Arthur Christopher Benson

“ I ought not to think lightly of mysteries, when all this astonishing conspiracy has taken place round me, to give me a home and a wife and a whole range of new emotions—how Maud came to care for me is still the deepest wonder of all—a loveless prig like me!"
"I won't be understood to subscribe to all that," said Mrs. Graves, laughing, "though I see your point of view; but there's something deeper even than that, dear Howard. You care for me, you care for Maud; but it's the power of caring that matters more than the power of caring for particular people. ”

“ If you ever wake, you will know that I am thinking of you; not far apart! Good-night, my sweet one, my only darling."
Maud put one hand on his shoulder, but did not speak—and then slipped in light-footed through the gate. Howard walked back to the Manor, through the charmed dusk and the fragrance of hidden flowers, full of an almost intolerable happiness, that was akin to pain. The evening star hung in liquid, trembling light above the dark down, the sky fading to a delicious green, the breeze rustled in the heavy-leaved sycamores, and the lights were lit in the cottage windows. ”

“ But there is one other thing I want to say now, and that is that I should above all things like to see you married—don't, by the way, fall in love with dear Jane, who worships the ground you tread on! I have been observing you, and I feel little doubt that marriage is what you most need. I don't expect it has been in your mind at all! Perhaps you have not had enough to marry on, but I am not sorry for that, for a special reason; and I think, too, that men who have the care of boys and young men have their paternal instinct to a large extent satisfied; but that is only a small part of marriage! ”

“ I have always had what I liked, and done what I liked; and now when I am confronted with things which I do not like at all, I have just got to endure them, and be glad that I have still got the power of suffering left."
Mrs. Graves looked at him very tenderly. "Yes," she said, "suffering has a great power, and one doesn't want those whom one loves not to suffer. It is the condition of loving; but it must be real suffering, not morbid, self-invented torture. It's a great mistake to suffer more than one need; one wastes life fast so. ”

“ Why cannot we put education in touch with life, try to show what human beings are driving at, what arrangements they are making that they may live? It is all arrangements with us—the frame for the picture, the sheath for the sword—and we leave the picture and the sword to look after themselves. What a wretched dilettante business it all is, keeping these boys practising postures in the anteroom of life! Cannot we get at the real thing, teach people to do things, fill their minds with ideas, break down the silly tradition of needless wealth and absurd success? ”

“ Have you any religion or faith of your own?"
"Ah," said Howard, "who can say? I am a conformist, certainly, because I recognise in religion a fine sobering, civilising force at work, and if one must choose one's side, I want to be on that side and not on the other. But religion seems to me in its essence a very artistic thing, a perception of effects which are hidden from many hearts and minds. When a man speaks of definite religious experience, I feel that I am in the presence of a perception of something real—as real as music and painting. ”

“ Jack was couched at a little distance in the heather, smoking a pipe. Howard went and sat down moodily beside him. "An odd thing, a picnic," said Jack musingly; "I am not sure it is not an invention of the devil. Is anything the matter, Howard? You look as if things had gone wrong. You don't mind that nonsense of Guthrie's, do you? I was an ass to get him to do it; I hate doing a stupid thing, and he is simply wild with me. It's no good saying it is not like, because it is in a way, but of course it's only a rag. It isn't absurd when you do it, only when someone else does." ”

“ The activities which one makes for oneself, they are the delusions which hide God from us. One must not strive or rebuke or arrange; one must simply love and be. Let me tell you one thing. I was haunted all my early life with a fear of death. I liked life so well, every moment of it, every incident, that I could not bear to think it should ever cease; now, though I shrink from pain as much as ever, I have no shrinking whatever from death. It is the perfectly natural and simple change, and one is with God there as here. The soul and God—those are the two imperishable things ”

“ It was a time of wonderful discoveries for Howard, that month spent in the little house under the cliff and beside the cove. It was a tiny hamlet with half a dozen fishermen's cottages and two or three larger houses, holiday-dwellings for rich people; but there was no one living there, except a family of children with a governess. The house they were in belonged to an artist, and had a big studio in which they mostly sate. An elderly woman and her niece were the servants, and the life was the simplest that could be imagined. Howard felt as if he would have liked it prolonged for ever. ”

“ Cambridge is not a place that puts its characteristic beauties in the forefront. Some of the most charming things lurk unsuspected beyond dark entries and behind sombre walls. They penetrated little mouldering courts; they looked into dim and stately halls and chapels; they stood long on the bridge of Clare, gazing at that incomparable front, with all the bowery gardens and willow-shaded walks, like Camelot, beside the slow, terraced stream.
It was a tortured kind of delight for Howard to feel the girl beside him; but she showed no wish to talk intimately or emotionally. ”

“ By the little chalk-pit just outside the village a rustic pair, a boy and girl, stood sheepishly clasped in a dull and silent embrace. Howard, to whom public exhibitions of emotion were distasteful, walked swiftly by with averted eyes, when suddenly a poignant thought came on him, causing him to redden up to the roots of his hair, and walk faster than ever. It was this, then, that was the matter with him—he was in love, he was jealous, he was the victim of the oldest, simplest, commonest, strongest emotion of humanity. ”

“ Why, indeed? and even now, I simply can't believe it—oh, the wretched hours when I thought you were drifting away from me; do men and women indeed miss their chances so? If I had but known! Yet, I must tell you this—when I first came to this spring here, I thought it held a beautiful secret for me—something which had been in my life from everlasting. It was so, and this was what it held for me."
The afternoon sped swiftly away, and the shadow of the western downs fell across the pool. An immense and overpowering joy filled Howard's heart, and the silent world took part in his ecstasy. ”

