Beside Still Waters Part 10

Sometimes, for weeks together at Cambridge, Hugh would go without hearing any music at all, until an almost physical thirst would fall upon him. In such an arid mood, he would find himself tyrannously affected by any chance fragment of music wafted past him; he would go to some cheerful party, where, after the meal was over, a piano would be opened, and a simple song sung or a short piece played. This would come like a draught of water to a weary traveller, bearing Hugh away out of his surroundings, away from gossip and lively talk, into a remote and sheltered place; it was like opening a cas.e.m.e.nt from a familiar and lighted room, and leaning out over a dim land, where the sunset was slowly dying across the rim of the tired world.

Hugh always found it easy to make friends with musicians. They generally seemed to him to be almost a race apart; their art seemed to withdraw them in a curious way from the world, and to absorb into itself the intellectual vigour which was as a rule, with ordinary men, distributed over a variety of interests. He knew some musicians who were men of wide cultivation, but they were very much the exception; as a rule, they seemed to Hugh to be a simple and almost childlike species, fond of laughter and elementary jests, with emotions rather superficial than deep, and not regarding life from the ordinary standpoint at all. The reason lay, Hugh believed, in the nature of the medium in which they worked; the writer and the artist were brought into direct contact with humanity; it was their business to interpret life, to investigate emotion; but the musician was engaged with an art that was almost mathematical in its purity and isolation; he worked under the strictest law, and though it required a severe and strong intellectual grip, it was not a process which had any connection with emotions or with life. But Hugh always felt himself to be inside the charmed circle, and though he knew but little of the art, musical talk always had a deep interest for him, and he seemed to divine and understand more than he could explain or express.

But still it was true that music had played no part in his intellectual development; he had never approached it on that side; it had merely ministered to him at intervals a species of emotional stimulus; it had seemed to him to speak a language, dim and unintelligible, but the purport of which he interpreted to be somehow high and solemn. There seemed indeed to be nothing in the world that spoke in such mysterious terms of an august destiny awaiting the soul. The origin, the very elements of the joy of music were so absolutely inexplicable. There seemed to be no a.s.signable cause for the fact that the mixture of rhythmical progress and natural vibration should have such a singular and magical power over the human soul, and affect it with such indescribable emotion.

He had sometimes seen, half with amus.e.m.e.nt, half with a far deeper interest, the physical effect which the music of some itinerant piano-organ would produce upon street children; they seemed affected by some curious intoxication; their gestures, their smiles, their self-conscious glances, their dancing movements, so unnatural in a sense, and yet so instinctive, made the process appear almost magical in its effects. Though it did not affect him so personally, it seemed to have a similarly intoxicating effect on Hugh's own mind. Even if the particular piece that he was listening to had no appeal to his spirit, even if it were only a series of lively cascades of tripping notes, his thoughts, he found, took on an excited, an irrepressible tinge. But if on the other hand the time and the mood were favourable, if the piece were solemn or mournful, or of a melting sweetness, it seemed for a moment to bring a sense of true values into life, to make him feel, by a silent inspiration, the rightness and the perfection of the scheme of the world.

One evening a friend of Hugh's, who was organist of one of the important college chapels, took him and a couple of friends into the building. It had been a breathlessly hot summer day, but the air inside had a coolness and a peace which revived the languid frame. It was nearly dark, but the great windows smouldered with deep fiery stains, and showed here and there a pale face, or the outline of a mysterious form, or an intricacy of twined tabernacle-work. Only a taper or two were lit in the shadowy choir; and a light in the organ-loft sent strange shadows, a waving hand or a gigantic arm, across the roof, while the quiet movements of the player were heard from time to time, the pa.s.sage of his feet across the gallery, or the rustling of the leaves of a book. Hugh and his friends seated themselves in the stalls; and then for an hour the great organ uttered its voice--now a soft and delicate strain, a lonely flute or a languid reed outlining itself upon the movement of the accompaniment; or at intervals the symphony worked up to a triumphant outburst, the trumpets cras.h.i.+ng upon the air, and a sudden thunder outrolling; the great pedals seeming to move, like men walking in darkness, treading warily and firmly; until the whole ended with a soft slow movement of perfect simplicity and tender sweetness, like the happy dying of a very old and honourable person, who has drunk his fill of life and blessings, and closes his eyes for very weariness and gladness, upon labour and praise alike.

The only shadow of this beautiful hour was that in this rapt s.p.a.ce of tranquil reflection one seemed to have harmonised and explained life, joy and disaster alike, to have wound up a clue, to have brought it all to a peaceful and perfect climax of silence, like a tale that is told; and then it was necessary to go out to the world again with all its bitterness, its weariness, its dissatisfaction--till one almost wondered whether it was wise or brave to have chased and captured this strange phantom of imagined peace.

