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

picture of my dining-room, with the table laid for luncheon in a very cramped perspective, or if a photogravure of the scrap of grass and shrubbery that I call my garden, were to be published in a magazine. All that is to a certain extent public already. I should not wish to have a photograph of myself in bed, or shaving, published in a magazine, because those are not moments when I am inclined to admit visitors. Neither do I particularly want my private and informal conversation taken down and reproduced, because that often consists of opinions which are not my deliberate and thought-out utterances. But I hope that I should be able to talk simply and courteously to an interviewer on ordinary topics, in a way that would not discredit me it is was made public; and I hope, too, that decency would restrain me from making inflated and pompous remarks about my inner beliefs and motives, which were not in the least characteristic of my usual method of conversation.

The truth is that what spoils these records is the desire on the part of worthy and active people to appear more impressive in ordinary life than they actually are; it is a well-meant sort of hypocrisy, because it is intended, in a way, to influence other people, and to make them think that celebrated people live habitually on a higher tone of intellect and emotion than they do actually live upon. My on experience of meeting great people is that they are, as a rule, disappointingly like ordinary people, both in their tastes and in their conversation. Very few men or women, who are extremely effective in practical or artistic lines, have the energy or the vitality to expend themselves very freely in talk or social intercourse. They do not save themselves up for their speeches or their books; but they give their best energies to them, and have little current coin of high thought left for ordinary life. The mischief is that these interviews are generally conducted by inquisitive and rhetorical strangers, not distinguished for social tact or overburdened with good taste; and so the whole occasion tends to wear a melodramatic air, which is fatal both to artistic effect as well as to simple propriety.


October 9, 1888.


Let me set against my fashionable luncheon-party of a few weeks ago a visit which I owe no less to my success, and which has been a true and deep delight to me. I had a note yesterday from a man whom I hold in great and deep reverence, a man who I have met two or three times, a poet indeed, one of our true and authentic singers. He writes that he is in the neighbourhood; may he come over for a few hours and renew our acquaintance?

