Beside Still Waters

Beside those magical secrets the clumsy art of the writer stood abashed. Those tints, those notes were such definite things; but in the grosser and more tainted medium with which writers dealt, where so much depended upon association and point of view, there was so much less certainty of producing the effect intended, that one faltered and lost faith. One thing was certain, that it was useless to search for a mission; the purpose must descend from heaven, as the eagle pounced on Ganymede, and carry the trembling and awed minister high above the heads of men. But the only thing that the faithful writer could do was to map out some little piece of quiet work, make no vast design, seek for no large sovereignty; and then work patiently on with ever-present enjoyment, learning his art, gaining skill and mastery over his vast and complex instrument, till he gained certainty of touch and the power of saying, with perfect lucidity, with pure transparency of phrase, exactly what he meant; and then, behind his art, to live resolutely in his simple creed, whatever article of it he could master, sure of this, that if his inspiration came, he would be able to present it worthily; and if it did not come – well, his would have been a grave, quiet, gracious life, like the life of a song-bird that had never had an audience, or a stream which dropped in crystal cataracts from unvisited rocks, upon which no gazer's eye had ever fallen. And so there shaped itself what must be for the lover of the beautiful the first article of his faith, the thought that the happiness of art came in the making, the weighing, the disposing, and not in the recognition of the triumph by others; and that the temptation to gain a hearing, to touch hearts, to sway emotions was a natural one enough, but that it must be the first of all to be discarded, as one set foot in the enchanted world, among the dim valleys and rock-ridges, the thickets and the plains, that stretched beyond the sunset and on to the sea's rim, – that wider, more shadowy, more remote world of awe and mystery which lay so near, outside the window, at the opening of a door, at the sound of a voice, the glance of an eye, and in which one's busy fevered life was set, like the print of the wind's footstep in the crisping wave, on the surface of some vast unfathomable sea.

X

Retrospect – Renewal of Youth – The New Energy

In reading biographies of illustrious personages, Hugh was often interested and surprised to compare the pictures of undergraduate life drawn there with his own experience of that period. They were generally related in the form of reminiscences, seen far-off, at the end of a long perspective of years. It was generally represented as a period of high enthusiasm, intense energy, eager work, unclouded happiness. The perception of great problems, noble thoughts, seemed in these reminiscences to have fallen on chivalrous minds with a deep natural joy. They recorded hours of matchless talk, ingenuous debate, brilliant wit, scintillating intellect. Hugh liked to believe that this was the case, but he often wondered whether it was not all heightened by retrospect, and whether the radiance of the whole picture was not merely the radiance of recollected youth. If the picture was a true one, then the later years of the men whose lives were thus told, of whom more than one were known personally to Hugh, must have been years of sad physical and mental decline. There was one person in particular, an eminent ecclesiastic, who had been a frequent guest at his father's house, in whom Hugh had never discovered any particular swiftness of perception, of agility of mind, yet the reminiscences of whose undergraduate years were given in a vein of high enthusiasm. This worthy clergyman had seemed, if his memory was to be trusted, to have been the shining centre of a group whose life threw the life of young Athens, as represented by Plato, into the shade. The man in question seemed, in later years, a sturdily built clergyman, slow and cautious of speech, brusque and even grim of address, sensible, devoted to commonplace activities, and with a due appreciation of the comforts and conveniences of life. His conversation had no suggestiveness or subtlety. He was grumpy in the morning and good-humoured in the evening. He seemed impatient of new ideas, and endowed with a firm grasp of conventional and obvious notions.

Hugh's own recollection of his university days was very different, and yet he had lived in what might be called an intellectual set. There had been plenty of easy friendship, abundance of lively gossip, incessant and rather tedious festivities. Men had groaned and grumbled over their work, played games with hearty conviction, had nourished no great illusions about themselves and each other, had had few generous and ardent visions about art, poetry, or humanity; or, if they had, they had kept them to themselves with a very good show of contented indifference. There was indeed a little society to which Hugh had belonged, where books, and not very recondite ideas, of ethical or moral import, were discussed freely and amiably, without affectation, and occasionally with a certain amount of animation. But the arguments engendered were flimsy, inconsequent, and fantastic enough; the dialectic flashed to and fro, never very convincing, and mostly intended to aggravate rather than to persuade. Even at the time it had often appeared to Hugh to be shallow and flimsy. He had seldom heard a subject debated with any thoroughness or justice, and he had learnt far more from the preparation of occasional papers framed to initiate a discussion, than from any discussion that followed. The best thoughts that Hugh had apprehended in those days had been the thoughts that he had won from books; his mind had opened rapidly then, in the direction of a kind of poetical metaphysic, not deep speculation on the ultimate nature of things, so much as reflection on the more psychological problems of character and personality. It seemed to Hugh that his own mind, and the minds of those with whom he had lived, had been a mass of prejudices, of half-formed and inconsistent theories. None of them had had any policy into which they fitted the ideas that came to them; but a new and attractive idea had been seized upon, on its own merits, without any reference to other theories, or with any desire to co-ordinate it with other ideas, which were indeed just thrust aside to make room for the new one.

Hugh's idea of mental progress, in his later years, was the slow dwelling upon some thought, the quiet application of it to other thoughts. It seemed an inversion of the ordinary method of progress, if the biographies that he read were true. Taking the case, for instance, of the particular man whom Hugh had known, and whose biography he had studied, he seemed in youth to have been generous, fearless, candid, and ardent, and life must have been to him a process of hardening and encrusting with prejudice; he seemed to have begun with a bright faith in ideas, and to have ended with a dull belief in organisations. He had begun by being thrilled with the beauty of virtue, and he had ended by supporting the G.F.S. Hugh's experience was the exact opposite of this. He had begun, he thought, by being loaded and burdened with prejudices and stupid notions, acquired he knew not how; he had not doubted the value of authority, tradition, usage; as life went on, it seemed to him that he had got rid of his prejudices one by one, and that he had arrived, at the age of forty, at valuing sincerity, sympathy, simplicity, and candour, above dogma and accumulated beliefs. He had begun with a firm faith in systems and institutions; he had ended by basing all his hopes on the individual. He had begun by looking for beauty and perfection wherever he was told to expect it; if he had not discerned it, he had blamed his own dulness of perception. It had been a heavy and soulless business; and the real freshness of life, intellectual curiosity, mental independence, seemed to have come to him in fullest measure, just at the age when most men seemed to have parted with those qualities. As an undergraduate, he had been more aware of fitfulness and weariness than anything; only gradually had he become conscious of concentration, sustained zest, intention. Then he had tended to condemn enthusiasm as a species of defective manners. Now he lived by its steady light. Then he had been at the mercy of a new idea, an attractive personality. He shuddered to think how easily he had made friendships, and how contemptuously he had broken them the moment he was disappointed. Now he weighed and tested more; but at the same time he also opened his heart and his thoughts far more deliberately and frankly to sympathetic and generous people.

