The Upton Letters - Arthur Christopher Benson (learn to read books TXT) 📗

and moral beauty. He did live in the regions to which he directed others. But this is vitiated by a desire for recognition, a definite, almost a confessed, ambition. The letter, for instance, in which he announces that he has accepted a Canonry at Westminster is a painful one. If he felt the inexpressible distress, of which he speaks, at the idea of leaving Marlborough, there was really no reason why he should not have stayed; and, later on, his failure to attain to high ecclesiastical office seems to have resulted in a sense of compassion for the inadequacy of those who failed to discern real merit, and a certain bitterness of spirit which, considering his services to religion and morality, was not wholly unnatural. But he does not seem to have tried to interpret the disappointment that he felt, or to have asked himself whether the reason of his failure did not rather lie in his own temperament.

The kindness of the man, his laboriousness, his fierce indignation against moral evil, to say nothing of his extraordinary mental powers, seem to have been clogged all through life by this sad self-consciousness. The pity and the mystery of it is that a man should have been so moulded to help his generation, and then that this grievous defect of temperament should have been allowed to take its place as the tyrant of the whole nature. And what makes the whole situation even more tragic is that it was through a certain transparency of nature that this egotism became apparent to others. He was a man who seemed bound to speak of all that was in his mind; that was a part of his rhetorical temperament. But if he could have held his tongue, if he could have kept his own weakness of spirit concealed, he might have achieved the very successes which he desired, and, indeed, deserved. The result is that a richly endowed character achieves no conspicuous greatness, either as a teacher, a speaker, a writer, or even as a man.

The moral of these two books is this: How can any one whose character is deeply tinged by this sort of egotism--and it is the shadow of all eager and sensitive temperaments--best fight against it? Can it be subdued, can it be concealed, can it be cured? I hardly dare to think so. But I think that a man may deliberately resolve not to make recognition an object; and next I believe he may most successfully fight against egotism in ordinary life by regarding it mainly as a question of manners. If a man can only, in early life, get into his head that it is essentially bad manners to thrust himself forward, and determine rather to encourage others to speak out what is in their minds, a habit can be acquired; and probably, upon acquaintance, an interest in the point of view of others will grow. That is not a very lofty solution, but I believe it to be a practical one; and certainly for a man of egotistic nature it is a severe and fruitful lesson to read the lives of two such self-absorbed characters as Spencer and Farrar, and to see, in the one case, how ugly and distorting a fault, in the other, how hampering a burden it may become.

Egotism is really a failure of sympathy, a failure of justice, a failure of proportion, and to recognise this is the first step towards establishing a desire to be loving, just, and well-balanced.

But still the mystery remains: and I think that perhaps the most wholesome attitude is to be grateful for what in the way of work, of precept, of example these men achieved, and to leave the mystery of their faults to their Maker, in the noble spirit of Gray's Elegy:--


"No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
(There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God."


--Ever yours,

T. B.


MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON, Nov. 8, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I have been trying to read the letters of T. E. Brown. Do you know anything about him? He was a Manxman by birth, a fellow of Oriel, a Clifton Master for many years, and at the end of his life a Manxman again--he held a living there. He wrote some spirited tales in verse, in the Manx vernacular, and he was certainly a poet at heart. He was fond of music, and a true lover of nature. He had a genius for friendship, and evidently had the gift of inspiring other people; high-minded and intelligent men speak of him, in the little memoir that precedes the letters, with a pathetic reverence and a profound belief in the man's originality, and even genius. I was so sure that I should enjoy the book that I ordered it before it was published, and, when it appeared, it was a very profound disappointment. I don't mean to say that there are not beautiful things in it; it shows one a wholesome nature and a grateful, kindly heart; but, in the first place, he writes a terrible style, the kind of style that imposes on simple people because it is allusive, and what is called unconventional; to me it is simply spasmodic and affected. The man seems, as a rule, utterly unable to say anything in a simple and delicate way; his one object appears to be not to use the obvious word. He has a sort of jargon of his own--a dreadful jargon. He must write "crittur" or "craythur," when he means "creature"; he says "Yiss, ma'am, I'd be glad to jine the Book Club"; he uses the word "galore"; he talks of "the resipiscential process" when he means growing wiser--at least I think that is what he means. The following, taken quite at random, are specimens of the sort of passages that abound:--

"Rain, too, is one of my joys. I want to wash myself, soak myself in it; hang myself over a meridian to dry; dissolve (still better) into rags of soppy disintegration, blotting paper, mash and splash and hash of inarticulate protoplasm."

