old churchyard deep in the country, and saw the leaning headstones and the grassy barrows of the dead. A shudder passed through me, a far-off chill, at the thought that it must come to THIS after all; that however rich and intricate and delightful life was--and it was all three--the time would come, perhaps with pain and languid suffering, when one must let all the beautiful threads out of one's hands, and compose oneself, with such fortitude as one could muster, for the long sleep. And then one called Reason to one's aid, and bade her expound the mystery, and say that just as no smallest particle of matter could be disintegrated utterly, or subtracted from the sum of things, so, and with infinitely greater certainty, could no pulse or desire or motion of the spirit be brought to nought. True, the soul lived like a bird in a cage, hopping from perch to perch, slumbering at times, moping dolefully, or uttering its song; but it was even more essentially imperishable than the body that obeyed and enfolded and at last failed it. So said Reason; and yet that brought no hope, so dear and familiar had life become,--the well-known house, the accustomed walks, the daily work, the forms of friend and comrade. It was just those things that one wanted; and reason could only say that one must indeed leave them and begone, and she could not look forwards nor forecast anything; she could but bid one note the crag-faces and the monstrous ledges of the abyss into which the spirit was for ever falling, falling. . . .

Alas! it was there all the time, the sleepless desire to know and to be assured; I had found nothing, learned nothing; it was all still to seek. I had but just drugged the hunger into repose, beguiled it, hidden it away under habits and work and activities. It was something firmer than work, something even more beautiful than beauty, more satisfying than love that I wanted; and most certainly it was not repose. I had grown to loathe the thought of that, and to shrink back in horror from the dumb slumber of sense and thought. It was energy, life, activity, motion, that I desired; to see and touch and taste all things, not only things sweet and delightful, but every passionate impulse, every fiery sorrow that thrilled and shook the spirit, every design that claimed the loyalty of mankind. I grudged, it seemed, even the slumber that divided day from day; I wanted to be up and doing, struggling, working, loving, hating, resisting, protesting. And even strife and combat seemed a waste of precious time; there was so much to do, to establish, to set right, to cleanse, to invigorate, great designs to be planned and executed, great glories to unfold. Yet sooner or later I was condemned to drop the tools from my willing hand, to stand and survey the unfinished work, and to grieve that I might no longer take my share.


6


It was even thus that the vision came to me, in a dream of the night. I had been reading the story of the isle of Circe, and the thunderous curve of the rolling verse had come marching into the mind as the breakers march into the bay. I dropped the book at last, and slept.

Yes, I was in the wood itself; I could see little save undergrowth and great tree-trunks; here and there a glimpse of sky among the towering foliage. The thicket was less dense to the left, I thought, and in a moment I came out upon an open space, and saw a young man in the garb of a shepherd, a looped blue tunic, with a hat tossed back upon the shoulders and held there by a cord. He had leaned a metal stave against a tree, the top of it adorned by a device of crossed wings. He was stooping down and disengaging something from the earth, so that when I drew near, he had taken it up and was gazing curiously at it. It was the herb itself! I saw the prickly flat leaves, the black root, and the little stars of milk-white bloom. He looked up at me with a smile as though he had expected me, which showed his small white teeth and the shapely curl of his lips; while his dark hair fell in a cluster over his brow.

"There!" he said, "take it! It is what you are in need of!"

"Yes," I said, "I want peace, sure enough!" He looked at me for a moment, and then let the herb drop upon the ground.

"Ah no!" he said lightly, "it will not bring you that; it does not give peace, the herb of patience!"

"Well, I will take it," I said, stooping down; but he planted his foot upon it. "See," he said, "it has already rooted itself!" And then I saw that the black root had pierced the ground, and that the fibres were insinuating themselves into the soil. I clutched at it, but it was firm.

"You do not want it, after all," he said. "You want heartsease, I suppose? That is a different flower--it grows upon men's graves."

