Such was Shorthouse's best and most romantic hour. He had a deep-seated love of ritual; in spite of his inherited quietism—but for all that he was a very liberal Churchman, of the school of Kingsley rather than of the school of Pusey. Ritual was to him a beautiful adjunct; not a symbolical preoccupation.

The mystery is why this very delicate and unique flower of art should have sprung up on this particular soil. The most that one hopes for, in the way of literary interest, from such surroundings, is a muddled optimism, rather timidly expressed, based on the writings of Robert Browning and Carlyle. Instead of this, one gets this precieux antique style, based upon the Bible and John Bunyan, and enriched by a transparent power of tinging modern English with an ancient and secluded flavour.

It shows how very little surroundings and influences have to do with the growth of an artistic instinct, because in the case of Shorthouse it seems to have been a purely spontaneous product. He followed no one; he had the advantage of no trained criticism; because it seems that his only critic was his wife, and though Mrs. Shorthouse appears in these pages as a very courageous, loyal, and devoted woman, it is clear from the record that she had no special literary gift.

The rarity of the thing is part of its wonder. It is possible to tell upon the fingers of one hand, or at all events on the fingers of two hands, the names of all the nineteenth-century writers who have handled prose with any marked delicacy. There are several effective prose-writers, but very few artists. Prose has been employed in England till of late merely as a straightforward method of enforcing and expressing ideas, in a purely scientific manner. Literary craftsmen have turned rather to verse, and here the wonder grows, because one or two specimens of Shorthouse's verse are given, which reveal an absolute incapacity for the process, without apparently the smallest instinct for rhyme, metre, or melody,—the very lowest sort of slipshod amateur poetry.

After Shorthouse had once tasted the delights of publication and the pleasures of fame he wrote too much, and fiddled rather tediously upon a single string. Moreover, he attempted humorous effects, not very successfully; because one of the interesting points about, John Inglesant is that there is hardly the slightest touch of humour from beginning to end, except perhaps in the fantastic mixture of tragedy and comedy in the carnival scene, presided over by the man who masquerades as a corpse; and even here the humour is almost entirely of a macabre type.

Of course one would not assign to Shorthouse a very high place in English literature, beautiful as his best work is. But a writer may have an interest which is out of proportion to the value of his writings. The interest of Shorthouse is the interest which attaches to the blooming of a curious and exotic flower in a place where its presence is absolutely unaccountable; he probably will not maintain his hold upon the minds of a later generation, because there is no coherent system of thought in his book. Inglesant is a mere courtly mirror, the prey of his moods and his surroundings, in which beautiful tones of religious feeling are engagingly reflected. But to all who study the development of English prose, Shorthouse will have a definite value, as a spontaneous and lonely outcrop of poetical prose-writing in an alien soil; an isolated worker foreshowing in his secluded and graceful talent the rise of a new school in English literature, the appearance of a plant which may be expected in the future, if not in the immediate future, to break into leaf and bloom, into colour and fragrance.



LII

I found myself the other day in the neighbourhood of Wells. I had hitherto rather deliberately avoided going there, because so many people whose taste and judgment are wholly unreliable have told me that I ought to see it. The instinct to disagree with the majority is a noble one, and has perhaps effected more for humanity than any other instinct; but it must be cautiously indulged in.

In this case I resisted the instinct to abstain from visiting Wells; and I was glad that I did so, because, in spite of the fact that most people consider Wells to be a very beautiful place, it is undoubtedly true that it is most beautiful. Wells and Oxford on a large scale, Burford and Chipping Campden on a small scale, are in my experience the four most beautiful places in England, as far as buildings go. There are other places which are full of beautiful buildings; but there is a harmony about these four places which is a very rare and delightful quality.

Wells, as a matter of fact, is almost impossibly beautiful, and incredibly romantic. It is an almost perfectly mediaeval place, with the enormous advantage that it is also old, a quality which we are apt to forget that mediaeval places, when first built, did not possess. I do not think that Wells, when first built, was probably more than just a beautiful place. But it has now all grown old together, undisturbed, unvisited. It has crumbled and weathered and mellowed into one of the most enchanting places in the world.

God forbid that I should attempt to describe it; and indeed I am not sure that the things that are most admired about it are the most admirable. The west front of the Cathedral, for instance, has been temporarily ruined by the restoration of the little marble shafts, which now merely look like a quantity of india-rubber tubing, let in in pieces. The choir of the Cathedral, again, is an outrage. The low stone stalls, like a row of arbours designed by a child, the mean organ, the comfortable seats, have a shockingly Erastian air; there is not a touch of charm or mystery about it; I cannot imagine going there to pray. The Vicars' Close, which is foolishly extolled, has been made by restoration to look like a street in a small watering-place.

But, on the other hand, the Bishop's Palace, with its moat full of swans, its fantastic oriels and turrets, its bastions and towers, wreathed with ivy and creepers, is a thing which fills the mind with a sort of hopeless longing to possess the secret of its beauty; one desires in a dumb and bewildered way to surrender oneself, with a yearning confidence, to whatever the power may be which can design and produce a thing of such unutterable loveliness.

By the favour of an ecclesiastical friend I was allowed to wander alone in a totally unaccountable paradise of gardens that lies to the east of the Cathedral. It was impossible to conceive whom it belonged to, or what connection it had with the houses round about. It was all intersected with pools and rivulets of clear water. Here was a space of cultivated ground with homely vegetables. Here stood a mysterious ancient building, which proved on examination to contain nothing but a gushing well of water. Here was a lawn with a trim gravel walk bordered with roses; while a few paces away was a deserted thicket of sprawling shrubs, elders, and laurels, with a bit of wild rough meadow in the heart of the copse; and here was a sight that nearly brought me to my knees. Beside an ancient wall, with the towers and gables of the Cathedral looking solemnly over, a great spring broke up out of the ground from some secret channel into a little pool surrounded by rich water plants, and flowed away in a full channel; not one, but three of these astonishing fountains were to be seen in this little space of grass and copse.

These are the Wells themselves, the Aquae Solis, as the Romans called them, fed by some hidden channel from the hills, sent gushing up day and night for the delight and refreshment of men. I wish that the mediaeval builders had built the great church over instead of near these wells, and had let them burst up in a special chapel, so that the church might have been musical with the sound of streams; and so that the waters might have flowed from the door of the house, as Ezekiel saw them flow eastward from the threshold of the holy habitation to Engedi and Eneglaim to gladden the earth.

Then as I wandered in a place of dark leaves, beside the moat under the frowning towers, I saw a kingfisher sit on a bough, his back powdered with sapphires, his red breast, his wise head on one side, watching the stream. In a moment he plunged and disappeared; in an instant he was back again on his perch, flashing, like Excalibur, over the stream, his prey in his bill.

For a long morning I wandered about, dizzied with beauty, gazing, wondering, desiring I knew not what.

Then came the strange thought that this place of dreamful beauty should be in the hands of a few simple ecclesiastical persons; the town is little more than a village; century by century it has lived a little, quiet provincial life. It has produced, so far as I know, no great man. This soft air, this humid climate, sheltered from the wind, full of warm sunlight, fed with dew, seems favourable to a long, comfortable, indolent life. The beauty of the place seems to have had no particular effect upon the people who live there. It has never been a centre of thought or activity. It ought, one would have thought, to have produced a certain kind of poetical temper, even though it were a temper of indolent enjoyment rather than of creative force. But not even a beauty born of murmuring sound—and the air is full of murmurs—seemed to have passed into the faces of the simple townsfolk who make it their home. I could not gather thatthe exquisite loveliness of the place had any particular effect upon the dwellers there, except a mild pleasure in the fact that so many strangers should come to see the place. I do not exactly grudge strangers the sight of it, though I should like better to think of it all as standing in an enchanted valley hard to penetrate. But it is difficult to see exactly for whom it all exists. It seems to be a place that ought to have a dreamful, appreciative, emotional life of its own, a place where a few worthy natures might live in a serene, joyful, impassioned mood; a place where there is nothing that need remind the dweller of ugliness or vulgarity, of progress or statistics; a place for elect souls and fine natures.

