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The Altar Fire

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> The Altar Fire




Must one's hopes and beliefs be thus tentative and provisional?
Must one walk through life, never fathoming the secret? I have
myself abundance of material comfort, health, leisure. I know that
for one like myself, there are hundreds less fortunate. Yet
happiness in this world depends very little upon circumstances; it
depends far more upon a certain mixture of selfishness,
tranquillity, temperance, bodily vigour, and unimaginativeness. To
be happy, one must be good-humouredly indifferent to the sufferings
of others, and indisposed to forecast the possibilities of
disaster. The sadness which must shadow the path of such as myself,
is the sadness which comes of the power to see clearly the
imperfections of the world, coupled with the inability to see
through it, to discern the purpose of it all. One comforts oneself
by the dim hope that the desire will be satisfied and the dream
fulfilled; but has one any certainty of that? The temptation is to
acquiesce in a sort of gentle cynicism, to take what one can get,
to avoid as far as possible all deep attachments, all profound
hopes, to steel oneself in indifference. That is what such men as
my miller do instinctively; meanwhile one tries to believe that the
melancholy that comes to such as Hamlet, the sadness of finding the
world unintelligible, and painful, and full of shadows, is a noble
melancholy, a superior sort of madness. Yet one is not content to
bear, to suffer, to wait; one clutches desperately at light and
warmth and joy, and alas, in joy and sorrow alike, one is ever and
insupportably alone.



April 9, 1889.


I have been reading Rousseau lately, and find him a very
incomprehensible figure. The Confessions, it must be said, is a
dingy and sordid book. I cannot quite penetrate the motive which
induced him to write them. It cannot have been pure vanity, because
he does not spare himself; he might have made himself out a far
more romantic and attractive character, if he had suppressed the
shadows and heightened the lights. I am inclined to think that it
was partly vanity and partly honesty. Vanity was the motive force,
and honesty the accompanying mood. I do not suppose there is any
document so transparently true in existence, and we ought to be
thankful for that. It is customary to say that Rousseau had the
soul of a lackey, by which I suppose is meant that he had a gross
and vulgar nature, a thievish taste for low pleasures, and an ill-
bred absence of consideration for others. He had all these
qualities certainly, but he had a great deal more. He was upright
and disinterested. He had a noble disregard of material advantages;
he had an enthusiasm for virtue, a passionate love of humanity, a
deep faith in God. He was not an intellectual man nor a
philosopher; and yet what a ridiculous criticism is that which is
generally made upon him, that his reasoning is bad, his knowledge
scanty, and that people had better read Hobbes! The very reason
which made Rousseau so tremendous an influence was that his point
of view was poetical rather than philosophical; he was not too far
removed from the souls to which he prophesied. What they needed was
inspiration, emotion, and sentimental dogma; these he could give,
and so he saved Europe from the philosophers and the cynics. Of
course it is a deplorable life, tormented by strong animal passion,
ill-health, insanity; but one tends to forget the prevalent
coarseness of social tone at that date, not because Rousseau made
any secret of it, but because none of his contemporaries dared to
be so frank. If Rousseau had struck out a dozen episodes from the
Confessions the result would have been a highly poetical,
reflective, charming book. I can easily conceive that it might have
a very bad effect upon an ingenuous mind, because it might be
argued from what he says that moral lapses do not very much matter,
and that emotional experience is worth the price of some animalism.
Still more perniciously it might induce one to believe that a man
may have a deep sense of religion side by side with an unbridled
sensuality, and that one whose life is morally infamous may yet be
able to quicken the moral temperature of great nations.

Some of the critics of Rousseau speak as though a man whose moral
code was so loose, and whose practice was so libidinous, ought
almost to have held his tongue on matters of high moral import. But
this is a very false line of argument. A man may see a truth
clearly, even if he cannot practise it; and an affirmation of a
passionate belief in virtue is emphasised and accentuated when it
comes from the lips of one who might be tempted rather to excuse
his faults by preaching the irresistible character of evil.

