E. F. Benson

“ I left Capri, as you will have guessed, somewhat in a hurry; in fact, I firmly and speedily ran away as hard as I could. All September, so I see now, I had been living in the flimsiest paradise of a fool. I had thought it was possible to detach one’s self so utterly from the joys and frailties of the human race that one could take any liberties one chose, look at and live in beauty, and cease to be man. Then suddenly the flesh twitched me, and like the flowers of Klingsor’s garden my sexless paradise fell in red ruin of autumn leaf about my ears. ”

“ Your soul it was, not Schubert’s, that shone in the symphony that shall never be finished; your soul, not Beethoven’s, was passion and pathos—you, not he, turned night into a flame, and in that flame I burned and was consumed, happy as the gods are happy, and happier because I was not content. I shall never be content.
Oh, my own who did this, thanks is no word{278} between you and me. Do we thank the star that shines in the dark-blue velvet of the skies? We gaze only, and are drawn thither. For we thank a giver for a human gift ”

“ And as the boy’s voice rises and fills the great spaces of some sunlit cathedral, so this light pervades these aisles of yellowing trees and spaces of swelling downland. About each there is the same piercing, pervading quality; about each there is an utter absence of all passion or emotion. A woman’s voice, it seems to me, is like the mature light of summer, broad, full of feeling, full of the tenderness of sex. But in this October weather you have mere brightness; in the air there is a certain chill, which gives the precision that the warm, flower-blurred light of summer lacks. ”

“ Prey as I always am to the exaltations and depressions of the weather, it seems to me that I am living in some fairy story, as if the wicked witch who squirts the fogs and damps over the world was dead, and the good fairy of clear skies, though she cannot put the clock of the months back to summer, had allowed the seasons to stand still at this beautiful moment, to make up to us a little for all that we have suffered at the hands of the wicked witch. ”

“ We have been burning with alien fires and passions not our own: the temptation of Kundry has shaken us; the sorrow of Wotan, as wide as the world and as bitter as the sea, has for the time been ours; we have been laid to sleep on a mountain-top, like Brunehilde, and, like Siegfried, have dreamed in the green shade of woods until{201} the voice of Nature has become intelligible, and the twittering of birds articulate through the murmur of the forest. The quintessence of human emotion, in all its terror and beauty, has shaken and enthralled us. ”

“ You see, Jack, I can’t remember a single joy or sorrow of my life with which you and Dick were not bound up, as it were. And this—the greatest of all. Do come as soon as mother writes to you.’
The dusk began to fall in layers over the sky, and the evening breeze got up and tossed the incense of the flowers’ evensong over the garden. Then, as night closed in, the smell of syringa and lilac fell asleep, and the sweet-peas closed, and the benediction of the stars shone from the heights of heaven. Then Margery rose from her chair, and held out both hands to me. ”

“ That is the moment for which the collies (Huz and Buz) are waiting, and they fly after us and lick our faces before we can regain our feet, to congratulate us on the success of this excellent new game. Indeed, the ‘Alliance of Laughter’ is in league again, but below the laughter is love, which penetrates to the centre of the world and rises to the heaven of heavens. Then we tramp back, towing the slewing toboggan uphill, and getting our heels kicked by it downhill to the muffled town at dusk, and the long evenings begin. ”

“ SEPTEMBER The barren, sterile emotions which Art gives us, though they have the advantage of harmlessness over the emotions of Life itself, that tree of sweet and bitter fruits, bear with them the inherent defects of their unreality; and whereas there is hardly an emotion of Life which does not leave us stronger and more vivified, there is hardly an emotion of Art where one’s senses are stirred, not by actual events of joy or sorrow, but the imagined scenes thereof, which does not leave us flat and unbraced in proportion as the emotion excited has been keen. ”

