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The Upton Letters

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> The Upton Letters




A faith in God and a faith in Love; and here seems to me to lie the
strength and power of the Christian Revelation. It is to these two
things that Christ pointed men. Though overlaid with definition,
with false motive, with sophistry, with pedantry, this is the deep
secret of the Christian Creed; and if we dare to link our will with
the Will of God, however feebly, however complainingly, if we
desire and endeavour not to sin against love, not to nourish hate
or strife, to hold out the hand again and again to any message of
sympathy or trust, not to struggle for our own profit, not to
reject tenderness, to believe in the good faith and the good-will
of men, we are then in the way. We may make mistakes, we may fail a
thousand times, but the key of heaven is in our hands. . . .--Ever
yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
July 29, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--You must forgive me if this is a very sentimental
letter, but this is the day that, of all days in the year, is to me
most full of pathos--the last day of the summer half. My heart is
like a full sponge and must weep a little. The last few days have
been full to the brim of work and bustle--reports to be written,
papers to be looked over. Yesterday was a day of sad partings.
Half-a-dozen boys are leaving; and I have tried my best to tell
them the truth about themselves; to say something that would linger
in their minds, and yet to do it in a tender and affectionate way.
And some of these boys' hearts are full to bursting too. I remember
as if it were yesterday the last meeting at Eton of a Debating
Society of which I was a member. We were electing new members and
passing votes of thanks. Scott, who was then President and, as you
remember, Captain of the Eleven, sate in his high chair above the
table; opposite him, with his minute-book, was Riddell, then
Secretary--that huge fellow in the Eight, you recollect. The vote
of thanks to the President was carried; he said a few words in a
broken voice, and sate down; the Secretary's vote of thanks was
proposed, and he, too, rose to make acknowledgment. In the middle
of his speech we were attracted by a movement of the President. He
put his head in his hands and sobbed aloud. Riddell stopped,
faltered, looked round, and leaving his sentence unfinished, sate
down, put his face on the book and cried like a child. I don't
think there was a dry eye in the room. And these boys were not
sentimental, but straightforward young men of the world, honest,
and, if anything, rather contemptuous, I had thought, of anything
emotional. I have never forgotten that scene, and have interpreted
many things in the light of it.

Well, this morning I woke early and heard all the bustle of
departure. Depression fell on me; soon I got up, with a blessed
sense of leisure, breakfasted at my ease, saw one or two boys,
special friends, who came to me very grave and wistful. Then I
wrote letters and did business; and this afternoon--it is fearfully
hot--I have been for a stroll through the deserted fields and
street.

So another of these beautiful things which we call the summer half
is over, never to be renewed. There has been some evil, of course.
I wish I could think otherwise. But the tone is good, and there
have been none of those revelations of darkness that poison the
mind. There has been idleness (I don't much regret that), and of
course the usual worries. But the fact remains that a great number
of happy, sensible boys have been living perhaps the best hours of
their life, with equal, pleasant friendships, plenty of games, some
wholesome work and discipline to keep all sweet, with this
exquisite background of old towers and high-branching elms, casting
their shade over rich meadow-grass; the scene will come back to
these boys in weary hours, perhaps in sun-baked foreign lands,
perhaps in smoky offices--nay, even on aching deathbeds, parched
with fever.

The whole place has an incredibly wistful air, as though it missed
the young life that circulated all about it; as though it spread
its beauties out to be used and enjoyed, and wondered why none came
to claim them. As a counterpoise to this I like to think of all the
happiness flowing into hundreds of homes; the father and mother
waiting for the sound of the wheels that bring the boy back; the
children who have gone down to the lodge to welcome the big
brothers with shouts and kisses; and the boy himself, with all the
dear familiar scene and home faces opening out before him. We ought
not to grudge the loneliness here before the thought of all those
old and blessed joys of life that are being renewed elsewhere.

But I am here, a lonely man, wondering and doubting and desiring I
hardly know what. Some nearness of life, some children of my own.
You are apt to think of yourself as shelved and isolated; yet,
after all, you have the real thing--wife, children, and home. But,
in my case, these boys who are dear to me have forgotten me
already. Disguise it as I will, I am part of the sordid furniture
of life that they have so gladly left behind, the crowded corridor,
the bare-walled schoolroom, the ink-stained desk. They are glad to
think that they have not to assemble to-morrow to listen to my
prosing, to bear the blows of the uncle's tongue, as Horace says.
They like me well enough--for a schoolmaster; I know some of them
would even welcome me, with a timorous joy, to their own homes.