"No," I cried out petulantly, like a child. "I do not want heartsease! That is for those who are tired, and I am not tired!"

He smiled at me and stooped again, raised the plant and gave it to me. It had a fresh sharp fragrance of the woodland and blowing winds, but the thorns pricked my hands. . . .

The dream was gone, and I awoke; lying there, trying to recover the thing which I had seen, I heard the first faint piping of the birds begin in the ivy round my windows, as they woke drowsily and contentedly to life and work. The truth flashed upon me, in one of those sudden lightning-blazes that seem to obliterate even thought.

"Yes," I cried to myself, "that is the secret! It is that life does not end; it goes on. To find what I am in search of, to understand, to interpret, to see clearly, to sum it up, that would be an end, a soft closing of the book, the shutting of the door--and that is just what I do not want. I want to live, and endure, and suffer, and experience, and love, and NOT to understand. It is life continuous, unfolding, expanding, developing, with new delights, new sorrows, new pains, new losses, that I need: and whether we know that we need it, or think we need something else, it is all the same; for we cannot escape from life, however reluctant or sick or crushed or despairing we may be. It waits for us until we have done groaning and bleeding, and we must rise up again and live. Even if we die, even if we seek death for ourselves, it is useless. The eye may close, the tide of unconsciousness may flow in, the huddled limbs may tumble prone; a moment, and then life begins again; we have but flown like the bird from one tree to another. There is no end and no release; it is our destiny to live; the darkness is all about us, but we are the light, enlacing it with struggling beams, piercing it with fiery spears. The darkness cannot quench it, and wherever the light goes, there it is light. The herb Moly is but the patience to endure, whether we like it or no. It delivers us, not from ourselves, not from our pains or our delights, but only from our fears. They are the only unreal things, because we are of the indomitable essence of light and movement, and we cannot be overcome nor extinguished--we can but suffer, we cannot die; we leap across the nether night; we pass resistless on our way from star to star."


XV


BEHOLD, THIS DREAMER COMETH

I saw in one of the daily illustrated papers the other day a little picture--a snapshot from the front--which filled me with a curious emotion. It was taken in some village behind the German lines. A handsome, upright boy of about seventeen, holding an accordion under his arm--a wandering Russian minstrel, says the comment--has been brought before a fat, elderly, Landsturm officer to be interrogated. The officer towers up, in a spiked helmet, holding his sword-hilt in one hand and field-glasses in the other, looking down at the boy truculently and fiercely. Another officer stands by smiling. The boy himself is gazing up, nervous and frightened, staring at his formidable captor, a peasant beside him, also looking agitated. There is nothing to indicate what happened, but I hope they let the boy go! The officer seemed to me to typify the tyranny of human aggressiveness, at its stupidest and ugliest. The boy, graceful, appealing, harmless, appeared, I thought, to stand for the spirit of beauty, which wanders about the world, lost in its own dreams, and liable to be called sharply to account when it strays within the reach of human aggressiveness occupied in the congenial task of making havoc of the world's peaceful labours.

The Landsturm officer in the picture had so obviously the best of it; he was thoroughly enjoying his own formidableness; while the boy had the look of an innocent, bright-eyed creature caught in a trap, and wondering miserably what harm it could have done.

Something of the same kind is always going on all the world over; the collision of the barbarous and disciplined forces of life with the beauty-loving, detached instinct of man. The latter cannot give a reason for its existence, and yet I am by no means sure that it is not going to triumph in the end.

There is every reason to believe that within the last twenty years the sowing of education broadcast has had an effect upon the human outlook, rather than perhaps upon the human character, which has not been adequately estimated. The crop is growing up all about us, and we hardly yet know what it is. I am going to speak of one out of the many results of this upon one particular section of the community, because I have become personally aware of it in certain very definite ways. It is easy to generalise about tendencies, but I am here speaking from actual evidence of an unmistakable kind.

The section of the community of which I speak is that which can be roughly described as the middle class--homes, that is, which are removed from