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- Herausgeber: Krill Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Seitenzahl: 345
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FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW
Arthur Christopher Benson
DOSSIER PRESS
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This book is a work of nonfiction and is intended to be factually accurate.
All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.
Copyright © 2016 by Arthur Christopher Benson
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
I: THE POINT OF VIEW
II: ON GROWING OLDER
III: BOOKS
IV: SOCIABILITIES
V: CONVERSATION
VI: BEAUTY
VII: ART
VIII: EGOTISM
IX: EDUCATION
X: AUTHORSHIP
XI: THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS
XII: PRIESTS
XIII: AMBITION
XIV: THE SIMPLE LIFE
XV: GAMES
XVI: SPIRITUALISM
XVII: HABITS
XVIII: RELIGION
From a College Window
By
Arthur Christopher Benson
From a College Window
Published by Dossier Press
New York City, NY
First published circa 1925
Copyright © Dossier Press, 2015
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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I: THE POINT OF VIEW
I HAVE LATELY COME TO perceive that the one thing which gives value to any piece of art, whether it be book, or picture, or music, is that subtle and evasive thing which is called personality. No amount of labour, of zest, even of accomplishment, can make up for the absence of this quality. It must be an almost wholly instinctive thing, I believe. Of course, the mere presence of personality in a work of art is not sufficient, because the personality revealed may be lacking in charm; and charm, again, is an instinctive thing. No artist can set out to capture charm; he will toil all the night and take nothing; but what every artist can and must aim at, is to have a perfectly sincere point of view. He must take his chance as to whether his point of view is an attractive one; but sincerity is the one indispensable thing. It is useless to take opinions on trust, to retail them, to adopt them; they must be formed, created, truly felt. The work of a sincere artist is almost certain to have some value; the work of an insincere artist is of its very nature worthless.
I mean to try, in the pages that follow, to be as sincere as I can. It is not an easy task, though it may seem so; for it means a certain disentangling of the things that one has perceived and felt for oneself from the prejudices and preferences that have been inherited, or stuck like burrs upon the soul by education and circumstance.
It may be asked why I should thus obtrude my point of view in print; why I should not keep my precious experience to myself; what the value of it is to other people. Well, the answer to that is that it helps our sense of balance and proportion to know how other people are looking at life, what they expect from it, what they find in it, and what they do not find. I have myself an intense curiosity about other people’s point of view, what they do when they are alone, and what they think about. Edward FitzGerald said that he wished we had more biographies of obscure persons. How often have I myself wished to ask simple, silent, deferential people, such as station-masters, butlers, gardeners, what they make of it all! Yet one cannot do it, and even if one could, ten to one they would not or could not tell you. But here is going to be a sedate confession. I am going to take the world into my confidence, and say, if I can, what I think and feel about the little bit of experience which I call my life, which seems to me such a strange and often so bewildering a thing.
Let me speak, then, plainly of what that life has been, and tell what my point of view is. I was brought up on ordinary English lines. My father, in a busy life, held a series of what may be called high official positions. He was an idealist, who, owing to a vigorous power of practical organization and a mastery of detail, was essentially a man of affairs. Yet he contrived to be a student too. Thus, owing to the fact that he often shifted his headquarters, I have seen a good deal of general society in several parts of England. Moreover, I was brought up in a distinctly intellectual atmosphere.
I was at a big public school, and gained a scholarship at the University. I was a moderate scholar and a competent athlete; but I will add that I had always a strong literary bent. I took in younger days little interest in history or polities, and tended rather to live an inner life in the region of friendship and the artistic emotions. If I had been possessed of private means, I should, no doubt, have become a full-fledged dilettante. But that doubtful privilege was denied me, and for a good many years I lived a busy and fairly successful life as a master at a big public school. I will not dwell upon this, but I will say that I gained a great interest in the science of education, and acquired profound misgivings as to the nature of the intellectual process known by the name of secondary education. More and more I began to perceive that it is conducted on diffuse, detailed, unbusiness-like lines. I tried my best, as far as it was consistent with loyalty to an established system, to correct the faulty bias. But it was with a profound relief that I found myself suddenly provided with a literary task of deep interest, and enabled to quit my scholastic labours. At the same time, I am deeply grateful for the practical experience I was enabled to gain, and even more for the many true and pleasant friendships with colleagues, parents, and boys that I was allowed to form.