Yes, it was wise sometimes, Hugh felt sure! to have refused it would have been like refusing to drink from a cool and bubbling wayside spring, as one fared on a hot noon over the s.h.i.+mmering mountain-side--refused, in a spirit of false austerity, for fear that one would thirst again through the dreary leagues ahead. As long as one remembered that it was but an imagined peace, that one had not attained it, it was yet well to remember that the peace was real, that it existed somewhere, even though it was still shut within the heart of G.o.d. However slow the present progress, however long the road, it was possible to look forward in hope, to know that one would move more blithely and firmly when the time should come for the desired peace to be given one more abundantly; it helped one, as one stumbled and lingered, to look a little further on, and to say, "I will run the way of Thy commandments, when Thou hast set my heart at liberty."

x.x.xIV

Pictorial Art--Hand and Soul--Turner--Raphael--Secrets of Art

Hugh's professional life had given him little opportunity for indulging artistic tastes. He had been very fond as a boy of sketching, especially architectural subjects; it had trained his powers of observation; but there had come a time when, as a young man, he had deliberately laid his sketching aside. The idea in his mind had been that if one desired to excel in any form of artistic expression, one must devote all one's artistic faculty to that. He had been conscious of a certain diffuseness of taste, a love of music and a love of pictorial art being both strong factors in his mind; but he was also dimly conscious that he matured slowly; that he had none of the facile grasp of difficult things which characterised some of his more able companions; his progress was always slow, and he arrived at mastery through a long wrestling with inaccuracy and half knowledge; his perception was quick, but his grasp feeble, while his capacity for forgetting and losing his hold on things was great. He therefore made a deliberate choice in the matter, guided, he now felt, rather by a kind of intuition than by any very definite principle, and determined to restrict his artistic energies to a single form of art. His father, he remembered, had remonstrated with him, and had said that by giving up sketching he was sacrificing a great resource of recreation and amus.e.m.e.nt. He had no answer at the time to the criticism, but it seemed to him that he knew his own mind in the matter, and that as he could not hope, he thought, to attain to any real excellence in draughtsmans.h.i.+p, it had better be cut off altogether, and his energies, such as they were--he knew that the spring was not a copious one--confined to a more definite channel.

As life went on, and as time became more and more precious, as his literary work more and more absorbed him, he drew away from the artistic region; in his early years of manhood he had travelled a good deal, and the seeing of pictures had always been part of the programme; but his work became heavier, and the holidays had tended more and more to be spent in some quiet English retreat, where he could satisfy his delight in nature, and re-read some of the old beloved books. A certain physical indolence was also a factor, an indolence which made wandering in a picture-gallery always rather a penance; but he contrived at intervals to go and look at pictures in London in a leisurely way, both old and new; and he had one or two friends who possessed fine works of art, which could be enjoyed calmly and quietly.

He was aware that he was losing some catholicity of mind by this--but he knew his limitations, and more and more became aware that his const.i.tutional energy was not very great, and needed to be husbanded.

He was quite aware that he was not what would be called a cultivated person, that his knowledge both of art and music was feeble and amateurish; but he saw, or thought he saw, that people of wide cultivation often sacrificed in intensity what they gained in width; and as he became gradually aware that the strongest faculty he possessed was the literary faculty, he saw that he could not hope to nourish it without a certain renunciation. He had no taste for becoming an expert or a connoisseur; he had not the slightest wish to instruct other people, or to arrive at a technical and professional knowledge of art. He was content to leave it to be a rare luxury, a thing which, when the opportunity and the mood harmonised, could open a door for him into a beautiful world of dreams. He was quite aware that he often liked what would be called the wrong things; but what he was on the look-out for in art was not technical perfection or finished skill, but a certain indefinable poetical suggestion, which pictures could give him, when they came before him in certain moods. The mood, indeed, mattered more than the picture; moreover it was one of the strangest things about pictorial art, that the work of certain artists seemed able to convey poetical suggestion, even when the poetical quality seemed to be absent from their own souls. He knew a certain great artist well, who seemed to Hugh to be an essentially materialistic man, fond of sport and society, of money, and the pleasures that money could buy, who spoke of poetical emotion as moons.h.i.+ne, and seemed frankly bored by any attempt at the mystical apprehension of beautiful things, who could yet produce, by means of his mastery of the craft, pictures full of the tenderest and loveliest emotion and poetry. Hugh tried hard to discern this quality in the man's soul, tried to believe that it was there, and that it was deliberately disguised by a pose of bluff unaffectedness. But he came to the conclusion that it was not there, and that the painter achieved his results only by being able to represent with incredible fidelity the things in nature that held the poetical quality. On the other hand he had a friend of real poetical genius, who was also an artist, but who could only produce the stiffest and hardest works of art, that had no quality about them except the quality of tiresome definiteness.

