XXVI
Activity – Work – Isolation
Hugh went once to spend a few days with an old friend who had held an important living in a big country town. It was a somewhat bewildering experience. His friend was what would be called a practical person, and loved organisation – the word was often on his lips – with a consuming passion. Hugh saw that he was a very happy man; he was a big fellow, with a sanguine complexion and a resonant voice. He was always in high spirits: he banged doors behind him, and when he hurried upstairs, the whole house seemed to shake. Every moment of his day was full to the brim of occupation. He could be heard shouting directions in the garden and stables at an early hour; he received and wrote a great many letters; he attended many committees and meetings. He hurried about the country, he made speeches, he preached. Hugh heard one of his sermons, which was delivered with abundant geniality. It consisted of a somewhat obvious paraphrase of a Scripture scene – the slaughter of the prophets of Baal by Elijah. The preacher described the ugly carnage with much gusto. He then invited his hearers to stamp out evil with similar vigour, and ended with drawing a highly optimistic picture of the world, representing evil and sin as a kind of skulking and lingering contagion, which God was doing His best to get rid of, and which was indeed only kept alive by the foolish perversity of a few abandoned persons, and would soon be extirpated altogether if only enough committees would meet and take the thing up in a businesslike way. It was in a sense a vigorous performance, and Hugh thought that though there was little attempt to bind up the broken-hearted, yet he could conceive its having an inspiriting effect on people who felt themselves on the right side.
His friend found time one evening, as they sat smoking together, to inquire into Hugh's occupations, and read him a friendly lecture on the subject of making himself more useful. Hugh felt that it was useless to argue the question; but when he came away, somewhat dizzied and wearied by the tumultuous energy of his friend's life, he found himself wondering exactly how much resulted from this buzzing and humming organisation. There was not a marked difference between his friend's parish and other parishes, except that there were certainly more meetings. Hugh had indeed an uneasy sense that a man with less taste for organisation, and more leisure for pastoral intercourse with his flock, might have effected more. The vicar's chief concern indeed seemed to be with the prosperous and healthy members of his parish; if there was a case of destitution, of illness, of sorrow, it was certainly inquired into; some hard-featured lady, with a strong sense of rectitude and usefulness, would be commissioned to go and look into the matter. She generally returned saying cheerfully that she had put things straight, and that it turned out to be all their own fault.
But Hugh found his reflections taking a still more sceptical turn. The vicar's theory was that we were all put into the world to be of use to other people. But his idea of helping other people was not to help them to what they desired, but to what he thought it was right that they should desire. He had very little compassion, Hugh saw, for failure and error. If a parishioner was in trouble, the vicar tended to say he had no one to blame but himself for it. Hugh felt that he did not wish to be in his friend's parish. If one was able-bodied and sensible, one was put on a committee or two; if one was unfortunate or obscure, one was invaded by a district visitor. If one was a Dissenter, one would be treated with a kind of gloomy courtesy – for the vicar was great on not alienating Dissenters, but bringing them in, as he phrased it; and if a Dissenter became an Anglican, the vicar rejoiced with what he believed to be the joy of the angels over a repentant sinner, and made him a parish worker at once.
Then Hugh went further and deeper, and tried to ascertain what he really felt on the subject of usefulness. Tracing back the constitution of society to its origin, he saw that it was clear that every one owed a certain duty of work to the community. A society could not exist in idleness; and every one who was capable of work must work to support himself; and then a certain amount of work must be done by the able-bodied to support those who were either too old or too young to support themselves. But the labouring class, the producers, were forced by the constitution of things to work even more than that; because there were a certain number of persons in the community, capitalists and leisurely people, who lived in idleness on the labour of the workers.
He put aside the great majority of simple workers, the labouring classes, because there was no doubt about their position. If a man did his work honestly, and supported himself and his family, living virtuously, and endeavouring to bring up his children virtuously, that was a fine simple life. Then came the professional classes, who were necessary too, doctors, lawyers, priests, soldiers, sailors, merchants, even writers and artists; all of them had a work to do in the world.