Hugh seemed to have found rather than to have lost his youth. His actual youth, indeed, seemed to him to have been a tremulous and listless thing, full of fears and sensibilities, feminine, unbalanced, frivolous. Life had so far been to Hugh pure gain. Looking back he saw himself irresolute, vague, sentimental, incapable of application, unmethodical, half-hearted. He had had none of the buoyancy, the splendid dreams, the sparkling ambitions that seemed, according to the records, to have been the stuff of great men's youth.

He sate one day in the ante-chapel of his old college, through a morning service, listening, as in a dream, to the sweet singing within; it seemed but a day since he had sate in his stall, a fitful-hearted boy. The service ended, and the procession streamed out, the rich tints of the windows lighting up the faces and the white surplices of the men, old and young, that issued from the dark door of the screen. Hugh felt within himself that he would not have the old days back again even if he could; he was nothing but grateful for the balance, the serenity, that life had brought him. He was conscious of greater strength, undimmed energy, increased zest; faltering indeed he was still, not better, not more unselfish; but he had a sense of truer values, more proportion, more contentment. The mysteries of life were as dark as ever, but at least he no longer thought that he had the key; in those days his little rickety system of life, that trembled in every breeze, had seemed for him to bridge all gaps, to explain all mysteries. Now indeed chaos stretched all about him, full of huge mists, dark chasms, hidden echoes; but he perceived something of its vastness and immensity; he had broken down the poor frail fences of his soul, and was in contact with reality. He did not doubt that he seemed to the younger generation an elderly and sombre personage, stumbling down the dark descent of life, with youth and brightness behind him; but that descent appeared to himself to be rather an upward-rising road, over dim mountains, the air glowing about him with some far-off sunrise. Poetry, art, religion – they meant a thousandfold more to him than they had meant in the old days. They had been pretty melodies, deft tricks of hand, choice toys then. Now they were exultations, agonies, surrenders, triumphs. The prospect of life had been to him in those days like misty ranges, full of threatening precipices, and dumb valleys in which no foot had trod. Now he saw from the hill-brow, a broad and goodly land full of wood and pasture, clustered hamlets, glittering, smoke-wrapt towns, rivers widening to the sea; the horizons closed by the blue hills of hope, from which life and love, and even death itself, seemed to wave hands of welcome ere they dipped to the unseen. He blessed God for that; and best of all he had now no desire, as he had had in the old days, to be understood, to be felt, to claim a place, to exercise an influence. He had put all that aside; his only concern was now to step as swiftly, as strongly as possible, upon the path that opened before him, caring little whether it led on to grassy moorlands, or sheltered valleys full of wood, or even to the towered walls of some strong city of God.

XI

Platonism – The Pure Gospel – The Pauline Gospel – The Harmony

Hugh, in his leisure, determined to try if he could set his mind at rest upon one point, a question that had always exercised a certain attraction over him. This was to make himself acquainted with some technical philosophy, or at any rate to try and see what the philosophers were doing. He had not, he was aware, a mind suited for the pursuit of metaphysics; he had little logical faculty and little power of deduction; he tended to view a question at bright and radiant points; he could not systematise or arrange it. He did not expect to be able to penetrate the mystery, or to advance step by step nearer to the dim and ultimate causes of things; but he thought he would like to look into the philosophers' workshop, as a man might visit a factory. He expected to see a great many processes going on the nature of which he did not hope to discern, and the object of which would be made still more obscure by the desperately intelligent explanations of some obliging workman, who would glibly use technical words to which he would himself be able to attach no sort of meaning.

But after a few excursions into modern philosophy, in which he seemed, as Tennyson said, to be wading as in a sea of glue, he went back to the earliest philosophers and read Aristotle and Plato. He soon conceived a great horror of Aristotle, of his subtle and ingenious analysis, which often seemed to him to be an attempt to define the undefinable, and never to touch the point of the matter at all; he thought that Aristotle was often occupied in the scientific treatment of essentially poetical ideas, and in the attempt to classify rather than to explain. Yet there were moments, it seemed to him, when Aristotle, writing with a kind of grim contempt for the vagueness of Plato, was carried off his feet by the Platonic enthusiasm; and so Hugh turned to Plato, which he had scrambled through as an undergraduate long years before. How incomparably beautiful it was! It revealed to Hugh what he had before only dimly suspected, that the poet, the moralist, the priest, the philosopher, and even the man of science, were all in reality engaged in the same task – penetrating the vast and bewildering riddle of the world. In Plato he found the philosophical method suffused by a burning poetical imagination; and he thought that Plato solved far more metaphysical riddles by a species of swift intuition than ever could be done by the closest analysis. He realised that Plato's theory was of a great, central, motionless entity, which acted not by expulsive energy but by a sort of magnetic attraction; and that all the dreams, the hopes, the activities of human minds were not the ripples of some central outward-speeding force, but the irresistible inner motion, as to the loadstone or the vortex, which made itself felt through the whole universe, material and immaterial alike. The intense desire to know, to solve, to improve, to gain a tranquil balance of thought, was nothing more, Hugh perceived, than this inward-drawing impulse, calling rather than coercing men to aspire to its own supreme serenity; all our ideas of what was pure and beautiful and true, then, were the same vast centripetal force, moving silently inward; all our sorrows, our mistakes, our sufferings, were but the checking of that overpowering influence; and any rest was impossible till we had drawn nearer to the central peace. This seemed to Hugh to be not a theory but an intensely inspiring and practical thought. How light-hearted, how brave a secret! Instead of desiring that all should be made plain at once, one could rejoice in the thought that one was certainly speeding homewards; and experience was no longer a blind conflict of forces, but a joyful nearing of the central sum of things. At all events, what a blitheness, what a zest it gave to the genius of Plato himself! With what eager inquisitiveness, in a sort of childlike gaiety, he hurried hither and thither, catching at every point some bright indication of the delightful mystery. Plato seemed to differ from the serious and preoccupied philosophers in this, that while they were lost in a grave and anxious scrutiny of phenomena, he was rather penetrated by the cheerfulness, the romance of the whole business. The intense personal emotions, which to the analytical philosophers seemed mere distracting elements, experiences to be forgotten, crushed, and left behind, were to Plato supreme manifestations of the one desire. One desired in others what one desired in God; the sense of admiration, the longing for sympathy, the desire that no close embrace, no passionate glance could satisfy, these were but deep yearnings after the perfect sympathy, the perfect understanding of God. And thus when Plato appeared most to be trifling with a subject, to be turning it over and over as a man may turn about a crystal in his hands, watching the lights blend and flash and separate on the polished facets, he was really drawing nearer to the truth, absorbing its delicious radiance and sweetness. Those sunny mornings, spent in strolling and talking, in colonnade or garden, in that imperishable Athens, seemed to Hugh like the talk of saints in some celestial city. Saints not of heavy and pious rectitude, conventional in posture and dreary in mind, but souls to whom love and laughter, pathos and sorrow, were alike sweet. Instead of approaching life with a sense of its gravity, its heinousness, its complexity, timid of joy and emotion and delight, practising sadness and solemnity, Plato and his followers began at the other end, and with an irrepressible optimism believed that joy was conquering and not being conquered, that light was in the ascendant, rippling outwards and onwards. And then the supreme figure of all, whether imaginary or not mattered little, Socrates himself, with what a joyful soberness and gravity did he move forward through experience, never losing his balance, but serenely judging all, till the moment came for him to enter behind the dark veil of death; and this he did with the same imperturbable good-humour, neither lingering or hasting, but with a tranquil confidence that life was beginning rather than ending.