To any one who reads wisely, and not in a censorious and
Pharisaical spirit, this sordid record, which is yet interspersed
with things so fragrant and beautiful, may have a sobering and
uplifting effect. One sees a man hampered by ill-health, by a
temperament childishly greedy of momentary pleasure, by
irritability, suspicion, vanity and luxuriousness, again and again
expressing a deep belief in unselfish emotion, a passionate desire
to help struggling humanity onward, a child-like confidence in the
goodness and tenderness of the Father of all. Disgust and
admiration struggle strangely together. One cannot sympathise and
yet one dare not condemn. One feels a horrible suspicion that there
are dark and slimy corners, vile secrets. ugly memories, in the
minds of hundreds of seemingly respectable people; the book brings
one face to face with the mystery of evil; and yet through the
gloom there steals a silvery radiance, a far-off hope, an infinite
compassion for all weakness and imperfection. One can hardly love
Rousseau, though one does not wonder that there were many found to
do so; and instead of judging him, one cries out with horror at the
slime of the pit where he lay bound.



April 14, 1889.


A delusion of which we must beware is the delusion that we can have
a precise and accurate knowledge of spiritual things. This is a
delusion into which the exponents of settled religions are apt to
fall. The Roman Catholic, with his belief in the infallible Church,
as the interpreter of God's spirit, which is nothing more than a
belief in the inspiration of the majority, or even a belief in the
inspiration of a bureaucracy, is the prey of this delusion. The
Protestant, too, with his legal creed, built up of texts and
precedents, in which the argumentative dicta of Apostles and
Evangelists are as weighty and important as the words of the
Saviour Himself, falls under this delusion. I read the other day a
passage from a printed sermon of an orthodox type, an acrid outcry
against Liberalism in religion, which may illustrate what I mean.

"To St. Paul and St. John," said the preacher, "the natural or
carnal man is hopelessly remote from God; the same Lord who came to
make possible for man this intimate communion with God is careful
to make it clear that this communion is only possible to redeemed,
regenerate man; prior to new birth into the Kingdom of God, far
from being a son of God, man is, according to the Lord Himself, a
child of the devil, however potentially capable of being translated
from death into life."

Such teaching is so horrible and abominable that it is hard to find
words to express one's sense of its shamefulness. To attribute it
to the Christ, who came to seek and save what is lost, is an act of
traitorous wickedness. If Christ had made it His business to
thunder into the ears of the outcasts, whom He preferred to the
Scribes and Pharisees, this appalling message, where would His
teaching be? What message of hope would it hold for the soul? Such
a view of Christianity as this insults alike the soul and the mind
and the heart; it deliberately insults God; the message of Christ
to the vilest human spirit is that it is indeed, in spite of all
its corruption, its falls, its shame, in very truth God's own
child; it calls upon the sinner to recognise it, it takes for
granted that he feels it. The people whom Christ denounced with
indignation so fiery, so blasting, that it even seems inconsistent
with His perfect gentleness, were the people who thus professed to
know and interpret the mind of God, who bade the sinner believe
that He was a merciless judge, extreme to mark what is done amiss,
when the one secret was that He was the tenderest and most loving
of Fathers. But according to this preacher's terrible doctrine God
pours into the world a stream of millions of human beings, all
children of the devil, with instincts of a corrupt kind, hampered
by dreadful inheritances, doomed, from their helpless and reluctant
birth, to be sinful here and lost hereafter, and then prescribes to
them a hard and difficult path, beset by clamorous guides, pointing
in a hundred different directions, bidding them find the intricate
way to His Heart, or perish. The truth is the precise opposite. The
divine voice says to every man: "Hampered and sore hindered as you
are, you are yet My dearly beloved son and child; only turn to Me,
only open your heart to Me, only struggle, however faintly, to be
what you can desire to be, and I will guide and lead you to Myself;
all that is needed is that your heart should be on My side in the
battle. Even your sins matter little, provided that you can say
sincerely, 'If it were mine to choose and ordain, I would never
willingly do evil again.' I know, better even than you yourself
know, your difficulties, your temptations, your weaknesses; the
sorrow they bring upon you is no dreary and vindictive punishment,
it is the loving correction of My hand, and will bring you into
peace yet, if only you will trust Me, and not despair."