I have had the feeling of my disabilities brought home to me lately
in a special way. There is a boy in my house that I have tried hard
to make friends with. He is a big, overgrown creature, with a
perfectly simple manner. He has innumerable acquaintances in the
school, but only a very few friends. He is amiable with every one,
but guards his heart. He is ambitious in a quiet way, and fond of
books, and, being brought up in a cultivated home, he can talk more
unaffectedly and with a more genuine interest about books than any
boy I have ever met. Well, I have done my best, as I say, to make
friends with him. I have lent him books; I have tried to make him
come and see me; I have talked my best with him, and he has
received it all with polite indifference; I can't win his
confidence, somehow. I feel that if I were only not in the tutorial
relation, it would be easy work. But perhaps I frightened him as a
little boy, perhaps I bored him; anyhow the advances are all on my
side, and there seems a hedge of shyness through which I cannot
break. Sometimes I have thought it is simply a case of "crabbed age
and youth," and that I can't put myself sufficiently in line with
him. I missed seeing him last night--he was out at some school
festivity, and this morning he has gone without a word or a sign. I
have made friends a hundred times with a tenth of the trouble, and
I suppose it is just because I find this child so difficult to
approach that I fret myself over the failure; and all the more
because I know in my heart that he is a really congenial nature,
and that we do think the same about many things. Of course, most
sensible people would not care a brass farthing about such an
episode, and would succeed where I have failed, because I think it
is the forcing of attentions upon him that this proud young person
resents. I must try and comfort myself by thinking that my very
capacity for vexing myself over the business is probably the very
thing which makes it easy as a rule for me to succeed.

Well, I must turn to my books and my bicycle and my writing for
consolation, and to the blessed sense of freedom which luxuriates
about my tired brain. But books and art and the beauties of nature,
I begin to have a dark suspicion, are of the nature of melancholy
consolations for the truer stuff of life--for friendships and loves
and dearer things.

I sit writing in my study, the house above me strangely silent. The
evening sun lies golden on the lawn and among the apple-trees of my
little orchard; but the thought of the sweet time ended lies rather
heavy on my heart--the wonder what it all means, why we should have
these great hopes and desires, these deep attachments in the short
days that God gives us. "What a world it is for sorrow," wrote a
wise and tender-hearted old schoolmaster on a day like this; "and
how dull it would be if there were no sorrow." I suppose that this
is true; but to be near things and yet not to grasp them, to desire
and not to attain, and to go down to darkness in the end, like the
shadow of a dream--what can heal and sustain one in the grip of
such a mood?--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
Aug. 4, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have just been over to Woodcote; I have had a
few days here alone at the end of the half, and was feeling so
stupid and lazy this morning that I put a few sandwiches in my
pocket and went off on a bicycle for the day. It is only fifteen
miles from here, so that I had two or three hours to spend there.
You know I was born at Woodcote and lived there till I was ten
years old. I don't know the present owner of the Lodge, where we
lived; but if I had written and asked to go and see the house, they
would have invited me to luncheon, and all my sense of freedom
would have gone.

