The Altar Fire by Arthur Christopher Benson (classic books for 13 year olds .txt) 📖

brook, about all that was in his mind, and he was more than content if I asked an occasional question or assented courteously. Then we had some good talks about the rural problems of education--he is a sensible and intelligent man enough--and some excellent arguments about the movement of religion, where I found him unexpectedly liberal-minded. He left me to do very much what I liked. I read in the mornings and before dinner; and after dinner we smoked or even played a game of dummy whist. It is a pretty part of the country, and when he was occupied in the afternoon, I walked about by myself. From first to last not a single word fell from Musgrave to indicate that he thought me in any way different, or suspected that I was not perfectly content, with the blessed result that I immediately became exactly what he thought me.

I got on no better with my writing; my brain is as bare as a winter wood; but I found that I did not rebel against that. Of course it does not reveal a very dignified temperament, that one should so take colour from one's surroundings. If I can be equable and good-humoured here, I ought to be able to be equable and good-humoured at home; at the same time I am conscious of an intense longing to see Maud and the children. Probably I should do better to absent myself resolutely from home at stated intervals; and I think it argued a fine degree of perception in Maud, that she decided not to accompany me, though she was pressed to come. I am going home to-morrow, delighted at the thought, grateful to the good Musgrave, in a more normal frame of mind than I have been for months.


February 28, 1889.


One of the most depressing things about my present condition is that I feel, not only so useless, but so prickly, so ugly, so unlovable. Even Maud's affection, stronger and more tender than ever, does not help me, because I feel that she cannot love me for what I am, but for what she remembers me as being, and hopes that I may be again. I know it is not so, and that she would love me whatever I did or became; but I cannot realise that now.

A few days ago an old friend came to see me; and I was so futile, so fractious, so dull, so melancholy with him that I wrote to him afterwards to apologise for my condition, telling him that I knew that I was not myself, and hoped he would forgive me for not making more of an effort. To-day I have had one of the manliest, tenderest, most beautiful letters I have ever had in my life. He says, "Of course I saw that you were not in your usual mood, but if you had pretended to be, if you had kept me at arm's length, if you had grimaced and made pretence, we should have been no nearer in spirit. I was proud and grateful that you should so have trusted me, as to let me see into your heart and mind; and you must believe me when I say that I never loved and honoured you more. I understood fully what a deep and insupportable trial your present state of mind must be; and I will be frank--why should I not be?--and say that I thought you were bearing it bravely, and what is better still, simply and naturally. I seemed to come closer to you in those hours than I have ever done before, and to realise better what you were. 'To make oneself beloved,' says an old writer, 'is to make oneself useful to others'--and you helped me perhaps most, when you knew it least yourself. I won't tell you not to brood upon or exaggerate your trouble--you know that well enough yourself. But believe me that such times are indeed times of growth and expansion, even when one seems most beaten back upon oneself, most futile, most unmanly. So take a little comfort, my old friend, and fare onwards hopefully."

That is a very beautiful and wise letter, and I cannot say how much it has meant for me. It is a letter that forges an invisible chain, which is yet stronger than the strongest tie that circumstance can forge; it is a lantern for one's feet, and one treads a little more firmly in the dark path, where the hillside looms formless through the shade.


March 3, 1889.


Best of all the psalms I love the Hundred-and-nineteenth; yet as a child what a weary thing I thought it. It was long, it was monotonous; it dwelt with a tiresome persistency, I used to think, upon dull things--laws, commandments, statutes. Now that I am older, it seems to me one of the most human of all documents. It is tender, pensive, personal; other psalms are that; but Psalm cxix. is intime and autobiographical. One is brought very close to a human spirit; one hears his prayers, his sighs, the dropping of his tears. Then, too, in spite of its sadness, there is a deep hopefulness and faithfulness about it, a firm belief in the ultimate triumph of what is good and true, a certainty that what is pure and beautiful is worth holding on to, whatever may happen; a nearness to God, a quiet confidence in Him. It is all in a subdued and minor key, but swelling up at intervals into a chord of ravishing sweetness.