The world is full of dreadful things, pains and sorrow and
miseries, but the worst of all are the dreary wretchednesses of our
own devising. The old detestable doctrine of Hell, the idea that
the stubborn and perverse spirit can defy God, and make its black
choice, is simply an attempt to glorify the strength of the human
spirit and to belittle the Love of God. It denies the truth that
God, if He chose, could show the darkest soul the beauty of
holiness in so constraining a way that the frail nature must yield
to the appeal. To deny this, is to deny the omnipotence of the
Creator. No man would deliberately reject peace and joy, if he
could see how to find them, in favour of feverish evil and
ceaseless suffering. If we believe that God is perfect love, it is
inconceivable that He should make a creature capable of defying His
utmost tenderness, unless He had said to Himself, "I will make a
poor wretch who shall defy Me, and he shall suffer endlessly and
mercilessly in consequence." The truth is that God's Omnipotence is
limited by His Omnipotence; He could not, for instance, abolish
Himself, nor create a power that should be greater than He. But if
He indeed can give to evil such vitality that it can defy Him for
ever, then He is creating a power that is stronger than Himself.

While the mystery of evil is unexplained, we must all be content to
know that we do not know; for the thing is insoluble by human
thought. If God be all-pervading, all-in-all, it is impossible to
conceive anything coming into being alien to Himself, within
Himself. If He created spirits able to choose evil, He must have
created the evil for them to choose, for a man could not choose
what did not exist; if man can defy God, God must have given him
the thought of defiance, for no thought can enter the mind of man
not permitted by God.

With this mystery unsolved, we cannot pretend to any knowledge of
spiritual things; all that we can do is to recognise that the
principle of Love is stronger than the principle of evil, and cling
so far as we can cling to the former. But to set ourselves up to
guide and direct other men, as the preacher did whose words I have
quoted, is to set oneself in the place of God, and is a detestable
tyranny. Only by our innate sense of Justice and Love can we
apprehend God at all; and thus we are safe in this, that whenever
we find any doctrine preached by any human being which insults our
sense of justice and love, we may gladly reject it, saying that at
least we will not believe that God gives us the power, on the one
hand, to recognise our highest and truest instincts, and on the
other directs us to outrage them. Such teaching as this we can
infallibly recognise as a human perversion and not as a divine
message; and we may thankfully and gratefully believe that the
obstacles and difficulties, the temptations and troubles, which
seem to be strewn so thickly in our path, are to develop rather
than to thwart our strivings after good, and assuredly designed to
minister to our ultimate happiness, rather than to our ultimate
despair.



April 25, 1889.


I found to-day on a shelf a Manual of Preparation for Holy
Communion, which was given me when I was confirmed. I stood a long
time reading it, and little ghosts seemed to rustle in its pages.
How well I remember using it, diligently and carefully, trying to
force myself into the attitude of mind that it inculcated, and
humbly and sincerely believing myself wicked, reprobate, stony-
hearted, because I could not do it successfully. Shall I make a
curious confession? From quite early days, the time of first waking
in the morning has been apt to be for me a time of mental
agitation; any unpleasant and humiliating incident, any
disagreeable prospect, have always tended to dart into my brain,
which, unstrung and weakened by sleep, has often been disposed to
view things with a certain poignancy of distress at that hour--a
distress which I always knew would vanish the moment I felt my feet
on the carpet. I used to take advantage of this to use my Manual at
that hour, because by that I secured a deeper intensity of
repentance, and I have often succeeded in inducing a kind of
tearful condition by those means, which I knew perfectly well to be
artificial, but which yet seemed to comply with the rules of the
process.

