The Silent Isle. Benson Arthur Christopher

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Indeed, there seems no influx of life at all, nothing but a quiet interchange of voyagers. Promotion arrives from no point of the compass; nothing but a little tide of homely life ebbs and flows in these elm-girt villages above the fen. Of course, the anxious and expectant heart carries its own restlessness everywhere; but to read of the rush and stress of life in these grassy solitudes seems like the telling of an idle tale. And then the silence of the place! The sounds of life have a value and a distinctness here that I have never known elsewhere. I have lived much of my life in towns; and there, even if one is not conscious of distinct sound, there is a blurred sense of movement in the air, which dulls the ear. But here the sharp song of the yellow-hammer from the hedge, or the cry of the owl from the spinney, come pure and keen through the thin air, purged of all uncertain murmurs. I can hear, it seems, a mile away, the rumble of the long procession of red mud-stained field-carts, or the humming of the threshing-gear; or the chatter of children on the farm-road beyond my shrubberies breaks clear and jocund on the ear. I become conscious here of how noisily and hurriedly I have lived my life; happily enough, I will confess; but the thought of it all—the class-room, the street, the playing-field—bright and vivacious as it all was, seems now like a boisterous prelude of blaring brass and tingling string, which lapses into some delicate economy of sweet melody and gliding chord. It has its shadows, I do not doubt, this Silent Isle; but to-day at least it is all still and translucent as its clear-moving quiet waters, free as its vaulted sky, rich as its endless plain.

      It is not that I mean to be idle here! I have my web to weave; I have my lucid mirror. But instead of scrambling and peeping, I mean to see it all clearly and tranquilly, without dust and noise. I have lived laboriously and hastily for twenty years; and surely there is a time for garnering the harvest and for reckoning up the store? I want to see behind it all, into the meaning of it all, if I can. Surely when we are bidden to consider the lilies of the field, and told that they neither toil nor spin, it is not that we may turn aside from them in scorn, and choose rather to grow rank and strong, bulging like swedes, shoulder by shoulder, in the gross furrow. It is not as though we content ourselves with the necessary work of the world; we multiply vain activities, we turn the songs of poets and the words of the wise into dumb-bells to toughen our intellectual muscles; we make our pastimes into envious rivalries and furious emulations; and when we have poured out our contempt upon a few quiet-minded dreamers for their lack of spirit, scarified a few lovers of leisure for their absence of ability, ploughed up a few pretty wastes where the field-flowers grew as they would, bred up a few hundred gay golden birds, that we may gloat over the thought of striking them blood-bedabbled out of the sky on a winter afternoon, we think complacently of the Kingdom of God, and all we have done so diligently to hasten its coming.

