Essays by Arthur Christopher Benson Part 2

But it would be easy to quote and quote, yet give no real idea of the fertility, the wit, the pathos of the man. All humanity is before him, and must be handled tenderly because he is a part of it himself, and because faults, like ugly features, are sent us to be modified, perhaps; to be eradicated, no!

The one strain in character which throughout afflicts him most, and for which he reserves his most distilled contempt, is the strain of unreality--the affectation whose sin is always to please, and which fails so singularly of its object. Hypocrisy, pretension, falseness--against everything which has that lack of simplicity so fatal to true life he sets his face. For the rest he can hardly read the enigma; he only states it reverently. Like the old Persian poet, he seems to say:

Oh Thou, who Man of baser earth didst make, And e'en with Paradise devise the Snake, For all the Sin wherewith the face of Man Is blacken'd--Man's forgiveness give--and take,

HENRY MORE, THE PLATONIST

About the middle of the seventeenth century, Hobbes and Descartes, clear-headed and unprejudiced thinkers, caused a kind of panic in the devotional world: they resolved that they would not take anything for granted. Starting from a Socratic ignorance, they determined to verify, to try (and it was time) if they could not find a little firm ground among the vast and bewildering ma.s.s of rash dogmas and unsupported a.s.sertions that lumbered the scene of thought. Such an attempt cut very hard at Revelation. The religious fabric was so perilously elaborate--the removal of a brick was likely to set so much tumbling--its defenders felt themselves bound to believe that the part was as important, if not more so, than the whole; and they had pledged themselves so widely and rashly that they made no attempt at organised rational resistance, but attempted to overwhelm the rough intruders with torrents of solemn imprecations.

But there were in many places earnest-minded, faithful thinkers, profoundly attached to the revealed truths, who saw another way open.

Authorities and ancient names were being called into court; philosophers who had written from a Christian point of view were supposed to speak professionally; a daring thought struck them: what if they could trace a connection between the earlier sources of Revelation and the n.o.blest name that philosophy had ever enrolled? What if they could show that Plato himself owed his highest ideas to the transient influence of that teaching--the Law of Moses--which they themselves possessed in the entirety of a broad development? Pythagoras was said to have sojourned on Carmel and interviewed the priests of Jehovah; the Cabbala--the Law embroidered by metaphysical and mystical minds--was in their hands, and even their adversaries would "allow to Plato the spiritual insight that they denied to St. Paul."

At Cambridge this idea took shape in four remarkable minds: Dr.

Cudworth, Master of Clare and afterwards of Christ's, Dr. Whichcote, Provost of King's, John Smith, Fellow of Queen's, and Dr. Henry More, Fellow of Christ's, applied themselves to the solution of the problem.

The interest of the situation lies in the fact that these men were pure and devoted beyond measure in life as well as in thought. Smith did more by direct influence and personal weight than even by his "Select Discourses." Dr. Patrick at his death preached on the cry of Elisha, "My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horses thereof:" he said that a light had been extinguished in Israel. Cudworth had perhaps the most logical mind. He wrote an "Intellectual System" that was supposed to give Hobbes a death-blow. Whichcote wrote discourses delivered at St. Laurence, Jewry, and originated an immense ma.s.s of aphorisms, afterwards published.

But, of the four, More was the man of genius: he was divinely gifted in body and mind; with pa.s.sionate earnestness he combined humour and delicacy of thought, a trick of suggestive style, and a personality at once genial and commanding. The following pages profess to give a slight account of him.

The movement had unhappily no coherence. We cla.s.s the four together as Cambridge Platonists because they were possessed by the same idea and worked it out on individual lines; but they did not write or think in concert. They were acquaintances--More and Cudworth close friends, and Whichcote died in Cudworth's house--but it can never have occurred to them that their names would have been connected in later times, because they had no scheme of concerted action,--they originated no movement.

