Beside Still Waters

"You are a fine specimen of the individualist," said Sheldon, "and I have no desire to convert you – indeed we speak different languages, and I doubt if you could understand me; there is to be no such levelling as you suppose, rather the other way indeed; we shall not be able to do without individualism, only it will be pleasantly organised. The delightful thing to me is to observe that you are willing to let us have a little of your culture at your own price, but we shall not want it; we shall have our own culture, and it will be a much bigger and finer thing than the puling reveries of hedonists; it will be like the sea, not like the scattered moorland pools."

"Do you mean," said Hugh, "when you talk so magniloquently of the culture of the future, that it will be different from the culture of the present and of the past?"

"No, no," said Sheldon, "not different at all, only wider and more free. Do you not see that at present it is an elegant monopoly, belonging to a few select persons, who have been refined and civilised up to a certain point? The difficulty is that we can't reach that point all at once – why, it has taken you thirty or forty centuries to reach it! – and at present we can't get further than the municipal art-gallery, and lectures on the ethical outlook of Browning. But that is not what we are aiming at, and you are not to suppose that yours is a different ideal of beauty and sensibility from ours. What I object to is that you and your friends are so select and so condescending. You seem to have no idea of the movement of humanity, the transformation of the race, the corporate rise of emotion."

"No," said Hugh, "I have no idea what you are speaking of, and I confess it sounds to me very dull. I have never been able to generalise. I find it easy enough to make friends with homely and simple people, but I think I have no idea of the larger scheme. I can only see the little bit of the pattern that I can hold in my hand. Every human being that I come to know appears to me strangely and appallingly distinct and un-typical; of course one finds that many of them adopt a common stock of conventional ideas, but when you get beneath that surface, the character seems to me solitary and aloof. When people use words like 'democracy' and 'humanity,' I feel that they are merely painting themselves large, magnifying and dignifying their own idiosyncrasies. It does not uplift and exalt me to feel that I am one of a class. It depresses and discourages me. I hug and cherish my own differences, my own identity. I don't want to suppress my own idiosyncrasies at all; and what is more, I do not think that the race makes progress that way. All the people who have really set their mark upon the world have been individualists. Not to travel far for instances, look at the teaching of our Saviour; there is not a hint of patriotism, of the rights of society, of common effort, of the corporateness of which you speak. He spoke to the individual. He showed that if the individual could be simple, generous, kindly, forgiving, the whole of society would rise into a region where organisation would be no longer needed. These results cannot be brought about by legislation; the spirit must leap from heart to heart, as the flower seeds itself in the pasture."

"Would you be surprised to hear," said Sheldon, smiling, "that I am in accordance with most of your views? Of course legislation is not the end; it is only a way of dealing with refractory minorities. The highest individual freedom is what I aim at. But the mistake you make is in thinking that the individual effects anything; he is only the link in the chain. It is all a much larger tide, which is moving resistlessly in the background. It is this movement that I watch with the deepest hope and concern. I do not profess to direct or regulate it, it is much too large a thing for that; I merely desire to remove as far as I can the obstacles that hinder the incoming flood."

"Well," said Hugh, smiling, "as long as you do not threaten my individual freedom, I do not very much care."

"Ah," said Sheldon, "now you are talking like the worst kind of aristocrat, the early-Victorian Whig, the man who has a strong belief in popular liberty, combined with an equally strong sense of personal superiority."

"No, indeed!" said Hugh, "I bow most sincerely before the rights of society. I only claim that as long as I do not interfere with other people, they will not interfere with me. I recognise to the full the duty of men to work, but when I have complied with that, I want to approach the world in my own way. I am aware that reason tells me I am one of a vast class, and that I have certain limitations, but at the same time instinct tells me that I am sternly and severely isolated. No one and nothing can intrude into my mind and self; and I feel inclined to answer you like Dionysus in the Frogs of Aristophanes, who says to Hercules when he is being hectored, "Don't come pitching your tent in my mind, you have a house of your own!" —Secretum meum mihi, as St. Francis of Assisi said – identity is the one thing of which I am absolutely sure. One must go on perceiving, drawing in impressions, feeling, doubting, suffering; one knows that souls like one's own are moving in the mist; and if one can discern any ray of light, any break in the clouds, one must shout one's loudest to one's comrades; but you seem to me to want to silence my lonely experiences by the vote of the majority, and the vote of the majority seems to me essentially a dull and tiresome thing. Of course this sounds to you the direst egotism; but when one has labelled a thing egotistic, one has not necessarily condemned it, because the essence of the world is its egotism. You would no doubt say that we are no more alone than the leaves of a tree, that the sap which is in one leaf at one moment is the next moment in another, and that we are more linked than we know. I would give much to have that sense, but it is denied me, and meanwhile the pressure of that corporate force of which you speak seems to me merely to menace my own liberty, which is to me both sacred and dear."

Sheldon smiled. "Yes," he said, "we do indeed speak different languages. To me this sense of isolation of which you speak is merely a melancholy phantom. I rejoice to feel one of a great company, and I exult when the sap of the great tree flows up into my own small veins; but do not think that I disapprove of your position. I only feel that you are doing unconsciously the very thing that I desire you to do. But at the same time I think that you are missing a great source of strength, seeing a thing from the outside instead of feeling it from the inside. Yet I think that is the way in which artists help the world, through the passionate realisation of themselves. But you must not think that you are carrying away your share of the spoil to your lonely tent. It belongs to all of us, even what you have yourself won."

