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At Large

A >> Arthur Christopher Benson >> At Large



Contents

I. THE SCENE
II. CONTENTMENT
III. FRIENDSHIP
IV. HUMOUR
V. TRAVEL
VI. SPECIALISM
VII. OUR LACK OF GREAT MEN
VIII. SHYNESS
IX. EQUALITY
X. THE DRAMATIC SENSE
XI. KELMSCOTT AND WILLIAM MORRIS
XII. A SPEECH DAY
XIII. LITERARY FINISH
XIV. A MIDSUMMER DAY'S DREAM
XV. SYMBOLS
XVI. OPTIMISM
XVII. JOY
XVIII. THE LOVE OF GOD
EPILOGUE






I

THE SCENE





Yes, of course it is an experiment! But it is made in corpore vili.
It is not irreparable, and there is no reason, more's the pity, why
I should not please myself. I will ask--it is a rhetorical question
which needs no answer--what is a hapless bachelor to do, who is
professionally occupied and tied down in a certain place for just
half the year? What is he to do with the other half? I cannot live
on in my college rooms, and I am not compelled to do so for
economy. I have near relations and many friends, at whose houses I
should be made welcome. But I cannot be like the wandering dove,
who found no repose. I have a great love of my independence and my
liberty. I love my own fireside, my own chair, my own books, my own
way. It is little short of torture to have to conform to the rules
of other households, to fall in with other people's arrangements,
to throw my pen down when the gong sounds, to make myself agreeable
to fortuitous visitors, to be led whither I would not. I do this, a
very little, because I do not desire to lose touch with my kind;
but then my work is of a sort which brings me into close touch day
after day with all sorts of people, till I crave for recollection
and repose; the prospect of a round of visits is one that fairly
unmans me. No doubt it implies a certain want of vitality, but one
does not increase one's vitality by making overdrafts upon it; and
then too I am a slave to my pen, and the practice of authorship is
inconsistent with paying visits. Of course the obvious remedy is
marriage; but one cannot marry from prudence, or from a sense of
duty, or even to increase the birth-rate, which I am concerned to
see is diminishing. I am, moreover, to be perfectly frank, a
transcendentalist on the subject of marriage. I know that a happy
marriage is the finest and noblest thing in the world, and I would
resign all the conveniences I possess with the utmost readiness for
it. But a great passion cannot be the result of reflection, or of
desire, or even of hope. One cannot argue oneself into it; one must
be carried away. "You have never let yourself go," says a wise and
gentle aunt, when I bemoan my unhappy fate. To which I reply that I
have never done anything else. I have lain down in streamlets, I
have leapt into silent pools, I have made believe I was in the
presence of a deep emotion, like the dear little girl in one of
Reynolds's pictures, who hugs a fat and lolling spaniel over an
inch-deep trickle of water, for fear he should be drowned. I do not
say that it is not my fault. It is my fault, my own fault, my own
great fault, as we say in the Compline confession. The fault has
been an over-sensibility. I have desired close and romantic
relations so much that I have dissipated my forces; yet when I read
such a book as the love-letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth
Barrett, I realise at once both the supreme nature of the gift, and
the hopelessness of attaining it unless it be given; but I try to
complain, as the beloved mother of Carlyle said about her health,
as little as possible.

Well, then, as I say, what is a reluctant bachelor who loves his
liberty to do with himself? I cannot abide the life of towns,
though I live in a town half the year. I like friends, and I do not
care for acquaintances. There is no conceivable reason why, in the
pursuit of pleasure, I should frequent social entertainments that
do not amuse me. What have I then done? I have done what I liked
best. I have taken a big roomy house in the quietest country I
could find, I have furnished it comfortably, and I have hitherto
found no difficulty in inducing my friends. one or two at a time,
to come and share my life. I shall have something to say about
solitude presently, but meanwhile I will describe my hermitage.