This then seemed the law of one's being: that men were put into the world, and the one thing that was clear was that they were meant to work; did duty stop there? had a man, when his work was done, a right to amuse and employ himself as he liked, so long as he did not interfere with or annoy other people? or had he an imperative duty laid upon him to devote his energies, if any were left, to helping other people?
What in fact was the obscure purpose for which people were sent into the world? It was a pleasant place on the whole for healthy persons, but there was still a large number of individuals to whom it was by no means a pleasant place. No choice was given us, so far as we knew, as to whether we would enter the world or not, nor about the circumstances which were to surround us. Our lives indeed were strangely conditioned by an abundance of causes which lay entirely outside our control, such as heredity, temperament, environment. One supposed oneself to be free, but in reality one was intolerably hampered and bound.
The only theory that could satisfactorily account for life as we found it was, that either it was an educational progress, and that we were being prepared for some further existence, for which in some mysterious way our experience, however mean, miserable, and ungentle, must be intended to fit us; or else it was all a hopeless mystery, the work of some prodigious power who neither loved or hated, but just chose to act so. In any case it was a very slow process; the world was bound with innumerable heavy chains. There was much cruelty, stupidity, selfishness, meanness abroad; all those ugly things decreased very slowly, if indeed they decreased at all. Yet there seemed, too, to be a species of development at work. But the real mystery lay in the fact that, while our hopes and intuitions pointed to there being a great and glorious scheme in the background, our reason and experience alike tended to contradict that hope. How little one changed as the years went on! How ineradicable our faults seemed! how ineffectual our efforts! God indeed seemed to implant in us a wish to improve, and then very often seemed steadily and deliberately to thwart that wish.
And then, too, how difficult it seemed really to draw near to other people; in what a terrible isolation one's life was spent; even in the midst of a cheerful and merry company, how the secrets of one's heart hung like an invisible veil between us and our dearest and nearest. The most one could hope for was to be a pleasant and kindly influence in the lives of other people, and, when one was gone, one might live a little while in their memories. The fact that some few healthily organised people contrived to live simply and straightforwardly in the activities of the moment, without questioning or speculating on the causes of things, did not make things simpler for those on whom these questions hourly and daily pressed. The people whom one accounted best, did indeed spend their time in helping the happiness of others; but did one perhaps only tend to think them so, because they ministered to one's own contentment?
The only conclusion for Hugh seemed to be this: that one must have a work to be faithfully and resolutely fulfilled; and that, outside of that, one must live tenderly, simply, and kindly, adding so far as one might to the happiness of others; and that one might resolutely eschew all the busy multiplication of activities, which produced such scanty results, and were indeed mainly originated in order that so-called active people might feel themselves to be righteously employed.
XXVII
Progress – Country Life – Sustained Happiness – The Twilight
One hot still summer day Hugh went far afield, and struck into a little piece of country that was new to him. He seemed to discern from the map that it must have once been a large, low island almost entirely surrounded by marshes; and this turned out to be the case. It was approached along a high causeway crossing the fen, with rich black land on either hand. No high-road led through or out of the village, nothing but grass-tracks and drift-ways. The place consisted of a small hamlet, with an old church and two or three farmhouses of some size and antiquity; it was all finely timbered with an abundance of ancient elm-trees everywhere; they stood that afternoon absolutely still and motionless, with the sun hot on their towering green heads; and Hugh remembered how, long ago, as a boy at school, he used to watch, out of the windows of a stuffy class-room, the great elms of the school close rising just thus in the warm summer air, while his thoughts wandered from the dull lesson into a region of delighted, irrecoverable reverie. To-day he sate for a long time in the little churchyard, the bees humming about the limes with a soft musical note, that rose and fell with a lazy cadence, while doves hidden somewhere in the elms lent as it were a voice to the trees. That soft note seemed to brim over from a spring of measureless content; it seemed like the calling of the spirit of summer, brooding in indolent joy and innocent satisfaction over the long sweet hours of sunshine, while the day stood still to listen. Hugh resigned himself luxuriously to the soft influences of the place, and felt that for a short space he need neither look backwards nor forwards, but simply float with the golden hour.