What a waste of mental energy it is to be careful and troubled about one’s path in life! Quite unexpectedly, at this juncture, came my election to a college Fellowship, giving me the one life that I had always eagerly desired, and the possibility of which had always seemed closed to me.
I became then a member of a small and definite society, with a few prescribed duties, just enough, so to speak, to form a hem to my life of comparative leisure. I had acquired and kept, all through my life as a schoolmaster, the habit of continuous literary work; not from a sense of duty, but simply from instinctive pleasure. I found myself at once at home in my small and beautiful college, rich with all kinds of ancient and venerable traditions, in buildings of humble and subtle grace. The little dark-roofed chapel, where I have a stall of my own; the galleried hall, with its armorial glass; the low, book-lined library; the panelled combination-room, with its dim portraits of old worthies: how sweet a setting for a quiet life! Then, too, I have my own spacious rooms, with a peaceful outlook into a big close, half orchard, half garden, with bird-haunted thickets and immemorial trees, bounded by a slow river.
And then, to teach me how “to borrow life and not grow old,” the happy tide of fresh and vigorous life all about me, brisk, confident, cheerful young men, friendly, sensible, amenable, at that pleasant time when the world begins to open its rich pages of experience, undimmed at present by anxiety or care.
My college is one of the smallest in the University. Last night in Hall I sate next a distinguished man, who is, moreover, very accessible and pleasant. He unfolded to me his desires for the University. He would like to amalgamate all the small colleges into groups, so as to have about half-a-dozen colleges in all. He said, and evidently thought, that little colleges are woefully circumscribed and petty places; that most of the better men go to the two or three leading colleges, while the little establishments are like small backwaters out of the main stream. They elect, he said, their own men to Fellowships; they resist improvements; much money is wasted in management, and the whole thing is minute and feeble. I am afraid it is true in a way; but, on the other hand, I think that a large college has its defects too. There is no real college spirit there; it is very nice for two or three sets. But the different schools which supply a big college form each its own set there; and if a man goes there from a leading public school, he falls into his respective set, lives under the traditions and in the gossip of his old school, and gets to know hardly any one from other schools. Then the men who come up from smaller places just form small inferior sets of their own, and really get very little good out of the place. Big colleges keep up their prestige because the best men tend to go to them; but I think they do very little for the ordinary men who have fewer social advantages to start with.
The only cure, said my friend, for these smaller places is to throw their Fellowships open, and try to get public-spirited and liberal-minded Dons. Then, he added, they ought to specialize in some one branch of University teaching, so that the men who belonged to a particular department would tend to go there.
Well, to-day was a wet day, so I did what I particularly enjoy—I went off for a slow stroll, and poked about among some of the smaller colleges. I declare that the idea of tying them all together seemed to me to be a horrible piece of vandalism. These sweet and gentle little places, with a quiet, dignified history and tradition of their own, are very attractive and beautiful. I went and explored a little college I am ashamed to say I had never visited before. It shows a poor plastered front to the street, but the old place is there behind the plaster. I went into a tiny, dark chapel, with a high pillared pediment of carved wood behind the altar, a rich ceiling, and some fine columned alcoves where the dignitaries sit. Out of the gallery opens a venerable library, with a regretful air of the past about its faded volumes in their high presses, as though it sadly said, “I am of yesterday.” Then we found ourselves in a spacious panelled Hall, with a great oriel looking out into a peaceful garden, embowered in great trees, with smiling lawns. All round the Hall hung portraits of old worthies—peers, judges, and bishops, with some rubicund wigged Masters. I like to think of the obscure and yet dignified lives that have been lived in these quaint and stately chambers. I suppose that there used to be a great deal of tippling and low gossip in the old days of the vinous, idle Fellows, who hung on for life, forgetting their books, and just trying to dissipate boredom. One tends to think that it was all like that; and yet, doubtless, there were quiet lives of study and meditation led here by wise and simple men who