The Altar Fire - Arthur Christopher Benson (the chimp paradox txt) 📗

this that has stopped your writing?" he said. "No," I said, "the power had gone from me before--I could not originate, I could only do the same sort of work, and of weaker quality than before." "Well," he said, "I don't wonder; the last book must have been a great strain, though I am sure you were happy when you wrote it. I remember a friend of mine, a great Alpine climber, who did a marvellous feat of climbing some unapproachable peak--without any sense of fatigue, he told me, all pure enjoyment--but he had a heart-attack the next day, and paid the penalty of his enjoyment. He could not climb for some years after that." "Yes," I said, "I think that has been my case--but my fear is that if I lose the habit--and I seem to have lost it--I shall never be able to take it up again." "No, you need not fear that," he replied; "if something is given you to say, you will be able to say it, and say it better than ever--but no doubt you feel very much lost without it. How do you fill the time?" "I hardly know," I said, "not very profitably--I read, I teach my daughter, I muddle along." "Well," he said, smiling, "the hours in which we muddle along are not our worst hours. You believe in God?" The suddenness of this question surprised me. "Yes," I said, "I believe in God. I cannot disbelieve. Something has placed me where I am, something urges me along; there is a will behind me, I am sure of that. But I do not know whether that will is just or unjust, kind or unkind, benevolent or indifferent. I have had much happiness and great prosperity, but I have had to bear also things which are inconceivably repugnant to me, things which seem almost satanically adapted to hurt and wound me in my tenderest and innermost feelings, trials which seem to be concocted with an almost infernal appropriateness, not things which I could hope to bear with courage and faith, but things which I can only endure with rebellious resistance." "Yes," he said, "I understand you perfectly; but does not their very appropriateness, the satanical ingenuity of which you speak, help you to feel that they are not fortuitous, but sent deliberately to you yourself and to none other?" "Yes," I said, "I see that; but how can I believe in the justice of a discipline which I could not inflict, I will not say upon a dearly loved child, but upon the most relentless and stubborn foe." "Ah," said he, "now I see your heart bare, the very palpitating beat of the blood. Do you think you are alone in this? Let me tell you my own story. Over fifty years ago I left Oxford with, I really think I may say, almost everything before me--everything, that is, which is open to an instinctively cheerful, temperate, capable, active man--I was not rich, but I could afford to wait to earn money. I was sociable and popular; I was endowed with an immense appetite for variety of experience; I don't think that there was anything which appeared to me to be uninteresting. But I could persevere too, I could stick to work, I had taken a good degree. Then an accidental fall off a chair, on which I was standing to get a book, laid me on my back for a time. I fretted over it at first, but when I got about again, I found that I was a man maimed for life. I don't know what the injury was--some obscure lesion of the spinal marrow or brain, I believe--some flaw about the size of a pin's head--the doctors have never made out. But every time that I plunged into work, I broke down; for a long time I thought I should struggle through; but at last I became aware that I was on the shelf, with other cracked jars, for life--I can't tell you what I went through, what agonies of despair and rebellion. I thought that at least literature was left me. I had always been fond of books, and was a good scholar, as it is called; but I soon became aware that I had no gift of expression, and moreover that I could not hope to acquire it, because any concentrated effort threw me into illness. I was an ambitious fellow, and success was closed to me--I could not even hope to be useful. I tried several things, but always with the same result; and at last I fell into absolute despair, and just lived on, praying daily and even hourly that I might die. But I did not die, and then at last it dawned upon me, like a lightening sunrise, that THIS was life for me; this was my problem, these my limitations; that I was to make the best I could out of a dulled and shattered life; that I was to learn to be happy, even useful, in spite of it--that just as other people were given activity, practical energy, success, to learn from them the right balance, the true proportion of life, and not to be submerged and absorbed in them, so to me was given a simpler problem still, to have all the temptations of activity removed--temptations to which with my zest for experience I might have fallen an easy victim--and to keep my courage high, my spirit pure and expectant, if I could, waiting upon God. This little estate fell to me soon afterwards, and I soon saw what a tender gift it was, because it gave me a home; every other source of interest and pleasure was removed, because the simplest visits, the wildest distractions were too much for me--the jarring of any kind of vehicle upset me. By what slow degrees I attained happiness I can hardly say. But now, looking back, I see this--that whereas others have to learn by hard experience, that detachment, self-purification, self-control are the only conditions of happiness on earth, I was detached, purified, controlled by God Himself. I was detached, because my life was utterly precarious, I was taught purification and control, because whereas more robust people can defer and even defy the penalties of luxury, comfort, gross desires, material pleasures, I was forced, every day and hour, to deny myself the smallest freedom--I was made ascetic by necessity. Then came a greater happiness still; for years I was lost in a sort of individualistic self-absorption, with no thoughts of anything but God and His concern with myself--often hopeful and beautiful enough--when I found myself drawn into nearer and dearer relationships with those around me. That came through my niece, whom I adopted as an orphan child, and who is one of those people who live naturally and instinctively in the lives of other people. I got to know all the inhabitants of this little place--simple country people, you will say--but as interesting, as complex in emotion and intellect, as any other circle in the world. The only reason why one ever thinks people dull and limited, is because one does not know them; if one talks directly and frankly to people, one passes through the closed doors at once. Looking back, I can see that I have been used by God, not with mere compassion and careless tenderness, but with an intent, exacting, momentary love, of an almost awful intensity and intimacy. It is the same with all of us, if we can only see it. Our faults, our weaknesses, our qualities good or bad, are all bestowed with an anxious and deliberate care. The reason why some of us make shipwreck--and even that is mercifully and lovingly dispensed to us--is because we will not throw ourselves on the side of God at every moment. Every time that the voice says 'Do this,' or 'Leave that undone,' and we reply fretfully, 'Ah, but I have arranged otherwise,' we take a step backwards. He knocks daily, hourly, momently, at the door, and when we have once opened, and He is entered, we have no desire again but to do His will to the uttermost." He was silent for a moment, his eyes in-dwelling upon some secret thought; then he said, "Everything about you, your books, your dear wife, your words, your face, tell me that you are very near indeed to the way--a step or two, and you are free!" He sate back for a moment, as though exhausted, and then said: "You will forgive me for speaking so frankly, but I feel from hour to hour how short my time may be; and I had no doubt when I saw you, even before I saw you, that I should have some message to give you, some tidings of hope and patience."

