THE UPTON LETTERS

By

ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON

aedae muri' eseidon oneirata, koudepo aos.

1905

PREFACE

These letters were returned to me, shortly after the death of the friend to whom they were written, by his widow. It seems that he had been sorting and destroying letters and papers a few days before his wholly unexpected end. "We won't destroy these," he had said to her, holding the bulky packet of my letters in his hand; "we will keep them together. T—— ought to publish them, and, some day, I hope he will." This was not, of course, a deliberate judgement; but his sudden death, a few days later, gives the unconsidered wish a certain sanctity, and I have determined to obey it. Moreover, she who has the best right to decide, desires it. A few merely personal matters and casual details have been omitted; but the main substance is there, and the letters are just as they were written. Such hurried compositions, of course, abound in literary shortcomings, but perhaps they have a certain spontaneity which more deliberate writings do not always possess. I wrote my best, frankest, and liveliest in the letters, because I knew that Herbert would value both the thought and the expression of the thought. And, further, if it is necessary to excuse so speedy a publication, I feel that they are not letters which would gain by being kept. Their interest arises from the time, the circumstance, the occasion that gave them birth, from the books read and criticised, the educational problems discussed; and thus they may form a species of comment on a certain aspect of modern life, and from a definite point of view. But, after all, it is enough for me that he appreciated them, and, if he wished that they should go out to the world, well, let them go! In publishing them I am but obeying a last message of love.

T. B.
MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON,
Feb. 20, 1905.

THE UPTON LETTERS

MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON,
Jan. 23, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,—I have just heard the disheartening news, and I write to say that I am sorry toto corde. I don't yet know the full extent of the calamity, the length of your exile, the place, or the conditions under which you will have to live. Perhaps you or Nelly can find time to let me have a few lines about it all? But I suppose there is a good side to it. I imagine that when the place is once fixed, you will be able to live a much freer life than you have of late been obliged to live in England, with less risk and less overshadowing of anxiety. If you can find the right region, renovabitur ut acquila juventus tua; and you will be able to carry out some of the plans which have been so often interrupted here. Of course there will be drawbacks. Books, society, equal talk, the English countryside which you love so well, and, if I may use the expression, so intelligently; they will all have to be foregone in a measure. But fortunately there is no difficulty about money, and money will give you back some of these delights. You will still see your real friends; and they will come to you with the intention of giving and getting the best of themselves and of you, not in the purposeless way in which one drifts into a visit here. You will be able, too, to view things with a certain detachment—and that is a real advantage; for I have sometimes thought that your literary work has suffered from the variety of your interests, and from your being rather too close to them to form a philosophical view. Your love of characteristic points of natural scenery will help you. When you have once grown familiar with the new surroundings, you will penetrate the secret of their charm, as you have done here. You will be able, too, to live a more undisturbed life, not fretted by all the cross-currents which distract a man in his own land, when he has a large variety of ties. I declare I did not know I was so good a rhetorician; I shall end by convincing myself that there is no real happiness to be found except in expatriation!

Seriously, my dear Herbert, I do understand the sadness of the change; but one gets no good by dwelling on the darker side; there are and will be times, I know, of depression. When one lies awake in the morning, before the nerves are braced by contact with the wholesome day; when one has done a tiring piece of work, and is alone, and in that frame of mind when one needs occupation but yet is not brisk enough to turn to the work one loves; in those dreary intervals between one's work, when one is off with the old and not yet on with the new—well I know all the corners of the road, the shadowy cavernous places where the demons lie in wait for one, as they do for the wayfarer (do you remember?), in Bewick, who, desiring to rest by the roadside, finds the dingle all alive with ambushed fiends, horned and heavy-limbed, swollen with the oppressive clumsiness of nightmare. But you are not inexperienced or weak. You have enough philosophy to wait until the frozen mood thaws, and the old thrill comes back. That is one of the real compensations of middle age. When one is young, one imagines that any depression will be continuous; and one sees the dreary, uncomforted road winding ahead over bare hills, till it falls to the dark valley. But later on one can believe that "the roadside dells of rest" are there, even if one cannot see them; and, after all, you have a home which goes with you; and it would seem to be fortunate, or to speak more truly, tenderly prepared, that you have only daughters—a son, who would have to go back to England to be educated, would be a source of anxiety. Yet I find myself even wishing that you had a son, that I might have the care of him over here. You don't know the heart-hunger I sometimes have for young things of my own to watch over; to try to guard their happiness. You would say that I had plenty of opportunities in my profession; it is true in a sense, and I think I am perhaps a better schoolmaster for being unmarried. But these boys are not one's own; they drift away; they come back dutifully and affectionately to talk to their old tutor; and we are both of us painfully conscious that we have lost hold of the thread, and that the nearness of the tie that once existed exists no more.

Well, I did not mean in this letter to begin bemoaning my own sorrows, but rather to try and help you to bear your own. Tell me as soon as you can what your plans are, and I will come down and see you for the last time under the old conditions; perhaps the new will be happier. God bless you, my old friend! Perhaps the light which has hitherto shone (though fitfully) ON your life will now begin to shine THROUGH it instead; and let me add one word. My assurance grows firmer, from day to day, that we are in stronger hands than our own. It is true that I see things in other lives which look as if those hands were wantonly cruel, hard, unloving; but I reflect that I cannot see all the conditions; I can only humbly fall back upon my own experience, and testify that even the most daunting and humiliating things have a purifying effect; and I can perceive enough at all events to encourage me to send my heart a little farther than my eyes, and to believe that a deep and urgent love is there.—Ever affectionately yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
Jan. 26, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,—So it is to be Madeira at present? Well, I know Madeira a little, and I can honestly congratulate you. I had feared it might be Switzerland. I could not LIVE in Switzerland. It does me good to go there, to be iced and baked and washed clean with pure air. But the terrible mountains, so cold and unchanged, with their