The old Isle of Ely lies in the very centre of the Fens. It is a
range of low gravel hills, shaped roughly like a human hand. The
river runs at the wrist, and Ely stands just above it, at the base
of the palm, the fingers stretching out to the west. The fens
themselves, vast peaty plains, the bottoms of the old lagoons, made
up of the accumulation of centuries of rotting water-plants,
stretch round it on every side; far away you can see the low
heights of Brandon, the Newmarket Downs, the Gogmagogs behind
Cambridge, the low wolds of Huntingdon. To the north the
interminable plain, through which the rivers welter and the great
levels run, stretches up to the Wash. So slight is the fall of the
land towards the sea, that the tide steals past me in the huge
Hundred-foot cut, and makes itself felt as far south as Earith
Bridge, where the Ouse comes leisurely down with its clear pools
and reed-beds. At the extremity of the southernmost of all the
fingers of the Isle, a big hamlet clusters round a great ancient
church, whose blunt tower is visible for miles above its grove of
sycamores. More than twelve centuries ago an old saint, whose name
I think was Owen, though it was Latinised by the monks into Ovinus,
because he had the care of the sheep, kept the flocks of St.
Etheldreda, queen and abbess of Ely, on these wolds. One does not
know what were the visions of this rude and ardent saint, as he
paced the low heights day by day, looking over the monstrous lakes.
At night no doubt he heard the cries of the marsh-fowl and saw the
elfin lights stir on the reedy flats. Perhaps some touch of fever
kindled his visions; but he raised a tiny shrine here, and here he
laid his bones; and long after, when the monks grew rich, they
raised a great church here to the memory of the shepherd of the
sheep, and beneath it, I doubt not, he sleeps.

What is it I see from my low hills? It is an enchanted land for me,
and I lose myself in wondering how it is that no one, poet or
artist, has ever wholly found out the charm of these level plains,
with their rich black soil, their straight dykes, their great
drift-roads, that run as far as the eye can reach into the
unvisited fen. In summer it is a feast of the richest green from
verge to verge; here a clump of trees stands up, almost of the hue
of indigo, surrounding a lonely shepherd's cote; a distant church
rises, a dark tower over the hamlet elms; far beyond, I see low
wolds, streaked and dappled by copse and wood; far to the south, I
see the towers and spires of Cambridge, as of some spiritual city--
the smoke rises over it on still days, hanging like a cloud; to the
east lie the dark pine-woods of Suffolk, to the north an
interminable fen; but not only is it that one sees a vast extent of
sky, with great cloud-battalions crowding up from the south, but
all the colour of the landscape is crowded into a narrow belt to
the eye, which gives it an intensity of emerald hue that I have
seen nowhere else in the world. There is a sense of deep peace
about it all, the herb of the field just rising in its place over
the wide acres; the air is touched with a lazy fragrance, as of
hidden flowers; and there is a sense, too, of silent and remote
lives, of men that glide quietly to and fro in the great pastures,
going quietly about their work in a leisurely calm. In the winter
it is fairer still, if one has a taste for austerity. The trees are
leafless now; and the whole flat is lightly washed with the most
delicate and spare tints, the pasture tinted with the yellowing
bent, the pale stubble, the rich plough-land, all blending into a
subdued colour; and then, as the day declines and the plain is
rimmed with a frosty mist, the smouldering glow of the orange
sunset begins to burn clear on the horizon, the grey laminated
clouds becoming ridged with gold and purple, till the whole fades,
like a shoaling sea, into the purest green, while the cloud-banks
grow black and ominous, and far-off lights twinkle like stars in
solitary farms.