One does not want to be fantastic or absurd in such reveries as these; but it is sad to think that scattered about England in mean towns, perhaps in sordid houses, are natures that could live in a place like Wells with a perpetual delight, a constant drinking at the sources of beauty, while most of the actual inhabitants have come there almost by chance, and do not appear to be particularly conscious of their blessings or particularly affected by their surroundings. It seems indeed a curious wastefulness, that the Power who rules the world should have heaped in this tiny place among the hills such a treasure of delicate beauty, with such an indifference as to whether it should he perceived or discerned by congenial spirits.

The type of ecclesiastic whom I would like to see in a place like this would be a man deeply sensitive to art and music, with a strong mystical sense of wonder and desire; visionary perhaps, and what is called unpractical, believing that religion was not so much a matter of conduct as a matter of mood; in whom conduct would follow mood, as a rush bends in the stream. I do not say that this is the most vital form of religion. It is not the spirit of Luther or of John Wesley; it lives more among hopes than certainties; it desires to see God rather than to proclaim His wrath. Such a man, tenderly courteous to all, patient, wise, sad with a hopeful sadness, living in an atmosphere of uplifted prayer, hearing the ripple of the spring or the bird's song among the thickets, his heart rising in ecstasy upon the holy music, upborne by the grave organ-thunders, speaking sometimes out of a full heart of the secrets of God, would lead a life that would be shepherded by his Lord in a green pasture; led by waters of comfort and in paths of righteousness, with a table indeed prepared. Such a life is apt nowadays to be viewed contemptuously by the virile man, by the practical philanthropist; but it is such a spirit as this that produced the Psalms, the Book of Job, the Apocalypse. It is a type of religion that even those who base their faith upon the open Bible are apt to despise and condemn; if so, their Bible is not an open one, but sealed with many seals of ignorance and dulness. Such a life should be full of energy, of faith, of purity. It should speak to those that had ears to hear in secret chambers, even though it did not cry from the house-tops. In this stupid and hypocritical age, that mistakes money for wealth, excitement for pleasure, interference for influence, fame for wisdom, speed for progress, volubility for eloquence, such a life is despised, if not actually condemned.

Yet such lives might break from underground, in a place of greensward and bushes, among the voices of birds and the mellow murmur of bells, even as the fountains themselves spring forth. In these bustling days we are apt to think that streams have no work but to turn mills and make light for cities, to bear merchandise, to sweep foulness to the sea; we forget that they pass through woodland places, feeding the grasses and the trees, quenching the thirst of bird and beast, that they sparkle in the sun, gleam wan in the sunset, reflecting the pale sky. Oh, perverse and forgetful generation, that knows better than God what the aim and goal of our pilgrimage is; that will not hear His murmured language, or see His patient writing on the wall! That in teaching, forget to learn, and in prophesying, have no leisure to look backwards! It is we that have despised life and beauty and God; it is we that make graven images, and worship the fire till we cannot see the sun, who pray daily for peace, and cast the jewel in the mire when it is put in our foolish hands.

And after all, though we shelter our lives and seclude them as we may, we have all of us a heavy burden to bear. These mouldering walls, these soaring towers, the voice of many waters, teach me this, if they teach me nothing else, that peace and beauty are dear to the heart of God; that he sets them where he can; that we can perceive them and love them; and that if our life is a learning of some great and dim lesson, these sweet influences may sustain and comfort us at least as well as the phantoms which so many of us pursue.



LIII

I am sure that it is an inspiring as well as a pleasant thing to go on pilgrimage sometimes to the houses where interesting people and great people have lived and thought and written. It helps one to realise, that "they were mortal, too, like us," but it makes one realise it gratefully and joyfully; it is good to feel, as one comes to do by such visits, that such thoughts, such words, are not unattainable by humanity, that they can be thought in rooms and fields and gardens like our own, and written down in chairs and on tables much the same as others. Tennyson went once to see Goethe's house at Weimar, and was more transported by seeing a room full of his old boots and medicine-bottles than by anything else that he saw; and it is a wise care that keeps dear Sir Walter's old hat and coat and clumsy laced shoes in a glass case at Abbotsford. Of course one must not go in search of old boots and bottles, as many tourists do, without caring much about the hero to whom they belonged. One must have grown familiar first with every detail of the great man's life, have read his letters and his biography, and the letters written about him, and his Diary if possible, and all his books; one must have grown to admire him and desire his presence, and hate the thought of the grave that separates him from oneself; until one has come to feel that the place where he slept and ate and walked and talked and wrote is like the field full of stones at Luz, where the ladder was set up from heaven to earth, and where Jacob, shivering in his chilly slumbers, saw, in a moment of dreamful enlightenment, that the heavenly staircase may be let down in a moment at any place or hour, and that the angels may descend, carrying bright thoughts and secret consolations from its cloudy head.

And thus there can be for any one man but a few places to which he owes such a pilgrimage, because, in the first place, the thing must not be too ancient and remote; it is of little use to see the ruined shell of a great house in a forest, because such a scene does not in the least recall what the eyes of one's hero saw and rested upon. There must be some personal aroma about it; one must be able to see the garden-paths where he walked, the furniture which he used, and to realise the place in some degree as it appeared to him.

And then, too, there must be some sense of a personal link, an instinctive sympathy, between the soul of the writer and one's own spirit. It is not enough that he should have just written famous books; they must be books that have fed one's own heart and mind, have whispered some delicious hope, have thrilled one with a responsive tenderness—the writer must be one whom, unseen, we love. It is not enough that one should recognise his genius, know him to be great; he must be near and dear as well; one must visit the scene as one would draw near to the grave of a father or a brother, with a sense of love and loss and spiritual contact It should be like visiting some familiar scene. One must be able to say: "Yes, this is the tree he loved and wrote about; there is the writing-table by the window that gave him the glimpse he speaks of, of lake and hill; these are the walls on which he liked to see the firelight darting on dark winter evenings."

It is strange, if one considers carefully what houses they are that one would thus wish to visit, to reflect how many of them are homes of poets, and after them of novelists. It is the personal, the imaginative, the creative touch that weaves the spell, I do not think that one would travel far to see the house of a historian or a philosopher, however eminent; I do not personally even desire to see the houses of generals or statesmen or philanthropists. I would rather visit Rydal Mount than Hughenden; I should experience a greater exaltation of soul at Haworth than at Strathfieldsaye. I would rather see the lane where Tennyson wrote "Break, break, break," than Mr. Gladstone's library at Hawarden. Not that the houses of statesmen and generals are not interesting; I would take some trouble to visit them if I were in the neighbourhood of them; but it would be a mental rather than a spiritual pleasure, and when one was there one would tend to ask questions rather than contemplate the scene in silent awe. It may be a sentimental thing to say, but I should hope to visit Brantwood and Somerby Rectory with my heart full of prayer and my eyes full of tears, just as I should visit some old and well-loved house that had been the scene for me of happy days and loving memories.

What I find to regret in these latter days is—I say it with shame—that there is no house of any living writer which I should visit with this sense of awe and desire and sacredness. There are writers whom I honour and admire greatly, whose work I reverence and read, but there is no author alive a summons to whose presence I should obey with eager solemnity and devout expectation. That is perhaps my own fault, or the fault perhaps of my advancing years; but, to put it differently, there is no author now writing whose book I should order the moment I saw it announced, and await its arrival with keen anticipation. There are books announced that I determine I will see and read, but no books that I feel are sure to hold some vital message of truth and beauty. I cannot help feeling that this is a great loss. I remember the almost terrible excitement with which I saw Tennyson stalking out of Dean's Yard at Westminster, with his dark complexion, his long hair, his strange, ill-fitting clothes, his great glasses, his dim yet piercing look. I recollect the timid expectation with which I went to meet Robert Browning—and the disappointment which I endured in his presence at his commonplace bonhomie, his facile, uninteresting talk. I remember, as an undergraduate, begging and obtaining an introduction to Matthew Arnold, who stood robed in his scarlet gown at an academical garden-party; and I shall never forget the stately and amiable condescension with which he greeted me. But what seer of high visions, what sayer of ineffable things, transforming the commonplace world into a place of spirits and heavenly echoes, now moves and breathes among us? The result of our present conditions of life seems to be to develop a large number of effective and accomplished people, but not to evolve great, lonely, majestic figures of indubitable greatness.