And then Hugh saw in a flash that the essence of the Gospel itself was like that. When he read the sacred record in the light of Plato, it seemed to him as if it must in some subtle way be pervaded by the same bright intuitions as those which lit up the Greek mind. It seemed to Hugh a strange and bewildering thing that the pure message of simplicity and love, with its tender waiting upon God, its delight in flowers and hills, its love of great ideas, its rich poetry, its perfect art, had taken on the gloomy metaphysical tinge that St. Paul, with all his genius, had contrived to communicate to it. Surely it was intolerable to believe that all those subtle notions of sacrificial satisfaction, of justification, of substitution, had ever crossed the Saviour's mind at all. In a sense He fulfilled the law and the prophets, for they had laid down, in grief and doubt, a harsh code of morality, because they saw no other way of leavening the conscience of the world. But the Saviour, at least in the simple records, had not trafficked in such thoughts; he had but shown the significance of the primary emotions, had taught humanity that it was free as air, dear to the heart of God, heir of a goodly inheritance of love and care. St. Paul was a man of burning ardour, but had he not made the mistake of trying to lend too intellectual, too erudite, too complicated a colour to it all? The essence of the Gospel seemed to be that man should not be bound by the tradition of men; but St. Paul had been so intent upon drawing in those to whom tradition was dear, that in trying to harmonise the new with the old, he had made concessions and developed doctrines that had detrimentally affected Christianity ever since, and gone near to cast it in a different mould. Of course there was a certain continuity in religion, a development. But St. Paul was so deeply imbued with Rabbinical methods and Jewish tradition, that in his splendid attempt to show that Christianity was the fulfilment of the law, he had deeply infected the pure stream with Jewish ideas. The essence of Christianity was meant to be a tabula rasa. Christ bade men trust their deepest and widest intuitions, their sense of dependence upon God, their consciousness of divine origin. In this respect the teaching of Christ had more in common with the teaching of Plato, than the doctrine of St. Paul with the doctrine of Christ. Christ was concerned with the future, St. Paul with the past; Christ was concerned with religious instinct, St. Paul with religious development. The strength of the gospel of Christ was that it depended rather on the poetical and emotional consciousness of religion, and thus made its appeal to the majority of the human race. Plato, on the other hand, was too intellectual, and a perception of his doctrine was hardly possible except to a man of subtle and penetrating ability. Hugh wondered if it would be possible to put the doctrine of Plato in such a light that it would appeal to simple people; he thought that it would be possible; and here he was struck by the fact that Plato, like Christ, employed the device of the parable largely as a means of interpreting religious ideas. The teaching of the Gospel and the teaching of Plato were alike deeply idealistic. They both depended upon the simple idea that men could conceive of themselves as better than they actually were, and upon the fact that such a conception is the strongest motive force in the world in the direction of self-improvement. The mystery of conversion is nothing more than the conscious apprehension of the fact that one's life is meant to be noble and beautiful, and that one has the power to make it nobler and more beautiful than it is.

It seemed to Hugh, reflecting on the development of Christianity, that perhaps it was not too much to say that the Pauline influence had been to a great extent a misfortune; it was true that in a sense he had resisted the Jewish tyranny, and moreover that his writings were full of splendid aphorisms, inspiring thoughts, generous ideals. But he had formalised Christianity for all that; he had linked it closely to the Judaic system; he was ultimately responsible for Puritanism; that is to say, it was his influence more than any other that had given the Jewish scriptures their weight in the Christian scheme. It seemed to Hugh to be a terrible calamity that had reserved, so to speak, a place in the chariot of Christ for the Jewish dispensation; it was the firm belief in the vital inspiration of the Jewish scriptures that had produced that harsh and grim type of Christianity so dear to the Puritan heart. With the exception of certain of the Psalms, certain portions of Job and of the prophets, there seemed to Hugh to be little in the Old Testament that did not merely hamper and encumber the religion of Christ. What endless and inextricable difficulties arose from trying to harmonise the conception of the Father as preached by Christ, with the conception of the vindictive, wrathful, national, local Deity of the Old Testament. How little countenance did Christ ever give to that idea! He did not even think of the Temple as a house of sacrifice, but as a house of prayer! How seldom he alluded to the national history! How human and temporary a character He gave to the law of Moses! How constantly He appealed to personal rather than to national aspirations! How he seemed to insist upon the fact that every man must make his religion out of the simplest elements of moral consciousness! How often he appealed to the poetry of symbols rather than to the effectiveness of ceremony! How little claim he laid, at least in the Synoptic Gospels, to any divinity, and then rather in virtue of his perfect humanity! He called himself the Son of Man; in the only recorded prayer He gave to His disciples, there was no hint that prayer should be directed to Himself; it was all centred upon the Father.