Of the house itself, exteriorly, perhaps the less said the better;
it was built by an earl, to whom the estate belonged, as a
shooting-box. I have often thought that it must have been ordered
from the Army and Navy Stores. It is of yellow brick, blue-slated,
and there has been a pathetic feeling after giving it a meanly
Gothic air; it is ill-placed, shut in by trees, approached only by
a very dilapidated farm-road; and the worst of it is that a curious
and picturesque house was destroyed to build it. It stands in what
was once a very pretty and charming little park, with an ancient
avenue of pollard trees, lime and elm. You can see the old terraces
of the Hall, the mounds of ruins, the fish-ponds, the grass-grown
pleasance. It is pleasantly timbered, and I have an orchard of
honest fruit-trees of my own. First of all I expect it was a Roman
fort; for the other day my gardener brought me in half of the
handle of a fine old Roman water-jar, red pottery smeared with
plaster, with two pretty laughing faces pinched lightly out under
the volutes. A few days after I felt like Polycrates of Samos, that
over-fortunate tyrant, when, walking myself in my garden, I
descried and gathered up the rest of the same handle, the fractures
fitting exactly. There are traces of Roman occupation hereabouts in
mounds and earthworks. Not long ago a man ploughing in the fen
struck an old red vase up with the share, and searching the place
found a number of the same urns within the space of a few yards,
buried in the peat, as fresh as the day they were made. There was
nothing else to be found, and the place was under water till fifty
years ago; so that it must have been a boatload of pottery being
taken in to market that was swamped there, how many centuries ago!
But there have been stranger things than that found; half a mile
away, where the steep gravel hill slopes down to the fen, a man
hoeing brought up a bronze spear-head. He took it to the lord of
the manor, who was interested in curiosities. The squire hurried to
the place and had it all dug out carefully; quite a number of
spear-heads were found, and a beautiful bronze sword, with the
holes where the leather straps of the handle passed in and out. I
have held this fine blade in my hands, and it is absolutely
undinted. It may be Roman, but it is probably earlier. Nothing else
was found, except some mouldering fragments of wood that looked
like spear-staves; and this, too, it seems, must have been a
boatload of warriors, perhaps some raiding party, swamped on the
edge of the lagoon with all their unused weapons, which they were
presumably unable to recover, if indeed any survived to make the
attempt. Hard by is the place where the great fight related in
Hereward the Wake took place. The Normans were encamped southwards
at Willingham, where a line of low entrenchments is still known as
Belsar's Field, from Belisarius, the Norman Duke in command. It is
a quiet enough place now, and the yellow-hammers sing sweetly and
sharply in the thick thorn hedges. The Normans made a causeway of
faggots and earth across the fen, but came at last to the old
channel of the Ouse, which they could not bridge; and here they
attempted to cross in great flat-bottomed boats, but were foiled by
Hereward and his men, their boats sunk, and hundreds of stout
warriors drowned in the oozy river-bed. There still broods for me a
certain horror over the place, where the river in its confined
channel now runs quietly, by sedge and willow-herb and golden-rod,
between its high flood banks, to join the Cam to the east.

But to return to my house. It was once a monastic grange of Ely, a
farmstead with a few rooms, no doubt, where sick monks and ailing
novices were sent to get change of air and a taste of country life.
There is a bit of an old wall still bordering my garden, and a
strip of pale soil runs across the gooseberry beds, pale with dust
of mortar and chips of brick, where another old wall stood. There
was a great pigeon-house here, pulled down for the shooting-box,
and the garden is still full of old carved stones, lintels, and
mullions, and capitals of pillars, and a grotesque figure of a
bearded man, with a tunic confined round the waist by a cord, which
crowns one of my rockeries. But it is all gone now, and the pert
cockneyfied house stands up among the shrubberies and walnuts,
surveying the ruins of what has been.

But I must not abuse my house, because whatever it is outside, it
is absolutely comfortable and convenient within: it is solid, well
built, spacious, sensible, reminding one of the "solid joys and
lasting treasure" that the hymn says "none but Zion's children
know." And, indeed, it is a Zion to be at ease in.

One other great charm it has: from the end of my orchard the ground
falls rapidly in a great pasture. Some six miles away, over the
dark expanse of Grunty Fen, the towers of Ely, exquisitely delicate
and beautiful, crown the ridge; on clear sunny days I can see the
sun shining on the lead roofs, and the great octagon rises with all
its fretted pinnacles. Indeed, so kind is Providence, that the huge
brick mass of the Ely water-tower, like an overgrown Temple of
Vesta, blends itself pleasantly with the cathedral, projecting from
the western front like a great Galilee.

The time to make pious pilgrimage to Ely is when the apple-orchards
are in bloom. Then the grim western tower, with its sombre windows,
the gabled roofs of the canonical houses, rise in picturesque
masses over acres of white blossom. But for me, six miles away, the
cathedral is a never-ending sight of beauty. On moist days it draws
nearer, as if carved out of a fine blue stone; on a grey day it
looks more like a fantastic crag, with pinnacles of rock. Again it
will loom a ghostly white against a thunder-laden sky. Grand and
pathetic at once, for it stands for something that we have parted
with. What was the outward and stately form of a mighty idea, a
rich system, is now little more than an aesthetic symbol. It has
lost heart, somehow, and its significance only exists for
ecclesiastically or artistically minded persons; it represents a
force no longer in the front of the battle.

