Arthur Christopher Benson

“ The extraordinary apportionment not only in balance but in kind of punishment to sin—long-continued, secret, base desires, punished by long-hidden suffering—the sharp stress of temptation yielded to, requited by the sharp pang—the glorious feeling which I have once or twice felt—the sin once sinned and the punishment once over, as one is assured supremely sometimes that it is without doubt—of trustful freedom, and fresh fitness for battling one's self and helping others to battle—a mood that is soon broken, but is an earnest while it lasts of infinite satisfaction. ”

“ There was no depth of the despairing spirit, I say it deliberately, that Arthur had not sounded—and he had not been, as it were, lowered—deaf, blind, and unconscious—into the abysmal deeps; it was with an eye alert to mark every ledge of the dark walls, an ear quick to catch the smallest murmur from below, a sense keen to experience and record every new depth gained, every qualm of heart-sickness encountered. Naturally prone to serious contemplation of life's enigmas, there was not one that life did not bring with shocking vividness to his touch. ”

“ I can't listen to a concert comfortably if there is a great throng, unless the music is so good as to wrap one altogether away. There is undoubtedly a force abroad among large masses of people, the force which forms the basis of the principle of public prayer, and I am conscious of it too, only it distresses me; moreover, the worst and most afflicting nightmare I have is the sensation of standing sightless and motionless, but with all the other senses alert and apprehensive, in the presence of a vast and hostile crowd. ”

“ Is it indeed true that, as I have so passionately denied, I have fallen into the grasp of a power which is waging an equal war with truth and light and goodness? Shall I be sacrificed to the struggle, without having made the world a whit better, or richer, or stronger, with the only memory of me a quiet life with few follies and fewer deeds of power, to be laid away in the dark? ”

“ I am not even physically capable of writing, even if the world would hear me; and I am forced back upon myself, upon a feeble life, necessarily self-centered, to nurse and coddle myself as though I was a poor failing dotard, with one avenue alone—and how precarious!—through which I may perhaps speak my little message to the world—the education of a child to carry on my torch. ”

“ I like a boy to cram himself with novels; a day will come when he is sick of them, and rejects them for the study of facts. What we want to give a child is 'bookmindedness,' as some one calls it. They will read a good deal that is bad, of course; but innocence is as slippery as a duck's back; a boy really fond of reading is generally pure-minded enough. When you see a robust, active, out-of-door boy deeply engrossed in a book, then you may suspect it if you like, and ask him what he has got ”

“ Oh, if I can only make him good; put him in the way of inward happiness! I break out into prayer and aspirations for him in his presence when I think of the utterly heedless way in which he regards the future, and the awful, the momentous issues it contains. He, dear lad, thinks nothing of it, except as a sign of my love for him. We have no misunderstandings, and I seem somehow to love the world better, more passionately, since he came to me.
"I send you a few flowers from our garden, and Edward sends his love, if that is respectful enough.
"I am your affectionate friend, "Arthur Hamilton." ”

“ But with depression it is not so: it poisons any cup—it turns all the cheerful little daily duties of life into miseries, unutterable burdens; death is the only future event which you can contemplate with satisfaction. It admits of no comfort: the whispered suggestion of the mind, 'You will be better soon,' falls on deaf ears. No physical suffering that I have ever felt, and I have not been without my share, is in the least comparable to it ”

“ I had hoped that whatever they engaged in my sons would say, 'If this is worth doing, it is worth doing well.' I did not want them to say, 'I mean to work in order to be first in this or that, to beat other people, to court success'—I do not suspect you of that—but to say, 'I mean to do my best, and if I am rewarded with honours to accept them gratefully, as a sign that my endeavours have been blest.' I fear that in your case you have done what pleased yourself—sucked the honey of the work, or tried to; that always ends in bitterness. ”

“ Life shows me more and more every day that there is something watching us and working with us, so that now and then in unexpected moments when I have felt particularly independent for some time back, I come upon a little fact or incident that reveals to me that I am like a mouse in the grasp of a cat, allowed sometimes to run a few inches alone—or more truly like a baby walking along, very proud of its performance, with a couple of anxious, loving arms poised to catch it. ”

“ Your duty is most plain; you have no right to cause acute distress to several people, because you can not take exactly such an exalted view as they do, of an institution which, from the lowest point of view, is the dying request of a great and loving soul, to all who can feel his beauty or listen to his call, a beautiful pledge of family and national unity, and a touching symbol of all good things. ”

“ I can hardly describe my sensations at this announcement—I felt the room swim and shake; and yet it was made in such a deliberate matter-of-fact tone, that it flashed across me for an instant that Arthur was joking, and together with it came a curiously dismal sense of unreality, that is well known to all those who have passed through any great strain or emotional crisis, as if, suddenly, the soul had fallen out of everything, and they were nothing but lifeless empty husks, hollow and phantasmal. ”

“ My experience of life generally gives me a strong impulse in favour of Determinism; that is to say, the system which considers the histories of nations, the lives of individuals, their very deeds and words, to be all part of a vast unalterable design: and whose dealing with the past, with each event, indeed, as it occurs, is thus nothing but interpretation, an earnest endeavour to exclude regret or disappointment, and to see how best to link each fact in our past on with what we know of ourselves, to see its bearing on our individual case. ”