have long since mouldered into dust. And all that dull rioting is happily over. The whole place is full of activity and happiness. There is, if anything, among the Dons, too much business, too many meetings, too much teaching, and the life of mere study is neglected. But it pleases me to think that even now there are men who live quietly among their books, unambitious, perhaps unproductive, but forgetting the flight of time, and looking out into a pleasant garden, with its rustling trees, among the sound of mellow bells. We are, most of us, too much in a fuss nowadays to live these gentle, innocent, and beautiful lives; and yet the University is a place where a poor man, if he be virtuous, may lead a life of dignity and simplicity, and refined happiness. We make the mistake of thinking that all can be done by precept, when, as a matter of fact, example is no less potent a force. To make such quiet lives possible was to a great extent what these stately and beautiful places were founded for—that there should be in the busy world a corner where activities should not be so urgent, and where life should pass like an old dream, tinged with delicate colour and soft sound. I declare I do not know that it is more virtuous to be a clerk in a bank, toiling day by day that others should be rich, than to live in thought and meditation, with a heart open to sweet influences and pure hopes. And yet it seems to be held nowadays that virtue is bound up with practical life. If a man is content to abjure wealth and to forego marriage, to live simply without luxuries, he may spend a very dignified, gentle life here, and at the same time he may be really useful. It is a thing which is well worth doing to attempt the reconciliation between the old and the young. Boys come up here under the impression that their pastors and teachers are all about fifty; they think of them as sensible, narrow-minded men, and, like Melchizedek, without beginning of days or end of life. They suppose that they like marking mistakes in exercises with blue pencil, and take delight in showing their power by setting punishments. It does not often occur to them that schoolmasters may be pathetically anxious to guide boys right, and to guard them from evil. They think of them as devoid of passions and prejudices, with a little dreary space to traverse before they sink into the tomb. Even in homes, how seldom does a perfectly simple human relation exist between a boy and his father! There is often a great deal of affection on both sides, but little camaraderie. Little boys are odd, tiresome creatures in many ways, with savage instincts; and I suppose many fathers feel that, if they are to maintain their authority, they must be a little distant and inscrutable. A boy goes for sympathy and companionship to his mother and sisters, not often to his father. Now a Don may do something to put this straight, if he has the will. One of the best friends I ever had was an elderly Don at my own college, who had been a contemporary of my father’s. He liked young men; and I used to consult him and ask his advice in things in which I could not well consult my own contemporaries. It is not necessary to be extravagantly youthful, to slap people on the back, to run with the college boat, though that is very pleasant if it is done naturally. All that is wanted is to be accessible and quietly genial. And under such influences a young man may, without becoming elderly, get to understand the older point of view.
The difficulty is that one acquires habits and mannerisms; one is crusty and gruff if interfered with. But, as Pater said, to acquire habits is failure in life. Of course, one must realize limitations, and learn in what regions one can be effective. But no one need be case-hardened, smoke-dried, angular. The worst of a University is that one sees men lingering on because they must earn a living, and there is nothing else that they can do; but for a human-hearted, good-humoured, and sensible man, a college life is a life where it is easy and pleasant to practise benevolence and kindliness, and where a small investment of trouble pays a large percentage of happiness. Indeed, surveying it impartially—as impartially as I can—such a life seems to hold within it perhaps the greatest possibilities of happiness that life can hold. To have leisure and a degree of simple stateliness assured; to live in a wholesome dignity; to have the society of the young and generous; to have lively and intelligent talk; to have the choice of society and solitude alike; to have one’s working hours respected, and one’s leisure hours solaced—is not this better than to drift into the so-called tide of professional success, with its dreary hours of work, its conventional domestic background? No doubt the domestic background has its interests, its delights; but one must pay a price for everything, and I am more than willing to pay the price of celibacy for my independence.