This was a great mystery to Hugh; but it ended eventually, after a serious endeavour to appreciate what was approved by the general verdict to be of supreme artistic value, in making him resolve that he would just follow his own independent taste, and discern whatever quality of beauty he could, in such art as made an appeal to him. Thus he was not even an eclectic; he was a mere amateur; he treated art just as a possible vehicle of poetical suggestion, and allowed it to speak to him when and where it could and would.

He had moreover a great suspicion of conventionality in taste. A man of accredited taste often seemed to him little more than a man who had the faculty of admiring what it was the fas.h.i.+on to admire. Hugh had been for a short time under the influence of Ruskin, and had tried sincerely to see the magnificence of Turner, and to loathe the artificiality of Claude Lorraine. But when he arrived at his more independent att.i.tude, he found that there was much to admire in Claude; that exquisite golden atmosphere, suffusing a whole picture with an evening glow, enriching the lavish foreground, and touching into romantic beauty headland after headland, that ran out, covered with delicate woodland, into the tranquil lake; those ruinous temples with a quiet flight of birds about them; the mysterious figures of men emerging from the woods on the edges of the water, bent serenely on some simple business, had the magical charm; and then those faint mountains closing the horizon, all rounded with the golden haze of evening, seemed to hold, in their faintly indicated heights and folds, a delicate peace, a calm repose, as though glad just to be, just to wait in that reposeful hour for the quiet blessing of waning light, the sober content so richly shed abroad. It was not criticism, Hugh thought, to say that it was all impossibly combined, falsely conceived.

It was not, perhaps, a transcript of any one place or one hour; but it had an inner truth for all that; it had the spirit of evening with its pleasant weariness, its gentle recollection, its waiting for repose; or it had again the freshness of the morning, the vital hope that makes it delightful to rise, to cast off sleep, to go abroad, making light of the toil and heat that the day is to bring.

And then, in studying Turner, he learnt to see that, lying intermingled with all the power and n.o.bility of much of his work, there was a displeasing extravagance, a violence, a faultiness of detail, an exaggeration that often ruined his pictures. Neither he nor Claude were true to life; but there was an insolence sometimes about Turner's variation from fact, which made him shudder. How he seemed sometimes, in his pictures of places familiar to Hugh--such, for instance, as the drawing of Malham Cove--to miss, by his heady violence, all the real, the essential charm of the place. Nature was not what Turner depicted it; and he did not even develop and heighten its beauty, but subst.i.tuted for the real charm an almost grotesque personal mannerism.

Turner's idea of nature seemed to Hugh often purely theatrical and melodramatic, wanting in restraint, in repose. The appeal of Turner seemed to him to be constantly an appeal to childish and unperceptive minds, that could not notice a thing unless it was forced upon them.

Some of the earlier pictures indeed, such as that of the frost-bound lane, with the boy blowing on his fingers, and the horses nibbling at the stiff gra.s.s, with the cold light of the winter's dawn coming slowly up beyond the leafless hedge, seemed to him to be perfectly beautiful; but the Turner of the later period, the Turner so wildly upheld by Ruskin, seemed to Hugh to have lost sight of nature, in the pleasure of constructing extravagant and fantastic schemes of colour. The true art seemed to Hugh not to be the art that trumpets beauty aloud, and that drags a spectator roughly to admire; but the art that waits quietly for the sincere nature-lover, and gives a soft hint to which the soul of the spectator can add its own emotion. To Hugh it was much a matter of mood. He would go to a gallery of ancient or modern art, and find that there many pictures had no message or voice for him; and then some inconspicuous picture would suddenly appeal to him with a mysterious force--the pathetic glance of childish eyes, or an old face worn by toil and transfigured by some inner light of hopefulness; or a woodland scene, tree-trunks rising amid a copse; or the dark water of a sea-cave, lapping, translucent and gem-like, round rock ledges; or a reedy pool, with the chimneys of an old house rising among elms hard by: in a moment the mood would come upon him, and he would feel that a door had been opened for his spirit into a place of sweet imaginings, of wistful peace, bringing to him a hope of something that might a.s.suredly be, some deep haven of G.o.d where the soul might float upon a golden tide. One day, for instance, two old line-engravings of Italian pictures which he had inherited, and which hung in his little library, gave him this sense; he had known them ever since he was a child, and they had never spoken to him before. Had they hung all these years patiently waiting for that moment? One was "The Betrothal of the Virgin," by Raphael, where the old bearded priest in his tiara, with his robes girt precisely about him, casts an inquiring look on the pair, as Joseph, a worn, majestic figure, puts the ring on the Virgin's finger. Some of it was hard and formal enough; the flowers on Joseph's rod might have been made of china; the slim figure of the disappointed suitor, breaking his staff, had an unpleasing trimness; and the companions of the Virgin were models of feeble serenity. But the great new octagonal temple in the background,--an empty place it seemed--for the open doors gave a glimpse of shadowy ranges--the shallow steps, the stone volutes, the low hills behind, with the towered villa--even the beggars begging of the richly dressed persons on the new-laid pavement--all these had a sudden appeal for him.

