The Altar Fire. Benson Arthur Christopher

pleasure, there would be none of the flatness which sometimes follows the departure of a guest, but that one was leaving them to a home life that was better than sociability, a life that was both sacred and beautiful, full to the brim of affection, yet without any softness or sentimentality.

      Then came my friend's great success. He had written less since his marriage, and his books, I thought, were beginning to flag a little. There was a want of freshness about them; he tended to use the same characters and similar situations; both thought and phraseology became somewhat mannerised. I put this down myself to the belief that life was beginning to be more interesting to him than art. But there suddenly appeared the book which made him famous, a book both masterly and delicate, full of subtle analysis and perception, and with that indescribable sense of actuality which is the best test of art. The style at the same time seemed to have run clear; he had gained a perfect command of his instrument, and I had about this book, what I had never had about any other book of his, the sense that he was producing exactly the effects he meant to produce. The extraordinary merit of the book was instantly recognised by all, I think, but the author. He went abroad for a time after the book was published, and eventually returned; it was at that point of his life that the Diary began.

      I went to see him not long after, and it became rapidly clear to me that something had happened to him. Instead of being radiant with success, eager and contented, I found him depressed, anxious, haggard. He told me that he felt unstrung and exhausted, and that his power of writing had deserted him. But I must bear testimony at the same time to the fact which does not emerge in the Diary, namely, the extraordinary gallantry and patience of his conduct and demeanour. He struggled visibly and pathetically, from hour to hour, against his depression. He never complained; he never showed, at least in my presence, the smallest touch of irritability. Indeed to myself, who had known him as the most equable and good-humoured of men, he seemed to support the trial with a courage little short of heroism. The trial was a sore one, because it deprived him both of motive and occupation. But he made the best of it; he read, he took long walks, and he threw himself with great eagerness into the education of his children—a task for which he was peculiarly qualified. Then a series of calamities fell upon him: he lost his boy, a child of wonderful ability and sweetness; he lost his fortune, or the greater part of it. The latter calamity he bore with perfect imperturbability—they let their house and moved into Gloucestershire. Here a certain measure of happiness seemed to return to him. He made a new friend, as the Diary relates, in the person of the Squire of the village, a man who, though an invalid, had a strong and almost mystical hold upon life. Here he began to interest himself in the people of the place, and tried all sorts of education and social experiments. But his wife fell ill, and died very suddenly; and, not long after, his daughter died too. He was for a time almost wholly broken down. I went abroad with him at his request for a few weeks, but I was myself obliged to return to England to my professional duties. I can only say that I did not expect ever to see him again. He was like a man, the spring of whose life was broken; but at the same time he bore himself with a patience and a gentleness that fairly astonished me. We were together day by day and hour by hour. He made no complaint, and he used to force himself, with what sad effort was only too plain, to converse on all sorts of topics. Some time after he drifted back to England; but at first he appeared to be in a very listless and dejected state. Then there arrived, almost suddenly, it seemed to me, a change. He had made the sacrifice; he had accepted the situation. There came to him a serenity which was only like his old serenity from the fact that it seemed entirely unaffected; but it was based, I felt, on a very different view of life. He was now content to wait and to believe. It was at this time that the Squire died; and not long afterwards, the Squire's niece, a woman of great strength and simplicity of character, married a clergyman to whom she had been long attached, both being middle-aged people; and the living soon afterwards falling vacant, her husband accepted it, and the newly-married pair moved into the Rectory; while my friend, who had been named as the Squire's ultimate heir, a life-interest in the property being secured to the niece, went into the Hall. Shortly afterwards he adopted a nephew—his sister's son—who, with the consent of all concerned, was brought up as the heir to the estate, and is its present proprietor.

      My friend lived some fifteen years after that, a quiet, active, and obviously contented life. I was a frequent guest at the Hall, and I am sure that I never saw a more attached circle. My friend became a magistrate, and he did a good deal of county business; but his main interest was in the place, where he was the trusted friend and counsellor of every household in the parish. He took a great deal of active exercise in the open air; he read much. He taught his nephew, whom he did not send to school. He regained, in fuller measure than ever, his old delightful charm of conversation, and his humour, which had always been predominant in him, took on a deeper and a richer tinge; but whereas in old days he had been brilliant and epigrammatic, he was now rather poetical and suggestive; and whereas he had formerly been reticent about his emotions and his religion, he now acquired what is to my mind the profoundest conversational charm—the power of making swift and natural transitions into matters of what, for want of a better word, I will call spiritual experience. I remember his once saying to me that he had learnt, from his intercourse with his village neighbours, that the one thing in the world in which every one was interested was religion; "even more," he added, with a smile, "than is the one subject in which Sir Robert Walpole said that every one could join."

      I do not suppose that his religion was of a particularly orthodox kind; he was impatient of dogmatic definition and of ecclesiastical tendencies; but he cared with all his heart for the vital principles of religion, the love of God and the love of one's neighbour.

      He lived to see his adopted son grow up to maturity; and I do not think I ever saw anything so beautiful as the confidence and affection that subsisted between them; and then he died one day, as he had often told me he desired to die. He had been ailing for a week, and on rising from his chair in the morning he was seized by a sudden faintness and died within half-an-hour, hardly knowing, I imagine, that he was in any danger.

      It fell to me to deal with his papers. There was a certain amount of scattered writing, but no completed work; it all dated from before the publication of his great book. It was determined that this Diary should eventually see the light, and circumstances into which I need not now enter have rendered its appearance advisable at the present date.

      The interest of the document is its candour and outspokenness. If the tone of the record, until near the end, is one of unrelieved sadness, it must be borne in mind that all the time he bore himself in the presence of others with a singular courage and simplicity. He said to me once, in an hour of dark despair, that he had drunk the dregs of self-abasement. That he believed that he had no sense of morality, no loyal affection, no love of virtue, no patience or courage. That his only motives had been timidity, personal ambition, love of respectability, love of ease. He added that this had been slowly revealed to him, and that the only way out was a way that he had not as yet strength to tread; the way of utter submission, absolute confidence, entire resignation. He said that there was one comfort, which was, that he knew the worst about himself that it was possible to know. I told him that his view of his character was unjust and exaggerated, but he only shook his head with a smile that went to my heart. It was on that day, I think, that he touched the lowest depth of all; and after that he found the way out, along the path that he had indicated.

      This is no place for eulogy and panegyric. My task has been just to trace the portrait of my friend as he appeared to others; his own words shall reveal the inner spirit. The beauty of the life to me was that he attained, unconsciously and gradually, to the very virtues which he most desired and in which he felt himself to be most deficient. He had to bear a series of devastating calamities. He had loved the warmth and nearness of his home circle more deeply than most men, and the whole of it was swept away; he had depended for stimulus and occupation alike upon his artistic work, and the power was taken from him at the moment of his highest achievement. His loss of fortune is not to be reckoned among his calamities, because it was no calamity to him. He ended by finding a richer treasure than any that he had set out to obtain; and I remember that he said to me once, not long before his end, that whatever others might feel about their own lives, he could not for a moment doubt that his own had been an education of a deliberate and loving kind, and that the day when he realised that, when he saw that there was not a single incident in his life