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

admixture of both; if sin can be shown in its true colours, if the darkness, the horror, the misery of the vicious life can be displayed, and the spirit then pointed to the true and right path, the most is done that can be done.

But we grow so miserably stereotyped and mannerised. My cautious colleagues are dreadfully afraid of anything which they call revivalistic, and, indeed, of anything which is unconventional. I should like to see the Sunday sermon made one of the most stirring events of the week, as Arnold made it at Rugby. I should like preachers to be selected with the utmost care, and told beforehand what they were to preach about. No instruction is wanted in a school chapel--the boys get plenty of that in their Divinity lessons. What is wanted is that the heart should be touched, and that faint strivings after purity and goodness should be enforced and helped. To give the spirit wings, that ought to be the object. But so often we have to listen to a conscientious discourse, in which the preacher, after saying that the scene in which the narrative is laid is too well known to need description, proceeds to paint an ugly picture out of The Land and the Book or Farrar's Life of Christ. The story is then tediously related, and we end by a few ethical considerations, taken out of the footnotes of the Cambridge Bible for Schools or Homiletical Hints, which make even the most ardent Christian feel that after all the pursuit of perfection is a very dreary business.

But a brave, wise-hearted, and simple man, speaking from the heart to the heart, not as one who has attained to a standard of impossible perfection, but as an elder pilgrim, a little older, a little stronger, a little farther on the way--what cannot such an one do to set feeble feet on the path, and turn souls to the light? Boys are often pathetically anxious to be good; but they are creatures of impulse, and what they need is to feel that goodness is interesting, beautiful, and desirable. . . . Ever yours,

T. B.


UPTON, Oct. 5, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--It is autumn now with us, the sweetest season of the year to a polar bear like myself. Of course, Spring is ravishingly, enchantingly beautiful, but she brings a languor with her, and there are the hot months to be lived through, treading close on her heels. But now the summer is over and done; the long firelit evenings are coming, and, as if to console one for the loss of summer beauty, the whole world blazes out into a rich funeral pomp. I walked to-day with a friend to a place not far away, a great, moated house in a big, ancient park. We left the town, held on through the wretched gradations of suburbanity, and then, a few hundred yards from the business-like, treeless high-road, the coverts came in sight. There is always a dim mystery about a close-set wood showing its front across the fields. It always seems to me like a silent battalion guarding some secret thing. We left the high-road and soon were in the wood--the dripping woodways, all strewn with ruinous gold, opening to right and left; and soon the roofs and towers of the big house--Puginesque Gothic, I must tell you--came in sight. But those early builders of the romantic revival, though they loved stucco and shallow niches, had somehow a sense of mass. It pleases me to know that the great Sir Walter himself had a hand in the building of this very house, planned the barbican and the water-gate. All round the house lies a broad moat of black water, full of innumerable carp. The place was breathlessly still; only the sharp melancholy cries of water-birds and the distant booming of guns broke the silence. The water was all sprinkled with golden leaves, that made a close carpet round the sluices; the high elms were powdered with gold; the chestnuts showed a rustier red. A silent gardener, raking leaves with ancient leisureliness, was the only sign of life--he might have been a spirit for all the sound he made; while the big house blinked across the rich clumps of Michaelmas daisies, and the dark windows showed a flicker of fire darting upon the walls. Everything seemed mournful, yet contented, dying serenely and tranquilly, with a great and noble dignity. I wish I could put into words the sweet solemnity, the satisfying gravity of the scene; it was like the sight of a beautiful aged face that testifies to an inner spirit which has learnt patience, tenderness, and trustfulness from experience, and is making ready, without fear or anxiety, for the last voyage.

I say gratefully that this is one of the benefits of growing older, that these beautiful things seem to speak more and more instantly to the mind. Perhaps the faculty of eager enjoyment is somewhat blunted; but the appeal, the sweetness, the pathos, the mystery of the world, as life goes on, fall far oftener and with far more of a magical spell upon the heart.

We walked for a while by a bridge, where the stream out of the moat ran hoarsely, choked with drift, in its narrow walls. That melancholy and sobbing sound seemed only to bring out more forcibly the utter silence of the tall trees and the sky above them; light wreaths of mist lay over the moat, and we could see far across the rough pasture, with a few scattered oaks of immemorial age standing bluff and gnarled among the grass. The time of fresh spring showers, of sailing clouds, of basking summer heat, was over--so said the grey, gentle sky--what was left but to let the sap run backward to its secret home, to rest, to die? With such sober and stately acquiescence would I await the end, not grudgingly, not impatiently, but in a kind of solemn glory, with gratitude and love and trust.