The other picture was the "Communion of Jerome," by Domenichino--a stiff, conventional design enough. The cherubs hanging in air might have been made of wax or even metal--there was no aerial quality about them--they c.u.mbered the place! But the wistful look of the old worn saint, kneeling so faintly, so wearily, the pure lines of the shrine, the waxlights, the stiff robes of the priest, the open arch showing an odd, cl.u.s.tered, castellated house, rising on its steep rocks among dark brushwood, with a glimmering pool below, and mysterious persons drawing near--it all had a tyrannical effect on Hugh's mind. Probably a conventional critic would have spoken approvingly of the Raphael and disdainfully enough of the Domenichino--but the point to Hugh was not in the art revealed, but in the a.s.sociation, the remoteness, the suggestiveness of the pictures. The faults of each were patent to him; but something in that moment shone through; one looked through a half-open door, and saw some beautiful mystery being celebrated within, something that one could not explain or a.n.a.lyse, but which was none the less certainly there.

Thus art became to Hugh, like nature, an echoing world that lay all about him, which could suddenly become all alive with constraining desire and joy. There was a scientific apprehension of both nature and art possible, no doubt. The very science that lay behind art had a suggestiveness of its own; that again had its own times for appeal.

But Hugh felt that here again he must realise his limitations, and that life, to be real, must be a constant resisting of diffuse wanderings in knowledge and perception. That his own medium was the medium of words, and that his task was to discern their colour and weight, their significance, whether alone or in combination; that he must be able to upraise the jointed fabric of thought, like a framework of slim rods of firm metal, not meant to be seen or even realised by the reader, but which, when draped with the rich tapestry of words, would lend shape and strong coherence to the whole. All other art must simply minister light and fragrance; it might be studied, indeed, but easily and superficially; not that it would not be better, perhaps, if he could have approached other arts with penetrating insight; but he felt that for himself, with his limitations, his feebleness, his faltering grasp, nothing must come between him and his literary preoccupation. The other arts might feed his soul indeed, but he could not serve them. He found that he took great delight, and was always at ease, in the company of musicians and painters, because he could understand and interpret their point of view, their att.i.tude of mind; while on the other hand he could approach them with the humility, the perceptive humility, which the artist desires as an atmosphere; he did not know enough about the technical points to controvert and differ, while he knew enough to feel inspired by the tense feeling of secrets, understood and practised, which were yet hidden from ordinary eyes.

Art, then, and music became for Hugh as a sweet and remote ill.u.s.tration of his own consecration--and indeed there were moments when, wearied by his own strenuous toil, ploughing sadly through the dreary sands of labour, that must close at intervals round the feet of the serious craftsman, the sight of a picture hanging perhaps in a room full of cheerful company, or the sound of music--a few bars rippling from an open window, or stealing in faint gusts from the b.u.t.tressed window of a church lighted for evensong--came to him like a sacred cup, carried in the hovering hands of a ministering angel, revealing to him the delicate hidden joy of beauty of which he had almost lost sight in his painful hurrying to some appointed end. _Hinc lucem et pocula sacra_, said the old motto of Cambridge. The light was clear enough, and led him forward, as it led the pilgrim of old, s.h.i.+ning across a very wide field. But the holy refreshment that was tendered him upon the way, this was the blessed gift of those other arts which he dared not to follow, but which he knew held within themselves secrets as dear as the art which in his loneliness he pursued.

