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The Upton Letters

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> The Upton Letters




Hark! it is midnight! The soft murmur of bells rises on the clear
air, toppling over in a sweet cascade of sound, bringing hope and
peace to the heart. In the attic above I hear the children moving
softly about, and catch the echo of young voices. They are supposed
to be asleep, but I gather that they have been under a vow to keep
awake in turn, the watcher to rouse the others just before
midnight. The bells peal on, coming in faint gusts of sound, now
loud, now low.

I suppose if I were more simple-minded I should have been thinking
over my faults and failures, desiring to do better, making good
resolutions. But I don't do that. I do desire, with all my heart,
to do better. I know how faltering, how near the ground my flight
is. But these formal, occasional repentances are useless things;
resolutions do little but reveal one's weakness more patently. What
I try to do is simply to uplift my heart with all its hopes and
weaknesses to God, to try to put my hand in His, to pray that I may
use the chances He gives me, and interpret the sorrows He may send
me. He knows me utterly and entirely, my faults and my strength. I
cannot fly from Him though I take the wings of the morning. I only
pray that I may not harden my heart; that I may be sought and
found; that I may have the courage I need. All that I have of good
He has given me; and as for the evil, He knows best why I am
tempted, why I fall, though I would not. There is no strength like
the abasement of weakness; no power like a childlike confidence.
One thing only I shall do before I sleep--give a thought to all I
love and hold dear, my kin, my friends, and most of all, my boys: I
shall remember each, and, while I commend them to the keeping of
God, I shall pray that they may not suffer through any neglect or
carelessness of my own. It is not, after all, a question of the
quantity of what we do, but of the quality of it. God knows and I
know of how poor a stuff our dreams and deeds are woven; but if it
is the best we can give, if we desire with all our hearts what is
noble and pure and beautiful and true--or even desire to desire it-
-He will accept the will and purify the deed. And in such a mood as
this--and God forgive us for not more often dwelling in such
thoughts--I can hope and feel that the most tragic failure, the
darkest sorrow, the deepest shame are viewed by God, and will some
day be viewed by ourselves, in a light which will make all things
new; and that just as we look back on our childish griefs with a
smiling wonder, so we shall some day look back on our mature and
dreary sufferings with a tender and wistful air, marvelling that we
could be so short-sighted, so faithless, so blind.

And yet the thought of what the new year may hold for us cannot be
other than solemn. Like men on the eve of a great voyage, we know
not what may be in store, what shifting of scene, what loss, what
grief, what shadow of death. And then, again, the same grave peace
flows in upon the mind, as the bells ring out their sweet refrain,
"It is He that hath made us." Can we not rest in that?

What I hope more and more to do is to withdraw myself from material
aims and desires; not to aim at success, or dignity of office, or
parade of place. I wish to help, to serve, not to command or rule.
I long to write a beautiful book, to put into words something of
the sense of peace, of beauty and mystery, which visits me from
time to time. Every one has, I think, something of the heavenly
treasure in their hearts, something that makes them glad, that
makes them smile when they are alone; I want to share that with
others, not to keep it to myself. I drift, alas, upon an unknown
sea; but sometimes I see, across the blue rollers, the cliffs and
shores of an unknown land, perfectly and impossibly beautiful.
Sometimes the current bears me away from it; sometimes it is veiled
in cloud-drift and weeping rain. But there are days when the sun
shines bright upon the leaping waves, and the wind fills the sail
and bears me thither. It is of that beautiful land that I would
speak, its pure outlines, its crag-hollows, its rolling downs.
Tendimus ad Latium, we steer to the land of hope.

And meanwhile I desire but to work in a corner; to make the few
lives that touch my own a little happier and braver; to give of my
best, to withhold what is base and poor. There is abundance of
evil, of weakness, of ugliness, of dreariness in my own heart; I
only pray that I may keep it there, not let it escape, not let it
flow into other lives.

The great danger of all natures like my own, which have a touch of
what is, I suppose, the artistic temperament, is a certain
hardness, a self-centred egotism, a want of lovingness and
sympathy. One sees things so clearly, one hankers so after the
power of translating and expressing emotion and beauty, that the
danger is of losing proportion, of subordinating everything to the
personal value of experience. From this danger, which is only too
plain to me, I humbly desire to escape; it is all the more
dangerous when one has the power, as I am aware I have, of entering
swiftly and easily into intimate personal relations with people;
one is so apt, in the pleasure of observing, of classifying, of
scrutinising varieties of temperament, to use that power only to
please and amuse oneself. What one ought to aim at is not the
establishment of personal influence, not the perverted sense of
power which the consciousness of a hold over other lives gives one,
but to share such good things as one possesses, to assist rather
than to sway.