Hugh felt that Sheldon was probably speaking the truth. He thought long and earnestly over his words. But the practical outcome of his reflections was that he realised the uselessness of trying to embrace an idea which one did not instinctively feel. He knew that his real life did not lie, at all events for the present, in movements and organisations. They were meaningless words to him. His only conception of relationships was the personal conception. He desired with all his heart the uplifting, the amelioration of human beings; he could contribute best, he thought, to that, by speaking out whatever he perceived and felt, to such a circle as was in sympathy with him. Sheldon, no doubt, was doing exactly the same thing; there were abundance of people in the world, who would agree neither with Sheldon nor himself, amiable materialists, whose only instinct was to compass their own prosperity and comfort, and who cared neither for humanity nor for beauty, except in so far as they ministered to their own convenience. Hugh did not sympathise with such people, and indeed he found it hard to conceive, if what philosophers and priests predicated of the purpose of God was true, how such people came into being. The mistake, the generous mistake, that Sheldon made, was to think that humanity was righting itself. It was perhaps being righted, but ah, how slowly! The error was to believe that one's theories were the right ones. It was all far larger, vaster, more mysterious than that. Hugh knew that the element in nature and the world to which he himself responded most eagerly was the element of beauty. The existence of beauty, the appeal it made to the human spirit, seemed to him the most hopeful thing in the world. But he could not be sure that the salvation of the world lay there. Meantime, while he felt the appeal, it was his duty to tell it out among the heathen, just as it was Sheldon's duty to preach the corporateness of humanity; but Hugh believed that the truth lay with neither, but that both these instincts were but as hues of a prism, that went to the making up of the pure white light. They were rather disintegrations of some central truth, component elements of it rather than the truth itself. They were not in the least inconsistent with each other, though they differed exceedingly; and so he determined to follow his own path as faithfully as he could, and not, in response to strident cries of justice and truth, and still less in deference to taunts of selfishness and epithets of shame, to lend a timorous hand to a work in the value of which he indeed sincerely believed, but which he did not believe to be his own work. The tide was indeed rolling in, and the breakers plunging on the beach; but so far as helping it on went, it seemed to him to matter little whether you sat and watched it with awe and amazement, with rapture and even with terror, or whether you ran to and fro, as Sheldon seemed to him to be doing, busying himself in digging little channels in the sand, that the roaring sea, with the wind at its back, might foam a little higher thus upon the shore.

XXIX

Bees – A Patient Learner

The morning sun fell brightly on Hugh's breakfast-table; and a honeycomb that stood there, its little cells stored with translucent sweetness, fragrant with the pure breath of many flowers, sparkled with a golden light. Hugh fell to wondering over it. One's food, as a rule, transformed and dignified by art, and enclosed in vessels of metal and porcelain, had little that was simple or ancient about its associations; how the world indeed was ransacked for one's pleasure! meats, herbs, spices, minerals – it was strange to think what a complexity of materials was gathered for one's delight; but honey seemed to take one back into an old and savage world. Samson had gathered it from the lion's bones, Jonathan had thrust his staff into the comb, and put the bright oozings to his lips; humanity in its most ancient and barbarous form had taken delight in this patiently manufactured confection. But a further thought came to him; the philosopher spoke of a development in nature, a slow moving upward through painfully gathered experience. It was an attractive thought, no doubt, and gave a clue to the bewildering differences of the world. But after all how incredibly slow a progress it was! The whole course of history was minute enough, no doubt, in comparison with what had been; but so far as the records of mankind existed, it was not possible to trace that any great development had taken place. The lines of species that one saw to-day were just as distinct as they had been when the records of man began. They seemed to run, like separate threads out of the tapestry, complete and entire from end to end, not mixing or intermingling. Fish, birds, quadrupeds – some had died out indeed, but no creature mentioned in the earliest records showed the smallest sign of approximating or drawing near to any other creature; no bird had lost its wings or gained its hands; no quadruped had deserted instinct for reason. Bees were a case in point. They were insects of a marvellous wisdom. They had a community, a government, almost laws. They knew their own business, and followed it with intense enthusiasm. Yet in all the centuries during which they had been robbed and despoiled for the pleasure of man, they had learnt no prudence or caution. They had not even learned to rebel. Generation after generation, in fragrant cottage gardens, they made their delicious store, laying it up for their offspring. Year after year that store had been rifled; yet for all their curious wisdom, their subtle calculations, no suspicion ever seemed to have entered their heads of what was going forward. They did not even try to find a secret place in the woods for their nest; they built obediently in the straw-thatched hives, and the same spoliation continued. A few days before Hugh had visited a church in the neighbourhood, and had become aware of a loud humming in the chancel. He found that an immense swarm of bees had been hatched out in the roof, and were dying in hundreds, in their attempt to escape through the closed windows. There were plenty of apertures in the church through which they could have escaped, if they had had any idea of exploration. But they were content to buzz feebly up and down the panes, till strength failed them, and they dropped down on to the sill among the bodies of their brothers. An old man who was digging in the churchyard told Hugh that the same thing had gone on in the church every summer for as long as he could remember.

And yet one did not hesitate to accept the Darwinian theory, on the word of scientific men, though the whole of visible and recorded experience seemed to contradict it. Even stranger than the amazing complexity of the whole scheme, was the incredible patience with which the matter was matured. What was more wonderful yet, man, by his power of observing the tendencies of nature, could make her laws to a certain extent serve his own ends. He could, for instance, by breeding carefully from short-legged sheep, in itself a fortuitous and unaccountable variation from the normal type, produce a species that should be unable to leap fences which their long-legged ancestors could surmount; he could thus save himself the trouble of erecting higher fences. This power in man, this faculty for rapid self-improvement, differentiated him from all the beasts of the field; how had that faculty arisen? it seemed a gap that no amount of development could bridge. If nature had all been perfect, if its rules had been absolutely invariable, if existence were conditioned by regular laws, it would be easy enough to believe in God. And yet as it was, it seemed so imperfect, and in some ways so unsatisfactory; so fortuitous in certain respects, so wanting in prevision, so amazingly deliberate. Such an infinity of care seemed lavished on the delicate structure of the smallest insects and plants, such a prodigal fancy; and yet the laws that governed them seemed so strangely incomplete, like a patient, artistic, whimsical force, working on in spite of insuperable difficulties. It looked sometimes like a conflict of minds, instead of one mind.

