indeed was so eager to meet people on their own ground that it seems to
me he was to a certain extent misapprehended. I have seen a good many
things said about him since his death which seem to me to be entire
misinterpretations of him, arising from the simple fact that they were
reflections of his companion's mood mirrored in his own sympathetic
mind. Further, I am sure that what was something very like patient and
courteous boredom in him, when he was confronted with some sentimental
and egotistical character, was interpretated as a sad and remote
unworldliness. Someone writing of him spoke of his abstracted and
far-off mood, with his eyes indwelling in a rapture of hallowed thought.
This seems to me wholly unlike Hugh. He was far more likely to have been
considering how he could get away to something which interested him
more.
Hugh's was really a very fresh and sparkling nature, never insipid,
intent from morning to night on a vital enjoyment of life in all its
aspects. I do not mean that he was always wanting to be amused--it was
very far from that. Amusement was the spring of his social mood; but he
had a passion too for silence and solitude. His devotions were eagerly
and rapturously practised; then he turned to his work. "Writing seems to
me now the only thing worth doing in the world," he says in one of his
letters when he was deep in a book. Then he flung himself into gardening
and handicraft, back again to his writings, or his correspondence, and
again to his prayers.
But it is impossible to select one of his moods, and to say that his
true life lay there. His life lay in all of them. If work was tedious to
him, he comforted himself with the thought that it would soon be done.
He was an excellent man of affairs, never "slothful in business," but
with great practical ability. He made careful bargains for his books,
and looked after his financial interests tenaciously and diligently,
with a definite purpose always in his mind. He lived, I am sure, always
looking forward and anticipating. I do not believe he dwelt at all upon
the past. It was life in which he was interested. As I walked with my
mother about the beautiful garden, after his funeral, I said to her: "It
seems almost too pathetic to be borne that Hugh should just have
completed all this." "Yes," she said, "but I am sure we ought to think
only that it meant to him seven years of very great happiness." That was
perfectly true! If he had been called upon to leave Hare Street to take
up some important work elsewhere, he would certainly not have dwelt on
the pathetic side of it himself. He would have had a pang, as when he
kissed the doorposts of his room at Mirfield on departing. But he would
have gone forward, and he would have thought of it no more. He had a
supreme power of casting things behind him, and he was far too intent on
the present to have indulged in sentimental reveries of what had been.
It is clear to me, from what the doctors said after his death, that if
the pneumonia which supervened upon great exhaustion had been averted,
he would have had to give up much of his work for a long time, and
devote himself to rest and deliberate idleness. I cannot conceive how he
would have borne it. He came once to be my companion for a few days,
when I was suffering from a long period of depression and overwork. I
could do nothing except answer a few letters. I could neither write nor
read, and spent much of my time in the open air, and more in drowsing in
misery over an unread book. Hugh, after observing me for a little,
advised me to work quite deliberately, and to divide up my time among
various occupations. It would have been useless to attempt it, for
Nature was at work recuperating in her own way by an enforced
listlessness and dreariness. But I have often since then thought how
impossible it would have been for him to have endured such a condition.
He had nothing passive about him; and I feel that he had every right to
live his life on his own lines, to neglect warnings, to refuse advice. A
man must find out his own method, and take the risks which it may
involve. And though I would have done and given anything to have kept
him with us, and though his loss is one which I feel daily and
constantly, yet I would not have it otherwise. He put into his life an
energy of activity and enjoyment such as I have rarely seen. He gave his
best lavishly and ungrudgingly. Even the dreadful and tragical things
which he had to face he took with a relish of adventure. He has told me
of situations in which he found himself, from which he only saved
himself by entire coolness and decisiveness, the retrospect of which he
actually enjoyed. "It was truly awful!" he would say, with a shiver of
pleasing horror. But it was all worked into a rich and glowing tapestry,
which he wove with all his might, and the fineness of his life seems to
me to consist in this, that he made his own choices, found out the
channels in which his powers could best move, and let the stream gush
forth. He did not shelter himself fastidiously, or creep away out of the
glare and noise. He took up the staff and scrip of pilgrimage, and,
while he kept his eyes on the Celestial City, he enjoyed every inch of
the way, as well the assaults and shadows and the toils as the houses of
kindly entertainment, with all their curious contents, the talk of
fellow-pilgrims, the arbours of refreshment, until his feet touched the
brink of the river, and even there he went fearlessly forward.
XIX
RETROSPECT
Now that I have traced the progress of Hugh's outer life from step to
step, I will try to indicate what in the region of mind and soul his
progress was, and I would wish to do this with particular care, even it
the risk of repeating myself somewhat, because I believe that his nature
was one that changed in certain ways very much; it widened and deepened
greatly, and most of all in the seven last years of his life, when I
believe that he found himself in the best and truest sense.