“ Graves laughed, and said, "Yes, that is so."
Howard went on, "I have been thinking a great deal about our talk yesterday, and it's a new light to me. I do not think I fully understand, but I feel that there is something very big behind it all, which I want to understand. This great force you speak of—is it an AIM?"
"That's a good question," said Mrs. Graves. "No, it's not an aim at all. It's too big for that; an aim is quite on a lower level. There's no aim in the big things. A man doesn't fall ill with an aim—he doesn't fall in love with an aim. It just comes upon him." ”

“ Graves, "but that's the last sacrifice. That is what losing oneself means; to believe in love itself, and not in the particular souls we love; to believe in beauty, not in beautiful things. I have learned that! I do not say it in any complacency or superiority—you must believe me; but it is the last and hardest thing that I have learned. I do not say that it does not hurt—one suffers terribly in losing one's dear self, in parting from other selves that are even more dear. But would one send away the souls one loves best into a loveless paradise? ”

“ It's like what you said about Cambridge long ago, the dark secret doorways, the hidden gardens; I see now that all those ideas and thoughts are only things you are carrying with you, like luggage. They are not part of you at all. Don't you know how, when one is quite a child, a person's house seems to be all a mysterious part of himself? ”

“ I rather mistrust the people who say they must get time to think out things. It's like the old definition of metaphysics—the science of muddling oneself systematically. I don't think one can act by reason; one must act by instinct, and reason just prevents one's making a fool of oneself."
"I believe the time for the other life will come quite naturally later," said Maud. "At your age, you have got to do things. Of course it's the same with women in a way, but marriage is their obvious career, and the pity is that there don't seem enough husbands to go round. ”

“ Cousin Anne is wonderful about it, but she seems able to let things alone in a way I can't dare to."
"Oh, one learns that as one gets older," said Howard. "One can't argue things straight. One can only go on hoping and wishing, and if possible understanding. I used to make a great mess of it with my pupils at one time, by thinking one could talk them round; but one can't persuade people of things, one can only just suggest, and let it be; and after all no one ever resents finding himself interesting to some one else; only it has got to be interest, and not a sense of duty." ”

“ There were brighter hours, when in the hot July days a little peace fell on him, a little sense of the fragrance and beauty of the world. He took to long and solitary walks on the down in search of bodily fatigue. There was one day in particular which he long remembered, when he had gone up to the camp, and sate in the shade of the thicket on the crisp turf, looking out over the valley, unutterably quiet and peaceful in the hot air. The trees were breathlessly still; the hamlet roofs peeped out above the orchards, the hot air quivered on the down. ”

“ A great deal of the muddle comes from the feminine weariness of logic, and a great deal, too, from the fact that they never learn how to use words—words are the things that divide people! But I believe more and more, by experience, in the SOUL. I do not believe that the soul begins with birth or ends with death. Now I have no sort of doubt in my own mind that the soul of your child was a living thing, a spirit which has lived before, and will live again. Souls, I believe, come to the brink of life, out of some unknown place, and by choice or impelled by some need for experience, take shape. ”

“ Sandys. "No compulsion for me—the children may do as they like, live as they like, marry whom they like. I don't believe in checking human nature. Of course if Jack could get a Fellowship, I should like him to settle down at Cambridge. There's a life for you! In the forefront of the intellectual battle! It is what I should have liked myself, of all things. To hear what is going on in the intellectual line, to ventilate ideas, to write, to teach—that's a fine life—to be able to hold one's own in talk and discussion—that's where we country people fail. ”

“ That was a delicious hour, when the mind, still unsated of sleep, played softly with happy, homelike thoughts. He slept again, but the sweet mood lasted; his breakfast was served to him in solitude in a little panelled parlour off the Hall; and in the fresh April morning, with the sunlight lying on the lawn and lighting up the old worn detail of the carved cornices, he recovered for a time the boyish sense of ecstasy of the first morning at home after the return from school. While he was breakfasting, a scribbled note from Jack was brought in. ”

“ Howard took her hand and kissed it. "Thank you," he said, "thank you a hundred times for speaking so. It is perfectly true, every word of it. It is curious that to-day I have seen myself three times mirrored in other minds. I don't like what I see—I am not complacent—I am not flattered. But I don't know what to do! I feel like a patient with a hopeless disease, who has been listening to a perfectly kind and wise physician. But what can I do? It is just the vital impulse which is lacking. I will be frank too; it is quite true that I live in the surface of things. ”

“ Graves, "it is like that in a way; it is the one thing worth doing and being. But it isn't a conscious using of minutes and opportunities—it isn't a plan; it is just a fulness of life, rejoicing to live, to see, to interpret, to understand. It doesn't matter what life you live—it is how you live it. Life is only the cup for the liquor which must else be spilled. ”

“ It's a system, I suppose, a social system, to enable people to waste their time. I feel as if I had got caught in a sort of glue—wading in glue. One ought to live life, or the best part of it, on one's own lines. I feel as if I was on show just now, and it's a nuisance."
"Well," said Maud, "I am afraid I do rather like showing you off and feeling grand; but it won't go on for ever. I'll try to contrive something. I don't see why you need be drawn in. I'll talk to Cousin Anne about it."
"But I am not going to mope alone," said Howard. "Where thou goest, I will go. ”

“ One must have a criterion, mustn't one, or it is all loose, and indeed, so to speak, illusive? I am all for formative education; and it is there that women—I speak frankly in the presence of three intelligent women—it is there that they suffer. Their education is not formative enough—not formal enough, in fact! Now, I have tried with dear Maud to communicate just that touch of formality. You would be surprised, Mr. Kennedy, to know what Maud has read under my guidance. Not learned, you know—I don't care for that—but with a standard, or if I may revert to my former expression, a criterion. ”