The kind of repentance indicated in the book as appropriate was a
deep abasement, a horror and hatred of one's sinful propensities;
and the language used seems to me now not only hollow and
meaningless, but to insult the dignity of the soul, and to be
indeed a profound confession of a want of confidence in the methods
and purposes of God. Surely the right attitude is rather a manly,
frank, and hopeful co-operation with God, than a degraded kind of
humiliation. One was invited to contemplate God's detestation of
sin, His awful and stainless holiness. How unreal, how utterly
false! It is no more reasonable than to inculcate in human beings a
sense of His hatred of weakness, of imperfection, of disease, of
suffering. One might as well say that God's courage and beauty were
so perfect that He had an impatient loathing for anything timid or
ugly. If one said that being perfect He had an infinite pity for
imperfection, that would be nearer the truth--but, even so, how far
away! To believe in His perfect love and benevolence, one must also
believe that all shortcomings, all temptations, all sufferings,
somehow emanate from Him; that they are educative, and have an
intense and beautiful significance--that is what one struggles,
how hardly, to believe! Those childish sins, they were but the
expression of the nature one received from His hand, that wilful,
pleasure-loving, timid, fitful nature, which yet always desired the
better part, if only it could compass it, choose it, love it. To
hate one's nature and temperament and disposition, how impossible,
unless one also hated the God who had bestowed them! And then, too,
how inextricably intertwined! The very part of one's soul that made
one peace-loving, affectionate, trustful was the very thing that
led one into temptation. The very humility and diffidence that made
one hate to seem or to be superior to others was the occasion of
falling. The religion recommended was a religion of scrupulous
saints and self-torturing ascetics; and the result of it was to
make one, as experience widened and deepened, mournfully
indifferent to an ideal which seemed so utterly out of one's reach.
It is very difficult to make the right compromise. On the one hand,
there is the sense of moral responsibility and effort, which one
desires to cultivate; on the other hand, truth compels us to
recognise our limitations, and to confess boldly the fact that
moral improvement is a very difficult thing. The question is
whether, in dealing with other people, we will declare what we
believe to be the truth, or whether we will tamper with the truth
for a good motive. Ought we to pretend that we think a person
morally responsible and morally culpable, when we believe that he
is neither, for the sake of trying to improve him?

My own practice now is to waste as little time as possible in
ineffectual regrets, but to keep alive as far as I can in my heart
a hope, a desire, that God will help to bring me nearer to the
ideal that I can perceive and cannot reach. To-day, turning over
the pages of the old Manual, with its fantastic strained phrases
staring at me from the page, I cannot help wishing that some wise
and tender person had been able to explain to me the conditions as
I now see them. Probably the thing was incommunicable; one must
learn for oneself both one's bitterness and one's joy.



May 2, 1889.


It sometimes happens to me--I suppose it happens to every one--to
hear some well-meaning person play or sing at a party. Last night,
at the Simpsons', a worthy young man, who was staying there, sang
some Schubert songs in a perfectly correct, weak, inexpressive
voice, accompanying himself in a wooden and inanimate fashion--the
whole thing might have been turned out by a machine. I was, I
suppose, in a fretful mood. "Good God!" I thought to myself, "what
is the meaning of this woeful performance?--a party of absurd
dressed-up people, who have eaten and drunk too much, sitting in a
circle in this hot room listening gravely to this lugubrious
performance! And this is the best that Schubert can do! This is the
real Schubert! Here have I been all my life pouring pints of
subjective emotion into this dreary writer of songs, believing that
I was stirred and moved, when it was my own hopes and aspirations
all along, which I was stuffing into this conventional vehicle,
just as an ecclesiastical person puts his emotion into the
grotesque repetitions of a liturgy." I thought to myself that I had
made a discovery, and that all was vanity. Well, we thanked the
singer gravely enough, and went on, smiling and grimacing, to talk
local gossip. A few minutes later, a young girl, very shy and
painfully ingenuous, was hauled protesting to the piano. I could
see her hands tremble as she arranged her music, and the first
chords she struck were halting and timid. Then she began to sing--
it was some simple old-fashioned song--what had happened? the world
was somehow different; she had one of those low thrilling voices,
charged with utterly inexplicable emotion, haunted with old
mysterious echoes out of some region of dreams, so near and yet so
far away. I do not think that the girl had any great intensity of
mind, or even of soul, neither was she a great performer; but there
was some strange and beautiful quality about the voice, that now
rose clear and sustained, while the accompaniment charged and
tinged the pure notes with glad or mournful visions, like wine
poured into water; now the voice fell and lingered, like a clear
stream among rocks, pathetic, appealing, stirring a deep hunger of
the spirit, and at the same time hinting at a hope, at a secret
almost within one's grasp. How can one find words to express a
thing so magical, so inexpressible? But it left me feeling as
though to sing thus was the one thing worth doing in the world,
because it seemed to interpret, to reveal, to sustain, to console--
it was as though one opened a door in a noisy, dusty street, and
saw through it a deep and silent glen, with woodlands stooping to a
glimmering stream, with a blue stretch of plain beyond, and an
expanse of sunny seas on the rim of the sky.

