Home > Authors Index > Arthur C. Benson > Upton Letters > This page
The Upton Letters, a non-fiction book by Arthur C. Benson |
||
Upton, Feb. 25, 1904 |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ DEAR HERBERT,--You ask what I have been reading. Well, I have been going through Newman's Apologia for the twentieth time, and as usual have fallen completely under the magical spell of that incomparable style; its perfect lucidity, showing the very shape of the thought within, its simplicity (not, in Newman's case, I think, the result of labour, but of pure instinctive grace), its appositeness, its dignity, its music. I oscillate between supreme contentment as a reader, and envious despair as a writer; it fills one's mind up slowly and richly, as honey fills a vase from some gently tilted bowl. There is no sense of elaborateness about the book; it was written swiftly and easily out of a full heart; then it is such a revelation of a human spirit, a spirit so innocent and devoted and tender, and, moreover, charged with a sweet naive egotism as of a child. It was written, as Newman himself said, IN TEARS; but I do not think they were tears of bitterness, but a half-luxurious sorrow, the pathos of the past and its heavinesses, viewed from a quiet haven. I have no sympathy whatever with the intellectual attitude it reveals, but as Roderick Hudson says, I don't always heed the sense: it is indeed a somewhat melancholy spectacle of a beautiful mind converted in reality by purely aesthetic considerations, by the dignity, the far-off, holy, and venerable associations of the great Church which drew him quietly in, while all the time he is under the impression that it is a logical clue which he is following. And what logic! leaping lightly over difficult places, taking flowery by-paths among the fields, the very stairs on which he treads based on all kinds of wide assumptions and unverifiable hypotheses. Then it is distressing to see his horror of Liberalism, of speculation, of development, of all the things that constitute the primal essence of the very religion that he blindly followed. One cannot help feeling that had Newman been a Pharisee, he would have been, with his love of precedent, and antiquity, and tradition, one of the most determined and deadly opponents of the spirit of Christ. For the spirit of Christ is the spirit of freedom, of elasticity, of unconventionality. Newman would have upheld in the Sanhedrim with pathetic and exquisite eloquence that it was not time to break with the old, that it was miserable treachery to throw over the ancient safeguards of faith, to part with the rich inheritance of the national faith delivered by Abraham and Moses to the saints. Newman was a true fanatic, and the most dangerous of fanatics, because his character was based on innocence and tenderness and instinctive virtue. It is rather pathetic than distressing to see Newman again and again deluded by the antiquity of some petty human logician into believing his utterance to be the very voice of God. The struggle with Newman was not the struggle of faith with scepticism, but the struggle between two kinds of loyalty, the personal loyalty to his own past and his own friends and the Church of his nativity, and the loyalty to the infinitely more ancient and venerable tradition of the Roman Church. It was, as I have said, an aesthetic conversion; he had the mind of a poet, and the particular kind of beauty which appealed to him was not the beauty of nature or art, but the beauty of old tradition and the far-off dim figures of saints and prelates reaching back into the dark and remote past. He had, too, the sublime egotism of the poet. His own salvation--"Shall I be safe if I die to-night?"--that, he confesses, was the thought which eventually outweighed all others. He had little of the priestly hunger to save souls; the way in which others trusted him, confided in him, watched his movements, followed him, was always something of a terror to him, and yet in another mood it ministered to his self-absorption. He had not the stern sense of being absolutely in the right, which is the characteristic of the true leaders of men, but he had a deep sense of his own importance, combined with a perfectly real sense of weakness and humility, which even disguised, I would think, his own egotism from himself. Again his extraordinary forensic power, his verbal logic, his exquisite lucidity of statement, all these concealed from him, as they have concealed from others, his lack of mental independence. He had an astonishing power of submitting to his imagination, a power of believing the impossible, because the exercise of faith seemed to him so beautiful a virtue. It is not a case of a noble mind overthrown, but of the victory of a certain kind of poetical feeling over all rational inquiry. To revert to Newman's literary genius, he seems to me to be one of the few masters of English prose. I used to think, in old University days, that Newman's style was best tested by the fact that if one had a piece of his writing to turn into Latin prose, the more one studied it, turned it over, and penetrated it, the more masterly did it become; because it was not so much the expression of a thought as the thought itself taking shape in a perfectly pure medium of language. Bunyan had the same gift; of later authors Ruskin had it very strongly, and Matthew Arnold in a lesser degree. There is another species of beautiful prose, the prose of Jeremy Taylor, of Pater, even of Stevenson; but this is a slow and elaborate construction, pinched and pulled this way and that; and it is like some gorgeous picture, of stately persons in seemly and resplendent dress, with magnificently wrought backgrounds of great buildings and curious gardens. But the work of Newman and of Ruskin is a white art, like the art of sculpture. I find myself every year desiring and admiring this kind of lucidity and purity more and more. It seems to me that the only function of a writer is to express obscure, difficult, and subtle thoughts easily. But there are writers, like Browning and George Meredith, who seem to hold it a virtue to express simple thoughts obscurely. Such writers have a wide vogue, because so many people do not value a thought unless they can feel a certain glow of satisfaction in having grasped it; and to have disentangled a web of words, and to find the bright thing lying within, gives them a pleasing feeling of conquest, and, moreover, stamps the thought in their memory. But such readers have not the root of the matter in them; the true attitude is the attitude of desiring to apprehend, to progress, to feel. The readers who delight in obscurity, to whom obscurity seems to enhance the value of the thing apprehended, are mixing with the intellectual process a sort of acquisitive and commercial instinct very dear to the British heart. These bewildering and bewildered Browning societies who fling themselves upon Sordello, are infected unconsciously with a virtuous craving for "taking higher ground." Sordello contains many beautiful things, but by omitting the necessary steps in argument, and by speaking of one thing allusively in terms of another, and by a profound desultoriness of thought, the poet produces a blurred and tangled impression. The beauties of Sordello would not lose by being expressed coherently and connectedly. This is the one thing that I try with all my might to impress on boys; that the essence of all style is to say what you mean as forcibly as possible; the bane of classical teaching is that the essence of successful composition is held to be to "get in" words and phrases; it is not a bad training, so long as it is realised to be only a training, in obtaining a rich and flexible vocabulary, so that the writer has a choice of words and the right word comes at call. But this is not made clear in education, and the result on many minds is that they suppose that the essence of good writing is to search diligently for sparkling words and sonorous phrases, and then to patch them into a duller fabric. But I stray from my point: all paths in a schoolmaster's mind lead out upon the educational plain. All that you tell me of your new surroundings is intensely interesting. I am thankful that you feel the characteristic charm of the place, and that the climate seems to suit you. You say nothing of your work; but I suppose that you have had no time as yet. The mere absorbing of new impressions is a fatiguing thing, and no good work can be done until a scene has become familiar. I will discharge your commissions punctually; don't hesitate to tell me what you want. I don't do it from a sense of duty, but it is a positive pleasure for me to have anything to do for you. I long for letters; as soon as possible send me photographs, and not merely inanimate photographs of scenes and places, but be sure that you make a part of them yourself. I want to see you standing, sitting, reading in the new house; and give me an exact and detailed account of your day, please; the food you eat, the clothes you wear; you know my insatiable appetite for trifles.--Ever yours, T. B. _ |
||