Here again the Aristotelian method, the delight in analysis, the natural human desire to make truth precise and complete, had intruded itself. What was the Athanasian creed but an Aristotelian formula, making a hard dogma out of a dim mystery? The outcome of it all for Hugh was the resolution that for himself, at all events, his business was to disregard the temptation to formularise his position. With one's limited vision, one's finite inability to touch a thought at more than one point at a time, one must give up all hope of attaining to a perfected philosophical system. The end was dark, the solution incomprehensible. He must rather live as far as possible in a high and lofty emotion, beholding the truth by hints and glimpses, pursuing as far as possible all uplifting intuitions, all free and generous desires. It was useless to walk in a prescribed path, to frame one's life on the model of another's ideal. He must be open-minded, ready to revise his principles in the light of experience. He must hold fast to what brought him joy and peace. How restful after all it was to know that one had one's own problem, one's own conditions! All that was necessary was to put oneself firmly and constantly in harmony with the great purpose that had set one exactly where one was, and given one a temperament, a character, good and evil desires, hopes, longings, temptations, aspirations. One could not escape from them, thank God. If one only desired God's will, one's sins and sufferings as well as one's hopes and joys all worked together to a far-off end. One must go straight forward, in courage and patience and love.

XII

Sacrifice – The Church – Certainty

Hugh made friends at Cambridge with a young Roman Catholic priest, who was working there. His new friend was a very simple-minded man; he seemed to Hugh the only man of great gifts he had ever known, who was absolutely untouched by any shadow of worldliness. Hugh knew of men who resisted the temptations of the world very successfully, to whom indeed they were elementary temptations, long since triumphed over; but this man was the only man he had ever known who was gifted with qualities that commanded the respect and admiration of the world, yet to whom the temptations of ambition and success seemed never to have appeared even upon the distant horizon. He was an interesting talker, a fine preacher, and a very accomplished writer; but his interest was entirely centred upon his work, and not upon the rewards of it. He was very poor; but he had no regard for anything – luxury, power, position – that the world could give him. He had no wish to obtain influence; he only cared to make the work on which he was engaged as perfect as he could. The man was really an artist pure and simple; he seemed to have little taste even for pastoral work.

One day they sat together, on a hot breathless afternoon, in a college garden, on a seat beneath some great shady chestnut-trees, and looked out lazily upon the heavy-seeded grass of the meadow and the bright flower-borders. The priest said to Hugh suddenly, "I have often wondered what your religion really is. Do you mind my speaking of it? You seem to me exactly the sort of man who needs a strong, definite faith to make him happy."

Hugh smiled and said, "Well, I am trying, not very successfully I fear, to find out what I really do believe. I am trying to construct my faith from the bottom; and I am anxious not to put into the foundations any faulty stones, anything that I have not really tested."

"That is a very good thing to do," said the priest. "But how are you setting to work?"

"Well," said Hugh, "I have never had time before to think my religion out; I seem to have accepted all kinds of loose ideas and shaky traditions. I want to arrive at some certainties; I try to apply a severe intellectual test to everything: and the result is that I seem obliged to discard one thing after another that I once believed."

"Perhaps," said the priest after a silence, "you are doing this too drastically? Religion, it seems to me, has to be apprehended in a different region, the mystical region, the region of intuition rather than logic."

"Yes," said Hugh, "and intuitions are what one practically lives by; but I think that they ought to be able to stand an intellectual test too – for, after all, it is only intellectually that one can approach them."

The priest shook his head at this, with a half-smile. And Hugh added, "I wish you would give me a short sketch, in a few words if you can, of how you reached your present position."

"That is not very easy," said the priest; "but I will try." He sate for a moment silent, and then he said, "When one looks back into antiquity, before the coming of Christ, one sees a general searching after God in the world; the one idea that seems to run through all religions, is the idea of sacrifice – a coarse and brutal idea originally, perhaps; but the essence of it is that there is such a thing as sinfulness, and such a thing as atonement; and that only through death can life be reached. The Jews came nearest to the idea of a personal, ruling God: and the sacrificial system is seen in its fullest perfection with them. Then, in the wise counsels of God, it came about that our Saviour was born a Jew. You will say that I beg the question here; but approaching the subject intellectually, one satisfies oneself that the purest and completest religion that the world has ever seen was initiated by Him; it is impossible, in the light of that religion, not to feel that one must give the greatest weight to the credentials which such a teacher put forward; and we find that the claim that He made was that He was Himself Very God. The moment that one realises that, one also realises that there is no primâ facie impossibility that God should so reveal Himself – for indeed it seems an idea which no human mind would dare to originate, except in a kind of insane delusion; and the teaching of Christ, His utter modesty and meekness, His perfect sanity and clear-sightedness, make it evident to me that we may put out of court the possibility that He was under the influence of a delusion. He, it seems to me, took all the old vague ideas of sacrifice and consummated them; He showed that the true spirit was there, hidden under the ancient sacrifices; that one must offer one's best freely to God; and in this spirit He gave Himself to suffering and death. He founded a society with a definite constitution, He provided it with certain simple rules, and said that, when He was gone, it would be inspired and developed by the workings of His Spirit. He left this society as a witness in the world; it has developed in many ways, holding its own, gaining strength, winning adherents in a marvellous manner. And I look upon the Church as the witness to God in the world; I accept its developments as the developments of the Spirit. I see many things in it which I cannot comprehend; but then the whole world is full of mysteries – and the mysteries of the Church I accept in a tranquil faith. I have put it, I fear, very clumsily and awkwardly; but that is the outline of my belief – and it seems to me to interpret the world and its secrets, not perfectly indeed, but more perfectly than any other theory."

