From a college window

From a college window by A.C. Benson

"From a College Window" presents itself as the sincere personal confession of a Cambridge don, A. C. Benson, reflecting on his life and outlook from the vantage point of his rooms in a small college. He opens by explaining that personality and sincerity, not mere skill, give art its value, and that he intends to be as candid as possible about his own experience. He recounts his upbringing under a busy, idealistic official father, his schooling, his years as a public-school master, and his eventual, unexpected election to a college Fellowship, which gave him the settled, leisurely life he had always wanted among ancient buildings, gardens, and young men. He reflects on the merits and defects of small colleges versus large ones, resisting a colleague's proposal to amalgamate the smaller colleges, and takes pleasure in exploring an unfamiliar college's chapel, library, and hall. He describes the ideal of a don's life as one of simplicity, celibacy, and quiet benevolence, valuable for bridging the gap between generations and correcting the false picture of dons as remote and joyless. He states his own creed: sincerity, simplicity, tolerance, distrust of authority and dogmatism, and belief in a shared spiritual "city" reached through varied experience. Watching the river sports and undergraduates from his window, he muses on aging, contrasting the self-consciousness, vanity, and craving for impressiveness of youth with the tolerance, patience, and deepened interest in the world that come with middle age, while owning to the losses of physical vigor and close domestic ties. He returns each evening to his book-lined rooms and undergraduate visitors, content with his bachelor life. He then describes the college library, largely disused now that cheap printing has diminished the value of accumulated erudition, and discusses what and how one should read in later life—favoring rereading, biographies of contemporaries, and reading pursued for pleasure, intellectual clarity, or, above all, an "ethical" motive of feeding the spirit through sympathy with suffering and beauty rather than seeking bare facts. He introduces his friend "Perry," a genial, unambitious scholar beloved by undergraduates, and uses a dinner-table disagreement with a lady called Egeria—who holds that sociability is a duty—to argue that society should be sought only for pleasure, never as an obligation; he condemns crowded, forced social gatherings such as garden parties and defends the right to choose one's own congenial circle. This leads into an extended meditation on the art of conversation: the tediousness of egotists, paradox-mongers, and inveterate anecdotalists; the superiority of tete-a-tete talk, especially with men rather than women; and the qualities—sympathy, charm, unselfishness—that make a true conversationalist. He turns to the elusive, intermittent sense of beauty that visits him unpredictably, independent of happiness or health, describing vivid instances (a sunlit court, a broken lock-gate in the Sussex woods) and warning against making the pursuit of such sensations the whole business of life, as he feels aesthetes like Rossetti or Pater risked doing. He distinguishes sincere feeling for nature from fashionable pretense, argues that true appreciation lies in small, familiar effects rather than sensational grandeur, and, departing from convention, denies that nature directly consoles grief, holding instead that it "tolerates" rather than heals, so that comfort must be distilled by the human spirit itself, with ultimate resignation found only in submission to God's will. He examines the artistic temperament broadly, distinguishing those with perceptiveness alone from those with expressive power, praising humble, sympathetic amateurs, and arguing that beneath artists' surface sensitivity often lies a hard, self-focused core—one reason, he suggests, that women rarely reach the highest ranks of artistic achievement, being motivated more by unselfish devotion to others. He extends the "artistic spirit" to life itself, urging people to judge character by intrinsic quality rather than social rank, and to cultivate sympathy and simplicity in education rather than coercive convention, citing Christ's example as the perfection of this humane perceptiveness. Prompted by an acquaintance's angry accusation of egotism, he analyzes intellectual, aesthetic, and "mystical" (spiritual/relational) egotism, prescribing tolerance, humility, and submission to God's will as correctives, and reflects on a moment of peace found in a country church while anxious about a loved one's conduct. He then delivers an extended critique of English classical education, drawing on his twenty years as a schoolmaster: the curriculum is overloaded and insincere, producing boys who master nothing, neither the classics (taught pedantically rather than as literature) nor practical modern subjects; he proposes simplifying instruction around French, mathematics, history, geography, and science, with specialization only for boys of proven aptitude, and argues passionately that education fails because it feeds neither practical usefulness nor the "soul" of intellectual and aesthetic enthusiasm, leaving students cynical and indifferent to books. Turning to literature as a profession, he warns aspiring writers against depending on it for a livelihood, distinguishes serious authorship from fashionable amateur book-writing (which he defends as a harmless, even beneficial, hobby), and offers craft advice: keep a diary, write poetry as apprenticeship, avoid imitating a striking stylist's mannerisms, and above all achieve lucidity, recalling a professor's counsel not to be afraid of "letting the bones show." He commends sincere, sincere self-expression as literature's highest use and modest personal influence as its truest reward. Finally, he recounts a debate with a serious-minded friend over whether it is right to discuss and criticize one's friends' characters; his companion holds it a breach of loyalty and the ninth commandment, while Benson argues that just, non-malicious discussion of others is a mark of vital interest in life, contrasting it with the deadening dulness of self-satisfied, uncritical people, illustrated by an anecdote of a tediously discoursing antiquarian at a dinner party. He begins to set out his governing principle—that such criticism must be tempered by justice—when the passage ends.

By A.C. Benson · First published 1906 · Genre: Autobiography, Personal Essay, Memoir · 18 chapters · 77,799 words

First lines

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.

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