x.x.xV

Artistic Susceptibility--An Apologia--Temperament--Criticism of Life--The Tangle

Hugh had found himself one evening in the Combination-room of his college, in a little group of Dons who were discussing with great subtlety and ardour the question of retaining Greek in the entrance examinations of the university. It seemed to Hugh that the arguments employed must be identical with those that might formerly have been used to justify the retention of Hebrew in the curriculum--the advisability of making acquaintance at first hand with a n.o.ble literature, the mental discipline to be obtained; "Greek has such a n.o.ble grammar!" said one of these enthusiasts. Hugh grew a little nettled at the tone of the discussion. The defenders of Greek seemed to be so impervious to facts which told against them. They erected their theories, like umbrellas, over their heads, and experience pattered harmlessly on the top. Hugh advanced his own case as an instance of the failure, of the melancholy results of a cla.s.sical curriculum. It was deplorable, he said, that he should have realised, as he did when he left the university, that his real education had then to begin. He had found himself totally ignorant of modern languages and modern history, of science, and indeed of all the ideas with which the modern world was teeming. The chief defender of Greek told him blithely that he was indulging the utilitarian heresy; that the object of his education had been to harden and perfect his mind, so as to make it an instrument capable of subtle appreciation and ardent self-improvement. When Hugh pleaded the case of immense numbers of boys who, after they had been similarly perfected and hardened, had been left, not only ignorant of what they had been supposed to be acquiring, but without the slightest interest in or appreciation of intellectual or artistic ideas at all, he was told that, bad as their case was, it would have been still worse if they had not been subjected to the refining process. Hugh, contrary to his wont, indulged in a somewhat vehement tirade against the neglect of the appreciative and artistic faculties in the case of the victims of a cla.s.sical education.

He maintained that the theory of mental discipline was a false one altogether, and that boys ought to be prepared on the one hand for practical life, and on the other initiated into mental culture. He compared the mental condition of a robust English boy, his st.u.r.dy disbelief in intellectual things, with the case of a young Athenian, who was, if we could trust Plato, naturally and spontaneously interested in thoughts and ideas, sensitive to beautiful impressions, delicate, subtle, intelligent, and not less bodily active. He went on to carry the war into the enemy's country, and to attack the theory of mental discipline altogether, which he maintained was the same thing as to train agricultural labourers in high-jumping and sprinting, or like trying to put a razor-edge on a hoe. What he said was neglected altogether was the cultivation of artistic susceptibility. In nature, in art, in literature, he maintained, lay an immense possibility of refined and simple pleasure, which was never cultivated at all. The mental discipline, he argued, which average boys received, was doubly futile, because it neither equipped them for practical life, nor opened to them any vista of intellectual or artistic pleasure. What he himself desired to do was, on the one hand, to equip boys for practical life, and on the other to initiate them into the possibilities of intellectual recreation. The ordinary boy, he thought, was turned out with a profound disbelief in intellectual things, and a no less profound belief in games as the only source of rational pleasure. His own belief was that a great many English boys had the germs of simple artistic pleasures dormant in their spirits, and that they might be encouraged to believe in books, in art, in music, as sources of tranquil enjoyment, instead of regarding them as slightly unwholesome and affected tastes. He was aware that his views were being regarded as dangerously heterodox, and as tainted indeed with a kind of aesthetic languor. He felt that he was appearing to pose as the champion, not only of an unpopular cause, but of an essentially effeminate system. His opponents were certainly not effeminate; but they were masculine only in the sense in which the soldier is masculine, in his st.u.r.dy contempt for the arts of peace; whereas to Hugh the soldier was only an inevitable excrescence on the community, a disagreeable necessity which would disappear in the light of a rational and humane civilisation.

A young Don, a friend of Hugh's, who had taken part in the discussion, a few days after, in the course of a walk, attacked Hugh on the subject. Hugh was aware that he defended himself very indifferently at the time; but some remarks of his friend, who was a brisk and practical young man with a caustic wit, rankled in Hugh's mind. His friend had said that the danger of Hugh's scheme was that it tended to produce people of the Maudle and Postlethwaite type, who made life into a mere pursuit of artistic impressions and sensations. "The fact is, Neville," he said, "that you upheld Epicureanism pure and simple; or, if you dislike the word because of its a.s.sociations, you taught a mere Neo-Cyrenaicism. You may say that the kind of pleasure you defended is a refined and intellectual sort of pleasure, but for all that it tends to produce men who withdraw from practical life into a mild hedonism; you would develop a coterie of amiable, secluded persons, fastidious and delicate, indifferent citizens, individualistic and self-absorbed; the training of character retires into the background; and the meal that you press upon us is a meal of exquisite sauces, but without meat.

Fortunately," his friend added, "the necessity of earning a living keeps most people from drifting into a life of this kind. It is only consistent with comfortable private means."