Perhaps there are personalities whom the young and ardent as whole-heartedly desire to see and hear as I did the gods of my youth. But at present the sea and the depth alike concur in saying, "It is not in me."

But I do not cease to hope. I care not whether my hero be old or young; I should like him better to be young; and if I could hear of the rise of some great and gracious personality, full of fire and genius, I would make my way to his presence, even though it involved a number of cross-country journeys and solitary evenings in country inns, to lay my wreath at his feet and to receive his blessing.



LIV

The other day I was at Peterborough, and strolled into the Close under a fine, dark, mouldering archway, to find myself in a romantic world, full of solemn dignity and immemorial peace. There in its niche stood that exquisite crumbled statue that Flaxman said summed up the grace of mediaeval art. The quiet canonical houses gave me the sense of stately and pious repose; of secluded lives, cheered by the dignity of worship and the beauty of holiness. And then presently I was in the long new street leading out into the country; the great junction with its forest of signals, where the expresses come roaring in and out, and the huge freight-trains clank north and south. The street itself, with its rows of plane-trees, its big brick-built chapels, its snug comfortable houses, with the electric trams gliding smoothly under the crossing wires—what a picture it gave of the new democracy, with its simple virtues, its easy prosperity, its cheerful lack of taste, of romance! Life runs easily enough, no doubt, in these contented homes, with their regular meals, their bright ugly furniture, their friendly gossip, their new clothes; for amusement the bicycle, the gramophone, the circulating novel. I have no doubt that there is abundance of wholesome affection and camaraderie within, of full-flavoured, local, personal jests, all the outward signs and inner resources of sturdy British prosperity. A certain civic pride exists, no doubt, in the ancient buildings, in the influx of visitors, the envious admiration of Americans. But, at first sight, what a difference between the old and the new! The old, no doubt, stood for a few very wealthy and influential people, priests and barons, with a wretched and down-trodden poor, labouring like the beasts of the field for life. The new order stands for a few wealthy people whose hearts are in their amusements and social pleasures; a great, well-to-do, busy, comfortable middle class, and a self-respecting and, on the whole, prosperous artisan class. No one, surveying the change from the point of view of human happiness, can doubt for an instant that the new order is far richer in happiness, in comfort, and in contentment than the old.

And then, too, how easy it is to make the mistake of thinking that all the grace of antiquity and mellowness that hangs about the old buildings was part of the mediaeval world. Go back in fancy for a little to the time when that great front of the Cathedral, with its forests of towers and pinnacles, its three vast portals, was brand-new and white, all free from the scaffolding, and fitting on so strangely to the Norman work behind. I can well imagine that some one who loved what was old and quiet might have thought it even then a very bustling modern affair, and heaved a sigh over the progress that had made it possible.

Moreover, looking closely at that great grey front, with its three portals, I am almost sure that the design is an essentially vulgar one. It is much of it a front with no back to it; it is crowded with useless and restless ornament. The rose-windows, for instance, in the gables, give light to nothing but the rafters of the roof. The designer was evidently afraid of leaving any surface plain and unadorned; he felt impelled to fill every inch with decoration. Indeed, I cannot doubt that if one saw the West Front reproduced now, the connoisseurs, who praise it so blandly in its mellow softness, would overwhelm it with disapproval and stern criticism.

Whatever that front, those soaring towers, may mean to us now, they stood then for a busy and eager activity. What one does desire to know, what is really important, is whether the spirit that prompted that activity was a purer, holier, more gracious spirit than the spirit that underlies the middle-class prosperity of the present day. Did it all mean a love of art, a sacrifice of comfort and wealth to a beautiful idea, a radiant hope? Did the monks or the great nobles that built it, build it in a humble, ardent, and loving spirit—or was it partly in a spirit of ostentation, that their church might have a new and impressive front, partly in the spirit indicated by the hymn:

"Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee, Repaid a thousand-fold will be"?

Was it an investment, so to speak, made for the sake of improving their spiritual prosperity?

It is very difficult to say. The monks in their earlier missionary times were full of enthusiasm and faith, no doubt. But when the Abbeys were at the full height of their prosperity, when they were vast landowners and the Abbot had his place in parliament, when the monastic life was a career for an ambitious man, was the spirit of the place a pure and holy one? That they submitted themselves to a severe routine of worship does not go for very, much, because men very easily accommodate themselves to a traditional and a conventional routine.

And thus one is half inclined to believe that the spirit of the monks in their prosperous days was not very different from the spirit that prompts railway extension, and that builds a railway terminus with an ornamental facade.

And so when one sees prosperity spreading wider and lower, and the neat villa residences begin to cluster round the knot of ancient buildings, we must not conclude too hastily that our new wealth has swamped ancient ideals; probably the ideals of prosperous people do not vary very much, whether they are monks or railway officials. The monks in their decadent days have no abounding reputation for virtue or austerity. One likes to think of them as lost in splendid dreams of God's glory and man's holiness, but there is little to show that such was the case.

I do not want to decry the ideas of the monks in order to magnify our modern middle-class ideals. I do not for a moment pretend to think that our national ideals are very exalted ones nowadays. I wish I could believe it; but there is no sign of any particular interest in religion or cultivation or art or literature or romance. We have a certain patriotism, of a somewhat commercial type; we have a belief in our honesty, not, I fear, wholly well-founded. We claim to be plain people who speak our mind; which very often does not mean more than that we do not take the trouble to be polite; we should all say that we valued liberty, which means little more than that we resent interference, and like to do things in our own way. But I do not think that we are at present a noble-minded or an unselfish nation, though we are rich and successful, and have the good humour that comes of wealth and success.

Peterborough is to me a parable of England; it stands for a certain pride in antiquity, coupled with a good-natured contempt for the religious spirit—for, though these cathedrals of ours are well cared for and well-served, no one can say that they have any very deep influence on national life. And it stands, too, for the thing that we do believe in with all our hearts—trim, comfortable material prosperity; a thing which bewilders a dreamer like myself, because it seems to be the deliberate gift and leading of God to our country, while all the time I long to believe that he is pointing us to a far different hope, and a very much quieter and simpler ideal. How little we make of Christ's blessing on poverty, on simplicity, on tenderness! How ready we are to say that his strong words about the dangers of wealth were only counsels given to individuals! The deepest article of our creed, that a man must make his way, fight for his own hand, elbow himself to the front if he can—how little akin that is to the essential spirit of Christ, by which a man ought to lavish himself for others, and quit the world poorer than he entered it!

I turn again into the great, shadowy, faintly lit church, with all its interlaced arches, its colour, its richness of form; I see the figures of venerable, white-robed clergy in their tabernacled stalls, a—little handful of leisurely worshippers. The organ rises pouring sweet music from its forest of pipes. Hark to what they are singing to the rich blending of artful melodies:—

"He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things; but the rich He hath sent empty away."