It is thirty years since we left, and I have not been there, near
as it is, for twenty years. I did not know how deeply rooted the
whole scene was in my heart and memory, but the first sight of the
familiar places gave me a very curious thrill, a sort of delicious
pain, a yearning for the old days--I can't describe it or analyse
it. It seemed somehow as if the old life must be going on there
behind the pine-woods if I could only find it; as if I could have
peeped over the palings and seen myself going gravely about some
childish business in the shrubberies. I find that my memory is
curiously accurate in some respects, and curiously at fault in
others. The scale is all wrong. What appears to me in memory to be
an immense distance, from Woodcote to Dewhurst, for instance, is
now reduced to almost nothing; and places which I can see quite
accurately in my mind's eye are now so different that I can hardly
believe that they were ever like what I recollect of them. Of
course the trees have grown immensely; young plantations have
become woods, and woods have disappeared. I spent my time in
wandering about, retracing the childish walks we used to take,
looking at the church, the old houses, the village green, and the
mill-pool. One thing came home to me very much. When I was born my
father had only been settled at Woodcote for two years; but, as I
grew up, it seemed to me we must have lived there for all eternity;
now I see that he was only one in a long procession of human
visitants who have inhabited and loved the place. Another thing
that has gone is the mystery of it all. Then, every road was a
little ribbon of familiar ground stretching out to the unknown; all
the fields and woods which lay between the roads and paths were
wonderful secret places, not to be visited. I find I had no idea of
the lie of the ground, and, what is more remarkable, I don't seem
ever to have seen the views of the distance with which the place
now abounds. I suppose that when one is a small creature, palings
and hedges are lofty obstacles; and I suppose also that the little
busy eyes are always searching the nearer scene for things to FIND,
and do not concern themselves with what is far. The sight of the
Lodge itself, with its long white front among the shrubberies and
across the pastures was almost too much for me; the years seemed
all obliterated in a flash, and I felt as if it was all there
unchanged.

I suppose I had a very happy childhood; but I certainly was not in
the least conscious of it at the time. I was a very quiet, busy
child, with all sorts of small secret pursuits of my own to attend
to, to which lessons and social engagements were sad interruptions;
but now it seems to me like a golden, unruffled time full of
nothing but pleasure. Curiously enough, I can't remember anything
but the summer days there; I have no remembrance of rain or cold or
winter or leafless trees--except days of snow when the ponds were
frozen and there was the wild excitement of skating. My
recollections are all of flowers, and roses, and trees in leaf, and
hours spent in the garden. In the very hot summer weather my father
and mother used to dine out in the garden, and it seems now to me
as if they must have done so all the year round; I can remember
going to bed, with my window open on to the lawn, and hearing the
talk, and the silence, and then the soft clink of the things being
removed as I sank into sleep. It is a great mystery, that faculty
of the mind for forgetting all the shadows and remembering nothing
but the sunlight; it is so deeply rooted in humanity that it is
hard not to believe that it means something; one dares to hope that
if our individual life continues after death, this instinct--if
memory remains--will triumph over the past, even in the case of
lives of sordid misery and hopeless pain.

Then, too, one wonders what the strong instinct of permanence
means, in creatures that inhabit the world for so short and
troubled a space; why instinct should so contradict experience; why
human beings have not acquired in the course of centuries a sense
of the fleetingness of things. All our instincts seem to speak of
permanence; all our experience points to swift and ceaseless
change. I cannot fathom it.

As I wandered about Woodcote my thoughts took a sombre tinge, and
the lacrimae rerum, the happy days gone, the pleasant groups broken
up to meet no more, the old faces departed, the voices that are
silent--all these thoughts began to weigh on my mind with a sad
bewilderment. One feels so independent, so much the master of one's
fate; and yet when one returns to an old home one begins to wonder
whether one has any power of choice at all. There is this strange
fence of self and identity drawn for me round one tiny body; all
that is outside of it has no existence for me apart from
consciousness. These are fruitless thoughts, but one cannot always
resist them; and why one is here, what these vivid feelings mean,
what one's heart-hunger for the sweet world and for beloved people
means--all this is dark and secret; and the strong tide bears us
on, out of the little harbour of childhood into unknown seas.

Dear Woodcote, dear remembered days, beloved faces and voices of
the past, old trees and fields! I cannot tell what you mean and
what you are; but I can hardly believe that, if I have a life
beyond, it will not somehow comprise you all; for indeed you are my
own for ever; you are myself, whatever that self may be.--Ever
yours,

T. B.


P.S.--By the way, I want you to do something for me; I want a MAP
of your house and of the sitting-rooms. I want to see where you
usually sit, to read or write. And more than that, I want a map of
the roads and paths round about, with your ordinary walks and
strolls marked in red. I don't feel I quite realise the details
enough.



