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

is? It is the same more or less with most people; but one sees instincts at their nakedest among boys. As I go on in life, the one thing I desire is simplicity and reality; pose is the one fatal thing. The dullest person becomes interesting if you feel that he is really himself, that he is not holding up some absurd shield or other in front of his shivering soul. And yet how hard it is, even when one appreciates the benefits and beauty of sincerity, to say what one really thinks, without reference to what one supposes the person one is talking to would like or expect one to think--and to do it, too, without brusqueness or rudeness or self-assertion.

Boys are generally ashamed of saying anything that is good about each other; and yet they are as a rule intensely anxious to be POPULAR, and pathetically unaware that the shortest cut to popularity is to see the good points in every one and not to shrink from mentioning them. I once had a pupil, a simple-minded, serene, ordinary creature, who attained to extraordinary popularity. I often wondered why; after he had left, I asked a boy to tell me; he thought for a moment, and then he said, "I suppose, sir, it was because when we were all talking about other chaps--and one does that nearly all the time--he used to be as much down on them as any one else, and he never jawed--but he always had something nice to say about them, not made up, but as if it just came into his head."

Well, I must stop; I suppose you are forging out over the Bay, and sleeping, I hope, like a top. There is no sleep like the sleep on a steamer--profound, deep, so that one wakes up hardly knowing where or who one is, and in the morning you will see the great purple league-long rollers. I remember them; I generally felt very unwell; but there was something tranquillising about them, all the same--and then the mysterious steamers that used to appear alongside, pitching and tumbling, with the little people moving about on the decks; and a mile away in a minute. Then the water in the wake, like marble, with its white-veined sapphire, and the hiss and smell of the foam; all that is very pleasant. Good night, Herbert!--Ever yours,

T. B.


UPTON, Feb. 9, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--I hope you have got Lockhart's Life of Scott with you; if not, I will send it out to you. I have been reading it lately, and I have a strong wish that you should do the same. It has not all the same value; the earlier part, the account of the prosperous years, is rather tiresome in places. There is something boisterous, undignified--even, I could think, vulgar--about the aims and ambitions depicted. It suggests a prosperous person, seated at a well-filled table, and consuming his meat with a hearty appetite. The desire to stand well with prominent persons, to found a family, to take a place in the county, is a perfectly natural and wholesome desire; but it is a commonplace ambition. There is a charm in the simplicity, the geniality, the childlike zest of the man; but there is nothing great about it. Then comes the crash; and suddenly, as though a curtain drew up, one is confronted with the spectacle of an indomitable and unselfish soul, bearing a heavy burden with magnificent tranquillity, and settling down with splendid courage to an almost intolerable task. The energy displayed by our hero in attempting to write off the load of debt that hung round his neck is superhuman, august. We see him completing in a single day what would take many writers a week to finish, and doing it day by day, with bereavements, sorrows, ill-health, all closing in upon him. The quality of the work he thus did matters little; it was done, indeed, at a time of life when under normal circumstances he would probably have laid his pen down. But the spectacle of the man's patient energy and divine courage is one that goes straight to the heart. It is then that one realises that the earlier and more prosperous life has all the value of contrast; one recognises that here was a truly unspoilt nature; and that, if we can dare to look upon life as an educative process, the tragic sorrows that overwhelmed him were not the mere reversal of the wheel of fortune, but gifts from the very hand of the Father--to purify a noble soul from the dross that was mingled with it; to give a great man the opportunity of living in a way that should furnish an eternal and imperishable example.

I do not believe that in the whole of literature there is a more noble and beautiful document of its kind than the diary of these later years. The simplicity, the sincerity of the man stand out on every page. There are no illusions about himself or his work. He hears that Southey has been speaking of him and his misfortunes with tears, and he says plainly that such tears would be impossible to himself in a parallel case; that his own sympathy has always been practical rather than emotional; his own tendency has been to help rather than to console. Again, speaking of his own writings, he says that he realises that if there is anything good about his poetry or prose, "It is a hurried frankness of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active disposition." He adds, indeed, a contemptuous touch to the above, which he was great enough to have spared: "I have been no sigher in shades--no writer of


Songs and sonnets and rustical roundelays
Framed on fancies and whistled on reeds."


A few days later, speaking of Thomas Campbell, the poet, he says that "he has suffered by being too careful a corrector of his work."