And then, too, the wonder which one felt seemed to lead nowhere. It did not even lead one to ascertain sure principles of conduct and life. The utmost prudence, the most careful attempt to follow the guidance of those natural laws, was liable to be rendered fruitless by what was called an accident. One's instinct to retain life, to grasp at happiness, was so strong; and yet, again and again, one was taught that it was all on sufferance, and that one must count on nothing. One was set, it seemed, in a vast labyrinth; one must go forward, whether one would or no, among trackless paths, overhung by innumerable perils. The only thing that seemed sure to Hugh was that the more one allowed the awe, the bewilderment, to penetrate one's heart and mind, the more that one indulged a fearful curiosity as to the end and purpose of it all, the nearer one came, if not to learning the lesson, yet at least towards reaching a state of preparedness that might fit one to receive the further confidence of God. Such tranquillity as one gained by putting aside the problems which encompassed one, must be a hollow and vain tranquillity. One might indeed never learn the secret; it might be the will of God simply to confront one with the desperate problem; but a deep instinct in Hugh's heart told him that this could not be so; and he determined that he, at all events, would go about the world as a patient learner, grasping at any hint that was offered him, whether it came by the waving of grasses on the waste, by the droop of flower-laden boughs over a wall, from the strange horned insect that crawled in the dust of the highway, or from the soft gaze of loving eyes, flashing a message into the depths of his soul.

The pure faint lines of the wold that he saw from his window on the far horizon, rising so peacefully above the level pasture-land, with the hedgerow elms – what did they stand for? The mind reeled at the thought. They were nothing but a gigantic cemetery. Every inch of that soft chalk had been made up by the life and death, through millions of years, of tiny insects, swimming, dying, mouldering in the depths of some shapeless sea. Surely such a thought had a message for his soul, not less real than the simpler and more direct message of peace that the soft pale outlines, the gentle foldings of the hills, seemed to lend his troubled spirit; in such a moment his faith rose strong; he trod a shining track through the deeps of God.

XXX

Flowers – The Garden

The air that day was full of sunlight like fine gold, and put Hugh in mind of the city that was pure gold like unto clear glass!– he had often puzzled over that as a child; gold always seemed so opaque a thing, a surface without depth; but, after all, it was true of the air about him to-day – clear and transparent indeed, with a perfect clarity and purity, and yet undoubtedly all tinged with lucent liquid gold. He sate long on a bench in the college garden, a little paradise for the eye and mind; it had been skilfully laid out, and Hugh used to think that he had never seen a place so enlarged by art, where so much ground went to the acre! All the outer edge of it was encircled by trees – elms, planes, and limes; the borders, full of flowering shrubs, were laid out in graceful curves, and in the centre was a great oval bed of low-growing bushes, with the velvet turf all about it, sweeping in sunlit vistas to left and right. It gave somehow a sense of space and extent, achieved Hugh could not guess how. To-day all the edges of the borders were full of flowers; and as he wandered among them he was more than ever struck with a thought that had often come to him, the mystery of flowers! The extraordinary variety of leaf and colour, the whimsical shapes, the astonishing invention displayed, and yet an invention of an almost childish kind. There was a clump of pink blooms, such as a child might have amused itself with cutting out of paper; here rose tall spires, with sharp-cut, serrated leaves at the base; but the blue flowers on the stem were curiously lipped and horned, more like strange insects than flowers. And then the stainless freshness and delicacy of the texture, that a touch would soil! These gracious things, uncurling themselves hour by hour, blooming, fading, in obedience to the strange instinct of life, surprised him by a sudden thrill. Here was a bed of irises, with smooth blade-like stalks, snaky roots, the flowers of incredible shapes, yet no two exactly alike, all splashed and dappled with the richest colours; and then the mixture of blended fragrance; the hot, honied smell of the candytuft, with aromatic spicy scents of flowers that he could not name. Here again was the escholtzia, with its pointed horns, its bluish leaf, and the delicate orange petals, yet with a scent, pure but acid, which almost made one shudder. There was some mind behind it all, Hugh felt, but what a mind! how leisurely, how fanciful, how unfathomable! For whose pleasure were all these bright eccentric forms created? Certainly not for the pleasure of man, for Hugh thought of the acres and acres of wheat now rising in serried ranks in the deep country, with the poppies or the marigolds among them, all quietly unfolding their bells of scarlet flame, their round, sunlike faces, where no eye could see them, except the birds that flew over. Could it be for God's own pleasure that these flower shapes were made? they could not even see each other, but rose in all their freshness, as by a subtle conspiracy, yet blind to the world about them, conscious only of the sunlight and the rain, with no imaginative knowledge, it would seem, or sympathy with their brethren. It always filled Hugh with a sort of pity to think of the sightless life of trees and flowers, each rising in its place, in plain, on hill, and yet each enclosed within itself, with no consciousness of its own beauty, and still less conscious of the beauty of its fellows. And what was the life that animated them? Where did it come from? Where did it pass to? Had they any sense of joy, of sorrow? It was hard to believe that they had not. It always distressed Hugh to see flowers gathered or boughs broken; it seemed a hateful tyranny to treat these delicate creatures so for an hour's pleasure. The sight of flowers picked and then thrown carelessly down by the roadside, gave him a sense of helpless indignation. The idyllic picture of children wandering in spring, filling their hands with flower-heads torn from bank and copse, appeared to Hugh as only painful. Man, from first to last, seemed to spread a ruthless destruction around him. Hugh's windows overlooked a stream-bend much frequented by fishermen; and it was a misery to him to see the poor dace, that had lived so cool and merry a life in the dark pools of the stream, poising and darting among the river-weed, hauled up struggling to the air, to be greeted with a shout of triumph, and passed about, dying and tortured, among the hot hands, in the thin, choking air. Was that what God made them for? What compensation awaited them for so horrible and shameful an end?

Hugh felt with a sigh that the mystery was almost unendurable, that God should make, hour by hour, these curious and exquisite things, such as flowers and fishes, and thrust them, not into a world where they could live out a peaceful and innocent life, but into the midst of dangers and miseries. Sometimes, beneath his windows, he could see a shoal of little fish flick from the water in all directions at the rush of a pike, one of them no doubt horribly engulphed in the monster's jaws.

Why was so hard a price to be paid for the delightful privilege of life? Was it indifference or carelessness, as a child might make a toy, and weary of it? It seemed like it, though Hugh could not bear to think that it was so; and yet for thousands of centuries the same thing had been going on all over the world, and no one seemed an inch nearer to the mystery of it all. How such thoughts seemed to shrivel into nothing the voluble religious systems that professed to explain it all! The misery of it was that, here and everywhere, God seemed to be explaining it Himself every day and hour, and yet one missed the connection which could make it all intelligible – the connection, that is, between God, as man in his heart conceived of Him, and God as He wrote Himself large in every field and wood. On what hypothesis of pure benevolence and perfect justice could all these restless lives, so full of pain and suffering, and all alike ending in death and disappearance, be explained?