“ It sweeps away for a minute or two, as it goes and comes and returns upon itself until its sweet course is run, all the hard and stifling web of convention and opinion that closes us in; it takes me back for a moment to old-world fancies, till I seem to feel, as I am always longing to feel, that we are separated only by a very little flimsy hedge from the secrets of the beautiful, from the shadow-land which is so real; and that every now and then a breeze breaks and stirs across, with something of the fragrance of the place in its wandering air. ”

“ I have just been reading Emerson's Essays. They certainly kindle one's belief in the greatness of life and the nobility of little things; but, after all, the great refreshment of such books to me is—not that they give me new working ideas; I hardly know a book that has ever done that; the stock of ideas is almost constant in the world; but because they show that others are on the same track of admiration and hope as one's self for a goal only hinted at and conjectured to be glorious—on the same track, and farther advanced upon it ”

“ The extraordinary delicacy with which the screw of pain and mental suffering is adjusted, just lifted when we can bear no more (not when we think we can bear no more, but when God knows it) and resolutely applied again when we have gained strength which we propose to devote to enjoyment, but which God intends us to devote to suffering. The very beauty, too, of pain itself—the strange flushes of joy that it gives us, which can only thus be won—the certainty that this is reality, this is what we are meant to do and be—happiness of different kinds, art, friends, books, are delusive ”

“ There is one of these at Cambridge now, a man for whom I not only have the profoundest respect, but whose personal presence exercises on me just the fascination I describe; and influential as he is, it is influence more utterly unconscious of its own power than any I have seen—a rare quality. He finds all societies into which he enters, stung by his words and looks, serious, sweet, interested in, if not torn by moral and social problems of the deepest import; yet he always fancies that it is they, not he, that are thus potent. He is not aware that it is he who is saintly ”

“ I get out of scrapes in a way I don't deserve; I find letters I have mislaid; annoyances are mysteriously shunted aside; money flows in; days of extraordinary happiness succeed one another; little events save vast complications of trouble, so that I long to turn round and grasp by the hand or kiss the cheek of the sweet friend who stands at my elbow, suggesting, ordering, providing day and night, smiling on me as I sleep, hovering around me as I work, without a word of praise. ”

“ No, for ordinary minds the strain is too strong. 'I will gain fame,' the pure young soul said once, 'as an engine of power, that I may have a platform where men will listen to me;' but the effort of struggling thither has been too much, and once arrived there, what is his object now? merely to remain there, and among the crowd of pushing selfish figures, that have lost in the fight the very signs of their humanity, monstrari digito, to have the gaze of men, to feel somebody. ”

“ This time it tells me that I am not equal to the direct responsibility; that I can not, with my habits of mind and temper, impress a permanent enough mark upon the lads. It is like beginning a system of education that is to take, say, thirty years, giving them a year of it, and then taking to another; you not only lose your year, but you unfit them for other systems. ”

“ Then, as ever, I could not help feeling a subtle influence in Arthur's conversation and presence, that defied analysis and yet was undoubtedly there. He seemed to encourage one to hope, or rather believe, in the ultimate tendency to good in all things, to wait and watch the developments and the bents of life, rather than to fret over particular events—and this without a vague optimism that refuses to take count of what is unsatisfactory and foul, but looking causes and consequences fairly in the face. ”

“ You know I pretend to a kind of familiar; like Socrates, I am forbidden to do certain things by a kind of distant inward voice—not conscience, for it is not limited to moral choice. I don't mean to say I do not or have not disobeyed it, but it is always the worse for me in the end; it is like taking a short cut in the mountains; you get to your end in time, but far more tired and shaky than if you had followed the right road, which started so much to the left among the pines, and moreover, you get there very much behind your party. ”

“ Anyone who will take things as he finds them, and fairly come to a conclusion about them, not hampered by fetters of authority or tradition, but independently arriving at his own solution, must inevitably arrive at this; there is no logical escape. But the difficulty lies in the application of this determinism to life. So many people persist in saying that it is only a logical account of the existence of the world, only an ontological solution, not a life-philosophy. The best man, who can not confute it, only says mournfully that it will not do for an ethical system ”

“ The boy who 'rebukes' his schoolfellows for irreverent or loose conversation, the boy who is always ready in his odious way to do a kindness, the boy who is never late for school—these seem to him to be the kind of figures that the clergyman is holding up in his sermon as ideal types of character, to be imitated and reverenced, and for whom he has in his young soul the most undisguised and wholesome loathing. ”

“ That represents, in an exaggerated form, the ideal of the Western mind. They are, though they would not so name themselves, gross materialists; and the tendency is increasing on them daily and yearly. Those who protest occasionally against current thought, who appear like prophets with bitter invective and words of warning on their lips, are swept away by the tide, and write of trade and treaties, of wars of principle and convenience. The very divines are tainted. 'Live your life to the uttermost,' they cry. ”