My companion of that day was Vane, one of my colleagues, and we had discussed a dozen of the small interests and problems that make up our busy life at this restless place; but a silence fell upon us now. The curtain of life was for a moment drawn aside, the hangings that wrap us round, and we looked for an instant into the vast and starlit silences, the formless, ancient dark, where a thousand years are but as yesterday, and into which the countless generations of men have marched, one after another. That is a solemn, but hardly a despairing thought; for something is being wrought out in the silence, something of which we may not be conscious, but which is surely there. Could we but lay that cool and mighty thought closer to our spirits! That impenetrable mystery ought to give us courage, to let us rest, as it were, within a mighty arm. Behind and beyond the precisest creed that great mystery lies; the bewildering question as to how it is possible for our own atomic life to be so sharply defined and bounded from the life of the world--why the frail tabernacle in which we move should be thus intensely our own, and all outside it apart from us.

Yet in days like this calm autumn day one seems to draw a little closer to the mystery, to take a nearer share in the great and wide inheritance, to be less of ourselves and more of God.--Ever yours,

T. B.


MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON, Oct. 12, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I have nothing but local gossip to tell you. We have been having a series of Committee meetings lately about our Chapel services; I am a member of the Committee, and as so often happens when one is brought into close contact with one's colleagues upon a definite question, I find myself lost in bewilderment at the views which are held and advanced by sensible and virtuous men. I don't say that I am necessarily right, and that those who disagree with me are wrong; I daresay that some of my fellow-members think me a tiresome and wrong-headed man. But in one point I believe I am right; in things of this kind, the only policy seems to me to try to arrive at some broad principle, to know what you are driving at; and then, having arrived at it, to try and work it out in detail. Now two or three of my friends seem to me to begin at the wrong end; to have got firmly into their heads certain details, and to fight with all their power to get these details accepted, without attempting to try and develop a principle at all. For instance, Roberts, one of the members of the Committee, is only anxious for what he calls the maintenance of liturgical tradition; he says that there is a science of liturgy, and that it is of the utmost importance to keep in touch with it. The sort of detail that he presses is that at certain seasons the same hymn ought to be sung on Sunday morning and every morning throughout the week, because of the mediaeval system of octaves. He calls this knocking the same nail on the head, and, as is common enough, he is led to confuse a metaphor with an argument. Again, he is very anxious to have the Litany twice a week, that the boys may be trained, as he calls it, in the habit of continuous prayerful attention. Another member, Randall, is very anxious that the services should be what he calls instructive; that courses, for instance, of sermons should be preached on certain books of the Old Testament, on the Pauline Epistles, and so forth. He is also very much set on having dogmatic and doctrinal sermons, because dogma and doctrine are the bone and sinew of religion. Another man, old Pigott, says that the whole theory of worship is praise, and he is very anxious to avoid all subjective and individual religion.

I find myself in hopeless disagreement with these three worthy men; my own theory of school services is, to put it shortly, that they should FEED THE SOUL, and draw it gently to the mysteries of Love and Faith. The whole point is, I believe, to rouse and sustain a pure and generous emotion. Most boys have in various degrees a religious sense. That is to say, that they have moments when they are conscious of the Fatherhood of God, of redemption from sin, of the indwelling of a Holy Spirit. They have moments when they see all that they might be and are not--moments when they would rather be pure than impure, unselfish rather than self-absorbed, kind rather than unkind, brave rather than cowardly; moments when they perceive, however dimly, that happiness lies in activity and kindliness, and when they would give much never to have stained their conscience with evil. It seems to me that school services ought to aim at developing these faint and faltering dreams, at increasing the sense of the beauty and peace of holiness, at giving them some strong and joyful thought that will send them back to the world of life resolved to try again, to be better and worthier.

I am afraid that I do not value the science of liturgical tradition very much. The essence of all science is that it should be progressive; our problems and needs are not the same as mediaeval problems and needs. The whole conception of God and man has broadened and deepened. Science has taught us that nature is a part of the mind of God, not something to be merely contended against; again, it has taught us that man has probably not fallen