I have had similar experiences before. I have looked in a gallery
at picture after picture--bright, soulless, accomplished things--
and asked myself how it was possible for men and women to spend
their time so elaborately to no purpose; and then one catches sight
of some little sketch--a pool in the silence of high summer, the
hot sun blazing on tall trees full of leaf, and rich water-plants,
with a single figure in a moored boat, musing dreamily; and at once
one is transported into a region of thrilled wonder. What is it all
about? What is this sudden glimpse into a life so rich and strange?
In what quiet country is it all enacted, what land of sweet
visions? What do the tall trees and the sleeping pool hide from me,
and in what romantic region of joy and sadness does the dreamer
muse for ever, in the long afternoon, so full of warmth and
fragrance and murmurous sound? That is the joy of art, of the
symbol--that it remains and rests within itself, in a world that
seems, for a moment, more real and true than the clamorous and
obtrusive world we move in.

It is so all along the line--the hard and soulless art of technique
and rule, of tradition and precept, however accomplished, however
perfect it is, is worth nothing; it is only another dreary form of
labour, unless through some faculty of the spirit, some vital
intensity, or even some inexplicable felicity, not comprehended,
not designed, not intended by the artist, it has this remote and
suggestive quality. And thus suddenly, in the midst of this weary
beating of instruments, this dull laying of colour by colour, of
word by word, there breaks in the awful and holy presence; and then
one feels, as I have said, that this thrill, this message, this
oracle, is the one thing in the world worth striving after, and
that indeed one may forgive all the dull efforts of those who
cannot attain it, because perhaps they too have felt the call, and
have thrown themselves into the eternal quest.

And it is true too of life; one is brought near to many people, and
one asks oneself in a chilly discomfort what is the use of it all,
living thus in hard and futile habits, on dull and conventional
lines; and then again one is suddenly confronted by some
personality, rich in hope and greatness, touching the simplest acts
of life with an unearthly light, making them gracious and
beautiful, and revealing them as the symbols of some pure and high
mystery. Sometimes this is revealed by a word, sometimes by a
glance; perfectly virtuous, capable, successful people may miss it;
humble, simple, quiet people may have it. One cannot analyse it or
describe it; but one has instantaneously a sense that life is a
thing of large issues and great hopes; that every action and
thought, however simple or commonplace, may be touched with this
large quality of interest, of significance. It is a great happiness
to meet such a person, because one goes in the strength of that
heavenly meat many days and nights, knowing that life is worth
living to the uttermost, and that it can all be beautiful and lofty
and gracious; but the way to miss it, to lose that fine sense, is
to have some dull and definite design of one's own, which makes one
treat all the hours in which one cannot pursue it, but as the dirt
and debris of a quarry. One must not, I see, wait for the golden
moments of life, because there are no moments that are not golden,
if one can but pierce into their essence. Yet how is one to realise
this, to put it into practice? I have of late, in my vacuous mood,
fallen into the dark error of thinking of the weary hours as of
things that must be just lived through, and endured, and beguiled,
if possible, until the fire again fall. But life is a larger and a
nobler business than that; and one learns the lesson sooner, if one
takes the suffering home to one's soul, not as a tedious interlude,
but as the very melody and march of life itself, even though it
crash into discords, or falter in a sombre monotony.

The point is that when one seems to be playing a part to one's own
satisfaction, when one appears to oneself to be brilliant,
suggestive, inspiriting, and genial, one is not necessarily
ministering to other people; while, on the other hand, when one is
dull, troubled, and anxious, out of heart and discontented, one may
have the chance of making others happier. Here is a whimsical
instance; in one of my dreariest days--I was in London on business--
I sate next to an old friend, generally a very lively, brisk, and
cheerful man, who appeared to me strangely silent and depressed. I
led him on to talk freely, and he told me a long tale of anxieties
and cares; his health was unsatisfactory, his plans promised ill.
In trying to paint a brighter picture, to reassure and encourage
him, I not only forgot my own troubles, but put some hope into him.
We had met, two tired and dispirited men, we went away cheered and
encouraged, aware that we were not each of us the only sufferer in
the world and that there were possibilities still ahead of us all,
nay, in our grip, if we only were not blind and forgetful.

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