Well, it is all in the hands of God; again and again one returns to
that, as the bird after its flight in remote fields returns to the
familiar tree, the branching fastness. One should learn, I am sure,
to live for the day and in the day; not to lose oneself in
anxieties and schemes and aims; not to be overshadowed by distant
terrors and far-off hopes, but to say, "To-day is given me for my
own; let me use it, let me live in it." One's immediate duty is
happily, as a rule, clear enough. "Do the next thing," says the old
shrewd motto.

The bells cease in the tower, leaving a satisfied stillness. The
fire winks and rustles in the grate; a faint wind shivers and
rustles down the garden paths, sighing for the dawn. I grow weary.

Herbert, I must say "Good-night." God keep and guard you, my old
and true friend. I have rejoiced week by week to hear of your
recovered health, your activity, your renewed zest in life. When
shall I welcome you back? I feel somehow that in these months of
separation we have grown much nearer and closer together. We have
been able to speak in our letters in a way that we have seldom been
able to speak eye to eye. There is a pure gain. My heart goes out
to you and yours; and at this moment I feel as if the dividing seas
are nothing, and that we are close together in the great and loving
heart of God.--Your ever affectionate,

T. B.



SIBTHORPE VICARAGE, WELLS,
Jan. 7, 1905.


DEAR HERBERT,--Four nights ago I dreamed a strange dream. I was in
a big, well-furnished, airy room, with people moving about in it; I
knew none of them, but we were on friendly terms, and talked and
laughed together. Quite suddenly I was struck somewhere in the
chest by some rough, large missile, fired, I thought, from a gun,
though I heard no explosion; it pierced my ribs, and buried itself,
I felt, in some vital part. I stumbled to a couch and fell upon it;
some one came to raise me, and I was aware that other persons ran
hither and thither seeking, I thought, for medical aid and
remedies. I knew within myself that my last hour had come; I was
not in pain, but life and strength ebbed from me by swift degrees.
I felt an intolerable sense of indignity in my helplessness, and an
intense desire to be left alone that I might die in peace; death
came fast upon me with clouded brain and fluttering breath. . . .



SIBTHORPE VICARAGE, WELLS,
Jan. 7, 1905.


DEAR NELLIE,--I have just opened your letter, and you will know how
my whole heart goes out to you. I cannot understand it, I cannot
realise it; and I would give anything to be able to say a word that
should bring you any comfort or help. God keep and sustain you, as
I know He CAN sustain in these dark hours. I cannot write more to-
day; but I send you the letter that I was writing, when your own
letter came. It helps me even now to think that my dear Herbert
told me himself--for that, I see, was the purpose of my dim dream--
what was befalling him. And I am as sure as I can be of anything
that he is with us, with you, still. Dear friend, if I could only
be with you now; but you will know that my thoughts and prayers are
with you every moment.--Ever your affectionate,

T. B.



[I add an extract from my Diary.--T. B.]


Diary, Jan. 15.--A week ago, while I was writing the above
unfinished lines, I received a letter to say that my friend Herbert
was dead--he to whom these letters have been written. It seems that
he had been getting, to all appearances, better; that he had had no
renewed threatenings of the complaint that had made him an exile.
But, rising from his chair in the course of the evening, he had
cried out faintly; put his hand to his breast; fallen back in his
chair unconscious, and, in a few minutes, had ceased to breathe.
They say it was a sudden heart-failure.

It is as though we had been watching by a burrow with all
precaution that some little hunted creature should not escape, and
that, while we watched and devised, it had slipped off by some
other outlet the very existence of which we had not suspected.

Of course, as far as he himself is concerned, such a death is
simply a piece of good fortune. If I could know that such would be
the manner of my own death, a real weight would be lifted from my
mind. To die quickly and suddenly, in all the activity of life, in
comparative tranquillity, with none of the hideous apparatus of the
sick-room about one, with no dreary waiting for death, that is a
great joy. But for his wife and his poor girls! To have had no last
word, no conscious look from one whose delicate consideration for
others was so marked a part of his nature, this is a terrible and
stupefying misery.

I cannot, of course, even dimly realise what has happened; the
remoteness of it all, the knowledge that my own outer life is
absolutely unchanged, that the days will flow on as usual, makes it
trebly difficult to feel what has befallen me. I cannot think of
him as dead and silent; yet even before I heard the news, he was
buried. I cannot, of course, help feeling that the struggling
spirit of my friend tried to fling me, as it were, some last
message; or that I suffered with him, and shared his last conscious
thought.

Perhaps I shall grow to think of Herbert as dead. But, meanwhile, I
am preoccupied with one thought, that such an event ought not to
come upon one as such a stunning and trembling shock as it does. It
reveals to one the fact of how incomplete one's philosophy of life
is. One ought, I feel, deliberately to reckon with death, and to
discount it. It is, after all, the only certain future event in our
lives.