I despair, as I write, of giving any idea of the impressiveness of the old man; now that I have written down his talk, it seems abrupt and even strained. It was neither. The perfect naturalness and tranquillity of it all, the fatherly smile, the little gestures of his frail hand, interpreted and filled up the gaps, till I felt as though I had known him all my life, and that he was to me as a dear father, who saw my needs, and even loved me for what I was not and for what I might be.

At this point Miss ---- came in, and led me away. As Maud and I walked back, we spoke to each other of what we had seen and heard. He had talked to her, she said, very simply about Alec. "I don't know how it was," she added, "but I found myself telling him everything that was in my mind and heart, and it seemed as though he knew it all before." "Yes, indeed," I said, "he made me desire with all my heart to be different--and yet that is not true either, because he made me wish not to be something outside of myself, but something inside, something that was there all the time: I seem never to have suspected what religion was before; it had always seemed to me a thing that one put on and wore, like a garment; but now it seems to me to be the most natural, simple, and beautiful thing in the world; to consist in being oneself, in fact." "Yes, that is exactly it," said Maud, "I could not have put it into words, but that is how I feel." "Yes," I said, "I saw, in a flash, that life is not a series of things that happen to us, but our very selves. It is not a question of obeying, and doing, and acting, but a question of being. Well, it has been a wonderful experience; and yet he told me nothing that I did not know. God in us, not God with us." And presently I added: "If I were never to see Mr. ---- again, I should feel he had somehow done more for me than a hundred conversations and a thousand books. It was like the falling of the spirit at Pentecost."

That strange sense of an uplifted freedom, of willing co-operation has dwelt with me, with us both, for many days. I dare not say that life has become easy; that the cloud has rolled away; that there have not been hours of dismay and dreariness and sorrow. But it is, I am sure, a turning-point of my life; the way which has led me downwards, deepening and darkening, seems to have reached its lowest point, and to be ascending from the gloom; and all from the words of a simple, frail old man, sitting among his books in a panelled parlour, in a soft, summer afternoon.


July 10, 1890.


I have been sitting out, this hot, still afternoon, upon the lawn, under