Their unique interest lies in this--that, in an age when both religion and philosophy were making huge strides into materialism, they discerned and strove to indicate this truth,--that the capacity in the human soul of conceiving ideals, and in part transfusing them into life, is at once its highest boast and the most potent factor of its eternal quest.

Henry More was the son of a gentleman who lived near Grantham on a small estate of his own. The principles of the family were those of the straitest Calvinism, though sufficiently cultivated for the father to read the "Faerie Queene" aloud in the evenings; and the boy, after being carefully trained in a private school, kept by a master of this persuasion, was sent to Eton, with strict injunctions from his father and uncle to hold to the faith delivered by Calvin to the Saints.

But the boy's instinct for philosophy was greater than his loyalty to family principles. He had, moreover, none of that gloomy and business-like habit of mind that demanded an accurate and severe disposal of the future of the entire human race as the basis for a creed. Though melancholy as a boy, he had the beginnings of that serene and even temperament, that afterwards was so conspicuous. He was immaturely an optimist: the beauty and kindliness of the world occupied a large share in his thoughts; and, when his elder brother came down to see him at Eton, he maintained the brutal inadequacy of Predestinarianism so strongly, that his uncle, to whom this scandalous position was reported, fell back upon threats of personal chastis.e.m.e.nt.

He gives us a strange picture of himself at Eton, walking slowly in the Playing Fields while his comrades were at their games, with his head on one side, kicking the stones with his feet, while he murmured to himself the lines of Claudian:

Saepe mihi dubiam traxit sententia mentem; Curarent Superi terras; an nullus inesset Rector, et incerto fluerent mortalia casu.

Such a precocious, anxious childhood is generally, alas! only a sign of deficient vitality--a disposition to embrace a religious life and die early; but the event proved a singular contradiction to this.

More was, it seems, a lovable lad--very simple-minded and sweet; resolving that, should the horrid phantom of inevitable destruction be true, should he be destined to that bitter place, yet that he would even there behave himself with such submissive patience that G.o.d should not have the heart to keep him there. In his studies he made great progress, troubled more than elated by success, because he was too diffident to believe anything in his triumphs but that he would break down next time.

The Provost of Eton at that time was Sir Henry Wotton--amba.s.sador, courtier, poet, and philosopher. It was an encouraging and stimulating time to be at the school, for Sir Henry, with his romantic past and his courtly, affectionate manners, must have been a fascinating figure for the boys; and he was, moreover, fond of their society; had constantly one or two about him; put up pictures of great orators and statesmen in their schoolroom; and used frequently to walk in to their lessons, never leaving the room without dropping some aphorism or epigram worthy of a place in the memory of a growing scholar.

At the age of seventeen More went up to Christ's College, Cambridge, just at the time when Milton was leaving it; and at his earnest desire was entered under a tutor that was not a Calvinist. On getting established at Cambridge he found himself in an atmosphere, which then, at least, teemed with inducements to study, for the studious. There was little of the social life of a modern university--hours were longer, earlier, and more regularly kept; there was no prejudice in favour of bodily exercise as a means of improving health: for the more absorbed students a turn in the cloisters as a remedy for cold feet was deemed sufficient--the fen invaded Cambridge on every side; the wild birds screamed in the pools, and snipe were snared where Downing now stands.

The high-road to Ely was fenced from the marsh by a few farms, and the ruins--still ugly--of a religious house; beyond Ely lay the interminable lagoons, with here and there an island farm.

