Beside Still Waters by Arthur Christopher Benson (sites to read books for free TXT) 📖

an instrument capable of subtle appreciation and ardent self-improvement. When Hugh pleaded the case of immense numbers of boys who, after they had been similarly perfected and hardened, had been left, not only ignorant of what they had been supposed to be acquiring, but without the slightest interest in or appreciation of intellectual or artistic ideas at all, he was told that, bad as their case was, it would have been still worse if they had not been subjected to the refining process. Hugh, contrary to his wont, indulged in a somewhat vehement tirade against the neglect of the appreciative and artistic faculties in the case of the victims of a classical education. He maintained that the theory of mental discipline was a false one altogether, and that boys ought to be prepared on the one hand for practical life, and on the other initiated into mental culture. He compared the mental condition of a robust English boy, his sturdy disbelief in intellectual things, with the case of a young Athenian, who was, if we could trust Plato, naturally and spontaneously interested in thoughts and ideas, sensitive to beautiful impressions, delicate, subtle, intelligent, and not less bodily active. He went on to carry the war into the enemy's country, and to attack the theory of mental discipline altogether, which he maintained was the same thing as to train agricultural labourers in high-jumping and sprinting, or like trying to put a razor-edge on a hoe. What he said was neglected altogether was the cultivation of artistic susceptibility. In nature, in art, in literature, he maintained, lay an immense possibility of refined and simple pleasure, which was never cultivated at all. The mental discipline, he argued, which average boys received, was doubly futile, because it neither equipped them for practical life, nor opened to them any vista of intellectual or artistic pleasure. What he himself desired to do was, on the one hand, to equip boys for practical life, and on the other to initiate them into the possibilities of intellectual recreation. The ordinary boy, he thought, was turned out with a profound disbelief in intellectual things, and a no less profound belief in games as the only source of rational pleasure. His own belief was that a great many English boys had the germs of simple artistic pleasures dormant in their spirits, and that they might be encouraged to believe in books, in art, in music, as sources of tranquil enjoyment, instead of regarding them as slightly unwholesome and affected tastes. He was aware that his views were being regarded as dangerously heterodox, and as tainted indeed with a kind of aesthetic languor. He felt that he was appearing to pose as the champion, not only of an unpopular cause, but of an essentially effeminate system. His opponents were certainly not effeminate; but they were masculine only in the sense in which the soldier is masculine, in his sturdy contempt for the arts of peace; whereas to Hugh the soldier was only an inevitable excrescence on the community, a disagreeable necessity which would disappear in the light of a rational and humane civilisation.

A young Don, a friend of Hugh's, who had taken part in the discussion, a few days after, in the course of a walk, attacked Hugh on the subject. Hugh was aware that he defended himself very indifferently at the time; but some remarks of his friend, who was a brisk and practical young man with a caustic wit, rankled in Hugh's mind. His friend had said that the danger of Hugh's scheme was that it tended to produce people of the Maudle and Postlethwaite type, who made life into a mere pursuit of artistic impressions and sensations. "The fact is, Neville," he said, "that you upheld Epicureanism pure and simple; or, if you dislike the word because of its associations, you taught a mere Neo-Cyrenaicism. You may say that the kind of pleasure you defended is a refined and intellectual sort of pleasure, but for all that it tends to produce men who withdraw from practical life into a mild hedonism; you would develop a coterie of amiable, secluded persons, fastidious and delicate, indifferent citizens, individualistic and self-absorbed; the training of character retires into the background; and the meal that you press upon us is a meal of exquisite sauces, but without meat. Fortunately," his friend added, "the necessity of earning a living keeps most people from drifting into a life of this kind. It is only consistent with comfortable private means."