One other fine feature of the countryside there is, of which one
never grows tired. If one crosses over to Sutton, with its huge
church, the tower crowned with a noble octagon, and the village
pleasantly perched along a steep ridge of orchards, one can drop
down to the west, past a beautiful old farmhouse called Berristead,
with an ancient chapel, built into the homestead, among fine elms.
The road leads out upon the fen, and here run two great Levels, as
straight as a line for many miles, up which the tide pulsates day
by day; between them lies a wide tract of pasture called the Wash,
which in summer is a vast grazing-ground for herds, in rainy
weather a waste of waters, like a great estuary--north and south it
runs, crossed by a few roads or black-timbered bridges, the fen-
water pouring down to the sea. It is a great place for birds this.
The other day I disturbed a brood of redshanks here, the parent
birds flying round and round, piping mournfully, almost within
reach of my hand. A little further down, not many months ago, there
was observed a great commotion in the stream, as of some big beast
swimming slowly; the level was netted, and they hauled out a great
sturgeon, who had somehow lost his way, and was trying to find a
spawning-ground. There is an ancient custom that all sturgeon,
netted in English waters, belong by right to the sovereign; but no
claim was advanced in this case. The line between Ely and March
crosses the level, further north, and the huge freight-trains go
smoking and clanking over the fen all day. I often walk along the
grassy flood-bank for a mile or two, to the tiny decayed village of
Mepal, with a little ancient church, where an old courtier lies, an
Englishman, but with property near Lisbon, who was a gentleman-in-
waiting to James II. in his French exile, retired invalided, and
spent the rest of his days "between Portugal and Byall Fen"--an odd
pair of localities to be so conjoined!

And what of the life that it is possible to live in my sequestered
grange? I suppose there is not a quieter region in the whole of
England. There are but two or three squires and a few clergy in the
Isle, but the villages are large and prosperous; the people
eminently friendly, shrewd and independent, with homely names for
the most part, but with a sprinkling both of Saxon appellations,
like Cutlack, which is Guthlac a little changed, and Norman names,
like Camps, inherited perhaps from some invalided soldier who made
his home there after the great fight. There is but little
communication with the outer world; on market-days a few trains
dawdle along the valley from Ely to St. Ives and back again. They
are fine, sturdy, prosperous village communities, that mind their
own business, and take their pleasure in religion and in song, like
their forefathers the fenmen, Girvii, who sang their three-part
catches with rude harmony.

Part of the charm of the place is, I confess, its loneliness. One
may go for weeks together with hardly a caller; there are no social
functions, no festivities, no gatherings. One may once in a month
have a chat with a neighbour, or take a cup of tea at a kindly
parsonage. But people tend to mind their own business, and live
their own lives in their own circle; yet there is an air of
tranquil neighbourliness all about. The inhabitants of the region
respect one's taste in choosing so homely and serene a region for a
dwelling-place, and they know that whatever motive one may have
had for coming, it was not dictated by a feverish love of society.
I have never known a district--and I have lived in many parts of
England--where one was so naturally and simply accepted as a part
of the place. One is greeted in all directions with a comfortable
cordiality, and a natural sort of good-breeding; and thus the life
comes at once to have a precise quality, a character of its own.
Every one is independent, and one is expected to be independent
too. There is no suspicion of a stranger; it is merely recognised
that he is in search of a definite sort of life, and he is made
frankly and unostentatiously at home.

And so the days race away there in the middle of the mighty plain.
No plans are ever interrupted, no one questions one's going and
coming as one will, no one troubles his head about one's
occupations or pursuits. Any help or advice that one needs is
courteously and readily given, and no favours asked or expected in
return. One little incident gave me considerable amusement. There
is a private footpath of my own which leads close to my house;
owing to the house having stood for some time unoccupied, people
had tended to use it as a short cut. The kindly farmer obviated
this by putting up a little notice-board, to indicate that the
path was private. A day or two afterwards it was removed and thrown
into a ditch. I was perturbed as well as surprised by this,
supposing that it showed that the notice had offended some local
susceptibility; and being very anxious to begin my tenure on
neighbourly terms, I consulted my genial landlord, who laughed, and
said that there was no one who would think of doing such a thing;
and to reassure me he added that one of his men had seen the
culprit at work, and that it was only an old horse, who had rubbed
himself against the post till he had thrown it down.

The days pass, then, in a delightful monotony; one reads, writes,
sits or paces in the garden, scours the country on still sunny
afternoons. There are many grand churches and houses within a
reasonable distance, such as the great churches near Wisbech and
Lynn--West Walton, Walpole St. Peter, Tilney, Terrington St.
Clement, and a score of others--great cruciform structures, in
every conceivable style, with fine woodwork and noble towers, each
standing in the centre of a tiny rustic hamlet, built with no idea
of prudent proportion to the needs of the places they serve, but
out of pure joy and pride. There are houses like Beaupre, a pile of
fantastic brick, haunted by innumerable phantoms, with its stately
orchard closes, or the exquisite gables of Snore Hall, of rich
Tudor brickwork, with fine panelling within. There is no lack of
shrines for pilgrimage--then, too, it is not difficult to persuade
some like-minded friend to share one's solitude. And so the quiet
hours tick themselves away in an almost monastic calm, while one's
book grows insensibly day by day, as the bulrush rises on the edge
of the dyke.