Yet, stranger still, the mystery did not make him exactly unhappy. The fresh breeze blew through the trees, the flowers blazed and shone in the steady sun, the intricate lawns lay shimmering among the shrubberies, and Hugh seemed full of a baffling and baffled joy. At that moment, at all events, God wished him well, and spread for him the exquisite pageant of life and colour and scent; the very sunshine stole like some liquid essence along his veins, and filled him with unreasoning happiness. And yet he too was encompassed by a thousand dangers; there were a hundred avenues of sense, of emotion, by which some dark messenger might steal upon him. Perhaps he lurked behind the trees of that sweet paradise, biding his time to come forth. But to-day it seemed a species of treachery to feel that anything but active love and perfect benevolence was behind these smiling flowers, those tall trees rippling in the breeze, that lucent sky. To-day at least it seemed God's will that he should be filled with peaceful content and gratitude. He would drink the cup of sweetness to-day without retrospect or misgiving. Would the memory of that sweetness stay his heart, and sustain his soul when the dark days came, when the garden should be bare and dishevelled, and a strange dying smell should hang about the walks; and when perhaps his own soul should be sorrowful even unto death?

XXXI

A Man of Science – Prophets – A Tranquil Faith – Trustfulness

The perception of one of the great truths of personality came upon Hugh in a summer day which he had spent, according to his growing inclination, almost alone. In the morning he had done some business, some writing, and had read a little. It was a week when Cambridge was almost wholly given up to festivity, and the little river that flowed beneath his house echoed all day long to the wash of boats, the stroke of oars, and the cheerful talk of happy people. The streets were full of gaily-dressed persons hurrying to and fro. This background of brisk life pleased Hugh exceedingly, so long as he was not compelled to take any part in it, so long as he could pursue his own reveries. Part of the joy was that he could peep at it from his secure retreat; it inspirited him vaguely, setting, as it were, a cheerful descant to the soft melody of his own thoughts. In the afternoon he went out leisurely into the country; it was pleasant to leave the humming town, so full of active life and merry gossip, and to find that in the country everything was going forward as though there were no pressure, no bustle anywhere. The solitary figures of men hoeing weeds in among the growing wheat, and moving imperceptibly across the wide green fields, pleased him. He wound away through comfortable villages, among elms and orchards, choosing the byways rather than the high-roads, and plunging deeper and deeper into country which it seemed that no one ever visited except on rustic business. There was a gentle south wind which rippled in the trees; the foliage had just begun to wear its late burnished look, and the meadows were full of high-seeded grass, gilded or silvered with buttercups and ox-eye daisies.

He stopped for a time to explore a little rustic church, that stood, in a careless mouldering dignity, in the centre of a small village. Here, with his gentle fondness for little omens, he became aware that some good thing was being prepared for him, for in the nave of the church, under the eaves, he noted no less than three swarms of bees, that had made their nest under the timbers of the roof, and were just awakening into summer activity. The drones were being cast out of the hives, and in an angle formed by the buttress of the church, Hugh found a small lead cistern of water, which was a curious sight; it was all full of struggling bees fallen from the roof above, either solitary bees who had darted into the surface, and could not extricate themselves, or drones with a working bee grappled, intent on pinching the life out of the poor bewildered creature, the day of whose reckoning had come. Hugh spent a long time in pulling the creatures out and setting them in the sun, till at last he was warned by slanting shadows that the evening was approaching, and he set off upon his homeward way.

In a village near Cambridge he encountered a friend, a bluff man of science, who was engaged in a singular investigation. He kept a large variety of fowls, and tried experiments in cross-breeding, noting carefully in a register the plumage and physical characteristics of the chickens. He had hired for the purpose a pleasant house, with a few paddocks attached, where he kept his poultry. He invited Hugh to come in, who in his leisurely mood gladly assented. The great man took him round his netted runs, and discoursed easily upon the principles that he was elucidating. He spoke with a mild enthusiasm; and it surprised and pleased Hugh that a man of force and gravity should spend many hours of every day in registering facts about the legs, the wattles, and the feathers of chickens, and speak so gravely of the prospect of infinite interest that opened before him. He said that he had worked thus for some years, and as yet felt himself only on the fringe of the subject. They walked about the big garden, where the evening sun lay pleasantly on turf and borders of old-fashioned flowers; and with the complacent delight with which a scientific man likes to show experiments to persons who are engaged in childish pursuits such as literature, the philosopher pointed out some other curiosities, as a plant with a striped flower, whose stalk was covered with small red protuberances, full of a volatile and aromatic oil, which, when a lighted match was applied to them, sent off a little airy flame with a dry and agreeable fragrance, as the tiny ignited cells threw out their inflammable perfume.

Hugh was pleasantly entertained by these sights, and went home in a very blithe frame of mind; a little later he sat down to write in his own cool study. He was working at a task of writing which he had undertaken, when a thought darted suddenly into his mind, suggested by the image of the man of science who had beguiled an afternoon hour for him. It was a complicated thought at first, but it grew clearer. He perceived, as in a vision, humanity moving onwards to some unseen goal. He took account, as from a great height, of all those who are in the forefront of thought and intellectual movement. He saw them working soberly and patiently in their appointed lines. He discerned that though all these persons imagined that they had purposely taken up some form of intellectual labour, and were pursuing it with a definite end in view, they had really no choice in the matter, but were being led along certain ways by as sure and faithful an instinct as the bees that he had seen that day intent on their murderous business. Each of these savants, in whatever line his labours lay, felt that he was striding forward on a quest proposed, as he imagined, by himself. But Hugh saw, with an inward certainty of vision, that the current which moved them was one with which they could not interfere, and that it was but the inner movement of some larger and wider mind which propelled them. He saw too that many of his friends, men of practical learning, who were occupied, with a deep sense of importance and concern, in accumulating a little treasure of facts and inferences, in science, in history, in language, in philosophy, were but led by an inner instinct, an implanted taste, along the paths they supposed themselves to be choosing and laboriously pursuing. They encouraged each other at intervals by the bestowal of little honours and dignities; but at this moment Hugh saw them as mere toilers; like the merchants who spend busy and unattractive lives, sitting in noisy offices, acquiring money with which to found a family, with the curious ambition that descendants of their own, whom they could never see, should lead a pleasant life in stately country-houses, intent upon shooting and games, on social gatherings and petty business. He saw clearly that the merchant and the philosopher alike had no clear idea of what they desired to effect, but merely followed a path prepared and indicated. And then he saw that the minds which were really in the forefront of all were the poetical minds, the interpreters, the prophets, who saw, not in minute detail, and in small definite sections, but with a wide and large view, whither all this discovery, this investigation, was tending. The investigation, worthless and minute enough in itself, as it seemed to be when examined at a single point, had at least this value, that some principle, some inspiration for life could be extracted from it, something which would permeate slowly the thought of the world, set pulses beating, kindle generous visions, and teach men ultimately the lesson that, once learnt, puts life into a different plane, the lesson that God is behind and over and in all things, and that it is His purpose and not our own that is growing and ripening.

