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

the red roofs of a great town, the smoke going peacefully up; here was a shining river-reach, like a crescent of silver. It was England indeed--tranquil, healthy, prosperous England.

The rest of the day I need not record. It was full of delicate impressions--an old, gabled, mullioned house among its pastures; a hamlet by a stream, admirably grouped; a dingle set with primroses; and over all, the long, pure lines of upland, with here and there, through a gap, the purple, wealthy plain.

I write this in the evening, at a little wayside inn, in a hamlet under the hill. The name alone, Wenge Grandmain, is worth a shilling. It is very simple, but clean, and the people are kind; not with the professional manner of those who bow, smiling, to a paying guest, but of those who welcome a wanderer and try to make him a home. And so, in a dark-panelled little parlour, with a sedate-ticking clock, I sit while the sounds of life grow fainter and rarer in the little street.


THE CROSSFOXES INN, BOURTON-ON-THE-WOLD, April 16, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I have now been ten days on my travels, but for the last week I have pitched my moving tent at Bourton. Do you shudder with the fear that I am going to give you pages of description of scenery? It is not a SHUDDER with me when I get a landscape-letter; it is merely that leaden dulness which falls upon the spirit when it is confronted with statements which produce no impression upon the mind. I always, for instance, skip the letters of travel which appear about the third chapter of great biographies, when the young gentleman goes for the Grand Tour after taking his degree.

But imagine this: a great, rich, wooded, watered plain; on the far horizon the shadowy forms of hills; behind you, gently rising heights, with dingles and folds full of copsewood, rising to soft green downs. There, on the skirts of the upland, above the plain, below the hill, sits the little village, with a stately Perpendicular church tower. The village itself of stone houses, no two alike, all with character; gabled, mullioned, weathered to a delicate ochre--some standing back, some on the street. Intermingled with these are fine Georgian houses, with great pilasters, all of stone too; in the centre of the street a wall, with two tall gate-posts, crowned with stone balls; a short lime avenue leads to a stately, gabled manor-house, which you can see through great iron gates. The whole scene incredibly romantic, exquisitely beautiful.

My favourite walk is this. I leave the little town by a road which winds along the base of the hill. I pass round a shoulder, wooded and covered to the base with tangled thickets, where the birds sing shrilly. I turn up to the left into a kind of "combe." At the very farthest end of the little valley, at the base of the steeper slopes but now high above the plain, stands an ancient church among yews. On one side of it is a long, low-fronted, irregular manor-house, with a formal garden in front, approached by a little arched gate-house which stands on the road; on the other side of the church, and below it, a no less ancient rectory, with a large Perpendicular window, anciently a chapel, in the gable. In the warm, sheltered air the laurels grow luxuriantly; a bickering stream, running in a deep channel, makes a delicate music of its own; a little farther on stands a farm, with barn and byre; in the midst of the buildings is a high, stone-tiled dovecote. The roo-hooing of the pigeons fills the whole place with a slumberous sound. I wind up the hill by a little path, now among thickets, now crossing a tilted pasture. I emerge on the top of a down; in front of me lie the long slopes of the wold, with that purity and tranquillity of outline which only down-land possesses. Here on a spur stands a grass-grown camp, with ancient thorn-trees growing in it. Turning round, the great plain runs for miles, with here and there a glint of water, where the slow-moving Avon wanders. Hamlets, roads, towers lie out like a map at my feet--all wearing that secluded, peaceful air which tempts me to think that life would be easy and happy if it could only be lived among those quiet fields, with the golden light and lengthening shadows.

I find myself wondering in these quiet hours--I walk alone as a rule--what this haunting, incommunicable sense of beauty is. Is it a mere matter of temperament, of inner happiness, of physical well-being; or has it an absolute existence? It comes and goes like the wind. Some days one is acutely, almost painfully, alive to it--painfully, because it makes such constant and insistent demands upon one's attention. Some days, again, it is almost unheeded, and one passes through it blind and indifferent. It is an expression, I cannot help feeling, of the very mind of God; and yet the ancient earthwork in which I stand, bears witness to the fact that in far-off days men lived in danger and anxiety, fighting and striving for bare existence. We have established by law and custom a certain personal security nowadays; is our sense of beauty born of that security? I cannot help wondering whether the old warriors who built this place cared at all for the beauty of the earth; and yet over it all hangs the gentle sadness of all sweet things that have an end. All those warriors are dust; the boys and girls who wandered a century ago where I wander to-day, they are at rest too in the little churchyard that lies at my feet; and my heart goes out to all who have loved and suffered, and to those who shall hereafter love and suffer here. An idle sympathy, perhaps, but none the less strong and real.