The elderly Don in college rooms, interested in Greek particles, grumbling over his port wine, is a figure beloved by writers of fiction as a contrast to all that is brave, and bright, and wholesome in life. Could there be a more hopeless misconception? I do not know a single extant example of the species at the University. Personally, I have no love for Greek particles, and only a very moderate taste for port wine. But I do love, with all my heart, the grace of antiquity that mellows our crumbling courts, the old tradition of multifarious humanity that has century by century entwined itself with the very fabric of the place. I love the youthful spirit that flashes and brightens in every corner of the old courts, as the wallflower that rises spring by spring with its rich orange-tawny hue, its wild scent, on the tops of our mouldering walls. It is a gracious and beautiful life for all who love peace and reflection, strength and youth. It is not a life for fiery and dominant natures, eager to conquer, keen to impress; but it is a life for any one who believes that the best rewards are not the brightest, who is willing humbly to lend a cheerful hand, to listen as well as to speak. It is a life for any one who has found that there is a world of tender, wistful, delicate emotions, subdued and soft impressions, in which it is peace to live; for one who has learned, however dimly, that wise and faithful love, quiet and patient hope, are the bread by which the spirit is nourished—that religion is not an intellectual or even an ecclesiastical thing, but a far-off and remote vision of the soul.
I know well the thoughts and hopes that I should desire to speak; but they are evasive, subtle things, and too often, like shy birds, will hardly let you approach them. But I would add that life has not been for me a dreamy thing, lived in soft fantastic reveries; indeed, it has been far the reverse. I have practised activity, I have mixed much with my fellows; I have taught, worked, organized, directed. I have watched men and boys; I have found infinite food for mirth, for interest, and even for grief. But I have grown to feel that the ambitions which we preach and the successes for which we prepare are very often nothing but a missing of the simple road, a troubled wandering among thorny by-paths and dark mountains. I have grown to believe that the one thing worth aiming at is simplicity of heart and life; that one’s relations with others should be direct and not diplomatic; that power leaves a bitter taste in the mouth; that meanness, and hardness, and coldness are the unforgivable sins; that conventionality is the mother of dreariness; that pleasure exists not in virtue of material conditions, but in the joyful heart; that the world is a very interesting and beautiful place; that congenial labour is the secret of happiness; and many other things which seem, as I write them down, to be dull and trite commonplaces, but are for me the bright jewels which I have found beside the way.
It is, then, from College Windows that I look forth. But even so, though on the one hand I look upon the green and sheltered garden, with its air of secluded recollection and repose, a place of quiet pacing to and fro, of sober and joyful musing; yet on another side I see the court, with all its fresh and shifting life, its swift interchange of study and activity; and on yet another side I can observe the street where the infinite pageant of humanity goes to and fro, a tide full of sound and foam, of business and laughter, and of sorrow too, and sickness, and the funeral pomp of death.
This, then, is my point of view. I can truthfully say that it is not gloomy, and equally that it is not uproarious. I can boast of no deep philosophy, for I feel, like Dr. Johnson’s simple friend Edwards, that “I have tried, too, in my time, to be a philosopher, but—I don’t know how—cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Neither is it the point of view of a profound and erudite student, with a deep belief in the efficacy of useless knowledge. Neither am I a humorist, for I have loved beauty better than laughter; nor a sentimentalist, for I have abhorred a weak dalliance with personal emotions. It is hard, then, to say what I am; but it is my hope that this may emerge. My desire is but to converse with my readers, to speak as in a comfortable tete-a-tete, of experience, and hope, and patience. I have no wish to disguise the hard and ugly things of life; they are there, whether one disguises them or not; but I think that unless one is a professed psychologist or statistician, one gets little good by dwelling upon them. I have always believed that it is better to stimulate than to correct, to fortify rather than to punish, to help rather than to blame. If there is one attitude that I fear and hate more than another it is the attitude of the cynic. I believe with all my soul in romance: that is, in a certain high-hearted, eager dealing with life. I think that one ought to expect to find things beautiful and people interesting, not to take delight in detecting meannesses and failures. And there is yet another class of temperament for which I have a deep detestation. I mean the assured, the positive, the Pharisaical temper, that believes itself to be impregnably in the right and its opponents indubitably in the wrong; the people who deal in axioms and certainties, who think that compromise is weak and originality vulgar. I detest authority in every form; I am a sincere republican. In literature, in art, in life, I think that the only conclusions worth coming to are one’s own conclusions. If they march with the verdict of the connoisseurs, so much the better for the connoisseurs; if they do not so march, so much the better for oneself. Every one cannot admire and love everything; but let a man look at things fairly and without prejudice, and make his own selection, holding to it firmly, but not endeavouring to impose his taste upon others; defending, if needs be, his preferences, but making no claim to authority.