What a message to thrill through this palace of art, with the pleasant town without, and all the great trains thundering past! To whom is it all addressed? The spirit of that meek religion seems to sit shivering in its gorgeous raiment, heard and heeded of none. Yet here as everywhere there are quiet hearts that know the secret; there are patient women, kind fathers, loving children, who would think it strange and false if they were told that over their heads hangs the bright aureole of the saints. What can we do, we who struggle faintly on our pilgrimage, haunted and misled by hovering delusions, phantoms of wealth and prosperity and luxury, that hide the narrow path from our bewildered eyes? We can but resolve to be simple and faithful and pure and loving, and to trust ourselves as implicitly as we can to the Father who made us, redeemed us, and loves us better than we love ourselves.



LV

I have had a fortnight of perfect weather here—the meteorologists call it by the horrible and ugly name of "anticyclone," which suggests, even more than the word "cyclone" suggests, the strange weather said by the Psalmist to be in store for the unrighteous—"Upon the ungodly he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, storm and tempest." I have often wondered what the fields would look like after a rain of snares! The word "cyclone" by itself suggests a ghastly whorl of high vapours, and the addition of "anti" seems to make it even more hostile. But an anticyclone in the springtime is the opening of a door into paradise. Day after day the fields have lain calm beneath a cool and tranquil sun, with a light breeze shifting from point to point in the compass. Day after day I have swept along the great fen-roads, descending from my little hill-range into the flat. Day by day I have steered slowly across the gigantic plains, with the far-off farms to left and right across acres of dark plough-land, rising in dust from the feet of horses dragging a harrow. Every now and then one crosses a great dyke, a sapphire streak of calm water between green flood-banks, running as straight as a line from horizon to horizon. One sweeps through a pretty village at long intervals, with its comfortable yellow-brick houses, and an old church standing up grey in the sun. It was on a day always to be marked with letters of gold in my calendar that I found the house of Bellasyze in a village in the fen. Imagine a great red-brick wall running along by the high road, with a pair of huge gate-posts in the centre, with big stone wyverns on the top. Inside, a little park of ancient trees, standing up among grass golden with buttercups. A quarter of a mile away in the park, an incredibly picturesque house of red brick, with an ancient turreted gate-house, innumerable brick chimney-stacks, gables, mullioned windows, and oriels, rising from great sprawling box-trees and yews. By a stroke of fortune, the young kindly squire was coming out at the gate as I stood gazing, and asked me if I would care to look round. He led me up to the gate-house, and then into a great hall, with vast doors of oak, flagged with stone. "There is our ugliest story!" he said, pointing to the flags. I do not profess to explain what I saw; but there was in one place a stain looking like dark blood just sopped up; and close by, outlined in a damp dimness, the rough form of a human body with outstretched arms, just as though a warm corpse had been lying on the cold stones. "That was where the young heir was killed by his father," said the squire; "his blood fell down here—he was stabbed in the back—and he stumbled a pace or two and fell; we can't scrub it out or dry it out." "I suppose you are haunted?" I said. He laughed. "Well,-it is a great convenience," he said. "I only live here in the summer; I have a little house which is more convenient in the winter, a little distance away. I can never get a caretaker here for the winter—but, bless you, if I left every door and window open, there is not a soul in the place that would come near it!" He led me through ranges of rooms panelled, recessed, orieled—there were staircases, turret-chambers, galleries in every direction. I think there must have been nearly fifty rooms in the house, perhaps half-a-dozen of them inhabited. At one place he bade me look out of a little window, and I saw below a small court with an ancient chapel on the left, the windows bricked up. It had a sinister and wicked air, somehow. The squire told me that they had unearthed a dozen skeletons in that little yard as they were laying a drain, and had buried them in the neighbouring churchyard. But the back of the house was still more ravishing than the front; surrounded by great brick walls, curving outwards, lay a grassy garden, with huge box-trees at the sides, and in the centre many ancient apple-trees in full bloom. The place was bright with carelessly ordered flowers; and behind, the ground fell a little to some great pools full of sedge, some tumbled grassy hillocks covered with blackthorns, and a little wood red with buds and full of birds, called by the delicious name of "My Lord's Wood." The great flat stretched for miles round.

One of the singular charms of the place was that it had never undergone a restoration; it had only been carefully patched just as it needed it. I never saw a place so soaked with charm from end to end, its very wildness giving it a grace which trimness would have utterly destroyed. I stood for a while beside the pool, with a woodpecker laughing in the holt, to watch the long roofs and huddled chimneys rise above the white-flowered orchard. Perhaps in a stormy, rugged day of November it would be sad and mournful enough in its solitary pastures; but on this spring day, with the sun lying warm on the brickwork, it seemed to have a perfection of charm about it like the design of a mind intent upon devising as beautiful a thing as could be made. The old house seemed to have grown old and mellow like a rock or crag; to have sprung up out of the ground; and nature, working patiently with rain and sun and wind, drooping the stonecrop from the parapet, fringing the parapets with snapdragons and wallflowers, touching the old roofs with orange and grey lichens, had done the rest. No one shall learn from me where the House of Bellasyze lies; but I will revisit it spring by spring, like a hidden treasure of beauty.

The result of these perfect days, full of life and freshness, with all the loveliness and without the languors of spring, is to produce in me a perfectly inconsequent mood of happiness, which is better than any amount of philosophical consolation. The air, the breeze, the flying hour are all full of delight. Everything is touched with a fine savour and quality, whether it be the wide view over the dappled plain, the blue waters of the lonely dyke, the old farm-house blinking pleasantly among its barns and outbuildings, the tall church-tower that you see for miles over the flat, the busy cawing of rooks in the village grove; the very people that one meets wear a smiling and friendly air, from the old labourer trudging slowly home, to the jolly, smooth-faced ploughboy riding a big horse, clanking and plodding down the highway. One sees the world as it was meant to be made; a life in the open air, labour among the wide fields, seems the joyful lot of man. The very food that one eats by the quick-set thorn on the edge of a dyke, where the fish poise and hang in dark pools, has a finer savour, and is like a sacrament of peace; hour after hour, from morning to sunset, one can range without weariness and without care, one's thoughts reduced to a mere flow of gentle perceptions, murmuring along like a clear stream. Pleasant, too, is the return home when one swings in at the familiar gate; and then comes the quiet solitary evening when one recounts the hoarded store of delicate impressions. Then follow hours of dreamless sleep, till one wakes again upon a bright world, with the thrushes fluting in the shrubbery and the morning sun flooding the room.



LVI

It was by what we clumsily call chance but really by what I am learning to perceive to be the subtlest and prettiest surprises of the Power that walks beside us, that I found myself in Ely yesterday morning—the first real day of summer. The air was full of sunshine, like golden dust, and all the plants had taken a leap forward in the night, and were unfurling their crumpled flags as speedily as they might. I came vaguely down to the river, guided by the same good spirit, and there at the boat-wharf I found a little motor-launch lying, which could be hired for the day. I took it, like the Lady of Shalott; but I did not write my name on the prow, because it had already some silly, darting kind of name. A mild, taciturn man took charge of my craft; and without delay we clicked and gurgled out into the stream.

I wish I could describe the day, for it was sweeter than honey and the honeycomb; and I should like to pour out of my stored sweetness for others. But I can hardly say what happened. It was all just like the tale of Shalott, with this difference, that there was no shadow of doom overhanging me; I felt more like a fairy prince with some pretty adventure awaiting me as soon as the town, with gardens and balconies, should begin to fringe the stream; perhaps a hand would be waved from the lawn, embowered in lilacs, of some sequestered house by the water-side. There was no singing aloud of mournful carols either, but my heart made a quiet and wistful music of its own.