He came, in the morning. One has only to set eyes upon him to know that one is in the presence of a hero, to feel that his poetry just streams from him like light from the sun; that it is not the central warmth, but the flying rippling radiance of the outward-bound light, falling in momentary beauty on the common things about his path. He is a great big man, carelessly dressed, like a Homeric king. I liked everything about him from head to foot, his big carelessly-worn clothes, the bright tie thrust loosely through a cameo ring; his loose shaggy locks, his strong beard. His face, with its delicate pallor, and purely moulded features, had a youthful air of purity and health; yet there was a dim trouble of thought on his brow, over the great, smiling, flashing grey eyes. He came in with a sort of royal greeting, he flung his big limbs on a sofa; he talked easily, quietly, lavishly, saying fine things with no effort, dropping a subject quickly if he thought it did not interest me; sometimes flashing out with a quick gesture of impatience or gusto, enjoying life, every moment and every detail. His quick eyes, roving about, took in each smallest point, not in the weary feverish way in which I apprehend a new scene, but as though he liked everything new and unfamiliar, like an unsated child. He greeted Maud and the children with a kind of chivalrous tenderness and intimacy, as though he loved all pretty and tender things, and took joy in their nearness. He held Alec between his knees, and played with him while he talked. The children took possession of him, as if they had known him all their lives. And yet there was no touch of pose, no consciousness of greatness or vigour about him. He was as humble, grateful, interested, as though he were a poor stranger dependent on our bounty. I asked him in a quiet moment about his work. "No, I am writing nothing," he said with a smile, "I have said all I have got to say,"--and then with a sudden humorous flash, "though I believe I should be able to write more if I could get decent paper and respectable type to print my work." I ventured to ask if he did not feel any desire to write? "No," he said, "frankly I do not--the world is so full of pleasant things to do and hear and see, that I sometimes think myself almost a fool for having spent so much time in scribbling. Do you know," he went on, "a delicious story I picked up the other day? A man was travelling in some God-forsaken out-of-the-way place--I believe it was the Andes--and he fell in with an old podgy Roman priest who was going everywhere, in a state of perpetual fatigue, taking long expeditions every day, and returning worn-out in the evening, but perfectly content. The man saw a good deal of the priest, and asked him what he was doing. The priest smiled and said, 'Well, I will tell you. I had an illness some time ago and believed that I was going to die. One evening--I was half unconscious--I thought I saw some one standing by my bed. I looked, and it was a young man with a beautiful and rather severe face, whom I knew to be an angel, who was gazing at me rather strangely. I thought it was the messenger of death, and--for I was wishing to be gone and have done with it all--I said something to him about being ready to depart--and then added that I was waiting hopefully to see the joys of Paradise, the glory of the saints in light. He looked at me rather fixedly, and said, "I do not know why you should say that, and why you should expect to take so much pleasure in the beauty of heaven, when you have taken so little trouble to see anything of the beauty of earth;" and then he left me; and I reflected that I had always been doing my work in a dull humdrum way, in the same place all my life; and I determined that, if I got well, I would go about and see something of the glory that IS revealed to us, and not expect only the glory that SHALL BE revealed to us.' It is a fine story," he went on, "and makes a parable for us writers, who are inclined to think too much about our work, and disposed to see that it is very good, like God brooding over the world." He sate for a little, smiling to himself. And then I plied him with questions about his writing, how his thoughts came to him how he worked them out. He told me as if he was talking about some one else, half wondering that there could be anything to care about. I have heard many craftsmen talk about their work, but never one who talked with such detachment. As a rule, writers talk with a secret glee, and with a deprecating humility that deceives no one; but the great man talked, not as if he cared to think about it, but because it happened to interest me. He strolled with me, he lunched; and he thanked us when he went away with an earnest and humble thankfulness, as though we had extended our hospitality to an obscure and unworthy guest. And then his praise of my own books--it was all so natural; not as if he had come there with fine compliments prepared, with incense to burn; but speaking about them as though they were in his mind, and he could not help it. "I read all you write," he said; "ah, you go deep--you are a lucky fellow, to be able to see so far and so minutely, and to bring it all home to our blind souls. He must be a terrible fellow to live with," he said, smiling at my wife. "It must be like being married to a doctor, and feeling that he knows so much more about one than one knows oneself--but he sees what is best and truest, thank God; and says it with the voice of an angel, speaking softly out of his golden cloud."

I can't say what words like these have meant to me; but the visit itself, the sight of this strong, equable, good-humoured man, with no feverish ambitions, no hankering after fame or recognition, has done even more. I have heard it said that he is indolent, that he has not sufficient sense of responsibility for his gifts. But the man has done a great work for his generation; he has written poetry of the purest and finest quality. Is not that enough? I cannot understand the mere credit we give to work, without any reference to the object of the work, or the spirit in which it is done. We think with respect of the man who makes a fortune, or who fills an official post, the duties of which do nothing in particular for any one. It is a kind of obsession with us practical Westerners; of course a man ought to contribute to the necessary work of the world; but many men spend their lives in work which is not necessary; and, after all, we are sent into the world to live, and work is only a part of life. We work to live, we do not live to work. Even if we were all socialists, we should, I hope, have the grace to dig the gardens and make the clothes of our poets and prophets, so as to give them the leisure they need.

I do not question the instinct of my hero in the matter; he lives eagerly and peacefully; he touches into light the spirits of those who draw near to him; and I admire a man who knows how to stop when he has done his best work, and does not spur and whip his tired mind into producing feebler, limper, duller work of the same kind; how few of our great writers have known when to hold their hand!

God be praised for great men! My poet to-day has made me feel that life is a thing to be lived eagerly and high-heartedly; that the world is full of beautiful, generous, kindly things, of free air and sunshine; and that we ought to find leisure to drink it all in, and to send our hearts out in search of love and beauty and God--for these things are all about us, if we could but feel and hear and see them.


October 12, 1888.


How absurd it is to say that a writer could not write a large, wise, beautiful book unless he had a great soul--is it almost like saying that an artist could not paint a fine face unless he had a fine face himself. It is all a question of seeing clearly, and having a skilled