This mighty truth came home to Hugh that quiet afternoon with a luminous certitude, a vast increase of hopefulness such as he had seldom experienced before. But the thought in its infinite width narrowed itself like a great stream that passes through a tiny sluice; and Hugh saw what his own life was to be; that he must no longer form plans and schemes, battle with uncongenial conditions, make foolish and fretful efforts in directions in which he had no real strength or force; but that his only vocation must lie in faithfully and simply interpreting to himself and others this gigantic truth: the truth, namely, that no one ought ever to indulge in gloomy doubts and questionings about what his work in the world was to be, but that men and women alike ought just to advance, quietly and joyfully, upon the path so surely, so inevitably indicated to them. The more, he saw, that one listens to this inner voice, the more securely does the prospect open; by labour, not by fretful performance of disagreeable duty, but by eager obedience to the constraining impulse, is the march of the world accomplished. For some the path is quiet and joyful, for some it is noisy and busy, for some it is dreary and painful; for some it is even what we call selfish, cruel, and vile. But we must advance along it whether we will or no. And it became clear to Hugh that the more simply and clearly we feel this, the more will all the darker elements of life drop away from the souls of men; for the darker elements, the delays, the sorrows, the errors, are in vast measure the shadows that come from our believing that it is we who cause and originate, that our efforts and energies are valuable and useful. They are both, when God is behind them; but when we strive to make them our own, then their pettiness and insignificance are revealed.

It must not be said that Hugh never fell from this deep apprehension of the truth. There were hours when he was haunted by the spectres of his own unregenerate action, when he regretted mistakes, when he searched for occupation; but he grew to see that even these sad hours only brought out for him, with deeper and clearer significance, the essential truth of the vision, which did indeed transform his life. When he was ill, anxious, overwrought, he grew to feel that he was being held quietly back for a season; and it led to a certain deliberate disentangling of himself from the lesser human relations, from a consciousness that his appointed work was not here, but that he was set apart and consecrated for a particular work, the work of apprehending and discerning, of interpreting and expressing, the vast design of life; it represented itself to him in an image of children wandering in fields and meadows, just observing the detail and the petty connection of objects, the hedgerow, the stream appearing in certain familiar places, by ford or bridge, the trees that loomed high over the nearer orchard, and seemed part of it. And then one of these children, he thought, might, on a day of surprises, be taken up to the belfry of the old church-tower in the village, and out upon the roof. Then in a moment the plan, the design of all would be made clear, the hidden connection revealed. Those great towering elms, that rose in soft masses above the orchard, were in reality nothing but the elms that the child knew so well from the other side, that overhung his own familiar garden. There, among the willows, the stream passed from ford to bridge, and on again, circling in loops and curves. The village would be a different place after that, not known by an empirical experience, but apprehended as a construction, as a settled design, where each field and garden had its appointed place.

And so Hugh, with a great effort of utter resignation, a resignation which had something passionate and eager about it, cast himself into the Father's hands, and prayed that he might no longer do anything but discern and follow the path that was prepared for him. Long and late these thoughts haunted him; but when he went at last through the silent house to his own room, it was with a sense that he was reposing in perfect trustfulness upon the will of One who, whether He led him forward or held him back, knew with a deep and loving tenderness the thing that he, and he only, could do in the great complicated world. That world was now hushed in sleep. But the weir rushed and plunged in the night outside; and over the dark trees that fringed the stream there was a tender and patient light, that stole up from the rim of the whirling globe, as it turned its weary sides, with punctual obedience, to the burning light of the remote sun.

XXXII

Classical Education – Mental Discipline – Mental Fertilisation – Poetry – The August Soul – The Secret of a Star – The Voice of the Soul – Choice Studies – Alere Flammam

Hugh found that, as he grew older, he tended to read less, or rather that he tended to recur more and more to the familiar books. He had always been a rapid reader, and had followed the line of pure pleasure, rather than pursued any scheme of self-improvement. He became aware, particularly at Cambridge, that he was by no means a well-informed man, and that his mind was very incompletely furnished. He was disposed to blame his education for this, to a certain extent; it had been almost purely classical; he had been taught a little science, a little mathematics, and a little French; but the only history he had done at school had been ancient history, to illustrate the classical authors he had been reading; and the result had been a want of mental balance; he knew nothing of the modern world or the movement of European history; the whole education had in fact been linguistic and literary; it had sacrificed everything to accuracy, and to the consideration of niceties of expression. It might have been urged that this was in itself a training in the art of verbal expression; but here it seemed to Hugh that the whole of the training had confined itself to the momentary effect, the ring of sentences, the adjustment of epithets, and that he had received no sort of training in the art of structure. He had never been made to write essays or to arrange his materials. He thought that he ought to have been taught how to deal with a subject; but his exercises had been almost wholly translations from ancient classical languages. He had been taught, in fact, how to manipulate texture, but never how to frame a design. The result upon his reading had been that he had always been in search of phrases, of elegant turns of expression and qualification, but he had never learnt how to apprehend the ideas of an author. He had not cared to do this for himself, and from the examination point of view it had been simply a waste of time. All that he had ever tried to do had been so to familiarise himself with the style, the idiosyncrasies of authors, that he might be able to reproduce such superficial effects in his compositions, or to disentangle a passage set for translation. He had not arrived at any real mastery of either Greek or Latin, and it seemed to him, reflecting on this process long afterwards, that the system had encouraged in him a naturally faulty and dilettante bent in literature. In reading, for instance, a dialogue of Plato, he had never cared to follow the argument, but only to take pleasure in beautiful, isolated thoughts and images; in reading a play of Sophocles, he had cared little about the character-drawing or the development of the dramatic situation; he had only striven to discover and recollect extracts of gnomic quality, sonorous flights of rhetoric, illustrative similes.