I thought that I should have liked a more grave and ancient mode of conveyance; but how silly to desire that! The Lady of Shalott's boat was no doubt of the latest and neatest trim, fully up to her drowsy date; and as for quaintness, no doubt a couple of hundred years hence, when our river-craft may be cigar-shaped torpedoes of aluminium for all I know, a picture of myself in my homely motor-boat, with antiquated hat and odd grey suit, will appear quaint and old-timed enough. And, anyhow, the ripple gurgled under the prow, the motor ticked tranquilly, and the bubbles danced in the wake. We went on swiftly enough, and every time that I turned the great towers had grown fainter in the haze; we slid by the green flood-banks, with here and there a bunch of kingcups blazing in glory, the elbows of the bank full of white cow-parsley, comfrey, and water-dock. I heard the sedge-warbler whistle drily in the willow-patch, and a nightingale sang with infinite sweetness in a close of thorn-bushes now bursting into bloom; blue sky above, a sapphire streak of waterway ahead, green banks on either side; a little enough matter to fill a heart with joy. Once I had a thrill when a pair of sandpipers flicked out of a tiny cove and flew, glancing white, with pointed wings ahead of us. Again we started them, and again, till they wearied of the chase and flew back, with a wide circuit, to their first haunt. A cuckoo in a great poplar fluted solemnly and richly as we murmured past; the world was mostly hidden from us, but now and then a church tower looked gravely over the bank, and ran beside us for a time, or the lowing of cattle came softly from a pasture, or I heard the laughter of unseen children from a cottage garth. Once or twice we passed an inn, with cheerful, leisurely people sitting smiling together on a lawn, like a scene out of a romance; and then at last, on passing Baitsbite lock, we slipped into a merrier world. Here we heard the beat of rowlocks, the horse-hoofs of a coach thudded on the bank, and a crew of jolly young men went gliding past, with a cox shouting directions, just as I might have been doing thirty years ago! Thirty years ago! And it seems like yesterday, and I not a scrap older or wiser, though, thank God, a good deal happier. Even so we drift on to the unseen. Then we passed a village, the thatched cottages with their white gables rising prettily from the blossoming orchards. Ditton on its little hill; and the old iron bridge thundered and clanked with a passing train; then came the rattle of the grinds; and the mean houses of Barnwell; and soon we were gliding up among the backs, under the bridge of St. John's, by the willow-hung walks of Trinity, by the ivied walls and trim gardens of Clare, past the great white palace-front of King's, and so by the brick gables and oriels of Queens' into the Newnham mill-pool. It was somehow not like Cambridge, but like some enchanted town of palaces; and I would not break the spell; so we swung about, made no stay, and then slowly reversed the whole panorama again, through the long, still afternoon.

The old life of Cambridge—it was all there, after the long years, just the same, full of freshness and laughter; but I came into it as a revenant, and yet with no sense of sadness, rather of joy that it should all be so continuous and bright. I did not want it back; I did not desire any part in it, but was merely glad to watch and remember. I thought of myself as a fitful boy full of dreams and hopes, some fulfilled, some unfulfilled; those that I have realised so strangely unlike what I expected, those unrealised still beckoning with radiant visage. I did not even desire any companionship, any interchange of thought and mood. Was it selfish, dull, unenterprising to be so content? I do not think so, for a stream of gentle emotion, which I know was sweet and which I think was pure, lapsed softly through my mind all day. It is not always thus with me, and I took the good day from the hands of God as a perfect gift; and though it would be easy to argue that I could have been better employed, a deeper instinct said to me that I was meant to be thus, and that, after all, God sends us into the world to live, though often enough our life tosses like a fretful stream among rocky boulders and under troubled skies. God can give and he can withhold; I do not question his power or his right; I mourn over the hard gifts from his hand; but when he sends me a sweet gift, let me try to realise, what I do not doubt, that indeed he wishes me well.

Once in the afternoon we stayed our boat, and I climbed to the top of the flood-bank and sate looking out over the wide fen; I saw the long dykes run eastward, the far-off churches, the distant hazy hills; and I thought of all the troubles that men make for each other, adding so wantonly to the woes of the world. And I wondered what was this strange fibre of pain so inwoven in the life of the world, wondered wistfully and rebelliously, till I felt that I drew nearer in that quiet hour to the Heart of God. I could not be mistaken. There was peace hidden there, the peace that to-day brooded over the kindly earth, all carpeted with delicate green, in the cool water lapping in the reeds, in the green thorn-bush and the birds' sudden song, even in this restless heart that would fain find its haven and its home.



LVII

To-day was oppressively hot, brooding, airless; or rather, not so much without air, as that the air was thick and viscous like honey, without the thin, fine quality. One drank rather than breathed it. Yet nature revelled and rejoiced in it with an almost shameless intoxication; the trees unfolded their leaves and shook themselves out, crumpled by the belated and chilly spring. The air was full of clouds of hurrying, dizzy insects, speeding at a furious rate, on no particular errand, but merely stung with the fierce joy of life and motion. In the road crawled stout bronze-green beetles, in blind and clumsy haste, pushing through grass-blades, tumbling over stones, waving feeble legs as they lay helpless on their backs, with the air of an elderly clergyman knocked down by an omnibus—and, on recovering their equilibrium, struggling breathlessly on. The birds gobbled fiercely in all directions, or sang loud and sweet upon the hedges. I saw half-a-dozen cuckoos, gliding silvery grey and beating the hedges for nests. Everything was making the most of life, in a prodigious hurry to live.

Indeed, I was very well content with the world myself as I sauntered through the lanes. I found a favourite place, an old clunch-quarry, on the side of a hill, where the white road comes sleepily up out of the fen. It is a pretty place, the quarry; it is all grass-grown now, and is full of small dingles covered with hawthorns. It is a great place for tramps to camp in, and half the dingles have little grey circles in them where the camping fires have been lit. I did not mind that evidence of life, but I did not like the cast-off clothing, draggled hats, coats, skirts, and boots that lay about. I never can fathom the mystery of tramps' wardrobes. They are never well-dressed exactly, but wherever they encamp they appear to discard clothing enough for two or three persons, clothing which, though I should not personally like to make use of it, still appears to be serviceable enough. I suppose it is a part of the haphazard life of the open air, and that if a tramp gets an old coat given him which is better than his own, he just leaves the old one behind him at the next halting-place.

The chalk-pit to-day was full of cowslips and daisies, the former in quite incredible profusion. I suppose it is a cowslip year. The common plants seem to have cycles, and almost each year has a succession of characteristic flowers, which have found, I suppose, the particular arrangements of the season suit them; or rather, I suppose that an outburst of a particular flower in a particular year shows that the previous year was a good seeding-time. This year has been remarkable for two plants so far, a sort of varnished green ground-weed, with a small white flower, and a dull crimson dead-nettle; both of them have covered the ground in places in huge patches. This is both strange and pleasant, I think.

I loitered about in my chalk-pit for a while; noted a new flower that sprinkled the high grassy ledges that I had never seen there before; and then sate down in a little dingle that commanded a wide view of the fen. The landscape to-day was dark with a sort of indigo-blue shadows; the clouds above big and threatening, as though they were nursing the thunder—the distance veiled in a blue-grey haze. Field after field, with here and there a clump of trees, ran out to the far horizon. A partridge chirred softly in the pastures up above me, and a wild screaming of sparrows came at intervals from a thorn-thicket, where they seemed to be holding a fierce and disorderly meeting.

I should like to be able to recover the thread of my thoughts in that quiet grassy place, because they ran on with an equable sparkle, quite without cause or reason. I had nothing particularly pleasing to think about; but the mood of retrospect and anticipation seemed to ramble about, picking sweet-smelling flowers from the past and future alike. I seemed to desire nothing and to regret nothing. My cup was full of a pleasant beverage, neither cloying nor intoxicating, and the glad spring-time tempered it nicely to my taste. There seemed to brood in the air a quiet benevolence as of a Father watching His myriad children at play; and yet as I saw a big blackbird, with a solemn eye, hop round a thorn-bush with a writhing worm festooned round his beak, I realised that the play was a deadly tragedy to some of the actors. I suppose that such thoughts ought to have ruffled the tranquil mood, but they did not, for the whole seemed so complete. I suppose that man walks in a vain shadow; but to-day it only seemed that he disquiets himself in vain. And it was not a merely selfish hedonism that thrilled me, for a large part of my joy was that we all seemed to rejoice together. As far as the eye could see, and for miles and miles, the flowers were turning their fragrant heads to the light, and the birds singing clear. And I rejoiced with them too, and shared my joy with all the brave world.