      There is a pleasant story of a man who was asked by an ardent missionary for a subscription to some enterprise or other in the ends of the earth. The man produced a shilling and a sovereign. "Here is a shilling for the work," he said, "and here is a sovereign to get it out there!" That seems to me an allegory of much of our Western work. So little of it direct benefit, so much of it indirect transit! When I was a schoolmaster, it always seemed to me that nine-tenths of what we did was looking over work which we had given the boys to do to fill up their time, and to keep them, as we used to say, out of mischief. The worst of bringing up boys on that system is that they require to be kept out of mischief all their life long; and yet the worst kind of mischief, after all, may be to fill life with useless occupations. There are two ways of going out into your garden. You may walk out straight from the bow-window on to the lawn; or you may go out into the street, take the first turn to the right, then the next to the right, and let yourself in at the back-garden door. But there is no merit in that! It is not a thing to be complacent about; still less does it justify you in saying to the simple person who prefers the direct course that the world is getting lazy and decadent and is always trying to save itself trouble. The point is to have lived, not to have been merely occupied. I remember once, when I was an undergraduate, staying at a place in Scotland for a summer holiday. There were all sorts of pleasant things to be done, and we were there to amuse ourselves. One evening it was suggested that we should go out yachting on the following day. I agreed to go, but being a miserable sailor, added that I should only go if it were fine. We were to start early, and when I was called and found it an ugly, gusty morning I went gratefully back to bed, and spent the rest of the day fishing. There was a dreadful, strenuous old Colonel staying in the house; he had been with the yachting party, and they had had a very disagreeable day. That evening in the smoking-room, when we were recounting our adventures, the old wretch said to me: "Now I should like to give you a piece of advice. You said you would go with us, and shirked because you were afraid of a bit of wind. You must excuse an older man who knows something of the world saying straight out that that sort of thing won't do. Make up your mind and stick to it; that's a golden rule." It was in vain that I said that I had never intended to go if it was windy, and that I should have been ill the whole time. "Ah, that's what I call cry-baby talk," said the old ruffian; "I always say that if a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing thoroughly." I said meekly that I should certainly have been thoroughly sea-sick, but that I did not think it was worth while being sea-sick at all. At which he felt very much nettled, and said that it was effeminate. I was very much humiliated, but not in the least convinced; and I am afraid that I enjoyed the most unchristian exultation when, two or three days after, the Colonel insisted on walking to the deer-forest, instead of riding the pony that was offered him; in consequence of which he not only lost half the day, but got so dreadfully tired that he missed two stags in succession, and came home empty-handed, full of excellent excuses, and more pragmatical than ever.

      Of course, a man has to decide for himself. If he does not desire leisure, if he finds it wearisome and mischievous, he had better not cultivate it; if his conscience tells him that he must go on with a particular work, he had better simply obey the command. But it is very easy to educate a false conscience in these matters by mere habit; and if you play tricks with your mind or your conscience habitually, it has an ugly habit of ending by playing tricks upon you, like the Old Man of the Sea. The false conscience is satisfied and the real conscience drugged, if a person with a sense of duty to others fills up his time with unnecessary letters and useless interviews; worse still if he goes about proclaiming with complacent pride that his work gives him no time to read or think. If he has any responsibility in the matter, if it is his business to help or direct others, he ought to be sure that he has something to give them beyond platitudes which he has not tested. In the story of Mary and Martha, which is a very mysterious one, it is quite clear that Martha was rebuked, not for being hospitable, but for being fussy; but it is not at all clear what Mary was praised for—certainly not for being useful. She was not praised for visiting the sick, or for attending committees, but apparently for doing nothing—for sitting still, for listening to talk, and for being interested. Presumably both were sympathetic, and Martha showed it by practical kindness, and attention to the knives and the plates. But what was the one thing needful? What was the good part, which Mary had chosen, and which would not be taken from her? The truth is that there is very little said about active work in the Gospel. It is, indeed, rather made fun of, if one may use such an expression. There is a great deal about simple kindness and neighbourliness, but nothing about making money, or social organisation. In a poor village community the problem was no doubt an easier one; but in our more complicated civilisation it is not so easy to see how to act. Suppose that I am seized with a sudden impulse of benevolence, what am I to do? In the old storybooks one took a portion of one's dinner to a sick person, or went to read aloud to some one. But it is not so easy to find the right people. If I set off here on a round with a slop-basin containing apple fritters, my intrusion would be generally and rightly resented; and as for being read aloud to or visited when I am ill, there is nothing I should personally dislike more than a succession of visitors bent on benevolence. I might put up with it if I felt that it sprung from a genuine affection, but if I felt it was done from a sense of duty, it would be an intolerable addition to my troubles. Many people in grief and trouble only desire not to be interfered with, and to be left alone, and when they want sympathy they know how and where to ask for it. Personally I do not want sympathy at all if I am in trouble, because it only makes me suffer more; the real comfort under such circumstances is when people behave quite naturally, as if there were no troubles in the world; then one has to try to behave decently, and that is one's best chance of forgetting СКАЧАТЬ