There is never the least note of loudness, none of that terrible patriotism which defaces many of the psalms, the patriotism which makes men believe that God is the friend of the chosen race, and the foe of all other races, the ugly self-sufficiency that contemplates with delight, not the salvation and inclusion of the heathen, but their discomfiture and destruction. The worst side of the Puritan found delight in those cruel and militant psalms, revelling in the thought that God would rain upon the ungodly fire and brimstone, storm and tempest, and exulting in the blasting of the breath of His displeasure. Could anything be more alien to the spirit of Christ than all that? But here, in this melancholy psalm, there breathes a spirit naturally Christian, loving peace and contemplation, very weary of the strife.

I have said it is autobiographical; but it must be remembered that it was a fruitful literary device in those early days, to cast one's own thought in the mould of some well-known character. In this psalm I have sometimes thought that the writer had Daniel in mind--the surroundings of the psalm suit the circumstances of Daniel with singular exactness. But even so, it was the work of a man, I think, who had suffered the sorrows of which he wrote. Let me try to disentangle what manner of man he was.

He was young and humble; he was rich, or had opportunities of becoming so; he was an exile, or lived in an uncongenial society; he was the member of a court where he was derided, disliked, slandered, plotted against, and even persecuted. We can clearly discern his own character. He was timid, and yet ambitious; he was tempted to use deceit and hypocrisy, to acquiesce in the tone about him; he was inclined to be covetous; he had sinned, and had learnt something of holiness from his fall; he was given to solitude and prayer. He was sensitive, and his sorrows had affected his health; he was sleepless, and had lost the bloom of his youth.

All this and more we can read of him; but what is the saddest touch of all is the isolation in which he lived. There is not a word to show that he met with any sympathy; indeed the misunderstanding, whatever it was, that overshadowed him, had driven acquaintances, friends, and lovers away from him; and yet his tender confidence in God never fails; he feels that in his passionate worship of virtue and truth, his intense love of purity and justice, he has got a treasure which is more to him than riches or honour, or even than human love. He speaks as though this passion for holiness had been the very thing that had cost him so dear, and that exposed him to derision and dislike. Perhaps he had refused to fall in with some customary form of evil, and his resistance to temptation had led him to be regarded as a precisian and a saint? I have little doubt myself that this was so. He speaks as one might speak who had been so smitten with the desire for purity and rightness of life, that he could no longer even seem to condone the opposite. And yet he was evidently not one who dared to withstand and rebuke evil; the most he could do was to abstain from it; and the result was that he saw the careless and evil-minded people about him prosperous, happy and light-hearted, while he was himself plunged by his own act in misunderstanding and solitude and tears.

And then how strange to see this beautiful and delicate confession put into so narrow and constrained a shape! It is the most artificial by far of all the psalms. The writer has chosen deliberately one of the most cramping and confining forms that could be devised. Each of the eight verses that form the separate stanzas begins with the same letter of the alphabet, and each of the letters is used in turn. Think of attempting to do the same in English--it could not be done at all. And then in every single verse, except in one, where the word has probably disappeared in translation, by a mistake, there is a mention of the law of God. Infinite pains must have gone to the slow building of this curious structure; stone by stone must have been carved and lifted to its place. And yet the art is so great that I know no composition of the same length that has so perfect a unity of mood and atmosphere. There is never a false or alien note struck. It is never jubilant or contentious or assertive--and, best of all, it is wholly free from any touch of that complacency which is the shadow of virtue. The writer never takes any credit to himself for his firm adherence to the truth; he writes rather as one who has had a gift of immeasurable value entrusted to unworthy hands, who hardly dares to believe that it has been granted him, and who still speaks as though he might at any time prove unfaithful, as though his weakness might suddenly betray him, and who therefore has little temptation to exult in the possession of anything which his own frail nature might at any moment forfeit.

And thus, from its humility, its sense of weakness and weariness, its consciousness of sin and failure, combined with its deep apprehension of the stainless beauty of the moral law, this lyric has found its way to the hearts of all who find the world and temptation and fear too strong, all who through repeated failure have learned that they cannot even be true to what they so pathetically desire and admire; who would be brave and vigorous if they could, but, as it is, can only hope to be just led step by step, helped over the immediate difficulty, past the dreaded moment; whose heart often fails them, and who have little of the joy of God; who can only trust that, if they go astray, the mercy of God will yet go out to seek them; who cannot even hope to run in the way of God's beloved commandments, till He has set their heart at liberty.