In going to Cambridge, a scholar who meant to use the place, did not go with any idea of enjoying life in ordinary ways, of finding society, of amusing himself: no, he went where there were honest, silent, like-minded men, too intent on study to do more than occasionally discuss the subjects with which they were grappling, or give the young student a word of encouragement--_alere flammam_; and besides this, a plain but adequate living, food and shelter, books and lectures--and all not without a certain severe grace and dignity--grace thrown over life by the stately courts of grey stone, retired gardens full of gra.s.sy b.u.t.ts and old standard trees, grave parlours and venerable halls, talks in galleries or cloisters; and for the young hearts that gathered there the unvarying march of the seasons: the orchards whitening and blushing over the stately stone walls of college gardens; the plunge of the water in the fountain, the snow on the ground throwing up mysterious light on to the ceilings of studious chambers, and choking the familiar street sounds; or there was some great preacher to hear; my lord of Ely travelling post-haste through the town with his long train of servants and gentlemen, and just stopping for compliments and refreshment at a Lodge, or the grave figures of the doctors, pa.s.sing through the street, to be watched with bated breath and whispered names; some scholar, with worn spiritual aspect, stealing from his rooms, some n.o.bleman with his flourishing following; or, best of all, the quiet services in the dark chapel, the droning bell ceasing high in the roof, the growing thunder of the organ, the flickering lights, and the master moving to his stall, accompanied by some scholar or writer of mighty name; and then the liturgy, the reviving in prayer and meditation of the old ideals, the thankful consciousness that G.o.d could so easily be sought and found.

Into this quiet society More was lovingly received, and it gave him deep content. He plunged into his studies with a kind of fury, like a man transported, digging for treasure; and one day it happened that his father came upon him unexpectedly as he sat with all his books about him, and, being rapturously delighted with the serious intentness of the young man, used a curious phrase about him, suggested no doubt by a certain glory, hardly human, transfiguring the boy's face, "That he spent his time in an angelical way," and then this old Puritan, to mark his sense of satisfaction by some practical testimony, went home and wrote the lad down for a handsome legacy in his will, in token of complete reconciliation: and this legacy was never revoked; but it moved Henry's heart when he discovered it, as the surest sign that he had been forgiven, knowing his father's concrete mode of thought as he did.

He tells us that his tutor, when he first arrived, received him kindly, and asked him, after some talk, observing the boy's melancholy and thoughtful disposition, whether he had a discernment of things good and evil, to which he replied in a low voice, "I hope I have." He says that as he uttered this he was all the time conscious of being the possessor of a singularly sensitive discrimination in these matters, and besides of an insatiable and burning curiosity after all kinds of knowledge.

This, however, his diffidence did not allow him to confess. The tutor seems to have watched him carefully, for not long after, seeing his intense and unflagging zeal in study, he asked him rather brusquely why he was so intent on his work, hinting that mere ambition, if that were the motive, was too low an end. On this he confessed that his only aim was knowledge, an aim in itself. The mere consciousness of knowledge was exquisitely pleasurable to him.

Until he took his B.A. in 1635 he occupied himself chiefly in the works of the natural philosophers--Aristotle, Cardan, and Julius Scaliger; but they were a bitter disappointment to him. Their acute and solid observations pleased him, but they seemed to make hasty and obscure a.s.sertions on very trivial grounds; and he became a complete sceptic.

Not, says Tulloch, as he carefully tells us, regarding the existence of G.o.d, or the duties of morality--"for of these he never had the least doubt"--but regarding the origin and end of life. This step he recorded, as his habit was, in a double quatrain of elegiacs, a metre to which he more than once resorted to summarise the turning-points of his career.

Being now able to please himself, he attacked the Platonists--not only Plato himself, but Plotinus and his followers--and gradually he was led to doubt the serious value of mere knowledge. Down into the valley of humiliation he stept; in the bitterness of the fruit of the intellect he could presume to believe, for he had tasted of it and strenuously bruised the savour from it,--and he came to see that it is not the origin and method of life, but life itself that it behoves the true man to know.

That was the point at which so many of his contemporaries were stopping all round him; they, too, had penetrated the secrets of the mind. A few of them, more enthusiastic, continued to pursue it: the others, mistaking the sensuous region for the higher way, fell back on life in its grosser forms; they ate and drank, they buried themselves in local politics and temporary interests. Such things had no charm for More; he pushed through and out into a purer air.