As a boy, up to the age of eighteen or nineteen, it was, I believe, a
vivid and unreflective nature, much absorbed in the little pattern of
life as he saw it, neither expansive nor fed upon secret visions. It was
always a decided nature. He never, as a child, needed to be amused; he
never said, "What shall I do? Tell me what to do!" He liked constant
companionship, but he had always got little businesses of his own going
on; he joined in games, and joined keenly in them, but if a public game
was not to his taste, he made no secret that he was bored, and, if he
was released, he went off on his own errands. I do not remember that he
ever joined in a general game because of any sociable impulse merely,
but because it amused him; and if he separated himself and went off, he
had no resentment nor any pathetic feeling about being excluded.
When he went on to school he lived a sociable but isolated life. His
companions were companions rather than friends. He did not, I think,
ever form a romantic and adoring friendship, such as are common enough
with emotional boys. He did not give his heart away; he just took a
vivid and animated interest in the gossip, the interplay, the factions
and parties of his circle; but it was all rather a superficial life--he
used to say that he had neither aims nor ambitions--he took very little
interest in his work and not much interest in games. He just desired to
escape censure, and he was not greedy of praise. There was nothing
listless or dreamy about it all. If he neglected his work, it was
because he found talk and laughter more interesting. No string ran
through his days; they were just to be taken as they came, enjoyed,
dismissed. But he never wanted to appear other than he was, or to be
admired or deferred to. There was never any sense of pose about hint nor
the smallest affectation. He was very indifferent as to what was thought
of him, and not sensitive; but he held his own, and insisted on his
rights, allowed no dictation, followed no lead. All the time, I suppose,
he was gathering in impressions of the outsides of things--he did not
dip beyond that: he was full of quite definite tastes, desires, and
prejudices; and though he was interested in life, he was not
particularly interested in what lay behind it. He was not in the least
impressionable, in the sense that others influenced or diverted him
from his own ideas.
Neither had he any strong intellectual bent. The knowledge which he
needed he acquired quickly and soon forgot it. I do not think he ever
went deeply into things in those early days, or tried to perfect himself
in any sort of knowledge. He was neither generous nor acquisitive; he
was detached, and always rather apt to put his little possessions away
and to forget about them. It was always the present he was concerned
with; he did not deal with the past nor with the future.
Then after what had been not so much a slumber of the spirit as a vivid
living among immediate impressions, the artistic nature began to awake
in him. Music, architecture, ceremony, began to make their appeal felt;
and he then first recognised the beauty of literary style. But even so,
he did not fling himself creatively into any of these things at first,
even as an amateur; it was still the perception of effects that he was
concerned with.
It was then, during his first year at Cambridge, that the first
promptings of a vocation made themselves felt towards the priesthood.
But he was as yet wholly unaware of his powers of expression; and I am
sure that his first leanings to the clerical life were a search for a
quiet and secluded fortress, away from the world, in which he might
pursue an undisturbed and ordered life of solemnity and delicate
impressions of a sacred sort of beauty. His desire for community life
was caused by his decided dislike of the world, of fuss and tedium and
conventional occupations. He was never in the least degree a typical
person. He had no wish to be distinguished, or to influence other minds
or lives, or to gain honour or consideration. These things simply
appeared to him as not worth striving for. What he desired was
companionship of a sympathetic kind and the opportunity of living among
the pursuits he liked best. He never wished to try experiments, and it
was always with a spectacular interest that he regarded the world.
His call was very real, and deeply felt, and he waited for a whole year
to make sure of it; but he found full decision at last.
Then came his first ministerial work at the Eton Mission; and this did
not satisfy him; his strength emerged in the fact that he did not adopt
or defer to the ideals he found about him: a weaker character would have
embraced them half-heartedly, tried to smother its own convictions, and
might have ended by habituating itself to a system. But Hugh was still,
half unconsciously, perhaps, in search of his real life; he did not
profess to be guided by anyone, nor did he ever suspend his own judgment
as to the worth of what he was doing; a manly and robust philanthropy on
Christian lines was not to his taste. His instinct was rather for the
beautiful element in religion and in life, and for a mystical
consecration of all to God. That did not seem to him to be recognised in
the work which he was doing. If he had been less independent, he might
have crushed it down, and come to view it as a private fancy. He might
have said to himself that it was plain that many human spirits did not
feel that more delicate appeal, and that his duty was to meet other
natures on some common ground.
It is by such sacrifices of personal bias that much of the original
force of the world is spoiled and wasted. It may be a noble sacrifice,
and it is often nobly made. But Hugh was not cast in that mould. His
effectiveness was to lie in the fact that he could disregard many
ordinary motives. He could frankly admire other methods of work, and yet
be quite sure that his own powers did not lie in that direction. But
though he was modest and not at all self-assertive, he never had the
least submissiveness nor subservience; nor was he capable of making any
pretences.