LVIII

One of the most impressive passages in Wordsworth's poems describes how he rowed by night, as a boy, upon Esthwaite Lake, and experienced a sense of awestruck horror at the sight of a dark peak, travelling, as the boat moved, beyond and across the lower and nearer slopes, seeming to watch and observe the boy. Of course it may be said that such a feeling is essentially subjective, and that the peak was but obeying natural and optical laws, and had no concern whatever with the boy. That there should be any connection between the child and the bleak mountains is, of course, inconsistent with scientific laws. But to arrive at a scientific knowledge of nature is not at all the same thing as arriving at the truth about her; one may analyse everything, peak and lake and moonlight alike, into its component elements, and show that it is all matter animated and sustained by certain forces. But one has got no nearer to knowing what matter or force is, or how they came into being.

And then, too, even from the scientific point of view, the subjective effect of the contemplation of nature by the mind is just as much a phenomenon; it is there—it demands recognition. The emotions of man are a scientific fact, too, and an even more complicated scientific fact than matter and force. When Wordsworth says that he was

"Contented if he might enjoy The things that others understand,"

he is but stating the fact that there is a mystical poetical perception of nature as well as a scientific one. Perhaps when science has done her work on elemental atoms and forces, she will turn to the analysis of psychological problems. And meanwhile it must suffice to recognise that the work of the scientist is as essentially poetical, if done in a certain spirit, as the work of the poet. It is essentially poetical, because the deeper that the man of science dives into the mystery, the darker and more bewildering it becomes. Science, instead of solving the mystery, has added enormously to its complexity by disposing of the old comfortable theory that man is the darling of Nature and that all things were created for his use. We know now that man is only a local and temporary phenomenon in the evolution of some dim and gigantic law; that he perhaps represents the highest development which that law has at present evolved, but that probably we are rather at the threshold than at the climax of evolution, and that there will be developments in the future that we cannot even dimly apprehend. If the contemplation of nature and the scientific analysis of nature are meant to have any effect upon humanity at all, it seems as though both were intended to stimulate our wonder and to torture us with the desire for solving the enigma.

Perhaps the difference between the poetical view and the scientific view of nature is this—that while scientific investigation stimulates a man to penetrate the secret as far as he can, with the noble desire to contribute what minute discoveries he may to the solution of the problem, the poetical contemplation of nature tends to produce in the mind a greater tranquillity of emotion. The scientist must feel that, even when he has devoted his whole life to investigation, he has but helped on the possibilities of solution a little. There can be no sense of personal fruition as long as the abyss remains unplumbed; and therefore nature is to him like a blind and blank mystery that reveals its secrets slowly and almost reluctantly, and defies investigation. Whereas the poet may rather feel that he at this precise point of time may master and possess the emotion that nature can provide for his soul, and that he is fully blessed if the sight of the mountain-head above the sunset cloud-banks, the green gloom of the summer woodland, the lake lashed with slanting storm, gives him a sense of profound emotion, and fills him to the brim with the pure potion of beauty. He may rest in that, for the time; he may feel that this is the message of nature to him, thus and now; and that the more perfectly and passionately that the beauty of nature comes home to him, the nearer he comes to the thought of God.

This does not, either in the case of the man of science or the poet, solve the further mystery—the mystery of complex human relationships. But the investigation of science ardently pursued is more likely to tend to isolate the explorer from his kind than the poetical contemplation of nature, for the simple reason that the scientist's business is not primarily with emotion but with concrete fact; while to the poet the emotions of love and friendship, of patriotism and duty, will all tend to be the object of impassioned speculation too. Both alike will be apt to be somewhat isolated from the ordinary life of the world, because both to the poet and the man of science the present condition of things, the problems of the day, will be dwarfed by the thought of the vast accumulation of past experience; both alike will tend to minimise the value of human effort, because they will both be aware that the phenomenon of human activity and human volition is but the froth and scum working on the lip of some gigantic forward-moving tide, and that men probably do not so much choose what they shall do, as do what they are compelled to do by some unfathomable power behind and above them. This thought may seem, to men of practical activity, to weaken the force of effective energy in both poet and scientist. But they will be content to be misunderstood on this point, because they will be aware that such activity as they manifest is the direct effect of something larger and greater than human volition, and that the busiest lives are as much the inevitable outcome of this insuperable force as their own more secluded, more contemplative lives.

The Mareway is an old track or drift-road, dating from primitive times, which diverges from the Old North Road and runs for some miles along the top of the low chalk downs which bound my southern horizon. Its name is a corruption of the word Mary—Mary's way—for there was an ancient shrine of pilgrimage dedicated to the Virgin Mary that stood on the broad low bluff still known as Chapel Hill, where the downs sink into the well-watered plain. No trace of the shrine exists, and it is not known where it stood. Perhaps its walls have been built into the little irregular pile of farm-buildings which stands close to where the way ends. In a field hard by that spot, the leaden seal of a Pope, the bulla that gives its name to a Pope's bull, was once ploughed up; but the chapel itself, which was probably a very humble place, was unroofed and wrecked in an outburst of Puritanical zeal, with a practical piety which could not bear that a place should gather about itself so many hopes and prayers and holy associations. Well, it is all history, both the trust that raised the shrine and the zeal that destroyed it; and we are the richer, not the poorer, for our losses as well as for our gains.

The Mareway passes through no villages, and only gives access to a few lonely, wind-swept farms. The villages tend to nestle along the roots of the down, in sheltered valleys where the streams break out, the orchard closes and cottage gardens creeping a little way up the gentle slopes; and thus when the time came for the roads to be metalled there was little use for the high ridgeway; for its only advantage had been that it gave in more unsettled times a securer and more secluded route for the pack-horse of the pilgrim—a chance of seeing if danger threatened or risk awaited him.

And so the old road keeps its solitary course, unfrequented and untrimmed, along the broad back of the down. Here for a space it is absorbed into a plough-land, there it melts with a soft dimple into the pasture; but for the most part it runs between high thorn hedges, here with deep ruts worn by heavy farm-carts, there trodden into miry pools by sheep. In places it passes for a space through patches of old woodland, showing by the deep dingles, the pleasant lack of ordered planting, that it is a tract of ancient forest-land never disparked. Here you may see, shouldering above the irregular copse, the bulk of some primeval oak, gnarled and hollow-trunked, spared partly because it would afford no timber worth cutting, and partly, we may hope, from some tender sense of beauty and veneration which even now, by a hint of instinctive tradition haunting the rustic mind, attends the ancient tree and surrounds it with a sense of respect too dim to be called a memory even of forgotten things. To right and left green roads dip down to the unseen villages, and here and there the way itself becomes a metalled road leading to some larger highway; but even so, you can soon regain the grassy tract, following the slow curve of the placid down.

There is no sweeter place to be found on a hot summer day than the old drift-road. The hedges are in full leaf, and the undergrowth, sprinkled with flowers, weaves its tapestry over the barer stems of the quicksets. The thrushes sing clear in the tiny thickets, and the blackbird flirts with a sudden outcry in and out of his leafy harbourage. Here the hedge is all hung with briony or traveller's joy; there is a burst of wild-roses, pale discs of faintest rose-jacinth, each with a full-seeded heart. The elder spreads its wide cakes of bloom, and the rich scent hangs heavy on the air. One seems in a moment to penetrate the very heart of the deep country-side, and even the shepherd or the labourer whom one passes shares the silence of the open field, and the same immemorial quality of quiet simplicity and primitive work. It is then that there flashes upon one a sense of the inexplicable mystery of these inexpressive lives, toiling to live and living to toil, half pathetic, half dignified, wholly mysterious in the lie that they give, by their meek persistence, to restless ambitions and dreams of social amelioration. For, whatever happens, such work must still be done until the end of time; and the more that mind and soul awake, the less willing will men be to acquiesce in such uncheered drudgery. If one could but educate the simpler hearts into a joyful and tranquil consent to conditions which, after all, are simple and wholesome enough; if one could implant the contented love of field and wood, wide airs and flying clouds life, love, ease, labour, sorrow—all that is best in our experience—could be tasted here and thus; while the troubles bred by the covetous brain and the scheming mind would find no place here. It is a better lot, after all, to live and feel than to express life and feeling, however subtly and ingeniously, and I for one would throw down in an instant all my vague dreams and impossible hopes, my artificial cares and fretful ambitions, for a life unconscious of itself and an unimpaired serenity of mood. The dwellers in these quiet places neither brood over what might have been nor exercise themselves over what will be. They live in the moment, and the moment suffices them.