The mysterious and fascinating doctrine of the divine illumination opened before him--uncleanness of spirit, not distance of place, he said, divide men from G.o.d: to purge the mind from vice and impurity and the subtle temptations of sense, so as to leave the spiritual eye clear and undimmed--this holy art of life became his dream.

There fell into his hands Tauler's "Theologia Germanica," that precious treatise that, through similitudes, spoke so clearly of G.o.d; the work that had been so beloved of Luther. It spoke of the surrender of the will to G.o.d--the loosing it from selfish impulses to sail like a ship upon the free sea--the nameless but unerring instinct that falls upon the soul if such a course is faithfully pursued.

He awoke like a man out of sleep, and the conflict began. The old man, which, like Proteus, a.s.sumes so many and so bewildering shapes, stood revealed: but the struggle was a matter of time, though sharp at first, so clearly was the truth grasped; and this growing purity and simplicity of mind which he discovered, together with a superhuman a.s.surance, which began to stir and rise within him, const.i.tute what may be called his conversion. Another quatrain records this:

I come from Heaven, am an immortal ray Of G.o.d; O joy! and back to G.o.d shall go.

And here sweet love on wings me up doth stay.

I live, I'm sure; and joy this life to know.

Night and vain dreams begone--Father of lights, We live, as Thou, clad with eternal day.

Faith, wisdom, love, fixed joy, free winged might-- This is true life: all else death and decay.

He wrote also to record this a long mystical poem, called _Psychozoia_ (Life of the Soul), in 1640, at the age of twenty-six. He was flooded with a perpetual content.

In the pursuit of mysticism there are often several painful facts to record. In the first place, it is common to find a mystical temperament in those whose physical nature is not very strong or pa.s.sionate. It seems as if certain natures, by the very fact that the ties which hold them to the earth are more than half-loosened already, have a strong affinity to the world of abstractions--as if the very weakness of their corporeal organisation held open a door through which strange shapes are seen moving, and airy voices heard to call; and again the mystical life is, more than any other, subject to deep depressions of spirit, dumb insensibilities, and heavy overshadowings from the towers of death. In the history of More's life no trace of either of these failings can be even faintly discovered. In the first place, he was of a strong and sound const.i.tution; he did not know what it was to be languid or out of health; he was gifted with an extraordinary spring and plenty of pure animal spirits--"a rich ethereal sort of body, for what was inward," to use his own Pythagorean phrase; he says of himself that his body seemed built for a hundred years; that he had a high warmth and activity of thought that never flagged--notably too, that, after a long day of incessant thought, when he came to sleep he had a strange sort of narcotic power; and he was no sooner in a manner laid on his bed, that the falling of a house would scarce wake him, and that he woke in the morning to an inexpressible life and vigour, so that his thoughts and notions "rayed" about him.

There would seem to be little of the visionary here; and yet he confesses to a consciousness of what he calls "Enthusiasm"--which we should almost call madness: he could summon up a material object with such distinctness--visualise it, as it is now called--that it produced on him all the sensations of being seen with the outward eye: that is, he could at any moment, with his eyes open, command a scene or a person, so that the vision pa.s.sed before and effaced the furniture of his room or the page of his book: and he says that all his life he could, with an almost inconsiderable effort of the will, fix his mind so intently on any subject or line of thought that he could spend as much as three hours in an intent uninterrupted reverie.

Such a man would be sure to fling himself with rapture into ascetic and mortifying practices--and so he did: the result was a prolonged exaltation of soul, apparently unaccompanied by any symptoms of exhaustion and depression, which is almost miraculous. One reverie, which he records, lasted for fifteen days, during which he slept and rose, ate and drank, went about his ordinary business, without, he a.s.serts, any one suspecting that he was all the time occupied in a serene and rapturous contemplation. In this "lazy activity," he said, "he pa.s.sed from notion to notion without any perceptible images or words in the mind;" as he walked in the street he could have fallen, he said, and kissed the stones for joy; when playing the theorbo, for he had considerable musical talent, he says that he sometimes became almost mad with pleasure--so overcome that he was forced to desist.