The same tendency had affected all his own reading, which had lain mostly in the direction of belles-lettres and literary annals; and, in the course of his official life, literature had been to him more a beloved recreation than a matter of mental discipline. The result had been that he found himself, in the days of his emancipation, with a strong perception of literary quality, and a wide knowledge of poetical and imaginative literature; he had, too, a considerable acquaintance with the lives of authors; and this was all. He could read French with facility, but with little appreciation of style. Both German and Italian were practically unknown to him.

Hugh made the acquaintance, which ripened into friendship, of a young Fellow of a neighbouring college, whose education had been conducted on entirely different lines. This young man had been educated privately, his health making it impossible for him to go to school. He had read only just enough classics to enable him to pass the requisite examinations, and he had been trained chiefly in history and modern languages. He had taken high honours in history at Cambridge, and had settled down as a historical lecturer. As this friendship increased, and as Hugh saw more and more of his friend's mind, he began to realise his own deficiencies. His friend had an extraordinary grasp of political and social movements. He was acquainted with the progress of philosophy and with the development of ideas. It was a brilliant, active, well-equipped intellect, moving easily and with striking lucidity in the regions of accurate knowledge. Sometimes, in talking to his friend, Hugh became painfully aware of the weakness of his own slouching, pleasure-loving mind. It seemed to him that, in the intellectual region, he was like a dusty and ragged tramp, permeated on sunshiny days with a sort of weak, unsystematic contentment, dawdling by hedgerow-ends and fountain-heads, lying in a vacant muse in grassy dingles, and sleeping by stealth in the fragrant shadow of hayricks; while his friend seemed to him to be a brisk gentleman in a furred coat, flashing along the roads in a motor-car, full of useful activity and pleasant business. His friend's idea of education was of a strict and severe mental discipline; he did not over-estimate the value of knowledge, but regarded facts and dates rather as a skilled workman regards his bright and well-arranged tools. What he did above all things value was a keen, acute, clear, penetrating mind, which arrayed almost unconsciously the elements of a problem, and hastened unerringly to a conclusion. The only point in which Hugh rated his own capacity higher, was in a certain relish for literary effect. His friend was a great reader, but Hugh felt that he himself possessed a power of enjoyment, an appreciation of colour and melody, a thrilled delight in what was artistically excellent, of which his friend seemed to have little inkling.

His friend could classify authors, and could give off-hand a brilliant and well-sustained judgment on their place in literary development, which fairly astonished Hugh. But the difference seemed to be that his friend had mastered books with a sort of gymnastic agility, and that his mind had reached an astonishing degree of technical perfection thereby; but Hugh felt that to himself books had been a species of food, and that his heart and spirit had gained some intensity from them, some secret nourishment, which his friend had to a certain extent missed.

Hugh had been so stirred on several occasions by a sense of shame at realising the impotence and bareness of his own mind, that he laid down an ambitious scheme of self-improvement, and attacked history with a zealous desire for his own mental reform. But he soon discovered that it was useless. Such an effort might have been made earlier in life, before habits had been formed of desultory enjoyment, but it was in vain now. He realised that accurate knowledge simply fell through his mind like a shower of sand; a little of it lodged on inaccessible ledges, but most of it was spilt in the void. He saw that his only hope was to strengthen and enlarge his existing preferences, and that the best that he could hope to arrive at was to classify and systematise such knowledge as he at present possessed. It was too late to take a new departure, or to aim at any completeness of view. The mental discipline that he required, and of which he felt an urgent need, must be attained by a diligent sorting of his own mental stores, haphazard and disjointed as they were. And after all, he felt, there was room in the world for many kinds of minds. Mental discipline from the academical point of view was a very important thing, perhaps the thing that the ordinary type of public schoolboy was most in need of. But there was another province too, the province of mental appreciation, and it was in this field that Hugh felt himself competent to labour. It seemed to him that there were many young men at the university, capable of intellectual pleasure, who had been starved by the at once diffuse and dignified curriculum of classical education. Hugh felt that he himself had been endowed with an excess of the imaginative and artistic quality, and that, owing to natural instincts and intellectual home-surroundings, he had struck out a path for himself; books had been to Hugh from his earliest years channels of communication with other minds. He could not help doubting whether they ever developed qualities or delights that did not naturally exist in a rudimentary form in the mind which fell under their influences. He could not, in looking back, trace the originating power of any book on his own mind; the ideas of others had rather acted in fertilising the germs which lay dormant in his own heart. They had deepened the channels of his own thoughts, they had revealed him to himself; but there had always been, he thought, an unconscious power of selection at work; so that uncongenial ideas, unresponsive thoughts, had merely danced off the surface without affecting any lodgment. He had gained in taste and discrimination, but he could not trace any impulse from literature which had set him exploring a totally unfamiliar region. Sometimes he had resolutely submitted his mind to the leadership of a new author; but he had always known in his heart that the pilgrimage would be in vain. He felt that he would have gained if he had known this more decisively, and if he had spent his energies more faithfully in pursuing what was essentially congenial to him.

There were certain authors, certain poets who, he had instinctively felt from the outset, viewed life, nature, and art from the same standpoint as himself. His mistake had been in not defining that standpoint more clearly, but in wandering vaguely about, seeking for a guide, for way-posts, for beaten tracks. What he ought to have done was to have fixed his eyes upon the goal, and fared directly thither.