The time of my life that I consider to have been wasted, from the intellectual point of view, was the time when I tried, in a spirit of dumb loyalty, to admire all the things that were said to be admirable. Better spent was the time when I was finding out that much that had received the stamp of the world’s approval was not to be approved, at least by me; best of all was the time when I was learning to appraise the value of things to myself, and learning to love them for their own sake and mine.
Respect of a deferential and constitutional type is out of place in art and literature. It is a good enough guide to begin one’s pilgrimage with, if one soon parts company from it. Rather one must learn to give honour where honour is due, to bow down in true reverence before all spirits that are noble and adorable, whether they wear crowns and bear titles of honour, or whether they are simple and unnoted persons, who wear no gold on their garments.
Sincerity and simplicity! if I could only say how I reverence them, how I desire to mould my life in accordance with them! And I would learn, too, swiftly to detect the living spirits, whether they be young or old, in which these great qualities reign.
For I believe that there is in life a great and guarded city, of which we may be worthy to be citizens. We may, if we are blest, be always of the happy number, by some kindly gift of God; but we may also, through misadventure and pain, through errors and blunders, learn the way thither. And sometimes we discern the city afar off, with her radiant spires and towers, her walls of strength, her gates of pearl; and there may come a day, too, when we have found the way thither, and enter in; happy if we go no more out, but happy, too, even if we may not rest there, because we know that, however far we wander, there is always a hearth for us and welcoming smiles.
I speak in a parable, but those who are finding the way will understand me, however dimly; and those who have found the way, and seen a little of the glory of the place, will smile at the page and say: “So he, too, is of the city.”
The city is known by many names, and wears different aspects to different hearts. But one thing is certain—that no one who has entered there is ever in any doubt again. He may wander far from the walls, he may visit it but rarely, but it stands there in peace and glory, the one true and real thing for him in mortal time and in whatever lies beyond.
II: ON GROWING OLDER
THE SUN FLARES RED BEHIND leafless elms and battlemented towers as I come in from a lonely walk beside the river; above the chimney-tops hangs a thin veil of drifting smoke, blue in the golden light. The games in the Common are just coming to an end; a stream of long-coated spectators sets towards the town, mingled with the parti-coloured, muddied figures of the players. I have been strolling half the afternoon along the river bank, watching the boats passing up and down; hearing the shrill cries of coxes, the measured plash of oars, the rhythmical rattle of rowlocks, intermingled at intervals with the harsh grinding of the chain-ferries. Five-and-twenty years ago I was rowing here myself in one of these boats, and I do not wish to renew the experience. I cannot conceive why and in what moment of feeble good-nature or misapplied patriotism I ever consented to lend a hand. I was not a good oar, and did not become a better one; I had no illusions about my performance, and any momentary complacency was generally sternly dispelled by the harsh criticism of the coach on the bank, when we rested for a moment to receive our meed of praise or blame. But though I have no sort of wish to repeat the process, to renew the slavery which I found frankly and consistently intolerable, I find myself looking on at the cheerful scene with an amusement in which mingles a shadow of pain, because I feel that I have parted with something, a certain buoyancy and elasticity of body, and perhaps spirit, of which I was not conscious at the time, but which I now realize that I must have possessed. It is with an admiration mingled with envy that I see these youthful, shapely figures, bare-necked and bare-kneed, swinging rhythmically past. I watch a brisk crew lift a boat out of the water by a boat-house; half of them duck underneath to get hold of the other side, and they march up the grating gravel in a solemn procession. I see a pair of cheerful young men, released from tubbing, execute a wild and inconsequent dance upon the water’s edge; I see a solemn conference of deep import between a stroke and a coach. I see a neat, clean-limbed young man go airily up to a well-earned tea, without, I hope, a care, or an anxiety in his mind, expecting and intending to spend an agreeable evening. “Oh, Jones of Trinity, oh, Smith of Queen’s,” I think to myself, “tua si bona noris! Make the best of the good time, my boy, before you go off to the office, or the fourth-form room, or the country parish! Live virtuously, make honest friends, read the good old books, lay up a store of kindly recollections, of firelit rooms in venerable courts, of pleasant talks, of innocent festivities. Very fresh is the cool morning air, very fragrant is the newly-lighted bird’s-eye, very lively is the clink of knives and forks, very keen is the savour of the roast beef that floats up to the dark rafters of the College Hall. But the days are short and the terms are few; and do not forget to be a sensible as well as a good-humoured young man!”
