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The Upton Letters

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> The Upton Letters



PREFACE





These letters were returned to me, shortly after the death of the
friend to whom they were written, by his widow. It seems that he
had been sorting and destroying letters and papers a few days
before his wholly unexpected end. "We won't destroy these," he had
said to her, holding the bulky packet of my letters in his hand;
"we will keep them together. T---- ought to publish them, and, some
day, I hope he will." This was not, of course, a deliberate
judgement; but his sudden death, a few days later, gives the
unconsidered wish a certain sanctity, and I have determined to obey
it. Moreover, she who has the best right to decide, desires it. A
few merely personal matters and casual details have been omitted;
but the main substance is there, and the letters are just as they
were written. Such hurried compositions, of course, abound in
literary shortcomings, but perhaps they have a certain spontaneity
which more deliberate writings do not always possess. I wrote my
best, frankest, and liveliest in the letters, because I knew that
Herbert would value both the thought and the expression of the
thought. And, further, if it is necessary to excuse so speedy a
publication, I feel that they are not letters which would gain by
being kept. Their interest arises from the time, the circumstance,
the occasion that gave them birth, from the books read and
criticised, the educational problems discussed; and thus they may
form a species of comment on a certain aspect of modern life, and
from a definite point of view. But, after all, it is enough for me
that he appreciated them, and, if he wished that they should go out
to the world, well, let them go! In publishing them I am but
obeying a last message of love.

T. B.
MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON,
Feb. 20, 1905.






THE UPTON LETTERS





MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON,
Jan. 23, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have just heard the disheartening news, and I
write to say that I am sorry toto corde. I don't yet know the full
extent of the calamity, the length of your exile, the place, or the
conditions under which you will have to live. Perhaps you or Nelly
can find time to let me have a few lines about it all? But I
suppose there is a good side to it. I imagine that when the place
is once fixed, you will be able to live a much freer life than you
have of late been obliged to live in England, with less risk and
less overshadowing of anxiety. If you can find the right region,
renovabitur ut acquila juventus tua; and you will be able to carry
out some of the plans which have been so often interrupted here. Of
course there will be drawbacks. Books, society, equal talk, the
English countryside which you love so well, and, if I may use the
expression, so intelligently; they will all have to be foregone in
a measure. But fortunately there is no difficulty about money, and
money will give you back some of these delights. You will still see
your real friends; and they will come to you with the intention of
giving and getting the best of themselves and of you, not in the
purposeless way in which one drifts into a visit here. You will be
able, too, to view things with a certain detachment--and that is a
real advantage; for I have sometimes thought that your literary
work has suffered from the variety of your interests, and from your
being rather too close to them to form a philosophical view. Your
love of characteristic points of natural scenery will help you.
When you have once grown familiar with the new surroundings, you
will penetrate the secret of their charm, as you have done here.
You will be able, too, to live a more undisturbed life, not fretted
by all the cross-currents which distract a man in his own land,
when he has a large variety of ties. I declare I did not know I was
so good a rhetorician; I shall end by convincing myself that there
is no real happiness to be found except in expatriation!

Seriously, my dear Herbert, I do understand the sadness of the
change; but one gets no good by dwelling on the darker side; there
are and will be times, I know, of depression. When one lies awake
in the morning, before the nerves are braced by contact with the
wholesome day; when one has done a tiring piece of work, and is
alone, and in that frame of mind when one needs occupation but yet
is not brisk enough to turn to the work one loves; in those dreary
intervals between one's work, when one is off with the old and not
yet on with the new--well I know all the corners of the road, the
shadowy cavernous places where the demons lie in wait for one, as
they do for the wayfarer (do you remember?), in Bewick, who,
desiring to rest by the roadside, finds the dingle all alive with
ambushed fiends, horned and heavy-limbed, swollen with the
oppressive clumsiness of nightmare. But you are not inexperienced
or weak. You have enough philosophy to wait until the frozen mood
thaws, and the old thrill comes back. That is one of the real
compensations of middle age. When one is young, one imagines that
any depression will be continuous; and one sees the dreary,
uncomforted road winding ahead over bare hills, till it falls to
the dark valley. But later on one can believe that "the roadside
dells of rest" are there, even if one cannot see them; and, after
all, you have a home which goes with you; and it would seem to be
fortunate, or to speak more truly, tenderly prepared, that you have
only daughters--a son, who would have to go back to England to be
educated, would be a source of anxiety. Yet I find myself even
wishing that you had a son, that I might have the care of him over
here. You don't know the heart-hunger I sometimes have for young
things of my own to watch over; to try to guard their happiness.
You would say that I had plenty of opportunities in my profession;
it is true in a sense, and I think I am perhaps a better
schoolmaster for being unmarried. But these boys are not one's own;
they drift away; they come back dutifully and affectionately to
talk to their old tutor; and we are both of us painfully conscious
that we have lost hold of the thread, and that the nearness of the
tie that once existed exists no more.