“ That was as I{41} would have it: for the time I was just a Live Thing, conscious of life. I wanted no distant stars to remind me how small I was, or how immense was heaven—for the time I desired only the kind warm earth—no moon to evoke, as she always does, the need of companionship. I was about on this earth, which, like I, was bursting with the promise of spring. Mating-time was not yet; not yet was the time of fresh leaves, or any outward sign of vitality. The vitality was within, everything had drawn a long breath, and the long breath hung suspended for the moment. ”

“ I know also how good the world is, how full and brimming with things that are lovely and of good report. For two years, in spite of what went before, God knows how much happiness I have been allowed to enjoy, how rich I have been, levying my tax of joy on all created things, finding music in all the strings of human emotions except one only—love, definite love for one woman. ”

“ Phloxes are still in flower, sunflowers have topped the garden wall, and the beautiful sylvestris is vigorous with pale leaf and snowy flower. But—only fancy—that vile Jackmanni is dead. Quite dead. God forgive it for a senseless fool.
These golden October days! Every morning I stray out before breakfast, sometimes only into the garden, sometimes as far as the water-meadows, to find the same glorious return of day. This morning the least pallor of hoar-frost was on the grass, and the clean smell of the morning was more exquisite than all the perfumes of Arabia. ”

“ Lie open to the air and the stars, let your life pause, breathe deep, make no effort, and the thrush and the stars and the green things will communicate with that which is within you by direct ways.
Then as dusk deepens into night thought comes back; but thought, too, is driven inwards, going home to roost, and for a little while, as I walk in this dewy grass by the sweet-peas, Margery will be leaning on my arm, talking to me of the days{163} that were—talking, too, in a way I do not yet fully understand, of the days that will be. ”

“ In lonely places the daffodils dance together for the joy of their renewed life, and the warm wind shakes the snow of almond and apple-blossom on to the thick-bladed turf. Morning by morning fresh spears of living stuff have pierced the earth, rising upwards in obedience to the great law that moves all life, to look on the kingdom of the sun; and every day the sap of growth hums and tingles to the end of twig and tree, bursting forth through pink-sheathed bud into stars and crescents of leaf and blossom. ”

“ A lively repentance sets its face steadily forwards, never backwards.
This Spirit of the falling leaf is my especial foe, and I detest him with all the fervour of familiarity. Every autumn he whispers to me, ‘Look at the trees from which the yellow leaves are falling slowly, slowly, but steadily. Soon they will be quite bare; their summer is over, a year is gone. But they will renew their youth in the spring, the green buds will burst again, and June will laugh among the revivified branches, and the birds will again make there a melodious habitation. But no spring will renew you ”

“ Yes, if you wish, but it is just that prosaicness which makes the romance of life, the intertwining of the common little everyday affairs with the great lords of romance, Love and Death, who by their presence lift life entire into their domain, so that nothing is common or commonplace.
That night, as I walked home, it seemed to me that never before had Margery been so close to me. Do you know how sometimes you can almost hear a voice you are familiar with, so that it seems as if the person to whom it belongs had just spoken? ”

“ For happiness consists not in getting a thing, but in hoping that one may get it. With satisfaction walks surfeit; but to keep your ambition steadily a little ahead of your possibilities is to be constantly eager. There is nothing in the world which, if I got, would make me happy. There are a million things in the world which the desire to get and the hope of getting make me happy. And it is this which a man sets out to seek when he falls in love, which is the best form of happiness devised in the world at large, and, thank God! ”

“ How well I remember the first day of the year, a morning of fog, with fugitive gleams of sun, type of the inscrutable young year, which now is flaming to its close in a glory of rose-coloured sunset! All I ever desired, all that I scarcely dared to desire, is mine, and yet this is only the promise of what shall be. The love which is mine is like a golden thread passing through the scattered beads of my days, threading them into a necklace which I place round her neck, so that it lies on her heart, and day and night moves to its beating, and rises and falls with her breath. ”