But this misdirected attempt, over which he wasted some precious months, to enlarge the horizon of his mind, had one valuable effect. It revealed to him at last what the object of his search was. He became aware that he was vowed to the pursuit of beauty, of a definite and almost lyrical kind. He saw that his mind was not made to take in, with a broad and vigorous sweep, the movement of human endeavour; he saw that he had no conception of wide social or political forces, of the development of communities, of philosophical ideals. These were great and high things, and his studies gave him an increased sense of their greatness and significance. But Hugh saw that he could neither be a historian nor a philosopher, but that his work must be of an individualistic type. He saw that the side of the world which appealed to himself was the subtle and mysterious essence of beauty – the beauty of nature, of art, of music, of comradeship, of relations with other souls. The generalisations of science had often a great poetical suggestiveness; but he had no vestige of the scientific temper which is content to deduce principles from patient and laborious investigation. He saw that his own concern must be with the emotions and the hearts of his fellows, rather than with their minds; that if he possessed any qualities at all, they were of a poetical kind. The mystery of the world was profound and dark, though Hugh could see that science was patiently evolving some order out of the chaos. But the knowledge of the intricate scheme was but a far-off vision, an august hope; and meanwhile men had to meet life as they could, to evolve enough hopefulness, enough inspiration from their complicated conditions to enable them to live a full and vigorous life.

Poetry, to give a large name to the various interpretations of subtle beauty, could offer in some measure that hope, that serenity; could lend the dignity to life which scientific investigations tended to sweep away. Science seemed to reveal the absolute pettiness, the minute insignificance of all created things, to show how inconsiderable a space each separate individual occupied in the sum of forces; the thought weighed heavily upon Hugh that he was only as the tiniest of the drops of water in a vast cataract that had rushed for thousands of years to the sea; it was a paralysing conception. It was true that the water-drop had a definite place; yet it was the outcome and the victim of monstrous forces; it leapt from the mountain to the river, it ran from the river to the sea; it was spun into cloud-wreaths; it fell on the mountain-top again; it was perhaps congealed for centuries in some glacier-bed; then it was free again to pursue its restless progress. But to feel that one was like that, was an unutterably dreary and fatiguing thought. The weary soul perhaps was hurried thus from zone to zone of life, never satisfied, never tranquil; with a deep instinct for freedom and tranquillity, yet never tranquil or free. Then, into this hopeless and helpless prospect, came the august message of poetry, revealing the transcendent dignity, the solitariness, the majesty of the indomitable soul; bidding one remember that though one was a humble atom in a vast scheme, yet one had the sharp dividing sense of individuality; that each individual was to himself the measure of all things, a fortress of personality; that one was not merely whirled about in a mechanical order; but that each man was as God Himself, able to weigh and survey the outside scheme of things, to approve and to disapprove; and that the human will was a mysterious stronghold, impregnable, secure, into which not even God Himself could intrude unsummoned. How small a thing to the eye of the scientist were the human passions and designs, the promptings of instinct and nature; but to the eye of the poet how sublime and august! These tiny creatures could be dominated by emotions – love, honour, patriotism, liberty – which could enable them, frail and impotent as they were, to rise majestically above the darkest and saddest limitations of immortality. They could be racked with pain, crushed, tormented, silenced; but nothing could make them submit, nothing could force them to believe that their pains were just. Herein lay the exceeding dignity of the human soul, that it could arraign its Creator before its own judgment-seat, and could condemn Him there. It could not, it seemed, refuse to be called into being, but, once existent, it could obey or not as it chose. Its joys might be clouded, its hopes shattered, but it need not acquiesce; and this power of rebellion, of criticism, of questioning, seemed to Hugh one of the most astonishing and solemn things in the world. And thus to Hugh the history of the individual, the aspirations and longings of mankind, seemed to contain a significance, a sanctity that nothing could remove.

He did not believe that this rebellious questioning was justified, but this did not lessen his astonishment at the fact that the human soul could claim a right to decide, by its own intuitions, what was just and what was unjust, and could accuse the Eternal Lord of Life of not showing it enough of the problem for it to be able to acquiesce in the design, as it desired to do. Hugh believed that he was justified in holding that as Love was the strongest power in the world, the Creator and Inspirer of that love probably represented that quality in the supremest degree, though this was an inference only, and not supported by all the phenomena of things. But it seemed to him the one clue through the darkness; and this secret hope was perhaps the highest and best thought that came to him from searching the records of humanity and the conceptions of mortal minds.

And therefore Hugh felt that he was on the side of the individual; and that he touched life in that relation. Literature then must be for him, in some form or other, an attempt to quicken the individual pulse, to augment the individual sense of significance. He must abstain from what was probably a higher work; but he must not lose faith thereby. He must set himself with all his might to preach a gospel of beauty to minds which, like his own, were incapable of the larger mental sweep, and could only hope to disentangle the essence of the moment, to refine the personal sensation. That was the noble task of high literature, of art, of music, of the contemplation of nature, that it could give the mind a sense of largeness, of dim and wistful hope, of ultimate possibilities. The star that hung in the silent heaven – it was true that it was the creation of mighty forces, that it had a place, a system, a centrifugal energy, a radiation of its own. That was in a sense the message of a star; but it had a further appeal, too, to the imaginative mind, in that it hung a glowing point of ageless light, infinitely remote, intolerably mysterious, a symbol of all the lustrous energies of the aspiring soul. And in one sense indeed the pure imagination could invest such vast creatures of God with even a finer, freer charm than scientific apprehension. Science could indicate its bulk, its motions, its distance, even analyse its very bones; but it could do no more; while the spirit could glide, as in an aerial chariot, through the darkness of the impalpable abyss, draw nearer and nearer in thought to the vast luminary, see unscathed its prodigious vents spouting flame and smoke, and hear the roar of its furnaces; or softly alight upon fields of dark stones, and watch with awe the imagined progress of forms intolerably huge, swollen as with the bigness of nightmare. Here was the strange contrast, that science was all on fire to learn the truth; while the incomprehensible essence of the soul, with its limitless visions, was capable of forming conceptions which the truth should disappoint. And here again came in a strange temptation. If life and identity were to be indefinitely prolonged, then Hugh had no wish but to draw nearer to the truth, however hard and even unpalatable it might be; but if, on the other hand, this life were all, then it seemed that one might be even the happier for comfortable and generous delusions.