SENNICOTTS,
HONEY HILL,
EAST GRINSTEAD,
Aug. 9, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I am making holiday, with the voice of praise and
thanksgiving, like the people in the Psalm, and working, oh! how
gratefully, at one of my eternal books. Depend upon it, for simple
pleasure, there is nothing like writing. I am staying with Bradby,
who has taken a cottage in Sussex. He has had his holiday, so that
he goes up to town every day; it does not sound very friendly to
say that this arrangement exactly suits me, but so it is. I work
and write in the morning, walk or bicycle in the afternoon, and
then we dine together, and spend peaceful evenings, reading or
talking.

But this is not the point. I came in yesterday to tea, saw an
unfamiliar hat in the hall, and found to my surprise James Cooper,
whom you remember at Eton as a boy. I knew him a little there, and
saw a good deal of him at Cambridge; and we have kept up a very
fitful correspondence at long intervals ever since.

I am ashamed to confess that I was bored, though I trust to Heaven
I did not show it; I had come back from my ride brimming over with
ideas, and was in the condition of a person who is holding his
breath, dying to blow it all out. Cooper said that he had heard
that I was in the neighbourhood, and he had accordingly come over,
a considerable distance, to see me. He is in business, and appears
to be prospering. We had tea, and there was a good deal to talk
about; but Cooper showed no signs of moving, and said at last that
he thought he would stay and see Bradby--perhaps dine with us. So
we walked about the garden, and I gradually became aware, with
regret and misery, that I was in the presence of a bore. Yes, James
Cooper is a bore! He had a great deal to say, mostly on subjects
with which I was not acquainted. He has become a botanist, and
seemed full to the brim of uninteresting information. He stayed
till Bradby came, he dined, he talked. At last he decided he must
go; but he talked in the hall, he talked in the porch. He pressed
us to come over and see him, and it was evidently a great pleasure
to him to meet us again. Since his visit I have been pondering
deeply. What is one's duty in these matters? How far ought loyalty
to old friends to go? I confess that I am somewhat vexed and
dissatisfied with myself for not being more simply pleased to see
an old comrade--actae non alio rege puertiae, and all that. But
what if the old comrade is a bore? What are the claims of
friendship on busy men? I have a good many old friends in all parts
of England--ought I to use my holidays in touring about to see
them? I am inclined to think that I am not bound to do so. But
suppose that Cooper goes away, and says to another friend that I am
a man who forgets old ties; that he took some trouble to see me,
and found me absorbed, and not particularly glad to see him? I
hope, indeed, that this was not his impression; but boredom is a
subtle thing, and it is difficult to keep it out of one's manner,
however religiously one tries to be cheerful. Well, if he DOES feel
thus, is he right and am I wrong? His whole life lies on different
lines to my own, and though we had much in common in the old
pleasant days, we have not much in common now. It is quite possible
that he thinks I am a bore; and it is even possible that he is
right there too. But, que faire? que penser? I can honestly say
that if Cooper wanted my help, my advice, my sympathy, I would give
it him without grudging. But is it a part of loyalty that I must
desire to see him, and even to be bored by him? I am inclined to
think that if I had a simpler, more affectionate nature, I should
probably NOT be bored, but that in my gladness at the sight of an
old friend and the reviving of old memories, the idea of criticism
would die a natural death.

What I have suffered from all my life is making friends too easily.
It is so painful to me being with a person who seems to be dull,
that I have always instinctively tried to be interested in, and to
interest my companion. The result has been--I am making a very
barefaced confession--that I have been often supposed to be more
friendly than I really am, and to allow a certain claim of loyalty
to be established which I could not sincerely sustain.--Ever yours,


T. B.



KNAPSTEAD VICARAGE,
BALDOCK,
Aug. 14, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--A curious little incident occurred to me
yesterday--so curious, so inexplicable, that I cannot refrain from
telling it to you, though it has no solution and no moral so far as
I can see. I am staying with an old family friend, Duncan by name--
you don't know him--who is a parson near Hitchin. We were to have
gone for a bicycle ride together, but he was called away on sudden
business, and as the only other member of the party is my friend's
wife, who is much of an invalid, I went out alone.