At last he bestirred himself, realising that he had yet far to go. It was now cool and fresh, and the shadows of the trees lay long across the grass. Hugh struck down on to the fen and walked for a long time in the solitary fields, by a dyke, passing a big ancient farm that lay very peacefully among its wide pastures.
The thought of the happy, quiet-minded people that might be living there, leading their simple lives, so little affected by the current of the world, brought much peace into Hugh's mind. It seemed to him a very beautiful thing, with something ancient and tranquil about it. It was all utterly remote from ambition and adventure, and even from intellectual efficiency; and here Hugh felt himself in a dilemma. His faith did not permit him to doubt that the civilisation and development of the world were in accordance with the purpose of God on the one hand, and yet, on the other hand, that expansion brought with it social conditions and problems that appeared to him of an essentially ugly kind, as the herding of human beings into cities, the din and dirt of factories, the millions of lives that were lived under almost servile conditions; and so much of that sad labour was directed to wrong ends, to aggrandisement, to personal luxury, to increasing the comfort of oligarchies. The simple life of the countryside seemed a better ideal, and yet the lot of the rustic day-labourer was both dull and hard. It looked sweet enough on a day of high summer, such as this, when a man need ask for nothing to better than to be taken and kept out of doors; but the thought of the farm-hand rising in a cheerless wintry dawn, putting on his foul and stiffened habiliments, setting out in a chilly drizzle to uproot a turnip-field, row by row, with no one to talk to and nothing to look forward to but an evening in a tiny cottage-kitchen, full of noisy children – no one could say that this was an ideal life, and he did not wonder that the young men flocked to the towns, where there was at all events some stir, some amusement. That was the dark side of popular education, of easy communications, of newspapers, that it made men discontented with quiet life, without supplying them with intellectual resources.
Yet with all its disadvantages and discomforts, Hugh could not help feeling that the life of the country was more wholesome and natural for the majority of men, and he wished that the education given in country districts could be directed more to awakening an interest in country things, in trees and birds and flowers, and more, too, to increasing the resources of boys and girls, so that they could find amusing occupation for the long evenings of enforced leisure. The present system of education was directed, Hugh felt, more to training a generation of clerks, than to implanting an aptitude for innocent recreation and sensible amusement. People talked a good deal about tempting men back to the land, but did they not perceive that, to do that, it was necessary to make the agricultural life more attractive? It was a mistake that ran through the whole of modern education, that the system was invented by intellectual theorists and not by practical philosophers. The only real aim ought to be to teach people how to enjoy their work, by making them efficient, and to enjoy their leisure, by arousing the imagination.
Hugh's musings led him on to wonder how it was possible to cultivate a sense of happiness in people; that was the darkest problem of all. Children had the secret of it; they could amuse themselves under the most unpropitious circumstances, and invent games of most surpassing interest out of the most grotesque materials. Then came the age when the sexual relations brought in a fierce and intenser joy; but the romance of courtship and the early days of marriage once over, it seemed that most people settled down on very dull lines, and made such comfort as they could get the only object of their existence. What was it that thus tended to empty life of joy? Was it the presence of anxiety, the failure of vitality, the dull conditions of monotonous labour undertaken for others' gain and not for oneself? Looking back at his own life, Hugh could not discern that his routine work had ever deprived him of zest and interest. It was rather indeed the other way. The suspension of other interests that his life had involved, had sent him back with renewed delight to the occupations and interests of leisure; he had been, he thought, perhaps unusually fortunate in receiving his liberty from mechanical work at a time when his interests were active and his zest undimmed. But how was one to guard the quality of joy, how could it be stimulated and increased, if it began in the course of nature to flag? It was clear that life could not have for every one, nor at all times for any one, that quality of eager and active delight, that uplifting of the heart and mind alike, which sometimes surprised one, when one felt an intensity of gladness and gratitude at being simply oneself, and at standing just at that point in life, surrounded and enriched by exactly the very things one most loved and desired – the feeling that must have darted into Sinbad's mind when he saw that the very sand of the valley in which he lay consisted of precious gems. Probably most people had some moments, oftenest perhaps in youth, of this full-flushed, conscious happiness. And then again most people had considerable tracts of quiet contentment, times when their work prospered and their recreations amused. But how was one to meet the hours when one was neither happy nor contented; when the mind flapped wearily like a loosened sail in a calm, when there was no savour in the banquet, when one went heavily? It was of no use then to summon joy to one's assistance, to call spirits from the vast deep, if they did not obey one's call. There ought, Hugh thought, to be a reserve of sober piety and hopefulness on which one could draw in those dark days. There were no doubt many equable and phlegmatic people who, as the old poet said,
"Perfacile angustis tolerabant finibus aevom,"
(In narrow bounds an easy life endured).
