From a College Window - Arthur Christopher Benson (grave mercy .txt) 📗

rather than to define, to hope rather than to be satisfied. A spirit which walks expectantly along this path grows to learn that the secret of such happiness as we can attain lies in simplicity and courage, in sincerity and loving-kindness; it grows more and more averse to material ambitions and mean aims; it more and more desires silence and recollection and contemplation. In this mood, the words of the wise fall like the tolling of sweet, grave bells upon the soul, the dreams of poets come like music heard at evening from the depth of some enchanted forest, wafted over a wide water; we know not what instrument it is whence the music wells, by what fingers swept, by what lips blown; but we know that there is some presence there that is sorrowful or glad, who has power to translate his dream into the concord of sweet sounds. Such a mood need not withdraw us from life, from toil, from kindly relationships, from deep affections; but it will rather send us back to life with a renewed and joyful zest, with a desire to discern the true quality of beautiful things, of fair thoughts, of courageous hopes, of wise designs. It will make us tolerant and forgiving, patient with stubbornness and prejudice, simple in conduct, sincere in word, gentle in deed; with pity for weakness, with affection for the lonely and the desolate, with admiration for all that is noble and serene and strong.

Those who read in such a spirit will tend to resort more and more to large and wise and beautiful books, to press the sweetness out of old familiar thoughts, to look more for warmth and loftiness of feeling than for elaborate and artful expression. They will value more and more books that speak to the soul, rather than books that appeal to the ear and to the mind. They will realize that it is through wisdom and force and nobility that books retain their hold upon the hearts of men, and not by briskness and colour and epigram. A mind thus stored may have little grasp of facts, little garniture of paradox and jest; but it will be full of compassion and hope, of gentleness and joy. . . .

Well, this thought has taken me a long way from the College library, where the old books look somewhat pathetically from the shelves, like aged dogs wondering why no one takes them for a walk. Monuments of pathetic labour, tasks patiently fulfilled through slow hours! But yet I am sure that a great deal of joy went to the making of them, the joy of the old scholar who settled down soberly among his papers, and heard the silvery bell above him tell out the dear hours that, perhaps, he would have delayed if he could. Yes, the old books are a tender-hearted and a joyful company; the days slip past, the sunlight moves round the court, and steals warmly for an hour or two into the deserted room. Life--delightful life--spins merrily past; the perennial stream of youth flows on; and perhaps the best that the old books can do for us is to bid us cast back a wistful and loving thought into the past--a little gift of love for the old labourers who wrote so diligently in the forgotten hours, till the weary, failing hand laid down the familiar pen, and soon lay silent in the dust.


IV


SOCIABILITIES

I have a friend here, an old friend, who, in refreshing contrast with the majority of the human race, possesses strongly marked characteristics. He knows exactly the sort of life that suits him, and exactly what he likes. He is not, as Mr. Enfield said, one of the fellows who go about doing what is called "good." But he contrives to give a great deal of happiness without having any programme. He is, in the first place, a savant with a great reputation; but he makes no parade of his work, and sits down to it because he likes it, as a hungry man may sit down to a pleasant meal. He is thus the most leisurely man that I know, while, at the same time, his output is amazing. His table is covered deep with books and papers; but he will work at a corner, if he is fortunate enough to find one; and, if not, he will make a kind of cutting in the mass, and work in the shade, with steep banks of stratified papers on either hand. He is always accessible, always ready to help any one. The undergraduate, that shy bird in whose sight the net is so often spread in vain, even though it be baited with the priceless privilege of tea, tobacco, and the talk of a well-informed man, comes, in troops and companies, to see him. He is a man too with a deep vein of humour, and, what is far more rare, a keen vein of appreciation of the humour of others. He laughs as if he were amused, not like a man discharging a painful duty. It is true that he will not answer letters; but then his writing-paper is generally drowned deeper than plummet can sound; his pens are rusty, and his ink is of the consistency of tar; but he will always answer questions, with an incredible patience and sympathy, correcting one's mistakes in a genial and tentative way, as if a matter admitted of many opinions. If a man, for instance, maintains that the Norman Conquest took place in 1066 B.C., he will say that some historians put it more than two thousand years later, but that of course it is difficult to arrive at exact accuracy in these matters. Thus one never feels snubbed or snuffed out by him.