These phrases stuck in Hugh's memory with a painful insistence. He felt as if he had been rolled among thorns. He determined to think the matter carefully out. Was he himself drifting into a species of mystical hedonism? It was very far from his purpose to do that. He determined that he would prepare a little apologia on the subject, to send to his friend; and this was what he eventually despatched:--

"_Your conversation with me the other day gave me a good deal to think about. What you said practically amounted to a charge of hedonism. Of course much depends upon the way in which the word is applied, because I suppose that the large majority of men are hedonists, in the sense that they pursue as far as possible their own pleasure. But the particular kind of hedonism of which you spoke, Epicureanism, bears the sense of a certain degree of malingering. It implies that the person who pursues the course which I indicated is for some reason or other shirking his duty in the world. It is against this that I wish to defend myself; I would say in the first place that what I was recommending was a very different sort of thing. I was rather attacking a certain sheepishness of character which seems to me to be the danger of our present type of education. The practical ideal held up before boys at our public schools is that they should be virtuous and industrious; and that after they have satisfied both these claims, they should amuse themselves in what is held to be a manly way; that they should fill their vacant hours with open-air exercise and talk about games; a little light reading is not objected to; but it is tacitly assumed that to be interested in ideas, in literature, art, and music is rather a dilettante business. I was reminded of a memorable conversation I once had with a man of some note, a great landowner and prominent politician. He was talking confidentially to me about his sons and their professions. One of the boys manifested a really remarkable artistic gift; he was a draughtsman of extraordinary skill, and I said something about his taking up art seriously. The great man said that it would never do. 'I consider it almost a misfortune,' he added, 'that the boy is so clever an artist, because it would be out of the question for him, in his position, to take up what is, after all, rather a disreputable profession. I have talked to him seriously about it, and I have said that there is no harm in his amusing himself in that way; but he must have a serious occupation._'

"_That is a very fair instance of the way in which the pursuit of art is regarded among our solid classes--as distinctly a trade for an adventurer. It will be a long time before we alter that. But the truth is that this kind of conventionalism is what makes us so stupid a nation. We have no sort of taste for simplicity in life. A man who lived in a cottage, occupied in quiet and intellectual pursuits, would be held to be a failure, even if he lived in innocent happiness to the age of eighty. My own firm belief is that this is all wrong. It opens up all sorts of obscure and bewildering questions as to why we are sent into the world at all; but my idea is that we are meant to be happy if we can, and that a great many people miss happiness, because they have not the courage to pursue it in their own way. I cannot believe myself that the complicated creature, so frail of frame, so limitless in dreams and hopes, is the result of a vortex. I cannot believe that we can be created except by a power that in a certain degree resembles ourselves. If we have remote dreams of love and liberty, of justice and truth, I believe that those ideas must exist in a sublime degree in the mind of our Maker. I believe, on the whole, though there are many difficulties in the way of the theory, that life is meant for most of us to be an educative process; that we are meant to quit the world wiser, nobler, more patient than we entered it; why the whole business is so intolerably slow, why we are so hampered by traditions and instincts that retard the process, I cannot conceive; but my belief is that we must as far as possible choose a course which leads us in the direction of the thoughts that we conceive to be noble and true. We may make mistakes, we may wander sadly from the way, but I believe that it is our duty, our best hope, to try and perceive what it is that God is trying to teach us. Now, our choice must be to a great extent a matter of temperament. Some men like work, activity, influence, relations with others. Well, if they sincerely believe that they are meant to pursue these things, it is their duty to do so. Others, like myself, seem to be gifted with a sensitiveness of perception, an appreciation of beauty in many forms. I cannot believe that such an organisation is given me fortuitously, and that I am merely meant to suppress it. Of course the same argument could be used sophistically by a man with strong sensual passions and appetites, who could similarly urge that he must be intended to gratify them. But such gratification leads both to personal disaster and to the increase of unhappiness in the race. Such instincts as I recognise in myself seem to me to do neither. I believe that poets, artists, and musicians, to say nothing of religious teachers, have effected almost more for the welfare of the race than statesmen, patriots, and philanthropists. Of course the necessary work of the world has got to be done; but my own belief is that a good deal more than is necessary is done, because people pursue luxury rather than simplicity. I recognise to the full the duty of work; but, to be quite honest, I think that a serious man who will preach simplicity, disseminate ideas, suggest possibilities of intellectual and artistic pleasure, can do a very real work. Such a man must be disinterested; he must not desire fame or influence; he must be content if he can sow the seeds of beauty in a few minds._

"_Now the Maudle and Postlethwaite school are not concerned with anything of the kind. They merely desire to make a sort of brightly polished mirror of their minds, capable of reflecting all sorts of beautiful effects, and this is an essentially effeminate thing to do, because it exalts the appreciation of sensation above all other aims; that is the pursuit of artistic luxury, and it is, as you say, quite inconsistent with good citizenship. But I do not think that my