Well, I did not mean in this letter to begin bemoaning my own
sorrows, but rather to try and help you to bear your own. Tell me
as soon as you can what your plans are, and I will come down and
see you for the last time under the old conditions; perhaps the new
will be happier. God bless you, my old friend! Perhaps the light
which has hitherto shone (though fitfully) ON your life will now
begin to shine THROUGH it instead; and let me add one word. My
assurance grows firmer, from day to day, that we are in stronger
hands than our own. It is true that I see things in other lives
which look as if those hands were wantonly cruel, hard, unloving;
but I reflect that I cannot see all the conditions; I can only
humbly fall back upon my own experience, and testify that even the
most daunting and humiliating things have a purifying effect; and I
can perceive enough at all events to encourage me to send my heart
a little farther than my eyes, and to believe that a deep and
urgent love is there.--Ever affectionately yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
Jan. 26, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--So it is to be Madeira at present? Well, I know
Madeira a little, and I can honestly congratulate you. I had feared
it might be Switzerland. I could not LIVE in Switzerland. It does
me good to go there, to be iced and baked and washed clean with
pure air. But the terrible mountains, so cold and unchanged, with
their immemorial patience, their frozen tranquillity; the high
hamlets, perched on their lonely shelves; the bleak pine-trees,
with their indomitable strength--all these depress me. Of course
there is much homely beauty among the lower slopes; the thickets,
the falling streams, the flowers. But the grim black peaks look
over everywhere; and there is seldom a feeling of the rich and
comfortable peace such as one gets in England. Madeira is very
different. I have been there, and must truthfully confess that it
does not suit me altogether--the warm air, the paradisal
luxuriance, the greenhouse fragrance, are not a fit setting for a
blond, lymphatic man, who pants for Northern winds. But it will
suit you; and you will be one of those people, spare and compact as
you are, who find themselves vigorous and full of energy there. I
have many exquisite vignettes from Madeira which linger in my mind.
The high hill-villages, full of leafy trees; the grassy downs at
the top; the droop of creepers, full of flower and fragrance, over
white walls; the sapphire sea, under huge red cliffs. You will
perhaps take one of those embowered Quintas high above the town, in
a garden full of shelter and fountains. And I am much mistaken if
you do not find yourself in a very short time passionately attached
to the place. Then the people are simple, courteous, unaffected,
full of personal interest. Housekeeping has few difficulties and no
terrors.

I can't get away for a night; but I will come and dine with you one
day this week, if you can keep an evening free.

And one thing I will promise--when you are away, I will write to
you as often as I can. I shall not attempt any formal letters, but
I shall begin with anything that is in my mind, and stop when I
feel disposed; and you must do the same. We won't feel bound to
ANSWER each other's letters; one wastes time over that. What I
shall want to know is what you are thinking and doing, and I shall
take for granted you desire the same.

You will be happier, now that you KNOW; I need not add that if I
can be of any use to you in making suggestions, it will be a real
pleasure.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
Feb. 3, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--It seems ages since we said good-bye--yet it is
not a week ago. And now I have been at work all day correcting
exercises, teaching, talking. I have had supper with the boys, and
I have been walking about since and talking to them--the nicest
part of my work. They are at this time of the day, as a rule, in
good spirits, charitable, sensible. What an odd thing it is that
boys are so delightful when they are alone, and so tiresome (not
always) when they are together. They seem, in public, to want to
show their worst side, to be ashamed of being supposed to be good,
or interested, or thoughtful, or tender-hearted. They are so afraid
of seeming better than they are, and pleased to appear worse than
they are. I wonder why this is? It is the same more or less with
most people; but one sees instincts at their nakedest among boys.
As I go on in life, the one thing I desire is simplicity and
reality; pose is the one fatal thing. The dullest person becomes
interesting if you feel that he is really himself, that he is not
holding up some absurd shield or other in front of his shivering
soul. And yet how hard it is, even when one appreciates the
benefits and beauty of sincerity, to say what one really thinks,
without reference to what one supposes the person one is talking to
would like or expect one to think--and to do it, too, without
brusqueness or rudeness or self-assertion.