And yet we struggle with it, put it away from us, live and plan as
though it had no existence; or, if it insistently clouds our
thoughts, as it does at intervals, we wait resignedly until the
darkness lifts, and until we may resume our vivid interests again.

I do not, of course, mean that it should be a steady, melancholy
preoccupation. If we have to die, we are also meant to live; but we
ought to combine and co-ordinate the thought of it. It ought to
take its place among the other great certainties of life, without
weakening our hold upon the activity of existence. How is this
possible? For the very terror of death lies not in the sad
accidents of mortality, the stiffened and corrupting form, the dim
eye, the dreadful pageantry--over that we can triumph; but it is
the blank cessation of all that we know of life, the silence of the
mind that loved us, the irreparable wound.

Some turn hungrily to Spiritualism to escape from this terrible
mystery. But, so far as I have looked into Spiritualism, it seems
to me only to have proved that, if any communication has ever been
made from beyond the gate of death--and even such supposed
phenomena are inextricably intertwined with quackeries and deceits-
-it is an abnormal and not a normal thing. The scientific evidence
for the continuance of personal identity is nil; the only hope lies
in the earnest desire of the hungering heart.

The spirit cries out that it dare not, it cannot cease to be. It
cannot bear the thought of all the energy and activity of life
proceeding in its accustomed course, deeds being done, words being
uttered, the problems which the mind pondered being solved, the
hopes which the heart cherished being realised--"and I not there."
It is a ghastly obsession to think of all the things that one has
loved best--quiet work, the sunset on familiar fields, well-known
rooms, dear books, happy talk, fireside intercourse--and one's own
place vacant, one's possessions dispersed among careless hands, eye
and ear and voice sealed and dumb. And yet how strange it is that
we should feel thus about the future, experience this dumb
resentment at the thought that there should be a future in which
one may bear no part, while we acquiesce so serenely in claiming no
share in the great past of the world that enacted itself before we
came into being. It never occurs to us to feel wronged because we
had no conscious outlook upon the things that have been; why should
we feel so unjustly used because our outlook may be closed upon the
things that shall be hereafter? Why should we feel that the future
somehow belongs to us, while we have no claim upon the past? It is
a strange and bewildering mystery; but the fact that the whole of
our nature cries out against extinction is the strongest argument
that we shall yet be, for why put so intensely strong an instinct
in the heart unless it is meant to be somehow satisfied?

Only one thought, and that a stern one, can help us--and that is
the certainty that we are in stronger hands than our own. The sense
of free-will, the consciousness of the possibility of effort,
blinds us to this; we tend to mistake the ebullience of temperament
for the deliberate choice of the will. Yet have we any choice at
all? Science says no; while the mind, with no less instinctive
certainty, cries out that we have a choice. Yet take some sharp
crisis of life--say an overwhelming temptation. If we resist it,
what is it but a resultant of many forces? Experience of past
failures and past resolves combine with trivial and momentary
motives to make us choose to resist. If we fail and yield, the
motive is not strong enough. Yet we have the sense that we might
have done differently: we blame ourselves, and not the past which
made us ourselves.

But with death it is different. Here, if ever, falls the fiat of
the Mind that bade us be. And thus the only way in which we can
approach it is to put ourselves in dependence upon that Spirit. And
the only course we can follow is this: not by endeavouring to
anticipate in thought the moment of our end--that, perhaps, only
adds to its terrors when it comes--but by resolutely and tenderly,
day after day, learning to commend ourselves to the hand of God; to
make what efforts we can; to do our best; to decide as simply and
sincerely as possible what our path should be, and then to leave
the issue humbly and quietly with God.

I do this, a little; it brings with it a wonderful tranquillity and
peace. And the strange thing is that one does not do it oftener,
when one has so often experienced its healing and strengthening
power.

To live then thus; not to cherish far-off designs, or to plan life
too eagerly; but to do what is given us to do as carefully as we
can; to follow intuitions; to take gratefully the joys of life; to
take its pains hopefully, always turning our hearts to the great
and merciful Heart above us, which a thousand times over turns out
to be more tender and pitiful than we had dared to hope. How far I
am from this faith. And yet I see clearly that it is the only power
that can sustain. For in such a moment of insight even the thought
of the empty chair, the closed books, the disused pen, the
sorrowing hearts, and the flower-strewn mound fail to blur the
clear mirror of the mind.

For him there can be but two alternatives: either the spirit that
we knew has lost the individuality that we knew and is merged again
in the great vital force from which it was for a while separated;
or else, under some conditions that we cannot dream of, the
identity remains, free from the dreary material conditions, free to
be what it desired to be; knowing perhaps the central peace which
we know only by subtle emanations; seeing the region in which
beauty, and truth, and purity, and justice, and high hopes, and
virtue are at one; no longer baffled by delay, and drooping
languor, and sad forebodings, but free and pure as viewless air.


THE END

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