I went off through Baldock and Ashwell. And I must interrupt my
story for a moment to tell you about the latter. Above a large
hamlet of irregularly built and scattered white houses, many of
them thatched, most of them picturesque, rises one of the most
beautiful, mouldering church towers I have ever seen. It is more
like a weather-worn crag-pinnacle than a tower; it is of great
height, and the dim and blurred outlines of its arched windows and
buttresses communicate a singular grace of underlying form to the
broken and fretted stone. I fear that it must before long be
restored, if it is to hold together much longer; all I can say is
that I am thankful to have seen it in its hour of decay. It is
infinitely patient and pathetic. Its solemn, ruinous dignity, its
tender grace, make it like some aged and sanctified spirit that has
borne calamity and misfortune with a sweet and gentle trust. A
little farther on in the village is another extraordinarily
beautiful thing. The road, while still almost in the street, passes
across a little embankment; and on the left hand you look down into
a pit, like a quarry, full of ash-trees, and with a thick
undergrowth of bushes and tall plants. From a dozen little
excavations leap and bicker crystal rivulets of water, hurrying
down stony channels, uniting in a pool, and then moving off, a
full-fed stream, among quiet water-meadows. It is one of the
sources of the Cam. The water is deliciously cool and clear,
running as it does straight off the chalk. No words of mine can do
justice to the wonderful purity and peace of the place. I found
myself murmuring over those perfect lines of Marvell--you know
them?--


"Might a soul bathe there and be clean,
And slake its drought?"


These two sights, the tower and the well-head, put my mind into
tune; and I went on my way rejoicing, with that delicate elation of
spirit that rarely visits one. Everything I saw had an airy
quality, a flavour, an aroma, I know not how to describe it. Now I
caught the sunlight on the towering greenness of an ancient elm;
now a wide view over flat pastures, with a pool fringed deep in
rushes, came in sight; now an old manorial farm held up its
lichened chimneys above a row of pollarded elms. I came at last, by
lanes and byways, to a silent village that seemed entirely
deserted. The men, I suppose, were all working in the fields; the
cottage doors stood open; near the little common rose an old high-
shouldered church, much overgrown with ivy. The sun lay pleasantly
upon its leaded roof, and among the grass-grown graves. I left my
bicycle by the porch, and at first could not find an entrance; but
at last I discovered that a low, priest's door that led into the
chancel, was open. The church had an ancient and holy smell. It was
very cool in there out of the sun. I turned into the nave, and
wandered about for a few moments, noting the timbered roof, the
remains of old frescoes on the walls; the tomb of a knight who lay
still and stiff, his head resting on his hand. I read an epitaph or
two, with the faint cry of love and grief echoing through the
stilted phraseology of the tomb, and then I went back to the altar.

On a broad slab of slate, immediately below the altar steps, lay
something dark; I bent down to look at it, and then realised, with
a curious sense of horror, that it was a little pool of blood;
beside it lay two large jagged stones, also stained with blood,
which had dried into a viscous paste upon them. It seemed as if the
stoning of some martyr had taken place, and that, the first
horrible violence done, the deed had been transferred to the open
air. What made it still stranger to me was that in the east window
was a rude representation of the stoning of Stephen; and I have
since discovered that the church is dedicated to him.

I cannot give you the smallest hint of explanation. Indeed,
pondering over it, I cannot conceive of any circumstances which can
in any way account for what I saw. I wandered out into the
churchyard--for the sight gave me a curious chill of horror--and I
could see nothing that could further enlighten me. A few yards
beyond stood the rectory, embowered in thickets. It seemed to be
deserted; the windows were dark and undraped; no smoke went up from
the chimneys. It suddenly appeared to me that I must be the victim
of some strange hallucination, So I stepped again within the church
to see if my senses had played me false. But no! there were the
stones, and the blood beside them.

The sun began to decline to his setting; the shadows lengthened and
darkened, as I rode slowly away, with a shadow on my spirit. I felt
I had somehow seen a type, a mystery. These incidents do not befall
one by chance, and I was sure, in some remote way, that I had
looked, as it were, for a moment into a dark avenue of the soul;
that I was bidden to think, to ponder. These tokens of violence and
death, the blood outpoured, in witness of pain, in the heart of the
quiet sanctuary, before the very altar of the God of peace and
love. What is it that we do that is like that? What is it that _I_
do? I will not tell you how the message shaped itself for me;
perhaps you can guess; but it came, it formed itself out of the
dark, and in that silent hour a voice called sharply in my spirit.

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