The Upton Letters by Arthur Christopher Benson (fiction book recommendations TXT) 📖

I dare say they were as preoccupied in professional matters, as careful and troubled as myself, if I had known more about them. But in that moment they were finding leisure simply to taste and enjoy the wholesome savours of life, and were neither looking backward in regret nor forward in anticipation. I dare say the jokes that amused them were mild enough, and that I should have found their conversation tedious and tiresome if I had been made one of the party. But they were symbolical; they stood for me, and will stand, as a type of what we ought to aim at more; and that is simply LIVING. It is a lesson which you yourself are no doubt learning in your fragrant, shady garden. You have no need to make money, and your only business is to get better. But for myself, I know that I work and think and hope and fear too much, and that in my restless pursuit of a hundred aims and ambitions and dreams and fancies, I am constantly in danger of hardly living at all, but of simply racing on, like a man intoxicated with affairs, without leisure for strolling, for sitting, for talking, for watching the sky and the earth, smelling the scents of flowers, noting the funny ways of animals, playing with children, eating and drinking. Yet this is our true heritage, and this is what it means to be a man; and, after all, one has (for all one knows) but a single life, and that a short one. It is at such moments as these that I wake as from a dream, and think how fast my life flows on, and how very little conscious of its essence I am. My head is full from morning to night of everything except living. For a busy man this is, of course, to a certain extent inevitable. But where I am at fault is in not relapsing at intervals into a wise and patient passivity, and sitting serenely on the shore of the sea of life, playing with pebbles, seeing the waves fall and the ships go by, and wondering at the strange things cast up by the waves, and the sharp briny savours of the air. Why do I not do this? Because, to continue my confession, it bores me. I must, it seems, be always in a fuss; be always hauling myself painfully on to some petty ambition or some shadowy object that I have in view; and the moment I have reached it, I must fix upon another, and begin the process over again. It is this lust for doing something tangible, for sitting down quickly and writing fifty, for having some definite result to show, which is the ruin of me and many others. After all, when it is done, what worth has it? I am not a particularly successful man, and I can't delude myself into thinking that my work has any very supreme value. And meanwhile all the real experiences of life pass me by. I have never, God forgive me, had time to be in love! That is a pitiful confession.

Sometimes one comes across a person with none of these uneasy ambitions, with whom living is a fine art; then one realises what a much more beautiful creation it is than books and pictures. It is a kind of sweet and solemn music. Such a man or woman has time to read, to talk, to write letters, to pay calls, to walk about the farm, to go and sit with tiresome people, to spend long hours with children, to sit in the open air, to keep poultry, to talk to servants, to go to church, to remember what his or her relations are doing, to enjoy garden parties and balls, to like to see young people enjoying themselves, to hear confessions, to do other people's business, to be a welcome presence everywhere, and to leave a fragrant memory, watered with sweet tears. That is to live. And such lives, one is tempted to think, were more possible, more numerous, a hundred years ago. But now one expects too much, and depends too much on exciting pleasures, whether of work or play. Well, my three persons in a garden must be a lesson to me; and, whatever may really happen to them, in my mind they shall walk for ever between the apple-trees and the daffodils, looking lovingly at each other, while the elder man shall smile as he reads in the Chronicle of Heaven, which does not grow old.--Ever yours,

T. B.


UPTON, May 9, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--I am going back to the subject of ambition--do you mind?

Yesterday in chapel one of my colleagues preached rather a fine sermon on Activity. The difficulty under which he laboured is a common one in sermons; it is simply this--How far is a Christian teacher justified in recommending ambition to Christian hearers? I think that, if one reads the Gospel, it is clear that ambition is not a Christian motive. The root of the teaching of Christ seems to me to be that one should have or acquire a passion for virtue; love it for its beauty, as an artist loves beauty of form or colour; and the simplicity which is to be the distinguishing mark of a Christian seems to me to be inconsistent with personal ambition. I do not see that there is any hint of a Christian being allowed to wish to do, what is called in domestic language "bettering" himself. The idea rather is that the all-wise and all-loving Father puts a man into the world where he intends him to be; and that a man is to find his highest pleasure in trying to serve the Father's will, with a heart full of love for all living things. A rich man is to disembarrass himself of his riches, or at least be sure that they are no hindrance to him; a poor man is not to attempt to win them. Of course it may be possible that the original Christians were intended to take a special line while the faith was leavening the world, and that a different economy was to prevail when society had been Christianised. This is a point of view which can be subtly defended, but I think it is hard to find any justification for it in the Gospel. Ambition practically means that, if one is to shoulder to the front, one must push other people out of the way; one must fight for one's own hand. To succeed at no one's expense is only possible to people of very high character and genius.