But for those whose perceptions were keen, who lived upon joy, from the very constitution of their nature, how were such natures – and he knew that he was of the number – to avoid sinking into the mire of the Slough of Despond, how were they to rejoice in the valley of humiliation? What was to be their well in the vale of misery? How were the pools to be filled with water?
The answer seemed to be that it could only be achieved by work, by effort, by prayer. If one had definite work in hand, it carried one over these languid intervals. How often had the idea of setting to work in these listless moods seemed intolerable; yet how soon one forgot oneself in the exercise of congenial labour! Here came in the worth of effort, that one could force oneself to the task, commit oneself to the punctual discharge of an unwelcome duty. And if even that failed, then one could cast oneself into an inner region, in the spirit of the Psalmist, when he said, "Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it." One could fling one's prayer into the dark void, as the sailors from a sinking ship shoot a rocket with a rope attached to the land, and then, as they haul it in, feel with joy the rope strain tight, and know that it has found a hold.
Hugh felt that such experience as this, experience, that is, in the vital force of prayer, might be called a subjective experience, and could not be put to a scientific test. But for all that, there was nothing which of late years had so grown upon him as the consciousness of the effectiveness of a certain kind of prayer. This was not a mechanical repetition of verbal forms, but a strong and secret uplifting of the heart to the Father of all. There were moments when one seemed baffled and powerless, when one's own strength seemed utterly unequal to the burden; prayer on such occasions did not necessarily bring a perfect serenity and joy, though there were times when it brought even that; but it brought sufficient strength; it made the difficult, the dreaded thing possible. Hugh had proved this a hundred times over, and the marvel to him was that he did not use it more; but the listless mind sometimes could not brace itself to the effort; and then it seemed to Hugh that he was as one who lay thirsting, with water in reach of his nerveless hand. Still there were few things of which he was so absolutely certain as he was of the abounding strength of prayer; it seemed to reveal a dim form moving behind the veil of things, which in the moment of entreaty seemed to suspend its progress, to stop, to draw near, to smile. Why the gifts from that wise hand were often such difficult things, stones for bread, serpents for fish, Hugh could not divine. But he tended less and less to ask for precise things, but to pray in the spirit of the old Dorian prayer that what was good might be given him, even if he did not perceive it to be good, and that what was evil might be withheld, even if he desired it.
While he thus mused, walking swiftly, the day darkened about him, drawing the colour out of field and tree. The tides of the sky thickened, and set to a deep enamelled green, and a star came out above the tree-tops. Now and then he passed through currents of cool air that streamed out of the low wooded valleys, rich with the fragrance of copse and dingle. An owl fluted sweetly in a little holt, and was answered by another far up the hill. He heard in the breeze, now loud, now low, the far-off motions of the wheels of some cart rumbling blithely homewards. All else was still. At last he came out on the top of the wolds; the road stretched before him, a pale ribbon among dusky fields; and the lights of the distant village pierced through the darker gloom of sheltering trees. Hugh seemed that night to walk with his unknown friend close beside him, answering his hopes, stilling his vague discontents, with a pure and tender faithfulness that left him nothing to desire, but that the sweet nearness might not fail him. At such a moment, dear and wonderful as the world was, he felt that it held nothing so beautiful or so dear as that sweet companionship, and that if he had been bidden, in that instant, strong and content as he was, to enter the stream of death, a firm hand and a smiling face would have lifted him, as the stream grew shallower about him, safe and satisfied, up on the further side.