In the winter weather the Mareway, in its dreary and sodden bareness, is to my mind an even more impressive place. The wind comes sharply up over the shoulder of the down. The trees are all bare; the pasture is yellow-pale. The water lies in the ruts and ditches. The silence in the pauses of the wind is intense. You can hear the soft sound of grass pulled by the lips of unnumbered browsing sheep behind the hedgerow, or the cry of farmyard fowls from the byre below, the puffing of the steam-plough on the sloping fallow, the far-off railway whistle across the wide valley. The rooks stream home from distant fields, and discuss the affairs of the race with cheerful clamour in the depth of the wood. The day darkens, and a smouldering sunset, hung with gilded clouds streaked with purple bars, begins to burn behind the bare-stemmed copse.

But what is, after all, the deepest charm that invests the old road is the thought of all the sad and tender associations clothing it in the minds of so many vanished generations. Even an old house has a haunting grace enough, as a place where men have been born and died, have loved and enjoyed and suffered; but a road like this, ceaselessly trodden by the feet of pilgrims, all of them with some pathetic urgency of desire in their hearts, some hope unfulfilled, some shadow of sickness or sin to banish, some sorrow making havoc of home, is touched by that infinite pathos that binds all human hearts together in the face of the mystery of life. What passionate meetings with despair, what eager upliftings of desirous hearts, must have thrilled the minds of the feeble and travel-worn companies that made their slow journeys along the grassy road! And one is glad to think, too, that there must doubtless have been many that returned gladder than they came, with the burden shifted a little, the shadow lessened, or at least with new strength to carry the familiar load. For of this we may be sure, that however harshly we may despise what we call superstition, or however firmly we may wave away what we hold to have been all a beautiful mistake, there is some fruitful power that dwells and lingers in places upon which the hearts of men have so concentred their swift and poignant emotions—for all, at least, to whom the soul is more than the body, and whose thoughts are not bounded and confined by the mere material shapes among which, in the days of our earthly limitations, we move uneasily to and fro.



EPILOGUE

_A blunt and candid critic, commenting on Keats' famous axiom, "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," said: "Then what is the use of having two words for the same thing?" And it is true that words cease to have any real meaning when they are so loosely applied. The same mistake is often made about happiness. It is supposed to be, not a quality, but a condition, or rather an equipoise of qualities and conditions. It is spoken of and thought of as if it were a sort of blend of virtue and health and amusement and sunshiny weather, and no doubt it is often found in combination with these things. But it is a separate quality, for all that, and not merely a result of faculties and circumstances. It is strangely and wilfully independent of its surroundings, and it is not inconsistent with the gravest discomfort of body and even affliction of mind. A ruinous combination of distressing circumstances does not by any means inevitably produce unhappiness. The martyr who sings at the stake among the flames is presumably happy. It may be said that he balances one consideration against another, and decides that his condition is, on the whole, enviable and delightful; but I do not believe that it is a mental process at all, and if the martyr is happy, he is so inevitably and instinctively. Some would urge that happiness is only an effect, like colour. There is no colour in the dark, but as soon as light is admitted, a thing that we call green, such as a leaf or a wall-paper, has the power of selecting and reflecting the green rays, and rejecting all rays that are not green. But the leaf or the paper is not in itself green; it has only a power of seizing upon and displaying greenness. So some would urge that temperaments are not inherently happy, but have the power or the instinct for extracting the happy elements out of life, and rejecting or nullifying the unhappy elements. But this I believe to be a mistake; the happy temperament is not necessarily made unhappy by being plunged in misfortune, while the unhappy temperament has the power of secreting unhappiness out of the most agreeable combination of circumstances. Every one must surely recollect occasions in their own lives when, by all the rules of the game, they ought to have been unhappy, while as a matter of fact they were entirely tranquil and contented. I have been happy in a dentist's chair, and by far the happiest holiday I ever spent in my life was under surroundings of discomfort and squalor such as I never before or since experienced. Those surroundings were certainly not in themselves productive of happiness; but neither did they detract from it. The pathos of the situation is that we all desire happiness—it is merely priggish to pretend that it is otherwise—and that we do not know in the least how to attain it. Some few people go straight for it and reach it; some people find it by turning their back upon what they most desire, and walking in the opposite direction. I had a friend once who made up his mind that to be happy he must make a fortune. He went through absurd privations and endured intolerable labours; he did make a fortune, and retired upon it at an early age, and immediately became a thoroughly unhappy man, having lost all power of enjoying or employing his leisure, and finding himself hopelessly and irremediably bored. Of course, boredom is the surest source of unhappiness, but boredom is not the result of the things we do or avoid doing, but some inner weariness of spirit, which imports itself into occupation and leisure alike, if it is there. There is no nostrum, no receipt for taking it away. A kindly adviser will say to a bored man, "All this discontent comes from thinking too much about yourself; if only you would throw yourself a little into the lives and problems of others, it would all disappear!" Of course it would! But it is just what the bored man cannot do; and the advice is just as practical as to say encouragingly to a man suffering from toothache, "If the pain would only go away, you would soon be well." Ruskin was once consulted by an anxious person, who complained that he was unhappy, and said that he attributed it to the fact that he was so useless. Ruskin replied with trenchant good sense: "It is your duty to try to be innocently happy first, and useful afterwards if you can."

What, then, can we do in the matter? How are we to secure happiness? The answer is that we cannot; that we must take it as it comes, like the sunshine and the spring. Few of us are in a position to alter at a moment's notice the course of our lives. It is more or less laid down for us what paths we have to tread, and in whose company. We can to a certain extent, taught by grim experience of the habits, thoughts, tempers, passions, anticipations, retrospects, that disturb our tranquillity, avoid occasions of stumbling. We can undertake small responsibilities, which we shall be ashamed to neglect; we can, so to speak, diet our minds and hearts, avoiding unwholesome food and debilitating excesses. To a certain extent, I say, for the old fault has a horrid pertinacity, and even when felled in fair fight, has a vile trick of recovering its energies and leaping on us from some ambush by the way, as we saunter, blithely conscious of our victory. It may be a discouraging and an oppressive thought, but the only hope lies in good sense and patience. There are no short cuts; we have to tread every inch of the road.

But we may at least do one thing. We may speak frankly of our experiences, without either pose or concealment. It does us no harm to confess our failures, and it puts courage into other pilgrims, who know at least that they are not alone in their encounters with the hobgoblins. And no less frankly, too, may we speak of the fine things that we have seen and heard by the way, the blue hills and winding waters of which we have caught a glimpse from the brow of the windswept hill, the talk and aspect of other wayfarers whom we have met, the noble buildings of the ancient city, the stately avenue which the dull road intersects unaware, the embowered hamlet, the leafy forest dingle, the bleat of sheep on the dewy upland, the birds' song at evening—all that strikes sharp and clear and desirable upon our fresh or tired sense.