Hugh, then, felt that if the old division of more highly developed minds was the true one; if one was either Aristotelian or Platonist, that is to say, if one's tendencies were either scientific or idealistic, there was no doubt on which side of the fight he was arrayed; not that he thought of the two tendencies as antagonistic; and if indeed the scientific mind tended to contemn the idealistic mind, as concerning itself with fancies rather than with facts, he felt that there could not be a greater mistake than for the idealistic mind to contemn the scientific. Rather, he thought, the idealists should use the scientific toilers as patient, humble, and serviceable people, much as the Dorian conquerors of Sparta used the Helots, and encourage them to perform the necessary and faithful work of investigation for which the idealists were unfitted. The mistake which men of scientific temper made, Hugh thought, was to concern themselves only or mainly, with material phenomena. The idealistic and imaginative tendencies of man were just as much realities, and no amount of materialism could obliterate them. What was best of all was to import if possible a scientific temper into idealistic matters; not to draw hasty or insecure generalisations, nor to neglect phenomena however humble. Books then for Hugh were, in their largest aspect, indications and manifestations of the idealistic nature of man. The interest about them was the perceiving of the different angles at which a thought struck various minds, the infusion of personality into them by individuals, the various interpretations which they put upon perceptions, the insight into various kinds of beauty and hopefulness which the writers displayed.

And thus Hugh turned more and more away from the critical apprehension of imaginative literature, to the mystical apprehension of it. A critical apprehension of it was indeed necessary, for it initiated one into the secrets of expression and of structure, in which the force of personality was largely displayed, taking shape from the thought in them, as clothes take shape from their wearers. But deeper still lay the mystical interpretation. In the world of books he heard the voice of the soul, sometimes lamenting in desolate places, sometimes singing blithely to itself, as a shepherd sings upon a headland, in sight of the blue sea; sometimes there came a thrill of rapture into the voice, when the spirit was filled to the brim with the unclouded joys of the opening world, the scent of flowers, the whispering of foliage in great woods, the sweet harmonies of musical chords, the glance of beloved eyes, or the accents of some desired voice; and then again all this would fade and pale, and the soul would sit wearied out, lamenting its vanished dreams and the delicate delights of the springtime, in some wild valley overhung with dark mountains, under the dreadful and inscrutable eye of God. Life, how insupportable, how beautiful it seemed! Full of treasures and terrors alike, its joys and its woes alike unutterable. The strangest thing of all, that the mind of man was capable of seeing that there was a secret, a mystery about it all; could desire so passionately to know it and to be satisfied, and yet forbidden even dimly to discern its essence.

What, after all, Hugh reflected, was the end of reading? Not erudition nor information, though many people seemed to think that this was a meritorious object. Professed historians must indeed endeavour to accumulate facts, and to arrive if possible at a true estimate of tendencies and motives; the time had not yet come, said the most philosophical historians, for any deductions to be drawn as to the development of the mind of the world, the slow increase of knowledge and civilisation; and yet that was the only ultimate value of their work, to attempt, namely, to arrive at the complex causes and influences that determined the course of history and progress. Hugh felt instinctively that his mind, impatient, inaccurate, subtle rather than profound, was ill adapted for such work as this. He felt that it was rather his work to arrive, if he could, at a semi-poetical, semi-philosophical interpretation of life, and to express this as frankly as he could. And thus reading must be for him an attempt to refine and quicken his insight into the human mind, working in the more delicate regions of art. He must study expression and personality; he must keep his spirit sensitive to any hint of truth or beauty, any generous and ardent intuition, any grace and seemliness of thought. He was fond of books of travel, as opening to him a larger perspective of human life, and revealing to him the conclusions to which experience and life had brought men of other nationalities and other creeds. Biography was his most beloved study, because it opened out to him the vast complexity of human motive; but he thought that its chief value had been in revealing to him the extraordinary part that conventional and adopted beliefs and motives played in the majority of lives.

His reading, then, began to have for him a deep and special significance. He was no philosopher; he found that the metaphysical region, where one stumbled among the dim ultimate causes of things, only gave him a sense of insecurity and despair; but he was in a sense a psychologist; his experience of life had taught him to have an inkling of the influences that affect character, and still more of the stubborn power of character in resisting influences. Poetry was to him a region in which one became aware of strange and almost magical forces, which came floating out of unknown and mysterious depths – it was a world of half-heard echoes, momentary glimpses, mysterious appeals. In history and in biography one saw more of the interacting forces of temperament; but in poetry, as the interpreter of nature, one found oneself among cries and thrills which seemed to rise from the inner heart of the world. It was the same with religion; but here the forces at work so often lost their delicacy and subtlety by being compounded with grosser human influences, entangled with superstitions, made to serve low and pitiful ends. In poetry there was none of this – it was the most disinterested thing in the world. In the pure medium of words, coloured by beauty and desire, all the remote, holy, sweet secrets of the heart were blended into a rising strain; and it was well to submit oneself, tranquilly and with an open heart, to the calling of these sweet voices.

Hugh was aware that his view was not what would be called a practical one; that he had no fibre of his being that responded to what were called civic claims, political urgencies, social reforms, definite organisations; he felt increasingly that these things were but the cheerful efforts of well-meaning and hard-headed persons to deal with the bewildering problems, the unsatisfactory débris of life. Hugh felt that the only possible hope of regeneration and upraising lay in the individual; and that if the tone of individual feeling could be purified and strengthened, these organisations would become mere unmeaning words. The things that they represented seemed to Hugh unreal and even contemptible, the shadows cast on the mist by the evil selfishnesses, the stupid appetites, the material hopes of men. As simplicity of life and thought became more and more dear to him, he began to recognise that, though there was no doubt room in the world, as it was, for these other busy and fertile ideas, yet that his own work did not lie there. Rather it lay in defining and classifying his own life and experience; in searching for indubitable motives, and noble possibilities that had almost the force of certainties; of gathering up the secrets of existence, and speaking them as frankly, as ardently, as melodiously as his powers would admit, if by any means he might awaken other hearts to the truths which had for him so sweet and constraining an influence.

XXXIII

Music – Church Music – Musicians – The Organ – False Asceticism