"I see!" said Hugh, "but I will tell you at once my initial difficulty. I grant at the outset that the teaching of Christ is the purest and best religious teaching that the world has ever seen; but I look upon Him, not as the founder of a system, but as the most entire individualist that the world has ever known. It seems to me that all His teaching was directed to the end that we should believe in God as a loving Father, and regard all men as brothers; the principle which was to direct His followers was to be the principle of perfect love, and I think that His idea was that, if men could accept that, everything else mattered little. They must live their lives with that intuition to guide them: the Church seems to me to be but the human spoiling and complicating of that great simple idea. I look round and see the other religious systems of the world – Mahomedanism, Buddhism, and the rest. In each I see a man of profound religious ideals, whose system has been adopted, and then formalised and vitiated by his followers. I do not see that there is anything to make me believe that the same process has not taken place in Christianity. The elaborate system of dogma and doctrine seems to me a perfectly natural human process of trying to turn ideas, essentially poetical, into definite and scientific truths, and half its errors to arise from feeling the necessity of reconciling and harmonising ideas, which I have described as poetical, which were never meant to be reconciled or harmonised. And then there is the added difficulty that, owing to the system of the Church, the ideas of the earliest Christian teachers, like St. Paul, have been accepted as infallible too; and hence arises the dilemma of having to bring into line a whole series of statements, made, as in St. Paul's case, by a man of intense emotion, which are neither consistent with each other, nor, in all cases, with the teaching of Christ. My idea of Christianity is to get as close to Christ's own teaching as possible. I do not concern myself with the historical accuracy of the Gospel narratives, or even with the incidents there recorded. Those records are the work of men of very imperfect education, and feeble intellectual grasp, in the grip of the prejudices and beliefs of their age. But their very imperfection makes me feel more strongly the august personality of Christ, because the principles, which they represent Him as maintaining, seem to me to be entirely beyond anything that they could themselves have originated. It seems to me, if I discern Christ rightly – speaking of Him now purely as a man – that if He could return to the earth, and be confronted with the system of any of the Churches that bear His name, He would declare it to be all a horrible mistake. It seems to me that what He aimed at was a strictly individualistic system, an attitude of sincerity, simplicity, and loving-kindness, free from all formalism (which He seems to have detested above everything), and free, too, from all elaborate and metaphysical dogma. Instead of this, He would find that men had seized upon the letter, not the spirit, of His teaching, and had devised a huge mundane organisation, full of pomp and policy, elaborate, severe, hard, unloving. Now if I apply my intellectual tests to the central truths of Christianity, such as the law of Love, the power of self-sacrifice, the brotherhood of men, they stand the test; they seem to contain a true apprehension of the needs of the world, of the methods by which the happiness of humanity may be attained. But when I apply the intellectual test to the superstructure of any Church, there are innumerable doctrines which appear to me to be contrary to reason. It is difficult indeed, in this world of mystery, to affirm that any mystical claim is not true, but such claims ought not to appear to be repugnant to reason, but to confirm the processes of reason, in a region to which reason cannot scientifically and logically attain. Such doctrines, for instance, as prayers to saints for their intercession, or the efficacy of Masses for the dead, seem to me to have a certain poetical beauty about them, but to be contrary both to reason and experience. I do not see the slightest hint of them in the teaching of Christ, or anything which can be taken as giving them any support whatever. They seem to me purely human fancies, hardened into a painful mechanical form, which forfeit all claim to be inspired by the Spirit of Christ. But I must apologise for giving you such an harangue – still, you brought it on yourself."

The priest smiled quietly. "I quite see your point," he said, "and we are at one in your main position; the difficulty of the Church is that it has to organise its system for people of all kinds of temperament, and at all stages of development. But the spirit is there – and if one lets go of the letter, the grasp of many human beings is so weak that they tend to lose the spirit. The Church no doubt appears to many to be over-organised, over-definite, but that is a practical difficulty which every system which has to deal with large masses of people is confronted with. It is the same with education; boys have to do many definite and precise things which seem at the time to have no educational value; but at the end of their time they see the need of these processes."

Hugh laughed. "I wish they did!" he said; "my own belief is that, in education as well as religion, we want more individualism, more elasticity. I think it is very doubtful whether great ideas, rigidly interpreted and mechanically enforced, have any value at all for undeveloped minds; the whole secret lies in their being liberally and freely apprehended."

"What really divides us," said the priest – "and I do not think we are very far apart – is my belief that God has not left the world without a definite witness to Himself – which I believe the Church to be."

"Yes," said Hugh, "I believe that the Church is a witness to God: any system which teaches pure morality is that; but I could not limit His witness to a single system; Nature, beauty, music, poetry, art – to say nothing of sweet and kindly persons – they are all the witnesses of His spirit; and the Church is, in my belief, simply hampered and restricted from doing what she might, by the woeful rigidity, the mechanical and hard precision, which she has imported into the spiritual region. The moment that the liberty of the spirit is restricted, and grace is made to flow in definite traditional channels, that moment the stream loses its force and brightness."

"I should rather believe," said the priest, "that, with all the obvious disadvantages of organisation, left to itself, the stream welters into a shapeless marsh, instead of making glad the City of God! And may I say that you, and those like you, with ardent spiritual instincts, make the mistake of thinking that we exclude you; indeed it is not so. You would find the yoke as easy and the burden as light as ever. In submission you would gain and not lose the liberty of which you are in search."

The priest soon after this took his leave. Hugh sate long pondering, as the evening faded into dusk. Was there no certainty, then, attainable? And the answer of his own spirit was that no ready-made certainty was of avail; that a man must begin from the beginning, and construct his own faith from the foundation; that reason must play its part, lead the soul as far as it could, and set it in the right way; but that the spirit must not halt there, but pass courageously and serenely into the trackless waste, content, if need be, to make mistakes, to retrace its path, only sincerely and gently advancing, waiting for any hint that might fall from the divine spirit, interpreting rather than selecting, divesting itself of preferences and prejudices one by one, and conscious that One waited, smiling and encouraging, but a little ahead upon the road, and that any turn in the path might reveal his bright coming to the faithful eye.