For one thing is certain, that the end is not yet; and that there is something done for the soul both by the morning brightness and the evening heaviness which can be effected in no other way. And in this spirit we may look back on our mistakes, sad as they were, and on our triumphs, which are sometimes sadder still, and know that they were not mere accidents and obstacles which might have been otherwise—they were rather the very stuff and essence of the soul showing through its enfolding garb.

And then, too, if we have suffered, as we all must suffer if we have any heart or blood or brain at all, we can learn the blessed fact of the utter powerlessness of suffering to hurt or darken us. Its horror lies in the continuance of it, in the shuddering anticipation of all we may yet have to endure; but once over, it becomes instantly either like a cloud melting in the blue of heaven, or, better still a joyful memory of a pain that braced and purified. No one ever gives a thought, except a grateful one, to past suffering. If it leaves its handwriting on brow and cheek, it leaves no shadow on the spirit within. It is so easy to see this in the lives of others, however hard it is to realise it for oneself. What interest is there in the record of the life of a perfectly prosperous and equable person? And what inspiration is equal to that which comes when we read the life of one who suffered much, when we see the hope that rose superior to thwarted designs and broken purposes, and the joy that came of realising that not through easy and graceful triumph is the soul made strong? Why does one ask oneself about the dead hero, when his life rounds itself to the view, not whether he had enough of prosperity and honour to content him, but whether he had enough of pain and self-reproach to perfect his humanity? Suffering is no part of the soul; the soul has need to suffer, but it is made to rejoice; and when it has earned its joy, it will abide in it.

And now a word of personal experience. This book is a record of an experiment in happiness. I had the opportunity, and I took it, of arranging my life in every respect exactly as I desired. It was my design to live alone in joy; not to exclude others, but to admit them for my pleasure and at my will. I thought that by desiring little, by sacrificing quantity of delight for quality, I should gain much. And I will as frankly confess that I did not succeed in capturing the tranquillity I desired. I found many pretty jewels by the way, but the pearl of price lay hid.

And yet it would be idle to say that I regret it. I may wish that it had all fallen out otherwise, that things had been more comfortably arranged, that I had been allowed to dream away the days in my hermitage; but it was not to be; and I have at least learned that not thus can the end be attained. The story of my failure cannot be told here, but I hope yet to find strength and skill to tell it. At present I have but endeavoured to catch the texture of the pleasant days, before my visions began to fade about me. And indeed I can say sincerely that those days were happy; but the root of the mistake was this: I have by nature a very keen appetite for the subtle flavours of life, a sense of beauty in simple things, a relish for the absurdities and oddities as well as for the beauties and finenesses of temperament, a critical appreciation of the characteristic qualities of landscapes and buildings, a sense which finds satisfaction as well in such commonplace things as the variety of grotesque vehicles that go to compose a luggage train, or the grass-grown, scarped, water-logged excavations of a brick-field, as in the sharp rock-horns of some craggy mountain, impulsive as a frozen flame, or the soft outlines of fleecy clouds that race over a sapphire heaven. If one is thus endowed by nature, it seems such an easy thing to seclude oneself from life, and to find endless joy in sight and hearing and critical appreciation. Instead of mingling with the throng, marching and fighting, fearing and suffering, it seems easy to stand apart and let nature and art and life unfold itself before one in a rich panorama. But not on such terms can life be lived. One hopes to avoid suffering by aloofness; but there falls upon the spirit a worse sickness than the weariness of toil—the ache of pent-up activities and self-tortured mystifications. The soul becomes involved in a dreary metaphysic, wondering fruitlessly what it is that mars the sweet and beautiful world. The fact is that one is purloining experience instead of paying the natural price for it, estimating things by the outside instead of from the inside, and growing thus to care more for the strangeness, the contrast, the picturesqueness of it all, than for the love and the hope and the elemental forces, of which the world is but the garb and scene.

Here in this book the mind turns from itself and its rest, when it has satisfied its first delight in creating the home, the setting, the scenery, so to speak, of the drama; turns to the men and women who cross the stage, surveys their gestures and glances, interprets their movements and silences; and then winds out into the further distance, the towns, the buildings, the roads, that stand for the designs and desires of pilgrims that have passed into the unknown country, leaving their provender for later hands to use. But the whole book, if I may say it, is the prelude to the further scene, the silent entry of Fate, the coming of the Master to survey the servant's work.

Those pleasant days have a savour of their own for this one reason—that they were not spent in a mere drifting indolence or a luxurious abandonment. They were deliberately planned, intently lived, carefully employed; behind the pleasures lay a great tract of solid work, very diligently pursued. That was to have been the backbone of the whole; and it is for this that I have no sense of regret or contrition about it. It was an experiment; and if in one sense it failed, because it did not take account of energies and elements unused, in another sense it succeeded, because one cannot learn things in this world by hearsay, but only by burning one's fingers in what seemed so comfortable a flame. It was done, too, on the right lines, with the desire not to be dependent upon diversion and stir and business, but to approach life simply and directly, practising for the days of loneliness and decline; and this was the error, that it tried to mould life too much, to select from its material, to reject its dross and debris, to rifle rather than to earn the treasure, to limit hopes, to dip the wings of inconvenient desires.

But it is difficult, without experiment, to realise the strain of living life too much in one mood and in one key. Neither is it the sign of a healthy appetite to be particular about one's food. This I freely admit. I came to see that, trained as I had been in certain habits of life and work, habituated to certain experiences, the savour of the interludes had owed their pungency to their economy and rarity.

And so, like some weft of opalescent mist, the sweet mirage melted in the noonday. What I then saw I will leave to be told hereafter; but it was not what I desired nor what I expected.

What, then, remains of the time of plenty? Not, I am thankful to say, either vanity or vexation of spirit. It was what remains to the ruffled bird, as he shivers in the leafless tree, in which he had sung so loud in the high summer, embowered in greenness and rustling leafage. No sense of the hollowness or sadness of life; but rather a quickened knowledge of its delight and its intensity. It is the same feeling that one has when one speeds swiftly in a train near to some place where one lived long ago, and sees glimpses of familiar woods and roads and houses. One knows well that others are living and working, sauntering and dreaming, in the rooms, the gardens, the paths where one's own energies once ran so swiftly; yet the old life seems to be there all the time, hidden away behind the woods and walls, if one could but find it! But I no more wish my experience away, or wish it otherwise, than I wish I had never loved one who is gone from me, or that I had never heard a strain of sweet music, because it has died upon the air. Because I did not find what I was in search of, or only found a shadow of it, I do not believe that it is not there—the wheat-flour and the honey are in the hand of God. I should have tasted them if I had but walked in His way! Nay, I did taste them; and when He gives me grace to hearken, I shall be fed and satisfied._

Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co. Edinburgh & London



Works by Arthur G. Benson, C.V.O.

MEMOIRS OF ARTHUR HAMILTON. ARCHBISHOP LAUD: A Study. POEMS. LYRICS. ESSAYS. LORD VYET and Other Poems. FASTI ETONENSES. LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP BENSON. THE PROFESSOR and Other Poems. THE SCHOOLMASTER. THE HOUSE OF QUIET. TENNYSON (Little Biographies Series). SELECTIONS FROM WHITTIER. THE HILL OF TROUBLE. THE ISLES OF SUNSET. ROSSETTI (English Men of Letters Series). PEACE and Other Poems. EDWARD FITZGERALD (English Men of Letters Series). THE UPTON LETTERS. THE THREAD OF GOLD. WALTER PATER (English Men of Letters Series). FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW. THE GATE OF DEATH. BESIDE STILL WATERS. THE ALTAR FIRE. AT LARGE. POEMS (Collected). THE SILENT ISLE. RUSKIN: A Study in Personality. THE LEAVES OF THE TREE. THE CHILD OF THE DAWN. PAUL THE MINSTREL and Other Stories. THY ROD AND THY STAFF. ALONG THE ROAD.

With H.F.W. Tatham MEN OF MIGHT.

Edited, with Viscount Esher SELECTIONS FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE OF QUEEN VICTORIA.

THE END