Sometimes it seems to happen that men are punished for wilfulness of
choice by missing great opportunities. A nature which cannot compromise
anything, cannot ignore details, cannot work with others, is sometimes
condemned to a fruitless isolation. But it would be wrong to disregard
the fact that circumstances more than once came to Hugh's aid; I see
very clearly how he was, so to speak, headed off, as by some Fatherly
purpose, from wasting his life in ineffectual ways. Probably he might
have worked on at the Eton Mission, might have lost heart and vigour,
might never have discovered his real powers, if he had not been rescued.
His illness at this juncture cut the knot for him; and then followed a
time of travel in Egypt, in the Holy Land, which revived again his sense
of beauty and width and proportion.
And then followed his Kemsing curacy; I have a letter written to me from
Kemsing in his first weeks there, in which he describes it as a paradise
and says that, so far as he can see, it is exactly the life he most
desires, and that he hopes to spend the rest of his days there.
But now I feel that he took a very real step forward. The danger was
that he would adopt a dilettante life. He had still not discovered his
powers of expression, which developed late. He was only just beginning
to preach with effect, and his literary power was practically
undeveloped. He might have chosen to live a harmless, quiet,
beauty-loving life, kindly and guileless, in a sort of religious
æstheticism; though the vivid desire for movement and even excitement
that characterised his later life would perhaps have in any case
developed.
But something stronger and sterner awoke in him. I believe that it was
exactly because the cup, mixed to his taste, was handed to him that he
was able to see that there was nothing that was invigorating about the
potion. It was not the community life primarily which drew him to
Mirfield; it was partly that his power of speech awoke, and more
strongly still the idea of self-discipline.
And so he went to Mirfield, and then all his powers came with a rush in
that studious, sympathetic, and ascetic atmosphere. He was in his
twenty-eighth year. He began by finding that he could preach with real
force and power, and two years later, when he wrote _The Light
Invisible_, he also discovered his gift of writing; while as a little
recreation, he took up drawing, and produced a series of sketches, full
of humour and delicacy, drawn with a fine pen and tinted with coloured
chalk, which are at all events enough to show what he could have done in
this direction.
XX
ATTAINMENT
And then Hugh made the great change of his life, and, as a Catholic,
found his dreams realized and his hopes fulfilled. He found, indeed, the
life which moves and breathes inside of every faithful creed, the power
which supplements weakness and represses distraction, the motive for
glad sacrifice and happy obedience. I can say this thankfully enough,
though in many ways I confess to being at the opposite pole of religious
thought. He found relief from decision and rest from conflict. He found
sympathy and confidence, a sense of corporate union, and above all a
mystical and symbolical devotion embodied in a great and ancient
tradition, which was visibly and audibly there with a movement like a
great tide, instead of a scheme of worship which had, he thought, in
the Anglican Church, to be eclectically constructed by a group or a
circle. Every part of his nature was fed and satisfied; and then, too,
he found in the Roman Catholic community in England that sort of eager
freemasonry which comes of the desire to champion a cause that has won a
place for itself, and influence and respect, but which is yet so much
opposed to national tendencies as to quicken the sense of active
endeavour and eager expectation.
After his quiet period of study and thought in Rome and at Llandaff
House, came the time when he was attached to the Roman Catholic Church
in Cambridge; and this, though not congenial to him, gave him an insight
into methods and conditions; and all the while his own forces and
qualities were learning how to concentrate and express themselves. He
learned to write, he learned to teach, to preach, to speak, to be his
own natural self, with all his delicate and ingenuous charm, in the
presence of a great audience; so that when at last his opportunity came
to free himself from official and formal work, he was able to throw all
his trained faculties into the work which he had at heart. Moreover, he
found in direction and confession, and in careful discussion with
inquirers, and in sympathetic aid given to those in trouble, many of the
secret sorrows, hopes, and emotions of the human heart, so that his
public work was enforced and sustained by his ever-increasing range of
private experience.
He never, however, took whole-heartedly to pastoral work. He said
frankly that he "specialised" in the region of private direction and
advice; but I doubt if he ever did quite enough general pastoral work of
a commonplace and humdrum kind to supplement and fill out his experience
of human nature. He never knew people under quite normal conditions,
because he felt no interest in normal conditions. He knew men and women
best under the more abnormal emotion of the confessional; and though he
used to maintain, if challenged, that penitence was a normal condition,
yet his judgment of human beings was, as a consequence, several times
gravely at fault. He made some unwise friendships, with a guileless
curiosity, and was obliged, more than once, to extricate himself by
summary abandonments.