XIII

Waiting for Light

The charm of the Cambridge life was to Hugh the alternation of society and solitude. He was soon fortunate enough to obtain a post at his old college, and to be allotted a set of rooms there. He was sociably enough inclined, and the stir and movement of the minute society was interesting and enlivening. He had a little definite work to do, and he tried to cultivate relations with every one in the college. It was pleasant that he had no connection with disciplinary matters; and thus he was able to enter into a friendly intercourse with the undergraduates, not checked or hampered by any necessity to find fault or to offer advice. He occupied his rooms during term-time, and lived the life of the college with quiet enjoyment. But he retained his little house as well, and when the vacation began, he retired there, and spent his days much in solitude. He preferred this indeed to the life of the college, but he was well aware that it owed half its pleasure to its being an interlude in the busier life. But it was thus that what he felt were his best thoughts came to him; thoughts, that is to say, that pierced below the surface, and had a quality of reality which his mind, when he was employed and full of schemes, often seemed to himself to lack. But, like all speculative people who spend much time in solitary thought, he seemed to himself very soon to cross the debateable ground in which people of definite religious views appeared to him to linger gladly. Here he left behind all the persons who depended upon systems. Here remained Roman Catholics, who depended chiefly upon the authority and tradition of the Church, and Protestants, depending no less blindly and complacently upon the authority of the Bible. The real and crucial difficulty lay further on; and it was simply this: he saw a world full of joy, and full too of suffering; sometimes one of his fellow-pilgrims would be stricken down with some incurable malady, and through slow gradations of pain, sink wretchedly to death; was this suffering remedial, educative, benevolent? He hoped it was, he believed that it was, in the sense, at least, that he could not bear to feel that it might not be; but however ardently and eagerly he might try to believe it, there was always the dark alternative that pain might not be either remedial or educative; there was the terrible possibility that identity and personal consciousness were absolutely extinguished by death; for there was no sort of evidence to the contrary; and if this was the case, what remained of all human belief, philosophies, and creeds? They might simply be beautiful dreams, adorable mistakes, exquisite fallacies: but they could supply no inspiration for life, unless there was an element of absolute certainty about them, which was just the element that they lacked; and, in any case, the sad fact that such certainties as men professed differed from and even contradicted each other, introduced a new bewilderment upon the scene. A Romanist maintained the absolute divinity of the Church; a Protestant maintained the absolute reliability of the Bible; both of these could not be true, because in many points they contravened each other; the authority of the Church contradicted the authority of the Bible, while neither was perfectly consistent even with itself. They could not both be true, and Hugh was forced to believe that the point in which they were both in error, was in their claim to any absolute certainty at all. The conclusion seemed to be that one must take refuge in a perfect sincerity, not formulate one's hopes as beliefs, but wait for light, and keep the eyes of the mind open to all indications of any kind – that one must, in the words of the old wise proverb, be ready to begin one's life afresh many times, in the light of any new knowledge, any hint of truth. And thus one kind of happiness became impossible for Hugh, the happiness that comes of absolute certainty, when one may take a thing for granted, and not argue any more about it; that was the sort of happiness which many of his friends seemed to him to attain; and if life did indeed end with death, it was probably the best practical system to adopt; but Hugh could not adopt it; and therefore the only happiness he could expect was a candid and patient waiting upon truth, a welcoming of any new experience with a balanced and eager mind. To some a human love, a human passion, seemed the one satisfying thing, but this was denied to Hugh; and the only thing in his life which was of the nature of a passion was the sight of the beautiful world about him, which appealed to him day by day with a hundred delicate surprises, unnumbered novelties of rapture. He realised that the one thing that he dreaded was a cold tranquillity, uncheered by hope, unresponsive to beauty.

He rode one day, in the height of summer, for miles across the fenland. To left and right lay the huge plain with its wide fields, its solitary trees; to his left, between grassy flood-banks, ran the straight reedy river, full to-day of the little yellow water-lily, golden stars rising from the cool floating leaves; far ahead ran a low wooded ridge, with house-roofs clustering round a fantastic church tower, with a crown of pinnacles. Cattle grazed peacefully, and the whole scene was brimful of sweet passionless life, ineffable content. If he could only have shared it! Yet the sight of it all filled him with a sweet hopefulness; he travelled on, a lonely pilgrim, eager and wistful, desiring knowledge and love and serenity. He felt that they were waiting, certainly waiting; that they were tenderly and wisely withheld. That was the nearest that he could come to his heart's desire.

XIV

Dreariness – Romance – The Choice of Work – Dulness – A Creed

It was always a great pleasure to Hugh to explore an unfamiliar countryside, and the same pleasure was derivable to a certain extent from railway travelling, though the vignettes that one saw from the windows of a swiftly-rolling train were so transitory and so numerous, that one had soon the same sense of fatigue that comes from turning over a book of photographs, or from visiting a picture-gallery. If one explored the country in a leisurely manner it was less fatiguing, because one could taste the savour of a sight at one's ease. Hugh came to the conclusion, as life advanced, that he preferred a landscape on which humanity had set its mark to a landscape of a pure, natural wildness, though that indeed had a beauty of its own, a more solemn beauty, though not so near to the heart. But the great red-brick house, peering through its sun-blinds, among the flower-beds, with a rookery behind in the tall trees of a grove, and the cupola of stable-buildings among the shrubberies, that one saw in a flash as the train emerged from the low cutting; or the tiled roofs of houses, with an old mouldering church-tower peering out above them, in a gap between green downs; or a quiet manor-house among pastures, seen at the close of day when the shadows began to lengthen, gave him a sense of the long succession of peaceable lives – the boy returning from school to the familiar home, or the old squire, after a life of pleasant activities, walking among the well-known fields, and knowing that he must soon make haste to begone and leave his place for others. There was a sense of romance and pathos about it all; and the scenes thus unfolded suddenly before his eyes were dear to him because they had been dear to others, and stood for so much old tenderness and anxious love. There was always, too, a feeling in his mind of how easy, how sweet and tranquil, life would be under such conditions. Seen from outside, certain lives, lived in beautiful surroundings and tinged with seemly traditions, seemed to have a romantic quality, even in their sufferings and sorrows. No amount of experience, no accumulation of the certainty that life was interwoven with a sordid and dreary fibre, seemed ever to dispel this illusion, just as sorrows and miseries depicted in a book or in a drama appeared to have a romance about them which, seen from inside, they lacked. There were in Hugh's own memory a few places and a few houses, where by some happy fortune the hours had always been touched with this poetical quality, and into which no touch of dreariness had ever entered. Something of the same romance lingered for Hugh over certain of the colleges at Cambridge. To wander through their courts, to read the mysterious names inscribed over unknown doors, to think of the long succession of inmates, grave or light-hearted, that lived within, either for a happy space of youth, or through long quiet years; this never ceased to communicate to him a certain thrill of emotion.