That is a little ungenerous, a little complacent; noble and large as Scott's own unconsidered writings are, he ought to have been aware that methods differ. What, for instance, could be more extraordinary than the contrast between Scott and Wordsworth--Scott with his "You know I don't care a curse about what I write;" and Wordsworth, whose chief reading in later days was his own poetry. Whenever the two are brought into actual juxtaposition, Wordsworth is all pose and self-absorption; Scott all simplicity and disregard of fame. Wordsworth staying at Abbotsford declines to join an expedition of pleasure, and stays at home with his daughter. When the party return, they find Wordsworth sitting and being read to by his daughter, the book his own Excursion. A party of travellers arrive, and Wordsworth steals down to the chaise, to see if there are any of his own volumes among the books they have with them. When the two are together, Scott is all courteous deference; he quotes Wordsworth's poems, he pays him stately compliments, which the bard receives as a matter of course, with stiff, complacent bows. But, during the whole of the time, Wordsworth never lets fall a single syllable from which one could gather that he was aware that his host had ever put pen to paper.

Yet, while one desires to shake Wordsworth to get some of his pomposity out of him, one half desires that Scott had felt a little more deeply the dignity of his vocation. One would wish to have infused Wordsworth with a little of Scott's unselfish simplicity, and to have put just a little stiffening into Scott. He ought to have felt--and he did not--that to be a great writer was a more dignified thing than to be a sham seigneur.

But through the darkening scene, when the woods whisper together, and Tweed runs hoarsely below, the simple spirit holds uncomplaining and undaunted on his way: "I did not like them to think that I could ever be beaten by anything," he says. But at length the hand, tired with the pen, falls, and twilight creeps upon the darkening mind.

I paid a pious pilgrimage last summer, as you perhaps remember, to Abbotsford. I don't think I ever described it to you. My first feeling was one of astonishment at the size and stateliness of the place, testifying to a certain imprudent prosperity. But the sight of the rooms themselves; the desk, the chair, the book-lined library, the little staircase by which, early or late, Scott could steal back to his hard and solitary work; the death-mask, with its pathetic smile; the clothes, with hat and shoes, giving, as it were, a sense of the very shape and stature of the man--these brought the whole thing up with a strange reality.

Of course, there is much that is pompous, affected, unreal about the place; the plaster beams, painted to look like oak; the ugly emblazonries; the cruel painted glass; the laboriously collected objects--all these reveal the childish side of Scott, the superficial self which slipped from him so easily when he entered into the cloud.

And then the sight of his last resting-place; the ruined abbey, so deeply embowered in trees that the three dim Eildon peaks are invisible; the birds singing in the thickets that clothe the ruined cloisters--all this made a parable, and brought before one with an intensity of mystery the wonder of it all. The brief life, so full of plans for permanence; the sombre valley of grief; the quiet end, when with failing lips he murmured that the only comfort for the dying heart was the thought that it had desired goodness, however falteringly, above everything.

I can't describe to you how deeply all this affects me--with what a hunger of the heart, what tenderness, what admiration, what wonder. The very frankness of the surprise with which, over and over again, the brave spirit confesses that he does not miss the delights of life as much as he expected, nor find the burden as heavy as he had feared, is a very noble and beautiful thing. I can conceive of no book more likely to make a spirit in the grip of sorrow and failure more gentle, hopeful, and brave; because it brings before one, with quiet and pathetic dignity, the fact that no fame, no success, no recognition, can be weighed for a moment in the balance with those simple qualities of human nature which the humblest being may admire, win, and display.--Ever yours,

T. B.


UPTON, Shrove Tuesday, Feb. 16, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--One of those incredible incidents has just happened here, an incident that makes one feel how little one knows of human beings, and that truth, in spite of the conscientious toil of Mr. H. G. Wells, does still continue to keep ahead of fiction. Here is the story. Some money is missed in a master's house; circumstances seem to point to its having been abstracted by one of the boys. A good-natured, flighty boy is suspected, absolutely without reason, as it turns out; though he is the sort of boy to mislay his own books and other portable property to any extent, and to make no great difficulty under pressure of immediate need, and at the last moment, about borrowing some one else's chattels. On this occasion the small boys in the house, of whom he is one, solemnly accuse him of the theft, and the despoiled owner entreats that the money may be returned. He protests that he has not taken it. The matter comes to the ears of the house-master, who investigates the matter in the course of the evening, and interviews the supposed culprit. The boy denies it again quite unconcernedly and frankly, goes away from the