Boys are generally ashamed of saying anything that is good about
each other; and yet they are as a rule intensely anxious to be
POPULAR, and pathetically unaware that the shortest cut to
popularity is to see the good points in every one and not to shrink
from mentioning them. I once had a pupil, a simple-minded, serene,
ordinary creature, who attained to extraordinary popularity. I
often wondered why; after he had left, I asked a boy to tell me; he
thought for a moment, and then he said, "I suppose, sir, it was
because when we were all talking about other chaps--and one does
that nearly all the time--he used to be as much down on them as any
one else, and he never jawed--but he always had something nice to
say about them, not made up, but as if it just came into his head."

Well, I must stop; I suppose you are forging out over the Bay, and
sleeping, I hope, like a top. There is no sleep like the sleep on a
steamer--profound, deep, so that one wakes up hardly knowing where
or who one is, and in the morning you will see the great purple
league-long rollers. I remember them; I generally felt very unwell;
but there was something tranquillising about them, all the same--
and then the mysterious steamers that used to appear alongside,
pitching and tumbling, with the little people moving about on the
decks; and a mile away in a minute. Then the water in the wake,
like marble, with its white-veined sapphire, and the hiss and smell
of the foam; all that is very pleasant. Good night, Herbert!--Ever
yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
Feb. 9, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--I hope you have got Lockhart's Life of Scott with
you; if not, I will send it out to you. I have been reading it
lately, and I have a strong wish that you should do the same. It
has not all the same value; the earlier part, the account of the
prosperous years, is rather tiresome in places. There is something
boisterous, undignified--even, I could think, vulgar--about the
aims and ambitions depicted. It suggests a prosperous person,
seated at a well-filled table, and consuming his meat with a hearty
appetite. The desire to stand well with prominent persons, to found
a family, to take a place in the county, is a perfectly natural and
wholesome desire; but it is a commonplace ambition. There is a
charm in the simplicity, the geniality, the childlike zest of the
man; but there is nothing great about it. Then comes the crash; and
suddenly, as though a curtain drew up, one is confronted with the
spectacle of an indomitable and unselfish soul, bearing a heavy
burden with magnificent tranquillity, and settling down with
splendid courage to an almost intolerable task. The energy
displayed by our hero in attempting to write off the load of debt
that hung round his neck is superhuman, august. We see him
completing in a single day what would take many writers a week to
finish, and doing it day by day, with bereavements, sorrows, ill-
health, all closing in upon him. The quality of the work he thus
did matters little; it was done, indeed, at a time of life when
under normal circumstances he would probably have laid his pen
down. But the spectacle of the man's patient energy and divine
courage is one that goes straight to the heart. It is then that one
realises that the earlier and more prosperous life has all the
value of contrast; one recognises that here was a truly unspoilt
nature; and that, if we can dare to look upon life as an educative
process, the tragic sorrows that overwhelmed him were not the mere
reversal of the wheel of fortune, but gifts from the very hand of
the Father--to purify a noble soul from the dross that was mingled
with it; to give a great man the opportunity of living in a way
that should furnish an eternal and imperishable example.

I do not believe that in the whole of literature there is a more
noble and beautiful document of its kind than the diary of these
later years. The simplicity, the sincerity of the man stand out on
every page. There are no illusions about himself or his work. He
hears that Southey has been speaking of him and his misfortunes
with tears, and he says plainly that such tears would be impossible
to himself in a parallel case; that his own sympathy has always
been practical rather than emotional; his own tendency has been to
help rather than to console. Again, speaking of his own writings,
he says that he realises that if there is anything good about his
poetry or prose, "It is a hurried frankness of composition, which
pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active
disposition." He adds, indeed, a contemptuous touch to the above,
which he was great enough to have spared: "I have been no sigher in
shades--no writer of


Songs and sonnets and rustical roundelays
Framed on fancies and whistled on reeds."


A few days later, speaking of Thomas Campbell, the poet, he says
that "he has suffered by being too careful a corrector of his
work."