But it is difficult to see what motive to set before boys in the matter; the ideas of fame and glory, the hope of getting what all desire and what all cannot have, are deeply rooted in the childish mind. Moreover, we encourage ambition so frankly, both in work and play, that it is difficult to ascend the school pulpit and take quite a different line. To tell boys that they must simply do their best for the sake of doing their best, without any thought of the rewards of success--it is a very fine ideal, but is it a practical one? If we gave prizes to the stupid boys who work without hope of success, and if we gave colours to the boys who played games hard without attaining competence in them, we might then dare to speak of the rewards of virtue. But boys despise unsuccessful conscientiousness, and all the rewards we distribute are given to aptitude. Some preachers think they get out of the difficulty by pointing to examples of lives that battled nobly and unsuccessfully against difficulties; but the point always is the ultimate recognition. The question is not whether we can provide a motive for the unsuccessful; but whether we ought not to discourage ambition in every form? Yet it is the highest motive power in the case of most generous and active-minded boys.

In the course of the sermon the preacher quoted some lines of Omar Khayyam in order to illustrate the shamefulness of the indolent life. That is a very dangerous thing to do. The lovely stanzas, sweet as honey, flowed out upon the air in all their stately charm. The old sinner stole my heart away with his gentle, seductive, Epicurean grace. I am afraid that I felt like Paolo as he sate beside Francesca. I heard no more of the sermon that day; I repeated to myself many of the incomparable quatrains, and felt the poem to be the most beautiful presentment of pure Agnosticism that has ever been given to the world. The worst of it is that the delicate traitor makes it so beautiful that one does not feel the shame and the futility of it.

This evening I have been reading the new life of FitzGerald, so you may guess what was the result of the sermon for me. It is not a wholly pleasing book, but it is an interesting one; it gives a better picture of the man than any other book or article, simply by the great minuteness with which it enters into details. And now I find myself confronted by the problem in another shape. Was FitzGerald's life an unworthy one? He had great literary ambitions, but he made nothing of them. He lived a very pure, innocent, secluded life, delighting in nature and in the company of simple people; loving his friends with a passion that reminds one of Newman; doing endless little kindnesses to all who came within his circle; and tenderly loved by several great-hearted men of genius. He felt himself that he was to blame; he urged others to the activities which he could not practise. And yet the results of his life are such as many other more busy, more conscientious men have not achieved. He has left a large body of good literary work, and one immortal poem of incomparable beauty. He also left, quite unconsciously, I believe, many of the most beautiful, tender, humorous, wise letters in the English tongue; and I find myself wondering whether all this could have been brought to pass in any other way.

Yet I could not conscientiously advise any one to take FitzGerald's life as a model It was shabby, undecided, futile; he did many silly, almost fatuous things; he was deplorably idle and unstrung. At the same time a terrible suspicion creeps upon me that many busy men are living worse lives. I don't mean men who give themselves to activities, however dusty, which affect other people. I will grant at once that doctors, teachers, clergymen, philanthropists, even Members of Parliament are justified in their lives; then, too, men who do the necessary work of the world--farmers, labourers, workmen, fishermen, are justifiable. But business men who make fortunes for their children; lawyers, artists, writers, who work for money and for praise--are these after all so much nobler than our indolent friend? To begin with, FitzGerald's life was one of extraordinary simplicity. He lived on almost nothing, he had no luxuries; he was like a lily of the field. If he had been a merely selfish man it would have been different; but he loved his fellow-men deeply and tenderly, and he showered unobtrusive kindness on all round him.

I find it very hard to make up my mind; it is true that the fabric of the world would fall to pieces if we were all FitzGeralds. But so, too, as has often been pointed out, would it fall to pieces if we all lived literally on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount. Activities are for many people a purely selfish thing, to fill the time because they are otherwise bored; and it is hard