“ The brooks all down the valley of Monsalvat—for to Monsalvat he was come again—were no more thick or tainted with the melted snows, nor had summer yet made them run low or less melodiously; but they brimmed through the meadows, combing the waving grasses that leaned to them and drank of their coolness, and over their pebbly beds they glanced and sparkled like young things at play. Between the stems of the trees were strown carpets of hyacinths and wind-blossoms, and from thicket to thicket the merry thrush glanced in and out, and filled his throbbing throat and sang of love and of summer. ”

“ Then mounting again, I passed up a long gentle slope by a few outlying châlets, and, having come out of the shadow of the Eiger, sat down to lunch. The air was utterly windless, the frost so keen that not a flake of snow clung to my clothes, yet through the glory of that pellucid air the sun struck so hot that a coat was altogether a superfluity. Eastwards the Wetterhorn rose in glacier and snowfield, and its superb and patient beauty, as of some noble woman waiting for the man she loves, struck me with a pang of delight. ”

“ A tree was blown down in the night not far from the house—an elm growing in a hedgerow—and a cruel gaping wound of torn earth has opened, with the fibres of the root like tortured and exposed nerves standing out into the air. For thirty yards round the field is littered with the pitiful debris—torn branches, bunches of leaf, even a couple of bird’s-nests. For it, poor soul! autumn has been the end of life, and spring will not build it anew. ”

“ We are people that sit in darkness, content that our religion should make us sad, and as such we have a lesson humbly to learn from paganism, and in particular from the paganism of the Greeks, whose hierarchy of gods were enthroned in brightness, and the name thereof was Beauty. And that Beauty, the search of which to them was worship and prayer and praise, they found everywhere: in the sunlight and the blue dome of heaven; in the crisp, curly acanthus leaf which they set to twine about the capitals of their marble-hewn columns and on the necks of the vases of the dead ”

“ Yet God never makes facsimiles; she, too, is a living soul, of her own identity, and none other’s. Or—the wildest impossibilities riot in my brain to-night—is this some wraith of my Margery—Dick’s Margery—sent, God knows from where, to comfort me or to drive me insane? Was there in my love for Margery, after she was Dick’s wife, something which was evil, which kept suggesting, ‘If this had been otherwise—if Dick died?’... ”

“ Your own niche, your own particular angulus terræ, must, I think, be small; the great reception-rooms, the huge lawns, are delightful to have, but you will often find the owner of such choosing a small room for himself to work in and live in, and making perfect, according to his own taste, some sequestered angle of his garden, shut out from vastness, and brought within the scope of his invention. The great lawns and shrubberies he may plan and take pleasure in, but he will not be fond of them with the personal affection he feels for his own room, his own garden corner. ”

“ I think the man who lies there must have been a good husband. God keep all our memories as green in loving hearts!
Meantime April is here, and it is good to be in England, for in no other country that I have ever seen is the rush of colour more jubilant.{94} Flowers you may get in plenty on the Grecian hills when ‘blossom by blossom the spring begins,’ but nowhere do you get such green as that in which here April hangs the trees and hedgerows. Star-like the pink petalled daisies shine in the grass of the water-meadows, and soon the yellow shower of buttercups will make Danaë of the earth. ”

“ Some also are better-looking than others, but not much; some rather wider-awake, but all seem to have set as a seal on their foreheads a ruminating mediocrity in all points and qualities which the human mind is able to conceive. Apart from the festival, it is impossible to imagine being either very happy or very unhappy in Bayreuth; ‘very,’ in fact, is a word which is without meaning there.
Yet here, by a strange irony of fate, is planted the cult of perhaps the most ‘very’ mind that ever existed, for the brick theatre on the hill-side is the casket which holds that heart of flame and song. ”

“ And the happy temperament cannot possibly have anything to do with pleasures. No amount of pleasure will foster it at all; whereas, if you have got the happy temperament, almost everything by that mysterious{158} alchemy is turned into pleasure—even as a rose-tree turns that which its root-fibres suck from the earth into blossom. And certainly health is a great help to happiness, for to be well—really well—makes ‘the mere living,’ as Browning says, a joy, and at times it seems enough to be alive. ”