These phrases stuck in Hugh's memory with a painful insistence. He felt as if he had been rolled among thorns. He determined to think the matter carefully out. Was he himself drifting into a species of mystical hedonism? It was very far from his purpose to do that. He determined that he would prepare a little apologia on the subject, to send to his friend; and this was what he eventually despatched:--

"_Your conversation with me the other day gave me a good deal to think about. What you said practically amounted to a charge of hedonism. Of course much depends upon the way in which the word is applied, because I suppose that the large majority of men are hedonists, in the sense that they pursue as far as possible their own pleasure. But the particular kind of hedonism of which you spoke, Epicureanism, bears the sense of a certain degree of malingering. It implies that the person who pursues the course which I indicated is for some reason or other s.h.i.+rking his duty in the world. It is against this that I wish to defend myself; I would say in the first place that what I was recommending was a very different sort of thing. I was rather attacking a certain sheepishness of character which seems to me to be the danger of our present type of education. The practical ideal held up before boys at our public schools is that they should be virtuous and industrious; and that after they have satisfied both these claims, they should amuse themselves in what is held to be a manly way; that they should fill their vacant hours with open-air exercise and talk about games; a little light reading is not objected to; but it is tacitly a.s.sumed that to be interested in ideas, in literature, art, and music is rather a dilettante business. I was reminded of a memorable conversation I once had with a man of some note, a great landowner and prominent politician. He was talking confidentially to me about his sons and their professions. One of the boys manifested a really remarkable artistic gift; he was a draughtsman of extraordinary skill, and I said something about his taking up art seriously. The great man said that it would never do. 'I consider it almost a misfortune,' he added, 'that the boy is so clever an artist, because it would be out of the question for him, in his position, to take up what is, after all, rather a disreputable profession. I have talked to him seriously about it, and I have said that there is no harm in his amusing himself in that way; but he must have a serious occupation._'

"_That is a very fair instance of the way in which the pursuit of art is regarded among our solid cla.s.ses--as distinctly a trade for an adventurer. It will be a long time before we alter that. But the truth is that this kind of conventionalism is what makes us so stupid a nation. We have no sort of taste for simplicity in life. A man who lived in a cottage, occupied in quiet and intellectual pursuits, would be held to be a failure, even if he lived in innocent happiness to the age of eighty. My own firm belief is that this is all wrong. It opens up all sorts of obscure and bewildering questions as to why we are sent into the world at all; but my idea is that we are meant to be happy if we can, and that a great many people miss happiness, because they have not the courage to pursue it in their own way. I cannot believe myself that the complicated creature, so frail of frame, so limitless in dreams and hopes, is the result of a vortex. I cannot believe that we can be created except by a power that in a certain degree resembles ourselves. If we have remote dreams of love and liberty, of justice and truth, I believe that those ideas must exist in a sublime degree in the mind of our Maker. I believe, on the whole, though there are many difficulties in the way of the theory, that life is meant for most of us to be an educative process; that we are meant to quit the world wiser, n.o.bler, more patient than we entered it; why the whole business is so intolerably slow, why we are so hampered by traditions and instincts that r.e.t.a.r.d the process, I cannot conceive; but my belief is that we must as far as possible choose a course which leads us in the direction of the thoughts that we conceive to be n.o.ble and true. We may make mistakes, we may wander sadly from the way, but I believe that it is our duty, our best hope, to try and perceive what it is that G.o.d is trying to teach us. Now, our choice must be to a great extent a matter of temperament. Some men like work, activity, influence, relations with others. Well, if they sincerely believe that they are meant to pursue these things, it is their duty to do so. Others, like myself, seem to be gifted with a sensitiveness of perception, an appreciation of beauty in many forms. I cannot believe that such an organisation is given me fortuitously, and that I am merely meant to suppress it. Of course the same argument could be used sophistically by a man with strong sensual pa.s.sions and appet.i.tes, who could similarly urge that he must be intended to gratify them. But such gratification leads both to personal disaster and to the increase of unhappiness in the race. Such instincts as I recognise in myself seem to me to do neither. I believe that poets, artists, and musicians, to say nothing of religious teachers, have effected almost more for the welfare of the race than statesmen, patriots, and philanthropists. Of course the necessary work of the world has got to be done; but my own belief is that a good deal more than is necessary is done, because people pursue luxury rather than simplicity. I recognise to the full the duty of work; but, to be quite honest, I think that a serious man who will preach simplicity, disseminate ideas, suggest possibilities of intellectual and artistic pleasure, can do a very real work. Such a man must be disinterested; he must not desire fame or influence; he must be content if he can sow the seeds of beauty in a few minds._

"_Now the Maudle and Postlethwaite school are not concerned with anything of the kind. They merely desire to make a sort of brightly polished mirror of their minds, capable of reflecting all sorts of beautiful effects, and this is an essentially effeminate thing to do, because it exalts the appreciation of sensation above all other aims; that is the pursuit of artistic luxury, and it is, as you say, quite inconsistent with good citizens.h.i.+p. But I do not think that my own theory is in the least inconsistent with good citizens.h.i.+p. I have no admiration for the citizens.h.i.+p the end of which is to make a comfortable corner for oneself at the expense of others; I do not at all believe that every man of ideals is bound to take a part in the administration of the community. We can easily have too many administrators; and that ends in the dismal slough of munic.i.p.al politics. After all, we must nowadays all be specialists, and a man has as much right to specialise in beauty as he has to specialise in Greek Grammar. In fact a specialist in Greek Grammar has as his ultimate view the clearer and nicer appreciation of the shades of Greek expression, and is merely serving a high ideal of mental refinement.