The only period of his life that seemed to Hugh to lack this quality of poetry were the years of his official life in London, the years that the locust had eaten. He did not grudge having spent them so, for they had given a sort of solidity and gravity to life; but now that he was free to live as he chose, he determined that he would, if he could, so spend his days, that there should be as little as possible of this dull and ugly quality intermixed with them; the sadness and incompleteness of countless lives seemed to Hugh to arise from the fact that so many men settled down to mechanical toil, which first robbed them of their freshness, and then routine became essential to them. But Hugh determined that neither his work nor his occupation should have this sunless and dismal quality; that he would deliberately eschew the things that brought him dreariness, and the people who took a mean and conventional view; that he would not take up, in a spirit of heavy rectitude, work for which he knew himself to be unfit; and that such mechanical work as he felt bound to undertake should be regarded by him in the light of a tonic, which should enable him to return to his chosen work with a sense of gladness and relief.

This would demand a certain sustained effort, he foresaw. But whatever qualities he possessed, he knew that he could reckon upon a vital impatience of things that were dull and common; moreover it was possible to determine that, whatever happened, he would not do things in a dull way; so much depended upon how they were handled and executed. One of the dullest things in the world was the multiplication of unnecessary business. So many people made the mistake of thinking that by minute organisation the success of a system could be guaranteed. Hugh knew that the real secret was to select the right personalities, and to leave systems elastic and simple, and that thus the best results were achieved; the most depressing thing in the world was a dull person administering faithfully an elaborate system; one of the most inspiring sights was an original man making the best of a bad system.

And so Hugh resolved that he would bring to his task, his leisure, his relations with others, his exits and entrances, his silence and his speech, a freshness and a zest, not directed to surprising or interesting others – that was the most vulgar expedient of all – but with a deliberate design to transmute, as by the touch of the magical stone, the common materials of life into pure gold. He would endeavour to discern the poetical quality in everything and in everyone. In inanimate things this was easy enough, for they were already full of pungent distinctness, of subtle difference; it was all there, waiting merely to be discerned. With people it was different, because there were so many who stared solemnly and impenetrably, who repelled one with remarks about the weather and the events of the day, as a man repels a barge with a pole. With such people it would be necessary to try a number of conversational flies over the surface of the sleeping pool, in the hope that some impulse, some pleasant trait would dart irresistibly to the surface, and be hauled struggling ashore. Hugh had seen, more than once, strange, repressed, mournful things looking out of the guarded eyes of dreary persons; and it would be his business to entice these to the light. He determined, too, to cultivate the art of being alone. There were many people in the world who found themselves the poorest of all company, and Hugh resolved that he would find his own society the most interesting of all; he would not be beaten by life, as so many people appeared to him to be. Of course he knew that there were threatening clouds in the sky, that in a moment might burst and drench the air with driving rain. But Hugh hoped that his attitude of curiosity and wonder could find food for high-hearted reflection even there. The universe teemed with significance, and if God had bestowed such a quality with rich abundance everywhere, there must be a still larger store of it in His own eternal heart. The world was full of surprises; trees drooped their leaves over screening walls, houses had backs as well as fronts; music was heard from shuttered windows, lights burned in upper rooms. There were a thousand pretty secrets in the ways of people to each other. Then, too, there were ideas, as thick as sparrows in an ivied wall. One had but to clap one's hands and cry out, and there was a fluttering of innumerable wings; life was as full of bubbles, forming, rising into amber foam, as a glass of sparkling wine. That cup he would drink, and try its savour. There would be times when he would flag, no doubt, but it should not be from any failure of desire. He would try to be temperate, so as to keep the inner eye unclouded; and he would try to be perfectly simple and sincere, deciding questions on their own merits, and with no conventional judgment. Such an attitude might be labelled by peevish persons, with prejudices rather than preferences, a species of intellectual Epicureanism. But Hugh desired not to limit his gaze by the phenomena of life, but to keep his eyes fixed upon the further horizon; the light might dawn when it was least expected; but the best chance of catching the first faint lights of that other sunrise, was to have learnt expectancy, to have trained observation, and to have kept one's heart unfettered and undimmed.

He saw that the first essential of all was to group his life round a centre of some kind, to have a chosen work, to which he should be vowed as by a species of consecration; it was in choosing their life-work, he thought, that so many people failed. He saw men of high ability, year after year, who continued to put off the decision as to what their work should be, until they suddenly found themselves confronted with the necessity of earning their living, and then their choice had to be made in a hurry; they pushed the nearest door open and went in; and then habit began to forge chains about them; and soon, however uncongenial their life might be, they were incapable of abandoning it. There were some melancholy instances at Cambridge of men of high intellectual power, who had drifted thus into the academical life without any aptitude for it, without educational zeal, without interest in young people. Such men went on tamely year after year, passing from one college office to another, inadequately paid, with no belief in the value of their work, averse to trying experiments, fond of comfort, only anxious to have as little trouble as possible, expending their ingenuity of mind in academical meetings, criticising the verbal expression of reports with extreme subtlety, too fastidious to design original work, too much occupied for patient research, and ending either in a bitter sense of unrecognised merit, or in a frank and unashamed indolence.