I suppose that both he and his friends thought that picturesque; to me it is neither beautiful nor amusing--simply ugly and aggravating.

Here again:--

"On the Quantocks I feel fairies all round me, the good folk, meet companions for young poets. How Coleridge, more especially, fits in to such surroundings! 'Fairies?' say you. Well, there's odds of fairies, and of the sort I mean Coleridge was the absolute Puck. 'Puck?' says you. 'For shame!' says you. No, d--n it! I'll stick to that. There's odds o' fairies, and often enough I think the world is nothing else; troops, societies, hierarchies--S.T.C., a supreme hierarch; look at his face; think of meeting him at moonlight between Stowey and Alfoxden, like a great white owl, soft and plumy, with eyes of flame!"

I confess that such passages simply make me blush, leave me with a kind of mental nausea. What makes it worse is that there is something in what he says, if he would only say it better. It makes me feel as I should feel if I saw an elderly, heavily-built clergyman amusing himself in a public place with a skipping-rope, to show what a child of nature he was.

I cannot help feeling that the man was a poseur, and that his affectations were the result of living in a small and admiring coterie. If, when one begins to write and talk in that jesting way, there is some one at your elbow to say, "How refreshing, how original, how rugged!" I suppose that one begins to think that one had better indulge oneself in such absurdities. But readers outside the circle turn away in disgust.

The pity of it is that Brown had something of the Celtic spirit--the melancholy, the mystery of that sensitive and delicate temperament; but it is vitiated by what I can only call a schoolmaster's humour--cheap and silly, such as imposes on immature minds. When he was quite serious and simple, he wrote beautiful, quiet, wise letters, dealing with deep things in a dignified way; but, as a rule, he thought it necessary to cut ugly capers, and to do what can only be described as playing the fool. I wish with all my heart that these letters had not been published; they deform and disfigure a beautiful spirit and a quick imagination.

Pose, affectation--what a snare they are to the better kind of minds. I declare that I value every day more and more the signs of simplicity, the people who say what they mean, and as they mean it; who don't think what they think is expected of them, but what they really feel; who don't pretend to enjoy what they don't enjoy, or to understand what they don't understand.

I may be all wrong about Brown, of course, for the victory always remains with the people who admire, rather than with the people who criticise; people cannot be all on the same plane, and it is of no use to quench enthusiasm by saying, "When you are older and wiser you will think differently." The result of that kind of snub is only to make people hold their tongues, and think one an old-fashioned pedant. I sometimes wonder whether there is an absolute standard of beauty at all, whether taste is not a sort of epidemic contagion, and whether the accredited man of taste is not, as some one says, the man who has the good fortune to agree most emphatically with the opinion of the majority.

I am sure, however, you would not like the book; though I don't say that you might not extract, as I do to my shame, a kind of bitter pleasure in thinking how unconsciously absurd it is--the pleasure one gets from watching the movements and gestures, and listening to the remarks of a profoundly affected and complacent person. But that is not an elevated kind of pleasure, when all is said and done!


"We get no good,
By being ungenerous, even to a book!"


as Mrs. Browning says. . . .--Ever yours.

T. B.


UPTON, Nov. 15, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--A controversy, a contest! How they poison all one's thoughts! I am at present wading, as Ruskin says, in a sad marsh or pool of thought. Let me indicate to you without excessive detail the kind of thing that is going on.

We have been discussing the introduction here of certain important educational reforms, in the direction of modernising and simplifying our curriculum.

Now we are all one body here, no doubt, like the Christian Church in the hymn; but unhappily, and unlike the hymn, we ARE very much divided. We are in two camps. There is a conservative section who, doubtless for very good reasons, want to keep things as they are; they see strongly all the blessings of the old order; they like the old ways and believe in them; they think, for instance, that the old classical lines of education are the best, that the system fortifies the mind, and that, when you have been through it, you have got a good instrument which enables you to tackle anything else; a very coherent position, and, in the case of our conservatives, very conscientiously administered.

Then there is a strong Progressive party numerically rather stronger, to which I myself belong. We believe that things might be a good deal better. We are dissatisfied with