I do not say that it would be a life to live for the whole of a
year, and year by year. There is no stir, no eagerness, no brisk
interchange of thought about it. But for one who spends six months
in a busy and peopled place, full of duties and discussions and
conflicting interests, it is like a green pasture and waters of
comfort. The danger of it, if prolonged, would be that things would
grow languid, listless, fragrant like the Lotos-eaters' Isle; small
things would assume undue importance, small decisions would seem
unduly momentous; one would tend to regard one's own features as in
a mirror and through a magnifying glass. But, on the other hand, it
is good, because it restores another kind of proportion; it is like
dipping oneself in the seclusion of a monastic cell. Nowadays the
image of the world, with all its sheets of detailed news, all its
network of communications, sets too deep a mark upon one's spirit.
We tend to believe that a man is lost unless he is overwhelmed with
occupation, unless, like the conjurer, he is keeping a dozen balls
in the air at once. Such a gymnastic teaches a man alertness,
agility, effectiveness. But it has got to be proved that one was
sent into the world to be effective, and it is not even certain
that a man has fulfilled the higher law of his being if he has made
a large fortune by business. A sagacious, shrewd, acute man of the
world is sometimes a mere nuisance; he has made his prosperous
corner at the expense of others, and he has only contrived to
accumulate, behind a little fence of his own, what was meant to be
the property of all. I have known a good many successful men, and I
cannot honestly say that I think that they are generally the better
for their success. They have often learnt self-confidence, the
shadow of which is a good-natured contempt for ineffective people;
the shadow, on the other hand, which falls on the contemplative man
is an undue diffidence, an indolent depression, a tendency to think
that it does not very much matter what any one does. But, on the
other hand, the contemplative man sometimes does grasp one very
important fact--that we are sent into the world, most of us, to
learn something about God and ourselves; whereas if we spend our
lives in directing and commanding and consulting others, we get so
swollen a sense of our own importance, our own adroitness, our own
effectiveness, that we forget that we are tolerated rather than
needed. it is better on the whole to tarry the Lord's leisure, than
to try impatiently to force the hand of God, and to make amends for
His apparent slothfulness. What really makes a nation grow, and
improve, and progress, is not social legislation and organisation.
That is only the sign of the rising moral temperature; and a man
who sets an example of soberness, and kindliness, and contentment
is better than a pragmatical district visitor with a taste for
rating meek persons.

It may be asked, then, do I set myself up as an example in this
matter? God forbid! I live thus because I like it, and not from any
philosophical or philanthropical standpoint. But if more men were
to follow their instincts in the matter, instead of being misled
and bewildered by the conventional view that attaches virtue to
perspiration, and national vigour to the multiplication of
unnecessary business, it would be a good thing for the community.
What I claim is that a species of mental and moral equilibrium is
best attained by a careful proportion of activity and quietude.
What happens in the case of the majority of people is that they are
so much occupied in the process of acquisition that they have no
time to sort or dispose their stores; and thus life, which ought to
be a thing complete in itself, and ought to be spent, partly in
gathering materials, and partly in drawing inferences, is apt to be
a hurried accumulation lasting to the edge of the tomb. We are put
into the world, I cannot help feeling, to BE rather than to DO. We
excuse our thirst for action by pretending to ourselves that our
own doing may minister to the being of others; but all that it
often effects is to inoculate others with the same restless and
feverish bacteria.

And anyhow, as I said, it is but an experiment. I can terminate it
whenever I have the wish to do so. Even if it is a failure, it will
at all events have been an experiment, and others may learn wisdom
by my mistake; because it must be borne in mind that a failure in a
deliberate experiment in life is often more fruitful than a
conventional success. People as a rule are so cautious; and it is
of course highly disagreeable to run a risk, and to pay the
penalty. Life is too short, one feels, to risk making serious
mistakes; but, on the other hand, the cautious man often has the
catastrophe, without even having had the pleasure of a run for his
money. Jowett, the high priest of worldly wisdom, laid down as a
maxim, "Never resign"; but I have found myself that there is no
pleasure comparable to disentangling oneself from uncongenial
surroundings, unless it be the pleasure of making mild experiments
and trying unconventional schemes.

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