Hugh saw that in choosing the work of one's life, one must not be guided by necessity, or even mere rectitude. Work embraced from a sense of duty was like driving a chariot in sea-sand. One must have an enthusiasm for one's task, and a delight in it; for only by enjoyment of the results could one tolerate the mechanical labour inseparable from all intellectual toil. It was true that he had himself drifted into official duties, but here Hugh saw the guidance of a very tender providence, which had provided him with a species of discipline that he could never have spontaneously practised. His great need had been the application of some hardening and hammering process, such as should give him that sort of concentrated alertness which his education had failed to bestow; and none the less tenderly provided, it seemed to Hugh, was the irresistible impulse to arise and go, which had come upon him when the process was completed. And now he was free, with an immense appetite for speculation, for intellectual pleasure, for the criticism of life, for observation. It was the quality, the fine essence of things and thoughts that mattered. To some was given the desire to organise and manage the world, to others the instinct for perception, for analysis, for the development of ideas. It was not that one kind of work was better than the other; both were needed, both were noble; but Hugh had no doubt on which side of the battle he was himself meant to fight. And so he determined that he would devote his life to the work, and that he would not allow any excessive intrusion of extraneous elements. The blessing of the academical life was that it entailed a certain amount of social intercourse; it compelled one to come into contact with a large variety of people. Without this Hugh felt that his outlook would have become narrow and self-centred. He knew of course that there would be times when it would seem to him that his life was an ineffective one, when he would envy the men of affairs, when he would wonder what, after all, his own performance amounted to. But Hugh felt that the great lack of many lives was the failure to perceive the interest of ideas; that many men and women went through existence in a dull and mechanical way, raking together the straws and dust of the street; and he thought that a man might do a great work if he could put a philosophy of life into an accessible shape. The great need was the need of simplification; the world was full of palpitating interests, of beauty, of sweetness, of delight. But many people had no criterion of values; they filled their lives with petty engagements, and smilingly lamented that they had no time to think or read. For such people the sun rose over dewy fields, in the freshness of the countryside, in vain: in vain the sunset glared among the empurpled cloud-banks; in vain the moon rose pale over the hushed garden-walks, while the nightingale, hidden in the dark heart of the bush, broke into passionate song. And even if it were argued that it was possible to be sensible and virtuous without being responsive to the appeal of nature, what did such people make of their social life? they made no excursions into the hearts and minds of others; their religion was a conventional thing; they went to concerts, where the violins thrilled with sweet passion, and the horns complained with a lazy richness, that they might chatter in gangways and nod to their friends. It was all so elaborate, so hollow! and yet in the minds of these buzzing, voluble persons one could generally discern a trickle of unconventional feeling, which could have made glad the sun-scorched pleasaunce.

Hugh determined with all his might that he would try to preach this simple gospel; that he would praise and uphold the doctrine of sincerity, of appreciation, of joy. He made up his mind that he would not be drawn into the whirlpool, that he would intermingle long spaces of eager solitude with his life, that he would meditate, reflect, enjoy; that he would try to discern the significance of all things seen or felt, and practise a disposition to approach all phenomena, whether pleasant or painful, in a critical mood; and at the same time he resolved that his criticism should not be a mere solvent; that he would strive to discern not the dulness, the ugliness, the dreariness of life, but its ardours, its passions, its transporting emotions, its beauties. That was a task for a lifetime. Whatever was doubtful, this was certain, that one was set in a mysterious, attractive, complex place; if one regarded it carelessly, it seemed a commonplace affair enough, full of material activities, dull necessities, foolish stirrings, low purposes; but if one looked a little closer, there were strange, dim, beautiful figures moving in and out, evanescent and shadowy, behind the nearer and more distracting elements. Here was hope, with a far-off gaze, beauty with mournful yearning eyes, love with finger on lip and dreamful gaze. It was here that the larger, the holier life lay. What was necessary was to keep apart, with deliberate purpose, from all fruitless vexations, dull anxieties, sordid designs. To detach oneself, not from life, but from the scum and foam of life; to realise that the secret lay in the middle of it all, and that it was to be discerned not by fastidious abstention, not by a chilly asceticism, but by welcoming all nobler impulses, all spiritual influences; not by starving body or mind, but by selecting one's food carefully and temperately. If a man, Hugh thought, could live life in this spirit, reasonable, kindly, humble, sincere, he could encourage others to the same simplicity of aim. To be selfish was to miss the beauty of the whole; for the essence of the situation was to reveal to others, by example and by precept, what they already so dimly knew.

To find out what one could do, where one could help, and to work with all one's might; to live strongly and purely; not to be dissuaded by comment or discouraged by lack of sympathy; to meet others simply and frankly; to be more desirous to ascertain other points of view than to propound one's own; not to be ashamed to speak unaffectedly of one's own admirations and hopes; not to desire recognition; not to yield to personal motives; not to assent to conventional principles blindly, nor to dissent from them mechanically; never to be contemptuous or intolerant; to foresee contingencies and not to be deterred by them; to be open to all impressions; to be tender to all sincere scruples; not to be censorious or hasty; not to anticipate opposition; to be neither timid nor rash; to seek peace; to be gentle rather than conscientious; to be appreciative rather than critical – on these lines Hugh wished to live; he desired no deference, no personal domination; but neither did he wish to reject responsibility if he were consulted and trusted. Above all things he hoped to resist the temptation of taking soundings, of calculating his successes. Fame and renown allured him, none but he could say how much; but he knew in his heart that he contemned their specious claims, and he hoped that they would some day cease to trouble him. He knew that much depended upon health and vigour; but on the other hand he believed that the most transforming power in the world was the desire to be different; why he could not stride into his kingdom and realise his ideal all at once, he could not divine; but meanwhile he would desire the best, and look forward in confidence and hope.

XV

The Pilgrim's Progress – The Pilgrimage – Development – The Eternal Will

Hugh was seized, one bright February morning of clear sun and keen winds, with a sudden weariness of his work. This rebellious impulse did not often visit him, because he loved his work very greatly, and there were no hours so happy as those which were so engaged. But to-day he thought to himself suddenly that, lost thus in his delightful labour, he was forgetting to live. How strange it was that the hours one loved most were the hours of work that sped past unconsciously, when one stood apart, absorbed in dreams, from the current of things. It seemed to him that he was like the Lady of Shalott, so intent upon her web and the weaving of it, that she thought of the moving forms upon the road beyond the river merely as things that could be depicted in her coloured threads. He took up the Pilgrim's Progress and sate a long while reading it, and smiling as he read; he wondered why so many critics spoke so slightingly of the second part, which seemed to him in some ways almost more beautiful than the first. There was not perhaps quite the same imaginativeness or zest; but there was more instinctive art, because the writer was retracing the same path, lodging at the same grave houses, encountering the same terrors, and yet representing everything as mirrored in a different quality of mind; the mind of a faithful woman, and of the boys and maidens who walked with her upon pilgrimage. There was not quite the same romance, perhaps, but there was more tenderness and sweetness. It came less from the mind and more from the heart.