Well, for the purposes of my argument, I will call my friend Perry, though it is not his name; and having finished my introduction I will go on to my main story.

I took in to dinner the other night a beautiful and accomplished lady, with whom it is always a pleasure to talk. The conversation turned upon Mr. Perry. She said with a graceful air of judgment that she had but one fault to find with him, and that was that he hated women. I hazarded a belief that he was shy, to which she replied with a dignified assurance that he was not shy; he was lazy.

Prudence and discretion forbade me to appeal against this decision; but I endeavoured to arrive at the principles that supported such a verdict. I gathered that Egeria considered that every one owed a certain duty to society; that people had no business to pick and choose, to cultivate the society of those who happened to please and interest them, and to eschew the society of those who bored and wearied them; that such a course was not fair to the uninteresting people, and so forth. But the point was that there was a duty involved, and that some sacrifice was required of virtuous people in the matter.

Egeria herself is certainly blameless in the matter: she diffuses sweetness and light in many tedious assemblies; she is true to her principles; but for all that I cannot agree with her on this point.

In the first place I cannot agree that sociability is a duty at all, and to conceive of it as such seems to me to misunderstand the whole situation. I think that a man loses a great deal by being unsociable, and that for his own happiness he had better make an effort to see something of his fellows. All kinds of grumpinesses and morbidities arise from solitude; and a shy man ought to take occasional dips into society from a medicinal point of view, as a man should take a cold bath; even if he confers no pleasure on others by so doing, the mere sense, to a timid man, of having steered a moderately straight course through a social entertainment is in itself enlivening and invigorating, and gives the pleasing feeling of having escaped from a great peril. But the accusation of unsociability does not apply to Perry, whose doors are open day and night, and whose welcome is always perfectly sincere. Moreover, the frame of mind in which a man goes to a party, determined to confer pleasure and exercise influence, is a dangerously self-satisfied one. Society is, after all, a recreation and a delight, and ought to be sought for with pleasurable motives, not with a consciousness of rectitude and justice.

My own belief is that every one has a perfect right to choose his own circle, and to make it large or small as he desires. It is a monstrous thing to hold that, if an agreeable or desirable person comes to a place, one has but to leave a piece of pasteboard at his door to entail upon him the duty of coming round till he finds one at home, and of disporting himself gingerly, like a dancing bear among the teacups. A card ought to be a species of charity, left on solitary strangers, to give them the chance of coming, if they like, to see the leaver of it, or as a preliminary to a real invitation. It ought to be a ticket of admission, which a man may use or not as he likes, not a legal summons. That any one should return a call should be a compliment and an honour, not regarded as the mere discharging of a compulsory duty.

I have heard fair ladies complain of the boredom they endured at tea-parties; they speak of themselves as the martyrs and victims of a sense of duty. If such people talked of the duty of visiting the sick and afflicted as a thing which their conception of Christian love entailed upon them, which they performed, reluctantly and unwillingly, from a sense of obligation, I should respect them deeply and profoundly. But I have not often found that the people who complain most of their social duties, and who discharge them most sedulously, complain because such duties interrupt a course of Christian beneficence. It is, indeed, rather the other way; it is generally true that those who see a good deal of society (from a sense of duty) and find it dull, are the people who have no particular interests or pursuits of their own.

There is less excuse in a University town than in any other for adopting this pompous and formal view of the duties of society, because there are very few unoccupied people in such a place. My own occupations, such as they are, fill the hours from breakfast to luncheon and from tea to dinner; men of sedentary lives, who do a good deal of brainwork, find an hour or two of exercise and fresh air a necessity in the afternoon. Indeed, a man who cares about his work, and who regards it as a primary duty, finds no occupation more dispiriting, more apt to unfit him for serious work, than pacing from house to house in the early afternoon, delivering a pack of visiting-cards, varied by a perfunctory conversation, seated at the edge of an easy-chair, on subjects of inconceivable triviality. Of course there are men so constituted that they find this pastime a relief and a pleasure; but their felicity of temperament ought not to be made into a rule for serious-minded men. The only social institution which might really prove beneficial in a University is an informal evening salon. If people might drop in uninvited, in evening dress or not, as was convenient, from nine to ten in the evening, at a pleasant house, it would be a rational practice; but few such experiments seem ever to be tried.

Moreover, the one thing that