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The Upton Letters, a non-fiction book by Arthur C. Benson |
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Upton, Oct. 5, 1904 |
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_ DEAR HERBERT,--It is autumn now with us, the sweetest season of the year to a polar bear like myself. Of course, Spring is ravishingly, enchantingly beautiful, but she brings a languor with her, and there are the hot months to be lived through, treading close on her heels. But now the summer is over and done; the long firelit evenings are coming, and, as if to console one for the loss of summer beauty, the whole world blazes out into a rich funeral pomp. I walked to-day with a friend to a place not far away, a great, moated house in a big, ancient park. We left the town, held on through the wretched gradations of suburbanity, and then, a few hundred yards from the business-like, treeless high-road, the coverts came in sight. There is always a dim mystery about a close-set wood showing its front across the fields. It always seems to me like a silent battalion guarding some secret thing. We left the high-road and soon were in the wood--the dripping woodways, all strewn with ruinous gold, opening to right and left; and soon the roofs and towers of the big house--Puginesque Gothic, I must tell you--came in sight. But those early builders of the romantic revival, though they loved stucco and shallow niches, had somehow a sense of mass. It pleases me to know that the great Sir Walter himself had a hand in the building of this very house, planned the barbican and the water-gate. All round the house lies a broad moat of black water, full of innumerable carp. The place was breathlessly still; only the sharp melancholy cries of water-birds and the distant booming of guns broke the silence. The water was all sprinkled with golden leaves, that made a close carpet round the sluices; the high elms were powdered with gold; the chestnuts showed a rustier red. A silent gardener, raking leaves with ancient leisureliness, was the only sign of life--he might have been a spirit for all the sound he made; while the big house blinked across the rich clumps of Michaelmas daisies, and the dark windows showed a flicker of fire darting upon the walls. Everything seemed mournful, yet contented, dying serenely and tranquilly, with a great and noble dignity. I wish I could put into words the sweet solemnity, the satisfying gravity of the scene; it was like the sight of a beautiful aged face that testifies to an inner spirit which has learnt patience, tenderness, and trustfulness from experience, and is making ready, without fear or anxiety, for the last voyage. I say gratefully that this is one of the benefits of growing older, that these beautiful things seem to speak more and more instantly to the mind. Perhaps the faculty of eager enjoyment is somewhat blunted; but the appeal, the sweetness, the pathos, the mystery of the world, as life goes on, fall far oftener and with far more of a magical spell upon the heart. We walked for a while by a bridge, where the stream out of the moat ran hoarsely, choked with drift, in its narrow walls. That melancholy and sobbing sound seemed only to bring out more forcibly the utter silence of the tall trees and the sky above them; light wreaths of mist lay over the moat, and we could see far across the rough pasture, with a few scattered oaks of immemorial age standing bluff and gnarled among the grass. The time of fresh spring showers, of sailing clouds, of basking summer heat, was over--so said the grey, gentle sky--what was left but to let the sap run backward to its secret home, to rest, to die? With such sober and stately acquiescence would I await the end, not grudgingly, not impatiently, but in a kind of solemn glory, with gratitude and love and trust. My companion of that day was Vane, one of my colleagues, and we had discussed a dozen of the small interests and problems that make up our busy life at this restless place; but a silence fell upon us now. The curtain of life was for a moment drawn aside, the hangings that wrap us round, and we looked for an instant into the vast and starlit silences, the formless, ancient dark, where a thousand years are but as yesterday, and into which the countless generations of men have marched, one after another. That is a solemn, but hardly a despairing thought; for something is being wrought out in the silence, something of which we may not be conscious, but which is surely there. Could we but lay that cool and mighty thought closer to our spirits! That impenetrable mystery ought to give us courage, to let us rest, as it were, within a mighty arm. Behind and beyond the precisest creed that great mystery lies; the bewildering question as to how it is possible for our own atomic life to be so sharply defined and bounded from the life of the world--why the frail tabernacle in which we move should be thus intensely our own, and all outside it apart from us. Yet in days like this calm autumn day one seems to draw a little closer to the mystery, to take a nearer share in the great and wide inheritance, to be less of ourselves and more of God.--Ever yours, T. B. _ |
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