It seems to me purely conventional to accept as valuable the work of a commentator on Sophocles, because it is traditionally respectable, and to say that a commentator on sunsets, as I once heard a poet described, is an effeminate dilettante. It is the motive that matters.

Personally, I think that a man who has drifted into writing a commentary on Sophocles, because he happens to find that he can earn a living that way, is no more worthy of admiration than a man who earns his living by billiard-marking. Neither are necessary to the world.

But the commentator and the billiard-marker are alike admirable, if they are working out a theory, if they think that thus and thus they can best help on the progress of the world._

"_My own desire is, so to speak, to be a commentator on life, in one particular aspect. I think the world would be all the better if there were a finer appreciation of what is n.o.ble and beautiful, a deeper discrimination of motives, a larger speculation as to the methods and objects of our pilgrimage. I think the coa.r.s.eness of the intellectual and spiritual palate that prevails widely nowadays is not only a misfortune, I think it is of the nature of sin. If people could live more in the generous visions of poets, if they could be taught to see beauty in trees and fields and buildings, I think they would be happier and better. Most people are obliged to spend the solid hours of the day in necessary work. The more sordid that work is, the more advisable it is to cultivate a perception of the quality of things.

Every one has hours of recreation in every day; the more such hours are filled with pleasant, simple, hopeful, beautiful thoughts, the better for us all._

"_Of course I may be quite wrong; I may be meant to find out my mistake; but I seem to discern in the teaching of Christ a desire to make men see the true values of life, to appreciate what is beautiful and tender in simple lives and homely relations.h.i.+ps. The teaching of Christ seems to me to be uniquely and essentially poetical, and to point to the fact that the up-lifting of the human heart in admiration, hope, and love, is the cure for some, at least, of our manifold ills.

That is my own theory of life, and I do not see that it is effeminate, or even unpractical; and it is a mere caricature of it to call it Epicurean. What does complicate life is the feeble acceptance of conventional views, the doing of things, not because one hopes for happiness out of them, not even because one likes them, but because one sees other people doing them. Even in the most sheltered existence, like my own, there are plenty of things which provide a bracing tonic against self-satisfaction. There are the criticism and disapproval of others, contempt, hostility; there are illness, and sorrow, and the fear of death. No one of a sensitive nature can hope to live an untroubled life; but to court unhappiness for the sake of its tonic qualities seems to me no more reasonable than to refuse an anaesthetic on the ground that it is interfering with natural processes._

"_I don't know that I expect to convert you; but at least I am glad to make my position clear. I don't a.s.sume that I am in the right. I only know that I am trying to do what appears to me to be right, trying to simplify the issues of life, to unravel the tangle in which so many people seem to me to acquiesce helplessly and timidly._"

x.x.xVI

The Mill--The Stream's Pilgrimage

There were days, of course, when Hugh's reflections took an irrepressibly optimistic turn. Such was a bright day in the late summer, when the sun shone with a temperate clearness, and big white clouds, like fragments torn from some aerial pack of cotton-wool, moved blithely in the sky. Hugh rode--he was staying at his mother's house--to a little village perched astride on a great ridge. He diverged from the road to visit the ancient church, built of ma.s.sive stone and roofed with big stone-tiles; up there, swept by strong winds, splashed by fierce rains, it had grown to look like a crag rather than a building. By the side of it ran a little, steep, narrow lane, which he had never explored; he rode cautiously down the stony track, among thick hazel copses; occasionally, through a gap, he had a view of a great valley, all wild with wood; once or twice he pa.s.sed a timbered farmhouse, with tall brick chimneys. The country round about was much invaded by new, pert houses, but there were none here; and Hugh supposed that this road, which seemed the only track into the valley, was of so forbidding a steepness that it had not occurred to any one to settle there. The road became more and more precipitous, and at the very bottom, having descended nearly three hundred feet, Hugh found himself in a very beautiful place. He thought he had never seen anything more sweetly, more characteristically English. On one side was a rough field, encircled by forest on all sides; here stood some old wooden sheds and byres; and one or two green rides pa.s.sed glimmering into the thick copse, with a charming air of mystery, as though they led to some sequestered woodland paradise. To the right was a mill, with a great pond thick with bulrushes and water-lilies, full of water-birds, coots and moorhens, which swam about, uttering plaintive cries. The mill was of wood, the planks warped and weather-stained, the tiled root covered with mosses; the mill-house itself was a quaint brick building, with a pretty garden, full of old-fas.h.i.+oned flowers, sloping down to the pool; a big flight of pigeons circled round and round in the breeze, turning with a sudden clatter of wings; behind the house were small sandstone bluffs, fringed with feathery ashes, and the wood ran up steeply above into the sky.