He wrote of himself once, "I am tired to death of giving myself away,
and finding out too late.... I don't like my tendency to agree with
people wildly; my continual fault has been to put on too much fuel."
Like all sensitive people, who desire sympathetic and friendly
relations, he was apt to discover the best of new acquaintances at once,
and to evoke in them a similarly genial response. It was not till later,
when the first conciliatory impulse had died down, that he discovered
the faults that had been instinctively concealed, and indeed repressed
by his own personal attractiveness.
He had, too, an excessive confidence in his power of managing a critical
situation, and several times undertook to reform people in whom
corruption had gone too far for remedy. He believed in his power of
"breaking" sinners by stern declarations; but he had more than once to
confess himself beaten, though he never wasted time in deploring
failures.
Mr. Meynell, in his subtle essay which prefaces my brother's little book
of poems, speaks of the complete subjugation of his will. If I may
venture to express a different view, I do not feel that Hugh ever
learned to efface his own will. I do not think his temperament, was made
on the lines of self-conquest. I should rather say that he had found the
exact _milieu_ in which he could use his will to the best effect, so
that it was like the charge of powder within the gun, no longer
exploding itself vaguely and aimlessly, but all concentrated upon one
intense and emissive effort. Because the one characteristic of the last
years of his life was his immense enjoyment of it all. He wrote to a
friend not long before the end, when he was feeling the strain upon him
to be heavier than he could bear; after a word or two about the war--he
had volunteered to go to the front as a chaplain--he said, "So I am
staying here as usual; but the incessant demands on my time try me as
much as shrapnel and bullets." That sentence seems to me to confirm my
view that he had not so much sacrificed as devoted himself. He never
gained a serene patience; I have heard him over and over again speak
with a sigh of his correspondence and the demands it made on him; yet he
was always faithful to a relation once formed; and the number of letters
written to single correspondents, which have been sent me, have fairly
amazed me by their range, their freshness, and their fulness. He was
deeply interested in many of the letters he received, and gave his best
in his prompt replies; but he evidently also received an immense number
of letters from people who did not desire guidance so much as sympathy
and communication. The inconsiderate egotism of unimaginative and yet
sensitive people is what creates the burden of such a correspondence;
and though he answered his letters faithfully and duly, and contrived
to say much in short space, yet he felt, as I have heard him say, that
people were merciless; and much of the time he might have devoted to
creative work, or even to recreation, was consumed in fruitless toil of
hand and mind. And yet I am sure that he valued the sense that he could
be useful and serviceable, and that there were many who depended upon
him for advice and consolation. I believe that his widespread relations
with so many desirous people gave him a real sense of the fulness and
richness of life; and its relations. But for all that, I also believe
that his courtesy and his sense of duty were even more potent in these
relations than the need of personal affection. I do not mean that there
was any hardness or coldness about him; but he valued sympathy and
tranquil friendship more than he pursued intimacy and passionate
devotion. Yet in the last year or two of his life, I was both struck and
touched by his evident desire to knit up friendships which had been
severed, and to renew intercourse which had been suspended by his change
of belief. Whether he had any feeling that his life was precarious, or
his own time short, I do not know. He never said as much to me. He had,
of course, used hard words of the Church which he had left, and had said
things which were not wholly impersonal. But, combative though he was,
he had no touch of rancour or malice in his nature, and he visibly
rejoiced in any sign of goodwill.
Yet even so, he was essentially solitary in mind. "When I am alone," he
once wrote, "I am at my best; and at my worst in company. I am happy and
capable in loneliness; unhappy, distracted, and ineffective in company."
And again he wrote, "I am becoming more and more afraid of meeting
people I want to meet, because my numerous deficiencies are so very
apparent. For example, I stammer slightly always and badly at times."
This was, I believe, more an instinctive shrinking from the expenditure
of nervous force than anything else, and arose from the feeling that, if
he had to meet strangers, some brilliancy of contribution would be
expected of him. I remember how he delighted in the story of Marie
Bashkirtseff, who, when she was summoned to meet a party of strangers
who desired to see her, prayed as she entered the room, "Oh God, make me
worth seeing!" Hugh disliked the possibility of disappointing
expectations, and thus found the society of unfamiliar people a strain;
but in family life, and with people whom he knew well, he was always the
most delightful and charming of companions, quick, ready, and untiring
in talk. And therefore I imagine that, like all artistic people, he
found that the pursuit of some chosen train of thought was less of a
conscious effort to him than the necessity of adapting himself, swiftly
and dexterously, to new people, whose mental and spiritual atmosphere he
was obliged to observe and infer. It was all really a sign of the high
pressure at which he lived, and of the price he paid for his vividness
and animation.