"I am not out of my wits [as he writes in a touching pa.s.sage in one of his mystical dialogues] in this divine freedom, for G.o.d does not ride me as a horse, and guide me I know not whither, but converseth with me as a friend: I sport with the beasts of the earth; the lion licks my hand like a spaniel; the serpent sleeps upon my lap and stings me not. I play with the fowls of heaven, and the birds of air sit singing upon my fist.

Thou canst call down the moon so near thee by thy magic charm that thou mayst kiss her, as she is said to have kissed Endymion--or control and stop the course of the sun; or, with one stamp of thy foot, stay the motion of the earth.

"He that is come hither, G.o.d hath taken him to be His own familiar friend; and though He speaks to others aloof off, in outward religions and parables, yet He leads this man by the hand, teaching him intelligible doc.u.ments upon all the objects of His providence: speaks to him plainly in His own language, sweetly insinuates Himself and possesseth all his faculties, understanding, reason, and memory. This is the darling of G.o.d, and a prince among men, far above the dispensation of either miracle or prophet."

There is no figure in literature that comes very close to this, except the solemn form of Prospero in the enchanted land:

The isle is full of noises.

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Henry More's life was a very simple one. His private means were large; we hear of his possessing the advowson of a living in Lincolnshire, Ingoldsby, to which he presented Mr. Ward, who wrote his life, and a large farm in the same county; he had also other sources of income. Thus he had no temptation to seek for wealth, or for preferment for the sake of wealth, since his tastes were extraordinarily simple. He did, as a matter of fact, give very largely in charity; his door, it was said, was like the door of an hospital; indeed, he was so liberal with his money, that in later life he made over to a nephew, Gabriel More, who had fallen into misfortunes through no fault of his own, not only his Lincolnshire estates, but a large legacy which he received from Lady Conway.

He was elected a Fellow of Christ's soon after taking his M.A. degree: his solitary and contemplative habits, his ascetic practices--for these, though not marked, were sure to be discussed in so small and intimate a society as a college--and the slight suspicion of fanaticism that he incurred, led some to doubt whether he would not be a melancholy addition to the Combination Room; but those who knew him better a.s.sured the authorities that, though he was studious and serious, yet he was a very pleasant companion, and in his way one of the merriest Greeks they were acquainted with.

He was offered several important posts. Great efforts were made to get him over to Ireland. On one occasion he was offered the Deanery of Christ Church, Dublin, and on another occasion the Provostship of Trinity College combined with the Deanery of St. Patrick's; as he never even considered these for a moment, he was offered two Irish Bishoprics in succession, the Lord-Lieutenant writing to him to press his acceptance of the latter. "Pray be not so morose or humoursome," he wrote, "as to refuse all things you have not known so long as Christ's College."

Once even he was offered an English Bishopric, and his friends got him as far as Whitehall to kiss hands, but they concealed the real object of their designs, and when he understood it, he was not on any account to be persuaded.

Late in life he accepted a prebend at Gloucester, urgently pressed on him by Heneage Finch, Earl of Nottingham, the Lord Chancellor, brother of an old pupil, but he resigned it almost immediately in favour of one of his friends; and once, too, the Fellows offered to elect him to the Mastership of Christ's, when it fell vacant, but this also he declined.

He was tutor of the College for a time, and was brought thus into close relations with Sir John Finch, afterwards Amba.s.sador to Turkey, younger brother of Lord Nottingham, then an undergraduate. Finch's sister, Lady Conway, had been converted to the tenets of the Quakers, and Henry More, whose interest in his pupil extended itself to his pupil's sister, laboured to reclaim her for several years; he was thus brought into contact with Penn and the leaders of the Quietist party.