That is a little ungenerous, a little complacent; noble and large
as Scott's own unconsidered writings are, he ought to have been
aware that methods differ. What, for instance, could be more
extraordinary than the contrast between Scott and Wordsworth--Scott
with his "You know I don't care a curse about what I write;" and
Wordsworth, whose chief reading in later days was his own poetry.
Whenever the two are brought into actual juxtaposition, Wordsworth
is all pose and self-absorption; Scott all simplicity and disregard
of fame. Wordsworth staying at Abbotsford declines to join an
expedition of pleasure, and stays at home with his daughter. When
the party return, they find Wordsworth sitting and being read to by
his daughter, the book his own Excursion. A party of travellers
arrive, and Wordsworth steals down to the chaise, to see if there
are any of his own volumes among the books they have with them.
When the two are together, Scott is all courteous deference; he
quotes Wordsworth's poems, he pays him stately compliments, which
the bard receives as a matter of course, with stiff, complacent
bows. But, during the whole of the time, Wordsworth never lets fall
a single syllable from which one could gather that he was aware
that his host had ever put pen to paper.

Yet, while one desires to shake Wordsworth to get some of his
pomposity out of him, one half desires that Scott had felt a little
more deeply the dignity of his vocation. One would wish to have
infused Wordsworth with a little of Scott's unselfish simplicity,
and to have put just a little stiffening into Scott. He ought to
have felt--and he did not--that to be a great writer was a more
dignified thing than to be a sham seigneur.

But through the darkening scene, when the woods whisper together,
and Tweed runs hoarsely below, the simple spirit holds
uncomplaining and undaunted on his way: "I did not like them to
think that I could ever be beaten by anything," he says. But at
length the hand, tired with the pen, falls, and twilight creeps
upon the darkening mind.

I paid a pious pilgrimage last summer, as you perhaps remember, to
Abbotsford. I don't think I ever described it to you. My first
feeling was one of astonishment at the size and stateliness of the
place, testifying to a certain imprudent prosperity. But the sight
of the rooms themselves; the desk, the chair, the book-lined
library, the little staircase by which, early or late, Scott could
steal back to his hard and solitary work; the death-mask, with its
pathetic smile; the clothes, with hat and shoes, giving, as it
were, a sense of the very shape and stature of the man--these
brought the whole thing up with a strange reality.

Of course, there is much that is pompous, affected, unreal about
the place; the plaster beams, painted to look like oak; the ugly
emblazonries; the cruel painted glass; the laboriously collected
objects--all these reveal the childish side of Scott, the
superficial self which slipped from him so easily when he entered
into the cloud.

And then the sight of his last resting-place; the ruined abbey, so
deeply embowered in trees that the three dim Eildon peaks are
invisible; the birds singing in the thickets that clothe the ruined
cloisters--all this made a parable, and brought before one with an
intensity of mystery the wonder of it all. The brief life, so full
of plans for permanence; the sombre valley of grief; the quiet end,
when with failing lips he murmured that the only comfort for the
dying heart was the thought that it had desired goodness, however
falteringly, above everything.

I can't describe to you how deeply all this affects me--with what a
hunger of the heart, what tenderness, what admiration, what wonder.
The very frankness of the surprise with which, over and over again,
the brave spirit confesses that he does not miss the delights of
life as much as he expected, nor find the burden as heavy as he had
feared, is a very noble and beautiful thing. I can conceive of no
book more likely to make a spirit in the grip of sorrow and failure
more gentle, hopeful, and brave; because it brings before one, with
quiet and pathetic dignity, the fact that no fame, no success, no
recognition, can be weighed for a moment in the balance with those
simple qualities of human nature which the humblest being may
admire, win, and display.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
Shrove Tuesday, Feb. 16, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--One of those incredible incidents has just happened
here, an incident that makes one feel how little one knows of human
beings, and that truth, in spite of the conscientious toil of Mr.
H. G. Wells, does still continue to keep ahead of fiction. Here is
the story. Some money is missed in a master's house; circumstances
seem to point to its having been abstracted by one of the boys. A
good-natured, flighty boy is suspected, absolutely without reason,
as it turns out; though he is the sort of boy to mislay his own
books and other portable property to any extent, and to make no
great difficulty under pressure of immediate need, and at the last
moment, about borrowing some one else's chattels. On this occasion
the small boys in the house, of whom he is one, solemnly accuse him
of the theft, and the despoiled owner entreats that the money may
be returned. He protests that he has not taken it. The matter comes
to the ears of the house-master, who investigates the matter in the
course of the evening, and interviews the supposed culprit. The boy
denies it again quite unconcernedly and frankly, goes away from the
interview, and wandering about, finds the small boys of the house
assembled in one of the studies discussing a matter with great
interest. "What has happened?" says our suspected friend. "Haven't
you heard?" says one of them; "Campbell's grandmother" (Campbell is
another of the set) "has sent him a tip of L2." "Oh, has she?" says
the boy, with a smile of intense meaning; "I shall have to go my
rounds again." This astonishing confession of his guilt is received
with the interest it deserves, and Campbell is advised to lock up
his money, or to hand it over to the custody of the house-master.
In the course of the evening another amazing event occurs; the boy
whose money was stolen finds the whole of it, quite intact, in the
pocket of his cricketing flannels, where he now remembers having
put it. The supposed culprit is restored to favour, and becomes a
reliable member of society. One of the small boys tells the matron
the story of our hero's amazing remark on the subject, in his
presence. The matron stares at him, bewildered, and asks him what
made him say it. "Oh, only to rag them," says the boy; "they were
all so excited about it." "But don't you see, you silly boy," says
the kind old dame, "that if the money had not been found, you would
have been convicted out of your own mouth of having been the
thief?" "Oh yes," says the boy cheerfully; "but I couldn't help it-
-it came into my head."