It looked like an old steel-engraving, like a picture by Morland or Constable. The blue smoke went up from the chimneys in that sheltered nook, rising straight into the air, lending a rich colour to the trees behind. Hugh thought it would be a beautiful place to live in, so remote from the world, in that still valley, where the only sound was the wind in the copses, the trickle of the mill-leat, and the slow thunder of the dripping wheel within. Yet he supposed that the simple people who lived there were probably unconscious of its beauty, and only aware that the roads which led to the spot were inconveniently steep. Still, it was hard to think that the charm of the place would not pa.s.s insensibly into the hearts, perhaps even into the faces, of the dwellers there.

He stood for a little to see the bright water leaping clear and fresh from the sluice. There was a delicious scent of cool river-plants everywhere. It was hard not to think that the stream, bickering out in the sun from the still pool, had a sense of joy and delight. It was pa.s.sing, pa.s.sing; Hugh could trace in thought every mile of the way; down the wooded valley it was bound, running over the brown gravel, by shady wood-ends and pasture-sides; then it would pa.s.s out into the plain, and run, a full and br.i.m.m.i.n.g stream, between high sandy banks, half hidden by the thick, glossy-leaved alders. Hugh knew the broad water-meadows down below, with the low hills on either side, where big water-plants grew in marshy places, and where the cattle moved slowly about through the still hours. Soon the stream would be running by the great downs--it was a river now, bearing boats upon it--till it pa.s.sed by the wharves and beneath the bridges of the little town, and out into the great sea-flat, meeting, with how strange a wonder, the upward-creeping briny tide, with its sharp savours and its wholesome smell; till it flowed at last by the docks, where the big steamers lay unlading, blowing their loud sea-horns, past weed-fringed piers and s.h.i.+ngly beaches, until it was mingled with the moving deep, where the waves ran higher on the blue sea-line, and the great buoy rolled and dipped above the shoal.

And then, perhaps, it would be drawn up again in twisted wreaths of mist, rising in vapour beneath the breathless sun, to float back, perhaps, in clouds over the earth, and begin its little pilgrimage again.

Was the same true, he wondered, of himself, of everything about him?

Was it all a never-ending, an unwearying pilgrimage? Was death itself but the merging of the atom in the element, and then, perhaps, the race began again? On such a day as this, of bright sun and eager air, it seemed sweet to think that it was even so. This soul-stuff, that one called oneself, wafted out of the unknown, strangely entangled with the bodily elements, would it perhaps mingle again with earthly conditions, borne round and round in an endless progression? Yet, if this was so, why did one seem, not part of the world, but a thing so wholly distinct and individual? To-day, indeed, Hugh seemed to be akin to the earth, and felt as though all that breathed or moved and lived had a brotherly, a sisterly greeting for him. As he moved slowly on up the steep road, a child playing by the wayside, encouraged perhaps by a loving brightness that rose from Hugh's heart into his face, nodded and smiled to him shyly. Hugh smiled back, and waved his hand. That childish smile came to him as a confirmation of his blithe mood; there were others, then, bound on the same pilgrimage as himself, who wished him well, and shared his happiness. To pa.s.s thus smiling through the world, heedless as far as might be of weariness and sorrow, taking the simple joys that flowed so freely, if only one divested oneself of the hard and dull ambitions that made life into a struggle and a contest--that was, perhaps, the secret! There would be days, no doubt, of gloom and heaviness; days when life would run, like the stream which he could hear murmuring below him, through dark coverts, dripping with rain; days of frost, when nature was leafless and benumbed, and when the rut was barred with icy spikes. But one could live in hope and faith, waiting for the summer days, when life ran swift and bright; under a pale sunset sky, till the streaks of crimson light died into a transparent green; and the stream ran joyfully, under the stars, wondering what sweet unfamiliar place might stand revealed, when the day climbed slowly in the east, and the dew globed itself upon the fresh gra.s.s, in the invigorating sweetness, the cool fragrance of the dawn.

x.x.xVII