But now for a little human experience that befell me here. I found the other day, not far from the church, an old artist sketching. A refined, sad-looking old fellow, sunburned and active, with white hair and pointed beard, and a certain pathetic attempt, of a faded kind, to dress for his part--low collar, a red tie, rough shooting-jacket, and so forth. He seemed in a sociable mood, and I sate down beside him. How it came about I hardly know, but he was soon telling me the story of his life. He was the tenant, I found, of the old manor-house, which he held at a ridiculous rent, and he had lived here nearly forty years. He had found the place as a young man, wandering about in search of the picturesque. I gathered that he had bright dreams and wide ambitions. He had a small independence, and he had meant to paint great pictures and make a name for himself. He had married; his wife was long dead, his children out in the world, and he was living on alone, painting the same pictures, bought, so far as I could make out, mostly by American visitors. His drawing was old-fashioned and deeply mannerised. He was painting not what was there, but some old and faded conception of his own as to what it was like--missing, I think, half the beauty of the place. He seemed horribly desolate. I tried, for his consolation and my own, to draw out a picture of the beautiful refined life he led; and the old fellow began to wear a certain jaunty air of dignity and distinction, which would have amused me if it had not made me feel inclined to cry. But he soon fell back into what is, I suppose, a habitual melancholy. "Ah, if you had known what my dreams were!" he said once. He went on to say that he now wished that he had taken up some simple and straightforward profession, had made money, and had his grandchildren about him. "I am more ghost than man," he said, shaking his dejected head.

I despair of expressing to you the profound pathos that seemed to me to surround this old despondent creature, with his broken dreams and his regretful memories. Where was the mistake he made? I suppose that he over-estimated his powers; but it was a generous mistake after all; and he has had to bear the slow sad disillusionment, the crushing burden of futility. He set out to win glory, and he is a forgotten, shabby, irresolute figure, subsisting on the charity of wealthy visitors! And yet he seems to have missed happiness by so little. To live as he does might be a serene and beautiful thing. If such a man had large reserves of hope and tenderness and patience; if he could but be content with the tranquil beauty of the wholesome earth, spread so richly before his eyes, it would be a life to be envied.

It has been a gentle lesson to me, that one must resolutely practise one's heart and spirit for the closing hours. In the case of successful men, as they grow older, it often strikes me with a sense of pain how passionately they cling to their ambitions and activities. How many people there are who work too long, and try to prolong the energies of morning into the afternoon, and the toil of afternoon into the peace of evening. I earnestly desire to grow old gracefully; to know when to stop, when to slip into a wise and kindly passivity, with sympathy for those who are in the forefront of the race. And yet if one does not practise wonder and receptivity and hope, one cannot expect them to come suddenly and swiftly to one's call. There comes a day when a man ought to be able to see that his best work is behind him, that his active influence is on the wane, that he is losing his hold on the machine. There ought to come a patient, beautiful, and kindly dignity, a love of young things and fresh flowers; not an envious and regretful unhappiness at the loss of the eager life and its brisk sensations, which betrays itself too often in a trickle of exaggerated reminiscences, a "weary, day-long chirping."

This is a harder task, I suppose, for an old bachelor than for a father of children. I have sometimes felt that adoption, with all its risks, of some young creature that you can call your own, would be a solution for many loveless lives, because it would stir them out of the comfortable selfishness that is the bane of the barren heart.

Of course, a schoolmaster suffers from this less than most professional men; but, even so, it is melancholy to reflect how the boys one has cared for, and tried to help, drift out of one's sight and ken. I have no touch of the feeling which they say was characteristic of Jowett--and indeed is amply evidenced by his correspondence--that once a man's tutor he was always his tutor, even though his pupil became grey-headed and a grandfather. One must do the best for the boys and look for no gratitude; it often comes, indeed, in rich measure, but the schoolmaster who craves for it is lost.

Well, it is time to stop. I sit in a little, low raftered parlour of the old inn; the fire in the big hearth flickers into ash, and my candles flare to their sockets. I leave the place to-morrow; and such is the instinct for permanence in the human mind, that I feel depressed and melancholy, as though I were leaving home.--Ever your affectionate,

T. B.


THE BLUE BOAR, STANTON HARDWICK, April 21, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I have made