Of course this is an exceptional case; but it illustrates a curious
thing about boys--I mentioned it the other day--which is, their
extraordinary willingness and even anxiety to be thought worse than
they are. Even boys of unexceptionable principle will talk as if
they were not only not particular, but positively vicious. They
don't like aspersions on their moral character to be made by
others, but they rejoice to blacken themselves; and not even the
most virtuous boys can bear to be accused of virtue, or thought to
be what is called "Pi." This does not happen when boys are by
themselves; they will then talk unaffectedly about their principles
and practice, if their interlocutor is also unaffected. But when
they are together, a kind of disease of self-accusation attacks
them. I suppose that it is the perversion of a wholesome instinct,
the desire not to be thought better than they are; but part of the
exaggerated stories that one hears about the low moral tone of
public schools arises from the fact that innocent boys coming to a
public school infer, and not unreasonably, from the talk of their
companions that they are by no means averse to evil, even when, as
is often the case, they are wholly untainted by it.

The same thing seems to me to prevail very widely nowadays. The
old-fashioned canting hypocrisy, like that of the old servant in
the Master of Ballantrae, who, suffering under the effects of
drink, bears himself like a Christian martyr, has gone out; just as
the kind of pride is extinct against which the early Victorian
books used to warn children, and which was manifested by sitting in
a carriage surveying a beggar with a curling lip--a course of
action which was invariably followed by the breaking of a Bank, or
by some mysterious financial operation involving an entire loss of
fortune and respectability.

Nowadays the parable of the Pharisee and the publican is reversed.
The Pharisee tells his friends that he is in reality far worse than
the publican, while the publican thanks God that he is not a
Pharisee. It is only, after all, a different kind of affectation,
and perhaps even more dangerous, because it passes under the
disguise of a virtue. We are all miserable sinners, of course; but
it is no encouragement to goodness if we try to reduce ourselves
all to the same level of conscious corruption. The only advantage
would be if, by our humility, we avoided censoriousness. Let us
frankly admit that our virtues are inherited, and that any one who
had had our chances would have done as well or better than
ourselves; neither ought we to be afraid of expressing our
admiration of virtue, and, if necessary, our abhorrence of vice, so
long as that abhorrence is genuine. The cure for the present state
of things is a greater naturalness. Perhaps it would end in a
certain increase of priggishness; but I honestly confess that
nowadays our horror of priggishness, and even of seriousness, has
grown out of all proportion; the command not to be a prig has
almost taken its place in the Decalogue. After all, priggishness is
often little more than a failure in tact, a breach of good manners;
it is priggish to be superior, and it is vulgar to let a
consciousness of superiority escape you. But it is not priggish to
be virtuous, or to have a high artistic standard, or to care more
for masterpieces of literature than for second-rate books, any more
than it is priggish to be rich or well-connected. The priggishness
comes in when you begin to compare yourself with others, and to
draw distinctions. The Pharisee in the parable was a prig; and just
as I have known priggish hunting men, and priggish golfers, and
even priggish card-players, so I have known people who were
priggish about having a low standard of private virtue, because
they disapproved of people whose standard was higher. The only cure
is frankness and simplicity; and one should practise the art of
talking simply and directly among congenial people of what one
admires and believes in.

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