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.