Thackeray, in a delightful ballad, invites a pretty page to wait till he comes to forty years: well, I have waited—indeed, I have somewhat overshot the mark—and to-day the sight of all this brisk life, going on just as it used to do, with the same insouciance and the same merriment, makes me wish to reflect, to gather up the fragments, to see if it is all loss, all declension, or whether there is something left, some strength in what remains behind.
I have a theory that one ought to grow older in a tranquil and appropriate way, that one ought to be perfectly contented with one’s time of life, that amusements and pursuits ought to alter naturally and easily, and not be regretfully abandoned. One ought not to be dragged protesting from the scene, catching desperately at every doorway and balustrade; one should walk off smiling. It is easier said than done. It is not a pleasant moment when a man first recognizes that he is out of place in the football field, that he cannot stoop with the old agility to pick up a skimming stroke to cover-point, that dancing is rather too heating to be decorous, that he cannot walk all day without undue somnolence after dinner, or rush off after a heavy meal without indigestion. These are sad moments which we all of us reach, but which are better laughed over than fretted over. And a man who, out of sheer inability to part from boyhood, clings desperately and with apoplectic puffings to these things is an essentially grotesque figure. To listen to young men discussing one of these my belated contemporaries, and to hear one enforcing on another the amusement to be gained from watching the old buffer’s manoeuvres, is a lesson against undue youthfulness. One can indeed give amusement without loss of dignity, by being open to being induced to join in such things occasionally in an elderly way, without any attempt to disguise deficiencies. But that is the most that ought to be attempted. Perhaps the best way of all is to subside into the genial and interested looker-on, to be ready to applaud the game you cannot play, and to admire the dexterity you cannot rival.
What then, if any, are the gains that make up for the lack of youthful prowess? They are, I can contentedly say, many and great. In the first place, there is the loss of a quality which is productive of an extraordinary amount of pain among the young, the quality of self-consciousness. How often was one’s peace of mind ruined by gaucherie, by shyness, by the painful consciousness of having nothing to say, and the still more painful consciousness of having said the wrong thing in the wrong way! Of course, it was all immensely exaggerated. If one went into chapel, for instance, with a straw hat, which one had forgotten to remove, over a surplice, one had the feeling for several days that it was written in letters of fire on every wall. I was myself an ardent conversationalist in early years, and, with the charming omniscience of youth, fancied that my opinion was far better worth having than the opinions of Dons encrusted with pedantry and prejudice. But if I found myself in the society of these petrified persons, by the time that I had composed a suitable remark, the slender opening had already closed, and my contribution was either not uttered at all, or hopelessly belated in its appearance. Or some deep generalization drawn from the dark backward of my vast experience would be produced, and either ruthlessly ignored or contemptuously corrected by some unsympathetic elder of unyielding voice and formed opinions. And then there was the crushing sense, at the conclusion of one of these interviews, of having been put down as a tiresome and heavy young man. I fully believed in my own liveliness and sprightliness, but it seemed an impossible task to persuade my elders that these qualities were there. A good-natured, elderly friend used at times to rally me upon my shyness, and say that it all came from thinking too much about myself. It was as useless as if one told a man with a toothache that it was mere self-absorption that made him suffer. For I have no doubt that the disease of self-consciousness is incident to intelligent youth. Marie Bashkirtseff, in the terrible self-revealing journals which she wrote, describes a visit that she paid to some one who had expressed an interest in her and a desire to see her. She says that as she passed the threshold of the room she breathed a prayer, “O God, make me worth seeing!” How often used one to desire to make an impression, to make oneself felt and appreciated!
Well, all that uneasy craving has left me. I no longer have any particular desire for or expectation of being impressive. One likes, of course, to feel fresh and lively; but whereas in the old days I used to enter a circle with the intention of endeavouring to be felt, of giving pleasure and interest, I now go in the humble hope of receiving either. The result is that, having got rid to a great extent of this pompous and self-regarding attitude of mind, I not only find myself more at ease, but I also find other people infinitely more interesting. Instead of laying one’s frigate alongside of another craft with the intention of conducting a boarding expedition, one pays a genial visit by means of the long-boat with all the circumstance of courtesy and amiability. instead of desiring to make conquests, I am glad enough to be tolerated. I dare, too, to say what I think, not alert for any symptoms of contradiction, but fully aware that my own point of view is but one of many, and quite prepared to revise it. In the old days I demanded agreement; I am now amused by divergence. In the old days I desired to convince; I am now only too thankful to be convinced of error and ignorance. I now no longer shrink from saying that I know nothing of a subject; in old days I used to make a pretence of omniscience, and had to submit irritably to being tamely unmasked. It seems to me that I must have been an unpleasant young man enough, but I humbly hope that I was not so disagreeable as might appear.
Another privilege of advancing years is the decreasing tyranny of convention. I used to desire to do the right thing, to know the right people, to play the right games. I did not reflect whether it was worth the sacrifice of personal interest; it was all-important to be in the swim. Very gradually I discovered that other people troubled their heads very little about what one did; that the right people were often the most tiresome and the most conventional, and that the only games which were worth playing were the games which one enjoyed. I used to undergo miseries in staying at uncongenial houses, in accepting shooting invitations when I could not shoot, in going to dances because the people whom I knew were going. Of course one has plenty of disagreeable duties to perform in any case; but I discovered gradually that to adopt the principle of doing disagreeable things which were supposed to be amusing and agreeable was to misunderstand the whole situation. Now, if I am asked to stay at a tiresome house, I refuse; I decline invitations to garden parties and public dinners and dances, because I know that they will bore me; and as to games, I never play them if I can help, because I find that they do not entertain me. Of course there are occasions when one is wanted to fill a gap, and then it is the duty of a Christian and a gentleman to conform, and to do it with a good grace. Again, I am not at the mercy of small prejudices, as I used to be. As a young man, if I disliked the cut of a person’s whiskers or the fashion of his clothes, if I considered his manner to be abrupt or unpleasing, if I was not interested in his subjects, I set him down as an impossible person, and made no further attempt to form acquaintance.
Now I know that these are superficial things, and that a kind heart and an interesting personality are not inconsistent with boots of a grotesque shape and even with mutton-chop whiskers. In fact, I think that small oddities and differences have grown to have a distinct value, and form a pleasing variety. If a person’s manner is unattractive, I often find that it is nothing more than a shyness or an awkwardness which disappears the moment that familiarity is established. My standard is, in fact, lower, and I am more tolerant. I am not, I confess, wholly tolerant, but my intolerance is reserved for qualities and not for externals. I still fly swiftly from long-winded, pompous, and contemptuous persons; but if their company is unavoidable, I have at least learnt to hold my tongue. The other day I was at a country-house where an old and extremely tiresome General laid down the law on the subject of the Mutiny, where he had fought as a youthful subaltern. I was pretty sure that he was making the most grotesque misstatements, but I was not in a position to contradict them. Next the General was a courteous, weary old gentleman, who sate with his finger-tips pressed together, smiling and nodding at intervals. Half-an-hour later we were lighting our candles. The General strode fiercely up to bed, leaving a company of yawning and dispirited men behind. The old gentleman came up to me and, as he took a light, said with an inclination of his head in the direction of the parting figure, “The poor General is a good deal misinformed. I didn’t choose to say anything, but I know something about the subject, because I was private secretary to the Secretary for War.”
That was the right attitude, I thought, for the gentlemanly philosopher; and I have learnt from my old friend the lesson not to choose to say anything if a turbulent and pompous person lays down the law on subjects with which I happen to be acquainted.
